# June 8, 2026 | Nothing Personal, It's Just Business > [!Summary]+ meta > **Role Call**: [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] • [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] • [[Kouneli]] • [[Styx]] • [[Cheeto]] • [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] > **Where We Are**: Lower Tavick's Landing — the Cardamom Club > **Tagline**: "When three people tell you the same thing, that's a script." [[E18 - Smells Like Grandma's Buns|↶ Last Session]] | [[The Bleeding Veil| Campaign Home ↝]] ## This Session The brawl ends, and then the campaign turns over its biggest card. The party finishes the Cardamom Club fight in the most chaotic way available — a poisoned wizard, a pantsless window escape, and a near-total party wipe on a single acrobatics DC — while **Meren** wriggles free and smoke-bombs into the night. [[Lhara]] shifts into a wolf, runs him down, and reveals the corpse was a changeling: one of her own missing operatives. Then she sits the party down and tells them the truth they've been circling since the schema: **[[Nigel Faurious|Provost Faurious]] is building a machine at [[Morgrave University|Morgrave]], Clifftop is his supply chain, the artifacts they've been delivering feed it, and nine more wait across the planes.** She recruited them to go where she can't. The party pockets a ruby ring stamped **MT**, a stranger leaves two cups on a stoop, and everyone goes home heavier than they came. ^session-summary ## Session Log ### Bean Pasta and a Caved-In Face We pick up exactly where we froze: smoke, blood, and [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] opening the round on a blinded **[[Meren Thaldris|Meren]]** — the actual Clifftop man, flanked by two hired thugs from the Deathsgate guild. (The pre-combat table chatter bleeds in first — the DM has discovered you can make cacio e pepe with great northern beans instead of pasta. *"It was delicious. But I will be lighting incense in this office."*) - [[Cheeto]] goes in with gauntlet and Flurry of Blows, narrating a full wrestling combo: *"I punch him, and then I punch him again, and that's where I get my critical damage. Bring it back, look at it, look at him. Punch him again in the face... come back and stare at it one more time. And then punch him right in the stomach."* - Inspiration cited: *"It's like Man with the Iron Fist. Have you guys seen that movie?"* The DM rules no decapitation but *"standard critical damage, and gain an action point."* - The gauntlet's flavor, per the DM: *"Your monkly ways infuse you with the spirit — but it requires eye contact with your fist."* ### It's Made Out of Orc Milk. Or Calcium. The villains' names and the party's weapons both get mangled beyond recovery, and a legend is born. - [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] spends the fight slashing with a fancy dagger nobody can pronounce — *"or chakalum. I never know how to say that word"* — which mutates over the night into a blade *"made out of orc milk... orc calcium... ork milk or calcium."* By the end he won't even risk throwing it: *"I'm not throwing my nice dagger. It's made out of orc milk. Or calcium milk."* - [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]]'s bonus-action Healing Word, delivered in full warforged: *"Do it for the child processes."* ### I Just Stare in His Eyes as I Slump Down Meren refuses to die and makes [[Kouneli]] pay for it. - Tendy tries to shove Meren prone; he's braced against the wall — *"there's really nowhere for him to go... he doesn't fall over."* - Meren Cunning-Actions away, sprints at Kouneli, and runs him through with a **poisoned rapier.** The DM: *"Do you scream?"* Kouneli: *"I don't even feel like I have time."* - Ty narrates the wizard getting skewered: *"He shoves it into my belly, and I just go and stare in his eyes as I just... slump down."* - [[Lhara]], from outside the room, clears the poison cloud with *"a sharp gesture of her wrist and a barked command."* ### Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Man The fight turns slapstick, mostly at [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]]'s expense. He rolls his gunshot shoulder — *"I haven't lost my arm to this infernal machine"* — burns a focus on a spear Flurry of Blows, and connects with absolutely nothing. - The DM narrates **Torvin** ignoring him entirely to swing at Brian instead: *"as you wave your arms like a wacky waving inflatable arm tube man near Torvin, he smiles at you, pulls out his scimitar, and takes an attack at Brian."* - Boldran, wounded in a new way: *"Wow. That was so disrespectful to me. He's like, you don't even count, bro."* The grudge goes on the books: *"I still believe that I will make Torvin pay for his crimes against me."* - [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]], Witch Bolt still tethered to Meren: *"I've got his daddy in an electric chokehold... no — an electric leash."* ### Without Pants, Back From the Brink of Death The comedic spine of the night: the whole party tries to chase Meren through one window, and nearly everyone eats the same acrobatics check. - **Styx** goes for a parkour dive-roll with the rapier and fails — *"your foot catches on the unconscious bandit... you got tangled up in Torvin's big hairy legs."* - **Cheeto** (40-foot speed, *"nimble like a cat"*) tries *"sweet flare moves over the top of them,"* trips on a crack in the stone, and *"basically bounces off his chest."* - **Tendy** Kool-Aid-Mans it — *"breaks at least the window frame out of it"* — though his player insists it was *"more of a Captain America maneuver, down to the centimeter."* - **Kouneli**, freshly un-poisoned and concussed, is the worst of all. He snags his belt loop on the sill and rolls a **9**: *"I just came back from the brink of death... weak legs just trying to fumble my way through this window,"* and *"flops out like a fish, ass over head"* — without his pants. - Friendly fire: Brian's Eldritch Blast nearly takes Styx's head off. *"Dang, Sticks, your big-ass dome piece is in the way."* ### The Most Chaotic Evil Thing I Can Do A pure out-of-character beat, and one of the best lines of the campaign — aimed at a *player*, not a character. - Brian's Eldritch Blast is missing its Agonizing Blast bonus. The DM fixes it live in the VTT and reflects on his choices: *"I thought about it, and the most chaotic evil thing I can do in this whole game is just teach Anders how to manipulate his own damage rolls."* - *"All right — your Agonizing Blast is now hard-coded."* A monster has been created. ### Nothing Personal, It's Just Business [[Lhara]] enters the fight openly for the first time — vaulting into the room with *"You can't let him get away,"* sprinting past the party, and swinging her **ironwood staff** — and Meren makes his exit. - She looks at Boldran, turns away, and then *"you just hear this loud cracking and popping"* as the cloak *"seems to shift and melt away."* What's standing there when it's done is *"a large white werewolf,"* leaning back into *"a blood-curdling howl across the room."* The table: *"Hell yeah."* And then the immortal note-taking aside: *"Guess who's writing 'howl' in their notes? Lots of letters in that one, fellas. And a big arrow towards it."* - Meren keeps disengaging, drops a smoke bomb in the hallway, and blinds everything. A fleeing bandit gets caught on the way out — *"you reach out, touch faith, and he dies."* - Torvin sheathes his scimitar with *"a little bit of a flourish,"* turns the momentum into *"a discombobulating flail of hair and scarves,"* barrel-rolls away from Styx and Tendy — *"you guys are a little bit surprised at how nimble he was"* — dusts himself off, takes in the scene, and delivers the clean villain line: *"Nothing personal. It's just business."* (He does not, comically, die — despite the party's best wishes.) - Wolf-Lhara is genuinely terrifying: [[Styx]] turns to chase Torvin down the alley and fails a Frightened save — *"your legs just won't work, you are paralyzed with fear"* — while Cheeto, undeterred, announces *"I want to pat that dog."* The DM: *"Your hair stands up on the back of your neck."* Cheeto: *"My cat's not scared of dogs."* - The smoke thins — *"the smell of cardamom wafts over you again"* — and wolf-Lhara takes *"two big sniffs in the air"* and is gone after Meren. When it's over, the cracking and popping runs in reverse, *"the more traditional form of Lhara takes shape in the alleyway,"* and she says only: *"This way. We don't have long."* ### Finger Guns at an Empty Courtyard A small, perfect character beat in the chaos. The DM's ruling on why: *"You're concussed and a little bit of a naive young boy anyway."* - Kouneli can't tell which way the fight went; Brian points him wrong. He heads off with gusto — broken pallets on his left, stone housing on his right — and spills out into *"a big open cobbled courtyard, and it's quiet and there's nobody there."* Finger guns up, *"ready to dick it to anybody,"* and absolutely no one to dick it to. Brian has to U-turn and retrieve him. ### He Was Never Meren Lhara stalks over to the downed form, crouches decisively, and works through his coat and pockets for a silent thirty seconds before the guild badge comes off the cloak lapel. Then the floor drops out. - She *"folds something nondescript into her shawl"* and shows — for the first time — *"a pained expression... maybe the first time you've ever seen any kind of emotion on her."* - With a flick of the wrist, *"Meren's face starts to blur and distort and reshape into a wholly different face."* Meren was a changeling. She watches it happen *"almost back to her normal self, but maybe a little bit more weary."* Who he actually was, she saves for the briefing. - *"We won't have long before someone comes looking. An hour, maybe. We need to get off the street. Follow me."* ### The Briefing She leads them through a window and a winding passage back to the room where Styx first met her, drags an old padded chair to the window, parts the shade just a little, and wards the room — *"a sharp pressure in your ears, the room dims a bit."* Then she settles into the chair *"like someone who just ran a marathon,"* stares out the window through several quiet minutes, and *"without preamble"* starts to talk. > [!quote] Lhara, the whole truth > *"About 18 months ago, I was working a special contract down in the lower wards. I watched one of those inspectors open a crate — one moment he's holding a clipboard in a dark alley, and in the next, that entire section of the warehouse was gone. Just illuminated by white-hot light. And when my vision cleared, there was nobody left."* > *"I reported it. And when I told Aldrich — my supervisor — he said, 'don't worry about it, everything's in hand.' ... If you want someone to stop looking, you don't tell them to stop looking."* > *"I always knew that if two people tell you the same thing in the same way, that's a coincidence. But when three people do it, that's a script."* > *"**Nigel Faurious.** Provost of applied thaumaturgy at Morgrave. Over the last twelve months, almost every contract Clifftop has executed traces back to one man. And it's always to go get something — always something related to artifacts. He's building something. Some kind of machine. It's at Morgrave, maybe under it. Clifftop has become his supply chain. Every artifact that passed through those doors is going to the same project. You've given them two of them. There are **nine more pieces** — scattered around the different planes."* - The corpse gets its real name only here: one of the three-person team she'd lost — *"They checked in at the drop and then nothing."* She killed one of her own people tonight. - The rival: *"There's an excoriated d'Cannith who's taken a particular interest. Less patient than our friend Nigel. Less careful. I think you may have met some of his people recently."* - The recruitment truth, finally said plain: *"I didn't lie to you the first night we met. I recruited you to go to the places that I can't go. And now you know why. My status in Clifftop is the only thing keeping us in the picture. I can put you on the contracts to go get those remaining artifacts."* - The handoff: *"You know where the dragon is. [[Hascal d’Ghallanda|Hascal]] will get word to me with your decisions."* Then she slips out the door and is gone. The table: *"How far in the wind?"* — *"Like a fart in the wind."* ### A Grain of Salt The debrief, the loot, and one last unsettling stranger. - [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] runs the trust calculation in warforged: *"I wouldn't ask her to be godmother to my children. But I will update my programming notes to trust her not to put us in unnecessary danger."* [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]]'s read: *"I think at this point we're so useful to her that we can trust that she cares about our survival."* (*"It's a good way of looking at it, Boldran."*) Kouneli: *"We call that taking things with a grain of salt."* Tendy: *"Figure of speech. Appreciate it."* - [[Styx]] insists on doubling back an hour later to loot the body — *"My master said, never leave any stone unturned."* The table: *"Jesus Christ, Ronnie."* He recovers 20 gold, scrap papers, and **a ring** — *"a beautiful red ruby inset with a big M and a T in gold leaf."* Hold that thought. - Final beat: the block is unnaturally silent after a loud fight — *"quieter than it's been the entire night."* From the stoop the party used as a stakeout earlier — empty all evening — a **changeling** steps out *"not wearing a face currently — just that pale, smooth indication of somebody in their own skin,"* sits down easy *"like you would on your own front porch,"* sets a second clay cup beside him, tips his own back, and says: *"Long night."* His read on the neighborhood: *"Blocks like this one tend to look after themselves. That lady, she picked this corner for a reason. We don't ask after her, and she don't ask after ours."* One of the party goes out, sits down next to him, and picks up the second cup — *"I'll be back in a minute."* - The crew goes home a level stronger and a whole conspiracy heavier. They finally know what they've been carrying — and who's been building with it.