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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Old Fezziwig" data-source="post: 9559466" data-attributes="member: 59">I've been meaning to continue this, and, now that the game has wrapped up, it seems like a good time.Yorath struggles along the donkey path into the Great Wood.  As he works his way down, he feels the coldness of Persefoni welling up within him.  “We don’t need to suffer like this.  It’s a simple matter of casting the ring into the waters below.  It’ll sink to the bottom and never be worn again.”  Yorath says, “No, give me back my sight and serve Helior like you should.”*  He thinks for a moment. "Let me prove Helior's worth to you."  Persefoni is intrigued.  "Make a sacrifice to the Void. Turn something to its worship."No dice.  "How does that prove the greatness of Helior?  What if I turn the Pale Hunter** to Helior's worship?"She accepts this offer. And, really, why not?  She has nearly nothing at stake here: either Yorath proves it and she concedes, or he fails and she's free.  She gives Yorath his sight back, and he heads northward looking for the Pale Hunter. He looks carefully for previous landmarks that he'd encountered in the forest***, the den of Crinwinn or the tree poisoned by the Things Below. And he does find evidence of sinkholes, but everything looks the same to him, and he eventually finds himself stuck in a ravine deep in the afternoon.  It's a dead-end, and the canopy is so full that it's dark.  His only choices are to climb up the walls, 60 or more feet straight up a vertical crag, or to turn around and go back. It's at this point that he's noticed the forest has gone very quiet.---Meanwhile, back in Stonetop, Vahid has spoken to the Elders and told them to lock the gates no one in or out.  Then he goes to Branwyn and picks up her dogs, Cushie and Culann.  Yorath has a forty-minute head start, but Vahid at least has an idea of where he might be going and heads down the donkey path to the Great Woods.  When he reaches the basin at the bottom of the trail, he pulls out a bit of Yorath's mummer suit† and shows it to the hounds.  Like that, they're off.††The dogs track Yorath all over the Great Woods, only to lose his trail when he started moving eastward. His intentions are clear to Vahid, as is where he missed the mark.  What's worse, Yorath was being stalked the whole time.  As near as Vahid can tell, it's big and serpent-like.  It's gaining on him, and there's no evidence that Yorath has a clue.---In the ravine, Yorath decides to camp where he is.†††  He looks for a spot where he won't be too obvious.  The crag has a pretty claustrophobic overhang at the bottom, a notch created by water over time, roughly human-sized and covered with deadfall.  At about the same time, Yorath notices a colossal constrictor.  It's roughly the size of an anaconda, with two frontal t-rex style arms and a head with a swept-back frill and shaggy jowls.  It's not friendly.‡Yorath looks at the notch carefully and discards it as an option: if he gets into the burrow, he's in trouble.  The snake thing will grab him, bite him, then suffocate him.‡‡  Instead, he pulls a torch out his pack and tries to scare it away.  It doesn't work entirely, as the snake drops down at Yorath, clipping him.  He yells at the snake, driving it off.‡‡‡---Vahid can hear Yorath cursing and crunching on leaves.  He tells the dogs, "go find Yorath for me," and lets them go.  The dogs catch up to Yorath.  They are thrilled.  Do they know the snake is here?  Do they care?  Who knows?§While greeting the dogs, Yorath looks around.  What's not what it appears to be?  Way, way up in a tree at the top of the ravine, leaning out on a branch, he spots the snake, perfectly still, surveying things and waiting for the perfect moment to move.  It's almost surely going to take a breather than stalk the group until it has an opportunity.Vahid comes around the corner and sees Yorath scanning the canopy.  "Are you going to play with them or birdwatch?""I'm snakewatching.""Is that what's been tracking you?""It's a giant snake with hands?""Hrm.  So did you have a plan, or did you come out here to sulk?""I'm looking for the Pale Hunter.  We're going to teach him to worship Helior."Vahid raises an eyebrow, but says nothing about the plan.  He does fill him in on Persefoni's freelancing, and his theory of the Void and Helior.§§They talk about the possibility of fen-walkers to the east.  Vahid gives him a smudge of bendis root, which he explains will slow the fen blight.  Vahid also gives him some liquid to drink. He does not explain what this is for.  It becomes apparent shortly: it's a diuretic, and, when Yorath urinates, his urine smells of the Fen (one of the joys of fen blight).  The dogs pick up this scent and attempt to lead them to the bog.†††,§§§Around midnight, the group emerges into the Fen.  It's foggy as hell and dark; there are no will-o-wisps and only minimal light, but somewhere out in the distance the smoke billows up into the sky.  Vahid frowns. "Yorath, is the fen safe?"  The mummer shrugs, it's been a while since he's been here, and he's had bad experiences in both the fen and forest.  Naturally, this is when the snake reappears, reaching down for Vahid.Vahid sidesteps the attack and turns on the snake with his spear, pinning it momentarily and creating an opening for Yorath, who pulls out his iron knife and jabs the snake.This is when Yorath and Vahid realize the snake has a rattle on its tail.  The snake rattles its tail, and fear wells up in the two Stonetoppers.Vahid studies the snake for a moment, taking a nasty claw wound for his trouble.  Yorath gets the other claw, but his armor deflects the blow.The seeker stabs at the tail with the twisted spear, severing it in an unholy mess.The snake's had enough, and Yorath lets it slither off into the Wood.^ As it slithers away, their lantern gutters, and they're left in the moonlight.  It's time for camp, so they use the dogs to identify some better ground, which they find.^^  It's about twenty feet across, firm and elevated, and marked by the hollow of a thick willow tree.  Around the tree are quartz markings.  It's a language but unreadable at the moment.  For lack of options, they stay and settle in.  Yorath prays, while Vahid makes a bendis root tincture (which will both stretch their store of bendis root and make it last longer).  As they settle down to sleep, Yorath asks, "Are you praying to the Void, Vahid?"The Lygosian shakes his head.  "You never really pray to the Void.  You empty your mind to it and consider your own insignificance."[SPOILER="Footnotes"]* Defy Danger, +CHA, 9, pushing into a Persuade, +CHA, 8.** The Pale Hunter is an entity living in the Great Wood.  I always thought of it as kind of a primeval forest spirit version of the Green Knight mixed with the Black Racer from the New Gods.  Drawing the attention of the Pale Hunter is not great.  Naturally, we sought out the Pale Hunter quite a bit.  In an earlier expedition, Branwyn, who was a PC at that time, convinced him to kill Maeve, a Manmarcher barbarian that had taken control of Marshedge. And before I joined the game, a group of Marshedger woodsman went too far into the forest after some cave bears, and the Pale Hunter "took" all of them, despite Yorath's attempts to bargain.  *** Seek Insight, +INT, 4. † Two comments here: (1) one of the special gear that the Fox can start with is a mummer's kit, described as "juggling balls, whirlybird seeds, motley, ribbons, bells, puppets, a fiddle, etc." [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER] used it liberally and cleverly during some of the early sessions I was in.  To the point where I would suggest checking the mummer's kit as a solution for just about any problem.  This was partly me on my nonsense again but also because it was always fun. (2) Vahid is loosely based on Batman, including Batman's tendency to do things he thinks are necessary without gathering appropriate permission or telling people.  I spent minor loadout on the mummer's suit piece to use for the scene.  We never bothered to narrate how or when Vahid acquired this and whether Yorath knew, leaving it as a creepy mystery. †† Dogs, Track, +2 tags, 6 > Vahid, burn brightly, 7. It's worth noting here that we frequently roll very poorly and find ourselves in, er, "spots of bother" because of it.  Most of our rolls this session are in the 7-9 bracket, so "soft hits" that end up introducing complications.  Towards the end of this session, we have an unusual string of high rolls, which I mention now because of how unusual it is.  Things returned to normal with a vengeance in the next session.††† What.‡ Forage, +WIS, 7.  I'm not sure we ever succeeded on a Forage move during the game.  And I don't know what success would look like if we had — on a 10+, you get to pick 2 out of a menu of options, one of which is "You avoid danger or risk (else, there is some)," and on a 7-9, you get to pick one of the options.  I think in play, this tends to end up in a situation where you're always giving up something on a 10+ (if only to pick avoiding danger in lieu of something more fun), which doesn't feel like success.  In this case, I think the choice was "You discover something interesting or useful" (the notch), which revealed the danger (the snake-beast, which I think was what the game calls a chimera, though I didn't identify it as such in my notes).  ‡‡ Danger Sense, +INT, 9.  Another Q&A move: "You can always ask the GM, “Is there an ambush or trap here?” If they say “yes,” roll +INT."  If you could quantify how much I dislike Forage as a move (nothing beats getting kicked in the teeth on a success), I like this move design equally on the other end of the scale.  There are a number of these types of moves in the playbooks, and I always felt like they pushed play into interesting directions.  ‡‡‡ Defy Danger, advantage, +INT, 7. Yorath took 2 damage here.§ Here are the stats for the dogs: trackers, keen-nosed, fast; HP 6, Dmg d6 (hand, grabby); Instinct: to give chase; Cost: training. +2 for tracking. 15/10, they're good dogs, Brent.§§ From <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/actual-play-stonetop-or-how-to-make-friends-and-influence-people.704678/post-9378368" target="_blank">last session</a>: "In the back of the crowd, Vahid clocked the magical energies and uses his Countermeasures move to assess how Persefoni might be countered. He gathers that the air spirit's freelancing here and suborning the Void's authority by acting out."  Vahid's theory came up elsewhere, but the gist of it is that Helior and the Void are two sides of the same god.  This is, at risk of understatement, a pretty unorthodox theory.§§§ I don't remember this beat from play at all, but it's in my notes.  At some point during this stretch, we also dealt with why is Vahid not contracting fen blight?  Apparently he innoculated himself with a specific, presumably Lygosian, poison and is for the moment immune.  He feels like hot buttered garbage, though (Defy Danger, +Con, 8, takes the miserable condition).^ Part of the reason that I wanted to pick this up again was because of this combat.  It's a really nice example of how the game works in combat.  It was tense at the table and had great momentum.  This is where our luck with the dice turned over for a bit:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Vahid, Defy Danger, +DEX, advantage from knowing it was coming back, 12. Sidestep snake, menace with spear.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Vahid, Work With What You’ve Got, +INT, 10. Pin snake, 2 damage, create opening for Yorath</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Yorath, Clash, +STR, advantage from Vahid's Work With What You've Got, 11.  3 damage.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Snake rattles its tail and attacks.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Vahid, Countermeasures when the snake rattles its tail.  The tail is its weak spot.  We can deal full damage on it.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Vahid, Defy Danger, +WIS, 9.  No fear effect, but 4 damage from the claw.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Yorath, Defy Danger, +CHA, 8.  No fear effect, and his armor negates damage from the claw.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> Vahid, Clash, +STR, advantage from Countermeasures, 13.  6 damage, and the spear has the messy tag.</li> </ul>^^ Dogs, Forage, +1, 8. We found something interesting (the hollow) and something dangerous (the quartz markings).  We also made a fortune roll here (1d6: 1-3 trouble, 4-5 issue/opportunity, 6 all good) and pulled a 5 on it.  But that's for next session.[/SPOILER]</blockquote>

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