(no subject)

[dragonoflife]

The recording begins with an argument over who earns the title of asshole – the DM, Inferian, and Calinai all claim the title. Last time, the characters had opened a door and triggered a magical alarm, causing foes to pile in through doors!

Inferian: And that was how Lars came out to us about his struggle with men’s breast cancer. Step one, have men’s breasts. Step two, struggle with cancer.
Calinai: (sputtering)
Inferian: And Calinai realized she came in midway…

Initiative is rolled, with shocking results!

DM: How did Falgrim get ahead of you in the initiative roll? How did ANYONE?!
Sioneva: I rolled a 14.
Inferian: Her lowest roll ever.
Calinai: An unprecedented event has occurred.

Treedon, first in order, considers the map and the two chokepoints formed by the doors to their room. His actions of choice: dropping a quickened bear summon to block up the closer door, then winds up another summon at its full casting time while animal companion Harmony and summoned bear go through their attacks. This takes a phenomenal amount of time.

DM: As the first zombie runs in, your bear bamfs out of nowhere, slapping first one, then the other arm off of it, then finally biting its head off where the stump should be. Even as it completes this disgusting motion of events, Harmony has leaped in to pounce on another…

…and attack, and attacks, and attacks…

DM: That’s one of the drawbacks of having a party of broken characters, it takes us forever to calculate how much ridiculous effects and damage you do.
Inferian: It’s not broken!
DM: I only have to plan basically two rooms in a dungeon, I can keep you here for three months… Leaping on the second zombie, like the poor Stormtrooper in A New Hope!

Some Knowledge-rolling identifies these as sprinting zombies. Calinai takes her turn by flipping a Fiery Burst into a pair of them. Falgrim hustles forward, intent on closing with a group, while Sioneva skirmishes… failing to get any benefit from that, because their foes are undead. The group attempts to get Calinai to decide her Warder’s actions, but Calinai is so busy eating cake this takes several minutes.

DM: Bullock… squeezes around the smilodon… Not the smilodon, the Harmony – the MAGE-BRED GHOST TIGER.
Calinai: Seven points of damage, plus a trip attempt.
Inferian: Is it relevant?
Calinai: I dunno, is it?
DM: No, I’m not gonna do it… Valiantly, Bullock rushes in, flipping his chain at the double-arrow-pierced third zombie. His chain pierces the midsection, removing it entirely from the legs.
Inferian: The torso collapses onto the legs and continues fighting!

Benar draws his weapons and moves up. Lars attempts to turn Benar into Sinbad, drawing his weapons only to cast them deliberately down.

Inferian: Wild surge for 2!
DM: And? And? Roll it! I wanna roll those damn percentile die. What is it, a 2% chance?
Inferian: 10% chance.
DM: Ooh, I like that.
Inferian: And my anarchic surge… 61, it’s Empowered.
DM: Like I could say yes or no. “61, it’s actually now a tactical nuke.” Like I know the difference…

Inferian blows away three and injures two more in the clump of zombies.

Falgrim: Falgrim just turns around and looks at Inferian. “Come on.”
Inferian: I left you two!
DM: Falgrim wonders why he bothers!

Lars squeezes through a door, necessitating the looking up of those rules. Treedon regrets his choice of spells now that he’s seen how this is all going, although the zombies finally act, and several more pile through the doors. While the DM resolves this, Lars returns to an earlier point of discussion, as the group had been telling him about the Second Birthright Game earlier in the evening.

Lars: So your Intelligence of 36 made you so smart that the world like…
Inferian: That’s how he played it, the DM did. Every time I heard someone talk it was the horrible 6 Intelligence hick voice. “We-yell ya see there’s got ta be a little emergency down in tha Southern lay-unds…”
Lars: Wait, are we playing the racist game?
Calinai: Everyone else hears, “Sir! There’s a great deal of trouble in the Southern—“ very normal, very natural, very productive. He hears, “They all be a lotta trouble down there…”
Inferian: Also my capital city had evasion for some reason. A fireball hit it and it dodged out of the way. Also I briefly turned Iglar’s character into a god. He had 200 in every stat. And then he mooned me.
Falgrim and Sioneva: The most perfect ass in the world.
Calinai: Nothing beats seeing Inferian get destroyed by everybody…
Inferian: God damn that! God damn it! My God!

The bear takes some damage from zombies, which is described in a way that would soon be regretted…

DM: Sinking their teeth into its forepaws…
Lars: Not two paws. Forepaws.

Silence.

Inferian: Oh, that was the ‘paws’ that refreshes.
Treedon: That’s it, I quit.
Falgrim: To the ponies!
DM: The bear takes 15 points of damage, and I’ll need a Fortitude save.
Sioneva: Noo, zombie bear.
Treedon: Nice… the bear rolled a 26.
DM: It now has two zombies attached, as they attempt to savage it—
Inferian: But it’s able to grin and bear it.
Falgrim: FOR FUCK’S SAKE, INFERIAN. Come on! I can handle it now and then, but the last three things that came out of your mouth were puns!
DM: If that’d been your first one, the whole room probably would’ve been, “aaah, an oldie but goodie.”
Inferian: Sorry, I didn’t mean to bruin the evening.
Sioneva: FUCK OFF, INFERIAN!
DM: That would be a caltrop smite at your head if I had one… that was a good one, though. That would be a spiteful one…

A horde of zombies pile out of the door nearest to Falgrim, to the alarm of the players. Falgrim bemoans the lack of Supreme Cleave in 3.5 rules. Benar gets bitten, then actually fails his Fortitude save, though with no immediate effect. Falgrim is surrounded but unharmed. Treedon finally completes his cast, dropping a rhino into the room with Falgrim and his zombie horde. The rhino immediately charges, annihilating one zombie off the face of the planet.

DM: And its horn sinks with a massive GORE, GORING a zombie—
Inferian: And reducing it to OOOOO—
DM and Inferian: --OOOOOOOZE.
Falgrim: HORNO!
Calinai: (in the background and out of context) No one lays a finger on Falgrim’s butter button?
Falgrim: Sad but true…

The group laboriously muscles through Treedon’s many, many minion attacks. Again, this takes a while and visibly embitters the DM. Inexplicably, Treedon starts casting another SNA.

DM: Thank goodness. That’s what I needed. What’s the anti-druid class, Inferian?
Inferian: There are none. Druids are god.
DM: I’ll just make druids as your enemies, then…

Falgrim goes for the Power Attack, dealing out a minimum of 37 points of damage and leading the DM to threaten injury on himself because his attack is too powerful. Falgrim cleaves through some more zombies, and Calinai flicks out a Fiery Burst, frying three.

Sioneva: Oh, natural 20. Of course.
DM: Yes, waste them on the undead.
Inferian: She has an unlimited supply, dude.
DM: The zombie horde’s been halved in less than two turns.
Treedon: Zombie horde? I’m gonna have an animal horde here in a minute.
DM: There’ll be a dragon horde, and not the kind you loot, coming your way.

Bullock’s failure to take an AOO some time ago is noted, with the DM pointing out he’d asked Calinai for it and she’d never responded. Bullock slaps around a zombie.

Inferian: Benar… disappears.
Falgrim: “I’m out of here!”
Lars: (removing Benar’s mini)
Inferian: Give me thaaaaat.
DM: Be careful what you say!
Falgrim: Just give him a mook,
Calinai: He said ‘disappears’, not ‘disappears from existence’.
Falgrim: “Goodbye, Lord Dragon. My people need me.”
Inferian: He strikes that dude from invisibility! …natural 1. Good work, Benar. I guess he DID disappear from existence.
Calinai: Was that the check to see if he fails the teleport? He’s in the ground…. “Aaah! Aaaaaah!”

Benar reappears sans short sword. Again, he is made into Sinbad. Lars and Inferian slice and blast in turn. Lars AOOs a zombie, then another one bites Benar, who fails his Fortitude save again.

Treedon: Aww man, I can’t summon a unicorn.
DM: He cries out, “Save me, Lord Dragon!” in a voice that sounds somewhat slurred and woozy.
Calinai: The zombies carry mummy rot, seriously?

Falgrim actually takes a hit, though he laughs off the Fortitude save. The DM sings the praises of the ninja die set Inferian gave him. Inferian starts rolling up Benar II.

Calinai: Don’t kill off Benar!
DM: I don’t WANT to! He keeps throwing him – “oh, there’s a dragon, get him Benar!”
Inferian: What is he supposed to do, hang back?
DM: That’s your job.
Inferian: Exactly!

Bullock trips some zombies on AOOs. The transcriber vows to transcribe something that ought to be redacted, except to discover as he transcribes that the sequence of events lacks the verbal context to adequately describe it. Damn. The players discover that Star Crunch is pretty much a perfect 3x3 mini base and are entertained beyond measure. Treedon’s army of minions is up… and he summons a snake to clog the doorway. Falgrim’s turn comes up, and Inferian cranks up the Skyrim music. He promptly rolls a natura1 1.

Inferian: I guess that was the zombies’ theme song after all…
DM: You swing in a great arc as you once did, only a few seconds ago, but this time, your sword, covered in blood and raining blood from all the dead zombies, flies free, and flies backwards. Directly in between the eyes of the rhinoceros.
Falgrim: (laughing) Uh-oh.
DM: Roll your damage!
Falgrim: Uh…33.
DM: 33 dama—did the rhino have 33 hir points to lose?!
Treedon: Yes.
Calinai: What happened?
DM: He swung so hard…
Treedon: The rhino has 92 hit points, apparently.
DM: The rhino is undeterred, despite having Frostrbrand buried to the hilt in its face.
Falgrim: Oops.
DM: Hey, I know it’s not gonna outcome anything, I just wanted something to be comical in this fight. You gotta roll a 1 sometime.
Falgrim: And this was the time.
DM: Calinai, would you like to do the honors?
Calinai: (utterly unenthused) I guess.
DM: Or not. We’ll move on to Sioneva!
Calinai: 13.

Benar and Falgrim make a quiet pact to never speak of their fumbles again. Sioneva and some animals make their attacks, as does Benar.

Calinai: I took the time to memorize Neutralize Poison and it’s a disease people get…
Inferian: Yeah, who gets a disease, honestly…
DM: People that attack zombie hordes… Well what comes first? The disease or the hooker? It’s like the chicken or the egg.
Calinai: …WHAT?!
DM: Does the hooker catch the disease, or is the hooker the source of the disease?
Calinai: …god damn it, DM…

With the field cleared, the party is knee-deep in zombie corpses. Calinai examines Benar and believes him to be infected with the Living Death disease, and in a space of hours to a day he will drop dead and then rise as a zombie again.

DM: You keep this information to yourself as you are looking over Benar’s wounds…
Calinai: “You’re gonna be just fine! You’re gonna be just fine—“
Inferian: SENSE MOTIVE!
DM: I’m saying you’re not sharing this with Benar...
Calinai: “You’re gonna be just fine,” Fiery Burst…
Treedon: How long does he have before he goes all zombie on us?
DM: Give me another Knowledge(religion) roll to determine that.
Lars: 11…
Calinai: Ha ha, 30!
Lars: Calinai comes walking in. “HOLY SHIT HE’S GONNA DIE TODAY!”
DM: You will know the time down to the hour, minute, and second most likely…
Inferian: What’s that clock for, Calinai? Why have you conjured a countdown with Silent Image?
Lars: Oh please tell me this is going to be like the one in Final Fantasy VII, where the skull’s head floats over the dude…
DM: Judging from the severity and deepness of the wounds, even though you’ve stabilized the wounds, you figure he has three hours.
Calinai: I give him some Zombie-X, he’ll be good for 24 hours…

The group begins discussing how to save Benar in the very limited time they have available, such as stalling a day or going back to see if Inferian’s paladin minion can save him.

Lars: I have no pity on him!
Inferian: Charm Person, you’re on board.
Lars: I can’t be charmed, actually.
Inferian: Dominate Mind.
Lars: Alignment shift!
Inferian: I’m charming you to save my own minion, I don’t see how that’s an evil act…
DM: What’s the greater evil, trying to preserve the life of this poor helpless thrall, or waiting for another to become ensared in this man’s grasp?
Calinai: We LIKE Benar. We don’t know if we’ll like Fenar. Or Trenar.
Inferian: My next one’s going to be a bard, thus, Benard.
Falgrim: I’m going to place my hand on the hilt of my sword and just wait for the rhinoceros to disappear…

The DM grouses about Treedon’s summoning power; Inferian vows that Treedon will gain the power to summon two of every animal from the prestige class, “Noah”.

Inferian: Seal off all those stairways… “We don’t want anything coming upon us.”
Falgrim: I like how your voice kinda went into Inferian’s…
DM: I wanted an excuse to have you guys start RPing so I could hear the voice again. God, I missed it.
Inferian: I realized that was going to be an in-character statement as I made it. “Shifting, shifting, maybe they won’t notice… fuck.”
Falgrim: Of course we do. We notice everyone’s mistake.

Checking her inventory, Calinai realizes she has a Staff of Healing which she can just burn 3 charges off of. Problem solved! The question arises as to how, exactly, ‘charges per day’ items recover and when, which leads to the singing of the MST3K theme song. They assess their condition and determine that the summoned bear did a damn fine job of tanking the zombie horde. The DM grumbles about this. Lars comes under mockery for how much squeezing through he’s going to have to do, considering he has a Persisted enlarge effect in a dungeon not designed for it. Someone injures Inferian.

Inferian: What the hell did you do?! You lightly tapped me and I think you hit a nerve…
Calinai: You’re just a pussy, that’s why. Sioneva beat you too hard?
Inferian: Apparently.
Falgrim: He gets off on it.
Calinai: What’s the safety word? “Natural 20.”

They head down the hallway behind a doorway, only to discover it leads to a large room with a huge burning fire almost right outside the door, at the base of a gate. Wood, refuse, and corpses mingle as the fuel of the fire, though the gate itself is not in danger. Falgrim extinguishes it by drawing his Frostbrand, which automatically puts it out. Calinai continues to insist the fire is magical for some reason.

DM: REFLEX SAAAVE – I’m kidding.
Falgrim: Oh. Rolled a 1. “Aaaah!”
DM: To your horror, Falgrim dives beard-first into the flames!
Inferian: What the fuck, man.
Falgrim: Why am I rolling 1s all of a sudden…
Lars: Some of Benar’s zombie juice got in his eyes.
DM: But before his beard can kindle and spark, the Frostbrand causes the flames to diminish and expire.

Caliani steps up to investigate the corpses; the DM attempts to rule she brings them back to life, then describes them as abnormally large, and some of them are most likely trollocs. Sadly, Calinai has no castings of Speak with Dead prepared. The DM finally points out that Artemis has disappeared.

Inferian: All right, well, let’s continue to step forward…
DM: Unperturbed, Inferian—
Inferian: We lost a player, what are we supposed to do, acknowledge it? Come on.

The room has three different doors leading out. Benar starts listening at the doors.

Inferian: The door after that… 23.
DM: (Iglar accent) A 23…
Falgrim: (Iglar accent) 23, Inferian.
Calinai: (Iglar accent) I need to go home, my baby is crying.
Falgrim: (Iglar accent) I need to go home. My baby’s about to be born.
Inferian: (Iglar accent) I’m having another child.
Calinai: Tell your wife to do something about the baby! She’s a parent too!
DM: At the second door, Benar believes he heard the sound of—
Calinai: It’s gonna happen to the DM too. He’s gonna betray us for a baby, you son of a bitch…
Inferian: That’s what Benar hears?! The trollocs are angry at one of their own!

Benar hears muttering in a guttural tongue, and the other characters step up to see if they can identify the language (Inferian having never written down what tongues Benar speaks).

Calinai: Don’t we all speak that silly Olde Tongue?
DM: Yes, you all wasted a language slot on it.
Calianai: I don’t! I don’t…
DM: You’re the one person that SHOULD speak it in the group, too. Well, it would’ve been a waste, considering – and it has actually astonished your character that all these people in one group happen to speak a language that one in ten of the nobility even bother to learn basic court readings and such. It’s enough to make you think something special is going on here.

No one can recognize the tongue (in retrospect, it was probably Giant). Falgrim suddenly realize he’s been wearing the Helm of Comprehend Languages and Read Magic the entire time, steps up, and rolls. The Helm is dubbed ‘Siri’. Falgrim hears the voices arguing over what to do with “the rest”.

Inferian: “I would suspect that they are not friendly to our cause. If you look at the bonfire, they burned human and trolloc corpses together. I believe that humans would have given their own kind a separate, decent pyre, at least.”
Calinai: “With the zombies here, they might have feared a zombie infestation. Those untrained in the arts might have burned the bodies, it’s not uncommon for lesser villages to do that to diseased individuals for their safety. Though this normally spreads the disease faster.”
Inferian: “Even so, I think they’d have burned them separately.”
DM: You guys are having this conversation in hushed voices, I take it?
Calinai: Of COURSE.
Inferian: Listen to us being hushed in-character and all!
DM: Well I thought that was just in consideration for the gay leapfrogging neighbors upstairs…

The group cheerfully agrees that the ensuing conversation is redacted, but nevertheless continues to believe that they’d go viral on Youtube. To prove how disastrous this would be, the transcriber shall now unveil merely the smallest fraction of redacted humor…

Calinai: Oh dude! Tent heil! TENT HEIL!
2:12:30
It just gets worse. Yes, it get worse than THAT.

Calinai: Back to the game… We’ve treaded the darkest path possible. Sorry, buddy.
Lars: It’s all right.
Calinai: Lars goes home and has a sad shower in the bathroom…
Inferian: “Must get clean…”

Benar hears nothing at the third door. The DM calls for a Knowledge(nature) roll from Treedon, while the other players do weird stuff.

Calinai: He’s rubbing his beef jerky on me.
Inferian: Come on, Calinai, snap into a Slim Jim!

On the other side of the door with the grunting, the party discovers a group of formidable ogres, well-armed and armored and probably of the Skullcrusher variety.

Treedon: That sounds nice and safe.
DM: Rigidly trained in the art of martial discipline, as opposed to the typical ogre who is “Rob smash kill.” As you’re determining this, the one with his back to you looks over his shoulder and takes note of the open door, and the party of adventurers revealed within! That’s where I’ll let it hang until the next time…

With a dramatic noise signaling the positioning of the minis being captured for posterity, they close the game… and discuss what to do next.

Calinai: Treedon, do you have a character for that xenomorph game, where there was aliens and stuff?
Inferian: Yeah, it was the druid who didn’t know what trees were, remember?
Treedon: Ooh, that game.
Calinai: That’s restarting to something with a decent, better storyline since Inferian outright laughed at me. I feel depressed and I don’t want to play it any more… He stopped the game for 20 minutes to laugh…

Calinai threatens to make Inferian run something, but topically, Inferian vows to run an Exalted campaign based on the government shutdown. Horribly the game ends with the musical question of fox vocabulary being posed.