Session 3: The one where Elias saves Potion Pitstop (October 26, 2022)
Last session, our heroes sat and talked after the fight in the Foamy Waves Tavern. After some discussion, they decided to sleep for the night and regroup the next day to go clothes shopping, taking advantage of promised “foreign clothes for discount prices” at the Capitale Market. Elias headed out to wander the city, taking in the views and climbing (and falling off) some buildings. Heph and Rormir headed to the Shadeby Inn, where Rormir acquired some pants and a place to sleep for the night. Heph stopped by Potion Pitstop on his way back to the Alchemist Guild bunk house, responding to an earlier call to help his parents with their plumbing.
Rormir and Elias woke bright and early on their first new day in this strange land. After overeating pancakes and failing at socializing, respectively, they met up with Heph and started to make their way to the Capitale Market. On the way, though, Rormir noticed an apparent break-in at a nearby shop. Upon realizing it was Potion Pitstop, Heph rushed in to see what was happening.
The party easily dispatched a group of three burglars who were noisily stuffing their bags with merchandise in this broad-daylight robbery. The culprits were wearing white, expressionless porcelain masks, and each had a gold ring with the etching of a hawk on their right ring finger. Heph called out for his parents, but received no response. Rormir then opened the door in the back of the shop, only to be ambushed by more burglars who were lying in wait.
- The fight in Potion Pitstop continues
- A burglar misses Rormir with his knife
- The burglar leader shoots Rormir with a crossbow and does max
damage (9)
- Rormir then fires an arrow back, also doing max damage for the exact number of hit points required to kill the leader
- Another burglar stabs Rormir with his knife, knocking him
unconscious
- This burglar then moves to block the doorway into the back room
- Heph uses Catapult on an inkwell on the checkout counter and kills this burglar
- Elias tries to put on the mask he’s holding,
only to realize that there are no straps or anything to attach the
mask to his face
- They must have been stuck on to the burglars’ faces somehow, only to come loose when they died
- Elias tosses the mask at the remaining burglar,
hitting him in the face and killing him
- The mask falls to the ground, a chip having broken off the top right portion
- Combat ends
- Heph heals Rormir after he fails one death save
- Everyone does perception checks
- Elias hears timid footfalls from upstairs
- Rormir rolls a 25, and apparently while he was unconscious he
had an out-of-body experience and saw lots of shit
- He recognizes the footsteps from upstairs as belonging to two gnomes
- He hears an alarm horn blaring in the distance
- And he sees the lid of a trashcan across the street quickly close, but not before seeing the glint of light off an eye peering out from it
- Heph runs upstairs to find his parents
- They are relieved Heph is okay and a little embarrassed that when
they heard him calling they didn’t come down to help faster
- They were hiding upstairs
- Heph tells them about the people who fought alongside him, and his
parents are very excited that he has new friends
- They ask if these are “Martha’s kids”, thinking they must be children of their friends from the Alchemist Guild
- They all come downstairs to meet his friends
- Meanwhile, Rormir looks through the apparent leader’s clothes
- He has a crossbow and a scimitar, and is wearing the same gold ring and mask as the other burglars
- Rormir takes all of this except for the mask
- Also the baggy black robes seem to be hiding the fact that the leader, and in fact all the burglars, look incredibly tired and malnourished, beyond the point where a normal mortal would collapse from exhaustion
- Elias looks at the other bodies
- He takes the remaining four rings that Rormir hasn’t already taken (six total)
- He also grabs all five daggers
- He then starts poking through crates along the wall of the back room
- Heph and his parents comes downstairs
- Elias quickly drops a potion from a crate he was holding, and it
breaks
- The blue liquid soaks into the packing material with a quiet hiss
- The parents are excited to meet Heph’s friends
- Amble asks Heph why Rormir is only wearing pants and Heph says it’s a long story
- Elias introduces himself to the parents, charming them and saying
he’s from a distance away
- Amble says he’s handsome
- The parents ask Rormir where he is from, but he is just confused
why these creatures look like Heph
- Eventually it’s explained to him that they’re his parents and what that means
- The parents note that both Elias and Rormir are from far away, and make sure Heph didn’t get any “mail-order friends”
- The group goes to check out the trashcan across the street,
and the parents say that they’d love to schedule a dinner sometime
- Elias is very into that idea
- Rormir moves to lift the lid off the trashcan,
but before he can two legs pop out of holes in the bottom and it starts
running away
- Elias thinks this is just how trashcans work in this new magical world
- The trashcan is moving slowly, but beats the party on a
stealth check
- It turns a corner and Rormir follows quickly behind it, but it’s nowhere to be seen
- Rormir can at this point hear the sound of armor clanking from a couple streets away
- The party then heads directly to the Capitale Market
- It’s very crowded, and many signs advertise the discount wonders on sale today
- Rormir heads straight to a drooping tent pitched in various
shades of gray canvas stitched together
- The owner looks pretty disheveled and is wearing a large top hat
- No patrons are at this tent
- This tent sells shoes and hats
- Rormir buys shoes that look like they were made of leather once,
but it has since fossilized and turned them into shapeless bags of dirt
- He and the shopkeeper agree that these will keep him closer to nature
- They’re 1sp
- He also gets a ratty-looking black bowler hat
- The shopkeeper demonstrates that if you shake it, either a bat, a rat, or a frog can come out of it three times a day
- He identifies it as a Hat of Vermin
- Rormir trades in the scimitar he got from the burglar for it
- Otherwise it would have been 8gp
- Elias is running around, trying out different outfits and asking
Heph how he looks in each one
- The gaudy-looking merchant of a gaudy-looking tent calls him over in a British accent and says he has just what he needs
- He demonstrates a cloak that can turn into any other color or style of cloak
when turned inside-out
- This is the Cloak of Many Fashions
- It costs 15gp and Elias thinks it’s maybe too expensive
- The shopkeeper offers him a Cloak of Billowing for 10gp instead, but Elias isn’t too interested
- Elias tries to sells his four gold rings, but he lets slip that he
got them off dead people and the shopkeeper doesn’t want anything to do with
them, nervously wiping off his fingerprints and giving them back
- When he was inspecting them, though, he did seem surprised and curious where Elias got them
- A merchant right across the aisle of tents calls Elias over
- The fancy merchant swears as Elias heads to this other tent
- This new merchant, in a non-British accent, informs Elias that he’s the other shopkeeper’s brother, and that he’s not as uptight as him
- He shows Elias what looks like a comfortable button-up shirt and
asks him to put it on
- He does, and it transforms into a long blue cloak
- This is a Shiftweave, and it contains five different outfits it can transform into at will
- It costs 13gp
- Elias then sells the rings to this merchant, netting 65gp
- After selling the rings Elias goes right back to the brother and
buys the Cloak of Many Fashions
- The second brother swears as soon as he leaves the tent
- Heph heads to a tent that sells belts and sashes, as well as
seashells to decorate them with
- This one is run by a gnomish woman
- She gets off a stool she was standing on and turns a crank to lower the wooden counter so she can talk to Heph eye-to-eye
- Heph is looking for a utility belt that can hold a large quantity
of things
- She brings out a thin leather gnome-sized belt with large tan pouches all along it
- It seems very well-made
- This belt is 1gp
- Heph asks if she has anything else
- She says she has a very special belt that she had shipped from Homeburr
- It’s a plaid fabric belt with a small circular cushion as a buckle
- Heph puts it on
- The merchant tells him to push the cushion, and he does
- A faint hissing comes from it
- She then asks him to sit down as if there’s a chair behind him
- He does without hesitation
- His butt hits a soft seat, and there seems to be an invisible armchair underneath him that’s even capable of reclining
- This is a Seat Belt
- It’s 7gp
- He tests the belt out by trying to sit on the invisible chair while standing on a stool, but he falls on his ass on the ground
- Heph convinces the merchant to sew the pouches from the previous belt into the Seat Belt, and he buys it for 7gp 5sp
- Rormir goes to the non-British brother
- This merchant puts on a dull blue vest and asks Rormir to punch him, which he does immediately
- The vest flashes white, then red, then green, before settling back to a dull blue
- This is the Heart of the Sleeveless, which changes color based on the emotions of the wearer
- The merchant explains that the flash of white (surprise) was due to the fact that people usually need a little more prompting to punch him when asked
- The Heart of the Sleeveless is 15gp, which Rormir doesn’t have the money for
- He tries to sell his gold rings, but lets slip that he got them from dead
people and the merchant does not want to buy them
- He sells his crossbow to the now quite nervous merchant for 12gp after arguing that it should be a lower price since 12gp would “leave things unbalanced”, then buys the Heart of the Sleeveless
- Their shopping done, the party regroups
- Elias vows to himself to steal the Seat Belt
- Heph receives a call from his parents that the city guard stopped by, and they want to speak with him and his friends