Part 3:


The group begins in Mitram on Proem 25th. Mitram is bustling and nervous- the only thing most country folk know about Voriphans is that they look funny and have airships, and the niceties of how Arcata defends itself from these sorts of attacks are mostly lost on them- and unlike a larger city such as Melior, the less educated common folk are greater in proportion. The group, still grimy from the long journey, finds two close rooms at an inn, and then heads out to relax and take the pulse of the town. Alenka quickly finds a group of friendly Dulian mercenaries, Brooke's company, heading in the opposite direction- Alenka finds the aged and butch Brooke to be an odd sight, and the entire rough crew all just think she's the most precious little rapier wielding doll! Despite being a welcoming group for Alenka, she's not willing to abandon her new friends, her temporary post as a body guard, or reverse the trip she just took. Marzo announces his intention to be in town a few days to conduct trading, and happily pays for the inn.

The very next day, the non-Ashes of the group wake midmorning, feast upon the inn's breakfast, and head out, timing their arrival for about noon, prime undead hunting time. The Erinthian monastery is exactly what they expect, and exactly where they expect- a small two story central building, surrounded by a narrow courtyard and a one story building that encloses the area- or used to. The monastery was attacked by a darkbonded black dragon during the war when most of its members were in the north- the dragon was dispatched at the cost of most of the defenders, and heavy losses in the war meant that the order was disbanded and the remaining members reabsorbed into to church. The southeast corner of the outer building is ruined, allowing a clear path into the central courtyard and to the central taller building. But what makes this so special compared to all the other abandoned monasteries is that it came equipped with three assholes with a limitless supply of arrows on the roof. The PCs, being smart, sent the pixie ahead to scout out the situation, and he used sleight of hand to hide some of their arrows, then he distracted them to the north while the group snuck up from the south, their first warning being a pair of fighter/rogue...

Wait no. That's not what happened whatsoever. Instead, they charged forward, shooting and being shot, only the beginning of what was to be the Night Of A Thousand Arrows. After knocking out and killing two of the defenders, the third tried to sneak away in the tall weeds of the courtyard. His fate was the same as his companions, just with more spot checks. The defenders, all local-looking men in their late teens to early twenties, were slain. However, the rogue had released a bird, which went unnoticed in the narrative stream, because your DM is pretty good at sleight of mouth. The bird had to fly to a birdhouse kept in town, whereupon a messenger would be dispatched, and the mastermind behind the “hide in the abandoned monastery and fuck around with some undeads” plan would immediately set out for the monastery. Presumably making better time than the PCs, who had no idea of this chain of events. However, the minute by minute tracking provided a not-so-subtle metagame clue, made lamer by the fact that they didn't know that they had until 1:42 PM before Rim-Thul the Cruel would arrive and blow them the fuck up. Since that was plenty of time, maybe it's a good thing though.

The PCs skipped entirely the outer building, leaving all that tasty treasure on the ground and skipping a couple encounters with some disposeable undead. Instead they went directly into the central building, fighting a Bloodhulk Fighter which Rigby had briefly seen whilst trailing the rogue. The Bloodhulk is a reasonably easy way to make a tough undead, but it is weak against anything that can pierce its skin, which is pretty much everything the PCs have. Morgrim was the only one not to join in the damage race in a substantial fashion.

The PCs, having quickly sliced and poked the red blood-turgid monstrosity, then began a fun game of bingo, choosing squares randomly and rolling search checks while the minutes ticked away. Ash eventually found it with his elfdar, pointing out the secret trapdoor that all his companions had walked over and through but not actually searched. This was the greatest minigame in any roleplaying experience ever, and you can be sure that I will replicate this in the future, with tiny small things that must be manually walked over and searched like a terrible version of the NES Dragon Warrior.

The pixie looked downwards, and all eventually headed down the ladder. They found a system of passages in minor disrepair, smooth stone in most places with some collapsed areas in others. There were some great traps that stupid Alenka just randomly choose the one spot with a fucking off-switch instead of walking over them and falling onto some spikes, and then there were some cool dread guards that they just fucking ignored, which is cold, because stupid monsters have feelings too. Finally, they found their way to the common area of the underground safehold, which had become a storage place for the undead as they were slowly being created. Without too much effort, Ash turned the undead, and Rigby created an illusory wall with his Permanent Visual Pollutant ability. The mindless undead quite naturally assumed it was a real wall, and responded appropriately. The situation defused with surprisingly few arrows, the PCs searched as much of the room as they could, and I think they found the potions.

Heading out of the common room, they found themselves in an area more freshly hollowed out. A burial pit / graveyard, interned bodies being used as raw materials for undead creation when possible, some scaffolding to cross to a smaller tunnel- and 12 skeletal archers, two of them a bit more powerful than the others, blocking their way. More arrow shots followed, and the pixie debated bullrushing or grappling them off the ledge one by one. Cooler heads prevailed, and the much saner path of having Keichi hold a giant fucking table as a tower shield while balancing on one foot of wood, shielding Lithonian as they both waddled across the small pit to get within range of putting the fear of Latukefu into them. This, surprisingly, worked. Also, because apparently your DM didn't possibly think the undead might be turned, they had nowhere to go but a locked door, so they all ran there and waited to be fucking slaughtered. An encounter which somehow didn't involve to-hit rolls with arrows, I apologize for that and will rectify it next session by including more arrow-shooting devices. After noisily bonking the undead out of existence, the group opened the door to see a mad alchemist in a well appointed room. A ladder went to the ceiling, and he was on it. He had spent his previous rounds imbibing extracts for temporary health and extra dexterity, and the immediately preceeding rounds setting timed bombs to destroy his enemies. He should probably have just left, but a penchant for violence and rhymes meant that this proto-gangsta-rapper just couldn't leave well enough alone. He taunted them with the impending arrival of Rim-Thul, and tried his very hardest to blow them the fuck up and escape. Keichi, having none of the escaping shit and not giving a FUCK about getting blow up, simply grappled him off the ladder, not dissuaded by such minor things such as exploding on fire. Surrounded, his defenses shattered, Alenka found his distraction useful and provided his right ventricle a Temporary Emergency Release Vein, thus ending the encounter. Quickly scooping up all the magical items and easily resellable weapons, along with a cage with apparently other homing pigeons in it, and books, the group used the ladder, briefly found themselves inside the outer building, at which point they retreated to town to train, Morgrim with a new spellbook, and everyone else with a retarded array of stupid weapons no one will ever use.

Rim Thul began making gather information checks, something I had to wing, being as there's like no fucking rules for that! He failed. For now...

To be continued...

9 hit points don't scout shit.

I heard everything you said about the bird. However, the way you described I got the impression the dead bird fell to the ground. I assumed it was some guy who had caught a bird and then started eating it. When he saw an enemy, he "threw it off the roof" in order to fight. At no point did I hear "and the bird flew away."

What time was it when we made it out?

You named a guy Rim? It's too easy...

TERV: love it!

While I enjoyed reading the entire recap at this early hour, I particularly enjoyed this part, because it brought back a flood of memories:

Thanks for that.


YOU'RE INVISIBLE AND FLYING!!!!

Don't forget the DR except to cold iron, just on the off chance someone does have some way to strike the invisible flying target with a smashingly good AC!

Sorry, thanks for the reminder. I wonder if there's a prestige class for pixies called "Whiner".

Jerks.

Invisible flying pixies have feelings too. If you prick us, do we not bleed?



I get that the pricking has to be pretty hard or cold iron, but we could still bleed.

You will grant, of course, that such bleeding is heretofor theoretical, of course.

Sure.

You guys have "hit points" and with that you have varying degrees of health. I'm basically taking life pass/fail.

Right, but you're also boinking the professor, bringing him donuts every day, and hacking into the grade storage system like Ferris Bueller. Your chances of failing are pretty slim.

I could be mistaken, but I believe you confused Mathew Broderick in War Games with Mathew Broderick in Ferris Bueller. In the former, he changed his grades. In the latter, he changed his number of absences.

Anyway, don't think the rat bastard of a DM isn't going to critical with an axe. I think he would say "Sorry you're dead. Here's a copy of the character generation rules."

Dammit. Pwned.

Les jeux sont faits. Translation: the game is up. Your ass is mine.

Upon arrival back in Mitram, having safely avoided the hastily returning Rim-Thul the Cruel, the group lays low whilst waiting for Marzo to make the sales and purchases that are literally his trade. They rest, recover from their injuries, recoup their magical energy, and discuss and practice the new techniques that they have witnessed. I suspect that the primary reason that no one can make a good D&D movie is the training montage that you would have to witness 19 times. Morgrim, using the prodigious amounts of “recovered” magical pigments, eagerly deciphers the early spells of Rim-Thul, which he carelessly left lying around right there in the open, in his secret base guarded by a shitfuckton of skeletal archers and Adram, his right-hand mad alchemist. Keichi continues to ask very guarded questions about his small list of items to recover, while keeping the aged item from a lost world hidden carefully in an obscured section of his pack.

But as for the magical bird cage, they are immediately curious about that, mostly because it carries pidgeons in it already. While in one of their second floor hotel rooms, Morgrim opens the cage, and is immediately breezed past by something. A few moments later, the suspicious pixie-sized weapons are lifted from the Loot Pile© , and promptly disappear. Morgrim, realizing that a possible ally is present, and that the cage is likely some fey-imprisoning devise, frantically cycles through languages, attempting to prevent the likely pixie from fleeing, and cursing the DM for having regional languages instead of just fucking Common. Eventually, the pixie reveals herself, and possibly agrees in pidgin Pallian to wait for just a moment. Fire Pixies, of course, look very much like the normal Sylvan Pixies, but usually have yellow, orange, or red hair, with eyes that are never ever green or blue- the fastest way to tell them apart at a distance is the wings- Sylvan Pixies almost always have a smooth costal margin and outer margin, whereas Fire Pixies are very likely to have some concave sections and “points”, as well as being more likely to have metalmarks on their wings.

Charlotte Skyseeker is a pretty typical specimen, with a round face clouded with confusion and a bit of anger. The dwarf, leaving the room quickly, grabs the attention of Rigby. Rigby flies in as fast as his little butterfly wings can take him, who quickly began conversing in fey, still stymied a bit by regional dialects, and found a similar story to his own: she had been nabbed in the fire forests of Queris, and instead of ending up on a boat headed east, instead headed up headed west. She was held as a slave briefly in Pallia, and eventually purchased by Rim-Thul for magical experiments- presumably Cruel ones. She reacted initially in anger and fear when she saw that Morgrim was reading from the same book that Rim-Thul had been- a book specifically enchanted to reduce the cost of researching spells, able to erase itself, move inscribed glyphs, words and magical concepts around from page to page, without always requiring a fully new magical transcription, in a confusing manner indecipherable to those of insufficient intellect. The spell Rim-Thul had been working on was a form of Enlarge Person modified to function on Fey- and he had notes on how the fey-specificness of the magic could be targetted to other spells. Morgrim, believing that a discount on Enlarge Rigby couldn't really be a bad deal, had some problems convincing her that such a thing could be used for good, but eventually she was persuaded. Charlotte made her intentions on returning to her fire forests clear, but agreed to travel with the group for a time. She and Rigby did agree to destroy the fey-magic-suppression cage, melting it with a nice little fireball.

But what were Alenka, Keichi, and Ash doing during all this? Rember this and more, in part 3, coming soon....

PS: The group analysis of the "key" mentioned by Adram, a small disk of about four inches diameter and three-quarter inches deep, an azure disk with images of clouds on the side, slowly moving, has come to nothing so far. But, obviously it is magical, and a wizard had it, so... it's gotta be good for something!

I was about ready to post a ginourmous picture razzing you for not using paragraphs.

I copy it out of my notes after making it readable and censoring it for the delicate eyes of players. That time I forgot to add spacing.

Alenka had taken the time during training to try to figure out how the city's underside functioned. Without too much trouble she was able to figure out that there had been a thieves guild a few years back, possibly one of the more powerful ones in Kelestris but an assassination and an unclear chain of inheritance broke the guild into two almost-warring factions, reds and blues. The infighting weakened them quite a bit. Keichi uses the same time to try to find any hints on his quested items, and meets with less success: none of these roundeyes have heard tell of any of his stolen shit, in any possible way. Alenka switches from social mode to a bit of spying, sneaking around the areas she suspects are frequented by smugglers. She overhears a conversation between Tan and Exker (Exas Milker). Exker scolds Tan for selling a “box”, saying that they were ordered by “Boss” to hold it for a powerful client. Tan responds by saying that he was told to sell it by The Night Cloak. This name seems to cause Exker to go pale, and quickly change the terms of the conversation to one of running the fuck out of town as soon as they can, as they recognize that they are two thieves in a damned-if-you-damned-if-you-don't situation. Alenka follows them to the edge of town where, just as he said, Tan produces two horses, which they hitch to a wagon, and depart. They mentioned heading to Exta, which is pretty much like being in Omaha and planning to head to Haiti because that's a better solution than anything else you could come up with.

Because little girls out at night manage to get attention, and if you ask for enough hide in shadow rolls every rogue eventually fucks up, Alenka is spotted by a small crew of gang members. They aren't entirely clear on whether they are seeking to rob her, rape her, or recruit her (or some combination), but she has none of it, holding their leader at knife point until they surrender and run away to go beat up something even weaker. Perhaps a puppy, or a pillow, because some puppies might have teeth.

Over the next few days, she and Keichi drop the name of The Night Cloak to try and figure out who or what that is. They discover it is some kind of crime overboss, and not a local one, a legend with pretty much nothing known about him, her, or it. The Night Cloak seems to have pull over thieves guilds from Kelestris and much of Zemnia, at least. No first person actual details are available (because Alenka didn't just fucking ask Tan), so details are pretty sketchy. What is clear is that they are entering into the territory that this powerful underground figure has some sway over.

Lithonian spends some time finding a very unusual temple to Latukefu on the outskirts of town, defining a point a bit west of where one is likely to be found, but truly, who can define the limits of Latukefu? Certainly not the DM, apparently. The members of this temple dress in elven fashion, and think that an actual elf is pretty great. After a small amount of prayer, their tone changes from one of respect to one of great respect: it is clear to them that this elf is even elfier than the typical elf, and is apparently impossible to scry upon: all that they see is the point of a rapier. As it turns out, being respected by the local clergy, even in a very small temple, means you can save fifteen percent or more on cure light wounds potions.

Tobma finds the group at their hotel, gnoshing away, and tells them to make ready for a next-day departure. Marzo checks to make sure that this is ok with them, a bit unusual. They are ready to leave and do, and continue east, but with a new destination. Marzo is now making for Emerald, the capitol of Zemnia, the very heart of all Arcata. Marzo mentions that he found a very good deal on an item, though it was expensive (his cart is essentially empty besides it), but he is fairly certain that he needs to take it to the wizards of Zem tower. Marzo no longer detects as evil.

Two days out of town, riders approach, having made more haste than the one-wagon caravan. Two hulking men announced that the box that Marzo Hunter purchased was not for sale, and that the sale price is being refunded (plus a bit more). Marzo refuses, and the group decides immediately to help the guy they are hired to help. The ambush takes place almost immediately, with rogues leaping from the shadows. Having bided his time and kept his head low in town, the ambushers had no idea whatsoever that Morgrim could reshape reality at will. Which is a bit of a dressed up way of saying, Morgrim can lube stuff at a distance. The fight was quickly brought under control. Neither pixie decided to go scout for whomever was actually holding all that gold that they promised to repurchase the box with, instead assuming that it was a bluff. Or maybe just forgetting. Pixies have very small heads, after all.

Marzo then shows them what is in the box: a small clockwork silver dragon sits in the middle of its horde, all very detailed. At diagonally opposite ends of the box are two chains, with the ability to be linked in the middle. The entire box radiates magic- primary necromancy, abjuration, and enchantment. The chains are obviously meant to bind the dragon. Marzo wants to sell this, not necessarily to the highest bidder, but to the ones that will figure out what the hell this thing is meant to do, or who made it, or whatever the hell you are supposed to do with evil little shit like this, and to that end the party is headed directly to Emerald.

It is Proem 34th.

Oh, thank gawd. I was running out of creative juices for what you were going to do in your speedo.

Pffff all my WoW characters are female night elves.

You just don't mess with the chicks, man... don't mess with the chicks.

Yeah, because that matters.

Or the people that can spread a bunch of lube all over the ground and send you to your keister.

Morgrim's spellbook is clearly labelled "ACME Spells". He'll be super helpful as long as the group doesn't have to catch the roadrunner.