A player from my usual game (Forgotten Realms - Family Matters) was going to be away for six sessions, so the rest of our group decided to do a short Eberron campaign to fill in the gap. This is a continuation, in a way, from the previous Eberron campaign we played. Without further ado, I present:
The Dragonflies
You all share the same father, one Connor Shepherd, a native of the Eldeen Reaches who traveled to Sharn looking for grand adventure.
He found it, in spades.
After a long career of adventuring, thrilling, heroic, and occasionally absurd (no one could forget the perpetually-falling sheep. No one. Not even with modify memory spells), he eventually married a fellow party member, a dragon(fire adapt) smith called Tamara. But before that, and occasionally after, Conner was extremely popular with a wide variety of ladies, particularly fey, and even a few dragons. So popular, in fact, that they mothers of his children eventually created a town, called Shepherdton, where the children could be raised together.
Any child of Conner's lineage can find a home here, and the place is a happily chaotic, bustling village that doesn't look like one at all. Founded by the fey, particularly those associated with the Greensingers sect of druids, Shepherdton is in a lush corner of the Eldeen Reaches, and resembles a series of interconnected groves with tree-house in them rather than the more traditional villages that dot the countryside.
Any child growing up in Shepherdton can't help but learn something about nature and something about magic, considering the wide diversity of mothers in town. (All Children of Conner have a +2 bonus to Knowledge (arcana), Knowledge (nature), and Survival checks. Those skills are always considered class skills for you.)
Now that you've proved yourself aiding the Greensingers or the Wardens of the Wood, it's high time to assuage the adventurer in your blood!
You're going to Xen'drik.
The Siblings
(All characters started out at 5th level, with either the half-fey or half-dragon template, with the other half being human. I was somewhat flexible on what spell-like abilities the half-fey had, depending on their fey mothers.)
Junior Shepherd - CN Female half copper dragon human wilderness rogue 2. (Conner named the egg, but the offspring turned out to be female. The others call her "June" or "Juju", unless they're mad.)
Cricket Shepherd - CN Female half-fey human (grig mother) spirit shaman 3, with spirit companion Charlie the buffalo. Conner named her, but he wasn't feeling creative that day (grigs have cricket legs/wings). She does indeed have cricket wings.
Veylan Shepherd - CN Female half-fey human (baccae mother) barbarian 2/sorcerer 1. Conner didn't name her, because her mother was a baccae, and their "free spirits" often end of orgies of violence as much as the other sort. Her mom said Veylan while in her cups, so Veylan it is. Her wings look like glistening wine. Accompanied by her hawk familiar, Krell.
Luna Shepherd - CG Female half red dragon human swashbuckler 2.
Dusty Shepherd - LN Female half fey human (oread mother) rogue 3. She doesn't fly, but rather burrows.
You've Got To Be Kidding Me That Isn't Even Possible Shepherd (commonly known as Buzz) - CN Male half fey (atomie mother) druid 3, accompanied by Unholy Terror, his giant Yorkshire Terrier animal companion. Buzz, despite his half-human size, is Small, due to the smallness of his mother. His conception involved a lot of shapechanging spells. Don't ask.
----
When we first meet our intrepid heroes, they were all back in their home village of Shepherdton. While some had been working with different druidic sects (the Greensingers, Gatekeepers, or Wardens of the Wood), others might have been working with caravans as guards or perhaps just wandering about doing what they felt was right and/or fun.
In the late morning they were called by one of their dryad “aunts,” Lytheria, to a small grove in town. “You are all destined for great things, and you have all proven yourselves to be more than capable of handling as much trouble as you create. We have a task, a trial, we think you would like, a grand adventure with a prize at the end. See this?” she held out a wand, the grain of it twisted and gnarled. Lytheria aimed it upward and colors burst from the end in a spell of faerie fire. Then Lytheria held the wand out again and pointed out that the grain was noticeably straighter.
“Eldritch whirlwood, it’s called,” she explained. “It’s a very rare plant that only survives under magical care, and the only living ones are in Xen’drik. The Greensingers want seeds, we want to save the trees and give them new life.”
To that end, Xen’drik being full of many dangers, they needed someone who knew where they were going, so they didn’t wander about there for too long. Lytheria tapped a leafy mound on one side of her tree, which started and moved, revealing itself to be a gnome hunched over a book. She was a woman of late middle age, her hair done up in silk cords. She introduced herself as Killabee, a scholar of the Age of Giants.
She gave them a quick run-down of Xen’drik’s history, how over 40,000 years ago the giants had a huge empire with powerful magic, and were assisted by countless elf slaves. The beings from Dal Quor, the plane of dreams, invaded, and the giants had to turn their magic to violent purpose and vile destruction, using blood sacrifices and even worse to try to drive the nightmare-fueld quori from their lands. They eventually succeeded, sacrificing and twisting much of their magic to sever Dal Quor from Eberron for all time. Hard on the heels of this bitter victory, the elf slaves took the opportunity to rebel, and the giants were ready to turn their war magic on them.
The dragons, who had been the ones to teach giants magic in the first place, would not stand to see their gifts turned to basest genocide, and destroyed the giant empire with a united assault that broke the continent apart with magic and dragonfire, cursing them forever. Now all that is left is ruins, and secrets. The giants that exist in Xen’drik now are degenerate primitives compared to their sophisticated ancestors, and the magic that they once commanded only exists in small remnants. The continent itself is twisted with the force of the magic unleashed on it, and is inherently unstable; environment, distance, and time are all fluid.
Killabee had learned of the existed of something called the War Garden of Sulatar, said to be a wonder of strange plants and magic, also said to contain eldritch whirlwood trees. She described it as far as she knew – low mountains surrounding a valley, with fortress walls of stone and trees together, with the garden in the middle. Killabee wanted to study the ruins, and needed protection. There might be giants, drow, both, or worse. She said she’d contracted an airship out of Sharn to get them there.
The group, colloquially known as the Dragonflies, was always up for something interesting. And this looked mightily interesting. They set off for the lightning rail station, Dusty a bit disconcerted at the whole “moving without touching the ground” thing once they got going. The airship was going to be a real challenge.
After several days on the lightning rail, they disembarked in Sharn, the City of Towers. It being built in a manifest zone to Syrania, the Azure Sky, it was a treat to the flying half-fey, as flying became incredibly easy within the bounds of the city. The rest of the ground-bound traveled by sky coach to the Lyrander docking tower to meet one Medishi d’Lyrander, their airship captain, dragonmarked heir of the house, and part-time adventuring scoundrel. Her airship was The Sylph’s Bride, and painted in blue and white in sky camouflage. Medishi seemed a happy and adventurous sort, and hit it off well with the group. Cricket, their resident spirit shaman, wanted to meet the air elemental that powered the ship (The Sylph’s Bride had an air elemental bound to it instead of the more common fire elemental).
Medishi said Killabee had introduced her to the Power of Purity some years ago, so the air elemental, Rufus, was her partner and friend. (The Power of Purity was an organization that believed in working with elementals so they wanted to be bound to vessels, instead of binding them unwillingly and treating them like objects). And Cricket was welcome to meet him.
(During the embarking, Killabee had been dealing with her homunculus, a packmate called Raleigh, who teased her about some documents by sticking out of his mouth like a tongue. She swatted him, and he finally started behaving.)
Thusly prepared and aboard, the group set off across the sky, Rufus circling the ship in their own private windstorm as they soared above Shargon’s Teeth and the Thunder Sea. Dusty didn’t like that, not one tiny bit, and stayed within cabins a lot of the time when she couldn’t pretend she was just on a really high mountaintop. Below, once they saw a dragoneel big enough to be seen swimming even from their impressive height.
Eventually, they came to the city of Stormreach, built up within the ruins of the giant city, the center for trade and last bastion of civilization in Xen’drik. They docked at the half-finished docking tower and disembarked to gather some further specialized supplies before heading into the jungles proper. Dusty picked up some “lock assistance” tools sized for giant locks, while Killabee picked up rations and a new round of glyphbooks to help with her translations. The others picked up little knickknacks and looked around at the wonders of the marketplace. One odd thing they found was a bunch of bright green bananas for the high price of one gold apiece. The stall owner said they had been regular fruit, but had gotten caught in the shifting landscape of Xen’drik, which had turned the tree into an arctic version of itself. Now the bananas were perpetually cold and tasted like a lime slushy. Enchanted, everyone got one.
Provisioned and ready, the group set off. Finding something in Xen’drik was always an inexact science. You can pick the right direction, even follow certain landmarks and blazed signs, but how much time it took you to get there was variable from trip to trip, or even day to day. Killabee was doing her best with the clues she had.
On the third day out, around nighttime, right before Captain Medishi was about to be relieved by the other crewmember with the Mark of Storm, some of the group saw a falling star. Then another. And another. Commenting to the Captain, she took a second look and cried out, “Shardfall!” Dragonshards from the Ring of Siberys were falling! Luna went to put a shield up over the captain while everyone else tried to dodge the rocks or get below deck. Luna and some of the others were slashed up by the falling crystals, but there was an ominous crack from one of the ship’s binding struts, which held the elemental in the ring shape necessary to keep the ship moving. Then there was a shout for’ard.
“I’ve got good news and bad news,” Medishi said, clutching the wheel as she tried to dodge the worst of the remaining shardfall. “Good news is, someone spotted the garden. Bad news is we’re going down, and might possibly hit the ground and die. Brace for impact!”
Medishi aimed to get the ship below the canopy, and finally managed to convince Rufus to go back into his Khyber shard before they hit the ground at speed. The ship halted a few feet above the forest floor, its soarwood construction letting it float, if not move. The crew swarmed over the ship, assessing damage, while the Dragonflies tended to their own, and Medishi thanked Luna for protecting her.
The crew returned with the new a binding strut was definitely broken, and they would need a new one. Densewood if possible, and the most likely place for that would be the War Garden. They were perhaps a day away, maybe more on foot.
The next morning, after keeping watch, the Dragonflies gathered themselves and Killabee together and started for their destination. A few hours in, they were attacked by a nest of tentacle spiders, and after a short, messy fight (June used her acid breath to dispatch over half of them), they prevailed. Scraping away the nasty webs from all of them, and dispelling the willies (tentacle spiders truly should not be allowed. Ever), they marched on.
They made excellent time due to Cricket using her easy trail spell, avoiding the need to hack through the undergrowth or try to find trails of their own. Towards the end of the day, they were confronted by a voice out of the jungle, a sharp, staccato demand in the Drow dialect. Killabee spoke it, and would act as a translator, but wanted someone else to actually figure out what to say, because this was far from her forte!
Luna stepped up to begin with, but eventually everyone began to put words in, Buzz, Cricket, Dusty, June, even Vaylen. Usually drow met intruders into their territory with poisoned arrows, followed by further swift death, but the Dragonflies’ unusual look made them pause and consider they might not be mere treasure-hunters.
When asked who they were, Luna explained they were family. (Cricket showed a picture of their dad, Conor, and said his name. Killabee translated that some commentary from female voices that they found the man a “handsome devil.”) After a good deal of back and forth, the drow said they would have one of their own guide them to the war garden, if the group would bring back the skulls of three drow warriors killed by giants who lived in the ruins.
Their guide was called Kessar, a white-tattooed warrior-scout wearing chitin armor and bearing a drow scorpion chain. His Common seemed limited, and he explained, with short phrases in drow and some drawing in the leaf litter, that there was a gorge, a “rift to the underworld” filled with “horrors” all around the garden, and that a “dead giant” guarded the garden itself. When Buzz started to live down to his name, Kessar did let a very clear, “shut up” in Common, though. His mate, he explained, was one of the slain, and he wanted to be able to honor her death.
With Kessar as a guide, he led them through a narrow pass through the mountains, and then, below them, lay the War Garden of Kessar. A deep rift, over a hundred feet wide, lay all around its tree-and-stone walls, and the strange plants of the garden rose within them. Inside were at least several live giants, probably one dead one, and that was only the things they knew about. It was called a War Garden, after all. But first they had to get inside, and the best way they could see was one Kessar suggested, a crude bridge formed of a huge tree.
With giants probably watching it, the group elected to wait until night. None of the group was strong enough to bring everyone over while flying, and it would be very dangerous to get caught if something attacked them in the air. And most of the Dragonflies could see in the dark, or at least the half-light of Xen’drik’s jungles with their weird phosphorescence.
When darkness fell, they began to walk across the huge tree, the flying members of their party ranging up and down to hopefully avoid any attacks. That was when Vaylen saw two horrors, dolgaunts clinging to the underside of the bridge, one of whom caught her in its tentacles and began to drain the life out of her! The rest of the group swung into action, sometimes literally. Cricket tried to use magic, Buzz got a bit too close and got grabbed, Luna protected Killabee, and Dusty and June did something clever. Dusty tied a rope about her waist, and June did the same with the other end. Then Dusty jumped down and fired her crossbow. Then June jumped down the other side as Dusty was pulled/climbed back up again. In this fashion, they played conkers with the dolgaunts with crossbow and sword. Veylan tangled with a dolgaunt for a long while before raging and slashing it down with her father’s sword, Orange Crush.
Up above, Luna saw four ugly dolgrims racing along the tree trunk towards her and Killabee. She breathed fire on them, frying them all dead, but that attracted the attention of the giants. Boulders began flying, one winging Luna, the others either missing entirely or crashing against the trunk, making it shake. Cricket tried to use her ventriloquism power to fool the giants into thinking they’d moved, but only one fell for it. Killabee translated the giants’ cries, mostly entreaties to “get them,” and derision against their fellows, taunting them for missing.
Dolgaunts and dolgrims dead, the Dragonflies got off the bridge and circled around the wall until they’d found a convenient cave to wait for dawn, and the start of a new adventure…
The Dragonflies
You all share the same father, one Connor Shepherd, a native of the Eldeen Reaches who traveled to Sharn looking for grand adventure.
He found it, in spades.
After a long career of adventuring, thrilling, heroic, and occasionally absurd (no one could forget the perpetually-falling sheep. No one. Not even with modify memory spells), he eventually married a fellow party member, a dragon(fire adapt) smith called Tamara. But before that, and occasionally after, Conner was extremely popular with a wide variety of ladies, particularly fey, and even a few dragons. So popular, in fact, that they mothers of his children eventually created a town, called Shepherdton, where the children could be raised together.
Any child of Conner's lineage can find a home here, and the place is a happily chaotic, bustling village that doesn't look like one at all. Founded by the fey, particularly those associated with the Greensingers sect of druids, Shepherdton is in a lush corner of the Eldeen Reaches, and resembles a series of interconnected groves with tree-house in them rather than the more traditional villages that dot the countryside.
Any child growing up in Shepherdton can't help but learn something about nature and something about magic, considering the wide diversity of mothers in town. (All Children of Conner have a +2 bonus to Knowledge (arcana), Knowledge (nature), and Survival checks. Those skills are always considered class skills for you.)
Now that you've proved yourself aiding the Greensingers or the Wardens of the Wood, it's high time to assuage the adventurer in your blood!
You're going to Xen'drik.
The Siblings
(All characters started out at 5th level, with either the half-fey or half-dragon template, with the other half being human. I was somewhat flexible on what spell-like abilities the half-fey had, depending on their fey mothers.)
Junior Shepherd - CN Female half copper dragon human wilderness rogue 2. (Conner named the egg, but the offspring turned out to be female. The others call her "June" or "Juju", unless they're mad.)
Cricket Shepherd - CN Female half-fey human (grig mother) spirit shaman 3, with spirit companion Charlie the buffalo. Conner named her, but he wasn't feeling creative that day (grigs have cricket legs/wings). She does indeed have cricket wings.
Veylan Shepherd - CN Female half-fey human (baccae mother) barbarian 2/sorcerer 1. Conner didn't name her, because her mother was a baccae, and their "free spirits" often end of orgies of violence as much as the other sort. Her mom said Veylan while in her cups, so Veylan it is. Her wings look like glistening wine. Accompanied by her hawk familiar, Krell.
Luna Shepherd - CG Female half red dragon human swashbuckler 2.
Dusty Shepherd - LN Female half fey human (oread mother) rogue 3. She doesn't fly, but rather burrows.
You've Got To Be Kidding Me That Isn't Even Possible Shepherd (commonly known as Buzz) - CN Male half fey (atomie mother) druid 3, accompanied by Unholy Terror, his giant Yorkshire Terrier animal companion. Buzz, despite his half-human size, is Small, due to the smallness of his mother. His conception involved a lot of shapechanging spells. Don't ask.
----
When we first meet our intrepid heroes, they were all back in their home village of Shepherdton. While some had been working with different druidic sects (the Greensingers, Gatekeepers, or Wardens of the Wood), others might have been working with caravans as guards or perhaps just wandering about doing what they felt was right and/or fun.
In the late morning they were called by one of their dryad “aunts,” Lytheria, to a small grove in town. “You are all destined for great things, and you have all proven yourselves to be more than capable of handling as much trouble as you create. We have a task, a trial, we think you would like, a grand adventure with a prize at the end. See this?” she held out a wand, the grain of it twisted and gnarled. Lytheria aimed it upward and colors burst from the end in a spell of faerie fire. Then Lytheria held the wand out again and pointed out that the grain was noticeably straighter.
“Eldritch whirlwood, it’s called,” she explained. “It’s a very rare plant that only survives under magical care, and the only living ones are in Xen’drik. The Greensingers want seeds, we want to save the trees and give them new life.”
To that end, Xen’drik being full of many dangers, they needed someone who knew where they were going, so they didn’t wander about there for too long. Lytheria tapped a leafy mound on one side of her tree, which started and moved, revealing itself to be a gnome hunched over a book. She was a woman of late middle age, her hair done up in silk cords. She introduced herself as Killabee, a scholar of the Age of Giants.
She gave them a quick run-down of Xen’drik’s history, how over 40,000 years ago the giants had a huge empire with powerful magic, and were assisted by countless elf slaves. The beings from Dal Quor, the plane of dreams, invaded, and the giants had to turn their magic to violent purpose and vile destruction, using blood sacrifices and even worse to try to drive the nightmare-fueld quori from their lands. They eventually succeeded, sacrificing and twisting much of their magic to sever Dal Quor from Eberron for all time. Hard on the heels of this bitter victory, the elf slaves took the opportunity to rebel, and the giants were ready to turn their war magic on them.
The dragons, who had been the ones to teach giants magic in the first place, would not stand to see their gifts turned to basest genocide, and destroyed the giant empire with a united assault that broke the continent apart with magic and dragonfire, cursing them forever. Now all that is left is ruins, and secrets. The giants that exist in Xen’drik now are degenerate primitives compared to their sophisticated ancestors, and the magic that they once commanded only exists in small remnants. The continent itself is twisted with the force of the magic unleashed on it, and is inherently unstable; environment, distance, and time are all fluid.
Killabee had learned of the existed of something called the War Garden of Sulatar, said to be a wonder of strange plants and magic, also said to contain eldritch whirlwood trees. She described it as far as she knew – low mountains surrounding a valley, with fortress walls of stone and trees together, with the garden in the middle. Killabee wanted to study the ruins, and needed protection. There might be giants, drow, both, or worse. She said she’d contracted an airship out of Sharn to get them there.
The group, colloquially known as the Dragonflies, was always up for something interesting. And this looked mightily interesting. They set off for the lightning rail station, Dusty a bit disconcerted at the whole “moving without touching the ground” thing once they got going. The airship was going to be a real challenge.
After several days on the lightning rail, they disembarked in Sharn, the City of Towers. It being built in a manifest zone to Syrania, the Azure Sky, it was a treat to the flying half-fey, as flying became incredibly easy within the bounds of the city. The rest of the ground-bound traveled by sky coach to the Lyrander docking tower to meet one Medishi d’Lyrander, their airship captain, dragonmarked heir of the house, and part-time adventuring scoundrel. Her airship was The Sylph’s Bride, and painted in blue and white in sky camouflage. Medishi seemed a happy and adventurous sort, and hit it off well with the group. Cricket, their resident spirit shaman, wanted to meet the air elemental that powered the ship (The Sylph’s Bride had an air elemental bound to it instead of the more common fire elemental).
Medishi said Killabee had introduced her to the Power of Purity some years ago, so the air elemental, Rufus, was her partner and friend. (The Power of Purity was an organization that believed in working with elementals so they wanted to be bound to vessels, instead of binding them unwillingly and treating them like objects). And Cricket was welcome to meet him.
(During the embarking, Killabee had been dealing with her homunculus, a packmate called Raleigh, who teased her about some documents by sticking out of his mouth like a tongue. She swatted him, and he finally started behaving.)
Thusly prepared and aboard, the group set off across the sky, Rufus circling the ship in their own private windstorm as they soared above Shargon’s Teeth and the Thunder Sea. Dusty didn’t like that, not one tiny bit, and stayed within cabins a lot of the time when she couldn’t pretend she was just on a really high mountaintop. Below, once they saw a dragoneel big enough to be seen swimming even from their impressive height.
Eventually, they came to the city of Stormreach, built up within the ruins of the giant city, the center for trade and last bastion of civilization in Xen’drik. They docked at the half-finished docking tower and disembarked to gather some further specialized supplies before heading into the jungles proper. Dusty picked up some “lock assistance” tools sized for giant locks, while Killabee picked up rations and a new round of glyphbooks to help with her translations. The others picked up little knickknacks and looked around at the wonders of the marketplace. One odd thing they found was a bunch of bright green bananas for the high price of one gold apiece. The stall owner said they had been regular fruit, but had gotten caught in the shifting landscape of Xen’drik, which had turned the tree into an arctic version of itself. Now the bananas were perpetually cold and tasted like a lime slushy. Enchanted, everyone got one.
Provisioned and ready, the group set off. Finding something in Xen’drik was always an inexact science. You can pick the right direction, even follow certain landmarks and blazed signs, but how much time it took you to get there was variable from trip to trip, or even day to day. Killabee was doing her best with the clues she had.
On the third day out, around nighttime, right before Captain Medishi was about to be relieved by the other crewmember with the Mark of Storm, some of the group saw a falling star. Then another. And another. Commenting to the Captain, she took a second look and cried out, “Shardfall!” Dragonshards from the Ring of Siberys were falling! Luna went to put a shield up over the captain while everyone else tried to dodge the rocks or get below deck. Luna and some of the others were slashed up by the falling crystals, but there was an ominous crack from one of the ship’s binding struts, which held the elemental in the ring shape necessary to keep the ship moving. Then there was a shout for’ard.
“I’ve got good news and bad news,” Medishi said, clutching the wheel as she tried to dodge the worst of the remaining shardfall. “Good news is, someone spotted the garden. Bad news is we’re going down, and might possibly hit the ground and die. Brace for impact!”
Medishi aimed to get the ship below the canopy, and finally managed to convince Rufus to go back into his Khyber shard before they hit the ground at speed. The ship halted a few feet above the forest floor, its soarwood construction letting it float, if not move. The crew swarmed over the ship, assessing damage, while the Dragonflies tended to their own, and Medishi thanked Luna for protecting her.
The crew returned with the new a binding strut was definitely broken, and they would need a new one. Densewood if possible, and the most likely place for that would be the War Garden. They were perhaps a day away, maybe more on foot.
The next morning, after keeping watch, the Dragonflies gathered themselves and Killabee together and started for their destination. A few hours in, they were attacked by a nest of tentacle spiders, and after a short, messy fight (June used her acid breath to dispatch over half of them), they prevailed. Scraping away the nasty webs from all of them, and dispelling the willies (tentacle spiders truly should not be allowed. Ever), they marched on.
They made excellent time due to Cricket using her easy trail spell, avoiding the need to hack through the undergrowth or try to find trails of their own. Towards the end of the day, they were confronted by a voice out of the jungle, a sharp, staccato demand in the Drow dialect. Killabee spoke it, and would act as a translator, but wanted someone else to actually figure out what to say, because this was far from her forte!
Luna stepped up to begin with, but eventually everyone began to put words in, Buzz, Cricket, Dusty, June, even Vaylen. Usually drow met intruders into their territory with poisoned arrows, followed by further swift death, but the Dragonflies’ unusual look made them pause and consider they might not be mere treasure-hunters.
When asked who they were, Luna explained they were family. (Cricket showed a picture of their dad, Conor, and said his name. Killabee translated that some commentary from female voices that they found the man a “handsome devil.”) After a good deal of back and forth, the drow said they would have one of their own guide them to the war garden, if the group would bring back the skulls of three drow warriors killed by giants who lived in the ruins.
Their guide was called Kessar, a white-tattooed warrior-scout wearing chitin armor and bearing a drow scorpion chain. His Common seemed limited, and he explained, with short phrases in drow and some drawing in the leaf litter, that there was a gorge, a “rift to the underworld” filled with “horrors” all around the garden, and that a “dead giant” guarded the garden itself. When Buzz started to live down to his name, Kessar did let a very clear, “shut up” in Common, though. His mate, he explained, was one of the slain, and he wanted to be able to honor her death.
With Kessar as a guide, he led them through a narrow pass through the mountains, and then, below them, lay the War Garden of Kessar. A deep rift, over a hundred feet wide, lay all around its tree-and-stone walls, and the strange plants of the garden rose within them. Inside were at least several live giants, probably one dead one, and that was only the things they knew about. It was called a War Garden, after all. But first they had to get inside, and the best way they could see was one Kessar suggested, a crude bridge formed of a huge tree.
With giants probably watching it, the group elected to wait until night. None of the group was strong enough to bring everyone over while flying, and it would be very dangerous to get caught if something attacked them in the air. And most of the Dragonflies could see in the dark, or at least the half-light of Xen’drik’s jungles with their weird phosphorescence.
When darkness fell, they began to walk across the huge tree, the flying members of their party ranging up and down to hopefully avoid any attacks. That was when Vaylen saw two horrors, dolgaunts clinging to the underside of the bridge, one of whom caught her in its tentacles and began to drain the life out of her! The rest of the group swung into action, sometimes literally. Cricket tried to use magic, Buzz got a bit too close and got grabbed, Luna protected Killabee, and Dusty and June did something clever. Dusty tied a rope about her waist, and June did the same with the other end. Then Dusty jumped down and fired her crossbow. Then June jumped down the other side as Dusty was pulled/climbed back up again. In this fashion, they played conkers with the dolgaunts with crossbow and sword. Veylan tangled with a dolgaunt for a long while before raging and slashing it down with her father’s sword, Orange Crush.
Up above, Luna saw four ugly dolgrims racing along the tree trunk towards her and Killabee. She breathed fire on them, frying them all dead, but that attracted the attention of the giants. Boulders began flying, one winging Luna, the others either missing entirely or crashing against the trunk, making it shake. Cricket tried to use her ventriloquism power to fool the giants into thinking they’d moved, but only one fell for it. Killabee translated the giants’ cries, mostly entreaties to “get them,” and derision against their fellows, taunting them for missing.
Dolgaunts and dolgrims dead, the Dragonflies got off the bridge and circled around the wall until they’d found a convenient cave to wait for dawn, and the start of a new adventure…
