oozetown

This weekend, we did the first two missions of HGR’s personal quest chain. He’s the Seeker of Xorn, impelled to awaken an eldritch figure named Xorn. Concidentally, Dante just started playing Cult of the Lamb, which has a similar premise (a dark deity was sealed away by the four guardians, and it’s your job to defeat the four guardians and unleash him upon the world, etc etc) (also, rip Tigerty o7).

In the first mission, we were exploring a catacomb when rocks fell from the ceiling, separating all of us from each other. The rocks could not be destroyed by any means (are you telling me the great Cragheart, who is literally Titan, can’t destroy a few rocks?? breaking my immersion smh). Each of us was in a multi-room corridor with a treasure chest at the end, and the win condition was everyone retrieving their chest. If anyone died before reaching their chest, it was a full-party wipe.

This was great for Dante, our vermling mindthief, who promptly went invisible, scurried over to the chest in record time, and then had 50 years to chill out and kill elites for his personal goal. This was terrible for me because, as tinkerer, I’m more of a support character with mediocre DPS. (I wouldn’t have picked tinkerer if I knew it was support. I made a blind pick between tinkerer and scoundrel. HGR later found a post online lampooning my exact choice. “Imagine picking the tinkerer over the scoundrel!” Me, in ruins. But I respect blind picks/going with your gut on a first playthrough, so I wouldn’t want to have looked it up beforehand. Also I can summon a battle bot!!)

Predictably, I wiped on our first attempt. We made a trip back to town where I reluctantly bought jump boots (using money I was saving for something useful for more than one damn map, such as dps enhancements). My second run went much better, partly due to the boots, but also partly due to better planning + better luck. The initial room had me sharing space with a shaman (3 shield), a living corpse, and a scout. On turn one, I used a devastating ink bomb + goggles + bow (which ignores shields) to kill the shaman and severely wound the corpse, then used the bottom move of my toxic bolt to kill the scout. On turn two, I jetted out of the room past a chokepoint and dropped a proximity mine behind me. The living corpse shambled into the mine and blew up. From there, I used a lot of movement abilities and deployed my battle bot as a decoy while I ran to loot the chest.

Also, there were oozes. Every few turns, oozes split into two, losing 2 hp in the process. Classic ooze behavior. But they can’t multiply infinitely because there are only so many ooze minis in the box. (This is an actual game mechanic. If a particular enemy type is maxed out, no more can appear.) HGR hung out in his opening room for ages, waiting for my oozes to multiply and hit the max so none could spawn in his corridor. We thought the max was six. Finally Dante checked and discovered the max was ten (too long to wait; HGR would exhaust) so HGR reluctantly moved forward. Then it turned out he didn’t bring Ride the Wind, his jump 8 card.

“If we lose this, I swear to god…” said newbie.

“It’s fine,” said HGR testily.

Thankfully, it was fine. HGR got his chest and everyone was happy (especially Dante, who got to farm elites twice). The next night, we proceeded to the second mission, a survival map where we had to hold off enemies for ten turns while an NPC created the Staff of Xorn from the parts we recovered the night before. Oozetown 2.0! It was kind of a shambles for a few reasons:

(1) At the start of the fight, we spent too long setting up (me with Proximity Mine + Potent Potables, Cragheart with placing obstacles around the room that ended up not being super useful due to the abundance of ranged enemies) instead of focusing on dps, and things rapidly got out of control.

(2) Inox Brute was long resting on the turn things hit the fan (classic Inox Brute).

(3) HGR planned to run into the final room (that unlocks on turn 8) and grab the chest (“there’s gotta be a chest in there,” he said, and he was right) but forgot he had already used his movement boots, so he couldn’t get it and nobody else was remotely in position. RIP. Someday we’ll head back there and see what it is. I hope it’s a trapped chest.

Despite all that, we were victorious. (Really, our victory was a foregone conclusion, since Dante could have done an invisibility loop for the whole fight: go invisible, long rest to get his invisibility back, repeat. But then we wouldn’t have gotten to farm exp. We love exp. Also Dante got enough elites to retire! tfw you get to retire before HGR)