I was going to save that for the party, but stating it here is probably a good Idea to get plot going. Rohal would have brought it up.

---

For the Crab Goddess

http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Crab_Truckers

William will sit back & enjoy the moment. Looks like the opportunity for employment is here again. He'll wait to see what alfred is doing - and if he can see radulf swinging yet.

OOC: was working from somewhat shaky memory. This is the bit of rumor that I was thinking of, since of course Eliska hasn't been in the castle today to hear the good word that the countess is our new leader.

IC: "The obvious alternative to a natural successor is to make one. From the sad claimants as they stand or otherwise."

'Good.' Caralus says. 'Oh, now I see, you mean Tamora Riedell. She has all to regain and little left to lose- and she has a courage that will serve her well, but she will need every part of it. She has few followers and no strength in support, and has only herself to bargain with. And she is- unfortunately- of her father's line.

Think a step smaller, start with the barony. And you are right- that is what the will of the goddess suggests. It is a time of stres and trial anyway, so more may seem superfluous, but there's always a way. Little things like provoking the constable into losing his temper, and arresting and accusing several of the least likely suspects, and making a fool of himself thereby.

Making sure people have the reputations they deserve, it's usually enough to condemn. Well, are you with us?'

IC:

Meanwhile, back at court:

Larric walks a little closer to where Lautern and Alfred are talking.

"Ah, milords? One more thing, about the elves- the warrior, D... Dll-" he sounds it out, hammering it from memory- "Dleamthayaran, he had some papers on him. Letters, journal, something like that, I don't know. I got ahold of them before the elves chased us off after the fight. I think you might want to read them before you send a man off to talk to the elves about what he was doing. Or, well, have someone read them- the only elvish words I know are for eighteen kinds of root extracts, eleven kinds of rocks, and the- ah, well, it's an alchemy thing, you've probably never seen one, looks like it was made by a glazier with the hiccups. Anyhow, I can't read them myself..."

He rummages in his belt pouch and digs the papers out.

Verone, being utterly uninvolved with any of the proceedings, hadn't been paying them all that much attention. Most of his cogitative capacity had been going towards mulling over why all that ridiculous crap Larric had been up to had actually worked. Had anyone else volunteered the Elvish letters, he might have missed them entirely, but given that it was the subject of his own scrutiny and consternation that did it, well, front and center. With a polite cough, the mage raised a hand, then thought better of it and simply stood; the support-braced plume of The Hat would go much farther towards attracting attention than any politely-upraised hand.

"I may be of some assistance there," he noted, moving towards the (chaos?) mage, extending a hand once close enough and saying, "If I may?"

---

Chronological Incontinence: Time warps around the poster. The thread topic winks out of existence and reappears in 1d10 posts.

Out of Context Theatre, this week starring Vanas
-'I think a relativistic paladin has its own problems.
Lack of skin error, please reboot.'


Fiction!: The Final War (Bolo/Lovecraft) (Ch 7 9/15/11), Living (D&D, Complete)

"Of course. Here you go."

Verone handles them gingerly, carefully, as if they may detonate at any moment. It could be respect due delicate papers containing highly valuable information, it may be because Larric held them before he did. Hard to say. With that, he began to laboriously translate them into a booklet, phrase by phrase. He could probably read them on the fly, but his Elvish is rarely-used to the point that it'd risk getting something critical [/i]almost[/i] right in a notoriously-touchy language.

---

Chronological Incontinence: Time warps around the poster. The thread topic winks out of existence and reappears in 1d10 posts.

Out of Context Theatre, this week starring Vanas
-'I think a relativistic paladin has its own problems.
Lack of skin error, please reboot.'


Fiction!: The Final War (Bolo/Lovecraft) (Ch 7 9/15/11), Living (D&D, Complete)

Oh, craponastick.

Think about this for a second- I did suggest that he might have left some kind of boobytrap on his person, some kind of last screw you from beyond the grave, yes?

What's the one thing he could be reasonably sure, if the worst came to the worst, would be found and taken to somebody important? That anyone wise enough to drop him wouldn't just throw away, but would use? Something of potential intelligence value, something that would end up in a hall like this...

Oh crap.

Well, if anyone's competent to defuse that bomb, it's Verone.

Also...

VERY OOC:

"What's this phrase in Elvish? I... prepared... Explosive... Runes... today..."

...How ridiculously serendipitous that he was handed them by Larric, of all people, and thus he's treating them like they may be bombs for the wrong reason

---

Chronological Incontinence: Time warps around the poster. The thread topic winks out of existence and reappears in 1d10 posts.

Out of Context Theatre, this week starring Vanas
-'I think a relativistic paladin has its own problems.
Lack of skin error, please reboot.'


Fiction!: The Final War (Bolo/Lovecraft) (Ch 7 9/15/11), Living (D&D, Complete)

(OOC: Incidentally, would that make Girard Draketooth *badum tsh* dragonborn? )

He respectfully waits for the reading of the note.

---

"I'm just reading through your formspring here, and your responses to many questions seem to indicate that you are ready and willing to sacrifice realism/believability for the sake of (sometimes) marginal increases in gameplay quality. Why is this?"
"Because until I see gamers sincerely demanding that if they get winged in the gut with a bullet that they spend the next three hours bleeding out on the ground before permanently dying, they probably are too." - J.E. Sawyer

OOC:

Possibly. Perhaps more to the point:

It's an elvish tradition.

And of course, this is only going to make Verone's preconceptions about Larric worse...

If only it went boom; it wouldn't be nearly as gruesome. It's basically a roughly A4 sized sheet of thin parchment, folded, covered edge to edge in very fine handwriting- three, four thousand words- and the effect, if not stopped, will be to reduce you all several steps on the evolutionary ladder.

Yes, it's screwing with the biology again, and if it is not stopped and you get off lightly you may end up bonobo monkeys. More likely, lemurs- if you really screw up, amoebae. Non sentient ones. Unlike many transformations, this will not attempt to preserve and translate the contents of your head and soul in any way whatsoever- actively shredding them is closer to the mark.

How do you intend to avoid being dehumanised and reduced to primitive life forms, exactly? In- jokes and bad puns may get a bonus, but they are not enough on their own.

Blame Larric? No, entirely too sophisticated. Warn people? Hmm. Probably cause a panic. That said, someone might know something. Panic, knowledge, panic, knowledge...

All that's being mulled over by a corner of Verone's mind as his eyes trace over the entirely-depressing trap-spell inscribed into the letter itself. The first warning, to any of the thaumaturgically-aware, would be when he set down the simple ink quill and drew out an ornate pen filled with metallic ink. The second warning would be when he started marking on the original, rather than the copy. The third, of course, would be a rather distracted-sounding Verone commenting in a neutral tone of voice, "I don't mean to alarm anyone, but there's a trap here. Please, no one panic, distraction would not be helpful."

((He's trying to futz up the workings of the trapspell. No time to properly analyze it, but you don't need to know how something's supposed to work to know how to make it not work. Mix of thaumaturgy, runes, and knowledge of Elvish.))

---

Chronological Incontinence: Time warps around the poster. The thread topic winks out of existence and reappears in 1d10 posts.

Out of Context Theatre, this week starring Vanas
-'I think a relativistic paladin has its own problems.
Lack of skin error, please reboot.'


Fiction!: The Final War (Bolo/Lovecraft) (Ch 7 9/15/11), Living (D&D, Complete)

(OOC: We can at least be relieved it doesn't immediately summon a chlorine elemental or a mercury elemental. It'd be all liquid metal Terminator on us.)

Alfred thinks to himself, "Oh, lovely. It's going to explode isn't it?" He keeps an eye on the others.

---

"I'm just reading through your formspring here, and your responses to many questions seem to indicate that you are ready and willing to sacrifice realism/believability for the sake of (sometimes) marginal increases in gameplay quality. Why is this?"
"Because until I see gamers sincerely demanding that if they get winged in the gut with a bullet that they spend the next three hours bleeding out on the ground before permanently dying, they probably are too." - J.E. Sawyer

OOC does this effect everyone in the room or just Verone?

---

For the Crab Goddess

http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Crab_Truckers

OOC:

Son of a bitch.

Also, ook? You want puns and allusions, you got 'em. Watch closely, gentlemen.

Maybe William will get turned into a Neanderthal. But would anyone notice?

I wonder if Rohal will end up as a lemur or a caniform miacoid? If he really flunks his saving throw, this may sort out his werewolfism by default, by stripping him down to the bedrock of the geologic column. Or maybe we'll end up with a salamander that turns into a wolf when the moons are full...

IC:

Larric is a bit perturbed when Verone starts marking up the original, although he doesn't quite grasp why until Verone speaks- unless his own supernaturally-perceptive radar starts pinging at him first.

As to fighting the magic? There's really nothing in his mental registry that he can use for an active counter, certainly nothing that won't be more likely to disturb Verone than to do any good, and he doesn't know enough to ape Verone directly.

So, defiance.

Resist Magic- this is simply wrong, this is an attack against... against thought itself, the idea of thought and sentience and the self-reflective, other-observing world. Such monkey games are a blasphemy against thought itself, not just a violation of the natural order in its ridiculous, impossible, inordinate complexity- but that too: Dleamthayaran is not a god, and you'd have to be one to be wise enough to really know what you are doing by attempting something like this. This is as ridiculous as walking down the beach and seeing a watch in the sand, spontaneously disassembling itself.

Also, one more thing he might be able do. Substance magic- of a conservative type, burned at an absolute do-or-die pace. Larric thinks, more or less, I am made of atoms, I know this even if there are some details about how they work I haven't got nailed down. They are what they are and will not be reshuffled into australopithecine patterns on a moment's notice. They are damn well going to stay put, I am not an amorphous mass of putty for someone else to Shape on a whim.


If he's experiencing enough success at resisting the transformation of his body along the lines of therapsy, enough to feel reasonably confident of surviving the effect in a fully sane and sapient form, he will definitely try to extend a side order of what he's doing to others. Resist Magic is translatable that way, witness what Hywel did for that man-at-arms; the Substance trick of atomic immobility and immutability may be as well.

"What then are you trying to move towards, because this sounds all to easy so far. Practically no reason to not be with you so far, rather than work at cross purposes. There has to be more, and since I am so far with you why don't you give me the rest of it."

OOC
What was that again about Special Forces and claymores....
I do believe the sceptre of mess-up has now passed from Alfred to Larric for his attempt to kill the entire party, along with the local nobility.

Sorchus & Feral, to keep this chain going we’re going to need something from either of you two next. Panzer and I have already had our turn.

IC

William sighs; this is why he hates magic.

“Use the stones, Sir Alfred. The elves’ provided them for a reason”

OOC:

Larric messes up, usually because of things he doesn't know. Alfred has a poor grasp of the situation and has to be talked out of bad ideas. There's a difference.

Ignorance is no excuse.

A good player knows that a DM will always find a way to have things come back and bite them in the end.

OOC: I'm not messing up and bringing potential death to the party, I'm apparently actively courting such forces that could do so if they thought it would be better. So if I were you I would hope this doesn't become a regular occurrence.

But then life would become very dull.....

Don't be relieved it works like this; physical damage can be healed. It is the way it is because this cannot. Applying life magic afterwards would make you no more than a healthy lemur. Or flying squirrel, or whatever member of the mammal kingdom you end up- as a human person and a personality you would be gone forever.


For rules purposes, I'm going to assume a collective resistance- because your odds are a lot better that way. Starting with the values of the most skilled among you, and augmenting with the rest, you should get close enough to a mass of resistance sufficient to stop it cold; resisting individually, each of you would likely be overmatched.

Right now, the most resistant's actually Larric. Stubborn complexity, mix of grasp of and tangents to reality, and dubious humour- humanity at it's best. Well, maybe not but it seems to be the most likely thing to actually work.

Detrick and Andrea are resisting too- Detrick's plan is to throw it in the fire, but Andrea stops him- 'he'd expect that, and if we breathe it,' if it goes up in smoke and people breathe the smoke, then the curse might strike them, she guesses, and you know what? She's right.

Off the page leaps a green, three (four? five?) dimensional knotwork, twisting and spinning and looping around itself, reaching past you all, dazzling in it's complexity and chilling in it's elegance, each of the coils itself a coil of words and symbols- he was not a god, but he has done his best to fake it.

The motive behind it may have been vile, but the thing itself is a work of art, of complex results from simple beginnings, of natural intricacy compelled to emerge and express itself- doublethink very evidently at work, a mind so capable of love of nature and hate of the human.

It's perfectly capable of doing what it's supposed to, against each of you alone it could hardly fail to do so. As it stands the centre of it shifts, coils around Larric, loops out to all of you though, (passing through and beyond the walls- the area of this one is large. Dangerously so- it would get the centre half of the castle mound)- and you feel the foundations of your minds start to slip away, the sense of being a person in a place and of being able to think begins to melt, ebbs and flows as you fight back-


Larric's doing what he can already, Verone diminished it a little before it could launch itself- the balance is close, and the pressure is on. Detrick and Andrea are resisting, as is everyone else still there. What is everyone else doing to tip the scales?


Caralus says to Eliska 'Consider the treasurer. He's old. Still subtle enough to do, but not to do tactfully- he doesn't realise it isn't working, that his plans are transparent.
For the good of the barony, he has to be stopped- but what can you honourably do to an eighty year old man who can barely walk? Defeat him in a checkers tournament? Most of what there might be to blacken his name and reputation was either taken to the grave or is public knowledge.

His sons, though, they may be his weak point. Something tragic should happen to them, perhaps. We need to work on that.

The constable has already managed to falsely accuse three good knights on the word of a habitual criminal- and may perhaps need another push, something else daft engineered for him.'


---OOC note; Kaelan, metagaming like that- assuming you had a "PC badge"- nearly got William and Alfred killed. The less of it you do, the better off all of your characters will likely be; by all means think it, feel free to point out the patterns, but don't act on it.