Sessions 6, 7 & 8:
From where they last left off, the players found a Danoran engineer at the encampment, who agreed to accompany them to the fortress to help them infiltrate. During the dawn of the next day, I had the leaking golem encounter (thanks for that art
@arkwright!). They were thinking about taking some potshots but decided to leave it, since it was heading away to the west. I described to the resident psychic rogue how they heard multiple voices and minds from the golem and the oil, and they took a sample of it for future study.
At the fortress, there was a ton of amusing chaos, they were quite split on what they wanted to do. They were really worried that if they went straight to open the sea gate, the duchess would kill Nathan Jierre, so they decided to try and rescue him first by deceiving their way into the central keep. They rolled high enough that they really should have been able to get in (they were all disguised as rebel guards), but I knew that the moment the duchess spotted them, she would've recognized them and thrown them in jail/killed them, so I basically just reminded them that this was an inevitablity for their plan. I feel bad about this in retrospect though, I really should have just let them go forward with their plan to talk to the duchess and then get thrown in the makeshift brig till they got freed by Risuri forces or something. Ah well!
They instead went for the sea gate, and this encounter was really fun. The initial sneaking in was very splinter cell, and then I described the waves of enemy forces just crashing in on them (to the tune of Thunderstruck!). Just as they were about to get overwhelmed, I had Squad B (the initial infiltration group that had went missing during the sea cave-in) reappear; and together they managed to hold it long enough for the first ships to appear.
After some rest and the reappearance of Captain Smith, they were interrupted by the appearance of Asrabey who did his anime jumps into the fortress. There was some confusion on what to do next, but at the prompting of an assigned sergeant, they went over to the makeshift brig to talk to the danorans, from whom they got a key to the room of the central keep. This is of course when Asrabey reappears and throws his orb; since the book described iron nails beginning to float, I also included that our resident warforged was slightly beginning to float as well (the others started to grab onto his massive limbs!).
The players all ran through and got past the hedge maze quick enough (Gillie Dhu recognized them as friendly forces from their previous excursion into the inner keep, and just let them pass). They made their way to the roof, where they began to hear the conversation between Asrabey and the Duchess. When the conversation got to the topic of Kasvarina, I described a memory of pain and fire engulfing Snow (the player who is playing a Deva, who I intend to have been the betrothed of Kasvarina's daughter), I also showed the players Kasvarina's portrait as Snow remembered her face but nothing else.
They interrupted the conversation once Asrabey started to threaten Nathan Jierre, and a fight pretty quickly broke out, since they got the sense that there was no chance Asrabey would let Nathan go. Some freaking how, they actually managed to kill Asrabey. Two of them went down, but between some insanely high rolls and the shadow elemental that appeared from the Icon of Nem, they JUST managed to get enough damage to kill him.
The main thing I need to think about after all this is what are the consequences for them killing Asrabey? Here's what immediately comes to mind:
- it was the shadow's strength drain that dealt the final blow. As per the text of the attack: "If a non-evil Humanoid dies from this Attack, a new shadow rises from the corpse 1d4 hours later." So maybe Asrabey returns as some kind of shadow creature at some point?
- They will definitely take a loss of reputation from the unseen court because of this. Maybe they will demand a trial in the Dreaming for the constables? could be a possible side mission down the line
Session 8 ended with a nice epilogue, a level-up, and the proud declaration of "End of Book One!" to much applause.
Next session we'll pick back up with some downtime activities, and then the beginning of the murder mystery.
. I'll have another shot at that when he shows up after the opening the sea gate.
