Dungeon 13 Turn 60
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Lara continues to hold off the Guard patrol, but more and more of them keep showing up. Before too long, she’ll be completely overwhelmed. But with Ricki’s life potentially on the line, Lara is prepared to make whatever sacrifice she needs to.
But then…
“Hi everyone!”
“Don’t mind me, I was just leaving!”
“There! That’s the goblin on the posters!”
“Get her!!”
“THAT IS SIGNAL.”
“GIRLS MAKE A WAY OUT FOR US.”
“RUN NOW, OR BE LEFT BEHIND.”
*crackle*
While Lara and Ricki lead the guards away, Amadeusz and Ix run in another direction, disappearing into the night. Ix’s glow is a little too noticeable, so Amadeusz gives them a little space to minimize the chances of being seen.
It appears that they’re going to get away.
However, although dungeons are inherently chaotic places of powerful magic, Ix was modified to exist in that environment, and that environment alone. Away from the dungeon magic, the control collar that keeps them stable has an opposite effect.
They flash rapidly between their two forms, each transformation a painful shifting of their body’s fundamental being. Their every component particle screams in agony.
They collapse to the ground, helpless.
But help arrives nonetheless.
“It’s okay.”
“We’ve got you.”
Dungeon 13 is complete!
Congrats all!
That said, that dungeon was a disaster. We Really need to consider our party composition better before setting off and always bring kamau when dealing with intelligent enemies.
Nnnnot gonna happen.
I’m pleased we managed to get through this with a pretty unoptimized comp. But yeah I’m ready to unleash lohk and Kamau with our new gear and see what we can do and get those bonds.
I wouldn’t count on it. Next time we’re picking a party, chances are the huge mob that is ALWAYS voting and ALWAYS pitching new ideas during the dungeons will surge up and select Amadeusz again.
Kamau? Lohk? Botanya? Cyx? What the f*ck is a Cyx?!! Th8s misterious mob NEEDS Amadeusz. It is 35 upvotes do select doggy man or bust. After all, who doesn’t love Amadeusz? True friendship is the douchebag we meet along the way.
And don’t mind me. This here is a poorly worded humorous rant.
Why so negative? I think this is the best we did in a while. ^_^
Like, we perma lost a friend in the armor dungeon but none here and we overstayed the poison dungeon so the timer became instant-kill death squads but here we got out before that point.
I think the main mistakes in this dungeon was just making bad assumptions, not party. We should have asked LSN on discord instead of just assuming the elemental heart worked like meat. And we shouldn’t have assumed a low estimate for justiciar hp in skeleton room.
The party composition for this dungeon was considered extensively, in very fine detail, and ad nauseam, but different people have different opinions and priorities. As I remember it, the party composition for dungeon 13 was finally determined by the GM/author/storyteller because the players couldn’t agree.
If we had brought Kamau, what would be the likelihood that he would have managed to make it to the end without getting 5 Remorse? Healing can fix damage, but it can’t fix Remorse. There were a lot of ranged and area effect attacks in dungeon 13 that would have been more problematic if we’d been relying on Kamau. How much longer would the fights have taken because Kamau would need to be there for every fight but the easiest because we couldn’t risk getting any other characters damaged? How would we have dealt with the Death Wisp? What would we have done after Kamau ‘remorsed out’? Kamau isn’t going to be a magic solution to all the party’s problems.
We interrupt our program for whatever this is. I know as much as you do, no one tells me anything.
So…
INCREDIBLY HANDSOME NARRATOR: Lara continues to hold off the Guard patrol, but more and more of them keep showing up. Before too long, she’ll be completely overwhelmed. But with Ricki’s life potentially on the line, Lara is prepared to make whatever sacrifice she needs to.
But then…
(Tension!)
RICKI (she sounds kind of like Bubbles, voiced by Tara Strong, happily bouncing on the bed, only she’s jumping on people’s heads like Xena): “Hi everyone!”
“Don’t mind me, I was just leaving!”
SMART AND OBSERVANT GUARD: “There! That’s the goblin on the posters!”
“Get her!!”
WOLFADEUSZ: THAT IS SIGNAL.”
“GIRLS MAKE A WAY OUT FOR US.”
“RUN NOW, OR BE LEFT BEHIND.”
IX: *crackle*
NARRATOR, STILL IMPOSSIBLY HANDSOME: While Lara and Ricki lead the guards away, Amadeusz and Ix run in another direction, disappearing into the night. Ix’s glow is a little too noticeable, so Amadeusz gives them a little space to minimize the chances of being seen.
It appears that they’re going to get away.
However, although dungeons are inherently chaotic places of powerful magic, Ix was modified to exist in that environment, and that environment alone. Away from the dungeon magic, the control collar that keeps them stable has an opposite effect.
They flash rapidly between their two forms, each transformation a painful shifting of their body’s fundamental being. Their every component particle screams in agony.
IX:
(Okay, we don’t actually hear the scream. It’s more of a metaphore. Methafore? Mepha… It’s just a figure of speech, okay?)
NARRATOR, HOW DOES HE EVEN DO THIS?: They collapse to the ground, helpless.
But help arrives nonetheless.
RICKI: “It’s okay.”
“We’ve got you.”
Dungeon 13 is complete!
I somehow get the feeling we really should have had that wand thing.
Yeah I got no clue what that was about. Guess we’ll see in the wrap up stream.
By ‘wand thing’ I assume you mean the items on the table in the lower right room (stick and glass ball) that are described to Ricki as, “but decides to leave the stick and glass ball where they are for now since she can’t think of any immediate use for them. Maybe there’s something somewhere else that will change that.” (D13T35) and described to Lara as, “Lara looks over the collection of parts and tools on the table, considers taking some of them, but ultimately comes to the same conclusion Ricki did; they’re no use as they are now, at least not to anyone in the party. She leaves them where they are.” (D13T52).
That looks to me like the parts for a Wand of Heal. According to the Note by the red pipe in the lower left room, “Fire and ice: up. Life: right. Poison, lightning, and death: up/right. Holy: keep.” (D13T47), the lower right room is the destination for green Life Wisps so it would make sense that they would be making green Life items there (the bottle attached to the apparatus looks like a bottle for a Potion of Healing and that was what was in one chest in that room, D13T38).
My guess would be that the characters could either make a Wand of Heal themselves using the apparatus on the top floor of the lower right room and a green Life Wisp, perhaps only if Lohk was with them, or perhaps the three women in labcoats could do it for the characters as a reward (or under coercion). The contents of the chest in the room the three women in labcoats were in might have also been needed. We’ll never know unless it is revealed in the wrap up stream and someone posts the summary of the stream to the Comments somewhere.
There might have been more time to mess around with the other rooms if the Turn 20 patrol hadn’t been alerted and perhaps the last lever on the yellow pipes wasn’t thrown until after Turn 50, maybe this dungeon would have been an exception to the unwritten rule that horrible and unadvertised things happen on Turn 50, but I guess things went well enough.
So did she manage to get that collar off or did the frame just happen to freeze (no pun intended) on ice form after she got to Ix?
It’s still on in the penultimate panel, so I assume it’s still there.
Let’s get Ix home and put them in a nice warm bath.
D’aww the gloves have little holes for Amad’s claws <3
Now that I see that a “Level up” notice has finally appeared, I finally went back and read what happened after Turn 13 (D13T13), when I decided that I was no longer interested in attempting to interact with the story during dungeons and stopped reading.
It was interesting to read the rest of the dungeon’s comic pages in one sitting (without needing to read the Comments) and I found it fun to watch the antics without needing to worry about trying to interact with the story or agonize about all the unknowns. It all seemed rather chaotic when just reading the comic without knowing what was motivating particular actions. I see the party didn’t even manage to make it past the Turn 20 guard patrol without fighting it, including Turn 19 where Lara is riling up the bats and my thought was “Laaaaaaara Jenkins!!!” (and again on Turn 39).
While reading, I noticed that sometimes a reader who is only following the webcomic and not reading the Comments or able to look at the Current Party page on that Turn cannot fully follow what is happening in the story. One thing that would be helpful is if when a character takes or heals damage the text description not only said how much damage they took or were healed but also what that made their current HP, since that is very difficult to figure out later. Also, on Turn 57 the text does not say that Amadeusz healed the prone elemental for 1 point with the Wand of Mend just above the pictures of Ix waking up and joining the party, I had to go back to Turn 46 and actually read the Comments to figure out what was happening.
Somewhat sadly for me, the group didn’t ever try to see if Ricki’s Case ability worked on that chest in the Death Owlbear room so I hope somebody asks the GM about what would have happened during the wrapup chat and gets some clarification on how Casing chests works and if casing chests actually can work through walls if the chest is close enough to the wall.