I wasn’t here when the first black lotus happened. Can you explain whats it means, what happened with it in the past, and how it applys now?
as someone who havent seen before episode 50, how exactly ( or more precise to someone watching the show) does the bracer work?
Man, the character stuff was awesome in this episode. Those interrogations were lit af.
I can’t help but feel something terrible has happened in the Scarlet Fortress.
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The bracer effectively acts as a shock collar and is used in to enslave people, often those who have committed crimes. It doesn’t control their actions, but allows the holder of the rod to inflict pain/damage on the wearer of the bracer.
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Adam, did you expect the party to take as long as they did to try to escape the cell? Also, are leaving berg’s arm up to Gassy to put attention on, or will you try to remind him he doesnt know what its capable of?
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Well. It comes off if you die (…?) We know it is made by the workers or Acana of Judgement? Priests of Judgement? Not entirely sure. But yea. Big nono. It’s attached to your soul and can’t be removed by any means (known) so far besides dying.
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All thats in the episodes from after 50.
The holder of the paired rod can choose to release the bracer. So death is not the only option, but the most like one.
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while yes they traveled to the temple “district” and back, that was in the “secure” area of the city where there were the most guards and people living, it also being the oldest and wealthiest district. i dont remember if adam specified how many “extensions” have been added on to the city but i would imagine that relatively speaking the vast majority of the city is outside the area the PCs have currently been in.
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I don’t remember any difference in lore prior to episode 50. I certainly may have forgotten something. Actually, the rod may have been a ring earlier on? That about the only difference I can remember.
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A looooong time ago, [spoiler]the cast encountered a similar Lotus after it grew from the body of a sickly Page of the Court of Swords. It too spawned a shadow creature that led, eventually, to the deaths of hundreds and the first TPK of the series. I don’t think in the early episodes it was confirmed that this was the work of the Mara (I can’t remember for sure)[/spoiler] but the moment of its appearance was a really impactful and beautifully grisly image that’s fondly remembered by longtime fans of CoS.
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The Mara also feed off of conflict, so this is almost literally the most active they’ve been able to be in many years. (Excluding the Court of Swords, which they could basically run at this point and us have no idea)
i dont think that the ring could release the bracer but i think the holder of a rod can give a ring to the same bracer as the rod controls to allow other people to “manage” (damage/harm) the people with out the rod holder being present
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The Rod is enchanted through powerful magics of both Judgement and Justice, and thus requires similarly powerful magic from both Arcana to remove without the Control Rod.
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Ahh, that makes sense. I just remember the ring being put on, and off we go. 
Oh right, I keep forgetting that he has an arm made of lava. I think the cast and Adam do too, no NPC ever mentions it 
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Has it been said whether or not the Necromancer King is a/dealing with the Mara?
I think the Necromancer King is in the Court of Swords. Not sure we’ve had an explicit update on what is going on in that part of the world.
Edit: Oh sorry, I assumed Faraang and not Mara. My apologies.
(wow this got long, nerded out about images lol…)
Illusion rules are definitely a bit confusing, those spells are really wordy. I think it would be worth it for yall to take a bit of time squaring out exactly what is capable of what by the rules as it is easy to lose track of it, especially if it is misused on one of the first usages. They’ve been a pretty common source of uncertainty.
I think it may have been partially addressed during the session, but Malleable Illusion has been misused a few times. All Malleable Illusions does is allow you to use an action to instantaneously change an existing illusion’s nature “using the spell’s normal parameters for the illusion”. It’s kind of like recasting, which is useful for saving spell slots, though doesn’t do a ton for cantrips like Minor Illusion (I think it all effectively does is allow for changes from farther than 30 feet away, and without requiring the S/M components)
To be clear, Minor Illusion can never create a moving image (EDIT: in fact, on another look and as referenced in the video linked a couple posts below, Minor Illusion can’t even make images of creatures/people, only of objects). So Malleable Illusions cannot cause Minor Illusions to move (well, not any faster than a 1/6 frames per second speed 
). If you want animation, it’s gotta be Major Illusion.
I can’t remember exactly what the logic behind the Malleable Illusions + spell = invisibility was, but if it was something like “continuously redefine the illusion to refract the light properly”, I think you can see how the “continuously” part is not in line with the instantenous changes once every 6 seconds allowed by Malleable Illusions. So as a start, any discussion about invisibility via Minor Illusion / Major Illusion need not factor in Malleable Illusions at all, it would not help.
That said, I’ll give my personal piece about why I think using Minor Image / Major Illusion for invisibility is some horseshit :P. To start, it is definitively outside of the intended use case of the spells. Adam, you definitely touched on this idea when considering the existance of a Ventriloquist spell, in that spells are not supposed to be invalidating of other existing spells.
But beyond the whole spirit of the rules, I think it logically does not allow for it anyway. The summary of my rambling below is that invisibility via a Minor Illusion or Major Image would be argued to work via an object that refracts light to give the appearance of whatever is behind the illusion. What is ‘behind’, however, depends entirely on what perspective/direction an onlooker is viewing from. The illusion would have to simultaneously be displaying infinite different images to replicate invisibility to any given onlooker. Therefore, these spells cannot replicate invisibility as they create single images (i.e., a point on the image looks the same from any perspective). However, some spells of an entirely different nature such as “Invisibility” should be able to make something invisible perfectly!
Rambling:
What are these images generated by Minor Illusion and Major Image? I think (though curious about other ideas) we all see them as basically holograms which are basically 3D images. 2D images are defined by the ordering of its pixels which give it form, so we can extrapolate that same idea to these hologram illusions in that the images are created by coloring in the pixels contained in the space of the illusion. So if we froze time and projected a scene into some 3D editor, you’d be able to see how each pixel (x,y,z coordinate) is defined by a single value (e.g., a shade of blue). Notably, these values would be constant regardless of what perspective the pixels are viewed from (above, below, to the right, slightly less to the right, etc.). This is where we can see how invisibility via a conjured light refracting object doesn’t work. For an object surrounded by a light refracting illusory image to be invisible, the image would have the pixels between the object and the onlooker set to precisely the values of the images directly behind the object. But what if there was a second onlooker slightly to the first’s side? Now those same pixels would need to simultanesouly have different values in order to also appear as whatever is directly behind the object from the second onlooker’s perspective. As these spells create images, this shows how the desired effect of invisibility would be impossible as being an image means that each pixel can have only one value.
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yes, it has been explicitly said he is a servant of the mara, i dont know weather that was from a prep video from adam or not though.
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