Spoony Experiment - Thieves' World

Okay, are you ready for another rambling story about gaming? Because I've been thinking for a long time on a lot of topics to do for Counter Monkey and so I thought I would go over one of the best campaigns that I ever DMd and this was in a game store. Before I went online, it was probably the last campaign or on the tabletop I ever DM'd. It went really well. I'm not saying I stopped because it went badly, it actually went great. So much so that they kept begging me to go back to it. I finally got a job at an office. It was a terrible job, but I had to stop DMing up around that point. 

It was kind of a D&D game but not really. When D&D third edition came out it had the open game license. It was supposed to be the open-source alternative to gaming. People believed you could print pretty much anything you wanted as long as you included the open-source gaming license at the end of the book. But I believe there were some legal entanglements. You eventually had to pay a license to use it but there were a lot of spin-off games that used the open gaming license at the time. Some really good, others really really bad. 

The best one that I remember was called "Lone Wolf". If you remember the "Lone Wolf" RPG based on the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. And almost nobody played it. Another good one was "The Wheel of Time" and I wasn't even that big fan of the novels but "The Wheel of Time", the magic system with the Aes Sedai was very complex and at the same time very clever. Really liked that one. I never got a chance to play it especially since there was only one published series of adventures. "Prophecies of the Dragon" or something like that. I'll probably do another episode on this very soon. 

But there is a problem with running a campaign inside an established movie, TV, or novel series, because it's like "Star Wars". In "Star Wars", you're married to the main characters so you can't actually run into them. Otherwise, continuity is all sorts of fucked. There was a "Babylon 5" RPG which I very much hated. The fluff was very good, the crunch not so much. You have this problem where the star characters are the command crew and so what do you do? The same thing with "The Wheel of Time". There are the core main characters and it's really all about Rand al'Thor. 

Anyway, the game I'm talking about is--it's a good book--Thieves' World. And this is going to take some explanation. The book was published by Green Ronin Publishing and it's based on a series of anthology novels called "Thieves' World". And what that means is--you don't see this much anymore--it was an open world. These authors create this world and would allow any other authors to write in that world (with editorial approval). But you've got this common pool of characters in a common setting and other fantasy and sci-fi authors would write their own adventures with their own characters but also using the shared characters. Almost like a comic book, like how Batman has his own established universe and authorized writers can use Batman characters. 

And so Green Ronin published three or four sourcebooks. I pretty much have all of them and one of them is just the Player's Book. One is the campaign setting, a map book, and a couple of adventure books. Ironically enough, the adventure books I never used. I basically used them for the maps to explain Thieves' World. 

So here's the thing with Thieves' World. I almost don't want to call it a "low magic" setting although magic is a prevalent force in Thieves' World. But it's not accessible to people on the street, if you know what I mean. It's like Conan. You might call Conan a very "low magic" setting but it's also powerful. But at the same time, magic is not like in normal D&D where a mage can go "expecto patronus" and throw out a spell. It's not that fast. Magic in Thieves' World and in Conan would require a lot of preparation. A lot of people chanting around a circle. A lot of hours and hours of ritualistic preparation. Killing a goat and draining its blood and drawing pentagrams on the floor and shit like that. It's very powerful when it happens and they replicate that in Thieves' World where you can't play a spellcaster. But you have to have stuff prepared way ahead of time so it's more when you're a mage in Thieves' World you have to plan ahead. 

I won't say it discourages you from being a spellcaster, it's just that your magic would consist of "I want it to rain today" and so I would cast a spell and it takes four hours, and by god it's going to rain today. Or "I want to call a lightning storm down on a motherfucker". That's a more powerful version of that so you plan out your chart, you put a marker on a map, and then you put candles around a map, and you chant. Three hours later, certain enough, lightning hits that guy's house. It's very powerful, but methodical. 

You have to know the differences between that and D&D to explain Thieves' World. It's not so much a world--that was my big problem with the setting name. It's not so much Thieves' World as it is "Thieves' City". Thieves' World is based almost entirely around the city of Sanctuary, which is the equivalent of Ankh-Morpork. Well, that's too big. I almost want to say Mos Eisley but it's bigger than that. I'm trying to think of a good equivalent. Sanctuary is a very large trading city that went from obscurity into a trading boomtown. It used to be part of a very large empire. The story is that the Ilsigi Empire was conquered by another empire called the Rankan Empire. It's in this weird transitional state in history where Sanctuary belonged to one empire and then that empire was conquered by another. Sanctuary is being occupied by the Rankan Empire and people are disturbed by this idea that they're being occupied by a foreign power. 

The guy in charge of Sanctuary is a foreign prince. The Prince of the Rankan Empire. He's given this impossible task of having to keep law and order in a city that fucking hates everyone. They're occupying a hostile populace. In this case, warfare not only existed on the land between two armies facing each other but also among the gods. The Ilsigi Empire and the Rankans have their own set of gods and these gods fought as well. 

So you've got the Ilsegi gods and the Rankan gods and they had their own little warfare. And when the Rankan Empire won, the Rankan gods won as well and exiled the Ilsegi gods out of this world. Not only the Ilsegi lost their empire but also their entire religion. People are still devoutly worshipping their old gods which literally are not there anymore but it's prophesied that they will come back. The Rankans will fall and the Ilsegi gods will come and get their vengeance on the Rankan gods. 

It's a very attractive setting and I got into it for a long time. You've got a lot of political tensions brewing, you've got cool characters, you've got this dark gritty fantasy world where everyone's a cut-throat and dark. There's a lot of self-interest. None of the gods are really what you'd call "huggable golden rule" type of good gods. All the gods are very brutal, very dark. It's hard to find a god that's equivalent to the Judeo-Christian "love thy neighbor" God. It's all brutal and bloody and none of these gods are happy. 

So you've got the political tensions and there's potential for character development. People who hold different political values can have loyalty to one or the other or none. You can have people who hold very strongly or not at all to the various faiths. You can have varying levels of nobility and self-interest. Guys who are the rare people who consider themselves vigilantes or people who are just out for themselves or people who are just very anarchist and want to tear down the established social order because, seriously, fuck those guys running the city, we want our city back. Sanctuary is in this weird place where it's torn between two empires but also really wants to carve out its own identity as a city-state. It wants to be independent. 

I liked it a lot especially since it was different from the high-powered D&D game that we were used to playing. There are no alignments so much as good versus evil. There's basically survival in this hardcore setting. It's more adult-oriented. The magic was way different. There's a lethality--the violence is much more decisive where there's almost no healing in Thieves' World because healing magic and clerics almost don't exist. They do exist but there's almost no healing magic. And what healing magic there is accelerates healing but isn't a magic band-aid where you get eight hit points back. If you take a brutal sword wound, it's hard to get healing. And if you do, the healing process is very painful. Even common medicine is almost like the Dark Ages--the concept of keeping things clean is not so known. Leechcraft is huge in Thieves' World, so even getting wounded you run the risk of serious septic infection. So you don't want to get into fights that much in Thieves' World. And if you're going to get into a fight, it's a last resort, because if you get hurt you might die. 

The book series itself was uneven. I got hooked on it but if you read the stories you'll start to hate several of the authors that would sometimes take over the anthology series. One author that I grew to hate, and unfortunately she was one of the most prolific writers in the Thieves' World universe, was Janet Morris. Janet Morris had a specific Mary Sue character and that character was Tempus Thales. I didn't like how Janet Morris used him. He was a cool character but Janet Morris Mary Sue'd him. I'll explain Tempus Thales in a second because he's a central focus of this game. I also liked him, but at the same time, I hated him. So when I did my RPG I took Tempus Thales and made him into a new beast. So I Mary Sue'd myself in this campaign. Janet Morris did a bunch of spin-off books that exclusively follow Tempus Thales outside of Sanctuary while following his exploits in this war. 

There were a lot of wars going on. So the prince would send Tempus to go fight other wars outside Sanctuary to maintain the rank and hold on their land. But another reason I like Sanctuary is because it all takes place in one city. It's a place you can get familiar with. It's low level in this setting where players can get good and familiar with the city. It doesn't change. They know there's a map where everything is. Once you get familiar with that, you can plan around that map. There are landmarks. It rewards players for knowledge of the topography of the city. There are places you want to go and places you don't want to go. If you're being pursued, there's a specific place where you can disappear for a price, but it's also very dangerous because there's a lot of pickpockets there. 

Another thing when you're doing a game based on a specific intellectual property like "Game of Thrones", "Wheel of Time", or "Thieves' World". It helps to make sure they're familiar with the campaign setting. If you're playing the Babylon 5 RPG you pretty much can't throw people into Babylon 5 unless they've seen the show. Thieves' World, I was a little apprehensive about because you honestly should read at least the first book to know the tone. 

So I get these guys together and I'm like "I want to play Thieves' World. What would you think about that?" About half of them had read at least the first book. One of them knew the books inside and out, which was a little intimidating for me. It's a double-edged sword where you want them to be familiar with it, but you don't want them to be obsessive about it to the point where they'll be correcting you on setting materials. It's very annoying when you're DMing a game, say Forgotten Realms, and you throw in a character who's common to the setting and you say "This guy says this" and the player speaks up "Actually in this novel, Elestar would never say this because he's related to this person or he did this in this novel written by R.A. Salvatore". All you have to do when somebody says that, you have to say "Look, I know that happened in a novel. I didn't read that novel so it's just what I say goes. I'm sure in the book this happened, but let's just roll with what I said". So if something happens to Tempus in one of these books and they go "Well, actually Tempus would never have done this" and I go "Well, he does it here." Tempus Thales was one of those characters I had to use because Thieves' World revolves around Tempus Thales. So who is Tempus Thales? 

At his base level, Tempus Thales is like Kratos from "God of War". That's not entirely accurate, but it's close. Tempus Thales is one of the prototypical brooding super-characters you would see in anime. The guy who was "unbeatable" in sword combat. He's got magic powers. He can decimate armies by himself. He's that fucking good. And the reason he's that fucking good is because he's immortal. And the reason he's immortal is because he's essentially the chosen vessel of the... I forget the name of the Rankan god, but the head god of the Rankan Empire is basically a god of war. So this god of war, a long time ago, chose Tempus Thales from another dimension and then pulled him out of that and said "Guess what? You're now my vessel. I've given you immortality. I've given you super-strength. I've given you the best weapons. You are handpicked by me to be my agent on this world so I'm giving you the powers of gods among men. You're on this world and all you have to do is follow my orders. You have to act as my agent and be this agent of war. You have to spread chaos. You are me on this world." 

So Tempus is this warrior who's given immortality and all this power. The only time he's happy is when he's killing, maiming, murdering, when he's acting out war. And that's why he's working for the Rankan Empire, because these guys are steamrolling all the competition. Tempus is given the job of administering justice in Sanctuary. He's given command of the City Guard in this brutal city and he has to maintain order in this city that hates him. Tempus Thales is beatable, but he's like Brad Pitt's character Achilles from "Troy". He's the best swordsman ever. Nobody can take this guy one-on-one. Hell, I don't think anybody could take this guy ten-on-one. A hundred-on-one, maybe, but I'd still put money on Tempus. It's rumored that he's indestructible. You can wound him but you have to touch him first and you're not gonna touch him. Everything is boring to him now because he's that good. He's killed millions. He's slaughtered his way through history. So he kills people but he's bored. He's this avatar of war and he's sworn to serve the Empire. So Tempus is already in a bad mood. If you fuck with him he's just gonna cut your head off. He has all this backstory. He broods constantly. He's only happy in the thick of combat. 

What's also very disturbing about him is that he is definitely not a hero. I would almost hesitate to call him an antihero to the point where he's a villain. And in the hands of the right author, he's sympathetic, but he's also a wanton murderer. A good author can walk that tightrope to where you're interested in him but he's still absolutely evil. He's evil partially by choice but mostly by circumstance if that makes sense. The god who's chosen him to be his agent is not only the God of War, she's also the God of Rape. One of the only things that makes him happy is to rape people. So there are times when the only way he can satisfy himself is to violently rape people. Quite a lot actually. You're with this guy to a point and then he starts raping people. So he's a disturbing character, in case you were starting to like this guy, he's also a wanton rapist. In the hands of the right author... He's told by god to do it. If he doesn't do it, he'll lose his powers. But it's still his choice to do it. 

So we get these characters. So we have cutthroats, we have thieves, and one of the characters is Matthew. His big thing was he rolled a classic thief character. But every time we asked him to do something, he would go "Well, I'm not that kind of thief". Here's an example: let's say they got hired to do a job of robbing this guy's house. 

They'd see the safe on the wall, so one of the characters would say "Hey, Matthew, why don't you go crack that safe. It's got a lock on it. You can do that." (We only had one thief. One guy was an assassin, one guy was a wizard, and we had a fighter, and a priest of the god of death.) And he'd go "I'm not that kind of thief." "What do you mean?" "I didn't put any ranks into 'open lock'." We all just look at him. The big hulking fighter would say "All right" and get his crowbar. They'd be like "Why don't you search for traps?" Matthew would be like "I'm not that kind of thief either." Even I'd be like "What kind of thief are you?" He wouldn't answer. He'd be like "I'm just not. I don't do locks. I don't break in the door." I'm like "Then you're not a thief." We'd be asking him to do thief stuff. One of us would go "I got an idea. We have to get inside this keep, this manor, so why don't you scale the wall, then open the gate from the inside?" He'd be like "I'm not that kind of thief." "But what do you mean?" "I didn't put any rank into 'climb walls'." I think he eventually put ranks into "climb walls". I think what he did was he put all his ranks in "tumbling" and he was more of a backstabbing hiding thief where he was good at stabbing people but his intelligence was really low. Everything that you'd think a thief would do, he's not that kind of thief. It blew my mind. The funny thing was he was a good player. He was really solid. I think he was trying to go for an iconoclastic thief. "I want to do a thief, but I don't want to be a thief like everyone else. Not the kind of guy who picks pockets." I think one thing he did was he picked pockets really well but he never did it. He didn't want to get caught. He put all his ranks into 'move silently' and 'pickpocket'. 

We had our brute force--the blade master guy. And we had this wizard, let's call him Martin. And wizards in Thieves' World are much different from other ones where they mainly do rituals, not fast spellcasting. The fastest spells that a wizard can do in Thieves' World take at least a minute to prepare, to the point where you have to crack out incense and burn it. So he got leveled to where he could throw fireballs but he still had to set up things and get your staff out and chant and focus in. Then once every minute you could throw a fireball at something. To the point where he got good at setting up ambushes, to lay down some pretty heavy destruction, like Batman where, as long as he had prep time, you were dead because he could fuck you up. But he realized if it was a situation where he couldn't prepare, he was in trouble because wizards do not act quickly. They can have stuff prepared like scrolls but you need to have time, effort, and money to where if you want to bust out a spell on the fly, you still got to put time into it you know. So he recognized this weakness in his character, which was a good thing. He wants to prepare. 

So he spent time specializing in ranged weapons. He got a crossbow or throwing knives. He wanted to be a knife man where he was quiet and didn't want to look like a wizard because people target wizards. Which, if you're ever playing a wizard, a smart DM will always target wizards first, especially at high levels. Because if you're obviously a wizard, anyone with any kind of intelligence knows that you are the guy who dishes out pain and pain in a wide area of effect. So don't be the kind of wizard who dresses like Gandalf because they're going to hone in on you hard. What I always do is dress like you're a thief. You don't have to wear heavy armor. Don't wear a robe. Don't wear a pointy hat. Don't carry a staff. If you're the kind of adventuring party who causes crimes, people are always going to remember the guy in the sky-blue cloak raining fire down from the heavens. They're not going to know the guy who dresses in leather armor, hiding behind the barrel. 

I was impressed with Martin's ability to play this guy who laid low, didn't make clear his nature. He just said he was a mercenary. He had a shield strapped to his back, mainly to stop people from stabbing him in the back. He carried a short sword. He didn't know how to use it, but he carried it. But he still wanted to throw fire. So he's like "I'm gonna take skill in 'alchemy' and I'm gonna know how." At low level, you can't make much with alchemy, especially in Thieves' World. But he's like "I'm gonna create Greek fire/alchemist fire and acid." He spent most of his off time writing scrolls and creating flasks of acid. His big thing was crowd control. If they got ambushed, he would throw "grenade" weapons, either Greek fire or acid. If you stop to think, that's really sick. A guy who throws acid at you?You'd be less afraid of the big guy with a sword. The guy with the sword might stab you, you might live. But this guy throws acid at you. He had this bandolier of flasks of acid and and Greek fire and flint them into Molotov cocktails.

The worst character was Kenny. Kenny played this cleric of the God of Death. His character was this guy who, if there was a plague, he would want to go visit the plague and pray at it. His eyes would light up if there was ever a stack of bodies somewhere. There was a fire in the lower quarter, bodies are stacking in the street. He'd run off and be like "Oh Goddess of Death, praise be to thee. You have brought death to these believers." Everyone else would shake their head. But, you know what, he heals people so we'll keep him. But even then he would be like "I'll heal you, but you have to say this prayer to the God of Death." And we'd be like "I pledge allegiance to the reaper." 

We ran this campaign and these guys were travelers on the way to Sanctuary. In Sanctuary, they all get robbed. They're aware Sanctuary is dangerous, but they had no idea. As soon as they get into the city they get stopped by city guards. Twenty of them. The city guards rob them blind. There's a fight, but they're first level and so they just get trounced. So I start the campaign by stripping them of all their gear, which is kind of a dick move on my part, but this was the point. I wanted to drive home early on that these guys have no friends in this city. I told them from the beginning it was going to start this way, so it wasn't really surprising them. They're starting at the bottom of the barrel with no resources. They're part of a merchants' caravan and even the merchants get robbed. 

So these guys are stuck in the lower quarter with no weapons. There was one guy who managed to conceal a knife on himself that they didn't steal. There was a guy who had a hidden compartment in his boot with three gold pieces. All you've got is a knife and three gold pieces. What are you guys going to do? This was how I injected them into Thieves' World by saying "You guys aren't necessarily heroes. You're not evil. But you're in this tough situation so you got to do what you got to do to eat." First thing, they asked Matthew if he could go into the wealthier quarter and pickpocket people. Matthew says "I'm not that kind of thief." 

They lured a city guard into an alley, saying "Help! Help! I'm being attacked!" "There's someone hurt! There's someone hurt!" Then they shank him. They take the Guardsman's armor and they have the thief Matthew dress in the armor. "Can you disguise yourself?" He's like "I think so. I'm not that kind of thief but I have charisma." They dress him up. He sneaks into the guards' barracks and steals some stuff back. Enough where they can sell it and at least have food for the night. 

They go to the Vulgar Unicorn, which is the popular tavern from the novels, and start to get some work. The first couple weeks they take simple jobs that give them some money. They scrape together enough for a place to live, which is a one-room flophouse they're all stuck in. Martin says "With a little bit of investment, I can create some weapons and we can start to even the playing field where people won't fuck with us because we're the new blood in the city." It was not only about eating but establishing a reputation. Like forming a gang. So they developed into this gang mentality where they had a reputation to uphold.

They get contacted by the City Guard. Some of the city guards go into The Vulgar Unicorn looking for these guys. They list off their names. The bartender likes the party now so he's like "What's this about? Are they in trouble? Are they wanted for anything?" The City Guardsman is like "No, no. In fact, we have some work for them." They didn't trust the City Guard as far as they could kick them because the last time that happened the guard kicked the shit out of them. So they followed this guard around to see what was up. It was actually very smart, they scouted it out. They told the guard "no". The guard goes back to the Royal Palace and they sneak past. Very tense, very exciting. One of them climbs up (not Matthew because he's not that kind of thief) and sneaks in the window. The guard reports back. And they look in and it's Tempus Thales. 

The guard says "They refused the offer, my lord." Tempus is like "Why not?" "Well, they don't trust us." "Well, I don't blame them. How about this?" So they play "messenger tag" for a little. Eventually, the guards are like "Why don't you want to come meet us? We'll pay you if you want." "We don't want to. The last time we came into the city we got mugged by these guards at the gate." The guardsman's like "Okay. Okay." The next day all of the guards who robbed them are dead in the street in front of the tavern. And the PCs are like "Oh. Shit." This guy just killed his own men. This must be important. They knew it was nothing good, but at least they knew this guy was not leading them into a trap, because he just murdered twenty of his own men. And the guardsmen weren't touching it. There was no investigation. So they're intrigued by this Tempus guy. Of course, James (who had read the books and didn't trust Tempus Thales as far as you can kick him) had "Knowledge - local" and "Knowledge - history", so he rolls and says "I've heard of this Tempus Thales guy. He is bad news. We do not want to fuck with this guy." They're like "We're not gonna fuck with him. We're gonna talk to him. He must want something. He killed twenty men to talk to us." 

They go there and Tempus is like "I need some people that aren't from this town and you guys definitely are not. "Yeah, yeah, go on." "As you can tell, we've got some bad apples in the city. We've got some Guardsmen who were not following my rules and that pisses me off. I got to thank you for pointing out those guys at the gate because their behavior was not authorized by me or anyone else." He gives them all their stuff back. "This may not be all your stuff but I did what I could. I took them down into the dungeons and I made them talk. I got everything I could back. And you can have the rest of their stuff because their families aren't going to need it." "Okay, Mr. Thales. What do you want?" "I'm not asking you to work for me because I know you guys don't like the Rankans very much. I'm not asking you do that. All I'm asking you to do is, there's this new shop that opened in the lower quarter. I just want you to go in there and look. Some of my guys are going in there. Some of them aren't coming out. And some of them are coming out acting very differently." "What do we get out of this?" "You walk out of this room alive." "Oh, really?" "Yeah, really. But, if you want, I'll pay you X amount of gold pieces each. And I'll pardon you for the murders of the twenty guards outside. Because I could easily pin this on you. Which do you want? The honey or the vinegar? Because I'm being nice right now. And I'm only gonna ask nice once." "Oh, be nice, be nice." 

They go outside and are like "How do we fuck over Tempus Thales." "Well, we can't right now but let's do this thing because we need the money." I put them in this position where they need the money because they also have to pay protection of this gang. 

They go into this shop in the lower quarter that just appeared one day. If you've read the books you're familiar with the store, but I changed it a little where these people are walking in and some of them are walking out with strange magic items. Some of them aren't walking out at all. Some of them are walking out acting differently than they walked in. They sneak in and go into the basement. This place has a shockingly deep basement. At the bottom of this place is this cult. It's basically a cult of Cthulhu, but not quite. They're either taking people for sacrifices, brainwashing them, or giving them cursed magic items that are like weapons. So one guy will walk out with a magic wand that will throw fire at command, but it's like one of the rings that turn you into a nazgûl--the more you use it, the more corrupted you are by this evil influence. So these gang wars are breaking out in the city. They were fighting thugs who had these magic weapons and collecting them, but they were very shady. The wizard looked at the stuff going "This isn't like no kind of magic I've ever seen before. There's something off about it." "There's something off about every kind of magic." "No, you don't get it. This is really weird." 

They eventually decide to put a stop to this because "They're gonna burn the city down. They're gonna cause this war in the city because everyone's getting these free magic items. People are walking out with psionic powers, almost like Tetsuo. There's this guy they had to deal with who could crush a house with his mind. So they retreat out of there and start putting this plan together, like the A-Team. They map out this store and all the levels beneath it. They had to kill Guardian Monsters but hid the bodies so they weren't going to be found. But they had to do this fast because they only had eight hours before they found the bodies. They put them in a pantry and spiked the door shut. But they're outnumbered four to one, there are psionic dudes. They start planning. "We're gonna surround them like this. On this command, the mage is gonna throw something into the fire that's gonna cause smoke." They're working like a well-oiled machine. They're all going to make mist, they're going to take some alchemist fire, they're going to hit the guys in charge. They're going to try to murder as many of the obvious spellcasters as they can. And this was all predicated on the fact that they knew this ritual was going to go on for some time. The cultists were all planning this huge ritual to culminate at the solstice. The wizard says "That's in ten hours." "They're going to be chanting until then, right?" So they plan this hit to the last day. They had contingency plans. Matthew goes "I throw things. I'm not that kind of thief, but I can stab people. If I could stab this guy and stab him more until he stops moving, I can do that." 

They go back in there and sneak in. I got this whole fight planned out. I didn't think they'd do it. I thought they would just go back to Tempus and be like "There's a cult down there. You got to stop it." I thought they would stick to the letter of intent where he said "Go scout it out." But they wanted to stop it. For some reason, they had this sense of nobility about them. Mostly I think they were itching for a fight and the notion that I kept hinting that there was a lot of cool stuff down there. And if they took it themselves, they would have the first crack at the loot. I think that greed motivated them more than anything. I went into great detail about how the guy leading the cult ceremony was wearing all this gold, gold rings, a silver necklace, and this exquisite looking serpentine style sword. They're like "We're not letting Tempus have this shit." I was expecting them to go to Tempus and have Tempus bust up the ring. 

So they go down there and have a great fight. It was close. But they worked together as a team and they killed everybody in that cult. When the fight's over, the smoke is cleared, they bust up this ceremony. They even bust up this cthulhoid monster. When they bust up the ceremony, the head priest says "You fool, you've disrupted everything." He falls down. This weird amorphous blob comes on, they kill that too. 

"Okay, you guys just enacted World War III down here. You guys caused a racket and you can hear outside, there's a commotion. You don't have long before the guards arrive. You've cleared this room, but you don't know that there's not more coming." "We got to move fast, cuz we're beat up." One guy's watching the door. There's only one door in and out. "We need to find another way out of here." They set one guy looking for a secret passage (because it's always a secret passage in the ritual chambers, right?) The other guys are scooping all the loot they can. They don't care if it's cursed. "We'll figure it out later." They brought burlap sacks in preparation for the loot. They go in and eventually pull the guy off the door. They bar the door. "Matthew, shove a crowbar in the door." 

I start rolling dice to see what's coming. They're getting really nervous. "You hear a pounding at the door." "Shit!" And finally, Matthew goes "I found a secret door." "Great, we're almost done here. We've only got the one guy to search." The pounding at the door grows more and more intense. Suddenly, with one final crashing impact, the door is violently kicked aside. The doors fly open. The crowbar spreading. 

Martin cuts me off and says "I hurl a flask of acid at his face!"

Now what was supposed to happen was Tempus Thales was supposed to swoop in with his detachment of guards in the nick of time to save these guys. That was my plan if they were starting to lose the fight. I was going to fudge it and have Tempus come in and do mop-up duty so they wouldn't all get slaughtered. But Tempus Thales was gonna swoop in, claim all the credit, and stiff them on the payment but let them live. He was going to be like "Thanks for doing all my work for me, douchebags. I'm gonna take it from here."

So Martin goes "I hurl acid at the door" before I could manage to say "...and Tempus Thales and his troops walk in the room". Everyone at the table was like "No!" And then he rolls his dice. I was almost gonna say "Are you sure?" but he rolled dice and he was committed. So he rolls a crit. He rolls a 20. So I'm like "roll again" cuz in third edition you have to confirm your crit. He rolls an 18. So I put my head down for a minute. I go "As Tempus Thales and the squad of six guardsmen enter the room, a flask of acid crashes into his face." And I was even going to cut him some slack, because Tempus is really hard to hit because he's the God of War. Tempus gets a flask of acid crashing into his face. "You do max damage. In fact, you do double damage. The two guardsmen on either side of them get splashed with the acid and they go down clutching their faces. The guardsmen draw their swords and Tempus shrieks in surprise and pain because that was the last thing even Tempus Thales was expecting." 

Honestly, this was in no danger of killing him, because acid does not do that much damage in the grand scheme of things. Certainly not to Tempus Thales, but... it was a flask of acid in the face. Tempus clutches at his face and shrieks. The party, as soon as I say the words "Tempus Thales", turn white. Martin is like "I thought it was fucking cultists." And they say "Obviously fucking not." They're like "Oh, shit." So they run.  

So what was supposed to happen was that Tempus Thales was developing a grudging respect for them. He was still going to screw them over on payment, but it was gonna be like, he likes these guys cause they got the job done. So every now and then he would throw them a bone. They wouldn't be working for him, but there was there was a plan in motion to where like eventually Tempus was going to use these guys to maybe overthrow the city and put them in positions of power. He was going to put them into greater things. There was going to be a greater campaign involved and Tempus was the guy to give them the option to work for him. But that's out the window. Because you just threw acid in his face.

So now I'm thinking "My whole campaign is dead. Because they just threw acid in this face." There's "by the rules" and then there's "what should happen". Bottom line: Tempus just took nine points of damage, which for him is nothing. But if you think about this, in any kind of real-world scenario, it's a flask of acid to the face. So I'm thinking I could do this one of two ways. I could do this where it's nothing to Tempus Thales. He's pissed but he heals because he's a god. He goes it's no big deal, they're stupid, but it's nine points, it's nothing. Or. This is a really bad situation. Let's say you take a 20th-level fighter and he's got an absurd amount of hit points. Like 300 hit points, he's got an 18 Constitution, but you put him in a situation where you have him dead to rights. Let's say an assassin surprises him in bed. He's got a knife at his jugular and he's like "If you move, I'm gonna kill you." And the 20th-level Fighter says something stupid or tries to resist and pisses him off. Because, in metagame, he knows that a dagger only does 1 to 4 points of damage. So in his thinking, in-game thinking, 4 damage to me is nothing. 

Or you could think of it like, it doesn't matter how many hit points you have, the dude has a dagger literally at your jugular. If he stabs you with this, you're dead. So there's a game way of thinking and a real-life way of thinking about this. So I start thinking, either it's just 9 hit points, it's nothing, or I go "Dude took a flask of acid in the face." There's no good way to take that. Especially since we're dealing with this dark and gritty world where magic is not the end-all cure-all to things. Even if you take a sword in Thieves' World, then you get it magically healed, you're still gonna have a pretty vicious scar. In fact, I think there are rules for permanent maiming and wounds. So if you take a critical hit and it doesn't heal properly, you take penalties. You get some lasting impact. There's a wound. If you take a crit to the leg, you lose points off your speed. 

The guards are so surprised by this. Tempus is so stunned by this. A) that he got hit B) that he got hit by a flask of acid to the face and C) that he got hit by a flask of acid in the face by the guys who're working for him. These guys are worried about their commander. Tempus is like "Ah, fuck, fuck, fuck." "Lord Tempus, are you okay?" "Fucking! (mimes waving a sword)" They close the secret door behind them and they run. Like they're doing like Blues Brothers routine where they're throwing shit in front of the door. "Tempus is coming!" So they they get away.

So if I took a flask of acid in the face, you'd be fucked up. Like that guy in Alien Resurrection when he gets spit on or that dude in Robocop. So now here's the thing with Tempus. He's a god but his healing, his immortality, comes from the goddess of rape, murder, and war. But he only gets those powers if he pleases the goddess. There are instances in the book where he greatly displeases the goddess and his wounds don't heal as fast or she'll withhold powers from him. The goddess doesn't let him die but she doesn't let him forget failure either. Ordinarily, this is the sort of thing that the goddess would just heal Tempus from in a day. But--think about this--Tempus just got humiliated. He walked in a door and got douched with acid and these second-level guys ran off laughing, humiliating the god of war. Like if these guys had tried to jump Tempus, they wouldn't have been able to touch this guy. Unless the guy critted him, which is the only way it's gonna happen. It would have taken a miracle shot to hit this guy and, guess what, he got a miracle shot. Even if he were surprised, which he was, this guy's natural armor class is so good and he's so blessed by this goddess that he's untouchable. But this guy, blind shot with acid, bam. 

The goddess is pissed. You don't do this to my servant on this planet. You know what? I'm not healing this. Tempus, you're a fuck up. Tempus goes back to his room, he's flipping shit over. Scarred all over his face, his face smoking, his eyelids are burned. So he prays to his goddess. "These fucknuts burned my face. Heal me so I can go kill these mother fuckers." Because this is the kind of guy who does not take things lying down. 

The goddess goes "No. No." Then Tempus is like "What?" "No. You got owned." "What?!" "I'm not gonna heal you. You go get them back. I'm not gonna heal that until you get revenge. Until you show them who you are. Because that is not who you are. You're not getting healed until you fix this. Until you make this right. Until you make your name is feared again. Because people are gonna be laughing at you. You fix this."

The guys are in hiding now cuz they can't go back to the Vulgar Unicorn, their normal hangout because that's where they found us last time. So like they go back to their place and pack up. They leave and find another place somewhere in the bowels of the city. "Oh, fuck. Tempus is gonna kill us." "Tempus is a god. He'll heal." So they're very naive about this. "He'll be mad. He's not gonna hire us again, but we did what he wanted." "But our money..." "Fuck money, we got all this stuff from the cultists. We can sell this." "Won't he be looking for us to be fencing goods?" "Maybe. Matthew, you can fence stolen goods right?" "I'm not that kind of thief." "You don't have 'streetwise'?" "No, I'm not that kind of thief." "You know what? This is not the end of the world, okay? Because he'll heal. I know enough about the books. He's immortal, he's fine. He'll be pissed but he's not gonna be coming after us. Even if he does, we'll explain it." They're actually kind of optimistic. "We'll give this guy a week, he'll cool down." And I'm like "You don't know Tempus Thales very well, do you?"

They decide to lay low for a couple of weeks and sit on their loot. But they're not worried about Tempus. Tempus is going to heal. He doesn't heal. I'm trying to think of ways I can salvage the campaign where Tempus is still contacting them, but I can't do it. Because Tempus is scarred, he's pissed, and he can't get his healing factor back until he gets revenge. Certain historical events still happen, but a week passes, and soon all of the town criers are saying "Hear ye, hear ye, the Lord Tempus Thales has an announcement he wishes to make. All who wish to hear this announcement, please gather at the inner city wall and he will address thee." So these guys go "Tempus Thales? Oh, fuck." So they go and listen. The crowd is gonna be so big because there are thousands of people in Sanctuary. They all disguise themselves anyway. So Tempus Thales is looking like the guy from "Assassin's Creed", he's got this hood on. The criers hold their hands up for silence. He's got crossbowmen all over the place, pointing down at the wall, so nobody throws shit at him because nobody likes Tempus. 

Tempus is pacing back and forth on the wall, walking back and forth. He's got the hood over his face. You can see him talking to himself. He's so fucking mad, he can't even keep it together. Eventually, he stops. "Some of you may be aware that I've been missing for a few days." He pulls his hood down and reveals this horrible--he looks like Two-Face except way worse--you can actually see his skull, his jawbone. "The reason I've been missing is because there are some people who broke into the palace and did THIS to me." 

The crowd is torn. Some people are horrified. Women are passing out from the horrific scarring. Some guys are laughing. Some guys are trying to kiss up, who are loyal to the Rankins "boo" and some go "yay". The reaction is mixed. But Martin is like "Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit." 

"And I know exactly what these guys look like." Criers go "Shut up, shut up, all of you." Everyone shuts up. The people who don't, he orders crossbowmen to shoot them. So it's this huge scene where people are dying. "Everyone shut up. Here's the thing. I only want one of them. Just one." He holds up this flyer and it's got Martin's character's face on it. "I will give five thousand gold pieces to the man who brings me this criminal. Alive, if possible. If you give him alive, ten thousand." That's an absurd amount of money. People shut up now. "Every tip as to his location, I'll give you a hundred." So everyone's like "I know where he is." "I'll have my clerk standing here. Talk to him."

All of a sudden, the party members are looking at Martin now. Five thousand? Ten if he's alive? Martin's like "Wait, whoa, whoa. Let's not talk about this here." "Okay..." So they go back to their place. They're gonna screw Martin over. "You were with me! You turn me in, you know this guy's gonna kill you too, right?" "Let's think about this now." Eventually, they decide "Yeah, he's probably right. But you don't move." "What if we killed him?" Right in front of his face. "No, that wouldn't work cuz then they wouldn't know where to send the money." "Thanks!" "Shut up, we're thinking about this. No offense, but that's a lot of money." MArtin's like "Yeah, You're right." 

Eventually, they decide there's no good way they can do this. A) They can't trust Tempus to actually pay them and B) it goes against their code. They've agreed early on they wouldn't screw each other unless the money was really really good. No way they could turn him in without getting their money. Right in front of him, they're like "What if we had a guy we could trust to turn him in, then we could split the money." "No, we couldn't trust anybody with that much money." Martin's like "Okay, dicks." "Hey, look... ten thousand!" "Yeah, I know, I know, but dude." It was a great moment where they were planning this guy's kidnapping right in front of him. 

Martin is doing a good job trying to talk them out of it. "The only reason he's offering this much money is to do exactly what's happening--he's trying to turn you against me just to lure you guys out of hiding. Right?" "Yeah, you know what, you're right. Still... ten thousand. Damn, we want that ten thousand. That means he has ten thousand, doesn't it?" Martin's like "Well, not necessarily, but yeah, probably." "Would he really go that far just to get me?" "Yeah, probably. But you know what? He probably wouldn't pay us. And even if he paid us, we wouldn't make it out of the palace alive." They know enough about him to know they couldn't trust him as far as kick him. "No way we can trust this guy, BUT there's money to be made here." (and money funds rebellions)

"Look, we know we can't trust this guy, but the other people in the city don't necessarily know that. Or they're not as smart as we are. So they're going to be giving tips to where this guy is." (Because it's a really good picture.) It's going to be hard to maintain a cover like this. Martin's character is essentially unplayable at this point because he can't show his face. He can't go outside anymore because everybody who sees a guy who looks like him is going to get turned in for a hundred gold pieces. There was so much they didn't know and what I knew is they couldn't trust him. Had they marched him right in the door, he'd have killed them. He'd be like "Oh my God, I can't believe you're that stupid." Tempus was hoping that the city would be so lured by the promise of that much money that they would eventually, like mob mentality, turn them in. 

They started thinking "Well, in a way, we could still make money off of this." They start scheming. And these guys were such good schemers even I was impressed with their underhanded thinking. "Okay, we can't make the five or ten thousand gold pieces. There's no way we can get that because, even if he has it in a box, which he probably doesn't, but let's say best case scenario he has it in a box, we can't go steal it because it's in the palace. He's going to have people watching it. He might be expecting us to go after the money." "We do know where there IS money being handed out and that's the clerks who are paying for tips. Because if there's one thing we can count on in this city, it's greedy bastards giving tips as to where we are." "Martin, you hide in a place nobody's gonna find you. You've got to trust us now. We got an idea." And Martin's like "I don't have much of a choice, do I?" "No, you don't." 

"Look, we're not going to turn Martin in. There's no point because we're not going to get paid. Even if we do, it's a dick thing to do. We're not going to screw over another party member. We're loyal to each other. We're brothers. We're thieves, we're killers, but we're bros. We're not going to turn against each other." But they knew where the money was and it was with the clerks. They scout out where the clerks were. Of course, the clerks were surrounded by guardsmen like crazy. They can't just attack the clerk, because they'd have to kill twenty guards to get to it. "We could do this, but there's no way we could do it fast enough to not draw attention. And we wouldn't get away with it clean. But you know who's not guarded? The guys giving the tips and walking away with a hundred gold pieces." 

They weren't giving away a hundred gold pieces to anybody, but only those with reliable tips that panned out. Anything that sounded good. The clerk would have this magic device, accompanied by a court mage who had a spell that could detect falsehood. It would glow if the guy was telling a lie. So if the guy was lying, they wouldn't pay him, just beat the shit out of him and send him packing. But some guys were telling the truth. "Yeah, I saw this guy. He's at the Vulgar Unicorn all the time. His name is so-and-so and I think he hangs out here." If the guy was telling the truth, the clerk would write it down and be like "Thank you very much" and hand him a hundred gold pieces. He also hangs out with these guys and "I know where these guys hang out." One guy out of twenty would be in line giving tips and getting money. 

They were scouting this out in disguise. They finally realized that the clerk's guarded, but these dickweeds aren't. So they start mugging the guys who have a hundred gold pieces in the alley and taking their money. You also figure that the other thieves in the city are thinking along the same lines. The player characters just got to it first. So anyone who was giving away tips was getting violently mugged. The party ended up making fifteen hundred gold pieces by mugging the informants. Eventually, the other thieves in Sanctuary figured this out too. So either you have these guys are making a big production out of being stool pigeons, which in Sanctuary, is a death sentence already, being a guy who narcs on other people. But this was a lot of money. So either these guys would walk to the desk with bodyguards or the kind of guys who hung out at the Vulgar Unicorn who couldn't afford all these bodyguards so even people who knew stuff who wanted to tell couldn't tell because they were going to get mugged on the way back home. They didn't know it was the player characters mugging them because they were wearing masks. So nobody was giving tips anymore, because anyone who had information was getting beat up. So eventually the tips dried up. And it took a day. They not only managed to make some money but also embarrass Tempus to where they got his money and made him look like a fool. 

Eventually, Tempus was turning up the heat. He was always a specter who was a step behind them. He would institute a plan and it would look like they were screwed, but they would put their heads together and find a way to make money out of it. Eventually, Tempus got so frustrated with them that they got to keep the money from Tempus, got to keep the swag from the temple. All of a sudden, these guys are rolling in loot. The downside was that money was marked with the Royal seal of the Rankan Empire. So if they started throwing money around, that would be an obvious clue as to where these guys were. Tempus started having marked money. So anyone spending this marked money was immediately under suspicion. 

"Well, what do we do?" "One of us could pay a blacksmith to melt the coins down." So they're reminting coinage or paying foreign privateers or merchants that are leaving the city anyway for goods and services. They're buying property under false names. Complex shit. Buying parts of the city and running their own rackets. They're real full-fledged crime lords in this city to where people are legit afraid of them too. Almost more afraid of them than of Tempus. Tempus starts to realize nobody's afraid of him. So he calls in these Stepsons. 

And I have to explain what the Stepsons are. In historical context, they are a Greek fighting force. Back in ancient Greece, they would have specialized elite soldiers called Hoplites who emphasized teamwork and a special fighting style. These guys were very brutal, very elite. One of the aspects about some of these guys is that homosexuality was just a thing that happened. Not something that was frowned upon. 

The Stepsons in Thieves' World were known for a special fighting tactic where they had a special pair bond called "The Sacred Banders" or "The Stepsons". These guys were a cavalry unit, not hoplites. They would specialize in fighting in pairs and oftentimes these pairs were homosexual couples. That might sound silly, but you got over that real quick because these guys were a fighting force that would have all sorts of specialized feats. These gay dudes would flank you and kill you. They'd kill you both ways like a pair of finger cuffs. It's funny until it happens to you. These guys are high-level fighters and they're also fiercely loyal to Tempus Thales. 

They've humiliated Tempus for the last time and he's like "I'm going to bring in martial law. I'm going to go in there and clean up this city if I have to kill it to do it." Cuz Tempus has been pushed over the line, finally. There's a resistance to the Rankan Empire and the party members have essentially joined up with it because anything to piss off Tempus, right? These guys are not only actively opposing Tempus but sabotaging the Rankan influence in the city. Hitting supply convoys, major municipal buildings, causing chaos. So Tempus is like "I got to crack down. There's a full-fledged open rebellion in my city and the guy who threw acid in my face is behind it. (Still scarred up, not healing, won't die). So he brings in the Stepsons. "The City Guards are not cutting it. Anything I got to do, I'm gonna do it to find these guys." Suddenly, a military unit is occupying the city like frontier law. (It was already pretty much frontier law in the city, but you know...) If the Stepsons catch you, you're dead. 

I'm painting the scene. "You guys are doing pretty well for yourselves. You're pissing off Tempus. I know you guys are having fun but now it's pretty clear playtime's over. Now they've brought in the regular army and the Sacred Band guys. So they run into these some of these Sacred Band guys. It was a tough fight because they run into about twelve of them. And when they start pairing off, it's two-on-one every way that you can imagine. 

Tempus calls another meeting. He's like "Look, I'm tired of fucking around. I tried to be nice. I tried to offer you guys a reward to turn these guys in, these criminals. But I'm not going to punish THEM for their crimes. As long as they're free, I'm going to punish YOU." Almost like Robin Hood's Sheriff of Nottingham. He's turned from the carrot to the stick. "I brought in the Sacred Band. You cross them, you're dead. Hell, you know what? You're dead anyway. So every day that these guys go free, people will die. Every day, there's going to be a lottery." And the prince is standing there going like "I can't tell this guy 'no'. I could order this guy around but when he gets his mind set, I can't do nothing." The prince has got a rebellion on his hands and Tempus is like "I'll handle this, I'll handle it. I brought in the sacred band to do it. But people are going to die."

"And I know you're watching. I know you guys are in the crowd somewhere watching. So I want you to watch this. And watch real fucking close." They've been in the city so long that they've developed an extensive network of contacts. He knows enough about the underworld, enough informants in the city that he doesn't know where they are, but he knows who they talk to. Fences who buy stolen goods. People who give them weapons. People who are contacts to the Resistance. Informants. Thieves' guild members. People they buy magic supplies from. So he's like "I want you to watch this real close. So he lines up the barmaids from the Vulgar Unicorn (they've started going back to the Vulgar Unicorn because it's one of those places where the guards don't go. One of the characters had a romance going with one of the barmaids.) 

This is going to sound really dark and it is. Very disturbing. But this is in character for Tempus Thales. They pushed this guy over the limit. And this is one of the sickest things I've ever done in an RPG. Honestly, I would never do this in an RPG except for Thieves' World because Tempus is evil anyway. He takes one of the barmaids from the Vulgar Unicorn, puts her on her knees, and skullfucks her to death in full view of the entire city. He kills her with his dick in her eye socket. Even the PCs were looking at me like "Are you seriously going there?" They were shocked that I would go that sick on them. The party was disturbed by this. "You just had a guy skullfuck a live woman to death with his dick." "Yeah. You have no idea." "That is disgusting." "Yeah, isn't it?" "We don't even know you." I'm kind of disgusted myself. "But I'm not saying that's what I would do. I'm saying Tempus Thales does. He's the avatar of the god of rape. This is what he does." "But we didn't think he was that mad." "He's that mad." 

Tempus puts his pants back on. His dick's covered in blood. "Did we just watch that?" The crowd is horrified, rightfully horrified. "Oh my god, Tempus. You bastard. What did you do?" Tempus is like "Yeah, I'm doing this. Every day that these guys are not brought to me, people are going to die. They're going to die slow. And they're going to die horribly, right in front of you. I'm gonna do it right here, in front of everybody." So he's got a riot on his hands. He's like "Stop. You better stop." They're like "Down with the Rankans." So he sends in the Stepsons. And the Stepsons enact a massacre. "From this point forward, the city of Sanctuary is under a police state. There's a curfew. The lawlessness will end here. Find these people. Turn them in."

The mood in the campaign has just changed. This went beyond real. Shit had gone hardcore. A thousand people dead in this city. The streets are running red with blood. Tempus is skullfucking people on the city walls. The prince is looking down at this going "Hah?! What the fuck?" The city's in an uproar and so like now the city's like The Dark Knight where this demagogue supervillain, this god who's creating a reign of terror on this city. It was a struggle for the soul of Sanctuary. You had this despot slaughtering all these people, but he's unstoppable. You can't approach this guy. You can't kill this guy (not for lack of trying). He's got this army, this mailed fist hammering this city. 

And they don't want any more people to die. He's making horrible examples out of these people. But he made an impression on the city. He's going to be killing people every day. The resistance didn't know the full fury of this guy and you just set it loose. So even the resistance is stepping away from the guys. 

The city might really turn on you. It doesn't matter how much money you have anymore. It doesn't matter how much influence you have. This guy has just gone on the wall. He's got the crazy eyes. He's out of his mind. Clearly, you've driven this guy to the point of madness. He can't sleep, he can't eat. His face is festering because the goddess is so mad at him. It's not even healing, it's getting worse. He's in so much pain he's been driven mad. This guy does not sleep. All he is doing is looking for you guys. He's been on the wall and said "I am willing to burn this city to the ground if it means killing you guys." And you know what? The city's starting to believe him. You've got to do something. You've got to make it good because it's not going well. 

It's time for the rebellion. So they start leading this rebellion. "If the rebellion's stepping away from us, we're going to fan the flames." So a bard character they have who starts working his oratory and whips the rebellion up. "This is the time to strike. He's pissed. He's making mistakes. We've driven this guy to the point of madness. We can strike." "Well, the Stepsons are in the city? I'm not quite following. These guys outnumber the rebellion 10-to-one and they're Elite Troopers. You're talking mercenaries here. We can't take the Sacred Band. We've tried. Those guys are tough." "But we have the luxury of knowing the city and knowing that Tempus is mono-maniacal. He's tunnel-visioned on us. We will handle Tempus." "Sure, you will." 

"Here's what we're going to do. We're going to start we're going to start the fight. We are going to start it in the city. And we're going to call him out. He is going to send everything he has at us. So when that happens, you're storming the palace. You're going to kill the prince and whoever's there. And Tempus? He's ours, because he's going to come personally to do us. He's not going to expect a counter." 

These guys are leading an army. I think they're seventh-level at this point. Pretty high level considering. They have planned out a coup in the city. They map out this plan. I'm still not getting how they're planning on taking Tempus Thales down. "We are the diversion. We have to draw Tempus out, but Tempus is coming. And he's going to bring about ten thousand troops with him. What do we do?" "We're probably going to die." "Well, that's not good." "Maybe we can use this against him to where we can call him out, but we don't have to start a stand-up fight as long as we get the troops out of the Royal Palace, out of their garrisons for long enough, we can play hit-and-run. And Tempus will have nowhere to go. If we can occupy the palace and hold the prince hostage, he's still loyal to the prince. So we'll be in a power of negotiation here. At least, we'll have a bargaining chip. We can call them out." 

So they call Tempus out. They start doing--I called it "the Chicago way"--where these Stepsons were enacting frontier justice. They were cutting people's hands off, they were hanging people. Their point of view was "They cut off one of our hands, we cut off one of their arms. They send one of our guys to the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue. That's the Chicago way. That's the Sanctuary way." 

So they use the Stepsons' pair tactics against them. They would lure patrols into the city and then murder them. Not only murder them but make grisly examples of them. They had upped the ante from the rape on the wall. They were erecting grisly shrines, murder these guys, and go into great detail about the attention to detail put into the examples they were making out of the Stepsons. They would ambush entire squads of Sacred Banders. Really tough fights, but they would do it. They would give false tips or start a fight just to draw more Sacred Banders into a larger ambush. Or they would walk into an ambush to set a bigger ambush. They're almost dictating to me what the adventure is, and it was so great. 

I haven't mentioned this guy yet, Peter. I learned a lot of things about Peter in this adventure. What he started doing was, he was in charge of the decorating. They would kill eight to twelve Sacred Banders. He would cut their heads off and make a mountain of them. He would leave them for other guards to see. And eventually that wasn't good enough. 

"It's good, but it lacks that personal touch. I'm going to nail them to a wall. I'm going to impale them." He starts going into hate crime territory because he's like "Okay, I'm gonna show these gay Stepsons dudes. I'm going to impale them up the ass with a pike and then I'm going to shove their balls in their mouth." I'm like "Dude!" He's like "What?" "That's homophobic and horrible." "Look, Tempus has driven us to this." I'm like, maybe we should stop this game. This has gone over the edge. 

They started enacting guerilla warfare tactics. There's mass murder going on. People are getting balls shoved in their mouths and impaled up the ass with a pike like it's like Cannibal Holocaust. I've made these guys into horrible people. I crossed the line and when I did, all bets were off. "We are going to show Tempus we are not to be fucked with." Everywhere was this escalation. 

It all comes to a head in this big battle. They do these hit-and-run tactics and leave a pile of heads with a note. This note is signed by all of them saying "Meet us in the Town Square. Meet us there/ We'll end this." This is obviously a trap. But Tempus is like "I don't care. I've got 10,000 guys." 

This is where Martin and his magic came into play. He was going on rooftops to set this elaborate ambush. He'd have ritual circles set up on all these rooftops. The guys would do these hit-and-fade strikes against the Stepsons with a hundred of these other resistance guys. He'd be throwing and setting strategic fires to funnel them into the square where they turn the square into a killzone. And they were counting on Tempus pounding at these traps like a hammer, not thinking straight. So they caused chaos. There was smoke. There was fire. They were burning the city down. This fight took two weeks to go through, it was that detailed and elaborate. These guys were meeting outside of game time to plan the war. They had charts drawn. It was like "Patton" going on. They not only wanted to "beat" him, but "end" him.

So Martin is going from rooftop to rooftop, throwing fiery death down on the Sacred Banders cuz it's taking two to three minutes to prepare these spells. But he had all the elements in place on these rooftops. He'd jump to the next rooftop because he had these escape routes planned. He did this for an hour of game time. 

In the meantime, I'm rolling for the attack on the palace, and sure enough, they capture the prince. So they get over there. I think one of them died. I think Tempus managed to catch one of them and kill him. But essentially they won the war and occupied the palace. They not only freed everyone from the dungeons, all these political prisoners and all their friends. They had the prince hostage. 

Tempus is just humiliated. I mentioned--I can't remember the name of the character but there's a character similar to Tempus, I think she's like his daughter or sister or something. She's also very potent and magical and they had an adventure with her at one point that ended with Tempus capturing her and throwing her in the dungeon. So they started thinking "This chick's on a level with Tempus." 

They take her out of there and she's like "How do you want to do this?" "We got the prince. What do we do with him? Because there's an army outside our door. The only thing keeping them from kicking the door down is the prince. And even he might reach the point where he may not care. How do we kill Tempus?" "You can't." "That's not good enough. We need to kill Tempus." "Well, there is a way. You can't kill him, but you can get rid of him for a time. You can exile him from this dimension if you can destroy his corporeal form. You can kill his vessel, but he will return." "How long until he returns?" "There's no way to tell. But it's happened before and it was a hundred years." "Good, fine, we'll be dead by then." "Okay, but no promises." "Okay, so how do we beat him?" "You can't beat him." "All of us? We've got a thousand guys in this palace." "You can't beat him." 

"No, you don't understand. You're assuming we're gonna have a stand-up fight. What if we were tricky here?" "You know what? I've got these things." She has these--I'm not even kidding--her character in the series has these magic hair... not hairpins but "chopsticks" that women hold their hair up with. Magic needles that go in her hair that she uses to absorb the souls of people she kills. She's an elite assassin who gains her powers from doing that. "You could try these. If you can keep him occupied long enough, I can do this, but I guarantee you, I won't get his soul but it will definitely disrupt his mortal form." "Only chance we got." 

They get on the walls and call Tempus. Tempus is like "You don't really think you can hold up in there forever." "We'll kill the prince." "You've got an hour. Give us the prince. I don't even care at this point. Give us the prince or we're going to come in there and kill you." "I'll do you one better. I'll let you in. You and me--one-on-one." "What? Hahaha. You know what? All of you? That's all I wanted from the beginning. All of these people who died, thousands of people I've killed, just to get to you. All I wanted from the beginning was you guys against me. But you were too much of cowards to do this." The fighter's (gladiator) talking up a big game. "Yeah, but we've got your number now. You have no idea the stuff we're capable of." Tempus knows there's a trap coming, of course. He knew the last one was a trap but he got suckered once when they took over the palace. He knows something is up now. But they browbeat him, they taunt him. The fighter says "Okay, you don't have to come in. We'll come out." "Are you serious?" "Yeah, call your guys off. We'll call our guys off. We'll do this five-on-one."

So they finally fight Tempus and keep him occupied long enough. They're beaten. They're beaten handily. But even though they're beaten, they're bleeding out, they're still taunting him, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in "Commando". "You don't want to just cut my head off. You want to stick a knife in me and see what's going on when you turn it." Tempus is like "I can do it." So he takes his knife out. The one guy who Tempus raped his girlfriend (the barmaid) says "Start with me, motherfucker. Start with me." Tempus takes his knife and jams it in his gut and he starts turning it. And I'm like "You know, you're going to die." "Yeah, I don't care." He eventually cuts his heart out and he rips it out and laughs and he starts eating his heart. 

And all of a sudden his wounds are healing. "Ah, I feel so good. I feel so good." He's enjoying it so much. The other guy starts "Do me next. Do me next, you bitch." So he comes up to the next one. He's so occupied, in such glee that his pain is leaving, that the woman they were talking to plunges her needles into his spine and disrupts his form. But it doesn't work. 

It drops him. It knocks him out, but it takes more than that to drop Tempus Thales. Everyone who has potions quaffs what few potions they have and jumps on the guy. There are four of them left and they jump on the guy. They're raining shots down. They pummel this guy into jelly. Even the puddles of jelly, they're hitting, because the puddles of jelly are moving. Then they take like kerosene and burn that. And the ashes are moving, so they take the ashes and throw the ashes. So they're like "We killed Tempus Thales." 

I know even hardcore fans are like "You can't kill Tempus that way." And you're probably right. But this was such a hardfought victory and they worked so hard for it. They knew they hadn't beaten this guy definitively. He was going to come back one day and it wasn't going to be no hundred years from now. But today, they won. 

So that was basically where the campaign ended. They had thrown Thieves' World into upheaval. They'd taken over Sanctuary. I was going to do the thing where there was another race of people called the Beysib from across the sea and they would take over. In the novels--this is not much of a spoiler--in the novels, the Beysib come and take over the city from the Rankans anyway. So I was going to fast forward to where the Beysib have come and conquered Sanctuary out from under them. 

But I didn't let them have anything. They planned it. They deserved it. They did it. It was a plan that probably wasn't going to work. It cost them dearly to make it work. And it worked. One of the best examples of player teamwork and one of the worst examples of player teamwork, when they were considering turning Martin in. I don't think he was ever in any real danger of that happening because they never trusted Tempus. But it was one of those things where the money was so good. 

They weren't playing noble characters, but they were playing smart characters. They were playing self-interested characters but also had a mind for the bigger picture. It was some of the best teamwork I'd ever seen where they didn't use knowledge of the novels to an unfair advantage. They used knowledge of how people act and their knowledge of the characters as I portrayed them against them. 

They used their own weaknesses as strengths, like Martin with spellcasting or the psychology of the city, the greed of certain people, and how predictable certain people can be when it comes to rage or greed or love. 

A few people were kind of flaky, like Matthew with his "he's not that kind of thief" character. He was the character who died in the initial fight because we could never establish what he did well. And apparently, fighting was not it. They weren't necessarily the traditional lawful good hero-type guys, but they were the kind of guys who could read a situation and know how to turn it to their advantage. They were impulsive, sure, and to a degree, they would rebel against being railroaded into a campaign hook. 

I didn't have to come up with adventures. I didn't have to come up with a reason to get them involved. They instigated a situation and the situation progressed from one step to another. Things would happen, and they would react to it.