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Message: <blockquote data-quote="LordVyreth" data-source="post: 1673577" data-attributes="member: 9626">The characters completely lose it.As the party and the undead horde prepare to swarm each other, a third party watched from a nearby hilltop.  She is called Danae, and she has come from Methosilang, seeking the heroes.  It was she who Tsine sought for help when he could no longer travel, and she did what she could to care for him.  Unfortunately, things recently took a turn for the worse.  Instead of being merely weak to the point of uselessness, he developed a kind of strange hysteria, and while laughing, he teleported away!  Danae tried to find him, but by the time she could find someone with the right magic prepared, he was impossible to find.  However, before he lost his mind, Tsine told her about his friends, and asked her to find them if anything should happen to him.  Danae agreed, and has been trying to track them ever since.  She finally succeeded in finding them, just as it looks like they needed her help.  She smiled.  Well, she may not have much experience with the gritty and dirty parts of adventuring, but she has been studying the Arts for a long time.    As for the party, they regarded this new figure with curiosity, but she at least appeared alive, and they had far bigger concerns to worry about.  Their major concerns were the smoky monster, armored skeleton, and bat.  The bat slowly moved towards them, and cast a spell on Fnipper.  It seemed to confuse him, and in his mentally-addled state, he saw everything as an enemy, and fled in terror.  Robin began to fire at the bat, and Tebryn and Tal used magic on the same creature, but all of their attacks seemed to do nothing.  While they party was distracted by them, they were surprised when a trio of strange-looking ghasts attacked.  They each touched runes that were carved all over their bodies, and used them to cast spells!  One became incredibly fast, as if it was hasted, and the others respectively fired arrows of flame and a lightning bolt at Grockith and Galeron, wounding them both slightly.    Just as things were looking bleak, the mysterious figure at the top of the hill entered the fight.  She cast one simple spell, and suddenly two of the ghasts and essentially the entirety of the army’s lesser minions were destroyed!  This let the party focus on the heavy hitters of the enemy team.  Grockith took the initiative here, and charge the remaining ghast, killing it instantly.  However, this left him wide open for the armored skeleton, which rode his horse towards the paladin, and attacked him repeatedly with his sword.  Most of the attacks couldn’t penetrate Grockith’s heavy armor, but a few lucky strikes found openings, leaving painful cuts in the half-dragon's skin.  Meanwhile, the smoky monster suddenly vanished, and then re-appeared near the party’s rear, where it could pose as a potential threat to Tal and the party’s other spell casters.  Finally, Thorrun used magic to enhance Robin’s arrows, in the hope that this will let him hit the bat, and Galeron tried to drive off the remaining undead using his holy power, but since only the most powerful undead remained in the battle, it did nothing.    The bat, meanwhile decided to focus on what seamed like the greatest threat on the field, the strange wizard.  It flew up next to the creature, and managed to bite her.  The bite was extremely painful, but even a cloistered mage like Danae had some training on how to minimize attacks, and she was able to easily survive an attack that would have felled a lesser wizard instantly.  However, unknown to her, a hideous transformation was beginning inside her.      The party began to split up to deal with their threats.  Grockith and Galeron began to attack the Death Knight, though when Tebryn closed to help, he was suddenly overcome by fear, and fled into the temple just like Fnipper did earlier.  Robin and Tal focused on the smoky creature for now, while Danae tried to stop it using magic.  However, though her training taught her that these creatures easily ignored all but the strongest magic, even the best spells she could muster did nothing.  Even worse, after a couple of tries, she suddenly realized the horrible effects of the transformation she was undergoing, and transformed into a giant bat herself!  She immediately went to look for a reasonable meal, and her now animalistic mind picked up a small but appetizing purple lizard with wings.    The smoky monster proved to be a fairly minor target.  He managed to emit one cone of mind-numbing psychic force, but the trained heroes easily resisted its effects, and then ripped it apart with arrows and a blast of sonic force.  However, no sooner did it die than they were faced with both the bat of darkness, and a new bat that was attacking Tal’s familiar.  Robin focused on the new bat, but Tal had a new moral dilemma.  He saw this strange figure helping them earlier, so he didn’t want to simply kill her, but she had to be stopped.  Fortunately, he was able to hold her in place with a spell, and then tried to help fight the bat, though his spells did nothing to it.      However, Robin’s arrows were another story, and Grockith used magic to fly up and engage the creature directly.  In desperation, the bat pointed at Grockith with one wing, and fired a beam of pure negative energy that could kill with a touch.  But Grockith withstood the power of the magic, and ended the creature’s life with one blow.    The fight was over, but a far more disturbing one was continuing in the temple.  While the rest of the party worked to capture the surviving, fleeing cultists and then restored Danae to her true form and heard her story, Fnipper and Tebryn ended up deep in the temple.  In his confused state, Fnipper recognized Tebryn as an enemy, and made one clumsy attack at Tebryn.  While it was obviously caused by a mind addled by magic, and posed no real threat to the drow, Tebryn had finally had enough.  The chaos of these past few months, the growing uselessness he felt, the sudden onslaught of enemies far stronger than anything he’d ever seen before, and his increasing and mostly irrational hatred for this strange gnome had finally drove him mad.  He entered a state of pure violence, and simply began to wail into the gnome.  Though Fnipper normally could resist such an attack, he was confused and totally unprepared, and barely reacted as Tebryn repeatedly attacked the near-helpless gnome.  The rest of the party returned just as Tebryn was about to drive his sword straight into Fnipper’s heart.  Tebryn ignored their cries of protest, and finished the shocked gnome!  In his rage, he then turned to the party, and seemed to regard them as more possible victims for his madness.  However, this would be the last thing he would see, for Grockith was already riding up to this clearly evil force in their midst, and decapitated him with one strike!    The rest of the party members were beside themselves with shock and grief.  To think that they would survive the threat of the undead, only to lose two of their own to fellow party members!  Galeron in particular was upset, since he knew Tebryn the longest, and never could have imagined him doing such a thing.  And everyone was further shocked when they turned again to the body, only to see Grockith neatly cutting them into parts and shocking them and their equipment into a bag!    “Grockith, what are you doing?” a shocked Galeron asked.    “Well, I couldn’t fit their bodies into by Bag of Holding, so I had to cut them into pieces to fit them in,” Grockith said, in a strangely hollow voice.    “That’s awful!  What paladin could do desecrate the body of a comrade like that, so soon after they died?”    Grockith shrugged, as if he didn’t really care about them one way or the other, and continued.  Only Tal had the clarity to speak up and point out another flaw in Grockith’s plan.  “You know, that’s really not such a good idea.  Fnipper also has a Ba…nowaitstop!”    BOOM!        It was too late.  Fnipper, who also had a Bag of Holding, just had his equipment tossed into Grockith’s Bag of Holding, with predictable effects.  Soon, all the remains of Fnipper, Tebryn, Fnipper’s bag, and Grockith’s bag were scattered across the Astral Plane, lost forever.    The party could do nothing but sit in stunned silence after the madness and loss that they witnessed.  Some mourned friends that died and/or revealed deeply disturbing sides of themselves, some regretted the loss of so much treasure, and Tal in particular came to the horrible realization that Raz himself was in Fnipper’s bag, and thus all the answers they intended to get from him have been lost.  And Danae watched these friends of her own friend turn on each other, die, and make terrible mistakes with magic items, and wondered what she got herself into.  Ironically, she had also already lived out her own worst nightmare before she even heard of the Nightmare Prince, for she had always feared losing her amazing intellect, and she had already been reduced, albeit briefly, to the intellect of an animal.    OOC Notes:  Okay, I won’t regularly do this feature any more, but this game needed some explanation.  Basically, we have one new player (Danae being her character,) who will essentially replace Tsine.  We had two players who wanted to play new characters, and thus killed their characters off (hence the deaths of Fnipper and Tebryn.)  This bothered me quite a bit at the time, especially since Fnipper played a big part in the plot of the next adventure and the player didn’t tell me he wanted to switch, but this is water under the bridge from over a year ago, and things have long since been resolved.  And we had a paladin who acted really strangely, and we still don’t know why.  This isn’t exactly the last or worst of his odd behavior, either.  At any rate, I was worried that all the other strangeness would drive away the new player, but she would later tell me that the whole thing was just part of the strangeness that she expected from a gaming group!</blockquote>

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