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Message: <blockquote data-quote="LordVyreth" data-source="post: 2121572" data-attributes="member: 9626">The Price of a Soul: Having a Bit of FunHours after she initially contacted some sort of god or similarly powerful extra-planar entity, Danae returned to the party with what she knew.  “I was able to get some leads, so I don’t think we’re completely out of options,” she explained.  “I now know where Tesserill’s soul has gone.”“To Bas?” Tal asked, but Danae shook her head.“No, it’s not that simple, fortunately.  Bas might be regaining strength, but she’s not a full goddess yet.  She’s still trapped on this plane in her physical body, so she doesn’t have a domain on the outer planes.  Thus, her followers don’t go to her when they die?”“So where do they go?” Robin wondered.“Well, the various evil sects end up in appropriate planes, where they have to wait for Bas to ascend before they are allowed to leave.”  She grinned.  “With any luck, we can make this a very long wait.  However, the neutral followers don’t really have an appropriate place to go.  It turns out that when this kind of thing happens, a new afterlife is created for them until they can be taken to a more appropriate place.  It sounds like the Bas worshippers ended up in some place called the Crystal Glade.  Now, this place doesn’t have its own demi-plane.  Instead, it’s located somewhere on a plane called the Outlands.  And before you ask, The Outlands is a plane believed to be located at the very center of reality!  Remember Sigil, that weird city we ended up in after exiting the Rift?  It’s theoretically located at the very center of The Outlands.  The Glade is no where near the center.  It’s supposed to be close to this city on The Outlands called Glorium.  I don’t know exactly the Glade is from there, but I think we can get more information if we go to this city.  Is everyone good with taking a look?”Everyone agreed, and after taking a few days to make final preparations, the party was ready to go!  However, before they could, they were subject to another delay, albeit a pleasant one.  This one came in the form of Tiana, a member of the anti-undead Delaspie guards, and Azat, a strange cleric from an alternate Prime Material Plane that somehow ended up in Delaspie and also joined their guards.  However, the two have been less busy lately since the war between Delaspie and the Orc Empire heated up, leaving Delaspie in ruins.  The war ended almost a year ago at this point, but Delaspie was still in recovery, and with the undead being so quiet lately, Tiana and Azat were suspicious.  They heard of the party’s exploits and decided that if anyone could help them get to the bottom of the undead’s plans in time to save Delaspie, it would be them.  Eager to go, the party did a quick check of their backgrounds, found their stories checked out, and simply brought them along. The city of Glorium was, in a word, strange.  Danae told the group before they left that the city was a good place, but it also tended to be pretty wild.  But they knew she was understating this last part when they learned that the town was ruled over by a slaad!  To make things worse, it was a black slaad, which most of the party didn’t even hear of.  According to Danae, though, they were incredibly powerful beings that even balors and pit fiends feared.  After exploring the town for a few hours, the party finally learned that one of the locals had knowledge of the Glade and where it was located.  His name was Blediggs, and he apparently spent a lot of his time in a local tavern called the Gleeful Tankard.  The party entered the strange tavern and began to search for their hopeful new contact.Of course, keeping adventurers on track at a tavern is like herding cats in the best of situations, and extraplanar taverns are not the best of situations.  While Danae tried searching for Blediggs, the rest of the group explored the strange bar.  Robin was interested in one of the bar’s more interesting attractions; a combat pit in the middle of the bar that holds daily non-lethal fights.  Tal was interested in proving himself as well, but not in battle.  He noticed that there were a lot of bards trying to ply their craft here, and wanted to see how he stood against the competition.  Finally, Bath noticed that despite being a mostly good town, there were a lot of demons that seemed to live here.  She instinctively put a hand on her sword, but for once she decided that restraint would be the better choice.  Besides the fact that attacking the local patrons would probably get her run out of town and seriously hurt her friends’ plan, this was one of the rare opportunities she could get information from a demon on neutral grounds.  After all, she wasn’t just in the party to hunt demons; she was there to hunt a very specific demon or some other kind of evil outsider.  She was an assassin, after all…Danae, meanwhile, had finally found someone, but it wasn’t Blediggs like she hoped.  Instead, she located a githzerai named Amon, or more accurately, he found her.  “Are you Danae Loreweaver?” “It’s Runeweaver, actually, and do I know you?” A distracted Danae asked.“No, but I know about you guys.  You’re awesome!  I mean, I don’t know that much about you, because of you-know-who,” he says, while clearly avoiding even mentioning The Indigo Entity, “But what I heard about you was really cool!  Did you really save a city full of dragons?  And team up with pirates?  And discover a lost continent?”“Well, I wasn’t there for that last one, but otherwise yes,” Danae muttered.  “But I’m kind of busy right now.  Is there something you want?”“Oh, yeah, I heard about that.  You’re going after the Crystal Glade, right?  You’re so on top of what’s new!  I want to help you!  I can be a big help!”“Well, I don’t know,” Danae said.  “I’ll talk to the others about it, and maybe we can figure something out, okay?” Meanwhile, Robin was the first to try out the arena.  He decided to try fighting the toughest guy in the bar.  What he didn’t learn until it was too late, however, was that the toughest guy in the bar was a white slaad that was one of the black’s personal bodyguards!  White slaads aren’t as powerful as the black variety, but they’re still far more powerful than normal outsiders.  They have evolved to contain a bit of the divine power, letting them reach epic proportions of power.  And since Robin couldn’t use his bow since it was nonlethal combat, the fight was a little stacked in the slaad’s favor.  It easily pummeled Robin into unconsciousness.  While the party healed Robin’s bruises, Amon decided this would be the perfect chance to prove his worth to the party, and he challenged the white to fight him next.  Danae sat down to watch with an amused look on her face, convinced that this adventurer fan would last even less time than Robin did.  Both her and the slaad’s amused looks faded, however, when Amon immediately pummeled him with a blow that left the frog-thing stunned!  Unable to evade the githzerai monk’s attacks, the frog was an easy target and got repeatedly stunned every time Amon had the chance.  Eventually, it recovered and the battle turned back in its favor, but while Amon lost the fight, he had earned Danae’s respect.  She decided that he could tag along with them until they at least got through the Crystal Glade.Tal, however, was having more luck with his own challenge.  He found the most popular (and snottiest) bard in the tavern, strode up to him, and said, “You think you’re better than me?”The bard looked at the competition and sniffed dismissively.  “You’ve barely left your plane, haven’t you?  I can defeat you without breaking a sweat.”Tal didn’t skip a beat.  He threw a few thousand gold down at the table and asked, “Want to back those words up?”The two musicians each played three songs.  It was obvious from the start that the local bard had more experience, but he was also overconfident.  Tal had something to prove and he gave it his all for every song.  The bard was struck speechless when the tavern erupted in applause after ever one of Tal’s songs!  Realizing he was defeated, the bard quickly tossed a bag of money at Tal and ran out the door before he could be humiliated further.By now, Bath managed to strike up a conversation with a local succubus.  To gain an edge in negotiations by making the demon overconfident, she used her traditional human disguise as a naïve young human woman (as opposed to a naïve young angel, of course.)  “Hi!” the cheerful Bath said to the demon as she approached.  “Can you help me with something?”The succubus, eager to find a mortal to corrupt, happily replies, “Of course, young one.  What do you want?”“I need you to find some information about an enemy of mine.”“That shouldn’t be too hard.  But my help comes at a price…”“Okay, how about this?  If I can beat you in a fight, you tell me?”This suggestion was a bit of a surprise for the succubus.  After all, though her kind weren’t known for their combat abilities compared to others of her kind, she was nonetheless still a demon, and no mere human should stand a chance.  “Very well,” the prideful demon said.The two quickly entered the tavern arena, and just as quickly, Bath revealed her true form and beat the succubus into the ground.  When she had recovered, the embarrassed demon asked Bath, “Who are you looking for?  And could you make it quick?  I want to get out of here; I’ll never be able to live down being fooled that easily.”Bath described the creature she was instructed to hunt down, and the succubus agreed to go “home” and get what information she can.While all this was going on, Danae finally found Blediggs.  It turned out he was a Death slaad that works for Ur-Gaxx, the black slaad.  He was ordered to investigate The Outlands after a swarm of strange monsters attacked Glorium.  His group tracked the survivors to a strange crystal forest, but the monsters inside wiped out the rest of his band.  He fled home, and explained to Ur-Gaxx that the problem will solve itself very soon.  While he was there, he saw that the monsters were coming from a tear in reality itself forming in the middle of the forest.  Apparently, this temporary afterlife was imperfectly established, creating a portal to the area beyond reality; an area known as the Far Realm!  This portal is growing and it will soon engulf the entire glade, sending it to the Far Realm and dooming Tesserill and other dead followers of her sect to a hellish afterlife!  With little time to spare, Danae realized she had to negotiate a contract with Blediggs and get to the Crystal Glade as soon as possible.  By the time negotiations had begun, Tal joined Danae in discussing terms.  Blediggs is willing to travel with the party, but his services won’t be cheap.  He wants 20,000 gold up front.  In addition, he has figured out that the glade is an afterlife of sorts, and he wants the rights to half of the souls present!  A more noble soul would be morally opposed to giving away souls, even souls who were once enemies of the party, to a slaad who would most likely use them to create more of the bizarre frog monsters.  Tal and Danae, however, were happy with the deal for now, and figured this part of the agreement could be kept secret from the more noble souls in the party!  After all, they only care about one soul in the first place.  Danae, in fact, considered selling Blediggs the rest of their half of the souls, but thought that would be going too far for now!  Once their plans were made, the party gathered so Danae and Tal could explain the situation, Amon was introduced to everybody, and the party set out to traverse The Outlands.OOC Notes: Lots of new people this game!  Tiana and Azat are new characters for new players who joined us in this adventure and have been generally consistent in making the games since then.  In fact, after a few problems early on due to changes in living situations and such, I don’t think they missed a game!  Amon is the new character for Xalem’s player.</blockquote>

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