Sands of Blood Campaign Journal (3.5e)

[Silva Stormrage]

Sands of Blood Campaign Journal

With the whole pandemic situation and myself having more free time on my hand than usual, a player of mine and I wanted to post a campaign journal after reading through some of the more excellent journals posted here. We just started a new campaign which I have been prepping for a bit which is hopefully entertaining for you guys .


Cast of Characters:
Mira the Illusionist: Wizard/Shadowcraft Mage
Raeka the Pirate Queen: Ghost Lord of the Uttercold
Arvin the Historian: Anthropomorphic Bat Ardent/Cleric/Sacred Exorcist/Psychic Theurge
Royce the Phoenix: Saint Half Dragon Phoenix
Imotekh: Warforged Shaper Psion
Kaiser: Human Homebrewed Enchanted Weapon Master

Background Info
In the previous campaign, the PCs helped along an unfathomably powerful ritual to defeat an ancient horrific beast -- the cost was that the ritual partially shattered the very fabric of reality as other material planes started to bleed into their own. This campaign takes place in one of those other material planes as they scramble to try and figure out what is going on and what happened while defending the few allies who are with them.

Spoiler: Setting Background Info

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In The Alliance of the Silver Path, a collection of 28 individual city states that have survived in the harsh deserts of Juchon clerics start to have ill omens. Clerics of Sekmere, the God of the Sun, Exhaustion, Perseverance and Gems, started to hear vague prophecies of doom and inevitable ruin while dreaming of their cities turning to ash. Most troubling was that Sekmere and other gods didn’t send these omens and their deities were almost unable to perceive them. A scant month later the world shattered -- rifts were torn in the sky, mountains uplifted and then came crashing down, and oceans poured out from the earth.

The people of the city of Nehekara were one of those few that survived -- later stories would be told of the massive earthquake that seemed to shatter the very sky itself when the calamity first began. Gravity seemed to shift and tumble as people were thrown into the walls and ceilings of their houses and then slammed down again. When this calamity ended hours later the city found their desert home was surrounded on all sides by mountains wreathed in flames. They sent out scouts and tried contacting others with divination magic and found that a scant 4 cities of the Silver Path were with them. Worse, the desert they had so painstakingly mapped out was a mess of familiar and unfamiliar landmarks. Familiar cities were haphazardly placed across the new landscape and they were exceptionally closer than they should have been. There was no word or sign of the other cities in the alliance and spells to contact them failed outright. Even Sekmere himself was disturbingly quiet to the prayers of the clergy.

People were not sure what to make of this event, called the “Transition”. At first the citizens and clergy thought that the fires were a method of Sekmere’s protection. They saw a great valley of fire and ash to their south of the mountains which they could enter but their expedition soon found this to be folly, finding horrific monsters and soul rending fires within that pit. The clergy and the city government tried to stabilize the towns and scout the region but the process is still very much ongoing. They found only their nominal allies, the Children of Nadrit, cannibalistic giants made of sand who appropriately hold great power over sand and earth. They are mostly on friendly terms due to them being led by a Demigod daughter of Sekmere.

A month after the Transition, Atsu, a cleric of Sekmere who took control of the situation and currently heads the clergy post transition, began to see rivers of blood seeping up through the sand in his dreams as well as other ill omens. After the previous omens he decided to try to call the notable or powerful figures still in the scattered cities of the Silver Path to his side to discuss possibilities and options...

I have good amount of extra world info listed in the following doc including a setting map. I tend to write out fairly in depth setting information for my players.
Further Map Details

Mechanical Overview
Starting Level 10
1 Free LA
32 PB
Homebrew Friendly
Partial Gestalt (Tier 1-2//Nothing, Tier 3//Expert or Warrior, Tier 4//Tier 5)
Due to having a large party the sessions will often be split up into two groups of 2-4 players to handle scheduling and make combat shorter and more manageable.


Session 1

Spoiler: Starting Session and Introductions

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After a few minutes of Discord chatter, everyone arrives, and the DM gives a quick introduction monologue to begin setting the scene.

“In the month since the Transition happened, you have all found your way to one of the cities of the Silver Path and due to existing connections, prowess shown in the initial transition or other reasons you have been summoned by the head cleric of Sekmere, Atsu, and have agreed to hear him out. You are allowed into the city by the city’s protective spirit, Arash, and all arrive at the meeting spot in the courtyard of the main temple of Sekmere around noon. You glance around and spot a decent amount of people, 13 people in total. You recognize the Sun Guard Captain of Nehekara, a runaway young noble daughter now-mercenary captain, and a few other notable clerics who have been instrumental in managing the city.”

Those not notably standing with the church officials are a diverse group -- A warforged psion stands next to a small batlike being, who introduce themselves as Imotehk and Arvin, though the warforged shoots an angry glare at the bat as it speaks, blaming the bat for an accident of some sort. Seven identical copies of a young female mage, stand arrayed in a wide area, all facing in precisely the same direction and moving with perfectly choreographed movements. She introduces herself as Mira, a capable illusionist. A second woman sits at attention wearing a crisp uniform and a mask while seemingly nonchalantly looking about.

Besides the group of outsiders are a tall pale man wielding a shortbow on his back, observing everyone with a keen eye and holding themself almost unnaturally still, as well as a spellscale who seems to be a bit restless, jumping back and forth a bit. Lastly, a phoenix hovers above the ground by the church’s faction, bathing the area around it in a soft holy light. The phoenix speaks telepathically, introducing itself as Royce, saint of Sekmere and protector of the Silver Path for the last several centuries.

NPC Cleric (in an undertone): What a strange assortment of characters.

NPC Cleric 2: They’re our only option. Did you hear about the scouts exploring that valley of fire to the south? None have returned.

This is ominous, but Atsu eventually arrives as the initial group finishes introductions and looks around the courtyard of the city’s magnificent basilica. He is followed by a dwarf with pale blue skin who is clearly sweltering in the heat.

Atsu, The Head Cleric of Sekmere: Sorry I am a bit late, Durgas and I were going over some agricultural plans and needed to wrap it up.

Speaking of you, Durgas, you had mentioned another guest who would be arriving? I don’t see anyone unexpected so far.”

The Dwarf shrugs.

Durgas: Don’t worry yourself my good friend, Arash said she had arrived and docked a bit ago but I figured I would tell her to wait until we arrived.

At that word the ground beneath the party seems to rumble and shake and behind the group the ground seems to part way as the sky over the courtyard starts to become slightly overcast. The temperature drops quite significantly to the point where the weather is quite chilly compared to the oppressive desert heat.

Out of the pit comes a burst of wind and a literal sailing ship rides the burst of wind until it’s fully above the surface and the ground closes beneath it forming a sort of port for the ship to rest. Standing on the bow is a spectral female elven pirate wearing an incredibly fancy and well maintained hat. The pirate sweeps her hat off with an exaggerated bow.

Raeka: I heard the Silver Path had need of my...”help”.

At this point the party mobs Raeka’s player, who had mostly kept their character's abilities and backstory a secret up to this point specifically to make this entrance. OOC, the player of Royce just groans loudly in response to Raeka's player's smug explanations.

Royce’s Player (OOC): I wish I could justifiably hit you with my lightning breath.

Getting back to the NPC's reactions, Atsu was not particularly pleased with Raeka's sudden appearance.

Atsu (to Durgas): Really? You invited a pirate?

Durgas: She is reliable enough in her own way, and clever enough to evade your patrols. I figured her ship will be incredibly useful with the Tradeway being disrupted and our vehicles that run along it rendered useless. With the state of the cities as they are, this situation is, ehem, all hands on deck.

Groans all around at the pun. Then the various characters continue their introductions. The warforged and the bat creature stand next.

Imotehk: My name is Imotehk. I was once a desert elf, but since transcended my mortal flesh to this glorious form. However, due to the INCOMPETENCE (he suddenly shouts, with a glare towards the bat-creature) of an assistant of mine, the transfer did not go off perfectly, and we have been trapped in time for the last 400 years, though only one of us was conscious for that time… even if I was unable to move or act during it. I am a capable psion and focus on summoning astral constructs to fight my battles for me.

The clerics are somewhat startled at Imotekh’s casual admission that he is in fact older than the Silver Path itself.

Arvin: I am also psionic, but I have also dabbled in the clerical arts. My abilities will shield my allies by transferring any damage done to them to me instead.

The various images of the woman stand next, in perfect synchronicity, and bow.

Mira: I am Mira Lucian the Illusionist. My shadow magic makes me able to cast nearly any spell, and my illusions are real enough that they can even damage my foes. This is my real body, the rest are merely highly advanced illusions.

Each identical copy points to a particular identical copy. They all then sit down. There is some peanut gallery chatter at how terrifying having random illusions sweeping through your living room would be for the poor townsfolk, as the illusionary clones stay at a set distance away from the main body. This means as Mira walks through a busy street their illusions will suddenly walk through individuals and potentially clip through buildings. The woman standing at attention in the crisp uniform raises.

Kaiser: I’m Kaiser.
(Silence as Kaiser simply sits back down)
Atsu: (Coughs) Nice to have a representative of the Lo Po Bia family. Thank you for coming.

All turn towards the phoenix next, whose player has been casting Detect Evil for the last three rounds on the pirate and has determined that the pirate is, in fact, unsurprisingly and unrepentantly evil.

Royce: I refuse to work with this undead SCUM.

Raeka (mockingly): It’s okay Polly, calm down, have a cracker.

The Phoenix shoots a line of lightning at Raeka, which Raeka dodges with the aid of her incorporeal nature. A brief scuffle ensues, but Atsu manages to calm it down relatively quickly.

Durgas: As long as she’s paid, Raeka won’t cause issues.

Royce: Are you saying you take personal responsibility for her actions? Because, if so, this is on your head when it goes wrong.

Durgas (with an uneasy look at Raeka): I...guess I will.

A grinning Raeka gives Durgas an overexaggerated wink and a thumbs up. For some reason, Durgas does not look reassured.

Raeka: I’ll even forfeit the traditional extra pay that goes to the captain, as long as you bring any of my crew that you find to me unharmed and healed. Some were lost in the transition. How’s that for an offer? Amnesty for me and my crew for our help, at least until the cities are able to fend for themselves again.

Atsu warily agrees, and the other introductions go off without issues. The party meets several of the NPCs, learning that the still pale man is a church-sanctioned archer-assassin, and the spellscale is a combat alchemist of some renown. Durgas introduces himself as a master enchanter and crafter, and the captain of the city Sun Guards also introduces himself.

Once everyone is introduced, Atsu begins laying out the broad strokes of the reasons for calling this meeting. Two months ago, many high level clerics began receiving ominous visions of the world ending, something which came true when the world was shattered a month ago. Now, he is starting to have ominous visions again, of blood seeping up through the sand to eat the world. Given what happened with the last visions, he is understandably concerned, especially since clerical magic has been functioning strangely since the world was re-arranged. His divine magic responds more easily than usual, but feels fragile in some odd, difficult to explain way. Mechanically, regaining spells is reduced to 10 minutes for clerics, but using the spells feels odd in some unspecified way (no mechanical effect). Described as suddenly having to use your left hand instead of your right. This happens on the ethereal as well. When Atsu asked Sekmere if he was actually the one giving him spells Atsu got a strange response… He pulled out a magic item and replayed what he heard which was a noise that seemingly came from over a dozen voices speaking over themselves in a cacophony of noise.

Recorded Message: "Adfavumysnosoiionuveompmetiahiremviisothutnehghat oseadunelemiavyasiussdhimdohrbtautrahotchuvsekasti xsohddohrosmerethysic”.

The party is told out of character that this response actually has a meaning to it and was not randomly generated. Mira’s player and Arvin’s player both pledge to spend the next week attempting to figure out the meaning out of game. Atsu also informs us that teleportation also functions strangely. The party is told that any teleportation beyond 500 feet may cause unpredictable effects including death. This effect is even more powerful for outsiders who are not native to the Material Plane, as any teleportation effect they use (excluding items) has a 100% chance of ending in a mishap, even extending to their natural abilities. Shifting to different planes is also decently risky as the one cleric who had attempted to Plane Shift to Sekmere’s domain didn’t return and divinations register him as dead. The clergy are less willing to experiment after that though one brave individual does find that ethereal travel still functions as normal.

Spoiler: Elemental Sandstorm

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As the meeting continues, a rough voice that the party recognizes as the city spirit, Arash echoes into the chamber.

Arash: High Cleric, a great storm manifested just outside our walls and is battering the walls with sand and wind. The walls are holding but the storm covers most of the northern wall and is battering through the streets. Worse, elementals seem to be emerging from the storm. Fire, earth and air elementals of various strengths.

Atsu: Thank you Arash, everyone this is Nehekara’s guardian nature spirit. Please inform us if any humanoid or undead creatures start to emerge from the storm or if burrowed creatures try to breach the lower wall. Alright everyone looks like this meeting is going to be adjourned for a bit.

Atsu then requests the party to group up and to follow Arash’s whispered words to be directed to the most powerful of the elementals, the Sun Knights will launch their calvary and assist in clearing them out. Atsu directs the combat capable individuals here into two groups, the church’s servants (NPCs) in one group, and the outsiders (PCs) in a second group, under the watchful eye of Royce the phoenix. Atsu then requests some of the surrounding clerics to close the market place and get people into shelters as fast and non panicked as possible.

Atsu: Anyone who is ready to go att-
Bah Kames, the NPC Combat Alchemist *teleports away*: OKAY!

Atsu:…..okay then. The church will provide you all with protective gear: filtration masks and simply sand protection gear, against the sandstorm. If you need any time to prepare, you have one minute. Take any magic items you need from this table, we have gathered all of the materials we can spare here.

The party buffs up, and uses various defensive items. Along the way, we notice that Atsu’s staff and crown, while clearly magical, are not visible to arcane sight, indicating they might be artifacts.

Atsu: You six, group together. We don’t know how you fight, but you can support each other until we form more permanent teams.

The storm's harsh winds cuts at the party, but most are immune except for Mira and Arvin, who take moderate damage that is mostly handled via fast healing. There are various huge elementals destroying the city in the sector Arash guides the party to, all of whom seem to be desert elementals, a custom variant of the standard elementals which have additional fire and desert themed abilities such as spewing out cones of fire. The sun guards help by mounting on flying gryphons away from the sandstorm and firing lances of light that pass straight through objects, cutting down elementals both above and belowground.

Mira and Raeka open up with blasts of cold and freezing winds, respectively, cutting into the fire elementals. Kaiser also reacts near instantly, summoning a ghostly wolf that charges the nearest wind elemental and attacking with a series of enchanted weapons held in place by her telekinetic might, slashing and causing acidic burns to appear over the bodies of the elementals. Arvin attempts to dispel the elementals, but failed even with a result of 38 on his dispel check. Despite knowing they have a 9th level conjuration effect on them, implying there is something with a 28 Caster Level out there running around. The party was somewhat concerned by this fact.

The Fire Elementals came out and attempted to scorch the party with cones of fire but mass resist energy cast beforehand and intellect fortress rendered the attack mostly moot. Most of the elemental attacks were not incredibly effective until one huge air elemental landed a series of powerful blows on Royce.
Royce damaged and in somewhat of a bad position felt the best option was to self destruct in a huge explosion of divine flame and resurrect herself as a phoenix naturally should.

Royce: I have a great idea

Rest of the Party: Please can’t you move so we aren't caught in the area first?

Royce: Nope it’s a full round action and I can’t 5ft step in this sandstorm

Royce then explodes in a 40ft burst of divine flames damaging most of the party as well as the elementals. The fire resistance and Arvin’s share pain spells activate, pulling the damage from all his allies to himself, minimizing damage to the party as a whole, and Arvin quickly starts healing the damage.

Still, more enemies started to emerge as Arash warned the party that earth elementals were coming, about 3 seconds before an elemental reached out from the ground and attacked. One grabs at Mira’s feet, and another at Kaiser’s feet. Kaiser is grabbed and pulled under the sand, but she swaps places with her wolf freeing her from the pit and leaving her on top of a nearby building. The party goes back and forth a bit with the elementals, with the elementals continuing to pull people under. One thing that bothers the party is that the flame elemental begins to flee when he gets low, which is very a-typical for summoned creatures, if these are actually summoned. However, they disappear like summons do when they die. That aside, the elementals are being slowly whittled down. One air elemental did manage to land a solid hit on her and tried to knock Kaiser off the building but unfortunately hit Kaiser hard enough that she was simply knocked clear off the building onto another one about 30ft away instead of tumbling to the street below…

Unfortunately as this fight is happening some nearby elementals finally break through the walls in several buildings filled with civilians. Royce convinced Raeka to help the civilians, as her incorporeality lent itself well to entering the buildings easily, but the party still wasn’t quick enough to rescue or protect the civilians before a good chunk of them were incinerated via blasts of flame. Still, the party intervened and finished off the rest of the elementals before all the civilians were killed.

Spoiler: Post Combat

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After the initial group of elementals was dealt with the party was tasked with patrolling and being directed by Arash to deal with lone elementals while Atsu was casting control weather to disperse the storm, Kaiser suggested the party observe the outer rim of the walls and see if they could find anything interesting or perhaps the caster who spawned the storm in the first place. When they reach the walls, they find a strange cloaked figure with golden hair and glassy skin hovering outside the walls, attempting to reach towards the city as if through an invisible barrier. Their fingers look like they are pushing against something, and as they push in their fingers dissolve into sand. Arash could not detect the creature’s presence in any way and the party’s arcane sight, detect evil and mindsight could not detect anything about the creature. Royce attempted to use diplomacy to ask the creature what it was there for but the creature didn’t respond to it in any way. Kaiser walked up next to it and found out the creature’s eyes held a powerful enchantment which induced horrible despair, which Kaiser thankfully managed to resist.

After resisting the gaze Kaiser lightly tapped the creature with his binding weapon dimensionally anchoring the creature but he found the creature dispersing into sand at the slightest touch. After the dimensional anchor hit and the glass-like creature continued making no motions other than to continually struggle against a barrier only it could perceive, Kaiser just scattered the creature with his weapon and the creature dispersed into dust.

Atsu recalls the party, who gather again in the church. Atsu reveals he has no idea who may have orchestrated this, and also knows nothing about the fey the party saw. Atsu is highly suspicious that this creature or whoever its serving is probably related to the ill omens. He’s somewhat concerned about fending off multiple sandstorms of that level of power because the city doesn’t have many scrolls of control weather just lying around, at the moment they only have 2 more and if whoever created the sandstorm simply recreates it that could be a major problem as they don’t have any cleric in the city capable of casting the spell natively. Atsu retires briefly to his chambers to cast a divination and returns with the result that he believes similar sandstorms within the next week are very unlikely in any of the cities but he can’t confirm anymore than that.

Atsu is still shaken by the sudden attack from out of the blue, but in the absence of having any concrete leads or ideas for tracking the creature down, shows the party a stack of files with details regarding various other strange, troublesome, or unexplained events across the five cities that need urgent attention in the meantime. The party is told to pick those missions they might be able to help out with, and that they will be recalled once the city has more information on the forces behind the sandstorm. Some minor questions regarding the various missions listed below get lobbied towards Atsu but the party finds it spends the rest of the day on logistics and planning.

Kaiser asks if the Sandstorms covering the Sand Giant’s nations could be bypassed by Ethereal travel and the clergy frankly furrow their brow in thought and honestly claim they don’t know and will have to use some divinations to register the possibility.

Among the conversations, it is revealed that Raeka’s magical hat (and class abilities) give her various auras granting huge bonuses (+18) to charisma based checks to allies near her, leading to the memorable statement:

Arvin: I would rather the murderous CE pirate come along to help talk down the riots rather than the saint.

With that somewhat ironic note the party ended the session and discussed amongst themselves who would be taking which job or mission and how to split the party for the next session.

Spoiler: Possible Leads or Jobs

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1: Akhnepata Riots: Akhnepata is still under some pretty harsh restrictions, curfew, limited public gatherings etc. Working with Apedi to try and lift restrictions/quell riots might help. Children of Jahal have also been harassing people wandering outside the city walls due to the city’s sudden close proximity to the mountains. The Jinn are acting unusually aggressive but that's probably just due to the sudden terrain shift and world shattering nature of the Transition.
2: Duzek Kore: A notable druid with a sizable enclave of druids used to supply Nehekara with a good chunk of its magical material resources, he would specifically prepare and shape gems that he mined for particular spell use. His mine was guarded by a particular type of desert fey with whom he bonded to. He and at least some of his enclave were confirmed to have appeared with them in the Transition. However, Duzek Kore is dead according to divinations. The fey’s status is not dead but otherwise unknown; they haven’t been able to contact it with scry or similar magics and none of the clerics in Nehekara have actually met with it for a sending or similar spell. The current guess is that his mine and some of his enclave were transported but were crushed in a cave in of the mine or similar event. However, since the “mine” is currently unknown in a different position and not an actual “location”, scry location, find the path and similar divinations aren’t helping to find it. Finding it and reviving Duzek could be a great help in defense or at the very least simply getting a large amount of diamonds/rubies/other gems could be useful as well. They aren’t quite sure where to start with this one though due to the unknown nature of the location of the mine and being unable to comb through the entire desert easily.
3: Valley of Nadrit: The Sand Giants have sealed their valley off. A great magical defense of theirs allows them to put up a tremendously powerful sandstorm surrounding the region and they have ignored/rebuffed all our communication attempts. Atsu suggests that the party doesn’t go to the Sandstorm, it’s too far and they probably can’t get in and might start a war the cities can’t win. Instead if he suggests that if the party encounters any Sand Giant Patrols or similar try to get an understanding as to why they shut themselves off and if they can establish communications
4: Disappearances: Edma is experiencing some disappearances. Only about ten people have gone missing so far and it's unclear if they simply tried to make the trek through the desert but evidence points to something more sinister. Instances include individual members of a family leaving without taking gear or supplies and disappearing in the night.
5: Tajuna Undead Hunting. Tajuna has had some undead incursions but they would like some help clearing out a few tombs they have located nearby that are too deep to safely clear out with the Sun Guards they have on standby.
6: Nehekara Thefts: Some valuables have been stolen by a thief in town. While this normally wouldn’t be a concern worthy of this kind of focus they have stolen some odd items, a particular fancy mirror, an urn filled with ashes and a few magic items of assorted power. All from different locations and most concerning is that they seem to be able to 1) Teleport without being detected by the wards and 2) Possibly teleport long distances. Achoris has the ability to track locations of creatures based on their kills. Achoris attempted to track them based on a particular kill they made during the robbery but the attempt failed. Meaning they were either more than 110 miles away or on a different plane of existence, or had some method of blocking the tracking attempt.
7: Assassination: A local well respected merchant, Ran Saba was murdered in his house at Anoset within the past week. Kaiser recognizes him as owning a large mine and has many smaller merchants and craftsmen working for him, he is well known for being a particularly good boss and not ripping people off. Famously he once demanded a customer sue him instead of a craftsman under his employ when a product turned out poorly due to materials he supplied. He was found dead collapsed in his bed, at first they thought it was simply natural causes but one of the investigators noticed slight irregularities with a diagnostic spell and further investigation showed that he was stabbed through the chest and then the wound was healed over by healing magic. In addition, his body was fairly damaged by an unknown drug or poison of some sort, there are no remnants of the material left in his body so it’s unclear how it worked. Still there are no suspects and his mansion, while outside the walls of the city and closer to one of the now defunct mines, was heavily guarded and warded against things such as teleportation or incorporeal or burrowing creatures. Atsu is concerned because this doesn’t seem like a spontaneous attack and was way too competently done to be by amateurs. Further divinations were unable to detect anything else on the assailant. The only other oddity of the attack was that his daughter went missing about the same time and there appears to have been a scuffle in the lower rooms. Beyond that the party would have to ask the authorities in Anoset for more details

Links to Others Sessions:
Session 2: Meeting with the Children of Nadrit (Raeka, Mira, Kaiser)
Session 2: Descent into Tarjuna's Tomb (Royce, Imotehk, Arvin)
Session 3: "Handling" the riots (Entire Party)
Session 4: "The Party vs a Giant Rock" (Mira, Arvin)
Session 4: "Interrogations and Ambushes" (Royce, Flower, Raeka and Kaiser)
Session 5: "The Plot Revealed" (Entire Party)
Session 6: "Completely off the Rails" (Entire Party)

[Silva Stormrage]

Character Spotlights:

Instead of posting every player character’s backstories every session we decided to just post a short blurb explaining one or two characters’ builds more in depth each session. That way we can also introduce new characters more in depth if characters happen to die or get swapped out.

Spoiler: Imotekh

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Many centuries ago Imotekh was born amongst a tribal band of Desert Elves Imotekh rather quickly grew bored with their rituals and the constant clashes with the elders over various minor matters. His way lied in learning and curiosity rather than hunting and nomadic wandering. Eventually due to minor squabbles turning bad he was banished and he sought to master his own psionic potential by himself.

Eventually though in his wanderings he came across a band of undead loyal to Amun Tep, an ancient absurdly powerful lich who ruled over the desert in the time before the Silver Path. Beaten to an inch of his life and inflicted with a painful and deadly mummy curse Imotekh attempted to cure himself of the disease and his fragile mortal form in one go. Struggling against the time limit the disease imposed on him he eventually came across a curious Efreet during his research. This Efreet promised aid in exchange for a small favor to be cashed in at a later date. Desperate Imotekh agreed and the Efreet gave him the knowledge to construct a body.

Still Imotekh needed assistance to actually complete the procedure and didn’t trust the Efreet with the delicate and critically important transfer so he called upon an individual who had reached out to him earlier during Imotekh’s wanderings, Arvin a anthropomorphic bat who was a member of an organization of clerical historians and whom also had a fair bit of psionic power.

With Arvin’s help the two completed the steps of the transfer perfectly until the very last step, as Imotekh was transferred into the proper warforged body a burst of psionic energy radiated from the equipment shocking Arvin who fell backwards in his shock, tripping and falling into a vat of quintessence freezing him in time. Imotekh however, was left fully conscious and aware, just unable to move his body or do anything other than think and rage in his mental prison.

After the transition Arvin was shaken from the vat of quintessence and rushed to free Imotekh after he realized what had happened. Arvin then completed the transfer and Imotekh awoke, nearly completely enraged at the 400 years of isolation he had to endure and set out to try and figure out what the current era had in store for them.



Character Build:
Mechanically speaking Imotekh is a psion shaper warforged focused on summoning astral constructs, item crafting and various other shaper discipline powers.

Spoiler: Arvin

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Arvin was born a regular bat, in a cave somewhere in the mountains. Eventually an expedition force found him and took him back to their study. There Arvin found himself growing more intelligent and wise with each passing day, someone in the study was clearly using him as an experiment but he never could figure out who. Arvin found he didn’t really care, as he's happy for his newfound sentience and his newfound opposable thumbs. So thus Arvin was raised in the study of the Conservationists, a group of clerics dedicated to worshiping history and working towards the preservation and recording of historical events. The Conservatory was a complex that was designed to conserve history and culture. It was an ever expanding museum, and library all in one. The Conservationists taught their disciples to literally worship history, and this worship granted them the divine power to make sure that culture was preserved. As all disciples Arvin started by learning history, and while he wasn't the smartest learner he did the best he could. He started to be trained as a gatherer, a person who finds important cultural items and gathers them to the Conservatory.

Due to such a trip Arvin learned how to control the psychic powers of his mind, and how to protect others with these powers. Arvin liked the idea of being able to take injuries and pain for others, he felt like he was doing his part in preserving the lives of his allies, who he was sure would become important to history. He started to develop a combat style and various strategies to enhance this personal style of his. After this, in the rare cases that the Conservationists found someone who had psionic abilities and who would be a useful ally the Conservatory sent Arvin as an emissary. This is how Arvin came across Imotehk, who became an acquaintance, and ally of Arvin.

When Imotehk fell ill, mummy rot, uncurable, Arvin was concerned. When Arvin heard that Imotehk was planning to transfer his soul into the body of a construct he was intrigued. He believed that if such a procedure were effective it meant that the conservationists could actually conserve willing historical figures forever. Of course he didn't mention those aspirations when he asked to take leave to help save Imotehk's life, because he knew that the life of the elf was the more pressing issue. So he started trying to create a custom spell that would help along with the transfer

With Arvin’s help the two completed the steps of the transfer perfectly until the very last step, as Imotekh was transferred into the proper warforged body a burst of psionic energy radiated from the equipment shocking Arvin who fell backwards in his shock, tripping and falling into a vat of quintessence freezing him in time. Arvin awoke with a large shake as the underground lab which they were working in trembled with a mighty heave and spilled Arvin out from his temporal prison.

After the transition Arvin was shaken from the vat of quintessence and freed, realizing what had happened Arvin completed the transfer and Imotekh awoke. Imotekh was furious at Arvin who was deeply apologetic and agreed to serve and work with Imotehk as a form of recompense.

Arvin found some time to go to the Conservatory afterwards, and he was disappointed in what he found. The Conservationists were still an organization and the Conservatory still stood,even if it had moved to the city of Akhnepata. Most of the contents were still intact, and some new pieces had been added to the museum, but the soul of the Conservationists was gone. The Conservatory was much more akin to a magical college, where people studied history to help them prepare to be soldiers, politicians and bodyguards. While they still worshiped history and believed they could learn from it, they no longer collected current samples. They didn't understand that history happens in the present, and the culture of the present must be preserved now, when it is fresh, and not eroded. The Conservationists are still a good organization, with a valiant goal of teaching the importance of history, but Arvin would never call them great.



Character Build:
Mechanically speaking Arvin is an Ardent/Cleric Theurge who focuses on DMM Persist and Share Pain/Shield Other and similar types of effects. Arvin tends to have the power Share Pain and the spell Shield Other active on all relevant party members while also using Share Pain to share half the damage he takes to mindless undead zombies or his psicrystal to absorb damage. He persists Delay Death on himself and uses his natural fast healing to lower the risk of taking a good majority of every other party member's damage.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Silva Stormrage
I have good amount of extra world info listed in the following doc including a setting map.

That's a very nice map you have there. Did you work that up yourself? What sort of program(s) did you use?

[Silva Stormrage]

That's a very nice map you have there. Did you work that up yourself? What sort of program(s) did you use?

Alas I am nowhere near a good enough artist for that . I ended up searching on google/pinterest and other similar sites for a vaguely appropriate map (Desert + Mostly surrounded by mountains) and then proceeded to edit the map with a free online image editor. You can see some of those edits still if you look closely, the black mountains in the bottom of the map and on both sides of the Tradeway are .png mountain files I found online and rotated/resized/adjusted to fit in better with the map. Likewise you can see that Nehekara's city name is different from the other cities. The other cities were copied and pasted into the map to fit the campaign and I had to manually add the city titles as well trying to get as close as I reasonably could to Nehekara's city title with the font.

Still I am glad you liked the map XD I think it still turned out quite well.

[Demidos]

Wow, this is a great read! 15/10 as good as SilverClawShift's journals.


I really think there should be more of a focus on Raeka though -- maybe she should be the protagonist, along with her boat and dashing crew? Alternately, perhaps she should receive a larger share of the loot, given the no doubt enormous upkeep costs of maintaining a ship that sleek?


Just throwing out some ideas!

[Silva Stormrage]

Wow, this is a great read! 15/10 as good as SilverClawShift's journals.


I really think there should be more of a focus on Raeka though -- maybe she should be the protagonist, along with her boat and dashing crew? Alternately, perhaps she should receive a larger share of the loot, given the no doubt enormous upkeep costs of maintaining a ship that sleek?


Just throwing out some ideas!

And everyone this modest individual is my cowriter and the player of Raeka. So their personality in game should make more sense now XD.

[Silva Stormrage]

Session 2 (Kaiser, Raeka, Mira)

Spoiler: Reconnecting with the Navigator

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As the city is still recovering from the sudden elemental incursion, the party is presented with the list of urgent missions by the head cleric, Atsu. Before deciding on specific missions, the party decides to have Imotekh, the party psion, manifest several divinations to attempt to learn a bit more information. They have enough spare power points to manifest three psionic divinations.

Questions
“Does the Sandstorm produced by the sand giants extend into the ethereal plane?”
“Where will I be able to encounter a sand giant patrol within the week?”
“Will the riots in (city) cause it to collapse within the week?”

Responses
The sands nor wind will harm but the glass shields have eyes and can turn into cages
Where the reconnected navigator sets the meeting point.
The creaking iron fist won't rust and break nor crush beyond recognition while oil is still being applied

All: Well, that was pretty unhelpful…

DM: I think two out of three are pretty clear…

Rest of the Party: We can’t tell if that’s a joke or not....

Raeka: I might actually know what the second divination means -- our ship’s navigator, Gulum, was a sand giant, although he was knocked off our boat in the Transition. If he is still alive, we can reach out to him, perhaps he can get us a meeting.

The party generally agrees that this is worth attempting, and scrounge some scrolls of sending for Raeka to use to contact Gulum.

Raeka’s Sending: "Gulum, this is your captain speaking. Please fasten your seatbelt, except you already fell off the ship. Consider silver path friendlies, for now. Status? Location?

The rest of the party: “Lots of deadpan looks and eye rolling”

Gulum's Response: "You’re alive? Hara thought you died. Currently with brethren to payback debt. Patrol Path passes mountain south east of valley between twin peak at noon"

The party quickly finds the rough location based on an initial map sketch compiled by the Silver Path’s scouts. The party splits into two at this point -- out of character, this is due to player schedule constraints. With six players, combat tends to be a bit of a drag, and we hope that dividing into two groups will help speed up combat while also allowing for players to get more into character. In character, there are too many (metaphorical) fires and urgent issues for a single group to put out, and by splitting up we can cover more ground. Due to the quickly approaching deadline from Gulum, Raeka, Kaiser, and Mira split off to contact the sand giants, while Arvin and Royce accepted a ride from some Sun Guards to the agricultural hub of Tajuna, to tamp down the undead threat before it could cause a mass displacement of refugees which might threaten the order in other cities. Before leaving Nehekara, however, the party makes a few gather information checks regarding the thievery and assassinations going on in Nehekara, to hand over to the relevant authorities but that is mostly handled by the other party.

Raeka, Mira and Kaiser travel on Raeka’s boat, the Luminescence, towards the Valley of Nadrit, where the sand giants reside, the party finds that they are able to comfortably travel underground for the vast majority of the trip, largely insulated from outside predators or concerns. The sand becomes relatively shallow around the pass near the silent watchtower, but is still traversable. However, the twin peaks themselves are craggy rock, and as Raeka’s ship is unable to tunnel through solid stone, the ship lifts up from the ground to fly up the side of the peak.
Mira (OOC): Wait, your ship could have been flying this whole time, instead of burrowing?? Why didn’t we do that the whole time?
Raeka (OOC): Two reasons -- first, between harpies, djinn, and any other flying beings, there are far more dangers in the air than underground. Second -- flying ships are old hat. Ships that can tunnel underground, however? A hundred times cooler!

DM: Speaking of aerial dangers….make spot checks.

Kaiser succeeds on the check, and notices a group of three winged creatures three hundred feet in the distance leave cover and attack the ship -- harpies. The harpies immediately begin singing an enchanting song (which everyone promptly passed the save for). Raeka’s player gets a sudden smile on their face.

Raeka: Just out of curiosity, they are 300 feet away, and this boat moves at 440 feet per round….what are the chances that ramming one of these harpies with a several ton ship would do much more than scratch the Luminescence?

DM: Given that your hull is effectively made of magically treated iron? Pretty low….

Mira blinds two of the three harpies with a casting of Flashburst, while Kaiser readies an action to attack the harpies with her enchanted blades once they are in range. Seeing that the party is unaffected by their singing, the harpies switch tactics and begin blindly lobbing maximized searing fireballs at the ship, lighting the sails on fire in several places and causing moderate damage to the boat’s structure.

Kaiser and Mira’s Players: Wait, in a desert themed campaign you didn’t ward your super expensive flying wooden boat against fire in any way? What…?

Raeka: Look it is expensive and it’s on my todo list.

Raeka is incensed, and summons a storm of snow to put out the flames as she spins the wheel hard to run down the two the harpies closest together. One is able to dodge with a lucky reflex save, the other one fails and the third Raeka telekinetically throws into the path of the ship causing both to take a large chunk of damage as the ship crashes past them. As the party gets closer, they also notice something odd -- the harpies are wearing obviously enchanted matching belts, showing up clearly in Mira’s permanencied Arcane Sight. Raeka, having encountered this species before, notes that this is very uncommon for a race of what is essentially “glorified pigeons”. (Raeka’s player is still fuming about the damage to their precious boat). Now on the far side of the harpies, the harpies again target the boat.

Mira: How are they able to target the boat if they’re blinded?

DM: Well, Raeka did just summon a constant storm of sleet and snow around the boat, and the boat itself is propelled by near hurricane level winds. It’s not exactly a subtle sound and these creatures have pretty good listen checks in the first place.

Raeka: Oops.

The party, now low on health, manages to finish off two of the harpies, but before they can finish off the last one, it disappears in a puff of feathers and teleportation magic.

Kaiser: Well, I guess we know what the belts do now.

Despite the party’s best efforts, they are unable to locate the harpy that fled, and so content themselves with looting the dead harpies. They find little of value, besides the magical belts. Some experimentation reveals the belts to be Belts of Dimension Door, usable twice per day! A little perturbed by the thought that someone is able to afford arming scavengers in military grade gear, the party continues towards the rendezvous point.

Spoiler: Meeting and discussion

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The party arrives at the point about 30 minutes early, and spends most of it buffing up, while Raeka searches the area nearby for any sort of hidden traps, ambushes, or secret doors. Apart from a thick cover of sand smothering the floor of the valley between the peaks, Raeka doesn’t manage to find anything in the time it takes for the sand giants to arrive. The party asks Raeka about the various abilities that sand giants have in this area since she has worked with one constantly and they are not standard sand giants. Raeka explains that from her time working with Gulum they have various abilities, 1) The ability to see and move through sand and sandstorms easily along with the ability to regenerate limbs and heal while touching sand. 2) Various SLAs regarding sand, sandstorms and the ability to turn sand to glass and shape glass 3) The ability to attack through sandstorms they create, even allowing them to grapple enemies within their own magically created sandstorms from a distance and then pulling distant creatures adjacent to their location, they often pull such creatures underground and then transmute the area around them to glass burying enemies alive.

The Party: Okay but even if they try that on us every one of us can get out of being buried alive fairly easily with items or our own teleports/class features.

DM: Okay the ability is probably much more terrifying to random travelers than magically geared adventurers but still, being buried alive is pretty scary XD

After that discussion and a tense wait, four sand giant soldiers appear from the sand promptly at noon, followed by Raeka’s navigator Gulum and what appears to be a sand giant captain, clad in magical gear. Several of the sand giants seem to be injured with seared flesh and blackened wounds that do not heal, an oddity given that sand giants are known for their ability to consume sand to regenerate and heal their wounds. Despite some initial uneasiness, and Gulum’s initial shock at seeing the ghost of the woman who had been his captain a mere month before, both parties begin to relax in each other’s presence….

Raeka: I call out to Gulum and say “Check out what I can do now!” before telekinetically slapping him across the face while trying to give Gulum a telekinetic high five from 100 feet away.

Despite Raeka’s enthusiasm at being reunited with her old crew member, copious amounts of diplomacy (“I’m so sorry!”) and bluff (“She didn’t mean it!”) checks manage to smooth over tensions, and the two sides begin communicating. The party starts with asking why the sand giants have been incredibly non responsive to the Silver Path and the sand giant captain looks initially pensive as if choosing his words wisely. Then eventually he tells the party that a few of the divinations they while they could revealed that the Silver Path had been infiltrated to some degree, not overtaken entirely just it had holes in its security and was a possible threat in the future from being undermined from within.
The sand giant captain informs the party that their nation has been attacked by a powerful individual, a shapeshifter carrying a black stave topped with a ruby bleeding tears of blood, and backed with an army of humanoids and demons. Although the individual’s army was largely routed, the individual escaped, and they are uncertain of the shapeshifter’s current location. The leader of the sand giants, Ersan, summoned the sandstorm to protect their borders from the incursions while she dealt with a secret task regarding destroying some mysterious thing that the sand giants somehow got their hands on. It is implied that this thing is the reason for the shapeshifter’s assault, but the sand giants remain purposely vague and elusive regarding the nature or abilities of the items, simply reiterating that it is a dangerous thing that must be destroyed for the good of all.

The party reluctantly accepts this, and in exchange provides the information regarding the sandstorm that assaulted their own city, as well as the inability of the city’s nature spirit to detect the presence of the mysterious fey. They also recount the scuffle with the harpies earlier. The giants are unable to provide any information regarding the sandstorm, but are very interested in the news about the harpies.
Sand Giant Captain: You say they were visible the whole time? This is very strange -- harpies in these parts are what are known as mirror harpies, and their intrinsic abilities include the ability to become invisible, even while attacking. For them not to use that ability, as well as for two of them to fight to the death, this is extremely unusual. What happened to the last one?

Party: She teleported away, and we weren’t able to locate her.

Sand Giant Captain: So she teleported away -- she couldn’t have gone more than 500 feet. So she must still be somewhere nearby….
The party is now wearing matching looks of sinking dread.

Kaiser, to the sand giants: So…..do you guys have any way to detect invisible creatures?

Spoiler: Children of Jahal

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On cue, a section of the cliff which had remained un-searched up to this point becomes translucent as a small army of djinn and demons bursts through the illusionary stone. The djinn open with blasts of cold which slow and damage the party, while the demons, a particularly nasty variety named Djybbuk which resemble floating jellyfish, drift forward, draining the life of those who their tentacles brush.

Out of character, the Children of Jahal are air elemental djinn specific to this region with a variety of cold and storm based SLAs and a variety of other offensive tools including limited wish 1/week as an SU ability, they are well known for being cowardly with a tendency to bind demons, and almost always attack during the night where they have perfect vision. They are bitter enemies of the sand giants (the Children of Nadrit), as Nadrit and Jahal were ancient primordial elemental deities and rivals. Nadrit was the ruler of earth and fire, while Jahal had mastered air and cold. Nadrit was eventually slain in ages past but Jahal still roams the windy mountaintops and lends the occasional aid to his children.

The sand giants are caught quite flat footed by their foes sudden appearance during the day. The Children of Jahal were quite well prepared for this ambush, however, as Mira’s arcane sight detected over six ongoing spell effects on them as well as a greater blinking effect probably produced by their limited wish ability. Casting lightning bolts and boreal winds the ambush is actually quite fierce as spells chewed through the assorted party and sand giants. The Children of Jahal are led by a priest, who exhorts them to continue fighting from a safe distance. After the initial shock wore off and the party had time to act Raeka sent her frost magic to blast a few with her frost attacks (which proved remarkably ineffective), and reached out to grab one and pull it downwards within reach of the various sand giants. Kaiser thrust at three of the djinn using her weapon’s binding abilities to dimensionally anchor the Children of Jahal. Preventing them from using their greater blinking spell and making them much easier to deal with. Mira decides to go for the priest before they could cast a spell and Mira casts Sensory Deprivation on the distant priest. The priest botches the saving throw and ends up being completely stopped from seeing, hearing or using any special senses like blindsight or blindsense to locate the party. The Priest then spends his action futility attempting to dispel the CL 21 spell effect before the sand giant Captain grabs the priest through the sand cloud he generated and pulls the priest to the ground level. He and a few other sand giants slash out and cut massive gashes across the priest, slaying him as he was unable to see or react to his opponents.

While this was going on the party noted the very odd aggression of the Children of Jahal who while normally raiders and are fairly violent they are also super cowardly and would often flee if their leader was slain. These ones however, were still fighting strong. Kaiser managed to succeed on a sense motive check to detect the presence of an enchantment and she did manage to succeed on determining that they were under some sort of enchantment though they couldn’t tell which one or what its effects were, just that their rage was unnatural.

Unnatural or not a fight was still ongoing and when Kaiser somewhat jokingly asked for parley after stabbing multiple of them pointing to the gleaming white flag on the ship above. The Children of Jahal however, shout out in rage “Death to the Captors of Jahal!” and continue their assault. The party turns as one towards the sand giant captain and gives him a very unimpressed look.

Kaiser: Really, you somehow captured their god?

Mira: That seems kinda relevant and probably should have been mentioned before now.

However, the sand giants seemed fairly confused by the proclamation and denied knowing anything about it. The party is skeptical, but according to the party’s sense motive checks it seems like the giants are telling the truth.

The djinn’s fury was unabated by this apparent confusion as they send volleys of lightning bolts and boreal winds to buffet the party and various sand giants while the demonic Dybbuks continue to drain Kaiser and the sand giant Captain of their vitality. After one too many tendrils draining the sand giant Captain to a measly 2 constitution he burrows underground and pulls back from the battle to prevent his death. As Kaiser with her evasion and obscene reflex save continuously dodged the various lightning bolts sent her way, A few of the djinn who were dragged to the ground by the various sand giants went with a different approach. They produce a massive cone of frost and wind from their hands blasting everyone with cold and slowing those who were hit. Most of the sand giants and Kaiser were pretty well injured at this point as Kaiser couldn’t reliably dodge and she was already drained of a fair bit of con at this point.

Still Kaiser decided to use the last charges of her binding weapon to dimensionally anchor the last two children to prevent them from fleeing while also shutting off their greater blinking spell. Still, as the rest of the Children of Jahal were mostly still alive they resumed their blasts of elemental fury knocking Gullum to unconsciousness. The flurry of spells would've killed him without the timely intervention of Mira casting Energy Aegis and providing some emergency elemental resistance. The sand giants resumed their assault, cutting down 2 more djinn with the help of Kaiser and Mira. With the Children of Jahal injured or beaten in some ways, the major threats were now the demonic Dybbuks and their constitution draining tendrils. The demons lash out hoping to turn the fight by taking out the party’s main source of non elemental damage Kaiser. Two out of three tendrils hit inflicting another 5 points of constitution damage leaving Kaiser drained to 4 constitution and 20 HP from the various other elemental blasts she has taken.

Sensing a strategy to actually deal with the mostly unharmed demons, Raeka used her elemental dragon to bull rush the three Dybbuks into one pile on the corner of the map. Mira then cast a shadow resilient sphere spell to seal the incorporeal creatures inside. With the high DC only one of the Dybbuk’s dodged the effect but the demon was unable to finish off Kaiser with its last attack. The demon did drain Kaiser to a single point of constitution left before being cleaved in two by one of the few remaining conscious sand giants. The other two demons attempted to use dimensional door to escape the sphere but apparently they were not aware of the mishap chance for outsiders using teleportation in general on this material plane and ended up vanishing to places unknown away from the battlefield.

Kaiser, feeling that the fight wasn’t really the best for her when she had only a single point of con and single hit point left, decides to retreat to the safety of the ship. However, as she was about to flee she caught the sight of a strange human figure on the ethereal plane peering out through the cliff face clearly observing the fight. Deciding to take a risk she approaches the somewhat surprised individual.

Kaiser: Hello, good day it seems, what are you doing here?

Observer: Oh dear it seems my presence has been spotted, this is quite embarrassing. I was just observing a rare fight between elemental rivals, usually one side just flees at this point.

Kaiser: Quite, it appears they both have reasons not to flee

Observer: Oh what would those reasons be?

At this point we were all somewhat laughing about how this was “somewhat” stretching the concept of talking being a free action as this all somehow took place after Kaiser’s move action but just before she could teleport away. We decided to call the conversation there for realism .

Kaiser: Well I would love to chat more but I need to pull back for now, meet me on the ship above and we can chat.

The observer looked somewhat pensive at that idea as Kaiser used one of the belts of dimensional door to retreat back to the cover of the ship several hundred feet above.

Seeing their hope for victory basically vanish with their demonic allies gone, the three remaining children of Jahal attempted to flee. Two launched a last minute lightning bolt which slew one of the sand giants but nothing else and one turned invisible and fled. The two who launched the lightning bolt were slain as Mira blasted them with arcane magic and Raeka grappled one to prevent it from running away. Unfortunately the party wasn’t able to capture any of them alive to get any information out of who was potentially behind this.
Still, seeing an opportunity to get more information Raeka intercepted the observer who was making their way to the ship where Kaiser was.

Raeka: Hello my good friend!

Lenathor: Spotted again...? My reputation is going to take quite the hit from this…
As a ghost, Raeka is able to see the observer hiding on the ethereal plane. The observer blinks in surprise, now having been spotted twice and clearly unused to the situation. In fact, he seems pretty unsure about how to proceed from this point, clearly not wanting to engage with the entire party.

Raeka: Come onnnn, stay and hang out a bit!

The siren call of “Come on” somehow seems unable to phase the Observer, but Raeka’s accompanying 48 on diplomacy buys her quite a bit of leeway, and she manages to get a small amount of information from him.

Lenathor: I really must go, but I supposed you did provide me quite the show, so as a token of appreciation I will provide you some information you may find interesting -- you say that you are with the Silver Path? I’ve heard there is quite some rioting occurring in Akhnepata. A rival of mine, Atef, is staying there, and I believe he is one agitating the Children of Jahal in that region. Stop their raids, and the city should quiet down somewhat. If you are able to, ehem, remove him from the chessboard, as one might say, I would consider it a favor. Accomplish that and we may find a mutually beneficial business relationship waiting for us.

With that Lenathor vanishes outside the party’s line of sight.

Kaiser: Thanks Raeka, thanks a lot.

Still after that the party and the sand giants discuss the situation and what they plan to do, after sharing the information regarding the enchantment on the Children of Jahal and Lenathor’s presence and comments the group discusses their next steps. The sand giants hadn’t heard of any of the names given and planned to keep an eye out and promised to send word to the Silver Path. Gulum promised to stay with the sand giants for at least a month to repay his debt to them and the party went off to Akhnepata to see if they could help solve the riot issue as well as possibly track down Atef.

Raeka: So who in the Silver Path do we trust at the moment? Do we share this information with Atsu?

Kaiser: No, I doubt he is trustworthy in the long run.

Mira: I am neutral about it.

Raeka: Come on I think Atsu at least is pretty reliable. Which probably means he will die in a session or two, but still!
The party continues to discuss things as the loot and XP is being tallied, and eventually settle on proceeding to Akhnepata to settle the riots and attempt to sniff out more information about Atef, the alleged instigator of the djinn raids.

[Silva Stormrage]

Character Spotlights: (Raeka and Kaiser)

Spoiler: Raeka Opol

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Raeka the “Pirate Queen” was an elf born in the frozen lands to the north born in a village which commonly was “Blessed” by the various stars in the sky. The various blessings the villagers received varied but hers was strange even by the village’s standards, getting marked with various silver birthmarks and seemingly nothing else.

Growing bored with her life in the rural village she went off in search of adventure with her friend Ranik. Accompanying her were a few other individuals they picked up on the way and together the new group went tomb diving in the deserts of the Silver Path far to the south. After breaking through some enchantments and long aging wards they broke into what appeared to be an ancient underground dock of some sort and found a long buried ship left there when the tomb was abandoned. Claiming the ship, The Luminescence, she and her crew set about raiding tombs, caravans and other such targets of opportunity. The Luminescence was a magical ship reinforced and capable of flight, still even better it was capable of burrowing underground through sand and loose dirt if not through stone. Creating a bubble of space around the ship Raeka and her crew set about to explore other various tombs and see what adventures they could have in this new world.

Making sure to avoid small targets she even protected various smaller caravans in danger if they didn’t have anything worthwhile to take. This led to her having a somewhat favorable reputation amongst the populace but still fairly despised by the merchants and upper class of the Silver Path. She even made fairly fast friends with Durgas, a famed crafter in the Silver Path who she often called upon to repair and further enchant her ship when repairs or upgrades were needed.

However, Raeka’s pirate crew was underground during the transition, the warping of space and the massive shakes of the land pierced through the protective bubble of the Luminescence knocking the crew members off the ship and into places unknown. Raeka herself was slain as the ship was dashed upon the stony terrain of a mountain as her ship was bashed against it.

She awoke several weeks later, spectral and incorporeal she found her tattoos granted to her by her ancient birthright of her village were glowing alight and had bonded her spirit to the ship. She was eventually found by Durgas who after hearing about an abandoned ship that sounded like the Luminsesence came by to check it out and perhaps salvage the wreck. With his and Raeka’s combined skill they repaired the ship to functioning capacity and Durgas invited Raeka to join up with the Silver Path. Arguing that this was not time to continue her raiding spree and the clergy were easily the best way to reconnect or find her scattered crew. With that Raeka agreed, though she demanded she be allowed to make a fitting dramatic entrance.


Character Build:
Mechanically speaking, Raeka is a Lord of the Uttercold, with the ghost template. The Lord of the Uttercold is a homebrew class I made and they are using a slightly modified version of the Uttercold Knight ACF. Raeka gains a set amount of funds to improve and reinforce her ship instead of building a stronghold. The Lord of the Uttercold is a highly mobile but fragile cold/necromantic based class with a fair bit of battlefield control. Their main abilities are the ability to produce a dragon made of ice which crashes into foes bull rushing them a good distance, the ability to create a sleet storm effect as a swift action they can see out of, the ability to produce a minor marshal aura and short range teleportation usable a limited times per encounter.
Raeka uses her ghostly telekinesis as her main form of offense using the Lord of the Uttercold’s minor marshal aura to boost her disarm, grapple and bull rush checks to an obscene height and then using her various cold/negative energy based Lord of the Uttercold abilities as supplemental attacks and utility.
She also has a very fancy Admiral’s Bicorne which grants another boost to charisma checks to all allies in addition to her marshal aura which she spent 95% of her WBL on so they could say they had the fanciest hat in the party.

Spoiler: Kaiser

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Kaiser (Elaine Lo Po Bia)
The Lo Po Bia family is an outcast even in the far northern reaches of the frozen forests above the deserts of the Silver Path. Isolated this tight knit family has several branches and were the major leaders of a small city state in the frozen north. There the family experimented with and made pacts with various spirits, magical animals and other such creatures becoming experts at fusing themselves with such creatures and binding them to their services. The family however, caught the ire of the Perkuna, the newly crowned leader of the Rus. Clamping down on their specific culture the Lo Po Bia immigrated south to the newly forming Silver Path several hundred years ago. They assimilated into this new culture piecemeal, adopting some customs while keeping a strong internal code and keeping some of their new countrymen at arms distance. Still they assist the clergy of Sekmere quite often and a large portion of the family converted to worshiping Sekmere. They were the ones who formed the Solar Sphinxes, magical sphinxes which the elite of the Silver Path ride and the gigantic beetle creatures called merely the Sekmere Collosus.

Elaine Lo Po Bia was a talented swordswomen of one of the various branches of the family and was in fact slated to join the Sun Guards under the command of a notable and well respected commander. Imbued with the power of various magical creatures and even the blood of a dragon she was exceptionally swift and observant. During training she ended up falling for a particular handsome and talented recruit in her class. She and the recruit conspired to ditch the Sun Guards and run off somewhere else to be together but when Kaiser arrived at the planned point with her Sun Guard gear she was met with her commanding officer and several other officers. It turns out the recruit was a plant from a merchant family who had long been rivals and despised the Lo Po Bia family.

With her attempted escape, breach of contract with the Clergy and theft of equipment her family’s reputation took a large hit and her family branch in particular were harshly punished for Kaiser’s actions. Her family in particular had to take on enormous debts to cover the various damages that Kaiser’s actions had cost them. Kaiser was treated as a family disgrace which was exceptionally humiliating and shameful for such an insular and tightly knit family. Horrified by her own actions and dedicated to make up for them, she donned a mask and took up the name Kaiser, dedicating herself to working to earn money and work herself ragged until her family forgave her.

After the transition, most of the Lo Po Bia family heads were left in other cities as Kaiser worked in Nehekara during her exile. Isolated from her family she still pushes forward to try and redeem herself in the eyes of her family.

Spoiler: Side Note

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Yes, for those familiar with the series Kaiser is a blatant expy of the character of the same name from the Tower of God series (An excellent series by itself) worked into the setting.

Character Build:
Mechanically speaking Kaiser is a melee combatant. She uses a homebrewed class the player made that is not posted online anywhere but is fairly straightforward in its abilities. She can wield multiple enchanted blades telekinetically and attack creatures within medium range with them. These weapons are all enchanted with the same enchantments and she traditionally applies greater dispelling and binding to her weapons. All her weapons share the charges per day for her various abilities but when spending a charge for her weapons abilities they apply to all of her weapons that round. She uses dexterity to attack and damage but she isn’t able to apply various damage boosting effects to her attacks like sneak attack and her weapons function almost like constantly active spiritual weapons than traditional attacks.

She can also conjure up an enchanted shield which grants high amounts of temporary hit points once per encounter to defend herself with as well as being granted a small amount of energy resistances and damage reduction.

Beyond that she can summon a spectral wolf animal companion that can go ethereal and inflict wounds that can’t be healed. She is also partial gestalted with the base monk class mostly for evasion and the monk’s bonus to AC, leading her to have a pretty high amount of saves and AC.

Her race is “Human” but she is really an anthropomorphic weasel white dragonspawn with those aspects being refluffed as biological enchantments done by the Lo Po Bia family to enhance her capabilities.

[Silva Stormrage]

Session 2 (Imotehk, Arvin and Royce)

Spoiler: Arrival

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While half of the party remains set on trying to contact Raeka’s old navigator Gulum, the other three party members, Royce, Imotehk and Arvin, decide to address the undead assaulting Tarjuna as that seems the most pressing issue set before them. The party begins their session with some initial information gathering regarding some of the other problems in Nehekara, most notably the thefts and whether or not anyone else saw anything particularly unexpected during the elemental attack on the city.

With Royce’s connections in the city and Raeka lending her massive bonuses to charisma checks, Royce manages to get an incredible 58 on the check and rakes in the information. First, regarding the thefts, they find an old wizard who had set up the wards in one of the merchant’s houses. Discussing the event with him is somewhat tricky as he is at first somewhat hesitant to potentially tick off one of his former clients; however, he eventually lets it slip that the painting is in fact a magic item. After a bit more prodding, the party learns that it was in fact a scrying magic item that the merchant had kept hidden from the rest of his household. The party was unfortunately unable to contact the merchant before they had to leave, as he was in Anoset for the week on business.

They also manage to uncover some information on another stolen item, an urn. As the party investigates further into the family and the individual whose urn was stolen, they find out that the family was closely tied to the clergy of Sekmere. After the transition, the father, a middle aged cleric of Sekmere, lived together with his wife, his two adult sons and one teenage daughter. The two sons were also clerics but the eldest one had only the most mediocre of spiritual insights, while the youngest stopped worshiping Sekmere altogether to worship a variety of nature spirits instead. This of course caused no small amount of anger in the family, which boiled over post transition leading to the eldest son leaving within a week of the transition. Neighbors told the party that the family had quite a lot of arguments during the first week of the transition but that eventually died down once the eldest son left the city. Soon after the father was struck with a terrible magical disease and died despite the best efforts of the son and the clergy who were called to assist him. The father was cremated as is tradition and his urn was only in the family’s house for a week. Searching around the city told them that the eldest son had left Nehakara entirely and reports had him heading north to Edma.

The various magic items were just that, various magic items, nothing priced above 5000 gold pieces, and consisted mostly of scrolls and consumables that were being rounded up by the church.


There was much less info for the elemental invasion though -- No one else had seen anything unusual regarding the assault on the walls, no one else had seen the fey figure in the sands, and no other figures were found. The others involved in the battle had all just been struggling to take cover from the elementals. The Sun Guards had only had extremely limited visibility in the storm, and had mostly been firing blindly as the city’s nature spirit directed them.

Concluding that there was nothing immediate they could do, the party set off towards Tajuna, hitching a ride with some Sun Guards who were sent as reinforcements. Arriving at Tajuna they are quickly greeted by the guards there and moved to an office in the main temple of the city. Awaiting them in the room are three individuals already deep in discussion, as well as a few assorted guards. A desert elf wearing simple traveler’s apparel sits at the head of the desk, while two seemingly well-off humans face him. One, judging by his gear and holy symbol is a high ranking clergy member, and the other, based on her fancy attire and gear, a fairly wealthy merchant.

The elf greets the party as they enter the room, introducing themselves as Khemes, the temporary leader of Tajuna until the clergy of the city can actually agree on a leader amongst themselves. Khemes introduces the other two to the party but seems to stumble over their actual titles and roles, to the unimpressed reaction of everyone in the room.

Khemes: “So this Ahmes and Senbel, Ahmes is a highly respected clergy sent to assist me and Senbel is… I am sorry Senbel what is your official title again?”

Party: “Wow, great show of leadership”

DM: Your sense motive checks do confirm that Khemes is 100% serious upon forgetting their title, this isn’t some kind of grand political chess move here. Likewise your sense motive detects that Senbel is none too happy about that.

Senbel: “I am the current Advisor of Trade to the city council sir…”

With introductions out of the way Khemes and Ahmes pulls out a large scale map detailing the city’s situation. Khemes lays out a large map of the surrounding region, roughly drawn due to the uncertainty of the terrain too far from the city. On the map are several large X’s marked in red indicating existing tombs that have either become awakened from the presence of the living nearby or by the transition. Regardless the Sun Guards have tried to bombard those and kill any wandering undead that get too close to the city.

Khemes brings up the one tomb that is causing problems for them to the point where they requested reinforcements. Every few days a batch of oddly sculpted canopic jars are being found buried inside the city’s walls. These jars emanate a radius of necromantic energy that siphons and drains the life from the various crops and farmers working around them. The jars are being tunneled inside the city. Oddly, the usually near-omnsicient nature spirit of the city has trouble detecting them, and mostly detect them only once they notice nearby plants starting to die.

The city council aren’t quite sure what the jars do precisely, as they aren’t traditional magic items, but rather alchemical items with an ongoing spell effect on them. The party asks a few more clarifying questions regarding the jars, how they spread, how strong their effect is, etc.

Arvin: Alright so, I think the best option is for the city to gather up the jars and let me dispel them in one go. That should remove the ongoing spell and then we can figure out how to destroy the remaining jar. I have a pretty high dispel check so I should be able to get most of them.

Khemes: … I appreciate your dedication but we have just been smashing them to pieces to stop the jar’s effects. It's just that more canopic jars keep being sent and we need to stop it at the source.

Arvin: Oh… I guess that works too.

The city’s nature spirit Nehzra has been able to give the general direction of the tomb based on the entrance of the jars into the city. Khemes explains that after the city found the tomb where these cursed items were coming from they bombarded the tomb from the sky with Sun Guard’s lances but their attacks can only go through sand to a certain level and the tomb is fairly deep. They cleared out the first two floors but there is at least one more below that. Divinations revealed poor results for the Sun Guards trying to clear out the rest of the crypt as they are not particularly trained or equipped to handle close quarter’s combat within tombs packed to the brim with undead. Hence why the city requested some reinforcements more capable of fighting in those conditions.

After spending a day to prepare and search around the city for anything in particular notable without finding anything the party goes to investigate the actual tomb. Getting directions and a ride from a few Sun Guards they arrive to the tomb’s entrance which seems to have been completely covered by the rolling sand dunes and wind by the time the party shows up, still with no real enemies around it only takes them about 10 minutes to clear out the sand enough to uncover the entrance. An unassuming chimney like structure with a single ladder is all that marks the entrance to the tomb.

Spoiler: Descent

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The party descends down the vertical tunnel, slowly making their way into the depths of the tomb.

DM: You descend into pitch black darkness. The silence makes your every movement echo loudly below you…

Royce: Actually I am glowing due to my Saint Template

DM: Oh, well in that case I guess…

Arvin: I have luminous armor up as well, so permanently glowing here.

Imotehk: I have darkvision and true seeing and we have light cantrips.

DM: I meant to say your various light effects cleanly illuminate the pitch black darkness below revealing the entire length of an empty crypt... Spoilsports…

The party descends to find the first two floors of the crypt littered with partially crumbled coffins and the scattered remains of destroyed undead. The party cautiously works their way forward, obviously expecting an ambush, but the fallen corpses remain silent. Eventually finding their way past the levels the Sun Guards have already cleared the party finds a large 20ft wide stairway going down to the third level.

Walking down the path they find inky blackness overcoming their various light effects and seemingly obscuring their vision beyond 20ft. They also feel the air getting progressively colder as they descend. After a few minutes of walking down the path eventually they hear a horrendous sound as the roof begins creaking and the tunnel around them starts to collapse. Seeing the exit they manage to sprint down the path and avoid being buried by the collapsing tunnel, but they see their way out has been crushed. Shortly after catching their breath they feel the air turn oppressive and the members of the party who still possess living bodies start taking minor amounts of negative energy damage. Royce and Arvin have fast healing so it’s mostly a minor inconvenience but it does cause damage to Arvin’s vigor’s temporary hit points which is obnoxious.

As they discuss where to go first they hear the rattling of bones coming from above them and Royce rushes off to engage. They find themselves in a narrow corridor filled with human skeletons and then proceeds to wreck most of them with a burst of her lightning breath weapon. However, these are no ordinary undead, as the skeletons are able to take a full 60 points of damage without crumbling. The fossilized skeletons proceed to attack Royce with swords and bone spikes shot out from their wrists!

The party realizes mid-combat that perhaps they are not the best equipped out of the six regular players to handle undead. What follows is about 1 hour of out-of-character game time as they alternate between casting halt undead from their staff, and trying to find out a way to kill the undead without spending any actual resources and stalling until Royce’s 8 round breath weapon cooldown is back up. Eventually Imotehk just decides to start blasting and starts killing them with Energy Ray, not caring about wasting power points.

As they continue stalling the skeletons, more undead reinforcements start to arrive. First it is only more fossilized human skeletons, but they begin to scale up as several spear-wielding ghostly undead appear. The undead can fly and their spears deliver a nasty electric shock. As such, by using flyby attacks and their incredibly fast movement speed these undead proceed to cause a nuisance of themselves for quite a bit before the party manages to kill one and force the other to flee out of the crypt.

The party explores a bit more of the tomb, finding a black barrier blocking off one path, as well as a large chamber where the incorporeal undead came from. Inside the chamber, they find a large worn statue of Amun Tep, the ancient lich who once ruled these lands. Beside him are two pools of a light blue liquid that registers as necromantic to their detection spells. A small stream of this liquid drips continually from the columns adjacent to these pools. Finally they see a large serpent statue coiled in the corner, newly constructed but seemingly non magical. Royce searches the statues for traps, and rolls a 5 for her search check.

DM: Congrats, you actually find one!

Royce: Wait really?

DM: Yes, as you are searching the roof of the serpents mouth for traps some of the statues fangs shoot out and impale your wings. Make a fort save versus poison.

Royce: Oh. That kind of discovery…

Luckily for Royce, they manage to succeed on the saving throw versus a more powerful form of mummy rot, and the party begins to experiment with the pools of necromantic energy. As no one in the party really has spellcraft, they have Imotehk’s astral construct scoop out some of the liquid from the pool and place it in the skull of the Amun Tep’s statue. Sure enough the liquid burbles and writhes and soon a stream of liquid from the pool rushes to the statue. Shortly after the stream subsides and a good gallon of the liquid bubbles inside the statue's mouth a new incorporeal undead forms from the statue’s mouth. It seems that the statue gives form to the necromantic liquid, and allows the spirits of dead warriors to return through possessing that liquid. Luckily for the party though, this undead’s form is incredibly unstable and it collapses into ectoplasmic goo before it can even raise its spear. The party at this point is pretty convinced that the tomb is siphoning energy to reanimate more of these creatures, and marks a note to destroy the entire room before they have to leave the tomb. A bit concerned about Royce’s habit of taking unnecessary damage while having share pain active, Arvin dismisses his Shield Other spell on Royce to avoid accidentally killing himself from the shared damage.

Spoiler: Exploration

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The party continues onward exploring further into the tomb, which has returned to eerie silence despite the sounds of raging battle just a few moments ago. Creeping through the darkness the party finds a particularly narrow hallway, about 3ft across, which Royce has to squeeze through to lead the party. Rounding one particularly tight corner Royce finds themself face to face with a huge 15ft wide 20ft long scorpion fossilized undead which quickly proceeds to stab and tear at Royce. Due to the tight corners and the creature’s fairly impressive damage the scorpion leaves Royce at only about 2 hit points and around 8 con damage from the creature’s poison.

Even worse, behind the creature several voices call out, “Intruders? In the tomb!? They are disrupting our research!” and the party hears footsteps shuffling towards them. Around the corner comes a blast of several waves of cutting sand preceding what seems to be several half-mummified creatures wearing clothes that scholars may once have worn. Fortunately for the party, the sand is a spell-like ability, allowing Royce’s Saint-granted Globe of Invulnerability to nullify the attack.

With Royce barely alive, Royce decides to use their phoenix abilities to resurrect in a fiery explosion, incinerating a good chunk of the room and damaging the scorpion and the other casters further down the room. Arvin and Imotekh proceed to finish off the undead, and search through the room as they wait for Royce to resurrect. They find it to be an alchemical lab of some sort, with cauldrons and beakers worn from the centuries and other such materials such as tomes and journals. The party finds some partially constructed canopic jars as well, albeit still without the magical aura. Finding a key they highly suspect is for the black barrier, and several magic items and tomes they shove everything into their handy haversack to be analyzed later.

The party goes further into the tomb, walking forward into a large chamber the roof above them suddenly collapses and four of the previous huge scorpions burst from the roof and ambush the party. Arvin remembering how a single one of these creatures just previously nearly killed Royce Arvin decides to go all out, winning initiative after the Scorpion’s initial surprise round Arvin decides to not take any risks and casts moonbolt paralyzing two of the scorpions, then manifesting Anticipatory Strike to get a second turn immediately he proceeds to paralyze the other two. One of them succeeds on their saving throw but the end result is a much much simpler encounter and the party only has to burn a few more charges of their staff with Halt Undead to finish off the creatures. The party continues on to find a strange runic circle on the ground. Unable to identify the runic circle beyond being a divination effect Royce attempts to just blindly activate the rune with Use Magic Device.

Royce: What could possibly go wrong?

DM: Hold on let me quickly just generate a table so I can have you roll a 1d100 to answer that question.

Royce activates the runic circle a few times and from the runic circle observes two skeletal knights fighting each other in a dark room, a living human wearing a heavy cloak seemingly reading in a large dusty library and a few other images that the party can’t really parse. They decide to just come back to the tomb and identify the runic circle with proper equipment later.

Continuing onward with their exploration they find themselves sorting through a large storeroom filled with more of those canopic jars, these ones radiating a powerful necromancy aura. Along with them are a few fossilized skeletons but these undead seem barely functional and whose ability to swing a sword and even move were so lethargic they didn’t even pose any sort of threat to the party.

Royce: Alright I think we can pretty much confirm these canopic jars are draining life from the surrounding region and giving it to undead. In particular probably making more of those incorporeal undead in the statue room.

Spoiler: The Library

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The party agrees and just uses Imotehk’s astral construct to smash the rest of the canopic jars to pieces and confirm with detect magic that they stopped radiating magic when destroyed. Still even after the loud ruckus they don’t hear any oncoming reinforcements but continue to advance cautiously, eventually coming to a long hallway with an ajar door at the end. Royce’s mindsight pings a single living humanoid creature at the end of it, the party rushes in weapons drawn and spells ready to cast.

Bursting through the door however, they find only a single heavily cloaked individual seemingly well equipped for desert travel, the party recognizes him and the room they are in from their previous divination with the runic circle and see the room filled to the brim with old tomes, scrolls, with bookshelves and desks lining the walls and room. The roguish figure draws a dagger as the group bursts in but doesn’t react too aggressively as he drops the book he was reading and readies himself.

The roguish individual chuckles to himself and simply notes that he wasn’t sure if the party would explore back here. Upon asking what exactly he is doing here he simply says he was simply seeking to find a few tomes here and there as he points to a portable hole opened by his side filled with a pile of various tomes and other items from this ancient library.

The party mostly stands down as it turns out the individual named Monta Tros wasn’t actively hostile to the group and seemed quite willing to actually talk and explain himself. According to Monta he had heard of the group’s possible expedition from a network of “Spies” that he has, nothing malicious he assures the party just some people who happen to hear stuff. He states he is working for a group called “The Molten Pool” and is simply seeking to acquire some research materials they might need.

When pressed on his group Monta is fairly evasive but with Royces prodding and a confirmation that this information wasn’t going to the rest of the Clergy tells the party that he is simply working for a friend whose boss is in some form of trouble. The boss is a fire elemental or similar type of creature who post transition was spread out amongst several different planes of existence and the Molten Pool is looking for items, lore or similar that might be able to to help coalesce the elemental’s form. Monta hints that they would be willing to pay the party if they come across anything relevant and that divinations cast led them to suspect this library would have something valuable and when they heard of the party’s expedition they felt it was the best time to sneak in and grab some stuff. Monta, not being much of a spellcaster himself simply grabbed a whole bunch of tomes that seemed relevant. The party offers to help transcribe or decipher some of the tomes but Monta says he needs to bring the tomes back to his friend first but perhaps in the future they could be of assistance.

Spoiler: Final Cavern

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Wanting to clear out the tomb as soon as possible they leave Monta to his devices in the library room after arranging contact information and confirming the possibility of perhaps using Monta’s spy network. Monta admits that their previous existing network was pretty heavily shattered by the transition but he was a decent amount of eyes and ears in places and can do some espionage himself if need be. The party still feels like having an extra source of information available might be helpful in the future even if they might have to pay for it. The party has essentially explored the entire dungeon at this point besides the one path concealed by the black barrier, sure enough though the key the party picked up in the room with the mummified scribes was enough to open the barrier and lead them down into a chilly cavern carved out amongst the tomb.

Eventually descending down into the cavern they begin to hear metal clashing on metal. Buffing up with their short term buff effects the party descends the final level with the shadows of the previous floor dispersing as they descend. The party finds the other major image shown by the runic circle as the party sees two heavily armored skeletal knights intensely sparring with two greatswords.

Undead Knights: “Intruders in the Tomb?! Who dares trespass?

Royce (OOC): I think the first thing every enemy has said so far has been “Intruders in the tomb?!”, I know this is a several hundred year old tomb but they should be more original…

Arvin: We are with the Silver Path, sent to investigate this tomb.

Undead Knights *Look at each other*, We have never heard of this "Silver Path".

Arvin: Have you heard of the conservatory perhaps?

Undead Knights: The Conservatory!? The Enemy of Amun Tep?! Die Intruders!

Arvin (OOC): Alright I expected that to happen but good to confirm these guys are super ancient, also they don’t appear to be particularly intelligent.

Intelligent enemies or not they do have over eight of those fossilized soldiers from the previous floor assisting them and while the knights don’t have the best initiative the soldiers do, leaping from their post to engage the party. Royce is focused by the horde as they are in the front of the party and get horrifically mauled. The first swing critically hits her as one of their swords cuts across their chest and the next few attacks brings them dangerously low.

Royce: Wow if only someone didn’t decide it wasn’t worth it to have share pain active on me.

DM: On that note, the next skeleton is about to swing their sword at you, do you have any immediate actions to try to block this attack?

Royce: I don’t but Arvin can use anticipatory strike to save me right?

Arvin: Ya but I am not sure if that's the best use of resources right now.

Royce: What...

Arvin: Ya let me think for a bit.

Imotehk: If Royce dies I can use the staff of Halt Undead instead of her.

Royce: WHAT!?!

Arvin: Ya I think I have a better plan

DM: Alright the next attack swings down bringing Royce down into negatives.

Royce: ....

Luckily Royce wasn’t brought too far down into negatives and right before her turn on initiative Arvin casts Close Wounds bringing Royce into positives and then casts his final moonbolt on the two undead knights, paralyzing one of them.

Arvin: See this way more skeletons wouldn’t have targeted you and you were only in risk if one of them rolled high on damage or critically hit you to death. This way you get to act immediately on your turn and they didn’t consider you a further threat.

Royce: Oh ya… definitely the best option. Oh and for my turn I need to heal myself as soon as possible so I am going to self destruct and revive myself in a burst of flame, "Unfortunately" you are all within range.

Royce keeps her word and explodes, singing her allies a bit and decimating the undead horde that were nearby. The one undead knight remaining attempts to bolster himself with necromantic magic before engaging the party but Imotehk proceeds to seal him in an ectoplasmic cocoon, the undead’s reflex save somewhat hampered by his full plate armor. With that handled Imotehk finishes off the rest of the undead with a burst of psionic force. After that the party wraps up the encounter by finishing off the two paralyzed and helpless undead knights.

After defeating the two knights and their retinue the party returns up to the floor above to smash the two pools of necromantic liquid and the columns as well as the two statues before teleporting to the surface. Planning on reconnecting with the rest of the party to handle the Ahknepata Riots they hitch a ride to Ahknepata from Sun Guards and the session ends there.

Spoiler: DM Note

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Unfortunately Imotehk's player had to drop out of the campaign due to real life concerns so his character is going to be mostly regulated to NPC status from now on.

[Silva Stormrage]

Character Spotlight: Royce

Spoiler: Royce

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Phoenixs are not particular common in the harsh deserts of the region, certainly not in the aftermath of Amun Tep’s ancient defeat and the beginnings of the Silver Path. However, that is where Royce’s story begins as a troop of Sun Guards, elite guards of Sekmere stumbled through the ruins of an undead tomb. When one of them was separated from the rest of his company, a guard named Kau Tet, discovered a lone egg hidden in the tomb he decided to take it back home.

From there he raised the phoenix and effectively adopted the creature into the family. Naming the phoenix Royce, Kau and Royce set a pact where Royce would guard the eldest son of the family each generation. This continued for 250 years and Royce grew into a powerful and reliable ally for the Tet family. However, everything changed when the transitions struck. Royce and the current eldest of the Tet family, a sun guard named Apies Tet, were out on patrol when suddenly the ground and sky began to warp and twist, throwing Royce from Apies’s mount and separating them. In an act of desperation Royce called out to Sekemere and felt the faintest touch of Sekmere’s will filling Royce, but the whispers and cries of their god were faint and indistinct, almost feeling like the divine equivalent of just missing something that slips past your fingertips. When Royce awoke and surfaced after being loosely buried in the sand they could find no trace of Apies around, but felt a holy amount of energy surge within them.

Returning to Nehekara they found no sign of Apies and the city had unfortunately more urgent matters to attend to than trying to track down a single Sun Guard lost in the desert. Sendings failed to get a reply from Apies but Royce continued to work with the ravaged cities of the Silver Path, their loyalty and dedication unwavering; they pledged themselves to protecting the cities and finding Apies as the first Saint of Sekmere in recorded history.


Character Build:
Mechanically speaking Royce is a phoenix using the phoenix monster class from the giantitp community monster class compendium found here as well as having a level in a slightly modified version of the half dragon monster class from the same source. This results in them having a variety of SLA’s, some more useful than others and a lightning breath attack usable every 1d4 rounds dealing 1d6/HD damage. Royce’s main offensive options are either using their breath weapon with maximize and clinging breath for fairly solid aoe damage or exploding in a radius up to 5ft/HD dealing 2d6/HD divine fire damage and effectively restoring herself to full health while removing any status effects on her. Her SLA’s and self immolating explosions are limited in uses per day so she also tends to rely on staffs and other consumables usable with UMD.
Her Saint Template is pretty standard, granting her many immunities and protections including fast healing and a permanent magic circle against evil and globe of invulnerability. Though the globe of invulnerability has almost harmed her allies more than her enemies in some situations.

[Silva Stormrage]

Session 3 (Entire Party)

And the campaign finally starts to go off the rails. Third session too so that's pretty impressive.

Spoiler: Important Session Notes

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I had this section of the campaign including the riots and the church's opinion on the riots mapped out for a couple months ago as I was working on the campaign and it predates the various situations in America occurring right now. Nothing in the session is intended as political commentary or a metaphor for anything else in the real world.

Figured I needed to mention that in case anyone drew the wrong idea from reading this.

Spoiler: Initial Landing

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The session starts with Mira, Raeka and Kaiser arriving in Ahknepata. Arvin and Royce are slated to arrive a day later, as their mission took longer to complete. Surfacing a ways away from the city, the party marches up to the city walls trying to figure out a way to get the ship into the city.

Mira: Wait, I’m confused -- can’t we just dock the ship normally?

Kaiser: They’re landlocked… and in the middle of a desert.

Mira: Okay right, they probably don’t have a port for flying ships but they should have a spot for regular vehicles right?

Kaiser: Ya there might be some other issues, *Points at the pirate flag waving majestically above their heads.*

Mira: … I don’t suppose we could take that down?

Raeka: Blasphemy!


The party eventually decides to just park the ship underground with Reaka grumbling about discrimination against chaotic evil undead pirates. The party approaches the city walls and gets hailed by a guard. The party notes that the guard is on fairly high alert but the outer walls are severely understaffed. The guard introduces himself as Akill and asks the party what their business is.

Mira: Hmmm, I believe he might be *pause* a-killer…

Kaiser: We probably shouldn’t trust him with anything.

Raeka: Agreed.

DM: Okay you guys. I’m using a random name generator for Egyptian sounding names for the campaign tone so this setting doesn’t default to a ton of European names. They aren’t all going to be winners...

Party: You should probably just keep generating names until a halfway decent one comes up XD.


The party explains their situation and shows the badges that Atsu gave them to prove legitimacy. The party gets the guard to explain the current situation regarding the riots and chaos happening in the city.

Akill: Well as you guys know the whole riots started when the church established order after the Transition. The church took over and supplanted the democratically elected council so they could make quick and effective decisions. The regular people didn’t really get why that was important and started protesting and generally being a nuisance. Thoris Ken, the former head of the church, met out to greet the protesters, being the freaking saint that she is, and the rioters ended up killing her in anger. After that they crushed her skull so she couldn’t be raised. The church obviously had to establish a firmer order after that and now the lazy artists and general populace are causing a ruckus destroying buildings and shops and even attacking guards.

Kaiser: Are there any buildings or individuals being targeted in particular?

Akill: Not that I have noticed really. I mean they are obviously targeting clergy members and guards but beyond that I haven’t noticed a pattern. After Thoris’s death Abdei Ka, the Sun Guard captain, took over control of the temple and most of the city. He has done a good job of increasing patrols and reestablishing order and taking care of the various rioters and criminals in the city. Anyway, to get a better sense of things you are probably going to have to go into the main temple to speak with one of the higher ups.

After explaining their boat to the utter confusion of Akill he just shunts that responsibility onto the temple to handle that. His guard training did not handle the proper permits for underground flying ships. Walking through the city they find most of the shops and stores boarded up and a few ruined structures dotting the landscape. The city becomes much less damaged the closer the party gets to the temple.

Upon reaching the highly fortified temple they meet with a female assistant organizing a few other clerics, who quickly breaks off to greet the new arrivals. Introducing herself as Nena Ta she helps the party on their way and after a confusing few moments decides they can keep their ship burrowed underneath the temple for safe keeping. She informs them that Abdei Ka is currently too busy to meet with them, he handles a lot of the patrols personally but might be able to meet with them later tonight. She informs them of the various hold outs and where the rioters are the strongest and weakest in the city. When asked about the whereabouts of the council members Nena reveals that two of the council members are in the church’s safe house for their own protection. The last thing Nena Ta reveals is that while they have Thoris’s body, someone in the riots cut off her head and they have no real idea about its whereabouts.

The party decides to go out and gather some information from the townsfolk, considering the church and the guards seem to have a fairly extreme bias. Raeka in particular wants a clear understanding of both sides before she can try to act in any decisive fashion.

Raeka: Well with my aura and my hat I can give a plus 18 to gather information checks to whoever has the highest ranks.

Kaiser: 10 Charisma 0 rank

Mira: 8 Charisma 0 ranks

Raeka: … I have a high charisma bonus but I don’t have any ranks either, and being a ghost? That might apply some kind of penalty here among the regular people in town.

Royce’s Player: I have ranks but you guys rushed ahead of us, so I guess you made your bed and have to lie in it now

Raeka: Siiiigh, I hope this doesn’t start a riot.


Thankfully it doesn’t, with a natural 18 on her roll and a solid charisma score she manages to make a reliable untrained gather info check and get some information while only slightly panicking the nervous townsfolk. The party learns that the protestors are split amongst two factions, “The Artists” and “The Revolutionaries” the artists just want the council back in place and to remove a lot of the restrictions on public assembly and similar laws that Abdei Ka has put in place. They are the majority of the protestors and mostly are filled with artists, scholars and various bards and arcane casters. The Revolutionaries are the much more violent of the two, advocating for the complete removal of the church from Ahknepata. They are the ones usually attacking the guards with lethal force and destroying buildings and such. No one really is taking credit for Thoris Ken’s death and the people the party talks to are frankly sad and regretful about her death. None of the groups have taken credit for her death and very few people who were present are even still alive. After Thoris was slain, Abdei Ka unleashed a devastating barrage of magic on the crowds of protestors while attempting to rescue Thoris, killing a good majority of them.

At this point the party is beginning to be a bit suspicious about the righteousness of the city guards given what they’ve heard. While Mira suspects some of the revolutionaries might be under enchantments to make them more aggressive, arcane sight doesn’t register any kind of enchantments on any of the protestors while they are out gathering information, reinforcing the suspicion. The party starts to focus on speaking to the protesters, who inform them that the two “factions” are far more decentralized than might be expected. Each main faction is formed of dozens of smaller sub factions with sometimes conflicting goals and agendas. With enough digging, the party eventually gets the names of some important figures, mostly various sub faction leaders, as well as the name of a few traders/black market dealers who may be supplying the Revolutionary factions with weapons and gear.

After that gather info check the party returns to the main temple and find that Abdei Ka still isn’t free to meet with them but will certainly be free the next day. The party is a bit uneasy at that but decides to rest anyway and wait for the rest of the party to arrive.

Spoiler: Prisoner Interrogation

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Royce and Raeka arrive with a few more Sun Guards sent to reinforce the city but Imotehk stays behind, traveling to his lab hidden in the mountains to work on a few personal projects. Still the party reunites and generally informs each other of what's been going on and their past couple days of work. The party goes to Nena Ta to get an update on anything major that happened during the night as they see a bit more flurry of activity in the temple. She informs the party that during the night a group of rioters stormed into one of the temples in the city and defaced a large amount of statues and artwork inside the sanctum. Abdei Ka led the charge to arrest them and they are currently being guarded in a prison. The party discusses amongst themselves what the best course of action is at the moment.

Arvin: Well first things first, I need to cast my share pain/shield other combo on you guys now. That means you can’t go further than 100ft from me or their effects fade. Does anyone have a problem with that?

Rest of the Party: *Silence*

Arvin: Alright I cast my buffs, they will last the entire day.


Within the next 30 seconds of discussion the party decides to split up, Kaiser and Mira want to interrogate the prisoners while Royce and Raeka want to go out on some more gather info checks with Royce’s much higher bonus.

DM: Alright looks like your buffs are going to fall off one group Arvin as you can’t be within 100ft of them both.

Arvin: Wait wait can’t we just do this sequentially as a whole group?

Rest of the Party: Nah, this way is more efficient

Arvin: I asked 30 seconds ago if anyone had a problem and no one said anything!

Raeka: Ya we didn’t have a problem with it then, now we do apparently.

Arvin: *Grumble*...


Arvin follows Kaiser and Mira to go to the prisoner interrogation. The guards are somewhat hesitant to allow the party in to interrogate them but eventually concede the point as long as they are also in the room with them. The party finds 5 scruffy roguish types in prison attire, bruised and battered they glare up at the party as they enter. One of them, seemingly the leader of the group mockingly asks, “So, what do you bastards want?”

Kaiser: Why did you do it?

Leader: I beg your pardon?

Kaiser: I want to know why you attacked the temple

Leader: Heh, you want to know something so trivial? I just did what the rest of us want to do. The church is corrupt, pointless, they kill us for protesting and they have no real legitimacy. We need to toss them out.

Kaiser: By defacing a few statues?

Leader: To show the rest of the populace that the church isn’t invincible! Sekmere isn’t showing up to smite me is he? That big guy isn’t helping us at all post transition, we need to kick the church out

Kaiser: So you don’t believe in Sekmere at all then?

Leader: I mean obviously he exists, and I will admit I cared more about him in the past but now he is nothing more than a dead weight around our necks.

Kaiser: Are you not at all concerned with your impending death?

Leader: Hey we all gotta die sometime? I might as well make it memorable doing something important right?

Kaiser: *Rolls Sense Motive*

DM: Your sense motive determines that he seems oddly unconcerned with his impending demise.

Kaiser: Hm, I see. *Proceeds to turn out of the room*

Leader: Wait you’re done here?

Kaiser: I asked everything I wanted, unless you two have further information you want to know?

Mira: Yeah wait, who was in charge of the raid?

Leader: You’re looking at him of course. What don’t believe someone like me could manage something like this?

DM: Your sense motive check determines he is lying.

Mira: Hmmmm

Arvin’s Player: Should I burn a slot on inquisition? It would force him to answer 3 questions fully.

Rest of the Party: That seems like a good use.


Arvin casts the sanctified spell Inquisition forcing the self-proclaimed leader to answer his questions, starting with “Tell us everything you know involving you or your leader’s current, past or future plans”. The leader struggles against the spell but begins outlining what he knew happened that night. First off, he did have a leader, one of the smugglers the party learned about in earlier gather info checks. The leader wanted to retrieve a precious artifact hidden beneath one of the statues in the temple. The leader didn’t know what it did but only knew it was a blood red ruby necklace. The main plan for the temple raid was that either Abdei Ka would show up in person after the smuggler had escaped with the ruby and the squad leader would then detonate the incredibly powerful magical bomb implanted in his chest killing Abdei Ka. If Abdei Ka stayed far enough away that he didn’t get a good opportunity he was supposed to detonate the bomb at his execution, killing Abdai Ka and a good chunk of clergy there. Beyond that they didn’t have any major ongoing plans beyond just general ideas of raids and taking out the clergy and forcing them out of the town.

Mira: Wait he has a what inside his chest?

DM: In fact he seems somewhat panicked about revealing that and he seems to be making a sudden move. Roll initiative.

Luckily the party is quick to react and a quick Venom Bolt cast by Mira paralyzes the squad leader before he can detonate his bomb.

Mira: Why didn’t he detonate the bomb while answering the question?

DM: Inquisition is a compulsion, he has to answer the question fully without lying. I feel that interrupting answering the question by detonating a suicide bomb would be going against that compulsion.

Party: QUICK ASK HIM ANOTHER QUESTION!

Arvin: Uh, where do you and your organization meet and how do you meet?

Arvin: And then for my third question tell us every person’s name and nickname in your organization. That should take him a bit at least to answer.


And it does, the squad leader informs the guards and the party of their exact base location, that they meet in a museum that is currently closed due to the riots and that they enter through a hidden underground tunnel that leads to a non affiliated civilian’s house who they pay to let them use the house. After that he begins to list a long stream of names and occupations for the people in his organization, which seems to have over a hundred people in it. The party spends a bit of time planning and discussing amongst themselves about how to best deal with him. Kaiser goes with the straightforward approach and just non lethally beats him unconscious with her many telekinetic swords.

Spoiler: Memory and Unstable Minds

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In the meantime, Royce and Raeka continue their efforts to find more information on Thoris’ murder. Their initial check lands them an initial meeting with a woman who was present at the scene of the death. Raeka manages to wrangle up a bard who is friendly to the church to apply one of her favorite tricks -- the modify memory spell allows a subject to perfectly remember up to five minutes of their memories with laser precision. With their new perfect recall, the witness remembers watching a mostly peaceful crowd speaking to a calming Thoris. However, one hooded figure breaks from the crowd and stabs at Thoris with a poisoned dagger. Instantly, a haze seems to fall over the crowd as they seem to believe themselves to be attacked, and they all move forward, clawing and smashing at Thoris. The guards react predictably, bashing through the protesters to reach the body of their leader. Interestingly, although the guards claim that Thoris was beheaded by the time they reached her corpse, the woman does not see anything of the sort, only seeing some protesters smashing at her head. After this continued assault happens Abdei Ka who had been circling overhead unleash holy fire on the crowd killing a huge swathe of the protesters in an attempt to separate them from Thoris’s body. By this time the woman is fleeing for her life, but as she looks back Thoris’ body is buried beneath the press of bodies, and does not see anyone who might be fleeing with a concealed head. After thanking the bard and the witness who promise to stay in touch if their assistance is needed in the future.

Royce and Raeka continue looking for more dirt that might be useful. They do manage to turn up one more interesting clue -- Abdei Ka, the new city leader and Thoris’ one time bodyguard was and is still in love with her, and in fact still keeps her headless corpse in his personal room in a preservation field, worried that someone else might attempt something that may carry her even further from his ability to return her. With this ghastly detail, and confirmation of Abdei Ka’s unstable mental state, Raeka and Royce decide they’ve learned enough.

Spoiler: The Meeting

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Eventually, the party reconvenes to share information. As they are wrapping up, Nena Ta confirms that Abdei Ka will meet them briefly. Royce’s mindsight picks up that Nena Ta is actually an outsider with an intelligence score of 22. The party discusses amongst themselves the correct way to approach with Abdei Ka, most of the party favoring re-establishing the council as the main form of government. It really isn’t benefiting the church that much to manually run everything, and it would show a strong commitment to reform and listening to the people.

The party’s ideas are quickly dashed as they enter the room with Abdei Ka in full military garb, seemingly having just returned from a patrol. He greets the party quite warmly and appreciates their approach and success with the prisoners and the attempted assassination attempt. He then lays out his current plan to storm the southern section of the city with a full force of military guards. After learning that there are civilians hiding passages into rioter’s bases and possibly sheltering these criminals he favors storming in and manual checking people’s houses with force if necessary. He lists out his various tactical approaches and looks to the party for their opinion.

(Via Telepathy)
Kaiser: Sooooo are we attacking him now or should we buff up a second first?

Raeka: I am all for attacking him now.

Royce: Lets try to convince him otherwise first.


The party then attempts to sway his opinion and to put back the council in power, as puppets or figureheads at a minimum. They logically point out the various advantages they could bring including allowing him to focus more on restoring order and such to the city. Abdei Ka even seems decently taken in by their arguments, unable to really muster a decent counter argument beyond skepticism of the council member’s dedication. However, just as soon as he swapped his mind towards agreeing with them he abruptly changes his mind back and dismisses the idea outright.

Mira’s Player: Soooo I don’t see any enchantments on him via Arcane Sight correct?

DM: Nope

Kaiser’s Player: Alright he is definitely under some kind of mind control. No one swaps opinions that fast in the middle of a conversation.

Arvin: I am going to cast telepathy tap to see if he is in communication with someone else.

DM: Huh, I forgot that spell exists… I am going to need to see how a couple things interact here.

After a minute or two the DM calls everyone back. The telepathy tap reveals that Abdei Ka is in fact in telepathic communication with someone or something, however, they are immune to divinations so telepathy tap only reveals Abdei Ka’s responses to their questions. The party is treated to the following excerpts from his thoughts --

Abdei Ka: “Yes I am the only one who can restore order”

Abdei Ka: “Agreed, these councilmembers would be mere pawns”

Abdei Ka: “I need to atone for my failure to stop Thoris’s death in order for her spirit to lay peacefully.”

Kaiser’s Player: Ya, that’s definitely the responses of someone under mind control…

Mira’s Player: It could be a really high diplomacy check via telepathy.

Regardless they also pick up the sounds of inconsolable weeping and occasional screams of pain coming from Nena Ta’s square. Further confusing the hell out of the party is that these noises appear to be male. Nena Ta’s face seems to betray no sign of this distress in any way.

(Via Telepathy)
Kaiser: So I reiterate, roll for initiative?

Mira: I can cast a silent sending via shadowcraft mage they won’t notice me making any random motions, I haven’t even said much in this conversation so I doubt they are paying attention to me. Let's send to Atsu first and see what he thinks.

Mira (Sending to Atsu): “Hey Atsu. Abdei Ka mind controlled by assistant? Proceeding with suppressive action. Stand by for immediate offensive. Send help ASAP”

Atsu (Response via Sending): “NO NO NO NO DON’T ENGAGE DON’T ENGAGE! I will be at a call orb in 5 minutes and will contact you DON’T ENGAGE PLEASE!”


The rest of the party sighs and agrees to wait, they have Royce and Raeka stall the meeting for a bit discussing how Sekmere would view the… rather harsh approach Abdei Ka is taking towards these protesters when a messenger comes in panting a bit, requesting an urgent meeting with Mira and his group. Royce and Raeka stay behind to continue distracting Abdei Ka while the rest of the party goes off to meet with Atsu.

Atsu’s presence reveals himself, being broadcast from a small magical orb in the center of the room. These call orbs are the main ways the cities of the Silver Path communicate with one another, allowing instant communications as long as the orbs are not moved in any way and they are connected in advance. Atsu requests an explanation for the sending and the party informs him of what they saw and discovered.

Atsu obviously finds these events incredibly troubling and the party and Atsu go back and forth discussing possible alternatives and options. Obviously, Abdei Ka can’t be allowed to stay in charge. Discussing possible options such as the council being reinstated, etc. After consulting a few divinations Atsu agrees with the party that the council basically needs to be reinstated, Abdei Ka is too unstable and until he knows more he doesn’t want to appoint a random cleric from Ahknepata that he doesn’t really know about. The party offers Nena Ta but Atsu surprisingly has never heard of her. Atsu drafts up a document with a seal appointing Royce as temporary regent of the clergy in Ahknepata and gives the party authority to apprehend Abdei Ka immediately. He brings in the runner to confirm the orders. The party suggests an extra set of commands regarding the guards outside the room, calling them towards Atsu so he can explain the situation to them and leave them out of the ensuing crossfire. Atsu agrees and drafts up the appropriate documents and sends them via the call orb to the party.

Spoiler: The Campaign Gets Slightly Derailed

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The party approaches Raeka and Royce, still in deep theological debate with Abdei Ka, and shows the orders to dismiss the two guards who are replaced by the runner who is already in the loop. The party opens the door and warns their allies that combat is imminent but finds Abdei Ka surprised and readying himself for combat. Seeing that combat is inevitable and there is no chance of Abdei Ka surrendering if the situation is explained to him Rakea calls out in a brash confident tone.

Raeka: Muahahahha the clergy have fallen for it! Now we shall take over and take control of the city. Surrender now to our might!
Rest of the Party:.....
Raeka (Via Telepathy): Look we don’t know who he is in telepathic communication with, this way they might not suspect we know about them.

The combat starts with Kaiser, summoning her ethereal wolf and then unleashing a flurry of blows upon Nena Ta, hoping to knock her out of the fight immediately, only to her surprise missing every single one of her attacks against the flatfooted unarmed opponent.

Kaiser: Uhh… She has a flatfooted AC of at least 34?

DM: Yep

Mira: Hey I just checked it out Planetars have an int score of 22!

Rest of the Party: Oh that's not a good sign.

Mira tried to use Sensory Deprivation on Abdei Ka but Abdei Ka resisted the effect, Raeka was a bit more successful, telekinetically disarming Abdei Ka of his spear and then using her frost dragon to knock Abdei Ka away into a corner trapped by Kaiser’s wolf. Nena Ta goes next, pulling out a scroll from her robes and casting radiant assault, a 7th level spell that assailed the party with searing light. The various party members with spot and UMD realize as she was casting that she was simply faking using the scroll and instead cast the spell under her own power.

Arvin’s Player: Wasn’t she supposed to be limited to 5th level spells? She mentioned that earlier.

Mira’s Player: I think we are all pretty sure she is a planetar just trying to disguise herself as weak for some reason.


Still the party managed to valiantly resist the blinding assault and only Royce is dazed for three rounds from the attack, the rest just eat a decent chunk of damage. Arvin proceeds to try to nauseate the two enemies with a cone of nauseating gas but both manage to resist the toxic fumes. Abdei Ka finally gets to act but since he is now in a corner with a summoned wolf with improved trip, thicket of blades, combat reflexes and mage slayer his options are somewhat limited and he struggles to get away from the wolf for any significant amount of time. Still with the maximum amount of his actions he manages to slip past the wolf with only a swift action remaining. He then proceeds to blast the party with multiple quickened searing flamestrikes revealing himself as a Ruby Knight Vindicator. This damage badly wounds the party who are now very concerned about their chances of winning this fight. While Abdei Ka is on his last legs Nena Ta is still perfectly fine and hasn’t even been scratched yet.

Kaiser, trying a different approach, taps Nena Ta with her dispelling blades and attempts to strip off a good chunk of her ongoing magical effects, hoping to reduce her armor class. However, the party learns much more as the dispelling effect removes her shapechanging spell, revealing Nena Ta as a demonic looking red skinned humanoid creature. Sharp claws tip her hands and burned and warped skeletal wings flap behind her. Growing and writhing from her back are several tendrils dripping a hideous toxin. Her staff which she held before also shifts, taking the form of a black rod tipped with a ruby that seemed to drip blood down the staff, a perfect description of the shapechanger who assaulted and burned the Sand Giant armies with unhealable black flame. Kaiser finishes her assault with her binding weapon dimensionally anchoring Nena Ta, but is still unable to deal any damage of note, instead deciding to knock out Abdei Ka with her remaining attacks. Mira on her turn desperately tries to lock Nena Ta in a resilient sphere but she dodges nimbly out of the way before it can encase her.

Kaiser’s Player: I am surprised she didn’t use anything to try to dodge or block that resilient sphere, she might not have any immediate actions left.

DM: Frankly, pretty much all of them are teleports and she is dimensionally locked at the moment. Still she has great saves so it's not much of a problem.

Mira, Raeka and Kaiser: “Somehow this is even worse than a Planetar”

Arvin’s Player: So DM I take it you didn’t expect us to fight her this early

DM: Nope, best of luck to all of you!

Raeka’s player, meanwhile, has been flipping back and forth quickly on her character sheet.

Raeka: Did you say that she had no immediates left that she could use?

DM: *with a slightly leery expression* Yeeees?

Raeka: Like none? Zilch zero nada?

DM *with a wary expression* Yeeees?

Raeka: Well in that case….I disarm her of her artifact staff. The one that had like 12 descriptor words and is literally oozing magic? Yeah, I take that, unless she can match my…+48 on disarm checks?

DM: Well, it’s on the floor on her square

Arvin: I dive in, grab the staff, and throw it to Mira.

Mira: I grab the staff, summon an earth elemental, and send the elemental with the staff into the floor.

DM: *Panicked Sounds* Huh…let's see does she have any way of getting it back…? She….turns incorporeal using permeable form to chase the staff underground?

Royce: She isn’t affected by my bubble of invulnerability? It stops spells of 3rd level or below.

DM: No, actually. Her spell bypasses that somehow. And no, it isn’t homebrew. Mira, you feel something attempt to override your controls on your elemental.

Mira: That’s okay. I can just dismiss the elemental and request the city’s nature spirit to move the staff the rest of the way to our ship which was specifically mentioned to be under the temple. We can have the city fey spirit move the boat up to the surface so we can board, and leave. The boat is warded against divination and can travel through earth, we should be fine.

DM *Looking somewhat frantically through Nena Ta’s statblock and prepared spells*: Whelp, that's going to cause some rewriting to the plot. You guys can successfully get away, she can’t stop it when your ship moves at 440ft per round and can burrow underground.

Upon hearing that the party grabs Abdei Ka's unconscious body and immediately bolts from the room. Still not trusting their chances with Nena Ta even without her fancy artifact empowering her.

Spoiler: Tactical Retreat at Full Speed

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After the escape the party boards onto the Luminescence and flees to Nehekara to deposit Abdei Ka and seal the artifact staff. After confirming the weeping that they heard before comes from inside the staff (or possibly from the DM whose entire plot has just been scrapped) via another telepathy tap, the party concludes that there is probably a corrupted planetar trapped within the staff. They cast a flurry of sendings with Mira’s remaining spell slots and the scrolls of sending they had from the consumables given to them at the start of the campaign. First they contact Imotehk and request a few divination responses to aid them in deciding where to go with the staff, secondly they inform Atsu that they held the staff, and request his opinion. They debate over whether or not to give it to the Silver Path or the Sand Giants for safe keeping. Mira Argues that the Sand Giants already have their giant epic sandstorm effect to keep out Nena Ta while the Silver Path was already infiltrated. Royce argues that the Silver Path is much more trustworthy compared to the faction of cannibalistic sand giants who are mostly kept in check by one good aligned leader. Raeka argues that she should get the staff for herself as she is already chaotic evil and the staff can’t possibly corrupt her further. The rest of the party is unconvinced by this logic and being unanimously opposed Raeka concedes the point.

Mira (Sending to Atsu): “Shapechanger. Radiant Assault. Near-impossible to dispel. Unhealable black fire. Dodges spells, blows. Poison Tentacles. Divination-immune. Manipulated my summon. Can teleport. Any info? How protect staff”

Atsu (Response Via Sending): “Sealing Classified, Method sealed evil artifacts before. Target casts Gigantic Cold Flames not Black, summoned squadron of spectres and incorporeal undead, at will charm effects”

Raeka (Sending to Imotehk): “Emergency, cities in danger, low on Sendings. Psychic Reformation to give yourself Correspond, Divination, and the Extend Power feat. Then Extended Correspond Mira, I'll explain.”

Imotehk (Response Via Sending): “Of course. I would prefer if you didn’t contact me out of the blue, as I have other things to do here.”

Once Imotehk has the appropriate communication power he contacts the party and they give him the list of diviantions as well as informing him of the situation.

Spoiler: Divinations

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Questions
1. "Do the sand giants have better or worse current capability and resources than Atsu for keeping the staff away from a person with X abilities", where X is everything we told Atsu about if possible, or whatever our word limit with Imhotekh permits
2. "Which out of the sand giants or the clergy of Sekmere would be more likely to use the staff for what Mira would describe as evil purposes"
3. "What is the best course of action the party could take to stop the staff from doing harm?"
4. "What source would we have best access to to learn more about this artifact and how it can be destroyed or redeemed"
Responses
1: Unclear, both have advantages and disadvantages
2: Sand Giants
3: None should see, hold or use the staff, even for noble purposes.
4: Power Failed (Rolled a 97 on a 1d100)

Kaiser: Great… the 4th one was the more important one.

Spoiler: Sealing up the Session

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Still the party agrees after receiving the divinations to head to Nehekara to see what Atsu’s sealing method for the artifact is. They land with permission from Arash the nature spirit and find the main temple in a pretty chaotic state as clerics hustle back and forth. Eventually the party is brought before Atsu, still in front of the previous call orb discussing things with a few other clerics, the call orb from Ahnekpata is disconnected and no visuals or sounds come from its end.

Atsu: Ah, you have arrived, thank you. The rest of you please go work on the assigned tasks we talked about, we need reinforcements or aid for the refugees and we need to be able to make a decision quickly. The rest of you follow me to a more secure location.

The party brings the staff into the room and Atsu reveals the current plan that the silver Path has used to seal and destroy previous corruptive artifacts they have recovered from tombs before. First, the temple has a few lead lined boxes which radiate an antimagic field, not a powerful enough effect to suppress an artifact but good enough to prevent other people from simply teleporting or scrying it. After the staff is sealed within it they have one of their Sekmere Colossus devour the staff. The beast’s stomach devourers magic and traps the box inside, Atsu states that the process might take as long as a year but it is still a viable option. After that the Sekemere colossus will remain burrowed underground with Arash keeping specific watch over it and the surrounding environment to make sure the creature is not attacked. If it is attacked the creature has been granted a single use teleport item that it can use to teleport to the surface in the case of an emergency.

The party discusses possible other options such as planeshifting the staff to a random spot on the ethereal plane but decide that keeping it underground buried and inside an antimagic field in the stomach of a giant monster is probably a decent way to hold of Nena Ta from retrieving it immediately.

The conversation then turns to the current status of Ahknepata. After the party fled Nena Ta went on a rampage it seems. Blasting apart large swathes of the temple in her assault with frost infused fires. She summoned hit squadrons of incorporeal undead as well, slaying various clerics who were unprepared for a sudden assault of that magnitude. However, her flames were not the black spreading ones that Gulim had described. Atsu suspects that she might only be able to produce those flames with the aid of the staff they just sealed, which if true would be a great boon. Regardless Nena Ta or whatever her true name is went through the temple and slaughtered a good chunk of the clergy and the Sun Guards before they realized what was happening as well as slaying the two council members staying in the temple for safety. She concluded her rampage by going into Abdei Ka’s room and stealing Thoris Ken’s corpse or at least what remains of it.

Even worse, as Atsu was in contact with some of the remaining clergy trying to establish order the rioters stormed the compound, killing some clergy and essentially claiming ownership of the city. Atsu tried to reason with some but they disconnected the call orb and he was left in the dark. The attack’s timing was far too convenient to be anything but coordinated by Nena Ta which Atsu also finds fairly concerning. Atsu tries to contact a few more clergy later on via sending, to try and establish what is happening. According to them the city is splitting off from the Silver Path and forming an independent city state. They are reinstating the council, holding elections for the fallen members and banishing all the clergy from the town. Those who stay behind have to renounce their political rank and pay large fines to repair the damages to the city. The rest are making a long trek to Nehakara. Unfortunately a good chunk of the Sun Guards defect as well, choosing to stay and defend their home city rather than return to Nehekara or another Silver Path city. From what Atsu hears the city is in pretty decent turmoil from this catastrophe but he doesn’t really blame the party, there really wasn’t any way of knowing of Nena Ta’s true identity and causing her to act out in the open is probably worth it. They can try to establish peaceful communications with Ahknepata in the future and possibly bring them back into the Silver Path at a later date.

The session ends with Atsu requesting the party stay in Nehekara for a couple days to act as an additional buffer in case Nena Ta attempts to break in and to recap what happened on their trip to various higher up clerics to see if there is anything they could use.

[Silva Stormrage]

Character Spotlight: Mira Lucian

Spoiler: Mira Lucian

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Mira was born in the forests of Rus far to the north. Head priest of a notable goddess who she was quite devoted to. Or at least that's what she has managed to piece together from the fragments of her memory. When the world began to crack and the gods had no idea what to do about it, only knowing of impending catastrophe her goddess unleashed a powerful forbidden magic, removing herself and all memory of her from the flow of time. Hoping to seal herself away in a safe dimension her spell warped history and the mind of those who existed in the world. This dangerous spell caused traumatic damage to the material plane and was probably only possible due to the fragile state of the world and the weakening of the fabric of reality.

Regardless for Mira who had devoted her entire life to her goddess she found her holy symbols blank, with no divine symbols on them. The miracles she once performed for her town are now remembered as illusionary fakes and her divine magic she was so proud of has been warped to be illusionary magic. Too much of Mira’s life had been tied to the goddess and her mind was fragmented. Memories of timelines that don’t quite fit, the knowledge of something being not quite right drove Mira to paranoia and uncertainty for quite a while. Still devoted, she scoured libraries, tomes and interviewed scholars hoping to find some clue or confirmation of her goddess’s faded existence.


Character Build:
Mechanically speaking Mira is a Shadowcraft Mage. The standard tricks of earth spell + heighten are still in effect but Mira’s main gimmick for the character is the use of the ranger spell “Decoy Image” which basically makes a replica of yourself anywhere within long range that duplicates your actions. The illusions are just that, illusionary so they can’t actually cast or do anything but Mira has extended the 8 hour duration spell and has 6 of them active at any time. Then she uses the deceptive spell metamagic in order to make foes think her spells are coming from one of the decoys instead of her. She has the vecna blooded template, refluffed to fit her backstory which prevents divinations from revealing her true form as well as the insidious magic feat which hampers true seeing from piercing her illusions.

And yes her name is pronounced incredibly similarly to "Mere Illusion" that was intentional

[Silva Stormrage]

Session 4 (Arvin, Mira)

Spoiler: Hunting for Info

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After the rapid fire pace of the past sessions the party spends a few days recovering, opting to remain near the capital to share information with the clergy and to safeguard the relic in case of a sudden attack. Luckily, no outright attack is enacted to reclaim their pilfered evil artifact, and the party is able to attend to various miscellaneous tasks. One of these includes the long awaited “Hallowing” of the Luminescence in the name of Raeka’s deity, a minor goddess of adventure. This not only provides those onboard some protection from the attacks of evil beings, but also enacts a silence effect on those not of Raeka’s faith, effectively allowing her to chatter on and on uninterrupted.

One notable event does occur -- during their downtime Mira’s goddess’ blessing (a refluffed vecna-blooded template) is triggered when someone attempts to divine her location, blocking the effect as well as revealing the name and location of the creature making the attempt. The protection of the blessing reveals the character’s name, “Nemora”, with the image and location making it clear that this is Nena Ta’s true identity, and that she is still somewhere within Ahknepata. The party is obviously concerned, but after some debate conclude that there is nothing they can do to counteract her without more information, and votes to ignore the attempt.

Instead, the party focuses on gathering more information. Arvin is one of the more persuasive voices, arguing that it would be invaluable to try to contact Duzek Kore and see if they can grab his mine’s various resources, including gems that could be used for further resurrections and to fund the Silver Path’s protection. After a few divinations, they gather the following information --

1) Duzek Kore is now undead and his bodyguard is still guarding the mine
2) Sekmere (The Silver Path’s patron deity) is still granting his priests spells, but many other deities are also contributing to grant spells to the clerics.
3) The best way to find the location of the mine is “By asking the paranoid survivor cowering beneath the tower’s pass”.

Arvin then persists a casting of the spell commune to allow him to communicate with a deity of his alignment and ask questions on demand during the day.


DM: Wait you can do that…?

Arvin’s Player: I don’t see why not, what’s the action to ask the questions?

DM: Huh, I suppose it would just function like talking then.


The church offers to send a mercenary with them and the party accepts. The church sends Cynthia von Varley, an ex-merchant family heiress and competent mercenary tracker that they had met in the first session.With this information Mira summons some phantom steeds for the three of them, allowing them to make a journey that might take weeks on foot in a mere few hours.

Consulting the map of the known region the party decides that there are two locations most likely for this individual to be hiding -- either beneath the “Silent Tower”, a seemingly abandoned tower which sprung up overnight after the transition, or somewhere around it, in the approximately 100 mile pass between the cities of the Silver Path and the Sand Giants living in the Valley of Nadrit.

Deciding to canvas the mountain pass first, they quickly realize they have almost no ranks in spot or listen and are traveling at over a hundred miles an hour. After some pointed jokes from the DM, Cynthia reveals herself to be a melee focused binder, using her abilities to summon a small army of ravens. By looking through their eyes, she is able to scout the sands and cave networks, although all ultimately turn out to be dead ends. They do manage to spot the tracks of a small group of people. Following them, they end up finding a desert elf nomadic tribe crossing through the pass. The band of about 30 or so various fighters seem very cautious about their group, but not immediately aggressive.


Arvin’s Player: Hm, that’s a decent number of elves. We should probably just approach them.

Mira’s Player: Hey with my various images up we almost appear to outnumber them!

Mira turns invisible and disguises her various images while the party goes up to negotiate with the elves to see if they possibly know anything. Landing they quickly realize a problem. Neither Mira nor Arvin speaks the desert elves’ language.

DM: Please don’t tell me I have to negotiate with myself in a language neither of you guys can understand while relaying the information back and forth with you.


Thankfully, Mira realizes they have comprehend language actually prepared, allowing her to actually participate in the conversation by whispering invisibly into Cynthia’s ear. The discussion is pretty tense but the party eventually convinces the elves that they aren’t going to try to kill or harm them, and simply want to know about a potential individual in the region. The elves, who identify themselves as part of what they call the “Brush Tribe” are hesitant, though they clearly have something they are keeping to themselves. After a few more minutes of negotiation the party convinces the elves that they don’t mean any ill intent, but the elves are still reluctant to actually tell the party the individual’s exact location. They do reveal that there is a skittish druid whom they have made trade with in the past weeks. They give a vague direction of “north east” and give the general area on their map and bid them farewell.

The party accepts their aid and narrows down their search in that direction, upon flying over the Silent Tower they find that the massive 80ft tall 40ft wide tower has a single guardian standing in front of it. The party feels the humanoid figure staring at them from quite a distance away. The female individual is wearing a martial art style sleeveless gi but doesn’t seem to be making any movements towards them. Arvin spends a question of his persisted commune to determine the individual isn’t associated with Nemora and figures this is a question for another time and the party heads north.

Spoiler: The Druid’s Cave

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After spending several hours scouring the cliff face, a lucky roll brings a certain cliff face to their attention. The stone here is perfectly even and smooth, far too much so to be natural. Although they verify it is not an illusion, the party highly suspects it to be the Druid’s hiding place. Unfortunately, it is also sealed with druidic magic, as after failing to find any kind of keyhole, lever or other means to open the door, they surmise that the druid simply uses magic to open the stone face. The party debates on what to do after that, not wanting to simply break down the door as breaking into the base of a paranoid druid by force is probably not the best of starting impressions.


DM: The most fearsome opponent! A solid wall of nonmagical stone! How will our heroes overcome such a mighty foe??

Party: Not helping…


Eventually the party summons a small earth elemental to scout what is behind the wall, which the earth elemental reports to be a long stone tunnel. The party takes some time to comb through their abilities, eventually summoning a mephit who has the spell Soften Earth and Stone, and proceeding to push through the now soft clay into the tunnel. Cautiously moving through the tunnel, they end up finding a female druid on guard as they round one particular corner. The tunnel widens into what appears to be a wide cavern with a large underground lake and a few obvious indications of living, a table, a hammock for sleeping, etc.

Standing fully alert and clad in leather and other rough clothing the druid screams at them to not approach and that she will fight back if necessary. She is surrounded by a 3 inch wide curved, semi transparent wall of ice. The party attempts to try to calm her down but it doesn’t go particularly well, as the charismatic characters are not with the current group. The druid claims that the party are infiltrators sent to bring the druid back to “Her”. The party has no idea what the druid is talking about, but fails to convince her of that. After a few more failed attempts at diplomacy, the druid attempts to force them out of the cave by attacking. She animates a colossal snake of earth from the surrounding walls, attempting to physically push the party from her cave.

The snake fails to grapple Arvin due to his freedom of movement but still lands a damaging blow. The druid then blocks off the rest of the pass with a giant wall of stone, forcing the party to go through the snake if they want to reach the druid herself. Her casting is seemingly unlike normal spellcasting as she is manipulating the earth surrounding the party with motions that seem like dancing rather than actual spellcasting.

The fight however, is still rather short. Despite the impressive show of the earthen snake, the party maneuvers past it and the blockade with Cynthia and Arvin tumbling through the squares and Mira just casting spells at range. The druid isn’t really capable of fighting all three of them at once and finds themself quickly overwhelmed. Opening a tunnel beneath them they attempt to collapse the ceiling above them causing a collapse. Arvin, however, uses anticipatory strike to immediately block off the druid’s tunnel, preventing them from dodging their own cave in. Deciding to risk it anyway the druid collapses the roof crushing herself as well as Cynthia and Arvin beneath falling rubble. The druid is pinned beneath nearly twenty feet of rubble while Cynthia nimbly dodges out of the way. Arvin is not so lucky and finds himself trapped underwater, buried by several tons of rock and dirt.

Having lost sight of the druid, the party decides that it would be easiest to beg for forgiveness later rather than risk death now, and Mira summons some orbs of electricity to pierce the rubble and finish the druid off. The party obviously wanted to capture her alive, but given the life or death circumstances don’t feel they can continue fending her attacks off while rescuing Arvin, and decide that in the worst case they can simply grab the body to raise the druid in a safer location where she might be calmer.

It was at that point they realized that the druid was in an unknown state 20ft down a tunnel in a stone cave buried under several tons of rocks. While Arvin was also buried underwater in a similar situation…

Mira: Alright so… we are two spellcasters who have 5th level arcane spells, 5th level divine spells and 5th level psionic powers… I am not sure what I have that can actually move this.


DM: Cynthia’s vestiges aren’t helpful for moving this amount of rubble either. You guys don’t have any teleports prepared? No scrolls of dimensional door or similar items?

Party: No…

DM: Whelp... Best of luck?


What follows was literally three hours of real life discussion on how to get the druid out of the pit. Sorting through the various summons and evocations Mira could cast results in nothing that could move such a large amount of material and even summoning another mephit wouldn’t help as soften earth and stone only goes four feet deep, and would still be incredibly tedious and slow to dig through so many tons of earth. They ended up summoning some earth elementals to check if the druid was still alive and she was, although incredibly wounded. The two earth elementals were able to stabilize her but she was still underground buried and was going to take further damage from the rubble. They still didn’t have any real way of getting her out of the pit.

As Arvin was also stuck they eventually figured a way to get him out, as psionics don’t take verbal components he was still able to manifest underwater, communicating telepathically with Mira he manifested time hop on himself, sending himself into the future to return to his current location in a couple rounds. While he was temporarily displaced Mira sent her two earth elementals into the space where Arvin was previously. When Arvin reappeared he was shunted to the nearest available space which was outside the rubble.

Eventually though they figure out a… “plan”. One that Cynthia was not too fond of. If you are ever a DM and your players come up to you with a glint in their eyes as you get a sinking feeling in your stomach….know that you are not alone. The first part of their plan was to kill Cynthia -- as vestiges are unbound on death, the plan was to have Cynthia kill herself and then immediately use a scroll of revivify on her. After healing her back up this would technically allow her to bind new vestiges. There are various vestiges that allow one to teleport or turn an ally into a gaseous form, but none that would solve this problem directly. As her weapon is merciful and therefore, technically painless, she….very….hesitantly agrees to the procedure. She binds a vestige that would allow an ally to become gaseous and reach the Druid. After that they then repeat the time hop plan to shunt the druid outside of the pit. There is much rejoicing.


Arvin’s Player: It’s a good thing Mira has high enough int that she thought of the plan in a minute rather than the 3 hours it took us.

DM: I mean it’s not unreasonable XD

Spoiler: Interrogation

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After getting the druid stable and outside of the rubble they bind her, restricting all possible movement. Cynthia’s choice of vestige allows her to use the spell suggestion on the druid to help calm her down and explain the situation. The druid, unable to escape eventually failed a saving throw versus the suggestion and calms down enough to actually talk and explain the situation to the party.

The druid, named Mai, was indeed part of Duzek Kore’s enclave of druids. When the transition hit the mine collapsed and they were mostly just trying to stabilize themselves, dig out their comrades who had been buried, and trying to figure out what happened. About a week or so after the transition, a wanderer entered the mine. Calling herself “Nemi”, she was incredibly charming, and Duzek Kore was immediately intrigued by her story. She claimed to be a wanderer of the desert, and offered her skills as a potent cleric in exchange for a place to stay. She proved every bit as potent as she claimed, and Mai recalls her ease in charming the druids with a shudder. Eventually “Nemi” claimed she had a ritual for Duzek Kore to undergo that would allow him to become a true “embodiment of nature”. Taken in, Duzek Kore agreed, but walked out a horrific undead creature even more charmed by “Nemi’s” thoughts and opinions.


Mira’s Player: So a Dry Lich. Great.

DM: What makes you say that?

Mira’s Player: Unless this is a homebrewed undead...that is literally the only intelligent desert undead in the game.

DM: Okay, fair.


Although to the best of Mai’s guess he retained his free will, Duzek Kore and Nemi slowly transformed the enclave into a harsher and harsher version of the druids’ once benign teachings. Mai would take the high ranking druids to a place called “The sanctuary” but Mai had no idea where that was. A few more outspoken critics of Nemi ended up “fleeing” in the night and the enclave was firmly in the hands of those who didn’t mind this new direction. Mai was unsure what to do herself, but her mind was made up very quickly when as she was working on some earthworks outside the collapsed mine she discovered the corpse of one of the druids who had “Fled”. Realizing what could happen to her she fled that instant.

Nemi has sent several individuals and groups to try to kill or capture her in the ensuing weeks, driving Mai into a frenzy of paranoia. Still the party managed to convince Mai that she would be safer in Nehekara rather than hiding out in various caves where Nemi keeps finding her. Mai was somewhat hesitant as she explained her druidic abilities were locked within a city due to the enclave’s specific techniques.

Spoiler: Homebrewed ACF

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The Enclave basically has a homebrewed druid ACF that trades out wild shape, their animal companion, makes all their spells that take a standard action or more to cast to take 10 times as long to cast and forbids them from casting or using any druid class features within a densely populated city or locus of civilization. In exchange for those brutal drawbacks they gain various monk/rogue abilities like improved uncanny dodge and monk bonus to AC as well as the ability to use limited bending abilities from the Avatar d20 bending system.

With their new ally in tow, the party flee back to Nehekara to recover and deposit Mai where she might be safe. Mai gives the party the location of the mine, but warned them that the druidic enclave still visited that mine and were constantly siphoning the various resources out of the location to bring back to the “Sanctuary”. The party decides to call the session at this point, so that they have some time to prepare before engaging what will clearly be a grueling fight.

[Silva Stormrage]

Session 4 (Royce, Raeka, Kaiser, Flower)

We recruited another player for this session who is playing "Flower" a small child fey sorceress.

Spoiler: Downtime Sleuthing

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The party starts off getting the results of their gather information checks from downtime. People have somehow already heard about the riots and the loss of control over the Ahknepata. Their information is woefully misinformed and distorted by rumor but it is concerning in and of itself information with any level of detail that quickly at all, considering the city has declared independence and is on a communications blackout. On the thefts, further details surface regarding the family. The Kan family, as mentioned before, was a family with close ties with the church but where each of their children has chosen a different path. The eldest son left the city after a final disagreement post transition, the younger son was unconvinced by Sekmere’s message and worships various nature spirits, while the youngest child, their daughter, plans to maneuver into a merchant household and take that as her path when she is of age. The wife is distraught according to the neighbors, who can often hear her wailing in despondence from the family’s split. The youngest son currently runs the household.

The one new major piece of information the party obtained was that the daughter was actually quite close friends with the son of the merchant whose magic mirror was stolen. Upon questioning the merchant’s son, he revealed he did know about the mirror’s true purpose and had mentioned it to the daughter, although he had stopped short of revealing to his father that he knew his secret.

The disappearances in Edma seem to be getting worse – an entire rowdy tavern’s worth of people vanished in the middle of the night – the streetlights were dimmed, but a nearby witness lit a torch and went by, and found no one within. The witness fled the scene the next morning. The party suspects either an area effect that doesn’t affect the tavern, or an effect that dims magic, since the streetlights are dimmed but the mundane lights are unaffected. They also hear that Nena Ta has resurfaced, inadvertently revealing herself when she targeted Mira, who has an ability to reflect divination. Nemora is Nena Ta’s true name, and it is revealed that she is still in Ankhnepata. The party mostly shrugs their shoulders, as the city has left the Silver Path and they have no real way to find and oust her. The party does remember to ask Atsu as well as several church officials about what type of demon she might be, and they theorize she might be a Lilitu, a type of demonic succubus well known for infiltrating good aligned churches and using magical items to disguise her demonic clerical magic as holy.

DM: You also hear rumors about a serial killer in Anoset who is leaving their victims ripped up via spell and claw. The populace suspect a random wandering undead

Kaiser’s Player: I think we all know what that is – it’s a WERESPELL

DM: Honestly kinda regretting not thinking of that, that's kinda an amazing concept.

Spoiler: Investigation

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The party resolves to deal with the thefts first, and goes to speak with the Kan family. The wife is despondent, but the party learns that the daughter of the family was actually quite friendly with the son of the merchant with the mirror, and he had told her of its functions in strict confidence. The daughter is home today, so the party heads over to talk to her, but is interrupted by the arrival of a church official, who brings a small child with delicate fey-like features.

Atsu: Royce, we might need you on a special assignment – A powerful fey child showed up at our door and demanded to help, and we need you to oversee her and take care of her. She has... caused trouble when we have tried to keep her out of harms way.
Royce’s Player: I was really waiting for you to say….take her under my WING.
DM: Yeah, I don’t think the cleric would go for that.

(New player introduction) Flower showed up at the door of the Silver Path a few weeks ago, offering to fight. Being only 10 years old, she wasn’t taken very seriously, until she proved her worth thanks to her overt sorcerous might. She is quite a potent sorceress, and is getting quite restless being put on minor assignments. The clerics decide maybe placing her with the party might ensure her safety while still giving her some taste of excitement.

Cleric: So we are leaving her in your charge, Royce.
Raeka, to the small child: Hey punk – I’m Royce’s first charge, you’re only number two. And don’t you forget it.
DM: I would like to dismiss that as out of character, but it’s not even all that out of character, is it….

The party moves on to question the daughter, arriving at a quite nice house with a large statue of Sekmere out front. It looks largely deserted, and it takes a while, but after a bit of knocking the youngest son appears.

Son: Yes, may I help you?
Royce: Yes, we’re here with the city. (OOC: A 67 total, too bad we don’t use diplomacy as written! A 34 on sense motive too)
DM: (OOC: Yes, I wonder why we don’t use diplomacy as written…)

The son looks displeased at the mention of his father, and explains that his mom has already had an extremely difficult few weeks, and is not interested in talking to anyone at the moment. The party asks for him to bring out his sister to speak with, and despite some misgivings he is won over by the diplomacy check. He motions the party in, and shows them to his sister’s room, knocking politely on the door.


Daughter: Hello?

Son: These people are here to talk to you.

Daughter: How can I help?

Royce: We are here investigating the various thefts. We believe you may have some information on the disappearance of your friend’s father’s mirror.

Daughter: (silence)

Royce: Well, we can do this telepathically, or we can say it out loud in front of your brother. (Intimidate)

Daughter: How is that relevant to my father’s urn??

Royce: We’re asking the questions here. (Rolls 50+ On Intimidate)

DM: Wow, you’re doing a great job intimidating the 15 year old girl who is a level 3 expert, especially as a so called majestic phoenix saint of justice.


The daughter breaks down, and tells the party that she only told her father and her eldest brother, beyond her discussions with the merchant’s son. The mother is barely responsive, and the youngest is a bit combative. One interesting thing that the party picks up is thanks to Royce, who has been continually casting Detect Magic and Detect Evil. As Royce scans back and forth, Royce suddenly notices a certain hawk who is sitting unobtrusively in the background, and is almost stunned by the overwhelming amounts of evil coming from the bird. The bird registers as a regular hawk with 2 intelligence to the party’s mindsight, despite putting off enough evil energy to appear as a high cleric of an evil deity. The party, after a quick powwow, agrees that this bird is almost certainly a Malphas’ raven radiating it’s master’s alignment and evil aura, indicating that a powerful binder is somehow interested in this case, and that they should pretend to ignore it in hopes of gathering more information about it. They leave, but task the city spirit with keeping an eye on the hawk and its movements.

Various jokes and Star Wars references are invoked at the phoenix’s true alignment, given its actions against the daughter. Flower, the fey girl, is appalled at Royce’s use of force to extract information from the daughter, and declares that the party is no fun and all mean people. Raeka manages to change her mind by stealing Flower’s ring and returning it to her “as a present”, which the little girl finds very amusing. An unlikely friendship forms between Raeka and Flower.

Royce: I trained children for war for hundreds of years. I know what children can and can’t take.
Flower: Pbbbt. You’re mean and a bully!
Raeka: Don’t worry, I’ll protect you from the evil fire parrot.

Spoiler: Trip to Edma

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The party agrees that heading to Edma to speak with the eldest son is probably their best bet, as he seems suspicious and has the most motive to take an urn that has no apparent value except sentimental, but decide to stop by and interrogate the merchant family before leaving. The party speaks to the merchant father and son. The father claims that no one knew except for the wizard who installed it. However, the son told the daughter of the cleric, plus a few of his friends. A cursory investigation indicates that none of his friends have spread any information.

The party heads to Edma, and quickly determines that the eldest son is not in the city, but was here until a week or so ago when he mysteriously vanished into the night. The party gathers that he was within Edma and even purchased an apartment but hasn't been there within the past week, seemingly leaving randomly one day. The guy was seen in the days before getting increasingly annoyed and upset with people around him in the apartment. Causing some scuffles but nothing particularly violent, no one really wanted to mess with the cleric. Reports of people in the same apartment noted that he did not have any holy symbols of Sekmere and instead had a necklace with a symbol which appeared to be a solitary snake's fang. They weren't sure if that was a holy symbol or just a magic item though. He was often heard meeting with two other individuals in the apartment but the residents never saw those two individuals entering the apartment complex, they just overheard the conversations. Unfortunately in a language none of them could understand, a sharp harsh language. The owner of the complex curious about these meetings made up an excuse to enter the room during one one night and saw Merah speaking with two females, a desert elf and a spellscale both dressed in black robes and wearing matching amulets. They looked pretty pissed at the interruption and before the owner could really ask the question they argued that she should leave immediately and ended up doing so, she was incredibly panicked about them possibly hurting her and so she didn't really mention it to anyone. No one saw him leave one day and he simply stopped appearing outside and no one really knows exactly where he went. Inside his room you don't find much, though Royce does see lingering traces of Evil in the room.


Raeka: There’s one thing this calls for – finding a bard, and casting MODIFY MEMORY. I told you guys it’s always useful.

DM: There aren’t any bards in the city capable of casting it.

Raeka… Uh any other ways?

DM: (Rolls) you can find a cleric who is capable of casting it if you wait a day.

Raeka: Good enough!


With magical help the innkeeper recounts the conversation perfectly, and with the help of Royce’s tongues ability the party determines that the language that was being spoken was Abyssal, the language of demons. Furthermore, with the help of her now perfect recall, the innkeeper can confirm that she was almost certainly enchanted to leave the room immediately, as her behavior seems very odd in hindsight. The innkeeper transcribes the following conversation.

Elf Cultist: So ya you don't really have any reason to stay within my city. Nemora told us to spread out, you being here just draws more attention to the city when I am trying to be subtle. You said this was a temporary thing until things died down in Nehekara but you keep on requesting meetings here. It's not my fault that your plan involved being stupidly obvious about motives and you needing to flee to another city to avoid being immediately interrogated.

Merah: Look you don't really get to boss me around we are the same rank here. You can complain all you like but me just being here doesn't cause much more issues than already exists.

Elf: You used necromantic magic to rot off a man's arm! That's going to cause WAY more attention than it should have! I have to talk with that rotting Vizor and tell him to slow down! He is already unfathomably obnoxious, he is going to get worse if I try to keep ordering him around. Not all of us have a special pact with Nemora to manipulate undead here.

Merah: Ya because you just joined later, that sounds like your problem.

Elf: Ya, ha ha. Get out of my city

Spellscale Cultist: Agreeing with Sagria here, I don't need the rest of you guys messing around. And frankly these in person meetings are obnoxious. If you didn't block off sendings in your south super secret lair, we could just call you. When is that supposed to be done?

Merah: Fine, you bunch of cowards. I can head back. And I should be done in a week or so, after that a few tweaks should be all I need. I need to make sure the bastard is obedient before I bring him back to the base.

Spoiler: Ambushing the Cultist

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Based on the transcript, it seems apparent that Merah is trying to use the ashes to resurrect his father as some type of powerful undead beneath his control. The DM kindly informs the party that the father had been a cleric able to cast 7th level spells in his prime, which causes mild consternation among the party as they thought the father was at most 7th level and this suddenly dramatically increases the urgency of the situation. The party discusses several options to obtain more information, and eventually decides to ask the innkeeper to sketch the elf and the spellscale. Using the sketch, the party manages to discreetly pick out the public identity of the desert elf, who is masquerading as a local cleric helping the church scout out the surrounding region. The party meets with the city leader, and, with a large amount of convincing and appropriate paranoia, manage to get the city leader and nature spirit on their side. They set up an ambush outside her apartment building.

DM: She comes around the corner towards her apartment building 100 feet awa....

Royce: I cast two greater dispel magics to dispel all her buffs.
Kaiser: I dimensional anchor her and deal 90 damage with my six swords
Raeka: I telekinetically steal her amulet.
Flower: I cast Evard’s Black Tentacles to lock her in place.

DM: But….can you see her from that far away? In the dark?

All: Yes.

DM: Whelp then you successfully capture her then.

The fight is effectively over, and the party finishes knocking her out and subduing her. After disarming her of all her magical trinkets and items (of which there is only a single one, a +1 chain shirt, much to the party’s frustration) as well as her strange amulet, she is subjected to a variety of effects to attempt to get her to speak regarding the plans of her fellow demonic shapeshifters. Despite not having any visible magical auras, she is still somehow reacting as if she were under the effects of a mind blank or a similarly powerful effect. At this point, Flower speaks up –

Flower: I could also just make her into a cute mouse.

All: Look at her quizzically

Flower: Via Baleful Polymorph

Kaiser: That WOULD bypass any resistances or immunities she gets racially or from classes…


With sufficient debuffing and the help of a few good SR rolls Flower was able to transform the elf into a mouse. Surprisingly as she did that a large bulge seemingly formed in her throat and she began choking, it wasn’t difficult but the party did telekinetically force out a small acorn that appeared to be lodged in her throat and that didn’t get resized when she was transmuted to a small woodland creature.

As soon as the acorn was removed the elf suddenly was appearing on Royce’s mindsight. The last pieces fall into place, as the party realizes that the mind blank effects were being granted by the effects of an Acorn of Far Travel, which allows the user to act as if in a far-off location. The players deduce that the acorn must be tied to a room which is affected by a mind-blank type effect, allowing anyone holding the acorn to benefit from the effect of the location at any distance. The party glares at the DM for a bit as they realize this trick is probably on every single major NPC now and using divinations to track them is going to be obnoxious.

Still the party sets up their plan, with the aid of the city leader, a spellscale wizard named Etrith, they apply enough negative levels to the now mousified cult member in order for Kaiser to apply one of her less used but more insidious abilities, the ability to dominate low level creatures to her whims. With her effective HD reduced to low enough for Kaiser to dominate her the party begins to plot out exactly what they want to ask her and how they plan to use that information to get the entire details from the cult.

[Silva Stormrage]

Character Spotlight: Flower

I swear I have no idea why almost all of my players decided to have their characters either come from ancient times or the Forest of Rus. They all came to that conclusion independently

Spoiler: Flower

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Flower was a small disfigured child born in a small rural village up in the Forests of Rus. The father, disgraced and disappointed in his newborn daughter’s crippled arm abandoned the child in the forest and lied to the mother that the child had died due to complications of the birth.

Flower was thankfully found by a group of fey living in the countryside, an enclave gathered around a particularly powerful faerie dragon. The faerie dragon used it’s magic to heal and bless the small flower granting her powerful magical abilities. Flower grew up with the fey, playing harmless tricks on travelers and pranks on her fellows. With each year her magic grew at a rapid pace and her abilities allowed her to pull off wondrous tricks and spells.

Eventually though it all came to an end, shortly before the transition a large band of undead were awoken from the southern desert and stormed their way into the forests. The fey were completely caught off guard by these unnatural foes and their various illusions and enchantments were useless. The faerie dragon died as many of the fey were scattered to deeper parts of the forest.

Flower however, left alone again marched south, being the most powerful of the fey even at the age of 12 she decided to try to clear out the undead from the desert entirely. Even as she marched down and was trapped in the strange new land by the transition she eventually got recruited/adopted by the clergy of the Silver Path. However, she was stimed by the clerics' lack of initiative on stopping the undead and by their constant coddling of the 12 year old child. Eventually after being enough of a nuisance she got the clerics to foist her into the care of a saintly phoenix named Royce who was taking a more active measures against the undead and various other threats in the desert.

Character Build
Mechanically speaking, flower is a half fey gnome Sorcerer with the Faerie Dragon Bloodline. Playing as a pathfinder sorcerer instead of a 3.5 one because the player is more familiar with that system than the multitude of 3.5 prestige classes.
She has taken the vow of non violence and various other DC boosting feats to augment her non damaging spells and abilities, mostly focusing on illusions and transformations like baleful polymorph.

[Demidos]

Where else in the desert wastes could we come from? Besides the Silver Path of course, but that would be so passe

[Silva Stormrage]

Alright it has been a bit but we finally finished up the campaign journal.

Session 5 (Entire Party)

Spoiler: The Descent

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As the party embarks on Raeka's ship they descend into the depths of Edma, they prepare themselves for the interrogation. They have to wait several hours after capturing the cultist to rest and recover spell slots in order to debuff her enough for the dominate effect to work but eventually they have all the pieces in place. Bringing down the head of the city and several trustworthy bodyguards, Raeka reveals one of the new powers of her ship -- an ability to enact a silence effect across the entire ship, where only Raeka and those worshipping her obscure goddess of adventure can speak. Raeka’s player cheerfully abuses this privilege to chatter away to a captive audience. However, it is also the safest place the party had on hand, as the boat was impossible to access to mundane characters and hostile territory to most spellcasters thanks to its silence effect and divination wards. The party also sets strict orders to the spirit not to allow anyone near the ship, which is currently hovering in an unmarked spot roughly a mile underground.

Once everything is set up, the party commences the interrogation with the help of telepathy. The cultist, whose name they quickly learn is Sagria quickly starts responding to the party’s various questions, but not first without a quip from the party upon learning her name.
Arvin’s Player with the rest of the party in firm agreement: Her name is now Sangria and there is nothing you can do about it.

DM: God dammit… I walked into that one.

The party starts by first confirming the most important question any party can ask -- in other words...

Party: Do you have any loot we could steal within the city, and if so, how can we reach it?

Unfortunately for them, although they receive a location of a stash house and send out a trustworthy assistant and the city’s spirit to scout it, by the time they reach the designated spot it is emptied. The group presumes it was looted by her allies before they could reach it. Based on what she tells the party, the cult is probably aware of her capture, as the party ambushed her right before her standard check in for the night. Beyond that, however, she isn’t aware of whether the cult will even attempt to try and rescue her, as they are fairly isolated from each other and the cells of the cult are often in open competition with each other. With that hurdle cleared, the group has her divulge the cult’s size, base of operation, major operatives, abilities, and any other facts of interest that they can think of. At this point, the DM pulls out a veritable wall of exposition in response to their questions.

Spoiler: Veritable Wall of Exposition

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Sagria and her fellows are what she calls “Void Priests”. Nemora infuses random mid level clerics who are dissatisfied with their current lot in life or with the status of the church and infuses them with the power of a succubus. This power is only infusable via a daylong ritual involving mass human sacrifices, where she empowers the void priests with various spell-like abilities, resilience and other abilities associated with succubi. Once the Void Priest is empowered, Nemora assigns each of them two “Black Blades” -- near mindless assassins who are also infused with the power of a lower ranking demon (in this case a Maurezhi, ghoulish necromantic beings whose claws paralyze their victims). Fortunately the party finds out that Nemora needs her staff to perform those rituals so for the time being the party’s lucky theft managed to prevent her from creating more powerful minions.

Party: We are, uh, definiteeely going to say we planned that the whole time.
The Void Priests were granted quite extensive magical enchantment abilities as well as the ability to shift onto the ethereal plane at will, which along with their powerful stealth capabilities made them quite dangerous assassins. Their magical attacks mostly revolved around profane blasts of necromantic energy and frost attacks.

There are currently 6 void priests, one for each city and one more who is simply aiding and observing at this time. With each priest planning on destablizing and undermining the various cities, their plan was to cast each city down into anarchy and chaos. When pressed for more information on why, Sagria could only reply that Nemora wished to free an “ancient evil being of tremendous power beneath the sands”, and that the cities of the Silver Path were weakening it and preventing it from being unleashed. Once the cities were destroyed and the creature was released they would be rewarded extensively by this being.

Raeka: It’s Amun Tep, 100% calling Amun Tep here.

The cult is joined by the various druidic cult members that Arvin and Mira had found via interrogating Mia and found their numbers at around 80 druids. Throwing in a small faction of elite Sand Giants who had grown tired of Ersan’s rule and wish to overthrow her and return to their more warlike past, and the cult’s headquarters (a place called “Sanctuary”) was clearly well defended. When questioned, however, Sagria doesn’t know the actual location of the place called the “Sanctuary”, revealing that Nemora had recruited her in the city proper, which frustrated the party to no end. Sangria is able to, however, detail the various goals and plots each of the Void Priests were trying to accomplish in each city.
Merah Kan, the Void Priest in charge of destabilizing Nehekara had stolen the various magical items around the city as well as his own father’s urn. He hoped to reanimate his father as an undead monstrosity under his control and was holed up in an undiscovered cave network just north of the city. While the party had mostly figured this one out by this point they are quite pleased to find out that Sagria could in fact give them the coordinates for the location of the cave network and that the undead may have been animated at this point but not actually under Merah’s control yet if they hurry to attack.

Nena Wrath was the spellscale they heard in the memories they recovered and was charged with destabilizing Anoset. His methods were mostly about assassinations of key individuals and he was responsible for the assassinations in that town. A capable spellcaster, he mostly sent his Black Blades to deal with the actual killing.

Ahkem Hurabasa was the void priest tasked with destroying Tajuna -- a former cleric of Sekmere she had wormed her way into the high ranks of the current government and was helping the various undead in the tombs send in corruptive urns filled with negative energy to kill off the farmland and starve the town out, eventually planning on a large scale undead invasion.

Atef, the last priest, was in charge of inciting Ahknepata but with the city in its current half-destroyed state he mostly has free rein to accomplish other tasks right now that Nemora needs done.

Sagria’s goals were capturing individuals who may become problematic in the future, clerics, sorcerers, etc. Then she would deliver them to a powerful mummy lord in a tomb a couple miles outside the city. There they would be killed and raised into undeath and eventually she and the mummy lord would be able to storm in and destroy the city in one blow, or at least cripple it enough for the cult to come in and kill off the remaining forces.

In summary, the players learn that Nemora has been creating powerful clerics (Void Priests) and assassins (Black Blades) by infusing them with the essence of demons using mass human sacrifice along with her artifact staff, but with the theft of her staff her efforts have largely stalled, leaving her with only six clerics and twelve assassins. She is also supported by the druidic cult she infiltrated and commandeered, along with various other miscellaneous undead and sand giants.

DM: Alright you guys were NOT meant to have this level of information at this point… lets see how well you put it to use.

Spoiler: Inevitable Conflict

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As the party is wrapping up the investigation, the party is suddenly surprised by a cleric of Sekmere appearing through the sands a mile below the city, a large tunnel granting him access and then the earth gently depositing him onto the moving boat. The party was quite surprised as they had specifically told the nature spirit protecting the city to not let anyone find the boat, and were well within its protective sphere. They recognize the cleric as being fairly high ranking and had been left in charge while the head of the city was down with them.

Cleric: Quick you have to help! The city is under attack!

Raeka: Aren’t they in the silence aura?

DM: … Correction, you see them wave their hands in a frantic motion as no sound comes out of their mouth, they then seem really confused for a moment at the sudden lack of noise.

Royce opens up a channel to the cleric with their telepathy and the party is informed that the cleric had overridden their request to keep the boat isolated, as the city is currently under attack. Incorporeal undead have sprung up all around the city, as well as a void priest who has been spotted teleporting around the city, causing mayhem. Furthermore, the cleric has a specific warning for the party.

Cleric: My close friend told me that your boat is about to be ambushed!

Party: Which friend was this?

Cleric: They are... uh... huh... I can’t quite remember their name… Wait did they ever tell me their name?

At that moment, two blackclad humanoid shapes appear from the shadow of the cleric, as well as two incorporeal demons phase into view behind him. The humanoids nimbly tumble onto the ship and rush towards the players while the large demonic forms have hunchbacked forms with large visible spines protruding from their backs.

Party: ….you brought the assassins with you, didn’t you. Gosh darn it. We need better NPC allies.

DM: To be fair to the cleric, they didn’t know they were doing that and were charmed.

The two Black Blades act first, moving with extraordinary speed and agility. A rapier spears Kaiser, and he is forced to make a fortitude save as poison on the blade begins to sap his vitality.

Kaiser: 33 on Fortitude, no problem.

DM: That fails! You take constitution damage!

Party: Oh…...Oh. That’s not good.

Luckily, the Black Blades roll “low” on the damage, only dealing 3 points to his Constitution along with a hefty chunk of regular hit point damage. In fact, the Black Blades hit an unlucky streak, missing the next several attack rolls, bull rush checks and saving throws by one. Although the DM is bitter, it is still a tough fight. In an unfortunate bout of friendly fire, Etrith and Flower are mostly incapacitated by the silence aura, while the mostly martial Black Blades are largely immune to its effects.

Raeka: You know…in my defense, if the Void Priest had come instead of the Black Blades, I bet my Silence aura would have been real useful…

DM: Actually if you recall, most of Sagria’s capabilities were spell-like or supernatural so they would have been mostly fine as well.

The NPC clerics are likewise crippled having few spells they can cast while silenced, but still manage to deal respectable damage with the few they have available. In doing so they also deal significant damage to the ship, leading Raeka’s player to sullenly mutter about coming back and “getting revenge on those glorified healers”. With Royce’s dispels knocking out a fair amount of the Black Blades’ buffs and Kaiser dealing some fair damage while dimensionally binding them, the Black Blades are in bad shape. Still, using a dispelling blade of them manages to dispel the restraints on Sagria as well as her baleful polymorph, and teleport her out, though she is knocked unconscious by the crossfire in the process. Eventually, both Black Blades are eventually killed by the party’s focused fire, though not before the following exchange occurs.

DM: Royce, Fortitude save against the poison.

Royce: 28 save?

DM: No, and they finally rolled decent damage...you take 17 points of Constitution damage!

Party: How is that fair???

DM: 3d6 from Black Lotus Extract. Welcome to mid/high level combat!

The demons prove to be a more difficult enemy to finish off. While not as lethal as the Black Blades, they are much more mobile. As they are incorporeal, they dart in and out of the ship, poking up and hitting the party with endless ego-whips (a psionic mental attack that drains charisma even on a successful saving throw), slowly draining their charisma. The party has a very limited supply of ways to affect them at this point, ways which are even more limited by inter party politics.

Royce: I could explode in a giant firestorm on this totally expendable magic ship.

Raeka: I will rip your feathery wings off and stuff them so far down your esophagus they’ll come out the other side if you so much as scratch the deck of this ship.

DM: A bit late for that. Parts of the ship are currently on fire...

It becomes worse when Kaiser critically fails an important save against ego whip and is knocked unconscious, leaving the party without any real way of damaging the demons. Royce is slain soon after by the Black Lotus Extract poison she was hit with a few rounds ago. This leaves Mira, Flower, Raeka and the remaining clerics. Most of which can’t cast spells due to the silence aura. The demons try to coup de grace the few allies and party members they knocked unconscious but Raeka keeps interrupting their attempts by knocking them back with her rampaging frost dragon attack. One of the demons is slain but eventually the remaining demon knocks out all remaining combatants except for Flower and Raeka. Still, they find themselves in a stalemate. Flower was able to keep casting Wings of Cover blocking the demon’s ego whip and Raeka was immune due to her undead nature and they didn’t have very many other effective combat tools. Eventually the demon decided fleeing was the best approach (in case reinforcements arrived) and fled with the remaining Black Blade’s corpse.

The party healed themselves back up with mostly minor spells and items, with one notable exception -- They did end up having to cast Revenance, a spell to temporarily revive someone for a couple minutes on Royce as they were the only one to actually die in the fight. Luckily for them Royce could fully resurrect and restore themselves thanks to their phoenix abilities once they were conscious.

Royce: Whelp, looks like I have to self immolate and resurrect right away then.

Raeka: Not on my ship! I will kill you again if you blow yourself up on my deck for no reason!

Royce: Fiiiiiiiine.

With the party fully restored they check on the status of the city above and help deal with the remaining incorporeal undead haunting and attacking various civilians. The undead go down fairly easily with the party at full strength and the city’s nature spirit directing them.
The party attempt to track down Sagria as the Black Blade had to have attempted a long distance teleport to get her out of the city spirit’s range -- given the disruption to long range teleportation style effects she necessarily suffered a mishap. Though she was no longer a squirrel (and thus had her magical capabilities restored), she was still without her magical acorn of far travel blocking scrying and divinations.

Unfortunately for them, the two scrying attempts failed and they did manage to get her direction with the spell circle dance but after scanning a couple miles out into the desert searching for her they came up empty. Frustrated at losing their captive they return to Edma.

The Party: So to be clear about this -- we got no loot as all the enemies either fled or weren’t carrying any, and we lost Sagria, the first good source of information on this secretive cult we’ve had all game.

DM: Pretty much! Sorry about that. You still have the Acorn of Far Travel that grants Mind Blank and you got an absolute ton of information about the cult and know the location of another one of the Void Priest’s lairs though, so it wasn’t a complete loss.

[Silva Stormrage]

Session 6 (Entire Party)

Spoiler: The Plan

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The party spent the next week of real life time discussing on how to proceed next, having lost their hostage and not wanting to deal with trying to track down a million different tombs in a crypt infested desert. After quite a bit of debate, they were still stuck with a plan no better than just going after the cultists whose locations they knew and trying to subdue them before they could go to ground and disappear.

That is...until Raeka had a very interesting idea. With the Acorn of Far travel they had a tenuous connection to what they assumed was their enemy’s main base, but with no teleportation getting that far and not having any divination that works through such a connection it didn’t help them much. But Raeka realized they had another option by using the spell Tree Stride.

The way Acorn of Far Travel works is that you take an acorn from a still living oak tree and as long as you hold the acorn you are treated as if you were under the canopy of that oak tree. Thus the cult probably had a magic item or ongoing spell effect around that oak tree along the lines of “Anyone who stands here has the benefits of the spell Mind Blank”. Meanwhile, the spell Tree Stride allows you to merge into a tree and then exit out of the same type of plant some distance away. This would allow the party to teleport straight into the main base of the cult and take them by surprise. In addition, despite long distance teleportation effects being incredibly hazardous in the setting, this plan would bypass that restriction. Since the Acorn of Far Travel treated them as being next to the Oak tree they were teleporting to, it wouldn’t be treated as long distance teleportation and they wouldn’t risk a magical teleportation mishap.

Raeka’s Player: Or at least that's how I THINK it would work. Anyone have good enough spellcraft to determine if that's correct?

Mira: A 42 should be good enough.

DM: Yes, that’s high enough to deduce the interactions between these spells. I am just not sure if this works the way you think it would. Give me ten minutes to check the rules and decide...

Royce: Oh come on, you know you want this to work. Imagine how hilarious it would be to have us suddenly appear next to Nemora as she is drinking tea or something and then *BAM* task force ambush.

DM: Hmmm, let me see what the internet suggests. (Thread located here ). Mostly seems to side with you guys. I am going to roll a dice, 50-50 this works. *Rolls Success*
DM: Alright the plan will work if you go through with it. What is your plan once you get in there, what steps are you taking for preparation?

Raeka’s Player: All of them.

What follows is another long discussion amongst the players about the exact method of their assault. Flower and Arvin argue that it is far too risky to send the entire party into an unknown probably heavily fortified base with no idea of what awaits them, they instead argued for sending just Raeka along as they were 1) The most likely to get away with their incorporeal nature allowing them to phase through walls, 2) If they did die they had a high chance of just respawning in a couple days at their ship due to their ghost abilities. So they argued sending her alone, invisible and having her scout around and survive for long enough for the rest of the party to cast enough divinations to pinpoint Raeka’s current location and plan a better full on assault with the aid of the entire church and their armies at their back.

The rest of the party argued that they could waste their shot if they were too passive, the cult almost certainly did not expect a squad of highly trained and powerful forces to suddenly appear in the middle of their base. They had almost no wizards and were mostly divine casters meaning they likely couldn't all suddenly teleport to that location in an instant with a retaliatory defense force. Likewise if the cult figured out how the party had arrived they could simply cut down the tree and prevent the party from entering that location by surprise again, meaning they would have to storm through the front gates in a full on assault.

In the end the “Send everyone” party won and they prepped for the session and how they would approach this battle.

DM: Are you guys sure you want to go along with this plan? It is very risky as you will be teleporting into an unknown location inside the core of the enemy’s base. I have already set up what's on the other side since the campaign started so it's not necessarily level appropriate for you guys right now.

Mira’s Player: The opportunity is just too good to pass up at this point. We have to do something with this and this is the best approach I think. Even if it's too much for us to handle we will almost certainly get a surprise round and they probably won’t be able to prevent us from fleeing. Nemora also doesn’t have her artifact staff at the moment so this may be the best time to ambush her if she is there.

Spoiler: The Church's Aid and the Dramatic Entrance

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Mostly in agreement on the matter the party started to pool their money for various consumables and possible allies to assist them. They spend the next couple days and are informed that the aid the church can give them will be told to them at the start of the session. After preparing their equipment and pooling their resources the session begins with the party in a meeting with Atsu in Nehekara discussing the plan and the aid the church can grant them.

Atsu: Alright, to recap what you informed me via magical communication yesterday, the plan is to connect to this oak tree via the acorn you retrieved from the Void Priest you captured. Only one individual can transport themselves via this method but you will take a portable hole and have your party concealed within that. Once Raeka exits the tree they will unload the portable hole and your party will scout/engage what forces you can find trying to keep a low profile.

On our end once you go through the tree we will begin attempting to pinpoint your location via divinations and will have all available Sun Knights on standby to rush over to your position and give covering fire/assistance. The location you are entering is almost certainly going to be underground given the descriptions of the “Sanctuary” and the abilities of the druidic cult. Remember that the room you will be entering will be warded against divinations so you will need to get out of the room in order for us to pinpoint you. You will have one minute to do so as thats the casting time of the divination we will be using (Circle Dance)

Raeka: You forgot the part where we emerge victorious over all their forces and you throw a festival in our honor.

Atsu: I will put off the planning of the festival of your triumph until we actually succeed. Here is a list of the individuals who are capable of assisting you and what magical spells we can cast on you before you enter the cave.

The DM then proceeds to give a 16 spell list of ongoing spells and several different NPCs who were volunteering including a Sekmere colossus, an incredibly powerful giant divine beetle capable of burrowing and producing tremendous blasts of solar power. The party is joined by Cynthia the martial binder, who has worked with the party before and Bah Kames, a dragonscale sorcerer who the party has interacted with briefly before.

Arvin’s Player: Wait, how is the Sekmere Colossus possibly fitting in the portable hole? I was under the impression it was the size of a large bus.

DM: Bah Kames, your sorcerer ally can simply polymorph the Colossus into a smaller form and dismiss it once you enter the cave.

Mira’s Player: Is anyone else concerned that the DM just gave us a stupidly large amount of gear, ongoing spell effects and what is probably a CR 18 giant holy laser beetle on our side?

Kaiser’s Player: Oh yes. I am sure we will be fine.

DM: Ya… don’t worry about it.

The party gathers their allies and squeezes tight into the portable hole barely being able to fit and needing a couple castings of the spell reduce person for everyone to fit into the tiny space. Still while it may be uncomfortable, they manage to squeeze in, give the portable hole to Raeka and then use Tree Stride to enter the tree and transport themselves to the cult’s inner sanctuary. .

DM: Alright so the spell is a success -- you can’t see or hear anything until you stop being merged with the tree.

Raeka: Alright I exit the tree and dump everyone out immediately.

DM: Do you want me to describe the room first?

Raeka: I am dumping them out anyway so I would rather them be out in the open rather than in the portable hole if I get ambushed right as soon as I exit.

DM: Alright then… so as you quickly exit the tree and dump the party onto the ground you take a quick glance around the chamber. The first thing you note besides the large oak tree which you just exited from is that the entire chamber is on fire. 10ft high flames roast the entire chamber and reach the ceiling. The second thing you notice is you are stricken with dimensional anchor as soon as you exit the tree due to the chamber being under the effects of an unhallow spell.

Raeka: I feel like I would have noticed that…

DM: The clerical magic cast upon you beforehand included protections from fire so you are currently fine. The rest of the chamber is a 30ft radius circular cavern with a large intricate stone gate at the southern entrance, the floor is sand and there is a scattering of plant life in the chamber somehow completely unaffected by the roaring flames . More importantly though you see five large heavy crystalline chains leading to a central figure in the middle of the room. One of those chains is disconnected from the ground but still is tied to the creature. An androgynous looking humanoid figure with long flowing golden hair sits bound in the center of the chamber. Their copper skin seems to be made from sand and they glare at you with a hate filled rage. You recognize them as the individual you saw outside the sandstorms in the first session. With the ominous aura emanating from them you highly suspect them to be the ancient evil buried beneath the sands that the cult wishes to restore.. This time they certainly recognize your presence and turn towards you with a growing wrath, speaking in a raspy voice eerily reminiscent of the whirling winds of the desert.

Khetora: Greetings dwellers of the cursed cities. My name is Khetora, an ancient spirit of this sacred desert. Your bravery is at least impressive, if foolish. I will grant you a quick death for entering this hallowed ground.

Kaiser: I don’t suppose those chains prevent them from attacking at all…

DM: They appear to be loose enough that they can move around in the chamber but they won’t be able to leave.

Spoiler: The Chained BBEG

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DM: As you ready yourselves for combat you notice Khetora’s eyes are surrounded by a baleful nimbus of wispy sand which seems to drag you in. Everyone needs to make a will save or be captured by their gaze attack.

The party’s slew of magical protections and resistance items lets them shrug off the gaze attack except for Flower who immediately drops to the floor paralyzed by hopelessness and fear. Khetora assaults the party in a blitz of movement and conjures up massive bursts of flame that torch the entire area and pierce through the party’s protections due to the searing spell metamagic. Still those immune to fire only take half damage and Arvin’s protections manage to ward the party quite effectively at the cost of taking significant damage himself.

Kaiser goes next, swiftly getting up out of the pile the party is still lying in and sends out her faithful hound and a flurry of blades at Khetora. The wolf lashed out and lands a powerful bite upon Khetora but unfortunately for the party Khetora has the answer -- a feat called Rolibar’s Gambit, allowing them to make counter attacks whenever a melee attack strikes them. Khetora reaches out and with their hand coated in a haze of sand and grabbed the wolf, who upon failing a fortitude save turns into lifeless sand.

Khetora: A magical unnatural beast, return to nothing, you are unfit for my realm.

Party: That’s uh….bad.

Kaiser retaliates by continuing swinging a flurry of blades at Khetora, but Khetora is able to counter attack based on those strikes as well. Unable to strike at Kaiser directly due to the distance involved, they instead resort to turning several of Kaiser’s blades into sand, scattered dust falling to the ground. Kaiser aborts the rest of their attacks to avoid losing all his weapons but manages to at least dimensionally anchor Khetora pulling back.

Kaiser’s Player: Whelp, thats going to be problematic. I have the distinct impression that those chains aren’t really restricting them that much.

DM: Oh, no, they are certainly restricting them. You can see their movements are being hampered and weakened due to the chains holding them back.

Mira is next but her barrage of spells fails to land a decisive hit on the creature due to a mix of their agility, and natural resistances.

Raeka assaults Khetora with a barrage of wind and snow and finds the creature immune to cold damage, but still manages to knock it around and past her, giving her the ability to make an attack of opportunity on it as it flies past.

DM: Do you actually want to make that attack on Khetora?

Raeka: Of course! I’m sure it won’t do much, but it's still worth swinging.

Kaiser’s Player: Wait what!?!

DM: Alright, you deal a minor glancing blow to the creature as it flies past you, but triggers its Robilar's Gambit feat and gives it the ability to attack you in turn. Make a fortitude save or be forced to turn to sand.

Raeka’s Player: Oh…Okay. So. I definitely mis-interpreted how you described that ability. I thought it simply turned anything that hit Khetora into sand, not that Khetora got a free attack on anything once she was attacked…

Kaiser’s Player: They literally turned my wolf to sand not 2 turns ago and described it as the feat Rolibar’s Gambit… We were just discussing how many attacks of opportunity they might have in a given round...

Raeka’s Player: There is a lot going on, I might have missed that…

DM: Well regardless, due to being undead and not having a constitution bonus you fail the fortitude save and are turned to spectral sand that floats down gently to the ground.

On Arvin’s turn they reapply their defenses and manifest Vigor giving them and their psicrystal more ability to absorb damage from the rest of the party as well as manifesting Intellect Fortress allowing them to reduce incoming damage even further.

Bah Kames, the NPC sorcerer, undoes his polymorph effect allowing the giant colossus to manifest its true form, actually sinking into the floor due to its sheer size, barely able to fit into the cavern. It slams its pincers into Khetora and easily resists being turned to sand by the inevitable counter attack.

Mira: Alright this still looks good, even assuming they can heal on their turn I think we can still out last the creature if we can lock it down and stay out of its melee range.

DM: The problem with that assumption is that it assumes the cult and Nemora left no other defenses to their unholy divine spirit they are trying to restore to full power.

With that, the sands of the ground violently shake and a large fist made of sand rises from the ground and whips around the chamber, slamming into the various party members sending sand pouring into their eyes and throats.

DM: Those of you with knowledge of arcane magic recognize the creature as a colossal burrowed sand golem, as it attacks sand from its body will try to force its way into your throats and suffocate you. If you are hit you need to make a constitution check or start to suffocate. You can also spend your turn to clear your throat to prevent any more checks. Good news is that the golem is so large that you can still attack it even while it's burrowed.

Mira: I got a 45 on Knowledge Arcane, Golems are often immune to magic but have vulnerabilities, does this one have any specific spells that make it vulnerable?

DM: It is immune to magic but let me check if it has any weaknesses… Earthquake and Vitrify. Both 7th + level spells…

Mira: Well that's less than helpful.

Still, the golem’s appearance grants the party one thing, an extra target to fight for those party members not wanting to risk getting hit by Khetora’s sand touch. Kaiser and Royce are assisted by the Colossus as well as Cynthia and throw everything they have at the construct, severely damaging it.

Flower: Did the paralyzing fear effect end this round?

DM: Uh no unfortunately.

Flower: Great, I love being taken out of the fight before my first action....

Beyond that the fight takes another turn for the worst when Khetora acts again and blankets the party in more waves of flame, the party notices the fey absorbing some of the fire from the spell it cast and using it to heal himself, undoing the slow progress they were making on damaging the creature. Khetora then positions themselves between the party and the solid door, blocking the exit.

Another round goes by. Arvin is still keeping the rest of the party sustained with various protections and share pains absorbing the damage, but even he and his psicrystal are starting to take significant damage. The martial side of the party manage to actually down the giant sand golem with the help of the colossus, who finishes off the golem with a blast of divine solar power.

Royce: The colossus used Hyper Beam, it's super effective!

DM: No…

Royce: It’s a solar energy beam that it powers from absorbing sunlight energy over time. It’s Hyper Beam!

DM: ……..

Their NPC ally also manages to blast open the door behind Khetora with a well aimed disintegrate spell but they don’t have any means of rushing past Khetora at the moment without risking being turned to sand. Khetora has shown themselves possessing some form of extra senses which let them ignore Mira’s illusions and other forms of concealment, and their NPC allies don’t have any great options at the moment.

Spoiler: The Fight Continues

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Another 2 rounds go by with similar results. Khetora covers the entire region of the cavern with fire, slowly draining Arvin’s protections and his pool of power points he is using to fuel his constantly recovering temporary hit points. Unfortunately their allies start to drop. Bah Kames, their NPC sorcerer is taken out from the ongoing flames and Royce needs to reincarnate herself to stay alive. The Colossus’s Hyper Beam attack is ineffective against Khetora as well since they simply absorb and negate the attack. Struggling to find any way past Khetora without killing themselves and while also grabbing their unconscious or helpless allies they notice that Khetora’s attacks are slowing down. Khetora’s normal attack spell was Flame Storm but after the third such attack they started switching to Flame Strike instead, a much weaker smaller attack which while still inflicting serious damage to the party leaves the party with hopes of just simply outlasting the fey. The continuous walls of flame covering the cavern does heal Khetora but at the moment the party is out damaging that healing.

Unfortunately for the party they take too long to get to that point. Within a round, reinforcements arrive, but not the good kind of reinforcements -- Duzek Kore, the Dry Lich Druid leading the druidic cult, comes to assist the nature spirit. Arriving via the druidic spell Master Earth they arrive and cast a spell which the party identifies with spellcraft as “Ash Ruin”, a fire variant of the deadly 8th level spell “Frost Fell”. It's a massive gout of flame that turns all creatures in the area to ash if they fail a fortitude save, while still dealing mountains of fire damage to those who pass. The flames end up consuming Royce and Cynthia, transmuting their bodies to scorched ash on the ground and while Arvin succeeds on the saving throw the damage he has to absorb from the colossus, Kaiser, Mira and such end up killing him outright even with his protections active. With only Kaiser, Mira and the Colossus alive and no way to retreat the group agrees to call the fight and unfortunately we end the campaign with a TPK.

Raeka: At least I will rejuvenate back at my ship due to my ghost powers, and can fly off in the sunset even if the rest of the Silver Path is destroyed...

DM: Unfortunately for you Khetora’s sand touch ability prevents all resurrection except from miracle or wish. Raeka is staying dead…

Raeka: Well this ending suddenly went from “sucks to be the rest of the party” to legitimately tragic if it means I die too…

While the DM prepares the epilogue the party ends up discussing back and forth what they could have done differently with Arvin and Flower’s players eagerly telling the rest of the party that they had called this as being a terrible idea. Royce and Kaiser’s players were mostly laughing at how absolutely screwed they were upon entering the chamber.

The DM then describes how in the coming months, unable to defend themselves against the coordinated assaults, one by one the various towns of the Silver Path collapse due to infighting, assassinations and sabotage. Eventually, the chains that bound Khetora are weakened enough for them to manifest avatars and they siege down the cities with fierce sandstorms that break down the various walls and fortifications of the cities. Soon the sands run red with the blood of refugees and the cities are reclaimed by the desert. The Sand Giants themselves are eventually overrun by Khetora and Nemora who return, backed by another army of demons crushing the remnants of their culture and returning them to their former nomadic lifestyle. The desert landscape is eventually filled with pools of demonic essence as Nemora slowly but surely corrupts Khetora into a demonic demigod of tremendous power. Flower, being the only party member who didn’t actually fight Khetora and being partially fey herself was taken alive and eventually became part of the druidic cult for several years until she eventually grew tired of their cruelty and left to explore the world.

Still, for many decades travelers learned to avoid that region, lest they be consumed by the harsh deserts and monsters who roam its lands. Adventurers and armies both have tried to excavate riches and drive out the various demonic forces inhabiting the land but none have succeeded so far...