Session 09 - Prison Upgrades, Sylvia 'Elopes', and Catching Up With Old Friends

Fritz: What if someone conducts aerial surveillance of our plant? They’ll see 2 corpses’ worth of bones strung up on webs, swaying in the wind, decorating our roof like the world’s most morbid wind chime.

Plot points/Scenes

Meeting Roger

• We are greeted, hungover, by breakfast brought by a male
  • Claims he was okayed for a guest pass by all three of us when we were drunk last night, and that he came here with Sylvia
  • Fritz goes into interrogation mode - Roger (no last name), even on legal papers (because apparently he works contract-only, no strings attached)
  • Seems genuine, has scars across his face, could potentially have a sketchy past, a little dirty, doesn’t have the features of a high-born person
  • Drant asks if he can eat Roger

Security Upgrades - Bracelets and A.S.S.

• Jalan and Fritz discuss guest passes and security
  • Jalan suggests Fritz invent explosive collars/bracelets that trigger whenever the wearer leaves the perimeter or on a signal
  • Meghan suggests spike bracelets, so they don’t explode messy and violent and could be reused
  • Jalan complains that spike bracelets that cause people to bleed out are messy, and instead suggests poison spike bracelets
  • Fritz gets to work on Mk 1
• A.S.S.
  • Arachnid Security System
  • A web (ha) of arachnids linked to Drant telepathically, like his own hive mind, set up in the forests around the power plant to warn of incoming intruders/escapees/whatnot
  • Needs to go to the library to research a species that will best fit his needs
    • Takes off on his own
    • ……..
    • 10 minutes later he’s back
      • D: “I can’t read”
      • F: “I’m drawing up Jalan’s poison bracelet schematics, sorry bud.”
      • *looks to Jalan*
      • J: “......I just don’t want to.”
      • …….
      • J: “hey Roger, can you read?”
      • We give him a short test and it’s like kindergarten level, sounding out each word phonetically
      • D: “good enough, OFF MY NOBLE STEED”
        • Jumps in a backpack stocked with chips and Roger carries him down to town
    • Long research hours later, Wizmur informs Drant of a species of giant Arctic Wolf Spiders that reside on a mountain ~2 hr away that may be able to be tamed
  • Upon returning
    • Roger brings roasted rabbits for everybody
      • Jalan refuses his, Roger and Sylvia start lovey-dovey sharing theirs and giggling
    • Fritz has a thought
      • F: “Hey uh, Roger. How long have you and Sylvia known each other?”
      • R: “Almost 25 hours now!”
      • ………
      • J: “What do you give em, 1 week? 2?”
      • F: “1 week TOPS.” [oh, if we had only known…]
• Back to the bracelets, Fritz finishes the Mk 1 design
  • Spike is able to administer a paralysis poison that lasts for a minute if it’s constantly injecting (in other words, if it’s able to be removed, it won’t last the full minute)
  • Mechanism works 9/10 times
  • Jalan wishes it were lethal (Fritz agrees)
  • Since this is mark 1 of everything, decide to rework it, however, mark 2 of anything will cost more money: Fritz doesn’t want to pay, neither does jalan…
    • F: “DRANT!”
    • D: “yah.”
    • J: “pay us money. For the security system, everyone’s gotta chip in.”
    • F: (“he’s probably more loaded than both of us put together”)
    • D: “I don’t have any money”
    • J: “.....buuut we’re giving you a paycheck. How did you spend it all already?”
    • D: “was that what that was? That paper shit, I just threw it away” F & J: “WHAT”
    • Jalan realizes that Sylvia is in charge of taking out the trash and confronts her, she immediately looks guilty and admits recognizing Drant’s checks as he threw them out
      • J: “and what did you do with them”
      • S: “I recycled them!”
      • F: “like, back into company funds, or-”
      • S: “......at the barrrs?”
      • …….
      • J: “Who hired this useless hoe?”
      • F: “YOU did, Jalan. YOU did.”
• Jalan comes up with a contract just for the purposes of outlining responsibilities and pay and hierarchy
  • After some bitching about who gets the most shares in the company or who gets final decision-making power, Fritz bullies Jalan into making everyone’s shares equal (wow basic human rights what’s that)
    • There is a little back and forth where F&J discuss if Drant would notice if he only had a half share; this idea is discarded but Jalan tries to turn Drant against Fritz anyway
      • J: “hey Drant did you know Fritz was trying to cut you out of the company”
      • F: “you motherfucker”
  • THE CONTRACT
    • Jalan is CEO
    • Fritz is CTO
    • Drant is CSO
    • Meghan retains her position as Head of Public Outreach ig but we’re the big three that have final say in important things
• One final ongoing prison modification - the interrogation chambers
  • There’s a pre-installed conveyor system that brings prisoners to the furnace - Jalan suggests we modify it so that it brings prisoners to interrogation rooms
    • Fritz offers that we need sonic insulation just like we did with the furnace
  • 3 rooms will be built but will take a very long time to be built to the code we’re specifying, we set our security team on it while we go on…...

The Company Retreat

• Drant requests our help in hunting his A.S.S. spiders - Fritz makes Jalan go along and he dubs it a company retreat, taking Roger along as a meat shield (he is very proud that his job is to be bait)
  • Sylvia begs to go along so she can be with Roger, after some groaning we coyly agree (with luck she’ll have an ‘accident’ and we won’t NEED to draft a position for her in our new company contract)
• Drant’s survival skill narrowly prevents us all from getting exhaustion as we trek through these cold and treacherous mountains
  • J: “ah! My ankle! I cannot go on.”
  • F: “?”
  • J: “leave me here and collect me on your way back, k bai have fun with the spiders!!”
  • R: “I KNOW FIRST AID”
    • Turns out he actually does and very nicely wraps Jalan’s ankle so he can walk on it, but he keeps protesting that he ‘cannot go on’
  • Drant realizes he’s an Odic and can actually heal this shit, promptly realizes Jalan’s 100% faking
  • Fritz makes the point that if he wants to be alone on top of a sub-freezing mountain where human-sized spiders are known to live, he’s welcome to
    • He decides he maybe wants to come after all
• A little farther on, Jalan steps on a web and starts getting dragged away, Fritz runs to help but gets tangled up in webs herself, a spider appears at the edge of the clearing and starts scuttling over
  • Roger (“I was supposed to be the bait!!”) runs to Jalan and cuts him free
  • Fritz (“I hate webs I hate webs I HATE WEBS”) gets herself free and fires off a crossbow bolt
• Drant notices the spider making her way along towards the crew and telepathy hive minds it
  • “Pain….kill…..eat”
  • It pounces on Sylvia (who’s also gotten stuck) and takes her down, starts ripping her apart
  • Fritz and Drant and Jalan just kind of look the other way and shrug
  • Roger runs to try to save Sylvia
• Drant fucking STABS ROGER IN THE BACK OF THE NECK with his snake fang, Roger falls over, Drant gifts Roger to the spider as well
  • Fritz is no longer on board with this, Jalan is MIA as he peace’d the fuck out into the woods when things went south
• Drant talks in hive-mind to the spider and talks her into helping us
  • Her name is Nymarinian, “Nymph”, okay I guess Nympharinian then
• Fritz’s crossbow bolt is still stuck in her, manages to pull it out without killing her
• Nymph wraps our two former employees’ bodies in silk for transportation
  • F: “can’t she just...eat them now? Get rid of the evidence?”
  • D: “she’s not that hungry, she wants to save them for later”
  • Drant tells Nymph about the wonders of refrigeration and suddenly we’re roped into storing the evidence of our EMPLOYEES’ MURDER IN OUR CRYOCHAMBERS
• When we return, Meghan asks about where roger and sylvia went
  • We feign ignorance
  • F: “I dunnooo maybe they eloped”
  • M: “she left lots of her clothes here…”
  • F: “if she’d wanted to keep them she would’ve taken them with her when she eloped probably”
  • M: “.....can I take them”
  • F: “go for it”

Caring for Nymph and the establishment of A.S.S.

• Drant’s spider wants a partner
  • After some sexual suggestions he learns the area around our base is just a lot of area for one spider to cover, so Drant agrees to finding her a mate
• Asking the spider what she eats
  • Meat. like raw meat is cool. The bodies(!) in our freezers will last her awhile but not forever
  • 20gp of livestock will keep her fed for a year
  • Drant coughs up the gold and suddenly we’ve got 30 hogs and two former employees wrapped in silk shoved into the cryo-freezers farthest from the plant’s entrance with some “out of service” signs and prayers to the God Emperor that no one tries to go back there
    • this might be one of my favorite sentences I've ever written, I love this campaign
• Spider den on top of plant
  • Nymph says she can create her nest on top of our plant and link to her net of webs in the area surrounding from there
  • Drant (without consulting anybody) gives her complete and unrestricted access to the vent systems (the same one our mechanical spiders use) so she has a back door to the interior of the facility
• Once Jalan becomes aware of this, he requests that Fritz implement a Jarvis protocol: restrainDrant
  • Under the conditions of: Drant having caused direct personal harm to Jalan
  • Jalan gunned for a “kill or maim” protocol but Fritz refuses and creates an “incapacitate or restrain” protocol instead
  • He then tries to make the argument that assaulting his emotional well-being constitutes “direct personal harm”
    • F: “imma stop you right there”
• Talking about hiring new employees to replace the ones we’ve inexplicably lost
  • J: “Isabelle? She offered to work for us.”
  • F: ”she’d have a lot of questions about Sylvia.”
  • J: “we need to come up with a better reason why she’s gone.”
  • F: “She and Roger eloped? after knowing each other for a day? Is that a good explanation?”
  • J: “uhhhhhh….no, not really.”
  • F: “What’s a better explanation, that she was consumed by a giant spider and HER BONES ARE NOW DECORATING OUR ROOF?”
  • We go with the story that she eloped
• Jalan warns Drant against telling people that he has a pet spider that killed our former employees
  • D: “well no duh”
  • F: “you let a lethal man-sized spider have free roam of our facility! How are we supposed to know that you know which lines you can and can’t cross”
  • D: “she’s fiiiiiiine”
  • J: “does this constitute direct personal harm I feel like this counts as personal harm”

Touching All of Ralodithius’ Shit

• Fritz notes that it’s been a year since we looted Ralodithius’ stuff and we still haven’t spent time with it to figure out what it does yet, so she and Jalan spend 2 days working through the armor
• Glasses
  • allow you to pinpoint the weak points on a target after given a minute to analyze the target
  • Jalan tells fritz that it’s basically a mood ring, it shows the emotional state of the individual
    • LIES but for the sake of the archive she is none the wiser
• Circlet
  • Charge the circlet with electricity from the gauntlets, when people in a certain radius lie their breath turns red
  • The severity of the lie as perceived by the individual changes the color - tiny lies are barely visible, but bigger lies are violently dark red
  • There is a way that we could create like a charging station so we could bypass the gauntlet requirement, but the use has to be by the person wearing it, it cannot be extended or turned into a radius effect
• Necklace
  • Stores spells
• Ring
  • Very brief glimpses into the future, as it pertains to you, in your current location
• Quarterstaff
  • Way of focusing the powers - use it to amplify any other piece of the ensemble
• Robes
  • 1/day be focused on metal and will rapidly heat it to red hot
  • Could be a good use on people in armor
• Mouthpiece
  • amplify/modulate voice
  • Anything like gas clouds doesn’t work, filters the air

Security detail

• Drant claims title of OCSO (Outdoors Chief Security officer) because he doesn’t have a fecking clue how to run security inside the facility
• We decide to promote Robin to ICSO (Internal Chief Security officer)
• Jalan takes over training Robin, and we put Robin in charge of training/organizing internal security detail
• Gregory Hammstein approaches Jalan and challenges Robin for charge of security
  • He thinks Robin is too much of an amateur to be given such responsibility, and tells us that he himself has much more experience in this kind of thing
  • (he’s one of the original security team we hired, the one Drant Odic’d up to figure out that he was good with a sword and slightly magical and has a ton of potential)
  • We concede fairly easily and tell Robin to act as undercover intel on how Gregory is training/treating the troops
• We try to have an important meeting between the three of us about further construction/design of the prison and Gregory begins to insist that he be involved
  • Uhh, no: “this is a private company meeting. Heads of company only.”
  • “Aren’t I a head of company? I am your ICSO, do I not have a right to these things?”
  • We have to add an amendment to our contract making the distinction between shareholder meetings and company meetings
    • People like Meghan and Gregory and Robin we consider “shareholders,” or basically higher ups in the company, and we’ll have semi-regular meetings amongst all of them on general company operations
    • On the other hand, “company meetings” will be called under special circumstances and will only concern the three of us unless all three specifically agree to an additional party

MVP - Minimum Viable Prison

• We skip ahead three months, to where we have built what we’ll call the “minimum viable prison”
  • The holding chambers are bare minimum operational, and the tracks that carry cryochambers to and from them are laid out and also operational
    • Bells and whistles like perfect soundproofing, perfect magic-proofing, etc. are still in their Mk. 1 phase
• Drant over the course of the three months tattoos his pet spider and now has telepathy within 1 mile
  • Kept buying it pigs (a few of our cryochambers still designated as pig fridges but I think the evidence of our employees’ murder is efficiently digested and now ‘harmlessly’ decorating our roof)
    • D: “see, I told you, everything’s fine. No one suspects anything”
    • J: “when I said ‘maybe we’ll get lucky and Sylvia will die’ I didn’t mean actually die-”
    • F: “ ‘everything’s fine’ and what if someone tries to conduct aerial surveillance of our plant, huh? They’ll see 2 corpses’ worth of bones, strung up on webs, swaying in the wind, decorating our roof like the world’s most morbid wind chime”
  • I digress
• Overall the prison is pretty dang secure, but the door on each holding chamber is pickable by a particularly skilled rogue, and could be broken down by a particularly persistent goliath
  • Soooo basically plebs would be easily imprisoned but anyone we actually try to hold here (the big-shot criminals) will be skilled enough to get out if they manage to get out of the shackles
• Preparing for Carissa’s tour
  • Gregory Hammstein gets to work
    • drafts new guard schedules every day so that they can’t be predicted or memorized
    • Call sign and challenge for guard shifts
    • 2 people at a time per shift
    • Guards know the patterns of security and of the spiders so they can alert the security system
    • Gregory can put his sword down and open his eyes and he can sense things around him ooh magic
  • Work on bracelets mark 2, with spider venom, keeps you paralyzed for an hour (still provided that it is administering constantly)
  • Install on Nympharinian’s webs bells that she could tug on the webs from far away and the bells in our vents would ring to warn us
    • Drant is able to find a partner for Nympharinian Nymph and Drac
    • He also gives them permission to get funky
      • J: “You realize spiders lay like 100 eggs”
      • D: “Yeah.”
      • F: “.....it’s coming out of your paycheck”
      • J: “whenever he stops throwing them away”
      • D: “hey now”
    • Expect eggs within 3 months, and DM refines it so they’ll have 4 babies

Carissa Tours the Facility

• Gregory dons his spiffiest best armor and shows off his regiment
• Carissa seems initially impressed by everything
• Showing them that the cryochambers function
  • Asking about possibility of psychosis
  • (*flashbacks to Ralodithius*)
  • (F: “.......ohhhh that makes sense”)
  • J: “nope nuh uh not gonna be a problem”
  • Carissa seems impressed that Fritz invented all this (remember we tricked them earlier bc they think the government technically has claim over anything already in the plant when we take it over) and she manages to keep up the act that “yes of course all my design I’m a genius aha”
• Showing them the conveyor belts
  • Testing them with Daryl Borksnob
    • He’s not a fan
    • They work
• Jalan also brings out the circlet of truthy-telly-things and brags that with this, interrogations will never be easier
  • Carissa: “oh good”

Interrogations??!

• Carissa’s fully-armed guard suddenly closes in and Carissa requests to test out this circlet by way of interviewing each of us and looking for treachery or deceit
• Interrogating Jalan
  • She asks mostly about his papers
  • He kinda sorta tells enough of a half truth that the circlet doesn’t reveal anything amiss
    • Some sly shit like “everything that should be in there is in there now”
• Interrogating Fritz
  • Asking about the facility’s tech
    • She says something like the basic infrastructure of the facility was all in place when we got here but that all of the prison modifications were Fritz’s doing
      • Again, half-truths true enough to slide by the circlet
      • (Whoo boy if we’re able to trick our way around the circlet what are actually intelligent criminals going to be able to make us think is true)
• Interrogating Gregory
  • Who tf knows what she asked him but she now probably knows more about our own head of security than we do
• Interrogating Drant
  • Even Carissa knows that Drant doesn’t have any juicy secrets
  • Asks a little about his hive mind past/his species but he doesn’t disclose anything interesting

“We’ll take the contract”

• Storage capacity of 20 prisoners
• They offer 5 gold/person/month
  • We do some calculations and realize we could probably squeeze a bit more from the government
  • Counteroffer 20 gold/person/month, they accept it surprisingly quickly
    • F: “damn, should’ve asked for 50”
  • We even have our first shipment on the way (he’s very crafty - Carissa doesn’t think we need to know his history)
    • F: “ahahah-no”
    • She makes the point that if we’re to be expected to hold the worlds’ most dangerous criminals here, we need to know what to expect from each individual
  • Fritz requests all of the prisoner paperwork available from the Embassy, and also asks that it be standard procedure to release copies of all government documentation for each prisoner to the prison
    • Lots of redacted information (date of birth, name)
    • Came from Arcadia (fuuuuuuu-)
    • Elf, getting older in years
    • Surprise, it’s Nevermore!!!

Catching Up With An Old Friend

• Nevermore is delivered to the facility
• Looks very downtrodden, covered in dirt, grey hair, bound head to toe with his arms behind his back and like a muzzle on
• On the walk through the facility to the cryochambers, everybody starts just getting the general feeling that “hey this guy’s gotta be a good guy, we should let him go” but we recognize it as Nevermore doin his thang
  • Jalan punches him in the gut
    • Fritz scolds him
• Freezing Nevermore
  • We get him into the cryochamber but realize we have to unbind then rebind his arms in front of him to fit right
  • This whole time he’s talking in Fritz (and Drant’s? At any rate definitely not Jalan’s because he’s punchy) head saying “if you want to know the truth of things, talk to me, if you have any mercy at all, just kill me”
  • Drant gets Nymph to use her webs to hold him in place while we switch his handcuffs from back to front
  • Fritz tries to get info out of Nevermore’s escort what he did/etc., they don’t say much except he’s been wanted for a really long time by the God Emperor himself
  • As we lock him up and start freezing him, a single tear rolls down his cheek
  • A moment of silence...remembrance for a campaign long past…..
    • J: “........well, back to work.”
    • F: *suddenly guilty* “waaaaait.”
  • Fritz tries to convince Jalan and Drant to unfreeze Nevermore for just a little bit to talk to him
    • Not least of which because Anna just wants to talk to him
    • But Fritz is also just super excited to test out the prisoner interrogation system and the conveyor belts and shit, and Jalan’s also pretty excited about playing with interrogation tactics, Fritz also just wants to know more about this guy because all of his records were redacted
• Un-freezing Nevermore
  • Cryochamber conveyor belt works like a charm, and Nevermore just begins to regain consciousness as the pod settles into the interrogation chamber
    • N: “....wha….how long has it been”
    • F *matter-of-factly* “some forty-three years”
    • *Nevermore almost faints*
    • F: “nah fam I’m just kidding it’s been like five minutes tops”
    • N: “.........what.”
    • J: “You’re our first prisoner and we’re kind of sort of really excited to test our stuff out”
    • D: “are you hungry? Do you want any pork? We’ve got pork”
    • N: “........WHAT.”
    • F: “ooh, while we’ve got you here, how about you tell us about your experience with the facility so far”
    • D: “here, we’ve got a 17 page questionnaire….”
    • F: “- how was your stay, is the cryochamber comfortable, do you see any structural weaknesses in the facility -”
    • D: “- if you were to attempt to break out how would you…”
    • J: “is it time to interrogate yet, I want to interrogate. they actually covered this part in school”
    • F: “the last time you tried to interrogate someone he almost succeeded in killing himself-”
    • *Nevermore looks like he’d rather be back in Ragnar’s throne room than here*
  • We finally calm down enough to get him to tell us his story
    • Mostly what we know already, including some spewing of how “the god emperor cannot be trusted” and “we’re living under the empire’s thumb” or whatever (Jalan’s for some mystical reason not so convinced)
    • Tells of how when Heimdall/Vanessa disappeared/sacrificed themselves, Ragnar’s hospitality to Nevermore thinned (“I practically put him on the throne and only asked for a favor in return yet never got it, I was naive and ended up hunted”)
    • Tells of how on Atrya even more so than here elves are hunted, and he was turned against and went on the run
    • Eventually got caught, was sent here
    • Offers that if we ever “see the empire for what it is” or “want to know the truth” or “undo some wrongs” or something that we should come speak to him again
      • J: “ok cool good talk buh-bye now”
  • We re-freeze him
    • F: “I kinda liked him”
    • D: “are you gonna do this with all of our prisoners”

Carissa and a Bandit Contract

• Carissa notifies us of a bandit starting a stronghold in the north, whom the government can’t touch
  • We’d be allowed to keep any loot we found there and intern the bandit leader if we capture him alive for another 20gp/month from the govt
  • We think why the hell not

Plot type

Session

Parent Plot

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