- Issue #73 – Give Thanks
- Issue #74 – Bit Part Bad Guys
- Issue #75 – Kaiju for Christmas
- Issue #76 – Silicon Soul, Adamantine Will
- Issue #77 – Date Night
- Issue #78 – Delved Too Deep (Une Mascarade Brisée Part 1)
- Issue #79 – Tome of Secrets (Une Mascarade Brisée Part 2)
- Descendants Special #7 – The Curtain Rises
- Issue #80 – Bitter Work
- Issue #81 – Kin, Speed and Ducks
- Issue #82 – What To Do With Your Downtime
- Issue #83 – Avalon Rises
- Issue #84 – Darkness Falling
- Descendants Annual #7 – First Frost
“Heeeeeey, Moooooolebeeeear!”
In the middle of the forest, Ghoja and Vedan could only stare dumbfounded at Father Trephan as the cleric dropped everything to throw his hands in the air and wiggle his fingers dramatically as if he were trying to be spooky to a five year old while sing-songing the words.
Back at camp, Litec was having the same reaction to the previously stoic Eva did the same.
“…” spake the god. “No. Seriously, what if even the hell?”
Eva chuckled into the back of the gauntlet. “Sorry. It was just an in-joke our old gaming group had.”
“Yeah,” Father Trephan continued for her despite being hundreds of yards away and having had no way of hearing her. “He loved molebears because they’re so ridiculous and he had them show up everywhere until having one turn up was like an old pal visiting.”
Eva picked up the explanation “So when a molebear attacks, we greet him like Jack does to Alec on Coming Up Daisy. ‘Heeeey, Moooolebeeear!’”
Litec smirked. “Your group is weird.”
“Is it really any different than using your left over magic slot to buy a wand of lubricate just to make your boyfriend squirm?”
“I swear it’s one of the most versatile basic spells in the game!” Litec defended.
“So anyway,” spake the god, “The molebear says hi the only way molebears know how—”
The earth beneath the group in the forest erupted in a cloud of overturned dirt and stone. A shaggy hulk rose up; sleek, black fur stretched over muscle. Still partially concealed in its hole, the beast sniffed the air, the fleshy tendrils around its nose flapping in the air as it homed in on its target.
With a huffing growl, the molebear raised a set of thick claws almost as large as Ghoja’s hammer and swung them at Father Trephan.
The cleric managed to dodged backward, but the claws still struck his chain shirt, driving him back until he tripped over a root and crashed down on its back.
Ghoja didn’t wait to see if his comrade was alright before hurling himself into the fray. A guarded swing of the Heavy Hand connected solidly with one of the molebear’s claw as it started to attack him, then pushed it up and away from its body, leaving an opening.
“Make your strike count.” he grunted to Vedan.
The temple elf gave a grunt of her own and stepped forward with a powerful, practiced stride, falling into a series of stances as she did. After three steps, she shouted wordlessly and struck the air with a knife-hand strike, sending a narrow concussion wave from her fingertips and into the molebear.
Something popped in the monster’s shoulder and it roared with a noise that caused small animals to take flight for nearly a half-mile around.
“I’m pretty sure we hear that, right?” Litec asked, getting up from where she’d been sitting. She grabbed up her satchel and looked to where Eva stood. The other woman had weapons at the ready.
“Shall we rescue our intrepid hunters from their quarry?” Litec asked, her expression detached and cold.
Eva nodded with a grim expression. “Whatever beast they’ve stumbled upon, I say we make them eat it regardless.”
***
“I never knew that cheddar gravy existed.” Kareem admitted, trying to sound diplomatic. He didn’t mean to be rude, but he also couldn’t help giving his meal a suspicious glare.
Orange. The gravy seeping out from beneath the pastry lid of the potpie as orange. And not the orange of certain cheeses. It was an orange food didn’t come in unless the ‘cheese’ it contained was spelled with a ‘z’. Meanwhile, the smell of the sauce Juniper’s burger was smothered in made his nose hairs burn.
When he caught himself dwelling ruefully on that, it took an effort not to shake his head to clear it. This wasn’t like him. After spending over a year detached from his body, he’d never had any reason to brood and complain. It made no sense to when the world—the physical plane—was such a vibrant place if one just looked.
So why now, when the apparent ‘offenses’ were so fleetingly minor, was he nitpicking and grousing in his own head?
He answered his own question almost instantly: He was nervous.
And that itself was ridiculous. In heroic life and mundane, he prided himself on his bravery. He fought villains with no weapons besides his mind. He’d confronted and negotiated with an enraged dragon. On several occasions, he’d done astral battle against horrors that couldn’t even exist on the material plane. He even stood up to the mean girls in his high school—and worse, the constant flirtations one of them had been trowing at him for months.
All of that, and yet improvisational comedy was getting him in a snit.
“I think they invented it here.”
Kareem looked across the table to Juniper, who seemed to be in wide-eyed fascination with the fact she’d just stated.
“It looks… completely awful,” Malcolm added, supplying some much-needed grounding to Juniper’s starry optimism. “But believe me, it’s not bad. Like I said, I was really just sick of beef. Also the beef in that’s a bit bland, I think.”
“I’m not sure we can take your word on what’s bland, considering you work with chili powder all day.” Desiree laughed.
Malcolm laughed. “I can’t say I blame you. I dumped some of our ‘mild’ spice blend in the pot too hard the other day—I’m fairly certain it scoured my respiratory system clean.”
That got a wince of sympathy from everyone. Kareem took the lull in the conversation to dig his spoon into his potpie. The orange volcano that ooze out of the hole the spoon made was not encouraging. To take his mind off it, he decided to continue the discussion.
“Juniper, when is Snackrifice’s next show? I haven’t heard about you doing any lately.”
She shrugged with a small frown. “Our last one was just after Valentine’s Day, so it’s been almost a month. It’s mostly because of school, and also Lisa doing her songwriting thing for Sonja Remington.”
“You know, I keep forgetting how many famous people you know.” said Malcolm.
She blushed. “Well it’s not people I know, it’s people I know who know famous people. Lisa knows Sonja, Ms. Brant and Ms. Keyes know Mr. Liedecker and the mayor… I guess. Warrick knows Liz Von Stoker, who knows Lester Mendel…”
“Who?” Desiree asked.
“The founder of ConquesTech.” Kareem provided. “Though the circumstances of that one are tragic. I think you may have heard what happened to Elizabeth around school.”
Desiree visibly wracked her brain to recall the name, but ended up shaking her head.
“She wasn’t in our school when Liz went there.” said Juniper, then her expression fell. “It really is a sad story though. Liz was a…” she broke off when she realized just who she was talking to. “Um…”
Fortunately, Kareem was there to rescue her. “Desiree does not have any problems with her protomorphism.” he said, making it a point to put his free arm around his girlfriend. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he caught a glimpse of a thankful or perhaps guilty smile. He knew they would have to talk later.
“Unfortunately, Elizabeth did have her problems with hers. She had bone spurs growing through her skin in places. Some—Lily and her friends—made things difficult for her over it.”
“And Warrick…” Juniper chimed in unhappily, “Well he had to bail out on a date with her—for a very good reason—and she took it the wrong way. The really wrong way.”
Kareem nodded solemnly. “She took part in a trial program at ConquesTech. I was never really clear on the full intentions, but I believe that she believed it would cure her protomorphism or at least advance it to full metamorphism.”
“Mmm.” Desiree’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve heard that theory. That protomorphs are supposed to be ‘stuck’ mid-morph?”
Malcolm, who unbeknownst to him was the only non-descendant at the table cocked his head to the side. “Stuck? As in you started to change, but didn’t finish? Change how?”
There was a temptation to explain the entire process. Or rather the theory of the process, as no one was certain. Kareem kept quiet, however, because it would be weird that a supposed baseline human knew so much about the mechanics of descendant powers.
That left Desiree to take over, which she did with a roll of her eyes and a dismissive hand gesture. “It’s something people who don’t get it like to take a guess at. The idea is that all descendants kind of change shape once when we manifest; gaining whatever new organs and whatnot make our powers work. That might be true, and it’s also true that there’s metamorphs—people who can switch between forms: things like growing scales or horns or something.
“But then they get to people like me, and I guess they like to think we’re not supposed to be the way we are, so they figure we’re not ‘done’ or something. Like a half-baked cake in the oven.” She rubbed a hand over her face and took a moment to reign in her frustration. “I’ve heard about the idea for years. They always tell you that your chance of being ‘normal’ is just around the corner.”
Malcolm winced visibly, apparently forgetting that it was Desiree, not himself that brought the conversation to that point. “Well, if it matters at all, it’s very clear that Kareem understands that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with how you look. Why, if I do say so myself, you’re quite attractive.”
After a beat, he blinked and blood rushed to his face. “Oh my, I’m sorry. That was terribly inappropriate.” He said this while looking toward Desiree, Kareem and Juniper in turn, realizing that it might bother each of them for separate reasons.
For his part, Kareem just waved the comment away with his orange-coated fork. Malcolm wasn’t the only guy to take notice of how attractive Desiree was despite—or maybe even because of her protomorphism. Many of them were even more vocal and he’d learned to tolerate it. After all, it was a natural result of having such a beautiful woman as his significant other.
Desiree just ducked her head in apparent acceptance of the complement in the manner it was intended. It was a wonder to Kareem how she could ever be self conscious about herself when she kept getting that kind of response. It made him wonder if Sonja Remington went through the same sort of thing.
Finally, Malcolm’s gaze settled on his date’s. Juniper was all smiles and it seemed to take her a moment to get that he was apologizing for what he’d said. “Hmm? Well I don’t really think it’s inappropriate.” She shrugged and gaze Desiree a visual once over. “She is pretty… um… pretty.”
Awkward phrasing or not, that was the best complement Desiree had gotten from one of his female friends since he’d known her. Cyn was aggressive even beyond her natural aversion to people, and Melissa was a scold to her as she was to almost everyone else, but the other surprised him. Even Ms. Brant, who he deeply respected fro her level head and warm heart seemed to be only grudgingly polite to Desiree.
The only logic that seemed to make sense struck Kareem as just a little too sexist for him to accept, so it left hm at a loss for how to fix things.
Malcolm cleared his throat, having suddenly found himself in the midst of an uncomfortable silence not entirely of his own making. “So. I’ve only heard rumor and hearsay about this girl, Elizabeth. What happened to her?”
Kareem’s attention snapped back to the conversation. “Oh. Right. Flawed theories aside, the treatment did end up reacting with Elizabeth’s powers. Unfortunately, it also caused other problems. She had some sort of breakdown and became dangerous for a time. ConquesTech has been working to help her ever since. The last time Warrick spoke with her brother, she seems to be doing well enough at least.”
“My god, that’s awful.” Malcolm said, recoiling a bit.
Juniper nodded. “I know. It’s really terrible the things that happen to descendants.”
Sometimes even Kareem forgot just how cunning juniper actually was. Of course she knew the things done to descendants—she still had the scars to prove it.
“Agreed.” Kareem said and finally screwed up his courage enough to plunge his spoon once more into his pot pie and take a bite.
***
The molebear sank its teeth into Vedan’s arm and latched on, lifting the temple elf off her feet and into the air.
“You should at least try to break free!” Ghoja shouted up to her.
“And waste ten minutes figuring out the grapple rules?” She asked, “Hell no. I’ll save us all some time and just punch it while grappled. I get a +3 for close quarters fighting anyway.” She looked around and made a face. “Hey, shouldn’t the slackers be hear already?”
“We’ll arrive after Father Trephan takes his actions.” said Litec in spite of the handicap of not being present.
The cleric had gotten to his feet and was raising his hands in praise to his Goddess while begging divine favor. “O Mistress, your humble servitor prays for deliverance from this foe. Grant me thy ire, fill me with your scorn!” He faced the molebear, his eyes now filled with otherworldly light. When he spoke, he did so with the voice of legion. “I cast thee out, heretic!”
All action on the battlefield came to a screeching halt. The molebear, without releasing it’s jawsome grip on Vedan spake with the voice of the god, “Wait. Did you just cast mark of heresy… on a bear? As in, you just declared a bear to be a heretic of your church and cast it out of your god’s sight?”
“And imposed a -2 on all its rolls against spells and effects stemming from my Goddess, yes.” said Father Trephan, giving the bear a defiant look.
The molebear blinked. “But… it’s a bear.”
“A mole bear.” Litec chimed in helpfully from somewhere far away from them.
Ghoja snickered. “Don’t you mean moooooolebeeeeear?”
“He’s got you on this.” Eva piped up. “Mark doesn’t say the target has to be sentient, just that they aren’t a worshiper of the same god. Does the bear worship the Good Father’s Mistress?”
For a brief moment, the vestments of the Goddess’s priesthood appeared draped over the bear’s shoulder along with a bishop’s hat upon its head. Then they faded to nothingness. “Fine.” spake the god. “The molebear is now a heretic. Eva and Litec, you both arrive now.”
The two women appeared on the edge of the forest clearing as if they had just been placed there.
Litec smirked. “Hey, remember the wand of lubricate? It’s about to get a workout and I’m about to prove that it’s worth than a cheap, dirty joke.”
To Be Continued…
Seems to me Warrick loses out gaming with people who don’t know about his powers. He could easily make custom miniatures for all the characters and have them walk around the tabletop on their own.
He did that in the original game he showed up in :p
So two groups possibly involved in events this issue: Warrick, Tink, JC, Meghan, Ron(Meghan’s boyfriend right?), Jamie(who?), and Kareem, Juniper, Desiree, Malcom. Will they be entirely separate, is one a red herring, will anyone’s identities be revealed in the chaos that appears to be inevitable, will anyone work out the most probable Tome mole, will Cyn start selling custom homemade clothes online because it’s no different than wool off a sheep? Why wouldn’t Warrick think his brain turning up the fantasy of a threesome healthy? It’s a perfectly natural thought given the unique circumstances, though maybe not healthy to his relationship(s) if it’s not shared.
And the most important question of all: Vaal have you decided what to put on 4th Wednsdays or keep using them for one-offs and/or well deserved time off for a while more?
“Kareem sighed. “But no. If you must no…”
Second ‘no’ should be ‘know’
Ron and Jamie were caught in the DeathGate virtual reality gaming system in the Gremlin and Game, and they were in the Immersion one shot.
Ron and Jamie also showed up in Crashers at the Halloween party.
Hmmm, stuff I can answer:
– The two stories won’t intersect, but all the segues link up so the last line of one section refers to the first of the next… if that makes sense.
– While nothing is revealed in this issue (It’s a fun, cooldown before Avalon Rises Parts 1 and 2), I can assure you we are in the last days of the Tome Mole plotline. It’ll be over before the close of Volume 8, and it is going to be either awesome or heartbreaking depending on the reader.
– Cyn really, really should. Sadly, it’s one of those things she would never think of on her own. Someone should suggest it.
– Warrick thinks the threesome is unhealthy because 1) he’s kind of old-fashioned and thinks of it like cheating on Tink and 2) PrimeTimeline!Meghan has not shown any sexual interest in him at all. She’s just a friend.
– Fourth Wednesdays, starting this month will host the proud return of So I Married a Supervillain.
Cyn actually thought about selling ivory and chitin all the way back in… *search function* …Issue #29: Little Girl Lost. While explaining to the readers that giant mutant arthropods are totally a thing in the Descendantsverse, because scientists make them to harvest for parts.
I’d like to imagine she was stymied by being unable to find a place that bought huge carapaces without asking questions.
She just needs to learn some new tricks. Once she figures out how to produce nacre she can make a nice living growing pearls.
“…an abomination until several gods…”
Unto.
I can’t help but shake my head condescendingly at the naivete of people wondering about something being in the local random encounter table. Any good encounter table will have entries for moving to other tables, and that’s how with a bit of rolling you get woodland random encounters like ‘a demon dragon teleports in from the plane of darkness to kill you’ or ‘That hill you set up your camp on? It’s a sleeping behemoth, and you just woke it up.’
I find it interesting to look at the style of play here. They’re very focused the actor stance, up to and including to discussing character builds in-character (which boggles me a bit), but at the same time the metagame runs rampant and they’re oddly stuck on the mechanics.
For example, they are actually playing out a scene of hunting because someone didn’t buy food. As opposed to hand-waving it with “I hunt for food since I’m broke” “You got skills for it? Okay then that’s fine, moving on” and getting back to the adventure.
Then again they may be doing it on purpose of course, to intentionally flex their builds a bit with some random fights. Might be something similar in play as my usual play group’s house rule that if a player insists on rolling for something they don’t need to roll for, that means they’re actively looking for a risk of catastrophic failure so any adverse results are scaled up to reward them.
Actually I should probably just shut up here. Doing so now.
I’m pretty sure we’re just seeing everything playing out in-game because it’s funnier that way. The narration actually tells us when Warrick is speaking in-character, and he hasn’t been discussing mechanics while doing so.
Yeah, all the table chatter is coming out of the character’s mouths and they’re mimicking what their players are doing (besides eating of course). JC let them actually go hunting because it was time for a random encounter anyway :p
This whole thing is a love letter to my old webcomic, Ledgermain Comics, where the characters lived in an RPG-Mechanics universe and understood the game rules like we understand math and physics. We’re shifting into maximum over-silly because Avalon Rises Parts 1 & 2 are going to be intense.
Wands of lubricate, bottles of oil… this all sounds strangely familiar….
I… I couldn’t resist.
“Back at camp, Litec was having the same reaction to the previously stoic Eva did the same.”
Doing the same I guess?
“The gravy seeping out from beneath the pastry lid of the potpie as orange.”
Was.
So, is “Coming Up Daisy” a real thing in the DU or are they making a reference to a fictional movie that appears in a real movie more than twice the age of the oldest character here? Which would probably mean at least one of them is a huge cinephile.
I was unaware of a real movie of that title, so yeah, someone used the obvious name I should have realized would have been taken sometime in the 2070’s.
Funny thing: novel authors don’t have to do clearance for stuff like this like movie and TV writers do.
Guess it’s a bit obscure, appears in the 2008 movie Burn After Reading. Wouldn’t have known about it either without googling, which is why I had to ask since I have no idea if there’s some characters and greeting like that in it.
In regards to the first typo correction, you could also change “to’ in the sentence to “as” making it…
“Back at camp, Litec was having the same reaction as the previously stoic Eva did the same.”
“The bear’s just been hanging around for ten minutes while we gabbed. We need a plan.”
This sort of thing is why in Macho Women with Guns there’s a rule that if you spend more than 10 seconds to think about what you do on a combat turn you get -1 exp (normal gain for a session is like 2-5 or so). You get this penalty again for every 10 seconds you spend thinking, and yes it can mean you get negative exp for a session.
Which is not to say I’m in favour of that level of strictness, just that I see the point. What I actually AM in favour of is that talk actions are actions, too, and you only get to make actions on your own turn so if the players want to start discussing a plan mid-combat they have to spend turns doing it, and the enemy gets to listen in if they understand the language.
Which can make for interesting complications when you find out in the middle of a tough fight that one of the PCs actually doesn’t know the language you used to keep the orc adventurers from understanding and as such has no idea what the plan is.
So that’s a fantasy roleplaying game with Shadowrun DNA as well as D&D’s? I recognise that mechanic!
I’ve never liked mechanics preventing/disincentivizing people from talking during the game, unlike Mazzon. It always seems to hit RP which is the point of the game after all. If slow decision making is a problem for some you try to push those people towards characters who don’t have a dozen subtly different combat options.
I feel what I said is being misunderstood here. Players chatting in-character is great, and should be encouraged. But if you spend 15 minutes chatting during a time period that in-game lasts like 10 seconds during which your character is in mortal peril, that’s not RP. That’s people pausing the game so they can chat out of character.
Which is fine, too, if that’s what people want. I’m as much a fun of pausing the action to frame what someone just did as an indication of an unwholesome interest in sheep as the next guy.
Now, getting to plan and trade information between characters during a fight is a big resource. If it’s something that a team used to working together could be expected to have planned ahead for then sure, let it slide and assume the characters actually just said something like ‘attack pattern theta, variant green five’. But if they’re trying to cope with a situation nobody saw coming, like what they have here, getting to plan makes a bigger difference than any single action any of the characters is probably capable of taking, AND I’d even say it detracts from RP since you miss out on the players coming up with what their characters do in the situation and in stead get the players figuring out how their pooled resources can best solve it.
In my experience though, ‘what the character would do’ goes out the window if the answer is ‘die’.
I get what you’re talking about, but really some of the most fun I’ve had on the player side of things was hashing out a stupid, complex plan while the DM looked on in utter confusion, shading to surprise when it starts to work.
Different strokes for different folks I guess. The people I play with are less into wacky cunning plans and more into safe, efficient by-the-numbers plans, so the fun stuff mostly starts happening when the plans break down (most common reason for breakdowns being that somebody decides they have a better idea).
Yeah, we’re more Antics4Life.
We like to THINK we’re about safe, efficient plans, but really we tend to degenerate to “let’s use the corpses of our enemies to make a barricade” alarmingly often…
Of course, considering our DM’s propensity to send hordes of surprisingly tough mooks at us, choke points are often just as valuable as enemy corpses are plentiful.
immanent stabbing
imminent
The Bastion is playing the giant dude.
Was that supposed to be The Blockade, professional wrestler and supervillainous Knight Amore Detestabilis?
to repay her min kind.
in
slipped into unconsciousness.”
no quotation mark
vestments instead f armor.
of
if he’s still think
he’ll
she covered her moth
mouth
After a big of thought
a bit
talk to someone…” Thanks
no quotation mark
Everyone let’s here it
hear
rounding on Tyler with a glad
glare?
Thinking quickly in their feet
on their
It is indeed supposed to be The Blockade. Because he’s very thinnly based on The Rock.
Yay, wounds that actually do stuff! A clear improvement over certain nowadays popular systems in my book.