Piratecat's Updated Story Hour! (update 4/03 and 4/06)

[Rune]

Originally posted by Piratecat

Before he can do anything, the hillside under their feet erupts into a shower of dirt and a rising juggernaut of slimy, rotting gray flesh. At first the group thinks it’s an undead purple worm; as both Tao and Velendo disappear into its huge mouth, that’s certainly their first impressions. But as the creature engulfs them, they realize that they’re wrong. Like grasping cilia, the inside of the worm’s mouth is filled with ghoulish arms, clutching and tearing, and dozens of screaming heads that barely poke their way out of the fleshy wall and tongue.

Someone screams.

To the horror of people watching, the outside skin of the worm pulses grotesquely and then turns… shuffling itself around and revealing that each 5 ft. section of the worm’s body is the torso of a ghoul, somehow flesh-merged together. Now the worm looks more like a humongous centipede, only with ghoulish arms clutching anything nearby, instead of a centipede’s legs. The monster throws its blind snout skywards, and hundreds of half-seen gibbering mouths slobber and drool in hunger.

Inside its gullet, Tao manages to lock one hand around the razor sharp bone-like protrusion of the lip; Velendo, who has never been terribly strong, isn’t as lucky. The raising of the snout breaks his grip, and dozens of clawed arms grab him and force him down the long throat, tearing at his flesh as he goes. He feels negative energy coursing through his body, and his screaming muscles lock in place.

Oh. My. FREAKIN'. God!

Piratecat, prior to this post, I had been able to convince myself that I was a somewhat creative guy and that I could run horror reasonably well, but you have once again reminded me how this stuff is really done!

Thank you, to a true master of the craft! I will go weep in fear and resignation, now.

[Sagiro]

Originally posted by Rune


Thank you, to a true master of the craft! I will go weep in fear and resignation, now.

Funny... that's just what Velendo was doing at that moment.

-Sagiro

[Piratecat]

As Velendo and Tao disappear into the necropede’s gullet, the Defenders leap into action. TomTom, who is virtually useless against undead, schisms his mind and runs over to manifest inertial barrier on Mara as well. She smells hot metal as he does so, as for just a few seconds the smell of his psionics masks the reeking taint of dried blood and rotting flesh.

Inside the creature’s maw, Tao strains every muscle she has, and barely manages to pull herself free. It isn’t easy, and the clutching undead arms almost drag her back inside, but she rolls clear and makes it to her feet. Near her, Malachite levitates downwards and sprints towards the monster, determined to help Velendo.

Unfortunately, the beast sees Malachite with hundreds of half-rotten eyes, and smells the irresistible odor of flesh. It rises slightly, twists its snout, and swallows him whole.

Inside its throat, Malachite ignores the dozens of clawed hands trying to pull him apart. Instead, he focuses his eyes on what little he can see of Velendo as he concentrates, focusing his will through the lens of his faith. He releases another positive energy burst. In the glare of the emerald light he feels arms searing away into stumps and watches ghoulish eyes boiling in their sockets within the worm’s rotting throat.

From outside, the Defenders watch as the necropede shudders, emerald light pouring from rents in its skin. The positive energy streams past them, destroying even more ghouls back in the graveyard behind them. For a second or two, the air smells clean.

“I’m coming, Blessed One!” Malachite calls to Velendo, and forces his way farther down the creature’s throat.

Outside, Mara’s eyes light up with a clever idea. She can’t get close to it without being swallowed, but…. She digs in her pouch and pulls out a tiny token shaped like a perfect tree. With a flawless throw, she sinks it right into the monster’s mouth. It tumbles past Malachite. Velendo, paralyzed, can only watch as it is lands near him and is grasped by an undead hand. The token is blindly passed, hand to hand, past him down the long slimy throat into the depths of the worm itself. Velendo notes, out of the corner of his eye, that the Quaal’s Tree Token is already starting to grow roots.

Raevynn tries to cast gutroot on the monster, with no effect, and Agar casts a rope trick for people to use as a sanctuary. He clambers into it himself and dangles out upside down, casting spells from a nice safe place. He still remembers his recent death, and would rather not repeat the experience.

Tao gets to her feet next to the necropede. As she does, though, the worm starts to slither, and the hill around it begins to collapse. Mara and TomTom jump back, but Tao doesn’t have time, and she falls downwards along with sliding dirt and rocks. She doesn’t fall far before her ring of feather falling kicks in, and she gets the first horrified look at what’s below her. The worm is slithering upwards, and clinging to its outsides are scores more ghouls, mostly dwarven. They’re using it as transportation to the surface… and Tao’s falling right on top of them.

The worm surfaces and ghouls drop from it with slavering glee. Tao is still balanced on its back, swinging her swords around her as she clears herself a place to fight, plunging her weapon into the beast itself. Mara opens her mouth in a prayer as she dismounts Luminor….

And finds her head snapped backwards. Someone – something – riding on the back of the worm has shot a bone arrow at her, shot it with such precision that it flew into her mouth and punctured the back of her throat and the back of her skull without touching any of her teeth. She begins to choke on her own blood as she fights off the darkness. All she can hear around her is the gurgling screams of the hungry undead.

to be continued….

• DM's Note: One arrow, 85+ points of damage! She liived through it, partially due to the inertial barrier, but she (and Velendo, and Malachite, and Tao) are in a bad spot right now. And who's the archer, and what's up with the ghoulish worm, and what about that tree? Next update Sunday!

[madriel]

Oh. My. GOD!

That was too cool. Seriously. That necropede is nasty biscuits. It just gets worse and worse. Not only is it swallowing every party member it can get its hands on, it's piggybacking ghouls and a very nasty sniper. What a shot. 85 points of damage. Great way of writing up the arrow shot that took out Mara. I'm still stunned.

Suddenly Sunday seems a very long way away.

[Blackjack]

Originally posted by Darklone
How did you manage that?

+5 DM of Paladin Hating.

[J'quan]

Deepworm Sniper? *shiver*

Add a few rogue levels to that DS, and shooting from invis... likely a sneak attack for some more loving.

[Samnell]

Originally posted by Piratecat
“I’m coming, Blessed One!” Malachite calls to Velendo, and forces his way farther down the creature’s throat.

If I were in Malachite's shoes I don't know that I'd be calling a paralyzed guy stuck in the maw of a giant undead worm filled with ghouls (made of ghouls?) blessed. He might not appreciate the irony if he survives.

"Blessed One? Ha ha ha, very funny. You'll see just how blessed I am once I get this smell out of my clothes."

[Blackjack]

Originally posted by Samnell
If I were in Malachite's shoes I don't know that I'd be calling a paralyzed guy stuck in the maw of a giant undead worm filled with ghouls (made of ghouls?) blessed.

Alas, this was actually a typo on PCat's part. Malachite always calls Velendo "your Holiness"; the title "Blessed One" is for St. Aleax. (The sword.)

Malachite is very precise with titles, much to Velendo's chagrin -- Velendo has repeatedly asked Malachite to stop calling him "your Holiness", but Velendo might as well be talking to a wall.

Which, given his faith, makes a lot of sense, actually.

[Samnell]

Originally posted by Blackjack

Malachite is very precise with titles, much to Velendo's chagrin -- Velendo has repeatedly asked Malachite to stop calling him "your Holiness", but Velendo might as well be talking to a wall.

Which, given his faith, makes a lot of sense, actually.

Being told to stand in the corner must have special significance in the religion. You get Calphas in stereo.

[Piratecat]

We're headed off to the incredibly important climax of Sagiro's game, the encounter that we've been building towards for five years... and we're really excited. But between that, chores, and a fun couple of days at ConnCon (where I saw some EN Boarders!), I haven't had time to update yet. I do have a special feature for you, though; want to see stats on the necropede?

If you aren't an active player in my campaign, follow this link! If you are in my campaign, I trust you not to look there.

So enjoy, and expect a story hour update on Monday!

[Piratecat]

Mara manages to keep consciousness. She watches in pain as Nolin activates his new psionic ring and breaths a gout of fire down upon the creature. He swoops over to the injured paladin and casts healing circle. As he does so, he’s silhouetted against the flickering light of burning, wriggling, undead flesh; it would make a wonderful portrait. The warm energy of Nolin’s spell flows through Mara, and she feels the bone arrow dissolve.

Malachite pulls his way through a sea of ghoulish limbs, ignoring their imploring wails and clutching fingers. Undead flesh pressing in at him on all sides, he sees Velendo’s horrified face. He reaches out… stretches as much as he can… and his fingers barely latch on to Velendo’s paralyzed forearm. As he does so, he activates his new cape of the mountebank acquired from the Dockside Royals, and both he and Velendo vanish.

With a flash of colored smoke, the two Defenders appear 50 feet away, right next to Mara. They’re covered with slime and saliva that seeped from dozens of gaping mouths, but they’re alive.

“Who can remove paralysis?” asks Malachite, gasping.

“I can!” calls Tao. She is still standing on the necropede surrounded by partially dismembered ghouls, balancing there precariously as she tries to pull her sword free of the beast’s spine. She thinks she hit something important; it’s quivering and squirming. She dimension doors over to Velendo, pausing for a few seconds until her head clears.

Meanwhile, everyone who can fly or levitate has risen into the air, trying desperately to identify the archer who shot Mara. One armored dwarf with a rotting bow is a possibility, and he’s quickly taken out of action by Agar, but even the levitating TomTom can’t see anyone else standing out in the chaotic tangle of undead.

Then the giant worm thrashes, screams with a hundred voices. A ragged split forms across the gray jelly of its back. Sections of undead flesh shear off of the body with a nightmarish sound of "shlupurplurp". Some dissolve into cloudy sludge that sinks into the upturned soil, but many more – too many – regaining their previous ghoulish forms. Now there are almost 200 ghouls on the battlefield, clawing their way out from the dissolving corpse like maggots from a burning corpse. They turn towards the Defenders, the closest source of warm, fresh, tasty meat.

Malachite releases another positive energy burst, blasting scores of them out of existence. Mara turns undead and watches as her faith disintegrates half a dozen that are running towards her. Nolin drops two flame strikes in perfect synchrony, and Agar’s tentacular fire elemental wades into a company of ghouls and begins to lay waste.

Once again the ground vibrates. Mara’s tree token has sprouted, and with the sound of a hundred summers compressed into six seconds, a 60 ft. tall oak tree springs up from the burrowed hole. The tree blocks the opening and flings almost twenty ghouls high into the air. Gravity then takes its normal course, with splattering results. Mara grins, and Raevynn - still hunting for the archer - almost cheers.

With a prayer, Tao cures Velendo’s paralyzation, and gleefully wades back into the battle. There isn't much for her to do, though, other than mopping up. Within twelve seconds, more than a hundred and fifty of the undead on the battlefield have been completely and utterly destroyed.

"Not too bad," someone says.

Then an elf stands up from the charred shadows of a dozen blasted ghouls. She is not terribly tall; her armor is made from the skin of a flayed elf, and her bone bow is as big as she is. She looks around, almost as if she knows Hundle’s Crossing herself. TomTom's keen ears catch a fragment of a muttered remark: "It's good to be home."

And then, with a terrible smile on her sunken face, she licks a handful of bone arrows with her long, forked tongue... and sends all four arrows – Thwip! Thwip! Thwip! Thwip! - hurtling through the air at Malachite.

to be continued….

[Magnus]

*magnus shows his ignorance*
... KidCthulhu, what does your sig mean???

[KidCthulhu]

In the original short story "The Call of Cthulhu", by HP Lovecraft the cultist of great Cthulhu summon and invoke the dread elder god by chanting "Ia, Ia, Cthulhu Ftagen." So the sig is a play on words.

It's also a really funny mental image, Pkitty and I came up with one night in a fit of giggles. Picture Great Cthulhu on a sled, with a big red and white striped stocking cap flapping in the breeze behind him, and his tentacles all being blown back into his face.

Makes me wish I had any artistic talent and could draw it. Chronosome? Sialia? Contact? Anybody?

[blargney]

Originally posted by KidCthulhu
Picture Great Cthulhu on a sled, with a big red and white striped stocking cap flapping in the breeze behind him, and his tentacles all being blown back into his face.

That's funny, I'd actually pictured it with Great Cthulu AS the sled! Face-down in the snow, a jubilant kid with a big red and white striped stocking cap flapping in the breeze behind him on Cthulu's back using the tentacles for steering.

-blarg

[Plane Sailing]

Originally posted by KidCthulhu


It's also a really funny mental image, Pkitty and I came up with one night in a fit of giggles. Picture Great Cthulhu on a sled, with a big red and white striped stocking cap flapping in the breeze behind him, and his tentacles all being blown back into his face.

Makes me wish I had any artistic talent and could draw it. Chronosome? Sialia? Contact? Anybody?

Hey, KidC - is this one any good (just drew it)?

[drnuncheon]

Originally posted by Nail


Yah, but...what kind o' lumber is the sled made out of?

It's made of the grotesque, cyclopean, non-Euclidian trees of the Far Plains of Leng, a stygian pit where dwell the gauntfins and the inhumanly chuckling Deep Things.

Duh.



J

[Piratecat]

We just played! One person killed 94 ghouls with one attack... and it wasn't Malachite and his positive energy burst! The group hunted down and killed 189 more ghouls, but Malachite was responsible for two of them. He was busy saving the life of one of the three people who could raise dead.

It was quite the game. Clever tactics, tunnel-crawling, with ghouls aplenty and experience galore! Everyone gained a level - Velendo now gets 9th level spells - and a bunch of undead got their comeuppance. Read it here, next week!

By the way, a bone arrow is simply an arrow made from a creatures arm or leg bone; Blackjack's reply was funny, but there really wasn't anything special about them beyond what you'd expect.

[Piratecat]

Malachite tries to dodge, but there’s no time. One of the arrows is blocked by the githyanki crystalline armor he wears, shattering into splinters of bone. The other three arrows hit, two of them striking his torso and the third piercing his throat. He gags and clutches for the arrow, but it has already passed through his throat and out the other side, leaving burning pain caused by the ghoul’s saliva. Blood fountains down Malachite’s front, and with a shock he realizes that without TomTom’s inertial barrier slowing the arrows down he would probably be dead. As it is, the only thing keeping him alive now is the flame of his faith, buoyed by Nolin’s inspirational music. Aleax would heal the paladin, but Malachite isn’t holding the sword, so there’s little that the steel saint can do. Instead, Malachite holds his own hand to his throat, and sunlight blazes from between his fingers as he heals himself.

TomTom is one of the first people to react. Levitating over the combat, he spots the archer with his true seeing; already, she’s starting to disappear back into the shadows, her form incredibly difficult to follow. Then TomTom draws on a resource that he’s used only a handful of times over the last six years; he lifts his hand up in front of him, focuses his will, and with a grimace unleashes the strongest magics of his ring of shooting stars.

Moonbeams play about him for a few seconds, a sign that the ring is invoking the power of Celian, God of the Heavens. Then three fiery meteors shoot from the ring with a thundering burst, blazing across the battlefield's darkness to strike the ghoul solidly in the chest. She is blown backwards as celestial flames sear into her, and an echoing BOOM rolls back and forth across the sleeping valley of Hundle’s Crossing. The ghoul's scream sounds almost two-toned, both high and feminine and low and masculine, but that's probably a trick of the acoustics. She rolls to a stop in a shallow crater blasted from the surface of the hill, most of her hair and flesh charred from the impact.

“Wow!” someone says in an awed voice. “I didn’t know he could do that.”

Raevynn seizes the opportunity. She changes into a 20 ft. long dire bear and charges the archer as quickly as she can. The ghoulish woman is fast – incredibly so – but Raevynn is huge, and that makes all the difference.

Raevynn’s buckler-sized paw slams down, knocking the dodging ghoul to the ground. The archer is wearing armor made from a flayed elven skin, some man who had apparently crossed her in the past, and as Raevynn's massive paw slaps into the ghoul the armor opens its eyes, looks at Raevynn with a look of incomprehensible pain and madness, and shrieks. As it does so, Raevynn recoils, but the archer smiles with a toothy grin as wide as her entire face.

The ghoul tries to escape from underneath Raevynn's paw, but Raevynn’s claws hold fast and the druid uses her substantial weight to keep the ghoul pinned to the ground. Members of the Defenders who aren’t healing Malachite rush over, but Velendo is faster. Flying from a previously cast spell, he swoops over and sees the female ghoul wiggling her way free.

Velendo shakes his head, scared and angry and yearning for some payback. With his jaw set, he holds out the grimrod that he had recovered from the Dockside Royals, and uses its power to focus a spell. He sends a maximized searing light into the woman’s upper chest, just about the same place that she shot Mara and Malachite.

She screams for a few seconds, her armor screams louder… and then the holy energy burns away her head, setting her flesh afire and cutting off her inhuman voice.

A few more squads of ghouls are turned and blasted, and then the Defenders pause and look around the battlefield. The last glow of the setting sun lights up the western sky, and the once-beautiful cemetery is a mass of steaming bones and sulfurous vapors. Two fire elementals make the acid fog in the charnel pit light up with an odd reddish glow, and the huge oak tree silhouetted against the darkening western sky still has a few undead impaled upon its upper branches. Charred bones litter the ground. Nothing is moving but the branches of the tree, waving slightly in the gentle breeze that is slowly carrying away the stink of death.

It appears that the Defenders have won.

----------------------------------------------------------------

To be continued!

• Notes: TomTom’s ring did a whole 88 points of damage; who coulda guessed? Not me, that’s for sure. I guess that makes up the more than 100 points that Malachite took from the ghoulish archer’s critical and two hits. Blackjack may claim I’m a +5 DM of Paladin Hating, but the truth is that the female ghoul had a grudge against humans. Not the same thing at all!
  
  Incidentally, Raevynn made her grapple check by *1*. If she had failed it, this combat may have been very different indeed.

[Piratecat]

Originally posted by DocMoriartty
Do you "cheat" a bit and keep copies of all of the characters sheets handy so you can peruse them at will? Or do you do the much more dangerous hope you remember routine?

At least to me it seems that once a party gets over 10th level on the average the DM just needs a copy so that his ideas don't get totally smashed by something completely unexpected. Like say a Ring of Shooting Stars someone may have.

This session it was even worse than that; Tremere (TomTom's player) is a brand new daddy, so he wasn't there. I was NPCing TomTom, and I recalled that he had a ring of shooting stars that he didn't often have the opportunity to use. "I wonder what it does?" I mused, and then I looked it up. Holy cow! It's potent in 3e! So TomTom unleashed Hell, and I found out that I'd grown too attached to my own NPC baddie. I think it's good for the players when their ideas and abilities trump something that the DM dreamed up; they're heroes, damn it, and if they're creative they deserve to reap the (usually positive) consequences.

I seldom review the sheets and abilities; I prefer that the players surprise me with stuff that I didn't know they were capable of. For me, that's half the fun of playing. That said, Sagiro recently undertook a project (now 80% done, waiting for some info from me) to put all the character sheets on the web so that they're clear and easily accessible. He's done an amazing job. When his character got XP last night, some of it was due to that!

I'll point out that now I'm officially nervous. The PCs leveled up last night, and now Velendo has 9th level spells! Other PCs are similarly buff, with Nolin gaining fire seed and Tao gaining a new level of spells. I've never tried DMing at this power level before, and I still have some concern about being able to sufficiently challenge the players by using something that the DMG says is bad: lots of low-lvl foes with decent-to-good tactics and a few clever people leading them. Will it be fun? I have no idea! But we'll find out. They'll leave traditional politics behind when they enter the underdark, and that makes for a campaign with a different feel to it.

There are all sorts of things to think about: what if the PCs spend all their time wind walking? What if they plane-shift to the ethereal and travel there? What if Velendo decides to cast true resurrection on Aleax, or on St. Morak, Aleax's Calphasian companion on that long-ago illfated journey? What about powerful divination spells? What if Tao uses her gate ability to summon something with 30-odd hit dice? Lots of stuff to consider! But we'll run with it, and I have contingencies and different plot branches and all sorts of interesting things planned, so I'm trusting that this will be fun for some time to come.

[Sialia]

Originally posted by Piratecat
Yay! Sialia, drop a link in here when you put up the thread in the (brand new) art gallery forum.

Baby Pictures of the Elder Gods

More pictures than just the originals--check in daily!

End of digression.

Everybody, that was a fantastic combat! very glad to read this.