Monster Party Book Seven Author Commentary, part 2:
I LIVE AGAIN!
Seriously I need to work myself into a better schedule for this kind of thing or I'm never going to get anything done. Sorry guys, been busy with a lot of stuff, Marvel Strike Force is fun, etc, maybe now that I've finally managed to proofread and post this, I'll feel inspired to start writing more stuff again.
Anyway, back to/lets start discussing the story on a chapter by chapter basis.
Chapter one, we have our heroes arrive in G'Henna. We quickly establish that Alex takes the difference between good and bad alcoholic beverages seriously (as previously pointed out, when you have a constitution score that makes it the next best thing to impossible to actually get drunk, "it tastes terrible but at least it will get me hammered" swiftly turns it "well this just tastes terrible") and G'Henna is known for producing some of the finest drinks around. Or to be more exact it used to be known for producing some of the finest drinks around, they've stopped exporting the stuff they made (and noticeably decrease how much of it they made/increased how much of it the church claimed) since Yagno went even crazier than normally and insisted Zhakata the Provider did not exist.
Thus, we have successfully established our main character's motivation, or at least one motivation.
Next we have our run in with Callian, she isn't around very long, but she isn't around very long in the adventure book either. She basically exists to give the characters another less mundane motivation for exploring G'Henna, possibly with a dying Vistana curse thrown on top if they're proving especially callous/uncooperative.
Remember this is Ravenloft, the players will go along with a reasonable amount of railroading so long as the trip has a nice view to watch out the windows and they get to blow the whistle a few times.
If the above metaphor displeases you blame my brother, he came up with it, though he was using it to describe Shadowrun adventures at the time….
Speaking of Shadowrun….
Alex: Possession Mage (back in 4th edition when that was legal at least).
Mirri: Face adept who also has some cyberware for tanking. (My brother has proven this is a perfectly viable build for 5th and while it may lack for direct damage output using "commanding voice" to make our opponents surrender can end fights pretty damn quickly all the same).
Cal: Street samurai, longarms.
James: Street Samurai, probably some exotic meta-human type giving cat like features. Also fairly decent odds he was originally born/created in a megacorp tank to kill people for them.
Devi: Skill monkey rigger/hacker.
Florence: The traditional "Glass cannon" mage build with a few healing spells.
Wait, this is about Ravenloft and D&D not Shadowrun right? (I kid, especially given that in the past I've already made arguments for how adventures in Ravenloft tend to have much more in common with shadowrunners than traditional D&D protagonists…)
Anyway, getting back to the story…
Next up our group encounters the wolf pack.
They're much more threatening in the adventure book, but that's because your standard adventure party isn't going to include Alex who more or less has an innate "charm wolf" spell like ability (though it does not supersede Darklord based abilities), due to the fact that he has the eye (and a fair portion of the consciousness) of a lupine demi-god in his head.
Alex's solution for getting rid of the dead Vistani's body is pretty gruesome, but as he points out, dead is dead, the terrain is really unsuited to burying anyone at the moment, and all burying really would accomplish in this case is lead to the body being eaten by worms and other insects.
This is also the first time that Alex insist that he isn't a god in this book. It'll be something of a running theme as you may have noticed, leading up to the character development (question mark?) of him eventually insisting that he /Fenrir is a god at the story's climax. Not so much because Alex genuinely believes he's a god, but because with great power comes great responsibility and sometimes you have to take a page out of the Ghost Buster's playbook if you want to save the day. Well, that and a few other reasons that I'll touch on later.
Then we get to meet Marda who is understandably getting out (or at least trying to) while the getting is good when it comes to Zhukar in particular and G'Henna in general. This isn't too surprising since as a rule of thumb, when things start to go do bad (well more bad than usual) in the domains of Ravenloft, the Vistani are going to be the first ones to notice it, and the first ones to try and jump ship, since often they have ways of pulling it off that may even allow them to escape through a closed border.
Her wagon breaks, the wolves show appreciation for a coming meal but alas Alex has to disappoint them.
If for some reason this was you first Monster Party Story (which it probably isn't and probably shouldn't be, but in the words of the great Stan Lee, "every comic is someone's first" so if you're going to write serialized adventures, write them with an eye towards making each one have at least some appeal to first time readers) we get a hint about the group when Alex says that James and Mirri should help him right the wagon. He asks for those two to help because of course as a werecat and vampire respectively, they have superhuman strength, and of course so does Alex since he's a demi/quasi-god.
Once the wagon is fixed Marda is kind enough to give our characters a reading from her Tarokka deck.
This reading comes pretty much straight from the adventure book, much like the reading in book five, it helps lay out the adventure to come, and what the main characters can expect.
Unlike those readings however, since the darklord card needs to show up as part of the reading, its not possible for the darklord reversed card to show up, because there's only one copy of any given card in a Tarokka deck.
Granted, there have been past events where cards that were not part of the deck at all have shown up (in "The Enemy Within" (which I suppose is not the best place to draw material from given how its been retconned half a different ways from Sunday) one Vistani points out that they never actually made a "Darklord" card, it just suddenly shows up in their deck after they're taken to Ravenloft) so a second copy suddenly being present in the deck would not be too unbelievable in the grand scheme of things, but I decided that running gags should stand aside to help avoid breaking suspension of disbelief.
Besides, we don't need the darklord reversed card when instead we have the swashbuckler card to represent Alexander Diamondclaw and the part he will play in the coming story.
The swashbuckler is of course a card related to two things, the first being "coins" which unsurprisingly are the cards related to thieves/people whose lives revolve around money which isn't quite as apt, but the second thing that the card is related to, is people of a Chaotic Good alignment, and that is Alex through and through.
Also if you've read the adventure book, you'll know at this very point roughly how the final climax is going to go down in the sense of Alex/a member of the group will steal Yagno's powers and use them to destroy Malistroi. The adventure book basically tells you to stack the deck so that you can draw the necessary cards for foretelling the story to come, but to leave the very last card random and based on what suit it is will possibly determine how to resolve the final conflict.
Interesting idea, might be a bit "meh" since it means that the heroes don't necessarily have full control of how the story will resolve, but on the other hand this is Ravenloft, so stuff like that happens.
Anyway, the group gets their reading and go back into the desert in order to try and reach Zhukar and thus of course, to find Alex a good drink.
Thus end chapter one, and so we move onto chapter two.
We start out with just something silly stuff of the group laying around in a great big "wolf pile" for shared bodily warmth. I'm not sure if wolves actually do snuggle up as close to one another as portrayed here, but if they don't Alex convinced them to for their own good.
Also to double back for a moment, yes this was another Discworld reference when the alpha of the wolf pack the group encounters is named "Gavin" since that is the same name an alpha wolf goes by in Fifth Elephant.
Mostly this chapter just starts off with our group making their way through the desert and we see the various precautions both magical and mundane that they take to deal with the less than welcoming terrain.
We eventually manage to get to Zhukar itself where the guards are not exactly friendly, but at least trying to be somewhat welcoming. They're soldiers of a totalitarian theological regime, but that doesn't mean they're opposed to the idea of visitors!
As outsiders, the group ends up having more leeway than most actual citizens of Zhukar, and in the grand spirits of most PC parties, if they're given an inch they're going to take a mile. This is especially true when they're taking a mile from the people who deserve to have even more taken from them, which is unquestionably the case when it comes to Zhukar and Yagno Petrovna.
If it has somehow not already been established, while Yagno may not be as personally blood thirsty as say Vlad Drakov, remember the entire "slow motion suicide cult" thing I brought up earlier.
So the first thing that our group needs to deal with is getting some place to sleep, once again, when in doubt deal with the simple necessities in life.
We get to see a little of how Alex handles the fact that guesting houses owners in general (and Leon in particular) don't like to deal with atheists. Alex fast talks his way through his by referencing "The Chained Wolf" as what he puts his faith in. This probably sounds on first reading sounds like a nicely metaphorical approach to the how Alex describes his internal struggles with restraining the animalistic instincts/aspects of his personality.
It might sound like that, but as we discover later he's actually being much less metaphorical, Fenrir is the Chain Wolf, and Fenrir is what Alex puts a lot of his trust in.
That lets us close out chapter two and we move onto chapter three.
In chapter three we start with the running gag of Alex and the bells of G'Henna. Alex due to his powers has keener ears than ordinary humans, and so he does not like the city's ritual of ringing bells early in the morning. Once again, simple thing in practice, but it helps firmly establish that Alex is suffering, which will help generate catharsis and feelings of accomplishment when he finally escapes/puts an end to that suffering.
Then we see Alex do some shopping (or to be more exact, try to do some shopping) and eventually come to the shocking realization that much of G'Henna's architecture is made of human bones.
He takes it well… in the sense that he doesn't actually harm anyone. Then Florence convinces him to go watch one of Yagno's sermons, both to better plan for how to defeat him, and to have a more better idea of what he looks like while fantasizing about defeating/killing him!
Faced with such an impeccable argument, Alex allows himself to be dragged along.
Before he can get there though, he receives a flat in your face slap that the people of Zhukar are not just suffering from a lack of food, some of them are lacking the will/desire to eat even if given food.
Alex is not happy about this. Alex considers that there is more than enough suffering in the world already, people don't need to be creating more of it for themselves intentionally.
It is at this point when Alex comes to that conclusion about how the people of G'Henna (or at the very least that person in particular) are so deeply tied to Zhakata that the only way they could possibly accept anything different and better would be not only if their faith in Zhakata was forcefully ripped away from them, but it was then directly and without them having any choice in the matter, transferred over onto another more benevolent (not to mention sane) god.
FORESHADOWING!
Anyway, next we get to see Yagno preach and we get introduced to Petchko, who if I had done a worse (or simply different) approach to this book could be argued to be the main character in much the way that as previously mentioned book two centers around Mikhail and book five around Wyan.
Petchko is going to surfer as much or more than Alex suffers in this book but unlike with the above two examples Alex at first more or less turns a metaphorical cold shoulder to Petchko's suffering.
Not that he'll ignore him or make his suffering worse, (which exactly what the ordinary people of Zhukar are doing) but if at certain points in this story you got the feeling that Alex found Petchko irritating and annoying, congratulations that was exactly what I was going for.
In the mind of Alexander Diamondclaw (at least early on in the story) when you decide to not only get involved in a slow motion suicide cult, but actually become a priest and thus try to perpetuate/recruit others into said slow motion suicide cult, you don't really have much in the way of a moral high ground to complain from if the slow motion suicide cult suddenly turns on you.
Alex's approach to Petchko can best be described as a veterinarian tending to a squirrel that was stupid enough to chew through his house's power lines shocking itself half to death and leaving him without power for a day.
That squirrel is stupid, it brought its suffering on itself, but I will help it because it is my job as a veterinarian/RPG protagonist to help this poor stupid squirrel/priest who clearly has no one else to rely on.
The RPG protagonist is the last thread in the social safety net of many worlds, and so Alex will help Petchko not because he really wants to (at first) but because he knows in his heart of hearts that if he doesn't then no one else will and Petchko deserves better than he's getting….
Well that, and if a Vistani finds out that you let her nephew get mistreated when you had the power to help them, that's a great way to wind up getting hit with a nasty Vistani curse. Alex's eye of Fenrir may make him immune to conventional magic, but he isn't quite sure if it will hold up against Vistani curse, and he'd would rather not have to find out, to say nothing of how the rest of the group wouldn't have any convenient immunity if the Vistana in question decides to curse them instead/they got caught up in the same curse that was laid on Alex.
Speaking of helping Petchko, that neatly brings us into chapter four.
In this chapter we get to mainly see three things. The first thing is Alex rescuing Petchko from the people of Zhukar who now consider him an outlaw (in the original sense of the term meaning "this person is outside the law, do what you will to them, you will face no punishment") and so will mistreat him, either because he makes a convenient target to unleash their petty sadism against, or because they believe they'll earn Zhakata's favor by further punishing those who he has cursed.
Alex of course gets to have at least a little fun scarring the pants off of some people, before grabbing people and escaping with Petchko. It is written in such a way that if this was your first Monster Party Book then there would be no way to know for sure that the creature which saved Petchko was Alex, but it is not exactly the world's most carefully hidden secret either, after all we cut from Petchko passing out while in the creature's grip to being woken up by Alexander Diamondclaw.
The next part of the chapter is the farce/comedy of Alex/the party doing things that Petchko would clearly not approve of, (not that they especially crave his approval, but lacking his disapproval makes him easier to manipulate/get along with) either just outside of his ability to witness said acts, or quickly covering them up with lies that range from believable to… not so believable.
For example, Mirri isn't using magic (which is the technically correct (the best kind of correct) since vampiric charm is actually a spell like ability) she's just using Nova Vassan mesmerism.
The third and final part of this particular chapter is the group taking a trip of the avenue of the false gods. As suggested in the adventure book this place is home not only to many versions of Zhakata worship which are now considered forbidden, but also whatever gods that the PC's worship.
For James, that's a statue of Bastet, and for Mirri one of Kali. I decided that since in theory G'Henna was created more or less fully formed by the Mists when Yagno first found it, there should be a statue of/temple dedicated to Fenrir as well in order to help twist the knife/give Alex one more reason to find G'Henna unnerving and distasteful.
Fenrir of course is verbally having none of it, he's fairly certain that if there were people who worshiped him, he would have been aware of it. Even more to the point, aside from his body sharing arrangement with Alex/Douglas, Fenrir's entire life has been one long series of betrayals, that has left him feeling like the entire world is more or less out to get him.
Thus, when presented with evidence that runs contrary to this particular theme (that at least in one place he was once venerated, respected and worshiped) he immediately rejects it. He's not wrong in the grand scheme of things, but since the group has no idea just how much power the Mists/Dark Powers have, he can only sort of pick around the edges and point out a few things that are so inconsistent that even to people who grew up in Ravenloft don't feel quite right.
So with that done we go to chapter five, or I finally remember that these books are (at least in theory) an ensemble cast production, and so we need to give the rest of the group some interesting stuff to do.
I still will stand by it being amusing (and a testament to how realized the city of Zhukar is in the adventure book notes) that this book somehow manages to go all the way to chapter six before we have a proper "inciting incident" and chapter seven before our characters are really doing more than just reacting to the situation unfolding around them as best they can.
In this case, we get to see James and Mirri dealing with a few unintended consequences of James' favorite outfit.
As established in the adventure book "red" is the color associated with the priests of Zhakata (though interestingly at no point is the color ever directly associated with the Beast God himself, for example there's no mention of even a single statue of Zhakata being painted red) but it also happens to be the color of James' outfit.
James' outfit being a bright red color, and James himself looking noticeably more well fed than most occupants of Zhukar (ironically despite James having to flirt with fasting back in the first book he's got no such problems at all in this one, in addition to his "magically preserved meat" the city of Zhukar has a reasonably sized rodent population as you might expect from its rather run down condition) gets mistaken for a priest.
This entire situation is inspired by something straight from the adventure books that mentions since the PCs aren't going to look like the half starved wretches who make up most of Zhukar's population, they might be mistaken by said half starved wretches for wealthy merchants, leading to awkward situations/requests for help, I just took it one step beyond that.
If the person in question making the mistaking had pressed James for some philosophical advice then it would have been a race between the speed at which James forgot everything the group got told back in chapter two about how preaching about other gods is strictly forbidden, and Mirri's hand going over his mouth as she expects exactly that to happen.
Since the only thing requested of him as a "priest" is of a strictly secular nature however, James (as he is wont to do) promptly gets all aboard the Good Samaritan train to go help someone in need.
Mirri (as she is wont to do) somewhat sullenly follows along with him, hoping that something much more interesting will happen and luckily for her (and unluckily for the bandits) something does!
First major fight scene takes place, then we close out this chapter.
Oh and we also got a little of Cal and Devi, wish I could give them more "page time" but if all goes according to plan (and assuming I ever get around to writing it) they'll get plenty of it in the next book.
In chapter six we finally get around to that inciting incident/event that I'd been planning to have really get the ball rolling since I first drafted mental notes for how this particular story would go, its just that other stuff kept popping up that I had to write about first!
Alex gets a mysterious note that suggests he should go to a particular brewery. It's established in the adventure book that some of the abandoned/run down breweries have become gathering places for black markets, and the group might end up visiting one, which promptly ends up getting raided.
Granted the adventure books also tends to expect the protagonists to be noticeably less powerful than the Monster Party, and so while it'd be easy to intimidate and arrest most Ravenloft PCs (especially ones of appropriate level for the adventure) that wouldn't work quite so well with our group.
In particular, Alex as you may have noticed has been getting more and more and more pissed off with the things he's seen going on in Zhukar. If a hundred or so Swords of Zhukar (the soldiers who enforce the will of the priests) decided to try and take Alexander Diamondclaw prisoner, the last surviving one might actually accomplish it… but only after the only after running up the hill created by the dead bodies of the other ninety nine.
Also keep in mind this is assuming that it the hundred guys fighting Alex on his own, if Florence pitched in with her AOE's, well Florence is a high level druid, she has AOE spells powerful enough to destroy a noticeable portion of a city, to say nothing of the people who were occupying said portion of the city.
She doesn't use them all that often because Florence is a fundamentally good person, but it is an option.
So, rather than meeting up with our heroes after they've been captured as the adventure book suggests, Madar/Rega (I'm going to use those two names interchangeably in this commentary) does it to help them avoid being captured.
As a side note, even taking into account the fat that Rega seems to have an unremarkable face/keeps a lot of people guessing on what he actually looks like, Rega probably also uses some minor magic in order to keep people from recognizing him. I say that because the adventure books mentions the possible background farce (in the sense that the PCs aren't aware of it) of Rega getting the PCs captured, and then Madar springing them out of prison.
Granted the adventure book doesn't directly mention the PC's ever being allowed to meet with Rega while he's in his Rega persona, but as you may have noticed I like playing with certain elements of farce, so I like the mental image of a person shoving you into a jail cell, walking out of the room, changing costumes, and then coming back in to break you out of the jail cell, but it only really works if the characters aren't aware of what is happening but the reader is, so I didn't try to work it into the story for the sake of preserving who Madar really was...
So, with Alex and Florence getting some unexpected help we can move onto chapter seven.
I hope that you guys didn't find the plot of this adventure dragging too much due to how the first few chapters were mostly just meandering around Zhukar, if it did feel like it dragged let me know.
Most of chapter seven is Madar/Rega and Alex trying to have a properly conspiratorial conversation without Petchko getting in the way.
Alex and Rega are both playing very deep games at this point, and Petchko, isn't.
So both Alex and Rega need to drape everything they say, suggest or plan to do, not just in an aura of morality but piety as well. If that wasn't problematic enough, they both need to argue that what is really more of a naked power grab/revenge against Yagno Petrovna is actually for Yagno's own good since he's lost touch with what is good for the people of Zhukar, and thus what Zhakata himself really wants.
Its not surprising that the two can't wait to send Petchko away and have some private time with each other to really confirm that they both view Yagno Petrovna as an arrogant pompous fool who would be doing G'Henna a favor if he choked on his own dinner, assuming Yagno actually bothers to eat anything with bones in it in the first place, given how he looks he might he might get by on a diet of soup and bread.
Once Alex and Rega are done wheeling and dealing with each other Alex finally gets Petchko out of his hair for a bit and we move on to chapter eight.
Chapter eight is pretty darn brief and mostly exists to move the plot along, but none the less it felt like a good idea to actually have a break between the it and chapter nine.
In particular, the group gets the package with the robes that they'll need to sneak into the temple and then sneak in they do.
If this chapter does anything (besides moving the plot along), it helps to humanize the Swords of Zhakata. It is worth pointing out that say what you will about the Swords of Zhakata… they're not the Talons of Vlad Drakov.
Granted, said Talons may be wearing mind controlling bracelets which make them such utter bastards, though of course others might argue that the bracelets are simply to keep others from mind controlling them against Drakov, and they put them on willingly.
The politics and sociology of Falkovnia isn't the point, the point is to talk about the politics and sociology of G'Henna!
In this case, much like how we saw a glimpse of back in chapter two, many of the Swords of Zhakata are more or less fundamentally decent people who are by no means anywhere near as corrupt as the majority of the priests who oversee them.
This is important because it means that we can feel okay cheering for them, and or caring about how many of them survive when Malistroi's army ends up attacking the city near the end of the story. In fact, I probably could have added in another entire chapter of just James/other members of the group interacting with various Swords of Zhakata as they gathered up survivors from the city, getting them out of their homes and to the relative safety of Yagno's ritual.
That said, this story was already long enough, such a chapter doesn't add any plot important details to the story just a bit more emotional flavoring, so who knows, I may go of and eventually add something like that happening as a side-story chapter at some point.
Either way lets close out chapter eight and move onto chapter nine.
Except that we won't at the momentum because dear god this author commentary is already pretty long and it's been forever and a day since I last posted anything… (posts should get more frequent, I hope) and so I'm going to have another chapter of author commentary covering the second half of the story…
