A Rather Odd Shovel [Judge: Bront]

[sblock=ooc]I started a response to this earlier today, got distracted by something else, then several times when I tried to come back to it, I couldn't seem to manage to pick up the thread of what I was going to say. Which I suppose you could interpret as indicative of something relevant to the topic: Either that I'm not quite engaged enough to keep my attention on it, or that I'm not really quite clear on what it is that I was going to say in the first place, or simply that I'm stretched too thin. Any of those things is plausible, but... Eh. Analogy stretched too thin.

With respect to the game itself, I think we should certainly shoulder some of the blame, Rae. We seem to keep getting bogged down in the details of our clever plans, waiting on someone specific to post, and then when they do, we seem to keep managing to post in such a way that it's not clear whose turn it is to do something. I mean, if we had said two months ago, something like this: "Our plan is to find Turket, steal him away using a barrage of illusion magic to cover our tracks, then pump him for information. Here's how we plan to go about it: Fimble casts X, Tommy casts Y, then blah blah blah...", well, you could have responded with "It all goes well, but when you get in, Turket isn't home." We'd have gotten to where we are now, months ago. Instead we've tried to be coy, and gotten tangled up in our own plan. Roughly the same thing happened when we crafted stuff; we spend weeks in real time planning (dithering about?) what we were going to craft, instead of just getting on with it.

Part of it is just the inevitable PbP slowdown with age. Every single PbP game I've seen, in any forum, starts off with a flurry of activity, but gets gradually slower and slower until either it ends and the party splits up, or it trails off into silence. Continuations with the same DM and same players don't get a reset, unfortunately; it seems to count as the same game for purposes of post-frequency decay. In that sense, this game has lasted since almost the beginning of Tommy's career, years ago.

Another part of it is the open-endedness of this adventure. From the moment we arrived in Fallon, we've effectively had the whole city to play with, sandbox-style. That's great with eager, motivated parties who can agree with each other on what to do first, but with a party full of followers who like to second-guess themselves and each other... Well, maybe a bit more of a linear plot is called for? I feel a bit dirty saying that, but...

Finally, I wish I were well enough inside Tommy's head that I could generate a post for him in five minutes. It's usually more like 20 minutes these days, and I'm easily distracted.

I'd like to continue, if we can find a way forward. I'm still fond of Tommy (and of Keldar... I'd watch the Keldar Show) and I'd like to see this wrapped up nicely.
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Tommy follows the others into the Rope Trick. "Keldar, can you change back to yourself? I'll never be able to pay attention if I keep seeing the face we're looking for out of the corner of my eye."

[sblock=OOC]I am still reading this thread, if that matters![/sblock]

"I, uh, well, I suppose," says Keldar. He jiggles with the ribbon tying back his long blond hair, and resumes his normal be-hatted form, looking darker, smaller and crestfallen.

"Turkey'd have been all 'Aiee! It's my evil twin!', only, you know, good, because he's already evil, and we'd.... So. Here, we are, sitting in a featureless invisible box in the middle of I don't know where. It's going well."

Tommy sighs pensively. "I hope so. What if Turket skipped town just this morning? Or is spending the night with a... a lady friend? We'll look pretty foolish then..."

He sniffs the air, wrinkling his nose. "Who ate onions this morning? Ugh!"

"If we get to feeling too foolish, we'll skip out and come back another day," Keldar returns.

"You know, I don't think anyone had onions," he adds after a moment. "It's... I think it's coming from Tarag's haversack and my quiver."

You sit in the extradimensional space, peering through the window below you, the faint smell of onions hanging in the air. Before long, it's not onions you smell, but salt water. Then, amazingly, a flipfish leaps out of Keldar's quiver, landing with a thick, wet smack on the black ground. It flops about, gills gasping.

Then Tarag's haversack bulges outward. Suddenly, it belches a geyser of fresh water straight up, splashing all of you. As the bag continues to spurt watery mist, a whisper reaches your ears.

"Attention... The Sentinel has designated this use of magic as disruptive to the Fallonese magic matrix... Please dispel it immediately... Attention... The Sentinel..."

The flipfish flops about, Keldar's quiver begins to tremble, and Tarag's bag is now coughing up mud and dirt along with the water. The window to the material plane begins to warp at the edges.

And at this moment, the cellar door opens, and in walks Vlad Turket. He closes the door carefully behind him, and bars it from this side. He doesn't seem to have noticed you. But that flipfish is flopping dangerously close to the rope...

"Tommy, it's a recursive dimensional inversion!" Fimble squeaks.

"I think you'll find it's a flipfish," says Keldar, getting to his feet hastily to avoid it.

"No, no," Fimble explains agitatedly, "to put it simply, under the greater pressure of the magical energies that maintain the operation of Fallon's geysers, the extradimensional spaces that lie beyond the apparent interiors bounded by the mundane materials of your magical containers -"

Fimble breaks off as the warning message sounds.

"Eh? Sentinel? Disruptive? Well, I can see that for myself! Dispel? Ah, yes, dispel, yes," Fimble says. "Everyone - "

"Here he is, it's him, he's here, here he is!" Keldar interrupts.

"If it's not one thing it's another," says Fimble. "Make ready, everyone. We are leaving here the fast way."

Fimble recites the syllables needed to instantly dismiss the Rope Trick.

"Dimensional inversion? Oh, no! Fimble, quick, dispaaaauuuugh!!" Tommy's sentence turns to an involuntary shout as as Fimble anticipates his request and dismisses the rope trick.

ooc: How do we proceed? Initiative? Surprise round?

Tarag, who had leapt to his feet when the flipfish appeared, hits the ground running, and charges at Turket, attempting to grapple him and drag him to the ground.