Looks like it's thee, me and Caleb, Bristle.  Our beloved leader seems to have departed.

I still exist.  Honestly thought this game was done for.

It may be. But I am more than happy to continue if it is not.

I thought that perhaps by poking the body with a stick, we might find out whether there was life in it yet.

I'm still around, deepest apologies for my silence. I've had some things happening, but it's not fair to vanish without a word.

Okay, checking in. First off, I want to deeply apologize for my sudden absence and prolonged silence. Not to get too personal, but because of some insurance difficulties, I've been off of numerous medications for the past three months. Quite honestly I don't even know whether I said anything about it in this game. My memories are pretty garbled. Turns out going off of half a dozen psychiatric medications at once can be pretty, uh, difficult to manage, shall we say. So, if I didn't say anything about the game going onto hiatus, I apologize for my silence. If I did, well, I still apologize, because I definitely was not providing updates and clarity on the topic of what's been going on. I didn't engage with you in the way that I should have, and I do genuinely regret that I handled things so poorly with respect to communicating with players.

I just now got a measure of stability back, I'm back on the meds, etc. It's resulted in some sharp improvements in my functioning. I'm actually feeling able to work my way back into social hobbies and interaction, and while there's a possibility of serious backsliding, right now things are more or less working over here.

I'm not going to pressure anyone into playing. I know it's been a long hiatus with no real communication. I'm not assuming that everyone is still interested or that anyone necessarily thinks that I'm a reliable enough GM to invest time in, after that whole thing. It's totally understandable that people would feel like this game is dead and should stay that way, or that it was a waste of time, anything of that nature. I get that. It's also possible that people just don't have the ability to start this again, and I get that too.

I did, however, want to at least let people know what's going on. I want to apologize for the mishandling of the situation on my part. You deserve at minimum an explanation of what happened, and not all of you have gotten that. So, there's that. And on the off chance that anyone does want to get this going again, and is still invested in the game concept and characters, I want to throw that out there as a possibility. I can't really promise that things will work out this time, either, but I want to say that it's a possibility I'm willing to try for if people are interested.

Thank you all. Again, apologies.

Speaking for myself, no worries about your disappearance. Life happens. And real life should always come first. Thank you for the update and I am glad you are feeling better.

As for the game, I am still interested in continuing. I am in whether we pick up where we left off, or fast forward to the end of the mission (if not enough players return to continue). Bristle Chonk is a character unlike any others I have played, and I have been enjoying the setting.

Oh blessings to you ylva. I have experienced psychiatric issues myself but I have the good fortune to live in the UK where I don't need insurance to continue with meds.  I am sorry you experienced that and I can imagine how it must have been.

As for the game, I've got a lot of games going now and I'm not sure how often I'll be able to post but I'm happy to try.

Okay, well, I've talked to Caleb and he's also still interested. So that gives us three people with at least some interest and ability. That seems like enough to at least make some kind of attempt at moving forward, to me. Might have to recruit a couple more to keep things going smoothly, but three is enough to have some kind of continuity I think.

As for whether to pick up where it left off or skip forward, I'd definitely lean towards the former. The thing is that this scene specifically is one that has some definite importance to the larger story of the game, and I think skipping over it would make it hard to segue into the larger-scale narrative. So if people are all right with it, I think the best way to pick this up again is for me to do a post that has maybe a quick recap of what's happened so far, and then advancing the conversation that you were in the middle of. Then, after the currect scene and story arc is complete, we can start looking into picking up new people, since it would make...a lot more sense to add people after that than in the middle of a dungeon-type arc.

Does that sound all right to folks?

Sounds cool. Happy to carry on on that basis.

That works for me!

Works for me as well.

Glad to see this back.

So just to check in - are people feeling all right about what's going on? As in, is it getting to be frustrating? Just checking because it can be hard, as a GM, to tune mystery based plots - there's a delicate balance between "it is so obvious why is there a need for another clue?" and "I am just trying to guess what the GM is thinking right now." It's been a bit now of back and forth with people rolling knowledges and trying to get more information that way, so I figured I might be hitting a little too far to the obscure or unintuitive side. If so, I can try to be a little more explicit in the information I'm giving, or give you an OOC hint of some kind.

I'm not sure Hester has any intuition but usually I am so I'm guessing I'm erring on the side of wandering round in a daze and hoping someone else knows what they're doing.

Thank you for asking this. The recent info I have been given for skill and knowledge rolls has been extremely helpful. However, I still feel like I am missing a piece of information that connects everything together, keeping me from making that last leap to, "Ah ha! That is what we must do!"

We have a village plagued by shadow creatures and nightmares, the living and undead seem to be mind-controlled by some entity (likely the woman in the dreams), there is a demonic altar to evil werewolves (destroyed), a semi-undead non-rotting werewolf (destroyed), undead werewolves that seemed to be under something's influence (destroyed), a pool of dead things, and a ghost with a well-preserved yet disturbing corpse. Even with all that, I haven't quite been able to piece together how we are supposed to "fix" the village. It seems obvious we should face the dream-woman, but I don't know how/where to find her in awake-world.

Overall I am really enjoying this plot and the roleplay, but I guess I wouldn't mind an extra nudge in the right direction.

Okay, that's a pretty easy one for me to provide a hint on.

In terms of directly addressing the woman you saw in your dreams, who seems to be a likely cause or other factor in what is going on, you're basically right that you don't have a way to find her right now. It's not intuitive how you would go about reaching her or what she is.

However, in terms of simply resolving the current, immediate situation in the village, you don't necessarily need to, because you're talking to a piece of that situation (or were until she vanished). Annabelle is not seemingly the one that is doing this, but she is definitely connected - you've already seen enough factors pointing at that to make it apparent. Whatever power is doing this was not able to do it before she was here, and she has some influence over how it manifests specifically. It's fairly reasonable to move from that to the conclusion that in order to address this situation enough to buy time for a more comprehensive solution, the best approach you currently have available is to lay the ghost to rest and hope that the power doing this is not able to act as freely without her involvement.

Ah, that is good to know. I was leaning toward waiting to deal with Annabelle until after we faced dream-lady. Which would not have worked.

I'll bring it up IC after someone else posts. Unless, of course, they bring it up first. Which is fine by me.

So, just as a sort of observation thing that I don't think I really mentioned sooner but which you would certainly be aware of - there are basically three ways out of the cavern you're in. You can try to go back out the way you came in, which you know there's an exit, but it does entail going back across a lake and up a moderate climb before moving through the cavern. There's following the river onward - it flows out of the lake and down another tunnel. Or there's going straight up by some means and seeing if the shadows are covering a gap or passage in the roof of this cavern that would lead straight up to the earlier cave that you entered through.

Mentioning because it seems like there's a consensus on what to do at this point, so the question becomes how to do it.

I was assuming we would go out the way we came in. Unless Bristle can determine if it would be quicker and safe to follow the water with an appropriate knowledge roll?

13:35, Today: Bristle Chonk rolled 21 using 1d20+7.  Knowledge: Nature or Geography, with Guidance. (possibly 26)

If she can use Geography and it counts as a check to "avoid getting lost," then she gets a +5 to her roll from casting Lay of the Land within the last 24 hours.

Hm, yeah, I'll say that it counts. There's a pond about a mile from the hill you entered through, which everyone assumed was fed by a spring. It seems extremely likely that spring is actually this underground river, based on the direction it's in. So, while it's hard to be absolutely certain that it would be safe, it seems pretty probable that there is an exit in that direction.

Sounds like we are going out the way we came in. A bear skeleton shouldn't be too heavy to pull up with rope, right? A bear zombie on the other hand would probably be quite heavy.

Or could it take 20 on climb checks? It has fast healing, so a few falls shouldn't be much of a problem.

Excellent! That concludes the first chapter of the game, more or less. The immediate danger is passed, the undead shadows seem to have vanished, and Annabelle's spirit has been put to rest. Questions remain, but at least the imminent threat appears to have been quelled.

This is also the first milestone of the game, so welcome to level seven.

Sweet! A satisfying conclusion to this chapter, and a level up! How would you like us to handle leveling up? Also, I don't suppose we would be allowed to greedily go back and collect Illix's gear, would we? I'll admit it, I'm a sucker for magic items of all kinds.

Schaweeeet!

Also at the very least we could bury Ilix