Death's Door 1: Why Does Everyone Die?

With the first book in "The Clinic" sub-series of Discworld stories complete, the campaign moves onto the next book, Death's Door. Like all Discworld series, such as "The Guards," "The Wicthes" and so on, this features the same cast of characters but in a new story. This story begins a few months after the events of Alternative Medicine, with Ankh-Morpork now under a literal cloud, as the smoke of progress meets the fogs of Autumn and plunges the city into a week-long dark smog.

• Analogue Cockaday now shares lodgings with her nephew Cosine, in newly built affordable housing in Dragon's Landing; she receives a disturbing legal document and needs Celia Woodruff's help to decipher it as a request for a dissolution of marriage form her husband Obediah, who is still managing the animal sanctuary back in Lancre!
• At the clinic, Toby Determined examines new patient Clarrida Murphy, a banshee who no longer wails outside the homes where a death is going to occur, but finds herself compelled to wail at children's birthday parties, to the consternation of all. Toby determines to ask Death about this the next time he sees him, and with Toby's special relationship to causality, the intent is the same is the action, so he considers the job done.
• Another patient is seen by Count Holloway Harris, when a highly inebriated merfolk stumbles through the door and collapses, their condition growing worse when Celia throws water over them. This is Saphy Mariana, who is suffering from the unusual ailment that they can't breathe water, only alcohol! Count Holloway decides to pickle them for the time being, but this goes a little too well and kills the patient, but the Count is confident he can revive them later!
• Thackeray Ambrosius is away from Ankh-Morpork at this time: something to do with finances, again.

Celia encourages Analogue to get on the coach to Lancre to confront her husband, so of course Count Holloway and Toby come too, leaving the clinic under the care of Epidermis Foxglove, the reanimated skin puppet version of Analogue. On the way, they have some narrow encounters with Death, who seems to have something he wants to say to them, and also aid Langran Bilth, a dwarf emissary returning from Ankh-Morpork with a high, squeaky voice. A tap on the head from Analogue's hammer resets him to "Antonio Banderas" mode, which still isn't right, but Langran seems quite happy with the results, so takes them the rest of the way in his personal coach, so they complete the trip in luxurious but very cramped style.

A confrontation with Obediah, Analogue's husband, leads to more confusion as he knows nothing of the divorce papers, but suggests it looks like somethng that might have been drawn up by Mr. Kipling, a travelling lawyer who was in Lancre recently. Beside making rather disappointing, soggy individual apple pies, the lawyer explains that he didn't write the document yet; rather, it looks like something he may write, in the near future, when Analogue is missing, presumed dead. Meanwhile, Count Holloway and Toby take turns dying and resurrecting each other, enabling a more complete convesrsation with Death, who wants to know why everyone dies, a philosophical conundrum they have no answer for.

A consultation with the Queen of Lancre, and occasional witch, Magrat Garlick, only shows that the letter uses retrograde ink, that is, ink that travels backwards in time. Some near future event is so huge, so important, and so intimately woven into the lives of the clinic staff, that is has produced echoes in the past before it happens.

The staff get back on the coach with seven other dwarves, following the lead of Langran Bilth in the hope of getting sexy voices of their own, so they stop at the same dwarven long hall they enjoyed hospitality at on the way out. Toby goes to relieve himself on a convenient tree but a very inconvenient door opens and he stumbles into Death's domain again. The reaper is busy at his work, picking hourglasses from the shelves and arranging them on his desk, and asks the question again: "WHY DOES EVERYONE DIE?" The only consolation Toby can offer is that it's just their time, but Death shows Toby the huge collection of hourglasses on the table, thousands of them, with the names of everyone in Ankh-Morpork and clarifies his question.

"WHY DOES EVERYONE DIE... IN TWO WEEKS?"

Next Episode: Apocalypse How?

Alternative Medicine 4: It's All Just Me, Me, Me, Isn't It?

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming for the end of the first story arc of the game, starting where we left off as panic spreads at a dinner party about the collapse of the Bank of Ankh-Morpork, while Celia investigates the alchemical factory of Dr. Frank Winkie. She discovers a goblin workforce producing shampoo made from the runoff of Dragon's Landing, but also gets chased by Todd Candiman, a disgruntled toymaker with a very realistic dragon cosplay.

Things break-up back at the dinner party and the team regroup at the clinic to discuss strategies for the following day, as the city descends into more rioting that lasts much of the night. The next day, the team returns to Dragon's Landing for a closer look for the source of the magical energy spilling out there and discover a crack in reality; they'll need a wizard to check this out. Also, at last night's party, Gail Lambshead, founder of the clinic, suggested that rather than pay Dr. Frank Winkie AM$10,000 a month for the dubious pleasure of being a member of the Guild of Medical Practitioners, she could write a cheque for AM$50,000 to put a price on his head with the Assassin's Guild! Thackeray takes the cheque and immeditaely tries to change the Payee bit, ruining it in the process, so it's left to Analogue to take it along to the assassin's guild.

After a visit or two to Unseen University, the team recruit the services of Ponder Stibbons, research wizard, and Kinrich Hardaw, who has had a very disturbing idea, that ideas themselves can come alive and become like plagues. He postulates to them that ideas behave selfishly in order to propogate & survive, with a "Me! Me! Me!" attitude, hence he has dubbed these living ideas mememes. While Ponder helps to measure and explain the crack in reality at Dragon's Landing, Lago Balmedie and his MAMMA group have begun a rally at the site, where he announces that he will return the property to it's original owners, on the understanding that they will build new housing here, and announces his intent to replace the Patrician! They also start to spread rumours about the "Vermillion Virulence," a plague that makes you turn red, then drop dead.

Speaking of the Vermillion Virulence, Lord Vetinari shows up at the clinic with some apparent victims, who are examined by Count Holloway, who discovers that it is real and now he has it too! The city is in uproar and it seems likely that the Patrician will have to step down and let someone else take the job; already, as a result of a meeting between Kinrich Hardaw and Mandan Barr, the power of mememes has grown exponentially, resulting in a wave of Communism gripping the city, causing the Assassin's guild to slash their prices to AM$50 per inhumation!

The power of mememes comes to the rescue, however, as Count Holloway discovers placebos and walks the streets, healing those infected with the Vermillion Virulence by speaking like an absolute authority on the cure for it and dispensing said cure, which were really peanuts rescued from a pub ashtray. The clinic makes an attempt to stand in the way of Lago Balmedie's plans, but popular support has given his campaign too much momentum, even after they neutralise his dragon & plague plans. They do, however, manage to repair the fracture... well, move it might be more accurate, as Analogue and Thackeray use the former's retrophrenology to relocate the crack into the latter! Almost as an afterthought, Thackeray persuades his personal torment demon Sizzle to tear up the contract with Lago Balmedie, because it technically only promised him the position of Patrician for life, so he and Dr. Winkie end up getting inhumed by Casey Crawford.

Just for Fun

I worked out a number of NPCs I wanted to use in this campaign in advance, to fill various roles in the story and the roster of employees/patients needed for the clinic. Some of these names were just made up to sound "Discworldy," but others had their origins in word play. Here's a few notable ones who we probably won't see again.

• Lago Balmedie: You've no doubt all heard of "Maralago" but did you know the owner of that resort also owns a golf course at Balemedie in Scotland?
  
• Dr. Frank Winkie: So, the Winkies are a race of people in the magical Land of Oz, hence effectively 'Dr. Oz'; I just threw in the 'Frank' as a trtibute to another Oz.
• Todd Candiman: tribute to Tony Todd, the original Candyman, another boogeyman haunting the streets of an urban ghetto.
• Dydon Harlyn: the clinic's first patient, whose name breaks down into the same elements as 'Lyndon Hardy,' author of a book that has a lot of sympathetic magic in it.
• Kinrich Hardaw: same principle as the above; who else was I going to name the inventor of mememes after than Richard Dawkins?
• Mandan Barr: the God (?) of Rumour's (?) secret idenity derives from mangling the phrase "I heard it from the man down the pub," but 'Mandan Pub' would have been a bit too obvious.
• Justin Enterica: sufferer of the peripatetic boil, whose name... actually, I'll save this one, his full story is yet to be told!

Next Episode: Death's Door

Alternative Medicine #3: Blind Dates

 A new patient calls in at the clinic, or more properly is dragged there by his wife Donica Grace, who complains that her banker husband Caldon Grace is giving away their possessions to charity, in the form of donations to the convent of the Sightless Sisters of Sek! Count Holloway consults with Caldon in Uberwaldean so his wife won't understand them and learns that he is trying to impress a pretty new nun he has a crush on. This simple revelation has repercussions for all the staff members for the rest of the day.

• Thackeray persuades Caldon that he needs to make a much larger donation to the convent to impress his sweetheart, and so they set off to the bank to take a large amount of gold from it and give it to Sister Bennitta Qulp.
• Count Holloway and Analogue decide that Donica needs to feel more appreciated and should just make her husband jealous of the attention she gets from others, so they set out a convoluted plan to find her a lover.
• Celia senses that Caldon is also tied into the strange form of magic she has sensed around their previous patients, Dydon Harlyn and Lago Balmedie, but their wigs were the cause of their ailments and Caldon doesn't wear a wig.
• Toby has an appointment with Justin Enterica, who has a peripatetic boil: it comes and goes, appearing in a different place every night and vanishing by morning, but always exactly the same boil. Toby's attempt to examine Justin leads to acquiring the boil himself, but it becomes entangled with his unique relationship to causality, causing temporal copies of the boil to appear all over his body!

Much ado follows, with many diversions and distractions from what might loosely be thought of as a plot, including such highlights as:

• Count Holloway enlists Analogue's help in resurrecting a dead rat: this is a success, but it also resurrects Analogue's dead skin cells, when she leaves her hand in the electric eel tank. This results in the creation of a floppy, skin-puppet copy of Analogue, henceforth known as Epidermia Foxglove, who becomes the new caterer for the clinic.
• Thackeray goes to the bank with Caldon and Analogue and acquires the gold; they then team up with Celia to take this to the convent, which currently has a lot of construction work taking place. They meet Sister Bennitta, a novice who joined the order last month and now wears the Holy Blindfold, but they also learn that the nuns donate their hair to make wigs! A little further digging reveals that Sister Bonnitta's shampoo is the source of the unknown magic, but there are still questions to be answered.
• Count Holloway and Toby put their plan into action, which involves taking iconograph pictures of corpses in the morgue so that they can present these to Donica Grace and get her to choose the one she is most attracted to, so that they can resurrect that one to send him on a date with her! This simple, flawless plan inexpicably encounters a few hiccups: first, the pair find prior patient Dydon Harlyn dead in the mrogue and second, they also find currently alive clinic employee Toby Determined dead in the morgue! Putting these troubling discoveries aside, they take their pictures and leave, headed for a social gathering hosted by Donica Grace, where they take her to one side and show her the images of dead men.
• Toby and Count Holloway contemplate how to get out of jail (no text missing here, that's how the session went as we played) and hit upon a genius plan! If Count Holloway temporarily kills Toby, the guards will take him out of the cell, where he can be resurrected and then come back to rescue the Count! This plan works better than they could have expected, as Toby wakes up in a drawer in the morgue which is then pulled open as himself and Count Holloway take pictures of the corpses! Toby plays dead so as to not break causality, then returns to the jail and terrifes the guard into releasing Count Holloway.
• The gang finally make it to the dinner party of Gail Lambshead, the patron whom they have never met, where they mingle with luminaries of Ankh-Morpork society, including the Graces, Lago Balmedie and Dr. Frank Winkie, creator of the shampoo that has caused so much trouble. Celia sneaks out of the party, while Toby flirts with Donica Grace (and also his boils are cured remotely when Justin Enterica applies a mushroom poultice to himself at this time.)

Two last twists occur at the end of this narrative, with the shocking announcement that there's been a run on the bank, causing panic at the dinner party, and Celia discovering a gutter carrying the runoff from Dragon's Landing leading right into the alchemical laboratory of Dr. Frank Winkie, but nothing leaves from the other side.

Next Episode: It's All Just Me, Me, Me, Isn't It?

Alternative Medicine #2: Mamma Told Me Not to Come

Continuing my short campaign of Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork, the staff of the Lambshead Clinic for Indistinct Medicine were having their morning meeting to catch each other up on yesterday's shenanigans, when a new patient demanded to be seen immediately. This was Lago Balmedie, an entrpreneur afflicted with [BEEP] verbal censorship. Celia got to work on diagnosing his condition, making a connection between his wig and the Voodoo Wig of Harlyn Dydon from the previous session, while Analogue administered treatment, i.e. she tapped him on the head with a hammer.

Meanwhile, Toby found a golden envelope on his deck, containing a card with a set of numbers printed on it; decoding this lead him to the Assassin's Guild and one Casey Crawford working the desk. Checking the ledger for the day, Casey found that Toby had a site visit booked, to case the joint and provide an estimate. The site in question proved to be the cemetry though, specifically a gravestone with Toby's name on it! Casey thoughtfully distracted Toby and then whacked him on the back of the head with a cosh: Toby awoke a little while later in the afterlife, apparently, with the God of Causality looking down on him and demanding to know why he was here early! The God offered to adjust the celestial calendar and move the date of his death to 'Today', but Toby politely refused and instead walked through the door the God indicated would take him back to the land of the living. Walking through the door, Toby entered his surprise birthday party, with all his colleagues from the Clinic there! Naturally, this was the suprise party Toby will/had organised for himself.

In another meanwhile, Thackeray went to negotiate the bill with Harlyn Dydon but arrived at the architect's office to find it boycotted by Cosine Cockaday and others, protesting the way their property had been taken out from under them. Thackeray took a moment out of his schedule to stitch up the scratches across Cosine's face, noticing in the process that they resembled the marks left by a dragon's claw. After that interlude, he went into the office and pushed Harlyn for a payment, subtly suggesting that the truth about Harlyn's wig might get out if he didn't pay up; Harlyn was in no position to argue, literally, as he collapsed to the floor, choking, so Thackeray helped himself to some golden ornaments on the desk and left. In actual fact, these trinkets were intended as a bribe for Sizzle, a demonic entity that had been contracted to beleaguer him but instead took the bribe and pointed Thackeray towards Mandan Barr, the God (Maybe?) of Rumours (Possibly?)

Back with the mainish plot, Analogue and Celia thought it would be a good wheeze to follow Lago Balmedie to his meeting with the consortium that had bought out Dragon's Landing for redevelopment, as they had left him with some post-treatment total honesty. It turned out the consortium was a political rally of some sort, united by their desire to Make Ankh-Morpork Magnificent Again, known as MAMMA for short. Unfortunately, Lago's brutal frankness had the crowd on his side, cheering him on and begging for the opportunity to give him their money. Even Celia and Analogue got caught up in this, finding themselves back outside 5 minutes later wearing MAMMA badges. Celia had gotten another whiff of strange magic about the proceedings, suggesting something larger was going on.

Further investigation by the clinic team... well, it didn't exactly go the way they wanted. A swift revisit to the Dragon's Landing site lead to Cosine Cockaday's revelation that he had been attacked by a dragon! This rumour began to spread like widlfire around the city, along with one about the River Ankh rising, but most people ignored this and decided to panic about the return of the dragon instead.

• Thackeray met with the God (maybe?) of Rumours (possibly?) in a bar that mostly sold erotic peanuts and found favour in the divine presence of a shadowy figure in the furthest corner, who told him that something more powerful than magic was at work in the city and their troubles were being driven by an idea. The God pointed him towards Kinrich Hardaw, a wizard who had committed himself to a sanatorium and refused to speak to anyone.
• Celia, Analogue and Toby went to see Lady Sybil Ramkin at the Sunshine Sanctuary for Sick Dragons, to seek her opinion on the dragon rumors flying about the city. She poo-pooed the idea while allowing them to pet Floofy, an adorable swamp dragon who only caused burns they could easily treat. Not only did Lady Sybil direct them towards the university for answers, she also promised to get them an invite to dinner with Gail Lambshead, their mysterious patron who was behind the founding of the clinic.

With the city in panic over the rumoured return of the dragon, a large crowd had gathered around the walls of Unseen University, demanding that the wizards do something, or blaming them for the whole thing. The clinic team decided to enter through the simple ruse of hijacking a sedan chair belonging to one of the high class citizens here to consult directly with the wizards about the whole situation. Naturally, this turned out to belong to Lord Vetinari, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, who calmly stepped out of his chair to introduce his abductors to Mustrum Ridcully, Arch-Chancellor of Unseen University. Of course, the Patrician had known what was happening all along and had arranged for the clinic team to meet the wizards for his own inscrutable reasons.

The team now have a purpose: find out what in the Nine Hells is going on in the city and put a stop to it, or face the Patrician's attention! Gulp! He might... talk to them!!

Next Episode: Blind Dates