Session 13.7: Hold nothing back

Vahid commands the storm. Padrig holds fast. The Last Door opens wide.

Last episode, we left off with a dicey dilemma. The party faced perhaps insurmountable odds: Two dozen or so of Odo’s knives, many of whom have given into the Howling Curse, manifesting bestial transformations, plus six of the monstrous Most-Blessed, the half-man, half-beast hybrids that are the product of the curse permenently fully taking over its unfortunate victim’s body and mind. Add to that Odo Thriceborn, the lord of wolves, chosen of the Thing Below known as Y’kaa’raaw. Reunited at the center of Odo’s fighting pit, the party is surrounded. Odo has been wounded by Anwen, but he still lives, and his foul patron has empowered him with a monstrous form.

Vahid has called upon the powerful storm spirit bound into his cloak to aid them, but even that seems a thin reed to place their hopes of victory. After a miss result at a critical moment, he was offered two costly opportunities: Rip the spirit from its bindings in the cloak and turn it loose, allowing it to unleash its full power. Or draw the spirit from the cloak and into his own body, using the techniques of the hdour to secure victory. It was a narrow call, and mid-week I put out a plea for extra votes to break the tie. Let’s see where we landed:

This is probably the closest poll in PTFO’s almost two-year history. Vahid taps into the forbidden magic: To do a great right, do a little wrong¹. Without further ado, we’ll dive into the fiction:

Scene 13: The Fighting Pit, continued

A half-dozen of the jeering creatures circle them, drawing closer and closer, snapping fanged maws and maniacally tearing at their own flesh.

“Vahid!” Padrig shouts. “Hold nothing back! Without your magic, we are lost!”

As Vahid makes his decision, Padrig, Anwen, and the escaped prisoners must hold the line. Anwen will lead the roll with the aid of everyone else. If she succeeds, she’ll get some Readiness hold, but the primary purpose for this move is to hold back the enemy.

Anwen triggers Defend: 5+3+3+2 Constitution = 10, Strong Hit

She holds 3, and for the moment, the group holds back the crush. She’ll spend that hold immediately to deal damage — the bronze blade is fearful to the Most-Blessed, who normally rely on their profane resiliance, and so Anwen holds them at bay.

The Most-Blessed are closing in. Anwen hauls herself to her feet and lashes out with Kirs’ dagger, slashing at one who draws near, giving the others pause as the wound steams and hisses from the bronze’s touch. Beyond the circle of snarling half-men, Odo’s other creatures draw near, moving to encircle the party fully but cautious of the savage, random violence of the Most-Blessed.

In the center of the tightening noose, Vahid is lost in the unseen world. He urges the storm spirit within the cloak to unleash its fury, but beneath the earth, far from the open sky, its will is sapped, and it struggles to attend him.

As the wolves circle, Vahid’s mind flashes back to a pitch-black, rain-soaked night years ago, revealed to him by the fate-tree. How the Thousand-Year Storm entered the hdour’s body and granted him the power to lay his enemies low. 

Hold nothing back. He grips the Azure Hand tightly before him, the corroded aetherium headpiece even with his missing eye. With the hand, he beckons the storm spirit. “Laughter-of-Thunder, I have need of your strength,” he whispers.

The spirit struggles at first, pulling away, but the Azure Hand is irresistible to its elemental nature, and Vahid draws it closer and closer. He opens his mind to it. “Come. Let us be one.” Laughter-of-Thunder is drawn out from its perch in Vahid’s cloak, spirit meets soul, and Vahid becomes the storm.

For the purposes of this scene, we'll give Vahid access to all of the spirit's moves -- in particular, wreak havoc on its surroundings and fling lightning from a raging storm. We'll also upgrade it's damage a bit (1d6->1d8 for its wind, rain and flung debris and 1d10+3->1d12+3 for its lightning bolt) -- as a GM, it's good to embrace the dramatic moment and give Vahid some extra juice here.

We'll also envision the physical effects on his body -- after all, he has done nothing to prepare himself for this. Vahid resists:

Vahid will triggers Defy Danger 6+6+1 Constitution = 13, Strong Hit

Nice to see his luck turn around after his triple snake-eyes at the end of last episode! Resisting the strain of having the spirit bound to him, Vahid's now uses the spirit's move to wreak havoc on its surroundings. To judge how effective it is, I just rolled damage, and got max: 8 damage. Since the spirit has the area tag, the damage is applied to multiple enemies at once, and these NPCs have already been a bit roughed up by Vahid's previous use of the storm-spirit, so I rule that many are killed, and the rest are scattered and demoralized.

Vahid enters the storm; the storm enters Vahid. Source: Midjourney

Only now does Vahid remember the pain Cirl felt that night when the storm entered him -- his veins run with lightning, his lungs swell with a howling gale. Vahid swallows the copper taste in his mouth and grasps tight the Azure Hand, channeling and smoothing the turbulent vis, lest it overwhelm him. He comes to his senses and finds himself floating high in the air above the arena floor, possessed of a strange, mad calm. Beneath him, he sees the monstrous Most-Blessed drawing ever closer to his friends. He gently -- almost playfully -- reaches out with a caress of wind, and one of the creatures is flung into the air, landing heavily on a stone bench with a sickening crunch. Vahid turns his attention to the surge of white-robed cultists, and he directs the storm’s wrath to them. 

A swirling dust devil arises from the ground, picking up sand and discarded blades as it goes, and it falls upon Odo’s warriors like a volley from the Despot’s great warhost. Those who do not flee before the storm are caught up in it, battered and tossed -- Vahid sees one man carried screaming into the air, only to fall on the arena’s makeshift iron fence, where he writhes, wounded and bleeding. Another of Odo’s creatures is lashed with flensing sand -- driven mad by the Howling Curse, he flings himself into the maelstrom and runs until he collapses, laughing maniacally.

Below, Anwen, Padrig, and their crew huddle in a tight schiltron in the center of the arena, in the eye of the storm. The Most-Blessed’s yellow eyes are fixed on the Seeker, floating above -- one of them takes a running leap to try to seize him and drag him down, but Anwen leaps to his defense, Kirs’ dagger tight in her grip as she slashes at the monster.

Anwen spends another Readiness from Defend and then triggers Clash to intercept the attack and engage the creature. 

Anwen triggers Clash: 6+1+2 Strength = 9, Weak Hit

She will spend her last Resolve hold to deal an extra 1d6 damage, and she totals 8 damage. Her bronze dagger ignores the Howler's armor, so the thing is almost dead with only 2 HP remaining. In return, it deals 6 damage, leaving Anwen with just 1 HP. She'll choose to halve it using I Get Knocked Down, leaving her with 4 HP instead, and once again she'll choose to be temporarily put out of the action. Fortunately, she's with allies, so Padrig and his crew can protect her while she recovers. He's going to trigger Defend again, rather than making an offensive move which could lead to damage being dealt to him or his people on a weak hit.

Padrig triggers Defend: 1+2+4+1 Constitution = 7, Weak Hit

The bronze blade deals a terrible wound, and the beast howls in pain -- a strangely elated sound -- as it falls back and slashes at Anwen in return with its long, taloned fingers. They cut through her thick hide gauntlets, and she staggers back. Padrig pulls her among the crush of their allies. “Hold fast!” he bellows. “The storm fights with us!”

Jens and Axel, fighting shoulder to shoulder, drive off another snarling Howler, and the rest of the prisoners raise a ragged war cry and press forward, pushing the Most-Blessed back. Axel, in a booming baritone, begins hollering in Marchsprech — Pad recognizes the words of an old Marcher shield wall cadence the lad must have learned at his father’s knee.

Now flying high above the bloody field, Vahid turns his attention to Odo’s box. The Thriceborn is surrounded. Vengeful Mutra, fighting for her followers slain by Odo’s jackals, presses him with her iron -- a wickedly recurved Peaks-blade, with Cerdic and Ollem holding her flanks. They cannot draw close for fear of running afoul of Odo’s grasping talons, nor can the lord of wolves escape. Behind them, Baraz fends off a pack of white-robed cultists with his whirling chain.

Odo meets Vahid’s eye, glowing gold and crackling blue. The Thriceborn is unrecognizable -- the curse has twisted his body into a lupine monstrosity, patchy fur over corded muscle and sinew, marked all over with bleeding runes. 

“The Howling Wind showed me a vision of you. It told me I would feast on your heart and take your power,” the beast rumbles.

Vahid triggers his new move, Borrow Power, to use the spirit's move fling a bolt of lightning. 

Vahid triggers Borrow Power: 5+4+1 Wisdom = 10, Strong Hit

He succeeds, and retains use of the power! He deals 10 damage, which Odo's armor brings down to 6, leaving him with a mere 4 HP.

Vahid feels the storm thrumming in his scarred, burnt hand, and he reaches out to Odo. His fingertips become forks of lightning, arcing towards the Thriceborn’s monstrous form, and deafening thunder echoes in the arena.

The force of the lightning strike drives Odo to his knees, and grey smoke rises from his burnt fur.

“It lied.” Vahid thunders. “It led me to you -- it cares nothing for you, fool; it wants only slaughter. You are as you have always been: A lesser pawn of greater powers.”

Vahid hits him again: 

Vahid triggers Borrow Power: 4+2+1 Wisdom = 7, Weak Hit

Vahid flings another bolt of lightning, but this one is his last. Luckily, it deals 11 damage, which is enough to put Odo down, even reduced by his considerable armor.

Vahid reaches out with intent this time, calling on the full measure of the storm spirit’s might. Lightning arcs through Odo’s twisted form, and the once-mighty lord of wolves falls before his throne, writhing and twitching as Vahid’s power drives the life from his limbs until, finally, he is still. Mutra and her men look up at Vahid in undisguised awe as the Seeker rises higher above the sands of the arena.

As Odo falls, Vahid can feel the howl of his master reverberating through the unseen world. The Most-Blessed can hear it, too -- they cover their ears and grasp their heads, straining against the pain and madness. One of them flings itself towards Anwen heedlessly, falling onto her dagger as it gnashes its distended jaws at her, struggling in vain for a bite. Others turn on their former keepers, gibbering and sprinting toward Odo’s demoralized minions, who flee or fight back desperately.

With Odo dead, his cult is now descending into the curse’s madness. This sort of unstructured, chaotic fight is perfect for a useful move that I recently read in Homebrew World, another Dungeon World hack by the creator of Stonetop. HBW and Stonetop are close cousins, so the moves are quite compatible -- take a look:

We'll do one roll for each of the PCs, but we'll also keep mind the various groups of friendly NPCs -- Mutra's gang up in Odo's box, Dawa and her handful of hopeful escapees, and Padrig's ragtag crew in the arena: 

• Anwen fights her way to Odo's box to rejoin & protect Mutra and her allies: 5+3+2 Strength = 10, Strong Hit

• Padrig stands with the prisoners and protects them from the Most-Blessed: 2+1+1 = 4, Miss

• Vahid seek out Dawa and her people to protect them from the chaos: 6+1+1 Wisdom = 8, Weak Hit

Now we have to weave these together to complete the fight -- Vahid is easy -- he finds Dawa in the chaos and protects her from whatever recriminations might be coming. He chooses to mark a debility -- the storm will leave him Sickened before he releases it to return to the cloak, with disadvantage on Constitution and Charisma rolls. 

Padrig is in a tougher spot -- he'll choose to take damage (he still has a good amount of HP left) and, to deliver on the peril we've established to his prisoners, the GM picks suffer a strategic setback, which will be many of the prisoners being savaged by the Most-Blessed (more-or-less negating his aim in the combat, which is OK since he missed!). But Anwen has a chance to save the day -- with her strong hit, she chooses to take damage, and then uses the opportunity to negate a choice to zero out Padrig's strategic setback, allowing him to save the bulk of the prisoners. We have to envision how Anwen accomplishes that -- first, this is a chance to use her newest move, Aura of Courage, which heartens the people around her, including Pad's prisoners. She'll also give Pad her bronze dagger -- that'll allow him to cut through the Most-Blessed's thickened hides and unholy resilience with ease. Pad will still take a beating, but he'll now be able to save the folk he pulled out of the prisoner's pens.

For damage, Anwen takes 4, which puts her down, even if she halves it! She might have to make a Death's Door roll and potentially die, but fortunately her move Never Gonna Keep Me Down states that she doesn't roll, but instead automatically receives a 10+ result -- she wrests herself back from the Last Door and remains in the land of the living, with a single HP. 

Padrig, meanwhile, takes 5, leaving him with 8 HP remaining. He still has the Weak debility, but managed to limp through the fight without triggering many Strength or Dexterity-based moves². Here’s how it unfolds in the fiction:

All around, Odo’s accursed family descends into chaos. Those who have given into the Howling Curse turn on those who have kept their senses, throwing their weapons aside and attacking with talons and fangs, still bursting forth from their twisted fingertips and distending jaws. In Odo’s place of honor, Anwen sees a surge of the afflicted pressing Mutra and Anwen’s other fighters, threatening to overwhelm them. 

She calls out to Padrig over the din of battle. “The others need me! Can you hold?”

Padrig is exhausted, seeming barely able to stand, but he calls back. “We’ll hold. Go! We need Mutra alive, and Odo’s body.”

Without another word, she tosses him Kirs’ bronze blade, bane of the cursed, and she races into the melee, snatching up her axe Bearkiller from where Odo had cast it and cutting her way towards the gate.

Padrig rejoins the escaped prisoners, who are desperately fighting off the blood-mad cultists who have forced their way through Vahid’s storm. In the crush, he spots Jens, who has been born down to the ground by one of the Most-Blessed -- the caravan guard hollers madly, holding the creature back with his gauntleted arm as its thicket of twisted, yellow fangs worry the leather and the meat beneath. Pad seizes the beast by the mane and twists its head back, opening its throat with the bloody bronze blade and throwing it off his comrade as its life drains away, but not before it slashes at his face with its claws, leaving three angry red gashes across his cheek.

Meanwhile, Vahid surveys the battlefield from above. He can feel the lordly presence of Laughter-of-Thunder at the edges of his mind. The regal storm spirits thoughts blend with his as he surveys the fighters below. His allies. His warriors. Odo lies defeated at his gesture, his followers scattered and terrified. All that remains is to reward those who served him well. His eyes scan the melee, searching for Dawa. There, he finds her near the edge of the arena, shielding her few chosen escapees from the revenges of some of Odo’s remnants -- those uncertain whether to flee or to fight. Dawa, so close to being released from Odo’s hell, holds them off like a devil with a blade, batting their speartips away with her iron. 

In a whirlwind, Vahid descends on them. “Begone!” he thunders, his voice booming throughout the chamber. “The Thriceborn is fallen. You are bereft. Flee, or be swept away by the storm.”

Anwen and Padrig hear Vahid’s call from their battlefields -- Anwen high at Odo’s throne, hewing her way through the cultists towards Mutra, Padrig below in the arena, still holding back the remnants of Odo’s fighters. As the thunder of his voice rolls over them all, a wave of dismay goes through Odo’s people, and they begin to break and flee, making for the surface or deeper into the complex. Seeing their tormenters turn and run, the prisoners pursue them with a terrible will, bearing them down, taking dropped weapons, and exacting justice and vengeance in equal measures.

Vahid swells with pride as his foes flee at the sound of his voice. Strange memories flash in his mind’s eye -- mountain peaks reaching up towards him but falling short of his commanding heights. Fields of grass bowing rhythmically before his majesty. Ant-sized men and women fleeing before his coming or praying for his rain as though he was Tor, born again. And, as his spirit-life flashes before him, he can sense the presence of Laughter-of-Thunder in his memories as well -- the resentment he felt when the magisters of the Lycaeum scorned his research, his envy towards Master Stelios when he crowed over his acquisition of the Azure Hand, and the anger he directed at the Ustrina when they betrayed him, and he burnt them to ashes. He can feel his crooked human failings seeping into Laughter-of-Thunder’s mind as the spirit’s lordly mein takes root in his own. 

Fortunately, it is pain that brings Vahid back to himself. The spirit’s vis is powerful, and the Azure Hand has held it at bay, but now the Seeker’s focus slips, and he can feel the elemental power burning jagged wounds into his flesh. Before his eyes, the blacked lines now spread from his hand, up his arm, towards his heart. With his fleeting strength, he focuses his will through the Azure Hand and pulls the spirit from him, and it is quickly drawn back into its bindings and returns to its cloak, which settles around Vahid’s shoulders as he collapses to his knees. An unbearable feeling of emptiness rushes in to fill the void left by the spirit’s presence.

Dawa goes quickly to his side, her voice tinged with desperation. “You cannot die, Seeker. By Aratis, you owe me a marker, and I will have the cure³ that is owed me.”

He laughs and coughs -- both are rattling, wounded sounds. “I am glad the Lawkeeper still holds some sway here. You and yours will have your due -- but Odo is not finished yet. His patron will drag him back from the Last Door, and the journey will leave him still more twisted. Help me, now.”

Dawa obliges, pulling him to his feet. A shocked silence has descended over the arena. A few of the cult’s lowly servants are cautiously peeking in from the grand archways, hopeful that this nightmare may end. Bodies are everywhere, more than any of them, perhaps save Padrig, has seen before — cultists, their white robes stained red, escaped prisoners who gave their lives for their fellows’ freedom, and the monstrous Most-Blessed, their death rictuses fearful to behold. Padrig has led his small company to Anwen and Mutra, and now they form a ring around Odo’s fallen form, each wanting to see the cursed tyrant’s body for themselves, and it is to them that Dawa leads the weakened Seeker.

The crowd parts for Vahid -- even though the spirit’s power has departed him and left him weak, his eye still glows and sparks with blue-white vis, and he grasps his staff with his blackened, scarred hand. He cuts a fearsome figure as he joins Padrig and Mutra over Odo’s body, now returned to its merely human form. Fallen, the lord of wolves is greatly diminished: No longer a giant, just an old, scarred-up Manmarcher, fallen on the field of battle. Smoke still rises from the wounds Vahid dealt him when he became the storm.

Vahid meets Padrig’s eye -- the old bandit looks worried for the Seeker. ‘What did you do?’ is his unspoken question. I held nothing back, is Vahid’s silent, prideful reply. He feels a rush of certainty, of complete confidence in his decision, but pulls himself back. Are these my thoughts? Or some remnant of the spirit’s still lingering? How long will they yet linger? Padrig’s face clouds with worry as he watches Vahid closely.

“Just the man,” Mutra mutters, breaking both their reveries. “How do we make sure he is not born a fourth time?”

“His body must be consumed utterly. Burnt to ash, or perhaps treated with lye or aqua regia, if any can be found or concocted here.”

“Let’s build him a pyre, then,” Ollem growls. “Him and the rest of his scum.”

Vahid shakes his head weakly. He leans heavily on the Azure Hand, weakness spreading as the rush of battle fades. “No. The flames must burn hot, A crucible, not a pyre. We must bear his body to Jahalim⁴, and his Foundry -- there, we can be rid of this monster.”

Padrig frowns and looks around at the circle of faces peering down at Odo’s broken body. “Where is Anwen? Mutra? Vahid? Where is she?” he raises his voice in growing desperation.

“Here,” comes her strained response. The crowd opens up, and Pad sees her slumped against Odo’s throne. Top to toe, she is splashed with crimson. Her armor is split in too many places to count quickly, and her face is flushed and sweaty. Padrig goes to her side, and Baraz joins him at her other shoulder. Bearkiller is still in her hand, resting at her side, its milky white blade barely visible beneath the blood.

“Are you all right, girl? How dire is it?”

She spits blood. “Dire. But not so dire I can’t get up. Give me your hand, Baraz.”

Pad barks a relieved laugh as the burly Lygosi pulls her to her unsteady feet. “Orders, Marshal?” he asks with a fond smile.

“If I heard the Seeker right, Odo needs a funeral procession. Who’ll help me carry him to his just reward?”

Many hands reach out. Axel, Baraz, a few of the haler prisoners, Mutra, and her bravos lift him, with Anwen at his head. They heft the Thriceborn’s corpse and bear him from the arena towards the surface, and the flames.

Setting the Scene: Emerging from Odo’s Lair

For this sequence, we'll use a new move from Ironsworn: Delve -- Escape the Depths. This move, like Gloss Over a Fight above, allows you to abstract what might otherwise be a complex series of moves while still hewing to the fiction. Here's the move: 

Recall from the previous episodes, we're using Ironsworn: Delve to track our movement through Odo's Lair, first through the tenements and then through the underground complex. We've marked 7 out of 10 progress, but have yet to trigger the Locate Your Objective move, which generally concludes the exploration of a site. In the fiction, this means that there's still something to discover in Odo's Lair -- perhaps the reason he's stockpiling scavenged scraps of orichalcum⁵, or some gruesome shrine to the Thing Below that granted him all this power. It would be interesting to continue to explore, but the action is very much pulling us out -- maybe we'll make a return, at some point! Vahid will lead the group, and since we're retracing our steps out, he'll roll with Intelligence, his strongest stat:

Vahid triggers Escape the Depths: 4+2+2 Intelligence = 8, Weak Hit

The party is already pretty damaged and sporting a few debilities between them, so rather than suffering more damage, they opt for you face a new complication as you emerge from the depths -- one of the more fun option for the GM. We'll return to the action with a more zoomed out scene, which introduces the complication and how they deal with it:

Scene 14: Flight from the Depths

Anwen’s jest becomes truth: Odo does indeed have a funeral procession worthy of a great chieftain. His freed servants follow behind the escaped prisoners, with Odo’s once-queen, now-betrayer, Dawa Eyegouger, leading them through the halls. A few uncertain members of Odo’s fallen family follow along. Chastened, they cast off their white robes and walk at a distance from the others, who glare daggers at them.

They pass through the grand entryway and its black, mirrored pools and up the long stairway to the hidden entrance. They emerge into the common hall of the Crooked Tower, the massive insula block built atop the Forge Lord ruins that hid Odo’s Lair. Outside, a rumbling of a great crowd can be heard — many tongues and the sound of a growing hue and cry.

Mutra swears under her breath. “Some of Odo’s lapdogs must have reached the surface and spread word of his death.”

“Surely that is cause for celebration, not rancor?” Vahid asks.

“He feeds them,” Padrig replies. “For many, that is enough, and I don’t blame them. Ever been starving, Seeker?”

Mutra nods. “He was clever. People knew he was dangerous, but the rumors of darker deeds were just that — rumors. And he made sure to sow doubt at every opportunity.”

“They must be told the truth of it, then,” Vahid says weakly.

“They don’t sound in a listening mood,” Cerdic Snake-Eye mutters. “Who’s going to talk to them? You, Seeker?”

Vahid’s voice is barely a whisper. “Not I, I fear. Anwen, it must be you. Put fear from your heart and speak the truth. They will listen.”

“Right,” Anwen says. “Follow me. They should see the body.”

Baraz and Padrig throw open the hall’s double doors and beyond is a throng — a hundred folk or more, gathered and angry.

Anwen has advantage from her Speak Truth to Power move, but her Charisma is still +0. Swingy!

Anwen triggers Persuade: 5+5+2+0 Charisma = 10, Strong Hit

She holds Bearkiller low to her side, its menace still implicit, and raises up her hand for parley. “Hear me, people! Odo is slain, for just and right cause! I know you are angry. I know he took care of you when no one else would. But his mercy was a lie. He was a monster, and he bred monsters. He took your friends and neighbors from you in the night, and did the unimaginable to them. Look behind me!” she gestures at the freed prisoners, the servants no longer under Odo’s thumb. “These were your people. They could have been you or your nearest. We did what we had to do to put an end to Odo’s crimes. Let us through — if we do not burn his foul body, he will return an even worse monster, as he did before!”

There is quiet muttering, as her words are translated into the Delve’s many tongues. The crowd seems to deflate, like a windless sail — robbed of their righteous vengeance, their bellies are still empty. But moved by Anwen’s plea, they part, and fall in behind her, as Odo’s procession swells further.

They are nearly an army when they arrive at the Foundry. Good, Padrig muses, glancing behind them. We’ll need an army when the hdour comes⁶. His thoughts begin to race — there is so much to do: Odo’s body must be destroyed, the Delve must be strengthened against the coming raid, and the three of them are near-dead on their feet. He banishes the grey cloud of exhaustion from his mind for a moment as he considers their options.

We’ll wrap up the episode here. Odo is slain — for now. The party has a lot to do, and only a small amount of time to do it. Next episode should be the last of the session, and it’ll be a more zoomed-out series of vignettes wherein the party prepares for the arrival of the hdour’s army. To lay out the series of scenes, we’ll need to know how the party spends their time — back in Session 12.5, we created a 8-tick countdown clock representing the time remaining before Cirl strikes. At that point, it had two ticks marked. I think after this night’s travails, we can mark one more, leaving 5 ticks remaining. As we go through the next scenes, we’ll mark ticks as it becomes narratively appropriate to apply some time pressure. All that remains is to put our heads together and decide the party’s priorities. Here’s a list I ginned up:

1. Deal with Odo’s body: This one is obvious. Odo is down, but not out. They’ll need a find a way to light the fires of Jahalim’s foundry (there’s no fuel stockpile, remember, thanks to Odo’s feud with Mutra!) Alternately, they might find another way to dispose of the body.

2. Rescue the other prisoners in Odo’s Lair: Not everyone in the prisoner’s pens went with Pad to the fighting pits — there were more in the depths, not to mention those on the upper tiers who had killed before in the arena but who had not yet been taken up into the cult. Those at the bottom need rescuing, and those above might be useful in the coming fight.

3. Investigate a cure for Dawa Eyegounger: It’s not likely that Vahid can find a complete and safe cure for the curse in the next week or so, but it’s possible he can find some way to mitigate it, or cleanse it at some great cost.

4. Sort out leadership in the Delve: The Bosses, disunited and fractious, allowed Odo’s poison seed to take root, and the power vacuum left by Odo will make matters worse. Without a unified front, it’ll be tough to resist the hdour. This option in particular will feature Vahid — his newfound Hubris instinct, gained as the result of his bonding with the storm spirit, coupled with his parallel drive of Vision, might drive him to enact a grandoise scheme indeed.

5. Rest: Our heroes are, as we used to say, on the struggle bus. They need to rest and recuperate. This is important, but it will definitely mark ticks.

6. See to the Tenements: The tenements have lost their patron, and there is now a power vacuum. They need a new protector — hopefully someone who’s a bit less of a monster.

7. Train a Militia: A great raid is coming to Gordin’s Delve. The Bosses have bravos — street fighters, not soldiers. To resist the hdour’s raiders, they’ll need to coordinate. Pad can train them.

8. Train themselves: Anwen and Padrig both have enough XP to trigger the Level Up move. Wouldn’t hurt to be a bit tougher in the coming fight.

9. Arm Up: If they somehow manage to relight the fires of the Foundry, they could begin forging weaponry to arm up the militia, complimeting option #7 or simply augmenting the armament of the bravos.

10. Hunt down the remaining cultists: They are out there, some of them infected with the Howling Curse. Without the knowledge of Y’aaw’kara that Dawa gave Odo, they likely cannot start a new cult, but they are still dangerous.

11. Hunt down the assassin Cicatrix: The assassin Master Stelios sent after Vahid is here in Gordin’s Delve, and unbeknownst to the party, he has been suborned by Cirl-of-the-Storms. A knife in the dark at an inopportune moment could spell disaster — best find him fast. If we don’t pick this one, it might pick us anyway, depending on miss results.

This poll will be a bit quirky — we’ll used ranked choice voting (selecting up to five options, one for each tick remaining) to develop something of a priority list, and work our way down. Some opportunities may amalgamate (options seven and eight, for example) and some may become moot. But until we run out of countdown clock, we’ll work our way through it, prioritizing your choices. I invite you to hold forth in the comments section with your reasoning, or with anything big I’ve missed — your thoughts can inform the specifics of how the work gets done! As always, thank you with all my heart for reading, and smash the button below to help the party make their plans!

1. Bassanio to Portia in Merchant of Venice, Act 4, Scene 1. The full quote ends “…and curb this cruel devil of his will,” which applies quite tidily to Odo as well as Shylock.

2. His Let Fly roll that began the combat had disadvantage, but it was cancelled out by the advantage he receive from his Read the Land move last episode.

3. As a price for her betrayal of Odo, Vahid promised Dawa he would seek a cure for the Howling Curse.

4. It’s been a moment since we talked about Jahalim of the Keys. As a refresher: He is one of the Bosses of Gordin’s Delve, likely the most powerful and influential. He holds control of the Foundry, an ancient Maker building that smelts all the iron, copper and silver ore mined in the three great delves. Our most recent conversation with him was in Session 12.4.

5. This was alluded to in Session 13.1.

6. In case you forgot! Cirl-of-the-Storms marches on Gordin’s Delve with an army of his Stormcrows, seasoned killers all.