Dramatis Personae
- New this session Lucius, a member of the Gate Pass resistance headed to Seaquen to hook his group up with the Lyceum. He wield a pair of short swords and a silver tongue.
- and Seda, a spellcasting Seela, sick and tired of singing, with her mountain lion companion Smoke.
- Basel, an Innenotdaran (aka grey) elf evoker from Gabal's school who previously made his living as a baker, with his familiar Simon, a cat from Seaquen's docks.
- Dämmek, a brainy and brawny human swordswoman with keen senses and the Living Blade.
- Gusle, a seela bard who escaped captivity from a circus before coming to Gate Pass. This player has been through the first few chapters already, so she was able to fill Torrent's role as guide, and her familiar Sparky, a rat from beneath Seaquen.
- Jesús Tillamook, a half-elf cloistered cleric of the Stormbringer Phoenix, a sect of the Stormchaser Eagle that is dedicated to finding the Aquiline Heart so that they can reincarnate the Eagle.
Lucius, after passing through Innenotdar and learning about the seela who have recently left the forest, encounters a mountain lion watching him out of some undergrowth in a forest in Dassen. Hungry for something to eat, and mistaking the cat for something smaller,
...because the DM botched the description...
he starts to attack. The mountain lion charges him, but lets him go when given an order by the Seela Seda. Having established that they are both headed to Seaquen, they decide to travel together.
Excellent decision! The next day, they encounter a weary elf riding a weary horse moving as quickly as they can north. As soon as the horse smells Smoke, it bolts, dumping the elf on the ground, and runs away. Lucius and Seda question the elf and learn that he is being chased by an inquisitor. Just then, the two notice the sound of hoofbeats coming up the trail. Prepare for the inquisition!
The two, with very limited help from the elf, manage to defeat the inquisitor and his allies. The elf then explains that he is from the Shahalesti embassy in Dassen and is headed to Shahelsti with important news: King Steppengard's entire family has been assassinated, and the Ragesians have taken advantage of Steppengard's grief to arrange safe passage for the Ragesian army through Dassen in order to attack Seaquen -- safe for both the Ragesians and Dassen.
The above was the mini-session with the players trying out their new characters -- and it lets me let them introduce the information that sends the heroes off in adventure 4. I actually ran the battle twice, in particular to see the techniques and limits in Lucius's sneak attacks. The second run took awfully long....
Meanwhile, in Seaquen, the heroes have returned to the pyromancer's tomb and are investigating the stone dragon's mouth inside the first room in the tomb. A couple of the heroes find it challenging to cross the
wall of gloom just inside the dragon's mouth, but they all eventually make it into the vestibule. Gusle is able to read the warning Damatarion wrote above the door at the other end of the vestibule about disturbing his body's rest. They are alarmed by the lava flowing above their heads and even more alarmed when they realize that the door is somehow connected to the ceiling.
They give up, and ask advice from Simeon, who came down to inspect the teleportation magnet. He's thrilled to learn the pyromancer's name, since his name had been lost to history; otherwise, he has little more to suggest.
Jesús isn't content to leave well enough alone. He goes back into the vestibule and tries to shove the door open. He gives it best, mightest shove, but the door doesn't budge. On the other hand, lava starts dripping from the ceiling, burning him, so he quickly scurries out of the vestibule. In a matter of seconds, there is a loud
ka-wump from within the dragon's mouth, and a trickle of lava spills from it. Well, so much for that bit of exploration! Eventually, they leave with Simeon, who has left his assistants to prepare the teleportation magnet and its surroundings for possible visitors. On their way back to the Lyceum, Simeon suggests that the heroes go visit Cernaban to inquire about Nira.
Funny enough, they never inspected the vestibule again and didn't realize tha the lava had vanished. They now assume that getting into the tomb will be a mining operation.
Cernaban isn't around when they reach the remains of his business the next morning, but they do strike up a conversation with one of the workers. They learn that Cernaban is out arranging for building materials, and that Nira hasn't been seen since the hurricane -- unsurprising, since she's currently rotting in a cell beneath the Lyceum, but Cernaban's associates don't know that. Nira wasn't particularly social and was somethnig of a workaholic.
Eventually, they track down Cernaban and have a long, pleasant conversation with him. Cernaban lets them know what happened to the ships in the south shore: When Pickens and the people who listen to him learned that the Shahalesti had attacked the Wayfarer's Theater, they decided to attack the Shahalesti blockade. Unsurprisingly, between the increasingly bad weather and the strength of the blockading flotilla, the battle went poorly. So far as anyone knows, the ships that weren't destroyed by the Shahalesti were destroyed by the hurricane. On the other hand, so far as anyone knows, all the Shahalesti ships were destroyed by the hurricane as well.
When they get back around to the topic of Nira, he's equally uninformed, thinking of Nira as nothing but a steady second, and is shocked -- shocked! -- to learn that Nira would be involved in a plot to murder people, and promises to have his staff conduct an investigation into Nira's activities.
Surprisingly, the heroes seemed to actually take him at his word on this point, despite having already indentified him as the local crime lord. They earlier suspected that he was a really good liar and don't usually trust what they hear from him. Amazing what you can get away with by using a little glibness!
Instead of heading straight back to Seaquen, they decide to swing by the refugee area in hopes of meeting the hippogriff riders they spotted when they were headed to meet Cernaban. They're a bit surprised to see that the riders, Ostaliners, are waiting to meet them, along with Arick, the cleric of Nuador that Jesús battled to convince him to join the pantheistic temple. As they approach, Arick shouts out, "Give us the half-elf!" Gusle bristles and insists he's not their to give, but Jesús flees as fast as he can.
The heroes are confused...
I exclude Jesús from "heroes" at this point, given his abject cowardice.
...but Daemmek takes a firm stance, fires a warning shot into the ground in front of the Ostaliners. Arick is not impressed, but the hippogriff riders are cowed!
Unbelievable -- an untrained, rushed intimidate check with a 10 charisma is enough to wreck the whole encounter. I had planned for the cavalry to rain arrows down on Jesús, but Daemmek rendered them irrelevant with a single shot from her bow. In retrospect, that was a total misreading of the intimate skill.
Arick grabs one of the hippogriffs himself and gets ahead of Jesús. Jesús, realizing that escape is unlikely, runs back towards the heroes while the heroes quiz the cavalrymen about what's going on, eventually learning that they intend to take Jesús back to Ostalin for treason.
Arick and Jesús start to get into melee, and the heroes eventually join in as the two trade blows. Gusle, arriving last, uses Sparky to turn Jesús invisible and tells him to run off, which he readily does. Arick remains undeterred, and with the help of magic, attempts to head in the direction he heard Jesús run in. He almost decides to surrender, but after healing himself decides to continue the fight -- foolish, that, because Daemmek puts her strength behind her next blow and drives the living blade through Arick's heart. "Oops, I didn't mean to really kill him!"
The heroes go back to the cavalrymen with what they manage to loot from Arick but notice a few more Ostaliners come up -- another person from the cavalry, but also a couple squires and grooms as well. They ask if they are speaking to Prince Haizenius, and kneel when Jesús tells them they are. Everyone is baffled, but the newcomers explain that the Arick was hoping to hand the prince over to the Khagan in hopes of getting back in his good graces. These five, however, believe the Khagan is incompetent, and that his plans to invade the rest of Sindaire will effectively hand their entire empire to the Ragesians. They therefore wish to have Jes...Haizenius come back to Ostalin to help lead a revolt against the Khagan. Haizenius immediately agrees, but Dämmek, at least, is a little more cautious, and checks with her allies to see if they agree that this Ostaliner groom is telling the truth. She is.
And thus Jesús is written out of the story. This was a fun surprise, since he was thinking that his character was going to be dragged off to Ostalin in chains, not welcomed as a liberator. This scene also let me plant the rumor that the Khagan is planning to invade Sindaire, which is supposed to come up at some point in the next adventure or two.
"Look, up in the sky!"
"It's a bird!" says Dämmek.
"It's a dragon!" says Gusle.
Nope, sorry Gusle, it's a bird -- Takasi, to be precise, who says that he had a revelation while flying west. He explains what Laurabec and he had been planning: That the two of them were going to head north and provide aid to the refugees fleeing the Scourge in defiance of weather and Ragesian patrols. He has noticed Gusle's fundamental Goodness that she radiates even simply standing here now, and so he invites Gusle to join him on this noble Quest. Gusle is stunned by Takasi's offer, asks a few clarifying questions, and, after some consideration (certainly more than Jesús), decides to join Takasi, so the two fly west.
And thus Gusle is written out of the story. This was also a fun surprise, since she thought that she was going to become Naizelasa's attache in Seaquen. Gusle really deserved Takasi's company. Given that Gusle really was being played as Good, having her go on a heroic (and slighthly chaotic) quest that Laurabec would have taken seemed a much better fit that representing a lawful, self-aggrandizing dragon.
Incidentally, was the business about Takasi going west intended as another homage to Tolkein? It's sort of subtle in the text, but when I said it out loud during the previous session, it sounded very much like how the elves in The Lord of the Rings would go west.
Gusle later realizes, as they pass the Dragonspire, that they need to borrow the
lyre of building from Naizelasa to rebuild Seaquen, but that's all off-stage.
Dämmek and Basel are pleasantly surprised by how calm the next few weeks are. They both spend a lot of the time studying magic -- Dämmek with Crystin, Basel with the librarian. No one tries to kill them, no desperate mission calls, no one even tries to steal their stuff. Eventually, while strolling about, they see another seela walking toward them, accompanied by a mountain lion and maybe some guy. They decide to approach the newcomers when all seven hear a truncated scream down an alleyway. The seela and the guy (Seda and Lucius, in case you hadn't guessed) see the woman collapse, and then the shadows surrounding here start to move toward them. Oh my!
Lucius charges in to rescue the woman while Seda starts singing the Song of Forms. Dämmek and Basel join the battle as well. Blows are struck, spells are cast, and strength-draining slams are made in return. Seda has to call Smoke back because of all the strength damage she'd taken, and Dämmek has to retreat for the same reason. Lucius, surprisingly, takes minimal damage, despite keeping at least one shadow in sword range. Finally, after defeating the shadows, he heads into the alleyway to check on the woman only to have her shadow get up and attack him! A little more chopping defeats the remaining shadow.
This encounter was supposed to be an opportunity for the heroes to meet, greet, and battle some easy opponents together, but the shadows kept doing huge amounts of strength damage and it kept feeling to me like one of them was going to die. I therefore delayed the fourth shadow a little longer to at least avoid having anyone surrounded.
Singing the Song of Forms turns out to be not very fun, since the singer is stuck concentrating on singing. At least she had the animal companion to run -- that is, until it was too weakened to safely participate.
The heroes introduce themselves, and Seda and Lucius explain that they have important information for the Lyceum. So, they go to the Lyceum and tell their tales. Katrina is there and happily greets Lucius, and notes the irony of his trip -- if she had known her brother was in the resistance, she could have established contact with their cell easily enough.
On the other hand, Simeon is rattled by the news from Dassen. He dashes out of the room to start some preparations and asks the heroes to come back the following day to help with the effort in Dassen.
Our next session is November 9th.