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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Echolocation" data-source="post: 8347237" data-attributes="member: 7011911">Session 65The team jumps into he minecart that has Tinker’s head in it. Lisandra sensing that once again Tinker's soul was stretching to the northwest. The cart went slowly at first until it was asked if it could be sped up, at which it took off extremely fast. As we travelled Tinker warned us that he thinks we would be fighting soon, and not that he wanted to kill us but that to be mind controlled in a manner that you designed was odd.[SPOILER="DM Note: Tinker and Ella's Interaction"]Tinker had only met Ella as a baby gnome, but he is biologically related to Ella's deceased mother and worked closely with her Father. To quickly force the point of conversation, Tinker accused Ella of having familiar eyes and teeth, asking where she stole them from.[/SPOILER]As the drive was happening, Tinkers head would morph into Benedict's face, telling us that he would be willing to aid us against the Obscurati with his great War Machines, that he would use the Duplicant’s to overtrhow Ber and then ally with us. He uuuh, didn’t take it well when we politely told him to shove it. At the end of the track though, the team had to leap out of the minecart toa void crashing into a barricade. Everyone bar Xambria managed to do it safely, but that’s what the filthy fake Lisandra gets. Burn in magma monster.Tinker in a fantastic mech suit that I am pretty sure is a gundam, I don’t care it’s the wrong genre; started to bombard the party. Lya and her minions would arrive shortly after, telling her bodyguardsto disable their contingencies as the platforms probably didn’t exist in The Bleak Gate. Tinker's suit would end up shooting out bombs with magnets and teeth, while also being able toshoot out force pulses that inhibit your movement.And then, gloriously a cybernetic dragon would swoop out to join the fight. "I am Terakalir, and you have trespassed into my lair."  Robotic claw, jet engine wings. Coolest dragon. Tinker bragged about the augments he had put onto her, and he was bloody right.  John though, was having none of Lya’s naughty word and would shoot her in the neck before setting Sydney on her to finish her off. Take that you horned traitor. Kinda traitor, engaged to Risur’s king.. its weird okay.[SPOILER="DM Note: My Rendition of Terakalir"]I think it was [USER=6925177]@arkwright[/USER] who mentioned in their notes for the campaign that there is a lot to unpack around Terakalir. Her upbringing, her place among the gnolls, the devastation of her race, and her recent augments make her a deep and complex character. As I often am, I was left to reverse engineer the motives given the character's choices in the Adventure Path. Why did Terakalir stay behind to oversee the gnoll defences? She could have fled and used a gnoll as a duplicant proxy.So, I made a decision. Unlike some other DMs who opt to have a dragon daughter who can be reasoned with diplomatically, I made Terakalir quite evil and unrepentant. Born malformed and with little sense of control, she was motivated to personally buy into the doctrine of the Cult of the Steel Lord. Her belief, like the gnolls, was only strengthened by Tinker's mechanical augments. The dragon, partly thinking herself a god and partly having an opportunity to finally prove her might, refused to leave the lair when Pemberton evacuated. She would have listened to the party if they pledged obedience to her, but unsurprisingly, they did not.When roleplaying her, I really laboured over her speech. Words were interspersed with deep heaving and sporadic tempo. A player mentioned afterwards that she thought Pemberton's choice to keep his daughter alive was selfish and immoral. [/SPOILER] Terakalir would end up pushing Angharad towards the lava he was shooting past on his way to Mecha Tinker. For once in his life, Angharad decided maybe he should be cautious, falling back towards his team mates instead of going for an utterly glorious last stand. Ella would dimension door Lisandra, Angharad and herself into a room, hoping to regroup but she sadly left John to fend for himself, of which Terakalir would make use of, trying to push him into the magma and nearly succeeding, but he caught the lip of the platform and transformed into a bird to survive.In the "safe" spot, it wasn’t safe. At all. Why do you have dimension door Ella. Pemberton was there, holding a knife to Tinkers throat. The real tinker. We were warned that if we attacked, tinker died. Angharad looked at the others, looked at the crown on tinkers head and decided it was worth it. Pemberton slashed Tinkers throat as Angharad broke the crown upon his crown. As Tinker fell, Angharad would break apart Pemberton’s fake body while the others looked after the almost dead Tinker. Sadly the Gundam would continue even without a mind controlled Tinker at its helm (DM Note: This is my bad, I had entirely forgot to let the suit fall idle when Tinker lost consciousness. Instead, when Tinker regained consciousness, his suit fell into the lava without it's pilot.)And as this was happening, an undead dragon had been hunting Lisandra the entire time, its artifact trying to strike her down still. It demanded she pay a debt that she had accrued to it. The team would break the mech suit, would come close to collapsing to Terakalir’s failsafes as she exploded around the room, and as the eye of Yerev kept hunting Lisandra until it was forced into the magma.With the team rushing to secure whatever they could from the hidden lab, grabbing documents and things off Lya's body before the volcano exploded.And that is what happened last time on Zootsnoot.[SPOILER="Epilogue Scenes"]There was a bit of an epilogue, where Tinker shared his secrets interspersed with scenes of wordly events caused by the players (e.g., dragon inquisitions in Ber, Angharad introducing the Old Stag to Gluacia and her sisters in arms, etc.).This was the final scene with Tinker, which the player's seemed to enjoy:[/SPOILER]</blockquote>

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