NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8576607" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Last session, the party finally opened the master bedroom of the ancient Al-Shafadir palace. The room itself was kind of dull, clearly set up to protect the furniture with magical and mundane means, but they knew more had to be going on. Moreover, the room had some very impressive magic items: a pair of large glass "windows." See, this being the private bedroom of some powerful genie-rajahs, having open windows was a bit of a gamble, but having no windows would have been drab. So they had magic glass installed, panes magically treated so they would reveal what was on the other side of the wall! The party spent a bit of time in the middle of the session learning what they could about how it worked and hoping to copy its magic later (cooperating with their wizard and expert artificer ally, Hafsa).Investigating the room, they were able to locate a hidden latch that revealed a secret chamber containing a magic "panic room" type thing. Basically, the genie-rajahs (and both of their successor cultures, the mortals who replaced them in the mortal world and who were the ancestors of the PCs, and the Jinnistani genies who departed the mortal world for the elemental otherworld, Al-Akirah) would magically treat a wall so that it would become a portal to a room completely cut off from the rest of the house, often buried underground, as a way to hide secrets or escape attackers. This one, however, had something strange on its portal mural.Similar to the very first mural they found of this kind (at a human-built house in Al-Rakkah), it featured two trees. One tree, on the left, was a kind they were familiar with, the hikmah tree. This tree is called the "tree of wisdom." It grows very slowly (think olives and other trees that need several years before they produce proper fruit) but it has some alchemical activity in its fruit and really can encourage enlightenment and wisdom. It wasn't much of a surprise to see this tree there, as they had found other hikmah trees (not very healthy, mostly due to two millennia of neglect) on the palace grounds.The other tree, however, was deeply strange. Unlike other Jinnistani plants they have seen, it was a relatively normal tree (as in, having leaves and fruit and such made of ordinary plant matter, not fire or ice or smoke etc.) But its appearance was weird, even disturbing. Its leaves were black, and it seemed to grow out of fire rather than earth. On its many branches, it bore fruit that looked like faces. The party Bard, whose area of knowledge is effectively cryptozoology (he carries a Bestiary of Creatures Unusual), identified the tree as a zaqqum, but that opened even more questions. Zaqqum are not good trees in the mythology of the Tarrakhuna. They are associated with sin and darkness and the knowledge of suffering. They're also extremely rare, to the point that none are known to exist and some modern-day naturalists are unsure if they ever existed at all, thinking they may have just been a metaphor for the faults of the often cruel and oppressive genie-rajahs when they ruled mortal kind in the ancient past. But a few fragmentary myths thought to be based on old genie beliefs present the zaqqum in a more positive light; it isn't a happy or joyful tree, but it is still serving a good end, by providing a more grounded form of understanding, compared to the implied abstractness and detachment of the hikmah's enlightenment.Further, after a quick search located the physical key, the party Spellslinger (hybrid wizard, sharpshooter, and artificer) learned that the trigger word for the mural was the ancient genie-rajah word for "succession" or "inheritance," which seemed curious.Inside they found an almost completely empty private vault, containing mostly just empty chests and storage stuff. But on the far side, in a prominent spot, was a single wooden box. Its surface was covered in lovely carvings of fire and water. And just as hoped, it contained the two elemental jewels they were looking for. The jewels, shaped like a teardrop and a little flame, strongly resembled lesser versions of other objects the players previously found. Where the prior ones were more like powerful artifacts capable of major feats, these roughly golf ball sized jewels are more like major magic items, potent focuses for elemental energy but not nearly as capable of major feats. (E.g. the previous stones had the power to alter the winds and weather of the entire region in capable hands; these smaller ones might be usable on a radius of a hundred feet perhaps. Still useful, but waaaay weaker.)Before departing the palace, the players decided to check out the basement, which they correctly assumed contained the regular vaults. At first it was mostly just odd, but then the Druid started getting really, really disoriented. Trying to use his spirit sight in this place gave him the feeling of looking into a kaleidoscope. So they cautiously advanced into the first hallway after the loading and unloading room, and doing so caused the Druid's kaleidoscope vision to shift. Going back to the entry room shifted it to where it had been before.Turns out, the genies were damn clever with their security. The basement is a minor labyrinth, but every connecting door is actually a magic portal connecting to a different spot in the labyrinth. They designed the doors so that, if you couldn't circumvent these portal "traps," you could never get to the "island" (isolated from surrounding walls so the "right hand on the wall" trick won't get you there either) where the real treasures were. Party defeated those traps and found four treasures (coincidentally one each). Two treasures, as I shared when I pasted in the table, rolled up as "There is Absolutely Nothing Wrong with the item you find!" (Cursed, but the curse is not obvious.) One was a set of tiger claws (punching weapons) with a berserker rage thing, basically making you very strong (increase class damage die by 1 size) but forced to fight to the death and ah...taste one's success, shall we say. The other is a vorpal sword that works just like a regular one...but if you botch an attack you must defy danger to prevent it from cutting off something on yourself, making it rather dangerous to use. The third, which rolled as obviously cursed, was a belted wolfhide cloak...that forcibly turns the wearer into a desert wolf (thought to have been a punishment device). Finally, the Bard found...ERMAHGERD, SHOES! We don't know what they do yet, but they're "something Special."After collecting their treasures (and the Spellslinger making damn sure no one USES any of them until they're ALL checked for curses), the party ascended and went to the fire-and-water temple that had been their ACTUAL goal for quite some time. They used the knowledge they had previously gathered, their elemental attunements and personal connections to water and fire, and their own improvisations, to perform the Danse Paradox, the dance of fire and water, allowing them to pass the traps guarding the deeper parts of the temple.We ended session with them entering an underground chamber that looked, strangely, VERY MUCH like a Kahina (druids and shamans) place of study and ritual. Near the center of the large, somewhat dome shaped semi natural cavern, they saw two healthy trees...a hikmah and a zaqqum.And next session, they will learn many things.</blockquote>

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