# June 1, 2026 | Smells Like Grandma's Buns > [!Summary]+ meta > **Role Call**: [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] • [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] • [[Kouneli]] • [[Styx]] • [[Cheeto]] • [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] *(on table autopilot — Griffin out)* > **Where We Are**: Lower Tavick's Landing — the Cardamom Club > **Tagline**: "Did you intend to crash my entrapment?" [[E17 - Rat Has Excellent Penmanship|↶ Last Session]] | [[The Bleeding Veil| Campaign Home ↝]] ## This Session The hunt for [[Lhara]]'s dead drop turns into the night the floor finally gives out. The party gropes through Lower Tavick's Landing chasing a club with no sign and a smell like fresh baking, only to find the **Cardamom Club** is a cranky halfling's living room with a hand-lettered joke sign over the door. [[Styx]] spots the handoff, tails it, and blunders into the fact that the entire scene is Lhara's trap — sprung on a corrupt Clifftop handler named **Meren**, who promptly explains the whole conspiracy to the rest of the party before deciding to arrest or dismember them. Meren's muscle is a **Death Gate** operative named **Torvin**. Lhara snipes through the window, initiative is rolled, and the crew finally — *finally* — burns the inspiration they've been sitting on since the Cogs. We leave them in a room full of smoke, [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] blinded, Torvin marching on [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]]. ^session-summary ## Session Log ### Smells Like Grandma's Buns Dusk in Lower Tavick's Landing — *"just street and more street, hemmed in by tenements that lean together overhead until the sky is a thin bruised seam."* No bridges down here, no everbright lamps either; just oil lamps throwing *"pools of warm light every 30 feet, long stretches of darkness in between."* The party knows the Cardamom Club is *around here somewhere* and proceeds to fail every check to find it. - [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] does what an orc with a nose does and follows the smell. The verdict, repeated all night: *"Smells like grandma's buns."* *"Yeah, it does."* - The party loiters openly in a neighborhood that does not love outsiders. The DM, thrilled: *"Yeah, you're just all standing out in the open, loitering in a weird place. It's great, I love this."* - An old woman cracks a shutter, takes one look, and slams it. Without missing a beat: *"Don't worry. We get that a lot."* - The DM, several whiffed Investigation checks deep: *"I gotta tell you, I'm out of ideas, and I feel like I was soft cheating the last couple."* ### A Message One Way or Another [[Styx]] tries to talk his way in by impersonating a courier — the smoothest dead end of the night. - Styx, in disguise and a *very* serious voice: *"I have an urgent message to deliver to the Cardamom Club, but I seem to have been terribly lost. A silver for you if you're able to direct me."* - The man at the door — House Orien, it turns out — gives a slow wolfish grin: *"That's not the kind of place that you want to go... maybe look for some other kind of baking spice. Maybe that's where your message goes."* Then asks Styx if he knows what a *hint* is. - Styx, refusing the hint on principle: *"I have a message to deliver, and this message is going to be delivered one way or another."* The door closes in his face. ### The Hot Goth Cat A cat solves the puzzle the party couldn't, because of course it does. - At a dead end, a cat sits *"dead center, blocking the alleyway,"* regards them *"disdainfully,"* and hops onto a roof. The table, immediately: *"The hot goth cat. It was bad news."* The DM: *"She's never watched a Disney movie in her life."* - Following the cat, Investigation finally lands on the missing chunks of brick in the wall: *"Guys, it's a ladder."* - Styx auditions disguises for the climb like he's casting a movie — Val Kilmer (*"too good looking, attract too much attention"*), old fat Val Kilmer, Danny DeVito (*"bad climber,"* vetoed) — and settles on *"Sylvester Stallone from Cliffhanger."* - Up top: the cardamom smell thickens, and so does the plot — *"a cloaked and hooded figure crouched on another roof."* The first watcher. ### A Streak of White Fur Through a window, Styx catches the handoff the whole hunt was chasing. - A halfling woman with her back turned, a cup she isn't drinking, and a hooded figure with *"a streak of white fur and an edge of something that could be an eye patch that catches the lamplight."* A leather folio slides across; she folds it into her shawl without looking and slides back *"a small cloth bundle."* - Styx matches it to the description of [[Lhara]]: *"He said eye patch and white hair... is it your shifter?"* It is. ### Get Dice. Need to Look Like Hoodlum. The stakeout, which is mostly the party being bad at stakeouts. - Nobody owns a gaming set to fake a dice game. The DM, wounded: *"I cannot believe that Cheeto doesn't have a dice set."* [[Styx]] writes in the serial-killer notebook: *"Get dice. Need to look like hoodlum."* - The night collapses into *dude-watching-a-dude-watching-a-dude* — the party watching the watcher watching the door. *"The dude on the roof — a scarecrow. We've checked."* - The halfling slips out; Styx drunk-tails her and loses her instantly — *"She's not in the street. Gone."* So he does the only thing left and walks in the front. ### Did You Intend to Crash My Entrapment? [[Lhara]] re-enters the campaign by greeting the man who just blew her operation. - That familiar melodious voice: *"So you ran down a dead drop and tailed it all the way over here, huh? Pretty good instincts."* Styx, fairly: *"Well, you hired me to do what I'm good at."* - The whole scene, it turns out, is *hers*: *"What do you think I'm doing here?"* And, drier: *"Did you intend to crash my entrapment?"* - The grudging respect underneath it: *"It takes real talent to find me when I don't want to be found, and I feared we are approaching a time where I will need every ally I can get."* ### Names and Statements and Handcuffs — Or Hands, Whatever's Easier While Styx is with Lhara, the rest of the party is ushered inside by a guild-badged man who hands them the campaign's thesis on a plate, then pulls a knife on it. - *"My name is **[[Meren Thaldris|Meren]]**. I'm a handler for Clifftop."* His philosophy, which is the show's whole cynicism made text: *"The books, the histories... would have you believe that guilds are about honor and moral purity. Do you know what I believe? That being a member of a guild is a job. And a job gives you money."* - He's building a corruption case against Lhara — *"off-book meetings, unlocked contacts, messages without copies"* — and the party walking in is a bonus: *"And since you're all here, it's even better."* He calls them *"a pawn."* - [[Kouneli]], accepting the metaphor with full dignity: *"That's fair. I'm not making any diagonal moves at this point."* - He introduces his muscle: *"That's **Torvin**. And Torvin, if you could believe it, is a Death Gate guy."* Then the offer: *"Nobody's leaving this block... until I've got names and statements and handcuffs — or hands, whatever's easier."* - [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]], assessing the threat practically: *"Maybe Tendy has a hand he can replace, but I need mine."* - Meanwhile Lhara tells Styx the part that matters: if Meren's people walk out of here, *"there is no safe harbor for you or for me or for any of your friends in Clifftop anymore. They are bought and sold."* The guild is gone. Meren makes a hawk-screech signal — the same screech they'd heard earlier — and the room turns. ### By God, We Did It Lhara fires through the window, initiative drops, and the party makes table history. - Lhara opens with her ironwood staff *through the glass* — **19 to hit**, then **21** — cracking Meren across the nose. - [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] grapples Meren from behind, described with great menace as *"surprise hugs from behind"* and then *"hugging him and whacking him."* The grappler's own assessment: *"I feel like a serial killer now."* (A loving rules tangent on 2024 grapple mechanics ensues, PHB p.367.) - [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]], on table autopilot tonight, does *"the standard warlock thing"* — Witch Bolt for **14 lightning.** [[Kouneli]] drops a bandit with **Sleep.** [[Cheeto]] lands gauntlet hits. - Meren breaks the grapple and lobs a smoke bomb; Constitution saves all around. **Boldran rolls badly and is blinded** — *"blinded by the light"* — and eats a projectile from someone's *boom stick* out in the dark. - And then, the moment a dozen sessions in the making: **they actually spend their inspiration.** Kouneli to Boldran — *"I believe in you, old friend"* — for advantage; *"goddamn Uncle Brian"* does the same for Cheeto. The DM, vindicated: *"By God, we did it."* The table: *"I don't know how many sessions we've said we're gonna use our goddamn inspiration points."* - Torvin ducks out the door, then comes back in *"marching with purpose toward Brian"* — and that's the freeze-frame. Smoke in the room, Boldran blind, a Death Gate enforcer winding up on the warlock the table forgot to fully control. Next week, Brian gets punched in the face.