Autumn in Hieron 04: Is It Time Already?
Transcribed by Linda @imperialhare (111m) and Max (pine#6681) (34m)
KEITH: Last time, on Dungeon World.
[Music - “Autumn not Winter” starts]
AUSTIN: As we pick up the game, you’ve already traveled towards this island, the Island of Eventide. The leadership, the government of the Berg has sent you here to investigate this strange tower.
AUSTIN: You hear a bell ringing from above you. Those of you who have lived in kind of posh civilization before know that it’s a dinner bell.
JACK: No, oh no, this is not a good situation. [ALI laughing nervously]
AUSTIN: And then you hear the faintest dut-dut-dut dut-dut-dut like a kind of percussive --
KEITH: That sounds like a waltz, like for sure.
AUSTIN: I hate this, you can see my face, this is the worst!
KEITH: [quietly] Ghost waltz...
JACK: I’m -- all -- this place is great, there’s waltzing, there’s food, there’s some paintings, and then Hadrian just killed a skeleton. [KEITH and NICK laughing]
AUSTIN: Hadrian --
AUSTIN: Butcher knives going up and down, up and down on tables, there are people -- there aren’t people, sorry, there are bowls hanging in the air with whisks spinning things around --
AUSTIN: A bunch of the book people start to fall away, and the books start to move together, and rise up. You see now that the books have formed a giant wave, and it’s coming right in your direction.
AUSTIN (as TALKING BOOKS): Leave our kind with us. You should not torture them with your sound.
AUSTIN: Resting in one of the chairs is a suit of black and gold armor, and it turns and looks up and says --
AUSTIN (as RIVALO): I don’t know what in the name of Good King Samot you want. But this place isn’t yours. Get out.
[music ends]
KEITH: Uh, Lem is in the room opposite to us, right?
AUSTIN: No. Lem is now in the room -- is in the bedroom, is in this bedroom here. Because he charged through this who is here, inside the bedroom.
KEITH (overlapping AUSTIN): Okay.
AUSTIN: This is like a nice bookcase here, and there’s like some stuff in the corners… Um, kind of there --
JACK: I’m gonna search the hell out of this place if I survive.
KEITH: Wait, so --
AUSTIN: So, Lem --
KEITH: -- so, if we were here --
AUSTIN: Yes?
KEITH: If we were in the entryway, bottom room there so now --
AUSTIN (overlapping Keith): Yes. You are here.
KEITH (overlapping Austin): Ohhh, that’s the room we got pushed into. Okay.
AUSTIN: You and Hadrian are in here, Hella’s in the middle, Fantasmo’s in the middle, now Brutus and Rivalo are here, and Cali -- Calithane -- the woman with the hammer is here, who’s turned her attention to Hella who is pinned. Uh…
KEITH: Okay, I wanna -- (I wanna?) get at -- oh --
AUSTIN (overlapping KEITH): Hey, let’s go -- here’s a question, Hadrian hasn’t moved in like forever. What are you up to, Hadrian?
ART: I actually think Fantasmo’s before me.
AUSTIN: I mean, we’re not doing an ordered system, and I don’t -- the last thing you did was like, get hit, right?
ART: No, that was just a counter to me trying to hit someone.
AUSTIN: Okay, then Fantasmo, what are you doing as once again Cali has turned her attention away from you and is now moving in on Hella?
NICK: Um, Fantasmo’s going to go invisible again. Or try to.
AUSTIN: Okay. Okay. Go ahead and make that roll.
ALI (overlapping AUSTIN): [laughing] That’s it?
AUSTIN: Uh-oh.
KEITH: Can I see Fantasmo doing this, from where I’m standing?
AUSTIN: Oh, I don’t know what just happened. Oh, you tossed on another plus I think. Go ahead and just re-roll that. Yeah, you can. [pause] Why -- ohohoh, you’re doing a hashtag spell. I didn’t see that. Phew!
NICK (overlapping AUSTIN): Yeah, I’m messing around with this website.
AUSTIN: No, that’s cool, it’s a cool website.
NICK (overlapping AUSTIN): Oh, that’s bad.
AUSTIN: That’s bad, though. What happened to --
NICK: I made -- I made a spell roll macro, basically, so I can just type --
AUSTIN: Ohhh. Neat!
NICK: I can type !spell and it’ll roll.
AUSTIN: And then it’ll make that roll. That’s really useful. Uh, when you fail a spell, uh… let’s see. I get to make --
KEITH (overlapping AUSTIN): Woof, we are not doing great.
AUSTIN: -- okay, well you failed that spell so mark that XP. Um… [sigh] Okay. Uh… You...
KEITH: [quietly] This is going so bad. [laughing]
AUSTIN: How should I (explain?) this. As you… As you begin to cast the spell, Hella and Cali kind of cross weapons and Hella, despite being pinned down manages to push Cali back, onto you.
NICK: [groans]
ALI: [cackles]
AUSTIN: You don’t take any damage from this, but her weight sends you stumbling through the now open wall there, and into the other room. She then turns and steps in there with you. At this point, the party is like all over the place. So that all of the bad people are in this bedroom, Hella is pinned in this entryway, Hadrian is off in the corner here with Fero in this storeroom, and Hella -- Lem is… alone? No, Lem and Fantasmo are in the bedroom surrounded by these… these roughboys, the roughboys gang.
KEITH: I’m gonna take a charge at Cali.
AUSTIN: Okay, as she steps into that other room.
KEITH: As she steps into that other room I’m gonna charge at her and leap and try to go for the same sort of neck head area that Nick hit with magic missile --
AUSTIN: Okay, sounds good.
KEITH: --the unprotected area. And --
JACK: Only one dwarven arrow was made. [AUSTIN laughs]
KEITH: Wait that’s a… that’s a 9?
AUSTIN: Yeah, look at that! That’s a, that’s a…
KEITH: Yeah, there we go.
JACK (overlapping AUSTIN): This site is starting to work in our favor.
AUSTIN: I mean, go ahead and make that damage roll.
KEITH: ... 4.
AUSTIN: Okay… Uh…
KEITH: Uh, can -- is it too late to use my forward on that thing that maybe -- could have turned it from a 9 to a 10?
AUSTIN: What fo -- oh, from the thing that the animal warned you about?
KEITH: From my -- yeah.
AUSTIN: I don’t know that your animal warned you into how you could bite this woman’s head better…
KEITH: No, nonono.
AUSTIN: You know what I mean?
KEITH: Oh, do I have to use that in an applicable situation?
AUSTIN (overlapping KEITH): Right, remember that you have to explain what that animal told you --
KEITH: And why that for -- okay.
AUSTIN: Yeah, how you got that there. There are places where you could’ve used it already, you could use it again somewhere else, I -- I mean, maybe the animal told you something really practical, like hey when you bite make sure to use all your mouth, like I dunno. [KEITH, ALI, and JACK laughing]
ALI: Can I...
AUSTIN: Let me finish --
KEITH (overlapping AUSTIN): I mean, I was thinking of -- what I was thinking of --
JACK (overlapping KEITH and AUSTIN): You are giving terrible advice to animals.
KEITH: [laughing] I was thinking of something, uh, sort of like a broader inspiration for why these people are important to defeat.
AUSTIN: Oh, okay!
KEITH: So that we can make it, but I since I al--
AUSTIN (overlapping KEITH): That’s fair.
KEITH: Yeah, since I already did my, I wasn’t just like “he told me about you specifically, with your hammer, he said watch out for the hammer lady!”
AUSTIN: Nonono, I actually don’t mind that, I actually don’t mind that so much. What did the animal tell you about these people?
KEITH: Uh… So --
AUSTIN: And yeah, I’ll let you push that up to -- from a 9 to a 10 so that you don’t have to get hit.
KEITH: Yeah. So, when I was approached by this sort of komodo dragon type lizard that I would like to give another name, later, uh, I was told as we were going on this mission that it was crucially important that we succeed, that we find out what is happening in this tower, because the power that is held inside the tower is, uh, large enough to change the face of the world as it exists.
AUSTIN: Okay. That’s accurate and I could see that inspiring you to despite your damage, kind of like soldier on and hit hard here. Um… Yeah, you cut hard -- you bite hard into the back of her neck, and latch on there pretty well. Ali, you were about to -- Hella was about to say something.
ALI: Well, I was going to see if I could aid, um… Keith with that, but I feel like -- I mean, she’s back there because we kind of had -- (moves?)?
AUSTIN: Yeah, yeah.
ALI: So I feel like I should also be going in for an attack.
AUSTIN (overlapping ALI): You -- you need to at this point spend a little bit of time -- effectively one action -- unpinning yourself from the ground.
ALI: Okay. That’s fair.
AUSTIN: So, you’re now down there pulling that bolt out of your shoe and stuff, let’s now let’s see what Hadrian’s up to.
ART: Alright, so how far into this room would you say I was pushed, I mean I’m pushed far enough that I can see around the corner, how -- what’s --
AUSTIN: Um, yeah, I think like -- here, hereish, (unintelligible)
ART (overlapping AUSTIN): So my visibility of what’s happening here is pretty bad.
AUSTIN: Yeah, but you can -- you’ve been able to move around a little bit, you can see that like, hey, no one’s in that room anymore, except for Hella, weird.
ART: Right. But like… But like I don’t have a great sense of how this fight’s going.
AUSTIN: No, you have no idea.
ART: There’s like -- there’s a part of me and this might be a really shitty like, out of character part of me --
AUSTIN: Mhm.
ART: -- that wants to like, go up here. Like, what if there’s something important -- here, right?
AUSTIN (overlapping ART): Sure, do you want to do that? Do you want to have done that? I can -- I’m gonna say you can --
JACK: Since this is a podcast, could you be clear about where “here” is?
AUSTIN: Yeah, sorry, so he wants to go -- again -- there’s kind of like an L shape --
ART (overlapping AUSTIN): Like, here.
AUSTIN: Yeah, but he can’t -- they can’t see that, Art.
ART: Oh. [JACK chuckles]
AUSTIN: There’s an L-shaped -- Art is in an L-shaped storeroom that’s attached to the entryway at the bottom-right of the L? He wants to go up the length of the L and around to where it like, curves back around, it’s almost like a C-shape here.
JACK: Yeah.
AUSTIN: So if he goes up to the top-left of the L, if that makes sense -- or, is that what you’re doing, Art?
ART: Uh, yeah, I don’t think -- I’m -- I’m worried it’s like hideously out of character, but I’m dismissing that worry.
AUSTIN: I think that it’s -- I think that -- I know what you wanna do here, I get what you wanna do here and I think that that’s fair. Um… and in fact, given the amount of time this has been, since all that stuff, I’m gonna let you like, get a lot here, just so I can also draw in the rest of this if that makes sense.
ART (overlapping AUSTIN): Sure. Yeah…
AUSTIN: So you go up to here and see that it in fact circles around, and that here, you get to this big door, smash that open, it’s a big wooden door --
ART (overlapping AUSTIN): Sure.
AUSTIN: -- uh, one second, there are stairs up here.
ART: Okay.
AUSTIN: Okay. Um… So you don’t see what’s over here, but you do see that on the other side of the stairs --
ART (overlapping AUSTIN): Er, this is -- this is stairs?
AUSTIN: That’s stairs. On the other side -- on the right -- so at the very north end of this map, at this point, there are stairs. Um… back behind whatever’s inbetween the storeroom -- there’s kind of a rectangle, it seems now, around the center of this floor. And on the right side, on the east side of this room, of this storeroom, there are -- it’s armor, and weapons and stuff like that all the way over here. Um… And on the left side it’s foodstuffs and ropes and building materials. Art has now busted into -- what he immediately sees is a giant war room, with an octogonal war table -- like a map in the center, and some…
JACK: Good octagon!
AUSTIN: Yeah, it’s alright, freehanded. And just like some stuff scattered around, some tables and chairs here, you can see there’s a table in the corner where there are some cards set up, there’s -- I’m gonna say that that’s the big stuff. And you can see that there’s a door here that is closed… That’s a good rad -- whatever rad ferry is doing over there is really good. Uh, I’ma say that that door is open again just for the sake of time, and you can see that there are more --
KEITH (overlapping AUSTIN): Oh, did I typo my fucking name?
AUSTIN: Yeah, you -- yeah, you did. You wrote “rad ferry”.
KEITH: [laughing] This is a rad berry.
AUSTIN: Uh, it says F-E-R-R -- oh is this -- is that a? No, F-E-R-R-Y, Keith, your name on this chat is Rad Ferry. F-E-R-R-Y.
KEITH (overlapping AUSTIN): [laughs] I -- hold on, if you can see, look under mine the position of the mic and then the keyboard, it’s like I can’t really see -- what’s going on.
AUSTIN (overlapping KEITH): Uh-huh. Yeah, I see. That’s fair. That’s fair. So here we go, this is it, this is what the room, this is what the floor looks like at this point. Um… These are other bedrooms --
JACK: And we will be posting -- we’ll be posting this map somewhere for people to look at.
AUSTIN: Right. Including Keith’s drawing of…
KEITH: I wanna say that this is the first time that anyone’s ever said anything I drew was cool. Because I can’t draw.
JACK: It looks sort of like a Jabberwocky.
KEITH: It’s got -- I dunno, I drew an arm and something horrible coming out of the arm.
AUSTIN (overlapping KEITH): It looks like… I thought it was like a diseased Italy.
ALI: Uh, no, I thought it was like a goat.
KEITH: No, you can see, here, this is the head, this is the head and the neck, he’s kind of looking back and his arm is holding up some sort of terrible thing coming off it.
JACK (overlapping KEITH): No, Italy is diseased, says Austin Walker.
AUSTIN (overlapping KEITH): Oh, I see. It just looks bad. Great!
AUSTIN: So, Hadrian is now in this war room. You can hear the fighting has spilled into the main -- this big bedroom here.
ART: Sure. Uh… Okay, there’s nothing like super distinct about this war room?
AUSTIN: There is a crown on the table.
ART: What does it look like?
AUSTIN: It’s super familiar. It is… an iron crown with the sun emblazoned on its front.
ART: Can I… Can I touch it, is it… is it weird?
AUSTIN: It’s warm to the touch. Hadrian is up in this other room playing with things, what’s happening in the -- I like this actually, I like that Hadrian is like “alright, I’m gonna run around, I’m gonna get like the tactical drop on these guys,” and steps into this room and sees this crown on this table and --
JACK (overlapping AUSTIN): And is like, oh damn! [KEITH laughing]
AUSTIN: I should actually talk about the -- if you’re that close to the table, Art, I’m gonna describe the table for you.
ART: Yes. I’ll say I’m, I’m next to the table, yes.
AUSTIN: Yeah. Here-ish. Uh… Let me… Okay, so it’s a map of the continent on that war room, or at least it’s like, a continent that looks sort of like what you understand the continent to look like, it looks like old maps of the continent -- so there are some things that are different than what bad current maps are. It’s kind of dioramic, it’s not a flat map, there are things sticking up out of it, so there are little cities carved into it out of the marble. Um… There are forests and mountains that rise up off the table and are carved in in some material. As you -- and there’s even like villages here, like little important spots on the map that are marked -- you can almost see where they’ve been marked on the table, and in the place of the mark is -- are like, little tiny diorama style huts. As you get closer, and as you touch the -- as you touch the crown, which is warm to the touch, you can almost see the breeze in the forests that are swaying them back and forth. You can hear the low hum of activity from the cities. You can hear the waves lapping on the shores, on this map. So, meanwhile...
[TIMESTAMP 15:04]
AUSTIN: Great, now this guy has weird shoes. Looking at this map again.
JACK: I’m gonna go for Brutus again! How’s it going?
AUSTIN (overlapping JACK): Is everyone now in this room at this point? Yes, everyone is now in this room.
ART (overlapping AUSTIN): Except for Hadrian.
AUSTIN: Except for Hadrian, is in the room. Um, alright, so, you said you wanted to go for Brutus again, what do you do at this point?
JACK: I uh, I kind of scramble up from Brutus’ previous counter-attack --
AUSTIN: Oh, that was actually Rivalo, the captain’s, counter-attack, remember -- he like grabbed and stabbed at you. He’s the captain.
JACK (overlapping AUSTIN): Oh, I’m sorry, Rivalo is the -- Rivalo is the armored man.
AUSTIN: Yeah, he’s the big armored man.
JACK: I’m still gonna focus in on Brutus, largely because I feel that he’s the target best suited to my lack of [laughing] physical strength here. He’s got crossbows.
AUSTIN (overlapping JACK): [laughing] Sounds fair.
JACK: So uh, I’m gonna scramble back up and essentially just take another similar shot at Brutus, I’m gonna go charging towards him, just attempt to like slice at him with my… with my weapon.
AUSTIN: Go for it.
JACK: So I’m gonna roll… 2d6 + strength, which is 2d6+1… 2… d... 6.
AUSTIN: I’m rooting for y’all at this point, I really am rooting for you. [ALI laughs]
JACK: 9!
AUSTIN: Hey, that’s a --
KEITH: I think we can do it.
AUSTIN: That’s a hit! Um, go ahead and do your damage.
JACK: Right, so I roll 1d6 here.
AUSTIN: Is that bardic damage? Yeah.
JACK: Yeah, unless I have -- yeah, that’s not modified by anything.
AUSTIN (overlapping JACK): That’s, that’s…
JACK: 1d6… 4!
AUSTIN: That’s a solid--
ART: Well plus your weapon, your weapon has a bonus, right?
AUSTIN (overlapping ART): Nah, his weapon doesn’t have hit bonuses.
JACK: Nope. Um, so basically I, uh, hit him.
AUSTIN: Yeah! You, um…
JACK: And he makes an attack against me.
AUSTIN: Right, so you go ahead and hit him well, across his chest, but as you do you’ve seen that he like reached into his -- into his, he has like a, what do you call those things, like a chest belt where stuff is --
JACK: Like a bandolier or something?
AUSTIN: A bandolier of knives.
ART (overlapping AUSTIN): Like a cumberbund?
AUSTIN: Like a cumberbund of knives -- no, a bandolier of knives -- has pulled out a little dagger, and stabbed down at you with it -- um, roll 1d6 for damage.
JACK: Okay, cool.
AUSTIN: Uh, 1d6-1.
JACK: Why 1d6-1?
AUSTIN: Yeah, 1d6-1.
JACK: Why the minus?
AUSTIN: Cause it’s just not as good as his crossbow. There are like tinier... shittier daggers. Look at that!
JACK: Ze...zero.
AUSTIN: Yeah, so, so, it -- he stabs at you, to do, to -- and it doesn’t even -- it doesn’t even scrape against your armor, he overreaches behind you and like catches the back -- the air behind your back. You can feel the pressure of the dagger but it doesn’t cut into you at all. Nick, what were you gonna say?
NICK: It was a dumb joke, I was gonna say he’s got a little Benedict Cumberbund… figure. Holding a bunch of knives.
AUSTIN and ALI: [laughing]
AUSTIN: Great. Um…
JACK: Just hanging around his waist.
ALI: [laughs]
AUSTIN: Um…
KEITH: Wait, sorry, who tried to stab Lem? Which one was it?
AUSTIN (overlapping KEITH): That was Brutus, the guy who used to have the crossbow. Uh, the crossbows.
JACK (overlapping AUSTIN): Brutus.
ALI: Okay. And then like, so uh… hammer lady’s still kind of --
AUSTIN (overlapping ALI): Hammer lady -- she’s in the middle of that bedroom at this point, uh, and then she is --
ALI (overlapping AUSTIN): Okay. Still kind of reeling from that bite?
[TIMESTAMP 18:31]
AUSTIN: No, she has -- no, she has, here’s what she’s doing, she has Fero by the scruff of his neck at this point, and is charging forward -- she wants to try to like pick him up off of her neck and throw him against the far wall -- the wall that the connects it to the war room. But she’s struggling to get him off.
ALI: Are we at the point where I can attack her?
AUSTIN: Sure! Uh. Absolutely.
ALI: Um…
AUSTIN: Let’s say that she’s struggling with Fero to get him off at that point.
ALI: Yeah. And then I sort of see that opening and since I’ve pulled the bolt out of my foot and then just kind of charge her...
AUSTIN: Yeah, yeah.
ALI: With my sword…
AUSTIN: Go for it.
ALI: Yeah. That is 2d6+2?
AUSTIN: Mhm.
ALI: So I get an 8.
AUSTIN: That’s a hit.
ALI: Yeah.
AUSTIN: So go ahead and do your damage, she’ll also get to do damage to you. She’ll be able to hit you. But...
ALI: Hit -- oh, um, what I wanted to, we forgot this before but my sword has +2 piercing and, uh--
AUSTIN: Oh, that’s good. Nothing on her, if you’d been hitting Rivalo that would have come up. I don’t think you’ve hit him. Oh, wait you totally did, you did hit Rivalo once --
JACK (overlapping AUSTIN): (??) Rivalo (??)
ALI: Yeah.
AUSTIN: -- so I will take note of that. There we go. He’s a little bit more hurt.
ALI: And then my damage is d10 plus… is there a +1 or no?
AUSTIN: No, it’s just a d10. Unless it says, unless your sword says plus on that.
ART: It probably does.
AUSTIN: It probably does, your sword almost certainly does.
ALI: It only has a +1 piercing which doesn’t have a thing for her, right?
AUSTIN: No, unless you had -- yeah, yeah yeah, so you could’ve taken -- your signature weapon could have had +1 damage but +1 weight or something, but you didn’t, you took piercing and something else?
ALI (overlapping AUSTIN): Right right right. Okay, yeah. Um, it’s uh, sure... crafted.
AUSTIN (overlapping ALI): Well-crafted? Yeah.
ALI: So that’s -1 weight.
AUSTIN (overlapping ALI): Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
ALI (overlapping AUSTIN): Uh, one -- oh - ahh! My damage is a 4.
AUSTIN (overlapping ALI): Okay, no, that’s fine. Go ahead and do -- take -- also roll d10 damage against you really quick, 1d10 for you, and I’ll see how this goes.
ALI: Oh, a 1! Which is --
AUSTIN: Which is nothing for you.
JACK: We’ve had good rolls!
AUSTIN: Uh, you, uh -- so she’s trying to get Fero off her back and spins around to like -- and looks up to see you and you’re able to just like one clear stab through her stomach --
KEITH: Nice.
AUSTIN: -- and drops forward, like, reaches out to like hit you as she falls, and looks straight up at you for the first time and you can see that over her left eye, something’s been carved right there, like right over her eye and then falls, blood seeping out, no life left in her.
JACK: (inhales) Yes! Okay, one down, two to go.
ALI (overlapping JACK): Like, on her eye, or…?
AUSTIN: Like, no, like, her eye is gone.
ALI (overlapping AUSTIN): No, actually don’t -- [laughs]
AUSTIN: Her eye is gone, it’s just flesh, it’s just flesh.
ALI: Okay. Okay. Okay.
ART: Piercing subtracts from armor, everyone’s clear on that?
AUSTIN: Yes.
KEITH: Yeah.
JACK: Cool. I’m gonna do a ha -- if we survive this I’m gonna do a pretty big sweep on the kind of like, enemy iconography in this room --
AUSTIN: Mhm.
KEITH: I would like -- I would like to transform back into a halfling.
AUSTIN: Okay, on top of her corpse, you kind of like -- “huh”? [laughs]
KEITH: Well I’m not confused about it, I know that I’m doing it!
AUSTIN: [laughing, imitating Fero] “Whoa, why am I a halfling now?”
KEITH: I -- I want them to note that on the video Austin like, did like a “huuuh!” like a, like an arms up, hands raised, fucking Neil deGrasse Tyson thing --
AUSTIN: [laughing] I did!
KEITH: You did that fucking -- you did that meme, you did that!
AUSTIN: I did the meme.
KEITH: [sigh-laughs]
AUSTIN: So you’ve now turned back into a halfling at this point --
KEITH: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Do you now have -- what’s your weapon as a halfling, a short bow? (unintelligible)
KEITH: I have a short bow and I have a short sword.
AUSTIN: Okay, hold on, one second.
KEITH: Oh, I have a ragged bow and a short sword.
AUSTIN (overlapping KEITH): Seeing Cali fall, you see the mask of Rivalo turn into a frown -- again in this kind of stop-motion chk-chk-chk like almost mechanical style. And --
JACK: Sorry, Austin, how is this actually -- could you -- you say stop-motion, like, how is this actually being reflected in his faceplate?
AUSTIN: It’s turning --
JACK: Is his faceplate composed of different pieces?
AUSTIN (overlapping JACK): His faceplate is a face. No, it’s as if it’s changing -- it’s just changing from one -- it’s almost as if he’s rapidly changing to a different mask.
JACK: So it’s magical rather than mechanical.
AUSTIN: Yes. Well, I mean, it could be mechanical, but I don’t know -- [KEITH overlaps] you aren’t an engineer.
KEITH (overlapping): It could be magic mechanical.
AUSTIN: You know what I mean?
JACK: Right. Yeah.
AUSTIN: So like, who knows, it could be mechanical. But like, in a world with magic, your first instinct is “ohh, [astonished mumbling] it’s a weird magic mask!” [JACK laughs] So it turns into a frown, and… Jack. Actually -- hm, okay. Uh… Huh. Everyone -- he says -- he says:
AUSTIN (as RIVALO): Your blades are mine!
AUSTIN: And… Everyone in the room except for Hella, and obviously Hadrian who is not in the room, but anyone with a weapon in the room, which now includes Lem, give me a roll… Give me a defy danger roll. Um… versus… or with… What do I have written down, one second, I have to check. A wisdom defy danger. I think it would be wisdom here.
JACK: Mental fortitude.
KEITH: Ooh, perfect.
AUSTIN: Yeah! That’s right.
JACK: Okay, so 2d6 plus our… thingy.
AUSTIN: Mhm.
KEITH: Mhm.
ART: Plus your WIS.
KEITH: I got an [AUSTIN overlaps] 11.
AUSTIN (overlapping KEITH): Plus your WIS. Alright, good.
JACK: Uh, I’ve got a… um… an 8.
AUSTIN: Okay. [pause] Hm, okay.
KEITH: Man, loving that +2 wisdom right now!
NICK: I got a 7.
AUSTIN: Okay, so, on a 7 to 9 you stumble, hesitate, or flinch, the GM will offer you a worse outcome, hard bargain, or ugly choice. Uh… you, Jack -- Lem, and the Great Fantasmo -- what’s your weapon, Great Fantasmo?
NICK: Uh, he’s got a staff.
AUSTIN: Okay, so you have a staff. You feel the staff being pulled out of your hands here. You can --
JACK: [laughs] This is the fucking dragon shout, isn’t it?
AUSTIN: Oh, wait, what’s the (JACK overlaps) dragon shout?
JACK (overlapping AUSTIN): From Skyrim.
AUSTIN: Oh no, it’s not --
JACK: In Skyrim they do that.
AUSTIN: It doesn’t feel like you’re being disarmed in the sense that, like, oh, your weapons are being knocked from you. It feels as if someone has gripped them -- it feels as if they -- someone else is taking them literally from you here.
KEITH: [dramatic whisper] Ghost hands!
AUSTIN: Yeah, it feels like ghost hands are taking them from you. I’m gonna say you can… it’s fundamentally a success, which means you’re gonna hold onto them, but it means that you’re gonna be -- you’re gonna basically be wide open for the next little bit, struggling to hold -- you can let go if you want, and maintain kind of general control of your body, or you can like -- struggle with these things for the next few moments, which could be very important moments.
JACK: Is this an enchantment?
AUSTIN: Yeah, I think you would think that.
JACK: Is there any way I could play some semiotics at this point? (AUSTIN overlaps) I don’t -- my hands are full.
AUSTIN (overlapping JACK): If you -- if you -- did you want to let go of the sword, you could totally take your violin back out.
JACK: Right, but if I want to play my violin out to shake my mind clear of one enchantment, that would -- that super wouldn’t work.
AUSTIN (overlapping JACK): [laughs] Right. [KEITH laughs] Oh, wait, actually, so your thing says, your thing says -- sorry -- um, the mind is shaken clear of one enchantment, that would not count for this.
JACK: Oh.
AUSTIN: You are not enchanted.
JACK: It’s almost as though our weapons are.
AUSTIN: Yes.
KEITH: I would like to, in order to defend the others from being attacked while they’re open, I would like to take out my bow and shoot my bow at, uh, armored dude -- armored man.
AUSTIN: You’re gonna have to Defy Danger to do that, I think. Because a bow is like, a thing you wanna use at kind of what’s considered near range, which means --
KEITH: Oh, am I -- am I that close?
AUSTIN: You guys are in the same room. You guys are all in this bedroom, right?
KEITH (overlapping AUSTIN): Alright. Yeah.
AUSTIN: So you kind of have to back away from him to gain enough distance so you can make that shot. Um...
KEITH: Okay, so I’ll just -- I’ll short sword him instead.
AUSTIN: Okay. That’s fair.
KEITH: I was only doing the bow because I thought that I was farther away than I was.
AUSTIN: No, you’re pretty close at this point. So you’re using this on Rivalo, the captain knight--?
KEITH: Rivalo. Yeah. Yeah. I got a 5.
NICK: Can I, uh…
AUSTIN: Keith.
KEITH: Well that’s technically my first failed roll!
AUSTIN: That’s true. I’m gonna come to you in a second, Fantasmo.
JACK: Mark XP, Keith.
AUSTIN: Mark XP.
ART (overlapping AUSTIN): Can I assume that that made noise?
AUSTIN: What did?
ART: That whole thing?
AUSTIN: Yeah, you heard him shouting from the other room. Um...
ART: Okay, I’m gonna stop doing my thing. When appropriate, I’m gonna stop.
AUSTIN: Okay. (unintelligible)
JACK (overlapping AUSTIN): So you’ve just been poking this crown, repeatedly.
AUSTIN: Well, we can actually come back to you in a second and talk about what you did with the crown before you put it down, but let me just -- let me just take -- let me just make sure that Keith takes damage here, go ahead --
KEITH: [sarcastically] Yeah, everybody make sure that I take damage.
AUSTIN: [laughs] Um..
KEITH: What do you want me to roll?
AUSTIN: A d8. Where are you at, in terms of health at this point? (unintelligible) (28:14)
KEITH: I have…
AUSTIN: I think you’re doing…
KEITH: 10 health.
AUSTIN: Okay.
KEITH: [pause] 6. Minus 2.
AUSTIN: What happens here is interesting. The -- it isn’t that Rivalo strikes you with his own weapon, when you like go to come in at him, he has -- one of the -- it’s the knife that Brutus had in his hand, slides out of his own hand and slams forward into your upper torso.
KEITH: Okay.
AUSTIN: It then pulls itself out and is hovering in front of you. Um… talk -- Fantasmo, what did you want to do?
NICK: Um… I don’t know if this is going to do much of anything, but… in an attempt to like, I dunno, distract… to make a distraction -- before I -- so I’m hanging onto my staff, I wanna use my light cantrip to light it up.
AUSTIN: The staff.
NICK: Right. It gets about as bright as a torch, it says.
AUSTIN: Okay.
NICK: But it’s still like, a bright thing in the room. And then I’m gonna let it go and let it fly to wherever it’s going.
AUSTIN: Sounds good. Um… that’s neat, I’m just gonna… I think I’m just gonna let that happen. Go ahead and roll to see what happens around that, so go ahead and give me your spell roll.
NICK: Okay.
AUSTIN: Cause I wanna - but like, the actual casting of it isn’t the thing I’m interested in at this point.
NICK: 10.
AUSTIN: Alright, great. So… Yeah, I’ll say that that’s a pretty good distraction. You let go of the staff and it’s bright -- and it’s not so bright that it blinds anyone --
NICK: Right.
AUSTIN: -- but what it does do is fully distract Brutus as it flies up into the air -- and he isn’t sure what it is, and he has -- his back is just straight to you, and you can get a free hit in on him.
NICK: Okay.
AUSTIN: So you can just roll your damage there?
NICK (overlapping AUSTIN): Can I cast Magic Missile then?
AUSTIN: Or yeah, you can cast Magic Missiles at him.
NICK: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Though I knew you did that -- there you --
JACK (overlapping AUSTIN): Does he do that immediately, or could I do some semiotics on Fantasmo before he does that?
AUSTIN: No, this has to be a quick thing. This is like a --
JACK: Okay.
AUSTIN: Cause, y’know, that -- again, for you -- that’s -- okay, you have to take out your violin, you have to start playing, and this is just like a brief moment --
JACK: I dunno, man, I’m kind of like Doc Holiday of my vi-- [laughing]
AUSTIN: [laughing] It is! But this is a window of opportunity in which Brutus hasn’t seen and doesn’t understand what’s happening.
JACK (overlapping AUSTIN): I can just like, shoot this thing, and…
KEITH: Wait… what does Doc Hollywood have to do with this?
JACK: Doc Holiday. He’s a gunslinger.
AUSTIN: Oh boy. Go ahead and make your magic missile roll here.
NICK: 7.
AUSTIN: 7 is a success, but it means at 7 you have to choose to either open yourself up to attack, forget the spell, or take a -1 forward on all spellcasting. Which do you choose?
NICK: I, uh… [lip smacking noise]
AUSTIN: Also, go ahead and roll your 2d4 damage on this guy.
NICK: I’m gonna forget magic missile.
AUSTIN: Okay, so… you fire them, you do your thing where you kind of like point out with your hands and fire them and you strike Brutus, once in the back like square in the back and once in the back of the head and he just drops flat, and you do it with such force and conviction that you find the words and the motions slipping away from your body, you just can’t line it up the way you normally can, you can tell like, ah, you’re gonna have to practice this spell and this motion again to re-remember have to do it.
NICK: Right. Maybe the arrows get a little wobbly on the way to their destination --
AUSTIN (overlapping NICK): Yeah, as they go. Yeah. The one -- do the arrows when they hit, do they stay in, or do they vanish? Like is there a weird purple magic arrows, like --
NICK: No, no, they don’t stay in.
AUSTIN: Okay. Okay. So it bursts and he falls over. Brutus is now on the floor, leaving only Rivalo on his feet. Meanwhile, Hadrian, uh… So you were touching the crown for let’s say 20 seconds before you heard the shouting from the other room. What do you do with it, what do you…
ART: Well, like, this is -- this is essentially the holy grail, right, like I’m trying to… (AUSTIN overlaps) or it could be.
AUSTIN (overlapping): As far as you know. It could be. It could be... It could be the holy grail!
ART: Or, y’know, it’s not a cup, but, yeah!
AUSTIN: Right, right.
KEITH (overlapping AUSTIN): [quietly and mockingly] “Oh I, y’know, it could be the holy grail!”
AUSTIN: [laughing] It’s an iron crown, certainly. It could be. You don’t know.
ART: Is it evil?
AUSTIN: Yeah.
ART: Alright, so it’s probably not.
AUSTIN: [“I don’t know” noise]
ART: Or if it is, my entire belief system is a sham, and I dunno that I want to confront this while my friends are dying!
ALI: [laughs]
ART: I mean, I’m certainly interested in this, and I want to come back to this.
AUSTIN: Okay. So you’re gonna now move into the other room, so you don’t -- okay.
ART: Yeah, I will move with all due swiftness to the noise in the other room.
AUSTIN: So let’s say you hit that room just as you see Brutus fall to the ground.
ART: Alright.
AUSTIN: Who -- Hella? hasn’t done anything in a bit?
ALI: Uhhhhm… Well, I took out Cali, and then… so…
AUSTIN: Oh, Fero, Fero hasn’t done much -- he’s turned back into a halfling, and has maintained grip on his short sword. But… and let’s say now, you’ve kind of like -- wiggled it, you’ve kind of like pulled it back into control.
ALI: Oh, but, okay, wait, while that was happening, nothing happened…
AUSTIN: Nothing happened to your sword.
ALI: So I…
AUSTIN: Weird!
ALI: I guess I have an opportunity to (attack those guys?) ?
AUSTIN (overlapping ALI):Yeah, you do have an opportunity. Yeah, that makes sense.
ALI: Who do we have left?
AUSTIN: Just Rivalo, the knight -- the captain.
ALI: Okay, um.. And, so this room is wider but he’s still -- my sword has short range so I could just kind of --
AUSTIN (overlapping ALI): Yeah, yeah, you’re within range, you’re both wielding swords, you’re both within range of each other at this point.
ALI: So Nick throws the arrow -- oh, nono, that was Nick, never mind. Okay, um, so yeah I guess I just kind of approach him and try to take another kind of -- it worked for me last time so another kind of (overhead slash?)
AUSTIN: Sounds good.
ALI: So that’s 2d6…
AUSTIN: Plus whatever your strength mod is.
ALI: So I get an 8 on that.
AUSTIN: Okay.
ALI: And then…
AUSTIN: So go ahead and do your damage.
ALI: d10… And then what does piercing get on him?
AUSTIN: It subtracts his armor, and he only has two armor, so that’s subtracted to nothing.
ALI: Okay.
AUSTIN: So just go ahead and roll your d10.
ALI: So I get a 5 on him.
AUSTIN: Okay. Um… your hit… lands strong again, this time it actually pierces through his armor straight away and you get kind of like deep into him before he pushes you off, and then slashes back at you with his short sword, aiming for your shoulder. Roll d8 damage on you.
ALI: So that’s a 4 minus 2?
AUSTIN: Yeah. He does not -- oh, actually, he does have piercing, he also has 1 piercing. So 3.
ALI (overlapping AUSTIN): Oh, he does. Okay.
AUSTIN (overlapping ALI): Yeah. My bad.
ALI: So I go down to uh, 17. (unintelligible)
AUSTIN (overlapping ALI): [laughs] Yeah. Other people -- yeah, I guess so! Geez, you have so much more HP than everybody else.
KEITH: She only has 6 more than I do! I just got hit, uh, 10 in one turn.
AUSTIN: Right, that’s true.
KEITH: Like, right up front.
AUSTIN: That’s true. So now, Fero, what are you up to? You’ve retained -- that hit, let’s say, has kind of calmed things back down. Fantasmo’s staff hits the ground. And you had your…
KEITH: Okay. Who has Rivalo’s attention?
AUSTIN: Hella, for sure.
KEITH: Hella, okay.
AUSTIN: But he’s not like -- he’s not tunnel vision, right, he’s a warrior, he’s aware of all of you at this point.
KEITH: Okay, would it -- are we talking about Defy Danger if I wanted to back off?
AUSTIN: No, no, you could back off if you want.
KEITH: Okay, I wanna -- I wanna back off and I wanna draw my bow.
AUSTIN: Okay, go ahead. Do you want to take a shot?
KEITH (overlapping AUSTIN): Uh, I wanna -- yeah, I wanna take a shot.
AUSTIN: Sounds good.
KEITH: So I back off, sort of to the corner -- as far away as I can get and still have enough room to shoot my bow -- and I wanna sort of aim, uh… I’ma aim for his mask --
AUSTIN: Okay.
KEITH: -- I wanna try to hit his mask, his big dumb mask.
AUSTIN: Okay.
KEITH: And that is… a 5! SO that’s another failed roll.
AUSTIN: It is another failed roll. Uhh…
KEITH: Yeah.
ALI: That’s horrible!
AUSTIN: Hm. Go ahead and… So you take that shot and it totally misses him, but go ahead and roll damage on that…
KEITH: I’m never using this site again, by the way.
AUSTIN: [laughs] I like this site a lot --
KEITH: YOuknow what, hold on. Hold on.
AUSTIN: Uh-huh.
ALI: I love this site.
[dice rolling noise]
AUSTIN: Great, I can’t see that. That’s a 3.
KEITH (overlapping AUSTIN): That’s a 3. Great.
AUSTIN: Ali, take 3 damage.
ALI: Huh?
AUSTIN: Minus your armor. The arrow that -- He backs off as you’re fighting this dude and shoots an arrow into the fray, catching you in the back.
ALI: Fuuuuck you! [JACK laughs] What!
KEITH: I rolled just for fun in there a d6 and it was a 4 so I saved you one! cause that’s how this works!
AUSTIN (overlapping KEITH): Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
ALI: Daaang.
AUSTIN: Fantasmo, what are you up to?
NICK: Uh…
AUSTIN: Oh yeah, you just did that spell, okay, so now --
NICK: Yeah.
AUSTIN: -- let’s go back to Lem. Lem, you see that that at this point -- at this point, RIvalo is kind of… he’s in dire straits but he’s keeping his, he has kind of a grit to his -- the the mask’s expression where he still thinks he can take you.
JACK: Alright, um…
AUSTIN: He’s wounded though, he’s definitely wounded.
JACK: I’m gonna roll Hack and Slash, I’m gonna… so, I’ve wrested control back of my weapon at this stage, right?
AUSTIN (overlapping JACK): Yes, you have your machete again.
JACK: So I’m gonna -- I am absolutely not a fighter or a paladin or a cleric [AUSTIN: Sure.] by any stretch of the imagination, I’m not particularly well versed with a sword, [AUSTIN: Mhm.] but I’m gonna a kind of weird particular stance that I think might be useful even though I’ve probably only ever seen it in pictures.
AUSTIN: Mhm.
JACK: Where I”m going to like, prepare to try and strike him on his neck [AUSTIN: Okay.] in the join between where his mask meets his chestplate.
AUSTIN: Sounds good.
JACK: So I’m gonna roll Hack and Slash on that. Um… If I can just move from Skyping to Chrome here… That is 2d6+1. Fingers crossed, Keith, with this site that you love. That’s a 4.
KEITH: Yeah, I hate this site.
AUSTIN: Oh my… Christ! This is rough, y’all!
JACK: SO I’m gonna mark EXP here…
AUSTIN: Yeah! I mean, there’s a lotta XP. Lotta XP.
KEITH: Yeah, I think I might’ve leveled already.
JACK: Uh, I’m still on 4. Alright, so uh, I guess that’s a fail! [claps] Bring me the bad news, Austin!
AUSTIN: The bad news is that… you slice down at him, and he literally with his armored gauntlet slaps the blade away, [JACK laughs] and it goes clanking across the room, and he lifts you in the air with his other hand, and the arm -- the gauntlet burns your neck. Take -- roll 1d4.
Jack: Alright. Now of course, because this site is the worst I’m gonna get 4, aren’t I?
AUSTIN: We’ll see. And he’s beginning to choke at you at this point.
JACK: 3. [laughs nervously]
AUSTIN: Hm.
JACK: So I take 2 damage.
KEITH (overlapping JACK): Listen, i’ve got these real dice out now.
AUSTIN: Oh, actually, you’re gonna take 3 damage, your chest -- your like leather armor isn’t gonna protect your neck from burning. Right?
JACK (overlapping AUSTIN): Oh, yeah. Okay, right, fine, so I’m down to 7 health.
NICK: Keith gets to use real dice, I wanna use real dice.
ALI: Maybe he (unintelligible)
AUSTIN (overlapping ALI): I would prefer you not because I’m keeping -- I am like, recording the dice footage, so that (KEITH overlaps) -- so that worse comes to worst I can actually see this shit quickly without having to...
KEITH (overlapping AUSTIN): Oh, okay, I’ll do the real di-- I’ll do the fake dice.
AUSTIN: And please do the thing where you add your stuff, cause this way in the future I’ll see what your, um...
KEITH: What were attacks and what weren’t attacks?
AUSTIN: And what -- if you failed stuff, for XP’s sake.
NICK: This thing is... This site is really cool, you can (AUSTIN overlaps) put a hashtag at the end of a roll so you can like identify stuff and you can click over on the right -- uh, click to see this room’s logs, [AUSTIN: Yeah.] so we can like totally like save our logs for (later?)
AUSTIN: Yeah. This is a thing I would I would love to do, and like have notes. So going -- I really like this site going forward, I think it does this really well, and then like when you roll an attack you can say like, oh I was rolling Hack and Slash there, and stuff like that. And again, because I’m using OBS to record this stuff, I’ll be able to keep those logs, which will be useful for when we do forget what we did. Y’know? Anyway.
NICK: Yeah.
JACK: Mhm.
AUSTIN: Especially as we get different moves that might need to be revisited, y’know? Um… So, uh…
ART: I contend it’s me.
AUSTIN: Yeah, I think it’s Hadrian at this point. You see Lem lifted in the hand by this man who is wearing the black and gold armor.
ART: Yeah, I’ll charge him and -- and…
AUSTIN: Thrust in.
ART: -- thrust? It’s an awkward weapon -- like it’s really --
AUSTIN (overlapping ART): It’s awkward for this space too.
ART: In this, in this, it’s probably, it’s actually probably a slashing motion.
AUSTIN: Yeah, but I don’t think that you have all that room in here, do you know what I mean? Like even Cali had to choke up on her hammer to make those swings, so I think the thrust is probably what you got in this bedroom. You know what I mean?
ART: Sure.
AUSTIN: In that big entry hall I think you could do some slashes. But in here, I think it’s a little bit tighter. Or you could do side slashes! Plenty of room that way, hopefully you don’t hit anybody else. Y’know.
ART: I mean --
AUSTIN: I wouldn’t, unless you --
JACK: Don’t do a Fero.
AUSTIN: Don’t do a Fero.
ART: Alright.
KEITH: By a Fero, do you mean don’t fail every roll?
AUSTIN: Right. [JACK laughs] He doesn’t!
ART: Right, I got a 9.
AUSTIN: Okay, go ahead and uh, (deal?) your damage.
JACK (overlapping AUSTIN): Oh, good! Nice work!
NICK: It’s not the site, it’s just you.
ALI: Yeah, I mean I failed every roll like last time.
AUSTIN: Nick says “dicegate” in the chat. It’s (just?)...
ALI: [laughs]
ART: Am I gonna pretend --
KEITH: Jack’s failed a few rolls, right?
AUSTIN: Go ahead and do…
NICK: I haven’t failed any.
AUSTIN: Go ahead and also roll…
KEITH: Yeah you did, you failed a spell roll!
AUSTIN: another… You did fail that one spell roll.
NICK: Oh yeah.
AUSTIN: Go ahead and take d8 damage, Art, and then I’ll narrate how this all plays out. [pause] So nothing for you.
ART: So nothing, uh, soaks… soaks armor.
AUSTIN: Soaks… Yeah. So you just thrust right--
ART: Really I gain a hit point.
AUSTIN: [laughs] If only. You thrust your halberd forward, piercing the holy symbol in the middle of his chest, the holy symbol you recognize as your own. And just, shove him, all the way against the back of the room where that bookshelf is -- and just like, yeah! all the way through, and he like just impotently slashes at you and drops his sword and pulls you closer, and as you die you see the mask’s lips actually open up, [MUSIC - “Autumn not Winter” starts playing] and he says:
AUSTIN (as RIVALO): He lives.
AUSTIN: And spits, and falls, and clank, and he’s down on the ground.
JACK (overlapping AUSTIN): Oh geez.
AUSTIN: You wanna take a break at this point? Should we take a -- so I can go, run to the bathroom and some water?
ART (overlapping AUSTIN): (unintelligible)
JACK: Should we do an Idle Thumbs break here?
NICK: Yep.
AUSTIN: Sure.
JACK: They pioneered breaks, right?
AUSTIN: They did, they pioneered breaks.
ART (overlapping AUSTIN): Yeah that’s not a -- I’ll just -- I’ll just sit here and sing an a capella version of The Girl from Ipanema until we’re back… [everyone laughing]
AUSTIN: O-kay.
KEITH: Hold on.
[TIMESTAMP 44:50]
JACK: Cool. Let’s go.
AUSTIN: So what’s up? What are you guys doing? These people are down on the floor now, what do you wanna do?
JACK: We don’t know these people’s names, right, Austin?
AUSTIN: You know everyone except Rivalo. You know that Rivalo was calling the lady with the hammer Cali -- Calithane, you heard him say once, and you know that the other one’s name is… Brutus.
JACK: Okay, I’d like to make a note somewhere on some like piece of paper that I’ve written down.
AUSTIN: Right, in one of your compartments you have -- yeah, a scrap --
KEITH: I would like to --
JACK: So that’s Cali and Brutus.
AUSTIN: C-A-L-I, yeah.
KEITH: I’d like to --
ART: I’d like to go back to the crown.
KEITH: And I wanna take off Rivalo’s mask.
AUSTIN: Okay, it’s hot to the touch, but you can do it without taking damage. Underneath he’s a man, he’s just a man, he’s middle-aged, graying thinning hair. On the top of his -- on his forehead he has a kind of brand marked in on his forehead -- similar to the one that’s on Cali’s eye.
Keith: I -- I wanna touch the inside of the mask where the -- like where it would have corresponded to his searing mark.
Austin: Uh… what do you mean, his searing mark.
KEITH: Like wherever the sear is, I wanna touch the corresponding spot -- there’s nothing?
AUSTIN (overlapping KEITH): Oh, oh yeah sure. Nothing there. Nothing there.
KEITH: Okay.
AUSTIN: It didn’t, it doesn’t like, fit on or anything like that.
KEITH: Okay. I’m… I’ll put the helmet on my face.
JACK (overlapping KEITH): Uh, could I roll my --
NICK: (unintelligible)
JACK: No, go -- go on -- Fantasmo?
AUSTIN (overlapping JACK): One at a time, one at a time. Fantasmo, what’s up?
KEITH (overlapping AUSTIN): Okay.
NICK: Uh, he’s gonna go look at the bookcase.
Austin: Okay, in Rivalo’s bookcase… I’m just gonna tell you -- you guys are in this room, this big room -- let’s talk about Rivalo’s room first since we’re already here. There is a huge bookshelf in that corner, there are some like -- a couple of loose swords, none that are very -- like, none that are -- have a lot of worth -- kind of practice tools or things that he might have held for sentimental reasons. There’s a flute in the corner, resting against the wall near his bed, and there’s -- on the bookcase a bunch of different types of books, some of them are in that script that was in the dwarf’s house that you can’t really read, that you can catch a word or two of, but some of them are from stuff that you can make out most of - among them are -- there’s a book series called “The History of Reunification,” seems to be like a historical thing -- there’s a thing... Are you like, flipping through these books?
Nick: Yeah, I’m looking to see if there’s any like replace the books I lost.
Austin: Sure, plenty, yeah there’s a lot of books here. You can easily grab another -- uh, but -- yeah, you can easily grab a bunch of other books. Yeah, sure. That kind of replenish that set that you gave away, you mean? Just kind of like, to replace literally whatever that item is called?
NICK: Yeah.
AUSTIN: I think yeah, if you pull from his sets of books you can definitely do that.
Nick: Okay, so Fantasmo’s just like pulling interesting books off. And setting them down on his invisible servant.
Austin [overlapping NICK]: There’s a series -- okay. There’s a series of books that you see that you probably don’t take, because they’re not very helpful to you, but they’re called “The Trials of Coracle(?),” and flipping through it you can tell that it’s like an adventure book series, kind of like a Hardy Boys… Um, and… Just like reading through bits and pieces of it, you read that Coracle seems to be this city, um... it’d be like saying “The Adventures of Rome” -- sorry, “The Trials of Rome,” and each book focuses on a different boy adventurer off to save the day, save the city from some great menace. And he has like, the whole set of these books as far as you can tell. And he also has… Placed on the eye-level shelf are a bunch of texts -- these are probably the ones you’re pulling from the most -- that range in topics but are about history and religion, this isn’t stuff that’s especially rare, these are the books that were saved from before the Erasure, but these are all pre-Erasure books. One that is there that you’ve never heard of or seen before is one that says “The Canon of Samot”. Um… S-A-M-O-T or whatever the equivalent in whatever the common speak is. That’s basically the types of books he has. What are other people doing, as Nick is pilfering -- as The Great Fantasmo is pilfering these books?
ALI: Um, I will say that Hella is just sort of leaning her sword and then seeing if she could like, pull the metal of her shoe (AUSTIN overlaps) to close that hole, but she doesn’t care about the room or anything else that’s there.
AUSTIN: Yeah, yeah, you can -- yeah, that’s -- okay. okay. [ALI laughs] That’s fair.
Jack: Can I take a look at the marks on the faces of Cali and Brutus and Rivalo?
AUSTIN: Yeah, you… You recognize the…
JACK: Don’t I -- Don’t you roll Discern Realities for that? I mean I don’t know what questions I’d ask, really.
AUSTIN: No, though it’s not really a Discern Realities, Discern Realities is really about seeing -- finding hidden stuff or being aware of dangers… Um, you could maybe Spout Lore.
JACK: Um… Yeah, alright, cool, yeah. Right, 2d6 + intelligence… Plus intelligence… [keypress] Aha. 2.
AUSTIN: Uh…
JACK: That’s a fail, right?
AUSTIN: That’s a fail. That’s a fail. Um… While you’re touching it --
JACK: It?
AUSTIN: Oh, sorry, the mark on his head. You’re kind of just -- the mark on his head and the mark on Kali’s eye, when you’re investigating it, you can’t quite place what it is or what it like, uh… what it’s from, it looks vaguely familiar to you, I would say, you have enough stuff in your archives that were like, you kind of still -- sort of make it out, you can kind of -- you know? it’s like probably some sort of linguistic thing -- it probably means something, it’s probably means a word of some sort. Uh, and… as you touch it, you get a strange feeling through your knowledge of pattern magic that lets you know that this mark exists throughout this tower, not just here.
JACK: Okay. Hm.
AUSTIN: Andandand -- that mark is now aware of your presence.
Jack: Oh, balls. Alright, fine. [ALI laughs]
AUSTIN: It’s like making eye contact.
JACK: Yeah. Cool.
AUSTIN: Uh, who else.
ART: Um, I went back to -- to look at the crown --
AUSTIN (overlapping ART): Hadrian went back to look at the crown.
ART: — I want to remind that I have senses that pierce all lies.
AUSTIN: No lies here.
ART: I’m really vexed here. I guess that’s what I’m doing, I’m being really -- I guess I should, take it?
JACK (overlapping ART): [laughing] Do you hear all this, Austin, I’m really vexed.
AUSTIN: I’m really vexed.
KEITH: You should put it on. Put it on. Put the crown on.
Art: Do I have anything to like, carry it in, hold it? (KEITH overlaps) Like, if I took it would I have to like, would I have to wear it out?
Keith (overlapping ART): On your head. Put the crown on your head.
AUSTIN: Yeah, you could --
JACK: Yeah, you got hella pouches.
AUSTIN: You could -- yeah, you could fit it in your baggage. It’s one weight.
KEITH: Um, I realize that I was muted a minute or two ago, and I wanted to make sure that I did say that I was looking at the mask.
AUSTIN: Okay.
KEITH: We did that?
AUSTIN: Yeah, you looked at the mask.
[TIMESTAMP 53:10 or so]
KEITH: Okay, I wasn’t sure if I was muted during that and I just forgot if I didn’t do it? Okay.
JACK: No, you looked.
KEITH: I do — I do wanna check to see — cause you mentioned that Ar-guy, what’s his name? Armin? With the armor?
AUSTIN: Oh, the armor man, Rivalo. Yeah.
KEITH: Rivalo. I meant R for Rivalo. [AUSTIN laughing] Uh, you said — you mentioned that he has a shortsword, I wanna tell if he has a nicer shortsword than I do?
AUSTIN: Nah, it’s a shortsword.
KEITH: It’s just a regular-ass shortsword? Okay, and then I — I wanna see if, uh, I wanna go check and see if Fantasmo will detect magic on the mask.
AUSTIN: Sure. Fantasmo, what do you do?
NICK: Yeah, I’ll, uh detect magic on it.
AUSTIN: So you’re just — detect magic, again, go ahead and make your roll, but it lets you open up one of your senses to see if things are magical. Roll it and then tell me what sense you’re using.
NICK: Um… Why do I have to roll for that, cause it’s a cantrip.
AUSTIN: No, you still roll on cantrips. You just don’t have to — cantrips don’t take up slots.
KEITH (overlapping AUSTIN): Yeah, you just don’t have to memorize it.
NICK: Really? Oh.
AUSTIN: Mhm. As far as I know, maybe I’m — I mean if you can point me to...
KEITH (overlapping AUSTIN): That’s how we did it last game.
AUSTIN: I’ll double check it, but cantrips… yeah yeah yeah.
NICK: Yeah, I guess I’m thinking of D&D rules, where cantrips are just like free whatever...
AUSTIN: Mhm. No, I think — yeah, cantrips are just spells that you — yeah, you prepare all of your cantrips every time you prepare spells without having to select them or count them towards your allotment of spells, but they’re still spells you have to cast. There might be a thing that lets you cast them more easily or not have to roll or something as you level up, y’know?
NICK: Well…
AUSTIN: Good. So what—
NICK: I’m using sight, I guess.
AUSTIN: Okay. In this room you can tell that the mask is definitely magical. The…
NICK: Okay.
KEITH: I—
AUSTIN: I’m trying to think of anything else here that is… The armor is, which I’ve discussed already. Um… In this room, that’s it. But I’ll leave that on, like you can have that for the—
KEITH: Okay, can I call Lem over — I call Lem over, and I’ll ask them both, like hey — “Does any of this seem familiar? You’re the guys that are — the guys that know stuff.”
JACK: I’ll roll Spout Lore on it.
AUSTIN: Sure. Go ahead. You guys both can do that if you like.
JACK: Actually…
NICK (overlapping JACK): Yeah, let me — I’m gonna roll Spout Lore specifically on that symbol.
AUSTIN: Okay. Sounds good.
NICK: Uh, and I’m gonna use… I’m gonna use...
JACK (overlapping NICK): Is the symbol on the mask?
AUSTIN: Oh no, the symbol’s not on the mask, the symbol is on… There’s no symbols on the mask, the symbol’s on his face.
KEITH (overlapping AUSTIN): On his face.
AUSTIN: But that’s fine if he wants to do that.
NICK: Yeah, that’s what I wanna… That’s what I want to roll about. Uh… What is Spout Lore again? +INT?
AUSTIN: Intelligence. Yeah.
JACK: Nick, I super love your house.
NICK: Huh? Oh.
JACK: I super love your house, it’s really nice.
NICK: Thanks.
AUSTIN: Uh… yeah, so go ahead and Spout Lore.
NICK: Uh, I got an 8 on the lore for the symbol.
AUSTIN: Um… okay. You—
NICK: Oh, wait—
AUSTIN: Interesting but not useful is basically what I get to tell you… I get to tell you that something — on a 7 to 9 on Spout Lore, the GM tells you something interesting, it’s up to you to make it useful. If you had gotten above a 10 I could tell you something interesting and useful. You know that this sort of script is a sort of magic that — it’s sort of like, it allows an ongoing magical effect on the thing it’s inscribed into, when it’s inscribed correctly and infused with magical energies.
NICK: Alright. I share that with everybody.
JACK: Fero, is there anything in particular that you would be interested in knowing about this mask — what are you trying to gain from this mask, because I’ve got a lot of like… Like banked knowledge from the Archives, specifically regarding my Bardic Lore. But I was wondering if from your perspective there was anything in particular that you wanted to know or whether or not you’d like me to just Spout Lore on it.
KEITH: I want to know if this is a pre-Erasure artifact or if this is just a magic mask.
JACK: Alright, no problem, I can do that. Um… So I’m gonna activate Bardic Lore. I’m gonna close my eyes and in a very, very mundane sense like someone trying to remember revision, roll back through my filofax in my head of what I know about things that look like this.
AUSTIN: Yeah.
JACK: And I’m gonna try and work out whether or not this looks like it’s pre-Erasure or post-Erasure.
AUSTIN: So that’s the one question you’re asking about this mask. It’s pre-Erasure. It’s definitely pre-Erasure. Definitely pre.
KEITH: Okay. Um… I—
AUSTIN: Do you also want to Spout Lore on it to see if you know more about it than that?
JACK: What the hell, alright, cool.
AUSTIN: I’m just asking. You don’t have to, obviously.
JACK: No, uh, I don’t see what the damage is here.
AUSTIN: Well—
JACK: So I’m gonna roll +2d6, plus intelligence… 5. Which is a fail.
AUSTIN: Woof. Wait, what’s your intelligence?
KEITH: Um...
JACK: Zero.
AUSTIN: Oh, it’s a zero. Okay.
JACK: Yeah, I spec’d towards charisma.
AUSTIN: Right. Right right right.
KEITH: Lem, I know that you’re into this sort of stuff—
AUSTIN: One second.
KEITH: Okay.
AUSTIN: So that’s the mask you’re looking at, right?
JACK: Mhm. What do I get on a fail for Spout Lore?
AUSTIN: Well I get to make — I get to make a move. In general, when someone fails, I get to make a move from my list of moves, which is what I’ve been doing this whole game. That’s kind of like how I do damage to you and do a bunch of other stuff. Uh...
JACK: Yeah.
AUSTIN: You… you can’t help it… Jack, even though you have a big ol’ orc face, you just — the thing that’s weird is, this mask doesn’t have any eyeholes, and you just wanna know like, how is it that you can see—
KEITH (whispering, overlapping AUSTIN): Goddamnit. I was gonna put it on.
AUSTIN: And you put the mask on your face. And it just sort of locks to you. And without saying much, you begin to walk to the hallway. [JACK laughing nervously]
ART: Wait, which hallway are we talking about?
AUSTIN: I’m sorry, the hallway to the right, to where the other two bedrooms are — these are bedrooms, these other two rooms — and then up towards the war room. He’s a few — let’s go to Hadrian at this point, while Jack is — is cut running, this shot is—
JACK: (unintelligible)
AUSTIN: Yeah, you failed.
ART (overlapping JACK and AUSTIN): I had forgotten about the Spout Lore move and wanted to use it on this thing, so do I have time to do that before he bursts in here?
AUSTIN (overlapping ART): Yeah, we’re gonna do that.
AUSTIN: Uh, Jack to be clear, you were compelled to do this.
JACK: Yeah, no, so when I said what could go wrong, I was not expecting possessed by painted black metal masks…
KEITH: I want to make a note that in between you failing that roll and Austin telling you that you, possessed, put the mask on your face, I was about to ask your permission to destroy it and the armor.
JACK: [laughing]
AUSTIN: Good call. So in the other room that Lem is now walking towards, Hadrian, are you Spouting Lore on the… Is that what you’re doing?
ART: On the crown.
AUSTIN: Yeah, sure. Go ahead.
ART: 5. I hope they both don’t possess us and turn us into evil creatures.
JACK: Great, Hadrian we can be friends.
ART: Yeah, we can be friends on the other side.
AUSTIN: It’s almost a dance. Uh — Lem enters the room and kneels before you, and in an instant you’ve placed the crown on his head. Lem—
ART: On his head.
AUSTIN: On his head.
ART: Great.
ALI: Oh no.
KEITH: If I have to kill Jack I’m gonna be so mad.
AUSTIN: His face is beautiful, Lem.
JACK: ...Whose face?
AUSTIN: The man you’re seeing. It is, uh, he’s uh… Boyish good looks, pale skin, bright blue eyes — and a crown that the one that you’re now wearing—
KEITH: Like a Doc Holiday.
AUSTIN: Like a Doc — no. [KEITH laughs] Fluffy, kind of — not fluffy, but wavy and voluminous blond hair down to his shoulders and a crowd of people chanting: “Samot. Samot. Samot.” And he turns back to you — and you can see like over his shoulder, you can see there’s people — and he turns and makes eye contact with you — and whispers, “Is it time already?” Um… Take 1d4 damage.
KEITH: I knew this armor fucker wasn’t talking about the same king we were talking about. [ALI laughs] I said it. And Art said, “nooooo”.
ART: What, no, I definitely think he’s talking about the same king, it’s just a different — it’s clearly a derivation of the same name.
AUSTIN: Uh—
JACK: Sorry, Austin, what do you want me to do?
AUSTIN: Roll 1d4 to take that damage.
JACK: Okay. Wait, I’m taking damage?
ART (muttering): It’s three letters off...
AUSTIN: Yeah!
JACK: Oh. Well, fine alright… [ALI laughs] Um… 1d4...
ART: What does this look like to me?
AUSTIN: You—
KEITH: Oh wait, Art, is your god the king, is that who it is?
ART: Yeah.
KEITH: Oh, I thought like— this was just like that fucking dude in charge of the city.
JACK (overlapping KEITH): 1.
AUSTIN (overlapping KEITH): You take that 1 damage.
ART: Nah.
JACK: I take one damage?
KEITH: Oh, okay. So no, I—
AUSTIN: You take 1 damage, uh…
JACK: How do I take 1 damage?
AUSTIN: Uh, a searing flame -- in fact, take 1 damage, and also take — you see on your sheet?
JACK: Uh-huh.
AUSTIN: There’s a thing there where it says Charisma, there’s a little checkbox that says “scarred”.
JACK: Oh, balls.
AUSTIN: The mask falls from your face, and kind of clanks around on the ground. The crown is still there, but you’re not under any sort of possession from it alone. And where the mask was, there’s like an outline — again, your face is bigger than the mask — but there’s an outline, a sharp-angled outline burned into your face.
JACK: Like wearing swimming goggles too long.
AUSTIN: Yeah, but it’s your whole, it’s like — uh, you know in Face-Off, where they take people’s faces off, and there’s kind of like a line, [ALI laughs] around like the hairline and like the chin line… It’s like a scar there, kind of framing the center of your face.
JACK: Ah, geez. And I’m — and so I’m scarred now.
AUSTIN: You’re scarred now. Minus 1 to charisma for the time being.
JACK: Okay.
AUSTIN: You can recover that, that’s not a thing that you can’t recover over time, it’s a debility.
JACK (overlapping AUSTIN): Am I able to… Am I able to make moves now?
AUSTIN: Yeah, what did you roll?
ART: Wait, what did this look like to me?
AUSTIN: Uh… that’s good. Uh, when you placed the crown on his head, you saw the same figure he did, looking up at you, and then standing.
ART: Okay.
JACK: Um, I would like…
ART: So he is standing up.
AUSTIN: Now he is standing back up, yeah.
JACK: I would like to share with everybody what just happened to me, um…
KEITH: And then I immediately go turn into a bear and try to destroy the armor as a bear.
ALI: Wh — Yeah?
KEITH: Yeah.
JACK: Are you sure?
AUSTIN (overlapping JACK): Um, you can—
ALI: [unintelligible] animal for that?
JACK (overlapping AUSTIN and ALI): I’m going to stop you from doing that. Keith, I’m going to stop you from doing that.
KEITH: What are you gonna do, what’s up.
ART: What if you [unintelligible]
AUSTIN (overlapping KEITH and ART): Fero, Fero, you don’t think you can destroy this armor — you can destroy the armor, probably, but you don’t know — you can try it. You can try it. Like I’ll let you do that and people can try to stop you if you want, you can do aid/interfere, but I do want you to know like — this stuff isn’t gonna break cause he’s a bear.
ALI: Yeah, can I kind of like put my hand on bear Fero’s shoulder like, “What are you doing?”
JACK (overlapping ALI): I would also like to do that.
AUSTIN: Yeah.
[ALI laughing]
KEITH: “I want to destroy this dumb armor!”
AUSTIN: The armor, maybe, y’know, but you also remember the last time you touched the armor it hurt you a bunch.
KEITH: Yeah, but that was — that was when it was in a living dude.
JACK: Austin, what happens if I touch the armor?
AUSTIN: Are you touching the armor?
JACK: What happens if I do?
ART (overlapping JACK): You’re — we’re in a different room from the armor.
AUSTIN: Yeah, you’re in a different room—
JACK (overlapping AUSTIN): Oh, no no no, cause last time I touched the mask. The mask.
AUSTIN: Nothing, the mask doesn’t do anything at this point.
JACK: Okay.
KEITH: Last time I touched the armor you said that it was warm to the touch.
AUSTIN: I said that was the mask. The mask was warm to the touch.
KEITH: Oh, okay. Right.
JACK: Can I put the mask in my inventory, please?
AUSTIN: Sure, it’s one load.
JACK: How much… Is that gonna — one, one weight.
AUSTIN: It and the crown together are one weight. Is what I’ll say.
JACK: Okay.
ART: Oh, I was gonna take the crown.
JACK: Do you want to take the crown?
AUSTIN (overlapping JACK): Yeah then whatever, no weight. Split it up.
JACK: So zero — zero weight?
AUSTIN: Zero weight. Yeah, that’s fine.
JACK: Alright, fine. I won’t… [erasing noise]
KEITH: Are we doing half weights?
AUSTIN: No, I don’t… I’m not gonna do… I’ll remember.
ART (overlapping AUSTIN): I guess I’m trying to gather people up towards the stairs.
AUSTIN: Okay, you guys aren’t checking out these other rooms on this floor?
JACK: Uh… Hang on, wait a second—
ART: Yeah, I guess…
JACK: Uh, “painted mask”... Um…
AUSTIN: It’s not really painted…
JACK (overlapping AUSTIN): Okay, before I—
AUSTIN: It’s engraved, just so you know.
JACK: Okay. I’ll cross out painted. Uh, so um… Can I just take a quick reckie at the flute, please, before we move?
AUSTIN: It’s a nice flute.
JACK: Can I just, like, play some notes on it, see if it sounds like — is it worth me trading for my violin?
AUSTIN: [pause] No. I mean, you have a — you described that violin to me as being like a Stradivarius, do you know what I mean, like...
JACK (overlapping AUSTIN): Thank you for your assistance, Austin. I will keep my— [laughs]
AUSTIN (overlapping JACK): This is a flute that a person plays because they like playing the flute.
JACK: [laughing] Why didn’t— alright, yeah, cool, I’ll keep my — I’ll keep my...
KEITH: So you’re saying this isn’t a double Stradivarius flute.
AUSTIN: No.
JACK: [laughing] I’ll keep my violin. Alright. I’m good.
AUSTIN: So not touching these other rooms. Or checking out this whole side of the (unintelligible).
KEITH: I want to go to the other rooms.
ALI: Oh, the other two… bedrooms?
AUSTIN: So there’s 2 more bedrooms, so to paint a picture for the listeners…
KEITH: Note there’s [???]
AUSTIN: There’s an entryway kind of center south, and from that to the west and the east are big hallways that wrap around a big central area. To the north of that entryway is a big, lush bedroom. To the right of that, to the east of that, is a hallway that connects to two other bedrooms and to the war room, which is where Hadrian and Lem are. I will post this somewhere on the Internet for us. [JACK laughs]
AUSTIN: So yeah. Where you haven’t been are either of those other two bedrooms or this eastern stockroom hallway.
NICK: I wanna go look at the weird mold man with the clown shoes.
AUSTIN: Nope, I lost you for a second, Nick.
JACK (laughing): Sorry?
AUSTIN: What, man? Oh, that’s not a real—
KEITH (overlapping AUSTIN): He’s talking about the picture that I drew. [laughing]
AUSTIN (overlapping KEITH): That’s just a fake picture. But you’re over there! Are you going to go into that hallway?
NICK: Sure. Yeah, I’ll go over there.
AUSTIN: Okay. In that hallway are rows and rows and rows of armor and swords and spears, none of it is of a quality higher than what you guys have, really, but there is something interesting on those — on the armor is not a sun, the way Rivalo’s armor was, but what there is, is a kind of — a series of symbols sort of in the same quality of the room, in that it’s kind of simplistic, in a circle around it. Uh, and… Let me make sure I get these right here… Okay, yeah. So, it’s — the sun symbol, like what he had, on his thing, a ship, a tree, a shield, and then a fourth one — or a fifth one, rather — that’s sort of like… it looks almost like an open book, so it’s like a rectangular, but open, this way, thing — with a cup in front of it.
JACK: Hm.
AUSTIN: You would recognize the ship symbol as being sort of similar to stuff you’ve seen in the Berg.
NICK: Okay.
AUSTIN: And the sun is the thing that he had on his armor. But that’s it, just like rows and rows of this type of armor.
NICK: There’s nothing, that’s uh...
AUSTIN: Nothing magical in this side hallway, no. Um… Anyone going into the bedrooms?
KEITH: Is it like a — is this armor set up like a barracks thing, where people—
AUSTIN (overlapping KEITH): Yeah, yes. They would go in there to equip up.
KEITH: Okay, okay. Yeah I wanna go in the bedroom.
AUSTIN: Okay, which one, the north one or the south one?
KEITH: I’m gonna start with the smaller one, the south one.
ALI: Um…
AUSTIN: Hella?
ALI: Well, I was just going to say that I kind of imagined her as sort of peering into the lower one to check that there’s no one else on the floor.
AUSTIN: There’s no one else here — you were able to wander around this room at this point, uh… The southern one has — there’s like kind of a table at this north wall here, and on that are just like a bunch of knives laid out to be sharpened and admired, they have various like interesting handles on them, they’re of varying quality but they’re of like someone who collects these sorts of things. And then in the corner, where I’m marking on the map here, in the kind of corner next to that thing of knives, is a couple of like little drums that you would put on your lap to play, kind of like, I guess, congos? Bongos? Congos?
KEITH: Bongos, or congo...
ART: No, a congo drum is a much bigger drum.
AUSTIN: Is it? Okay. Yeah, these are bongos, these are like bongos. Also a couple of sketchbooks that are actually just on the bed, and most of them are, like… they’re sort of thing like a teenager draws, they’re kind of like monsters and swords, like a teen who listens to a lot of metal. You know? But every now and then there’s like—
KEITH: One of those weird S’s.
AUSTIN: Right, one of those — DEFINITELY one of those weird S’s. Definitely. Like… yeah. [KEITH laughing] But, there’s also once in a while kind of a very naturalistic sketch of the other people, of… And actually that’s one way you’re able to find Rivalo’s name, there’s a picture of Rivalo with the mask on that says “Rivalo” on it, and you can even see Cali’s full name is — you can see it, except I forget where I wrote down her full name… Oh, it’s down here, cause it’s on her sheet here. Calithane. C-A-L-I-T-H-A-N-E. Really like above-class drawings of them.
KEITH: Okay. Um… there’s nothing under the bed?
AUSTIN: Some dust? You know...
KEITH: Some dust? Can I take — can I see if — are there any throwing knives, from that collection of knives?
AUSTIN (overlapping KEITH): Yes, you can have some throwing knives.
KEITH: I’m gonna get those the throwing knives, also—
AUSTIN (overlapping KEITH): Take the throwing knives.
KEITH: I’m gonna take the throwing knives, plus the nicest collection knife that’s there.
AUSTIN: Okay, they’re all basically throwing knives, just that some of the collection knives have cool handles. Y’know? So like, what’s the—
KEITH (overlapping AUSTIN): I’ll take the ones that I think are coolest.
AUSTIN: What’s the coolest one look like?
KEITH: Okay, so the coolest one has sort of—
NICK: A fucking eagle on it.
KEITH: No, it’s got, it’s a very simple looking blade and then it’s got sort of like a pearl inlay going down the spine, and then it’s got a bird’s eye maple handle, like a laminated… yeah.
AUSTIN: Okay, sure, great. We’re the knife show now.
NICK: And it’s also got a fucking eagle on it.
KEITH: It’s got a fucking eagle on it, and it’s got one of those S’s!
AUSTIN: Great. Hella, what’s up.
ALI: I also want to take a knife.
AUSTIN: Yeah, you take a knife.
ALI: But I just take sort of a basic one, and I feel the weight in my hand before pocketing it. That’s more of a priority for me.
AUSTIN (overlapping ALI): It’s a good one. In fact, you can have one that has a cool like belt sheath on it, if you want, and just take like one good one and like take that with you, yeah.
ALI: Yeah, and I just have that.
AUSTIN: Okay, and go ahead and write that down.
KEITH (overlapping AUSTIN): Okay, and because I took like, several, am I getting one weight, probably like… 3 ammo?
AUSTIN (overlapping KEITH): Yeah yeah yeah, let’s say one weight for each of you. Yeah, throwing knives are weird, they’re not ammo based, you have three throwing knives. Those are not like arrows where you get just like abstract three ammo, you get three throwing knives, and yeah Hella take that one and take mark of it, it’s a nice knife — maybe that one’s more than a throwing knife, that’s like the sort of thing you could really use in close combat if you had to.
ALI: Okay. Yeah.
KEITH: Okay — wait, the sort of thing I asked about at the beginning?
AUSTIN: Yeah, but… listen. It’s more interesting for me if we split it up that way.
KEITH (overlapping AUSTIN): [laughing] No, that’s fine, I’m not… Yeah.
ALI: How does weight factor into being encumbered and stuff, how do you figure out…?
AUSTIN (overlapping ALI): So, if you take a look at your...
ART (overlapping AUSTIN): It’s on your character sheet.
AUSTIN: Yeah, if you take a look on your character sheet and also at like the special moves thing, um, your weight is… What page is that on, is that on the front page?
ART: No, it’s on the second page to the gear, your load is that something?
AUSTIN: Your load is, so for Ali as a fighter…
ALI: Oh, I don’t even have to worry ever.
AUSTIN: Why, cause you have so much load?
ALI: Cause it’s 12 plus 2. So 14. So I’ll be fine forever.
JACK: I have… 22.
KEITH: What?
AUSTIN: Do you? No you don’t.
KEITH: No.
AUSTIN: There’s no way you do.
JACK: My load is 9 plus strength?
ART: No, it’s +STR.
AUSTIN: It’s not plus strength, it’s +STR.
ALI: Oh, it’s +STR, plus your bonus.
AUSTIN: Plus your bonus.
JACK: Okay, now that makes sense.
AUSTIN: Okay, so going forward, so there are a few times, like with health, if it says the whole word — if it says “strength”, then it’s your whole strength.
JACK: I was confused as to why…
AUSTIN: If it’s just the abbreviation it’s just the bonus.
KEITH: Okay.
JACK: Mhm. Cool.
KEITH: So I think mine is 7, I think. Yeah.
AUSTIN: That sounds right.
JACK: That makes sense.
AUSTIN: Fantasmo, what are you up to at this point?
NICK: Um, my load is… well, my S-T-R is -1, so I have 7 plus strength which means I have a 6 max load, and I have 5 load right now.
AUSTIN: Okay. What are you up to, what are you doing?
NICK: Oh, oh. Sorry.
AUSTIN: Sorry, I should’ve been clear. That’s on me.
NICK: No no no. Um…
ART: Hella, you might be — I don’t know what you picked for your starting gear, you might be closer to your maximum load than you think.
AUSTIN: You should check.
ALI: Um, my...
NICK (overlapping ALI): Oh I double and triple checked.
AUSTIN: No no no, Hella, Hella...
ART (overlapping AUSTIN): No, not you...
ART: Cause she was saying she could never get there and she might be close.
ALI: No, my sword is, um, minus 1 weight, so that doesn’t come into account, and then I just
have… armor is 1, gear is 1.
NICK: Minus 1?
ALI: Yeah.
NICK: Carrying the sword lets you carry something else?
ART (overlapping NICK): No, it’s minus 1 from 2.
AUSTIN: From 2, it drops down to 1.
ALI: Oh okay, so one, two, three, four… five…
AUSTIN: Plus the stuff… Okay.
ALI: Plus that knife…
AUSTIN: Is 1.
ALI: And then the…
KEITH: So you’re still less than half.
ALI: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Okay.
KEITH: Okay.
AUSTIN: I’m just opening up… yeah.
KEITH: Ugh, I’m one below my encumbrance level. Oh I might be at it, I might be like, I can’t get anything else without dropping something.
AUSTIN: Okay. So. Uh… what are you doing, Fantasmo?
NICK: Are there any other exits out of this armory that I’m in?
AUSTIN: Uh, no, in fact, in the armory, there is one thing, though, which is when you pass up past that other bedroom to the north side of that hallway, so one there is into that interior hallway, you can go from the armory into that interior hallway where the bedrooms are. But two if you go past that doorway into, or like next to the other bedroom, you can see that there’s a big crack in the wall there where you can kind of look into that bedroom from the armory room. Into the armor like stockpile room. And I mean you can just see inside the room, there’s nothing, there’s no like, “oh there’s a monster in there”, I’m not trying to trick you or like, but like there’s a crack there, and that’s weird.
NICK: Does the crack look like just regular wear and tear, or does it look like someone made it?
AUSTIN: No, it doesn’t look human-made, it doesn’t look man-made, but it looks like more than just oh this is just like an old tower, do you know what I mean?
NICK: Sure.
AUSTIN: Um…
NICK: Uh, is there another…
AUSTIN: That’s it.
NICK: Is there like a crack on the other wall inside the bedroom?
AUSTIN: No, there is not. Um…
JACK: Hadrian, what’s your feeling on like the war room? Are you particularly interested in it?
ART: I believe Hadrian is profoundly uncomfortable and he’s just standing around the stairs waiting to go, like he’s not happy here anymore, and he doesn’t wanna be here…
JACK: As a result of the interaction with the crown?
ART: Yeah.
AUSTIN: That’s fair.
ART: That was, that was…
JACK (overlapping ART): Where is the crown, am I still wearing it?
AUSTIN (overlapping JACK): He has it. He has the crown in his pocket.
ART: I have it. And I’m taking it out of here, but I don’t want to be here no more.
AUSTIN: Okay.
JACK: Okay. Could I, um, do Discern Realities in the war room, please?
AUSTIN: You don’t even need to roll it, there’s nothing… I mean, yeah, you can do Discern Realities and ask me the questions if you’d like.
JACK: Oh, but you’ve just said there’s nothing here, so—
AUSTIN: No, but go ahead and ask the questions, because the questions aren’t just — I had just remembered how Discern Realities works, which is you get to ask me these questions from the list, which means — like I was just going to say that there’s nothing of special value here or something, but no you get to roll this and ask what these questions are if you want, absolutely.
JACK: Alright. Okay, cool, I’ll roll that.
AUSTIN: Which is wisdom.
JACK: Yeah. 9.
AUSTIN: Okay. So on a 9 you get to ask one question from the list.
JACK: Um… Hm. Can I consult, can I phone a friend?
AUSTIN: Yeah, everyone can look at that list and… sure. [KEITH makes a phone ringing noise] I mean, I’d rather you, actually… hm. I’d rather you decide, Jack.
JACK: Okay, well… So thinking about it, um, I think “what here is not what it appears to be” is kind of an obsolete question in that we’ve had some pretty weird interaction with the crown and that sort of stuff…
AUSTIN (overlapping JACK): That’s fair.
JACK: Um… I think just, just so we can get a sense of kind of what — how exactly this room works, I’m gonna ask “what happened here recently”?
AUSTIN: So in the corner there’s that table where, you can see people have been playing cards… On the war room table, though, if you take a good close look at it, you can see that some of the — so again, to describe that, there’s the war room table that’s a map of the continent, or a continent that looks like yours in your little region, but it’s a little bit different. But you can see that some of the pieces have been moved recently. Just like, some of the kind of city, diorama stuff — again, there’s a magical element to this, you can tell there’s something powerful happening here, there’s a murmur to these little tiny cities — but you can tell that there are a couple of things spread around the continent that were recently placed there. And those, on close inspection, are kind of… kind of crystalline forms — like kind of like a diamond—
JACK: A plumb-bob.
AUSTIN: Like a plumb-bob, from the Sims, in different colors. And what you realize is that there’s one where you are currently, on this island. And there are other ones across the map, and some of them are laying down, and two of them are placed upwards, besides this one.
JACK: Um, I (unintelligible).
AUSTIN: You do.
JACK: I have a map of the northwest quadrant, is there any way I could mark the locations of one of these up points here?
AUSTIN: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely, you can mark two of the locations of the up ones.
JACK: Oh, great. Cool.
AUSTIN: I’m gonna, ah… If people remember that map, here, I’m gonna…
JACK: I will also write down “plumb-bobs marked on map”. Two plumb-bobs marked on map.
AUSTIN: Yes. I’m gonna (unintelligible) so I can actually tell you correctly what’s happening here. Here we go, here’s the map… So… There is… I’m gonna put this image in the chat so that we have it here too, I’m just gonna paste it for everybody… Uh… Bop. Go ahead and accept that.
JACK: Um… I think that’s…
AUSTIN: Let’s see how quickly this is going to go. Is this going to be upload this somewhere… It might just be easier to upload this. Ah, no, that’s pretty quick.
JACK: No, it’s gone. It’s gone.
ART: It’s going.
AUSTIN: Okay.
KEITH: Mine’s at 4 out of 24 or 5, I don’t know why it’s going so slow.
AUSTIN: Okay so there’s one, Jack…
JACK (overlapping AUSTIN): I got it.
AUSTIN: Right where it’s the X is, where it says Mark of the Erasure?
JACK: Hold on, it’s just loading.
AUSTIN: Mhm.
JACK: I’m just opening up in Preview, thingy. Damn this is a cool map.
AUSTIN: Oh, have you not — you’ve seen this map, right?
JACK: Yeah, no, I’m just remembering how cool it looks.
AUSTIN: Okay. There’s one where it says Mark of Erasure on that X. And then do you see the little inlet south of the halfling farms?
JACK: Uh-huh.
AUSTIN: At the kind of tip of that inlet, the most eastern point of that inlet, there’s another one there. The one in the Mark of the Erasure is green, it’s a green plumb-bob, green like crystal thing, and the one at the tip of that inlet is a brown one, it’s kind of like a brownish, kind of cloudy crystal.
JACK: And just so we know, where are we abouts on this map right now?
AUSTIN: Uh, in between the Berg, which is the red X at the top northwest, and the long island.
JACK: So we’re on an island somewhere—
AUSTIN: In between, and that’s where there’s a blue crystal, and that’s where you’re at now.
ART: Wait, is plumb-bob a real term, am I supposed to know what that is?
AUSTIN (overlapping ART): It’s the symbol from the Sims, yeah, it’s the symbol from the Sims. If you do a search for plumb-bob you’ll know — it’s like that green thing that’s above—
ART: It’s that green arrow thing?
AUSTIN: Yes, it’s the green — it’s a green crystal.
KEITH: It’s the green plumb-bob.
AUSTIN: Yeah, it’s the green plumb-bob.
ART: That’s self-refe— you can’t, that’s not how you define something.
AUSTIN: What don’t you...
KEITH: Who’s that?
AUSTIN: Yeah?
KEITH: Who’s that juicy guy? That’s plum-bob.
AUSTIN: Heugh. [KEITH laughs]
JACK: Cool, right. So I think I’m probably done here.
AUSTIN: Yeah, that’s fair.
JACK: From my perspective. So if anybody else has...
AUSTIN: Uh, you can see that there are other crystals that are color-less, elsewhere on this map — um, on the big continent map — there’s one in the far northeast corner, right, uh — one second, let me make sure I have this list right. One, two, three, four… One in the… kind of, at the equator of this, at the middle line on the eastern side, like, dead, dead… I don’t know if you want to update your side of this map or not or like take notes or whatever— and then one on the little island that’s floating to the south — except on their continental map, that island is not an island, it’s just a landmass that’s connected to the rest of the world.
JACK: Cool. Okay.
ART: Okay…
JACK: I accidentally started a slideshow and I have no idea how to get out of it.
AUSTIN: Oh no. Those crystals are all down and colorless.
JACK: Alright. Okay. [inhales] Hm.
NICK: Is there anything else magical that’s sticking out to me?
AUSTIN: That table is definitely magical. Um...
NICK: Okay.
AUSTIN: Nothing else—
KEITH: Oh, the table?
JACK (overlapping KEITH): Should we take the table with us?
AUSTIN: No, this table is of intense weight. [NICK laughs]
ALI: Does anyone wanna check (unintelligible)
JACK (overlapping ALI): Can we all carry it together?
KEITH: What is it made out of?
AUSTIN: You don’t know. Uh, Hella, what?
KEITH: Oh, okay.
ALI: Well, does anyone wanna try moving those crystals?
JACK: You mean the plumb-bobs?
KEITH: Uh, Ali, your mic got all weird.
AUSTIN (overlapping KEITH): Your mic is really quiet, Ali.
ALI: Um, does anyone want to try moving those plumb-bobs, or…
AUSTIN: You can move them. Nothing…
JACK: That seems like something that Fero would do.
ALI: Yeah, Hella definitely wouldn’t, but…
KEITH: I would like to move those plumb-bobs. [ALI and JACK laugh]
AUSTIN: You move them to other places, and they just kind of fall colorless when they’re not in their right places.
KEITH: Okay.
AUSTIN: But when you put it back, it kind of magnetizes to its place and recolors.
KEITH: We probably shouldn’t leave those on the spots. These people were bad. [JACK laughs]
AUSTIN: The table isn’t evil. Is a thing I’ll tell Art, cause he was checking for that shit before. That table wasn’t evil.
ART: Sure.
JACK: Can you scan the plumb-bobs?
ART: I’m not in the room.
AUSTIN (overlapping ART): No, he’s not in the room, and nothing—
ART (overlapping AUSTIN): I don’t want anything to do with this.
AUSTIN: Nothing in that table was… yeah.
KEITH: I, yeah, I don’t… I think that we should probably— hey, I’m going to move the plumb-bobs away from their spots again. Um… Maybe I… Should we keep one of them? Keep all of them? Eh, let’s take these plumb-bobs. [ALI laughs]
AUSTIN: Okay, great, you take them.
KEITH: I pocket these plumb-bobs.
ALI: Is that any weight?
AUSTIN: No.
ALI: Okay. (unintelligible)
AUSTIN: They’re weird little gem crystals.
KEITH: Yeah they’re like chess pieces, right?
AUSTIN: Yeah.
KEITH: Like that’s… Yeah.
AUSTIN: That’s about the weight they are. They’re maybe a little heavier than that but like… from density—
KEITH: So like a nice glass chess set.
AUSTIN: Yeah. Yeah.
KEITH: Yeah. Um… There’s a whole nother floor.
AUSTIN: There’s more— Yeah there is, you know that.
KEITH: Let’s do this floor.
AUSTIN: Alright.
ART: What are — what are—
AUSTIN: Let’s move.
ART: Are we doing this whole floor?
AUSTIN: It’s not that long. Well… it’s up to you.
ART: Like… okay.
AUSTIN: We’ll get through it.
ART: Okay.
ALI: Okay.
ART: We’re late, that’s…
AUSTIN: We can be done.
NICK (overlapping AUSTIN): We’re pushing 3 hours…
AUSTIN: Okay. This is why I wanted to start at [???]
ART: We’re an hour — we’re an hour over…
AUSTIN: Okay. That means… okay. that’s fine.
ALI: I guess… unless there’s something bad upstairs.
AUSTIN: Right. [ALI laughs.] No—
ART: Well, let’s go upstairs and— let’s go upstairs and look. And then we can decide…
JACK: Peek around the corner.
KEITH: I turn into a hummingbird. [JACK laughs]
AUSTIN: Um…
ALI: Just being hurt affect your turning into things at all?
AUSTIN: Nah.
KEITH: No. Oh, I would like to ask Jack if he can heal me.
JACK: Um… I could give it a shot, I haven’t been very lucky before.
AUSTIN (overlapping JACK): You could give it a shot.
JACK: Alright, everybody…
ART (overlapping JACK): I could— I could heal you in a guaranteed way…
JACK: Yeah, do it.
ART: But it’s… well, it’s riskier in different ways.
KEITH: I have 4 out of 19 health, so you could both give it a shot. [ALI laughs]
JACK: Uh…
ART: Well, if I fuck up healing you, you still get healed and I take your damage.
JACK: Oh, no, I wouldn’t want to do that to you, I’ll give it a shot, like the worst that happens here is that he doesn’t get healed as much, um...
AUSTIN: That’s not the worst that happens there. The worst that happens when you fail a roll is I get to make a hard move.
KEITH (overlapping AUSTIN): Yeah, yeah.
JACK: Well, in that case, um, I think I could…
AUSTIN (overlapping JACK): And your magic gets to go into other places, remember.
JACK: I think I could conceivably cope with being possessed by a spirit mask again, so…
AUSTIN: Yeah, okay.
JACK: Okay, everybody listen up. I prop myself against the table… and play this pretty upbeat tune. Um, I’m gonna roll… plus Charisma, which I’m scarred, so that’s great. So 2d6…
ART: I mean, to get on — I’ll do it.
JACK: I should be fine. I should be fine. Um… 2d6+1 which is… 12! Take that!
AUSTIN: Look at that!
KEITH: Nice!
AUSTIN: Alright, so that’s 1d8 heal to Keith.
JACK: 1d8. Alright.
ALI: Well it’s a song, so does he have to direct it to him?
AUSTIN: Yes.
ALI: Okay.
AUSTIN: You choose an ally.
JACK (overlapping AUSTIN): Keith has been healed 6.
AUSTIN: Look at that.
KEITH: Great! I’m at half health now.
AUSTIN: We can move through this next floor very quickly. If you’re willing to do that. Like, ten, fifteen minutes.
JACK: Okay.
AUSTIN: If that.
KEITH: I’m willing to do that, yeah.
JACK: I’d be up for that.
AUSTIN: Okay, so… You guys go up to the next floor, and… yeah—
KEITH: I get a 13 for hummingbird.
AUSTIN: Great. You get… three hold or whatever.
KEITH: Three hold.
AUSTIN: So as you go up the next floor, you can see almost like where a vault door would have been, and it’s missing, there’s hinges off— there’s hinges where the door would’ve been. And the rest of the room is— what time is it, what time do you guys think it is at this point?
KEITH: Well It was like early afternoon when Hadrian was doing his service, so I thinking that it is now late afternoon, pushing evening.
AUSTIN: Pushing evening. Let’s say it’s sunset.
KEITH: Yeah let’s say it’s four-thirty, five?
ART: Yeah, we had like a bad time exchange last time.
AUSTIN: Yeah, we did.
ART: Like we said it was a time and thinking back over it later, that didn’t work out.
AUSTIN: It wasn’t. Okay, yeah, so let’s say it’s sunset now, is that fair?
ART: Yeah, it’s alright.
KEITH: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Okay, so the sun is setting and you know that because there’s no roof on this floor. There used to be a roof. There used to be a lot of things. I mean, there’s a roof on this floor, but it’s actually on the floor, you can see cracks running up and down the walls of this octogonal room — the tower takes on another octogonal shape — and there are stairs leading up the sides of the walls, and at a certain height the walls kind of fall away and there’s no ceiling. At the very top of the stairs there is a little platform that blocks some of the sun and seems to be, kind of, the one remaining room there. There’s also spread — so, spread among the bottom of the floor is a bunch of gold and gems — this was a place where important things were kept. They seem like — this is where they were. There’s a lot of stuff here, it would take you a lot to carry it back, but there are like some chests that you could totally grab, if you wanted to slog down the whole tower again with it, bringing it with you. So then there’s the stairway up. Uh… What are you, what are you doing?
JACK: Um...
KEITH: Um… I want to look in the chest.
AUSTIN: Yeah, there’s gold and gems and… this is—
KEITH: Okay, there’s nothing— there’s nothing but gold and gems?
AUSTIN: Um, yeah that’s all there is.
KEITH (overlapping AUSTIN): Nothing but gold and gems?
AUSTIN: There’s only gold and gems?
KEITH: There’s only gold and gems?
AUSTIN: It’s gold. It’s gold, but here’s the thing — wait, one second, here’s a thing — what are you, what do you use now for money? I don’t think it’s gold, you probably used to use gold as a society, but what’s money look like in the Berg?
JACK: Caps. [AUSTIN laughs]
NICK: Fish bones.
KEITH: Um…
AUSTIN: Sure. Y’know, it’s like… What about— hold on—
ART: Ugh… that’s not…
ALI: Maybe it’s just like a cheaper metal.
ART (overlapping ALI): That’s gross.
AUSTIN (overlapping ALI): Fish bones?
KEITH (overlapping ALI): Fish bones are very brittle. [NICK and ALI laugh]
NICK: [???] is more expensive.
KEITH: Super brittle.
JACK: What about maybe like some sort of small scale scrimshaw, like, tiny… tiny whalebone circles.
AUSTIN: That’s like what they historically, were totally fishbone currencies… and like bony, yeah…
NICK: [???]
JACK: Yeah, I guess when I think about fishbones like here’s a tiny ribcage or something, or like a, a little bony circle, almost like a poker chip.
NICK: Yeah. Yeah.
JACK: With something carved into it.
NICK: When I said fish bones, I was thinking of those things that are, I guess they’re whale bones, from Dishonored, that you pick up, like those little whale bone charms?
AUSTIN: Yeah.
JACK: Yeah, almost like those little runes, yeah.
KEITH: Okay, I was thinking of when you are eating whitefish and you’re like, oup! There’s a fish bone in here! [AUSTIN and ALI laugh]
NICK: No—
AUSTIN: No, I mean it’s fine, I just wanted to be clear, so like this stuff is like whoa this is gold. Like… you’ve been buying lunch.
NICK: Yeah.
KEITH: Well then yeah, then we super wanna take this.
JACK: So when I, when I, three gold is part of my gear—
AUSTIN (overlapping JACK): On the one hand, that’s great—
JACK (overlapping AUSTIN): Am I talking about the scrimshaws, or am I talking about coins.
AUSTIN: You’re talking about — you in fact didn’t pick three gold, when you picked—
JACK: It says coins.
AUSTIN: Right. So you get—
JACK: Right, so I guess it’s the scrimshaws, yeah.
AUSTIN: So yeah—
JACK: Can I, uh…
AUSTIN: What are you doing?
JACK: Can I Discern Realities, please?
AUSTIN: Sure. Uh, how are you doing it, what are you doing in the room?
JACK: I’m just, I’m looking at stuff, I’m um just going…
AUSTIN (overlapping JACK): I mean, that’s not, everybody’s looking at stuff. How are you… Discerning Realities means like taking up an effort to look around for something, you know what I mean?
JACK: Okay, so I’m uh, I guess I’m just like sifting through things, I’m opening chests, I’m passing gold and stuff through my hands…
AUSTIN (overlapping JACK): Okay. Go ahead.
JACK: So I’m gonna roll… 2d6 plus wisdom, which is… 10.
AUSTIN: Okay. You can ask three questions off this list.
JACK: Do I have to ask three questions?
AUSTIN: You get to ask three questions. [JACK laughs]
JACK: Alright, okay, what here is useful or valuable to me, please?
AUSTIN: All this money. All this money is pretty valuable. [JACK laughs]
JACK: Okay. Alright. How much, uh, what’s the weight on this money like? That’s not one of the questions, but…
AUSTIN: Uh, no, but it’s not… I’d say a chest is probably four, five weight, right? That’s a big thing… Maybe more. There’s more here than you could ever carry. We’ll have to think about what… like tell me how much you wanna bring and we’ll determine a weight, y’know?
JACK: Can I take… okay, so we’re brokering something here, could I take half a chest? How much is half a chest?
AUSTIN: Uh, it’s easier to — I mean, where are you going to put half a chest of stuff?
JACK: In my multiple pockets.
AUSTIN: That would be… Yeah. But it wouldn’t be half— you couldn’t fit half a chest in your pockets.
JACK: Okay, right. What about a quarter of a chest.
AUSTIN: You could put a tenth— it’s a big chest, it’s a big chest of gold. You could put like… You could put 30 coins in your…
JACK: Okay.
KEITH: Could we just teamwork carry a chest and divide it up later?
ART (overlapping KEITH): This is an on the way out conversation, right, like…
AUSTIN: What’s that, someone — Art started yelling from a different…
NICK (overlapping AUSTIN): [???] up on your head.
AUSTIN: Okay.
ART: Forgot I did that. This is an on the way out conversation.
AUSTIN: This is an on the way out conversation. Let’s come back to this on the way out.
NICK: Okay, great.
JACK: Okay, right, cool. Okay, next question—
ART: Cause we’re not gonna drag this gold upstairs.
AUSTIN: Right.
JACK: Yeah. Uh… Next question, um, what here is not what it appears to be?
AUSTIN: Slumped on the back wall is a door, the door from the front of the vault. But it has taken on arms and legs.
JACK: [laughing] Okay.
AUSTIN: And you can see that it once had life breathed into it. There is however, there are... dents and like, bashes into it, and you can see that what was once alive has now been killed.
JACK: Alright, um…
NICK: Are we talking like, are they like realistic like human arms and legs?
AUSTIN: They’re humanoid, they become humanoid. And they’re comprised not of the metal of the door but of — like, material in the walls, there’s some wood in there, there are some gold coins making up different bits of it that have been kind of— katamari’d together.
KEITH: There’s a door nail in there.
AUSTIN: [laughing] Right. [KEITH laughs]
NICK: I was imagining… Trogdor…. the door.
AUSTIN: [groans]
JACK: Oh, boy. Okay.
KEITH: A giant muscly arm coming out of his back?
AUSTIN: Yeah. Uh, so what’s — last one, Jack?
JACK: My last question is, what should I be on the lookout for?
AUSTIN: Something from above, probably, is what your instincts are saying, like… what’s up there, is probably what you’re at this point saying.
JACK: Alright. I’m done.
AUSTIN: Okay.
NICK: Uh, I’m gonna do a… I’m gonna roll Detect Magic.
AUSTIN: Okay, go ahead. [pause] Nailed it. What sense?
NICK: I’m gonna go with… I’m gonna go with hearing this time.
AUSTIN: There’s a kind of shimmering… hmmm… like hmmm noise happening, in fact you hear it from a different place… You hear that sound twice. Once is from above, the second time is from Hella’s sword. And you’ve done this before and haven’t heard it like this before. [ALI gasps] But in this room, suddenly, you hear a low hum.
NICK: Hm.
AUSTIN: It’s sort of a… it’s like… In both cases, it’s uh… they’re almost harmonizing.
NICK: Is, I mean…
ALI (overlapping NICK): Am I sensing anything?
AUSTIN: You’re sensing something, but you’re not, you don’t have the senses that Fantasmo does here. Like you can feel it… You’ve had this gut feeling before about it, but not… yeah, yeah, that’s all it is.
ALI (overlapping AUSTIN): Okay, alright, yeah, cause we’ve established that I have like a connection to it.
AUSTIN: Okay, so that’s…
NICK: What is above us?
AUSTIN: There’s a stairwell going up the sides of the wall, to a platform that’s up there.
NICK: Oh, okay. I’m gonna go up the stairway.
AUSTIN: Okay.
NICK: So I’m gonna follow my ears to the humming.
ART: I’m following him.
AUSTIN: Okay. Is everyone going up there?
JACK: I’m gonna go up there behind some other people with swords.
ALI (overlapping JACK): Yeah.
KEITH (overlapping JACK): Yeah.
AUSTIN: Okay, so…
KEITH: I’m gonna, I’m gonna flap up front.
AUSTIN: Okay, great. [ALI laughs] On the top is a platform that has like supports out from under it, and… I mean you could look straight down. This is the equivalent to 2 or 3 of the other floors you’ve been through, this is very high up. So it’s a bit of a slog up there, but you get through it no problem. Up there are, uh, y’know, there’s a couple of tables and chairs that are lined out in front of a dias — dais? Dais.
ART: Dais.
KEITH: Dais.
ART: And on that dais there is a crack that has split it. And on the ground next to the dais, is a very weighty looking tome.
JACK: Fantasmoooo. [ART chuckles]
NICK: Fantasmo, as soon as he sees that, he almost involuntarily lets out a little “ooh”. [ALI laughs] And he immediately beelines over to the book.
AUSTIN: The tome has like brass hinges, is heavily bound in good leather. And on the front is the same rune that was on the forehead of Rivalo and on the eye of Calithane, and you didn’t really check out the body of Brutus but was also there.
NICK: Okay.
JACK: Hm.
AUSTIN: It’s open— you can open it if you’d like.
NICK: Uh… I don’t know if I want to if it has that rune on the front of it.
AUSTIN: I dunno.
ALI: Can you kind of like...
KEITH (overlapping ALI): I mean, I’ll open it.
ART: Yeah, I need to know. [JACK chuckles] Like, yeah that’s— that’s getting opened.
NICK (overlapping ART): Alright.
ALI: Can you take like the tip of your staff and just kind of… [ALI laughs]
JACK: Yeah, like…
ALI: That way just don’t touch it with your hands.
ART: I mean just like back away and like…
AUSTIN: As you flip it open, it kind of like — it gets kind of pushed out of the sunlight and into the shadow next to the dais, and you kind of just feel like — a sigh of relief shake the entire tower a little bit there. Suddenly there is white noise that you don’t hear anymore. Y’know, like there was white noise that you’d come to internalize and like, block out and suddenly it’s way quieter than it was a moment ago. And it opens up and you can see it’s just row after row after row after row of these runes, and some language thrown in, and... Fantasmo—
KEITH: Are they the same runes repeating, or is it…
AUSTIN: So no, the thing is…
KEITH: Okay.
AUSTIN: Uh… hm. Fantasmo, are you… It depends on how close you get to this book, I guess, what are you, are you trying to read this book, are you trying to…?
NICK: Is it… so wait, did it, did it move? Of its own accord?
AUSTIN (overlapping NICK): No, you moved it. No, no when you opened it up with your staff you pushed it a little bit and now can see that it’s filled with words and runes and stuff.
NICK: Okay. Yeah, no, I cautiously approach it.
AUSTIN: Okay, if you take a look at it, you can just read it and understand what’s — you know,
you spend a couple minutes with it, you can see the same phrasing is repeated again and again, these are kind of, what’s the word I’m looking for, not hieroglyphic but… logo… There’s another word for it—
JACK: Like pictographic?
AUSTIN: Pictographic, yeah, where these runes are all words that are communicating through, y’know, the symbols. That front rune is repeated over and over again in different scenarios, in different rows. And you recognize this from your history studying magic that this is sort of, like, a sort of automation, kind of like an automated magic system that would repeat itself. We would think of it as like a program, it’s like code. And it’s set to operate something — you’re not sure exactly how it’s supposed to operate, but that one phrase keeps returning and returning and returning. It’s… The phrase doesn't mean “give life” exactly, like it’s not necromancy, it’s not a resurrection spell, it’s not reconstructive magic, it’s sort of like “animate”, the word? But it’s not like you're animating something and can control it. It’s something where, it’s about bringing something to life, but, yeah, it isn’t exactly like a thing you know, but, um... You think with enough time, you could do that.
KEITH: So you’re saying this is probably why this building got all Pagemaster.
AUSTIN: What’s Pagemaster— I don’t know Pagemaster.
KEITH: Pagemaster is the, it’s an animated movie starring Macaulay Culkin where he walks around a library with three anthropomorphic books that take him…
AUSTIN: Oh. I believe you.
KEITH: Yeah.
JACK: I believe that that’s a real thing.
AUSTIN (overlapping JACK): Sure.
NICK: The, uh, the spirit cooks… staff…
JACK: Yeah, that makes sense to me, and to an extent it might explain the waves, I don’t know.
AUSTIN: If you give… Hm.
ART: The waves thing makes less sense, though, right, like… what’s doing that.
AUSTIN (overlapping ART): If you give it — give me a Spout Lore, Nick, if you’re giving this real consideration.
NICK: Okay, yeah.
AUSTIN: There’s no like magic Spout Lore, right, like separate from your basic one?
NICK: No.
AUSTIN: Okay.
KEITH: The closest thing is probably Jack’s Bardic Lore.
AUSTIN (overlapping KEITH): Yeah but that’s only for his topics and his topics don’t include magic like this.
KEITH: Right.
NICK: (quietly) Excuse me.
AUSTIN: Mhm.
NICK: I successfully muted that from everyone, right?
AUSTIN: Yeah, you did, basically.
ALI: Mhm.
KEITH: Yeah.
NICK: Uh… no, I have like advanced moves later on that I could use… [???]
AUSTIN (overlapping NICK): Yeah, yeah, that’s what I figured, but you can go ahead and just give me a Spout Lore on it, if you’re giving it considered… [pause] And I gave you like the key bit of it. Okay.
NICK: Uh, seven. Wait— um, shoot, I’m gonna add, well…
AUSTIN: Yeah, you can go ahead and add, if you’d like — it’s only gonna be a plus one, right, if you add one of those books?
NICK (overlapping AUSTIN): It’s only gonna be a plus one.
AUSTIN: Yeah, so save it. [SOMEONE coughs] So, I’m gonna tell you something interesting if not useful. Uh… I’m gonna be a really nice GM here and give you something that’s maybe useful, just not useful immediately. What this book is doing… This book is supposed to make things serve their purpose. And it’s bringing things to life to do their kind of teleological built-in intended, like, end result is — it’s seeing design come to life. And you realize that means that for, yknow, for knives, it’s to chop things, for a kitchen, it’s to cook. For waves, it’s to crash against the shore. And you know this probably wasn’t supposed to be happening to the tower and to everything around it, you’re — I guess you can theorize that it’s probably because it’s not where it’s supposed to be, it’s kind of — if there was a bug, when it moved off of its place. Things like this, rituals like this are not meant to be shooken up. And... It’s not where it’s supposed to be. You also know that with enough study, you could replicate that spell — but you can’t do that right now. If you had gotten a real success here I would’ve let you copy this spell right away.
NICK: Oh.
AUSTIN: Just the basic spell. Not like the whole big, like, the ability to bring things to life like that.
NICK: Right, right.
AUSTIN (overlapping NICK): So think about that with regards with whether or not you want to
keep this book, or put it back, or whatever.
NICK: I totally want to keep this book. [ALI laughs]
ART: Is the book evil?
AUSTIN: Hm. No. The... Hm.
ART: Or, what here is evil, I guess is the question.
AUSTIN: Hella.
ART: Required to ask — well, yeah.
AUSTIN: Uh... I don’t think the book is evil.
ART: Still the crown and the mask?
AUSTIN: Yeah. I don’t think the book is evil.
ALI: Um… Can I…
NICK (overlapping ALI): Can we see— oh.
AUSTIN: Yeah, go ahead, what’s the question—
ALI: Uh—
AUSTIN: Yeah, both of those questions, let’s do Hella first.
ALI: Well, I was just gonna ask, cause I don’t have the move to like consult my sword yet—
AUSTIN: No.
ALI: But like, am I hearing it at this point…?
AUSTIN (overlapping ALI): Yeah. Your sword is not super… Like… Your sword is reacting to this thing that’s so close to it.
NICK: Oh yeah.
ALI: Okay.
NICK: Did I…
AUSTIN: If that makes sense.
NICK: Did I notice that it got louder or anything?
AUSTIN: Yeah, yeah. The hum is now — as it moved and stuff… You can see that the dais is also magical here. You can see that the dais is also magical. It was a lower baseline, like it was a bassy mmmm. Um… then you were gonna ask something else, is that what you were gonna ask? Uh… Nick?
NICK: No, I was gonna ask if we could see, uh, the shoreline from where we were over on top of...
AUSTIN (overlapping NICK): Not from here… you can probably… No I don’t think this is within sight of the other things, you can see the ship out in the sea. Um, the waves have calmed.
NICK: Okay. Yeah. That’s all I was [going to ask?]
AUSTIN: Okay.
NICK: Um… so do I know that the hum is coming from the book?
AUSTIN: You know that it’s the book and the dais, you know it’s both. And from reading the book, what you can kind of understand here is, the book was supposed to work a certain way when it was on the dais, and this stuff wasn’t happening. Then it was off the dais and it was wild, and it was happening fre— it was doing stuff it wasn’t supposed to be doing. Its magic was falling out of the circuit. Do you know what I mean?
NICK: Right. Yup.
AUSTIN: So… but you’re not, you’re also not sure why it was happening there, you know that the sunlight was hitting it and this was happening, and now it’s out of the sunlight, and it seems to have stopped.
NICK: Hm. Okay.
AUSTIN: So. What you want to do with that is up to you.
NICK: Um… What happens — does anything happen if I pick the book up?
AUSTIN: Not… not if you just pick it up, no.
NICK: Okay. Um...
AUSTIN: Um...
NICK: What if I hold the book and walk over towards Hella. [JACK laughs]
AUSTIN: Uh, Hella…
NICK: Does it make the humming louder?
AUSTIN: The humming is louder. And Hella, you start to hear the sword. You hadn’t heard it before, again, you felt it in your gut. But as you approach it, it becomes more and more — it feels more and more like it’s — like a thrumming. Mmm, mmm. It’s kind of like a two-beat hum: Mmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And as he gets closer you can hear it start to take on the sound of words, and — it’s your name. “Hella. Hella. Hella. Hella.”
ALI: [laughs] That’s so [???] Um… I guess… I think she initially...
JACK (overlapping ALI): Well, you gotta throw it into the sea.
ALI: Noooo.
AUSTIN: I don’t know, what are you guys doing with this book, I think this is — I think this is kind of where I—
NICK (overlapping AUSTIN): Do I... I don’t hear it talking, do I, I just hear it humming and reverberating?
AUSTIN (overlapping NICK): No, you just hear it humming.
NICK: Okay.
AUSTIN: Um…
ALI: I think—
KEITH: I—
ART: I don’t want it on the boat.
NICK: Well, no one else really knows what’s going on right now, do they?
ALI: Can I, well— so this is the first—
ART (overlapping ALI): I’ve seen that symbol.
ALI: Can I pull my sword out? [laughs] I guess it wouldn’t...
AUSTIN (overlapping ALI): Sure, this is, it’s gonna keep— I mean, what are people gonna say when you pull out your sword? But like, so keep that in mind, you can totally pull it out, it’s going to keep making this noise.
ALI: Okay. But only to me.
NICK (overlapping ALI): While she’s pulling it out— whoa.
KEITH: Oop! Sorry, hold on. [ALI laughs]
ALI: I think I guess—
KEITH: Sorry, there we go.
ALI: I initially sort of step back and sort of half-desheath it.
NICK: Okay.
AUSTIN: It gets even louder as you do that.
ALI: Okay.
NICK: While she’s doing that, Fantasmo says:
NICK (as FANTASMO): Hella, I believe you are keeping secrets from us.
[TIMESTAMP: 1:50:55]
ALI: That's rude, [unintelligible]
AUSTIN: Hella is drawing her sword, y'all. [ALI and ART laugh] People who aren't Hella and Fantasmo, what is happening?
KEITH: I--
AUSTIN: What are you doing?
KEITH: I-- I'm flying still and I'm flying a little higher.
AUSTIN: Okay.
JACK: I'm uh... I'm a little concerned but I don't know how to interact with the book in the same way that --
AUSTIN: Yeah.
JACK: -- the Great Fantasmo does, as reluctant as I am to admit it. Um... So I'm cautious about any sort of meaningful interaction with what, to me, is clearly a very powerful magical object that I don't fully understand.
ART: I--
JACK: Um, I suppose that if I was back home, my reaction would just be like, "Fuck it, go for it, I'm gonna work out what this thing does," But I'm super not back home. Um.
ART: I am not happy with this book and us being up here, like, I don't want to act rashly, but that's where I'm at.
NICK (overlapping KEITH): Are you vocalizing that?
KEITH (overlapping NICK): I feel like uh...
ART: Like, I'm-- Yeah, yeah.
ART (as HADRIAN): I don't-- I don't want-- I don't like this. I-- I don't-- This is a-- This is a place with profound evil and I don't-- I don't think we should be interacting with these objects.
KEITH: You've been checking for evil a whole bunch and the only evil that you've found, besides Hella, was those three dudes.
AUSTIN (overlapping ART): No, and the mask and crown.
ART (overlapping AUSTIN): No but this-- And these-- I mean.
KEITH: And, yeah, the crown.
ART: Well--
KEITH: And the book's not evil.
ART: This-- This is-- Like, that's an internalized process and like, I'll tell you-- I'll tell you what my logic is. Like, how like, we're talking about, what me the player is thinking. Is that this is the symbol those guys had. Those guys have had the most profoundly fucked up thing I've ever seen in the form of that crown and that mask. Like that is-- that is a-- a shaking moment for me. I am-- I am not doing well with this.
KEITH: So but-- So we know-- But we know, like...
ART: And I don't want something with those-- With the symbol, what-- So you know, because I can't think the problem is my religious artifact, I think the problem is whatever this symbol is and I don't want to be near something with that symbol.
KEITH: Oh yeah.
ART: The white noise stopped, you know. I— Wait, was the white nose that everyone thing or was that just if you had magic thing?
AUSTIN: Everyone. Everyone noticed that --
ALI: Yeah.
KEITH: Everyone.
AUSTIN: -- it stopped when it was out of the sun.
KEITH: I-- I feel like the book has very clearly stopped doing the things that it was doing.
ART: Great. Let's go.
KEITH: But I also-- I also want to say that, I've been mad about this since, uh, since Fantasmo first said like, "Yeah, everything here is from pre-Erasure stuff. Like, ble-bleh." Like that is all like, so as far as I'm concerned. Nothing here is more or less dangerous than uh… than anything else.
NICK: Um...
AUSTIN: You're like, "All of this is shitty," basically, right?
KEITH: Yeah, like, all of this is shitty. We've been-- Like, I took these knives, these shitty knives. I'm gonna keep the knives. Like, he can keep his book.
NICK: Um...
JACK: I think the book should probably go back on the dais. And I think that that's the-- From my perspective that's because… it seems to be the pattern. It's moved. It-- I don't know what it is. I don't have the time or the research budget to work out what it is. [AUSTIN laughs] Nobody is paying me to do this.
KEITH: I'll-- I'll stop-- I'll-- I won't, if you guys don't want me to, but I will metagame for a second, if it's cool.
AUSTIN: Sure.
KEITH: Okay, like, fuck if Nick keeps his book he gets a spell maybe in the future that can animate shit to fight for us, so we should let him have the book.
AUSTIN: You don't know exactly how it'll work, but...
ART: I don't-- I don't--
ALI: Yeah.
AUSTIN: It'll do a cool thing, but I don't know-- But I have a real broad definition of cool.
[JACK laughs]
ALI: [laughing] There's um... I would--
JACK: It's the-- the gardener rule.
ALI: There's--
NICK: Um...
JACK: Back on the pedestal for me.
ALI: There's also like a conversation happening here where Hella's like,
ALI (as HELLA): No, I haven't.
ART: Right.
ALI (as HELLA): Get that book away from me.
ART: And to which, I responded out loud with,
ART (as HADRIAN): I don't want us touching anything up here.
JACK (as LEM): Yeah.
ART: And like, I'm in a defensive posture. Like...
JACK: I'm gonna side with Hadrian for completely different reasons but I'm still gonna side with him.
AUSTIN: So-- So I guess right now it sounds like there are two things happening. There's, "Do we keep the book?" which is, it sounds like, Fero and uh, and… What's Nick's character's name. Fantasmo.
KEITH (overlapping AUSTIN): Yeah, it's--
AUSTIN: Okay, I was right. I was going to say, 'Fantasmo,' but I said-- I was like, [incredulously] "That can't be right." Uh, Fero and F--
KEITH: Fantastico? Fancisco.
AUSTIN: Francisco.
KEITH: Fan--
AUSTIN: Fantasmo and Fero, are like, "We want to keep the book." Then there's the question of, if we don't keep the book, "What do we do with it?" And on that, it sounds like Lem wants to put it back on the dais, because of pattern magic and this is the right pattern. And then, other people are like, "Nah."
KEITH: I-- I'm-- Honestly, I'm split between destroying it and keeping but I am more interested, as a player, in seeing what this book does. Than in…
AUSTIN: Right, right.
KEITH: Than in destroying it.
NICK: Fantasmo-- Like this is my--
KEITH: All I know is last time I wanted to destroy something, everyone got all mad. [ALI laughs] So, I want--
NICK: This-- This is meta here, but Fantasmo sees this book as power so he's not giving it up.
AUSTIN: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's fair. I understand that.
NICK: Uh.
ALI: Yeah.
ART: This'll be an interesting day, then.
[AUSTIN and ALI laugh]
NICK: He stood-- So Fantasmo addresses Hadrian and says, um,
NICK (as FANTASMO): The book itself is not evil. The spell itself is not evil. Magic is neutral. The things-- The things that the beings of this land do with the magic are potentially evil or not evil. Magic is no more evil than the wind. I'm keeping this book.
NICK: And then uh, he turns to, uh, Lem and he says to Lem,
NICK (as FANTASMO): Your pattern magics, while sometimes impressive, do not dictate how the entire world works. They-- This book… does not need to go back. The only reason to put this book back on it's dais is if we want it to resume the spells that were happening here. We got sent here to find out what was happening and disable it if possible. We've done that. And we have this book now. I suggest we take off.
JACK: The-- The waves will stop if we put the book back on the dais. Dais?
ART: I don't know if that's true. Uh...
NICK: How do you know that that's--
AUSTIN: Uh, Nick thinks-- Fantasmo thinks that's true.
JACK: It's the fact--
AUSTIN: Based on the study that you did before. That-- That again --
NICK: Okay.
AUSTIN: -- previous to very recently, the waves hadn't been a problem. This is ancient.
NICK: Sure.
AUSTIN: You can tell this is pre-Erasure. And I think that even-- Your-- (NICK overlaps) think-- Right, yes.
NICK (overlapping AUSTIN): But, not putting the book back on the dais isn't going to turn it back on, either.
AUSTIN: Right. I think as long as you know, you keep this book protected and careful with it, you believe the waves aren't going to come back. That's the-- Yeah.
NICK: Yeah.
AUSTIN: That is what you think. Um...
KEITH: Especially going to say if he's away from-- if he's away from the waves, it's not gonna work on the waves.
ART: Hadrian lets out like a sigh. Like a deep, sigh. Like,
ART (as HADRIAN): [sighs] Of course the wind can be evil. Everything can be evil. You know, such is the way of the world.
[ALI and AUSTIN laugh]
KEITH: I hate-- I hate paladins so much. I fucking can't stand the whole thing that paladins are about.
ART (as HADRIAN): But-- But…
AUSTIN: [laughing] Of course the wind can be evil. Fuck.
[KEITH laughs]
ART (as HADRIAN): But I'm not willing to fight you. I'm not willing to-- to kill you over this book. But I'm-- But I'm done.
ART: And I walk downstairs.
NICK: I think Fantasmo just--
ART: I'll be figuring out how much gold I can carry.
NICK: Fantasmo just shrugs and says,
NICK (as FANTASMO): Great. I'm done too. Let's go home.
[KEITH laughs]
AUSTIN: What do you do-- What do you do with the book?
NICK: Um, how-- How much does it weigh?
AUSTIN: It weighs 2.
NICK: Okay.
AUSTIN: It's heavy. And it's like-- And it's magically heavy. It's dense. The weight of it--
KEITH: Oh, you've got your-- your butler's free.
NICK: Yeah. Um, I give the-- What?
AUSTIN: Uh-- I'm having a hard time deciding how much to give you. You know that when sunlight touched this thing, bad shit happened.
KEITH: Oh, uh, put it in a bag.
NICK: Okay, yeah. I--
JACK: Put it back on the dais.
NICK: I take all of the books out of my book sack and give the mundane books --
AUSTIN: Good call. [laughs]
NICK: -- to my uh-- to my servant.
AUSTIN: Sounds good.
NICK: And then I put the-- the book-- I mean, that's what I was going to do anyways.
AUSTIN: Alright, that works. Okay. Just wanted to make sure that I wouldn't have to extend this further.
NICK: Yeah. No, I--
ALI: [laughing] I...
AUSTIN: Be honest. Okay.
ALI: Um, I will say that I kind of glare at Fantasmo and put my sword away and then follow as closely behind Hadrian as I can.
AUSTIN: Okay.
NICK: And then, on the way out of the room. So Hadrian goes down first. Fantasmo shrugs, puts the book in his bag and follows him right away. On the way past Hella, um, Fantasmo just says,
NICK (as FANTASMO): We will have words later.
ALI (as HELLA): Whatever.
AUSTIN: Mhm.
[ART laughs]
KEITH: I wanna land on-- I wanna land on Hadrian's shoulder.
JACK (as LEM): I uh…
AUSTIN: Defy Danger-- No, you don't have to.
[KEITH and ALI laugh]
JACK (as LEM): I would also like to register my uh... my discontent with the fact that this goddamn book is not in the right pattern on that dais. That's not where the book should be.
AUSTIN: Okay. That's fine.
JACK (as LEM): Um, it should not be in the inventory of some wizard. So I go marching off downstairs as well.
AUSTIN: Okay. Uh, you guys can...
ALI: Everyone's so mad at each other.
NICK: Does Fantasmo hear him say "some wizard?"
JACK: Yes, he super does.
AUSTIN: [laughs] Alright, uh...
NICK: You hear Fantasmo bellow from the stairwell,
NICK (as FANTASMO): [muffled yelling] I am not just some wizard. I am the Great Fantasmo!
JACK: Ah, god wizards.
AUSTIN: Wizards man.
ALI: Oh my god this is going to be such a tough boat ride home. [laughs]
AUSTIN: Alight, so... Yeah, it is gonna be a tough boat ride home. Um, I'm just going to give you the amount of gold-- the amount of coin that you guys can carry safely, is that fair? As in you figure out--
JACK: Okay.
KEITH: Yeah.
AUSTIN: You're gonna be able to bring it back.
JACK: With all our weight stuff.
AUSTIN: Yeah. You're gonna be able to bring it back on this boat fine.
JACK: Okay.
AUSTIN: Like, being encumbered means you move slowly and stuff, but there aren't anymore dangers in this tower. They aren't any more dan--
NICK: Right. Oh my god, I just ruined my throat.
AUSTIN: Yeah, that was loud. Uh, there aren't any more dangers. I had to be clear. I had to make sure that was true, now that the book was safe. Uh, and I think you can take like, I think a total of 300 coin from that vault. And you can split that up among yourselves as requested. Uh, of course, you know, uh, the ship captain, Captain Calhoun, really wants his cut.
ART: Wait, we actually did Captain Calhoun?
AUSTIN: Yeah, that was his name.
ART: I hate us.
AUSTIN: Uh, Captain Calhoun, of course requests his fair share as the leader of this party. Uh...
JACK: Can we kill him?
KEITH: He wasn't even there. He gets 20 gold, top for riding in a boat with us.
AUSTIN: Nah. The Burg elected him. He-He's the captain of that boat.
KEITH: He's the captain of that boat fucking up against the six of us. The five of us.
AUSTIN: The Burg says he's the boss.
ART: No, I think-- I think he gets it. I mean he... Yeah, that's what the law says.
AUSTIN: We can deal with that in the future if you want to steal this money from him, Keith. But...
KEITH: Yeah, I do.
AUSTIN: We can talk about that next week.
KEITH: I'm gonna steal it from him and then we'll redistribute it amongst us. They don't even have to know.
AUSTIN: Fuck communism now.
ALI: That was straight up --
AUSTIN: Uh... Let's--
ALI: -- a little Robin Hooding.
NICK: Uh, is Captain Calhoun a reference to Star Trek: The New Frontier books?
AUSTIN: No.
NICK: Oh.
AUSTIN: Not on purpose.
NICK: Alright.
AUSTIN: It's a good captain name. I'm not surprised someone before me used it. It's a great captain name. Um...
ALI: Did I mention that I also take a gem of the same color as my sword?
AUSTIN: Sure.
ALI: And I just pocket that.
AUSTIN: You just pocket that. That's 1-- That's worth 1 coin, or like 5 coins of your coins, you know?
ALI: Okay.
ART: Oh, she's not a captain. I thought that was the name of the lady from Wreck-It Ralph.
AUSTIN: No, I haven't seen that still.
ART: That's where I recognized that name before.
AUSTIN: Uh, so...
KEITH: That's good.
AUSTIN: On the boat ride home, you have to kind of decide what you want to do here. I should note that there's that door that you guys never opened, at the bottom of that tower that leads into the other building. But other than that, everything here is done. Uh...
KEITH: Fuck! Ah, shit! We gotta go back there. Not now.
AUSTIN: Mhm.
NICK: We couldn't get it open. We tried.
KEITH: Maybe not soon.
NICK: Fantasmo's got his book. I don't care.
ALI: Yeah. I mean, I can try again.
AUSTIN: Yeah, there's--
KEITH: Hey, maybe when Hella's stronger she can reroll that Strength...
AUSTIN: [sarcastically] There is definitely no way to open that door at the very top-- [seriously] Okay. Uh, so on the boat ride home, uh... You have to kind of make a choice of what to do, going forward, and I think we'll handle most of this off screen, but I just want to like, like from a meta game perspective, I know Andrew, Dre, wants to step into the game and I kind of see this group taking a, however temporary, a split. Um. The Burg is very interested in those two towers that the map revealed. And given your initial success here, would like you both-- Would like you to check out both of them and in a timely manner, and I think is going to split you off into groups. We'll talk about who is in what group going forward, but I kind of-- I'm really happy that this ended on this tension, which might let that grouping split up easily.
AUSTIN (cont.): One of those towers is in the Erasure, and is a place of you know, terrible magic or something terrible disaster. And the other is to the south, south of the halfling villages. And you're not really sure what is between here and there. You know there are some roads that travel that way that survived the Erasure that have been rebuilt a bit. But, you know, you don't know what's past that, to the south. You know that this tower is there, in that inlet. So think about this, going forward. Who should be grouping up with who. Talk to me off recording and we'll figure that out. And we'll work Dre's Ranger into this. He will probably be in the Erasure group, is what I'll say. Um...
[TIMESTAMP: 2:06:10]
JACK: We should do our End of Session uh, XP because of--
ALI: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Let's-- Let's talk about our End of Session, uh XP. Let's start with uh, with Bonds first.
KEITH: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Let's do the general ones first and then we'll do--
ART: Yeah, let's do the other thing first.
AUSTIN: Let's do the general thing first.
KEITH: Okay, yeah.
AUSTIN: It isn't-- Bonds are supposed to be first, uh but-- but let's start with these three questions because that's a baseline that I want to write down. Um… let's see. Did you guys learn something new and important about the world?
ART: I would say yes.
KEITH: Yeah.
ALI: Yeah, we did.
JACK: So that's 1 XP.
AUSTIN: That's 1. Did you overcome a notable monster or enemy?
JACK: Yes.
KEITH: Yeah.
ALI: Yeah.
ART: Yeah?
AUSTIN: Did you loot-- Did you loot memorable treasure?
JACK: Uh...
KEITH: Yeah.
AUSTIN: So baseline 3.
ART: Is it memorable?
AUSTIN: Uh...
NICK: That book is totally memorable.
ART: It's just gold.
AUSTIN: If you want to-- Well, so here's the thing.
KEITH: It's gold in a world where gold isn't relevant anymore and it's like a crazy thing that we found that.
JACK: I've got the engraved mask.
KEITH: And it's like a crazy thing that we found that.
AUSTIN: That's the thing, is I could-- I could suffer an argument that said only Fantasmo, Lem and Hadrian took something memorable.
KEITH: Well, I got that super awesome dagger. It's got a pearl handle.
AUSTIN: Yeah, it's a nice dagger. I'm not saying you can't, I'm just saying.
KEITH: Yeah.
AUSTIN: If someone wants to make that argument, I'll listen to it.
NICK: This question--
ART: No, I guess it's stupid.
NICK: This question is for the whole party, right?
AUSTIN: It is, it is.
NICK: Yeah. So, I mean.
AUSTIN: It's as a group, you're right.
NICK: So just because like technically Fantasmo has possession of the book right now, it's--
AUSTIN: That's true. So that's 3 for everybody, that's-- that's fair. So now...
ART: Alright, so--
JACK: I can level up next time.
ALI: We don't get--
AUSTIN: Well you'll level up over-- over the group. Over the break, rather.
JACK: Oh really?
ALI: Those three enemies don't count as separate experience points? [laughs]
AUSTIN: No, 'cause it's just a--
KEITH: No.
AUSTIN: Did you overcome a monster or enemy?
ALI: I know.
JACK: Mhm.
ART: If we'd stopped after killing one of them...
AUSTIN: You'd still get one.
[ART laughs]
ALI: Okay.
ART: Well then we'd kill the next two the next time.
KEITH: But we'd be dead.
AUSTIN: No, then you'd get-- Yeah, exactly.
ALI: Oh, okay.
[KEITH laughs]
AUSTIN: So bonds.
KEITH: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Uh, when you reach the end of a session, choose one of your bonds that you feel is resolved, completely explored, no longer relevant or otherwise. Ask the player of the character you have the bond with if they agree. If they do, mark XP and write a new bond with whoever you wish. Let's start at the top of my list. Uh, which.. is... the Great Fantasmo.
NICK: Um. Is uh-- Alright, so one of my bonds is Hella is keeping an important secret from me.
AUSTIN: Mhm.
NICK: Um, I know that the secret is her sword now.
AUSTIN: Yeah, you do. You can now say something about that.
NICK: I don't know what-- Okay, is that-- You think that's enough? Okay.
AUSTIN: Yeah, now you know that it's-- You can now make a kind of more declarative bond. Like you want something.
NICK: Right.
KEITH: Yeah.
AUSTIN: More, you know?
NICK: Um... So yeah, I'm gonna-- I'm gonna resolve that but then I'm just gonna basically morph it into um... I need to figure out what that sword is.
AUSTIN: Mhm.
NICK: Potentially how I can get it from her if it's useful to me.
ALI: Fuck you! [laughs]
AUSTIN: Okay. So take 1 more from that. Did you-- How many did you miss today? What's your total XP at now? Is what I'm saying.
NICK: Uh, after that, I am at 8.
AUSTIN: Okay. So you're going to level. Next up is Fero, Keith.
KEITH: Hey.
AUSTIN: Uh, right now you're at 7 and how many did you miss?
KEITH: Uh, I missed 3.
AUSTIN: Jeez, you're at 10 XP.
KEITH: Yeah.
AUSTIN: At this point.
KEITH: I'm at 10.
NICK: Oh wait. Oh wait.
AUSTIN: That's what I'm saying.
NICK: This isn't right. How many did I miss? Just one.
KEITH: I think you missed one.
AUSTIN: So you're at 9.
NICK: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Keith said 10 before the bond.
KEITH: Mhm.
AUSTIN: Are you resolving any of those bonds?
KEITH: Yeah, I'm going to resolve um, uh, Hella Grosso smells-- Smells more like prey than hunter. And I'm gonna resolve that um, because uh...
ART: I thought that was your bond with me.
AUSTIN: No that's Hella.
KEITH: No, no, no, with you, it was, "The spirits spoke to me of a great danger that follows Hadrian," and then I resolved that with you last week and replaced it with that I-- I sense that you're a danger to me. To our companions.
ART: Um...
KEITH: Um...
ART: Sure, I guess I remember that.
KEITH: Yeah. And so I'm gonna resolve...
NICK: Did you --
KEITH: Hm?
NICK: -- have her name written down as Hella Grosso?
AUSTIN: Christ.
KEITH: [laughs] Yeah.
NICK: That's funny, 'cause I've got her written down as Hella Buff Body.
AUSTIN: Good one.
KEITH: [laughs] Well 'cause, that was I think originally what her last name was, right? In the Skype chat before we started playing.
AUSTIN: So what's-- What are we replacing it with?
KEITH: Uh... Oh, I'm replacing it with uh, that--
AUSTIN: And why?
KEITH: Oh, so, because I-- Right after I bit um, uh, Cali on the neck, she was able to kill her in the next move.
AUSTIN: Sure, yeah.
KEITH: And now I respect her as a Fighter. 'Cause, you know, before she was--
AUSTIN: So just something like, I --
KEITH: I don't--
AUSTIN: -- respect Hella as--
KEITH: Yeah, yeah, I respect Hella's skills in combat. [laughing] And I won't call her Hella Grosso anymore. I swear that that was an established joke.
AUSTIN: Uh-huh.
ALI: It's uh, Hella Varal.
AUSTIN: Okay.
ALI: Jerks.
AUSTIN: Lem?
KEITH: Did you say, Hella Varide [hell of a ride]? Is that what you said?
ALI: No.
KEITH: Oh, okay.
ALI: V-A-R-A-L.
[KEITH laughs]
JACK: Um... I've got "This is not my first adventure with Fero," that I think I reflected in um, performing healing magic on him twice.
AUSTIN: Sure.
JACK: Uh, once after being pretty-- pretty unhappy about him being bitten. Or after him being attacked by uh-- by Cali. So I'm gonna-- I'm gonna cross that one off, mark 1 XP and replace it with um, whoops, okay there we go. With uh, "Fantasmo's disregard um, for pattern magic, or semiotics, um, is a danger… to everybody." Um, and that leaves me with 10 XP.
AUSTIN: Great.
KEITH: Oh, I'm at...
ART: Ugh, I didn't miss enough rolls.
AUSTIN: Next up is Hadrian, who's--
ART: Who can't possibly level up.
AUSTIN: No...
ALI: You-- Did do some like bonds?
KEITH: How many rolls did you miss?
ART: None.
AUSTIN: You missed none rolls?
ART: Or one. I hit one? I was marking-- I was marking that as I-- No I didn't, I was marking that as I went.
AUSTIN: You didn't miss any?
ART: I never-- I didn't miss?
AUSTIN: Jeez.
ART: I mean, it didn't help that like I went around and like missed two rounds of combat.
AUSTIN: Yeah, that didn't-- that also didn't help. That's true.
KEITH: Well it can-- It can be an out-of-combat roll too.
AUSTIN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
KEITH: Did you miss any lore check or anything?
ART: I don't have out-of-combat rolls.
AUSTIN: Yeah, wait, what's this five?
ART: Like, my shit just works.
AUSTIN: What's this 2d6-1 that you have, here, at the very bottom.
ART: Oh, that was my-- That was my-- my Lore.
AUSTIN: That's a failed roll.
KEITH: Yeah, that counts.
ART: And I guess I did not add that.
AUSTIN: Yeah, there you go.
ART: Uh, do you have the bonds as I wrote them out originally because --
AUSTIN: Yeah, I think I do.
ART: -- I wrote them in later and I want to make sure I didn't change them.
AUSTIN: Mine, so as they are for me are, "Lem's misguided behavior endangers their very soul."
ART: Sure. I didn't do that.
AUSTIN: "Hella is in a spiritual crossroads and only I can't see her through it."
ART: Yeah, that's the new one.
AUSTIN: Uh, Fan--
ART: And you have, "I respect--" Oh.
AUSTIN: I have "Fantasmo is a brave soul, I have much to learn from him."
ART: Oh, I don't know if--
AUSTIN: Which I think you could resolve.
ART: I think I can.
KEITH: Frankly, you could also resolve with Lem, for the same reason, where he was on your side with getting rid of the book.
AUSTIN (overlapping KEITH): You could resolve either one of those.
ART: Uh, I'll resolve Lem-- I'll resolve Fantasmo. Because--
AUSTIN: I think that's the one you've better-- Yeah.
KEITH: Yeah, that's a probably a better argument.
ART: I don't-- I don't even-- Like part of me just wants to drop it and get a bond with Dre. Like I am-- I am upset with that guy.
AUSTIN: I mean, you could take that as a bond but, but you could also take--
ART: But "I am upset with that guy," is a bad bond.
[ALI and KEITH laugh]
KEITH: That's-- Wait.
ART: "Fantasmo, comma, I am upset with that guy."
KEITH: That's my bond with you.
ALI: That's basically my bond with him, so...
KEITH: That's my bond with you, is that I'm upset with you.
ART: Uh... Oh... Oh 'cause it's just-- It would just be like hateful shit.
AUSTIN: We can save it. We can come back to it.
ART: Like it would just be like, "What a fucking dumb idiot." And that's not like good.
AUSTIN: No.
ART: Uh...
KEITH: You're breaking up Austin.
ART: You're breaking up, but I feel like you're providing wise council.
AUSTIN: No, all I said was, "No."
KEITH: We're breaking up, Austin.
AUSTIN: Wait. Us?
JACK: I'm sorry Austin?
ART: Yeah.
KEITH: Yeah, you're going to have to try one more time. I'll cut this out. [whispering] I won't.
AUSTIN: I'm typing.
NICK: I think he said, "Hit me in the eyes with a hot printer?"
ART: Oh, that was--
KEITH: He's typing in the chat.
ALI: All he said was, "No."
JACK: He seems--
KEITH: "All I said was, 'No.'" Oh.
ART: Uh, something like, uh... Oh, 'cause I can change 'brave' to like, 'foolhardy.' Like, Fantasmo's foolhardy behavior, you know, will-- will bring ruin to the-- to the very world.
AUSTIN: Foolhardy... Do you think that he's foolhardy?
KEITH: Yeah, because he thinks that he's wilfully endangering everyone.
AUSTIN: That feels stronger than foolhardy.
ART: Well it's like he doesn't-- he refuses to understand the danger of his actions.
AUSTIN: That sounds fool-- Okay, that's fair.
ART: Like we can tweak this. Like we can--
AUSTIN: Yeah, yeah. We can. But this-- The spirit--
ART: We can do drafts on this.
AUSTIN: The spirit of this is here. Sounds good. Uh... Hella.
ALI: Um, are we only allowed to do one bond?
AUSTIN: Yes.
ALI: Or... Okay. Um, hm. 'Cause I have... I have my bond with Nick that I am not impressed with him and I think that's resolved and I-- My feelings for him are much more extreme now.
AUSTIN: Okay. What are they now?
ALI: Where um, it's also hard wording it. Where like, can I say that like, Fantasmo-- I know that Fantasmo is suspicious of me and I'm also suspicious of him? Or is that...
AUSTIN: I'd go even more extreme than that, if you-- And again, you can make a new bond with anybody. It doesn't have to replace the one with him, you know what I mean?
ALI: Okay. But it--
AUSTIN: If you want to leave it in limbo, it can totally be.
ALI: No, but I definitely have strong feelings towards Fantasmo now, like--
AUSTIN: Okay.
ALI: Um, I guess, um... Like his suspicious of-- Or his accusations that he made towards me, uh --
AUSTIN: So like--
ALI: -- I don't want say something really bold, meaning that like, I don't want to work with him anymore but... [laughs]
AUSTIN: Sure, sure. What about like, Fantasmo knows my truth and he cannot be trusted?
ALI: Okay. But I-- Like, I don't-- I don't-- Hella doesn't consider what he's saying true. And I also sort of don't.
AUSTIN: Oh, okay.
ALI: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Well then that's--
ALI: 'Cause he thinks that she's like actively hiding something from the group and she's not.
AUSTIN: Yeah, yeah.
ALI: Sort of.
AUSTIN: Um...
ALI: But well so it would be um, Fantasmo's suspicion of me... whatever you just said. [laughs]
AUSTIN: Okay. Does anybody else want to help here?
KEITH: Um, Fantasmo's...
ALI: Well, no, Austin, what did you just say?
AUSTIN: I said, "and he can't be trusted," but like that first part is--
ALI: Okay, yeah so. Right. So...
AUSTIN: Unfounded...
KEITH: "Fantasmo's unfounded suspicion of me is-- is--"
ALI: Yeah.
KEITH: Um, uh... Hate it. I hate it.
ALI: It would be like, I know Fantasmo doesn't trust me and I also don't trust him.
NICK: Yeah.
ART: What a raving nutbar, Fantasmo is.
AUSTIN: Jeez. Nick, you're playing your character very well.
[KEITH and ALI laugh]
AUSTIN: I think everyone thinks that.
NICK: I'm really happy.
AUSTIN: Okay.
[NICK laughs]
ART: Yea, no, that wasn't-- Yeah. Absolutely.
NICK: No, no, no, I am so happy that everyone hates me right now.
AUSTIN: [AUSTIN and ART laugh] Uh, yeah, this is good for the arc I think you have in mind. Alright, so last thing here is Alignments. Uh, Nick, Lawful. The Great Fantasmo says, "Gain respect through power." Do you think you gained respect through power today?
NICK: Uh... Gosh, um. I mean, like, not-- Yeah, I think I did. Not-- Not a respect in the positive light.
AUSTIN: Sure.
NICK: But like, these people--
AUSTIN: Yeah.
NICK: These people are scared of me now.
AUSTIN: Yeah, that's fair. Take 1, so you, on my paper you're at 10.
NICK: And I-- I can tell that.
AUSTIN: Mhm. Uh, Fero's was destroy a symbol of old civilization.
NICK: Yup.
KEITH: No, I was going to but everybody yelled at me.
AUSTIN: Yeah, I know. Uh, Lem is to avoid a conflict or defuse a tense situation.
KEITH: Hold on I can break one of these knives.
AUSTIN: It's not a symbol. It's just a holder of that. Jack...
JACK: I don't think that happened.
AUSTIN: No, you didn't really-- You could've at the very end there but it just didn't go that way.
JACK: I don't think that happened at all. Um...
AUSTIN: Yeah. Uh, Art. Hadrian, deny mercy to a criminal or unbeliever.
JACK: Sorry, Austin?
AUSTIN: Yeah?
JACK: You're breaking up.
ART: Austin, you're breaking up.
AUSTIN: Oh boy.
KEITH: Yeah.
JACK: Yeah.
ART: Oh, I could've let you--
AUSTIN: Am I back? Can you hear me?
ART: No, did I?
KEITH: I don't think so.
ART: Absolutely not.
AUSTIN: No, I don't think you did.
ART: Yeah.
ALI: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Um. And Hella, kill a defenseless or surrendered enemy? How do you bring it up? Ope, our video stopped.
ART: I reached the four hour group video limit.
AUSTIN: Jesus.
ALI: [laughing] Oh my God.
KEITH: Me too.
AUSTIN: Okay.
JACK: Yup.
AUSTIN: This is part of why I want smaller groups. This is part of why I want smaller groups. [ALI laughs] Uh, 'cause this is just too long.
NICK: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Uh, Hella also didn't-- Hella, what's your total XP at right now?
ALI: Uh, it's 3... It's 8.
AUSTIN: Okay. Let's say that's game. We'll talk over the next week or two to figure out who's gonna be in what group.
JACK: Cool, cool.
NICK: Okay.
ART: Great.
[TIMESTAMP: 2:21:23]
AUSTIN: That's for joining us, everybody.
KEITH: Okay.
AUSTIN: You can again find me @austin_walker on twitter, theCalcultec on twitch, clockworkWorlds.com for the stuff that I write. Uh, please tell people that you're listening to this. I know that this is like, the point in which I'm supposed to do that and say that. Uh, welcome to Friends at the Table, we really enjoy this and would like to keep doing it.
NICK: Yeah.
AUSTIN: Who else joined me today? Let's start with Nick.
NICK: Uh, my name is Nick. You can find me at twitch, twitter, youtube/DrEvilBones.
AUSTIN: Uh, next up, let's say Keith.
KEITH: Uh, my name is Keith Carberry, you can find me on twitter @somethingDumb, you can find the let's plays that I do at RunButton.net or youtube.com/RunButton, where there's many different series that you can check out that we do. Um, you can also go to uh, ContentBurger.biz if you want to toss some money our way.
AUSTIN: Uh, Art.
ART: Art Tebbel, you can find me on twitter @ATebbel. You can read things that I write at ComicMix and uh, that's really it.
AUSTIN: Ali?
ALI: Uh, my name is Alicia Acampora, you can find me @ali_west on twitter.
AUSTIN: Uh, great. And Jack who has stayed up way too late for this.
JACK: I'm pretty-- I'm pretty sleepy.
AUSTIN: Yeah.
[ALI and NICK laugh]
AUSTIN: It's a long day.
JACK: My name is-- My name is Jack de Quidt. You can find me on twitch and twitter @NotQuiteReal, and at my game studio's website, theToolTreesGames.co.uk.
KEITH: Jack, have you ever quit somebody and then someone told you, "Uh, more like Jack de Quit?"
AUSTIN: Woof.
JACK: Uh, well people constantly mispronounce my name, like that, for about all of my life, so I was-- Yeah, that's-- That happens quite a lot. Yeah.
KEITH: Okay.
AUSTIN: Have a good week, or weekend. We'll see you next-- here next week and we'll see where this goes.
[Music - "Autumn not Winter" starts]
ALI: Oh, um and it goes without saying that you can find all of us at StreamFriends.tv or twitch.tv/StreamFriends.
AUSTIN: That is true.
KEITH: Uh, and then...
ART: That is not what "goes without saying," sounds like.
[ALI and AUSTIN laugh]
KEITH: And then also, thanks-- Special thanks to Keith Carberry for editing.
AUSTIN: Uh-huh.
KEITH: Uh, and...
AUSTIN: And Jack de Quidt for recording the amazing intro, too.
NICK: Yeah.
AUSTIN: And maybe to Cra*g/Gr*g for doing the art. We'll see.
KEITH: I'll bl**p those. I gotta bl**p those.
AUSTIN: [laughs] Have a good night. Bye.
KEITH: Let me timestamp that, 3:56.
AUSTIN: Bye.
JACK: Bye bye.
AUSTIN: Bye everybody.
ART: Bye.
ALI: Bye.
AUSTIN: Alright, we need to do a clap.
NICK: Yeah.
KEITH: Okay, yeah.
JACK: Okay.
KEITH: Alright.
ART: Go back to the website time.is.
KEITH: Are we doing time.is or "three, two, one"?
JACK: Are we doing time.is?
AUSTIN: The website.
KEITH: The website time.is.
JACK: Time.is...
KEITH: And Jack, while you're there, you should take a look at the text that says, "Your clock is blank seconds ahead."
JACK: Uh-huh. It says my clock is 15 seconds behind.
AUSTIN: My clock is 35.9 seconds ahead.
KEITH: Okay, mine is 3.6 seconds ahead.
AUSTIN: These clocks-- Okay. At--
ART: I'm two-and-a-half.
AUSTIN: At 53:55.
JACK: Okay.
KEITH: Okay, yeah.
ART: Sure.
[out of sync claps]
KEITH: That was like a joke.
[Music - "Autumn not Winter" ends]