Sangfielle 09: The Secret Ledger of Roseroot Hall Pt. 1
Transcribed by: Theo (ptpramos #8424) [0:00:00 - 0:32:21], Iris (@sacredwhim) [0:32:21 - 1:51:58]
AUSTIN: Sangfielle is a series that draws on elements of dark fantasy, horror, and Gothic fiction. As such, a list of content warnings will always be made available in the episode description.
[MUSIC INTRO BEGINS - ”Sangfielle” by Jack de Quidt]
AUSTIN (as NARRATOR): They say it takes all kinds, and there is truth in that. A place like Blackwick County, for instance, needs folks eager to wake up early in the morning, and others to stay up well past everyone else has said their final prayers to Slumbous in the evening. It needs fishers, farmers, and prospectors, but it also needs people of letters—of art and music and, of course, the adventuring sort. But if you've encountered a story in these pages about a credulous fool, or a contemptible cretin, chances are you’ve found someone who's misunderstood the idiom. Thinking that since it takes all sorts, one must become all sorts. And in the act, betraying themselves—confusing ambition for generosity, intellect for wisdom, or luck for grace. Unfortunately, it is of my opinion that Dayward YVE is one such man.
Do not get me wrong—as a fellow storyteller, I admire his ability to tell his tale with gusto. But it's nothing you ain't heard before; a well-to-do sort from the depths of the empire, come here chasing his family's history in hopes to remedy some un-reckoned-with guilt he's inherited. And if that was that, there'd be little to say. He'd come in, find who his people had wronged, do some grand apology tour, and get out of our lives. He'd go unremembered, uncommented on, and you certainly wouldn't find him at the center of today's installment of the perilous adventures of the Blackwick group, beginning page next. But these remorseful devils, let me tell you, they can never just say ‘I'm sorry’. They can never just be guilty. They gotta be industrious, too.
Dayward yon Vantzon-Estonbergh, Blackwick's latest arrival. A man so eager to ‘give back’, that he's confused the phrase as a synonym for ‘take more’. And that is why we lead you, in this issue, to his stately manor in the north county hills—Roseroot Hall. A house with a dire history of oaths kept and broken, the shadows of masters present and past, and a mystery of the sort only M. Leopold Duvall, Lye Lychen, and Lady Es of the Blackwick group could solve. Let's just hope they do so before the very tendrils of Mr. YVE's guilt find their way into town.
[MUSIC INTRO ENDS]
AUSTIN: Welcome to Friends at The Table, an actual play podcast focused on critical worldbuilding, smart characterization, and fun interaction between good friends. I am your host, Austin Walker. Joining me today, Janine Hawkins.
JANINE: Hey, I'm Janine Hawkins. I'm @bleatingheart on Twitter.
AUSTIN: Art Martinez-Tebbel.
ART: Hey, you can find me on Twitter @atebbel. Go to Fangamer and see if you can still buy our stuff, I literally have no idea what's going on with that anymore.
AUSTIN: Well, if it was not COVID year, maybe it would've gone better. You know?
ART: Yeah, who knows?
AUSTIN: Who knows? Also joining us, Keith J. Carberry.
KEITH: Hi, my name is Keith Carberry. You can find me on Twitter @KeithJCarberry, and you can find the Let’s Plays that I do at YouRube.com/RunButton. Also—I don't know—I've never said this on Friends at The Table, but RunButton does a morning show now every Tuesday morning.
AUSTIN: That's true. Yeah.
KEITH: So you can watch that live on YouTube and Twitch, it goes up—
AUSTIN: You’re talking about The Snooze Button?
KEITH: The Snooze Button, yeah. It's 11:00 AM, most Tuesdays.
[AUSTIN CHUCKLES]
ART: That's late to be hitting the snooze button.
AUSTIN: Eh.
JANINE: Depends on the life.
KEITH: It—well, we wanted a time where we would only occasionally be feeling like we were waking up too early to do a show.
AUSTIN: Daylight savings. I was a—as someone who used to do a morning show occasionally too called Hot Mic Mornings, 11:00 was my go-to. I love starting at 11:00. 11:00 feels right to me.
KEITH: Yeah.
AUSTIN: I'm awake. I've had coffee. I've—you know, it's not other people's mornings. It's my morning.
KEITH: Right.
AUSTIN: You know? That was the motto, by the way.
KEITH: I never know whether I'm in sort of a groove where I'm waking up and feeling good at 9:00 or noon. And so, I was like, ‘I can always make it at 11:00, even if it sucks.’
AUSTIN: Which is why it's most Tuesdays.
KEITH: Most, right. [CHUCKLES] Most Tuesdays.
AUSTIN: Most of the time.
KEITH: We've got—Kylie's a parent, we've got—you know, we’ve got a lot of stuff going on.
AUSTIN: Yeah, I get it. Yeah.
KEITH: Stuff happens. She also had her teeth thing, so she was going to the dentist a lot of Tuesdays.
AUSTIN: Yes.
ART: ‘Teeth Tuesdays’. That's what they call it.
AUSTIN: I found that I would need that slot on Tuesdays when I was doing teeth stuff recently.
ART: Huh.
KEITH: Huh.
JANINE: I think the thing is that a lot of—at a lot of practices, there are only certain days where the dentist themself is actually in.
AUSTIN: Sure, sure.
KEITH: Yeah.
JANINE: So they'll do, like—I think that's also the case with my dentist is like, if I'm going in on a Tuesday, I know I'm seeing the actual dentist. If I'm going in on, like, a Friday, I'm seeing a hygienist just to get a cleaning.
AUSTIN: For me, it was also like... Monday—
ART: Yeah, because it's not teeth day.
AUSTIN: Right, it’s not Tues—
JANINE: Tooth-day. Just say ‘Tooth-day.’
[GROUP REPEATS “Tooth-day”]
AUSTIN: For me it was also like, work is Mondays. I have to go to work and do a podcast and set my day. It'd be like, ‘okay, what's this—’ Or set my week. ‘What's this week look like?’ I don't want to miss Monday. Monday's important to understand the rest of the situation. Tuesday, eh. I want to go lay in a chair for a few hours while I'm being miserable ‘cause someone's fixing my face. That's fine.
KEITH: Miss Monday, Teeth Tuesdays.
AUSTIN: Uh-huh.
KEITH: Um—
AUSTIN: Work Wednesdays. [DEJECTED SOUND]
KEITH: Work Wednesdays. Right. [LAUGHS]
ART: We're really close to that Friends bit right now.
KEITH: Which one?
ART: The ‘Monday–One Day, Tuesday–Two Days, Wednesdays–What? Thursday, the Third Day.’
AUSTIN: [LAUGHS] That's an alright bit. Okay. I'm not a big Friends fan, but sure.
KEITH: [LAUGHING] I don’t remember this.
JANINE: I don't remember that at all.
AUSTIN: You delivered it well enough for me to be like, ‘yeah, okay, I laughed.’ I chuckled.
KEITH: Yeah, okay, I can see that. I like the idea that Wednesday doesn't exist and Thursday is the third day.
AUSTIN: Yeah, that's a Sangfielle thing for sure.
JANINE: I like it because it also—it then follows into ‘Friday is five’s day. So where did the fourth day go?’
AUSTIN: I see. Right. You still have Five Day on Friday.
JANINE: Yeah.
AUSTIN: You can support Friends at The Table by going to friendsatthetable.cash. If you enjoy conversations like the ones we just had, let me tell you, for $1, you can get a huge collection of Clapcasts in which we are just talking about [LAUGHING] whatever comes to mind.
KEITH: Oh yeah, we did an intro.
AUSTIN: Yeah, we did an intro. We're in the podcast now, Keith.
KEITH: [LAUGHING] This is the real podcast, okay.
AUSTIN: This is the real podcast. Today, we are playing Heart: The City Beneath by Grant Howitt and Christopher Taylor. My goals are to, uh... let's see here. "Instead of planning, ask questions. Reuse details and always evoke an atmosphere of wonder, horror, and humanity. Build and break tension. Pay attention to what the players want, both long-term and short-term.” And “play to find out what happens." Um—how do we—okay. Here's how I want to jump into this. This is—we're doing Heart. We're doing it. This is the first time y'all have played this. We've done one adventure on the—I won't even say ‘the other side’ because these team-ups are going to change week-to-week or, you know, sessions, whatever, scenario-to-scenario. Adventure-to-adventure. And so I don't want to say ‘the other side,’ but we've done one, and it went well. But I do want to say up top again, that we are learning the system. I've now run it once. No one on this side has played it yet.
KEITH: Yeah.
AUSTIN: And so there is a degree to which—please be patient with us as we look up rules, or as we like, stumble over stuff or miss stuff. We're always learning on how to execute on things in various ways.
KEITH: We knew so much about Heart two months ago.
AUSTIN: Right. Exactly. When we were like, going through it and choosing it and being like, ‘hm, what excites us?’ and blah-blah-blah.
KEITH: Yeah, and creating characters, and all reading it—yeah.
AUSTIN: Totally. What I will say is, it's a fairly simple system, both to run and to listen to and play, and—or, that's how it seems at least. And so I would say—I would say don't worry too much about it. We'll take it one step at a time, and I hope it's enjoyable to listen to. Um—to set you up a little bit, your group—which includes the other four players, who today are off doing other stuff. Maybe their adventure is going on, you know, concurrent with this. Maybe it's happened before this. Who could say, I don't know what the situation is. But your group has—the full group has moved into a sort of former retail space, a storefront near the main strip of kind of the small commercial, like, downtown of Blackwick. This space has been a hat shop, it's been a wine seller. Seller with an ‘S-E-L’, not a ‘C-E-L’, not like a basement filled with wine., like someone who sells wine.
KEITH: Sure.
AUSTIN: A music store where instruments were sold, probably some other stuff over the years, all those businesses.
ART: A Tower Records.
AUSTIN: Yeah, uh huh. Yeah, Tower Records. [CHUCKLES] The other side did find a phonograph player, or—they didn't take it, but they were in a temple with a phonograph player, which must've come out of the mine, which is fun.
JANINE: [DISAPPOINTED] Why didn't they take it?
AUSTIN: Because it was owned by someone who worked there at the temple, by a nun.
JANINE: So what?
KEITH: Oh, fair.
ART: I wish they had just dug the whole Tower Records out. They just stand up like, ‘No one bought anything. What are you even doing with this?’
AUSTIN: Yeah. ‘What are you doing? What is this?’
KEITH: If it's a loose phonograph, you pick it up. But.
AUSTIN: Right. Exactly. In any case, there are still remnants of the other shops here. Like, you know, there definitely are like—hat boxes, and instrument cases, and old casks of something. And many of those have probably been moved into a back room at this point. What I want from each of you in this space is to just give me a snapshot to help reintroduce your character. You can talk about what you're doing, or what you're wearing. Give me your name, pronouns, whatever your class is. Your beats—which, to remind the audience, are things that are tied to like, what you want to do. And they're also kind of how you level up in this game. And then, if you remember them, any starting connections with the other players on this side of the game, or in this current group. Who has an image, a kind of sharp image of their character in this kind of retail space turned investigator's office? In or around, I guess. How does the camera first see your character this season?
JANINE: Okay. So I think, when… I think when we first see Es, she's probably… I want her leaning in that really... Man, why am I just picturing, like, saucy ladies in New Orleans now?
AUSTIN: [CHUCKLING] Because Art was talking about accents.
JANINE: Yes. Yeah. So I'm picturing her like probably leaning out—she's probably outside. She's probably outside the front door. She's leaning sort of against the spot of the wall that's like, maybe between the door and like—maybe there's like a window, or something like a window display, if it was an old shop.
AUSTIN: Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
JANINE: And it's one of those leans that's like really far—like the feet are pretty far away from the wall.
AUSTIN: Uh-huh.
JANINE: So the whole body is kind of like... You know, reclined and in repose, but when you look at the math of it, it's like, ‘how are you standing like that for so long and making it look so comfortable? You look like—you look like you're laying down, but you're upright.’
[AUSTIN CHUCKLES]
JANINE: And she's leaning like this, and she has a fan in her hand, and she's fanning herself with it. For like basic descriptive notes, she has hair that's sort of a very dark berry color. It's very very long, but today she's got most of it—most of it is sort of wound up with a few sort of sections that are sort of in a fishtail—like, very thin fishtail braids that are hanging loose. But most of it is wound up very elegantly, and sort of half-tucked under a feath—like a hat with a nice feather in it. She... I'm not going to like, describe her exact outfit, but for me, her notes for her outfits are like, very inspired by this old MMO called Granado Espada.
AUSTIN: [CHUCKLING] Uh huh.
JANINE: Specifically the Wizard and Elementalist classes. There’s a lot of—
AUSTIN: Who could forget?
JANINE: [LAUGHS] There’s a lot of—I mean, okay, that MMO still exists in a state I can't vouch for. And also that MMO in general—bad premise, terrible premise. Just like, ‘what if we made a fantasy MMO out of colonialism?’ Nuh-uh, bad.
AUSTIN: Ah, sure, of course. Yeah.
ART: That's all of them, right?
AUSTIN: Eh.
JANINE: Well, this one especially.
AUSTIN: This one leaned in.
JANINE: It's called “Granado Espada”, so.
AUSTIN: Right. Sure.
JANINE: But, the costumes, the concept art, really—like, some of the best costuming I've seen in a video game ever, at least in terms of speaking to my personal tastes. So, that's where I'm going with her. Like, lots of ruffles, and lace, and ribbon, and high collars, and either puff sleeves or flared sleeves—like, small practical bustles, that kind of thing. Very much a fan. So that's—she's wearing an outfit in that vein, probably lots of dark purples, dark blues, and leathery browns. And she's sort of fanning herself, and like—are there people walking by in the street?
AUSTIN: Yeah, definitely. It's one of those late afternoons where people are—you know, the other—this is—this is a kind of, you know. I don't know that you have a corner lot necessarily, but you're definitely in that situation of like, people are going to... you know, there's a tool shop across the way, and there's a bar maybe a couple of blocks down. [CHUCKLING] They've rebuilt that bar from the end of our worldbuilding. Or not blocks, but a couple of buildings down. Stuff like that. There is probably some sort of clothing store. Everything is very, you know, not thrown together, but like—you know, the people in this town built these buildings probably. You know what I mean? And lived here. In fact, the people who run these shops probably built the buildings that they're in for anything that is newer than the last 50 years, you know? So yeah, people are around. You can be like people-watching, you know what I mean? Like, that makes perfect sense.
JANINE: Yeah. And I think basically—yeah, I think she's people-watching. I think she's—when people walk by, she's smiling and sort of like tipping her head to them. Like, she’s—she’s being friendly, but also not, you know, not stopping anyone or anything, just like taking it in, soaking it in.
AUSTIN: Cool. So Es—’E-S’ is how her name is spelled.
JANINE: Yes.
AUSTIN: Pronouns?
JANINE: Pronouns, she/her. I am probably going to strongly favor ‘she’. Or, sorry, ‘she/they’, sorry.
AUSTIN: Okay. But leaning ‘she’.
JANINE: Yes, strongly leaning ‘she’.
AUSTIN: Okay. And then class?
JANINE: Class is Witch.
AUSTIN: And then—your beats, your active beats?
JANINE: My active beats are “to charm someone with tales of your exploits" and "to rescue someone from peril.”
AUSTIN: And then… Do you remember what your connections are to either of the other players or characters in this group?
JANINE: My connection—my relevant connection is with Lye, which is Keith's character. Where "recently you and another character returned from a Delve with an item for a wealthy person. They wouldn't give it up. Why, and what was it?" It was a snuff box full of [CHUCKLING] owl's wit.
AUSTIN: Right. Uh-huh. Which is a thing we all know what that means, yeah.
JANINE: Some full bullshit. You know, sometimes you go to the corner store and you pick it up. Whatever.
AUSTIN: Uh-huh.
JANINE: So it was a snuff box full of owl's wit, which he wanted to hoard for himself. [???] on a Delve with a Junk Mage.
AUSTIN: [CHUCKLES] You had gotten that on a job for a character named Dayward YVE. Y-V-E as the last name there.
KEITH: Yup.
AUSTIN: Who will come up again momentarily. Multiple times, probably.
KEITH: Why?
AUSTIN: Who could say?
[KEITH LAUGHS]
AUSTIN: Keith, tell me your character. Tell me what the camera sees of your character, Lye Lychen, as he first enters the scene.
KEITH: Okay. He's sitting. He's at a long table. You know, plain clothes, except there's a series of utilitarian pouches open. Junk all over the table.
AUSTIN: Uh-huh.
KEITH: And I'm just sort of like looking at and inspecting it. This is sort of the thing—I have to do two things—
AUSTIN: How old are—you're a human, right?
KEITH: I'm a human.
AUSTIN: Okay. How old are you? I don't have a good handle on your face. Like for Janine's character, for Es, I'm like, okay. Kind of like someone who moves around in society, an adult, but still like in the bloom of their youth, because the whole thing with the heritrix is like—or the thing that you pitched me with this is like, ‘oh, this person wanted a heritrix to kind of like help guide them through whatever.’ Right? And so she's like, young-ish still. But I don't have a—all I know from Lyke is ‘blew up a building once.’
KEITH: Right.
AUSTIN: And got kicked out.
KEITH: So Lyke—so here's the—you know when you see someone and you're like, ‘I can't tell if they're 38 but look old, or like 65 but look young.’
AUSTIN: Yes.
KEITH: But it's neither, it's in the middle. It's actually—they're like 48, or something.
AUSTIN: Sure. So that’s—he's like in that space.
KEITH: Yeah. So he’s 48. Yeah.
AUSTIN: But looks good for his age or [CHUCKLING] looks old for his age, depending on the day.
KEITH: Yeah, depending on what your impression of him is, he either looks younger and good or is—or, sorry, younger and bad or older and good.
AUSTIN: And is that like, about—is that about like the difference between his expression and the way he moves versus like, wrinkles on face, so to speak, like independent of what you judge as—
KEITH: Yeah, I think he’s like—he acts and feels young. Gonna be easy for me, because I'm not 50.
AUSTIN: Right.
KEITH: But yeah, it's like, you know, um… Regardless of the work that he's done in his life, you're—you know. You spend that much time in front of an open flame, when you're blowing—when you're practicing blowing stuff up.
AUSTIN: And it's gonna have a cost at some point, right? You’re gonna look a little weathered. Anyway, so you're at a table.
KEITH: You gotta figure out what goes—you can't just put the stuff in the pockets. ‘Cause you'll forget. I'll forget.
AUSTIN: Sure.
KEITH: So you have to periodically take it all out, make sure it's all working. ‘Cause if you're—if you remember and then it's broken, it's still not a help. So tinkering—
AUSTIN: What sort of stuff is on the table at this point of your—besides owl's wit, which we know there is a little bit of—you know we've got some of that.
KEITH: Bits of metal that gently whirs, things that look like brain teaser puzzles that you'd buy in a shop that say like, ‘Level 8 Brain Teaser’ on it. And it's like, ‘Well, I don't know what this is. This is like two nails in a loop or something.’
AUSTIN: [CHUCKLES] Right. Yeah. Uh-huh.
KEITH: Wooden things, cups on sticks.
AUSTIN: Okay.
KEITH: Uh, you know. Maybe things that look like big matches. Um...
AUSTIN: They're not big matches though?
KEITH: A box of owl's wit.
JANINE: Have you also been watching the true crime documentary about the Unabomber? [CHUCKLING] ‘Cause you're just describing all of the—
KEITH: [LAUGHING] No, I have not seen the—I don't know anything about the Unabomber.
JANINE: You’re describing all of the reenactments.
AUSTIN: [CHUCKLING] Listen, Lye Lychen blew up one building. You can't—
KEITH: [LAUGHS] And it was—it was premeditated, but it was an accident. I meant to start a fire. I didn't mean to blow up—
AUSTIN: Uh-huh...
JANINE: It was also a school though, huh? Jeez.
AUSTIN: This is going away. This is rough.
ART: The Unabomber did more bombs, but smaller. So maybe total explosion here?
AUSTIN: Lychen—right, you'd have to—
KEITH: So you’re saying it evens out megaton-wise.
ART: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Jesus Christ.
ART: Basically the Unabomber, is what I'm saying.
KEITH: It's funny that the Unabomber did multiple bombs. I don't know anything about the Unabomber. I just always assumed because of the name it was one bomb.
JANINE: ‘Una’ as in—
ART: No, ‘una’ is U.N.A. United Nations and Airports.
JANINE: Universities.
KEITH: See, that's how little I know.
ART: Or, universities, not United Nations.
[AUSTIN AND JANINE LAUGH]
AUSTIN: U.N.
JANINE: That's ‘Un-A’ bomber.
KEITH: So I've got—this is not a typical piece. This is like a specialty. I only bring this out when I need it, but it's got the, um—did anybody see Mousehunt?
AUSTIN: The movie?
ART: The Nathan Lane movie?
KEITH: Yeah, the movie Mousehunt.
AUSTIN: Yeah, Nathan Lane. Who's the other person? Who's the other—there's another.
KEITH: Er—Er—Ernie... Ernie...
ART: Ernie from Sesame Street.
JANINE: What?
KEITH: Ernie Sch—I wanna say Schmidt, but I don't know. Is it Ernie Schmidt?
AUSTIN: No, it's not.
ART: [IMITATING ERNIE FROM SESAME STREET] Hey Nathan, we're gonna try to catch a mouse today.
AUSTIN: It's somebody I don't know named Lee Evans—
KEITH: Lee Evans.
AUSTIN: —but Christopher Walken is in that movie apparently.
ART: As the mouse.
KEITH: So okay, this is what I'm talking about. I'm about to reference a Christopher Walken character.
AUSTIN: Oh, he's the mouse. I see.
ART: No, it's not true.
AUSTIN: Oh.
KEITH: No, he plays a mouse—he plays an exterminator.
AUSTIN: Sure.
KEITH: This is—I was actually going to bring up the Christopher Walken character. This is my touchstone here. By the way, this movie was not well received in the 90s. I think it has aged like a fine wine. This is an excellent movie.
ART: It was excellent then, I saw that movie in theaters.
KEITH: I also saw it in theaters, I loved it then, but I learned later in life that people didn't like it. And I think that they're wrong. It's fantastic. Um—so he comes in—so he's like—he plays an extremely serious, like, comically—it's a comedy—comically serious exterminator, and he's got like these little switches where he puts the—he has like a magnification helmet.
AUSTIN: I see it. Yeah.
KEITH: This is what, this is what I have on to sort of—just looking at all the bits, making sure that everything's in order, and I'm just sort of flicking through different magnifications looking at stuff.
JANINE: [LAUGHING] I thought—sorry, I thought—
AUSTIN: This is a very funny character.
KEITH: Oh my god, this video's amazing.
JANINE: I thought from the way you were talking that you, Keith, had sent a picture, [LAUGHING] so I switched to the window and it was just this bug man. What is this?
AUSTIN: [LAUGHS] That's from Granado—
KEITH: That’s from your MMO!
AUSTIN: That’s from your MMO.
JANINE: Oh, okay. I thought that was the—I was like, ‘I don't think that's Christopher Walken.’
AUSTIN: A fun note here is the name of this character is "Caesar”, from Mousehunt. And so I did a search for "Christopher Walken Caesar", and of course, Christopher Walken has also played Caesar.
KEITH: Julius Caesar?
AUSTIN: Julius Caesar, in Julius Caesar.
ART: In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar? Oh, when?
AUSTIN: I don't know.
JANINE: Oh, wow.
KEITH: I would love to see that. [LAUGHING] I would love to see that!
ART: Is it on tape? Can I watch?
AUSTIN: Sorry, he does not play—he does not play, he's in—he's in a miniseries from 2003 called Julius Caesar. He is Cato the Younger, so not Caesar, but he is in like a toga. He is that.
KEITH: Oh, okay.
ART: Oh, now—I wanted—you could have said Brutus and I would have been back in, but yeah.
AUSTIN: Yeah, fair. Anyway. He looks terrible in this outfit, so. He looks way better as Caesar the Mouse-hunter than Cato the Younger.
KEITH: Yeah. So, I wholeheartedly recommend this movie, but if not, if you don't know what I'm talking about with the goggles, at least look at that. ‘Cause it's a good image. It's sort of like, what if you had a jeweler's loupe that had a jeweler's loupe that had a jeweler's loupe?
AUSTIN: Yeah.
KEITH: So that's what I'm doing. I'm flicking around—I'm flicking around these—I’m looking at all my stuff.
AUSTIN: Great. What is your… class? ‘What is your class.’ Let's start there.
KEITH: I am a Junk Mage. That’s my class.
AUSTIN: Pronouns?
KEITH: He/him.
AUSTIN: And so, again, your name is Lye, L-Y-E, Lychen, L-Y-C-H-E-N.
KEITH: Yes.
AUSTIN: And also Lyke, people can just call you Lyke? L-Y-K-E?
KEITH: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Okay.
KEITH: Nickname, yeah.
AUSTIN: I should ask your Calling, also. Your Calling—yours and Janine's are the same, so we don't have to double dip. What is your Calling?
KEITH: Adventure.
AUSTIN: I believe that's true for Janine, right? You're also Adventure?
JANINE: Mhm.
AUSTIN: Okay. What are your active beats?
KEITH: My active beats are to "go somewhere where no one else has stepped for at least a century," and "help an important or influential figure in a haven.”
AUSTIN: Great.
KEITH: Maybe a third chance at that.
AUSTIN: Yeah, uh-huh.
[KEITH LAUGHS]
AUSTIN: And then, do you remember your connections to other players?
KEITH: Yeah, I have them here in my bio info. I forgot to do this work that I said that I would do, but my pitch at the end of the last episode that I was on was that Es and I actually did another job for Dayward YVE. And—but this time it was Es that took the thing that we were supposed to give to Dayward YVE. And I said, ‘I will come up with a thing that is also fun, like owl’s wit’, and then didn't. So that's what I'll be thinking about in the back of my head. And then, do I have—
AUSTIN: Great. Good. And then you also have a connection to Art's character, right?
KEITH: Yes, I think I do. Okay. Yes. I had Art's character—M. Leopold Duvall. Is that right?
ART: Duvall is fine.
KEITH: Okay. Duvall is fine. Basically, I asked for like a guide, like, ‘Hey, can you show me around the town? Can you show me what the cool places are? The places where maybe I wouldn't know as a newcomer here to sort of get a vibe of like where—where the limits of—where daily life here wouldn't take me.’
AUSTIN: Cool. I think that that's it. I'm not forgetting anything there. So, Art. What—how do we see Duvall?
KEITH: Oh, wait, I'm sorry. Sorry to interrupt. But that was a prompt for "you and another player character barely escaped from a dangerous situation recently. Who was it and what happened?" I didn't write what the dangerous situation was there.
AUSTIN: You did not.
KEITH: We did talk about it.
ART: It was peer pressure.
KEITH: I believe it was something that happened in a mine.
AUSTIN: It was peer pressure? Oh, okay. That was a joke. I thought Art was like ‘am I not remembering this?’
[GROUP LAUGHTER]
ART: I was—
KEITH: Yeah, something bad happened in a mine. I can't remember exactly what it was.
AUSTIN: It has been many weeks since we recorded that character creation, so I don't blame you.
KEITH: It might've been a beast in a mine. We might have like, heard or seen something.
AUSTIN: Seen some sort of creature. Yeah, I think that that’s correct.
KEITH: Some sort of creature in the mine, yeah.
AUSTIN: Oh, a quick note before we actually go to Art. I do know now where you both—so, both of you have kind of just gotten here. I know—actually, I guess Lyke, you've been to Last Rest before. You’ve been here in the past, right? You moved here after leaving Unschola Republica.
KEITH: Yeah, I moved here—yes.
KEITH: But I actually think that you and Es did work for Dayward YVE before Dayward YVE got here.
KEITH: Okay.
AUSTIN: There's a town a little further south on the map now near the ocean. Near the inland sea called Sapodilla. And that is like a seaside city. It's one of the larger cities in Sangfielle. And you—he was based there at the time. And that's where you were when you did these jobs for him. Because he's—he's a new transplant here in Blackwick. And so, I want to make sure that we don't like, ‘hey, he's been here long enough for you two to do missions for him.’ And I want there to also be like, enough distance that he wouldn't still be peeved about not getting his owl's wit, you know.
KEITH: Right.
AUSTIN: So yeah.
KEITH: Just a quick pitch—do we maybe want to change that to "Spagonia" as an homage to—
AUSTIN: We don't. We don’t want to do that, no. Shout-outs to Spagonia, though. Good music. Art, tell me how the camera sees Duvall.
ART: I think Duvall is like sitting at a front desk with like a 30 mile stare. And Duvall is in these like, sort of like gentleman adventurer clothes, like a white shirt and a vest, and like a cravat. And like, you know—there's probably like a—yeah, dark slacks, and like boots. But it's obvious that these clothes don't fit anymore. Like, Duvall was like a strapping young man, and has lost a fair amount of weight. And so like, the clothes are just kind of like hanging off—like it fits, you know? The belt’s cinched, you know, it's not like sloppy or anything, but it doesn't fit right. You know, he’s—he has money to tailor his clothes sometimes, but this isn't the set that he's gotten to yet.
AUSTIN: Yeah.
ART: And so it just looks a little unsettling—
AUSTIN: How old is he—he's human, right?
ART: He's human.
AUSTIN: But not from Unschola. He's a human with like, connection to Aldomina, the devil-like country, right?
ART: Yeah, yeah.
AUSTIN: Weird ‘the devil country’ is not a nickname for the Heartland where the curses are. The devil country is actually what we call [CHUCKLING] ‘the fanciest place in this setting.’ So yeah. How—
ART: A man of wealth and taste.
AUSTIN: [chuckles] Yeah. Perfect. How old is—how old does he look to someone who maybe does not know what class he is, and doesn't yet know that maybe human ages don't count anymore?
ART: I think he kind of has the—you know that John Mulaney joke, the like, ‘stop burning the candle at both ends. tall child’.
AUSTIN: [CHUCKLING] Uh-huh.
ART: It's kind of like that. I think there's like—there's like a youth in his face ‘cause he's young, but he looks—he looks like he's burning the candle. He looks—he looks very ‘rough young,’ you know?
AUSTIN: Oh yeah. Sure. Totally. What class are you playing?
ART: I'm playing the Deep Apiarist.
AUSTIN: Cool. Good.
ART: I—
AUSTIN: ‘He/him’ pronouns, right?
ART: Oh yeah, ‘he/him’ pronouns. Oh, and, just a little more, just a little more.
AUSTIN: Please.
ART: So he's like at the front desk, but he's got this really, like, off-putting stare, like he's not moving. He's just like, looking at the door.
AUSTIN: Right.
ART: I think people have been like, ‘Hey buddy…’
[AUSTIN LAUGHS]
ART: ‘You gotta be a little more.... You know, you're creeping people out. They're not coming in.’
AUSTIN: Yeah.
ART: And he’ll be like, ‘Yeah, I get it. I totally—yeah, you got it. I see what you're talking about, I'm going to fix it.’ And goes back and does the same thing, you know?
AUSTIN: Of course.
ART: Like when you give someone a note, and they don't do it.
AUSTIN: They just don't internalize it. Yeah. Uh-huh. Um, your Calling—
KEITH: Is that related to the bees?
ART: I think focus—I think focus is a bee thing I'm giving out.
AUSTIN: Yeah. The bugs are really, um… orderly.
ART: Yeah. And it's really going on inside.
AUSTIN: Yeah.
ART: So there's a lot of like, ‘What are you talking about? Everyone’s—’
KEITH: Right. Your rich, internal lives.
ART: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Many of them.
[KEITH LAUGHS]
AUSTIN: As a Deep Apiarist, you are filled with bugs. You're filled with bugs. There's bees in there...
ART: It's unclear how many bugs there are, in a lot of these.
AUSTIN: Yeah.
ART: There's moves that suggest you get more bugs. So I don't want to push too many bugs too fast.
AUSTIN: Sure.
ART: But there's some—there's some more that require a—
AUSTIN: Whew! There's some that require a lot of bugs. Yeah.
ART: Yeah.
AUSTIN: You are—your Calling is…
ART: Enlightened.
AUSTIN: Right. Good. And do you remember what your specific goal is for Enlightenment? For what your—
ART: Yeah, to like—to really figure out the self is, uh—trying to figure out the nature of oneself and if one is themselves or if one is the bugs that live inside them.
AUSTIN: Right. Both literally, but also metaphorically—
KEITH: And—
AUSTIN: Like culturally, philosophically, psychologically.
ART: Yeah—
AUSTIN: Big picture.
ART: We all have bugs inside us.
KEITH: In a way we’re all full of bugs, just of different sizes.
ART: Yeah.
AUSTIN: That’s exactly right. Yeah. Exactly. What are your beats?
ART: “Gain access to knowledge that someone tried to conceal” and “find a helpful text.”
AUSTIN: Love it. Great. Okay.
ART: Oh, and I have a connection to Es.
AUSTIN: Yes.
ART: “I believe Es has information, and is concealing it from me.”
AUSTIN: On the nature of the self.
ART: On the nature of the self—
AUSTIN: Because of being a being which has a different perspective on selfhood as someone who co-inhabits a body.
ART: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Which is—which I guess, actually, you do that, but you’re coming from it at like a different direction, it feels.
ART: Right. Yeah. There’s some differences.
AUSTIN: Yeah.
JANINE: Also, we haven’t—have we established that that’s known?
AUSTIN: I don’t know.
ART: I don’t think it needs to be. I think you know something. It doesn’t say if you do, or if I think you know something because of anything.
AUSTIN: Oh, I think Janine meant whether or not her character was a heritrix.
ART: Yeah, yeah, that’s what I meant.
AUSTIN: Okay.
JANINE: Okay.
AUSTIN: I don’t know. It’s up to Janine.
JANINE: ‘Cause we had discussed—we’ve done some consultation with this character, just to try and be safe, and, you know, a thing I don’t want—and we should mention this straight up—a thing I don’t want is any big revelations about, like, someone being really betrayed and making a big deal of it, like, ‘You’re not just a person? You’re two people?’ Like, we don’t want any of that.
AUSTIN: Mhm. Yeah.
JANINE: But also at the same time, I don’t feel like it’s information that gets volunteered too quickly.
AUSTIN: Totally. We should also just shout out—and at this point it will have also come up in a previously released episode, but I’ll shout out Emphabet again. The Emphabet system at @cuddlepotato on Twitter. We had a really great consultancy session on plurality and what that means, and the ways in which it has been depicted, you know, poorly, and well in some cases, and even though I know, Janine, Es is not explicitly a plural character—
JANINE: No.
AUSTIN: —in the ways that real human beings experience plurality, it would be—it would be, like, deeply… just, dishonest to say that that reading isn’t understandable.
JANINE: Mhm.
AUSTIN: And so we wanted to make sure we did that consultancy just to like, make sure we knew what we were—what sorts of stories we were telling and what traps we could fall into, et cetera. Right?
JANINE: Yeah.
AUSTIN: So, yeah. So yeah, maybe that’s not known, but you’re certainly someone who understands magic and shit, right? Or has some sort of supernatural ability, or something?
JANINE: Yeah. I think it’s safe to say that there’s—
AUSTIN: There has to be some reason, right?
JANINE: I think it’s safe to say there’s going to be an uncanny sort of weirdness around Es that I think would be identifiable.
AUSTIN: Right. That would be enough for Duvall to be like, ‘I think she knows more than she’s letting on.’
JANINE: Yeah. I think Duvall would absolutely be able to clock that something’s up.
AUSTIN: Mhm. Okay. So, I think it is—is that the last thing, Duvall? Have I skipped anything? I think that that’s it.
ART: I think that’s all.
AUSTIN: Okay, well. As the day comes to an end, as the sun begins to set over the hills to the west, and the mountains to the west, and to the, you know—things starting to like close up shop, so to speak, the—there is someone who comes in. This is Tamm, they are a like, 18/19-year-old teen from the town, they’re from one of the rare kind of crossover families of like ‘old school family that’s lived here for a long time’ plus ‘recently arrived miner.’ And recent at this point is, you know, 20 years old or whatever, like that’s—this person has like, stuck around and started a family. Or their parents have, rather. And so they are now at the point in life where they’re like, ‘Do I go become a miner? Do I get into whatever the other parent’s line of work is?’ You know? I don’t know what else they do. But for now, Tamm—and Tamm is short for Tamith, Tamith Callaki. Tamm just makes money as a messenger, and doing odd jobs around town. And they show up and give you an envelope with the council’s—like, the town council’s mark on it. You know, I think that they probably look deep into your eyes, Duvall, and are like,
AUSTIN (as TAMM): Mr. Duvall? Do you—um, can you take this letter and sign for it?
AUSTIN: Not deep into your eyes as in they’re making a human connection, deep into your eyes because you’re not looking. You’re just staring into the distance as they do this.
KEITH: They’re like, looking for where—
AUSTIN: They’re looking for Duvall, yeah.
KEITH: —his eyes are? Yeah.
AUSTIN: Yeah. Uh-huh.
ART (as DUVALL): Hm, yes. Yes, of course. I will take the letter.
AUSTIN (as TAMM): I delivered it very, uh, hastily.
AUSTIN: Kind of like, fishing for a tip.
ART: Do we have—am I at a cash register? Is there like, money here? I don’t—
AUSTIN: Yeah, sure. [LAUGHING] I don’t know if—yeah, they probably have an old cash register here even though that’s not how detectives work, but it’s a very good detail. It’s like too heavy to move. Who wants to move it, you know?
ART: It was here when we got here.
JANINE: Just use it to store your float for like getting drinks and stuff.
KEITH: [OVERLAPPING] I would use it. I would reuse the cash register.
AUSTIN: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
KEITH: If you’ve got it, you might as well use it.
AUSTIN: Exactly.
ART: Hit the ‘no sale’ button and like the little cha-ching! Heavy drawer comes out.
[AUSTIN CHUCKLES]
ART: I don’t know what our money is. I give a—
AUSTIN: Yeah, I was thinking about this the other day. I don’t know what we want to do for money. Because it’s fun to have like, big stupid old-style bills, those are really fun, but it’s also good to have coins—
KEITH: Like bank notes you have to like, sign, from—
AUSTIN: Old signed bank notes, yeah, exactly. But also coins are fun and clanky. My guess—my real thing is like, the way the game works, resources are more abstract than that and tend to be things. And so, we can do whatever we want. You know what I mean? You all start with a resource that is—that has—
KEITH: Trade ledgers.
AUSTIN: Sure. Exactly. Like, what’s that value like? You know?
JANINE: What if—I mean, okay, on the one hand, I feel like—I feel like this answer should be different depending on where you are. I feel like—
AUSTIN: Yes, that’s exactly right. Yeah.
JANINE: For Aldomina—Al-do-mee-na?
AUSTIN: Aldomina [Al-DOM-in-ah] is right. You got it right the first time.
JANINE: Big huge bank notes, old-fashioned paper money like that, feels right. But for where we are right now, the thing that feels right is like, that cash register opens, and then it’s just a bunch of like, various pocket-sized valuables?
AUSTIN: Right. Totally.
JANINE: Like, maybe the important thing is that it’s valuable and it fits in a coin purse. So it could be like—
AUSTIN: Exactly. It’s a gem, or it’s—
JANINE: —polished stones, or, you know, small, various—yeah.
AUSTIN: A hundred percent. A little—a pack of cigarettes. Little things that carry value.
JANINE: A little cloth-wrapped pouch of seeds, or something.
AUSTIN: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, again, that is the way that, mechanically—
JANINE: Teeth.
AUSTIN: That is how resources work. Yeah, teeth, big one. We know that here.
ART: Just give them a handful of teeth and send them on their way, like you do. In the little teeth pocket of the cash register—
AUSTIN: Yeah, everyone knows. I think what they actually do is they start walking around the room to like, give you time to read it in case you need to send back something. Which, you’re not gonna need to do, probably, but this is what they do. This is their job. Any opportunity to get two tips out of a transaction is good.
ART: I’m not gonna tip someone for not taking a letter back for me.
AUSTIN: [LAUGHS] Okay.
ART: I believe in tipping, I believe in doing it generously, but I really think there has to be something going. You can’t just—
AUSTIN: So, this message basically lays out that—and maybe you’d heard a bit about this, you’d heard that there was—just through the grapevine or over at dinner or whatever—that maybe this Dayward YVE guy might have work for you soon. And you do. He, who again, Lyke and Es have a history with, has requested the investigatory skills of the Blackwick Group, which is what I’ve, you know, informally started writing in my notes for your group. The entrepreneur—this entrepreneur—recently moved to Blackwick and purchased a few lots in town, along with a kind of, like, station up near the mine entrance, where either he directly or one of, you know, someone who works for him runs as basically a broker. He’s someone who buys stuff that people find in the mines, and then resells it elsewhere throughout Sangfielle or back into Aldomina. He is very moneyed and long-term, seems like he has big plans for being part of Blackwick and Blackwick County. And that means that the council wants to like, not stay on his good side, necessarily, like they’re not afraid of him, but they are, like, ‘Hey, let’s make sure that we’re all in this together, and that if someone is upset, we’re willing to let our new supernatural investigators go check out your shit.’
He recently—I mean, specifically the thing that he does that makes him powerful in this town is that he pays a little bit better for what the miners bring out on average than the other brokers do. And that means that the miners like him even though they don’t know him, because his money is good. Right? He’s making sure that they have enough automat tickets or whatever to make it feel like it’s a good deal to go to him and not go somewhere else. The—though he has stayed in town for the last month or two probably since moving here, he recently constructed—finished construction, or, the construction of, he didn’t build it—but, the construction of a manor called Roseroot Hall, about an hour or so north of here on a clear day’s hike, finished, and he has reported to the council that there have been strange occurrences happening at night in his home. Candles go out on their own, the moonlight can’t get in through the windows, he can go outside the house, look up, see the moon, see outside is lit by the moon, but inside it’s not breaking through the windows. And remember, the moon gets real big here, so that’s very strange. And then, he’s reported some nights he just can’t find himself where he is in his own home. And that’s—it’s a manor, but it’s not like a palace. You know? So that’s something strange.
The council basically tells you like, ‘Hey, this might just be a homesick guy who should go back to Aldomina, who’s having anxious dreams and confusing them for reality, or it could be a haunting. And if it’s a haunting, deal with it.’ Or it could be something worse. And if it’s something worse, that’s extremely scary because it’s in Blackwick County even if it isn’t in Blackwick proper. So go check it out. Tomorrow morning, you can—you’re supposed to go meet one of YVE’s servants at the old abbey ruins, and then go north and get to this manor and see what’s up. And then that letter is signed by two members of the council, which gives you the sort of knowledge that yes, this is a real thing.
One of the people who signed is proctor Ekashi Wolff, who is part of the Triadic Pyre, who showed up in the other side’s game very briefly. And my guess is probably one of the other people is the Nun of Slumbous, whose name I’m forgetting, but she—
ART: Oh, she had a good name. I liked her name.
AUSTIN: She did. Stanislaka. Also just called ‘Laka’ sometimes. Okay. So yeah. That’s the message that comes. Tomorrow you head north to Roseroot Manor, Roseroot Hall, and investigate this house that may or may not be haunted. You obviously have leave to do whatever you want tonight. Duvall, do you send a message back to the council basically being like, ‘Yeah yeah yeah, we’re good, we got it’? Or do you just—
ART: No, I don’t think it’s necessary.
AUSTIN: You don’t think it’s necessary.
ART: I think they really cheated this courier. They should have asked for—
AUSTIN: They should have tipped—maybe they did.
ART: But they should have—they’re like, ‘oh, just meet us here’, they didn’t ask for our returned correspondence.
AUSTIN: That’s true.
ART: They’re the jerks here.
AUSTIN: Uh-huh.
KEITH: So you’re saying because there is no specific request for our return, you’re choosing to not, and that’s Day—Daylight—Daybreak’s fault.
ART: Yeah.
KEITH: Okay.
AUSTIN: Dayward.
KEITH: Dayward’s fault.
AUSTIN: Mhm.
KEITH: “Dayward’s Fault” is also a pretty good name.
AUSTIN: That’s a great name. Listen, we’ll see how this story goes. Maybe this ends with a place called Dayward’s Fault being added to the fucking map.
JANINE: Season 9.
AUSTIN: Uh-huh. So—
ART: Can you believe how high these season numbers are getting?
[JANINE AND KEITH LAUGH]
AUSTIN: It’s scary. I get now, Final Fantasy, you know—they should have stopped doing—you gotta go to colon and a subtitle. We should just be Friends at the Table—
JANINE: We did our MMO season too soon and didn’t number it, that’s our problem.
AUSTIN: We didn’t—god, we should have waited until like, 11, for our MMO season.
JANINE: Mhm.
AUSTIN: Alright, so, does anyone want to—is there anything anyone wants to do before adventuring? I don’t think anything—this is not space where I’m like ‘you better get ready’, this is space where I’m wanting to make sure you have the opportunity to be like ‘oh, I wanted to do da-da-da-da-da’, but that’s not a—again, I have no expectations here.
KEITH: Well, great, ‘cause I have nothing to do.
AUSTIN: Great. [CHUCKLES] Alright then. So—let me just put this thing down.
KEITH: Do I know that this is—do you tell—Art, do you tell me that this is—
AUSTIN: Good question.
KEITH: That we’re working—that this is like another Dayward job?
ART: Yeah, I think I faithfully—
KEITH: Okay.
ART: —read you the letter.
KEITH: I don’t know if I feel anything about this. I—
AUSTIN: How do you and Es, yeah, feel about working for this person who you’ve worked for before, and maybe took stuff from?
KEITH: Right. Unclear if we got paid in advance and took the stuff, or just decided ‘No, we decided we want this. Keep your money.’
AUSTIN: ‘Sorry, bud.’
KEITH: Sorry.
JANINE: I feel like Es probably would have made an effort to return at least a portion, maybe would have kept like a per diem, and been like, ‘Look, they’re expensive, sometimes these things happen.’ And subtracted the value of—
KEITH: Right. I took out lunch costs, but.
[AUSTIN AND JANINE CHUCKLE]
AUSTIN: Right. Uh-huh. Cool. Alright, well then, it’s the next morning. Unless—again, unless someone wants to break in. And it is like, a brisk gray morning, it’s one of those days where it’s like, ‘It was sunny yesterday. Where did all these clouds come from? Why is it so overcast? This sucks.’ And it’s early in the morning. By the time you get to these kind of abbey ruins—which as a reminder, the ruins are like—the buildings of the abbey are gone except for this one high tower, this, like, bell tower, and then also the kind of huge cavernous ribcage and like, basic structure of a strange beast, which kind of provides the kind of framework of what would have been a building, sort of. And—including the skull is like, wrapped up around the bell tower and all that, it’s cool.
Anyway, you’re there, and there are people setting up stalls—this is like higher up in the town, this is towards the northern end of the town, and it’s close to where the mine entrance is. And people set up little stalls to sell replacement pickaxes, and hammers, and, you know, lantern fuel, and basic necessities up there. It costs more than getting it in town, but it’s right there near the entrance, so it’s easier to like, grab something midway through the day and not have to schlep all the way back down to the main street. So you know, you’re seeing miners and prospectors get ready to go in the mines, and up in the hills, and all that other stuff. And I take it at first you’re like—
Actually, you know what, because Es and Lyke, you’ve met Dayward before, you have a pretty good expectation of who you’re going to meet here. It will either be, you’re pretty sure, Mr. Kenson, who is like a Kaprak, which are the goat-people, with like—big horn ram, like the kind of spirally inwards horns that big horn rams have. And that’s like his butler, basically. Or this Carpana which are the capybara-type rodent-type people, named Ana Berylia. And, you know, those are the two people you’re looking for. A little short capybara maid, or a big fancy ram goat man with big horns and copper wire-frame glasses and a proper suit. Neither of them show up. And instead, you’re like, ‘Okay, well where the fuck is this person, who are we meeting here?’
And eventually there’s someone who is so strange-looking that you’re like, ‘Ah, gotta be this motherfucker, I guess.’ He is standing at almost seven feet tall. And that is probably not the most striking thing about him, which is strange, because that’s very tall, even for this world of buffalo-people and goatmen. He is really up there. And he is wearing a kind of deep red carnival mask, specifically—I’m looking at this kind of style of mask called a bauta, which is—I’ll post it. Actually, let me just post the image. I don’t think it has any of this kind of like, extra flair on it that I’m posting. But a bauta is a type of mask that was like a Venetian carnival mask, it’s one of the more popular—was one of the more popular variants, I guess is what I would say. How would I describe this? It’s like, boxed-off—
ART: Sort of looks like a coffee mug.
AUSTIN: It does kind of look like a coffee mug. It’s kind of like boxed-off at the top, and then it comes to a sharp point on the bottom. And there is like a nose, but it’s kind of open at the bottom because the point of them was that you could eat or drink from under them.
KEITH: Ohh.
AUSTIN: It’s very weird-looking. But very like—B-A-U-T-A.
JANINE: I want to say they have these in Amadeus, right? Like, when Salieri’s like pretending to be his dad, or something.
AUSTIN: That sounds likely. Historically they were—they were used—
ART: Well, this guy on the right’s got like a plague doctor version of one, which—
AUSTIN: I mean, that is another one of the—that is another different type of mask. That is one of the medico masks.
ART: It’s a different thing, okay.
AUSTIN: I read a lot about Venetian masks this week. The bauta—
ART: Why?
AUSTIN: Because of this character.
ART: Oh.
AUSTIN: I was like, ‘What’s up with masks?’ So yeah, here is how Wikipedia describes this mask. “Designed to comfortably cover the entire face, this traditional grotesque piece of art was characterized by the inclusion of an over-prominent nose, a supraorbital ridge, a projecting chin line, and no mouth. The mask’s beak-like chin is designed to enable the wearer to talk, eat, and drink without having to remove it, thereby preserving the wearer’s anonymity. The bauta was often accompanied by a red or black cape and a tricorn.” The mask like, fits into the tricorn. And this person is wearing a tricorn, but they are not wearing—they are wearing a cape, but you don’t really see what—you don’t see any of their face underneath this thing, especially at a distance. And you don’t see what their clothing is underneath. I guess the wind maybe blows and you can see they have kind of a colorful vest on. But they’re wearing like, a long black cape that covers the outfit, and not just the back of it, but the front of it too. They’re almost underneath it like a sheet.
They also are—while they’re wearing the tricorn hat, they are not wearing the kind of cowl that would cover their hair and the rest of their head, and so you can see that they also have like, long, dark hair that is like, layered and a little feathered, and comes down past their shoulders. Past his shoulders. And at seeing you, with this bright red mask on, he raises a gloved hand to, like, ‘yep, me’, and then does like, a little bow. And I’ll note, he looks like he’s dressed—he does look like he’s dressed for some sort of festival or—more importantly, no one dresses like this. He looks old-fashioned, in a way. [LAUGHING] No one wears tricorn hats. Not even in—maybe in Aldomina. Maybe in one of the cantons. But certainly not here in Sangfielle. Like, this is—that’s an outfit that—there are dust storms here, my guy. You know? And maybe the cape helps with that, but it also would get dirty really quick. But here he is, kind of signaling the three of you to come over so he can take you on your way.
KEITH: It doesn’t look super easy to eat under the mask, although I can—
AUSTIN: Forks.
KEITH: Right, forks.
AUSTIN: Yeah. Keith, I had the same thought.
KEITH: I was thinking of like, a sandwich.
AUSTIN: Yeah. I know. Mhm. And then I thought ‘ah, a fork.’ A fork would get under there real easy.
KEITH: A fork, right. It makes a lot of sense. Or, you know, I don’t know if they had these, probably not, but stick a little straw up there and suck your drink. That would be fine.
ART: I was thinking corn dog. You can eat a corn dog in this mask.
KEITH: Corn dog would work, yeah.
AUSTIN: Venetians, famous for their corn dogs.
JANINE: Venice is—yeah.
KEITH: I would love to see someone with like, a takeout cup of soda, like the wax paper cup of soda, and a straw going underneath one of these. [LAUGHS]
AUSTIN: Yeah, just drinking it with one of these. The thing is, today, you would, because like, Venice just does carnival season still, but also definitely has drinks with straws in them. You know? Like, here’s an image of Carnivale, and in the background is Super Mario with a [LAUGHING] backpack on.
[GROUP LAUGHTER]
AUSTIN: It’s very funny.
JANINE: I thought that was Spiderman until I registered the overalls.
AUSTIN: The hat, yeah. The overalls, yeah, uh-huh. It’s so fucking funny to me.
ART: I’m still not seeing any corn dogs, though. I’m gonna move to Venice and try to make my fortune. As the Venetian corn dog guy.
AUSTIN: Yeah, it’s a real white—yeah, uh-huh, a real blue-sky opportunity.
KEITH: It would be great for festival season.
AUSTIN: So, as you come over, he does—he kind of repeats that bow, and says:
AUSTIN (as MASKED MAN): Mr. YVE has sent me to meet with you here. If you are ready, I can lead you up to Roseroot Hall. My name is Dyre Ode. It is a pleasure to meet you all. Your reputations precede you.
[PAUSE]
KEITH (as LYKE): Uh-oh.
AUSTIN (as DYRE ODE): It’s a compliment. Even those of you who’ve worked with Master YVE before come highly recommended. If there are no questions—
JANINE (as ES): I have a question.
AUSTIN (as DYRE ODE): Of course.
JANINE (as ES): What was the recommendation?
AUSTIN (as DYRE ODE): That you and your concern here in town are the… best suited toward our current predicament at Roseroot.
ART (as DUVALL): Absolutely we are.
AUSTIN (as DYRE ODE): If that’s all. It is a short hike, but I do worry about the weather.
ART (as DUVALL): Let us worry about the weather.
AUSTIN: He can’t make an expression, because he’s wearing a mask. And so he just turns and begins to lead you out past the town. And I think as he goes, I think there is like some—he’s chattier than maybe a guy in a big mask might suggest. And is like, very much interested in hearing how your—you know, it’s stuff like, ‘How are you finding Blackwick since arriving?’ Stuff like that. You know? And—
ART (as DUVALL): I lived here once before, but.
AUSTIN (as DYRE ODE): Do you find it better now, or did you prefer it in its more foolish days, let’s say?
ART (as DUVALL): It’s so hard to find now.
AUSTIN (as DYRE ODE): The town?
ART (as DUVALL): Just everything, it’s all… Everything’s changing so quickly. I turn down the street, I don’t recognize anything.
JANINE (as ES): It’s exciting. You’ll discover new things that way.
AUSTIN (as DYRE ODE): There are so many new things that have come to the Heartland, and I have to say, I’m with Miss Es on this one.
ART (as DUVALL): I feel like you’re both ascribing a certain level of judgment not present in the original assessment.
[AUSTIN AND JANINE LAUGH]
ART (as DUVALL): But uh, sure.
AUSTIN (as DYRE ODE): I think of change as an opportunity. Even if what you were before fit well, perhaps you’ll fit even better in what comes next. You don’t even need to put any effort into it if the world changes right.
JANINE: I love that. I’m gonna steal that.
KEITH (as LYKE): Are you talking about something specific?
AUSTIN (as DYRE ODE): [STAMMERING] A town like Blackwick, even ten years ago, was a different place than what it is now. Curse broken, name changed. What is the name of the—Slumbous?
KEITH (as LYKE): That’s a load off my mind.
AUSTIN (as DYRE ODE): Well.
KEITH (as LYKE): I was in those mines! I was on the chopping block!
AUSTIN (as DYRE ODE): I didn’t know that you’d spent time inside.
KEITH (as LYKE): Oh, yeah.
AUSTIN (as DYRE ODE): Did you ever find anything of great value?
KEITH (as LYKE): Bips and bops. Bits and bops.
AUSTIN: Bips and bops.
ART: Bips and bops, that’s what they say in Blackwick.
KEITH: Yeah, bips and bops.
AUSTIN: ‘You find anything up there today, Charlie?’
KEITH: ‘It’s bips and bops.’
AUSTIN: ‘Yeah, bips and bops, bips and bops.’
ART: Bips and bops. Scattadoos all over the place.
AUSTIN: All over the damn place.
KEITH: There’s a lot you can do with the right bip and bop.
AUSTIN (as DYRE ODE): Again, your reputation. I’ve heard as much.
AUSTIN: And I think this continues for a little bit. And we’re gonna do a little Delve here. Delves are the kind of mechanization of going on a journey in Heart. They are one of the kind of core organizing principles, let’s say, of what—of the way you move around the world. “A journey through Heart is considered to take place between two landmarks, and it’s called a Delve. If the landmarks are connected by a road or a path (see Connections section below)—” Sorry. “If the landmarks are connected by a road or a path, see the Connections section below. If there’s no established connection, the players will have to forge their own route through the unstable and shifting terrain of the Heart.”
This is gonna be a light one. I’m gonna say it is not connected here, and you’ll figure out why that is shortly. The long and short—I guess the long and short is, two landmarks are connected when there is like, some degree of hostility or hazard that has been taken care of and allows the pathway between the two to be a little bit lighter. Maybe there had been a rockfall that gets cleaned, or you know, taken care of—not cleaned, what’s the word I’m looking for?
ART: Cleared.
AUSTIN: Cleared, thank you, yeah. And that means that, hey, it’s a little easier to take this basic path. And that reduces basically how difficult it is to make this crossing. But to begin with, this is just—it’s a hike. It’s a hike in the day, it’s again, kind of a brisk morning, the wind is kind of biting at you a little bit as you’re climbing these hills. If you went west a little bit, you would get deeper into the mountains and towards the mines, but heading straight north from where you are at the kind of angle you’re at, you’re just up and down these hills over and over again as you get closer and closer to Roseroot. And to begin with here, you—someone is going to take the lead on this and make a roll in order to kind of lead this hike, so to speak. Let me again read just from the book here.
“Each Delve has a Resistance. Resistance functions much like the equivalent statistic for an adversary; successful actions on the part of the player characters reduce it, and once it hits zero, the journey is complete. As with any situation, it’s up to the GM to provide interesting options and react to player choices when they seek out solutions and problems. When a character works towards completing a journey, they roll an appropriate combination of Skill and Domain just as they would with any other action. A success or partial success: They inflict Stress (d4 Stress by default) on the Delve. Equipment and abilities can increase that number or change the way it’s calculated.”
So it’s almost as if Delves are almost like enemies that you’re doing damage to. For us who have been on a Forged in the Dark game, it’s sort of like there is a clock you can’t see, a clock that’s like an HP number that you’re filling—that you’re decreasing or filling up as if it were a clock until it’s complete. And the ways in which you fill that up change depending on what’s happening in the Delve.
In this case, I think you come to a point where there had been some—there’s like a particularly steep section where some stairs had been carved into the rock, but the—the stairs seem like they’ve been—seem like they’ve been purposefully damaged, as if someone’s taken a hammer to them or something to mess them up. And make the path up this next set of the hill a little bit more difficult. And so, you kind of have like—I’m gonna say like, brushland across these hills where like, you could go deeper into a brushland and try to climb up that way, you could try to like, set up some sort of climbing rope system, you could try to find a different path altogether forward. How do you handle the fact that the path forward seems to have been literally sabotaged?
[PAUSE]
ART: Ignore it and press on?
AUSTIN: And just like, struggle through it? Just kind of like, grit your teeth and—grit your teeth, is that right? Yeah. And make the climb even with the more damaged kind of pathway?
ART: I think—I mean, that’s my idea, I don’t think, like—
KEITH: Yeah.
JANINE: I mean, what’s the—
ART: Going and finding a new path seems like that’s where the trap is.
KEITH: Good point.
AUSTIN: Mm. What were you going to say, Janine?
JANINE: I was gonna—mm. I was gonna say, like, what’s the terrain like on either side of the path?
AUSTIN: Again, it’s like—it’s kind of like brushland, right?
JANINE: Mhm.
AUSTIN: It’s like, lots of little bushes, and some trees here and there. I’d say it’s pretty dry up in this part of the hills, in this part of the year, but it’s not—there—you’re—it’s a risk, right? Because like, you don’t know if you’re gonna fall into a pit, or trip on some roots, or whatever. Right?
JANINE: Yeah, I was gonna say broken steps seem—even if they’re busted up, seem easier to manage than like, scrubby bushes and things like that where you can’t see the ground.
AUSTIN: Totally. So, let’s talk about what a roll is in this game. The way you make a roll in this game, basically, is you take a skill—in this case, that skill could be something like Delve, which is “progress into dangerous or unknown territory,” or it sounds like Endure, which would be “resist the effects of the Heart on your body and mind.” And then a Domain related to what the place you’re in is like. In this case, I think this is Wild. “Wilderness, vegetation, and animals.” It’s not quite Haven, because there aren’t people living here. If it was—if this place was—if this part of Blackwick County was more lived in, it would be a Haven. And so I’d say it’s probably Wild. I could hear an argument for Desolate, this kind of like, territory that clearly used to have more people in it if there’s stairs out here.
But what you’re gonna do is, you start with one die, then you take a die if you have an equivalent skill, and then you take a die if you have an equivalent Domain, and you roll that many die. And they’re all d10s. That many dice. Duvall, it sounded like you were taking the lead on this. And so you—
ART: I do have Delve. I do not have any relevant Domains.
AUSTIN: Do you have any sk—do you have anything else that would change this, or anything like that? I guess you have a thing that could increase the damage you do on this Delve.
ART: Yeah, I have a damager, but I don’t have a helper.
AUSTIN: Okay, well, so let’s start with one die, plus another die for Delve, so that’s two. And then, um, you could ask for help here. The thing that I’m gonna say about help. [CHUCKLES] The things I’ve learned about help from the last few sessions. One, it’s—the way it works is like, if it makes sense for people to be able to help, they can help. When they do that, they open themselves up for negative repercussions. Because the way the game works is that when you roll really well, if you roll an 8, 9, or a 10, you succeed and you don’t take any Stress. If you roll a 6 or a 7, you succeed but you take Stress. And unlike Forged in the Dark games, you cannot resist taking Stress. That Stress is going to hit you. And so there is a degree to—I guess that’s kind of like you resisted by taking Stress in Forged in the Dark, so that doesn’t quite map. But you know what I’m saying. And then anything under that is a failure. And really will start hitting you on the Stress side.
That said, aid really helps. So if you can get aid from somebody, it really does start to like, increase your chances of succeeding. But that risk is real, and then also, there are times at which adding more people to the thing does not necessarily help you. And so in this case, you’re like, guiding this group forward. Maybe I’d say one person could help you if they have a relevant skill or domain. And if they can tell me how they’re helping. Any more than that ends up making it like a ‘too many cooks’ situation and then you’re like—once three people are leading a group, you’ve stopped—no one’s leading the group anymore. You know what I mean?
JANINE: Mhm.
KEITH: Mhm.
AUSTIN: So Es or Lye, are either of you trying to help out here, and if so, how? Do either of you have Wild or Delve?
ART: Or Desolate.
KEITH: No.
AUSTIN: Or Desolate, or Desolate.
KEITH: No, I looked, I don’t have anything that would be very helpful.
AUSTIN: Okay, well, let’s just do it straight. Let’s just do the damn thing. Art, if you go ahead and—do you see where it says, like, “Blood, Mind, Echo, Fortune” on your sheet?
ART: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Do you see under that there’s two drop-down menus?
ART: Yes.
AUSTIN: Choose Delve on the first one and then choose—I guess let’s go with Wild, which I think is probably the more dominant one out here.
ART: Alright.
AUSTIN: And then you don’t have Mastery, you don’t have any pluses to this, so just hit roll.
ART: Okay, just Standard?
AUSTIN: Standard. Yeah, this is not risky, this is not dangerous, this is just—you’re climbing the hills, you know? Hey, there you go, that’s a 7, but you take Stress. Okay. Time to talk about Stress.
AUSTIN: 7 is a success. You manage to make—you manage to bring everyone up this, uh… kind of pathway safely, it’s touch and go for a second there, maybe there’s a moment where you reach out and grab someone’s hand. Dyre, who is the masked man you’re with, is—seems to be handling this just fine. Big long strides. But both Es and Lyke are definitely aided by your determination and you kind of finding the pathway forward. Do your bugs help with this at all? Like, is that part of why you’re able to do it is some sort of bug sense?
ART: Yeah, I mean, I have a move that would like, let me make it more bug-like, but it doesn’t have a mechanical benefit, so I’m not—I’m gonna pass on that right now.
AUSTIN: Sure. Okay.
ART: But yeah, there is—yeah, “Once per session while on a Delve, you can opt to fall asleep and let the bugs inside your body steer you.”
AUSTIN: Oh my god. That’s not what you’re—you’re awake right now, right?
ART: Right, because it reduces Stress, and so…
AUSTIN: Sure. Well, you’re not gonna use it now, obviously. Alright.
JANINE: It would be so funny if he was like ‘Yeah, I got this.’ Promptly falls asleep.
AUSTIN: Mhm.
JANINE: Just bug-ambulates up the broken stairs.
AUSTIN: God. Incredible.
ART: Well, the bugs talk, so, I mean.
JANINE: Oh, okay.
AUSTIN: They—yeah. Mhm. So, here’s the Stress part. You’ve gotten a 7, which means on top of your success, I get to now roll a die and do Stress on you. Every place in the world has a sort of Stress die that it can roll against the party. In this case, it’s a d4. And we roll a 4.
ART: Oh, fuck you.
AUSTIN: [LAUGHS] And you’re gonna take d4 Mind Stress. So, do you see where it says “Stress - Mind Stress”? Raise that to 4.
ART: Okay. I have a move that pertains to this, but we’ll get there.
AUSTIN: I—yeah, let’s get there in a second here, right? That—as long as that thing doesn’t—that move does not stop you from receiving that Stress, right?
ART: Right. I clear Mind Stress at the beginning of ‘situations’, and I’m not a hundred percent sure what a ‘situation’ is.
AUSTIN: Right. Which is a complex, weird term, that I’m still working out what that means.
ART: We’ll get there together, Austin.
AUSTIN: We’ll—I know. It’s—I’ve checked the server, the Discord server on what a situation is, I’ve read the book many times. In any case, when you receive Stress—
ART: Have you read the book Here’s the Situation by The Situation?
AUSTIN: I have not read that book. Have you? I feel like you—
ART: No, but I own a copy of it.
AUSTIN: I was gonna say, you own a copy, right? That’s a thing, right?
ART: Signed, signed copy. Gonna retire with that.
AUSTIN: That’s your retirement fund?
ART: That’s my retirement fund. I might have thrown it out when we moved, if I’m gonna be completely honest with you.
AUSTIN: Right. So, I need you to hit the button that says “Fallout Test”. Because whenever you receive Stress, “when you act and something goes wrong, i.e. when you roll a 7 or less as your highest result, you’ll mark Stress to one of your Resistances.” You’ve done that now. I’ve told you Mind. I’ll tell—I’ll explain why it’s Mind in a second.
“Each time your character takes Stress, the GM will check for Fallout to see if there’s any kind of ongoing serious effect at play. The GM rolls d12 and compares the result to the current total of Stress marked against the character’s Resistances. If the result of a d12 is equal or lower, the character suffers Fallout.” So Stress is abstract. In this case, Duvall, you lead everyone up, and that means that it’s you who sees as you clear the top of the last step—broken step area—that off to the east, a big storm is coming. One of these sandstorm dust-storms, clay-storms, who knows what it will be this time—is coming. And in seeing that, you are hit with a wave of anxiety.
ART: Yeah, that sounds right.
AUSTIN: And it’s scary. And apparently, d4, and you got a 4 on that—it’s really scary. So that is abstract. That’s not—that storm hasn’t hit, that storm might not ever hit if there’s not a Fallout that makes it hit, so to speak. Right? Or if there’s not another vent on the Delve that makes it hit. Right? And so, the—it’s kind of like an abstract, distant thing. In the same way that like—let’s say you’ve gotten Blood Stress that would have been you almost got hit, or you got scraped, or, you know, the bullet flew past your eye but it didn’t hit you—you know, whatever it is, but then when it becomes Fallout, it becomes kind of material and real. It becomes physicalized, to go back to that word, from the ground itself.
And so now, because you took Stress, I do need you to hit the button on your sheet that says “Fallout Test”. At that point it will roll a d12, you roll a 9, that’s above 4, so you’re safe. As Stress adds up, it will get increasingly easy for you to get a Fallout, and we’ll talk about what that looks like when someone gets one. For now, though, we’re at the top of this place. Everyone can see that that storm is off to the east. And I think, at seeing it, Dyre Ode, like, sniffs into the air, and he’s like:
AUSTIN (as DYRE ODE): [SNIFFS] I cannot tell what—hmm. Does anyone else smell wine?
AUSTIN: And it’s as if the dust has—the dust storm to the east smells like some sort of grape wine. I don’t know if there are any wine experts among you who could like, place whether or not it’s a chardonnay or something else, but like, that’s a thing that I guess happens. The dust storms can be kind of anything, and this one seems to be some sort of dirt-wine. So, hopefully—
ART: [LAUGHING] I don’t want to drink it.
AUSTIN: No. Fair.
KEITH: Dirt-wine.
AUSTIN: Mhm. After that tall climb, you’ve made—oh, sorry, Art, you should do your damage to the Delve at this point.
ART: Yeah.
AUSTIN: So again, almost like an NPC, you’re gonna do damage. What do you do? You do 5 damage, that’s quite a lot of damage to this thing. And that’s partially because of your Dimensional Barometer which gives you a d6 instead of the normal d4. What’s a Dimensional Barometer?
ART: Uh, what’s a regular barometer? [CHUCKLES] Hold on, let me Google something real quick. It’s gonna be “barometer”.
AUSTIN: Uh-huh. [LAUGHS] A barometer’s like, height? Is that right? Or barometric pressure?
ART: It’s pressure, it’s atmospheric pressure, but I have no idea—oh, they look like a lot of different things, huh?
JANINE: The Unabomber used one.
ART: Okay, the most common one looks like a weird clock.
AUSTIN: It does look like a weird clock. That’s fun. Is yours like a watch? Or like a pocket-watch, but you take it out and it’s like ‘yep, it’s gonna rain.’
ART: Hold on, I had a favorite one and I lost it. There it is. It’s got like ‘stormy, rain, change, fair, very dry’ but it’s dimensional, so instead it’s like—I feel it’s like, metaphysical conditions?
AUSTIN: Yeah. Uh-huh.
ART: Like—but one is probably still ‘stormy’, right? Because of the storms.
AUSTIN: Yeah, one of them’s ‘cause of the storms, and then like—is one of them about like ‘yeah, it’s about to get really dense’. This next area, everything’s gonna feel a little like, more compact somehow.
ART: That’s probably on the other end, because I think that’s how the barometer works.
AUSTIN: Sure. Yeah. Definitely.
ART: ‘Stormy’ on one end, ‘dense’ on the other. And probably still ‘change’ in the middle if we’re being honest.
AUSTIN: Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah. So that’s in fact—maybe that’s part of this, is like, you’re able to—having used that, you’re able to be like ‘Oh shit, this storm is going to be coming here. We have to start moving at a more rapid clip. It is coming our way. Let’s be a little bit more aggressive here.’ And that pays off, basically. You’ve done 5 damage. You don’t know how much resistance this Delve has, but 5 is a lot, so that’s solid.
I’m gonna say you get about 5 minutes away from here and, again, you’re on a walking path, not like one that’s been paved, but one that’s been worn in from people traveling this way over the years, and off in the distance you can actually see the Roseroot Hall. I’d say it’s probably about 30 minutes away still, you know, kind of around a few curves and out on another hill, and it’s just after you see that, that you hear the sound of a weapon being cocked—a gun being cocked. And, as if to pay off the earlier prediction of there being someone sabotaging the stairs, a trio of people walk out, kind of trying to surround you around this path.
It is a woman, I think a human woman, let me check my notes. Yes, sorry, it’s a devil—it’s a devil who is a woman, a Drakkan who are the seahorse people, and then a big human dude, and he is holding a sledgehammer, which maybe you would have hit the stairs with to damage those a little bit, and the devil who seems to be the leader says:
AUSTIN (as DEVIL WOMAN): Look what we have here. Four for the price of one. Hand over your things and you can go.
AUSTIN: And then the—Ettel, who is the Drakkan, is like, ‘this is what you call a stick-up.’ What do you do?
JANINE: I need to do, like, a style flourish.
AUSTIN: Uh-huh.
JANINE: So I think as they’ve been going up the stairs, Es has had her fan out, and kind of like—I imagine her—you know how tightrope walkers like, stick their arms outside—I remember when I was little, I saw a tightrope walker who had like—I want to say she had like a tiny tiny umbrella in one hand, and then like, a fan in the other, and that always really stuck with me. So I’m kind of imagining Es having her fan out and kind of—just to sort of balance herself every now and then when her heels are not great on the broken stairs. I think as soon as this group appears though, she sort of flicks her fan shut, twists it, and then opens it the other way. And when she does that, there is—I haven’t decided whether it’s just a blade that extends across the top, or whether opening the fan in that direction opens up like a full-on metal. Like, it’s just metal on that side. When she opens it. It’s basically like a trick device where it just looks like a normal fan or you turn and open it the other way and the thing spreads across.
AUSTIN: Sure. Right. So is this like an—
JANINE: And I think she makes that switch.
AUSTIN: Yeah. Is this an attempt to intimidate them?
JANINE: No, this is an attempt to be prepared.
AUSTIN: I see. Gotcha. Okay.
JANINE: This is like a, you know. This is recognizing a threat and being like ‘Alright, I’m ready for this.’
AUSTIN: Right.
JANINE: This is technically my sacred blade.
AUSTIN (as DEVIL WOMAN): Don’t get fancy, love. Just—gems. Coins. Whatever you have, toss it our way. We’re not here to raise blood.
JANINE (as ES): Then leave.
AUSTIN (as DEVIL WOMAN): Not without a toll. That’s what they call it, right?
AUSTIN: And Larch, who is the human with the big hammer, says ‘Yeah, they call it a toll.’
JANINE: Toll roads are far better maintained than this.
AUSTIN (as DEVIL WOMAN): Well, perhaps if we could collect taxes, we could fix the road up for you.
ART: Ha!
[KEITH AND JANINE CHUCKLE]
AUSTIN (as DEVIL WOMAN): So cough it up.
JANINE (as ES): Get out of our way.
AUSTIN: This does sound like a Compel to me. This does sound like—you are making the case to compel her. Her name, by the way, is… Agdeline. A-G-D-E-L-I-N-E.
JANINE: Great name.
AUSTIN: I think she’s like a mid-20s devil lady, with like, curly hair, and I’m imagining her dressed like a pirate for some reason, but that’s not true because these are three miners who are just not doing particularly well in the mines recently.
JANINE: Oh, I was going to say ‘miners in what way,’ but okay. Miners like mining.
AUSTIN: M-I-N-E-R-S. Like mining, yes. Prospectors. Who have turned—who have become bandits, because it’s not going great. So yeah. I feel like this is like a situation where you are trying to intimidate them back. Is anyone helping Es with this intimidation?
ART: [HUMS] Um—
JANINE: Are we still in the Wild domain here?
AUSTIN: We are still in the Wild domain here, yeah.
ART: I would love to help. I have nothing that can help.
KEITH: Same—yeah, I’m in the same boat.
AUSTIN: What do you—yeah, I guess I have not looked at your sheets. I don’t have them open right now. You have Discern and Mend, and then, Duvall, you have Delve, Discern, and Mend. Yeah, I don’t—I mean, neither of you have—
KEITH: Best I can do is if you get hit, I can mend you up. [LAUGHS]
AUSTIN: Okay, sounds good.
JANINE: Great.
AUSTIN: I’ll note, Duvall, really quick, do you want that first ability of yours to trigger at this point? Before we get into whatever this is gonna be?
ART: Oh, this is a situation?
AUSTIN: I believe so in the sense that I’ve now asked the official Heart Discord and people’s opinion seem to be ‘every event in a Delve counts as a situation,’ so.
ART: Alright, I wanna say, and I know that making an RPG book is hard—
AUSTIN: Yes.
ART: —but if you have a word like ‘situation’, it should be in your index.
AUSTIN: It should be defined. It should be in your index, yeah.
ART: But yeah, I understand it’s very hard, I don’t do it, and I do sloppy work on this show, so. You know, I don’t have anywhere to stand here. But yes, “clear all Mind Stress as all your Mind Stress flows through you and into the hive.”
AUSTIN: Right. The idea there basically being like, whatever stress you just had about the storm coming, you’ve like proc—your bugs have processed it for you.
KEITH: Yeah, they eat your stress.
AUSTIN: They eat your stress for you.
JANINE: God, that’s the fuckin’ dream.
AUSTIN: Uh-huh.
ART: Yeah.
KEITH: I need some brain bugs to eat my stress.
AUSTIN: So yeah. So, clear that Mind Stress. That’s very useful.
ART: I can never benefit from Mind Protection or remove stress from Mind any other way. That’s the—like the—
AUSTIN: Right. That is a downside, yeah. That is a default ability for the Deep Apiarist. So yeah, that’s fun. So that’s—meanwhile, Duvall looking out into the middle distance as Es untwirls her sacred blade fan-weapon. Yeah, so then Es, this is a Compel, so that’s—again, there is a little dropdown box underneath all your Stresses, and you choose that as Compel. You can put Wild down as the second thing, but again you don’t have Wild. And then, again, I don’t think there’s any other moves that you have that are relevant here? Any other abilities at this point? So. Yeah, give me that Compel roll.
JANINE: Okay.
AUSTIN: First roll of the season for you, Janine. Let’s see—ooh. Rough one.
JANINE: Yeah, that’s not a—
AUSTIN: Two 2s.
JANINE: Great. Fantastic.
AUSTIN: Uh-huh. So, again, let me roll that d4 Stress. That’s a 3. In this case, take d3—I’m also gonna give you Mind Stress here, as the—Agdeline pulls the trigger and shoots right next to your head, which is a frightening thing that she did not back down from this at all. Because you gave her a good flare. You gave her a good, you know, ‘Listen, I’m not—don’t fuck around with me.’ And maybe this group of people is that desperate, maybe they are that seasoned, but they didn’t blink at that. And that stresses you out some.
JANINE: Okay, so I’m just rolling a d3?
AUSTIN: No, you’re just taking 3 Stress and putting that into Mind, except now that I’m looking at it, you have 2 Mind protection.
JANINE: I have 2 Mind protection.
AUSTIN: So just put 1 in Mind.
JANINE: Okay.
AUSTIN: And then hit the Fallout test button that is on your sheet, which will roll a d12, and as long as it’s not a 1, there is—you’re not gonna suffer any Fallout. You rolled an 8, so you’re safe. So again, a little shaken up, but not necessarily—
JANINE: Yeah, I don’t wanna like—I imagine I’m shaken up because like, I don’t want to fight these miners, but also, just get out of the way, you dumbass. [LAUGHS] Like it’s—
AUSTIN: Uh-huh. At this point they are beginning to circle and close in, and—
KEITH: Circle the three of us, or circle Es?
AUSTIN: All four of you, because also in this mix is Dyre, the masked man.
KEITH: Oh, right.
AUSTIN: Who’s taking action at this point, if anyone? Also again, that storm is on the horizon and getting closer. So that’s a fun element to this.
JANINE: I have a thing I wanna do, but I feel like I should let someone else do stuff first.
AUSTIN: Uh-huh.
ART: I feel like we should let Keith go. Keith has not—
KEITH: That’s—well, that’s true. I’m maybe not the guy you want to initiate in a fight.
[AUSTIN LAUGHS]
ART: I’m not gonna force you to go.
KEITH: But I sure will.
ART: But I don’t wanna—
KEITH: No, no, I—you know. Um… uh, I have a—wow, I have a skill that lets me fix something. Would that I could fix this situation with my spider ink.
AUSTIN: Yeah, it’s really not—yeah.
JANINE: The thing I was thinking of was kind of a retaliation for the gunshot, which is why I mentioned it. But I don’t know about storytelling timing.
AUSTIN: Wait—oh, I mean, what’s the thing? What do you—? You can pitch whatever.
KEITH: Yeah, I don’t mind.
JANINE: I wanted to use Exsanguinate.
AUSTIN: Oh. Sure. Okay. Yeah, I think we should do that.
KEITH: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Unless, Lyke, you really have a thing you want to do.
JANINE: Because I really want to scare her. [LAUGHS]
KEITH: No, no, if she wants that blood, she can have it.
AUSTIN: Uh-huh.
JANINE: Like, if she’s gonna shoot at me, I want to show her, like, I don’t just have a fan, like, this is a thing you maybe don’t want to get into.
AUSTIN: Yeah. That’s a dangerous thing. One second. Let me double-check how that move works.
JANINE: Although, I don’t have—I don’t have Kill as a… thing.
AUSTIN: Yeah, that’s a—there are still ways to maybe—and you could maybe Endure with it, but that means, like, in my mind that would almost be like, casting the spell despite a fight happening, and you like taking some hits, you know. But yeah, it’s definitely—I would let you roll Occult for it because it’s a spell, is what I would do.
JANINE: Okay.
AUSTIN: That’s still Occult even though it’s—I think that that is fair. So maybe that’s the play. And again, here could be a place where other people could get involved to try to like, mix things up or whatever. But, I don’t know—again, if anyone has skills ready to do that—not really, what do we have? We have—Duvall has Delve, Discern, Mend, and Lyke has Discern and Mend. Big ‘looking at things’, not big ‘defending their friends’ things, huh?
ART: No, you’ve definitely convinced me to, uh—
AUSTIN: To invest.
ART: To invest, yeah. When I get this minor beat, I’m gonna take the one that lets me take Kill.
AUSTIN: Absolutely. Here’s what—I mean, there is someone with you who knows how to fight, and that is Dyre Ode, who I think immediately, seeing you begin to—what’s it look like when you cast this spell, Es?
JANINE: Um, I think… I’m trying to think if there’s like, a body movement I want.
AUSTIN: Yeah.
JANINE: I think it’s a thing of like, uh… I think she lifts her arm—the arm without the fan—slightly, not like pointing?
AUSTIN: Mhm.
JANINE: But it is like a—it is sort of a directional thing. It seems like an unconscious kind of gentle movement. I think the real tell is probably that Es’s eyes—I think Es’s eyes are like dark dark gray, but when she’s casting, they lighten to a kind of very light gray, depending on the spell, maybe to even, like, white. And kind of—sizzle’s not the right word, but it’s kind of—’cause there’s no—it’s not heat, but like, I think visually the effect—sizzle is more useful to me than the actual—is more useful to me than the actual descriptor I’d use, which is like, when you are stirring mica into water. Like, mica powder.
AUSTIN: Sure.
JANINE: The way it kind of flows around. Not a lot of people are gonna understand what I mean by that.
AUSTIN: No, but. [CHUCKLES]
JANINE: But sizzling is–you know, there’s like an effervescent kind of quality. I think that’s the indication that she’s casting.
AUSTIN: Cool. So then, yeah. That sounds like Occult—it sounds like Kill - Occult, based on what the spell is, but then click the Mastery box because you’ll get a Mastery die here for that aid from Dyre Ode. But then also—yeah, I’m like, if either of you can come up with a way for Discern to help here, I would let you do it to get one more die on this. Either Lyke or Duvall.
ART: ‘Hey look, trouble!’
AUSTIN: [CHUCKLES] Meet me halfway.
JANINE: I don’t think they’re going to back down.
AUSTIN: Give me Discern. “Understand the world by drawing on accessible information.” You know? Meet me somewhere here?
ART: ‘You know, that guy’s left-handed.’
AUSTIN: ‘That guy’s left-handed’. Okay. Alright.
KEITH: That’s something.
AUSTIN: Yeah, that’s something. That’s almost something. Yeah.
KEITH: Yeah. That’s almost something.
AUSTIN: I’ll give you that. Yeah, that’s like—sure. And then, the thing that Dyre Ode is doing is like, you know—kind of opens the cape in a big dramatic almost bullfighter way of just like ‘look at me for a moment’ to try to draw attention so that you can get this spell off.
JANINE: Hell yeah.
AUSTIN: So, on top of hitting Mastery, hit the—do you see where it says plus?
JANINE: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Hit—make a +1 there and then you can hit roll.
KEITH: I like how you—you said ‘like a bullfighter’ and I thought you meant like, visually, but you meant literally doing what bullfighters do which is wave a cape around to make people look.
AUSTIN: Yeah, literally. Exactly. Alright, read me—you got a 7, so that is a success at a cost. Read me Exsanguinate.
JANINE: This is my slightly modified version of Exsanguinate.
AUSTIN: Uh-huh.
JANINE: “You pluck a target’s”—in square brackets—”[Material Consciousness]”—close square brackets—”out of its mouth and nose, choking it on its own viscera.”
AUSTIN: Eugh.
JANINE: “This spell functions as a weapon with the following text: Kill d6 Ranged. You can mark Stress accrued as a result of this spell to Echo.”
AUSTIN: Which is good because you’re about to take some Stress, and that’ll go to your Echo.
JANINE: Yes. Sure.
KEITH: This is one of the spells that—
AUSTIN: Do you—go ahead.
KEITH: —that Heart has. Heart has these spells where the description of the spell makes me think they would die immediately if it were to happen even once. Like, I had—the drowning spell that Junk Mages have, is like, if this happened you would die once. Right?
AUSTIN: Also bad. I mean, player characters have d6—or, sorry, have 10 HP. Right? Have 10 total. So 6—if you hit a 6 on this, that’s a long way to killing many types of people. Do you want to describe what the fuck “material consciousness” looks like, Janine?
JANINE: Yeah, I was just gonna say, I should probably describe that. Once again, I have to get my gif—or my ‘jif’ if you will—of it that’ll help. Ah, there it is. So, the way that I’ve conceptualized material consciousness is that it’s like molten glass that’s kind of being blown, stretched, pulled, whatever, twisted, and it kind of gets—weeping out of the pores isn’t right, because weeping, it’d have to be a thinner liquid, but it gets like pulled from the face. Like, probably primarily the face holes, but also the skin, and then kind of into like a ball that can sort of be drawn forward. So, I have a gif of molten glass being shaped that I’ve kind of been using as like a—yeah.
AUSTIN: It’s very good. It’s cool that that’s what a soul looks like, I guess.
JANINE: It’s not really a soul, it’s just your awareness.
AUSTIN: Sorry. Right. “Just your awareness.” Hey Duvall, I think Es might know some shit about the [LAUGHING] self.
[JANINE LAUGHS]
ART: It’s hard to know how you would be able to pick that out, though. I don’t want to jump to any conclusions.
AUSTIN: Yeah. Give me your d6 damage here, Janine.
JANINE: Is there a quick button for that or just type d6?
AUSTIN: You could add one. You could add one to—I mean, just hit your, uh—your equipment one. Your bladed hand-fan is still d6. So you can hit that.
JANINE: Okay.
KEITH: Janine, does Es also take a pair of scissors and quickly snip off the remainder of the awareness?
JANINE: Probably could do.
AUSTIN: So, that happens—are you going after Agdeline? Or Agdelina? Who seems to be the leader of this gang? Agdeline was right. So yeah, that happens. Give me—you then take 2 Stress back into—I guess it says you could put it into Echo if you want to, right?
JANINE: Yeah, and I’m putting it in Echo.
AUSTIN: That’s fine. It says “Mark Stress accrued—” yeah. Which I think is just—that’s the cost of doing the spell, right?
JANINE: Yeah. It’s not a good thing to see this happen to someone or to be the one who did it to them.
AUSTIN: Right. And I think there’s a degree to which any time you’re fucking around with this sort of magic, it opens you up to the truth of the Heartland in a way that is like… ‘Ahh!’ Like, it touches you back. So go ahead and hit that Fallout test button for me again. You’ve got 3 total, so anything under a 3 will—whew, that’s a 4.
JANINE: Got a 4. Okay.
AUSTIN: No Fallout. Uh-huh. I love how, you know, I hadn’t thought about this before but there’s a real ‘press your luck’ element to the Fallout test in this that is fun. Anyway, I think—I do think Agdeline like, backs up quickly upon this happening, and then can’t find words, because of how you began to pull her awareness out of her body. And I think at that point, the other two kind of back off and go like—kind of move around to her sides to be like ‘Boss, you okay?’ And she’s like struggling to find the words to tell them basically to run, which is scary, in a way, because she’s giving up, but she can’t communicate that she’s giving up to them. What do y’all do? They’re still in your way and the kind of two other people, the big burly human who has a hammer and the Drakkan, the seahorse person, who I imagine has some knives, I’m imagining like dual-wielding daggers is what Ettel’s doing, have like put up a—gone into a defensive stance around Agdeline, their boss, and I think Ettel is like:
AUSTIN (as ETTEL): What the hell did you do to her?
JANINE (as ES): Well, I warned her, is what I would call it.
KEITH: Damn.
ART: [HOLLERING] Ohhh!
AUSTIN: Where’d you find this? Yeah. Uh-huh. Great.
JANINE: I just realized I also am supposed to have added 1 Resistance—or added 1 to a Resistance of my choice at the beginning of this session and totally forgot.
AUSTIN: Oh, you should do that. What is—is that from an ability? Yeah, that’s from Implacable?
JANINE: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Where do you want to put that?
JANINE: Uh… I’m gonna be honest, I kind of want to put it in Mind.
AUSTIN: Uh-huh.
JANINE: But that feels like that’s too—that’s informed.
AUSTIN: Put it in Mind, but don’t remove that 1, let’s just say you didn’t trigger it before, and—listen. It’s fine. Actual play. I think what happens here is Agdeline like, drops to a knee at this point, and they don’t know what to do. And they’re like:
AUSTIN (as ETTEL and LARCH): How do we fix her? Is she—did you kill her?
JANINE (as ES): She’ll be fine, she just—I didn’t kill her.
JANINE: ‘I just rolled Kill.’ No.
AUSTIN: Uh-huh.
JANINE (as ES): I didn’t kill her, she’ll be fine, she just needs a few minutes to come to her senses, as you all should. Now will you let us go?
AUSTIN (as ETTEL and LARCH): If you fix her.
JANINE (as ES): As I said, time will fix her.
AUSTIN (as ETTEL and LARCH): You—you’re lying. You just—you did—where’d that even come from? We don’t have that in us.
[KEITH LAUGHS]
JANINE (as ES): You’d be surprised what you have in you.
AUSTIN: I am—for what it’s worth, I do think it would be—it could be possible to mend this person, and maybe win their, uh… not affection, but their—they would let you go, is what they’re saying, if you could bring her back to her senses, or… reattach her awareness?
KEITH: It sounds like they don’t have much of a choice anymore.
AUSTIN: I mean, they’re holding—they are still two big people who will fight you, right?
KEITH: That’s fair.
AUSTIN: None of you have Kill. We could go—
JANINE: And they can always come back later in the story and alliances would be of value, blah blah blah.
AUSTIN: Exactly, yes. That’s totally possible, right?
ART: Um, yeah, do you want to try to Mend, or do you want me to try to Mend, Keith?
KEITH: I can try and Mend. I’m definitely not blowing my really good Mend spell.
AUSTIN: On this person. Who isn’t—
KEITH: No offense. On this person who just like, threatened to shoot us in the head.
AUSTIN: Yeah, you know how bandits do.
KEITH: Yeah.
ART: Yeah, I feel like my attempts to Mend would just read as gross, you know?
KEITH: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Because of the bugs?
ART: Because of the bugs.
KEITH: Probably because of the bugs. They’re very bug-based. Mine is just an overstuffed coat—
JANINE: ‘Oh, you didn’t like that glass thing? Don’t worry, I got bugs. I’ll fix you right up. With my bugs.’
ART: ‘I’ll fix you up with some bugs.’
AUSTIN: Alright. So then, yeah, Keith, it seems like a Mend thing to me.
KEITH: Yeah.
AUSTIN: And then, yeah. I’m gonna say that’s Mend and then either Haven or Wild. Art, are you helping? Is Duvall helping with this somehow? Also—
ART: I mean, I do have Mend. I think I could help. I think there’s like, a sense of knowing—I think it’s an inherent skill for Apiarist, I think that’s how I got it?
AUSTIN: Probably.
ART: Yeah, it’s the core skill.
AUSTIN: Mhm.
ART: I think there’s just like an amount of doctoring knowledge you get when bugs clear out all your organs.
AUSTIN: Sure. And also just, knowing—the other thing is like, Mend is also just about building and making things, so like, there is a degree to which—
KEITH: Yeah, the roll for fixing a clock is the same roll as stitching up someone.
AUSTIN: Yes. For—yeah. “Repair something or someone that is broken; build something new.” Both of those things feel like things that you’re about both bug-wise, mechanically, and then like ideologically or kind of—in terms of your Enlightenment thing.
ART: Yeah, yeah.
AUSTIN: But what’s this look like? What does—
KEITH: You’re full of nature’s architect.
ART: Yeah.
AUSTIN: [CHUCKLES] Yes. What does it look like to try to like, bring this person back to her senses?
KEITH: So the—I have—this is not my Mark of the Weaver skill, this is my overstuffed coat. Presumably the thing that it’s stuffed with is like, different kinds of medicines and first aid things.
AUSTIN: And, we talked about this already, IQ toys and whatever.
KEITH: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All the other—yeah. So—sorry, this is my overstuffed Mend coat, not my bips and bops pockets.
AUSTIN: Oh, I see. Different coat. I see. Yeah. Uh-huh.
KEITH: We got a layer on—in the Heart. Heartland.
AUSTIN: It’s also—is this also not your “Back Pocket Arcana: Your satchel is overstuffed with occult leftovers”?
KEITH: [LAUGHING] Yes, that is a third separate thing, yes.
AUSTIN: Okay, good. Alright, well, then go ahead and hit this with this help, add a +1 to this roll.
KEITH: Well, okay, so I do have to—I have to go back.
AUSTIN: Okay.
KEITH: I do have to go back because I’m not patching—this isn’t exactly—I’m not stitching someone. This person’s—
AUSTIN: No, but you’re a mage.
KEITH: Right. So I was like, ‘ah yeah, first aid stuff.’ But it’s not just first aid—
AUSTIN: Yeah, no.
KEITH: Like, maybe I have a stick with a light that blinks and I’m like, ‘yeah, if you focus on the light, you’ll just like, remember how to do stuff.’ Maybe like a reflex little hammer.
AUSTIN: Yeah, great.
KEITH: Because I was thinking like, ‘stop the bleeding’. But there’s no bleeding, right? There’s just—
AUSTIN: No, we specifically made this not a blood one.
JANINE: The light’s probably a good idea.
AUSTIN: Yeah, the light’s fun.
JANINE: Like, if this is a thing where consciousness is being separated from the body, then reintegrating the consciousness to the body by like, doing sensory stuff, makes a lot of sense.
AUSTIN: Yeah.
KEITH: Yeah.
AUSTIN: That’s really fun. Reflex hammer, to like, get those involuntary stuff firing. And then—is it like a—’cause it’s not like a pen light, but what if it’s like a—remember you had those long matches? Or those long things that look like matches? What if when you light that, it like, flickers on and off almost, as if it’s a blinking light? But it’s a wooden object? Love it.
KEITH: Yeah, this is totally what I was thinking.
ART: And that’s what help looks like, right? So like, you can do the ‘shine the light,’ and I’ll do the hammer. Like, that’s how it’s happening.
AUSTIN: You’ll do the hammer on the knee, yeah, exactly. [LAUGHS]
ART: Two things at once.
AUSTIN: Alright, give me your roll.
KEITH: Okay. Um—do I have no—
AUSTIN: Make sure you get the +1 and then you have to click away so the +1 sticks. Yeah, there you go.
KEITH: Got it. Yeah.
AUSTIN: Now go ahead and give me a roll.
[PAUSE]
AUSTIN: Hey, that’s a full success.
KEITH: 9.
AUSTIN: That’s 9-9-7. You love to see it.
KEITH: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Um—Janine, I’ll give you a little bit here. What’s it look like when Agdeline kind of comes back into her senses? What’s it look like as someone recovers from Exsanguinate?
JANINE: Um… Oh, I wonder if it’s—ooh, this is kinda—this is this season in a nutshell, me saying ‘oh, this is kind of gross, but...‘
AUSTIN: ‘But.’ Uh-huh.
JANINE: So, I hadn’t really thought about the aft—I thought about the act of what it looks like when it’s happening, I hadn’t really thought about like, does the molten glass stuff go back in? And like, that doesn’t feel right to me, that it goes back in.
AUSTIN: Uh-huh.
JANINE: So I think what happens is that the sort of luminousness—you know, molten glass has a glow to it. I don’t think it’s like hot bright orange, but it has a glow. I think what happens as it fades is that the glow goes away, and then the molten part just kind of falls off into the dirt. And it’s just kind of a dull lump of glass, really. Like it just—it’s hard and cold and just like, gross, kind of, to look at probably. But it’s like—you know, its role is done at that point. The consciousness is back in. Maybe it’s like containing the consciousness in some way.
AUSTIN: Yeah, that makes sense.
JANINE: We don’t have to get existential about it, but you know.
AUSTIN: No. Yeah. I gotcha. And I think there’s like a gasp. [GASPS] And then she like, stumbles back up to her feet, and Ettel and Larch help her up, and she’s like:
AUSTIN (as AGDELINE): You four don’t joke around. Thought you’d be easy marks. [SIGHS] Let’s get out of here.
AUSTIN: And like, starts to wander away, basically.
JANINE: I yell ‘thank you.’ ‘Thank you. Bye.’
KEITH: I yell ‘you’re welcome.’
AUSTIN: [LAUGHS] Great. There is a—I think she has not noticed this, but on the ground as she leaves, she has left, like, from when she fell over, a pouch of ammunition, that’s a d4 resource, that is just like, d4 Technology - Ammo Pouch, basically. So, someone wanna lift that from the ground? Who wants to take this resource? It’s like, think about it as like ‘this is money,’ almost more than—or this is a thing you could power your abilities if you have resources, if you have abilities that use resources, you know?
KEITH: I like bags of stuff.
JANINE: I’m gonna be honest, my first reaction was to yell at her that she forgot the thing. So it probably shouldn’t be me.
AUSTIN: [LAUGHS] God. Yeah, I’m gonna say, Lye, that makes sense for you. You don’t have a thing that uses Technology yet, but you know, you do have—you’re the person who eats—not eats—
KEITH: I eat it. No, I eat it.
AUSTIN: No, that’s—Dre’s character explicitly eats it, so we can’t do two people that explicitly eat stuff like that.
KEITH: To be fair it said ‘consume,’ and I did assume that it meant eat the whole time.
AUSTIN: It does, I know. No. [LAUGHS] I get it, but there is literally a class built around it, I’m not gonna double-dip on eaters.
KEITH: Yeah. Okay, fair.
AUSTIN: Um—
KEITH: Can I sometimes eat it if it makes sense?
AUSTIN: Yeah, if it makes sense. Sure. Of course. Definitely.
KEITH: Okay. Alright. I’ll sometimes eat stuff.
AUSTIN: Add yourself a resource that is d4 underneath where it says “Vial of Cursed Ink” now you just have “Pouch of Ammo” and that is—
KEITH: “Pouch of Ammo.” Is it a gummy—is it a gummy pouch?
AUSTIN: It’s—what?
KEITH: I can eat it, right?
AUSTIN: No. No, it’s not a gummy pouch.
KEITH: Okay. So it wouldn’t make sense to eat.
AUSTIN: No. It’s just like a leather pouch. You could eat it. You could eat leather. It’s possible. I wouldn’t advise it.
KEITH: If you rehydrate it? Yeah.
AUSTIN: And then that’s a d4 resource. And also your Occult resource there is a d6 one. So you should mark that that’s a d6 one. Those are important because it’s like, how much it’s worth, basically.
KEITH: d6, d4… And sorry, what was the tag on the ammo?
AUSTIN: I think it’s Technology? I think it’s Technology. Maybe it’s Haven, but I’m gonna say Technology. I feel like bullets are Technology at this point still. Now, that was like a longer encounter, and unlike just climbing some stairs or whatever, where you just immediately do damage to the thing, after you’re done something like this, you can then roll a flat d4 as if you’ve—once you’ve solved a situation. So who wants to roll a d4 to see if we’ve—how much further into this Delve we’ve gotten?
ART: I’ll do it.
AUSTIN: Yeah, go for it. That’s a 2. That is plenty, because the Resist—because you were only one Resistance short of having beaten this Delve. The rest of this trip is uneventful. The storm has not hit yet, but it looks like it will hit tonight.
[MUSIC OUTRO - “Sangfielle” by Jack de Quidt]
So with that behind you now, with that storm still coming in, with the bandits kind of slinking away, you’re able to finish this journey to Roseroot Hall.