The Canary in the Undercroft

Bram —and look, I'm just saying, Team Anzu is a fine name, it's a fine working title, and Johnny was being dramatic about it—

Maeve It's a bad name, Bram. It's a bad name and you know it. Benny said Heartbreakers right there at the top of the session and everyone just — fumbled past it.

Bram Heartbreakers is good, I'll give you that, Heartbreakers has swagger, but you can't just — you can't name your faction after your bit, Maeve, that's not how you build a brand, you gotta earn it first, and they hadn't even killed a heart yet at that point — well, no, they'd killed Whirling in Rags, but that was—

Maeve They'd killed Whirling in Rags the previous session. They'd harvested two hearts. They'd earned it.

Bram Okay, fine, but you know what, that's not the point, the point is they went down into the Undercroft and they went down HARD, like, this was a proper dungeon crawl, and we haven't seen these guys do a real dungeon crawl yet, and it was — I mean, Johnny's recap at the top was beautiful, right, just this breathless — "we met Maranthorn, we paid him in sandwiches"—

Maeve They paid a debt-enslaved mongrel folk worker in sandwiches.

Bram In sandwiches! Daily sandwich deliveries! And it was — okay, it was maybe not the most airtight promise they've ever made, but it got them past the mongrel folk, it got them into the forsaken sector, and then Argyle just — lights up. Divine Wrath, holy water, the whole nine yards, just obliterates the Sinister Six cultists in what, one turn?

Maeve The Oculums and the Oris creatures, yes. And that was a genuine turning point, I'll grant you. Argyle's Holy Water plus Divine Wrath crit-killed both Oculums and an Orus in a single round. That's not nothing.

Bram It's not nothing, it's everything! That's the whole combat right there! And that's why they kept going, that's the whole reason they pushed deeper, because when your champion just nukes an encounter off the board, you feel invincible, you feel like—

Maeve You feel reckless. That's what you feel. And that's exactly what happened.

Bram No, no, no, that's not — okay, look, they found the ink ribbon, they found the manuscripts, they found the skull key, they got what they came for, they could've turned around, but they didn't, and I think that's the right call because — and this is the thing nobody's talking about — they're already in a Fane. They crossed that threshold last session. They passed through the air curtain. They're IN it. You don't turn around when you're in a Fane, you push forward and you find the heart, because the heart is the whole point.

Maeve The heart is the whole point if you have the resources to take it. Which, by the end of this session, they manifestly did not. But we'll get there. Let's talk about the piston room first, because that's where the resource bleeding starts.

Bram The piston room! Oh, the piston room was incredible, just this — imagine it, right, you're in this warped hallway deep in the guts of the Strider, the walls are twisting, the floor is tilted, you're leaning rightward, and then you come out into this enormous cylindrical chamber, eight massive pistons crisscrossing back and forth, slamming into the ceiling, and the whole thing is just covered in spider webbing, floor to ceiling—

Maeve And Benny falls through the floor.

Bram Benny falls through the floor! Just — whoops, no floor! And he catches himself, barely, and he's spooked like a cat, and it's — it was funny, it was a great moment, but it also tells you something about this place, right, the architecture itself is compromised, the Undercroft is not what they were told it was, Josh made a point of saying this is not new construction, this is old, this is warped—

Maeve Right, and that's a significant lore beat, actually. Josh explicitly said there's no way the Undercroft got to the state it's in within six months. So the Strider was not freshly built. Whatever it is, it's old, or it's built on something old. And then Anzu — actually, it was Anzu who noticed, right, that the Fane looks like the Strider. The Fane's structure mirrors the Strider's structure. Which raises the question—

Bram Which raises the GREAT question, the best question of the night, which is: can a heart get co-opted? And Johnny asks it, right, he's like, can Big Bug come in and just — take over a heart? And Anzu rolls, what was it, a thirty-eight on occultism with Johnny aiding—

Maeve Johnny's aid was a forty-one, which is — yes, it was a crit on the aid, Anzu's own roll was high, and the total was a thirty-eight, which also crit'd. And what Josh gave them was genuinely important lore: yes, a heart can be co-opted by something more powerful. You can't force it against its will directly — mind control doesn't work on hearts — but you can coerce it. You can, and I'm quoting the spirit of what Josh said here, push the right levers. And the Fane's structure stays in the image the heart produced, even if the heart is being made to do something else.

Bram So Big Bug — and I love that they just started calling it Big Bug, that's beautiful, that's pure table energy — Big Bug could have come in and muscled this heart into doing something for the spiders instead of for the Strider. And that's — I mean, that's a huge reveal, because it means the hearts aren't these sacrosanct things, they're not untouchable, they can be dominated, or coerced, or—

Maeve Not dominated. Coerced. There's a difference, and Josh was careful about it. You can't mind-control a heart. But you can apply pressure. And that's — look, we don't know what's actually happening with this particular heart yet. We don't know if it's been co-opted. We know the Fane looks like the Strider, we know there are spiders everywhere, and we know the linkages — the mechanical linkages in the Strider's guts — have been gummed up by webbing in places. That's circumstantial.

Bram It's pretty damn convincing circumstantial! The webs are everywhere, the spiders are everywhere, the machinery is being choked—

Maeve Some of the machinery. Josh was clear that the pistons in that room were still functioning. Some linkages were gummed up, others weren't. So it's not a total takeover, if it is one. It's partial.

Bram Fine, partial, but — okay, here's where I want to push on you, because you said the resource bleeding starts in the piston room, and I think that's unfair, because what happened in the piston room is they had a problem — hundred-foot gap, pistons in the way, webs on the walls — and they solved it. Anzu cast Fly on Argyle, Anzu cast Levitate on Benny, Johnny Dimension Doored across, and they just — they flew over. Problem solved. No damage, no combat, clean.

Maeve They burned a third-rank spell and a fourth-rank spell. Fly and Levitate. And then Johnny burned a Dimension Door. That's three spell slots to cross a room they didn't need to cross. They could have turned back.

Bram Turned back to what? They're in a Fane! If they turn back, they've still got to navigate a quarter mile of webbed hallway to get out, and they haven't found the heart yet—

Maeve They could have turned back, rested, come back with a better plan. Instead they pushed forward into unknown territory with diminishing resources, and that is the story of this entire session. Every decision after this point is downstream of that choice.

Bram I just — I can't agree with that, because the whole point of a dungeon crawl is that you push until you can't push anymore, and then you rest in the dungeon, that's — that's classic, that's how it works—

Maeve That's how it works when you have a safe place to rest. Which they didn't. And don't have. Still don't.

Bram We'll come back to that. But first — the piston room crossing, Johnny goes first, he Dimension Doors across, he does a perception check, a thirty-one, which is good but not amazing, Josh makes him roll a d-two, a literal coin flip, for whether there's a button or switch on the other side—

Maeve And he lost the coin flip.

Bram He lost the coin flip! And Johnny's reaction, just — "no, that's the bad one!" — it was perfect, it was this beautiful moment of — of the dice giveth and the dice taketh away, because he rolled well enough to get the perception check but then the coin flip just—

Maeve It's a funny moment, but it also means they crossed the room, burned those spells, and got nothing for it. No switch, no shortcut, no way to turn off the pistons. Just a doorway deeper in.

Bram A doorway deeper in, which is what they wanted! They wanted to go deeper in! That's the whole point!

Maeve Fine. Let's talk about what they found deeper in, then.

Bram The silk curtain room. Oh, this was — this was gorgeous, right, this enormous cylindrical shaft, like an old elevator shaft that's been commandeered, rafters crossing at different angles, and from the ceiling, just thousands and thousands of strands of spider silk, hanging down like curtains, and in among the silk you can see these blue-black figures moving, and these nodules, these silk-wrapped shapes—

Maeve Egg sacs, presumably.

Bram Presumably! And Benny, because he's in front, because they gave him the Obsidian Goggles and sent him in as the canary—

Maeve They literally called him a canary. They painted him yellow in their heads.

Bram Because it's funny! And Benny rolls a thirty-three on perception, which is excellent, and he sees the spiders before the spiders see him, and Josh gives them the chance to be stealthy. And this is where Johnny — I've got to hand it to Johnny, this was the play of the night, the Illusory Creature. He creates this big undead-looking thing, makes it look like it works for Grayson and the Necrolog folks—

Maeve That's a nice touch, by the way. Using Grayson's aesthetic as the disguise. It's both a distraction and a — it's a little dig, right? It's Johnny being Johnny.

Bram It's perfect! And he has the illusion trip and get caught in the web and start screaming, and the performance check — he rolls a thirty-five on the performance check, which is a crit, and Josh lets it cover the whole group for stealth. And the diversion works, the spiders go swarming up toward the illusion, and the party sneaks across. It's clean, it's elegant, it's — I mean, this is what a bard is FOR, right? This is the bard fantasy.

Maeve I'll give you this one. The illusory creature diversion was well-executed. The performance check was excellent. The stealth checks were — well, they were mixed. Argyle crit with a thirty-one, Johnny got a twenty-three with a mythic point, Anzu rolled a twenty, Benny got a twenty-seven. But Josh let the crit and the failure cancel out, so they all got through. And I think that ruling was—

Bram Generous? Yeah, it was generous, but it was also — the crit and the failure canceling is a reasonable way to handle group checks, and the diversion was so good that it justified giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Maeve I think it was more than generous. Benny's twenty-seven is a regular success. Johnny's twenty-three — on a mythic point, mind you — is a success. Anzu's twenty is a failure, Argyle's thirty-one is a crit. Josh had the crit cancel the failure, making it four regular successes. But by the letter, you'd want to look at whether Anzu's failure actually matters independently. In group stealth, it depends on how you run it. Josh ran it kindly. I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm saying it's kind.

Bram It's kind! And you know what, I'm fine with that, because they earned it with the diversion, and the scene was great, and then they get to the other side and they find — the shrine. The statues. And this is where the session goes from good dungeon crawl to genuinely significant lore drop.

Maeve Yes. This is the part that matters most, I think, and I want to make sure we get it right. They enter this chamber, and it's got stone — granite or marble — in a place where everything else is metal. The Strider is metal. The Undercroft is metal. And suddenly there's stone, and statues, and religious iconography. Argyle rolls a thirty-seven on religion.

Bram A thirty-seven! Which is —

Maeve Which is very high. And what he sees is six statues. Six figures. One in old Scale armor. One in the vestments of the Church of the Compelled from Raelion — which Johnny recognizes, and which Josh was clear no longer exists in any form. Two in Belvedere academic robes. One wearing clothes made of leaves and vines. And one — one very clearly in the vestments of the Iridescent Church, a face that everyone at the table would recognize: Aurelia the First.

Bram Aurelia the First! The original Pontifex! And the six statues are her party — the group she led on her first crusade against the Dark Ages civilizations. And Josh drops this context, right, that each member of the party swore to a different outer god, and after the party broke up, they went their separate ways and formed their own religions and organizations. The Scale, Belvedere, the Iridescent Church — they all trace back to this original group.

Maeve Which means this shrine is old. Anzu tries to date it with an academia check, gets a twenty-nine with Johnny's aid, and Josh tells them: probably minted before the time of Aurelia the Second, because that's when the church started separating its image from the other party members. Aurelia the Second was born one-oh-one AG. Current year is eight-sixty-three. So this shrine is roughly seven hundred years old, give or take.

Bram Seven hundred years! In the Undercroft of the Strider! A shrine to all six outer gods, collectively, from before they split up! That's — I mean, that's a holy site, that's a pilgrimage site, and it's been — it's been webbed up and infested with spiders, and possibly co-opted by Big Bug. That's sacrilege on top of sacrilege, and it raises this enormous question: what IS the Strider? What's it built on? What's it built around?

Maeve That's the question I think the table hasn't fully grappled with yet. They know the Undercroft is old. They know this shrine is old. They know the Fane down here mirrors the Strider. And now they know there's a shrine to all six outer gods collectively — which, as Josh noted, you don't see in the modern day, because the narrative doesn't support talking about how everyone used to be one big group. This is a pre-schism site. On the Strider. Under the Strider. Something the Strider was built on top of, or around, or—

Bram Or the Strider IS the shrine, in some way, right? Like, maybe the Strider itself is — okay, I'm getting into speculation, I'll pull back, but the point is this is a massive lore beat and I don't think the table has fully processed it yet because they're too busy trying to survive.

Maeve Which brings us to the combat.

Bram The combat! Okay, so they're in the shrine, they're being stealthy, they can see the spiders moving around, and they decide — and this is where I think the argument about resource management really heats up — they decide to buff before engaging. They want to get off spells before combat starts. Argyle does Benediction, Johnny does Dirge of Doom, and they need to roll stealth to see if they get a second round of prep.

Maeve And the stealth rolls are bad. Argyle gets a twenty-nine, which is good, but Anzu — I'm sorry, I need to check — actually, it was Argyle who got the twenty-nine, and someone got a sixteen.

Bram The sixteen blew it. And Josh was clear: a twenty-nine is not good enough to save a sixteen. So the buff spells going off alerted the spiders, and combat starts. And here's my take: that's unlucky, but the decision to buff was correct. You want to go into a fight against unknown enemies with your auras up, especially when you can see they're large creatures with sword arms — sword arms, Maeve! Spiders with swords for front legs! That's — Josh said "their front two arms are swords" and everyone just lost it—

Maeve It's a horrifying image, yes. Giant spiders with blade-limbs. And the combat itself was — let me make sure I have the sequence right. Johnny goes first, casts Bless, then does a Distracting Performance to hide Benny. Rolls a thirty-eight on performance, which succeeds. Benny's hidden. Argyle goes, has Benediction and Bane running, raises his shield. Then the swarms act, shoot a web at Argyle, he barely makes the reflex save. Then Benny — Benny just goes off. Double slice, crit, sixty-two damage—

Bram Sixty-two damage! Benny just — eviscerates them! And this is the thing about Benny, right, this is the nine-year-old android child just going absolutely nuclear on these spiders, and it's — you had to be there, honestly, just watching Mike roll dice and just go "kill kill kill kill"—

Maeve The "kill kill kill" was a highlight, yes. But I want to talk about the apothecary bug, because I think that's the real story of this combat.

Bram The apothecary bug! Oh my god, the apothecary bug. Okay, so — so Johnny's standing there, he's been doing his bard thing, and suddenly this little spider — this little spider — jumps onto him and bites down. Josh makes Johnny roll a d-eight to determine which poison he gets. Johnny rolls a seven. And Josh says "no."

Maeve The d-eight determines which of several poisons the apothecary bug injects. Johnny rolled a seven, which was — it was just basic spider venom, I think, or something relatively mild. But then on the bug's next turn, it bites him again, and this time it's Sloughing Toxin, which — the description Josh gave was genuinely unsettling: your muscles start separating from your bones. Every time you take an action with the attack or move trait, you take poison damage.

Bram And Johnny's a bard! Everything he does has the attack or move trait! He's just — he's melting, he's melting while trying to fight, and then — THEN — the bug crawls into his bag and drinks his healing potion. It steals his healing potion! The apothecary bug has Potion Sight — which is apparently a real thing in Pathfinder Two-ee, Josh said "fun fact, the apothecary bug has potion sight, that's a real thing"—

Maeve It is a real ability. The apothecary bug can sense potions and will attempt to consume them, which destroys the potion and heals the bug. It's — I'll admit, it's a well-designed enemy for a party that carries a lot of consumables. It's just a nightmare for this specific group at this specific moment.

Bram It's a nightmare! And Johnny — Noah's reaction, just this mounting fury, "I hate this bug, this bug is my arch enemy" — and he means it! He means it with every fiber of his being! And the thing is, the bug keeps rolling well, and Johnny keeps — he tries Fear, he tries Inventive Vulnerability, he tries Bone Mow—

Maeve Bon mot.

Bram Bon mot, right, bon mot, and the bug just — it doesn't care! It's immune to his BS! It's this little spider that just will not die and keeps poisoning him and stealing his stuff!

Maeve And then it gets worse, because the bug hits Johnny with Clown Monarch.

Bram Clown Monarch! Which — okay, explain this to the audience, because this is—

Maeve Clown Monarch is a poison effect that, at stage one, causes you to fall prone and makes you roll a flat check to stand up. Your legs give out. So Johnny is on the ground, melting, poisoned, prone, and his legs won't work. And he just — stays down. He just lies there. "I'm not getting up."

Bram "I'm not getting up." It's the funniest and saddest thing, because he's right! Why would he get up? Everything he does hurts him, the bug is on him, his legs don't work — just stay down, Johnny, just stay down and let the fighters handle it.

Maeve And eventually they do. Argyle burns the bug off Johnny with Holy Light — literally puts a hand on the side of Johnny's head and blasts the bug — and then Anzu hits it with an Amped Telekinetic Projectile, and then Johnny — Johnny, on the ground, prone, poisoned — summons a Horde of Underlings, six tiny copies of himself that just swarm the bug, and then he stabs it with a dagger.

Bram He stabs it with a dagger! He uses a mythic point to crit, and the bug has seven hit points left, seven, and Johnny's rolling two d-four, and everyone's just holding their breath, and — he kills it! He kills the bug! It's this beautiful, cathartic, ramshackle kill where everyone's just chipping away at this horrible little spider, and Johnny finally gets to be the one to put it down.

Maeve And then the bug explodes, leaving remnants of all its poisons spread across the floor.

Bram Of course it does! Of course it explodes! It's the gift that keeps on giving! But — okay, here's where I want to come back to the resource argument, because by the time the bugs are dead, right, the party is hurting. Anzu caught Spider Venom from a crit — stage two, sickened two, clumsy one. Argyle got grabbed by webbing. Johnny's been through three different poisons. And their spell slots are just — gone. Argyle's burned all his fourths, most of his thirds. Anzu's down to scraps. Johnny's running on fumes.

Maeve This is my point. This is exactly my point. They entered this combat already down a Fly and a Levitate from the piston room. They entered it after burning a Dimension Door. They entered it without having rested since the previous session's fights. And now they're at the bottom of unfamiliar stairs, in a Fane, in the Undercroft, with almost no spell slots left, multiple party members poisoned, and no safe place to rest.

Bram But they won! They won the fight! All the spiders are dead, the apothecary bug is dead, they're bloodied but standing—

Maeve Some of them are standing. Johnny was on the floor. Argyle had been grabbed. Anzu was sickened. And they're talking about resting right there in the shrine. In the spider-infested Fane. With no Rope Trick, no Leomund's Hut, no gingerbread house — which, by the way, Johnny sacrificed to a heart previously because he thought they wouldn't be doing a dungeon crawl. Two sessions later.

Bram That is — okay, that is a funny and painful callback, I'll give you that. But the thing is, they don't have anywhere else to go. They can't make it back a quarter mile through webbed hallways. They can't rest in the piston room. The shrine is the best defensible position they've found. And Benny doesn't need to rest — Benny's a fighter, he's always at full capacity, he only took — what, eight points of damage all fight?

Maeve Benny is not the issue. Benny is never the issue. Benny is a nine-year-old android who does sixty-two damage on a crit and has no resources to exhaust. The issue is that their primary spellcasters are empty, their support is poisoned, and they haven't even found the heart yet. Josh ended the session with "we'll find out next time if there's a heart in this room, or perhaps in the room further up the stairs." They're at the foot of the stairs. They haven't reached the heart. They don't know what's protecting it.

Bram And that's the cliffhanger! That's a great cliffhanger! You're bloodied, you're depleted, you're standing in a seven-hundred-year-old shrine to six outer gods surrounded by spider corpses, and there are stairs going up, and you don't know what's at the top. That's — that's perfect dungeon crawl pacing, Maeve, that's exactly the tension you want.

Maeve It's perfect pacing if they survive next session. If they go up those stairs with no spells and fight something with a heart — something that can co-opt a Fane, something that can coerce a heart into serving it — and they TPK, then this session is the session where they made the wrong call. And I think they know it. I think you can hear it in the table chatter at the end, where they're all going "there's no way there's a bigger spider" and Josh is just laughing.

Bram Josh's laugh! Josh's laugh at the end was — it was malevolent, it was pure GM energy, just this—"that would be terrible if there was a big spider in this area with spiders in it, that would be crazy"—

Maeve He's not even hiding it.

Bram He's not hiding it! But — okay, here's my counterpoint. Even if there IS something at the top of those stairs, right, even if there's a boss, the party has options. They can rest. They can take ten minutes, patch up wounds — Argyle has Treat Wounds, he did it during the fight, patched Johnny up between rounds. They can recover some HP, maybe recover from the poisons. They're not at zero, they're at low.

Maeve They can't recover spell slots from a ten-minute rest. They need a full night. And they have no safe place to take one. That's the squeeze.

Bram That's the squeeze, and I think — look, I think that's intentional. I think Josh has been building toward this. He said it himself at the end: "I've made you too complacent. You haven't been in areas long enough where you might have to rest with enemies nearby, so no one has any spells for doing that." He knows. He designed this. He put them in a position where their usual tools don't work, where they can't just pop a hut and sleep safe, and that's — that's good GMing. That's challenging your players.

Maeve It's good GMing if the challenge is fair. It's good GMing if there's a path through that doesn't require resources they don't have. We don't know that yet. We'll find out next session.

Bram We'll find out next session. But — can I just — before we wrap, can I just say one more thing about the apothecary bug fight? Because I think there's a real design question here, and I want to hear your take. The apothecary bug — is it a fair enemy? Is it a fair enemy to put against a party that's already depleted, that's already in a Fane, that's already dealing with sword-spiders? Because the potion stealing, the multiple poisons, the d-eight random poison table — that's a lot of mechanics on one little creature.

Maeve It's a lot, but it's — the apothecary bug is a real bestiary creature, Josh confirmed that. He said "this is a real guy." The potion sight, the random poisons, the sloughing toxin, the clown monarch — those are all real abilities. It's not a Josh invention. It's a real creature that he placed appropriately in an environment where it makes sense. It's a creature that lives in dark places, that feeds on potions, that uses poisons. It belongs in the Undercroft. It belongs in a spider-infested Fane. I think it's fair.

Bram Even the potion stealing? Even crawling into Johnny's bag and drinking his healing potion?

Maeve Especially the potion stealing. That's the creature's whole thing. It's an apothecary bug — it steals potions. That's what it does. If you don't want it to steal your potions, kill it before it gets to your bag. They didn't, because they were dealing with the sword-spiders first, which was the correct tactical priority — the sword-spiders were doing more damage — but the consequence of that priority is the bug gets to your consumables. That's a tradeoff, not a gimmick.

Bram I — okay, I actually think you're right about that. I think the apothecary bug is fair. I think it's brutal, and I think Johnny will have nightmares about it for weeks, but it's fair. It's a creature doing what it does, and the party made choices that let it do its thing.

Maeve Johnny will never forget the apothecary bug. Johnny will be talking about the apothecary bug in season five.

Bram Johnny will be writing poems about the apothecary bug. Bad poems. Angry poems. It's going to be — honestly, it's going to be great content. But — okay, final thought. The shrine. The statues. Aurelia's party. I think this is the thing that's going to matter most, long-term. Not the combat, not the resource drain, not the apothecary bug — the shrine. Because if the Strider is built on a seven-hundred-year-old site of worship to all six outer gods, and if that site has been co-opted by something, by Big Bug or whatever's up those stairs, then the whole pilgrimage — the whole thing they're on, the nineteen orgs, the tithe, the Harlequin, all of it — it's built on top of something much older and much stranger than any of them realize.

Maeve I think you're right about that. And I think the question of whether the heart down here is still serving the Strider or serving something else is the question that will define the back half of this arc. If they kill the heart and the Fane collapses — if the structure collapses with it, because the Fane is grafted onto existing structure — they could damage the Strider itself. That's a risk they haven't talked about.

Bram They haven't! And that's — okay, that's actually a great point, because Josh was clear: when a Fane is grafted onto existing structure, killing the heart removes the Fane qualities but the structure remains. But if the structure IS the Strider — if the Fane is woven into the Strider's own machinery — then killing the heart might not collapse the building, but it might change what the building does. It might change the Strider.

Maeve Or it might free the Strider from whatever's coercing its heart. If Big Bug is co-opting a heart that's supposed to serve the Strider, killing Big Bug and freeing the heart might be the best thing they could do for the pilgrimage.

Bram Or it might make the Strider stop working entirely, and then all nineteen orgs are stranded in the void with no way to reach the wall. That's — that's a real choice, right? That's a real dilemma. Do you kill the heart and risk the Strider, or do you leave it and risk whatever Big Bug is doing with it?

Maeve That's the dilemma, and they're going to have to face it next session with no spell slots and no safe rest. So.

Bram So it's going to be great. It's going to be a disaster and it's going to be great. Happy birthday to Tanner, I guess.

Maeve Josh said he can't kill Anzu because it'd be too rude right before his birthday. I'm sure that restraint will last exactly until the first roll next session.

Bram It absolutely will not. He's going to open next session with a lich that steals experience points.

Maeve He literally threatened that. He literally said "I'm going to make you fight an A-D-and-D lich that can take levels from you as one of its attacks."

Bram And then he realized they're on milestone leveling so it wouldn't work, and you could just — you could hear the disappointment. He was so upset. He really wanted that lich.

Maeve He really did. God help them when he figures out a workaround.