PROBLEMATIC!!!!!

Some days I use this blog as a platform to talk about the gap between public perception and day-to-day reality in the lives of sex workers, using gaming and game-play (including the terrifyingly Delta-Force style murder-hobo efficiency of which this group is capable) as a lens through which to show that women in porn are far more complex as both individuals and as a group than media stereotypes about them might suggest.

This is not one of those days.

The first thing that went sideways was Mandy (cleric, highest level PC in the game) was too sick to play, so she just liveblogged the game on Twitter. The previous session had been quiet and it all started innocently enough:

I still have that plastic vegetable tray, it seems like a good place to put dice.

Without Mandy's Roger-Waters-esque lead-from-behind style the party was bereft of direction, a dangerous thing in the cruel white wastes of the Devoured Land. They were not, however, bereft of alcohol.

Adam arrived and was quickly elected new boss:

Stokely: Adam is the pussy wrangler.

Zak: It's the Second day of the Purifier so Ratatoskr--the slandering ferret--will leaves his fastness to gaze upon his shadow and thereby measure the depth of the coming winter. 

Alondra (druid): Wait can I turn into a ferret & fuck that Valentines Day ferret dick? I'm gonna get some Valentine Day ferret dick or pussy I dunno what it is.

I allow that should the animal in question be encountered there is nothing in the rules to prevent the occurrence of said assignation.

Stokely climbs up an embankment for some reconnaissance. There appears to be a wolf, pacing behind the piled snow, waiting to pounce.

Stokely: I turn back to the party & I go like this.

Karolyn: I don't know what that means--does that mean eat some pussy?

The battle is joined and becomes quickly desperate. The animals of the Devoured Land are not like ordinary animals. Things are here as the once were and will be again--beasts intrigue like gods, understand our languages, do not fear fire, are not distracted by meat or scattered by thunder. They have goals, and would see them efficiently achieved. People are running out of options.

Alondra: I have a snow a leopard you can ride on.

Stokely: I said I cast Fire Shield.

Zak: Yeah and I said you can't because you're in hella close combat.

Stokely: You were distracted because I unbuttoned my blouse.

Zak: All I know is 3 wolves are attacking you.

Karolyn: Remember the time we all took our tops off and he tried to kill us even harder?

Zak: You guys have theories within theories.

Alondra: I cast flaming sphere.

Karolyn: Is your flaming sphere named RuPaul?

Zak: RuBall.

Mandy: This game is chaos so far.

Karolyn: Seriously.

The party beat up two wolves, scared away two others and captured a third. It turns out the wolves can talk--all the animals can because Things there are as things were in the day before all days, when all that is now knew a common tongue and a young, smoother moon hung pearl-like in a black bed of stars yet unborn.

After some questioning, the wolf agrees to leave the party alone if it is let free.

Then the party decides to camp for the night. It's two wizards, and druid and an alice, 5 inches tall.

The spellcaster sleeps while the tiny DelRay the alice stands guard. Meanwhile the wolf (who is a liar, duh-wolf?) spends a few hours corralling its friends, the GM rolls some encounter dice, the alice fails a perception check, and is promptly ambushed.

The party awakes to the sound of a doll-size scream and a line of bloody tracks.

A pursuing Adam casts Evard's Black Tentacles, the wolf saves against them.

Karolyn: So there are tentacles and I'm not having sex with them because I'm unconscious?

Alondra: I think I have a bow & arrow.

Everyone in the room in unison: You have a boner?!

Karolyn (having now lost her 5th PC in a year): Drunken color commentary here we come. RIP DelRey.

Zak: You died fighting for what you believed in, not unlike Antonin Scalia. Does anyone have more than 60 feet of dark vision?

Stokely: I have a big dick.

Alondra: I have 60 feet of darkvision.

Stokely: My dick is 2d4.

Karolyn: My dick is going home.

Someone else gets ambushed by the wolves' remaining companions and Adam the wizard is running out of spells.

He tries to cast Fabricate to create a structure to protect his friend...

Dave: Nevermind--the casting time is ten minutes.

Chaos continues to reign.

Stokely: What do I do next big daddy?

Zak: It's your spell not mine.

Luckily Alondra has her shit together, or at least her pet does...

...and, just as the party is in need of tracking, the ranger arrives...

...though she was perhaps not taking things as seriously as the situation warranted...

Alondra rolls another 20. And there is much rejoicing:

.

Alondra, oscillating in celebration so her ponytails hit her in the cheeks: "I don't need a man! I can smack my own face!"

Ela: Does anyone want some beer? I stole it from my parent's basement.

Karolyn: Your live tweeting is highlighting the hoe-ness of this game.

Eventually they find a safer place to sleep. When they wake up...

There are like, some clues and stuff, and landscape. It looks like the ferret tracks are four hours old and run perpendicular to a set of leopard tracks.

Stokely (Very softly): Zaaaaaaak what does that mean 'cause we're not paying attention.

Zak: It means you're gonna die.

Then the druid has to go, to meet a Valentine's date:

Karolyn: We support each other.

Zak: We can stop now if you guys want...

Ela: NONO NO KEEP GOING!

Zak: Uh ok.

Following the frozen course of the River Slith, they run into Amazons of the dread Ulvenbrigad, who will not hear the words of men. This requires some quick explaining about Adam and Dave.

Stokely: By the way milady I have pink nipples.

The quotation mark was emphasized.

Adam (to Ela): Excuse me mistress may I speak?

Ela: I like this a LOT!

Siri plays a Rihanna song. The party begins to realize they've been captured.

The amazons take the party to their leaders, KylesaMara and MaraKylesa, the lychewives.

Ela: Can my rat do anything?

Zak: I feel like I should not have to explain to a Harry Potter fan the vast capabilities of a rat.

In the manner of all vastly outnumbered PC parties brought before high-level foes, the PCs begin to say the completely wrong things--almost immediately bringing up, before the wolf-worshipping Ulvengbrigad, the amount of canis lupus they've chewed through in the last 48 hours.

Their attempts to rectify this faux pas were less than impressive:

Dave: Tell her something like 'I'm just on the rag.'

Stokely: Slave no one asked you!

They begin to strip the party of their arms and armor, and while the wizard does beg successfully to be allowed to keep a ration of cheese, the PCs don't manage to keep their heads.

Adam: She's a tool of the patriarchy she started this!

Ela: Slave!

Adam: You're gonna want me to talk soon!

Caroline Pierce: Oh shit.

After two brutal rounds of combat Stokely is unconscious, Ela is surrounded and Dave is grappled.

After a lot of metagaming, Adam decides the best he can do is touch the remaining awake PCs and Shadow Walk out of there to a spot about 3 miles away.

Dave: I'm gonna cast Scry on Stokely.

Zak: You see the Amazons preparing to cut the arms and legs off an unconscious Stokely so they can torture her and find out where you went.

She took the news surprisingly well.

Happy Valentine's Day.

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Gotta Remember to Possess More People

Nails matching dice is a thing around here.

5th Ed D&D

Sunday, Jan 31--

There's a 900,000 gp bounty on the party's heads, from that time they single-handedly destroyed a noble elven family in Nornrik for defying Mandy's frost-giant princess girlfriend.

After some pretending to be zealots of the White-Lipped Goddess, The Alice used her "know one secret about anyone per session" ability to figure out that the murder-crowdsourcing survivor of the doomed house of Rath Orlath was hiding in The Devoured Land.

The girls were eager to meet the Amazons Who Ignore The Words of All Men, but so far have only found:

-a severed tongue

-a hunting party seeking a hart whose horns map the flow of the River Slith

-some crates.

One contained a starving snow leopard, another contained a lot of beets and a champion rat named Ribboned Jenny, escaped from the fighting pits of Rotting Crowns.

Ranger rolled a 2 to befriend the snow leopard, then just got bored and shot it, but then a nat 20 to befriend the rat so...you win some you lose some? Now she has a rat.

It was an oddly quiet session, but kind of nice--just enough inertia that it felt like the players were genuinely trekking around a frozen doomforest looking for clues. It nicely built suspense.

AD&D

Monday Feb 1--

Other group: The Inexplicable Isles. They found themselves (inexplicably) in a dungeon with a guy on a platform in the middle of some lava guarding a narrow causeway. The 12th level wizard incinerated him, then appeared in his place, now compelled to guard the causeway from the other PCs.

Yeah so whoever kills the guardian becomes the guardian (and yeah old trope, fucking works too). But Mandy's there so she's like Wait I have the Hammer Of Exorcism!

She has been carrying this thing since 2011 and has never used it. Which is a shame because it is so. Much. Fun.

Basically you have to beat the possessee in the head with the hammer until they're unconscious and then the evil spirit flees. Also: chance of side effects each round.

Which is hard when the patient is a 12th level wizard who doesn't want you to do that and also funny.

So the party take out years of frustration and inferiority complexes on their acid-spitting mutant wizard and grapple him, regrapple him and eventually tie him up beat the bad thing out of him and then it then possesses the barbarian. Who for some reason I can't remember was carrying the wizard down the causeway when it happens. So he throws the wizard down to run back to the platform and guard it, but throws poorly, so the wizard falls in lava. 3d6 damage on top of having already been beaten unconscious, the hallowed wizard was a cocked die away from permadeath in lava.

Now in a miracle of D&D-time, in the other half of the initiative (possessee goes first), Mandy runs over to the wizard (30 feet, half move) casts Heal and heals him (touch spell) as he is in the lava then wins initiative and rolls a crit success to yank him out. Which technically all can happen since as soon as you see a barbarian about to throw a tied up wizard you start running, that makes sense.

They then beat the shit out of the barbarian and wisely fled, leaving the spirit casting around for someone else to possess. Probably gonna go back in, though.

Marvel FASERIP

Tuesday Feb 2--

First session of the Everything Is Terrible.

Hannah Von Berlin, electrical-touching mad scientist played by Actual German Matze goes in search of #1 Most-Wanted Jewish Terrorist (or, if you're not a Nazi: Petty Car Thief) The Shocker.  Instead she finds the masterfully deadpan confused everyman Dr Velocity, who pretends to be The Shocker because Hannah seems insane and can fry people like spit pigs just by touching them.

Meanwhile The Sleepless, a paranoiac with a self-programmable endocrine system discovers an ordinary commuter train harbors Morgenstern the Man Who Fell To Earth Only To Be Put On TV By Fascists Who Claimed He Was A Perfect Aryan From the Future And Is About To Betray Them With Plasma.

In what the GM feels comfortable calling a coincidence, all four witness-, and somewhat participate in-, a high speed chase ending in a 3-cop-car pile-up next to a moving train and then kill a bunch of Stadt cops who can't shoot straight.

For lack of anything better to do, our heroes go look at a massacred underground cell in a brownstone. Then our heroes notice they're being watched...

As the moon rises, Sleepless snipes one of these undercover minders white-van only to discover these are no ordinary plainclothes Gestapo but the might Weremacht, skinchanging man-beasts who can only be harmed by silver!

So a lot of brand-new superheroes are about to be eaten by Nazi secret-police wolves, but then two things happen:

1) Morgenstern asks the neighbors where they keep the good silver

2) -False Patrick wakes up and realizes he missed the first half of the game. The Shocker rolls up in a stolen car. And realizes Hey you may not be able to kill that wolf that stopping short just sent hurtling through the windshield but you can sure park a Mercedes i8 on top of it.

...so, breathing heavily, Dr Velocity, Morgensterm, Hannah Berlin, Sleepless and The Shocker survive their first adventure and are about to find out what's in a van...

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Somebody Check Laney Chantal's Dice

Session before last was a long time coming:

9 millenia ago it was prophesied that unto Demogorgon would be betrothed a Champion of Tiamat, and this union would bring the Age of Eradications.

To determine the distaff part of the sacred union the Five Churches of Tiamat--The Pale Eye, The Jade Fang, The Red Hand, The Cobalt Claw, The Black Wing--brought forth champions to battle to the death in a mad tourney. Winner marries Demogorgon.

Through a barely explicable series of events involving the Plane of Shadow, a hot dog, and not wanting to be fat, the champion of the Jade Fang was named: a halfling with a pet flying squirrel-Estuche, avatar of Laney. That's the halfling--the squirrel's name I can't remember.

The other champions were more typical: level 20 paladins in plate mail with crazy powers.

Long story short is we have a lone 10th level halfling ranger with like 40-50 hit points going up against 4 bad guys with like 160 hit points each and, among other things, the ability to heal 100 hp in a single round action.

In the gambling parlors of the cube-shaped earth, the experts have weighed in:

So you're probably wondering how Laney died. Well here we go:

The Black Knight

The party managed to take out the Black Knight before the tournament even started. Which, yeah, is cheating. But then Ela:

...sorry--Baweyn the elf ranger--had the bright idea to go around wearing the black knight's armor. So nobody knew the Black Knight was missing and the Black Wing never thought to replace him. Go Ela!


The Cobalt Knight

So Estuche faced the Cobalt Knight in the first round of the tournament, the joust. Herein Alondra (as Excene the druid)...

(seen here with Red & Pleasant Land cake)

...thought to aid her ally with low cunning: although magic is not permitted in the tournament, there was nothing to prevent the Knight Viridian from secretly replacing the standard mount of tiny Knights of her Church (the velociraptor) with a druid wearing that shape.

Also Alondra

So it was a blue armored electromagnetic titan with a bastard sword on a carnivorous destrier vs a halfling with a spiked chain on a friendly dinosaur.

First round Laney wins initiative and immediately rolls a natural 20 with the spiked chain, meaning the Cobalt Knight's not only taking double damage but has a chain around his neck while on a horse and needs to extricate himself before doing anything else like, say, healing. Plus also velociraptor.

On his turn the Cobalt Knight can't get himself loose, then gets yanked by the neck off his horse (rolls a 1) and Laney then proceeds to roll natural 20s over and over and over and over for the rest of the fight. Everyone's sitting on the couch just staring as she and Alondra beats the fucking tar out of this guy who doesn't even get one spare round to lay on hands. Also I think she uses her rangerness to tell his horse to just go away.

First round to the Knight Viridian: the crowd goes wild. The Church of the Cobalt Claw begins scheming to assassinate the celebrating PCs in their seats.


The Red Knight

After the joust begins the melee--all the remaining knights (minus the Cobalt one, slain in the first round)--thrown together.

The Red and Pale champions engage each other, leaving Laney to fight the (fake) Black Knight, who she, of course, (fake) beats handily.  While the PCs in the stands manage to stop an assassination attempt from mutant elves of the Cobalt Claw, The Red Knight falls to...


The Pale Knight

...the last Knight left opposing the bold halfling. The Pale Knight is (Roll d100...) 90% fucked up from fighting the Red Knight, and Laney, who hasn't got a scratch on her, leaps on her as soon as Red goes down. All the Pale Knight's bonus Tiamat powers like level drain and reversing the last round depend on Pale winning initiative, which Pale never does, Laney then proceeds to natural 20 the fuck out of him too while the gods of probability weep as rain rolls down their bell-curved roofs and everyone playing is just like holy mother of fuck.

...thus winning the tournament--as was clearly ordained by Demogorgon, Inciter of All Incidents, Laney's new fiance.

As I wrote almost 2 years before I had any idea this would happen:

The Jade Fang is one of the five Tributary Temples of Glistening Tiamat....its energies are green: the energies of jealousy, lushness, vigor, triumph, old wisdom, glibness, and theft.

Praise be to Him

As word reaches the gambling halls of Gaxen Kane:

Fiddlin' Joe Cooper makes 5000gp.
Anxious P's Babs loses 1200gp betting on the Black Knight.
Malice Aforethought wins 10,000gp.
Sir Ward wins 2500gp.
Pete Loudly the Sorcerer wins 10,000gp.

...and the girls make their way back to Vornheim, undisputed leader of the Church of Tiamat in tow where Alondra gets drunk and wakes up next to a succubus, Twiggy gets such a reputation as a party animal that carousing in Vornheim costs twice as much from now on, and then party sets off to find an easy side quest before a PC has to marry an elder god and are promptly set upon by carnivorous apes.

More later.
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Desserts Aren't Always Right

When we last left our heroines, they were stuck in the Red & Pleasant Land version of The Gem Prison of Zardax.

So using Legend Lore, Mandy's sister figured out the symbol on the floor of the square room...

(that thing in the middle)

...meant you had to rearrange the rooms in the dungeon until they matched that pattern in order to get out.

Because in the Gem Prison of Zardax: (highlight for SPOILERS)....

The doors lead to a different random room each time you close and re-open them.

One room had the sphinx in there--blinded with magic sapphires by forces unknown.

Another had a secret door with 12 vampires behind it. As well as an altar to the Red Hand of Tiamat with a pair of ruby chalices.

Karolyn, who spent last session playing and losing two of the other players' pet dogs and pigs becaue her own cleric was temporarily out of commission received an apposite fortune...

...and made a new character--an Alice.

Just as she showed up, a horde of high-on-fire dwarves showed up, setting everybody's stuff on fire...

After they were dispatched but before they finished the shape and escaped, Karolyn decided to see what happens when you drink fire-dwarf blood from ruby chalices.

Not good things, really.

She immediately became a zealous adherent of the Red Hand. Though a Remove Curse was dropped on her forthwith, she didn't walk away normal...

Mariah is her character that got turned into a stomach

So that's a whole thing.

And now, a word from our sponsor:

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Two Dogs, A Hog and A Banshee

So, first:

One cleric was already a stomach. So Karolyn played the druid's dog.

Also:

Party thief--she's very inexperienced. Only played a handful of sessions.

Ok:

They fought some evil statues with clacky nutcracker faces who ate your stuff. They got through that fine.
Then two things happened:

-The party illusionist goes to get something to eat and the druid has to go early, leaving three.

-The players ended up fighting a weird angel in a room which had a magic portal in it.

During that fight, Mandy--the party's most experienced member--went half through the portal while her anti-magic shell was up. This deactivated the portal with her on the far side. She ended up in another part of the dungeon.

This left the inexperienced party thief and the dog. Fighting an angel. 5e stats for angels are no joke.

So...Karolyn transmigrates over to another pet in the dungeon, the illusionist's pig. One of the illusionist's pigs. One of the same pigs she bought off the AD&D equipment list at the beginning of the campaign when the player realized how much gp an illusionist has left over after character gen in AD&D.

Luckily, the angel is confined to that one room.

Unluckily, in the next room there's a banshee. A re-done banshee.

The schtick there is: the first one to see it is the only one who can see it, the first one to hear it is the only one who can see it, the first to touch it is the only one who can touch it, etc.

So first thing that happens, of course, is everyone's confused.

Second thing that happens is the pig gets killed by the banshee's wail.

Third thing that happens, is the illusionist (who's comes back from getting food) and Mandy show up from the other direction after bumping around the dungeon.

Karolyn, still lacking a character, now has to play another pet. There's one pig that they've been using as a guinea pig for all the potions they keep finding--it's got one eye and floats 3 feet off the ground--she chooses that pig. This is silly, but hey: every single part of how it got that way is Rules As Written. Oh well. Now Karolyn is that pig.

The banshee begins to wail so only the illusionist can hear, but she has her fingers in her ears.

The thief can see the banshee, but that's all. The illusionist can hear it, but doesn't want to, the cleric can smell it.

Then the pig--trying to cross the room to pick up an arrow the thief saw go clean through it--runs into it.

So: Only the one-eyed floating pig can hurt the banshee.

Because the rules. Possibly also due to this:

So...

...the banshee is a dead ethereal drowned elf so not that strong but still is tougher than a pig.

The players develop the following scheme: Everyone leaves but the thief and the pig, then the thief puts on her alignment-switching ring.

They do that. The banshee is now BFFs with the party thief and the floating pig is compelled to attack the thief.

The thief opens the door to the room with the angel in it and tells the banshee to go fight the angel. She obliges.

Then she closes the door and takes the ring off. XP for everyone!

This fucking game, man.

ONLY 55 COPIES LEFT.