Now, THAT was the session with everything.
I swear, my Britannia 3E game is turning into d20 wuxia, or at least one session of it. Furthermore, I also got to quote the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching and the Sermon on the Mount in the one session -- heck, in the one scene. And finally, I scored a hattrick: 3 PC deaths in one session. Okay, the first two weren't really deaths as such, and the last was the character sacrificing himself to save someone else, but I'll take what I can get.
Background: for the last several sessions, the group's witch hunter, Carcosa, had been in a blue funk because his wife, Thea -- a witch hunter herself -- joined the bloodmages and became accursed. She was essentially forced into doing this against her will, but that didn't make it any easier for him to take. (Obviously all this tragic business had been preordained ever since Carcosa's parents named him after a mythos city, but sadly he never twigged.) One of the other PCs, Arjuna the spirit folk archer, had taken pity on Thea and a bond had developed between them. She may have been accursed, but she wasn't totally gone yet. In one of her more morose/despairing moments, she asked Arjuna to kill her if it ever seemed like she would slip over to the dark side completely, and he said yes.
Meanwhile, the rest of the group had been on the quest of the Avatar, which is basically the search for self-perfection and transcendence. This being mythic fantasy set in a demon-haunted world, the path to self-perfection and transcendence involved racking up a kill count reaching into 4 digits. It also involved a search for the artifacts of the three Principles of virtue, namely the bell of courage, the book of truth, and the candle of love. They'd found the first two, and were looking for the third. Coincidentally enough, it was hoped that this candle would also be able to free Thea from her status as one of theSith accursed. It's amazing how these coincidences crop up all the time.
So, where was this candle? After much searching and asking around, they got the answer by going to the Spirit World, and speaking to the Shrine of Spirituality, which in turn pointed them in the direction of a great forest. By means of wind walk, they traversed the massive distances involved in just a few short hours. And none of my players had even seen Green Snake.
This forest -- the Spirit World counterpart to the Deep Forest in Britannia -- was one to put its Material World cousin to shame, filled with gigantic trees forming grand aisles and hallways, and populated by strange creatures exihibiting characteristics of both plant and animal [woodling template from MM3]. Carmen, the healer, got herself one of these for an animal companion: a forest spirit dire bear. She named it Totoro. It's clearly the Totoro from hell, with giant claws, teeth, barklike armour and all. They also fought a forest spirit dire tiger, which was clearly the catbus from hell, and its treant friends after someone got trigger-happy with the fire spells.
(One slightly disconcerting feature about the Spirit World was an everpresent mist, which meant that while the sights were astounding, the sight lines were restricted to much shorter distances than they were used to. The Spirit World has a problem with fill rates, you see -- or at least it does for those who haven't achieved avatarhood yet and aren't 3l33t enough to get the hacked drivers.)
Their search eventually led them to a great mountain, its summit lost in the clouds, its sheer flanks cloaked with lush vegetation. At the base of the mountain was a dark cave, which they'd been warned was the lair of the great Earth Serpent. So in true Joseph Campbell style, they had to enter into the dungeon, fight the serpent and retrieve the candle of love.
At this point I think we stopped for a few minutes to get the IYKWIMAITYD mood out of our systems. Sheesh, how many vibrator jokes are there anyway?
As it turned out, the serpent came out to meet them. This was a kaiju large viper snake with 600 hit points and hitting for 80 points of damage plus poison (Fort save DC 39) per bite. Obviously easy-peasy for 17th level characters with heroes' feast going, even if one of the players seemed to have a temporary brain explosion and sat out the fight at the rear. Penetrating into the dark tunnel inhabited by the snake, they ascended the mountain and finally came to a hidden grotto at its summit.
We stopped here again to get the IYKWIMAITYD mood out of our systems. NO IT WASN'T A VOLCANO AND IT WASN'T ERUPTING DAMMIT.
The sides of the grotto were sheer, covered by scraggly trees and brush, and at the bottom was a small pond fed by rainwater. Think limestone caves, where the roof has fallen in. In fact, the whole place was sorta like that, funky limestone formations and all.
In the middle of the pond was a pedestal, but there was nothing on it. One of the characters moved forward to examine it, whereupon a challenge rang out from someone they hadn't noticed. Not a bad trick when you have a sniper chyk with Spot +30 in the party. It was a nature spirit, wielding two longswords, standing on a sapling 30 feet up the side of the grotto: one of the Aspects of Light they had been told guarded the candle. He challenged the group to defeat him -- to defeat them. So Carcosa stepped up -- that's literally up, using air walk -- and they eyeballed each other for a bit from a distance of 10 paces. Then Carcosa started casting a spell, and the nature spirit struck him with his swords, across that distance of 10 paces.
Yay, I finally got to use my spirit warrior PrC. Was Hero a great movie, or what?
The fight started in earnest, and the other PCs jumped in. Darius the knight charged the swordsman, and got pinged by the second Aspect of Light, this one a female archer, from the other side of the grotto. That was one shot, for 80 hit points and 7 Con damage. I could have gone the typical machine-gun archer route, but doing one killer shot is much more fun, plus I got to use my Zen archer PrC.
Carcosa then tried casting scorching ray again. He never got the hint after the first few times he cast it in the wood-aspected forest led to big-ass monsters trying to eat him. But this time the whole grotto, 80 feet across, filled with fire from the meteor swarm cast by the third Aspect of Light, a mage.
Over the next two rounds Carcosa got wiped out by a hold person + fireball, and then Arjuna got taken to -236 hit points (a new record for this game). The rogue tried rushing the mage, ran into his aura of peace (yes, I know) and was filled with a most inconvenient sense of calm and serenity. But then Darius managed to kill the swordsman, and they called a halt to the fight. The players probably figured out right away that, this being a quest for the candle of love, a violent solution wasn't going to work but they were willing to play along for the sake of a cool fight scene. I love my players.
This being an encounter in the Spirit World with something as close to the divine as you're likely to get in Brit3E, it wasn't truly a fight in the physical sense of the term, hence a mage with Vows of Peace and Nonviolence casting meteor swarm. I think I just heard someone losing a bet somewhere.
The mage Aspect asked each of them whether they truly had no hate in their hearts, and these being incarnations of the divine with the ability to see through the self-delusions and petty hypocrisies that mortals often surround themselves with, there wasn't much room to dissemble. So it was really more about interrogating the _players_ about their _characters'_ state of mind, rather than asking the characters themselves. Epic skill checks be damned, sometimes for maximal engagement you want to be able to go right to the source.
Carcosa was asked if he wanted to come back, and the answer was no. Of course, as Carcosa is/was a complex character, this was a very nuanced no, along the lines of "I've done all I can, and this way I don't have to commit myself to a decision on my feelings for Thea". Arjuna was also asked if he wanted to come back, and the answer was yes. This one was more along the lines of "I'm dead? WTF?" Poor guy cast a couple of defensive buffs, moved out, and then got obliterated in one round. So naturally he wanted to come back, if only because it hadn't really sunk in yet that he'd got killed.
After a while, the Aspects were satisfied that the characters held no hate in their hearts. Satisfied that the candle would be safe in the party's hands, they introduced themselves: the swordsman as Courage, the archer as Truth, the mage as Love. This is the bit where I got to quote the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao te Ching and the New Testament at my players. Such are the perks of being a DM, in particular a syncretist one.
The archer brought up her bow, nocked an arrow, and with one shot opened up a portal directly above the pedestal in the center of the grotto. Motto to self: next time, quote Keats' Ode to a Grecian Urn instead of quasi-Kyudo pap. The party went through it, and found themselves back in Yew, with the candle of love in their possession. I turned the candle into a hollow crystal sphere with a tiny flame flickering within it -- a metaphorical candle, in other words. No way was I going to have it be an actual candle after all the IYKWIMAITYD moments.
Back in Yew, they found that it was two weeks later, Thea had grown in power, and had escaped the custody of the witch hunters where they'd left her. With the aid of a discern location, they found where she was -- a rocky outcrop outside the city. She hadn't gone far.
Arriving at the scene, they found it surrounded by the witch hunters, including their leaders Jaana and Bishop (whom they'd adventured with in the past). They realised that the outcrop was part of a hill, located in the same place as the mountain in the Spirit World. So they went to the top, and where the grotto where they'd fought the Aspects had been, they found a smaller version: a cave open to the sky. Landing in the cave, they met Thea, who had clearly had a turn for the worse since they'd last seen her. Carmen managed to persuade her not to attack (a Diplomacy check of ~40 will do that) and they lit the candle. Thea shrank back from the light flooding out, doing a passable Gollum/Smeagol imitation ("It burns! It buuurrrnnnss!") but Arjuna ran forward and grabbed hold of her, keeping her from running away.
As the light washed over her, the characters could see the mask of insanity and bloodlust fade from her face and her former self return. Jaana and Bishop teleported in at this point, bringing with them several of their troops. Angry words were exchanged, but again Carmen calmed people down (Diplomacy check of 55 using a hero point). She also managed to talk Thea into surrendering, although it would mean imprisonment. It was better than death, which would have been her fate before the PCs' intervention, and there would be hope for future release. Finally, Carmen broke the news of Carcosa's death, and Thea took it hard, since all along she'd been hoping against hope for a reconciliation with her husband. But again that Diplomacy 55 check meant she got Thea to pull herself together.
All of this took ten minutes, which was how long the light from the candle lasted.
I mentioned that this was like d20 wuxia, yes? Well, one characteristic of wuxia, aside from the flying people and fights in treetops, is that they're almost always tragedies.
As the candle light died away, Thea howled in agony and doubled over, the shimmering black flames of an unholy aura enveloping her body. The various people stood astounded at this transformation. I reminded Arjuna's player what he'd said he would do if it came to this, mentioning how Thea was looking wildly, imploringly at his character. He responded by refusing to let go of her, choosing to take the Str damage from the unholy aura. She said, "kill me". He responded by kissing her. She croaked out "forgive me", as the red haze of insanity fell over her eyes, and cast harm on him. He voluntarily failed the save, taking the 150 points of damage, and still unwilling/unable to kill her.
At this point the witch hunter Bishop, sensing that Thea was about to escape, yelled something that sounded remarkably like "nooooo" and in desperation hurled his spear at her. Arjuna stepped in front of it, shielding Thea with his body. I said, "are you sure?" The player said yes. I said it would be an automatic coup de grace on him. He said that was fine. And so it was, a 33 point crit and a DC 43 Fort save as the spear point crashed into Arjuna. The roll was a 4. The spear burst out the other side, spraying Thea with his blood.
And they could see her rejoicing in it as she teleported away.
This was without a doubt the single coolest character death I've ever seen. The player insists Arjuna wasn't in love with Thea as such, but that sure ain't what the bards will be singing.
The next time they meet Thea -- and given the players have resolved to clean up the mess, I'm sure there'll be a next time -- she'll be wearing red and black face paint. Heh.
I swear, my Britannia 3E game is turning into d20 wuxia, or at least one session of it. Furthermore, I also got to quote the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching and the Sermon on the Mount in the one session -- heck, in the one scene. And finally, I scored a hattrick: 3 PC deaths in one session. Okay, the first two weren't really deaths as such, and the last was the character sacrificing himself to save someone else, but I'll take what I can get.
Background: for the last several sessions, the group's witch hunter, Carcosa, had been in a blue funk because his wife, Thea -- a witch hunter herself -- joined the bloodmages and became accursed. She was essentially forced into doing this against her will, but that didn't make it any easier for him to take. (Obviously all this tragic business had been preordained ever since Carcosa's parents named him after a mythos city, but sadly he never twigged.) One of the other PCs, Arjuna the spirit folk archer, had taken pity on Thea and a bond had developed between them. She may have been accursed, but she wasn't totally gone yet. In one of her more morose/despairing moments, she asked Arjuna to kill her if it ever seemed like she would slip over to the dark side completely, and he said yes.
Meanwhile, the rest of the group had been on the quest of the Avatar, which is basically the search for self-perfection and transcendence. This being mythic fantasy set in a demon-haunted world, the path to self-perfection and transcendence involved racking up a kill count reaching into 4 digits. It also involved a search for the artifacts of the three Principles of virtue, namely the bell of courage, the book of truth, and the candle of love. They'd found the first two, and were looking for the third. Coincidentally enough, it was hoped that this candle would also be able to free Thea from her status as one of the
So, where was this candle? After much searching and asking around, they got the answer by going to the Spirit World, and speaking to the Shrine of Spirituality, which in turn pointed them in the direction of a great forest. By means of wind walk, they traversed the massive distances involved in just a few short hours. And none of my players had even seen Green Snake.
This forest -- the Spirit World counterpart to the Deep Forest in Britannia -- was one to put its Material World cousin to shame, filled with gigantic trees forming grand aisles and hallways, and populated by strange creatures exihibiting characteristics of both plant and animal [woodling template from MM3]. Carmen, the healer, got herself one of these for an animal companion: a forest spirit dire bear. She named it Totoro. It's clearly the Totoro from hell, with giant claws, teeth, barklike armour and all. They also fought a forest spirit dire tiger, which was clearly the catbus from hell, and its treant friends after someone got trigger-happy with the fire spells.
(One slightly disconcerting feature about the Spirit World was an everpresent mist, which meant that while the sights were astounding, the sight lines were restricted to much shorter distances than they were used to. The Spirit World has a problem with fill rates, you see -- or at least it does for those who haven't achieved avatarhood yet and aren't 3l33t enough to get the hacked drivers.)
Their search eventually led them to a great mountain, its summit lost in the clouds, its sheer flanks cloaked with lush vegetation. At the base of the mountain was a dark cave, which they'd been warned was the lair of the great Earth Serpent. So in true Joseph Campbell style, they had to enter into the dungeon, fight the serpent and retrieve the candle of love.
At this point I think we stopped for a few minutes to get the IYKWIMAITYD mood out of our systems. Sheesh, how many vibrator jokes are there anyway?
As it turned out, the serpent came out to meet them. This was a kaiju large viper snake with 600 hit points and hitting for 80 points of damage plus poison (Fort save DC 39) per bite. Obviously easy-peasy for 17th level characters with heroes' feast going, even if one of the players seemed to have a temporary brain explosion and sat out the fight at the rear. Penetrating into the dark tunnel inhabited by the snake, they ascended the mountain and finally came to a hidden grotto at its summit.
We stopped here again to get the IYKWIMAITYD mood out of our systems. NO IT WASN'T A VOLCANO AND IT WASN'T ERUPTING DAMMIT.
The sides of the grotto were sheer, covered by scraggly trees and brush, and at the bottom was a small pond fed by rainwater. Think limestone caves, where the roof has fallen in. In fact, the whole place was sorta like that, funky limestone formations and all.
In the middle of the pond was a pedestal, but there was nothing on it. One of the characters moved forward to examine it, whereupon a challenge rang out from someone they hadn't noticed. Not a bad trick when you have a sniper chyk with Spot +30 in the party. It was a nature spirit, wielding two longswords, standing on a sapling 30 feet up the side of the grotto: one of the Aspects of Light they had been told guarded the candle. He challenged the group to defeat him -- to defeat them. So Carcosa stepped up -- that's literally up, using air walk -- and they eyeballed each other for a bit from a distance of 10 paces. Then Carcosa started casting a spell, and the nature spirit struck him with his swords, across that distance of 10 paces.
Yay, I finally got to use my spirit warrior PrC. Was Hero a great movie, or what?
The fight started in earnest, and the other PCs jumped in. Darius the knight charged the swordsman, and got pinged by the second Aspect of Light, this one a female archer, from the other side of the grotto. That was one shot, for 80 hit points and 7 Con damage. I could have gone the typical machine-gun archer route, but doing one killer shot is much more fun, plus I got to use my Zen archer PrC.
Carcosa then tried casting scorching ray again. He never got the hint after the first few times he cast it in the wood-aspected forest led to big-ass monsters trying to eat him. But this time the whole grotto, 80 feet across, filled with fire from the meteor swarm cast by the third Aspect of Light, a mage.
Over the next two rounds Carcosa got wiped out by a hold person + fireball, and then Arjuna got taken to -236 hit points (a new record for this game). The rogue tried rushing the mage, ran into his aura of peace (yes, I know) and was filled with a most inconvenient sense of calm and serenity. But then Darius managed to kill the swordsman, and they called a halt to the fight. The players probably figured out right away that, this being a quest for the candle of love, a violent solution wasn't going to work but they were willing to play along for the sake of a cool fight scene. I love my players.
This being an encounter in the Spirit World with something as close to the divine as you're likely to get in Brit3E, it wasn't truly a fight in the physical sense of the term, hence a mage with Vows of Peace and Nonviolence casting meteor swarm. I think I just heard someone losing a bet somewhere.
The mage Aspect asked each of them whether they truly had no hate in their hearts, and these being incarnations of the divine with the ability to see through the self-delusions and petty hypocrisies that mortals often surround themselves with, there wasn't much room to dissemble. So it was really more about interrogating the _players_ about their _characters'_ state of mind, rather than asking the characters themselves. Epic skill checks be damned, sometimes for maximal engagement you want to be able to go right to the source.
Carcosa was asked if he wanted to come back, and the answer was no. Of course, as Carcosa is/was a complex character, this was a very nuanced no, along the lines of "I've done all I can, and this way I don't have to commit myself to a decision on my feelings for Thea". Arjuna was also asked if he wanted to come back, and the answer was yes. This one was more along the lines of "I'm dead? WTF?" Poor guy cast a couple of defensive buffs, moved out, and then got obliterated in one round. So naturally he wanted to come back, if only because it hadn't really sunk in yet that he'd got killed.
After a while, the Aspects were satisfied that the characters held no hate in their hearts. Satisfied that the candle would be safe in the party's hands, they introduced themselves: the swordsman as Courage, the archer as Truth, the mage as Love. This is the bit where I got to quote the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao te Ching and the New Testament at my players. Such are the perks of being a DM, in particular a syncretist one.
The archer brought up her bow, nocked an arrow, and with one shot opened up a portal directly above the pedestal in the center of the grotto. Motto to self: next time, quote Keats' Ode to a Grecian Urn instead of quasi-Kyudo pap. The party went through it, and found themselves back in Yew, with the candle of love in their possession. I turned the candle into a hollow crystal sphere with a tiny flame flickering within it -- a metaphorical candle, in other words. No way was I going to have it be an actual candle after all the IYKWIMAITYD moments.
Back in Yew, they found that it was two weeks later, Thea had grown in power, and had escaped the custody of the witch hunters where they'd left her. With the aid of a discern location, they found where she was -- a rocky outcrop outside the city. She hadn't gone far.
Arriving at the scene, they found it surrounded by the witch hunters, including their leaders Jaana and Bishop (whom they'd adventured with in the past). They realised that the outcrop was part of a hill, located in the same place as the mountain in the Spirit World. So they went to the top, and where the grotto where they'd fought the Aspects had been, they found a smaller version: a cave open to the sky. Landing in the cave, they met Thea, who had clearly had a turn for the worse since they'd last seen her. Carmen managed to persuade her not to attack (a Diplomacy check of ~40 will do that) and they lit the candle. Thea shrank back from the light flooding out, doing a passable Gollum/Smeagol imitation ("It burns! It buuurrrnnnss!") but Arjuna ran forward and grabbed hold of her, keeping her from running away.
As the light washed over her, the characters could see the mask of insanity and bloodlust fade from her face and her former self return. Jaana and Bishop teleported in at this point, bringing with them several of their troops. Angry words were exchanged, but again Carmen calmed people down (Diplomacy check of 55 using a hero point). She also managed to talk Thea into surrendering, although it would mean imprisonment. It was better than death, which would have been her fate before the PCs' intervention, and there would be hope for future release. Finally, Carmen broke the news of Carcosa's death, and Thea took it hard, since all along she'd been hoping against hope for a reconciliation with her husband. But again that Diplomacy 55 check meant she got Thea to pull herself together.
All of this took ten minutes, which was how long the light from the candle lasted.
I mentioned that this was like d20 wuxia, yes? Well, one characteristic of wuxia, aside from the flying people and fights in treetops, is that they're almost always tragedies.
As the candle light died away, Thea howled in agony and doubled over, the shimmering black flames of an unholy aura enveloping her body. The various people stood astounded at this transformation. I reminded Arjuna's player what he'd said he would do if it came to this, mentioning how Thea was looking wildly, imploringly at his character. He responded by refusing to let go of her, choosing to take the Str damage from the unholy aura. She said, "kill me". He responded by kissing her. She croaked out "forgive me", as the red haze of insanity fell over her eyes, and cast harm on him. He voluntarily failed the save, taking the 150 points of damage, and still unwilling/unable to kill her.
At this point the witch hunter Bishop, sensing that Thea was about to escape, yelled something that sounded remarkably like "nooooo" and in desperation hurled his spear at her. Arjuna stepped in front of it, shielding Thea with his body. I said, "are you sure?" The player said yes. I said it would be an automatic coup de grace on him. He said that was fine. And so it was, a 33 point crit and a DC 43 Fort save as the spear point crashed into Arjuna. The roll was a 4. The spear burst out the other side, spraying Thea with his blood.
And they could see her rejoicing in it as she teleported away.
This was without a doubt the single coolest character death I've ever seen. The player insists Arjuna wasn't in love with Thea as such, but that sure ain't what the bards will be singing.
The next time they meet Thea -- and given the players have resolved to clean up the mess, I'm sure there'll be a next time -- she'll be wearing red and black face paint. Heh.
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