The Heart in the Basement

Bram Okay so look, the big moment of the night — the thing everyone's going to be talking about — is obviously the Machine God. You cannot tell me that wasn't one of the all-time great reveals in this campaign, because here they are, right, they're sitting in this ancient forgotten basement of the Strider, they're surrounded by these beautiful seven-hundred-year-old statues of Aurelia the First's original adventuring company, and they have no idea — no idea — that they're about to stumble into what is essentially a sleeping deity, a heart from the era when hearts were actually worshipped as gods, and it just — it wakes up and talks to them in this grinding metal voice and says "little one, I have not spoken to one in a very long time," and I mean come on, that's — that's movie stuff, that's the kind of moment you remember for years.

Maeve It's a good reveal. I'll give you that. But can we back up? Because the reason they got there at all is a decision I want to talk about first — they pushed forward into the room with barely any resources, half of them diseased, Argyle's sitting on exactly two fourth-level spell slots, and Anzu just says "we're not going to rest, right? We're just going right in?"

Bram And they were right to push! They'd just cleared the spider room, they'd cleared the piston room, the momentum was there, and sometimes — look, sometimes the table knows, right, you can feel it, the energy is building and you just — you go. You don't stop and rest in a spider-infested basement because you're tired. You push through.

Maeve They literally stopped and rested. That's what happened next. They made a lean-to out of fallen masonry and slept in a corner.

Bram Okay, fine, fine, but the point is they didn't go back. They didn't retreat to the surface. They rested in the room and then pushed forward, and that push-forward is what got them to the Machine God. If they'd gone back to Iconoclasm, if they'd said oh let's rest somewhere safe, they never find this thing.

Maeve Or they find it at full strength and the fight goes completely differently. We'll come back to that. But I want to start with the rest itself, because I think it matters. Johnny is carrying Avernal Fever from two sessions ago — a disease he never got cured because Argyle doesn't prepare Cleanse Affliction and won't until next level. That's a table management problem.

Bram It's a Pathfinder problem, more than a table problem. The spell tax on disease removal in this edition is brutal — you need a fourth-rank slot for a level-appropriate disease, and Argyle's got more pressing things to prepare. He's got heals, he's got Spiritual Weapon, he's got — look, he's the only healer in the party, he can't afford to blow a top-rank slot on "Johnny feels a little warm."

Maeve Avernal Fever isn't "a little warm." It's an infernal disease. And Johnny fails Fortitude saves against everything gross — Josh basically confirmed it at the table, the man has no immune system, which is darkly funny for a character who literally resurrects from death, but it's also a real liability. Argyle finally remembered he could Treat Disease during the rest, which is what saved Johnny, but that took them an embarrassing amount of table time to figure out.

Bram But they figured it out! And this is what I love about this group, right, they're not optimized, they're not — they don't sit down with spreadsheets, they just kind of muddle through, and the muddling is what makes it feel real. Argyle treating Johnny's disease while they're huddled under a stone lean-to in a seven-hundred-year-old room surrounded by statues of dead heroes — that's a scene. That's atmosphere.

Maeve The statues are a good scene, I agree. And the Argyle connection is genuinely interesting — he walks up to the statue of Coulombe Honorsworn, the founder of the Scale, and Josh tells him the face looks familiar, there's a familial resemblance to his grandmother. That's not nothing. That's a thread.

Bram It's huge! Argyle is — okay, so Argyle is a former celestial and a former devil sharing a body, right, and now he's just the celestial half with a custode from the Scale on loan to Iconoclasm, and he's standing in front of the literal founder of his organization, carved in stone, in a room that's been sealed for centuries, and there's a connection to his family line? That's — you can't tell me that's not going to pay off later. That's Chekhov's statue.

Maeve Maybe. Or maybe it's just flavor text. Josh does that — he seeds things that feel loaded and sometimes they're just texture. I'm more interested in what happened during Anzu's watch, because that's where the session's real tension starts.

Bram The sounds! Yes! So Anzu takes first watch, rolls a perception check, and Josh gives him this incredible description — he can hear, beneath the regular mechanical thrum of the Strider, something irregular. Something moving with intent. These metal-on-metal raps, pauses, then it picks up again, and it's not getting closer, it's just... there. For the entire four hours.

Maeve And then Benny takes over and rolls lower and can't hear it at all. Which is — look, I know Josh said maybe it got quieter, but I think that's the Vrax'leth setup. The spider's in there, doing something, and Anzu caught it and Benny didn't. That's a genuine tactical miss. If Benny had heard it, they might have gone in more carefully.

Bram But they went in loud anyway! That's the thing — Johnny's casting Dirge of Doom and Bless and Haste before they even cross the threshold, Josh explicitly tells them "you're announcing your entrance," and they just... go. No stealth. No subtlety. Just four guys with music playing walking into a room they've never seen.

Maeve Because Anzu's scouting was incomplete. Othello flew in, got a look around — saw the four vats with runes floating in red liquid, the mechanical ball on a cart in the center, and the giant half-torso mecha at the back — but rolled poorly on perception. Anzu even said it himself, he got "a pretty bad check," and then he and the table kind of talked themselves into believing there was nothing alive in there.

Bram To be fair, the room was empty of visible creatures. The spider was inside the pipes. That's — Vrax'leth was hiding in the conduit system, right, it's this little blue-purple-yellow spider that floats through the liquid in the vats and travels through the pipes, and it had readied an attack for when they entered. That's a smart enemy. That's a GM who designed a boss around its environment.

Maeve And I want to talk about the augury, because I think that's where the table talked themselves into a bad call. Argyle casts Augury asking "would it be bad if we break this heart," and Josh gives him a good feeling. But Argyle's asking about breaking the heart — the heart they haven't even met yet. He doesn't know it's the Machine God. He doesn't know it's sentient. He doesn't know it's an ally. He's asking "should we destroy this thing for energy" and the spell says "yeah, go ahead."

Bram And that's — okay, I see where you're going, but I think you're wrong here. The Augury is asking about the outcome of a course of action, right, and the outcome of breaking the heart is — well, it turns out the Machine God himself says he'd be fine with them taking a piece of him. He offers them a piece voluntarily. So the Augury was correct. Breaking the heart wouldn't have been catastrophic.

Maeve But it would have killed a potential ally worth far more than two hundred energy. The Augury told them "no bad effects" and they took that as "this is safe to do." If they'd rolled poorly on that diplomacy check with the Machine God — and Johnny hit a nat twenty, which is the only reason any of this worked — they might have just killed it for the energy and never known what they lost.

Bram That's — okay, that's a fair point, the nat twenty on the diplomacy check is doing a lot of work here. But I think you're underrating how the scene played out emotionally, because even without the dice, right, even if Johnny rolls average, the party's choice to kneel down and talk to this thing instead of just smashing it — that's character. That's who they are. Johnny says "are you okay? There was a spider in you." That's —

Maeve That's a very Johnny line, yes.

Bram It's perfect! It's this bard who's been getting poisoned and diseased all session, who's been screaming about apothecary bugs, and he kneels down in front of an ancient mechanical god and goes "hey buddy, you doing alright?" That's the heart of the table right there.

Maeve I'll concede the characterization. But let's talk about the fight itself, because I think the conduit node mechanic was the most interesting encounter design Josh has done all season, and I think the party played it sloppily.

Bram Sloppily! They won!

Maeve They won because Benny's damage output is absurd and because Johnny finally landed some crits on the hivelings. But the strategy was a mess. You've got four conduit nodes, each one does something different — one fires a death ray that does massive electric damage to a marked square, one shoots webs that grab you, one spawns hivelings, one does a mental fear effect — and the party doesn't know which is which for most of the fight. They're just hitting whatever's closest.

Bram But that's the encounter! You're supposed to learn by doing. The first time the death ray fires, it evaporates a hiveling instantly — forty-five electric damage to anything in the square — and the party goes "oh, we need to not stand there." Then Argyle immediately starts thinking about whether they can bait it onto the nodes. That's reactive tactics. That's reading the room.

Maeve Except they never actually executed on it. Argyle yells "we can cluster around the conduit nodes to get it to hit them" but then nobody does it. The death ray keeps firing on empty squares or on hivelings, and the party just kills the nodes one by one with raw damage.

Bram Which worked!

Maeve Which worked because Benny can crit for over a hundred damage on a tube of glass with a butterfly sword. That's not strategy, that's a damage check.

Bram Okay, but the Vrax'leth thing — the actual spider, the heart thief — that's the clever part of the encounter. It's not just sitting there taking hits. It's traveling through the pipes. It pops out of one tube, attacks, goes back in, moves to another tube. It's whack-a-mole. You have to destroy the tubes to corner it.

Maeve And they failed to corner it! Vrax'leth escaped. Johnny summoned eight underlings to box it in — which was genuinely clever, by the way, using the summon spell as a containment tool rather than a damage tool — but the spider just tumbles through them, because the underlings automatically fail all saving throws, and it disappears into the central orb. Then Benny smashes the orb, a dead spider pops out, and... that's it. It's dead. But they didn't kill it through strategy. They killed it because it was inside the thing they were already smashing.

Bram A kill's a kill! And I would argue that destroying all the conduits and the central orb was the strategy — they systematically took away every place the spider could hide until the only place left was the one they were breaking. That's cornering, even if it doesn't look like a chess move.

Maeve I'd buy that if they'd done it intentionally. But the sequence was: Benny smashes Beta, spider doesn't pop out. Benny smashes the central orb later, dead spider pops out. They didn't know the spider was in there. They got lucky.

Bram Fine, fine, there's luck involved. There's always luck involved. But I want to talk about what I think was the real tactical story of this fight, which is Argyle getting webbed — how many times was it, four? Five?

Maeve At least four. Beta's web attack targeted Argyle repeatedly.

Bram And Argyle just — he takes it. He's stuck there, he can't move, he's spending actions trying to escape, and the whole time he's saying "it's fine, it's fine, if it keeps webbing me it's not webbing you guys." He's being a damage sponge. He's being a tank. That's the champion's job.

Maeve That's a very generous reading. I think Argyle got webbed because he was in a bad position and couldn't get out, not because he was sacrificing himself. He even said at one point, quote, I'm very fine getting spiderwebbed repeatedly if it lets you guys bash things, end quote — but that's rationalizing after the fact. He was stuck. His Spiritual Weapon kept missing. He tried Percussive Impact and missed. He had — what was it — three or four rounds where he did almost nothing useful.

Bram But he kept casting! He kept sustaining Spiritual Weapon, he kept healing, he burned the webs with Holy Light — which was a good call, by the way, clearing the web tiles so they couldn't hide hivelings —

Maeve That was a good call, I'll give you that. Burning the web thicket was smart. But his damage output was negligible. The nodes went down to Benny and Anzu, not to Argyle.

Bram And that's — okay, that's fair, but Argyle's not a damage dealer, he's a champion. His job is battlefield control and support. The Holy Light burn, the Battle Medicine on Benny that critted and gave him a mythic point back, the Divine Wrath that vaporized a hiveling on a crit fail — he was doing his job. He was the glue.

Maeve The Divine Wrath was good. I'll give you the Divine Wrath. But let's talk about Anzu's fight, because I think Anzu had a worse round than Argyle, and I don't think the table's talking about it enough.

Bram Anzu had a rough fight, no question. He got grabbed by the web attack early, spent his whole first turn escaping, then got grabbed again later, and then he was stupefied on top of it, so he's making flat checks just to cast cantrips —

Maeve He failed both flat checks on one turn. He was immobilized and stupefied, he needed to pass a DC five check for the grab and a DC six for the stupefied, and he couldn't do either. His entire turn was gone. And then on a later turn he burned his last focus point on an Amped Telekinetic Projectile and missed.

Bram But when he did hit — when he hit the conduit node with the telekinetic projectile for thirty-four damage — that was the one that shattered it. That was a big moment. And the bludgeoning weakness on the nodes meant his telekinetic projectile was actually one of the most efficient damage sources they had. Once he recalled knowledge and learned the weakness, he was calling it out — quote, bludgeoning damage, everybody, end quote. That's the psychic being useful in a knowledge way even when his spells are getting shut down.

Maeve The recall knowledge was good. Learning the bludgeoning weakness — and the fact that the nodes are immune to spirit damage, which Argyle should have known before he wasted Spiritual Weapon on one — that was the turning point. But Anzu's performance overall was rough. He spent more actions escaping webs than doing anything productive.

Bram The fight was rough for everybody except Benny. Let's just acknowledge — Benny was the MVP of this encounter, hands down. The double slice on the conduit node, the crit with the butterfly sword, the switch to the polytool for bludgeoning damage once they learned the weakness — I mean, Benny's switching his weapon's damage type on the fly to exploit a weakness he just learned about, that's —

Maeve That's good tactical play, yes. The polytool shift to bludgeoning was the single smartest moment of the fight. And his damage numbers were genuinely ridiculous. He hit Beta for over a hundred damage in one turn.

Bram Over a hundred! On a tube of glass!

Maeve On a tube with hardness, no less. The butterfly sword is doing too much damage for a two-d-four weapon.

Bram It's the twinned weapon property, right, the stacking damage, plus the spirit damage, plus — look, Benny's a fighter, fighters hit things, that's what they do. And Mike plays Benny with this beautiful energy where he's just — he's this nine-year-old android child who is also a killing machine, and he's foaming at the mouth because the spider finally hit him. Quote, now he has a reason to kill these. Before, he didn't really know. He was like, I don't know, maybe they're mean or something, end quote.

Maeve That was a great line, I'll admit. Benny's characterization carries encounters.

Bram And then Johnny — poor Johnny, right — Johnny spends most of this fight running after Benny trying to keep buffs up, his Dirge of Doom keeps getting mentioned and then not mattering because the hivelings are trivial, and he keeps trying to cast things on the central orb and getting told quote, it's not a creature, it doesn't have a mind, end quote. He tries Invented Vulnerability on a conduit node — immune to mental. He tries Albatross Curse on the orb — that targets a creature. He literally starts reciting the Rime of the Ancient Mariner at a ball and then gives up and throws needle darts at it.

Maeve And the needle darts did fifteen damage, which was enough to start cracks in the orb. So Johnny's damage, even when he's fumbling, is contributing. And his Invented Vulnerability on Vrax'leth itself was huge — five slashing weakness, then eight underlings at fourth rank doing eight-d-four plus forty damage. That bloodied the spider.

Bram Eighty-four damage! From Johnny! The bard who keeps failing fortitude saves! And then — the moment — the conduit reforms. The glass around Beta rebuilds itself because the spider's been bloodied and it triggers some kind of regeneration. Josh literally takes the dead condition off the conduit. The tube came back from the dead.

Maeve That was cruel. That was genuinely cruel encounter design. You smash a tube, you think it's gone, and then the act of bloodying the boss brings it back. That's a gut punch.

Bram But it's fair! It's telegraphed — the room shakes every time they break a tube, right, the heart is reacting. The healing is coming from the heart. It makes sense that the system would try to repair itself.

Maeve It makes sense, but it also means the encounter is a damage race in a way that punishes the party for having already spent most of their resources in the previous two rooms. If they'd come in fresh, the conduits reforming wouldn't matter — they'd have the spell slots to burn through it. Coming in depleted, it nearly killed them.

Bram But it didn't! And that's — look, we keep coming back to this, they were depleted and they went in anyway and they won. Sometimes the gamble pays off.

Maeve Sometimes the gamble pays off. I want that on record. Because next time it might not.

Bram Noted. Can we talk about the Machine God now? Because this is — this is the thing. This is the moment.

Maeve Let's talk about it.

Bram So they clear the room, Vrax'leth is dead, the conduits are shattered, and Johnny — Johnny just walks up to this giant mechanical half-torso with a glowing orb in its chest and says hello. And Josh has him roll diplomacy. Nat twenty. Natural freaking twenty.

Maeve And the Machine God responds. In this grinding, metal-on-metal voice. Quote, little one, I have not spoken to one in a very long time, end quote. And you can feel — I mean, Josh's delivery on this was —

Bram It was incredible. And the lore dump! So Argyle rolls a religion check, gets a thirty-eight after Johnny's aid bumps him up, and Josh lays out this whole history: in the early days of Aurelia the First, hearts were believed to be gods manifest on Færrin. They were treated as deities. Then after Aurelia the Second, the manufacturing process changed, hearts became less powerful, and the church declared that modern hearts aren't direct divine manifestations. But the old ones — the old ones are different. They have abilities modern hearts don't. And this is one of them.

Maeve And Argyle would know this because he's interacted with an old heart before — Voice of Many, the one that could make large jumps across the Infinite Horizon. So he has context for what they're looking at. This isn't just a stronger version of their little Eerie heart back at base. This is something from a different era entirely.

Bram And the Machine God confirms it, right — he was Aurelia's eyes and ears. He worked with the original party. He's been trapped in this Strider, adrift on the horizon, for centuries. The Strider was a trap that was never sprung. His inhabitants were taken and changed by Herald —

Maeve The false god. One of the outer gods, or something claiming to be one. The Machine God calls it quote, a false god, one of many, worming its way into the people for years, centuries, end quote. And Johnny immediately connects the dots — quote, was its name Herald? end quote

Bram Which is — that's a callback to earlier in the season, right, the whole Strider pilgrimage is voidward, toward the wall, and the theory from Kadou was that Raelion was thrown voidward past the wall and the Voidsong is its cry for help. And now we've got an ancient heart saying Herald's followers are on this ship, they wormed their way in, they have a destination in mind. That's — those threads are converging.

Maeve They are. And I think the most important detail the Machine God gives them is about the followers. There are — well, there were three groups, now two since they killed Vrax'leth's spiders. One is dormant, would activate at the right conditions — presumably when the Strider reaches whatever destination Herald's followers are aiming for. The other is active, growing, on the other side of the Strider, and has recently taken on new members from outside and is converting people from inside.

Bram And that's where Anzu's sister is.

Maeve That's the implication, yes. Anzu's been trying to reach his sister, who's somewhere on the Strider, and now the Machine God is telling them there's an active cult of Herald on that side of the ship. That's personal stakes for Anzu.

Bram And Argyle immediately goes — quote, I got resurrect now, so if we gotta kill her, we can bring her back, end quote. Which is — okay, that's dark, but it's also practical, and it's very Argyle. He's thinking about the mission. But the table's reaction, right, Benny's like quote, we going to kill her right, guys? end quote and it's this moment of — are they actually considering killing Anzu's sister if she's been converted?

Maeve I think that's a real question this table is going to have to answer. The Machine God's deal is clear: purge Herald's remaining followers from the Strider, and it lends them its support. That's the quest. And if Anzu's sister is among the converted, that's a moral dilemma this table hasn't faced before.

Bram But that's next session. That's — we're not there yet. What I want to talk about is the deal itself, because I think the party made the right call. They didn't kill the heart for two hundred energy. They didn't harvest it. They struck an alliance.

Maeve I agree that keeping the Machine God alive was the right call, but I want to push on why. The two hundred energy is a lot — it's more than they've gotten from any single source this season. But the Machine God offers something energy can't buy: eyes and ears throughout the Strider. It can see everything inside its own body. It knows where the Herald cultists are. It can communicate with them telepathically without a totem. And it's an old heart with unknown capabilities that dwarf anything modern hearts can do.

Bram So the calculus is obvious — two hundred energy now, or a living ally that can see the whole board.

Maeve Right. But here's what I want to push on: Argyle asks if the Machine God would connect to the tithe system, and the Machine God says it's loathe to connect itself to quote, whatever infernal machinery has been added to the Strider, end quote, but would do so if necessary for their survival. And Argyle immediately says quote, don't do it yet, this is a last resort, end quote. Which I think is correct, but also — that's a contingency plan. That's the party's emergency button if the tithe becomes unsustainable. And I don't think they're fully thinking through what it means to have an ancient heart plugged into the tithe network.

Bram What do you mean?

Maeve The tithe drains energy from hearts. If they connect the Machine God to the tithe, it's being drained alongside everyone else. But it's also an enormously powerful old heart — does it have enough energy to sustain the tithe where others don't? Could it replace Obratz as the energy source that keeps the Strider running? And if so, what does that mean for the faction politics on the surface? If the Machine God is secretly paying the tithe, the surface factions don't need to fight over energy anymore, which means the party's whole alliance structure becomes irrelevant.

Bram That's — okay, that's a big swing. I think you're getting ahead of the table. Right now they've got a quest — kill two more cult groups, earn an ally. That's clear, that's actionable, and that's what they're going to do next session.

Maeve Probably. But Argyle also mentioned wanting to use a Ring of Truth on everyone in their alliance next session to root out spies, which — given that the Machine God already told them none of their allies inside the Strider are actively screwing them over — might be unnecessary. And might offend people.

Bram But the Machine God said it can't see above the Strider. It only sees inside. The allies who might be compromised — Tas from Prime Meridian, Hildebrandt — their dealings could be happening on the surface where the Machine God can't see.

Maeve That's a fair distinction. The Machine God's knowledge is limited to the interior. But still — walking into your alliance meeting and going everyone drink this truth serum is not a diplomacy move.

Bram It's a very Argyle move, though.

Maeve It is. It is a very Argyle move.

Bram Can we talk about the loot, at least? Because the Machine God gives them a piece of itself — a Greater Jolt Coil, spellheart, electric resistance and lightning bolt — and the Vrax'leth corpse, which can be fashioned into a Usurper's Crown, plus one to mental saves, once per day turn a failed mental save into a success.

Maeve The crown's the better item. Five hundred gold value, and the mental save turnaround is exactly what this party needs — they just spent an entire fight getting feared by a conduit node's mental attack. Anzu was stupefied, half the party was frightened. Mental protection is their weak spot.

Bram And Anzu couldn't identify it. He rolled a twenty-three on the occultism check, which was a failure. So they're sitting on a dead spider they can't fully assess until they rest and retry.

Maeve Josh ended up just giving it to them, which — I mean, I understand, it was the end of the session and the stakes were low, but that's the second time Josh has handed them information they didn't earn because the session was running long. I don't love it.

Bram It's pragmatic. You don't want to end a session on you can't identify the loot, see you next week. That's an anticlimax.

Maeve You identify it next session. That's how it works.

Bram Not everyone is as patient as you. Some of us want to know if we're wearing a dead spider on our head.

Maeve You're wearing a dead spider on your head.

Bram The Usurper's Crown! It's a crown made from a spider's cephalothorax! That's metal as hell!

Maeve It is admittedly metal. Both senses.

Bram And then — the level-up. They hit level eight. Argyle's already got his sheet sent to Josh, which Josh is both annoyed and delighted by. Anzu's got new spells to pick. And the table ends on this naming discussion, which has been going on for multiple sessions now — they've gone through Chronicle, Heartbreakers, Choir, Topside Boys, and now Argyle proposes the Coalition.

Maeve The Coalition is fine. It's not exciting, but it's fine. Benny still wants to be the Heartbreakers secretly, which is the best idea anyone's had.

Bram Heartbreakers is great! Heartbreakers is — it's got edge, it's got humor, it references what they actually do, which is break hearts —

Maeve It references what they do, yes. The Coalition sounds like a government agency.

Bram But that's the point! Argyle says it himself — they like simple, generic names. The Wayfinders, the adventurers. They're not trying to be cool, they're trying to be functional. And the Coalition with a Ki-Rin on the flag is — okay, the Ki-Rin thing is weird because they killed Ki-Rin, like, that's a trophy from a fight, but —

Maeve They killed corrupted Ki-Rin. The Ki-Rin itself is presumably a noble creature. Having it on your flag is a statement about what you're fighting for, not what you killed.

Bram Exactly! It's aspirational. It's — look, the naming thing is going to keep going, it's going to be next session too, and I don't think we need to resolve it here. What I want to say is — this was a session where the table went in tired, went in depleted, went in with diseases and missing spell slots, and they came out with a new ally that fundamentally changes the strategic landscape of the entire Strider arc. They came out with a quest that has personal stakes for Anzu. They came out with loot that patches their biggest defensive weakness. And they leveled up. That's a session.

Maeve I'll give you most of that. I think the fight was messier than it needed to be, I think they got bailed out by a nat twenty on the diplomacy check, and I think the augury was a misuse of a spell that could have gone very badly. But the outcome — the Machine God, the quest, the lore — I can't argue with the outcome. It's the biggest thing that's happened this season.

Bram Bigger than the tithe? Bigger than Obratz getting wrung dry on the dance floor?

Maeve The tithe was the inciting incident. The Machine God is the pivot. Everything after this is about Herald, about the voidward journey, about what's waiting at the wall. The tithe told them they were in danger. The Machine God tells them what the danger is for.

Bram That's — yeah. That's a good way to put it. The Strider isn't just a ship. It's a trap. It's a vessel that was taken over by a false god's followers, and the party is now inside it, making deals with the thing that used to run it. That's — that's the season, right there. That's the whole season in one image.

Maeve And next session they either go after the active cult on the other side of the Strider — where Anzu's sister probably is — or they try to deal with the dormant one first. Or they go back to the surface and try to manage their alliances with the Ring of Truth idea. They've got options.

Bram Too many options. That's their problem. They always have too many options and not enough spell slots.

Maeve Some things don't change with level.

Bram Ha. No, they don't. But you know what does change? Now they've got a Machine God in their corner. And I cannot wait to see what that looks like when the Herald cultists find out.

Maeve Assuming the cultists don't find out first. The Machine God just joined their skein network — everyone in the alliance can see it now. Machine God has joined the chat, all caps, different font. That's not subtle.

Bram No. No, it is not. And that's going to be a problem.

Maeve That's going to be a problem.

Bram Next Monday.

Maeve Next Monday.