20220118 - Run 20
So Chad gives them a bit of a sermon. Pops his collar of rank, puts on his Sperrys, starts going over the concept of the Win-Win Mystery on his Whiteboard of Presentation.
These people are incredibly devolved and just simply do not understand how two people can come out of an interaction both coming out ahead when there’s killing (and the tanning of hides and the consuming of flesh) on board, but eventually Chad wins them over with his management talk and probably also his Bermuda shorts.
After talking about his invisible hand for a bit, Chad swaps back into his armor and… we start trying to figure out how to get these people to stop raiding. Clearly we want to trade with them, but we need to make sure that they don’t raid the Church caravans. Conversation continues; they start getting hung up on trying to get meat, flesh, and leather from people who break contracts, so we have to waste time dissuading them.
D.va gets the idea to sell them a decanter of endless water and/or an alchemy jug. (Also, she wants a Heward’s Handy Spice Pouch for her own usage.) Grandma from the world with the tower can probably help with the jug and the pouch, and Felginor could help with the decanter, we think.
Chad ends up trying to set up a deal where these raiders act as caravan guards for pay, instead of raiding caravans, perhaps even to extend to working as mercenaries on other worlds.
OK, so that’s fine, we’re talking about what next and what we want to do now, whether we should just go to the road and wait for the Church caravan, when I just kind of ask, offhand, “hey, what’s up with the other leg?”
All the cannibal raiders stop and grimace and appear scared. “It went bad, It eats people. Sometimes they scream.” Nobody brings up that they also eat people. Someone manages to expand on this: There was once a spirit of the place. The spirit is no longer in this leg and in the space under this leg; but it is still in that leg. Some say that the spirit going bad is why the Scouring happened; others say the spirit went bad because of the Scouring. D.va knows a bit about genius loci and this kind of tracks with what she knows.
So we’re probably not going to go do that, as interesting as it might be. Apparently you can’t really fix a genius locus once it’s maddened and broken like that. D.va gets distracted copying down name-songs onto papers and then later engraving it in bones in exchange for their stories. One she’s talking to talks about how their ancestors were shut out of Heaven at Heaven’s Feet, and were stuck here presumably at the Scouring, which gets us thinking again about ‘hey, how do we get to the top of the heaven’s ladder that these feet used to be the bottom of’. They show us where some of the heavens used to be, and where some are still in the sky, still zipping around in orbit.
We don’t end up staying for too long, though. We head back to the “path” with 2 raider mercs to seal the first deal between these people and the Church, and D.va nails the rendezvous enough to impress the raiders. The Church shows back up in a bit, we meet up, Chad smooths things over, and we head back to the portal and go back to the Hub.
The Church gives us a bit of a purse for setting that up - 500gp - and D.va really wants to go hang out with Grandma, so we send a message to Felginor first before heading out and then we head through the portal to the planet with Grandma’s village. Goblintown. They probably have a name but we’re heathens and never learned it or something.
Someone has cleared the thicket away from the portal so that it can be exited, so clearly there’s some trade going on. The place is humid enough to give us a good reminder of the concept of “swamp ass”, but we get to Grandma’s place so D.va can talk magic items while we eat bread and have tea and soup.
We start looking at the stuff that was on the altar, as well.
Grandma tells D.va that the magic of the gauth hide that D.va has started to tan and has been keeping in her bag of holding should be enough to turn it into a Heward’s handy spice pouch.
While Grandma and D.va are working on that, I take over minor medical services in the village. Nyla headed back to the Hub for a few days, and we got word that a spider was trying to make contact with the trade caravan on this world. Something about their eggs getting eaten by something. That’s something we’re probably gonna want to fix.