Bad Brain
The spell formerly known as Feeblemind
We’re gonna start a little different today, with an adventure recap:1
The story thus far…
the party — Jibaro (a fighter wielding a magic sword and a ritual spellbook) Karnur (goofball bard) Varlax (a paladin haunted by his military past) and Glory (zealot of a fallen angel)— delves once again into Undermountain: a massive dungeon complex under a major port city in the realms of Dungeons and Dragons. It’s taken them further than they’ve been before, passed lava rivers, undead beholders, and most recently a gate to a space dock.
Session Notes:
The party pushes further into the tunnels beneath the Crystal Labyrinth. On this new level, there are signs of Gith and Mindflayers fighting on battlefields, as well as heads on pikes, and even mind controlled puppets acting out situation comedy...
For now, the group has agreed to rejoin their Gish envoys in two hours. But questions about this place remain:
What was the presence Karnur sensed in the minds of the Githyanki? What about the warning from the Knights... about a creature being kept by the Ulitharid? And what hit Glory with that spell??
This session was wild, lmao.
The group was ready, or at least they thought they were, for what would happen next. And to be honest, we’re high level at this point, I think the group was like, level 12 - 15 at this point, and this is a game where 20 is the max level. We are late in the game! When you take a step back, the arc of these sessions are at a downward turn, a portion of the adventure where they’ve come to expect a certain thing: move through the dark of a level, explore their options for advancement, and deal with the obstacles that lay in their path. The experience they’ve accumulated playing this game starts to catch up to the mass of experience their characters have accumulated in the ruleset.2 They did this last level, thinking their way through around the lava river, defeating the Death Tyrant, and then finding Jibaro’s equipment. On this level, it did not go as well, and looking back I’m glad I was able to hit them with a curveball.
Even as I was drafting this post I was like, “was I fair? did I telegraph the danger enough?” but honestly, this level is fucked! Even if we start at the beginning here, this place is in disarray. There’s signs of fighting all over the place, and there’s the heads on spikes nearby.3 It’s violent out here, ya’ll. And then it gets weird. Passed that first area, there’s a room where the group can hear voices, and when they listen in, it’s nothing that makes sense. There’s five people just acting out situational comedy. Karnur’s go to, Detect Thoughts, isn’t much help at first. But when he digs a little deeper, he can sense another presence there. A puppeteer pulling the strings. but what the hell is out there?4
Well the party heads further in, and there’s a massive cavern so dark you can’t see the other end of it. So of course there’s something awful down there. Just the worst. And the party moves in, and could you imagine it goes poorly? Let’s talk about Darkvision, torchlight, and dungeon delving!
So one of the most common features a character can have in capital dungeons capital dragons is the ability to see in the dark. It’s not like, great infrared, but the simple version is you can see shapes in complete darkness and you can see in ‘dim’ light — think distant torch or candlelight — like no problem. But this is the risk in dungeenering: do you stay in the dark when you can’t see as well, or do you use a light source and risk being seen yourself? What would you do as a high level character? Even if you got a warning from some of the other folks staying here that something dangerous was up ahead, they just weren’t sure what. Glory opts to move into the darkness ahead of everyone else. I believe in his case he had the best line of sight into this cavern, and could see pretty far ahead. But unfortunately for him, some things can see better in the dark than most adventurers, and just good enough to see him coming. And sometimes those things have access to very high level magic.
We’ve been talking a lot about Mind Flayers on the blog, Undermountain’s got a decent number of squid headed star travelers, but they aren’t just one monolith of alien after alien after sci-fi movie alien.5 Some of them have brought… pets? friends? allies? What is the right word for a giant worm that sleeps in a dark cave and can lock you inside your own brain. The creatures are Neothelids and one of the spells they can cast is eighth level.6 They’re several meters long, like a snake from like, the Jurassic era one of those ancient relatives of the anaconda that holds the fossil record or something. And they can shoot a beam that fries your brain. Not that the party saw this thing just yet, they only saw Glory run into the dark and collapse. Maybe even worse than not seeing it, your character just feels this reach in their brain, and then like a switch goes off and the magic takes its hold.
In Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced, maybe the best Video Game every programmed, there’s a host of status effects your characters can be tagged with as they trade fantasy blows with all host of weapons and magic. There’s your classic poison, and sleep, the less common petrification, there’s silence to prevent spellcasters from speaking magic words, and a whole host of other things that you’d recognize if you’ve played these types of combat heavy games. But one of the statuses I disliked the most was addle. It’s nuts, it’s like putting a character on lockdown basically: you lose access to your skills, techniques, magic, anything that differentiated your character from the others. You’re stuck with the simple weapon attack and item usage, that’s it. It’s like being sent back to level one. It is rough, and that’s essentially what Feeblemind7 does to Glory. He doesn’t even have access to language anymore. The party goes into this cave, and one of them comes out a total mess. Welcome to Undermountain, baby!
And that’s where I ended the session. we’ll pick up the adventure in a couple of weeks: Dec 20th brings us to the shortest day of the year in my part of the world, so I’m gonna take the winter solstice to just rest. But I’ll post plenty come the new year, continuing the session notes that have been the through line of this blog, but peppering in more Mothership stuff since that’s really what I’ve been playing currently.8
This might be something I incorporate as I get through the months of my notes. It’ll be useful to take a step back and take a look at the story thus far, sort of how I do when I switch between the notebooks for the campaign. Plus, if you’re here from Mothership Month or the recent signal boost from Infinity of Ships (shoutout to Jamie and Adam), it might help to be caught up!
Except our world is real, and their world is governed by things we made up. Like math.
The book adventure goes even further, describing forts and strongholds and hostile enemies just itching for a fight I guess. But the party has an escort, so if a description of a Gith group says, “Three of them fight to the death to defend the cavern, while the fourth retreats to alert their allies.” I can ignore that!
And what possible reason could they have for mind controlling people into acting out a sitcom plot?
In the language of the game, Mind Flayers are a kind of ‘monstrosity’ very much like centaurs, troglodytes, and other creatures that are like a mashup of one thing. Or even like, less human? or demi-human? It’s fucked, and this separation between people and those not quite people is gonna be a thing DND grapples with in perpetuity. But for now, I want to talk about how Mind Flayers specifically are a type of Illithid, which really means “creature with tentacales coming out of its face” and wouldn’t you know it, there’s more than just them in that club: giant worms, young mind flayers, bigger mind flayers with more tentacles, it’s a whole thing.
To put that in context, spells are ranked by how powerful they are, and an eighth level spell is just about as strong as they get. The magic at the level above this is the stuff used to stop time and shape reality
Mechanically it’s even crazier: it alters certain stats to minimum scores, it prevents you from telling friend from foe, and if this all sounds devastating for a single saving throw, don’t worry: You can attempt another save in 30 days.
And Mausritter, and Troika, and I’ve been looking to do a Bastards game if anyone is interested…