Twenty Years Later! Last time the group was down in the sewers, cleaning out the lair of assassins and their cauldron-hurling ettin.

DM: He tried to beat you to death with his own cauldron… someone cast Grease on that cauldron…
C: Oh yeah!

Bodies and goo litter the floor. The field is theirs, as is their life energy.

Ellerian: What they used for evil I will use for good.

Extremely long silence.

Ellerian: Let us search them, to –
C: I’m TRYING not to say anything!
Erik: Are we going to continue adventuring or not?

The answer is not: they’re struggling with a cork. Erik discovers that the bottle opener on a swiss army knife can be deployed to augment the corkscrew.

Erik: Hah! Lever! That is amazing!
Ellerian: (super-dramatic) Once again, another problem is solved BY A SIMPLE MACHINE.
Erik: Levers will kill us all.
Ellerian: When they become sentient.
Erik: Dumb levering devices, like, “Oh, well, I’m going to go stand on this awkwardly placed ramp to nowhere. OH NO IT’S A LEVER! AAAAAAH!”
Ellerian: Welcome, to the fulcrum… OF HELL!

Silence.

Morzan: Aaaaah!
Ellerian: Thank you.
Erik: Man’s hell is a bunch of levers.
C: Is this soul-sucking supposed to be at all morally questionable.
DM: It’s not SOUL sucking, it’s more like the life essence. PoTAYto poTAHto.
C: You say potato, I say borderline evil alignment.
Ellerian: I do good things with evil ends, that’s why I’m neutral.
C: I get that but that’s at least the second character of that type you’ve made.
Ellerian: Wait! What was the other one?!
DM: That character wasn’t meant to be evil, was he?
Ellerian: Leonarus was evil as hell, straight out.
C: I’m not talking about him… It’s only one of his most infamous characters…
DM: Apparently it’s questionable at best.
C: I get that you’re taking evil things in a borderline evil way to do good things with them, I get that part of it, but it isn’t even the least bit morally dubious?
Ellerian: Not in MY mind!
C: If I just go steal a bunch of money from drug dealers and revitalize a community center with it…
Ellerian: 100% that’s chaotic good! You’re not getting revenge on the lawbreakers within the law.
C: But I’m just motivating those drug-dealers to sell more drugs to replace the money that I stole.
Ellerian: Not if you kill them.
C: Oh! Well that makes everything just great!
Ellerian: Chaotic good, man!
C: I don’t think chaotic good sanctions murder…

They debate the quirks of alignment, with necromancers compared to Metal Gear, and finally wheel back around to whether or not Ellerian is on the path to evil. Ellerian compares it to looting the bodies.

DM: He’s doing the Native American thing. We use everything even the life essence.
Ellerian: Yes. And now to tighten my belt of tongues.
C: You keep making the soul-sucking noise when you do it, too! It doesn’t put me on the sympathetic end of your character’s agenda.
DM: Like an astral straw.

They switch to the proper microphone and come back to legitimate discussion on whether or not actual souls are involved.

Erik: I’m glad I’m not a fucking paladin for this game, because there’d be a lot of questions. Every night. “Lord. Please tell me. About this. Is he good? Should I murder him?” The DM would just be like, as the god, “Murder him tonight!”
Ellerian: ‘Okay, okay, that was fine for Ellerian, but we’re five characters in! Stop giving that answer! One of them was another paladin for god’s sake!’

Actual roleplaying results! The characters do some sleuthing, discovering that what they thought were bedrolls are actually waxed canvas. There are bodies beneath, cut open in horrible ways. Apparently organ-harvesting was in full swing.

Ellerian: “More fools they for being unable to work directly with life-f—I mean…” I only think that, I don’t say it out loud…

Erik investigates a body. Bex establishes that he’s swam through poop many times, for some reason.

Bex: Wouldn’t I just dive in? It’s like, dead bodies, poop, what’s the difference?
DM: Nyeh.
Ellerian: Uh, there’s…
DM: They both are here this evening. What’s the difference?
Ellerian: Nothing at all, apparently! We’re just big walking bags of poop!

No liver and no kidneys. Sable realizes she might be covered in liver and kidney stew, but the DM reminds them these are filtering organs. Some of them are in jars, and they also find crossbow bolts with encased heads and a staff. The staff is definitely magical, and they spend a moment wondering what exactly it does. They get on with the ceremony?

Ellerian: C, could you get the Pathfinder book?
Erik: That’s what he was trying to do earlier, when he was trying to telepathically do it, C. He was trying to have you do it.
C: I am his visual projection of Mage Hand.
Erik: That’s what he was trying to do, but it failed.
C: But it failed! Ellerian tried to Mage the Hand. But he failed! And was thrown to the ground! Aiden tried to Mage the Hand… or cast the Mage Hand. But he failed!
Erik: I like Mage the Hand….

Bex, a ninja, is starting to think poisons, but can’t bring anything specific to mind. Ellerian determines he can use Spellcraft to identify the staff’s properties and promptly rolls 30 – it’s a staff of voluntary lycanthropy.

Ellerian: “Disgusting!”
DM: A willing target.
Ellerian: “A little better BUT STILL!”

C: Use your context clues.
Ellerian: I did. I cast Detect Magic, which gave me the context to identify it.
DM: I have your loot.
C: I have your loot. Which is encased inside 9mm bullets, which is encased inside of a gun. I’m gonna grab it, and then shower loot upon you.

Loot is distributed; somehow Ellerian mind-tricks Erik into recording it. Somehow Spellcraft rolls manage to identify everything they get except a bog-standard splint mail +1.

C: Does the splint mail have a soul?
Ellerian: Not anymore! (slurping noise) Just wait till we find an intelligent item!
C: Would – would that stuff work? On an intelligent item?!

Erik confuses Gears of War with God of War somehow. Splint mail turns out to be heavy mail, so they pass it to Morzan. Nobix confuses martial and marital weapons. The loot is distributed – everyone gets 21 silver, apparently. The DM asks to see if anyone has Knowledge(local) – a lot of people do, but not for the dwarven lands, believe it or not. So they’re clueless on the crossbow bolts save that the heads are protected.

Nobix: “I can’t make heads or tails as to their purpose.”
DM: Do you remove one of the cylinders?
Nobix: Sounds like a good idea to me!
Ellerian: Oh god, it’s full of bees and snakes! Why were they in there and how were they living in harmony?!
Sable: Dwarven boom powder.

The heads are coated in a black substance – poison! A nasty one – the Burning Blade, a very deadly poison.

Bex: I share this information.
Nobix: Really? Pulling out the good stuff?
Ellerian: In what language?
Bex: Uh, well. I don’t know – wait, I know Draconic. Draconic!
Erik: WOW! A limited population of people who can read it! Just me and him!
Ellerian: Doesn’t Morzan know Draconic?
Morzan: Yeah.
Bex: Doesn’t everyone know Common? I’ll say it in Common!
Ellerian: I patiently await a translation.
Erik: (sounding utterly soul-crushed) I’ll translate for you.
Ellerian: Thank you!

The DM explains just how wild this poison is: the entire cauldron of goo would only distill down to two bolts’ worth of poison, which is distilled by toxin-infused organs. The group forces Bex to carry the poison, since Bex is a ninja and trained in the use of poison. He manages to kill them all within seconds.

Bex: Well, I have a blanket, so I will…
Morzan: You’re going to wrap the bolts in a blanket?
Bex: I’ll take a bit off, so it won’t touch anything.
Morzan: Don’t you have gloves?
Nobix: As a ninja you can’t accidentally poison yourself –
DM: When you apply it. It says nothing about stabbing yourself with a bolt.
Nobix: I’m curious, are you able to poison up some of my ammunition?
Bex: I probably could, yeah.
Ellerian: Oooh, ethically grey!

Ellerian gets such a dirty look from C that he cracks up.

Ellerian: I imagine if I miss a game one day and CP comes. Sunlight is streaming down, birds are singing, pastoral music fills the air…
C: No, you are simultaneously one of the best and worst things about this. The group would not recover from losing you. But at the same time… OWN SOME MORE OF YOUR SHIT! Please!
Bex: Okay, at a breaking point, I don’t mind doing that.
DM: What’s that?
Morzan: He’s going to liquor up some of Nobix’s bullets.
Nobix: As long as it only goes on the inside. If it goes on the outside, nah.
Ellerian: I can’t wait till a natural 1 discharges a cloud of poison smoke directly in your face.
DM: Oh my god!
Bex: That’d be beautiful.
C: Not to like poo on the parade, but I think the way poison’s supposed to work is that you can’t poison it in advance.

Political jokes are made which silence the table. It gets weird.

Ellerian: Yaar, that be no justice! ‘Tis a groping machine!
DM: You gather up your dubious items, wade through the poison that would be, and make your way through the tunnels once more.
Ellerian: (with something clamped on his nose, apparently) I don’t know why I’ve done this.
DM: Does it hurt?
Ellerian: A little. (switching to his character voice, which is now hopelessly nasally) “Now let’s see if we can find our lost companions.”
Erik: (deep, deep breath)
Ellerian: What?
DM: You hurt Erik. Yeah, you would be proud.
Ellerian: Yeah, I will be proud! It’s like earlier when I was feasting off his pain.
Erik: You son of a bitch. Double Edge. Double Edge. Over and over and over!
Morzan: Like seven or eight times!
DM: At least we didn’t hear Poppi Power.
Ellerian: You leave Poppi the fuck alone.
DM: I will not. Fuck that little douchebag.

They find their abandoned NPC folks back where they’d left them. They attempt to get Sable to talk to her friends, but Sable is allegedly dazed and unable to speak. Simon thanks them for their help, and they in turn explain what they’d encountered. They pass him a healing potion and he passes them some coin to replace it.

Sable: “Oh, thanks.” Almost mechanically, Sable puts it in her belt pouch.
Ellerian: Like a good adventure. (moving mechanically) Vvvt-vvt.
DM: ‘Insert coins. Thank you. We saved the day.’

They emerge from the sewers and apparently leap into the ocean to get clean, no matter how much Ellerian attempts to do the job with Prestidigitation.

Sable: Do you actually do that, or do you just tell Sable you CAN do that and then don’t?
Ellerian: I’ve done it in your presence before!
DM: That still doesn’t answer the question…

Ellerian refuses to force it on others, by which he means he expects them to ask. They emerge in Masked Hill in the noble district, outside of a high-class Banglasharan boarding school.

Ellerian: There are none.
DM: It’s empty.
Ellerian: “What were we THINKING?!”
Erik: Has Aiden’s reputation finally ended?
DM: He used to call it the mall.
Erik: ‘Ladies.’
Sable: Sable’s certainly not going to go into that school looking the way she is.
Ellerian: Like Sable.

Because they are unsuited for the grounds, they are launched from a catapult. Sable talks with Ragnar briefly, and then KETCHUP apparently. Tasteless condiment jokes are made.

DM: In this day and age, using a word like ‘tard’.
Ellerian: Yes! That’s certainly the most offensive thing we’ve done at this table.

The DM is reminded of some really really redacted stuff. Sable questions if children of Skeldric are allowed to bathe. Determining they are, her player takes off as the rest of them meet with the sergeant-at-arms. Otakon instructs Snake in the use of lemon drops.

Erik: Horehound.
Ellerian: Horehound. That’s the flavor. Horehound.
C: (laughing helplessly)
Ellerian: That’s the flavor. I don’t know what to tell you.

It gets weird.

Ellerian: You leave the GMOs alone, DM! Or they’ll be after you…

Elvish is declared to be Spanish as they speak to the sergeant. He tells them that Faldoun is out at present.

Ellerian: He’s off. Doing evil.
DM: As you all suspect for some reason. Now I’m gonna react like you said that.
C: You SHOULD!
DM: “I’m afraid he’s over by the east side of the city at the Mage Quarter. Apparently there’s been a break-in at the dwarven tram warehouse.”
C: “Who would break into a place like that?”
Bex: Every pun that someone makes, I’m taking a drink.
Ellerian: I’m going to kill you.

Since the dwarven army retinue is stationed here, the incident takes on greater import Ellerian tries and tries to get some sort of reaction out of Nobix concerning all this, but fails. They kill the sergeant-at-arms to avoid doing paperwork. Then tell him about the staff! As usual, Erik translates for Ellerian, since he’s the only one who likes Ellerian, but their combined Charisma of 35 wards off awkwardness.

C: I’m not saying ‘is the sergeant disapproving’, I’m just saying, is the sergeant like, ‘Why couldn’t I just speak to one of the others instead?’
Ellerian: Because you guys don’t TALK! I’d love it if you did!
DM: Holy crap. He’s got a 17 Charisma.
Ellerian: Get that wand of Eagle’s Splendor out, we refuse to be outdone.
DM: He has a beautifully-sculpted mustache. It droops with purpose.

This description takes Ellerian out of the game with laughter for some time. They debate some of the nuances of the poisons and the local organ trade (Bex offers to buy a kidney). The rest of the group refuses to talk to the sergeant even as he offers to write up a report for them, to the point where Ellerian openly begs them all to roleplay.

Ellerian: Morzan, you’re an inquisitor! Inquisite!
Morzan: I’m more of an intimidation type! I’m not supposed to intimidate my superiors, am I?!
Ellerian: Intimidate him with your knowledge of what we did!
Morzan: Oh my god!

They tell him everything, even about the bolts and poison! He’s horrified and demands they relinquish all the bolts.

Bex: I keep one! Shhhh!
Erik: His character’s saying that out loud! ‘I’LL KEEP ONE, GUYS!’
Ellerian: ‘NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW!’

The sergeant recaps for them magnificently as he takes their report. But what do they do now?

C: So. I’m gonna go solicit some, uh…
Ellerian: Prostitutes.
C: If they can cast Harm on me, then fine, prostitutes it is.
Bex: I’m going to bathe, but then I’m going to possibly look into the… the Dark Market.

The group cracks up.

Erik: It’s the new one!
Ellerian: It’s down Knockturn Alley!

Some divergence occurs as C looks for healing and has a bit of a time doing it, including looking up spell prices for possibly the first time ever. Erik scorns him for not eating wall chicken. They try to convince Morzan to heal him, though it will mean a day of downtime to get patched up. A long digression on a wand of Inflict Light Wounds and its utility ensues. They propose STEALING IT! NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW! Ellerian and Erik debate which of them has the superior Use Magic Device skill, failing to acknowledge that Morzan can use the wand without needing that skill. A great deal of time later, Bex at last finds the Dark Market.

Erik: He gets down there, it’s just a guy selling lucky rat legs. No!
Bex: Let’s hope I roll well… oh sweet, I did. 22.
DM: You bid your comrades you’ll be back as soon as you can, and you go out and about, asking questions. Subtly at first, until you start getting leads. You find one particular merchant who gives you a set of directions.

The directions are comically ridiculous. Bex follows them to a small square with several seedy stands.

C: ‘Boxes here!’
DM: In the distance you hear, “Boxes here! Boxes!”
C: Still in business!
DM: “The finest poisons in the land. Don’t care for your neighbor? Sprinkle a little ungol dust in his cereal in the morning.”
C: ‘Something different about the gruel this morning.’
Ellerian: ‘This’ll take care of that elf…’
C: ‘I’LL POISON HIM!’
C, Erik, and Ellerian: ‘NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW!’

Bex approaches the poison vendor, producing the coated bolt. The vendor is surprised at the name of the poison, which is too rich even for his blood.

DM: “The only place you can readily find it is far, far in the south.”
Bex: “Do you know the name?”
DM: “The city of Shar’kalim. Down in the deserts of Isula. Basically the other end of the continent. Either someone has a limitless bank account, or they know how to make the stuff.”
Sable: (finally reappearing) That was a nice long bath.
DM: Well, you enjoyed it. “I know nothing of its activity in the city market.”

Shrugging, Bex buys poison. It get weird.

Erik: Your arm is so hairy.
Ellerian: What do you mean my arm? I am so hairy.
Erik: I haven’t touched the rest of you yet.
Ellerian: Thank god.
Erik: That you know of.

It gets weirder.

DM: There’s an index in the back of the book.
Bex: Just look up ‘P’?
DM: Well, preferably poison.
Bex: Yeah, P for poison, right?
Erik: Dwarf urine!
Bex: Oh yes!
Erik: In more toxic form than the human urine! I do like the idea of the D&D ‘Big Book of Urine’. Just every species that can pee, its pee content and if it’s deadly or not. Dragon urine! If it wasn’t peeing so much, you’d probably be fine. Otherwise, you’re going to drown in pee. Some races enjoy dragon urine a bit too much.
Bex: Finally. Found all the P’s. Good old P’s.
DM: You all bathe profusely.

A group member has to leave early, so the DM quickly fires a Perception check off at Bex. He passes, and notices a cloaked and hooded figure next to the poison vendor. A line forms at the poison hut apparently.

Bex: There’s no chance of me following them?
C: No, that person had a roundabout.
Erik: But did he steal it?
DM: You’ll never know.

Bex tries to swap disguises, but it would take too much time, so goes after him like that. He was never seen again. With a good roll, the kobold slips along, but loses him mysteriously! The scene switches to the Temple of Skeldric with numerous scene-transition cues.

DM: A messenger arrives.
Ellerian: What does he say?
DM: ‘I’m a messenger!’ Erik, you take notice of this messenger, as he’s wearing acolyte robes of the wizard college. And in fact this message is for YOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!
Erik: “Tell me, acolyte, what do you have for us?”
DM: ‘A message for YOOOOOOUUUUUUUU!’ “I did not read it, it is not my place to.”

Archmage Carrick has summoned them, to their gasping shock! They decide to OBEY – but next time!