Griffin O'Callahan (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
icastsword) wrote2025-01-31 07:30 pm
icastsword) wrote2025-01-31 07:30 pm
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Session 182: The End of the Chapter
We don’t know what happened to the Confluence of Caedes. Our first order of business is getting out of the dungeon under the Tower of London. Let’s start things off with a Perception Roll. Griffin rolls a 10. Shane rolls a crit fail. Shane is doing the math woman meme. We’re running out of here with a teenager who has the power of an evil god. He may be a little preoccupied figuring out how he’s going to spin this, because we can’t just let Baahl Meets World over here. Yeah, Serra said she was going to take care of him, but Shane is on thin ice with Interplay right now (Nah, he can just talk to Merlin and things will be fine). He’s making plans within plans. Who can he call? What favors does he have? He doesn’t have his minotaur favor anymore, but he’s still got the Backdoor Jerry favor. Whatever that is.
With his 10 Perception, Griffin is focused on looking out for more threats. We just dealt with a bunch of Relentless demons. He’s on Defense. He’s also put his glamor back on.
We’re retracing our steps to leave, to hopefully avoid any more encounters. Serra, Jericho, and Pip are noticing that there doesn’t seem to be anyone coming. We just made a big ruckus down there. We took out a lot of the berserker cultists, we took out Jack the Ripper. There doesn’t appear to be anybody. They’re replaying the fight in their heads. It seems kind of weird that in an underground dungeon hell cathedral, no one ran down to help the Relentless Slasher. And we never encountered Montgomery Powell again once he dropped us off in the Tower of London.
Hm.
What did Crimeny see with their 25? As we pass by that library we wanted to come back to later, it’s apparent that a LOT of the literature there has been taken away. This place has been ransacked. The odds of Powell doing this on his own are slim to none. All of the books of value seem to be cherry picked. Crimeny takes a random book. They roll a 27 Investigation and a 6 Arcana. "This is a science book!"
Jericho and Mr. Bishop get into an argument about the superiority of metric versus imperial. Shane asks Crimeny if he can see the book. Shane rolls Arcana on the book. He rolls a second crit fail, for a total of 8. He can’t focus on anything besides the really dumb argument his dad is having with Jericho. He asks Nellie to look at the book. She rolls a dirty 20 Arcana.
This is a book of alchemy. It’s pretty ironic that Shane didn’t notice. She points it out to Shane, and he is allowed to roll Arcana again with Advantage. This time he manages a 23.
This is a book about anamnesis - regarding recovering memories from previous lifetimes. It’s a collection of theories - however the soul manifests, it retains memories over many lifetimes, and this specific school of alchemy is meant to draw those memories out.
If you’re going to manufacture a body for a soul, in order to bring back its past memories, what would be needed would be potentially remains from the past lives, or something that has connection to the soul’s memory. So if a soul was a strong warrior in a past life, you’d want to imbue the essence of a weapon into the new vessel (Vessel, not necessarily a body).
It’s weird that Nellie didn’t notice the subject of this book.
We continue upward - it’s time for more Perception rolls: dirty 20! Mr. Bishop and Jericho are still arguing. Nellie is hyper-fixating on the anamnesis book. Everyone else doesn’t see anything unusual - no guards, until we get back up to the Tower proper, where there ARE guards, but the guards that are supposed to be there.
Well, Nellie’s last remaining spell slot is 5th level, she COULD cast a turbo sleep.
Is there any way we can figure out how many guards there are, and where they are? Can we send Nekonomicon out to peep? Sure. Nellie asks Crimeny if the cultists left any tools out that might be helpful to us in leaving. Crimeny rolls a 30 Perception. Nellie rolls a 28 Arcana. Nellie knows that any number of decent illusion or suggestion spells could have tricked any of these guards. Crimeny is thinking maybe some of these guards might be on the cult payroll, and/or they might be magic folk in disguise, but we don’t know.
It seems as if all means of entering/exiting was straight up subterfuge and misdirection.
Nekonomicon rolls 12 Stealth. Time for the guards to roll Perception. First guard sees nothing. Second guard sees nothing. THIRD GUARD SEES NOTHING. Fourth guard sees something, probably a cat.
Three of the guards aren’t paying attention. They’re looking for human threats. Nekonomicon walks out into the courtyard. There are six guards stationed around. Three of them seem to notice the kitty, but they don’t react.
Shane lets the crew know there are six guards. Two are on patrol.
We can take a 10 minute break and get Shane his spell slots back. Griffin can also get two spell slots back.
We have enough Invisibility spells amongst the group to invisible 5 out of 6 people. Crimeny can take care of themself. Nellie can cast fly on up to 3 people. She asks Mr. Bishop if he has anything that might help? Mr. Bishop has Pass Without Trace.
...Why don’t we just do that!?
We can split into an invisible team and a flying team.
Team Fly/Pass Without Trace: Nellie, Griffin, Mr. Bishop
Team Invisible: Serra, Samsara, Jericho, and Shane
Crimeny will just leave.
Time for Stealth with Pass Without Trace: 28.
Samsara rolled a 15 on ground stealth. Time for the soldiers to roll Perception.
The walkers make it to the trees. No one sees any guards. The airborne team rolls Perception: Griffin rolled a 7! Nellie rolled a 9! Mr. Bishop rolled a 9! We soar over the wall and land uneventfully on the other side. The Invisible team joins the flying team.
We are missing Samsara. As we realize this we hear the sound of alarms going off.
Shane sends Nekonomicon back in. Nekonomicon rolls a 19 Perception. Samsara is running through the courtyard with one of the guards’ hats. Four guards are hot on his heels.
Shane decides Mr. Bishop is going to pretend to be Sam’s dad and to be very cross. But before he can put his brilliant plan into action, Crimeny steps up.
Sam is running west, away from the group. Crimeny runs ahead to catch up. They have a 12oz bottle of baby oil. They are confident in their hooligan skills. They run in to catch up to Sam - they roll 23 Acrobatics. They deploy the baby oil like a Mario kart item. They roll a ranged attack. They roll a crit to attack with baby oil.
ANT: How are you deploying the baby oil?
SCOTT: Like Speed Racer.
So imagine a pair of onesie pajamas: imagine Crimeny’s butt-flap opening and depositing baby oil. Nah, they appear to pull it out of the hat and squirt it manually.
Time for some dex saves: None of the four pursuing guards make it. The highest roll was a 10. The first three collapse and sprawl out. The final guy sees this and manages to jump over them, only to be beaned in the head with the empty bottle of baby oil. Bagel’d in the head. Then he falls backward onto the other three.
Crimeny leads Samsara out of the Tower of London. Alarms are blazing, we should get out of here.
Crimeny promises Samsara they will instruct him on proper getaway, later.
We return to Mr. Bishop’s flat. He says he’s going to check his email. Shane tells him to go to bed. He says if he goes to bed, he’ll just check his email on his phone. Shane threatens to take his phone. There is a dexterity contest. Shane rolls with disadvantage because he fell below 0HP several times tonight and also it’s four in the morning. Ryo rolls a 1 and a nat 20. Mr. Bishop checks his email. Hey, he finally got some intel on that guy we came here to find!
Sigurd Skoglund is apparently dead. He’s been dead for 3 years. His last known address was a small shack in a secluded village in the Magmatic Realm.
We go to bed. We wake up. Mr. Bishop wakes Crimeny up with the TV. Everyone else is still passed out with terrible Perception rolls.
Crimeny sees Mr. Bishop making brunch. The TV is set to the travel channel. It’s got one of those really dumb paranormal shows on. This particular episode is about New Orleans!
CRIMENY: I have a bad feeling about this.
WELCOME BACK TO SPOOKY BROS! There’s a heavyset dude with a backwards baseball cap and a T-shirt that was printed at the mall that says Spooky Bros. He’s live right now in the French Quarter. The show cuts to a testimonial, live from the French quarter. As the testimonial goes, there is shaky, grainy footage of the French Quarter at night. The footage shows a number of the buildings spasm out, and turn into weird multi-colored geography, before snapping back into reality.
"We were just walking, and all of a sudden, this building like, plane-shifted??"
Plane-shifting! Is it something feasible? Are there other planes of existence? Higher realms than our own? Perhaps this isn’t plane shifting, but TIME shifting!
They show the video clip again, in slow motion. Then they play it a third time.
Crimeny sees the building turn to STATIC before it spasms out. They’ve seen that static before.
After that, it cuts back to the dude bro - "Catch us next week everybody! Me and my partner here, my partner Skully? It’s something in the sewers! We’ve seen it and we’re going for it!"
Even though Crimeny is mechanical and doesn’t possess sweat glands, a single drop of moisture is dripping down their face.
Does Crimeny want to wake everybody up and explain what just happened?
Crimeny makes a very loud gunshot noise. Jericho is out of his bed and in the kitchen instantly. GUNSHOT!? The others follow at a slightly more sedate pace. The Spooky Bros show is played back for the rest of the crew.
So I guess Interplay is really, REALLY bad at the job it claims it’s good at? No one was able to find the sewer egg?
Looks like there’s no rest for the wicked. It’s time to go back to the US and look for a sewer egg.
With his 10 Perception, Griffin is focused on looking out for more threats. We just dealt with a bunch of Relentless demons. He’s on Defense. He’s also put his glamor back on.
We’re retracing our steps to leave, to hopefully avoid any more encounters. Serra, Jericho, and Pip are noticing that there doesn’t seem to be anyone coming. We just made a big ruckus down there. We took out a lot of the berserker cultists, we took out Jack the Ripper. There doesn’t appear to be anybody. They’re replaying the fight in their heads. It seems kind of weird that in an underground dungeon hell cathedral, no one ran down to help the Relentless Slasher. And we never encountered Montgomery Powell again once he dropped us off in the Tower of London.
Hm.
What did Crimeny see with their 25? As we pass by that library we wanted to come back to later, it’s apparent that a LOT of the literature there has been taken away. This place has been ransacked. The odds of Powell doing this on his own are slim to none. All of the books of value seem to be cherry picked. Crimeny takes a random book. They roll a 27 Investigation and a 6 Arcana. "This is a science book!"
Jericho and Mr. Bishop get into an argument about the superiority of metric versus imperial. Shane asks Crimeny if he can see the book. Shane rolls Arcana on the book. He rolls a second crit fail, for a total of 8. He can’t focus on anything besides the really dumb argument his dad is having with Jericho. He asks Nellie to look at the book. She rolls a dirty 20 Arcana.
This is a book of alchemy. It’s pretty ironic that Shane didn’t notice. She points it out to Shane, and he is allowed to roll Arcana again with Advantage. This time he manages a 23.
This is a book about anamnesis - regarding recovering memories from previous lifetimes. It’s a collection of theories - however the soul manifests, it retains memories over many lifetimes, and this specific school of alchemy is meant to draw those memories out.
If you’re going to manufacture a body for a soul, in order to bring back its past memories, what would be needed would be potentially remains from the past lives, or something that has connection to the soul’s memory. So if a soul was a strong warrior in a past life, you’d want to imbue the essence of a weapon into the new vessel (Vessel, not necessarily a body).
It’s weird that Nellie didn’t notice the subject of this book.
We continue upward - it’s time for more Perception rolls: dirty 20! Mr. Bishop and Jericho are still arguing. Nellie is hyper-fixating on the anamnesis book. Everyone else doesn’t see anything unusual - no guards, until we get back up to the Tower proper, where there ARE guards, but the guards that are supposed to be there.
Well, Nellie’s last remaining spell slot is 5th level, she COULD cast a turbo sleep.
Is there any way we can figure out how many guards there are, and where they are? Can we send Nekonomicon out to peep? Sure. Nellie asks Crimeny if the cultists left any tools out that might be helpful to us in leaving. Crimeny rolls a 30 Perception. Nellie rolls a 28 Arcana. Nellie knows that any number of decent illusion or suggestion spells could have tricked any of these guards. Crimeny is thinking maybe some of these guards might be on the cult payroll, and/or they might be magic folk in disguise, but we don’t know.
It seems as if all means of entering/exiting was straight up subterfuge and misdirection.
Nekonomicon rolls 12 Stealth. Time for the guards to roll Perception. First guard sees nothing. Second guard sees nothing. THIRD GUARD SEES NOTHING. Fourth guard sees something, probably a cat.
Three of the guards aren’t paying attention. They’re looking for human threats. Nekonomicon walks out into the courtyard. There are six guards stationed around. Three of them seem to notice the kitty, but they don’t react.
Shane lets the crew know there are six guards. Two are on patrol.
We can take a 10 minute break and get Shane his spell slots back. Griffin can also get two spell slots back.
We have enough Invisibility spells amongst the group to invisible 5 out of 6 people. Crimeny can take care of themself. Nellie can cast fly on up to 3 people. She asks Mr. Bishop if he has anything that might help? Mr. Bishop has Pass Without Trace.
...Why don’t we just do that!?
We can split into an invisible team and a flying team.
Team Fly/Pass Without Trace: Nellie, Griffin, Mr. Bishop
Team Invisible: Serra, Samsara, Jericho, and Shane
Crimeny will just leave.
Time for Stealth with Pass Without Trace: 28.
Samsara rolled a 15 on ground stealth. Time for the soldiers to roll Perception.
The walkers make it to the trees. No one sees any guards. The airborne team rolls Perception: Griffin rolled a 7! Nellie rolled a 9! Mr. Bishop rolled a 9! We soar over the wall and land uneventfully on the other side. The Invisible team joins the flying team.
We are missing Samsara. As we realize this we hear the sound of alarms going off.
Shane sends Nekonomicon back in. Nekonomicon rolls a 19 Perception. Samsara is running through the courtyard with one of the guards’ hats. Four guards are hot on his heels.
Shane decides Mr. Bishop is going to pretend to be Sam’s dad and to be very cross. But before he can put his brilliant plan into action, Crimeny steps up.
Sam is running west, away from the group. Crimeny runs ahead to catch up. They have a 12oz bottle of baby oil. They are confident in their hooligan skills. They run in to catch up to Sam - they roll 23 Acrobatics. They deploy the baby oil like a Mario kart item. They roll a ranged attack. They roll a crit to attack with baby oil.
ANT: How are you deploying the baby oil?
SCOTT: Like Speed Racer.
So imagine a pair of onesie pajamas: imagine Crimeny’s butt-flap opening and depositing baby oil. Nah, they appear to pull it out of the hat and squirt it manually.
Time for some dex saves: None of the four pursuing guards make it. The highest roll was a 10. The first three collapse and sprawl out. The final guy sees this and manages to jump over them, only to be beaned in the head with the empty bottle of baby oil. Bagel’d in the head. Then he falls backward onto the other three.
Crimeny leads Samsara out of the Tower of London. Alarms are blazing, we should get out of here.
Crimeny promises Samsara they will instruct him on proper getaway, later.
We return to Mr. Bishop’s flat. He says he’s going to check his email. Shane tells him to go to bed. He says if he goes to bed, he’ll just check his email on his phone. Shane threatens to take his phone. There is a dexterity contest. Shane rolls with disadvantage because he fell below 0HP several times tonight and also it’s four in the morning. Ryo rolls a 1 and a nat 20. Mr. Bishop checks his email. Hey, he finally got some intel on that guy we came here to find!
Sigurd Skoglund is apparently dead. He’s been dead for 3 years. His last known address was a small shack in a secluded village in the Magmatic Realm.
We go to bed. We wake up. Mr. Bishop wakes Crimeny up with the TV. Everyone else is still passed out with terrible Perception rolls.
Crimeny sees Mr. Bishop making brunch. The TV is set to the travel channel. It’s got one of those really dumb paranormal shows on. This particular episode is about New Orleans!
CRIMENY: I have a bad feeling about this.
WELCOME BACK TO SPOOKY BROS! There’s a heavyset dude with a backwards baseball cap and a T-shirt that was printed at the mall that says Spooky Bros. He’s live right now in the French Quarter. The show cuts to a testimonial, live from the French quarter. As the testimonial goes, there is shaky, grainy footage of the French Quarter at night. The footage shows a number of the buildings spasm out, and turn into weird multi-colored geography, before snapping back into reality.
"We were just walking, and all of a sudden, this building like, plane-shifted??"
Plane-shifting! Is it something feasible? Are there other planes of existence? Higher realms than our own? Perhaps this isn’t plane shifting, but TIME shifting!
They show the video clip again, in slow motion. Then they play it a third time.
Crimeny sees the building turn to STATIC before it spasms out. They’ve seen that static before.
After that, it cuts back to the dude bro - "Catch us next week everybody! Me and my partner here, my partner Skully? It’s something in the sewers! We’ve seen it and we’re going for it!"
Even though Crimeny is mechanical and doesn’t possess sweat glands, a single drop of moisture is dripping down their face.
Does Crimeny want to wake everybody up and explain what just happened?
Crimeny makes a very loud gunshot noise. Jericho is out of his bed and in the kitchen instantly. GUNSHOT!? The others follow at a slightly more sedate pace. The Spooky Bros show is played back for the rest of the crew.
So I guess Interplay is really, REALLY bad at the job it claims it’s good at? No one was able to find the sewer egg?
Looks like there’s no rest for the wicked. It’s time to go back to the US and look for a sewer egg.