Graywolf-ELM
Explorer
Bolo died again? another reincarnation as a Treant?
Just when you think it's safe to go adventuring again. Wham.
GW
Just when you think it's safe to go adventuring again. Wham.
GW
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NOW LIVE! Into the Woods--new character species, eerie monsters, and haunting villains to populate the woodlands of your D&D games.
Wizardru's Story Hour (updated 11/21)
- Thread starter Zad
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Zad
First Post
Fire in the Blood - Chapter 4
Fire in the Blood - Chapter 4
To the readers:
Tonight, on a very special Savage Sword of Meepo…
Before we get started I’d like to say something: I’m sorry. It was a great session, and as I sit down to start writing it, I am realizing what a sad reflection it will be of the gameplay that night. Scorch, you see, is being dominated, and is generally losing his mind from all outward appearances. How can I write anything that captures his maniacal glances? His talking aside to the air? His tapping of his fingers together? Even if I had captured every word of dialog, it wouldn’t matter. It wasn’t the words, it was the delivery that made it great. I’ve been fortunate in writing this story all these years to make gold out of lead a couple times, but this time I think the reverse will be true. If you can imagine a half-comical Renfield, you’ll be on your way.
Experience:
23: 5175
24: 3600
This moves at least two more people into being 24th level if you were interested.
This Week’s Adventure:
Fraz stood on a small planetoid that seemed to be an island of stability in the ever-shifting Far Realms. Instead of being comforting, it just threw everything else into a worse perspective and made me feel a wave of nausea. He was wearing light silks in black and purple and was very handsome, if you liked jet-black skin. The only weapon he showed was an immense greatsword across his back, but I’m sure it was more for show than anything.
“So you came after all,” he smiled.
Aethramyr and I looked at each other and both shrugged. “Hello Fraz,” Aethramyr said over his shoulder. It was all the conversation we cared to have with him.
“So what now? Are you going to attack it? Cleave it in twain? Perhaps smite it with the force of your gods?” Fraz was grinning.
The truth was we had no idea. We didn’t say a word to Fraz of course, though I’m sure it was apparent to him. In fact all of us made a point of ignoring him. Whether he was surprised, depressed or amused, I couldn’t say.
The creature Xukrischis was large. It was hard to gauge how big – it seemed eighty feet long but I could tell that was a lie of the Far Realms, since the Silverring was a mere blob inside and he himself was that large. By using the context of the captured victims, I surmised it was the size of a village. We made two long, careful circuits around the creature to see what we could learn, but it was precious little. It was more like the universe was rotating around us and it and the effect was unsettling. The creature (if it was a creature) was vaguely symmetrical. There were spines or fins occasionally. We could not see far below the surface but there were dozens, perhaps hundreds of creatures trapped inside. Most of the shapes were humanoid. Floating on the surface were eyes of various types. The eyes didn’t seem overly intent on us but at the same time there was always a few watching us.
We had returned to something vaguely like our starting point, with little to show for it. Scorch was still babbling quite a bit. He was having conversations with someone but when we asked who he was talking to, he’d always turn back and say something like “Hm? What? Me? Oh nobody. Nothing at all.”
Bolo suddenly started moving closer. I suppose he was tired of being careful. As a reward for his curiousity, several of the eyes under the surface started at him, and then with an intense glare, beams of light shot out at Bolo. The beams knocked him backwards towards us and he began to change. He sprouted roots and branches and his skin turned to bark. He became some twisted kind of treant with strange teeth sprouting in odd locations.
“That’s not the way in,” Fraz said.
“No, not the way in. Not at all,” Scorch started babbling. Then with a sudden start he proclaimed “Stories! We must tell it stories!”
“Why would you think that Scorch?”
“What? I was told… I mean I just ah,” he stumbled as he kept looking back and forth to an empty space next to him. “No reason… well I mean I just thought it would be the way in after all. It’s perfectly obvious.” And then he tried to harrumph convincingly.
Scorch was losing his mind. And I didn’t have the faintest idea what to do about it except free the Silverring and get out of here and hopefully he’d come back.
Bolo, always game to try anything, started telling a story. As the tale went on, some of the captives inside bumped up against the edge of the skin and others were yanked back inside. At the end of the story, Bolo suddenly burst into flame and was an even more twisted version of a flame-blasted treant.
So while there was a reaction, it didn’t seem to help us get the Silverring free.
Valanthe appeared and then immediately doubled over with a pain in her midsection. She became even more shadowy and started phasing in and out of… here. (I can hardly say “reality”.) The pain faded a moment later but the shadowy form persisted, although she didn’t seem to be suffering due to it.
Dravot shrugged, and took a different approach. He told the story of St. Beline.
“Must you utter such vulgar things in My presence?” Fraz snorted.
Dravot’s appearance also shifted. He looked more like a statue – sort of an idealized version of himself. He could still move however. During his story, the eyes focused a bit more on Dravot but otherwise there was no reaction. We seemed to be losing ground.
So Bolo tried again. He told the story of Ashardalon. Fraz giggled a bit then accompanied him with inappropriate music on a lute he pulled from somewhere. At the end Bolo spasmed and his eyes caught fire. His chest exploded and a creature clawed out of the hole. It looked around and screamed then it collapsed back inside his chest. A metal plate formed over the hole. But there was no reaction from Xukrischis. Bolo tried other stories but there was no reaction.
Scorch decided to test the waters by casting a spell. I didn’t know the spell but it was clearly transvalent. After it was complete he contorted into a maniacal position. His hair fell out but was replaced with more facial hair. He sounded even more insane than before.
We were getting nowhere and in fact likely doing damage to ourselves. Aethramyr decided to take a bigger risk, and entered the dreaming. Once there he tried to tug on the Silverring’s silver cord, but his hand passed through. But while dreaming, his appearance changed. His hair was sparkling with starts and his cloak was flowing in an intangible wind. His armor became more ornate and fantastic and he was backlit by the full moon in a night sky.
Aethramyr looked at the creature from within the dreaming. He could feel a hunger like it was a palpable thought. The creature was hungry for us and growing impatient.
It wanted to consume us. The transformations were somehow part of the process. But one of us was still untransformed – me. It released a scream we felt more than heard. The local reality shook in terror. It shot its beams of light at me and I too changed. I became wispier, and thinner – more fey, for lack of a better term. My bow sprouted buds and leaves like a spring branch.
Then Xukrischis split along one axis, and it moved to envelop us. It consumed the entire horizon as it moved closer.
We were consumed into darkness. As the halves flowed over us like oceans, someone said “So this is what it’s like to be Bolo…”
[OOC: I’ll offer my thanks to Wizardru for moving us along at this point. I was stuck. I knew, out of character, that we’d need to all be transformed for the story to move forward. But in-character, I just couldn’t look at “being eaten” in anything like a good way. I was quite honestly searching for a way to re-align my in-character perspective so we could stop standing there but was coming up with nothing. So Wizardru did the kind thing – he ate us.
]
After several seconds, the darkness faded as if candles were being lit all around. We stood in a field of yellow and white flowers reaching as far as we could see. Our forms were all still changed but now in addition we were puppets. Each of us had strings from our joints trailing up into the sky. When I looked to see where they went, my mind wrenched in a way that told me that was a bad thing to do. At least the strings weren’t hampering our movement for the time being.
Moments later two things began descending from the invisible ceiling. The center mass was vaguely spiderish but covered in gnashing mouths. There were eight legs covered in spikes, and large mandibles surrounding sharp teeth.
As they descended they fired beams from their eyes. It was then we realized they were like some twisted form of retrievers. Their long legs gave them phenomenal reach and they closed on us quickly. As one passed Valanthe, she struck at it. Under the skin was not blood or muscle but worms that spilled out of the wound.
Bolo shifted to a red dragon form but the fire breath had little impact. Scorch’s polar ray did somewhat better, as did my arrows. At least this was the kind of threat we knew how to handle and we waded in to it hammer-and-tongs.
The creatures were incredibly fast and lethal with their legs. It was only my mirror image spell that saved my life at least twice. Aethramyr was nearly torn apart at one point, only to be healed by Dravot to return to the fight. It was a close thing but we were slowly wearing them down.
Then one of them reached out and tore Scorch’s body to pieces. He fell to the flowered field spraying blood across the petals. Perhaps we weren’t winning after all. Scorch’s pieces began floating off to one side, drawn who-knows-where, perhaps for final consumption.
We renewed our attacks and the spiders fell first one then the other. Their bodies began sinking into the field, the area around them turning spongy. We ignored them and started trying to find where Scorch had floated off to.
“Well on the plus side,” said Dravot “with a True Ressurection, I don’t really need the body.” At least we could still laugh.
As we moved it began snowing blood. The flowers disappeared and the ground got damp. A musty odor filled the area. The walls, once infinitely far away, contracted to form some kind of translucent large tunnel. Occasionally we could see eyes watching us from the other side. The pipe led to a chamber full of bodies, and every one of them was Scorch. They were all dressed in ancient robes, probably Suloise.
Scorch was more mind than substance as he floated with the hacked up bits of his body into the chamber.
“You need to chose,” said Emperor Zinkman ad Zol.
“Choose what?” Scorch asked, eager to please his master.
“Choose a new clone, fool.” The emperor was losing patience but he needed Scorch for his plans. “The one you had was damaged. You were careless.”
“But I liked the whole missing-eye look,” Scorch pouted, ignoring the fact that intestines were hanging out of the body he accompanied.
Scorch floated around a bit and surveyed the choices. They were all inarguably him, but varied slightly in age or appearance. He settled on one that was fairly close to his old body.
There were at least thirty Scorch’s. But we quickly realized only one was missing an eye. We go to that body and Dravot was quite sure it was completely dead. No simple healing would restore this form. As we examined it, another one of the bodies suddenly coughed and came to life. The new Scorch came over to his old body. Any doubt that it was truly Scorch was removed when he started taking his stuff from his old body before anything else.
Nobody asked why there were thirty-some-odd Scorch’s in this chamber. Nobody knew how. And nobody wanted to know what the explanation might be. Instead we identified another passage out the other side of the chamber, and quietly moved towards it.
This tunnel was more translucent and we could see freakish organs and sentient beings floating in the suspension outside the walls. They tried to communicate but their words made no sense to us. It led us to another very large chamber. Inside there was no dragon but there were perhaps a hundred distinct beings floating about. Most were awake and looking at us. At the center was a human of Sule descent, his face overed in horrible scars. Surrounding his throat and limbs were strange organisms holding him in place. Other small parasites floated around the room feeding off the captives who could not pull them off. They absorbed some kind of energy until their tails lit up, then they scurried off.
The human spoke. “Excellent. I am Zinkman ad Zol. I welcome you. You will help me start the Empire anew. Especially you, Slerotin. I knew your clones would not fail.”
Fire in the Blood - Chapter 4
To the readers:
Tonight, on a very special Savage Sword of Meepo…
Before we get started I’d like to say something: I’m sorry. It was a great session, and as I sit down to start writing it, I am realizing what a sad reflection it will be of the gameplay that night. Scorch, you see, is being dominated, and is generally losing his mind from all outward appearances. How can I write anything that captures his maniacal glances? His talking aside to the air? His tapping of his fingers together? Even if I had captured every word of dialog, it wouldn’t matter. It wasn’t the words, it was the delivery that made it great. I’ve been fortunate in writing this story all these years to make gold out of lead a couple times, but this time I think the reverse will be true. If you can imagine a half-comical Renfield, you’ll be on your way.
Experience:
23: 5175
24: 3600
This moves at least two more people into being 24th level if you were interested.
This Week’s Adventure:
Fraz stood on a small planetoid that seemed to be an island of stability in the ever-shifting Far Realms. Instead of being comforting, it just threw everything else into a worse perspective and made me feel a wave of nausea. He was wearing light silks in black and purple and was very handsome, if you liked jet-black skin. The only weapon he showed was an immense greatsword across his back, but I’m sure it was more for show than anything.
“So you came after all,” he smiled.
Aethramyr and I looked at each other and both shrugged. “Hello Fraz,” Aethramyr said over his shoulder. It was all the conversation we cared to have with him.
“So what now? Are you going to attack it? Cleave it in twain? Perhaps smite it with the force of your gods?” Fraz was grinning.
The truth was we had no idea. We didn’t say a word to Fraz of course, though I’m sure it was apparent to him. In fact all of us made a point of ignoring him. Whether he was surprised, depressed or amused, I couldn’t say.
The creature Xukrischis was large. It was hard to gauge how big – it seemed eighty feet long but I could tell that was a lie of the Far Realms, since the Silverring was a mere blob inside and he himself was that large. By using the context of the captured victims, I surmised it was the size of a village. We made two long, careful circuits around the creature to see what we could learn, but it was precious little. It was more like the universe was rotating around us and it and the effect was unsettling. The creature (if it was a creature) was vaguely symmetrical. There were spines or fins occasionally. We could not see far below the surface but there were dozens, perhaps hundreds of creatures trapped inside. Most of the shapes were humanoid. Floating on the surface were eyes of various types. The eyes didn’t seem overly intent on us but at the same time there was always a few watching us.
We had returned to something vaguely like our starting point, with little to show for it. Scorch was still babbling quite a bit. He was having conversations with someone but when we asked who he was talking to, he’d always turn back and say something like “Hm? What? Me? Oh nobody. Nothing at all.”
Bolo suddenly started moving closer. I suppose he was tired of being careful. As a reward for his curiousity, several of the eyes under the surface started at him, and then with an intense glare, beams of light shot out at Bolo. The beams knocked him backwards towards us and he began to change. He sprouted roots and branches and his skin turned to bark. He became some twisted kind of treant with strange teeth sprouting in odd locations.
“That’s not the way in,” Fraz said.
“No, not the way in. Not at all,” Scorch started babbling. Then with a sudden start he proclaimed “Stories! We must tell it stories!”
“Why would you think that Scorch?”
“What? I was told… I mean I just ah,” he stumbled as he kept looking back and forth to an empty space next to him. “No reason… well I mean I just thought it would be the way in after all. It’s perfectly obvious.” And then he tried to harrumph convincingly.
Scorch was losing his mind. And I didn’t have the faintest idea what to do about it except free the Silverring and get out of here and hopefully he’d come back.
Bolo, always game to try anything, started telling a story. As the tale went on, some of the captives inside bumped up against the edge of the skin and others were yanked back inside. At the end of the story, Bolo suddenly burst into flame and was an even more twisted version of a flame-blasted treant.
So while there was a reaction, it didn’t seem to help us get the Silverring free.
Valanthe appeared and then immediately doubled over with a pain in her midsection. She became even more shadowy and started phasing in and out of… here. (I can hardly say “reality”.) The pain faded a moment later but the shadowy form persisted, although she didn’t seem to be suffering due to it.
Dravot shrugged, and took a different approach. He told the story of St. Beline.
“Must you utter such vulgar things in My presence?” Fraz snorted.
Dravot’s appearance also shifted. He looked more like a statue – sort of an idealized version of himself. He could still move however. During his story, the eyes focused a bit more on Dravot but otherwise there was no reaction. We seemed to be losing ground.
So Bolo tried again. He told the story of Ashardalon. Fraz giggled a bit then accompanied him with inappropriate music on a lute he pulled from somewhere. At the end Bolo spasmed and his eyes caught fire. His chest exploded and a creature clawed out of the hole. It looked around and screamed then it collapsed back inside his chest. A metal plate formed over the hole. But there was no reaction from Xukrischis. Bolo tried other stories but there was no reaction.
Scorch decided to test the waters by casting a spell. I didn’t know the spell but it was clearly transvalent. After it was complete he contorted into a maniacal position. His hair fell out but was replaced with more facial hair. He sounded even more insane than before.
We were getting nowhere and in fact likely doing damage to ourselves. Aethramyr decided to take a bigger risk, and entered the dreaming. Once there he tried to tug on the Silverring’s silver cord, but his hand passed through. But while dreaming, his appearance changed. His hair was sparkling with starts and his cloak was flowing in an intangible wind. His armor became more ornate and fantastic and he was backlit by the full moon in a night sky.
Aethramyr looked at the creature from within the dreaming. He could feel a hunger like it was a palpable thought. The creature was hungry for us and growing impatient.
It wanted to consume us. The transformations were somehow part of the process. But one of us was still untransformed – me. It released a scream we felt more than heard. The local reality shook in terror. It shot its beams of light at me and I too changed. I became wispier, and thinner – more fey, for lack of a better term. My bow sprouted buds and leaves like a spring branch.
Then Xukrischis split along one axis, and it moved to envelop us. It consumed the entire horizon as it moved closer.
We were consumed into darkness. As the halves flowed over us like oceans, someone said “So this is what it’s like to be Bolo…”
[OOC: I’ll offer my thanks to Wizardru for moving us along at this point. I was stuck. I knew, out of character, that we’d need to all be transformed for the story to move forward. But in-character, I just couldn’t look at “being eaten” in anything like a good way. I was quite honestly searching for a way to re-align my in-character perspective so we could stop standing there but was coming up with nothing. So Wizardru did the kind thing – he ate us.
]After several seconds, the darkness faded as if candles were being lit all around. We stood in a field of yellow and white flowers reaching as far as we could see. Our forms were all still changed but now in addition we were puppets. Each of us had strings from our joints trailing up into the sky. When I looked to see where they went, my mind wrenched in a way that told me that was a bad thing to do. At least the strings weren’t hampering our movement for the time being.
Moments later two things began descending from the invisible ceiling. The center mass was vaguely spiderish but covered in gnashing mouths. There were eight legs covered in spikes, and large mandibles surrounding sharp teeth.
As they descended they fired beams from their eyes. It was then we realized they were like some twisted form of retrievers. Their long legs gave them phenomenal reach and they closed on us quickly. As one passed Valanthe, she struck at it. Under the skin was not blood or muscle but worms that spilled out of the wound.
Bolo shifted to a red dragon form but the fire breath had little impact. Scorch’s polar ray did somewhat better, as did my arrows. At least this was the kind of threat we knew how to handle and we waded in to it hammer-and-tongs.
The creatures were incredibly fast and lethal with their legs. It was only my mirror image spell that saved my life at least twice. Aethramyr was nearly torn apart at one point, only to be healed by Dravot to return to the fight. It was a close thing but we were slowly wearing them down.
Then one of them reached out and tore Scorch’s body to pieces. He fell to the flowered field spraying blood across the petals. Perhaps we weren’t winning after all. Scorch’s pieces began floating off to one side, drawn who-knows-where, perhaps for final consumption.
We renewed our attacks and the spiders fell first one then the other. Their bodies began sinking into the field, the area around them turning spongy. We ignored them and started trying to find where Scorch had floated off to.
“Well on the plus side,” said Dravot “with a True Ressurection, I don’t really need the body.” At least we could still laugh.
As we moved it began snowing blood. The flowers disappeared and the ground got damp. A musty odor filled the area. The walls, once infinitely far away, contracted to form some kind of translucent large tunnel. Occasionally we could see eyes watching us from the other side. The pipe led to a chamber full of bodies, and every one of them was Scorch. They were all dressed in ancient robes, probably Suloise.
Scorch was more mind than substance as he floated with the hacked up bits of his body into the chamber.
“You need to chose,” said Emperor Zinkman ad Zol.
“Choose what?” Scorch asked, eager to please his master.
“Choose a new clone, fool.” The emperor was losing patience but he needed Scorch for his plans. “The one you had was damaged. You were careless.”
“But I liked the whole missing-eye look,” Scorch pouted, ignoring the fact that intestines were hanging out of the body he accompanied.
Scorch floated around a bit and surveyed the choices. They were all inarguably him, but varied slightly in age or appearance. He settled on one that was fairly close to his old body.
Nobody asked why there were thirty-some-odd Scorch’s in this chamber. Nobody knew how. And nobody wanted to know what the explanation might be. Instead we identified another passage out the other side of the chamber, and quietly moved towards it.
This tunnel was more translucent and we could see freakish organs and sentient beings floating in the suspension outside the walls. They tried to communicate but their words made no sense to us. It led us to another very large chamber. Inside there was no dragon but there were perhaps a hundred distinct beings floating about. Most were awake and looking at us. At the center was a human of Sule descent, his face overed in horrible scars. Surrounding his throat and limbs were strange organisms holding him in place. Other small parasites floated around the room feeding off the captives who could not pull them off. They absorbed some kind of energy until their tails lit up, then they scurried off.
The human spoke. “Excellent. I am Zinkman ad Zol. I welcome you. You will help me start the Empire anew. Especially you, Slerotin. I knew your clones would not fail.”
Last edited:
dravot
First Post
Some asides:
Looking up the strings triggered a Will save DC 40. Fail and lose a point of wisdom. Gah.
Everytime the name Zinkman was mentioned, all I could think of was Ghostbusters and Dr. Peter Venkman. "You don't know what it's like on the Prime. I do. They expect results!"
I was sooo close to leaving Kayleigh behind and trying to get the rest of us inside the creature, but unsupervised I figured she'd wind up making out with Fraz, and that'd just be wrong.
Roleplaying with Scorch was rather hard to do (although Scorch did a great job). In the meta, we knew he'd been dominated, but in character all we knew was that he was acting funny. I personally had a tough time finding the sweet spot in which I felt that my character had enough info for interfering with Scorch. Even now, I'm not sure that I acted properly.
Looking up the strings triggered a Will save DC 40. Fail and lose a point of wisdom. Gah.
Everytime the name Zinkman was mentioned, all I could think of was Ghostbusters and Dr. Peter Venkman. "You don't know what it's like on the Prime. I do. They expect results!"
I was sooo close to leaving Kayleigh behind and trying to get the rest of us inside the creature, but unsupervised I figured she'd wind up making out with Fraz, and that'd just be wrong.
Roleplaying with Scorch was rather hard to do (although Scorch did a great job). In the meta, we knew he'd been dominated, but in character all we knew was that he was acting funny. I personally had a tough time finding the sweet spot in which I felt that my character had enough info for interfering with Scorch. Even now, I'm not sure that I acted properly.
LordVyreth
First Post
dravot said:
Heh, do you want to tell him, Sandain, or should I?
Argent Silvermage
First Post
Why do they taunt us like this!LordVyreth said:Heh, do you want to tell him, Sandain, or should I?
BTW... I shocked everyone by casting Magic missile during the game. My breath weapons were doing nothing and so I decided to use a magic item i had been keeping for ages. It's a ioun stone that stores spells. A long time ago I had Scorch cast Magic Missile, True Strike and ? something else into it but never really planned to use it. I figured what the heck. You should have scene the faces in the room. I almost wet myself.
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