Adventure IV, Prolog
Dramatis Personae
Erielle (or maybe just Eriel, but pronounced the same either way) is a ranger from Shahalesti. She shoots things with her bow. She's spent the last month or so guiding refugees through the swamps to Seaquen. Some of them, it turns out, found their way to the Lyceum, so they have her respect.
Kjolmar is a clanless dwarf in dreadlocks decorated with feathers, beads, and small animal bonus, some of which might have significance but some of which is certainly just debris. He's rough, uncouth, and antisocial. Unknown to most people, he was cast out by his clan in Gate Pass when he sided with an elf contrary to the clan's interests. He was banished for doing so, so he was forced into life as a mercenary. Eventually, he regained something of a name for himself when he joined the Gate Pass Resistance 40 years ago when Ragesia first invaded the city. His combat effectiveness, combined with his unwavering dedication to the cause, earned him a place with the resistance, and he has spent the last several decades popping up to help whenever Gate Pass was being threatened. He has regained the respect of his clan, but is still officially outcast in order to protect the clan. When not in the service of Gate Pass, he has spent some time as a mercenary. He briefly encountered Katrina while in the employee of a Ragesian fort. They fought giants together, but Katrina scared him more the giants.
Warm-up: Encounters In Seaquen
Our first encounter is a simple spellduel -- Katrina and Amelia start the dueling off with a sister act, refereed by Kjolmar. Amelia hammers away at Katrina with her rays, hoping to score a sneak attack with which to steal a spell from Katrina. Katrina mostly sticks to her offensive spells, although she did have to become invisibility at one point during the duel. She also manages to immolate Kjolmar at least once -- Kjolmar will be having nightmares of burning to death for months. Amelia manages to use grease to bring Katrina down once. Finally, after much back-and-forth between the two duelists, Amelia gets close enough for Katrina to immolate the both of them, knocking them two women unconscious. While technically a tie, the audience, aware of Katrina's reputation, reacts as though Amelia had won the duel.
Having Katrina throw the spellduel was harder than I had expected. In part this was because Amelia didn't attempt to use any of the spelldueling tricks like readying or bluffing and in part because Katrina is sorely lacking in non-offensive spells.
After the spellduel, Amelia is approached by someone who indicates that Xavious Foebane is interested in speaking to her. Eriel and Kjolmar follow along to, uh, act as bodyguards -- yeah, that's it.
Not the most cohesive of parties -- it's not at all clear why Amelia would associate with the other two at this point.
Xavious is surprised when the heroes arrived, as he was not aware that people were coming to visit him. He introduces them to the Conquest board and play a brief game with Amelia, with Kjolmar rather rudely kibitzing on the side -- well enough to convince Xavious that Kjolmar might know something about strategy.
I didn't find the rules for Conquest very interesting, so we skipped that and simply role-played playing the board game. It helped burnish Kjolmar's backstory, if nothing else.
Xavious eventually realizes why he'd sent for help from the Lyceum: He'd heard that Pickens Frankart is stirring up trouble in the south harbor regarding the fires. He doubts there is much to the fires along the south harbor, as they weren't terribly new, although he does mention the fires along the North Shore as an unusual twist.
So, the heroes go to the south harbor area and find Pickens in a tavern, speaking with a halfling. The halfling excuses himself when they arrive, so the heroes start quizzing Pickens about his story. They spend a great deal of time trying to reason with him and getting nowhere, of course. However, one thing that does get Pickens' attention is Kjolmar's mention of the fire sorceress who recently arrived in town -- Pickens immediately put two and two together and decides that it was Katrina in particular who has been starting the fires along the south harbor.
The whole "blame Katrina" thing was funny, but now Amelia is getting annoyed that Kjolmar keeps casting aspersions on her sister. Can't please everyone, I guess.
The other theory the heroes propose to Pickens was that maybe it was Ragesian spies, not the Lyceum, that was setting the fires, trying to sow discord in Seaquen. He responds fairly positively to the idea at the time, but this story works even better when the heroes share it with the most recent victims of a house fire. Amelia spends the afternoon trying to organize neighborhood watches to look out for Ragesian spies.
This was an unexpected "solution" to the Pickens problem -- now, rather than blaming the Lyceum, the south harbor residents had multiple targets to blame. I figured this blunted Pickens' efforts at rousing the rabble, so the rag-tag fleet assaulting the Shahelesti during the storm didn't have as many ships as it might have had they not done this. I'm still not quite clear what Pickens accusing the Lyceum of starting fires has to do with the fleet sailing against the Shahalesti, though -- the causal relationship there escaped us all.
The heroes spend quite a while discussing what to do regarding the halfling they saw talking to Pickens. They figured out while listening to Pickens that someone else was feeding him this story, as some of his arguments didn't ring true -- he was mouthing someone else's words about the Lyceum. They never get around to confronting the halfling, though.
...which was probably for the better. They assumed that The Halfling was himself a person of some import, but I had decided that he was just a gopher for Cerneban Gremman. They would have either gotten stuck, confused by Cerneban's lack of real knowledge, or gotten themselves into a heap of trouble with the halfing mafia.
They never did follow up on the fires on the North Shore. The rats would have been fun: Ari had seen the sparking teeth of the inquisitor's rat in the fire tomb right before she killed the poor rodent.
On the way back to the Lyceum, they run into a small group of thugs in a back alley who had encountered Judson Figovich carrying oil for his stove back to his apartment. The mob had decided Judson was an arsonist, despite the fact that he's lived in Seaquen for most of his life. Amelia manage to charm the leader of the mob, which only angers the rest of them, but eventually they manage to get Judson free and scare away the thugs without killing anyone.
Judson spends some time with the party, spouting off various trivia about the city, until he decides he needed to head home (down one of the more public streets, this time). Judson doesn't get but two doors down before screaming briefly and vanishing from sight. The heroes race to investigate, only to discover that Judson's trail suddenly ends right in front of an abandoned warehouse. Kjolmar bashes through the warehouse door to discover a pitch-black warehouse with teetering towers of crates, bits of abandoned belongings, and very little else. Then suddenly, a spider the size of a horse appears out of thin air! It takes a bite of him, then vanished seconds later. Kjolmar feels the poison running through his bloodstream and finds it invigorating. The three of them creep deeper into the warehouse, peering around for the spider. It phases in to attack Amelia and the immediately vanishes, so they beat a retreat back to the warehouse entrance. However, Eriel happens to stride past one of the less stable towers of crates, making enough noise to bring it down on her head.
I'm not going to go into detail about their fight with the phase spiders. Suffice to say, it was a good opportunity for this party to spend some time trying to figure out how to work together. It also pointed out how ill-equipped the elf and the dwarf are for adventuring, although it's not clear that they got the hint.
I also decided that Judson spends some of his free time playing his lyre to entertain the children, just on the off chance they figure out that trying to get the magic lyre from Naizelasa might be useful. Strangely, they didn't think to ask anyone at the Lyceum about the phase spiders, although they did mention the spider nest to the temple they left Judson in.
Eriel and Kjolmar spend the week before the hurricane cleaning up the warehouse to provide living space for refugees, while Amelia returns to her duties at the Lyceum. Then, as the weather is changing for the worse, Crystin approaches Amelia. The Lyceum has learned that Lee is a Ragesian agent, and she needs Amelia, with her new elf and dwarf friends, to go to Lee's residence and capture him, or at least confiscate his magic items. Amelia denies having any new friends, but Crystin isn't falling for it.
Yeah, real cohesive, this bunch.
The heroes break into Lee's place without any difficulty. In his office, they discover a scroll case, a wand case (with a fire trap that Eriel mostly dodges) and a large amphora that looks to be a recent addition. After some debate on the correct way to break an amphora, Eriel takes the simple approach and simply lifts off the lid after Kjolmar gets halfway down the stairs. The amphora is protected another fire trap that destroys the amphora and lets loose its occupant -- a living prismatic cloud. It slimes Eriel with acid, and poisons Kjolmar, not that he even notices, before they turn the ooze into a blob of technicolor marshmallow cream on the carpet.
They proceed on and eventually get down to Lee's water exit, in which he's left a flock of stirges to guard the place. Eriel manages to kill a couple before both she and Kjolmar get covered by the blood-suckers. Kjolmar squishes one against a wall and Eriel manages to shoot several that are on him before Kjolmar jumps into the sea in hopes of convincing the last attached stirge to leave. It doesn't work -- it drinks its fill before trying to get away. Meanwhile, the stirges on Eriel continue to suck away and completely drain her blood before the heroes finish the stirges off.
No worries though -- Amelia quickly digs through the magic items Eriel grabbed in Lee's office and discovers a scroll of reincarnate -- and a wand of owl's wisdom to make using it feasible! So, ten minutes and six seconds later, Eriel stands back up -- only a bit clumsier and a whole lot hairier. Amelia brought Eriel to life as a half-orc!
I did not expect that scroll to get used so soon. The funny thing is, Eriel's player didn't know how reincarnate works, so she was completely surprised to discover her character is now a half-orc. Better yet, she's now beginning to seriously think about this character's personality in light of this little change of identity.
Back To Our Regularly Scheduled Adventure
Amelia notices a young man staring at their group rather than listening to Crystin's strolling lecture. Amelia invites Crystin over for introductions, whereupon everyone is dismayed to learn that they're heading for Bresk. She introduces the staring lad as Jineer, who haltingly asks the heroes to carry a message to his father, as he has a bad feeling that his father is in trouble. "Your father will be caged by madness," says Crystin, not even slightly reassuringly. The heroes agree, although they're more concerned about why everyone knows that they are headed to Bresk but them. Crystin tells them they should talk to Simeon.
Eventually, they give up on getting information out of Crystin, go to Simeon's office, and get the spiel about their next mission from Balan (as described in the adventure). They run into Fitz on the way out of the meeting, who smugly points out that he is actually going on a mission that will help liberate Gate Pass. "Try to keep Seaquen from getting overrun before I get back, mm'kay?"
Making Crystin the lecturer that Jineer was ignoring made it easier to give her a chance to utter her latest prophecy. I hadn't expected them to quiz her so on their not-so-secret mission, though. That said, they've now started deeply planning clever ways to get to Bresk without getting waylaid by Ragesian agents, including radical ideas like taking a ship to the Ostalin-Dassen border and walking cross-country to Bresk from there. Given how seriously they're taking this, I guess I'm going to have to come up with some Ragesian agents to waylay them. Uh...help?
Dramatis Personae
- Amelia, a human spellthieving acetomancer
- Erielle, an elven archer ranger
- Kjolmar, a dwarven dungeoncrashing deepwarden
Having Amelia related to Katrina makes me a bit nervous. Lylandra's example has inspired me to be brave, though!
Erielle (or maybe just Eriel, but pronounced the same either way) is a ranger from Shahalesti. She shoots things with her bow. She's spent the last month or so guiding refugees through the swamps to Seaquen. Some of them, it turns out, found their way to the Lyceum, so they have her respect.
Kjolmar is a clanless dwarf in dreadlocks decorated with feathers, beads, and small animal bonus, some of which might have significance but some of which is certainly just debris. He's rough, uncouth, and antisocial. Unknown to most people, he was cast out by his clan in Gate Pass when he sided with an elf contrary to the clan's interests. He was banished for doing so, so he was forced into life as a mercenary. Eventually, he regained something of a name for himself when he joined the Gate Pass Resistance 40 years ago when Ragesia first invaded the city. His combat effectiveness, combined with his unwavering dedication to the cause, earned him a place with the resistance, and he has spent the last several decades popping up to help whenever Gate Pass was being threatened. He has regained the respect of his clan, but is still officially outcast in order to protect the clan. When not in the service of Gate Pass, he has spent some time as a mercenary. He briefly encountered Katrina while in the employee of a Ragesian fort. They fought giants together, but Katrina scared him more the giants.
Warm-up: Encounters In Seaquen
Our first encounter is a simple spellduel -- Katrina and Amelia start the dueling off with a sister act, refereed by Kjolmar. Amelia hammers away at Katrina with her rays, hoping to score a sneak attack with which to steal a spell from Katrina. Katrina mostly sticks to her offensive spells, although she did have to become invisibility at one point during the duel. She also manages to immolate Kjolmar at least once -- Kjolmar will be having nightmares of burning to death for months. Amelia manages to use grease to bring Katrina down once. Finally, after much back-and-forth between the two duelists, Amelia gets close enough for Katrina to immolate the both of them, knocking them two women unconscious. While technically a tie, the audience, aware of Katrina's reputation, reacts as though Amelia had won the duel.
Having Katrina throw the spellduel was harder than I had expected. In part this was because Amelia didn't attempt to use any of the spelldueling tricks like readying or bluffing and in part because Katrina is sorely lacking in non-offensive spells.
After the spellduel, Amelia is approached by someone who indicates that Xavious Foebane is interested in speaking to her. Eriel and Kjolmar follow along to, uh, act as bodyguards -- yeah, that's it.
Not the most cohesive of parties -- it's not at all clear why Amelia would associate with the other two at this point.
Xavious is surprised when the heroes arrived, as he was not aware that people were coming to visit him. He introduces them to the Conquest board and play a brief game with Amelia, with Kjolmar rather rudely kibitzing on the side -- well enough to convince Xavious that Kjolmar might know something about strategy.
I didn't find the rules for Conquest very interesting, so we skipped that and simply role-played playing the board game. It helped burnish Kjolmar's backstory, if nothing else.
Xavious eventually realizes why he'd sent for help from the Lyceum: He'd heard that Pickens Frankart is stirring up trouble in the south harbor regarding the fires. He doubts there is much to the fires along the south harbor, as they weren't terribly new, although he does mention the fires along the North Shore as an unusual twist.
So, the heroes go to the south harbor area and find Pickens in a tavern, speaking with a halfling. The halfling excuses himself when they arrive, so the heroes start quizzing Pickens about his story. They spend a great deal of time trying to reason with him and getting nowhere, of course. However, one thing that does get Pickens' attention is Kjolmar's mention of the fire sorceress who recently arrived in town -- Pickens immediately put two and two together and decides that it was Katrina in particular who has been starting the fires along the south harbor.
The whole "blame Katrina" thing was funny, but now Amelia is getting annoyed that Kjolmar keeps casting aspersions on her sister. Can't please everyone, I guess.
The other theory the heroes propose to Pickens was that maybe it was Ragesian spies, not the Lyceum, that was setting the fires, trying to sow discord in Seaquen. He responds fairly positively to the idea at the time, but this story works even better when the heroes share it with the most recent victims of a house fire. Amelia spends the afternoon trying to organize neighborhood watches to look out for Ragesian spies.
This was an unexpected "solution" to the Pickens problem -- now, rather than blaming the Lyceum, the south harbor residents had multiple targets to blame. I figured this blunted Pickens' efforts at rousing the rabble, so the rag-tag fleet assaulting the Shahelesti during the storm didn't have as many ships as it might have had they not done this. I'm still not quite clear what Pickens accusing the Lyceum of starting fires has to do with the fleet sailing against the Shahalesti, though -- the causal relationship there escaped us all.
The heroes spend quite a while discussing what to do regarding the halfling they saw talking to Pickens. They figured out while listening to Pickens that someone else was feeding him this story, as some of his arguments didn't ring true -- he was mouthing someone else's words about the Lyceum. They never get around to confronting the halfling, though.
...which was probably for the better. They assumed that The Halfling was himself a person of some import, but I had decided that he was just a gopher for Cerneban Gremman. They would have either gotten stuck, confused by Cerneban's lack of real knowledge, or gotten themselves into a heap of trouble with the halfing mafia.
They never did follow up on the fires on the North Shore. The rats would have been fun: Ari had seen the sparking teeth of the inquisitor's rat in the fire tomb right before she killed the poor rodent.
On the way back to the Lyceum, they run into a small group of thugs in a back alley who had encountered Judson Figovich carrying oil for his stove back to his apartment. The mob had decided Judson was an arsonist, despite the fact that he's lived in Seaquen for most of his life. Amelia manage to charm the leader of the mob, which only angers the rest of them, but eventually they manage to get Judson free and scare away the thugs without killing anyone.
Judson spends some time with the party, spouting off various trivia about the city, until he decides he needed to head home (down one of the more public streets, this time). Judson doesn't get but two doors down before screaming briefly and vanishing from sight. The heroes race to investigate, only to discover that Judson's trail suddenly ends right in front of an abandoned warehouse. Kjolmar bashes through the warehouse door to discover a pitch-black warehouse with teetering towers of crates, bits of abandoned belongings, and very little else. Then suddenly, a spider the size of a horse appears out of thin air! It takes a bite of him, then vanished seconds later. Kjolmar feels the poison running through his bloodstream and finds it invigorating. The three of them creep deeper into the warehouse, peering around for the spider. It phases in to attack Amelia and the immediately vanishes, so they beat a retreat back to the warehouse entrance. However, Eriel happens to stride past one of the less stable towers of crates, making enough noise to bring it down on her head.
I'm not going to go into detail about their fight with the phase spiders. Suffice to say, it was a good opportunity for this party to spend some time trying to figure out how to work together. It also pointed out how ill-equipped the elf and the dwarf are for adventuring, although it's not clear that they got the hint.
I also decided that Judson spends some of his free time playing his lyre to entertain the children, just on the off chance they figure out that trying to get the magic lyre from Naizelasa might be useful. Strangely, they didn't think to ask anyone at the Lyceum about the phase spiders, although they did mention the spider nest to the temple they left Judson in.
Eriel and Kjolmar spend the week before the hurricane cleaning up the warehouse to provide living space for refugees, while Amelia returns to her duties at the Lyceum. Then, as the weather is changing for the worse, Crystin approaches Amelia. The Lyceum has learned that Lee is a Ragesian agent, and she needs Amelia, with her new elf and dwarf friends, to go to Lee's residence and capture him, or at least confiscate his magic items. Amelia denies having any new friends, but Crystin isn't falling for it.
Yeah, real cohesive, this bunch.
The heroes break into Lee's place without any difficulty. In his office, they discover a scroll case, a wand case (with a fire trap that Eriel mostly dodges) and a large amphora that looks to be a recent addition. After some debate on the correct way to break an amphora, Eriel takes the simple approach and simply lifts off the lid after Kjolmar gets halfway down the stairs. The amphora is protected another fire trap that destroys the amphora and lets loose its occupant -- a living prismatic cloud. It slimes Eriel with acid, and poisons Kjolmar, not that he even notices, before they turn the ooze into a blob of technicolor marshmallow cream on the carpet.
They proceed on and eventually get down to Lee's water exit, in which he's left a flock of stirges to guard the place. Eriel manages to kill a couple before both she and Kjolmar get covered by the blood-suckers. Kjolmar squishes one against a wall and Eriel manages to shoot several that are on him before Kjolmar jumps into the sea in hopes of convincing the last attached stirge to leave. It doesn't work -- it drinks its fill before trying to get away. Meanwhile, the stirges on Eriel continue to suck away and completely drain her blood before the heroes finish the stirges off.
No worries though -- Amelia quickly digs through the magic items Eriel grabbed in Lee's office and discovers a scroll of reincarnate -- and a wand of owl's wisdom to make using it feasible! So, ten minutes and six seconds later, Eriel stands back up -- only a bit clumsier and a whole lot hairier. Amelia brought Eriel to life as a half-orc!
I did not expect that scroll to get used so soon. The funny thing is, Eriel's player didn't know how reincarnate works, so she was completely surprised to discover her character is now a half-orc. Better yet, she's now beginning to seriously think about this character's personality in light of this little change of identity.
Back To Our Regularly Scheduled Adventure
Amelia notices a young man staring at their group rather than listening to Crystin's strolling lecture. Amelia invites Crystin over for introductions, whereupon everyone is dismayed to learn that they're heading for Bresk. She introduces the staring lad as Jineer, who haltingly asks the heroes to carry a message to his father, as he has a bad feeling that his father is in trouble. "Your father will be caged by madness," says Crystin, not even slightly reassuringly. The heroes agree, although they're more concerned about why everyone knows that they are headed to Bresk but them. Crystin tells them they should talk to Simeon.
Eventually, they give up on getting information out of Crystin, go to Simeon's office, and get the spiel about their next mission from Balan (as described in the adventure). They run into Fitz on the way out of the meeting, who smugly points out that he is actually going on a mission that will help liberate Gate Pass. "Try to keep Seaquen from getting overrun before I get back, mm'kay?"
Making Crystin the lecturer that Jineer was ignoring made it easier to give her a chance to utter her latest prophecy. I hadn't expected them to quiz her so on their not-so-secret mission, though. That said, they've now started deeply planning clever ways to get to Bresk without getting waylaid by Ragesian agents, including radical ideas like taking a ship to the Ostalin-Dassen border and walking cross-country to Bresk from there. Given how seriously they're taking this, I guess I'm going to have to come up with some Ragesian agents to waylay them. Uh...help?
