Grrl Power #882 – The slippery arm of the law
Just be thankful it’s freshly summoned lube.
Sydney’s not actually correct about it being a cantrip. It’s like the level 6 version of “Lube.” Honestly I feel bad for whoever has to clean up after this fight. That stuff does not wash off easily, and the duration is about 500 hours. Because succubi wildly overestimate every other races’ endurance.
Dabbler is one of those adventurers who knows that in a universe of infinite possibilities, it doesn’t matter how many guns you have, or grenades or cool gadgets. They’re tough to use if you can’t stand. While the average merc or adventurer has good traction, it takes exceptional traction to resist a spell like that. And the ones who are prepared for that eventuality might not be ready for the web spell, and the ones ready for that might not be ready for the insect swarm spell.
Don’t get me wrong, Dabbler is a bullets and swords kind of gal most of the time, but she knows it’s the oddball attack that gets the job done.
Anyone have any unusual takedown stories from your tabletop games? I was in a D&D party once that wound up stripped of all their equipment and facing off against a bunch of vampires. The problem being that vampires in D&D can’t be hurt unless you use magical weapons on them. A friend of mine playing a barbarian with 18/100 strength and 3 intelligence (I watched him roll the character up – he had the craziest dice karma) logiced that vampires can’t be hurt by non-magical weapons… because they’re magic. So, one successful grapple check later and our barbarian was beating one vampire to death with another. If vampires can hurt each other in a fight, they can certainly hurt each other if one of them is being used as a maul.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like!
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
one d&d campaign, we were given special abilities, mine was to make any piece of armor into a magical one, so I asked what my limit was, and was told I could add up to two pluses or minuses, so, me being weird, i asked, ‘can i make my round shield into a throwing weapon?’ after consideration, the DM said yes, but only if you also give it a negative. so I asked, ‘can i curse it?’ the DM says sure, but that means it’s stuck to whomever equips it. ‘okay, I say, it is now the shield of Dwarven Hurling’, and i equip it on my dwarf, and throw it at the enemy. threw it, stuck to it, flew with it, spinning, and hit the enemy, having to make a con check…didn’t make the check, and my dwarf tossed his cookies, and his ale, all over the enemy. battle ended with our team winning. :)
I am somehow sadly disappointed I can’t sing that list of weapons to the tune of weird al’s hardware store…
try ‘my favourite things’, it sort of works
Again I must ask why is the light hook BLUE?? Why is no one addressing this?!?!
I’ve noticed slight differences in the lighthooks coloration throughout the story. The color is always some mix of blue and white light. My theory is that it depends on how close to its “maximum” output its at, max output say trying to lift something heavy is more white, where lighter objects sydney is relaxed with are more blue.
But again without DaveB’s word its just speculation.
Because the orb is pink and blue makes a nice contrast to this.
Check out each of the orbs, and you will find several have things visible inside them. The Truesight orb has its inner orb, which flies out when Halo wants to teleport somewhere (for example). Likewise the PPO has crackling energy inside it, which matches the attack when it is used. For the Energy Tentacle orb, it has a blue tentacle wrapped up inside it, when not in use, which is no longer in the orb, when the Lighthook is deployed.
Aesthetically DaveB will have made the colour choices, for these inner objects, so that we, the viewers, can make out these subtle details. Hence the tentacle is blue because it stands out and looks good against a pink background. The white, mentioned by GreatGreenHorn is for colour variation to keep it interesting, as plain blocks of colour do not look good.
Which can also reflect on the Grrlverse reason for why it is blue, because the orbs are (probably) Nth generation technomagic. In other words they are made by beings who are able to create artefacts with their pick of properties. So the choices are far less likely to be an engineering necessity (for instance why we have to make aircraft with wings of particular types of shapes, so that they do not fall out of the air) but rather an aesthetic choice as well.
They chose to make the orbs transparent/translucent, so presumably they had one or more reasons for doing this. And if they want the inner contents to be on display they, like Dave, will have wanted to make them stand out.
Advanced beings probably have multiple reasons for doing things, especially when designing sets of complicated objects. So we can also consider that the PPO’s attack is a vivid red. Making the tentacle have distinctly different look to it, in many ways, as it is also a softer more diffuse light. If you want observers to know when the user is deploying a non-lethal power, these are very good choices to make. Both for a webcomic artist and the designer of components for a personal space ship.
Hasnt the tentacle itself always been pink too though? Ive archived binged this baby literally 9 times now from start to finish and I couldve sworn to fracture and back again that the tentacle was also pink…
Okay so I just went back and checked and the tentacle has indeed always been blue >.>
I feel like im in a parallel world now because i literally could have sworn up and down that the tentacle was pink O.O
Don’t worry, you will get used to it. Learn to recognise when you have shifted, and keep an eye open for any other changes which may have also occurred. Do not fixate too much on your previous world, as you probably will not be able to find your way back to it. So the exercise would be a pointless exercise in futility.
But if you do like prawn cocktail, or peeling the shell off a freshly cooked plate of jumbo prawns in garlic sauce, do go out and savour the experience again now. Otherwise all too soon you may lose the option, if you end up in the world without shrimp, or if all restaurants close down in this timeline.
This is a particularly rough timeline, actually. Here’s an idea of what to expect around you – the political and global health situations may actually be even more chaotic. I’d recommend a new timeline if at all possible.
Please don’t let me be the only one reading this in Julie Andrews’ voice, and trying to fit it to “My Favorite Things.”
…please.♀️
bharda.m.sullivan@gmail.com
Sorry, I only hear Bill Paxton
Heh, it fits nicely.
One of my more memorable takedowns was playing Warhammer TT. My mercenary had somewhere in the past got an enchanted/cursed dwarven warhammer which had one face that could randomly trigger into a (normally) momentary Void Portal. Due to some annoying backfire effects, I didn’t use this face of the hammer often.
In one campaign, our party made a few mistakes and wound up triggering an encounter we were a bit low for. The big boss had armour none of us even dent and the only thing keeping us alive was he was rolling really badly to hit us. I decided to have my guy Otto risk the consequences and start hitting with cursed face. The plan was to try and pop some holes in the armour so the rest of the party could get a shot at the soft bits inside. The first couple of hits didn’t trigger it either way and we were looking at a total wipe. Next hit, I crit, damn hammer triggers but on backfire mode. Random roll gets me a massive rebound off the armour and backswings on to the shield of the party member just beside me, the resulting roll from that gets him parked on his arse and my hammer rebounding back at the boss again.
Somehow, the DM worked out that it swung right into his groin. Checked the hit, hammer triggered Void Portal but also a partial fail, the result was that instead of the portal instantly collapsing once it ate a piece of armour, it stayed on. We all spent the next good while unable to play because we were laughing too hard at the DMs description of this guys body getting sucked out through his nuts!
We had just managed to kill off a crowd of kobolds at a vineyard/distillery, returning with a wagon load of the last wine that was going to come out of there. The only casualty was a curse on the Cleric. Everything tasted like shit to him now. He needed a remove curse but we were too low level and couldn’t afford it and the reward from this trip wasn’t going to pay for it either. My Rogue had a brilliant idea.
As we rolled into town to hand over the haul to the local bar keep who gave us the quest I drove the wagon to the town square to address the crowd. I told them all about the evil marauders we killed and the wine makers who had died for their craft. The last of their greatest work was in the wagon in front of them. But I told them the load had been cursed. We needed the town to buy a remove curse to cure the wine.
Naturally being suspicious they want proof of the curse. So I hand a bottle to the cleric a known Lawful Good upstanding citizen.
“Cleric, what does this taste like to you?”
“Gulp,bleck”
“Horse Piss”
That was enough for the town. We bought a curse removal, used it to cure the cleric and watched the dastardly inn keeper raise the price of wine.
The only extra money we made was refilling empties with Horse Piss and selling them as bottle we had held back. Of course they would have to uncurse the bottles themselves.
How did I never notice that Dabbler had 4 fingers?!
DnD 3.5, level 5 party. We come upon an ancient dwarven stronghold that’s been taken over by orcs. We peek in the huge doors of the great hall and see some 300 orcs feasting in there. Reasoning that discretion is the better part of valor, the cleric uses Stone Shape to seal the great doors. Then my wizard inquires as to the location of the chimney. The cleric, a dwarf, knows where it’s likely to be, and we’re located the above-ground opening with ease. I then produce from my pack two gallon jugs filled with alchemist’s fire, drop them down the chimney, and cast Shatter on the jugs before they hit the bottom. This dispersed the liquid into mist, causing a fuel-air explosion that sucked all of the oxygen out of the hall. Cue the GM complaining that since we didn’t enter comcast with any of the orcs, we weren’t getting the xp for killing all 300 of them.
Ok so we were playing 5e and doing a monster campaign. I was an arachne cleric. We had a triton fighter, a goliath barbarian, and out star, a goblin WILD MAGIC sorcerer. We’d needed recon down a chimney so I’d wrapped the gobby in my spider silk, this became a kind of leash afterwards… Our gobby lacked intelligence so the gobby leash helped keep him mostly out of danger, and lowered him head first. After we got down and were exploring the orc stronghold our gobby was riding on the goliaths head while crossing a rope bridge when orc swarm out the other side and start taking potshots at the goliath. Gobby got first initiative, his first spell turned ALL our weapons into food… While we were dealing with that I decided to jump and yank gobby back out of weapon range, using him as a fulcrum to change position so I could get in attack range while leaving him safe, only he tried to cast something again, wild magic triggered again and he blinked. which means the silk dropped around the goliaths head and I yanked said goliath off I the bridge and hung him from his head. While I was kept busy keeping both of us from plunging into the chasm our slightly forgotten triton fighter charged forward with his spear turned into salami and lays the hurt down on our orc attackers. By this time gobby had gotten another turn and wild magic triggered AGAIN and turned him into a goat. So at the end we had a gobby goat, a goliath hanging from his noodle, an attachment keeping the goliath from plumeting to his doom, a traumatized orc the sole survivor who had surrendered…. And a triton who from then on had weapon proficiency with salami.
My favorite takedown was the culmination of a months-long quest (in game and out of game).
I was DM, and the party had been plagued by a recurring villain – a half-Fiend Red Dragon -for years, often without knowing it was her machinations that had affected them. When they pieced it all together they tried to confront her and I pulled off one of my best personal Bluff checks and got them to back off. Realizing what had happened led them to begin the quest to have a sword created that could take her down: a Frost, Demon-Bane, Dragon-Slayer greatsword.
Long story short, they finally found her lair and assaulted it. The dragon and the party beat each other bloody, and the dragon used Dimension Door to get to a deeper part of her lair (and grab some healing potions). By the time the party figured out how to get to where she was everyone was a bit healed up.
The second battle was even more epic as everyone pulled every trick they could think of… and the dragon was winning, if only barely. At last the fighter who had the sword was able to get close enough (the dragon had been flinging her away every time she approached) to take her first and possibly only swing at the beast.
Nat 20. A hit! Roll to confirm.
Nat 20.
The weakened beast crackled with ice, which shattered as the slaying weapon destroyed her forever.
To this day I remember the cheers around the table as we all celebrated the final and irrevocable death of a truly vexing recurring villain.
I’ve got a few memorable takedowns/moments to share, from Pathfinder.
One of the most epic was close to the conclusion of a years-long campaign, where our party was gathering parts of a single-use, god-killing weapon, to reforge it to kill the big-bad-demigod-emperor. One of the final forging reagents we needed was the heart of a massive magma dragon, of which we promptly tracked one down. After infiltrating its lair, we engaged it and put some good damage into it, but our druid swiftly ran out of useful offensive spells. She decided to try a save-or-suck spell she hadn’t tried before that would be unlikely to succeed, but would be fun to try – Death Clutch. The spell basically telekinetically grabs the target’s heart to try to pull it out of their chest and into the caster’s hands- and though the spell is technically Evil, the druid was Neutral and could still cast it, and the circumstances justified it. She went and cast it, smirking “this’ll never work, but I might as well try” (target needs to pass a fort save or die in a couple rounds, but dragons tend to have high fort saves). The GM rolls, and starts laughing. The dragon rolled a nat 1. With a lurch and a spasm, the massive molten heart of the magma dragon tears out of its chest and hurtles towards the druid (“Oh shit that’s big, I did not think this through!”), which she narrowly dodges. Welp… that “epic battle” only lasted a couple turns, but we got the heart out cleanly!
Another funny takedown was a bit earlier in that campaign, when our party went to some dockside warehouses to (I forget if this occurred when we were trying to track down some shipment records to find out where some weapons shipments were coming from, or if this was when we were trying to locate a secret entrance into an enemy underground lair), but it was a trap. The enemy tried to ambush us using a deep spiked pit in the middle of the floor with an illusory floor over it and minions hidden with invisibility around to shoot us when the trap was sprung – but my Battle Oracle had really good perception and noticed something was up, and immediately cast Truesight, seeing everything. He then Greater Dispelled the illusions and invisibility, while our wizard summoned an animated Chain of Perdition which immediately managed to drag the boss over and drop into the spiked pit. He survived, but had to spend a couple turns climbing back out – until on the next turn the animated chains dragged another minion into the pit and right on top of him, dropping them both to the bottom of the pit. The boss got a boost from the wounded minion and managed to climb back out- but the the chains once again rolled well and dragged him back in! We got a lot of kicks out of using their own trap against them like that, with only a single spell.
Another instance (I’ll be brief this time!), was also later in the campaign when we were fighting an enemy caster who used Prismatic Spray on us (does random effects, ranging from minor elemental damage, to a lot of damage, to poison, to petrification, or even dimensional teleporting). Most of us just took damage, our wizard got dimensionally shifted to the Material plane (which we were already on, so it did nothing!), but the druid’s wolf animal companion got dimensionally-shifted into the Abyss… Normally we wouldn’t make too much fuss about losing an animal companion, but the backstory behind the wolf is that he was actually the druid’s brother, cursed and mind-lost into the form of a wolf, so the character was particularly attached to him, and once the battle was over we embarked onto an impromptu side quest to rescue him before his soul got chomped by a demon. Totally unplanned, but memorable!
Did something similar in a more comedic scene because we had encountered something that ignored nonliving things but could interact with living things… so I picked up my party members and started using them to beat it back to death
“Every tool in my box?” Is she implying there are still tools that haven’t been in her box?
Had a new player join our group. He wanted to play an assassin, and our DM saw his opportunity. Seems he had “accidentally” allowed my Paladin to much magical armor and weapons and throwing appropriate challenges to the Paladin would kill the rest of the group.
So the DM allowed the assassin with a Geus spell set on him to kill all Paladin’s. A widget to hide his alignment, several potions of poison and a cursed arrow of Paladin slaying (one use). Then the assassin was introduced as a thief to the group. He passed my check alignment spell so the Paladin accepted him as a companion.
Now the Assassin knew he was screwed as past my character he had to continue slaying and it would be harder as he went. Paranoia sets in.
So we went seeking our fortune with the Paladin on point with the occasional “fumbled” arrow in his back. Finally the group ran into a party slayer. An Umber Hulk. The Paladin is out front blocking him from killing all the confused behind me. I’m making head way, but it’s not clear the Paladin can win the fight. The assassin reaches into his bag of tricks and says “here’s a potion of Heroism, drink this!”. Needless to say it was poison. The Paladin in the midst of battle makes a save and only takes half damage. But I ignored it for the role play. My character with increased confidence of a hero pressed the battle, the assassin panics and starts all out attacks from behind, tries to back stab and fails. He’s revealed himself to all in the group so he has to flee. We barely survive the encounter.
We set up camp to rest.
Some time during the night the Assassin sneaks in to bow shoot the Paladin with the arrow of slaying. And that was the end of both our character’s careers. Satisfying the DM’s blood lust.
It’s not really a ‘Takedown’, but it made a good plot twist…
A game of Call to Adventure, with four players. (For context, a large part of this game’s hook is building up your character’s backstory over the course of the game, fitting points-scoring encounters and actions around major elements that you picked at the start but only reveal in stages.) Player 1 has spent most of the game being a Shining Royal Light of Good, with the help of some rather exploitable card interactions. Player 2 has gone the Dark path, from a thieving orphan to the head of an invading army. Player 3 started out as the sole survivor of a gutted village, became an avenger, and eventually discovered that she had dragon blood. I started out as a seeker after wisdom, then seemed to spend half the time having to break out of prison; I decided I was a sort of Scarlet Pimpernel for imprisoned keepers of knowledge.
It’s the endgame. Player 1 is virtually guaranteed to win in the next round, he’s that close. Player 2 is similarly close to his quest’s conclusion, and nailed-on for second place. Player 3 and I are well behind, playing for the story rather than the win and we know it. One of the encounter cards that’s just come up is fighting a dragon. A decent haul of points, a great story-climax for the dragonblood avenger – this is the beast that torched her family and left her marked! The encounter system isn’t as involved as ‘proper’ RPGs, but it’s shaping up to be an epic fight, as she uses up all her expendable bonuses to try to take this thing down.
And then I play a ‘Fear’ card.
Paraphrased, this says “you can’t take this encounter, pick another one”. Normally it’s played against a rival to ‘scare them off’ getting points, and I won’t claim the point I got for using it wasn’t welcome, but that’s not how this one was presented.
“You’ve spent all this time building yourself up, specifically to take down dragons. Now here’s you, found this beastie, and he knows you’re angry. Lady, that Fear card isn’t you running away. That dragon just passed [somewhere 100-odd miles away] and he ain’t stopping!”
One of my favourite 5E stories will always be the time I took down a grey slaad with a jug of infinite honey.
Late to the party, but I DM a 5e game session for my 10yo godson, his parents, and his other godfather. They’ve just fought off some pirates, who weren’t keen on the undead that their captain had been using. My godson’s father, playing a nobleman/monk, tries to see if he can get any of them to join their side, because some pirates would be useful. Unfortunately, he rolls a 2.
Everyone starts asking if they can give him advantage. Technically it’s too late, but I tell them that, if they can explain how they’re assisting him, he can roll again. My godson (a ranger) has been sniping from the crow’s nest of their own ship. So he shouts “This is how powerful we are! He can catch this arrow right out of the air!” and shoots his father’s character. We’re trying to encourage creativity, so I allow it, figuring that if any damage gets through, I’ll subtract it from the next Persuasion roll (Neither of us had realized that the monk only had 1hp left, so if he didn’t absorb all the damage, he would have passed out and failed anyway).
He hits, and his father manages to block all the damage, then roll a nat twenty on the follow up check. So that’s how they got an entire pirate ship to join them by shooting one of their own members.