Book of Vile Darkness: Demonologist

Today’s excerpt has garnered some negative criticism partially for the outfit, but largely because of the quasit’s anger issues; most of the time it gets along just fine, but if you are unable to give it orders–like you are stunned, dominated, or sleeping–then it “acts under the Dungeon Master’s control as your enemy”.

Despite this drawback it is still a pretty sweet package; adjacent enemies take a save penalty, it doubles up on ability score damage (determined by you, no less), can turn invisible whenever it wants to, can grant you a skill bonus, and can even save-ends daze a target that attacks you. Since it can communicate via telepathy, you can have it scout places while invisible and get some excellent intelligence because it has to do what you say. 

And that is just the start. You still get your action point benefit–adjacent creatures take variable energy damage and you gain resistance for the encounter against that type–and an encounter attack that lets you bind a demonic essence to a creature, which lets you slide a target, have it make an attack with combat advantage and a damage roll. If the attack hits? The attacker is then also dazed for a turn. Very nice.

At 12th-level you can levy an evil-eye type effect against an enemy as an interrupt, imposing an attack penalty and causes them to grant combat advantage for a turn. It is an effect, so no attack roll required.

The level 16 feature causes your quasit and all summons to gain a damage bonus, so there is extra incentive to take summoning magic (not that I needed more).

Finally at 20th-level you can summon a huge blast of hordlings that deals damage and prones targets. It also creates a zone that lets you spend a standard action to deal automatic damage and prone all creatures inside (or more damage if they are already prone). Oh, the zone lasts the entire encounter. The only downside is that it is not friendly, so you gotta be careful not to tear up your allies.

I like this paragon path because it is very thematic. I do not really give a fuck if the quasit can be abused by douchebag DMs, as you can always kill it and summon it later anyway (I would just allow a character to dismiss it). Otherwise I can see it bringing some interesting social roleplaying to the table, giving suggestions and trying to tempt the character. I would have honestly preferred it to be an imp (devil), because then it could literally play devil’s advocate.

Beyond the Crystal Cave: Encounter 1

Given that the day I am scheduled to run Encounters at Knightfall Games fell on a holiday I did not have the chance to run it, so instead of a play report I am just going to give my thoughts on how the first encounter is written.

The session opens up with the characters waiting for Count Varis, who has summoned them for various reasons. He feeds them the plot–two people have gone missing, and if they are not found there could be problems between Crystalbrook and Sildaine–gives them some cash, and sends them on their way. While going to Crystalbrook they are attacked by xivorts, which after defeating them gives them the street cred required to talk to Lady Tamora, who gives them more information before they go to Sildaine to talk to the quest herald there. Eventually the session wraps up under the assumption that the characters are going to the Crystal Cave.

At a glance the hook is pretty weak, and a lot of the interactions and dialogue seem rushed, which is understandable because the Encounters format is intended to be wrapped up in an hour or two. This also leads me to the other problem, which is that I could see players who did not attend week 0 (which in my store no one did), and having the issue where they end up having to shoehorn their character into the plot. I ran into this in the past while running Songs of Erui; a player showed up with a warforged fighter and basically had to tag along with the rest of the group because they are on a time-sensitive mission. It can work, but it can also easily detract from social roleplaying.

The actual encounter part looked alright. The characters face off against a band of seven xivorts, some bloodied and one missing an encounter power, as they harass some locals of Crystalbrook. There is some difficult terrain, but the real heavyweight is the mist, which creates a really big lightly obscuring zone that moves at the start of each turn. The townsfolk kind of hang around the edges. I guess you could have them try and jump in if things go badly (which they should not), or just give the characters someone to actually rescue besides an empty town square.

Things I Would Change
I would have added more buildings (and actually furnished them if they were going to be open) and just yanked the food carts. It does not looks like a half-ass mashing of a street and market square. Also some things that the characters could drag and drop to give themselves cover against the ranged attackers (like a barrel or something). Finally, even if I did not want to actually have guards in the combat, I would at least add in some flavor text indicating that the guards were actually there doing stuff. Failing that, I would at least have been dead guards on the map to show that they were around to do their job.

Oh yeah, I would also have someone aside from the town drunk be the one to vouch for them after everything was said and done.

Feywild Themes

I am really pleased with the timing of the recent Feywild love, because my group has pressed me into re-visting Erui, a homebrew campaign that I ran and shelved over a year ago.

The first article is really in name only intended for the Moonshaes, a region in Forgotten Realms (which as an aside has an interesting-looking related article that I will write about later). In addition to giving some advice for reskinning some existing themes out of Neverwinter Campaign Setting, we also get the Sarifal warden and Callidyrr dragoon themes and a new varient elf.

Sarifal wardens start out with a turn-long aura that grants scaling energy resistance/vulnerability to your allies and enemies respectively. Level 5 gives you a bonus to Nature and lets you cast Spirit Fetch once per day for free, and level 10 gives you a Fortitude bonus.

• Sarifal Advisor (level 2 daily): You can summon a pixie that cannot attack, and is better than you at Arcana, Nature, and Stealth. It can also talk to natural and fey animals, and you can use its senses for a turn. Mostly I can see this being good primarily for social roleplay situations.
• Light of Sarifal (level 6 daily): A sustainable aura that imposes a damage penalty based on your highest stat.
• Level 10 is different; instead of choosing from a specific power, you can instead choose from blur, mirror image, shadowed moon, or warlock’s leap.

Callidyrr dragoons are like elite knights that are geased, but are generally charged with going on adventures anyway. On the plus side, violating the geas just causes a memory wipe, which could have some interesting side effects. You start out with Mounted Combat and a free martial weapon of your choice, making it ironically not too well suited for the types of classes that I would most often expect. Level 5 gives you a bonus to Diplomacy and Intimidate, and at level 10 you can use Diplomacy instead of Heal for triggering a saving throw or second wind. Oh, and you can do it at a distance. Fucking sweet.

• Dragoon Warding (level 2 encounter): An adjacent ally gains a AC and Fortitude bonus, and you take hits on melee and ranged attacks.
• Dragoon Parry (level 6 encounter): An interrupt that gives you a bonus to AC and Reflex against a melee attack targeted at you, and the enemy grants combat advantage for a turn.
• Dragoon Summons (level 10 daily): You summon an ancestral defender, which I guess is a natural animate that packs a damage boosting aura, can heal as a minor action, and take hits for allies as an interrupt. The downside is that it cannot attack, but then it is a defender.

Llewyrr elves are eladrin that can swap out their Arcana bonus for Insight and use long- and shortbows at the expense of Eladrin Weapon Proficiency.

The second article is a tad shorter, giving us the wild hunt rider and oracle of the evil eye.

Wild hunt riders give you a Perception bonus, but only when looking for a creature. On the plus side you ignore partial concealment entirely. At level 5 you can use Phantom Steed once per day for free, using Arcana or Nature (whatever is best). At level 10 you gain a bonus to save against effects that hinder your movement.

• Wild Hunt Leap (level 2 encounter): You can jump your speed, and gain combat advantage for a turn if you land next to an enemy.
• Moonfire Aura (level 6 daily): A small aura that negates invisibility and concealment. It is not friendly, so you gotta be careful.
• Relentless Pursuit (level 10 encounter): If an enemy moves away from you, you can teleport next to it as a reaction, and you do not need line of sight. Awesome.

Oracles of the evil eye are unfortunate victims that undergo a ritual that results in them gaining a fomorian’s iconic…well, eye. You can an at-will minor power that causes a non-marked creature to take a piddling amount of automatic psychic damage after damaging you. Like “normal” evil eyes it only works on one creature at a time. At level 5 you gain a bonus on Bluff and Intimidate, and at level 10 you gain low-light vision (or darkvision if you already had low-light vision).

• Eye of the Fomorians (level 2 daily): You can a bonus to Perception and can see invisible creatures for the encounter.
• Urge of Destiny (level 6 daily): An ally deals bonus damage for the encounter. If the creature marks them, they deal even more. 
• Evil Eye Mesmerism (level 10 encounter): A reaction that prevents a creature from attacking you at all for a turn if it misses you.

Aside from the elf variant I pretty much liked all the new themes for one reason or another. The oracle and dragoon can introduce some interesting adventure hooks–such as a key villain or memory loss plot hook respectively–and social roleplay elements to a game. I am also liking the ritual freebies, which if nothing else will hopefully encourage players to try more out (especially with the heroic rituals article).

Legend & Lore: A Different Way To Blah

This picture does not work at any level.

What? No…just…what?

Having actually played 3rd Edition, attacks of opportunity might not have actually come up all the time–though they were pretty common–but the fact that they existed affected how characters moved and what they did. For example, if the wizard was on the ropes the fighter might want to go save his ass, but in the process might take an ogre’s greatclub in the face for his troubles. Does he provoke it and try anyway? Up to him. The fact is, we knew the rules, even if knowing the rules just made us do shit to not have to use them.

No, the rules should not become more complex simply by leveling. Being able to run circles around an orc or fire an arrow in his face while right next to him from levels 1-5, but not at levels 6 and up, is both inconsistent and makes no fucking sense. It would be fine to simply have a modular ruleset where you can simply ignore them (which you already can), but it would be best to just make a game that is simple and elegant to learn and play, which 4th Edition already is.

To me the game already gets more complicated the higher level you get. Having players pick up more abilities, class features, feats that can change more, and magic items that can do more is sufficient complexity. At low levels the players mainly concern themselves with a handful of powers and feats with varying complexity. I have seen players just default to feats that give them passive bonuses to their stats because they don’t want to have to think too much, and avoid powers that have triggering requirements.

I remember trying a paragon tier barbarian and having plenty of trouble remembering that oh, I spent an action point so this happens, and because I have these feats and I am raging I also get some more bonuses. On top of all this, you want to also increase the rules as you go along? Call me crazy, but the fact that not all groups even hit paragon tier probably makes it even more likely that these level-based rules would be ignored or forgotten.

Heroic Tier Rituals

So…rituals. Well, also ritual feats. Rituals have been a tricky thing in my games, despite my including them–both in book and scroll form–with the specific intent to give my players an edge, components to use them, and reducing the casting time on a lot of them.

Who knows, maybe new Ritual Feats will give them the last bit of incentive they need? You need Ritual Caster as well as some rituals to pick them up, but they let you use your skills in flexible ways and eliminate the cost of using a ritual once per day. For example, Binding Mastery lets you use Arcana or Religion in place of Diplomacy and Intimidate against unnatural creatures, as well as a bonus. I like the flavor behind this, using your knowledge of binding magic to threaten or bargain with the fey or a devil. Warding Mastery is also pretty nice, giving you a bonus on Perception to find traps and hazards and checks to disable them (as well as casting warding rituals).

The new rituals include classics like Alarm, Hold Portal, and Explosive Runes. Most have castings times of only 1 minute, though Hold Portal clocks in at an outstanding one standard action. Frankly I wish more rituals had shorter casting times, if only to give them more utility when time is a factor. I mean, in a lot of cases the players did not use one simply because they did not have the time, but to me charging them each time is punishment enough. Speaking of casting costs, a lot require healing surges in lieu of cash, or a small amount of cash in addition to your surges.

I also like this, as it represents a caster exhausting herself from using magic (as well as giving the wizard a way to use healing surges). A pretty good article. I am going to reduce more rituals to a minute or less casting time and see what happens. I might also let them burn healing surges more often (perhaps at an exchange rate).

Thunderspire Labyrinth, Episode 1

Cast 

• Ceriok (male eladrin hybrid ardent/fey-pact warlock)
• Sterling (male vryloka paladin)
• Riven (male halfling vampire)
• Reyn (male human bard)
• Shen (male tiefling infernal-pact hexblade)

A month had passed since the characters slew the dragon leading the kobolds, and defeated Kalarel before he could open a portal to the Shadowfell.

Lord Padraig summoned them and as wardens of Winterhaven tasked them with investigating the disappearances of villagers. The few that managed to evade capture blame a group of hobgoblin slavers known as the Bloodreavers, which are believed to be based out of Thunderspire Labyrinth. He recommends that they talk to Valthrun before leaving to get some more information.

Meanwhile Reyn has arrived in Winterhaven and is searching for something that he believes to be hidden within Thunderspire. The rest of the characters run into them as they are preparing to leave, and so they all head out together after convincing Valthrun to buy horses for some of them.

When they arrive in Fallcrest they split up to try and gather more information. Shen runs into a hooded stranger who offers to pay him well for a control amulet that the Mages of Saruun use to command golems. Riven sees his former family, but evades them. Reyn learns that a dwarf jeweler has an estranged cousin twice removed that stole an immense amount of money for him 20 years ago, and true to dwarven memory is both still angry and willing to pay someone who can find him. They meet up outside and exchange information before proceeding on.

The night before they arrive at Thunderspire a blue dragon ambushes them at their camp, but they manage to convince it to let them go in exchange for 200 gp and a horse. They decide to push onward to Thunderspire to finish resting, and encounter a slave caravan entering the labyrinth, which they successfully ambush. One of the hobgoblins is spared and reveals that the Bloodreavers serve a kobold, and in exchange for his freedom agrees to lead them to the Seven-Pillared Hall.

Next Time: Rendil

Legend & Lore: Out of Bounds

I have really gotta stop reading these things, because all they do is confuse, frustrate, and make me wonder exactly what game Monte Cook was allegedly playing “back in the day”. 

Does the game present players with challenges that have pre-made solutions?

Kind of? There are useful guidelines and suggestions for the budding DM—such as how to unlock doors, scale walls, and disarm traps—but ultimately it is the DM’s decision to design, place, and either limit or encourage how the players overcome them. Just because a trap can be disarmed with a Thievery check or have its hit points smashed out of it does not mean that there could not be a clearly visible lever that shuts it off, or a password that disables a magical trap.

For example, can all monsters be defeated in straightforward ways, which is to say, attacked with swords and magic missiles until they die? Can all physical obstacles (walls to climb, narrow ledges to traverse, rivers to cross, and so forth) be overcome with die rolls? Are those die rolls achievable given the PCs’ level and abilities? Is the solution to every puzzle available to those with the right skills or spells? Is the counter or resolution to every problem hardwired into the game?

Generally yeah, monsters can be defeated in the ways that players expect, and this has been globally true over the course of every edition. I am wondering how Cook handled climbing walls in 2^nd Edition. Did he require a die roll? Did he just decide on a whim whether they succeeded or failed? Did he give them a bonus/let them succeed if they described their technique well enough? I mean if there is a wall, and the players want to climb it, and there is a consequence for failure, then yeah I will make them roll.

I fail to see how requiring dice rolling to determine success for meaningful actions or challenges corresponds to every challenge (or any) having a hardwired solution. Just because I require players to make a Strength check to bash open an iron-bound door or a Thievery check to pick the lock, does not mean that those are the only solutions I will allow. If a player wants to try conning a guard out of a key, or get someone to open the door by making noise, pose as another NPC, or just bash it open, then I can make a judgment call (and again probably require a dice roll, like a Bluff check).

As a DM I have never just thrown random shit at my players and assume that they would just figure something out. Generally I had at least one solution to the problem even if that solution was in the next room (or even the next dungeon). Hell, they might find a door with a very high Thievery check that they will have to come back to later. It might even be guarded by constructs that are way too tough for them to defeat.

Looking back at the game’s roots, the answer to these questions was usually no. In the early days, the game’s mechanics rarely provided solutions to the problems the characters faced. Players stretched beyond the bounds of the rules and looked for solutions not covered in the books. Player ingenuity was always the key to winning encounters. And very often, the DM didn’t actually have a set solution in mind ahead of time. He expected the PCs to come up with something on their own.

To put it nicely, this is not the way I remember it. Players generally relied on their characters’s strengths, which was usually something to the effect of stabbing or blasting monsters, picking locks on doors, bashing doors open, etc. Things that all required dice rolls. I remember playing a fighter and trying to lie to a NPC to get them to let their guard down, and the DM had me make a Charisma check to see how well I pulled it off. The only thing that has changed over time is that actual, solid mechanics have been provided to help DMs adjudicate their decisions and players get a better bead on stuff that their characters could reasonably do.

This isn’t true of more recent expressions of the game. There are few encounters that can’t be won simply by using the PCs’ straightforward powers and abilities. For example, consider fire immunity. In older versions of the game, the red dragon was immune to fire. If you’re packing fireballs, you’re just out of luck. In the most recent version of the game, the designers decided that it’s no fun if the game tells you that the choices you made were wrong, so red dragons are resistant to fire, but not immune. You can still use your fireballs.

The game still “punishes” them, it just does not render them utterly useless. If you fight a red dragon then fire attacks can do something, just not nearly as well as they otherwise would. It still has an impact. It still has meaning. Aside from making some thematic characters take a back seat during what will probably be an epic battle I see no benefit to this, and I thought Monte Cook had moved away from the whole system mastery philosophy? 

That’s a viable design approach. You make sure that no choices are bad choices. You make sure that every lock has a key that can be found. Every barrier has a way past it. You ensure that the PCs are never presented with a challenge that they can’t somehow overcome. You encourage the players to roll some dice and then move on to the next thing.

There should be no “bad” choices. Again just because the game makes it more difficult for a character to be rendered obsolete, does not mean that every challenge has to have a way around it. Not having “bad” choices does not mean that everything has to have an obvious or immediate solution. These two things are not related.

Now imagine a simple dungeon room. There’s a pile of treasure on the far side. The PCs come in and quickly discover that an impenetrable force field blocks the far side of the room from them. In an “old school” dungeon, the players would be forced to figure out a way to get past the force field or somehow get beyond it to reach the treasure. The DM might have no preset solution in mind. It might very well be impossible for the characters, given their resources, to get the treasure.

Which differs from recent editions how? I can throw a forcefield in a dungeon on a whim with no clear way of getting past it. I can even say that it cannot be damaged. I could throw in a monster that cannot be hurt by non-magical weapons, or weapons period. Or even hurt by a specific weapon. The closest parallel I can think of are 2^nd Edition monsters that were immune to weapons without a minimum bonus, and if DM’s really want to do that then they still can without needing WotC’s approval.

As the game developed over the years, solutions were inserted into that encounter’s design. Perhaps there’s a lever somewhere else in the dungeon that lowers the field. Maybe a spell or the right combination of spells would bring down the barrier. Perhaps a secret passage circumvents the force field. Or maybe just pounding on it long enough will destroy the barrier.

This statement bothers me for two main reasons. The first is because he seems to believe that spells that let players instantly bypass challenges—comprehend languages, detect secret doors, knock, break enchantment, disintegrate, dispel magic, passwall, find the path, miracle, etc—did not exist before. If anything 4^th Edition has reduced the number of abilities that allow characters to say fuck all and just skip obstacles.

The second is that he acts like that DMs who designed encounters just plopped shit down on paper without any clue as to what players might do about it. Maybe it is just me but as a rule of thumb when I design encounters I consider my group demographic and at least one way for the players to get by. Well, assuming I want them to.

And maybe that’s really the takeaway here. The rules are not the sum total of the game. The game is larger than that. Breaking the rules, circumventing the rules, or ignoring the rules does not take you out of the game. The game encompasses that type of play. It’s built upon it, in fact. So why shouldn’t the design of the game also be bigger than the rules? Why shouldn’t those kind of assumptions be taken into account? It puts the responsibility back in the hands of the players, rather than the DM or the designer. Success or failure lies within their own hands again.

More importantly how the hell does doing away with a solid foundation of mutable rules put responsibility back into the hands of the players? As a DM I like having something to go off of, and as a player I like generally knowing what to expect when I try to do something. Personally it sounds like WotC already has a plan for an upcoming edition, and at least these articles are steeling for me a change that I seriously doubt I am going to like. Maybe I am just reading it wrong, but the threads on the WotC forums and RPG.net are not giving me much hope.

Excerpts: Evil Campaigns

The first look at Book of Vile Darkness concerns campaign themes and an arc that will hopefully unify an evil party to work together long enough to see results. Staples such as conquest and destroying the world are present, along with working against other evil forces and killing gods. Running an evil campaign can be a tricky business, and in my experience players tend to use it as an excuse to wreak havoc without any direction. Kind of like Chaotic Neutral, except that there might be more murder depending on your groups definition.

There is not a lot of information, and hopefully these concepts are expanded upon. At the least I hope that it offers better stuff than a bunch of weak-ass feats and prestige classes that we got from the original Book of Vile Darkness.

Critical Failures: What Color Was That Dragon, Again?

This happened like, the session before we stopped running my first homebrew 4th Edition campaign over a year ago. I had gotten Player’s Handbook 2 months before and was itching to run something with a tight primal/Feywild/celtic theme. The main quest was that the players were searching for pieces of a song that had been written by a long-dead bard that for some reason a bunch of other major players–eladrin, drow, and fomorians to name a few–were also looking for.

Over the course of some ten levels, they plundered an eladrin crypt, found the ashes of someone who knew the location of one part, had a ghostspeaker pry the information out of it, liberated a town from a haunted castle, navigated a forest half stuck in the Feywild, delved into an ancient druid pyramid, and eventually found the first piece. They also found a map with two parts clearly marked: an island far to the north, and a dwarven city that was pretty close by. They decided to go to the dwarven city first, and were surprised to find it occupied by drow.

Not that they get along with any elves, really.

Even so, they somehow managed to sneak inside and make their way to the castle, only to be spotted while scaling the gate. At some point while they were fighting off drow, giant spiders, and web golems I decided to throw in a dragon to mix things up. Not just any dragon, mind you, but something that I felt best represented what the Underdark had to offer: a purple dragon.

Now, I chose a purple dragon because they also lived underground, and I figured that drow could strike a bargain with one. Also I had never gotten a chance to use one before, and have the mini and everything to go with it. Unfortunately having never used them, I was not privy to a very specific weakness until several rounds into the battle, that being sunlight. When purple dragons are exposed to sunlight they react almost the same way as most vampires do, in that they can only take one action a round and take a fuckton of damage to the tune of 160.

Each round.

They are like the mogwai of dragons.

What should have happened was that the dragon should have instantly exploded, probably like the boss at the end of the first Blade movie, just to drive home how silly the mistake was. I ended up retconning the dragon into being a black one, dropping its level considerably as a concession since I could not conceive of a situation where a purple dragon would ever venture to the surface during the day. In retrospect I should have read more carefully (or just kept my mouth shut), but in all fairness this was the original 4E statblock format, so the weakness was mentioned almost at the very bottom. 

Critical Failures: So, You Had a Twin Sister

This is just a story about something that a player did–or rather, did not do–during one of my campaigns that we still bring up from time to time.

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About a year ago I had started running a campaign set in Eberron’s Shadow Marches, which relied heavily on aberrant cults gradually weakening Gatekeeper seals, raising sunken cities, summoning aberrant stars, etc. When planning a campaign I like to get input from my players on their character’s history, motivation, and goals so I can fine tune the campaign (similar to how it is done in Dresden Files). My philosophy is if i can get the players to step up and willingly do something without having to be prodded, I am good. The only real stipulation was that the characters had to have a reason for heading out to a remote mining town deep in the Marches.

Well, one of the characters wanted to play a changling rogue named Moxie, so we worked out a background where her sister had joined up with a guild in Zarash’ak when they were young in order to make some quick cash to pay for her illness (the character had a Con of 8). Her sister stopped coming home at some point, and after discovering the guild she joined Moxie signed up because they were not exactly going to give anyone a roster (not that looking for a changling exactly helped). So she toughs it out, does some menial jobs, and eventually gets signed up to do quite a bit of dragonshard smuggling from a remote mining town called Shardpit to the tune of 3,000 gps.

Fast forward six levels and a couple star-worshipping hellholes, and the characters are finally back at Zarash’ak with only a couple thousand gps worth of dragonshards to their name. Mind you, two characters went to Shardpit due to terrible visions (and belonged to the Cerulean Sign), and the other was a guide. Moxie’s player divulged any information about who she was or what she was doing, and in fact in character they were not even aware that she was a changling.

They head to the Tharashk enclave in order to be debriefed, explaining what happened in Shardpit and Greyshore, and hand over their pittance of shards after learning about the shortages (other mining towns are being raided by orcs) before hitting the town to sell their loot, buy new stuff, and catch up with key NPCs.

Once they were sufficiently split up they run into some hired muscle, who threatens to kill Moxie unless she can come up with the dragonshards within a very short time frame. The party is now surprised to learn that she is part of the local thieves guild and that she was supposed to smuggle dragonshards. They ask her if she has anything else she’d like to share. You know, like her motivation (or at least her race). She tells them no, and decide to take the offensive and attack the guild. They ask around, beat up some people, find an entrance, and proceed to cut and blast their way through their ranks.

Once they are almost done, they run into something a bit different.

In the midst of the usual suspects of brutish thugs they run into a cloaked figure who is dashing and flipping about, wielding sword and dagger, dealing sneak attack damage with a flank, and faking them out like a changling would. Since Moxie’s player was not getting the hint I even described the opponent’s fighting style as “very similar to Moxie’s”.

It didn’t work.

Eventually, everyone is dead and I describe how the cloaked figure reverts to its true form in changling fashion, and basically have to spell it out that she is Moxie’s sister, the player evidently having completely forgotten what she was doing the whole time. Everyone at the table is surprised to learn that A) she is a changling, and B) that she even had a sister. Moxie’s player is also surprised at this, despite knowing that this was the guild her sister joined and that she fought in an almost identical manner, tricks and all.

So…yeah. It was just one of those things that probably would have had an impact at all if the player had actually divulged any information to anyone and/or paid attention.