Ptolus: Midwood - "The Dark Waters of Moss Pond"

[Renraw Kem]

Tock must be a pretty lonely guy if he considers Renraw a friend.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I'm still not sure where the Lil Midwood story will go in the Story Hour. Maybe in an interlude after this adventure, since it marks a real break in what's come before and what comes after.

 

[Tock Chandler]

Tock must be a pretty lonely guy if he considers Renraw a friend.

Tock's eagerness for a friend allows him to look past a lot of Renraw's flaws and see "Hey, he hates these turds, too!" He also sees more of Kat in Ren than anyone would like to admit.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Daily updates of this story hour will resume in a day or two. I'm a Virginia Tech alumni and having a hard time focusing on anything enough to clean up the logs and all that at the moment.

This would be a good time to go to the lobby and get a delicious refreshment.

 

[Tock Chandler]

And here's where things start to get pretty interesting.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Swifty is one of a long line of one-off references that eventually grow to be a bigger part of the campaign. You know those running feats that "no one" takes? He's taken them. All of them. Surprisingly useful in an NPC.

 

[Renraw Kem]

The Ballad of Tiberius was a personal favorite of mine.

 

[Tock Chandler]

The Ballad of Tiberius was a personal favorite of mine.

Thanks. I was proud of it.

 

[Gnome Quixote]

Thanks. I was proud of it.

As you should be. It's brilliant.

The fire sequence stands as one of my absolute favorite parts of the campaign so far. It was so unexpected and different, and it was a blast to play out. In fact, describing it to some of my friends here at home was what finally convinced them to give D&D a try, as it finally clicked for them how tabletop gaming could actually have more going for it than, say, World of Warcraft.

I still marvel at how much my mouthy lil' gnome was able to get away with. It doesn't last, of course--in the adventure we're currently playing, people finally seem to be getting tired of him and telling him to stuff it, which has been a long time coming--but it took a heckuva lot longer than I ever dreamed it could.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

If you flip to the back few pages of the Players Guide to Ptolus, you'll see Monte's write-up of friendship bands. So, despite what it looks like, Bufer wasn't pinning Hazel or asking her to the gnomish prom.

Bufer references the lord of Wit's End, his mentor and his father being religious subversives against the Church of Lothian. Gnomes are long-lived, and Tarsis is the heart of the church's power, but it'll be a long time before it occurs to him that Lothianism isn't the enemy today in Midwood as it once was in Tarsis. Despite talking a good game with Emmerson, he's almost as suspicious of the church as Tock is.

This all comes to the fore in the next few adventures, when the bishop begins to call in the debt Emmerson owes him for raising the young paladin from the dead. It's a plot line that's not done yet, with various religious forces pulling at all the clerics in the campaign. This is complicated by the fact that none of the religious folks are evil and, technically, none of them is really in the wrong.