ZEITGEIST [ZEITGEIST] The Continuing Adventures of Korrigan & Co.

[RangerWickett]

The plan is for Stanfield to be a 'final boss' in adventure 9, so he's one of the very few individuals in the setting who's reached 20th level. (Opening the Axis Seal will release a flood of energy that will let many more people achieve that power.) They'll confront him as he's overseeing the activation of a Wayfarer Lighthouse in the Ayres while simultaneously the Ob on Axis Island are opening the seal. Stars fall from the sky, literally impacting the surface of the world like burning white meteors.

I'm thinking of making Stanfield a 22nd level solo, with three stages of tactics.

First would be sending minions at the group as he conjures manifest zones of deadly planes. Then once he takes some damage, he starts calling forth manifestations of his former lifetimes to clog the battlefield and defend him, showing that he has been many things throughout his life. One of those manifestations, however, was a poet, and does not approve of what he has become; he will try to tell the party how to kill him.

After dealing enough damage to take out a normal elite, though, Stanfield goes down. The party has a few moments to try to deactivate the eldritch machine built into the lighthouse, and then Stanfield returns as a rakshasa. (This element will be quietly foreshadowed in adventure 8, and hints of it go back to the Cauldron Hill vision back in adventure 2.) At this point the battle turns ridiculously destructive as Stanfield's attacks crack the walls of the lighthouse and start to bring the whole place down. And Stanfield can only be killed by striking him with a falling star, our own personal version of the traditional Blessed Crossbow Bolt.


As for his Bluff skill? The centuries-old politician who is a key component of a massive international conspiracy? Yeah, let's say +31. (Math-wise, that's +11 level, +5 trained, +3 skill focus, +7 for a 24 Charisma, and a +5 magical perk for being an Obscurati cell leader.) And he can add +1d6 with Memory of a Thousand Lifetimes when he really needs to. For his carefully rehearsed lies, assume he can Take 10, which puts you at DC 41.

He certainly has soldiers he can call upon as governor. The writing will be on the wall by that point -- the King himself knows about the Cauldron Hill facility, so the only real question is can the colossus be ready in time. And the answer is no, because they haven't been able to restore its memories. That said, the Ob all assume they can rebuff an attack by the party and hold out for at least a week against a siege, which will give them time to come up with . . . well, it wouldn't be quite fair to call it a contingency plan. More like 'damage control option list. If they have enough time, they'll figure out a way to remove the colossus and just let it roam the Bleak Gate, figuring that's preferable to letting the King of Risur capture it. But PCs are resourceful, and even if they get stuck, Tinker Oddcog helps them out.

 

[Crispy120286]

I love how Stanfield is playing with the PC's... I cant wait until the revelation that they were working with the bad guys all along making their own jobs more difficult. Exciting!

 

[gideonpepys]

The plan is for Stanfield to be a 'final boss' in adventure 9, so he's one of the very few individuals in the setting who's reached 20th level. (Opening the Axis Seal will release a flood of energy that will let many more people achieve that power.) They'll confront him as he's overseeing the activation of a Wayfarer Lighthouse in the Ayres while simultaneously the Ob on Axis Island are opening the seal. Stars fall from the sky, literally impacting the surface of the world like burning white meteors.

I'm thinking of making Stanfield a 22nd level solo, with three stages of tactics.

First would be sending minions at the group as he conjures manifest zones of deadly planes. Then once he takes some damage, he starts calling forth manifestations of his former lifetimes to clog the battlefield and defend him, showing that he has been many things throughout his life. One of those manifestations, however, was a poet, and does not approve of what he has become; he will try to tell the party how to kill him.

After dealing enough damage to take out a normal elite, though, Stanfield goes down. The party has a few moments to try to deactivate the eldritch machine built into the lighthouse, and then Stanfield returns as a rakshasa. (This element will be quietly foreshadowed in adventure 8, and hints of it go back to the Cauldron Hill vision back in adventure 2.) At this point the battle turns ridiculously destructive as Stanfield's attacks crack the walls of the lighthouse and start to bring the whole place down. And Stanfield can only be killed by striking him with a falling star, our own personal version of the traditional Blessed Crossbow Bolt.

As for his Bluff skill? The centuries-old politician who is a key component of a massive international conspiracy? Yeah, let's say +31. (Math-wise, that's +11 level, +5 trained, +3 skill focus, +7 for a 24 Charisma, and a +5 magical perk for being an Obscurati cell leader.) And he can add +1d6 with Memory of a Thousand Lifetimes when he really needs to. For his carefully rehearsed lies, assume he can Take 10, which puts you at DC 41.

He certainly has soldiers he can call upon as governor. The writing will be on the wall by that point -- the King himself knows about the Cauldron Hill facility, so the only real question is can the colossus be ready in time. And the answer is no, because they haven't been able to restore its memories. That said, the Ob all assume they can rebuff an attack by the party and hold out for at least a week against a siege, which will give them time to come up with . . . well, it wouldn't be quite fair to call it a contingency plan. More like 'damage control option list. If they have enough time, they'll figure out a way to remove the colossus and just let it roam the Bleak Gate, figuring that's preferable to letting the King of Risur capture it. But PCs are resourceful, and even if they get stuck, Tinker Oddcog helps them out.

Wow, what a detailed answer! I guess you must have been waiting to get that all out of your system for a while now! 41 is good. Even Malthusius with his maxed out insight will be unlikely to penetrate that. Ironically, the higher he rolls, the more he will trust him!

I love how Stanfield is playing with the PC's... I cant wait until the revelation that they were working with the bad guys all along making their own jobs more difficult. Exciting!

It will be particularly galling for Malthusius, of course: the whole situation only came about because he wanted to have the Governor as one of his contacts.

 

[gideonpepys]

Session 78c - Uru's Ritual

On the night of the Winter Solstice, while the denizens of Flint engaged in an Old Faith festival in honour of the Voice of Rot (wherein a chinese-dragon representation of the titan tries to catch children in the street), Uru withdrew to his secret fungal garden, daubed his naked body with human blood and - wearing only a headdress of black feathers - chanted the words to the ritual he had been taught by Tokoloshe. While he chanted he danced within a circle formed from severed limbs, and at midnight, as the huge, glistening black flowers of the Bleak Lotus unfurled, he inhaled deeply of its dank spores and passed into the Bleak Gate.

Before him was the Grim Candle, which in the real world had burned with a black flame and made the surrounding area dim. In the Bleak Gate it glowed brightly, and Uru covered it with a hood so that it could not be seen until the right moment.

The first thing he needed to do was dig himself out of the underground well, for while the dried-up river-bed might have existed in this parallel world, the access tunnel he had dug for himself did not. And so he was truly filthy when he emerged and trotted through the barren landscape of the Gate, heading upwards through the Bleak Nettles to Cauldron Hill, with Tokoloshe flapping along behind him.

As he went higher Uru was surprised to see lights in the distance, in Parity Lake, and to hear the distant sounds of machinery. Though curious, he ignored these distractions and pressed on; though Tokoloshe had reassured him that his safe presence in the Gate would last for several hours, he was nonetheless keen to waste no time. This was the culmination of many months of planning and effort, and he did not want to take unnecessary risks.

Reaching the foot of Cauldron Hill, he began a cautious assent, gradually picking his way towards the summit, where the whole unit had stood last Spring in the company of Nevard Sechim. Even at these lower reaches he came across the drifting, forlorn spirits of crying, limbless children - victims of industrial accidents and disease who had been waylaid in their passage to the peaceful lands of the dead. Uru gathered these spirits and told them of the garden he had made for them, and had the friendly, tame ghosts who had accompanied him on many adventures (and whom he nicknamed Winken, Blinken and Nod) each lead a group of the lost spirits back down towards the garden. Little Jack was sent down with a group too.

Nearing the summit, he crept ever more cautiously, not wanting to attract the attentions of the evil spirits that lurked here. As he went, he noticed smoke from just over the rise and could not resist investigating. To his surprise, Uru found a vent, issuing not smoke but steam. He pressed his hear to it and could hear a rhythmic clanking that echoed up the pipe from deep down below. Industry, here on the hill! Though sorely tempted, he decided not to investigate further, and headed back towards the bald crown of the the hill.

There he prepared to remove the hood from his candle, when a strange thing happened: he felt a deep pain, like hunger, as if his very life-force was being sapped. Familiar with necrotic energies, Uru immediately realised that the Bleak Gate was beginning to gnaw at him! Another pang almost caused him to double over and cry out. Despite his welling panic, he was still determined to succeed in his quest to draw the lost spirits to his garden, and so he revealed the brightly shining grim candle and set off in a head-long sprint down the hill.

As he ran, the gnawing pain became unbearable, until at length he collapsed to his knees. There was no way he could make it back down the hill in time!

Tokoloshe now hovered over him and giggled, "You must sleep here. I cannot linger, but make haste back to the garden to play with my new friends." With that, the treacherous creature flapped away.

Uru lost consciousness as the last of his vitality slowly ebbed away...

 

[RangerWickett]

That was a very creepy and wonderful depiction of the Bleak Gate. I should have populated it more with lingering ghosts.

Limbless children, eh?

 

[gideonpepys]

That was a very creepy and wonderful depiction of the Bleak Gate. I should have populated it more with lingering ghosts.

Limbless children, eh?

Thanks. I felt that Uru's player deserved a good write-up, as this whole episode was largely of his manufacture. Though the ritual, Tokoloshe, and his ultimate fate were thrown in my me, the desire to rescue the lost spirits of the hill was his, as of course was the creepy fungal garden.

I left it on a cliffhanger here, but Uru's player doesn't like cliffhangers and demanded to know what had happened, which I'll add to next week's write-up. I was quite surprised that he got so emotionally involved, and appeared to be convinced that I had killed his character through DM fiat - as if!

All of this will turn out to be to his benefit in the long-run.

 

[gideonpepys]

Session 78d - Unit B

Man do we cram a lot into three hours. This week, we finally managed to catch up with Unit B. It was my intention to do roleplay and interaction with Alpha Unit for the first half of each session, and run some simple combats with their lower-level colleagues and have them level up every couple of weeks. But the 'downtime' sessions have been so involved and so much fun that poor unit B has been all-but forgotten.

A quick reminder of the team roster: the level-headed Captain Theren (an elven warden) leads the group, ably assisted by his strange and flamboyant brother Brajham (a sorcerer). The others are Sevitar Anrathi, a disturbing loner (who is actually dead); Niniel, an enthusiastic half-elven bard (who is a changeling in disguise); Doctor Will Stanmore - wizard and nervous war vet; and Ffenwig, a female bugbear who has long been an ally of the two elves.

When we left them they had just dispatched a band of strangely mutated dragonborn in a clearing in the Cloudwood jungle. One of the dragonborn had yelled for help down a hatch in the ground at the bottom of a hole the creatures had been excavating and during the fight the PCs had closed the hatch. Now something was clearly trying to get out of the hole, but could not do so because of the immensely heavy stone lid.

Confident in their safety, the group healed up, searched the dragonborn and kept an eye on the hatch just in case. The dragonborn had various items on their person which indicated that they spent a long time in the Dreaming, of all places. Their mutations were unpleasant, causing their skin and scales to blacken and ooze. Some had vestigial tentacles, fingers coming out of their armpits, eyespots under their cheekbones (and one they had encountered earlier had sprouted wings). But the exact nature of these mutations could not be identified, not even from the mental repository of lore that Niniel had amassed over the years.

Will Stanmore had been watching the hatch and shouted a warning: white tendrils were emerging around the edges; a summons of some kind, judging by the muffled chanting that could be heard. The tendrils coalesced into a pulsating ball of light which was nauseating to look at - sort of like a four-dimensional jelly-fish. The thing took hold of Doctor Stanmore's mind causing him to stagger to the edge of the clearing and collapse. When the others layed into it, their weapons did not seem to do much damage, but Niniel was able to harm it more easily with her psychic attacks. The creature caused mental discord among its foes, whose own alarm and aggression began to injure each other psychically.

While they tackled this unidentified thing, there came a great pounding on the stone hatch. They managed to kill it just as the hatch broke open, sending jagged shards of stone hurtling through the air like a bomb blast. From the wreckage strode another huge dragonborn wielding an enormous axe. This creature's armour had fused with its flesh, and its face had wizened as though burned with acid. Its blows were extremely powerful and the group fell back before them, but Captain Theren warded off the worst of its attacks and Brajham, Ffenwig and Sevitar proved to be a very deadly offensive team. This final dragonborn was felled, though not before it had scoured them with foul bile.

Once rested up, and leaving Will to recover up top, they descended the flight of spiraling stone stairs beneath the hatch. Brajham proposed to illuminate their way with a torch, but Sevitar stopped him and stole ahead before he realised that he could not see in the dark. The others caught up with him at the bottom, although this took several minutes as the flight went down over a hundred feet.

Beneath was high, vaulted chamber of ancient origin. At its centre was a burnished silver hemisphere, and five bricked-up doorways gave onto five radial chambers, two of which had already been broken into (presumably by the dragonborn leader). He had dispatched orcish zombies that had issued forth, and ransacked both rooms - burial chambers.

While they looked around, an ancient orcish spirit manifested and spoke to them urgently in a language they could not understand. It appeared to be warning them and telling them to leave. Niniel thought it was something like a magic mouth.

Ffenwig picked up a pickaxe that had been left leaning against the silver dome and prepared to smash through the third bricked up door.

 

[gideonpepys]

Extended Skill Challenge

There are three main strands to the downtime period my main group of PCs is engaged in: training, to gain bonuses and boons instead of items, and to explain character developments such a multiclass feats and paragon paths; narrative progression of their personal plotlines that are not necessarily related to the core campaign storyline; and an extended skill challenge, which I thought I should describe below in order for it to make any sense:

The skill challenge involves the whole unit (though some are able to contribute to a much greater extent than others) in an effort to prevent or at least delay the launch of a mercernary fleet sponsored by Black Star Mining and Pemberton Industries. This fleet plans to sail south and strike at the 'deep ones' (aboleth and their sahuagin servitors) to prevent a supposed invasion, open up trade routes with wealthy off-map border states, and obtain the mythical Stone of Not.

The unit want to prevent the launch in part because they hate Khaled Valchek, owner of Black Star Mining, and in part because they have been asked to do so by the merfey who fear deep one reprisals.

The group can prevent the launch in a number of ways, the most obvious being to have the Flint Council deny the fleet safe harbour or simply to delay its launch until after the break-down of peace talks, when every able Risuri ship will be placed on stand-by by the King.

They have three goals:

Goal 1 - Political influence. Persuade the councillors to their way of thinking.
Goal 2 - Public opinion. Get the vocal majority of Flint to oppose the fleet.
Goal 3 - Cause delays (by hook or by crook).

Last week, Korrigan's political ambitions dovetailed with Goal 1 and saw him introduced to the workings of the council. He learned more about that this week, and began to realise the extent of the task that lay ahead of him. Next post, I'll provide a bit of detail on the council.

 

[gideonpepys]

Flint Council

I didn't want to spend too much time on the political structure of Flint, or make the skill challenge to hard/difficult (depending on which way you look at it) by having all power to reside with Governor Stanfield, so I decided there was a council consisting of the mayors of each district who decide on key issues, with Stanfield having a veto which he only uses very rarely (because mostly the mayors tow the line, if there is one, and if there isn't Stanfield obviously doesn't care). I used the information from the player's guide to determine the outlook and flexibility of each of them:

Ayres - no mayor; part of North Shore, although wealthy citizens are campaigning to have their own representative, a vote which goes through the council before the first week of Spring. The players could back this petition and gain a vote (as the new mayor of the Ayres would be sympathetic to their cause) but this would anger the Dockers who don't think a few rich islanders deserve their own mayor.
Bosum Strand - Griffen Stowe. "Work provided by Mercenary Fleet is good for docks and dockers." Tows the lines, keeps the region clean. A martinet who admires Pemberton. One way they could gain his support is through blackmail. (He has some strange sexual predilections and frequents brothels throughout Flint.) Failing that, and requiring less ingenuity but more hard work, they could influence working-class public opinion, and get support from the Dockers (who, it has to be remembered, are benefiting from the presence of the Fleet, but opposed to it ideologically).
Central - Oncala Putnum. Supervising new underground steam train network sponsored by Pemberton Industries. Unlikely to be swayed in any way, especially since the party is working with Jayce (see below). However, a huge success in swaying middle-class public opinion might just tilt her in their favour, but only if they think to find another investor for the public works project she is supervising.
Cloudwood - Doyle Idylls. A traditionalist whose constituency are farmers, woodsmen and druids. The unit's only natural ally from the outset.
Nettles - Isaac dan der Grimnebulin. No need to concern himself with popular vote, but appointed by the council. The unit will assume Issac sides with them, as he is their contact and friend. But if they make that assumption obvious, Isaac will take offence and at the very least make them sweat.
North Shore - Aaron Choir. Every inch the politician. The chattering classes will dictate his vote. The group need to influence middle-class public opinion.
Parity Lake - Rosa Gohins. Rumoured to be in Lorcan Kell's pocket. Works on behalf of factory owners, not workers. But Kell is inimical to Black Star Mining (as they tried to assassinate him earlier in our campaign) so, oddly, with some trickery the group could join the dots for him and have him lean on Gohins.
Pine Island - Roger Pepper. Ex Battalion graduate and military man. The party don't know it, but he's already on-side, swayed by Leon's paper on keeping military assets out of private hands.
Stray River - Chrystine Robinson. Korrigan's own mayoral representative and an unknown quantity on this issue. Again, public opinion will be a factor.

Deneric Jayce is running against Oncala Putnam in Central District. He is popular with students at the University, but Oncala has more support among government officials.

To succeed in the political element of this skill challenge, the unit need a majority of mayors on their side by week 10 of the downtime 'adventure' (actually week 12 of Winter).

Next up, I'm going to post details of the 'concerned citizens' Korrigan has succeeded in rallying to his cause - public figures who are opposed to the mercenary fleet and until now have been all-too-easy to dismiss as 'doves'. With a war vet and local hero on their side, they now have a chance of being taken seriously.

 

[gideonpepys]

Dinner Party Guests

Not sure why I'm posting the full details of these, but anyway, this is a list of the group of people who Korrigan invited to his dinner:

Heward Sechim - idealist industrial magnate
Bernard of Glenwade - influential druid (player contact)
Deneric Jayce - career politician
Sana Santorum - young, firebrand skyseer. Follower of Nevard.
Kranz Bordray - successful dwarven engineer. Rival of Khaled Valchek.
Heredis Wardrough - softly spoken Ayres resident. Old money. Traditionalist.
Climatis Wardrough - wife of Heredis. More vocal than her husband. Old Faith adherent.
Rose Woodward - wealthy heiress. Philosophical ally of the Panoply (Beran democrats/anarchists.) Lover of El Perro.
Guy Goodson - well-meaning industrialist, chastened by recent events and unpopular due to apparent 'allegiance' with Gale.
Yosaria Neldris - Elven technologist and University professor. Opposed to military application of technology.
Mutya Offendor - High-ranking Battalion scholar. Convinced to publicize her misgivings by Korrigan/Leon.

I thought Guy Goodson was an interesting one. I decided that the player's decision to persuade Gale not to kill him should have a positive impact. Goodson told Korrigan he had lost a lot of people he thought were friends following the public outcry over his apparent association with Gale. Ironically, her action against him caused him to reconsider his whole philosophy.