Darkest Corners volume 2

Game Master Harakani

Note that I'm giving Isama and Ophelia a head start so the junkies don't hear my report to Diene, IF message works.
We probably saved her life, and they are likely to be helpful, but they are still junkies, and shouldn't know more about potential renegade guard involvement than needed.

@Addicts - We could probably just bring them to a nearby cafe or something. Grab a somewhat discreet table and offer them some refreshments while trying to soak up as much info as possible.

I'm guessing, like Daria, that they probably don't mind given the events that transpired or are dazed enough to simply go along with things. But we'll see how that turns out :D

Source Advanced Class Guide

Price 30 gp; Weight 1/2 lb.

This violet balm comes in a small ceramic pot. When applied to a weapon as a standard action, it forms a transparent coating. Weapons coated in this balm deal an additional 2d4 points of damage to undead or evil outsiders. A creature affected by the balm must succeed at a DC 10 Reflex save or take an additional 1d4 points of damage the following round. Any non-magical weapon coated with the balm affects incorporeal undead or evil outsiders as if it were a magic weapon. Any magic weapon coated with the balm affects incorporeal undead or evil outsiders as if the weapon had the ghost touch special ability. The balm remains effective until you make a successful attack with the weapon or until 1 minute has passed, whichever is sooner. Each dose of balm can coat one weapon or 10 pieces of ammunition.

Hmm why don't we have a few of these laying around for just these sort of situations :P?

...Hmm I have to dig up my ACG and see if there are any special tricks to it or if Ophelia could simply head to the temple and purchase some Holy Water as a base ...

That's pretty cool!

That came up in another game recently, too. We decided it's much more effective to use with ammunition, due to 10 pieces being coated. The one-minute time also meant you cannot coat all pieces in sequence, then use it.

The modus operandi, then, was to open it, and pass it around, with everybody dipping 2 pieces of ammunition in preparation, then going in to attack.
(with slings for the melee...basically free, adds strenght bonus, one-handed(so easy to drop, and no worries if no retrieval possible))

The problem, of course, being that you need to have a couple rounds to prepare and need to know enemy will be there.

But by all means, lets fetch some!

Btw: my action depends on Diene actually being successful in parrying the touch attack. If for some reason that does not work, and I got a Wand Zap from Ophelia, I may run right up to her instead.
Just saying if she is badly hurt, I may act differently, didn't want to write out a conditional action tree.

Diene: hugelyimportant. Parry is -2 per size category bigger. This thing is Huge (it's an enormous mist cloud - almost the size of Obscuring Mist). I make that a -4, which makes both you and it 20, and you have to beat it.
Can you double check the maths, please, because there's a LOT of damage riding on which way it goes.

Well, for starters, it rolled an 18 to hit, not a 20. 20 was damage.

For secondzies, I rolled a 28 to parry, not a 24. 24 was my riposte.

So, I beat it by 6, even with the -4.

Huh! So it was. Sorry - I had the feeling something was wrong, but I couldn't pin it down.

Happy New Year guys.

Taking the body? Still leaving it?

I'd vote for taking it, if we can do it discreetly. Might be some way to find traces of what happened to it maybe ...? Or it could just continue to try and expend scary ghosts and spread doom everywhere!

Taking it seems fine. We still haven't managed to figure out the drug dealer connection to the guards yet.

Diene doesn't care about the body so much as the ghost. Maybe finding out what kind of ghost it is/was would help.

If it is a ghost, it'll be back anyway, until put to rest.

Haunt? Not certain.
@Body: I'm with Ophelia. Plus if the other bodies "disappeared", then a dead dessicated junkie on fever ally MAY get other guard units involved when it's found, which we don't really want, right now.

@connection: luckily, any connection to the guards is only a bonus. Our goal is to find out who is behind the killings of drug users, and I'd say we got a whole lot closer, there. Plus if we find proof on who is organizing the distribution of this dangerous new substance, I feel the connection to bribed guards will fall into place from there.

And with the Witch House=>Greeleys Crew we have a good lead in that direction.

Is there a knowledge roll that would help figure out what that thing was?

Well, since Detect Magic acted weirdly, and Knowledge(Religion) didn't work, I guess we can deduce it is not a "regular undead" like a Ghost. I guess I could look things up in the library of my day job, but I fear former colleagues of my guard job may be waiting for me there.

But if there's a smart idea on what to use my Take 20 Knowledge today for, I'm all ears. I THINK I have not used it yet. Will add to tracked resources from tomorrow on.

IC Today's been a REALLY long day.
Knowledge: Planes can give some knowledge. Only DC 17 to get that was an extraplanar creature and NOT a ghost.
Diene knows for sure that it was gaseous rather than incorporeal.

Does Diene know that? I'm not sure Diene knows the difference between the two.

Huh. Good question. Has Diene punched a ghost?

I'm wondering if ghosts and gasses feel particularly different to punches. Ghosts and inexplicably structured gasses have a lot of similarities.

And no.

So what you are saying is that we have to find a wide range of gassy and/or incorporeal critters for Diene to punch and compare.

*Punch!* "Hmm no, a bit more crunchy then this." *Punch!*

__________________

Yeah today has been long. So stash the body, quiz the addicts and take a nap?

"Suspect 3, please step forward and get punched again."

Yeah, Past midnight, and a long day. I think one question was how we spend the night, and I believe the decision was "together" rather than splitting up.

So yeah, lets take the body, stash the addicts, and quiz a nap.

I think Ophelia rolled a 20 to Kn:Planes?

I guess that was before. Ophelia rolled a bunch of KN's, I rolled two Generic KN's too.

But I guess we need to roll specific for the creature. As said, my "base" knowledge is 20, so if it's DC 17, we should know more, now that we got a look at it ^_^

But good catch, Isama.

Also, remained behind with the addicts, so didn't actually see the smoke critter...

Site's actually up...
I figure once the critter manifested it gives you a much better clue than you had before.

A tiny blue Fey manifests next to Daria, taking a moment to look around, sniffing the air, then poking the body: "Yeah. Not THAT hard to guess now is it? It's from where I'm from. Now, not then, of course."
Looking around at the others, she then shrugs:"What, it's a discussion thread...I can make cameos here! I'm leaving your gameplay alone, like my human told me!", with that, she shows her tongue, then dances a little pirouette, vanishing from sight as she turns on the spot.

Uhm...yeah, what Yin said. With semi-real illusions that are not shadow-based, only dimension of dreams comes to mind, if we mean to speculate.

I think we might be in a situation where players have worked it out, and are trying to work out if their characters would have as well.

Certainly the fact its dream-related is already out IC and OOC.

I put up a knowledge roll in the IC thread real quick. I figured that, despite it being late, we would probably go over what information we gathered before going to sleep.

Which is basically our next step I guess!

We don't really have access to the police station at the moment, being suspended and all? Ophelia's shop might be an alternative, though we know someone might know of that place already given the earlier strangeness...

Any other nice places we could take a nap at and hopefully don't really dream too much :P?

I'm thinking that if you were prepared to pay for it you could hire a few rooms from an inn criminals use for confidentiality.
Ironically a high class Shiver Den has pretty much everything you want. Privacy. Anonymity. Reasonable security. Everything possible to give nice dreams.
You could squat in a building not used during the night. Not so comfortable, but relatively safe.
Ophelia's house or Isama's apartment does have the risk of being an obvious place to be found.
Otherwise there's the suite of rooms the Will O Wisp guy was using. They're REALLY secure AND vacant - because no-one wants to live in a site steeped in ritual murder ;)

I'm thinking we might want to find a criminal inn that isn't a shiver den, just so we don't accidentally something :P

Maybe such an establishment would be known to our not-so-lawful character(s)? :P

Maybe we can crash in the storage room of Victor's workshop.
It's in his interest to have us re-instated, since I cut a deal with him.
Formally, because we did not push charges back then about what happened at the Academie.

Plus if any extraplanar soul beings come up, he can simply hook them up to a construct of his ^_^

Seems reasonable that you'd know a range of them.
I'm prepared to put a single room for four of you under 'living expenses'. Not great security, but you'll all be there together.

Can I assume Ophelia 'stands guard' while resting, and everyone else sleeps?
Any special precautions?

That is a fair assumption, though it is unlikely that she will manage to remain completely still and inactive during the night. Standing around doing nothing for so long will most certainly bore her, so she might try and find something in the room to pass the time with : )

Ophelia can simply chat silently with whoever is up with her.

I'd much rather extend our rest time slightly and go with double shifts.
Instead of having the ONLY person awake who was having weird foreboding daydreams earlier, and saw the webs and stuff in the alley.

So...3 shifts for Daria, Diene and Isama, each of them accompanied by Ophelia...sound like a plan?

That does sound better. Less risk of someone getting poked in the middle of the night just because Ophelia wants something to do :P

Seems like you guys have a plan, let's do it.

Isama shrugs. We just need to get evidence of how they're paying off the Guard as far as I'm concerned. If the witch house helps with that that's fine by me.

Hey Isama...you repeatedly only worried about the Guards involvement, and I was always wondering when you did.

It's no problem if you want to play it perfectly straight, only caring about being re-instated in office and not caring about the side job, but I would like to know if I am mis-reading Isamas intention, because eventually this will come up in-game, I think. Because I'm rather certain we will learn about this information before we're done with the job as a whole, so if Isama intends to "abort mission" because she's content with what she has, we'll need to deal with it, in character, and if you've been dropping hints on that, I'd prefer making sure I am not misunderstanding them either way.

It's more she wants to get back to doing this officially. She doesn't like being on paid leave.

Yeah I/Ophelia agree that it would be better to do things by the book.

Though there are some things that might need urgent fixing ... We'll see : )

Ah, okay, so it's more of an interest to do it by the book.

That possibility kind of eluded me. I figured if we expose them, officially, then whoever is responsible will cut the ropes and become intangible for the law.
I kind of expected we'll have to see things through to the end before we can go back to Spooky and do things the proper way again.

I think the root cause may be meta-gaming, expecting the module to be somewhat self-contained, meaning it makes sense to force the characters apart from any other resources they would have at their disposal - that probably spilled over into Daria's thought process...apologies for that.

But then, since the councillor sought her out, and offered a TON of money, she'd probably still see things that way :)
I mean, that amount of cash? She could technically retire and move to greener pastures enjoying a simple yet good life in rural Kyonin. If she wanted that kind of thing. Either way the money is a huge motivational factor for her :)
Plus she's Neutral Good, not Lawful Good, so that stuff about doing everything by the book?...well it's enforced guidelines, more than actual rules in her eyes ;)

There are a lot of resources that we're cut off from right now because we're having to work undercover . Obviously a less comfortable thing for Isama rather than Mia :). Isama likes being the authorities rather than hiding from them.

Either way, if we take out this entire Shiver gang then that'll take care of their guard corruption as well and she's perfectly fine with that too.

The module is fairly self contained.

I hope there's an understanding that a councillor is probably being paid off somewhere along the line; if this comes to light only a few scapegoats are going to be punished (at best).

Spooky and Drune have indicated even they can't do anything officially.

I'm stuck at one of the big post areas again. I probably need a couple of hours to write it up, and I'm just not getting that kind of time at home. I'm going to try breaking it up into smaller chunks - better disjointed than never, and I'v got stuck on these type of areas before.

Sensible : )

Hmm... For my next level, do I want to advance monk and talk about making the change to an Unchained Monk so I can get Style strike for more fun crazy punching shenanigans, or dip into Vigilante so that I can get 3 charisma based/will save rerolls a day for hugging Mia for an hour as well as boosting my will save for when I make that Unchained Monk change..

~~

On a more immediate note, did we have any spare healing casts before sleep?

@Perception - Side-effect of that whole investigative theme I guess. Would be awful if the police checked out a crime scene but couldn't find any clues right!

But I agree, it gets silly sometimes. Maybe that Skill Focus isn't totally needed ... :P

---

Ophelia has a second slot open still I think, but Cure Moderate isn't in her book. She could brew together an hearty mix of lubricant and sugar equivalent to a Cure Light Wounds extract though : )