Quick Plug: Monday night (the 3rd) is our sixth-month anniversary meeting of Board Game Night at Gate City Growlers on Battlegound Avenue. We’ll be playing Pathfinder.
Slightly slower plug: From the ashes of Johnny of Greensboro’s D&D Meetup comes the Gate City OSR Discord. Recruit players, find GMs, all that nerdly networking stuff. I hear the young-uns can even play games by voice chat.
Over Christmas, I finally got around to watching Season 2 of The Devil is a Part-Timer! First season had some good banter, but the majority of the humor was situational, playing off the absurdity of an inter-dimensional demon lord working the registers at a fast-food place, while simultaneously being stalked by a vengeful holy warrior from her post in a local call center. His demon lieutenants were both neurotic losers, and since his nice-girl co-worker was still in high school, her intense and not-at-all-secret crush on him was . . . uncomfortable.
Season Two continues and deepens those relationships while introducing new characters like Gabriel the blue-haired surfer angel, while simultaneously ramping up the wordplay to MCU levels. Like every character is suddenly Tony Snark, Irony Man.
Devil does not feel the need to maintain a PG-13 rating, however, so there’s a lot of scatology before they find their rhythm in the later episodes. Just saying.
Going to Ground in Gosterwick
This little scene is our first example of the Testing a Scene mechanic in Mythic, and of the system not cooperating.
4 → Interrupt → Move Away from a Thread
5 → Laudanum and Malice again, Action table 1 → 77 Repair, table 2 →Extravagance
Laudanum visits the smaller Temple of Mitra in Gosterwick.
Will they
healpurify her? 80 not for freeWhat if she swears an oath to find Lilian? Unlikely. 70 No
Has Klimt told them where they’re going? Very Unlikely. 43 No
What if she swears an oath to stop Malice? Unlikely. 70 No
She leaves angry and defeated, but determined.
Can Cosmos Cure Poison? Likely. 38 Yes
cravings gone, temporarily
A Heated Exchange
Cap was recovering from his infection in the calidarium (the hot room) at Kaelo’s Bathhouse. From Rick Barton’s description:
The bathhouse is a democratic institution in Archontean culture; one is likely to encounter people of all classes here. Although many enjoy a rousing debate or argument at the baths, brawling and/or physical confrontation is considered bad form; indeed, Kaelo will have his guys apprehend and expel any who break his rules. Kaelo pays the Benevolent Brotherhood a portion of his monthly earnings for security and protection
So less fairy-tale than the one in Spirited Away. Also less steam-punk-ish, though not necessarily less capitalist.1
I really had no idea how this was going to go. Were we looking at an abduction? An ultimatum? An assassination attempt?
Lorak stepped back out into the daylight, squinting and grimacing. He had been all through the baths, trying to lay eyes on his daughter’s killer, only to find him standing in the middle of the street, staring him down. The description Turpentine’s last living guard had given him was clear and accurate: a short yellowish fellow wearing an blue cloak of expensive make but frayed condition. “You the chief of the Lone Pines?”
Lorak was armed and Cap Doffer was not. Lorak started towards him, hands open, sword sheathed, sure that he could overpower the smaller goblin if necessary. Townies were soft from easy living.
He was perhaps three steps away when Cap lifted the flap on the leather satchel hanging from his shoulder and shoved it forwards. Out of it rushed an impossibly large cloud of flapping birds, full into Lorak’s face. He stepped backwards, surprised, but did not fall. He reached for his sword and it wasn’t there.
Cap Doffer had the blade, pointed at Lorak’s throat. “Did she live?”
“No.”
“The ant that tore her spear arm off was defending me. She stabbed me. In the back. I can show you the wound.”
Lorak sighed. “That one was crazy.”
Cap stepped back and lowered the sword, but did not return it. “I can’t pay weregild at this exact moment,” he said, referring to the Thorcin custom of blood money, “but I have a line on two thousand gold. It’s yours if we can come to some agreement.”
Lorak presented his thinking face as though he was considering. “Only life can pay for life,” he said, in his best impression of a noble savage. “Not gold, not death,” he continued. “I lost a child. I am owed a child.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“I have another daughter, not so stabby. She is being held here.”
“A jailbreak? Are you shitting me?” Cap seemed madder about that idea than either physical assault.
“No, no,” said Lorak, eyeing an approaching Knight of the Azure Shield on horseback. “And keep your voice down.”
The Knight apparently did not speak Goblin, but he did notice the drawn sword. “Put that away, Citizen,” he barked, his hand on his own longer sword, hanging from his saddle.
Cap flipped the blade around and handed it back to Lorak, hilt first. “Of course, sir knight,” he said in polished Archontean. “It’s a fine weapon, but not worth what he’s asking for it.” The knight rode on, looking smug.
“Smooth,” said Lorak, in Goblin. “What other tricks have you got in that bag?”
“None,” said Cap, turning it over and shaking it out, “just a lot of dried-out pigeon shit. There’s a spell on it that shrinks ‘em down so they can fit in the little pockets.” He stepped away from the dried white droppings, which also grew in size as they fell to the muddy ground. “Now I gotta wait here until the flappy bastards calm down and find their way back.” He reached into another pouch and started sprinkling grain onto the slightly fresher patch of stinking mud as he scanned the sky. “Tell me more about your girl’s unfortunate situation.”
Shrink is not in basic OSE, but it’s a standard magic-user spell in other versions of D&D. Under-used, in my opinion. Cap’s satchel would be much cheaper to make than a Bag of Holding, and safer for the birds.2 There’s also a low level version of a clerical spell, Create Water, reversed to Destroy Water, on the bag for pigeon-hygiene purposes. A present from Cap’s family back in Narsileon. Probably has the Pigeon Post logo on it somewhere, which looks nothing like this.
Does Lorak find him there? 50/50. 88 No
Does Cap see him coming? Unlikely. 23 Yes
Does Cap lose Lorak when he leaves? 50/50. 85 No
Does Cap approach him in the street? Unlikely. 19 Yes
Does Cap apologize? 50/50. 38 Yes
Does Lorak accept? Very Unlikely. 16 Yes
Was I wrong about his daughter dying? 50/50. 68 No
Does Lorak want ca$h, like a weregild (blood money)? Likely. 79 No
Does he want a replacement child? Likely. 37 Yes
Does he have another daughter? Likely. 35 Yes
Does Cap have to marry her? Very Likely. 07 Exceptional Yes
Right now? Unlikely. 28 Yes
Is she here, now, outside the town? Very Unlikely. 93 Exceptional No
Do we have to rescue her? 50/50. 14 Yes
Well, dang. Maybe I should have seen that coming, but I did not.
A Hottie Heist Scenario
There are many, many sub-types of the Rescue trope. I’ll let you decide which one this is. My subtitle is not one of them; I was just trying too hard with the alliteration.
from the Gnolls? 50/50. 52 Yes
Are they at the Paw? Likely. 22 Yes < Chaos Factor 6 so Random Event
NPC Action → involving the faction Temple of Heschius Ban
Action table 1 02 Accompany, Action table 2 03 Agreement
So she’s not at the Paw with the Gnolls, but here in Gosterwick, working as a garden slave at Urdenna Belst’s palatial new house, under construction by other illegally obtained Goblin slaves. Lady Alexia has outlawed slavery, locally; it’s a whole thing.
(The girl has a way with plants.)
Can they buy her back? Very Unlikely. 95 Exceptional no
So stealing her it is.
Does Cosmos have enough mushrooms to trip the whole household? Very Likely. 57 Yes
Target food (yes) or wine (no)? Likely. Yes, food
Is the high priestess Urdenna Belst on site? Likely. 00 Exceptional Yes
Random Event → PC Negative
50 Intellect 94 Usurp
Cap runs into Urdenna Belst herself while searching the compound.
Did she save vs poison? 1 Critical failure!3
She is so far gone on Cosmos’s psychedelic brew that she is wandering around her garden, naked and unable to cast spells or give coherent orders, but Cap’s face and voice are burned into her memory forever.
It was not a good trip for her.
She will have nightmares and flashbacks about Cap.
Her god of domination and control is not happy with her.
Urdenna Belst is a high-level cleric, head of a powerful official religion, highly placed within the empire politically. And though she doesn’t know his name, Cap Doffer gets the entire blame for her abject humiliation in front of her followers and her god. That’s not good.
To add insult to injury:
Let’s Meet Cap’s New Fiancee!
I had already decided this based on her stats
str 6 (not yet an adult), int 13, wis11, dex11, con 9 (not yet an adult), chr15
but the Chiho connection from Devil just amplified the comedy in my mind. Suddenly Cap is informally betrothed to a tween. Thankfully there’s no parental / cultural expectation of consummating anything at this point.
And at least she’ll be cute when she comes of age (Charisma 15!). However that might work with not-at-all-human Goblins in a fictional fantasy world.
I took it a little easier with the NPC tables this time.
motivations 15 Death and 69 Official
She wants revenge against Urdenna Belst and imperial recognition for her tribe.
personality 63 Mercurial and 60 Likable
So not a tsundere and not a nice girl, but potentially sharing some qualities of both.
Before anybody freaks out at the arranged marriage thing, I knew a guy in Lexington, a co-worker on the graveyard shift at the LexMark computer tape library where they stored prescription records for Eckerd and such, who happened to be from Pakistan. To hear him tell it, he completely trusted his parents to choose his bride.
They love me, he said. And I’m totally inexperienced in these matters.
They will choose much better than I would.
Knowing my own parents and their preferences, I could never in a million years have agreed with him, but like the Great Pumpkin I was impressed with his sincerity and always remembered that particular late-night exchange of ideas.
Obviously an n-of-one anecdote, don’t overgeneralize, blah blah blah. I happened across the original Disney short The Three Caballeros the other night, which I had never seen before. There was a long disclaimer at the beginning about how stereotypes were wrong then and they’re wrong now, but the company wanted us to see it uncut for purposes of historical completeness.
There was also a revival effort in 2018 or so. I got through the first episode.
Thanks for reading!
https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc51.2009/SpiritedAway/
An insightful essay from an outlet I had never heard of before called Jump Cut.
“Once the spirit takes a bath and Chihiro removes the stinking refuse from it, it turns back into a noble river spirit. Such an incident within the Yuya imply that the Yuya’s business depends for its success on the neglect of spiritual value in post-modern Japan.”
The question of how much air is inside a Bag of Holding has come up many times.
It seems possible to die from an overdose of psychedelics, but very rare. Most often people hurt themselves, either accidentally or on purpose, though free will on drugs is a touchy subject philosophically.
We did not in fact end up playing PATHFINDER. Somebody brought a copy of this classic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_War_(card_game)
I posted this a day early because of a conversation in the comments of this post.
https://www.woman-of-letters.com/p/editors-dont-want-male-novelists
I corrected the day of Board Game Night to Monday the 3rd, but couldn't recall the e-mails. Sorry about that.