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56: No Good Comes From Reading

June 26, 2026

Setting​

Lord Bradicus's death-game reality show, in progress. The party — competing under their mediocre-mercenary cover as Pupusa Possum — was told to fetch a cursed artifact from a haunted library and win the right to pass into the Eldoran capital past its magic detectors. When Bradicus rang his bell and said "go," the whole thing detonated into a drunken cookout brawl: dancing, a parking-lot fight circle, three rival gangs, and camera drones filming every second. By the end of the night the team will have out-driven all three gangs, warped into a soul-eating library, watched a rival get his soul torn out, uncovered the murdered congregation of Luna, and learned that this library is the exact place where Leliana walked through a gateway as a girl and came back as Helisanna. It ends with the whole party clinging to a sheep as a hidden portal swallows them.

Players Present​

  • Topher (DM)
  • Taylor Ramsey as Silas Fairbanks — Halfling Rogue/Sorcerer, disguised as "Tristan William Hammerfell"
  • Justin Hale as Bru — Goblin Artificer
  • Ali Leonard as Elspeth Cooper — Dwarf Artificer/Gunslinger, wheelman
  • Luke Neverisky as Leliana Goldspring — Human Bard, birthday player and reluctant tour guide
  • Ellis Taylor as Olivia Cooper — Dwarf Paladin, retired detective

Plot Events​

Escape from the Cookout​

The bell rings, Bradicus says "go," and the lot erupts. Pupusa Possum is the only sober group in a sea of drunk revelers, three rival gangs, and buzzing camera drones — the whole audition is a reality show, and they are on camera. Silas has already teleported ahead of the pack. Rather than fight, the party books it for the van.

Silas, on a natural 20 Perception, clocks a tiny Volkswagen-Beetle-shaped car slipping out through the gate, then whips out his wand of web and webs every biker's motorcycle to the ground. Leliana covers the trick with a minor illusion of a giant web-spitting spider. Keeping up her drunk-facade from the night before, Leliana stumbles past the four blinded bikers on a Deception of 19, drawing only a mournful "Oh my eyes... come on, Paul."

Olivia climbs down and takes her axe to the cat gang's catmobile — a huge furry white cat-shaped car with a mechanical swirling tail — slashing a tire. Elspeth follows up with heat metal on the car's aluminum shell; the whole thing droops, melts, and caves in as a chorus of sad cats meows at the doors. Bru wants to hang out the window lobbing fireworks, so Elspeth grabs his ankle to keep him from falling out.

The Chase​

Elspeth takes the wheel and Tokyo-drifts the entire escape on a driving check of 29, realizing mid-corner that she may in fact be one of the greatest racers in the world. She vrooms past the cowboy gang's Dodge Ram wheel-to-wheel and leaves them in the dust. The lot gives way to the first paved asphalt the party has seen since the little-spoon merchant village — an inn, farmland, a fort, and a forest between them and the library.

Bru finally gets his moment, spewing lit fireworks into the window of a rival Beetle. The competitors panic, call him crazy, and drop back. As the countryside rolls past, the party realizes with a jolt where they are: this is Leliana's homeland, the Eldoran back-country she came from. She is, she cheerfully admits, illiterate — the reading program back home was terrible, but the art program was excellent.

Bad Library, No​

Then the memories hit. As the library comes into view, Leliana's suppressed past floods back through a shattered memory barrier — 3 psychic damage, then 9 more — and she panics, lunging for the wheel.

"No. Bad library. No. Not going back... That's where Helisanna was born."

Silas grapples her and German-suplexes her back into her seat before she can crash the van; Elspeth regains control. Once she's calm, Leliana tells them everything:

"I just wanted to be a musician so bad... somebody tipped me off to this location... next thing I know I was making some sort of deal with this really scary being... and then Helisanna was created."

The party pledges to walk in with her. Olivia climbs down through the van's hatch to counsel her and establishes a safe word: "pineapple." Bru offers his own gesture of profound trust — emotional support dynamite, a single stick of dynamite fitted with a service-animal vest — so Leliana won't feel alone. Silas reassures her she is not doing this by herself this time.

The Triple C​

They reach a squat brutalist concrete building — the Cornwall Community Library, "the triple C." The rival frog-people team overcooks the approach and drives straight into a bog. Scarlet volunteers to stay behind and guard the van rather than tuck it into the pocket village. The front door teleports whoever enters onto a glowing glyph in the basement, and the party warps in one by one.

The Book Club​

They materialize in a horrible shade-filled basement — a library reading room where the "patrons" are ghosts, arranged in reading circles, a book club, and a checkout desk, none of them yet aware of the intruders. Some, Leliana realizes, are ghosts of people she used to know. Initiative is rolled.

The library's clerks shush constantly — "Shh, this is a library" — and the shades warn "the book club is disturbed now... No more playtime." The party quickly learns the central rule: teleporting draws the shades' attention. When Silas misty-steps to a chandelier to hide, the light flickers and seven shades drift up to the ceiling; he barely holds his hidey-hole on a 29 Stealth.

Bru summons his Eldritch cannon, casts reduce on his familiar Kevin, and sends him to hug the ceiling for recon while mind-telephoning the group to stay quiet. Elspeth throws a warding bond on Leliana. The rival cowboy team warps in too — Paul, Kish, Jesse, and the rest — and one of their red frogs, Blade, is crit-devoured, his soul torn out on the spot.

"Blade is dead. Blade is dead."

The dead Blade, now a shade himself, sprays acid and dissolves three of the library's shades in a grim triple kill. Bru force-ballistas another to dust. Leliana drops intellect fortress on Bru and Silas and slips Olivia some bardic juice. Silas swings from the chandelier chain and shears through three shades at once for 18 damage, then throws a dagger to kill a fourth — studio applause plays over the drone speakers as the spidery camera-drone frames the shot. Olivia finishes the room, channel divinity crackling down her lightning axe as she leaps up shouting:

"A library is a public space. Stop gatekeeping!"

Underneath it all runs a nauseating psychic whisper about "study and betterment," forcing repeated DC 14 Wisdom saves; each failure drops a point of Charisma or Intelligence. Bru's Charisma bleeds away, and both Silas and Leliana take Intelligence hits before the fortress and the fight are through.

The Best of Us​

In the aftermath, Olivia runs to the dead frog to lay on hands, and finds nothing.

"There is no life in this body. He was the best of us."

A grieving rival, Neer, asks for a hug; Olivia gives him one and cries "I'm so sorry." She holds revivify in reserve but won't burn the slot — and when the party later finds another dead old man, Paul, they realize the shades did something that prevents resurrection entirely. Olivia's verdict on the reading compulsion sinks in: reading, in this place, traps souls.

No Good Comes From Reading​

Pressing deeper, the party enters a library that exerts a physical compulsion to read — and reading is what turns visitors into shades. Olivia deploys her charm-immunity aura, gathering everyone within ten feet, and the party moves kindergarten-style: everyone gripping Bob, Elspeth's mount, with Silas riding piggyback. Leliana crams the compulsion books into her portable hole so no one can crack them, offering to let the others read a chapter she wrote herself instead. Silas, still going by Tristan William Hammerfell under his hat of disguise, sums up the lesson repeatedly:

"I've said it before and I'm going to say it again. No good comes from reading."

They pass through rooms of skeletons and corpses. Olivia's investigations tell a story:

  • Three armored mercenaries, dead maybe six months, killed violently — one stabbed in the back, one beheaded, one disemboweled. Each wore a crescent-moon amulet of glass and silver: followers of Luna. One of them was carrying a pressed-rose birthday card.
  • Two Eldoran soldiers who killed each other, slumped in piles of books — victims of the reading compulsion.

The birthday card reads: "For our little rose bud who never gives up on her dreams... We love you, Leliana. From mom, dad, and Peter." At first the party fears these are Leliana's parents; they are not — they are Luna's faithful, mercenaries who found the card and came looking for her. A congregation of Luna existed near here and was slaughtered about six months ago. Timeline shakes loose: the moon fell over a year ago, and the party has been away roughly two years.

The Wishing Pond​

The trail leads to a crystal-clear pond beneath a gargoyle-like dragon statue. The pond is a mirror that speaks — and the face it shows is Helisanna, Leliana's severed other half, now (she says) running things in the South and riding an undead dragon. Bru tries to pee in the pond to flirt, goblin-style, but the water shows him a handsome, luscious-haired version of himself and gives him performance anxiety. Leliana peers in anyway, and Helisanna delivers the full history.

Long ago, a naive young Leliana wandered these halls searching for books, lost her favorite birthday card, and walked through what was then a shining magical gateway — where she was "rendered from her body and reformed anew." In that deep abyss she sold her soul to a monstrous demon, and Helisanna was born. They are two halves of one whole. Helisanna's warning is blunt:

"Don't dig too deep or you'll be dead. And then I'll be dead. So keep it together."

"You... with your naive self just prancing down the hall searching for books like an idiot, lost your favorite birthday card and then you sold your soul to a monstrous demon thing."

Grab the artifact, she urges, and leave without excavating the past. If Leliana goes through the gateway again, both halves cease to exist. The gateway, everyone realizes, is still here — hidden behind the statue.

The Button​

The party debates whether reuniting the two halves would simply be a death for both. Bru recalls that Helisanna once made him and Leliana both believe they were part of her family, though she never believed it herself — proof of how good a liar she is. Nobody can tell whether she is lying now to protect her own existence.

Luke's investigation of the dragon statue finds the hidden mechanism: the statue slides back into a false door, revealing a disguised button in the wall tile. He briefly considers an insight-and-arcana dig into the fusion process — the memory of being burnt alive from the inside, a nothingness like being part of an ocean, a new self clawing out of primordial goo — and decides the memory is too horrible.

"As curious as I am, maybe we should just leave it."

Olivia insists she's the best one to handle whatever comes, and pushes the button.

Light floods the room and a whirling vortex opens, dragging the party in. Bob's teleport can only carry a single rider, so extraction as a group is off the table — everyone piles onto the sheep anyway.

"Whatever. We're all touching Bob. If she gets teleported, we all get teleported."

Paper streams in behind them as the portal pulls. The session ends mid-teleport, the whole party clinging to Bob, with the real possibility that one of them fails a strength save and is sucked in alone.

Notable Character Moments​

  • Elspeth's getaway drive is the mechanical spine of the first act. A 29 driving check turns the escape from a drunken cookout into a Tokyo drift, webbed motorcycles and a melted catmobile in the rearview and the cowboys' Dodge Ram eating dust. She realizes mid-corner she might be one of the best drivers alive, and the roll backs her up.

  • Leliana's memory return is the emotional center of the night. This is the library where Helisanna was born, and the past comes back as literal psychic damage as she tries to grab the wheel. What follows — Olivia's "pineapple" safe word, Bru's emotional support dynamite, Silas's suplex and then his reassurance that she isn't alone this time — is the whole party physically and emotionally bracing one member for the worst room she's ever walked into.

  • Bru's emotional support dynamite is the session's most Bru gesture of affection. He hands Leliana a live stick of dynamite in a service-animal vest so she'll feel safe. As Silas notes, offering someone your emotional support dynamite is a huge gesture of trust.

  • Silas swinging from the chandelier to shear three shades apart while studio applause plays over the drone speakers is the moment the reality-show framing and the horror-dungeon framing collide. He's fighting for his life against soul-eating ghosts and getting hero-shot framing from a camera drone at the same time.

  • Olivia's grief for a rival cuts against the whole competition. She won't burn a spell slot she may need, but she still runs to a dead frog on a rival team, tries to revive him, and hugs a crying stranger. "He was the best of us" is not kayfabe.

  • Everyone holding Bob is the perfect image to end on. Facing a compulsion that traps souls and a portal that only teleports one rider, the party's answer is to physically cluster around a sheep and refuse to be separated. If one goes, they all go.

Themes​

  • Reading as a trap: The library kills by compulsion — read a book, become a shade, lose your soul, forfeit even resurrection. Silas's running gag that "no good comes from reading" turns literal in a building full of the corpses of people who couldn't stop turning pages. Knowledge here is a hook, and Leliana's whole tragedy is that she came looking for books and lost herself to a gateway.

  • Two halves of one whole: Helisanna and Leliana can't both be excavated without both ceasing to exist. The pond frames the party's central dilemma — is Helisanna warning Leliana to protect her, or lying to protect herself? — and nobody can answer it, because Helisanna is among the best liars any of them have ever met.

  • The faithful get hunted: Luna's followers found Leliana's birthday card and came looking, and were slaughtered for it six months ago. The moon Leliana raised over Greyport has a cost the party is only now seeing — belief draws attention, and the Eldoran back-country is a graveyard for people who carried the crescent.

  • Spectacle over everything: Camera drones frame the shade-slaying for applause, a rival's soul gets torn out on-screen, and the whole life-or-death library run is content for Lord Bradicus's audience. The horror and the reality show are the same event, and the party is winning a contract by surviving a place designed to kill them.

Session MVP​

Leliana — On Luke's birthday, his character carried the session. The library is her origin wound: the place a naive girl lost a birthday card and walked out as Helisanna. She took psychic damage as the memories broke through, let the party brace her through it, and still chose to walk in, investigate the statue, and find the hidden gateway — then decided some memories are too terrible to dig up. The whole session was a tour of the worst night of her life, and she led it.