At long last, the module PO 1: Vale of the Basilisk is complete. I wrote the final encounter tonight and if any party makes it through, they deserve those bolts of fine fabric that are parts of the basilisk’s treasure trove. In putting the adventure together, I realized that I would be a stingy, stingy Dungeon Master.
I am still surprised that it is done.
Perverse Osmosis gathered at Save Vs Poison Mid-West branch recently to record Vale of The Basilisk, our long-awaited choose-your-own adventure album. We have been talking about this audio dungeon crawl for about three years, and our schedules finally worked out.
We tried to record 34 songs over the course of two days. An ambitious goal, no doubt, but Perverse Osmosis is ambitious. Sure, not the usual ambition of critical or popular success, scantily-clad librarians, or giant Scrooge McDuck style swimming pools filled with gold coins. I don’t even like swimming. No, our ambition is to create the Sgt. Pepper of thrash in 48 hours. And we almost pulled it off.
But then our recording device failed its saving throw vs. working and went inert. But we had no real way of knowing what had gone wrong. Who expects the box that had been working perfectly for the last 32 songs to crap out without a sound? But it did. Kitten spent the next two hours trying to figure out what was wrong, only to learn what was wrong through what we in the business call “percussive maintenance.” One of the lights came on briefly and we knew we had our culprit. It is difficult to get another input box at 2:00 in the morning in rural America, so we gave up. I blame all the retakes we had to do of “Berserker” and “Kobold Swarm.”
I am probably the least competent drummer in any active, semi-active, retired, deceased, or undead band. Sure, I can alternate hitting the bass and the snare with the best of them, but I can’t keep time, count in a steady beat without playing, or do anything other than “1and2and3and4and.” It is a good thing that I can write moronic thrash lyrics about nagas on surfboards, invisible stalkers who fall in love with elf archers, and insane multidimensional spiders, or I would have been kicked out of this band a long time ago. Two stories reflect my incompetence and the patience of my bandmates:
“Party Beach Blood Bath” features a drum solo, a reference to the Ron Wilson solo in the famous “Wipeout.” After a particularly inept take on my part, Kitten’s comment: “It is like the drunk guy who gets on stage when the band is on break and tries to play the drums.”
“Phase Spider” varies from the usual 1-2 Perverse Osmosis drumming style. After I tried to start the song a couple times, Ultra said to me, “It is customary that the clicks are the beat of the song.” It is also customary for the clicks to be the same speed as the song, but you don’t see me doing that either. I’m not in a thrash band to follow custom. And how cool is that Ultra guy that he used “customary” in casual conversation.
No nagas here
As I mentioned in an earlier post, adventurers are largely sneaky jerks. In two different pieces of A1 module art, characters are lying in wait for some unsuspecting hobgoblin or orc who is merely doing his or her job patrolling the fetid back streets of Hightower. We observe more of this underhanded behavior on the cover of A2: Secret of the Slavers Stockade.
We see three characters–a chain-mailed elf or half-elf, a female of indeterminate race, and a mailed human fighter–about to jump a boggle and what looks like a hobgoblin who is taking the boggle on a walk. That little boggle was cooped up all day in his cage, simply waiting for his master to get home from a hard day of slaving to take him for a walk and maybe get some boggle treats at the local fish mart. Off he and his master go, thinking they are going to have a nice walk when, bam, Grizrof the Hobgoblin gets his dorsal region stabbed and, instead of getting a treat, the boggle eats two feet of steel.
There is a reason that many patrols attack parties on sight: behavior like this. These three are ruining it for the rest of us.
Ogle my boggle
Now don’t get me wrong: I have nothing directly against orcs; our porcine companions are like much of the rest of us. Most of them are jerks, lots of them are crazy, some of them are tolerable, and almost all of them carry sweet, sweet gold pieces. I distinctly sort of remember two different parties where I spent a surprising amount of time drunkenly talking to orcs; one of the conversions was about someone’s recent conversion to Luthic and the other explaining why I needed to pick up a half-orc lover: it was something about their thighs.
But, and this is an important but, I do not like orcs when they are trying to kill, harm, maim, hurt, or injure me. I am not talking about the occasionally tankard thrown at me or an “accidental” punch during a brawl. I am talking about intentional actions, the kind where it is obvious that Utrtru or Lorth is swinging their rusty axe right at my head. It is easy to forget those drinking buddy evenings then.
When Hamor, Faragon, Cilcilre, and your humble narrator first headed into the Slave Pits, I was much less anti-orc. I wasn’t on the adventure because I care about some elf getting shackled up; far as I am concerned, it will probably do Ms. High-and- elegant Pointyears some good to spend a little time sucking at the teat of sweet lady fetter. I was on the adventure for the usual reasons I go on adventure: gold pieces, gems cut and uncut, various other coins, and assorted magic items. I also go on adventures because I am often being chased by the forces of so-called law and order.
I knew that orcs were fairly filthy as a race, but it must have been something about the Slave Pits or Hightower because these orcs were low-end even for orcs. We are talking kobold-level squalor here. Some of these snout-nosed bastards tried to dump raw sewage on us: that’s right, raw sewage. I don’t really want to know how long they had been keeping the waste; I never thought of asking them while Faragon was smashing their heads in. I will give this to Frargon; when he wants to, he can do some damage. His problem stems more from his moral code, in that he has one.
Not only did we have to dodge and then fight in some upright pig’s waste, we also had to battle with a orc witch doctor. I never thought that any orc was disciplined enough to be a witch doctor; I always figured orcs as going a bit more for the shamans, since my experience with shamans is that pretty much anyone who suffered a head injury as a kid or is crazy can qualify. One time at the festival of Cyndor, I saw a shaman spin in a circle for about 15 rounds, drink a wineskin, spin for another 5 or 6 rounds, and fountain vomit on the crowd. A person does not need much discipline pull that off; what they mostly need is iron stomach and a low intelligence roll.
Mr. Witch Doctor had it all planned out: I could vaguely hear him praying when we first entered the room. It was the typical “Gruumsh, Lummsh, gorky, goo” mumbling that is a usual indicator that some ‘fraidy orc is asking for protection.To make matters worse, Dr. Doctor also found the time to cast shield on himself. Now, I am not really a fan of fighting fair; any being who know me, knows that. But prayer and shield in the course of two rounds? That’ s dirty, about as dirty as the sewage that got dropped on us.
I am many things: a drinker, a gambler, a backstabber, but what I am not is sewage showerer. I can get behind almost any sort of fetish, orgy, bacchanalia, but even I draw the line here. In addition to drawing the line, I also drew my sword. This is not the Tomb of Lizard King sword that I’ve talked about before. No, this is Mr. Stabby’s predecessor: Baron Blood. Baron Blood was my first named weapon; as a level 1 and 2 fighter, I was mostly swinging whatever I could find along the way. But things broke my way during a battle with a flind chieftain, and the Baron found its way into my hand.
But this is not a story about Baron Blood, whom I still have hanging above the table at my keep. This is story about killing some orcs and kill them we did. The witch doctor’s shield, prayer, darkness, and affect normal fires didn’t really work. Come on, they had just dropped poop on us. No one was getting out of that room. No one.
No saving these orcs
A recent paper presented by Dr. Zeroth, chair of the political economy department at Keoland University on the gold and slave trade operating out of the Slave Pits of the Undercity:
“Commodity inequities in Hightowerarian trade models”
The investigation makes two central assumptions. The first is that the availability of humans and demi-humans to capture and enslave. Recent demographic trends indicate that an more than likely (90%) chance that humans, elves, and halflings will continue to propagate at a sustained rate. Our second assumption is that the per unit price of these slaves will not exceed inflation +/- 10 gps. This assumption is warranted by using a regression model into historical pricing and the recent stagnation lead by the political advances of Iuz.
Our thesis is simple: Even without action by hired adventurers, the Hightower economic model will face internal contradictions, stemming largely from its underfunding of capital projects. An increase in slavery without a subsequent increase in investment into expanded slave pens, a more rationalized method of containment, and/or fewer inefficiencies in the trade of slave commodities will lead to a reduced per-unit price for each slave. In essence, more slaves equals less worth per slave; less worth per slave increases deflationary pressure; deflationary pressure reduces price per slave.
Hightowerarian economics
