Session 02 - Taking Control of the Power Plant, 1 Year Vacation

Meghan: I guess you could say he didn't have a...grate...read on the situation.

Fritz: ...you're on thin fucking ice, Meghan.

Drant: I like her.

Plot points/Scenes

Entering the Inner Sanctum

• Jarvis (is what we’re apparently calling the little robot dude) opens the door to the inner chambers, locks us in, and shows us around, refuses to let us leave until we get the generator running reliably
• There’s a bunch of cryo-freezer chambers, only one of which has anybody in it
  • Jarvis explains he’s the last resort as he will power the system for hundreds of years if not infinity in an emergency
  • Fritz does a history check and realizes that this is Ralodithius, an ancient (like 2000+ years) elf king who tried to take over the entire island to ensure peace, waged war on the ancient Dwemer and disappeared
    • Welp, found him
• Meghan is shackled to this conveyor belt thing suspended some 4 feet of the ground, being propelled towards some furnace in a corner
• A giant six-legged intimidating mechanical creature thing stands in the middle of the room, and three humanoid statues line one of the walls
• We order Jarvis to stop trying to feed Meghan to the furnace and surprisingly it works

The Generator Runs On People...Who To Sacrifice?

• We ultimately decide that getting the facility up and running and then selling the power to the city is our most profitable bet, even though we’re a little morally questionable
  • We actually debated for a bit about this and eventually agreed to get the machine running instead of shutting it down, even though Jalan had to triple check with Fritz that three months down the line she wouldn’t “get a little moody at me because we killed some people”
• So now we debate who to feed to the system
  • Save Ralodithius, who probably is uber-powerful and has a bunch of magical artifacts, or save Meghan and sacrifice Ralodithius because he was a questionably war-mongering maniac
  • End up deciding to release Ralodithius, strip him of his shit (which Jalan detects magic and realizes there’s a shit ton of good stuff), and strap him to the conveyor belt (since the conveyor belt suppresses magic so we’d be safe), then pretend we thought he was dead when he wakes up and that the robots made us do it
• Questioning Ralodithius
  • Jalan starts questioning him, feigning that really no time has passed
  • He basically wants to rule the entire island but under the guise of “for peace”
  • Ralodithius calls Fritz a “shrimp” and she gets huffy
  • Drant takes a liking to him
  • This is basically our interview, whether we definitely want to sacrifice him or whether he seems cool and powerful
  • He gets angry and tries to break out with some magical blue pulse thing, he gets fired at by the giant six-legged automaton in the center of the room and is knocked unconscious by a bolt of electricity
    • Pretty quickly wakes up, we talk a little more, he tries to break out again and is knocked out again
  • We use this time to confer and decide what to do with him
    • He’s ultimately underwhelming and decidedly sociopathic so we decide he goes to the furnace
    • He gets put in and starts screaming, turns out it’s the eternal agony of the subject that powers the furnace and he could literally be in there for eternity
    • Or until we’re like level 17 and the plot demands, who knows
  • We order Jarvis to release Meghan
    • He tries to cut off her hands (??) to drop her to the ground and Jalan’s just like “uh nah dude just undo the shackles wtf”
• The power grid goes back online, and we realize that we’re still considered the primary administrators for the power system but we still don’t know the password

Password Reset

• What is Gramiere’s (some important Dwemer king) mother’s maiden name?
  • Fritz crit-fails: “Helga. It’s DEFINITELY Helga.”
  • “Failed password attempts: 1.”
• What is Gramiere’s favorite pet?
  • “Hey asshole! We’ll let you out if you tell us what Gramiere’s favorite pet was!”
  • “Probably the giant rhino he rode into battle!” (“I need the rhino’s name.”) “Hey asshole! What was the rhino’s name?”
  • “I’m not helping you!”
  • “Have fun in eternal damnation!”
• What was Gramiere’s favorite meal?
  • “Alright we’re not getting anywhere.”
  • Fritz: “Hey Jarvis, how many password attempts do we have?” (“Primary Administrator has zero failed attempts. New Administrator (Jalan) has one failed attempt of five.:) “Alright, I’m gonna go out on a limb: Is the password “RalodithiusSux”?
  • Jarvis: “Password accepted.”
  • New Password: exaltedadministrator!1
  • We now own a power company so that’s cool
  • Turns out the city is actively drawing 360,000 Flux from the facility which is just nice to know in terms of setting price points

Securing Our New Power Plant and Heading To Town

• Setting administrative permissions: Fritz is still recognized as primary administrator, Jalan has administrative permissions: “Hey are we cutting Drant in on the deal? ….you know what, you can be a Junior Member.”
• Jalan Detects Magic on the pile of shit we got from Ralodithius, it has stuff from the Abjuration, Transmutation, Evocation, Necromancy, Conjuration, Divination, Illusion schools of magic
  • There is a set of robes, a quarterstaff, a necklace, a ring, a tiara, a mouthpiece/mask, and glasses
  • Drant puts the elf king’s ring on as an antenna-ring
  • Jalan takes the fancy glasses
  • Fritz grabs the Bane-esque mouthpiece
• Magic event 1000 years ago that weakened all magic on the island also disturbed the one anti-magic containment system, we will need to sacrifice somebody to the system to get it from 90% functionality back to 100% especially, we’re worried about Ralodithius being able to break out
• Puns are NOT accepted here:
  • J: “Oh by the way Fritz, sorry about throwing you around a corner with killer spiders.”
  • F: “Jalan, you need to look around blind corners before throwing your friends around them.”
  • J: “But there was an electrical grate! We had to shut it off!”
  • Meghan: “I guess you could say he didn’t have a...grate...read on the situation.”
  • F: “......you’re on thin fucking ice, Meghan.”
  • D: “I like her.”
• We give Jarvis orders to start redecorating/cleaning up the place and head out
  • We give orders to exterminate any lingering organic lifeforms after we’re gone (Jarvis runs a small scan and there’s only vermin and small mammals)
  • Jalan says to wait two hours, since to run the extermination/incineration system will turn off the power to the city

First entry into Stonedeep

• Meghan starts going on that she had to do degrading things to feed her family and now she’s super happy that she’s got friends
  • She and Drant become sort of friends but the rest of us are not impressed by the clingy thus far useless damsel
• Get to the gate, asked to present the proper paperwork, which we do, but Drant is stopped because he’s not on the species list
  • Drant’s put down as an unofficial “slave” of Jalan’s since the guard doesn’t want to do paperwork but Jalan will be held doubly accountable if Drant gets in trouble

Claiming Our Power and Extorting the Government

• We (excluding Meghan) decide to go to the Volaris Embassy (hey-o) to make our proposition for power production
• We are sat down in some lobby and given some knock-off Pseudodragon Vodka, Fritz knocks back a few shots, Jalan turns his nose up at it, Drant starts questioning whether his insectoid digestive system can even process alcohol
• Carissa Pinejumper
  • Hates adventurers bc they act outside the law more than within it and we barely get her to listen to us
  • Pays the five of us (Fritz, Jalan, Drant, Meghan, Varis) 50 gold total (10 gold apiece) for turning the power back on, then Jalan presents our offer
  • Doesn’t understand why this machine that’s run independently for thousands of years suddenly needs maintenance
  • Tries to talk us into just making her an administrator, washing our hands of the situation and walking away rather than deal with all the troublesome maintenance ourselves
  • Bargains, threats, mudslinging…
    • Jalan uses the bargaining chip that in 30 minutes (it’s been 90 since we left the facility) the power will turn back off (to turn on the facility’s extermination systems) and one of us will have to turn it back on or the power will be off forever
  • End up settling on 50 gold/day, and she can set the prices for the individual factories/companies
    • She’s totally making bank on over-selling power to the factories but you know what it’s way more money than we had and we’re too squishy to argue
  • She proposes that we implement some system so that they could discriminately shut off power to trouble areas of the city, she and Fritz strike a bargain that she’ll work on some schematics and work on implementing systems and get back to her in a few days
  • We remember to mention that we need a single human sacrifice to reboot the magic suppression system
    • She puts on our radar that there is a public enemy that we could go hunt down for the fuel to repower the magic suppression system if we so wanted

Post-Job Party!

• Go to a bar and order some drinks, waitress never comes back
• Tavern owner comes over to us and tells us to leave because he doesn’t appreciate our insectoid slave (“It doesn’t even speak English!” Drant: “Yes I do.”)
• We leave and go to the Fluffy Duck (Phil: “It’s a chain! It’s a chain now!” Michael: “Haha-oh no.”)
  • It’s kind of a rough establishment with a bunch of different races and kinds of people, even a warforged
• Tiefling waitress comes up to us, Jalan orders Pseudodragon Vodka (“the REAL stuff”), Fritz orders the cheapest meanest vodka (which because of non-existent Volaris regulations could literally be methanol and blind people)
  • Waitress is a little weird about Drant and pulls him aside for like an hour to ask him questions before he kicks her out of his room
  • Drant fails a perception check and wakes up without his 10 gold
    • Actually, he wakes up when she’s stealing it but he lets her take it - “you can’t even eat it”

Hunting Down Fuel For The Furnace

• We have two options: Jalan votes buy a slave and just chuck them in, Drant votes that we go hunt down that public enemy, everybody else votes to hunt down the public enemy
• We’ll come back to this session later because it’s apparently important but we’ll go on a year-long hiatus in the meantime because DM hasn’t even named the town we’re in yet

Repairing the Magic Suppression System

• We go after and sacrifice that public enemy, in our absence it went down to 89% (turns out it drops by 1% per day)
• Jalan votes to just sacrifice slaves constantly
  • Drant (who as an odic can sense people’s life forces) realizes that a slave will increase the shield by anywhere from 0.1-10%
• Fritz begins research and development on a feedback-loop system that will loop power from the furnace back into the containment system, we sacrifice 200 slaves before she is able to implement a system that loops furnace power back into the containment field, so we’ve got 156 days of productivity, giving everybody 1462 gold for the year (minus 2000 for components for the containment system and 300 gold for Meghan and other expenses)
• Carissa notes that we’re outputting some 10 times more power than the system was prior to our intervention so that’s great but also a little freaky because this moody uber-powerful elf is definitely gonna bite us in the ass

Taking a Year Off

• Rolling in the dough!
• Fritz spends a year crafting the containment loop system, setting up a small-time tinker’s shop, reputation as a mechanical contractor, and a rapport with the government
  • Very good understanding of flux energy - can make any tier components from 1st to 9th level-equivalent spells that are in the field of flux energy (thanks to extensive study of the furnace/generator/containment system)
  • About 100 days into the year begins profiting 1 gold/day off tinkering
    • Gets small reputation throughout Stonedeep as a tinker, gets small contracts/jobs (though no big ones yet) and a good connection/reputation with the government/Carissa
• Meghan becomes Head of Public Relations and Project Outreach because she came up with the good idea of running power lines to other cities since we’re producing so much power
• Jalan spends the year whoring/gambling/drinking
  • Gets a garrote, some acid, some poison, a hand crossbow…
  • Expanded criminal network
• Drant studies life force and is able to sense how many hit points somebody has as a bonus action (but the caveat is people are aware that he is doing something)
  • Also becomes an official citizen so he’s not Jalan’s slave anymore, woot woot for personal liberties
• We’re good friends with Carissa now
• Our magic items seem inert, but seem to gain slight power when we’re near to the elf king we stole it off of
  • None of it works independently, no matter how close we are to the elf
  • Jalan gets the idea to put all of it on simultaneously, near him
    • DM: “What do you do to try to activate it?”
    • J: “I wave my arms around and shout “WIZARD STUFF WIZARD STUFF WIZARD STUFF, PEW PEW PEW.”
    • DM: “....nothing happens.”
  • We decide to shoot him with electricity, not enough to put him into cardiac arrest if nothing works
    • Jalan takes no damage from something that probs should’ve hurt a lot but notices that his left gauntlet (part of the elf’s robes) starts buzzing with electricity
    • He aims at Fritz and fires, it knocks her out IMMEDIATELY
    • He starts flipping shit because he thinks if she dies, he dies
    • Drant casts Spare the Dying, she wakes up “you are SO gonna pay for this”
  • Subsequent testing proves that it continues to work, but will only aim the dangerous energy at a living creature or an enemy, not something inanimate like a wall, and it loses power the farther you get from the elf
• Jalan becomes SUPER interested in starting a prison in our facility, we’ve got cryo-storage, shackles, interrogation techniques, maximum security…
  • Fritz could probably take some time to come up with some schematics for less-effective, less lethal furnaces basically for torture/interrogation purposes with the pleasant side effect of generating extra power
  • We’ll have those mechanical sentries be wardens and screen incoming people
  • The cryo-storage is self-powered by the elf in the furnace so we’re all profits, baby

Naming the Party

• We need to come up with some cheeky name for our power company that is also a double entendre for the people we sacrificed to run it (and the elf currently in eternal torment) but could also feasibly be the name of our party
  • Something with morally ambiguous implications
  • An acronym?
    • SOUL
    • POWER
    • SPIRIT
  • Soular Power
    • Anna woke up and sent a text with this idea at 3am before promptly returning to bed, we’re going with it for now but it’s not a work of genius

Plot type

Session

Parent Plot

Act 1: Just Your Normal, Everday, Morally Ambiguous Power Company