Session 11 - Deceiving the Government and the Inception of Sheen

Jeochhmann: Wow, the Underdark sounds like a terrible place.

Jalan: It's not that bad if you're a prince.

Jeochhmann: Are you a prince?

Jalan: ...no.

Plot points/Scenes

To-Do List

• Resolve what the DM says we can and can’t keep of our technology
  • (biggest part is that Fritz has her understanding of flux technology from her work with her father, not from her brief study of the murder-death-cult’s flux suits)
• Make it back down the mountain
• Decide what to do with the bandit commander
  • Imprison the bandit commander and ask the govt for our $$$? Secretly hire him?
  • He had offered to work with us given the chance, perhaps we leave him with Gregory and they can make the journey back together when the spiders replace them, and he can be the trusted head of security at our new research stronghold
  • We’ve also got his archer friend to deal with
• Send mechanical spiders back to the stronghold to replace Gregory
• Give Gregory a goddamn raise
• Bring the papers written in archaic from the strongbox to Wizmur for translation
• Upgrade the prison because it’s currently still the Minimum Viable Prison and needs some work
• BUILD KNIFE-WIELDING TENTACLES
• Talk to Robin about pursuing the murder cult?
• Talk to the govt about obtaining new prisoners?
• Find more fun library rooms
• Steal more stuff from the Embassy
• Continue pursuing the millennium Artifacts

The Journey Home and a Disgruntled Workforce

• Jalan’s lazy ass refuses to walk so shares the little walking carriage with the bandit commander
  • He shares his fancy underdark fish and they bond
  • They start talking about the Underdark
    • BC: “Wow, that sounds like a terrible place. I’m at least glad I’m not there.”
    • J: “It’s not that bad if you’re a prince.”
    • BC: “Are you a prince?”
    • J: “......no.”
    • BC: “So then what did you do?”
    • J: (“what do peasants do….”) “I’m a farmer!”
    • BC: “Oh! What do they farm down there?”
    • J: “........I don’t know??”
• Bandit commander talks about his background
  • As a militia member, collecting taxes etc. apparently
  • Why did he become a bandit tho
• As we approach our base, there is a mob surrounding our power plant
  • We send Gregory down to discuss, they shout “there they are! Get em!”
  • Gregory takes his security detail and forms a defensive line between us and them, and we skirt around them back into the base
  • Turns out a bunch of people got fired from their jobs because of electricity/technology taking jobs and suddenly had to deal with the high cost of electricity and put the blame on us
    • A message from Carissa tells us that the same thing is happening at the Embassy
  • Jalan suggests we just ignore the problem and it’ll go away eventually
  • Fritz suggests that we reallocate this disgruntled workforce for a project of our own, they’re happy because we give them jobs, we’re happy because cheap workforce

One, Two, Switcheroo and Lying to Carissa

• Gregory fetches Carissa (bc we need to discuss the matters of imprisoning the bandit commander)
  • Fritz opposes actually imprisoning the bandit commander (we discover his name is Tristan Jeochhmann), but Carissa’s already on her way to negotiate terms of his imprisonment
  • Fritz suggests trying to pass off the female bandit archer as the commander, Jalan suggests imprisoning them both for twice the cash
• Decide to switch the commander for his archer lackey, Carissa arrives
  • C: “I’m impressed. I think our previous terms are still fair...20 gold a month for you to hold him?”
  • J: “Him? The bandit commander was a girl.”
  • D: “No, Jalan, the commander was a guy, his second-in-command was the girl.”
  • ……….
  • F: “Drant. Did you just give away our entire ruse before we even got to the DIFFICULT PART?”
  • ……….
  • D: “.....I wasn’t listening.”
  • DM: “.....I’ll retcon that.”
  • (D: “nobody told me we were lying!!”)
• Tricking Carissa with a partially-charged crown of lie-detection
  • We know she’s gonna interrogate bandit archer chick and that bandit archer chick is gonna claim she’s not the commander, which will be a dead giveaway if the crown turns her breath red
  • Plan is to partially charge the crown, then run it through a quick ‘mandatory test cycle’ so Carissa knows it’s working, then delay sending her into interrogation until the crown runs out of juice
• While we wait, we make an offer to Carissa to supply jobs for the displaced workforce
  • We tell her it’s a necessary “cooling line” to increase safety and production of the current line into Stonedeep, when in reality we’d be using the workforce to extend the line to other cities
  • We realize we’re lucky the crown had already run out of juice at this point because that was a lie
• Interrogation
  • C: “She said some things we thought were lies but her breath didn’t turn red, are you sure this thing works?”
  • Apparently the archer chick said that the place sits on a well of innate power, and Carissa doesn’t exactly believe it but since her breath didn’t turn red she doesn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands - she requests that it be destroyed
    • All things considered we’re lucky she’s not more suspicious
    • Fritz panics a bit but then offers to do it for her (so that we can pretend to destroy it while keeping our research facility running underground), Carissa agrees under the condition that Borksnob accompanies us so that she can ensure it gets done
    • Plan is to party our way up there and get him super drunk
    • Delay the fireworks by 30 minutes for like 5 hours until he passes out and wakes up “ohhhh you missed itttt”
• Carissa agrees to let us house the archer chick - offers 20 gp/month for six months (seems to be our going rate), after that there will probably be a trial but they’ll quit paying us the holding fee
• After Carissa goes on her merry way we touch base with the dude whose ass we just saved
  • Q: what magic u do (A: Shadowfell shit)
    • T: “Isn’t that what you do down there? Where you’re from, ash-face?”
    • J: “wtf”
  • Fritz explains why she doesn’t want to imprison Jeochhmann
    • (F: “because the people we left back at the stronghold are his people and his cause seems just and we need someone capable and trustworthy to lead the security detail up there and he might be an outlaw but he’s not a bad guy and we can get more from teaming up with him than by turning against him and….”)
    • J: “......oooookay.”
    • T: “see, she gets it”
  • Jeochhmann explains his purpose
    • Claims that the Empire is not allowing people free will and they were doing research to allow people to break free
    • That fortress is built on magical ground, and the spell he used to almost kill gregory he couldn’t cast here
    • (looking backwards, that’s why Jalan was able to dispel magic on the strongbox that Jeochhmann was shocked he was able to dispel)

On Cyborg-Spider-Bartenders

• Planning to upgrade the prisoner transport thing into a mobile bar
• With a bar/tender within the cage, and some swing seats strapped to the outside
  • But we need a bartender - Fritz plans to commandeer one of the facility’s mechanical spiders, stick a claw on one of its legs and the old cyborg arm (from the murder-death-cult’s cyborg) on another
• Name?
  • Definitely 5H33N or Sheen (after Michael Sheen’s bartender character Arthur in Passengers)
  • Jalan calls him ████ ^{(it’s Karl, I may be bitter but historical accuracy is my kryptonite)}
    • (D: “it’s funny that you chose ████ and Sheen as your names…”
    • (F&J: “???”
    • (D: “they’re both characters from Jimmy Neutron”
    • (J: “......that was a deep pull, Danner”
  • Drant wants to call him Spobert/Spanthony (any variation of “spider” or “robot” and a name)
  • Fritz is the one constructing him so she brands him Sheen (literally, she brands him. With an iron)
• We give Jeochhmann a prison bracelet and turn him loose
• Renegotiating power and income
  • Look at spreadsheet

Plot type

Session

Parent Plot

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