Once more unto the Slums, dear friends. Because we have learned nothing.

Previously...

And so our fantastic four returned to the Slums, each with a tiny gleam in their tired eyes and their own reasons for being there. Aldren dreamed of restoring Phlan to its original glory. Mara, Lucian, and Merrick wanted to find cool shit.

Close enough.

The party retraced its steps toward the old hemp market, exploring some of the buildings they had previously missed. Inside one particularly seedy establishment sat a haggard old fortune teller. The smell of Nag Champa incense and dusty antiques permeated the room.

She looked up as the four adventurers entered. “Welcome. For the price of a few coppers, I will tell your fortune.”

Full stop.

The game presented me with three options: Attack, Leave, or Pay.

Oh, good. Another grand opportunity for one of our famous dice rolls.

Lucian had absolutely no interest in what he considered psychic fakery and wanted to leave. Aldren, unsurprisingly, thought paying the poor woman a few coppers was perfectly reasonable.

Mara and Merrick?

They wanted whatever the bitch had.

That meant two votes for attacking, one for paying, and one for leaving.

So a 1 meant Lucian got his way and we left, a 2 meant Aldren convinced everyone to pay, and a 3 or 4 meant Mara and Merrick got to murder an old woman for pocket change.

I rolled.

A 3.

Looks like we’re attacking the fortune teller.

I’m sure this won’t have any lasting consequences whatsoever.

Congratulations, everyone. We just butchered Grandma.

Before Aldren could even spit out a “Hey, what in the heck are you two doing?!” Mara had already crossed the room and brought her mace down onto the poor woman’s head. She fell like a sack of bricks.

Aldren stared at the blood and assorted chunks of what used to be the woman’s brain. “Mara! Why would you—”

He vomited.

“—do this!?”

Merrick was already combing through the dead woman’s pockets while Lucian casually began searching the room.

Mara wiped her mace clean. “Relax. She was a miscreant feeding on the naive and desperate. It had to be done for the greater good.”

“Shit,” Merrick muttered. “All she had was a few coppers.” He slid them into his pouch anyway.

Lucian suddenly stopped searching. “Hmmm.” He closed his eyes and raised one hand into the air. The loose sleeve of his robe swayed slightly as he stood there. “So, I have some bad news.”

Mara glanced toward him.

“It seems our actions here may have some undesirable consequences after all.”

“Hmph. You mean the gods?” Mara asked with a slight arrogance. “The gods I worship wouldn’t see this pathetic woman as anything of significant value.” She spit on the corpse.

Lucian opened his eyes. “No. But the gods they worship…” He pointed toward the door. “…might not share that sentiment. I suspect we may have a considerably harder time remaining unmolested in this immediate area.”

Mara shrugged, perfectly content with her decision.

Aldren was considerably less content. “You are all mad! She was completely innocent!” He looked at the fortune teller’s bashed-in skull again, then immediately looked away.

Turns out Lucian was right.

Almost immediately, wandering through the Slums became an exercise in getting jumped every few steps by increasingly angry and motivated mobs apparently determined to remove our heads from our bodies.

Apparently murdering Grandma unlocked Hard Mode.

The fortune teller may have been worth only a few coppers, but apparently she had one hell of a Yelp following.

After several increasingly desperate battles, the party decided it might be a good idea to head back to New Phlan, scrape together whatever money they could stomach sharing, and outfit themselves with the best equipment they could afford.

Eventually, they returned to the Slums.

Lucian stopped just beyond the entrance. “I believe it would be prudent if we ventured farther on past the Slums. At least until the locals have forgotten about the fortune teller’s unfortunate demise.”

Aldren flashed an angry look toward Mara and Merrick. “Agreed. Let’s see what’s west of here.”

And so, after fighting through a few dozen more foes, the four adventurers finally reached an unexplored section of the city.

The difference was staggering. All around them were piles of rubble and the remains of shattered buildings. It looked as though this entire section of Phlan had suffered some terrible, war-torn calamity and nobody had bothered cleaning up afterward. Which, considering the history of Phlan, probably narrowed it down to about seventeen different catastrophes.

Welcome to scenic Old Phlan. Please ignore the complete absence of Old Phlan.

New enemies began emerging from the ruins as well: lizard men lurking among the rubble, watching from broken buildings and disappearing between piles of stone.

Eventually, the party discovered a large empty room that seemed defensible enough to make camp. They rested, healed their wounds, and gave Lucian and Mara time to rememorize their spells.

And that’s when I noticed something horrifying.

My map was wrong.

Apparently, somewhere in my excitement, I had forgotten how to count little fucking squares. Even better? I was on vacation at the time of this particular play-through and I hadn’t thought to bring an eraser.

Go figure.

Thankfully, my cartographical incompetence wasn’t the only equipment-related fuckup of the day.

Lucian proudly pulled out his shiny new sling, turned it over in his hands, and stared at it with the same expression a child might have while examining an Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer.

“Um.”

Everyone looked at him.

“I don’t think I have the skills required to use this.”

He threw it back into his pack and shrugged.

Goddammit. I should have bought him darts.

Mental note made.

The party continued exploring the ruined district, winding their way through broken buildings and piles of rubble until they encountered a group of lizard men standing guard outside a nailed-shut door.

“Hail, lizards!” — Aldren Kestyr, approximately six seconds before everyone died.

Aldren stepped forward. “Hail, lizards!”

He raised his hand and separated his fingers in some bizarre attempt at an interstellar gang sign.

The lizard men attacked.

Things went poorly.

Very poorly.

Within moments, the entire party was dead.

Moments later...

Aldren lowered his hand and stared at the lizard men standing in the distance. Then he slowly turned around.

“Perhaps we should go another way.”

Nobody argued.

After a little more exploration—and considerably less interspecies diplomacy—the party eventually discovered an old well near the center of the ruined district. A weathered sign identified it as:

Kuto’s Well.

An unexplored well with a ladder descending into darkness. Obviously, we’re getting in the fucking well.

Merrick peered over the edge. There were ladder rungs leading down.

Naturally, he immediately started climbing.

“Merrick!” Aldren shouted. “We don’t even know what’s down there!”

Merrick disappeared into the darkness.

Lucian looked over the edge. “There may be powerful artifacts yet to be discovered down there. The gods know we aren’t finding anything worthwhile up here.” He climbed down after Merrick.

Mara followed.

Aldren stood alone beside the well, sighed, and begrudgingly climbed down after them.

Within seconds, Lucian took an arrow to the neck.

He collapsed.

“What the absolute fuck!” Merrick shouted. He spun around, desperately searching the darkness for whoever had fired the shot.

Welcome to Kuto’s Well. Please enjoy your complimentary arrow to the neck.

Nothing.

Mara knelt beside Lucian, grabbed the arrow, and violently ripped it from his neck. Blood sprayed across her hands as Aldren winced. She set about magically repairing the new holes in Lucian’s body until, eventually, he was once again among the living.

“Be careful,” she said, wiping Lucian’s blood onto the tail of her shirt. “We don’t know who or what’s down here.”

They were about to find out.

The party headed north through a narrow hallway. Before long, disheveled hooligans began emerging from seemingly every direction.

Then their leader stepped forward.

“Surrender or die!” Naturally, we chose the option we had the most experience with.

“You dare to invade my halls? Surrender or die!”

His name was Norris the Gray.

And Norris the Gray was apparently not fucking around.

Within seconds, he and his merry band of assholes stabbed the entire party to death.

Moments later...

“We’re way too underpowered for this,” Mara said, rubbing her left thigh right around where a dagger had severed a major artery only moments before.

“Agreed,” Aldren said. “We should be careful, lest one of these times we don’t come back.”

He shuddered.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Then Merrick stepped forward. “There was another hallway a few rooms back. Let’s see where that leads.”

And so the party explored the halls east of their current location.

Guess who was there.

Norris the fucking Gray.

Apparently Norris had spies everywhere down here. Or perhaps he simply possessed the supernatural ability to sense whenever four underleveled idiots entered his moist basement.

Either way, it took mere seconds before he and his friends laid waste to the entire party.

Again.

Moments later...

“Well, what now?” Aldren asked as he pulled out the map.

At this point, the answer seemed obvious.

Get the fuck out of Kuto’s Well.

“We need to explore farther west,” Mara said. “This place seems to contain nothing except that fucker Norris and his brigands.”

Nobody disagreed.

And so, for now, the party retreated back to the surface.

Fuck Norris.

It took the party a few hours before they reached yet another unexplored area, this one farther west of the crumbling ruins surrounding Kuto’s Well. The buildings here were in considerably better condition.

That somehow made things creepier.

They wandered from one empty structure to another without encountering a single living thing. No monsters. No bandits. No lizard men. Nothing. After everything they’d been through, the complete absence of something trying to murder them felt suspicious.

They discovered several locked doors along the way that neither Merrick nor Aldren could open. The party made note of their locations.

As did I.

Because you know damn well I’m coming back for those fucking squares.

Eventually, they came across a small shrine.

A desecrated shrine to Bane. Somehow not the sketchiest place we visited today.

Something was immediately wrong.

The place had been desecrated. Symbols of Ilmater had been torn down or defaced, replaced by symbols belonging to Bane.

Aldren looked around the ruined shrine. “This is terrible.”

Mara looked around the ruined shrine. “This is interesting.”

Merrick looked around the ruined shrine. “I wonder if there’s anything valuable in here.”

Lucian was already inside.

Naturally, the other three followed Lucian inside without giving the situation another thought.

Inside they encountered a robed orc. The battle didn’t last long. The party killed him, took everything they could carry, and decided that perhaps now would be an excellent time to return to New Phlan and unload the growing mountain of shit they’d accumulated over the last day or so.

The journey back through the Slums was surprisingly uneventful.

Suspiciously uneventful.

Not a single monster attacked them.

Lucian glanced around. “I wonder if those previous battles were sufficient to clear the area.”

Turns out they were.

Holy shit. The game says we actually did something useful.

Back in New Phlan, the City Council officially announced that the party had successfully cleared the Slums.

Holy shit.

We actually accomplished something.

Each member of the party received 675 experience points for their efforts.

Even better, the Council had another job waiting for them. Apparently, a weapon of great power was going to be auctioned off to Phlan’s enemies somewhere in Podal Plaza. The Council wanted the party to infiltrate the auction, determine exactly what the weapon was, and report back.

A weapon of great power?

Merrick’s eyes lit up.

Aldren immediately noticed. “We are finding out what the weapon is and reporting it to the Council.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t have to.”

Before embarking on yet another potentially suicidal mission, however, there were considerably more important matters to attend to.

First:

I finally bought Lucian some fucking darts.

He held one up and examined it. “This I can use.”

Fantastic. We’ve successfully armed our wizard with tiny pointy murder sticks.

More importantly, Aldren had found a piece of jewelry during their adventures worth well over 3,000 gold. Under the party’s standing rules, it belonged to him.

Merrick watched very carefully as the merchant counted out Aldren’s money.

Aldren looked at the pile of coins, then at his companions, then back at the money.

“I think we should split it.”

Merrick nearly choked.

Mara raised an eyebrow.

Lucian smiled.

“You’re serious?” Merrick asked.

“Of course. We’re all risking our lives out there. If this helps everyone become stronger, then it helps all of us.”

There was a long silence.

Merrick slowly held out his hand. “Well, if you insist.”

Nobody had to ask him twice.

Aldren divided the profits among the party. Nobody disagreed, and although Merrick would never admit it, I suspect his opinion of Aldren went up just a little bit that day.

The newfound wealth also meant training.

Lucian finally accumulated enough experience to reach level 2. Even better, he learned a new spell:

Magic Missile.

Lucian stared at his spellbook with a grin.

Merrick looked over his shoulder. “So what does that one do?”

“It creates a magical projectile that unerringly strikes its target.”

Merrick blinked. “You mean you can’t miss?”

“Correct.”

Merrick glanced toward Aldren. “Why the fuck hasn’t he been doing this the whole time?”

Lucian ignored him.

Aldren and Merrick also trained, advancing to level 3. For the first time since arriving in Phlan, our four idiots were beginning to look slightly less like random people who had wandered out of a tavern and considerably more like an actual adventuring party.

So, after all that bullshit, here’s where our heroes currently stand:

Aldren Kestyr — Fighter, Level 3
Still the party’s moral compass. Unfortunately, democracy remains in effect.

Mara Threl — Cleric, Level 2
Still solving theological disagreements with a mace.

Lucian Eldwyck — Magic-User, Level 2
Now equipped with Magic Missile, darts, and absolutely no excuse.

Merrick Sorne — Thief, Level 3
Stronger, sneakier, and still pretty sure “ours” is a scam.

There was, however, one problem.

Money.

Specifically, they had too fucking much of it.

Gold is wonderful until you realize your characters actually have to carry the shit. The party had accumulated so many coins that they were becoming overburdened simply by being wealthy.

I briefly wondered whether New Phlan had a bank.

Apparently, they did not.

So we did the next best thing and found one of the local merchants willing to convert the party’s ridiculous piles of coins into considerably lighter platinum.

There was just one problem.

Doing so efficiently meant pooling everyone’s wealth.

Again.

Merrick frowned. “No.”

Aldren sighed. “Merrick…”

“We specifically agreed that my money is my money.”

“And how much of your money came from the jewelry I just sold?”

Merrick opened his mouth.

Then closed it.

Mara smiled. “Oh, this should be good.”

Merrick looked at the bags of coins, then at Aldren, then at the bags again.

“Fine.”

Aldren smiled. “For the good of the party?”

“No. Because I don’t want to carry six thousand fucking coins.”

Fair enough.

And so, after four episodes, countless battles, several deaths, magical equipment, shared trauma, and one brutally murdered fortune teller, the unthinkable finally happened.

The party agreed to start pooling its money.

The No Sharing the Loot rule was officially dead.

Mostly.

Merrick raised one finger.

“Fine. But any gems I find are mine.”

Everyone sighed.

Baby steps.

Next Time On...