- Issue #73 – Give Thanks
- Issue #74 – Bit Part Bad Guys
- Issue #75 – Kaiju for Christmas
- Issue #76 – Silicon Soul, Adamantine Will
- Issue #77 – Date Night
- Issue #78 – Delved Too Deep (Une Mascarade Brisée Part 1)
- Issue #79 – Tome of Secrets (Une Mascarade Brisée Part 2)
- Descendants Special #7 – The Curtain Rises
- Issue #80 – Bitter Work
- Issue #81 – Kin, Speed and Ducks
- Issue #82 – What To Do With Your Downtime
- Issue #83 – Avalon Rises
- Issue #84 – Darkness Falling
- Descendants Annual #7 – First Frost
They went to dinner first.
Juniper had planned the whole date and picked a little diner on the outskirts of the Shore Walk neighborhood called Munk’s that no one else had heard of. As he was parking Cyn’s giant gold humvee (which at this point, he drove more often than the woman who loaned it to him), Kareem got a good idea why Juniper knew about the place from a sign in the window advertising their spicy jalapeno fries.
“Something wrong?” Desiree moved closer to him on the walk across the parking lot. The fresh citrus scent she always wore played in his nostrils; familiar and welcome.
Kareem shrugged. No senses in lying about it. “Nerves, I guess you would say. The idea of getting up on stage doesn’t generally bother me, but trying to be spontaneous while doing it?”
“I know.” Desiree sighed. “Just try and do it when you know a bunch of assholes will be staring at you like a freak show.”
It was rare to hear Desiree acknowledge her unconventional appearance, especially not in disparaging manner. Kareem gave her a concerned look and reached out to take her hand. He stroked it with his thumb, careful to go with the grain of her skin. “Anyone that would is a fool. Yours is an exotic beauty.”
She smiled at him. As always, she kept her mouth closed to do so. “And you are smart enough and witty enough to kill at this improv thing. You never had trouble with karaoke, after all.”
“You don’t have to write the song you sing for karaoke.” Kareem pointed out, but gave her hand a squeeze to show that her support was noted and appreciated.
Malcolm was holding the door open for them when they got to the door, and Juniper was chatting with the waitress.
“…no idea what tenthousandcranes was so upset about, all you said was that you didn’t think the kind of paper was all that important.” the waitress was saying. Kareem suppressed a laugh. It was amazing how many people from her origami message boards Juniper managed to contact in real life.
“I guess some people are really traditional.” Juniper replied, “Which is really sad, because the stuff in that post was so beautiful and I don’t think you can get real origami paper with Christmas trees on them. Oh! They’re here!”
The waitress smiled broadly and genuinely. “So they are. Welcome to Munk’s, home of the Munk’s Mega Waffle.” She smoothly took four menus out of a bin built into the wall. “Table or booth?”
“Booth, please.” Malcolm said ahead of anyone else. He slipped an arm around Juniper’s shoulder and asked her, “It’s just rather more intimate, don’t you think?”
Kareem suppressed a wince. Of all the things JC’s little speech could have left in his brain, the question of Jun’s sex life was one he could have done without. That went double for how foolish he felt—after all, he knew what ‘intimate’ meant in this context.
“I agree.” he made himself say. The waitress smiled and led the way.
The menu proved to be the standard for that kind of place: eighty-percent bog standard ‘diner food’ like breakfast at any hour, burgers, fries and chicken strips; and twenty percent attempts at coming up with a signature food to make the place stand out. In addition to the jalapeno fries, there was an interesting selection of off-beat pot pies.
“Cheeseburger pot pie?” Kareem’s eyebrow rose with his intrigue.
“I’ve actually tried that last time we were here.” Malcolm said helpfully. “Not my cuppa, honestly, but it wasn’t bad—I’m not that big a beef fan to be honest.”
“Then why’d you order it?” asked Desiree.
Juniper blushed. “We ordered for each other—in secret. I thought it would be kind of romantic but…”
“Oh, it was perfectly romantic.” Malcolm waved off her doubts. “The way I see it, it was a learning experience: you didn’t know I wasn’t so big on beef before then.”
“He has a point.” Desiree admitted, “Better you find it out now than when you do something like cook him a special dinner or take him to a steakhouse as a surprise.” She smirked. “It could have been worse too: he could have been allergic.”
If it wouldn’t have been completely out of character for her, Kareem almost imagined he saw Juniper shoot off a glare toward his girlfriend before lapsing into a nervous chuckle.
“Well he works at Devil’s Own Chilli, so I thought maybe he worked there because he could eat all the chilli and burgers and things he could eat.”
Malcolm smiled and shook his head. “Part of why I don’t eat it that much anymore.” For Juniper’s sake, he quickly changed the subject. “So Kareem: Jun said that your parents work at Dayspring. They don’t let you take any of their classes do they?”
“Actually, they won’t have much choice if I wish to study the physics of the Astral Plane. No one else on the entire east coast is qualified to teach it at the moment.”
Malcolm glanced up from studying his menu. “Are you then? Studying the Astral, I mean? I tried to read up on it when Beyond This Earth has a special about it, but I can’t wrap my mind around it.”
“I’m considering it.” Kareem said, which wasn’t a lie—as honest as he’d like to be, it would be an easy A considering he personally knew more about the Astral than any other person. “But for now, I’m focused on fulfilling my Liberal Arts requirements: Eastern Religion, Psychology 101, Neurobiology…”
All of which would help him more with understanding the Astral Plane more than his parents’ classes. For one, he really wanted to figure out why the Astral projected so much Hindu and Buddhist imagery but so far nothing related to any Western of New World analogs.
“How about you? Juniper said something about you wanting to go pre-med?”
Malcolm shrugged. “I haven’t declared yet, but I like the idea of it. Hmm. I think I’ll go with something familiar today: meatloaf with macaroni and cheese.” He looked to Juniper. “What’ve you go in mind, luv? Aside from the spicy stuff, that is.”
Ordering the hottest thing on the menu was just a given when it came to Juniper. She had a bottle of hot sauce in her purse for the eventuality of dining out somewhere that didn’t have a chile pepper-laden menu item. That or to incapacitate otherwise invulnerable villains—after it happened once, she always kept the excuse handy. She giggled at Malcolm calling her on it.
“I think I’m going to have a burger with my fries. The Barbecue Boss Burger looks good.”
Kareem glanced at that on the menu. Sure enough, the copy boasted ‘sweet n’ spicy’ barbecue sauce. “And what would you like?” He asked Desiree.
She gave the menu a thoughtful look. “I really can’t pass up the ‘breakfast anytime’ gimmick. Colorado omelet and a short stack of blueberry pancakes.”
Folding his menu and taking hers once she was done, Kareem passed both back to the waitress as she returned with their drink orders. “I’m going to take a chance to form my own opinion on that Cheeseburger Pot Pie.”
Once all the orders were in and the waitress away, Desiree piped up. “Malcolm, you’re from England, right?”
He ducked his head. “Originally. I’m a citizen of the US now though.”
“I saw last night where they had earthquakes in England last night. Did you have any family where it happened?”
He shook his head. “It was actually in Wales, which is in the UK, but not England.” He corrected, “And no, most of my family comes from Leeds, with the occasional escape to London or Sheffield. Not that I haven’t kept my eye on the story: it’s the third set of tremors in a week in places where it doesn’t happen ever.”
“You think it might not be… natural?” Juniper asked.
Kareem felt for her. Even though Ethan Braylocke and what he did at Greenview Ridge affected the lives of every single descendant on some level, it was more personal for Juniper. He briefly considered telepathically reminding her that the ROCIC would tell them is Braylocke was loose again.
“I wasn’t thinking that.” said Malcolm, “Just worried that it might be building up to a bigger one.”
“Now you’re making it sound like the opening of a disaster movie.” Desiree said, making a face. “I hope it’s nothing like that.”
Not natural. Kareem turned the question over in his head. It was entirely possible this was just a natural phenomenon, but given the strange and amazing things he’d seen in his short life, Kareem refused to discount there was something more to it. He made a note to ask Ms. Brant about it. After all, it never hurt to be prepared for anything.
***
“I can’t believe all of you forgot to pick up rations.” Eva Croix gave her companions an imperious glare from across the camp.
Ghoja was just coming back from watering the horses while Father Trephan and Vedan were busy stringing their bows to go hunting. “Hey, I at least didn’t forget. I couldn’t afford them. Do you have any idea how much a magic hammer with both Knockback and Rumbling costs? It’s cheaper to get a sling for a single copper and then do the hunter/gatherer thing.”
The other two would-be hunters nodded.
This did not make Eva glare less. In fact, her ire intensified as it settled on Father Trephan. “Wait. Can’t you just cast ‘Conjure Sustenance’?”
“Not in Third Edition: Reloaded I can’t.” he replied bitterly. “They moved all the utility spells to supplement books and they won’t be out until April.”
“Sometimes I think truth in advertising is going to force them to change this game’s name to ‘Cash Cow: The Franchisening.” Vedan rolled her eyes.
“I see I’m not going to have to give out any roleplaying experience points this session.” spake a voice that could only belong to some sort of universe-defining deity.
Vedan rolled her eyes. “Lighten up. It’s downtime in the wilderness. There’s not a lot to play off of.”
Sitting cross-legged before her tent, which was a bit off from the others and on the opposite side of camp from the animals so as not to spook them, Litec smirked. “It’s times like this where being an abomination until several gods really pays off. All I need is a cup of sapient blood a week to live on.”
“Yeah, but if I starve to death, what are you going to do then?” Ghoja teased.
“Are you two seriously playing a couple where one of you is the blood thrall to the other?” asked the god. “Because that… that right there is unspeakably horrible.”
Ghoja assumed a most serious stance, his casual expression dissolving into a sharp-jawed countenance of authority worthy of the Herkuel lineage. “Of course not. As if a son of Thalish Herkuel would lie with a corpse-that-walks. No, I have offered up my blood to gain the allegiance of the Baned Sorceress Litec in my quest to retrieve my people’s Holy Relic, stolen by the same dark conspiracy we now seek to thwart.”
His face then fell immediately back to casual. “Seriously, it’s all there in our backgrounds, man.”
Eva raised a brow at Litec. “And what do you get out of this?”
“Consuming blood freely given doesn’t generate Depravity.” The dead woman replied, “And the longer I go without having to steal blood, the lower my Depravity score goes. Once it hits zero, I’m immune to most anti-undead effects.”
Vedan laughed. “Seriously? That’s awesome! And all you have to do was take Blood Thrall?”
“All you have to do is convince another player to take Blood Thrall.” Ghoja pointed out. “But luckily, at this level, my Shrug It Off class ability lets me regenerate the blood loss and she can cast buff on me through the Thrall connection. It’s actually pretty sweet.”
“Regeneration only works if you stay at Well Fed condition though.” said Father Trephan. “Which means we need to get out there and hunt something to eat.”
Eva groaned and folded her arms. “You guys, we are supposed to be making for Keep Sevarius to take the Knot of Ghaliforus before the Nash’s Cabal gets it. This whole hunting trip is a waste of time you could have avoided if you just spent the stupid ten gold to have maximum rations.”
“Loan us ten gold then and we’ll get them retroactively.” Father Trephan suggested, pausing in his preparations.
At this, Eva snorted. “Hell no. I’m saving to trade in my horse for a Fresian Warcharger.”
“Then a-hunting we will go.” Ghoja huffed. He stooped to pick up some rocks from the ground for his sling. He stuffed the rocks into his belt pouch, then stood, waiting. So did Father Trephan and Vedan.
Nothing happened.
“Um…” said Vedan. “It is a survivalism roll to hunt, right? We just roll and figure out if we were successful or not plus how long it took?”
Father Trephan bit his lip as an ominous sound that wasn’t quite thunder rumbled overhead. “…why’s he rolling dice?”
Litec groaned, stood up, and started casting protective buffs and herself. “Oh, we’re screwed now. You guys wasted the DM’s time and now we’re going to pay for it.”
“Oh, you don’t have to cast anything, Litec. You and Eva are fine.” spake the god.
Eva planted her sword on the ground and leaned on it. “Oh yeah, they’ve done it now. Dilly-dallying and keeping him from getting to the plot stuff he wanted to run? This is going to hurt—like a good lesson should.”
“Hey, I’m not that kind of DM.” spake the god. “They wanted to go hunting, that’s what they wanted to do… I’m just being accommodating and making it more fun thank just rolling some dice to see how many pounds of unexplained meat you manage to come back with. By the way, Litec, Eva, Observation rolls to hear the combat when it starts up.”
“Aw man…” Ghoja muttered as he and the other two hunters were forcibly moved away from camp and onto a nearby game trail. He keen hunter’s senses allowed him to pick out the telltale signs of creatures passing through the forest down to a stream he could now hear.
“Hmm.” He said, returning to his serious (and in-character) mode. “I think I recognize these tracks…”
He tensed as the name of the beast entered his mind and he grimaced. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me. Are those even on to local random encounter table?”
“I can roll twice on the table if you want to complain.” the god sing-songed instead of just spaking.
Ghoja cast a glare at the heavens, then turned back to his compatriots. “The ground is rooted up and disturbed in a distinct pattern that can only mean one creature is nearby—and that we’ve foolishly wandered into its territory. Prepare yourselves: the molebear could attack at any minute!”
To Be Continued…
Seems to me Warrick loses out gaming with people who don’t know about his powers. He could easily make custom miniatures for all the characters and have them walk around the tabletop on their own.
He did that in the original game he showed up in :p
So two groups possibly involved in events this issue: Warrick, Tink, JC, Meghan, Ron(Meghan’s boyfriend right?), Jamie(who?), and Kareem, Juniper, Desiree, Malcom. Will they be entirely separate, is one a red herring, will anyone’s identities be revealed in the chaos that appears to be inevitable, will anyone work out the most probable Tome mole, will Cyn start selling custom homemade clothes online because it’s no different than wool off a sheep? Why wouldn’t Warrick think his brain turning up the fantasy of a threesome healthy? It’s a perfectly natural thought given the unique circumstances, though maybe not healthy to his relationship(s) if it’s not shared.
And the most important question of all: Vaal have you decided what to put on 4th Wednsdays or keep using them for one-offs and/or well deserved time off for a while more?
“Kareem sighed. “But no. If you must no…”
Second ‘no’ should be ‘know’
Ron and Jamie were caught in the DeathGate virtual reality gaming system in the Gremlin and Game, and they were in the Immersion one shot.
Ron and Jamie also showed up in Crashers at the Halloween party.
Hmmm, stuff I can answer:
– The two stories won’t intersect, but all the segues link up so the last line of one section refers to the first of the next… if that makes sense.
– While nothing is revealed in this issue (It’s a fun, cooldown before Avalon Rises Parts 1 and 2), I can assure you we are in the last days of the Tome Mole plotline. It’ll be over before the close of Volume 8, and it is going to be either awesome or heartbreaking depending on the reader.
– Cyn really, really should. Sadly, it’s one of those things she would never think of on her own. Someone should suggest it.
– Warrick thinks the threesome is unhealthy because 1) he’s kind of old-fashioned and thinks of it like cheating on Tink and 2) PrimeTimeline!Meghan has not shown any sexual interest in him at all. She’s just a friend.
– Fourth Wednesdays, starting this month will host the proud return of So I Married a Supervillain.
Cyn actually thought about selling ivory and chitin all the way back in… *search function* …Issue #29: Little Girl Lost. While explaining to the readers that giant mutant arthropods are totally a thing in the Descendantsverse, because scientists make them to harvest for parts.
I’d like to imagine she was stymied by being unable to find a place that bought huge carapaces without asking questions.
She just needs to learn some new tricks. Once she figures out how to produce nacre she can make a nice living growing pearls.
“…an abomination until several gods…”
Unto.
I can’t help but shake my head condescendingly at the naivete of people wondering about something being in the local random encounter table. Any good encounter table will have entries for moving to other tables, and that’s how with a bit of rolling you get woodland random encounters like ‘a demon dragon teleports in from the plane of darkness to kill you’ or ‘That hill you set up your camp on? It’s a sleeping behemoth, and you just woke it up.’
I find it interesting to look at the style of play here. They’re very focused the actor stance, up to and including to discussing character builds in-character (which boggles me a bit), but at the same time the metagame runs rampant and they’re oddly stuck on the mechanics.
For example, they are actually playing out a scene of hunting because someone didn’t buy food. As opposed to hand-waving it with “I hunt for food since I’m broke” “You got skills for it? Okay then that’s fine, moving on” and getting back to the adventure.
Then again they may be doing it on purpose of course, to intentionally flex their builds a bit with some random fights. Might be something similar in play as my usual play group’s house rule that if a player insists on rolling for something they don’t need to roll for, that means they’re actively looking for a risk of catastrophic failure so any adverse results are scaled up to reward them.
Actually I should probably just shut up here. Doing so now.
I’m pretty sure we’re just seeing everything playing out in-game because it’s funnier that way. The narration actually tells us when Warrick is speaking in-character, and he hasn’t been discussing mechanics while doing so.
Yeah, all the table chatter is coming out of the character’s mouths and they’re mimicking what their players are doing (besides eating of course). JC let them actually go hunting because it was time for a random encounter anyway :p
This whole thing is a love letter to my old webcomic, Ledgermain Comics, where the characters lived in an RPG-Mechanics universe and understood the game rules like we understand math and physics. We’re shifting into maximum over-silly because Avalon Rises Parts 1 & 2 are going to be intense.
Wands of lubricate, bottles of oil… this all sounds strangely familiar….
I… I couldn’t resist.
“Back at camp, Litec was having the same reaction to the previously stoic Eva did the same.”
Doing the same I guess?
“The gravy seeping out from beneath the pastry lid of the potpie as orange.”
Was.
So, is “Coming Up Daisy” a real thing in the DU or are they making a reference to a fictional movie that appears in a real movie more than twice the age of the oldest character here? Which would probably mean at least one of them is a huge cinephile.
I was unaware of a real movie of that title, so yeah, someone used the obvious name I should have realized would have been taken sometime in the 2070’s.
Funny thing: novel authors don’t have to do clearance for stuff like this like movie and TV writers do.
Guess it’s a bit obscure, appears in the 2008 movie Burn After Reading. Wouldn’t have known about it either without googling, which is why I had to ask since I have no idea if there’s some characters and greeting like that in it.
In regards to the first typo correction, you could also change “to’ in the sentence to “as” making it…
“Back at camp, Litec was having the same reaction as the previously stoic Eva did the same.”
“The bear’s just been hanging around for ten minutes while we gabbed. We need a plan.”
This sort of thing is why in Macho Women with Guns there’s a rule that if you spend more than 10 seconds to think about what you do on a combat turn you get -1 exp (normal gain for a session is like 2-5 or so). You get this penalty again for every 10 seconds you spend thinking, and yes it can mean you get negative exp for a session.
Which is not to say I’m in favour of that level of strictness, just that I see the point. What I actually AM in favour of is that talk actions are actions, too, and you only get to make actions on your own turn so if the players want to start discussing a plan mid-combat they have to spend turns doing it, and the enemy gets to listen in if they understand the language.
Which can make for interesting complications when you find out in the middle of a tough fight that one of the PCs actually doesn’t know the language you used to keep the orc adventurers from understanding and as such has no idea what the plan is.
So that’s a fantasy roleplaying game with Shadowrun DNA as well as D&D’s? I recognise that mechanic!
I’ve never liked mechanics preventing/disincentivizing people from talking during the game, unlike Mazzon. It always seems to hit RP which is the point of the game after all. If slow decision making is a problem for some you try to push those people towards characters who don’t have a dozen subtly different combat options.
I feel what I said is being misunderstood here. Players chatting in-character is great, and should be encouraged. But if you spend 15 minutes chatting during a time period that in-game lasts like 10 seconds during which your character is in mortal peril, that’s not RP. That’s people pausing the game so they can chat out of character.
Which is fine, too, if that’s what people want. I’m as much a fun of pausing the action to frame what someone just did as an indication of an unwholesome interest in sheep as the next guy.
Now, getting to plan and trade information between characters during a fight is a big resource. If it’s something that a team used to working together could be expected to have planned ahead for then sure, let it slide and assume the characters actually just said something like ‘attack pattern theta, variant green five’. But if they’re trying to cope with a situation nobody saw coming, like what they have here, getting to plan makes a bigger difference than any single action any of the characters is probably capable of taking, AND I’d even say it detracts from RP since you miss out on the players coming up with what their characters do in the situation and in stead get the players figuring out how their pooled resources can best solve it.
In my experience though, ‘what the character would do’ goes out the window if the answer is ‘die’.
I get what you’re talking about, but really some of the most fun I’ve had on the player side of things was hashing out a stupid, complex plan while the DM looked on in utter confusion, shading to surprise when it starts to work.
Different strokes for different folks I guess. The people I play with are less into wacky cunning plans and more into safe, efficient by-the-numbers plans, so the fun stuff mostly starts happening when the plans break down (most common reason for breakdowns being that somebody decides they have a better idea).
Yeah, we’re more Antics4Life.
We like to THINK we’re about safe, efficient plans, but really we tend to degenerate to “let’s use the corpses of our enemies to make a barricade” alarmingly often…
Of course, considering our DM’s propensity to send hordes of surprisingly tough mooks at us, choke points are often just as valuable as enemy corpses are plentiful.
immanent stabbing
imminent
The Bastion is playing the giant dude.
Was that supposed to be The Blockade, professional wrestler and supervillainous Knight Amore Detestabilis?
to repay her min kind.
in
slipped into unconsciousness.”
no quotation mark
vestments instead f armor.
of
if he’s still think
he’ll
she covered her moth
mouth
After a big of thought
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talk to someone…” Thanks
no quotation mark
Everyone let’s here it
hear
rounding on Tyler with a glad
glare?
Thinking quickly in their feet
on their
It is indeed supposed to be The Blockade. Because he’s very thinnly based on The Rock.
Yay, wounds that actually do stuff! A clear improvement over certain nowadays popular systems in my book.