Drink Talk Roll Extended #13: The Plan with No Brains

You know, like The Man with Two Brains? Too loose a connection. Probably.

Session Recap

After the near fatal encounter with the Kobolds at the end of last session, the party (minus Amra) decides to venture deeper into the caves looking for the source of the problem. They soon find a large behemoth covered in gems that seems to fit that description and try to get the drop on it. The combat takes its toll on Jedah but he manages to kill the beast with a bullet through its mouth. 

As the creature dies, it lets out a psychic wail that the everyone in the area feels in their heads but Jedah feels it more strongly that the others. It sends him into convulsions and gives him a vision of some deeply buried memories. He sees himself, in what he assumes must be his childhood, carried by two feminine Elven figures he can’t quite make out. The speak of protecting him and place him in a magical circle that begins to glow. The memory fades to black and Jedah’s fit ends.  

The party chops off the head of the creature and returns to the city to present it to Lady Demi. True to her end of the bargain, she has Amra’s petrified body brought into her office and restores his condition.  With their deal done, she tells the party they can leave but are free to spend another night in the worker’s room she had converted for them. The party takes Lady Demi up on her offer but the room is a bit cramped with Amra now there.

The next day, they set out back for the magic circle they used to enter the area and Ulrich uses his necklace one more time to return the cave where they fought the cultists. They head back outside to find that the Skybreaker Goliath tribe believing them to be dead or disappeared, has left the area. Instead of pursuing them, the party decides to continue on their journey to Khanya via To’anata.

But the first stop on their trip is Jaran, a southern city on the edge of the same desert as Rashin. The town has been on the edge of conflict. Its ruler has died with his heirs nowhere to be found. The nobility of Rashin and Shunil both have their eyes on claiming Jaran for their own and have hired Arretin’s two largest mercenary companies, Crimson Comets and Golden Scales respectively along with a bunch of smaller companies to being the plots to control the city-state.  

Seeing the situation, Amra tried his best to come up with a plan straight out of Yojimbo but Manuel’s drunkenness made it seem like his plan was just:
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1. Join one side.  (Side Note: The Golden Scales is made up entirely of Dragonborn so I don’t know how that was going to work.)
2. ????? (Gather some information?)
3. Defect to the other side
4. ????? again
5. Profit.

This plan was changed up a few times but it never made sense to anyone other than Amra/Manuel in or out of character. 

While Amra tried to get his plan working, the other members of the party ventured around the city. Khorr and Jedah tried to find good food and wound up in a kebab place in the temple district where the took on guard duty for some Crimson Comets. Ulrich decide to go skirtchasing and ended up learning a bit of info on the leader of the Crimson Comets, Casval Elbanza. Some lower-level members apparently said that the commander is cursed and frequently bathes in the pools at the Temple of Larg in the city to purify himself. 

The finally got back together and with all his wild geese chased, Amra finally realizes that he’s been missing the easiest option in all of this: They can just leave so they did.  Next time, they head to To’anata.

Worldbuilding Spotlight: Larg

It’s been nearly ten episodes since I last talked about the mythology of the world so let’s take a few minutes to talk about another member of the main pantheon of the world: Larg. Larg is the Goddess of the Moon, Chaos and Trickery. She is said to have entered the Mortal Realm at the top of Mount Risalah in Erezel with her husband the Soel, God of the Sun, Order and Law. Using their opposing powers, the two created the world and the other major gods including Favel, God of the Wind, to whom Amra is devoted and whom I talked about in DTRE 4.  

Larg is greatly associated with the moon because its constant changing nature also reflects her role as the Goddess of Chaos. It’s not necessarily evil. It’s just the constant state of change as opposed to Soel’s connection with the unchanging sun. The phases of the moon are also described in the worldly mythology as Larg playfully running around the sky and Soel chasing after her until she lets him catch him on eclipse days. They also have enough understanding of astronomy to know that the moon’s light is a reflection of the sun’s and thus, in some cultures, a mirror is used as an engagement gift and sending them a broken mirror is universally seen as breaking of an engagement or marriage. This also lends into a few minor domains as a goddess of marriage and motherhood.

In artwork, Larg is generally depicted as a dark-skinned woman of various humanoid species. She is said to have created the Halflings and giving them a disposition towards chaos so many of her depictions have her in the form of a halfling if she’s not depicted as a human. Some Halflings claim to have met her personally travelling the world in the guise of a Halfling. 

Worship of Larg takes many different forms. Some people count their Robin Hood-like antics as a form of worship. Some believe reveling in the moonlight or even more intensely on the nights of eclipses is a form of worship. Some might say that for a goddess who thrives on chaos and changes, the only right is to do it is never the same way twice. Ask her the next time you pass a Halfling walking down the streets of Jaran.

Well, that’s it for this week. We’ll be off the week of May 24 so our next episode will be June 7th. Until then, keep on rolling.

-J.D.