The Acorn King
2013-05-03, 02:19 AM
So my group and I are about 3 weeks deep into a campaign that has gotten all types of outrageous. We're technically playing 3.5 but our story got to a point of epicness that the DM has allowed a bit of rule-bending to say the least. I want to relate the events of the story to the world because some things the DM allowed has enabled it to reach HBO levels of drama. I think you will enjoy it!
I rolled a Transmutation/Illusion Elf Wizard name the Acorn King Hieronymous and another player rolled your average Human Ranger Fridel Bresch. Right off the bat, the DM lets us choose one magical item to start with of our own creation. My item of choice was a bag of 5 magical acorns that immediately sprout a magic oak tree (size dependent on roll). My story was that I was a 236 year old Elf prince (looks about 13 years old) from the Eastern Acorn Forest whose parents, and all their forest kingdom was destroyed in a cataclysmic conquering of origins my character is oblivious to, owing to the fact that it occurred when he was about 20 (infancy). So the Acorn King's general goal is to find somewhere to replant a new Acorn Forest.
We start out at the wedding of our Spanish-speaking friend Zuesto d'Papi in the Land of the Stallion. During the wedding, things go bad when a host of mysterious blackguards shrouded in a black smog roll through, kidnap the newlywed bride Maria, and make off with her, leaving Zuesto harshly wounded. So Fridel and the Acorn King set off with Zuesto's brother Salvestro and his old sailing buddy Tio Santo and off we go to rescue Maria, sailing to the distant city of Bern, known for its steampunk-esque technology unheard of in the rest of this magical world which is the source of terrible pollution as the result of the vex oil they use to power their machinery.
Along the way on the voyage, we rescue a young guy who is on a vessel with a chest of gold. So we take the gold because we know it's not his, but he still is a total **** to us and never talks to us even though we saved his life. We also pick up an Elf Druid named Django (enter player 3) before arriving in the port of Bern 3 days after setting off.
First day in Bern, we enter this magic shop, and through a rather comical chain of events rob the hell out of the place unbeknownst to the shopkeeper. We decide to spend the night in a brothel in order to lie low after this robbery. The Acorn King learns magic from his hoes, Django gets it in with about 20 of them, and Fridel accidentally kills his hooker by yanking off her scalp when he tries to brush her hair with a razor-sharp brush he stole from the shop.
In a bar the next day, we see a bard who is excellent at getting huge crowds together, but he is rather elusive. We also meet a man with a huge mechanized arm named Ser Galvin. He is the longtime champion of the tournament that occurs here every 5 years, the Best of Bern, but is now ineligible for the tournament which is in 3 weeks because of his new mechanized arm, which is not allowed in the tournament.
Later, Fridel and the Acorn King track down that bard, named Nello Bartz, and successfully recruit him by telling him that the Acorn King plans to overthrow the oppressive, polluting leadership of Bern and cover the land in trees. Rolled the natural 20 on this speech. This establishes the Acorn King's spiel which he throws at pretty much anyone who asks him who he is. We proceed to plant a huge oak tree directly in front of the main town gate, and tell the people of the slums our intentions to overwhelming support. Then we dip fast before any blackguards realizes we're the ones responsible for obstructing the gate.
I suppose our general plan at this point is to recruit as many people to rally behind our cause, and strike when the city is most distracted during the Best of Bern tournament. We kind of got side-tracked from saving Maria, but Sal and Tio understand that her rescue is tied in with the conquering of Bern.
Meanwhile, Django establishes himself as a bounty hunter by successfully catching several criminals with Druidic magic, befriending the town inspector, the gruff, Daniel Day-Lewis-esque Curtis Kober and his faithful pot-smoking ward Kimbly.
We find an abandoned building in which we set up a little hideout. Inside, we find a mysterious table with celestial markings and a closed eye in the middle. Rolling for Knowledge (Planes), the Acorn King awakens the eye in the table who reveals himself to be the all-seeing spirit, Oa. Oa finds the Acorn King's cause quite virtuous and agrees to answer a few of our questions each day. Being that he is all seeing, he kind of snaps at answering questions.
By chance, we meet up again with that first guy we rescued at sea, who seems to be a rather powerful wizard, Nest who commands a retinue of bugs. He takes us to see his master, Swarm, who is a member of the Circle of Wizards of olde, and lives in exile. We take a mysterious door there which Nest draws on a strange wall with chalk. It seems to lead us to another part of the world. In our conversations we learn that another member of the Circle was Ceemone, who possesses powers similar to Oa, in that he can see all possible futures. In fact, he is the one who originally created the table that Oa channels his spirit through. Ceemone, we learn, is currently locked up in the mysterious Detention Yellow. There, he is tortured into revealing what he sees with his future sight, which is what allowed the Bastard King to advance technology so quickly. The Circle of Wizards were in power before the current Bastard King made the city the polluting industrial waste center it is today. Swarm tortures Nest, for ratting out the Circle many years ago and waiting 15 years to show his face again. We depart, leaving Nest behind to deal with his guilt and the wrath of Swarm. Upon leaving, Nello reveals that he stole something: a strange bottle of red liquid. This turns out to be the liquified remains of an immortal human, named Redner, who was another of the Circle that was put through a meat grinder as a form of torture, but was obviously unable to die due to his immortality. He does not mind in the slightest that he was plucked from his resting place, as Swarm has never made any effort to help him find a new body through all these years. We assure him that we intend to help him find a new body if he can in turn lend us his strength, and he finds this more favorable than sitting alone with Swarm for another few decades.
We run into Nest again later and after smoking some weed with him and Kimbly we bring him back to our hideout, where he expresses great interest in our magic table of Oa. Oa warns us 'not to rely' on the one they call Nest.
Unfortunately, our cover at this hideout is eventually blown and a blackguard begins to inspect the area of our hideout. So naturally we proceed to murder him. Inspector Kober spots us near there later and confronts us about the situation. I throw him the Acorn King spiel, and with a mix of the fact that he is contemptuous of Bern for demoting him to Inspector of the poorer Southside of town, the fact that he likes the Acorn King's good heart, and of the fact that Django is on his good side, he pretends this never happened...but not without shooting Fridel in the face with a rubber bullet before things get sorted out.
We decide that this spot has gotten too sketchy, so we set out of town and begin to plant these magic oak trees a few miles out of town. Using Django's woodshape spell we are able to hollow out our trees and make homes out of them. This becomes our new hideout.
On our mission to bring the table from the inside of the city out to our new hideout, we are confronted by Nest who, after Oa's advice, we have decided not to keep him in the know about our new hideout. He asks very suspiciously about where the table is. At this point none of us are ****ing with Nest, so Nello tells us to leave Nest to him, and get the table to the new hideout safely. He successfully preoccupies Nest and we get the table back to the hideout without incident.
Later, Nello returns with a tied up Nest, but Nello in his struggles with the little ****er is afflicted with all sorts of nasty poison that has him nearly at death. Oa instructs us to place both of them on the table, and he proceeds to extract the poison from Nello and puts all of it in Nest's body. None of us make an effort to save him, and he dies and is subsequently buried. Good riddance.
This is about the first 1/3 of everything that has happened so far. I want to complete this recount of the story because 1. **** starts to get really real from this point on in the story and 2. I want to be able to remember everything that's happened in it for my own sake.
However I'm tired so I'm going to continue my narrative of the game tomorrow.
Unless no one is interested, in which case I won't. But I'll think you'll all appreciate what comes next...
I rolled a Transmutation/Illusion Elf Wizard name the Acorn King Hieronymous and another player rolled your average Human Ranger Fridel Bresch. Right off the bat, the DM lets us choose one magical item to start with of our own creation. My item of choice was a bag of 5 magical acorns that immediately sprout a magic oak tree (size dependent on roll). My story was that I was a 236 year old Elf prince (looks about 13 years old) from the Eastern Acorn Forest whose parents, and all their forest kingdom was destroyed in a cataclysmic conquering of origins my character is oblivious to, owing to the fact that it occurred when he was about 20 (infancy). So the Acorn King's general goal is to find somewhere to replant a new Acorn Forest.
We start out at the wedding of our Spanish-speaking friend Zuesto d'Papi in the Land of the Stallion. During the wedding, things go bad when a host of mysterious blackguards shrouded in a black smog roll through, kidnap the newlywed bride Maria, and make off with her, leaving Zuesto harshly wounded. So Fridel and the Acorn King set off with Zuesto's brother Salvestro and his old sailing buddy Tio Santo and off we go to rescue Maria, sailing to the distant city of Bern, known for its steampunk-esque technology unheard of in the rest of this magical world which is the source of terrible pollution as the result of the vex oil they use to power their machinery.
Along the way on the voyage, we rescue a young guy who is on a vessel with a chest of gold. So we take the gold because we know it's not his, but he still is a total **** to us and never talks to us even though we saved his life. We also pick up an Elf Druid named Django (enter player 3) before arriving in the port of Bern 3 days after setting off.
First day in Bern, we enter this magic shop, and through a rather comical chain of events rob the hell out of the place unbeknownst to the shopkeeper. We decide to spend the night in a brothel in order to lie low after this robbery. The Acorn King learns magic from his hoes, Django gets it in with about 20 of them, and Fridel accidentally kills his hooker by yanking off her scalp when he tries to brush her hair with a razor-sharp brush he stole from the shop.
In a bar the next day, we see a bard who is excellent at getting huge crowds together, but he is rather elusive. We also meet a man with a huge mechanized arm named Ser Galvin. He is the longtime champion of the tournament that occurs here every 5 years, the Best of Bern, but is now ineligible for the tournament which is in 3 weeks because of his new mechanized arm, which is not allowed in the tournament.
Later, Fridel and the Acorn King track down that bard, named Nello Bartz, and successfully recruit him by telling him that the Acorn King plans to overthrow the oppressive, polluting leadership of Bern and cover the land in trees. Rolled the natural 20 on this speech. This establishes the Acorn King's spiel which he throws at pretty much anyone who asks him who he is. We proceed to plant a huge oak tree directly in front of the main town gate, and tell the people of the slums our intentions to overwhelming support. Then we dip fast before any blackguards realizes we're the ones responsible for obstructing the gate.
I suppose our general plan at this point is to recruit as many people to rally behind our cause, and strike when the city is most distracted during the Best of Bern tournament. We kind of got side-tracked from saving Maria, but Sal and Tio understand that her rescue is tied in with the conquering of Bern.
Meanwhile, Django establishes himself as a bounty hunter by successfully catching several criminals with Druidic magic, befriending the town inspector, the gruff, Daniel Day-Lewis-esque Curtis Kober and his faithful pot-smoking ward Kimbly.
We find an abandoned building in which we set up a little hideout. Inside, we find a mysterious table with celestial markings and a closed eye in the middle. Rolling for Knowledge (Planes), the Acorn King awakens the eye in the table who reveals himself to be the all-seeing spirit, Oa. Oa finds the Acorn King's cause quite virtuous and agrees to answer a few of our questions each day. Being that he is all seeing, he kind of snaps at answering questions.
By chance, we meet up again with that first guy we rescued at sea, who seems to be a rather powerful wizard, Nest who commands a retinue of bugs. He takes us to see his master, Swarm, who is a member of the Circle of Wizards of olde, and lives in exile. We take a mysterious door there which Nest draws on a strange wall with chalk. It seems to lead us to another part of the world. In our conversations we learn that another member of the Circle was Ceemone, who possesses powers similar to Oa, in that he can see all possible futures. In fact, he is the one who originally created the table that Oa channels his spirit through. Ceemone, we learn, is currently locked up in the mysterious Detention Yellow. There, he is tortured into revealing what he sees with his future sight, which is what allowed the Bastard King to advance technology so quickly. The Circle of Wizards were in power before the current Bastard King made the city the polluting industrial waste center it is today. Swarm tortures Nest, for ratting out the Circle many years ago and waiting 15 years to show his face again. We depart, leaving Nest behind to deal with his guilt and the wrath of Swarm. Upon leaving, Nello reveals that he stole something: a strange bottle of red liquid. This turns out to be the liquified remains of an immortal human, named Redner, who was another of the Circle that was put through a meat grinder as a form of torture, but was obviously unable to die due to his immortality. He does not mind in the slightest that he was plucked from his resting place, as Swarm has never made any effort to help him find a new body through all these years. We assure him that we intend to help him find a new body if he can in turn lend us his strength, and he finds this more favorable than sitting alone with Swarm for another few decades.
We run into Nest again later and after smoking some weed with him and Kimbly we bring him back to our hideout, where he expresses great interest in our magic table of Oa. Oa warns us 'not to rely' on the one they call Nest.
Unfortunately, our cover at this hideout is eventually blown and a blackguard begins to inspect the area of our hideout. So naturally we proceed to murder him. Inspector Kober spots us near there later and confronts us about the situation. I throw him the Acorn King spiel, and with a mix of the fact that he is contemptuous of Bern for demoting him to Inspector of the poorer Southside of town, the fact that he likes the Acorn King's good heart, and of the fact that Django is on his good side, he pretends this never happened...but not without shooting Fridel in the face with a rubber bullet before things get sorted out.
We decide that this spot has gotten too sketchy, so we set out of town and begin to plant these magic oak trees a few miles out of town. Using Django's woodshape spell we are able to hollow out our trees and make homes out of them. This becomes our new hideout.
On our mission to bring the table from the inside of the city out to our new hideout, we are confronted by Nest who, after Oa's advice, we have decided not to keep him in the know about our new hideout. He asks very suspiciously about where the table is. At this point none of us are ****ing with Nest, so Nello tells us to leave Nest to him, and get the table to the new hideout safely. He successfully preoccupies Nest and we get the table back to the hideout without incident.
Later, Nello returns with a tied up Nest, but Nello in his struggles with the little ****er is afflicted with all sorts of nasty poison that has him nearly at death. Oa instructs us to place both of them on the table, and he proceeds to extract the poison from Nello and puts all of it in Nest's body. None of us make an effort to save him, and he dies and is subsequently buried. Good riddance.
This is about the first 1/3 of everything that has happened so far. I want to complete this recount of the story because 1. **** starts to get really real from this point on in the story and 2. I want to be able to remember everything that's happened in it for my own sake.
However I'm tired so I'm going to continue my narrative of the game tomorrow.
Unless no one is interested, in which case I won't. But I'll think you'll all appreciate what comes next...