#vigilante goblin incoming

[jihef03]

It's a dope design tbh and really in line with that they seemingly want to do with Harry.

[pagesofkenna]

Direct Mayhem: Undermountain, Chapter 8

In which we do some housekeeping

The C.A.T.S. (Carlin, Anahera, Tariq, and Sadi) have some free time to spend up in the city of Waterdeep again, taking care of the home base before they head back down into the Undermountain.

Tariq, the facechanging warlock, is visited by his mentor and patron Dantea. She checks in on him, to see how he’s doing, and he tells her about the strange otherworldly dreams he’s been having.

Sadi, the tabaxi monk, is visited by her father-figure Syl, who heard the news that her actual father was murdered days ago by the mysterious Black Viper. Sadi, who was actually the one to kill he father, reassures him that she’s doing OK, and throws herself back into vigilante work to distract herself. She’s actually very upset, though, and struggling to reconcile what she’s done with the kind of person she always wanted to be.

Carlin is invited out by Rishaal, the dragonborn bookstore owner down the street. He’s going down to the Dock Ward to buy some books at a library estate sale, and wants Carlin to accompany him, as he’s never been down there by himself before. Carlin picks up some books of his own while he’s there - some on magic, some on history, and some on tinkering - to fill out the manor library.

Anahera, their triton tagalong, just tries to make herself useful.

As a group, the CATS hire a small band of adventurers (through Mirt the Moneylender) to mount an expedition into the Undermountain and retrieve the barrels of ale the party discovered. They also pay all the fines and fees required to start their tavern properly; hopefully, the tavern will be a secondary source of income while the CATS are down exploring.

During the week, the CATS are visited by a Harper friend Mattrim, who gives them a small purse and asks them to repay a Harper debt down in Skullport, which can be accessed from level 3 of the Undermountain. Soon afterward, Esvele Rosznar knocks on the door. She reminds the party that her brother is missing, and asks them to go find him, or news of what happened to him, as a favor. She looks pointedly at Sadi (who had asked Esvele to tag along on her little murder party) as she asks this.

Finally, after a tenday, the CATS head back down into the Undermountain to work on their new missions: the Harper debt, Esvele’s brother, and the threatening letter from Manshoon, who asked the party to retrieve a stolen object from Halaster’s apprentice academy.

They pass the first floor easily, pausing on the second to check out the Goblin Market again. Yek, who they’ve heard wants them dead, isn’t immediately around, but some of the goblins murmur loudly that they wish someone would come along and kill him, so the party decides to oblige. Tariq sits on Yek’s throne and makes a show of horsing around, and a minute later Yek himself, the goblin boss in his magical human form, arrives, flanked with four bugbears.

Sadi and Carlin attempt to threaten Yek, insisting he leave the market for good, but the bugbears don’t take kindly to this threat and attack. In six seconds, Sadi and Carlin both attack Yek, and he dies instantly.

Two more bugbears are killed before the last two, and any goblin’s still on Yek’s side, lay down their arms. The goblins cheer, claiming to be finally free of Yek’s tyranny, and scowl once Sadi starts to loot all of Yek’s treasure.

Before the party leaves, they discover the goblins are attempting to start a slavery ring in the market, and thoroughly chastise them for this.

Next, the party stops by one of the portal archway gates that they saw earlier. This one has an image of a dying tree carved into it, and when Sadi touches it with her wooden staff, the portal flashes green and then opens. At the same time, the party all hears a woman’s voice speaking in their heads, pleading with them not to go any further. They call back, but there’s no response, and after a minute the portal closes.

Moving on, the CATS meet up with Rizzeryl, the drow convoy from House Auvyndar and ally of the Zhentarim. He’s surprised to see they’re alive, and passes on some more info: Halaster’s apprentice academy, Dwemorcore, is down on the 9th level, and Skullport is accessible both from the 3rd level and the Xanathar hideout, as well as having direct access to the sea outside Waterdeep.

The party also checks in on the nearby Xanathar outpost, and is happy to hear that their hired adventurers are all alive still and doing their paid jobs.

Down on level 3, the party has to sneak past an entire city of Drow soldiers on their way to the entrance to Skullport. They venture further through these tunnels than they had before, passing the location of the Xorn fight from last week, and spot a few Drow waiting in ambush over the nearby river. They kill some drow in a nearby cave, and find another one of those portal archway gates.

This gate is inscribed with three images of a man carrying a staff. They dick around with it for a while, trying to figure out how to solve the riddle, and finally Tariq pulls a broom out of his Bag of Holding, and shaves all the bristles off of one end. He hands it to Carlin, then he and Sadi take out their respective staves, and the three of them each touch this archway once with their ‘staff’. The portal flashes green, and opens.

This time there’s no voice in their heads, but a faint ghostly image of a woman, shaking her head and shooing them away. Everyone is confused, and not sure how to take this, but Sadi decides she needs to make a point, and marches right on through.

Something flashes, and Sadi feels magical power flow into her. She stands in a dusty, cobweb-filled room on the other side of this portal, surrounded by a magical force field. When she decides to turn back, bumping into Carlin on his way to go rescue her, the force field remains and everyone can see she is protected by something. The party agrees not to go through the portal until they can figure out where it leads, but Sadi now believes using the portals to travel is a wonderful idea.

The CATS kill the two drow ambushers before they move on, winding through the tunnels before they eventually find a troop of hobgoblins. The hobgoblins, they know, are at war with the drow, so they agree to swear fealty to their leader, a hobgoblin named Azrok.

There’s a bit of bureaucracy beforehand but finally they meet the warlord Azrok, who sits on a throne of skulls and will not look them in the eye. His wife, Lurkana, whispers in his ear, and when they finally all kneel Azrok and Lurkana thank them for their fealty, and promise them safe passage through the Hobgoblins’ space.

While kneeling, Carlin looks up and sees the necklace of trophies on Azrok’s neck - a few claws, some eyeballs, and a single human finger still wearing the ring of House Rosznar. He whispers this to Sadi and the others.

Sadi is at first too distracted looking at Azrok, who she realizes doesn’t react to their movement whatsoever. It appears that Lurkana is whispering in his ear to tell him what’s happening - it seems like he’s blind.

The group is escorted out of the throne room and are left free to roam the small underground city. They hear about a strange ambassador from Xanathar who is staying in town, and ask to be shown where he is. They’re lead to a simply furnished bedroom, occupied by a single Illithid, or Mind Flayer.

The mind flayer welcomes them in and warns them away from Skullport, telling them it’s a horrible place, no place for curious adventurers. He tells them a fanciful story about Halaster and his seven apprentices, attempting to distract them with another adventure. The CATS don’t take the bait, and decide to leave.

Before they can head to Skullport properly, they’re pulled aside by a messenger from Lurkana. She invites them into her quarters, and asks them to complete a job for her in exchange for a lot of gold. Apparently, some adventurers came through a while back and stole something from her husband: a magical dagger he needs to defeat the drow. Without it, the drow have been gaining ground. The adventurers were Duergar, who she believes are either hiding in Skullport or passed through on their way somewhere else. Get it back, she asks, and the CATS will be handsomely rewarded.

[antoine-roquentin]

The first and third incarnations of the Klan—the cross-burning lynch mobs and the vigilantes who beat up and murdered civil rights workers in the 1960s—seem beyond the pale of today’s politics, at least for the moment. But the second Klan, the Klan of the 1920s, less violent but far more widespread, is a different story, and one that offers some chilling comparisons to the present day. It embodied the same racism at its core but served it up beneath a deceptively benign façade, in all-American patriotic colors.

In other ways as well, the Klan of the 1920s strongly echoes the world of Donald Trump. This Klan was a movement, but also a profit-making business. On economic issues, it took a few mildly populist stands. It was heavily supported by evangelicals. It was deeply hostile to science and trafficked in false assertions. And it was masterfully guided by a team of public relations advisers as skillful as any political consultants today.

Two new books give us a fresh look at this second period of the Klan. Linda Gordon’s The Second Coming of the KKK is the wiser and deeper; Felix Harcourt’s Ku Klux Kulture offers some useful background information but then, reflecting its origin as a Ph.D. thesis, becomes an exhaustive survey of Klansmen’s appearances, variously as heroes or villains, in the era’s novels, movies, songs, plays, musicals, and more.

The KKK’s rebirth was spurred by D.W. Griffith’s landmark 1915 film, Birth of a Nation. The most expensive and widely seen motion picture that had yet been made, it featured rampaging mobs of newly freed slaves in the post–Civil War South colluding with rapacious northern carpetbaggers. To the rescue comes the Ku Klux Klan, whose armed and mounted heroes lynch a black villain, save the honor of southern womanhood, and prevent the ominous prospect of blacks at the ballot box. “It is like teaching history with lightning,” said an admiring President Woodrow Wilson, an ardent segregationist, who saw the film in the White House. Wilson’s comment underlines a point both Gordon and Harcourt make: the Klan of this era was no fringe group, for tens of millions of nonmembers agreed with its politics.

The founder of the reincarnated Klan in 1915 was an Atlanta physician named William Joseph Simmons, who five years later fell into the hands of two skilled public relations professionals, Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clarke. They convinced him that for the Klan to gain members in other parts of the country, it had to add Jews, Catholics, immigrants, and big-city elites to its list of villains. Tyler and Clarke in effect ran the KKK for the next several years, a pair of Bannons to Simmons’s Trump.

Simmons signed a contract giving the two an amazing 80 percent of dues and other revenue gleaned from new recruits. They are believed to have reaped $850,000—worth more than $11 million today—in their first fifteen months on the job. The whole enterprise was organized on a commission basis: everyone from the recruiters, or Kleagles, up through higher officers (King Kleagles, Grand Goblins, and more) kept a percentage of the initiation fee ($10, the equivalent of $122 today) and monthly dues. The movement was a highly lucrative brand.

Tyler and Clarke polished Simmons’s speaking style and set up newspaper interviews for him, gave free Klan memberships to Protestant ministers, and assured prominent placement of their blizzard of press releases by buying tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of newspaper advertising. To appear respectable, they made these purchases through two well-known ad agencies, one of which had a Jewish CEO. Simmons, however, spent much of his share of the take on horse races, prizefights, and drink. Several rivals who lusted after the KKK’s lucrative income stream maneuvered him out of office with the help of Tyler and Clarke.

A plump, diminutive Texas dentist, Hiram Evans, became the new Imperial Wizard in 1922. He, in turn, his eye on Tyler and Clarke’s 80 percent of revenues, was able to force them out because of a scandal—the two were sexually involved but each was married to someone else. Linda Gordon gives Tyler major credit for the Klan’s success: “The organization might well have grown without this driven, bold, corrupt, and precociously entrepreneurial woman, but it would likely have been smaller.” About other women in the Klan, such as one group called Ladies of the Invisible Empire, Gordon dryly notes, “Readers…must rid themselves of notions that women’s politics are always kinder, gentler, and less racist than men’s.”

Significantly, the new Wizard moved the Klan’s headquarters to Washington, D.C. Membership skyrocketed, reaching an estimated four million by 1924. The revenue remained enormous: beyond dues, there were sales of Klan insurance, knives, trinkets, and garb. Those robes and pointed hoods were made to an exacting pattern, sold at a big markup, and, until his ouster, could only be purchased from a company owned by Clarke. The temptations of this fountain of money led to further rivalries and embezzlement, compounded by the conviction of several Klan leaders for various sordid offenses, most spectacularly the Indiana Grand Dragon for the rape and murder of a young woman who worked for him—a crime that left his bite marks all over her body. All of this made the Klan largely collapse by the end of the decade—but not before it had helped win an enormous legislative victory, and not before there occurred a curious episode involving the Trump family.

Before we get to that, however, there’s another odd parallel between the Klan of the 1920s and the present day, which has to do with the sheer value of getting attention in the media. Many newspapers campaigned against the KKK, and no less than five such exposés won Pulitzer Prizes. The first was for an excoriating series of stories in the New York World in 1921 that revealed secret Klan rituals and code words, gave the names of more than two hundred officials, and listed violent crimes committed by Klansmen. The heavily promoted articles ran for three weeks, were reprinted by seventeen newspapers throughout the country, and provoked a congressional investigation. But instead of crushing the organization, the exposé did the opposite; one historian estimates that the series increased Klan membership by more than a million. Some people even tried to join by filling out the blank membership application form the World had used to illustrate one story.

Being denounced by a liberal New York newspaper, it turned out, gave the Klan just the political imprimatur it needed, and spread the news of its rebirth across the nation. Imperial Wizard Evans exulted that the exposés had provided “fifty million dollars’ worth of free advertising.” People loved the idea of joining a fraternal organization with secret rites and extravagant titles that included judges, congressmen, and other prominent citizens, and that legitimized combat against the forces that seemed to be undermining traditional American life.

What were those forces? Movements heavy on ethnic hatred and imagined conspiracies flourish when rapid changes upset the social order and people feel their income or status threatened. In the heyday of European fascism, the threat came from the enormous job losses of the Great Depression, which in Germany followed the humiliating Versailles Treaty and ruinous inflation that wiped out savings. Among many of Trump’s supporters today, the threat comes from stagnating or declining wages and the rapid automation and globalization that makes people feel their jobs are ever less secure.

We don’t normally think of the heady, expanding American economy of the 1920s as a period of threat, but Gordon offers a broader cultural and feminist analysis. “The Klan supplied a way for members to confirm manliness,” she writes, in an era when many traditional male roles were disappearing. “As more men became white-collar workers, as more small businesses lost out to chains, as the political supremacy of Anglo-Saxons became contested, as more women reached for economic and political rights,” the Klan “organized the performances of masculinity and male bonding through uniforms, parades, rituals, secrecy, and hierarchical military ranks and titles.” She quotes an admonition from one Oregon chapter: “Remember when you come to lodge that this is not an old maid’s convention.” A man who by day might be an accountant or stationery salesman or have a wife who earned more than he did could, in his Klan robes, be a Kleagle or Klaliff or Exalted Cyclops by night.

Not all Klan members were men, of course, and the Klan was not the only organization that offered ceremonial dress and fancy titles: it’s telling that the first place Klan recruiters usually sought members was among Masons. But Gordon’s is a thoughtful explanation of the Klan’s appeal in the fast-urbanizing America of the 1920s, which was leaving behind an earlier nation based, in imagined memory, on self-sufficient yeoman farmers, proud blue-collar workers, and virtuous small-town businessmen, all of them going to the same white-steepled church on Sunday. It was a world in which men did traditionally manly work and women’s place was in the kitchen and bedroom. Even city-dwellers—perhaps especially city-dwellers—could feel this nostalgia. (Although, as with many idealized pasts, the reality was less ideal: many late-nineteenth-century farmers and small businessmen went bankrupt or deep into debt, casualties of a string of recessions and declining world commodity prices.)

All these feelings, of course, came on top of centuries of racism. And that hostility was surely exacerbated during the 1920s when the Great Migration of African-Americans out of the South was well underway, making black faces visible to millions who had seldom or never seen them before....

Sometimes what doesn’t happen is revealing. If upheavals that threaten people’s jobs and status provide the classic fuel for movements like the KKK, then in the 1930s, when the Depression threw a quarter of the American labor force out of work and left hundreds of thousands living in shacks of scrap wood and tarpaper, why didn’t the Klan come back to life stronger than ever? One answer is that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, despite its shortcomings, was a far-reaching and impassioned attempt to address the nation’s economic woes and injustices head-on, with a boldness we’ve not seen since then. It gave people hope. Another answer is that although FDR made many compromises with southern Democrats to get his programs through Congress, he was no racist. The more outspoken Eleanor Roosevelt was a fervent proponent of anti-lynching laws and of full rights for black Americans. The tone set by the White House matters; it creates moral space for others to speak and act. Perhaps it’s no surprise that these were years when the Klan lay low.