PDA

View Full Version : Journal A first campaign log



Terane
2020-03-01, 04:31 PM
Long-time lurker, finally created an account to post a first campaign log. The campaign concluded about a year ago, plan to post sessions as I get the notes cleaned up.

Campaign ran from late 2011 till mid 2018, averaged monthly sessions.
Noticeably house-ruled 3.5 - all core classes overhauled, a few custom classes added. All races redesigned, so don't assume anything about any race.
There will be points where things don't match standard rules - sometimes that means a mistake in the game, more often there's a house-ruled change.

Players shifted somewhat over time - initial group was:

Aqila, Human Mage (Edited Wizard)
Joseph Listens-to-Wind, Human Druid (Fairly close to core)
Moonbeam, Human Shaman (Custom class, druidish spell list)
Segmund, Dwarf Rogue (Close to core)

Notes are as taken by my wife (Aqila's player), with inserted commentary. There are in a few places comments that were provided to players at the time, these will be directly present, my new comments will be in spoilers inside the post.

Unfortunately, no notes for the first few sessions survived - the first session with surviving notes was January 2012, after the party had finished their first adventure, summarized at the beginning of the notes. Earlier sessions notes were hand-written and transcribed, so they ended up noticeably less detailed than the sessions after acquiring a mini-laptop for notetaking.

EDIT: Added some thumbnail setting information - this is very sketchy, trying to focus on details relevant to the campaign instead of the whole background dump.


Extremely abbreviated.

Player races originate from one stock - human. The different races were the results of deliberate alterations made by the Ancients to create slaves properly suited to an intended role - e.g. elves were intended to be librarians, artisans, etc. Most of the races are really a mix of a set of reasonably similar designs, not a single design.

The Ancients ruled until about 2000 years ago, when they were overthrown in a very devastating war - large parts of the world are still not recovered (plot relevant later).

In the immediate aftermath, the rebellion's leadership were divided over their next actions. One faction thought that they'd won the right to replace the Ancients - i.e. keep the system going much the same as before, just under new management. The other major faction would have none of that - they'd fought to free everyone, not turn around and enslave them again. Neither side had enough strength for a quick victory, and the damage the war had already done was just starting to become apparent - so they ended up backing off to neutral corners until things recovered enough for another round.

Over the next couple thousand years, various kindoms rose and fell. A lot of this background isn't terribly important. The major kingdoms of the present day, by continent:

Ferial
The continent the party started out on. Until a few decades ago, was ruled by the Ferial Empire - a nasty multi-way civil war split it apart into two rival nations, Seferia (southern half), and Asferia (northern half). The other two significant regions are Hyath-Adon (was a provice of the empire that broke away somewhat before the civil war - heavily mountainous region, population is mostly dwarves), and Leferia (chunk of the northwest that's currently an undesired protectorate of the Teredoran Empire. The locals don't really want them there, but also don't want to be absorbed by Asferia, and know that's inevitable if Teredor leaves. The Teredorans don't want to be there, but expect that they'll be facing yet another war with the Ferial sooner or later if they leave.

Forinal
The northern continent. Dominated by the Teredoran Empire. To the west of Teredor is Aerodon, Teredor's traditional rival - always in second place and resenting it. To the north is Elethor - a mostly frozen country, home to most of the world's elven population. And then further north is Arandor - a mostly mysterious country, with all manner of wild tales of arcane marvels to be found there. In reality, this is where the second faction of the rebellion moved - the ones who were fighting to free everyone. To the northeast and east are the minor kingdoms - a hodgepodge of tiny kingdoms, many allied to Teredor. To the east along the southern border is Almaera - land of powerful mages with no common sense. Also one of Teredor's common opponents - their rulers constantly fail to recognize that they've lost every single war. Finally, east of Almaera is the island kingdom of Amerel - known for its pirates and raiders.

Atenil Union
The continent is known by the name of the sole 'kingdom' located here. To an outsider, it looks like a collection of constantly feuding clans, with absolutely no cohesion. In reality, this is the stronghold of the first faction of the rebels - the feuds are in fact a carefully managed training and breeding program, aimed at creating an army to take up where the Ancients left off.

Chaos Continent
The region most badly damaged in the war. Dominated by three major regions:
The Foulness, an area contaminated by random magical residues (think continent-sized superfund site)
The Dead Lands, a region where nothing lives, inhabited by hordes of undead monstrosities - many of which are more powerful than any known necromancer could create
The Maelstrom, a swirling vortex of ruined planes, all blended into the material plane. Centered on the Ancient stronghold that previously dominated this continent - the result of the last attempt to destroy the rebellion on this continent.
A handful of small kingdoms exist around the periphery - descriptions omitted here, they'll be described in the notes as they become relevant.

Dragon Continent
The single largest continent, home to better than 60% of the world's population. Controlled entirely by the Dragon Confederation - officially an alliance of several kingdoms, in practice ruled by the Dragon Temple.


The party started out in southeastern Ferial. The region they're in is the more or less second-class portion Seferia - the local duke was one of the potential claimants, he chose to support the man who became king of Seferia in an effort to forestall the civil war. The king doesn't trust him, but isn't quite prepared to act against him.



Aqila
Novice member of the Sentinel Order, in the Ferial for her first solo mission. Supposed to be a nice quiet patrol, with absolutely nothing happening. Her affiliation with the Sentinel was unknown to the rest of the party for several sessions. The character was built as a spy-type, with very little combat-applicable magic. This did not last very long.


An organization founded shortly after the rebellion against the Ancients, by the faction that wanted to free everyone. At the time, the founders expressly renounced all claim to authority over anyone who did not choose to join them, except that they claimed permanent authority to judge anyone meddling in specific areas of magic: Lifewarping (altering living beings, as the Ancients did), Blood magic (Symbolic naming, not literal - this refers to magic fueled by devouring souls), and the creation of undead (Note: in setting, relevant spells are house-ruled to be explicitly evil - black onyx use replaced with spirit shards, fragments of someone's soul ripped away. And yes, that does mean this is also generally blood magic in setting). Dealing with anyone involved in this is the Sentinel's entire purpose. Note that this does not technically forbid such magic - simply that they get to judge whether its safe to allow you to study and use it.
The Sentinel is divided into four branches - the Shield (members assigned to guard specific areas with known threats), the Eye (intelligence gathering, covert operations), the Book (records, research - not field agents, but a common retirement job for former field agents), and the Sword (active countermeasures - sword field agents get thrown at nasty problems that need to be resolved forcefully)


Other characters didn't have as fully fleshed-out backgrounds - Aqila's player had an obvious advantage.

Joseph Listens-to-Wind
Travelling druid from up north - mostly just out for adventure.

Moonbeam
Traveler from the western Ferial - looking for somewhere to relocate her family far away from the Dragon Temple's influence

Segmund
Thief on the run after killing another thief (self-defense, but can't prove it). Had made a trade for an item, then the thief he was bartering with flipped out and tried to kill him after handing it over. Believes the item is cursed and if he gives it up he'll go nuts.



White Temple
Worships The One, proclaimed as the only true god. In game terms, over-deity - they are perfectly correct, the other gods are entirely his creations.
Also a note relevant to the campaign - as part of the houserules, the Paladin class is replaced by a homebrew Templar class - functionally the same role, but with built-in adaptation to other alignments. Paladins in setting are specifically Templars of The One - the term is not used to refer to servants of any other deity. They are also rare, and having one show up usually means something important is about to happen.

Kantoran Pantheon
The good gods of the setting
Kantor - God of War and Justice
Nareel - Goddess of the Sun
Reshana - Goddess of Death
Tareina - Goddess of Healing
Talast - God of Knowledge

Aeranen Pantheon
Nominally good deities - often trending firmly into neutral territory
Aeran - God of the Sea and Storms
Ravenne - Goddess of the Hunt
Melore - Goddess of Love
Selwende - Goddess of Lust

Blood Gods
The evil gods of the setting. Not firmly organized. (The party managed to at least mildly offend the entire list by the campaign's end)
Rakan - God of Tyranny
Makarn - God of War
Shenea - Goddess of Undeath
Deiliana - Goddess of Treachery
Zeleya - Goddess of Pain and Torment
Asurak - God of Disease and Destruction

Dragon Temple
Worships The Dragon - their god takes the form of an immense dragon. Known for being violently opposed to all other gods. Controls the world's largest continent, and the bulk of the world's population.

Also some assorted minor deities here and there, mostly not relevant to the campaign.




What happened previously:
We all met in a bar. Whoops, wrong one. To start again, Joseph and Moonbeam were travelling to Duke Dobroslaw's territory to scout it out and see if it was a good place to relocate to, their native lands being not as safe these days. They met the thief on the road. On the way to Waymeet, a group of goblins attacked and were felled. Continuing on, they reached a small village with an unusually large church and were attacked by more goblins. These were also dispatched with help from Aqila, who stayed at the door of the church with the priest. Plot information is given - goblins aren't that bright and normally don't know what swords are, let alone cast spells, the village basically got destroyed by a small horde of them earlier that week, and it would be nice if certain somebodies got word through to the Duke's troops that something is Seriously Messed Up at the very least, or dealt with the mess at best. The priest also helpfully mentioned that the horde had come from and retreated to the north, there was a lake with a shrine on its shore in that direction, and we could avoid sneaking through the woods by heading northeast to a weird old tower made of an unidentifiable material, then cutting west to get to the lake.
The Party set off to investigate the weirdness after a good night's sleep. A few other details are located in the temple's library - to whit, that the temple had been erected after a demon prince had been imprisoned somewhere in the area, though there hadn't been any planar disturbances of a level to indicate any major demon summonings. Also that if a human magic user was behind the goblins, they'd be able to see through the eyes of any goblin they were concentrating on. If it was a demon, they'd see through any goblin's eyes. As recommended we head for the tower first to avoid being seen by goblins. We got attacked by an undead 'thing' on the way there, which was very hard to kill, and the thief learned not to loot the body before it's confirmed to be dead.
At the tower, there was a small group of the scrawny goblins that had been seen slinging spells. We tried sneaking up on them, and found that they were freshly dead, drained dry, upon arrival. There were also signs that something had been hacked out of the tower. In addition to those bad signs, an inspection of the lake-shrine via spyglass indicated some activity in the area. We rested for a short time, and then pushed on into the shrine.
We found: 1 priestess doing something unsavory with an altar and a pulsing red gem, 2 undead things like the one we fought earlier and piles and piles of dead goblin corpses. Then the screaming started. End results: 1 killed undead thing, one dead priestess, one dissolved undead thing, and one interrupted ritual to release the aforementioned demon prince from its prison with the red gem key from the weird tower.
Fallout: The demon had been controlling the goblins. When it realized adventurers were inbound, it sucked its power out of them, killing the lot, and waited for the last few sacrifices needed to break open the door to come wandering over. The priestess was a member of the Dragon Cult. When she tried to let the Dragon work through her during the battle, she got a shard of the Mad God instead. This should not have happened and indicates either the Dragon Temple is messing with scary stuff, or a third party is messing around. Safe bet is on the 3rd party theory. And the local representatives of the Dragon Temple are now pissed at the four people who 'assassinated' one of their own.
We encountered one of Duke Dobroslaw's patrols after we returned to the temple for healing, and travelled with them to see the Duke. Along the way a mysterious fellow in a helmet and cloak stopped us, gave everyone a bag with gems in it, and told us 'The Sentinel thanks you for your services'. And that ended the December session.

This was also the first time the party derailed the plot. I had intended for the priestess to survive and be a recurring villain for a little while.




January Gaming session:
We're all 'guests' of Duke Dobroslaw while he figures out what to do with us. The local leader of the Dragon Temple would prefer to have us for an inevitably fatal interrogation, or just dead period. We're each interviewed under the Zone of Truth separately by the Duke and he decides on how to further his own ends and flip off the local Dragon Temple priest. It is agreed that we can clear ourselves with the DT by investigating who was behind the priestess’s obviously odd behavior, but first we have to prove we can investigate. The DT wants the new mage academy opened by Count Ziemowit closed down. Duke Dobroslaw just wants to know who's funding it because the Count owes everyone in the area substantial funds.
We take a week to prepare, and then ride south. 24 days after we accept the Duke's offer, we arrive in Stonebridge, on the border between the Duke and the Count's land. Nearly everyone in the Count's land outside of his capital who can legally head north to the Duke's land has, as have many of those living in the capital. And even some of the serfs who legally couldn't have run north. The toll collectors on the eponymous bridge warn us about weird noises coming from the mage academy, which is to the west, upriver. The poor section is east, downriver. We enter the town into crafter row, where we see a rather run-down Kantoran temple and a worn looking White Temple. Moonbeam and Aqila visit the Kantoran temple while Joe and Segmund stay with the horses and learn a few things from Emil the priest. One, since the Count is a follower of Rakan, one of the Blood Gods, the Kantoran temples are being subtly or not so subtly persecuted. The Priestesses of Tareina, the Kantoran healing goddess, have retreated to the poor quarter to continue ministering to their needs. The Priestess of Nareel is still holding on in the rich quarter, mostly by being a rather formidable woman in general. The rest of the priests and priestesses have retreated to the Duke's domain.
We then go across the street to the White temple. Bozydar, the priest there has been using his magic to keep the temple under the Count's radar, or he would have been run out of town already. He's a fountain of information. On who might be funding the academy, there are three local merchants with new money from no obvious source, and one new merchant who's built a fancy house right next to the Count's palace. He notes that the new merchant is rather obvious and might be a deliberate red herring. There are taverns we could nose around for information - Boar's Head in the poor quarter and the Golden Bowl in the artist's quarter are the most likely to be useful. Workmen from the academy might show up at the former, and mages might show up at the latter. There's also rumors of a cult trying to bring back the Old Gods in the poor quarter - the usual 'bread and circuses for everyone when the Old Gods return!' schtick - by sacrificing chickens. He also gives us a lead on a safe hotel to lodge at where they make an effort to discourage thieves.

The old gods cult was deliberately intended to look utterly ridiculous. How ridiculous they were, well, we'll see. They ended up being less effective than expected - a recurring theme for villains in this campaign.

Joe, Moonbeam and Segmund go check out the Boar's head while Aqila hits the Golden Bowl in an attempt to find an open and aboveboard way to get into the academy. The Boar's Head is one step above rickety fire-trap, barely. Bribing the barkeep yields the tip that a mason who works at the academy periodically drinks there. At the Golden Bowl, which is a nice establishment, Aqila makes contact with Zahak, a master mage from the academy, by posing as a travelling alchemist who wants to peruse the academy library. Zahak allows that he needs alchemical support that the academy's alchemist is unwilling to give him, and suggests that she come see him and the chancellor tomorrow.
New day, Aqila goes to the academy and the rest of the party goes to the Kantoran temple of Tareina in the poor quarter. They meet Adelajda the priestess and offer to help out with healing there so Joe can compare healing techniques with her when she has the time. It also gives another source for picking up rumors. That was the agenda for the next three days as well, while Moonbeam spends her evenings in the Boar's Head waiting for the mason. He shows up on the second night, mentions that he has to do repairs often from damages due to magic accidents, and promises that if he hears anything interesting, he'll stop by the Temple of Tareina to pass it on.
Backing up, Aqila went to the academy and met Chancellor Milogost and Archmage Fiorino with Master Zahak. Fiorino is an Almaeran mage, specializing in Conjuration and Transmutation, which means both his magic and his mistakes are spectacular and annoying. You're safer being in another kingdom if you have the option. The Chancellor allowed that they might have a use for an alchemist - it would let the academy's alchemist go out to 'The Dig', which we aren't quite sure what it is yet, if Aqila can prove herself. The test is making alchemical preparations for Zahak's 'flesh golems' experiment. It is debatable if that's what's really going on. Aqila makes decent progress over the next three days and is offered a month's guest lecturer position, giving her an excuse to snoop around.
Over those three days, various odd occurrences happen, including a 1 mile zone of darkness around the academy one day, cats turning odd colors another, and a purple and green rain on another. On the third day, an explosion of lights and sounds distracts the Chancellor while Aqila is reporting to him, letting her snoop on his papers, which yields the fascinating tidbit that the dig site is 'haunted' and near Meadow Brooks. And that they're having trouble getting workers because the locals are too freaked out by the place.
Session ends with a discussion on what to do next, to be settled next time.

Fiorino being an Almaeran mage is the reason for describing his mistakes as big - in setting, Almaera is a nation known for powerful mages with a distinct lack of common sense. Being anywhere near an Almaeran mage trying out a new spell is not exactly healthy. The academy hired him mostly because he was cheap - the fallout from his last experiment had left him distinctly unpopular with his peers. It was an instant palace cleaning spell that was a little too thorough - part of the effect removed all hairs from the palace, including those formerly attached to someone. And naturally he conducted his first test with everyone of importance in attendance.

Sam113097
2020-03-02, 11:00 AM
I like it! It would be helpful to have a little primer with basics about the characters and especially the setting!

Terane
2020-03-02, 06:12 PM
I'll look at putting together some setting notes that aren't excessively long - currently contained in some fairly substantial docs.


We began with a few points that hadn't come out in the prior session. To whit, Aqila forgot to mention that the White Temple priest told her that he should have some information in a few days that we really need to hear. Which delays the plans to go look at the dig site. Also, we'd been told about the Priestess of Nareel on the rich side of town, but we hadn't talked to her yet. So the next day, after our usual daily activities, we go do that. Roksana suspects that Grozdan, a smuggler of Teredoran goods into Ferial aka 'the northern trade' is the likely source of the funding for the mage academy. He's the one with the shiny new estate next to the Count, but he spends most of his time elsewhere. He does have an assassin for a bodyguard, which seems to be a little odd for a mere merchant. He's described as being built very sturdily, like a fighter, while his female bodyguard is more on lissome lines.
The next day, Aquila finishes the infusions for Zahak's flesh golem project. Though, she does notice that they don't seem to be the strength and durability enhancing infusions she was told they were. Two of them combine into a strong acid, and don't seem to do anything alone. Meanwhile, Moonbeam and Joseph are helping at the temple of Tareina again, and hearing rumors of a dog made of smoke, which is freaking out people in the poor quarter. Segmund meantime is being sneaky and casing Grozdan's mansion. Or trying to be. The merchant is sighted and confirmed to be in town, but his bodyguard wasn't seen.
Next day, Moonbeam and Joseph ask some more questions about the smoke-dog. The priestesses of Tareina suspect it's an extra-planar servant that is not wholly on this plane yet, which means it can't interact with anything in the world until it is. Perhaps a Yeth Hound. Meanwhile Segmund was spotted skulking outside Grozdan's manor. The lady bodyguard/assassin tells him to 'have fun!' as she and Grozdan leave that afternoon, and do not return by evening. Moonbeam and Joseph try to get a fix on where the 'smoke-dog' is hanging out, but the rumor mill has been swamped by the latest actions of Gawel's cult. An abandoned building next to the Boar's Head was used for a summoning of some sort. Chickens, scrawny alley cats and emaciated dogs were used for the blood. They go to have a looksee at the scene of the crime, but are blocked by two of the Count's guards. A priest, presumably of one of the Blood Gods, unknown which one, was investigating, and they get chased off into the Boar's Head after seeing him come out and zap a guard for protesting orders to burn the building down. Granted, going into the firetrap next door to an active fire isn't a good thing, but fortunately for them, not only does the bartender have a discreet exit to the sewers, he also has some information about what happened next door. In a nutshell, a few nights ago, strange lights, noises, chanting and such like were heard, and the barkeep's boy even made a drawing of the weird circle of writing, just in case it was worth something. It was worth some silver to the party at any rate. As the patrons fled the beginning to burn bar, Moonbeam and Joe followed the barkeep into the sewer, where he imparted one last nugget of information: Gawel was going to have a meeting at the burned-out bar that night after twilight for his cultists/interested parties. He had predicted that the bar was going to burn down before it did, so how did he know that? Meanwhile, Aqila continued subbing for the alchemy class and learned over the grape-vine that Zahak will be demoing his flesh golem project for the faculty at midnight the following night.
We met at the inn, shared information, and decided to crash Gawel's little party. So, we get dressed in our grungiest garb and go blend in with the actual and would-be cultists. Gawel, garbed in a blue robe, mesmerizes the crowd, except for Moonbeam and Segmund oddly enough, and begins to rant. Yes, he's the shadow dog summoner. In fact, if we want the 'Old Gods' to come back with cake and cookies for everyone, we need to finish bringing their herald into this world. For which we need human sacrifices, so go my minions to get the weak and not-going-to-be-missed! Aqila put her 'phantom sounds' spell to good use as a lure to coax the bulk of the enspelled people to the temple of Tareina, where the priestesses managed a mass sleep spell to stop the bulk of the problem. Moonbeam and Joe hunted stragglers, while Segmund trailed a cultist to their destination. Aqila ran for the temple of Kantor to get some priestly back-up, passing a squad of the Count's guards on the way, but found it had been broken into, and the shattered doors were under guard by the Count's men. The White Temple appeared to have been burned to the ground, but the neighboring buildings weren't even scorched. She continued on to find Roksana and let her know what was going on. Roksana is not happy about Emil’s disappearance, or the impending human sacrifices, so she calls the Flames of Nareel to protect her temple and comes with Aqila to the burned out bar. There's a distinct lack of cultists there. Turns out the main event is going down by the docks. They run for the docks, but meanwhile, the rest of the party is already there.
Segmund gets there first, hides behind some boxes, and gets to see the whole picture. A man in blue robes *cough*Gawel*cough* has a stack of bodies to work with and stabs one to let the blood out to draw symbols with. Presumably another summoning circle. There are two other figures there, one's built sturdily and the other is along more slim lines. Moonbeam and Joe arrive just as Blue Robes finishes drawing his bloody circle. After a "You're too late" from Blue Robes and a mocking wave goodbye to the dwarf from Slim Cloaked Figure, they all bamf away, leaving a large muscular black dog behind from the summoning. It's sort of built like a Yeth hound, but not quite. As combat ensures, they find out it can absorb faery fire spells and disappear into shadows. The forces of Good, well, Neutrality prevail and the beast is slain, but not before a crate of illegal drugs is set on fire, along with some other things, which is incentive for the party to make themselves scarce. Guards show up to put the fires out around the time Aqila and Roksana finally arrive, and are distracted by that, so they can have a good like at the circle. Roksana ID's it as a professionally drawn summoning circle, but for shadows, not infernal. Those sorts of creatures are more neutral but harder to control. Also harder to link to any specific summoner, making them an ideal choice for someone trying to hide his responsibility for a summoning. Roksana requires Aqila to help her the next day to locate Gawel and company.
Aqila tries to figure out where the rest of the group is. The temple of Tareina was broken into and deserted. She tries the inn next, finds them, and information is shared. This is the day that the White Temple's priest promised to have information for them, so the party heads that way. As suspected, the burned out temple is still there, under an illusion, and so is Emil. And a lot of information is dispensed. The priest's sources include seers with the ability to statistically analyze the various possible futures to determine the most likely one to occur. We learn that there's most likely just one person behind all the chaos going down in Seferia, they have a reason for mucking things up so badly, and they are using the chaos to hide what their goals are, muddying the waters that the seers peer into. Also, there are some worries about Zahak's 'flesh golem demo'. The priest agrees that the infusion recipes that Aqila remembered don't jive with what Zahak said they were, and informs her that Zahak's people have two factions, one larger one that wants to return Jahan, a necromancer lord who ruled this area right after the God Wars, to the physical world from his banishment, assuming that's possible, and a minority that wants to permanently get rid of him. There's a chance that Zahak belongs to one of those factions, so if that name comes up during the demo, Aqila probably should do something about it.
After a good night's sleep, the dwarf goes and breaks into Grozdan's mansion. It's completely empty of people that he can tell, untrapped, though with phantom voices which suspiciously speak about things Segmund is doing as he does them. He finds papers in a desk which may or may not be useful, but nothing else. He has not yet shared what he's found with the rest of the party.
Moonbeam and Joe decide to go commune with their respective spirits, which required leaving town. This led to no end of aggravation as a brand new regulation had been passed the night before, to whit, you need papers proving you aren't a serf to get back into town. The guard nicely warned them of that before they left, so they could go get papers. Moonbeam jumped through hoops and got papers for herself from the Captain of the Guards. We are planning on forging papers for the rest of the party, now that we have an example to work from.
Aqila made her excuses for why she was missing a day of substitute teaching at the academy, then made tracks to Nareel's temple so she can assist Roksana and fill her in on the news from the White Temple's priest. Since she does not know divination, she can't help with the actual spellwork, but she can search for Gawel the usual way, though legwork. She also, with much trepidation, delicately enlisted Archmage Fiorino into being her back-up at the demo that evening. It's debatable whether it would have been safer going in with no back-up at all. The Archmage thought she was being hysterical about the possible danger from the flesh golem demonstration, but decides to humor her.
That night, the entire faculty gathers in a lecture hall as Zahak begins the demo. The first sign things are not what they seem is Zahak freezing everyone into their seats, Aqila included. The next big obvious clue is when he starts proclaiming that he has created a body for Jahan to inhabit and starts chanting a ritual presumably to enable the possession to occur. Aqila and Fiorino both manage to break out of their paralysis and the ritual is thoroughly interrupted. Given that Fiorino 'accidentally' summoned something nasty, things could have gotten even worse, but the injured Zahak managed to banish it before collapsing. Jahan's spirit laughs mockingly, comments that Zahak's plan to capture him was futile, and stops talking, presumably leaving. Zahak's in bad shape, and expires quickly in spite of Aqila's attempt to stabilize him. She gets to him in time to be told that he expects her to deal with Jahan since he failed.



We pick up where we left off. Aqila's at the school's auditorium and everyone else is sleeping off the shadow dog fight at the inn. She gets permission from the Chancellor to investigate Zahak's notes, as long as she's escorted...by Fiorino. Neither of them are particularly happy about that, but Fiorino really wants to poke through Zahak's office. Aqila leaves and makes a beeline to Roksana who wastes no time in coming back to the school to trace where Jahan got to. Their arrival interrupts an argument twixt the Chancellor and Fiorino, the latter of whom storms off. He didn't want to call the temples in; the Chancellor did and is willing to let Roksana use the room for what she needs. There's a distinct lack of writing materials around, so Aqila sneaks back into the room at the inn to write a letter for the priest at the White Temple to pass on to the parties who warned us about there being one person behind the current chaos.
She heads to the temple around dawn to pass the letter on and make sure the priest is aware of what's going on. He is. Emil is still sleeping off the shock of having Kantor sever his connection to his ransacked temple. Back to the school, where Roksana has traced Jahan as far as she's been able. The track was blindingly bright, making it difficult to pin down the terminus. She gives Aqila a black stone that will guide her in when she gets close, and warns her that Fiorino is waiting to go poke through Zahak's office impatiently. She also tells Aqila to come see her again before taking off after Jahan. Aqila finds Fiorino and they go into the office together, and find a spartan setting, with one book and one set of loose sheets. The book is of basic necromancy, presumably what Zahak was teaching from for his students. The papers are thirteen in total, and written in Ancient. Aqila made sure she had some of her stash of paper with her this time, and feigns far less competency with translating the notes that she has. She picks out a few words, enough to convince Fiorino that they're the notes Zahak took about the ritual, and he rapidly loses interest. She takes the sheets to an empty lounge to finish translating them. Zahak's spelling and grammar are nothing short of atrocious.
Meanwhile, back at the inn, everyone else wakes up and goes looking for information. Segmund heads for the docks. Moonbeam and Joe check the Temple of Tareina, which is still deserted. The Boar's Head has relocated to a nearby warehouse. Same quality drinks. However, there's nothing of any use to be heard. Some people brag about fighting off the crazed cultists. Ironically, these were also people who were among the mesmerized horde. It occurs to them that the guards who sacked the temple might know what happened to the priestesses, and the guards have their own private bar, by virtue of breaking the legs of anyone who goes in and isn't a guard. So, they head there next after making some preparations.
Little Brother, Joe's animal companion, is bribed into helping with taffy. The size of the bribe is increased several times over the course of the expedition, as he submits to wearing a funny hat with a belled collar and gambols for an hour, even after one of the guards leaving the bar chucks stones at him. Moonbeam augments the lure by obviously enjoying a joint where the smoke will drift towards the door. After a few failures, a reasonably talkative guard comes over for a smoke. He doesn't have a very good opinion of priests in general, but they do find out that the priestesses from the temple are likely to be held either in the Count's dungeon or in the Temple of Rakan. A problem for another day, however.
Everyone reconvenes back at the inn. Aqila's translated the twelve pages of notes that were only written in Ancient. The last sheet is in code, with three different alphabets employed. In sum, Zahak was seeking a way to stop Jahan's return since he was aware that it would be a very bad thing, unlike the most of the rest of his kindred. He ran into a merchant who not only helped him acquire tomes, some very old, but told him about 'a school in the East' that was being started, and put him in contact with Grozdan if he needs 'special' supplies. Zahak cached his books before heading to Stone Bridge, so the coded sheet probably is directions to where that cache is. We won't know until we figure it out, though. The rest of the notes mention that Grozdan was instrumental in helping him acquire the supplies for his flesh golem, as was a 'wandering alchemist'. He helpfully adds that Jahan mostly knows necromantic spells, he likes making simulacras, the real one is likely to be in the same room with an Ancient device that saps one's strength, and we'll need to destroy his soul anchor to make sure he stays gone.
Segmund was a busy dwarf and managed to snoop on a conversation between Gawel and some angry guy whose voice he didn't recognize. He managed to hear quite a bit before he was noticed. The gist of it was Gawel is in deep doodoo for screwing up, his love of the theatrical is not helping him get things done, he lost control of the Count and let him move against the Temples before an excuse was in place, and 'oh by the way, you have one week to kill those meddling fools who are getting too close to our business'. I wonder who those fools could be, hmmm!
In the morning we get ready to travel. Stop 1 is Roksana, who managed to make two scrolls of turn undead and six vials of holy water after recovering from the Jahan hunt. We mention to her that Gawel had been sighted in the city most recently. Stop 2 is the White Temple to give the priest there the latest news and pick Emil up. He's riding Aqila's pack horse, so Aqila caches her alchemist lab kit spare clothes, and other things she won't need until returning. Emil is still pretty shook up and not sure how much help he'll be, but he still comes.
Day 1: we take off cross-country heading for Three Stones, the closest village to where Roxanna roughly pin-pointed Jahan's sanctuary. It's a quiet ride until after dark. Two shadow servants roll in during the 3rd watch and are dispatched. Their being incorporeal makes it a tad tricky, though Emil's Turn Undead helped. Segmund was the only one who got hit, and took 3 str temp damage. Day 2: Quiet day, quiet night, except certain persons have dreams. Day 3: We hit a road midday right where it should be, and encounter a mage and two guards conveying items from the dig site to the mage academy. Aqila fast-talks the mage into letting her eyeball the artifacts. Nothing but magic imbued twisted fragments of Ancient stuff. No way to determine what it had been. Might have been nukes, might have been a coffee maker. So, no old weapons that could be captured by Jahan-controlled undead to do Bad Things to innocent adventurers. We continue on, and camp for the night with 3 ghouls, or at least three undead indistinguishable from ghouls, attack. These guys burn real nicely, and Emil Turns Undead with more authority. They don't manage to paralyzing touch anyone before we dispatch them.
Noting here that everyone has been having a go at decoding the 13th sheet every morning and evening. Progress is occurring, albeit slowly. At one point, Moonbeam susses out that what seems to be a place name and is possibly a place she knows back where she comes from, though this is out of game knowledge for everyone else.
Days 4 and 5: Uneventful. Near the end of the 5th day the party reaches Oaktree, about a day’s ride from Three Stones, the village that is probably closest to Jahan’s lair.
Day 6: We hit the road leading to Three Stones, and around noon we encounter the survivors from the village fleeing north. The hale are walking, the badly wounded are in hay carts. They aren't in danger of dropping dead before reaching another village, so we push south to deal with whatever massacred their fellows. We hit the village around dusk. It's deserted, the few dozen huts are all broken down and rotting. A heavy necromantic taint coats everything. Emil says he may be able to interrupt the ritual Jahan has going to raise the corpses of the slain as powerful undead, but it'll take at least an hour or more and he can't be interrupted. While he's busy communing with Kantor, the rest of us start on the brute force method of interrupting the ritual, to whit, digging up the corpses from the shattered hovels and torching them. We get one house's worth of corpses, a woman and two children, torched when a small horde of zombies shambles out of the woods with two more shadow servants. Battle ensues.
We find that zombies burn well too, and aren't all that smart. We also manage to wax the shadows before they get to sap anyone. There were only zombies left when Emil finishes channeling Kantor's power directly to cleanse the area. It takes everything he has, so he's down and out for the count. The remaining zombies are mopped up, and the weary heroes set up camp in the woods away from the stink, mend wounds, and get some shut-eye. Unsurprisingly, no one's in the mood for Crypto before some shut-eye.
Day 7: Emil regains consciousness in the morning, but he's not exactly in great shape as yet. He's able enough to handle being tied to the pack saddle so he can keep snoozing on the road. We head south a bit farther when the black stone wakes up and starts tugging southeastish. We follow its guide through the day and when it self-destructs, turning to dust, we stand before a low hill covered with dead vegetation. Sure looks like a spooky necromancer's lair.



Cliff Notes Version: We find Jahan and kill him permanently, and find his spellbook. Joe keeps it because he doesn't trust Aqila, but his spirits do let him know that she can keep it safe and they can't. Gawel finds us and also dies. The dig site the Mage Academy was working on is visited. The good stuff already left for Stone Bridge, and the clean-up crew is in rotting pieces. One survivor is found, subdued, and carted back to town. We all go hide out at the White Temple for a good night's sleep and some news. The Count's been assassinated, his wife is ruling the town, and we still don't have evidence as to who is funding the mage academy. The fact that shards of the Mad God keep showing up seems to be a pretty strong hint as to who was behind framing the priestess of the Dragon, though we aren't actually supposed to be investigating that just yet.
Full Version:
We begin outside a probable site for an evil necromancer's lair in mid-afternoon. A low hill covered in dead vegetation. Circling the hill, we find a half collapsed tunnel. Some thought goes into what stuff is being left on the horses, and what is being taken in. Emil is still rather shaky from almost dying the night before, but he's on his feet. The interruption of the undead-raising ritual probably weakened Jahan, so time is of the essence. Aqila gives everyone Mage Armor and prepares combat spells for the expected attacks. We crawl in and begin to methodically explore the natural cave system. Candles, then rocks with light spells provide illumination. A few signs of tool-marks give a hint to the correct direction to take, and a door is found. Segmund checks the door for traps and notices some rather decayed dart-throwers. A few millennia don't treat fine hardware well. Ironically, the door is unlocked.
Just as we get inside, we get attacked by two incorporeal entities. Moonbeam finds out quickly that if you so much look at them funny with a palm full of fire, they evaporate. Emil IDs them as frost wraiths - weak annoyances and distractions. There's another door inside the room. Again, not locked. We find a pretty good simulacra of Jahan inside, which taunts us. Aqila taunts it back and got to eat a vampiric touch for her pains. The lack of his orb of doom, as mentioned in Zahak's notes, makes it obvious that it wasn't the real one. The party was going to go keep searching the caverns when Joseph Listens-to-Wind had the happy thought that there might be a secret door. There was. Moonbeam finally gets to use her morning star to bash it open. A spiraling staircase descends deeper into the darkness.
At the bottom is a room with four doorways, one in each wall. All light stops 5 feet into the corridors. A bronze disc with a stylized pattern is observed under the staircase, but is not examined more closely. The maze is protected by a spell of darkness that stops any light from penetrating more than 5 ft from its source. The halls are narrow enough to require people to move in single file. Produce flames from whichever spellcaster is leading and a glowing rock for Segmund guarding the rear provide enough light for them to start mapping the maze. Jahan occasionally deigns to taunt the party, saying outright that Joe has some books that Aqila would want to know about, and implying strongly that Segmund murdered someone for the fan in his possession. He also puts up a spell of cold, which steadily lowers the temperature in the area. Endure elements is a very handy spell. Several hours later after half a dozen more attacks by frost wraiths, the entire maze is mapped. The areas where secret rooms might be are scanned for secret doors. Nothing. The party finally realizes they haven't looked at that bronze disc. Guess where the door down is? Moonbeam gets to vent some frustration via morning star.

Almost had dice thrown at me over this one.

At the bottom of the stairs is a stone door. Again, unlocked. We take a last minute to prepare, then go in. This time, it's the real deal. He has two shadows in the room with him, while he's up on a dais with a railing, a shiny orb, and two staircases blocked by scary looking necromantic energy. Aqila gets a good enough look at the orb to freak out. Genuine Ancient artifact with Kashirna's sigil on it, and the sort that usually uses high level demons for a power source. And you can let them loose if you screw up using the controls. Combat ensues. Priority is given to taking the shadows down fast, and they're gone within two rounds. Segmund put a crossbow bolt through Jahan's eye socket. Jahan fiddles with his toy and zaps everyone - sapping energy and damaging anyone who fails their saves. Owwie. Emil is on his last legs, but has enough oomph for a mass Bless. Joe has been having some luck peeving Jahan - dropping a sphere of flame on top of him for one, so he gets targeted when Jahan unleashes his magic hand of doominess. Another vampiric drain, down to 2 HPs. Moonbeam patches him up fast while Aqila manages to fry Jahan thoroughly with a Scorching Ray. This really infuriates him, so she gets fried next with black lightning of doom. 3hps left and a negative level. Moonbeam coup de grace's Jahan with more fiery goodness before he does any more damage.

Kashirna would be one of the Ancients - the people responsible for creating all of the other races from human stock, to create slaves fitted to an intended task. And among those who remember him, considered probably the most vile of the lot. So yes, that orb was a very alarming discovery.

So, the now fairly exhausted party heals up, and starts trying to find Jahan's Soul Anchor before he comes back for round 2. Emil's pretty much out of it. Aqila's still a bit loopy from getting fried and decides to nap for a bit to clear her head. There's a door off to the side, which leads into Jahan's workroom, presumably. Murky flasks of liquid and body parts. Joe and Segmund go have a look at the giant mural behind the dais, and amazingly don't mess with the shiny orb. The warning that a demon might get loose if you even look at it funny took. There's also a sarcophagus up there. Joe finds a book in there, and slips it into his pack. The two of them discover that the gems in the mural-Jahan's crown are actual gems, not paint. On the off chance that one of them is the soul anchor, Joe hangs on to them. Further examination of the mural turns up a lever. Pulling the lever causes the whole rear wall to sink into the ground, revealing a giant round chamber with Ancient writing carved into the walls at intervals. They appear to be fragments of necromantic spells at a glance. Aqila wakes up and blearily wanders over to see what's going on. Since the first search of the room hasn't turned up any obvious soul anchor, she tries using detect magic on the new room to see if anything stands out. That was a real good idea - the shock blasts her unconscious for about five hours. Moonbeam tries and gets an excruciating headache. Joe gets to see basically a solid wall of necromantic energy flooding the round room.

This was a custom effect - certain very powerful things can be dangerous to even look at in this setting. Players had been warned.

Since most of the party is now in bad shape, a delay until people wake up and/or regain consciousness is needed. Hoping that no necromancers show up in the intervening hours. None do. Joe spends the time trying to decipher the contents of the book he found and taking rubbings of the writing on the walls in the round chamber. After Aqila wakes up, and Emil recovers some strength, they have another look at the gems. Segmund thinks they might be emeralds, rubies, and sapphires - there are 4 each green, red, and blue. Emil confirms that they are all tainted with necromantic energy. Joe reluctantly shows Aqila the book he found, which makes her even less happy. It wasn't written personally by Kashirna, but is basically one of his lectures written down by an underling with lots of necromantic spells following. Now we know what Jahan was using for his spellbook. Emil notes that the book isn't tainted with Jahan's energy, though it's soaked in evil otherwise. With no other ideas, breaking the gems is tried. Through much toil and effort, Joe manages to smash all the green gems with his shillelagh one by one, then starts on the red ones while Emil begins on the blues. The 3rd red gem poofs more enthusiastically than the rest had, and all the remaining gems shatter as one. Bye-bye Jahan.
At this point, it's nap time. For everyone. Aqila examines the orb one more time after she wakes up and decides that while hiding the thing in the round room and putting the wall back up might make it a little more secure, there isn't a safe way to move it and not risk accidently interfacing with the controls. And she is in no way qualified to deal with it otherwise. They leave Jahan's lair, and weld the bronze door shut behind them. It'll slow down any ordinary adventurers, as does rubbing out all the chalk-marks in the upper cavern that mark the path to the lower levels.
As we emerged from the half-collapsed tunnel into daylight, Gawel shows up. He's rather pissy. Since Segmund overheard him being ordered to 'kill those fools within the week!' and it's been well over a week now, it's not surprising why. He has a large crystal in his hand, and we all feel that same weird crawling wrongness last experienced when the priestess of the Dragon got possessed by a shard of the Mad God. Oh, joy. He demands our surrender, and threatens dire consequences if we fail to comply. Defiance is duly offered, so he shatters the crystal on the ground and starts doing...something. Aqila lobs a thunderstone at him, stunning him and interrupting whatever he was up to. We find out what in short order as some amorphous blobby thing materializes almost on top of Joe, tentacles waving. Aqila had just finished using animate rope to tie up Gawel when the weird thing shows up. Even with four 'arms' it completely misses Joe, which lets us smash, burn and otherwise destroy the whatever it was. Emil didn't help because he was almost paralyzed with terror. When the thing is gone, he recovers enough to fill us in - it was a chaos beast, and it should have been much scarier and harder to kill. As in it used to be a person who was infected with chaos and can turn other people into more chaos beasts if it spreads the infection. Chalk one up for ignorance.
Meanwhile, Aqila sits on the bound Gawel with a dagger to his throat to see if she can interrogate him without him doing something nasty. He's babbling mindlessly and thrashing around, managing to cut his own throat on her dagger. Joe runs over and patches up the damage as Emil comes over too. Gawel resumes babbling, pretty much like the priestess had been. Emil's 'quick, kill him' added impetus to the assessment that an interrogation was a lost cause, so Aqila made with the stabby-stabby. There are still some shards of the chaos crystal on the ground, but no one has any idea how to deal with that mess. Aqila adds it to her list of 'things someone with more experience needs to be made aware of'.
Before setting off, there remain a few matters to discuss. Aqila is quite firm that Jahan's book needs looked at by experts and kept somewhere safe. Joe is quite sure that he's able to keep it safe and that he doesn't trust her at all. The matter of Segmund being a murderer is tabled for the moment. There is an agreement to continue the discussion under a zone of truth, since Aqila has scrolls and Emil can use them as a neutral arbitrator. The matter of Joe having books squirreled away somewhere that Aqila would be wanting to look at is also tabled in favor of Aqila trying to explain why she's sure that the dangerous and scary book is safer with people she knows. It's not the world's most coherent explanation - almost dying several times in 24 hours may have contributed to that - but Joe decides he'll ask his Spirits to tell him what they think about the whole thing. So, halfway to their next stop, we take a day off and Joe gets told that yes, Aqila knows people who can keep that thing safe, while they can't, and Joe probably shouldn't have been reading it at all.
Now, there was that dig site on the list of 'things that need looked into' on the way back to Stone Bridge, so the party detours to the village of Meadow Brooks to get better directions. They find out that a caravan left the dig site three days ago with a load of stuff, but there are still people out there looking for any leftovers. We'd ridden within a mile of the place on the way to the village - it's half a day's ride south. So, after a nice quiet night, we head back south to see if there's anything we need to worry about, and yes, yes there is. We reach the clearing where the site is, and it's basically a charnel house. Body parts are strewn liberally around the pit dug into the ground to expose the low square structure, made of the same black stuff the tower back in Duke Dobroslaw's lands was, where the key to the demon prince's tomb had been hidden.
Aqila asks Joe and Moonbeam to see if they can see any non-human tracks that might give clues as to what tore people into pieces, and if Joe could keep the horses calm, since they really, really don't like smelly carrion. She goes to have a closer look at the structure. Circling around, she finds a door. Carven over the door is the legend 'The Tomb of Azarkan' . To her, this is a red alert that someone is doing something screwy - Ancients never had tombs. Pausing for a minute, she gets a lit rock going, and peers into the structure. A gaunt figure in tattered rags is seen in the back of the room, hunched over something clutched in its hand and muttering something about people trying to take its precious. As Aqila enters the room, the now very familiar crawling sensation of wrongness is apparent. However, this one, while babbling, is actually using words, so there's a chance he might be able to answer questions at some point. She hollers for everyone else to come help. Granted, live capture didn't work too well last time, but...
A short scuffle and one Animate Rope later, the madman is trussed up, and the shard of glowing crystal is on the ground. No one wants to touch it, but it's probably not safe to leave it either. Emil finally gets over to the building, sees the shard, and makes it clear that we should vacate the premises. We do. Joe hauls the nutter out as Emil goes in. We don't find out exactly what happened next, but the end results are the crystal being gone, and Emil is flat out of it. At this point, a warm bed is half a day's ride away, so Emil gets tied to a saddle again, as does the madman. The rest of us take turns walking/jogging back to the village. We sack out, keep an eye on the incapacitated members of the group, warn the village that the dig site isn't a good place to go now, and keep heading to Stone Bridge cross-country in the morning. Emil eventually comes to, though he's in really bad shape now. The madman doesn't sane up, but his babbling gives us his name and the fact he's a minor mage from the academy. The Chancellor is probably not going to like this news.
We get back to town. The gate guards don't ask for papers. We find out from them that the town is in quite an uproar. The Count's been assassinated, the Countess is ruling now, and she released the priestesses of Tareina who had been arrested with apologies for their treatment. We make it to the White Temple without incident, and the priest there is reasonably sure that the protections there will hide Jahan's tome from unfriendly eyes until someone can get here to deal with it in a few days. This is the best news Aqila has had all month. Now we just have to figure out how to help the mage we rescued, find out who's funding the academy, not die, maybe even get some actual answers as to what's going on.
Aqila, meantime, has a very long letter to write. With annotations from the rubbings Joe took, Zahak's notes, and a detailed account of the past fortnight's activities, with maps and as good a drawing as she can make of Kashirna's device.

Terane
2020-03-04, 06:06 PM
Hit the character count limit, so two posts coming up.


At some point around this time Segmund's player had to drop out due to severe schedule problems. Don't remember exactly which session he dropped out after. The other players took over controlling Segmund until such time as he managed to get killed or a good reason to leave him behind appeared - or at least that was the plan. Several arguable good reasons got passed up. Also about this time the dice turned insanely lucky for Segmund.



We resume late afternoon on the day the party returned to Stonebridge. After hearing the short version of the last fortnight's events, the priest at the White Temple makes a magic phone call and gets word back that someone will coming in three days for a full report, and said person can deal with the artifacts we dug up. Since it's already getting towards evening and we have two injured with us, we get the insane mage Lubomir and Emil settled comfortably and camp out overnight in the temple. Aqila starts working on writing a very long letter.
In the morning, we wake up to the sound of someone pounding on the temple's door. One of the Countess's Guards is there, and after making some disparaging remarks about the temple being so poor that it needs to take in lodgers, he demands our names and activities. We answered truthfully, though in as little detail as possible, giving names, the fact we'd been on a mission for the Chancellor of the mage academy, arriving back in town only the afternoon before, and having left nearly three weeks prior. The guard was somewhat disgusted and informed us that someone had murdered the Count and his murderers needed to be caught, so don't leave town and keep the guard appraised of your movements. Can you spell 'looking for scapegoats?'
Leaving Joe and Moonbeam to keep an eye on Emil and Lubomir, and Segmund to stay out of trouble, Aqila bee-lines to the Temple of Nareel to let Roksana know what'd been going on, ie Jahan = dead, Gawel = dead so Roksana doesn't need to keep trying to scry for him, and there have been two more Mad God shards found. Roksana's news boils down to 1) the Count has been murdered by one of Deiliana's sacred poisons, one of the rare ones only a high priestess of Deiliana would have access to, the chancellor's position is under threat by Fiorino, an Inquisitor of Reshana, the Kantoran goddess of death, is in town and consulting with the Countess about the murder of her husband, and most worrisome, information from Roksana's contacts at the academy reported that there may be two tomes from the dig site there. Oh, and there's a new necromancer already there to replace Zahak, as if his death was planned. The new necromancer's name is of the same people group's as Grozdan, which is even more worrisome. Gawel's replacement as Grozdan's local agent most likely. And, given what Aqila knows about the dig site being one big plant, that means someone specifically went to great pains to ensure those books ended up where they are at this time. Roksana also mentions that the Kantorans are debating whether to stay in the county or evacuate. Some of them probably will regardless. Aqila suggests that Emil probably needs a quiet vacation somewhere safe, like up north in Duke Dobroslaw's capital, and him mentioning to the Duke what's going on in the county would be a good thing.
Aqila hits the academy, where the gate guard warns her that the chancellor wants to see her quickly and quietly before Fiorino finds out she's back. That doesn't sound good. When she gets to his office, she can see that the Chancellor looks terrible. He's not even cheered up by the news that Jahan is dispatched and the academy won't have a stain on its reputation from that. Reading between the lines, Fiorino's been claiming he chased Jahan off and his reputation is getting a boost from that. The Countess is supporting Fiorino's bid for the chancellorship. Aqila warns him about the massacre at the dig site and the survival of Lubomir albeit in a damaged state, and is told emphatically by the Chancellor that she needs to keep Lubomir out of what's going on at the academy. Her offer to check the artifacts from the site for booby-traps yields him outright telling her that the booby-trap was the two Ancient tomes they found. Fiorino's got his hands on them firmly, and the new necromancer is helpfully translating them for him. From what the Chancellor knows, they're probably information about how to open gates between planes. He warns her that if she hears that Fiorino has left town suddenly, she should do the same with no delay. She tries mentioning to him that, given the current situation, he's probably going to be murdered to give Fiorino a clear shot at the chancellorship and him leaving town would be a very good idea, but he insists that since he built the academy, it's his duty to try to mend the mess it's in. Okay, then. The most useful event was him giving her a small stack of papers in response to her asking if he was aware someone was trying to cause trouble using the academy. He couldn't talk about it of course. He also told her that he'd heard that her dwarf had broken into Grozdan's mansion, and to believe anything he found there.
Back at Nareel's temple, she gives Roksana the current academy news straight from the Chancellor's mouth. She takes time then to read the letters she'd just gotten and shares the contents. Given some references in the letters from the Chancellor, the theory that the Countess poisoned the Count and is a High Priestess of Deiliana is moving from plausible to likely. Roksana agrees that someone is obviously and deliberately orchestrating a campaign to cause chaos and disorder, but there's no obvious candidate for who or why. Teredor? They have the resources, but Seferia is south of Asferia, and they'd have to go through Asferia to get to them. If Asferia had the resources to pull off all the machinations that we've been seeing, they wouldn't have lost the Ferial civil war in the first place. Aerodon would love to get Teredor embroiled in a war with someone else so they'd have a better shot at their next attempt to conquer Teredor, but again, Seferia is south of Asferia and Asferia would make more sense in that scenario. Almaera would have the resources, maybe, but not the motive. Besides, the mage lords there don't exactly work together well generally. No countries on the Chaos continent have any motive to be causing trouble half way around the world, and most of them wouldn't have the resources. The pirate archipelago Amerel is flat out - the pirate lords can hardly stop fighting each other long enough to keep the same leader for a single generation. No motive, no resources. The continent that the Dragon Temple runs as a total theocracy would have the resources, but the first attack was on a Dragon priestess. Besides which, they sent the party down to Stone Bridge to investigate in the first place. If you want to cause chaos, why deliberately send adventurers who will work to stop your plots right to where you're trying to cause trouble? And to round up the suspect list, there's the Atenil Union, for some values of union. The little city states are fighting each other constantly and are almost as bad as Amerel for pirating. Atenil have a reputation for being scary, and would have the resources to pull off this mess presumably, but again, no obvious motive, unless someone is trying to test a new superweapon for use in their internal battles. That, sadly, is the only scenario within shouting distance of plausible and there's only puffs of circumstantial evidence to support it.
At this juncture, the Inquisitor of Reshana comes in. Since priests of the goddess of death have a very pointed hatred for necromancy, and he's most likely heard about Jahan returning at this point, Aqila sees no reason not to let him know that that particular problem has been dealt with, and that someone is screwing around with shards of the Mad God. The Inquisitor really, really wants to know where Jahan's lair was so it can be 'purified'. Given what's still in there, Aqila quite firmly declines to spill the beans. He's annoyed, but Roksana managed to shush him. He makes a derogatory comment about the Sentinel before 'dismissing' Aqila.
Aqila takes over babysitting the patients and the book while Joe and Moonbeam go visit the priestesses of Tareina to see if they have any tips for mending Lubomir's mind. It's beyond their skills, but if we can get him to a Great Temple of Kantor, the priests there probably can fix him. Coincidently, the nearest one is in Duke Dobroslaw's capital. While they're gone, Aqila has a quick chat with Segmund, gets him to cough up some letters he found in Grozdan's mansion, which dovetail with the ones she got from the Chancellor. She also tells him that she'd like his help to more or less steal everything in the chancellor's quarters in the not too distant future. She just wants two books, he can keep the rest. He thinks that sounds like an equitable arrangement. They come back, we cache our important papers and books at the temple, and make sure the priest doesn't mind taking the night shift for keeping an eye on our patients. He allows that under the circumstances, it's permitted. Before heading to the hotel, Aqila fills the now mostly recovered Emil in on the current Kantoran gossip, who's in town, etc. He's rather startled to hear who the Inquisitor of Reshana is, muttering something about 'I thought he'd been stripped of his rank', before saying more distinctly that this was a matter of internal temple politics, and then leaves to presumably go have a heart-to heart with Roksana.
So, we check back into our hotel and try to get some sleep. Yeah, right. Around midnight, the door is broken down and an annoyed someone is demanding what exactly we thought we were doing. Aqila recognizes the accent as likely being a dragon priest of some sort, and begins using her bluff skill to good effect. In sum, the dragon temple had been keeping an eye on us. We were supposed to be investigating the academy, and then suddenly we take off into the hinterland for over two weeks. Obviously we weren't doing what we were supposed to and this priest wants answers. Aqila spins a neat yarn about them going south on an errand for the chancellor to the dig site, Gawel coming after them because we screwed up his plot with the shadow dog demon thing, dying after trying to use a shard of the Mad God, and oh by the way, the dig site was a charnel house and the lone survivor had a fragment of a shard and by the way we brought him back with us. Gawel is a known agent of Grozdan and we have some letters indicating that he's been funding the academy. The dragon priest demanded the letters, which Aqila had left at the White Temple. He put a killing curse on her before letting her go fetch them. She does, and he takes them when he leaves. He's really annoyed that there are no names, though she suggests that they probably have the resources to scry using them to verify their veracity. She also makes sure he knows that because we're pretty sure Gawel was Grozdan's stooge, the current necromancer at the academy is probably his new stooge, and the fact that they've been sighted playing with Mad God shards is a probable link to the ah, 'accident' with the dragon priestess. The dragon priest stalks off after informing us that he's going to consult with his master and determine if they believe us on any points, and don't dare lose Lubomir because they'll want to examine him. So, we may or may not be off the hook with the dragon temple. Aqila and Moonbeam patch the door up so we don't have to answer any awkward questions in the morning, then get back to sleep.
The next morning we all head over to the White Temple and lo and behold the promised 'person who can deal with the rest of the Jahan mess' is there. The priest ushers us quickly to the back room and leaves. It's the same helmeted and cloaked fellow that met us on the road to Duke Dobroslaw's capital after the dragon priestess incident. Aqila passes over her carefully assembled report, since he should be able to read faster than she can talk. He's not particularly happy about the active Ancient artifact, or the book, but the copy of the rubbings got a definite reaction. No, we don't know what that room was, besides Bad News, and we aren't given any more specifics. He also is not happy about hearing that Fiorino has some 'ancient' tomes, and Grozdan's new agent is helping him use them. Aqila finishes up a summary of current events, and surprisingly he recognizes the name of the Inquisitor of Reshana, not that he remembers why offhand, but the fact that an Inquisitor came to his attention is a sort of red flag. We're asked if we want some more specific answers. The catch being, he's not going to answer them without making sure no one can eavesdrop, him putting up that sort of shield will be noticed, and we might get noticed too if someone's paying attention. After some debate, and keeping in mind that whatever's going on out here, we're pretty much it for dealing with it, we choose to have some straight answers.
After the Q&A session we know the following: His name is Valrim, he's one of the Atenil, one of the 'Unfallen' as opposed to the crew over in the Atenil Union who very much qualify as fallen, and are the reason Atenil in general have a very, very bad reputation. This is why he's usually wearing the very face-concealing helmet, which he takes off to talk to us. He's the field commander for the Sentinel, a group that's been around since the God Wars, when the Ancients were overthrown. Valrim's parents led the rebellion, so he'd have a first-hand perspective on the events. The mission statement for the Sentinel is simple - the world was almost destroyed once, never again. Which, essentially, means finding and getting rid of or at least containing any Ancient technology, magic, knowledge, etc that would permit a repeat of events that created the Chaos lands, almost completely depopulated the world, poisoned large chunks of the chaos continent, and created a lot of the weird monsters and other unnatural critters wandering around today. And for what bears on our current situation, based on the evidence we turned up, it's almost certain that a civil war is being fomented in Seferia. Grozdan is almost certainly an agent for whoever actually rules the Atenil Union, the 'controller of the chaos' there. Naming no names, as that would draw whoeveritis's attention if you know it's name. Grozdan is likely a sword sworn, and his body guard a death dancer, which means they could pretty much take us apart if we run into them. Lovely. The likely reason for causing a civil war is to let the Atenil Union conquer the Ferial, which gives them a foothold on the Twin Continents and a staging ground to continue working their way north.
Afterwards, we're offered an item of minor magic each. Getting more substantive support would be noticeable, but that's within the realm of plausible. Joe's circlet, Moonbeam's cloak, and Segmund's dagger need a little time to get, but Valrim had several bags of holding on his person, and he just hands her one. Which means she can now hide things a little bit better that she doesn't want other people finding. He returns in an hour with the rest of the goodies and orders for Aqila. He also flat out states that the Ferial is now considered hostile territory except for known safe havens like the Duke's holdings, and the appropriate rules of engagement are to be followed. Priorities are 1) make sure Fiorino doesn't use the tomes to open gates to other planes, given how horrendously dangerous and damaging that sort of thing is, by stealing them if possible or destroying them if not. If he does start opening gates, he goes on the 'needs killing' list. Stealing the tomes is preferred so the Sentinel can find out just what sort of information is being handed out. 2) As a rule Sentinel members are absolutely forbidden from interfering in local politics. There are a few circumstances where this rule is bent a little, and we're in one, so keep the Duke alive if at all possible. 3) If the Duke is assassinated, make sure his son ascends to the dukedom. 4) Find Zahak's books and keep them safe too.
Valrim also tells us that normally, after the sort of fun Aqila's already been having, she'd get to go home for a vacation, but there isn't anyone around to take over just yet. The Tarrasque is keeping quite a few of the higher level Sentinel busied in seeing that it doesn't rampage out of the chaos lands and into settled territory, so resources are stretched everywhere. She can hold out hope that it won't take too terribly long for someone or someones with more experience to get sent out to take over.

For this setting, the Tarrasque was intended as the shell for a weapon the Ancients were making - it was to house a major infernal lord, giving it all the best traits of both creatures. The weapon wasn't quite finished when the disaster that created the Maelstrom happened. It got tangled up with that effect, such that killing it is expected to cause lots of things to go boom - and even harming it may well do that. So periodically a team of Sentinel agents gets to go play tag with it to keep it from rampaging over any settled areas - both to keep the death toll down and to avoid having someone who hasn't gotten the memo trying to kill the thing.

Afterwards, Aqila checks with Roksana to see if she's got any fresh news from her contacts at the academy. Word is the Chancellor is failing, but the Countess is not as yet letting Fiorino take over - not until the Chancellor is dead presumably. So, no overt law-breaking to embark on just yet.
The next morning as usual we check at the White Temple, then leaving Joe and Moonbeam to keep an eye on Lubomir, Aqila and Segmund both go to hear Roksana's news. Per her contacts, the Chancellor is getting stronger. Meanwhile, Joe and Moonbeam are being arrested by the Countess's guards. The other half of the squad intercepts Aqila and Segmund on their way back. We are left cooling our heels for an hour before being escorted into the Countess's presence. She makes it rather clear that she'd cheerfully use us as a scapegoat to blame the Count's murder on, but the fix isn't in completely as yet, so while we're waiting for the wheels of justice to turn, we might get some good marks in her book if we take care of this teensy little problem she has. There is a mine that her husband let fall into dreadful disrepair, and while she's trying to get it modernized, the miners recently are refusing to work because they say there are 'things' in there. Now, surely you heroes can easily quell their fears and maybe put paid to any little varmints that are frightening them? Right, like we're going to say no. It's a day and a half away, and it's about midday when we're dismissed. So, after picking up a lantern and some lantern oil, we set off. And spend the night in a village about half a day's ride away.
We reach the mine near evening, without stopping along the way to let the nature lovers pick up some new spells. Aqila argued against delaying since we'd be fined for each day's delay and letting the Countess know that we have a decent stock of gold might be bad for us. We check in at the mining village to see if they've got a better description of what we're going in after. Lizardy things is the best we get, plus seeing some bite marks. Not deep, but with a distinct double ring, indicating that the animal had two sets of choppers in its jaws. There still is some light left, so we start investigating. The mine office just inside the entrance is occupied obviously by two lizardy things. They're dispatched after attacking us. Joe tried to talk to them, but a voice speaking infernal set them on us. Aqila thus far is managing not to freak out, some seriously bad memories of mines and demons notwithstanding. We hear nothing as we move deeper in. The largest open space where the lifts are has been nicely boobytrapped with floating orbs of fire. Fire imps that are fairly fast moving. Segmund and Joe get pretty thoroughly roasted by the initial salvo. Aqila magic missiles some of the balls, then backs up to give them some room and trips over a previously invisible imp - the source of the voice we'd heard earlier. It's pissed and casts a field of Darkness. Moonbeam heals up Joe while the boys start retaliating. Create water proves that fire and water don't mix well, and the orbs start falling. Wind also puts out fire as Segmund uses his fan. Aqila one-shots the imp, proving it to be a very weak specimen, while the rest of the orbs are poofed.
At this point, most of us are charred, tired, and cranky. Time to call it a night. Aqila takes the imp corpse over to the village to prove that 'yes we believe you that there's nasty stuff in the mine, we can kill it, and we'll finish clearing the place tomorrow'. She gets first watch too, since she avoided the earlier barbecuing. Next day, bright and early, back to it. Using detect magic to locate invisible imps, we start sweeping the top floor, and find two imps in a shaft off to the side. Aqila and Segmund find out that imp stingers hurt, but we do finish them off.
And RL break due to it having been 3am.

These fire things were custom monsters that I goofed with - there was a transcription error copying my rough notes to a clean form for use running the game. They were supposed to be effectively landmines - that nasty barrage of fire should have been them self-destructing. But that detail got omitted - so it turned into an at-will thing, and almost fried the party.
The bad memories referenced for Aqila were a backstory thing - not an event that happened to her, but how her older brother (also a Sentinel agent) died. Chased an imp into a mine, and discovered too late that the idiot responsible for the imp running around had also called a marilith.




We resume in the middle of a dungeon, well, mine crawl. To recap, we got to the mine in the evening, poked our noses in, killed a couple of lizardy monsters, find some mostly burnt papers with writing on them, then hit a minefield of fireorbs. One imp shows up mid-battle and is also killed. The druid and the rogue got pretty crispy, so we rested for a night, then resumed clearing the level. Two more imps were found and dispatched in a side passage, though not before Segmund and Aqila got poisoned. Hurray for vials of anti-toxin. We picked up here, finishing our inspection of the top level. In the back corner of side passage, we find traces of magic that feels like abjuration or sealing in a rubbish pile. Aqila realizes the magic is on some shiny dust after a successful knowledge check, then we move down to the second level.
This level features magical darkness right from the get-go. Since Aqila has a lantern, she starts pushing into the effect, and gets chomped by a lizard-like head on a long neck that shot out of the darkness right past Joseph, who reacts quickly enough to break its neck with one hit. It had a poisonous bite, so while Moonbeam healed Aqila up, Joe collected the head for further investigation. The teeth are identical in pattern to the bite wounds seen on the miners. The rest of the level yields several more 'darkness turds' and two more monsters of the same species. Everyone gets bitten except Joe killing them. At this point, we investigate the darkness bubbles more closely and discover that they're being generated by a shard of stone on the ground that crumbles at a touch, banishing the spell. We get rid of all the darkness bubbles on the level without finding more lizards. There is a somewhat larger pile of what looks like gem dust with a familiar feel of abjuration magic on it. Down we go again.
Level three is unsurprisingly a wall of darkness. We all take one step off the lifts, and the sources show up. The passage is narrow enough that only four floating orbs of darkness can come at us at a time, but there are a lot of them. Aqila recognizes them as shadow spawns, a semi-sentient construct mostly used to discourage adventurers or at least slow them down. They freeze their targets, are incorporeal, and are generally a minor nuisance. Magic Missile is a fairly effective minesweeper. Segmund's ghost-touched dagger also helps out. Fifteen essences later, the darkness is gone and we can resume searching. We find what looks like a tiny animal’s stash in a side passage, so Joe sends Little Brother in to dig it up. And then we hear a voice. "Hey, what big people doing with Sneezil's stuff?". An imp that is articulate in common and non-hostile is a new thing. He makes us understand that he'd like to move his treasures to a new place since we found them, and that he knows where shiny things are. Little Brother keeps digging during the dialogue, and turns up an intact gem with the same feel of abjuration magic as the dust we'd found earlier. We decide to humor it and search the rest of the level while he hides his stuff, then go down one more level to see the 'shiny things'.
We follow a cheerfully babbling Sneezil through a narrow tunnel to a small excavated chamber. The rippling sheets of reality are obviously a badly closed gate. There're puddles of imp and lizard-dog goo under them. Sneezil comments that they're other imps that 'lost the game', which is what imps play to get big. Aqila recalls that imps can grow up to be Pit Fiends, but doesn't want to mention that tidbit in front of Sneezil. We also hear that the imps have been coming here to escape the 'masters' aka bigger demons, and are quite happy here. Joe uses his new headband to help him convince Sneezil that we need to close the portal firmly to keep any 'masters' from coming here, and we'll even take him someplace where he can play all the games he wants. And eat kidneys, since he seems to like them in particular. The guard's private tavern back in Stonebridge comes to mind as an ideal spot to sic him on. Aqila goes along with this plan since an imp might be a useful bit of chaos given what we're likely to find when we get back. Sneezil decides he likes this idea, and goes to get his gem. As suspected, breaking the gem closes the portal more firmly, but the planar fabric is still weakened there. Yet another thing that we can't deal with ourselves so mentioning the problem exists to someone who can fix it is a good idea.
Now, the fun really starts. It's still early in the morning, and we have a Sneezil with us. We head back to Stone Bridge with all haste while trying to entertain a happily hyperactive imp. Joe handles most of the imp wrangling, starting with card tricks and then hunting squirrels and rabbits in wild shape. Aqila uses prestidigitation for another hour. That gets us to camp. Did I mention imps don't sleep? Segmund entertains him by picking locks while we get ready to sleep. That buys us a few hours. Moonbeam and Aqila try other gambits, which buy only a little time. Aqila's alchemy kit is worse for wear. Joe gets woken up for the last few hours before dawn and then we still have half a day until we get back to the town. Slinging stones, eating more squirrels, and for a very short time, practicing the 'quiet game' to get ready for sneaking him into town get us to the gate guard. When we're close enough to see the town, the imp exclaims that it looks familiar, implying that he'd been summoned here before. Crap. The gate guard demands our names, then tells us the countess wants to see us. Now. Sneezil almost gets us in even more trouble, and we aren't allowed to even get some lunch. So what to do with the imp? Grozdan's mansion is on the way to the keep, and has lots of shiny glass windows. We promise to show Sneezil where the pub is after a bit, and he goes off to play cheerfully.
The countess is less than amused to hear that there actually was a problem, and that one of the academy mages probably caused it by being careless. She informs us that the new chancellor will keep such things from happening again, and he's planning a demonstration either tonight or tomorrow. She implies that we might have been useful enough not to be blamed for the count's murder, and declines Joe's offer of the lizard's head as a trophy. We say we'll stay in town to await her pleasure.
The rest of us go to the inn while Joe wildshapes to go pick up Sneezil. Sneezil has been having a fine old time - every window in the mansion is broken and there's a small group of guards running around to his great glee. Joe hangs out under some bushes until the imp gets bored with tormenting those guards, and leads him to the pub. The town guards are not going to be at their best if everything blows up that night. Meanwhile, Aqila goes to update Roksana on the situation at the mine and ask her if she can make sure someone finishes cleaning up that mess at some point. She also warns her about Sneezil, and the fact that he's familiar with this town. Roksana is a bit worried now, after getting a fair description of what Sneezil's like, especially since he's been staying invisible the whole time so we haven't seen him. She theorizes that he might not actually be an imp, but a projection of a greater demon with about the same power level, which can serve as an anchor to let the demon come through a gate more easily. The reasoning being that imps invariably have grandiose names for themselves, while Sneezil means 'toenail' or 'unimportant' in Infernal. She also confirms that Fiorino is going to be doing his planar gate demo tonight, and that she can close the gate if she is at her full strength. Essentially, if we can get her in without her having to fight, and protect her while she's busy, we can deal with this mess. Aqila also learns that the inquisitor has been recalled to answer some questions about his actions.
With that happy news, Aqila returns to the inn to pass the word, then she and Moonbeam go to the White Temple to check on Lubomir and update Bozydar, the priest, on current events. Lubomir is his usual mad self. Bozydar confirmed what Roksana was worried about Sneezil, and imparted some important tidbits. 1) Not squishing Sneezil was a good course of action if he is a projection - the greater demon would be aware of anything Sneezil experienced if he was sent home. 2) If we really want to achieve the best outcome for this whole mess, getting the gate to close while the greater demon is coming though is a winner - the shock of getting squished in that fashion would disorder the demon badly, and might leave it open to being killed by its peers on its home plane. Cutting things that finely would be somewhat dangerous, but markedly less than entering the gate to fight it on its own plane - aka suicide. 3) Pulling that off might free Sneezil as an independent entity with his current personality intact. Bozydar also muses a moment on what exactly the people who have been orchestrating these attacks are trying to accomplish. The county is the gateway to Duke Dobroslaw's lands from the west. If they wanted to capture Stone Bridge, all the chaos would make it hard to hold the town, especially if there's a demonic invasion. But, if they merely want to make travel through the area difficult, then even a brief invasion might be enough to accomplish that end. Things to ponder for later.
Armed with that knowledge, we go back to the inn, and decide that we are going to crash the party and let Roksana know we're in position and able to protect her by firing off a flare spell. Aqila makes one more trip out to the temple of Nareel to pass that on.
Now, the fun really starts. At dusk, we all set out for the mage academy. The gates are guarded, so we leave our horses nearby, and use animate rope to help us get over the wall near the chancellor's quarters unseen. The plan is to 1) break in and steal everything in sight then 2) deal with the mage himself and anything he's screwed up. We make it to the building without being stopped, as people are filtering into the academy's open field for the demonstration, and proceed to the door. Segmund gets it open, then trips the glyph of warding just inside and gets mostly incinerated. Joe stabilizes him and Moonbeam heals him up. The dwarf is now bald and naked, but he's got spare clothes in his pack. Oddly enough, burnt dwarf smells less bad than his usual odor. We take everything not nailed down or on fire and stuff it in the bag of holding. The three books in the room are an elementary abjuration tome, most likely one of the books from the dig site, and what looks like a popular novel. They go in the bag last. Aqila can see Nayden the Necromancer and likely agent of Grozdan leaving the demonstration and coming towards the building. Fiorino is still orating. She preemptively animates the rope again so they can climb out the third-floor window, which she opens as Nayden goes around the corner to the door. Now an alarm sounds. We bug out the window and cross the field to the mass of students and faculty.
We join the crowd just in time to hear Fiorino finish up. The faculty is crowded near the front in the best seats. The Countess is there with two guards a bit off to the side where she won't be crowded. We recognize the mage who was bringing back a load of artifacts from the dig site that we met on the road behind the rest of the faculty. "Now we embark on a new era of exploration" as Fiorino opens the gate. A gout of flame explodes out. When it recedes there is a charred corpse about where Fiorino had been standing, and five or six of the front of the crowd are also barbequed, as is one of the Countess's guards. Two imps come through the gate, seeming a bit confused. The crowd starts fleeing. The mage we know stays put. The Countess begins languidly departing the area. Moonbeam shoots off a flare as we start moving towards the gate to deal with the imps and anything else that shows up. Aqila goes to the mage to see if he's willing to help deal with this mess. His reaction? "Oh, it's you. No matter. You are of no consequence and cannot interfere with the master's coming". Craaaaaaaaaap. A direct hit with scorching ray does absolutely nothing accept amuse him. However, her next attempt is Magic missile and that actually annoys him. He 'eats' an imp then starts working to enlarge the portal, casually summoning some fire orbs to keep us busy.
Everyone else continues to leave the area. Aqila keeps MM'ing the mage to try to distract and hurt him. Segmund, Moonbeam, and Joe alternately kill the annoyances he summons and try to distract him too. Shillelagh’d quarterstaff also gets his attention. After several iterations of this, Roksana arrives, and realizes that she can't shut the portal while the mage is enlarging it. Joe concentrates beating on the mage, Aqila continues the MM barrage, and Moonbeam and Segmund continue killing summons for a few more rounds. We hear the voice of the demon coming through the portal, "Hurry up slave" yelling at the mage. Then a lot of things happen at once.
The mage finishes enlarging the portal, then the countess's guards show up to arrest us 'for sabotaging the chancellor's demonstration' as the guard captain put it. Aqila sarcastically asks if they intend to take us in before or after we get the portal closed, but any reply is interrupted as the demon lord starts coming through the portal in a gout of fire. Those of us close to the portal hit the deck to avoid being cooked. The mage actually gets a little fried by the flames then Joe really lets him have it with the quarterstaff. Almost dead, the mage then absorbs an imp and curses us as he suicides. We withstand the triple attack without too much further damage. There are still three imps left at this point. The demon comes through enough that the terror of his presence is felt. Only the guards and Moonbeam start fleeing in terror. The captain unsurprisingly declines to come any closer.

This became something of a running gag for a few sessions - despite having fairly good saves Moonbeam ended up constantly rolling really badly on fear effects. Usually only on the more powerful ones, so a lot of unexpected running in terror.

We quickly finish off the remaining imps and try to figure out how to distract the demon lord until Roksana can close the portal. Joe had the best idea, creating water on its head. They don't have water rain on the infernal plane after all - it was good for a 'what was that?' reaction. We don't know if magic missile would do anything to it or not - Aqila was tiring at this point and failed to cast the spell. Moonbeam bounced off the wall of the building the chancellor's quarters are in while the guards were frantically trying to pour through the gate and recovered from her panic. Segmund bounced a quarrel off the demon's leg to no effect.
However, we'd held on long enough. The portal starts collapsing slowly, then more quickly. The demon tries to withdraw, but is too slow. And then we have to dodge chunks of demon as they come raining down. Minor acid damage all around, except for Moonbeam who hadn't gotten back yet. At this point, it's time to get the hell out of Dodge. Aqila quickly mentions to Roksana that Sneezil is probably an independent entity now, but is upstaged by the imp in question bouncing by yelling 'Sneezil is Freeeeeeeee!'. This is still not a large enough problem to warrant sticking around. Moonbeam and Joseph decide to make sure the guard captain won't interfere with our departure. Moonbeam entangles him. Joe adds insult to injury with 'create water' and 'chill armor'. That should have him mad enough to ignore Roksana and let her leave too. Aqila checks the presumptive corpse of Fiorino while this is going on to see if there's enough left to be sure it's really him. All that's not a charred mess is one ring that looks like the flashy one she's seen him wear, and the charred remains of a book, possibly the other one from the dig site. They both get picked up for later analysis.
We blow by the White Temple, pick up Lubomir, give Bozydar the two minute version of what just went on since he can get a fuller account from other sources, and hit the road, not stopping until midnight or so. Before we skated out, Bozydar had a message for Aqila that had been slipped under the door of the temple. It read, simply, 'I'll be seeing you', and was signed Nayden. One recurring villain, check. We stopped five days out for a two-day rest to repair gear, scrounge food, and let the nature loving types learn some spells. The druid happily showed off lightning storm to all. Aqila tried using the abjuration text she ah, acquired, to learn endure elements, but the foreign style foiled her. Twelve more day's travel saw them to the Duke's capital.

This was the introduction of Sneezil. He was supposed to be an annoying character that the party had to struggle not to kill before learning what he knew. I misjudged slightly - the party druid decided he was cute and they more or less adopted him as the team mascot - and later a valuable ally.

Terane
2020-03-04, 06:07 PM
We begin just outside Duke Dobroslaw's capital. We being the PC's, Segmund and Lubomir the mad mage. We get directions to the Great Temple of Kantor from the gate guard, as that's likely to be the only source of sufficiently power healing magic in the region to fix the mage. The main temple building is roughly octagonal, with four wings for each of the other deities in the Kantoran pantheon. We start at the wing for Tareina. The priestess there doesn't think she's sufficient for the problem we're bringing her, so she goes to hunt up the high priest for the whole temple. He comes in, and Aqila explains what the problem with Lubomir is, which adequately matches the story he'd already heard, since he waves Emil into the room then. The high priest sounds disgusted that someone's playing with demons again. Not being a young man, he's apparently seen this before. A 'we'll buy the beer' story to ask for later? We find out that it'll take both the high priest and the priestess of Tareina to perform the cleansing ceremony, and it'll be at least a month, possible more than one, before he recovers his senses if ever. So it'll be a while before we can get any information about what happened before the shard showed up, or any other info about the academy. Lubomir's one of the few surviving faculty at this point.
Next on the list is making sure we have all the important information before we go report to the Duke. Specifically, Aqila grabbed a ring off what was most likely the corpse of Fiorino. It would be nice to confirm he actually died and stayed dead, given Almaeran mages' reputations for surviving things most mortals wouldn't. A priestess of Nareel is the best diviner in the temple, so we head back there next. Upon examining the ring, for a short look, she's reasonably sure that the ring's owner's name was Fiorino, but she'll need to do some in-depth looking to make sure it's the Fiorino we mean and what his current state is.
So, on to the Duke. The guards hustle us inside, and we're taken to his study. Just him, no guards or anything. Aqila recaps. Extensively. Including the important points that Grozdan seems to be behind most of the messes she turned up down there, his crew are playing with shards of the Mad God, the Countess is likely a priestess of Deiliana and the murderer of the Count, she probably knew about the demon lord before the demo, the academy's more or less destroyed, the whole series of disasters are part of a ploy to destabilize the region to kick off a civil war so Grozdan's backers can come in as saviors rather than conquerors, the Duke's likely on the hit list with his being a major pillar of regional stability, and Aqila's been told to keep him alive if she can, and see his son hold the Dukedom if she can't. That last bit being nigh unprecedented, the Duke has a lot to think about. The letters between the Chancellor and Grozdan aren't sufficiently damning for the Duke to act against his interests in his lands, but if we can find more proof of his complicity.... Aqila mentions that we haven't actually finished sorting through the stuff we stole from the Chancellor's rooms. The Duke calls his court mage in to help sort. Most of its tacky artwork and knickknacks, but two items are not - the necklace and the cheap novel still have spells on them. The novel has a mix of transformative and illusion magic on it. The necklace has a communication spell on it, targeted at the Astral plane. The court mage decides to see if he can get the spell of the book, which Aqila is pretty sure that the Chancellor set, but it will take a bit to get it off without destroying the book. We're quartered in the Duke's keep over night as 'guests' since the Dragon Temple priest still wants to talk to us. It is past time for everyone to get a bath after twelve days on the road.
In the morning, the Duke and the representative from the Dragon Temple are there. The 'edited for consumption' version of events is given, mostly what we'd already told Mr. break-down-the-door in Stone Bridge with some more recent events added on. The priest is pissed, informs us angrily that he'd been given instructions from higher up to accept our story, but if we ever kill another priest of the Dragon, we're toast. Okay then. I'm sure that won't happen for a few sessions anyway. After he storms out, the Duke informs us that he's thought on our report, and Aqila's orders. We should keep ourselves available to help out with any little things that come up which a deniable group of adventurers is needed to deal with. The Moonbeam and Joseph Listens to Wind have spell learning, shape changing and/or stat training to play around with. Aqila's being set up as a visiting scholar at the local academy and since the Duke's son visits there regularly, that'll be the information conduit when needed. Segmund has loot from the Chancellor's office to fence. So now, some downtime. Maybe.
First off, Aqila stops by the Great Temple to see what the priestess of Nareel has turned up with the ring, and to see what she thinks about this necklace. It's not exactly a normal enchantment after all. The news about the ring is peculiar. 1) The ring belongs to Fiorino. 2) He is dead, he hasn't been raised, turned into an undead, or otherwise has his soul on this plane anywhere. 3) The peculiar bit is a feeling like his soul may have been grabbed by the demon lord we helped squish, but that sort of thing needs a link between the person and the demon. Hmmm. Aqila mentions what the court mage discovered about the necklace, and asks if the priestess would mind taking a look at it. She really really does. After a few minutes of concentrating, she abruptly breaks it, then explains. The necklace's spell was originally linked to the demon lord, but the disrupted pieces have been claimed by a far greater malevolent power which had taken over the spell. If Fiorino's soul is still around, it's probably in its possession. I'm sure this won't be significant in the future at all, unless it's more amusing for us to be worrying about it in perpetuity. The high priest stops her on the way out to ask her if she'd testify at Radomil's trial in a week's time. Radomil is the Inquisitor of Reshana we'd met in Stone Bridge. Or at least he was claiming that rank. The trial is apparently about him claiming that after being stripped of his title. Goody.
All in all we get a whole ten days in the Duke's Capital. During that time Aqila and Moonbeam learn spells, Joe gets practice using various wild shaped forms, and Segmund, well... We still had the gems from our first adventure needing sold off. The ones the dwarf pegged at 1000 gold value. Since mages do use gems for spell components at times, Moonbeam suggested that Aqila ask at the academy for who'd be a reliable gem buyer. Three suggestions are a somewhat shady fellow, someone with connections to the 'northern trade' and a nice but rather odd fellow. We decide to each visit one of them for some comparison shopping. Aqila takes Mr. NT, Moonbeam takes Mr. Odd, and Joe and Segmund take Mr. Shady.
Mr. NT offers 200 gold for the gems. He also eyes up Aqila, reads a description, then gives her a message from his associates to hers. To whit 'The debacle my associates were involved in wasn't intended, so please ask yours not to respond in kind'. She keeps this all under her hat for the moment. Mr. Odd notes that Moonbeams gems, while of a common type, are of an exquisite cut, and one he recognizes. He wanted proof that she hadn't stolen them in fact. She remembered that there was a slip of paper to that effect in with the gems and presents it. He's happy to help her then, offering 240 gold up front, or a 10% cut when he sells them if she gives him a month or two. She's not hurting for gold, so she leaves to think it over.
Mr. Shady turns out to be all kinds of excitement. After Joe and Segmund go into the shop, he eyes up the dwarf, and asks someone in the corner if that's him. Of course it is. Apparently, the local thieves guild has been looking for the dwarf, who killed a member of the guild and therefore owes them a 20k gold blood-debt, or his life. Joe decides that he's not getting involved, leaving the dwarf to try to wrangle the best deal he could. This went from paying the enforcer 500 gold to get to keep breathing, 10% of the debt owed and the enforcer keeps half, down to 20 gold a day to be allowed to live. Segmund pays up for 2 weeks. Mr. Shady only offers 210 gold for the gems. Segmund is still convinced they're worth 1000.
That evening, we meet in the city square and compare notes. Aqila gives Segmund all the Chancellor's Office loot he can carry, so he can start fencing it, while the rest of them plan to visit Mr. Odd en masse to see if they can get a group price. That is how it plays out when we go there the next day - 300 gold each. Segmund, of course, still being convinced the gems are worth more, did not send his along, and gets nothing. Mr. Odd catches Aqila on the way out and quietly asks if she was responsible for them all having those gems. At her response that is was a group effort, he makes sure she knows they can sell any more such gems to him. Meanwhile, Segmund sells all the cheap junk, then has the happy thought of asking the Duke if he has any art-loving friends that would be interested in buying some pieces. The Duke's guards haul him in. After ascertaining the provenance of the items, the Duke makes him an offer - let his steward appraise the items and take the offered gold or not. In spite of the true tastelessness of some of the articles, Segmund comes out with 2000 gold. AKA 10% of the blood debt owed.
After seven days, Aqila stops by the Grand Temple as asked, and finds out that while Lubomir isn't showing any signs of improvement yet, there's hope that he will finally recover in a month or two. No mention of testifying at Radomil's trial at this point. Three days later the Duke's son catches her at the academy to pass on the message that his father needs to talk to us all. It was a nice rest while it lasted. She Whispers everyone to head thataway and heads herself.
In increasing order of importance, we learn 1) the popular magicked up novel was in fact a ledger, listing all monetary transactions between the Chancellor and Grozdan. That's the evidence the Duke needed to move against Grozdan's interests in his territory, and will be doing that soon. 2) The Kantorans need to talk to Aqila about something, probably related to some news from back west. 3) The Duke has a job for us. There's a dragon living in his Dukedom with an arrangement for the Duke to have free access to his library in exchange for herds for food and privacy. The Dragon Temple teaches that any dragon who doesn't bow to the Dragon's authority is an abomination, and no dragon does, so keeping quiet about having one living in your territory when your king is playing footsie with the Dragon Temple is rather important. The dragon sent a somewhat incoherent complaint in earlier about nomad raiders. Since no sane raider would go for a dragon's lair when there are safer targets around, this seemed odd, but the actual situation turned out to be a raid on a caravan bringing about a dozen books to him along the Desert Road from back West. Hand-copied books that he'd ordered and had shipped at some expense. The Duke has two mages who are fluent in Draconic, but they're both on the powerful side and are currently up north shoring up the defenses on the Asferia border. The Duke had a shrewd notion that Aqila was also fluent, correctly, and would appreciate us making the trip out to meet with the dragon and if at all possible, deal with the problem. Also, King Mykyta has finally heard about the original killing of the Dragon Priestess, and is somewhat pissed at us, so making ourselves scarce for a time is indicated. We talk the Duke into subsidizing our purchase of riding horses to replace the ones we'd borrowed from him, and while Joe and Moonbeam go make sure they get good steeds, Aqila goes to the temple to find out what they want.
At the temple, the main problem is politics. There's a potential schism forming in the Kantoran temple over their policy of helping the Sentinel. The bug up Radomil's butt is mainly due to his disagreement with the temple policy on that issue. The high priest suspects that if they put him on trial for falsely claiming the Inquisitor title, which he was stripped of at an earlier trial, that might be enough to kick the schism off, since people on the opposing side had some doubts about the legitimacy of the first trial. So, the high priest has the happy thought that if Radomil travels with a real live Sentinel member for a while, he might gain an appreciation of what we really do and get over himself. And he had this thought right before we leave on a delicate diplomatic mission. Aqila frantically tries to wiggle out of this conundrum, pointing out that if she tells Radomil something, and he doesn't listen because he doesn't like her, she can't guarantee that she can bring him back alive. After all, look at all the fun Emil had! Radomil suggests that he can just as well wait for the next trip. Fine, this works.
We set off after resupplying in town. Nine days later we get to the foot of the mountain that the dragon, Zalakirinal, lairs in. There's a nice inn at the bottom for visitors and an impressive set of stairs leading up. We stable our steeds, noticing that there is an exceptional white war horse already there. Joe tries chatting it up, and comes away with the feeling that it was laughing at him. We get a good night's sleep, then spend half an hour climbing stairs in the morning. Sitting outside the main opening to the cave complex, there's a tall, black-haired and chain-mailed figure reading a book. Joe compliments him on his horse, and he introduces himself as Tervel, a paladin of the White Temple. Aqila knows what paladins are and what they portend. She's heard stories, and an aggravated rant ensues. The main point being that paladins showing up when you’re a Sentinel agent generally means you're due to get right in the middle of doom, destruction, and all around terrifying messes. Corpses are common side effects, missing limbs if you’re lucky. Tervel listens bemusedly, commenting that he hadn't been planning on coming with them...oh, wait, never mind. When we go west, he's supposed to come along. Well, it's nice to have some warning of when the screaming is due to start, roughly.
We head in and meet the dragon. Aqila talks to him while Moonbeam and Joseph sit firmly on Segmund so he doesn't go looking for loose shinies. The dragon explains that the caravan carrying his goods was hit about eighteen days travel by horseback west down the Desert Road, and the nomads responsible were of the Kethorim tribe, who reverence nature spirits generally. He'd expect this sort of behavior from the Lazeerim tribe, which worship the Blood Gods, but they're much farther north. He'd appreciate it if we'd go find out what's going on, and recover any readable books we can. He's already re-ordered, but hand copying texts takes a lot of time. Aqila also regales Zalakirinal with the minimally edited account of what we'd been up to. Valrim's appearance is most definitely on the 'do not mention to anyone' list, but most everything else is fair game. While she's tale-spinning, a few recently reiterated bits of information gain new importance. She asks the dragon if her conjuncture that the Atenil Union is making a move on the Ferial because King Mykyta is trying to ally himself with the Dragon Temple holds water to his way of thinking. He allows that it's not improbable, and while he'd like to see those two going after each other, he doesn't particularly want to be in the middle of it either. He then comments on her 'Northern accent' and asks her to give his regards to the elders next time she sees them. She says she will, and notes that if everything goes to hell in a handbasket in the Ferial, the elders might appreciate someone passing word of what went on to them, especially if there isn't anyone else left alive to do so.
The dragon then switches to mostly comprehensible common, telling Joe that as a druid, he may have an in with the tribe, being a fellow reverer of the nature spirits. He also asks if we'd like a boon before we set out. Wisely, Joe takes the lead in stating that we'll ask if he's still offering when we get back, but we haven't done anything worth it yet. We get a gem that we can use if we think of something to contact the dragon. He then directs us to the dining hall for a good dinner before we head off.
Ten days down the road, Moonbeam spots a funny lump on the road. Impulsively, Aqila tests her new spell on it. The sand dragon was unhappy about being fireballed. The rest of the part was unhappy with her doing so before anyone could dismount. Aqila and Joe's horse get chewed on before we kill the thing. The skin isn't huge, but we take it along anyway. Joe claims the teeth for a necklace. Eight days later we're closing in on the ambush site. We wake up to a ring of nomad raiders, one dozen with spears and four more at least with bows. They're rather rude and after we state that we're here to speak with their elders about a possible problem, they demand that we disarm if we want to see the elder. Aqila pushes to be allowed to leave our weapons with our horses, and that's allowed. After an all day walk, we reach the war camp.
The elder is a bit...odd. Given a previous explanation on how foresight works, we come to the conclusion he's a somewhat untrained seer who sees trends of the future, rather than specific images. This means what he sees happens, but if he doesn't have a context for what he's seeing, it's not much use to anyone. Case in point, he buttonholes Joe at one point and for his ears only, tells him that he sees 'Light from the darkness, evil that is not evil, a traitor that is true, and one of our party holds a key that will lead us to darkness'. Very useful stuff, that, if you already know what he's talking about! Unfortunately, the party doesn’t. He inquires as to why we're not armed, and upon hearing that we were 'required' to disarm to meet with him, he gives us his okay to carry our weapons again, which the war party grudgingly accepts. Aqila is somewhat insistent on this point since she's recognizing signs that the tribe's cultural mores about weapons are markedly similar to her home culture. To whit, unless you're a helpless cripple, a prisoner, or a young child, you bear some sort of weapon as token that you're able and willing to defend your self/family/tribe if or when there's an attack. So going armed keeps our status as 'guests' rather than 'prisoners'. The elder rather obliquely mentions to us that there's some sort of dispute between members of the tribe about the whole raiding thing, but no honorable person would discuss the full situation with an outsider or ask them for help. The implication being there is a problem and we can help, but we have to figure out how on our own. It's only straightforward and simple when there are demons to be slain, it seems.

I had a lot of fun with the elder's cryptic comments. Several didn't get transcribed in the notes - though I think all the ones that actually meant something did end up there. Which does not mean all the comments that got transcribed actually meant something.

Four days walk later, we reach the rest of the tribe's camp. One of the tribes elders welcomes us into his home after he verbally smacks the war party for their bravado. A dozen and a half warriors to capture four of the 'weak wetlanders' being one of the barbs. Since she hadn't explained explicitly earlier, Aqila makes sure she gets the rest of the group's attention and warns them to hang on to their weapons at all times, to show due courtesy to our host, as disarming is a signal that we expect him to defend us if a dragon shows up or something. The proper response upon entering your host's dwelling is 'By art I stand ready to defend' if you're a castery person, or 'by art and staff' or whatever weapons you favor. We eat. Aqila sees if she can get our host to open up a little bit about what's going on with the tribe by presenting him with a highly edited version of our adventures, cast in a proper talespinning chant as near as she can. No dice, though. We only find out that we need to speak to the 'Young One' whoever he is, and he'll likely be at the tribal meeting in the morning. We sleep.
Session ends here.



June III session
We begin in the tent of one of the tribal elders of the Kethorim after a good night's sleep. We were told the night before that there'd be a tribal council meeting when the Young One shows up. He declined to put in an appearance the first day, so Aqila finally got around to making her consumables from the components she'd bought while making Segmund assist while Moonbeam and Listens to Wind spent some quality time with the horses. We got word that evening that the Young One was going to be arriving tomorrow. The elder somewhat wryly noted that he has a tendency towards dramatics, so being ready before dawn is a good idea. Our goals going in are to try to figure out what problem the tribe has that no honorable member of the tribe will tell us about and to find out how to ensure the tribe stops raiding.
We're out with the tribe members at dawn. Just as the sun comes up, a figure in an immaculate white robe comes walking in from the east directly out of the sun. Joe notices that he's got a long dagger or short sword, a short rod, and some lumpy pouches on his belt. In personality, we find the Young One to be rude and abrasive. And annoying. Verbal judo, answering questions with questions, and deliberately phrasing things to imply one thing that is probably not true without coming right out and lying.
The first gambit was to try to deny that we were guests of the tribe in the first place, and to force one of us to participate in a 'demonstration'. We managed to deflect his barbs with sufficient deftness to get a few of the tribal elders in on our side, asserting that we'd deported ourselves as proper guests and it would be rude to force us into combat without our consent. Hurdle one jumped successfully. Segmund is somewhat blunt and gets to go tend to the horses so the grown-ups can talk.
The next parley had us garner information that the Honored One, aka the cryptic elder seer, was the one who saw the caravan for the warriors to attack, a warrior who was not of the tribe was the one who specifically took the books and left north with them, the Young One knows that we know Zalakirinal, though not naming him by name, and implied that the tribes problem is that the dragon will take revenge for his lost books because he won't be able to get replacements with the pending war about to kick off but to get the books back from the warrior would start a blood feud and they don't want that, so obviously we need to go find this warrior, get the books back, and placate the dragon with at least some of his property. He quite deliberately implied that the warrior was from the more fanatical nature worshipping tribe to their west, but never specifically said so. He also kept re-emphasizing that it was a 'simple warrior' who had taken the books. He insinuated that the elder seer had betrayed us by setting up the ambush in the first place, but we declined to accuse the elder of anything. There's also the point that the tribe to the north, the Lazeerim, worship Rakan, the Tyrant of the Blood Gods.
Final important bits - the Young One's given reason for trying to goad one of us into sparring was to prove that we are 'weak wetlanders' as he's been asserting. Our sense motives indicate that he's quite deliberately hiding something but he's not actively hostile to us. He says that he is not being any clearer because if he spoke clearly, it would change what he's seen. Also, after we take our leave and head north but before we leave the camp, the elder seer stops us with this nugget of advice - "The one who stands at your front with a bare blade is not always your enemy, nor is one who stands at your side a friend". I'm sure it will make sense eventually. North is somewhat of a less than specific direction for finding someone, but we have the impression that he'll find us.
We ride north two days quietly. Day 3 sees us getting dive-bombed by baby dragons. This is very peculiar. Sand dragons have delicate wings that they use as solar collectors to supplement their solid food, and they're sensitive to them being damaged. The three of them attack from the rear, larger one on Segmund's horse, the other two each taking a pack horse. Combat ensued. Amusing incidents such as Segmund dismounting successfully as his horse gets knocked over and Listens to Wind monkey-smashing his target into paste in one round occurred. Segmund ending the fight at -7hps was less amusing. Moonbeam successfully incriminated Segmund by tossing fire at his dragon, which didn't end well for him. Aqila killed the one chewing on her packhorse as a solo effort, but the horse got pretty chewed too. Wounds healed, we continued on.
Around evening, we found a campsite. A shredded destroyed mess with a barely breathing survivor under what was left of the tent. Joe and Moonbeam patch him up. His speech is odd. Not quite aphasia but there's obvious brain damage. He's also rather emaciated. We find out that he was attacked by a swarm of dragons, that he'd seen a rider on a beautiful black horse that morning, and that he is Outcast from the Lazeerim tribe, so he has no name. Whether the brain damage was from the recent injuries or from him getting kicked out violently isn't obvious.
We decide to sleep, let him sleep, and see if he's more coherent in the morning. One hour later, the screaming starts. About half a mile away, unearthly, and continuous. After ten minutes, we conclude that it's probably someone playing games and go back to sleep. Joe is the only one to get a good night's sleep because snakes can't hear, but we're adequately rested come morning. The noise cuts out at dawn. We start searching the camp site before Outcast wakes up, checking to see if 1) there are any books, 2) if the dragons were around the same size as the ones that got us, and 3) if we see anything else plot-hook like. The damage we can see clearly indicates that the dragon swarm was made of critters around the size of the ones that attacked us the day before. Aqila found a something, which she didn't mention at the time, but it did come up later, being a necklace with a staff symbol. So as we were getting ready to go investigate the circle, Aqila hung back a moment to talk to Outcast, ascertained that that was his necklace, that's why he got kicked out of his tribe, and he didn't have any way to make the trip to the Vanithim tribe who share that faith because the Lazeerim control all the routes there from this part of the desert. He might be able to get to them if he gets to the Desert Road, which requires going through the Kethorim's territory, which he wouldn't be able to do alone, but travelling with us, maybe. At his query of what cost this would entail, she assured him that she wasn't offering to get money - strictly good samaritan time.
We find a circle of dried blood about where the screaming came from. There is no magical signature whatsoever. Aqila has some vague memory of a dying art among a few clans in the desert nomad tribes whereupon they use their own blood to create a magic circle which permits them to cast detection-proof magic. It does require quite a bit of their own blood, though. She nukes the circle with a fireball to make sure it's disrupted. A faint scream as the spell hits seems to confirm that it worked. We pick up Outcast and then head north tracking the rider he had seen the day before.
About midafternoon we find him encamped with a large black horse, tending a fire. Listens to Wind has been helping track as a fennec fox, and stays in that form initially. We dismounted and approached the fire, leaving Outcast to hold the horses. Big surprise, he was waiting for us. He invites the druid to come out of wildshape, taunts us that we've been betrayed by the Kethorim seers because they saw he would win and sent us here anyway, and so forth. Prots are put up as he pontificates. Joe comes out of wild shape to point out that the horse has fire coming out of its nose. It's a Nightmare. Aqila tries to fireball him just as he drops a black stone. The fireball is a fizzle as the antimagic field snaps up.
Battle tactics are getting back out of the antimagic field then sniping him. Aqila's lobbing of a thunderstone at him before scooting backwards yielded a taunt about him 'not being as weak as that fool Gawel'. Now, how did he know about that? Very few people know how we killed him. Segmund and Moonbeam start with crossbows. Joe realizes that lightning bolts can be dropped into the field and fires up a lightning storm. The nightmare decides to go chew on Moonbeam. The rider uncases a strung longbow and nails Joe with his first shot. Aqila drives the nightmare off into the ethereal plane with a well timed scorching ray. Of course now we don't know where it's going to pop in at. Everyone else dives back into the antimagic field to hammer on the rider, letting Segmund sneak-attack him into unconsciousness while the mage plays bait for the nightmare. Instead of popping in for a chomp, it just winks in, pauses, and winks out, from the perspective of everyone in the antimagic field. Aqila hears in her head it commenting that while this was fun, it's going to go play with other people now. Since Aqila doesn't know if she can one-shot it with a readied magic missile or not, she lets it go.
The rider mutters something about this being impossible, it was seen that he'd live, before collapsing. Well, that was technically accurate, since instead of coup de grace'ing him, we patch him up enough to get him conscious before trying to interrogate him. He's sufficiently confusing that we end up dragging him along with us. Maybe the dragon can get some more sense out of him.
Things mentioned include him claiming that there are already assassins attacking Duke Dobroslaw, and that he'd sent them, that we'd never find the warrior who'd originally taken the books, presuming he's dead, and that the books were taken by courier to the Lazeerim tribe some time ago. He's apparently one of the Lazeerim and apparently the Tyrant of the Gods wants to take over the world. Big surprise there. He's sure that the dragon won't be able to get new books because of the war, and that he'll attack the Kethorim because he's pissed about losing his property. That's not jiving with his personality, so someone's lying somewhere. We need to think of some better questions to ask next time we have a chat with him, I guess.
Session ends with us nearing the main Kethorim camp.

Terane
2020-03-07, 08:45 AM
Hitting the character cap again, with a set of three sessions that should be in one block after this one.


We pick up outside the Kethorim encampment. After some debate as how best to approach the camp, given we're hauling a prisoner around and the circumstances under which we departed, we decide on riding up and asking to speak with the elders again. We're told by a guard that they are in conclave, but he'll ask to see if we'll be granted admittance. We are, and inside we see six elders, split down the middle in seating, with both seers and the gentleman who offered us tent room last time we slept here standing before them. We bring our prisoner Arman in, since he'd previously said some interesting things that need to be dealt with.
We start out by informing those assembled of Arman's assertion that we were betrayed by a seer of the Kethorim, who told him that he was going to win, before we fought. They all agree that we need to get to the bottom of this, and one of their shamans comes in and puts an enchantment on Arman to compel him to speak only the truth. The Young One starts off by asking him who struck the first blow in the battle we captured him in. He points out Aqila, who observes that when someone is threatening to kill you, and you can react faster than they can, you're allowed to defend yourself. Arman unwillingly admits that he had said he was going to kill us before the screaming started. 1 point for the PCs.
The elder seer asks Arman how Nurzhan is going to react when he finds out that Arman failed in his task. This sets off another round of questions where it comes out that Nurzhan is the leader of the Lazeerim, and that only 4 books went north. Were there only 4, or were there 5? The elder seer declines to confirm the latter. We also hear again that the purpose of the raid was to steal the dragon's books, take them back to the Lazeerim, and cast the blame on the Kethorim so the dragon takes his revenge on them instead. Oh, and that Arman was told to speak to the Young One who was the Kethorim seer that told him he would win against us. This really pisses the Young One off, and he denies it hotly. His ire only fanned by Aqila's idle observation that someone who'd conspire with a man out to wipe your own tribe out is a nasty fellow. The Young One demands that she either come right out and challenge him or shut up. The elder seer observes that, given the Young One's known battle prowess and seer's abilities, the four of us vs one of him would constitute a fair fight. The elders agree that this is so.
Listens-to-wind really doesn't want to get into the middle of a something when 'we don't have a dog in this fight', and tries to calm things down by asking if they're sure Arman can't lie. The shaman who cast the spell points out that Arman had been trying not to answer on some occasions, indicating that the spell was compelling him to speak. Arman is then asked why he was told to speak with the Young One. His answer? "Why should I not speak with Nurzhan's greatest ally among the Kethorim?" That really put the fat in the fire. The Young One flatly denied the charges and is mad enough to challenge us for pushing matters when Listens-to-Wind asks if it would be possible for Arman's mind to have been tampered with so he thinks he's speaking the truth, but is mistaken, which would fool the spell. We don't know what Nurzhan is capable of, after all. The shaman allows that it's possible, but traces of the meddling would be observable, which he could discover, given a night to search.
It's agreed to table matters until the next day, and Garegin, the fellow we bunked with last time, offers us tent space again for the night. The four of us and Outcast bunk down in a cozy tent, but set watches since things are a little tenser this visit. Joe goes first, in monkey form because he can. Aqila takes the next watch, and halfway through it, everything goes silent. Dead silence. Crap. She pokes Joe awake, who is still an ape, but as they wake up Moonbeam and Segmund, the trouble starts.
Swords rip into the side and rear of the tent from four swordsmen, and since Moonbeam and Segmund just got woken up, they're still drowsy and get stabbed where they lie. Outcast is sleeping still in the middle of the tent. Segmund gets knocked down to -8 hps, plus poisoning after getting one whole stab in. Joe stands over Moonbeam to get at those two swordsmen and give her a chance to get up. Aqila, realizing that she can't do much of anything useful as is, dashes out of the tent until she can hear again, tosses up SpeedyMage and starts screaming bloody murder. Joe monkey-smashes the attackers and Aqila plinks them with Magic Missile, after one Scorching Ray misses and sets the tent on fire, sigh. Moonbeam gets up and into the fight belatedly. The silence field goes down when there are only two left. People start heading towards the commotion, but no one arrives until the screaming is over. Outcast wakes up as Joe kills the last guy, now that he can hear again. Segmund is saved from certain death. Joe noticed that they have no tongues during the fight.
Garegin and his son run up, and he's very apologetic that we were attacked while technically under his protection. The elder seer arrives from the other side, then the tribes warriors and the Young One arrive very belatedly. The dead guys are identified as Lazeerim assassins. The Young One rudely tells Joe to drop out of Wildshape and dismisses the idea that the now corpses were actually assassins as specious. And notes we killed them all so they can't even be questioned. His tirade is cut off at the knees when Joe picks one up by the hair and indicates the missing tongue with an emphatic 'Ook!', at which point the Young One storms off in a huff. We assure Garegin that we're not mad at him for the assassins, then realize that other people might have been targeted. Arman and the shaman were unbothered by nocturnal alarms. However, the old seer's tent had been slashed up. He hadn't been sleeping in there, though.
The old seer speaks with us briefly, telling us that his ability to see the future is being deliberately fuzzed up, which can be done by another seer, though it would screw that guy up too. However, two seers working together, one fuzzing their target, and the other retaining clear sight, could get an advantage that way. The Young One is another seer, as is Arman. Coincidence? He can't tell us anything useful about the morrow, in other words, warning us to be careful, then we go camp outside the camp and finish getting some sleep.
The next day, bright and early, the council of elders reconvenes. They are sitting in the same order, but one of the Young One's supporters has scootched his chair a little ways apart from the other two, towards the other three elders on the right. Both seers and Garegin are there, along with the Shaman and Arman. The shaman kicks off the meeting by affirming that Arman's mind was not tampered with, and moreover, his memory of the Young One is faithfully accurate. The Young One then states that he will withdraw his bid to prevent strife within the tribe and leaves the tent. We then find out what the conclave was all about as Garegin is invited to take his seat among the tribal elders, and we are told that now that the elders' stance has been clarified, there will be no further raids. One mission objective, met.
We leave the tent and the elder seer has a word with us. He apologizes for roping us into this mess without our permission, and gives us a book. Yes, there were 5 books. He also tells us explicitly that this is the original copy of the book, and that it has a greater value than the dragon knows, so he needs to look it over very, very carefully. Warning noted. This was the target of the raid so Nurzhan's not going to be happy with anyone involved. We head off for the desert road, all six of us. Time to get back to the dragon's lair with one of his books and the assurances that the raids are over, at least until the next shake-up among the elders.
Half a day short of the desert road, we get yelled at from thin air. "I may not have long until Nurzhan catches up with me, but I'll have the pleasure of seeing you dead first!" We're dismounting while this is going on. A flash of fire hits Aqila as a blurred wavering figure of the Young One is revealed. Okay, so now we have to fight him. Aqila retaliates with a fireball. Everyone else wisely decides to stay away from her target until she's done, so ranged attacks and prots are a go. We see him put his hand in his pouch, but we can't see what he did. After another fireball, we find out. He grabs a red stone out of a pouch and chucks it in our midst, and it goes off like a fiery grenade. Owwy. Aqila gets her half-dead self out of range and magic-missile plinks for the rest of the fight, which is short. Joe lets him have it with his quarterstaff, which scares the Young One badly, as demonstrated by him chucking 4 more red stones. Aqila's out of range, everyone else eats fire, including the Young One. Moonbeam is down and unconscious. Segmund can't hit the blurry target. Joe can, and kills him. We loot the corpse. One fire stick - evocation. One robe of magic - illuson. 1 empty pouch, 3 full ones with yellow - transmutation, blue - biomancy and green - conjuration stones. And one short sword - transmutation. We bury the body in sand to prevent grumpy Kethorim coming after us, even if he attacked first.
We reach the desert road, and Aqila makes sure that Outcast is sure he can get to the Vanithim from there. He is sure, though he's still not in great shape. She gives him two of her four waterskins and her packhorse to help him on his way. The bag of holding suffices for her gear. We now have 18 days until we can get to the Dragon's lair.
Three days into that leg of the trip, we hear yelling over a rise in the road. The yelling is an older fellow in a robe being chewed on by a horse sized dragon. It's quite a bit bigger than the ones whose hides and teeth we're hauling around. Altruistically, we wade in. Aqila stays at range to keep the horses and the prisoner under control while she again does the Magic Missile plink. People are a bit nervous about her shooting scorching rays into a target they're meleeing for some reason. The old guy tells the dragon to 'eat this!' and shoots a cloud of green gas in its mouth. Shortly thereafter the scales start turning green. This is new. Moonbeam tries lighting it up whilst Monkey Smash and stabby stab are ongoing. The attacks get more effective as the dragon gets greener. Segmund in frustration makes a flying leap onto the dragon's back and stabs it from above. Then Joe smashes it splooshily from behind. It dissolves into rotten goo, with the dwarf falling into the mess. A dragon-sized pile of rotting flesh is not something you want to take a bath in, and even Segmund's nose is offended. Escaping the slippery mess while vomiting provides the rest of us with some comic relief.
Healing spells all around, even for the old guy who was getting chewed on the whole time. Julek, as he introduces himself, is apparently on the outs with his deity and may not speak his name until he makes atonement at a nearby shrine, one of the oldest shrines of this unnamed deity on this continent. Only 4 hours away, and would we mind escorting him? A fierce interparty debate erupts. In that corner, Joe, insisting that it would be an interesting excursion to see the shrine and it won't take that long and we already started helping Julek and he's all worn out. In this corner, Aqila and Moonbeam insisting that we have places to go, people to see, the dude won't even tell us what god he's a cleric of, and what if he's a dragon priest and tries to kill us and we have to kill him because we don't want assassins after us again so soon. Sense motives are rolls. Moonbeam is clueless. Aqila is sure Julek is lying. Joe thinks he's being truthful but perhaps hiding something. Segmund is petrified and sure that Julek means to sacrifice the lot of us when we get to the shrine. Outvoted 3 to 1, we leave Julek and keep travelling. When Julek was asked what pantheon his god was a member of, he told us that his deity works for himself, essentially. So, a male deity not in a stable pantheon like the Kantorans or the Aeranans. The suspects list of male deities: Sarkan - craftsmen, Velek - thieves and spies, Gurthan - not likely given he's only worshipped on the chaos continent, the Dragon, and maybe one of the blood gods, since they don't play well together, being Rakan the tyrant, Makarn - war, or Asurak - disease and destruction.

This was actually a priest of Asurak, in his role as plaguebringer. The party would have had some problems if they had gone with him - probably survivable, but decidedly unpleasant. Though, on the bright side, they'd have gotten to desecrate a shrine and tick off another blood god - and since Asurak was probably the one they'd offended the least by the end of the campaign, that'd have been a noticeable boost in the blood god irritation department.

The next day, Moonbeam and Joe are running fevers, and by the next day they can't even travel. A day of rest later, they've thrown off the plague, so we can keep moving. Aqila reads the book we recovered while we're sitting around to try to figure out what's so special about it. And gains no clue from her reading - it's a treatise on the development of magic since the God War. The rest of the trip to the dragon is uneventful.
We bring Zalakirinal his book and a prisoner to chat with, and tell him all about our fun little adventure. He's surprised that the original was sent, because he'd ordered a copy, and is puzzled by why the elder seer was so insistent that there's something special about this book. He then offers up a boon again for services rendered. Aqila, having had lessons in Draconic Etiquette, knows that asking the dragon to decide what boon to give you will often net you neater toys than asking for something, and mentions that to everyone else. So, Aqila gets a spellbook, that a seer made up the list for, being the next so many spells that she really really wants to learn. Perhaps not the ones she'll need, but the ones she'll want. Moonbeam gets a pouch of around 200 smooth black stones, which will help her learn spells more easily. Joe gets a nifty scimitar with animals carved all over it. Just a sword, when he's just a man, but when he wildshapes, it will sharpen his fangs and claws. Segmund babbles out his sad tale of woe, and finally comes clean about the 'cursed fan'. The dragon amusedly offers to deal with the problem, and destroys the fan. He gives Segmund some jewels in recompense, about half of what he needs to pay off the Thieves Guild, even.

More detailed version, these were:
A spellbook that will be retroactively defined to contain the next few spells (I think it was 100 spell levels worth, don't seem to have a record of that anymore) Aqila chooses to learn - whatever they might be. So easier to get a few spells. Doesn't let you get anything higher level than you are able to learn - and it is a limited number, so burning them all early means not getting free higher level spells.
200 stones, which may be consumed in any number for a +1 bonus on spellcraft checks per one consumed when researching a new spell - and may be spent after rolling, so effectively guaranteed successes as long as you have enough.
Scimitar that conveys any enhancing spells cast on it to the natural weapons of a wildshape form, as well as making those weapons count as one size larger.
And Segmund got kind of screwed in comparison.

The dragon also warns us that he has heard rumors from the capital about assassins, and he suspects they are true. With the Duke being injured to an unknown extent but not dead. Nine days of travel later, we can find out for ourselves. After identifying ourselves to the gate guard, we get escorted to the palace by a squad of guards. The Duke's son meets us, we fill him in on everything that's happened, which gets a 'At least something is going right' reaction. We find out that assassins nearly killed the Duke, and did cripple him, but he's still alive with all his mental faculties.
And with that cliff-hanger out of the way, session ends.

Terane
2020-03-07, 08:46 AM
In August we had a new player join briefly - not local, so using skype to join in sessions. Between technical difficulties and significant playstyle clash he ended up leaving - and at his request at time of departure identifying information for his character has been removed. Name is replaced with GUARD in all occurences.


August Session
We resume finishing our conversation with Prezmyslaw, the Duke's son. Namely, warning him that we've heard from three different seers that a war was coming, of the sort that would prevent trade between east and west Seferia. Which pretty much can only mean civil war. He's unsurprised. Some group has been clouding the 'sight' of the seers his father employs, but clumsily: it's obvious that someone's messing around so they know not to trust what they 'see'. He also mentions that the assassins who attacked his father may have had support from inside the city from the Veiled Order, possibly members of the mage academy. As always, trying to pin down who's in the Order is nigh on impossible. Aqila knows of them, that they're a group trying to recover Ancient technology and knowledge, and willing to do anything to further that goal. So, yeah. Prezmyslaw asks us to go about our usual business, and he'll be in touch if he needs us.
Remembering that we'd dropped a patient off at the Temple of Kantor, we stop by there to see how he's doing. Short answer - his brains got thoroughly scrambled, regressing to infancy in some ways, and his memory is unreliable. He's re-learning how to function, but it'll take time. Dead end on information then. The priest we spoke with also told us that Radomil, having been listening to Emil's stories, has decided he needs a bodyguard when he travels with us, and he'll be back soon. Please, please take him with you! Radomil shows up shortly, and is his usual rude snarky self. He informs us brusquely that his new bodyguard is outside so we step outside to see what we're getting into.
We see massive tower of muscle with a blond mohawk and blue eyes. Yep, looks like a bodyguard. Aqila tells Radomil and his employee that she's planning on visiting the mage academy tomorrow to see if she hears anything at all about the Veiled Order, since they may have been involved with the assassins. Radomil's disbelieving snark is answered by assurances that she's aware that it's a long shot, but they do pan out sometimes. But, not going tonight, it's late, and we all need to sleep. Moonbeam hits a tavern to unwind. Aqila goes across the street to the White Temple to do the same. Listens to Wind heads out of town to find a nice tree. He also lets Little Brother, now a well grown '****, return to the wild side of life. Segmund goes with him so he's not in town where the Thieves Guild enforcer is. We don't know or care what Radomil does.
Next morning, we all meet up temporarily. Aqila is given pearls to use to ID the loot we got last session, and she takes Radomil and GUARD to the mage academy to hang out for the day. She works on ID spells and listening to the rumor mill whilst Radomil makes himself "popular" with the locals. GUARD does his bodyguard thing, and at some point notices guys wearing veils. He calmly suggests to Aqila that we all find a defensible position and call the rest of the gang in so our forces are concentrated. She's not sure what's worrying him, but assumes he knows his job absent proof of incompetence and sends a message to Listens to Wind that we might be attacked at the mage academy soon and would you guys come meet us there?
Joe, Moonbeam, and Segmund had been having a dodgeball scrum in the woods to blow off steam, and start heading for the city and the academy. They are a little ways off, however. Meanwhile, GUARD has convinced Radomil to listen to his body guard and move to a place with one entrance and exit only. On our way there, GUARD hears a sword rasp. He whirls, puts the squishies behind him, and sees a guy. He then howls, startling Aqila into skittering away from him and scaring the guy into running in terror, and pegs him with a rock. Guy goes down. After checking with the rest of us, he grabs the limp unconscious guy and brings him along to the safe room. It's an office, with a partial boarded up secret door. GUARD barricades both doors with bookcases, then we turn our attention to the erstwhile attacker. Aqila gets him conscious, then he sings like a little birdie, helped by GUARD’s inimitable diplomacy skills. Apparently, our party is now on the thieves guild's list for 'helping the dwarf escape guild justice'. Oooookay, then. Since Aqila was the first one they saw, she was the one he was trying to make an example of. Obviously, that was a really good idea. GUARD explains to the scrawny thief that his life belongs to him now, and that he's going to behave. The thief hides in a corner and is on his best behavior. Aqila also whispers Joe again that we had been attacked, that GUARD has seen people wearing veils, so hurry up but be careful. Then she whispers Prezmyslaw to warn him that her group had been attacked at the mage academy and if he needs to talk to us, send a message.
Meanwhile, the other half of the party is making their way through the city and to the academy grounds without incident. After the more urgent warning, they start paying very careful attention as they cross the grounds to where the safe room is. Moonbeam spots a furtive shape behind a statue and makes a light to see who it is. The other guy narrowly misses her with a scorching ray from behind. The guy she saw lights the dwarf up. Battle ensues. Joe and Segmund beat the statue guy unconscious, then start to deal with the other guy as the mage academy guards show up. They order everyone to drop their weapons. The still conscious attacker, one Master Krezimir, claimed that they had attacked him. They protest and don't want to disarm until they're sure he's not going to keep trying to kill them. The guards finally get everyone to go with them so they can sort out what's going on. Joe makes sure the guards understand that their group had been going to help a friend who'd already been attacked. The guards agree to send people to investigate and take everyone to a guard shack that's been temporarily converted to a holding cell.
Meanwhile, Aqila, Radomil and GUARD hear a knock at the door. Aqila loudly asks if it's Joe and Moonbeam, and gets a reply that no, it’s mage academy guards and are we alright? GUARD removes the bookcase and lets them in, whereupon the guards ascertain that we know their current prisoners, that their story matches ours, and would we mind coming with them to help sort things out? They also determine that we had been attacked, but GUARD has claimed the thief and so they don't need to do anything with him. We go with them and the party is reunited.
The guard shack is a little cramped with everyone in there, GUARD included. An academy mage comes and Zone of Truth's everyone in the room. We repeat our stories, thus demonstrating that we are telling the truth. Joe, Moonbeam, and Segmund's story contradicts Master Krezimir's assertions that they attacked him first. When the mage asks him to repeat his story under the ZoT, he splutters and stonewalls. GUARD notices something important, points at Krezimir and says loudly 'Snakes under skin'. Whereupon we all notice the peculiar phenomenon of his skin writhing like it has a life of its own. The mage yells 'Everyone out now!' and promptly takes his own advice. There's only one door. Two guards, GUARD, Moonbeam, Joe, and Aqila can't get out in time. GUARD tries stabbing Krezimir to stop the magic, then shields Moonbeam and Joe with his body. Then Krezimir explodes. Gooey slimey stuff goes everywhere. Aqila is badly hurt but not dead, Joe and Moonbeam are unharmed, the guards both die, and GUARD is just covered in sludge. We emerge into the night and everyone gets healed up.
The academy mage is fairly sure that the Krezimir must have been a priest of Asurak, since that trick is a known ability his priests have that discourages anyone from killing or interrogating them - and as far as he knows nobody else uses it. And since that's the Blood God of disease and destruction, we probably all have cooties. A runner is sent to the Kantoran Temple while we use our bucket and create water to start cleaning mage sludge off. We also determine that the mage who was knocked out was taken to the infirmary. The academy guards go to fetch him with some alacrity. Within fifteen minutes, a priest from the temple shows up to find out how bad the situation is. Ironically, after checking the room and us, he finds no contagion at all, indicating that the exploded fellow wasn't a priest of Asurak after all. Which just raises more questions. Which we aren't in a mood to get answered tonight. The inn and hot baths are priority.
After cleaning up, Moonbeam and Joe buy GUARD a pony keg of mead in thanks for him protecting them from the explosion. GUARD and Ape become drinking buddies. The rest of the inn's customers get used to the sight of the two of them drinking and singing in the corner. Radomil makes snarky comments about the quality of the accommodations. Segmund tries to stay out of sight. Aqila finds her room and starts writing up a report on everything that's gone on since the last time she wrote one. We get a good quiet night's sleep.
Next morning, a messenger from the Duke is waiting for us. He tells us that the Duke wants to speak to us, but he won't be able to until after morning court, so would we all mind waiting in his office for him? Sounds like a plan. We go to the stronghold and hang out in the office for a bit, except GUARD, who hangs out in the hall outside the audience chamber. Aqila finishes writing up her notes through the previous night's excitement. And then we hear shouting. Aqila opens the door between the office and the audience chamber whereupon we see Prezmyslaw, with two of his guards standing in front of him. Facing him is a man in gold armor with a dozen of his own guards filling the chamber to near capacity. Gold Armor accuses Prezmyslaw of treason to the crown. Given that her orders are to keep the duke alive if she can, and see his son take his place if she can't, Aqila darts to the other side of Prezmyslaw so she can protect him if possible. The Duke's son replies to Gold Armor that if anyone is committing treason, it's King Mykyta, or you, Lord Bohdan, especially if the papers are forged.
Bohdan commands his guards to arrest everyone. Aqila asks Prezmyslaw if he needs any of them alive. He says to spare them if we can. Then the screaming starts. In rapid succession, Aqila whispers GUARD that he needs to help protect the Duke, which just confuses him, most of the enemy soldiers start piling towards the front of the audience chamber to get at us, GUARD comes under attack by three soldiers who didn't fit into the chamber, Aqila fireballs the room and hits all but two of the soldiers without toasting any good guys, Segmund tries to be helpful by stabbing soldiers and gets stabbed by Bohdan for his pains, GUARD howls to open up some breathing room, and chaos ensues.
In no particular order, Moonbeam spends most of the battle further charring the walls, a panicked Ape does a loony-tunes smashing through the wall between the audience chamber and the office, followed by both of the Duke's panicking guards, Radomil never left the office and hides back there the whole fight, Prezmyslaw doesn't like the idea, but understands that getting out of the way is the best help he can be, and goes into the office too, and the dwarf spends most of the fight under a pile of panicked soldiers hallucinating. Aqila methodically picks off soldiers with less flashy spells. GUARD deals with his three then charges into the room behind the enemy soldiers and starts messing them up royally, taking out Bohdan with his claymore. Ape, when he finally stops panicking, re-enters the chamber for some ape-smash. We winnow the horde down to two badly injured foes. Aqila ties one up. GUARD knocks the other guy out.

The sheer number of bad rolls on all sides in this fight was ridiculous. I don't think a single character on either side actually succeeded on a saving throw for the entire fight.

Prezmyslaw comes out with his now unpanicked guards to thank us for saving his life. Then a corpse hits the floor. It's a young woman in a black cloak and body suit, which just screams assassin. Unbeknownst to the rest of us, GUARD had noticed a fight going on in the screened balcony above the chamber, which had now been resolved. A male voice from the balcony requests that we not skewer him, and he'll clamber down and introduce himself. He also suggests that we search the body since she is most likely carrying a poison and anti-toxin similar to what's affecting our dwarf. Ape searches the corpse and finds two vials and a blow-dart gun. A youngish fellow hops over the railing and lands gracefully on the floor, holding up one hand. We can see he's wearing a thin silver ring. Aqila recognizes what he is and when he says he needs to talk to her, she asks Prezmyslaw if she can borrow his office for a quick privy chat. He doesn't mind, so they go back and pass information quickly.
Aqila wasn't expecting someone else to show up so quickly, given how stretched Valrim had said things were. He tells her that priorities have been rearranged, and that now her only priority is to find the cache the coded paper points to and get its contents back to Arandor with all haste, these orders coming from the top. Aka Valrim's parents. She checks that he's heard about the earlier events in East Seferia, and gives him her current report for perusal. He's taking over the job of protecting the Duke. Given who her new orders came from, only her deity manifesting to tell her personally to do something would have higher priority.
Aqila comes back out, tells Prezmyslaw that her colleague is taking over protecting him; she's got to get out of town now, and tells the rest of the party that they've got one hour to get ready to travel, and we'll probably be on the road for months. She'll fill the rest of them in outside of town. She asks Radomil if he's still sure he wants to travel with her. He mockingly replies that he wouldn't want to miss further opportunities to chronicle her ineptitude. Lovely. Everyone buys what they need and set off. Once on the road and well away from any overhearing ears, Aqila fills everyone else in on what the new job is. A short debate over whether to take the desert or the coast road ensues, but it's two weeks shorter by the desert road, even if there are fewer towns. A point that Aqila didn't make was the fact that we'd just seen a civil war kick off, so how long are the roads going to stay open? Hence the tearing rush to get moving. GUARD still has a pet thief at this point, and we'll see how long that lasts.
We know it'll take about two and a half months to get to West Seferia, and the only landmark we've ID'd definitively is a bit further on yet. There are three we need to find, and the cache is where they intersect. Four days down the road, towards evening, we reach a campsite that's already occupied. A familiar horse is hanging out there, and we see as we get closer that a certain paladin is by the stream, fishing. He's got a nice pile of fish already, and comments as we ride up 'Ah, there you are, right on time'. Well, he did tell us that he'll be joining us when we came west.
Break here due to tired. Awake brains will probably have questions for Tervel when we resume.



August Session 2
We resume where we left off, meeting Tervel, who was waiting for us with fish. GUARD decided he needed a bath, and made the dwarf clean up too. Since Joseph Listens-to-Wind, Moonbeam and Aqila had been expecting Tervel to show up, they didn't have many questions for him. Segmund was nervous about the whole 'he's a Paladin' thing. Radomil, Inquisitor of Reshana, thinks all paladins are delusional and avoids him as much as possible. GUARD, as usual, keeps his thoughts opaque. Since we're all there now, Aqila and company run through the great long list of everyone who is trying to kill us for GUARD and Tervel's benefit. At the moment, we've got Grozdan, Nayden, and anyone working for their faction, the Dragon Temple since we did kill one of their priestesses, King Mykyta because he's heard we killed a Dragon Temple priestess and he wants to ally with them, the Countess from Stone Bridge, the Lazeerim in general and their chief Nurzhan in particular due to the book incident, and the remote but possible addition of that cleric we met on the desert road who probably was the reason half the party caught the plague the day after. Oh, and maybe the Veiled Order. Moonbeam notes that, while we have a lot of people after us, an invisible voice asking about kidneys probably is friendly. For certain values of friendly.
Aqila filled the paladin in on recent happenings in the capital, being the assassination of the old Duke, his son taking over and Lord Bohdan trying to arrest Prezmyslaw with an order purportedly from King Mykyta. Tervel is a bit more informed on Ferial law, and notes that technically the King doesn't have the authority to arrest one of the great dukes unless his peers agree it's necessary. Great dukes are descended from independent heads of state that joined the Ferial empire back in the day and still have special privileges because of that. It is also highly unlikely that the other two would want to weaken their positions by permitting the King to arrest Dobroslaw - that would leave either of them at risk of being next after all.
Now that everyone who's likely to show up has, we try to work out a work schedule, but initially fail to realize that we are functionally two separate parties travelling together not one group. GUARD, Radomil and GUARD's pet thief Maksym do their own thing and the rest of us stand solo watches, except that we are starting to make Segmund help out. Given how the previous trip out this way went, he's helping Moonbeam with the dawn watch. A quiet night passes, no attacks. We're still in the Duke's lands and will be for one more day, until we pass South Waymeet. The original party has been through there before when we were being escorted to the Duke's capital the first time.
The next day passes uneventfully until we get to South Waymeet. Aqila, because she trusts Tervel, gives him the entire 'what's been going on' story on the off chance anything clues him in on why he's travelling with the party, starting from how she got to the Ferial and only excepting anything about Valrim, since Sneezil's already been mentioned and he already knows about Zalakirinal. The conversation is held in Ancient partly so GUARD and co. don't overhear things she doesn't trust them to know about and partly for the relief of being able to use her birth tongue for once. She then picks his brains about ideas for getting out of Seferia into Teredor safely, because finding the cache is only step one - getting it to Arandor is equally as important. He can't recommend the party using the route he used to cross into Seferia, and doesn’t want to say more about it than that, but we will have a few options. Depending on where the cache is exactly and how hairy things are. One way is to get to the coast and take ship from Seferia straight to Teredor’s duchy of Leferia, and from there across the Sea of Storms into Teredor proper. Of course, since the duchy used to be part of the Ferial, there may be more than a few people working for Mykyta there. Benefits - we skip Asferia completely. Given there have been rumors about their king Innokenti making a law that made all corpses property of the state, suggesting some sort of necromantic plans, that may not be a bad thing. Downsides - we'd have to get to the coast and pass fairly near Mykyta's capital and through lands that are very loyal to him. The other option is to retreat to the desert, avoid the southwestern tribe that's turning from nature spirit reverencing to the worship of Makarn, one of the Blood Gods, and get north to where the Vanithim are. They worship the One, and are likely to help us get to the very thinly settled middle area of Asferia whereupon we can just walk to Leferia, and take ship from there. Or we could try to get through the fortified isthmus – probably not the best idea.
We catch sight of South Waymeet in late afternoon. A brief discussion concludes that trying to go around would look suspicious, and since the coast road and desert road both meet at South Waymeet, the fastest route is still crossing the city to get to the Desert Road. Theoretically. In practice, we get stopped by the gate guard who asks us our business, then asks us if we'd seen any soldiers wearing a specific insignia, which we had last seen on the soldiers with Lord Bohdan trying to arrest Presmyslaw. Answering truthfully resulted in a 'request' that we talk to the mayor. Radomil angrily states that he's going to an inn, then at being told that we're not intending to overnight in the city, snarls that he will at least have a good meal and stalks off with GUARD and Maksym. So the rest of us talk to the mayor. He wants to know what's been going on at the capital and about those soldiers, since no one in South Waymeet remembered them until a few days after they passed through the town. That's odd. Aqila tries to pull a wide-eyed chatterbox routine without lying outright and trips herself up. The mayor demands to know how he can be sure we aren't spies for Mykyta heading back to our boss, since we are intending to go west. Tervel intervenes minimally, pointing out that we might feel more free to speak if the mayor uses a crystal he has in his desk. The crystal blocks scrying in the room, at which points it's more or less safe to clue the mayor in that she's one of the good guys and we're free to go.
On our way out the door, the mayor hands Joe a note. He reads it as we're leaving, then makes a point to show it to everyone there but Segmund, and for good reason. It reads "If you join our side, my master will be generous - Nayden" Yes, we aren't giving the dwarf any compelling reasons to turn coat, given that we're heading back to the west where he got in trouble in the first place. Aqila does not want this to mean that we need to kill the mayor before leaving town, and Tervel's assessment is that the mayor had no idea that he had a note to hand off - people working for Grozdan's boss would have a noticeable feel that the mayor lacked. At most, he might be an unwitting pawn. The fact that we are definitely being watched is plenty of reason to get out of town fast. Of course, in spite of Aqila sending Radomil and GUARD a message to meet us at the west gate in an hour, they are fashionably late. Joe scouts by air, determines that they are actually coming, and word is passed to catch up. We decamp.
The entire group reunites without incident and the night passes quietly except for a young black bear wandering over. Joe starts working on befriending it, and it tags along with us the next day. Nothing sighted except a camel until we get to Rocky Ford. This was the small town with the large temple that the goblins mostly destroyed. Rebuilding is underway, though getting the fields cared for is given priority over shelter for the winter, given it's late spring/early summer. The priest there remembers some of us. Radomil stands aloof haughtily in the background, since this is a small village's priest. Aqila gives the priest the basic information that Dobroslaw was assassinated, Prezmyslaw is holding the Dukedom, and we have it on good authority that civil war is coming very soon, so watch out for trouble. He had initially asked if we'd spend the night there, but given the news we had, he suggests we might want to keep moving instead. We do.
An uneventful night passes. We are outside the borders of the Duke's lands now, so Aqila's orders to treat the territory as hostile are in effect. We are close enough to the desert to find a small sand dragon near noon. A somewhat messy fight ensues. Radomil coup de graces the dragon when it's almost dead and pinned under GUARD's foot. Joe collects the hide and teeth as usual. Moonbeam patches the wounded, or tries to. She fails to heal GUARD, who passes the failure off as 'bad magic'. Joe stitches him up instead. Quiet rest of the day. Camp. During Aqila's watch she sees a spectral figure appear out of nowhere, prompting her to quietly peg her group with pebbles to wake them up. An investigation with detect magic yields a strong feel of divination. So, we're being watched. Nayden is a good bet. The obviousness is a message in and of itself. We have no reason not to think he has subtler spells.
The next morning, as we're breaking camp "Sneezil find Sneezil friends!" Coincidence? Yeah, right. Tervel starts to draw his sword since an imp has appeared in our midst, then pauses. As he's exclaiming, "Wait, I'm not supposed to kill the imp?" Sneezil starts shrieking, loses his invisibility and curls up in a little ball on the ground terrified. Those of us who have met Sneezil before watch bemusedly as Radomil starts yelling 'What are you waiting for, kill it!" The imp is a scaly humanoid with a tail, about 3 feet tall, though he looks smaller all curled up shivering. He starts babbling about a big big big big big big big voice going away now, which Moonbeam deduces was whatever was talking to Tervel. As he calms down, we ask him why he came looking for us now, and we find out that he has a new master who wants Sneezil to play a game with his friends. A fun game, he assures us, lots of fire! Aqila parses that statement through imp and starts putting up resist energy fire on herself and anyone in touch range while Joe does likewise. GUARD moves to where he can protect Radomil and Maksym bodily. We also learn that Sneezil's new master is a very good master, always watching Sneezil. We take that warning to heart. He also asks if 'Sneezil friends play games with Master?'. Parsing that through imp logic, that would seem to be him asking us if we'd kill his master. And if that master is indeed Nayden, I don't think we'd object to that course of action. The 'game' turns out to be a fireball gem not unlike what the Young One had, just more powerful. Resist Energy is a lovely spell. GUARD bodily protects his wards and is unharmed by the blast. Sneezil poofs out after being told that that wasn't a nice game.
We discuss Sneezil for a bit before hitting the road for the day. Tervel is puzzled, Radomil is apoplectic, and GUARD is ambivalent. Since GUARD has stone-carving as a hobby, it's suggested that he make a little Sneezil statue that we might be able to use as a distraction next time he shows up. GUARD is reluctant, but agrees. Quiet day and night. Next day, we trip over a Kethorim on the road, almost dead. Not one of the ones who we met in the camp, but the tribe is much larger than that one camp. Patched up, we get some information out of him. Our dear good friend Nurzhan has gone nuts and is lashing out wildly at everyone. Dragons flocks attacking everyone. We admit to probably being at least part of the reason for why he's pissed at the world and note that the Elder Seer probably would be more help, but getting out of range of Nurzhan's temper tantrum would be a really good idea. Of course, we're still planning on heading deeper into the desert where we're liable to be on the receiving end ourselves in a week or so. Good times. Joe gives the guy a waterskin to make sure he can get back to the rest of his group and he gives us some directions to oases that we may need to find, depending on obstacles on the road. Nothing else happens for the rest of the day or night.
Next day, towards evening, the road is blocked. Completely. Palisade and all. We stop about 400 feet out, out of easy bowshot but already close enough to have been seen. We can see an archer's platform and with Segmund's spyglass, see a device on flags on the fortress, which appears to mark this as a known mercenary band with a dubious reputation. Problem: this isn't the Duke's land anymore, but it's not really anyone else's. The area was under direct control of the imperial crown when the Ferial Empire was whole, but now that it's split, ownership of this patch is a bit iffy. So, who would have the authority to hire mercs to block the road? We already know of people who want to cause trouble in the area. Blocking travelers from going east to west or vice versa would support that goal. GUARD just wants to go up and find out what's going on. Aqila is on the fence about whether they can go around once dark falls, or if fireballing the wooden fort at range would be safer for the party.
GUARD decides to cut the Gordian knot while the rest of us are debating by sending Maksym in to investigate. When he's a hundred feet out, a voice bellows from the fort through a speaking horn to come no closer and disarm. This sounds somewhat ominous to Aqila, who makes preparation to level the place with fire if the situation calls for it. We try to find out who they are working for, a question which they refuse to answer. Tervel sees if they'll fess up to who's authority they are claiming to be under for blocking the road. No dice there. They claim they were hired to deal with bandits in the area. Most of the party had just been through here a month ago and nary a bandit was to be seen. Fishy? Yes.
GUARD decides that we're a bunch of wusses and tries to negotiate passage down the road with gold, drawing his wages to date from Radomil for use in the negotiating. The fort's counteroffer is for one of us to come in alone to negotiate, which GUARD does. We don't know exactly what went on, but deducing from information gained well after the fact, GUARD talks to the commander of the fort and is told that the messenger the Duke sent West with a message for King Mykyta tried to get by the fort, and attacked the mercs when they tried to question him. Which is why he's in very bad shape and full of arrows. The mercs are not happy about having a wounded messenger of the Duke's on their account this close to his capital and are hoping people in our group can fix him up and maybe do something about the message. GUARD returns to the group, doesn't tell anyone what he'd learned but asks Moonbeam to trust him and takes her to the fort, whereupon she finds out at least some of the story and does what she can to patch him up.
Eventually, Tervel and Listens-to-wind both end up in the fort too. The rest of the party remains ignorant of all goings on still. The party members in the fort debate what to do about the letter. The mercs would like us to either deliver it to Mykyta or let the Duke know it didn't get through, but they really don't want to get involved. Joe thinks it would be amusing to air-mail the letter through the King's bedroom window wrapped around a brick while he's wildshaped but that's not really practical. GUARD thinks it would be best to simply not mention the letter to Aqila at all and have one of the mercs take it back to the capital as evidence that it didn't get through, because the longer it is before the letter gets to where it's going, the later the roads will likely be shut down due to the impending civil war. Not taken into account is what would happen if the letter never gets through. Moonbeam and Joe point out that they've known Aqila longer and not telling her about something that important would be a bad idea, besides the fact that she can probably include a note proving that the message is legit. The message reads, more or less, that Duke Prezmyslaw inquires of King Mykyta if Mykyta means to break the agreement that existed between him and his father, because if that is indeed the case, Prezmyslaw intends to press his claim to the Imperial Throne of the Ferial immediately upon confirmation of that fact.
Eventually, the rest of the party hears about what went on. GUARD derides the mage as being weak and panicky for no good reason. However, the mercs do eventually admit that they don't know who their employer is, so we still have no proof that their enterprise here is sanctioned by any lawful authority. The mercs won't interfere with us moving on, and Aqila writes a note to the Duke briefly explaining what the mercs said happened about the messenger and that the message still needs delivered. She adds a footnote in Ancient to prove that it is really her, if her colleague doesn't recognize her handwriting. In that, she warns the Duke that a mercenary force who doesn't know who their employer really is is set up less than a week and a half from his capital and are stopping all travelers on the Desert Road. A member of the merc company will deliver the missive.
Session ends here.




GUARD's player was late this session - this was also his last session, a chunk of this session ended up being retconned at the next one - retconned portion summarized in a spoiler at the end.

We pick up a few hours short of sunset outside the mercenaries fort. We decide to push on and make camp further down the road. Tervel tells Aqila, Moonbeam, Listens-to-wind and Segmund that he's detected signs that Shenea, Blood Goddess of Undeath, is trying to influence Radomil, but can't determine if he's listening or not. The mere attempt leaves a noticeable mark, though. The now familiar spectral figure shows up around midnight.
As we're breaking camp, two lizardy things attack from above. Their mode of attack is to dive and scream, targeting Tervel and Joe first. Aqila manages to fireball both of them without any friendly fire, knocking one to the ground where it's quickly dispatched. Joe grounds the other one with a well placed lightning bolt, almost landing it on Tervel, who finishes it off. The corpses start dissolving almost immediately, being a major clue for Joe and Tervel to determine that the things weren't natural, or infernal. Radomil is offended that his opinion is being asked on whether they were undead constructs and snarls that undead take the form of the dead flesh they were made from. Aqila remembers vaguely from one of her classes that a highly skilled necromancer could shape undead into the forms they wanted. Upon pressing Radomil further, he admits that it is theoretically possible but would require 'the skills of the ancients'. Oh, goody. Working theory is that Nayden the Necromancer, our dear good friend, is likely the source of the monsters, but why reveal that level of capability?
Given the morning's fun plus what the mercs said about bandits, Joe is asked to scout ahead from the air to see what potential problems are avoidable, high enough to not be vulnerable to a Nurzhan temper-tantrum sand dragon attack. Before we get very far down the road, Joe's spotted the ruined fort about where we'll be stopping for the night, and a dozen scattered figures watching along the road. Given that news, we take to the low rolling hills south of the road to avoid notice, bandit ambushes, or who knows what. Quiet day's travel, and Joe amuses himself by catching dinner. The usual spectre shows up over night.
The next morning, again as we're breaking camp, a nearly skeletal crazed man wearing a big medallion and a shard of the Mad God implanted in his forehead lurches into our camp, exclaims 'He sent you. Die!' and tries to kill Moonbeam with worrisome efficiency. She's not unconscious but it was a near thing. Tervel patches her up before charging the madman. Radomil, on being asked if he can do something about the shard, tells us that we need to get it off the madman first. Aqila drops a fireball on his head, but it's not as effective as usual. He's got protection of some sort, and even starts healing. Moonbeam sics a croc on him to pin him down and interfere with his spellcasting. Joe tries a splinterbolt to no effect. Segmund's crossbow does nothing. Aqila fires a scorching ray at him, and makes him yell. Then either the crazy guy or the shard starts doing...something. We hear a deep voice speaking gibberish, but most of us are smart enough to try to ignore it, Segmund being the unsurprising exception. Radomil and Maksym hang back while GUARD charges in to help Tervel. Segmund starts working his way behind the mage to stabby him. Moonbeam adds another croc to the fray. The first croc's mouth is turning black where it's gripping the madman. Tervel smites him smitingly with a glowing sword, which makes him really yell. Segmund gets into position, then Aqila tries scorching ray again, mightily burning him. He drops dead, but the fun's not over yet.
As the body drops, both it and the shard dissolve in a mind-hurtingly wrong fashion into a glowing blue formless spectre. The event kills the wounded croc, and harms the second croc, Segmund and Tervel. Moonbeam casts snake's speed on the group around the blue spectre, letting everyone there get further hits in. Joe's lightning storm hits. Aqila tries magic missile. GUARD enters the melee, but fails to do any damage. The glow starts shredding around the edges. The deep voice had been continuing to chant gibberish the entire time, and it begins to take a toll. Segmund goes insane. Moonbeam starts hearing voices muttering in her head and strives to ignore them, then casts mass snake's speed again. GUARD is unaffected, Segmund thinks the spectre is his friend and attacks the croc. Tervel misses his hit. Joe brings the lightning again. Radomil, having been asked to try to help, finally saunters over to where Joe is and casts some spell on him. We don't know what but assume it's supposed to be helping. Tervel gets swatted and retaliates, missing both times. Moonbeam summons four bison as a sort of mobile padded room to contain the crazy dwarf. Joe goes Ape. Aqila fires her last magic missile off, which is the last straw for the shredding spectre. It shrieks and dissolves. The sound finishes off Segmund’s brain, leaving him a drooling idiot. The very skeletal corpse reappears with the shard on its desiccated forehead.
Radomil saunters over and picks the shard of the Mad God up, and settles down to stare at it. Emil was afraid to even touch one. This is a bit worrisome, especially when he's specifically asked if this is a good idea, given that fact. He sneers that he's not as weak as Emil, and resumes staring. Since Joe is Ape, and the rudimentary sign language is still rudimentary, Aqila dares to try detect magic on the site of the fight. The corpse definitely has magic on it, residue of conjuration and abjuration magic, but the amulet is the interesting bit. Upon patient observation, it randomly changes what school of magic it is emitting, changing between every school out there and infrequently no magic at all. Having gleaned everything she can from that, Aqila glances at Radomil and the shard. She manages to note that the shard is radiating very strong universal magic before getting smashed into unconsciousness, a quiet thread of insane muttering taking up residence in her skull at the same time. Owwie. Moonbeam moves Aqila to the tent she hadn't taken down yet until she recovers. Moonbeam tries to study a new spell to help block out the mutters in her head. Five and a half hours later, Radomil abruptly tosses the shard into the air. It dissolves. Aqila wakes up half an hour later.
Breaking down camp is barely underway when a happy voice declares that 'Sneezil is smart!' On being asked what that statement meant by Joe, Sneezil happily explains that he knows we don't like fire after the last 'game' and how cold is the opposite of hot, so maybe we'll like this game better. Resist energy cold all around, and Sneezil even waits a minute for us to get ready. Moonbeam casts faerie fire on him so we can see where he's flying around, and Sneezil doesn't mind. The icy explosion inflicts minimal harm. We find out that Sneezil doesn't have to go back to Master right away, so we can chat for a bit. This does make Radomil blow a blood vessel, but the rest of us don't care. We see if Sneezil will accept Tervel as a friend too, but he's a little nervous about the idea, since Tervel talks to a big big big big... big voice that scares him. Sneezil then asks who the short tall skinny man is. We eventually figure out this means Radomil. Sneezil things he's funny because he talks to three big ones. This really makes Radomil blow his top. It's also a more than a little worrisome - Reshana is the deity Radomil serves, and Tervel warned us that Shenea was trying to mess with him, but who's number 3? Unless Sneezil was specifically told to say that, and it seems unlikely that he's got enough acting skills to pull that off. Aqila remembers that the gut piles from last night's dinner are probably fresh enough by imp standards, and the kidneys are still there. Joe points out the garbage pit, and Sneezil enjoys a snack.

Sneezil's scenes were always a lot of fun for me. And given how the players reacted to him, I think they enjoyed the character too.

Sneezil then says he has to go back to Master, but Tervel pauses his leavetaking, telling him that his master can't see him for this short time, and asks him 'Do you want to serve your master?' Sneezil thinks a moment and asserts that he likes being free. Tervel then tells him that in the future, he will have a choice and if he chooses wisely, he'll be free.' Sneezil is confused and says so, then poofs out.

NOTE: GUARD's player shows up at this point, so events past here may be retconned, redone, or otherwise altered next session.
We want to use the other half of the day to keep moving, but there's still the medallion to deal with. Tervel's assessment is that it's radiating evil so strongly that while he'd be protected against it, he wouldn't want to carry it around. Leaving it also seems inadvisable. Due to the chaotic nature of the magics it's showing, putting it in the bag of holding also seems inadvisable. There's also the fun thought that the medallion could be a trap much like the madman was. As GUARD is the strongest member of the party, Aqila asks him to see if he can smash it. That and if it discharges magic on destruction, he's the best equipped to not be harmed by such an event. He instead pockets it, claims there's no reason to try to destroy it, and starts walking off with his group when she objects. This can't end badly at all, no nope, evil artifact in the possession of the employee of someone talking to three different 'big ones'.

This was somewhat more contentious than the summary suggests.

We get half a day's travel in, quiet night, day's travel with Joe scouting, and night. Sneezil pops in that morning as we're breaking camp. He tells us that his Master wanted to see what lightning does, but he's not allowed to stay this time. We had started lightning prot, but Sneezil tosses a green gem and poofs away. It spews a cloud of acid when hits the ground, but we can easily get out of the area of effect. GUARD threatens to kill Sneezil the next time he can, irregardless of other people's objections. Sigh. We make ready to travel. Joe gets airborne to see what's on the road today. A party of seven armed men is riding towards us at a good clip. We'd probably meet around noon if we stayed on the road. Some of them are Kazil. Aqila advocates taking to the hills as we've done before to avoid notice, and to not get slowed down by stupid things if they're hostile.
GUARD and company at this point absolutely refuse to leave the road, don't give much of a reason for why and won't budge. At which point the rest of us go off-road anyway. We aren't spotted and have a quiet ride that day, coming parallel with another ruined fort. Joe observes the action of the other groups from the sky, sees the seven riders meet GUARD, Radomil, and Maksym around noon. They pause, appearing to talk for a bit, then the seven ride on. GUARD and co set up camp right there. At this point, serious thought is given to the situation. Aqila assesses that the damage that would be done to Sentinel relations with the Kantoran temples by her breaking promise to let Radomil travel with her is being outweighed by the threat he and GUARD are representing to her ability to complete her priority mission, which is in the 'do this successfully or really bad things happen' category. There is either agreement or no argument from everyone else about making the split permanent.
Session ends here due to tired and stuff.

Terane
2020-03-09, 06:24 PM
Through the magic of retconjuration, we are transported back in time to the amulet discussion, after Aqila regained consciousness and after Sneezil popped in for a visit.
The parameters of the great amulet debate: Tervel doesn't think it's safe to touch the thing, based on how nasty an evil aura it has. We can't just leave it lying out in the middle of nowhere for someone to pick up. But, we don't know if we even can destroy it.
Listens to Wind wants to take it with us, somehow. Maybe tying it to a pole so no one has to touch it. Aqila wants to destroy it, if we can. Some experimentation may be required. Moonbeam comes in on Aqila's side for making the attempt. Radomil gets tired of listening to the wrangle and states that he'll take it. No, just no. Aqila uses mage hand to move it to a bare patch of ground, shoos everyone else off to a safe distance, and finds a convenient hill to hide behind the crest of at max fireballing range. Fire one - detect magic reveals that instead of evenly radiating a random school of magic, the amulet is now more strongly radiating Evocation, Transmutation, and Conjuration. And it's glowing. Fire two - an even stronger glow. Fire 3 - now things get weird. A wavering door appears in the air, and a heavily armored yet familiar figure appears to step through. It's our dear good friend Grozdan. He observes that no one had mentioned the amulet to him, says that he's taking it, and since Aqila was so useful in finding it for him, he won't kill her just yet. Aqila, meanwhile, is frantically casting expeditious retreat and getting to max fireball range, whereupon fireball number 4 is bestowed on the amulet and Grozdan. Looking back, she can see that he's disappeared, and the brightly glowing amulet is still there. Time for a second opinion.
Tervel, Moonbeam, and Listens to wind come to inspect the damage. In a small glassy circle, the amulet is still glowing brightly. It is radiating evocation magic most strongly, followed by illusion of all things. The evil aura is even worse now, per the paladin's sense. Joe notices that there are no footprints on the ground. Was Grozdan just an illusion? In any case, the behavior of the amulet has given Tervel a clue to its nature, and the perils of trying to destroy it are currently worse than taking it with us, though he is unwilling to state out loud what he thinks it is. Aqila has a sheet of canvas in her stash of stuff, so the amulet is entombed in cloth, tied up with a rope and stowed on the pack horse, after she sacrifices a piece of chalk to write an Explosive Rune on its face as insurance against tampering.
It being mid-afternoon, we make some miles before making camp. Quiet night, usual spectre, and no surprises in the morning. Joe sees a small party heading our way down the road on his usual morning scout - large guy in plate mail with a great sword and six Kazil. Given that the amulet is still undestroyed, we decide going around is better than an unnecessary fight. Back to the hills. Mid-day, the other group reaches our campsite and Joe sees them set up camp there, while two of the Kazil are sent back down the road towards our direction of travel. Cold camp that night, though it is again a quiet night and no visitors in the morning. The morning's scout shows a clear road, though Joe spots a largish piece of canvas stretched between where we are and our last campsite off the road. Odd, but in the interest of avoiding traps, uninvestigated.
Mid-day, we reach the ruined fort that's next in the line, and we are greeted by a cheerfully happy Sneezil. He lets us know that Master has a new game for us. We leave Segmund and the clerical party with the horses. Joe is still being eyes in the sky so it's just Aqila, Moonbeam, and Tervel on the ground. Sneezil elaborates that the game is to meet the new friend Master made for us, a scary one. It even scares Sneezil, he says. After finding out that he plans on sticking around so he can watch what happens and report back to Master, Aqila asks him to fly up high to watch so he doesn't get hurt. He drops something and a rotten lizardy thing appears beneath him as he heads upwards. Aqila greets the 'new friend' with a fireball. It's lightly scorched. Joe is diving to come help, but he was starting from a fair height. The lizard starts lumbering towards Tervel, who protects himself. Moonbeam smacks it with produce flame, then Aqila scorching rays, putting a hole in its hide. It begins leaking green goo. This is disconcerting. Moonbeam puts another hole in it, then Tervel unleashes the power of Smite, and gets a green goo shower. Joe finally gets down to ground level and finishes it off, then sluices the paladin off with create water and uses purify drink to neutralize anything nasty that might be lurking in the goo. Crisis averted. Sneezil flits down and asks about the 'big shiny talking to the big........big one'. We figure out he's talking about Tervel using smite when it comes out that Sneezil is confused about how Tervel used power from his god since 'big ones only take power not give'. Sneezil departs, still confused.
Quiet rest of the day and night. An inspection of the amulet's package with detect magic reveals that the power is fading a bit. Whilst breaking camp, Aqila overhears Radomil muttering in an unknown tongue. Comprehend Languages doesn't clarify the meaning of the language, but makes it more obvious that it sounds wrong in the same way someone babbling under the Mad God's influence does. Radomil's bodyguard and Maksym are in the area too. Aqila quietly goes and finds Tervel to warn him about what she'd just observed. He replies that the corruption he'd noticed in Radomil is getting worse. Shenea, or did destroying the shard of the Mad God the way he did affect him badly? Can't tell. Moonbeam and Joe are filled in, and given how Radomil feels about paladins in general and about Aqila in particular, we let Joe confront him. Radomil is offended that we dare accuse him of having issues, and is sincerely pissed at the suggestion that he return to the Duke's Capital for healing. We don't have a good way to make him go, and his bodyguard declines to say anything one way or the other.
Joe goes up for the morning's scouting, which reveals two things of note: the next ruined fort about two and a half days ahead, and about a hundred emaciated people scattered along the road in clumps, which is rather worrisome. We reach the first clump of six about an hour later. They're a mix of garbs, merchant, nomad, tattered rags, and then the one nearest us moans 'you will not keep us from the Master'. Craaaaap. They aren't exactly a threat, so disabling rather than killing is called for. Joe effectively and quickly knocks three of them out with deft use of his dire eagle form. If we need to deal with new groups, having Joe fly the Eagle Naptime Express ought to be useful. Aqila finally finds a use for Daze. She sees an enchantment type spell on them and yells that important fact with a request for Radomil to dispel it. Tervel uses bless. Radomil's bodyguard moves between him and the horde shambling his way and punches the nearest unconscious. Maksym falls off his pony, scrambles up, and in a panic, disembowels the last one. Moonbeam patches him up. The guy begins moaning 'Maaaaaster' when he regains consciousness, so Joe knocks him back out with a carefully aimed blow.
We had all noticed the living zombies had been shambling towards Radomil's general direction. And then he starts audibly speaking in the unintelligibly babble Aqila had heard earlier, in front of everyone. Joe uses created water to simulate sobering bucket of water splash, which snaps him out of it. Radomil is now pissed. We explain that he'd begun babbling audibly, we all heard it, and his bodyguard can back us up. The barbarian finally admits that 'boss was babbling, again'. Cue the 'you are all against me' rant, followed by a nice sinister 'fortunately, I have the means at hand to deal with you,' and thanks Aqila for the fireballs. And then he calls a fireball on us from the amulet.
The toll from that is very owwie. Joe's horse and Maksym's pony die outright. The rest of our valiant steeds are near death. We're all hurt. All the zombies we so carefully knocked out are dead. Radomil fried himself as well, and then he makes a fatal error. He calls the amulet to himself out of its charred wrappings. It flies to his hand and then he sees the explosive rune. Boom. Joe does the 'death from above' shtick in spite of seeing the purple glow around Radomil when he touched the amulet, like what was protecting the original crazy guy. He knocks Radomil off his injured horse and tears his throat open with his beak, then Radomil breaks his neck hitting the ground. He has the amulet in a literal death grip now. And to make our day complete, the amulet opens up, revealing another Mad God shard. Aqila uses mage hand to move it out physically away from us so we can clean up the mess.
First, the aftermath. Searching Radomil's possessions turns up 9 potions of 4 types: 4 bio magic, 1 stronger bio magic, 2 enchantment, and 2 transmutation. Also a bar of soap, 200 gold over what his bodyguard is owed for services rendered, pen, paper, and ink, a few days rations, his signet ring and sealing wax, a spell component pouch, a light mace with a minor evocation aura on it, his vestments and a robe with a minor abjuration aura on it. We bury his corpse in his vestments, and the rest of the stuff is stowed in the bag of holding. The dead horses are butchered for meat, the living are healed. Radomil's mule is given to Maksym to replace his pony, and the barbarian and the thief ride off into the sunrise. Joe is going to need to ride Moonbeam's packhorse when he's not wildshaped, which will require some creative stowing of goods. We've done this before, though.
The matter of the amulet still needs resolved. We cannot leave it, and taking it with us is a bad idea. There's no way to block its emanations - that's what screwed Radomil up so badly. And with Segmund being essentially brain dead at the moment, there's no telling what it'd do to him, let alone to the rest of us. Proximity worsens the corrupting effect. So we're back to the 'can we destroy it?' question. Tervel finally explains his suspicions, conjectures, and guesses. He thinks that the amulet is meant to control the shard lodged in it to help its bearer. We've seen evidence of this, the purple glow of doom for one. And to make things more fun, we can't just yank the shard out, as if touching it would be safe anyway - it might self-destruct the amulet which would a Bad Thing. Tervel estimates that it has a few minor demons for a power source, a fact which makes Aqila rather unhappy. Ancient tech was often powered by demons.
Tervel says that he might be able to disarm the amulet by essentially fighting the bound demons where they live in a sort of astral projection battle, but it's a very unsafe process and he'll need a lot of support. This entails Moonbeam and Listens to Wind standing by to watch his body while he's busy out of it and pour healing magic on as needed, since he'll be at a real risk of dying during the process. We determine that for this type of combat, your willpower is your strength. To improve Tervel's chances of survival, Aqila spends the rest of the day learning Mule's Stubbornness, and the morning and early afternoon of the next day. Moonbeam has a spell of her own she wants to learn and Tervel needs to make his own preparations, leaving Joe to stand guard.
After a quiet night, and no visitors in the morning, everyone but Joe is busy doing their own thing when Sneezil pops in. He isn't visiting because Master sent him this time - he has questions about the big.......big one. Joe is now in a bind because while he knows a lot about the spirits of nature, he knows far less about the One. He stalls and pumps Sneezil for some information about Master. Sneezil chats about how Master makes dead things walk, and some careful questions get him to describe the dead things as human and horse sized. Then Joe hits on the masochistic yet brilliant ploy to buy time - he asks Sneezil to show how good he can count by counting to 10,000. Some hours later, everyone else is done prepping, Joe hasn't gone off his rocker, and we quietly set some horse kidneys nearby so the little imp can have a treat when he's done. Sneezil gets to enjoy one, and get complimented on his fine counting before Master calls him back. Joe, in a stroke of malevolent brilliance, suggests that Sneezil show Master how well he can count to 10,000; Sneezil emphatically agrees.
We get a few last-minute warnings before the fun really starts, namely, Tervel expects that if there is more than one demon bound in the amulet, he'll be fighting them weakest to strongest, and the demons may try to call in outside forces to kill us while he's busy. He also may have to hunt around to find his next target. And the outside forces are likely to start strong and then get weaker. So, the game plan is for Moonbeam and Joe to be standing by ready to heal Tervel as needed, Segmund will be tied firmly to a tree in case anything tries to move into his empty head while we're busy, and Aqila will try to keep anything nasty from getting at the other three while they're busy, and keep her buff spell up on the paladin at all times. Moonbeam will also keep Owl's Wisdom on tap for aiding Tervel in searching wherever the battles are taking place. Since Joe doesn't need to prepare spells ahead of time, if Aqila can't handle something solo, he'll be ready to support. And then the fun began.
It was a bit difficult to tell when the first battle was joined, as the only sign was Tervel twitching a bit. It was easy to tell when he was done because a succubus popped in and englobed Aqila in a darkness spell. She didn't like eating a fireball, and followed the darkness up with some sort of blight spell, nearly killing the mage. Joe had to help her kill the succubus and heal her up. The next combat by Tervel was again fairly subtle, then life outside got interesting as a bone monster with a scorpion's tail appeared. More fireballing occured. Joe moved to prevent it from physically attacking Aqila and got poisoned for his pains. It was easier to kill than the succubus at least. The poison sapped Joe's strength badly, but that didn't prevent him from being able to cast spells.
Combat number three elicited more noticeable responses from Tervel, but his vital signs, being watched by Joe, didn't waver. But, the amulet didn't poof when he was done, indicating that there were at least 4 demons in there, and then a trio of imps popped in. Fireball hurt two of them, then Joe got a lightning storm fired up and helped Aqila fry them. Magic Missile finished off the last two before they closed to melee range. Combat four was again a little more noticeable - Joe and Moonbeam took turns healing, then a Quasit showed up. Joe annihilated it with a lightning bolt. And we still weren't done. 5 demons was far in excess of what Tervel was expecting to deal with. Combat number 5 was much rougher - visible nosebleed on Tervel and more frantic healing needed. No demons showed up when it was over this time, but the amulet was still intact. Six demons? It turned out to be six, in the end. Last battle was very rough. Joe exhausted himself healing, and Moonbeam wasn't far from it. Tervel got put through the wringer, but he prevailed. The shard of the Mad God poofed as did the amulet.
As the mage was least exhausted, she got first watch and first checking up on everyone else. The paladin's steed looked like someone had clubbed her with a 2x4. And to make things more entertaining, Segmund woke up. Sort of. Babbling, but actually taking voluntary action on his own. We kept him tied up until Tervel recovered enough to assess whether the shard or one of the demons had moved into an empty vessel. The paladin's assessment, when he was able, was that he couldn't tell if it was a demon moving in, but Segmund's behavior was like part of his brain was scrambled. His babbling was reminiscent of a baby learning to talk, for example. This sounds somewhat familiar - the mage who's brain got worked over by the Mad God shard at the dig site had similar issues. The timing of his recovery - when the shard was destroyed, was suspicious. Healing and a good night's sleep all around. We weren't in any shape to do anything that afternoon.
The next day, with folks mostly recovered, we get ready to get back on the road after two days delay. Joe goes up to scout, and finds that the zombie horde is mostly dead - 1 in 5 seem to be still among the living. He flies down to examine one up close, and finds he's moaning 'water' not 'Master'. He also spots a merchant's caravan broken down at the fort that's about two days ahead. So, we now have an interesting problem. There's about twenty people that need help. We have as resources, two people who can create water, two butchered horses, the travel rations we need to finish our journey, five live horses, and four functional people. And if we don't do anything, the people will be dead in a day or two. It's a safe bet that them being in this position is linked to the amulet somehow, since their recovery probably coincided with the amulet being destroyed, though we can't tell for certain. We'd been busy.
Session ends here, since unravelling this issue isn't going to be short.



We resume where we left off, trying to decide how best to deal with the survivors that had been dragged willy-nilly behind the mad mage with the cursed amulet along the desert road. 4 in 5 are deceased out of roughly a hundred strung out along 50 miles of the road between our position and the next ruined fort, where a merchant and his guards are camped. For resources we have five live horses, two butchered horses, four people, 1 Segmund or at least his body, create water spells, a bucket, water skins and our own rations.
After some discussion, Joe goes to talk to the merchant and see if he'll help with the rescue effort while the rest of us move along the road and collect survivors while we head to the fort. Once we have them all rounded up, we can find out who's from where and if they have any friends or relatives closer than 12-13 days away. Twelve days east is a mining town, and thirteen days west is the small village with the large temple where the campaign started.
Joe flies over and makes himself known to the merchant and his five guards. Their wagon has an obviously damaged wheel and there are no supplies to fix it. Moonbeam can probably mend it with wood shaping, and the merchant is willing to help with the refugee problem if we help with the wagon problem. Since the rest of us are moving at the pace of the survivors, Joe and Moonbeam could go on ahead to get the wagon repaired so everything is ready when the rest of us arrive. Joe flies back down the road, watering survivors along the way. The rest of us travel 20 of the 50 miles and get most of the refugees rounded up, fed and watered. Three of them are Kethorim, one is the last survivor of a family that was homesteading between the ruined fort and the mining town, and the rest are assorted townsfolk from the mining town. Mostly lower class or indigent, as more important people would have been stopped by friends/relatives/business associates or just not survived the deprivations.
As previously planned, Joe and Moonbeam pushed on ahead and were about 10 miles ahead of the rest of us. Joe mentioned to Moonbeam that night what he'd noticed about the merchant, namely that the merchant wore a pendant of a closed hand and the guards had illusion magic on them. This is sufficiently worrying that they decided Moonbeam would wait for the rest of us to catch up so we don't meet the merchant and guards piecemeal. She gets to spend most of the next day studying. Joe finds some Kethorim the next day and the rest of us make 16 miles, since we're picking up more people who can't walk. Quiet night. Tervel, upon being asked by Joe about the pendant he saw, posits that the merchant could be a priest of Rakan in disguise, or just an adherent, since Rakan is popular back East, because the King venerates him. Tervel will keep an eye out for trouble, however.
The next day, Joe leads the Kethorim we found back to their tribe members. The rest of us troop on. We reach the fort in the early evening. Joe drops into the fort from above while the refuges clump up outside with Segmund, and the rest of us head for a gap in the wall. Moonbeam walked in, telling them she's ready to fix the wagon, then Aqila and Tervel walk up to the entrance. As Tervel reaches the doorway, the 'merchant' says 'Paladin!'. That answers that question, anyway. Tervel confirms our assumption by stating 'A priest of Rakan. Did you really think you would survive what is to come?' The priest responds with a few harsh syllables and while Moonbeam and Tervel are fine, Aqila and Joe are paralyzed by fear. The flames of the campfire go purple. This is probably a bad thing. And combat is joined.
Moonbeam summons three crocodiles on the priest. The guards go after the crocs, Moonbeam, and Aqila. The fire darkens. Joe tries kelp strand for the grapple, and fails. Tervel comments 'Your master has no more concern for your life than you have for ours. Do you wish to continue on this course of action?' before engaging the guard who was killing the mage. Another guard almost kills Joe with one blow, then we hear a high-pitched voice yell 'Sneezil help! Oops!'. A small purple gem drops from the air and lands at the priest's feet. An eruption of what is presumably negative energy just misses Joe, hits most of our enemies, and then a shadowy figure appears where the gem had been. As if we needed more targets at this point.

The first use of what was probably the most terrifying phrase of the campaign - 'Sneezil help!'. He meant well. He really did.

Moonbeam mightily summons five bison and sics them on guards. Charging bison take out the guard that hurt Joe, and hurt two more badly. Aqila finally overcomes her fear and fireballs the room, missing all allies and the horse who'd pulled the wagon. The priest is less than amused. "I will not be thwarted. Rakan, aid your servant!" precedes the fire exploding and killing all but one of the guards. Really bad boss to work for. Everything goes dark, though Tervel is still visible and glowing. Joe casts Daylight on his armor, so we can see again. The last guard has died and the priest has been replaced by a large dark armored figure with a ridiculously large mace. And then, to put the icing on the divine intervention cake, Tervel states echoingly, "Rakan, you are denied this. As much power as your priest can wield, and no more." Followed rapidly by a panicked 'Sneezil Go!'. Apparently, we'd been temporarily transported to Rakan's demi-plane. Not a nice place to visit.
Moonbeam adds two more to her swarm of bison and directs them all to attack the avatar of Rakan. Aqila switches to Magic Missile. Then the avatar tries to do something. We never find out what because it leaves itself open to attack by all seven bison, and it dies right there. And then the shadow, which we'd been ignoring until then, speaks, "Now the master's will is clear." A wave of fear causes a bison stampede. Moonbeam gives the paladin Bull's Strength. It being immaterial, Aqila Magic Missiles it too, causing an annoyed 'you will die in agony, mage.' Joe's lightning bolt gets a 'so many eager to die.' And then it zaps us with black lightning. That hurt. Joe goes airborne since he can drop lightning from anywhere, but the fight is over when Tervel walks up and smites it smitingly. Hooray for combat buffs.

Significant divine intervention here - probably the most direct of the entire campaign. And now the party had managed to add Rakan to the list of blood gods mad at them. This would have consequences.

We loot the corpses. The dead guards turn out to be in full plate, not leather armor, when the illusion is down. Of course, the emblazoned symbol of Rakan will have to go before we can resell any of them. We just knocked off five temple guards and a priest, so the rest of the priesthood is probably going to be annoyed with us. The bag of holding is getting rather full now. A tentative 'Sneezil helped?' is heard. We assure Sneezil that he did help us. He explains that Master said that the gem would help us if he dropped it on us, but he accidentally dropped it on the mean priest who talks to a big big big one, but Sneezil's friend talks to a bigger big one. So, Tervel's been promoted to a Sneezil friend now.
And then things go pear-shaped again when Aqila has the bright idea to ask Sneezil about Segmund. Tervel had been rather out of it when Segmund started acting like something had returned to his skull, and we hadn't asked him again due to the refugee issue. Sneezil seems to have a pretty good idea of what's going on ethereally, so he should notice if a demon moved in. Sneezil understands the question as 'Something wrong with short friend?' We explain, briefly, what happened, and he looks at Segmund, and freaks out a little, confirming that whatever's going on, Segmund is at least not alone in his head. Sneezil then blinks out. 'Master need me'. Now, we have a problem.
Given Sneezil's reaction, we bring Segmund, still bound, into the ruins to decide what to do. Then we start hearing voices in our heads. Moonbeam fails to block the voice out, so she gets to hear its bargain - let it keep the dwarf's body, and it will sow havoc and wreak chaos among our enemies. Deal with the devil anyone? Moonbeam fills the rest of us in on what she heard. Joe decides he wants to hear for himself. We find out later that he left himself open to a strong Suggestion to accept the deal doing that. Aqila and Tervel converse in Ancient, as the entity is unlikely to understand that. Aqila wants to know if there is a reason to not kill Segmund's body to stop the current threat, if that would cause more problems than having a mind-talking demon around or let it go after another host. Tervel notes that that would prevent us from ever recovering Segmund. Aqila mentally weighs the costs vs benefits of fireballing against not fireballing and the 20 vulnerable refuges outside push the pendulum to 'fireball and knock out'.
Several things happen very rapidly - Segmund gets burnt down hard, Joe Eagle-Expresses the already hurt mage under the influence of suggestion, Moonbeam fails to damage Segmund at all, but Tervel knocks Segmund out, and then the demon tries to mentally force Joe or Moonbeam to do it's bidding while Tervel asks nicely for a minor miracle. He gets it. Demonic powers are bound for a year, so we have time to figure out what we're going to do about this lovely little problem. Issue isn't resolved, and still needs dealt with sometime. Aqila is somewhat less than amused when she gets healed back to consciousness, probably due to the unhealed subdual damage.
Joe finally gets around to inspecting the wagon and finds four sealed crates and one open crate of grain. Plus a hand-mill and some cooking gear. Between that and what horse meat we can't eat before it goes off, the refugees can get back to the mining town on their own - those too weak to walk can ride in the wagon. Quiet night. We take off in the morning, having delayed too long as it is.
While Joe is up playing eyes in the sky, he sees a large dragon attacking some Kethorim and goes to help. His dive bombing does help a bit, though some of the warriors die regardless. Meanwhile, the rest of us are visited by Sneezil and he brought a friend with him, another imp. Sneezil introduces Aqila as his bright friend and Moonbeam as his burny friend. However, when he tries to introduce the imp to Tervel, his 'big friend', it shrieks 'Paladin!' and poofs out. We chat with Sneezil for a bit, then Moonbeam gives him some 'toys' to 'play a game with Master'. Smoke stick and the stone caltrops she'd made earlier. We're also told that Master thinks we're moving too slow. Which implies that he knows where we're going. Another tidbit to keep in mind.
Meanwhile, Joe heals up wounded Kethorim and chats a bit. Interesting details he learns include the fact that the Lazeerim are screwed long term. Nurzhan is stirring up dragons from their own territory to unusual activity, meaning they'll need to eat more to stay alive. And as seen, dragons will cheerfully eat people if they can catch them. He fills us in later.
A bit further down the road, we are stopped abruptly by a small explosive being thrown in front of Aqila's horse from the right. A voice emitting from three different points, left, right and dead ahead, inquires if we really need to keep going down this road. After affirming that yes, we have reason to go this way, the voice explains that he was hired to stop anyone from passing by to the East, and he will do his job. Two fireballs and one paladin charge demonstrate that the voice point sources were all dummies. A flaming crossbow bolt from behind makes Aqila look behind her to spot another magic source to the rear. Joe, diving in to join the combat, paints the target with fairy fire. Three bison, one scorching ray, and hypothermia cast against the resistance from the guy's sanctuary finish him off quickly. We test the stone that the sanctuary spell probably came from to see if it doesn't need a command word. Aqila successfully dope-slaps Joe, so it probably needs a command word. We loot the corpse, as usual. Some enchanted crossbow bolts for Moonbeam, and a note offering a one thousand gold bounty on Moonbeam, Listens-to-Wind, Aqila, and Tervel, based on the descriptions. No names given. And a five thousand gold bounty to kill all of us. Which means we probably should try to figure out who's trying to kill us this time.
Session ends here due to late hour.



November Session
We pick up where we left off, right after the foiled assassination attempt. Since Moonbeam can now learn wind at back, and that will speed up travel immensely, we have reason to stop and study for a bit, but camping somewhere out of sight of the road would be less conspicuous/suspicious. We're currently in a very flat area, but the terrain gets a bit hilly soon. That night, Sneezil pops into ask how 'big friend got big' and if he eats imps, because the Sneezil's new imp friend said that paladins eat imps. This leads to an explanation of what paladins do, protecting the weak, which really blows Sneezil's mind, since in his world view, the strong eat the weak. We do find out how Moonbeam's smokestick and caltrops present went over. Per Sneezil, 'Master' hopped around a lot and it was very funny. He pops out, and the rest of the night is quiet.
We travel for another day and a part of the next morning to find a good campsite. A quiet day of study and a quiet night, then Sneezil shows up the next morning. Fortunately, Tervel is available to distract the imp this time, while the rest of us resume our work. He talks to Sneezil for a while and lets the rest of us know that night that Sneezil let slip that 'master' has a special present for us in the next day or two and fire spells won't do anything to it. More incentive to study hard. The next day is quiet, then the next morning Sneezil pops in to let us know that we're getting our present that night. The rest of the day is spent in study and preparation.
Come full dark, Sneezil brings us our present. He tosses a colorless gem on the ground, and an incorporeal entity appears. Joseph has Daylight cast on his armor again in case of darkness. Tervel IDs it as a Specter and recommends strongly that we don't let it touch us. So, of course, it goes right for the mage. And misses. Aqila manages to get clear without getting hit and hide behind the paladin. Moonbeam and Listens-to-wind start summoning unicorns, and Tervel attempts to Turn Undead. A spectacular success sends the monster fleeing for its life. Aqila smacks it with magic missile, then Joe goes airborne. Three unicorns box it in, then the Eagle Express obliterates the undead. A brightly glowing eagle then proceeds to victory dance across the sky, away from our campsite in case any eyes were close enough to see the light show.
We study for one more day, then take off down the road, wind at our back and eagle eyes in the sky. Moonbeam is getting tired of being the only one in the party who can't speak Ancient, so language lessons resume. Four quiet days see us to just short of Bronius's Folly, the mining town. We take the opportunity to get our stories straight for getting through town unhindered since we have assassins with our descriptions after us and we did just bump off a priest of Rakan a week ago. The plan is for Joe to not walk through town at all, because he can be the cavalry if things get ugly. Moonbeam has done her looking around and is going home. Aqila is an alchemist looking for work and is travelling with her for safety. We met the paladin on the road and are travelling with him for the same reason. Segmund is an acquaintance who mysteriously went nuts in the middle of the night and we're trying to get help for him. And everything magical is hiding in the bag of holding. Aqila is pretending the pack horse is hers and has her kit loaded on it for verisimilitude.
Aqila gives the spiel to the gate guard, and flubs it. He's a mite suspicious of us, and gives us a guard to guide us right to the temple of Rakan. Yikes. Since temples are direct links to their deity's plane if the temple is important enough, we really, really don't want to go there. We also find out some possible problems - anyone selling wares in town must be licensed, all magical items must be declared, all weapons must be declared, and all professions must be declared. Aqila says nothing of the bag of holding or any of its contents, or her Magecraft. Simple alchemist, yes sir. Moonbeam represents herself as a healer, and Tervel's pretty obviously a paladin, so he doesn't need to declare that bit. We aren't scanned for magic items there, but are warned that we may be on the way out of town. Crud. We then set off with our 'guide'.
There's a run-down temple of Nareel on the way. The guard flashes an amulet which indicates he's a worshipper of the One briefly, but only Aqila notices. She mentions that to Tervel, and eventually we convince the guard to drop us off at the Nareel temple instead. The priestess is several shades of pissed, grumbling about how hard it is to keep the temple open without a paladin showing up on her doorstep. She gives us directions to the temple of the One and shoos us off hastily. We make our way to the east side of town, and find the temple in a ghetto - falling down buildings with a few signs of limited repairs. The very elderly priest greets us and agrees that this should be a short visit. He's happy to see a paladin, though. On hearing about Segmund, he gives us his best advice, that if we ever find ourselves in River's Edge, which is near the Asferian border along the Westwall, we should look for Dovydas. Aqila thinks to mentions a few things that happened a week ago to the priest, namely that the mad mage is dead, any survivors should be back soon, but there might be trouble because we got the supplies for them by bumping off a priest of Rakan. She then uses whispering wind to call Joe in to pick up the bag of holding, lest it get spotted as we're leaving. He drops in, and grabs a rat before leaving to be the visible excuse for a large bird diving into the poor quarter.
As we're riding towards the gate, we hear an excited 'Sneezil here!'. Thinking quickly, Aqila tells him about the rat Joe just picked up and suggests he go ask Joe to share. This gets Sneezil distracted long enough to let the rest of us clear the gate. One of the guards has a short wand which he uses to scan us and finds nothing undeclared on our persons. Whew. We decamp. Sneezil, after messily shredding the rat, comes back and forgets his question. Then he remembers it - "Can big friend teach Sneezil to be big and protect imps?' This is a new development. Tervel explains that the first lesson he needs to do that is to understand when protecting is needed. So, Tervel begins trying to explain philosophy to Sneezil in language that the little imp can understand. Eventually, Sneezil declares that his head hurts and he pops out, but not before Aqila gives him a present for 'master' - a stink bomb.
That night, Aqila pulls out the directions and the map to start figuring out where to start searching for Zahak's cache. Consulting with Tervel , they narrow the likely places down to two locations in the West Wall. And since Zahak came from the west, we'll probably need to go through the gap and try to find a way to the spots from the west side. Then Tervel, to help us all avoid notice, has an argument with his horse. Eventually, his paladin's mount grudgingly shifts her color to a muddy brown. Tervel ruefully explains that Star has some 'firm ideas' on what a paladin's mount should look like. Eight days later, we're half a day from a new fort being build across the West Wall Gap. A few Sneezilings took place in that time, and language lessons continued. One of the incidents involved stink bombs, so Aqila's little present must have gone over well, heh.
That night, we get woken up by a loud, angry, female voice demanding 'what have you done with him!?!' The pronoun without an antecedent leaves us puzzled. Aqila requests more information so we can answer the question. The response is a blast of flame that sets some shrubbery on fire, revealing an annoyed dragon. She resumes her demands to know what we've done to her chosen mate. It seems logical that she means Zalakirinal, he being the only other dragon we've met, but we didn't do anything to him, except get him a book and get some presents in thanks, which Aqila explains hastily. The dragon insists she can feel his essence, so we display the gifts we got, in hopes of resolving the issue. She zeroes in on Moonbeam's black stones, and seems very ticked off about her having them. On being asked what she thinks they are, Moonbeam replies 'they're to help me with researching', which marginally mollifies the irate dragon. She's also very annoyed about Segmund, but accepts our hasty explanation about his situation. Calming down, she asks what recompense we're require of her for her imposition of us. The first thing that comes to mind is help finding the cache - we only know two of the three landmarks so maybe she'd know the other one? Looking at the map, she points out one of the two points Aqila and Tervel had identified as being a location with a stink of necromancy about it, but not being accessible for her to burn out herself. She allows that she could transport us there, but the effort would be in excess of what she deems to be proper recompense.

The stones were actually made from Zalakirinal's blood - Telesriel thought they had to have attacked him. She was reading minds through the entire encounter - unknown to the party.

Aqila throws caution to the wind, switches to Draconic, and explains that she's on a mission given from the upper echelon of the Citadel of Valanas to recover whatever is in that cache and get it transported to Valanas as fast as possible. This is something the dragon hadn't been expecting to hear, and after pointing out that lying about something like that would be a very bad idea, the dragon leaves to confirm Aqila's story, and tells us to stay within half a day's travel of this place, and she'll be back in a day. We head north a bit the next morning to find a concealed campsite and study for the day. Next morning, the dragon returns, informs us that she's been assured that we're telling the truth, and that she'll help us as much as she can without endangering herself. She etches a diagram in the sand with one claw and bids us to step inside.
Session ends here. Dungeon crawl coming soon.

Terane
2020-03-11, 05:10 PM
We resume where we left off, with Zalakirinal's lady friend etching a diagram in the sand. We step into it, and then the world gets larger. About ten times larger. This made our transportation method clear without an explanation. A second spell floated us and the horses up onto the dragon's back whereupon she took off. The paladin's mount helped keep our horses from panicking during the daylong trip. The dragon explains en route that there's a clearing for her to land about half a mile from the necromantic lair she had spotted, and while the spell she used is going to attract Dragon Temple attention, it will mostly be centered on her, and she's not sticking around. We thank her appropriately as she heads off.
Immediately after, we hear a cheerful Sneezil greet us. He's figured some things out and wants to tell us all about it. He has recently comprehended the following concepts - one, that if imps don't want big ones to play games with them, then imps shouldn't play games with smaller ones, and two, if a big one tries to play games with an imp, the imp is allowed to play games back. This naturally brings up the question of how imps can play games with big ones. Aqila notes that everything has strengths and weaknesses. We also get the latest gossip about Sneezil's Master - he thinks that first we move too slow, then too fast, and now he's rushing to get a special present ready for us. Oh, yay. Listens-to-Wind sees if Sneezil can describe it. We ascertain that it has a big fist the size of a human head and is smaller than a horse. Joe hits on the notion of having Sneezil draw a picture of the beastie. This is a somewhat new concept for the little imp, but eventually we get a very rough sketch of something roughly humanoid with skinny legs, a sharp clawed hand on one side and a massive fist on the other. This could be bad. Aqila then gets the evil, evil idea to get Sneezil to practice drawing so he can get better at it. His 'master' probably has lots of paper and ink lying around.... Sneezil is not allowed to touch his master's ink at all, because he spilled some, but there isn't a prohibition about paper. We cheerfully supply him with some ink and pens to facilitate his future artistry.
About then, an irate voice from halfway up the cliff interrupts us. It berates Sneezil for wasting his time and promises to tattle to Master about it. Joe detects an imp-sized blob of magic where the voice is and fairy-fires it. The other imp, presumably the one that Sneezil introduced us to earlier and who had been telling him how paladins eat imps, proceeded to pass on to us a message from its master. Essentially, while his master is quite confident that we can't escape his toils, should the shaman and druid try to, the shaman's village is going to be torched and the druid's 'lady friend' is going to suffer. After the mage observes that the imp didn't bother trying to threaten her family, the imp makes it clear without specifically stating so that it is aware that she's in the Sentinel and states that the war will be resumed. This is a somewhat unsettling development, but not one to follow up at the time. And the icing on the cake is the imp's final message - that the mage should check with her masters about this name, and to be sure that if we somehow escape the imp's Master's trap, Saralis will be coming. After checking if Sneezil minds, Joe blots the imp out of existence with Boreal Winds. Sneezil's reaction is to observe that 'Master is going to need a new messenger'. About then he hears 'Master' calling and blinks out.
About an hour's climbing later near dusk we reach an area where the stone has been obviously worked a very long time ago. A stone-sided channel has been cut into the mountain, and after passing two dog's legs, we reach a metal door radiating necromantic magics faintly. Along the passage, there are tunnels set well off the ground, mostly caved in or choked with debris. One or two seem open as far as we can see. A debate ensues, and the druid's viewpoint that we should take a few days to prepare prevails over Aqila's antsiness about delays and 'Master's' special surprise. New spells are learned, provisions for an extended stay for the horses are made, and gear is sorted into 'cache' and 'carry in'. Useful items are apportioned, namely the flame-stick is lent to Tervel in case he can't get into melee on something. On the morning of the 4th day, we prepare to go dungeon-crawling. Segmund, still seeming oblivious to the world is coming in with us, since we don't want to leave whatever is possessing him with the dwarf's abilities by itself alone out of our sight.
Aqila inspects the door carefully, and determines there is a very faint abjuration enchantment underlying the faint necromantic aura. Dispel Magic turns the door to dust. Moonbeam's spider hand scouts ahead. A corridor runs to another door at the far end, but what we couldn't see from outside is two parallel ledges 5 feet up are set into the walls on either side, and there are ten skeletal figures set at regular intervals along it. With information as to their locations, we don't enter just yet. Listens-to-wind picks off the two farthest ones with Boreal Winds, then the rest are grouped closely enough for a fireball to incinerate all eight. The weak skeletons were armed with bows, as we discover on closer inspection, so not getting pincushioned was nice.
The next door has similar enchantments. Dispel magic weakens it, and some staff bashing finishes the job. We see a wall and two passageways going around it to the left and right. Spider recon reveals that it's basically an octagonal room with a C-shaped column in the middle, with the open side of the C facing another door opposite the first door and two figures in the hollow of the C. Provocations by the spider fail to get a reaction out of them. To conserve spells, the boys go left and right to attack one figure each simultaneously. Moonbeam concentrates on keeping the spider spell running while Aqila stands by to help if needed. Joe gets smacked solidly by his opponent and yells, which impelled the mage to go magic missile it in support. Otherwise, the probable wights are dispatched easily. Mighty smitey paladin is handy to have along.
Aqila examines door number three. This one's scarier. Very ancient abjuration magic is the first layer, and it would have been tremendously powerful when it was first cast, with also powerful transmutation, necromancy, and more abjuration layered on top. This perhaps is not a good thing to dispel magic on, depending on what's behind it. She observes runes on the door, and makes a rubbing of them to be examined later. In the center of the door is a hexagonal arrangement of runes, and while the middle feels rough, the eye sees only smooth stone. The runes, read clockwise, indicate Kantor, Reshana, Makarn, Rakan, Aeran, and Nareel. There is obviously some design in the center, but nobody in the party seems to be able to perceive it, either directly or in the rubbing – the space seems blank. This actually triggers a vague memory for the mage, that the symbol of the Mad God was not discernable to those who weren't his followers. Aqila tentatively tries pressing each of the runes, then finally presses in the middle. In the alcove, a stuttering image of Zahak appears with a message to deliver. It boils down to 'Turn back now, you have faced only my disappointments so far, I have something really nasty behind that door and even deeper in are things that even a mage of my power wouldn't want to mess with, ever.' Yay. Tervel, given these hints, suspects that we're in the lost temple of the Mad God where his followers made their last stand. The thought of what Zahak probably disturbed making this cache is not making the paladin happy. Given all the fun we've had with Mad God shards to date, it's not exactly something the rest of us should be happy about either.

Note that nobody had any real ranks in Knowledge<Religion> - the paladin NPC was actually the party expert on the subject.

The dwarf, who was temporarily unwatched, wanders into the room then. The fact that he's being independently mobile is worrying. What he says is more so: "I remember this place", followed by 'I can open this door if you unchain me'. When asked who he is, he answers "Kaneth". Past details fall into place, and Tervel now knows what is using Segmund's body - a piece of the Mad God that has power and intelligence. Kaneth was the name of the Mad God before he was shattered. Of course, now, we're back to the 'can we trust it' question. Since he's completely unarmed and we aren't, we unchain him so he can open the door. And then a hitch develops - Segmund's body is too small to reach the proper spots. The face of the alcove is textured with depressions, and Kaneth has to show Listens-to-wind, being the tallest member of the party, the proper indentations to press down in. The door swings open, with the panels almost closing off access to the outside world. They don't touch the edges of the column, but you aren't getting through there at a run. Segmund is hastily rechained.
Inside, we see a room that has partially collapsed along the right side. There's a door directly across the chamber, and one on the left. 4 columns support the roof, though the front right one sheared off. A low retaining wall keeps the rubble out of the rest of the room. A table has been built around the left rear column, and there are items on it. A purple spectre floats in the middle of the room. "Intruders" "Speak the Password" Aqila tries 'Jahan is dead'. No dice. Combat time. 4 icy orbs blink into existence around the spectre and the temperature starts plummeting. Spells are slung, nature's allies are summoned, and smites are dealt. The cramped quarters inhibit our usual tactics. A line of runes on the floor encircle the figure and require a stiff will check to pass. Tervel has to struggle for a while to get into melee, and that is a mixed benefit - a solid hit from the figure gives him a negative level. Every time we start to wear it down, it 'eats' a cold orb, healing itself and damaging us. It uses up two orbs before we finally kill it, then the other two explode, really hurting us. Aqila gets knocked out by the shock. Heals all around. Conscious again, time to inspect the table. There are three items, each neatly labeled by Zahak.
1) An orb of glossy obsidian with three iron rings encircling it at right angles. Described as one of the last known intact control devices Jahan created to control his undead hordes. Permits a necromancer to control far, far more undead than his own power would allow. 2) A shard of what looks like iron. Zahak has no idea what it is, but it was said to be one of Jahan's prized possessions. It seems to be very, very unmagical, but it makes bad things happen when it's put in extradimensional storage. No bag of holding for that, then. Aqila hides it in a components pouch. 3) A pile of twisted scraps. Purported to be the remains of Jahan's crown, but Zahak can't confirm the rumors. Very strong necromancy on them. Also, we find a few tomes of general necromancy. Probably the ones that Grozdan gave Zahak way back when.
The door to the left behind a low wall has no magic on it at all. The other door has very, very strong abjuration it. Given what Zahak's last message said, the mage is adamant about not poking around, though the druid really, really, really wants to snoop. Priority is given to getting the doors to the chamber shut again. Kaneth laughs in Joe's face when he tries to talk him into showing us the close doors combo. No help on that front. Joe and Moonbeam escort Segmund's body out of the temple and check out the passageways outside. Meantime, Tervel stands guard while Aqila examines the wall minutely. Playing a hunch, she carefully checks the two spots Joe touched, then all the obvious depressions and determines that a total of 11 depressions have a smoother feel to them, 4 on one side, 3 on the other, so a limited number of combinations are possible. Time to experiment. 8 trys later, the doors close. Five of the combos didn’t seem to do anything, and three made the other two doors groan. No way to tell if anything bad happened somewhere, but sticking around is contraindicated.
Outside, Moonbeam's spiderhand didn't find anything interesting in the intact passages. We quickly repack everything. Another argument as to whether to rest here for a bit or head down to the clearing ensues, with the mage winning this one, based on really not wanting to get attacked in cramped quarters. We already had one demonstration of how a lack of room interferes with using summoned creatures effectively.
Not unexpectedly, when we reach the clearing an hour later, it's occupied. A blue dome on one side is covering Nayden, several lumps on the ground, a figure standing behind him, and what looks like a very unhappy and visible Sneezil hunched on the ground next to Nayden. We dismount and leave Segmund with the horses. Nayden inquires if we were successful in recovering the cache. Aqila bluffs that we'd bitten off more than we could chew, but Nayden is more than welcome to go stick his nose into the mess if he really wanted to so we can laugh at him from a safe distance. He seems to take that at face value, observes that we are disappointing but maybe we'll be a valid test anyway, but first, the wraiths are hungry. Joe wildshapes into his favorite death from above form and poofs wraith 1 with the Eagle Express. Wraith 2 damages Tervel painfully - con damage - but a magic missile and another eagle dive poofs it too. Moonbeam's rhino found it to be incorporeal when it charged. With those two foes down, Moonbeam has the rhino and a unicorn test the blue barrier. They bounce, and are hurt a bit. Phase 2 of Nayden's test starts when the two figures lying on each other shamble to their feet. Mummies. Will saves all around, but only the unicorn, Joe, and Tervel make them. Others are frozen in fear for a few rounds. Mummies are, however, slow. It takes them a little time to get to the edge of the barrier, and they are unwilling to come out piecemeal, giving Moonbeam time to recover and cast Entangle. It has no effect in the blue bubble, but makes a barrier of sorts outside it. When the mummies emerge, Joe dives and shreds one. Tervel gets into range, but misses. The unicorn hits the other. Joe finishes his off, Tervel manages to avoid succumbing to Mummy Rot, and Aqila unleashes Magic Missile on 2. Joe finishes it off.
Now the real fun starts. Nayden thinks this will be an adequate test after all, and please do give him feedback on how the disease works, since it should infect anyone trying to cure it, assuming we live long enough to try. The new monster, which looks like what Sneezil had tried to draw, claws, fist and all, moves into combat. A fast abomination, it can't cross the unicorn's circle against evil, so it goes for the still paralyzed rhino and punches it in the head. Tervel closes from behind and mightily smites it. Aqila tries to Dispel Magic on it in case Nayden had any protective spells in place. Moonbeam gets another rhino into place, and it charges in for a very effective attack. The unicorn misses, though. The monster goes after the paladin, and Tervel is now very much worse for wear, but resists succumbing to the plague it carries in its clawed hand. Joe is leery about touching the thing, so he rains lightning down on its head. Aqila fries it but good with Searing Light for the killing blow.
Nayden is mildly disappointed that his creation fell so quickly and makes a note to soup up his next iteration. He then states that he thinks we were lying about not recovering the cache and 'politely requests' that the mage hand over the goods. She declines to acquiesce to his request. He makes it clear that he's also aware of who her actual employers are and tries to make her cooperate by using Finger of Death on...Segmund. The unarmed dwarf who's chained up. Aqila is less than impressed by his choice of targets and as much says so. Then, Tervel echoingly tell Sneezil that now is the time for him to decide. And Sneezil does. "Sneezil help Sneezil friends!" And with the battle cry of 'No Play Games!' he attaches himself to Nayden's leg firmly. The blue dome winks out. And that's all the opening we need.

Nayden had actually recognized what had happened to Segmund - and his faction was not at all friendly to the Mad God. He needed to kill the dwarf, and decided to try for whatever intimidation he could get at the same time.
The FoD was not actual spellcasting, though the party never learned that. One-shot consumable.
Note that the players had been waiting for Segmund to get killed off ever since his player left. It took this long, and only succeeded because they forgot to heal him. He did actually make the save, but the damage was still enough to knock him into negatives at that point. (Rolled pretty near maximum, he was a bit banged up still)

Rhinos charge, unicorn charges, eagle divebombs, spells fly. Much yelling ensues. Aqila had been saving Arcane Bolts for an opportune moment, and this was it. Chekov's fire-stick was used by the paladin, who was too far off to run in in time, but he missed. Sneezil's poison worked its way into Nayden's system and made him clumsier. Enough that he dropped his emergency escape trinket. Which gave us enough time to finish him off. More charging of rhinos, and attacking by summons weakened him significantly, then Magic Missile for the coup de grace. Only at which point did people remember the dwarf who was quietly bleeding out on the ground. And had in fact expired. RIP Segmund. As per our usual MO, we loot Nayden's corpse. And muffle the druid when he thinks about suggesting to Sneezil that he should loot the kidneys. We find some travelling money, a ring, the wooden splinter that was the 'get-a-way' trinket, a small spellbook, a small dagger, some cheap jewelry, and robes. Which were soaked in poison, as Joe and Aqila found out. Con saves required.
Sneezil is very happy to be free and now he's able to travel with his friends! Listens-to-wind thinks that Tervel should take the lil' imp under his wing as an understudy paladin. We'll see what happens. Aqila remembers to ask Sneezil about his drawing practice, and whether he could bring any examples for us to see. No, he won't. Nayden had told him that if he died, a 'big scary thing' would come, so can't blame Sneezil for abstaining.

Yes, Sneezil did end up becoming a paladin.

Session winds down at this point. Will pick back up in 2013. Up next: The Great Escape



January notes:
We resume where we left off, post-corpse-looting and pre-corpse-disposal. Listens-to-wind can't take the suspense any longer and goes treasure hunting while the rest of us bury Segmund and burn Nayden's corpse in hopes of delaying any successful scrying into his whereabouts. Given that the ruined temple is over an hour's walk back, no one without wings is getting there with any speed. The scouting by earth elemental of the area behind the bricked up door yields...lots of half-collapsed passages. Nothing of value found. The druid returns, and then scouts downtrail to find us a campsite that wasn't recently a battlefield. There's a decent spot three hours down the path, and we camp there for the night.
At this point, decisions must be made. The cache has been found, items of dubious value and great peril have been recovered and now it's time to finish the job and hoof it north. Getting to Teredor and the northern continent is step one. Aqila would prefer to avoid people lest whoever was sending assassins after us have an easier time doing so again, plus less chance of someone noticing the scary magical artifacts she's couriering. Moonbeam would really really rather avoid people, since she's had 'issues' with the Dragon Temple in the past and we're now in a region where she might be recognized.
We have two potential routes north to Asferia from Seferia. One, we go west and north, taking us through more populated areas past the capitals of both countries where it's more likely that mages and clerics are going to be around and over a border that's guarded on both sides. The only advantage to this route is not having to cross the mountains. The other way is to recross the western mountains to their east side and go through the desert north though a more or less unguarded border into Asferia. Other than the possibility of needing to skirt Teleshim territory on our way to more likely to be friendly Vanathim territory, there are a lot fewer known perils that way. Joe is tasked to scout for a pass that we can get the horses across. After spending one day checking north, he finds nothing passable, but the next day south yields a probable route about 45 miles south. We'd definitely be in Teleshim turf for a bit, but it beats going anywhere near Mykyta or Innokenti. Tervel keeps Sneezil entertained with shortsword (dagger) lessons, Moonbeam enhances her repertoire of making things go boom, and Aqila finally gets some quality alchemical time in while Joe is scouting.
The terrain between our campsite and the pass is less than kind to horses, requiring us to walk at times and slowing us down drastically. It takes a full week to reach the pass. The first day of travel was the summer solstice. Moonbeam celebrates by breaking into her ale stash in moderation. Aqila and Tervel go off by themselves until Sneezil tags along to commemorate the winter solstice that is occurring in their homeland. Listens-to-wind doesn't recognize the day as a holiday and does nothing special. The next day Moonbeam and Joe get woken up by singing at dawn, the others apparently not having slept all night. Joe continues scouting ahead as a panther to test footing for the horses. Sneezil spends the rest of the day bouncing around chanting snatches of rhymes and pestering people to teach him songs. Joe tries singing as a panther with moderate success. And so the days pass.
It takes us all day to cross the pass and we're still short of the desert when night falls. Sneezil is asked to look around up ahead and let us know if he sees anything alive bigger than himself. He returns excitedly to tell us about lots of people up ahead. Aqila thinks to ask if they are wearing robes - they are- which likely means they're desert nomads, probably Teleshim. Sneezil's reward for a job well done is learning a new song from Aqila. We camp for the night. Scouting in the morning reveal that about a dozen nomads are camped at the end of the pass, too close for us to sneak past in daylight. Since randomly murdering a dozen people is Not Done and since the Teleshim are starting to worship Makarn, who's Rakan's lieutenant among the Blood Gods, it would be better to sneak past quietly. Aqila spends the day learning Silence to aid with that.
Two hours before dawn, we commence to sneak. Our back-up plan is Sneezil, on the far side of the nomad camp, with a thunderstone, and a request that if he sees the camp stirring and heading our way, to drop the stone to make a lot of noise then come find us. We successfully get clear guided by our seeing-eye panther and start relaxing when a loud boom shatters the wee hours followed by a commotion. Sneezil's embarrassed 'oops, I dropped it' when he gets back explains exactly what happened. Silence is put back up and we keep sneaking off. A few miles north, around dawn, we come to a badly torn up area with very large lizardy tracks with claws. Joe's nose tells him that they smell like gecko, but not quite. In the interest of not getting surprised by monsters while we're travelling, we track the tracks over the next hour to an artificial lair. There's a faint magical residue on the hole, and an earth elemental reports three large crocodile shapes inside. Further scouting via spiderhand lets Moonbeam see three saltwater crocodile sized lizards with iguana like skin, independently rotating turret eyes, and abundance of teeth and very long claws. Nobody can think of any known creature they possibly could be. The tiny fragments of uneaten meat and bones are too small to determine what they used to be, so we can't confirm if they are or aren't eating nomads.
Joe is disinclined to simply kill unknown creatures out of hand merely because they might be a hazard, so to confirm whether they're natural to the area or not, he shifts to a bat and enters the cave to see if he can chat with them. The end result is one snapping at him, then all three sluggishly beginning to move towards him. He moves away and tries to communicate again, at which point they get more agitated and follow him more quickly out of the cave. Lots of fire ensues. Joe blinds two of them so Tervel only gets puked on once. Ungunking the paladin occurs while Joe gets out his scalpel for an assessment. The disgorged corpse is essentially a walking stomach - internal organs are rather simplified. The heart is a mere two chambers and there are no reproductive organs. A check of one that hadn't already up-chucked showed that a similar melange of acids and digested food in the stomach. Verdict is these aren't natural critters, probably mage-made. Why is a question that may never be answered. Joe collects a bucket of teeth and claws and takes the hides. We move on, wind at back.
The rest of the day is quiet, as are the next five. On day six of the desert trek, Joe spots a family group of nomads. Since we're well into Vanathim territory now, it's likely safe to pick up any information we can about what's going on in Asferia these days. We reach them around sunset, and two young men detach from the group to meet us and then escort us to the patriarch of the group. He invites us to spend the night, and we accept. On being asked if there was anything that might bring danger to his family by offering us hospitality, Aqila assures him that anyone who would have caused trouble is now deceased. The gossip includes mention of a town that is rumored to be a stronghold for the necromancers the king favors in Asferia, and of a noble who is less than enthralled with the current situation in the country. Neither place sound like somewhere to visit if we want to keep staying under the radar, though. We mention the lizard things, which prompts one of the young men to bring out a handful of familiar looking teeth. Joe shows off his collection. The new ones are bigger. Apparently, a few days prior, they were attacked by one, and it left teeth in one of their herdbeasts while they were escaping.
There is party consensus that killing it would be a Good Deed and we offer to do so. The patriarch offers us one of his grandsons, named Fehrit, to guide us to the area, about two days northish, so we're not even going out of our way to help. And two days later around evening we find the beastie out hunting. Found the tracks, followed them, and the lizard is indeed larger. Joseph ones again uses blinding spittle to great effect before the fire flies. A rhino emphatically ends the combat. Sneezil tries to help this time, but his stinger can't pierce its hide. Autopsy confirms that it's another construct, albeit a bigger/older one. There are signs of cancerous growths and the work is cruder. Our guide looks a little green around the gills. Afterwards, he gives Aqila a piece of parchment, telling us that his grandfather said to hand it over if we did what we said we would, killing the monster. It's a map to the oases in the area. Very handy. We didn't find the lair, so after a good night's sleep, we continue tracking to do that.
The trail ends at another noticeably artificial lair in the sands - the rock seems to be constructed somehow, but even the residue has faded. A horrific stench is emitting from inside, due to a corpse of a still larger beast, with signs the other one had bashed into it and tried to eat it. The working theory is that these beasties have a definite, probably on the short side, life span. We make sure Ferret picked up on the nuances of this trip and then bid him farewell.
Over the next three days we make good time north and talk to more groups of Vanathim, passing on warnings about the lizards and hearing rumors out of Asferia. These range from the town in the mountains being a rebel stronghold, a necromancer stronghold, being contested, then there was the forest being a rebel stronghold, necromancers hunting rebels in the forest, weird colored skeletons in the forest and even fey in the forest, etc. The druid now really, really wants to visit the forest. The last family we visit is near the border, more settled, and more conversant in local politics than usual. Their take on the Bright Haven situation is that it would be a silly place for the necromancers to be fortifying - it's nowhere near the Seferia border and it's an open secret that's what the undead are for.
The final point of debate for route is how to get to Teredor. We could try to take ship in Asferia to cross the channel, or make for Leferia which is a Teredoran territory. It would probably be easier to get a legitimate transport in Leferia. Asferian ships crossing are less likely to not be in some grey trade. Hindsight - Grozdan was known to be in the 'northern trade' aka smuggling between the Ferial and Teredor, so trying to take a smuggling ship north might entail running into some of his associates. Over strong protests from Listens-to-wind who deeply desires to check out the rumors of fey, the best route we can see goes north of Bright Haven, south of the forest, and runs northwest to the Leferian border, and requires crossing two major roads. And probably avoids people as much as possible.
We travel for two days without incident through Asferia. The morning of the 3rd day, we see five black avians overhead. Inspection with Segmund's spyglass reveal that they are undead constructs. The bones sticking out are a give-away. Likely aerial spy platforms. The paranoid mage decides to fix the problem with a fireball. For certain values of fix. We have no way to know if they were able to 'see' only visuals, or pick up magic too. Joe spots two more 'birds' and knocks them out of the sky after we start travelling. We angle more north for the rest day to perhaps throw off any pursuit, stopping short of the old trade road that looped around then whole desert. This puts us close enough to the forest when we stop for the day that Joe can't take it any more and flies off to poke around. When he reaches the outskirts, he can see signs of battle, damaged vegetation and burn marks. No corpses. Necromantic and evocation residue permeate the area. He decides to perch in a tree for the sake of enjoying being in a tree and gets lightly toasted by a glittery red skeleton. He fills the rest of the group in when he gets back.
We cross the old trade road after our eyes in the sky make sure there is no traffic first thing and keep going. We reach a new road that evening and stop for the night. In daylight, we can see that it's warded by a line of guard 'towers' - more like barely stable scaffolding - stretching at regular intervals as far as we on the ground can see. They're 'manned' by corpses. Presumably more necromantic puppets. Having no good options, we make a run for it. A loud screaming alarm kicks up as we cross the road and is passed down the line both ways. We haul tail. A cloud of the avians show up and there are too many to easily put their eyes out this time. Joe goes panther for the day due to the airspace cover. Sneezil helps him watch for large living things as we cover ground, and helps by checking for pursuit that night. He returns excitedly warning us that there's a lot of shiny skeletons coming. Five-six of each color and there are green, yellow, red, blue, and black ones. And since they don't need to rest or sleep, they are going to catch us, so better to pick ground of our own choosing for battle. The red ones shoot fire, likely, the rest, well, we'll find out, won't we?
Break here due to late and impending lots of dice rolling

Terane
2020-03-13, 07:05 PM
We resume where we left off, about eight hours ahead of a small army of shiny skeletons in the evening after we'd been riding for eight hours. After some discussion we come up with a plan. We're in gently rolling grassy plains so we don't have any help from the terrain to bunch up the skeles to make them more easy to fireball, but some deft use of summons and entangle may help with that. Since we can move wind at back speeds, and the skeletons don't need to rest, a three-hour forced march will buy us eight hours to recover from the march and four hours to prepare in the morning and ensure we don't get hit until it's daylight. Listens-to-wind makes a wand of resist energy to ensure that all five of us are protected from any energy attacks the skeletons do. Moonbeam prepares to unleash the forces of nature. Aqila loads up of fireballs, to open the ball up at range. Tervel's job is to prevent any of them that get into melee range from splattering caster pieces all over the place. Sneezil is on scouting duty, looking for any person controlling the skeles.
Listens-to-wind uses the spyglass to watch for when the army is coming into range. Protection spells are put up in preparation, then the battle order of the skeletons becomes apparent - they're moving in a tight clump. AKA a perfect fireball target. There are the 5-6 of five colors that Sneezil described, plus one odd one out that is a glassy crystalline appearance. When they get into range, Moonbeam summons four Grigs to entangle them in place. All but the odd one are stopped, whereupon they are roasted. Most of them seem to be smoking, but none drop. The grass being fried too, they resume moving forward, into more entangling grass, and start clumping up. The Grigs are commanded to entangle again with the same results, followed by fireball two. When the smoke clears, all six red skeletons, one black, and the odd one are still standing. The blues, yellows, and greens are all down. The reds are presumably fire immune.
At this point, while watching the field, Joe notices that the bones on the ground are vibrating and pulling themselves together. This is an ungood sign. Moonbeam gets some cape buffalo out to go trample the survivors. Joe makes one of them a huge buffalo. Aqila decides to save her spells for the moment. Joe uses Boreal Winds to shatter two red skeletons. And then Sneezil puts his oar in, excitedly telling us that there's a 'no see thing' in the middle of the bone pile about 'ten sneezil's high' up in the air. Joe fairy fires it, revealing an amorphous blob. Moonbeam sends in another buffalo, made huge, and has the two already inbound go in for the trampling. The glassy one seems unaffected but the black one falls apart. The reds go down too. Then the previously destroyed skeleton start trying to rise, so the buffalo keep trampling and knock them back down again. Moonbeam feels a tugging, which is unexplained at the time. Aqila starts moving to deal with the airborne target. A fireball has no obvious effect.
Another buffalo trampling of the remaining skeleton leaves the glassy one apparently untouched. Bones start rising in the bone heap again, and are interrupted by more trampling. Aqila runs full out to get in range to deal with the floating target, with Sneezil following to help. Joe decides to go eagle to help with that and begins the process. A buffalo goring knocks splinters off Mr. Glass, so progress is being made. Joe gets airborne. Moonbeam gets some new buffalos out, as one of her old ones gets dismissed by a temporarily re-assembled then trampled black skeleton. Aqila runs into range to use detect magic on the blob, which is radiating very strong necromancy magic. Big Surprise. As she runs past Mr. Glass, it veers away from her which is unusual and weird. The buffalos keep dancing. Joe dive-bombs the blob to no effect except to feel very cold when he passed through. Aqila tries Dispel Magic on it and only dispels the fairy fire. Joe puts it back up. More buffalo are summoned. Searing light has no visible effect on the blob. Sneezil flies up and gives it a good smack with the ghost-touched dagger Segmund used to have.
Meanwhile, Tervel has been working his way into melee range, since we started well away from the action. Moonbeam gets some fresh buffalo out while the rest keep trampling, goring, and otherwise entertaining dem bones. Aqila tries a magic missile plink and the blob disappears. The bones stop trying to rise. Hooray, progress. Joe tries dive-bombing the last skeleton standing and misses. Moonbeam keeps up the pressure with repeated buffalo impacts, knocking splinters off of Mr. Glass this time. Tervel at last gets into range and with a mighty smite destroys the last target.
The spies in the sky got to watch the whole show. We collect all the bone fragments we can quickly into Joe's backpack with the other assorted monster bits he's been collecting. Time to vamoose. At this point, we're 4 days from the border if we don't do forced marches, or three if we do. We decide to march. As we ride, Eagle Joe entertains himself by potting every spy bird he can. At intervals, he drops down for a Prestidigitation bath and a CLW from Moonbeam. Sneezil gets sword lessons from Tervel and practices the strokes on birds. After an hour the birds start looking 'recycled' as if they're being patched up and sent back in. By evening, the ranks have been thinned considerably. Some high flying incorporeal things are spotted, but they seem to be watchers too. We aren't molested as we sleep.
In the morning, the skies are clear. There is a single bird corpse near the campsite that no one noticed land there with a note tied to it. Due to paranoia, Aqila uses mage hand to unfold the note and Joe reads it through the spy glass. It has only 4 words on it: Turn Back or Die. Yeah, right. Moonbeam encases the corpse in stone so we can transport it for evidence. We hustle. Around noon a dire curse is placed on the party, though Tervel and Moonbeam resist it. We can't do anything about it now, so we keep moving. When we finally camp for the night, Aqila expends most of her energy decursing herself, then gets Joe and Sneezil fixed up too. It really was a dire curse. Nothing attacks that night.
In the morning, we on. We're one day away with a forced march and hustling, and we do. And it was almost not enough. As we come in sight of the border, being a river, two solid figures come into view behind us. They're close enough to catch us before we can cross the river if we don't find some way to slow them down. River crossing plans are for Aqila to featherfall all the non-flyers. Joe will animal growth himself as Ape and toss us across. The horses can swim. Aqila starts unpacking the packhorse into the Bag of Holding to minimize the chances of it losing stuff when it crosses. Joe starts preparing for the big toss. Moonbeam sends in a rhino. It charges into one of the figures, and is stopped dead. Then they kill it, but they had to stop to do that. Moonbeam sends in another rhino. This time the one it hits kills it in one hit, so the other one keeps coming. A purple blob appears. Tervel moves to stand between us and the oncoming things just in case. Moonbeam sends in rhino 3 to slow down the one in the lead. It dies, and now the two figures are together again. Aqila gets tossed over the river and prepares to receive horses. Sneezil flies over to help with that. The horses are shooed into the river. Moonbeam sends in one more rhino, charging at the first figure. It turns to dust on impact. The other figure attacks but doesn't kill the rhino for once. Tervel gets tossed across. Aqila tries searing light because the rhino is still alive then, but misses. The rhino attacks and dies, but delays the remaining thing again. Moonbeam gets tossed. Aqila tries a fireball, to no noticeable effect. Joe is the last man standing on the wrong side of the river and polevaults into Leferia. As he crosses the midpoint of the river, the figure and the purple blob dissolve. Dead or recalled, we don't know. We're out of Asferia at last, hooray.
Moonbeam notices scouts in the scattered trees along the river but doesn't have time to mention that. Since we are in notionally friendly territory, Aqila reminds everyone, herself included, that we are no longer operating under hostile territory rules, so talk first, without fireballing. A voice comments that he's glad to hear that and would we please explain ourselves? They are presumably members of the Teredoran army that's currently occupying Leferia, and would like to know more about the odd things they'd just seen across the river. Aqila states that we have information that we're happy to share and would you take us to your leader? The scout asks for a reason. She shows him her ring. That suffices. We're very tired from our long day, but the camp is an hour off. Unsurprising, though we'll need a good night's sleep to recover. When we arrive, we're greeted by a lieutenant. Aqila perhaps too bluntly explains that while we are happy to share information about what's going on in Asferia, someone higher in the command hierarchy should judge the sensitivity of it. He doesn't seem too offended and we will be talking to the captain in the morning. We get to bunk down in a nice safe spot surrounded by soldiers. Perhaps this time we won't get attacked by assassins in the middle of the night!
In the morning an escort is detailed to take us to the captain. Around midafternoon we reach a fort, seeming to be of rather recent construction. We're taken to see the captain and asked to explain ourselves. Aqila starts the explanation by stating that we were trying to get to Teredor from Seferia, which required crossing Asferia, so we didn't spend a lot of time poking around but we did see things on our way across. Topics covered included the trade road being barricaded by watchtowers, the spy birds, the rumors we heard from the Vanithim, Joe's eyewitness account of what he saw in the forest, the colored skeleton army, and the two things by the river. Joe dumped his backpack out for show and tell, that being where the colored skeleton fragments were stored. The captain decided that the information was sufficiently interesting for us to be sent on to tell it to the general directly. Four days later we reach the port city. Governor General Melker is at the citadel in Lencar, the primary port city of Leferia, a short way up the coast. The locals, on seeing our Teredoran soldier escort, were generally not happy, ranging from downright pissed to merely disgruntled.
We're taken in to see the general. On being asked if he'd like to ask us questions under zone of truth, he indicates that he wants to hear our story now. So, Aqila gives the 'What's been going on in the Ferial' sanitized and abridged version, starting from the beginning. She was down in Seferia looking for anything odd that needed sorted out, and then found more than she wanted to. Met Joe and Moonbeam in an incident whereupon we pissed off the Dragon Temple by killing one of their priestesses who was affected by a shard of the Mad God. As part of pacifying the Temple, we ended up in Stone Bridge and found out they'd hired an Almaeran mage. The general interrupted at this point to ask if it was Fiorino, prompting Aqila to pull the ring out of her bag, whereupon we establish that the general never actually met Fiorino, but the fact that he was infamous enough to have been heard of clear out here is interesting. Continuing on, Aqila hits upon the whole Demon Lord incident, our side trip out to the desert where the Lazeerim are busily self-destructing, and Dobroslaw's attempted assassination. Another interruption here where we find out that the general at least knows of the Duke if not met him before, and he is interested to know if the Duke lived. And on hearing that he died but his son Presmyslaw took over, the general very pointedly asked if the son was in the same mold as the father. Aqila's assessment that this is a true statement made the general very happy. She then mentions the fact that Mykyta tried to have Prezmyslaw arrested, and it stayed 'tried' due to personal intervention, and he was still alive and in charge last she saw. The general seems to be glad to know that.
Then mentioned we went east, didn't say why specifically, related the tale of the priest of Rakan including showing off the trophies taken then, and implied that the whole point of going East was to get close enough to let Moonbeam send a message to her home village to get the heck out of the East before the civil war starts up before going north. Moonbeam then gets to describe what the Dragon Temple's been up to in her neck of the woods. Suppressing and/or killing any non Temple magic users being a big chunk of it. Next covered is our trek across the desert. Joe gets to do a little show and tell on the subject of the monsters we ran into. And now Asferia, largely a repeat of what we'd told the captain already, including showing off the bone bits, the stone-encased dead bird, and speculation about where all the corpses for the undead armies came from. We didn't see a lot of people crossing Asferia, at all.
At this point, the general called in his mage to cast zone of truth. And he has only two questions. One is whether the account we just related was true and complete. Aqila answers that it was true but not complete because there are matters she's not free to talk about. (Valrim, Jahan, the Mad God's temple, and anything about Grozdan, his minions, or his master). And that means the second question is if anything she's not talking about constitutes information that not knowing about would cause harm to his command in particular and Teredoran security in general. She can say to the best of her knowledge that no it won't. The general sends the mage back out of the room then, and speaks a phrase in Ancient that sounds like nonsense to Joe and Moonbeam, but Aqila knows it as a request for an active Sentinel agent to identify themselves. She does. And since her companions don't, he asks her if they know anything. Answer: Enough that their continued safety requires that they stay in her company. Valrim did give that warning several months back.
Now, the general changes tacks, and tells us that while we could probably charter a ship to Teredor tomorrow and pay through the nose for it, there's a military courier leaving in three days and we could be on it, if Aqila answers a question honestly. She'll try, as long as it's not a topic she can’t talk about. He then asks forcefully what the very powerful necromantic artifact that his mage noticed she has is. Since he already knows about it, she explains that it's something nasty, powerful yes, probably powered by several bound demons, and well beyond her ability to dispose of safely, so she's transporting it somewhere where that can happen. Given that trying to do that when you aren't trained might level a city. That answer satisfies him, so we have a ride to Teredor. Aqila belatedly remembers that she completely forgot to mention the Mad God shards, and fills the general in on that mess, including that we hadn't seen them anywhere except West Seferia.
Now, Tervel sticks his oar in and lets us know that our path is now diverging from his so he needs to take his leave. He then requests that Sneezil introduce himself. The imp does so tentatively. Tervel then asks Sneezil who he's going to travel with, him, or the rest of us. Aqila warns Sneezil that we are going to go see a couple of 'big big ones'. Sneezil does have to think about it a minute, but decides that he wants to stay with Tervel. Tervel then asks the general for a pass to let him back through the lines into Asferia because he needs to go deliver a message to Innokenti. The king of Asferia who's behind the whole undead army schtick, presumably. A paladin showing up to tell him to turn from his current path is likely to go over like a lead balloon, but that is a paladin sort of job. We give the two of them going-away presents. Sneezil gets to keep Segmund's ghost touched dagger that he got from Valrim. We officially give Tervel the fire rod, and also caltrops and the stones we got from the Young One. They are similar to the stones Sneezil had been given by Nayden, so he already knows how to use them.
Tervel suggests that Sneezil hide again before they leave the room to cut down on awkward questions, then departs. The general looks at the three of us and in a somewhat baffled tone asks us about the imp. Aqila explains where Sneezil came from rather thoroughly, hitting the important points that he was part of the demon lord sent through early, when it was disrupted, Sneezil was set free, that Sneezil is around 4-5 months old at this point and he's spent a lot of his formative time hanging out with us and lately the paladin. And also the important tidbit that The One seems to have taken an interest in him. The general's reaction is essentially 'I probably should include this in my report but I'm not sure I want to'. He then warns us that while we could go to town to do some shopping, we probably should stay together because we've been seen with Teredoran soldiers and the locals may take our presence amiss. Not that he's worried about us winning any fights, but he doesn't want there to be any at all.
So, we have three days of downtime. Things that go on: Aqila spends three days learning how to cast identify by expending more energy to use fewer pearls. This was done by Joe talking the army mage into letting Aqila borrow his books for a few days in trade for the book of low level abjuration magic she'd picked up back in Stone Bridge. This means we can ID on the cheap all the magic items we've been hauling around since we started heading to East Seferia. We unload the plate mail, the six magic swords, and the shields, then buy arrange to buy 15 pearls for a net profit of 7500 gold. 3-way split. Aqila, when not studying, gets in touch with the local Kantoran priest to see if he can do something about the Rakan priest's rod, presumably his means of communicating with Rakan. The Kantoran allows that he can probably dispose of it and please put it on that table so I don't have to touch it. She does. Then she properly reports Radomil's death and the circumstances of it. The fact that he got his brains scrambled by a shard of the Mad God and essentially committed suicide, and the insane babbling can be seen in the notes he was taking. She then turns them over to the priest. If he has questions, she'll answer them. He never does.
The swords are IDed before we go so we can sell them. 5 plus 1 swords and the assassin's sword did sonic damage. 1k apiece was respectable. The rest of the loot, we examine while on the courier, since it takes us two days to arrive in Ambarel. So, magic items. The robe off the priest of Rakan permits the wearer cast spells as if one caster level higher for one round twice a day. We're still not sure if Aqila or Moonbeam would get the most mileage out of it. The priest's dagger is cursed - if you aren't evil and you wield it, you can't put it down and it saps a level until you put it down. It does, however deal 1d3-1 con damage on a hit, CON save DC 25 to prevent. The abjuration stone the assassin has lets you put up a sanctuary as if you were 20th level once a day. Might be useful. Nayden's ring is interesting and possibly useful for Listens-to-wind. Once you've worn it for 24 hours it works, and if you take it off, you have to reattune it. It gives +1 caster level for all necromancy spells, and restores 1 energy/10 minutes. Very useful for an imbued caster. The catch is, if you take energy damage (cold, fire, elec, sonic, force, positive energy, or negative energy) there's a 10% chance it will drain 1 energy/10 min for a day. So, there is that. Nayden's robes, that were soaked in poison and have been cleaned, are cursed if you aren't evil, applying 2 negative levels and a -3 to all saving throws. If you are evil it gives +3 to saves, +1 caster level, and poison at will. And last but not least, Nayden's pen knife. It's a +1 on something that does 1d2-1 damage. Heh. Good for carving things though. Joe claims it for woodcarving.
Session ends as we debark into the port city of Ambarel in Teredor proper.



We start off by making sure our stories are straight and by figuring out just how we're going to travel north. Going by sea is quickly eliminated - we'd have to go between Almaera and Amerel even if we managed to find a captain willing to carry passengers, and go about 1/3 of the distance we'd have to travel as the crow flies north anyway overland to the port. Cutting cross-country means travelling through the central plains, which are mostly grazing territory. So we'd be more obvious and there would be fewer villages to resupply at. The final route is taking the trade route along the river to the capital then taking the road around the Crystal Sea up to the Elethor border and following it to our destination. The downside is the trade road runs along the river border between Teredor and Aerodon, and the Aerodonese have no qualms about cross-border raiding given the opportunity. On the other hand, it's a more heavily travelled route so we'd be less noteworthy, especially if we find a caravan or something to travel with.
Before debarking, we poll the courier's crew to see if they have any tips as to where to ask for guard work. The general consensus is that we're unlikely to turn anything up, but we're given directions to the area of the city where the major trading houses have offices, and the name of a tavern where smaller traders meet. We decide to spend the morning trying the major houses then break for lunch at the tavern, the end result of which is our being firmly turned away from most establishments, save for one that might have a caravan they'll need more help for...leaving in a month. We don't have that kind of time to wait around. So, we lunch at the tavern. Listens-to-wind pumps the barkeep for information while the other two eat, the sum total being that he might know some people who might be interested in our services, and he should know by evening. We then spend the afternoon buying supplies and eat dinner in a less fancy place than the Inn of the Golden Parrot.
Joe pumps the barkeep at the seedier tavern, and the man sends a runner to put a bug in someone's ear. We find out who shortly thereafter when a somewhat portly man comes in. He allows that he has a small shipment he's transporting to the capital and would see his way to hiring us, particularly if we can shorten his journey. It'd normally take him 88 days to get there, and we could get him there in 44. After some haggling, we agree that if we take the job, the wages are 1 gold 9 silver a day plus a 4 gold bonus for each day we cut off his travel time. We choose not to take the job immediately because we might get a less shady offer from the other tavern. The whole deal feels somewhat greasy. We take a room at the seedy inn and while we stand watches, it's a quiet night.
First thing in the morning, the owner hands Aqila specifically a note. After checking it for trap spells, she reads it. It casts aspersions on Edmao, the merchant we'd last spoken with, stating that his cargoes are suspect and requesting that she come alone to get more information at the Inn of the Golden Parrot where a private room will have been engaged for the discussion. Oookay, then. Since we'd been planning on going back there anyway, the plan is for Aqila to go in first, then Joe and Moonbeam to come in and finish the business we'd started the day before. They would then be on hand if they need to play cavalry. Joe is entrusted with keeping the bag of holding safe while Aqila is talking to strangers, since you aren't getting it back easily from a wildshaped druid in a pinch.
It turns out that the precaution probably was necessary. When she walks in, the barkeep directs her to one of the private rooms. There are three chairs in there, two facing the door, one facing the window. She pulls one around to the side where she can watch both and waits. A few minutes later a voice outside requests that she not react badly because they have no quarrel with her at the moment, though they did get her there under false pretenses. It is then somewhat less surprising when a man wearing a light blue veil enters the room followed by a man wearing a black veil. She remembers from classes on the subject that Mr. Blue would be rather low ranked, and Mr. Black would be one of the highest ranking – given the location, almost certainly the head of the Teredoran Order. Mr. Black, who had been the previous speaker, then stated that the Ferial branch of the Veiled Order had been requesting for him to either have the three of us killed or let them send assassins to do the deed. He then notes that his brethren hadn't been offering near enough for him to accede to their request to operate in his territory, but he is now curious as to what we did to get the collective noses of the Ferial Order out of joint. He also does mention that Edmao is known to move shady goods, but they don't have any specific information on his current cargo.
Since these guys would find some very interesting things if they inspected us too closely, there is quite a bit of incentive to give them no reason to look more closely. Taking a tack to play up Mr. Black's prejudices concerning his Ferial brethren, Aqila spins a story whereupon Duke Dobroslaw took our part for his own reasons when we annoyed the Dragon Temple, and so we were available to do him a service later, and while we were off doing that, someone tried to kill him. There were rumors that the Veiled Order had been involved, and while Aqila attempted to investigate subtly, an Inquisitor the Kantorans asked to assist her was about as unsubtle as humanly possible. This caused the local Veiled order members to freak out and try to kill her companions that hadn't even been in the area, an attempt that they did not survive, and thus proving that there actually was an active chapter of the Order there, which we wouldn't have known had they done nothing. So, they've been trying to have us killed to hide the fact that they were incompetent idiots.
This story amuses Mr. Black, and he comments that he is not inclined to let the Ferial crew send assassins after us now, but he does have one more question. They had offered 'new information about creating life' to Mr. Black as part of the payment to get him to let them operate on his turf. He's curious as to whether they have anything. Making a deductive leap, Aqila guesses that the walking stomachs in the desert are the result of Veiled Order experiments and describes them accurately as being primitive and short lived, furthering Mr. Black's contempt of his Ferial brethren. He thanks her for her information by a description of an assassin he's made use of in the past and likely to be the one in the price range of the Ferial branch, should they choose to act against us anyway. A physical fighter with a lot of experience and quite a bit of hardware to help him with his job choice, including bracers that he needs to feed fresh blood once a month. Lovely. Mr. Black asks that Aqila wait a few minutes before leaving while he and his associate depart. She sees no reason not to do so.
Meanwhile, Joe and Moonbeam made contact with the bartender and get a useful message. Not only is there someone who maybe, possibly, would hire us, he's willing to pony up 15 gold each to ensure we'll still be there at noon tomorrow to talk to him. This sounds like a good thing, at least better than taking twice as long to cover the same distance we need to travel any way with a possible shady merchant. We don't need any avoidable problems, thank you. We give our regrets to Edmao and then occupy ourselves for the day. Aqila makes sure her notes are up to date after the chat with the Veiled Order. Moonbeam goes shopping.
After perusing most of the shops in search of a handy haversack or a bag of holding and not finding anything available, or not available soon, she crosses the threshold of a seedy pawn shop with a sign requesting that no one use divination magic inside the premises. The proprietor has a front room with maybe magical maybe not items and a back room with known magical items that are much more expensive. 3k gold each. The owner apparently either has trouble getting people to ID items, isn't willing to pay for the service, or isn't sure how to not get ripped off. Moonbeam smells opportunity and comes up with a neat plan where everyone wins. To whit, she offers to have a look at all the unknown items and tell the owner which ones are magical, and what type. She will also ask Aqila to specifically ID two of the items. One of those will be her payment for the services rendered. The owner gets to know precisely what items he has that are known to be enchanted, and what type of enchantment they have, as well as knowing exactly what one of the remaining items is.
This project takes the rest of the day and the next morning. Some things that could be interesting include a few rings, a necklace, pipes, clothes taken from a thief, and so on. The strongest magics are on one of the rings, the pipes, and the necklace. Since none of us can play pipes with any proficiency, Aqila IDs the ring and the necklace, finding them to be a necklace of fireballs and a +2 AC ring. Moonbeam claims the ring, and we head back to the Inn of the Golden Parrot to meet up with Joe and be interviewed by the merchant.
We find that the merchant is a gem merchant who would like to get to the capital in a month, which we can help with, as long as everyone's on horseback. It's twenty-two days with wind-at-back. He then asks for some bona fides since we are to him complete unknowns. Aqila volunteers that her uncle is the current patriarch of the Bordeaux clan along the great river, and her father had married a woman from 'up north' and moved to her clan. That suffices for the moment. He's leaving in two hours and we're to meet him in at the north gate, which we do. His other guards are eight veterans from the Teredoran army. Aqila recognizes that some of them, the older ones, have awards signifying that they served in the last major war with Aerodon.
After an hour's march we're far enough from the city to be less conspicuous when the giant eagle takes up his job as eyes in the sky. The other guards only comment that it's nice to have a druid who's proactive for once instead of waiting for trouble to come to him. The trip is speedy and uneventful. Well, there were two attacks by over-achieving bandits, but they didn't end well for them. The first group of four ambushers neglected to look up. And the large band had a whole 3 survivors turned in to the next outpost we passed. We each made 171 gold off of that trip when we reached the capital, Temaleth on the Crystal Sea. At this point, we need to pick up cold weather gear before continuing on. Endure elements needs some help where we're going. There's not a lot of ready-made gear around. The only shop selling frost wolf cloaks is horribly overpriced from Aqila's perspective and they trimmed the fur to make it look 'pretty', rendering it markedly less protective from the cold. We end up going with wool suits and cloaks which should be good enough to get us where we're going, from the more expensive but better quality tailor. Twenty-five gold apiece. Aqila makes a point to look around to get some candied fruit for reasons of her own, and finds some apples.
We get a good night's sleep then keep going. After eleven days we sell the horses in what is likely the last sizable village before we hit the Elethor border. The assassin that Aqila had described to her by the Veiled Order leader is waiting for us on the road later that day. Joe spots him before he sees us and after a quick discussion, we decide to just deal with him rather than play tag with him the whole way to Arandor. We move to fireballing range, then Aqila uses whispering wind to advise the assassin to buzz off. IE we know who he's working for and we're more trouble than he's being paid for. He outright states that he isn't working for the Ferial Veiled Order and he's not going to cry off. He then drinks a potion and vanishes.
Aqila had a fireball readied and nukes the spot he was in. Joe, watching from above, sees the assassin blink into existence behind Aqila and Moonbeam. The assassin decides the giant bird is the biggest threat and throws something that acts like a fire grenade at Joe. He's pretty well scorched but still in the fight. Aqila, hearing the commotion behind her, spots the assassins and let's fly with arcane bolts, but feels him resist half of them, and warns the others of that fact. Moonbeam sends in a rhino. Joe dives in to join the party. The assassin beats the poor rhino almost to death. Aqila tries to dispel magic on the assassin and fails to get anything. Moonbeam adds another rhino to the party, but neither of them manage to land a hit on the slippery character. Joe does a rapid turn around and flies in to attack again, successfully grabbing the assassin by his shoulders, which lets him pick the guy up. The now panicking assassin tries dimension door to escape. They both end up 800 feet away. Aqila puts up expeditious retreat and starts running over to see if she needs to help with anything. Moonbeam gives out some rhino scritches. Joe flies up and drops the assassin, and gets to see him splat, get knocked out, then regain consciousness and heal visibly, which won't do at all. The assassin's last sight in the world was a giant eagle getting bigger faster. Aqila arrives in time to help loot the corpse.
That evening, Aqila starts IDing loot and this continues in the evening until everything is known. It's five days from the assassin fight to get right to the Arandor border so there was time to check everything of interest. The gauntlets granted +2 strength. The bracers were the ones the Veiled Order mentioned, giving your weapons a bonus as if they were a size larger, but if you don't feed them monthly with the blood of a fresh killed sentient, they become cursed and reverse the effect until fed. The greatsword was +2 and keen. The plate mail was +1, the ring was +1 AC, the other ring was +15 fire resistance, the boots were +1 agility and once a day allowing double movement speed for a minute, the stone allows for fast healing 20 for two minutes once a day, the other stone granted blur for a minute, and the belt gives a constant haste effect. So some things we can use and some we can't.
The next day we reach the border and are met by one of the local guards, who lets us know that we were expected and that we're to take the line from Tireth to Valanas. Moonbeam and Joe don't know what he's talking about. Aqila assures them that they'll have to see it to believe it. We get directions to the nearest keep on the way to Tireth. Before heading off, Aqila remembers that she did have a message to pass on, and upon finding that none of the dragons in the border patrol were nearby, asked the guard to pass it on next time he saw one, specifically, that Zalakirinal of the Ferrial gives greetings to the elders, and Aqila would personally like to add that the gift from him was one of the reasons we all made it to Arandor.
As we approach the keep, the watch dogs come to keep an eye on us. Picture 200lbish heavily muscled black dogs wearing armor backed up by unarmored light tan speed-demons. Aqila makes sure Moonbeam and Joe know to stay on the path and that they need to be on company manners here, like in the Kethorim tents. Keep your weapons with you at all times, in other words. We're met at the main entrance of the keep by one who is probably a senior member of the clan living there, who invites us to dinner after Aqila introduces herself and mentions that she's under orders to report to Valanas via Tireth. Moonbeam and Joe observe the keep has outer walls easily ten feet thick.
At dinner, conversation is mostly about our adventures down south, anything that isn't 'under seal' at the moment. Dinner itself is meat, bread, assorted sauces, and water for drinking in a large hall where the entire clan can eat together. Unfortunately for the druid, he does not recognize what the sauces are, and he slathers his sandwich from the same pot Aqila and Moonbeam dip into. Upon his taste-buds informing him that he'd been a little too enthusiastic with the horseradish, the shock triggers an instinctive shift into...octopus, which lacks tastebuds inside its beak for one and can grab eight glasses of water at once for two. Aqila asks our host resignedly if he would of kindness overlook the druid's 'peculiarities' as he's unused to spending much time in civilization. Joe dumps her water glass on her head before changing back to apologize for the disturbance. Prestidigitation fixes that problem and it is suggested that the druid use the garlic or fish sauce henceforth.

The party's introduction to Arandoran cuisine. Lots of meat, lots and lots of seasoning, bland chewy bread. Garlic and fish sauces are the mild ones.

After dinner, it is time for rest and recreation before bedtime, and thus, the puppies are unleashed. The roiling scrum of puppies, sturdy ropes, and children envelops Joe and Moonbeam who are happy to blow off some steam. Aqila asks for and gets the last few issues of Field Notes, which she curls up happily in a chair with to read, with the help of whatever puppies/kids decide that her lap is a good spot to nap. The Notes cover the usual amusing anecdotes from field agents and the usual list of deaths at the end. Ones of rarer and particular note are a few in the Dragon Confederation and one presumed dead in Nieribar. One never sees 'amusing anecdotes', only death notices, from those locations. After a comfortable night in the guest lodgings, we keep traveling. After four days travelling from keep to keep, we reach Tireth.
Tireth is a huge city built into a mountain, and its massive walls are its most obvious feature. At the ground level entrance, we're met, told that we were expected, that Taran, the lord of the citadel wants to speak to us and we're to place ourselves at his disposal. This isn't something Aqila was expecting, at least. We are taken directly to the throne room where we can see paired thrones with a male and a female Atenil seated on them. The first one, Taran, states that he wanted to meet the one responsible for the breaking of one of their longest held laws and then comments that perhaps one day he will get to find out why we had to travel as fast as we could overland from the Ferial to here. He then gives us each a token which Moonbeam and Joe shortly find out are to let us onto an underground train. The ride to Valanas takes two days. One day to the next citadel up the line where Aqila's sister lives and one day to our final destination.
When we get off the train, we're met and told we're to go before the rulers immediately. There is a pause in the antechamber where we are warned that it would be unwise to use divination spells inside. Aqila has a brief, painful, flashback to Jahan's lair. Inside, it seems obvious that this throneroom was the model for the one we saw in Tireth. Inside there is an Atenil couple seated on the twin thrones, flanked by another male and female pair, one of whom we've met before. The family resemblance is clear - we're meeting Valrim's parents and his sister. Mirarn, the lord of Valanas, addresses us first, requesting that Aqila lay out the artifacts we recovered on the table. (the player was too tired to remember, but Aqila would have mentioned that we got them out of a semi-active temple of the Mad God here). She starts with the orb, which doesn't excite any special comment, then pulls the suspiciously inactive splinter out of the spell component pouch she hid it in and lays that out. Valrim walks over to look at it more closely, then asks Aqila if she knows what that is. On hearing her negative, he looks back at his parents and asks if he should explain, and on confirmation from Mirarn that we've earned it, he does.
There were five Ancient citadels. Each one had a key, a staff that would open all the store rooms inside. The staff of Valanas is held by its ruler. The staff of Tarevale is utterly destroyed. The staff of Reshak-Nasar is lost. Angrenore's staff is possessed by the great enemy. And the staff of Ambar, which was located in the midst of the Chaos continent and whose destruction caused the unholy mess that currently is the Chaos lands, was thought to be either destroyed or lost. The splinter is part of that staff and suggests that it wasn't destroyed but shattered, and may be recoverable. And if so, having the key to Ambar's still intact storerooms may hold the key to finally unraveling the terrible mess of the Chaos lands and healing them at long last. The spellbooks and the shards of 'Jahan's crown' are a bit anticlimactic after that and excite no further commentary.

Enter what became the central quest of the campaign - tracking down the pieces and rebuilding the staff. With plenty of sidelines as players chose to follow up on things they learned along the way.

Next on the agenda is determining, now that Aqila has successfully completed her first mission, which branch organizations she will be primarily affiliated with. She finds out that all four would be willing to accept her, but the Book would prefer she have a little more seasoning first. Aqila knows that the Book is the research arm, the Eye blends into different regions and watches for trouble, the Shield primarily tries to keep a lid on known trouble spots, and the Sword gets to deal with anything 'interesting' that pops up. Hunting demons and monsters and rogue mages and necromancers...wait, that was our trip through the Ferial! Aqila notes that she already has a brother in the Book and the Shield, and given that our adventures down south weren't exactly 'low profile', the Sword is probably the proper place for her.
At this point, Moonbeam and Listens-to-wind are formally thanked for aiding Aqila without being compelled to help in any way. They are offered the chance to be considered associates of the Sentinel Order, meaning they'll get support on par with what full agents receive, albeit some of the shiniest items will still be reserved. The only 'catch' is the requirement to abide by a code, which boils down to no making or commanding undead, no using blood magic from others, no using magic to twist living beings, and not using magic to compel another against their will, and opposing those who do do such things. They aren't asked for an immediate decision since it is a big thing to think about, but are asked to try to be back by the summer solstice and to decide by then.
Joe starts making plans to visit his family. Moonbeam might travel with him, or find out what this greenhouse Aqila speaks of is. Aqila is going to enjoy some serious downtime with her clan.
For when we resume - deciding what spells to learn over our six month break, skills to work on, and what nice items to request as rewards for surviving all the fun in the Ferial.

Terane
2020-03-17, 05:16 PM
Second session in March introduced another new player. He mostly stayed through the rest of the campaign, though attendance got a little spotty towards the end due to family demands on his time.
Character was Dagnar. Spellsword - another custom class, not the 3.5 prestige class of the same name. This was also by far the most complicated of the custom classes - basic chassis was a kind of hybrid fighter/mage/rogue, not particularly good in any role. At 1st and every even level pick a training focus (magic, martial, or stealth), improving abilities in that area. And all special abilities were linked to the number of training focuses of different types, not to level - the number of possible ways to build a spellsword was utterly insane. In retrospect, this was a poor design, and a terrible class for someone completely new to D&D to try playing.


We resume six months in game time after the end of the last session. It's now September and a good time to be leaving the snowy north for warmer climes, which is what we will be doing. Listen's to Wind and Moonbeam spent most of our downtime hanging out at his place with his wife and daughter, with Moonbeam learning Sylvan and how to fly. Joe found a golden eagle to awaken as a companion who is likely to have an aptitude for learning magic too. Aqila split her time between the alchemy lab, the library, and chores around the keep. We are summoned to Valanas to be briefed for our first mission officially working for the Sword arm of the Sentinel. The fact that Valrim is the one giving the briefing, given he's the commander of the entire Sword, is a bit disquieting. Another Sentinel agent is there, who we find out is called Dagnar and has been assigned to work with us for this mission, since stealth is likely to be required and the rest of us aren't known for that quality.
Our primary mission is to find a piece of the staff of Ambar that is somewhere in the vicinity of Chalisce. We are not to discuss this even with other Sentinel agents to minimize the chances that the Enemy finds out that the staff still exists and is reconstructable. It is a lot easier to fix something when other people aren't actively trying to break it. Aqila is given custody of the iron splinter that we recovered from the Ferial and warned strongly not to lose it. We will all be taught a cantrip that uses the splinter to roughly locate the nearest staff piece if we're close enough. The closer we are, the more precise the direction. Additionally, Aqila will be taught a spell to 'quiet' the spinter down so it doesn't react badly to dimensional magic used in its vicinity. Unfortunately, it is too complex to teach anyone but Aqila. It may work on a whole piece, but probably not as well. Taking the splinter through a teleport is still strongly contraindicated. Finally, we will all be taught a cantrip that will allow a person to definitively ID another Sentinel agent. Each ring is made specifically for the agent, so if the person doesn't have the special ring, or one that is not made for them, something fishy is going on.
Our cover for being in the area is our secondary mission. A demon summoner is binding succubi for sale to wealthy nobles, guaranteeing them to be unable to harm their buyer. He is the current most likely candidate to be behind the blood magic being used in Chalisce. There is no definitive proof that he is using it, but a combination of an army of succubi and blood magic would permit a person to do some truly horrible things, so if we get proof that he's dabbling, we're to kill him. But only with proof. If he's innocent of blood magic use, we're to find out who is responsible and take them out. Available evidence suggests there could be as many as three people involved, because there are three distinct signatures observed. This doesn't mean that it isn't just one person hiding their tracks, or more than three, which will make for a fun job unraveling what's really going on.
To gather information on the known demon seller, Valrim suggests we go under cover. And the chaos we were involved in down south suggests a likely story. Listens-to-wind will pose as wastrel spend-thrift noble son from the Ferial, sent overseas to get him away from the fighting. Aqila will be his court mage/tutor assigned to keep him out of trouble. Moonbeam will be his personal shaman, assigned to keep him in good health, and Dagnar will pose as his bodyguard, assigned to keep him in one piece. Or at least few enough pieces for Moonbeam to put back together. The reasoning behind this is the summoner is paranoid about letting spellcasters into his stronghold. No mage can pass the wards without setting them off. Spellswords use arcane magic, and will likely trip the wards. Likewise, as a natural caster, a shaman likely will as well. But, a druid is an imbued primal caster and may be invisible to the wards. So, the druid will pose as a buyer, but is emphatically not to actually buy a demon, and see if he can determine if blood magic is being used.
We'll be taking an Arandoran ship to an island near the chaos continent, then getting passage in the appropriate direction. When we get to Chalisce, we'll be met by a local agent who'll give us any new details he's been able to scare up. Aqila is then given a stone to be used after we've completed both missions to call our ride home, and strongly cautioned not to lose it, as anyone examining it would be able to figure out what it is. As a final warning, we're forbidden to enter the true chaos lands unless the only other option is dying. Not that going there is a good way to avoid dying anyway. Next on the agenda - getting dress-up clothes for our impersonation and a briefing on the Foulness.
The gist of the briefing is that summoning fae in the Foulness is contraindicated. Summoned fae are liable to go insane. Native fae already are, twisted, warped, or otherwise messed up. It's a bad idea to interact with them other than by using violence to protect oneself. The other major issue is pockets where magic itself is warped. Spells may be weaker or stronger than normal, nonfunctional, have unexpected effects, etc. And then there are pockets of surging power that if you use that power, you're likely to go insane. If you don't, your spells are drastically weakened. And there's generally already something living there that does use the surging power. This of course does not make the druid happy at all.
Next, we hit the tailor for fancy clothes and gauds and then take the train to the port and take ship to our duty. The first leg of the voyage is fifteen days, over which Joe gets accent lessons from Moonbeam, a native of the Ferial, and deportment lessons from Dagnar. Dagnar had most recently been on a rotation keeping an eye on Almaera, so he has had recent first-hand experience with the noble culture and how a rich brat would likely walk and carry himself. Aqila buried her nose in a spellbook to pass the time and kept the eagle company while Joe was busy. She also would have passed on to Dagnar the stories of all the fun we had down in the Ferial so he had a better idea of just how much trouble he's in now, leaving Dagnar to wonder just what he did to deserve this punishment detail. The list of deities and organizations we've pissed off in just six months is long and distinguished. There is desultory discussion on how we could conduct our investigation as well. Various summons that could be used to search for signs of blood magic are discussed, as is the idea of using baleful polymorph to get one of us inside. One of us being Dagnar, since he's not the mage with Break Enchantment, the Shaman with Baleful Polymorph or the druid who's going to be posing at the buyer, thus confirming Dagnar's suspicions that he must have really annoyed someone to get assigned this task.
We disembark quietly in the early morning and start heading to town when we're intercepted by a peculiar character. A completely average physical appearance, forgettable, wearing a dingy, might once have been white robe, is what we see. What we hear is rather disturbing. He starts off by asking us if we've traveled far. Aqila states that we have been travelling, and asks why he's asking. He then appears to be talking to himself, commenting that he has been waiting for someone and he thinks we're them. He then proceeds to accurately ID our party as a druid, shaman, and two agents, furthering already twinging paranoia. And then for the icing on the cake, he tells us that he has something for us that we'll need when we find what we are seeking. Given that only 7-8 people on the planet are supposed to know that we're looking for something, and 4 of them are right here, that is really nervous-making. He then gives a teardrop shaped bottle to Moonbeam, and when she examines it with detect magic, it seems profoundly unmagical. And then the detect magic spell fails, long before it should wear off. At this point, all we can do is politely thank him, at which point he finishes the surreal encounter by giving us a blessing of the One before leaving.
We then make our way to the port, where Joe gets to get into character. First stop is picking an appropriate inn to stay at, then the party splits up. Moonbeam picks what seems to be an appropriate tavern to start with, and the carousing commences. Aqila heads down to find out what ships are in or are expected in to arrange for passage. A ship that will be sailing to Chalisce is expected in that afternoon, and will leave after resupplying. Aqila goes back to the inn to write up a note to be sent back Arandorward about our interesting encounter this morning whenever she can get it sent, then when afternoon hits, makes arrangements for passage. We'll be leaving the day after next on the morning tide.
Meanwhile, Joe is working on the 'spending copious amounts on wine, women and song' shtick. There are a few mercenary wenches at the tavern, so the 'picking up girls' part goes smoothly. Joe experiments with seeing if he can get his bodyguard set up with a girl as well. A second tavern is hit up, then a tour of the tourist shops to get an appropriately gaudy present for the lady. And after drinking pretty much all day, when Joe heads back to the inn to pretend to pass out, his new lady friend isn't far behind. Moonbeam gets to do a Pepper Potts impression in the morning.
To stay in character, Joe waits until after noon this time, then the carouse resumes, and Aqila can't weasel out of it this time. Moonbeam takes pity on her and picks out the least potent drink in the tavern for her to nurse while Joe makes a spectacle of himself. The mage's service is limited to prestidigitation hair care, ranging from a nice copper to lime green with purple stripes. This time, he decides to up the ante by experimenting with mixing his own drinks. Part of the entertainment is seeing if people will try his concoctions, and how they react afterwards. The Flaming Lamborghini is invented, with Moonbeam providing the flame. As night has fallen, the ante is upped drastically by rolling a barrel outside and making a crowd sized flaming Lamborghini, complete with a light show provided by some shaman summons. Joe gets two girls to follow him home this time, and both are sufficiently sloshed to pass out rapidly, preserving Joe's appearance of a lout without him doing something that might get him in trouble at home later.
We take ship without incident, and three days later we reach Chalisce in early afternoon. The most notable features are the bay, which is almost perfectly circular, and the local architecture. "Old' Chalisce is mainly heavily built stone forts with tall towers. There was limited building space when the city was first founded, so architecture tended to be more vertical. There is a region of less sturdily built housing in a belt around the old city. It's still very sturdy, just not quite fortress level. Then there are the outer fortifications for the outer ring.
We had been told before we left what inn to take rooms at, so we could make contact with the local agent, who is posing as a jewelry seller. Rooms being reserved, it's time to resume building our cover. A minor carouse is embarked on, then Joe realizes that if he picks up a girl, it will make meeting our contact awkward. So, the simple solution is to pretend to claim Aqila for his pick-up girl, grab a bottle of wine, and then we retire back to the inn, where our contact arrives on schedule.
The briefing starts with a map of the fortress the demonist lives in. The information is drawn largely from its layout under the former owner. Some redecorating is sure to have occurred, but major structural changes aren't as likely. The demonist appears to always meet with his clients in what was the main hall, on the ground floor. No information has been obtained about the uses to which the upper levels have been put. Best guess is that, for reasons of space, his laboratory will be either in what was the nursery, on the second level, or the older children’s room on the third. The latter seems more likely, as the library was on the third floor, and is likely where he keeps his tomes, which he would want readily available while working. The lord and lady’s bedchamber is probably where he sleeps, also on the third floor. He's got a pack of hellhounds roaming between the outer wall and the tower. He has a demon for a butler that looks very formidable. When he meets with customers, he always has two succubi with him. Our contact confirms that no mage can breach the wards without alarms going off. How they go off is unclear, but any attempt to enter is met by the hell-hound pack. Another interesting point of information is that the demonist has made arrangements with one of the local protection guilds not for protection, but that in the event that something unfortunate befalls him, the guild has been paid well to avenge him. Oh well, in that event, we already have a lot of people who'd like our heads. They can get in line.
As for the rest of the briefing, no, there is no proof yet that the demonist is using blood magic. And pinning down exactly what's happening is suspiciously difficult. There are no first hand accounts to be had, only people who heard the story from an eyewitness. They may actually be eyewitnesses who had their memory messed with so they think they heard about it rather than saw it, but there's no way to tell without examining them more closely than is practical. The story generally goes that a beautiful woman goes into a bar, picks up a guy, who is never seen again, at least alive. The woman never looks the same twice, and even if there are two stories from the same event, the woman still looks different to different observers. The men are either disappeared, found dead, found dead and withered, and so on. There are fewer stories that are much less clear of women being taken, but those aren't necessarily related.
The fact that blood magic is being used is obvious from sightings of 'hunters' created of blood and torn souls of victims, but who they are hunting is unknown. On two occasions, sentinel informers were taken, and those two each were the only informer in the bar at the time of their disappearance. It is very interesting/frustrating that no sentinel agent or informer has seen an incident in person. Aqila advances the theory that the whole thing may be an orchestrated attempt to catch Sentinel agents, since our opposition to blood magic is known. The contact notes that such things have happened before. We could be about to get into a game of Spy vs Spy, in other words.
Session ends here due to 4am.



Since we forgot to pick out undercover names last session, we fix that oversight this time. Joe is 'Borys', Moonbeam is 'Natalka', Dagnar is 'Demyen', and Aqila is 'Zoya'.
We pick up where we left off, finishing our meeting with our local Sentinel Agent contact, Saba, in Chalisce the evening of the day we got into town. Aqila gave him a letter to be sent back up-chain detailing our encounter with the weird old guy back on the island. Dagnar inquired if it was possible that his magical aura spell could be used to deliberately set of the mage's wards, which was thought to be possible to trigger the alarm that way. Listens-to-Wind wanted to know what had happened to people who tried to break in to the mage's tower before. Our contact could tell us that in all the confirmed cases of people trying to break in, they didn't get very far and were escorted off premises. Of three people who were thought to have made the attempt, they all disappeared, but there was no proof that they did actually make the attempt. Further information we got was that there are at least 6 hellhounds guarding the grounds, that the price for an unrestrained succubus is 15,000 gold, and that the price for a restrained one is unknown. Also, it is known that when a succubus is sold, it is bound by a contract that expires when its buyer dies, leaving the demon free to go home.
When the question of how Joe in his persona of Spoiled Brat Borys of the Ferial can plausibly learn about the demonbinder, we are told that the guy does advertise his wares, and also what the contact protocol is. We're further told that people who violate those protocols are not dealt with again. Perhaps indicating that he either has more than enough customers or he doesn't need money that badly. Joe is handed a packet explaining how to use the secure message and money transfer systems in Chalisce, since those are the required avenues to deal with the demon binder, and our contact takes his leave.
We now begin plotting our next move. Instead of sending a message to the mage right off, it might be less suspicious if 'Borys' demonstrates that he's bored with the local girls, and has some time to be told/learn about his service. So, the next day, in the afternoon, we start with a visit to a strip club. Midrange price, in the wealthy quarter, not one of the exclusive clubs. 'Borys' leads the way to the bar and buys himself and his entourage a round of Unicorn Farts. The foam continually changes colors. Aqila resolves to make the drink last the entire evening. Then 'Borys' buys the club a round of drinks to stay in character and perhaps lubricate some tongues. Which works. We get to hear some lurid tales, from 'a friend of a friend heard from a friend' 4th hand sources, of disappearances, and a few of the dancers volunteered that a few of the local bars were making them nervous, as if something invisible was staring at them. Borys also chats up another rich idiot and gets a recommendation for a club he might enjoy, some place called ‘Endless Fantasies’. Meanwhile, Dagnar has been doing his bodyguard duty, and notices that a few people are watching patrons and not dancers, albeit subtly. He decides to use the 'wow my boss is an idiot but the pay is good' ploy to see if he can talk shop with them. Watcher 1 rudely rebuffs him with a sneer of 'you think I'd tell you who I'm working for', but Watcher 2 is a bit more laid back. On being told that 'the boss likes the exotic', Watcher 2 suggests a bar that on comparing notes later, we find is one of the bars that made the dancers nervous.
The evening concludes with a round of Abuse The Mage, specifically, abuse the prestidigitation spell. Borys polls the dancers as to what color he should be now. About an hour later he is about 192 different colors in increasingly smaller patches. Borys heads back to the hotel with four well lubricated dancers and his entourage. Moonbeam gets to play 'Pepper' in the morning as usual, which mostly consists of making sure each girl gets an appropriate gratuity from the slush fund. Then we convene for our next debate on what to do next. We have 1 recommendation from a rich idiot, and two bars where the girls were getting creeped out, one of which was also recommended by Watcher 2. The conclusion is that checking out the rich idiot recommendation first would be most in character.
We find out that we are visiting a club with an 80 gold cover charge. Inside, we discover a very 'exotic' strip club. The dancers have been transformed via magic into a variety of forms, incorporating fur, feathers, scales, and other less mundane items. Dagnar and Moonbeam notice a few people, possibly bodyguards, pointing 'Borys' out to their patrons. Why is unclear, as we have insufficient data to speculate. Dagnar proactively scans the area with detect magic, picking up on various patrons wearing magic items and of course transmutation magic on the dancers. A few have minor enchantment spells, but they seem to be in the category of calming spells rather than anything inimical.
As a way to subtly pay back Joe for the aggravations on this mission to date, Dagnar buys him a lap dance from a leopard girl. The mage adjusts a girl's appearance to suit then and there. Whether the guy is an employee or the owner isn't known or relevant. Borys establishes that this flavor of exotic is not to his taste, and leaves with his entourage not long after. Working down the list, we hit up ‘Simple Treasures’, the bar recommended to Dagnar and find that it is also a discrete bordello. Here, we change tactics a little bit. Each table seems to have its own dedicated waitress, and the ladies in the room range from relaxed to noticeably jumpy. We split up so the guys have their own table and Moonbeam and Aqila might have a chance to perhaps solicit information about the weirdness, picking a table with a jumpy waitress.
Moonbeam gets the lady to open up a bit, and we get a few details on the weirdness. Apparently, some of them have been hearing invisible wings flapping and other unseen creepy incidents. Aqila remembers that she has this nifty cantrip called message and sets up a 4-way conversation so all four of us can talk, even at different tables. Since Dagnar can use detect magic and see invisible without being obvious that he's casting, he decides to take a turn around the bar, ostentatiously and really checking out the layout, entrances and exits, as well as scanning for anything hanging out invisibly. While he's doing that, Borys starts chatting up Takara, his waitress and having a nice time buying her drinks, which she subtly makes sure he gets most of. Dagnar doesn't find anything out of place, and joins the girls table for some downtime. We more or less settle in for the evening. About 5 hours later, we hear wings flapping.
Before anyone has a chance to do anything, a cheerful voice that is eminently familiar to three of us chirps 'Brightfriend!'. Aqila tries hard not to react and frantically recasts message to include a certain invisible imp. She then asks Sneezil to not be so loud and tells him that we are playing a quiet game to find people using bad magic. Sneezil whispers back that he's helping Tervel look for a very bad thing and he's watching in six places. Tervel is apparently on the other side of the harbor. It seems rather unlikely that whatever has Tervel in town isn't related to what we're investigating, under the circumstances, but it would seem wise to make sure. We hang out a while longer so as to not have our leave-taking associated with strange voices out of thin air. Joe helps by pretending to be more inebriated than he really is, so he has an excuse to not bring any women back to the hotel, and the rest of us have a reason to leave, helping 'young sir' hotelward. Aqila tells Sneezil where we are hanging our hats in case he needs to find us for something.
Back in our rooms, Aqila 'sends' a message to Tervel, boiling down to 'Hi, we're in town undercover looking for blood magic users. Might be up to three groups. Saw Sneezil. Want to meet up and compare notes?' He terse reply was 'Not soon. Sneezil will arrange.' And after that eventful evening, it's time for bed. The next day we decide it's time to get the ball rolling on investigating the demon binder. Dagnar delivers the message to the appropriate service company. Then, to reinforce the image that Borys is bored, we wander around town a bit and let Soars over Mountains stretch his/her wings, and not coincidently, get a birds-eye view of the mage's tower. We don't need to get close on the ground. The golden eagle's report was useful, seeing four hell-hounds on the grounds, the mage's library is in the same room the previous owner's was, what looks like a workroom is in the old children's room, with workbenches holding things the eagle can't describe with any accuracy. Glass tubes, crystals, bubbling things, etc. The final interesting information is about the roof. There was a trap door that has been thoroughly blocked off, and the roof is tinted red. Some sort of trap seems likely.
We get a reply though the message service that evening that the mage would be happy to meet with a new customer, but to make sure his guards will let you through, you need to provide a vial of blood or a prized possession, which will be destroyed as part of the spell to ID you to the guards. No one, Joe most explicitly included, wants him to send a vial of blood. The sorts of interesting things you can do with an enemies blood isn't a short list. However, a substitute isn't too hard to find. Joe's been hauling dragon teeth around for almost a year now. If a trophy from a successful hunt doesn't count as a 'prized possession', it'll be a surprise. The reply is sent back. The next day Borys spars with Demyan in a way that emphasizes his incompetence with his rapier and the fact that he's just blowing off steam rather than actually practicing. And the reply arrives that day - Borys will be expected to arrive around the tenth hour the next day. So midafternoon.
We spend the rest of the day preparing. This includes finding an appropriate spider. The plan: Borys will find out what he can talking to the demon binder. Succubi can read minds, so he's going to have to work hard to stay in character mentally as well as verbally. He'll try to string out the meeting as long as possible. Meanwhile, since it's vanishingly unlikely that any of the rest of us will be invited/allowed in, we have an opportunity. Moonbeam has baleful polymorph, Aqila has break enchantment, invisibility, spider climb, and major image, leaving Dagnar to be the designated guinea pig. Or in this case, designated flying squirrel. We need to get eyes on the mage's working places to find out if he's responsible for any of the blood magic going on. The safest time to do that is when we know that he's not in his workroom. And a form that can move quietly and bypass the hell-hounds, hopefully without setting off any alarms, is required.
So, we set out machinations into action, and arrive at the stronghold. Aqila puts a stalker's brand under Borys's hair to make sure we get our idiot back and not a succubus in disguise. Borys goes to the door alone and knocks. He's met by a 7' tall being that seems to be made of fire and obsidian. Joe has no idea what it is. The 'butler' states that the master is expecting him. Borys goes in and finds the binder in what's probably a receiving room, flanked by two beautiful women. After allowing himself to be appropriately distracted by the merchandise, Borys explains that he's bored already by the local talent and he heard the demon binder was selling something more interesting. The binder gives his sales pitch, and explicitly details what he's selling and the consequences.
15,000 gp - A base price for a summoned but unbound succubus, so not an item for the your average person, but available if you don't mind a high likelihood of being eaten. For an additional 5,000 gp, the binder will lay a spell on the succubus explicitly protecting you from her, but otherwise she's free to hunt as she wills. This would include your family and staff, but if you don't care... An additional 15,000 gp and he'll bind the succubus so that she only needs to feed once a week, and may only take a victim that her master designates, but if he fails to designate a victim, she's free to hunt as she wills until he resumes feeding her properly. At this point, Borys observes that people say he's not very responsible and asks if there's another option. The binder then states that for 60,000 gp, he will lay a binding on the succubus so that not only can she not hunt, she won't need to feed at all. Borys demonstrates that he's realized that is a lot of money, even if he can't add that well, and says he needs to talk with his attendant because she keeps track of the money. The binder asks if Borys means his mage, as he's heard that Borys has one on staff, at which Borys responds that no, he meant his shaman, unless she's allowed to come inside to talk. The binder seems to find the idea interesting, so Borys unhastily suggests he go outside to talk to her, and is told that would be for the best.
Meanwhile, as soon as Joe is on his way inside, the rest of us get ready. After a quick check for anyone in the area, the spellcasting commences. Dagnar casts see invisible, detect magic, and comprehend languages on himself then eats a spider as Aqila puts spider climb on him, followed by invisibility and a major image to hold his place for him. Moonbeam finishes with a baleful polymorph - flying squirrel. Dagnar heads up the nearest tower to get enough altitude to glide to the demon binder's tower without getting in range of the hellhounds, sticks the landing and scurries up to his first investigative target - the library. Peeking in the window, he can see that the bookshelves completely surround the window, and there's a door that wasn't in the plans now between the workroom and the library. The door is slightly ajar and a rustling sound can be heard through it. There are a lot of books in the room and a few on a table. Dagnar carefully enters the room and checks the table. One of the books is entitled 'The Works of Telanvor', which is not a familiar name for Dagnar. An examination of the rest of the library doesn't yield anything that screams 'I'm using blood magic neener neener'.
Rather than go through the door where whatever is rustling might notice/hear, the invisible squirrel goes back out the window and around the tower to the next window. Peering through, Dagnar has a clear view of the workroom, and of a skeletally thin imp idly moving around at random. Dagnar sees what he can through the window without alerting the imp. There are various apparati around the room. On one table are only three items - a bowl with a foul green liquid in it, a rod of crystal spiraling up in a shrinking circuit, and a crystal with no two facets the same size or shape. Having exhausted the view there, the now visible squirrel moves to the next window and is still not noticed. From there he can see a summoning circle on the floor. The walls in this room are badly scorched, and in some places look melted.
The next three windows in short succession are a closet full of broken bedroom toys - or maybe intact ones, there's no way to tell, at least not without closer examination than anyone wants to give them - the master bedroom with a very large bed, and the privy. The 4th window is the office. In it are an open book and what looks like a journal, and no pesky imps. Dagnar ventures in for some more in-depth snoopery. The book has the same title as the one on the table in the library 'The works of Telanvor', and it's open to a page showing a diagram that is partly clear and partly blurred as if it was copied exactly from a damaged tome. The journal seems to belong to the demon binder and he looks like he's copying the book into it and trying to work out what the damaged portions of the diagram should be. As Dagnar flips through journal and book, he notices a few important items. One, the tome is written in Ancient, and while the binder seems to be translating the tome into his journal, he's not the most proficient speaker of Ancient out there. For example, a phrase that he knows means 'demon essence', the binder tries as 'demon creature' or 'demon spirit' with evident frustration. After seeing the context the diagram is in, Dagnar realizes it's for a spell to let a mage drain a demon's essence. Yes, this is blood magic.
Dagnar, in the interest of thoroughness, skitters down the tower to the 2nd story to peek through those windows, and sees a corridor running around the entire outer wall, with an inner room where presumably the stairs are being blocked from sight by a closed door with warding sigils drawn on it. There are some odd things on the walls, but no way to tell what they are. The final scout involves eyeing up the roof while he's here to see if he can figure out what the red stuff Soars-Over-Mountains saw is. Examining the roof with see invisible doesn't yield any new information. And then it's time to glide back to safety and get uncursed.
Meanwhile, Borys and Natalka put on a good show for anyone listening, with Natalka patiently and thoroughly explaining that yes 75,000 gp is a lot of money and no we don't have that much money here and the only way to get that sort of money is to send a message to his father and he may very well say no anyway, etc. This burns some more time for Dagnar to investigate safely. When the skit has been milked dry, Borys slouches back to the door and is once again admitted. He then tells the binder that his shaman says they don't have that much money here and he has to talk to his father first. The binder observes that he will be willing to sell when Borys has the money to buy, essentially. Borys then takes his leave.
While that was going on, Dagnar sneaks back over to Aqila and Moonbeam, and after some fiddling, namely re-invising Dagnar so he can be decursed without it being obvious, then some work getting him and his image matched up. We're ready to go when Borys shows up again, and then we return to the hotel. And now it is time to compare notes. Aqila writes up two copies of Dagnar's report, one for our reference and one to get passed upchain. She recognizes the name on the book he saw twice. Telanvor was the last Lord of Ambar, and the one who was killed in the decapitation strike that kicked off the God War as it’s known today generally. He was known for his research into modifying demons. Which means Aqila needs to prepare sending a few times just in case. Hopefully the books aren’t genuine, but counting on that seems like a bad idea.
Call number one is to our contact to let him know what we've found. A quick discussion turns up a reasonable pretext for sending one of the hotel's messenger boys to summon him here - Borys made a friend at the bar the other day and it would be reasonable for him to get a pretty trinket as a present for her. When our local contact gets to the room, Aqila just hands him the copy of Dagnar's scouting report since it's faster to read than explain verbally. His reaction boils down to 'Just great. There are two different groups doing blood magic.'. The demon binder's work lets him drain a demon's essence, but not any power it's taken from a victim, and the constructs that were sighted were made of blood and torn souls and not demons, which is not what he's researching. So we still have an unidentified person or group running around in town. Our contact also tells us that with the evidence we've found, we will probably be authorized to kill the demon binder, but need to check with our bosses first. Which can be done via sending.
Aqila then drops Tervel a line since we have fairly good evidence that some of the disappearances around town are due to succubi feeding either freely or on designated victims. Message is a warning that some of the disappearances around town can be chalked up to feeding succubi. The reply boils down to 'thanks for the info, not my mission, and btw, there's at least one handmaiden of Zeleya in town'. Given that Zeleya is the goddess of pain, torture, and blood, we now have a likely suspect for the reason behind people disappearing and showing up as mutilated corpses. Aqila passes this tidbit on to our local contact, who is just overjoyed to find out that there are at least three different groups practicing blood magic. And none of the two we know about are likely behind the constructs. Aqila also directly contacts Valrim for authorization to kill the binder, given he's the head of the Sword and our only higher up for this trip. The permission for assassination is given in short order.
Break here due to 4am.

Terane
2020-03-20, 10:16 AM
We resume where we left off last session, the evening of the day we scouted out the demonbinder's tower. We have one known target, the demonbinder, one unknown target responsible for the blood magic constructs, and one probable target that our former comrade in arms Tervel is investigating, which sounds like a hidden temple to Zeleya somewhere in the city. There's also our primary mission to accomplish, recovering the staff piece that's somewhere in the area.
Since we don't want to attack the demonbinder until we have a reasonable plan for dealing with the security firm he has on retainer, we don't even know where to start looking for our unknown target, and we don't want to joggle Tervel's elbow while he's in the middle of something, we debate our next move. We haven't yet done any looking into precisely where the staff piece is, and a hunting trip would be in character for oh so spoiled Borys, recently thwarted in his desires.
So, by early afternoon of the next day we have rented a fancy tent and some horses and set off south. The cleared and relatively safe territory outside the city extends about a two day ride from its walls. Beyond that is a no man's land of a buffer zone between the farmland and the Foulness. Aqila uses the divination spell on the splinter to get a south and a little east bearing for us to follow, which we do for the rest of the day. Soars over Mountains keeps watch from above for anything we can pick off as an appropriate hunting trophy for Borys. No targets present themselves on the first day, but he does see a weird grove of trees about half a day ahead of us, a bit out of our line of march.
Day two gets us towards the edge of the safe zone and a better fix on where the staff piece is. If it had been a splinter, we'd have passed it already. If it's closer to 6" long, it's probably another two days south, in the fringes of the Foulness. If it's closer to a quarter of the staff long, it'll be more like 9 or 10 days, and well into the Foulness. Yay. We don't want to be away from the city too long in case something blows up, so we aren't going to get it on this trip. But, we now have a better idea on where it is. On the way back, the next day, we skirt near the weird grove so Soars can take a closer look. He spots something moving in the grove, not invisible, but blending in very closely with the trees. Since we'll be coming back this way when we're after the piece for real, we give the mystery a pass for the moment.
On our way back, we finally find something weird enough to qualify as a trophy for Boris, and because we are trying to stay in character in case of scrying, we limit our offensive prowess to our assumed abilities. We see an odd looking cat about five hundred feet in front of us. It's black with green highlights. Then six seconds later it blinks in sixty feet ahead of us, whereupon we can see its outline is blurring. Aqila opens the ball with glitterdust to blind it and perhaps prevent any sneaky invisibility tricks. Soars dive-bombs the kitty. Moonbeam brings back some old memories with produce flame. Dagnar powers up his damage resistance while Joe skillfully misses with his longbow. The cat runs up and mauls Joe's horse, probably because it was the closest target, so Aqila moves to get a clear line of fire and more or less melts the kitty. So no, not getting a pelt off of this kill, but Joe gets a nice skull to show off. We return to our lodgings and sleep.

Blink Dog/Displacer Beast mix - in stats/special abilities, not origin. Wasn't intended to be a challenge to the party, other than needing to hold back.

The next day, for lack of any better leads to follow, we resume the bar crawl, checking out the 3rd bar on our original list, the one that had people nervous from hearing things. Might be one of the ones Sneezil's been camping. It's a seedier bar with a waitstaff that is overall less comely than previous stops and trying harder to flaunt what they do have. Borys decides that he would like to stir up some trouble and goes to work with a will. His initial ploy of trying to peel off girls who were already paying attention to other patrons is derailed by some of the unattached girls swooping in to distract him. So he starts up a drinking game of 'quarters' to try to draw in the rest of the ladies, and after playing for a while with a little subtle help from Dagnar to make sure the other players were missing frequently and after one bad hop whereupon he bounced a gold piece of a rather large fellow's forehead, he noticed the bartender was subtly motioning the rest of his staff to keep circulating. He then makes attempt number 2 to cause a ruckus, and after 3 tries does indeed manage to peel loose a previously attached girl. At which point two more swoop in to distract and soothe the offended patron, demonstrating that these tactics aren't going to work in this bar. Borys is getting bored, so we move on.
With no more leads to follow up on, we trust Moonbeam to find a somewhat less seedy bar and see if we see anything interesting. We find an establishment that is straight-up drinking only, no other entertainment. Dagnar surreptitiously looks around and sees traces of enchantment magic around, but not recent, maybe 5-6 days old. This might be one of the places that the succubi or the Handmaiden, as she would have similar powers, had been hunting. Or the mysterious 3rd group because we don't know anything about how they are getting victims yet. We don't have an obvious pretext to stick around, or a real reason to, so Boris gets bored and we move on. The next place we try is in a lull, it being very early afternoon, so we keep moving. Dagnar suggests looking for a place offering games of chance.
We find one and Borys loses 500 gold over the next few hours, then picks up a girl at her suggestion to be his 'luck'. With her 'help', he wins back all he lost and another hundred gold besides, which he spends on a round or two of drinks for the room. It's around 3:30pm now, and we move on to the bar where Borys' lady-friend Takara works. She is not in evidence when we arrive, and upon being asked the proprietor tells us that she hadn't been there at all today, though she'd been expected, but she might be somewhere with a client. He doesn't know for sure. After we take a table, we all try to see if our waitress noticed anything odd involving Takara. Borys offends her rather quickly, but we do find out that a fellow who looked too poor to have the funds to patronize this bar had been in the establishment the night before and had been talking to Takara.
About ten minutes after we walked in the door, before we'd had time to discuss this latest tidbit of news, we hear fluttering wings. Aqila hastily casts message so we can converse with the newcomer, presumably Sneezil, covertly. And our identification of the sound is accurate. Dagnar quietly casts See Invisible as Sneezil drops the bombshell that there's going to be a sacrifice and Tervel's trying to stop it. Adding up one missing waitress with one impending sacrifice, Joe comes up with 'Time to go rescue Takara'. Sneezil tells us to follow him; he'll lead us to where Tervel is. Borys leaves a note for Takara before we exit stage left, trying to hurry without breaking character.
The issue of trying to hurry without looking like we're hurrying continues as we follow Dagnar, being the only one who can see Sneezil, until we can find a deserted alley for disguises and invisibility. Aqila, since she's never tried disguising other people before, picked some people from the first bar we hit to use as models. We keep following Sneezil to a somewhat rundown building. There's an unconscious man upstairs, who appears to be someone's bodyguard by his accoutrements. There's a trap door in the floor. We descend three flights down then Sneezil halts us on a landing so we can hastily finish preparing for battle. Since we all had requisitioned a 'protection from evil' item for this trip, Sneezil doesn't need to cast it himself, but he does bless all melee weapons we have. We move down to the door, still invisible, where Sneezil halts us once more. The chamber, Joe notices, is made of the same black substance that the tower and the fake Ancient tomb back in Seferia were made of.
Sneezil then cautions us to wait for the signal, pulls a wand out of his bag, which Dagnar can see and tells us, then makes a pattern of colored lights on the floor in the doorway. Inside the room we can hear a female voice saying 'Surrender and our Lady will give you a painless death'. Peering through the doorway, we can see a decent sized chamber. There are three men dressed as peasants standing nearer the edges of the room, a richly dressed man with a rapier standing nearer the back, two well dressed women flanking a much fancier dressed lady and of course an 8ft tall bat-winged lady standing near the front of the room. Up on a raised platform we can see Tervel looking rather battered holding his position between the rest of the room and an altar where a prone bloodied figure is just visible. Then we hear Tervel stating 'I think not. Let none escape!' That sounds like a signal.
Aqila opens up the ball by stepping into the room and clearing the doorway, then hosing the room with a sonic fireball, while not hitting the paladin in the process. The three coarsely dressed men, and the two lesser priestesses die instantly, leaving the nobleman, the high priestess, and the Handmaiden on the field. As everyone but the mage is still invisible, Dagnar slips through the door and sneak-attacks the nobleman with the rapier. Moonbeam calls down a sonic strike on the priestess and the Handmaiden. Joe goes rhino and invokes nature's favor on himself. Dagnar can see Sneezil flutter into the room. Soars is waiting for an opportune moment to do something useful, and watches for any reinforcements coming down the stairs meanwhile.
The Handmaiden moves up onto the platform to beat on the already battered Tervel, shouting 'Kill the paladin and our Lady will feast on their souls' and thrashes him soundly with her whip. Which is good incentive to try our best to keep him alive. Aqila casts Arcane Bolts at the Handmaiden, somewhat ineffectively, as it has a hefty spell resistance. The priestess runs up and heals the Handmaiden then the Rapier Twit charges Aqila and stabs her, apparently because he was afraid she's stop him from escaping through the door. Moonbeam calls in the unicorn cavalry and has both of them patch up the paladin. Dagnar moves up behind the Twit and backstabs him enthusiastically enough that he's Dead Right There. Joe charges the priestess, withstands the shock of entering the pain aura of the Handmaiden and rather thoroughly smooshes the priestess, at which point she goes into Death Throes and explodes, undoing some the hard work of healing the unicorns did on Tervel, and not helping Joe's day out any, or the sacrifice on the altar. Soars heals Aqila a little for something useful to do, and stays on watch otherwise.
At this point, the magical lights scattered around the room begin to go out, starting with the two farthest from the altar. The Handmaiden at this point pauses her kill the paladin campaign and inflicts a curse on Rhino-Joe. Since Dagnar is going to need to get closer to the Handmaiden to help fight, which means entering the pain aura, Aqila gives him Mule's stubbornness to facilitate resisting the effects. Moonbeam starts moving to where she might be able to heal the wounded and directs the unicorns to patch up Tervel and the sacrifice meanwhile. Dagnar maneuvers to get a clear line of attack at the Handmaiden and gets a solid zap in. Joe is in the thrall of the curse and unable to make himself move. Soars preemptively casts light on some rock in the middle of the room in case the lighting situation gets worse. Sneezil keeps moving up closer to where the battle is.
Two more lights go out. The Handmaiden resumes her game of 'whack a paladin', who is looking distinctly worse for wear. Tervel is having trouble fighting through the pain. Sneezil is now close enough to do some good and unleashes a mighty smite evil to his war cry 'No play games!'. Aqila tries to inflict a lesser acid orb on the Handmaiden, but the spell fizzles. Moonbeam reinforces the unicorn cavalry by two, so they have two healing the paladin, one on the sacrifice, and one stabbing the Handmaiden. Dagnar can't quite get into range to stab yet, so Screeching ray it is. Joe is still stunned, but Tervel is feeling spunky enough to finally get his own Smite Evil in.
More lights go out. At this point, the Handmaiden tries casting a spell, leaving an opening for Joe, Tervel, Sneezil, and a unicorn to get a free blow in. The killing blow is dealt by Sneezil, at which point a more enthusiastic Death Throes goes off with a bang. One unicorn bites the dust, and no one in the blast radius enjoyed the process. The lights keep going out as Moonbeam moves in to patch up the wounded. Dagnar moves to the altar where an unconscious Takara is chained in place. A few well aimed Knocks gets her loose. Aqila moves up to the landing to be out of the way and have a little peace and quiet to prepare a Break Enchantment to fix Joe up. Shadows start filling the room, particularly by the altar. Sneezil sees some of the shadows moving. On being asked, Tervel thinks that the shadows may indeed indicate an imminent problem. Time to clear the room.
Tervel's not in very good shape, having stood off all the occupants of the Zeleyan temple until Sneezil brought the cavalry, but he can hobble out unaided. Dagnar gets Takara up on a unicorn and holds her on while they skedaddle. Moonbeam makes like a tree and leaves. Joe manages to throw his immobility for a few seconds, swaps to kitty shape and scampers for the exit. He makes it out of the room before the altar blows up. The two unicorns still in the room are violently unsummoned. We regroup on the stairs. Aqila is still concentrating on her spell, so people who aren't her or Joe go and loot the corpses.
Notable items recovered are three daggers from the priestesses, 6 strips of silver cloth off the necks of the lesser priestesses and the onlookers plus 4 more from a chest, and manacles that cause pain on touch. Meanwhile, it takes two tries before Aqila can cure Joe. Takara is still unconscious, probably mercifully. Tervel takes the opportunity of this breathing space to mention that the Veiled Order has a stronghold in the East Harbor area and gives us the location. He'd found it while he was hunting for this temple, which makes them a prime candidate for our mysterious 3rd group of blood magic users. And magical constructs does sound like the sort of experimenting that bunch gets up to. Tervel needs to head out promptly to get to his next assignment, so he can't stick around to help out with that mess. On the other hand, Sneezil can teleport, and offers to stick around for a bit and help us. Since we do need to scout out the stronghold and make sure we have the correct target, I'm sure we can find something for him to do. There is also a discussion on what to do with Takara. Dropping her off at her place of work in the shape she's in sounds like a bad idea period, and that's before figuring out how to do that without breaking our cover. After ascertaining that there is indeed a White Temple in the city, Joe suggests that Tervel could take her there, which keeps us out of it. Also, we do have that suit of plate mail and great-sword that none of us can/want to use and we know a paladin that we keep running into who might be able to make good use of it. So Aqila gets to make a little more room in her bag of holding.
And now it's time to head out. There was an unconscious man upstairs that we might want to question to determine if he's on the 'let none escape' list too. We come up through the trap door right after he's come to and gotten on his feet, albeit shakily. It's fairly obvious he's the bodyguard for the Rapier Twit, confirmed by his asking about his employer. Aqila makes no effort to be sneaky or diplomatic, flatly stating that his boss is dead and asking if he knew about the temple of Zeleya in the basement. At which point he makes it clear his priority is now avenging his master. Joe tries pinning him, which doesn't work out too well, but the mage has animate rope handy. And now the problem with using real people as models for disguise spells really comes into play - the bodyguard is honor bound and oathsworn to defend and/or avenge his employer, and apparently was trying not to be aware of what his boss had been up to downstairs. We can't turn him loose, because he's honor-bound to go after the people we look like, and he's not going to violate his sworn word, which means giving him a clean death is the least bad option left. The druid very pointedly suggests that he deal with things involving talking to people henceforth.
His corpse is cremated on the plane of fire. Aqila sets to preparing illusory wall and wall of stone to seal off the temple for now - the stone to seal it and the illusion to hide the trap door. And now it's time to exfiltrate and slip back into our cover identities, and resume the carouse, which will give us an excuse not to be seen tomorrow until late. Once we're back at the inn, Aqila drops our local contact a line to bring him briefly up to speed, then he shows up in person with some more information. One, because the blood-magic constructs were consistent with the sorts of antics the Veiled Order gets up to, they had been investigated originally, but the Sentinel wasn't aware of them having a stronghold in the East Harbor. Two, the constructs are similar to a nasty 'toy' the ancients used, typically involving killing a few (more meaning a more powerful construct) people with close emotional ties to the target of assassination to create the thing, and then setting it loose to hunt that person down. The creators of these constructs are suspected to be using random people, which means the constructs don't have a target, and their half-life existence is constant torment, so destroying them is a mercy. Of course, first we have to make sure that our suspects are actually the culprits, and we do have an invisible helper who has some practice at stake-outs...
Pause here due to 4am.



We pick up where we left off, back in our hotel room with Sneezil. Given that we need to rest up after our fun and games in the ex temple of Zeleya, Sneezil doesn't need to sleep, and we have a fresh tip from Tervel about a possible location for the source of the 3rd group of blood magic users we're fairly sure is operating in Chalisce, Aqila sets up an illusory wall/ Pass wall sneaky exit from our rooms so Sneezil can get in and out unnoticed. He doesn't mind going to scout out the possible site overnight while we get some sleep. In the morning, we're recharged, and Sneezil is back. He describes a normal looking warehouse, two stories tall, with two balcony rooms connected by a catwalk between them, and stairs leading up to each one from below. There are crates stored in the building and dockworkers working, as would be expected. Sneezil saw one man who he describes as 'funny'. He doesn't have the vocabulary to be more specific. Time for the next phase of the investigation.
Dagnar, Listens-to-wind and Sneezil are going to check out the warehouse in more detail. Aqila and Soars-over-Mountains are going to go test the demonbinder's defenses. Moonbeam will hold down the fort and cover for the rest of us being out with the handy excuse of Boris being too hungover to want to bestir himself today. Dagnar makes up some rocks with magicked auras of different strengths, which we number to keep track of which is which, set to wear off fairly soon, as part of the testing we had been planning on doing on the tower's defenses. Dagnar gets himself dressed up like a dock worker. Joe is going to be a cat. Sneezil is going to be himself. Dagnar is grateful that the initial plan being tossed around that involved him being turned into a squirrel and carried around by Sneezil was not used. We set off.
Straight-line it's about 2 miles across the harbor. Walking around the city, it's closer to four miles. Dagnar keeps see invisibility up so he can follow Sneezil and the newly made alley cat can follow him. Once they get there, Dagnar casts Message so he and Sneezil can talk, and Joe can listen in, before going to see if he can get work as a day laborer. He gets hired to move crates around the warehouse for 1 copper an hour. Meanwhile, Joe notices the distinct odors of herbs, oil, and metal emanating from the crates. Many of the crates have magical auras, but faintly as if it had rubbed off on them rather than being directly applied spells. As Sneezil and Joe continue poking around, Dagnar notices a very strong Conjuration signature coming from one of the upstairs rooms. Also, some of the crates have a residue on them reminiscent of the signature in the room. Sneezil is asked to see if he can get into the room. He tries the door at the top of the stairs, and reports that it's barred or boarded up inside. However, there is another door for access to the catwalk.
To distract people from doors that open with no one near them, a plan is quickly concocted. Dagnar stacks a box a bit precariously. Joe, after finding the warehouse to be annoyingly rodent free, summons up a rat, and chases it wildly through the crate stacks, and knocks the designated crate over during the scrum. Meanwhile, Sneezil tries the door to the other room and it is unlocked. Unfortunately, the room isn't unoccupied, and a shout is heard, then a white-haired old man comes storming out yelling 'You workers know you aren't allowed up here. Who opened this door!' Meanwhile, Sneezil slips out the door onto the catwalk and crosses to the other room with the magical aura, while describing the first room to Dagnar and Joe. Apparently it's full of desks and papers. Unfortunately, the 2nd door into the interesting room is also boarded up on the inside. The crate that was knocked over is full of melted bits of metal. Dagnar wasn't there, but Joe can remember seeing something similar a good while back in the Ferial - a load of items purportedly taken from an Ancient's tomb being hauled to the Stone Bridge mage academy. Not that Joe can communicate that to Dagnar at the moment. Dagnar thinks to pocket one of the pieces for later study, then finishes out his shift so as to not draw further attention to himself, at which point Dagnar and Joe head back to the inn, asking Sneezil to hang out until we all come back.
Meanwhile, Aqila has disguised herself on principle and snuck invisibly to the demonbinder's tower with Thoron and flies up to a convenient nearby tower to commence the formal testing of the demonbinder's defenses, keeping flight and invisibility up at all times. The first 4 rocks that Thoron dropped don't elicit any visible reaction. Rock number 5 triggers the hellhound pack to come running up. Noting that down, the investigation moves on to phase 2. Hovering 60ft over the tower, she can examine the roof with detect magic. The red color is overlaid with a rather faint abjuration. After being asked nicely, Thoron goes to get a live rodent for another test. Dropping the rodent on the roof has an interesting result - it falls over, stops moving, and apparently stops breathing. Aqila starts dropping lower to get a better look at the test subject and to see what a bath does to the roof, but when she hits 30ft up, a succubus pops into view and starts scanning the sky. She hightails it out of there. The demon doesn't follow, and there's no way to tell if she was seen or not.
Moonbeam had a fairly uneventful day, only needing to turn away a few helpful souls who wanted to minister to the ailing Boris. Once everyone straggles in, we compare notes, and presumably eat dinner. Dagnar gets to hear a bit of backstory about what the rest of us know about the melted metal piece. Basically, they are fragments of destroyed machines of the Ancients that some people collect in hopes of reconstructing the machines in question. Given that any given pile of pieces has no guarantee of all being from the same machine for one, and any traces of what spells were on them are generally muddied by whatever destroyed the machine in the first place, it's a vain pipe dream. But people still try. The Veiled Order often collects them.
As it is now evening, we move onto the next phase of the investigation. Aqila refreshes the pass wall and we all head out to the warehouse. Once there and in the alley by the room with the conjuration aura, Aqila puts the now familiar illusory wall and passwall combo up so we can sneak in. Sneezil had warned us about wards on the doors. Detect magic showed anti-theft spells on the doors, and while we could dispel them, no one has the ability to put them back up again. We sneak in. Dagnar and Moonbeam notice voices coming from the boarded up room, and Thoron and Sneezil are asked to move closer and see if they can hear anything useful. Shortly afterwards, Sneezil warns us that people are coming out, and makes sure he's out of the way. Joe, Moonbeam and Thoron scoot back out into the alley. Aqila and Dagnar cast invisibility on themselves and hide amongst the crates for a closer look.
A wall moves, letting out two veiled figures, one in a light blue veil leading, and one in a dark veil following. Both are wearing heavy dark robes, so genders are indeterminate. They come down to the warehouse floor via the catwalk and the office room's stairs, and start rifling through crates. After some minutes, they find what they were looking for, and Light Veil carries it back to the secretive room. Sneezil reports that there was a flare of magic not long after they re-entered the room. And we're alone again. While the investigating is good, Dagnar goes up to rifle through the office room. Moonbeam and Joe rifle through crates. Aqila re-prepares spells. Quite a few of the crates are full of twisted Ancient scraps, but there are also a number containing exotic herbs from the Chaos continent. Specifically spellflower, grave blossom and mindwrench, which leads to a somewhat heated discussion to explain to the druid why it is a bad idea to help ourselves to the plants, starting with 'Yes, they're going to notice if any of it is missing' to 'we have no proof the owners of the warehouse are involved with what's going on' and ending on 'stealing from people for your own personal gain is wrong'. Meanwhile, Dagnar finally turned up something interesting - a hidden panel, and a hidden journal in code. He removed a page for examination later. The argument is tabled by a desire to go have a look in the secret room.
Sneezil patiently continued his look-out duties while Aqila sets up another illusory wall/passwall combo to let us into the room, to avoid trying to puzzle out the moving wall. Inside we behold a doorframe, freestanding. Examining it with detect magic, it obviously has a conjuration spell of some sort on it. A closer examination reveals that it is a portal spell, 2-way, with a keying cantrip. And, of course, we don't know the cantrip. In hopes that the portal will be used again tonight, we ask Sneezil to wait in the room so he can overhear the cantrip we hope, and the rest of us retreat to the office. Well, all the humans do. Thoron is stationed outside the passwall into the warehouse for a different viewpoint. 45 minutes pass.

Yes, the druid was very acquisitive at all times.

Thoron sees one of the doors opening and warns us. A succubus comes in leading a dazed and confused Kazil, looks like a common laborer. They start heading up to the office. Invisibility spells are tossed quickly and we jam ourselves into the back of the room away from the doors. And then Sneezil sees the portal activate and Light Veil comes through and starts heading to the office too. The two groups both enter the office at the same time, and we get to overhear him, the voice was obviously male, chewing out the succubus for being late. She points out that if she wasn't operating under so many restrictions, she'd be able to find subjects faster. They all head back to the other room. Dagnar sneaks behind them in hopes of also overhearing the key cantrip to increase our chances of getting it right. And it works - he does hear the cantrip clearly when the portal is activated.
We wait a few minutes to avoid landing on the party who just went through, then try the key. It works - we're transported into a small completely bare room with one door and the mate to the other portal. Detect magic shows a faint abjuration on the room. Aqila takes a few rounds to study it, and discerns that it's an alarm spell just as it goes off. Crap. We open the door, and can see three hallways. We go down the one we aren't now hearing voices from. It leads to a room full of cages, seven of them. Three are empty. One has a Teiril female, one a Elenil male, one has a shadowy incorporeal thing in it that we don't recognize, and the last has what appears to be a very beautiful Teiril female. Only Aqila realizes that it's a nymph right off, possibly because the cages are likely negating all magical abilities of the occupants. A fae wouldn't be held otherwise. We don't have leisure to inspect the room as we can clearly hear one of the other halls a female voice snarling 'Some person set off the alarm. Find them. Check the cages and the library.'
We are still invisible, and scoot deeper into the room of cages, re-ordering ourselves so Dagnar is in front, and Aqila is ready to silence the area. We barely finish our preparations when Light Blue Veil comes walking over, right into a sneak-attack. Aqila casts silence to eliminate any racket while we finish him off. It's over in seconds. At the other end of the room is another room off to the side that looks like a pantry. As we're dragging the corpse back there to get it out of immediate view, a shambling figure comes into view. Aqila hastily casts Silence again, and then we find out there's a kitchen past the pantry with another shambling wreck of a person in it. They had been human females once, until someone enchanted them to a fare-thee-well, damaging their minds in the process. Since the silence prevented them from alerting anyone else, we took the time to knock them out. Some rags in the kitchen were used to clean up the ambush site - there was already dried blood on the floor in splotches - enough to fool a casual inspection.
We then took a few minutes to buff up. Joe has a sneaky idea and strips the corpse of its robe and veil and gets dressed, being the closest to the right size in our group. Moonbeam holds onto his staff for him. Invis's back up all around, before Joe gets dressed, so his stolen attire is visible, then we move to investigate the rest of the complex. To the left is the library, and it's empty of people. To the right we can hear voices, and we proceed carefully. As we approach the entrance, there's an abjuration spell. Aqila dispels it on principle, and we enter with Joe leading, to the sound of an irate woman talking.
Inside we see a roughly square room. A column-like cage is right of center holding the Kazil. In the back left corner, the succubus is standing near a table covered with glassware. The dark veiled woman, who we can see has a purple veil, is standing at the other end of the table. Dark purple means we're looking at someone who if they aren't the 2nd in command for the Chaliscean Veiled Order, is at the very least in the top echelon. In the front left corner is a whirlpool shaped design of runes, which is unsettling to look at. When Purple Veil sees Joe, she reacts unexpectedly. 'There you are...what? Lower your defenses!'. Apparently lower ranking members of the VO shouldn't have buff spells up around higher ranks. Since our cover was about to blow, Aqila opens up the ball with a Shout, trying to aim the cone so it misses the prisoner and hits the succubus and mage. Joe follows right up with a blast of sand, finishing the pulverizing of the glassware on the table and killing the succubus. Dagnar and Moonbeam have maneuvered to wear they can get a clear shot too, Dagnar using a scorching ray and Moonbeam dropping an earth elemental where the table was, which subsequently lowers da boom on Purple Veil. Sneezil flutters close enough to slap her with a crackling touch.
And then we experience the retaliation. With no warning, Purple Veil fireballs the room, targeting herself. We are all owwied, but survive, even Sneezil. The Kazil however is a charred corpse. The rescue mission failed. In the interest of having someone to ask questions of, we switch from 'kill' to 'capture' mode. Joe uses kelp strand, the elemental tries to attack non-lethally, then Dagnar makes the same attempt. That's finally enough to knock her out. After an argument starts up over how to keep her captured - Joe advocates using the pain manacles, Aqila doesn't want to make use of anything dedicated to Zeleya - the fact that there are three unoccupied presumably anti-magic fielded cages is remembered and Purple Veil is tossed in there, after being unveiled. None of us know her. She looks like she'd been an attractive woman before she started presumably 'improving' herself. She has been healing noticeably since being knocked out, and wakes up shortly after being caged. Little time passes before we notice that she is getting noticeably gaunter as well.
After a comment from Purple Veil, Aqila goes to check the portal. No, the cantrip we used doesn't activate this end. A search of the facility with 'Detect Secret Doors' turns up a passage between the lab and the cage room, and nothing else. This could be a problem. Joe summons an earth elemental, and finds out that we are under 200 feet of ground, and there's water overhead. So twenty castings of 'Passwall' won't get us out without everyone getting a bath. Joe tries interrogating our prisoner, and tries talking to the nymph. The nymph implies she can get us out if we let her out, but she is also giving off very disturbing vibes. This is the chaos continent, and it does bad things to Fae, even in the relatively 'clean' areas. We decline to risk letting her loose at this time. The other two mortal captives are frantic to get out of their cages, but since we're all trapped at the moment, having more panicky people running around and perhaps running afoul of something nasty like the runes in the lab seems inadvisable. Aqila hands out alchemist trail bars to everyone, even Purple Veil.
Joe's interrogation efforts are largely stymied. He gleans that the cantrip to leave is in the library somewhere, so Aqila goes to work on that project while he's busy. Joe continues to question Purple Veil for a while and gets nowhere. His next idea is to see if he can get the shambling servants, who have come to, to open the portal. He is dressed in Blue Veil's clothes after all. Several attempts later, he is forced to conclude that either they've never been permitted to hear the cantrip, or their memories are too damaged from all the spells they've been inflicted with to hold the information he's after.
Meanwhile, Aqila is in her native habitat. The most disturbing find in the library is a very familiar book - The works of Telanvor. This copy has a rather familiar diagram in it, but a different portion was damaged this time. Aqila also turns up three tomes written in an unusual form of Ancient, several books on demonology and multiple treatises on blood magic. These all go into the Bag of Holding on principle. Nothing else is sufficiently alarming to get confiscated on principle. She also finds a journal, in code, and settles down to crack it. This takes ten minutes. She finds near the end the cantrips to activate the portal written down, in a different code. Since we know one of them, she tries breaking them both ways, and gets results that both make sense, so there's no way to know which is the actual key. There is also another section mentioning that the keys to reanchor the portal if it becomes unmoored can be derived from the activation keys, but no hints on how to derive them, or what might cause the portal to become unmoored. Finally, there are scattered references to renting space from the warehouse owner, and bribing him to ignore their activities.
Since the night isn't getting any younger, Aqila moves to test her findings. Trying the second cantrip first doesn't activate the portal, but the first one does. Due to prudence, or perhaps a well honed sense of paranoia, Aqila doesn't want to test if the portal is working properly by just walking through. Once everyone else has been told that the portal may be working, Joe summons a Celestial ape trap-monkey and asks it to test if the portal works both ways again. Two monkeys later, we're getting suspicious. Purple Veil is delighted to tell us that we've tripped her trap and the portal is now unmoored. Aqila outsmarted herself by trying the wrong cantrip first. So, we are now moving on to Plan B.
Joe sends out earth elemental scouts until we determine that we're under the harbor, about 500 ft from shore. After doing the math, passwall could get us out, but it would take a while, with a few rest breaks for the mage to recover. Joe and Moonbeam put their heads together and come up with Thoqqua - creatures with very hot heads that can tunnel by literally burning a path. Two of them make a tunnel we can walk instead of crawl through, with a fairly steep grade. Further use of elemental scouts lets Joe and Moonbeam place the end of the tunnel in the warehouse we started from. Aqila uses this time to copy down the rune spiral for later study.
To finish cleaning up, one the tunnel is made, we get the two mortal prisoners and the two shambling servants out. Purple Veil is executed in the interest of giving her a clean death on the grounds that she is a serial murder. All corpses are looted, and anything that looks interesting is picked up. Sneezil is asked to wait until we're all out, then let the nymph loose and teleport to us. We don't trust her not to try to hurt any of us, but we don't have any grounds that merit killing her out of hand. Meanwhile, the Thoqqua are asked to make a 2nd tunnel, boring up to the harbor, to flood the facility and if not deny it to anyone else we missed who knows about it, then make it annoyingly inconvenient to reinhabit. We also don't disable the portal, but leave it up and unmoored. When Sneezil lets the Nymph out, the first thing she does is try to gut him with abruptly elongated finger nails. He escapes uninjured. And then Thoqqua are asked to finish the tunnel and the secret lab is inundated. At this point none of us really care if the Nymph was sane enough to escape before she got soaked or not.
Aqila had been keeping Disguise Self up on everyone the whole trip on the off chance we were seen by anyone who lived to tell the tale, which in hind sight was prudent. We depart the warehouse after Dagnar goes back to snag the journal in the hidden cubby and Aqila gets rid of the passwall. We take our rescued captives to the White Temple, where they are oh so happy to see us in the wee hours before dawn for the 2nd drop off of injured souls in 3 days. Then we take ourselves back to the inn, sneak in, and collapse, essentially. Aqila takes the time to report in via sending to our contact, along the lines of 'found a secret Veiled Facility, another copy of Telanvor's notes, dispatched the Veiled, rescued some victims, and the lab is under water now.' Aqila got nothing but a sense of stunned silence in reply. We may be getting yelled at later.
Session end here due to 5am.

Terane
2020-03-23, 06:51 PM
We pick up where we left off, having gotten back to the inn after our fun and games with some members of the Veiled Order, after Aqila dropped our contact a line, but before we got some sleep. And there not being anything else to be done, we get some shut-eye. First thing in the morning, the inn-keeper escorts our contact up to our room. He's noticeably perturbed, after the innkeeper leaves, and asks us to describe the two members of the Veiled Order we'd killed last night. Since Thoron had the most leisure and the best eyesight, he gives a perhaps overly detailed description of Purple Veil and Light Blue Veil. And that confirms our contact’s fears - we killed the King's sister last night. His contacts somehow managed to ferret out the tidbit that she hadn't shown up for her customary breakfast with her brother that morning, and the description of Purple Veil matches hers.
The King most likely won't get diviners involved immediately because the three best divination specialists in the city don't work well together. One is a priestess of Deiliana, the goddess of treachery, one is a priest of Kantor, and one is a priest of the Dragon. While the priest of Kantor might sound like his best choice, the King wouldn't want the information that his sister is missing to leak out prematurely, and he's unlikely to be willing to tell the priest enough to convince him to swear an oath of secrecy on the matter. So we may have a little time yet, but when the news leaks out, the city will be sealed. How thoroughly sealed depends on how much the king is willing to invest in the project. We really don't want to stick around for that, though. Aqila takes the time to recount in detail our exploits of last night, in case anything else needs dealt with.
Joe checks to see if our contact has any idea who the nobleman we killed at the temple of Zeleya was. No, he doesn't - definitely not one of the major nobles, and some of the minor nobles are known for dropping out of sight for days or weeks at a time, and some are right now. And our contact will handle any further clean-up needed involving the lab we wrecked last night. As there are no more questions, he departs. And then a mighty argument ensues on how to deal with the demonbinder, mainly on the timing. Eventually, enough reasons for attacking that night so we can get out of town before anything else blows up are brought up, and battle-planning begins in earnest.
Joe concocts powder of coughing and sneezing. Aqila sets to work cracking the journal we recovered from the warehouse and makes two copies of her translation. It's apparently a list of goods moved through the warehouse, with four coded columns – presumably the items shipped, shipper, and destination are three of these – contextually, two of them seem to be items shipped, and either shipper or destination. Also, the transhipment costs are recorded plainly – most of them seem reasonable, but a few are oddly high. One of the unidentified columns has a consistent entry associated with these unusually high costs – all places that entry appears have the increased cost, and there are no examples of it not associated with an oddly high cost. Aqila has one copy delivered to our contact in case he finds it useful. Dagnar spend his time rigging up some dust and pebbles with Magic Aura so we can set off the tower wards when we want to. Around midafternoon or so, we get back into our cover personas and lay an obvious trail on where they are going to disappear to. Boris wants to go on a long hunting trip, so we pay off the innkeeper, pack, and talk to various vendors for supplies - don't actually buy anything, but muddy the waters enough that no one can say we didn't get appropriately geared up for an expedition. And then before dusk, drop out of sight via disguise self and then invisibility and fly to get to a convenient nearby roof and settle in to wait for an opportunity to catch the demonbinder with his pants down, so to speak.
Sneezil is helping by watching through the window into the bedroom to let us know when he's in the room. Thoron is watching too, though the other window. Two and a half hours pass. Aqila refreshes our disguises when the spell wears off the first time with seemings of Veiled Order members - a variety of light blue veils and a darker one for herself, since she will definitely be using high level mage spells. Long duration buff spells are cast and combat spells are prepared. As soon as Sneezil reports the demonbinder has entered the bedroom with three succubi, or at least three identical women, fly spells are cast, and Mule's Stubbornness on Dagnar, then Aqila gets invisibility on herself and moves to about sixty feet out in hopes she can get a clear target for Dimensional Anchor through the window. Sneezil also reports that the demon binder looks 'funny'. A few questions improve that description to 'orange and scaly'. After five minutes, and no likelihood of getting that shot, we go to plan B.
Sneezil takes the bags of dust and pebbles, flies around the tower, then does a bombing run to scatter it all over the tower, setting off the alarms all over. At the same time, Aqila darts in to the wall and opens up a Passwall so we can start the attack. Thoron uses mage hand to lob the dust into the room. It looks like all 4 of them are still on the bed, but only the presumed succubi react to the dust. The demonbinder is naked, orange and scaly, and an illusion. So he's somewhere in the tower, most likely, we just have to find where. Moonbeam casts wall of thorns on the whole room to keep the succubi out of our way and drops some thorns on the Hellhounds too. Joe summons an earth elemental to open the door and start hunting for where our actual target went. The door isn't locked. It then glides through the floor and hits some sort of trap, and is temporarily stunned. Dagnar starts searching for the demonbinder by going clockwise around the tower and looking in windows. No one is in the library. Sneezil blesses the thorns, which then start having a damaging effect on the succubi. Thoron lobs a sonic bolt at one of them for something to do. Aqila drops down one level and manages to get off a passwall unprepared so we have access to the second story too.
Joe goes counter-clockwise and finds the demonbinder in his lab, wearing a hastily donned robe and frantically digging through scrolls. Moonbeam flies over so she can summon something in that room. Dagnar keeps going clockwise and sees the imp in the lab, and sleeps it as a precaution. Thoron had spotted it as he was flying past counterclockwise, too. Sneezil blesses the thorns on the hellhounds too, since we had specifically asked him to bless thorns earlier. Joe can now hear the demonbinder chanting after picking a scroll and saw the demon butler enter the room, so Aqila floats up and nails the binder through the window with a Dimensional anchor. Joe then casts Kelp Strand and manages to grapple the binder with it. Moonbeam then summons a large earth elemental into the room to start the pain. It gives the binder a good solid smack. Thoron, having circumnavigated the tower now, tosses a bolt at the butler so as to not damage the kelp strands on the binder. Sneezil starts fluttering up towards us. Then the butler blasts the elemental in the face. We can also get glimpses of a 'something' attacking the elemental. Best guess, that had something to do with the spell the binder had been reading off.
At this point, the binder invokes an item targeting the person currently peering in his window - Joe. It turns out to be a reaving dispel - it rips four spells off of Joe and applies then to the binder. Then the item blows up, damaging everyone in the room and singing Joe's eyebrows. He starts floating down to the ground since his flight spell is now gone. Aqila tries dispelling magic on the binder, and manages to knock off two of the stolen spells. While he's on the ground, Joe dumps an Avalanche on the hellhounds to make sure they stop being a threat. Between the thorns and the snow, they are most likely going to smother to death before they can get loose. Moonbeam takes the time to drop three more earth elementals into the room, blocking the door so the binder and butler can't escape. Two of the new elementals can reach and hit the binder, the big one adds its hefty swat, and the third smaller one punches the butler, and gets blasted by fire in the process. Thoron bolts the butler again. Sneezil gets an idea, and teleports into the room to smite the binder. Dagnar anoints the wall with stonebreaker acid. It would be nice to get into the room before something bad happens to the lil imp. The butler takes a solid swing at the large elemental, singing it significantly.
At this point, the binder breaks free of the kelp strands. What we now know is a spectral firey cat beats on the large elemental again. Dagnar saw it when he went past the window. Aqila tosses an acid orb at the binder for something to do. Joe down on the ground protects himself against fire and acid in preparation of Updrafting back up when the acid makes a hole to get into the room. Moonbeam casts snake's swiftness on her allies in the room. Sneezil misses, but the elementals don't. The demon binder is knocked unconscious then coupe de grace'd in the melee. The butler manages to avoid all the blows aimed his way. Thoron zaps the butler again, then Sneezil chucks a flask of holy water at it and Dagnar magic missiles the spectral cat that's still mauling the large elemental, which is looking distinctly battered now. The acid finishes its work and a hole opens up in the wall. The flames on the butler start darkening and sputter a bit. Sneezil flutters out the hole. Unfortunately, he doesn't get out of line of sight of the butler, who lobs a blast of darkness and fire at the lil guy. Sneezil drops to the ground unconscious, just missing landing on Joe.
Aqila follows him down and uses her small heal to make sure he's stable until someone else can patch him up. Joe goes vertical and unleashes Boreal Winds, which also pins the butler against the wall. The large elemental gives the butler a good smack. Moonbeam drops down too to fix up our paladin in training. Sneezil wakes up and comments 'that hurt'. Thoron continues tossing sonic bolts at the butler. Dagnar missiles the cat again, which finishes killing off the elemental meantime. Sneezil patches himself up a bit more too. The butler takes aim at Joe, and does nothing to him. His ring protects him from the negative energy, and his own spells handle the fire damage. The cat looks for a new chew toy and pounces at one of the small elementals. That however, takes it through the Boreal Winds spell effect zone and it dies. Since the battle is winding down, Aqila floats up to the second floor and goes to look at the door to the room where Joe's earth elemental was trapped. Joe enters the room further to hit the butler with a blast of sand without destroying the scrolls on the table. The butler dies and then blows up. Joe and Dagnar both get hit, but not badly.
Joe immediately strips the mage of anything that looks magical, grabs the scrolls, and doesn't see anything else obviously useful in the conjuring room. Dagnar goes and grabs the binder's imp familiar and takes it down to Aqila for a Dimensional Anchor so it can't escape until we decide what to do with it. Dagnar then goes back up to loot the laboratory. Meanwhile, Aqila finishes studying up on the door, determines that the wards are meant to keep things inside from getting out rather than the other way around, and dispels the door. Taking a look inside, she sees 6 cabinets, 5 of which have strong abjurations on them. Ignoring them for the moment, she exits through the door to the stairway, heads upstairs, and loots the library hastily but thoroughly. Joe goes all the way downstairs to see if there's anything on the first floor that looks interesting. There isn't. Coming back up as Dagnar's coming down, they both go look at the other door in the warded room. The other large room on the second floor is full of shallow trays, full of a smelly liquid and arms-length worms that are dead and decaying. Dagnar cudgels his memory and comes up with 'demon breeding pools'. They probably aren't dangerous anymore, but in the interest of making this look like a Veiled Order strike, Joe quickly grabs a sample of the liquid then he and Dagnar thoroughly torch the trays.
While the guys are busy, Moonbeam makes her way to the warded room and starts checking out the cabinets. Aqila starts scanning the tower for hidden rooms/cubbies. She eventually turns up two. One has the binder's customer list in it. Aqila makes a copy hastily, then stows the two veils we ah, acquired earlier in there along with the journal from the warehouse. The other cubby had 500 gold and a list of which money lenders the binder had accounts with. We take nothing from the cubbies to facilitate the illusion that they were overlooked when the tower was ransacked.
As for the cabinets, Moonbeam dispels the protecting spells, then we see what's inside. 1) small red gem. The note reads 'Unstable heat generating gem. Unsafe to attempt to use in its current state. Possibly repairable.' That's one for stowing in a haversack or bag. The second cabinet is empty. 3) The irregular stone Dagnar had seen in the lab earlier. Note 'Believed to be a portal stone, highly dangerous, unstable. This item is stored in a pouch and not one of Aqila's lest it react badly to the splinter or to being in an extradimensional space. 4) A sword with a green glowing blade. Note 'Chaos magic. Possibly useful if a method is found to control it, otherwise it is more dangerous to the wielder. 5) A pitch black orb in a wooden box about two feet square. note 'Sphere of Annihilation. It may be moved with the box.' 6) A suit of black plate mail with a symbol etched on the chestpiece of a crown of thorns with a serpent threaded through it surrounding a flame. Aqila and Dagnar recognize that as the sigil of Kashirna, the last lord of Reshak-Nasar. He's simply referred to as the 'Accursed One' and seeing the armor triggers a minor mage freak-out. She starts preparing then casting Sending to warn our local contact that we tripped over something nasty. The note reads 'Restrictions on the use of this armor makes it useless to me. Might be valuable as a trade good for a necromancer.'
Aqila Sends 'Demon Binder dead, found Sphere of Annihilation, armor made by the Accursed One. Recommendations? Tower cleared of threats.' The reply boils down to 'take the stuff with you and hurry up and finish your mission, there's a situation developing that that you all are going to be needed for.' That's clear enough. And it's at this precise juncture that Sneezil chirps 'Time to go. See you in Bright Haven!' and flies off. After a moment, we remember that that was the name of the town in Asferia that was supposedly having a necromancer problem, per the rumors from the Vanathim we picked up. Dagnar is filled in. Given how paladins roll, we are starting to suspect where the just mentioned 'situation' may be developing.

Listens-to-wind's player spent the rest of the campaign trying to find a safe way to use the sword of chaos. Never really did, and the rest of the party voted down trying all of his ideas. Had a table of 100 random effects, 50/50 chance to hit target or wielder - AOE effects centered on hit creature. Unfortunately the table was on a device that's died, no backup - so can't reproduce. Ranged from simple hair-color changes all the way to mage's disjunction.
The armor, on the other hand, they never tried to find a safe use for - copying out the stats here:
While wearing, casts Inflict Light Wounds on the wearer each round. 3x per day, wearer may cast Harm on himself. Living creature wearing takes 1d3 temporary, non-restorable CON damage per day (i.e. restoration spells and similar are ineffective, only rest can recover). If you die while wearing, your soul is bound to it. If you are evil, and you bind yourself to the service of the armor's creator, you will rise as an undead creature (Apply lich template, armor is phylactery) in 1d3 days, the armor does not interfere with your spellcasting, and you're now proficient with it. If you are not evil, your soul is trapped in the armor until you turn evil and swear allegiance or someone who knows how draws your soul out for any purpose. While wearing, immune to all positive energy effects, including healing spells. Additionally, it's +2 plate mail. Grants +4 turn resistance and +2 bonus to Strength. Requires Remove Curse to remove, CL check (don't remember DC, wasn't recorded - but it was fairly high)

For the other items:
Stone was an at-will random teleport/plane-shift effect - that might send you to more than one place at the same time. The party never used it.
Red gem generated a heat effect on use - ranging from equivalent to a candle flame to a city-sized inferno. Also never used.

The useless items they were able to turn in for bounties, eventually they got a total of 66K gp out of it (6K for the stone and gem combined, later 60K for the plate armor - took a little time for evaluation) This was a common option throughout the campaign - items that weren't usable by reason of exceptional evil could be turned in for bounties. Later on those were favor tokens, tradeable for various otherwise unobtainable boons.

We hastily clean up a few loose ends. The succubi are most assuredly dead - shredded bits of corpses are all that's left on the blood-soaked bed. Moonbeam dismisses all the Thorns. We can't think of anything to ask the captured imp, given how dumb it seems to be, so instead, after the Dimensional Anchor wears off, we let it wake up, see us in our Veiled Order guises, and 'escape' while we're ostentatiously not paying attention to it. No idea if our ruses will suffice to redirect the attention of the security firm the binder hired to kill anyone who killed him, but it's worth a shot. Finally, Aqila rolls up the copies of the customer and moneylender lists she made from the contents of the hidden cubbies, and hands them over to Thoron to be dropped off at our contact's business, then uses Whispering Winds to alert him to the impending delivery. At which point we vamoose. Two rounds of Fly and Invisibility later, we're outside the city. Thoron catches up with us before we leave easily. Moonbeam summons four stags for us to ride, casts wind at back, and we get some distance put between us and Chalisce. We cover about 200 miles, with Aqila checking out heading every hour, before we sleep. After a good night's sleep, Joe insists on checking out at least some of the loot we took before we finish hunting the staff piece, in case we have to fight to get it.
The strong abjuration ring allows for stoneskin to be cast 3x a day, and grants SR 19 when worn. The amulet is complicated - CL +1 for spell effects only, 5x/day quicken a spell but also -2 con, -2 str, and -2 ac vs crits. The robe allows +2CL for summoning or calling spells only. The belt gives a bonus to saves and 5 force damage resistance. This takes 4 hours. Moonbeam resummons stags and wind at back, and we keep hunting the staff piece. This takes an hour and a half, with more frequent heading checks. As we close in, the divination starts pointing downward, and at last indicates vertically. Joe sends an earth elemental down to see what it can see. He completely loses contact with it around 500 ft down. Thoron, maintaining our air cover, can see a few depressions that might be caves. In lieu of trying to find a pre-existing path down, Moonbeam summons some Thoqquas and they make us a nice spiraling ramp down. She loses contact with them around 500ft down as well. Expecting trouble, we prepare combat spells before heading into the depths.
We find nothing until we near the end of the tunnel, when a light source become apparent. As we round the last bend, we see the tunnel terminate at a 3ft in diameter white glowing sphere. Aqila tries using detect magic to try to figure out what it is, and almost has her mind melted looking at the thing. She retains consciousness, but can't even ID the type of magic there, just that it's obscenely strong. And it apparently 'ate' our summons. A pebble tossed in vanishes without a sound. A pebble tied to a string that is swung in also vanishes, and the string drops limp, severed at the point where it touched the light. At this juncture, it is remembered that Moonbeam was given something at the island we debarked at before coming to Chalisce, a vial of a liquid that when examined with detect magic, caused the spell to fade away, quickly.
Before doing anything irrevocable, another Thoqqua is summoned to make a passage around and below the white light so as to have more room to work. A drop of the liquid applied to the white fire causes it to dimple and darken briefly at the point of application. Then the vial is tied to another piece of string, and cloaks are piled below in case it just drops through because the vial is stoppered. However, as the vial enters the white fire, it vanishes with a soft pop. A five inch long piece of iron drops onto the cloaks. Aqila claims it, casts the 'quiet' spell on it, and gingerly stores it in a wand pocket in her clothes. At this point, we have completed all the missions we had on the Chaos continent, and it is time to make like a tree and leaf.
Aqila uses the stone to let our ride know we're ready for pick-up, and we high-tail it for the coast. We're about six hours away as the stag gallops, and can easily get there by evening, we think. And then half an hour from the ocean, we are waylaid, so to speak. A very familiar looking old man is sitting by a fire, roasting a loaf of bread. He hails us and invites us to eat. Aqila makes sure the Sphere's box is firmly on the ground before joining the company, to avoid accidents. As we eat, the uncanny mage informs us that we've annoyed some powers. Zeleya is annoyed enough to make a pact with Rakan for the use of one of his servants. Not any of his mortal servants, but one of the strongest demons that can reach the material plane unaided. There was a chance for us to get to our ride home before it caught up with us, but our ride is delayed and the servant is going to catch us first.
While we're digesting this bit of news, he then informs us that we're carrying an item with us that he feels somewhat responsible for, and asks us if we'd let him deal with the Sphere. Aqila knows we don't have any way to deal with the nasty thing, and has no objections. Joe asks if we can know who he is. The old man doesn't say anything, but bends over and sketches in the dirt quickly an open book with a key across the middle. This makes for a very nervous mage, as she recognizes that as the personal sigil of Valeiran, the last Ancient lord of Valanas, the leader of the rebellion in the God's war, and who as far as she knew hadn't been heard from since he gave his staff to Mirarn and Kalya and ceded the Citadel to their rule. Dagnar recognizes it too. Unless he's grossly misrepresenting his identity to us, yes he's trustworthy. Joe, we hope jokingly, asks him not to drop it in the ocean. The somewhat annoyed reply is basically his purpose is to mend the damage caused by his brothers, not add to it. Joe gets dope slapped and fuschia hair for his rudeness. Valeiran then tells us he's helped us as much as he's allowed to under the constraints he accepted long ago, and perhaps more than we're expecting, warns us that the servant is almost here, and states that he hopes to speak with us later if we survive. Then he disappears.
At this point, we start tossing buff spells. Aqila still has her combat spells she prepared earlier where we found the staff piece. And then we realize we have indeed been helped quite a bit, to the tune of fast healing 10/round, +5 to saving throws, and 1 energy regen/round. Joe uses the last 25 charges on his resist energy invokeable to get all 5 types up on all of us. Aqila and Dagnar pop mirror images up, and Aqila tosses invisibilities up in case they help at all. And then we see a large winged humanoid coming towards us with a bladed tail and an enormous greatsword. It can obviously see invisible because its first act is to fireball us, mostly futilely. Moonbeam is lightly scorched, and it heals the next round. Our attacks are mostly futile as well, with its strong spell resistance. Moonbeam puts it in a thorn hedge. The demon's response is to teleport to Joe. Joe spends energy freely and manages to force a Quill Blast to hit. Then we are granted a +1 to spell penetration and attack rolls. Moonbeam opens up the rhino ball. One of them even hits. Aqila tries to dispel magic on it, and finds nothing to dispel. Dagnar tries to Grease it's longsword and fails to punch it through.
The demon almost annihilates the rhino that was stuck in its behind, then panics it as our attack bonus increases to +2. Joe gets out of the way, then hits it with a blast of sand successfully. Moonbeam adds more rhinos to the fray. Aqila resorts to lesser acid orb and gets a hit. Dagnar tries Grease again and succeeds in making it drop its sword. The demon goes after Moonbeam as the source of its rhino-pains, teleporting to her location. We are granted a + 3 attack and spell penetration bonus. Moonbeam aims even more rhinos at the demon. Joe very carefully aims blast of sand again. Dagnar gets a sonic orb through the demon's defenses, and Aqila finishes it off with a lesser acid orb before it can call for help. We were a tougher nut to crack than it expected.
After the corpse hit the ground, the old man reappeared, pleasantly surprised that we were successful so quickly. He congratulates us, then pulls out a gold chain with a simple shepherds crook on it, a symbol of the One, and asks us to give it to the imp when we see him next. Apparently that will be in Bright Haven, soon, Aqila commented wryly, given how events tend to happen around us. In response, Valeiran notes that follies are being committed, apparently by King Innokenti and his necromancers, but are being fed in the background by one we should never seek to meet. Remembering back to our fun and games in the Ferial, we were told by the other imp Nayden had as a familiar that 'Saralis' was coming. We never did find out who that was, other than the implication that he's part of the same group that Nayden, Grozdan, and the power behind the chaos of the Atenil Union. We are likely in for interesting times.
Session ends here due to sunrise and really really late.



We pick up where we left off, waiting on the shore for our ride home. Boarding ship occurs without incident and we settle in to pass the time while we steam back to Arandor. Aqila finds a corner to curl up in and catch up on her report for our boss then sort through the libraries we more or less snatched on the run to figure out if there's anything that needs to be brought to her boss's attention without delay. Moonbeam, Dagnar, and Joe decide to while away the hours with a darts competition.
On the 3rd day out, the 'imminent teleportation' alarm went off. We stopped what we were doing, and ran for the deck tossing buffs on the run in case something hostile was coming to say 'Hi'. This time it was Valrim, our boss, with a young agent we didn't recognize carrying a heavy metal box. On seeing us, Valrim stated 'Good, this will save time'. Looking at Aqila, he continued, 'Go below and put what you recovered in the box and bring it back'. Aqila carries out his instructions quickly, stowing the splinter and the staff piece in the box and closing it before returning to the deck. At this point, Valrim ran his finger around the seam, visibly welding it shut. He then passed the box to the other agent and firmly cautioned him against trying to see what's in the box, talking about the box, or even speculating on what might be in the box as far as he is able to. Then Valrim teleported us all into Valanas. Mirarn and Kalya were in the room, which ratchets Aqila's rampant paranoia up several notches.
We are told that while normally we'd get to pick out what we'd like as a reward for services rendered, we're getting sent out again immediately and if we want to trade things in when we get back, that's allowed. Except for two of the rewards, since they are altering existing items. Mirarn asks to see Joe's scimitar, then with a touch applies an upgrade to it. Kalya does the same thing to Dagnar's blade. This casual and unusually blatant display of power further increases the mage's paranoia levels, and the quality of the items we're gifted with doesn't help either. The icing on the cake is the initial briefing.
We're told that the Asferian necromancers have been gifted with enough information to perform a ritual to create a gulvor. Kashirna, who designed the monstrosities, was afraid to have too many active at once for fear he couldn't control them. The Ancient that made the other members of his race look like saints was leery of these things. They've also made four machines, based on designs Kashirna used, that can produce far more soul shards from one person than most means a necromancer can make use of, can drain many people at once, and can run constantly. Essentially, one of these machines can replace the harvesting efforts of a few dozen highly skilled necromancers – or a few hundred ordinary ones. The number made depends on the strength of the victim, and it's believed that the Asferians have been using the local fae population, which makes Listens-to-wind particularly unhappy. The ritual needs to be interrupted before they succeed, the machines need to be destroyed, and all necromancers who know anything about both topics need to be killed.
With that, we're sent to see the quartermaster. Aqila asks quickly where to drop off the suit of armor we recovered, another Kashirna artifact, and is told to go see the Vault keeper. So she takes a side trip to drop off the armor, the chaos sword, the malfunctioning gem, the portal stone, Zeleya's shackles because we don't need to give her any help in tracing us for another assassination attempt, and drops off the book collection for analysis. When it's our turn with the quartermaster, he looks us over, and comments 'Oh, you're part of that group. I feel sorry for you guys', and then kits us out. 10 spellstones, 3 healing draughts, a stabilization charm, and 4 wands, death ward, protection from evil, negative energy protection, and undeath to death and one resurrection stone. And the 'suicide kits': 3 healing potions, 3 energy regen potions, 3 empowering potions, 3 ignore pain potions, 3 mind ward potions, and the one that gives the effects of all 5 at once, and kills you within 2 minutes infallibly. Which moves the mage beyond 'twitchy' to 'acceptance of coming death'.
We then all report to a large room with about fifty people already inside it. There are tables with boxes on them labeled with names. Aqila and Dagnar recognize them as containers for sensitive papers, usually timelocked. Aqila sees a few agents that were also some of her instructors, who get looks of 'this is bad enough they're calling in the kids too' on seeing her. We take our seats, and shortly afterwards the boxes all click open as Mirarn and Kalya enter the room for the briefing.
In sum, the Enemy is the most active that he's been since the Wars of Unification 800 years ago. There are multiple problems erupting at once, and while the situation in Asferia looks likely to be the actual main attack, they have to honor the threats posed by the other issues, which limits the number of agents they can commit to Asferia. Everyone in the room has been assigned to assault one of the 4 citadels containing a soul-ripping machine and destroy it, kill all the necromancers involved, and destroy or recover any artifacts. Anything that seems to be a bit too powerful is probably a 'gift' from the Enemy and almost certainly has a subtle flaw with it. Some of us will have a note that further instructions are forthcoming, and if not, go to your departure point and head out. We of course have in our documents boxes a single sheet with the word 'Brighthaven' and 'further instructions will be forthcoming' written on it, so we stick around.
After most of the other agents file our, there are eleven of us left, plus Thoron. Introductions are given all around. The other agents going with us are as follows: Falasmir - arcane knight, abjuration specialist, married to Meldon - spellsword with a stealth focus; Yon - mage, one of Dagnar and Aqila's instructors, necromancy specialist, with biomancy, evocation and a little divination knowledge as well, comes across as a bit creepy at times; Elarial - Elethoran elven ranger lent to the Sentinel for this mission, huge wolf companion; Nasar - priest of the One, purity focus aka undead killing (CL 10); Ohtar - mage, artificer, divination magics mostly centered around gathering information about machines, very elderly and frail, one of Dagnar and Aqila's instructors also and father of Mabliosse, mage, artificer, apprentice of her father.

Collection of NPC helpers - aimed for useful, but not powerful enough to steal the show. Intended to provide enough support to give a reasonable chance of success - in retrospect I probably could have cut the support back a lot. At the same time, also intended to be a reasonable commitment for a very high-priority mission.

Then we get the rest of the briefing. Besides what we had been told earlier about the ritual and the machine, we are now given what intelligence has been gathered about the citadel in Brighthaven, the floor plans as far as they are known, and traps as far as they are known. As some of the information has been obtained by examining possible futures, its reliability is uncertain. The city is located between two arms of a mountain, with an upper city between the arms and a lower city literally lower down outside the arms. The lower city is in ruins and the upper city has been razed flat. The citadel is set into the mountain itself. There are store rooms, holding areas for prisoners, quarters for the necromancers and their guards, a room for the machine, and a round ritual chamber, which is protected with all the ingenuity of 25-30 paranoid mages. There are five layers of banishment wards, 1 greater alarm layer, and a dimensional lock on the room, except around the platform where 12 necromancers will be standing for the ritual. The platform has a teleport and summon delay ward, the caster can redirect incoming entities to a location he chooses, and it doesn't prevent outgoing teleports. Those performing the ritual will each be using a shard of the Mad God, provided by the Enemy, and the shards will be consumed by the ritual. We are also given a bit more information on the machine. Apparently, when Kashirna used it, the strongest persons he dared stuff in it went irrevocably and violently insane in a matter of hours and survived for months as it shredded their soul. The fae aren't near as tough, so if we find one in the machine when we get to it, we are not to try to rescue them but give them mercy.
At this point we are given a partial list of some of the necromancers likely/expected to be at this citadel, shown their images via illusions, and given a rundown on hit list priority. 1) He was the most powerful still living priest of Shenea, and may now have joined his brethren in lichdom. 2) A lich priestess of Shenea, rather weak on her own, but with an unusual ability to act as a powerful conduit for her Goddess. If Shenea decides to intervene personally, and she's involved, it'll be bad. 3) He is the oldest known lich not directly employed by the Enemy. Purportedly Jahan's disciple, at least 1 if not 2 millennia old. He's been 'killed' 3 times by Sentinel agents at various times and keeps coming back. No one's found his soul anchor. 4) He isn't as strong a necromancer as others, but he has a noted skill with possession magic. 5) This one goes by Taras, probably a pseudonym. He gained power unusually fast and may be a direct agent of the Enemy. 6) He is a Lazeerim who unusually worshipped Shenea not Rakan. He's been helping Innokenti with his desert campaign, something we want to see ended soonest. 7) She is a necromancer-artificer, and may be able to recreate the soul-rending machines. Killing her permanently has a priority higher than destroying the machine but lower than stopping the ritual.
Other threats besides the necromancers include about 10,000 minor undead swarming the tunnels around the city. There is something bad lurking in the upper city as well, but no divinations have gotten a fix on precisely what it is. There are some nasty undead lurking in the ruined lower city. Jahan's disciple will have 2-6 undead guards with him, culled from a millennia of selecting the best and toughest fighters from each generation. The ritual to turn them undead may also grant them some spellcasting abilities. The other necros will also likely have guards and powerful undead protecting them.
On the debit side of the ledger, there is a local resistance movement we may be able to recruit from, led by an Inquisitor of Reshana, a Justicar of Kantor, the 3rd son of the lord of Bright Haven and only survivor of his family, and a local brigand who's thrown in with the resistance and whose past misdeeds are being ignored because his band is more warm bodies for the fight. They are in contact with a powerful fae known as the Lady who has asked for aid in freeing her people. The Lady can't help directly because the desecration of the land around the citadel prevents her from approaching. Recruiting may be important since our fastest way into the citadel is a straight-up frontal assault. The other possible entrances are manned by undead and trapped to a fare-thee-well against anyone living. We need to, in order: disrupt the ritual, kill the necromancer-artificer, destroy the machine, keep Ohtar and/or his daughter alive so we can destroy the machine and keep Yon alive since he has the best chance of tracing a lich's soul back to its anchor so we can permanently kill them, and kill every necromancer we can catch who knows anything about the ritual or the machines. At the end of the briefing we are all given a clear stone that will turn red when the ritual starts if we're close enough to the citadel, darken as it progresses, and turn black when the gulvor is created. The ritual will take 4-16 hours at the best guess, so we need to get moving.
We all move to our departure point and are dropped off about four hours walk from Bright Haven and one hour from where the rebel leaders are waiting. As we get close enough to see who's there, we do see a familiar face, and one we were rather expecting. Listens-to-wind calls out a 'Glad to see you're looking better' to Tervel. 'Indeed. A mutual friend told me you'd survived your recent adventures'. 'We did. Are you having a party down here without us?' Tervel then greeted Nasar, the priest of the One, and then we introduce ourselves, then meet the rest of the resistance movement
The leaders are again Ninel (CL 13), an inquisitor of Reshana. Yes, that's the same title Radomil had, so we probably should avoid that whole topic. She's part of the same faction that does not want to work with the Sentinel period. She's supported by Illarion, a templar of Reshana. Afanasy (CL 12) is the Justicar of Kantor, who's a bit more approachable than she is. Mitrofan is the 3rd son of the former lord of Brighthaven and the last surviving member of his family. He's wary of the Sentinel, and has three guards with him. Tihomir is the brigand leader, with two thuggish guards.

More NPC helpers - these ended up largely being monster fodder.

Ninel lit into our group asking where we, meaning the Sentinel in general, had been for the last year and sarcastically commenting that now we need something we expect them to die for it. Mitrofan thinks this is their best shot at reclaiming Brighthaven. Tihomir notes it'll be a good opportunity for loot but getting back out again will be tricky. Afanasy observes that it will take a great deal of cleansing to make the town fit for habitation again. Aqila sticks her oar in to state that it's our intention to kill every necromancer in the city even if we die trying. Afanasy observes that's a good intention. After some more wrangling, and Aqila promising to give Ninel a spellstone loaded with a teleport spell, we manage to talk them all into coming along on our merry venture.
A quick discussion on strategy follows. Mitrofan knew about several secret passages into the city which have all been collapsed rather thoroughly now. One of the necromancers has a sideline in earth magic. At this point Aqila points out that we can continue this line of discussion on the move, so we set out towards Brighthaven, intending to camp outside of the desecrated area, but close enough to get inside when the stones light up without much delay. The sum total outcome of the tactics debate is our best way in is through the front gate - there's not a good alternative method to breach the defenses, not for the living. Aqila managed to catch Tervel when no one else was in listening range and passed on the necklace for Sneezil along with a brief explanation. Local intel on the necromancers is sparse but interesting. Only two of the necromancers have been seen outside of the citadel. One has been travelling to and from the citadel overland, which none of his brethren do. We don't recognize their description, but it might possibly be the previously living priest of Shenea. He carries some obviously powerful and evil artifacts, and the one ambush they tried ended badly. The lone survivor died of wounds no healing magic would touch. The lich was better with a blade than a mage or priest is expected to be. The other one we recognize from the description as the necromancer calling himself Jahan's apprentice. He was seen on one occasion in the upper city scattering something on the ground. Well, we already knew there was something bad waiting on the scoured plain.
We make camp less than half an hour from the town, and then set to preparing for battle. Aqila, Moonbeam, Listens-to-wind, and Nasar did most of the work charging the spellstones. We got a whole 5 hours sleep to recover before the gems lit red. Go time. Moonbeam put up Wind at Back so we can cross the corrupted land as fast as possible. This turns out to have been a life-saving precaution. We got through the lower city without incident, worryingly. About halfway across the razed plain of the upper city we all feel an intense chill. Yon gets an 'I'm wracking my brains' look on his face. Dagnar and Aqila vaguely remember a deep chill is a sign of an extremely nasty undead, but can't remember which one. We halt for a moment, but only a moment as Yon's memory spits out the answer he was looking for, and he yells 'Don't stop, run!' in a frantic tone. We take off pellmell heading for the citadel's main gates.
Bare seconds after we resumed forward progress, a hundred foot long and seven foot wide worm erupts out of the ground. One of Mitrofan's guards was lagging slightly behind, appropriately being to the rear of his master. This earned him the reward of being grabbed by the nightcrawler and swallowed whole. Three of our party including the ranger prepared to turn back to distract the monster while the rest of us get into the citadel. Moonbeam prepares to summon an earth elemental to play doorknocker. Then Aqila gets an idea. One unprepared Major Image later, a small crowd of running, screaming, panicking people is scurrying around the Nightcrawler. This doesn't buy us much time, but just enough to get the middle gate busted open and for us all to dash inside. Joe summons some Janni to cast Reduce Animal on Elarial's wolf friend so he fits inside the room. Moonbeam has the elemental close the gates again. Since the bars won't keep them shut and we don't want the monster inside with us, Aqila burns her spellstone with Stone Wall to seal it up. We can get out one of the other two later, if we figure out how to get back past the Nightcrawler.
We shake ourselves out into a travelling formation to go up the stairs to the first inner gate. The corridor is 30ft wide, and the 2nd gate is just vertical bars. As we get near the top, a man in grey robes sees us, walks up to the gate and demands "What's going on here!?". He is answered by the earth elemental grabbing his legs from below and giving him a good smack followed by Dagnar basically splitting his head in two like a melon through the bars. The elemental has no issues bending the bars until we can get through and into the first floor of the Citadel. On this level we have the store rooms and the guard room where the still living guards have their quarters. Most of our party fans out to search the store rooms and clear the level. Mitrofan and his two remaining guards volunteer to guard our escape route.
Aqila, Moonbeam, Joe, and Falasmir head over to deal with the guards. Three blasters and one sturdy meatshield should be plenty. Dagnar, since he has see invisible up, notices that Sneezil is indeed in the room with us. If we need to chat with him, message is a wonderful spell. The strike team moves to just outside the entrance to the guards' quarters, then Aqila opens the ball with Stinking Cloud. Incapacitation and visual cover so they can't see us. There are 7 thugs, 4 templars of Shenea, and one fellow who is likely a still living body guard for Jahan's disciple. Moonbeam positions the elemental under the door and ready to grab anyone who makes it to the exit, then unleashes a sonic strike on the group closest to the door. Some of the templar manage to ignore the stench and start moving towards the door. Only one thug is still functional, and the disciple's guard of course. The first templar through gets grappled. Falasmir and Joe let that guy have it since he's held in melee range of them.
The disciple's guard casts Gust of Wind to clear the air, so we now get to make saves as the cloud wafts out the door. Everyone manages to not start puking. Aqila sonic fireballs the room, big surprise there, and takes out two thugs. The elemental gives its victim a good smack and kills him, so Falasmir steps around it and starts hitting the next closest templar. Joe walks in to smack a different one. The elemental then takes advantage of its long arms to grab each of those templar in one hand and bashes them both on the floor. They croak. Aqila hoses the room again and kills all the thugs but one. Moonbeam aims her sonic strike at the disciple’s guard and the remaining templar. The disciple's guard moves to go after Falasmir. He parries her blows. Joe maneuvers behind the guard but misses his stroke. At this point, Aqila starts repreparing her spells since the battle has degenerated into a melee.
The finishing moves are Moonbeam's elemental moving to give the guard a good smackdown, the disciple landing three hard blows on Falasmir with the sword glowing green each hit, then she retaliates and kills him in two hits. The remaining templar and thug are dispatched without any trouble. Then it's time for clean-up. The elemental is set to stripping the corpses of anything that radiates magic then piling them in a corner. A fire elemental is then summoned to ash the corpses so we're not leaving raw materials for the locals.
Joe has a look at Falasmir's wounds and sees they are rotting at the edges. This is worrying. Moonbeam and Joe put their heads together, conclude that the injury is not natural in any way, and Joe goes to get Illarion the templar of Reshana because he can cast Remove Curse. That does work and allow Moonbeam to patch up the arcane knight and fix the weakening caused by the hit. While we were busy clearing the room and fixing the damage afterwards, the rest of our group fully cleared the 1st level. Some minor undead, nothing to write home about, but also no traps and no more junior necromancers. They're on the next floor down and our next targets on our rampage to kill everyone and take or break their stuff.
We end here 4am or so.

Terane
2020-03-27, 05:02 PM
We resume inside the Asferian Necromancer's citadel. One of Mitrofan's guards was killed by the nightcrawler on our mad dash to enter the citadel, but otherwise all sentinel agents and rebels are still alive so far. One junior necromancer and all the living guards have been dispatched so far as we cleared the first floor, being mostly store rooms. We are ready to head downstairs to the level where the junior necromancers have their quarters. Everyone is under the effects of Protection from Evil and Death ward from spells, items, or both, just in case.
DM note: There is an old agreement between Mirarn and Kalya, and the Enemy, that they won't contend with each other directly lest the world be destroyed, nor will they attack the other party's servants unless they are attacked first. The agreement extends to their kids and to the Enemy's greater servants. So if someone scary isn't attacking us just yet, but is taunting us into it, we might want to not take the bait. Once you've attacked one greater servant, you're fair game for any of them. And killing one doesn’t accomplish much, since the enemy can bring them back after a little while.
Mitrofan previously had expressed his desire to guard our escape route. Being as some undead can walk through walls, leaving him at the citadel gates seems to be a less than good idea. Joe convinces him that we value his idea and support his endeavors to make sure we have our rear secure, but he should do it from a bit closer at hand, say guarding the stairs up while we clear a level. Mitrofan is convinced.
We shake out into our initial assault order - Illarion and Tervel go first followed by Falasmir and Aqila, to cast a silence on the next set of stairs down and the entrance to the catwalk over the prisoner's cages, lest the sounds of conflict alert people deeper in. After the four of us make sure nothing is waiting at the bottom of the stairs and get the silence up, everyone else comes down the stairs. Aqila then casts Rope Trick in the stairwell after cutting off an appropriate length of rope and we boots Ohtar, Mabliosse, Yon, and Afanasy into the hidey-hole. The Justicar is there mostly so we have one decent fighter protecting our squishies. Mitrofan and his two guards are stationed where they can watch both stairwells at once, along with Elarial and her wolf companion, hoping that those two can hear/smell people coming more reliably and are perhaps less well suited to a room to room clearing spree.
Moonbeam, while this is going on, gets out an earth elemental to scout the level and pin down just where all the people are. The first foray covers the kitchens and locates all the drudges. They are subsequently locked in the kitchen so they don't get caught in the melee. The layout of this level is one large central room with doors to smaller rooms around the edges, then a hallway around the outside with inner and outer rooms, presumably apartments for the juniors. Further scouting turns up eight living beings in the rooms off the hallway, two rooms that couldn't be entered, six people in the inner large room, and two unenterable rooms in the inner ring.
Based on the layout, we decide to break up into strike teams and assault the level counterclockwise around the hallway, then swing north into the large room and deal with the remaining six. We have Moonbeam, Listens-to-Wind, and Thoron taking the first room on the left hall, Tervel, Dagnar, and Aqila taking the second, with Ninel and Illarion up front in case someone comes down the hall from the front, Tihomir the Bandit King and his thugs playing rearguard, and Falasmir, Meldon, and Nasar clearing the rooms of any traps, unfinished projects, magical or cursed items, or any other unholy abominations lurking around. The bandits can then loot whatever else they want.
Tervel, Dagnar, and Aqila's room is uneventful - Tervel charges in, Aqila gets ready to counterspell if needed, and then Dagnar sneaks behind the mage and backstabs her to death. Moonbeam, Joe, and Thoron have more fun. The earth elemental grab and smack works well, as usual, but this necro had a project in his room with him. The spectre glows every time it hits someone, or when Thoron flame bolts it. The necro dies inside of twelve seconds, the spectre takes twice as long, and explodes on death. Apparently it is a bad idea to feed those things fire. Moonbeam starts patching people up while the first hall is looted.
First dead guy had one ring with minor abj and some necro textbooks, one which is written in Common characters, but an unknown language. Ninell thinks she might have seen something like it, but can't remember where. Most of the other rooms are mostly empty, people obviously had moved out. Some lost notes are spotted and scooped up from under beds and behind chairs. Otherwise, not much more than random socks. The dead girl had 2 minor evocation wands, a trivial necro textbook, some more advanced evocation texts, and not much else. The only other room with signs of occupancy had minor texts from every school, and significant texts on conjuration, abjuration, and necromancy. That is a peculiar mix.
The north hall had three known occupants and no sealed rooms. Moonbeam, Joe, and Thoron take the one farthest forward. Dagnar and Tervel take the one next door, and Ninel and Illarion take the one directly across the hall from them. Aqila stands in the hall between them to support whoever finds the most interesting fight. Tihomir and co. are still looting. Nasar, Falasmir and Meldon are standing by in case something wanders in while everyone else is occupied. The precaution is unneeded. Moonbeam's elemental grabs their target, she hits her with a morningstar because she can, then Ape splatters her all over the room. Tervel barges in on his target and thwacks him soundly, then Dagnar slips in and backstabs their target to death. Two for two, there. Meanwhile, Ninel throws the door open on her target, hits them with searing light, then Illarion walks in and thwacks. Since that necromancer is still breathing, Aqila tries out her new wand, finishing him off.
Before we can start looting this hall, an alarm suddenly sounds, and we hear a wolf howl. En masse we thunder down the hall to see what's going on. Dagnar ends up near the front of the pack with Falasmir and Meldon leading the charge, and Tervel following right behind them. Aqila and Nasar are next in line. Moonbeam and Joe stay to the rear in case we get hit from behind. As Dagnar gets around the corner, he sees Mitrofan and his guards locked in combat with Tihomir and his thugs. Elarial and her wolf aren't in evidence. As soon as Aqila can see too, she grabs Ninel and Illarion since the combat is between rebels, so it's Ninel's mess to sort out. On seeing her, both Mitrofan and Tihomir yell in unison 'He betrayed us!'. The alarm is still clamoring. By this time Moonbeam is close enough to hear what's going on, and has her Elemental loom up between the combatants to physically separate them.
Aqila asks if Ninel would like her to Zone of Truth the idiots so we can find out what's going on. Ninel sharply states that she'll do it herself, and does so, repeating 'What is going on here!'. Tihomir states warily 'I believe Mitrofan betrayed us'. He then tells us that he and his men came around the corner, saw Elarial and her wolf apparently dead, after the alarm sounded, then Mitrofan and his guards attacked him. Mitrofan remains silent still, then Ninel gasps and doubles over. Thoron, with his keen eyes, saw Mitrofan make a subtle throwing gesture, then spots a dark line on the floor near her. Moonbeam has her elemental grab Mitrofan and pin him, and summons a unicorn to heal Ninel, presumably poisoned, then goes to look for Elarial and finds her near the stairs dead with her wolf. A dart is lying near each body. Joe followed her. Moonbeam picks up Elarial's body and takes it to the Rope Trick area where Afanasy can help her get the body into the space. Mabliosse is asked to handle the resurrection, since she's Ohtar's back-up and shouldn't need to do anything else for the next half hour. Moonbeam gives them the cliff notes version of what just went down.

I didn't actually expect the result I got here - this was a nasty poison, but should have left Elarial badly weakened, not dead. Expected only one hit, got two, and almost max CON damage from both. Wolf got the same, but just one dose. The dice were evil.

Meanwhile, a necromancer comes around the corner and all hell breaks loose. He was one of the students in an apartment coming out to see what the disturbance is, and he has a clear view of the hall full of heavily armed strangers. Dagnar reacts first and having expeditious retreat up, he can duck around the store room, enter the hallway behind the necromancer after using his helm to grant improved invisibility and moves to where he can stab his third target of the floor in the back. Tervel can't move until people get out of his way. Tihomir's thugs decide to tackle Mitrofan's guards so they can't cause any trouble. This blocks the side hall a bit. At this point, the necromancer starts to cast a spell. Leaving herself open for an attack of opportunity. Dagnar basically opens her up like a pea pod. Then he sees one of the necromancers in the large room run to one of the doors to an inner room and open to shrieks from her fellow students of 'Don't open that door you idiot!' Another necro in the large room casts an area dispel magic where Dagnar is. He can't see the spellsword, but he saw his fellow student get massacred by something there. Dagnar is not de-invised, but he loses his keen buff.
The unicorn moves down the hall until it can see into the large room, then charges and attacks the closest necromancer. The elemental tries to knock Mitrofan unconscious, and does, but he's also bleeding to death now. Falasmir walks around the corner, and casts magic missile. A necromancer responds with scorching ray, and another one casts fireball, hitting Falasmir, the unicorn, and with great luck, Dagnar too. He's feeling rather crispy now. A necromancer that came around the corner in the hall sees the mess up ahead and casts enervate, but fails the spell. At this point Aqila decides to thin the herd somewhat emphatically. She makes use of her expeditious retreat to leap the dogpile of thugs and guards on her way to a clear line of sight of the large room. One sonic fireball doesn't drop anyone, but a second quickened fireball knocks off two of them and leaves the survivors hanging on by a thread.
Joe moves into the hall by Aqila, still in Ape form, and Boreal Winds to knock two of the survivors dead. Sneezil, who has been fluttering around near the stairs we think - Dagnar's the only one who can see him - flies over to one of the necromancers coming down the hallway and gives him a good smack. He crits! for 5 damage... Thoron flies to where he can see into the large room and hits the last necromancer there with a fire bolt, the one the unicorn had been fighting. Ninel is still woozy from just having been saved from poison, but stabilizes Mitrofan. Tihomir starts working on sorting out the guard/thug pile. Tervel and Illarion are now able to get through the crush and move into the large room, which is important, because the experiment locked in the side room has rampaged out into the large room. It is rather intimidating looking, for a flaming skeleton, and it rampages towards Falasmir into the Boreal Winds effect. Nasar is watching to make sure nothing hits us from behind. The last necromancer unaccounted for walks around the corner, sees Sneezil near one of his fellow students - the little imp went visible when he attacked, and zaps him, but death ward negates the effect.
Round 2. Dagnar gets out of the line of fire and goes to get behind the last necromancer in there for some backstabbery. Tervel keeps working his way towards the skeleton, then tries to Turn Undead. The dice approve and he terrifies it. It flees, still in the Boreal Winds effect. Moonbeam slides back down the rope out of the Rope Trick room and starts moving moving towards the battle. The unicorn patches Dagnar up some. The elemental sinks into the floor and rises up under the pile of guard and thug. It misses its grab on one, but pins the other guard to the ceiling. Illarion moves to where he can hit the skeleton if it moves. Falasmir is close enough to move in and hit it, but misses her strike. The necromancer Sneezil stabbed tries to attack him and misses. Sneezil misses his attack of opportunity. The status quo breathes a sigh of relief. Aqila aims a Searing Light at the skeleton and sears it nicely. Ninel works on sorting out the guard/thug pile with Tihomir. Joe moves up to thwack the skeleton, and misses, but keeps Boreal Winds on it. Sneezil shows off his brand new scorching ray spell and lets the necromancer he was working on have it, burning him badly, then wisely scoots out of the way. The skeleton continues to flee in terror, or try to, provoking 3 attacks of opportunity. It's dead now. Thoron tosses another fire bolt at the last necro in the large room, almost killing him. Meldon finishes him off with a magic missile.
Round 3. Thoron firebolts the last necro standing in the hall. Dagnar hangs out to get healed, since his target died already. The elemental tries and fails to pin that last guard again. Listens to Wind sends Boreal Winds down the hall and finishes off the last necro. At which point he and Aqila move to quickly check the other three rooms that the elemental couldn't scout. All three were found to be empty, but warded. Presumably the students living in them didn't want their 'friends' from messing with their stuff. So, clean-up time.
Aqila rounds up Falasmir, Meldon, Tervel and Nasar, and finishes sweeping the level for magic items, unfinished projects, cursed things, traps, or other nastiness. Moonbeam expends two lesser restorations to fix most of the harm Ninel took from the poison. Mitrofan, on being searched, was found to have a holder with 1 dart remaining and spots for 4 more. He used one each on Ninel, Elarial and her wolf friend. So where's the 4th? Clearing the whole level takes about twenty minutes, so we decide to wait for Elarial to be raised before going down further. At this point, if the alarm is sounding on all levels, they know we're here and it would be bad to be separated. And if it's not, we don't need to rush off blindly.
There is also the point to keep in mind that while twelve of the senior necromancers are involved with the ritual, there are points when it can be stopped, which is why we have the 4-16 hour timeframe on completing it. So, if they do know we're here, at some point they may decide to come looking for us if we take too long getting to the chamber.
The results of the sweep - 4 rings with minor abjuration, seven assorted weak necromancy scrolls, a rod with strong necromancy aura, three more wands with weak evocation, moderate necromancy, and very weak enchantment respectively. About twelve cheap chunks of quartz which seem to be used for some sort of practice. Assorted body parts, three complete human corpses, and assorted animal corpses. Also three bookcases worth of paper, records and things, and some working tools enchanted specifically for the user. Everything except the bodies go in the back of holding. If nothing else, paper is somewhat scarce in Arandor - if the records aren't of any use, the paper will be.
So, while the sweep is progressing, Ninel first interrogates the guards under the still active Zone of Truth, then rouses Mitrofan to question him too. It boils down to Mitrofan for some reason thought helping the necromancers was his best chance to take back what was his. The guards are fanatically loyal to him and are 'just following orders'. Mitrofan is manacled, and arcane locked by Ohtar in one of the warded rooms. His guards each get their own room, locked in, after looting. The resurrection is completed about now, and since we're moving down a level, time for everyone to bail out of the hidey-hole until we secure a location to make a new one. Elarial saw nothing - she was darted from behind and died in seconds apparently. We held off on resurrecting her wolf friend until she could decide if it should be done or not. Her call is yes, but not now. Yon does something to the body - probably graceful repose. We'll move the wolf to the new Rope Trick space once it's up.
While Ninel was interrogating, the spellswords were asked to scout out the room of cages, where the prisoners due to be fed into the soul shard generating machine were housed. They see a mix of humans and fae, and can hear someone moving around in the machine room. There are catwalks over the rows of cages with trap doors in the cages where food can be lowered into them. Since there isn't anyone who isn't in a cage in that room, and a set of stairs leading down to the floor, we move everyone into that room. Aqila casts rope trick near the door to the machine room with a 6-foot long rope, on the theory that the people inside will be able to hear what's going on while we're dealing with whatever's in there, or even stick their head out and look. We move the wolf into the space too. Elarial, since she just had a bad time of it, will be staying in there on 'protect the artificers' duty while Afanasy gets a turn on necro-hunting duty.
We assure the inmates of the cages that we intend to get them all out, but there's a nightcrawler outside, and we'd rather they not get eaten on a dash for freedom. Some of the fae could dimension door out, right into its mouth, more or less. There is a set of iron doors leading into the machine room, currently locked. Dagnar picks the lock, opens the door, and is confronted by a wall of shrieking faces. We consult the resident necromancy expert, as we can't see anything past the wall. Yon sticks his head out, blinks, looks very disturbed, states that he needs to ask some questions, and disappears briefly, presumably in an urgent consultation with Ohtar.
The news, when he reappears, is bad, but could be worse. The idiot in the machine room cast a soul barrier. Only undead can cross it without harm. And we don't have a good way to deal with it, but we need to deal with it quickly. Casting the spell could have blown up the entire citadel, because the machine is a delicate destructive spell-filled monstrosity. The emanations from the soul barrier suddenly appearing could have destabilized it. Suddenly dropping it could also destabilize it. The barrier is most likely tied to the caster's soul, and might last for two days. We don't have that long to wait. Aqila could try to take it down with dispel magic, carefully targeting only the soul barrier, but it is rather hazardous. We could also breach it with very, very careful placement of an anti-magic field. Then go in, incapacitate the caster, destroy the machine, then kill the idiot. Joe has an item from our last mission to create one. He really doesn't want to use it here, as it would be of more use later, perhaps.
Before deciding on a course of action, we check on a few things. First, we try the other door, down the other set of stairs, which continue down deeper into the citadel. That's the set we left Tihomir and his buddies watching as an early warning system for a horde of angry liches coming upstairs. Tihomir should be twitchy and paranoid enough at this point to run to the rest of us at the first sign of trouble. That door is also blocked by a soul barrier. On Joe really, really not wanting to use his item now, Aqila consented to try a passwall. Upstairs, as the machine room is two stories high. She opens the wall up to find a lead barrier. On using her dagger to carefully peel it back, she sees the barrier there too. That seems conclusive that the barrier coats the entire inside of the room like a shell.
We resume trying to argue Joe into using the field. The next idea that is brought up is a magic circle against evil. The idea is shot down when Yon explains that a unicorn could probably use the ability to breach the barrier, but it would pay with its life. Not just be unsummoned, dead dead. While we are wrangling, a spectre not unlike the one that blew up and scorched Moonbeam and Joe upstairs comes through the doors at us. Aqila was right in front of the door, and it goes for her first. She burns a charge of her robes to dodge the attack, successfully. Nasar misses it, Tervel misses it, Aqila hits it with an arcane bolt, Ninel employs searing light, and it's dead. No glow, no boom. The wall flickered when the spectre died. Yon is puzzled momentarily, but thinks on it a moment, then lets us know that the barrier is weakened, but we may have to kill 7-8 spectres to fully drain it. Aqila moves away from the door, along with all the other casters, to leave room for the melee crew around the door, and starts repreparing her spell.
About a minute later, another one comes through with a faint glow. And it's another miss-fest until Falasmir unloads her special sword on it and it does exist when she hits. Illarion misses too, then Tervel gets a hit and Joe finishes it off. It blows up, but a small boom. Most of us get a little singed. Three minutes later one that's glowing brightly wafts in. The casters are at range just in case this time, as are the weaker meleeers, and any captives in the near rows of cages are moved to the back. Still in cages so the spectres don't go after them. All six of the door crew has resist fire up now. Nasar finally lands a Searing Light on it and it goes down quick, and blows up, but the resist fire absorbs the damage. Yon takes another look at the situation, and gives his opinion that one more spectre dying will weaken the barrier enough that a unicorn can live through opening a breach in it with magic circle against evil.
So, of course, two come through next, one in the usual spot, and one goes right for Nasar, Afanasy, Meldon and Aqila. The melee crew deals with theirs quickly, and the blast is absorbed with little harm. The one after the casters takes a bit longer. It gets nuked from several quarters, but the killing blow is withheld until Afanasy can get clear. Aqila gets clear. Nasar stays put, and Meldon comes over to kill it. He evades the damage, but Nasar eats it. At 11 hps, he needs a little TLC from the shaman.
End here about 2am, before the next stage of the 3rd floor fight.



We resume where we left off, with the soul barrier weakened to the point that a unicorn can breach a hole for us to enter. Healing up from the undead bombers happened first. Nasar needed some patching up, for one. The doorway is wide enough for 4 abreast, so we put the three plate wearers and Listens to Wind in Ape form in the front row to lead off. The clerics bring up the rear, and the rest of us are in the middle. Thoron's hovering, and Dagnar sees Sneezil hanging out behind us. Before we go in, Moonbeam summons an earth elemental to glide into the floor in front of us and perhaps grab the idiot necromancer in the machine room for easier killing.
We don't see an obvious occupant of the room when we breach the barrier. Thoron quickly scouts the room and spots the idiot flying invisibly about thirty feet up behind the central column. The room has a central column, 4 collectors feeding to it, and a ring of cages around each collector that is occupied by an irrevocably insane occupant. A mix of humans and fae. Thoron uses fairy fire to outline the necromancer, which lets Aqila target him with a dispel magic to see if she can knock him out of the air. She feels three spells dispel, and knows what two of them are, as the fairy fire and his invisibility drop. However he's still flying. What the 3rd spell is, she can't tell. Moonbeam sends her elemental to go around the pillar so he can grab the guy if we get him on the ground. The elemental refuses to go under the central pillar, and is greatly slowed moving under the cages. It is too large to avoid them entirely, and so doesn't get very far. Then Moonbeam summons an air elemental to take the fight to the necromancer. It becomes a vortex but fails to suck in its target, and is damaged by negative energy in a purple flash.
Illarion moves into the room cautiously, then Listens to Wind switches to Eagle form and uses control winds to move through the air elemental vortex, damaging it, to grapple the necromancer and claw him up. Then the necromancer retaliates. He hits Joe with a blast that would have been nasty without death ward. Dagnar and Meldon have the same idea and move into the room to get ready to backstab if the necromancer hits the ground. Tervel and Falasmir also start moving to where they can help, followed by Nasar and Afanasy. Aqila unloads an Arcane Bolt on the necromancer, as people keep moving towards the fight, then Joe shreds the necro a bit more. Dagnar, Meldon, and Falasmir fire at him with Magic Missile, but that's not enough yet. Tervel tries the fire stick we gave him way back when. Misses. And misses the giant bird too. Joe finishes what he started by shredding the necromancer in the air. The corpse hits the floor. OOC we find out that the 3rd spell that was dispelled was Death Throes, much to some druid's relief. As the idiot necromancer dies, his contingency mass poison spell sprays poison on everyone in range. Fortunately, that was just the elemental and the druid, who are, are of course, immune.
As the room is now clear, we give the high sign to the squishies in the Rope Trick room and they come in to inspect. Joe is tasked with making sure the prisoners have food and water to help them recover until we can evacuate them. While Ohtar is getting situated, Aqila strips the corpse and stuffs anything with a magical aura in the bag of holding. 2 rings, a statuette, a robe and a bracelet, basically. As she finishes, Ohtar finishes looking at the machine and comments that he wishes that we'd only knocked the idiot out so he could kill him again, and that if the other necromancers found his corpse, they'd probably raise him so they could kill him themselves. The idiot who raised a soul barrier in a room with delicate and sensitive equipment had also been fiddling with it. He broke the linkages between the collectors and the central core, and Ohtar has no idea where the energy that's being collected is going. Which is a bad thing. We're going to have to fix the machine so we can shut it down safely then destroy it properly.
Ohtar knows how to reconnect the linkages, but it'll take a mage investing energy into the process. There are four linkages and four mages. Aqila gets her linkage fixed first, with Yon and Ohtar finishing simultaneously next. Mabliosse has some trouble and is almost too slow, but we get it fixed. Then Ohtar spots the next troubles. He looks over at the spellswords to ask 'Do either of you know Arcane Sunder'? Meldon is straight stealth and doesn't, but Dagnar does have it. He is told to quickly hit four places. We find out when the danger is past that the idiot necromancer had modified the machine in a few places, and the changes would have blown up the place if the linkages hadn't been severed first. So once we fixed the machine, they started to go critical.
At this point, the machine appears to now be a properly functioning Ashaelan design, which Otar is familiar with and can probably shut down and destroy in 30-40 minutes of uninterrupted work. However, there are at least a dozen or more necromancers still running around the citadel. Since we were told in our briefing that we weren't to let the rebels know about the ritual, Aqila asks Ninel, Illarion, and Afanasy to stay here with Ohtar and guard him while he works, while the rest of us go necro hunting and keep them from investigating the machine room. Elarial, who is still resurrecting her wolf friend, will join them when she's done, and we'll ask Tihomir and his thugs to stay too. Futhermore, if something too nasty shows up, don't be idiots - teleport out and tell us if the machine isn't completely deconstructed so we can swing back through with Mabliosse to finish the job.
The plan is acceptable and accepted. We move out after spells are reprepared and energy potions are drunk. The senior necromancer's quarters are on this level and we clear them room by room to make sure there aren't any booby-traps, necromancers, pets, or interesting clues unfound. Room 1: pile of random body parts, cot, chamber pot, some books and an unused study. Books go to the Bag of Holding. Room 2: Looks like a mausoleum tribute to its owner's greatness. Elaborately carved walls, elaborate sarcophagus, with a grey linen pillow. Joe, still in Hawk form, eloquently indicates that he wants Aqila to grab the pillow for him.
Room 3: Chamber pot, bookcase full of notes and journals, one decrepit skeleton servant, large work table. All papers are looted, and Aqila got to enjoy her first melee kill by knocking the head off the skeleton with her staff. Room 4 - very strong abjuration wards on the door, determined to be inward rather than outward facing. Wards aren't active - bypassed to investigate later after we deal with the ritual. Room 5 - Mostly empty with mirrored walls, 1 cot. Dusty room. Room 6 - Decorated to look like the inside of a tent. Quarters of the Lazeerim necromancer? A seraglio is set up inside, there is a chamber pot and dust. Room 7 - Desk, empty bookcases, bed, working chamber, chamber pot, dust.
Room 8 - Shrine to Shenea, walls covered with her symbols. Channeling priestess's room? Listens to Wind, still in hawk form, leaves a 'present' of hawk chalk on the altar. Room 9 - Small shrine to Shenea, chamber pot, large pile of cushions for a bed. Room 10 - Actual temple to Shenea. Quarters for the priest the rebels saw commuting to work who's apparently also a skilled swordsman? The air stinks so badly Moonbeam gets nauseated. There's an altar and two guards. Tervel waits for Aqila to fireball the room, which almost fries the guards in one hit, then he goes in to smash one guard. Aqila had lent Mabliosse her force wand for this stage, and she gets to use it to finish off the other one. Nasar gets a chance to have some fun himself, commenting 'This may be a bit theatrical' as he smashes his mace down on the altar. It splits cleanly in two and the stink vanishes. He notes that it is usually easy to seal a temple - just make sure the deity knows a hostile foe has control over it.
Room 11 - Minor tomes, some notes on the machine. Artificer/necromancer's room? No chamber pot. Very clean with a thin layer of dust. Room 12 - As we approach, we hear a metallic voice state 'Speak the password, withdraw, or perish'. Moonbeam sends in a small earth elemental as a scout to find out just what's in there. It finds a silvery humanoid that immediately shoots flaming darts at it. Injured, it dives into the floor and moves around the wall to see what's on the other side. Inside the alcove is a glowing white portal unattached to any structure. That's the last thing it sees as a second figure flames it to death. We call on the resident expert for an analysis. Mabliosse is reasonably sure from the description that they are golems of some type, but smaller and faster than any she's familiar with. She also notes that if the flames are all they can do, we can probably deal with them, but we can't assume that. Golems are usually limited to a distinct set of responses, so they probably won't come out after us.
We gamble on nothing too interesting coming through the portal while we deal with the ritual rather than fight the golems then. Aqila puts an explosive rune inside the door, then Stone Walls it off and we move one. Room 13 - Signs of two people's occupancy, chamber pot, bookcases full mostly of journals, large room. Aqila grabs all the paper, as she has been doing the whole crawl. Room 14 - Ornately carved room, velvet lined sarcophagus. Seems to be competing with the other lich for who's got the fanciest crypt. Room 15 - Active workbench with beakers and tubing filled with a foul liquid . Yon ID's it as a preservative fluid. Working area with puddles of fluid and some scorch marks. More bookcases with research journals, tossed in the Bag of Holding. Newer journal on the desk has details of a complex necromantic ritual. The one we're here to stop, in fact. This one's handed to Yon to see if he can quickly glean anything useful.
After a quick scan, he thinks it doesn't show the whole ritual - one person's part for sure, maybe up to three people's. He thinks we don't want to interrupt the ritual once it gets to the last 1/6th or we'll get fragged even with our death wards. And we may be coming up on a point in less than half an hour where they can pause it. He can't give a more exact estimate - it could be any minute. We hurry downstairs, having finished clearing the senior necromancer's quarters.
In the hall before the ritual chamber, there is a balcony about 8 feet in the air around the hall's circumference. Directly over the entrance to the ritual chamber on the balcony is a glowing multicolored opaque sphere. On either corner at the front of the hall is a staircase leading up to the balcony. A skeletal guard is crouched at the top of each stair with its sword held before them, point grounded. Falasmir is the first to ID it as a prismatic sphere. Crap. We can't see most of the room or what's up on the balconies along the sides, so we procede in 'tanks first, squishies last' order.
We are addressed by a voice inside the sphere, musing out loud if we are a proper test for the fools in the ritual chamber and offering us a bargain - we fight his creations and if we win he'll grant us two boons. 1) He will answer any one question and 2) he and the rest of his servants will leave. On being asked, the voice states that the agents who have encountered him before know he keeps his word. The only lich on the 'must kill list' that has been killed before and keeps coming back is Jahan's disciple. That's probably this guy. He then tries to persuade us that it is only right for the strong to rule the weak for their own ends. We disagree. He then makes it clear that his goal is simple - to do whatever it takes to prevent the dragon from ruling the world again no matter the cost.
Aqila tries to piss him off to see if he lets drop any useful information by asking him if he was aware that his mentor Jahan was killed by a mage who hadn't even mastered Fireball. His response was that he was already aware of that fact and Jahan proved himself to be weak by his mistakes. The fact that he by some method knew we'd offed Jahan is perhaps relevant, maybe, sometime. Moonbeam asks if he intends to rule instead, which gets a 'Who better than one who is immortal and unkillable?' comment. Aqila points out that that's been tried before and didn't end well. The disciple's only response is to state that he doesn't intend to make the same mistakes.
A brief internal discussion via message notes that he didn't promise not to kill us, nor did he require we promise not to kill him, and he is on our priority kill list. Also, we do between us have all the spells needed to breach the sphere, and enough people to do it in one round if we share equipment. We decide to play along with his test, for now. We're even graciously granted time to prepare before the combat starts, which we take full advantage of. Falasmir and Joseph do most of the resists protting. Joe decides to try out an enlarged dire lion form for this melee. And then the fun really begins.
Six skeletal figures along the walls with great swords and purple glows stand up, and above them on the balcony, six more figures stand into view. The upper six are paired, two red, two blue, and two crackling. Joe goes full sized and pounces on one of the lower skeletons, mauling it to death in seconds and sustaining only scratches. Dagnar, out of a sense of self preservation, targets one of the crackling skeletons with a scorching ray. Moonbeam summons a large elemental to do the smashy smash on one of the cold skeles. Yon backs it up with searing light. And then we get royally screwed. Six greater dispellings hit us at once, stripping everyone of most of their buffs, and pretty much everyone in melee range of the skeletons gets thwacked painfully, including Moonbeam. Dagnar's mirror images don't help him too much - he gets hit twice and loses one.
Aqila lobs an acid orb at the battered icy skele. Nasar adds in his two cents and kills it with searing light. Falasmir shies a magic missile at the crackling skele Dagnar targeted earlier. Thoron casts snake's swiftness mass, allowing the meleers to lash out. Joe and the elemental hit. Thoron then invokes a stone to put up a wall of force around the balcony, walling off the blaster skeletons for now. Joe mauls another skeleton to death in one round. Dagnar, deciding that he doesn't want to stay where he is, scootches backwards, takes a hit, and repairs the damage himself. Moonbeam gets a regular earth elemental out, but both elementals whiff this time. Aqila aims a searing light at the skele that hurt Moonbeam. Yon whiffs. Nasar throws out another searing light, Meldon magic missiles, then Falasmir gets pounded on hard, 2/3 health gone. Tervel gets beaten almost unconscious. The skele that had damaged Dagnar decides to charge Nasar instead and beats him up. Falasmir retaliates on the skele that hit her, as does Tervel.
Joe charges the only untouched lower skele and again mauls it to death. Thoron casts snake's swiftness again. Joe claw's Tervel's target, Nasar misses, Falasmir hits. Dagnar shies a magic missile at Falasmir's target and kills it. The elementals hit. Yon sears the skele beating up Nasar. Aqila tries scorching ray as a test, and sees red flickers where the rays hit, and hopes it didn't just absorb a charge to explode fireyly later. Nasar sears his problem again. Meldon throws some magic missiles at Tervel's target, but it's not enough. Tervel gets smashed unconscious, but stabilizes. Nasar gets pounded into a pulp, but is saved by his charm. Falasmir steps over Nasar's prone body to hit his attacker. Thoron casts snake's swiftness mass again. Joe's swat kills Tervel's skele. Falasmir hits her new target.
Joe hurries to heal Tervel...by licking his face. Aqila is going to have to use prestidigitation to ungunk the paladin. Again. Dagnar uses magic missile. Yon is tapped. Aqila tries Arcane Bolts on the last great sword skele standing and doesn't quite kill it. Meldon gets the final blows in with magic missile. And now it is time to regroup.
Since Moonbeam and Falasmir were hit with cursed blades that prevent healing until uncursed, the first order of business is fixing that. Moonbeam uses the break enchantment wand to fix herself, and her remove curse invokable on Falasmir. Then healing all around happens, with unicorns summoned in to speed things up. Mages reprepare spells quickly. With one cold skele down already, we bet that we can drop the other one before they can react, and only put up fire and elec resistances.
Thoron drops the shield abruptly, so we get a short instance to attack before the skeles can react. Listens to Wind mauls the other icy skele to death. Dagnar tosses a scorching ray at the already damaged crackling skele. Moonbeam tries moonbolt and renders the other crackling skeleton helpless. Yon, obviously getting tired, misses with his searing light. Aqila tosses an acid orb at the crackling skele, then Nasar massively overkills it with his searing light. 2 to go. Listens to Wind mauls one of the two firey skeles to death and Moonbeam moonbolts the other, and the battle is over.
We get a 'very good' from the bubble, and the disciple invites us to ask our question. Since there is some question as to how useful the 'where is your phylactery' question would be, as if we get his fresh corpse, Yon can answer that for us, and the disciple had made a rather pointed and disturbing comment earlier, the question we go with is 'Who was the Dragon when he ruled the world?'. The answer? 'The lord of Reshak-Nasar, Kashirna himself'. That would be the Ancient lord that Jahan was a servant of, the one the Sentinel only speak of as 'The accursed one', presumed dead because they found his body. And creator of that lovely artifact we found in Jahan's lair, and the lich-making armor we found in the demon-binder's tower. That tidbit triggers a mix of startled expletives and stunned silence from the Arandorans present. Thoron is told via message to go stick his head in the Rope Trick room we tucked Mabliosse in to tell her what we just learned, and to bug out for home with that intel at the first sign of trouble.

They managed to find about the most valuable thing they could have to ask about. This earned them a massive reward later.

Moonbeam reprepares moonbolt while we talk, then we put our lich-killing plan into action. Aqila opens up with Cone of Cold, and the sequence procedes through to the invoked Dispel Magic. Dagnar was given the job of invoking Dimensional Anchor at the lich, and nails him. Now the fun really starts. Tervel charges up the left staircase to engage Guard 1. Joe leaps up onto the balcony, tackling the disciple back towards the ritual chamber and mauls him, making his grapple check. Moonbeam tries to moonbolt the disciple and Guard 2, but they resist the effects. Then the disciple reacts, hitting Joe with a multielement burst, badly hurting him. Meldon waits for something useful to do. Dagnar tries his moonbolt invokable. No dice. Guard 1 hits Tervel, and it's another one with a Vile Wounding blade. Tervel misses his stroke. Guard 2 tries to hit the lion and hits his boss instead.
Aqila and Yon both miss with searing light. Falasmir charges up the right hand stairs to engage Guard 2, and thwacks him. They're electricity immune. Bah. Meldon boosts Nasar up onto the balcony so he can heal Joe up. Thoron gets back from his side trip to Snake's Swiftness Mass again. Tervel and Falasmir miss, but Joe and Nasar hit. Sadly, Nasar's disrupting mace doesn't disrupt Guard 1. Joe resumes mauling the disciple, and grapples him more firmly. Moonbeam's moonbolts fail to affect the disciple and guard again. Thoron recasts Snakes Swiftness Mass and no one does anything effective. The disciple hits Joe again with the same spell and hammers him unconscious. The charm stabilizes him. The unconscious lion pins the disciple very firmly to the ground. Guard 2 beats up on Falasmir and Guard 1 almost beats Tervel unconscious. Again. Aqila casts Arcane Bolts unprepared and kills the disciple off.
At this point we hear a disembodied voice say 'Futility. You cannot kill me. Do you think I need the silly toys you'll be searching for?'

This was the party's first introduction to Sohrab - the setting's oldest 'lich'.

Actually a being able to possess and reshape any undead creature - and cast spells through it. Which, of course, means killing him just costs him some random undead that he probably didn't even create himself. This gives him an interesting perspective on life - or unlife - everything is just a game to him.
His spellcasting is limited by the hit dice of the undead he's possessing, unless he chooses to permanently damage it (effectively negative levels applying to undead) to get something stronger through - hence why he obviously had a 9th level spell, and never used another in the fight.


Moonbeam gets a boost from Meldon to reach Joe and heals him back to consciousness, at which point he kicks the corpse down to Yon for scrying, then tackles Guard 2 and grapples him. Thoron's usual spell means Tervel and Nasar miss Guard 1 while Joe and Falasmir hits Guard 2. Dagnar moves up to heal Tervel up a bit. Guard 1 speaks a word and vanishes instantly. Guard 2 fails to flee. Aqila uses mage hand to stick a flare stake in his eye socket for the amusement factor, then Joe kills it. That corpse is brought to Yon too. The guard's phylactery is his sword, which Yon asks someone to break for him. Joe snaps it. Then Yon has to explain that the disciple has no phylactery, as far as he can tell. That is an annoying piece of news.
Session ends there due to 5:30am
TBC
Next time, on D&D - healing session. Deciding whether to send Mabliosse back to Valanas right now with the news we have and the disciple’s corpse in hopes someone there can find the bastard. Plus that would let us give her kit to Tervel for the ritual room fight and the charm might keep him alive. Maybe. And then the grand finale.

Terane
2020-03-30, 11:43 AM
We pick up where we left off, the round after the disciple died. Some healing happens, more protting happens, and lots of potion drinking happens. Mabliosse is asked via Thoron to shimmy out of the rope trick room, handed the corpse of Jahan's disciple, and asked to head for Valanas as quickly as she can, and pass on the intel we got last session. The teleport stone won't get her the whole way there, but if we all get killed in the next few minutes, someone will have the information that really needs to get to our bosses. We also ask her to pass her kit to Tervel to increase the chances that he doesn't go splat in the ritual room. The stabilization charm in particular may be needed, given how the last fight went.
5 rounds into prepping, we hear a voice in our minds that makes our bones feel like they were dipped in ice. "Interesting. You are more dangerous than you seemed. Let's make this fair: Either they die or you do." The walls start glowing slightly, and Aqila is almost blinded by the force of the abjuration magic on them. It is probably a safe assumption that our teleport stones are now useless. And here's hoping that Ohtar & company aren't being attacked right now. We charge in the next round. For purpose of description, assume the exit is at 6 o'clock
Dagnar sneaks in invisibly and picks a target to annihilate on his next turn. Thoron takes a quill blast grenade in and does a fly-by quilling, circling through the room and heading back towards the exit. At this point a hollow voice from the lich at 12 o'clock booms 'Kill them! I will hold the ritual!' That looks like the priest the rebels had seen traveling overland, the one who had carved up a lot of them with his sword. Meldon slips in invisibly and tries to backstab the fragile looking mage at 6 o'clock. He misses. His wife Falasmir moves into the room, having been given the Pillar stones Aqila charged. She employs the Sonic Pillar to great effect, roasting two human necromancers at 4 and 5 o'clock to death and damaging the priestess at 3 o'clock, the one who is known to be an obnoxiously powerful channel.
Listens to Wind hustles in next and sandblasts one human and two liches, narrowly missing Dagnar, the human at 7 o'cloak and the liches at 8 and 9 o'clock. Then Aqila runs in counterclockwise and blows through all 4 of the remaining charges on her bracelet, playing doorknocker grenade a bit later than usual. Quickened Maximized Sonic Fireball one screams in at the priestess at 3 o'clock, the human at 2 o'clock and the liches at 1 and 12 o'clock. The human dies, and the lich at 1 o'clock. So the next spell, an Empowered Maximized Sonic Fireball is aimed at the 12 through 9 o'clock positions. The human at 10 o'clock dies, but the three liches are still up.
Yon steps into the room to see the lay of the land and shies a Greater Disrupt Undead at the priestess, who dies instantly, the retargets at the lich who looks the least battered. With two liches dead, he's got 6 rounds of spellcasting to do as soon as he has a corpse. Tervel charges in and gets on the platform. Moonbeam moves in as well, and moonbolts the liches at 11 o'clock and 12 o'clock, but they resist the effects. The lich at 11 o'clock is another one on the priority list, the one suspected of working for the Enemy. We have killed six necromancers in six seconds. 4 humans and 2 liches down, 2 humans and 4 liches to go.

This fight turned ridiculous quickly - the greatest problem the party ended up with was trying not to kill the liches too quickly, since the phylactery trace required fresh remains.

Dagnar annihilates the red-headed necromancer and shies a final ray at the fragile looking human, to little effect. One of the liches finally reacts, and nails Joe dead to rights with a fire spell. And with his resists up, it does nothing. Thoron holds off until he sees something useful to do, since we don't want to kill any more liches just yet. Melden stabs the last living necromancer to death. At this point, so as to not overwhelm Yon, Joe puts cylinders of force up around the rest of the liches to give him time to finish up with the ones we have down already. Aqila grabs the priestess's corpse and flies it over to Yon, who takes a step back into the hall and starts divining. Tervel finishes his movement to the middle of the room, grounds his sword point first in the center of the platform, looking strained. (apparently offing the priestess unmoored a gateway to Shenea's realm and killing the other necros released even more negative energy, and Shenea is making a go at personally manifesting in our airspace by grounding the gateway with all the extra negative energy. This is Not Good)
Dagnar, seeing that we need to take a break from mayhem, heads for the exit dragging a corpse. Melden does the same, followed by Falasmir and Moonbeam. Joe grabs a corpse and heads towards the door. Aqila flies back in, grabs another corpse, and nips back out again. Tervel remains stationary. The liches seem to be casting. Two rounds later, Yon is done casting Soul Seeker on the priestess's corpse. "This can't be right. It feels like she has one phylactary in two places. One ten miles north of here and one...on the ceiling?" Aqila had glanced around while she was recovering corpses and remembers seeing a faint illusion spell on the ceiling. Faint like its being blocked, not like it's weak. As Yon starts on corpse 2, we get ready to cut another one out.
Joe heads in so he can drop his walls. Falasmir is ready to retrap the next three, and the spellswords move to do the stabby stabby thing on the lich at 9 o'clock. Dagnar does his thing and gets a hit in. Then the lich at 11 o'clock does something and the wall flickers out. Crap. Thoron casts Snake's Swiftness, Mass and everyone standing around the first lich beats on him. Joe's disrupting scimitar poofs it to a pile of dust and gear. Then the high priest stalks from its position at 12 o'clock and Smites Good on Tervel. That hurt. He's bleeding. Meldon tries to recast the force wall, but it flickers out an instant later. Falasmir moves towards Tervel to help him, and uses the other Pillar stone, and hits all three remaining liches. Moonbeam scoots in so she can patch up the paladin. Joe decides the appropriate action now is to take out the lich who killed the wall so we can trap the other two long enough for Yon to clear his backlog. The dire lion leaps across the room and disrupts it too. So we have two new customers for Yon. And annoyingly, the effect disrupting the force walls is still present. Dagnar can see it.
Aqila moves from the doorway towards the first lich powder pile to scoop it up for Yon, with a readied counterspell just in case. The lich at 10 o'clock eyes the dire lion up, smiles evilly, and casts Greater Dispelling at him. Aqila tries to counterspell and fails miserably. He loses 14 buffs, and keeps 5. Moonbeam tries healing Tervel, and the spell fails to do anything, so Dagnar uses his Remove Enchantment stone, and manages to uncurse the paladin. Thoron, having flown to the back of the room, uses mage hand to scoop all the lich powder and gear onto the left behind robes to be flown to Yon. Nasar burns his wall of force stone to trap the priest so he stops beating on our friend. The lich's response is to drop to his knees, ground his scepter, about the size of a forearm, and start casting something. Moonbeam tries to moonbolt the other lich, and it resists the effect. Aqila tosses her Moonbolt stone to Meldon then quickly sweeps all the lich dust and gear into her bucket and flies it to Yon, who starts casting Soul Trace. Nasar drops the wall to allow Joe to tackle the priest, and he disrupts that guy too. Since the scepter was being used to do something, and we don't know if the effect is going to persist even after the lich died - the other spell is still up after all - and we really don't want to play with Shenea today, Thoron rolls all the lich bits and gear and most especially the scepter into a pile on robes. Dagnar wraps a piece of cloth around his hand, picks up the bundle, and sprints for the door. Thoron then picks up the other pile he made in his beak and flies it to the door too. Moonbeam casts Moonbolt again, and this time it works! The lich collapses.
And now, things get hairy. A bulky figure in black platemail drops in from the ceiling. In hindsight, he was probably behind the illusion spell we saw. He states 'Interesting. You're more formidable than expected." Then all the negative energy in the room is suddenly absent. 'Refreshing'. He then makes a comment along the lines that any agents who know who he is should know not to attack him, then comments about recovering what he can after we spoiled his plans, gestures, and calls the sword from the lich we thought was likely an Enemy agent, commenting 'If that was the best he could do, he was a fool to think he could join us. Then he offers us a bargain - the priestess's phylactery for the scepter, which Dagnar is still holding in the bundle. Somewhat uncomfortably because he's now hearing faint voices in his head. A small crystal appears in his gauntlet. Yon gives a startled yelp, and tells us he had never felt something like that before. The phylactery moved and instead of feeling two, he now feels one, and it's in the room. That seems definitive that the man in black really has it.
Pausing to analyze the facts, we remember 1) the priest always travelled overland, everyone else teleported around. Which implies he had something that reacted badly to teleporting. And we've recently been involved with a few somethings that match that description, which would be really, really bad for an agent of the Enemy to get their hands on. And 2) this is probably a high level agent of the enemy, do we really want to bargain with someone like that? We have Meldon decline, politely. The man in black then adds the priest's phylactery to the bargaining table. Anything he wants that badly is something we really, really don't want him to have. Offer is again refused. And now the man comments 'Well, then my master will have two holds on Shenea', then advises us to clear out of his way or we'll regret it. The shards of the Mad God which had been quietly floating in midair this whole time start swirling in a circle, tightening towards the man in black and spinning faster as they move.
Moonbeam and Falasmir help Tervel off the platform, and Moonbeam heals him as they run. Everyone clears out and/or grab corpses on the fly, and in seconds the platform is deserted except for the man and the shardnado. In seconds, they all disappear in a mighty implosion. The abjuration on the walls vanishes at the same instant. Joe uses his control winds spell to keep air near the ground calm so we don't have lich powder swirling everywhichway and getting mixed up. Yon resumes casting. Moonbeam finishes her usual paladin patching duty, then starts fixing up the damage from exposure to all the negative energy. Aqila casts Break Enchantment on Dagnar and shuts the voices up for him, then starts prepping sending because we have some 'Above our Paygrade' news.
At this point, Falasmir and Meldon head upstairs to check on Yon. Halfway up the long stairs, they hear the sound of clashing blades and after yelling 'Trouble!', take off at a run. Dagnar and Joe take off after them while Nasar and Tervel stay put to guard the mages and the scepter. Moonbeam sits tight too, and it's a good thing she did. After the others leave, a spindly humanoid pops in and makes a dive for the scepter. A hastily summoned earth elemental squashes it.

Ethereal Filcher. I did not expect this to succeed, just a hint to the party that their new acquaintance wasn't giving up.

Meanwhile, upstairs, Meldon and Falasmir find Tihomir and his thugs blocking the stairs to the next level to keep a flood of minor undead from gaining a foothold. As they get closer, they hear one of the thugs calmly say 'here comes another big one' followed by Ninel casting something and a brief glimpse of a puff of dust. They don't seem to be in any major distress, and report that a few minutes ago a horde of undead started coming down the stairs. Mostly they're negligible, but the big ones can knock you back, so Ninel is handling those so they don't lose control of the stairs. On being asked how Ohtar was progressing, they report that he's muttering about incompetents and half trained monkeys, and expects to be done in another ten minutes or so. Joe decides to go hang out in the machine room just in case, now that we're in the home stretch.
Meanwhile, as Yon finishes up his divinations, two more skinny things pop in and make a dive at the scepter under the elemental. One gets squashed, Thoron tags the other and it winks out. At this point, Moonbeam has had enough, and makes a stone lattice over the scepter so we can see it, but it can't be removed without breaking the stone. And no more things pop in after that. Yon reports that three of the phylacteries are in the citadel, and one is about ten miles north. So Meldon, Dagnar, and Yon go phylactary hunting not long after. All three of the ones immediately accessible are in the senior necromancer's quarters. One's in the room with the mirrored walls, one's in the 2nd room with the fancy sarcophagus, and the 3rd is in the room with the small shrine to Shenea. Falasmir hangs out with Ninel in case they need a backup holding the stairs.
After breaking some mirrors and finding one decoy compartment full of junk all enchanted to look like a phylactery, they finally find the right compartment in the ceiling and Meldon destroys it. And then gets hit by several curses. He resists two of them, but is inflicted with a curse of clumsiness. In the 2nd room, Yon pinpoints the phylactery actually in the altar. Which still has a pile of hawkchalk on it courtesy of Joe. Instead of breaking their weapons on the stone, they go get Moonbeam to stoneshape a hole in the altar. She then head back downstairs to resume sceptersitting. A crystalline pyramid is inside the hole. Dagnar moves across the room and uses two rounds of screeching ray to shatter it. And then a wash of blue light fills the room and everyone has to resist curses. Dagnar now has Mental Fog and a Diseased Mind.
At this point the hunt is delayed due to curses while they go hunt up the Templar of Reshana for some uncursing, then check out room 3. Yon finds the phylactery to be under the sarcophagus, so Moonbeam has to climb the stairs. Again. She gets an earth elemental out to glide into the stone and break anything it finds in the floor. It's damaged by some traps, but perseveres and destroys the 3rd phylactery. Then it's sent to go check the portal room and finds that the portal is gone, the wall has crumbled and the golems are slag. Okay then.
Ohtar finishes his task and is asked to come down and have a look at the scepter. Joe gives him a ride downstairs. Yon and the spellswords headed down too. Aqila finishes casting and sends a message directly to Valrim. 'Ritual Interrupted. Machine Dismantled. Four phylacteries traced. Two taken to Enemy. Offered a trade: phylacteries for scepter. Declined. Like item we couriered before. Returning Overland.' She doesn't get a verbal response. Valrim's sister, Elenmire abruptly appears instead, and picks the scepter up. A stone box isn't going to stop her. She eyes it, frowns, and the scepter comes apart. A thumb-sized piece of iron drops out of it. That looks familiar!
Elenmire is now very unhappy and interrogates us as to just who had wanted the scepter. We describe the man in black, and she IDs him as Duraln. She speculates that the Enemy may know about the staff, but in case they don't, she's going to arrange for transportation. She also comments that the hunt will need to be speeded up. We're to head back to Valanas ASAP. Yon is going to stick around until the last phylactery is dealt with. Aqila asks if Mabliosse had gotten in yet, and on Elenmire's puzzled look, tells her the information we got from the disciple, that the Dragon is the last lord of Reshak-nasar, and gets a comment that that will need to be investigated.
Rapid looting occurs, tons of stuff acquired. Determining what we left for the rebels and what we kept will be done before next session. Tervel and Sneezil, who was very quiet the whole time, are going their own way now as usual. We finish cleaning up by getting all the prisoners out of cages, getting the traitor and his guards out of the rooms we locked them in, and then using most of the teleport stones, everyone gets poofed to the rebel's camp. And then all the Sentinel agents and auxiliaries get a ride home. For our efforts, everyone involved gets 15 tokens, tradeable for minor favors from Mirarn and Kalya or tradeable to other people for services or items, whatever we can bargain for.

Minor favors meant a wide range of things - most were spent on special spells. SL^2 tokens = learn any one spell, including off-list. Use your spell list level if on your spell list, otherwise default to mage/priest/druid/other - in that order. Generally taking the highest level other when other applicable.
This was also an incredibly lucrative mission for the party - partly due to some mistakes on my part with item value. After a reasonable loot division, the party still ended up ridculously past standard WBL guidelines.

Session ends here and it was only 2:30am! DM says our characters are only getting maybe 3 days break so the fun resumes next month.



The session begins with a lot of ooc sorting out of the last session's loot. It turns out that we have four days for R&R, so there is also some trading around of gear, learning of spells, and collecting of bounties from the last load of stuff we brought in. Collecting of bounties for this load will have to wait until there's time for them to be assessed.
Back IC, after getting bounced back to Arandor after the citadel raid, we wait at Valanas for another staff fragment to be located. It takes 4 days, and we're called to Valrim's office to be briefed. He tells us that the next piece is in the capital of Teredor, at the mage academy. This should be a routine retrieval because it's not uncommon for Sentinel agents to go to the Chancellor to request permission to remove an item from their artifacts storage. Unfortunately, it’s probably in the 'Unidentified Artifacts' storage, and that can mean a lengthy search. These aren't small areas. The University offers a bounty on interesting items, so treasure hunters bring in a steady stream of finds.
As for what precisely we're looking for, so far we've only found pieces of the staff's shaft, appearing as finger-width pieces of iron of various lengths. Valrim has a description of the staff to help us narrow down our possible suspects. The head of the staff was a silver orb studded with black onyxes, though whether the orb was hollow or solid is unknown. Below the head were seven bands each set with a different type of gem around their circumference. From closest to the head to the furthest, the gems were amethyst, topaz, obsidian, ruby, emerald, sapphire, and diamond. It is unknown if the bands were loose or solidly part of the staff. There was a report of the bands rotating, but that eyewitness was known to be having his perceptions manipulated at the time.

Yes, it was a fairly gaudy staff before getting shattered. In background, each of the citadel staves was designed to fit the personality of the original creator. I'll leave it to the reader to contemplate what that means for the personality responsible for that thing.

Based on the divinations, the 'feel' of the piece is probably larger than a splinter, likely another shaft piece, or maybe one of the bands if they were loose. The storage areas at the university have anti-teleport wards as part of the system to discourage theft, as artifacts are a prime target for thieves. This means we can't take the staff fragment along to ID the new piece because the wards would make it appear to explode if we took it in. We will be taught two new spells to help us ID the piece we're looking for. Spell 1 can tell us if an item either is a staff fragment or has been in close proximity to it - strength of the reaction is predicated on how long and how recently the contact was. Spell two will tell us if the item is a staff piece - using the spell at all damages the caster, and if it is a staff piece, the backlash will be very damaging and potentially fatal. The spell works by provoking backlash from the item.

Nobody was particularly happy about that news.

Also, when we do find the staff piece, to remove it safely, we'll need the teleport wards lowered by university officials, which they don't like to do often due to the theft risk. As a courtesy, we should introduce ourselves to the appropriate officials and will be given letters of introduction for that purpose. We are also warned that the king sometimes will invite Sentinel agents over to the palace to hear some war stories, perhaps one group in three is invited. We are warned to behave, pointedly, should that occur. Yes, Valrim did hear about the octopus incident. He makes sure that the non-natives are aware that the king will likely serve a local imitation of traditional Arandoran fare if we are guests.
And in other important news, the intelligence arm intercepted some enemy communications indicating that a 'old friend' of ours may be in town. Someone who may be the Enemy agent we knew of as Grozdan was reassigned from the Ferial to the Teredoran capital in disgrace for 'misuse of valuable assets outside of his area of responsibility and loss of said assets'. Aqila speculates as to whether the asset in question might have been that assassin we killed around the Elethoran border - we assumed he's been working for the Ferial Veiled Order, even though he said he wasn't. Could he have been telling the truth?
Valrim then noted that there were some suggestions that since we were going to be in town anyway, and Grozdan has reason to have a grudge against us, we could play bait to draw him out so his current cover could be identified or perhaps to just kill him. However, given how important our primary mission is, we're not going to be asked to do that too. On the other hand, if we trip over him... He likely has 3-7 Death Dancers under his command. These are the female assassins that the Enemy fields. The higher ranked Dancers can have abilities given to them, using methods that the Sentinel wouldn't countenance, that can be used at will, such as invisibility, dimension door, enchantments like charm person, etc. If we run across someone with one of those abilities, assume they have all of them. Grozdan's bodyguard was likely a high ranked Dancer, but whether she's with him or has been reassigned elsewhere is unknown.
Of the Dancers that may or may not be in the capital, but have been sighted there before, one is an enigma. She may never have been seen undisguised, is a master of infiltration, and even infiltrated and betrayed a Sentinel group from within in the past. Another possible can use dimension door, but seems to only do so rarely, is invariably invisible and her usual MO is shooting her target with disease-causing bolts. Periapts of health may or may not help. Of six confirmed attacks by her, five times they worked and once they didn't. What caused the difference the time a periapt failed to work is unknown. This is not counting unconfirmed attacks where the agent died and the body wasn't recovered.
We're reminded that while teleportation won't work through the wards on the artifact storage buildings, it can be used internally. The entrances are heavily fortified with a central lift shaft down to the first level, and four corner lifts from there to the lower levels. There is no direct connection from the lower levels to the entrance. Currently, there are five vault buildings for unidentified artifacts. At least four of them were in full use as of a few years ago. The staff piece could also be in unstable artifacts storage or in ID'd Ancient artifacts storage - though in the latter it will have been misidentified. If it's in unstable artifacts, that's going to be extra annoying to find, and it would be a good idea to 'send' a message back if we need to go there so they know where to tell the next team to start looking, should we blow ourselves up. Cheery thought that that is.

Elided in the notes, but the comment about periapts of health was in response to a direct question.

Aqila gets to be in charge of transportation for this excursion, since three teleports will get us close enough to the capital to ride the rest of the way to avoid comment. We were told to start with Count Kaj, the city administrator, so that is our first stop. On the off chance that Grozdan or one of his people spots us, Dagnar makes a point of not being seen with us as we ride in, and sticks with us invisibly as we hand around our passes to the appropriate officials on our way to meet with Count Kaj. He successfully sneaks past all comers, after one close call. We present our bona fides to the count, who has two guards, and then Listens to Wind asks very politely if we could speak privily. Kaj sends one guard out, then tells us the other one is his son, whom he trusts implicitly. Aqila briefly explains why Dagnar was being sneaky, and he stops being invisible to be polite.
At this point, Kaj asks us what our business is, and we explain that we need to remove an item from the mage academy's vaults. He provides us with introductions to the chancellor of the academy. He then warns us that the king may want to speak with us and inquires if we have court clothes. Nope. He is somewhat less than happy at hearing that, but notes that something may be contrived if it becomes an issue. We depart, except this time Dagnar can't avoid all listening ears. There is a disturbance that is escaped with his Ring of Blink. Next stop: Mage Academy.
Dagnar and Thoron hang out outside to avoid being obviously pegged as part of our merry band while the rest of us go in to meet Chancellor Thorben. Thoron is going to be playing eyes in the sky, while Dagnar shoots the breeze at a nearby bar. After introductions, we confirm to the chancellor that we need to remove an item from the vaults. Aqila explains that we're after something that reacts badly to teleportation magic, possibly city-levelingly bad. It's not something we want to test, and the Chancellor is so very happy to hear that. He notes that knowing it reacts badly to teleportation only eliminates 10% of the items in unidentified artifact storage, since they don't usually test for the magnitude of the reaction. We're also told that the Chancellor is 1 of the 3 people needed to lower the wards so we can remove the item when we find it. Henning, the dean in charge of the vaults is the 2nd, and the 3rd can be one of three people. However two of them are on sabbatical and the 3rd, Bertil, is caring for his sick wife.
His suspiciously sick wife, suffering from a puzzling disease that even a high priestess of Tareina couldn't cure, as Joe finds out when he asks if there was anything he could do to help. Aqila has a bad feeling and mentions the presence of death dancers, specifically the one that's known to shoot disease-causing crossbow bolts. It might not be related, but we have no way to know. The Chancellor expresses disbelief that an assassin would have bothered. Aqila ruefully notes that we haven't exactly been keeping anti-scrying spells up and we have experience with people reacting to things we're going to do before we do them. That triggers a minor rant from the chancellor about idiots who depend on divinations. That seems to have hit a sore spot. The chancellor will talk to the fellow so he can make alternative care arrangements for his wife so he can potentially be available to drop the wards after an hour or so.
We now go talk to Dean Henning, who on being told about the potential 'city go boom' artifact in his vaults, makes an annoyed sound and assigns his assistant Mellequelle to guide us. He'd rather she still be entering new acquisitions into their files, but she's the only one he trusts with something like this. We're introduced, and on being given a basic description of 'appears entirely non-magical' and 'reacts really, really badly to teleportation', she thinks of four items in vault 3 that potentially match that description. There's no time to start like the present, so we all head to the vault, show the guard our passes from Henning and go in.
The top level is bulk storage. Lots and lots of crates. We'll leave those for last. We go down the central lift to the level A and then take one of the corner lifts to level B. No lift goes to all the floors. On our first pass, we find 5 items that ping as either being the item or being in close association with it, an iron dumbbell, a plain ring, a chunk of iron in a stand, a fine metal latticework, and a clear gem. Aqila casts the 2nd level spell on the 4 that somewhat match what we think the item we're after might be. The lattice couldn't be a staff piece. None of them are it. Moonbeam patches up the damage done, then we head upstairs so Mel can look at the notes and see if she can suss out what items to try next.
As Mellequelle goes through the notes on the items that pinged to find out what else was in that shipment, she gets progressively more irate. On being asked, she explained that Egil documented the shipment in question and he took wretched notes. She does find out that all five items that pinged are from the same shipment that came in a year ago from treasure hunters off of the Chaos Continent. The five items in Building 3 are all noted as being in that building, but the other items don't even have a mention of where they ended up. She guesses building 4 or 5, based on how full the vaults were a year ago. Mel thinks she might get more detailed information from the main archives building to pin down just where the items we're interested in are. Aqila inquires if it were possible for us to start hunting in building 4 while she's researching to save time. Verdict is to ask Henning and get his permission.
Based on the brief notes, which may have run into the next shipment, so the last items may not be from the same box, Mel dug up the following Egil descriptions of what we're looking for: 5 rings, 3 chunks of iron, 1 lovingly detailed anatomically correct naked lady, one sphere on a cube on a pyramid, one suit of holey plate armor (Spelling error?), one circular glass lens, one group of eight spheres not touching but inseparable, one jeweled silver sphere, one multicolored wheel, one black waxy stick, one floating rock hovering at a consistent 1 foot height, one perfectly transparent ladies garb and one tangle of netting, partially not there. Several of these things are now on Mel's list to have a look at to catalogue properly.

No, that wasn't a spelling error. The party found this whole mess both aggravating and entirely believable.

We all troop back to the main admin building for the vaults to update Henning on our progress so far. He is both happy and unhappy with Mel's report. Unhappy, because that sort of shoddy work makes his life more difficult, but happy because Egil almost had enough seniority to be put in charge of one of the vaults and Henning didn't have an excuse to not promote him. Now he does. We get permission to go into the vaults, with one caveat - We need to take notes on what's where so he has a reliable record to start sorting the vaults out properly. Aqila volunteers, mentioning that her father is an artificer who specializes in Ancient artifact recovery, so she has some knowledge of these sorts of things.
We're escorted to Building 4, and decide to start at the bottom and work our way up. Only one of the 4 lifts down to the lowest levels is working. Apparently they have been having real trouble with mechanical breakdowns of late. Dagnar and Thoron are still hanging out at the bar. We decide to have Moonbeam and Joe alternate casting the cantrip to hunt for pings, then Aqila will cast the ID spell on the pings. She's most likely to stay conscious after eating the backlash if/when we hit the actual artifact, Moonbeam is the one who can fix up the victim afterwards, and Joe may be needed to sit on them to prevent 'accidents'. Plus, Aqila volunteered to write, and the cantrip takes a minute to cast.
We start in the corner and work our way around the outside of the rooms, then the inner ring. The first interesting item is a rapidly spinning hovering prism in a shaft of light. The hovering rock? As Aqila describes it in her notes, Listens-to-wind starts the cantrip. No ping, but as he finishes the spell, the beam flares, then flashes bright enough to blind her for a minute. Annoying, but not permanently harmful. The next room has a plain ring that pings. Aqila checks it, and it's not a staff piece. The next ping is on the statue, which is not a staff piece, but it is oddly warm to the touch, and not in the same position as described in Egil's notes. No one recognizes it, but we're a bit dubious as to what it is.
Joe finds the next ping, the wheel. The hub is purple, seven spokes are rainbow colored in order, and the rim is striped white and black. It is oddly hypnotic, and not a staff piece. Joe finds the next item off of Mel's list in what looks like an empty room. On a second look, the pedestal does indeed have an occupant - a pile of perfectly transparent cloth. On examination it seems to be an abbreviated tunic roughly the size of the statue with cut-outs in the chest region. It doesn't ping. Moving on, the next possible is a gold ball with a foot long spine about 1/4 inch at the base sharpening to a point at either pole. Not it. That's 4 pings on the floor so far. We move on to the next two rooms.
As Moonbeam and Joe start casting, Joe hears a thump immediately followed by a crossbow bolt sticking out of him. He can't see anything outside the doorway. Aqila looks up from her notes and sees a six and a half foot tall invisible woman holding a slightly oversized crossbow. Death dancer, presumably just dimension-doored down. Just what we needed. She responds by unloading two maximized Arcane Bolts at the assassin. Listens-to-Wind still can't see her, but aims a sonic bolt at the space Aqila was blasting and hits. She's still alive. Moonbeam lights up the area with Fairy Fire, then the assassin Door's out. We haul tail back upstairs to the entrance but unexpectedly find the guard still alive. He assures us that no one, invisible or not, got past him into the building, then seals it. We go find Dean Henning to report this latest development.
He is now even more unhappy with the situation. We are too. Probably time to reunite the party and see if Dagnar has seen anything useful outside the campus. Aqila sends him a message via Whispering Winds to come in, and tells Henning that we have a 4th member inbound now. After grabbing some goggles that are much fancier and more magical than Aqila's See Invisible glasses, Henning accompanies us back to the vault. And then he gets even more unhappy. He can see enchantment magic on the guard, and the wards should have let him get off an alert in spite of the magic. This doesn't reflect well on the security on the vaults, and implies that they need to invest more money to close the vulnerability. Just what a budget conscious university board wants to hear!
Meanwhile, Dagnar got the message. When Thoron sees him leaving the bar, he swoops by low enough for Dagnar to use message to fill him in too. As he starts heading for the campus, they realize that Dagnar is being followed. Dagnar ducks into an alley, goes invisible, and continues on. Thoron sees that he's still being followed. After casting Arcane Sight, Dagnar can see a strong divination spell on all his followers. True Sight? Some study reveals a faint abjuration/evocation spell on them as well. He messages Thoron that things may get ugly, ducks into an alley, and buffs up. Thoron keeps watching, and sees that Dagnar isn't the only one being tailed - other people heading towards the campus are also being followed. Dagnar resumes walking towards the mage academy, and soon Thoron reports that people who had been tailing him seem to be ducking into buildings and not reappearing. And that pattern is continuing for everyone being tailed. Not enough information to determine just what's going on. They continue on and meet up with the rest of us outside Vault 4.
Aqila reprepared spells while we waited. We discuss strategies for clearing the building with Henning. He allows that if we need to seal shafts with Wall of Stone, we can. We offer to undo the remodeling after we're done to save on clean-up costs. This however is plan B. Plan A involved Dagnar checking and determining that he can indeed repair the lifts to the other levels. So we each take one lift down, move to where we can see down the halls to the other two visible party members, while Thoron does a quick circuit to check inside each room. We clear the building and find no trace of the assassin. Presumably, she got past the guard in and out. The statue had indeed moved slightly from the last position we saw it in, but it's too short for the assassin to be hiding in. We then make sure no one is in bulk storage, then report our lack of results back to Henning.
We return back down to B level, and Henning comes with us this time. We show him the statue and find out that it is a known item. An Ancient Playdoll, and apparently the 9th one in reasonable condition the university has in stock now. Should have been ID'd on receipt and stored elsewhere, but, Egil. We also show him the other 'pings' and inquire about the floating rock. No, probably not the floating rock from the list - it's been there for a while and is known to give off bursts of light in direct proportion to the strength of the spell cast on it. Good thing Joe only used a cantrip...
The multicolored wheel might possibly match the description of an Ancient knowledge imprinter. Not something to experiment with willy-nilly, though. Henning has no guesses on the gold ball with spikes, and the ring is a generic ring. We resume checking items where we left off. Joe finds the next ping, the black waxy stick. Not it, and the black substance comes off on his fingers when he touches it to do the cantrip. The last item that pings on level B is a set of armor. It's sort of plate mail, but only some of it, like the shoulders, are solid metal. The rest is like a mesh with 3/8" holes. Henning recognizes it as a set of Ancient gladiatorial armor. The holes likely made for more interesting blood spray on hits, ugh. That makes six of the nineteen items on level B in Building 4, plus one that pinged but wasn’t on the list. So there are 13 more to locate.
Moving up to the next level, we continue our search pattern. We find a 1' diameter silver sphere studded with gems. Pings, not it. The next room had a massive chunk of iron, looking vaguely like a crushed mechanism of some kind. Pings, not it. Fourth room had three silver rings that look liquid and feel solid, interlocked. No ping. An ornate gold ring with a ruby, emerald, sapphire, and diamond set in it looks promising, and pings, but not it. 2/5 rings found. Next room has a pyramid with a cube balanced on it on one point, and a sphere balanced on top of that. Pings, not it. The crazed confusion of glass tubes in the next room doesn't ping. The next ping is a group of 8 spheres floating in a cube formation. Not it. We then find the floating rock. It looks like a blob of obsidian floating a foot off the floor. It pings, not it. And then Mel shows up and the excrement is hitting the rotating blades. So far may have found 13 of the 19 items, and at least one item that pings and wasn’t on the list. Still no sign of the tangle of netting, the lens, 3 of the rings, or one piece of iron. Leaving four good possibilities for the item still out there – and the possibility that it’s actually something that wasn’t even recorded properly, since we’ve found one item that pings but wasn’t on the list.
She tells Dean Henning that the guard in Vault 5 just sounded an alarm. We ask him if he'd like us to back him up. He leaves it up to us, so we tag along. Aqila flights everyone who needs it so we can haul tail without waiting for the lifts. We find the guard to be a greasy smear when we get to vault 5, the doors are shattered and the center lift is flaming wreckage. The first question is whether to block the door or not to prevent an escape, but Henning thinks that it would be better to leave it open so the university security can get in. Mel is asked to stay topside and make sure Security knows we're the good guys. The Dean feels safer sticking with us, and we don't blame him one bit. We smash the lift wreckage out of our way and Fly down the rabbit hole.
The Bulk Storage level has seen better days. All 4 lifts are smashed and the way to them blocked with walls of flame. Joe fires up Arboreal Winds and takes care of them. Moonbeam vents some frustration with her mace, but that method is too slow to clear the lift, so she summons an Earth Elemental, who clears the way more emphatically. We check level A, and find some doors smashed, and items taken. No living beings. We drop down to level B. As we move to where we can see down the halls, a glowing, floating sword attacks Dagnar. It's a Spiritual Weapon, so Joe tries to dispel it and fails, then Dagnar uses his Dagger of Dispelling and dispatches the sword. Again, Thoron is sent to do a quick circuit to scout while we stay grouped together in the lift area with the dean.
As he goes around the corner, he comes across a 5'8" death dancer. Not the one we beat up earlier. So he Spits on her, and successfully blinds the assassin. Aqila is thrown down the hall by the elemental so she can get line of sight on our target, using Fly to not slam into the wall at the far end. The dancer is successfully anchored, so she's not Dooring out on us. And then a glowing orange sphere flies out of the crossbow and explodes. Fireball. Thoron and Aqila eat it. The assassin may have gotten caught in the blast too, but we can't tell. Moonbeam heads down the hall to help deal with the threat.
And at this point Assassin number 2 steps around the corner and tosses a fireball down the hall, catching Dagnar and Joe, but fortunately not the Dean who wisely stayed back by the lift shaft. Dagnar still has his arcane sight up and sees abjuration and necromancy magics on the assassin. Death Throes? Thoron keeps circling the hall, comes up behind #2 and spits on her too, for a successful blinding. Dagnar moves down the hall and uses his Three Steel trick to do some serious damage to the now blinded assassin. Joe goes Dire Lion and pounces her dead. And then the corpse blows up all over him and Thoron. Aqila hears the cussing and makes sure when she Arcane Bolts assassin 1, that she's out of range of any exploding. Moonbeam also takes care when she tries out her new spell, Blistering Flame Pillar. Dead assassin, and another explosion, but no one was in range this time. We grab the surviving gear as Aqila uses message to ask everyone to go hug the lion, because we don't see any of the missing items in that gear. We get a few rings and a crossbow with a wand socket with an equipped wand. Probably Fireball.
Joe needs to go back to human so we can all go in one trip. Aqila Teleports the crowd back to the entrance. No one is there, yet. Since we went down one shaft, whoever had the vault items must have taken one of the other three. In total, we found seven vaults broken into – so whoever did this may have as many as seven artifacts of unknown properties.

And then we break here, because the screaming is going to resume very shortly.

Terane
2020-04-01, 09:14 AM
We pick up where we left off, the round Aqila teleported the whole party plus Dean Henning to the main door out of Vault 5. Listens to Wind had to revert to human so everyone could go in one trip, and Dagnar shrank himself for the same reason. No one is in evidence when we land, so the first thing Aqila does is slam a wall of stone over the loading door so we only have one easily accessed portal to guard. The rest of the party tosses up one buff before the university's Security team shows up. We're told, "Thank you for your assistance, we'll take it from here." and don't actually sound very thankful for our assistance. Aqila catches a glare from Joe, and lets him explain that we're happy to help. They aren't impressed. Aqila then states calmly that we intend to guard the door and make sure no one gets out who's not supposed to be here. They then ignore us, brush by, and head down the shaft.
Aqila sends a message to the chancellor via whispering winds to make sure he's up to date - 'Aqila here. Vault 5 compromised. 7 artifacts taken. Culprit still inside. We're blocking exit. Two death dancers killed. Likely Enemy agent responsible.' Everyone else keeps buffing. Then Mellequelle shows up out of breath, asks us if security got here, and then fills us in on what the other items were from that shipment in Vault 5. The descriptions are an ethereal net, which she is fairly sure is a known item that prevents ethereal creatures from moving through an area; a lens with no other information; a piece of iron formed into a ridged spike; and three rings, one of horn, one with an inch wide band and covered in topazes, and one described as a pearl ring, but the stone is referred to as transparent. While she's talking, Aqila relays her message to Count Kaj too, in case things blow up. On being asked, Aqila also rattles off the numbers of the vaults that we had seen broken into downstairs. Mel notes that the six items from the shipment were in 6 of them, but she has no idea what was in the 7th.
Aqila and Dagnar finish off their buffing with mirror image, and everyone else gets off one last spell because the next round is when things start happening. A black armored figure floats up the shaft, tossing an object towards us that explodes into a reddish wolf. Mini-Dagnari reacts first, ducking behind the wolf, and while he whiffs his first strike, the dagger of dispelling sinks home, as does his second falcatta strike. Then we're all hit with a wave of fear, though only Dagnar is shaken by it. Mr. Black bursts into flames and appears to blur. Aqila suggests to the Dean and Mel, politely, that they might want to get out of the line of fire, and they duck out the door and out of direct line of sight.
Thoron calculates the angles, and unleashes a Blast of Sand at the wolf and Mr. Black, while missing Dagnar. The wolf is visible injured and bleeding badly. Aqila, very low on energy, resorts to her wand and forceballs the pair, finishing the wolf off. At this point, Dagnar, via Arcane Sight, can see every school of magic up on who we presume is Grozdan except necromancy. Joe tries a dispel, and gets one. Dagnar sees the abjuration aura weaken. But he still looks like he's on fire. Moonbeam decides to engage in some vicarious pummeling and drops two large earth elementals into play, standing between Mr. Black and the door, where they can comfortably reach out and touch him.
Dagnar maneuvers behind Probably Grozdan the elementals are flanking for him and leads with his dagger. Some more abjuration aura disappears, then he slams his falcatta home painfully. Grozdan snarls 'I will not be defeated!' and starts glowing blackly, and is coated in shadows. Dagnar now sees a blinding Universal aura drowning out all the others. Thoron casts Snakes Swiftness Mass, allowing Dagnar and the elementals to get a whack in, but only one of the elementals actually makes contact, and takes fire and divine damage for its pains. Aqila blows the rest of her charges on her bracelet to shy an Empowered Maximized Arcane Bolts at Grozdan, and manages to hit with three of the bolts. The shadows start shredding visibly. Joe flies up to aim a Blast of Sand, shredding them further.
The elementals both miss with their slams. Moonbeam vents some annoyance with a Blistering Flame Strike with all the bells and whistles. About half the shadows seem to be gone. That is an annoying spell he has up. Dagnar goes in for a full attack. Whiff, whiff, whiff Hit! And pays for it when Grozdan retaliates. Dagnar is now hurt and all his force-effect prots are poof. Thoron's Blast of Sand almost finishes off the shadows. Aqila tries another forceball, which fizzles on Grozdan's spell resistance. Joe also Blasts and the shadows are now mere whisps. That is a really annoying spell. The elementals go next. One misses, one hits twice and the shadows are completely gone now. Moonbeams spell is resisted, then Dagnar again manages to only land one of four hits, but makes his one hit count. Grozdan smacks Dagnar around again, yelling 'If I am to die, you will die too!'. Grozdan holds his sword in front of him, leaving himself open to retaliatory strikes by Dagnar and the elementals. All three of them hit, taking damage from Grozdan's protective spells, but he's still standing. Until his sword explodes.
Aqila is knocked out. Dagnar is knocked out. Thoron is beaten up, and so are Moonbeam and Joe. The second effect is resisted by Aqila. Everyone else is sapped of energy. Dagnar goes into energy shock on top of negative hit points. And the final effect is resisted by everyone who's not unconscious. The mage and the spellsword are now extra-special unconscious. The explosion not only killed Grozdan, half of his stuff blew up too. The surviving items are his plate mail, his shield, a rod of something, and some of the items from the vaults, being a charred half-there net, the iron spike, the ring of horn and the ring with a pearl that sometimes looks transparent. The topaz ring and the lens and whatever was in the 7th room are still missing.
Moonbeam heals the mage before she croaks, and Joe gets Dagnar, then Dean Henning runs in and shouts 'The wards are down!'. Which is just such happy making news, because now any number of people can just teleport in on us. On the other hand, the staff piece has to leave through the door, so camping the exit is still a viable strategy. More healing is done, but neither wake up. Joe decides to try something and pokes Dagnar with his own Dispelling Dagger. He twitches, but doesn't wake up. Then he tries the same trick on Aqila. Four jabs later, the Dean can't take it anymore and face palms, telling the druid to let him try.
The theoretician completes his examination and gives his assessment of the spell. He guesses that the two of us have a three in five chance of waking up in eight or nine hours on our own, or we won't wake up at all. With help, we might be awake in two hours. Given how the wards were violently sundered, the residue would make any delicate workings in the building unwise, so he'd rather do the spell elsewhere. On the other hand, the door needs guarded, and there are still death dancers out there. Joe and Moonbeam don't find the idea of their companions being out of their sight to be a good idea, and the Dean does understand why. He thinks it will take him a few hours to clear out the residue, and it has to be done to replace the wards anyway, so he gets started on that. Moonbeam borrows Aqila's glasses to help keep an eye out for death dancers sneaking in. She, Joe and Thoron settle down to wait.
Around then, the security team shows up. Apparently they had absolutely no idea that a short sharp battle took place upstairs, and take in the tableau bemusedly. The Dean angrily orders them to escort Mel back to the archives for her own protection so she can ID the 7th item that's missing, then resumes residue cleansing. Two hours later, the Dean is done, and Mel is back with an update. Apparently the topaz ring had been in the 7th vault, then it was moved for no discernible reason and a finger-thick five inch long piece of iron bent into a U shape was placed in that vault instead. Both those items and the lens are still missing. At one point during those two hours, the Chancellor stopped in, got an update, and then went racing off to round up people to get the wards back up again.
The Dean starts whatever spell it is to try and fix the pair of unconscious Sentinel agents. Joe and Moonbeam continue keeping watch and resting up. Joe takes a few minutes to try the cantrip on the three intact items taken from the vaults, and all three ping. After three hours, he finally finishes up, and they wake up. He explains that he found the spell to be more intricate than expected - and that he doesn't think that they would have woken up on their own at all without external intervention. He observes that it was a very nasty spell, and that he's impressed that we weren't killed outright.
After she'd woken up and been filled in, Aqila sent Valrim a sitrep - "Mission Update. Searched Vaults. Interrupted by Grozdan. Killed him and two dancers. Encountered two others. Two possible matches identified, still missing. Wards are down. Search continues." Then she reprepared spells in case things get interesting again. And then it's time to start searching the vaults in earnest. Joe summons a pack of air elementals and has them scour the lower floors. One of them poofs out, but a second one sees it happen and reports that it tried to pick up a U-shaped piece of metal. That's one item found. Joe and Thoron go pick it up from where it's just lying on the floor. After getting it back upstairs, it pings weakly, and it is not it. So that ring is sounding more and more likely to be our target.
Thoron gets to go scour the vault next, and finds three rings in the bulk storage area, one under a shelf, one covered in dust, and one in a box that was visibly disturbed. They are all three inch wide rings with topazes, but are slightly different from each other and look hastily made. They all three ping weakly, like the metal U, and the ping feels 'odd'. Aqila describes the phenomenon to the dean, in perhaps more detail than she should have. He wonders if someone was spoofing auras for decoys. Dispel magic poofs the aura on two of them. She checks the last ring and the U. The U doesn't lose its aura.
The next phase is sending earth elementals through the walls to see if someone used stoneshape to hide the ring in the wall. The elementals don't find the ring, but they do find lots of bits and pieces of scrap metal that shouldn't be there. The Dean is rather unhappy with this report. Moonbeam and Joe go downstairs and she uses stone shape to check a few out. It does indeed appear to be random pieces of metal, and the fused stone walls seem to have been put back together hastily. Henning observes that this is sounding more and more like someone took some time and effort to seed the vault with a lot of false trails to distract and delay anyone trying to find the missing two items from the vault. This is not happy-making at all. Were we being scryed on?
Aqila wonders if someone could have used passwall to get out of the vault where we couldn't see them, and is making off with the artifact. If so, they have a five-hour head start, so there's no point asking Thoron or Eagle-Joe to go have a look. She phones home to request a check on whether the artifact has moved or not. If it has, we're screwed. If it hasn't, it's either still in the vault, or someone went to ground within five miles. Aka somewhere inside the city environs - quite likely inside the city proper. The response is that the artifact hasn't appeared to have moved.
At this point, the Dean notes that while they are planning on leaving the wards on this vault down until we can find the item and get it out of here, they'd like to move the other artifacts to a more secure location. Mel is going to go gather up the items in the still sealed vaults, and would be safer with some protection. Moonbeam and Joe go with her to help and check to see if any of the artifacts have illusion magic on them, perhaps being the ring or lens in disguise. Out of everything that's easily man-portable, only three items have illusion auras, and Mel recognizes two of them. The 3rd she doesn't, but none of them ping. So that's one line of inquiry dead-ended.
While they're doing that, Aqila is manning the door solo because Dagnar and Thoron are doing a more thorough scour of Bulk Storage. He is still in energy shock, so he can't use Arcane Sight or Detect Magic, but he can search for visibly disturbed crates and see if any of them hold the item we're looking for. The two that are visibly disturbed are searched. One is full of junk. The 2nd has the lens at the bottom. It's brought up to Aqila, and it pings, then he goes back downstairs to keep looking. He looks through some crates that might be disturbed, and almost drops a few items, but doesn't find the ring. Around now, the Dean leaves to see what the hold-up is with getting the wards back up. Mel is off getting the artifacts settled in their new homes.
At this point, at our wits end, Moonbeam and Joe go have a root through the crates Dagnar searched to see if anything has illusion on it. One item does - the clay sphere that Dagnar almost dropped earlier. It's brought upstairs. It pings. Aqila casts the ID spell, and knocks herself mostly dead and unconscious. We found it! Presumably, the ring is hidden inside the clay. Joe puts the sphere in his pocket for safekeeping. Moonbeam starts restoring the mage so she's safe to have awake - no one wants Wile E. Coyote with Fireball around, for some strange reason. Five castings of Lesser Restoration later, a death dancer jumps in and shoots Moonbeam with a hand crossbow. A very nasty poison knocks her down to 3 con. Thoron reacts first and blinds the Dancer. Joe thinks she looks a bit like Segmund's description of Grozdan's bodyguard. We haven't seen her before in any case.
Moonbeam drags Aqila out of the room in case of Death Throes or Fireball. Joe sees Necromancy, Transmutation and Conjuration on the dancer. The conjuration is most likely Greater Dimension Door, the transmutation is probably a buff, and the Necromancy, given past results, is probably Death Throes. He tries a dispel, and only knocks off the Transmutation. The point is mooted when she blips out an instant later. Moonbeam revives the mage, and cures her own poison. On being updated, again, Aqila casts three flights and five invisibility spells. Joe goes Eagle. We all go vertical and get outside the city inside of ten minutes, then Moonbeam arranges for faster transportation. It's evening, and in four hours we cover almost 900 miles towards Valanas.
While in transit, Aqila being grateful for a smooth ride, she receives a Sending from Henning inquiring which item we took, so they can update the records. She replies that she'll fill him in tomorrow, because we were attacked by a death dancer within minutes of finding the item, and apologizes for needing to decamp so abruptly. We camp around midnight and get some sleep. A nice quiet undisturbed sleep. Moonbeam finishes patching Aqila up in the morning, then resummons our rides and we make Valanas by afternoon.
Aqila keeps her promise as soon as we get to the citadel, but fails to reach Henning. Worried, she tries the Chancellor next, with the same message that we took a clay sphere from bulk storage, probably with the ring inside it, and apologizes again for our hasty departure. His reply is disturbing. Dean Henning was killed by a Death Dancer and Mel very nearly was. We feel somewhat responsible for the attack, though we weren't exactly in any shape to go assassin hunting when we bugged out.
We turn in the sphere to Valrim, and after a cursory inspection, the sphere is smashed and the topaz ring is indeed inside. Upon the receipt of our report, we're told that the Sentinel has to assume that the Enemy knows about the staff pieces now, and that the hunt will be stepped up.
Session ends here around 3am. Another mission done, a new one pending.



We resume playing the day we got back from our excursion to Teredor, after turning in the ring and getting the news of the dean's murder. Originally, we were just going to get a gold bounty for a job well done if it had been a routine pick up. Given that we picked off Grozdan and almost died a few times, we get 3 more lesser favor tokens for a thank-you. Moonbeam hung onto the bolt that the last death dancer shot into her, and tried scrying on the personage. We were more than half considering day-tripping back to town to ah, 'finish the job', but the scry failed, because the target wasn't on the same plane. Which put paid to that notion. We instead, having been warned last session that the hunt for staff pieces is being stepped up, concentrated on acquiring some new spells while we could.
On the third day after we returned to Valanas, we all get called to Valrim's office. Unexpectedly, Meldon and Falasmir are there too. Valrim states, 'We believe we have located two pieces', then pulls out the topaz ring we recovered last, and looking at Meldon and Falasmir, asks, 'Do you recognize this? Perhaps with emerald stones instead of topaz?' Falasmir starts cursing emphatically, and exclaims 'You're sending us back there!?' Listens-to-wind looks puzzled, so Valrim explains that there's a group of assassins that call themselves 'The Serpents' Fang'. Their leader's symbol is a large ring crusted with emeralds, that resembles the topaz ring rather closely. So, Meldon and Falasmir get to go fetch it back.
We're being told about this because if they run into trouble, we're the back-up, after we get our own piece, because they know that one is the real deal, but only are fairly sure the assassin leader's ring is. They head off and we get our briefing. The location is somewhere in northern Amerel, the pirate archipelago. The likely island is referred to by the locals as 'The Tomb of the Damned'. It might be the northern most outpost of Jahan's empire, and if so, could be the stronghold of Jahan's Disciple. You know, the guy we didn't kill properly in Brighthaven. It could have a spawner in residence, which is not viewed as likely, because it would have required a willing sacrifice by one of Jahan's subordinates to allow it to survive for almost two thousand years.
And if Jahan wasn't involved at all, it could be almost anything. The worst case scenario is a temple of Shenea, because it would be a very old one, and probably too tough a nut for us to crack. Valrim tells us specifically that we're to report in immediately if that's the case. Also, the researchers looking into the known facts about this island will brief us shortly. There definitely are undead there. There's one account of spellcasting undead, which can be created by spawners, but the source was fevered and medicated almost insensate at the time of the sighting, so that's discounted. The spawners make casters that are counterspelling pains in the butt to protect the melee undead from enemy casters. The undead have not been observed using weapons, in any reports.
We'll be taking ship to get there, and taking the splinter with us to us as a locater. If that's the wrong island, we have authority to order the ship to the correct location. Valrim gives Joe the stink-eye and comments that he trusts that that we will only do so to find the staff piece. We get our briefing, and then we take the train to the port. Aqila and Moonbeam take advantage of the ride to get some more study time in. Thoron continues his crafting. Dagnar tries to not get bored.
The ship waiting for us is a fast cutter. The captain greets us with 'In light of your mission, I'll make sure you know how to operate the weaponry." There are two spell throwers, loaded with wands of fireball, which makes it easier to hit moving targets. The captain notes that if we do run into trouble, it'll likely be an idiot Amerelean pirate that actually believes the stories that Arandoran ships carry vast treasures, or an ambitious Atenil Union corsair. The latter is the only thing that might actually be dangerous to our ship, given that they spend so much of their time researching nasty things to do to each other. Think Almaeran mages, but competent. Sea monsters are very unlikely. Even if someone, somehow, woke up one of the Leviathans, they're all believed to be sleeping by the ruins of Tarevale, on the other side of the world from Amerel.
We set off. We're expecting it to take a week to make our way down to the equator. Five days pass quietly. More spells are studied. Noon on Day 6, a sail is spotted on the horizon between us and the island. Thoron goes to get a better look, and on hearing his report, the captain IDs the ship as an Amerel pirate, and on further details, notes that it sounds like a poorly maintained ship, and therefore more likely to be an idiot. We keep cruising, and it's obvious that they're coming in for a look. A fireball from the spellthrowers is shot across their bow as a warn-off, at least that was the plan. Apparently they had a mage onboard that 70-ft schooner, because it's counterspelled. They keep on boring in. Aqila looks at the captain. 'Shall we volley fire?' At his assent, 4 fireballs go flying at their rigging. 3 hit, and they are dead in the water. The mage on board tries shying a fireball at us, but Aqila counters it easily. Dagnar enjoyed his first combat use of his new spell. Further reprisals are bandied about, but we are making much better time and there's no need. Aqila and Moonbeam go back to their spell research.
Morning of Day 8, we reach the island. Aqila checks, and finds that the piece should be on the island, and it's likely a small one. Thoron goes to have a look at the scenery. The island is mostly barren with the ruins of a small town or village visible, and at the crest of the island is a square structure that used to have a tower before it collapsed, with a domed structure behind it. The only signs of life are crude repairs to the domed building. There is what looks like a ruined wall around the crest of the island, which is only a mile and a half across.
Aqila looks at the captain and says, 'And now it's time to do our job. There's some debate on what's here. The most interesting being an ancient temple of Shenea or the stronghold of Jahan's Disciple. We'll try to keep you appraised of our progress.' The captain comments that he hopes it's a boring mission. We debark and start recon. Flights and invises all around and we go check out the center of the island. As we approach the door of the square building, a hollow voice speaks out of the air, 'Begone from this holy place intruders, lest our master strike you with his wrath.' Dagnar sees an illusion spell over the doorway with Arcane Sight.
Dagnar stabs it with his Dispelling Dagger for grins. The door is a pile of rotted timbers. He peeks inside. Inside, standing silently is a formation of eleven skeletons, nine in a square and two to their rear, out of direct line of sight through the door. Dagnar prepares to stick his nose in the door to see if we can sneak past, with Moonbeam and Aqila standing by to unleash fiery doom if they so much as twitch. He does, and they do. A deafening shriek goes up from the two in the back, perhaps giving everyone except Dagnar flashbacks to Asferia, and the party starts.
Thoron reacts first, ducks into the room and unleashes a blast of sand. An attempt at counterspelling fails. When the dust settles, 5 of the melee types went for Dagnar, two went for Thoron, two died before they could move, courtesy of Moonbeam's flame pillar, the only one to do any damage hits Dagnar, and inflicts a will-sapping poison on him. Aqila finishes off five of them with a fireball. With the horde rather thinned out, Joe casually saunters in and smacks the last caster skeleton standing with his scimitar, killing it. Dagnar wanted to test out his new ray-splitting ability, and of the two left, hits both, but they don't die, so Thoron finishes it. Moonbeam gets a unicorn to patch up Dagnar while Aqila uses whispering wind to send the captain update vis a vis our encounter with a spellcasting skeleton.
Meanwhile, Thoron sticks his head upstairs, and sees nothing interesting. Aqila checks where the staff piece is now, and gets a heading of 'straight down', more or less. The domed room with the crude repairs to the roof covers a 5ft wide shaft descending straight down, with a staircase winding around its inner circumference as far down as we can see. The stairs are worn, mossy, broken in spots, and otherwise look rather uninviting. There are signs of a railing that completely rotted away. Moonbeam sends an air elemental down to scout, and finds the shaft is 120ft deep. There are corridors stretching in three directions at the bottom, and it's very dark. The fly spell hasn't expired yet, so we drop down the shaft using it.
At the bottom, another direction check shows the piece as being in the same direction as a corridor with two rusted gates. Dagnar can see them glowing with evocation, illusion and conjuration auras. Joe tries to dispel the effects, to no effect, so plan B is a Xorn, courtesy of Moonbeam, who is sent to eat the gates. It sustains injuries from acid and electricity traps while eating gate number one, and is violently unsummoned by more of the same when it takes a huge bite out of gate two. It did, however, set off all the traps and leave a big enough hole for us to pass through. The air elemental is sent on ahead to scout, goes around the corner, and gets hit by a massive negative energy burst, unsummoning it as well.
We find that that trap resets, but we all have death ward gear on. The discovery requires the sacrifice of two monkeys of the three Moonbeam summoned to scout next. We carry the third past the trap and send it on down the corridor. The way is blocked by a massive slab of stone. Dagnar sees very powerful abjuration on the slab, and a period of contemplation let's him figure out that not only are there wards protecting the stone from all forms of damage, there's an adaptation of the stone-shaping spell to make the slab self-healing. There's also an anti-scrying spell on the area, and another ward on the chamber beyond blocking spirits, like outsiders, from entering. The latter is discovered when Moonbeam summons an earth elemental to check for alternative means of passing past the slab, and it finds a 30ft sphere past the slab that it can't enter, probably containing a chamber with the staff piece in it.
The apparently insurmountable obstacle is dealt with via brute force. Specifically, a huge earth elemental shoving on it breaks whatever mechanism was keeping it closed, and it can shove the door open enough for us to pass through. It can't enter, but Moonbeam can summon more creatures once inside the ward. But first, we all have to fight the urge to succumb to nausea as a horrifically foul stench wafts out of the chamber through the now open doors. Joe's stomach can't quite take it, and the remaining monkey is sickened as well. Aqila reprepares some spells while Moonbeam attends to the druid and reprepares a few spells herself. The monkey looks in and sees that there's a huge pile of rotting flesh in the middle of the room, mounded ten feet high, and other piles of trash and garbage all through the room.
Moonbeam summons a huge fire elemental, after stepping through the wards, to go incinerate the rotting mess so as to clear the air up a bit. And then we find out that the pile has eyes, a shell of magic around it, and the ability to create undead. It spawns four skeletons to attack the elemental when it moves into the room. I think we have confirmation that there is in fact a spawner on the island. The elemental gives the mound a nice friendly hug of flames and gets sprayed with rot for its pains.
Thoron flies into the room and sprays the mounds and the skeletons with a blast of sand, and eats a bolt of force from the mound. The skeletons try to attack the elemental, which gives the mound another hug. Dagnar moves in and fireballs the whole mess, seeing lots of abjuration auras on the mound. Aqila notices that Dagnar's fireball did nothing to affect the mound, notices the shell, and putting two and two together comes up with 'Globe of Invulnerability'. So she tries a 5th level spell to bypass the effect. Sonic pillar makes the mound shudder and destroys two of the skeletons. Joe tries to dispel the mound and knocks off three effects. The globe is definitely down, since it's a visible shimmering effect. Dagnar can't tell what the other two were, or what's still in effect. Thoron ducks out of the room to heal himself.
At this point, we remember, from our briefing, that spawners like this are a pain to kill because they can have a shell like shield that covers them when they take a certain amount of damage, and they heal rapidly while it's up. The shell can be broken, so it's recommended you save your stronger spells for the shell so you can destroy it before the spawner recovers fully. The shell can regenerate when not in use. At this point, Moonbeam summons three huge elementals and they pummel the mound so hard that the shell pops up. The sprays of rots flying through the air during the beating make Dagnar have to do some fancy footwork to avoid getting hit with the disgusting glop. He waits until Aqila tries her new Spell Vulnerability spell, which seems to take effect, then tries his new ray splitting trick again. He hits the shell with three rays, leaving obvious scorch marks.
Joe tries a controlled burst of Sand Blast to hit only the shield and the last two skeletons, killing them. Thoron sticks his head back in long enough to cast Snake's Swiftness, Mass, and the elementals all beat on the shield a bit. The Moonbeam directs the elementals to keep punching while she casts Wall of Fire on the shield. The fire elemental is the only one that misses completely, then, annoyingly, the shimmer of the Globe reappears, suppressing the Wall of Flame's effects. Dagnar steps forward to try to get rid of it with his dagger. He manages to remove all three effects still up on the shield/spawner. Aqila deploys a blistering fireball and seriously blackens the shell.
Joe uses another controlled Blast of Sand and further tatters the shield. Thoron uses his favorite spell again to allow for more elemental punching action. The shield is visibly cracking now. And when Moonbeam's turn comes up again, the elementals finish destroying the shield, pulping the spawner, and then the floor starts shaking. The elementals are immune to the waves of noxious goo vomiting out of the pit in the middle of the room, but Thoron, Joe, and Dagnar have to duck, fast. The poisons released by the spawners death affect Moonbeam, Aqila and Thoron. While that's being dealt with, Aqila checks for where the piece is, again, and gets a fix on a particular junk pile. Joe, being immune to poisons, is delegated to sift through it with Detect Magic up to see if there's anything else useful in there besides the staff piece. He borrows Moonbeams Disease Immunity pendant first, just in case. Everything of interest is piled outside the room for decontamination.
When he's done, Aqila uses a combination of Create Water and Prestidigitation to cleanse the items before they go into the Bag of Holding. Or a convenient wand pocket, in the case of the 3" staff piece. The items are a red gem with weak conjuration magic, gloves with weak transmutation, a ring with weak conjuration, two rings with different weak abjuration auras, three short rods with different strong universal auras, a dagger with strong evocation, a buckler with weak transmutation, a crossbow with weak evocation, and an odd item with very, very strong universal magic on it. It's a wooden ring, covered with blades. You couldn't wear the thing without cutting yourself. There's also about 2000 gold worth of random stuff, assuming we take the time to look for buyers. That goes in the bag too.
Our objective is met, but there are two more passages we haven't explored, and Joe is not one to leave a rock unturned. Aqila recasts Fly on everyone in case we need to make a hasty exit, and hangs out under the shaft, since she's hanging onto the staff piece. Given how much trouble it was to pry Listens-to-Wind out of the Mad God's temple so he wouldn't open the door clearly marked with danger signs, no one feels like investing the effort to try to stop him this time. The initial exploration down the corridor sees the loss of all the new trap monkeys, Moonbeam's Spider Hand, and a bit of crisping on Dagnar due to a lightning bolt trap. Joe handles the heals and the resummoning more monkeys. Moonbeam is now done humoring him and goes to hang out with Aqila while the boys press on.
They manage to get a line of sight on the chamber at the far end, and Joe at least recognizes the golden and bejeweled statue as a fair likeness of Jahan. This seems to confirm the 'northernmost outpost of Jahan's empire' theory. Dagnar can see illusion, necromancy, and evocation spells on the statue. He then uses his blink ring to go straight through the wall instead of daring the corridor. This gets him into a side room off from the chamber where the statue is. There's an incredibly complicated rune pattern enclosing a decayed corpse. Even the bones are rotting. The runes are too effaced to be legible, at all. A reddish dagger is partly under the corpse, with an extraordinarily powerful necromancy aura on it. Dagnar uses mage hand to bag it, then goes to the doorway to check out the statue up close. He tries dispelling the effects on it with his dagger, and gets the illusion spell off the first time. The statue is gilt and colored glass. The second try sets off the evocation spell. A neat trap to trigger a spell if someone dispelled the statue. He narrowly misses being hit by a lightning bolt by diving to the floor. The third try clears all the spells of the statue.
Dagnar then checks out the other room in the area - apparently a bedroom of sorts. Rotted pile of stuff that was probably a bed at one point, dividing walls are heaps of rubble, and signs of what might have been a desk with illegible bits of parchment intermixed with scraps of rotted wood. Joe and Thoron come back for a look too, and Thoron spots a scrap of parchment with writing on it. That's enough to get Moonbeam and Aqila to come back to snoop too. Aqila doesn't find the rune pattern worth copying, due to nothing being clear enough to copy, but the parchment scrap is decipherable. Dagnar figures it out first, and translates for everyone else. Essentially, it's the last journal entry of a 'servant of Jahan', presumably a necromancer. He makes it clear that the empire, presumably Jahan's, is in trouble, the outpost is falling, and he's going to sacrifice himself to protect it. Reading between the lines, and knowing that the creation of a spawner requires the willing self-sacrifice of a human necromancer, we are now pretty sure what went on. The corpse in the other room was the author of the parchment, and we just finished finally killing him dead for good not ten minutes previously.
While Aqila finishes copying, Joe insists on checking out the other corridor, but finds nothing else of note. Before we leave, he seeds the corpse with hollyberry bombs because he wants to blow something up, and that seems like a good thing to set on fire. We all fly up the shaft and head back to the ship, less than half an hour after debarking. Aqila gives the captain a brief recap on what we turned up, and let's him know that we're ready to head back. He's glad that the situation wasn't as bad as he'd feared. She agrees that a Temple of Shenea or the Disciple's stronghold would have been a bit too much entertainment, especially since he might still be pissed at us for killing him recently. The captain wonders aloud if that hadn't been part of his plan, and lets us know that his grandfather had been in the last group of Sentinel agents who tangled with the Disciple. They killed him three times, and the first two seemed to advance his plan. So, one always must wonder when he's killed if that's not furthering his current plot. Not that we'll be running into the Disciple again, no, nope...
It's a quiet voyage back to Arandor. The mage continues taking advantage of the lull to find new ways to hurt people. When we get back, we learn that as of two days ago, Meldon and Falasmir were still working on getting into the citadel – they’re trying the sneaky route. Apparently the assassins remember them somewhat favorably from their last visit, and they’re hoping to get invited in instead of having to fight their way in. If it worked, they should have made it in, and will be reporting in a day or two. If not, time to head south and smash an assassin’s guild. Dagnar ID'd all the items we collected except the wooden ring on the trip back. We ask about it, to find out if it's worth turning in for a bounty, and get a "Oh, I hope that's not what I think it is." Followed by, "If it is, that's the first sign of a link between Shenea and Jahan. You're lucky none of you tried it on, if you were lucky it would have only killed you.” On being asked, we are told 'At worst, you'd have bound your soul to Shenea for eternity." Something to contemplate when finding unknown artifacts in forgotten lairs of evil. Yes, there'll be a bounty on this one, because if it isn't one of Shenea's rings, then it was probably Jahan trying to duplicate the effect, perhaps as part of an effort to achieve godhood. It’ll take a little time to determine which (or if it’s something else entirely) – so the reward will have to wait. If one of Shenea’s rings, it’ll be worth a few more minor favors. If it’s an imitation Jahan made, it might be worth even more – especially if it gives clues that can be used to work out spells to unmake Shenea’s rings, which thus far have resisted all attempts to disenchant.
The dagger found under the remains of the necromancer proves to have been a soul-linked dagger, and was probably the key to his suicidal ritual. No real value to anyone – the thing is dangerous to handle if you aren’t the original owner, and practically every necromancer worth noting knows how to make them – and most know why it’s a bad idea. About the only real reason to make one is for a suicidal ritual like the one that necromancer performed – and most necromancers know better ways to get the same results, assuming they see a reason to kill themselves to accomplish a task. It was unusually well made – normally it would not have been expected to survive this long – but otherwise ordinary. Valrim does note that finding the dagger might have made it easier to deal with the spawner – and that he will make a note to give brief instructions on the subject to agents sent against things that might be connected to Jahan. He comments that the subject is normally considered more a technical curiosity than anything worth considering, since it’s virtually unheard of for anyone to actually do this – this makes the third confirmed case since the Sentinel was founded.

Terane
2020-04-03, 08:15 AM
We resume the session the day we get back from our trip to the Tomb of the Damned, assuming that we had a quiet day's ride on the train to get back to Valanas. Five more days pass until we're called to a large auditorium where Valrim is waiting for us, along with a positively ancient dragon. Young dragons have golden scales that lighten with age - this fellow is nearly pure silver, indicating an age that probably exceeds two millenia.
Valrim begins the briefing by letting us know that we won't have to play cavalry for Meldon and Falasmir - they managed to secure the ring they were after just before one of the Enemy's less powerful Greater Servants could get it. We must therefore assume that the Enemy is aware that the staff fragments exist, otherwise Helluin wouldn't have been sent out so openly. The good news is that the locations of two more fragments have been found. The bad news is that they are both in Savenil's hoard. She is an Elder dragon who thought the Dragon had the right idea and claimed a chunk of the Minor Kingdoms as her domain. That would be north of Teredor and so not too far away, geographically.
Savenil to date has ruled her territory relatively benignly, and so has not come as an urgent problem for the Sentinel to deal with so far. Negotiations have been conducted to see if the Sentinel can get permission to remove the staff pieces from her hoard, and she may allow it, but she wants a group of agents to come personally to conduct the negotiations, and she specifically requested the ones that killed Grozdan. Valrim doesn't know why she wants us specifically, but she has given specific guarantees that no unavenged violence will be offered to us in her lands. That means that she will spend whatever effort is necessary to kill anyone who harms us.
The dragon in the room, being a contemporary of Savenil, will discuss what he knows of her personality for our benefit, but the dragons don't like speaking of her, so don't spread it around. The dragon, whose name we are not given, begins by stating that Savenil is not so much cowardly as...'excessively cautious'. She would much rather part with some of her hoard to pay others to fix problems than to risk any possible injury to herself. Something that would be a minor risk to her is quite capable of being fatal to an adventurer, though. Valrim notes that during the negotiations, we are authorized to offer her anything we have on hand, which the Sentinel will replace, or 'send' home for more esoteric items.
We are then made aware of some special magics she has. Detailing everything she knows would take days, but there are a few unique spells that are peculiar to her alone. Specifically, a spell that allows her to create a copy of someone that is then controlled by them until it is 'killed'. The person the spell is cast on suffers two con damage that can be restored and one con hit that cannot be restored by any means currently available. However, the Sentinel will resume research on this spell under the circumstances. Any further information we can add to their knowledge pool will help with this project. Gear is copied, but any consumables used stay used. Any charges used stay used. Energy spent is spent. Any spells on you before the cloning are still active on the clone. No idea if the reverse is true, or what happens if you die and the clone is still active, as that has never been observed to happen before. She places people under the cloning spell in secure vaults while the spell is active, usually.

The cloning spell does kind of seem to suck next to Astral Projection - two relevant details. Firstly, house-rules for Astral Projection make it somewhat less potent. Secondly, this didn't require the caster to be involved.

The other category of spells she specializes in is teleportation magic. We'll likely have to pass through at least one teleportation gate to reach her, and if we anger her, we'll likely never leave. That may make leaving with the staff piece 'interesting'. Her final 'special' is reading the future. She had a distinct gift for the art before she decided to play goddess as a young dragon, and has likely developed her abilities further, but the dragon can't speculate to what degree, in her isolation from other dragons.
She has had dealings with the Veiled Order in the past, but expelled them all from her lands in a fury about three years ago. She let them leave alive, so it may not have been too horrendous an offense. Valrim cautions us sternly that we are not to describe the artifact we are seeking if any members of the Order are around. The Enemy already knows, and Savenil may require a description of what we want before she'll relinquish it, which we are authorized to do, but having two groups chasing staff pieces is enough. He does not want to compete with the Order too.
As for what help we might expect from her in dealing with whatever problem may exist depends entirely on the problem. If it is say dispatching a rat infestation, we can safely expect to receive no aid. If a flock of ice drakes moved into her lands, then the question becomes, why didn't she ask for more people to deal with it?
We take a few hours to prepare for the trip, then Aqila uses two teleports to get the party to our destination. Savenil's lair looks like an ordinary cave until we step inside. The view changes instantly, though Aqila notices that it is an illusion. The stone wall in front of us has a glowing cylinder in it. A voice speaks from the cylinder. "Greetings, you are expected. Proceed through me. I will take you to the lady." We walk through and are teleported into a large cavern with no apparent exits. A massive dragon with nearly silver scales reclines before us.
Aqila greets Savenil in Draken with appropriate formality. Savenil responds by formally greeting her as follows: Aqila Yem Serinde Noh Inirinbar Yem Melia Noh Inirinbar Ah Jaromir Ohln Cowden Ah Theirn Ohln Bordeaux Yan Ghislain Noh Bordeaux Ah Amarante. She then notes that she hadn't had time to research Aqila's companions in as much detail, but it is unusual to see a shaman from the Ferial or a druid from the Wilds in the service of the Sentinel. And even she can miss families that are not as long in service, meaning Dagnar's here. The implication being that she pays attention to Arandoran lineages that tend to produce Sentinel agents on a regular basis.

Because of the fun involved in coming up with that name, awarded a small (100) EXP bonus to players able to work out the names of Aqila’s parents and both sets of grandparents from that. Extra points for correctly identifying relationships on all 6. Everybody ended up with the full bonus.

Savenil then requests our word that we will do no violence not in self defense or in her service. We accede, and then she has Cylene, Hand of Eleduath, enter the room. Aqila tries not to react too obviously to the appearance of an Enemy agent. In appearance, she is wearing chain, is fairly tall, and exceptionally comely. Savenil remarks that she finds it curious that both sides want the same two items out of her hoard at the same time. She wants to be considered neutral to both sides, and her conditions for letting each side have one of the items in question is that we each contact our superiors and have them agree that her lands are neutral. That means no fighting there, and any damages done be repaired. Aqila sends to Valrim, and gets in reply, "If the Enemy agrees, we agree. He will break the bargain in time and ensuring her alliance is worthy in its own right." On being given the Sentinels acceptance of the terms, Savenil informs us that the other side has agreed as well.
And now, Savenil has a small matter for us. She wants us to work with Cylene as a way to demonstrate our compliance with the new agreement and to resolve a small matter for her. She explains why she expelled the Veiled Order. She'd allowed them to establish a small research station on her lands on the condition that they refrain from certain categories of experimentation, such as the creation of life. They broke that rule, and did so to try one of the more idiotic experiments the Ancients did, in her opinion. They had a book that was supposed to describe a better solution for mining - creating a creature that spawns slimes that then absorb ores and then return to the parent to die, leaving behind refined metal. Normally, this is a very slow process, and exceptionally difficult to set in motion. The Order, of course, modified the spawner. There should only be a few dozen slimes active at a time, with them returning to the parent spawner with minerals and metals they've 'eaten' to be reabsorbed. Unfortunately, the modifications removed the limit on numbers. Also, there are now different types of them, with differing extra abilities. At least one of the types produces an anti-magic field, inhibiting her from being able to view the spawner, or spawners.
The types are as follows: Pale Green - generates the antimagic field and identified via the process of elimination; Silver - eats magic; blue - resists magic; dark green - releases acid; red - outgasses a constantly igniting flammable substance; gold - emits sonic pulses; dark grey - seems to be nearly indestructible but inert; translucent - emits pulses of force; purple - known to exist, but of unknown properties as she's only sighted two of them. She can't guarantee that she's seen all the different types. They've also been seen forming conglomerates of up to four types, partaking in the qualities of all the constituent parts, but if an unstable type (acid or fire) is included, it immediately falls apart back into the individual slimes. They've been infesting a series of natural caves for the last three years and she'd like the area to still be usable when we're done, as she's recently uncovered signs of valuable ores in that area, and she'd like for her people to be able to mine them, for their own benefit. The caves originally extended for about 300-400 ft, but who knows how far they run now. She can't say for sure with the anti-magic field emitters interfering with her scrying. We don't need to completely clear out all the slimes, just kill the spawners so they stop multiplying.
She notes that this task will test all our abilities, even the Hand's, so she's offering us the chance to make use of her clone spell. We will enter a room with two circles. One leads to the entrance of the cave system, and one will clone us. All five of us must enter the same circle for it to activate. Cylene finally snarks up, making her annoyance at the arrangement plain, commenting that she should thank us for showing that ‘Dear Lenalie’ wasn't the perfect little servant she pretended to be. We don't recognize the name, so she clarifies that she's talking about the Death Dancer that tried to kill Moonbeam. Cylene then speculates aloud that perhaps when the Great Lord has won, that she will request us for herself, as that will be more merciful than if Rezelene gets us. We mostly try to tune out her ranting.
We agree amongst ourselves to get a little more information about the clone spell before deciding on what to do, given what we'd heard at our briefing. On being asked about the spell, Savenil explains that it takes a small portion of our life to make the clone, and if we are concerned, since she didn't know who she'd be hosting, all five of us will have a separate room that we will be locked into until all five of us are back. The clone spell can be ended at will, so we don't have to suicide to get back to our bodies. She also states explicitly that if either group breaks their word, she will take that to mean that their superiors do not intend to bargain in good faith and she will regretfully have to choose the other side to ally with. We decide that cloning is a good idea. The Hand has been ordered to do what she has to in order to get her piece, so we go step into the appropriate circle.
We arrive at the cave entrance, and don't feel any different. Moonbeam restores the con damage we sustained, what is repairable. The Hand drinks a potion, frowns, then chugs another one. We are on a trail up a mountain just outside a square opening with signs of a smashed door. There are no signs of slimes here, but a shimmering is visible down the passageway. The Hand strides off, so we follow the volunteer trap monkey. Past the shimmer, the way is choked with slimes. We see blue, gold, clear, and dark green.

For this whole sequence, tried randomly generated opposition. Had a giant bag of jellybeans selected for colors matching the slime types, just pulled out however many were needed for each fight.

The Hand unleashes a barrage of lightning, and now there are mostly blues left. Thoron and Listens to Wind use Blast of Sand, then Moonbeam breaks out the large Earth Elementals, which splat everything they hit. The corridor is now clear, so Aqila nips ahead of Cylene to get a clear field of fire. Around the corner is a spiraling ramp up thirty feet to the next level, with slimes spilling down it in waves. Aqila fires a coldball at the ramp and knocks off about 1/3 of the slimes on it. The silver ones look bigger. Dagnar hastes the elementals, himself, Aqila, and the Hand. Moonbeam gets another pair of elementals out, and they all start squashing slimes.
Cylene decides to do something fancy, and a series of lightning explosions occur, though the first is more of a fizzle (tripled electric ray, quickened and another tripled electric ray). Thoron uses BoS again, while Joe goes for some quarterstaff smashing. Dagnar tosses a cold ball, which finishes clearing off the lower 2/3 of the ramp, with only a dozen silver and blues on the top ramp. The elementals work on thinning them out too. Aqila sees nothing worth casting at. Cylene charges up the ramp gracelessly, in her chain mail, wielding her long sword and short sword, with multiple rings visible on both hands. She beats on a few of the survivors.
Thoron flies up the shaft and sees no slimes in the upper corridor, as far as he can see, just slime trails, so he flies around two corners and runs into a mob. There's a huge mass of slimes, and larger bulks of conglomerates. The largest has 7 slimes in it, the colors swirling of all described types except the two unstable ones, red and dark green. The anti-magic field will make this fight fun. Almost 2am, so called at this point. Thoron is upstairs, the hand is on the ramp, the rest of us are down below and all 4 elementals are in the walls halfway up the shaft.



We pick up mid-clearance of the slime overrun mines. It takes us all a round to get to the top of the ramp and another to get to where the next accumulation of slimes are waiting. Moonbeam prepares Wall of Flame while we move. The slimes make no attack on Thoron meantime, continuing to mindlessly swarm. Three conglomerates are visible, comprised of all known slime types save the unstable fire and acid varieties. Listens to Wind starts our assault with a blast of sand, due to the antimagic fields covering the swarms. Aqila, with nothing else constructive to do, tosses a thunderstone into the mess to see what happens. Two of the three conglomerates shake apart into their constituent slimes - an unexpected yet useful result. Dagnar gets his Arcane Sight up, allowing him to see the edges of the antimagic fields. Glancing at the rest of us, he sees us all, Hand included, glowing with strong Universal Magic. He does divine that the Hand can cast 7th level spells. Moonbeam starts preparing Blast of Sand. The Hand simply teleports to the far side of the scrum and starts exploring deeper in. Thoron uses the favorite Blast of Sand and knocks off most of the slimes that hadn't been part of the conglomerates. The greys are also left alive. Joe's Blast finishes off everything that isn't either grey or in a conglomerate.
Meanwhile, the earth elementals, not being able to function in an AM field, were dispatched by Moonbeam to explore more of the mine and perhaps find clues to where the spawner is lurking. They find an auditorium filled with slimes, the largest concentration we've seen yet. And it's back the other way, down the stairs. So, we head off to check out that lead, ignoring the unkilled slimes, and invite the Hand to tag along. So, of course, she blithely blips on ahead. As we walk off, the conglomerate tries to attack Joe, but the bolt flies past his shoulder and craters the wall in front of him. Dagnar peeks back around the corner, and notes that the AM field is down. Apparently conglomerates can choose to lower their field at will.
Once downstairs, we find remnants of doors at the entrance to the auditorium. The whole room is covered by AM fields, but the slime mass is so thick, we can't determine if there are any conglomerates or not. There do seem to be somewhat larger slimes in here than we've seen before, from 2x to 10x larger, and some that are pink that Savenil did not describe in her briefing. After a protracted period of RL debate, prot spells are cast and Joe gets to lead off again against the mass. He uses blast of sand to hose the room, or at least as much as the cone can hit. This destabilizes more than one fire slime, which combust destructively. The resulting explosion scorches the druid significantly but not fatally thanks to prots, but also destroys a large swath of slimes, exposing three more conglomerates. All three attack Joe, and miss, having lowered their own AM fields to attack.

For this part, simply dumped half the bag of jelly beans on the map - this was a monumental pile. AOEs combined with unstable slimes made it a much shorter fight than it could have been.

Taking advantage of this, Aqila and her eight images move into range to use Acid Breath. (Evocation is contraindicated when silver slimes are part of the conglomerate). Moonbeam sends in the elementals, who pound the conglomerates thoroughly, killing one. The Hand stands idly, smirking. Thoron prots himself. Dagnar gets clear before the next boom and prots himself. Aqila casts one more Acid Breath before getting out of the blast radius. Joe then uses Blast of Sand to set off another slime fueled explosion, clearing another large swath of the room and triggering a weird gloopy sound at the rear of the room. The slimes mound higher. That seems suspicious. The elementals pound on the conglomerates again and destroy one of the remaining two. That one zaps Joe with a lightning bolt, and now he's very battered, so Moonbeam comes in to patch him up. The Hand does something, but we're not sure why. She moves to the entrance of the room, where she has line of sight on the last conglomerate (ooc, she recognized what Joe got zapped with, and is prepared to counterspell another zap).
Thoron gives Dagnar electricity resistance. Dagnar gives Moonbeam fire protection. And then Joe blasts the mess at the rear of the room. This one destroys most of the slimes left in the room, and exposes a crack stuffed full of a red slime, the biggest one we've seen yet. The crack is 3' long, 1' wide, and no way to judge how deep. Thoron takes out the rest of the AM field generating slimes. Joe decides to take the form of a spine-tailed swift for the flight and evasion abilities, and blasts the huge slime in the crack. The resulting fireball takes out the rest of the slimes in the room, blows out the crevice, and sends a column of flame skyward to roast the birdie. Moonbeam patches up the injured while the rest of us consider the crevice. It seems to be unnaturally dark inside. Joe drops a Daylight stone down the hole, which reveals a coating of ash partway down, then slime residue as far as we can see. An elemental goes down to look, and 20ft deeper than we can see, it hits AM fields.
Aqila gives herself, Dagnar, and Moonbeam flight just in case. The Hand declines. As we descend, we see signs of slimes retreating before us. The tunnel opens up into a cavern, revealing an unusually organized set of slimes, and a spawner, at last. The middle of the room is full of sonic and force slimes, bracketed by four AM generators around the edges of the room. A pocket of pinks is tucked at the back of the yellow and clear horde, and an arc of purples covers the back of the pile. The purples, which seem to be the 'brains', have filaments linking all of them to all the other slimes, and back to the spawner, which is a huge mass of slimey tissue. This may get messy.
The Hand teleports right to the spawner and starts whaling on it. Thoron casts Snake's Swiftness, Mass, and let's her do it again. Dagnar, then Aqila coldball the middle of the room where it's not covered by the AM fields. Aqila even burns a charge to maximize hers, and that still isn't enough to kill any of them, because these are all bigger slimes. Joe's sandblast finally plows a swath out of them. Moonbeam sends in the elementals to pummel the purples and pinks still alive and not in the AM field, killing several. And now the slimes begin to react. The AM field drops, and the sonic and force slimes volley fire at everything they perceived to be a threat, or everyone but Thoron and Moonbeam. Cylene gets bruised up, Dagnar manages not to die, Joe dodges everything but the magic missiles from the pinks, Aqila loses four of eight images, and then the spawner spits out five more slimes and shocks the room.
Cylene manages to land six blows on the spawner and rips it up badly, Dagnar gets his own images up, Aqila burns a charge to quicken a coldball and the double whammy clears one side of the room, Moonbeam sics the elemental horde on the surviving pinks, purples and the spawner while she mass heals her allies, Hand included. Joe Blasts the remaining half of the room, but none go down. Everyone gets hit by something except Dagnar when the slimes retaliate again, but their reduced numbers keep anyone from getting too banged up. The spawner burps out more slimes and shocks the room again.
Joe uses another Blast to clear out the remaining slimes that had been in the room when we go there. Now only the spawner and new slimes are left. The Hand only lands 3 blows this time, but does enough damage that the spawner is leaking goo and stinking. Badly. She, Thoron, and Moonbeam make their saves, the rest of us end up puking. Lovely. Thoron uses his favorite Snake's Swiftness, Mass to let Cylene and the elementals beat on the spawner some more. Dagnar stays put, but Aqila staggers back into the tunnel to get into cleaner air and hopefully recover enough to recast her images before wading back in. Moonbeam casts another mass heal which cures the nausea too, and directs her elementals to keep the smackdown going. The slimes go into 'just kill something' mode and volley fire at Thoron, who gets blasted into unconsciousness. Joe retaliates with a blast of sand, and that's the straw that breaks the camel's back. The spawner dies, exploding in death throes. Moonbeam heals Thoron up in the aftermath, along with everyone but Aqila, who was out of the blast radius.
Elementals are dispatched to check for more signs of a spawner, but none are found. The remaining slimes are disorganized and no signs of intelligent action are now observed, even from the purple led conglomerates. Mission accomplished. We will ourselves back to our bodies, and then hear Savenil congratulate us and request our presence. On entering the cavern she is reclining in, she looks at our group specifically and states, "Before we get to your reward, I believe this is your fault." And then we hear a cheerful voice call out, "Hi friends!"
Sneezil is happy to see us, and we determine that he heard we were in trouble and came to help us. And that he heard this at the 'Big Place' where he went with Tervel and his new 'once-big' friend. We suspect that the 'Big Place' is Valanas, since that's the only place he conceivably could have heard that we were out on a mission. Who the new 'once-big' friend is, we have no way to figure out from the information given. Savenil speaks again, observing that while it would be amusing to watch us hunt through her hoard trying to find the items we're after, then holds out a 'hand' with two rings in the palm and states that she's she believes these are the items in question. One is studded with sapphires, one with diamonds, and both look in design to be identical to the topaz ring we recovered earlier. Savinel further states that since our group is larger, she'll let us pick first. We don't have any way to know which ring would be 'better' to pick. So, Aqila looks at Sneezil and asks him which one he thinks is prettier. He thinks for a moment, then chirps 'Blue!' so sapphire it is. The Hand is completely expressionless during this interchange.
Savenil has no objections to our checking to make sure the item is genuine, and allows us to do so privily. Aqila half-kills herself again from the backlash, and Joe sits on her until Moonbeam heals the damage up. When we re-enter the room, the Hand prepares to take herself off. With an 'Enjoy the long ride back', she places the diamond ring in a metal box embossed with designs, then teleports away. We take the Phantom Stag Express back, and make it back to the citadel the same day. Sneezil rides with Joe and we get regaled with what he and Tervel had been up to. Given who the storyteller is, we don't actually get a lot of information, just that they went to a Big Scary Place and there was a Big Scary thing there and we're fairly sure that's where they found the 'once-big' friend, but there's no context to figure out what any of these things were. The non-linear nature of the telling doesn't help sort things out, either.
The first people we meet when we get to Valanas is Tervel, and a young-looking woman we've never seen before, who is introduced as Aremel. Listens to Wind doesn't recognize the name, so he throws an arm around Tervel's shoulder and congratulates him on his new girlfriend. Moonbeam, and somehow Thoron, do recognize the name, and make Joe understand that the lady is a goddess of healing, and was the prisoner of Gurthan in his home plane. Some of the story we heard from Sneezil starts making sense now. So Joe congratulates Tervel on the rescue mission instead.
We're called to Valrim's office to hand over the ring, which is worth a moderate favor token each, and get debriefed. We also get caught up on recent news, including Tervel's trip. The good news is he rescued Aremel, the bad news is why he succeeded. Apparently, Gurthan had a 12" piece of the staff in his plane, and Saralis, Greater Servant of the Enemy, battled his way onto Gurthan's plane and took it. Gurthan rules a small country over on the Chaos continent, and is one of the few deities to have made their home plane in the Materiel Realm. Tervel made good use of the distraction. So that's two pieces we know the Enemy has now.
The good news for us is that Aremel may have forfeited much of her power to escape, but she retains her knowledge of healing, and she knows several ways to repair the damage we took from Savenil's clone spell. The only one that won't almost certainly kill us if she tries to use it requires a few specific rare ingredients – she no longer has enough power for other methods. The one that we'll need to fetch ourselves is either fresh lich dust or a lich's phylactery. And it has to be from a lich that was not killed with any positive or disrupting energy to maintain the 'freshness' of the negative energy, and it has to be a sufficiently powerful lich. So, Jahan's disciple or one of his senior bodyguards would count. So would the arch-priest of Shenea, though he's not been seen in centuries. The lich artificer who made the soul-rending machines down in the Ferial would also work, and the Sentinel even knows where she is - in Marimen, the capital of Innokenti, ruler of Asferia. Since she hasn't made any attempts to rebuild the machines yet, and an assault on her would be uncomfortably close to a direct assault on Innokenti, taking her out is in a grey area - meaning the Sentinel will refrain unless there's a better reason to go after her. We now have a better reason, if we want to go for it.

The actual requirement was for a strong source of negative energy - these were the examples she could think of that would work and would be safe for her to work with in her current state.

Valrim also informs us that they have not been able to locate any more staff fragments at this time, so we're all on sabbatical until they do. And if we get bored while we're on vacation, and we aren't going lich hunting, there may be something we could do to entertain ourselves meantimes. Prezmyslaw is offering bounties on Dragon Temples desecrated and Dragon Priests slain. Not huge, but the Sentinel is willing to match his bounties. Since he didn't specify what he'd offer for someone to knock over one of the three Grand Temples, the Sentinel will give 10k gold per grand temple, or match his bounty, whatever's higher. Given what we heard from Jahan's Disciple, that the Dragon is really Kashirna, pretty much the worst of the Ancients, if that's true, then knocking over the temples is a worthwhile project in its own right. It would reduce his ability to interfere in the Ferial personally.
Session ends after 3am, and now we get to decide just how we want to spend our first vacation in months.

Terane
2020-04-06, 11:25 AM
Small side-track from the campaign logs. Aqila's player wrote up a short piece for interlude events - this was not actually played out, but gives a bit of background. Events are referenced a bit in later notes.


The libraries of Valanas are vast, occupying a significant square footage of the entire citadel. By and large, the halls are tenanted by those of the Book, researching topics of interest. Some will even camp out in a study cubby for days at a time, at least until they get noticed by a librarian. A smaller subset of other agents can also be found brushing up on this or that, intermixed with students and miscellaneous professors. However, the guardians of those resources are well used to the foibles of field agents, and have a distressing tendency to chase them out of the libraries for such things as ‘fresh air’ and ‘an actual nuncheon for once this week!’, particularly when said agent is supposed to be on vacation. A canny and quick-tongued sort might manage to stay ensconced for several weeks before the inevitable occurs.
Aqila held out for a respectable three weeks, mainly by monopolizing tomes that no one else had a pressing need for, but there are some people you do not argue with. Librarians do occasionally earn hazard pay, and there is old damage to the structure of the walls in a few places to prove it. It had been over half a century since the last time someone had managed to pop into the citadel and start trying to wreck the place, but living as if something of the sort could happen at any minute had been a national sport since the country was founded. Which, indeed, was why there was a distinct lack of arguing when the mage in question was finally chased out with an admonition that “vacations are for relaxing, not for trying to burn your brain out!” Librarians were fussy like that.
However, the walk back to transient housing was somewhat less than relaxing. The familiar path was giving her too much time to think. Disintegration. That was the spell that Vavara is known to like using so being able to counterspell that is important. It’s not necessarily a death sentence, but Last Breath won’t help anyone if there’s no body left to breathe into. I could have…, no there wasn’t time. If there was anything, I’d have to hunt up an abjuration specialist to find out, and there wasn’t time. I didn’t think of it in time. I need to…no, I need to make sure I have all the supplies that we might need stowed. Just because we think we know what we’re getting into doesn’t mean something else won’t happen and we’ve already annoyed people who’d be perfectly happy to have us all assassinated given half a chance. I won’t give them that chance….
The abrupt appearance of her door stilled that line of thought and the familiar routine as she checked and rechecked all her gear, mending some signs of wear, allowed her to quiet her thoughts and push the familiar litany of ‘and if that happened I could do this and if this happened I could react that way and…’ to the back of her mind and mostly out of sight. But, it was still some hours before dusk and she was going back out into the field again tomorrow, albeit on nominally personal business. Perhaps it would be good go home for dinner. Her brother had intimated that dropping in once a week wouldn’t be too disruptive to routine, and she could leave to meet the rest of her team straight from there. Her last family meal a few weeks ago had been a good visit for catching up on some news, though the inevitable pestering by her youngest cousins had started verging on aggravating, until they’d been bundled off to bed. The older ones took a hint a bit better. Decision made, she took a few moments to vacate her residency here. A few more were spent calling the now practiced Teleport spell to mind, which when invoked, deposited her neatly on the platform in her cubby in Keep Inir’in’bar.



The keep was unusually silent. Even the nursery was empty, at least of people. Two of the war dogs, retired to inside duty, were snoozing by the heated wall, at least until she stepped into the room. Then they both heaved upright and moved purposely over, insisting on their proper due of skull and chest scritches before she was allowed to keep searching and they were content to resume their interrupted nap. The dogs weren’t at all frantic, or even mildly worried, which implied that whatever was up, it didn’t bode ill. War dogs are smarter than the average canine. The labs, the conservatory and the library were equally deserted. The kitchens had a full dinner laid in and slowly cooking, making it obvious that everyone was planning on being back at some point for the evening meal. Without consciously planning to, her feet carried her out into the Main Hall and to the Wall of Memories.
Clan Inir’in’bar had occupied their Keep for a millennia and three quarters, one of the original Dozen clans, and their keep had never been deserted. In consequence, the Wall was somewhat more elaborate and detailed than most other clans would have, unless they were also one of the Founding Families. At first glance, it was a simple visual record of the clan’s lineage, covering one wall entirely and rambling around a corner onto the next. Years of birth and death were engraved under each full name, with lines denoting linkages between parent and child roaming over the walls like vines. It was tradition that a clan’s name was linked to their Keep unless they were Citadel bound – a larger clan in need of daughtering because of overcrowding would barter with their Citadel for the right for their kin to occupy a vacated Keep rather than establish a new one if there was one available. If they were out of room to spread out in their own lands. Most clans had outposts dotted around.
Inir’in’bar very rarely daughtered. Watching the pattern of the lines, it was obvious where three times the clan had grown enough to strain the walls, and each time it was those whose hearts longed to be Homebodies who left. Homebodies always left. The tradition of serving was soaked into the bones of this Keep, and for those with no taste for venturing beyond the border, it was an uncomfortable aura. The clan’s name literally translated into the Common tongue as ‘Far from Home’.
The last time the clan split was only four generations back, and that time the land had been split too, with the new Keep Bar’in’inir built to the east, and Inir’in’bar only keeping enough land to supply their own food. Most other clans wouldn’t have formally split, just spread out under the circumstances, but there’d been….reasons, at the time. That left their cousins the responsibility of keeping their new land clear of any major hazards, but the right to request aid if anything too ‘interesting’ turned up. That arrangement had been required by Hyarlin, because the citadel both Keeps looked to had a vested interest in making sure their border keeps could fulfill their responsibilities in making sure that anything nasty that had crawled into the mountains in past ages was noticed if it crawled back out again. Besides the usual hazards of frost wolves, ice drakes, and the occasional ice troll plague, though it had been a few centuries since the last one of those.
Inir’in’bar had always produced their tithe in Sentinel agents, for the most part. If there was a need for anything more or trade goods, they had the conservatory of rare and exotic plants, the War Dogs, crafting items, and training halfings ready for fostering. Granda almost always had two or three fosterlings at any one time, Granma too. With half the clan Outside most of the time, the remainder didn’t need much, and could make do trading services and skills as much as goods. That also had been the tradition from all the way back.
Aqila pondered the early names on the Wall then, letting more subtleties come to light. Each name glowed with a combination of colors to denote their race and their calling. White was for Teiril, or at least one with blood diluted enough that any other ancestral traits weren’t obvious. Bright red was Recrasil, with one name tinted thus descending down the line to pink, to paler pink, to white as the traits bred back out. A few flickers of pale rose here and there indicated descendants where some of them re-emerged. Yellow and green were Elenil and Ilvinil, respectively. That had been the first daughtering, where those colors predominated. That branch had founded a new Keep down near the Elethoran border, and the Keep was still there, at least, though the mage had never asked if the original bloodline dwelled there yet. Brown was for Saril, a few here and there, paling rapidly, or marrying back outclan in a generation or two, mainly to their dwarven neighbors, clan Selin’eth up west in the mountains proper. But, the color that predominated was blue for Atenil.
The deep bright blue that marked the founder of the clan’s bloodline, and the lighter blues of the descendants since then, was easily visible. Mostly, the names paled to white after the first half dozen centuries, but flickers of pale blue persisted where the identifying traits surfaced. Exceptionally strong mage gifts. The ‘look’ of a part blood. A life spanning six score years or more. All these were signs of a child descended from of one of the Dozen Sons of Thonyan, an Atenil who’d actually fought in the War. There’d been more than a dozen children, because he’d had daughters too, plus whoever knows how many bastards he’d sired in the field between marriages. The daughters’ descendants also were counted as being part of the Dozen clans, which had never numbered exactly twelve ever – the one time it had gotten close, four cousin clans had merged into two in the same year, after the Time of Troubles, eight hundred years ago. And when the population had recovered somewhat after a few generations, three of the Dozen clans daughtered in the same year. Aqila was fairly sure that had been done with malice aforethought, because the jokes wouldn’t have been the same without the mismatch between the numbers and the name.
Living up here gives everyone a peculiar sense of humor, and anyone who’s served gets that double. Lord knows that right after the Troubles, we would have needed that humor more than ever. It would have been much worse right after the War…not just those who deliberately chose to fight but everyone who lived through it would have had their souls scarred by the things they’d seen. Even being told what sorts of horrors there are in the world isn’t the same as seeing them face to face. We may laugh about what a terrible example he set in his personal life now, but really, surviving the War with the wife of your youth, finally coming to a place where you could raise a family in relative safety, and then losing the light of your life to swarming ice trolls…swearing an oath that you won’t wed anyone who’ll outlive you so they won’t have to feel the pain you did doesn’t seem that outlandish. We laugh now because we know Thonyan lived well past five hundred and outlived another eight wives before he died, and that while serving in the Sword until death ended all oaths. The fealty of service that we all judge ourselves against…
The other colors outlined each name to denote their calling and underlined to record their fate. A dark grey outlined clan members who’d never served in the Sentinel. There were precisely two names bordered in bright silver, Paladins both. Dark yellow indicated one of the Book, shining the light of knowledge of dark places. Dark green for the Eye, spreading far and wide like the grass of the field. Dark brown for the Shield, the wall against the woes of the world. And finally, dark red for the Sword, the sharp edge to cut back the dark. More than half the names in the main line were edged to denote service, and many were red. And underlined with black. White was for old age or illness, dark grey underlining for a violent death or accident, but black was reserved for deaths in the field. Often without the body coming home to rest. The first few centuries had more of the greys. Black splattered the Wall liberally, concentrating most thickly around eight hundred years ago.
That was the closest the clan had come to dying out, and the second time the clan had daughtered. The bulk of the survivors of the Troubles had turned Homebody en masse, quit halls too full of memories, and left to found a new clan seat as far east as they could get. Another decimated clan, one of the Dozen who were now too few to hold their land and headless besides, had merged with the remainder who’d stayed Inir’in’bar, and they’d soldiered on. Looking across the whole of the wall, it was easily seen that few red bordered names were underlined in white. Less than a dozen all told. Granda and Granma would be the first in several centuries to join their ranks. Maybe.
They’re still hale enough that if there’s an ‘All Hands’, they’ll come too. They wouldn’t stay behind, not unless they were specifically tasked for home defense, and that’s only to be the new mothers and the infirm. Granda’s knees are bothering him, but he’ll still chase you three times around this Hall if you imply that he’s getting old. From his chair, using his sling and a pouch of pebbles to make sure you run, but it’s none the less effective. And if things follow through the pattern I’m seeing, there’s no avoiding it – we can’t let the Enemy gain access to the vaults in Ambar, and if we find many more pieces, He will have to react - the staff is the key to the vaults. If he can’t access them and we can, he’ll throw everything he can at us to prevent it or to seize the key for himself. For the chance to learn more about the Maelstrom, maybe enough to mend that Woe and heal the world, we’ll have no choice but to answer in kind. And how many Keeps will be left desolate in the aftermath this time….?
The mage’s grim ruminations were rudely interrupted by the crash-bump of an outer door being hurled open and the thudding of several pairs of feet stampeding into the keep.



Three figures barreled across the Hall towards the kitchens at a full pelt, arguing unintelligibly at full volume the whole way. The three-way discussion was muffled as they entered the kitchen proper, then increased in volume as the three boy stampede reversed course. This time, at least, the front-runner noticed her and slammed to a halt just in time for the others to run him over. Aqila started walking over as the ensuing tangle tried righting itself, having identified two of the constituents as Mertan and Haryon, two of her younger first cousins. Mertan was on the cusp of adulthood, but Haryon had just come halfling that spring. The third, trying to get his sword-belt out from under his own leg so he could stand up again, was someone she hadn’t seen before. A fosterling newly come for Granda to train, most likely, looking to be midway in age between the other two.
Coming to a halt as the last boy scrambled to his feet, she caught their attention with an ironic look and asked, “Are you three planning on being in trouble? If Alban asks me if I’ve seen you, I can hardly avoid having done so now.” Her cousins immediately answered in unison while the fosterling watched her with a wary air, before stiffening suddenly.
“We weren’t...”
“..told us to...”
“…supposed to check dinner!”
Aqila quelled them with a gesture and said, “One at a time, halflings. Where is everyone, and what’s the rush?”
Mertan being the oldest, spoke up first. “Everyone’s over at Keep Bar’in’inir today, but they’re coming back for dinner, and we were supposed to make sure that nothing had gone wrong.” He rushed his words hurriedly, glancing at the other two as he spoke.
Haryon piped up, “I still think someone crossed a blink-dog in the lines somewhere – Pipper keeps getting into closed rooms, and we’re not doing it to play pranks.”
Aqila rolled her eyes. “He wouldn’t need to blink through a door, he’d just need to rear up against it and use his paws carefully. Hils saw old Three-toes get into the cold room that way years ago, and she probably taught the trick to some of the pups. That’s why the lock-bar’s on the store rooms, because the dogs can’t cast cantrips or squeeze the release. On that note, now that you’ve made sure that the kitchen is free of roving monsters, don’t you have chores to do before dinner?”
Mertan looked at the other two meaningfully. The quiet halfling showed no inclination to speak up, still looking somewhat alarmed. Haryon looked a bit nervous, and started to reply, but his brother interrupted him, “We finished our daily chores already, and neither Alban or Dad gave us anything else to do after we got back.” After glancing at his companions again, his tone shifted to a more thoughtful note, he continued, “He did say we could go check on the tripped alarm if we found an adult to supervise. It just happened this morning.”
Haryon finally plucked up his courage again to chime in, “That rocky section about two miles northeast, you know, where we have to kick a drake or three out of every year. Dad set up warner after the last one got properly denned up in there and tried to pick off some of the dogs.”
“Still haven’t figured out where they’re coming in from, then?”
“Selin’eth insists they haven’t seen any dragons inside their territory for decades, but it’s not like they go looking either,” Haryon continued disgustedly. “They never want to poke their heads out of their mines.”
“That does need looked into,” Aqila commented thoughtfully. “And I know you two know well enough that if I tell you to run, that isn’t a suggestion, but I do not know who you are…” Turning her attention fully to the oddly behaving third halfling, she waited for him to properly introduce himself.
And waited. She got the distinct impression that if he could have bolted for cover without losing face, he would have. Sighing audibly, she glared at Mertan. “I assume this is your fault. Just what tales were you telling?!”
Haryon was perfectly happy to answer that question. “All the good ones, of course. How you got to fight Jahan and saw a demon lord and helped a dragon and killed a bunch of necromancers and rescued a paladin and…” As his brother rambled cheerfully, Mertan looked more and more embarrassed.
Aqila facepalmed eloquently. Turning gently to the obviously mortified halfling, she began, “Let’s try this again, shall we? Yes, I’m Aqila, Albans’ crazy sister in the Sword. What my dear cousin probably forgot to mention was that all of those events were only survivable because I work with a good team, and I’d probably have gotten my line by now if they weren’t so practiced in keeping me and each other alive when the screaming starts.” Rubbing the slightly rough scar on her neck absent-mindedly, she finished, “That being said, assuming I agree to play escort for you boys, I need to be sure that if I give you an order, you’ll obey it right there without back talk or hesitating. I doubt anything too exciting is up on that ridge, but things happen.”
The fosterling had started relaxing slightly at her calm tone, and nodded quickly and solemnly in response. She added, “I also prefer to know who I’m travelling with. Which clan are you?”
Finally bringing himself to speak, he introduced himself as Darian Sar’in’dask. Recognizing the name, another one of the Dozen that tended to serve in the Eye if anywhere, she blinked once. “I’m sure there’s a story involved in how you ended up fostered here, but if I’m not mistaken, dinnertime is in an hour and a half, and it’s half an hour’s walk to the ridge”
“Two hours, yet, today, there’s plenty of time to walk out and have a look…” Mertan jumped in.
“Alright, then. On the condition that you all will pay attention, I see no reason not to let you three get some ‘in the field’ practice.
A round of extra vigorous nodding, and assurances were quickly given. And at that, it was only a matter of grabbing her outside gear and leaving a note on the message board briefly stating who was going out and where. The halfings were already armed and dressed for the weather and about bouncing out of their boots with anticipation as they left.



The walk out went about as Aqila was expecting, beginning with pestering on a variety of topics by all three halflings. Darian came out of his shell quickly, once curiosity overcame the shock of the sudden encounter with someone he’d only heard (somewhat inflated) stories about. She deflected them from topics not up for discussion, diverted them into a discussion on what training they were working on, and when that devolved into a three-way debate on how big an ice dragon they were going to find, she could listen with half an ear and resume her internal ruminations.
The pestering was much the same as she’d gotten during her vacation following her greenling tour, after the first few weeks of ‘decompression’. A benefit of being a scion of Inir’in’bar – her brother didn’t make the mistake of turning a freshly minted, and fresh out of the field, Sword loose without making sure she’d had time to have some long, long talks with Granda and Granma and some private time to get her head straight. Some of the advice she would have gotten before going out as a greenling if they’d thought there’d even been a chance of her choosing the Sword had been helpful for, if not getting a lid on her overactive paranoia, at least channeling it constructively. Swords were allowed to be a bit crazy, as long as it wasn’t destructive.
The weathered jumble of outcroppings that marked the ridge eased into view quickly and Aqila paused the group long enough to make sure everyone was warded with Mage Armor. “Let us at least pretend that there’s a big old ice drake taking a nap somewhere in there. That way, if it’s a stupid barely fledged dragonet, we are pleasantly surprised, and if it’s something worse, we might actually live through the experience.” Darian, took point, sword out, with Mertan following and Haryon at the rear, firmly cautioned that his most important job was keeping watch behind and above, given that he was still working on mastering cantrips. Aqila stayed about thirty feet back, flying along silently to let the boys at least pretend they were on their own on their monster hunt.
Twenty minutes later, they’d covered about half of the rocky patches, circling clockwise, and hadn’t found so much as a scale or a track. There were some traces of something passing by around where the warner had been set up, but nothing clear enough for them to read. Three small caves, more like shallow overhangs, had been poked into with no results, and no signs of recent occupancy. Boredom and disappointment were obviously beginning to set in by the stiff set of shoulders and more inattention to their surroundings. Another twenty minutes, and they were almost back where they’d started, frustration writ large in their attitude. Which is why Aqila almost forgot her resolve to let the boys handle as much as they were able to when Darian started walking around a boulder to pick up the trail back to the keep, and let out a howl of startlement that would have done one of the war dogs proud.
The accidental war cry startled the very small ice drake that had been trying to walk around the boulder from the other direction, and it reared up on its hind legs, flaring its wings to look larger. Darian connected with his sword, then rolled to try to get behind it as Mertan remembered what he was supposed to be doing and produced a flame to throw at it. He missed, and Haryon managed to hit it with an acid splash, to his brother’s evident disgust. The dragonet started to run towards Mertan, targeting the source of the fire that had flown past its nose, which gave Darian an opening to stab it from behind. That got him bit, but it couldn’t get a good grip through the cold weather gear, and only scratched his face with one claw, and the other two got several solid hits in while it was busy. Darian drew his dagger with his offhand, and finished it off.
“So, who’s carrying your kill back? Aqila asked when she strolled up to get a better look at the scene. As the boys started a somewhat involved discussion to make that decision, she took a better look at the dragon. It was a very small ice drake. Too small. A wyrmling shouldn’t be out of the nest at that age… Mertan had dug a piece of rope out from somewhere and was rigging up a harness with his brother’s help to carry the carcass back, while Darian started on ahead to see if he could figure out where the dragon had come from. Paranoia fully triggered, Aqila opened her mouth to call him back when a horrible screeching roar split the dry air. She dashed forward far enough to see around the boulder, and to catch a glimpse of a full grown adult ice drake barreling down on Darian.
“To me, all of you, now!” She had a Teleport stored for an emergency, but it would take a few seconds for Darian to get back, and the Ice Drake was inside her range…as Darian reversed course in a tearing hurry, she cut loose with a Fireball and Arcane Bolts combo almost out of habit. The dragon stuttered in midair, and dropped to the ground. Which it should not have done – ice drakes were fairly tough little rage-balls. Instead of bouncing out immediately, Aqila paused to watch the dragon where it lay. The boys were still a bit bug-eyed and quiet, giving her a few moments to think about what she was seeing.
“Stay here a moment. Something’s odd, and I’m going to take a closer look.” Raising a hand to still some incipient backtalk, she continued, “I can move faster than it can, just sit tight a moment.” Cautiously moving up towards the still unmoving body, what she thought she’d seen was confirmed – extensive battle wounds, tears and slashes parting scales and exposing bone in places, but old enough to be scabbed over. The open eyes were starting to film over. Giving her charges the all clear, she started moving the body around to get a better look at the damage, and could then clearly see that this dragon was three quarters starved to boot.
A discussion about the larger dragon started as she dug a piece of canvas out of her bag and some more rope to make dragging the interesting conundrum back to the keep an easier prospect. Nothing else showed up to investigate the commotion as they set off for home, the boys hauling, and Aqila hovering along about ten feet up to keep an eye out for anything else coming in.



It was less a welcoming committee and more of a pending inquisition that greeted the weary quartet as they trooped in. The halflings had paid a lot more attention to ‘situational awareness’ on the walk back, even loaded down, which wore them out faster than the fight did. After getting a good look at her seriously annoyed aunt and uncle, waiting in ominous silence, Aqila eyed three halflings that were carefully anywhere except the adults present.
“Forget to mention something, children?”
“They were told, explicitly, that they could go on ahead to check on dinner, and that I would decide what I needed them to do next when the rest of us caught up.” Uncle Arminas’s flat tone expressed his mood adequately. Three boys were definitely squirming now. As Aunt Firiel began quietly and pointedly chewing the three of them out, Aqila gestured for her uncle’s attention and pointed at the carcasses.
“Before you get too involved, you want to look at this while it’s fresh. I don’t know what happened, precisely, but I’d bet it means trouble. Probably the sort that involves all the neighbors.” She could hear in the background that one of Aunt Fi’s infamous tongue lashings was beginning to hit full stride, and focusing in on Mertan as being the likely instigator, quite accurately.
Raising an eyebrow, Arminas moved somewhat stiffly over and got a good look at the larger dragon. “Interesting,” he commented in a dry tone. “Please tell me you didn’t find this one where I think you did.”
“If you’re meaning the dragon-magnet northeast of here, I’ll be disappointing you then. We saw the warner you rigged up there. Mertan said it went off this morning.”
“It did, but it’s time for Bar’in’inir’s tithe, so we’ve all been busy since sun-up helping load and unload the railcarts. Which is where those three should have been, helping organize in the gate room for when it’s opened tomorrow.” The last sentence was spoken in a slightly louder but still deceptively mild tone. The boys didn’t turn their attention overtly away from Firiel’s dressing down, but they all flinched. Aqila sighed, flushing slightly.
“I’d honestly forgotten what time of year it was,” she admitted, wincing. “And I should have asked why everyone was out today before I agreed to the excursion.”
“Yes. Yes, you should have. I allow that I told those three, when they asked to go on ahead, that I would tell them what they needed to do next when the rest of us caught up with the last load. But the expectation was that they would be there to tell.” Arminas glanced over to see his sons visibly squirming. Darian seemed be torn between an impulse to hide or freeze in place, dismay evident.
Seeing that they had gotten his point, he continued, “but, it’s not my job to deal with your part in this. I’ll let the Nih’inir’in’bar do his duty, when he gets back. Because we were shorthanded, we’re late getting the carts back up the line, and he’s probably apologizing to the Nih’bar’in’inir now for delaying things on their end as well.” The even, mild tone and formal phrasing was exceptionally effective at getting the point across. A promise given was to be a promise kept, and that arrangement dated back to the clan split. Aqila disciplined herself to stillness lest she start fidgeting like a halfling too.
“My brother is going to blow his top when he gets back if I let him in for a lecture on the proper behavior of a clan leader,” she muttered, half to herself, “And finding an adult ice drake two miles from home is just going to be the seasoning on the roast.” That redirected her uncle’s attention back to the pitiful corpse lying on the ground.
“Oh, indeed. What happened, precisely?” He assumed an attitude of patient attention.
“It attacked us after the boys handled what I presume was its wyrmling with reasonable skill, and I dispatched it. Mainly because it was three quarters dead already. I only know what I see, and you can see it as well as I do. Probably better than me – you’ve spent more time studying the local fauna.” Arminas nodded, and she continued, “the scorch marks are from me, and the signs of impact damage, but the rest of the injuries were already there. I think it’s a female, but she couldn’t have been there long or you might have gotten a nasty surprise when you set the warner up...”
Arminas crouched down painfully to check the distance between the obvious slash marks, then examined the spread of the claws on the corpse. Aqila could see that indicating the damage had been inflicted by a larger drake, or at least something with wider set claws than this drake. He levered himself upright again with a stifled hiss, looking pensive. “Take that down to my lab, please. It will probably have to wait on Melia getting back from that emergency call to see if she can divine where it came from, but I can at least start the examination. I would suggest grabbing a bite to eat and pitching in on getting the cargo arranged in the gate room – That might mitigate the scolding I suspect you’re due for.” On that cheerful note, he turned and started carefully walking into the keep proper. Firiel was winding up her lecture as well. Aqila took a deep breath and waited a few moments to co-opt some help for her current task. This was not shaping up to be one of her more enjoyable visits home.
Act 6: The Next Morning.
Aqila managed to avoid her brother that night, or else he didn’t see fit to come seeking her out. The freshly incentivized halflings were zealous in their labors, helping the rest of the family in getting things sorted out almost quickly enough for them all to seek their rest at a normal hour. For some reason, there was an absolute dearth of questions while they worked. And that was not actually helpful, in a way. There was nothing to distracter her from her thoughts.
Aqila could have headed south at dawn, instead of seeking out the library, to make the planned rendezvous with the rest of her team, but like rotten fish, scoldings don’t keep well at all. And her disinclination to set a bad example for her younger relatives far outweighed her desire to not deal with the pending awkwardness. A distinctive whump-thump echoed through the room, where she had curled up with one of the journals, followed by some scratching noises and the door swinging open. A grizzled and scarred war dog trotted in smugly and slid to the floor with a groan, neatly pinning Aqila’s legs against her chair and putting her head at just the right level for caresses. Alban, expressionless, quietly treaded after the venerable hound into the room, and then stood there, letting the silence stretch out.
Knowing from experience that her older brother could maintain his imitation of a statue for hours if he felt like doing so, the mage didn’t see any point in putting off the inevitable, and broke the stillness first. “Hilaria still hasn’t found another pup that can find anyone, anywhere in the keep on command, has she?”
“Three-toes didn’t start showing off that trick until she was past three. There’s time yet.” Alban rumbled tersely, almost without moving. That gambit failed, as silence once again refilled the room. Sighing internally, Aqila got to the point.
“Are you planning on scolding me properly, or are you just going to stare at me until you’re sure I’m properly contrite?”
“Do I need to? You’re a woman grown, little sister. I shouldn’t need to tell you your duties.” He returned to motionlessness.
“Then why did you come looking for me?” She didn’t look up, concentrating on coaxing soft grunts of contentment out of the elderly dog leaning on her legs.
“I haven’t decided yet. I could assign you a portion of the blame for yesterday. And yet, I only have pieces of the story. It would not be just to pass judgment without all of the facts in hand.”
“Which facts do you think you’re missing then?” Aqila grimaced, and hunched her shoulders. “I forgot what time of year it was, I didn’t try to ask you or uncle to confirm the halflings were allowed to go on a drake hunt, and I kicked up a nice ‘little’ problem, which I am leaving you to solve, because I promised my teammates that I’d meet them for a little personal trip south this morning.”
“Not official business you’re after?”
Aqila sighed again. “Yes and no. Not being sent, directly, but more of a target of opportunity you might say. Sanctioned, but not ordered.” Images of Elarial dead on the floor because it hadn’t occurred to her that Mitrofan might be a traitor. Cage after cage of malnourished and hopeless people, waiting for death. Broken and mad things, sentient no longer, screaming in the machine that Varvara built…
The tap on the top of her head would have launched her out of the chair, but for the massive weight pinning her feet down. The journal she’d been reading went flying out of her lap, and she smacked into the hand her brother held out to keep her from falling on her nose and bounced back into the seat. The war dog rotated her massive head around to plant her chin firmly in Aqila’s lap, giving voice to worried whimpers that always seemed a bit ludicrous from that source. As her hands automatically reached out to scratch the worried dog soothingly, Alban raised one eyebrow, pointedly. “Should I go get Granda? Granma got another emergency call in the wee hours, and he was planning on giving the boys some extra training before we leave this morning, but if it’s needed, that can wait.”
Aqila took deep breath, and schooled her face to non-expression. “I’m fine, brother. I just let myself get distracted for a moment.”
“Some distraction.” He snorted softly, then bent over and picked the old and somewhat fragile journal off the floor. “Sakhr the Stone-handed’s last diary. Interesting choice of light reading here.” He set it carefully on a nearby table. “Cough it up, Qi. You’re brooding about something, and you’ve got half your kinfolk worried about how meek and mild you were being last night. Out of character, that was.” When he saw he actually had her attention, he continued, “Both your cousins, aunt, and uncle all made a point of catching me to plead leniency for you. Darian still thinks I eat babies for breakfast and pick my teeth with rail spikes, but he was lurking in the background looking worried too. Of course, that could have been from thinking I was going to finish what Aunt Fi started…” He trailed off, watching his younger sister carefully keeping her face still as she listened.
“She was in fine form last night. She and Mom always seem to have their own special way with words.”
“And you’re changing the subject. Spit it out.” He resumed a position of implacable patience.
“You don’t want to know. You really don’t. It’s not going to help you sleep any better at night.” She got a long level stare in response. “I did warn you.” Pointing at the two-handed blade he usually wore slung over one shoulder, she asked, “Have you been keeping up your training, to Granda’s standards?”
Narrowing his eyes slightly, he replied, “I fail to see how that is relevant.”
“It is if you get called out.”
“And why would I get called out? I’m needed here. It’s not like anyone else was jumping at the chance to boss this lash-up, and we’re already a bit shorthanded on home defense. I’m going to have to get Selin’eth involved to find out where that drake you dragged in last night came from.”
“I didn’t say only you would be getting called out. Uncle would be exempt, and Harmamel is still nursing your youngest, so she would be too. Haryon’s too young still but Mertan isn’t...” Alban’s attitude of stillness changed imperceptibly to one of pointed and fixed attention.
“You’re talking about an ‘All-hands’,” he said, half under his breath. “Do you know something you can actually talk about?”
“In part. Perhaps. I’m not speaking of something I’ve been told. Not that I would if I had been. But, oh, how to explain.” She gestured as if she was trying to draw a picture in the air. “ Think about how magic, using it, is seeing patterns. How things link together. How to take them apart. And it’s not just magic like that. Life is, history, how people behave, react. Individuals, they’re hard to see, but large groups are more predictable. And I’m seeing a pattern right now, no matter where I look.”
She continued, “When was the last time you looked at the Wall, really looked? It shows our lines, our lineage, but it’s also a story of the Long War. Where our ancestors died, where the conflicts flared up and died away. And when we almost did have an All Hands, eight hundred years ago, when it looked like Teredor, old Teredor might fall.” She pointed at the journal. “I know Sakhr’s namesake didn’t die in that mess. At least we think he died over in the Confederation with his twin, trying to rescue some of the last of the dragons, but he wrote about how the mess down south got started. Unrelated provocations. Seemingly random attacks by demons and monsters and factions springing up to destabilize the Northern League. Starting small, and getting larger and coming faster until it seemed like the whole continent was going to go up in flames. The Enemy we stand against, working behind the scenes to challenge, to sow the seeds of conquest and destruction. And we paid in blood to stop it.”
Alban gestured for her to finish, seeing she wasn’t quite done. “I told some of the stories about my greenling tour, when I was on sabbatical. What I saw down in the Fariel. Not everything, but do you see what I’m getting at? I think it’s another Time of Troubles we’re due for, and maybe the final war, or at least the start of it, we’ve been expecting to come for so long. The chaos is spreading. The Ferial is disintegrating. The Dragon Temple is on the move. My team, we were attacked by Death Dancers in Teredor’s capital. In the capital! The pace is picking up rapidly…it feels like a full blown conflagration is imminent.”
“And you’re very carefully not saying some things, I think. Are you sure?” Alban asked very slowly and seriously.
“I don’t want to be right. There are hardly enough of us to hold the Keep as it is.”
“Today, perhaps. That’s part of why Nih’Bar’in’inir has been being difficult. I’m sure he’s afraid that my siblings’ examples, you, most pointedly included, is going to entice half of his youngsters to join the Sentinel when they hit their majority, and probably petition for adoption over here, because they know he’s disapproving of anyone even thinking about joining one of the orders, except for the Book. He didn’t ban his own brother when he volunteered for the Eye, but they haven’t been on speaking terms for years, remember. And Mertan’s been most unhelpful by relaying all the stories you told last year any time he’s had an audience. If we didn’t have mutual assistance agreements dating back to the split, I think he’d ban the lot of us.”
“Oh. Then that isn’t all my fault. Just mostly.” She quirked her mouth wryly.
Alban snorted in response. “Not even mostly, sprat. His issues go back more years than we’ve both lived He’s an idiot, but he’s older than Granma. He’ll stop being a burr in my boot soon enough. And if that’s what you’ve been working yourself up about, I don’t see any point scolding you about yesterday. You were after an opportunity to test your cousin’s combat readiness, and didn’t question the serendipity, I suppose.”
“Insightful as always. You always could see right through me, no matter what I tried.” Aqila sighed ruefully.
“Not always. I still don’t know which of you horrible miscreants managed to hide those frogs in my bed.” He bestowed an eloquent glare on her, quirking his mouth slightly.
Aqila schooled her face to a look of studied innocence. “A mystery for the ages, that was, indeed.” Then she shifted back to a slightly worried mien. “You are going to take me seriously, though, yes? As fast as things are deteriorating, I wouldn’t be surprised if the final explosion came within the year.”
“I’m going to operate on the assumption that you aren’t imagining things. It will be good practice, if nothing else. And I suspect the Grans will let me know if they hear anything substantial through the grapevine. There should be some warning ahead of time, I would hope.”
“Don’t count on it. Though if word comes in that I’ve gotten my line, that might be one.” Visibly calming, she quirked her lips ruefully. Blinking thoughtfully, she remembered a discussion that hadn’t happened. “Would you mind indulging my curiosity, big brother? How did a Sar’in’dask end up fostered here? The closest to ‘sneaky stuff’ that Granda usually teaches is dirty fighting.”
Alban didn’t quite grin, but was evidently amused by his thoughts. “I believe the threat from his clan head was ‘Behave, or we’ll foster you out with Inir’in’bar’. And evidently he didn’t. Nih’Sar’in’dask was somewhat chagrined that he couldn’t handle one halfling, but Darian seems to be cut from the same cloth our Sakhr was.”
Aqila chuckled softly. “So that’s why he seemed so nervous yesterday. He’s probably still in shock that his clan head carried out the threat. Though I’m not sure it’s such a good thing that we’ve a reputation of being boogeymen.”
“I wouldn’t put it that way, sis. I see it as a vote of confidence that we can straighten out even the wilder halfings. And to be fair, he’s not any worse than Mertan is, or we were at that age. He’ll learn. And that’s only half the story. Darian doesn’t know that our Veli is due for a sabbatical soon. After two tours in Almaera, he’s earned some peace and quiet. Or as peacefully as chasing a scamp like that around the salle will be.” That coaxed an actually laugh from the mage before a sudden thought smacked her.
“Oh, ugh, I just realized…Mertan is probably going to want to tell everyone at Bar’in’inir about the drake hunt. And when their clan head hears that I was involved, he’s going to inflict another diatribe on you, isn’t he?”
“More than likely. I should do something to you, if only to spread the joy around.”
“Very funny. I suppose you could tell me to make myself scarce for a week. I think I can survive missing home-cooked meals for that long, and avoid adding any more fuel to that particular fire.”
“And I can demonstrate my steely resolve and proper discipline of my clan members. That should do it, I think. You think your trip is going to take a week?”
“It shouldn’t. If nothing goes spectacularly wrong, we’d probably be back tonight, but then there’s some other things we need to do first. It should be a routine assassination.”
Alban grimaced. “The fact that you can say that so casually is something I should find disturbing.”
“It shouldn’t be that bad, really. I’m not expecting any demons to show up this time, for example.”
At that moment, in a momentous display of bad timing, there was a huff of displaced air, and a very familiar high-pitched voice chirping, “Hi Aqila! You’re going on a trip, yes?” The old grizzled dog, who’d been trying to take a nap, woke up with a snarl and leaped to her feet, then let out a sharp whine as the abrupt motion hurt her hips. Aqila, feet freed, slid to the floor and wrapped her arms around the dog’s neck before anything unfortunate happened.
“Friend Three-toes, friend. Settled down, it’s okay, friend.”
Alban watched the scene bemusedly, then started putting two and two together. Turning slightly to face the hovering imp, he rumbled, “Sneezil, I presume?”
Sneezil twitched in the air slightly, having just noticed the other person in the room, “Yes, yes, I am Sneezil. Who are you?”
“I’m Aqila’s brother. And I should like to point out that it is proper manners to request entrance to a Keep you don’t live in. You’re less likely to accidently get hurt that way, as well.” The old war dog was still rumbling under her breath, pinning the imp with an unwavering gaze.
“That big dog, yes”. As Aqila stood up to stand by her brother, one hand resting on the dog’s head, the substantial difference in their heights became much more obvious. “And you big man.”
“He comes by it honestly. He’s not the tallest of my brothers. But, Sneezil, why are you here? You were in Valanas with Tervel, last time I saw you.”
“You are going on a trip, yes? Need help! Scary thing, have to help!”
Under her brother’s bemused gaze, Aqila asked, “What kind of scary thing?”
“Not know how to say. Scary. Bad, hurt. Very bad.”
“Are you talking about the lich? We know she’s bad and scary.”
“No, no think so. Not creepy dead thing. Not good. Need to help.” The dog finally decided that she didn’t need to eat anyone, and whumped back down into a comfortable sprawl, still watching Sneezil.
Trying another tack, Aqila asked, “And you’re sure you and Tervel aren’t heading off someone else soon?”
“Tervel has big job. No need me right now. Needed where you go.” Sneezil nodded emphatically. Aqila couldn’t remember if she’d mentioned the imp’s paladinhood in her stories, and hoped her brother didn’t remember if she had. There were quite a few black jokes floating around concerning Sentinel missions that paladins invited themselves along on.
Half under her breath, Aqila muttered, “Do I really want to know what the big job is this time, I wonder?”
Imps have good ears, so Sneezil helpfully explained, “Was big one has lot to learn.”
Aqila stiffened, and glanced at her brother, who was still taking the scene in with equamity. “Sneezil, I’m pretty sure that’s supposed to be a secret for now. And a secret means that you don’t talk about it.” The imps eyes widened, and he nodded vigorously.
“And I believe that’s my cue to get moving. The day isn’t getting any younger.” Alban started walking towards the door, then paused and looked back. “Given the company you’re keeping, I think I am going to make the banishment official. One week, or until you’re not likely to drag any interesting unexpected visitors home.” Aqila gestured her understanding formally, and he slipped out the door.
“We go now?”
“Yes, we should go now.” Scooping her pack off the floor behind the chair, she shouldered it, and prepared to bounce herself and the little imp south. Time to find out how well the rest of the team was going to take the news that a paladin thought they were going to need his help on this ‘vacation trip’.

Terane
2020-04-08, 11:03 AM
We start off the session with some epic book-keeping, sorting and training. (Some retconning will need to occur due to errors discovered after the fact). Three hours later we have ourselves sorted out and are ready to play. New spells are learned, new gear is acquired, old loot is sold off, and a few pending rewards stop being pending. Dagnar puts in some time and effort, sweat and tears, making a homunculus to use as a stealthy scout. He gives it the ability to poison, a fluffy tail and sharp buck teeth. We spend three weeks preparing first, and then go down the the Ferial to get Moonbeam's family moved out of the country before the situation down there deteriorates any further. Aqila is used as the party bus service - seven teleports get us all the way down to the appropriate village. Moonbeam has been using Dream to let folks know to get ready. The bag of holding has been emptied to hold baggage. Eleven people are reduced to travel more comfortably in the portable hole, and then we head back north. The plan is to head for a village near the Fey Wilds where Listens to Wind's family lives.

Used a set of homebrew rules for a custom homunculus, not standard. Yes, he made a squirrel homunculus with a venomous bite - used sleeping poison, not anything nastier.

In the middle of the six hops needed to get to the chosen resettlement site, we almost land on a familiar looking old man, last seen taking his leave of us, sphere of annihilation in tow. He has a message for Joe, or rather his descendents. "Know that that which you protect will be destroyed. You can't prevent it. When you hear that Almaera has fallen, you, or rather your descendents, will know that it is time to flee and rebuild." After pondering that weighty message for a few moments, Joe asks, 'How can something like that be rebuilt?'. The old man is not permitted to answer that question, or the one about what will happen afterwards. The druid thanks him with appropriate politeness, and we finish the move with no more surprises.

And yes, having someone meet them at a random waypoint on their trip was a bit disconcerting for the party. Even without the cryptic warning.

There's quite a bit of work that needs done to get everyone settled in in the new location. Moonbeam and Joe plan on sticking around for a few days to help with that. Dagnar decides to stick around too, after Joe's daughter stops by to see what's going on. Dances-on-Water derives some amusement value from his attempts to flirt with her. Aqila has a few more spells that would be somewhat important to learn before the lich hunt, and returns home to finish studying.
Six days later, she comes back, Sneezil in tow, with a 'request' from her clan head to make herself scarce for a week. Something about helping younger cousins skip out on chores and go on an ice drake hunt. They're in trouble for playing hooky, and she's in trouble for not checking that they did in fact have permission to go out hunting. Sneezil showing up just added some impetus to getting started on the necromancer stakeout. Sneezil greets everyone with 'Hi! Going to scary hurty place? Down south, big place.' Parsing that statement through our Sneezil translator, we think he means Innokenti's palace. It would qualify as a 'big place' and it is 'down south'.

See previous post for the ice drake hunt.

Aqila follows a similar route to move everyone to our target, pausing one teleport out from Innokenti's capital so we can have one last discussion of tactics. We did get a briefing on known information pertaining to our little jaunt before we left. There are three places where the artificer lich is likely to be found. One is in the quarters of the royal officials - the Chancellor, Archivist, Court Mage, and treasurer have rooms for when they need to stay overnight. The Chancellor has some fairly nasty wards on his room, double disintegrate is likely. There was an accident with a dog once, so they aren't particularly discriminating either. Another possibility is in the area where the royal family is quartered. The third possibility is in a very heavily warded area. Anti-teleportation and anti-divination wards mainly. The court mage is known to specialize in anti-divination protections, as well as stealthy magical murders, and isn't entirely without combat magics either.
The other thing to consider is that while Innokenti is known to be a fairly unpleasant fellow - 27 acknowledged bastard sons by 23 different women, and no way to know how many others are out there - and is known to be profiting from the use of necromancy, there is no confirmation that he knew about the Gulvor summoning in Bright Haven, so while we aren't specifically here to assassinate the king, if he suffers a mischief while we're dealing with the lich, we're not going to get in trouble over it. Though further confirmation that he's involved with something actionable - evil necromancy, blood magic, etc, would be nice. Also, he generally uses his own sons as body guards, and while at least one of them has, or at least had no idea what his father was up to, quite a few of the others are as bad as he is. So there's at least one relative innocent around that it would be nice to avoid killing by actual accident.
Finally, for some unknown reason, Innokenti's throne has some unusually nasty wards around it. They don't react to undead, or anything he lets through, but otherwise most living things aren't going to live through the whole series. Heavy duty curses, poison, and a disintegration finale aren't anything to sneeze at. Whether similar wards are anywhere else in the palace is unknown. Based on known information, we decide to start with the court officials area, because there are windows to sneak in, then check the warded area as the next most likely place to hide an ancient and powerful lich, and if those aren't it, then try the royal quarters.
We sneak into the city proper and find a convenient nearby roof to lurk on so Dagnar can use his new homunculus to scout for us. After a flight and invisibility spell, he sends it to start poking around the court officials' windows. The first three are all deserted and fairly plain, with vermin repulsion wards being the only unexpected wards seen. The 4th window has a small negative energy trap on it too, and with the alchemist bench and bookcases, it is tentatively ID'd as the court mage's quarters. The 5th room has no exterior window, so the scout is flown back around to an untrapped room, enters, and with some effort gets the door open. The corridor is deserted. The door to the 5th room is locked, but Dagnar can cast knock through the link, which pops the lock. The door appears to be unwarded. When it opens the door, a mechanical alarm bell goes off, magically amplified. Dagnar gets a glimpse of a necromancer's work room, and two spectres. Time to run away! After closing both doors to obscure why the alarm went off, he flies the homunculus away, but not before a spectre gets a swat in at it. They don't pursue it outside the window and it gets back to the roof safely.
The bell only rings for a short time, and no one comes to investigate. The homunculus is sent back and checks down the stairs. The heart of the bureaucracy is down there. All the little clerks and scribes that keep the engine of government running have desks down there. So, no lich sighting yet. Time to check out the warded area. After invisibility spells on everyone, and flights too, we move to the other side of the palace and make use of the usual housebreaking combo of passwall and illusory wall. We enter at the foot of a set of stairs to the right, and a narrow passageway to the left. It leads to a door opening in on a small chamber. Inside is a bed with sheets covered with bloodstains of various ages. A collection of shackles, chains, and various knives and other torture instruments paint a picture of how they got there. Some of the tools have necromantic auras. Sneezil's comment about us going to the 'scary hurty' place is starting to make more sense now.
Checking the other way, the stairs have six wards on them, and seem similar to what we heard described as the wards for Innokenti's throne. Several incantations of Greater Dispelling later, the stairs are cleared and Dagnar's fluffy-tailed scout is rendered invisible and dispatched to poke around. There are two doors in a short corridor. Opening one, it finds a shrine to Zeleya. An altar with fresh blood stains, with Zeleya's symbol over it and flanked by two Handmaids of Zeleya are all that's inside. That's enough. They seem somewhat more powerful than the one that was trying to kill Tervel back in Chalisce, which is also not happy making. Given that we don't know if they know we're here or not, and leaving a temple to a deity we've already gotten annoyed at us intact seems unwise, we decide to take care of it before anything happens.
Joe gets an evil grin on his face after contemplating the best way to do this, and starts making fireseeds. Moonbeam helps, and contributes a spider hand to be the delivery system. One of the Handmaids dodges all the explosions, while the other one dies. Aqila sticks her head in the room expecting to find mostly dead foes and is surprised by an unharmed one. She casts Arcane bolts after managing not to succumb to the effects of its pain aura. Two bolts strike home. Dagnar steps up and after he manages to shrug off the pain aura as well, he decides to get fancy. Triple ray splitting screeching ray. Seven rays hit, and four of them aren't nullified. The Handmaid retaliates by throwing two strands of greenish white fire at him. He's hurt but not too badly. Thoron blinds her, then Joe kelp strands her. Remembering that the last Handmaid we fought had nasty death throes, the rest of us get out of the blast radius before Dagnar stabbies her to death and takes full advantage of his reflexes to dodge most of the boom.
However, there's still an active altar in the room. Last time, the presence of a paladin persuaded Zeleya to just blow up her own altar rather than manifest and try to kill us. And a little paladin decided to tag along with us this time. A very rapid 'prot the paladin' occurs as he flies into the room to finish what we started. Shield other, barkskin, reflex save bonus, and so on. And then he trips and falls flat on his face when the altar blows up. It's the thought that counts; it was still a nicely heroic act and he lived through the explosion. And now we hear alarms going off, but the teleport wards seem to be down, so Aqila bounces everyone back to the roof we started on and closes the passwall to obscure how we got in.
While she's repreparing spells, Dagnar makes use of another new spell he's learned - Clairvoyance. It takes ten minutes, but let's him see what's going on in the temple we just desecrated. Meanwhile, Aqila Sends a message to our boss, under the circumstances. "Necromancer's workroom located, lich still at large, found Zeleya temple in warded area, two handmaids, tougher than previous encounter. Temple desecrated with paladin support." The reply is simple. 'Deal with the situation if you can.' Dagnar can see three heavily armored men have entered the temple area and are arguing animatedly. He can't hear what's going on, but briefly glimpses one of the men wearing an amulet with what looks like the symbol of Zeleya on it.
In the interest of making a clean sweep of cleaning out this little nest of Zeleya's adherents - given that her worship by nature involves blood magic, killing her priests is generally allowed whenever you trip over one - we head back to the pre-existing illusory wall invisibly and flying to repeat our previous infiltration of the temple area. And since it worked so well last time, Joe and Moonbeam make more fire seeds. The three men aren't standing close enough to all get caught in one blast, so two piles of seeds are needed. The spider shrugs off half its load at the feet of one, then moves between the other two and one more explosion goes off. If the room had been near a structural support, part of the palace would have fallen down by now.
Dagnar can see through his still running Clairvoyance spell that two of the men are dead, and the one with the amulet is still standing. He and Aqila cast mirror image as we move up the stairs to finish the fight. As we're moving, we hear a shout of 'Matvei!' Sounds like a name, and not one we know. We can see undead coming down the corridor from the left. To the right is a closed door that we hadn't opened yet, and ahead is the desecrated temple and the priest, we presume. He's loaded for bear, spellwise, and glowing with abjurations. Joe starts off our assault with Greater Dispelling. 12/20 effects are removed. The glow noticeably diminishes. And then the priest invokes a flame strike on our heads. That hurt. Aqila pulls out her wand and lobs a forceball down the corridor at the undead, but none drop.
Thoron uses blinding spittle and nails his target for the second time this morning. Sneezil is guarding our line of retreat down the stairs and wisely staying out of the blast radius. He fails to notice a small group of undead coming from the outside of the palace towards the passwall opening, so we don't know about them either. Dagnar pulls a fancy trick starting with haste, misses with the dagger, hits with the scimitar, then does his triple split trick again for seven hits. Moonbeam lands a cluster of thorns on the priest to pin him down, then fills the corridor to impede the undead. The priest was in full plate, so it won't actually hurt him. The undead can't advance very fast, but they can still cast. Joe sees a blob of acid fly past his head and eat a hole in the door to our right. We can hear pounding feet running this way. Then a greenish ray also just misses him.
Unbeknownst to us, Varvara was behind the undead around the corner, and she decides that the day has gotten too interesting for her tastes. She departs, and we don't notice. The court mage was back there as well, and dimension doors into the temple area. However, because Aqila had 'anticipate teleportation' up, his reappearance is delayed. She doesn't know who it is, just that someone is inbound. The pounding feet are now outside the door to our right. Joe kelp strands the priest to thoroughly entangle him. Dagnar feels a sudden jolt of pain, but it fades again. Aqila puts up a wall of stone to cut off all the reinforcements from this area. Thoron's snake's swiftness, mass gives Dagnar an extra hit, but he misses his strike. At this point, Moonbeam decides to try out this new spell she just learned. Mummification. She successfully lands a touch on the priest and he fails to withstand the effects (rolled a 1). Instant mummy. So, she then dismisses her walls of thorns, we grab all three corpses to inspect somewhere with fewer guards, call Sneezil up the stairs, and then Aqila bounces everyone out into the desert to a nice quiet oasis for a leisurely inspection of our kills.
That was the plan anyway. As soon as we get the helmet off the priest, we immediately recognize him. We have committed accidental regicide, because it is indeed Innokenti. At this point, we make use of the Word of Recall stones to take the whole mess home and let Valrim sort it out. As it turns out, in addition to killing the king of Asferia, we also killed his oldest son, who was the one with the best legal claim on the throne (and rather incompetent - he's a legend in his own mind). He and Innokenti’s favorite, who would likely have been his choice of heir, were the guards killed instantly by the fire seed explosions. Asferia's going to degenerate from a two-sided civil war to a multi-sided one now, at best.
The gear they had was 'interesting'. Both sons had plate and weapons and a resist ring, but one had a ring of 'charm person' and an amulet of the silver tongue. Taking after the old man, apparently. The king's gear was more 'interesting'. +3 plate, +3 ring of protection, +6 str gloves, +6 con belt, +6 cloak of resistance, +10 ring of universal resistance, and that amulet. Causes pain even handling the body wearing it. Powered by Zeleya and grants agonizing touch at will, fear at will, dominate person 3x a day, 10 damage reduction, and ten resistance to all types of damage. Not something that just any priest gets. This find is creating questions that need answered.
We give the belt to Sneezil for a job well done, besides making it easier to keep the little guy alive. Since he's not actually bound to any plane anymore, if he dies, he dies. No resurrection spells would work on him. And well after the fact we realize that we left before whoever was teleporting into the temple got to see us. They're going to be very, very puzzled, and look very, very guilty. And there is also an open question if we're ever going to be allowed to have a working vacation again, after this little mess.



We resume the session where we left off last time, after our return to Valanas with Innokenti’s mummified corpse and our debriefing. At which point, because we still have failed to kill a lich and lost our lead on Varvara, we turn our attention to the other lead we have, specifically the tidbit Tervel and Sneezil brought back with them about a representative of Sohrab, Jahan’s disciple, requesting a meeting with Gurthan in Rezanel. The representative is thought to be arriving in three days’ time, so if we want to try to pick off what might be a sufficiently powerful undead for our purposes, we need to hurry.
Listens to Wind, having bartered for a Greater Teleport item, gets us as close to Rezanel as we can safely. The region where planar magics are hazardous extends out into the ocean there, so we take a boat to get to shore, then finish the trip a-stagback where we find a fairly barren hillside, no large boulders and less cover. Sneezil is still hanging out with us, which may be useful because he did spend some time in Gurthan’s plane recently, if we can figure out what he’s trying to explain with his still somewhat limited vocabulary. It’s hard to remember he’s not much over a year old at this point.
To prepare our ambush properly, we make shift to dig an underground bunker with a small airshaft and entered via passwall. Mage’s Sanctum prevents scrying into the area and sound from leaving the area. Also, an escape tunnel about a mile long is dug in case we need to bail out in a hurry. Dagnar’s homunculus is left up top in a small burrow to simulate a chaotically deformed rodent. Not something that would stand up to intense scrutiny, but the idea is to be sneaky and hide not call attention to it. The rest of the day passes quietly, as does the next until noon or so. Moonbeam entertains herself by playing chess with Thoron. Aqila immerses herself in a review of her spell book to avoid succumbing to jitteriness.
At noon, the emissary rides in on a flaming horse, then moves to the hill and begins a lengthy spell. Listens to wind advocates springing the ambush while he’s distracted, but is overruled. Finding out what Sohrab wants to talk to Gurthan about is deemed more important under the circumstances. After about four hours, the hillside shakes and stone rises out of the ground, steadily shaping itself into an ornate mausoleum about forty feet square. The entrance is annoyingly facing away from our bunker, and is out of line of sight of the burrow. So Dagnar moves his spy to a new vantage point where it can see into the open doorway. The emissary is glowing vividly with abjuration spells and some evocation.
While we wait, we chat with Sneezil to see if we can figure out anything useful for our current project. He tells us that Gurthan’s plane ‘felt weird’, that it hurt, and that it didn’t like them. He and Tervil never saw Gurthan, only small things that were scared of them. Sneezil implied that he was also scared of them. We suspect that means that Gurthan’s plane was awash with negative energy. We also found out that after they rescued Aremel and were leaving, they saw Gurthan’s plane being torn apart. Presumably, that was Saralis’s doing, since he’s the one that smashed his way into Gurthan’s plane to take his 12” long staff piece.
On the third day, a representative from Gurthan rides in on a coal black horse, clad in black plate and carrying a flail. We believe him to be one of Gurthan’s priests, by the accoutrements. A conversation ensues. “You wished an audience with my Master?” “With your master, yes, not a lackey.” “He wishes you to prove you are worth listening to, and if you are, he will hear.” “Well, it’s not something that he would wish for his servants to hear, but if he insists… It is known to us that he has lost the goddess that he used to provide healing for his servants. We can replace it, to an extent. Is this sufficiently interesting?”
At this point the probable priest seems to grow taller and sounds different. Gurthan allows that he’s interested, so the emissary states that they are willing to provide healing in exchange for permission to operate freely in Rezanel and to let Gurthan know when profitable joint ventures are in the offing. One of which he’s willing to discuss right now, as it relates to the item that was stolen from him. To wit, Sorhab knows what it was, what it was used for, and where to find a larger piece, the largest in existence. We’re all ears at this point, as Dagnar relays the conversation. The piece is on the edge of the Maelstrom and might by itself permit one to control the Maelstrom, though an expedition to reach it will require some preparation. That’s Aqila’s cue to start sending home /now/ with that intelligence.
Gurthan is in fact interested in this information. He wants to know what precisely Sohrab intends to happen, since only one being can control the Maelstrom. Sohrab’s representative, who we’re starting to think is Sohrab himself, states that as long as his interests are protected, he has no issues with Gurthan taking control of the Maelstrom. He also offers to help Gurthan get rid of his neighbors, if he gets to keep the souls of the mages. It’s obvious they’re talking about Larithen. At this point, Sohrab requests that Gurthan not interfere with what is about to happen, unless the spies try to flee, in which case he can do whatever he wants to. The jig is up, in other words.
Since Aqila’s about half done casting, Dagnar does his best to stall until she’s done. Guessing that the homunculus was spotted, he uses that to respond when Sohrab addresses ‘the spies’ directly and buys about a minute before a demand that they show themselves properly. We find out that he seems to be fairly sure it’s us spying on him, and offers us some information to our mutual benefit, specifically, the location of Varvara. She apparently refused a job offer from Sohrab, and he would like to see her removed as payback. He doesn’t care who does it, as long as she suffers a mischief after refusing his generous offer of employment. Dagnar goes out alone to see if we can get Sohrab to buy the notion that he is by himself. The bluff succeeds, we think, but Sohrab adds a condition that Dagnar leave after their discussion so the rest of his discussion with Gurthan isn’t observed. Sohrab was assuming the people spying on him was us, and seeing Dagnar confirmed it, to a point.
Dagnar then gets detailed information about where Varvara’s lair in the Ferial is, some details about traps, and a note that she’s been protting up, so common energy types are unlikely to do much. On the other hand, he observes somewhat sourly that the tactics the druid used on him would work just fine. He initially wants to leave out details about her phylactery, then decides to allow us to know it’s the fancy necklace she wears, and that we really don’t want to destroy it. Is hauling it back to Valanas a bad idea then? Cross that bridge when we get there. Sohrab deliberately omits explaining why destroying it is a bad idea so we’ll have some surprises.
At this point, Aqila’s finished sending, with a reply of ‘be prepared for another task in a few days’. That doesn’t sound ominous at all. Dagnar is told to take his leave, so he drops back down into the bunker, where Moonbeam has been getting stags ready, and we bug out down the escape tunnel. Aqila dismisses the Sanctum once we’re clear as a sign of good faith. And then it’s a stag-back and a boat ride to where it’s safe to recall back to base.
We follow the now very familiar route to Valrim’s office for debriefing. Afterwards, he explains that another fragment, not the one Sorhab was talking about, has been located. It’s in Gulbar, the heart of the Dead Lands. (backstory note – the Ancients in Ambar tried to wipe out their rebelling servants by dropping a magical Death Plane Nuke on rebel army. They sort of missed, and ended up infusing a large chunk of the Material Plane with the Plane of Death. The worst of it has powerful undead roaming around it that can’t exist outside its confines.) Apparently, we’re about as powerful as you can be to enter Gulbar without destabilizing it. The Sword doesn’t have very many agents in the narrow band of ‘can survive in Gulbar with help maybe’ and ‘won’t destabilize the place’. Considering that destabilization could cause the deadlands to expand enough to cover 90% of the planet, that’s a really important consideration. We’re not leaving immediately because a) they are still finalizing what protections we’ll need to not die and b) we won’t be the only team going in to recover the staff piece.
So, we have a few days left to finish up business, like say offing a lich so we can fully recover from our visit with Savenil. Getting a good night’s sleep before trying to pick off Varvara seems like a good idea, but the day isn’t quite over yet. So, in the interest of being fresh for the next day’s excitement, we all teleport down to the Ferial, Sneezil and all. Then to entertain ourselves and blow off steam after being cooped up for most of two days, we decide to knock over some Dragon Temples, because we can. The standard temple nearest Moonbeam’s old village and half a dozen of the surrounding minor temples are steamrolled without any trouble at all. Stags make for easy hit and rum. Good timing on catching all the priests in the main room at the standard temple and four fireballs + one flame strike make that also a trivial exercise.
At this point, since Presmyslaw was offering a bounty on Dragon Temples, we hop over to his capital and nicely walked in, up to the palace, and presented ourselves at the door. He’s a bit surprised to see us, but it’s not like we called ahead. And given the opportunity, passing on a little relevant intelligence about Asferia seems like a good idea. The fact that Innokenti is dead as of 3 days ago, which two of his sons are also dead, and a little of the gossip we picked up in Valanas before we left, about which sons were breaking up into what factions where. The twins playing along with a necromancer to prop up the ‘undying king bound to the throne’ schtick, who has the allegiance of what parts of the army, the two that are trying to murder each other, and other useful bits that may or may not affect his realm in the near future. Before leaving, Aqila notes that we had been planning on trying to knock over a grand temple to see if we could, but we have the opportunity to commit an interesting form of suicide in a few days, so we had to give that idea a pass. Presmyslaw politely offers his hopes that the attempt at suicide is unsuccessful before we depart.
We pick up the bounty, then find a nice inn to dine on exotic viands and get a good night’s sleep. The Veiled Order declines to try to liven the night up with an assassination attempt, if they even noticed we were in town. (Would we have thought to stop by the Kantoran temple to say hi and find out if that mage we dragged all the way up here from Stone Bridge ever got his sanity back? GM Note: If you had thought of it, you’d have found out that he hasn’t recovered completely – he’s been improving, but it’s as if he was an infant relearning everything, only slower) Before we head to Varvara’s lair, Aqila remembers that the book we recovered for Zalakirinal was supposed to be special and important and suggests dropping in on the dragon to thank him for his presents last year and perhaps mutually catch up on news. So we do.
Zalakirinal has in fact figured out why the book is important but declines to say why, because that would decrease its value. Fair enough, knowing that our effort paid off is good enough. We suspect that Zala might care to hear a first-hand account of how Gurthan lost Aremel, and we are right. Sneezil is happy enough to relate the tale, with us filling in details gotten from Tervel as needed. Zala comments afterward that that was good hearing, and that perhaps his kin can return to their old lairs someday. Presumably on the Chaos continent. The intel that Innokenti is gone is also something that Zala would be interested in, given his presence down here.
The intel we get in return is somewhat disturbing. Innokenti tried sending an army of undead through the desert some time back, and the desert tribes took the brunt of the impact. The Vanathim are almost destroyed. They were the tribe in the north east that we killed the Veiled Order’s experimental monsters for, who gave us maps of the oases, and who told us about what to expect in Asferia when we were travelling through there. The Teleshim, who occupy the southeast, mostly avoided the army. They’re the ones who used to worship spirits, and are starting to worship Makarn too, one of the Blood Gods that we haven’t annoyed personally yet. The Deshanim hid, not that there were many of them in the first place. They hang out in the south, deeper in the desert, and they are violently fanatical worshippers of the goddess of nature. Not that she wants their worship. They’re the type to murder anyone who isn’t pure. Sleeping in a man-made tent instead of under the open sky counts and being impure in their book, which explains why there are so few of them. The Lazeerim are mostly dragon food at this point, which they did bring upon themselves. And our friends the Kethorim aren’t in good shape – it’s not so much that so many of them were killed, because they didn’t have many casualties, but they lost most of their herds. Food is now a real issue. Listens to Wind starts pondering if we can do anything to help.
Session ends here due to a longish section coming up next.

Terane
2020-04-10, 09:06 AM
We teleport to Varvara’s lair, and begin to get ready for the assault. The fruit of the training is Moonbeam learning the spell ‘Find the Way’, a handy bit of divination. Given that our intelligence about this place all came from Sohrab, who we did ‘kill’ once already, having a way to double-check his information is prudent.
We come across the first described trap, which does work as advertised. Its two carvings of snakes not too far inside the entrance, that summon a small swarm of fiendish vipers when Listens-to-Wind walks between them. The poison immune druid dispatches the swarm with one spell, and we continue. Moonbeam did make sure the rest of us were poison immune too, just in case, but it wasn’t needed here. The carvings, to those with detect magic up, glow with an unrecognizable aura. None of the mage schools or universal magic look like it. Dagnar, with Arcane Sight, has to make a will save, but has no idea why. The glow dims drastically after the trap goes off, but starts slowly brightening. It’s basically a reusable ‘Go Away Peasants’ kind of thing.
The next described obstacle is a maze of illusions and traps. Find the Path renders the challenges trivial, and leads us to the expected portal room, right up to the 3rd portal, which again is the one we were told was the correct selection. The wrong one would drop us in an oubliette built for one with an antimagic field that appears only for the living. Because traveling through a portal represents a discontinuity in our material travels, and there are six sets of portals, Moonbeam engages in more casting to check on Sohrab’s info. They match each time. The air is foul but breathable in the intermediate stops – rooms that are small and bare save for another set of 4 portals, each different when examined by detect magic, so none of the 24 looks the same. Dagnar, looking with Arcane Sight, thinks someone took a great deal of effort to obscure the portals.
The last portal drops us somewhere…different. Nowhere on the material plane, at least. The shaman and the druid notice it at once, as does Dagnar, but can’t quite pin down where exactly, as the room also contains four undead warriors. Also poison dust, but since we all have had poison immunity, cast or natural, since before the viper trap, we don’t care about that. Area spells fly, and the nuisances are dispatched handily. Now that we can take the time to look around, detect magic shows a faint aura of necromancy over everything, and an even fainter aura in the background, teasingly familiar to Aqila, Joe, and Moonbeam, but not recognized.
We move across the room to the door, which has no visible traps. Upon opening the door, we behold a bridge across a void to a castle on a floating rock. The room we’re in seems to be on another one – everything is suspended in a faintly glowing void. The castle has a large first story, a smaller second story with a blue glowy ‘window’ thing in it, and a thin tall tower reaching up more stories. Dagnar can see heavy abjuration and evocation on the window. At this point we pause to try to figure out just where we ended up. The mage contemplates the void and determines that we probably aren’t in any of the commonly known celestial, infernal, or elemental planes, but has no idea if this is an ethereal or an astral plane.
The druid and shaman put their heads together to decide which of their natural allies might be able to identify our location. Moonbeam summons an arrowhawk to answer the question, and finds that it is unusually ignorant of planar mechanics. Of the next two, one hazards a guess that this is an astral plane, but can’t even guess further than that. At this point, since Moonbeam has three summons with time left on their clocks, she dispatches one to check the path up to the castle door for traps, and to look at the ‘window’, while the other two are sent to circle the castle and check out the tower. The scouting reports let us know that the ‘window’ is entirely opaque, there weren’t any obvious traps on the way to the door, there aren’t any other openings into the castle except from the roof, and it might be a bit annoying getting in that way. There’s a metal grillwork at the top of the tower with stairs leading down into the edifice, but it’s a bit of a squeeze getting to the stairs under the grill. The arrowhawks were too large to fit in there, for example. There were also a lot of strange melted things on the platform.
To prepare for the next stage, Moonbeam grants us all a spell of Conviction, and Dagnar adds Heroism to the mix. Aqila gives flight to the two people who haven’t gotten the spell applied permanently yet, and we head for the tower top instead of going in the front door like Sohrab’s directions indicated. The melted things look like the remains of a complex device that involved a lot of crystals. A very strong divination aura pervades the wreckage, which looks old. The mage grabs some bits for later examination. There’s about a 4ft clearance under the grille to reach the stairs. While the rest of us crouch down to get to the stairwell, Dagnar decides to be fancy and shrinks himself. Arcane sight reveals at least one trap, abjuration aura, on the trapdoor covering the stairs. Find the Path indicates that there are multiple traps on the door, and not all of them are disableable. At which point, Aqila casts antimagic field. Problem solved, except now we’re all grounded and our protection spells don’t work.
The inside of the tower is a nice wide spiral staircase with a decaying railing and a wide shaft down the middle. Aqila keeps the antimagic field up for the time being and nothing of note happens before we reach the first landing. Everyone else keeps towards the edge of the field so as to be able to jump in or out as needed. At the landing, there is a door, and stairs continuing deeper into the building. So, we have to choose whether to continue down, or poke the door. Dagnar moves out of the field to use his Arcane Sight again, picks up nothing traplike on the door, and opens it. Inside the room is a raised platform towards the back with two wide shallow stairways leading up to it. Between the wall and each stair is a pool of some black goo. The platform is in the shape of a shallow, fat T, with four crystalline pillars at the corners. A translucent field is visible between the pillars with crackling fire and lightning dancing between them. Behind the fields, on the platform, is a chair, facing away from the door. It looks like someone could peek and see if there’s anything sitting on it, if they go fly over one of the pools to get a proper angle on the matter. But, before we can do anything ill advised, a voice speaks. “So, Sohrab’s servants arrive at last. You are too late. The Vessel has departed already.” We’re clueless, and Moonbeam seems a mite annoyed at what we presume is Varvara’s misapprehension of the situation, but the voice continues, “So, I suppose we must play this out. I see no reason to hold anything back.” That doesn’t sound ominous at all, no nope. The pools start bubbling as she speaks. The throne rotates, bringing her around to face us as she speaks. We’ve never seen her before, but she fits the description, down to the necklace, and she is a powerful lich to detect magic. Time to roll for initiative.
Joe gets the ball rolling with blast of sand, which causes some crazing on the pillars, but the field doesn’t even flicker. It seems to be some variety of force wall. Thoron follows his lead. Varvara reacts by trying to disintegrate the druid, but given that we knew that was her favorite trick, his bracelet of counterspelling was properly prepared and eats it. Dagnar lets rip a triple screeching ray, and in an almost flawless cast, does serious damage to the left fore pillar, with cracks appearing. A second quickened cast isn’t nearly as powerful, but chips away at the barrier. The pillar is wreathed in a cloud of sparks and flamelets now. The wall is wavering near that pillar. Moonbeam starts summoning elementals. Aqila casts wall of stone to cap the inky pools before whatever is making them bubble joins the party, and adds a quickened screeching sonicball to the pillar breaking effort. That is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. The left fore pillar explodes violently, seriously injuring the mage, but everyone else is a bit faster to duck or just harder to kill. The two fields that had connected to that pillar are down now, leaving a clear shot at the lichess. Thoron employs blinding spittle on the theory that she’s still using her eyes to see with, and hits. Then Joe does something truly terrible to Varvara. He casts Greater Dispelling. Much dice rolling ensues.
Basically, 3/5 resistance buffs, 1/3 AC buffs, the save bonus, a contingency spell and a mystery spell poof. Ironically, she keeps protection from good. And now we find out the consequences of dispelling that mystery spell. Turns out that it was that unstable matrix spell that Sohrab warned us about, and she had, no surprises there, three disintegrates stored in it. Having all three hit the same target would have hurt, but having all three of them discharge randomly into the room was almost as bad. The walls got cratered three times. And Joe now owns the top of Varvara’s **** list, basically, as demonstrated by her shying yet another Disintegrate at his head. Aqila finally managed to counterspell something and nullifies the spell. Dagnar, facing a blinded opponent, moves in for the sneak attack and sincerely ka-stabbities her. Moonbeam decides to add insult to injury and uses her Greater Dispelling want on Varvara. The lichess keeps her protection from good spell. And now the earth elementals go say Hi. We’re not sure how Varvara is still among the unliving after that much abuse, but the flash of some sort of necromantic spell is seen briefly during the pummeling. Aqila drops an acid orb on her. Thoron sends some Searing Light. And she’s still going. So, just because he can, the druid shifts into a giant floating hasted octopus and bludgeons her to death with his tentacles.
We now have our lich corpse to serve as a source of pure negative energy for the ritual to heal the damage that Savenil’s cloning spell did to us. On the other hand, we’re still on the wrong plane and need to find our way home. The octopus picks up the lich corpse carefully, then signals to Thoron to cast speak with animals so he can tell Thoron to tell Moonbeam to give him the cursed amulet of thought projection. We decide to work out a less convoluted means of doing that in the future. We had been told that Varvara had a ring that let her bypass all the traps in the place, and there was a duplicating machine somewhere on the premises to make tokens to let other people also bypass the traps. Wearing the ring is somewhat debilitating for the living, however, and we’re not quite sure how bad it is. A brief time to reprepare spells is taken before we look for an exit.
Also, with the lich dead, the aura of necromancy is dampened significantly. This lets the faint background aura show up more strongly, and now the trio who had travelled through Seferia recognize it. It’s very similar to the shards of the Mad God, and the necklace that is Varvara’s phylactary is giving it off noticeably, like a deific artifact would. This day is just getting better and better. We leave the throneroom and head down the stairs. The next room down has broken machine bits in it, and a depression in the middle of the floor that looks like it was eaten away with some sort of ichor. Aqila grabs a sample in a glass vial and we descend again. We find a door with traps on it, so Aqila casts antimagic field before we open it and find it leads into a large room with a statue in the middle. Will saves on seeing the statue. None of us make the hard one, which would have let us actually perceive the statue instead of a general awareness that a stone statue is there without being able to retain any idea of its appearance. Aqila fails the other one, which does nothing, because it was meant to stop people from thinking about the Mad God in connection with this plane, and we already figured out he was involved somehow. Maybe even made the place. We know Varvara didn’t.
There are 5 doors in the large room. Two of them lead to labs, an artificing lab and a necromancy lab. There are disintegrate traps all around, but use of the antimagic field and other spells let us deal with them. The artificer’s lab has the token making machine, which takes about 5 minutes a pop. It also has a large featureless metal sphere on a light wire pedestal. Moonbeam and Joe have a flashback to Jahan’s lair on seeing it. Aqila’s memory was apparently a bit fuzzier, probably due to her being knocked unconscious for hours due to incautious use of detect magic. It’s another one of the Kashirna death sphere powered by balors things. Or at least a really, really good imitation. So while the machine is making tokens, Aqila drops her bosses a line in case they want anything done before we try to leave the place.
The other thing we do while waiting for the machine to finish up is start disabling traps. There’s one disintegration trap in each corner of the statue room, and we were told they fire when anyone living walks between any pair of them. So as an experiment, we try having Aqila stand with an antimagic field up between a pair while Moonbeam tries to use stoneshaping to cover up the trap. The traps still go off, annoyingly, but miss them both. Moonbeam does manage to shape stone over that particular trap. On the next one, we try letting Dagnar have a crack at it. He tries to disable it while he’s in the antimagic field and it isn’t. That does work, albeit with a few scares along the way. So the statue room is safe for occupation.
There are four more traps that we disable in the artificer’s lab, plus an extra one over the door. There’s also a forge in the back of the room, and an artificer’s work room enchantment on the whole room, and a high quality one too. There’s a delicate workbench with jeweler’s tools of masterwork quality and some enchanted. A few seem to be quasi-living. We bag the lot. The back of the room has a heavily enchanted very plain looking door that we think leads to the portal room Sohrab told us about. We leave that alone for the nonce. Through another door in the statue room is a storeroom. We loot the place on principle, at least of the valuable items. The barstock and ordinary crystals aren’t of interest, but the 2lbs of adamantine, 1lb of mithril and 1oz. of orichalcum is. There’s also a few pounds of hepatizon in the corner, which is picked up as a curiosity, on the off chance there’s an actual use for it at some point. It’s not much use once you can work iron, but you never know. There’s also about 2k gold’s worth of alchemical supplies which Aqila pounces on happily.
The necromancy supply room is just eww. Major Eww. It’s full of corpses in various states of intactness, kept from decay with gentle repose. The spell is dispelled to let them decay in peace. The necromancy lab was obviously used recently. Corpse pieces strewn everywhere. Imagine some vain teenager’s bedroom with clothes tossed around everywhere after the hunt for The Perfect Outfit. Now imagine that with corpse bits standing in for the clothes. Varvara apparently was doing something very special, and anything even slightly substandard got tossed aside. An identical, down to the enchantments, plain door is in the back wall of this lab, which probably goes to the portal room too.
We could take our time and untrap the door to go through. Or just be lazy butts and use Passwall from the statue room. Guess which we do? The portal room has 8 portals with one on the fritz. It’s sparking and spitting out little bolts of lightning. Each portal has a number on a plate next to it with signs that you need to use that ring we got off of Varvara to use them. Just because we could, we tried using the ring with a severed arm to activate the portal. No dice. A trap monkey just kind of goes unconscious when we put the ring on it, but it’s fine when we take it off, so Dagnar decides to be proactive and puts it on. (-3 levels, but nothing else bad).
He touches door number one, and beholds a somewhat confused vision of fire and a faint voice asking ‘open?’. That would be a no. Door 2 opens on nothingness. 3 is a dilapidated stone tower, brief flash of a view outside that might be Innokenti’s palace. We were told that Varvara might have been housed in the ruined stone tower near the palace. Hmm. Door 4 is a city being beseiged by an undead army. We had heard the Seferian capital was under siege by Asferian necromancers. That’s probably a safe bet on what it was. 5 triggers a will save – nonsensical chaos that Dagnar’s mind really doesn’t want to comprehend. 6 is a view of mountains. Higher than any peaks in the Ferial, but nothing that can be pinned down from just that glance. 7 is dark and watery, an impression of being really, really deep under water. The sparking portal, checked for completeness’s sake, shows a stuttering fritzing image. Dagnar’s able to see a wooded area, then a large scaled creature that looks not dissimilar to some of the wildlife we saw on the Chaos Continent.
The party’s vote for our best way home is the portal to Innokenti’s palace, being one of the two we recognize. It’s not like we haven’t busted out of there before. Spells are reprepared before we decamp, and we step through the portal into the ruined keep. No one is around, disappointing Joe, who wanted to see what happens when guards behold a giant floating octopus holding a lich corpse. We’re immediately distracted by the alarm bells, not starting, but continuing to ring as if they’d been going for a while. Moonbeam spots a dragon through the window, and Aqila moves to see if it’s anyone she knows. The dragon is attacking the palace, is unusually large for his color, and isn’t anyone the mage has met before. The palace is being protected, but there’s signs that the attack didn’t just start a few minutes ago – it’s been going on for a bit. The mage contemplates trying to start a conversation, but discretion being the better part of valor (and a few ‘don’t you even think about it’ glares from party members), decides against it and we teleport for Valanas.

Mentioned previously in notes, this setting uses non-standard dragons - instead of color coded, all start out bronze/gold at birth, lightening to silver as they age. They were seeing a bronze-colored dragon at a size indicating mature adult at least - should have been gold to pale gold.

Once somewhat safe, we take a moment to inventory our acquisitions. Besides the passring for her lair, she had a ring of at-will 10th level resilient sphere on her, was wearing a ring spell storing up to 10 spells and 20 spell levels, a bracelet with 1/day immediate energy immunity, bracelet of +4 deflection. +6 headband of intellect with a minor necromantic aura but no ill effects, lenses of true seeing with 3xday 15th level analyze dweomer, belt of many pockets with about 500 gps of gems. She had 4 wands, disintegrate 15th, finger of death 15th, harm 15th, and chain lightning 15th. A rod with black blade of disaster 12th level 1/day. The necklace, her phylactery, was very complex. If your soul is bound to it, it grants you spell resistance of level +10, casts harm on you as an immediate action. A living person takes -1 con permanent until dead. Then the soul is bound to the necklace, but it doesn’t lichify you – someone else has to do that after you die. Which has interesting implications for how Varvara came to be.
And as we find out after we report in, our bosses have a bit more information about that necklace. It looks like what a deific artifact would after the creating deity was destroyed. Which the Mad God was. Except the necklace looks to be about 3 centuries old, and the Mad God shattered not too long after the end of the God’s War. This is not a happy making bit of intelligence, given that’s about when Varvara first showed up. On the subject of the dragon we saw, that’s the 3rd confirmed sighting of a strange dragon attacking a location where one of Innokenti’s heirs presumably is. It’s a different dragon all three times, and no one recognizes them. This is somewhat unusual, as there aren’t that many dragons left in the world. The death sphere we found is in a somewhat inaccessible spot, so it’s not on a high priority list – need a sufficiently experienced Book artificer or other Ancient Tech expert to have some free time before it can be dealt with properly. Plus, there are portals that need investigated.
Next up, Gulbar.



Some minor retconning occurs to reorganize the order of events that occurred when after the party recalled back to base last session. Instead of reporting in, then going to hunt up Aremel for the healing ritual, it’s we report in, get asked to investigate the dragon attack while the event is still fresh enough for divination to be relatively precise, and go do that. We’re told about two other dragon attacks that have happened, besides the one we saw. One was a neat and tidy torching of the two mansions that two of Innokenti’s feuding sons were living in. If the sons were home at the time or not was unknown. There was also a very second and third hand report about an attack on a village in the east, in the region where the son who was least like his old man may have gone to. Lots of casualties, messy attack. So, in the afternoon of a day that began with a lich hunt, we head back down to Asferia. Back to the ruined tower, even. After Aqila bums around Valanas looking for a divination expert who doesn’t mind taking a field trip. The Order of the Book member in question is willing to trade her time for some rare herbs that the druid can find around where his family lives, so with the deal made, and the mage having time to reprepare a pile of teleport spells in a hurry, we vamoose.

In the intervening time the players decided they didn't really want to do the Gulbar bit, so this was created as an alternative.

We were gone long enough that the dragon is gone too. The palace is still standing, though the wings look a little frayed around the edges. The shield obviously thinned at the edges, but the defenders efforts kept the main structure intact. The Book agent needs to be somewhat near where the dragon teleported away from to be able to divine the end-point of the spell, so to avoid exposing her to unnecessary peril, Dagnar fires up his Arcane Sight and Aqila casts her Invisibility on him so he can go snoop around without getting pincushioned. He finds the location fairly quickly, and Aqila flies the Book agent up to the vicinity for the spellcasting.
The agent pins down the approximate area down to a 100 mile radius area in the northwest end of the West Wall mountains. That’s around where we’d last seen Zala’s lady friend. And found the Mad God’s temple. The potential for things to get interesting is there, all right. We regroup, and Aqila bounces to what should be the center of the predicted zone of arrival for the dragon’s teleport spell.
Further consultation results in the Book agent agreeing to try out her experimental divination spell. After all, field tests can yield valuable data. After some time passes, she announces that the spell indicates that there is probably something powerful enough to be the dragon we’re looking for about ten miles away. That’s within the margin of error for a teleport, so we just fly that way. After protting up in case of tripping over a hostile true dragon. We get to the right area, and it looks like prime dragon lairing turf. The Book agent decides she’d like to hang out in a Rope Trick room while we poke around, just in case. Given how ‘interesting’ life could get in the next few minutes, that was probably a good idea.
Listens to Wind can smell dragon, remembering what Zala and his lair smelled like. The rocky area has two large caves, one noticeably larger. The smaller one has a nice take-off and landing ledge outside, and has the stronger scent about it. Moonbeam grants everyone fire immunity, just in case, before we politely hover without landing on the ledge outside the cave. Aqila calls out a polite request for conversation with an unknown dragon. Yes, you can do that in Draconic. And a few minutes later, there is a response. The dragon is not the one we had seen trying to torch Innokenti’s palace a few hours ago, but about thirty feet long, dark bronze, and female. For comparison, Zala is smaller by a few feet, and lighter in color, a dark gold. Which makes this dragon’s age a bit ambiguous. By size, she’d be over 300, by color, closer to 200 or 250.
A conversation ensues, with Aqila speaking, and Dagnar translating for the others who don’t speak Draconic. Aqila makes it clear that we’ve become aware of some incidents in the area and are trying to find out why they happened and perhaps help avoid more occurring in the future. We determine that she was the one responsible for torching the mansions where two of Innokenti’s son’s had been living. Her story is that ‘we’ are recent arrivals in the Ferial, as of eight or nine days ago, and she tried to negotiate with her new neighbors about food supplies, whereupon she was attacked, whereupon she decided to teach them a lesson by destruction of property. The attack on the mansions was fairly neat and controlled, according to the report we’d heard in Valanas before leaving, with little damage except to the structure of the buildings. Whether the princes survived or not is unknown, however. The dragon’s accent isn’t one that Aqila recognizes, though she’s really only heard Northern dragons before.
We also learn that as far as she knows, there aren’t any other dragons in the area, presumably why ‘they’ settled here. On being asked if she would appreciate an introduction to other dragons living on the Twin Continents, Aqila carefully not mentioning that she does know that Zala’s lady friend has a lair somewhere in the vicinity, she sharply asks Aqila if she means dragons living in the Ice Teeth or the Star Mounts. Those who lair in the Ice Teeth are fairly isolationist, and don’t have any dealings with outsiders. Aqila would have learned draconic from some of the dragon elders living in the Star Mounts. That’s where all the Arandoran dragons live. On being told the Star Mounts, the lady dragon makes it quite clear she doesn’t want anything to do with anyone from that area because they ‘live in the shadow of the heirs of the Ancients’. Which implies she thinks the rulers of Valanas had just picked up where the Ancients left off, but this is a bad time to try to correct mistaken assumptions, so, moving on to a new topic…
Aqiila used an illusion spell to show a still image of the attack on the palace, as part of a request for information about that incident, mentioning that we’d been on scene when it happened. This triggered the dragon to yell out about a seventy syllable name over her shoulder into the cave. She spoke too quickly for Aqila to catch more than a few fragments of meaning. ‘Island’ and ‘Waves’ were it. And then the dragon in question slid out of the cave, at which point his mother, we establish, asks him some pointed questions, scolds him, and apologizes to us, saying that she didn’t know that Kasen had wandered so far. Shortening his name to two syllables is one way to demonstrate that he’s in the dog-house now, and he notices. He protests that because they were attacked by humans, he went were there were a lot of humans to teach them a lesson. More scolding. Mama rips Kasen a new one, speaking very rapidly in her rather unfamiliar accent. Aqila caught something about ‘Father’ in there, but couldn’t pick out anything else. After the verbal spanking, Kasen is sent to his room.
We inform her that the whole region is unstable these days with a multi-pronged civil war, and there are liable to be bands of armed humans wandering around who are very unfamiliar with true dragons and likely to react badly to meeting one. Also that the Dragon Temple is moving in in force, and they like to kill true dragons on sight. She doesn’t seem too concerned.
Aqila then asks if Mama had any idea who might have been involved with the attack to the east that we’d heard rumors about. That report was the least complete and most hearsay. And we get this reaction, “I’d hoped he hadn’t followed us here.” She is apparently possessed of a violent and insane brother. There is nothing directly said to that effect, but she neatly implies that they’d come here to get away from him. We’re warned that he likes fire and we really don’t want anything to do with him. The best way to not get killed by him is to stay away from him, essentially. This more or less ends the conversation, so we head off, not forgetting to pick up the Order of the Book agent from her hidey-hole. She caught some of the conversation, but not all of it.
In the interest of not heading directly to Valanas from a location inhabited by folks who really, really don’t like that locale, Aqila spends another teleport to jump everyone as far east as she can. At this point, Moonbeam and Joe arrange for animal messengers to warn Zala and Presmyslaw about the new dragons, and Aqila uses Sending to warn Zala’s lady because we don’t know where she lairs, so an animal messenger can’t be sent to her. The gist of the message is that there are two new dragons in the area, they don’t like anyone from the Starmounts, and they have a bat**** dangerous relative. The response is to the effect that she’s not planning on staying in the area for much longer. That’s good to hear, though ‘much longer’ means different things to a dragon.
We bounce back to base, drop off our divination expert with thanks for her stellar searching, and report in. Valrim finds our findings to be interesting and wants to bring in some draconic allies for a consultation on the matter. This takes a few hours, so the mage takes a nap. It’s been a long day, after all. Valrim comes back after some time passes, and images of three dragons, scaled down to fit, appear in the room. By eye, they look to be some of Savenil’s contemporaries.
They found our report worrisome. There are questions they really want answered, but aren’t blaming us for not asking them. After all, risking incineration by annoying a strange dragon is not a long term survival strategy. Valrim expresses a wish that the strange dragons had been more willing to trust us, us meaning the Sentinel in this context. The information that the elders are most interested in is who the father of the young dragon is. The description given of the crazy-violent dragon means that that needs looking into and dealing with. And the elders are willing to offer a small reward for the confirmation or disproval of our information. And a larger reward for killing the problem child, if he’s truly as wicked as advertised.
We are informed that some Dragon Temple ‘demon slaying’ teams have been sighted in the eastern Asferia, and in consequence the older dragons would prefer not to spend too much time there. They carry special heavy crossbows, specially enchanted bolts and oils, all for killing dragons. Joe is curious about the equipment, and a minor sidetrack ensues. The oil is toxic enough to knock a decade off your life just from carrying the stuff around, even without touching it. Can’t store it extraplanarly without it losing potency 4x the rate it normally does, which is about a month after manufacturing, they believe. And exactly how it’s made is a really, really closely guarded secret. No one who knows it leaves the grounds of the temples it is made in, ever. Overall, the teams are generally not terribly dangerous to non-dragons – their equipment and training is centered around fighting dragons only, and for any non-fanatic would be insanely expensive relative to the benefit.

The poison in question was a homebrew thing - non-dragons, carrying it around shortens your lifespan, damage from poisoning is 3d6 CON/Death. Dragons, Souldeath immediate damage - no resurrection. And a much higher save DC for a dragon.

The conversation circles back around to the strange dragons, with one elder wondering where they came from. This reminds the mage about the odd accent the mother dragon had, and she uses Major Image to replay some of the conversation from memory to convey the sound most clearly. That really gets a reaction. Apparently, it’s very similar to how the former denizens of the Dragon’s Spine would sound, back when any still lived. The Dragon Temple having killed off the last holdouts about eight hundred years previously. And neither of the two dragons looked to be anywhere near eight centuries old, so just what is going on here? We’ll be going back to do some more sleuthing, soon. The elders break off the conversation with a final admonition that the most important piece of information we can bring back is who the father of these two dragons is. Why the elders think this is so important isn’t clear, but there must be a reason for them to think so.
We finish off the session with the healing ceremony at long last. Moonbeam and Joe spend most of it keeping the current ‘victim’ alive while Aremel mends the damage done by Savenil’s clone spell. And another report comes in about the dragon attack in the east – it’s worse than the initial report. The dragon deliberately tortured people until they passed out, and then flew off to get a new ‘toy’, generally burning limbs off slowly and expressing disappointment when they stopped moving. A scale was found in the burned village, but testing showed it to be a demon scale – of a variety favored by the Dragon Temple or some Old Gods cults. So there’s another complication.
Next session – Get out your deerstalker hats and your meerschaum pipes, we’re investigating.

Terane
2020-04-14, 09:30 AM
We start the session the day after our interview with the elder dragons. Which had started with raiding a lich’s lair, witnessing a dragon attack, finding said dragons, and ended with a nearly fatal healing ritual. So we all took a day off to recover. Aqila holed up in the library as her prefered method to decompress. Dagnar also decided to pick up some training before we headed back down to the Ferial, which meant he as in position to run into Meldon and hear the gossip about what went down in Gulbar. Apparently, we missed quite the party.
There are two agents still MIA, but everyone else made it back, albeit some with significant injuries, so the healers are going to be busy for a while. The staff piece was not recovered. Last seen, one of Eleduath’s greater Hands had gotten into Gulbar somehow without collapsing it, no one knows how, had the fragment, but was in a fight for her life with the Keeper, who was more pissed than anyone had ever observed. The keep was blowing apart around them. The whole area is so destabilized that it’ll probably be a year before anyone can get in there and look around to see what’s left. The fragment isn’t showing up on divination at all, which could mean either the Enemy does have it, or it’s still in there and the mess is interfering. And the two MIA agents were two who had known issues with teleporting, so they may just be coming back the long way and didn’t have any way to report in.
We all get together before our field trip to discuss tactics. We know there was at least one Dragon Temple ‘demon hunter’ team reported to be in the area where the village was demolished in NE Asferia, and they have that very horribly nasty poison that they use for killing dragons. Whether we’d want to even try using it on the culprit is of course an open question. And, we do need to make sure that the presumed culprit is actually the one who destroyed the village, which requires some sleuthing. The scale found in the ruins of the village was reading as ‘demon’ in the half-day or so of examination it got, and of a type that the Dragon Temple is known to use, as well as some Old God cults, which do tend to crop up in that area of Asferia. We get to hang on to the scale since we’re going on the hunt, in case we do manage to scare up a diviner to use it as a focus. The consensus is to just head south and see what we can scare up, what we run into first.
Of course, divination would still be useful. Aqila asks around and comes up empty – the Book agent that went south with us last time is perfectly happy to test out her experimental spell again…after she’s had time to tweak it. Which is going to be a week. So, we come up with a plan B. The priestess of Nareel who helped us find Jahan is a divination expert. We’re on reasonably friendly terms, and if she can’t help us, then maybe she knows someone else among the local Kantorans that would. It’s worth a shot, at any rate. Which brings up the next problem: getting into town without causing a ruckus. We did leave Stone Bridge last time we were there fleeing as if we’d stolen something, which we had, to be fair. So, disguise time!
And we have some fun with it. Layered disguise. Usually, we have our magic gear under an aura manipulation effect to make it look less powerful than it really is. This time, we futzed with things so that it looks just as powerful as it is, but with an illusion component as if it’s being made to look more powerful and is really cheap junk. Add in Listens-to-Wind and Thoron being housecats with Aqila maintaining an illusion that they are jaguars, Moonbeam doing herself up as a very loudly stereotypical shaman, Aqila tarting up as a trying-too-hard magelet with exposed cleavage and purple hair, and Dagnar going for some obnoxiously flashy chainmail and an illusion of being more handsome than his usual ‘bland everyman’ appearance, and you have a recipe for amusement. Powerful adventurers pretending to be cheesy wannabes pretending to be powerful adventurers. What could go wrong?
The mage transportation service is used to get down into the ballpark of Stone Bridge. Aqila had updated our faked ID papers from last time we were here, just in case. Dagnar wasn’t going to pass as a dwarf. But, when we reached the eponymous bridge, there was no requirement for papers, and no toll even. Now puzzled, we went into town to find an economic revival had swept through. The bar that burned to the ground was relocated and back in business. Three more taverns were open, and one had a prominent ‘Adventurers Welcome’ sign, so we made a beeline for it. As good a place to seek rumors of dragons, demons, demon-slayers, or Dragon Temple goons as any.
As we enter the bar, almost everyone looks up, and half the crowd winces on seeing our entrance. We nailed the effect we were going for, evidently. There are other animals in the bar, so Joe and Thoron don’t stand out too much. Dagnar, drawing on his memories of Boris’s rampage, swaggers up to the bar and hollers for a drink for himself and his women. The barkeep eyes Dagnar wearily and asks him what drink he wants. Dagnar expansively demands his ‘finest drink’. The barkeep gets an evil glint in his eye and pulls out a dusty green bottle from under the bar, pulls out a pair of thick gloves, gets out a packet of powder and gingerly pours it into a tiny glass, then fills the glass halfway out of the green bottle. So, of course, Dagnar gives it to Moonbeam and asks for a double.
We had arranged beforehand that if any vile drinks were going to be imbibed, that Dagnar would make use of his ability to stealthily use prestidigitation and tweak the beverage into something bearable, like orange juice. That with Moonbeam’s poison immunity made this little scene bearable. So Moonbeam could gulp down the probably vile brew without a qualm or a flinch. As could Aqila when she got handed the double as Dagnar asks for a triple. At this point, the barkeep turns to his assistant and asks her if they have any of the ‘special’ bottle left. She goes in the back and hollers ‘About a quarter bottle’ back. After the crowd is asked to close the blinds, which they do with alacrity, the bar is as dark as a moonless midnight. The assistant brings out a purple glowing thing. Aqila can see it’s a black bag with the outline of a bottle in it. What’s in the bag is doing the glowing. The barkeep takes the bag carefully and pours a shot for Dagnar without taking the bottle out of the bag. Dagbar uses detect thoughts to get a read on what he’s let himself in for, and picks up, “This will knock the lug out.” Given that minimal assurance that the experience won’t be fatal, he knocked the drink back.
There was a fairly stiff enchantment on the stuff, but Dagnar is a tough guy. A bit too tough for the role we’re playing, so he fakes being a bit woozy when he gets down to business and starts asking about jobs. We’re hoping to hear if there’s any rumors about dragons, demons, or dragon temple minions, and it turns out the barkeep vaguely remembers someone talking about demons up north, but doesn’t remember the details. The source of that rumor might stop by the bar later if he’s in town, so we stick around. Dagnar tries his hands at dice games while we hang out. It’s not his night, but the stakes are pocket change for us at this point.
A while later, a dwarf comes in, with two companions. The dwarf is obviously the leader, in full plate, festooned with axes. His comrades are a caster of some sort and a rangerish looking fellow with a bow. Dagnar stays in character to greet who we hope is the source of the rumors. The dwarf stops, looks at him, squints, pulls out a pair of glasses, puts them on, and looks again at us. He mildly comments that we won’t be fooling everyone in the bar. Probably glasses of true seeing, or at least detect magic. Not knowing which, we don’t know if he’s sussed out we’re probably the scariest people in the room or just thinks we’re faking it. Either way, we get what we came for, trading vague rumors of trouble in Chalisce for equally vague rumors about demons up north. The more concrete bit we gave him is that the king’s sister was killed and he’s really not happy about that. The solid bit we get from him is that a team of Dragon Temple demon-slayers was seen in North Waymeet, recently. The trail might be fresh enough to pick up still. And the dwarf is sure that it had to be one of those groups – they're the only idiots who routinely carry around crossbows better suited to a siege. We thank him sincerely and leave.
Our final stop in town is to visit the Temple of Nareel and say hi to an old friend. And see if she knows anyone closer to the epicenter of the problem area that might help us track down the potential rogue dragon. There is a temple in North Waymeet, but she doesn’t know who is up there. Bit far for news to travel. As for local gossip, Stone Bridge is having interesting times. The horde of adventurers is tapering off, but the mess we ran out on last year drew in a lot of people, and the loot they got from taking down wandering undead, loose demons, and the like has revived the local economy. On the deficit side, Bozydar, the White Temple priest who gave us a great deal of support last time we were in town, and one of the rare Order of the Eye Sentinel agents who is also a priest, ‘died in his sleep’ about six months after we left. He’d told us that he was going to be looking into whether the Countess, who inherited rule of the town after her husband the Count’s mysterious death by poison, was a Priestess of Deiliana. She’d tried to pin that death on us, or would have if we’d hadn’t been out of town for a few weeks to deal with Jahan. Long story, that. Sounds just a little bit suspicious, the timing on his demise. The Priestess of Nareel is almost positive that the Countess is a high ranking Priestess of Deiliana, but has no proof of it. And her temple is subtly under siege. Other people have conveniently passed away over the last year.
Gossip time over, we explain that we’re trying to determine just what destroyed a village up in Asferia. Third hand reports say dragon, the scale found on site says demon, and we’re trying to gather any information we can before we head north. Since the entity in question murdered/tortured the villagers, and we have word that there was a dragon with those tendencies in the area from a source we can’t verify as yet, it would behoove us to find out if it was the dragon we suspect and that he’s as bad as advertised. We note that the sister of this dragon admitted to torching the manors of two of Innokenti’s sons, but she had a good excuse for it. The priestess notes that them being Innokenti’s sons would have been a good enough excuse. Aqila mentions offhandedly that it’s been substantiated that Innokenti was a Priest of Zeleya, and had a temple in his own palace, which doesn’t surprise her at all.
Getting back to the topic at hand, the priestess asks how thoroughly the scale that we’d mentioned had been investigated. It had been less than a day, before we were given it as we were heading off, so we have it available for her to look at. She asks if she can keep it for a bit to see if she can tease more information out of it, which we have no problem with. Aqila will contact her after a few days to see if she gets anywhere, and takes the time to make a scroll of Sending, just in case she finds something urgent. If nothing comes up, then she should consider the scroll a belated thank-you for keeping us alive last year. She does want us to come back in person if she finds anything – it probably won’t be something that should be ‘sent’ if she does. Which is no problem.
We head north stag-back because Aqila hasn’t been in the area we’re heading for yet, and if we don’t strictly need to do blind-teleporting, why risk it? It takes most of the day to make the run, so it’s early evening when we reach North Waymeet. Or what’s left of it. It was a large city with thick walls and a stout gate. Which is now gone, the walls are crumbling, and there are no slums huddled by the walls because there’s more than enough empty houses inside for the indigent. There’s maybe three thousand people left in the city. There are more bars left than you’d think with that population. This did used to be a major crossroads before the civil war that split the Ferial started the disintegration process.
We pick a bar, still in our ‘cheesy’ attire, and Dagnar takes the lead, striding in and demanding ‘the best ale, a hearty meal, and a room for himself and his women’. Aqila and Moonbeam somehow manage to keep straight faces. The barkeep fires back with an offer of average ale, edible food, and a corner of the common room. Which is about what we were expecting to find. Bothering the barkeep for rumors, we find out that a group of dragon temple hunters had left very recently, and they had a priest with them, which is odd. They were hauling a big crossbow around, so it was probably a demon hunter team. That and they left towards the nearby mountains, which is the sort of terrain dragons like. Dagnar gives him a gold coin and tells him to keep the change. That generosity gets us a little more information – apparently the village idiot in Blackriver was heard to have seen a dragon, if you believe him. So that’s another lead to follow up on.
For the night, to make a little more sleeping room, Aqila casts a rope trick and we leave the ‘pets’ to guard our luggage. This ensures a restful night and stays in character. First thing in the morning, we drop in on the lone Kantoran temple in town, a dilapidated mess. The priest, the only priest, tells us we just doubled his usual daily visitors. We confirm from him that a Dragon Temple group left town towards the East Wall mountains, and receive a fairly pointed warning that this may be some sort of trap, after all, it’s known that Demon Slayer teams are essentially suicide squads, and Dragon Temple priests are too valuable to be wasted in that role. As if we weren’t expecting there to be some sort of trap involved in the whole situation. We leave town towards Blackriver. It’s very close, by stag.
The village is a place for herders, not fishers, in spite of the name. It probably should be ‘Muddy Creek’ in all honesty. We have no trouble finding the ‘village idiot’, or rather Aqila with Listens to Wind sans the jaguar illusion to be less threatening. The mage tones the vamp vibes way down before going in. Aqila uses an illusion spell to ascertain two things. One, the guy really did see a dragon, and two, he’s color blind, the main reason he’s considered to be an idiot. So we can’t find out if this is dragon has anything odd going on with its color to size ratio. Though seeing a dragon on the wing isn’t the best way to get a size estimate, really. He suggests we go talk to Uladzimir, a reclusive herder who lives outside of town. He doesn’t have anything concrete as to why, but we may as well. Aqila gives the guy a few coppers and a dragon’s tooth from Joe’s stash as a thank you.
The directions to Uladzimir point towards the mountains still. He’s not that far away, and obviously prospering. He has about half the number of goats as the rest of the village combined. Again, Aqila with kitty-Joe riding on her shoulder go in to be less threatening than the whole crew descending on the man at once. As they get close to the man’s homestead, the dogs start alerting, so Aqila stops and waits while a well-preserved elderly man comes out to see who his visitors are, with a light crossbow. On his demand to know who she is, Aqila explains that she’s investigating who torched a village further north, following rumors that it was a dragon, and has he seen a dragon perchance? Uladzimir replies that while normally he’s send her on her way, because it paid good silver, he’ll pass on the message the dragon paid him to give to anyone looking for it. To whit, Go to the cave up that path and wait for further instructions.
Aqila thanks the man for his help, returns to where everyone else is waiting to pass on the message, then Sends an update to Valrim that we’ve pinpointed a possible location for the dragon, and that there are purportedly DT teams in the area, with priests in tow. The reply is quick and worrying. “Message was <blank>. What’s your location?” A second attempt doesn’t get a reply. So, on the assumption that it’s a local effect to the area we’re in, a fast Teleport gets us all out in the desert away so she has time to try one more time. This time, the reply is, “The situation has grown more complex. Take him alive if possible. Help will be sent if we have an exact location. Stay Put. A device will be sent.” We wait there and a small object drops in with a note a short while later. The note explains that the device is a beacon to locate us, and to activate it when we find the dragon. So, we should get back to doing that.
A return teleport gets us back in the area to start following the path. Our well-honed sense of paranoia directs that we should scout ahead before sticking our necks in a noose, so Thoron goes upstairs to scout around. He sees a cave at the end of the path. He also sees not one but three encampments bracketing the cave in a triangle. Mostly likely the Dragon Temple teams we were warned about by their accoutrements. This is interesting and unexpected. And something we don’t want to just go charging into, so we conceive a sneaky and entirely underhanded plan.
Aqila casts a major image, of a full-up dragon. She’s seen enough of them over the years to be able to replicate the scent/sound/appearance with reasonable fidelity. Using Dagnar’s homunculus as a focus to cast from, the mage has the image strafe the first DT camp, with the invisible homunculus hiding inside the illusion, positioned to cast a fireball at the appropriate moment, then has the image fly off towards the cave until it’s out of sight. Beforehand, Dagnar inserts a clairaudience ‘ear’ into the area of the camp so we can hear the reactions of the demon hunting team. And repeat for the other two camps. We consistently hear reactions along the lines of ‘I thought you said we were safe from the dragon’, ‘That wasn’t in the plan you told us about’, followed by ‘that wasn’t in the plan I was told about, but we will wait and stick to the plan.’
Aqila’s paranoia is set off into nigh a full blown panic at the realization that there are three teams, there are three dragon elders involved in this investigation, the DT teams seem to be colluding with the dragon for some reason, and having priests along just adds icing to the cake – the ‘gods’ have a degree of foresight. So, what happens if we find the dragon we’re hunting in the cave, call in the elders who promised to come help when we find him, and there are three teams of dragon slayers outside, waiting in ambush? She convinces the rest of the party that this is actually important enough to recall back to Arandor to make sure we aren’t about to do something very, very bad.
Though, before we seek instruction from higher authorities, we send the homunculus into the cave to see what’s in there, just in case. There is no dragon in there. What is there, is eight crystal pillars with complex designs on the floor and pillars. Dagnar describes what he sees and does rough sketches in the dirt while Aqila does a clean copy on paper. Then he borrows Moonbeams spellcraft ring and casts Arcane Sight to see what he sees. He thinks that there are three summoning spells, relatively simple, and one horrifically complicated mess of a summoning spell sprawled across all eight pillars. The three simple ones are repeated on each pillar. Then we go take this latest evidence of ‘something screwy going on’ to be evaluated by the home office.
When we get in, none of the ruling family of Valanas are in evidence. We’re taken directly to the dragon elders instead. They inform us that all four of the Atenil leaders are interrogating Varvara and aren’t available to take our report. We quickly hit the high points of the situation around the cave – DT teams reactions to the ‘dragon attacks’, the cave set-up, and the message that was left with the goat herder, and see what they think. The elders are not happy with our news. They estimate that the horribly complex spell is designed to pull something out of one of the Old Gods’ sealed realms. Maybe Vasera or Sakaneth. If it’s the former, it would likely be a corrupted elemental terror weapon. She liked fire elementals. And we really shouldn’t leave those spells active lest some peasant wander in and accidently set it off. That would be just wonderful to have rampaging through Asferia, really it would. And there’s no reason to leave the demon slayer teams alive.
So, we make use of Joe’s Greater Teleport token to return without wearing the mage out and start dealing with problems. We say ‘Hi’ to the first camp with a force ball, a sonic ball, a sonic strike, and a dire lion. Moonbeam is somewhat miffed that the priest ignored her sonic strike, but Joe had fun mauling the guy to death anyway. On the second batch, force strike and forceball nail everyone except the priest. The priest wasn’t resisting force damage here, and is somewhat beaten up. Then to add insult to injury, Thoron turns him into a squirrel, mostly to tweak Dagnar’s nose, then pins him to the ground for interrogation.
Joe uses speak with animals to translate, but all we get out of the idiot is “This is not the Master’s plan, but no matter, it will be done.” Squirrel thrashes around suicidally trying to bite the eagle. Dagnar uses detect thoughts to see if he can get anything else. He sees an image of dragons falling from the sky and a giant (300 ft) black dragon rising from the cave in the mountain we’re next to. The Dragon is reputedly a very large black dragon, in person. This news does nothing for Aqila’s peace of mind. Dagnar saps the squirrel, and Aqila ties it into a square of canvas for safekeeping. And then we wipe out the last group with a force strike, the last forceball from Aqila’s wand, and that wipes out the troopers, leaving the priest alive, again. Joe knocks him out too. Aqila casts a Rope Trick to stow our catches in while we go stick our noses in the obvious trap.
We carefully don’t actually go into the room with all the summoning spells and crystal pillars. The druid tests the effectiveness of his newly enhanced knowledge of dispelling magic. He knocks all the lesser summoning spells off of the first pillar. It has no effect that we can see on the grand summoning spell sprawled over all eight pillars. The stones begin to glow faintly. Moonbeam starts summoning earth elementals to physically destroy the pillars, but just in case entering the room does something bad, she is going to wait until there are eight for a simultaneous smash. The second dispel has the same effect, with the glow brightening constantly, and jumping in luminosity when another spell is cast. The timer has obviously been started.
An illusion begins to form in the middle of the room, of a gargantuan dragon. “Clever mortals. Too clever. You decline my challenge. You murder those fools waiting in ambush. Well. It will hardly be as entertaining as I’d hoped, but I will see what I can do in spite of your interference.” Moonbeam now has seven elementals ready to help, so when a corrupted fire elemental appears, glowing a virulent greenish-purple, it is surrounded. That was the summoning spell firing. It throws a green flame at one elemental, where it sticks and keeps burning balefully. And then, in an anticlimactic flourish, Joe dispels the summon. The damaged elemental seems to be decaying, so we’re are perfectly happy to miss out on that flavor of pain.
A wall opens up on the far side of the chamber. Moonbeam sends the damaged elemental thataway as a scout, followed by the rest of them, after Dagnar grants them haste. We follow. The passage spirals upward and leads out onto a ledge that’s crumbled away in places. Nice place for a dragon to take off from. It was obviously deliberately shaped at one time. We lurk inside the tunnel while the elementals spread out on the ledge defensively. As soon as Aqila hears the dragon start speaking, she activates the ‘We found the problem child, come and get him!’ beacon. And now we get ranted at in earnest. “Cowards for refusing my challenge!” and proceeds to threaten us with being hunted no matter where we go, because we’re marked. Like we haven’t heard that before! Aqila tells the dragon, presumably the brother of the one we’d talked to a few days earlier, to get in line behind Rakan, Zeleya and Shenea.
That gets a reaction. He decries them as being weak compared to his father. That being one of the pieces of information we were supposed to find out, we follow up on that comment and determine that the Dragon is his father, if he’s telling the truth. Aqila hears a whisper from the beacon, “We heard. There is interference. We are coming as quickly as we can. Delay him if you are able.” And now that the rules of engagement have been established, the mage gets a very, very bad idea. And acts on it. “The Dragon is your father? Then where did your nephew come from? Was your sister a good time?” And takes advantage of her knowledge of Draconic to make all the implications as clear and insulting as possible.
That really got a reaction. A massive firestorm impacts the ledge. We’re shielded by the elemental army, but they get scorched badly, and the injured one is unsummoned violently. And the taunting continues. In response we get called pawns, as he mockingly asks if we actually expect to get any crumbs of power from our service. Then he tells us that Sakaneth is returning and he’s apparently ‘from the ancient world’ and more powerful than Rakan and Shenea. Okay, that doesn’t sound good, actually. Dagnar makes an attempt to see if this dragon will confirm or deny if the Dragon is Kashirna. The attempt is ignored, so no dice there. The druid makes some inquiries about the finer points of a dragon’s intimate anatomy as a distraction while Moonbeam uses a Spider Hand to get a look at our new friend. She sees six dragons sitting on another ledge above ours. So, he’s cautious enough to use Mirror Image. Interesting. Aqila tries to winkle out who his mother is, since that’s another point of interest. On noting that everyone ‘knows’ that the Dragon slaughtered all the remaining dragons from the Dragon Continent, his mother must be some piece of work to willingly mate with the murderer of all her kith and kin. We’re just assured that the Dragon didn’t kill any of her kin, and in fact two dragons lived. That almost raises more questions than it answers.

Moonbeam had augment summoning, so that dragon was almost evaporating augmented earth elementals with its breath weapon. Yes, they decided that the best way to keep him in place was to insult him and get him really mad.

Behind the scenes, he had multiple personalities defined - with random toggles between them. May not be terribly obvious here, but he actually switched personality twice during this bit. Fortunately for the party, he never switched to one of the effective spellcaster personalities.

Another wave of fire rolls in, crisping the hand and turning the first rank of elementals to rubble. Moonbeam starts getting more out. We employ more insults to try to get a bit more information on what the plan was, though we have some guesses now. The dragon says that he’s almost done everything he was supposed to and doesn’t care if those fools did their part or not. Aqila tries talking Moonbeam into sending an elemental up through the rock to grab the dragon’s tail, while she summons a group of Celestial Owls to divebomb the images and see if they can pick out the real one. On disrupting two images, one more appears. Greater Mirror Image, even. We think he’s getting ready for another wave of boom, perhaps in a different flavor, judging by his threats, when several peals of thunder split the cloudless sky. We can hear a startled and outraged roar.
The sounds of combat die out very quickly. Aqila flights them what need it and we cautiously fly up to see what happened. As we ascend, we all feel like suddenly, our magic is inaccessible. The flight spells still function, but no one could think about spells to cast a new spell in the field of effect, which is very unsettling. We find on the upper ledge three dragon elders and one unusually large and very unconscious dragon. We are thanked for dealing with the obvious trap, warned that there may be unobvious traps. And they’ve divined why this guy is too big for his britches – he’s been ‘enhanced’ with demonic essence. The original soul may not be in control any more. The elders are fairly sure that the two surviving dragons that were mentioned earlier must be the Dragon’s consort, and the mate of this dragon’s sister. They suspect that he may have been there while we were talking to her, and never came out of the cave. And now we’re told that we need to leave immediately, because they need to deal with the coalesced demon inside of Junior here, and we won’t survive being in the vicinity of what they need to do.
We check on the priests and find they’re both dead. Poisoned. Best guess is that they were poisoned with the same toxin used specifically for dragons – to make sure any dragon biting one died of poison? Nasty nasty thought. Not much to salvage in the camps, really. We get a few souvenirs, some interesting bracelets. In the interest of getting well clear of whatever is about to happen, Aqila teleports everyone to Presmyslaw’s capitol so we can get a good night’s sleep. Maybe we’ll get the bounty for the three dead priests in the morning and stop by Stone Bridge to pick up that scale. But first, sleep.



Yes, we skipped July this year. We pick up where we left off back in June, getting a good night’s sleep in an inn in Presmyslaw’s capital after our adventures with the demon-tainted son of the Dragon himself. Nothing tried to interfere with our getting a good night’s sleep. We resume our ‘wannabe’ adventurer’s personas in the morning before dropping in on Nareel’s temple in Stone Bridge. Just in case anyone notices us who would remember us from last year.
The priestess didn’t find out anything we didn’t know already, and interestingly, Nareel declined to say anything on the subject, which is odd. Aqila wondered aloud if the dragon elders being involved, or the dragon in question being the offspring of the Dragon had anything to do with Nareel’s silence, but the priestess declined to speculate.
Since we had run into more of the Dragon’s offspring earlier, and they were lairing somewhat close to where Zala’s lady friend was hanging out, we decided to go see if they were still there. In the interest of not dying horribly, Moonbeam sends some elementals in to ring the doorbell. Of course, no one’s home, and they left nothing behind except some melted places on the walls. It’s almost like they were expecting people to show up looking for them. Moonbeam tried scrying on the youngster that torched Innokenti’s palace using the melted spots on the theory that he’d have the weaker defenses against scrying. Doesn’t work, but it was worth a shot.
About then we get a somewhat urgent recall message. Apparently, Varvara’s interrogation has been completed, and borne some interesting fruit that needs dealt with immediately. We recall back to Valanas and are sent to a briefing room with more Sword agents in it than we’ve seen since the Brighthaven mission. No one comments on our appearance as Moonbeam starts dismantling her get-up. It’s about par for the course for field agents.
The gist of the briefing is simple – Varvara was making a vessel to allow Sakaneth to return. Sakaneth is the father of the Mad God, Kaneth, who became the Mad God and sharded into pieces trying to control the Maelstrom. (The staff pieces we’ve been collecting, assuming we find enough of them, can be used to recreate the staff of the ruler of Ambar, which was the Ancient citadel at the heart of maelstrom, and the wielder of said staff may be able to control the thing, or perhaps even close it.) We’d actually talked to a piece of Kaneth before, when it was possessing Segmund, which Aqila remembers unfondly due to that also involving the druid getting mildly mind controlled and concussing her. We tripped over a lot of Mad God shards on that trip, really.
The vessel is being transported to the site of the ritual to restore Sakaneth overland, why they don’t know. The plan is apparently to use mercenaries to help move/guard the vessel because the inner circle of the group doing this is very small. And they want to change companies frequently so as not to let them get too corrupted and thus make it obvious where the vessel is. Why the vessel has to be transported overland and ‘the long way’ is unknown - It’s going to have a fairly strong Mad God aura on it. That was the project we’d seen the detritus from in her lair, and what she’d told us we were too late to stop. It almost certainly reached the material plane through one of the portals that we’d seen and described in our report. Valrim is fairly sure that they’ve ID’d where the eight portals go to.
So, since three of the five of us have had recent and intimate experience with it feels like being around Mad God shards, we’re going to get sent to the most likely location of where it hit the material plane, specifically, Innokenti’s palace. The other probable locations for the other portals are the edge of the Maelstrom (the staticy portal), the ruins of Tarevale (the underwater portal), Sakeneth’s plane (the one that tried to affect Dagnar’s mind when he checked it), Rakan’s plane (the fiery one), Seferia’s beseiged capital, Vasera’s plane, or the Iceteeth (the mountains). The Ice teeth is the next most likely, and where another group is being sent to.
To wrap up the briefing, we’re given advice on how to start searching – namely try the local mercenary guild hall first to see if we can find out if anyone’s been looking for help to move a body, or something similar. Local labor would be convenient, perhaps. And given the urgency, we’re given a bounce down to Asferia. The Mercenary Guild Hall in the Asferian capital isn’t too hard to find. Moonbeam is in her second disguise of the day, given recent events. The rest of us are just trying to be low key.
When we get into the hall, the door warden isn’t a very good prospect for getting information out of, but we try anyway, playing the situation relatively straight. IE “We’re looking for a group of idiots that are trying to move an insanity inducing artifact. Word is they’re planning on hiring mercenaries to do most of the moving and take most of the ill effects. That sound familiar?” The warden is not an ex-merc like most of the staff, and kind of a jerk, but he at least owns up to there being two captains on site at the moment, and allows us to come in to talk to them.
The first captain we try is a mountain that walks like a dwarf, grizzled and hale. We give him the spiel and it rings some bells. He thought that job sounded fishy and gave it a pass but Dasio took it, another captain who isn’t here right now. It was a transport job to the middle of nowhere, 2-3 days from Brighthaven. No one flinches noticeably on hearing the location. The damaged Nightcrawler may still be there for all we know, come to think of it. He then wryly suggests that we go talk to the other captain, since the idiot downstairs suggested it. The elf responds will to obsequiousness and bribes, we’re warned. We dig out a gem for the bribe, and let the druid handle the sweet-talking.
We do get some more info out of the elf. One, most of Dasio’s company left on the escort mission four days ago, with a wagon with a crate on it bigger than a coffin, but not by much. A sergeant was left behind to keep training some recruits. That we can use, and go look for the sergeant next. He believes us enough to write us a note saying he things we’re legit for his captain, but not enough to let us use anything as a scrying focus to pinpoint where the company is right now. Oh well, we have a rough heading, stag-express, and multiple people who can probably tell which way a wagon went on a bad day, let alone a good one. He even gives us a brief description of what the captain and the two lieutenants look like, so we might recognize them when we find them.
After about an hour on the Moonbeam Stag Express, we find the company marching home. The leadership cadre matches the descriptions we had. The captain accepts the note, and we can tell right away that the lot of them have been tainted lightly with the Mad God’s aura. No one’s obviously insane, at least. They’re about 1/3 of the way home from where they left the wagon – their employer cast some spell as soon as they were out of sight of the city walls that sped up their march significantly. Wind at Back, perhaps? Their employers waited for them to be out of sight before continuing on, presumably. They at least didn’t see the people leave where they left the wagon.
The captain doesn’t trust us enough to let us see if remove curse or break enchantment gets rid of the taint, and since no one is going nuts, we keep going. We find the site of the handover fairly quickly. One group went north, one went south, and the wagon tracks continue on towards Brighthaven. In the interest of being thorough, because it sure looks like they’re trying to throw off pursuit, we start by trying the group going straight south. And hour later we find what’s almost certainly a decoy group. It’s just two guys in robes with a horribly powerfully radiating necromantic monstrosity. All plant life is dead near it. We stay enough out of range to not get seen right away so Dagnar can try spying on them first.
Clairaudience kicks in, and is noticed. “I see the other groups didn’t attract enough attention”, says one of them, so we drop in abruptly. Thoron goes for being intimidating them into talking first, so Aqila has time to cast Zone of Truth and see if that actually does anything for once. “I’m going to say one word. Does it mean anything to you? Sakaneth.” Robed Guy 1 says rudely ‘Should it?’ while Robed Guy 2 starts pulling a short black rod out of his pocket. Oooookay then. Aqila casts a quickented greater dispel at him and kicks the stag higher to get as far out of range as she can. That knocks off 1/3 of the spells on Guy 2. Moonbeam follows her up after putting her two cents in, in the form of a quickened Sonic Pillar and a Blast of Sand. That kills Guy 2, and the construct is looking worse for wear. Guy 1 is still up and at ‘em. The construct picks up a handful of stones and throws them in Moonbeams general direction, fruitlessly. Guy 1 tries to disintegrate her, but paranoia and a ring of Counterspelling pays off. Dagnar drops in to say hello via stabbity to Guy 1, and uses a combination of divination and his Dispelling Dagger, to cause trouble, while using his Greater Invisibility helm. He divines that seven of the spells this joker has active are resist sonic, resist electric, death ward, detect scrying, Statue, mage vestments and protection from law. The dagger strips 12/23 spells off of him, then Dagnar tries out his new trick, and a tripled Ray of Stupid to knock off 10 int. After Joe and then Thoron unleash blasts of sand, Guy 1 is down and the abomination is coming apart. Moonbeam tries a Mass Heal, and gets hit with a Reciprocal Gyre. Aqila sees what happened when Moonbeam targeted the thing, and finishes it off with a Fireball instead of arcane bolts.
Dagnar stabilizes Guy 1 so we can question him, and patiently pokes his buffs off to facilitate the process. For kicks and giggles, we let Thoron do the interrogation. A mix of threats and terrified babble ensues. The useful bits we pick out are that there were five groups who left the meeting site. We only saw tracks for four, one of which was the merc company. Aqila flubs her attempt to calm him down into coherency, so Joe does it properly. We confirm that one of the five groups he counted was the mercs, and one of the cultist groups left after his group did. He also confirms that the crate was opened, there was a body in it, and there was a great deal of reshuffling going on. A body was put in the crate again, but he can’t say that it was the same one.

Terane
2020-04-16, 08:17 AM
Resuming where we left off last time. To recap briefly, we’re trying to stop the Mad God from being resurrected. Varvara made a vessel for that purpose, and we’re out to find it. The cultists expected pursuit and have laid several false trails. Four trails, five groups. One was the mercs who escorted them to the meeting site. One trail went south, one north, and one southeastish towards Brighthaven. We tried the south trail, caught the decoy group, and convinced one of the survivors to cough up the information about the rest of the groups, which is how we know there’s on group that didn’t leave a trail.
We fly back to the meeting site at our best speed, which takes us another hour. Along the way, Moonbeam reapplies buffs that have dropped and Aqila recharges Moonbeam’s ring of counterspelling, just in case. However, when we reach the site, it’s not deserted. There’s a young woman, at least in appearance, wearing full plate armor, waiting there. As we get closer, she calls out to us, ‘It would be beneficial for you to stop and chat.’ She notes that we’ve been irritating to find, but now she can kill two birds with one stone…
We get close enough to see her features clearly, and the Arandoran natives realize she is an Atenil who looks a lot like Elenmire, our boss Valrim’s sister. A sort of familial resemblance. Aqila remembers a discussion in Valanas about our competition in the Enemy’s camp for the staff pieces. The Hands and Death Dancers being under the command of someone named Eleduath. And one particular Death Dancer, who’s the reason why Moonbeam now had Neutralize Poison prepared at all times, who we were told is sojourning under that Eleduath’s tender mercies. She quickly Messages her suspicions around to the party as we approach.
The woman stops time for us to have a chat, because this is an opportunity for her to deliver a message to Moonbeam and Listens-to-Wind, indicated by pointed at them, and for us to do something she wants. The message is straightforward enough – She wants the two of them to stop helping the Sentinel recover staff fragments. They don’t have to give an answer right away, even, just refuse to help next time they would be sent out. And if they don’t, everything they love will be destroyed utterly. That seems to be reasonable confirmation that the mage’s theory on her identity is accurate. The druid’s response to this dire threat is to declare his love for Eleduath, which she ripostes with an inquiry if he’d like to go back with her to her stronghold. Facepalms ensue.

I don't remember at this point, but I think this was one of Listens To Wind's player's drunken ideas - something of a lightweight, his ideas tended to get... interesting after a beer or two.

She continues to explain that while she would like to see us prevent the Mad God’s return, she also wants to see us suffer some losses along the way. So, she’s got a ‘present’ for us. A box, locked behind walls of force, it appears, that she tells us will open in three hours and at that point we can use what’s inside to scry on the group that has the vessel with them. However, it will let them scry on us the whole time, and the box will disappear if it is out the possession of one of the 5 of us. And three hours is when the group with the vessel will reach their faster transportation and likely be beyond our being able to catch them, without that help. Oh, and to be helpful, she also told that group about us and gave them some tips about traps that probably won’t kill us if we proceed prudently.
Then she offers to answer some yes or no questions. Just until she gets bored, and only if she judges that it won’t tell us which group actually has the vessel. Joe, as usual, starts trying to wrinkle out all the useful information he can. We determine that the ‘faster transportation’ she mentioned is magical in nature, there are issues with teleporting, it is faster than us but is liable to break down, the Vessel can’t cast spells yet, and to answer that last one, she broke her ‘only yes or no’ answers rule. Then he tried to get as much tactical information on our opponents as he could, which started boring Eleduath. Counteracting the boredom required some more ‘interesting’ questions, whereupon we learn that she would date Dagnar if she got to pick the entertainment, he probably wouldn’t survive it, and she hopes he wouldn’t enjoy it. Seeing that the druid is about to start boring our information source, the mage slaps a Silence on him, with the hearty concurrence of everyone else. A few more questions determine that the box would be fine if it were placed in an interdimensional space. We wouldn’t be, though. All our opponents are from this plane. And Lenalie is no longer in Eleduath’s stronghold, which pretty well confirms her identity there. We ran out of questions to ask, which concludes the Q&A.
Once at leisure to plan, we do so. Three hours, three potential trails to follow, two we can see, and one tricky box that may or may not be helpful. To avoid letting the cultists know where we are, we leave Thoron to babysit the box and the rest of us take off to follow the north trail. An hour later, we find two obvious minions hauling a coffin on a floating disc. Not even bothering to try to take one of them captive, a quill blast, flame strike, and one backstab leave them both dead in less time than it takes to describe it. The coffin was damaged in the fracas, and contains one slightly decayed and now burnt and extra smelly corpse. We return via teleport to save time and go haring off after the 2nd obvious trail towards Bright Haven, the wagon trial. We don’t see any traps along the way, if there were any.
We find after another hour about a dozen and a half people. Mostly mercenaries, and a few cultists on the wagon. Dagnar opens up the ball this time with a tripled ray of stupid to the three people that look like spellcasters. He gets two of them. Next up are a dispel, then a flame pillar. Aqila looses an enlarged freezing coldball from her max range and freezes out 2/3 of the mercenaries. One of the wagon riders would have like to have returned fire, but can’t hit at that range, so he shoots Dagnar instead. Moonbeam gives the wagon a ‘Divine Hint’ aka force strike. Joe finally gets to unleash the Avalanche he was wanting to, and that kills everyone. And now everything is buried in snow, so to make sure this wasn’t actually the group we wanted, he then summons up a flame elemental to melt down to the wagon. When the coffin is exposed, Dagnar casts ‘Knock’ and was correctly paranoid. The coffin blows up in a shower of glass. An alchemical trap, perhaps. We return to Thoron.
Knowing that there’s one group we haven’t found, the one that left no trail, and we have about an hour before the box is useable, we do make an effort to find the trail first. No signs of magical trails. And a spiral search pattern doesn’t turn up any sign of what direction to search in. On the theory that they went in the direction farthest away from the obvious trails, we leave Thoron one more time and start heading northeastish at our best speed, casting about for any signs. And when the hour is up, teleport back to see what we see.
The box contains a simple grey rock. And now we can see the cultists, sort of. We get the impression that there are three people on the other end, but can’t see them directly. The scenery is grey, indistinct, and ghostly. We also get a sense of position – north of the desert, past the West Wall. As we keep watching, everything snaps solid for a moment, then goes back to ghostly. A voice grumbles, “If that keeps up, we’re going to wreck!” A reply snaps back, “If the idiots who built this had done their job right, we wouldn’t be having these problems, Aton!” So, now it’s time to go make a mess.
Preparations are all the more short term buffs, invisibility from Dagnar, mass protection from elements from Joe, and so on. When we’re ready, Aqila teleports the party into the path of the cultists’ transportation, whatever it is, still stag-mounted. We know their traveling ethereally, and force effects can reach there. On the other hand, no one knows ‘Wall of Force’. Aqila improvises with a ‘Wall of Farce’ on the off chance it actually confuses our targets for a bit, in what we can tell is the line of travel of our targets via the grey stone.
And we see them coming very soon afterwards, those with the abilty to see ethereal things. It looks like a solid black carriage with no obvious doors, pulled by two ghostly horses. The carriage stops short of the wall. Thoron, lent the blink ring for this episode, uses it to try to Blast of Sand the works, and does so. The horses live, and thus are likely not to be ordinary horses. A frothing bearded, axe-swinging, maniac bursts out of the side of the carriage and charges us. Moonbeam’s ‘Divine Hint’ hits him squarely, but doesn’t stop him. An incomprehensible word is snapped out by someone still in the carriage, and four snaky things appear at each corner of the carriage. Hideous with pulsing writhing flesh. They look like something that might have come off the Mad God’s plane, and the texture of their hides is vaguely reminiscent of the chaos beast three of us had fought last year.
The druid uses transdimensional metamagic to hit the barbarian with blinding spittle. A man in yellow robes from the carriage decides that Moonbeam is the biggest threat on our side, and emerges to blast an explosive fireball, catching her squarely. Granted, Aqila and Dagnar were still invisible, so whoever it was only had three visible choices to choose from. Moonbeam had a ring to protect her from the fire damage, but she still gets thrown towards the barbarian, and then has a Dispel cast on her. She loses some buffs and isn’t amused. Aqila returns fire with her force wand, hitting as much of the enemy as possible – nothing dies through. Four snakes, three people, two horses, and one conveyance are still in play. Dagnar takes the opportunity to unload on the barbarian that’s uncomfortably close to the shaman. The first barrage of a tripled scorching ray doesn’t drop him, but the second set does remove him as a threat. The presumed nightmares drop into the material plane, which confirms that identification, and move to flank Thoron. Then they try to smoke him out, but he avoids the worst of the fumes.
He drops down to avoid the mares, and moves into position to quillblast several of the snakies and the probable mage. Moonbeam decides to give the mage who’d blasted her a return favor, and kills him and one of the snakes with another ‘Divine Hint’. The surviving snake on that side of the carriage decides to Blaspheme Thoron, and knocks him down to 2 str and dazes him. The other two are too far away to do anything from the ethereal Plane. The final cultist in the carriage, who we haven’t actually seen yet, casts a Globe of Invulnerability. Joe tries to make it go away, but fails to break it. Dagnar decides to keep the mares from going after Thoron again, and rays them too. One set for each one, and they both drop dead. Aqila cast Arcane Bolts at a snake so as to avoid damaging the carriage more. It lives.
Thoron is still out of it, so Moonbeam gives a couple of the snakes another ‘Hint’ and doesn’t kill them, but they’re visibly damaged. It sounds like whoever’s left in the carriage is still buffing himself. The snake Blasphemes Thoron again, but he dazedly Blinks out of the way by chance. Joe knocks the Globe out, then Dagnar finishes the snakes off by splitting a Scorching Ray three ways. The priest is still buffing himself, as we find the carriage to be locked up tight. No visible doors can be seen, though we saw two people leave it. Aqila readies an Arcane Bolt to unleash when she has a target. Moonbeam uses Ghost Dust to pull the carriage onto the material plane with us.
Joe tries negotiating. “We’re willing to discuss the terms of your surrender.” A voice replies out of the carriage, which is vaguely recognizable as the one being addressed as ‘Aton’ in the earlier scrying, “Yes, I’m willing to discuss your surrender.” So much for a peaceful resolution. Having somewhat recovered his wits, Thoron scratches on the side of the carriage to make it sound like we can’t get in, while Dagnar gets into position to ‘Knock’. Meanwhile, the Globe goes back up and Joe knocks it back down. Dagnar now is in position and casts his spell, which makes a piece of the side of the carriage retract sideways, exposing a figure that looks to be in tattered robes to most of the party. Aqila sees him as wearing chainmail with a mace and shield. Dagnar then charges into the carriage to stab the priest dispellingly, and misses completely. The guy is buffed more thoroughly than we are, probably, which takes some doing.
Aqila finishes moving into position and targets the probable priest with a Greater Dispelling. Knocks off some AC prots, false life, death throes, balor nimbus, see invis, and arcane sight (OOC knowledge, though the nimbus dropping off was obvious). Thoron casts Baleful Polymorph for grins, but fails to affect him. Moonbeam recasts a buff she lost earlier, and quickly casts a hypothermia towards the last cultist standing. It’s a rather weak cast, and has little effect. The priest invokes a Radiant Assault on our heads and it is painful. Hits most of the party, and the squishy mage ends up dazed as well as down to 1/3 health. Thoron and Dagnar are ‘merely’ dazzled. Listens to Wind uses his improved Dispelling skills to strip every buff off of the priest, who immediately teleports to the dazed mage. Dagnar pauses a moment for someone to flank the priest so he can do more damage. Thoron tries another polymorph. The priest abruptly becomes a 3-toed sloth in a small shower of gear and accessories.
Moonbeam patches up the wounded, while Dagnar investigates the carriage. He finds an apparently sleeping human tucked under the seat. When he lifts the seat, a wave of chaotic energy washes over him, but he manages to ignore the whispering voices long enough to slam the seat back down. Okay, mission accomplished, time to let someone else clean up the mess. Aqila phones home. Valrim showing up personally a few minutes later is somewhat disquieting, but not entirely unexpected. So we have a prisoner for him, as well as the vessel, which he observes has an interesting teleportation protection on it. The mage casts a still image of ‘probably Eleduath’ to let her boss know who’d been messing around with us on this mission. Valrim is less than impressed by the beacon and crushes it easily in one hand. He’ll take the sloth and the vessel back to Valanas, and doesn’t care if we want to bring the carriage back with us, though he recommends we don’t try to make the run in one day lest we shake it apart. Stags can go faster than nightmares, after all. Dagnar plans to go straight back to have time to bone up on some new spells, but the rest of us are going to travel in style to make sure we hang on to our new acquisition. Dagnar and Moonbeam discuss what color they want to paint it before he heads back north.



Skipped October this year too.
We pick off where we left off, with most of the party escorting our new carriage back north while Dagnar bounces home to do some studying. Aqila still has her present from Zalakirinal for on the road spell training. Two days later, we are all back in Arandor, and then spend another two days studying and shopping. Dagnar fancies the armor with the potion injecting apparatus, and finds someone who’s interested in playing around with it to fix it up and/or improve the design, given time. What to do about the carriage is tabled until we decide how much gold we want to invest in pimping our new ride. Also trying to figure out what the black rod of ‘Divination doesn’t tell us crap’ is. And visiting family and paying back old debts. And then we’re bored and oh, hey, weren’t we talking about getting a little payback by knocking over some more Dragon Temples? Before we head south again, we get an answer about the rod – someone created it to be mistaken for a Rod of Destruction i.e. a thing that makes Spheres of Annihilation, but it really isn’t one and doesn’t do anything except look like one. There is one Rod known to be unaccounted for (and possibly more created than known, but this isn’t likely), so that does beg the question of who got a good enough look at one to make such an uncanny facsimile?
Also before we take off, we pick up a little intel about what’s been going on. An Eye agent near Greenfields has reported a failed attack on the Grand Temple there, at least as far as actually destroying the temple. They did do some damage, and the agent is going to try to find survivors for more information. We know a few other things about this project. Each temple has a focus somewhere that connects it to the Dragon. If the focus is destroyed, that deconsecrates the temple because it severs the connection. Usually it’s the altar or a statue in the sanctuary, but there’s nothing stopping it from being something insignificant to be sneaky, especially if the temple is in hostile territory.
Of the three grand temples, one is in a port city, and is the main administrative/logistics hub for the Ferial branch of the Dragon Temple, and there’s been some troop build-ups going on, so it’s likely to be a bit busy there. There’s the temple at Naurande, Mykyta’s capital, though he’s not there now, as it’s besieged by an Asferian necromantic army. And there’s the other one at Greenfields, which is the agricultural hub of sorts. Presmyslaw hasn’t stated what the bounty for taking one of these three down is, probably because he knows he can’t pay what the effort is worth.
We head south to meet up with the agent in the field, and find him without too much trouble. He’s turned up the lone survivor of the attack, so we get some first-hand intel on what happened. Their attack started off fairly well, using barrels of hell-powder to blow the main gates to the temple compound open, then using some more barrels to thin out the ranks of the common soldiers. They’d gotten most of the rank-and-file killed off when the templar showed up with blood in his eye, moving almost faster than you could see. The templar took out the leader of the adventurer’s band and his second in command in his opening attack, before anyone saw him, and then proceeded to shred the rest of the band. The description of pale grey skin on the templar is enough for us to tentatively ID him as a Makril, one of a race that is rarely seen off outside of the Dragon Confederation, and then mostly as the Dragon’s elite forces. Odarka, a fighter, was the only one to escape with her life. The final tidbits we pick up is that at this point, the main gates are mostly repaired, at least aesthetically. The barracks are still wrecked, through. The repairs have been hasty and mostly aimed at fixing up appearances before substance.

Dagnar's player brought a lady friend to the game this session - Odarka was a pre-genned character to let her get a chance to play without having to create a character. She didn't join the game.

After a quick discussion, we decide that the attraction of a slightly weakened target isn’t outweighed by the idea of taking out the port temple, for maximum disruption. Because Grand Temples are generally constructed to be identical as possible, and Odarka’s recently been in the grounds of one, we let her tag along with us to see if she remembers anything else helpful, and to get some payback on the Temple. It isn’t too hard to find a vantage point to observe the temple and its environs, and we settle in for the rest of the day, having planned a night attack.
There are guards patrolling the walls, and we figure out in short order that they are most likely common soldiers, not elites. The layout of the ground appears to be identical to Greenfields, per Odarka. With Thoron’s help, we also figure out that the place is packed with troops. What were the common soldier’s barracks at Greenfields are filled with elites here, it looks like. The common soldiers cycling on and off guard duty appear to be heading to and from several warehouses nearby in the city. Which means we need a plan that will keep us from being overwhelmed by a small horde of soldiers when we hit the temple. And with an evil gleam in his eye, the druid thinks up a doozy.
Once night falls, we prepare. Aqila casts flight on everyone who needs it. Moonbeam makes sure we’re protected as she can make us before the screaming starts, then get started summoning earth elementals. Two of them are going to be very pissed off elementals momentarily, while the other four are happier getting to invade from below. A final casting of Vigorous Circle, and it’s time to get the party started. As four elementals burrow under the temple and everyone except Aqila and Dagnar start flying for the rooftop, the two people with the ability to move an earth elemental into the air do so. 600 feet above the temple roof. Careful aim and planning pay off as one elemental impacts right into the inner sanctuary of the temple, and the other lands right on the altar.

This was a one-time thing. Generally tried to allow ridiculous cool stunts to work at least once, then decide whether we really want to make that a permanent part of the game. In this case, kinetic elemental missiles were a little problematic.

As we find out later, due to the elemental complaining about getting sticky stuff smeared all over his backside, the high priest’s quarters were over the altar. His bed was directly over it, and he was occupying it when we attacked. The amount of body parts reported by the elemental imply at least two people helped thoroughly desecrate the altar by getting smashed into it by a plummeting rock monster. That’s at least one torque we aren’t turning in for a bounty, possibly two.
As agreed on, most of the party dives through the holes into the second story of the temple to start eliminating priests before they know what hit them. The four elementals sent in underground rise up to where they can block doors, and are set to smash any statues in reach without leaving the doors unguarded. Aqila stays topside where she can employ some crowd control measures to help keep any of the soldiers from joining the party inside. There’s estimated to be 30 elites in each of the two common barracks, and sixteen in the elite barracks, so that could get hairy fast if everyone piled in at once.
Listens-to-wind is the first in. There are rooms around a U-shaped hall with the ruined high priests quarters in the middle, and rooms for the other priests around the outside, interspersed with cubbies for the acolytes. Joe goes left and tries door number one. A half-dressed female priest is just turning towards the door as he opens it. To his disgust, she manages to stay conscious through not one but two Drowns. Thoron pops over to help and hits her with a blast of sand. And now the priestess is really pissed.
Odarka goes right and finds a priest in bed, just starting to wake up. She works off some aggression by mostly killing him with a vicious sword swing. Dagnar makes Odarka duck and he flies over her head to finish the priest off with a stab. One down. The priestess retaliates at Joe and zaps him with Electric Rays. Two hits hurt enough. Meanwhile, downstairs, the elemental that landed in the inner sanctuary starts working over the still intact statue in there. It’s chipped from his original impact, but still standing. He’d gotten zapped pretty good from his initial impact, and he gets zapped again after pounding on it, and dies. The other damaged elemental starts working over the cracked statue in the outer sanctuary. He gets zapped too, but it cracks more. The other two elementals that can reach the outer statue help work on it, and also get zapped. Moonbeam gives the priestess a ‘divine hint’ and kills her.
Topside, Aqila could see a squad boil out of each common barracks, looking to be the lower ranking elites on ready duty. Conveniently, each group is less than fifty feet from the temple doors. She casts Blistering Radiance centered on the doors to slow them down and discourage them from coming in. No sigh of movement from the elite barracks yet. Inside, stirring can be heard from the room past the priestess. Joe steps down the hall, opens the door, and casts Drown again on the priest inside. This time it works, and he coup de grace’s the priest to save time. Elementals beat on statues, and take more damage as it chips and splinters. Moonbeam summons more elementals.
Both ready squads push on towards the door, conveniently clumping up, so Aqila thanks them with a maximized freezing coldball. That doesn’t kill them, but they’re nicely softened up. And now six elites come out of the elite barracks, mainly armed with long and short swords. One is flying. Out of targets inside, Joe flies up to join the mage, and uses a fireball wand on the new group, being the best option for the situation. Thoron flies up too and blinding spittles the flier. One of the other elites misses Thoron with a black bolt. The newly blinded elite isn’t sure where Thoron is, but is sure where Aqila was. And nails the squishy mage with a profane blast. That’s enough to make the mage whimper softly. Odarka flies up and waits to see what the next best move is for a melee fighter. Dagnar follows quickly and follows Joe’s lead with another fireball, and a second for good measure. Another elite tries to pick Thoron off again with another bigger blacker bolt. He misses, but the bird is not amused.
Down below, the elementals manage to reduce the statue to dust, and a scream of rage reverberates through the temple. A jet of flame bursts skyward, stopping at the roofline, which doesn’t help Moonbeam, who’s still on the second floor. Not badly scorched, but not amused. Aqila gives a parting middle finger to the elites via blistering flame pillar. One lives. The other group trying to get in through the front doors is mostly dead after hanging out too long in the Blistering Radiance and/or getting punched by elementals. We dive back into the temple long enough to grab corpses and vamoose on the Teleport Express, back to the Greenfields area.
We end here to take stock of the situation and decide if we’ve had enough fun for one night, or if we want to tempt fate and the Dragon’s ire by pulling off a twofer.

Terane
2020-04-18, 09:25 AM
We also skipped December in 2014, so launching straight into 2015, and a new major plotline (in addition to ongoing, not replacing)


We pick up where we left off outside of the Grand Temple of the Dragon at Greenfields, contemplating our next move, mere seconds after wrecking the port Grand Temple. And the decision is to not risk getting killed taking on a 2nd temple tonight, because the Dragon is probably now paying extra close attention to his other two big temples. On the other hand, pranking the hell out of Greenfields before going to Presmyslaw's to pick up our bounty rewards is decided to be entertaining. The basic idea is for the druid to avalanche the whole temple, twice, and see how long it takes them to dig themselves out. 30 ft. of snow will be a bit of weight to move. Plus, when it melts, it's going to be a heck of a mess. Then Moonbeam has some fun strategically weakening the wall so the next group to take a potshot at this temple will have an easier time getting in. Dirty deeds done, Aqila bounces the party to the capital where we check into an inn for the rest of the night, so we are well rested and it is actually daylight before we go say Hi to the duke. And while it would have also been highly entertaining to sneak the chaos sword into the armory, one, we’d wouldn’t get it back, two, we wouldn’t get to watch the fireworks, and three, the chances of us sneaking into the elite barracks without someone noticing seem somewhat stacked against it being worth it for a prank. We also bid farewell to Odarka (at Greenfields or at the capital, we didn’t decide where she’d want dropped off).

After we go to the palace and get in to see the Duke, we exchange greetings, and collect the priests' bounties. Presmyslaw states that he'll have to consult his treasurer to see what he can afford to pay out for the grand temple. He knows he can't pay what it's worth but he does not want to be stingy. We mention that we'd pranked Greenfields properly before we left, if anyone wants to take advantage. He then fills us in on a problem he's having. Some of his southern barons are complaining about witchcraft. One has cattle dying. Another had wells drying up, and three more had fields withering. And to make things more fun, the one with the cattle deaths is blaming one of his neighbors for it. And the Duke doesn't want to send his own investigator in because it would appear that he was taking a side against the most powerful southern baron, and he does not need that when he's potentially facing invasion from two fronts. (backstory note, all the southern barons weren’t originally part of his Dukedom – they swore fealty to him after the whole attempted assassination of Presmyslaw/seceding from Seferia/ongoing disintegration of the Ferial crap got going)

We're fine with poking our noses in, since we're on leave at the moment, with the caveat that we might get recalled without warning. Ideally, we'll just pass as ordinary adventurers, not as powerful as we really are, and see what we can dig up. It makes sense to claim to be coming from Stone Bridge, since that was a hot bed of adventuring types within the last month, and that probably hasn’t changed. He cautions us that if we find anything, to tell him first, especially if it looks like the accused baron is behind it, because he does not want at all the situation to give even the possibility of an appearance of him sending assassins after one of his own barons. We acquiesce understandingly.

Step one is to go have a look before we talk to any locals, and investigating the wells seems like the best chance of finding scryable evidence. Talking to the cattle is the runner-up idea of the wells don’t pan out. Using maps copied from ones at the capital, we bounce down into the territory of the baron with the well issues and head into one of the villages to have a look at their well, and toss a stone in to hear if it splashes. We hear nothing. We drop a lighted rock. It disappears into darkness around 70 ft. down. Moonbeam sends a small earth elemental down to poke around. It reports cold darkness around 70ft and solid ice round 90ft. Yes, this is weird. We can see a few villagers standing around staring at us nervously, mostly women and old people who aren’t out in the fields working. Aqila casts fly on the homunculus and Dagnar takes his turn to check. It floats down to the darkness, and as it enters, Dagnar feels a sudden stinging burst of cold through his link, then the darkness disappears. The darkness was magical, and the sting was from a long ribbony blue-white tentacle slapping it. Once the darkness is gone, Dagnar can see signs of damage to the bottom of the well's walls, cracks where the ice pushed stones apart.

We notice that there are more people watching, but oddly enough, no one's coming over yet. Probably waiting for the pitchfork supply to come back in from the fields. Moonbeam drops a disgruntled fire elemental down the well. Steam hisses up the well noisily. Any elemental cussing is drowned out in the steam. Meanwhile, we ponder the implications of the tentacle. Moonbeam remembers her mentor talking about frostfae - things found only in the far north that like finding cool places and making them colder for their comfort. Which matches the behavior except for the location. And now we're pretty well done investigating here, since the villagers seem to be trying to work up their courage to lynch us, and scrying is higher level than we're trying to portray at the moment. We do draw up a bucket of water, check that it's not poisoned, which it isn't, then see if we can talk to the villagers. Joe and Dagnar pointedly fill their waterskins while Moonbeam and Aqila try to look nonthreatening. The mage fails badly, but Moonbeam works at putting out ‘simple village healer’ vibes, and that helps. Most of them ignore us, but some tell Moonbeam that we should go see the squire, half a day's walk thataway. It's obvious that they mostly want the weird foreigners to go away. So we do.

We actually do walk to see if we see anything unusual, and to keep the travel times believable. The flora and fauna seem normal, but there is an unusual lack of spirits in the area. Joe tries to chat up some of the local wildlife to see if there's anything weird going on. They get really nervous when he starts asking about strangers. He only gets that someone had passed through recently that smelled like death. That's the only info we get from them.

We go visit the squire, under our cover story that we're adventurers out of Stone Bridge looking for work somewhere less....crowded. He sends men to check that we'd actually fixed the well before he'll write a letter of recommendation to his baron for us. He doesn't have any other villages complaining of weird stuff, but he doesn't know what all is going on in the barony. The baron's seat is about a day away. Dagnar provides us with horses via the Mount spell, and we ride out in the morning. As we go, the animals we talk to have the same story for a while, then abruptly they're more relaxed and have no knowledge of a deathy person. So whatever went on was localized, perhaps. We get in around dusk, and while our letter gets the steward out to talk, he tells us that the baron doesn't take guests at this hour, but feel free to come back in the morning. Sounds like a plan.

We go do the adventurer thing by heading right to a tavern. We have three choices, farmers, riffraff, or soldiers. Farmers are more likely to be affected by problems with wells, so we go with that tavern. Moonbeam and Joe manage to get people to talk to them. Aqila and Dagnar can't quite look harmless enough. The stories are generally along the lines 'oh, I'm doing fine but my cousin's brother in law had his well run dry' and some disdainful snorting about people who don't know how to farm blaming witches for their poor skills. Later that night, a somewhat soused farmer cheerfully comments that some noble out west was hiring adventurers like us. Hav...something or other. Which we can identify as Havryil because we have maps copied from the Duke. This would be the powerful baron Prezmyslaw wants to avoid offending if possible. The farmer mentions that the noble was throwing around gold like water too. And that's all we get out of him. So we stake out a patch of floor and get some sleep.

In the morning, we see the baron. He observes that since we've cleaned up one well, he could hire us to fix the other 11 scattered around his domain, but fixing the source would be more useful. He allows that he could point us in the right direction, but would require us to maintain confidentiality, because it would not do for him to be found to have accused one of his peers. He tells us, hypothetically speaking, that say if one of his guards saw a woman pausing in a village around when the well went dry, and that said woman was a guest of one of his peers, and furthermore that said woman was known to have skills with cold magics... Appearance is given as white hair, black eyes, pale skin, and somewhat tall. He saw her in person at a social occasion so this isn’t a second-hand description. Could still be an illusion.

Aqila notes that that isn’t sufficient to determine if the peer is complicit or a catspaw, and the baron agrees. He notes that no one knows where she came from, when Moonbeam asked, and that she doesn't have a noticeable accent in response to another question. Remembering the farmer's comments from last night, Aqila inquires if the peer in the hypothetical question might be one who is known to have gold flowing like water and an interest in hiring adventurers. And after all, we are adventurers who are hungry for gold and have reason to go to someone like that without involving anyone else. The baron notes that he can't hire us, but if the problem goes away, there might be recompense.

We ride off, and about half a day out the animals turn skittish again, then relax as we approach the border. Joe stops to sniff around for the deathy person, but finds no traces. So we ride on, and find no more skittish animals before dusk. We stop at a local tavern to trawl for rumors, and here more detailed accounts of crop failure. Here it is being chalked up to bad luck for the farmers. And unseasonable cold snap. Thoron notices a man in the corner who's pretending to be asleep, but is watching us intently. Dagnar Detects Thoughts, and sees an image of a man with an accompanying comment 'The baron will pay handsomely for this information'. He stirs after a while and leaves the tavern, shutting the door behind him. Dagnar staggers obviously out towards the jacks, seeing the man heading down the road towards the direction we'd be leaving in the morning, steps out of sight, and casts invisibility before silently following him down the road. The man knocks on the door of a small house and goes in. Dagnar tries to cast clairaudience but just as he finishes, the man comes out of the stable leading a horse, mounts up, and rides off.

So Dagnar staggers back in, fills us in via message, and Joe stagers out with Thoron, who goes Owl to follow the spy. He knows here we're going, after all.

And ending here due to late, colds, etc.



We're picking up where we left off, at the inn just after Mr. Obvious Spy left town on a fast horse, Thoron flying after in pursuit. As a reminder, we crossed out of the barony of Pavlo heading west, the baron we'd talked to about the dry wells and who told us about Baron Havryil, he of the excess gold and mysterious guest. We are in a second barony now, and are heading to the next Havryil’s barony past there to the west. The spy might be going for the baron here, or to Havryil, or someone else further on, which means we might be waiting for Thoron to report back for a bit. We decide to hang out in the nearby woods and study and/or keep busy until he gets back. We spend a day studying before he gets back. Thoron's got the news that the spy went to the local baron, and what's more, not long after he arrived, the baron apparently dispatched a detachment of guards that were riding back down the road towards us. After some discussion, we decide that our best course of action is to act like we don’t know about the guards.

We teleport to a location up the road approximately where we’d be after a day's travel time and deliberately let the guards find us so we can find out what's up. They show up as expected and politely but firmly explain that the baron would like to see us and that they'll escort us there. And they do. We ride on and reach the baron, who quite readily explains that he has agents stationed around his borders to report when anyone with noticeable magical or martial skills comes into his lands so he can find out what they're up to. Implied is that he doesn’t want outsiders causing trouble in his domain. When we explain that we're heading to Havryil's capital to see if he has any paying work, since the leavings are slim in Stone Bridge these days, the baron accepts that as a valid reason to be travelling, and asks that we get out of town by sundown...err, cross his borders by sunset, or at least by the next day.

Dagnar had started casting Detect Thoughts as soon as he saw the baron, so he knows that baron's thinking about the feud between Havryil, the baron we're riding to see, and Kyrylo, the baron south of his lands, that this baron does not want embroiled in. He briefly thinks about Taras, who is south of Kyrylo, but with no context to how he's related to the feud. What he says is basically that he knows about this feud, it sounds like we're going to get into the middle of it, and he wants no part of it. Fair enough, really. We try to get any info about the witchcraft thing, indirectly, but he tells us that if we want to help fix anything, we should get moving along. So we do.

We find a nice patch of woods on the other side of the border to study for a few days. Moonbeam picks a few quiet locations to cast plant growth to help the local farmers out. We learn a few things, then teleport to a secluded spot outside the baron's seat around the time when we'd have arrived travelling normally. We ride up and are met by the baron's steward. On being asked what our business is, we hand him the letter of introduction from Baron Pavlo, which gets us, "I'll go see if the baron wants to receive you. Please wait here in the hall."

The baron enters the room. He's a short and stocky man, appearing to perhaps have some dwarven ancestry. We give him the standard spiel, that we’re adventurers looking for paying work and heard he might have some, and he tells us that the information is partially right. He's looking for a small number of people with specific skills on behalf of baron Taras who's been approached to help get a job organized. He won't say anything specific to anyone that isn't a strong candidate, but he will tell us in general that the skills needed are being able to handle yourself in an ocean environment, significant healing abilities, and combat abilities on a level able to contend with creatures from the middle chaos regions. Dagnar picks up from his thoughts that Taras has had some interesting guests trying to organize an expedition, to what they say is an unlooted Ancient citadel. Not an uncommon confidence game. On the other hand, the ruins of Tarevale are in the ocean. Might be worth checking out.

Listens to Wind asks him about wells going dry, and the baron says 'Not to my knowledge...', then the steward comes in, whispers to the baron briefly, and the baron continues, "Though there may be other things. If you would come back in two hours to dine with me, I have a guest who would like to meet you." We agree, and kill time in traditional adventurer fashion. Aqila casts message before we go in. When we meet the lady who Pavlo had described to us, everyone except her sees the tall white haired pale skinned lady with black eyes. Aqila sees a black haired lady with coppery skin and tattoos along her arms and one partially effaced on her forehead. Dagnar detects thoughts again. Havryil is again perceptible, but the lady isn't there as far as the spell is concerned.

She starts the conversation. "I am told you passed through some of the same baronies I did when I came here. Tell me, did you see any odd creatures while you were there?" We describe the encounter at the well, and that alarms her. She now wants to tell us something. The baron isn't sure, but she's insistent. "After dinner then". The rest of dinner passes in small talk, largely about Davare, then we're led down into depths of the manor, past a guard post and down to what look like cells. We're asked to not create any light sources, before being led to a cell lighted with a pale blue glow. Floating in the cell are about a dozen blue jellyfish appearing things. On being asked if the creature in the well could have been one of them, Dagnar assents that it looks pretty similar. She looks rather worried and then looks at Havryil, stating that she needs to tell us everything. He is again very reluctant, but she is very insistent.

So, to sum up, after she drops her disguise so we can see her true appearance, she explains that she's from Davare, she was given as a concubine to a high priest, he wasn't a nice fellow, she ran away, and received aid from the old powers of the land from before Davare took the land, but the price of their aid was to rescue what were essentially the last remnants of the frostsprite species. She was charged with taking them away from the chaos lands, which were slowly killing them. Four dozen in number, roughly came with her on a ship, which wrecked off the eastern coast of Seferia, and as far as she knew, all but the dozen here in the cell were lost, but now she has hope others are recoverable.

Given the magnitude of the revelation, Aqila decides to pay back in the same coin, and explains in “cards on the table” fashion that we'd come down here because Presmyslaw has asked us to find out what was going on with the rumors of witchcraft. We were in town picking up the bounty on some Dragon Temples we’d knocked over. We trust him and do occasional jobs for him because his father stopped us from being executed by the Dragon Temple back in the day, and he trusts us because of some of the jobs we've done for him. And since he knew we were flush with the bounty gold, we'd be more willing to take a job on spec. Besides, it's nice to have a nice stable kingdom to fence our loot in and get a good night's sleep without worrying about assassins, so we have some extra incentive to try to keep things calm around here.

Havryil takes this all in, and comments that he might have a commission for us after all. After some discussion, we're going to use something Ilene will craft to let us herd the sprites, and we can handle keeping them cold and dark until we can get them back. Aqila inquires on what Ilene’s future plans are, since this looks like a stopgap measure, and finding them a permanent home might be a good idea, somewhere like the Ice Teeth up near Elethor. Ilene thinks that would be good, but would prefer somewhere closer until she’s sure her commission to care for them has ended. That comment might imply she is under a geas or something. Aqila suggests trying one of the mountains down here, with a snowpack, which is a preferable choice for her. So we wait a few days for Ilene to make her device, and study while we wait.

She makes a bracelet that might let us control up to three at a time, maybe four but that's rising severe mind damage. Also, Havryil obtained some intel for us. The crop damage up north is worst on the border between the two northern barons’ borders, Nazar and Wasyl, with it being worst in Nazar's territory, which is odd. He'd expect things to be worse on the eastern side if it was the sprites, because Ilene wrecked on the eastern coast. He hasn't heard about any issues in the barony east of Pavlov, which is also odd. So perhaps we might want to poke around there too. He's got a man who can take us up north by back roads to where the epicenter of the crop failure is. He doesn’t actually expect it to be frostsprites, given a whole village is reported to have had total crop failure. A sprite would be slowly killing itself to keep a well comfortable to live in.

Oh, and in other news, Havryil might also have an idea on what the cattle issue Kyrylo’s barony is. He explains shortly that the basis of the feud between himself and Kyrylo was his late wife – Kyrylo had also been courting her and blamed Havryil for her death. And he’s got enough rancor built up that Havryil can believe that he’d poison his own cattle to frame him. This doesn’t rule out it being a third party trying to stir up trouble, but perhaps the druids can get some intel right from the cattle’s mouth when we get around to it.

We have a plan, roughly. Go north. Investigate. Swing to east of Pavlo’s barony to check that out quickly, then get the sprites out of the wells and bring them to Ilene. And then maybe go south to check out the cattle issue, and perhaps then see if Havryil will give us an in on the Ancient Citadel expedition. We are money grubbing adventurers after all. We set off, and with wind at back, we can get up north in a day and three quarters.

About half a day out, Aqila gets a Sending from Presmyslaw. “Kyrylo has reported evidence that his cows were poisoned and has claims to have proof that Havryil was responsible.” Aqila replies, "Met Havryil. Feud is over Havryil's wife. Kyrylo courted her too, blames him for her death. Poisoning may be a frame job, we're investigating it." Aqila Sends back "May have solved the witchcraft issue and are working to fix it. There may be something else of interest. When done here, we'll swing by." The reply is, “I’ll wait to hear your report.” More or less.

After taking leave of Havryil's man the next day, in Nazar's territory, we don’t travel very far before a dryad steps out in front of us, and looking right at Joe, pleads "Druid, have you come to heal the land?" She tells us that the life is being drained from the land, and Joe, on hearing that, notices the drain, and the direction. The dryad tells us that some of her sisters have tried to find the source, and perished. This sounds nasty and not frostspritelike. We start investigating, and determine that there's a open circular patch in the forest that looks burned and frozen, except for a weathered stump in the exact center of the circle. We head there to see what's up.

We're stopped at the edge of the trees around the damaged area by an incredibly ancient looking dryad. "Stop! I do not know you. I do not know if you are in accord with what must be done. You will not enter my wood" Dagnar tries to pry in her mind, and gives himself a headache. In trying to make sense of the things he saw, he knocks himself out. Aqila tries looking at the dryad with detect magic and sees an incredible tangle of magic around the creature of all types, including enchantment and necromancy. It would be an epic spell if it's all one spell, and beyond her ability to untangle. Moonbeam goes for the direct approach. "After such an unusual season as this, what fruit could come of it". "What fruit could come if the Old Ones return?". That sets off all sorts of 'old god cult' vibes. for most of us.

Joe motions Aqila for a consultation, and when she casts Message, Joe fills the rest of the party in on something he knows, specifically that a long time ago there was an old god that bound the fae to him and twisted them. Which might mean the magic Aqila saw could be deific magic. Analyze Dweomer tells her that it's an incredibly ancient spell, but nothing more. It might actually be a remnant of magic from one of the old gods who predated the Ancients. We get a bit more out of the dryad, that the circle in the woods is part of an opening and we're not to interfere, then she goes back into her woods. Dagnar revives a few minutes later.

He only had a few snatches of comprehensible images. A tall creature, featureless, wearing a glowing blue crown. A madness of twisting and swirling energy. A world covered in ice. That sounds bad. We start casting about for more information. Joe finds no spirits at all in the area, and we go away a bit to find one. He finds one about a quarter of a mile off who is horrified by the idea of where Joe came from. "You came from the Dead Woods? No one goes there. You cannot live there!" On being asked how long its been like that, he answers, since the Great War. And Joe can't get anything more precise than that. Dagnar consults with Aqila, who casts major image to replicate the humanoid figure he saw. The spirit doesn't recognize it. And when Joe presses him about the dryad, we only get details that the stump was her tree, it's dead, and when he tries to find out what her tree is now, he starts freaking out, yelling 'No' , and leaves.

At this point, given the potential for truly gnarly badness in the offing, we recall to Valanas to see if we can find a divination specialist to help us. We’re on leave at the moment, but you can find specialists to help on side projects if they’re not tied up elsewhere. This time, asking around ends us up in Elenmire's office. Where we're cryptically warned to be really extra careful about what we're about. "We are commanded that this matter is out of our jurisdiction. While you may request aid from any individual, the order will not be directly involved. Nor shall we give you any command regarding this, and shall advise only that you be careful in dealing with what lies behind these events, and break nothing that you cannot mend." On being asked why, she explains, "There are limits to what we can tell you - we know much, but not all, and to tell you too much will prevent that which must be. Your friends among the fey may prove to know more, as you learn things that will remind them of what they once knew."
That more or less seals the notion that we’ve tripped over something hairy and scary and probably obnoxiously easy to screw up. So, we do find a divination specialist. Old, relatively frail, senior divination instructor for the Eye.

And break here as brains were shutting down due to late. When the DM is dropping plot threads, it’s time to call it a night.

Terane
2020-04-20, 03:55 PM
We pick up where we left off, about to head back to the region the crazy dryad has claimed with a divination specialist to check if we can safely deal with her without blowing up large chunks of Prezmyslaw's kingdom. Because that would be bad. To see if we can determine where the dryad claims territory, Moonbeam summons a few members of the Trap-Monkeys United union and asks them to investigate, after we buff our Book member up. While we watch, they venture towards the forest, and as they cross the border, they have to dodge live branches. The divination specialist deduces from this that the whole wood, not just the dead area, is being controlled from a central intelligence. She would need to see the wood react more before making further assessments. So Aqila summons four Celestial Eagles to overfly the woods and see if they can see the Dryad. Sprays of thorns and wood splinters spray out from the woods and 'kill' two of the eagles. The other two don't see anything in the woods that aren't plants. No insects, even.

The next act of our 'provoke the dryad' play is for Moonbeam to summon a treant inside the woods. The treant eats a flamestrike. Not killed, just hurt. The treant starts awakening two trees in the woods to see what that does. Meanwhile, the other two eagles get splinterbolted to poofing, without seeing anything else useful. Maybe a brief glance of a face bouncing between the trees. The treant is hurt more (5hps left), but alive, so it is asked to force it’s way deeper in to see what happens. The diviner can see clearly that the dryad is casting through the trees. Which means she might be able to study the spell on the dryad by divining through the trees, but that might provoke a reaction, so we're to stop poking for a bit. We notice that the trees around where the treant was hit are badly scorched. The treant dies shortly after.

As she starts casting, half a dozen trees in front of us start to uproot themselves. Aqila checks to see what happens when you impede that spell by casting a wall of force around the trees. Two that were too far out of the ground already fall over while the rest stop moving. More start uprooting themselves. She gets ready to cast the spell again around us and the one tree the diviner is checking out, and does so before any trees get to us. After a few rounds, the diviner observes, 'Well, that's peculiar. The dryad isn't much of a problem, at least to find. The spell is what links her to the entire wood, but there's an interesting enchantment component to it. I would normally say that looks like a domination spell, but that's usually applied against the subject’s will, and this was obviously freely accepted. It's also very old. I think it's older than the dryad'. She doesn't know what it would take to dispel it, though she thinks it is dispellable. She also thinks the dryad let her examine that spell to distract her from the other spell that's linked to something in the middle of the wood. It looks like it's moving, but that may be an illusion. She doesn't think it's the stump., and might be able to discover more with a piece of something from the middle of the burned area.

We send in an invisible elemental to see what happens. It makes it in, and grabs a rock, but gets poofed on the way out. So we send in an invisible druid. He successfully makes the snatch but does get a frigid wind shyed at his backside on his way out, leaving a nice frost pattern on the ground. The druid recognizes the spell as a corona of cold. Thoron, flying overwatch, sees an indistinct glowing blue fuzzy human sized shape. Which is possibly related to the blue shape Dagnar remembered from his foray into dryad mindreading.

Meanwhile, having been delivered the dead zone detritus, the diviner starts contemplating. Shortly afterwards, we hear the sound of howling winds from half a mile away. It might be hurricane force in the center of the wood. Thoron can see that the shape is back, and the dryad has appeared near the stump. The temperature seems to be dropping in the ambient area, up where Thoron is too. After a few minutes, the expert observes 'Well, this is going to be tricky. Whoever set this up was being clever. I may have an advantage - it feels like someone who is clever, but inexperienced, with a lot of power to spend on it. We'll see if experience wins out." We boost her as much as we can, because this is going to take an hour. About 15 minutes in, it starts snowing. Listens-to-wind starts casting control weather, and by the time he finishes it's a howling blizzard. He fails to dislodge the weather on the first attempt and tries again. That damps it down to 'light snowfall'. (ooc, this is going to be a 19 week blizzard if we don't kill the caster, covering 16 miles radius.) Around 40 minutes in, two women made of snow in appearance emerge. They are mountain spirits, specifically snowy mountains.

Joe tries to chat them up, but they attack him anyway. Fruitlessly. So moonbeam just smokes them and they fall unconscious. Then two more rise out of the snow. So the druid tosses produce flames to take one out. It drops unconscious, and Moonbeam hedges them in with wall of thorns, since Dagnar saw necromancy on the two we'd already dealt with. Joe tosses those two over the wall so they blow up outside away from us. The next few minutes see pairs of them wandering in, charging, and blowing up in the thorns. And then things get really interesting when a colossal one appears at the same point the rest of them had spawned. So, in response, Dagnar unleashes a tripled scorching ray. Muchos damage. Moonbeam gets an evil grin on her face as she finally gets to try out her Blistering Flamestrike with all the bells and whistles, giggling as it flies. It's not dead yet, but that was noticeable. Dagnar doesn't see any necromancy or illusion magic on the spirit, but it has every other type of magic up on it. So maybe no death throes on this one. Joe decides to use an acorn grenade for his contribution to the combat, and that blows up large chunks of its chest.

And now it's time to roll reflex saves as small spheres of intense glowing blue fly from the unmoving spirit and zero in on us. Dagnar and Joe evade the spheres partially. Aqila and Moonbeam take full damage. Aqila decides to test out her new spell and tries darkbolt. 2/6 bolts hit. It's dazed. And now Dagnar decides to amuse himself. He casts Grease. And the fae falls backwards into the treeline. The damage from its impact kills the fae. A rubble of snowchunks remains. Making this the second time that spell has been used to seriously inconvenience an opponent.

The diviner comes out of her trance, having been entirely unaware of her surroundings, sees the snow, the wall of thorns, the huge mound of greasy snow, and asks 'I'll assume this was the work of whoever is in the middle of the woods.' She's fairly sure that there's a partially closed planar gate in there, but she can't determine what its focus is, without a sample of the focus, which would be redundant. On being reminded of what the dryad had said about this bringing back one of the old gods, and Dagnar’s visions from reading the dryad, she speculates that whatever the gate is aiming for is very far away, because anything that survived from that era would have had to have fled very far into the planes. It also begs the question if the world of ice was indicating its plans for our world, or describes the condition of the place it came from.

It would probably be a good idea to close the gate, which can be done by destroying its focus which is almost certainly in the dead area. So, Aqila volunteers to carpet bomb the area to see if that does it, and if not, we'll go to plan B. So flights up on everyone who wasn’t already airborne, just in case. Aqila covers the half-mile to the middle of the woods, and as she starts blasting, the forest goes nuts. Over a dozen trees start uprooting. So everyone else goes vertical to avoid the mess, and high enough that the hail of sticks and stones from below aren't hitting them. Which doesn't help when lightning starts raining down from the clouds. Everyone's getting hit, but only two rounds of bolts blaze in. After six fireballs, the stump is obliterated; just a crater remains. As Aqila flies back to the group, the diviner checks to see if the gate is gone. It's not, but the misdirecting spells are weakened enough that she can find out where it is, just not what. It's where the tree stump was, and it's still there.

At this point, we decide to go have a look, flying en masse to the middle, and then Dagnar loads up with mirror image and invisibility to go have a closer look with arcane sight. After he evades most of a storm of splinterbolts, he gets close enough to see a clear splinter floating in midair, not glowing with any magic, and nearly invisible due to being clear. Absent any better ideas he tries grabbing it. Even through the cold immunity, he gets chilled badly. And then he tries to dim door back, and comes thaaat close to accidently going extraplanar, but drops it when he feels the teleport twisting badly. The diviner observes dryly, on hearing Dagnar's description, that that sounds like a good candidate for the portal focus.

And at this point, we all fly back out of the woods, Moonbeam gets an earth elemental out, and sends it in to grab the shard. And it succeeds in getting it, in spite of damaging cold. There's a blast of cold from the middle of the woods when the shard gets out of range of the gate, so that's fixed. Now there's still the dryad to deal with. A trap monkey is torn to shreds when it ventures in, so she's a mite pissed. Listens-to-wind tries yelling 'We're willing to discuss the terms of your surrender'. He gets targeted by five lightning bolts. After healing himself, he hollers 'That tickles!'. And gets another volley. He's a walking static machine now. Moonbeam and Aqila both give him the hairy eye to warn him off any pranking.

Moonbeam has a sneaky idea. Diviner to pinpoint dryad. Chain of eyes with diviner's help so Moonbeam can see where the dryad is. Storm elementals to go play fetch. And that actually works reasonably well. They don't kill her, but she's kept busy long enough for Joe to finish her off with acorn grenades. The trees stop attacking us now, but the blizzard is still ongoing. So the blue glowy thing is probably the one who created the blizzard. Which will still kill people if we don't get it stopped. On the other hand, the diviner thinks for a moment and thinks the blizzard is now untended and will fade over the next day or two...and when Joe tries to change the weather its not fighting him any more.

So, we take the divination professor home, and she tells us that the favor she has in mind is some fresh oranges. Joe takes a jaunt through the earth to get a nice crate of fresh fruit. That wrapped up, we head back south to go talk to cows, because that will be fast, and sweeping for ice sprites will be slow. We get down to the count south of Havryil who's been feuding with him, who had the poisoned cattle issue. The peasants’ cows, what few we see, seem healthy enough. The baron's cattle seem to have had issues. Carcasses are being incinerated. Poking around, the cattle don’t have much to say, other than a few complaints about water tasting funny. The first tank we look at is poisoned. The watering system is somewhat complicated, being a series of tanks feeding out into troughs through pipes. We find out from the field hands that at least two people have been caught poisoning the tanks already, and sometimes more than one tank has been poisoned.
We decide to get to the root of the problem. Giving the 'money hungry adventurer' story gets us to the count's son. The 'Prezmyslaw's sent us to investigate the cattle problem' story gets the son to open up some. We find out that the complicated watering system was built by the count's father, in case of drought, but since it's already built ... they use it anyway. They have a court mage who is skilled in divination magic. He was hired by the count's father, so he's been working here for forty years. The mage interrogated the prisoners. On being asked, the count's son tells us that neither prisoner denied their guilt. We ask if we can talk to the court mage. We're told it'll be a few days because he's busy looking for a solution to this problem. But, we can go talk to the prisoners. Prisoner one is an itinerant peddler who under a zone of truth tells us that he is not a poisoner. He knows he was arrested because poison was found in his baggage, but he has no idea how it got there. He’d been in this area, served maybe 2-3 dozen people while he was here, and was picked up half a day’s travel away in a nearby small village. Dagnar and Aqila are both reasonably sure he’s telling the truth. At face value, this looks like a frame job on a stranger with no ties. There’s also the fact that the count’s son told us that neither prisoner had protested their innocence, and this guy did right off, so something is fishy.

The next guy is minimally cooperative. He adamantly won’t give up any details on the identity of the intermediary who actually gave him the money for the job. He explains at length in detail that he’s just in it for the money, and there’s no point to trying to trace his actual employer because he doesn’t know who it is, the intermediary shouldn’t know who it is, and anyway, why would you want to interfere with a businessman that the count would probably want to make use of at some point? It’s too useful a set-up to mess with. Suspecting there’s more than meets the eye, the Druid eyes up the guy, and he’s no peasant. We work out that he’s a bona fide assassin who was paid to do the deed and to get caught. Dagnar casts ray of stupid on him to help with the interrogation. Joe does most of the talking. Aqila’s clumsy attempts to help just convince the guy that she’s an idiot. We also, after a few rays, are fairly sure that the assassin was told to escape after a set period of time if he didn’t get more instructions. The Assassin is contemptuous of the prison here, and outright states that it wouldn’t hold him. Paranoia setting in, we suspect more dirty deeds are in the offing. We also confirm that this guy doesn’t know the peddler, at all.
This is starting to feel a bit like Stonebridge, where the Count there was poisoned, we barely avoided getting framed. And then the Priestess of Nareel had told us later that more people had been poisoned in the year since we’d been there including Bozydar, the White Temple priest who’d helped us a great deal. Is the use of poison here a coincidence, or a pattern?
We end here, to pick up later.




Recappery of how we got here: After recovering from our first tour through the Ferial, Dagnar is assigned to accompany us to Chalisce to find a staff piece, which we do along with desecrating Zeleya’s 2nd oldest temple to rescue Tervel and killing the king’s sister, and before we can finish sailing back, we get picked up and shipped down to Asferia to assault a necromantic citadel and destroy a recreation of an ancient soul sharding machine and stop the inhabitants from raising a continent wrecking monster. After finding another staff piece in the process, we get sent on an ‘easy’ mission to pick up a piece at the Teredoran capital and get to kill an old enemy in the process. Then we go visit a death-island that was probably part of Jahan’s old empire and find another staff piece after clearing out the undead spawner infesting it. That leads into a visit to Savinel, an elder dragon who has two staff pieces in her hoard. We get one, the Enemy’s agent gets the other, and we take some damage in the process. While we were gone doing that, some old friends had adventures of their own. Tervel and Sneezil rescued a goddess, Aremel, while one of the Enemy’s Bound Souls was stealing a piece from the god Gurthan holding her captive.

At this point we take a break from staff hunting, as we needed lich dust to fix the damage. Try one ends with us failing to find Varvara in Innokenti’s palace, and mummifying him after destroying a shrine to Zeleya. She’s really pissed now. We make a play on getting Jahan’s Disciple instead, he tells Gurthan where a staff piece is, and us where Varvara’s lair is. So we go back after her, and get to see a true dragon torching Innokenti’s palace on our way back with her corpse and phylactery. Some old friends are due to have some fun times in Gulbor, the center of the Dead Lands, for a staff piece, but we go investigate the dragon issue down in the Ferial because we just saw one. That turns out in the end to be 3-4 true dragons trying to make trouble in the Ferial, because they’re children/ grandchildren of The Dragon, and infused with demonic essence to boot, which means a whole new can of worms is just waiting to be opened. We distract the most violent one long enough for Elders to deal with him. The Gulbor mission doesn’t come back with a staff piece, last seen with an Enemy agent in a fight for her life, so no knowing how that turned out. Then our bosses find out from Varvara’s spirit that she’d made a vessel to bring the Mad God back, so we’re sent racing out to find it before that pain in the rump gets added to the world-wrecking crises list. We pick up a sweet new ride from that escapade, and get to have a chat with Eleduath, which was mildly disturbing.

At this point, we really need a vacation, and decide to wreck some Dragon Temples to blow off some steam. We smash up one Grand Temple and a bunch of smaller ones because we can. And bury a 2nd one in snow because it’s funny. Which lets us drop in on Presmyslaw and find out that his barons are having some weird complaints, and if we’re not busy, would we mind investigating. We’re still on vacation, so we have no reason not to, and that brings us to the present…


We pick up where we left off, after interrogating the prisoners, but before talking to anyone else. A quick discussion of what we should do now occurs. Things that can be useful - the druid has a spell to let him see, listen, and speak through skulls. He's laid in a stock of bumblebee bat skulls for the rest of us to use as retro jewelry. Which means we can split the party to fulfill all our obligations in this instance...Let Joe and Moonbeam go hunting frost sprites, while Dagnar hangs out in the castle to keep an eye on the assassin via homunculus, and Aqila will stay out of trouble studying until something breaks loose at the castle or the mage becomes available to chat with. Joe will make his portable hole a sprite-friendly environment and he and Moonbeam will coordinate the ingathering.

Quick review of local facts on the ground - when Presmyslaw went independent, one of the two counts in his area of control was a firm Mykyta supporter and was deposed. Which left three baronies that are open and need put into the care of a ruler. Which current baron has the best claim on the open lands, any or all, is unclear because family trees are very tangled for one and for two, the count had done a fair job of offing the three previous barons’ kinfolk to secure his claim on their lands. Which means Presmyslaw's scholars have a lot of researching to do to figure out who the proper person to give each of the three to with the minimum of bad blood created in the process.

So, plan made, we talk to the baron's son and politely explain that his account of the prisoners’ interrogations and what they told us does not quite match up, but we'd like to talk to the mage first so we can figure out where the truth of the matter is. But politely, so he's not offended. The shaman and druid excuse themselves and go sprite hunting, while the mage and spellsword hang loose until the baron’s mage is available to talk to and do what they can to keep an eye on the assassin there. Aqila learns Project Image in two days. Nothing exciting prevents Aqila from studying for the first two days. Dagnar is left wishing something exciting would happen. Moonbeam is a champion scrying machine and finds all the sprites in the area without much trouble. So any other information that might have been noticed was missed and she and Joe swoop in and scoop them all up with no complications.

In sum, over two days we got all the sprites, and Dagnar was bored out of his mind watching the assassin do calisthenics. And playing around with his aura changing spell to make sure he can reliably damp out signs of too high level spells or excess buff spells. On the third day, after Joe and Moonbeam get back, a page tells us that the mage can make half an hour to talk to us. We follow the page to the mage’s laboratory, and our introduction to him is him brusquely stating "So, you want to talk to me about the prisoners; well make it fast; I don't appreciate being taken away from my work." We diplomatically imply that he might not have put his best effort forth in interrogating the prisoners because what we learned from them doesn't match what we were told about them. "And what would make you think that?" Our answer that we’d interrogated them under zone of truth several times elicited a reaction that indicated his very low opinion of our competence. Meanwhile, Dagnar uses Arcane Sight under his sunglasses and starts looking around. He sees something weird on the mage, a flicker that he needs to study. He subtly passes on that the rest of us need to keep the mage's attention on us so he can study the weirdness. There are scrying devices all over the lab, plus something in the corner that looks like a telescope but with gems studding it and a complexly intricate web of divination magic beyond what Dagnar could sort out. We learn later that it’s a device for studying different planes. Aqila has detect magic up and is helping watch for weirdness.

So, to distract the baron’s mage, Joe brings up the way he had traced the coins the prisoner had back to Havryil and asks how he did it and could he teach them the spell? The mage refuses coldly to teach random passersby something that he had spent years learning. Joe tries to flatter him, drags out that learning that spell was a distraction from his great work, and further coaxing draws out that his 'great work' is to discover the nature of existence. Meanwhile, Aqila starts using Analyze Dweomer on the mage himself because the flicker is bothering Dagnar. On asking him why he is working in a small poor barony when a larger domain would have more resources for him, he angrily declaims that in a larger place there would be more distractions and impediments to his work.

Aqila finds something that makes her unhappy. He's got a very powerful and complex web of enchantment spells on him. The main spell is a more powerful enchantment than a mage would usually be able to cast alone, and there are at least three significant entwined spells with it. One that appears to trigger if the others are removed looks like a memory wiping spell. The other two look like memory modifying and compulsion plus a conditional compulsion, several of those. That looks really, really suspicious. We wrap up the conversation and go talk to the baron before we accidently trigger something.

We let him in on the 'Presmyslaw asked us to find out what's going on down here' cover story, explain that his mage seems to be being mind controlled, there's an assassin in his dungeon, and an innocent man, that we can probably fix the mage, but it involves us owing a friend a favor, and taking him to them, and we know he probably should want to verify our story, so we're even willing to lend him the glasses to let him see the spell on his court mage. The baron is willing to look into this, but wants an independent witness, a local priest of Kantor, to confirm our story. He also isn't willing to let the peddler go on our say-so, but he'll do some more checking to see if he can confirm our story. So, we wait a day and prepare for what could be an interesting tomorrow. Aqila takes some time to see if she can contact a specialist in disentangling enchantment spells, and eventually gets a lead on someone who’s willing to take a look at the problem for an appropriate favor owed.

The next morning, we all go to the baron's audience room. The baron and priest do their thing, confirm our account to their satisfaction under the circumstances, and give the signal. So Joe goes giant octopus in an instant. Aqila casts antimagic field while about standing on top of the court mage with Dagnar standing nearby just in case. Aqila is the designated explainer, since she can give the technical details in magish. She doesn't convince the mage that anything is actually wrong, but she at least convinces him that cooperating is in his best interest. So we give him a Moonbeam special sleeping potion and do one teleport hop to a quiet middle of the woods.

Aqila casts mage's private sanctum to ensure some privacy for this operation before bouncing to Arandor go pick up the someone who's willing to be owed a favor to unravel the mess of enchantments on the baron’s mage. The someone isn’t a member of the Sentinel; they’re one of the freelancers that generally do jobs closer to home, but can be talked into field trips for a good cause (and/or appropriate recompense.) The specialist needs a few minutes to get ready, and while Aqila is gone, the mage starts convulsing. Joe digs out and uses an antimagic field stone to see if that helps. It doesn't appear to. Joe starts ministering to him nonmagically and that slows the convulsions. He tells Aqila to hurry it up via skull after stepping outside the field. They notice that the green ring the mage was wearing is now clear, and on inspection has a needle and a triggering mechanism. Lovely gift that must have been.

When the specialist arrives, they observe that it would take a few days to safely unravel the mess. They also explain what a few of the spells are - one lets the mage modify his own memory, as directed to, so he could be compelled to do something and them make himself forget about it, or remember doing something different. The memory of the interrogation was the most recent one changed, and the only one recent enough that the evidence is still readily visible.

Meanwhile, Joe tries to figure out what the poison was. He can't quite make it out, but Moonbeam recognizes it as one of Deiliana's special sacred poisons. The specialist sees that one of the compulsions would have made him poison himself if we hadn't told him about the spells in the antimagic field. Even though it happened anyway. Either the person behind all this was observing somehow and triggered the ring remotely, or it was set to go off if an active spell on it was disabled. Which, we don’t know. The specialist also notes that the caster of these spells was almost certainly boosted by an outside source - in their estimate - the one responsible is a priest of Deiliana, based on the other evidence we've seen, who has access to a temple of sufficient age to serve as a strong conduit. At least 300 years old temple. Really, really wondering about that Stone Bridge countess now, since she's our strongest suspect for that role in this area. Bozydar was going to be investigating those rumors, before he died suspiciously.

Aqila Sends to the baron to appraise him of the situation - IE The mage is fixable, but it'll take a few days. Looks like a Deiliana backed-plot. He was poisoned by one of her sacred poisons. Trapped ring. The baron isn't happy about this, but he accepts that it needs done.

Now, we have a few days to wait, and a portable hole full of sprites. To get them out of the hole fastest, Joe jaunts to the dungeon where the sprites were staying, intending to leave them and a note. No sprites. So he asks Moonbeam to scry on them. No dice. She tries Havryil and picks him up in his study, pacing, with a snowstorm raging outside and a familiar voice saying 'You may as well ask your friend to come upstairs'. Moonbeam recognizes the voice as Valeiran, the last Lord of Valanas. The main reason we didn’t get curb-stomped by that one demon, and most recently sighted while we were relocating Moonbeam’s family north, warning Joe that bad things are going to happen sometime in the future. So Joe goes upstairs to the baron’s study, and is told by Valeiran that he'd better get ready to calm the storm since he's recently learned to control the weather, but to not try until he's told to because that which is creating it needs to be made to stop interfering first.

Then Valeiran explains quite a few things that are going on. The entity who’s existence we’ve been getting hints of is called Helvisarn. He’s the one who wants to turn our world into an ice ball, as Dagnar saw in the crazy dryad’s mind. Per Valeiran, he was driven very, very deep into the planes, and had no way of returning until the opening of the Maelstrom served as a beacon to show him the way back to the material plane. But, the Maelstrom also blinds him to any passages that he could find to our plane that came into existence after he fled. Ilene is gone, with the sprites, searching for another gate to let Helvisarn through, and she will be searching for a while. Of the thirty gates Helvisarn remembers, only 4 are still openable, now that we’ve closed one. The others aren't on this half of the continent. So she’s going to have to check every one systematically to find the ones that still work.

He's the reason that Ilene survived her trek to this continent, or, rather, part of it, and believes he was all of it. Valeiran implies he helped too, and apologizes to Havryil for sending Ilene here, being the nearest worthy ruler to the gate. He also says he won't be interfering further. Valeiran tells Joe directly that the best strategy we have to resolve this situation is to let Ilene try to open the next 3 gates and close them in Helvisarn's face, then let him come through the 4th gate, and if we can break the compulsion he has on Ilene, since she has a good chunk of his power right now to get the gates open, she'd be able to kill him. So there are a lot of ifs here. She's not entirely a willing servant here. The blizzard here is a demonstration Ilene was forced to make to show what Helvisarn will do to the area if she doesn't get down the road.

A few more relevant details – Since Valeiran can tell us where the four other gates are, and because we can’t directly scry on Ilene or the sprites, as Moonbeam has already discovered, Joe could ask some of his Fae allies to keep an eye on the places and let us know when she shows up – but the Fae should keep well away from any of the festivities lest they get controlled. Also, the sprites aren’t precisely sprites but rather seeds, and would become some of Helvisarn’s more powerful servants should he succeed, but if he fails, they’ll be powerful protectors for the Fae in general in the dark times to come. Joe’s already been warned by Valeiran about trouble to come, that might be the same time period.

The question of what to do about the frost sprites comes up because the original plan is now out the window. Valeiran is of the opinion that they should stay somewhat nearby IE not taken all the way north. A quick discussion ensues, bouncing from the Ice Teeth, to the southern continent (which, being the Ancient’s old ‘neutral territory’ site, has lots of booby-trapped ruins with no real treasure), and finally settles on a simple question: “Does the mountain Zalakirinal lives in have a snow cap?”. The answer would be yes, and as it turned out, he doesn’t seem to mind having some quiet lodgers taking up residence in his ‘attic’.

Valeiran had filled Havryil in, completely, on who we are, so he doesn’t have any questions for us per se, just a request to free Ilene from the compulsion and to perhaps repair some of the damage done by the blizzard. Moonbeam was going to do that anyway, so that's no issue there. So Joe comes back and we hang out for the two days it takes to uncompulse the mage. He's as grateful as expected. The specialist thinks they found traces of the spells going back thirty years. The mage worked for the barony for forty. Aqila asks him if he's planning on finding out who enchanted him, to avoid a repeat of his experience. He snarls 'If it would stop any further interruptions to my research', which seems to be as close to a 'yes' as we'll get. He doesn't have anyone he considers a colleague. So we give him a ride home.

The mage stomps off to his lab to answer Aqila's question, we hope, and the baron wants to talk to us. He tells us that he's had records from his father's time searched to see what he could find about who possibly enchanted the mage, and as far as he can tell, the mage has never left the castle since he came. And he came to work for his father on the recommendation of Taras's father, the baron who's sponsoring an expedition. And since the person behind the cattle poisoning is probably related to whoever enchanted the mage, there's no point hanging around until the mage coughs up a name, so we leave Kyrylo with a scroll of sending and a lot to think about.

We stop in to see Presmyslaw and fill him in on recent goings on. He's fairly resigned to the sorts of havoc we stir up now. He notes that that was rather more than he'd expected us to find. And he has no news for us, so we stop by Havryil to get references to show Taras for the expedition as an excuse to check out the local crop issues.

Terane
2020-04-22, 08:35 AM
Picking up where we left off, we ride for Taras’s barony from Havryil’s place, so we’re seen arriving normally for low level adventurers. We do speed things up to cover the ground in a day and a half instead of six, using nothing that would give the game away. As we go, Joe takes the tenor of the local wildlife, and finds nothing out of sorts. The farmers we pass on the road allow that it’s not been a good year for crops, late spring and early frost, but nothing out of the ordinary really. So the reports of failing crops and witchcraft we were hearing don’t seem to be borne out by the facts on the ground. With the letter from Havryil, we get in to see the baron easily. He thinks we sound like good candidates, but his associates would like to interview us themselves, over dinner. He even offers us rooms while we wait. He also asks us to not be alarmed by any oddities of one of our dinner companions – in addition to the folks organizing this expedition, he’s asked the local weather witch to come too, as she can have useful insights into strangers.
We kill time, then come down to dinner, suitably prepared with arcane sight, power vision, and detect magic. We are introduced to the expedition organizers, Matey and Raina. Joe pegs them as an eight and a seven. The elderly weather witch is introduced as Ludwiga, who Joe pegs as a three. She immediately starts screaming when she sees us and babbles about “The Heralds of Doom” and “The Gods tremble at their approach!” in between the screams. Dagnar immediately starts casting Detect Thoughts to see if he can sort out just what set her off. After avoiding a descent into madness himself, he sees a chaotic swirl of images of burning cities, recognizing Marimen as one of those burning. He also sees twisted structures rising out of the ground like some sort of cancerous growth with demons pouring out of them.
Minor Recappery – we were told a long time ago about the different types of seers. Some see what could be, the sheaf of possible futures, some see what will be, at least as far as they can tell with what they know, which might not actually be what will truly happen, and the third see what will be, in truth. The first two have the same gift, the difference in how they are trained in filtering what they see, the third is special, and won’t see everything, just specific events. Untrained seers can’t filter what they see. And point two, the whole ‘collect the staff pieces’ quest is in service to a larger ‘close the Maelstrom’ quest, and one of the preconditions for the pact to avoid open war between the Sentinel and the Enemy to be ended is the closing of the Maelstrom.
While this is going on, Joe takes a look at Taras too, and sees something very odd – he appears to be flickering between a two and a sixteen. Mindblank would just block the spell, and Dagnar’s aura tweaking trick doesn’t affect it, so he has no idea what’s going on, but messages the rest of us. Dagnar takes a quick peek too and sees Taras has 9th level spells prepared, which is also disturbing. Aqila asks Taras if Ludwiga normally freaks out when meeting new people like that, to which Taras replies that she doesn’t and he would like an explanation, after gesturing for several guards to carry the hysterical woman out of the room. Thinking quickly, Aqila asks if he’d heard about the events in Stone Bridge last year, and proceeds to tell a heavily edited account of the demon lord incident, concluding with an assertion that if we hadn’t been present, it was likely that the whole town would have lost. Taras notes that while a plausible explanation, it doesn’t explain the whole ‘The gods tremble at their approach’ bit, but if the local priests don’t think we’re a threat to the realm, he’ll take that as a mark in our favor as far as being good candidates for the expedition.
We then finally get around to having dinner, and after eating, Matey tells us that he agrees that we seem like good prospects, pending the priests’ assessment of us. He then proceeds to explain that he and Rayna had come into a multiply transcribed and translated book that describes a small outpost of an Ancient citadel in sufficient detail that he feels reasonably confident about finding it. The book describes a peculiarly powerful artifact called ‘The Oracle’ that is described as being able to scry on even the gods without their being able to block it. It’s supposedly in a ‘120 foot room’ whatever that actually means after all the translating, so it’s probably a sizeable and difficult to move artifact, and would require substantial resources to move, which are being provided by Baron Taras. The intent behind this quest is that such an artifact would probably prove invaluable to a beleaguered king, surrounded by many foes (Presmyslaw obviously, and sense motive doesn’t show anyone present as disagreeing with the notion that it’s been sought for him).
The book also mentions other items of value that might serve as recompense to us, for example, control rods for leviathans. Those were Ancient weapons to control the sea, constructs infused with demons. Nasty things, haven’t been heard about in two thousand years or so. Probably could be sold for a lot of money. There’s references to a library that was most likely at the main citadel, but there may be some tomes that survived the ages at the outpost. More interesting is the references to a ‘Planar Codex’ a book described as being extremely heavy, 3ftx3ftx1ft and heavily protected. Also probably was at the Citadel, but there might be more clues at the outpost. It is supposed to be the sum total of all the knowledge the Ancients had gathered about the planes. Very very valuable if so, absolutely do not want to fall into the wrong hands.
As for defenses, Matey mentions ‘Guardian Shades’, and a priest of Reshana is coming along to help deal with them. Also, the oracle is supposed to be protected by four golems. As a note, the writer of the text was a slave that survived the Ancient’s fall, and so probably doesn’t have a good standard to accurately measure the efficacy of defenses, so while both those things are described as being overwhelmingly powerful, he’s hoping that a well prepared band of adventurers can deal with them. We think he’s not saying something about the defenses, and definitely not saying anything about the location. And that’s the end of the briefing, so we go turn in. But not before Aqila quickly writes up a recap of the details as part of a ‘If we disappear, this is what we were up to’ note for Joe to leave in Valrim’s inbox, since teleporting is more likely to be noticed than rarer tricks like that.
In the morning, Aqila gets a Sending prefaced with ‘Do not reply to this sending. You need more information. Send someone up north’. That sounds fairly urgent, but we have a meeting with the priests to go to too, but we don’t know precisely when, only that it will be when all the priests arrive. On the other hand, Thoron has not been introduced as sapient, so Joe leaves to ostentatiously let his pet hunt for his breakfast and comes back without him. After taking Thoron to Arandor with a freshly enchanted Echo Skull on his collar. So not only can Thoron get briefed, but Joe can listen in an relay the discussion to the rest of us. And Valrim gets right to business.
First off, the translation of ‘The Oracle’ is probably wrong. ‘An Oracle’ is more likely, and rather annoying to use. The level of detail needed to get a good scrying on things that you can’t see with normal scrying is…annoying. Like if you’re trying to get info on a person, you’d need to have seen them within the last month at the outside to have enough details. You also can’t shrink or take the thing extraplanar without ruining it. He expects that we’re competent to assess any books found and make sure anything dangerous is dealt with appropriately. The Planar Codex was almost certainly destroyed with Tarevale, but if there are any hints that it wasn’t, we really, really want to follow up on them. And he finds it slightly disturbing that they knew about the leviathan rods, but he wonders if they are aware that each rod controls a single leviathan…and that the demons powering them are cunning enough to pretend that they are controlled by the wrong rod. Not likely that there were anything other than lesser leviathans stationed near an outpost…only 11 greater ones were known to exist, and took several years labor of a team of Ancients to construct. So if by some crazy random happenstance we wake one up, everyone is going to notice.
And in more good news, the shades aren’t undead – they’re incorporeal constructs. If it’s a Tarevale outpost, they’re probably gone by now unless they were very firmly anchored. Destroying one is easiest done by destroying their anchor stone, which is not necessarily a stone. They can emit powerful blasts of energy, but take time to recharge. If there really is an oracle there, they might have been firmly anchored enough. If it’s an outpost of Reshak-Nasar, it’s more likely that there are shades, but that isn’t likely because that would be on the Dragon Continent, and he doesn’t think these guys are sufficiently brain-dead as to believe they could remove an artifact of that size out from under the Dragon’s nose. The guardian golems, same deal, there might be weak golems still around if it’s a Reshak-Nasar outpost, but if it’s Tarevale they would have been stronger golems, but it’s probably under water and they weren’t made to function under those conditions.
After the Baron Taras’s power fluctuation issue is brought up, we learn that that sort of effect can be caused by a deity, but if it’s Deiliana, she’s probably smart enough not to do it to her actual high priest, but someone who knows the priest, if not what he or she is. So he could be a red herring, a lesser priest, or an adherent…no way to know without more info. We have no more questions, and that concludes the brief. Joe will pick Thoron up after we meet the priests, which we go to do now.
There are five priests waiting for us when we enter the room, one representative from each member of the Kantoran pantheon. Ireneusz, high priest of Kantor for the local temple, Joes sees as a six. For Nareel, Graznya, an eight. For Reshana, high priestess Filipa is a four. Talas is served by Florian, a ten, and Tyrana has Boguslawa, a seven. Boguslawa is the oldest, a grandmotherly figure. Florian is the youngest, looking to be in his thirties and having led an active life. As we’re soon told, the reason Florian looks so much younger for his position is that he’s newly come to it. His predecessor appeared to die of poison recently, but no trace of a poison was found. Florian was the head of the temple guard and second ranking priest at that time.
Ireneusz is acting as the head of the delegation, unsurprisingly. “So, we’ve heard what the weather witch had to say and your story to try and explain it. Those of us that are who are able have sought to contact our deities directly. In light of that, we’re inclined to give you a pass if you’ll swear that you mean no harm to this barony or any of its gods.” Given that we are on the **** list for several different deities at the moment, it seems prudent to inquire which deities are worshipped in the barony. We’re told the Kantoran pantheon of course, and some Aeranian adherents are present too. Aqila mentions that we’ve had issues with the Dragon and Rakan in the past, and the Blood Goes in general. That gets a reaction – “The witch didn’t say which gods would tremble. If she meant the Blood Gods…” Aqila also mentions that we “had a run in” with a priest of Rakan while travelling with a paladin, so he’s probably annoyed with us too. That’s the sort of resume to cheer all of them up, and they’re happy with us swearing an amended oath that specifies the Kantoran and Aeranian gods only, specifically excluding the Dragon and the Blood Gods. Joe notices a flash of annoyance on Baron Taras’s face at the amendment to the oath. Interesting.
After that, the priests offer to give us what aid they can, in light of the whole ‘The Gods Tremble!’ thing and Florian specifically tells us that we may find a visit to his temple useful. We take our leave, and Joe swings north to pick up Thoron, leaves the skull in case anything else comes up in the next day or two, and we all go to brunch at the temple of Talas.
Florian welcomes us in and shows us to a small room with runes carved into the walls. “With your permission, I’d like to make sure this meeting isn’t spied upon.” The runes appear to be protection against scrying, so we assent. So, story time. Florian and his predecessors have been aware that Deiliana has been weaving a very complex plot in the area for at least fifty or sixty years. They’ve identified two or three powerful priests that they thought had to be the true high priest of the temple, but they turned out not to be. It’s rather unusual for multiple high level priests to be working together like this. And to make things more complicated, it’s probable that a priest or priestess of Talas has been subverted. The previous high priest here had been trying to track down the Deilianans and Florian was sent as an outsider that could they could be sure was not subverted to help him. He did have a few years to get established in this temple before the probable assassination, but there is no convenient pretext to send another outsider in to support him in the mission.
Under the circumstances, we fill him in on everything we know or suspect about Deiliana’s activities in the area, from Stone Bridge to Kyrylo’s barony, and cop to being Sentinel agents, and significantly more powerful than we’ve let on. We do explain explicitly that we’re on vacation, we are in the area as a favor to Presmyslaw because of past dealings, and we’d be quite willing to help him out with anything relating to the Deiliana mess, since stomping out Blood God plots, temples, etc, is kind of our thing. Well, one of them. Florian can cast Sending, so if he comes up with anything our wrecking crew would be useful for, he’ll let us know.
We have five days to kill before the ship Baron Taras hired will sail, so studying happens. On the 4th day, the previously mentioned priest of Reshana arrives. Gerwazy(9), on meeting us, mentions that he’s heard of us and offers us his condolences for the issues we’d had with his colleague, and states that he trusts this trip will end better for him. Moonbeam assures him that she’s a better healer now. Some offline retconery has established that we’ve been told that the trip may take 6-10 months. We can certainly shorten that up a good bit – the trick will be doing so plausibly.
Next up – searching for buried treasure at sea. DUM! DUM! DUM!



We start out the day learning spells on the ship. Lots of them. The trip takes 45 days by arrangement. We control the winds, after all, so we can time it. We have two private cabins, one for sleeping, and one for hanging out in. Moonbeam brings a potted lemon tree along, and Joe brings more plants to make the place feel homey. Twelve days into the trip, more or less, we’re sighted by a dragon temple cutter. It's a few miles off and starts heading away from us, presumably to report our presence to its buddies. On one hand, if we sink the ship, they won't report our big slow ship to warships. OTOH, the sailors are probably conscripts. So just murdering them out of hand might be a leetle mean. After some discussion, we decide to mess with them lightly. Joe wildshapes into an albatross and flies to the cutter, perching in the rigging. Then after a few minutes, ropes start snapping. He takes a crap on the captain before flying off.

A few days later, Aqila gets a sending from Roksana. Summary - The countess has been poisoned in a peculiar fashion - self renewing poison i.e. cured, and then poisoned again. All the priests are being kept busy keeping her alive. Possibly one of Deiliana's poisons. Might mean she's not actually a priestess, or has fallen out of favor. Aqila replies that Moonbeam, Joe, and Dagnar will be coming soon to see if they can help out. She and Thoron can handle pretending to be all five of them if it goes long. The sending came in in the evening, so there's the whole night before anyone might notice something.

So the three of them travel to see Roksana, who takes them to see the countess. First off, Moonbeam detects poison on the unconscious woman. Finds it. Joe tries his buffed dispel magic. Still detects poison. Symptoms are difficulty breathing and heart murmurs. Most poisons Moonbeam can think of that do that are more rapidly fatal. Moonbeam tries remove curse next. Joe is watching with detect magic. Before the cast, he sees nothing. After, he sees very faint universal magic. As a note, the priestesses of Tareina had been run out of town, so there is a shortage of good healers around. A Heal spell cures the poison for about a minute. The universal magic flares more strongly as the poison returns. Dagnar checks the room with detect magic, only finding abjurer spells on the walls, door, floor, and ceiling. That’s it for magic in the room.
Since the count was killed and the son was left a babbling moron in the same attack, if the countess dies, there’s no real legitimate rulers left. There’s the count’s old spiritual advisor, who’s the closest thing to an heir. This is the priest of Rakan they last saw ordering the burning of the tavern while Moonbeam and Joe were still in it, the first time we all were in town. He’s got more abjuration magic on him than any one person should have. Joe decides to abuse his druidness and draws a drop of the countess’s blood to see if it tastes like any poison he’s encountered before. The blood tastes like blood, and only blood. The Countess is 17 hit dice. The Advisor is 12. Moonbeam tries casting delay poison and the spell dissipates immediately. Dagnar’s trying detect thoughts on the advisor his something like mind blank, so no joy.
Moonbeam starts questioning the advisor on what’s been done medically on the countess, and everyone watches him carefully to try to pierce the inscrutableness he’s putting off. He tells her that as soon as the countess was known to be poisoned, every priest in town was called in, and they’ve more or less been trying to repair the damage as it happens by throwing all the spells they have at it. The advisor seems to be telling the truth about what was done, but he doesn’t seem too concerned about the countess.
The countess is only wearing a nightie and the necklace of poison immunity that was tossed on her as soon as she was found poisoned. Analyze Dweomer from the glasses Moonbeam borrowed shows that the necklace looks like what it’s supposed to be, but there’s something funny. When they take it off, it returns to normal. Neutralize poison again, and the poison returns, but it’s not any worse than it was with the necklace than not. Moonbeam casts superior resistance on the countess before leaving the room so Joe can do a mega dispel nuke on the room, just short of the walls so it doesn’t damage any of the ancient abjuration spells on them, but it should expose any temporary magic auras. A check with detect magic shows nothing new.
Moonbeam starts pacing in frustration. She remembers that the description Joe gave her of the Universal magic sounds like a description she heard from Aqila about what the deific artifacts we’ve encountered look like. They try taking the countess out of that room. No joy. Then it occurs to Moonbeam that some animals react differently to poisons than humans do, and with Baleful Polymorph, they could put the countess in a shape that may not be vulnerable to whatever is killing her. They clear this plan with Roxana and the advisor before trying it, though the advisor advises them that if anything happens to the countess, he’ll hold them responsible.
So, Moonbeam casts the spell, and turns the countess into an Iguana. While she’s still poisoned, it’s not actively harming her now, which allows her to regain consciousness and become rather annoyed when her situation sinks in. After a quick explanation, on why she’s a lizard, she insists that everyone leave the room except for Moonbeam and Joe. Her next requirement is that they don’t discuss this with anyone else. She mentions that she’s aware that they are interested in finding a temple of Deiliana, and that she’ll give them the location only if they promise not to talk about anything except the location with anyone else.
They promise, and she tell them that her family has had a peripheral relationship with the priesthood of Deiliana and she suspects they smoothed the way for her ascension to being countess. (backstory – her whole family was on the wrong side of a previous civil war, and they were all executed except her on the condition that she marry the count, thus proving her loyalty. She suspects the temple has something to do with the option to not die existing at all). She also suspects she was poisoned on their orders, but has no idea why. As far as she knows, she’s done everything they wanted. She doesn’t know if they killed her husband and wouldn’t care if they had.
She believes the temple is about an hour’s ride southeast of Taras’s manor (the baron who sent us on the ship). She suspects he has a connection to them, but doesn’t know if he knows who they really are. Taras nominally adheres to the Kantorans. She suspects he knows the exact location. She also knows there are at least three very senior priests living in the area. She has no idea if destroying the temple would cure her, but she wants to see them suffer for what they’ve done to her.
On being asked if she can think of any one of her subjects that would stand to benefit from her demise, she says she can’t think of anyone in particular. She knows that many of the southern barons can’t stand the idea of a female ruler at all, but doubts that they would be willing or able to go to these lengths. It occurs to Moonbeam and Joe that the countess might find it useful to fake her own death, and then see what happens. They run this line of speculation past the countess and see if she knows anyone she’d trust to help her pull it off. She states that before the poisoning she’d have trusted her husband’s advisor, but now she’s not sure. She doesn’t think the Kantorans would have been involved, but she’s not absolutely certain.
OOC – She knows who Moonbeam and Joe are because she got a description of both of them from Taras. The whole “The gods tremble at their approach’ thing being something that would get passed around.
So, after some more discussion, we determine that the countess would like to fake her own death, she doesn’t trust anyone else to help her do that. We have the means to fake a realistic double of her as long as we get a real corpse first. It occurs to Joe to ask her about Bozydar, the White Temple priest, who had helped us a great deal on our first time in town, and died under mysterious circumstances recently. The countess believes that the high priest of Deiliana had Bozydar killed because he was getting to close to finding the temple, but she doesn’t know for sure. She doesn’t know who that priest is, only who he isn’t. She would also like to be someplace safe for the next month or so, or until we can take the temple out or a cure is found. Joe idly asks if there are any minor functionaries that she would like to pretend to be for that month to see how she reacts.
After some thinking, (for various reasons, having her stay with one of our family’s would have issues) the most logical answer is taking her to Presmyslaw. He owes her a duty of care as her ruler. So, Moonbeam uses scrying to tell Aqila to tell Presmyslaw via Sending that Joe needs to come talk to him and will be arriving momentarily. Aqila has no idea why, but goes with it. About ten minutes later, Joe is explaining to the King of the Southeast Ferial that his only countess has been poisoned, it’s probably the work of Deilianans, we’ve found a way to keep her alive, but it’s awkward, and that she’d like to fake her own death for now to see if that exposes anything that would give a hint on how to cure her, and that we’ve got a lead on the temple we’d told him about earlier, and we’re planning on taking that out in a month or so, and that might fix the countess, but we don’t know for sure, so could she crash at his place until then? Presmyslaw is pretty much resigned to our antics at this point, so he’s reaction is essentially ‘Why not.
The exact details on how we fake the countess’s death are left unsettled because we all agree OOC that we can do it, and debating the merits of various stratagems was eating up time. A Jane Doe corpse from the city morgue is probably going to be the basis for the fabricated duplicate, and it’s likely that we’ll at least tell Roksana that shenanigans are happening and we’ll explain later, promise. Joe and Moonbeam head back to the ship and only fill Aqila and Dagnar in on the details they didn’t promise not to talk about. The countess iguana crashing at Presmyslaw and the temple location being the main things to pass on.
After a few more weeks at sea, Aqila gets a sending from Valanas. They’ve dug up a 2000 year old preliminary report from one of their rebellion’s ships that sank before it reached port. They think the base we’re heading to is one of the Leviathan bases, given that the people running this show think there will be control rods there. The ship reported that it had killed a leviathan carrying one of the foci for Tarevale’s last spell, the one that would have destroyed all the life on the planet outside of Tarevale if the rebellion hadn’t blown the city up first by unleashing the volcano. That foci was recovered, but there may be more of them out there in that area. Also, they really want to know how these people found out about this base in the first place. We’re directed to recover any foci we find, and if possible the book that they used, the one that was supposedly penned by a slave that survived the fall of Tarevale.
The foci may be in carrying cases and inert, out of the case and inactivated, or out and active, in which case we might just have enough defensive spells to survive long enough to recover it. Also, we should expect that the defenses on the base may be stronger than we were led to believe if this was a staging base for the foci, and there may be more interesting items there.
The druid really likes the sound of ‘more interesting items’. As time passes, Joe and Dagnar try to worm out of the treasure hunters where we’re actually heading so we can scout the place out ahead of time on the sly. It works almost too well – they get half a dozen routes and end points from detect thoughts. Joe and Moonbeam practice their aquatic maneuvers to check them out. At the 5th location, Moonbeam finds some faint traces of what possibly could be an artificial construct. An ordering of silt and coral that look like it might be covering what was a ship, perhaps. (ooc – yes, that was the remains of the ship that sent the report in)
In a bit of a backtrack, the ship had been enjoying perfect winds for the first few weeks we were out, then became becalmed when Joe and Moonbeam left for Seferia and Joe was out of range to continue the control winds spell. He let the natural winds continue for a few days to make the amazingly good winds look less suspicious, then talked a pod of whales into taking turns towing the ship for a bit as a more explainable reason for why we’re making such good time on what was supposed to be a 6-9 month voyage. The captain things that’s a wonderful trick and is actively wondering if hiring a druid will actually make the ship profitable. The crew is more superstitious about it, but the older crew are grumbling more for form’s sake…they’d be more likely to have past experience with being becalmed and what can happen when the water runs out. The treasure hunters agree with the captain that it’s a useful trick and that druids are useful for sea voyages.
On reaching their destination, Rayna pulls out an impressive array of crystals. “According to our records, nothing less powerful than the oracle can scry on it, so I am going to scry for things that cannot be scryed on. Unfortunately, because we need to scry on a large area, we have to count on it being a large item”. Aqila asks if there’s any reason for the shaman and druid to not go out and scout around themselves to see if there are any signs of manmade things. There isn’t of course. Rayna things the most notable features to be looking for would be the Leviathan pools, which would almost certainly be silted up, but the silt should look different under the surface.
So, Joe wildshapes into a Beaked Whale and starts searching around, talking to fish. He gets one to mention Big Bones and goes down for a look. The skeleton is bigger than a blue whale. Colossal size is smaller than these bones. He checks them all over with detect magic and finds some significant abjuration magic near the base of the skull. Looking closely, he can see a crack in the skull which opens into a chamber completely surrounded with bone containing a fairly intact humanoid skeleton and a 5’x5’ box that is giving off an impressive abjuration aura. That’s probably a stasis box, what would be protecting a foci, or perhaps something else important and powerful. Joe switches to Octopus form to reach in and grab the box then uses Master Earth to go drop it off in Valanas in a tearing hurry. (There would be a spot in the citadel for people to drop things off that are in the ‘look at this now’ category and we’d know where it is by now). He heads back before being a landed octopus becomes uncomfortable and looks for some souvenirs. The small ear bones seem appropriate, as being about the only portable items down there, so he grabs all six and heads up, switching to a smaller size as befitting the power level we’re feigning before reaching the surface.
As he pulls himself onto the boat with his arms, a panicky seaman sees him and fires a crossbow at him, whiffing. Joe doesn’t even notice, before resuming human form. Rayna’s still in the middle of her multi-hour casting, but Matey takes the report of the Leviathan’s location and facing, observing that we’re on the right track, and we have two likely directions that the base is in, depending on whether it was coming or going. If it was the one that the ship killed so long ago, we know it was leaving, so we know which way the base is now, and even if it wasn’t, we know the base had been blockaded, also making it likely that it had been leaving.
After Rayna surfaces for air, she reports that she didn’t find anything definite, but there was a possibility at the extreme edge of the spell. After checking with Joe, she determines that what she felt was about 30 degrees off of the direction the bones were facing away from. The corpse likely would have rotated as it settled, so what she picked up is very plausible as a target. She’s too tired to do the spell again today, and Joe asserts that he needs to rest before doing another search, so the ship is se on a heading to the potential hit and we agree to try again in the morning.
Of course, we aren’t actually planning on waiting that long. Joe and Moonbeam go out searching once night falls and Aqila starts scribing a scroll of Major Image for Dagnar just in case. This time, Dagnar’s going to be staying behind with Thoron, if the primal casters find something. Aqila’s spells are more likely to be needed. And, they do find something. The sea floor begins to rise abruptly as if towards an island, until it crests about 400’ below the surface, and there are obvious signs of artificial constructions. There is a dome shape under the silt, three large mounds and one small mound. Moonbeam leaves to go get the mage while Joe does some initial scouting. He summons small earth elementals and sends two to the dome, and one to each mound.
The two at the dome find an entrance, but one dies almost instantly on entering. The other reports seeing a shimmer in the water before the other elemental disintegrated. Best guess is the incorporeal construct guards we were warned against. It also saw at least three encrusted statues in the dome, and that the water in there looks ‘different’, darker. Two of the other explorers get killed. The survivors find what might be a barracks in a large mound. The small mound might be someone’s office, possibly with intact books.
Aqila and Moonbeam have arrived now, and we decide to check the office first. After sneaking in, Aqila casts rope trick to provide a dry place to check the books out. The office is stuffed with preservation boxes. Moonbeam goes up first because she’s the one with Scholar’s touch to quickly check for valuable information. Joe is on sending boxes up and putting them back duty. Aqila sorts out the boxes that actually have books in them from ones that have nothing but sludge to save Moonbeam time. There are a lot of boxes down there. The first six boxes didn’t hold seal, and the contents were water-damaged to illegibility. The 7th was someone’s journal about things that went on before the war.
The 8th is damaged with a few legible passages, one of which mentions that the writer is the commander of the base. The date indicates he wrote this two years before the end of the war, when Tarevale blew up, and presumably the aftereffects sank the island that this base was on. It also mentions that an oracle was to be installed here and he had finally received the operating instructions and stowed them in the library. Probably one of the two mounds that the elemental scouts died in.
The 9th book is trivia, but it has a map of the base, showing an oracle, armory, barracks, library, and this office we are in. 10 and 11 are illegible and 12 is more trivia. The commander a thorough documenter of everyday minutia; historians would have a field day with these texts. 13 is sludge. 14-21 are trivia or illegible. 22 is a journal from the war and describes leviathans being sent out on missions, sinking three rebel ships. The rebels were trying to interdict the base. Four more useless books, then 27 is dated two months before the war’s end. He’d gotten a warning to be on the lookout for defeatists, along with rumors that the Lord of Tarevale was preparing to move and that some artifacts were already moved. The commander doubted those rumors, because the Codex would be hard to hide on a move. 28th is from a month earlier, where he was given instructions to ignore the defeatists preparing to escape into the planes, and that their madness would not be permitted.
Continuing to check, we find more trivia, some books that turn to dust on exposure to the air, and then we find a book from a few days before the end of the war. It mentions a courier coming from Tarevale with a set of foci for a spell that would end the war. The courier wanted a squad of leviathans sent with each one, but the commander barely had one for each, and not enough mages to activate them all at their destinations, so some would have to be sent activated. The emissary was satisfyingly horrified at the thought, but agreed that the risk was better than not sending them at all. More useless crap, then we find one from the day before the war ended.
The last journal had blank pages at the end, and what are probably the commander’s last words. “I believe I’ve figured out what that emissary did not wish to tell me. I can’t believe they would be so mad as to do this. I’ve ordered what troops remain to retreat to the oracle chamber with all the golems. If we drain them, we may be able to survive. I almost wish the rebels could win with the assault they are massing, but even if they had ten times the troops to send against Tarevale, they could not hope to overcome it.”
We find more trivia and unintact books, then we find one detailing a personal visit the commander received from the Lord of Tarevale. Instead of the commendation he’d been expecting for some recent actions, he got a reprimand for not stopping the most important ship from reaching the mainland (now the Dragon Confederation) and as a result, Kashirna is dead. He is informed that another officer will be assigned to keep an eye on him for some time. It ends with ‘Every day I become less sure that I should be fighting in this war.’ We find some more books of wartime trivia. And sludge, and a disintegrate on touch book.

I had a table for generating books found - with the special books (unique information) becoming rerolls after discovery. Set up the odds so they'd probably get about half the unique information. Rolls fell out lucky for them - they got every single unique book.

We find a rundown on the defenses of the base in one of the trivia books. He was assigned 20 guardian shades and 8 golems. The bulk were assigned to guard the oracle and the library, with a few roving the leviathan pool and the armory. 4 golems to the armory, 4 to the oracle, 6 shades to the oracle and the library, 6 to the pools, and 2 to the armory. And if the actions recorded in his last book are accurate, all 8 of the golems were taken to the oracle and drained there before the end. The elemental did see ‘encrusted statues’ in that chamber. Probably golem carcasses.
That finishes off the office trawl. We debate jumping the library, but decide it’s not worth leaving obvious signs that we’d been here already to our employers tomorrow. We do have some elementals search the pool for leviathans, or leviathan remains, and find none. This is probably a good thing. There are some kraken corpses down there, and bits of stone they can’t move and it hurts them to try.
We get one to use a few normal rocks to pick up one of the hurty bits and carefully bring it to the surface of the silt. It’s a piece of a rod or staff. Leviathan control rod piece? Lots of fragments, not worth messing with right now. We head back to the ship where Dagnar had an uneventful time with no visitors and rest up for the morning.
Rayna sets up her apparatus again first thing in the morning and states that she’ll check the area where she thinks she saw something yesterday, and that she’ll try to break the spell after an hour instead of waiting for the full 8 hours to be up, if she can. She’s never done something like that before. Two and a half hours later, she moves and stands blinking repeatedly for a bit before being able to speak. She observes that she now knows why no one probably tries this method for searching for oracles because she almost fried her brains just brushing against the shields. She further states that she hopes we can handle the spellcasting today. We assure her that we’re used to working together and Aqila suggests that Joe go check the location because he can probably search most efficiently in wildshape. The suggestion is accepted and Joe ‘finds’ the location quickly.

Terane
2020-04-25, 08:58 AM
We pick up where we left off, right after Rayna finished half killing herself finding the oracle. Joe had gone down to check the location, and came back up to confirm that there are mounds there. Matey notes that the priority is the oracle, if we can find it right off, otherwise priority is looking for records that might lead us to it. Joe gives the primer on deep diving, which boils down to, it's dark, you can't breathe, and the pressure sucks. Matey isn't too worried, he's got a short pearly rod that does a minor transformation that works to protect from the effects. It only lasts a few hours and makes you slightly nauseous when it wears off. Moonbeam asked about that in case the healer has to do anything.
Matey and the priest of Reshana will be going down with us - Rayna is too tired. Thoron will be staying topside because one, hard to explain why the bird is a druid, and 2, if things go badly, he can be the cavalry. Since we know exactly where we're going, all six of us are going to just go.
As we get in sight of the ruins, Matey observes that the dome looks promising. Aqila suggests that we might want to send scouts first to see if any defenses are active. We know they are, and the results of sending two earth elementals are the same. One splats in a swirl of water. The other comes back and tells us about it. So Dagnar offers to clairvoyance the area and Moonbeam sends two more. They both splat, but Dagnar can see four blurs of motion destroying them. He also sees 3 statues, 5 piles of rubble, and the room is dominated by a giant sphere, lacy and delicate looking. 60’ diameter dome, 40’ diameter sphere.
Matey thinks this sounds promising. Aqila points out that dealing with the guardians without damaging the thing might be a trick. She further suggests that we've got time to check around and see if there are any surviving records to give us more intel on what we're up against. And because she can be really convincing when she needs to be, the upshot is that after determining that three of the domes are guarded, and the little one is not, Joe and Moonbeam slowly clear the silt away from the wall and Aqila uses a 'scroll' to cast passwall on it. It’s the first use she’s had for her Explosive Runes trap papers. Then doing the same 'rope trick and search the boxes' thing to distract Matey and the priest on scholarship. Aqila stays with them to keep them occupied while the rest of the crew ostentatiously is clearing the silt away from the oracle dome. In reality, they're going to scope out the rest of the place.
Aqila picks out a good box to start with - the one where the base commander is getting berated about letting that ship get through, and helpfully helps with the translating and hauling boxes around, which gives her an excuse to not be in the room all the time. If she has a spell her party needs for this project, they can let her know though an echo skull, and she has lots of excuses to be down getting boxes.
Meanwhile, the doors to the library are uncovered, and Moonbeam, Joe, and Dagnar start working on getting inside without dying. Step one is sending in waves of sharks until they're not getting instakilled is step one. Step two is Moonbeam throwing ghostdust into the area and hoping to hit - she gets 3/4. While she's doing that, the boys are getting ready to beatdown. Dagnar poofs the first one Moonbeam freezes with ghostdust with a tripled screeching ray, with a few more bells and whistles. Joe lets Dagnar solo the next one too, and it's poofed. The third one goes the same way. the 4th one is not anchored and is moving closer, so Joe the Giant Octopus takes a tentacle. It takes two more rounds for Moonbeam to anchor it. He gets in a few hits before then, then poofs it in a flurry of blows.
And now, the library is clear for exploring. Anything not sealed in a box is sludge. Moonbeam settles down to thumb of knowledge all the boxes with surviving books, after Joe helpfully piles all the boxes up around her. Dagnar uses his Arcane Sight to hunt down the anchors for the constructs. He finds four stone spheres that probably are them. Joe settles in to search the library thoroughly for any secrets. Eventually, after amusing himself by squeezing through tight spaces and otherwise showing off, he locates a tile that moves. Inside it is a special box, strong force and abjuration spells on it, with no obvious way to open it. This may be the manual for the Oracle. (ooc, yes it is). We don’t know for sure what it is, so we hang onto it for assessment.
After a few hours, Moonbeam is done assessing the contents and finds half a dozen that need more expert opinion to determine if they're dangerous or not. The rest of the books are returned to their niches and Dagnar's haversack is used to stow the books until further notice. Next up, the armory, which is broken into the same way - clear the door, send in the sharks until they live, and then ghost dust and smash. Dagnar lets Joe have more fun, to save energy. There are only two constructs in this one. And they find two stones which go join the other 4 in Moonbeams haversack.
There are no books in the armory. There's a closed stasis box with writing on it. It appears to be saying something about dragon fire. There are also two boxes that are open. Stasis boxes are valuable in and of themselves. The rest of the armory is bare of anything interesting except for a short black rod. It somewhat resembles the fake rod of destruction we'd seen before, and looks entirely unmagical. Out of an abundance of caution, the rod is added to the list of things that is taken north to Arandor by Master Earth.
At this point, it's been 6 hours, and Aqila is running out of books to distract them with. So Joe and Dagnar and Moonbeam come and tell us that they're done moving silt. So they pull themselves out of the books, and we all go to look at the dome. The first thing we find out is that the passwall does not permit mixing of the dead water with the water outside. Matey looks at that and remarks 'This could be a problem. It may be a good thing that we brought you along." We start clearing the area. The first wave of small water elementals is wiped out. One of the statues slowly jerks to its feet. Aqila casts Force Claw as Moonbeam sends in another wave, and two die, and two are mauled. The claw doesn't succeed on any attacks yet. On the next round the other elementals die, and the two new earth elementals get damaged. Aqila casts another Force Claw. Next round is more elementals and another Claw. Elementals get mauled.
The golem is now ten feet from the passwall. A force claw hits it and winks out. That's not a good sign. It's a huge thing, so it's not fitting through the wall. Moonbeam has the elementals attack it to see what happens. They hit it, to no effect. Joe attacks it through the passwall with his tentacles. He might have chipped it. Aqila casts indomitability on herself, then on Joe the next round. He also had scintillating scales from her earlier. Moonbeam too. Which is important because the constructs recharged and the elementals are poofed. The other two attack Joe and Moonbeam. They get hurt.
The priest is cursing under his breath. We don't know what he tried to do, but we know he's not happy. Matey is furiously buffing himself. (ooc, the priest tried to turn undead, and now he knows they aren't undead. Both of them were all set up to smash undead.) Moonbeam heals up Joe. Joe animal growths and blesses himself. Aqila casts passwall again, with a 'scroll' to expand the opening so the golem will now fit through, horizontally. Dagnar does his 3-steel trick, with some bells and whistles. There is now a crack in its arm.

These were custom golems, designed to be ridculously tough - and not really much else. Intended function (in setting, not in game) was for them to draw attention while the incorporeal things shred the enemy.

Joe makes a valiant attempt to grab the golem with all nine tentacles and drag it out and toss it. He slams his tentacles into it, cracking the other arm, and battering it noticeably. He makes a grapple attempt, and fails to grab it. Aqila goes to 'screw it die die die ' land and arcane bolts one of the constructs...doesn't kill it, but it's hurt.
Dagnar starts off with screeching raying the dusted construct. It poofs. Moonbeam dusts another one. Aqila manages to hit the same construct again with another maximized arcane bolts and it poofs. Joe does the nine-tentacle slam again. The golem is now scrap. And now the constructs fire at Joe. He would have hit -7 but the indomitability spell stabilizes him.
To finish up, Aqila arcane bolts the one that wasn't dusted. The priest heals Joe for 28 points. Moonbeam dusts the last one. Dagnar tries to attack the dusted one. 4 hits. So Joe finishes them both off with tentacle smashy.
At this point, it's heal up time. We suspect the octopus may have our bosses a bit suspicious, but they don't say anything to us just yet. Joe carefully oozes into the dome to drag out the golems. And then he has to make will saves. He feels an internal wrenching feeling, but makes the first save. So he pulls back out and tells Moonbeam about it. So Aqila ties a rope around her waist just in case, and steps in to try to ID what it is. She makes her save, and ID's it as something like bestow curse, but stronger. And reports that to the party.
Joe goes in to get the statues and succumbs to a curse. Wis -6. And now he has one statue. Moonbeam removes the curse. And he goes back in for the other one. He gets two curses this time. The first is a slow. The second is -6 wisdom again. Moonbeam patches him up too. While Matey and the priest look at the golem carcasses, Joe and Dagnar go to search for the anchors. They make their first check. Then they both get cursed. -6 wis on Joe, indecisive and -6 cha on Dagnar. They pull out and then we send elementals to search. Moonbeam ostentatiously rests up while Joe and Aqila do the summoning. They find and recover 4 anchors.
And now it is break time. Aqila takes the time to prepare Raise from the Deep twice and floats the golems so they can be winched into the ship. After we get back, our bosses go into a huddle. Dagnar misses part of it, and learns Matey is suspicious, the priest thinks he's overreacting, and Rayna is too out of it to know what she thinks, but she'd always suspected we were stronger than we presented ourselves as, and unless we try to betray them, it's not worth fighting about. They do agree to keep a closer eye on us, though.
After they break the huddle, Aqila points out that if we take a net down, we can load the office's contents into it and float it. Aqila and Joe could handle it themselves, but Matey would be more comfortable if he went with us. It's uneventful. Aqila catches a lift to the surface as the net floats up. While the sailors are getting things stowed and organized under our bosses' direction, we go to our quarters to rest. Aqila restocks her explosive runes paper stash in case she needs to do the 'I'm casting from a scroll' trick again. It's quiet until the next day. Aqila learns amanuensis, so she can copy the half-dozen books Moonbeam picked out. They don't actually have any dangerous knowledge. So we can sneak the originals back.
Time to extract the oracle! And they do have a plan. Step one is remove the roof of the dome. Step two is to cut into the stone under the oracle and raise the whole mess. This will take a few days. We’ll be guarding while they work. The crew up top builds the raft they're planning on towing the oracle with, now that they know how big it is. While we're waiting for them to raise the oracle, we get sendings, and the boxes all come back, except the very first one. So, the first box was a focus. Should be a bounty on that. The 2nd box isn't useful for bosses, but might to us - 3 dragon fire orbs. Temporarily turns people into a dragon for a few minutes. There was a note in the box, addressed to us, that we might find these very useful in the future. Valeiran? And the stasis boxes we brought, they can give us the opening and closing instructions too.
The rod might possibly be the rod to control the defensive constructs for the base. Maybe. It would take some study to figure out how to use it because they’re somewhat idiosyncratic in how the control spells are laid on it for one, and for two, there’s no guarantee which constructs it is for – you usually wouldn’t have all the defenses linked to one rod. So it might have just been for the golems, or only some of the constructs. Paying for priority study would be expensive…back-burner let-the-intern-do-it would be a lot cheaper, albeit slower and less certain of success.
A few days later, they're almost ready to raise the oracle. And we get another sending that Savinel has a problem she'd like us to solve, and she'll pay. We reply that we'll go pay her a visit, and see if it's more urgent than knocking off Deiliana's temple. We tell Matey and company that we've gotten a new job offer, and since this one is pretty well wrapped up, we're taking off. Presmyslaw can hold our wages for us. And Aqila shows a 'scroll of teleport' and we vamoose. We leave a scroll of sending with the priest before we go, without letting Matey and Rayna know, with a comment that if things go really pearshaped, we'll come help. He gets the point that he's shouldn't let the other's in on it.
Savinel tells us that she's heard we might be interested in knocking off Zeleyan temples. And she wants a message delivered to Zeleyans that they are not to mess around in her territory. She's got a lead on a minor shrine, and the priestess there was trained at the Zeleyan High Temple. IE, she might be convinced to tell us where it is. And while Mirarn and Kalya can't directly support us on this sort of mission due to oaths sworn long ago, she's not constrained in that way, and if we find the high temple, she'll give us intel on what we may face. And possibly other support.
We ask if there's a reason we need to move on the shrine now, because we have another temple we've promised to deal with. She doesn't think it's too urgent, but they do move around. Though if the priestess has been tipped off, she'd be gone already.
We're still going to go after the Deilianan temple next, though. Presmyslaw is probably getting tired of this houseguest. Especially since we gave her an amulet of thought projection.



We pick up with our plan to take out the Deilianan temple by making contact with the priest of Talast who'd been sent south to unravel the Deilianan plot to compare notes. He hasn't made any progress himself, but he's fairly sure that Taras, his Chancellor, his head Guard, or his Huntsmaster might know where it is. We could stake them out and see if they lead us to the temple, though that might take some time. He has a potential lead that might be useful, and won't take more than a day to check out. Apparently some mysterious strangers have been visiting taverns and leaving messages with the bartenders seeking a group of high level adventurers to take out a Deilianen temple. They've been leaving a list of questions to screen out the wannabes. The priest sent a representative to investigate and he got screened out on the first question, which was, "Do you know the name Sakaneth?". No was not the right answer. The priest didn't recognize the name either. Aqila looks at him and asks if he wants to know. He wants to know if there are any dangers in knowing. She observes that being able to sleep at night might be at risk, but....
He replies, "What's one more eldritch abomination disturbing my sleep," so she simply explains that Sakaneth was one of the old gods. His son Kaneth tried to take control of the Maelstrom and shattered, becoming the Mad God. And that's the point that he decides that he really doesn't want to know more. Aqila does mention that Mad God shards have been around in the Ferial and you don't want to touch them, though we've had some practice dealing with them. Even though the last one took a Paladin's help to deal with.
And as soon as she says that, we all hear a cheerful voice chirp, "Did someone say paladin!" We quickly assure the priest that the imp is a friend of ours, and he really is a paladin. Aqila asks Sneezil if we're going to need his help and he agrees, mentioning a 'Strange Place' and 'No Magic'. We immediately put two and two together and start wincing. Dagnar gives Aqila a casting of Detect Thoughts to see if Sneezil can show her a bit more about what he knows since he's not the best communicator in the world. He doesn't mind, and shows her an image of a bridge between two platforms. The background is entirely black, featureless. The platforms and bridge float in a void. There are two glowing green portals, one on each platform. On being asked if there's anything more he can tell us, he lets us know we need to talk to a ghost of a bad priest, but he can't tell us more out loud, because the priest of Talast is still there, but shows Aqila that the 'bad priest' was a priest of Sakaneth. Joy.
We advise the priest that we're fairly sure we are going to be dealing with the temple soon, and we'll let him know how it turns out if we survive the fun. We take our leave and go to check out the bars in Taras's capital, which is where the strangers were leaving messages with bartenders. We find a bar with someone who knows the questions, and he takes in a back room to ask us them. The first question we know and answer 'yes'. The second is if we've encountered any shards. That's a big 'yes'. The third is if we've entered the Abyss. Dagnar's seen it, so we answer, 'having seen it, why would you want to?". That wasn't the answer he was told to accept, but he finds it adequate. The next is if we have angered any gods. We all burst out laughing. After asking if he wants just the number, or the complete list, in which case he'd better be ready to write it down, he thinks that suffices. The last question is if we've desecrated any temples, which also brings on some snickering, and another query if he wants the number or the whole list. That satisfies the bartender's part in this test, and he lets us know that we need to hang out for a few hours while the next person to test us arrives.
Under the circumstances, we just hang out in a private room, relaxing. Joe convinces Sneezil to find out how he reacts to alcohol, and we find that a pint just makes him more cheerful. Trying to teach him some drinking songs lets us discover that he may have a good singing voice, but he can't carry a tune at all. Before too long, an obvious hireling comes to lead us to the next person. Who leads us to another hireling? Then another. This takes some time, being led from one hireling to another in random directions until the last guy hands us a letter and tells us he needs to leave before we open it.
The letter tells us to travel a mile south down the road and the ghost will fill us in. And to hold the letter up to identify ourselves. Well, Sneezil did warn us that we had to go talk to a ghost. So we go and do, and within a few minutes, the ghost does materialize. He wonders out loud if we're another bunch of idiots like the last batch to waste his time. After a little back and forth snarking, the ghost looks at us and asks us if we'd be willing to lower our defenses so he can compel us to tell the truth when he questions us. That's met by a chorus of 'Nos followed by Aqila asking him if he realizes what he's asking for. Specifically, does he want to be up to his ass in annoyed servants of deities whose temples we've destroyed, most recently the Dragon's grand temple in the port city. That gets his attention, and makes him think. Then he looks right at Joe and orders him to show his true face. Joe obliges, briefly.
The ghost gets smug and thinks out loud that this will work out very well. Apparently our reputation precedes us. He is aware that we'd destroyed the vessel, and doesn't care, calling the architects of that plan 'idiots' and that it doesn't matter to the true plan. So, the temple currently occupied by Deiliana used to belong to Sakaneth, and they want her out. OOC, if she still has the joint when he comes back, she can exert a certain level of control over him. That wouldn't be a particularly good thing. Anyway, he's willing to tell us enough to get us in. The temple is only accessible through a pocket dimension made by Sakaneth. We'll go through a portal, and have to cross a bridge to another portal. This sounds familiar. And according to the priest, only Sakaneth's power works there, otherwise no magic functions. Yay.
He's heard the priests have hired mercs to guard the bridge, and at least one of the Deilianan priests thinks they are overpaid. He doesn't think more than 20 people are living in the temple, a high priest and at least three under priests among them. It's death to fall off the bridge. And to get through the portal safely, we need his blessing. If we don’t have it and they didn't activate the defenses, the portal just won't work. If they did, we'd be disintegrated. Yay. And we have no guarantee he actually put a blessing on us, but he does have some incentive to want us to succeed. He doesn't think more than two guards will be on the bridge at a time. Its 10 feet wide. He also shows us a map of the layout of the temple proper. It includes robing rooms, kitchens, and seraglios. Apparently this was a hardship assignment back in the day, so there were special ‘benefits’ included in being posted there. ooc, this was an outpost for Sakaneth to spy on the Life Lord.
The priest never actually thought about whether the temple is on the material plane or not, on being asked, but doesn't think it would have filled its purpose if it wasn’t. He also pointedly doesn't tell us if he'll maintain the blessing on us post-desecration so we can leave safely. Because he's a ****.
Having gotten all we can out of him, including the location of the portal, we go prepare for a magicless fight. Alchemical toys moved to pockets. Grease bought. Lanterns stowed, etc. Thoron and Joe are planning on going in as dire eagles so we have flight capability in a size to rescue floaters. We go through the portal with Joe and Thoron leading, then Dagnar, then Sneezil and Moonbeam and Aqila. Joe gets shot with two arrows right off the bat from the two guards blocking the bridge. The ghost priest was correct on the number of foes we’d face here. Joe gets into position to dive-bomb the guards. Thoron gets in their faces, making one of them drop his bow to draw his sword. Dagnar chucks grease at the feet of one of the guards, making the floor slippery. Sneezil looks at the situation, chirps, 'Not Safe' and gestures. Two walls of pearly light appear on either side of the bridge. The guards look nervous at this. Moonbeam greases the other guard's footing. Aqila moves up to nail the guard who still holding a bow with a tanglefoot bag. He barely stays on his feet, and only manages to drop his bow.

Thoron thrashes one of the guards soundly. Joe grapples the other one. Thoron gets thwacked a few times. Dagnar runs up to get into range to do something. Sneezil flies up over the battle. Moonbeam moves up even with Aqila, and they both get ready to entangle the other guard if there's an opening. Thoron thrashes the guard who attacked him again. Joe gets a good grip on the guard he grappled and carries him out over the abyss, where Moonbeam can give the predecided speech Joe suggested. Basically, 'drop your stuff on the bridge, and if you had no idea what you were guarding, you can leave.' The guard is willing to take the deal if everyone can leave. Turns out that that was the captain. We get him to write a letter to his other 4 men with our terms on it and we chuck it through the other portal. The other four guards listen to their captain and leave their equipment behind and all six of them leave through the other portal. (ooc they had adamantine swords and all the gear was provided by the priests, so they weren’t losing their own stuff when they left)
Dagnar makes sure there's room in the entryway, then the birds go through to pick a more useful combat form. Aqila stows the loot in the BoH. We prepare for round 2. The room is covered with carvings that are reminiscent of what we saw in the last Mad God temple we'd been in, including the weird blank patches that are where symbols of the Mad God would be visible to his followers. Thoron and Joe revert to normal. We enter the purification room. Four basins in the corners, currently empty. The next corridor is narrow and the door to the sanctuary is at the end. Dagnar doesn't see any traps, but an alarm sounds, a physical alarm triggered by wires, when we open the door. The sanctuary is empty of people, but it's been hung with tapestries depicting scenes of treachery on second glance. Moonbeam looks under the tapestries nearest her and sees the same sorts of carvings on the walls in here.
There is an altar in this room. We look at it, look at Sneezil, and his reaction is 'No, bad, trap'. We can't see how it's trapped, but we're willing to take his word for it. We start looking at the other three doors. We check what the ghost called the acolytes room first. Empty, no traps. The high priests quarters are completely empty, nothing in there. There are stairs down to the lower level behind. The normal priests’ room is also completely empty. The acolytes' quarters are being used as a rubbish heap, with signs that they get cleared out occasionally and a still clear path to the stairs.
We go down the high priest stairs because there's a steel portcullis between it and the rest of the temple on the lower level, and we can go through it with a xorn easily. Downstairs, the first room is a study. Aqila grabs the books on the desk on principle. We also find the bedrooms of the high priest and his girlfriend. And their 'play' room. Really big bed, and we don't want to examine it too closely. We can faintly hear raised voices through the door to the rear of the temple. Joe can hear a male voice saying “I assure you, my Lady has things well in hand, you don't need to concern yourself about these intruders.” The female voice replies, "So you say. My Lord is not convinced. You’ve already lost the Countess, and you're well on your way to losing this temple. Even if you deal with these intruders, the fact that it’s been found at all does not bode well for the plan. You're coming close to forfeiting his support for this scheme. You'd better do something to prove you're still worth supporting.” (ooc, we are cautioned to note the tenses in this exchange, particularly the fact that the female is speaking as if she’s getting real-time feedback from her deity.)
We decide to ambush the lot of them so Dagnar dimension-doors himself and Joe into the room and Joe quill-blasts the room. The priestess (of Rakan) is untouched, and wearing very heavy plate. The priest makes his save. The other lady in the room is wearing very little, mostly jewelry. Aqila casts greater invisibility on herself and Project Illusion right before Joe and Dagnar go, so she can physically stay outside the room and keep an eye on our rear in case of ambush. As Moonbeam and 'Aqila' enter the room with Thoron and Sneezil, the priestess of Rakan floats off to the side, sitting cross-legged in the air, saying, “Well, this should be an adequate test. I will not interfere if they don't attack me. Again.” We take the hint.
Moonbeam flame-strikes the priest and the lady. That hurt the lady in particular. Aqila uses Reciprocal Gyre on the priest, who apparently has a lot of buffs up. Joe the dire lion prepares to munch the priest. He can't scratch him, so he kelp strands the lady. The priest hits Joe with a nasty trick - it rips off one of his paws, and animates it as a wight to attack him. Aqila decides to get nasty and casts prismatic eye. The acid ray does no damage, but she also quickens a darkbolt and manages to daze him. Moonbeam eyes the field quickly, and finds a point to center a sonic strike to hit only the priest and the wight-paw, since we don't actually know if the lady is evil or not. And she's kelp-stranded. Dagnar fails to penetrate the priest's armor.
Thoron decides to try to baleful Polymorph the priest. Fail. The lady hums something briefly and the kelp strands slide off her. Joe does a massive dispel magic. It works. Produce flame follows as a bird-flip. Doesn't kill him. Aqila fires off her second darkbolt volley and redazes the priest plus lots of damage. The eye's fire bolt barely does anything. The lady is just sitting there quietly. Moonbeam inflicts hypothermia on the priest. And he dies. Aqila eyes the priestess and asks her if she considers this a failed test. The priestess replies that he certainly failed. The lady, on being asked if she's going to be hostile, responds, "Do I look like I'm crazy?" She slaps Dagnar when he tries a corny pick-up line on her, which the rest of us don't take as a sign of hostility. Sneezil can't tell if she's evil. Joe can't pick anything up with sense motive. Power sight pegs her at 15 hd.
Moonbeam goes to regenerate Joe's missing hand and Aqila moves to stand in her illusion before dropping it. Moonbeam asks the lady if we'd walked in on anything, and she responds, 'nothing unusual'. On being asked, the lady said the priest picked her out as eye candy, and has been using her as such for the last few years. Which moves her from the 'potential problem' to 'victim' category. Joe gives her his cloak and gently de-quills and patches her up. Moonbeam looks at the priestess and asks, 'Now where were we'. The priestess comments that she doesn't think we'd be willing to let her claim this temple, and we agree, so she says she's going to head off now, leaving us with a word of advice - Don't always trust what a pretty face says.
Lala, as we find her name is, has an undetectable alignment, blank mind, etc. Joe dispels her to make sure she doesn't have any nasty spells on her, and her jewelry lights up to Detect Magic when he does. We ask her to take it off, so we can see just what the Priest wanted her to wear. Analyze Dweomer finds that the 5 pieces are an interacting set. One ring is universal resistance, + 2 per piece of set worn. Ring two is +2 deflection per piece of set worn. Necklace is + 2 cha per piece of set worn. Bracelet one is undetectable alignment by itself, +2 other pieces, false alignment, + 5 pieces, it gives mindblank. Bracelet 2 is fast healing 1 per piece of set worn. Nothing harmful, mind-controlling, etc, so no reason not to hand them back over to their owner.
Dagnar and Aqila go clear the rest of the temple while Moonbeam and Joe chat with Lala. We find three minor priests that fight and die. We also find a dozen slaves. A few are attractive women that were obviously playthings for the lesser priests. Some aren't in great shape. Two are the cooks. We hear one of them mention the high priest's body guard, a large brute. The women all look frightened when he's mentioned. We don't find him. Or any other major priests. There were supposed to be a few more of them around.
Joe decides to check if he can leave via master earth. It takes an inscrutably long time, so the strengthening Sakaneth did on the walls is a serious impediment to leaving. Thoqquas would make a more permanent hole, but a passwall opens up a hole quickly, so Joe can find out that we're actually a quarter mile down under the West Wall mountains. Which is where the other Mad God temple was, but not quite the same region. Meanwhile, Aqila seals the portal just in case. And we desecrate the altar properly. Sneezil enjoys himself. There are some interesting magical items near the altar, centered around vials of blood. There's one vat of poison with a vial of blood (countess's blood, that’s how she was being poisoned, and Deiliana’s power was what was facilitating the transfer of poison to Countess)
We decide that since all the slaves have been here for at least two years, and not all of the homes still exist because of the war that started up in the interim, to drop them off at Joe's house to let them start recovering, Lala too. A few days later we get news from his wife that Lala had disappeared, completely, probably by teleportation, and left the echo-skull his wife had been using to help keep an eye on her in a forest in northern Almaera.

This ended up being a dangling plot thread - is now one of the possible hooks if I ever go back and run a one-shot or two for these characters.

We take the corpse, the poison/blood set-up, etc along with us to first check in with the priest of Talast to see if he recognized the high priest. He doesn't. Then we go to Prezmyslaw to see if he wants the corpse to try to ID it, and to restore the countess now that she's not being poisoned. This may be the point where we want to pick up next time to play out interrogating the corpse and resolve anything else that needs to happen.
In ruins of the Ancient outpost, when we go back to finish looting, we find 3 more spheres, and a rod that has 10 charges per day. 1 charge - immediate action counterspell as if casting 20th level greater dispel magic as a counterspell. 2 charges antimagic ray. 5 charges reaving dispel. 10 +80% chance of destruction or rod - mage's disjunction. Also a handful of items that might be restorable. 1 suit of chainmail that’s more or less intact, protective enchantments. Roughly +5-7 equivalent. 2 swords. 1 looks minor +1-3ish, 1 looks like it was very powerful +8-10ish. Also some odd metal fittings from something that appear to be something like a +10-12 enchantment originally, probably off an originally mostly wooden weapon.
Would cost 1/3 normal cost for the items to have them restored, 2/3 cost for the fittings.

Terane
2020-04-28, 10:44 AM
Picking up the plot in Presmyslaw's capital because we have a corpse to interrogate. He wants a summary, but doesn't have time to sit in on the session himself - he does have a country to rule after all. We traipse over to the major Kantoran temple, carting the corpse in the portable hole, and find a priest of Reshana to cast Speak with Dead. With appropriate boosting, we can get 12 questions out of him.
Questions 1-3 gets us names of beings important to the plot - Rakan, Deiliana, Hammer, Isay, Elizavita, Khariton, Ruzha, Shadow, The Lady(priestess of Rakan), Yevhen, Lykke. Got another 30 names from the initial 'involved in the plot' question, including Taras. If that's The Baron or not, we can't tell just by the name. Spend question 4 to confirm that is the Baron. Isay, Ruzha, Khariton, Shadow, and The Lady have protections against scrying, per question 5.
Question 6 is asking where all the Blood God temples he knows about are, and he knows about five of them. On in the southern West Wall, two in the northern East Wall, one in Amerel, and one somewhere in eastern Asferia, maybe on the large island. He doesn't know for sure where the last one is. We spent the next five questions to get as many details as we can for each one. West wall - Rakan, east wall, Shanea and Makarn, Amaril and Asferia are both Deliana’s.
Rakan’s - he knows it's relatively minor, maintains a significant armory, enough for 10k soliders at a moment's notice. Shenea's temple had an intended role in the plot, even though she isn’t involved. It’s also one of the largest research facilities for undead that she has left on the continent...expected to have unusual new designs that may or may not work as intended. Makarn's temple is one that he actually knows where it is. It's on the lynchpin of Asferia's line of defense against Presmyslaw. This is a semi-public shrine. He believes the worshippers there aren't particularly devout, except for an inner cadre that are exceptionally capable. 20-30ish. Since the soldiers there are at least partially loyal to the one son of Innokenti that isn’t a complete jerk-and-probably-dabbling-in-necromancy, we may want to leave that one be. Makarn’s the least vile of all the Blood Gods, too. The Amerel temple, he doesn't know exact location, but knows it's on the estates of one of their more prominent nobles, a secret worshipper of Deiliana, but doesn't know which noble...only that he's one of the top five by Deiliana’s reckoning...which may not match public rankings. The priest of that temple is Khariton. The final temple he knows almost nothing about, save that Elizavita is the high priestess there, and that because of her part in the plot, she hasn't been there in almost 4 years. Some of his comments imply that her part in the plot involves Innokenti's one decent son. So we spent the last question on details about that plot. We find this is a relatively recent change to the plot - her job is to obtain control of that son by any means necessary. She's a mistress of poisons, one of the high experts in crafting exotic poisons.
We find someone to 'gentle repose' the corpse in case we need to ask him more questions next week. And leave the body there in case Presmyslaw has his own questions too. Aqila makes a copy of her notes and takes them to the king, who is not all that happy to see one of his Barons on the list of plotters. He also tells her that he can't pay us to do this because it's not on his territory, but he'd appreciate it if we'd do something about that Shenean temple. The party is not likely to be averse to the notion.

Allowed some clever arguments here to wring a lot of information out of speak with dead. Possibly more than I should have allowed, but oh well.

Meanwhile, Moonbeam puts on her do-gooder hat and bounces around the area casting plant growth on woods and fields to help alleviate the effects of warfare. She’d been planning on doing this for a while, and finally has the time. After she’s finished her rounds, we look over the list of interesting answers we got from the priest’s corpse, and agree that the most urgent of the potential issues that doesn’t have scrying protection up is Elizavita and her screwing around with the closest thing to the man in charge of the forces on Presmyslav’s northern border. So Moonbeam finds a convenient puddle and settles in to see what she can see.
At first, it seems like the scrying spell fails, then after a longer pause than should have happened, an image forms. She sees a young attractive woman talking to someone she can't see. The unseen person speaks first. Moonbeam recognizes the voice as Eleduath, herself. The Enemy's daughter. "It would seem that your fellows to the south have suffered a bit of an accident. Which naturally makes your part in the plan more important, does it not." A slightly strangled affirmative from Elizavita. "You are, I trust, making progress. It would of course be a shame if anything happened to you before you complete your task." "It will not be long now. Already I can do practically anything that I wish. A matter of a few more weeks and he will be mine, permanently. And are you ready to do your part?" "Rest assured. When you have completed your task, my father's forces will be ready. Though, I think perhaps you need a reminder of your status." Moonbeam sees Elizavita collapse to the floor, screaming. "And now she will not be paying attention for some time. Whoever you are watching, take this as a free gift: This priestess’s death would be convenient. If you intend to cause it you may find her here." Then she gives the location and directions to Elizavita’s house.
Aqila adds what Moonbeam saw to her report of our recent activities after she got the account, and drops it off in Arandor before we go after the Zeleyan shrine. Given that Savinel took the time to tell us where the little shrine was, and that it’s a potential lead to Zeleya’s high temple, we’d rather not let the information get stale. Nothing in it was earthshattering enough to trigger immediate feedback on the report. We find the shrine with little difficulty and drop in. Thoron tries to baleful polymorph the priestess and succeeds. She is now a sloth. Joe loots the room. Finds one light filmy robe, one whip, and miscellaneous and assorted restraints. Thoron desecrates the shrine. Nothing happens when we smash the altar.
We decide to question the priestess elsewhere, so no votaries walk in on us. Dagnar uses Ray of Stupid to make her more pliable. After a few hours, we determine that if she had trained at the main Zeleyan temple, she has no memory of it, but her mentor had reminisced about her training at the high temple. With Dagnar having detect thoughts up, we get a name, Mikkeline, and a face. We also get information that she is someone very highly placed in Aerodon's nobility. At least as of 6 years ago. Rykke, the priestess we captured, was trained at a temple that has since moved, and she was told to not try to find it again. This was the 10th location she'd tried to set up shop in 6 years. Rykke believes Mikkeline was the most powerful priestess of Zeleya outside the high temple. After getting her to describe a few feats she'd witnessed, we estimate she can do 8th level spells.
Given that the Minor Kingdoms are more like city-states than actual countries, so the local authorities may already ‘know’ Rykke, and the penalty for worshipping most Blood Gods is death in general in civilized lands, we don't interfere when Thoron turns her into a squirrel and has a snack. Moonbeam tries to scry on Mikkeline with the info we have, and gets a blank, but it feels like a 'mages private sanctum' block, rather than personal protection, at least the outer layer. So try again later.
On the off chance that our plans to stop Elizavita from permanently mind-controlling Prince Miroslav, the closest thing Innokenti had to a decent son, might interfere with something the Sentinel is doing, and because this may be a grey area as far as interfering with politics, we do check with our boss before going to rescue the prince from durance vile. We're told that the nearest Sentinel agent is half a day away from that town, and based on our information, since he should be trying to keep an eye on that son, he'll be relocating soon, but he won't have time to do more than find Miroslav, so there's no objection to us going to deal with the situation.
So, we teleport to Asferia and scout out the location Eleduath dropped. It's a minor manor on the outskirts of town with a huge kitchen. There is a visible black film on the windows, and a scrying attempt confirms that a mage's sanctum has been applied. This is on the grounds of a larger estate, and there are guards at the entrance to the grounds. We ask some rats to scout out the joint - with chain of eyes from Moonbeam and an echoskull from Joe. The first interesting thing the rats notice is a shimmering green field inside the sanctum. Moonbeam recognizes it as a Dimensional Lock. The house is almost entirely deserted except for the front room. There are 4 hooded and cloaked figures seated in the room, with Elizavita and a young man are cuddling on the couch. They look like they're settling in for a while.
The cloaked figures appear to be oblivious to everything in front of them. Are they his guards? They seem almost unnaturally still. There is a cellar. It is stocked with enough food for a siege, nonperishables in abundance, including a pile of alchemist rations. No signs of a brewery for poisons down here, but there is a small clear section. No signs of a secret door there. (is a secret, but no door).
Miroslav and Elizabeth are still canoodling on the couch, and she casually picks up two goblets from the floor. Hers looks normal; his is glowing blue. We decide it would be a good time to intervene. Step one, invisibility and fly on everyone so we can get onto the grounds. And indomitability on everyone. Moonbeam gets ready with a heal and the mindblank gizmo, after summoning a few huge earth elementals, which are also invisibled. Joe turns into a giant octopus. Aqila moves up to the side of the house in preparation of casting passwall and wall of force to protect the guards.
And so we enact our plan. Aqila gets the passwall up and quickens the wall of force, then steps out of the way of any retaliation. Joe throws the front door open and yoinks the prince out, handing him off to one of the invisible earth elementals for safe-keeping. Thoron, taking advantage of the passwall, casts baleful polymorph at the priestess. She barely makes her save. Thoron tries again, and fails again. Since the passwall is directly behind the priestess, Dagnar attempts to sneak-attack her. He misses with the kukri and hits with the black blade of disaster. She makes her saves, but still eats a pile of damage.
Thus ends the surprise round. The guards start standing up in eerie unison. The priestess defensively casts disintegrate at the wall of force and then to most eyes, she and the guards disappear. They're invisible. The guards move forward, two of them threatening Joe and Dagnar. The priestess moves towards the back of the room. Dagnar misses his AOO. Joe is missed. Dagnar is attacked viciously. Sneak-attacked for 70 damage. Joe lets Aqila go first and she glitterbombs 4/5 targets, missing one guard. One guard is blinded. Then she quickens darkbolt to cast it at the priestess. This is reflected back at Aqila, which leaves her at 1hp due to Indomitability and dazes her. Miroslav is still oblivious to the world, doesn't even seem to realize he was grabbed by an octopus. Joe casts impeding stones on the house. And then drown on the priestess, and she does not make her save. The blind guard falls prone. Two others do to. The one facing Dagnar stays on his feet. The priestess is drowning, and prone. Thoron uses blinding spittle on the guard that isn't prone. Moonbeam casts mass heal. Aqila is back at full Hps and undazed. Moonbeam then casts a quickened snake's swiftness, mass. Dagnar has a grudge against the guard that shanked him, and retaliates. She's reduced to a pile of dust. Joe beats on the guard closest to Aqila, and grapples another one. Dagnar uses knight's move to go stabbity the guard by Joe because he can see him with see invisible. And disintegrated another guard. There are now two piles of dust, two live guards, and one drowning priestess in the house.
We're reminded that there are guards on the wall. They get will saves to decide not to run away. Two of them keep charging us. The rest are scampering. And Miroslav is now unconscious, after the mass heal. Dagnar has to make a check to stay on his feet in the mansion, and makes it. Joe sees two guards left that aren't dead and fixes that problem. All four had identical equipment. +1 keen dagger of backstabbing. +2 con belt, +3 cloak of resistance, + 1 studded leather armor, gloves of true strike as a swift action 2/day. And a ring that crumbles to dust when the priestess expires. Thoron entangles the two guards that were still charging, on the assumption that they might be the prince’s guards, not the priestess’s.
The priestess's gear, when we get around to inspecting it: Circlet of wisdom +6, cloak of cha +4, ring of displacement, boots of swiftness +4 agi, bracelet of spellturning 1/day lvl 15, ditto ray deflection bracelet. Ring of Protection +5. Choker of Beauty - grants blinding beauty as a standard action. Before the priestess drowns, Moonbeam inspects Miroslav and finds no magic. Aqila has a dispel prepared, and boosts it to lvl 20 just in case it's something we missed. No effect. Summoned a unicorn for magic circle against evil, no effect. We get Dagnar to try detect thoughts to see if anything is going on upstairs. Will save time. Dagnar confronts a somewhat fragmented mindscape. Most of it is complete babbling nonsense. The only thing that isn't nonsense is a faint scream.
Moonbeam tries a heal check. She determines that he probably needs a good psychiatrist. We let the priestess finish drowning. Joe puts on his diplomancer face and with the help of Dagnar and transfer detect thoughts, we convince the guards that this was a rescue mission, his 'girlfriend' was and had done a number on his brain, and to let us try to fix him. Meanwhile, Aqila teleports the priestess's corpse to the Kantoran temple in Presmyslaw’s capital, with gentle repose cast, and asks to see if anyone wants to take a stab at the interesting problem that the prince presents. Several of the younger priestesses of Tareina have to be told firmly that they aren't qualified, then an elderly lady who is a more senior priestess is willing to take a field trip.
ooc - Miroslav has no one he can trust in magical matters. His father's court wizard who spirited him out might count if he could trust the guy...and he can't. Miroslav hasn't found something he can use as grounds for executing him, yet. He's got possible mages he could trust that he's been working on, but he hasn't brought them and their armies in on his side, yet. Those are the armies who have the shrine to Makarn in their fortifications on their border with eastern Seferia
Anyway, once Aqila and the priestess of Tareina get back, the priestess goes right to the patient. When the priestess completes her examination, she opines that she can probably get him functionalish in a day, but fixing all the residual damage inflicted on him over the last month will take a few months. She's willing to stay out here for that length of time. We feel somewhat responsible towards her, so Aqila negotiates with her brother for a pair of the family's trained wardogs. Think 200lb rottweilers. A nice yet intimidating male for the prince and a cheerfully protective female for the priestess. (The wardogs do best when they have a designated person that is ‘theirs’ and they aren’t happy about having to share. They can be made to, but the resultant ‘sibling rivalry’ can be a bit wearing on their person. Which is why the prince is getting to be ‘owned’ by one of the pair). The price is some lower level gear from our loot stash to outfit some of the younger clan members (need to figure out which gear offline). And since Presmyslaw was gifted with a breeding pair of guard dogs some time ago, that would double the potential number of puppies that will be available in his capital, once the priestess returns home. The dogs come with their own armor. The priestess will send to us when she's ready for her lift home.
Break here. We’ll figure out which leads we want to run down next time.

GM Note: Giving Miroslav a guard dog was a much better move than it appears to be – those are reasonably distinctive guards, the presence of one forces Eleduath to wonder if Arandor is officially interfering here, and how far they’d be willing to go to protect Miroslav. Since she’s already gained a good chunk of what she was after, she’s likely to decide the risk isn’t worth the gain.



We pick up where we left off, the same day we left off. Moonbeam tries scrying on our list of plotters that don't have scrying protections that evening, so we can gather info before interrogating the priestess's corpse. The first target, Yevhen, resists the attempt. The second fails. Moonbeam sees Lykke, a very nondescript young woman, but it’s her surroundings that are interesting - she is rifling through papers in an office in Prezmyslaw's palace. That's something we weren't expecting to see. Moonbeam casts detect magic to see what else she can see in the room with Lykke, but only sees an abjuration on the door. So, being able to see the location through the scry, Aqila teleports us all into the office with her, and Moonbeam leads off with baleful polymorph, succeeding on her second try. We figure out quickly that this is a tax records office. Lykke’s dress and a bottle of oddly colored ink fall to the floor. It's the same color of the ink on the records.
Aqila then leaves to go let Prezmyslaw/his security detail know that a probable plotter was rifling through papers in one of his clerk’s offices, and would he like to be involved in the interrogation? He comes to the scene of the crime quickly, and we find that she had been looking at Baron Havryil's tax records for the last ten years. There are signs that she had been preparing the documents for forgery - some numbers have been scratched off in preparation. Aqila uses Silent Image to show the king what the sloth looked like, and Prezmyslaw doesn't recognize her. OOC - she as a newly hired maid, and she is not a caster.
Dagnar casts detect thoughts on himself and Prezmyslaw so he can be in on the interrogation. She's in a wild panic before we start asking questions. She was paid to get into the palace and alter the records for Taras, Havryil, and the baron south of Havryil. She was making Havryil look like he'd been grossly underpaying his taxes, which is treason. She knew what numbers she was supposed to change the tax records too, but wasn’t paying enough attention to remember which numbers had been there originally. Mykyta's clerks had been responsible for maintaining the tax records until recently, and Prezmyslav was undertaking a substantial review of the records and hadn't gotten to this room yet. Prezmyslaw gets some of his clerks in, to examine the documents. She had finished Taras's documents, which now show him making proper payments.
On being asked who hired her, she was hired by a somewhat reclusive, wealthy merchant, who has a manor about a day's ride from Taras's capital. We turn her back, Joe hands her her dress, then we turn her over to Prezmyslaw and get out of his hair. Lykke was the last person we knew didn't have scrying protection. Moonbeam tries the others, and fails on all three due to what feels like Private Sanctum or something similar.
We take a day to relax and run errands while Moonbeam rehearses for her planned Dream spell to fill Miroslav in on some facts of life. Moonbeam's second attempt to scry on Yevhen works. She sees a very heavily armored man currently in sword practice with a much lighter armored person. The focus implies the heavily armored guy is Yevhen. The surroundings look like a drill yard of a fairly large fortress. Joe decides to see if he can figure out where this guy is. He uses master earth, while being a cat, to pop in near the fortress, which he can now see is engraved with symbols of Makarn. He can see a crowd of people watching the bout.
Joe tries to blend in and wait for the end of the bout to see if the Yevhen takes off his helmet. After the bout, both combatants do, and Joe manages to get a good enough look at the heavily armed one to recognize him via description - he looks like he's the priest we killed's body guard, the one that terrorized the female slaves in the temple. The other guy isn't familiar at all.
Before Joe has a chance to slink off, a grizzled dwarf carrying a heavy warhammer walks towards him. "Well, I've never seen a cat like you around here before. On the odd chance that's its another one of you, would you tell your fellows to leave us alone?" Joe meows and flops catlike. Then he sees a small amulet hanging off the dwarf's armor...a book crossed with a sword, meaning he's an adherent of the One. Joe continues feigning catness, and the dwarf shrugs and wanders off, at which point Joe heads back. He does do a detour to his family because that's where we'd taken the survivors from the temple to recover, and confirms that Yevhen is the priest's bodyguard without inflicting further trauma on the survivors. Moonbeam tries the three protected people again. Isay and Khariton are still in a sanctum. Ruzha isn't, but apparently has a scrying redirect up. Which lets her see an empty field with a small pond, because we all have mindblank up. It does tell us that she must be a fairly formidable spellcaster, and she can infer that it was either a primal spellcaster trying to snoop on her, or a mage being sneaky.
We get a good night's sleep and then interrogate the corpse. Her list of important people matches the Priest's mostly, except she doesn't list Lykke and lists a name that 'was important' that is likely the priest we killed. That was two questions. Asking about The Hammer, she tells us that he's important to the part of the plot involving the army, and she thinks he's some sort of general. Isay is described as a twisted and creepy man. He took over a merchant's manor and she believes it was somewhere in the baronies, but isn't sure. All she knows about Ruzha's part in the plot was to bring the Shenean temple into it. She doesn't know where Khariton is, but she knows a lot about what he was doing. It takes two questions to find out that his job was to organize a raiding force from Amerel to ravage the coasts in Miroslav's area - to orchestrate matters so that Miroslav gets to win a crushing victory against them after they seem to be an irresistible force. He'd had some difficulties recruiting, but that wouldn't delay the plan by more than a few months. After spending another question, we find the attacks were supposed to be coming in two weeks, but he in his last assurance said it would take an extra three weeks. She thinks it would take him a few months, and then we're into winter, which would be a delay due to storms, so spring is likely when it'll hit, and they'll be more ferocious. This is probably something we need to deal with before it becomes a problem.
Her temple is on the island off the coast, but the exact location may be problematic - it's under a noble's manor, not connected, and he doesn't know it's there. And it's only being maintained by one acolyte, so that's a soft target. We asked about temples, and the only ones she knows about are ones we know about - e.g. Makarn's temple that Joe visited. For a final question, we ask if she knows where any other masters of poison are. She doesn't. So Aqila writes up three copies of the notes, and drops one off with Prezmyslaw and Arandor. Note, the Reshanans helping with the interrogations would like us to go after Ruzha first...Shenea is on the top of their **** list.
We go knock over the island temple quickly, which is trivial. And tell the noble whose land it's on that his ghost problem is over, and show him the temple. He can't give us a reward commiserate with our service to him, but he gives us his seal as a token that we've done him a favor, that the islanders would recognize. And then he asks us if we're for or against Innokenti. Carefully not all glancing as one at Moonbeam, we assure him we’re firmly against, though his son Miroslav is not cut in same mold as his father, and that we'd done him a favor recently too. He thinks about that contemplatively, and asks us that if we'd come back in a week, there might be someone who would want to speak to us.
And then we get interrupted. Joe gets a message relayed from one of the Fey he'd asked to keep an eye on the locations of the gates Ilene was being compelled to open. The northern most one was started to be opened a few days ago, and the area is starting to freeze over. Also, a local druid seems to have gone mad. He's started burning down the forests around the area. Joe recognizes the signs of someone who's gone Blighter. And the fey say he's yelling something about the fire saving them from the ice. Yay.
The gate is between Brighthaven and the coast, in a sparsely settled area. The only settlements were planted to support Innokenti's living members in the undead army. When we get to the area, we see there's a half-mile swath around the gate that's burned flat. The frost seems to be settling into the bare earth more easily than the living land around it. Then we started talking to the local fey, who tell us that the druid had started by burning a firebreak around the gate, and when the fey objected, he started targeting dryad trees specifically. There used to be 1 dryad/3-4 sq mi before. There are none for 50 miles now. So a few hundred massacred. He's also killing any fey who even try to talk to him about it now.
Joe asks about what forms this guy can take. The satyr tells us that an undead dire bear is the most common. He's also been seen in bat form. He's got an entourage of dead critters, which is why the satyr can't be absolutely sure what things were forms and what were minions. They think he's got another undead dire bear, but they've never seen both bears in the same place at the same time.
OOC, the blighter was nudged to go on his rampage and has been given an idea on what Helvisarn is planning when he comes back. Given the relative threat magnitudes, we decide to deal with the gate first. There's a half-mile clearing around it, so he's not going to sneak up on us. Aqila summons a Movanic Deva, being immune to cold, to see if it can find the gate's focus. We show it the piece from the last gate before it flies in. And have Moonbeam cast greater vigor to counteract the cold damage that ignores cold immunity.
It takes ten rounds, but the Deva has a good spot check, and successfully finds the sliver and brings it to us. Removing the sliver closes the gate. And about then, an undead sparrow crashes at our feet with a note tied to it ordering us not to meddle with the gate. Bit too late! We look around, and Thoron can see some large shapes in the edge of the trees. We don't have any reason to think that the undead mean us any good, and Joe especially isn't interesting in talking. We buff up, then advance to long range and prepare to open fire.

Joe casts control winds as the undead move out of the woods. 3 dire bears, 8 dire wolves, and a half dozen oozing things. Aqila spends a bracelet charge to quicken a spell and wipes five of the wolves out in two screeching maximized sonicballs. The survivors are grouped enough for Dagnar to hit them with a regular sonicball and he uses the rod to sonicball the bears too. There is no apparent effect. Moonbeam drops a rain of roses, centered on the bears. The bears show no obvious effects, but the oozes are now glowing green. Two of them take off at a good clip and appear to be vectoring towards Thoron. At 120ft flight speed. The grounded ones move 40. She then shies Moonbolts at the right and center bear. The center bear succumbs and collapses inert. Thoron starts summoning an elemental. Joe casts Boreal Winds at the flying oozes. They start glowing more brightly green. Aqila shies one chain magic missile at the oozes, and it ricochets to all of them. They're really glowing now. So the next one goes to the bears. Noticeable chunks of undead bear fly off. Dagnar fireballs the bears, again to no visible effect. The bears run to get out of the rain. The oozes keep oozing. The bear Moonbeam moonbolted continues lying in the rain.
Thoron's air elemental pops in and charges towards the flying oozes at top speed. Thoron starts summoning another one. Moonbeam is casting summon storm elemental. She also casts Avalanche on the oozes. The snow is melting unnaturally fast. The flying oozes close another 240 feet. Joe uses Boreal winds to push one of the bears back 50 feet. Then he avalanches the flying oozes to ground them, and manages to bury one. Aqila targets the leading bear with a forceball after flying up enough to see them over the pile of snow. The bears will have to go around it now. Chunks fly. Dagnar tries to be sneaky and goes invisible and dimdoors to 40 ft in front of the charging bear in the lead. It sees him and casts something at him. Dagnar feels like something tried to rip him apart. Thoron notices the lead bear casting and spreads the word that the blighter has been spotted and flies to close to medium range with the bear. The air elemental closed with the oozes, may get an AOO next round. At 60 ft away, it needs to make a will save, and just saves. Moonbeam's storm elemental shows up, and she sends it charging towards the blighter. It shocks the blighter. The still flying ooze flies back towards the blighter. The air elemental gets an AOO, and lands a weak hit.
Joe wildshapes a giant octopus, master-earths 30 ft from the blighter & boreal winds the other bear. pushed back again 50 ft. Aqila is running low on things that won't hit allies, so she tries a blistering fireball. No visible effect. Dagnar has the black blade of disaster out. Between the damage from that and the follow-up, the blighter bear is badly battered but still standing. Then he casts harm on himself. 150 hps restored. Thoron is up. He uses his circlet of blasting to zap the blighter, then casts mass snake swiftness. Dagnar disintegrates the blighter this time. A glowing blue crown falls to the ground, melting away as we watch, radiating the very familiar sensation of Mad God. Moonbeam sends the storm elemental to go beat up the still flying ooze. It liberally splatters the ground with bits of huge ooze. She sees the splatters on the ground make the earth look even more dead than it was. She then uses master earth to get into range of the other bear and obliterates it with an empowered flame strike. That leaves 4 oozes that are almost melted out, one still buried, and a badly battered flying ooze. It attacks the air elemental and fails to grapple it. The four ooze their way out of the snow.
Joe flies for the whole round towards the ooze. Aqila starts summoning a celestial elephant. Dagnar uses his not resisted energy spheres spell to attack the flying ooze, successfully. Thoron's air elemental's slams and his blast of sand finish it off. At this point, given that it's after 6, we assume that we're able to dispatch the rest. If nothing else, the octopus can hover out of range and bash them to death. And breaking here. We’ll figure out what targets we want to knock over next.

Terane
2020-05-01, 08:08 AM
We discussed what we did to Miroslav a few sessions back. In a nutshell, the priestess is going to need to stay with him for more than a few months to put his brains back together properly. And we incurred an obligation to keep her safe by asking for her help. So, the pair of dogs Aqila negotiated with her brother for are primarily to keep the priestess alive, and payment for services rendered, but as a bonus, the male bonded to Miroslav will be available to help keep him in one piece for 8-9 years. And since we have an interest in keeping him alive as being a relatively decent sort whose power base is Presyslav northern border. If he stays neutral, or even becomes friendly with his southern neighbor, that helps stabilize this area of the world, and that's a good thing. So, in the interest of the whole 'keeping alive' thing, Thoron awakened Rumble, the male we're giving to Miroslav. The wardog came by his name honestly, with a floor-vibrating growl, and a room-shaking charge when he has cause to go eat something. We're not telling Miroslav about the awakening thing, the dog knows his job is to keep Miroslav and the priestess alive (until she goes home) and we're giving him a collar of sending so he can let us know if something 'interesting' happens that might require more back-up. Won't necessarily let us intervene, but we can help pick up the pieces afterwards.
Everything is quiet on the Ilene front now, so we're going back to unraveling the Deiliana plot, since the Reshanans and Prezmyslaw would like us to deal with the temple of Shenea near their country, and our currently lead is a 'twisted and creepy' priest who's taken over a rich merchant's mansion who may know someone who knows where it is. We teleport about an hour's walk out from the mansion to approach on foot and see what the local wildlife thinks about the area. As we get closer, the critters, especially the smaller ones, are freaked out about invisible killers. So, just in case, we start scouting around to see what we see. Half an hour later, we see an imp, invisible, grab a squirrel. So we sic Thoron on it to try to take it alive so we can question it.
It looks a lot like Sneezil when we first met him, with a greenish cast to its skin. Moonbeam remembers a bit about demons, and thinks that may mean that imp has a more virulent poison, and Dagnar vaguely remembers that some authorities believe those imps have a connection to Deiliana. We try to question the imp, and it does chat with us. We discover that it likes brains, its master is tall, skeletally thin, and kind of greasy looking, he and his brothers are supposed to keep an eye out for anyone wandering around and then ask master what to do with them, which is apparently been 'kill'. They've killed 4 people so far, 1 forester and 3 poachers, based on what Dagnar is seeing with detect thoughts. 'Home' for master is an unfinished looking but complete dwelling, which is the mansion we're heading too. On being asked how many imps there are on patrol, he starts counting. We stop him around 60, that being enough to know 'lots'. Moonbeam asks what his master has been up to - answer is 'Summoning bigger help'. Oh, joy.
Joe asks if his master has any friends. 'Scary Lady!'. It's not someone Dagnar has seen before, with a demonic cast to her features...IE purple eyes. We determine that that is master's helper, not master. And that Master has a master, Big Master, who sent imps, aka Queen. We find that more imps come all the time, through a gate, and the gate is in Master's house. And that the imps are supposed to report back regularly, but it's a long interval. 4 hours intervals. We try seeing if we can get any info about magic items and spells master knows. We get a little info - he knows enchantment spells, has multiple spheres around him, and that's about it.
Having drained this information source, Thoron invokes a karmic retribution on him by turning him into a squirrel. We approach the mansion carefully, and see a swarm of imps outside the gate and more circling the walls. The mansion is 130' on its longest side. After watching for a few minutes, invisibly, we see a man in armor moving robotically towards the gate. He talks to the imps and lurches back inside the walls. He looks like he's dominated. Given what we know about the 'master', that's in keeping with his enchantment spells.
We plot. Moonbeam summons four huge earth elemental to erupt out of the ground and create chaos outside. Aqila goes in early to cast illusory wall and passwall to make an entrance into the tallest tower, then summons a small flock of Celestial Eagles to pick off imps that survive Joe’s contribution. Then as Moonbeam and Joe and Thoron fly into the tower, Dagnar saps the dominated guy and brings him along. Then Joe casts Avalanche with all the trimmings to take out all the imps in one go. As the imps are crushed, the elementals start noisily stomping towards the doors of the mansion, and an unearthly howl is emitted from the tops of all four towers. We leave Thoron outside to watch and report. He sees two 12' icy demon looking dudes teleport in behind the elementals. The eagles are flying around looking for imps to splat.
A voice echoes directionlessly, "You might want to take more care in your attack. It would be a pity if you killed those you came to rescue." Okay, so we know there are hostages in here. Duly noted. We start descending the tower. On floor four of seven, we see a cat radiating necromancy. We gently defenestrate the cat with a few treats to keep it outside on the snow. It had meowed hungrily at us, so we figured that would work. We reach the ground floor with no incidents, and Dagnar opens the unlocked door into the main mansion.
The scene that greets is half a dozen people in rags with the glazed look of the Dominated, a few dozen cats radiating abjuration and necromancy, and a greasy looking fellow with several translucent orbs around him. So regular and lesser globe of invulnerability, force immunity. Bleh. Aqila leads off with reciprocal Gyre, and eats it because of spell turning. 20 damage, but that strips some of his spell turning off, at least. Joe casts an area dispel and strips the abjuration magic off the kittens and spell turning off of the priest. Irony, though we don’t know that IC. He quickens another one and takes heroism off the priest and leaves only a dozen cats radiating necromancy. Step two is Aqila spending her move action to throw some munchies over her shoulder while Joe 'kittykittys', which gets most of them out of the room, and wild empathy convinces the rest of them to move into the tower. Moonbeam summons some rats to run up the tower next round and lead the cats away from us and the probable hostages. Dagnar uses another charge on the dispelling wand to target the priest. He stripped 7 buffs off.
And that ends the surprise round. The priest casts prismatic sphere, which blinds the hostages. The lady (purple-eyed) casts Trap the Soul at Dagnar. He has bracers of spell turning. The reflect doesn't even overcome her own spell resistance. Joe starts summoning a unicorn because its Magic Circle against Evil will temporarily suppress the domination spells and let the hostages leave of their own volition. And quickens a cast of Daylight so it strips the appropriate layer when we deconstruct the sphere. Dagnar casts haste on everyone who needs it. Moonbeam starts summoning a dire bear. Aqila uses cone of cold to take off the first layer of the sphere. The lady is still inside the opaque sphere. The priest steps into the corner and then casts a prismatic wall. Yay.
The unicorns appear and their magic circle against evil effect suppresses the effects of the enchantment spells. Their looks of glazed blankness are replaced by horror, but they are coaxable so the unicorns start guiding the blinded victims into the other tower where they'll be out of the blast radius. Moonbeam, realizing the bear ain't fitting behind the wall, summons a huge earth elemental instead, which goes through the floor into the cellar, and then tries to reach up through the floor to grab the priest. He misses. Moonbeam gusts of wind the sphere. Dagnar uses Night’s Move to teleport behind the priest and start with the backstabbery. Greater dispelling is turned into a ray to attack, and is deflected. His first main hand hit is a crit. Next attack is a hit, as is the next. The total damage is about 60% of the priest's health. Aqila disintegrates the sphere and quickens a passwall to strip two layers. The priest teleports away. Lovely. Moonbeam has the elemental check the sphere. It's empty, so the lady bugged out too. Crap. Aqila was told by Moonbeam that her elemental saw the portal downstairs, rippling like something is trying to come through, so Aqila passwalls the floor and goes down to seal the portal. Meanwhile, Moonbeam sees the priest picking up cats. He just teleported into the tower.
Joe opens the door, yells RUN KITTIES RUN with natural empathy to try to scare the cats upstairs. All of them run except the one that the priest had a hand on, and then Joe greater dispels the priest and quicken kelp-strands. And Dagnar, who dimension doored out from behind the wall while Moonbeam scryed, zaps the priest with dimensional anchor so he doesn't go away again. And then Moonbeam turns him into a sloth.
The lady pops in behind the sloth, hand glowing, and pauses in confusion for a moment because there is a sloth, not a human, there. The elemental smashes the demon. Dagnar dashes over, grabs the sloth, and dim doors behind the prismatic wall. (Except the priest had been dimensionally anchored, so that wouldn’t have actually work, in hindsight. RETCON: Dagnar grabs the sloth and runs. Same outcome) Aqila pops back up through the floor to the yells of 'Anchor the bitch' and follows the pointing finger to see the demon lady. Her first dim anchor misses, so she blows a charge to quicken a follow-up. That hits. Joe shifts to dire lion and, as he puts it, charges it to maul the **** out of her. It's all subdual damage. Because we have death wards, the Destruction spell she has readied won't actually do anything to us. The demon just passes out. Moonbeam tries mummify to see what happens, and we now have a demon mummy. Which starts disintegrating into dust rapidly.
Aqila makes sure no immediate fires need put out, then prepares a few more instances of teleport and casts invisibility to make sure our contact the priest of Talast is alone before shanghai'ing him. He is, and once he's been brought up to speed, starts recommending people to be brought in to help with this mess. Joe uses control winds to blow the snow up and away to be an inch blanket around the region, then settles in to start dispelling control spells on the victims. Aqila rounds up the recommended rescue party and brings them in on foot, to avoid showing off too much. The general reaction is consternation that they missed this big a mess. They are probably curious about why we aren't on the ship still, but they were picked for a disinclination to ask awkward questions.
(ooc, the gate rippling did indicate something coming through, it was a horned devil. This was an important operation.)
Since the sloth’s gear neatly fell to the floor, we can easily scoop it up before anyone else showed up, and identify it later. When we do, the list is as follows: Two metamagic rods, one quicken, one mass. One monk's belt. +6 wisdom amulet with +2 int. +4 agility boots with expeditious retreat 3x/day. +4 con belt with +4 to poison and disease saves. Coronet +6 to will and +2 to compulsion spell saves. A staff with death throes with transfer metamagic 1 charge, and destruction and disintegrate 2 charges each. 11 charges left.



A debate ensues on how to get the answers we need. Live or dead, location, preparations beforehand, etc. After much talking, the call is live, at the mansion, inside Mage's Private Sanctum, with the priest of Talas casting tongues on the sloth so it can talk to all of us, and being in on the interrogation because he's also been investigating this mess, with mind-blank up to force Deiliana to possess him if she wants to eavesdrop, with repeat rays of stupid to minimize how 'clever' his answers will be.
Who sent him here? His Goddess. Who are your underlings? He starts naming imps. What was going to come through your portal? More demons. (he was told he'd be getting something powerful enough to deal with any possible threat, but we don't find out who was supplying.) We ask if he left anything dangerous in the mansion. Yes, but he doesn't give specifics until we press him, at which point he fesses up that he'd thoroughly mined the mansion with triggered traps to remind his victims what they went through, enough that he doesn't think we can possibly find them all. The priest of Talas is manifestly unhappy, and the healer looks like she wants to rend him limb from limb.
On being asked if he knows where any temples are, he says he doesn't know, and doesn't expect us to believe him. We do, but he doesn't realize that, and he's scared, so he volunteers that 'Ruzha would know'. We discover that she is 'running everything' and 'she moves around a lot, she could be many places'. On being pressed, we get three different descriptions of her. She gave him 'just a little help' taking over the mansion. The demon we killed is identified as 'my junior partner'.
Because he looks confused when LTW comments 'she seemed eager to become the senior partner', Aqila plays a little silent image movie for him, showing her assassination attempt on him. "I'm not surprised, except that she was so incompetent at it." He doesn't give us a reason for why he chose this mansion. (ooc, he wanted a secure base of operations that no one would think to look at. The family was a bonus to play with). He's originally from the minor kingdoms. We don't recognize which one.
His biggest rival was Elizavita. We killed her already. The special extra powers he was granted were boosts to his enchantments. He knows of no others with these specific boons. He knows Elizavita and Ruzha, and no other names. Moonbeam asks him what sort of spells Ruzha casts. He's never really seen her use spells. He assumes she can teleport, since she does seem to be in more than one place at a time.
He thinks she's weaker than he is, and doesn't know why she was chosen to be in charge. He thinks he'd be much better at it. Aqila checks to see if the priest of Talas has anything he'd like answered, without obviously participating in this, and he suggests asking about anything he knows about the Shenaen temple. Aqila asks the sloth this, and we find that it's somewhere north of here (we'd previously been told that it was somewhere in the East Wall) and that they're working on something big, and have needed help getting demons and elementals to distill down. Oh, yay.
We press him more about Ruzha. He knows that she's a notable hostess in a city to the north...holding parties for the rich and famous. He doesn’t know what city. On being asked about who gets invites, he lets drop that it's a mix of people to maintain her cover and people that would be useful to the plot. North is more north than the Ferial, we gather.
He frantically wracks his brans for useful details, and says that Ruzha has contacts at the Silver Ridge academy...working with one of the instructors, who probably doesn't know who she really is. He's very unsure about these details...one of the battle mage instructors. In one of her guises, she usually travels with what he thinks is a golem bodyguard of some sort. Doesn't have it for the other two guises she uses.
We're out of ideas for questions. We have no reason to keep him alive, and the rest of the party is overly amused by the idea of mage vs sloth, staff edition. First, on the off chance someone else is working this, Aqila quickly finished writing up the notes and takes them to Arandor. And happens to catch Valrim, who recalls a detail that may be relevant - in the Aerodonese capital, a few years ago a new hostess came on the scene and rose to prominence quickly, but the agent on the scene didn't find any reason for worry. Under the circumstances, double-checking that report might be worthwhile. He's also a bit alarmed at the idea that they missed a Shenean research temple, but considers us able to handle the investigation and intelligent enough to yell for help if we need it.
Valrim also mentions that there's someone who might be able to get us into one of the parties, but we'll have to do him a favor. He'll also direct people to research through old reports to see if there are any relevant details that might be useful. Aqila realizes that this project is probably going to require scrounging up Aerodonese party clothes. Oh, yay. (Aerodon culture is in a very hedonistic phase among the nobility, currently being expressed as a competition to see who can wear the least amount of clothing in all weathers, without Baring All, because that would just be gauche.)
So she bounces back to fill the rest of the party in, dispatch the sloth, drop the corpse off with the rest of them, and fill in Presmyslav and the priests on the latest developments. They are happy that we're on the trail of someone who knows where the temple of Shenea is, less happy about hearing what they were wanting for reagents for experiments, and will be making discreet inquiries at the academy to see if they can find Ruzha from that end.
Then we spent the night in Arandor to rest up before going to Aerodon to meet the contact. The hostess’s name turns out to be Runa. He thinks that he could get two of us in to her next party, as his invited guests. Which begs the question, how the rest of us are getting in. Which brings up the idea of gate-crashing. And a reminder that we have that magical flying coach. And given how rare and valuable Arandoran lingerie is, that might just be enough to talk past the bouncer.
The contact's price for helping us is something off his short list of minor rarities. Arandoran lingerie, specifically. And with Aqila making a point to learn Alter Self, we all can fit ourselves to Aerodon costumes from the stash in Arandor, which makes the problem of finding appropriate garb easier.
The plan is for Aqila and Dagnar to go as guests. She is going to try to surreptitiously mark Runa so we can see if she shows up in the Ferial in another guise. Moonbeam and Joe are buffing themselves up to be maximally distracting.
Much rapid shuffling of gear to ensure maximum stats retained. Aqila makes some time to scare up some vials of various scents. We decide to pass as Almaerans, as a reasonably plausible nationality that would have the cachet of being foreign, and a cover for not knowing the minutia of Aerodonese culture.
The gate crashing is successful, and Aqila and Dagnar enter without comment. The girls notice an extremely subtle and long-lasting enchantment spell designed to both make the victim kindly disposed to the hostess and be undetectable. The room is a large and open ballroom, with what looks like a rough floor with gems set into it, but it feels perfectly smooth. An invisible orchestra is playing in the background.
Joe finds an opportunity to use power sight on Runa. 20. A few minutes after we arrive, there's a sudden commotion at the entrance. Runa heads that way trying not to look like she's in a hurry. Then there's an announcement that the crown princess of Aerodon, Louhi, has arrived. Joe also sees her hit dice. 22. He watches her interaction with Runa...outwardly they are being very friendly, but he can detect distinct strands of hostility there. Why they are hiding a strong mutual dislike, we have no idea. There are about 100 people at this party.
There is no sign of anything living inside the room. No servants in sight either. Or alcoves. Aqila hadn't moved too far from the entrance, and can overhear the conversation between Louhi and Runa. It's mainly pleasantries, some obviously overloaded lines with meanings beyond the surface, and one line that seems significant, Runa inquiring after the health of the princess's pets. Joe notices a malicious undertone. Aqila just hears a friendly malice. Given her concentration on the princess at the moment, Aqila takes the opportunity to stealthily mark Runa.
Joe thinks the princess notices what Aqila did, but Runa didn't. Interesting. Moonbeam was attracting attention before the princess showed up, but that drew off a fair crowd. Joe lets Aqila know that she was noticed, and we agree that Aqila is in the best position to approach the princess to engage her in conversation. Given her background, and what's she's pretending to be, she tries a discussion of the flora of the Chaos Continent and their uses as a gambit to be entertaining. (DM rolls double 20's. The gambit is a wild success. The princess is intrigued. A new conversational craze will soon sweep Aerodon).
Meanwhile, Moonbeam runs across a man who's been through the entrance enchantments way too many times and is absolutely infatuate with Runa. She gets Runa's schedule for hosting, which includes gaps when she's not here...none longer than 3 days, though. He thinks that those are just times when she's preparing for something special, helped by the fact that she tends to throw spectacular parties when she resurfaces.
Dagnar tries circulating to gather information, and gets largely useless datums about the local nobles. He ends up flirting with Moonbeam briefly and gets slapped for his efforts. Joe 'gets the phone number' of the 4th prettiest girl in the room. He does discover that the princess is quite popular, with a reputation for kindness. Inger is taken with Joe. Moonbeam meanders, looking for a slightly older man to feign being a gold digger and solicit information about parties. He's one of the princess's partisans and isn't very good at hiding his dislike of Runa. His opinion of Runa is that she's an upstart, is almost certain he has evidence that she's been using enchantments. Moonbeam 'let's slip' that that young man she'd talked to earlier seemed to have an almost magical enthrallment with Runa.
Meanwhile, it occurs to Dagnar that using alter aura to make it more obvious that there really is an enchantment spell might kick up some excitement. So he sneaks the homunculus out of the carriage to the door (the door guard sees it, assumes squirrel) and tweaks the spell's aura. Moonbeam tells the suspicious gentleman 'Hey, the door looks odd' as pandemonium erupts. Aqila isn’t too far from the door, as she has been playing Kaylee with an audience that is looking for material to use on the princess. Everyone who has detect magic/arcane sight/true seeing brings it up, so we join in. Moonbeam uses True Seeing, Dagnar Arcane sight, detect magic Aqila. Joe's sampling the crowd’s power levels sees an average of 5-9 with at least one other 18. And Joe approaches the princess in the chaos.
"Well, this is an interesting development, he comments."
Reply, "And probably an unfortunate one."
Meanwhile, Moonbeam, watching the door, sees the real enchantment effect vanish, leaving just the fake aura behind. Dagnar kills the fake as soon as MB tells him. MB uses the chaos to brand Runa for scrying purposes. She does not notice anyone noticing her spell.
Joe's next conversational gambit is "Do such things happen often around here?" "It is not uncommon for someone to try to embarrass a popular individual." "Ah, is that what happened?" "Of course. Anything else would be unthinkable." Joe continues, "The men in here all seem very taken with you. They have good taste but no subtlety" "Perhaps while you are visiting, you will have the opportunity to attend one of my small affairs. We will have to see if there is something suitable." Joe gets the impression that she finds him interesting but he can't discern why. He also thinks she thinks she knows something more about him that he isn't showing.
Meanwhile, Runa is doing her best to pretend nothing happened. Two sets of reactions predominate. Most people are following her lead. A smaller group is obviously upset about it. Dagnar sees that the upset group aren't affected, as are about half the group that is blowing it off. Joe's sense motive indicates that most of the people are only pretending that they think nothing happened. Dagnar determines that Runa and Louhi are casters, who have 10th and 11th level spells prepared, respectively.
The group Aqila is hanging with is the less politically adept group who has more people that can't conceal that they are upset. She tries to gently pick up local gossip from the group. The most useful detail is that several of them think Runa would be able to teach her something about exotic plants. Also, that Runa keeps a greenhouse, and sometimes throws garden parties. Something to investigate later.
Joe goes gathering gossip. Apparently there are regular attempts to gather scandalous dirt on Runa There were reports that she had a strange gentleman caller that shows up every 5-6 months. Maybe soon, based on that schedule.
Dagnar makes inquiries on whether the level of enchantments on the guests are unusual, to someone else who had arcane sight up, get him intel that while it seems rather high, but minor nobles do use enchantments for feel-good reasons. Dagnar gets a friendly warning that technically one requires authorization to use arcane sight, and while under these circumstances it may be overlooked, spreading around that he noticed something might bring questions on how he knew.
Because the princess essentially accepted Joe's phone number, all the other women, including the hostess, are acting wary of him until they can tell if the princess's attention is positive or negative.
Our contact is a little annoyed that there was a commotion, but doesn't think that anyone's associated us with it, which ameliorates his ire somewhat, or at least figures that Moonbeam or Joe is getting the blame for it, not the two of us who came as guests of his, and the fact that Aqila made a favorable impression on the crown princess, means that he found it a reasonably successful but somewhat hard on the nerves evening.
We head back to Arandor to give back borrowed gear, and report the intelligence gathered, namely the level of the princess, the level of Runa, and the enchantments. It had been known that the princess was formidable but not how much.
Moonbeam had a go at using her Stalker’s Brand as a scrying focus for Runa, but that evening’s scrying attempt failed due to mage's private sanctum, so we just get some sleep and head south in the morning to meet up with the Kantorans and let them know what we’d dug up so far. The temple priests have been working through the list of mages at the academy who are working on projects with outside help. They've eliminated all the ones they don't need special permission to get more information, the rest that do need special permission are projects specifically for the crown. There are a couple projects that we may be interested in, based on sensitivity. One is better methods to dispatch undead, which requires a certain ability to create undead to test. The second one is a project aiming at a practical mass production of golems.



Before we can follow up on anything we learned at the party, Joe gets a confused message from one of the fae that he'd asked to watch the gates. It boils down to 'Something happened and I don't know if it’s important or not.' along with an impression of a powerful being watching the gate, from this side. The most intel we can get on it from the fae is that this being is a hunter.
The gate is in a very isolated region, North and West of Brighthaven, towards the Leferian border in Asferia. The nearest village is about 50 miles away. (OOC - there's a reason it's isolated. No one wants to live there). Before sticking our heads in a hornet's nest, Moonbeam scrys on the Fae who contacted us originally so we can get a bit more information. The fae's slightly more detailed message is that it's one of the Old Ones waking up, and we get an impression that the fae isn't sure they should be helping us spy on them, a disinclination to offend the 'Old One'.
Joe knows that 'Old Ones' have a limited range (but could be anything from half a mile to a few hundred), that there are different types, of varying dispositions, and the proper way to greet one varies. We'd rather not pick a fight with someone we don't have to, so we discuss 'offerings' we could scrounge up to get on its good side so we can close the portal when the time comes without fighting two battles at once.
Oh, and we did learn that the weather around the portal has been pretty normal, except for a cold front that went through a few days ago. Unusual, but not necessarily unnatural. Joe would like to try to figure out if it wasn't natural by scouting around the portal and talking to the local critters to see if it was a very localized effect or behaved more like a normal weather pattern.
There are critters who report that it had been colder than usual along a line in the area. Which doesn't tell us if it was a normal front or something following a person around. Just proves it wasn't a localized phenomenon.
So, we round up a selection of offerings, and bounce about 50mi from the portal to ride in. Moonbeam makes sure we have the most souped-up versions of the stags in cause of trouble. About ten miles in, we realize we have an escort. Ebon-black hounds. We get the impression that they too are really taking it easy on the speed. Joe tries wild empathy on one and gets a warning growl in return. We also get the impression that they are escorting us to a specific place, that we're on the path to right now.
We keep going until the dogs stop us about half a mile from the gate. We pause, and a ten-foot tall figure steps out. He's carrying a spear, with a bow slung, and his armor is constantly shifting. Occasionally he's wearing a horned helm.
Aqila vaguely recalls her instructors mentioning a type of rare fae (rare as in seen 3 times in the last 2000 years), which this fae vaguely resembles. All three times, the fae hunted down a single target that they killed, brought back to life, and killed again until dawn. The victims all were alive at dawn, left with a vivid memory of being killed repeatedly. The dogs also resemble the dogs reported from those past incidents, except they are much larger.
We greet him, he asks us if we're seeking the lady of ice, and Aqila tells him “Yes, because she's being compelled.” He asks us if we're there to close the portal, and Aqila says that is specifically why we're here. Joe gives her a side-eye because he hasn’t figured out that her prior acts of fibbery were in service to maintaining cover, and we aren’t pretending to be something else here. The Hunter tells us that if we approach any closer to the portal, he will be forced to kill us. He makes no hostile moves, just calmly informs us of this. If we want to persist, either we need to defeat him in battle..more hounds are appearing as we talk...or, we can successfully compete in a hunt.
Joe is rather emphatic that we don’t want to appear as prey here, but as the conversation continues, it’s obvious that, basically, the hunter wants to help us. He can't do anything to give us information unless we ask the questions, but he seems willing to tell us anything not specifically forbidden. We learn that the hunt would not be a 'hunt of vengeance', the dusk to dawn hunt, but a 'capture the flag' deal. He shows us a golden goblet, which is the traditional target. He would leave the goblet somewhere in an extraplanar location, and we’d have to find it before he kills us all. He shows us a mile in radius circular forested valley, surrounded by cliffs riddled with caves. He won't put the goblet somewhere you have to fly to, but won't promise it would be easy to get to. Impression is that he is trying to rig the dice in our favor as much as possible, but he's compelled to at least make it look like he's rigging it in his.
He'll deliberately limit himself to the abilities of his lesser brethren to make this a 'fair' contest, which is bad enough. His lesser brethren are pretty nasty. Really good archers, permanent true sight, stories of arrows that can grow to ridiculous sizes, though they don't use magic much. They do have an innate knowledge of the direction of their prey, but not the distance. Also, they can fly, but we don't know how fast. The dogs' bites can apply a dimensional anchor attack. They have a terrifying howl, probably mind affecting, so no worries there. And bites on the run are more damaging than if they stop to bite.
Further inquiries about how the hunt would work, let us find out that any spell we can use is permitted. If we want to take a stag with us, he needs a balancing advantage to compensate (2nd level spells, druid list). Also, any damaged hounds or injuries to the hunter, are wiped away between rounds. Energy spent stays spent. Only spells that we can cast ourselves will stay up on us unless we bargain, which lets him use more of his abilities. He'll take 4 hounds into the hunt, the rest will stay out here to keep the rest of us from approaching the gate. And everyone waiting outside can watch the proceedings through the eyes of the current contender, and communicate with them.
Also to note, winning the challenge won't free him from some of the other compulsions he has binding him, but it will let us ask of him a boon that's within his power to perform under his own power. IE could ask him to take a nap for a day. And he will tell us if he can't perform a boon. (He has 50 HD. The dogs have 20).
We're going to send Thoron in first to spam Summon Nature's Ally and turn the field into Eagleland to get the easy obvious hiding places crossed off. He bargains to keep a casting of Invisibility from Aqila up on him when he goes in. Thoron appears near the top of the sphere in the middle. On his first eyeballing of the field, he doesn't see any glints of gold. There are a couple dozen groves of trees scattered evenly around. He starts summoning arrowhawks to help him search the groves. He can't see the goblet in the pool in the middle of the valley, though there are folds to keep it from all being visible from the air. He drops a water elemental in it when he goes past to make sure it's not there. There are 8 more eagles when Thoron is done summoning. He's still invisible.
The search through the trees turns up nothing. Thoron stays up in the air to see if he can see where the hunt comes in. They emerge right in the middle, over the lake. They aren't within 120', so Thoron speeds off away from them towards the edge of the valley to start summoning zorns to search through the caves. The dogs were flying a bit slower than Thoron. The hunter was slower than the dogs, then he summoned a steed that looks like a nightmare, at which point he is faster. Using control winds, diving, and Updraft, that lets Thoron stay out ahead of the hunter long enough to cover about half of the circumference of the valley's cave system with zorns before he gets caught.
As a last-ditch attempt to even the odds, Thoron updrafts twice to do a serious bombing run in an attempt to land a Blinding Spittle on the Hunter. He misses. Visible now, he uses updraft to evade two arrows. Two out of the next 4 arrows hit and deal 87 damage. Thoron tries to blinding spittle the hunter twice because the first one missed. The second one hit, but didn't take. And then Thoron gets turned into a pincushion.
Aqila bargains to take a long list of spells in with her. The hunter is amused. He bargains to use any three of his spells, freely, which he will choose before going in. Aqila pops in where Thoron left off in searching and starts summoning elementals to search caves. She gets off two batches of elementals and covers about a mile before the hunter pops in. She gets another 4 elementals dropped off before he gets too close and she stonewalls her self into a cave. He disintegrates the wall. Apparently that’s one of the three spells he chose. Aqila blasts him in the face with a prismatic spray then teleports across the valley to where Thoron started to start working back the other way. He takes 0 points of electricity damage. Because he's electricity immune.
She's gets 1/8 of the way around going the other way before he gets too close. Aqila decides to blow all three forceballs from her wand before hiding. He can shoot at her too, but it's at really long range. He misses all his shots, as spear sized arrows slam in all around her. The tips look silverish. She does 58 damage to him. And his mount goes poof. So that slows him down.
We abstract away the rest of Aqila's turn because those tactics are fairly effective. We assume that she keeps fireballing him intermittently to discourage mount-resummoning and teleporting to evade until she runs out of energy. She doesn't have time to find the goblet herself, but her elementals can find where it is before she dies. And Moonbeam's turn is next. She has plenty of time to grab the goblet before the hunter would even enter the arena and get too close, thus Moonbeam wins the challenge.

They did a little better than expected here - but this was a challenge deliberately rigged in their favor.

The Hunter warns us that the gate here is becoming active. And that he is bound to kill anyone that closes the gate, so don't. In a 'Please don't go do this thing I just told you about' way. We then try to think of some boons that might give us a guesstimate on his range since he just practically told us that if we stray back into his range, he’s going to be geas bound to try to kill us. Listens-to-wind's first idea: "Outside the city of Naurande, there is an undead army. Please destroy it." Then Aqila has to get a map out to show him where that is. It's too far away. So that’s one data point.
Aqila's proposal for our next attempt is to ask if he would cleanse Brighthaven and its immediate environs of all undead. There's definitely a Nightcrawler there that still needs killing. That is just inside his range, actually. Brighthaven is about 300 miles away. Well, that means we can't visit Leferia until we deal with this whole mess, but we hope that once whoever *cough* Helvisarn *cough* is dealt with, he will no longer be compelled. Before he goes, he also warns us that we might want to be more careful about trusting our fae friends, under the circumstances. (point being, some fae might not know that they could be compelled, because their ancestor bound all their descendants to serve that dude). He also warns us, “As the Old Master draws near, more things are awakening. I do not know for certain, but I think the lady you seek now serves with the Choir of Frost.” And he cannot tell us what that is, which he wasn't expecting. And while there are limits to what he can say, he finishes, “I think, to accomplish what you intend, you'll have to destroy all 8 of them. I can also tell you that she has been somewhat disappointed at the number of gates that are still active. You have at least three days before she reaches the next one." And we only know where the active gates are, not where all the inactive one are. We very carefully don’t say we know that.
He rides off, with a comment, "With the risk that I may have fight you, I reserve from you some knowledge of my abilities". We can figure out that riding is slower, so he's still helping us. The dogs go with him. We give him an hour to get out of range. Aqila takes a nap. Then we approach the gate. It's even colder than the last time. We just need to remove the crystal to destroy the gate, though, so Moonbeam summons an elder Xorn. And a second one to take over if the first one doesn't make it. We go through 9 Xorn before we get the crystal moved far enough away to make the cold stop. Moonbeam gave them all a copper before sending them out as an apology thankyou. When Moonbeam take the crystal from the 9th Xorn, she gets a brief flash of vision - Ilene surrounded by 8 chanting women, completely made of ice.
And discretion being the better part of valor, Aqila teleports the lot of them to the Kantoran temple in Presmyslaw's capital, since we hadn't told them how the party went yet. Then Joe gets a sending from the Aerodonese princess inviting him to a dragon hunt - reports that a large flying lizard destroyed a few farms. They want it to be a pleasant outing, but have enough parties out hunting to actually deal with the threat. He asks if he could bring his 'niece' and a few of his countrymen along to help, and is given assent.
Moonbeam goes to scry on Ilene/Choir of Frost while Aqila gives the Kantorans a rundown of what we learned at the party, and writing out a copy for Presmyslaw. The scrying attempts fail, both on Ilene and the Choir. Aqila tried to describe our garb for the party as 'appropriate for Aerodonese nobility', then Joe helpfully goes into details to the disgruntlement of the hearers. Moonbeam tried to scry on Runa too, who is still in a Sanctum, but it feels like a different one. The detail that gets the priests most disturbed about 'Runa' was her greenhouse full of herbs. Combined with her probably being a Deilianan, who has access to all the elite of Aerodon. Note, the last time Aerodon went through major turmoil, the Ferial got sucked into the melee. Pretty much the whole of the Twin Continents did. Aerodon is only second to Teredor in military power.
They'd also love if we could prove that Runa isn't Ruzha, but they aren't holding out too much hope of it. They are still working on getting more info out of the Silver Ridge academy to see if they can pinpoint which projects Ruzha was involved with.

Terane
2020-05-04, 09:35 AM
We have a few days before Princess Louhi expects us to show up to help organize the dragon hunt. The suspicion is that it was a frost drake responsible for damage, but it is possible that it was a true dragon. So training happens in those few days, along with investigating leads. Joe goes to talk to fae to see if anyone has heard of the Choir of Frost, and some of the older fae think they may vaguely remember something, and if they dig anything up, they'll let him know. One thing that is turned up is that Eltariel may know something and an inquiry will be sent to her. That's the queen of Elethor, who as a side effect of the spell that granted her immortality also has a perfect memory, so if she has ever heard something, she will remember it. Aqila has no luck in the Arandoran library. OOC, any books the Ancients would have had on that subject were stored at Tarevale. AKA long, long gone.

I think mentioned in notes previously, but Tarevale was a volcanic island - whole thing was obliterated at the end of the war with the Ancients. Which is why no books from there are still available.

The local dragons in Arandor has heard rumors that one of the youngsters over in Aerodon has been agitating for a more active response to humanity down there. But he's probably not stupid enough to do anything directly...we're told that he makes Savinel look rash and reckless. So it's theoretically possible that he's caused this problem, but it would be at a distance. We're cautioned that we don't want to give any reasons that would be seen as advancing his agenda. That youngster is seen as a young idiot hot-head, but he's one of the residents of the Ice Teeth, and those are the isolationist, human-hating dragons.
While we're getting ready, given what Aerodonese fashions require, we make sure we have our armor properly cleaned and polished and shined. And make sure we remember which faces we were wearing to Aerodon. Aqila gets someone to do some silkscreening on her robes...some intricate geometric designs that also help out on the camouflaging front.
When we show up around noon, we see that most of the crowd has intricately enameled and lacquered armor. While still a work of art, the Princess Louhi's full plate armor is less ostentatious and more practical – it looks like it might actually get through a battle without major damage to the decorations. We see some people we recognize from the party....nodding acquaintance level. Aqila resumes her persona from the party and wanders around the area looking for any interesting plants, collecting the occasional sample. Joe and Moonbeam make with the small talk.
Before we popped in, Moonbeam gave everyone cold immunity, and Aqila would have filled everyone in on all her frost drake lore...they're pretty common up in Arandor, so she'd know about how often mirrored drakes show up in the population and what sorts of spell-like abilities they could have.
Eventually, the princess acknowledges our existence, and Joe greets her courteously, and thanks her for the invitation. She makes a point to give us a warning that there are true dragons in the mountain and that nobody had better attack one of them unless you can prove for sure that they were involved in the attacks we're investigating, and mistakes may require your life in payment. She'll warn everyone again before the hunt starts. Aqila drifted over when she saw the princess approaching Joe, and allows that she has somewhat more ability in the language of dragons than the average mage. The princess says she will keep that in mind if a situation calls for it.
Louhi's expecting to hear back from the trackers in an hour or two, and has been assured by all the various nobles that they will be ready to move out then. She thinks they will not want to offend her by delaying too long after that, advises us to make ourselves known to her senior officers, because we'll be traveling with her party. The captain of the guard looks fairly tough, and has 18 HD to Joe's Power Sight, named Nyyrikki. He has heavy plate, relatively functional, 2-handed sword, and has a very heavy crossbow. He's been the princess's bodyguard since she was a small child. The weaponsmith and armorer is next - he repairs the princess’ armor in the field. 15 HD, Seppo by name. He'll fix other people’s armor when he has time. The court wizard, named Ilmari. 19 HD. He notes that he does not have a great deal of combat magic. He's a divination specialist, with a smattering of enchantment and illusion. Aqila greets him cheerfully in Ancient, and he responds fluently, then switches to Draconic. Aqila responds in kind, keeping her apparent fluency to be on par or just a touch beyond his.
We fill them in on our competencies. Thoron is pretending to be a familiar, and is noted as a mundane scouting resource. The officers are not happy, because the signs they've found indicate that if it is actually a frost drake, and not a true dragon, it's probably at least a century old, and any abilities it had would be much more dangerous that that age. On asking them what sorts of abilities they'd expect it to have, they mention things like freezing mists, and other cold-based abilities. They've also heard of some more outlandish things, but rarely from reputable sources, though something like a paralyzing gaze has been mentioned by some reputable sources.
Joe uses his weather prediction skills to determine we should have a few clear days for the hunt. For the hunt, the hunters will split up into smaller groups through the wide front the drake may be in. And every group will have a variety of signaling mechanisms so if they find something too nasty for them to handle.
When the trackers get back, they believe they have the general area where it was lairing, but one of them thinks he saw three different sets of tracks - a large set that are the same size as the tracks from the attacks, and the other two are in the mature adult range. The princess gives the order to ride now with everyone who is ready, with a side comment that anyone who isn't ready isn't going to be that useful anyway, though this is not to be repeated.
Joe asked for permission to go check and see if the tracks really are frost drake tracks...by summoning a wolf and letting it compare the tracks' scent to the trophies we've been hauling around. The wolf also reports it's getting 5 different scents from the smaller tracks...so 6 total beasties, possibly. Joe looks around a bit more and finds faint tracks left by a humanoid, with an obvious effort to erase them. Heading into the area where the drakes are thought to be lairing. Not recent either...made before the attacks, possibly.
Joe comes back and reports these findings to the princess. "Very well. Consulting with our local experts, I believe we have a likely location for the lair. We will be proceeding there. The other parties have been dispatched to the less likely locations." We follow the princess on her beeline to the likely lair. Her officers, a contingent of guards and three trackers/scouts make up the rest of the group. This takes a few hours. When we arrive, we see a large cave. Louhi asks her court wizard if he has anything to flush out a drake. He has a few things that could work, but suggests she ask her guests because they may have something more effective.
We suggest we do some scouting first. The wizard sends a prying eye inside, and reports that someone has been working the cave - there's significant new construction about 60' in. A large vaulted chamber about 30' down the hall and a ward that he doesn't want to risk passing with the eye. Aqila volunteers to go have a look, because analyzing magic is one of her specialties. Moonbeam sends an elemental with her, and Joe goes along to be muscle. One of the scouts comes too as an extra set of eyes.
The hall is about 10' wide and 8' high. On the way in, we notice something the mage had overlooked... it's not just stone. In the vaulted portion, there are thin reinforcing iron rods run all through the walls, floor, and ceiling, in a way that blocks earth glide. The rest of the party is about 200' from the entrance, in the nearest concealment. The wizard also missed some subtle symbols carved into the walls that look like anchor points or aiming points for spells. This is looking like a giant trap. When we get to the ward, it turns out to be a simple warding spell that will alarm if anything magical goes past, or anything living that isn't recognized by the spell.
We all go back out and report this to the princess on the theory that this is definitely not animal work. The princess orders 2 of the 3 scouts to go get reinforcements, but to not enter the cave; just surround it and let nothing escape. The armorer is staying outside with the bulk of the guard company. The captain, two of the guards, the princess, the 7 hd scout, and our party go in. Aqila casts antimagic field to get us all past the ward. The wizard then recasts his eye and sends it on, where it finds a 3-way split. The walls are all still lined with iron rods, and more aiming point marks, now that the wizard knows to be watching for them. Moonbeam tries casting find-the-path on 'nearest exit, not the one behind us' . The leftmost passage, per the spell, runs for about a mile, then exits. The wizard sends out prying eyes. 6" wide bands of iron at 1' intervals are found 50' down the middle passage. That’s new.
Meanwhile, given the heading and distance to the exit, Joe relays the princess's orders to the armorer through an echo skull he’d left as a magic comlink to send a guard or two to look for the exit we found. We also go have a look at those iron bands, which do seem to be normal iron with no obvious use. Louhi is getting pretty annoyed at this point, because no one had noticed this, and is wondering if this is a trap aimed at her. Moonbeam offers to get some Xorn to eat the bands - Louhi would prefer to try to understand what they are before destroying them, but if they look to be a danger, remove them without asking.
First, we wait for the report on the last passage, and the eyes showed that it comes to an apparent dead end, but there are no iron rods worked into the face, and there are claw marks in the stone, size consistent with the smaller presumed drake claw size. The wizard continued sending eyes out as more branching passages are found. And for the eyes to report when they see anything unusual. Moonbeam offers to send an elemental to check out the dead end. There's about 2' of stone, then the tunnel resumes, same as the other side save that it is entirely coated in a thin layer of ice. This is also reported to the princess, and Aqila notes she can get us through there with either disintegrate or passwall when appropriate. Moonbeam points out she can just stoneshape it away too.
"Before we proceed further, I want to know what resources we have to block passages". Stoneshape from Moonbeam, Wall of stone, wall of force, and illusory wall from Aqila. She points out that she can put illusory walls up in front of real walls of stone. Louhi wants the other two passages blocked, so Aqila puts up two illusory walls that completely cover the tunnel and two real walls of stone with a 3" gap to let the wizard's eyes back through. Joe updates the armorer on the situation.
Moonbeam 'parts the waves' to open up the dead end so we can feel the chill of the tunnel beyond. The wall on this side did not feel abnormally cold. The stymied eyes immediately keep going. The wizard's head jerks. Two of the eyes that went down the middle passage had just been destroyed. Louhi sends instructions to the armorer that as soon as enough forces arrive to block both cave mouths we know about, to send more in to the 3-way split and hold there too. In the meantime, we wait for the eyes to report back on this tunnel. The tunnel curves gently, so we can't see its end.
So, about 2 rounds after we lose sight of the eyes, we hear a loud screech. Ilmari reports both eyes were destroyed. It sounds like a frost drake to everyone that is familiar with that sound. Moonbeam casts conviction, buffs fly. Louhi unhooks her light mace from her belt. It bursts into intense blue-white flames. We can see about 150' down the tunnel. Moonbeam summons a fire elemental, Aqila invises it, and it goes to scout. Around the corner is a natural chamber, about 80' wide, but lower roof, and no obvious other exits. There is a frost drake pacing angrily, looking for more intrusions, and it looks bigger than we were expecting. More like a 150 year old frost drake, not a century old. So near end of life, but not in its final decline yet.
The tunnel is just barely large enough for the drake to squeeze though, and wouldn't be happy doing so. Dagnar sneaks down to do detect thoughts just in case, and we tell Louhi what he's doing. Dagnar picks up nothing but rage and pain. He can see that it's shimmering faintly, but there's no light source. This is odd. Louhi decides that we should check to see if there are any other exits from that chamber for the drake, and if not, we'll reseal it in here and search down the middle passage next. So an invisible Moonbeam goes to summon a small elemental to do that check, and Joe wants to try to do an empathy check to try to calm the beast.
Meanwhile, the elemental finds no obvious exits, but there's a web of iron at the far end...if it's covering a tunnel, it'd be a 20' diameter one, which is much easier to get that drake through. So we can't be certain it wouldn't get out while we're gone, but Joe can leave an echo skull to watch just in case while we go hunting the real threat. Moonbeam carefully replaces the wall in that tunnel and Aqila puts a passwall through the stonewall into the middle tunnel.
We are moving slowly enough that when we reach the iron bands, we do notice that the 3rd band is different than the first two – it’s 3" with a small gap between them. Looks a bit trappish. Louhi is annoyed that she hadn't thought to bring a traps expert, and eyes Dagnar stating "You're the closest we have to an expert, I think," so he goes to give the odd band a look-over. Taking his time, he ends up a bit puzzled. He found a mechanism that looks like it would open the gap in the bands, but he can't tell what's under it, and it doesn't seem to be connected to anything externally.
So, in an excess of paranoia, we get a jinn to go gaseous and explore the mechanism...it finds that it is indeed a trap - stone slab drops from above, things throw from the sides, and a sprayer from the bottom. Moonbeam uses stoneshaping to gum up the mechanism completely with stone, disabling the trap. We ask the jinn to explore a bit more and it finds more bands of iron, regular ones this time, then there's a 5' diameter hole in the floor, with a faint greenish light coming out, and a bend in the tunnel ahead. The Jinn flies down and finds a dumbbell shaped room with three portals in each room. On hearing this, Aqila facepalms and inquires wryly, "Scramble portal or Seal portal, I can do either." She settles down to prepare 6 rounds of seal portal.
Meanwhile, Moonbeam summons another two Jinn to explore the portals. They both go through a different portal and come out on the other side of the dumbbell. Which seems less than useful. Aqila offers to seal them anyway. She floats down the hole and pokes her head through first, whereupon she finds that she can't see the Jinn. They can see her. Moonbeam comes down too, and she can see the Jinn. Aqila has true seeing, so she's really seeing what's there, or rather, what isn't. There's a mess of illusion magic that makes you see everything that's in any of the 4 identical rooms, and if you go around enough loops, you end up where you started, as we find when the jinn keep following the portals. There is only an exit out in the room we're in...in the other three rooms, the ceiling is solid. We also see a subtle spell at the threshold of each portal that looks a bit like an alarm spell but not quite. It seems to count the number of passages through the portals, and they are connected in a complicated fashion.
Louhi, on being asked what we should do, answers slowly, "I may have seen something like this before, but if it is what I think it is, this is very disturbing. This looks to be like the sort of lock The Dragon uses to protect his most precious treasures". The Dragon does not have a presence (meaning temples) this far north, but he is a major trading partner of Aerodon. This looks like it could be a nasty betrayal. She thinks the sorts of things this lock would protect are either laboratories, or...I won't say now. On asking her again about whether they should be sealed or not, Louhi directs Aqila to seal all six portals as quickly as possible. Aqila does so. Louhi also mentions that from what she knows, the way the lock works, if you go through the portals in the right order, a temporary portal will open up.
After we go back up into the tunnel, looking down towards the right turn, we can faintly hear the sounds of clashing armor, like sparring practice just started up. We all look at Dagnar and tell him it's time to send the homunculus. The tunnel comes out on a balcony, opening onto a large practice room. Visible, are about a dozen large, muscular, and scaly figures sparring. They look like dragons smooshed into humanoid form, which is something that as far as any of us knows, is something that doesn't exist in the world. Also, across the room, there's a draconic figure, 4-legged but wingless, about the right size for the smaller of the claw marks, watching the practice. The 2-leggers don't have wings either. The room is a 90' by 30' rectangle and 20' tall.
Dagnar tries casting detect thoughts through the homunculus at one of the sparring figures. He picks up the sorts of thoughts you'd get from someone who is both in the middle of sparring practice and who has a very constrained worldview with no thoughts outside the approved pathway. The homunculus sneaks to see through the doorway, and now he can see a slender, 2-legged, winged critter that appears to be casting some sort of spell. Using arcane sight through the homunculus, Dagnar sees it finish casting a fireball at a target that's out of sight. The other figures have dull mottled grey scales. Trying detect thoughts again, Dagnar finds the 4-legged critter is near mindless. The red one is pondering if it should send more patrols out to figure out what those things were that were floating through the halls. He seems to think he's in command here, and the spellcasting is light recreation while he thinks. He's balancing his need to stay hidden versus his need to find out what's going on, and wonders if it's related to the accident a few days ago. Also a bit of 'This would be easier of some of my brothers were here.'
The red commander has many spells active on him. He knows 9th level arcane spells. Dagnar keeps us filled in in a running commentary. Louhi's reaction is basically, she doesn't want to attack an intelligent creature out of hand, but on the other hand, she doesn't want an enemy army building up in her territory. Joe asks her if she has any subtle enchantments that could turn the commander's thoughts to who its master's identity. She doesn't think her abilities are sufficiently subtle. Aqila asks, "So, if I use whispering winds to quietly comment in the red guy's ear, 'We've caught you trespassing in Aerodon's sovereign territory. What do you have to say for yourself?" Louhi likes this idea but wants to withdraw to the intersection first to give the commander time to order a withdrawal peacefully.
Dagnar can control the homunculus easily at that range. So he can hear any reply when the message, "You are trespassing in Aerodon's sovereign territory. Who sent you and why are you here?" is whispered in the red and winged commander’s earhole.
The commander speaks, saying "I presume you have some way to hear me, whoever you are. Before you take any further action, you should consult your king. It would be unfortunate if you created a situation where he was required to execute you." And from his thoughts, we can see no clear image, just a very large shape of a dragon, and beyond that, waiting, training, and breeding more troops. Sense motive gets a sense that the commander is firmly convinced that what he's saying is accurate.
Louhi looks furious. She tells us to wait here and make sure nothing leaves while she goes to have a chat with her father. After 10 minutes of waiting, Dagnar hears stone grating on stone, and a slightly sibilant voice, "I heard there was an incident, did you.." and then he sees the red commander cast a quickened silence spell at the speaker and starts waving his hands in an aggravated sign-language. Detect thoughts yields 'That Idiot is going to ruin everything!' with an image of a young true dragon. After a bit, he dismisses the silence spell, and the young dragon says, 'I apologize. I should have known you would not have done anything foolish. You have taken precautions to assure it is not repeated? " The commander replies, "It should not be possible for him to leave the cavern unless we permit it." The dragon replies, "I will be going now. Hopefully noone noticed my absence." Dagnar needs to reinvis the homunculus at this point.
Dagnar sees troops coming in and out to practice, and thinks there's at least 40 individuals there, over the next few hours. Almost 3 hours after Louhi left, she returns, still looking angry. "My apologies for taking so long. I wanted to be certain I was calm before returning. Apparently my father neglected to mention that he'd lent the use of these lands to the Dragon Temple for a term of 99 years, in exchange for a substantial sum that he had transferred to his personal coffers." Apparently part of the arrangement was that no one from his lands would trespass there during that time. We fill her in on the conversation that took place in her absence. "For the moment, I think we will leave this be. However, in light of this revelation, I will see if we can renegotiate this arrangement." Meaning that the evidence points to the frost drake attack we are investigating, which did kill some of the locals, being done by the ancient beast we saw caged up, and it happening because these bozos didn’t keep it under control.
Joe asks if she'd like to evict them. "If I could, I would, but that would be going beyond my authority at this time. However, since it appears they were not able to keep a tight rein on that creature of theirs, let us see if they are agreeable to having a personal representative stationed here." "Someone who can keep you informed?" "Precisely. As relatively neutral parties, I would appreciate your assistance in negotiating." She has Aqila send another Whispering Wind message to request them to come negotiate with Louhi somewhere else, since this cave is no-go territory right now per the prior agreement. The commander agrees to the negotiation, and Louhi directs Aqila to unseal the portals on our way out.
Dagnar recalls his homunculus on the way out, and pick up all the guards. The nobles drifting in either get told to clear off or stay, depending on who's in favor. We assemble at agreed negotiating point. After a few hours, in the evening, the red commander shows up with a dozen troopers in heavy armor. IE too heavy for a similarly sized human to walk in. Louhi begins the discussion with a summary of what she thinks is going on, with what she knows now. Most of the nobles she allowed to stay were surprised. A couple of them do not appear to be surprised. Louhi appears to be paying close attention to who looks surprised and who isn't. So the ones that weren't surprised knew what area the hunt was going on in, and didn't say anything. (Note, the war with Teredor happened 40 years ago. She wasn't born then. She's the heir because her older siblings have earned extreme royal displeasure in the past...Execution or exile).
Following this, she states her position, that in light of the failure, she'd like some assurances that no such unfortunate incident will be repeated. Opening with a suggestion that a partial repayment and their immediate withdrawal would be a sufficient assurance. At this point, Joe, who's the neutral arbiter for this event, asks the commander what his preferred designation is. "You may address me as The Dragon's Talon" We know that that's the title of a very senior priest in the Dragon Temple, the ones who elect the next Voice of the Dragon.
Followed by, "You can't seriously expect us to accept that offer." He counters that she has a point, but that they want to retain the secrecy they desired, so his offer is to allow one of those present to inspect our facilities once a year to assure you that we are appropriately restraining any potentially dangerous creatures." Louhi responds, "You can't be serious. You know that it would attract notice if any of these were to disappear periodically. Let us say instead that a small group, perhaps 30, chosen by those present, shall be permitted to live within your compound."
The commander counters, "We might be prepared to allow you to add additional persons to those allowed to conduct inspections. Say, add one new person a year to the list, and two inspections a year?"
Louhi counters with a requirement that they need a team of inspectors onsite to ensure that no other safety incidents occur, given that it only takes one door left open. Mere yearly inspections won't assure no incident won't occur the very next day.
The commander's counteroffer is for a single representative from him stationed in Louhi's court to inform her of any incidents and permitting a 3-man team to inspect his facility monthly.
Louhi counters with a team of 7, permanently stationed in the facility, with a set term of office, sworn to silence except to Louhi or her successor, and guarantees that their health will be protected. The commander starts to open his mouth, then acts as if he's listening to something. Dagnar uses Arcane Sight and sees a communication spell, more powerful than Sending. After about a minute, the commander says. "We offer that one representative may be stationed in our facility. We will guarantee that they will only die of old age, and if this provision is violated, we will withdraw immediately, forfeiting the remainder of the rent. Additionally, we will permit these 5 (indicating us all) and you (indicating Louhi) a tour of our secret laboratory." Louhi counters with requirements that the representative be replaced after existence failure, and they be free of any compulsions. And that our safety be assured during the tour. These terms are acceptable.
OOC - the commander got direct orders to offer those terms, tour and all, and he thinks the tour will make us more kindly disposed towards him.
So, we are escorted to the dumbbell room, told to wait, and see him walk through the left left portal, and then he disappears from our view. After a while he steps back out through the same portal and another portal appears in the central passage. "You may step through now and see what we are doing here". On the other side is a fairly large stone room, about 80' radius, 20' high. Lining the walls are what look like dragon eggs. Full sized dragon eggs. "Some of you may know something regarding the lack of fertility of our creators. As we are ordered, here we guard those eggs that are deemed likely to hatch and prepare to hunt for and serve the young as they emerge." OOC these are eggs that they've determined have embryos inside them, but no way to know if they'll actually hatch. Normally, dragon eggs can take 3+ years to hatch. The room is about 100 degrees. The commander continues, "This is the main purpose for this facility's existence. The frost drake is required to make the hunters. Young dragons require a lot of food. For the moment, we have not actually brought most of the hunters to full maturity. They're being kept preserved here until they are needed. With only enough mature to give our handlers experience in handling them." OOC a young dragon will eat pretty nearly its own weight in meat daily for a few weeks after hatching – slows down a bit after that, but they still need a lot of food for the first few years – and it has to be meat. He shows us another room, of the same size, but rectangular, with row after row of ice pillars, each with a single creature frozen in the center. They look almost like giant stretched toads with very long claws on the forelimb. Similar mottled grey-white skin to the critters we already saw. "These are what we'll primarily use in this region, with smaller prey. It's more important to train the handlers on the larger ones that are more difficult to train. You understand that this is more in the way of a holding facility. We are preparing for the possibility for the eggs to hatch before we expect. We intend to send eggs back home before they hatch, but it is considered safer for them to be here lest they are destroyed by certain fanatics." He seems to be hiding something, but we can't tell what...and he may not know what either.
Note, that a female dragon may lay one viable egg, per year. So, since there aren't enough dragons in the world to have laid this many eggs, where'd they all come from. Arandor has a dragon population in the low 30's. Worldwide, there’s maybe 100 dragons total.
"I trust that this, if it doesn't answer all your questions, answers enough for you to understand why we must insist on secrecy here?" He returns us to the portal. Louhi steps through. The commander gestures for us to pause a moment. "While I am not certain of this, if you have the associations I think you may, this will make sense, and if you don't, no harm is done. We would not object to you allowing other dragons of your acquaintance to know about this. In fact, we insist on it." (dragons have a nigh fanatical tendency to protect eggs and children). "To avoid causing the princess any undue concern, please hurry" as he gestures at the portal. We go through.
We're politely escorted out, and Louhi 'invites' us to dinner to discuss things. We return to the capital expeditiously for a late dinner. At dinner, she states, "While I’m not inclined to break the agreement just made, particularly not this quickly, I'm not entirely sure that a single agent is sufficient to give warning if they prove hostile, nor am I entirely happy about that collection of hunters, or their explanation of the eggs.” "They were imprecise about the prey as well." "Indeed. I'm also not inclined to include any nobles who might use this against me. So, I would appreciate it if you would be prepared in the event that they should act against my people, to intervene, quickly. As long as they keep to the agreement in all particulars, I will have no grounds for a quarrel with them, but if they step over the line, I want them crushed. At the same time, I most certainly do not want the negative consequences of destroying that many dragon eggs. If it becomes necessary, I trust you will take care to not harm the eggs?" Aqila notes she might know some persons who would be willing to see to their safety long term. Joe observes that he wonders if the allegiance of dragons is dependent on who raises them. Louhi notes that that had occurred to her, but she's not inclined to go back on her word. We do promise we'll be on call of things go pear-shaped, and she allows that there might be outings in the future. We take our leave.
On our return to Arandor, we get a message from Eltariel stating that she may know something, and she does want to meet with us. After a somewhat lengthy discussion, with Aqila advocating for and the others being more ambivalent/”It’s a trap!”, she talked the rest of them around to agreeing that telling the elder dragons specifically about this mess is a good idea. She would know how to arrange an urgent meeting.

Terane
2020-05-06, 09:02 AM
We missed June, so picking up where we left off. We owe a visit to Eltariel to find out what she may remember about the Choir of Frost, since that is going to be something we have to deal with at some point in the near future. The day after the dragon hunt, we teleport to the gates of Elembar. The city is the cleanest large city we've ever seen outside of Arandor. The population is almost entirely Elenil, who were bred to be fine artisans by the Ancients, so those tendencies show up in everything they make. Everything, down to the chamber pots, are subtly ornamented. And since Eltariel lives in Elembar, their tendencies are someone exaggerated because her presence slows people's perception of time. So the 'it doesn't matter if it's done today, or even this week, as long as it's done right' is in overdrive.
We were specifically invited, so we are granted an audience. After appropriately formal introductions, "I believe I do know something of what you wish to know. It is somewhat less than you would like, I think, but it may be of some use. However, before I delve into those memories, I would prefer to be certain it is worth the pain it will cost. So, tell me of your adventures thus far." So, we give her the unedited adventures log, starting with the goblins.
After we finish up, with a slightly edited account of the dragon hunt, since we did swear to not spread the contents of the lab around to all and sundry, she continues "So, as I have said, I do not think that I will know as much as you would wish, and I can't vouch for the accuracy of this information. This comes from a text written by one of the Ancients, supposedly one of the ones who fought against them, but I only saw the passage once and it did not contain any specific details of their abilities, only generalities. They were created to serve as heralds for Helvisarn, and provide means for him to travel by means that are less visible than the usual methods for a deity. All known uses required all eight, but the author suspected that one alone could suffice. He wanted to be able to travel while unnoticed by his peers. I believe that they would be very useful to one seeking to open a gate to give him passage - greatly accelerating the opening process. As for their combat abilities, they do employ a great deal of cold magics. And they are able to 'stop the hearts of those who are close to them'. That was the exact phrasing in the book. The author implied that it was effectively an ability to slay anyone at will. Precisely how it functions, unfortunately, is not described. Some of the spells I know that would mimic such a function would bypass a death ward. Others would not. It would be safest to assume that it does. If it does not, you have lost little, and if you do not and it does, it may cost you your life.”
She continued, “Their other major ability, the author thinks was connected to their ability to summon Helvisarn, but the author did not explain how, at least in the pages I saw. He called it the 'Unbreakable Pillars of Ice'...and within it, they cannot be harmed. The pillars can be harmed, and they can still attack anyone outside them while they are within them." Joe asked if the pillars can be moved. She doesn't know. "The final point of importance, is that while in appearance, they seem to be women carved out of ice, and that would suggest a weakness to fire, they in fact have no such weakness. The text stated that they seem to be immune, or at least highly resistant to all simple energies. (fire, cold, electricity, acid, sonic). The author was unsure if this was a natural trait of their beings, or if they had access to magics granting it." Joe points out this was a really old book, and wonders if they may have changed. "They were described as creatures of unalterable nature, but there is a point you should consider: They may not be the original choir. However, it is my experience that deities tend to follow the same patterns. Even when they think they are doing something innovative, they are following the same patterns they have always done. So even if they are a new creation, it is likely that they are largely the same." Moonbeam asked if there was anything about how to find them. "The strongest sign of their presence is unfortunately of limited value unless they are trying to hide themselves. They are always surrounded by a supernatural cold, which they cannot alter." On Joe asking if that effect is noticeable in a region that is already cold, Eltariel found the question interesting, because all known encounters with them were in areas controlled by the Lifelord, which was in temperate or warmer areas – never cold enough to match their supernatural cold.
Eltariel paused, her eyes going distant, and she resumed speaking in a changed voice. "There is one other matter. Your tales imply that you are hunting Zeleya. There are two things I may tell you, though I do not know what they mean. The first is that you have already met the one who will lead you to her last temple. And the second is that she does not know where it is." Her voice returns to normal. "I trust this has been reasonably helpful to you?" We agree. "I believe you can be trusted to find your own way out." She stands and walks off with her handmaidens, looking much more worn than when we had arrived.

We had been asked by Savinel to report in occasionally as we find more information about Zeleya's temple's location, because she has more info about what sorts of things we might face there, but she's reluctant to share until we're in a position to use it. Aqila takes everyone to her home keep as a place to crash for an hour and talk over what we've learned, then we swing by Savinel's territory to let her know what we've been told.
After that, Moonbeam has another go at scrying on 'Runa' using her stalker's brand. This time, she does get some information. But it's a blurry and distorted image. What she can make out is that she's in a city, presumably, a lot of large buildings around. She thinks she can see part of a harbor at the edge of the vision. What she can make out is that most of the buildings are nondescript, but one has signs of Almaeran influnce. So maybe Amerel, possibly Teredor. We recall that an early part of the plot we'd uncovered involved negotiating with the Amerelin pirates to attack Asferia. Trying to focus on any people in the image, they are dressed like common laborers working in a tropical area - breechclouts and similar. High proportion of Kazil, but they tend to be brute labor wherever there are large populations. The islands do have a large Kazil population.
Afterwards, we bounce down to Silver Ridge to see what the latest news is. The temple is reasonably sure that the golem project is actually being backed by Ruzha, but they need more evidence to act. They're torn between worry and laughter...what they have now is something that lets you convert a skillfull caster into 2-3 marginally competent warriors, and you're spending a small fortune to do it. One of them does point out that the research seems useless for its intended purpose, but combined with someone who knows how to bind demons into shells, it would be a means to create an incredibly powerful force of demon warriors.
The researchers’ argument for their work on the cheap golems will, once they work those last bugs out, have a wonderful addition to the country's army, which is why Presmyslaw has been funding it. At this time, we don't want to interfere in anything, so our next move is following up on Moonbeam's scrying. Aqila gives her flight and invisibility while she buffs herself up and then Master Earth's to the location she saw.
When she arrives and gets clear of the street, she sees that it does look like Amerel, one of the southern ports rather than the capital, and there are a crap-ton of warships...lots of fitting out and rebuilding going on. There's like 5 warships for every 1 trader in the harbor while normal is more like 1 per every 2-3. It looks like every petty noble in the area has sent their personal fleet there. Moonbeam tags the obvious flagships with brands for future scrying, then she takes a quick tour around town to see what's there.
It looks like a city that has suffered an enormous influx of sailors. Pretty much every lodgings has signs out saying they are full, some more colorful than others. Markets look fairly stripped, and other signs of an economy under stress. She heads back to regroup. Joe immediately starts speculating on how we could take advantage of the local economics situation for our profit. The ships look like they could sail today, but it would be a bad idea...probably be a few months before they will sail, and the port isn't really equipped to provision that many ships at once.
We table that mess for now, and take some downtime until the next crisis manifests. We get three days before we're called into Valrim's office. Studying happens, and Aqila finally takes the time to make a key so she can Plane Shift to Varvara's castle as a bolt hole. Present for our briefing is Valrim plus a group of Book members who have been studying the Veiled Order. We’re told that the Sentinel now has firmly located another piece of the staff. And they have a way for us to get to it. It's in the Veiled Citadel, which is a collection of linked planar bubbles, the largest being only 200' in diameter. There are at least 20 that are definitely part of the Citadel, and maybe up to 50. Plus some limited info on the layout.
The way in, is making use of the fact that a Purple Veil is dead, and the Order doesn't know that yet. And it's an unusual member - He was a shaman. So Joe gets another impersonation job, because it's easier to make him look like a shaman to the relevant spells than to make Moonbeam look like a guy. And the less that has to be altered for the doohickey that ID's a member, the better.
Whichever bubble the staff piece is in is somewhat unstable, probably because of the piece's presence, and they're fairly sure that there is only one portal in or out. Part of what's bugging them is how the Veiled Order got it there in the first place. There is the little problem of how we're supposed to get it home, but they think they have a solution for that. A stasis box from Tarevale is being sent with us as a quick emergency solution that may or may not work. The better solution is a ceremony that will 'seal' the piece for about an hour and make it safe to plane shift away, but it takes half an hour. So Aqila gets to learn a new spell.
The head of the order will be there; he hasn't left the citadel in 5 years since he reached that rank. The 6 black veils that are the regional heads will almost certainly be there too.
The Order was founded shortly after the God Wars with an original purpose to preserve knowledge in an environment where there were a lot of people who were violently against anyone studying magic. The Order's intent was to protect those who were studying magic. The purpose has drifted over time to a 'all knowledge is good and should be gathered by whatever means are necessary. Or entertaining for us'. The Sentinel would prefer it that the order return to its roots.
The head of the Order is known for two particular areas of study - investigating the infernal planes and golem manufacturing. He is also known to travel at all times with two golems of his own design. Unknown capabilities in full...known to be able to counter magic used in their vicinity. The informant thought he would be able to overcome that ability. At least four exist, as he has been seen with four occasionally. He has also been frequently seen to travel with a lightly dressed young woman...never with the same face twice. No idea if that's face changes, or person changes. Most think they are decorative, though one thinks she is a capable spellcaster, though they didn't give a reason.
The Aerodon Black Veil is the most and least dangerous of them. He's the only one that has studied combat magic specifically. His interests are more destructive magic aka Evocation. The Almaeran black veil is worse than the average Almaeran mage. She might not be a serious threat depending on how far the mental deterioration she exposed herself to has proceeded. She has bonded to a pair of Malveths...monsters the Ancients made to kill mages. The effects of the bond slowly drive the individual insane. It cannot be broken without killing all three individuals, so she won't have broken it. But, they don't know which variety this pair is - probably not any of the greater varieties which would have been hazardous for the Ancients themselves to fight. Her area of interest is creation of new forms of life.
The Ferial black veil is also interested in life creation and probably a non-entity as far as combat is concerned. He only got the position because he was the least objected too. The Chaliscean black veil specializes in demon summoning. (The purple veil we killed has not been replaced yet).
Those are the 4 that the Sentinel would least prefer to see take the Head's place. The Teredoran Black Veil is the one they'd most like to see replace the Head should it happen because he's the one most likely to abide by the Sentinel's limits not because he's a moral person, but because he recognizes that the Sentinel can make trouble for him, and he's not interested in the areas the Sentinel would restrict. He's most interested in creating constructs with spellcasting abilities. He's rumored to have hundreds of them in his quarters for security. The main reason he doesn't carry all of them around is that he can't usefully use them all at once. No one knows how many of the things he carries around are his constructs...his protections obscure which things do what.
The Elethoran Black Veil is known to be the closest ally and perhaps lover of the Teredoran Black Veil. She focuses on researching healing magic, specifically she's trying to find spells to correct congenital defects. A lot of her researches are on the fringes of the life creation magics that the Sentinel would want to stamp out. She's not over the line, but her mentor was and she doesn't know where the line is, which is why she's working with the Veiled Order. And she wouldn’t care if she crossed the line if she needed to, but so far she hasn't. No idea what she's so obsessed with this line of research, or how she got the position in the first place. Strongly suspected that her alliance with the Black Veil of Teredor had something to do with it, but not solid intel.
Throughout the briefing, we're repeatedly reminded that we're being given this info so we know what to try to avoid disturbing if we can, but our priority is firmly the recovery of the staff piece. Politics pale in the wake of the planet's fate. IE we might not have a planet in a few years if we fail. No pressure…
The purple veils generally tend to follow their black veil's interests. Almaera has 2, Aerodon has 3, Teredor has 3 slots and 2 filled. We're impersonating 3. Elethor has 0, Ferial has 2, Chalisce had 1 currently unfilled. There are exactly 4 ranks permitted unescorted access to the Citadel...Head, Black, Purple, and Dark Blue - and all of them are known and accounted for. They get tracked by the black veils closely, because they might be threats. Also, Dark Blues aren't allowed to escort anyone - purple and black are.
The staff piece was found a while ago, but this is the first chance to go get it. The dead purple veil was investigating undead. He wasn’t a necromancer, but had helpers to create undead for him to study. So we know what sort of minions the rest of us will be pretending to be.
Other things - we'll be entering in the Nexus. We want to avoid the entrance because there're golems that will kill anyone who doesn't speak the password. The staff piece is probably not in the stores or the vault, because those have multiple entrances.
Note, the briefing has been coming partly from Valrim, and partly from Order of the Book agents who are assigned to the Veiled Order under instructions to tell us everything they know about the Order, without knowing why.
The head of the Order has a known vault, and is strongly suspected to have his own private vault. That's one potential location for the staff piece. It's rumored that there are containers in the personal vault that haven't been opened in centuries because no one's worked through the traps. Also, they are preparing a force to assault the citadel if necessary, but that will draw the Enemy's attention for one, and for two, the Enemy has agents within the Order...the ones they know of are all Dark Blue or lower rank. Strong suspicion that the Ferial black veil is working for the Enemy, and also the Head...potentially thinking that he's working With, not For, but in his case they think the Enemy took steps to put him where he is...but no direct proof.
Another note on culture - Black veils are known to challenge each other to duels of sorts - they each pick one of their minions and have them fight, occasionally to the death. Also it is a norm to pick a different minion for each one. And if you have enough people pissed at the same person, they'll work together to stage a series of challenges to deprive the person of minions. Ignoring a challenge is a loss of social status. Only a purple or black veil may challenge. Taking the challenge yourself is considered incredibly stupid and ordinarily it's likely the challenger would either withdraw or take it up themselves. The purple veil we're using was known to be somewhat careful of his minions’ lives.
The dead guy was of the opinion that other Order members thought he was lax with his minions, so we're going to have Thoron come along as himself, pretending to be Aqila's familiar. Extra spot helps. So, Dagnar, being a stunted caster, is wearing a Light Blue veil, Aqila has Dark Red, and Moonbeam has Dark Green.
So we begin. The Nexus itself is floating in midair - an array of platforms with stairs and causeways connecting them. Each platform has at most one portal. Empty ones are obviously for future expansion. There are a few isolated platforms that are the arrival platforms for the black or purple veils. We start with the labs by way of Subnexus B. It's empty when we get there. We see there is one more portal than we have on our maps. There are actually labels on the portals, but they're very discrete. Thoron may or may not be able to see them when we enter a bubble.
Note, every bubble the Sentinel has been able to ID from the outside has a solid boundary, IE you hit the edge and bounce back. The other two common types are loop, which tosses you to the other side, and disintegration, which is as bad as it sounds. Moral of the story – don’t hit the edges.
So, while we're alone, Thoron checks the label on the mystery portal. It's to Store B. The labs are labeled Laboratory, mystery code, and mystery code. Aqila thinks about it for a moment and guesses it's either an identifier for the person who reserved the lab, or the subject being researched, but probably the former. We check the open lab first. It is a very very empty room. There are cabinets along the side with presumably general stores.
We bypass the reserved labs and check Store B. It's one of the larger bubbles, apparently, with emphasis on simple robes, tunics, trousers. New Minion outfitting, apparently. Also empty. We swing back through Subnexus B to the Library. There are 19 different catalogs, and a few others browsing. The smallest section has the most people in it, presumably because it has the Ancient tomes. Moonbeam does Scholar's Touch on the catalog...a lot of the books are marked 'Transcription', and 'Fragmentary'. All the ones on life creation are marked fragmentary. There's a book listed as 'A catalog of Useful Warbeasts'. Both copies are missing. We leave towards Subnexus A. Someone in a black veil was entering the Senior quarters as we entered. Didn't notice us. Two of the labs aren't reserved. The first is completely cleared and empty. The second looks like there'd been an accident and was not cleaned. Shattered glassware and puddles of noxious chemicals scattered around the room. One of the cabinets looked like it exploded. No ping there either.
Store A is where foodstuffs are stored..mostly prepared meals preserved in various ways. Next stop, senior's quarters. We have the symbols for the purple veil's quarters, so we can find his rooms. There are two women wearing purple veils playing some sort of game in the common room. It looks like a fairly complicated, multiple boarded, game. There's someone sitting near the door to the purple veil...he has a black veil and is reading a book. He has noticed us. We boldly continue onward, and as Joe passed, the black veil, who we recognize as the Teredoran Black Veil, he comments, "Have you decided your next move yet?" casually. Joe replies that he has not decided yet. The bluff holds, maybe. As we step through the portal, the black veil quietly comments, "Don't forget to turn off the trap." That seems a little suspicious....
As a note, Almaera is the only region that had two female purple veils, so unless the ladies are from different regions, that's a working hypothesis for their identities.
With the warning, Dagnar spots a very subtle trigger for what looks like a very nasty spell trap that looks like it's designed to fire off a sequence of spells. We decide to just not step on the trigger. There's no obvious way to disable it. This bubble has no other portals out that we can see. It's on the smaller side, about 30' across. Beyond that, the guy appears to have been fairly ascetic in taste. No decorations, a cot, and a small chest that appears to be secured to the floor. (ooc, the chest is an extradimensional space with all his furnishings).
A few spellcraft checks later, we determine that opening the chest is a bad idea. Some of the spells go off on opening, and some go off while it's open unless the proper password has been spoken. And there's no way to magic out the password. We also know this is a stable bubble, and we know the staff piece is in an unstable bubble. We do know that the only person who will know what state we leave the room in is the black veil outside. (slight retcon - we have a staff along with analyze dweomer on it - is rechargeable by the recharge spell, borrowed because the Sentinel knows we're light on divination) Aqila uses her glasses for this one - and finds that the first spell is implosion on opening and dispel check is 50. Next is a sequence of Summon monster 9...5 of them. On open only. A 6th later is continuous while open. The opening ones are 50's...the other is a 40. Another while it's open, mage's sword. Only 25. Next is also while open, energy drain, another 50. A while open burst disintegrate at 40. A targeted on opening disintegrate at 40. And a trap the soul effect on opening and while open targeting one person per round. And this one is a 50.
So, we can get rid of all the 'while it's open' spells except trap the soul, and that can be thwarted by smashing/removing the gems and if that's not enough, dimensional anchor should thwart the effect. So, we execute our plan. Resilient spheres, antimagic fields, dispels, lockpicking, and anchors, followed by looting the chest. 1st is a folding bed. The mattress is a spell effect. It is 2' on a side folded up. It disappears into the portable hole. Next is the bathroom. It has a built-in disintegrate spell for waste, 5x a day, and a heated seat. Next looks to be his library. Light reading only. Next looks to be a kitchen. Spells for reheating food, keeping it warm, and a fast refrigerate effect for cold drinks. It's a compact thing.

Next is a folding bookcase. Small spell to highlight specific books you've marked. Last are 3 very slim books. 1st looks like research notes. A quick skim indicates he was studying necromancy as a path to immortality. The other two look like someone else's research notes. Same vein, different handwriting. We put things back the way we found them, sans loot, use the notes as our excuse, and leave. The two women have left. The Black Veil of Teredor is still sitting there, and there is a woman wearing a black veil, presumably the Elethoran black veil.
We plan to go to the vault next, but as we head that way, the Teredoran speaks up saying, ‘You might not want to be dealing with Almaera right now. She was planning on searching through there for the next half hour. On the other hand, a conversation might be beneficial". Joe's sense motive tells him that the Teredoran black veil is unsure if he's who he says he is, and probably has a plan for either way. Joe indicates his willingness to talk, and the Black Veil says that it might be wiser to talk in his quarters. We follow him, and find that his quarters are comprised of multiple bubbles. His handiwork is strewn around the room. The Elethoran took up a position where she could watch as we entered.
He continued, "I would hate to think that the monitoring spell I designed was faulty...." We decided to put cards on the table, and Joe admits that we'd been made. The black veil is somewhat pleased that the field test is successful, and doesn't seem too broken up, when we reveal ourselves, that his friend fell to the Sentinel. Personal friend, public liability. We cards on the table and toss the veils up so he can see we’re the same group he met in Teredor over a year ago. He starts off by asking us if we’re here for theft or assassination, and in the course of the conversation, we determine a few things. 1) he believes us when we say we're here for theft, and that the item is apparently magicless, of no use to them, and that if we don't get it, the world may not still exist in a few years. 2) He wants something in return for helping us - specifically the death of Almaera’s black veil. The Clear Veil's death at this time would be bad, because Almaera would succeed him. He wants some time to build up his own base first. He recommends we try to ambush her in the forge or the observatory. He was unaware that the link being severed would kill Almaera, though he was aware that the link would drive her insane. (OOC: This did inadvertently mislead Teredor a bit – technically his monitoring spell didn’t actually work, it reported the purple veil’s death about a day before he actually died. But since we don’t know when he died, we couldn’t have caught that discrepancy anyway.)
So, plan is, we go get a scroll of disjunction, try to disjunction Almaera in the forge using mini-Dagnar, and if that doesn't kill her outright by disrupting the link, then we kill her as fast as possible. That may pull the Head to the forge when the alarms go off, and he has a private portal to there. Then we bugout through the senior's quarters to the vault then summon a crapton of small summons to swarm the Head's quarters to search for the portal to the private vault, and distract the golems, at which point we dive through the right portal, and scramble the portal so the golems not only can't follow, they will end up somewhere random in the citadel while we lock down that bubble and find the staff piece. But only if the piece is actually in there - we need to ping and make sure we've found the right place. And just to ensure that the chaos is complete, on our way back, we’ll chuck a rock with Silence cast on it into the foyer so anyone coming it won’t be able to speak the password and get attacked by the golems. Which were made by the Clear Veil. Embarrassment should abound with the chaos.

Terane
2020-05-08, 07:40 AM
Starting off, we're assuming that we left Teredor, went to the Purple-veils's quarters and unbolted the chest because Joe wanted it, then Aqila megateleports us back home, we report in, get an item with Disjunction on it when we explain what the plan is, possibly with some facepalming, then return to the Nexus, chuck a few rocks with Silent cast on them into the entry way, then make our way to the Forge room, where we begin this session. We talked about doing that last session, so no need to rehash the plan.
So, on finding Almaera in the Forge, as Teredor promised we would, with her two minions, we fire off the Disjunction, and it is indeed an instant kill. Using Detect Magic, Aqila realizes the only item that survived with its magic intact was her shoes, and grabs them, triggering jokes about a wizard’s pointy shoes for some odd reason, then they all run to the portal to the Senior Quarters, and sedately walk to the Vault just in case more Seniors show up. It also gives us a somewhat secluded venue to pull off the next phase of the plan.
We get ready to scout the head's quarters so we can run for the right portal, then Aqila will be able to scramble it and send any pursuers off into random parts of the fortress, or so we hope. The ‘is the staff piece here’ spell comes up empty, not that we were expecting it to be in here.
Moonbeam summons some large air elementals for the scouting mission, then sends them into the portal. There are four golems in the room, which appears to be an entry way of sorts, and they attack the elementals on sight. One eats 133 Disint damage and dies. The surviving 3 each go through a portal to see what's there. Moonbeam uses chain of eyes to see that one room is a harem with one golem and a dozen ladies of various appearances, the next one was the head's quarters, and when that elemental jumps to the next nearest portal, it ends up the same place as the 3rd one, in the lab, which only has 2 visible portals. The elemental in the harem went through the other portal and ended up in the head's quarters. So we haven't found the vault yet.
Joe sends in one elemental with Dagnar provided invisibility to see if the golems can see invisible. They can. Meanwhile, Aqila is casting summon elemental 4 repeatedly to get a swarm of small elementals. So for the next phase, Aqila sends her swarm into the room, with the last 4 carrying liquid smoke capsules to drop on the golems. This blinds the golems temporarily. The party runs through the portal to the Head's quarters portal while the golems are smoked. Aqila tells her elementals to bounce around the room until they get a golem chasing them, then follow through the portal, and then scrambles the portal once we're in the room. The swarm manages to get one to chase them before they get picked off.
There is one golem in the head’s quarters. We liquid smoke it too, but it still almost hits Dagnar with a disintegrate. Aqila finds a secret door with a spell, then Thoron goes rhino and charges the bookcases concealing the secret door. He smashes through and goes through the portal on the otherside into a small room with another golem in it. He manages to hit it. Bits of it are chipping off. And then the golem attacks. Thoron has a ring of counterspell, so he doesn't die from the Disintegrate.
Next round, the golem in the quarters with us lumbers towards Joe and takes a swing at him. He misses. Joe wildshapes into a legendary ape and grapples with it, succeeds and throws it through the scrambled portal. With Aqila trying and failing twice to help out with a grasping hand assist, and Moonbeam animal-growthing Joe to give him actual effective help. Meanwhile, Thoron rapidly backs through the portal he went through, but not before the golem in there swings at him and punches him in the head. More of a glancing blow, but it still hurt.
Aqila scrambles the other two portals in the head’s bedroom to keep anything else from coming in for a few minutes. While we quickly toss all the books into the bag of holding just because we never walk away from loot ever, a small construct pops in and in Teredor's voice warns us that we'd better hurry because the Head is aware that there is something going on and is coming back. We know that with the portals scrambled, that'll slightly slow him down, but we need to hurry. And the golem in the secret room is not following Thoron through. So Thoron is asked to also go Legendary Ape and we pile through the portal. The druids grab the golem while Aqila scrambles that portal too, and then they chuck it through. Meanwhile, Dagnar uses the scroll to dimensionally lock the secret room down so we can work undisturbed. When Aqila uses the 'Is the staff piece here please?' spell, she gets a yes and a rough direction.
So, inside this secret room, we see a vault which appears to be made of adamantine, a jewelry display table with two rings and a necklace, an empty armor rack, two iron bound chests, and a large pile of what look like various sized blocks of wood. 7' by 3' by 1' all the way down to a bunch of 2" cubes. All the blocks detect as magical and it looks like they all have associated extradimensional space. The spell was pointing at the vault as being the staff piece location. The chests are unmagical, the jewelry is.
The vault is 6'x6'x4', with a dial with numbers on the front. Aqila decides that this may take a bit, and takes a catnap. Moonbeam finds the rings to be strong but simple abjuration magic. The necklace looks like transmutation, but....odd. So Aqila gets woken up to use analyze dweomer...Ring of protection +4, ring of minor universal resistance, +10 all simple energies. Necklace of strangulation. Looking around quickly, the chests are still mundane, the boxes are all extradimensional stores, and Joe and Aqila remember hearing that those sorts of boxes have passwords that open them and that wrong passwords seal them permanently. And the items are probably around the size of the box. For some of them, Aqila can 'see' several words that are either the right one or a trap and she has no idea how to tell which is which.
Dagnar, meanwhile, was taking 20 and opens the lock on the vault. There's a set of slim boxes inside, all about the right size to be a staff piece, 5 in total. We open all the boxes. 4 of them have an elemental theme. 4 rods decorated with flames, drops, wind, and the last is a piece of granite. The last is the staff piece. There's a rune staff leaning in the corner...contact other plane and analyze dweomer. Type of staff that you power with your own energy. There is something that looks like a weird game board...it's something idiotic diviners try some time...the pieces represent specific people and the pieces moving is supposed to represent the future...it occasionally shows the future, and it's by accident if you guess right. There's an item that will summon an entity to answer any one question to answer a question to the best of its ability, and each person may only ask one question in their lifetime, and asking the question applies a curse to the asker. (next 20 d20 rolls where your life is in peril, roll 2 times, take lower. No way to remove the curse.). Also unclear what entity is summoned - so maybe not the safest thing to use. Or most reliable. Cloak of balor nimbus, with +3 to saving throws and spell resistance 20. Robes of permanent greater mirror image.
So, there are 55 blocks to be investigated, in the giant pile of wooden boxes. Aqila takes half an hour to cast the 'make it safe' spell on the staff piece. While the druids work out how to haul off everything that's not nailed down, Dagnar opens up the chests for kicks and giggles. Cash and gems around 50k gold value. Can't get into the hole or the bag of holding while we're in the dimensional lock. Then we get all the loot gathered up and Aqila gets us home.
So, mission accomplished. We hand over the staff piece, and there will be a reward for that forthcoming at some point. We also hand over the unused scrolls from our trip. As for the rest of the things we brought back, our bosses have a deal for us. It'll take a month, but if they get dibs on anything dangerous, they'll help us get the boxes open. (It'll be 2 months before they get the staff assembled so OOC we have a rough idea when the real campaign endgame kicks off)
And so we don’t have to do this later, the DM rolled to see what we would get out of the 55 boxes. Here’s the list:
Biggest box - Mirror - allows you to use greater scrying at will and is specifically able to view extraplanar, and can be used to open a gateway to where ever you're seeing. Risk of an intrusion of outsiders any time you use it, though. And the more times you use it in a given day, the higher the chance that you get attacked...up to dozens of balors. When we get it, we’ll most likely have it out on loan to the Sentinel, since we won’t need it all the time…may rack up some favors that way.
2' cube box - Comes with a note: If you put the hood on it's a face covering hood. It inflicts a negative level on wear and doubles the levels each minute you wear it...only works if you take the negative levels. if you are concentrating on a specific question when you put it on, you will receive a vision related to the answer, and the writer of the note believes that the visions are accurate, though the scene may be reconstructed rather than something that actually happened. No guarantee that you will get a vision; writer guesses that the spell casts a lot of divination spells and synthesizes an answer when it has enough info. Have to use restoration to fix negative levels afterwards.
2' cube. Fail. ooc, least useful of the cube items
2' cube It's a very large pile of journals. Belong to a head of the order that took many trips to chaos region - journals are in code, but could be interesting. She was considered the best of the heads of the order in the last millennium.
2' cube - fail. Was schmuck bait.
2' cube - Comes with notes. 3 crystal goblets. If you fill the goblet with a liquid and drink the entire contents, you will get an effect for 24 hours. 1/day/goblet. Water grants 10 DR. Wine is advantage on attack rolls. Writer won't tell us what other liquids do, warning that at least one liquid will kill you.
2' cube fail (item that you can use to scry on its location)
2' cube - marble carving of a human skull that randomly repeats single words that it has heard.
2' cube - collection of books that are really bad...one is written it what is purported in Sakaneth's language....to the dangerous stuff vaults. The rest were texts by ancients on ‘unwholesome topics’.
2' cube - mystic orb - 2' diameter featureless crystal sphere...no apparent function.
2' cube - thoroughly smashed mechanical gadget. Artificer thinks that it may have been a orrery of the planes, gadget for scrying on the planes. very partial chunk of one.
2' cube - large glowing coal the size of a human head. It appears if you fuse it with yourself in some way, it will grant some benefits like fire damage heals you and you gain an extreme vulnerability to cold. Completely unable to case cold spells. All fire spells are maximized. Removal is 24hr unconsciousness, and 2d6 permanent loss to all stats.
2'x1'x1' has a pile of very thick clothing...insulating properties against the Maelstrom. One set of clothes.
5'x1'x1' - a warhammer. Call down lightning bolts at will. Chance to be healed instead of hurt by electricity, and 1/day control weather.
3'x2"x2" fail – would have been a domino mask that makes you blind outside of 60', but lots of divination effects inside. all low level detect x spells.
3'x2"x2" Metamagic rod variant. 10 pts to be consumed. Can apply any metamagic - cost is = to metamagic cost. recharging hurts...8 hour ritual and 200 energy for 1 point recharge. ouch.
3'x2"x2" Spyglass that has applied to it true seeing and arcane sight but they only work when viewing an item between 500' and 1000' away from the viewer.
3'x2"x2"fail. Wand of 'nothing'
3'x2"x2" Flute carved out of ivory. Joe will claim it for his wife...no magic, just pretty.
3'x2"x2" Thin dagger, no real hilt. Allows critical hits and sneak attacks against undead, and makes you invisible to undead.
3'x2"x2" Rod of Wonder
3'x2"x2" fail on useless box
3x2"x2" Dangerous item - Scepter for communicating with a demon lord. Requires selling your soul to that demon lord. To the vaults with it!
3'x2"x2" Labeled by owner - supposed to be Codex Arcana...name of an item that never existed (every spell the Ancients ever knew, purportedly), on examination, it's actually a scroll that will cast a single random spell that you can't know what it is until you're done casting it. And it's reusable. 0-9th level spells.

Potentially the most powerful item they got - and the most horribly dangerous.

2"cube - gem that will cast a random spell. You know what spell it is, at least before using it. 50% chance that it will change spell when you use it. Changes once per 24 hours normally.
2"cube - small silver chain. 7 charms. While wearing, while at least 1 charm is active, can blink at will. use one to dim door. destroy one to teleport or plane shift. Chain acts as a key to any plane it's linked too...linked to a lot of them. Can use your own plane shift with it as key, and can teleport into maelstrom....destroys charms to do so, and more depending on how deep you go. 1d6 charms. Takes 1 day to generate a new charm. 7 max charms. no other cost.

Was surprised the party ended up never actually using this trinket.

2" cube. pair of lenses that grant continuous detect good, chaos, law, and evil. Just need a frame for them.
2" cube - lost next 3 of these
2" cube - prism lenses - distorts view, no benefit.
2" cube - lenses that obscure all living and dead plant matter - ie can see through a forest, but can't see the trees
2" cube - ring in shape of mobius strip. prevents use of shapechange while worn.
2" cube - random power surge ring. All spells are minimized except 20% chance of empowered. um, yeah...
2" cube - amulet that blocks all spellcasting abilities of the wearer.
2" cube - amulet of strangulation.
2" cube - ring made of glass - no magic.
2" cube - Gloves of Death. Continuous death touch effect - finger of death spell basically. while wearing, suppresses any death ward effect on you. so don't touch yourself.
2" cube - ring of warning. Effectively a constant augury, attunes to you over time, let's you know when danger is coming. Spidey-sense.
2" cube - fail. star of chaos, giant shard of the mad god. Would have gone to the vaults
2" cube - fail. ring of life, keeps you alive but drains con permanently.
2" cube - 3/day random globe of invulnerability, force ward, lesser globe, resilient sphere, death ward, stone skin, prismatic sphere or roll twice and get both.
2" cube that is viciously trapped - fail to open. ooc it would have shortcut some plot points....key to Zeleya's home plane.
2" cube - bracelet of souls - similar to trap the soul by binding subject in bracelet. up to 200 HD, no more than 30HD creatures, 9th level spell saving throw. Can drain the souls to reduce your age. That one's going to the vaults.
2" cube - artificer starts swearing when he sees it. Amulet that contains 3 spell matrices....3 spells up to 5th level in each matrix, max 10 spell levels...can discharge one matrix per standard action. Drawback is its unstable...chance that the other matrices will discharge explosively. up to 40d6 disintegration damage. You get no saving throw. Everyone inside 30' of you does get a chance to save, and when it goes boom, the matrix you fired off is destroyed. 1% chance per spell level. Only safe to use when using 1 matrix at a time. And it could still blow up the matrix, but lower chance and no damage if the other matrices are empty. So eventually it'll be useless, but it lets you cast 3 spells in the time of one.
3" cube - ring of keys. Only useful if you know where the doors are.
3" cube - Skullcap - when donned it dyes your hair a random color. Can't change haircolor afterwards except by the cap or letting it dye out. Shapechange won't change it.
3" cube - looks like a sphere of water. Will flow through your fingers, except it won't split in two. You can cut it apart, but it will rejoin ASAP. New toy for Joe
Fail – item absorbs all spells cast in its vicinity.
5'x6"x6" - staff with 37 charges. As long as it has charges, magic missile at will. 1 - shield or mage armor, 2 is forceward or resilient sphere, and you can spend 3 charges to maximize or 4 to quicken. It is rechargeable.
5'x6"x6" – Staff, rechargeable with 11 charges remaining. 1 charge is dispel magic, 2 is greater dispel or an anti-magic ray, 3 is a reaving dispel, 4 is disjunction.
4’x1’x1’ – fail
3’x3’x1’ – Labeled as Basin of Conjuration. It’s a large bowl, and if you fill it with water, it will summon a water weird, which will either attack you or answer questions. It has 18th level sorcerer spells. It looks like there is a long contract that binds it embedded in the magic on the bowl, but it would take time to analyze the spells to tease out exactly what the terms are, so you know under what circumstances the weird can attack you. Using dirty water to summon it is almost certainly one of them.

I decided to let them know what they didn't get once I saw how this was trending - they got most of what was actually useful to them. Don't remember what was in the failed boxes the note-taker missed recording.

We'll get all this in a month. This is just so we don't forget what we had gotten.
So we got back, dropped off a pile of stuff. And finally got a look at the Head's book stash. Largely light reading, with a selection of his personal journals, mostly not on magic, more like personal discussions, detailed accounts of experiments with his harem, and things like that. Presents for the Order of the Book scholars...their reaction is a mix of happy and horror. Most of the spell books appear to be relatively minor.
We all get a good night's sleep, then meet up to go report to Savinel about what we've learned, and Eltariel's prophesy. Moonbeam does some scrying first...the Amerelian ships are a bit better supplied now...and they might actually finish with the last ships before the first ships supplied eat through their supplies. Assuming that there's nothing in town to eat.
Savinel, after we talk to her, doesn't think Louhi has any involvement in Zeleya's worship. She's not perfectly certain, given what we told her Eltariel said, but... And Savinel thinks it's time to let us know a bit more about what we may be facing, since we're getting closer to reaching the temple. She's offering to create projections for us to face, and the fight will be 'real', except there will be no lasting effects afterwards, even if we 'die'. She thinks that it would be best to minimize what she's showing us lest someone figure out what she's doing...basically, if she thinks we can beat it, she's not bothering... she'll start with things that she thinks we can't beat...starting off with a beast that is a corruption of unicorns. Rare, and Zeleya's likely the only god to successfully pull this off, and even for her 9/10 die in the process. Practically, you want a paladin with you because they will attack the purest soul they perceive...you can use that trait to let you control who they're attacking. (OOC we only get exp if any of us survive the fight.)
Savinel will only do this one simulation for us this time because the effort of making it realistic will make it more visible. She'll give us a full run through of the threats she thinks we’ll be facing when it's closer to when we may be going to the temple, but for now, this is to give us the measure that we need to shoot for to pull this off.
So, we begin. We're in cramped quarters to make the terrain realistic. Thoron tries to baleful polymorph and fails. Was a 1/4 chance of success. The soul-bound unicorn tries to trap-the-soul on Aqila, and with all the buffs on her, she survives the attack. Joe wildshapes to dire lion then uses Blast of Sand, since it's resistant to a lot of things, cold and electricity in particular. Used a maximize for kicks. That, it felt. Dagnar uses the Black Blade of Disaster and closes to melee range and attacks. No joy. Aqila's darkbolt does 39 damage from 4 hits, no daze. So she uses a prismatic eye for her non-quickened spell and gets yellow, elec. Unicorn fails the save, so it gets owwied. Moonbeam does two quickened flame strikes. Makes the save on the sonic strike, and fails the save on the force strike. And now it is unconscious. Thoron does Blast of Sand. That kills it. (OOC if we hadn’t killed it before it’s next turn, it would have used Blasphemy on us, and that would have been….bad)
The construct dissipates. (Moonbeam did over half the damage it took) We can actually see signs of surprise in Savinel's countenance. "Perhaps next time I will see how well you do when it has assistance". She also gave us a quick verbal rundown on what else we may have to face. She thinks there should be more than a few of her greater handmaidens...we've faced lesser handmaidens to date. They're what she has serving her in place of Balors. At present, she has at least 11 in her service, based on Savinel's assessment...and she expects we'll have to face them all given how important the place is. It is not impossible that she will come herself (as an avatar) to defend her last temple, even if we bring a paladin.
“More likely, she will send her chief lieutenant. She is the one I know the least about, and when I judge it won't be an instant massacre, I will attempt to show you something of her. I should also note that when you face her it would be advantageous for you to be widely separated and for at least one of you to appear helpless. She is known to enjoy tormenting enemies provided she thinks she has time. If you can draw her into playing, that may buy you time to defeat her. Silviel is a being who if she was not bound to Zeleya's service, might well be a minor goddess in her own right. Fortunately the same oaths that bind her to Zeleya restrict what she can actually do. Still more fortunately, she is less than adept at forming her own avatars.”
(she'd kill a helpless paladin fast and thoroughly so don’t volunteer one to play bait). We want to find the biggest room in the temple to fight her because she can use Blasphemy and Savinel doesn't think we can get strong enough to resist her Blasphemy.
She looks thoughtful for a moment, then says that there are limits on what she can tell us that would be safe...safe for us, that is. She can say that there is a thing she knows that if we knows might help us find her temple, but it would be extremely dangerous for us to know it, and even for her to tell us how to learn it. She can tell us that we have met someone who may be able to tell us this thing without danger to him, but whether he would think it was safe for us, she can't say. 'There are things at work here that I do not pretend to fully understand.' Basically, be very indirect about asking questions on this topic.

Personality may not be sufficiently obvious from the notes, but Savinel admitting that she didn't understand something was a huge red flag for the party - a 'what are we getting ourselves into this time?'

Terane
2020-05-11, 04:47 PM
Started the session out by sorting out gear and things. And remember that we told Savinel about the dragon eggs in the Dragon's temple in Aerodon. So we start out by being called to talk to the Elder Dragons in Arandor. Once we are all there, one of them gestures briefly with a claw, and 5 items float down to us. Very formally, in Draconic, "As promised, your rewards. For that which you have done, and that which you will do, these are well and truly earned." (part of the Pact means they aren't allowed to bestow powers on anyone that they haven't earned, so there's a legal aspect to this). (Also implicit, we won't get any more presents ever). Proper responses are given of gratitude, by those that understood the statement. And quickly filling in those who didn’t. The elder dragon shifts to using common, "On another matter, our thanks for the information you have relayed to us. We would ask that you refrain from taking any action against that or any other such location you discover" We agree, and notice that he emphasized other such locations. The number of eggs in the one we saw was more than the known dragon population of the world could have produced, so we know something is odd there, but not what. "It is imperative that those eggs be permitted to hatch undisturbed." Joe asks what happens after they hatch. "The gamble has begun", and then says no more on the subject. (They know they are a dying race...population is too small to survive) "If you would question us on any other subject, we have a little time, but know there is much we cannot tell you without risking your own safety." The fact that we’re getting license to ask anything in and of itself is worrying…this is not something that happens, generally.

These were exceptionally powerful items - very thoroughly smashing WBL guidelines. Player designed with some fairly loose restrictions, party munchkin had a lot of fun creating powerhouse items for these rewards.
Everyone except Aqila had some form of shapechange from theirs - Dagnar had a limited (Gloom only) version, others had at-will full shapechange at varying caster levels.
Aqila had some substantial stat boosts and an at-will heal.
And then a pile of other abilities - couldn't find a full write-up, do remember Thoron's had a pile of detection tricks on it so he could see through pretty much any kind of trickery.

We ask if they know anything about Helvisarn and the Choir of Frost. "Now that is an old name indeed. We may not know as much as you'd like." We add what details we know, that he’s trying to come back, Ilene's association with him being unwillingly, etc. They give us some interesting details, like the easiest way for him to come back is to pour his own power into Ilene, but if she breaks free of his control, he can't defend himself against his own power without permanently severing himself from that power. And then the dragon has a thought that seems to scare him badly, and he declines to say anything further on the subject for our own safety, just that if he's wrong, saying more would be dangerous, and if it's true, it would be fatal. Aqila comments that Valeiran also wouldn't say more either, but he gave us far more details on the situation than we'd ever heard from him on anything else....The dragon found that to be a somewhat more terrifying idea.
The most he would say further was, "You know that there are things in this world that cannot be harmed by ordinary means, and I don't speak of the undead, for those, the most effective means to combat them may be healing magics"
Joe asked them about Louhi and Ruzha. "Of that, what I can say and you can take this as full truth, she is not the one that you know as Ruzha. That she has some connection is certain, though what it may be, we cannot say. And this much more I may tell you...if it is within your power at all, she must live." Joe asks about Runa. "That we may not answer directly, but we will say this: Before this month has ended, if you have not learned the answer by other means, the 3rd paladin you meet shall give you the answer."
Moonbeam asks if they could tell us anything about Zeleya's temples and where they are...They aren't allowed to tell us for one, and for two, if they told us what they know, we'd surely die. So noted. They can tell us that anyone who would tell us and that telling would be fatal, are well disposed towards us and won't tell us. So anyone who does tell us, that alone won't get us killed. Joe changes tacks and asks about Zeleya's greater servants. "As to that, Savinel is already showing you that which is known. There is no more than that she knows that we could tell you, and she knows more of them than we do. And we know some things we think we know are false, but not which things, so we judge it would be safest to let her show you what she will in her own time."
Joe asks if they could confirm if Kashirna is the Dragon. They can’t, but "If it is indeed true, however, then your recent discoveries are perhaps more dangerous than you have thought. We will not speak too directly on this, but consider well: If he is indeed the Dragon, he has had 2000 years to consider his overthrow and devise a new course that will not carry such a risk. What place might your kind have in his new world? And this much more may make that more likely...we do not think it was within the abilities of our kind to create such things, and there have always been those of our kind who have resented your people. If he has perhaps made an alliance with those who remain of them, that might well explain where he found a mate."
Joe asked about Sohrab, what he's trying to accomplish, and if he's really a lich. "The answers to all these, we do indeed know. The answers to one of these, you will know soon. And this much more, the purpose that he thinks he serves is not the purpose that he will serve. It would be well to frustrate his designs where you encounter them, but don't seek him too strongly. He will not perish within this life of men."
We asked about the priest we'd run into so long ago, if he was a priest of Asurak. Yes, and emphasis on the was. So, Segmund was probably accurate in his fears about us getting sacrificed by that priest…
Moonbeam asks about dangers to Presmyslaw and Miroslav. "There are many dangers. The greatest though is not obvious. You will soon receive a message that seems to be a trap. Walk into the trap." "This may help you recognize it...the one who bears the message won't know who it's from or know that he bears it. As for Miroslav, he may prove to be the king that that land needs. If you see opportunity to bring it about, it would be well if he meets the daughter of the Sun. (he's being very cryptic). "
Joe asks that if there's any one thing he feels we should know, what is it? "Don't die."
And with that, they've given us all the time they can spare. We thank them for the information and the shinies.
So, our first move is to go find a room and see what our shinies are. And then make logical adjustments to gear. Then Listens to Wind and Thoron go make inquiries as to who the local expert in shapechanging is. The party also goes into paranoia mode when they realize how shiny the shinies are, combined with that 'Don't Die' and the comment that they're not just for what we did, but what we will do.
After the gear adjustments, we think about where we need to be next, and remember that island with the noble who's property had a temple we'd deconsecrated, and we'd promised to come back later. So, now's as good a time as any. He greets us with "Oh so you did get my message!" We look confused, and as it turns out, he'd sent a courier to Presmyslaw...after we get that sorted out, he tells us that our visit is timely, and that Lady Andjela is there and that she has some questions for us about Miroslav.
We see a young woman. Thoron's powersight sees her flickering between 3 and 25 in power. We'd seen that on Baron Taras, so that's suspicious. Joe turns on the Diplomacy. She starts, "So, I have heard you have had some dealings with Miroslav. I do not think you know him well, but I would hear what you have to say of him. (the island is one of the areas that could be a valuable ally in Miroslav's efforts to get a cohesive power base.) Do you think he might, perhaps he might be willing to abandon Makarn? Joe explains diplomatically that Miroslav seem to only pay lip service for the sake of his devout army officers, and probably be persuadable.
Joe's keen perceptions indicate that she seems honest and likeable. He asks her what her interest in Miroslav is, and her response was, "What do you know about the civil war that was fought here years ago?" Fast recap, almost 4-way in Ferial...Innokenti vs Mykyta...Dobroslaw supported Mykyta to try to stave off the war...4th contender was from the island...idiot about governing...tried to make everyone happy all the time, but had popular support. He 'disappeared' and no one knows what happened to him. (Innokenti had him surreptitiously executed). Aqila gives the high points that she remembers from her briefing back before she was assigned to Seferia. The lady listens, and says that no one really speaks of the 4th contender any more, but she's the daughter of Count Blagun...she has the support of the nobles that supported her father, sort of...she can't make a claim in her own right, but if she supports someone else, they'll follow her lead.
We assure her that Miroslav is the least bad choice out of all of Innokenti's sons, and seems to be halfway decent, really. She asks us if we would arrange a meeting with Miroslav. And if he should need more reason beyond what I have told you...she bows her head for a moment, and then we see a sudden flash in the shape of a giant phoenix around her. Ah, so she's a priestess of Nareel, the Goddess of the Sun. So A) that explains the funky power level shifts and B) ‘daughter of the sun’ seems like an obvious allusion. We take our leave and plan out how to arrange this meeting.
We decide to be polite, so we scry in to the priestess we'd taken to patch Miroslav's brains up, and see if she's in shape to have a chat, before we drop in. She's tired, but willing. She let's us know that Miroslav is recovering, but along the way, she's been finding and fixing some nasty traps left in his mind. Mostly weird patterns of thought in reaction to specific stimuli, like odd reactions to seeing someone wearing a green shirt, for example. She thinks he's probably in good enough shape for a meeting, as long as the other person is warned that he may have the occasional odd reaction, and that they're not left alone.
The priestess has heard of Andjela before, and thinks it would be safe to just tell her he's recovering from a nasty psychic assault as an explanation for any oddities. We arrange to visit Miroslav, politely, He probably doesn't actually remember us, since he was out of it after being rescued. So, we let him know that a potential ally wants to talk to him. "If she does have that sort of following, exploring an alliance would be wise." Message delivered, we head off. Joe asks the dogs how life's been. They're actually starting to get bored; there's been nothing to chomp. Joe pops off to get some dog toys.
And after that, we pop to Presmyslaw's capital, and find out that the courier was only there for one day. So we give him a ride back to the island and let Lady Andjela know that the Miroslav's been given the message and is interested. Then go back to the temple to see what's new in the Ruzha/Runa thread. When we walk in, one of the senior priests says, "Well, I think this is going to settle the argument." Another priest hears that comment and comes running up and says that a man has come there, says he has a message, and our names, and nothing else. They'd been arguing about whether to contact us or not. This looks fishy. We shoo people out of the room just in case things go boom. So there are witnesses in the hall in case anything ‘interesting’ happens. We see a somewhat glassy-eyed man standing in the room endlessly repeating our names and that he has a message. Creepy. Thoron sees a monumental pile of enchantment magic on him. Aqila tries casting antimagic field, and the guy collapses immediately. She steps back and he gets back up and resumes repeating that he has a message for our names on an infinite loop. He looks exhausted so Moonbeam Heals him. Nothing else changes. Aqila steps forward again, and he stops talking, looks confused, and asks where he is. The last thing he remembers is being in South Waymeet and a man talking to him, but he doesn't remember what he said. Aqila steps back one more time, while Joe identifies us and asks for the message. The voice changes to one we've heard before, Sohrab's...."You may know that there is a temple of Shenea near where you are. It would be to my advantage if that temple ceased to exist. While I do not know where it is, I believe I can arrange for you to gain the means to discover its location. If you are interested, come meet with me (gives a location out in the middle of nowhere in the East Wall)" The web of enchantments unravels.
The priests could hear the message just fine. They're dubious about the source of this information, but if we're willing to risk our necks.... Joe points out later that we were told to walk into the trap, so how close do we want to teleport so we can walk in?
We greater teleport in to the meeting place and we see a single ordinary zombie at the site. Or, almost ordinary. Unusually strong aura of necromancy. The zombie speaks in Sohrabs voice after a while.."Ah, you've arrived. As I said, I cannot tell you precisely where the temple is or how to reach it, however, I can tell you where someone who knows will be in one week's time. Unfortunately, I'm not certain where you might find her in the intervening time...I have my suspicions, but sharing them would tell you more than I wish to tell you. In one week, however, you'll be able to find her at this manor, provided that you do nothing to disturb it and alert her in the intervening time.” The location he gives is a small isolated manor a bit north of Presmyslaw's capital. Joe asks if he has a name or descriptions. "You may well have heard of her in your other activities...her name is Ruzha. I will advise you to be prepared for...unexpectedly distructive magic. From what I understand, one of her gifts allows her to be as many spellcasters at once." And, having concluded the conversation, the zombie disintegrates.
So, we have a week before we can follow up on any of that. And bored adventurers look for ways to entertain themselves. And there's this temple at Greenfields that we didn't desecrate. Yet. So, for kicks and giggles, we seed the temple's foundations with the spheres we'd picked up at the outpost of Tarevale...the ones that have incorporeal guardians attached to them, and they respawn a day after unsummoning. So we'll leave those to wear on their nerves for a bit. The snow as all gone, so they managed to melt it somehow. That takes most of the day, since we wanted to space the appearances out a bit.
The next day, we remember that there is an artificer whom we owe a favor to for pimping our carriage. He has a colleague down in southern Teredor, and they've both been working on the same problem - finding a more efficient way to create minor magical items. They technically have a solution, but the price is a bit insane. He's walking with us to his lab while he talks. At his lab, it's dominated by an impressive array of metal, etched runes, and crystals. From a first glance, conservatively, 200k materials in the apparatus. "The biggest problem we're having right now is that it works, but something in the array blows up every two or three items, and we have to fix the whole thing. The cost for repairs mean you'd have to sell each sword for 50k to break even. If we could solve the power surges that are causing the explosions, I think it would work. The approach I've been taking is substituting in planar infused materials to find more resilient materials, but it drives up the cost of the array substantially. My colleague has been trying a different approach, running higher power through the array to see if higher power is more stable. He's gotten more promising results, but more spectacular explosions...the longest he's kept it stable was a whole 9 items. The problem is, from some of his recent letters, I think someone has been poking around, trying to steal his work. And there are many people who should not get ahold of such efforts. The Dragon temple comes to mind, considering what they could do if they could equip their army with even minor magical items...the Enemy comes to mind as well, not for the minor items, but for what I had pointed out to me what this effort could lead to...I believe you've been shown the Spellforges? (trying to use one is liable to kill most anyone.) In theory, this could well lead to eventually a more usable form of spell forge...and I mean eventually in the order of centuries, not years. But one of the advantages that Arandor enjoys in preparation for the eventual war is that the Enemy contains no surviving spellforges." Joe asks if there are any others. "To my knowledge, no." Aqila asks if the favor is for us to visit his colleague, determine who's bothering him, and dissuade them if possible? "Succinctly put. If you can bring back evidence of who is involved, then the Sentinel can get officially involved" (we can only get involved, because we're on vacation and this is a favor) "And since he's not entirely convinced there is a problem, you need a reason he'd accept to get involved. I have some materials for his project that you could deliver along the way" He pulls out a few bars of gold, with an obvious glow to Thoron, "Earth infused gold. One of the more common infusions for gold, really. I believe he's intending to alloy it with some other metals, fleeting adamantine, I believe. (artificially created adamantine, turns back to ordinary iron with a dispel magic.)
The capital city of the Southeastern Teredor is Madaska, where we're going. The local branch of the Imperial University is where this artificer is working. And given the value of the materials, we are a logical courier. Meeting him in person, we realize he's a very naive absent-minded professor. We get to see his apparatus. Thoron can see some extreme unevenness at points, but we have no idea if it's intentional or not. Aqila starts asking questions as an excuse to stick around. That triggers off a long explanation using many terms that seem to be his own invention. She can't tell if they're words she knows under different terms, or entirely new. After an hour and a half, there's a loud explosion next door. She asks what that was, and he tells her, "Oh, that's the abjuration team having another one of their accidents..they're trying to figure out how to stop people from summoning demons...in a big area like a city or something." While Aqila was taking one for the team, Moonbeam Scholar's Touched his notes to search for clues. Mostly 'I did this and that blew up', but there are notes about things going missing, and having to take time to replace it....so misplaced, or stolen? Locate Object might be useful.
Aqila, taking advantage of the pause, asks him where he's been getting his material from...it's not a secret, and he hands her a list of the University's suppliers. Doesn’t say what he got from who, of course, but it should be explicable. She also asks him, since we were dropping the bars off as a favor, we wouldn't mind helping out a bit more by locating anything that's gone missing. He says that would be helpful and shows us an adamantine object with gems, one of a pair of tuned focusers, and if we can find the other one, it'll save him 3 weeks worth of work. We tell him that Joe has to go outside to cast the spell (to cover the fact he's going to be a Water Weird for Locate Object). Very few people know how druids work, so we can say just about anything. Meanwhile, Moonbeam goes to make sure everyone is okay next door. The room has a forcefield in the middle with what looks like a human-sized crystal in the middle that exploded. The researchers around it are muttering. They answer her, Oh, no, it's the same problem we've had for the last three months...when we bring them up to full power, they blow up...the models worked perfectly, but it's only the size of a room, so it's absurdly expensive. They've been trying lots of variations....37 so far. The problem is flaws in the physical crystals. Stoneshape theoretically could fix flaws, but in practice they add two flaws in fixing one. The crystals have to be grown, takes a year to get to full size, and they only have 60. (GM note: The real problem is that they misjudged the time needed to grow a crystal – to reliably get a sufficiently flawless one actually takes 10 years in proper conditions – not one. One of them has suggested that, and they’ve set up a very conservative experiment to test the idea – that crystal will be ready in 25 years if nothing happens to it)
Aqila has wandered over too by this time and offers Thoron as a potential way to ID if any crystals are unflawed. At this point, they start realizing that maybe they shouldn't have been taking so freely to people they don't know. On being asked who we are, Aqila gives a largely factual answer, that we were doing a favor for a friend of their neighbor, by dropping off some materials for him, and we came over to see if everyone was okay when we heard the explosion...and Aqila's father studies Ancient artifacts, so this sort of thing is familiar to her. The guy only heard two words in that explanation, and directs them to the lab three doors down where they're studying Ancient objects. We aren't actually here to fix their problems, so we move on. Meanwhile, Joe does his thing and has 18 minutes to check around the university first, then the rest of the city for the missing item. No dice, not in the city at all. When he reports that to the artificer, he gets visibly upset and agitated. We tactfully point out that his work is valuable, and that his friend had noticed that more things had been going missing, based on his letter, than you would think is normal, and warned us....He explicitly asks us to investigate.
Joe uses Locate Object to search for all the missing items, that the artificer located in his detailed notes as having gone missing, and the replacements were usable as foci for the search. A few small items turn up, but nothing else. The artificer having had time to think about this new idea, that if someone was trying to copy his work, they'd have almost all the pieces they need now, except for the central focus, assuming they've copied his notes. It's the one piece of the apparatus that has never exploded or needed replaced. It's been a week and a half since the last disappearance, and things disappeared every 4-5 days before that.
After some discussion, Joe becomes a star-nosed mole and finds 5 scents that don't match anyone else in the room, that by strength seem to have not been there when others had been, and all go out to the street. There are no cleaning staff around right now to ask, but there are security staff. After some persuasion, we get the security staff to show us the sign-in logs. They have lamps of revealing at the door so invisible people can't sneak in. We quickly find that no one reviews these logs closely...there's one name that signed in three times, and then signed out three times. And that happened on one of the nights something disappeared from the lab. When we ask about it, we find that the name is one of the researchers in the abjuration lab. The thing is, why three? Two people pretending to be the same other guy? A set-up?
Aqila, being the forgery expert in the party, takes twenty to see if she can determine which sign ins and outs are him. She determines that the 1st and 3rd sign-ins are fake, and that the first two sign outs...the one who got in last left first. The researcher is really not happy to hear that someone’s been impersonating him. We ask him about that night, and he remembers hearing a lot of rustling and moving around in the artificer’s lab. He figured it was the artificer working late, but the signout show that the artificer left before the first fake arrived.
We continue plotting how to solve this mystery. A stakeout is in order. As we're getting ready, the artificer comes to us and says, you know, you're not the only one who asked me who my suppliers were...a couple of gentlemen down from the Imperial city came down to look at the labs, and thought they could get better prices for my materials, and asked who we bought from. You know, I haven't heard back from them." He can give us a description of them, so Moonbeam goes for scrying. Moonbeam gets the one she had the best description of, and someone who probably is the described partner. They're sitting at a table in a tavern. With three other people. A young women appearing to be mostly dressed in knives. A much larger woman with a huge battle axe leaning against her chair. The 3rd is a weedy looking man with shifty eyes. He has a small bundle of wands near his hand. Detect magic through the scry pegs them as an assortment of evocation, but there's some odd universal magic associated with the whole bundle. The two men are dressed in obviously good business dress. Gear on the rest looks on par to what we had before we hit Brighthaven.
They're talking about plans for a future job. What she can hear is “The boss is getting really impatient, but I'm not sure it's quite safe...the guards have been more alert lately.” The one guy, the one we had a less good description of, looks a lot like the impersonated researcher. The smaller of the two women mutters, “I just want to get this over so I can do MY part." We decide to go out for dinner, leaving Thoron behind to keep watch. He has a skull to get in contact with Joe if need be. The tavern is an old warehouse, taken over, in the bad part of town.
We just walk in, weapons slung, and claim a table in the vicinity of the conspirators, and order good beer. We're not cheap mercenaries, after all. Meanwhile, the other group is having an argument. The cause is not obvious, but Joe recognizes a name that one of them mentions, that “Rezelene wants us to hurry”. That's one of Eleduath's greater hands. She was at the previous incident in the Deadlands, and got in a pissing contest with the Keeper over a staff piece. So she survived, and she's here, and the Enemy is involved. This probably qualifies as ‘Sentinel intervention is permitted’.
Aqila steps outside and bounces back to Arandor to report that one of Eleduath's hands is directly involved with trying to copy the artificer's work, and after asking if they want us to interrogate them in the field, or bring them back, she’s told to collect them, so she pops back, and passes that onto the rest of the party. This won't be hard. Joe wildshapes into a squid in the tavern, grabs them, then Aqila bounces the whole mess home. Moonbeam left a few silver on the table before we left to pay our tab. (Greater Hands are in the habit of putting nasty traps in the minds they have working for them, i.e. ask the wrong question and they literally explode). We landed outside the Citadel proper because Joe is too big for the teleport rooms. The arctic temperatures take the rest of the fight out of the five of them.

After we drop them off, and one short interrogation later, "Alright, you need to get down there and get a guard on that artificer now. From what these said, there's another team, and these ones are the dupes." So, we haul tail back south. Thoron and the artificer are still in the lab. We tell the artificer that a team of assassins is going to kill him, but we'll stop them, and would he mind sleeping in this rope trick room tonight so we can guard both him and his work. He seems to be rather out of it, but complies. We make sure he's comfortable with the toilet, bed, and stove we picked up last week.
We settle in for a stakeout. We left a skull with the guards, but hear nothing. Most of the night passes before three people pop up, one in each corner of the room where the door isn't. The three of them are all male, bare-arse naked, and incorporeal. The apparatus is taking up most of the room in the center, which limits the area we can move freely in. Thoron becomes a giant octopus, with magic tentacles, and starts pummeling the nearest bad guy. 50% chance to hit incorporeal, and 3 hits total. The one Thoron hit gets to attack now. Smacks Thoron around a little bit, but since they’re doing cold and disintegration damage with their unarmed strikes, and we had cold immunity up cold immunity up from our delivery to Arandor earlier, it’s not that bad. (and Thoron got the same, since it’s easier to chose dtypes when we’re all immune to the same one) An unhurt one gets to act now. Hits Dagnar twice. Joe goes octopus too, and kelp strands all three. Two get hit. One is free, the one that isn't attacking Dagnar or Thoron. Aqila nukes him with force bolts. 126 damage. Still standing.
Dagnar attacks the one that attacked him. All misses. Moonbeam ghostdusts the room. All are made corporeal now. Then she tries to turn the one Aqila nuked into a sloth. It works, so we have a prisoner. The sloth barely moves. Thoron, with a now more hittable target, unloads. 4 hits. 2 crits. And the dude is still standing. Thoron tries a quickened dispel and knocks 3 spells off. They had a blend of necromancy, abjuration, and evocation. The one by Dagnar is grappled by kelp strands, and tries to escape. He does. Joe goes into super dispel man mode and hits both the nonsloths. Aqila disintegrates the one that doesn’t drop dead when his spell is removed. A back pendant is left in the wreckage of the assassin. We leave Thoron, and Dagnar, on guard, while Moonbeam, Joe, and Aqila escort sloth back for interrogation...after Moonbeam heals it just in case.
One of the other senor Sword members lets us know that we've stumbled on something more interesting that we’d thought. He explained that it was surprising that these assassins were sent on something like this. Among those who know of these people, they think of them as assassins for hire, and some of the most difficult to hire, as well as the most expensive. “Because of these”, he added, gesturing at the pendant. “When worn, they are absorbed by the body, and renders them incorporeal, and difficult to hinder by most means. I would recommend against wearing one, because they consume your soul...after donning one, you have perhaps a month to live. Normally they are trained for decades before they are allowed to don a pendant. These ones seem rather undertrained. What is not commonly known is that they are agents of the Enemy, and when they are hired out, it is because their hirer's goals further the Enemy's purposes.” We also find out that normally, 600k gold is a common fee for operations. Recovering the pendants should delay further operations because a Hand would not normally have more than 3, maybe a 4th in reserve.
“We'll be assigning some Shield agents to guard him, but if anything too interesting happens, we may call you in.” We allow that blowing things up is something we're good at. Joe once again makes snarky comments about tents, and points out that we did not damage the apparatus. He trusts that this repays our favor to the artificer in full.

Terane
2020-05-13, 08:08 AM
Everyone is here this month. We're on Day 3 of the week we were promised must pass before we can catch Ruzha, the lady who knows where Shenea's temple is. Presumably it’s the day after the morning we ganked the assassins in Teredor. After we get a little sleep, Aqila and Moonbeam go look up Tervel to see what he thinks about the whole Daughter of the Sun thing. And mention that we saw the same effect (the thing where, using power sight, someone flickers between a high and low level) on baron Taras. The ex-goddess Aremel is with him, as usual, and they explain that Angela is probably a favored priestess of Nareel, who has a guardian Phoenix bound to her...the lvl 25 we saw was the guardian, the 3 is her. Aremel is worried about the Baron, though...she'd like us to obtain whatever records of his family that we can find, because there's something it could be, and that's the first step to confirming. Tervel figures an archive dive in Presmyslaw's keep would probably turn up what we need. Aremel doesn't want to say anything about her suspicions because even reminding us that such a thing is possible is abhorrent to her.
And then Savinel metaphorically taps us on the shoulder and asks us to come visit. She's been reminded of the existence of one of the more irritating servitors of Zeleya...if we know how they work, they're relatively harmless, but ignorance would get us all killed. They're resistant to most forms of damage, and heal very quickly (quick healing 50). And if we destroy their physical form, they return very rapidly. Joe ask if squirreling them would work. She doesn't know of anyone who's done it, and can't guess if it would work. But, their ability to return does not work if they are killed in a brightly lit area...they of course can create darkness. (so area needs to stays brightly lit)...they aren't harmed by light per se, but certain of their powers are weakened, and they do not regenerate from light damage. Savinel describes them as 'unruly' creatures that will desert their masters at the drop of a hat....capricious and delighting in others pain, which is why they're attracted to her service. Their most dangerous attack can fortunately be seen coming...they can't cast spells directly but they can generate...a small bomb you might call it. Disintegration blast, disjunction, and simple energy blasts are all possible...it's a shadowy blob, and the effect goes off two rounds later...40' blast radius. You want to get out. The final effect looks like a simple paralysis attack, but ordinary protections are not reliable against it, so Savinel doesn't know what it actually does.
She doesn't see any point to having us fight one, since they are otherwise not impressive...they can create a weak electrical discharge (1d6 electricity ray) and that's about it. She has also, maybe, determined how we will find the place...what she's seen is too hazy to be reliable, but she suspects we will not directly locate it, and may never know where it actually is physically...what she's been able to piece together would require us to travel through a sequence of planes to reach it, though which ones she can't say, save that they would be hostile...planes with allegiance to Zeleya. Also, she can see that when this happens, Zeleya has some reason to want us to reach her temple, albeit badly weakened when we do...She can't see why she wants us there, only that is connected to the 6th person with us. No idea who that 6th person...she's seen no fewer than 6 and as many as 12. She never sees anyone clearly except us 5. And the 6th who is always the same she can't see at all.
She thinks her best chance of success (i.e. not dying as a result of this situation) seems to involve fewer people...all paths with the full 12 end in death for us all. She reminds us repeatedly that everything she sees is vague. Savinel today is willing to let us test ourselves against the best representation of Silviel that she can provide...she doesn't expect us to succeed, but it will give us a benchmark to test ourselves against to see what we will need to do to survive.
Savinel creates an image as a talking point before giving us the rundown: “Silviel is an accomplished spellcaster, but she is rather less than adept at actual combat (likely to make suboptimal spell choices). You will note that she is surrounded by many lines of energy...these are effectively whips that will attack you on their own if you go near her...dozens of them. She can also direct them herself. They are a part of her being...because of her nature, an antimagic field will not prevent them. She is also, to an extent, though I do not say this to discourage such a plan, able to cast her spells inside an antimagic field, but doing so is harmful to her. (spend hps equal to the SL of the spell). Her touch causes crippling agony. She can choose to kill instead of causing pain (blocked by death ward). Her final ability, that you will likely find most irritating...she is capable of forming a shell of near unbreakable energies around herself...she will heal rapidly within it, and can cast spells on herself, but can't act on anyone outside it. And she can't maintain it while uninjured.” Savinel has no idea if she can enter it while grappled.
Also, she's highly resistant to fire and cold. Resistant to electric and sonic, but still possible to injure. Acid, Savinel doesn't know...she's only seen weak acid spells used against Silviel...and those were ineffective. So, we plot and prepare, and then go to the same constricted room to face the approximation of Silviel.
Joe leads us off with a greater dispel. He knocks 17 spells off...10 left. (she has a habit of putting magic auras up to make it look like she has more spells up than she really does). Then he does kelp strands. 4 hits. 2 take, so she's twice grappled, for now. Dagnar is next, and using the spell knowledge stance. He hits, and learns 7/10 remaining spells she has up...spell turning - 9 levels left, spellcaster's bane - counterspell auto, superior resistance, death ward and 3 magic auras. Dagnar choses a tripled split ray of stupid for the spell cast through his dragon-gift sword, 14 int damage, we presume. And 50-odd damage from the hit. Moonbeam's turn - she uses her dragon gift with a time-stop to get 24 medium elementals out to soak whip damage.
Thoron did snake's swiftness mass, so Dagnar did another 50pts damage. Elementals did zilch. Spellcaster's band and superior resistance knocked off by Thoron. Then Silviel goes...the whips hit every elemental they strike, and Dagnar takes 36 fire damage. Then she casts the form of disjunction that suppresses magic items instead of destroying them. Everyone gets hosed...then Silvial spends her last action on Dagnar. She slaps him for 24 hps, with her pain touch. He blows the save, and is left cowering for a round.
Aqila’s spell matrix stored spells are now useless, effectively, so she tried prismatic eye, which takes out the spell turning. The turned spell also tries to banish the eye to another plane, but it survives the reflected banish. Joe gets to go again, and uses timestop to buff up. Bite of the werebear, wildshape to giant octopus, and then try to maul her to death. Needs a 20 to hit, so 8 misses. Moonbeam's turn is used to put up superior resistance, and throwing more elementals at her to soak tentacle hits. Dagnar is still out, so Thoron tried chain lightning, and it fizzled. So he tosses swiftness to give the elementals a chance to hit. 1 actually hits for 14.
Silviel's turn comes around. She casts wave of pain. And the tentacles beat up elementals. And Dagnar. His hit points are now in the teens. But she fails to cast defensively, so AOO abound. Dagnar is now uncowering, so he gets to take a shot too. Aqila fails to make her save against the wave of pain. Joe makes it. Moonbeam makes it with her resistance back. Thoron fails. Dagnar isn't in the cone, but gets slapped again and fails the save again, so he’s cowering again. Aqila is stunned by pain. For rounds. Retcon, moonbeam had time to greater heal on her turn, so Dagnar back at 63 hps. Aqila can't act but the eye can...doesn't instakill but does 4 con damage still.
Joe's turn. Timestop for 3 rounds so owl's insight, among others, then blasted her with 66 damage from blast of sand. Moonbeam also does the stop time to buff then blast of sand Silviel, and Heals everyone first, so Aqila is conscious again. What elementals were left did no damage. Thoron also did blast of sand. Did more damage, but not enough to drop her.
She goes into her shell. So we have some time. Savinel asks us if we want to bail here. We've already impressed her by not dying and getting this far. We agree...we've gotten a good idea of how far short we're falling, and what sorts of holes in our knowledge we need to fill for Round 2. Savinel thinks it might be worthwhile to see how well we do fighting more than one of Zeleya's servants. Turn up the difficulty a little.
We depart. Moonbeam takes a trip south to rummage through Presmyslaw's archives, and finds that Baron Taras's family is one of the oldest in the empire...extending back to Jahan's day. She takes that tidbit back to Aremel, who says, "It's not impossible then. I suppose I'll have to ask my sister for advice." OOC her sister, goddess of love, fertility, with a love of children, if she knew that someone might be using a spell to literally take over your own child's body, would go ballistic and order a holy crusade on Taras.



After our day of training with Savinel, we have 3 days before something happens. Aqila learns glasstrike, and other book-keeping things are taken care of. Then Joe gets a panicked message from one of the Fae he'd asked to watch the gate locations...it was mostly incoherent, with a vivid image of a blinding snowstorm. That seems suspicious. We teleport to the location, and find a very cold and miserable looking satyr. Moonbeam gives him cold immunity. We can see a short distance away a wall of white...a hurricane-force winds snowstorm. The satyr says it started up a short time ago, and it's about 2 miles in diameter. He wasn't watching when it started...but some of his friends are in there and he thinks they are still in there. Based on the location, the gate would be right in the center of this mess. And Thoron reports that the storm extends upward as far as he can see.

We're told the storm sprang into existence rather abruptly. Moonbeam and Joe start figuring out what forms they want to wear into this mess. They decide to be solars. We teleport into the middle of the mess, on speculation, and indeed find an eye in the center of' the storm...about 70' in diameter, and things look a little dicey. There are eight pillars arranged in a circle, with an icy maiden in each one, and a woman is hovering about twelve feet up in the middle of the circle with a growing hole in the world that opens on...nothingness, enveloping who we presume is Ilene.

Moonbeam uses Brainspider to pry on the thoughts of the ladies in the pillars...she learns that they are opening the gate, that it will be fully open in minutes, and that they are doing this willingly. Aqila casts message to see if we can just, you know, talk to Ilene. She does not respond to hails. So we prepare to break crap.

Moonbeam gets to go first. She uses time stop to summon a crap-ton of elementals. 3 huge earth and 3 huge storm. Then she flamestrikes a pillar...twice. Sonically. The pillar is now riddled with cracks and looks ready to fall apart. Thoron goes next and shapechanges into a sphinx, and roars. Does 50 damage to all crystalline objects within 90' feet. All elementals have to save against fear. They all fail, feared for 2 rounds. One of the pillars shatters and a Choir member is now floating 30' feet in the air surrounded by shards of ice. Joe goes next, wildshapes into a dire rhino and using his flight, charges the first vulnerable Choir member. He slams into her like a truck. She explodes in a 150' radius blast of frost, strengthening the remaining pillars. We all have cold immunity so we're immune. 150 pts of cold damage. The elementals take damage, but none are under half health yet.

Dagnar goes next, moves to the next pillar, and swings the black blade of disaster at it. 86 damage. Aqila's turn. She blows her spell matrix after floating 20' up to get 5 mirror images, and fires off two shouts to hit 4 pillars, starting from the one Dagnar hit and going counterclockwise. The two shouts don't take any out, so she uses a quickened cacophonous burst to hit the one Dagnar hit plus the one to the left again. Blows up one pillar. Then the choir gets to go. Dagnar, Aqila, and Moonbeam all get hit with a CL20 Greater Dispel. Oww.

Aqila loses Indomitability and her Mage Armor. Keeps cold immunity. And keeps primal instinct, heart of earth, owl's insight, heroism. Moonbeam loses all but 4 buffs, flight, owl's insight, nature's avatar, primal instinct. Dagnar keeps superior resistance, owl's insight, barkskin, mage armor. Which doesn't let him resist whatever the Choir member did to him. Fails his con save, and now feels exhausted and can feel his heart rate slowing. Eep.

Moobeam's turn. The elementals flee into the storm. She timestops and recasts cold immunity on herself. And shapechanges again, and summons more elementals. She's now airborne too. So she can Mass Heal Dagnar and get his heart going again. Then the new elementals attack the pillars. All of them show cracks now. Thoron changes from a sphinx to a dire rhino and also charges the choir member...he misses. Joe's up and used maximized fire seeds...he misses too.

Dagnar uses the Black Blade of Disaster to do a full attack, after taking a step to be flanking. And uses the Duskblade offhand. He drinks a potion of true strike and only makes 1 hit with the Blade. 89 damage and she has to make a fort save. Aqila uses quicken to fire off two arcane bolt spells....that kills frosty number 2 who also explodes in a foom of cold. Dagnar is not cold immune, so he has to dodge. The elementals all get blasted too. And the pillars heal a bit. No choir members are out, so nothing happens on their turn, except we hear a dissonant chord, almost like a scream. The void space grows larger. We're running out of time.

Moonbeam summons an archon to cast consecrate on the void/Ilene in hopes that that will weaken Helvisarn's grip on her, then does Earthquake on the pillars after she comes out of her timestop. One pillar breaks. Force Strike misses. Bah. The archon casts Consecrate on the portal, but nothing visibly happens. Thoron charges the just released 3rd choir member and hits. He kills it in one hit. So Dagnar has to dodge the cold blast again. Pillars heal again. Joe prepares to act...first he splinterbolts a pillar to break it, then rhino-charges and smashes the choir member. She explodes. Four down, four to go. Elementals are gone. Dagnar charges a pillar, and gets a swing in. Breaks the pillar. Aqila gets to go...casts darkbolt at Choir Member 5, but none of the bolts hit. So she gets cranky and glass strike's it, and it fails the fort save. So a glass statue drops to the ground, and lands, cracking but intact. No iceburst this time. No portal size change or screams this time...

Moonbeam goes again. Timestop, then quickly drops off the glass statue in one of the Arendor drop points. Then she summons three more storm elementals of which the first two attacked the pillars when her timestop ends and expose 2 more choir members then the 3rd does their thunder/lightning attack at the 2 exposed choir members. Both choir members make their saves, so Moonbeam then tries to petrify one of them. She succeeds. So one out, and one still pillared. And still an archon to act...it uses holy smite on the other choir member. 18 damage. Thoron next. He casts drown. It works. It'll be dead in a few rounds. Joe next. He spinterbolts the pillar. takes it down. Then he charges. It explodes in a icy burst. That's all eight dealt with. With 2 in a state where they could be revived and studied...though it would need to be done fast since even the ones we 'killed' left behind an icy shard that is their soul, and if any of them are still alive after a certain period of time, even the dead ones will revive.

And now the original 6 elementals finally make it back after their panicked fleeing. Dagnar finishes off the dying/drowning choir member just to get this done. She explodes, he dodges. The elementals have a handful of HPs left. Aqila casts indomnibilty on herself just in case something stupid happens. The void collapses and we hear a scream of rage from Ilene. Joe reflexively shifts to a needletailed Swift...very small and very fast. Which is a good thing because Ilene attacks him. 29 divine damage total. Looked like bolts of golden lightning. Then a towering things that seems to be mostly claws and teeth appears. Made out of ice. It attacks the archon. Shreds it a bit.

With the void gone, Thoron can now see Ilene has a massive pile of buffs applied to her, with a monumental pile of tangled enchantments on top of it. Plus we can all see a multilayered shimmering orb surrounding her, like an orb of invulnerability, except some layers look like ice. Also surrounded by swirling halo of ice. The ice is like a halo of sand, but stronger. Fire immunity is active. All 5 resistances active. Greater mage armor. Superior Resistance. Death Ward. Force Ward. Globe and Lesser globe of invulnerability. Cold Flame shield. Freedom of Movement. Mindblank. Hearts of Air, Earth, Fire, Water. Glacial Ward. Greater Glacial Ward. Plus the massive pile of enchantments...higher than 10th level. Mostly compulsion effects. The storm elementals take out Ilene's summon.

Thoron fills us in on what she has prot wise, and defers to Joe, who G. Dispels her. Knocks off some buffs. Thoron knocks off more. Dagnar passes. Aqila tries to Earthbind Ilene for grins...the spell goes through but she makes the save. Ilene pauses, looking like she's fighting with herself. Moonbeam summons a bunch of monadic devas and they cast dispel evil, x6. Thoron and Joe knock more stuff off. Dagnar passes again. Aqila tries a greater dispel and it takes some more off. Ilene zaps people, but only one hit Moonbeam. 39 divine damage. She also summons another ice beastie. It mauls the original archon but doesn't kill it. Then Moonbeam's turn. Lots of dispel evils seem to clear Ilene's mind.

Her voice seems to echo from a great distance. "Thank you, there is very little time. I trust you know where another gate may be found?"

Recap - Valeiran told us that if we could break Ilene free from Helvisarn, we could kill him. But that would require us to almost immediately go to the last gate, and let her open it so Helvisarn can come through....then Ilene can kill him. Because he can only be hurt by his own power, and he's poured quite a bit of his power into her so she can open the gate for him. So, this is our best shot at ending this. But, we need to go now. (Also, killing Ilene would stop Helvisarn from coming through, but doom the world in a few decades. We don't know why)

She quickly cautions us to not attack Helvisarn ourselves...we need to keep his servants from attacking her, because she can't be distracted while fighting. Also, every fae in the area will be coming in to fight for him.

We have a few rounds to rebuff, but we need to haul tail, because if she resuccumbs during the fight, the world ends. Ouch.

Terane
2020-05-19, 08:10 AM
Picking up where we left off, we rapidly reprepare and recast buffs, including tossing buffs at Ilene...we have little time, so we hurry it up.
When we arrive at the last gate location, we come in with greater invisibility up and everyone can fly, so we leave no trace of our passage on the grassy plain. Ilene asks us to do what we can to limit the damage this battle will do. So we just start plotting how to make the battlefield terrain more to our liking. There are small clumps of trees, but they are small and far off. 500' or farther. Plan is to use an avalanche to make a snow barrier, with Aqila using a wall of force spell to make a ceiling over the gate location so there's an open area for Ilene to work in. Then Joe will keep a control winds spell going to ensure that flight won't help as much to get past the snow. Moonbeam summons two monadic devas, one movanic deva and 2 ursinal guardian angels. Plus two warden archons and one guardian archon. And we gave Ilene the fast healing stone for safety. Ilene had cautioned us specifically to not attack Helvisarn, but to leave him to her, while we keep anything else from distracting her. We range ourselves on top of the heap of snow, looking down about 30’ into an open circle where Ilene waits.
With all preparations made, Ilene opens the gate. She faces the gate, lifts one hand, and slashes it down. The Gate springs open and a towering figure steps through (about 12' tall). He appears to be smiling. "So, you think you can challenge me. Have you told these fools what the price of your ascension will be?" "I know exactly what what I am about to do will cost. There is no need to concern them." she replies. We can tell he's trying to sown dissension here. We prepare to act.
Ilene leads off with what looks like a shimmering bolt of ice straight to Helvisarn. Thoron can tell it’s a lot of magical energy, and after one look, isn't sure he wants to keep looking at that. Helvisarn responds by summoning 8 minions, floating in the air up with us, about 30' up. We're still floating on the rim of the snow cliff. The minions look like full sets of plate armor made out of ice and nothing is visible inside them. First one attacks a monadic deva, as does a 2nd. 1 takes 44 damage, other takes 0. Joe is attacked next, and is missed. Aqila has 6 mirror images up and displacement, so she gets missed. Moonbeam is missed. Dagnar has Greater mirror image up, and is attacked by the last 2 minions. One minion hits an image, the other does too. Two images gone. And then Helvisarn returns Ilene's attack with a torrent of similar seeming bolts.
Thoron firsts casts firestorm and leaves all but one looking pretty melted, then he casts snakes swiftness, mass. Aqila can't hit the broad side of a barn. Everyone else hits. Two drop, Dagnar uses the black blade of disaster for grins on the non-melty one. It made the save, so normal damage. Joe goes next, with 6 still standing, and changes to octopus to deal max damage. He destroys all the minions. So Dagnar has nothing to do. Aqila gets a prismatic eye out for later. Moonbeam gets some more minions out while she has time. Storm elementals etc. Ten total.
Looking out past the edge of the avalanche, we can see that the grass seems to be shriveling, falling apart. Ilene repeats her attack. Helvisarn repeats his barrage of attacks against her. In the distance, we can see the leading edges of what looks like a mob of minor fae. Mostly satyrs, nymphs, and any dryad in range. Moonbeam summons more storm elementals. Aqila summons a Force Claw to guard us for grins. Thoron did Mass Resist Sonic - + 30 resist. Moonbeam also casts Vigorous Circle so we have fast healing 3.
Ilene does her thing, and while we can't see her face, her attitude seems to be smiling. Helvisarn snarls, "Enough of this!" and drops another horde of minions on us. 8 minions all grouping around Moonbeam, Dagnar, and Aqila. The minions are flying, with silver armor and a cloud of weapons surrounding them. They look like magic to Thoron, mostly Transmutation. Joe recognizes them as Fae Ragewalkers. First two minions attack Aqila, 3 potential hits, 2 miss on displacement, 1 hits an image. 5 left. Moonbeam has 3 on her. And they all went to the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy...all misses. Dagnar as 3 on him. And the dice hate him...18-19 rolled. 46 damage total, with his stoneskin active.
Then all Moonbeam’s summons have to make a will save...the PCs have mindblank up and are immune to mind affecting spells. And then it doesn't matter, because the effect can't take effect inside a protective aura, which the devas are projecting.
Now it's Thoron's turn. He uses the chain lightning effect from his dragon present, and some of the Fae Ragewalkers look a bit fried. Then Thoron casts snake's swiftness mass, again. Joe pokes one of the ones by Aqila, and does some damage. So does Thoron. Aqila misses, big surprise. The ursinal helps out and one is down. Moonbeam gets a smack in, so do a few of the other summons, and Dagnar. No deaths, though. Joe goes squid-zilla on the fae. When the dust settles, there are only 3 left. Dagnar takes his turn and nails one too. 2 left. Aqila split an arcane bolts spell between the two remaining, and nails one. The last was less beaten. So Moonbeam turns into a gold dragon and evaporates the last one in a puff of firey breathe. Then she starts giggling.
Ilene appears to do nothing. Helvisarn looks furious. "JUST DIE ALREADY!" he screams. What looks like lightning bolts come raining down on all of us. Hit's being proportional to your size. So Moonbeam eats 9 81 damage bolts. Stabilizes at 1hp as her indomitability triggers. Dagnar dodges completely. Aqila saves and takes 41 damage. 30 hps left. Thoron in Solar form saves, and takes 41. Joe reflexively changes into a swift and dodges but still takes 41 damage. Not all the summons make it. The monadic deva has less than 81 hps and poofs. The storm elemental swarm is far enough away to avoid it. Movanic deva goes too. And the warden archon.
On their turn, Joe and Thoron move closer to Moonbeam so she can heal them on her turn. Aqila puts Indomitability up on Moonbeam again just in case. And then Moonbeam goes into healbot mode and we're all back at full health. Then it's Ilene's turn. She unleashes a barrage similar to what he's been doing to her. He actually staggers back. Then it's his turn. He does the equivalent of 15 freezing fog spells all around the open area. They overlap a lot. Thoron can also see 4 ...holes, opening in space in a line in front of Helvisarn. They look like a complete absence of anything. The rest of us just see swirling ice and snow filling the hole. So on Joe's turn, he uses Control Winds to suck the fog away in an updraft, tailoring it to not affect Ilene because we don’t want to risk impinging on her concentration. Then Joe moves, becomes a Lupin, and howls to create a fear effect to scare off all the lesser fae under 7 HD. 8+ are just shaken. Dagnar has nothing to do. Aqila tries a Scramble Portal going off of Thoron's directions, but we can't see anything happen. Moonbeam waits.
Then four entities take form, and with the fog dispersed, we can see them. Ish. Our eyes refuse to look at them directly...we just get a vague impression of nothingness.
Ilene says, with a note of fear in her voice, "You cannot attack these directly, they are wounds in the world. Heal them." At the same time she is saying that, all of us here, sounding in our heads, "This is the true test, now. These must not touch my chosen one." The voice is one we, with the exception of Dagnar and Thoron, have heard before. Once. When we were fighting the Avatar of Rakan. Eep. Helvisarn renews his attack on Ilene. The nothingness shapes move 20' towards her.
Joe goes first and heals one for 170 hps, being a touch spell. And he has to make a reflex save, as a Solar. Easily. The shape gets a bit bigger. Thoron does two big heals on the one Joe hit. Dagnar does benign transposition to swap Ilene's for a deva to keep her away from the shapes. She looks a bit shaken but still together. Aqila uses her dragon shiny to mass heal the lot of them. 190 each Then the healstorm cometh as Moonbeam takes her turn. Mass critical heal wounds, 230. Then she summons a pile of hollyphants. And does a mass heal for 150 on each one. The 15 hollyphants start healing. The shape that has had the most healing is starting to look fuzzy and pulsing around the edges. And when the healing wave is done, they are all pulsing around the edges. The hollyphants got a little scorched around the edges after touching the shapes, but are all still here. And the Deva throws a 3d8 heal in for grins. 26 disintegration damage when it fails its save. The ursinals drop down to use their Heal too, and take 38 damage on a failed save.
Top of the order - Ilene resumes doing single bolts and Helvisarn and he returns a volley in reply. The shapes converge on the deva and it is extinguished. Thoron is up and does 140 healing as a swift. Joe does 170 with the same tactic. Dagnar has nothing to do, yet. He gets ready to move Ilene if needed. Aqila uses her necklace again for another 190. Then Moonbeam starts the heal train rolling, Choo Choo. First, 34 on each, which is enough to make the first one explode with negative energy damage. 72 damage takes out the ursinals. The snow pit contains the blast. The hollyphants flew out last round because their heal is 1/day, so they're okay. Moonbeam does a 250 mass heal, and the other three go boom. Moonbeam summons a potload of hollyphants again anyway, in case more scary boogers show up. And we can see the fae Joe failed to scare off now hitting the edges of the avalanche.
Ilene fires off another single bolt. Helvisarn says, "At last, yield your strength to me!" And then we see the leading edge of the fae shrivel and die. Crap. And then two icily white female fae appear flanking him. Thoron and Joe recognize them as Frostwind Viragos. Joe swaps to sphynx and does a roar to scare the fae clear. Thoron babysits the storm elementals as a solar, meanwhile, so they don't get scared and run. Joe scares off another 80% of what's left. Thoron uses his standard action to launch chain lightning at the viragos, skipping Helvisarn because Ilene thinks we can't do anything other than strengthen him. He does do a pile of hps to one of them. Her hair is poofed. Dagnar can't do anything ranged. Aqila has the Prismatic Eye target the unpoofed one. She succeeds in driving it insane. She darkbolts the other one. 6 hit, 71 damage, and dazed for a round. Moonbeam is up next. She has 21 hollyphants, a large swarm of storm elementals, but we have more fae coming, so Moonbeam just firestorms the Viragos. Neither makes the reflex save, and take full damage.
Ilene unleashes a barrage. Helvisarn staggers under the barrage, yelling 'I will not be defeated. The gate is open. Aid me! This world is yours!'. Five unique entities appear. Each looks like an assemblage of different animals that really don't go together. It is cognitively painful just to look at the messed up things. One voice, or possibly multiple voices, changing constantly in tone and pitch, even in midword, speaks - "The gate is not yet fully open. My servants will aid you but know that you must complete the bargain." The voice sounds angry. The sensation accompanying it feels like our bodies are screaming in protest at hearing that voice. Doesn't feel like Sakaneth, at least. Ilene looks dead white. She also seems to be barely aware of anything outside of herself now. And all living fae are running hellbent for leather now. The viragos don't look happy, albeit as much as they can in their current state. The dazed virago doesn't do anything, but the insane one babbles incoherently.
OOC - the voice belongs to an entity that kept Helvisarn alive - the bargain is he turns the world over to it. He was planning on a backstabbing, of course.
Thoron chain lightings everything that isn't Helvisarn. 114 damage to anything that takes it. Dazed resists the spell. Insane is damaged. 4/5 creatures look unaffected, but the one in the middle tries to avoid the hit. It seems to twist through more than 3 dimensions, and is unharmed. (light blue). Joe unleashes Deadfall. Untyped damage, 8th level spell, 20' radius, leaves difficult terrain behind. 22d6 for 77 damage. All 5 go through the same eyetwisting gymnastics and don't fall prone but all look slightly battered. That works. Dagnar borrows Aqila's favorite wand and launches a forceball at the quintet...2 appear unaffected, 1 twists, 2 look battered. On Aqila's turn, she uses 3 fireballs, sort of. Light green on the far left dodges fire, 2nd'd on left, midgreen, dodges cold, and yellow, 2nd from right, dodges sonic. Cold vuln and fire vuln fail to resist and take damage. And then the prismatic eye fires on the dazed virago and she's wobbling on her feet.
And now it's Moonbeam's turn. She starts with a sonic strike to catch the batterred virago and the creature that takes sonic. And then does fire on the other side to catch the other one. The insane virago is now at 0 hps, and the sonic weak creature is gone. Moonbeam has her trumpet archon dive on the fire weak creature. The discorporating dive disembodies the target. And then Moonbeam tells the 14 storm elementals to get off their butts and work for a living. 13 of them attack the middle creature with 12d4 lightning, and 1 plinks the last virago. Or would if they could all crowd within 10' of the target. 9 can get close enough. 197 damage.
Ilene does not do anything visible, and is not answering questions. The two remaining weird creatures seem to explode in a mass of waving tentacles at everything near them. Which is just Joe because the storm elementals did a double move to get out of there. Joe does a quickened updraft to get clear, so he’s unharmed. Helvisarn screams and charges Ilene. He flies up swinging wildly with his great sword and misses completely. The edge of the blade seems to be drinking light. So, now, Joe goes squidly and tries beating the remaining two creatures to death. The first one dies, exploding in a wave of ichor that starts soaking into Joe's tentacles...he takes 10 con damage. And then the 2nd one explodes doing another 9 con damage. Thoron heals Joe, fixing the con damage. Dagnar swaps Ilene for a storm elemental to get her clear, then uses grease on Helvisarn's sword. Aqila summons a movanic deva to hang out with Ilene. Moonbeam goes to summonerville again. Buncha Devas.
Ilene has a silvery sword appear in her hand, calling out"Back away!" And then she flies towards Helvisarn, covering part of the distance. Helvisarn takes a swing at the elemental, and manages to not lose his sword. He unsummons the elemental, then continues in a frothing charge at Ilene. Missed again. Then it’s our turns and we get the hell out of dodge making double moves at a dead run to get clear. We’re still easily close enough to get to see Ilene run Helvisarn through, and he collapses. She collapses. There's a blast of light, and then the snow is gone and the ground is scoured bare. Helvisarn is gone entirely, and Ilene is a crumpled heap. Then we hear another familiar voice – “Done and well done”. Valeiran strolls into view. He did say we wouldn't see him until after we finished with this mess. Valeiran walks up and reaches down to take Ilene's hand. "And for you also, little sister, done and well done," as she wakes up.
"So, you succeeded in the first test," he states, addressing Ilene, then looking at us, "And the next part will not involve you, but I will advise you in one thing", he continues, looking at Joe, "I believe you have some idea where in the future the lady Ilene will be found. You may wish to suggest to your lady that she might want to pay a visit. After all, it will not be long before your people will need a refuge." Moonbeam casts Plant Growth to help restore the damaged area.
"So, before I depart, is there anything you would ask?" Remembering that Savinel faintly hinted that we should ask someone else if it's safe for them to tell us certain things. So Joe asks the questions that she wouldn’t answer. “Direct information would not be safe, but...Three warnings, first - and I do not expect you to understand this until the time comes...Do not kill the Queen. Secondly, when you have spared her life, you will be asked to do something that will seem suicidal. Do it at once. And thirdly, she whom you think you are hunting is not the real threat. Ask who stands behind her."

The party had already firmly established that Valeiran being talkative means something bad is coming.

Valeiran finishes speaking, so Joe asks if there is anything else he thinks we should know that he can tell us. "Yes. Let Sohrab play his games." Joe asks, "What is he?" "A partial answer, I supposed will do no harm...A failed experiment." "Can you tell us who's?" "Kashirna's". Joe asks if Kashirna is the Dragon. "That I can only answer if you can truthfully swear to not reveal the answer...some things must not be broadly known at this time." We briefly consult and decide we can handle it. "He is." Joe asks, "What is he after, his motives" "Revenge". Moonbeam asks what's the fastest way to end the war in the Ferial...he comments "The fastest way would be to surrender to Mykyta," in a tone indicating that we shouldn't like that answer. "To end the war in a way you would prefer would not be quick. I may say this - when the Dragon's true armies invade and are defeated, the war will be over. And they are not human. You have already seen the forerunners." We recall the draconic humanoid critters from the…hatchery.
Aqila has been thinking, and asks, "Can we expect there to be an All-Hands soon, the first in eight hundred years?" "Yes. And if the world survives, it will be very soon." Hearing that, she also asks, "Would there be any harm in my placing that tidbit in the elder's ears" "There would not, and in fact it would be wise." Then Joe asks if he can tell us how many temples Zeleya has left. "I cannot tell you directly. She has enough to carry out her plan, and no more." IE, we knock one off, and that spokes her wheels. Good to know.
OOC sidetrack - Moonbeam, should she scry on the pirate ships, will see that the ships are a few days from being ready to sail.
Aqila checks to make sure Valeiran is Ilene's ride out of here, and he indeed is. Moonbeam asks one last question, 'What should I learn next?' "I think this is not the answer you are looking for but...a new song" That has some interesting implications. And then Joe asks if we could learn how to unmake spheres of annihilation. "Certainly, if you have a spare century or two." Having exhausted our questions, and being someone exhausted ourselves, we take ourselves off.
Break here. Next task, hunting down Ruzha, and a temple of Shenea if we can pry the location loose from her.



We have 2 days before Ruzha is due to show up at her mansion, per Sohrab's advice. And Valerian did say to let him play his games...So we take some time to study and recover from killing a god....well, playing a significant supporting role in saving the world, anyway. Moonbeam gave Miroslav an update on the Amerellian fleet's progress. No immediate reaction from Aqila tipping off the retired Sentinel's network that an All-Hands is imminent. We finish resting up and refitting and get ready for what is looking to be a nasty fight.
We regroup and move to stake out the mansion and wait for our target to arrive. And then we hear a cheerful voice greeting us. Moonbeam sighs slightly and answers, 'Hi Sneezil. Anything we need to know?" Moonbeam and Joe are currently in Solar form, but Sneezil has no difficulty recognizing them. Sneezil hasn't stopped growing, and he's over 4' tall now.
"Not know details, but...you need to be careful with this". Sneezil continued, "Is trap, but have to walk in. Priestess is expecting you. She has a trap and will run if she thinks the trap is failing. She will stay if it is succeeding. Also, there is someone else in there already. Will be friend." Well, that's interesting.
We take a look at the mansion, and it detects as very magical...lots of wards against divination plus a number of concealing spells to the point that Thoron is having trouble seeing through it. Looks like something that took decades to set up, rather than a quick project. There are also signs of some hasty recent additions...Thoron is having trouble making out exactly what because it's mostly inside the building, but it looks like at least one disjunction spell-trap. Goody. Moonbeam asks Thoron to let her look through his eyes at the building and see if she can figure out more of what the spells are.
Moonbeam can see a 2nd disjunction trap, and maybe 1-2 more deeper in, masked by the first two. It also looks like, the one they can see most clearly, has a partial gap in the wards near it. It also looks like that one is on a very fast reset. Like a 1/round fast reset, but with limited charges. May trigger by walking past it.
We debate how to deal with this, then Sneezil says, 'Need to hurry. Friend not far in. May die soon!'. So we send a Janni in to see what happens. A disjunction trap is set off, and disappears, but the wards remain. So Moonbeam sets up a chain of eyes with a 2nd janni in ethereal mode to see what's inside now. It goes through the outer and inner door and sees a woman in full plate sprawled on the ground with a pale-haired blue-robed woman standing over her. The disjunction traps in the foyer seem to be gone now, and this looks serious, so we just walk in through the front door.
We stay in the foyer and can now see that there are 8 statues around the main room plus one big one in the middle with lots of abjuration spells on them. Possibly traps activated by a command' word. Plus a conjuration spell possibly active just outside the walls of the room. So we just walk in and stand in the doorway, meatshields up front, squishies behind. Thoron sees 'Ruzha' as a lvl 10 with power sight...she was 20+ at the party so something's weird. She almost looks not real. Also has a pile of buffs up.
Ruzha's reaction to our entry is 5 bolts of force at Dagnar. 19 damage. Joe Dispels her and takes a lot of stuff off. Misses death throes and mindblank, among other things. Thoron goes next and does a Firestorm, since he can see Ruzha lost her fire prots, and he can shape it to not hit the prone paladin. Ruzha looks a bit wobbly after that hit. Thoron hits her with blinding spittle for a follow-up, then Dagnar swaps Joe and the paladin to get her out of the way, and then moves behind Ruzha.
Note, Thoron moved into the room, where he can see there are decorative stone insets...similar to other Deilianan decorations...they look like normal scenes until you see the hidden dagger or other wrong elements.
Aqila fires her matrix-stored spells then quickens a prismatic eye. So Aqila has Greater Mirror Image up, and Ruzha gets an earthbind and dimensional anchor. Then the eye fires and it's a banish effect. Irony. Moonbeam squeeze past Aqila to Heal the paladin. Then she casts baleful polymorph on Ruzha and turns her into a sloth. And now Thoron can see that some of the spells were crafted to match the shape of the creature, and can see that we were fighting a simulacrum. Which explains the power sight 10 thing nicely.
So, where's the real one? The paladin is now awake. And the first thing she says is 'That's not the real one!' Joe answers her, 'We know,' gesturing at the sloth, and continues 'so where's the real one?' The paladin answers, 'She's somewhere else in the mansion with her guards. She's been summoning demons to help her out, lots of them.' She spoke long enough that most of us can recognize her accent as being Almaeran Highlander. Aqila got it first because it was very similar to her grandfather's accent.
Moonbeam uses a timestop to quickly prepare some buffs to toss at the paladin. Joe picks up the sloth and presents it to the paladin with a flourish. "The real one was causing some problems up north.' Aqila cut in, 'under the name of Runa perchance? She was posing as an Aerodonese noblewoman under that name, we think, and if we find the real one, we can see if the mark we left on her is there… "No, I knew her as Rona.' We learn the paladin's name is Seonag. Sneezil finally speaks up...'Think I might know how to make her come out, but might be dangerous. Might get killed." Joe asks, 'How many times', which confuses Sneezil. 'The big room is trapped.' 'What kind of trap' – Joe again. Not sure, magic go away…If all in trap, then she spring it.'
We think about what to do next. Moonbeam uses brain spider to see what she can detect and picks up 8 demons (max for spell is 8 at a time), deeper in and above us, but there’s no obvious doors leading out of the main room, only the entrance. 4 are dumb-brutish goon squad types. One seems to be very powerful, feels like a Marilith. The other three are succubi, but stronger than the average...priestesses of Deiliana. Aqila is not happy to hear about a Marilith in the offing. Joe tries taking Rakshasa form and uses detect thoughts to double-check...he picks up a 4th succubi, but no humans...of course, he doesn't pick us up either, with mindblank up.
We've messed around long enough. Time to make a mess. Step 1 - we get ethereal to walk through the wall to get under the concentration of minds. There’s a hallway around the outside of the main room with interesting designs on the floor. Thoron can now see clearly that there are two massive summoning circles permanently laid into the floor and protected by a set of wards. It looks like these are strong enough to call through any demon we can think of. The spells are bound into the circle, with the names of specific individuals. It could be used for other things, but would take time to study...and it can be activated at a distance. Yay. We continue on to get under where the minds were, and enter what looks like a small chapel, and pass through into what looks like a hastily emptied storeroom. Aqila prepares to use a passwall spell, sideways to the usual orientation. So instead of a small hole up, it'll be a 8' wide and 35' long rectangle.
We arrange ourselves, come out of etherealness, and get ready for the fun. Seonag seems to be a bit…tentative about this interesting situation she’s found herself in. After Aqila casts the spell, we hear a strange chorus of voices. It sounds like multiple people speaking in near perfect unison. "This was not the plan, but it can be adapted." It sounds like the same voice speaking in unison with itself, actually. Thoron peers through the floor and sees something. Joe is remembering something about a type of demon called a 'spellkiller'...particularly dangerous to magic users at close range. The marilith floats over the hole, but two thugs drop through. Joe does remember that spellkillers are useless, summoned. But these are almost certainly called.
Moonbeam got some Monadic Devas out before we started, so we have a magic circle against evil. Thoron opens the ball up with blinding spittle. Hits both. Then Seonag acts, giving a resigned shrug, saying, 'I suppose now would be the time for it to work if it ever does,' and starts singing something in a language we don't know. (casting prayer). (ooc it's a song that has been preserved in her family’s lore as something that repels demons) (it's really Sakaneth's servants, but we don't know that IC) Joe is up next and sends a Murderous Mist upstairs and blinds all 4 succubi. Then he kelp-strands them because Thoron can see that the thugs and the marilith all have 'freedom of movement' up, but the succubi don’t. He succeeds. Moonbeam sprays the upper room with blast of sand then does a pimped out sonic strike for 177 base damage, reflex save for half. The three succubi who got hit by both are dead. The surviving succubus escaped one of the strands, is still held.
Sneezil is up and he gets excited and charges in to mightily smite evil on one of the spell-killers. He has that holy/firey blast mace that we'd given him some time ago. He smashes it dead with one hit. Dagnar is up and takes out the Marilith with the black blade of disaster. And then Aqila is up. She casts Project Image, sends the image to be closer to the rest of the party, pokes her head up above the floor so she can see what's up there, and has the image cast a quickened darkbolt at the surviving spellkiller on the ground floor. Whereupon we learn that they have a natural spell-turning effect. The illusion goes oww. Aqila sees an illusory Ruzha up top, but no real one.
Now it's the spellkillers turn. The three of them put up antimagic fields, which ends the passwall, dropping Aqila down because her flight cut out until the floor reappeared, whereupon her spells work again. Dagnar is also down below too. We hear two thuds from above. (The Marilith was giving orders to the lesser demons, and the last order it gave the spellkillers was to bring up their fields and jump down to attack us. Order of Operations – Fail) The thug down below, being blind and under orders to charge a target after bringing his field up, charges Joe and hits him for 15 damage.
Top of the order. Ruzha decides to go to broke instead of fleeing because we aren’t in the main room in her trap, and triggers the summoning circle to pull in everything that wasn't already here. 9 total, though we don't know this yet because they're all in the main room. We hear a voice echoing in the room, "this is becoming annoying. I give you a chance to win your lives. Come, face me in the proper place!" Thoron targets the thug with a blast of sand to try to get rid of the antimagic field. The thug attacks Joe blindly, and does 15 damage again. Seonag tries to attack the thug and hits for some damage. Not much with the field up. Joe goes squiddy and attacks, killing the thug and ending the field. He then decides to make some new doors...we’re still in the dusty storeroom. He smashes into the kitchen and pantry, and doesn't find Ruzha there. He then casts timestop and goes looking for Ruzha...he finds a very plain bedroom, empty of people. Then he fires up tremor-sense...he can feel two demons trying to jump through the floor, 9 large demons roaming around the main room, and he can feel ten medium sized creatures above the demons, in the cramped upper level.
Then Moonbeam sends out a pile of air elementals to search...they find a dozen Ruzhas in that upper room. Interesting. Half the air elementals are poofed when Ruzhas start casting banishments. Thoron turns into a hummingbird, zipped up the stairs to the cramped runway around the main room, and chain-lightnings every Ruzha he can reach. The paladin decides that the best thing she can do is play rear guard. Joe is already upstairs and he casts frost fell into the room. And that ends the fight, as the remaining Ruzhas become ice sculptures.
We regroup in the main room, then Sohrab appears in the middle of the room. "Rather more impressive than I had expected, but you still have a small problem, don't you. Under the circumstances, I believe a little assistance would be helpful.' He gestures, and one of the Ruzhas comes floating down from above, presumable the one where Ruzha’s consciousness is residing currently. 'A pretty solution, fortunately, I have my own variations on some common spells. I have a few questions of my own that need answered, and then you may ask whatever you will.'
Seonag looks distinctly unhappy about the fact that we’re not only not attacking the big bad necromancer, we’re shooting the breeze with him, but she does nothing to interfere. Sneezil’s just hanging out. Note, the paladins are being told not to attack Sohrab, but only Sneezil knows why.
Sohrab’s first question is, 'Where is the temple of Shenea?' She gives physical directions to the entrance. 'Is Savrein there?' The answer is yes. 'Has he the throne?'…again yes. 'What is the entrance key' Whereupon she recites a string of twenty color names...9 different names with some repetitions. Aqila is taking notes. 'And how many underlings has Savrein' 5 priests, 8 acolytes. Sohrab 'faces' us...his current spectral form doesn't really have a face, but gives the impression of being pleased.
“I suppose it's a good thing that you did not trip the trap”...we ask why, then he gestures and the side statues start generating a 10' antimagic field. 'I won't activate the central one...it would be inconvenient for me, being significantly larger. He then gestures at the relief over the door which slams down. 'If it had gone to her plan, you would have entered the room and been trapped and her pet demons could have entered and killed you at their leisure. Personally, I think she should have activated the trap with just a few of you in there...admittedly the rest of you would have been free to thwart her, but at least two of your more dangerous members would have been in there. "
‘So, we have the location of Shenea's temple and a current passcode for the door. It would of course be wise to hurry before they change the entry.’ Joe comments, ‘That seems wise, how much time do we have?' 'That depends on how closely they were watching their ally, or their supposed ally…They weren't monitoring her that closely, you have a little while before they check in.' Sohrab continues, 'I will be able to accompany you at least as far as the entrance, and I do have a few words of caution for you - the most important of which is this: Their high priest you, will find likely in the main sanctuary seated on what appears to be a throne carved out of obsidian. I can say with confidence that he will be seated in it because he can't rise from it. You would also be advised to not kill him because what he contains would destroy you utterly.’
Joe asks what would happen if we inflict a form of non-death on the high priest. 'While I cannot be certain, I do not think he can continue to contain that power in that form,’ is the reply. 'What about turning him into a squirrel?’ 'I do not think that will be possible. There is this also, somewhere near him in the temple you will likely find a sphere, also made from obsidian and perfectly smooth...under no circumstances break it. The consequences would be equally disastrous.’
‘Thirdly, while I am sure that some of you at least are aware, after all it is unlikely that your employers would not have given you this much training, it bears repeating that as in any temple of Shenea there will be laboratories that are sealed because they created something that they can't control...please remember that priests will break the seals if they think the temple will be lost. If you think you can deal with them, it would be wise to deal with them in isolation. The seal will depend on what the priests believed was needed to contain it. It is possible the barrier will be purely physical, but it is more likely that anything they can't control will have more than physical powers.’
He gestures and a series of glyphs appear. ‘These are the glyphs that mark what may be inside...if there are any that your employers do not know, I make you a free gift of the information.’ It's things like flying, reproducing, singular, multiple, ethereal, etc. Aqila takes more notes.
'One of the priests that I believe is there I know has been working on developing and employing spirit shards to create magic items. As it happens, I do know it is possible to do what he is trying to do, I also know it is extremely foolish. You would be well advised not to take any items from his possession since it is difficult to distinguish one of those from a conventionally crafted items until the madness sets in and then it is too late for the poor fool that used it.’
Joe, unsurprisingly, asked what would happen if we tested the items out on Ruzha, purely as a hypothetical of course… Sohrabs response is, ‘I know something of the nature of the powers she was granted. It would be rather difficult to discern the effects on her. She was already not entirely sane and having been affected by that spell will not have done wonders for her. It is a shock to have a portion of yourself suddenly destroyed. As for my other warning, hmm, your new friend is Almaeran, is she not?’ (from the noncrazy branch, the hill people, yes) ‘It might be wise for her to accompany you. There are some disturbing rumors I have heard about their research . Also, your employers will have some interest in this...I hear they have been trying to recreate those oh so useful machines from Brighthaven...I have also heard they have had somewhat mixed success. But after all, almost any necromancer who has heard it is possible would be trying to do such a thing...there are very few of us who have no real need for it. I will also note that if they manage to identify you as those responsible, they will be rather annoyed with you for interrupting their supply. Unfortunately, I don't know how many shards were diverted from Brighthaven or other centers for their use.’
'And lastly, if you are forced to confront the high priest, be very careful what spells you use in his presence...the throne is a quite potent artifact. I do not know what of its powers he's been able to unlock. It's not the easiest of things to use. He has unlocked enough to survive sitting in it which means it would be very unwise to cast any summoning spells near him.’ We ask about non-summoning conjuration spells in general. ‘That should not be an issue, but you should expect any summoning spell in his presence will be corrupted and turned against you. At least out to 30' and with the common layout for temples, it will be difficult to attack from father away.’
What if we bring in summons? If he has unlocked more than the bare minimum he will be able to dismiss them, and any near his nature he will be able to control. Also, spells that affect time should be avoided...and I am curious how you managed to gain access to timestop...you should avoid that at all costs because if he's gained the greatest powers, he will be able to enter the time stop with you. Also you should expect spells targeted on him to fail. I do not know of other powers that are useful for combat. It is designed for creating and controlling undead.
'What about the priest himself?' ‘I know less about him. He could have access to any spells you do. 'Like antimagic field? 'I do not know. I think it would suppress what he contains so that as long as the field is active, but I do not know how the throne would react. I supposed that would have been a good test to have made when I had the opportunity.’
ooc - he made the throne. and it's a trap for necromancers...it looks very useful, and then you find you can't leave it and given the opportunity its master can gather everything that you learned since you started using it.
Joe asks what the high priest contains. 'Something that could have been a god. And worse, something that if it is released will be a beacon. I believe you have encountered some of the least of its servants very recently'...we remember the 'things' that were wounds in the world. Avoiding creating a beacon for those things would be a very good idea, yes.
And, having divulged all he cared to, Sohrab departs. Joe turns to the paladin and says, 'so, what's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?' As it happens, she was searching through Almaera for 'Rona' and tracked her here. We find the stalkers brand that we put on 'Runa' on all 12 of the ruzhas. Ruzha wasn't being as careful in Almaera and would have been easier to track down there. The mansion technically belongs to the temple of Deiliana. We do let her know that we've been told to let Sohrab play his little game here, by an authority that we trust implicitly. 'Rona' had been working on stirring up a little civil war there in Almaera. The mages and highlanders don't like each other at all...

Terane
2020-05-22, 10:10 AM
Picking up where we left off, we are getting ready to assault the temple of Shenea. Sohrab warned us that the high priest would have monitors throughout the temple to keep an eye on his underlings (think security cameras) that he can cast through. The high priest will notice us if we destroy monitors, and may notice us if we kill a priest. Also, we're told that once we've desecrated the temple, Sohrab is willing and able to deal with the abomination that the high priest is containing - he wants it gone.
We take an hour to stop by the Kantoran temple in Presmyslaw's capital to let them know that 1) we know where the Shenean Temple is and 2) we're about to go desecrate it. Then we reprot up, share some gear with the paladins, get a snack, and teleport to the location we got from Ruzha. Sohrab is there, waiting for us in yet another guise. He tells us that he will try to keep us concealed at least until we're in the antechamber of the temple. Whether his protections will hold deeper in, he can't say. He can't enter the temple until we desecrate it. He also tells us that the lock we have the passcode for is probably a puzzle, with a time limit.
Aqila volunteers to open the lock, given her specialties. The lock is a smooth pane of stone, with illusions creating the colored tiles to enter the code into. With a little help from her friends (owl's insight, luck stone, etc) she cracks it right open.
Side note - the abomination that the high priest is containing is something that Shenea does not want unleashed ever, so unlikely that the priest will sic it on us, even if desperate. And Seonag is using a +1 icy burst long sword so we rummage through our stash and lend her a greater dispelling dagger. Aqila lends her her favorite rod of force damage effects. Seonag does have good armor with a permanent death ward effect, a death bane effect, with extra ac against undead. See invis and detect undead on her helmet. We also lend her a +1 reflecting shield to swap off with her turn undead invokable shield that also has sunburst 5x/day. She has some other shiny gear. We get her some +will and +cha gear on loan for extra pallie damage.
Aqila tosses Ectoplasmic Armor up on everyone just in case, so +8 ac against incorporeal. Joe gives Sohrab an echoskull so we can talk to him from inside the temple. The skull will be depowered the instant we’re ready to stop letting him have a direct view of everything we’re doing. We're protted, prepped, and ready to roll. As a note, Seonag does not have a mount...she has a Celestial Hawk familiar, who can cast spells for her, and before we go in, she casts the spell that let's her friend go Half-Celestial with all attendant spell-like abilities when invoked.
Anyway, a portal opens up when Aqila finishes the puzzle, and we enter the antechamber. It's a bare 30'x30' square, with two doors leading to the rest of the temple. Aqila is wearing the Sohrab link. Moonbeam casts find the path and finds no traps between here and the sanctuary...but we don't want to just go straight there because of all the experiments in labs that may be freed when we desecrate the temple. The seals binding the doors closed, we’re told, are powered by the divine connection to the temple, so they go poof when the connection is severed. And since some may be able to teleport...yeah, we need to clear the place first.
We go down the left stairs. There's a monitor facing the stairs, but Aqila casts an illusory wall right in front of it so it sees empty stairs, and anyone else sees the normal wall. We see a door that's covered in glyphs, including some that Sohrab didn’t know what they meant, so we skip that one for now...the next one only has 3, spawning, incorporeal and possession. Thoron can also see the far door that only has two - caustic and toxic, both with an extra glyph that means 'strong emphasis'.
Aqila casts silence on a rock and leaves it to block sounds from this level getting to the rest of the temple...the stairs continue down to a basement level...we're on the middle level of the temple, the sanctuary is on ground/top. Then we open the door. We see an incorporeal form inside an obvious binding circle. Roll for initiative!
Dagnar defers to Moonbeam so she can cast Ghostdust at the critter, which lets the rest of it hit it more easily. Then Dagnar circles around behind it and whacks it solidly with his sword. Then Thoron uses fire seeds for his attack...he sees it has 50 hit dice. Joe uses Sunbeam. He's been waiting for this. Aqila uses a Searing Light. 52 damage. Sneezil bounces in so Dagnar is flanking now, and unleashes a Smite Evil, or tries to. He manages to connect with his mace, and does 49 damage. Seonag does 25 with her sword. Then the creature acts. It spawns 5 monsters.
Thoron does chain lightning. 3 of the spawns die, 2 make their saves. Spawner is still up. Dagnar whacks it and channels scorching ray. He has haste so he lands several blows. Moonbeam does a moonbolt on the spawner. It saved. The second target failed. Helpless for 3 rounds. Joe does another Sunbeam on the Spawner. That kills it. Aqila targets the baby that didn't get moonbolted and vaporizes it. Sneezil thwacks the other one, and the room is clear. 1 down, many to go.
We poke our nose in the caustic and toxic room. Opening the inner door lets a cloud of green smoke roll out. We can see a tall rune-covered cylinder in the corner and a bunch of badly-eaten runes...Well, Dagnar and Thoron can see that, since Dagnar opened the door and Thoron was there to use his sight to look. Everyone has to make a reflex save before Dagnar slams the door shut. Aqila uses her artifact to heal everyone to full. So no monsters in that room, just an experiment gone very, very badly wrong, it looks like.
Dagnar recognizes the runes in that room as a calling spell and other runes that look like the diagrams from the wizards tower back in Chalisce...the ones for draining a demon's essence...except it looks like it might be elementals not demons. So, scene of a lab accident. Then Thoron hears someone moving around in one of the unsealed rooms near us. So Joe shapechanges into a mouse and quickly finishes scouting this level...the very runed door is the only other sealed one on this level. Then we go down the same stairs to the 3rd level...as we get down, we hear someone going up the other stairs. Thoron can hear someone puttering around in one of the labs, with sounds of repressed pain coming from it too. Aqila makes up another silence rock so we can block sounds of combat off from the people down here.
The only sealed room on this level has a glyph for very high speed, many creatures, energy immunity, needs maintenance - with glyph for maintainers present, and destructive of magic. That sounds tricky. That glyph is usually used for antimagic field, ray, or disjunction. Plus a glyph that indicates 'unexpected abilities'. Joe has a look in the occupied room to see what's going on there...a skeletal figure is pacing around a set of warding circles which contains a demon. The Demon appears to be in pain, and a stream of essence is being siphoned off into a rune-covered box outside the circles. The demon looks like 28 HD, and the priest is 15...with no combat buffs. Just stuff to protect him from the demon. Heh. We’ll deal with that later.
We move to the sealed room. Aqila sets the silence stones to keep combat sounds from leaving the area, and we open the doors. Inside, the room is ringed with boxes. Some are charred wooden boxes that are empty. (OOC note – the boxes are the ‘maintainers’. The charred ones were damaged in the accident that caused the lab to be sealed) The rest are filled with gaunt undead creatures. There are also warding circles inscribed on the floor. Moonbeam slipped out to grab a couple of huge earth elementals for this fight...we're hopefully far enough away from the sanctuary to avoid the high priest stealing/dismissing them.
Thoron can see 16 hd on these guys...Moonbeam goes first with a flamestrike to see what happens. The divine damage took, the fire did bupkis. The force strike she followed up with did significantly more damage. A voice intones ‘Adjustments needed’. We don’t know if we’ve just been noticed, or if it’s some sort of spell in the room that we set off. Joe goes next. He targets the row that Moonbeam battered, shapechanges into a will'o'wisp and launches a sunbeam down a row after teleporting into a corner. The glyphs in that area start glowing brightly and the creatures look very battered.
Seonag goes next, stepping just inside the room, and makes a shot at turning undead. She barely fails her roll. Thoron tries chain lightning. No effect. Joe had moved back to the doorway, so Thoron quickens a blast of sand out of frustration and fries that row of creatures. They all die. The creatures that still live begin moving out of their boxes. Sneezil makes a go at turn undead. He turns two of them. Dagnar casts mirror image because he doesn’t want to move into the room when area spells are about to fly, and then Aqila unloads her newest spell. Sunburst, pumped to 23d6. Half of them are blinded...though they have blindsight, bleh.
Moonbeam goes next and she can do mass heal. And then that does nothing because they have life ward up. Bother. So she quickens a forcestrike and nukes them. The voice intones 'adjustments complete'....this strike did noticeably less damage. Moonbeam swears expressively. Joe tries Deadfall. It knocks prone all but 4, and half of the ones still on their feet are turned. At this point, the earth elementals can hear someone coming down the stairs. Moonbeam put them on guard duty because they can’t get into the room with the creatures. Seonag fails to turn undead. Thoron decides to blast of sand, flying into the room to aim more precisely. 5 left.
The undead move to attack, and Hellfire does 92 damage to everyone. Owwies. Then Sneezil comes flying in to do a mighty smitey. He kills one of the 2 that are active. Dagnar flies in to slash up the other one. Gravestrike + duskblade aren't quite enough to finish it off. Aqila almost gets it with Searing Light. The voice intones 'Adjustments are needed' again...so we're running out of time for light to work as a damage type. Moonbeam does splinterbolt, which finishes the last unturned one off. Joe moves and sunbeams all of the survivors. Room cleared. Just in time for a very surprised priest to come down the stairs. The elementals are mostly in the walls, but we couldn't shut the doors and the silence zones are also clues that something hinky happened.
Thoron is the first person who can act and knows that something needs done. He tries Baleful Polymorph. The priest turns into a tiny tortoise. His gear falls to the floor with a clatter. That worked. We talk about just putting him into the room we just cleared, and Moonbeam gives him a strawberry because she finds it amusing. He was carrying an Unholy vile wounding Flail. No armor. A couple of scrolls - planar binding and a very complex scroll that we can't readily ID. Then we figure that we don't want to leave him to die, so Joe tucks him in one pocket in his belt, leaving the flap open for air circulation.
Sohrab chimes in at this point. “It appears that you've cleared all but one of the labs. I may be able to tell you what's in it if you get me access to the temple.” So, new plan, skip that last scary room and go to the sanctuary. (OOC: Sohrab is worried that the last room is too much for us, since he could see the list of runes on it through the echo skull, and would rather we get him in before we die). Joe asks how confident Sohrab is that the last lab's contents can't teleport away after we desecrate the temple. Sohrab believes that it won't go instantly, and that he can pin it down until we destroy it. Joe also asks if the priests will notice if we destroy the altar. Sohrab notes that Shenea is known to have priests that aren't fully attuned to her nature, so they may not notice the destruction immediately.
Moonbeam leaves the elementals behind, and we sneak back up with Thoron leading so we don't trip over any traps/wandering priests. Sohrab also notes that the stairs we went down were the ones by the priests quarters, in his opinion, and taking the acolytes stairs might be safer for the return trip. We go up a level, and Thoron can still hear someone puttering around in the lab we knew was occupied, and now we can hear someone in the room between the two sealed labs. That would have been the footsteps we heard going up a level when we went down to the 3rd level earlier. Joe takes a peek in the first lab, which has many cylinders with partial humanoid forms inside them...varying stages of growth - lots of necromancy – and one live priest puttering around.
As we move towards the sanctuary, Thoron can hear voices from it - sounds like 2 people talking. One voice is insisting that they should try the experiment again. We're in the purification chamber that has doors leading into the sanctuary. The voice argues that they know what went wrong now, and just one of those creatures would be enough to ensure their safety forever. The other voice is mostly silent...impression that Voice 2 is unimpressed and dubious. We listen to figure out if Voice 1 sounds alive or not. Thoron thinks he is, which means we can get some more information about the situation first. We get Moonbeam to use Brainspider on the priest to pick up what he's thinking of, and to suggest that he be distracting. Joe suggests that she have him try to kiss the high priest, so she goes with that.
We hear some interesting sounds through the door. Moonbeam loses her connection to the brain as the idiot touches the throne and gets disintegrated. There's our distraction. Time to roll. Plan is for Aqila to pop a resilient sphere around the throne and high priest to give the paladins free access to the altar for desecration purposes. There is a stone wall between the doors and the throne, so we can't just burst through the doors. So, we head in and see what we can do.
Moonbeam acts first and casts Binding Winds to keep the priest from speaking. He can't cast anything with a verbal component that isn't self only now. Thoron pulls out Telekinesis to try to grapple the seated priest. He fails. Joe does kelp strand for grappling. And Blinding Spittle for grins.
And now the Priest acts. His body bursts into flames as a Balor Nimbus appears, ashing the kelp strands. 3 Spectral figures appear by the altar. Seonag rolls a 20 on her knowledge check. The figures are guardian spirits for Shenean temples. The less distinct one eats spells. (Seonag spent a lot of time rooting out Shenean temples in the Almaeran highlands; this is bigger than any she's fought before) They look like a shadow, a skeleton, and a humanoid figure with a white sword. She advises against meleeing the sword wielder because it is dangerous. The skeleton should be mostly harmless because it's main attack is a death touch and we're protected. "If you can keep the sword wielder occupied, I can deal with the one that eats spells.” She moves into the room and with haste makes an attack on the shadow. She does some damage.
Aqila gets through the priest's SR and casts a resilient sphere around the throne and him. Dagnar moves in and does a ghost-touched scorching ray on sword-guy. Damage done. Sneezil moves in and does a Holy Smite. He hits all three of the spirits. That blinds them with failed saves. Moonbeam keeps the Binding Winds spell going, but she hands her ghost-touch bracelet to Joe. Joe goes next and ghost dusts the two that don't eat spells, so Thoron has a better shot of being useful when he goes after. Joe also does splinterbolt on the two that take damage from spells. Thoron does a telemantic attack to try to disarm sword-shade. It works. (The sword is an attempt to create a sphere of annihilation effect. It only does not affect its bonded wielder, and will disappear when the bonded dies...do not want to touch). Seonag continues beating on the spell eater.
The priest doesn't seem to do anything obvious. The skeleton attacks Seonag for 4 damage. The shadow does a full attack on her and misses completely. The unsworded guy chases his sword. Aqila fires her spell matrix and kills the unsworded with one hit, and puts displacement and greater mirror image up on herself. The sword poofs. Thoron is sad. Dagnar goes and closes with the skeleton, attacking with dusk blade. He almost kills it with that hit, and does a scorching ray to finish it off. Sneezil moves in to smite the spell eater...16 damage. Moonbeam maintains the winds to keep the priest locked down. Thoron shapechanges into a bronze dragon, snakes his head around, and sprays the spell eater with acid breath that also hits the altar. The shadow takes damage. The shadow poofs. The altar is pitted and smoke is rising from it.
Moonbeam holds firm on the winds. Seonag points at the altar, saying “If one of you can strike here, preferably with a blunt weapon...” Joe complies with alacrity. And now we can hear Sohrab's voice - coming from the high priest. Interesting. "Yes, I can see that this will be quite useful...YOU UNUTTERABLE IDIOTS!!! Get to the lab immediately! They tried to summon one of the abyssal lords...fortunately they failed...they only got one of his great captains." Joe asks, as we run, if Sohrab can take down the dimensional lock on the sanctuary, and he can't with any speed. Oh well. "They were trying to create an undead imbued with all 4 elemental types, infernal, abyssal, and celestial essences."
Thoron grabs the loot with telekinesis as we run out of the sanctuary and the dimensional lock on it, then Joe teleports us downstairs to save a round or two. We hear Sohrab’s voice continuing, "It's faster than I expected. I think I can keep it trapped in the temple, but it can teleport very quickly." Joe asks if he can tell us where it is. "I may be able to, but I won't be consistently reliable. And while I don't want to disturb you too much, there is also a book in the temple that must be found and destroyed...it has the name that purports to be the name of the abyssal lord they tried to summon." (The Abyssal lords, all three of them, were Sakaneth's lieutenants).
The critter tries to teleports to us and attacks Aqila. Her anticipate teleport spell slows his arrival by one round and lets us know where it will be arriving. So we get ready. Moonbeam casts timestop and casts true casting followed by summoning a bunch of archons.
Meanwhile, there were 3 other priests. The one with the growing corpses will be popping out with 4 of the more intact figures after the demon arrives. The other priest on the 2nd level pops out of his lab too, but we can't see him yet. No idea what the 3rd guy minding the demon siphoning process is going to do. So we get ready. Joe goes dire tiger and prepares to maul the crap out of it with all his buffs at the ready. Thoron does the same. Aqila gets ready to try to lock it down so it can’t escape.
Then the big bastard pops in and we unload on its butt. Joe charges in to maul. Seonag's hawk activates the spell and goes full half-celestial mode. The paladins and friend all do smite evil and Sneezil and the hawk roll near max. Thoron also does legendary tiger maul. Dagnar does Gravestrike. Everyone who does a melee attack gets a retaliatory stroke back, because this undead sprays acid every time it is struck by a melee blow. So Dagnar takes some acid damage. Joe's use of Nature's Avatar lets him really sink his teeth into this guy. Then he has to dodge 6 retaliations for his six hits. He takes 61 damage from 6 sprays of acid. Thoron does the same thing and also hits 6 times and takes 6 sprays of acid. 53 damage.
Moonbeam tries to Moonbolt the bastard and he rolls a 20. The archons Moonbeam summoned use discorporating dives. None of the six manage to get rid of it, and the fire damage does nothing. 47 holy damage. Aqila hits it with dimensional anchor, and with some buffs, makes it stick. And now the priest and his 4 friends pop out behind Dagnar.
Joe does a quickened greater teleport so he can charge again, and repeats his attack. He beats on it and takes more acid sprays. And now the demon/undead abomination acts...It utters Word of Chaos after coming out of its own timestop. Deafen, confuse, and stun possible...mindblank protects from confuse, so one round stun and 3 rounds of deafness. 20% chance to fail spells with a verbal component. Then is sprays us all with acid. 35 damage on a failed save. Then it casts petrification at Joe, and he rolls a 1. Tiger statue. So next person up who is not stunned is Moonbeam. She casts timestop, and unstones the kitty, casts mass heal which fixes the stuns and deafness, prepares a spell and casts rain of roses and casts true casting, then her summons get to act. 6 more discorporating dives. None hit. And the evil in the area start taking wis damage. That would be the big demon/undead, the priests, and the 4 buddies the one priest brought out.
Dagnar does a Gravestrike as a swift action, then starts whacking away under the effects of haste. And he's using the black blade of disaster offhand. The demon fails his save. 24d6 damage. So 90+82 disintegration+37 from sword. Monster does not disintegrate. He healed while in his timestop. Dagnar tries ray of stupid for grins. It fails. Aqila tries a disintegrate, pumps the damage. 149 disintegration damage.
And now the undead act before the priest does...they're behind Dagnar who’s behind the demon. One of them activates an aura of desecration. One attacks Dagnar with a sword. He takes an unholy blast but an image soaks it. One of the firestorms us, but we had fire immunity today. 2 of the archons made their saves. Now the priest gets to act. He decides to attack us because he thinks we are more dangerous. He casts Blind at Dagnar. Mirror does not soak. But Dagnar makes the save. Sneezil is up next and readies an action to attack the next time the demon tries to spellcast, using the Circlet of Blasting that we lent him. And now the other priest walks around the corner, sees Thoron the legendary tiger, and tries to Harm him. Thoron farts at him for his pains.
The rain of roses continues inflicting wis damage on the undead. Joe does his G. Teleport and charge shtick. Only 4 hits that time. The demon/undead is getting stronger every round it’s outside the sealed chamber. And now it's the demon's turn. It uses a 1-a-day ability, that is casting, so Sneezil uses the circlet of blasting to retaliate. And that makes it lose its concentration and it’s casting of implosion fizzles. We all get sprayed with acid. Low damage. Then is uses timestop and uses inflict critical wounds to heal 81 hps.
Seonag's turn and she starts singing. (the song was designed to affect abyssals/Sakaneth's servants specifically) The demon loses all the gains it made in the last round, lowering its ac and saves. Then she smites evil and does a full round attack. 71 damage. Then Thoron is up. He changes into a dire bear and mauls it, then casts snake's swiftness, mass. Sneezil hammers the demon with his holy blast mace. Jooe and Thoron hit. And Dagnar gets the kill. Moonbeam's turn. She has the archons do discorproating dives on the undead/priests. All but 1 undead and the priest behind Thoron are discorporated. So, for grins, Moonbeam goes legendary tiger, teleports and mauls the flame-strikeing undead to death.
Aqila goes to investigate the lab to make sure nothing else is going to be a problem. Thoron mauls the idiot who tried to stick his hand up his butt and turns him into a bloody smear. Aqila prepares to cacophonous blast the lab to get rid of all the experiments. But she calls everyone over to have a look first, because the things look vaguely familiar. They look like Ancient's Shaping cradles. Dagnar thinks they were derived from the cradles at least...and he remembers a box from another lab that might be a real one. She shatters the room before we go. She and Dagnar go look at that box, and discover that it is the remains of a shaping cradle. It looks like someone has been trying to repair it. If we work together, we can pick the thing up and haul it back to Arandor for analysis. (The Ancients used the cradles to create new life forms – the hard part is making the creation live, which is where most people messing with that tech today get stuck, but if you’re a necromancer that is intending to just animate it instead, it lets you create custom-designed undead.)
Joe decides to screw with the last priest, the one minding the demon in the basement, by shapechanging into a nightcrawler. The priest is a lich, and reacts by casting command undead. It fails. Joe mauls it for a bit. The demon laughs and says 'There must be quite a story behind this'. Then Joe goes Solar again after killing the priest. The demon laughs again. 'I don't suppose I can convince you to assume your true form.' Joe replies, 'Do I look crazy?' 'Well, some mortals are gullible. I don't supposed I could convince you to release me?' 'I don't know, depends on what would happen.' 'That depends on how many priests you've left behind.' Joe looks over his shoulder at the paladins. Seonag comments, 'My inclination would be to send him back the hard way, but...depending on how badly he's been weakened, he may be more dangerous than what we've already fought.' Moonbeam grins and says, 'I think I can handle it...' She summons 10 storm elementals and lets them frag him. One less pit fiend to worry about.
This lab was obviously a draining room. The one next door was the same, just a different flavor. Joe entertains himself by scaring the acolytes to death/eating them as a nightcrawler. There's a lab for infusing essence into an undead creature. There's a soul-shredding experimental room. We find the experiment log too. Aqila takes anything that's text. Meanwhile, Sohrab's been plundering the high priests memories. They were somewhat disappointing. Most new things were things that Sohrab thinks are too insanely dangerous to do.
We search the temple, and find the book and the orb. We’re taking the book with us, and leave the orb with Sohrab. So loot-wise, we find a staff, and the unholy flail, and a journal of one priest that implies they all had external lairs where they kept their good stuff. There's the pile of cursed loot with plate mail, etc. We'll get a bounty of around 30k gold for the lot because there are Sentinel researchers who are trying to come up with a fool-proof method of distinguishing this crap from normal enchanted items, and they have a shortage of guaranteed cursed items.

Picking up right where we left off we get Seonag to help us write down what her song sounds like phonetically along with the tune, get gear redistributed, and pick up the Shaping Cradle to haul it back to Arandor for reference/bounty. Plus the book and the cursed items. At this point, there's no reaction when we land in Arandor with our cargo of stuff, including the tortoise-priest. We've dragged in weirder things. We then take Seonag where she wants to go, and to pick up a pair of gems that she was given to give us by Valeiran.
Then we part ways, and go visit Savinel, as recommended. We let Joe ask her what she's afraid to tell us. "I can tell you, but I do not believe it will be safe for me to help you any further, after I have done so. There are three matters that may be what you were advised to ask me about. I will begin with the less dangerous, and move to the more dangerous...” She shows us what looks like an insane whirlwind of ice/fire/acid/lightning. “I do not know why you might face one of these, she did not make them, and does not have contact with the one who did. Firstly, do not attack them - for all practical purposes consider them invincible, however they do not exist for very long once they are created. Do not get close to them unless you can withstand the various energies that comprise their forms.” She thinks we can't fully resist the damage, but could blunt it (20d6/round, each type).
“From what I've seen, I do not think you will face these in Zeleya’s temple, but you may face them on the route there, about which I can give you a little more information now - I can say with confidence that you will depart this plane in order to reach it. How many planes the path passes through I cannot say. I can say that your guide will have somewhat greater knowledge of each plane as you pass through it. So listening carefully would be wise. Particularly since some of what I've seen implies that some of these planes will warp your magic in different ways, which could be lethal if you are insufficiently attentive. A final item, which is what I believe was what was referred to...well, there is some other piece of advice I can give you that would be beneficial...you would be wise, and I will not say which one because I don't know, but it would be wise to take a paladin with you, and I mean one only. Every vision in which I see you winning, I see only one paladin.”
“And for the last thing, it seems that Silviel has an ability that I was not aware of. I do now know how to properly imitate it in order to let you face it, but I can at least tell you what I have learned about it.” A new image appears, of Silviel with a cloud of darkness spreading out from her. “From what I can tell, when using this ability she is highly resistant to any form of damage, and no, I do not know the limits, however she is unable to do anything else while it is in effect.’ Joe asks if she can still regenerate - Savinel doesn't know. “The cloud continues to spread out from her, fairly rapidly, but for reasons which will become apparent, I don't know how rapidly or to the limits to which it can spread. Inside it, it significantly impedes spellcasting (50% failure rate). Secondly, it will completely blind you.” Joe asks about nonsight perception. She thinks it won't impede that but can't be certain. “It appears to slowly drain your life in spite of protections, I can't see the mechanism.”

Disjunction-like effect every round in the cloud - save or all spells/items suppressed for that round, but nothing permanently destroyed. Also 1d6+1 CON drain per round, no save, applied after the spell suppression.

“Light spells of sufficient strength can slow or apparently drive back the darkness.” Joe asks it a Quasar would suffice, an demonstrates. She is not certain, but she hasn't seen us use that ability in any vision where she's seen us fight Silviel - apparently Joe gets eaten first when it happens, as far as she's seen. “From what I have been able to see, I believe that this is severely draining to her, so I do not thing she can sustain it for long, but I have not seen her use it until she has to stop.” Joe asks some more questions. “You must understand that what I see is not entirely clear. From what I see, light slows the spread across the whole area, but the effect is greatest where the light is.
“If you have any other questions, I will not promise to answer, but I will at least entertain a few.” “Is there anything that seems to enrage Silviel greatly, any nerves to prod?” asked Moonbeam. “I can see how that would be useful, but to my knowledge, no. Perhaps you may learn something.” “If we live to tell about it, we'll let you know'” Aqila asked if there was cause to think that we need to embark on this sooner rather than later. “That touches on things that I may not tell you.” Moonbeam asks if Silviel has any other minions that she routinely brings in. “There are her greater handmaidens but from what I have seen, it would be likely that they would be there already. There are 11 of them. You would be wise to disperse some of them before embarking on this, but that will be nontrivial.” Joe asks how high the ceiling is, if there is one. “I have not seen clearly - I am not sure whether it is a distortion in my perceptions or if you are in fact fighting in different places in different visions. If it is a distortion, I would say between 10 and 20'.” We also learn the walls are structured, so not a cave. Joe asks if wind could hold the darkness back - she can't answer that, hasn't seen. She will say that she has seen times in the visions when it seemed to slow for no discernable reason, but I could not tell if you were using wind spells or not.
Aqila asks about whether walls of stone would work. “I do not believe any such approach was tried in any visions I have seen. Whether that means you did not think of it, or whether there was some reason it would not work...assuming you do not discover something at the time that would make it pointless, it seems to me that that should work. Of course, I can offer no guarantees on that point.” She can't see if the cloud acts like it is material or etherial.
“I would advise minimizing the number of spells you have active. (reciprocal gyre) And she rarely relies on spells cast on her.” We're running out of questions to ask, so Joe throws out “So, who is the daughter of the sun?” “In what context?” “Some peers of yours told us to introduce her to Miroslav...” “Interesting. I will have to look into that.”

Terane
2020-05-28, 03:06 PM
After dropping off our new paladin friend, letting our allies at the Kantoran temple know we took care of that little undead temple problem, and Sneezil left…somewhere, we find out that Zalakirinal wants us to come visit. So we pop over to his lair, politely. When we get there, he doesn't even try to beat around the bush, but tells us that Telesriel (his girlfriend that we met in the first arc of the campaign, who gave us a lift as an apology for attacking us because she thought we’d hurt her boyfriend because Moonbeam had drops of his blood in her backpack, though Moonbeam didn’t realize that’s what that present from Zalakirinal was when she got it…) has found something that she wants to investigate because she thinks it could be a hazard to establishing a nest in the area, but she can't easily get into it. Zalakirinal doesn't know what the problem is, but he knows the location. He’s basically operating off of one Sending's worth of information...he recommends we teleport in nearby and walk in because she sounded a bit jumpy. And of course we’re not smart enough to avoid something that’s making a dragon jumpy, at this point, so we promise to help.
Before we head off, we ask him how the ice sprites have been doing. He's found them to be quite helpful, since some things are best stored at low temperatures, “though it can be difficult to protect them from the ice that forms”, he adds as an aside. We also let him know that we'd just gotten back from deconsecrating the local temple of Shenea, so that's one less threat in the area, and we let him know about Helvisarn, which explains what that disturbance was. We also mention the weird crap we saw fighting Helvisarn, on the off chance that he has any idea what it was.
"There is only one thing that fits all of those details, but I didn't think anyone would be foolish enough to open those gates." Joe points out that we've met a lot of fools in our time. "The best that anyone opening a path for those could hope for is to be the last devoured. They exist only to devour all things." Cheery thought. Aqila asks, 'I take it, since we're all still here, that there are reasons why they can't reach the material plane easily." "Those paths were sealed off so long ago that even to my people, they are no more than legend. Unfortunately, that is also long enough ago that I do not know if anyone living knows how to check the seals. If Helvisarn was able to bring them through, they may be weakening." We ask if Mirarn and Kalya are old enough, or Valerian. "Understand that these are my vague recollections of already fragmentary stories that I was told when I was young...I cannot think what his proper name was, but it was said that it was the Lord of Sorcery who led the sealing. If you can find someone who can identify who that was..." Aqila is reasonably certain that that is not a title that any of the Ancients held, so it must be someone older than that.
Then it occurs to us to see if Zala has any idea what the words of the song that we learned from the paladin were. He doesn't recognize any of the words, but he thinks that it's a mix of Celestial, Abyssal, and Ancient, and he thinks the language changes every couplet. We were told that this song was supposed to work against demons. Zala seems to think it’s something else, that only works while whoever the creatures are bound to is disincarnate. The one creature we saw this work on was an undead that had an abyssal bound into it. Abyssal's were bound to Sakaneth, who is currently discarnate, so that jives with Zala’s theory.
Zala is willing to think about possible reconstructions of the song, but warns us not to get too much hope up. Seems like a reasonable trade for our investigative services. We buff up and take our leave to go see what has Telesriel's tail in a knot. She greets us after we arrive, and points us at a hole that was obviously drilled into the mountain we're on. "When I was scouting around here, I discovered when I came very close to this mountain, I could sense a very strong presence of negative energy, and it disappeared a very short distance away. Investigating, I found a small region inside the mountain that is impervious to divination spells and it appears to be an ethereal solid. I drilled a hole to try to reach it...the resistance to my spell increased enormously as soon as it contacted the object. The stone may be altered. It then decreased after cutting through a relatively small amount. I sent in my own summoned creatures to check...I broke through a relatively thin wall into a tunnel filled with poisonous gases, and it's also under an antimagic field. I appear to have breached it near the upper end of the tunnel." That is an interesting mess she’s turned up, and we discuss how to go about investigating it.
Joe turns himself into a huge earth elemental and determines that he can't glide through the ethereal solid...so he then goes in through Telesriel's tunnel, followed by Thoron. After a hundred feet of tunnel, he finds an open space. The whole place is filled with poison gas, and the tunnel has antimagic field up on it. The field ends in the open space, but there's a reverse gravity spell up there that's holding up a multi-ton slab of the same ethereal solid material that surrounds this object in the mountain. The open space is about 30' across. The tunnel continues along the other side, and there's a shaft running horizontally and perpendicularly to the tunnel through the middle of the open space. The shaft is too small for a human to fit through. They can't see where the tunnel goes on the far side. And there's some sort of strong abjuration spell in or on the small shaft. The set-up smells very strongly of TRAP!
There is some debate on how to proceed. Joe tries shapechanging and casting 'Find the Path'. It tells him to walk across the room, stopping every 5 feet to speak a specific password. He does so, with a readied action to timestop if he gets surprised. An alarm goes off, surprising him, so he timestops, casts echo skull on a skull, leaves it, and teleports out. The spells make his link to the skull weaker, but he has muffled sound and blurry vision from it. The rest of us were waiting outside with Telesriel, and Joe fills us in on what he found. Joe also leaves a trap-monkey behind that can move the skull.
As Joe watches, he sees an almost completely invisible figure approach. He has the elemental lift the skull up and speaks through it. "Hi, sorry about disturbing you - we found this place and were trying to figure out what it is." It ignores the voice and the elemental. It seems to be looking around. After a short time, and a few more tries in different languages by Joe, it turns and goes back down the tunnel it came from.
So, Joe teleports back in, leaves a note on the elemental, and switches to being an air elemental to proceed down the downward tunnel. It is no longer featureless, about 10' wide, with upright casket on each side every 5 feet. It curves to stay inside the ethereal solid, which is roughly egg-shaped, and slopes downward. After about 200', the sarcophagi are open, and empty. The whole tunnel is still antimagic field filled. The tunnel is smooth polished ethereally solid stone. After another 100', the tunnel starts being roughly hacked...still with sarcophagi. Then after 20', there's a set of doors. Still ethereal solid. Still antimagic field.
Joe makes a light stone to test where the field ends, if it does. He finds three inches of space outside the doors. And, absent any better idea, he just knocks on the door. A deep, gravelly voice responds. "I was wondering when you would actually get around to doing something. Would you mind explaining what you thought you were doing, breaking into my home?" Joe just tells the truth. And asks if the person would like to have tea. Being rebuffed, he sets the echo skull down in the brief gap of not antimagic field and leaves. He gets a brief vision of a skeletal humanoid smashing the skull after opening the door. He also briefly glimpsed very complex machinery and a skeletal figure with extremely elongated claws for hands. Also delicate machinery.
Joe makes a silent image of the machinery for us to look at. Aqila thinks it looks vaguely like the Ancient's shaping cradles. Dagnar concurs. Joe decides to try to get an expert's opinion, and asks Moonbeam to summon an Ursinal Guardian. And we hit the jackpot with the one who answers the summons. He recognizes the equipment.
"I trust you destroyed that thing?" We explain we haven’t, yet, but it's down that tunnel, and we're debating whether to make a mess or not. "You probably should, very carefully. It's liable to explode rather violently. I've never seen one exactly like it, but that machine is for flesh-shaping, soul sculpting. It looks like someone is remaking, refining and improving undead creatures. And possibly not one that he originally created. Taking control over something..." He doesn't recognize the spikey undead creature from the image...there are many things it could be. "And I will say that anyone capable of using that machine would be quite capable of making his own unique monstrosities." Telesriel observes that the change in the quality of the tunnel sounds like it was two different groups digging it.
As we're talking over things, a shadowy figure appears by the tunnel. Then we hear a familiar voice. Sohrab. "Well, I shouldn't be surprised that it was you that finally found this. Convenient, because I won't have to explain as much." Telesriel looks ready to attack, but is holding back. He asks us if we wouldn't mind evicting his former student. Joe asks if he'd fill in some details first. Sohrab notes that explaining everything would take some time, but that we've probably figured out that this is a repository for some of his old experiments, and his former student thinks that he can take control of them and turn them on him. Apparently Sohrab did the original trapmaking, then his student enhanced it with some anti-undead additions with no password to let anyone by. And the additions are dimensionally locked. So everything past the smooth tunnel is new. Joe asks what's in the sarcophagi. Sohrab is perfectly willing to tell us that they're old experiments in fighters that were laughably weak for the difficulty of creating them.
Sohrab notes that we can't be unaware of what is coming, and if we don't wreck the place too badly, he'd like to use it as he's been doing - it's one of the various caches of minions he's been placing around the Ferial in anticipation of the invasion by the Dragon's armies in the not too distant future. Sohrab also offers to do us a small favor if we oblige him in this...since we do have a small interest in keeping, oh what's his name, Prezmyslaw, in power, so we'd be interested in information about a significant near term threat to him. He's known about young Taras's foolishness for some time now. Aqila, noting Sohrab's choice of adverb, asks just how old the individual referenced is. Sohrab is amused and declines to answer, yet.
We then ask if he has any tips for making the eviction process go more smoothly. We learn that the student has not adapted to lichdom well. His mind has fragmented. He also observes that, after Moonbeam expresses distaste for that state, that she'd be more likely to adapt to the state than his former student has. She's not amused. Telesriel seems somewhat horrified contemplating the thought. We're also warned that our target has divided his phylactery, and any item he's carrying is probably part of it now. And cleansing the items for use would likely be more expensive than the item is worth. He could do it, for example, do it but it would be hazardous to him, so he'd charge a lot for it. Priests of Nareel or Reshana of sufficiently high rank probably could enact the rituals. He'd guess in the 30-40k gold range.
Joe asks for some more information about this guy's abilities...Sohrab’s willing to confirm that he's got the raw power to perform spells that are beyond us, but as for combat magics...that depends on how much he is concerned about destroying his devices. His more dangerous spells are not precisely discriminate. So we would want to avoid damaging them as well. “He is quite adept at defensive spells. You may have difficulty forcing him to combat, but his own traps mean he cannot run away”, Sohrab concludes.
Joe asks if Sohrab can disable any of the traps. Not the dimensional lock, since those aren't his. And removing the antimagic field would trigger the collapse of the tunnel. The material is something he deliberately designed to be as impenetrable as possible.
He also warns us that his student would have worked to make the creatures he removed from the coffins more resilient against attack, though he can't say precisely what that means. He also mentions that his student had some ideas for improving their attacks. “The point that would be most dangerous to you: they were made to be very accurate attackers, they can all cast quickened true strike. If they strike with both sets of claws, they do more damage, and they are exceptionally agile. He said he thought could make them highly resistant to damage, nearly invincible. I doubt he has been able to do that much, but they should be reasonably tough. He may not have been able to apply all the augmentation to each of them - so there may be different varieties.”
Sohrab sketches briefly. “If you see these, since he stole them before he left. They are spell matrices, activatable with a thought.” Joe wonders if we could activate them. Sohrab points out we would want to be sure of what spells are stored, since some may be beneficial only to an undead and would be cast on the activator. Joe briefly wonders what would happen if he used shapechange to be undead temporarily. Sohrab thinks for a moment, and notes that that might have a very bad interaction with the spells...perhaps making you permanently undead. It would be an interesting experiment, but not very useful.
He finally notes that it will be very difficult to surprise this guy because the walls contain a network of very simple watch sprites. Sohrab set it up and he cannot believe that his student wouldn't have maintained them. So if we return the tunnel, he will almost certainly be watching us.
So, we ask Sohrab to take down the antimagic field outside the new section so we can teleport in with poison immunity up, and while it partially collapses the tunnel, we can still get to the doors. We're loaded for bear and ready to go. Aqila casts project illusion right before we open the doors so she can use reciprocal gyre safely. Then we burst in, and the skeletal lich snaps out one word, and a prismatic wall springs up between us and him. The room is roughly rectangular with 4 sets of machines in each corner, an undead by each machine. The lich is in the back of the room up a set of stairs and behind the wall.
Thoron carefully positioned himself and casts disjunction. It succeeds. Three of the machines are now disabled. And sparking. Thoron can see some wild surges of magical energy now. The prismatic wall is also gone now. (And the rest of the spells we never saw like silence, prismatic sphere, resilient sphere, etc.) We can see all four undead....one has claws dripping acid, one is heavily armored, one has purple glowing claws, and the 4th is blurry and indistinct. Joe does Sunburst, with true strike to make sure it gets through SR. All the undead are blinded. The lich goes next.
He uses timestop and gets a prismatic sphere back up. And presumably some buffs. The undead move to attack Joe, currently a Wisp, and he takes 15 damage. Another blurry and indistinct undead pops in. Dagnar is up and doesn't even have to move. Wielding the black blade of disaster, he lays into his first, blinded target. Hits every time, doesn't kill it. Even with the followup with his offhand doesn't kill the heavily armored one. Aqila casts Sunburst and gets through to all but one of them. And she quickens a Prismatic eye for grins. She hits one with Indigo, but insanity doesn't work on undead. Bah.
Moonbeam unleashes a moonbolt that leaps from target to target, hitting them all twice. The armored guy resists both times, the rest are out for 4 rounds, helpless. Then she does a flamestrike. The armored guy evades and still lives.
Top of the order, Thoron does another disjunction to knock the buff spells back off. There goes the sphere. Only the new undead gets hit by it since the others are piled up by us. Thoron also does quickened snake's swiftness mass. Dagnar whacks the armored guy with his black blade of disaster. And Joe and Thoron, in wisp forms, zap the guy too. The electricity does nothing, but the blade poofs him. Joe is up and tries kelp strand. The lich has freedom of movement and ignores it. Then Joe goes dire lion and charges the lich. He mauls the lich for a little over 100 points, then reverts to wisp to be immune to magic.
The lich is up now. He hits Joe with the Reaving Dispel. Then he fires some cones at the room. Cone of Cold only reaches to Thoron and Dagnar. Thoron is immune and Dagnar evades. The lich’s Acid Fog has no saving throw, but we have acid resist 30. And it was cast at Joe, who's in the center of 20' of acid fog. And that conceals the lich from sight. Until he walks out of the fog in the timestop. And blasts the party with two delayed blast fireballs. Except one is sonic, and we're immune to sonic today. The fire was 63 damage. So Aqila takes nothing between saving for half and the ring of absorption. Dagnar dodges. Thoron is immune. And Moonbeam dodges. The lich is infuriated and his personality shifts. He's now going to kill us artistically. He launches a spell at Dagnar that causes his heart to start stopping. He will die in 4 rounds now. Same thing the choir of frost did to him. This is becoming a theme, here.
The undead are moonbolted and helpless this round, except the newest one is lying on the square where the new one is being drawn in. Trying to teleport a new thing into the same space as an existing creature creates some nasty feedback in the machine, which is sparking badly now, and both undead are damaged. Not destroyed, but damaged. Dagnar gets to go now. He goes to whale on the new undead, and leads with the Black Blade of Disaster. And misses every attack, because he's exhausted from the lich's spell.
Aqila starts off her next turn with a reciprocal gyre at the lich. 72 damage. Searing light hits. 42. And 4 dark bolts get through for 44 . That kills the lich. And then she fires the eye at the still upright undead, who takes 50 electricity damage. Then Moonbeam does a mass heal on everything. We heal, they don't. ka-poofery. And that fixes Dagnar's heart freeze. So we quickly grab items. 11 large gemstones on the lich...phylactery components, we think. About 30k gold worth, each. 9th level quicken rod. Monk's belt. Cloak of displacement. Ring of protection from positive energy. Ring of protection +5. All items are part of the phylactery. Also, we can see the interconnections between the pieces of the phylactery...and there's a piece missing. Or rather, Thoron can see it. Time to search!
Aqila works out that the area behind the throne is near the edge of the egg, based on Joe's description of the shape of it earlier, when he searched around it. So Aqila opens up a passwall through the ethereal solid so Thoron can go search in the direction that Thoron can see the energy connection coming from for the missing piece. Earth elemental shapechange lets him find the last piece fairly easily, buried in the mountain. It looks like a gem encrusted skull, but the gems are fakes. Aqila notices that the pattern of the gems is unusual...it looks like the skull of a high priest of Davare, ritually prepared for burial, except they wouldn't use fake gems and the gilding they would use is not there.
And we find the other two matrixes that Sohrab mentioned. The lich fired the other one off when we came in the room, which is where the pile of defensive spells came from. Of the two remaining, one has prismatic sphere, solid fog, and cloudkill as CL20. The other one is Harm, self only; a custom spell that energizes an undead creature for 1 round per caster level with 8 bonus HD; and animate dead on targets of your choice if you have soul shards. Before we go, we nuke the 4 machines and completely destroy them.
When we get outside, Telesriel thanks us for ensuring that she learned that this would not be a suitable region for raising children in. Sohrab’s causual assessment that this area will be a war zone ‘soon’ is on the same scale of ‘soon’ for a dragon, really. Sohrab is also waiting for us, since we were only in there for a few minutes. "So, you've succeeded. And it appears you've even left me with some of his experiments to examine. So, a favor for a favor. I believe you have had dealings with Baron Taras before. You probably did not realize he's nearly 1600 years old, but not in that body. He has been moving down through his bloodline. Technically the spell he uses lets him take the body of any of his descendants from any of his past bodies. In practice, he would find it difficult to take over anyone who is not a close descendant of his current body. Going beyond that would prove problematic. Of course, doing anything about this without some evidence would be problematic. He is one of the great barons of the south. If anyone believes that Prezmyslaw has him removed without good cause… As for what evidence you could find to support removing him, I can't give you direct proof, but I can give you the keys to his ritual chamber, would should be all the proof you require, especially since he will be taking his son there for the initial preparations. Catching him in the act would be difficult, but if he's used it recently, there should be plenty of evidence."
Then Telesriel says, “I trust you aren't going to let Melore find out about this.” (That's Aremel's sister, and that's the sort of thing that will flip her ‘go bat**** switch’ and people who know her are worried that she might use natural disasters to express her feelings in the matter). Aqila assures her that we won't tell Melore...but we've already talked to Aremel. Joe asks about the flickering we saw on Taras. "What you saw with Taras was his true self, and the image self he tries to project to hide his presence. But, as I said, he is a fool." He also mentions that if we see the flickering elsewhere, it doesn't necessarily mean the same thing, after Joe asks about that.
We wrap up here.



We pick up right where we left off, and review what Sohrab told us about Baron Taras. He told us exactly where to find the site the Baron has been using for rituals, with a note that the site is impossible to reach except for right before and after the ritual. When Joe asked why, Sohrab replied, “There are limits to what I may say regarding that, however I can tell you it is because of the being with whom he has bargained for this ability." Sohrab could give us an approximate time as to when the ritual will happen. He also noted that it may be easier to prove what's going on after the ritual, as opposed to before. Moonbeam wondered what would happen if we hallowed the area before the ritual. Sohrab thought for a moment, then responded, “It should certainly interfere with the ritual. I'm not aware of anyone actually trying that in the past but I cannot believe that the ritual would succeed under those conditions. That said, I also think it unlikely that you would be able to do so, because I find it unlikely that you would not attract his patron’s attention.” Joe suggested trying to unhallow it instead. Sohrab commented, “Even still, I think you would attract his patrons attention, less violently perhaps....”
He then showed us an illusion of a fairly complicated device and continued, “This is one of the focuses for the ritual. I believe there are somewhere between three and eight of them in use, I think likely towards the lower end, but I don't know enough about his ritual to know. When activated, I believe they will somewhat impede your spellcasting. For you, it should be a minor nuisance. At worst you may see a spell or two fail. Destroying these, if he's performed the ritual, will cause him to have to repeat the ritual again if he wants the transfer to be reliable. However, you may not wish to destroy them…” When asked why, he explained, “Evidence, yes, and they have a nasty side effect that may kill you.” Joe wondered what the effect was. Sohrab described it as an unstable rift between the planes that will open, very unstable, and mentioned that if we destroy one, the effects should destroy the others. He notes that we'd probably at least be sucked through in one piece - only end up in multiple pieces if very unlucky. How comforting.
Sohrab continued, “I will note, that while I think he has not realized this, strictly he does not need these focuses any more. He does not know this, and if you do destroy them, he may be desperate enough to attempt the ritual without them.” On being asked what he thinks will happen if we steal them: “It is possible that you could succeed at that. I wouldn't recommend trying moving them in an extradimensional space unless you don’t mind losing it. It is possible that it would not be destabilized but I wouldn't bet on that, and certainly not if you tried to put more than one in there.”
Joe commented that we just need one for proof. “The best way to prove it, assuming you are able to remove it from the site, there should be at the focus, the center of the entire spell, an object that looks like this, Sohrab stated, showing us an illusion of a rainbow swirling orb, “mounted in a framework. My advice would be to take it to Prezmyslaw, ask him to summon all the Barons together, and shatter it in his presence. His reaction to that should easily prove what he has been up to. But be warned that removing the orb may draw the attention of Taras' patron. And if you do, he will likely send some of his servants to deal with you. In theory, if Taras has made the appropriate bargains, it could be multiple balors, or worse. In practice, I think he has not made such bargains. At worst, he would send his pet. I do not think it can kill any of you, but it may make you wish for death. Unfortunately, telling you too much about the pet’s nature will tell you who the patron is, which I may not do. I can give you this further piece of advice that may allow you to learn more. If you mention to Aremel what I have told you, she will know that the patron must be one of a small number of beings, and may be able to deduce which one.
We take our leave of everyone, and head back to Arandor. There are a few days before Sohrab's estimate on when we can access the ritual site, so we carefully fill Aremel in and get a good night's sleep before doing some research. Her take on our report – depending on how literal Sohrab was being on who could be called in to defend the site, it's either one of the great demon princes, or Asurak or Zeleya...it is conceivable that it could be Asurak, but unlikely. Aremal stated, “As for the demon princes, it is unlikely that he has a deal with one of the council, which leaves....three that would be reasonably likely possibilities. Avrakin perhaps, I do not think he has the knowledge for that but it is possible that he has gained in in the time I have been absent. Shylarene almost certainly has the knowledge necessary for this, but it is not her style. Were he female, I could see her doing such a thing, but...unfortunately, the last one that seems likely to me would be the worst one of them for you. Kizravek the Void Prince. It is entirely in keeping with his nature and you said that he mentioned a pet?” As we confirm that, she continues, “and that it would be unlikely to kill you but make you wish you were dead, which is a perfect match for the void serpent...fortunately, the protections you have would protect you from the worst of its effects, since most of it is meddling with your mind...so as long as nothing lowers your defenses...and there may be at least some attempts at that. I believe the serpent has some ability to dispel magic....I don't believe any of you have the ability to restore someone afflicted by those nightmares.”
If we're afflicted by its venom, you don't act in the real world when you act in the nightmare. Joe may be immune to the venom...Aremel would be interested to know if he really is immune or not. Worth a favor token from her, to find out, but she can't recommend us trying to find out, given the severity of the effects. Aqila asks if we can purge the nightmares with dragonfire (from Savinel's gift), assuming one can manage to do that in the throes of nightmares...Aremel thinks it is possible. The rest of the party makes a few cracks about Aqila's fire obsession. Aremel also strongly counsels us to avoid being swallowed...in its gullet we would be afflicted with very potent nightmares, that no one she knows of has survived with their minds intact...granted, the victims she knows of were not up to our caliber, but still strongly advised against. She also doesn't think that we're likely to see an army of balors out of him. At most, she'd expect us to face his pet and some of his more powerful servants, perhaps 3-4 demons...which ones would be a trickier question. There are quite a few possibilities. But she thinks our ordinary defenses would suffice against most of what they can do.
Aremel says, “Those devices that you described concern me somewhat. The side effect he warned you about from destroying them was somewhat more extreme than what you would expect if they were merely focuses...they must be something more but what their other purposes are is more than I could say...if you have time, I would say you should examine one of them closely, and see what you can learn, before trying to remove any pieces.” On being asked if she thinks it would be safe to summon experts to help us with the examination, she thinks it would be safe only as long as we don't attract the patron's attention. She thinks it could be possible that he could send his aspect through to fight us...we'd have a fair chance, but only fair, of beating it, but a gate of that magnitude would be far more noticeable than the benefit gained, so very unlikely. Assuming Taras has not given him something of sufficient value to warrant the risk. We all remember that the venture to find the Oracle was funded by Taras, ostentatiously for the benefit of Prezmyslaw. Aremel comments, “Which, come to think of it, were he to have some way to move it off plane, the Oracle you helped recover would be a gift of that magnitude. That said, moving it off plane would be a major undertaking and I do not think he would open that gate without already having payment.” (The ship is about a month out from finally getting to the Ferial, still)
She noted that even though we gave the user’s manual to Prezmyslaw already, this demon prince specializes in collecting secrets and may know how to operate the Oracle already. She notes that if the patron is a devil, we have other protections against them, since the Enemy's Greater Servants are already forbidden from attacking us. Of course, we don't know if Sohrab was being literal with his reference to balors, or if he was just using an approximation of the power levels involved that we would understand. We don't know, and we didn't ask earlier. Though he probably wouldn’t have answered that.
And that's most of the info we can get from Aremel. So we take a few days to study and get ready for the party. When we get down there, there are clear signs of the 'hunting trip' that was Taras' excuse...we only missed him by a day, it looks like. Following Sohrab's directions, we find a very twisty cavern, and deep underground, we find a hole that looks....blurry. Looks like a small alcove that doesn't go anywhere, but it's a doorway that leads to a moderately large chamber. We can see four devices around a ritual pattern inscribed in the floor, with a complex spire in the center, with the glowing orb embedded in the middle. There are eight crystalline spheres below it, with enormously powerful divination magic associated with them, as far as Thoron can see...like 12th level spells. Near the door are two bubbling vats that weren't mentioned. They emit no noticeable odor. Thoron looks at them and they appear opaque. It is disconcerting.
Aqila acquires a sample to see if she can discern what it is via alchemy. The substance is mostly demon blood. Mixed in with that, she finds some slight traces of human blood, dragon's blood, and a substance she can't ID. Well, that's interesting. Before we do anything else, Moonbeam summons a Zorn to assess the metal of the spire while Thoron examines the spell. He sees it has 2 features...it provides ordinary vision to the caster as if they were standing at the focus, and it can be expended as a focus as a summoning spell up to the level of the spell. We determine the whole array was shaped by magic. The xorn thinks the metal isn't unbendable, but it might take a little bit.
We spend some time debating how to get the orb out without getting friends. Moonbeam casts Stonetell to see what the rock has seen. She learns that the structure in the middle is a sort of altar, used for burning incense/blood, and using it does attract the attention of Taras' patron. She also gets a description of Taras' patron. It's a perfect match for Kizravek. That doesn't prove that is him, but if it's not, they'd have to have had a reason to fake his appearance to a rock. Aqila, meanwhile has been not walking into the room, but studying the devices around the altar to see what she can discern. Thoron could see that there are 5 schools of magic on each focus - necromancy, some convoluted mess he can't make out - abjuration, currently inactive but looks like under some conditions these will pulse a disjunction spell - divination, relatively minor looks like its connected to the necro, guess it's a guide for Taras's soul to reach his new 'vessel' - significant enchantment spell, does also look like it's associated with the necro spell and is a memory modification spell - probably erasing memories of being in this room - and transmutation spell that appears to be already triggered and able to be dismissed, it looks like some form of shapechange spell holding something in a shape other than its own.
That triggers Thoron to look for whatever is shapechanged in the room, if its still there. He sees 4 otherwise insignificant lumps of rock in a circle around the center pylon that have 18 HD. That's going to need dealt with.
So, plan is for Aqila to cast a dimensional lock over the entire room, then find a friend to cast prismatic wall for us. The friend we get eyes the room and asks what demon lord we're ticking off today. We cop to it being Kizravek, probably, which gets us a warning to not get swallowed, and then explain that we're planning on chucking four pit-fiend power equivalents into that prismatic wall....he eyes us for a minute, and warns us that those are probably death drinkers, and we'd better be planning on throwing all four of them at once. He declines our offer to watch the show, and we drop him off back home, owing him for the casting, before starting the fun.
And then Thoron uses telekinesis to throw all four rocks at once at the wall. It works. We have sent 4 statues of insane death drinkers randomly into the planes. Heh. Next, Aqila casts an antimagic field after Joe shifts into a legendary ape and walks with her into the room and after some time and effort, pries the orb loose. And then everyone not in the antimagic field gets hit with a disjunction. We start decamping. As Joe and Aqila pass the vats, Moonbeam tosses holy water in each and runs like hell. We all follow as they start fizzing purple. Joe passes the orb to Aqila and lags back to drop an echo skull. Then on a 3-count Aqila drops the antimagic field and we teleport to the middle of the desert.
After we land, Joe hears a voice through the echo skull. "Leaving so soon? You could at least tell me who to thank for this… So, just who are you working for anyway? Nesimban, Chensirie? Surely not that idiot Walithan. Or are you maybe some of Shylarene's little pets.' Aqila knows Chensirie is one of the known demon princes with an ambitious goal in life....replacing Shenea. So, this may be a list of demon princes. Shylarene is the queen of succubi. Aqila does a quick flight check, then bampfs the party to the middle of the ocean just as a precaution against teleport traces, 100' up from the water. Joe can still see and hear through the skull. "Well, since it seems you don't wish to be helpful, I suppose I'll investigate on my own. I do hope to meet you, soon." We don't say anything. And we putter around for a little bit before heading to go talk to Prezmyslaw about this latest fun bit.
We land outside the city and walk in, as a final precaution, are escorted to Prezmyslaw, and after filling him on the latest fun problem we've turned up for him, he comments that it'll take a few days to call all the barons together. Mostly from political reasons - the southern barons in particular aren't entirely sure they want him as king. So we have a few days to kill. Aqila learns Prismatic Wall while she keeps an eye on the orb and keeps it Obscured from unfriendly eyes.
Meanwhile, a plan is hatched to deny Taras an escape route. A cheesy plan, but a plan nonetheless. Joe gets a potion of glibness, and Moonbeam uses brainspider on Vuk, Taras's legitimate heir, to figure out what makes him tick. She feeds that info to Joe, who shows up that night as an angel of Ravenne, after Dagnar sleeps the guards in the room, and convinces Vuk to take a necklace of death ward and Moonbeam as a Guardian Falcon - the kid is a hunter, so him carrying a bird around isn't unusual. He's also a bit of a spoiled brat, since his father saw no reason to instill social graces in him. We hope this will suffice to keep him unbodysnatched until we deal with dad.
Three days after we got the orb, the barons are assembled, mostly with their heirs. Prezmyslaw gives a quick summary, without naming names, of what he learned from us. Then he has the high priest of the Kantoran pantheon called in. The priest affirms that the orb, which is sitting on a stand near him, is what we said it is. "Now, we are told that if the orb is destroyed, there will be an unmistakeable reaction from the one who has been using it…” A fairly burly guard is brought in with a heavy hammer. Thoron can see that the guard is fairly glowing with prots. We're all in the room in various guises. The guard swings the hammer, the orb shatters into dust, and Taras lets out an unholy scream as Aqila throws a resilient sphere up around him on principle. And then a demon appears inside the sphere with him.
The demon speaks. “You have broken our contract. Will you attempt restitution or shall I take possession of your soul now?" The panicked rush to clear the room has started. (The demon has a fear aura up, but we don’t know that) Aqila looks over at Prezmyslaw. "Do we have your permission to deal with this situation?" "I didn't think you needed it”, he comments with a snort. "Well, he is your baron…" "Not any more he isn't." Joe offers to pop Prezmyslaw off to safety and does so, much to the relief of his guards. Moonbeam shifts from falcon to angel, tells Vuk he doesn't want to see this, and that's enough to get him to let her evacuate him back to his home. She comes back just in time to watch Taras’ body drop dead to the ground. A large shadowy form appears instantly. We assume that that's Taras. Dagnar manages to hit him with a dimensional lock spell as Aqila drops the sphere.
Dagnar goes first, using a haste potion, a true strike potion, and nails the shadowy thing with 3 hits. Moonbeam shies a moonbolt at both the demon and the shadow. It seems to stagger them, but no other effect. She follows up with a force strike. Thoron can see surrounding Taras a number of spectral figures linked to him by spectral chains. The demon looks like a monumental shape of flames, much bigger than he looks physically. Like 40' to 50' range. Thoron tries chain lightning to no effect and follows up with a mass resist fire on the party, given the fiery nature of the demon.
Joe changes into a legendary tiger and charges Taras. After mauling the crap out of Taras, he teleports back as we all hear a spectral scream and the sound of celestial trumpets. Thoron can see that one of the spectral figure has vanished. Taras does a Wail of the Banshee. And then Joe gets hit with a G. Dispel magic when the wail does nothing.
Aqila takes the field and casts a prismatic spray. She hits Taras with Electricity and Poison, and the demon with Stone. Demon rolls a 1. Demon is now a lovely statue. Hah! Then she fails to beat spell penetration with a glass strike. Bah!
Dagnar is up again. He tries moonbolt, and it has no apparent effect. He follows up with a mass assay spell resistance. We're starting to think Taras is not actually undead. Moonbeam does ghost-dust to make him corporeal, then does a flamestrike with dragonfire enhancements. Thoron does chain lightning again and we hear another scream. Joe timestops, rebuffs after his dispelling, and then makes a few fire seeds to leave by Taras before the spell ends. Then he charges as Taras screams again. He mauls Taras again and another scream sounds.
Taras has figured out that we have death effects protection. So, instead, he hits Moonbeam with a Reiving Dispell. Then Aqila casts Spell Vulnerability and follows up with a disintegrate. Some damage. Dagnar gets ready to unload next round, and moseys on up. Moonbeam does a timestop, summons 4 rounds of Devas and rounds it off with a flamestrike. Dagnar knows he'll need to evade and is ready. 9 Devas arrive, and there are 6 screams as they all cast dispel evil on him. They move out of the way. The flamestrike provokes another scream. Thoron estimates there are 30 more souls hanging around. Joe mauls Taras for another scream. Dagnar gets a sneak attack of opportunity and Taras starts looking desperate..(can't cast this round). Thoron tries to grapple with telekinesis. Fails. Tries splinterbolt for a little damage.
Taras yells "I will be avenged! Take my soul. Make me the Gate!" Well, that sounds bad. Aqila does a blistering flame strike, aiming to miss Dagnar, then tosses the Prismatic eye up now that his SR is low. 2 and 4, which is enough to do another scream. Then Dagnar gets to go all stabby. He gets a scream, and successfully feebleminds Taras. Well, now he won't be attacking us, but the Gate is still coming. Moonbeam's turn. 9 Devas cast holy strike and the 1 she gets that turn gets a scream from its dispel evil. Then she fires up a 200ish damage flamestrike. Dagnar evades as another scream sounds.
Thoron shapechanges into a giant squid and attacks with all ten tentacles, and bite. Another scream. Dagnar makes an AOO and gets a scream. Then Thoron finishes his turn with a splinterbolt for grins. Then Joe does a timestop to make some fireseeds, then mauls Taras. Two screams total. Taras mindlessly mauls Dagnar for 27 cold damage. Aqila puts up a dimensional lock centered on Taras, then tries a GlassStrike. Nope. Eye does fire damage. Bah.
Dagnar pulls out the Black Blade of Disaster. And Taras fails his saves twice. The fun is starting. 400ish damage. Two screams. Moonbeam takes her turn and gets 3 screams total. Adds 3 more devas. And does a snakes swiftness mass, so Dagnar gets a hit, using the Black Blade. Taras made his save that time...11 damage. 7 devas are in range and get hits in. Thoron does his tentacle schtick and finishes off with splinterbolt again. Two screams. Joe realizes that Devas are fire immune and gets an evil grin on his face. He makes 4 rounds of fire seeds and mauls Taras. Two screams from the seeds and one from the mauling. Dagnar takes his AOO and adds a little damage. Taras fails to break the paralysis then he vanishes. He has become the gate and the pet arrives through it. It's the nightmare serpent thingy we were warned about and it's colossal. We hope Prezmyslaw has reinforced floors in here.
Aqila's Eye zaps it with electricity. No resistance, but it makes its save. She tries to Glassstrike it twice. No dice. Dagnar gets up. Thoron sees it has 40 hd, but it looks insubstantial. (The dimensional lock did stop it from coming through completely, so we’re only facing its shadow) Dagnar does assay spell resistance mass and then does a full attack. Does a lot of damage, moonblade hits screw with its spellcasting, but doesn't get feeblemind through. Then Moonbeam comes up. She casts time stop, summons a bunch of devas, casts snake's switness mass to let the existing horde of devas and Dagnar beat on it, then finishes with a firestorm. The new devas also do dispel evil. 13 devas already there hit it. And then there are holy smites. It's about half hps at this point. Also 12 str damage from Dagnar sneak attacks to date.
Thoron the squid rolls in and unleashes his might. 170 after DR taken into account. Dagnar gets his sneak attack in now. A little more Str damage. Joe tries Frostfell, fails to turn it to ice. Does some cold damage. The pet's turn comes up, and it bites Dagnar for 35 damage and he fails the con save on the poison. And now Dagnar is in a coma and grappled, in the thing’s mouth, and due to be swallowed next round. Aqila's turn. She does spell vulnerability on the pet, tries a glass strike which fails, and the eye does 7, which doesn't work in a dimensional lock. Moonbeam tries flesh to stone and just fails, after a timestop and makes a bunch of hollyberry bombs. 180 from that. Thoron defers to Joe, who tried frostfell again. no effect. Thoron's up now. Dagnar's last hope of not being swallowed. He unleashes tentacly hell and it goes poof.
Dagnar's limp body falls the ground, until some of the Devas catch him. We take him back to Arandor for medical attention. There are people there that can cast Miracle/Wish. Dagnar still takes a few points wisdom damage, but that's fixable. Meanwhile, Moonbeam hunts Vuk up, fills him in on just want went on, and concludes with a "you'd better have been worth it, kid".
The collateral damage is a bit interesting. Prezmyslaw was more or less expecting us to trash the place again. There was records storage below the room and clerk's rooms above that will never be the same again. We've also mentally scarred some more guards. The fallout from every single baron being witnessed running away in terror will be interesting for Prezmyslaw.

Terane
2020-06-01, 11:41 AM
We are getting towards the time that Valeiran said would come, when we meet the person who will be able to guide us to a temple that Zeleya needs to carry out her current plot so we can destroy it and thwart her. As it turns out, we have three days after getting back from our last adventure to prepare and round up party members before we begin our long delayed attempted to assault Zeleya's temple. We debate who else to invite along on this caper. We ask Roxana, the priestess of Nareel from Stonebridge, if she thinks this sounds like fun. She's willing to come help, if we have time to pick her up when the ball goes up. She suspects that we won't though. The debate over which paladin to invite along is leaning towards Tervel, knowing that Aremel will come with him. The druid is firmly of the opinion that Sneezil would be more fun, though.
We do know that there are rules about gods attacking each other directly, so Aremel can't go the whole way with us, but her presence might throw wrenches into attempts by Zeleya making direct attacks on us. Also, it has been long enough since our raid on the Veiled Order citadel for the loot to be available. So we have some shinies for this party.
We settle firmly on asking Tervel to come along, and his opinion is that we won't have time to fetch anyone once the fun starts, so he'll accompany us until we find the temple or he gets sent somewhere else. At which point we’ll go get Sneezil if it comes to that. Aremel explicitly states that she's coming along, and brings up the restrictions about deities being allowed to attack each other - she thinks that the oath no longer is binding where she is concerned, but other gods may not know that. (note that gods get a warning twinge when they're about to break a gods-oath, even if they don't remember swearing it.) So she is going to behave as if the oath still applies to her, to not tip Zeleya off that it probably doesn't. And she doesn't think that she can substantially help us fight, but she still has piles of esoteric knowledge that may come in handy up to that point, though.
At the end of the three days, Princess Louhi contacts Joe via sending. Apparently, having heard some bits of not completely accurate information, her mother has decided to host a feast in honor of our efforts in dealing with the dragon problem, and wants us there as guests of honor. He accepts on our behalf, followed by some frantic shuffling of faces on Joe's part, trying to remember which one he was using for that mission. We're going to have to raid the costume department for Aerodonese fashion, again. And this is a week-long party, so we need to borrow some changes of clothing. Louhi also makes it clear that her mother will be inviting us to stay for the whole time, and providing accommodation, and it would be a grave insult to not accept. Also, we can get away with inviting a few guests, so Tervel and Aremel should come with us just in case this is the event Valeiran was telling us about.
As part of party preparations, Aqila, Moonbeam, and Aremel make an effort to coordinate outfits, menfolk not invited. When we arrive, Princess Louhi is there to greet us in person. "Before the actual festivities begin, there are a few people that you should have some warning about that will be in attendance." She's making sure we don't make a serious social gaffe. "Firstly, of course, my brothers and sister will almost certainly be there, (they're half-siblings, offspring of one of the king's 3 concubines, and could be made heir if the king chooses, and all want the throne) and Teemu is a reasonably skilled mage, scholar, and alchemist, and incredibly proud of his abilities in all areas...it would be extremely impolitic to make him look bad in any of those areas...be warned he is a very hot-tempered man. Here, you should be safe enough, since mother would disapprove, but if he gets angry enough, he may forget himself. And he does, technically, have the authority to have you executed..." We carefully keep straight faces. We also learn that the 4th night will be a costume ball.
"Prince Juho...it would be best to have as little conversation with him as possible, since he will almost certainly bring up his views for the future of the country, and you will most certainly disagree with...he believes that we should have closer ties to the Dragon Confederation, to the point that he believes we should invite their armies in to even up the score with Teredor. And then Prince Aimo...the ladies should probably avoid him...he is distinctly obese, unpleasant, and used to getting his own way in all things, including with women. And then there's my sister, Pinja...she is not in herself particularly dangerous, and will be pleasant and charming in person, but she does have a number of assassins on her payroll which are reputed to have, frankly, near impossible abilities. What their actual abilities are, I cannot say, because she has not yet decided to send them after me.”
“Beyond them, at least three of the dukes will be in attendance. Politically, Veli is the one that's most damaging to offend, since he is also Father's younger brother. Personally, I would consider him a blowhard and a fool, but if would be wise to avoid giving him any indications of your opinions about him. Duke Jorrit will probably be bringing along his wife. I would prefer not to go into much detail, but I suspect that you may want to help her out, but please don't. I don't think there is anything you can do that would actually help. He is a womanizer with somewhat brutish tastes. She will probably be wearing more concealing clothing than usual...unfortunately, since he is one of the Southern dukes, he is not in any way under my authority. (impression is that it will not go well with him when she gets the throne). And finally, Duke Sakari...I think, I hope, you will get along well with him. He is currently my strongest supporter among the greater nobility. And also known, and by a number of his peers, ridiculed, for his integrity. He may bring along his son, though I hope not, since, unfortunately, his eldest is somewhat of a rebel. His younger son, I think would be a better heir, but ducal heirs must be approved by the monarch...hopefully he will live long enough for matters to change.”
“I also strongly suspect Baroness Fredrika will be there, since, technically, the dragons were on her land. As far as the other nobles, the only other one I can be certain will be there, because he has never missed a chance to go to one of Mother's Festivals because he doesn't have to pay for the food and drink, would be Count Sampo. I suppose I should warn you about that...he is known to be a worshipper of Zeleya, and does nothing about that impression, because frankly, he is an idiot. So he is left alone in hope he will lead them to others who are more intelligent. I will also say he is a supporter of Prince Teemu for the throne, though Teemu would rather not have his support.”
“For the others that would be of some significance...others will attend, but have less influence, Count Rasmus is Fredrika's immediate superior. He's part of Prince Juho's party because the timber trade with the Dragon Confederation is extremely lucrative for him. I would also expect Countess Vilja to be in attendance because she has been one of Mother's favorites for some time now. Rather longer than most people have managed to enjoy her patronage. She has a somewhat nasty streak, there...she likes to build people up to cut the knees out from under them. It does keep those in her court quite attentive to her moods, which I believe is the point.”
We then introduce Aremel and Tervel to Louhi, and we do use Aremel's real name, on her advice. Louhi's reaction - "It has been quite some time since a paladin has openly attended a royal function - it would be nice if it happened more often. In any case, Mother is keeping some of her plans quiet for now, so I don’t know the entirety of the intended festivities. I know for the beginning she intends to have an open buffet with no servants present, other than those required to bring the food in.” The intent is to have an opportunity to mingle without reference to rank.
“As mother's guests, socially, you would rank with the greater nobles. Of course, it would be wise not to presume too much on that. Tomorrow, I believe she's organized a hunt of some sort. Quite likely, though I have no details, probably hawking, with a grand banquet planned for the evening. Towards that, I should note that each of you will likely have one of the grand nobles assigned to you as your dinner partner for the evening. Though I would suspect that she would attempt to assign the highest ranking nobles she can. Duke Jorrit, since he brought his wife, will be dining with her. I suspect you ladies will be dining with Duke Veli and Sakari. As for the two of you”, motioning at Dagnar and Joe, “likely two of her ladies in waiting would be assigned to you, though if you are lucky, she won't inflict Valpuri on you. And for your friends, well, I doubt she will have made any special arrangements for them, and would have no objections to them dining together. Beyond that, other than the costume ball on the 4th night, I do not know anything of her plans.”
"I think it would be best if I introduced you to Mother now." So, we follow her to a small receiving room. One elderly woman is seated there with four younger women standing around her. Louhi bows slightly. "Majesty, the guests you have requested have arrived." Louhi introduces us, as the queen nods slightly, then finally, "And they've asked to accompany them, the Paladin Tervel and his lady Aremel." And there's a definite reaction this time. The queen says, "Aremel? That is an interesting name. I am curious where your parents found it." Aremel replies that she is not certain and that, unfortunately, it is far too late for anyone to ask. "I see. I had not planned on additional guests, but we shall have to see that you two are seated at my table tomorrow night. It will, not doubt, be an interesting conversation. You may go. The servants will show you to our rooms. Daughter, if you would remain a moment...." We follow the servants out. They show us to a suite with 5 bedrooms and one central sitting room.
Spot check time! Dagnar sees some stones with odd carvings on the outer wall. He points it out when the servants leave. The suite is against the outer wall of the palace. They appear to be guides for a spell, but aren't magical themselves. The common use is to bar teleportation into an area, to protect an important area. But they need actively maintained by a mage, so most people don't use them unless they have a spell that's impractical to use otherwise. He also remembers that, in Aerodon at least, for defending structures, that one has been supplanted for some time, but there was a period of time when this was the best option available. This tends to suggest that this building is 700-800 years old.
Tervel, now that we're alone, lets us know that he's been using his detect evil ability, but he can tell us that the queen, all four of her handmaidens, and Louhi, were complete blanks. The servants didn't ping. Aremel explains to us something that Thoron just got a few hints of...the crown that the queen was wearing appears to be prepared to be a key to open something. It's also old, possibly old enough that no one remembers that it was a key...she guesses that it's 4-500 years old. And it wouldn't be detectable as evil even if it connects to a strongly aligned plane, if it's never been used. And if it connects to a more neutral plane, obviously it wouldn’t show as evil. It may even connect to a plane that no longer exists, and using it under those circumstances would, best case, at least let you survive, but you would end up on a random plane. Which is the simplest way to get to a plane you aren't wanted, but it is completely random. It might be possible to determine where the key leads, with an examination, but Aremel doesn't have the power to do so anymore, and her knowledge of the planes is woefully out of date. Plus, 'borrowing' the queen’s crown is contraindicated.
Moonbeam decides to use brainspider to snoop around on who's here, and detects all three dukes in evidence. Veli is 'entertaining' a servant girl. Other people are shielded...including the other princes and princesses. A Count Tauno is giving a lecture to Prince Aimo about his behavior, though Moonbeam can't figure out why the prince is letting the count lecture him. (Teemu is in his 30's, the oldest. Louhi is mid-20's. Juho is a year younger than her. Aimo is 21 now, and Pinja is technically not adult yet, but she only has about 3 weeks before reaching her majority.)
Moonbeam can pick up on Count Sampo, the Zeleya worshipper, and quickly confirms that he's a complete idiot. His main thought is that he hates being here because he hates hiding his nature from the queen. He believes no one knows he worships Zeleya.
Thoron is let out to stretch his wings and determines that the palace is somewhat isolated. 500' radius walls around the building and grounds. Guards are patrolling around, about 200 of them. 3-5th level per Thoron's power sight. No active magic on the walls, but quite a bit on the palace. From above, the palace seems to have been built around what had been a strong fortress. Our rooms are in that fortress-core, so we’ve got some of the high-status rooms. With Moonbeam's chain of eyes spell seeing what he sees, she can determine that Prince Imo's rooms are not in the prestigious area.
We are called down to dinner. The one rule being observed is that the least important are called in first, so by the time we get there, everyone is there except the queen and rest of the royal family. Duke Sakari is near the door - the other Dukes are on the other side of the room. He comes over to us, "You must be our queen's guests for these festivities. May I have the pleasure of being given your names?" We introduce ourselves, and he considers us for a moment. "While I'm quite sure that Princess Louhi will have warned you, do have a care if you have to speak to Duke Jorrit at any point. While I would personally approve if you decided to deal with his behavior appropriately, in my position, I must, of course, strongly disapprove."
Moonbeam asks if he might give us an appropriate excuse...Sakari thinks it would be unlikely that would give us an appropriate to the circumstances excuse here, though one could hope. He gestures slightly, then continues, “While it would have been impolitic for her to wait for you, I believe the Baroness Fredrika would like to thank you personally.” Sakari has a lined face, and grey hair, but not balding yet. He's also the wearing the most modestly dressed in the room. We follow him to meet the Baroness.
The Baroness is a somewhat matronly woman, wearing stylish, but of an older style, clothes. In person, she has a slightly high-pitched, grating voice. She thanks us for dealing with the dragon that was ravaging her lands. While she at such an event, she hates to do anything as crass as commerce, she also thanks us for saving her mountainberry farm, which is practically the only source of her disposable income. Moonbeam offers to 'goose' production if the Baroness is interested - the Baroness declines, noting that they've tried using magic to improve yields before, but every time it's been tried before, the quality dropped off, so she'd rather not risk using magic until they better understand why. (trace minerals in the soil that get used up faster when magical enhancement is used).
So, we mingle. Dagnar tries to hit on Countess Vilja, and gets a verbal flaying. Moonbeam is casing the situation. Joe is flirting with the ladies. Aqila is circulating slowly, seeing who approaches her, rather than the reverse. Thoron is wearing the guise of a white peacock and snooping on conversations. He's pretending to be a pet. Count Rasmus is haranguing a group of people, who look like they'd rather he shut up. The food at the buffet is intricately carved, and generally made to look like anything except what it actually is.
Princess Pinja enters now, wearing the most daring costume, surrounded by four ladies wearing the same thing she is, but in solid black rather than many colors. Also, her hair is flowing, while theirs is tightly bound with pins. Thoron can see they are 15 HD, while Pinja is 7. Prince Aimo at 6hd, is the next to arrive. He's a waddling pile of blubber, also wearing a 'daring' outfit. He arrives alone. Prince Temu 14hd, and Prince Juho, 10hd, enter together. Temu has a lady about his age on his arm, who shows as 7hd. And finally Louhi and Queen Ansa enter together, with the Queen's four handmaidens. Queen is 20hd. The oldest handmaid, plump and motherly, has 8hd, named Kielo. Youngest is 7hd, Lahja, seems to be maybe 18. 3rd is Tatjana, 15hd, pinched-face, vaguely shrewish. Last is Valpuri, who Louhi specifically mentioned as not being a nice person, has 10hd, an icy personality, and pale blond hair. Scorns anyone who is of lower rank.
Count Sampo is also 6hd, he and Imo are the lowest hd in the room, except for Count Tauno, who's 3hd. He's the court weathercock who will always support whoever is in the strongest position. Currently, he's supporting Louhi. He's being ingratiating towards us right now. After they enter, Louhi comes over to us. "I trust you are finding this at least tolerable?" We make appropriate noises. And then Count Sampo decides to come over. This is being observed with interest by onlookers, who know Louhi really doesn't like him.
Sampo starts with "I trust you have time to sample the delights of our fair city?" Moonbeam comments that it is a beautiful country. "If any of you would care to accompany me at some time, I'm sure I could show you things you have missed." “Like what?” from Moonbeam "Oh, I'm sure there are some hidden establishments that would be of interest of you". Joe is diplomatic. "If we were to remain for a while, are there any establishments that you would recommend? " "You might find the White Swan interesting." Moonbeam brainspiders him, and learns that he is convinced that Louhi is a high ranking priestess of Zeleya.
Note that we don't have most of our usual buffs up, because that would be rude. Mindblank is an exception.
Moonbeam gets us out of this conversation by planting a suggestion that Valpuri is into his kind of thing, and he departs. A few minutes later, we all hear a ringing slap. Followed by a palm strike that put him on the floor, stunned.
We go back to circulating. Over time, we determine Valpuri completely fits the description we were given. Gives a strong impression that she's putting up with our presence because the queen invited us. Tatjana is charming and witty, but her humor is at the expense of someone else. A cruel edge is noticeable. Lahja is very much a flirt, and it becomes quickly obvious that she's mainly after a husband of suitable rank. Kielo quickly gives the impression that she's the social grease between the other three and keeps things smooth between them. We also find out that she has 11 children and her experience raising them that is standing them in good stead here.
Sakari, we already met. Rasmus is....Rasmus. Jorrit, we avoid. The queen, we gather, has some genuine appreciation that we helped protect the kingdom, but she mainly invited us to assess us, since we are new acquaintances of her daughter that are unknowns and wants to know how to fit us in...threats, neutral, assets? The impression we can get is her plans include a strong dedication to her daughter taking the throne. From gossip we overhear, or rather, Thoron hears, that the king as suffered a serious health issue but none of the speakers know much in the way of details. From the disjointed bits and pieces, it sounds like a heart attack. We can also pick up threads that knowing about this is considered a risk to the safety and stability of the nation.
As Moonbeam is casting around for people with guilty knowledge about the king, an elderly man with long white hair and a long white beard comes up to her and said "Young lady, are you sure that's wise to be doing that here?" Moonbeam asserts that she's acting defensively only. He introduces himself as Antero, high priest Antaro, the queen’s spiritual adviser. Thoron sees 12hd. Joe suspects that Sakari has noticed what Moonbeam is doing too. We can also be confident that Louhi's court mage, and a man who's been avoiding us all night who appears to be someone's hired mage, have probably also noticed.
Moonbeam allows that the Sampo incident was her, and was hard to resist. Antero comments that while he doesn't know what her traditions are, he doesn't think Aeran would disprove. Since we obviously came with a paladin, Moonbeam asks if he's noticed anything 'odd'. He seems to have something he wants to tell us, but doesn't have time to do that tonight. He thinks he may have time to talk tomorrow, after the hunt, in our rooms, if that would be acceptable. We think that it would be.
Tervel and Aremel have been having an uneventful evening, and even an encounter with Aimo didn't go too badly. Tervel has also been using his pallie-senses, and detects some sort of evil presence, but he can't pin down what or where. Below us is as close as he can get, as we find out when we get back to our rooms after the party. Two notes get dropped off by servants. One is Sakari requesting that we make time during the hunt to find him for a conference, as it would benefit us both. The second note is from Prince Teemu, inviting us to join him for the noon meal during the hunt. We send back appropriately polite assents to the requests and turn in the night.
We get breakfast delivered, with a note from Louhi that she is aware we didn't bring any hunting birds with us, and offers us the run of her mews, with the exception of her favorite. Aremel is not going to fly a bird, she'll just hang out with Tervel. Moonbeam picks out a peregrine. Joe has Thoron. Joe/Moonbeam talk a few of the other birds into behaving for Aqila, Dagnar, and Tervel. When we get there, we see that Queen Ansa seems to be flying a great eagle of some sort, though it looks like a hawk in body shape. Sampo's bird seems to be half-crazed and ready to rip things into shreds. The rest of the hunters seem to have more ordinary bird choices.
Sakari is flying a well-cared for bird that reacts to him in a way that suggests he cares for it personally. The princes are all flying birds and give indications that they're aren't familiar with them. Joe talks shop, since he knows birds well. He tries chatting the queen up about her bird - he learns that it was found up in the Ice Teeth, and that it's been a challenge for the falconer to keep it alive. He is familiar enough with the local wildlife to know that's not an Ice Teeth bird, but she believes she's telling the truth.
Moonbeam chats with Sakari, observing that he's got a well-cared for friend there. His response is that he hopes his healer can keep the old girl going for another year - on closer observation, she can see that this is a bird who would not have reached that age in the wild. Moonbeam and Joe offer to have a look at her later. Sakari also gives us a warning that we would want to avoid flying our bird's when Sampo's is in the air - it's known for viciously attacking other birds. On being asked what would happen if our birds defend themselves when his is in the air. Sakari notes that as long as there is no evidence that we are cheating, no one other than Sampo would care if his bird suffers a mischief. Sakari delicately implies that slipping an intelligent bird into the hunt would be considered cheating. Joe makes shift to deflect suspicion.
The queen launches first, signaling the start of the hunt. Her eagle-hawk goes out, and brings back a rabbit. Everyone is to launch in a pre-determined order, which we will be told, and your bird is expected to make a kill and bring it back. And when the queen decides that there have been enough launches, the game is over. We're hawking in the queen's private game preserve, so it is well stocked. The order seems to be precedence.
Moonbeam gets a squirrel, Aqila can't talk her merlin into launching, Dagnar gets unreasonably lucky when his choice brings back a fox, though it’s a small fox.
On her second try, Aqila convinces her bird to fly and it brings back… a mouse. Moonbeam and Dagnar get squirrels. 3rd round - Aqila gets a squirrel, Dagnar gets a pheasant, and Moonbeam gets a mouse. 4th round - Aqila's merlin struggles in with a rabbit. Moonbeam gets a game hen, and Dagnar gets the rabbit. Last round - Aqila gets a grouse, Moonbeam's peregrine brings in a big fat pheasant, and Dagnar's bird gets a grouse.
Meanwhile, Thoron has been carefully picking targets. So he finds the largest rabbit in the range and brings it in. Followed by a big fat grouse, a big fat pheasant, then ends with a smallish bobcat and a young coyote. Sampo immediately begins arguing that Joe must be cheating. Joe calmly points out that a golden eagle is much bigger than a kestrel, and if you want larger game, you need to fly a larger bird. And because it's Sampo making a fuss, no one else is going to join in, because who wants to be caught dead agreeing with that idiot?
The queen decides to award the day to Joe/Thoron. We did manage to sneak off and talk to Sakari privately while the hunt was going on. "I have some reason to believe that, at some point during these festivities, one of Louhi's brothers intends to make an attempt on her life. I do not have any proof as to which one of them it is, nor, to be honest, can I prove that it is one of her brothers, other than that the ultimate paymaster is a man and the three of them are the most likely candidates, as there is no one else that could be as confident that their position would protect them in case of failure, and that would profit by her death.”
“The difficulty, and the reason I have not mentioned this to the princess, is because the evidence suggests that her bodyguard has been suborned. And she is, unfortunately, quite fond of him. He's been her guard since she was ten. The reports that I have of you, which are sketchier than I like, suggest that you might be trustworthy, and your behavior I've observed reinforces this." He notes that we cannot act first, but we need to be ready to act if need be. He has also picked up on some sketchy evidence that whoever is behind this is working with Zeleya's temple, though it seems more like evidence to blacken someone's reputation in case of failure rather than truth. He is confident that Teemu and Juho are not in any way involved with Zeleya. He thinks that is a blind, rather than truth, personally. He also requests that if we find any more solid evidence, to let him know, and to protect the Princess. We assert that we will do so.
The other event during the hunt was the noon lunch with Teemu. It quickly becomes evident that he wants to sound us out on various political subjects...mainly where we stand on the idea of closer ties with the dragon temple. Moonbeam switches to Dragon Speech to comment that they can go do something anatomically impossible. Joe's opinion is the same. The other point he tries to suss out on, is relations with Teredor. He seems to be looking for us to agree that closer ties are preferable. Aqila comments that her father's family has lived along the river since before there was a Teredoran empire, and they have no complaints about how they've been treated since the empire moved in. Teemu seems very happy to have that tidbit of information.
That night, there is a dinner where we feast on the results of the hunt. Moonbeam eats with Sakari. Aqila is assigned to entertain Duke Veli, the king's younger brother and noted blowhard. Dagnar draws Tatjana, and Joe gets Valpuri, the icy blonde. Tervel and Aremel eat together, at the queen's table. The high priest lets us know that his services have been requested for that night, so he won't be able to meet with us until the following night. And Louhi has been assigned to dine with Rasmus, the supporter of Juho.
Of note, that it is a saying in Aerodon that if you want to start a war, let the queen organize the banquet at the peace talks. Teemu is accompanying the queen tonight. We are all at the high table, within earshot of each other, roughly. Thoron is in his normal Golden Eagle shape, hanging with Joe and getting first dibs on dinner, since he was the star of the hunt. Moonbeam talks hawks and hawking with Sakari. Aqila takes one for the team, and lets Veli babble at her while contemplating the intricacies of the Art and listening in on other people's conversations to keep entertained. Joe tries to sweeten Valpuri up, and after many, many gambits, finds that Tatjana's behavior is becoming unnerving to her. She's almost wondering if Tatjana enjoys hurting people. And she's obviously uncomfortable with this conversation at dinner. Joe tries to lighten it up by asking if Valpuri thinks if Tatjana will break Dagnar's heart...she doesn't see why she would bother, and changes the conversation to talk about Joe.
He makes up a plausible and hard to verify story, and tries to talk her into having a more private conversation later....she has duties with the queen for the next two nights. Left implied is there might be time after that. Joe tries to subtly solicit info about Louhi's bodyguard. Valpuri believes him to be one of the most dedicated to his duty that she knows.
Joe also carefully probes for data about the princes and if there's any gossip about us from Louhi. The latter hits a brick wall, because anything she knows would have been in privileged conversations. He accepts her refusal, and probes about other gossip about us. He gets comments that there is a lot of speculation about us, and that our support of Louhi is unwise. Or perhaps her relationship to us is. Or both.
Moonbeam doesn't get any new useful info out of Sakari since we're in public. Veli is getting steadily drunker. As he's a point of collapse, he mentions the queen's court mage, maybe. “Blasted necromancer, never can tell when one of his little things will be spying on you.” Well, that's interesting. He's a drunk and not necessarily reliable source.
Moonbeam does get a little info out of Sakari about High Priest Antero...he's seen as being too nice to be a real player at court. Meanwhile, Dagnar is getting a nice collection of very subtle vitriol about everyone else at the table from his dinner partner. He's also picking up very subtle hints that she might be interested in him, but not yet. Needs to be an appropriate time, perhaps after tomorrow night.
Louhi is being polite to Rasmus, who decided that this was a good time to press her about his Dragon Confederation views. And there is nothing else of note at the dinner. We all politely take our leave, and return to our suite, where we trade stories and hear about how Tervel and Aremel's night went. She is obviously a little agitated. It seems the queen asked her point blank if she'd seen her sister lately. She answered that it had been some time since they'd spoken, truthfully. The point that has her agitated is the fact that the queen apparently recognized her for one, and for two, knew that she had a sister, because she's been out of circulation for about 2k years, and that connection wasn't widely known even then.
She also noticed that Teemu was very intrigued by that comment, since it implied that the queen knew who she was. Tervel comments that that sense of evil seems to be growing stronger. It's still from below, but there's a new sense of anticipation, but he can't tell if it means in the next hour or the next week.

Terane
2020-06-09, 08:04 PM
It is day 3 of the party. We know that there is a masquerade ball tonight, and Louhi had no idea what her mother has planned for the other two days. We find out in the morning that we're being left to our own devices until evening. We also find that we have invitations from Baroness Fredrika, who would like an opportunity to thank us in person for saving her lands from the marauding dragon. We also have an invitation from Prince Juho for a small party he's hosting for his friends and associates. And finally, we have an invitation from Duke Joritt...the wife-beater. He says he has some things that may be to our mutual advantage to discuss with us.
Juho's party is at a fixed time; the others are asking us to set a time. He would like us to show up mid-to-late morning. We can probably fit the other two in before and after the little party. We decide that we'll see Joritt first and the Baroness last, so we're going to the masquerade in a better mood. And for the purposes of these events, 'we' means all PCs plus Tervel and Aremel.
Joritt is alone when we meet him. He exudes a sleazy 'do not buy this used horse' sort of charm. He greets us pleasantly and leads off with some small talk before getting around to why he asked us here. "I believe, from what I've heard, you are currently inclined to support the Princess Louhi. I seem to have discovered something that might change your mind. You will of course have to wait some little time before exploring to verify my words, however, it seems that the rumors that she is a priestess of Zeleya may be more founded in reality than I had expected."
Joe asked what he found. Joritt explains, "I may have discovered a temple to Zeleya beneath this very palace. Moreover, I've discovered some evidence that Louhi will likely be there, participating in a great ritual, soon. Specifically, one of the caretakers of the temple said so in my hearing." When Moonbeam asked how he knew this was a caretaker. "If I see someone cleaning the implements inside the temple, I would assume they are a caretaker," he replied heatedly.
We ask him for more details - he tells us that it's a small temple, maybe 50', and he found it because it is well known to the greater nobility that there are many passages under the palace, and the keystone to the palace's defenses is down there. He was down there 'inspecting' the keystone, and found the temple off of that passage. He tells us that he's been warned by his counselors that the keystone may unstable, and he wanted to check it because if the defenses became active, it would be very difficult if not impossible for anyone to leave until they are disabled again.
We get the impression that he's not too bright. We know he's supporting one of Louhi's brothers, Imo, for the throne, and he seems to be trying to use us as catspaws to make an accusation against her. He tells us, "If you are interested, I can provide directions to the temple. I believe the ritual is to take place tonight or tomorrow night, and I can trust that you will denounce her if you see her taking part in the ritual as one of the officiants?" We note that we will take the appropriate actions, depending on what we see. He seems quite satisfied with that, and gives us the directions. We take our leave, discussing plans. Having Moonbeam shapechange into the form of a handmaiden of Zeleya to see how people react could be entertaining, for example.
We then make our way to Juho's soiree. He has surrounded himself with an impressive array of sycophants. Count Rasmus is the highest ranked noble here, besides the prince. Juho wants us to convince Louhi to support closer ties with the Dragon Confederation. His faction wants closer trade relationships and some degree of military alliance for the next time they go to war with Teredor. Note that Aerodon has started every war they've had with Teredor, and they've lost every time.
Moonbeam tries injecting a little sanity into the discussion, pointing out the realistic chances of Teredor acting aggressively, and the real risk of the Dragon Temple using pre-staged forces against their host. She is met with scorn. They don't see any risk, assuming that the Confederation would have to use ships to move enough troops to threaten them. The idea of using teleportation circles to invade is just not clicking. Then Rasmus starts rhapsodizing about the profits to be made by selling the forests of Teredor to the Confederation, noting that he's shipped more timber to the Confederacy than makes up the entire Aerodon navy, then hinting we could get a cut of this action if we help them. They just can't believe that the Confederacy could make even a half-decent navy. We politely tell him that we expect his ideas will have spectacular results.
After this 'bribe' is offered, the party winds down in small talk. We go off to confer amongst ourselves. Wisdom check! A few of us feel a massive blast of malice emanating from below the palace. Aremel goes dead white. "I didn't think it was possible for anyone to do that anymore. We may have walked into a trap coming here. The only way out may be to let it play out....one of the Six is trying to come here, in person. One of the Blood Gods. I can't tell which one, maybe not even after they come through."
Joe starts wondering if this is a challenge, if we were picked out for sacrifices...Aremel doesn't think this has anything to do with us, and if we leave, there are plenty of other sacrifices. And the only way to actually stop this may be to interrupt it in the middle. Good times. We briefly discuss importing some friends for backup, then Tervel looks up and looks worried. "I don't think it's safe for us to leave, now. Even just mentioning the idea gave me a feeling as if we're on the brink of disaster." We're on our own, then. Paladin intel is not to be ignored
Aremel states, "I would expect that our best course is to act as if we had noticed nothing. Hopefully, whoever this is...well, there are two possibilities. Either we're on the menu for sacrifices, in which case when they come for us, we can deal with them as is appropriate. And if we're not, then they must have some plan for keeping us from interfering. From how strong that was, assuming they can arrange for the sacrifices quickly enough, I suspect that this will peak sometime in the early morning. The masquerade ends at midnight....”, she trails off.
We start plotting, quickly. Aqila drops out of sight to go learn Nondetection from so we can have all our buffs up tonight, so she's missing the meeting with the Baroness. Excuse for her absence will be that she’s making final adjustments to costumes. The rest of us go meet Fredrika, are thanked thoroughly and given each a bottle of 10-yr-old mountainberry wine. For note, in a good year, she might get 30-odd bottles of wine from her lands, so this is a good chunk of production as a thank-you.
Before the party, we get our costumes on. We picked them out before coming here, so we don't have to leave. Aqila's going as a dragon. Moonbeam is a nixie. Joe is a floating Air Elemental. Dagnar is a tiger. And Aremel and Tervel are going as a Dryad and her tree. Thoron is wearing a peacock mask, ironically. Aqila puts nondetection up on everyone, so we can go in fully buffed.
We start playing the 'who's who’ game, since the costumes are supposed to hide your identity. Tatjana, Valpuri, Kielo are not spotted after a few hours. Count Rasmus, Duke Joritt, Baroness Fredrika, Count Sampo and Countess Vilja are also not in evidence. Veli was seen early on, but he's disappeared. We are also seeing people here that we haven't seen before. Two distinct themes to the new people's costumes - some are in seasonal related costumes, while the others are elemental themed. So Joe blends in. About a dozen of each theme are present. Two dozen people crashing the party in coordinated costumes suggests that it's either a high-ranking noble and his entourage, or an army here to kill people. The common reason people crash masquerades in Aerodon is as a romantic gesture, to make an impression on someone you want to pay court to.
The party continues normally until midnight, when everyone is supposed to unmask. Low rank to high are being called in turn to reveal themselves. When Baroness Fredrika is called, one of the winter themed persons unmasks. It looks like Fredrika, but there's something...off. Thoron can't tell if she looks strange magically or not. She's acting stiff, like someone is acting as her. The same pattern holds for everyone we hadn't seen. The ladies in waiting are after us in the order. Joe casts timestop, and shapeshifts briefly into something with true seeing to eyeball the people who are acting oddly. He can't see anything wrong.
Also, the two elaborate costumes that Thoron thought were the Queen and Louhi turned out to be relatively low-ranking noble women at the unmasking. We don't know if there was just a costume swap or if they were ringers the whole time. We all unmask. The Elemental themed folks are assembled on the balcony over the ballroom, and unmask in order as the court mages, their guards, 4 hand maidens, Louhi, the Queen, with two left. The final two are still masked when the Master of Ceremonies looks around, not seeming to notice the other two masked elementals. No one else seems to have noticed, either. The Queen thanks everyone for the festivities. "And now, to your rooms, to prepare for the festivities of the morning." We can see Louhi leaving the room, followed by both of the still-masked figures.
Joe uses timestop and quickened teleport to get the scent of the masked figures before they leave. One is male, one is female, and he doesn't recognize them. Joe asks Aqila to cast Message so he can ask Louhi if its normal for people to remain masked at the ball...she doesn't respond. We start leaving and blocking line of sight to Moonbeam so she can use Brainspider to check this out...they all have mindblank up. Joe does the timestop and teleport trick again to drop an echoskull into Louhi's pocket. Thoron sees the masked people as 18 HD each, and he can't see any magic up on them, including the mindblank we know they have. This is getting worrisome.
Aqila then uses Message to contact Antero and warn him that there are two masked people following Louhi, she's not responding to messages, they are visible to True Seeing, and this may be an assassination attempt on her. We'll be investigating and please give us top cover. He doesn't want to commit...he couldn't see them. While we're trying to convince him, Aremel stumbles in midstep, and urges us to get back to our rooms, fast. We send Thoron to follow Louhi as a bug while we teleport back, surreptitiously.
When we land, Aramel is freaked out. She's sure they are two of Sakaneth's Sorcerers....which should have died out thousands of years ago, and unless he's actually back, he shouldn't be able to make more. We could see them because we were with Aremel, and the pact prevented them from affecting us. She warns us specifically that these sorcerers don't do magic...it may seem to be, but magic doesn't interact with what they do in place of spells, and vice versa. Joe can see and hear through the echoskull, so that's not being suppressed. Aremel remembers that each one had a limit palette of spells, and they were themed. This group seems to do enchantment stuff. But, she can think of several ways to produce the effect we've seen. She thinks our best course of action right now is to meet with Antero and see if we can convince him that there is a problem, and Joe needs to keep an eye on where she's going. He can't see outside of Louhi's pocket, but Moonbeam can scry. She can see that the skull is currently in a narrow stone corridor, without decoration. So, likely in the older area of the palace
Aqila sends a Whispering Winds message to Antero to come to our rooms while she starts preparing combat spells. The moment Antero steps into the room, it feels like the floor is falling away, a sudden sense of vertigo. And everyone with fly permanencied pops into the air in reaction. At the same time, the little engravings that Thoron had noticed early on start glowing. Aqila immediately suspects that the castle wards have been activated. Moonbeam throws a mass heal to cure the vertigo. Antero stumbled to a chair, moaning, "I've never felt that before...the gods, they are all gone." Aremel speaks up, “It's not that they're gone, it's that they can't reach you. And I'd dearly love to know how this is even possible. We're halfway into Zeleya's realm!" Moonbeam scrys again...she can see that Louhi's clothes are in a pile in a small closet. Crap.
Aqila looks at Antero, 'We know where Louhi is. This is a rescue mission now. Are you in or out?" He is still somewhat dazed, but is willing to do whatever he can to help. We teleport to where her clothes are, and Joe goes Bloodhound to track her down. We chase after him. Thoron, meanwhile, from his vantage point in Louhi’s hair, sees that she has been chained naked to a pillar, and is starting to struggle. Around the periphery of the room, there are eight more people chained to pillars. 4 male, 4 female. In order, Countess Vilja, Valpuri, Keilo, and Laja. The other arc is Count Sampo, Count Rasmus, Duke Joritt, and Duke Veli.
Standing in front of Louhi is the queen in the regalia of the High Priestess of Zeleya, holding a dagger that seems to be drinking in the light. Tatjana is holding a barbed iron scourge and standing closest to the male arc. Prince Juho is standing across from her and closest the female arc, also carrying a scourge. There are two unfamiliar people, and the Queen and Louhi's bodyguards are closest to the door.
Each prisoner is chained to a post, with a carved stone basin under it and a channel leading to an elaborate pattern in the middle of the room. The chains include manacles and secure the prisoners to the post and the floor, so there’s no simple way to release them.
Before we teleport down, Aremel warns us that Zeleya can see everything we do, unless we have some way to hide from her sight, and mindblank won't cut it. We remember that Valieran gave us two gems earlier...one that would hide us from the sight of evil, no duration specified. And one gem to hand to whoever leads us to Zeleya's temple. The time to use them would be now, it seems.
When we arrive later, outside the temple, seemingly unnoticed. Aqila, will see this set-up and suspect that there are three components that matter to the ritual...the blood being shed, the pain of the victims, and their deaths. Meanwhile, when Thoron looks at Queen Ansa, she is blazing with magical energy, as if her entire body is being transformed. It looks like it's flowing from the crown she's wearing. Her effective HD have increased noticeably. Tatjana and Juho start scourging Vilja and Sampo.
Queen Ansa starts speaking in a very different voice. Thoron doesn't recognize it. "Now of course is the traditional time to reveal the evil schemes. Fortunately for you, it is important for the ritual for you to know exactly what is happening here, daughter, and no, I do not speak of the flesh I wear. You know who I am. And you, my daughter, will be my vessel. My form in this world, to break all the bonds of the gods! Already, the gods muster around this place. They know what is happening, and that they cannot break in to prevent me without breaking their own oaths. Even if, somehow, you disrupt the ritual, they will do whatever they think they need to prevent this from happen again. If the shield falls, everyone within this palace will die."
Meanwhile, the rest of us are getting close enough to start hearing the rant. "And of course, even if you resist long enough for the ritual fails, all I have to do is wait for one of them to get desperate enough to sacrifice themself. I'm sure that fool Kantor would do so. And if you are hoping for rescue, other than that fool riding you, I know none of your friends are anywhere close to help, none of them could reach here in time, and if he tries, he will die like the insect he is!"
That's our cue. Dagnar is being a Gloom, so he's got ridiculously fast reflexes. He charges in with the Black Blade of Disaster readied to chop Louhi free. He shatters one of the 4 chains binding her. Joe is being a Solar, and frostfell's the room, except for the center. He almost kills Count Rasmus. Valpuri is dying. Everyone else except for the sorcerers, Ansa, and Tatjana are also ice. Moonbeam takes the field and prepares to firestorm the bad guys. She fries everyone nicely. Thoron does a chain lightning, targeting people and implements of destruction. Nothing else is dead yet. He does a snakes-swiftness mass to give Dagnar another hit at the chain. It doesn't break. Tervel casts delay death on the two sacrifices that Joe inadvertently tried to kill. And then Aremel does something inexplicable, based on what we know...she heals Ansa. ,
Aqila takes a previously described action, casting two prismatic walls to cut off the prisoners from the ritualists. Dagnar, hasted, prepares to free Louhi. His 4 strikes break the remaining chains, and Louhi is free. Then he does 3-steel on the firey sorcerer. And essentially decapitates him. Joe goes next, turning into a giant squid to make ten disarming attacks on the queen, who's still holding the scary dagger. She stabs him with an AOO and does 30 damage, and some stat damage that he's shielded from. He manages to disarm her, then attacks the remaining sorcerer...she gets splattered.
The Queen is out of mooks, and it's her turn. She tries to implode Dagnar, but Thoron uses disjunction as a counterspell and that works. So she throws a quickened spell at him. 144 Disintegration damage. Moonbeam tries to heal him but fails to penetrate Dagnar's spell resistance. The 2nd time it works. Louhi summons her armor, commenting "I suppose they were right that this was a wasteful enchantment, but it does come in handy now.' Thoron is up. Puts up Battlemagic Perception. Tervel moves into Ansa's line of vision so she can see there is a Paladin here. Aremel does the same. Aqila tries 'Animate Rope' and tries to bind Ansa. Does nothing. Note that Antero is present, but mostly as a witness rather than an active participant.
Dagnar is up, and readies an action to disrupt any spell Ansa tries to cast. Ansa's turn. "I congratulate you on an impressive reversal. I suppose it's a good thing I did spend effort on a back-up plan. After all, as far as the Gods can know, nothing has changed. As soon as the shield is lowered, they will still try to obliterate everyone here. So, I have a choice for you to make. You can assume that your victory here is good enough, or you can take a gamble. If I win, I will get everything that I want. If you win, you will ensure that the gods will know that I cannot repeat what I have done. Rest assured, I will be risking something quite precious. I have prepared a path to my last remaining temple on this plane. If you fall, I will take my daughter as I have planned all along. And you must take her with you; the gates are keyed to her and her alone." Joe asks her where she found the sorcerers, while she's is in a talkative mood. "You'd be amazed at what you can find in hidden places. The Dragon may occupy his last citadel, but there are places where he's never delved."
Aremel suddenly looks taller, and more powerful. "It seems in this time and at this place, I am restored to what I was. I may not be able to attack you directly, but no oath prevents me from keeping your priestess alive." OOC Zeleya's using Ansa as a vessel means she can't withdraw until Ansa dies. So she can't directly oppose us in her last temple.
Zeleya asks us if we're taking the gamble or not. Joe asks Louhi flippantly if she wants to go on a date. Louhi looks somewhat pensive, noting that she can feel what's on the other side of the gate, and presumably that will continue to be true..this one feels like a minor plane of the daemons. Joe notes that it's not every day that we get to expel a blood god from our plane. Zeleya just laughs at the notion..."Do you think you can really do that?" We'll hurt her, and her fellows will watch her very closely so she can't pull this stunt again, but she'll be back. Some centuries after Louhi dies, and it would be a lot of effort for her to create as perfect a vessel for another try, but she will be back.
We're going to do it. Louhi's going whether we want to or not. Antero is not going - he'd rather help Aremel keep Ansa alive. Aqila rummages through our stash and pulls out the good manacles to bind the ice statues that were in on this whole thing so when the spell wears off, they won't cause trouble. The formerly dying are healed, and we prepare to assay the pathway with Louhi.



Review from last time – We are in the basement of the Aerodonese royal palace, standing outside a portal that leads to a path through other planes and purportedly ends at a major Zeleyan temple. We’ve used one of the spheres that Valeiran had delivered to us. It looks likely that we are to give the other one to Princess Louhi when/right before we get to this temple. Louhi is the key to all the portals and they will close when she passes through them. Louhi also is getting some information about what is on the other side of a portal when she’s near it – Zeleya still wants to win her gamble and she needs Louhi alive to do it.
Zeleya is currently using Queen Ansa as an avatar, and is stuck in her while she lives. Ex-goddess Aremel is temporarily empowered and is going to try to prolong this state of affairs as long as possible. We have between 4 hours and 4 days before Queen Ansa dies, at which point Zeleya escapes and is free to give her full attention to screwing with us. If that happens, she can screw directly with us if the local planarchs let her. Or change where the portals go - IE if Tervel gets killed, the next portal may lead directly to her plane. Zeleya is a coward and will not risk personally confronting a paladin, but if he dies, all bets are off.
Based on what Louhi is picking up from the first porta, we know the first planarch we're going to meet will be able to sell us lots of things, if we can meet his price. Louhi is going, whether we do or not. (OOC Her spell list has some interesting gaps in it, as we'll discover.) She'll also be able to, in theory, tell how far the next portal is from each portal we reach. She can tell from the first portal that the next one is 100 ft away. We have no idea what the trick is to slow us down, on this side of the portal so going through at top speed may be ill advised. She can also tell that on this first plane, the locals are likely to be immune to acid, and resistant to fire, electricity, and cold.
Note - no ethereal plane on an outside plane unless some planarch invested a lot of effort into it. A really powerful planarch could just kill us if we enter their plane, but it's unlikely that Zeleya approached someone that powerful for this pathway. Too expensive. OOC - when we first met Queen Ansa, it wasn't just Ansa...so we weren't told things so we couldn't betray to Zeleya that we're actually a threat to her plans. That’s why Valeiran didn’t give us the spheres directly – she could have picked that up from our minds, apparently.
Louhi thinks she may be slipped useful info from Zeleya because she has an interest in getting Louhi to her temple so she can complete the ritual and carry out her plans, which may inadvertently help us as well.
After a quick discussion, we decide to not risk leaving for more supplies, lest we get smitten by the gods...(ooc, if we tried it, we'd get hit with enough nasty curses that would take a high level priest most of a day to unravel. So, it's go time. We're burning daylight.
We go through the portal, and see a platform, a bridge, and another platform with a portal on the far side. These structures are floating in a void of disintegration energy. There's a 60HD dude on the bridge. In a calm, reasonable voice, he says, "Before you make with the spells and the stabbing, perhaps we can come to a beneficial arrangement. I have been paid a great deal to stop you, but if you outbid...and I will take into account the hazard to myself and my minions in attempting to stop you. Oh, and please don't try teleporting, I don't want to have to clean up the mess."
We begin negotiations. He notes that he's being paid by the death. We point out that that’s not necessarily permanent for us. He starts thinking that might be an interesting way to run his price up, since he’s being paid by the death. We note that we killed a god last month, and a few dread. He offers useful information and safe passage for 300k, the useful info being on the next two planes, that may let us obtain services from the next planarch that that planarch would normally charge 2M gold for. He does mention, for free, that the effects of healing magic are inverted on the next plane. He only mentions for free that the plane after that doesn't have a planarch, and that we're particuarly vulnerable to the things roaming that plane.
Joe offers the Bracers of Blood - he offers 40k for that. Holy water isn't of interest. We probably don’t have time to make scrolls, or have access to spells that he’d find valuable. Then Joe remembers that we picked up some souvenirs from the trip to find the Oracle. Joe pulls out the ear bone from a leviathan. The planarch is intrigued. Joe took all 6 ear bones, and is only showing one off here. He may be interested in other items of similar provenance. We try a control rod next. The planarch is still interested. He asks if we have a complete set of ear bones, and that those, plus the control rod and the bracers, would constitute a sufficient price for passage and information.
Joe asks if the planarch would mind tossing in a few blocks of stone so we could make casts of the bones before we hand them over, since these were trophies. He is willing, and notes that planarchs can't make real materials on their own planes...or rather anything a planarch makes won't stay real off their plane. These stone blocks are real, in this case. It seems a good bargain, and Tervel doesn't think this planarch is too evil to deal with. Louhi doesn't think she'd be able to replace those, and is grateful for our help. She is planning on trying to pay us back for the help we’re freely rendering to her.
While Moonbeam makes casts of the bones, the unnamed planarch begins fulfilling his end of the bargain. "Firstly, I would advise that before the next gate, you would provide yourselves with immunity to acid. The entire plane is swept with storms of acid constantly. And as I have already told you, don't use healing spells. The next thing to be aware of that it is a quite extensive plane. I do not know how much of it Zeleya has purchased the use of, but I would be amazed if you had less than a mile to travel and possibly much more. I would also advise against teleportation - for one, I find it hard to believe that you are familiar enough with it to do so safely anyway, and I do know the planarch has a special watch out for teleportation - he is inclined to think that that is evidence of thievery and is wont to strike first and ask questions of the ashes later. To be fair, he has had problems with teleporting thieves."
He then goes on to inform us that we could be taken for thieves, because we do actually have something that belongs to the guy. Basically, that mystic orb we picked up from the Veiled Order belongs to the next planarch over, and if we give it back, he's got a significant reward out for it. To the tune of a Wish each. But we'd have to get his attention and that might not be safe. He also notes that there will be some vermin around that may lightly annoy us.
Continuing, he informs us that the plane after that is one of the 'dead' planes...the planarch has died and no one has claimed it. There is generally a reason why no one has taken it over - he can rule out that it's the throne of all hells, since that would make it look the planarch who made the gate was making a play to claim it, and no one is going to do that until they're actually ready (and all the others would dogpile anyone trying to assert rulership over all the infernal planes unless they can actually make it stick). Otherwise, there's no way to know which dead plane it is.
Continuing: “To make up for that lack of knowledge - I will tell you about the three planes I consider it most likely to be. The most likely, though I find it hard to believe that Zeleya would defy Rakan in opening a portal there, is the former home of the god of undeath that Shenea unseated two millennia ago. The old god's remnants still roam there. If it is that plane, it is a pity you don't have more mundane combatants among you...the remnants are attracted to magic and eat it.” He recommends that we dismiss all our protective spells before passing through. On being asked, he tells us that using an antimagic field is considered to either be safe or suicidal. He personally thinks that some remnants are attracted to it, and others can't sense it, so it's a chance that could go either way. And, contrary to what many have expected, and never attempted to test, it doesn't possess any negative energy traits. In other words, dismissing our death wards will not doom us.
The next possibility is a realm with a technically living planarch who can no longer control his plane. He was a powerful devil that rebelled against his lord and was punished by being stripped of his powers and chained in torment in the center of his plane. “If it's that, you'll want to immediately protect yourself from fire, and still need many healing spells from the rains of hellfire. As long as you don't approach the center, nothing should slow you down, but I think it’s likely that one end or the other will be there. At which point you will meet the legion of devils set to protect the prisoner so that no one tries to rescue him, or put him out of his misery. Individually they wouldn't be a threat to you, but...”
"As I said, unless she knew exactly who would be in your party, I doubt she would have. Oh and it occurs to me, backing up for a moment, one important point about the god of undeath's plane, that I have heard people say, there is supposedly some form of enchantment on the plane that makes navigation, challenging. Going in circles, and so on. I have heard of people navigating the plane successfully, but you can't count on one of them being around...now that I think of it...oh, he's almost certainly dead..." He's talking about Jahan. We mention that we killed him, but we're on, strangely, cordial relations with his apprentice. He is amused and intrigued by the notion.
“The 3rd is an odd place, its first master constructed an entire ethereal plane for it. So a number of spells that normally don't work in the planes, do work there, but I wouldn't advise it - the horrors that live in ethereal plane are numerous. The plane is unpopulated except for those horrors, some of which can strike from the ethereal plane. Beyond that, the plane itself is quite straightforward to traverse. I suspect that Zeleya will have stationed some of her own minions there, if it is that plane. For a nominal fee, I could give you some information about them…” We decline to take the schmuck bait.
Given an opportunity for questions, Joe asks if control weather would affect the acid storms. The planarch thinks that Joe would be marginally able to - and only if that doesn't attract the planarch's attention...which could be a safe way of getting him to notice us so we can give him his thing back. Louhi has no questions.
Tervel wants to know about the nature of the next planarch. "Well, the simplest way to answer that question assumes a certain knowledge on your part. Are you familiar with the Anhref?" We aren’t, really, other than vague awareness of the term. "They consider themselves the lords of chaos, though, as should be quite obvious by them calling themselves Lords…" We comment "that they're somewhat missing the point?" He continues, "indeed. The being is closer than them to truly being that, while still being comprehensible to mortal minds. So the best way to describe him is...mercurial. So he can go from pleasant and charming to murderous instantly. Should you return his item, he will likely be well disposed to you for the length of your visit, but I do not advise a return trip unless you find another item to return. And to answer what I think you wanted to know,” he said looking at Tervel, “while he is not what you call good, neither is he evil. He is merely chaotic.”
We take our leave of this Daemon, and proceed across the bridge to the next portal. As we walk off, he gives us a cordial farewell – “It was a pleasure dealing with you. I believe my lady Felzanith will be pleased with how this turns out.”
As we're approaching the gate, we hear Zeleya's voice speak and tell Louhi that while we may have prevented her from directly interfering with us, she can take her blessings away from Louhi. Thoron sees what happens. Louhi's still 22 HD, but can only cast up to lvl 8 spells now, instead of 11th. (basically, had priestess levels converted to aristocrat) The planarch heard the whole thing. "An intriguing development. I will balance it with a small token of goodwill of my own. I don't know where on this path it will be, but Zeleya has made a bargain with some of the Elder Fey. And while some of you could expect to have an advantage with them, trust me: you won't. But you may be able to gain something to rebalance the scales in your dealings with the next planar lord, if you are clever. I could sell you some knowledge of the current courts of the fey." We decide that it's not worth the delay.
Louhi protects herself, Aqila, Dagnar, and Tervel, from acid, and the other three were already being in solar form, and naturally immune. We step through the portal into a driving, greenish, rain. Joe starts working on stopping the rain, as we walk. Everything that Louhi can sense matches what we were told. Another round of shapeshifting later, there are three silver dragons to fly to the next portal. 30 miles away, per Louhi.
As we go on, we see a significantly denser patch of rain. It speaks to us. "So, I am curious why you are travelling in my realm." Joe speaks for us, "We are here to return an item to you. We are not the thieves, but we did take it from them, or those who acquired it later." The planarch replies, "There are several items that could meet that description." Joe answers, "It is an orb seeming made of crystal, about two feet across." This gets his attention firmly. "The eye! I believe that you have heard about the reward I have offered, then?" We agree that it had been mentioned to us, and it is in part a wish for each of us, and the balance would be him teleporting us to the other portal.
He also notes that he sees we're expending some of our resources to protect ourselves from the environment. He offers, and grants us, all a permanent 30 resistance to acid, so if we chose to visit again, it would be a more pleasant experience. Not that we want to come back! He also notes that, per his bargain with Zeleya, he should impede us, but in gratitude for returning his Eye, he will waive that. We take our wishes (will backfill who asked for what later) and he bids us to be on our way, with a parting comment that he hopes we are prepared to deal with the remnants of the dead god. Well, that answers that question.
As we approach the portal, Zeleya yells at Louhi again, and now she can only cast lvl 6 spells at most. Aqila gets thrown through the portal with a readied action to cast antimagic field. As soon as she moves the field just clear of the portal, everyone else piles in. Aqila pulls out her box of chalk so we can track ourselves. It takes 5 minutes for us to cross the first chalk mark. The ground itself moves, as it turns out. The chalk marks are going weird. This is going to go well!
Over the next 20 minutes, we slowly learn our way around, then we hear a voice speaking up. "I thought I sensed a disturbance here. My apologies for being so slow. I should have known it was you." It's Sohrab. We chat for a bit. It's a congenial conversation - we amuse ourselves by stringing him along on how we got here. We let him know that it's a Zeleyan plot, eventually, that we got to this place from another plane, and that we're planning on leaving through a portal. He wonders what moron left a risk of one of these things getting out...he's not surprised to find it was Zeleya. After some chit-chatting we come to an accord: he's familiar with navigating this place. He thought he was the only one who knew how to get here from the material plane. He's willing to help us leave faster if we help him do some research while we're here - he'd like to lead one of the little guys over here for us to fight, slowly, so he can see what happens. He'll keep anything big and nasty from wandering over while we fight. Or try to. He also mentions that they have a horrific stench, at least all the human servants he's had come here all complained about the smell, briefly.
On our part, we try to kill it slowly so Sohrab can take notes, then we'll leave. Tervel will put favor of the martyr up on those who need it to protect from the sickening stench. The arrangement is agreeable to both parties, so we prepare to battle. Sohrab leads one of the ‘remnants of a dead god’ over and we attack. Dagnar goes first and just fails to hit. Moonbeam lobs a reverberating, irresistible sonic strike at it. The spell fizzes. Dagnar gets clobbered because he's closest. He's being a Gloom, so he's pretty tough. Still takes 61 damage from the slam that hits, and it dispels and eats some of his protective spells. Joe takes the form of a huge Legendary Tiger and mauls the thing for massive damage. Tervel charges in to strike the undead thing for 106 damage. Aqila casts Glitterdust for fun to see what happens. The spell works - doesn't actually do anything useful, but the spell works and it is now faaaaabulous. Louhi casts Searing Light and does 15 damage. So that actually worked.
Thoron proves with his shiny that the thing is electricity immune. Dagnar goes again and managed to hit this time, after flanking it between himself and Tervel. Moonbeam goes into timestop and gets out some friends. Storm elementals to Bring The Lightning! and the Thunder! The sonic damage does do some damage, but it resists some of it. Then she does a mass heal, including the thing for kicks. It resisted the heal. Bah. Then Tervel gets pasted. 150 damage. Still on his feet, but he needs a medic now. Ironically, none of his prots get dispelled. Joe casts timestop, reverts to Solar, pulls out one of the rocks we prepped for the temple fight with the Celestial Brilliance spell, sets it down where it will affect the undead, returns to tiger form, and mauls the undead again. Thoron decides to try picking up a bunch of rocks via telekinesis and chuck them at the undead. The pelting results in Sohrab calling out "I believe I've seen enough'. As the rocks contact the undead, the sink in, visibly healing it. Seriously?
Despite being more than half dead, Tervel still gets one hit in, for some damage. Aqila heals everyone with her shiny. Louhi does Searing Light again, and she gets it through. Dagnar stabbies again. Moonbeam’s friends do 40 sonic damage. Joe didn't teleport out of range this time, so he gets attacked. He's missed. Joe teleports away, and charges back in - the mauling finishes the undead off.
Sohrab feels this was productive. "Well, in hindsight, I should have expected that result, and that explains why my controls spells haven't been working - the plane itself has been helping absorb them. Knowing that, I can perhaps find a way around it. It will take some time, but perhaps in a few years I'll be ready to experiment. But, I believe you have somewhere you need to be." After consulting Louhi to figure out where it feels like the next portal is...he thinks he can get us there in half an hour or so. We follow him to the next portal.
Zeleya pitches her usual fit, and now Louhi is down to 5th level spells. And now we find out something weird - Louhi feels that this gate will only let us go through one at a time, once a round. Sohrab's contribution - "Well, you should let the planarch on the other side know where this portal came from. I think he will be rather displeased. Of course, if Zeleya has displayed any intelligence, this will be an opportunity for her servants to face you and not the planarch directly, so you have no opportunity to pass that information on." Sohrab estimates that the planarch is a low ranking demon, and a brutish thug, so one who's not likely to pay attention to the leased corner of his plane until after Zeleya leaves.
So, Moonbeam sends an Elder elemental through. It finds a small maze on the other side. It gets stuck. So the next person to try to go through just can't. Elemental butt blocking the portal, though we don't know that. We know something is up when we hear Zeleya laughing hysterically at us. Moonbeam flips some birds. Louhi is now getting an impression of small spaces on the other side. Moonbeam gets a large earth elemental to go through next time as an ablative meatshield. Joe follows as a will o' wisp. He finds that there is a greater handmaiden on the other side, standing at the end of a short hall with a corridor running off to her right. Joe has readied action timestop. He stops time, prepares to have no back-up for a round, and goes legendary tiger for maximum maulage. He crits a few times in the process. Then he has to make 6 con saves. Only fails one to take 28 disintegration damage. Another greater handmaid, standing at the far end of the right hand corridor, at another corner, casts blight at the tiger, and he takes 10 damage. Whiskers are singed. The light also goes out. Dagnar now comes through.
He goes to the end of the hall, jumps over the tiger and lands silently to see the handmaiden. He sneaks down to stab her. Misses. Joe's turn. His foresight tells him that teleportation is interestingly screwed up in here...it will send you somewhere random in the maze. And Dagnar is kinda in his way. The ceiling is only 8 ft high. So he timestops, reduces his size, and then charges by flying over Dagnar's head. He mauls this one to death too, and he has to make 5 saves this time. Makes them all. Then he has to make a will save. He fails. The tiger is now confused. Dagnar also has to make a save, and fails too.
Now the next person’s turn to come through. Except Joe and Dagnar act before Moonbeam - so Dagnar attacks Joe as the nearest creature. He doesn't hit. Joe starts babbling incoherently. We picture this like a cat talking to the ceiling. So Moonbeam comes in, sees Dagnar menacing Joe, with Joe staring into space, mouth gaping , and facepalms. She timestops, tigers up. and gets a few summons to make the enemy waste her actions. She has a readied heal for when the spell ends, and casts Earthquake to see what happens. She also scouts around and sees two more handmaidens further on.
The heal fixes the boys. The earthquake does nothing. The handmaiden sees herself surrounded by angels (movanic devas). She casts firestorm, gets all of them plus Dagnar and Joe in it. They resist. Dagnar goes in to stab, and just fails miserably. Joe does his flying charge schtick again. Another one bites the dust. He takes 18 disintegration damage from one failed save. Moonbeam aligns her fangs, summons more movanic devas, took a steadying breath, and cast improvisation while in timestop. Then positioned herself smack a handmaiden. She does, but eats 21 disintegration for her pains. And goes for the grapple. Succeeds, but the handmaid casts 'get off of me' immediately. 20d6, fort for half. Doesn't force the end of the grapple though.
At this point, Aqila comes through, yells down the hall to find out what's up, and then does a double-move to stand just behind Dagnar and under Joe so she can help if needed next turn. The handmaid we haven't engaged yet tries to teleport and ends up at the far end of the maze. We don't know this. We just know she vanishes. The other one tries to escape the grapple via teleportation. Moonbeam hangs on for the ride. The handmaid lands in the middle of the devas. It’s a total scrum now. Dagnar gets sent to go find the other one. Joe takes his turn and first turns into a solar as a free action so he can speak and lets us know about the teleport thing, then timestops and teleports. Twice. He doesn't land anywhere useful. He does manage to not land in LOS of Aqila, so her anticipate teleportation spell doesn't affect him. The timestop ends and he tries to figure out what to do with the pileup. He settles on trumpet - using a hollyphant form it does sonic damage, stuns for 1-2 rounds. The handmaid is not stunned. Must be immune. Moonbeam is also immune. He hits one deva who is stunned for 1 round. No damage to handmaid.
Moonbeams turn. The devas can't hurt it effectively, so Moonbeam does a full attack. Almost dead, but not quite. Aqila uses an arcane bolts so as to not hit any allies and does 23 damage. Still not dead. Thoron comes through now. He can't see anything, so he flies down the corridor in his natural hawk body, past Aqila, and finds the pile-up. He doesn't see anything useful to do there. So he keeps going through the maze. The battered handmaid decides to go out with a bang. It's a 154 damage, fort save for half. Moonbeam has a lot of temporary hps, so she lives even with a failed save. Aqila makes it, barely, and lives. Mass heal on her next turn. Joe is also in LOS and thanks to foresight, he gets enough warning to swap to a form that has high con and lives easily.
The last handmaid tries to teleport again and see where she lands... yeah, she lands out of LOS of any of us, but it was a quickened teleport. She moves and finds Joe. She tries to use blurstrike on Joe, but he has true seeing. Fails. Dagnar hears the commotion and comes up behind her. Fails his sneak attack. Joe swaps to legendary bear to maul better from a standing start. And does so. She is now paste. He fails a few con saves. 22 more damage. But, all enemies are dead and heals are coming. Tervel arrives to find that the screaming has stopped. Louhi shows up and we all move to the exit portal.

Terane
2020-06-12, 09:00 AM
Before we continue, we want to get a status report on Ansa from Antero. Moonbeam has a go at scrying the room. Her attempt to get Antero fails - he makes his save. Workaround - scry on one of the frostfell victims and use message. Antero says that his attempts to help don't seem to be helping anymore, but Aremel is holding her own for now. He thinks we may have another hour or two, speaking conservatively. He thinks when the end comes, it'll probably be fairly abrupt with little chance for a warning. As we approach the next gate, Louhi gets knocked down to 2nd level spells. She tells us that what she's picking up about the next plane can't be right...she's getting an impression of a Rakshasa planarch, and given they are very lawful, and extremely xenophobic, she can't imagine one dealing with Zeleya.
Moonbeam asks Tervel just how Aremel is doing all this, given that the gods aren't supposed to be able to reach into the palace right now. Tervel makes it clear that he's not going to say everything he thinks he knows about the situation, but implies that The One is involved. We accept that. Louhi thinks the next portal is fairly close, but it almost feels like it's moving.
After finishing our pre-portal checklist, we step through. Thoron is detecting a 'dead' magic zone in front of us...except for what looks like 12 teleport cages with normal magic, each a 15' cube. There's a glowing orb in each cage, and in front of us. We're on a ledge on one side of a chasm with the cages in the chasm, and a ledge on the far side with an image of a translucent Rakshasa on it.
We also see a good sized horde of demons surrounding the dude on the other ledge. "Welcome. I've prepared a most amusing entertainment for you. But first, one small matter..." He waves his hand and Louhi appears on the other side with him. "Her mother would be most distressed if anything happened to her, so of course she won't be participating in our little game."
"So, the game as I intend it is quite simple. You can of course do anything you can think of to alter the situation. I hope it will be amusing. Each of you in turn, touch the orb in front of you. You will be transported into one of the boxes." "And if we don't" "Then I look forward to what you devise to get past this little obstacle."
Thoron looks down into the chasm and sees some sort of disturbance in the earth below, as if something large was tunneling. The chasm extends as far as we can see in either direction. The ledge is metal.
Basically, we touch the orb on our side - victim gets teleported into one cage at random. Touch orb in that cage - we teleport to another cage and fight a demon. Only get a demon in cage we haven't been in, and each orb only goes to 1 of 3 randomly selected cages, so if it can't send you to a new cage, it sends you out of the dead magic zone to the other side of the chasm and you 'win'. That's the rules he's set. If we find another entertaining way to win, he'll let us win. Chucking a rock in the chasm ends with it doing loop-de-loops. Moonbeam summons a lemur to touch our orb and see what happens. It pops into one of the cages. She has it hop around and confirm that physics works and expected in the cage.
On being asked how he feels about angels, the planarch remarks that they're boring, unless they're being squished. So we have a few options. Ah, one rule is you can't land in a box with an ally. Enemies, yes. And there's no limit on how many beings can enter at once.
And then Joe gets a wicked gleam in his eye. He talks to Moonbeam. She starts summoning squirrels. Thoron casts Nature's Avatar when there are 27 of them. The waves of squirrels begin hitting the far ledge....first get one in each cage, then the rest just get sent to the far side. As the third wave hits the far ledge, 9 vrocks fly over to our side, carrying javelins. They squat on the cages menacingly. Meanwhile, the orb on the far side has been placed in a zone of freezing fog. That will impede the squirrels. Might not do much to tigers, though. And with the fog up, the demons can't see us. The squirrels, focusing on one foe at a time, have managed to eat one of them.
So, it's tiger time. But, in the meantime, the squirrels took down 3 more demons, including a marilith. Joe does a victory dance in celebration of the might of nature. And then the tigers start flooding in. One big guy starts speaking blasphemies, which daze and weaken the tigers, but damage is still happening. The tigers take down 5 of the mid-rank demons.
At this point, the planarch gets annoyed, and complains that we are making a mockery of his game. "Let the Serpent's Minions deal with you." 4 golothmas appear, two on either side. Unfortunately for them, Joe has control winds up. 3 of them get blown off the ledge. We see a larger serpent-like creature leap out of the ground and look around in confusion. We still have one left. Moonbeam is the closest to it. She gets a scorpion out of her terrarium and casts Giant Vermin on it. 20hd colossal scorpion on the field. The golothma is 40HD. The scorpion grapples the golothma firmly. The golothma's hands come out of midair to attack the scorpion back....4 of the 8 claws hit. Time to roll for initiative.
Dagnar is first up, and he gets out the duskblade to go stabby-stabby the golothma. He stabby stabs. It dies. This annoys the planarch, who sends all five champions over to our side of the chasm. 16, 18, and 3 20hd monsters. The wolfy one in the middle, we've encountered its kind before, and it's got a virulent poison that ignores immunity in its snake head. The rest of the demons on the other side are going to die to tigers soon. Joe is up. He unleashes a Murderous Mist. This blinds three of them. Then he decides to go a-mauling. He comes very close to killing the one that looks like a Balor. (ooc, it isn't, but we can't tell that). He grapples it too.
Moonbeams scorpion attacks the bullheaded demon and beats it up. She becomes a dire tiger for mauling goodness next turn, plus summoning 6 more to go maul the blue dude. She also sonic-strike-buffed-to-the-max the death-drinker and wolf-headed poison dude. The tigers barely scratch the blue dude. We conclude it has damage reduction. Thoron casts Snakes-Swiftness-Mass because we're pretty sure these things are electricity immune. More maulings, but not enough to knock one out.
Aqila flings off a screeching-ball and only gets through to 1...the balorish dude takes 44 damage. Then the blue demon acts by tossing his dancing axe into the air. This does not provoke an attack of opportunity. And Thoron has to make a will save. He avoids succumbing to trap the soul. And then the blue dude tries hurling Thoron into the dead magic zone. It fails too. The death drinker tries teleporting to land on Aqila. Which means the anticipate teleportation spell kicks in and takes him out for a round. He’s going to be very unhappy when he finally gets back.
Tervel's up, and is perfectly lined up to do a charge. He gets a critical hit in on the wolf-snake dude. 130 damage. It's dead, and the dancing axe melts into goo too. The balor-dude moves by attacking the tiger grappling him. Sort of. His natural weapons don't do anything to Joe beyond 11 damage. The blue guy goes now and tries to dismiss a summoned tiger. It fails. It does 38 damage to another one. Pitiful showing, that. The goristro, the bull-headed dude, currently grappled by the scorpion, tries to retaliate with natural weapons. No dice.
Top of the order with Dagnar having a choice of 3 targets. He targets blue-dude with a full-attack. And takes him down. Now the planarch takes his turn. "Oh, lets make this a little more sporting." Everyone without freedom of movement makes a will save, so basically the summons. Some still avoid being paralyzed. "Hmm, that seemed less effective than I'd hoped. This doesn't seem like a difficult challenge for you at all. It must be more entertaining, it must!" Aqila comments, "Oh, you want entertaining? Just give me a moment..."
Meanwhile, Joe quickens a greater teleport so he can charge and maul the balor-dude. He does. It dies. Death Throes. 100 untyped damage. Aqila and Moonbeam fail. Rolled 1 and 2 respectively. The goristro bull-dude also fails and poofs. Friendly fire, isn’t. Thoron waits for Moonbeam to summon on her turn, then does a quickened mass nature's avatar and readies an action to clobber then death drinker when it pops in. Moonbeam does a quickened mass heal, so HP damage is erased. She also summons more tigers, aligns their fangs, and gets all her summons positioned to clobber the death drinker when it comes in. Aqila just casts grease and moves out of the way.
The death drinker pops in, and winds up flat on its back. And then the mauling occurs. It's reduced to pink mist in seconds. The planarch pouts, dismisses the vrocks, the cages, and tells us we can go but with no help from him! So we just pile into the portable hole and have Thoron fly it across. We find the tigers, Louhi, and nothing else on the far side. And the portal.
When we reach it, Zeleya snarls, "Very well, I take back everything I gave you!" Louhi’s armor and weapons shatter. So she's again naked, with no spellcasting ability. We scrounge through our stash of gear to lend her some stuff. As for what she feels through the portal...the next realm feels like Fae. Aqila digs out some spare clothes for Louhi to wear under the armor. We give her the +3 plate that used to be Innokenti's, and the mace that we're going to give to Sneezil, on loan. Belt of giant's strength +4 and a +5 cloak of protection. When Louhi looks at the plate, commenting ‘Well, that explains some things…”, Moonbeam does make a point of stating that Tervel was not involved in that trip. Also dug out a coronet of +6 will and +2 resist compulsion. Boots with 3/day expeditious retreat +4 agi, and a ring of +5 protection and the robes of displacement. And a wand of healing as an option. Plus Moonbeam lends her her bracelets of flame strike and snake's swiftness mass.
We pass through the portal, and land in the center of a large arena. "Welcome. Greetings to our contestants, our contenders. Five challenges we have prepared. Five difficulties for you to surmount!" Five little glowing signs appear in front of us. 'Fangs to gnash and claws to rend', 'power turns to smite the wielder', 'Of all weapons, the deadliest is mercy', 'Spires protect and destroy', 'Shields shift and change'. "When the time comes, choose these in whatever order you wish, but first, we must talk."
The arena has no seats. The sky is...strange, psychedelic patterns strange. The ground feels like smooth sand. The portal is not in the arena. After he finishes speaking, a humanoid figure appears in the arena - Thoron can't see any HD, so that has interesting implications. "So, as I say, five challenges. Defeat 3, and you may pass freely. For each you defeat, a gift for the weakest of you. Arms and armor made for a queen. And should you win through, for each of you, a gift, a boon of knowledge to aid you when you enter the temple. And so, the terms, the challenge, to begin, there shall be no cheating sight, no perception other than your own. The second, between bouts, no spells shall you cast or remove.” Joe asks if he's going to change the rules on us like the last guy...the guy comments that he could give his word but would we believe him?
"And finally, if any of you die and remain dead at the end of a bout, they shall remain dead until all are finished, but for them I shall hold time in abeyance." "What is the end of a bout." "When the conditions for victory in the bout have been met." In appearance, our 'host' seems to be a rather short human, with armor that seems like water.
"Then only one thing remains, a simple word to each of you! Aqila hears “Sentinel”, Moonbeam “Dragon”, Joe “Tree”, Dagnar “Almaera”, but Thoron hears only silence. Louhi is looking very perturbed, and does not share what she heard. Tervel tells us that the word he heard was Sacrifice.
We break here since this next bit will take a while.



We pick up where we left off last month, in a Fae arena, with five challenges to face. We can see around the entire perimeter of the arena, gates for things to be brought in, and what might be a trap door right in the center. There are eight gates in total, evenly spaced. So, common consensus is that 'fangs to gnash and claws to rend' sounds like a good warm-up, and we position ourselves for what may come. We pick a chunk of wall between gates and away from the center, and wait for the challenge to appear. Six heavily muscled, oversized, wolf-like things appear from six of the gates...with six limbs each. Joe's inspection lets him notice that they also seem to have well developed throat muscles.
Dagnar acts first and casts scorching ray to get information about resistances for us. It hits with all three rays. The creature looks puzzled. One of its buddies charges us from the other side of the arena, but fetches up short of an attack this round. The one Dagnar zapped charges at him next and mauls him. It misses with the bite and racks, but hits with both claws and rends him a little. Only 33 damage. A third creature gallops towards us, but comes up short for an attack just yet. Thoron's turn comes next. He is in Solar form and casts blinding spittle at the closest creature, then grabs Louhi to get her out of the attack range and flies upwards with an updraft. The spittle misses the one that attacks Dagnar.
Joe begins his turn by changing into a chronotyryn, and after grabbing Aqila and flying upwards, he unleashes a murderous mist...20ft cylinder placed off the ground so only tall things get hit. But it does nothing...no blinding, and no apparent damage. He can see the slobber from the one that attacked Dagnar is smoking where it hit the ground. Acid spit? He tries Frostfell next, and four of them become ice statues. The only two still up are one that was closest to us on the right, and the one that had been next to the right before running over to us.
Louhi doesn't have anything she can do at the moment, other than climb onto Thoron's Solar back and free his arm up. The only uniced critter charges in at Moonbeam, who in Solar form with a monks belt, and handily dodges the attacks. Moonbeam retaliates by casting timestop and summoning some elephants. Then some rhinos. Healing Dagnar, and getting some more elephants for good measure. The timestop ends and the fun starts - rhinos smash 4 ice sculptures. Nine elephants attempt to trample the still moving creatures...one manages to trample the one that was attacking Moonbeam before she moved. Not much damage, though. They're pretty tough. Tervel takes his turn by landing a tremendous blow on one...mostly absorbed by its armor, but it does some damage and mildly curses it. Chance to fail actions. Aqila, shrugging away from Joe, drops a Slow on both of them. They fail their saves. Both slowed.
Top of the order - Dagnar goes up into the mist for concealment and three-steels the one Tervel attacked. He does quite a bit of damage, but it's still on its feet. It goes after Tervel, but the slow limits its attack, and it misses completely. Thoron warms up his shiny and zaps both of them. He hits the battered one, and misses the other. Joe decides that enough is enough, shifts to Legendary Tiger, and mauls the bugger. It's still alive, but looks more battered and bedamned. Joe gets mauled a bit in return, but not much. Moonbeam drops a flamestrike on them both, but only the battered one takes damage. The elephants trample through again...to no effect. Tervel swaps the less battered one with an elephant to break up the pair, then flies up out of range. Aqila flies up to cast flight on Louhi so she can get off of Thoron.
We basically finish the fight by letting Thoron zap them and elephants trample. It takes a while, long enough for the elephants to fade away. Also, Thoron does get acid puke horked on him before he got high enough, but it wasn't that much damage, and Moonbeam keeps people healed up. The acid resistance 30 is coming in handy here.
We decide to try 'Spires protect and destroy' next. We all start in the air. The challenge takes the form of a dark shadowy thing in the middle, which is surrounded by resummoned elephants. At each of the four 'not cardinal' points, there are three...'things'. Three spires in each set of blue, orange, and orange. We're in the air over the elephants. The planarch tells us that the challenge is to defeat the guy in the middle, and we can't affect him directly with anything we do. That implies the spires are the key, somehow. Dagnar gets to go first. He casts timestop and flies down and touches an orange spire. Nothing happens. Joe flies down next and changes into a lilitu and tries to figure out what the blue spire does. He can't do anything with it, but learns a linked target, if reduced to 0 or below HP, will receive a heal spell.
The thing in the middle looks incorporeal. Joe looks at the other two. The first type casts disintegrate only on the command of a linked creature at a specified target. The other will cast reciprocal gyre under the same conditions. He can tell at least that he would know if he was linked, and he is not linked to any of them. He swaps to will o’ wisp form and tries shocking the disintegrate pillar...some minor chipping, but not linked.
The shade goes next. Out of the pillar Joe just touched, he gets hit with a disintegrate. He is immune. Joe feels the pillar try to link to him and fail. Dagnar gets hit with a reciprocal gyre. 11 spells on him, so 99 damage and he has to make a fort save. He makes it and is not dazed. Dagnar feels the pillar that hit him link to him. Louhi gets hit with a disintegrate, and makes her save. Thoron eats a reciprocal gyre. He makes his save, and takes 65 damage. A disintegrate is aimed at Aqila but he misses. Moonbeam has a gyre shied her way...48 damage with her save. Tervel gets a disintegrate and makes the save easily. Joe gets hit with a reciprocal gyre as the last pillar fires.
Moonbeam's turn starts with a heal, goes into a timestop, and turns into a tiger for the con and lack of spell resistance. We're coming to the conclusion that the key to getting control of a pillar away from the shade is to fail a save. Louhi doesn't have anything useful to do. Thoron turns into a tiger and casts mass nature's avatar for the extra HPs. Aqila studies a blue pillar, but discerns nothing new.
Dagnar defers to Moonbeam. Joe learns that if a spire is destroyed, there is a backlash on whoever it's linked to. He also learns that that there is the potential for the spire to change links when it's used. If there is a valid target, it will change, but he can't discern what makes a valid target. This happens in timestop. He also learns that they have about 200 hps. So he returns to tiger form and goes to smash a blue spire. He doesn't finish it off, and attacking it sends an odd pain up his legs. The shade goes next and the first disintegrate is to the spire Dagnar is linked to...Thoron counterspells. Joe gets linked to that disintegrate pillar. Louhi gets a disintegrate. Thoron gets a gyre. Joe gets a disintegrate, but it misses. And then he gets a Gyre too. It hits. Moonbeam gets hit with a disintegrate and a gyre. No pillars link to us except the first one to Joe.
Moonbeam's turn. 3-round timestop starts by summoning angels to buff the shade to make gyre more effective. She gets enough to get 10 new buffs on the shade. She then has her elephants attack spires...each time they hit, they poof. The pillar has a banishing effect on attackers. There are enough to finish off the one Joe attacked, and damage the other 3. One elephant makes its will save and can try again next round. Dagnar now takes his turn and hits the shade with the gyre. There is no visible effect, but Dagnar loses control of the spire. We holler at Louhi to smash the blue ones. She can't hit hard enough to do anything. Thoron tops off Nature's Avatar on everyone, and as a tiger attacks the one Louhi whiffed on. He doesn't finish it off. Aqila uses a cacophonous blast to hit the blue spire 3 elephants beat on. It looks to be on the verge of falling apart now.
Dagnar moves to get in range to sonic ray the spire in the scrum of people, and destroys it. Joe's back up, and casts timestop. Which lets him get to the most intact spire and reduce it to a battered wreck. And now it's the Shade's turn. It targets Moonbeam with 4 gyres. She takes over 200 damage. Thoron eats a disintegrate and also takes a pile of damage. Aqila survives a disintegrate because Thoron casts instant of power, which lets her save for half. Dagnar, still in gloom form, also is targeted. He makes his save and takes 17 damage to Aqila's 14. And now Moonbeam takes the field. She timestops to summon some elephants, and sics them on the two battered spires. And that finishes them off.
Meanwhile, Joe has a burst of inspiration. He realizes that both people who took control of a spire had touched it. He's the only one who has control of one right now. So now everyone races to touch stuff. Louhi touches the gyre near her. Aqila goes to the nearest gyre to her and readies a counterspell. Tervel flies across the room and touches the gyre over there. Thoron gets the last gyre. Dagnar gets the disintegrate spire by Louhi. And Joe touches 'his' pillar again as will as Aqila's, then zaps the shade. It makes its save, though it's not like we can tell.
The shade goes and again fires 4 gyres at Moonbeam, and she again only fails one save. She's hurt, but it's fixable. Everyone who touched a gyre spire gets control of it. Dagnar saves against a disintegrate. Tervel fails, but lives. Moonbeam goes next and teleports over to Tervel, heals them both up, touches his pillar so he can use it on his turn. Louhi touches the disintegrate pillar, that Dagnar did not get control over because of is spell resist, and waits until someone can touch her pillar before she uses it. Thoron touches both of his pillars, on his way to touching both pillars by Louhi and Dagnar. Aqila touches both pillars and then fires the gyre. Joe now controls it. Tervel touches both pillars and then fires his gyre, giving control to Moonbeam. Dagnar touches both spires. Joe also touches both and fires off the gyre. And the Shade collapses.
We clump up, prepare some new spells, and go up in the air. We chose 'Of all weapons, the deadliest is mercy', and are told that this is another simple challenge if we find the key, and defeating the central figure is the key. Also, wounds we deal to him will harm us. We behold a indistinct figure in the middle of the arena, holding a staff, we think, with a ring of twelve, blank-eyed, armed and armored humanoids around it.
Aqila puts her high int to good use and posits that the blank-eyed look is a symptom of mind-control, and while we’d get hurt if we attack the dude in the middle directly, if she’s right, freeing the armsmen might allow them to deal with the problem for us. Dagnar is up first, and uses the wand of Greater Dispel to area dispel the ring of targets. Four of the guards start moving more naturally and seem less...controlled. This lends some weight to Aqila’s theory and gives Joe an idea. He turns into a form that can create an antimagic field in a cone in front of him. He does that over the whole group, and that frees all of them from the center figure's control. And we win, because we freed all the prisoners in one go, and that was a win condition. We didn't know this, but winning a challenge in one round is cool.
And we break here, having won our way free of the plane. There are two more challenges that we can choose to attempt to get more shinies for Louhi.



'Shields shift and change' and 'power turns to smite the wielder' are the final challenges for us to meet. We choose 'shields' first. When we do this, everyone gets a curse applied to them. Moonbeam - acid vulnerability. Dagnar - lose mind-affecting immunity. Joe has that one too. Thoron, Aqila, Tervel, and Louhi all manage to ignore the first curse. Meanwhile, a tall, humanoid figure appears in the middle and we understand we have to defeat him to win the challenge. We also know any curses we get will go away when we win or forfeit.
Time to roll for initiative. Dagnar goes first, moving towards the figure and preparing to unleash a three-steel. Does about 50 damage and leaves a small gash on the figure. Moonbeam decides to present a 'divine hint' to the figure, after going into timestop and summoning some friends. So, 5 elephants and two hollyphants, with animal growth. Sadly, the divine hint seems to do nothing. Joe teleports near the figure and shapechanges into a Nightcrawler to wreak havoc. He does nothing. Aqila tries Magic Missile to see if it hits. Nope. We think it's immune to crushing and spells that allow spell resistance at this point. Louhi has nothing she can do. Tervel moves to Dagnar and gives him a protection from evil. Thoron tries a Blast of Sand. 51 damage. The figure looks a little sand-blasted, so we know that works.
A 2nd round of curses comes out. Dagnar gets a cold vulnerability. Tervel is a frog. Thoron is vulnerable to poison, and Louhi is vulnerable to cold. Aqila, Moonbeam, Joe, and Dagnar avoid new curses. The figure attacks. Dagnar has to save against confusion and makes it. Moonbeam has a petrify aimed at her, but being a solar saves her. Joe is fine because we had fire immunity for this trip. Aqila has a petrification applied to her, so she's stoned now. Louhi is also stoned. Tervel resists confusion but is still a frog. Thoron gets poisoned and would have lost 7 con if Moonbeam didn't have sheltered vitality up on us all, since he's currently not poison immune due to curses. The hollyphants get confused and so do two elephants. This'll be fun.
Dagnar tries three steel again, and this time it doesn't work. Looks like the new shield is immunity to piercing damage. Moonbeam Heals the summons to fix confusions and damage. She also puts stone to flesh on Aqila and Louhi while in timestop because they're objects. That works. Then she gets ready to blast of sand the guy to see if she can replicate Thoron's success. It fails. We guess evasion. Joe shifts to a garngrath and does a 'swallowing charge' on the figure. 80' swath where everything gets hoovered in if it doesn't make an opposed grapple check. The figure fails, and ends up 'en mah belleh'. Aqila puts Indomitability up on Joe to see if that helps what's likely to come later.
Curses happen again. Louhi loses her cold vuln as that curse is removed. Aqila doesn't get a curse again. Joe loses his poison immunity. Tervel loses flight. Thoron is also grounded. The rest resist their curses. Then Joe gets hit with all the attacks the figure unleashes, because the figure is in his belly, and Joe is the only target. Joe first gets hit with some sonic damage. 77 hps would have been gone except garngrafts are immune. Then a disjunction. Joe wildshapes into an earth elemental as a reaction. A baleful polymorph is resisted because elementals are immune. Then a petrify hits and he passed his save. Then an antimagic ray and he fails. A daze does nothing; he's immune. Confusion comes up twice, and he fails. 2nd antimagic ray doesn't do anything more. Saves against poison. Daze does nothing again. And another disjunction comes up. Polymorph is immune again. And finally a stun which he is also immune to.
The disjunction does not cancel the antimagic ray. But, we get the win. All curses end, and a naked Tervel grumbles a bit as he gets dressed again. Joe's stuck as an elemental for a bit. And buffless, since we can’t use magic between bouts. Going to make the next challenge interesting. The last one is 'power turns to smite the wielder'.
Joe is stuck as an elemental until we start the last challenge, and had all his buffs stripped. Moonbeam wants to open with an earthquake, so we try to make sure everyone is hovering as the challenge starts. The summons are old, but still present. The figure that appears in the middle of the field looks exactly like the fae lord. Time to roll initiatives again. Dagnar goes first, and his enervate does not work. Spellturning seems to be a thing, here. Moonbeam is up next and casts her earthquake. The figure doesn't get caught in any fissures. She first does timestop to prepare some spells.
And now the fun really starts. We all get hit with a targeted prismatic dispelling...so for every failed save, we also get hit with an effect from prismatic spray. Moonbeam loses 9 spells and eats 9 sprays. 3 Stone - immune, 2 poisons - immune, 2 Acid - 0 damage, 2 electricity - 60 damage, and 1 disintegration. She made saves, so the damage was less than it could be.
Dagnar loses 7 buffs. 1 insanity, 3 electricity, 1 poison, 2 disintegrations. He makes enough saves to take no damage. Louhi loses 5 buffs, but makes her saves against 2 disintegrations and 2 insanity. 20 fire damage only. Thoron loses 16 buffs. This'll be fun. 4 fire - 30 damage, 2 acid - 20 damage, 4 electricity - 200 damage, 3 poisons and 2 petrifications that he's immune to, and 2 disintegrations - 80 disintegration damage. He has fortunate fate kick in when he hits 0 hps, which is a 160 point heal, and when the disintegrations take him back negative, his contingincy last breath kicks in. So he was dead, briefly, and then gets stabilized at -1hp.
Aqila only loses 3 spells. And then she gets stoned again. The electricity is therefore not absorbed by her ring, and she takes 36 damage. Tervel loses all his buffs except fortunate fate, which helps when he fails his save against poison and it Heals him up. The summons numbers are shrunk - both hollyphants and two elephants are dispelled. Of the three left, one gets insane, one takes some disintegration, and one takes some elec. And that concludes the Charlie Foxtrot. It's Thoron's turn, and since Favor of the Martyr lets him act at -1hp, his move is HEAL.
Louhi charges towards the figure. Tervel is still unconsious. Joe casts timestop, shapeshifts into a prismatic golem, and rebuffs. He comes out of timestop, craps out a fabulous diamond, and sparkles. Dagnar is up again and jumps in close enough to stab, and attacks. He does some noticeable damage. Moonbeam timestops, unstones Aqila, buffs, then flamestrikes the figure. It evades. The insane elephant begins babbling incoherently. Aqila takes her belated turn from her midair advantage point, aims a cone of cold at the figure. It seems to do something. The figure comes up next - Dagnar gets hit with a reciprocal gyre. 49 damage. Louhi takes 9 damage.
Now it's Thoron's turn. He's a might cranky about this. He does fire seeds. They work. 49 damage. Louhi finishes her charge and she smacks him a good one. And does near max damage on it. 40 damage. Aqila casts a sonicball unprepared and it does 38 damage. Moonbeam's heal got Terval back on his feet, so he starts charging in too. Joe does 48 damage with fireseeds. Dagnar is up, and is still dazed. Moonbeam timestops for 5 rounds, teleports to stand next to the guy after healing Dagnar, prepares a mummify, and deploys it. He is still fleshly. (needed 13+, rolled 13.)
Figure goes and casts another mass reciprocal gyre. Dagnar gets dazed for 4 rounds again. Louhi gets dazed for 4 rounds. Moonbeam makes her saves. Minor damage all around. Thoron takes his turn by doing a fly-by blast of sand attack. Aqila does a fireball, and does 40 damage. Moonbeam and Joe were in the area of effect, but immune. Louhi is dazed. Tervel is in his flight stance, so he has to do a diving charge to get at the figure. He manages to connect with his attack, dealing enough damage to end the fight.
We have completed all 5 challenges now. And now the faelord comes out to chat with us, and he's got some info to share. The first thing he goes over with us is the layout of the ritual chamber we'll be fighting in at the temple. The chamber is roughly 50' by 70' with a second level balcony and stairs up to a raised platform with a low railing around it at the far end of the first level. Also what we can expect to find within. The high priestess is a lvl 20 caster, focused on divination, pain, and torture. Flensing, prismatic dispel, reciprocal gyre, etc. There will be one of Sakaneth's sorcerers, with a focus on temporal distortions. 30th level caster, focused on manipulating timestops. IE jump into your timestop and pull in other people too. There are iron golems that are normal except they breathe hellfire. The guards are basic melee combatants, but their armor can be triggered to make them more powerful for a time, before they explode. The high priestess or Silviel can trigger that. There will be half a dozen handmaidens...probably not enchantresses. Silviel likely won't be there when we arrive. She'll show up if all 6 handmaidens are dead/incapacitated, if the high priestess is dead, or if we're there longer than a minute. Silviel can enter timestops, but not cast it herself.
The darkness can be slowed by 1 celestial brilliance spell...it'll take 3 to stop it. We can't hurt her while she's using it, but it takes a bit before she can recast. She also has two tortured unicorns that have fallen to blackest evil. The chamber is enclosed within a teleport cage, and the walls have walls of force built into them. The entire chamber is covered in a 'distort summons' spell. (summons are evil versions, and not under your control) The last portal will not permit summons to pass, and it will slow your passage...they'll know you're coming and Zeleya is watching us. (it's like an anticipate teleportation spell). There's a portal to Zeleya's realm in the room - that's where Silviel will be entering from. Depending on how the battle goes, we could have an opportunity to destroy Zeleya herself, but the faelord does not recommend that we take it.
The faelord also warns us that it is possible, but not likely, that the sorcerer could have been gifted with a reactive timestop - an immediate action. “In Sakaneth's current condition, I wouldn't think he could receive that, but I wouldn't have thought it possible to have received the abilities I know he has received.”
We ask if there's a reason why he wouldn't recommend us killing Zeleya. He explains that one reason is the danger to us, but the other is that if we were to do so, many of the gods are bound by an oath to hunt down and deal with anyone who kills any god, so those gods that participated in the oath, would be required to hunt us down afterwards.
Note - we're getting this information in parallel to save time. We will also be learning metamagic on one spell up to 6th level to make it interact with the sorcerer's magic. The faelord lets us know that he thinks our friends can definitely keep the queen alive for another half hour, but not more than two. So that gives us our time limit. He'll also give us the equivalent of 2 hours rest. While he's giving Louhi her 'winnings - gear she can use, he tells her that these are the items that were prepared for her a millennium ago. That’s not ominous at all, now is it?
The faelord will not explain that last comment now, but we might learn more about it on our return trip.
Also, when we were getting the in parallel info dump, Louhi appears to be moving a lot faster than the rest of us. We can't hear what the others are told. Conclusion is that she's being told quite a bit more than the rest of us.
As we're preparing to go, Louhi tells Aqila – “As you know, my last court mage betrayed me...I believe your superiors would support your taking that position, and yes, I know you are one of the Sentinel, now.”
To Dagnar – “I similarly find myself in need of a new bodyguard.”
To Joe – “You may have perhaps heard some of the nobility's plans for timbering and similar operations. With what I know now, I would rather those be greatly impeded...not stopped because my people have need to wood. If any of your people would be interested in relocating...understand it would be welcome to me, but those holding those lands would be less welcoming.”
To Moonbeam – “While it has never truly been a position within the court of Aerodon, I believe a court physician would be valuable, particularly one that can defend herself to some degree.”
She doesn't say anything to Tervel (ooc - she knows where he's going next because the faelord told her. The faelord also gave her short bios about each of us, which is why she's making those offers.)
The faelord tells us this before we leave - 'while I will not give it to you now, as you may fail at Zeleya’s temple and I will not have it fall into her hands, I have prepared a focus that will let you return to my plane.' And with an evil smile, he continues, “should you survive, you will always be welcomed in the Court of Remembrance.” And at that, we hear a by now familiar scream of rage from Zeleya. (ooc - she didn't know which fae lord she was dealing with). (also ooc, the Court of Remembrance has the job of Remembering everything that's gone on, so this guy has the memories of all his predecessors.)
We'll finish sorting out our prep next session. Breaking here before the temple fun.

Terane
2020-06-15, 07:22 PM
Some commentary on the previous post - didn't include inline because I wanted the whole block in one post, and looked to be a bit close on the character limit.

The fae lord was very definitely really there to help them - just had to make it look like he was trying to stop them. And, ideally, effectively kill at least one of them temporarily - Zeleya did a really bad job of reading the fine print on her deal with him. Anyone getting the impression that Zeleya wasn't exactly in the running for world's brightest deity is quite correct. In setting, quite possibly the least intelligent of all the gods - Asurak would give her competition, but his errors tend to be harder to see behind the general calamities. Add in that she's one of the more seriously crazy gods (virtually every deity in setting has some problems from past trauma, but Zeleya was definitely the worst off), and the fact that she had a plan as well thought-out as this is nothing short of astonishing. And not actually her work, as the party would learn soon.



We are preparing to go through the portal into Zeleya's Temple. We have had the equivalent of two hours rest, and are reprotting spells. Joe has a shapechange scroll that he's been hanging onto, and he manages to convince Aqila to use it. The plan is for her to go through the portal in Shadesteel golem form to make her immune to spells initially, with the suggestion to switch to Pit Fiend form so she can use spells again after the initial round. She's somewhat less than amused, but it does make sense. Tervel manages to not roll his eyes at the druid. Moonbeam and Dagnar are obtrusively snickering at Aqila's consternation.
We've been warned that the inhabitants of the temple will be waiting for us, because the way this last portal works, Louhi has to go last, but none of us will enter the temple until she does. It's a sort of detect teleportation spell that will dump us all out at once with them knowing exactly who's coming. So, to counter that, Joe is planning on casting flash flood at the portal so we have a water wall open the ball for us. We're warned that doing this might make things more difficult, but we judge that not getting killed outright is useful, and we'll prepare for stuff.
We need to kill Silviel before Tervel can deconsecrate the temple. Louhi has been enchanting every pebble she can with celestial brilliance so we have a weapon against Silviel's mist. We all have some of them, and she'll scatter a handful when we land. She also put Luminous Armor up on all of us - effect is benefits of full plate with no drawbacks, plus we glow. She'll also consecrate the area we land in so we can be healed - the soulbound unicorns emanate a 60ft field that makes damage dealt within it vile, which can't be healed outside of a consecrated area.
We come out with Aqila, Joe, Tervel and Louhi in the front of the alcove, and Dagnar, Thoron, and Moonbeam in the back. The flash flood smashes the door behind us, and flows down the stairs, damaging the balcony above us. (OOC it also drowns the prisoners that we never knew existed in the cells down below) The two priestesses on that balcony that wraps around the whole room are knocked prone, leaving four handmaidens up there. There was a wall of force preventing us from entering the sanctuary, and that fades away as we watch. Thoron, Joe, and Moonbeam are all in Prismatic golem form. The sorcerer acts first, and since he can't tell who's who reliably, and his initial thought for a spell won't work well on golems, he does something else. He disappears from our view, and Thoron sees some sort of spell effect on the floor under our 'feet'. We don't know what it does.
Dagnar goes next. He's gotten golem strike prepared and keen blade up on his weapons. He goes after a golem first and with one mighty blow knocks it down to 6 hps. Joe is targeted by the high priestess, and is hit with a dispel. He loses spells, but keeps his shapechange. Thoron gets the follow-up reciprocal gyre. He takes 57 damage or so. Joe gets to go next and opens with a murderous mist. He aims it to miss Dagnar and the golems, since they won't be affected anyway. Joe then puts whiteout up as planned, since had put snowsight up on us beforehand so we can see through it. A handmaiden goes next. She can use soulsight to see through the whiteout, and targets a prismatic golem. Thoron gets targeted again. Another 57 damage, then another one targets him, and indomitability stabilizes him at 1hp.
Thoron retaliates with a disjunction on the whole crowd, missing Dagnar and the golems. The portal ripples slightly, but appears untouched. He follows up with blinding spittle on the high priestess. That hits. Barely. A handmaiden targets Moonbeam with reciprocal gyre thinking that she's Joe, for 70 damage. The next one targets Thoron again, and he's saved by fortunate fate. He's at 114hps again. The next one targets Moonbeam for 35 damage. Moonbeam retaliates with an enhanced sonic strike at the back of the room. Only the high priestess and one unicorn make their saves. She casts firestorm next. The burning firestorm hits everything except allies and the golems. And it's all vile damage because of the unicorns. One unicorn makes the save.
A unicorn goes next, targeting Tervel with trap the soul. He makes the save. The last handmaiden goes and targets Moonbeam with 103 damage, but she makes the save for 52 damage. A lesser priestess is up, but she's blinded and in the whiteout. She Heals her blindness from murderous mist, but the whiteout is still in effect. The other unicorn is under orders to target Thoron with trap the soul, but it doesn't work on golems. He targets Tervel, and fails the attack.
Aqila goes next. She swaps to pit fiend form to cast, floats up 5 feet in case the floor does something unpleasant, then acid storms the room and puts a prismatic wall across the back of the room, in front of the portal. This may make things interesting. Louhi launches a Hammer of Righteousness at the lead soulbound unicorn, which gets killed outright, being evil, with 71 damage hit. The soldiers are up now, and 3 are blinded already. and all 4 are affected by whiteout. They all take defensive stances. Now the golems move. They rotate and breathe a 10ft cube of hellfire at Dagnar, futilely. Tervel's up, and his best move is killing the damaged golem. He fails to deal enough damage. It has 1 hp now.
The sorcerer is up again. He appears twice (can take two turns this turn). (OOC: He's been told specifically to kill Moonbeam, and he's pissed because his allies were not effective enough to get his target out of prismatic golem form). One of him disappears again. The other targets Dagnar with his equivalent of a disintegrate. Dagnar makes the save and takes 15 damage. Dagnar recasts golem strike and goes after the less damaged golem. He kills it. The high priestess is up next. She casts dispel at Joe again. He only loses only 3 spells this time. She's really annoyed now. So she hits Thoron with a reciprocal gyre. He takes some damage, but not enough to kill him yet. Then it's Joe's turn. He casts Control Winds. Chaos ensues. He forms it as a cylinder to not hit Dagnar and hits both levels of the room. Everyone who fails their save gets knocked prone. The high priestess, unicorn, and two handmaidens make their save. One handmaiden gets banished by the wall. One handmaiden gets turned to stone. 3 soldiers got blown in and are out of the picture. Both lesser priestess are dead. He uses his last action to cast Boreal winds. So, one more handmaiden gets banished when she slides into the wall.
So, left on the field are two priestesses above us on the balcony, confused in the whiteout, three handmaidens but two are prone, one unicorn, the high priestess, and one battered soldier. And the golem with 1 hp. The handmaiden who isn't prone hits Thoron with a reciprocal gyre. 55 more damage. Thoron's turn. Consistent Empowered Chain Lightning on the unicorn. It survives with 1 hp. We’re sensing a theme here.

This was more or less a theme for the entire battle. Didn't mention every time it happened, but virtually every enemy they dealt serious hp damage to ended up at exactly one hp at some point. I don't think I could duplicate that again if I tried.

We hear a familiar voice from the other side of the portal. "I'm so glad you are willing to meet my price." The prismatic wall shatters. The portal is no longer misty white, but clear. We can see a blue crystalline gem the size of a human on the other side. It's a very large shard of the Mad God. We can see Silviel next to it. Thoron hasn't finished his turn yet. He shapechange to Solar form with the High Priestess's face to taunt our opponents. Moonbeam's turn. She goes Solar so she can heal herself and Thoron. Then she firestorms things and now only two lesser priestess, the High priestess, and 1 golem with 1 hps are left plus the sorcerer. Aqila goes next. She tries a glasstrike on the now visible Silviel through the portal, which fails. She quickens an indomitability on Thoron so he's got a get out of death free card again.

And now the party knew why Zeleya's planning was abnormally good. They never got confirmation in character, but Sakaneth was more than a little annoyed at having to work through Zeleya. Of course, even if he had managed to fully reconstitute himself at this point, he'd never have considered personally taking the risks this plan entailed. That's what pawns are for.

Louhi's turn. She 'hammers' the High Priestess and she dies. Silviel steps into the room. She is now in the area of effect for the Control Winds and the Boreal Winds. She resist both. Tervel kills the golem, finally. Moonbeam put superior resistance back up on Joe one her turn. Silviel starts the turn order with 1 standard action. When she goes again, it'll be a full turn, but for this time, she dispels Thoron with a lvl 25 epic dispel. She thinks Thoron is Joe. Thoron keeps shapechange, but loses a lot of other stuff. The sorcerer acts next, and apparently it is now convenient for Sakaneth for Louhi to be dead. She eats two hits of +100 damage each, but stabilizes at 1hp thanks to indomitability. Dagnar goes to stab the sorcerer, who vanishes and appears across the room. Dagnar responds by finishing his move action to chase the sorc down and blurstrikes him to sneak-attack him.
Joe gets to go now. He becomes the flying spaghetti monster and starts beating the sorc down. He manages to kill it, and land a few hits on Silviel. Well, one. Thoron's turn would be next, but Silviel goes first. She still thinks Thoron is Joe. She fires a glasstrike at the bird. And succeeds. Thoron is out of the fight. Silviel has a swift action left and decides the octopus is Moonbeam. Reciprocal gyre at the Octopus. He takes 27 damage. Moonbeam is up next and heals Louhi up. Then she casts deadfall at Silviel, making the terrain over there treacherous. Silviel avoids being knocked prone.
Aqila manages to get a spell vulnerability to take affect on Silviel. And follows it up with darkbolt. Gets 4 bolts through, but Silviel makes all the saves against daze. Louhi's up next. She 'hammers' Silviel and does some damage. Silviel has a standard action next, and thinks Joe is Moonbeam, and Moonbeam is Thoron. She also thinks she's winning and decides to toy with us. She hurls a Darkbolt at Joe and he takes 62 damage. He's immune to daze, but feigns it anyway. Tervel is up. He uses the longstrider buff to charge Silviel and hits. He does 70 damage with smite evil.
Top of the order, and it's another Silviel standard action. She continues to attack 'Moonbeam' with a baleful polymorph. Because Joe put plant body up on everyone including himself, it does nothing. Dagnar is up next. He does a swift action Night's Move so he can flank her and full attack from behind. He gets 5 attacks with haste and gets 1 hit in, and it's a critical. 99 damage dealt, less damage reduction. Joe is up. He uses two charges of his still/silent thingy so he can cast mass resist sonic and mass resist cold while still appearing to be dazed. So Dagnar doesn't take much damage from the tentacles, and Tervel only takes 96. Dagnar is targeted with an implosion, but she fails to get through his spell resistance. She follows up with a reciprocal gyre. 80 damage and dazed. Thoron is a statue, so Moonbeam dragonflamestrikes Dagnar and Silviel, trusting in his saves, which he makes, then she mass heals the melee crew. Silviel makes a save, but still takes damage. She doesn't have evasion.
Aqila casts Ruby Ray of Reversal at Thoron, undoing the statueing. Louhi does a Righteous Smite on Silviel for 78 damage. Silviel does a mass reciprocal gyre. Aqila is at -23 hps, conscious because of favor of the martyr. Everyone in range gets beaten up. Tervel does an Emerald Displacement strike on Silviel...she now has a 20% miss chance. And takes 54 damage before reduction.
Silviel goes into a shell. She is going to be in there for 1 round. We have 6s to prepare. Tervel puts up strength of Stone. +8 to str. Dagnar puts Heroism up. Thoron puts up energy resistance electricity on Tervel, and now both melee types are immune to the tentacles. Aqila mass heals the front of the room, and everyone is healed to full. Joe goes into timestop and rebuffs Bite of the Werebear, and makes a bunch of fire seeds. Moonbeam goes into timestop and also makes a pile of fire seeds plus some Monstrous Vermin, then puts owl's insight up on Thoron. They both pile them where Silviel will be when she comes out of her shell. Then everyone goes prismatic golem again who can.
Silviel's move on coming out of the shell is to cast implosion, at Aqila. She makes her save. Dagnar goes next. He's got 5 attacks and lands 2. Plus he doubled his sneak attack for this round, so he does 188 total, after damage reduction. Joe detonates his fire seeds for a pile of damage. Silviel takes her full turn now. She tries to implode Dagnar again, and his spell resistance saves his bacon. So, she hits him with a quickened reciprocal gyre. Dagnar takes 74 damage and is dazed. Thoron's turn. He tries baleful polymorph for kicks and giggles. No sell. Moonbeam sets off her fire seeds. Another pile of damage plus she gets Dagnar healed back up, so he's back in it.
Aqila tries a Glass Strike and it fails. Louhi tries Implosion on Silviel. It succeeds splendidly. Silviel is now a messy mess. We hear Sakaneth's sardonic voice. "It seems, dear Zeleya, that you have a bit of a problem. You could try to meet my price for more active assistance. You could try to step through yourself, if you even have enough power to form an avatar right now, and I suspect any such avatar would be weaker than your little servant there was. Or, I suppose, they might try to purchase my assistance. That might even be entertaining." he concludes cheerfully.
Joe asks him what his price is, out of curiosity. "Well, you have removed some number of my servants lately, though, to be fair, that idiot Rakshasa should have used them more efficiently. So I suppose, if say, three of you would agree to join the ranks of my sorcerers, that would suffice." Joe says, "The answer is probably no, but to be fair, what would that entail?" "Why, your complete and total devotion to me of course." Moonbeam laughs, which looks like a Rave in her current form. Zeleya is almost incoherent with rage and sputters, “I can still kill them. They can't leave here quickly enough" Sakaneth laughs and says, "Ah, and here comes the final player in this little act." The fae lord shows up.
"A minor matter first, Zeleya. You do owe me for our bargain still. And I think I know exactly what I wish to collect. If you wish to survive, you know what deal you must make now, but first you will let these leave first, unharmed, with me." Then, looking at Louhi, he says, “You know what that gem is for. Throw it through the portal now." Louhi smiles, and does so with alacrity. The portal shatters, and the temple is fully deconsecrated. The fae lord looks at all of us, and comments, "It would be wise to depart quickly" Joe makes a point of eating the remaining priestesses on our way out. They are insane without Zeleya's influence, but it's the point of the matter. The temple collapses as we decamp.

The bargain is that Zeleya will ensure that that shard of Sakaneth reaches his temple so he can be reborn, and in return, he will make sure she comes back when he's back to his full power. And Sakaneth promised Zeleya that she will be given her sister Selwende, goddess of lust, to do with as she wishes. And if that sounds like a bargain favorable to Zeleya, keep in mind the relative talents of each as schemers. (Admittedly, Sakaneth's talents are more informed attribute than anything really shown in the campaign - interaction with his plots has been more his plots as carried out by underlings/pawns of varying ability, with his ability to provide effective guidance being distinctly limited)

So, we follow a Fae Lord to his home. He seems pleased with this day's work.

Terane
2020-06-22, 01:19 PM
So, we pick up where we left off, having destroyed the temple of Zeleya that we've been hunting for months, killed Silviel, her lieutenant, permanently, and saved the princess! We also haven't really slept in almost 24 hours, and we've just been told that we've been invited to a meeting of the Fae Courts. Tervel is not with us, because the Fae Lord sent him to where he is going next. Louhi is not going to be going either, because she’s not involved with the reason we’re being invited. Instead, she’ll wait for us as long as she thinks is wise, and if we don’t show in time, she’ll return to Aerodon without us.
The fae lord, who extracted us from Zeleya’s temple and who has extended this invitation to us explains why he has done so. It's because "We have been in contact with servants of the All-Devourer" (the blobby things we killed with healing magic when fighting Helvisarn). "I am aware that the contact was entirely hostile, however others of the Courts doubt that. There are more than a few cannot believe that any human could possibly defeat his minions, so obviously you must have struck a deal." Moonbeam looks insulted.
"So far, none of those who believe this think themselves strong enough to attack you directly." Moonbeam comments that that doesn’t rule out indirect attacks. Joe asks if they care that we stopped thousands of Fae from being consumed to be Helvisarn's servants'. The fae lord explains that the Outer Fae basically see the fae native to the material plane as worthless. If any of the outer fae themselves had been caught in that mess, we might have earned some points, but any of the ones likely to have that happen to them would be more likely to try to remove the embarrassment of being saved by mortals by removing said mortals. Eyerolls all around.
The Fae lord goes on to explain that his intent in inviting us here is so we can demonstrate that we have not been corrupted. Joe asks what happens if we can't prove that. The Fae lord says, "For you, nothing. The court of Blood would capitalize on it, as would Bone and Terror. The Court of Stars would be diminished, as would Light, though they might try to attack you directly." Basically, the courts of Light and Stars aren't necessarily friendly to mortals, but they leave us alone. Light likes the idea of defending mortals, even, as long as they don’t have to associate with us to do so. Bone and Terror don't want to wipe us out, because we are useful for raw materials and terrorizing. Blood just wants to kill everyone and they wouldn't object to spilling mortal blood a little early.
He then goes on to warn us that we probably want to hide the gifts we received - specifically calling out what we got from the elder Dragons of Arandor. The fact that he knows about where were got them from has interesting implications. He doesn't think any masking we can do would hide them sufficiently, on being asked, but if they’re concealed extradimensionally, that ought to let them avoid notice. He does not tell us why he thinks we need to hide them.
We are told that the debates may take a few hours, depending on which minor courts or other people show up. If, for example, Shylarene decides to show up, we can expect for her to be there and officially protesting any attempt to let us go free. Moonbeam asks if she’s a 'Zeleya fan girl?' The fae lord comments, “No, it would just be to her advantage to officially protest. If she thought you were stupid enough to accept them, she might shower you with gifts.” She's not a fae, she's the Queen of Succubi. Joe asks, “Did we cause a power vacuum?" His reply is, "In the planes, no, Zeleya still exists, but in the material plane, people will undoubtedly already be moving in.”

“Kizravek will have undoubtedly moved already - he has no use for politics. If Shylarene is there, I would expect quite a bit of additional debate. Perhaps a day or two.” Aqila comments that we haven't slept in almost a day. “I am well aware, and there won't be opportunity for rest while the debate goes on, unless you want it to go against you.” Joe points out cheerfully, “that's what Heal is for!”
The Fae Lord continues, “The most serious concern is if the Empty Court is aware of this and chooses to make their case. They are in favor of cooperation with the All-Devourer, and at best, they would believe that you have made a deal and would seek to cooperate with you. But I have no knowledge of their deliberation. The other minor courts are unlikely to contribute anything of note. Revelry and Mirth are likely to be present – but do not take their names to mean what you think - when Zeleya dealt with me, she thought I was of the court of Mirth and found it natural that I would deal with her. Others are willing to revel constantly, and they may be put out by having to interrupt their revels.”
His final cautions is, “Remember to be polite when dealing with the court of Stars. They are the most well-disposed towards mortals, which is to say they think you barbarians that may be trainable to not piddle on the carpet.” Joe cracks that neither the mage nor Dagnar should be allowed to talk, in that case.
(ooc - the division between the material plane fae and the outer fae happened before the time of the Old Gods. There are occasional contacts between them, but only occasional)
He asks, finally, “So, before we proceed, have you any questions?” Moonbeam asks if there is anything, apart from our mere existence, that the Fae Courts would find insulting?” Aqila expands that we are remembering a time when a dragon tried to kill us because her boyfriend gave us a present. The faelord comments that he is well aware of Zalakirinel's missteps. “I suppose there has been little enough contact that it would be good to remind you that the courts are under Seal of Peace so do not make any hostile actions. Those of the courts will try to insult you to tempt you to unwisdom.” On being asked, “What happens if we insult them back?” he comments, “It would get you no points with the fae you insult. With others, it depends on whether they would see gain, or at least no loss, by not reprimanding you.”
The fae lord gave us some more details on the courts: “Bone, Blood, and Terror are loosely aligned. Light nominally opposes them. They are in love with the theory of defending the mortal realms, but more the less they have to have contact with actual mortals.” Joe asks if there is anything we might do that would be seen as threatening that we might not realize would be seen as such. The fae lord gives us some details about duels - long story short, mortal duels are the only ones you can kill someone without suffering the wrath of all the courts, other types could be to first blood, to first folly, or to humiliation. Joe asks if that last one includes turning someone into a statue and crapping on them. The fae lord notes that that might be amusing to those of a vulgar mind, but if he wants to actually score points, he should think of something more refined. The best approach is to get your opponent to do something on his own that would be humiliating, but using enchantment spells to do that scores less points. (Note: brainspider is not enchantment).

He further remarked, “And I suppose, since you brought it up, I should stress that accepting any gifts that any members the court offers you would be unwise, but declining them will require a certain degree of tact.” Joe asks about the exchanging gifts thing to cancel debt. “Sometimes, yes. here it would be unwise to carry away anything you might be given here. You can be confident that such a gift will be in some way, trapped.” Good to know.
The fae lord pauses a moment, then “And there is some unwelcome news. Shylarene has just entered the courts. You should be prepared for a longer debate. I had hoped she would not move so quickly…” He pauses again. “It lacked only that. Apparently you made more of an impression than I thought. All the minor courts are in attendance. At least it is fewer than it would have been once. There would have been thousands once, but there are only dozens today. The strong become stronger and the weak disappear. You might find some entertainment from some of them, but don't accept any drinks from the Court of Wine. Pleasure, Pain, and Misery will all be present, and of course, the Empty Court.”
“One last matter before we enter, since they are all assembled and delay would insult now...” He gestures and an image springs up. “While the planes cannot be mapped precisely, to make it clear why they are concerned about the All-Devourer...” We can see in the image the rough sizes of the Fae plane, the Demon planes, the Infernal planes, and a giant dark region that is the All-Devourer, dwarfing the rest. The abyss is between the Devourer's region and the Fae and Infernal realms. The fae lord mentions that he has known that the Devourer has devoured over a hundred thousand planes in his time. “If Sakaneth were awake, the Abyss would be an insurmountable obstacle. So you see why we wish him to be awake. The devourer doesn't know Sakaneth is sleeping, and is so proceeding cautiously.”
So, we hide our dragonshinies, and Dagnar is warned to stop being a Gloom since that is an effect of his shiny. (Also, Glooms are servants of Sakaneth so we don't want to imply we're allied with him)
The fae lord had also given us the names and descriptions of the major players we'll be seeing. Most courts will only have between 2-5 representatives here, being the heads of the court plus any courtiers they chose to bring. For example, the queen of Blood will usually only bring some of her knights that have yet to earn a name. They earn names by shedding sufficient blood and mortals aren't worth much. The Queen of Bone will certainly have an attendant of some sort, likely of her own crafting. The King of Terror usually brings his huntmaster and his chief torturer. Light usually brings his Champion and sometimes his consort. She comes only for matters of lesser importance, otherwise she stays home to ensure the safety of their people. The Queen of Stars usually brings her chief advisor and two randomly selected courtiers, and it is as far as anyone can tell completely random. We shouldn’t expect either of them to be of any importance to any debate. Moonbeam asked if they were for 'decoration?' “Decoration and extra eyes and ears. Anything they hear will be made known to their queen, but what they think is unimportant. Though if you insult them, she may take it as an insult against her.”
That led to Joe asking if we might insult someone by accident, if there are any special sensitivities. The fae lord thinks a moment, and notes that if the Queen of Bones brings one of her more odorous servants, carefully do not comment about the smell. The Court of Light, of course...be quiet, courteous, and do not attempt any form of physical contact whatsoever. As far as the Court of Stars is concerned...if you can show yourselves to be reasonably polite and attentive to all the courts, not just to hers, she will likely side with you.
Joe asks, “How many of them do we have to win over?” The reply is “Strictly speaking, just one...the others will be unlikely to confront them over this. Ideally, you would win over all of them, but...The Court of Stars is the most powerful right now, but is in the descendent. Blood, Bone, and Pain are all in the ascendant. As far as the minor courts, as long as none of the major courts take offense against you, they are unlikely to acknowledge that they have been offended. They are also unfortunately less stable in their inner workings than the major courts, and I cannot be certain who will be sent to represent them. So I cannot say what idiosyncrasies might lead to giving offense. Though undoubtedly the Empty court will be offended if you manage to convince the others that you made no such deal.”
Joe asks what happens if someone attacks us unprovoked, are we allowed to defend ourselves? “You are, and technically the other courts are required to defend you. In practice they will delay as long as they think they can. Even the Court of Stars is unlikely to think it worth it to hurry. As a hypothetical, if the Queen of Blood chose to attack you directly, the Court of Stars would almost certainly intervene instantly. Of course, all the courts know this.”
We're warned that getting caught lying would be bad. Joe asks if there would be any reason to not just request that they put an antimagic ray and a zone of truth on us and ask is flat out if we made a deal or not, as a way of short circuiting the debate. The fae lord thinks the likely outcome would be to get ourselves removed from direct questioning, but we would still end up sitting in the room while we get discussed. It would be a gamble, but one in our favor, he thinks. And now, it is time to leave this antechamber and face the courts.
When we enter, the first reaction we see is from an attractive female fae surrounded by 4 faceless knights. “How good of you to grace us with your presence, Resondiel, and I see you brought pets.” The Fae Lord, who we now know is named Resondiel answers, “You would appear to be somewhat behind the times, or did you not hear that they sealed Zeleya away, for some time now. However, since the purpose of this meeting is to allow discussion over the possibility that they have bargained with the All-Devourer, I think it best that we hear their defense.”
There is silence for a little while, then we see a woman that is obviously the Queen of Bone, given the monstrous skeletal horror standing behind her. It looks like dozens of animal skeletons wired together. Moonbeam eyes the anatomical puzzle. The Queen breaks the silence with, “I supposed since you've gone to the trouble of bringing them here, we may as well hear what they have to say, assuming they can say anything for themselves. That you are in your right minds has not yet been proven”. Joe comments that that may be true, since sane people generally don't pick fights with gods.
The King of Terror speaks next – “To my mind, that is actually a point against you. While Zeleya is certainly unpleasant and far from a particularly reliable power, her realm is at least between mine and the All-Devourer.” Joe commented, “It should still be there.” “Yes, but you have noticeably weakened her. To be fair, she is not a particularly noticeable impediment, but she still would have impeded him somewhat, if anything by the time it would take him to digest her realm!”
Moonbeam points out that she is a shaman from a long line of shamans, and making such a bargain would be antithetical to her nature. The Queen of Blood came back with, “I think even Estarven would have to agree that it would not be the first time that convenience or power seduced someone away from their principles." Moonbeam rebuts that she could have taken service with Zeleya if she was after power. Estarven, the King of Light, speaks up to note that in the short run, Zeleya might seem safer, but in the long run the All-Devourer will not reach our realm for some time, and noting that the servants have shown up in fae realms, and even in the realms of pure law on occasion.
Aqila points out that the only reason the servants were on the material plane is because Helvisarn let them in and we ensured he suffered the consequences of that stupidity in short order, Joe noting that we did get rid of them first.
We can tell that the Queen of Stars seems annoyed when she speaks up. "These accusations and counter accusations could go on for some time. I for one would prefer we move on to discussion how we will respond to Zeleya's temporary removal. But, this matter must be disposed of first. So, do you have any suggestions for how to speed this along?” she asks the crowd in general.
Joe suggests a discern lies spell and an antimagic ray to suppress our ability to resist the first spell. No one seems to speak, from what we can see, but the Queen of Stars says, “So, it seems that the Queen of Blood has an objection to this procedure.” Blood contended, “It is perfectly well known that there exist magics that will defeat this. I would insist that they dismiss all of their defenses while they are questioned.”
Joe comments that he didn't think she would be that incompetent. The Queen of Blood states that she isn't speaking for herself, but the lesser courts that have less power - she doesn't want to have this debate again in a few months, so let’s be absolutely certain.
Shylarene speaks up next. “If it pleases the court, you are all familiar with my skill with enchantments and that their defenses are less than nothing to my skill.” A bit of backing and forthing about how reliable she would be, ie why wouldn't see wouldn't just have us lie under influence. Joe ends with a comment implying that she's saying that the fae aren't as powerful as she is. Shylarene gives Joe a look that would incinerate him instantly if she could. She seems noticeably pissed that he called her out like that.
The Queen of stars moves to move on from that suggestion. "Well, will you consent to Nezari's suggestion (The Queen of Blood’s name is Nezari)?" Joe points out that if you are saying you can't tell if we're lying or not with what protections we have up, that doesn't speak well to ones competence. No poisonous looks this time. We can tell the Queen of Blood would like to continue the line of argument, but it's too threadbare of an argument at this point.
"Very well, then, says Blood, "for whatever it will prove, go ahead. Let us hear from them exactly what happened to them in their battle, with no omissions. Aqila roots through her bag of holding for a moment, and pulls out her copy of the mission report she submitted to her bosses after that incident. And starts reading from the top so their admittedly fallible mortal memories omit nothing. When she gets to the part about the globby things that showed up, the Court of Wine’s representative spoke up. “That sounds like servants of the Unifier. You can't seriously expect us to believe that they fought on the same side as the All-Devourer!”
Aqila states that she's reporting what we observed, and that we have no insight into what bargains Helvisarn may or may not have made in his time outside the Material plane. "As interesting and implausible as that seems, she is at least truthfully reporting what they saw. What the creatures were, you may or may not be right. It hardly matters. The Unifier is at this time not of any great concern to the courts”. There is a pause, then “Let her proceed”, says the Queen of Stars. Aqila finishes reading off the mission report without further interruptions.
At this point, the King of Terror speaks up. “Presuming of course, as naturally I do, that they had no means beyond our ability to defeat our perceptions. I find it implausible that they made any sort of bargain. On the other hand, we have been remiss in considering the actions of this…Ilene.”
Long story short, Terror wants the fae to 'investigate' unwise humans who make bargains with powers like Helvisarn' by opening the old gates to the material realm. Aqila points out that when mortals engage in that foolishness, there are mortal organizations who deal with them, as was the case in this instance. Terror basically wants to get a gate open so they can go back to 'playing' with mortals, and sees this is a way to get that much.
The King of Light says, “I think I can agree that opening the gates would be premature. Certainly let us make preparations to open the gate if there is a reason to do so, and perhaps increase our efforts to observe their world so that we might spot anything of concern to us.”
The Queen of Stars says, “I think we can proceed as Estarven has suggested. I had hoped we could resolve this more finally, but I suppose it would be premature to permanently remove the threat posed by mortals - they may prove to have some value at some point in time. I supposed the only thing that remains is for our guests to give an account of their dealings with Zeleya. It is, after all, fortunate, that the same people were involved in both incidents.
We gave the fast version of events, along the lines of, “We thought we'd been invited to a nice party, until the torture scene in the basement, so we put the kibosh on that and followed the princess through 5 or 6 planes until we reached the temple...which Zeleya wanted us to do because she still wanted to use Louhi's body as a vessel. At which point we killed all of her unicorns, guards, priestesses, servants, and golems, and Silviel too. Well, Louhi killed her. Implosion spell. Very messy. Sakaneth has an interesting sense of humor, by the way. Zeleya was pretty pissed last we saw of her, before everything collapsed. But we'll be dead before she gets back, so we don't care…”
We give more details about the battle, of course. Shylarene asks Resondiel why he intervened. “Because it amused me. Why else does any of us do anything?" The Queen of Stars concludes our part in the proceedings with, "A quite clear statement. I think that we can for the moment dispense with your presence, though we would wish you would stay readily available in case we have more questions. Melisinel, Kelryn, see to their reasonable comfort while we deliberate further.” We are escorted out of the counsel hall to a side chamber with a buffet bar, and couches. We don't eat the food, but we have munchies with us.
After a few hours, Resondiel comes in. “I am somewhat surprised and more than a little suspicious that Blood and Bone have both agreed to go along with the Court of Stars’ response so quickly. There is a small matter that is of some concern to you. I am not certain you will be interested, and I am not inclined to try to advise either way. It appears the Court of Light has been working on a potential weapon against the All-Devourer. They believe they have a way to destroy his servants entirely and not merely return them to him. There is of course a small catch. To function properly, they think it will require a mortal to wield it and it has occurred to some of Estarvens's underlings that, since you have apparently defeated some of these servants, you might be appropriate wielders.
Joe asks what the costs are. “In the long run, the cost would be your life. That said, this is a timespan longer than you would likely live anyway, assuming of course they have correctly estimated the effect, it would ensure you could not live beyond two hundred years from the time you take it up. I will say that Estarven at least is prepared to offer you what he considers reasonable payment for taking up the task. I am not at all certain what he considers reasonable, and I would advise against attempting to bargain. And I will say that refusing after he states what it would be would be somewhat of an insult to him.”
Moonbeam asks what happens if the wrong hands get it. 'Assuming it functions as advertised, it would be nearly harmless to anything not one of the All-Devourer’s servants. I note that they would expect you to employ it against them, and if it should turn out if they have misjudged, it well could turn out to be fatal.” Joe asks why it would be fatal. “Because the time you would spend trying to use it would give the servants time to kill you. And even if it does work, it will take half a minute to be used, and in that time your companions would have to both not kill them and keep them from interfering with the device. And the range is short, about 60 feet. The device, fully assembled, it is about your size. It can be folded into a more compact form, of course, folded it will take more time to set up.”
Joe asks if there'll be more refined versions coming out. The fae lord notes that there could be, if they put the effort in, but most of the court is disgusted with the progress made thus far. He's surprised, given their distaste for mortals, that they're making the offer at all.
We also learn that as far at the faelord believes, when we killed the servants, they would have been instantly available for the devourer to dispatch again, but for some reason he wasn't able to send them back to our location.
Aqila asks if they'd be upset if mortals investigated how the device works. He thinks they wouldn't be, but they won't let it out of their possession unless it is bonded to a mortal who will use it. Long story short, there's little benefit to us, and if they're wrong on the magnitude of the life-shortening, a great deal of harm to one of us. So we are going to decline. If they want to work with the Sentinel to do more research, that'd probably be cool, but the Light guys aren't interested.
So, we go back to the fae lord's realm to reunite with Louhi, and prepare to escort her home. We arrive back at her castle where we'd left from, and alarm spells start going off. The room contains a very, very decayed corpse about where we'd left Queen Ansa. The clothes are decayed, the bones are crumbling, and the crown is dust. The former ice sculptures aren't there, and neither is the priest or Aremel. Spot checks!
Thoron spots a ripple along one wall, right before one of Pinja's assassins stepped out. “Ah, my lady was hoping that you would return. For the moment, at least, your brothers have been convinced to leave the castle. I hope you can convince some actual forces to reach here or convince your sister to leave.” Aqila points out that we just got back from killing Silviel and banishing Zeleya from the world, so we do constitute a force of sorts. The assassin looks exasperated – “can you produce an army? Prince Teemu at least had some suspicion that his father was dying and has half the army backing him up.”
We point out that we can scare an army off, or impede it without harming them. Louhi requests that whatever we do appear to be natural to a mage. Some things we could do include scaring them off with the moondog's ability, or just fogging things up.
Louhi's main concern is ensuring that the country is not torn apart in a civil war. Given that we’ve been directly involved in two of those so far, we aren’t exactly eager to go for three. The assassin reports Teemu’s forces are two, maybe three days away, at the rate that army is moving. The army is of concern to the assassin because their lady refused to leave without being certain that her sister was safe, and the four of them aren't enough to keep her safe from that.
Short sidetrack whereupon Joe determines that the assassin cannot speak of matters that are not for outsiders, such as the numbers and locations of other assassins.
We’re told her 'sisters' have counted no fewer than 97 people wearing robes of high ranking mages of Aerodon with the army. Counting the low level mages, there are approximately 120 mages in the entire country. They have seen no fewer than 35 wearing robes of archmage, of which we know there are 11 in the country. Beyond that, he apparently has a surprising, assuming the robes to be telling the truth, number of the priesthood with him. We are again confident that some of them are false, though the numbers are more plausible. He could have scraped up those numbers if all priests within 250 miles were supporting him.
Joe questions if assassination is on the table. The assassin states that she'd been advising her lady to take that option. Louhi states that she'll entertain that notion only if it's the only way to prevent him from taking the throne. Otherwise, she wants him alive to face justice.
Thoron is sent out to reconnoiter with his specially acute vision and pin down what the actual forces are. There are 6 archmages, 11 senior mages, and the remaining 80 have mage levels at least. This is a large chunk of the army's mages.
Other options discussed include just sending invitations to the country's nobles to come to the coronation. Antero is still at the palace, so we hunt him up to ask him what he thinks of all this. He thinks it unlikely that Teemu will have any of Selwende's priestess's with him, or any of Melore's, except for healers. They might be receptive to a chat, but they aren't likely to be in the loop on anything important. There are about 80,000 common soldiers. We also learn that traditionally, in coup attempts, the winner will share out about a quarter of the treasury among the survivors.
Moonbeam is sent out as a little birdie to brainspider folks in the army to see why they're following Teemu. The story going around the army is that both the queen and the princess has disappeared, presumably abducted, and Teemu has gathered them up to rescue them. Also a rumor that an imposter is going to show up. Moonbeam plants some counter-rumors with a compulsion to spread them. The soldiers are hoping that this is a rescue mission and that the princess will be there and shower her with gold for rescuing them.
Moonbeam then tries some of the lesser mages to see what they think. Quite a few of them are harboring their own suspicions about Teemu's actual plans and in general they're mostly approving of the idea. Moonbeam plants the idea that they feel like Louhi is scrying on them in some fashion in some of them, and the idea that Louhi may have more powers than she's shown, so are they really backing the right one?
Moonbeam audits the senior officers' thoughts and finds many of them are anticipating the perks of senior officers in a coup - gold and the pick of the loot and slaves if they get to sack a city. She's disgusted. A few officers are aware that there's a general who pointedly refused to join Teemu, and has been retired for sometime. This is the guy who's the reason that Teredor only took a small slice of Aerodon last war. He turned down the last two offers of a job he'd been given - and was offered lavish pay on one of those occasions. They're also nervous because he's popular with the common troops.
When Moonbeam gets back with her news, we ask about this famous general. Louhi hasn't met him, and he probably wouldn't know her by sight, but...it's worth a shot.
When we reach the general's house, his first question is, “What army do you have? We indicate that we're it. He comments that we're not doing a very good job selling or position. Aqila comments, “would you rather we lied?' and Joe asks if he wants a demonstration of competence. The general says no and no. Joe comments that we're hoping this won't come to a fight. The general states that it will, but the question is who will be fighting. The general asked who the opposition’s general is. We tell him. “So, young Jarmo is the best he could get? You probably won't need my help, but I'd rather that idiot got as few soldiers killed as possible.”
We mention that the army hasn't been moving as fast as it could be. He asks how fast. 2-3 days to cover what they should in 1. He'd have expected a week. We comment that we can arrange for some obstacles to slow them down further. Snow, sleet, fog, etc...He suspects that Jarmo wouldn't have remembered anything that wasn't weapons and army...'I wonder if they have shovels.'
We have recruited General Mauri. On the recruiting noble’s front, we're getting mixed results. Mauri is willing to help with recruiting armies, but helping with the nobles would backfire. We keep at it, and with one day's work, we almost have a quorum of nobles, after browbeating the nobles in the dungeon who haven't been stripped of their titles yet. Only some of them are willing to sign a petition supporting Louhi...others would be once the coronation has started. And others would sign on if we could neutralize the opposing army. Joe uses control weather to turn the rain to sleet, which has a heavy fog roll in.
So on Day 2, the army is basically stuck and some desertions start happening. The archmages are expending considerable effort to ensure that their tents and the senior officers tents are in clear patches. This doesn't help with their popularity with the troops. Being able to show that the army is sitting tight gets us to quorum. The coronation will take place in 3 days. The ceremony will take that long to set up, and Louhi insists that the formalities must be observed here.
The assassins are less twitchy about their lady being in danger now. And General Mauri is of the opinion that he wouldn't have tried to move the army through the snow - at least two of those archmages ought to know teleport circle. Also, his first response would have been to recognize that this was a magical assault and go hunting for the spellcaster. He also would have been reasonable sure that he had more overall magical power in hand than the opposition (us). He'll concede that individually we're probably a match for any one of Teemu's archmages, but he isn't sure the lot of us together can in a straight up fight take all of them. Mauri also thinks that we're unlikely to get any of the other archmages to join Louhi's side - he's met some of them. Their attitude is basically 'we'll serve whoever wins, otherwise we'll stay out of it.'.
We keep the lid on things for the next 3 days. Joe continues recruiting to get lagging nobles to join in. We do hear a rumor that Prince Juho has gone to sea, sailing for the Dragon Confederation. He's on a Dragon Ship. A proclamation that Juho left behind is also found, to the effect that, in the event Teemu is crowned, that Teemu is illegitimate, killed the princess, and for loyal citizens to resist his rule until Juho comes back with allies to free the land from Teemu. Louhi is reasonably confident that that proclamation will get out, at some point. There are also rumors that Prince Aimo was assassinated. (he was scooped up by some of Queen Ansa's minor priestess's to be sat on until they know whether the ceremony succeeded or not. If it failed, they need someone from the correct bloodline to get a new vessel for the next attempt. And with Zeleya gone, they can't get new spells burned into them.)
We have in total 5 days before the coronation. The ceremony goes off without a hitch. We are now officially hired, and the coronation decrees are proclaimed, starting with the traditional pardoning of minor crimes. Petty thieves, etc. Next, formally outlawing Zeleya's temples with an additional edict that anyone convicted of being one of her priests is now under the sentence of death. The final decree 'in light of the consistent and persistence failures of our predecessors in prosecuting wars against Teredor, we will seek to settle our differences and regularize our relations with that nation.'
(By custom, she was limited to three coronation decrees, and nobles do not dispute them. They will still try to find ways around it, but not publically).
Next step is to make a general announcement to the army of the coronation plus the proclamation's text. Shortly after that, we can see several fights break out in the camp, on the level of fist fights, not weapons. A day later, a delegation headed by 3 archmages shows up. They essentially repeating the story they'd been told, that Louhi had been kidnapped, and replaced with an impostor, and if they could be assured that she's really her, they'll serve her. We also hear from them that Prince Teemu disappeared during the confusion, along with two of their fellow archmages. They don't know if they left together or separately. The 6th will have quietly returned to his estates when they get back. The last guy hasn't decided what to do yet.
We ask where General Jarmo went - apparently he disappeared too, along with a high ranking priest. Afterwards, quietly, one of them approaches Aqila and tells her he thinks he knowns why the general disappeared, handing her a hefty ledger. On investigating, the army was twice as big on paper, and he was collecting the excess. He'd gotten a pardon from Teemu contingent on his taking the throne. It's not a capital crime, but grounds for dismissal and repayment. He'd only been cooking the books for a year, so he'd 'only' stolen about 10,000 gold. Mauri’s opinion is that Jarmo's skill in embezzlement was on par with his generalship. If he'd faked fewer soldiers, he wouldn't have needed to pay so many bribes, and gotten about the same profit with less consequences.
Louhi doesn't need us to look for Jarmo, she'll just publish an proclamation of exile and he can look over his shoulder until someone scoops him up. She does want to know where Teemu and the two archmages went to, and if they're together. Scrying doesn't turn them up. (the priests and mages who vamoosed had habits that Louhi would strongly disprove of. Beating of inferiors and so on)
So we pause here. Aqila drops off her latest adventure report in Arandor for the archives. She gets a simple warning that in about a week's time, we need to make sure we will be available on very short notice. We are also instructed to bring Louhi up to date on certain items with a note that she probably already knows. It's a list of things that the Sentinel is doing in general terms. We do know that the strike for the Maelstrom is coming soon, and there won't be much notice when it starts. Sometime in a week to three.
All the items from the Veiled Order Citadel are available now. The contract for the Weird has been deciphered, and we can release it if we want to. We'll have to fight it until it is released, and we can't kill or incapacitate it if we want it to work.

Plot thread that never got picked up - sitting around as a potential short one-shot for some hypothetical time part of the group can't make a game day for the currently running campaign.




Picking up where we left off. Louhi has been crowned, and we have jobs for the foreseeable future in her queendom. But first, there's the little matter that the Sentinel is going to need us for something within the next week...
Since Aqila is taking over as Court Mage from the stooge of the previous queen who tried to kill Louhi, she gets dibs on the lands and facilities associated with the position, and the party too, but it's not much. A townhouse, a library and a lab. It takes about a day to disarm all the traps and make sure it's cleaned out. That's done mostly by Dagnar with Aqila studying in the library and standing by in case he needs heals, disenchantments, or otherwise cured of undodged trap effects. Moonbeam and Joe also took some study time.
We give Louhi the heads-up that we're going to be taking scheduled leave sometime in the next 1-3 weeks. She's well aware that we will be required to be elsewhere at times and only requests that we let her know if and when we can.
We're not getting paid yet by the crown of Aerodon because, traditionally, court employees are 'paid' by being exempt from Aerodonese taxes. Which aren't income based, incidentally but based on living in the country and owning property in Aerodon. So it's more like we don't have to pay anyone to work for Louhi now.
Anyway, it's 4 days after the coronation when the call comes to return to Arandor. It's about noon when we return to the Citadel of Valanas. We finish up any unfinished shopping while we're waiting for the briefing on what we’re needed for. One of the errands we finish is giving Sneezil his hammer. He does a happy dance, then tells us that 'He may have to go away soon'. (OOC note, as Sneezil was made from part of a planar lord, technically he owns that plane.) We ask him if he'll come back. He thinks he will, but he doesn't know if we'll still be here.
The main briefing is a definite event, because it's pretty much the entire Sentinel order in one room. Around two thousand strong at this point. We're told that Mirarn and Kalya will be attempting the close the Maelstrom. The first step is letting the Final Weapon be completed. And it must not die until the Maelstrom is closed. Valrim and Elenmire's task will be to distract it and ideally keep it in the Maelstrom so it doesn't rampage through the world until the Maelstrom is closed. (note, the Tarrasque is the shell of the final weapon. Completing it means letting the demon lord that was bound to it when it was created enter the shell and empower it. And if it is completed, then killed before the Maelstrom is closed, the world goes boom. No pressure on Mirarn and Kalya’s kids or anything…)
The plan is, Mirarn and Kalya will be working to close the Maelstrom. They will be guarded directly by every surviving allied Atenil. They will be surrounded by an inner ring of defenders, whose job will be trying to stop everything that reaches them cold. There are multiple paths through the Maelstrom, and each path needs guarded. A middle ring further out from the center will try to stop everything they can...high level threats will be let through for the inner ring to smash, but they'll try to weed out all the distractions for the inner ring. The outer ring will try to keep the local wildlife from causing trouble, and smack down targets of opportunity among the Enemy's forces.
The inner ring will be composed of high level Agents, mainly Swords. Our group will be in the inner ring since that describes us to a T. The middle ring will be the rest of Agents of sufficient power to survive there, or basically the entirety of the Shield, Eye, Book, and low level Swords, excepting only those who aren’t really combat-capable…pure researchers or artificer-specialists for example. The outer ring will be most of the population of Arandor over 6th level who are combat effective, lightly salted with retired Sentinel agents who survived their tour of duty. Arandor's mostly going to be manned by children, mothers of infants, those with disqualifying disabilities and the hopelessly noncombatant for the duration of the crisis.
We’re told that there has been some communications from The Enemy, who has his own completed staff. In some ways, the Pact will be temporarily suspended. Some of the Enemy's more powerful agents will be allowed to attack us, when they normally won't be. The most powerful just won't attack first. Also, importantly, attacking one of them inside the Maelstrom will not remove the Pact's protection outside the Maelstrom. i.e. if we get a chance to take pot-shots at Eleduath, she won’t be allowed to nuke us later if we all survive the experience. Of course, he proposed this bargain thinking that he’d be there first, and we’d have to attack him.
We’re also specifically told that this will be the best opportunity any of us will ever have to take out some of the Enemy's forces, because they'll be weakened there in ways we won't. So more incentive to try our best to nail every one of them we can while the opportunity exists so they won’t be around to cause trouble in the aftermath.
We're all given a general outline of the plan of defense, and warned that closing the Maelstrom will take at least one day, at a minimum. They are reasonably confident that the Enemy won't start attacking with his strongest servants, but once he knows what Mirarn and Kalya are up to, he's likely to commit to an all-out attack with all his strongest forces, including himself. We're warned that if he's willing to risk enough, even if we manage to kill him, he can return in seconds. If he's playing it safe, it'll be a day at least. And if he does show up, it'll be at the last second, so even a small delay may be enough. His appearance means it’s win or die time, basically.
The next piece of information we’re given is that the environment will disrupt summons in some way...may strengthen or weaken spells in general. Teleportation is dangerous, unless it's short range. Physically walking around is safer, but there's a risk when walking between planar interfaces - if it collapses as you're passing through, you may die. And an interface can collapse in seconds to centuries. Average duration is 6-7 days.
"There will also be denizens of the planes that will come to investigate. We hope that they will stay neutral, and we would prefer that you convince them to leave, but if they will not be dissuaded, drive them off. (main reason - the effects of what Mirarn and Kalya are doing are liable to drive any extra-planar denizens irredeemably insane). "You will all be issued an item to hold a planar interface stable, but if it tries to go unstable while you're using the device, the wielder will take backlash until they stop using it, and the interface will collapse immediately. Also, some of these fragments do contain ethereal mirrors." (IE don't assume you're safe from ethereal effects.) We can probably buy off smarter denizens with magic items, and dumber ones with shiny things. We make a mental note to see how much costume jewelry we can round up in short order...Aerodon probably has a good bit floating around right now, post-coronation.
Plane shift is insanely dangerous, worse than teleporting. The Enemy's greater servants will likely be trying to conserve their strength for what they will find in the center of the Maelstrom. This could mean restricting themselves to weaker abilities, or going all out to kill you as quickly as possible.
After the briefing, we overhear a senior agent warning a group of juniors about the 'Ghost Raptors'. He sees us listening, and tells us, “oh, they won't be that dangerous for you. They're one of the things created by the chaos over there, and they're always getting into the Maelstrom. The only thing to watch out for is they tend to spin off ghostly projections of themselves so if you see a bunch of ghostly lizards, look around for the main one. They don't last long, maybe a minute, those projections, so they aren't dangerous to you, but they're a nuisance and they could be a fatal distraction."
The party starts tomorrow. So we have a few hours to find some trade goods. Jewels, fruit, chocolate, that sort of thing. Plus useful consumable like hero's feasts or restful candles. Moonbeam offers the use of her candle that gives everyone maximized spells for the next 24 hours. Aqila does the costume jewelry run to Aerodon and warns Louhi that we're going to be going to the End Of The World As We Know It and we'll see her on the other side. Joe rounds up foodstuffs and some livestock for the hell of it. Plus some puppies and kittens on the off chance someone wants a friend. Moonbeam really really is hoping anyone who wants one actually wants it for a friend, not for a snack. Joe collects some other exotic 'pets' for trade goods. We don't want to know what. He also collects some pests in case someone would be entertained by unleashing a plague of something on an irritating neighbor, to cover all the bases.
We make sure we get a good night's sleep, then it's time to get into position. Each group of us in the inner ring is linked to one of the diviners monitoring the situation. They'll be watching for attacks and we'll be sent to intercept. They'll give us their best estimate of the strength of the opponent, so if it's something one of us can handle alone, we can split the party so the rest of us are available to intercept a different attack. Each diviner is generally hanging out with the weakest group of the groups they're directing so the stronger groups can target the threats. But if something's going for an attack directly on a diviner, we probably want to quash it. We are most definitely not one of the weaker groups, and will probably be the primary quick reaction force for our sector, because we have a Moonbeam.
Specifically, Moonbeam spent some time last night summoning a pile of Phantom Stags, so as many diviners as possible can be mounted in case they need to run for it, plus mounts for us so we can get repositioned in a hurry. Aqila suggests that getting some of the strongest healers in the middle and outer rings mounted too might be the difference between survival and death in some situations.
Break here to finalize what we want to have on hand for bribes, consumables and so on, before the real fun starts next session.

Into the final stretch - all remaining sessions were on this event.

Terane
2020-06-24, 11:01 AM
Opening with the briefing on major servants the Enemy may send in.
“Duraln is known to be active. He's one of the weakest spellcasters among the greater servants (so lvl17ish). Devastating melee combatant. The two likely to show up early are, from the enemy's perspective, to be mistakes, as they aren't particularly useful. Fenire may not be active right now- his interests lie in pyromancy. If he can do it with fire magic, assume he can do it better than anyone you've ever heard of. He shows no inclination to use any other forms of magic,though he probably knows them. Helluin is known to be currently active and is of a similar bent, but with cold spells. Kentaliel is active, but we think it unlikely that she'll show up for this battle because she's not a combatant..she's an organizers, an administrator, and a skilled manipulator.”
“Lesheira is known to be active and physically the closest of his greater servants to the Maelstrom. We know she is currently based in Chalisce and may be the first to appear. She is known as the Fate-weaver. She is able to alter probability, but outside of that she's relatively weak. Possibly the weakest of all the greater servants. Nethran we believe is active but have not been able to confirm. He may show up early, because he's based in Larethin, if we're right on his activities. His specialty is corrupting spellcasters. Relia is known to have been in Aerodon, but she has disappeared lately. Probably because her candidate for the throne has been thoroughly discredited (Imo - the fat one). Her area of talent is in seduction. She’s likely also not going to be of any great impact in the battle.”
“Tyelene is also known to be active. She's the 2nd strongest of the greater servants and the Enemy's chief torturer. Be prepared for agonizingly painful spells.” We are. “Vaniras is most likely not active, though he may be called out in a great hurry if the Enemy deems it worthwhile.” Someone asks what the disincentive is? “In his case, he is extremely unstable. Vaniras is the Enemy's hunter. If he has a worthy quarry to hunt, he can be kept reasonably functional. If he doesn't, he becomes seriously unstable, to the point of jeopardizing the pact. For the others, he will hesitate to commit them, because, if a servant is killed, it takes a while for them to come back, and, from his perspective, if he throws too many of them into this battle, he runs the risk of losing control over one or more of them. Crezanthk is known to be active, as he always is, but, as an arch-devil, he is unlikely to be effective at all in the Maelstrom, so it is unlikely to be committed to this battle.”
“And finally, Saralis is known to be active, and the most dangerous of all of them. (we met him in Brighthaven, giving orders to Duraln, ordering us to hand over the scepter). If you can survive his initial assault, it is likely that you will at least survive the confrontation with him. Bear in mind that failure to survive will be eternally lethal. He is not called 'The Soul-Devourer' for nothing. (last breath wouldn't help). Death ward may provide some protection but this has never been rigorously tested. However, unleashing this assault weakens him for a time if it fails. If it succeeds, it will strengthen him instead. His known record is 11 at once.”
“Certain powers may be able to withstand the assault. There's an unconfirmed story of a paladin drawing the entire assault down on himself, but the paladin did not survive, and neither did anyone else, at least in their right mind. The lone survivor was rather incoherent in his account, which is why it is unconfirmed. The assault cannot be carried across planar boundaries, but then, not much can. We suspect he is the one least likely to be committed because he's the one most likely to break free, and the one most likely to be a threat to the Enemy if he does.” (Saralis is the only servant that's a pure-blood Atenil, and he was the Enemy's 2nd in command for the entire Gods’ war, so he remembers it well)
(OOC, if Saralis shows up, Sneezil will come help us. This is not good for him, because he'll also be affected by the planar effects)
That was the briefing before we got into position. The first hour goes by without anything getting to us. We get notified of a small group that snuck past the first two rings, that looks to be made up of half a dozen fighters and one competent mage. They didn't sneak past - they had 4x those numbers when they started. Unfortunately, the best place to intercept is going to be in a wild magic plane. There may be a small possibility of more serious effects, but the most likely side effects from casting there would be things like changing hair color. Foresight might warn you of bad effects, but don't count on it. The sliver is only 40' at its widest. Also, prepare to handle a dead magic zone...in about two hours, the planes will shift so the one interception point for the nearest good path will be in one. We can hope one of the greater servants takes that path then, because you'll have a good chance of taking them out.

I had a fairly complex set of tables for randomly generating the sliver layouts relevant to each fight - using both a set of detailed pre-designed planes, and a set of rules for generating new ones on the fly. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find them anymore - they appear to have gone missing some time over the past couple of years. I will note that the party ended up seeing just about all of the pre-designed planes show up in possible battlegrounds, though they didn't visit all of them.

The sliver has 6 interfaces. We know which one this group is coming through. You can't see through an interface. Aqila casts a Prismatic wall to block the interface. The random effect is 11 tiny gems raining around the portal. They're planar stuff, too, so they'll stop existing outside this sliver. The first 5 all die to poison. 6/6 is insane, and gets blasted to a random spot in the Maelstrom. The mage comes through last and gets a bit toasted, then stoned. That was easy. We return to our waiting spot.
Aqila resumes napping on her mount. 40 minutes later. "We've got a pretty good delegation of demons coming in. We don't know if the Enemy has decided to throw them away, or if they are coming to investigate on their own. It looks like a dozen assorted creatures, and we're not entirely sure what they are. A full-up Balor is leading them. Your best choice for an intercept, since we want to keep them as far away from the center as possible, is extremely strongly evil aligned. Probably noticeable amounts of hellfire. It won't help them as much as a devil, but it won't be pleasant for you. Good news is, if you have to fight them, they won't be thinking as clearly as they would otherwise, this far in. Expect more brute force solutions - a lot of these are powerful demons, so they'd normally be subtle. If you can convince them to leave without fighting, that'd be preferable, but we don't want them coming further in.”
“The other bad news is this is one of the larger slivers, and we don't think you can get there before they get there. You should be able to arrive while they're looking for the exit. It's unusually small for this size of sliver, which means they could block it if they think of it, and the largest of them might not fit through it, but we can't be sure at this distance.” We discuss on the way how to handle this. We could just attack, but there might be a slim chance of convincing them to leave.
We ask them what is so valuable that they'd risk losing their minds in here. The boss, an advanced Balor, answers, 'What is more valuable than power?' Then continues, 'I feel the storm shifting. Either it will be controlled or it will cease. Either way, there will be scraps of power for those who are near.' We point out that he's going to go nuts before then. He's planning on using his meatshields to shield his own mind, and the three Balors are fine with this plan. There're 7 other demons with him, that are the 'cattle' referred to. They don't seem to be concerned with the situation either.
Aqila tries to get them to believe that they've got a day before there would be scraps...it's the truth, even, but they really don't want to believe her. Joe gets them to consider the idea that they might be going mad already, so now they're willing to be bribed to leave. The boss would prefer to be paid in our essence, in quantity. So, we first try the handcuffs from Zeleya...he considers those tokens for his subordinates. The cursed dagger from Nayden is also considered a token. Moonbeam and Jon offer booze and weed. Then, as a capper, the rod that looks like a rod of Annihilation, and really isn't. The boss wants to be sure it's what it appears to be. Joe bluffs that we're sure. So, we buy them off with schmuck bait and weed. We keep the handcuffs and dagger for more bribes later. They leave.
We return to the planar sliver that we've been using as our base. Our diviner comments that that was neatly done when we get back. Half an hour later, we are told “This is peculiar...it looks like some sort of very weird creature...we've got someone doing a record search now to find anything like this. I'm guessing it's some sort of crap the Ancients came up with that's not widely known. 4 Golems, 2 of them decidedly large, and a couple of ...oozes? I honestly have no idea what purpose they could be serving. There's some sort of interference around them...I think the golems have some sort of spell disruption effect on them. If I'm right, you shouldn't be hurt if you can stay far enough away. We'll try to find a place to intercept them with that much room. 80-100 feet may be enough room, but we're mostly finding small slivers and good interception spots.”
“The good news is they're moving slowly...we don't think you can get to either before they arrive, but you should get there before they leave. The other is maybe 80 feet. The larger one is just dirt and rock. The other...I can't believe what I'm seeing. It looks like a giant slab of diamond. You know, academically, that planarchs can do whatever they want, but seeing it…. This is rather tame. I don't even want to think about what whoever did the lava and ice sculptures had to do to make that work. For that matter, I'm not sure why that thing's still stable....anyway...” Joe asks about the spell disruption effect..they can tell something like that is there, but it's disrupting their ability to keep an eye on them.
There's a 50-50 chance of catching the group in the bigger room, because it's on 1 of the 2 routes they could take. The definite room, they'll have to go through. And there's only a 30% chance to get from the bigger room to the smaller room in time if they don't take the route through the big room. There's a more direct route, but only a 20% chance of it staying stable. And any points to intercept past there, there's one poor chance of getting them in a big room, and better chances in small slivers where we'd be forced into melee.
The unstable route has just one point where it may close. So the plan is for Aqila to park there and hold the door, if they take the other route, so we can get to the guaranteed interception point before they do. She shapechanges into an ape form so Thoron can give her extra HPs. That will let her withstand holding the unstable point open for longer.
As the rest of the party nears the large plane, the diviner contacts them with, “We think we have a better fix on them. You're going to be able catch them in the larger plane, but they'll be almost right on top of the portal you'll be entering. But, you're coming in from a larger plane to begin with...they could have picked another route, but we now know where they're going. So the party sets up to ambush the golems et al, and the diviner tells Aqila she can stand down and go help. It'll take her about two minutes to get there.
Moonbeam casts reverse gravity by the portal as a trap. It takes them two minutes to show up, so Aqila gets there just as they come in. Moonbeam spends the rest of the time casting earthquake repeatedly to really screw up the terrain. The golems and blobs come through and start rising into the air, then something shifts and they drop down. Thoron can see the effect now - it was 'spell impedance' effect with 100' radius when they came through, and then shifted to antimagic field mode. Same radius, and stayed that way. We’ve never had to deal with this sort of thing before, that range of that spell, at least.
The golems are 2 small iron, 1 large iron, and one large stone. The oozes are almost transparent, slowly flowing blobs. They aren't impeded by the terrain. The golems are definitely slowed, though. The weird creature behind them comes through. It's vaguely humanoid with very long arms and a mass of waving tentacles coming out of its back. The tentacles seem to be pointing to one or another of the golems. It looks fairly frail.
We have basically no way to hurt them, so we decide to avalanche them, which blocks line of effect, then Joe uses control winds to shape the snow into a neat pile so Moonbeam can cover it with walls of stone. After a few minutes, we're told that this group must have jumped the gun, because more groups of the same composition are coming in from all points. He's relaying our tactics to the other groups, because they're guessing these are distractions and delayers so the real attacks can slip through. We don't have time to come help, but need to stay ready for whatever the real attack is. Ten minutes later....
“Well, someone in the enemy's ranks is going to get a stern talking to. Though, if our other teams had tried fighting them conventionally, they might have gotten by. There were three groups led by three Greater Servants. One is Helluin, the other two are a male and a female...the female is the one you can intercept...best guess is that it's Lesheira. She's got a handful of things escorting her. Very strongly recommend you have fire immunity up if you don't right now. She's got some of the Ancient's odder war machines with her. She also has a more powerful than average Nightmare as a mount. Cold spells should take them out fairly quickly, but she's got some of the old inferno-blasters too. They spit intensely strong lines of fire. Immunities should at least blunt the effect.”
The diviner continues, “Looks like she's got an assortment of things on the same theme, plus a few fire spirits...not outsiders, but we're not sure what they are precisely, just that they aren't getting scrambled. Options for intercept....there are three planes in a chain, but none are particularly great for fighting in. One is dead, one is intensely fire aligned, making your best spells against her escort useless, and the third one is highly unpredictable...with any other servant, it wouldn't be as bad a choice, but with her…”
We discuss how to handle this. The best plan we have right now is block Lesheira into the dead plane and force her to find another path with, we hope, a better ambush spot. The fire plane is unearthly fire, molten and even gaseous rock...frostfell around the portal cools it enough to have the rock stay solidish so Moonbeam can shape it over the portal. This works out reasonably well. It'll take Lesheira at least half an hour to find another route.
Once she does, we're told “I'm not sure if this is strictly better...we've got fairly good points. One's only probable, but it’s at the fork, and there's a strongly good aligned plane, with the other route is impeded magic. The other option is a chain of 5 tiny planelets. We suspect you'd end up with a running battle through them. The first in the chain is another dead magic plane, then some form of wild magic...different from the other plane and not similar enough to any we've seen to be sure what it'll do to your spells. Third is, oddly, the result of two planes smooshed together that were distinctly opposed. It's reading as earth and air, which means it should be noticeable unstable, but doesn't seem to be. That might mean someone is holding it stable, so that's concerning. It's not something that should stay stable naturally. Fourth may not be entirely safe...extremely strong positive energy plane. (healing and overhealing too far will make you explode). The 5th seems to have no unusual traits, which makes us very suspicious because there are no normal planes in the Maelstrom.
We go to the impeded magic plane on the assumption that she won’t want to go to the strongly good plane. It's one of the more sculpted slivers around. It looks like it was an earth plane originally...it's like a cavern with the sides sliced away. The floor and ceiling are stone, the sides are planar boundaries, looking like walls of force. Aka invisible, with void on the other side. We're warned that the walls may be dangerous to touch here. Perhaps not instantly fatal, but painful. (note, the properties of a plane can be more easily seen when we're in the plane physically). This is a 500' long cavern, and it's still 120' wide. It's narrowing at the points the portals are at, so it was probably close to '500 in diameter to begin with, with an '80 ft ceiling.
We craft a wall of stone sandwich with prismatic wall filling over the portal in and wait. “By the way, as a warning, you'll want to be careful leaving after this fight. The Tarrasque is heading this way. We don't think it will come into the plane you're on, but...”
We hang out 40' up and Joe prepares to cast Tsunami when they're in. We can hear them start working the stone over. It disintegrates. A minion tries to come through next. It's turned to stone and disintegrates. The next minion goes insane and is banished. The 3rd is a firesnake and goes insane without being banished. After she kills her minion, the next one survives and can tell her what happened to it, sort of. Now she knows what she's up against. She's decided this is too dangerous. As a note, she's on a water plane right now, and it's a big plane.
The diviner relays to us, “I think you made her angry. And also, some good news, in a way. It's not Lesheira. I'd like to know how she was close enough to get here this early. It's Relia.” She's not far enough away from the portal for us to get through. She's sent her minions back and cast prismatic sphere around herself while she's working to take down Aqila's wall. And she knows there's a 2nd wall of stone. We see the 2nd wall disintegrate, so Aqila puts a 2nd wall up. Another minion comes through and gets disintegrated. She takes that wall down. We are giggling now, and grease the area around the portal, then put a 3rd wall up a couple of feet farther from the portal. Relia sends one of the multi-legged fire-spewers through this time. It hits the grease, then hits the wall. And survives the trip, so she thinks that the wall is really down and comes through with the rest of her minions.
When the dust settles, there is a fire spewer, a firespirit, Relia, and her Nightmare steed on the field. Joe has control winds going and an evil grin on his face. We roll initiatives. The firespirit gets a trip back through the wall. It fails 4 saves...fire and poison immune, but takes cold and electricity damage. It's got like 5 HP left, so it's outta the fight. Dagnar's up first. Given we want to save our strength, Dagnar casts slow. Relia makes her save, but her mount and servant don't. Then it's Relia who starts by casting a mass dispel, which Thoron counters. Then she's really pissed, so she does a trick that will make her lose her next turn and blows a pile of limited use stuff, though we don’t know that in character. She throws three spell rips at the party, hitting Joe and Aqila. Moonbeam's protected by a counterspell by Thoron. All our buffs are stripped, and permanent spells are suppressed for a minute per caster level. We lose contingency spells. Then Relia follows up with a disintegrate, and Aqila doesn't make her save. She's dead, unless someone can last breath her, like now.
Joe fails his save too, but he 'only' takes 140 damage and survives. It's now his turn. 5 round time stop. Step 1 - shape change. Step 2 - rebuff what he can. Then he casts deadfall on the baddies, and the fire spewer dies. The nightmare and Relia are knocked prone. He tries a baleful polymorph but it fails. Moonbeam's turn. Timestop. She casts a reach Last Breath on Aqila, who is now not-dead and at -1 hps. Moonbeam can cast delayed flamestrike...so delayed, reverberating, empowered flamestrike, then force flavor and cold flavor to properly express her irritation with what happened to the mage. Relia makes her saves on the sonic and cold. Fails on the force. Relia is overkilled by 112. The nightmare is now a thin film of paste. The fire sprite tries to come back through the wall. It becomes a nice statue and disintegrates.
Moonbeam finishes her turn by healing Aqila. Aqila comments on regaining consciousness, “That wasn't any fun. Let's not do it again”. Joe recommends directing her complaints to God. We examine the corpse. Her formerly concealing robes now appear diaphanous. And more hole than cloth. The only not destroyed things on her person are a black crystal and a metamagic rod that does double-extends. The diviner starts yelling at us to destroy the crystal. It's a link back to the Enemy. So he knows everything we've just done. Yay. We're warned to get well back and physically smash it. A little stone-shaping, shapechanging and a wall of force later, it's pulverized.
We're updated on the situation - the unknown male has been ID'd as Duraln. He wasn't expected to come in this early.

The Enemy was annoyed with Relia for looking stupid in her failure, and seriously annoyed with Duraln, who was in charge of organizing this attack. He screwed up the timing by sending the first group of golems in too early, which gave the party a chance to work out a strategy that the other reaction groups could use to take them out of the fight and get it passed on in time for them to use it. So he came in in person to try to salvage things. If he dies, at least he doesn't have to get yelled at, for a while anyway.

Terane
2020-06-26, 10:13 AM
We head back to our base sliver, getting updates about the current situation from our usual diviner contact as we go. The group that Helluin hit lost two people, but they stopped him. Duraln was also stopped, but they had to throw a 2nd group in to do it. Between the survivors of both groups, they have enough people to put a solid team back together, but they aren't used to working together. So, there are going to be some redeployments among the groups in the inner ring...the 2nd roving group in our sector is being shifted over to the sector that got mauled. They're looking at getting another group deployed to our sector from a lower threat area, but they'll be one of the less capable groups, since that’s what would have been deployed to the lower threat areas in the first place. In the meantime, it’ll be just us to intercept anything in our sector, plus the group guarding our diviners.
There is some good news to go along with this...they have a source of news directly from the Enemy's camp. The bad news is that the Enemy has arrived in person, but at least he is staying outside the Maelstrom for now. The other news is that the Enemy has ordered a standdown in general attacks for now. He wants to make sure he has a suitable hammer in place first before the next major assault. Probing attacks will continue to try to determine where the weak spots are in the inner ring. We contemplate pretending to be a weak point to draw in the stronger attacks, but aren't sure that's a good idea or possible.
We get back to ‘our’ sliver, rebuff, reprepare spells, and Aqila at least settles in to take a nap in the saddle until the screaming starts again. About half an hour later, we all have to make a will save. Dagnar rolls a 1. He takes 4 points of damage. The rest of us make it. A fairly visible ripple of energy washes through the sliver we're in. We're told that everyone in the Maelstrom is reporting seeing this, and the scryers are certain this is not a natural occurrence. Speculation is that it's some sort of novel attack from the Enemy, or it could be caused by the process of closing the Maelstrom.
Aqila tries to go back to sleep, but a few minutes we get told, "We have something weird coming in. I have no idea what this thing is. It looks like some sort of incorporeal creature with a glowing shard in its core.” Joe gets a funny look on his face, and asks, “What color is that shard again?!?” We're told that it's a weird bluish color, and that the shard is about the size of a fist. We're all now wondering if it's a Mad God shard, given that we saw a sizable one about a month ago. The diviner’s reaction to our suspicions is, “Well, if it is related to the Mad God, it needs to be intercepted before it gets to the center, but you'll want to learn as much as you can about it before engaging.” Good advice that.
Then we get told, “We've got one down! One of our team has been driven mad trying to divine around that thing. We don't know if it's safe to contact other planes with it in the vicinity!” They have the victim sedated right now - Heal didn't fix their condition. We contemplate seeing if we can help, but they're 15 minutes from our position. There won’t be time to go to their base and intercept the interloper.
We’re told, “The first safe intercept point is in a dead magic zone, that he'll be hitting in about 10 minutes. The next possible point is a strongly chaos aligned fragment, which isn't a good idea if it is a Mad God shard. There's a good chance he'll take a specific exit from that sliver though. One exit is strongly good aligned, and the other exit is...” We hear him break out laughing. “Fortunately for you, it's just a fragment of that plane, assuming the whole thing had the whole structure that that looks like...I don't want to think about trying to guide you through something like that. I don't suppose any of you have taken the 3rd level course in incomprehensible planar architecture have you? This looks like a piece of the exemplar plane for that course. The inhabitants don't know where it came from; they just live there. It is one that the Dread have access to, though not complete access or they'd have absorbed it already. The thing everyone gets hung up is the doors - no door in that place connects to the same room from both sides.”
Joe asks what happens if you tried to use a antimagic field on one of the doors in there. “We don't know...the only person we know of who tried never left the plane. He just disappeared. This sliver looks like just a hallway and a room with a portal at the far end of the hallway and the other one, that you’ll come in at, is in the middle of the room, so you don't have to deal with any incomprehensible geometry here.”
We decided that making our own dead magic zone via the Dreadnaught would be more useful than using the existing dead magic sliver, so we head for that fragment of the incomprehensible geometry plane. We arrange ourselves in the room, and look down the hallway to where the other entrance is to estimate what we have to work with as far as room to set up traps and impediments.
Before setting up traps, Aqila casts shapechange, and assumes the form of a Water Weird to inquire of other planes if a shard of the Mad God is approaching our position. The answer is 'Yes'. She asks if it will be inhibited by an antimagic field. The answer is 'Yes'. She asks if it is vulnerable to sonic damage. The answer is 'no'. On asking if it is vulnerable to force damage, the answer is 'yes'. She then asks if it is capable of attacking our minds through the protection of mindblank. Yes. Through the protection of being a construct or undead. 'Yes'. Not what we wanted to hear. Aqila then asks if it is able to attack our minds while it is within an antimagic field. 'Somewhat'. The picture we’re getting here is less than good, but it took less than a minute to get that information.
We're then told that we have 1 minute before it reaches the dead magic zone on the other side of the portal, and since it's such a small sliver, we should expect it to come through to our sliver almost immediately. We're also told its rate of speed is ridiculously variable...sometimes it seems to be standing still, and others, moving faster than we can. (They're losing track of it and picking it back up again, in reality...it's actually moving at a constant rate). So, Aqila swaps to pit fiend form for the combat, waits for 30s, then casts in order, Maw of Chaos to fill the hallway with damage, then the druids leave a pile of force berries and an echo skull to watch, then she casts a Wall of Force just outside the area of effect of the Maw, and then a prismatic wall to block off as much as possible any spells that the Mad God shard could do.
Meanwhile, Joe also goes Water Weird and spams Vision for more info. He dredges up some vague legends of something that at least seems like this thing. He sees scenes of strange devastation. This thing shows up, and other monstrosities follow. Several of them, from what he sees, are equals of great infernal lords. He relays this to the diviner crew quickly. He also sees that it seems to warp spells cast by anyone fighting it. Mostly the spells seem to just not work. (note to self, Aqila needs to ask Joe if those monstrosities look like the statues in the temple we found later….)
He tries Vision again and sees more effects associated with the creature’s mere presence...spreading madness, people acting as if they were blind, paralysis, and death. He also gets to see one of them being destroyed...not how, but what. It explodes, and everyone within a huge radius seems to die from it. We may have to bail out into the unholy plane that’s on the other side of our door, but that’s a large plane with 11 exits and we'd be suffering from negative levels if we went there. (4 of them)
Thoron is being the Dreadnaught and projecting an antimagic cone down the hallway as the final piece of our ambush. Though the Echo Skull, Joe sees the Shard step through, and then we hear an annoyed but familiar voice state, “I should have expected this. You again!”. Having strong suspicions that this is the Mad God himself, Joe asks after Zeleya somewhat cheekily. Next we hear, “Well, first, I suppose, getting rid of this annoyance.” The Maw of Chaos winks out. Joe comments, “You could just go away. Save everyone some trouble” The reply is, “Well, I need some assurances first, that my world will not be destroyed.” Aqila checks to make sure we're on the same page. “We're trying to close the Maelstrom so that this bleeding wound in the world is closed. Does that endanger something you care about?”
We learn that Sakaneth - yes, it's really him, or at least a large shard of him - thinks that if we screw up closing the Malestrom, it will harm his interests. He’s come here to put a stop to this nonsense, it seems. Joe, at one point points out that if Sakaneth helps us instead, he could assure that we don't screw up and break his stuff, because we're kind of on the same side here, or at least he could stop the Enemy from interfering. He's not interested in doing that, though, unsurprisingly.
We point out that his choices are to let us keep going, or risk the Enemy coming in to take control of the Maelstrom and then he'd have to deal with someone with all that power and not his best interests in mind. He sneers at that, asserting that he, in all of his power, failed to control it, so he has no concerns of someone else succeeding, not even when we point out that they may know something that he doesn't. We are very carefully not mentioning the staff to him, lest he get tempted to go grab it and have another go at controlling the Maelstrom. That would be bad.
Eventually, we bring him to ask, “Let us say, for the sake of argument, that I choose to withdraw. What assurances do I have that you will succeed?” We take turns trying to talk him into not interfering, or perhaps helping, and eventually it seems to work.
“I suppose it could be entertaining to provide you with some small knowledge”. He mentions that that ripple was the first sign that the closing process is working, and was caused by a sliver collapsing. As the process proceeds, more ripples will happen as more slivers collapse, and the damage will increase with the size of the sliver that collapses. If we're lucky and there are only small slivers are in the area around the center, we might survive with only our skin flayed off our bones at the end, because the collapses will occur with increasing frequency. If a large sliver collapses, the continent may be destroyed.
He then mentions having servants in the area, and Moonbeam asks who they are, so we don't risk offending any of them. Joe comments that we rarely leave enough behind to be offended, which, leads to this comment: "Something you have in common with Pangwejahat. She rarely leaves enough of a mind behind to be offended either.” Moonbeam recognizes that as one of the names of the 3 great abyssal lords, aka the Mother of Madness. Joe asks if she's a relative. (she's one of his servants). This comment is duly ignored.
Aqila points out that as long as the Maelstrom exists, it's a bleeding wound on the plane that some moron could use to destroy the material plane for as long as it exists...closing it removes that risk permanently. Moonbeam makes hushing motions to shut her up before she says something too rude to the Mad God. Aqila mutters about the Veiled Order soto voce before piping down.
Sakaneth does decide that he has no reason to interfere right now, warning us that if he thinks we're failing, he will intervene. Joe comments that if he'd be nice enough to mention when something's going wrong, we'd have a better chance of not failing. Sakaneth allows that he might do that if he finds it amusing, and disappears.
The diviner crew got to listen in on the exchange and relayed the information to the archivist crew back home, and they believe the information he gave us is reliable. The diviners can see what slivers are near the center, and they'll need to see a few more ripples to get a better feel for how this works. They're fairly sure that the type of plane that is collapsing affects what the effect is. We ask if they think an antimagic field would protect against the effects. Not against all of them...the models predict that a dead zone collapsing would create an effect of a disjunction rippling through the Maelstrom, for example. That'd suck, yes.
We start heading back to our base camp as our contact comments, 'What I'd be most concerned about is if a strongly evil plane gets collapsed. The consequences of that, based on the models, are...ugly.” Joe asks if a magic circle against evil or consecrated ground would help. “It'd be like trying to turn a hurricane with a flyswatter,” is the response. Not completely useless, but the next thing to it, essentially.
Then the topic changes abruptly, before we even get back to our base sliver. “It seems you're getting all the weird stuff today. It looks like one of the probing attacks broke through.” He pauses, then continues, “It looks like some sort of golem, or seems to be. But it's fast...very fast, but other than that, it doesn't seem to have any sort of powers, just some vicious attacks.”
He pauses again, then. “That can't be an accident. That course it's taking is the worst possible one for you to intercept it. I have never seen so many dead magic planes connected to each other. We have a string of 6 of them. And the next best option we can find for you to have a chance of intercepting him looks like a fragment of the Abyss, but very concentrated. I expect, as badly as that's going to impede you, you may not be much better off there. (8 negative levels). There's another possible, but that's only if he takes the right route, and you won't be able to get to the other site if he goes the wrong way.”
“This looks like a scouted attack - they may be able to see you too.” We aren't happy, but it looks like the surest spot for the interception is the abyssal plane. And there are no other groups that could intercept it before us, so we can't find out if it can fly or not. This looks like a situation where Aqila may get to punch things, because we won't be able to cast anything over 5th level spells in there. She still has Shapechange up from doing the Water Weird thing, so she'll go in as a Solar. We ruminate over appropriate shapes for the party as we travel to the abyssal sliver.
We're told, “We can see two good places that you can fight it in the Abyssal plane.” Joe asks if there's anything else around. “Not that we can see, but in the time it would take for us to get this set up, something could get in from the outer ring. The gate he's going to come in from is in some sort of odd structure that looks sort of like a temple. The other, best possibility, before he has too many different routes to take, looks like outside the temple on the temple grounds. We'd advise against that because there are some odd structures around it that look reminiscent to some defensive structures that we've seen before.”
Joe asks if we can activate them to our benefit. “Not really. If they're what we've seen before, they'll act impartially against anything fighting on the grounds. We can't know what they'll do, but based on we've seen from similar ones, with the effects of the plane, they could take you out of the fight entirely. Inside the temple, unless they're mobile, you should be safe. Of course, if they are mobile, your best change may be to intercept it somewhere else on the plane. The problem is that it's fast enough that it may be able to outrun you.” “Even with phantom stags?” “Possibly yes. And if it can fly, most things can fly faster than walking, and if so, I don't want to think about how fast it could be. I'd dearly love to know what this thing is because it doesn't match any of our records. And while this does look like one of the Enemy's probing attacks, please try to be sure it is of the Enemy before destroying it - it could still be a third party.”
The sliver is about a mile across. It's one of the largest ones around. We don't get attacked walking into the temple. The portal is 20ft wide, and there are 3 statues behind it. One looks like a massive scorpion with too many claws. One looks like an octopus with too many tentacles and a giant shark mouth. The center one seems to be carved as a vaguely humanoid but indistinct figure. There is no altar, but there is a massive blasted spot in front of the statues, kind of under the portal. That makes us suspicous. Moonbeam thinks its safe to summon something small, as long as it's not good or lawful. Moonbeam gets a monkey out to go walk through the portal and come back. Nothing happens, so the statues don’t nuke things walking in from that direction. She also remembers that the two animalistic statues look like the described forms of the other two of the three Great Abyssal lords. Which would make the indistinct figure the Mother of Madness that no one has ever seen and lived to tell the tale, perchance?
Joe tries to Vision the past of the temple and has to make a will save when he tries, and succeeds. He sees the temple in a more repaired state, with fully intact walls and a major difference - a 2nd rank of three statues behind the three already there. Behind the scorpion is one that resembles a massively oversized rotting human form, about 12' tall. Behind the octopus is a similarly large massive figure with a number of smaller identical figures surrounding it. From the waist up it looks mostly human except with a mass of tentacles replacing each arm, but below the waist is just tentacles, and it has a horn in the middle of its forehead. The center statue is a giant serpent. Also, the altar is still present at that time and made of translucent blue stone.

There used to be 6 Great Abyssal Lords, but only 3 were around in Kaneth's day, and thus actually remembered. The other 3 can't take a physical form until Sakaneth comes back.

Meanwhile, back in the present-day temple….“It's getting close and we can say that they do have a similar set of divination spells running. It looks like they are less capable than ours, and we think they won't be able to see you until a creature they are tracking gets close. We're not sure yet how well they can track you after a creature they are tracking is out of the area.” We ask, “What if we cross a planar boundary?” “We won't know until they actually try it.”
We get ready for the incoming ‘fun’ - grease around the portal, web across the portal, solid fog in the area to obscure vision, and Wall of Thorns from Moonbeam's bracelet for added impediments. Aqila readies wall of force if it gets through that, and we lay down some sonic seeds to be triggered off if comes out. Joe gets some foresight twinges and then another ripple comes through. 27 chaos damage, half on a save. Dagnar fails. The rest of us make it. Presumably, a chaotic planar sliver of some sort just got collapsed.
The diviners let us know that this pulse was in line with both the original model, and the new model, and they'll need more data to know which one is more accurate. If the new model is right, the last few ripples as the Maelstrom closes won't be survivable. They've got everyone who's not combat-capable crunching numbers right now to determine which model is right. Also, because Joe asks, going into an extraplanar space not only will not protect us from the ripples, if we’d tried that for the last one, the damage would have killed us outright…eesh.
We all are hovering so Moonbeam can use Earthquake without friendly fire. Thoron sees the figure come through the portal, since he can see through solid fog. It looks like a mobile suit of armor, humanoid. It seems to be completely ignoring the web and the wall of thorns. And the grease. The fog does seem to be impeding it. Thoron quickly swaps to Weird to see if he can find a legend about this thing, now that he's seen it. He finds bupkis. Well, that's interesting.
Joe tries Guardian Archon to test it's alignment. It's so evil that a balor is less abhorrent, and Thoron can see a strong aura of necromancy on it. Aqila decides to cut to the chase and states loudly, “Sohrab, if that's one of yours, would you like to talk before we start trying to blow it up?” A very feminine voice laughs, “Not Sohrab!” Aqila, strongly suspecting what’s going on now, comments, “Ah, it's you. Still pissed at us for killing all your priests and priestesses?” Moonbeam facepalms. The voice speaks, “Thank you for confirming who you are.” Moonbeam glares at Aqila, who shrugs and whispers, “it wasn't like she wasn't going to figure it out....' since we now have confirmation that this is Shenea.
“I had been prepared to resent this requirement. Now I see I can enjoy it a bit.” Wen she’s asked, “why are you here”, the answer is, “One cannot give away all of the unguessed secrets yet.” (our characters may strongly suspect that Shenea has had the screws put to her to cooperate with the Enemy because of what happened in Brighthaven, to whit, the Enemy’s servants making off with the phylacteries or souls of her more powerful priests/priestesses)
“Let me put it this way...depending on why you are here, we might not have to destroy you,” is Joe’s way of trying to convince her to talk instead of fight. “I don't think you'll stand aside and let me destroy your masters?” she asks snarkily. We answer, “No, that would have unfortunate consequences.” “From your perspective perhaps, not from mine.” Time to roll initiative.
Dagnar starts us off by throwing a fireball into the fog, and it appears to do nothing. Then Joe sets off his fire and sonic seeds, and that seems to have an effect, making the figure stagger. The figure disappears, but Aqila's anticipate teleport spell lets her know where it's going to be showing up next round, so we move to get out of the way and ready actions. Thoron prepares to cast chain lightning when it pops in. Moonbeam readies a reverberating sonic strike with a quickened true strike first. Aqila prepares to cast dark bolts. Dagnar moves to be behind it when it pops back in and readies some backstabbery.
It reappears and we unload. Dagnar whiffs his strike. Joe is in squid form and colossally punches it. He hits. Thoron tries to chain lightning it and it gets reflected onto him. He tries to bounce it back and it just comes back. Spell turning foiled by Thoron being a prismatic golem. Moonbeam's Sonic strike damages it. Aqila can't not cast her readied darkbolt, and takes half of them. She's immune to daze, so it's not that bad, but still 48 nonlethal damage, though since she has 15 regen in Archon form and heart of earth, it wasn't that bad.
Shenea gets to act now. We aren't where we were so the pain is lessened, but not removed...except it whiffs on both its swings at Dagnar. Joe punched it some more. Thoron ties blinding spittle to no effect. Moonbeam repeats her sonic strike, and it looks rather battered now. Aqila throws a reverberating sonicball which does some damage. Dagnar goes for a duskblade full attack. He gets 2 of 3 hits, finally, with grave strike. It's visibly damaged. Joe does a full attack. With his first hit, the armor shatters, leaving a spectral figure behind. Joe lands a few hits on it, then it attacks Dagnar. He feels as though he's being torn apart - 32 disintegration damage.
Thoron tries to grapple the ghost with telekinesis. He fails. Moonbeam tries to cast ghostdust on it, and it fails. She mutters and casts mass heal swiftly. We're topped off, then she blasts it hard, becoming the new priority target. Aqila pulls out the wand she's been carrying since Brighthaven and throws a forceball at the spectre. 43 damage. Top of the order. Dagnar is up. He goes stabby stabby. His one hit passes through it harmlessly as it phases in and out. Joe again unleashes the tentacle massacre. It's looking tattered.

“It seems you are more dangerous than I expected. Well, at least I won't have to continue in this farce!” Shenea yells. Dagnar eats 120 force damage from a forcebolt ability. Thoron does quickened true casting with chain lightning. It declines to be affected. Moonbeam does her heal, which patches up Dagnar, and knocks it down to 1 hp. Her produce flames misses, so Aqila gets to kill it with magic missile. Then we all have to roll reflex saves, as a massive wave of unholy damage rolls through, and it's 117 damage. Aqila gets knocked out, but it's nonlethal damage so she is fine once Moonbeam heals her up along with everyone else who only took half damage.
Aqila comments, “Well, that was fun. Next thing you know, the ghost of Fiorino will show up with vengeance on his mind...” The diviner comments, “That sounds like it would be an interesting story. Perhaps after this…” Aqila states, “Long story short, he was the moron that opened a massive gate in Stone Bridge and almost let a demon lord through.” Joe chimes in, “and I wet his pants to distract him until we could close the portal on top of him.” “Yes, that does sound like I want the full story. Later.”
He tells us that things are heating up outside. “The outer ring is being hit by waves of undead. We'd rather not have you out of position if something big breaks through, though.” “Like another representative of Shenea coming in for an assassination attempt? I'd agree.” “Assuming that what we're getting out of the Enemy's camp is accurate, we may have some time before the real hammer comes down. Of course, he may change his plans depending on what his probes learn, but right now it's sounding like he’s planning a three-pronged attack, with him leading one, his daughter taking the second, and Saralis will lead the third. Given what we know, we'd expect him to take the weakest position, send his daughter against the next strongest, and send Saralis against the strongest threat.” Joe asks, “isn't he the one that would be a threat if he broke loose?” “Yes, which is why he'd be thrown at the strongest threat to keep it and him busy, since the worst outcome, from the Enemy's perspective, would be if Saralis reached the center before he did.” It probably wouldn’t be good from ours, either.
We're chatting as we make our way back to our usual spot. Aqila comments, “Great, so either we try to look weak and get to fight the boss, look strong and get to tangle with Saralis, or be neither and give Dagnar a chance to hit on Eleduath again.” This is another story that the Diviner would like to hear, though, he comments that he isn't that surprised since he knows Dagnar volunteered for duty in Almaera. Aqila snarks that him volunteering to hang out with us would be more telling, then Dagnar responds that he didn’t volunteer for that, he was voluntold! Aqila points out that we only turned him into a squirrel once, which gets a few snickers from the diviner, because he has heard that story. We choose to believe that that incident is making the rounds as a cautionary tale for new recruits.
The diviner switches topics on us: “The good news is that we think they've lost track of you with their scrying spells. The bad news is I'm starting to wonder if they can influence the motion of the slivers. We have 4 paths forming right now that are all incredibly bad for you to engage anything in. The best of them would force you to take baths in hellfire. The worst of them looks like, if it fully forms, would be completely unique in the history of the Malestrom...a chain of 23 dead or severely impeded slivers reaching from the middle ring to the center. And it looks to be, if nothing significant changes between now and when it finishes forming…” he pauses. “That is quite a mass of unholiness, and a tangled mess too. If they're not creating that, it's practically a perfect set-up for their purposes. Either you'd be playing tag with them in the tangle and likely miss them, or be forced to fight in a no-magic zone.”
This is not good hearing. “One of the other paths may have alternatives to the impeded sliver, but we don't know what they'll be yet, and some of them would be worse than a mildly impeded area. Though if the one plane moves into place, that could actually turn into a trap route for them.” Joe asks about odds. “Odds of the plane moving into place? 20-30%. Chances of them using that route? Practically nil if their scryers are doing their job at scouting ahead of them.” Joe then asks about the Enemy's scryers, and we learn that they were watching our battle with Shenea but we moved fast enough heading back to base that they lost us crossing the portals.
We still haven’t made it back yet when he breaks in again. “Well, if some of the recent rumors we've heard about you are true, this one should be right up your alley.” “What did you hear.” “You'll be able to guess. One of the outer fae is approaching, holding a staff with ambassadorial markings on it.” “Yes, the rumors are true. We'll go talk to him.” “If he keeps up his course, there's a nice neutral sliver. The only thing I have against it is that it's another case of someone doing weird things with their architecture, and it may collapse if you go in there. I don't know why someone thought balancing a slab of stone on the tip of a needle was a good idea, but I suppose I have seen stranger things done by people making their own planes...you can tell when they discover they can alter the gravity. It's even more obvious to see the ones where they didn't think through the implications of their changes. That was a real mess one time.” “What happened?” “Let's just say having two strong gravitational fields that act in two different directions where you can walk through both at the same time does interesting things to materials. That was the shortest lived planarch in history, I think.”
So, we didn't even get back to base before heading towards the aforementioned neutral sliver. We comment that we'll be fine even if it does collapse. The diviner asks “But will the ambassador?” Moonbeam can bring him back, but if he gets hurt in any way, the fae courts will likely take that as a declaration of war. Yet another thing to worry about.
We're only in the sliver for a few moments when the Ambassador steps through. The ground feels steady underfoot to us. We do not know him, nor he us. He states firmly, “If you have anything to do with those who are stirring this storm, I would have words with you, if you do not, Stand Aside!” Aqila answers, “Yes, we do. What words would you have with us?”
He begins, “My Queen has expressed concern for what the fate of the planes may be in this matter. The collapse of fragments of even long shattered planes is not a thing to take lightly.” We explain that the point of the exercise is to remove a bleeding wound on the material plane, some destruction of some of those shattered fragments is inevitable in the process, and the alternative is letting another power take control of the Maelstrom to use its power to his own ends.
“Then you are prepared, to give your solemn word under our laws that you will not cause harm to the realms of the Fae?” The precise definition of 'we' is important here. We establish that it means Mirarn and Kalya plus the Sentinel in general, basically.
We point out that we can't make promises on behalf of our employers, but his concerns will be relayed to the proper authorities if he will wait a few minutes. The diviner suggests we find out which court he represents, while we're at it. We ask.
“I speak for the Five Assembled.” IE the 5 major courts of the fae that we met with last month. We wait for a bit, then we hear the diviner speaking to us in a much softer voice than we're used to hearing, but it's so the communication is more secure, “Listen carefully. We're going to have to trust that you can resolve this situation under these instructions. We can not allow the emissary to approach any closer to the center. If he comes farther in, it would be as bad as a greater demon entering the maelstrom. If he speaks for all 5 courts, each of the courts will have pledged them a portion of their power to carry out his embassy” Basically, Mirarn and Kalya can't break off what they're doing, and letting him reach the center would ruin everything. “We can give him the assurances he desires, but only if he can guarantee that no fae will interfere, of all the fae under the command of the 5 courts.”
Moonbeam, Joe, and Thoron don't want to be guarantors of the oath here. Aqila is willing to do so. The Ambassador does not consider the oath of one to be sufficient, but three would. Aqila states, “it would be most proper for all those swearing to be of those directly in service to the Sentinel, and only two such are present here. Pray tarry a bit longer, and another of those directly sworn will arrive.” So Dagnar’s been roped in whether he likes it or not. The ambassador is a little put out, but is willing to wait. Three of the stag-mounted healers make it to the sliver in within 15 minutes, and all three of them combined with Aqila and Dagnar are considered sufficient guarantors, and the oath is sworn.
We're breaking here. Next time, The Final Countdown to the end.

Terane
2020-06-29, 04:47 PM
We managed to get all the way back to our base sliver and have a few minutes to rest after the meeting with the Outer Fae ambassador, when we get the next round of bad news. Our contact with the seers tells us, “I know you’ve been stopping everything effectively, but it’s become more important that nothing gets through. The Enemy has started employing a weapon from the time of the ‘Gods’ War’.” Joe asked what it is. Basically, it’s a ‘simple weapon’…that can fire massive interplanar energy blasts at targets. Specifically, a blast came in and hit the center dead on, which is very worrisome, given that the Maelstrom tends to screw up interplanar effects royally. The defenders in the center can protect Mirarn and Kalya from this thing, but they can’t do that and deal with anything else, which is why it’s critical for us to stop everything cold.
Our contact comments that he’s surprised that the Enemy is even using this thing, since they were created to crack open Ancient fortresses during the war, so we didn’t know he still had any left, for one, and for two, it takes a strong user to activate it and it kills the operator in the process. The Enemy is probably not firing it himself – might be possible for him to survive doing that, but if he’s wrong, he’d be out of the game for a while. We’re told that one of us could conceivably activate it, but it’d be a toss-up if we’d be able to fire it, and we’d die regardless.
So, for right now, until we know he doesn’t have any more, we have to stop everything that comes in cold, and hope he doesn’t decide to spend a shot fragging us. “How nasty are they, anyway?” Joe asked. The reply is, “Have you seen Chalisea? That was a small one, aimed wrongly.” We contemplate the perfect, circular crater that the city and it’s bay are situated in. That brings up another question – “How much warning did they have before the blast hit?” Our contact tells us, “They got lucky – They had a whole minute. Usually, you only get seconds before it hits.” We’re also told that the blast won’t cross planar boundaries, which means we’re going to be staying mounted, and know where our escape route is so we can be in another plane within a few seconds if the warning of an incoming blast is given.
Note that firing this thing into the Maelstrom is a bad idea, generally, because the Maelstrom generally royally screws up planar effects. So, the going assumption is that the Enemy either fired a lot of shots to manage to bullseye the center like he did, or he’s found a way to compensate for the distortions.
Shortly thereafter, we’re told, “Good news! It looks like you’re not going to be seeing anything other than probing attacks for a while.” Since these should be relatively low threat encounters, we’ll be warned when things start to actually heat up. “From the looks of things, it’s going to be a while before the main attack. Eleduath has been calling in all her hands, and some are currently in positions that they can’t leave quickly. This is good for us, because we may finally be able to figure out where all of them have been hiding now, and where her schemes have been operating.”
It wasn’t very long before our contact got back to us. “Well, that was unexpectedly fast. We have your first customers. You may only want to send a few of you – it looks like three relatively minor mages.” Dagnar and Thoron call dibs, with Gloom Stabby Fun expected to be the result. It’ll take them ten minutes to intercept that group. While they’re en route, another call comes in.
“This looks like feints – if it wasn’t critical to stop everything from reaching the center right now, it wouldn’t be worth sending even one of you.” It’s basically a couple of grunts, so Aqila heads out solo to go incinerate them, and it’ll be 8 minutes to intercept. It’s not very long later when the next call comes in.
“I have no idea what these are. It’s like a spectral dragon, but it’s coming in from a completely different direction than the other two groups. The best place to intercept it is in a small sliver that is…pretty much normal. It’s a few hundred feet across, and suspiciously normal, which is worrisome because there are not “normal” slivers in the Maelstrom. We don’t know what is weird about it, but there are 5 gates in and 11 out, so it’ll be very difficult to intercept anywhere else. Using the communication relay, we debate quickly if either Joe or Moonbeam or both need to go deal with this threat. The diviners have no idea what these things are, which doesn’t help. Their best guess is that it’s probably immune to some form of energy, and looks insubstantial. It’s 20 minutes there and back, even on stags. They could halve that time using timestop and not taking the stags, though. A weird long route made this possible. (OOC note – the spectral dragon-looking thing isn’t actually completely immune, but it’s really fast. It’s an easy fight if both go)
As Aqila is almost all the way back from her grunt incineration run, and Dagnar and Thoron are returning too, the diviner gets back on the horn. “This is getting ridiculous, but we’re probably running through his supply of expendable minions here. We’ve got what looks like a pack of minor stone golems. They look like some beginners experiments.” Aqila can get to the best spot to intercept them from where she’s currently at, which is mildly good aligned. Dagnar and Thoron could get to the second best spot from where they are – it’s a sliver that’s mildly evil, and some active curse generator is spewing things in there, so anyone inside it can expect to get hit with random curses the entire time.
Aqila notes she can shapechange into a Solar, use walls of stone to split the golem pack up, and then splatter them, so she proceeds to intercept and Dagnar and Thoron resume returning to base so they can get whatever shows up next. Aqila employs her plan, and gets to see the first stone wall Disintegrate. She mutters grumpily on seeing that. (Using that ability damages the golems – OOC) So, she throws up an illusion of a stone wall next, and sees the whole pack blast the ‘wall’ before one of them walks into it. We assume Aqila can handle this mess, but it’ll take some time.
Meanwhile, Thoron and Dagnar are almost back to our base camp when another round of whatsits show up. The diviner characterizes them as, “looks like someone’s been modifying wyverns. They look faster, but more fragile.” He also ‘saw’ pulses of electricity going between them and speeding them all up. Thoron grumbles, because he likes Lightning Storm, and that’s likely a bad idea here. They are in a position to intercept the group – there are 3 wyvern things with no active magic on them, 15 HD, and they are very, very fast. 400’ move speed. Thoron and Dagnar have this.
Joe and Moonbeam, having polished off the weird dragon thing and in the process of returning the whole long way, get to hear the diviner shouting over the message relay, “You cannot be serious! It’s a single fighter!” That does seem…less than useful as a threat. They only have to take a five minute detour to go have a look. So, the fighter is Dominated. Moonbeam turns herself into a Dreadnaught to project an antimagic field to take care of that problem, and Joe asks the guy if he really wants to be doing this. The guy immediately turns tail and runs…right out of the cone, where the spell reasserts itself, and he then reverses course.
To get this sorted out, Joe turns himself into a Weird and determines that the guy is a patroller from Resinel who wandered into the Enemy’s camp and got dominated. Dude is also vicious, cruel, and a raper of peasants (he’s a minor servant of Gurthan). Joe’s reaction to this knowledge is to switch forms to Garngrath, eat the guy, then swap again to Dire Ooze, pukes out the gear and flesh, then resumes Garngrath form to belch. End of encounter. Moonbeam takes the flail from the gear pile.
Meanwhile, Aqila is done playing tag with golems and is told, “You’re in a perfect position to deal with this one – I don’t know if it’s a feint or one of the weird things that pop up around here, but I’ve never seen a humanoid ooze before….” It’s a short hop to the best sliver to intercept the latest oddity – which is a thoroughly contaminated water plane, laced with acid, amusingly. That acid resistance gifted to the party a while back comes in handy again. When the oozes show up, Aqila is in Quasar form, and employing Searing Light. They’re vulnerable to it in particular, so the fight is a piece of cake.
Everyone except Aqila is almost back to base again when the next alert comes out. “I’m starting to think he’s grabbing everyone with a random experiment and is throwing them in here to see what they do. It looks like a Glabrezu but it’s not a demon. Looks like it was stitched together from many parts. Maybe some variation on a flesh golem, but it doesn’t look right for that either. It’s taking a circuitous route – unless you get lucky with some unstable jumps, which would cut 15-20 minutes off, it’ll take you half an hour to reach the interception point.
Moonbeam consults her Omen of Peril on her plan for her to go solo this one. The Omen comes back ‘not dangerous’ so she does go alone to face the golem. She finds that it is indeed not dangerous, but it’s like a nesting doll – Kill one layer, and a smaller version pops out, for many, many iterations. She tries to short-circuit the hilarity with an earthquake. It can burrow. Eventually she nails the last, mouse-sized, golem.
Meanwhile, the diviner’s seen something new. “Okay, that cannot possibly be who that’s supposed to look like.” A pause then, “Okay, I stand corrected…the Enemy could have brought Duraln back that quickly, but I’d bet it’s just meant to make you panic and send everyone. It’s a 20 minute trip out to reach the first possible interception point. There’s a better spot, but you’ll have to wait for him to get there. The later spot is Fire dominant (doubles effects of fire spells). The other one would be worse, but not a whole lot. It’s a negative energy plane, so if your death ward comes down for any reason, you risk dying instantly (mechanically, you’re getting barraged with Finger of Death the entire time you’re in there). A few minutes later, it’s clear ‘Duraln’ is going to pass through the fire plane sliver. Right around when that’s apparent, “Alright, I know these are fake. I know he wouldn’t send Eleduath in this early.” There are three separate groups, Fiery (known dead), Tylene, and Eleduath – Only Tylene is actually plausible.
Aqila is on her way back now and could intercept ‘Tylene’. The ‘Eleduath’ is on a path with a strongly (12-levels) good aligned plane – we can be confident that whoever it is is either evil or dominated, so intercepting there would be preferable. ‘Fiery’ might be a problem because he’s got a nice fire plane in that line – Joe calls dibs. Tylene has three good intercept spots, but none are good for fighting her, if that’s really her. The last spot to stop her is 1 gate away from the center, and if it’s really her, she has enough defenses to rush past and make it through. The three options are “not terribly bad, but it’s a dead magic sliver, and Tylene would be the worst one to fight there, other than Duraln. The second is also not terribly bad if those crystals aren't active still – the place looks like a fragment of one of the Ancients’ extraplanar strongholds. They had a defensive shell of crystals and if she knows the control words, and if they’re active, she could turn them on you. You could check if they’re active still with Analyze Dweomer, otherwise there’s nothing harmful in there. If they’re armed, that should be obvious. It takes seconds to arm. They look damaged, so likely not working right, but… The last option is, well, an unusual danger. It’s a strong positive energy plane (Fast healing 30) with one other possible problem. That sliver may be inhabited – I’m getting hints of movement. The splinter is ellipsoidal, 80’ by 40’. Aqila decides to go with option 3 for the interception.
As she’s traveling there, the diviner gets back to her. “I think I’ve identified the movement. You’re not going to like it. Flux Slime. (they have a 10’ antimagic field around them, and produce random effects when they die that can hit up to 50’ away) She’s just thrilled to hear this news. So, at this point in the action, we have Thoron going out to intercept ‘Duraln’, Aqila intercepting ‘Tylene, Dagnar presumably planning on hitting on ‘Eleduath’ again, Joe going after the fiery dude, and Moonbeam on her way back to base after finishing off the nesting-doll flesh golem.
Thoron reaches his target first, and his power sight says ‘Duraln’ has 5HD. Yeah, that’s not the real deal. He also sees True Domination on the guy. Initially, his plan was going to be ‘disjunction’ to remove the Dominate, but it would also remove whatever protections is keeping the poor bastard alive in the fiery sliver, so that’s not gonna work, assuming this is a victim. Instead, Thoron turns into a Solar whose aura suppresses the Dominate effect. Thoron then decides to be a jerk and spreads his arms and wings, intoning, “Salvation has found you, my son!” The ‘Duraln’ screams and runs around in a blind panic. Whether from Thoron or realizing Everything Is On Fire isn’t clear. Thoron follows and tries to calm him down. After deciding he can't escape, he turns to fight (and rolls a natural 1). Thoron catches the blade with one hand. The dude has no idea how to use a sword. He also has substantial transmutation magic on him. Thoron realizes under all the disguises, this is an elderly peasant. Eventually, Thoron figures out that the guy thinks he’s dead and in hell or something, so he tries to pick him up to move him somewhere less dangerous, and eventually grabs him and flies him to the mildly law aligned plane next door, past the acid showers.
Meanwhile, Dagnar is encountering ‘Eleduath’ in the strongly good aligned plane. His arcane sight tells him that ‘Eleduath’ has zero spellcasting. He tries a sap instead, and carries the person off to find a dispel. Aqila’s True Sight shows her an elderly appearing (mid-40’s) peasant woman, not Tylene. She switches to Planatar from and knocks the dominated woman onto the next plane over where they won’t go boom from overhealing. It’s very mildly chaotic and evil. The aura of the planetar cancels out the dominate effect.
This is the mother of the family, and a relatively calm and unflappable lady. She starts demanding an explanation right off. Aqila tells her that bad people are using her as a decoy and would she like to go somewhere safe-ish until the unpleasantness is over? “Yes, but where’s the rest of my family!?” is the response. Aqila answers, “I have a guess. Let me ask.” Meanwhile, Joe got fire immunity up before confronting the fiery dude. He doesn’t get toasted right off, so it’s probably not really him. Joe uses the Weird form to get True Seeing up and sees what he now knows is an early to mid 30’s peasant. Angel form cancels out the dominate, and the dude panics. Joe turns him into a kitten for transportation. Aqila relays to the woman that we’ve found two men and a girl so far. The woman lets her know there are three more boys that need found yet. They might not have been sent to this region…
Aqila promises she’ll pass word on about them, so people are watching. We all have time to take the peasants to the center of the Maelstrom where they can be sort-of safe until this is all over. We meet up for the trip, and Thoron spots a spy crystal necklace on the girl, so we smash that up first. We then learn that the Devaeran patroller that Joe ate had ‘visited’ that peasant family before being picked up – they were grabbed when the Enemy’s forces checked his back trail to make sure there weren’t others coming. The daughter was raped. Well, he’s dead now… Joe tells them that specifically before Aqila escorts them to safety, so he can’t hurt them again.
Aqila does escort duty solo so our region isn’t completely uncovered by us all going. She disjunctions each of them before letting them go through the last portal so the dominate spell,and anything else, are cleared off. She has just enough time to get back to the base sliver before the next bit of fun. The diviner assigned to our group breaks in with, “Well, congratulations. The Enemy decided you were too efficient, so he hasn’t sent anything to you for a bit. The other teams are getting run ragged. And yes, this does look like he’s clearing out the experiments from the labs. A lot aren’t effective for combat, and would have needed a lot of effort to make. For amusement value, the acid spitting beetle swarm was the funniest…they weren’t acid immune and melted themselves.”
The diviner also tells us, “We think we found the rest of the family. Two of them are alive. One is alive now, but picked up some side effects that are causing him to deteriorate before we got him into stasis.” We find out later that anyone trying to heal him or divine on him has all their energy drained. Antimagic fields get devoured. He’s also immune to Glass Strike, Petrification, and those who tried got energy drained too. They tried non-magic healing and found that to be…ineffective. So the whole family is reunited, sort of. Grandpa is still giving everyone suspicious looks. Blame Thoron.
The diviner then tells us, “Well, this is different. You probably want a diplomat for this one. Joe says, “Well, that leaves you out,” eying Aqila and Dagnar deliberately. Dagnar returns a mocking grin. Aqila just rolls her eyes. “This looks like an emissary of Shylarene (Succubus). For the moment, she’s paused. Honestly, if the adjoining team wasn’t being run ragged, we’d send one of them, because she’s technically closer to their area of responsibility, but…” Joe asks, “Any idea what she wants?” “We’re hoping you can tell us. We’re assuming she’s from Shylarene, because she’s the only Demon Prince that routinely uses succubi. Looks like a normal one, no enhancements, but she’s paused in a strongly evil aligned sliver (5 negative levels worth).
So, Joe, being the diplomancer of the group, heads out to go talk to the lady. When he gets there, he makes the appropriate diplomatic niceties, and inquires what the lady is here for. The succubus responds, “My lady has been offered some impressive concessions for some assistance here. My lady thought it would be only courteous to give your masters a chance to make a counteroffer. Most importantly, your opponent has offered his full support for her bid for the Throne of All Hells. Secondly, she has been offered a steady supply of souls for her work, twenty a day for ten years. Thirdly, she has been offered material goods of her choosing up to 200,000 gold value a year for the same ten year period.”
Joe asks what she wants, and establishes that she’s being offered that to throw her forces into this battle. (She is a mistress of misdirection, spies, saboteurs, but not a real army). Joe asks if she was responsible for the peasant family that we met. “No, but consider that an example of what we can do.” Joe responds, “So, obnoxious, but ineffective.” She insinuates, “Are you sure you stopped that attack?” Joe answers pointedly, “Yes, yes we are.” She responds, “Well, I could give you a warning on one matter…That was not the only family their forces have taken.” Joe is not impressed with her information. He points out that she hasn’t told him what she wants yet. “I told you. I want to know what you will offer me.” Sense motive check – she’s not telling the entire truth. He thinks the two minor offers were given, but support for the Throne was not. Also, he thinks she’s not actually an emissary, just trying to cozen for shinies for a reward. Joe decides to swap to Rakshasa form, her clone, and see how she reacts. He now knows that Shylarene rejected that offer – the conversation was being watched by diviners and relayed, so that detail was passed to Joe to let him know how to handle this encounter.
Joe demands, “So, give me one reason I shouldn’t kick your ass so hard it comes out that pretty mouth of yours.” She answers, “It was worth a try – some of you humans are so gullible…” He taunts her for a bit, and learns she’s a very old succubus who has been in the highest ranks and busted down to the lowest repeatedly. A bit more back and forthing occurs, then Joe tries to intimidate her by changing to a Sword Archon and tells her, since she isn’t familiar with that form, that when he puts this blade through her chest, her soul will be trapped on a Celestial Plane for eternity. No resurrections. Time to roll initiative. Joe wins. He casts baleful polymorph for an opening move, and she fails her save. Then he does a discorporating dive. Banished, she is. Break here.



We pick up with all our characters being back at base, waiting for the major attack we know is coming. We're warned that Saralis is coming our way. Eleduath is heading for the stronger of the other two groups, and the Enemy is heading for the group that Duraund shredded once already, and he's brought Duraund back quickly, and is having him lead the attack. There are only 3 survivors of the original two groups of 5 that took on Duraund. Our diviner gives us the details next, after that summary. “Eleduath has several of her hands - assuming we survive this, we might find out where they've been hiding. Saralis has what looks like a pack of liches with some of their creations. Most of the undead they have with them look like standard brute types, not terribly dangerous. One major exception - one of those looks like it’s had a demon fused into it, and since this is presumably someone working directly for Saralis, they probably know how to do that the right way, not the more commonly known cheap trick. What this does, the demon will be able to act, partially independently. and when you destroy the undead, then you have to fight the demon too. Can't tell you for sure what type of demon is in there. Good news is, it's likely to be affected like any other demon would be inside the maelstrom. The binding may give it some shelter from that, but deep enough in, and they won't be able to keep it with them because it'll be going nuts. I expect they'll send it back before they're in danger of losing control of it, assuming they know there is a problem with this. They'll probably be able to get fairly close to the center before they lose control of it, though.”
“Your possible options for intercepting him, right now, early in his path...I wouldn't recommend either - one's a negative energy plane, where you'll be fine unless you lose your death wards in which case you'll die instantly. The other one is 600' across with multiple entrances and exits, and a strongly evil plane. I would strongly advise against fighting there. From there, his possible paths split into more or less 3 options. There are places to intercept along all three, but....there's another evil plane, not as strong, but you would be noticeably weakend... (1st one would be a -10 lvls, this one would be -2). The two following that are both weird...1st one, if it wasn't so large, I'd say we were looking at a chunk of someone's laboratory, but it's 600' across. Beautifully tiled flooring with a number of runes with a strong signature of elemental fire on them. I have no idea what they do beyond that. The 2nd one, if I'm interpreting what I'm seeing correctly and I'm not sure if I am because I haven't seen anything like this before, there's some sort of dimensional warping in that area. Depending on where you're standing, the plane will look to be different sizes. The range looks to be anywhere from 40' across to 4,000' ft. From the warped area, there are quite a number of exits, and I'm not sure I'd advise you fighting him there, because the warping may allow him to get past you easily.”
“The second route has only 2 guarenteed planes, connected to each other. I would not advise fighting in the first of them simply because it's a ridiculous battleground and I have no idea what it will do to you. It is showing as very strongly evil, good, lawful, and chaotic. It's about 30' across. The 2nd is 900', and showing as impeded magic. At a guess, a fifth to a quarter of your spells are likely to fail in there. Not likely to affect Saralis at all. (higher level spells are more likely fail). The third possible route, there are no 2 connected planes he'll have to pass through, but there are 3 planes he will have to pass through. One is 20' across, dead magic. The 2nd is 300' water and earth plane, which as messed up as it's been, means you're walking through mud, with bad visibility. The last one is a ridiculously strong positive energy plane, about 200' across. The final place you can stop him, is guaranteed, because it is the only plane that he can pass through and still reach the center. It's weakly good aligned, so a slight impediment to him. And, of course, he'll be aware that getting past you there will let him win everything, and if he gets past, he may well win everything. That one comes in at about 950'.”
Joe wonders what would happen if you had a wall of stone or wall of force on the far side of the portal, and an antimagic field on this side, would that block him in. Our seer contact thinks that it might, but the Ancients had things that could get through that. The plane is gently rolling hills, with beautiful grass cover. We ask about the center's terrain. He's not going to try to describe it, because strictly speaking, it has no terrain. What you see is what you want it to be. Joe asks what that would do with the wall of stone spell. “I've never actually thought about that question. I think it may be one of two things...either the wall would only exist for you, or the wall might exist for everyone, but if they don't choose to see stone, then the wall would appear to be unsupported. It might be interesting to experiment under less desperate circumstances.” Joe comments about it would have been a good idea to do some research beforehand. The seer comments that research has been done, but the people who might know are currently otherwise occupied, but he can pass the question back to the research teams to see if they can find an answer before we run out of time.
The diviner resumes speaking, “And, oh, well that's going to make things interesting. One of the outer ring groups decided they were going to try to help and slow Saralis down. Not directly, but one of them had a scroll of wall of stone. He threw a disintegrate through the portal. We didn't know he could do that. Hopefully he can't target through a portal, and can only blind fire. And he can't do that unless you attack him first.” (if Saralis breaks the pact, and it can be proven after the fact, the Enemy would either have to renounce the pact entirely, or be obligated to permanently kill Saralis under the terms of the pact). (Also, it would have to be an obvious violation, witnessed and provable, so not likely worth it to try to draw him into doing that).
Joe asks what happens if you just collapsed the shards around the center to cut off the gateways into it. We learn that shards collapsed that way also create pulses, which will also hit the center under those circumstances. Collapse the wrong kind of plane, and it could disrupt things. We start thinking about how to slow him down. And ask about what we know about Saralis himself. The seer tells us that he likes to cultivate an appearance of being hot headed and impulsive, but he's likely never done a thing in his life that wasn't calculated in advance.
So for initial screwing with the enemy, idea is to wall of stone around the dead magic area's exits so he has to work to leave. And Frostfell the water/earth plane so it's a solid block of ice/mud. The second path with the connected planes he has to pass through, we can make a wall of stone with one of the remaining antimagic stones to make him have to smash through. And for the first rooms, Avalanche or Blizzard to fill them up with snow. And other rooms, too, to just slow him down.
Seer lets us know what the final boom is likely to look like...there'll be some powerful damaging energy blasts - force, disintegration, unholy, and holy. There's also going to be probably a disjunction effect in there too. They don't know which order the blasts will hit until it gets closer. We're instructed to assume it'll be the disjunction first, because they will hit in short succession, and any one of them would have a pretty good chance of killing us.
So, to created impedances in the negative energy plane - walls of thorns by the entrances plus a blizzard to fill it with snow. Blizzard in the Evil plane. Blizzards everywhere, really. We split up to hit all the 3 routes with traps - Moonbeam does the 2nd path, Joe does the 3rd, and Aqila and Thoron do the 1st. Then we meet up at the good plane, as the seer contacts us with an indirect message from Saralis - basically if we make any more traps like that, he's going to consider it an attack on himself, though he'll forgive any other ones we've already set up before he gave us this warning. Heh. Too late!
We know more about the undead than we did - one of the monstrosities seems to be able to maintain a sustained blast of hellfire - 60' cone. So the Blizzard trap is less effective than he'd thought. Per the diviner, “He's been keeping it up for 10 minutes so far, so we should assume it can keep it up for an entire fight.” Oh well, we did get some information out of this.
The Evil plane, we couldn't do blizzard in, but walls of thorns and stone were doable on the entrance. 'Well, a little more information. It's not good, but we have more information on how destructive that cone of hellfire is. It's melting stone.” Joe asks how quickly. “Not sure it's not turning up the heat for this, but it's looking like a foot per round. If it's not turning up the heat, and it can actually sustain that, for general property damage, it's one of the more horrifying undead creations we've ever seen.”
“If he doesn't get more efficient on getting through the delays you've set up, he's going to be very short on time when he gets to the last plane. He is likely not going to take the 3rd route now, because it’s too long.”

The diviners narrating abruptly changes tone. “Oh, that's not good. Duraln has hit the first group. Who thought it was a good idea to bring her here!” We all yell back, “WHO?” He responds, “Your paladin friend and his lady friend. Oh, that's interesting. She's directing all the power she's necessarily being forced to absorb from the maelstrom into him. He's standing up to Duraln in melee. If he can survive the torrent, he may be able to stand up to the Enemy, and they have a very lucky set of planes for an escape route to the center - they have a strongly good aligned plane to hop through to get to the center, which he would never go through, and the route around it is very convoluted.” (-20 levels for the Enemy to set foot in there).
“It looks like Eleduath is going to be hitting her group soon...Oh, it looks like we rate 2 paladins...I wonder who's going to be helping you.” We ask, “Who is it?” He answers, “I don't know. A lady paladin.” Aqila casts a quick illusion of our previous acquaintance, asking, “That look like her?” The diviner responds, “Yes, that's her, looks like a bit better armor now though. Alright, it's confirmed, he's taking the 1st route.” (Meaning Saralis)
“Well, we do know what some of those runes do now, anyways. Congratulations on your flame tornado.” So the room with the weird runes now has a blizzard, tornadic force winds, and fire, per the diviner's description of the scene. “He may choose to argue that that was a deliberate attack, especially if you take out some of his minions. If you just slow him down...” Joe notes, And if he's wrong, he gets permanently dead.” (since that would violate the pact) The diviner replies, “Which is why I said might. If it was lower risk, he definitely would.”
A bit later we hear, “Well, we have a little more information on two of his undead.” Aqila asks, “Immune to fire?” “Can't tell you that because nothing seems to have hit them yet. One of them appears to also be able to control winds. The other has some fairly powerful cold magic - looks like some version of Frostfell. For the rest of it, the one that appears to have some control wind abilities appears to be immune to the winds. Saralis is also ignoring the winds. So is one of those hulking brute things, though I think that's more a matter that he's strong enough to stand up to it. I would strongly advise against letting that thing hit any of you. All three liches seem to be having trouble except for what we think is the demon fused one. He's not exactly ignoring it, but it doesn't seem to be seriously impeding him either. Not sure what's really going on there. From everything I can see, he should be getting blown away. There's nothing to explain why he isn't. The good news is you have four of them in serious disarray.” We ask if he's waiting for them? “Doesn't seem to be.” The minions he’s not waiting for are the hellfire one, the cold one, and two others that we don't know about...(poison breath and nasty screamer - sonic damage plus blasphemy, ooc)
“Other thing that might mean something, or might not. Saralis is holding a bag with a small stone, or small lump of somethings anyway, half a dozen of something anyway. It seems to be important to him - the wind almost ripped it away from him, and he checked to make sure he had a better grip on it.” Joe asks if those could be souls to power his abilities? “From what we know, he himself functions as the container, but I suppose they could be souls over and above what he can contain in himself, which I don't like the idea of.”
When they enter the warped space, four more of them blow away - 3 of the liches and one of the undead. He still has the demon thing and the one that can control winds left. And he appears to be leaving the wind controller behind to try to get the other minions out. So, it's just Saralis and his demon pet now, per the diviners reports. A short delay later, and we’re told, “Good news, we can tell you which entrance he's going to come in from. It's the one with the 250' portal. Also, that undead he's got with him appears to have a hellfire ability, but instead of a cone, he's radiating out around himself, out to 40'. It's not as hot, but hot enough. Saralis appears to be having no trouble with it.”
Meanwhile, Moonbeam covers the portal with a wall of stone so we have an idea where they're coming in at. A little while later, 3 holes appear in the wall. Apparently he has a way to split the ray for disintegrate. Before we can use readied actions, 5 black spheres come flying in from the center hole. Thoron sees necromancy, conjuration, biomancy, abjuration and transmutation. He can see an effect that will 'adjust' any disjunction or dispells to put them back on the caster. Eep.
Aqila’s readied action is to cast a spell and gets 4 rounds of timestop. She uses analyze dweomer on a sphere and learns it's a limited resurrection effect tied to a specific person. It will also temporarily armor him when it does that, but he will be unable to act for about 3 rounds. He has to be within 1 mile of them, on the same plane. She also casts 3 prismatic Walls, one over each hole.
As a note, all of us who can are currently in a shapechange form. Moonbeam casts timestop too, with mudslide, and mud to stone to bury all the spheres in stone. She's being an ancient Verdant Twist. Joe and Dagnar are waiting to see Saralis. Thoron is also waiting.
Saralis steps through the middle hole into the prismatic wall. He takes some damage, but isn't stoned, insane or banished. Joe uses Time Stop. 3 rounds, so he does delay drown, delay polymorph, and throws a pinecone at Saralis's face. When the timestop ends, the drown....doesn't work. The polymorph might have nailed him. We see his form wavered briefly, then resolidified. The pinecone misses, and hits the prismatic wall, and it blows up.
Saralis goes next. Aqila blows the last 3 saves, but made the first one. Thoron makes all but the con. Joe makes them all. Dagnar blows 3 saves too. Joe lets Aqila reroll a roll so she's only failed a will and a con now. Moonbeam blows essence so Dagnar can do a reroll too. He makes it now. Thoron rerolls, and now makes all his saves too. Demon undead comes through, and is now a statue.
Saralis speaks, “That is annoying.” Then, from behind us, we hear a cheery “Sneezil Help!” Moonbeam comments, “And here's where it gets interesting. Let's hope it's good interesting.” We hear some gibbering from our seer, followed by a new voice, “I'm sorry, I think you broke him. The idea of having two outsiders on our side in an area where they may go nuts was too much for him.” Sneezil, meanwhile, changes into a Planetar form, which means he can now dual-wield his maces. He still has his own face, just bigger. Joe rustles his branches as if the tree is cheering.

Saralis’s reaction is, "So I see that idiot wasn't drinking this time." Apparently he'd discounted tales of an imp paladin running around. Dagnar gets to go next. He does Ray of Dizziness to try to slow Saralis down. It works. Partial actions only for the big Bad now. Moonbeam gets 3 rounds with her timestop. She sets up a set of quickened true casting and delayed flamestrike. With some force and irresistable thrown in. And empowered and blistering and sonic. When the dust settles, Saralis seems to be smoking a bit. Joe defers to Thoron, who casts disjunction. It's countered. Joe will swap shapes, then do quickened launch item to throw pinecones at Saralis. The boom is big enough that he's forced to burn another 1/day - fullheal. Then he casts timestop, gets two rounds, and does a irresistable delayed drown, dropped a pinecone on the ground, resumed twist form, and prepares to launch the pinecone when the timestop ends.
Saralis goes next. He uses disintegrate on the rocks, destroying 1 stone, and freeing two of them from the rocks. There's a massive blast of unholy damage on its destruction. And that burns his action. But, now Sneezil has to make a pile of saves. He doesn't die, but, he's got one of each failed for next time. Oww. Aqila does analyze dweomer again and sees the conjuration is a summoning effect, that will summon 4 major demons to defend him. Sneezil tries to glorybolt him, and misses.
Note from the diviners – “You might want to get closer to the exit portal - that blast is coming soon, and we're pretty sure the disjunction is first. Also, it would probably be a good thing if at least one of you has the strength to heal when you get there - your paladin friend is in bad shape, and his lady friend is keeping him alive, for now.” Joe asks how long she can keep it up. “Until she goes crazy.” We're told Saralis can probably set up some protections to get through the blast, but it'll slow him down, and he may not have enough time to get to the center. “And the other paladin was actually fairly useful. We're not sure what made it work, but Eleduath had some sort of spell creating counterspellers for her. Nothing anyone else in the group had seemed to affect them at all. We're going to see if she'll let us take a look at her sword, because it was taking them out with one hit each. Of course, given the weird things paladins seem to haul around, it'll probably be some sort of ludicrously expensive effect that was only useful for this specific situation. Anyway, the other two groups are fairly clear. Eleduath's group had to stop because they couldn't make it to the center in time. The group fighting her has been ordered to an emergency exit - planeshift from the nearest stable-ish point. Almost certain death, instead of certain death.”
Dagnar is up. He does Dimensional Anchor, and it works. Dagnar does a Peter Quill style dance. Moonbeam goes into timestop, drops a delayed forcestrike on his head, then sees Saralis go into a shell. Fast healing while it's up. Joe uses timestop, throws a pinecone at him, which shatters on the shell, and drops an avalanche on him, but he manages to not get buried. Thoron also tries to bury Saralis, and it fails too. We're not sure how he's managing this.
The snow is too deep for him to disintegrate his stones out. He can't teleport past us because he's dimensionally anchored. He could retreat and regroup, or he may go into 'if I'm going to die, I'm taking you with me. Thoron sees him building up for something big. Sneezil starts rolling saves. He makes enough of them to not die. Now, it's Aqila's turn. She drops a fireball on Saralis to blow up the shield. She follows up with darkbolts, but the bugger made his saves. Sneezil tries Bolt of Glory again. No sale, just 32 damage.
Dagnar, having spent time regarding Saralis, prepares to make a death attack. Three steel, sneak attack, with death effect on save fail. Saralis wobbles back and forth, then collapses flat on his face, dead. The resurrection stones explode with muffled whomps, and the snow slumps down into the new cratar. Joe grabs the corpse and runs. Moonbeam grabs Dagnar and runs. Sneezil and Aqla book it, and Thoron follows at speed.
When we get to the center, the seer groups are there already. Moonbeam starts looking around for bodies that aren't moving and are still bleeding. We remind her not to heal the energy vortex cursed guy. After the disjunction pulse goes by, “Good news, as much as Eleduath had to slow down to shield herself from that, she probably can't make it here in time. The Enemy might have enough time. Everyone who has enough energy left, please start putting up walls. It won't stop him, with the artifact he's carrying, but it'll slow him down. (He's got the Staff of Angrenore, the staff that goes with the citadel he conquered back in the God War. He also has his own copy of the Staff of Ambar, which can be used to control the maelstrom, and that first one was the most useful of all of them for combat.) We're also told that the group teleporting out hasn't gotten in contact with anyone yet, but there were not explosions consistent with a failed teleport, so they presumably survived.
Joe casts a bunch of flash-floods through the portal. Aqila and Moonbeam make some wall of force and stone sammiches. We're also cautioned that we need to dismiss anything that could be construed as an attack as soon as the Malestrom closes. Sneezil took off before he goes nuts. As we're setting up barriers, we hear Aremel start laughing, with a slightly manic tinge to it. "It's so obvious now.” We can see swirls of energy dancing around her. Tervel seem to be stable now, but is still unconcious even after all the mass heals. Joe's heal check reveals that during the course of the fight he had every bone in his body getting broken at least once, and healed, every single major organ ruptured and healed. Basically, if it could be damaged, it was, and healed.
Aremel continues, "I understand why those lessons were necessary. This would not be possible otherwise." Moonbeam does a brain spider to check if Aremel's gone round the bend or not. Moonbeam sees a cascade of images running through Aremel’s head, all centered around her being vastly more powerful, fixing everything that's wrong with the world.
"It would be so easy...and a mistake." Swirls of energy start winking out around her. "Enough for one thing, and only one thing..." She steps over to Tervel and speaks one word. "Live." He wakes up abruptly, and Moonbeam can see a change - she no longer has a deity brain-spidered, but a ordinary mortal.
And about this point, the walls start coming down. We look to see if more walls are needed. We’re told, "He won't get through in time, and it would be best to not prevent him from coming through too late. There is one more thing missing." And with that, the Maelstrom finally collapses. We can now see a massively screwed up landscape, that will need a long time to mend. It's a massive jumble of varied landscapes. Desert chunks next to jungle next to swamps, etc. Thoron is tasked to go take a look around to see if any architecture made it through intact, in case it's dangerous. The tiled area from the room with the fire runes is sitting in the middle of a jumble of various forests, and is clearly visible as a patch of even light green.
The Enemy has now stepped into the center. Valrim and Elenmire are still off finishing off the Tarrasque now that won't break the world. (On Saralis's corpse, we find a greater rod of intensify, which is maximize and doubled, and a set of robes that we'd want to have purified because they're evil. But, they're +2 to CL, function as high end bracers of armor (permanent epic mage armor) and has a 5 points per day pool of metamagic reduction, ring of freedom of movement, activatable elemental immunity 1/day, for all elements, and a greater rod of quicken.)
The Enemy is wearing full plate, and a face-concealing helmet. Jet black of course. He could be a metal golem, for all we can see. “A pity that most of you are protected now. With your superiors as exhausted as they are, if not for that… But, there is at least one person here that is not protected..." He's looking at Tervel. "But, death would be too merciful a vengeance, and under the circumstances, I can do something much more creative. For you and your descendants, a curse on your line, that they shall know nothing but failure.” (cursed fate trait)
"As for the rest of you, as agreed, you have 100 years. Use them well" Eleduath had also followed her father in, looking rather singed. They both Bamf out.



And that wraps up the campaign. I hope everyone reading has enjoyed the logs.