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druids need math tutoring too
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Griffie is obviously avoiding visibly reacting to the prediction. "Want to expand on that prediction and/or put a likelihood estimate on it, or shall I continue?"

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"80-20 on time travel at all, splitting that 80 into 65 'you travel pastwards via some means' and 35 'other temporal shenanigans' technically including 'sealed wedding-spirits in a can get opened' even if that's not really time-travel, either side nonetheless resulting in 'land spirits seeing impressive beekeepers pastwards enough that the present's beekeepers are either a continuation of apparent older tradition or just not actually there long enough to be worth distinguishing from famous past-beekeepers'."

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"...80-20 on it being time travel contingent upon the artifact being what it says it is."

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"Alright, thank you."

"We heard adventuring stories from the groom. We visited the chapel, which contained a cleric of Adrissa trying to pick out blessing stones for the happy couple, which we discussed with her. Ended up going for something about a long life protected from evil and the past. It turned out the horseshoe game was currently a solo game because people were intimidated by the half-orc in war paint who was playing, but we joined in and got other people to be more comfortable with him. …he was wearing traditional wedding guest war paint for signaling willingness to defend the wedding but if you're unfamiliar it just looks intimidating even if you're a welcome guest. Translation issue, I suppose. We'd have been fine even if he did attack us so it wasn't scary to us, but adventurers are a special case. We put him on a group message channel in case of future security issues since he was apparently participating in security. I told him about my family, he told me the legend of the Barrow King. …long story short there, orc leader tried to save his tribe from Charon, but Charon set him up to be misparsed as a necromancer by a paladin and attacked, and the only soul he had a grip on by the end of it was the paladin's. Anyway."

"Party continues to a pre-party tradition known as the Box Social. They auction off desserts the bridesmaids made, the dessert comes with an opportunity to eat it in the presence of the bridesmaid, and the proceeds go to the couple. I dropped by because it seemed interesting. For a little while it goes basically smoothly, but then this gnome Lumi Reasonknot goes up with her honeyed pumpkin bread, and a partially bleached male gnome who wasn't invited to the wedding shows up. Er, bleaching is a problematic senescence-like condition that gnomes can experience from boredom, and it can be lethal if not halted. Anyway, the male gnome keeps making increasingly large bids, Lumi looks uncomfortable, we get her on Message, she says he's a persistent unwelcome admirer, and I, uh, end up getting in a bidding war with him on the basis that I am very wealthy and it'd be nice to not let this ruin the wedding. He ultimately bids his life savings, I outbid him while annoyed by it, he runs off into the woods. I go on an, er, 'date' with Lumi, whom I have absolutely no romantic interest in, and whose bread I also cannot eat. I ask her about her unwanted admirer. His name is Tenzekil, he'd been interested in Lumi for a while, but when he lost his multi-year track record of winning honey-harvesting competitions to the groom he got really depressed. And it shouldn't have been a big deal, he's a talented druid and beekeeper, but it was for him, and he started bleaching, left his farm, went wandering a lot, got less sane and more obsessive. We discussed Tenzekil with others, asked if he might cause problems, they noted he was a pacifist but overall weren't sure."

"I go talk to the trees about Tenzekil. The trees don't recognize him from my first description and mention that both the druid and the forest change, and ask why the forest changes. I speculate about wood-harvesting and fae. The tree I'm talking to asks around about the druid for me, and I hear that he repeatedly walks to the point of exhaustion, burns himself and cries, sometimes flies around, and overall they don't understand him. They don't know where he is, because he did what they do not understand. They don't know why he talks, he used to be very kind but he and things around him became strange. Furthermore, the trees he passed by did not know where they are."

"At this point we're kind of concerned and we send our lantern archon Liel to check in with people about it, but 'the trees are disoriented' isn't actually very much information to go off of, lots of things can cause that – gases, diseases, insects, et cetera. We ultimately decide that even if we're concerned about some kind of threat, near the chapel is the most defensible area so we may as well hurry and do the ceremony now, and try to scry Tenzekil concurrent with that, though scries take a while to cast."

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"The trees not knowing where they are seems pretty important.  It suggests they're being moved.

"That, or otherwise actively meddled with in some specific manner.

"And Tenzekil absolutely sounds like he has a desire to go back to the good old days...

"...he did 'what they do not understand'?  In those exact words?  That is a suspiciously specific phrasing that I would have inquired further about, since they seem to understand self-harm.

"...damn, poor guy, though.  Senescence also really sucks."

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"Yeah, it really does. Anyway. Moving on."

"We plan to cancel the bit where everyone closes their eyes so any hidden celestials can bless the couple, it's traditional ceremony component but it's kind of a security risk and also we do have an archon to openly bless the couple. The ceremony gets started. A few bees are disruptive, and there's a spiritual presence near the trees. I'm going to pause for prediction time now but if nothing new comes to mind I'll go ahead."

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"...Bees were disruptive how, exactly?"

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"Stung the officiant."

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"Was there anything that would make the officiant a natural magnet for very angry bees?"

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"No, nothing."

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"Enemy action, check!"

"Something Weird Happening also check."

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"Shall I continue?"

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"Yeah, I think so.

"Currently...Hmm.

"60-30-10 odds 'someone in the guise of the druid is interfering with the wedding', 'the druid is interfering with the wedding', 'something else is happening'.

"Actually, make that 50-30-20.

"And put an outside bet on 'the officiant's secretly evil'....so maybe more like 40-40-20."

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"I take air elemental form because it's useful for engaging tiny fliers. Thousands of bees, formed into swarms, head for the crowd, and walls of thorns spring up around them. Naturally, people panic. I also observe that the swarms are people, which limits our combat options a bit, though we are pretty specialized in nonlethal. We discuss options, we plan to negotiate first and disperse the swarms if that fails. I ask the swarms for a truce, they say they have to help Tenzekil, I tell them that even if he wants this it won't help him. Conversation does not go productively. I start vacuuming up bees, we start advising the other attendees on self-defense."

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"...See, the question to ask here is 'help him with what?'."

"But yeah, this collapses into a 90-10 'druid's doing some bad shit', though I've certainly any odds on time travel still."

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"We hear Tenzekil yell at us, and he's … not doing great. Says we'll regret shunning him, which we didn't do, and supporting the 'violent man who stole his farm', which is a wild mischaracterization of the groom who has been taking care of his abandoned farm, and … oh, I'll just quote. 'I follow a woman far more powerful and dangerous! All of you, know your doom has come! When Queen Rhoswen arrives, all will perish-you will choke upon her mist, die by her thorns, and fall before her armies! May you forever suffer the curses of the Fellnight fey! I, Tenzekil shall have my revenge on you all!'. Three bramble spriggans walk in through the thorns … uh, generally-evil-ish planty gnomes, can manipulate thorns and travel via thorny plants of sufficient size. I do swarm cleanup with the help of some summoned air elementals, we fight the spriggans and hand out weapons for same. We can't actually find where Tenzekil is, unfortunately, so we get people some anti-poison stuff and finish up the ceremony while waiting for the thorns to be gone, since carrying all the civilians out over the thorns or such would be a huge hassle. Once that's done, we head into town to talk to them about being ready for the promised armies, and on the way there we notice a cloud of fog rolling in quickly."

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"Oh, great, cloudkill.  Really doing a good job representing the Neutral Evil slash Chaotic Neutral segments of the druid alignment chart, Tenzekil, that's just great.

"...Wonder if there's faerie beekeepers."

"Anyway at this point there's not much worth bothering to try predicting, per se.  Tenzekil's gone and spoiled everything in his monologue and attack; you'll be facing fae and his boss probably knows Charm Person."

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"Would you like me to stop storytelling at least in this format and tell you how you did?"

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"Sure.  Though I do want to hear the rest of the story!

"...I'm vaguely predicting a beekeeping-related fae grudge, too."

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"…to be clear, there's some stuff I would have benefited from figuring out in advance that I in fact didn't and also don't think I had adequate evidence for at this point in the story, so I think this exercise might be worth continuing. But I will tell you now that the fog was not an inhaled poison, it was in fact safe to breathe for extended periods. I made people do anti-inhaled-poison precautions over it, which were pointless, and this was used to argue against my party's credibility later. Do you want me to comment on time travel accuracy, or not yet?"

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"...But why would 'just in case, you shouldn't breathe that suspiciously-timed fog' be a signal of lacking credibility?!  Who comes up with this?!"

"Oh hmm.  If there's more to this..."

"...Well, first off, telling me that lets me cheat, so you shouldn't've.

"Also, thinking about it, how solid was the evidence of the groom actually living up to his PR?  And what did you then know about the bride?

"...And, tell me what you could have learned from the bees?"

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"It became fairly obvious the fog wasn't poison fairly quickly, I don't think it's actually letting you cheat when I don't think too much stuff happened before we noticed that. We got caught in the stuff with only some improvised wet cloths on our faces and it felt, uh, thick and damp and ominous when it hit us, not poison-y."

"The evidence of the groom living up to his PR was … people really did seem to like him, he gave us genuinely useful information when he could have just not, he was cool with us bringing an archon with alignment detection to his wedding instead of, say, just not inviting the adventurers who rescued his sister to his wedding and maybe sending us some money or maybe ignoring us entirely? We didn't know much about the bride, she was a local and a non-adventurer. I'm not sure what I could have learned from the bees, they were really uncooperative."

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"Ah.  Thick damp ominous fog sure does sound like time-travel or realm-shifting in this context."

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Griffie makes an I-heard-you noise (kind of weird-sounding, but it translates, apparently Bar can at least sometimes handle vocables) and continues storytelling.

"We go to the town council, dropping the spriggans off in jail on the way. Council argues that we falsely gave warning over the mist, and in general we have an annoying argument. …they're obnoxious about the thing where the groom thinks Tenzekil is worth trying to save and has plausibly been exploited by 'Queen Rhoswen', and also about proposals to team up with the local fae. Groom brings up that lumping all fae is like blaming townsfolk for same-species brigands, which is somewhat effective."

"Council decides to have a closed session with just the locals including the groom, so we're outside and we talk to his adventuring party. Apparently the groom doesn't like how the council is being about Tenzekil because his adventuring party had a gnome in it who died of bleaching, cursed by some obscure incorporeal undead. Wizard uses the Holy Book of Infinite Guidance…"

"I haven't explained that, have I. So! Our party's wizard invented a technology called Discrete Storage, but even though it's a fine name, if I don't force precise translation it often gets called something like 'digital data storage'. Which is not my favorite term, plenty of people think about math and information without having fingers, but whatever. He cooperated with some requests about format – it was magically useful for the Plane of Law for it to use a chunk size meeting specific criteria and he picked 16, which is actually pretty standard in a lot of places, and so he got some rewards for that. One of these was a 'Holy Book of Infinite Guidance', which competently downloads situation-relevant materials from Upper Planes libraries, but has a fixed amount of 'charges' to do so with, and only slowly recharges, and also drains the user if used repeatedly."

"Anyway, wizard makes a query about Rhoswen with the Holy Book of Infinite Guidance, and the book flickers and he gets really drained and the book is smoking a bit."

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"I think the root's not in fingers but in tens.  But heck if I know."

 

"...Well, that sure is something I could've seen coming.  Divination never works on the bad guy when it'd be convenient."

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