12/5/24 AP: Under the City 2

I'm 10 or more session reports behind and it's time to stop pretending to write the old ones and start actually writing the new ones. Here we go!

Second session in Simon's Under the City. Just Jay and me. He is returning with his character Hanbul Al-Alawi, a Sufi mystic and newcomer to the city. We determined that he's living in the crusader state of Odessa, and filled out a lot of detail about the city, its current religious and political tensions, and his place in it.

We started with some downtime maneuvers, three of them since it had been three weeks since the last Under the City session.

Normally that would be so much window dressing, but he spent a week collecting rumors in downtime, and he rolled the rumor "Several prominent citizens stand accused of grisly murders." I don't give bum rumors, the whole point of the rumor table is to see if you hear anything scenario-relevant, so we know it's going to come up sooner or later.

We figured out who the prominent citizens were, and looked in on their trials. It's members of the ruling class of the city (a mix of crusaders and their military aristocracy, their financiers, and local collaborators), and they are all accused of killing other elites. All acted in cold blood, butchered people in heinous ways, and were witnessed committing the crimes. Of course they all deny it!

Hanbul made a charisma check (at a disadvantage, since he's listening to a foreign language) to see if he could pick up anything interesting about the demeanor of the accused, in particular, guilt or innocence, but failed.

Two other downtime turns, both spent studying and praying with the murshid. The murshid (his anchor) couldn't identify the potions he looted last time.

He returned to the dungeon, not even bringing a torch, relying only on his walking stick and memory for navigation. His explicit goal was to find knowledge, especially about alchemy. Normally he'd be toast but the random encounter rolls were in his favor, and the whole expedition he only ran into one encounter with a lone giant rat, who fled.

He returned to the old Merry Japers HQ and found that it was the basement of an alchemist's shop. 

He found a door with some men behind it, and conned his way in, betting that they were part of the same gang he allied himself with last time. He was initially welcomed, once they realized who he was, because he had killed their entire rival gang. But his odd behavior soon wore through their patience and into their suspicion, and they politely but firmly led him out. (Failed Cha check.)

We learned that I had miscommunicated some mapping details; Jay thought he had explored everywhere he could see, while I thought I had left an obvious avenue of exploration. We cleared them up and he went back down into the sewers through the alchemist entrance.

There he followed the water to a big whirlpool/drain thing and waded through the water to the other side. This drew the attention of Blind Betty, a huge albino alligator, who arrived 4 minutes later to munch on him.

Betty attacked with surprise. I used the new combat rules. Betty had full penetration (Hanbul only wore clothes), Hanbul couldn't dodge because he was surprised (and he probably couldn't have dodged anyway because he's in pitch darkness on slippery algae-coated pavement in a sewer), and the alligator has 4 HD. So: 4d6, hits on 5/6. 3 hits! But! Simon says every hit has a 50% chance of failure when the alligator is attacking from the water onto the pavement. Every hit misses. He survives the surprise round.

Next round, Betty is going to attack again, obviously. Hanbul would have form advantage, because he's using a quarterstaff while the alligator is just biting near the ground. But! Jay surprises me by throwing a random alchemist's potion instead. In hindsight, I should have asked him if they were strapped to his waist or something; as it happened, I guess they were all in hammerspace until he took one out.

We roll, and it's a sleep potion affecting everybody in 15 feet. We briefly discuss alchemy and metaphysics, and conclude that alchemists comprehend theoretical the exact same cosmic truths mystics comprehend intuitively. Therefore Hanbul has one strong die and one weak die on his saving throw. Meanwhile Betty has 4 weak dice. Hanbul makes the save (with the weak die!) and Betty does not. She is knocked out and floats downstream into the whirlpool, where she takes 9 damage and dies.

(After, I wondered: do 4 HD creatures get hit by sleep? I still haven't looked it up. Should I have spent some of her HP on extra saves? -- Actually that wouldn't have been possible, it costs 10 HP for an extra save against a spell, and she only had 9 HP. But I should think about when monsters will buy saves with the HP cancel. Also, how does the action economy on this work? Shouldn't I have had Betty make her attack roll anyway?)

Hanbul finds the monster's nest and searches it for an hour. Normally he'd get the treasure there immediately, but he's in pitch darkness, so I gave him a 1/3 for every 30 minutes, with an additional 1/3 chance of getting injured on driftwood or sick on a rotting corpse. He finds nothing, and goes back home.

He looks for information on the old alchemist's shop (Cha check, nat 1, 11th degree success!) and find out when and why it closed. With a great success, I decide that the alchemist is still alive, and Hanbul finds out where he lives now. (He's named Al the Chemist, ah-ha.)

I misunderstand Jay's aim for a little while; I thought he wanted the potions identified. No! He wants to become the alchemist's student!

He makes a persuasion roll. Retired people have little to do, and are eager for hobbies and opportunities to show off, so it's 1/2. He pays the alchemist 30 rupees and passed a charisma check, each of which gave him a bonus die. He makes it. Now he wants to learn to brew a potion of growth. We spend the last 30 minutes of session talking about alchemy and figuring out how to brew a potion.

I decided that the potion is a single use +0 magic item. I quickly skimmed Eero's magic item creation CWP and eyeballed +0 single-use items at 20 rupees, 1 week of labor, and 5 potence to create. We figure out four ingredients for the potion, which will actually be administered as a ritual ointment. The ingredients all correspond to humors and elements, and, beyond that, are symbolically associated with growth. Now we need one more ingredient, or to get a super version of another ingredient (blood, most likely; blood from a 2 HD monster would fill out the recipe nicely.)