30 Day Challenge: Day 9 Dwarves

I'm struggling for inspiration at the moment, but I've been wanting to come back to my "Traditional" Fantasy tables and maybe do one for dwarves, which I somehow haven't done, so this'll be a warm-up for that.

• Gem dwarves: They are shiny and fabulous
• Fracking dwarves: Masters of subterranean sieges
• Mountain dwarves: Adapted for the mountains, they have a truncated snout like a saiga antelope
• Neanderthal: What we call dwarves are just neanderthals
• Nephilim: The dwarves were created by angels, believing themselves as capable as their god to create life
• Eldritch dwarves: Follow the pantheon of King Oberon, Queen Titania, and their uncouth uncle Tsathoggua
• Space dwarves: Skin shiny with a reflective metal coat, flying on solar kites

30 Day 5 Minute Challenge: Day 8 Unusual Spells

Alright, I feel like this is going to be a tough one, but I'm going to try to come up with spells that are still spells, but maybe operate a little differently than how you usually think of spells. We'll see how that goes...

• Recursion spell: The spell is a trap! If you read it on a scroll or use detect magic on it, the spell infinitely repeats, locking the caster down. It doesn't necessarily have an effect, but eventually the accumulation of magical energy will lead to a violent explosion.
• Memo spell: The spell is cumulative. Every time it is cast, it changes a little bit, in some systematic way.
• Golem: The spell learns, and eventually becomes a living, intelligent spell, a golem spell.
• Null: The spell is neither yes nor no, it defies binary logic.
• Papers, Please: The spell causes two players to switch character sheets (they are still the same character, just with different stats).
• We're playing different games: The spell causes a player to rewrite their character sheet for a different game (just one player). We're all adults here, figure it out.

A couple of these are ideas you might notice I've played with before, but I tried to stick to the rules of the challenge and keep it to mostly things I haven't done before. This list turned out better than I expected.

Weird & Wonderful Archons: Archons March On Appreciation

Two posts in one day! Whaaaaat!!!???

This is not actually a post about archons, but an appreciation post for my friend semiurge and archonsmarchon! Semiurge consistently produces some of the most amazing random tables in all of tabletop, and was one of the first friends I made in the community, back when I was just posting on reddit and hadn't even started a blog. I envy his ability to take his overflowing imagination, and channel it into something efficiently written and actually useful at the table. He has produced more work than I could possibly fit into one post, honestly you could make a whole book just from generations of his tables, but I will do my best to fit as much as I can into something interesting and manageable.

Also, this is the second in a series of appreciation posts, the first being for Saker Tarsos at tarsostheorem.

It's taken me a while to find the time and energy to do these right, but I intend to do at least several more of these appreciation posts.

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There is a market in the caldera of a mostly-extinct volcano, its remaining lava pumped throughout the market for heat and lighting. Try not to stand too close to the pipes when they break! Working the market is a raider offloading booty pillaged from a surface settlement. One item he offloads is a lamp loaded with troll-oil. It refuels itself, but if extinguished it will regenerate into a full, furious troll. While hidden treasures abound, the market is also home to conmen selling fake potions that’ll turn your face inside-out instead of healing you, or cause you to flash brightly instead of turning invisible, or any number of other horrid things. The only thing keeping the market in line is the knowledge that any spilled blood might seep down and attract vicious beasts from below.

The market is surrounded by a wall, with a single door at the entrance. The door has a handle that’s a tongue in the mouth of a laughing iron face. A man with a wizened face and bleeding eyes busts through the door, holding his gun to his head with one hand, desperately dragging it away with the other. He carries a custom-made revolver, with way more than six bullets in its oversized cylinder. Pinned to his chest is a bloodstained page of sheet music any trained musician could decipher to reveal a coded message.

In addition to the raider with his troll oil lamp, an elf knight comes to the defense of the market. Her armour is a buff coat made of her own leather, flayed and healed over decades. She rides a grumpy moose and fights with her own sharp tongue, which can snap out like a chameleon. She serves a petrified liege, or perhaps her liege was always just a statue. In any case, she pays the bills at the market, whilst on a quest to kidnap a gifted human child to be her squire.

After the raider and the elf knight kill the man with the gun, a scholar picks up the page of sheet music and deciphers the code. This scholar specializes in thanatology, the study of the dead both walking and still. He was a student kicked out of his university for excessive rowdiness and lewdery. He carries a pocketful of shiny rocks he's collected, ostensibly for personal defense. He has a knack for navigating in the wilderness, which is how he arrived at the market in the first place. He is infamous for his backhanded compliments.

The coded message was an incantation, opening a secret passage to the underworld. The threshold to this passage is a crossroads paved with brittle hair, marked by a trail of black feathers. It is guarded by a crocodilian abomination able to smell sin. This passage leads to the belly of a lifeless beast, dissolving in its own bile, left by a crusade against the insufficiently damned.

To defeat the crocidilian abomination, the scholar reveals his secret wacky wand. The wand is a peacock’s tail feather lacquered with amber that emit rays of mutagenic viridiance. So long as it is not exposed to water, it will maintain its charge, and even when it does run out of charge, it gains the ability to vampirically steal charges from other wands it touches. He snaps the wand, releasing the angel trapped inside to power it. The angel is grateful, but also has centuries of business to attend to. Nonetheless, it agrees to face the crocodilian abomination.

The angel is a fiercely tusked ogre cloaked in thunderclouds with wings of barbed iron and the flayed skins of sinners. It wields a chalice, ever-full of dark wine. The bearer of the chalice can cause this wine to heal, or burn like acid, and change which of these functions it serves even long after it’s been poured from the chalice or imbibed. It was created from a saint who was assumed, maimed but alive, into the heavens. The angel can sense the location and condition of the relics made from the severed parts of its body, as well as communicate through and exert limited influence around them even if it’s not currently summoned to the mortal realms. It cannot serve a summoner who holds any debt without first forgiving those debts. Several animals with unspotted coats were sacrificed in order to summon this angel.

The angel smites the crocodilian abomination, only to reveal its true form! It appears as a cancerous mushroom combined with complex clockwork, and gears made of wet flesh and teeth, which split apart into a swarm of lesser monsters. It is hungry, and attempts to incapacitate the first hunk of meat it finds then drag them away for an undisturbed meal (who will it be, the angel, the scholar, the elf knight, or the raider!?). This wizardly abomination was clearly intended as an experimental warbeast, to sell to the highest bidder.

After tearing apart each and every clockwork fungus monster, an illustrious intelligent sword is revealed at the core of the abomination. The sword is a notched, stained cleaver as big as a man is tall. With the sword’s blessing, its wielder will find it just light enough to bear in battle. Although intelligent, it is easily distracted and prone to meandering tangents. The wounds it deals become worse the further the wounded gets from the wielded until they’re healed. The sword reveals that it desires to learn martial techniques hidden by the ancient masters, but that prior to the incantation, it had been stuck in the middle of an eternal battlefield on the other side of the underworld passage.

The eternal battlefield of the underworld is headed by three armies.

The first army is led by a non-Euclidean entity, an uncanny humanoid that crawls with hideous vermin. Its origin is the interbreeding of humans and powers of the outer realms. Beware it, for it cannot be killed permanently by mortal means. In occult texts it is referred to as En-dwa-uch.

The second army is led by a vampire lord of an unusual variety. He feeds alongside his pet giant vampire finch, which serves him like a hunting dog. The vampire lord is the result of merging and melting together with others of his kind to form a large, more deadly gestalt. He rests among the deep machinery of his factory from which he builds his machine army, licking the leavings from industrial accidents. When he feeds his blood to predatory or parasitic animals, those animals grow huge, ferocious, and loyal to him, serving as mounts, scouts, and siege beasts for his machine army. He was once a vicious priest whose body was unfit for the blessing of his god.

The third army is led by a demon like a floating tumor randomly studded with eyes, teeth, and hair. Her primary tactic is to blight the fields and herds of her enemies, drive the fish from their nets, and otherwise drag them to destitution. She is occasionally summoned away from the endless battlefield to commit slaughter at the border between hostile nations, and those slaughtered in this fashion are conscripted into her army in the underworld. She keeps a memento from each person who’s summoned her, which she wears like military regalia. Her weakness is her own name said backwards, which banishes her permanently from the underworld (but then, wherever shall she go...?).

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D20x5 Dungeon Markets

D20x5 Men With Guns To Come In Through A Door

D20x5 Elf-Knights

D20x5 Scattered Scholars

D20x5 Passages To The Underworld

D20x5 Wacky Wands

D20x5 Angels To Summon For Chastity And Humility (Incidentally this may be my favorite random table in all of tabletop)

D20x5 Wizardly Abominations

D20x5 Illustrious Intelligent Swords

D20x8(+9) Lovecraftian Entities That Didn’t Make The Cut

D20x5 Variant Vampires

D20x5 Demons To Summon For Fun And Profit

30 Day 5 Minute Challenge: Day 7 Quirky Superpowers

While I've already done 100 superpowers which I'd like to think are generally better than whatever I'm going to come up with right now in 5 minutes, I want to come up with more. Many of those powers were very weird, high-concept, and bombastic. I want superpowers to be a part of my Aquarian Dawn setting, but in a much more low-key manner, more so inspired by knacks from the Powder Mage books (which I highly recommend), with a bit of YuYu Hakusho Season 3 (?) and just a dash of My Hero Academia  thrown in. This isn't going to be the definite list for Aquarian Dawn, but might jumpstart my thought processes.

On an unrelated note, I had intended to do a post on the Aquarians themselves at some point, where parthenogenesis was going to be (and still will be) a part of their biology, but I got scooped, and he wrote it up better than I could have anyway so I might wait a while to write that up, but there are certainly other aspects of Aquarian Dawn I'd like to get to sooner or later (for the record I think I talked about it in brief in a private discord group somewhere!). I think I have a different take on elves for the setting that could be pretty interesting, and also dwarves, and fey, and I want to talk about this superpowers angle at some point as well.

Ok, so quirky superpowers:

• Emit laser-pointers from fingertips
• Create strobe effect by blinking
• Can disrupt the internal clock of others by one second at a time
• Dream other peoples dreams
• Can see the last thing a dead person saw from looking in their eyes
• Can communicate with a dead person while they are freshly dead, before their synapses go to shit
• Bodily fluids are a powerful stimulant
• Bodily fluids are a powerful depressant
• Their presence makes music sound euphoric
• Objects do not wear when used by them
• Empathize with everyone and everything
• Their qualia is objective reality in the space around them

Not a terrible list, but I think the proper Aquarian Dawn list, if I ever make it, will be more finely crafted.

30 Day 5 Minute Challenge: Day 6 fantasy2supers

I really liked Semiurge's idea of converting fantasy concepts to superheroes (or superhero concepts to fantasy). I think, as with the last 5 minute challenge, this is a concept that with a bit more research and work could be much better, especially since I forget a lot of the particulars of the more "iconic" D&D monsters off-hand, but hopefully in 5 minutes I can at least drop a few interesting ideas.

• The Beholder: A corpulent villain with eyes all around his head. His eyes emit powerful incinerating beams. Although powerful, he lacks vision (pun intended), and often serves as a henchman in other supervillain's lairs, playing best to his strengths. He is usually head of security.
• Displacer Beast: During one of Magik's stays in Limbo, she encountered an unusual demonic beast. A powerful, panther-like creature with whip-like tentacles on its front shoulders and the ability to teleport like herself. The Displacer Beast is now her loyal friend.
• Mindflayer: A practitioner of the dark arts, a Sorcerer Supreme wannabe, bit off more than they could chew and summoned an eldritch entity from another dimension. The being infected them like a fungus, warping them into a cephalopodic form. The summoning was successful, and the Mindflayer is now truly more powerful than the Sorcerer Supreme herself, but with that great power comes great madness.
• Slime (Gelatinous Cube): A mutant with the ability to expand to the point of filling up the dimensions of a small to medium-sized space. In this form they are gelatinous, absorbing whatever they touch.

These are more-or-less straight adaptations of the respective monsters, but I think it's a decent start. With a bit more character and costume design, and some work on personality, motivations, and histories, these could be interesting characters.

30 Day 5 Minute Challenge: Day 5 Sin Demons

This five minute challenge will be sin demons! I'm finding that these 5-minute challenges are accomplishing what I intended them to do, which is to get me thinking creatively again. I know this 5-minute sin demon list isn't going to be as good as what I'd make if I thought it all out properly, but I'm hoping that after 30 or so days of this, I'll have a backlog of really cool ideas that I want to blow out, and I'm thinking this concept will be among them. This isn't going to be your typical "seven deadly sins", these are going to be MY list of cardinal sins (probably not accurately represented in 5 minutes haha, but a rough idea, in any case).

• Lack of self-awareness demon: Like a beholder it sees everything from the outside, but its eye stalks are stiff antennae and its field of vision is limited to only forward. It cannot reflect in on itself. The father of all other sin demons.
• Ethical tautology demon: This demon believes that it is good, and therefore everything it does is by definition good. It appears like an angel, and those lacking in wit will buy their tautology, but underneath is sickness and madness.
• Ignorance demon: This demon fears anything it does not understand or challenges its narrow and poorly-formed world view, and lashes out with hate and anger. 
• Twisted system demon: This demon is like a rat king. It inadvertently creates or exacerbates toxic and dysfunctional relationships. It will defend these relationships above and beyond any reason, even if it means cutting off a member of the system. 
• Short-sighted demon: This demon is not merely greedy, but also short-sighted. It seeks short-term over long-term gain. Most of the short-sighted demons are petty losers, but every once in a while, through luck and circumstance, one will rise to great power.
• Self-loathing demon: This demon could be a competent and capable demon, but engages in defeatist patterns, and never truly learns from its mistakes. Only enough to recognize them and incorporate them into its self-loathing.

Spent more time on the list of sins than the descriptions of the demons themselves, and even these sins need some work. Think of this as a preview for things maybe to come (some day...).

30 Day 5 Minute Challenge: Day 4 Fantasy Foods

For this five minute challenge, I'm going to come up with some foods for a fantasy setting.

• Flavor in a magic bubble
• Slime pudding
• Seared Bulette fin
• Deep-fried beholder eyes
• Dragon flame-grilled barbeque
• Giant rat fillet
• Fresh sushi cleric-revived just before serving
• Owlbear jerky
• Polymorph surprise

I actually would like to do a legit fantasy food / cooking table at some point, but this will have to do for now. Some of these are cool (and I'm pretty sure I've seen before), but I think with some more thought (not just a 5 minute challenge) this could be a lot better.

30 Day 5 Minute Challenge: Day 3 Themed Encounter Table

Third day of the challenge. I'm going to try Semiurge's themed encounter table idea, and hopefully it'll be a little more focused than the last challenge which was supposed to be traps and turned into not traps.

• A pack of purple wolf-bees protecting their royal jelly
• Marvel's Purple Man or an equivalent
• A bulbous, glassy, translucent humanoid full of purple liquid, an unstoppable force crashing through walls, chases you through the dungeon
• A wine elemental
• Wrathful grapes (purple mouthing gibbers)
• The witch with lavender potions
• The romantic mind flayer
• The devil in the satin sheets
• Purple-robed Nero-clone humunculi gang

I'm not totally sure what I was going for here, for some reason I just latched on to "Purple" as the theme. All things considered, I don't think this is too bad, actually.

30 Day 5 Minute Challenge: Day 2 Dungeon Gimmicks

So this is day 2 of my 30 day 5 minute challenge, where I spend 5 minutes trying to come up with as many new ideas as I can. I asked for suggestions for categories and Semiurge gave me several, so I'm going to start with traps (mainly because all of his other ones seem really hard). Traps have never been my strong suit, so this'll be interesting...
EDIT: As you can see below, my head immediately veered elsewhere and i just rolled with it, so instead we're doing dungeon gimmicks.

• Monty Hall dungeon: It's a dungeon based on the monty hall problem, but instead of a goat being behind the bad doors, there are men of leng.
  
• Game theory dungeon: When passing through the room, each party member chooses to either take X xp or take 0.5X xp. If all party members take 0.5X xp, they're all good, but if one takes X xp, the others lose 0.5X xp.
  
• Binary tree dungeon: Each room in the dungeon separates into two new rooms, up to some unknown but very deep length, and you are looking for an object in a specific room. If you just search every room, probably you will die before reaching the end. You need to come up with a systematic way to search the dungeon.

Ok, well I only came up with a few ideas, but I think they're pretty cool. They're not traps, but we're going to roll with it. I think the last one speaks to all of the leetcode challenges I've been having to do lately. Seriously binary trees and linked lists are the worst! That being said, even though probably nobody besides programmers will be able to solve them, I might run with the leetcode algorithm challenges as dungeon gimmicks idea in the future...

30 Day 5 Minute Challenge: Day 1

So... We'll see if I actually stay true to this, but I've decided to turn the "5 minute challenge" into 30 day challenge. Every day, I will do at least one 5 minute challenge. Depending on my mood I may make it category-less, or pick a specific category, or if people suggest categories in the comments I'll do that. I'll try not to skip a day but if I do I'll make up for it asap.

In my last 5 minute challenge post I did category-less, worldbuilding, and bestiary. I think I'll start this one off with category-less again, but after that we'll see.

Hopefully I'll be able to make a new "real" post this weekend, but in the mean time... Go!

• A restaurant that serves only foods that are cooked or cut alive at the table
• A flamethrower made from the organs of a dragon
• White blood cell slimes
• Juggling baseball bat energy ball spiking villain / NPC
• A mage spreads life onto new planets from the bacteria on meteors casting meteor bombardment spells
• Optimization function over atom-collisions to reverse engineer a hash function to extract "meaningful" data out of "nothing"
  

I will admit, a couple of these were poorly fleshed out ideas I was already sitting on. Didn't come up with as many as I would have liked, but I think some of these are pretty cool.

5 minute creative challenge

I thought this would be a fun practice to help me get back into the creative swing, and I would be interested to see what others do with this. The 5 minute creative challenge is to come up with as many spontaneous ideas as you can in just 5 minutes. Try not to jot down ideas you've already been thinking about. Allow spontaneity. I think you could do some more focused versions like 5 minute bestiary, 5 minute worldbuilding, etc., but for this first go I'm going to keep it general. Ok... go!

Grim version of the one eyed one horned flying purple people eater

A dog made of rainwater

Pineapple people

intelligent mustache fungus

Mongolian equivalent of ninja turtles

the last human in the future of the x-men

a brain folded in on itself like an ouroborus

a magic wand dildo

squirrel elves

bathing in shooting stars

a flat painting projected three-dimensionally

a species that look like caricature paintings

cat species that stand on their forepaws and have a second mouth where their butts would be, like a cat-gug

crawling skin bag


I had a lot of fun with that first one, even though I feel like 6 months ago I would have been able to do so much better, but anyway I decided to keep this train going. Here's 5 minutes of worldbuilding as well. Ok... go!

Space cowboys herding shooting stars

Poppy planet

LA roads spacetime distortion as being pulled into a black hole like Super Mario Rainbow Road

A world of living prepared foods as the reincarnations of their unprocessed selves

magic space colony


Oof, that one was a lot harder. Those aren't very good :(. Ok last one, 5 minute bestiary challenge, then I think I need to start getting on with my day. Ok... go!

Humanoid species that think in pure jazz

Green fur monkey with spider eyes, rat tail, elephant tusks

Cyborg space whale with the face of a star-nosed mole covered in blue flame

A planet-sized rat king

A double helix dragon

A lobster-like creature wrapped around the spine of a wolf-like creature bound by a cordyceps-like fungus

A humanoid species with a human-like exoskeleton


Hm... I was starting to get into a groove, but it took a while. I think I need more practice, but this has been a fun exercise.

Half-formed ideas from the onenote

Still figuring out the best way to be creatively active and also live my new life. I have a lot of ideas building up, but am definitely out of practice and don't have the time to flesh them all out. I want to do some more appreciation posts, keep building up some prose for Aquarian Dawn, eventually come back to World of Wonders, I've had some more thoughts for Second Exodus, and also more tables. For now, here are some half-formed ideas I'm sitting on.


Undead dreams


A "monk/psionic"-like class based on principles of massage therapy, reiki, and reflexology.


Ceramic-tech (toiletpunk?)
Microbiome / pathogenic / pheremonal communication network
Internet sewer / plumbing network


Cajun Mardi Gras mask tengu


Something with hell ants / vampire ants


Niobids as a fantasy species


German Drak fey-dragon (type of kobold?)


Crustaceans are arthropods but so different looking compared to other arthropods. What about other kinds of animals as arthropods (e.g.arthropod birds, horses, dogs)

"spider-monkey". Spider excretes a fluid that breaks down aether metal, which they weave into armor which allows them to grow much larger and still carry themselves and jump and climb. Eventually evolve into a monkey-like niche


Other elements of salamanders


Tarantula tarantism


Melting moon


Tree of life as Platonic, fractal dimensional representation of the universe; fractal geometry more common in nature than Euclidean.


Siren/mermaid is 100% fish, it's human-like appearance is just to lure humans


Copper-preserved mummies


Play on kubire-oni (hanging suicide oni)


Destrehan (near New Orleans) unsuccessful slave revolt. Slaves heads were put on pikes. Dracula analog with social commentary?


Norcini wandering mystic butchers. Sing in verse to cover the sounds of snapping bones. Combine dambe (Hausa butchers, Nigerian boxing)?


OSR class The Pervert. Deals in sexuality, sexual taboo, sexual imagery. Scarlet letter. Flamboyancy. Bondage gimp. Society begrudgingly tolerates them as a way of defining their social mores by being the exceptions.


Holy War Droid: A droid powered by the blood of soul-bearing life forms or celestial creatures.


A species that exists in the upper atmosphere or in space orbiting the planet that drop to the planet to feed and mate


Awkward/cringe as social horror. Folk monster out of that?


Whale wave-mancers


Black desert
actually singing dunes
sand moving at fast-speed like the sea
silver ants evolve to fill various ecological niches


The demon who doesn't think it's a demon


Magic "fishing" rod to fish out magical items, magical beings, demons, etc.


Dogu "Second City". Believed to be the original heart of the dogu kingdom, back when the positronic city was inhabited by its creators (or some other people).


Broken Node in the meridian system.


Culture which draws misplaced or misshapen facial features on themselves.


Scarring / mutilation as ritualistic worship


Rapa nui Easter island


Tenrec weird vibrating back quills


Taste/flavor-based creatures or species subtypes


Play on radiated tortoise, either “irradiated”, or something fractal or in some other way geometric or extra-dimensional.


Sea Sapphire-based creature. Glows, semi-translucent, can make itself ultraviolet (and effectively invisible).


Click beetle, railroad worm, and bioluminescent fungi.


An actual rain-forest


Barnacle goose myth / bird metamorphosis


SatPunk: An alternate universe where the internet was never invented and satellite TV technology advances accordingly, a la steampunk
CRTPunk?

Aquarian Dawn: Death Metal Crow

When she comes, first you hear a deep and rhythmic rumbling of thunder. Then, you hear a tinny wail that sends a tingle down your spine. A little closer and you see flashes of light glinting off black metal through a foggy film of crackling ozone and noxious fumes. Closer still, and you see a goblin channeling lightning from a magic rod. The current transmits directly into the impossibly loud metal instrument of the Death Metal Bard, strumming away furiously. The so called music is frightening in the basest sense, as much arousing as disturbing. Accompanying this show, you see a small army of goblins and hobs on black horses in black and crimson leather and spiky metal armor carrying clubs and swords and spears.

Then, she races ahead, the Death Metal Crow. The largest hob you've ever seen, covered from head to toe in black metal armor; a long, crimson, beak-like visor obscuring her face. She rides a beast thrice the size of a horse, with a scaly gray hide like a metal lizard covered in jewels, and a girthy horn longer than any man. She carries a metal compound bow as long as she is tall, and the metal string screeches and rends on each draw. Her metal bolts pierce the air, shrieking in absolute dissonance with the pounding music. Two massive blades protrude from both sides of her beast, the metal stained crimson from the fields of meat and blood left in their wake. It is said that at the end of battle, she draws these blades and effortlessly eviscerates every bit of dead meat into a single lump of pinkish pudding.

When total annihilation is not her aim, instead she sends her elites, the Crows. They are goblins and hobs, the most highly trained redcaps, greencaps, and blackcaps. They wear black leather outfits and spiked bracelets and plague masks, and wield metal claws on their hands and feet. They silently leap along trees and rooftops and glide from kites. Some have had their bones hollowed and granted true flight from gryphon wings grafted to their backs. Quietly and efficiently, they eliminate or remove anyone not on the guest list. When all is in place, the remainder of her elites, the Mosh, crash down from the sky, launched from blackcap rockets strapped to their backs. Heavy metal wings serve to adjust an unstable trajectory, shield from explosive detritus, and buffer their landing. They toss glass bottles of explosive and noxious black liquids, of gold-colored dust producing blinding flashes of rainbow or white light, and pulsing black boxes filled with metal discs encoded with the music of the Death Metal Bard. In this violent pit of sounds and sights, and smells and tastes, they slam and slash and shoot until no foe is left standing. With the remaining witnesses, those not on the guest list, stunned or otherwise overloaded and deprived of their senses, the Crows methodically and with extraordinary speed gather their belongings, cleanse all evidence, and exit stage left. If you were fortunate enough to be left off the guest list, you will come to with ringing ears, a pounding headache, a few bruises, and scattered memories.