City of the Dead ch. 4 addendum: Grave Rot

Something I forgot to mention at the end of my series of 3 blogs about session 4 of my D&D adventure, The City of the Dead, is that the players aren't out of harm's way yet. They're all inffected with Grave Rot.

Grave Rot is a disease I made up that's carried by bükken, the burrowing undead similar to ghouls I created for my game world. The group has had multiple combats with bükken and each person has been scratched multiple times. The disease allows a saving throw to avoid infection (a standard provision in D&D) but at this point everyone's been clawed and scratched so many times they've all failed at least once.

So, what happens next? This is where I used the technique of passing a clue-note to a player so they could explain it in character, as the group's knowledgeable person on the subject, to everyone else.

Grave Rot (Religion DC 19)
Attacks from bükken can infect victims with the disease Grave Rot. It causes Con damage. At this point likely everyone is infected. First symptoms only appear after 1-3 days. This ability damage is not permanent; it heals naturally at the rate of 1 point/day (double with complete rest). But those infected suffer more damage every day and will likely die unless the disease is removed.

I passed this note to the guy who plays Terence, a cleric of the goddess opposed to undead. He'd know the most about the disease because he knows the most (by far) about countering the creatures who spread it. Also, note I made it a DC 19 Knowledge (Religion) check. Terence has a +10 on that skill so it's within his wheelhouse.

"I'll check my Knowledge (Religion), too!" offered Hawk, who plays Astrin, the paladin. She rolled poorly and didn't make it. I suggested the in-game explanation for that could be, "Well, Astrin is actually immune to such diseases as an extraordinary ability of her Paladin class, so she skipped Religion class the day they taught that." 😂

Clothes Shopping 2023

Recently I've gone on my clothes shopping spree for 2023. Over the past 6 weeks I've bought 9 shirts and 1 pair of trousers. I call this my 2023 shopping spree because the last time I bought more than 1 item at a time was when I bought 8 shirts... in May 2021. (BTW, this recent set of 9 shirts are long sleeve while the 2021 set was short sleeve. I'm replacing different wardrobes in different years!)

This time, as with the last few times around, I did all my shopping online. That still seems a bit new to me as I resisted online clothes shopping for a few years. Oh, it's not because I'm afraid of technology or online identity theft or anything like that. I've been buying things online, including major purchases, regularly since 1997. It's just that buying clothes online took me a while to warm up to because details of color and especially sizing are so crucial, and you can't be sure of those online.

"Oh, but you can buy stuff online and return what doesn't fit," people assured me. Yes, I always knew that was possible. But it seemed like abusing the returns policy to me to order lots of stuff, 2, 3 or even 4 different sizes and colors, planning to return more than half of it.

What tipped me over was seeing that even traditional brick-and-mortar store chains were embracing online clothes shopping. As part of that they were implicitly endorsing the practice of plan-to-return-most-of-it necessary to make buying clothes online an actual, reasonable thing.

Speaking of returns, I did make a few this time. Those 9 shirts and 1 pair of trousers I mentioned are only the items I kept. I returned 2 other shirts because their colors didn't look as good in person as in the photos, and 2 other clothes items because they were inches shy of fitting properly even relative to the sizing chart the manufacturer provided. Overall 10/14 seems like a good hit rate. It's better than the 2/8 keeper rate I had on a buying spree earlier in 2021.

Three Days a Week

When I got home from a trip Thursday night last week I thought about what I wanted for supper and decided, "Pizza!" More specifically, I wanted good pizza. 😅 In Vegas there was plenty of pizza that was poor. Or wildly too expensive. Or both. Anyway, there's a great by-the-slice joint near my house. It has kind of funky hours, though, so I looked it up quickly online to see if it was open. Bingo!

When I got to the restaurant, I saw this:



The good news was they were still open Thursday evening. The bad news is they've reduced their schedule even further than what it was several months ago. Now they're only open 3 days a week. WTF?

And it's not even 3 full days a week. It's more like one day and two half days.

Again, WTF?

When this business first opened several years ago it was an expansion by a local entrepreneur who had another pizzeria across town. I'll call him Kirk. Kirk was a good guy, cared for his workers, worked hard to run a small business, etc. Kirk took a business partner in the expansion who I believe ultimately didn't pull his weight. (The partner was a techie who wanted to keep his day job for the money while running a pizzeria as a lifestyle job. It didn't work.) The partner left, and Kirk spun off this restaurant to focus on the original. Now the new owners don't seem to be so savvy.

Why not so savvy? It's because the restaurant says "costs" are the reason it has cut its hours. That's actually a double WTF. It argues to me the people running the business may not understand how to run a small business. "Costs" are only half the equation. The other half is "revenues", and there are no revenues being made the majority of the week when they're closed!

You might notice that typically people who are building a small business work long hours to get it going. I remember years ago when the local paper interviewed a local businessperson about his long hours. "You work 16 hours a day," the writer observed. "Why so long?" "Rent is 24 hours," he said.

This restaurant is now a cooperative; the workers run it! It kind of makes sense then that the owners— a crowd of mostly 20-somethings with little to no experience running a business— kind of suck at it. That's too bad because they do still make good pizza. But I doubt their business will be around at all in another year or two unless they hire someone with a clue.