[Mummy’s Mask] Still Delving

Nothing interesting to report on the Mummy’s Mask front. New delve, same nonsense.

[Mummy’s Mask] Wednesday Night Ghoul Fever

“I like to think of my familiar as quantumly entangled.”
— Devin

After a night of rest in the temple of the old goddess Bastet, Raenar the archaeologist awoke to find a cat lying on his chest. This seemed like a good omen, so the party proceeded down Acrid Street into Lapis Dog territory, looking for the leader of the pack, Priest in Chains.

First, they snuck up on ghouls rooting through what turned out to be a buffet of sorts: a street fountain filled with rotting corpses. One ghoul fleeing from that exchange led them to the Lapis Dogs’ chief lair, as Priest in Chains himself descended to join the fray, after the Plundercats forced their way through the rear entrance.

Once Priest in Chains’ head and items of value were secured, the adventurers discovered living humans languishing in the inn. While Akhil and Mentu tended to them — conveniently taking them out of dealing with any “friendly” ghouls — the others returned up Acrid Street. A chance encounter with ghouls brought out the Walkers of Nemret. Tath tried to sell the Walkers on using Priest in Chains’ mask of Set to impersonate the dead ghoul and take control of the remaining Lapis Dogs, but the language and culture barriers defeated communicating such a complex concept through gestures.

After a last pass of Bastet’s temple, Plundercats LLC cleared out of the necropolis. The ghoul victims were taken to the temple of Pharasma for care. Their cut of the take from Acrid Street did not impress the surviving Sand Scorpions at all. Sad for them, but the fewer competitors in the marketplace, the better for Plundercats LLC’s bottom line.

[Mummy’s Mask] The Fragrance of Fallen Qlippothim

“You know there’s a bard in the party when you’re arguing about scansion during a fight.”
— Mentu

This week in Mummy’s Mask, the party continued their sub-contract of investigating the perfume shop in the middle of a ghoul turf war. The depths of the shop beckoned, but ghouls gathered outside, so they took care of those first, with Viktovich playing the star role plowing through them.

The back rooms of the shop boasted elderly perfume-making apparatus, an oven with a qlippoth-infested cat and a giant black widow in the bedroom.

Loaded down with fragile glassware, they beat feet back to the temple of Bastet with ghouls on their heels. It was Walkers of Nemret versus the Lapis Dogs in the street, with archery support from the temple steps. And Tath finally got to use enlarge person on Viktovich, so everyone was happy.

Moreover, we leveled after all that! And then I discovered that all this time, Mentu’s favored enemy was the undead. So he’ll be shifting closer, if less tactfully, to Akhil’s stance of complete disgruntlement at treating with ghouls. However well-spoken, ghouls are pestilent vermin.

[Mummy’s Mask] Ghoulish Nation-Building

We went off-book this week in Mummy’s Mask. Tath the tiefling witch has been very interested in picking up where another team of treasure retrievers left off, as ghouls cut the Sand Scorpions in half before they could even get to their assigned target, Iskahara’s house of perfumes.

So into the necropolis they returned, heading for Acrid Street, the perfumery district. And they discovered not one pack of ghouls, but two, plus an embassy from a ghoul nation deep beneath the earth. Akhil was not psyched about treating with ghouls at all, but Tath and Raenar pushed forward, made some friendly overtures, and got free passage within their territory, so that’s a good start.

And then they met a girtablilu in Iskhara’s shop. It’s a very cosmopolitan population in today’s necropolis. More than half of whom did not immediately try to kill us!

[Mummy’s Mask] The House of Pentheru Is a Real Fixer-Upper

“Let’s make a vargouille-zela!”
— Akhil, oracle of Pharasma

We cleaned out the remainder of the house of Pentheru this week. Smarting from the encounter with the house’s off-kilter genius loci, the wealth extraction concern PlunderCats, Ltd., dba some more reputable name, were alarmed by the indication of vargouilles^[1] on the second floor of the house and suitably cautious in the exploration thereof. After dealing with the foreshadowed vargouilles — deprotagonization via paralysis is never not a poor choice to put in a monster’s list of ways to screw with characters — and wondering why Akhil was bro-tight with a disembodied floating head — the crypt of Pentheru was a little anti-climactic. Viktovich did a bang-up job threshing a swarm of undead cats — cat king? — and there were some items of note, but the action was low-key, thanks to the archaeologist ably disarming a nasty trap.

Looking forward, Tath the tiefling witch is pretty psyched about setting ghoul factions against each other. In-character, anything that sets ghouls against each other, rather than preying on innocents, is a bang-up idea to Mentu, my spell-less ranger, but out of character, all I have to say is goddamn motherfucking ghouls. More paralysis.

“I’m changing my class to magic-usurer.”
— Raenar slips into the role of party accountant

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^[1] Which were super obnoxious in one of the many Skull & Shackles‘ sessions ending in TPK or morale equivalent, too.

Mummy’s Mask: The Half-Dead City

Since Carrion Crown wrapped up last December, my role-playing opportunities have been a little sparse on the ground. Other obligations kept my schedule from lining up with other opportunities, which have been surprisingly plentiful, as Burlington has enjoyed a boom in public tabletop game opportunities in the last nine months, but it hasn’t ever really worked out.

Until recently, when Dan, he of Horace Gunderson and Auberon Crane, decided that the best complement to an every other week campaign of Wrath of the Righteous for Pathfinder would be the Mummy’s Mask adventure path on alternating weeks.

I dithered over a character for a long time. Long enough that almost everyone else settled on some kind of spell-casting class, which made it pretty clear we needed more than the dwarven warrior-matron Victovich. So, having seen the class in action with Geoff’s character Andris in Carrion Crown, I picked up the Expanded Spell-less Ranger PDF from Kobold Press. Clumsy name, but I liked that it brought rogue talent-like capabilities to the ranger, whose later level new additions tend to be “have some low level druid spells!” It’s so early in the game, that Mentu the spell-less ranger is exactly like any other ranger in Wati. I’ll keep you posted.

So far, the PlunderCats, doing business as . . . some other, less compelling name that I didn’t come up with, became a fully authorized team of tomb raid — antiquities reclaimants. They successfully explored a general’s tomb and circulated valuable goods into the local economy. Their second assigned job proved more problematic, with a swarm of scarabs and some kind of sand elemental proving the most troublesome.