Title: City Council of Darkness
GM: Brennan Lee Mulligan
Players: Emily Axford (she/her) as Vesper Childers (she/her). Zac Oyama (he/him) as Zaeth Bondana (he/him). Siobhan Thompson (she/her) as La Contesse Madelaine (she/her). Lou Wilson (he/him) as LaVonte Worthy (he/him). Ally Beardsley (they/them) as HJ Wingstreet (he/him). Brian Murphy (he/him) as Mitch Frederick(he/him).
Streaming Service: Dropout

We return right to where we left off last week. At Mike’s, our vampiric vixens host their American Psycho movie night and business networking mixer. Madelaine introduces HJ and LaVonte to Cal, working to bring him deeper into their fold and under their control. Cal mentions silver mines, but he manages to stop himself before going deeper into discussion of his family’s properties.

Meanwhile, Zaeth finds a marijuana farm during his brooding. The farm belongs to the Douglas Family, which is the other powerful family in Purpee. While the Whittakers are associated with silver, the Douglases have an association with gold as noted by Siobhan; however, Emily posits over table that the Douglases are warlocks, which I’m not certain I align with, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

The group heads to the Silver Spring Cemetery, noticing that no one from the Douglas family is buried there.

HJ and LaVonte make things right with Mama Angie’s. Her frustration with Zaeth and Mitch evaporates in the face of several hundreds, allowing the group to hang there unimpeded. It allows them to get more information on the Douglas family, learning that both are in the real estate business, but while one buys lands for development, the other side purchases for farmland.

Whittakers portray themselves as liberal while Douglases go hard right, posing themselves as in opposition while voting together on many corporate interest issues. These two families would sacrifice anyone and anything, even their own, to maintain control.

As the episode comes to a close, Nancy reveals that she’s listened the whole time as our group did the terribly cliche of not checking their surroundings before having a chat about murder.

Highlights

Ah, yes, the map means nothing, and this is a totally normal co-op. Don’t worry about the eye or the strange sigil or the potion bottle, that’s just all-natural lemonade from local farmers. Didn’t you know that fisheye is a delicacy? If the eye looks like a human, that’s totally a cause of the very, very sad pollution problem. No witches here.

Final Score (3.5 out of 5 Stars)

This episode dragged a bit for me. We’re around the time for a series connector episode, and they usually aren’t terribly exciting, stumbling with their pacing and often having a large amount of exposition. Brennan and Matt Mercer previously spoke about the concept of ma, and the positive discord of interrupted tension building like the rain shots in Seven Samurai. If we had a high-tension episode last week, having a bit of a break now would make sense in that context, but it definitely did not feel well timed. Then again, maybe that’s exactly the point.

Additionally, this episode saw the group relationship breaking down even among the more established pairs. Zaeth nearly connected with Madelaine, Mitch, and Vesper at different points, but he’s kept the group at arm’s distance while HJ and LaVonte remaine the strongest pair; however, Vesper has started pulling back from Mitch and even HJ, sticking toward her zoological passion first.

We did learn some important information, underlining the relationship between the two powerful families that are starting to form the main obstacles between our Intrepid Heroes and success in Purpee, but a lot of it was a rundown of locations, filling in the blue pins on the map more so than anything else.

That being said, I’m excited to see Mitch dress up as Aaron to push the blame on the one hunting them as they fake a serial killer and bring Nancy into their inner circle.

Let us know what you thought in comments below or go over to our Discord channel to join the conversation.

Featured Image: Dimension 20

The Boss Rush Podcast: The Flagship Podcast of Boss Rush Media and the Boss Rush Network

The Boss Rush Podcast – The Boss Rush Podcast is the flagship podcast of Boss Rush Media and the Boss Rush Network. Each week, Corey, Stephanie, LeRon, and their friends from around the internet come together with other creators, developers, and industry veterans to talk about games they’ve been playing, discuss video game and entertainment based topics, and answer questions solicited on social media and the community Discord. 

New episodes of The Boss Rush Podcast release every Monday morning on YouTube and all major podcast applications like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Patreon supporters gain one week early access. 

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