Out of the Abyss

Game Master Angie H

Let's move on out of recruitment now.

Hey there, thanks for invite. :D

I am personally not interested in any house rules. With multiple games it becomes hard to remember which games are doing what, and really they don't add much to the game in my experience.

That said, not going to complain about it if the majority want some in play.

I absolutely support home rules related to character generation, since you use them exactly once and then you don't need to remember about them. Otherwise, I agree with the speaker above, including in the matter that I have nothing against it if it is fundamental for DM or most players.

No strong opinion either way. I would probably mostly forget them.
I do like smarty pants because DND is really tight with languages.

On a sidenote, Alexandra may take 2 levels in Warlock rather the one, before going bard. 120 dark vision seems pretty enticing.

Random musings (tactical situations imprisoned):

--If I read the rules right, I do not need an arcane focus to eldritch blast enemies in the face, I just need to be capable of doing somatic and verbal components, so, I can blast as soon as I am not tied and/or gagged, meaning that even if we are unequipped but otherwise free, my DPR is respectable. I can cast Armor of Agathys, as soon as I get a cup of water, which should be easier then getting an arcane focus.

--I have invisibility as an SLA, and also have silent image as an SLA, both once per day. Silent image of a Drow transporting us somewhere seems useful, probably more useful then the conventional use of casting silent image to make it appear we are still prisoners.

I'm happy with playing with the house rules, they look interesting. My general inclination is to be down with whatever house rules tweaks the DM prefers. And since I've only played a bit of 5e so far, I'll not remember what is houseruled vs RAW anyway :-)

I especially like Smarty Pants because I really like having characters learning lots of things.

Random musings (tactical situations imprisoned):

--If I read the rules right, I do not need an arcane focus to eldritch blast enemies in the face, I just need to be capable of doing somatic and verbal components, so, I can blast as soon as I am not tied and/or gagged, meaning that even if we are unequipped but otherwise free, my DPR is respectable. I can cast Armor of Agathys, as soon as I get a cup of water, which should be easier then getting an arcane focus.

Correct, if there's no material component, you don't need an arcane focus. Likewise if you can get your hands on the material components for an individual spell.

The Variant Human bonus feat is in lieu of your +2 and +1 ability score increase, so make sure you're doing one or the other, not both.

Also, I'm going to limit languages to standard languages, please stay away from exotic languages, unless you can convince me a really compelling reason you would/could have learned it.

This is what I used

I think my character is correct, I get 2 ability increases of +1. (To Con and to CHA in my case).
My chosen Feat then gives another +1 to CHA.

I was a bit confused by this because many feats give some type of attribute score bonus, but then, humans dont get stuff like teleportation, free bite attacks, flight etc.

As for languages, Courtiers get 2 extra languages, Elfen and Abyssal.

While Abyssal is exotic, I think it makes sense that she can speak it, given that she

Her play also featured an Aria in Abyssal, which sounded pretty nice actually.

In the PHB, most races get a +2, sometimes a +2, +1, then some proficiencies, languages, and usually a few bonus features like darkvision and either a resistance or two, or advantage on saving throws or something.

Since humans don't get any of those features, they got +1 across the board.

Then the variant human changed it to two +2, and a feat. My intention with giving everybody a +2 and +1 was that replaced ALL other ability score increases, including variant human, but I can see how that doesn't really balance out.

My concern is that getting a 1st and 2nd level spell, plus yet another +1, is unbalanced compared to what everybody else gets. Resistances and advantages are situational, whereas you're getting two of the most useful non-combat spells in the game.

However, it is legal, and the powers that be don't seem to think it will unbalance things.

I've added maps to the header, and will add a description of the location to gameplay, later today or tomorrow.

Can you all roll 1d10 - that's how long you've been in the slave pens. Also, when you're ready, you can give us an opening description of your capture in gameplay. Wherever it happend, you were knocked out with drow poison, and your intro will end with you waking up in the prisoners cavern.

Please include a good description of yourself as you wake up. You'll have all your clothes, but nothing else. Any questions?

how long you've been in the slave pens: 1d10 ⇒ 10

In the Slammer: 1d10 ⇒ 7

Looking forward to writing some stuff up today or this weekend. Its been a loooooooooooooooooong week. XD

Please include a good description of yourself as you wake up

Ill get that one in the morning. ;)

Question: what sorts of things have been happening the last days of captivity?

In what setting do we play? I thought it’s Faerun but now I see Nocticula (Redeemed) as a patron of one of the character.

I absolutely don't mind going beyond the original setting or completely switching to another one (I'm not a fan of Faerun at all), but I would like to understand the framework. Ultimately, this may also affect my character - for example, I am a big fan of Nocticula all these years that I have been playing PF (about 7), and I could think about something in this direction (while preserving the concept of a "reformed drow from the surface").

@Ziyad - mostly hard labour in shifts, but I'll get more into that once everybody has entered the game.

@‘Eκάτη Good catch. Usually I play homebrew stuff, and don't pay too much attention to setting. Technically the adventure is set in Faerun. I don't think it'll unbalance play or make much of a difference, so I'd say go for it. The Underdark is a strange place, and may be connected to different worlds.

Yeah, good catch, "Auntie Noctie" is definitly an interesting one because she could go any way, and allows for great amoutns of GM Fiat to plausibly deniably, or deniably plausibly, make funny things happen.

Redeemed Nocticula is her deity, not her patron (you dont get face time with totally not demon lords as a level 1 character, typically), her patron is, as I envisage it, a noveau riche sarcastic CN succubus, who gets into art because thats fashioniable now and Redeemed Nocticula looks favorably on servants who save artists (as would non redeemed CE Nocticula, because artists do spread her word and thus her power). Her Patron is explicitly not a nice person, but she does like art, humor and is relatively easily amused.

Oh, Angie, Alexandra would be "contractually obligated" to save other artists or art, if you ever need a specific extra plot hook for her. You probably wont because I generally jump at all plothooks.

RE: House rules.

I've deleted the more complicated ones, and kept rules that are pretty much optional.

@Alex - more plot hooks, yay! What if they're an evil artist? An evil murdering artist who makes art out of intestines? Moral dilemmas incoming!

Excellent question! Given that murdering artist is what Nocticula is (murder is very much an art for her), it could actually be quite hilarious!
She would presumably attempt conversion and exfiltration, but yeah, the party may not be on board with that!

Ksenia has been in the slave pens for: 1d10 ⇒ 4 days

I've finished creating Ksenia and loaded all of her info up into the character tab. This is my first 5e character from scratch, so I think I did everything correctly, but if anyone notices anything out of whack let me know. I included notes and showed my work so to speak so it's easy for me to figure where it all came from.

@Angie: my background came from Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide (Clan Crafter, which tweaks Guild Artisan from the PHB). SCAG wasn't on the approved materials list, but it seemed like it had a lot more variety of backgrounds. The only mechanical difference is having history instead of persuasion (and some difference in equipment, but we lost our equipment). If that's not cool, I can change.

Ksenia, there's a thing built into the PHB for customizing backgrounds (it isn't a variant or optional rule). Basically you can just pick a feature from one of the backgrounds, then any 2 skills, and a combination of 2 total from tools and languages.

Thanks Ziyad! I'm going to customize then: insight and history definitely were not what I associated with Ksenia's character, but I liked the lore otherwise!

I've never looked at SCAG - I should pick it up. Custom crafting and tweaking backgrounds is great, I almost always make my own to fit exactly what I want for my character.

Ksenia looks good. How do you pronounce her name? Silent K? Or K-senia?

We're getting close to offical start. I know Shari is almost done with her barbarian, and I think ‘Eκάτη is working on their character today. I'm excited to get going!

Almost all of the crunchy stuff (subclasses/spells/races/etc) from SCAG have been reprinted in bigger sourcebooks like Xanathars/Tashas. Maybe all of it has, I've never really listed it out.

Really just background features and Sword Coast lore for the 5e time period still uniquely there. The cantrips were low level gamechangers for a lot of classes when it first came out. And bladesinging.

Still worth the read if you're a FR nut (I am). :) Explains how a lot of regional stuff was restored after the 4e oddness...or doesn't explain at all and just inexplicitly restores stuff to pre-4e. XD

Days in slave pens: 1d10 ⇒ 2

@Angie: thanks for taking a look at her! It's pronounced with a hard-K, i.e. Kuh-sin-ee-uh

I've added a Games Slide link in the header. I'll add all images to this, with new content coming at the top. There's some great fan art on the web, so I've added some that doesn't have spoilers in it. Also images of some of your captors.

@Kalanzar - there are definitely spiders down here, and any number of creepy crawlies - centipedes, fungi-eating beetles, etc. As you're so deep, everything will be differently adapted to what Kalanzar is used to. I'll allow any animals that you can imagine living deep in a cave, as long is doesn't unbalance the game. Cave lizards, blind rats, spoor-eating bats, weird eyeless fish in the pool...

Thats some pretty art there!

Beautiful indeed .)

@Angie H, thanks! It's a wonder I didn't think about bats ))

Echoing the gorgeous slides!

I went ahead and rolled something for each day since I only had four!

Can everybody check out this language table and make sure I've got all your character's languages? After I get your thumbs up, if they're not on the table, you don't have them!

Don't forget the smarty pants house rule for bonus languages/tool proficiencies.

Yep, looks right! Other than common and thieves' cant (from her class), Ksenia took all of the ones that use the Dwarvish alphabet.

Thumb's up for Maddy

I switched Elfen for Fey, there is a good enough reason for her to speak Abyssal, but there isnt really one for her to speak Fey (which i think is also exotic).

As smarty pants bonus: Is poetry a profession?

I switched Elfen for Fey, there is a good enough reason for her to speak Abyssal, but there isnt really one for her to speak Fey (which i think is also exotic).

As smarty pants bonus: Is poetry a profession?

Sure, poetry can be a profession.

Good call on languages.

Just a quick note for Kalanzar, I'm unable to post detailed IC stuff from work, so sorry to leave you hanging a bit...I'll be home in about 8 hours.

Good news though is 4 day weekend coming up. :D

No problem, I also come here a couple of times a day when I'm free from work.

DM, by the way, can we all communicate freely with each other within the slave cave? For some reason, at first I decided that we were kept separately, in small groups - but apparently I was wrong. I can't find any evidence for this ))

No worries about timing, post when you can.

The slave pen is one big open cave, with chains bolted around the perimeter. You're randomly shackled to chains when you return from work. But you can speak freely while you're in the cave to everybody else currently in there. At any one time, 3-4 or more of you are in a work group.

You can sometimes speak to each other while working, it depends on the guards and their mood at the time.

I'll be away this weekend for Easter. Please bot Maddy if you need to move the story along. I'll post if I can but I'm not sure if I'll have time.

@Maddy - the trap door does not appear to be locked. It's impossible to know exactly what blind spots there would be without going up and peering through every window-hole, which they wouldn't allow you to do.

Hey all, so I'm having a little kind of different timelines cognitive dissonance in that I've started a conversation with Eldeth, have a conversation with Maddy going like two days later, and I'd LIKE to crash into the conversation with Stool that everyone else has going on, but I think that's yet a different time.

I don't want to shut down the different roleplay strands of course, but do you think we should keep those parallel, or squish down to a common "present" time?

I dont think we should invest that much stuff into a timeline or chronological consistency.

We are currently in kind of introductory roleplay/plotting our escape, if you want to crash into the conversation, please do :).

NPC wise, Alex is quite protective of Stool and dislikes Ronc.

By all means, crash conversations, it's pretty tough to keep them all sepaparte when they're in the past, and no point duplicating every conversation. This is all sort of session zero stuff.

It's one of the difficulties of an adventure that starts with a timeline like this, where you're all rolling d10s for time in captivity. "Realistically", Kalanzar has 10 full days to make connections, learn things, etc, but if we fully roleplayed out every day, it would be super boring for Maddy, who comes in a full week later. So it all gets compressed.

Later I'm going to post things happening "today", and you won't all be in the same place at the same time. So you won't be able to crash conversations going forward unless it's clear you're together.

Im fine with the jumping timelines. It might be helpful to 'title' posts with a little ooc Day 1, In the cell or something just to facilitate reading it all in sequence later.

Yes, that sounds reasonable. I propose to assume that in 10 days Kalanzar really somehow came into contact with all the slaves. It was just unsuccessful with someone (Sarith, Stool), but he managed to have a normal conversation with someone. We can use this to simplify some game interactions.

Ksenia and Maddy what were your reactions when a drow prisoner starts talking to you in common and tells you in conversation that he is from the surface? Will you communicate with him or will you stay away from him as he is a drow?

I added Alexandra ambition to murder Ilvara to her character sheet. Her Patron approves. She is genre savy enough to not try and do so any time soon of course.

Yes, that sounds reasonable. I propose to assume that in 10 days Kalanzar really somehow came into contact with all the slaves. It was just unsuccessful with someone (Sarith, Stool), but he managed to have a normal conversation with someone. We can use this to simplify some game interactions.

Ksenia and Maddy what were your reactions when a drow prisoner starts talking to you in common and tells you in conversation that he is from the surface? Will you communicate with him or will you stay away from him as he is a drow?

Ksenia was cool with him and will talk with him. She tends to believe people and take them at face value, which of course makes her a bit naive in certain contexts. And growing up in Waterdeep she lived among dwarves, elves, half-orcs and the rest as a race that wasn't widely loathed, so she's very "I don't see race, I see everyone as dwarf" both in the positive and negative implications of that.

Well, then Kalanzar will be as friendly to her as circumstances allow. He fears that all the other prisoners will consider him "one of them." He is glad to see a different attitude.

By the way, a cool post from you with a dialogue between Ksenia and Eldeth. I enjoyed reading )

I hope Ksenia does not actually have a warhammer in her rearend or my little silent image play could have given that away.

I hope Ksenia does not actually have a warhammer in her rearend or my little silent image play could have given that away.

Nothing but the occasional set of thieves tools up there, though she really hopes the guards make their investigate check and don't go looking for any warhammers...

@Alex, I think with shadow touched you still need to cast the spells as written - with V,S,M components. I'll allow that you had a bit of fleece on you, as that could easily be something you found lying around.

Could you (and all you spellcasters) describe the casting of your spells please?

You are totally right, I thought it was an SLA but its actually a spell.