the Kyri Chronicles - last updated 22 Oct

[Plane Sailing]

Re: Good Stuff!

I have just gotten caught up...I didn't realize how far behind I was. How are you managing the transition from lower-middle to upper-middle power? It seems like you are throwing pretty tough encounters at them now.

Also, did you ever have "The Talk" with Lysander's player? If so, how did it go?

The transition is pretty tricky - it turns out that equivalent challenges for upper-middle level (or in 3e terms I suppose it is still lower middle - not got to halfway yet!) are just as likely to kill people off as hobgobins and orcs were when they were 1st level... OK, I'm jesting a bit, but a critical hit or bad luck at the wrong moment and the party would be nursing extra corpses... that never seems to change. We do all get to do more cool things now though (me as DM, them as PC's).

Lysanders player has been off on extended hols for a while, In his absence I've sent him a proposition, and he'll either email me back or (better) I get to talk to him in about 10 days time. Hopefully He'll sign up again (fingers crossed!)

Cheers

 

[Plane Sailing]

The horseman veers off to the left, avoiding Trajan and chasing after the screaming Cuckoo, galloping straight *through* small trees which lie in his path. Glancing at each other, Trajan and K’tan decide to follow the horseman and try to help Cuckoo, rather than Anne-Marie who seems not to be in such direct danger.

They have been running for only a few seconds when there is an awful, chilling scream from ahead. They burst into a clearing and can see nothing except for a smoking patch of scorched grass, and a lute which has been hacked in two. There is no other sign of Cuckoo or the horseman.

“Time to find Anne-Marie” Trajan grunts, and they start to retrace their footsteps to the place where the horseman ambushed them. It is quite time consuming, and once there following the tracks from Anne-Maries headlong flight is more difficult than they had expected. After spending an hour searching fruitlessly, K’tan suggests an alternative tack:

“The Red Horse. Best landmark. Wait there?”

“Yes” Trajan agrees “it is easier to see that than anything else - she may decide to head up that way. Lets wait up there”.

Meanwhile, Anne-Maries panic wore off, and she found herself deep in the woods, with no sense of where she had come from or what direction anything was. Her hair is messed and her clothes torn from her headlong flight, and she burns with shame at fleeing and leaving her companions in danger. She can’t think what came over her.

Choosing a direction at random and striking out, she stumbles across a horrific scene. A small clearing by a withered tree, and around the base of the tree are the rotted bodies of several horses. Each of them has had their legs broken many times, and... no, these are not horses... the stumps on their foreheads... someone has actually tortured unicorns to death in this place!

Feeling a cold chill settle over her, she quickly crouches and hides in the brush at the sound of a creature pushing its way through undergrowth in the other side of the clearing. To her mounting horror she sees the dismounted horseman stepping into the clearing!

 

[Plane Sailing]

She watches as the ghostly figure walks over to the unicorn corpses, then it appears to rest one hand on the nearby tree trunk and cover the face of its helm with the other. If it didn’t seem foolish, she would say she thought it was - weeping?
Deciding to risk it, Anne Marie stands up.

“Excuse me” she whispers haltingly “do you know who slew the unicorns?”

The figure straightens up and turns to face her, one hand on its sword hilt. It remains silent.

Anne-Marie continues “I hate it that someone could do this to creatures that are so lovely. I want to stop them. Will you let me? Can I help?”

The ghost gestures and a small twig breaks off a nearby tree and flies over to him. It hovers in the air and starts scratching some writing in the dirt.

“The
focus
of
evil
rests
in
the
village.”

“They
slew
me
but
I
cannot
Rest”.

“Where is your body?” Anne-Marie asks.

“By
the
lake.
Follow
Me”

A ghostly horse fades into existence beside them, and Anne-Marie starts following the horseman out of the forest.

A half-hours travel brings them to the hillside with a red horse carved out of the grass, and a still, dark tarn gathered near the horses feet, reflecting the clear blue sky and the red horse. As they approach Anne-Marie notices her two friends standing by the lake. She can see them loosen their weapons, and feels a tenseness from the horseman, so she quickly shouts out

“No! Friends!”.

They draw together and she quickly explains to Trajan and K’tan what she has seen. They figure that if they can bury the body, the ghost will be set free. They decide to ask the horseman a few more questions.

“Sire,“ Trajan asks, astonished at the majesty of the ghostly horseman sitting astride his ghostly mount “Where is your body lain?”

The figure points to the tarn. Trajan and Anne-Marie wade into the shallow water and before they get out of their depth find a headless body lying, covered in a thin layer of mud. They drag the body out to the bank.

The horseman seems to be staring intently at the body. Once again a twig is used to scrape some words in the dirt

“SHE
FED
IT
TO
HER
BEASTS!
THEY
ATE
MY
HEAD!”

Suddenly the horseman wheels his horse around and charges off in the direction of the village, fading from sight as he thunders away. Anne-Marie, Trajan and K’tan look wordlessly at one another. He must have been talking about Henwen and those evil little squirrel-beasts which serve her. Consider Cuckoo too - surprising that he showed up in the middle of the night, surprising that the animated tree was more interested in attacking him than any other, surprising that the horseman chased him down rather than any other.

Gradually the evidence seems to be piling up that their companions in the village are taking their ease in the midst of a nest of evil, and their erstwhile enemies might turn out to be the ones in the right...

 

[Plane Sailing]

Meanwhile, Arilyn has got fed up with waiting in the village, and even more fed up with Dala’s constant jibes about her book-learning. She and Zeph decide to take a walk out into the woods in order to find the others. She figures that with enough warning from Zeph the winds can carry her aloft and out of any harms way. Randomly choosing between the Barrow and the Red Horse, Zeph the smoky elemental flies up above the treeline and gives her a bearing towards the Red Horse.

The woods are still astonishingly quiet, and Arilyn mentally rehearses the trigger for the fly spell which she had prepared that morning, ready to escape at a moments notice.

As she takes a short break and Zeph comes down to chat with her and regale her with the wonders of the elemental planes, her smoky familiar suddenly registers alarm through their empathic link. Turning quickly around Arilyn espies something tiny floating in the trees a dozen feet behind her… it is about the size of a baby’s fist, and is pale with a dark dot facing her. As she watches it darts away behind a tree and disappears back the way she came.

“I wonder what *that* was?” she thinks. Then presses on towards the Red Horse.

As luck would have it, and with the additional guidance from Zeph, she is able to make contact with the other three companions. She doesn’t bother mentioning the strange floating thing since there is so much to learn from the experiences of the others.

After taking council with one another, they decide that the next step they need to take is to visit the “meeting stones”, the other locale on their little map of the area and the site of the supposed ambush by elves of the village delegation. Perhaps more light will be shed on the mystery there. It will be a couple of hours, so they should be able to get there before the sun sets tonight.

 

[Plane Sailing]

They reach the clearing around the meeting stones as the shadows are drawing longer along the ground. If one was imaginative you could almost visualise claws of shadow reaching out from the stones towards you.

While K’tan and Anne-Marie keep a watch from the edge of the clearing, Trajan and Arilyn move forward to investigate the ring of standing stones. As they are creeping up towards the edge of the ring, Arilyn thinks she hears a faint snatch of Archaic being spoken off in the woods to the far side...

Without further warning, a pillar of fire descends down from the heavens, engulfing Trajan and Arilyn. They both throw themselves to the side, Trajan rolls to his feet again while Arilyn stays down. Trajan’s eyes narrow as he sees six shadows glide out from the meeting stones themselves, and bear down upon him.

Meanwhile, Anne-Marie has spotted a figure gesturing in the woods around the other side of the clearing. She leaps into action, running pell-mell through the trees at the edge of the clearing, each step springing several strides in her magic boots. She covers 180ft in less than six seconds, and arrives to see Henwen, the deranged woman from the graveyard, smiling cruelly. Henwen completes some syllables and lashes out with a hand dripping with black ichor - it sprays over Anne-Maries shoulder and she shudders as poison eats away at her. Unperturbed, she strikes forwards with the new rapier from Saithnar, running Henwen right though the ribs! The evil shaman gasps...

Trajan doesn’t want to take any chances with the shadows, and calls upon Asura to disperse them. With the added force of presence granted him by Saithnars circlet, the power of Asura flows through him and blows like a wind through the shadows, dispersing their incorporeal substance into nothing. “Good job too” whispers the badly wounded Arilyn lying by his feet.

K’tan has started jogging across the clearing to help Anne-Marie in her fight when suddenly he is faced by four more shadows which had been hidden in the dappled light of the clearing. As they reach out one of them strikes true and, not being a strong fellow, he feels fully half his strength drain away. He is very robust against ordinary attacks, but these undead can quickly kill him if he is not careful!

Henwen knows she is badly wounded, so her outline blurs and she changes form to a Black Bear, incidentally healing some of her wounds. In recent weeks Anne-Marie has seen undead wights, fiends from the pits of hell and dragons that freeze the flesh off your bones. A bear just isn’t that frightening any more. She steps in close to the bear and thrusts her rapier up, under its chin and piercing into Henwen-bears brain. Stepping lightly back, she watches dispassionately as the bear collapses onto the ground, and returns to its normal raggedy human form.

At the same time, K’tan is rescued from the shadows by Trajan, who once again calls upon the power of Asura, and once again the shadows are swept away as if by a divine wind. Trajan then turns to Arilyn, kneels down, and the healing power of Asura flows through his hands and across her wounds, healing the worst of the burns she experienced. K’tan helps Anne-Marie take appropriate herbs, and she is able to resist the secondary effects of the nasty poison which she had been infected with.

Searching around, they find little here other than the evidence of non-human skeletons in the long grass - if anyone was betrayed here, it wasn’t human villagers. Henwen has a long black staff, with a black-painted skull on one end. They are not sure what it is for, but are certain that it is of evil design and nature, so they break the staff and leave the portions here.

Just then, a haunting melody floats across the clearing. A song follows, in a strange language but one which is hauntingly familiar. As one, the company is transfixed, enraptured by the beauty of the sound...

to be continued.

DMnote: I had expected this encounter to be somewhat more challenging than it turned out to be... the PC's dice suddenly found favour with them! Anne-Marie struck two blows, both critical hits for triple damage. The first one nearly crippled Henwen, she recovered some hit points via the wildshape and then the second one took her straight out. Then Trajan goes and rolls a 20 on his first turning attempt and a 20 on his second, dispersing all the shadows.

[edit] Doh! I just realised that since he doesn't have double the shadows HD in *class levels* they should have been turned rather than destroyed. Doh! [/edit]

 

[Krellic]

Such mistakes are a DM's bane, though they make good storytelling...

 

[Plane Sailing]

Hi Krellic, thanks for popping back!

I don't feel too bad about it - as you say, it made for a good scene, and they get whupped so often (and just escape by the skin of their teeth) it made a nice chance for them to strut their stuff and wipe out the bad guys so quickly!

Cheers

 

[Plane Sailing]

As they stand, listening, they see two humanoid figures at the far end of the clearing, armed with bow and harp. Familiar words in the Southlander tongue become noticeably interleaved into the music. “The village is evil. A festering wound. Eliminate the disease. Kill the villagers. Cleanse the wound. Heal the land”.

Then, just like that, the music fades away, and they can’t see the two figures any more.

“What was that about?” wonders Trajan.

“I don’t know”, replies Anne-Marie, “but we’d better get on with our business and wipe out those stinking villagers. Get everything right in the land once again”. K’tan glances over at her and raises his eyebrows.

They decide to circle back around to the village, certain that Dyson and his bodyguard are their foes, and a little worried by the bloodthirsty bent which Anne-Marie seems to have developed to the rest of the starving villagers they saw there. Once again Arilyn notices one of the strange floating balls, and sends Zeph to have a closer look as it flees away. Apparently it looks rather like a large squidgy eyeball?

Raising their guard, K’tan readies his power to launch a concussion at any further eyeballs which they spy. Halfway round to the village they are spotted by a large raven, that flaps down on a tree near them. “Awk” it says. They look at it guardedly.

“Dala has been trapped! Lysander too! Dyson walked in on them, read a scroll and now they are in a magic cage, and can’t escape!”

“Please help my master!”.

“Damn” whispers Trajan. “That’s our two heaviest hitters out of action. Lets get our plans ready”

 

[Plane Sailing]

“Excuse me chaps” a thin, reedy voice calls out.

They turn around to see the tall, thin, balding figure of cuckoo striding through the woods in their direction.

“Would you be so good as to accompany me back to the village? I’m a bit worried about the whole horseman thing”.

The party wander over nonchalantly. “I’m a bit worried too” says Anne-Marie. “But I think I know a great solution to clean things up”. She whips out her rapier and stabs at Cuckoo. “Oh, bad show” he says, dancing away from the tip of the rapier, but not drawing his own weapon. “Why are you attacking ME?”

“Because,” growls Trajan, “You are in league with Dyson and the forces of evil which he controls”. He likewise draws his weapon.

“Oh well, I suppose the jig is up” says Cuckoo. His voice becomes harsher, more croaky: “It was fun while it lasted, and it was a splendid opportunity to gather souls for the war… and make a foothold here! Dyson is to be commended, he is serving the masters very well indeed”

Then with a hideous groan the figure of Cuckoo grows - 7, 8, 9ft tall, a hooked bill extending out through his mouth and his outer skin peeling back and shredding off as he grows. His hands and feet become taloned and he shakes huge black-feathered wings, releasing a cloud of spores over the heroes surrounding him.

“have at thee, demon” cries Trajan, slicing at it with his scimitar, but seeing the weapon leave the creature unmarked. Anne-Marie thrusts forward with her rapier but finds that even the enchantment on her new weapon is not enough to penetrate the magical aura around the fiendish creature. K’tan launches a concussion at the beast only to see it deflected by spell resistance.

The Vrock throws back its head and laughs wildly, while spores sprout, grow and start entwine into the faces and arms of the company...

to be continued.

 

[Schmoe]

“Oh, bad show” he says,

Now that's just priceless!

Have at thee, demon!

I'm anxious to see how this turns out.