Crit Juice

The details of Crit Juice, episode 2.

Achievements

• "Bipolar" - both a crit and crit fail in the same encounter. Reward: unknown. Unlocked by Brian/Wolf.
• "Stand Your Ground" - don't move for an entire encounter. Reward: a healing potion. Unlocked by Brian/Wolf.

Crit Deck cards

• "You pull the beating heart out of your foe's chest. They take 1d8 extra damage and is now considered undead." Submitted by great-collapsing-hrung-disaster.tumblr.com. Rolled by Brian McGrath/Wolf.

Crit Fail Cards

• "You obviously haven't had enough to drink. Finish your drink." Submitted by Sarah E. Rolled by Gary Soldati/Gralford.

Characters

• Arience Everstorm
• Banner Black
• Princess Camellia
• Crawling claws
• Dar'Jjeeki
• Doc Keratin
• Franklin "Wolf" Lewis
• Giant Freaking Head
• Gralford Stoneshield
• Gub T. Montgomery
• Halvek
• Il Muir
• Peasant mother (and baby)
• The Red Cloaks

Jokes

• Merch Store ("Get your GFH T-shirts in the Merch Store!")
• Brian's looking for somebody special.
• Gary's drinking ("Drinking gluten-free beer LIKE A REAL DWARF WOULD!")
• David's sound effects (the GFH's blood-curdling scream)
• "Loot that body"
• "I'm from there"
• "The Taint"
• Daniel's descriptive abilities
• Red Cloaks are bad tippers
• the Mark of the Last Hope is the Nike Swoosh
• Gralford is an elf
• the Red Cloaks are bad tippers

Pop Culture References
Interested in knowing all the pop culture references the players make? Here's a start.

• "The Addams Family" (TV show) - referring to crawling claws
• "Left 4 Dead" (video game) - describing the GFH
• "X-Men: First Class" (terrible movie with Kevin Bacon)
• "X-Men 3" (an even more terrible movie)
• Jewel (musician) - "She's a powerhouse artist"
• "Game of Thrones" (fantasy novels, maybe TV show, too) - "You're not Arya Stark and you know it!"
• "Are you my mother?" (children's book)
• Spaghetti-O's (canned pasta)
• Dunkaroos (packaged cookies with frosting for dipping)
• String Things (extruded fruit pectin strings)
• "A Whole New World" (song from the Disney movie "Aladdin")
• "The Fugitive" (the movie with Harrison Ford, not the TV show)
• Nike (athletic shoe company with a swoosh logo and a slogan "Just Do It")

Listen to Episode 2

SUMMARY
The party peppers the giant with damage as it tries and fails repeatedly to grab and/or flatten Gralford. That dwarf is amazingly agile! To console himself, the giant picks up Arience and throws him into Wolf. Gralford, encouraged by his success at climbing Amon Rath, shimmies up onto a balcony and is promptly knocked down when the giant smashes the balcony from under him. Finally, the giant falls, and the party celebrates.

But too soon! For the Giant Freaking Head detaches itself from the body and rolls toward them. It vomits forth dismembered hands - crawling claws - which scrabble around the battlefield and strangle different PCs. The GFH's grotesque, purple tentacle of a tongue lashes around the battlefield, dealing damage to any PC that comes close. Arience summons forth a tempest of daggers, which Gub enters, heedless of the danger. Wolf shoots a crawling claw that is holding a bloody heart in its fingers, which squirts out of his hand into Wolf's grasp, and Wolf further kills the undead crawling claw. In addition to being pierced by his teammate's daggers, Gub gets strangled by a crawling claw and then strangled by the GFH's tongue. Dar'Jjeeki blasts it so that it starts to weep blood, then Gralford cracks its skull so that brains ooze out. Doc attempts to leap atop the head, and instead pulls off its diseased scalp. Gub, slowly dying, intimidates the GFH into surrendering: "Hey, you bulimic piece of shit. Sit down and don't hurt another motherfucker!" The players engage in a long riff about the possible future the GFH could have in the rebuilt Mariposa, and then Dar'Jjeeki hits the Giant Freaking Head with an energy strobe, splattering it like a ripe tomato. Everyone is covered with the gore, and Doc acts condescending to the Princess. The group of Red Cloaks appear. Everyone has heard of the Red Cloaks - ghost stories told around campfires about people who appear in a place and exterminate every last man, woman, child, dog and cat in a place. And now, here they are.

The red-cloaked wolf-man Banner Black is about the destroy the party, when he stops short, seeing the mark of the Last Hope on their upraised palms. Everyone who survived the battle with Amon Rath has the mark of the Last Hope emlazoned on their palms - the Adventurers, Halvek, the peasant woman AND her baby - except for Camellia, who clearly does not bear the mark of the Last Hope. Il Muir decides to talk to them, even though he really wants to cleanse them of the Taint. Banner explains the purpose of the Red Cloaks, and Gub rants about how one time the Red Cloaks visited Blazestone and didn't leave a tip.

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