Behind The Screen: Team X S03 E04 Conclave Part 1

Episode 4 streamed on March 15, 2020.

Warning: we talk about bugs in this one. Big nasty ones. And blood. And more bugs. And, as always, this is not for the players of Team X. Turn back now, or else feel the wrath of Zuggtmoy.

After an event (PAX East) and illness (myself and others) induced hiatus, we were finally able to play again after nearly a month. And boy, was I happy to do it. No D&D make Brian something something.

I went into today’s game considering it a “node”. By that I mean we were at a point in between missions/story arcs, having just completed the Arrival arc with them destroying the stone giant compound and rescuing most of the Gentletrunk family, or kjente (pronounced kyent, loosely “known ones”) (see Resources at the end of this post) , so there was an opportunity for them to choose where to go next. I felt like I had them on rails too much the last couple of games, so I wanted them to have the ability to direct the direction of the next few sessions.

To that end, today’s game was very simple from the Dungeon Master perspective. I hadn’t planned much more detail than them being chased by what we are now calling beebushkas: mobilized dilapidated children’s dolls that have been encased in hornets’ nests, and carrying something akin to megalara garuda in them. They are nasty pieces of work from the Shadowfell that I introduced last season. I’ll have to dig up the stats I wrote down for them.

The inspiration behind this episode was the Battlestar Galactica series premiere “33” (the first episode after the miniseries). I wanted them exhausted and having to find creative solutions to being hunted by an overwhelming force that, under normal circumstances, they may be able to defeat. The players didn’t disappoint.

I didn’t make plans for “if they try A, then B, and if they try C, then D” because there were just too many possibilities, and I would never be able to account for them all. I knew that I’d be rolling with the punches in today’s game. Even if I had, as any DM will tell you, they would have found the one scenario I hadn’t planned on, or would have found the technicality in something to exploit. I shall call this Rule X, where x=the variable you can never consider.

Improv is one of the most important skills a DM/GM can have. It may seem counter-intuitive at first, being that you are supposed to be the one in control, but the only way to “be in control” is to let go of it. Within reason, of course; you still need to act as referee and make sure that the rules are keeping the game moving.

A perfect example of Rule X: I never intended for there to be combat today. I placed an impossible force in front of them, including something that I named The Meatsnatcher. I had a vision in my head for a while of some kind of infernal hermit crab/spider thing that wore corpses as shells, and that could grow to enormous size if the shell was big enough. Today I was able to introduce it. It wore a stone giant meat shield.

The idea here was that it would help push the party along, something so obviously terrifying that there would be no choice but to run. Why would I need to stat this monster?

So of course, they fought it.

I quick wrote down some stats: 150 hit points, AC 17. It would attack twice with its fore appendages, +3 to hit, 2d8 damage each, and would get one spit attack with no bonus. If the spit hit the target, it would hold them in place (it acted like spray foam insulation) and would do 1d6 acid damage each round the character was stuck there. DC 12 to escape.

Was this the right amount of everything? No idea. I just needed something. I could have found an equivalent of some kind in the Monster Manual or one of the other supplements and cobbled something more definitive together, but what I initially put out there worked fine for the story.

I also didn’t want to make this an impossible monster; this wasn’t a boss, or even a mini boss, more of a tough new monster at a new level.

They ultimately defeated it with their typical flare. (The sorcerer hit it with a lightning bolt and blight, the bard polymorphed into a triceratops, the fighter mounted the triceratops, and they killed it dead.) It was a fun little battle.

I also didn’t know it was going to be called the Meatsnatcher until it actually entered the game. I kinda like it.

You may notice some notes in the upper right-hand corner of that last picture. During our break, I posed the idea of the Law of Conservation of Magic Creation, which posits that material is neither created nor destroyed, merely transformed from one form into another. In this case, Dren used Creation to take a drop of her blood and make a 5 foot cube of blood. We did some math:

We posited that the blood had to come from somewhere, so it came from the other Drens across the multiverse. Now, she could have taken just a little bit from hundreds of thousands of them, but that’s not on brand for Drenmai Jemweaver, so we said that approximately 2,137 Drenmais just dropped dead, completely exsanguinated, only to have the blood to reappear in them 12-24 hours later when the spell dissipated.

I’m sure we’ll pull on that plot thread later. I’m already envisioning the Trial of Drenmai Jemweaver in some court in Sigil or something.

Another little minigame I threw into the session was Thunuk attempting to activate a new gate. Usually this is a simple survival check, but I felt, in that moment, that it needed something more. It was a new gate, they were going to a new place, and they were under pressure with enemies approaching. I quickly decided that this would need to be a DC12 Survival check (as we’ve used in the past) and Thunuk (played by Yvan Martino) would need to roll 3 out of 5 successes.

Confession: the number of success rolls was arbitrary. It was as we were into the narrative of the moment that I decided that the three successes were tied to the entrance gate, the exit gate, and tethering the “worm hole” to reality and time.

But don’t tell my players that. It seems so much cooler when it looks like I had that answer the entire time.

Resources:

I mentioned that the word for the firbolg extended family unit is “kjente”, which in Norwegian means “known ones”. As we were playing, we took a second to talk about whether firbolg existed in “clans” or in “families”.

Clans seemed too formal, too political. But family didn’t seem to do it for me either, as we’ve established that while there are blood relatives in this unit, there are also non-firbolg who are a part of the family and regarded in the same light as blood relatives.

I don’t know why “known ones” sprung into my mind, but I did a quick Google Translate search for that term in Norwegian, which is relatively close to the language of giants. Kjente is what came up, and I liked the sound of it, so there we go.

Google Translate can be an amazing tool for taking a common English word and putting a spin on it that gives it the weight and flair deserving of a fantasy game like this.