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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Boojum" data-source="post: 1790983" data-attributes="member: 21028">I just started up my Shattered Skies campaign again after a hiatus for the summer.  Just before the break, the group had discovered that Mourngrimm's Holdfast, the dwarven citadel built as a prison for Orcus, was being infiltrated by shapeshifting demons bent on freeing him, who were using trapped souls to mask their identities to avoid triggering all the anti-demon defenses.  After going out to deal with the soul-harvesting operation, the party came back only to find out that the demons had succeeded in opening a breach that allowed steam-power-augmented unead to swarm through and overpower the defenders.Sneaking into the Holdfast, they found a hidden niche where one of the dwarven farseers was attempting to scry the source of the attack.  The scrying stone briefly showed a massive factory, with corpses on meathooks being brought in by conveyor belts, and steam-tech grafted onto them by a legion of infernal workers.  Overseeing it all, they saw a skull, burning with green fire and floating over a mechanical iron body.  It turned to face them, and they each felt it looking at them, then it gestured, the scrying stone went blank, and the farseer reeled back, babbling insanely.  Right about then, the undead found the hiding place, and began coming in.  The party pressed them back to get out the door, and then ran downward, fighting a running battle as they went down through stairs and corridors, until they finally reached the hangar.  With hundreds of undead on their tail, they barely reached a zeppelin and the gadgeteer in the group managed to get it started and headed toward the open sky.  It would have been overrun as it went, but the farseer, recovered from his madness, leapt into the swarm and held them back for the few precious seconds to allow the zeppelin to get free, and come out into the sky under the island they had been on, and heading for another dwarven holdfast to try and get help before the seal on Orcus' prison was broken.That was where we broke for the summer, and since coming back, we've only done one full session and a little bit more, in which the airship was almost crashed when two of the party members (the ones who had dropped out of the campaign during the hiatus) turned out to be shapeshifters and attacked the gadgeteer as he piloted it.  After barely defeating them and righting the zeppelin, they discovered they were being pursued by a flying black disk crewed by a contingent of a daemon mercenary company (can't remember the name at the moment).  The battle against them occupied basically the whole session, as they first fought four footmen of the company riding fiendish giant eagles that flew ahead of the ship.  To defeat them, they turned the zeppelin broadside to use the ballista and cannons, which made short work of the daemons, but meant the enemy ship gained a lot of distance on them, and soon came within catapult range, and began launching red glass spheres that each released four whiptails (small flying demons) on impact.  While the elven tank and sharpshooter were busy fighting off the whiptails, the rest of the group focused on using the cannon, eventually landing a couple of solid hits that disabled the catapults, then switched to grapeshot to thin out the daemons on the disk.  Finally, they arrived, and the daemons began swarming onto their deck, becoming enraged and growing in size.  With both sides already hurting, the fighting was quick and brutal--the footmen soon fell, but so did the tank, the sharpshooter, and the gadgeteer, leaving only the medic and the wilder facing off against the lieutenant of the company.  The medic fought well, repeatedly using his ranseur to disarm the lieutenant's halberd and landing a hit here and there, but was obviously overmatched, taking several vicious hits, while the wilder kept firing off mind thrusts augmented to the max, but to no effect against the iron will of the lieutenant.  Finally, as the lieutenant raised his halberd for another series of attacks that seemed all but certain to leave the medic dismembered, the wilder poured the last of his mental reserve into one last mind thrust.  Miraculously, it breached the creature's defenses, and its skull, bulged outward twice, then exploded in a shower of brains and ichor (I finally rolled low on the save, letting the power take effect, the wilder rolled the damage, and everyone stared in awe for a good 10 seconds at all the 8s, 9s, and 10s-- he rolled a 58 on 7d10.)Anyway, the session ended there, with over half the party unconscious, but apparently out of danger for the moment.  Wow, that ended up being a lot longer than I intended it to be  <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/nervous.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":heh:" title="Nervous Laugh    :heh:" data-shortname=":heh:" /></blockquote>

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