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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sbodd" data-source="post: 6278926" data-attributes="member: 6710971">This post is a highlight-reel summary of Dying Skyseer and the first 2/3 of Digging for Lies.  I'll post a recap of our last session afterward.Highlights from The Dying Skyseer and Digging for Lies:During the smuggling operation, the party assaults the hideout.  The boat casts off, Hannah swims after it while the party (with concerted effort) lights the boat on fire.  Hannah's cut off from shore by the piranhas, and has to swim for the boat; Felix sees her plight and dives in after her.  The two of them eventually end up subdued before the boat finishes burning down, but they manage to negotiate their release.When planning their meeting with Gale, the party decides to try and get her to accept some object so they can use Locate Object later as a means of tracking her; the plan that's settled on is...Felix proposing to her.  She declined the proposal and the ring, of course, but it was hilarious.  When Quintal showed up at the church, the party didn't bother with negotiating at all; they just went straight for the back door exit.Had a really good followup session from the papers von Recklinghausen got from Nilasa.  They backtracked a couple of the shell buyers, including faking a fire in one apartment building so they could get unfettered access to his apartment.  Tec had a nice showdown with a recalcitrant bank manager.After Macbannin was brought in to custody, Felix was bound and determined not to leave his side until the party could get his Geas lifted.  As a result, the Ob were forced to replace the spellcaster dispatched to remove the geas with their own operative; instead of Break Enchantment, the caster felled the mayor with Slay Living before slipping into the Bleak Gate.They didn't really do much with Rock Rackus - he was interrogated briefly after being brought in (he wound up accidentally taking out a civilian during the fight at the arms fair - we have a house rule where nat 1's have a chance of bad effects, one of which is hitting an ally), but I've just been using him as a bit of background flavor.Pearce took to fairly heavy larceny during Digging for Lies.  When asked during the audit about Kaja's bracers (which he had removed from her at the scene of the battle, then fenced without reporting), he turned it around and got official direction to ask around about various fences should anything similar happen in the future.  I may have to do something about this eventually, but for now I'm just enjoying making the player sweat from time to time <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />The Apet ziggurat was a heck of a lot of fun.  Upon entering, they started out entering the rainbow room; Pearce tossed a coin into the pit to gauge depth, which I decided would awaken all the monsters in the room.  (Sadly - it would've been so much more fun if the party had been halfway through the puzzle before triggering the fight.)  As soon as the first implanter tried to stick its proboscis down Felix's ear, the party collectively said "oh HECK no" and fled the temple, training Gidim beasts behind them.  Once outside (and since the orbs were slower than the rest), they were able to take the Gidim out without losing anyone - still a close fight.  They rested up before going in again, solved the rainbow puzzle, and wound up proceeding fairly directly to the portal room - tripping the flood trap without clearing anything else.  They fled into the sliding room trap, and split themselves up - Pearce teleported out of the flood room and into the fire traps, Doc went around into the hallway with the needle and spear traps, and the rest of the group was stuck dealing with the Gidim beasts in the trap room.  The rest of the party (barely) managed to escape, but Felix and Hannah decided to try and wait the flood out in the sliding-floor room; once the flood started rising above knee height, they hopped down and tried to get out, and _almost_ made it; Felix, carrying the unconscious Hannah, almost managed to fight past the last guardian mummy, but he rolled a nat-1 on his Concentration check to get a heal spell off.  So, the two of them wound up geas'd to the Voice of Rot.  (The Voice got less of a reaction than I'd been hoping for, sadly.)The party bypassed the fight with Il Dracon de Mer entirely - Tec conjured illusory doubles of themselves to hide their departure underwater.  The fight at the seal was kind of hilarious - I hadn't been planning to force the Mavisha creatures to emerge, but Tec's first action once they engaged was to create an illusion masking some of the diving bell lanterns; a couple of rounds later, I'd forgotten that that marker was an illusion.  The sharks came charging in from the seal's side of the map, and the obvious PC target was lined up with it.  It wasn't until the players pointed out that the sharks had swum into an air gap that their fate was sealed...the party prevailed, though.The party had also become convinced that *Finona* was the target of the Voice's ire - and one of the first things they did was throw smokesticks into the area around the seal.  No PC went down in there, so noone could see what was going on, but when the Mavisha beings attacked, the party was constantly asking "Is she bleeding? Has she been cut?"  After the smoke cleared, they actually deliberately cut her while she was unconscious - and I took a little bit of evil DM-ly glee in telling Felix that his taste for rotted flesh was still there.They cut a deal with Finona to let her leave in exchange for the letter from Caius (and picked up on the importance of the train ride immediately, so yay for that)!  I decided that Finona, (since one of her mage assistants was a puddle of goo after the Mavisha explosion, and success on the portal opening was no longer possible) was going to try and cut ties with the Ob, rather than having Il Dracon attack the party.  They bummed a ride back on the Dagger, and Xambria just teleported out once their questioning of her got a little too specific.Back in town, they spent the rest of the session killing the three days before the gala.  I used the barge decoy; the PCs think the Apet flask there was important, not that it was a red herring.  I wish I'd been fast enough on my feet to follow up with it - they asked if they could locate anything similar (say, a taxi or something) - using those as a geographical marker indicating something would happen to close to HQ would've been a neat touch, but I didn't think of that until after the session, naturally.</blockquote>

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