Necropolitans, episode 91: Maybe this is some form of teaspoon witch

The party get their fortunes told, in Episode 091: Maybe this is some form of teaspoon witch .

They find the shaman’s abandoned huts. They go to the village of Mountainfoot, and encounter the halfling residents. Vomm questions why anyone is doing anything with their time other than training, having mistaken this for some kind of xianxia campaign.

To be fair, the Pathfinder rules make it entirely possible to run the sort of storyline where nobody does anything except training, because there's no mechanical reason for you to do anything other than finding monsters and living on iron rations while sleeping in a tent. You don't have to have friends. You don't have to have hobbies. You don't have to seek any kind of normal human comfort because sleeping on the bare ground and only consuming hardtack has no mechanical effect. All of these things have to be added through roleplaying, and... well, in my experience of dungeony games, people don't tend to humanise their characters in areas like seeking basic pleasures, beyond "enjoys a glass of ale", "gambles", or "has sex", except for a couple of healers who specifically spent downtime treating poor people, as Makoa sometimes does.

They have their fortunes told by the halflings, revealing deep secrets about the characters’ fates. This is actual campaign stuff that I planned out. Pathfinder has some rules for running "Harrow" (Tarot) readings, and I designed a reading for each character that gave clues about metaphysical things going on. Essentially, each character has the potential to fall into a terrible destiny: Iris to become a hag, Jaal to succumb to the lure of lichdom, Quintella to become a sacrifice to the Mythos, Makoa to do… something, I don’t remember. Thanks to Zagor’s intervention and their sudden undead status, their adventures are slowly unravelling these destinies, escaping the confines of fate and leaving them free to complete Anubis’ quest as heroes outside the notice of diviners and prophets. This links to their current liminal status as beings not quite fully undead and certainly not living, who fall between the purviews of various gods and can therefore get up to shenanigans.

Direct Links

1. RSS feed for all episodes
2. Episode 001: Character Generation
3. Master list of episodes
4. Episode 007: Screaming blue murder from his waist (start of Castaways)
5. Episode 023: Everyone knows that mummy octopi are not scared of cooking (start of Nautical Shenanigans)
6. Episode 027: The crumpling noise you can hear was Book 2 (start of Nameless Ancients)
7. Episode 049: Mint Ice Cream (start of Trouble in Cheliax)
8. Episode 067: Or we'll come and eat you and your children (start of Road to Rachikan)
9. Episode 074: Give me a butter knife and about three days (start of City in the Deep)
10. Episode 088: I don’t want to try and explain why I’m covered in grease (start of Iris flashback)