The Quiz, the Maid, and the Ashen Pact

Bram Okay so I want to start with the elephant in the room which is that Josh — our GM, our beloved dungeon master — spent the first chunk of this session having an A I write us a trivia quiz about our own campaign instead of, you know, playing the game, and somehow that was the most engaged I've seen the table in weeks.

Maeve It was a recap tool, Bram. He said it himself, he wasn't sure it was a good one. He generated questions from the session beats on his phone on the subway.

Bram And Tanner won! Anzu won the quiz about his own life! That's poetry, that's cinema, that's—

Maeve That's what happens when you're the only one paying attention to the lore. Jorge was guessing. Mike was guessing. Noah was guessing. Tanner actually remembered what Yao told him about the Voidsong and what the Machine God said about the sleeping clan. It's not surprising.

Bram Fine, fine. But here's what I actually want to talk about — because the quiz fades and then we're back in combat, mid-fight, and the table is scattered across vat-tops in this corrupted hospital, and the Maid is banging on the glass of the central tank trying to wake up the heart, and the whole thing has this incredible ticking-clock energy where you can feel the session could go sideways at any moment.

Maeve That's because it could have. That was the actual stakes of the encounter. The Maid was spending actions every turn slamming on the tank to wake up Lifeline — the heart — and if that thing woke up while all the creatures in the vats were still alive, that was a T P K. Josh said as much at the end.

Bram He did! He straight-up said it, like, oh yeah, two actions left, if it had woken up you'd all be dead. And I think the table kind of knew that instinctively even during the fight, because the way they all pivoted to focus the Maid—

Maeve They didn't all pivot. That's what's interesting. Benny stayed on the Maid, yes. Anzu kept hitting her with Frostbite from range. But Argyle was up in the air healing people and taking potshots with Bone Shaker, and Johnny was running around being chased by everything else in the room. The focus fire was messy.

Bram But that's what made it work! The whack-a-mole! Every time the Maid stood back up — because she had regeneration, because of course she did — Benny just knocked her right back down. It was this beautiful, ugly rhythm where she stands, he hits, she falls. Stands, hits, falls. And it bought them the time they needed.

Maeve It was effective, I'll give you that. But it was luck as much as tactics. Benny was rolling terribly all night — Josh pulled up his dice statistics at one point, his average d twenty roll was something tragic, like five—

Bram Statistically improbable!

Maeve Statistically improbable, yes. And yet his attack rolls against the Maid kept landing just well enough to knock her prone every time she stood up. That's not a strategy you can replicate. That's a prayer that kept getting answered.

Bram A prayer answered by the gods of drama, Maeve! Sometimes the dice know what story you're telling. But okay, here's the thing I want to push on — Josh flagged at the top of the session that the whole party walked into the hospital clustered up, four abreast through the front door, after Benny had already been hit by a hostile spell. He said it almost plaintively, like, you know, there were ways to navigate that didn't involve walking in a line into the front entrance.

Maeve And he was right. They got hit by Black Tentacles, they got Mindfogged, they were bunched up for every cone and area effect the Maker had. That's not a tactical error you brush off. They should have scouted. Othello — Anzu's familiar — was right there. They used him last session to scout the Machine God's chamber. They didn't even try this time.

Bram They were coming off a brutal descent, they were low on resources from the spider fights, and honestly I think the table just got cocky. They'd cleared the Machine God's Fane, they'd allied with this ancient heart, they leveled up — they walked in feeling like the unstoppable protagonists and the hospital said, actually, no.

Maeve That's a fair read. And to be fair to them, once combat started, Johnny's opening was genuinely clever. He cast Silence on Benny, which turned Benny into a walking antimagic zone, and then he Calmed two of the Skindrones, which took them out of the fight for two or three rounds. That's a lot of value from one turn.

Bram Johnny's whole kit in this fight was these weird lateral plays. He moonwalks up a vat, he Calms the drones, he creates an illusory fire-Benny to flank the Maid. And then at the end, when the Maid's down and he's bleeding out and drained and surrounded by corpses, he just — he tries to diplomatize the Maker. He rolls a diplomacy check against the Maker's will D C.

Maeve He missed the D C by two. And then he did it again and hit, and it did mental damage equal to his level, which is eight.

Bram Eight points! Which is nothing! But the idea that this bard, half-dead, just clears his throat and yells the same quip louder—

Maeve That's very Johnny. But it's also not what killed the Maker. What killed the Maker was Argyle landing two slashing hits and the Maker being weak to slashing. That's the thing people forget about Pathfinder — it's not the flashy plays that finish fights, it's finding the weakness and exploiting it.

Bram Oh, speaking of weaknesses — silver. Johnny's Needle Darts, he loaded them with silver, and when they hit the Maid's body it bubbled up with this black caustic liquid and the whole thing collapsed into ooze. They figured out the weakness by process of elimination. They tried mental damage, they tried fire, and then Johnny just goes, well, let's try silver, and it worked.

Maeve They should have checked earlier. Nobody recalled knowledge on the Maid until late in the fight, and even then nobody specifically tested weaknesses. They just stumbled into silver at the end. If they'd done that two rounds earlier, the fight would have been shorter and Johnny would have taken less damage.

Bram Johnny took so much damage. Everything in that room wanted a piece of him. The Skindrones, the Ugathal, they all just beelined for him. He was grabbed, flayed, bleeding, drained, and at one point he was confused — well, stunned, because he spent a mythic point to downgrade the confusion.

Maeve Which was the right call. Confusion for a full minute would have been catastrophic. Stunned one is survivable.

Bram Right. And then the other big discovery — Anzu, after the fight, starts poking around the vats. He rolls a thirty-six occultism, which is just obscene, and he figures out that the whole hospital setup is a closed circuit. Blue glowing liquid cycling through the vats, through the creatures, through the heart called Lifeline. And the liquid — Josh says it's similar to what they saw in the Sable and Suns weapons and underneath Teller Run in Hallia.

Maeve That's a significant lore connection. Sable and Suns is a military contractor that supplies weapons across the continent. If the same liquid that powers their firearms is running through a corrupted heart's hospital deep in the Strider, that's a thread that goes somewhere. We don't know where yet, but it's there.

Bram And Anzu also figures out there's a valve on the heart — you can just walk up and pluck at it and kill the thing. But here's the dilemma Josh lays out: if you kill the heart, the creatures in the vats might wake up. If you poison the liquid through the intake ports, the creatures die but so does the heart, and you lose the energy. You can't do both. There's no way to sequence it so you get the energy and kill the creatures safely.

Maeve And the party had already found one dose of spider venom from the apothecary bug corpses near the Machine God. One dose, level five poison. Enough to contaminate the whole circuit.

Bram But before they do that — and this is where the session goes from good combat session to genuinely memorable — Anzu says he wants to dive into the mind of one of the sleeping creatures.

Maeve And I want to talk about whether that was reckless, because I think it was.

Bram It was absolutely reckless! That's why it's great! He's a level eight psychic who has never done this before. His family are the mind-birds, the Qureshi family, they do this academically, and Anzu ran away from home. He has the theoretical knowledge and zero field experience with this kind of deep mind dive. And he wants to stick his head into the brain of a seven-hundred-year-old servant of an outer god.

Maeve And he could have been enthralled. Josh made him roll a will save mid-dive, and he failed it. If Johnny hadn't had that Disgraceful ability—

Bram The thing where if an ally fails a will save against a mental effect, Johnny can reroll it with a circumstance bonus by calling them a disgrace—

Maeve By calling Anzu a disgrace, yes. And it worked. Anzu's reroll hit thirty-three, which was enough to pull back. But if Johnny didn't have that ability, or if Johnny had already used it, or if Johnny wasn't in range—

Bram Then Anzu's standing there with glassy eyes and the rest of the party has to figure out how to pull a psychic out of an outer god's song while standing in a room full of sleeping monsters. That's a bad day.

Maeve It's a T P K-adjacent day. And Benny was right to be nervous about it. He said as much — if Anzu gets enthralled and wakes these things up, that's worse than losing the information.

Bram But here's the counter — and I think this is where I land on Anzu's decision — he's been carrying the Voidsong for over half a year. It's been driving his whole arc. His sister is affected by the Herald's harmony. He has a research project going to try to reverse it. And now he's standing in front of creatures that have been sleeping for seven hundred years with a song in their heads, and he can hear it, and it's different from the Voidsong. This is potentially the breakthrough he's been looking for. The risk-reward makes sense.

Maeve I don't disagree that the information was valuable. What I'm saying is that Anzu had no way to assess the risk before he went in. Josh told him he couldn't risk-assess it. He just had to try and hope. And the augury Argyle cast — recall knowledge, whatever — came back oscillating between good and bad, which is the augury equivalent of a shrug.

Bram The augury was useless! It was just good, bad, good, bad, good, bad. Which, honestly, is the most honest augury result I've ever seen. Sometimes the universe just doesn't know.

Maeve Or sometimes the G M doesn't want to tip his hand.

Bram Same thing. But okay — the vision. Anzu dives in, and what he sees is — it's the plain from the Voidsong dreams. The riverbank, the wildflowers, the city in the distance with the weird non-Euclidean architecture and the yellow roofs. But it's on fire. The whole plain is burning. And towering over the horizon, like they're looking down at a diorama, are six figures.

Maeve Six figures. And Josh described each of them. A figure in stacked crowns with no face — that's Regent. A robed creature with too many arms holding spell foci and one green eye — Esoterica. Two torsos locked in mutual combat, each stabbing the other — War. A tall robed figure with horns — Giant. A burning figure tied to a stake raining fire down — Pyre. And a seemingly normal human, except when you look closer, the jaw splits into mandibles and there's a horn coming out of the chest — Herald.

Bram The Herald. The same name the Machine God used for the false god whose followers took over the Strider. And the thing that's been driving Anzu's sister's harmony. And the song Anzu hears in this vision — it's different from the Voidsong. It's gentler. It's welcoming. It pulls up childhood memories. It feels like contentment. But underneath it, there's a beat, a percussion, something driving it. And the Voidsong is just the harmony — one singer. This is a full song. Multiple components.

Maeve And the only lyric Anzu could make out — because his perception check was only a twenty, which Josh said was a failure for this — was the phrase "ashen-packed" repeating over and over. Which is where they got the name Ashen Pact.

Bram I love that. I love that the name for the big bad is a misheard lyric from a dream. That's not a name they chose for themselves. That's a word Anzu barely caught through the noise.

Maeve It's also not confirmed to be their actual name. The wiki says they offered no name of their own. The witnesses coined it from the lyric. This could be a title, a description, a misunderstanding — we don't know yet.

Bram You're right, and that's fair. But the vision itself — let me push on what it means. Because the table went feral after this. They started connecting the Ashen Pact to the Thessians, to the echo fragments of Formless, to the Sinister Six—

Maeve The Sinister Six and the Ashen Pact are not the same thing.

Bram Are they not?

Maeve We don't know that they are. The Sinister Six — or what the table's been calling the Sinister Six — are six outer gods that the mongrel folk in the Forbidden Sector were worshipping. The Ashen Pact are six figures seen in a vision from a sleeping creature's mind. Six and six is a coincidence until someone in the game confirms it isn't.

Bram But come on, Maeve. Six outer gods. Six figures in the vision. The creatures in the vats have black raiments — same as the creatures in the Forbidden Sector worshipping the Sinister Six's iconography. The Maker and the Maid are servants of the Herald, who is one of the six in the vision. The connection is staring you in the face.

Maeve I said I'd be wrong once, so here it is — I initially thought the creatures in the hospital, the Ugathals and the skin drones, were connected to the Sinister Six's unholy creatures from the Forbidden Sector. They're not. Josh specifically noted during the session that the things in the hospital didn't scan as unholy, unlike the Oculum and Manus creatures from the Forbidden Sector. Different servants, different patron, different magic. The black raiment is a thread, but it's not proof.

Bram Fair. But the city in the vision — Anzu recognized it. It's the same city from his original Voidsong dream. The river, the wildflowers, the strange architecture. And Noah — Johnny — immediately connects it to Old Thessia. The city they visited in the one-shot, the one with the echo fragment of Formless at its center.

Maeve That's Johnny's theory. It's a good theory. The city in the vision has yellow roofs, non-Euclidean architecture, strange angles — that matches what they saw in the Thessia one-shot. And if the echo fragment of Formless is there, and the Ashen Pact is standing around it on a burning plain, then maybe the Ashen Pact is trying to get in. Or trying to get something out. Or standing guard. We don't know which.

Bram Johnny's read was that the Voidsong is the echo fragment crying for help. The Ashen Pact is banging on the firmament trying to get in, and the echo fragment is calling out. That's why the Voidsong feels insistent, pleading — it's asking for something. And the Ashen Pact's song is different — it's welcoming, it's gentle, it's a lure. It's not crying for help, it's inviting you in.

Maeve That's a compelling interpretation. It also fits with what Yao told Anzu — the Brithwyn belief that the true Aurelia is trapped on the horizon and the Voidsong is her cry for help. If the Ashen Pact is what's trapping her, or what she's trapped alongside, that reframes the whole thing.

Bram And here's the detail that I think nobody at the table fully processed — the Herald, in the vision, looks like a normal person. An average Joe. Josh specifically said, mundane and godly at the same time, an amalgam of everyone you've ever seen. And then Mike — Benny — immediately goes, we know an average Joe just hanging around. And Johnny goes, we know an average Joe just hanging around. They're implying — and I think they're right to imply — that the Herald might be walking around on the Strider disguised as someone unremarkable.

Maeve That's speculation. It's fun speculation, but it's speculation. Josh didn't confirm it. He just said, that's a good catch, and moved on. Which is what Josh does when he doesn't want to say yes or no.

Bram He does the "I don't know what you're talking about" thing, which at this point is basically a tell.

Maeve No, that's genuinely how Josh responds to lore speculation. He does it constantly. Sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wildly off. The table thought the Sinister Six and the Ashen Pact were the same thing within five minutes — you think Josh is going to confirm or deny that on the fly?

Bram Probably not. But okay, let's talk about the decision the party made after the vision, because I think it's the most important tactical call of the night and I want to argue about it. Anzu comes out of the mind dive, takes some mental damage, the creature's skull caves in, and the party now has a choice: poison the liquid and kill everything, including the heart — losing seventy energy — or try to extract the energy from the heart first and risk waking everything up.

Maeve And they chose to poison. No hesitation. Anzu said they don't need the energy and he doesn't want to wake these things up. Johnny agreed. They injected the spider venom through the intake port and everything in the vats died within seconds.

Bram I think that's the right call. Seventy energy is a lot — they're sitting at one oh five, their tithe is twenty-seven, they're comfortable but not flush — but the risk of waking up a room full of seven-hundred-year-old outer god servants is not worth seventy energy. Not even close.

Maeve I agree it was the right call. What I want to push on is whether they should have mind-dived before poisoning at all. Because if Anzu had failed that will save and gotten enthralled, the party would have had to deal with him and potentially the waking creatures. The information was valuable — they learned about the Ashen Pact, the song, the vision — but they could have come back later, leveled up, better prepared, and done it safely.

Bram No, they couldn't have. Because if they poison the creatures, they're dead. The mind dive only works on a living one. Josh said that explicitly — you can only do this on a living creature. So it was now or never.

Maeve That's true. I'm wrong on that one. The mind dive had to happen before the poisoning, or not at all. Which means Anzu was making a now-or-never call with incomplete information, and I still think it was reckless, but I'll concede the window was closing and he knew it.

Bram And the payoff was enormous! They got a name, they got six descriptions, they got the connection to the Voidsong dreams, they got the city. That's session-defining lore from one risky check. Sometimes you have to stick your beak into the scary mind and see what comes back.

Maeve And sometimes your friend has to call you a disgrace to pull you out of it. Which, by the way, is the funniest mechanical interaction I've ever seen at that table. Johnny's Disgraceful ability — an ally fails a will save, you can reroll it by calling them a disgrace. Anzu is losing his mind to an outer god's song, and Johnny just yells at him, and it works. That's — I don't even know what to call that. Pathos and comedy in the same breath.

Bram It's the best moment of the night. It's the best moment of the season, maybe. This bard watching his friend's eyes go glassy and his only tool is to insult him back to consciousness. And the table knows it's funny, and Josh knows it's funny, but it's also deadly serious, because if the reroll misses, we're in a completely different session.

Maeve It landed on thirty-three. Just barely enough.

Bram Just barely enough. Everything this session was just barely enough. Benny's whack-a-mole rolls were just barely enough. Johnny's silver needle darts were just barely enough. Anzu's pull-back from the vision was just barely enough. The party survived this fight on the edge of every die.

Maeve And that's the thing about the Sleeping Clan choice. The Machine God told them the sleeping clan was individually more powerful but vulnerable if caught unawares, versus the waking clan which sprawls across multiple sections with at least eight Tengu. They chose the sleeping clan because they could hit them before they woke up. And they were right — but barely. Two more actions on the Maid and the heart wakes up, and Josh said it would have been a TPK. The margin was that thin.

Bram And now the Machine God is expanding. He said he'll begin taking over the area that Lifeline called home. That's the second Fane the party has handed to the Machine God — first his own, now Lifeline's. He's growing. He's becoming a power on the Strider.

Maeve Which is interesting in terms of the faction politics. The Machine God is an ancient heart from Aurelia the First's era. He's not one of the twenty factions. He's something older and more powerful. The party is essentially building a coalition and handing territory to an entity that operates outside the normal rules of the Strider. That has implications.

Bram And Anzu said it at the end — they've got to pick somebody, and the Machine God is better than the Harlequin. Which is a low bar, but a real one.

Maeve The Harlequin Fane is the most developed area on the Strider with about fifty Harlequins. They communicate nonverbally over distance. There's that void-heart tinge Anzu picked up in the library. They're not just jesters — they're something else. And the party doesn't fully know what.

Bram They really don't. And that's what makes the end of this session so good as a cliffhanger, because the party thinks they've won — they cleared the hospital, they got the vision, they're heading home with vials of mystery liquid and a name for the big bad — and meanwhile the waking clan is still out there, still growing, still converting people, and it's near where Anzu's sister is. The clock is still ticking.

Maeve And Johnny's research into the Voidsong harmony — the thing he and Anzu have been spending days on — just got a major data point. The Ashen Pact's song is gentler, more complete, more layered than the Voidsong. It has a beat underneath the harmony. If Anzu's trying to reverse the Herald's harmony affecting his sister, understanding the structure of that song matters.

Bram He said he has a plan. He said he doesn't know if it'll work. And that's where we leave it — Anzu, sitting on the floor of a corrupted hospital, having just seen six would-be gods standing over a burning world, with a name stuck in his head that he barely caught through the noise.

Maeve Ashen Pact.

Bram Ashen Pact. And the party picks up their water skins full of glowing blue liquid and starts the long climb back up through the guts of the Strider, and the whole time you can feel it — they got away with something. They walked into something they didn't fully understand, took a risk that should have killed them, and came out the other side with knowledge that's going to change everything. But the key word is "got away with." That's not a sustainable strategy.

Maeve No. It isn't. And the waking clan won't be sleeping.