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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Richards" data-source="post: 9720710" data-attributes="member: 508">ADVENTURE 2: SHIFT DAYPC Roster:Amris Goodwitch, celestial elf witch (wizard) 1                     Avoroth Bleakborn, fiendish human cleric 1                     Gonkle Bu'Onk, fiendish orc fighter 1                     Wilbur Von Schattenwalde, shadow human druid 1Game Session Date: 30 July 2025 - - -"I'm going to miss that serpent," mused Wilbur, as Goldie went slithering away.  A creature of the celestial planes, it would have been selfish of the druid to keep him in his service, not knowing where they were going to end up next.  Best for Goldie to make it back to his own plane before Elsewhere shifted elsewhere."We should get into position," grumbled Avoroth.  It was getting close to midnight, and while the rest of the population of Elsewhere seemed content to continue on with the festivities - the night of Shift Day was a time to celebrate the successful passing of another year of existence on another strange plane, a time for rejoicing over another year's survival, and a time for prayers that the next year would also be a good one - the grumpy cleric just wanted to get on with it.  He had never been one for partying, or even socializing, for that matter, and as a newly-trained scout party about to go on their first mission, he didn't want his teammates to mess things up because they all wanted another cup of ale."Relax," chided Wilbur, downing his drink.  "We have plenty of time to get into position.  It's just over there, at the edge of town."  There were two "zones" surrounding Elsewhere: the inner zone, about a mile in diameter and centered on the central buildings, was an area where no planar aspects manifested - during the time Elsewhere had floated for a year in the Negative Energy Plane, none of the plane's life-sapping effects reached into the heart of Elsewhere; and the outer zone, a torus another mile in diameter all around the central town proper, which consisted mostly of farmlands, where the crops were raised when Elsewhere sat on a plane that allowed for such growth.  (Surplus grains were stored in vast silos inside the central part of the town, protected from the planar effects during years when raising new crops wasn't feasible.)  On Shift Day, at midnight when the three-mile-diameter bubble around Elsewhere and its surrounding farmlands shifted to a new planar destination, the various scout teams were situated just inside the inner zone, where they'd be safe in case the town ended up somewhere dangerous like the Negative Energy Plane, ready to go forth through the farmlands and onto the new plane itself, if it was deemed safe to do so."Still," replied Avoroth.  "Better early than late.""He's right," added Amris, setting down her own cup of wine.  "It wouldn't do to start our first mission late to the game."  Avoroth was actually surprised that the flighty elf was taking this so seriously, and his estimation of her raised a fraction of a inch.  Amris looked around.  "Where's Gonkle?" she asked.  They found the fiendish orc guzzling a small keg of beer while those around him egged him on, chanting "Chug!  Chug!  Chug!"  The group of onlookers all cheered as the orc finished off the keg and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, giving a self-satisfied burp."Let's go," urged on Avoroth, and the orc, seeing the frown on the stern cleric's face, opted not to argue.  He gathered up his weapons and followed them through town to their starting station."We've been assigned due north," commented Avoroth once they found their station.  The other scout teams were all stationed roughly equidistant around the inner bubble, and would thus expand out in all directions once the shift occurred.  They had strict orders as an official scout team:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">If possible, extend a defensive perimeter out to the edge of the outer bubble, to protect the farmlands keeping the inhabitants of Elsewhere fed throughout the year.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">During the first day, find and mark a local landmark outside the outer bubble for divination and teleportation purposes.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">If immediate defense is not needed, go out and search for food, available resources, and potential threats.  If a threat was found, one that couldn't be dealt with by the scout team alone, report immediately back to Elsewhere.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">If peaceful inhabitants were found, negotiate trade under the guise of being an extraplanar caravan, without giving away any details about Elsewhere's existence.  If successful, report back to Elsewhere.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Repeat the above steps as needed throughout the year, but always remember to return to Elsewhere before the next Shift Day.</li> </ol>"Everybody got all that?" asked Avoroth, after they'd gone over their orders for the umpteenth time."Yeah, yeah, yeah," grumbled Gonkle.  He was already regretting having guzzled that beer so quickly, and was looking forward to a nap more than exploring new lands, if it came down to that.  But midnight came all too suddenly, and in a wink the skies above - the star-filled permanent midnight of Lunia, the first layer of Mount Celestia - were replaced by dark clouds, pitch black tinged with the occasional bit of red at the edges, like bloodstained wool from an ebon sheep.  The level of ambient light thus plummeted, although that didn't prevent any of the four from seeing just fine, as their various heritages had provided each of them with innate darkvision."Let's go!" commanded Avoroth, who in his own mind was the obvious leader of their scout party.  They rushed forward through the wheat fields, trying to ascertain what they could about their new home from what they could see thus far: dark, red-hued clouds."Well, it's not an energy or elemental plane," surmised Wilbur.  "Nor is it the Plane of Shadows.""Fire!" called out Amris suddenly."No," sighed Avoroth wearily.  "We've just excluded any of the elemental planes - including the Elemental Plane of Fire.""No, you idiot," countered the celestial elf, pointing ahead.  "There's a fire ahead, in the fields!"  Avoroth scowled - he didn't like being called an idiot, and the fraction of an inch he'd recently elevated his estimation of the elf witch was instantly removed from consideration, with a commensurate dropping in her mental rating by a significant factor - but he too could see flickering flames in the wheat fields ahead of them.  Elsewhere must have plunked down close enough to some unknown enemy that was setting fire to their wheat!  They wouldn't even have to leave the environs of Elsewhere before meeting up with their initial foes!"Pivot: scout and report!" commanded the elf, and her owl familiar leapt from her shoulder and took to the air, raising in elevation to get a better vantage point.  Gonkle, fully sober now at the anticipation of a decent fight, ran forward, warhammer gripped in his hands.  Wilbur followed suit, but one of the advantages of having been infused with planar energy from the Plane of Shadows was it gave the human druid an enhanced speed, and he quickly overcame the armored orc.  He squinted, for he thought he could make out a few foxlike shapes jumping through the flaming fields ahead.Amris ran forward as well, keeping pace with Gonkle as her familiar called back his findings in the secret language they shared.  "There are four foxes in the fires ahead," she called to the others.  Avoroth ran up along the other side of Gonkle, recalling that hell hounds - fire-breathing canines from the pits of Hell - occasionally preyed upon fell foxes, red-furred creatures whose tails blazed with flames that caused the beasts no harm.  As he ran the odds that they were on one of the Nine Hells of Baator - and part of his mind was occupied with trying to figure out which layer they were on, if that were indeed the case - another part of his mind puzzled over why so many scholars insisted upon alliteration when naming creatures.  The practice was beyond his sensibilities.The fell foxes darted through the wheat fields, their blazing tails setting fire to the stalks of grain as they passed.  Two paused in their panicked flight to brush their tails against the humanoids they suddenly found in their way.  Fortunately, both Gonkle and Avoroth, being fiendish in nature, had a natural resistance to fire, so they were unharmed - but the mere attempt sealed their fates.  Gonkle bashed the fell fox before him with an overhead swing, bringing the head of his hammer upon that of the fox, knocking it to the ground in an unconscious heap.  Wilbur, however, with his druidic training, took a moment to observe their behavior and deduced the fell foxes weren't running towards the scout team to attack; they were merely fleeing from something they feared behind them.  He stepped away from the fell fox running his way so as not to get set ablaze - unlike Avoroth and Gonkle, he had no innate resistance to flames - and pulled out a dried sausage from his food-stocks in a pouch at his hip.  "Here you go," he said soothingly to the frightened fox.  It wasn't apparent whether or not the fox understood the druid's words, but it at least picked up on his soothing tone and the offer of food was too good a thing to pass up.  Wilbur called out his findings to the rest of his group.He was too late to prevent Amris from casting a ray of frost at the fell fox attacking Avoroth (not that it mattered, as with every other casting of that spell thus far, the blast of cold went way far astray from its intended target, eliciting a derisive snort of disgust from the cleric she had been actively trying to help).  And while Avoroth heard the druid's advice that the fell foxes weren't trying to attack them, he actively chose to ignore it and brought the end of his staff down upon the head of the fell fox that had tried setting his cloak ablaze with its stupid, flaming tail.  The fox dropped into unconsciousness at the cleric's feet, and he took a step sideways, placing himself directly in the path of the fourth fox, so he could likewise whack it when it got within range.But then Pivot called out that he saw a larger fell fox just ahead, further north - where some rather unfoxlike howling could be heard.The fox approaching Avoroth darted off sideways to the east, while the one Wilbur had been feeding darted its ears up and looked over at its two downed siblings, who were being killed while they lay helpless by the two fiendish humanoids, human and orc.Having ensured his first foe was dead, Gonkle sprinted north, where there was an even bigger foe to be had.  He ran straight through the flames burning the wheat, not the least bit concerned they might engulf him.  Wilbur opted to leave his new friend to race over to the larger fox - a dire fell fox, he noted as he got closer - who was fighting off a hell hound while protecting the prone body of a humanoid figure nearby.  There were two dead hell hounds in the vicinity, and Wilbur could see the fox had already suffered quite a few wounds of its own.  He cast a shillelagh spell as he closed the distance between them.  Amris followed, not quite as fast as her human druid companion.Avoroth took a moment to bash in the skull of the downed fell fox that had tried to set his cloak ablaze, having failed to acknowledge the cleric as a superior being to its own unworthy self.  Once convinced it was dead - and would never repeat its insulting attack upon his person - he turned to see what all the fuss was about to the north.  The hell hound snapped at the dire fell fox with its jagged teeth, but the nimble fox darted away just in time.  But then Avoroth had to turn his attention to the west, where the first fell fox had dropped the remains of Wilbur's proffered dried sausage in indignation of seeing the fiendish cleric having killed its litter-mate, and it leaped at Avoroth, snarling and biting at him with its own vulpine jaws.  Its bite did little damage - but it put an evil smirk upon the young man's unholy face as he mentally sentenced this lowly beast to an immediate execution for its ill-considered attack.Gonkle raced ahead through the flames, wishing he were as fast as Wilbur, who was already almost at the dire fell fox's side.  It bit at the hell hound, getting in a healthy nip before backing off again.  Wilbur swung his spell-enhanced staff at the hell hound, but missed.  But Amris was now well within range to get a good look at the hell hound and target it with a magic missile spell, even as her familiar darted in from above, slashing the back of its neck with his talons.Avoroth knocked the fell fox back with his quarterstaff, getting in a good blow to the side of its head that sent it reeling into immediate unconsciousness.  "Attack your betters, will you?" the cleric sneered as he moved in for the kill.The hell hound backed off, seemingly in retreat - but it was just to be able to catch Wilbur, Pivot, and the dire fell fox in a gout of flame it belched forth from its open mouth.  The owl easily pivoted out of the way; the dire fell fox was immune to the hound's infernal flames; and Wilbur, having no such immunity, took the full brunt of the attack but was surprised at how little of a brunt it actually was - hardly scorching his clothes, and burning his flesh no worse than a slight sunburn.The dire fell fox was smart enough to realize it was badly hurt and that these two-leggers seemed to be here to help it, so she stayed back to guard her mistress's body - a body, she was saddened to see, was no longer breathing.  But then Gonkle arrived on the scene. charging the hell hound and smashing at it with his warhammer.  It reeled from the blow, barely able to remain on its feet.  Wilbur swung at it with his shillelagh and missed, and then Amris finally hit a foe with a ray of frost spell (the first time in four castings - good thing Avoroth wasn't close enough to comment on it!), staggering it from the icy attack.  It was Pivot, with another talon rake across the back of its head, that dropped it, allowing Gonkle to finish it off with a final blow to the skull.  And while all of that was going on, Avoroth concluded his death sentence of the fell fox who had unwisely bitten him, while the fourth - the one who had veered away from the cleric - made its way back towards the dire fell fox.Wilbur cast a cure minor wounds spell on the dire fell fox to demonstrate his trustworthiness, and the creature allowed the others to tend to his mistress.  Once it was apparent she was dead and beyond all help, the dire fell fox allowed the others to gather up her belongings: a backpack, black-and-gray staff, a blob of clay, and the shattered remains of some sort of mechanical device, all of which Amris, with a detect magic spell, determined was magical in nature, although the aura of divination magic surrounding the shattered device was fading fast."Orc!  Get over here and help me with this!" called out Avoroth.  Seeing an end to combat, he was busy stamping out the fires the fell foxes had inadvertently started with their flaming tails.  As the only pair of the scout party with an innate resistance to fire, they were the best suited to this duty, although Amris and Wilbur helped as best they could by kicking dirt upon the flames.  Once this was dealt with - no sense in allowing their fields of grain to go up in flames - they examined the slain woman and her belongings with greater detail.The staff, Avoroth determined, was a shadowflame runestaff, allowing a wielder to channel a fire-based spell through it, turning the flames of the spell black and infusing it with negative energy.  It only made sense for that to go to Wilbur, who already had access to more fire-based spells than Avoroth, whose fiendish nature forced him to prepare any healing spells he wanted to have on hand ahead of time, rather than being able to convert them on the fly like a good-aligned caster could do.The backpack was a variant of a Heward's handy haversack, which not only held extradimensional spaces that could hold more than should be able to fit into a backpack of that size, but also placed any animal or vegetable matter placed inside it into stasis.  This apparently included living beings, which was determined when Amris, looking inside each of the individual pockets, found four fell fox kits snuggled inside.  (The backpack was quickly given the nomenclature "Heward's even handier haversack" and Avoroth offered to carry it, although the others balked at his further offer to "rid them of the furry vermin inside.")Amris found a journal inside the haversack, and a quick perusal told her the purpose of the blob of clay: when fashioned into a replica of a spellcaster's familiar, having it on hand allowed the caster to share spells with her familiar or imbue it with attack spells for it to deliver to targeted foes without the familiar having to be in contact with his mistress; in effect, it was a sort of "familiar voodoo doll" linking mistress and familiar while physically apart.  This, naturally, went to Amris, who immediately began molding it into a likeness of Pivot, adding a plucked feather to it as a token.But it was the smashed mechanical device that held Avoroth's interest, for the journal indicated the woman, Asharen, a flame genasi witch, had been an Elsewhere scout who vanished some years ago when she'd failed to return to the town before the next Shift Day and had been left behind.  Separated from her wandering birthplace, she'd built the device, which not only apparently had been able to track Elsewhere's current location among the planes, had actually been able to determine its future landing spot on a new plane!  This tied in very nicely with the cleric's long-term goal: the figure out how and why Elsewhere shifted through the planes as it did, and hopefully find a way to actually "steer" it to where they wanted to go.  He claimed the device for himself, vowing he'd create diagrams of each piece, how they were connected, and try to puzzle out its workings on his own before turning it over to the leaders of the town."If she was one of our own," said Amris, "we need to bring her body back to Elsewhere, so she can be reunited with any family she might have had.  Pivot, return to the town and inform them who we've found and that we're bringing her back for burial."  The owl hooted his acknowledgement and took to the skies.  Gonkle, easily the strongest of the four scouts, gathered up Asharen's body and started back the way they'd come.  The dire fell fox and the last of the four smaller foxes (other than the four kits left in stasis in the haversack) followed behind."Tomorrow," promised Wilbur, "I'll prepare a speak with animals spell and you can tell me your name," he said to the dire fell fox.  "You can accompany us on our travels, like you apparently did with Asharen."  This apparently sat well with the two foxes, who made sure not to set any more grain on fire with their burning tails.Avoroth followed, his quarterstaff at the ready should they accidentally burn up any more of the wheat.  For he had a feeling they'd want every bit of grain possible in the coming year; the cleric wasn't sure exactly what layer they were on, but given the presence of the fell foxes and the hell hounds, he was fairly certain of one thing: they were in Hell. - - -This was a rather short adventure, but it had been intended to be short, since we leveled up to 2nd level after we finished up.  (We started at 6:30 PM and finished up a little after 8:00.)  Joe had to work the closing shift (same as last week), so his dad ran Gonkle for him again.  And Logan made up not only the fell foxes but all of the treasure we got, knowing brand-new treasure is always a treat to experienced players who have seen most of the standard magic items from the DMG throughout the years.</blockquote>

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