Previously, on TTRPG Night: The group went to a magical marketplace, found some information and seemingly got sucked into a trap. They had made it through the see-saw floor tunnel and fought devilish reflections of themselves after walking through the funhouse mirrors. Will they survive the Super Happy Blood Wars Funhouse and Execution Parlor? Read on to find out.
Night Two
We got right back to it a week later. The party’s first stop was the pendulum room. To cross the room, the characters would need to jump from one ten-foot square pillar to another, each felt just a bit too far apart. And that was the thing, since 30 feet below was a pool of acid, and some demon fish things for good measure, cause, you know, the potential acid bath wasn’t bad enough. Oh, and there was a massive stone demon-faced pendulum tracing an arc from one door to the other. The center pillar was just below the lowest point of the swinging stones movement and was as wide as the pillar iteself.
Q’or used Jump with Bitzie on his back. Deciding they were taking too long and I wanted some snap decisions, the demon faced pendulum started rotating. as the duo got to the second pillar. Q’or timed his next jump perfectly, after burning his bardic inspiration on the failed first attempt to get to the center stone edifice and immediately jump to the next: I described him about to be hit by the stone weight just before latching onto the face on the pendulum as it swung by. He used the momentum from both the swing and the spin to jump to the next platform.
The big brawny one of the group, Z carried Hobbler and jumped to the first pillar, and only passed due to the bardic inspiration. I was looking for some more drama, higher stakes, bringing some more pain. The stone demon pendulum stared to shoot fire as they talked it over their course of action. Q’or and Bitzie took a bit of a roasting. Q’or turned a crit fail into a crit success. He got to the platform with the locked doors. Chad asked if his paladin found any levers or anything.
There sure is, I said, having added them just as he brought it up. He proclaimed that Q’or would pull a couple levers. My roll came up bad: Sorry guys. Starting from the one closest to where they entered the room, each pillar began descending rather quickly into the acid. As the first dropped to the half way point, the next closest started falling as well, and so forth. That sure as fuck did it.
While Hobbler ended up smelling like burnt cat, the other two finally made it to the exit platform. It was then that I remember my damn NPC and I had Brick get there as well, joyfully announcing that the room was a blast.
Next was the rock tumbler room. Just a cylindrical hallway that was slowly spinning. Filled with brimstone. It was meant to be a breather before the final room, but, and also I thought the group might bottle up there for a bit. You know, you’ve seen it happen, a group losing a half our to trying to figure out how to get past a locked trapped door that in actually just totally unlocked and unimportant. They didn’t linger long, and after a quick dexterity save, they all got through the tunnel. Well, Z got her ankle crushed for good measure.
Every hit point they entered the final with was one less I had to contend with. Ha. Ha ha. HAHAHAHAHA…
The Big Event
At last, they entered the Blood War room. The sand was red as, well, blood and fissures of lava spread across the circumference of the round combat arena. Some twenty feet above was a terrace overlooking the event about to unfold. From that Balcony, they could see a familiar figure: the shadow elf that they met upon their arrival into Sigil. It was the same shadow elf that accompanied the big demon that was hunting them as they arrived in Sigil. I wonder what that monstrously large and ugly demon is up to these days.
I very much doubt The Shadar-kai appearing here was a random happenstance. It’s almost like I planned this or something…
With shadow hounds circling around her like a clinging shadow, the Shadar-kai went into monologue mode: “This will be a lot easier if you just die already. It will be much worse for you if Detrateradon gets you instead of me.”
Who the hell was that? Or what? Was it an organization, an individual, someone they had met already or another opportunity to add an adversary to their growing collection? is that the demon’s name? More questions.
There was some colorful replies by the adventurers and she declared that their deaths were inevitable anyway, regardless of their words or intentions. Then the fiends attacked at her command. This was the Blood War room after all.
I rolled to see what the demons and devils would do: Whether they fought each other, the pcs would have an easy time, if both sides went after the players they were fucked. I expected that the randomness would result in a mix and result in a fun fight, since it was well over what they would be able to handle on their own. We all know that math rocks can be fickle so it remained to be seen how the dice would land that evening.
Well, a bearded devil fought a quasit. That took some pressure off the players for a bit. The Shadow demon moved towards the players as a quasit fought a bearded devil. Killing a quasit fast after deciding to focus down a something fast as possible to improve action economy, Z and Brickhouse fought the Shadow Demon, while the others slashed at the other bearded demons.
Hobbler vicious mockeried the Shadar ka: she was not impressed. More threats were made and she left them to their fate. They made it through the engagement but it was clear that they were a few lucky rolls away from a total party kill.
The plan wasn’t to kill the group, yet. I did acknowledge that it was a possibiity as part of the prep for this dual-session and so I had determined the results of a TPK.
While I had not truly set out to run the campaign that was included in the setting, I had always planned to use some form of the alternate reality characters idea that was in the book. Didn’t come up this game. The fight was tough on purpose, and they had a good time. The characters took quite the beating, needing to use some of those healing potions I had liberally distributed (considering they had no dedicated healer) and burnt through nearly all of their daily resources.
Back to the Bar
Exhausted and moderately to savagely hurt, the characters fled back to the razor pit. I handed them a level up. Ding! But with no time to celebrate. A barbarian named Korgoth dragged himself into the hideout, missing an arm at the bicep and covered in gore. After him came a little gnome artificer named Gidgit, and she was carrying the severed limb and covered in gouges and blood. The players were getting stressed out about the fate of Jhell-o, so he finally arrived and screamed that they had lost Gilix, all NPCs that I had introduced them to within the Cosmomancer hideout.
A handful of the Marked had decided to search for answers on their own. They got into the Hall of Information within the Clerk’s Ward. They learned there is a relic in a vault deep within the bank that seemed related to their predicament. Upon exiting, they were accosted by an angry Angel of some kind that scolded them on how the laws of reality were sacred. When it Killed their sorceress friend Gilix, the party made the tough decision and ran.
Seemed it was time for some recon, as the group was not keen on staging a bank heist on a whim. And they didn’t even know who’s vault it was they needed to find. Speaking up from a dark corner, having been there without the party being aware, Farrow made the suggestion that it was time to speak to their employer. Looks like it’s finally time to visit the casino, but there was another task that needed to be tended to.
The players immediately made their way back to the bazaar. They were looking for answers as to whom set them up to get killed. Their first stop was the Quixote’s Questables. As they approached, Quixote might as well have announced “I DID IT” with his body language, and as the party moved into his tent to have a more intimate conversation, Quixote attempted to run. He failed, or, well, he got tripped up by Z and she held him to the ground. While Bitize started interrogating the downed knight, Q’or noticed a bit of fabric coming out of a long, low storage container: turns out he found the real Quixote.
Long story short, they had in their hands a shifter named Corolant, whom was hired by a grey-faced elf woman named Yilvaneth at the drunken Dabus. Hmm. Sound familiar, maybe? After some fun roleplaying and some decent social rolls on Kera’s part, her tiefling Bitzie talked the shifter into helping them, and Brick “escorted” him back to the hideout while the party went to threaten some halflings.
They pretty much started out at max level aggression and threatened the halflings. The tough one held his composure, albeit barely, and the other one straight up cried. It became painfully obvious that the halflings had nothing to do with the ambush and merely attempted to make money off of the things they heard while skulking about. The party took some cash from the lie peddlers, after they determined that halfling brothers heard the rumor at the Drunken Dabus. Isn’t that were Corolant was hired? Interesting.
Well, the second evening of the adventure was over, and after an even smattering of all three pillars of Dungeons and Dragons, Farrow found the team in the bazaar while they bought the nicest clothing they could afford and made ready. Brick returned to them in short order and back together, the party set out for the casino.
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Tyson
Obsessive and neurotic collector of little plastic men, novels about the same little plastic men and paints to make the little plastic men pretty. Married to Kera, who puts up with him and pretends that she doesn’t hear him speaking to the little plastic men in between making pew pew noises in the hobby room. Requires adult supervision. A menace to himself but rarely to others. More beard than man
