SESSION 43A: SCOUTING PORPHYRY HOUSE

October 25th, 2009
The 23rd Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

Porphyry House stood on one end of an open plaza in the Guildsman’s District near the Warrens facing a large, dilapidated open-air rotunda which stood along the Old Sea Road near East Street. It was an elegant, two-story structure constructed of dark purple and mauve porphyry. Minarets rose from each of the buildings’ four corners, and a central dome served as the roof. Its façade was decorated with several statues, bas-reliefs, and other carvings of handsome men and beautiful women (many of them striking a variety of lewdly suggestive poses).

The plaza itself was sparsely populated. A small band of jugglers was performing near the rotunda, and a few others were lazing here or there. No one seemed to be approaching the brothel itself (it was, after all, still the middle of the day), but a pair of guards – one male, one female, and both quite attractive – stood before the large pair of golden doors leading into Porphyry House. These guards were dressed in purple ceremonial full plate, which was both form-fitting and revealing of more skin than would normally seem practical. Their faces were masked by helmets with white porcelain masks depicting beautiful and handsome faces. The doors themselves were fully fifteen feet tall and featured detailed carvings depicting a frenzied orgy.

The party was impressed, but not daunted. Elestra transformed into a bird and performed a discreet aerial survey: She found no secondary entrances and no windows. Even the minarets appeared to be decoratively constructed out of solid rock. The only way in or out of the building seemed to be the front doors.

They thought about simply sending Agnarr through the doors looking for all the world as if he were a customer, but rejected the plan when they considered their fair degree of fame. If he was recognized by the cultists, that could horribly wrong.

“It might not work anyway,” Ranthir said. “They may not take walk-ins.”

“How do you know something like that?” Elestra asked, eying him up and down.

“I come from a city.”

“I come from a city,” Tee said. “I don’t know stuff like that.”

“They may not take customers at all,” Tor said. “I think the whole thing is a front.”

Ranthir agreed it was a front, “But to be one it must take customers. It would be suspicious if they turned away custom.”

Tee agreed. “And it probably makes a lot of money.”

Agnarr was glad the infiltration plan had been abandoned. “Tor and I could just sneak up on those guards and stab them from the side. They’ve got poor periphery vision in those helmets. They won’t see us coming.”

“Where did you learn a word like ‘periphery’?” Elestra asked, eying him up and down.

“What about everyone else in the plaza?” Tor asked. “Won’t they see us?”

“Not if we’re subtle.”

“So… everyone will notice?”

“Where did you learn a word like ‘subtle’?” Elestra asked.

They knew that Porphyry House was engaged in illicit as well as salacious trade, and they doubted the cultists were bringing that other business brazenly through the front door. That meant there must be a secondary, surreptitious entrance somewhere. Probably underground. Probably through the sewers.

They found a nearby sewer entrance at East Street and Hogshead and went down to explore. Unfortunately, they were right in the heart of the multi-layered interstice where the older sewer systems of the Warrens met the newer systems and it was all a chaotic, jumbled mess. If their senses of direction had held true, they eventually found their way to the area right beneath Porphyry House… but found nothing except a few impassable pipes which might (or might not) lead into the House.

ON HOLY BUSINESS

By the time they re-emerged from the sewers, evening was settling in and they were reminded that they had an appointment with Rehobath in the not-too-distant future. They decided they needed to leave and try again the next day, and on their way back to the Ghostly Minstrel laid out a plan to magically tunnel their way into the house from below (if they could figure out exactly where they should be digging).

At the Ghostly Minstrel they used the paving stones they had taken from the Temple of the Ebon Hand to quickly clean themselves, but didn’t worry themselves beyond the bare necessities (they were only meeting with Rehobath, after all). On their way through Oldtown, they took a short side-trip to the alley on Yarrow Street and spoke with Shim. They suspected that once the cultists learned that both the Temple of the Rat God and the Temple of Ebon Hand had been raided, their security precautions would skyrocket. They wanted to attack Porphyry House before that could happen, and the most effective way to do that was to find the cultists’ secondary entrance as quickly as possible. If anyone could do that, they felt it would be Shim. They introduced him to Nasira and got down to business.

“So let me get this straight,” Shim said when they had finished their explanation. “You want me to find a secret entrance to a brothel?”

“As quickly as possible, yes,” Tee said.

“And quietly,” Ranthir said. “We don’t want them to know we’re coming.”

“You’re looking for a discreet rush job on a whore house?”

“It sounds unsavory when you put it like that.”

“Could you keep using adjectives?” Shim said. “I like nice, expensive adjectives.”

They hashed out some surprisingly reasonable terms. Shim promised to bring them whatever he found first thing in the morning.

Throughout the conversation, however, Tor’s thoughts had been distracted by their upcoming meeting with Rehobath. They didn’t know what he wanted, but if their connection with Sir Kabel had been discovered then there was every possibility that they were walking into a trap.

So Tor asked Shim: “Do you have any idea why Rehobath might want to meet with us?”

“Fifty gold crowns.”

Tor shrugged and paid it.

“I’d guess it probably has something to do with your friend Dominic.”

Which it did.

They arrived at the Holy Palace to find it now staffed with servants in the livery of the novarch. The entire building was filled with a greater sense of pomp and circumstance than when Tor had first visited it only a few days before. They were led down a long hall upon a carpet of red and gold, passing between the great curves of two balustraded stairways, and through a door into the minimalist grandeur of Rehobath’s throne room.

When they arrived, Rehobath was surrounded by a number of functionaries. But he sent these away and spoke with them privately, keeping only a few guards at the far end of the hall.

“You have heard, I am sure, of what your friend Dominic has done?” Rehobath said, eyeing them with either suspicion or calculation.

The news was all over the city, so there seemed little risk in admitting it.

Rehobath gave them a report from one of his “house servants” (in other words, one of his spies). It detailed Dominic’s appearance in Empress Square the day before in much greater detail than the news reports they had been able to collect themselves.

“Did you know this was going to happen?” Rehobath demanded.

“Of course not,” Tor said.

“It doesn’t even sound like something that Dominic would say,” Tee said.

(“Well, maybe that last bit,” Elestra muttered.)

Rehobath looked sharply at her. “You think he may have fallen under the control of the traitors?”

“Perhaps,” Tee said. “Or it might not be Dominic at all. It could be an impostor. Or an illusion.”

“Yes…” Rehobath said, his eyes drifting into shrewd thoughtfulness. “That will serve… It might even be true.”

With a final nod, Rehobath changed the topic to the Banewarrens. They gave him a mildly edited account of their progress (particularly neglecting to mention the details of the legend lore spell Ranthir had cast). When Rehobath learned that they were waiting for a wish spell, however, he promised to expedite the matter with Heth Neferul.

From the moment they passed into the Holy Palace, Nasira’s nervousness had grown. Who, exactly, had she agreed to work with? And why did they seem so close to this freshly-minted novarch? Were they truly allies of Rehobath? But as their conversation continued, she became more convinced that the others were playing at some deeper agenda. At the very least, their travails together had instilled her with some trust of them. She would wait to hear their explanation.

Running the Campaign: It’s Gotta Be Here! – Campaign Journal: Session 43B
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 42B: False Brothels

With the other mothers still trapped in the web. Tee was able to broker a bargain in which they would be freed if one of them would lead the party to the southern sewer entrance. While the mothers were carefully freed from the web, Tor started discreetly taking ears and fingers from the dead as trophies. Meanwhile, Elestra distracted the ratlings with small talk to keep them from noticing Tee looting the coffers of the nest master (which were filled with gems, jewelry, and large amounts of coin; although given the bones and skulls dangling from the ceiling, Tee didn’t want to spend too much time thinking about where it had all come from).

A surprisingly frequent critique of xandering the dungeon is that navigational choice in a dungeon is irrelevant because, when confronted with Path A and Path B, the players will have no way of knowing where either path goes. Since the choice is blind, the “logic” goes, the choice is meaningless and no different than a linear dungeon!

This entire concept is so utterly alien to my experience running dungeons that I honestly have difficulty understanding what’s happening at these tables. I try to imagine a session in which the players are repeatedly making these navigational choices without ANY insight or reason and I literally can’t fathom what it would look like. It would seem to require both the GM and the players to deliberately go out of their way to make it happen.

Let’s start with the GM. It’s a common rejoinder to the “it’s all blind choices!’ gambit that it’s the GM’s responsibility to fill the dungeon with navigational hints like:

• strange sounds emanating from a passage
• physical evidence (e.g., tracks, blood smeared on the walls)
• treasure maps or similar intel
• navigational cues used by the inhabitants (e.g., signs or runes)

This isn’t bad advice. Any dungeon will certainly be improved by including this kind of stuff. Plus, if you’re designing your dungeon as a real place filled with history and life, this stuff will just naturally find its way into your dungeon key.

But I’m a pretty big believer in RPGs as a collaborative activity, and I’ve grown pretty skeptical of design philosophies that position the GM as the sole bearer of responsibility for the group’s experience. In practice, it’s just not necessary for the GM to lard up every crossroads with clues in order for the navigational choice to have meaningful context.

For example, a pillar of old school dungeon design is that the further down you go, the more deadly the challenges become (and the larger the rewards). Even in the absence of this classic design conceit, “going deeper into enemy territory is more dangerous” is going to be generally true just as a situational truism. (Particularly if the bad guys are being played as an active opposition and not just XP pinatas waiting for the PCs to kick down their door.)

Obviously, this principle won’t apply to every dungeon, but there are other diegetic cues that emerge from even the most cursory understanding of what’s happening and where you are. For example, “Should we finish clearing out this tower first or make a beeline for the central ziggurat?” or “Should we chase those goblins that ran away before they can reach reinforcements or should we move to a completely different sector of the dungeon to avoid pursuit?”

Similarly, if the PCs choose to “always go right,” that’s a meaningful navigational choice, as are other maze-solving techniques.

All of these provide a broad context for the players that can meaningfully guide navigational decisions even if they lack all other knowledge about the dungeon.

That lack of more specific knowledge should also be considered, however, because even if the PCs end up faced with a navigational choice for which they truly have no information, that only makes the choice meaningless if they ALSO lack the ability to gain that information. As long as they have that ability, the choice to NOT get that information is, in fact, a meaningful choice in itself.

And the truth is that, even without the GM seeding specific hints and clues into the adventure, the players have ample opportunities to gather the information they need.

Let’s start with the ubiquitous opportunities for interrogation. Almost anyone you can fight, you can also hold at sword point and demand answers from. “Which way to the lair of Bartox One-Eye?”

Note: This is a good place to mention that if you, as the GM, don’t want to bear sole responsibility for force-feeding information to your players, then you also need to make sure you’re not blocking the players from taking that responsibility. An occasional henchmen biting down on a cyanide capsule is all well and good, but if you teach the players that they ALWAYS bite down on cyanide capsules and they should never waste time trying to gain actionable intelligence, then you’ll have needlessly flattened — and perhaps even crippled — your game.

Even if there are no bad guys they can question, you can often just ask the gods. D&D comes well-stocked with divination spells that can be used to glean information about the dungeon. Augury, for example, is a 2^nd-level spell and I’ve often seen it make the difference between life and death.

Then there’s literally just physically scouting your options. From a central junction you can go left, take a peek around, then come back, go right, and poke around a little more. With information about both options in hand, you can figure out which direction seems the most promising and/or least dangerous.

Often, though, you don’t even need to personally go and check things. Given what you’ve already discovered about a dungeon, it’s often not difficult to use logical induction to make informed choices. For example, “We know the kobold warrens are in that direction, so it’s likely this tunnel will also lead us to them.”

You’ll also obviously have navigational information if you’re revisiting a location. This might be because you’re mounting a fresh expedition into the dungeon after returning to town or taking a long rest. It might be because you’ve been repelled by the kobolds and are trying to figure out a way around them.

You can also see from this how these different methods of gathering information can combine and reinforce each other: If you’ve previously been repelled by a kobold stronghold and encounter a small force of koblds while physically scouting, you can easily conclude that this passage must also be connected to that stronghold somehow. This conclusion would only be reinforced if, consulting your maps, you can see it’s also heading in the direction of that stronghold. This might prompt you to cast speak with dead and question one of the dead kobolds, which could lead to you learning that the passage does lead to the stronghold, but via a rear entrance which is only lightly guarded. Do you use this information to mount a fresh assault on the kobolds or choose a different path and avoid them?

What we’re beginning to touch on here is the dungeon as both a tactical and strategic battlefield. I’ve previously talked about Dungeon as a Theater of Operations, and once you start thinking of the dungeon experience in this more holistic fashion it’s easy to see how it can inform almost any navigational decision the PCs are making.

AN IMPERFECT WORLD

It should be noted, though, that the goal of all this is generally not for the PCs to end up with a perfect understanding of the dungeon. That might happen occasionally, but it’s not to be expected and, even if it does happen, it’s likely to pass quickly (as the PCs’ information becomes dated or irrelevant).

Sometimes your educated guesses don’t turn out right. And that’s just fine. Desirable, even.

It turns out that one of the key ways you can distinguish choice from calculation is through imperfect information. And these choices — rather than calculations — are the heart and soul of meaningful gameplay.

You can see an example of what it looks like when the PCs have made a mistake in the current campaign journal. The PCs have formed a goal (find an underground entrance to Porphyry House) and are actively pursuing it. You can see that they’ve engaged in a bunch of the different information-gathering techniques we’ve discussed:

• They’ve found maps.
• They’ve interrogated prisoners.
• They’ve used inductive reasoning to figure out where various passages are likely to lead.

The only problem?

Elestra flung open the shutters on a nearby window… and looked out over the Southern Sea. They were on the coast cliffs deep within the Warrens. Far from Porphyry House.

They retreated back to the sewer, retraced their path, and used the kennel rat to take the sewer route they hadn’t chosen before. The rat brought them to another tunnel leading away from the sewer proper, and although this one bore no resemblance to the work of Ghul, they sought out the nearest sewer entrance, poked their heads into the street above… and concluded that this wasn’t Porphyry House either.

In utter frustration at the time they had wasted, they left the sewers altogether and decided to head straight to Porphyry House’s front door.

The route to Porphyry House that they concluded must exist… doesn’t. Whoops.

But that’s OK. The choices they made along the way were still meaningful. They still led to interesting adventures. And, at every step along the way, the PCs were continuing to gather information and feeding that information back into their choices (both navigational and otherwise).

Campaign Journal: Session 43A – Running the Campaign: It’s Gotta Be Here!
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 42A: Rat Mothers

But Ranthir, upon hearing the word “flee”, whirled around and webbed the far side of the room: The mothers, the albino, and Berq were all helplessly caught – except for one mother, trapped in the corner, who futilely screamed for help in her despair. Tor closed on her and ruthlessly killed both her and the baby ratlings.

With the other mothers still trapped in the web. Tee was able to broker a bargain in which they would be freed if one of them would lead the party to the southern sewer entrance. While the mothers were carefully freed from the web, Tor started discreetly taking ears and fingers from the dead as trophies. Meanwhile, Elestra distracted the ratlings with small talk to keep them from noticing Tee looting the coffers of the nest master (which were filled with gems, jewelry, and large amounts of coin; although given the bones and skulls dangling from the ceiling, Tee didn’t want to spend too much time thinking about where it had all come from).

“Killing orc babies” in D&D is a trope not so much because DMs are deliberately trying to present their players with this moral dilemma, but rather because it arises pretty naturally out of the standard D&D adventure type: Dungeons inhabited by X. “Inhabited” leads to community; community leads to babies. And, of course, it’s not just orcs. In this session it happened to be ratlings.

Now, there’s a whole discussion to be had about the colonialist themes in D&D and also the degree to which the traditional fantasy tropes of “species which is inherently evil” and/or “humanoid species with sub-human intellects” are manifestations of and/or informed by real world racism, but I’m going to put a pin in that.

What I’m focused on at the moment is less the specific moral dilemma, and rather the phenomenon of emergent moral dilemmas.

There can sometimes be the impression that moral dilemmas are something that GMs need to specifically create, frame up, and present to the players. But the real world is filled with moral dilemmas with nary a GM in sight, so it’s not really surprising that they’ll also crop up more or less unbidden in our simulated game worlds – whether that’s ratling babies in the ratling nests; the decision to betray a friend; or the opportunity to profit at the expense of others.

Whether a particular moral dilemma is crafted by a GM or emerges from the narrative of play, it can offer a rich opportunity for roleplaying, allowing players to explore their characters at a deep and meaningful level. Like any form of play, it can also be a way to safely explore complex issues.

Or, alternatively, being a form of play, it can also provide an escape from the complexities of the real world.

This is where moral dilemmas can create strife at your table: When some players are approaching the game world as a place of deep meaning and other players are approaching the game world as an ephemera of casual play, this can easily create discordant perceptions. To some extent, of course, this is always true, but when it comes to moral dilemmas, the inherently heightened takes – e.g., killing babies! – will naturally amplify the discordance.

(The issues of how much a player’s actions/beliefs are separated from their character’s actions/beliefs also complicates this, but I’m going to put a pin in that, too.)

Not only will different players have different responses to these situations, the same player can easily have a different response depending on the nature and context of the moral dilemma.

To use a video game analogy, I’ve never seen anyone seriously object to Mario curbstomping koopas to death, but change the context to running down pedestrians in Grand Theft Auto and now there are many people who would find it distasteful. But some of the people who object to running down pedestrians have no problem with stealing cars in the same game! Others who will happily go on mass murder sprees in the game will draw the line at running over a sex worker you just paid so that your character can get the money back.

Why?

Because people are complicated.

In the case of the ratling babies in my own campaign, what happened was a combination of several factors:

• A general coarsening of the group’s morality in the face of hardships. (Something which has been commented on several times in recent sessions.)
• The perceived moral positioning of ratlings, with some of the players/characters perceiving them as being more like worgs or cannibalistic apes than human-equivalent sentients.
• The moral importance of the game world. The group was largely on the same bandwidth here, but there were definitely some players with a slightly more casual approach.

Because the players were mostly in alignment with each other – and also because they all had the same clear understanding that character actions were not player actions – these factors kind of balanced each other out: While one player might be slightly more cavalier than another, a player who was taking the world a little more seriously could nevertheless interpret those actions as being consistent with the other character “losing their moral compass,” and it would all sort of muddle out in a collective experience everyone was happy with.

Of course, this will not always be the case! It’s quite possible for disparate reactions to a moral dilemma to cause serious strife!

And the broader point is that, because moral dilemmas will naturally emerge from your narrative, you can’t dodge this issue by just saying, “Well, I just won’t include any moral dilemmas in the campaign, then.” You need to be aware and stay aware of what’s happening at your game table, and when player expectations get out of alignment you need to be prepared to hit the pause button and help everyone get back on the same page.

Safety tools – i.e., structures for having these conversations in clear and productive ways – are obviously helpful with this, and I particularly recommend using them if you’re playing with someone for the first time or with familiar players in a new genre. But a lot of safety tools are focused on identifying topics or themes, and moral dilemmas can often hit the group from unexpected angles and in unanticipated ways. So keep your eyes open!

Campaign Journal: Session 42B – Running the Campaign: Scouting Dungeons
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

SESSION 42A: RAT MOTHERS

October 17th, 2009
The 23rd Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

They burned their way through Ranthir’s web and passed into another trash-filled chamber. Rising out of the trash on the far side of the chamber, however, was a ten-foot-tall stone statue of a ratling. Its head was lowered, staring into the dark depths of a wide sinkhole that lay at its feet.

They were wary of the statue – thinking perhaps that it was cursed, enchanted, or trapped in some way – but ultimately chose to investigate it. In a hidden compartment at the rear base of the statue, Tee found three scroll cases: One contained a stack of gold and silver coins; another a copy of the Truth of the Hidden God; and the third an arcane scroll.

Uncertain of what might emerge from the sinkhole if they left it at their backs, Tor quickly tied a rope around Tee’s waist and lowered her into the darkness. The sinkhole bottomed out into a large, conical cavern. Near the limit of the light she carried, Tee could see a couple passages twisting away from the cavern. On the large wall nearest her she could see cave paintings: Rat-shaped humanoids worshipped a huge, bulbous rat. Gouts of flame seemed to erupt from the rat’s sides, and in the midst of the flames Tee could see white rats dancing in the infernos.

Something about the painting disturbed her deeply, and after studying it for a few long moments she tugged twice on the rope – giving the signal to draw her back up.

After Tee had described what she had seen, they discussed their options. Ranthir, as was his wont, strongly opposed delving deeper before finishing the exploration of the current level of the nests. Besides, they suspected that they were on a level with the Midtown sewers – delving deeper into the caverns beneath the city wouldn’t get them where they wanted to go.

THE MOTHERS

Leaving the chamber with the statue, they passed through the far end of a long hall filled high with even more of the rats’ garbage. Tee passed silently over the surface, but, of course, Agnarr and Tor made an unearthly racket wading their way through. In the process, they attracted the attention of several large rodents which emerged out of the trash heaps: They had pale, chalk-like fur and eyes which glowed like fierce embers of flame.

“Who’s there?”

The voice came from the direction they had been heading. A huge, lumbering ratbrute emerged from the shadows.

Tee turned to face him. “We’re looking for the sewers.”

“Who are you?”

“Silion sent us to the southern sewers. We have business with Porphyry House.”

A befuddled look passed over the ratbrute’s features (which was surprising, considering how befuddled they already looked). “I guess if Silion sent you…”

“That’s right,” Tee nodded encouragingly. “Now, where can we find the sewer?”

“There’s an entrance beyond the mothers.”

“Where are the mothers?”

“Right over here.” The ratbrute turned and started lumbering back the way it had come.

Tee looked back at the others as if to say “I can’t believe that worked” and then, with a shrug, followed the ratbrute.

The passage he took them down was relatively broad and surprisingly free from debris. They passed another of the tattered blue curtains, and Tee took a moment to poke her head through it: The chamber beyond was unnaturally chill and contained a variety of bloated corpses – dogs, birds, cats… and a few humans. The bodies had been variously dismembered, with a few pieces here and there having obvious gnaw-marks on them. (Ranthir identified the chill as coming from a simple cantrip, most likely cast here to permanently keep the room cool enough to preserve the “meat”.)

“Are you coming?” The ratbrute looked at them curiously.

“Of course,” Tee said. Hurrying after him, she drew her sword and pointed it at the ratbrute’s clueless back.

Pushing through another blue curtain, they emerged into a large chamber containing several of the now familiar ratling nests… along with half a dozen female ratlings. The mothers. Everyone froze: Ratlings staring at humans; humans staring at ratlings.

“Tattum! What have you done?!”

The mothers scattered. Tee stabbed Tattum in the back.

Tattum, roaring in pain, drew his greatsword in a massive sweep that caught Tee with the flat of the blade and sent her staggering.

Nasira, meanwhile, noticed that several of the chalk-white rats from the hall of refuse had been following them. She was about to call out a warning when the melee broke out.

And then the chalk-white rats burst into balls of bright flame.

As Tee fell back towards Nasira, one of the flaming rats – pouring inky black smoke into the air – spit a ball of fire at Nasira, catching her full in the chest. Agnarr and Tor, meanwhile, were moving up to form a line against the enraged Tattum.

Several of the mothers had dashed out of the room through other exits, while others circled around the melee shaping up at the cave mouth – dashing in and delivering blows whenever they found an opening.

Tor managed to inflict a few deep wounds on Tattum’s massive frame, but then one of the mothers managed to latch onto his arm. Another, going low, sunk her teeth into his leg. Tattum, seizing the momentary advantage, found a chink in Tor’s armor and, ripping the blade free, caught Agnarr with a devastating back-swing.

Elestra dove forward, pouring the strength of the Spirit of the City into Agnarr’s wounds. Tattum, thinking Agnarr dispatched, stepped over him to take another swing at the badly injured Tor—

And Agnarr plunged his blade up through the ratbrute’s crotch.

(Which was becoming something of a habit.)

Tattum stumbled backwards as another ratbrute pushed through the curtain on the far side of the room. “Tattum! What the hell is going on?! If you’re in another—Oh shit! Fudd! Get out here!”

Fudd, a third ratbrute, pushed his way through the curtain. “What has he done now, Berq? … Oh shit!”

As Tattum fell for the last time, Fudd and Berq rushed Agnarr and Tor. Agnarr, however, was in the full heat and flow of the battle. He stepped forward and in a series of smooth blows that looked like perfect arcs of flame dropped Fudd in his tracks. Berq was more cautious, however, and moved into a careful dance of blades with the two fighters.

The blue curtain swept aside once more, revealing an aging albino ratling. He lowered a dragon pistol and fired, but Tor narrowly dodged the blast (which passed harmlessly over Tee, who was finishing off the last of the ash rats with Ranthir and Nasira).

As the separate melees raged, punctuated with blasts from the albino ratling’s dragon pistol, the mothers who had fled into a side-chamber returned – each bearing ratling babes in her arms. The albino ratling cried out to them, “Flee! Run as fast as you can!”

But Ranthir, upon hearing the word “flee”, whirled around and webbed the far side of the room: The mothers, the albino, and Berq were all helplessly caught – except for one mother, trapped in the corner, who futilely screamed for help in her despair. Tor closed on her and ruthlessly killed both her and the baby ratlings.

Agnarr, meanwhile, was finishing off Berq. This gave the albino ratling enough time to rip his own way free from the web. Cutting another mother free, he took her and ran for it.

Tor and Tee chased him down, but before he was killed, the albino managed to buy enough time for the mother to escape into the effervescent chamber of the true temple. Tor and Tee skidded to a halt and cautiously retreated back the way they had come.

Several of the mothers were still trapped in the web. Tee was able to broker a bargain in which they would be freed if one of them would lead the party to the southern sewer entrance. While the mothers were carefully freed from the web, Tor started discreetly taking ears and fingers from the dead as trophies. Meanwhile, Elestra distracted the ratlings with small talk to keep them from noticing Tee looting the coffers of the nest master (which were filled with gems, jewelry, and large amounts of coin; although given the bones and skulls dangling from the ceiling, Tee didn’t want to spend too much time thinking about where it had all come from).

Running the Campaign: Killing Orc Babies – Campaign Journal: Session 42B
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index