One-Shot Summary
Oops! All Villains is a Tiresian Archives Nofiction One-shot DMed by Aoife. in 228 AL, five criminals find an opportunity to escape their high security imprisonment underneath the surface of
Acropolis. They skillfully skulk through the prison tunnels, dispatching all manner of mage, monster and men named Bill as they go. Eventually, they are cornered by the warden of the prison. Together the team dispatches their captor and escapes through the sewers into the city.
PCs
NPCs
Bill - a human man assigned to guard the PCs cells. He suspected his wife was being unfaithful and was considering abandoning his post to go confirm his suspicions, but in the end he served only as the party's first victim.
Synopsis
With each party member occupying their own cell all under watch by one guard, Phibius attempts to learn more about him. The guard, Bill, is currently having marital problems. Phibius is in the process of convincing Bill to leave his post and go home to his wife when Tickles gets the guard’s attention and brings him over to the crime cat’s cell, allowing Phibius to swipe the guards keys as he walks away. Once the guards keys are in Phibius’ possession, Ganbaatar seizes the opportunity to fry Bill dead with a sacred flame. Phibius then lets each fellow prisoner out of their cell - first Fern followed by Ganbaatar, then Tickles and finally Quid. The crew grabs what gear they can find in the room and starts their escape.
Phibius instinctively passes the keys to his brother Fern who leads them to the hallway beyond, but is superseded by Quid who ends up setting off a trap, taking damage and alerting a nearby guard to their presence. The guard is quickly dispatched by Fern and the rest of the group as Phibius opens the way to the next room and promptly gets attacked by more guards who were alerted by the commotion of the previous combat. By the end, a total of five guards have made their way to the scene and all been dispatched by the group.
Though Fern defeats many of the attackers, one is able to magically frighten them, causing them to unnaturally age 10 years in an instant. Quid magically animates the skeletons of the five corpses and uses them as pawns and transportation for the next leg of the journey.
Once unbothered by hostile guards, the party explores the chamber and finds an enchanted water feature used to pacify escaping prisoners. Though originally effective against Tickles, the party is able to skillfully avoid the trap. The party accumulates more gear from the chamber and their fallen foes and continues on.
The next room they find is some kind of office, deserted as everyone that was once inside is now a reanimated skeleton. Phibius and Fern are able to locate a police report from containing the details of their arrest, including record of a bribe from the Presch estate to have the pair framed for the death of Kryast Presch.
The group, continuing their adventure, finds a petty note from a senior guard addressed to Bill, the party’s first victim. The note is meant to remind Bill that the armory is to the left and that he will regret going to the right. The party, eager to recover the rest of their missing loot and not wanting to take their chances with whatever dangers lie to the right, head to the armory. Phibius is reunited with their arcane armor and the crew picks up some extra resources, but Quid’s walking stick through which she channels her magic, is notably still missing.
In the armory hang a number of tapestries. Phibius, looking for a path forward that circumvents the dangers back outside, notices a green and gold tapestry - the same color worn by the prison guards they’d encountered - is swaying as if in a breeze. Excited to have his magical armor back, Phibius blasts away the tapestry with a shock of lightning, revealing a door.
The party moves through this secret hallway - the ceiling so low that Ganbaatar has to unscrew their head from their shoulders and carry it like a briefcase - and emerges in a summoning chamber where a number of mages have summoned a monster for funsies. The group dispatched them all, this time with some close calls, and decides to rest to recover their strength before proceeding. During the combat Quid recognizes one of the mages is using her rod and finally retrieves it.
After the rest, the party enters a large nonagonal chamber wherein resides a sleeping beholder. The beholder is also adorned with green and gold accessories, indicating that he is in fact in charge of the prison. The party attempts to sneakily surround the monster, but are unsuccessful and alert it to their presence.
Contending with the monsters raving light show, antimagic gaze and distracting glitter explosions is only further complicated when more mages arrive to help their boss.
Defeating the beholder takes a combination of sheer force and clever subversion from all sides. Fern’s ki empowered strikes leave the foe stunned for much of the encounter while Phibius is able to temporarily blind its many eyes with a magically conjured and enlarged can of pepper spray until the creature is finally slain by a greataxe swing to its main eye delivered by Ganbaatar. Fern kicks the monster’s corpse and utters the only two word they speak throughout the prison break: “Fuck you.” The two mages flee for their lives and the party escapes into the sewers.
When they emerge in the city, it is clear that complicated relationships have developed between the escapees. Tickles offers Ganbaatar work with
The Litter should he want it while Quid vows to, at some point, kill Phibius Glimmer and march on Kauvet with an army of Fey. The group splits, each on their way to their next goal, but confident this will not be the last they see of one another.
Where Are They Now
After the events of the one-shot:
Tickles is returning to their work with The Litter.
Phibius and Fern are due at their sisters’ wedding the following day, after which Phibius has sworn violent revenge on The Presch Family.
Quid plans to amass an army of fey and march them across the kingdom. In the meanwhile, more crime.
Ganbaatar sets out to murder more folks in Acropolis and elsewhere, unless they submit to his makers.
Trivia
The group killed ten individuals in total during their escape: 8 guards, the warden beholder and a goop monster. Two additional guards fled after the beholder was killed.
Phibius is the only one of the escapees, including his homunculus servant, to not deliver any killing blows. He says he’s saving it for someone else.
The 'Phibius Fire Eye' was a move coined by Phibius Glimmer during the beholder fight. Phibius used their performance of creation skill to summon a can of pepper spray, cast Enlarge on the can and cast Jump on himself. He then jumped 15 feet into the air, landing on the enlarged pepper spray nozzle and covering the beholder's many eyes in the blinding spray.
After session, DM Aoife revealed that the dangerous room the players bypassed was a wyvern combat encounter followed by a secret puzzle room
After session, it was revealed by Darrell and Aoife that there was a plan in place for Quid to betray the party once they’d all escaped, killing them all and leaving as the only survivor, but she didn’t feel they’d been weakened enough by the beholder to get away with it, so everyone survived.
The following now canonically exist in Kauvet during the Age of Lavandin: firearms, pepper spray, glitter, and raves.
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