Piratecat's Updated Story Hour! (update 4/03 and 4/06)

[Jairami]

(IIRC, the defenders came up with teh innovative solution of polymorphing Malachite into a tape worm and having Tom Tom swallow him. That way, Tom Tom could get through becasue he was infected with a disease, Malachite the tape worm, and Malachite could get through because he was a disease.)

Thankfully TomTom didn't have to swallow Malachite, someone just held the little worm in their hand, stuck their hand temporarily in the bag of holding, and walked through while he was in there.

Else TomTom would have gotten a taste of Nolin's wonderful ring to get Malachite back out.

 

[Atticus_of_Amber]

So what's the plan?

So I suppose it's good you're not an arcane caster then, aye? You'd probably be dead seven times over. Oh, and live on the east coast... of China.

LightPhoenix

So, Blackjack, what's the plan?

For what it's worth, if I were in your shoes and had come to the same conclusion about Sir Ghouleax being a distraction from the White Kingdom, I'd have simply ignored him and gone about my business. But, then again, there is the possibility he's leading the Church Militant into a huge trap. But what can you do about that?

Are you going to gather all the former Knights of the Emerald Chappel? Sort of like one of the Three Musketeer movies where Cardinal Richelieu bans the musketeers and they all keep their old tabbards and turn up at the critical moment.

I imagine, a whole bunch of Hunters of the Dead would be useful right now.

Question: To become a Hunter of the Dead, a character must have been previously energy drained by an undead. So:

(1) What was Sir Malachite's "critical experience"? and

(2) Are all the Emeral Chappelars Hunters of the Dead? If so, that's one nasty initiation requirement!

And BTW, if they arent all Hunters of the Dead, are they all paladins?

 

[coyote6]

If he is NOT Aleax, it would have been... bad... for him, and answered a lot of questions.

If he IS Aleax, it's his sword AND his soul-- I don't see how Malachite could lay claim to it.

I wonder if Malachite was more afraid of hurting Aleax, hurting his own reputation, or if it was just as simple as not wanting to lose his nifty sword.

Nah. You left off the most obvious possibility -- there's no reason to think that the White Kingdom wouldn't know about St. Aleax the sword. So, if Ghouleax is really part of a White Kingdom plot (whether or not he's actually Aleax at all, and whether or not he knows the truth), then it would be quite reasonable to assume that they had a plan to deal with the sword. In that case, handing the sword over might be a good way to lose a valuable weapon against the White Kingdom.

Hand it over to him, and zap! A contingency triggers Mordenkainen's disjunction, a curse, or even a mere teleport -- goodbye sword.

Hell, who knows -- maybe the sword is one of the Kingdom's big targets -- maybe it's the undead-destroying artifact, or the key to some such thing.

Hmm -- combine some kind of teleportational swap with an illusionary light show (as the sword & the saint "reunite" or whatever), have Ghouleax announce that "You, Malachite, are worthy of this blade" and hand it back -- now Malachite's carrying a ringer sword, some sort of intelligent evil blade that'll fool one and all into thinking it's the holy blade. Then, when the chips are down, the sword turns on the Defenders, and things really go to hell.

Or, hey, Ghouleax really is Aleax, or at least some part of him -- but he's still the White Kingdom's creature. So skeletal saint touches sword, sword recognizes saint, and sword announces that Mr. Bones is the guy that ought to be wielding him. But as soon as Ghouleax touched the sword, the sword became theirs, too. Now, when the time was right, the Kingdom would just flip the off switch, and Aleax (sword and saint both) would go away. Oops, hope nobody needed 'em.

Plenty of ways for sneaky evil undead guys to rig the game. So -- nah. Not letting him touch the sword was the smart play. Though I would've been direly tempted, just to see what happened.

 

[Magnus]

i've only discovered this story a few weeks ago, in this incarnation. the huge number of pages in most of the story hours seemed too daunting for me to catch up, having only joined the boards since around December. i haven't posted here before, because i mostly felt like an outsider reading over someone's shoulder, plus wittier members usually beat me to anything i wanted to say.

but i just have to say:
OH! MY! FREAKING! GOODNESS!
in addition to the obviously brilliant DMing, PCat's writing in this Story Hour is superb! when i got to the point where the sword was demanded, i had to pause and take a breath before continuing. i have very vivid images of every scene that i read in this story.

i want to offer some kind of congratulations to you, PirateCat, and of course to the stellar players you have, for an amazing story, breathtakingly told (literally). but nothing that i can think of, can accurately convey just how much i'm impressed with your game/story/writing. the best i can manage, is:

thank you.

 

[Piratecat]

How many CN types though say they are speaking for their God and basically threaten to strip away your Diety granted powers for not kissing their arse?

In my game? None. CN's are lucky to have anything resembling an organized church; they tend to have many small chapels and hundreds of variant religions, all following different religious dogma.

What you describe, someone with ulterior motives threatening to strip a cleric's stature simply because the cleric is not flattering the superior, is lawful evil in my game. I'd rather not discuss it here, though; if anyone wants to start a thread in General Discussion, feel free to post a link here in the story hour.

Thanks!

 

[Blackjack]

Re: So what's the plan?

Are you going to gather all the former Knights of the Emerald Chapel?

Tune in next week, same PCat-time, same PCat-channel.

What was Sir Malachite's "critical experience"?

This story has yet to come up in-game, so I probably shouldn't go into it here.

Are all the Emeral Chappelars Hunters of the Dead? If so, that's one nasty initiation requirement!

And BTW, if they arent all Hunters of the Dead, are they all paladins?

My working assumption has been that the Chaplars, as with most religious groups in PCat's world, are not defined by one character class (which is, after all, often an out-of-game concept more than an in-game one.) Take, for instance, Velendo, who has always been a priest, but didn't realize he was a Cleric until his first adventure with the Defenders.

One can assume that most Chaplars are Hunters of the Dead, but presumably they have a few clerics, vanilla paladins, and the like among their ranks as well.

 

[Number47]

It's no use to say that Aleax is this or Aleax is that. I know how minds like Piratecat's work. As long as the possibility is open, he isn't going to be one thing or another. It will only be found out when something happens to force the issue. Essentially, Ghouleax is Schrödinger's cat.

Heh. Although that situation might have been forced already if Malachite had let him touch the sword.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Essentially, Ghouleax is Schrödinger's cat.

Yep, it's a great analogy. I run my campaign this way-- do as much on the fly as possible. Only paint the broadest of strokes.

It makes the difference between having your players "ruin your story" (I see a lot of DMs complain about this) and having the players help create the story.

As for your other point, I called Aleax by his name (not Ghouleax). I think Malachite knew that and was just poking back at me in his response.

Wulf

 

[Piratecat]

Okay, I have to say I love the "Schrödinger's cat" concept. It's a brilliant description of a common DM phenomena: never decide until you're forced to.

It isn't case here, though! I know all about Aleax, who/where/why and how he is. Changing the story on the fly for metagame reasons just wouldn't be fair.

We game tonight. My next writeup, on Monday, will detail the meeting between Velendo, Nolin, and TomTom with the civic minister of Emperor Congenio Ioun, Master Artifacer. You'll see rapid travel, hasty explaining, full scale evacuation and sneaky tactics. And then later in the week, you'll see what happens when the Defenders of Daybreak face off against several hundred ghouls! Stay tuned.

As to whether or not I hate paladins/Malachite, I'm looking forward to tonight's game. If there's anywhere where hunters of the dead get to shine, it's against hordes of undead. I'm expecting some excitement!

Incidentally, I'm amused at the view count, too; we get a hit roughly every minute and a half, 24 hours a day. At this rate, we're due to hit 100K in three months! But really, that's not important; the only thing that matters here is the story and the game. Hopefully you're having as much fun reading it as we do playing it. This is like a 1920's movie serial in the pacing: climax and lull, climax and lull.

 

[RangerWickett]

Schrodinger was a physicist who came up with the idea that if there are multiple possibilities that can happen, the one that actually happens is in flux until we actually check.

The example is this:

You have a sealed box, and inside this box there is a cat, and a vial of poison gas. Due to a mechanism of some sort, there is a 50% chance that the vial will break, and the gas will kill the cat. There is also a 50% chance that the vial will not break, and thus the cat will be alright. Thus, there are two possibilities, and we can't know which one is the truth until we open the box to check.

What Schrodinger said, that makes this all important, is that until we do check, the cat is both dead and alive. Only when we open the box does the universe have to choose one, but until that point, no choice has been made.

So they're basically saying that St. Aleax could be a badguy, or could be a goodguy, and that Pcat is just waiting for the right moment to decide, based on what would be coolest for the plot. From the players' perspective, Aleax is like the cat: he could be either possibility.

. . . . . .

As a further note, this ties in with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which is actually applied in an interesting way. Assume that we're trying to measure the location and temperature of a given molecule of gold in a huge mixture of other atoms. Heisenberg's theory helps us understand that if we shoot a light beam at the gold atom to figure out where it is, we'll change it's temperature ever so slightly, and if we measure it's temperature by touching it with the physics equivalent of a thermometer, we'll change it's location, ever so slightly. Thus, you can never know more than one attribute of an item with total precision at any given moment. This doesn't bother us from day to day, but it makes life fun for physicists.