Wizardru's Story Hour (updated 11/21)
- Thread starter Zad
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thatdarncat
Overlord of Chat
*blink* so Zad, storyhour will be up when?
Zad
First Post
A Fool's Errand - Chapter 6
A Fool’s Errand – Chapter 6
OOC Notes:
Exp: For 24th, 1600. For 25th, 1200.
Loot:
4 rubies, 200gp ea
+3 brilliant energy shortsword
+2 small metal shield
+2 chain shirt
Wand of owl’s wisdom, 17 charges
Full plate – Chaosbox - +3, +6 profane bonus to wisdom.
Shield – Chaosplate - +2 heavy steel shield, Fire resist 20,
Periapt of wisdom +6
Figurine of wondrous power – Onyx dog
This Week’s Adventure:
It finally happened. The best of us has fallen. Aethramyr is dead.
It’s remarkable partly because of the sheer uniqueness of it, and partly because of outside of that, it was pretty much a non-event. When I say “Aethramyr has fallen”, it’s more literal than one might think. Yes, he died. But here it was more like he fell. As in “tripped over a loose flagstone, fell down, got up, brushed himself off and said ‘Hm, I should watch out for that.’” The elf was dead for what was, I believe, a grand total of five minutes, and four of that was just moving him away from the altar. After he sat up and shook his head, he looked at me and said “When we get out of here, we’ll have to organize the wake.” I smiled and handed him my flask, and only after a long swig did we move on.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
After searching the library, we were out of directions to go. We went back to the octagonal room, thinking it was perhaps some kind of elevator as well but after a half an hour, we were convinced it held no other secrets. The only other area we hadn’t fully checked was the room full of mad prophets. The timer forced us to depart and left the question of what would happen when time ran out. So that’s where we went.
We spent some time at the door thinking, and finally re-entered the room. The thirty minute hourglass again appeared. The prophets were about as helpful as last time. We tried to ask various prophets which one might be able to help us, and a typical response was
“All the prophets paint the way. The man of green…the man of blood…beneath the heart. All the prophets paint the way.”
We turned our attention to seeing if we could get one of them to say something coherent. Scorch was able to break the insanity imprisoning one of them, and his screams immediately changed in tone. This likely had something to do with the fact that his leg was fixed to the floor with a huge spike. Once that was resolved, he was markedly calmer and more helpful.
His name is Lord Sorden, a prophet from Nyrond who disappeared some 400 years ago. He was now sane and reasonable and still held his prophetic gifts. We explained to him where he was and he asked the expected questions. Then his gifts began to show him things.
“I see your purpose takes you to the green man. The man of blood,” he said.
“And how do we get there?” Dravot asked.
“I see… blood that is not blood and the man who… I see a shadow that is green and I see a shadow of blood but neither are truly anything but shadows of the man. You burned down the tree of the green man.”
I looked at my fellows. “There’s only one tree we’ve burned down, a few years ago as I recall. Gulthias.”
“Yes!” Lord Sorden said. “That name speaks to me. He is the man of green and the man of blood. You burned his tree and drained his blood. You broke his heart.”
“Actually we did not defeat him,” I said. “We never faced him.”
“Well, there was that copy we fought near the map,” Dravot pondered.
“You defeated… you sent him to autumn. You killed him. You killed the green man, but you did not defeat the man of blood. You merely drained him. He has become shadow.”
“So does one of these portals lead out?” Scorch asked, eyeing the hourglass.
“No,” Sorden said. “No this is the past.” He was quite lucid and remarkably helpful, within the limits of what his gifts would show him. I was wondering how we would get him out of this place.
“So where does our future lead?” Scorch asked.
“To the dark heart.”
“And how do we get there?”
“You must obtain True Death,” Sorden said. I had heard this song before, and suddenly felt we were nowhere.
We concluded the only thing to do was wait for the timer to run out and see what happened. I spoke to some more prophets to pass the time but their ravings were much the same. I could not even begin to fathom what purpose Acererack would have in gathering them.
Aethramyr, while waiting, wondered if we were able to leave the room the way we came in. Out of curiosity and not expecting anything unpleasant, he stepped back into the hallway.
And disappeared.
In case you were wondering, no, this is not the point where he dies.
As soon as he winked out, I muttered an un-lady-like word or two, and stepped out after him. I appeared next to him in a new hallway. It was narrow and stretched out into darkness. The walls were rough stone and worn with age – rather different that the stone work we’d seen in the tomb so far. Sludge was seeping through cracks that scattered in delicate webs through the stone, forming puddles here and there, and the place smelled faintly of perfume.
There was an inscription on the floor but I didn’t recognize the language. And then Scorch appeared with Bolo soon after. Scorch looked at the inscription and recognized the infernal script.
“It says ‘Temur’”. And he disappeared. Back to the prophet room it seemed, because he returned a second later. “Right,” he said.
The timer was due to run out soon but we still didn’t know what would happen. Valanthe and Dravot were still in the prophet room, but we weren’t entirely sure why they didn’t follow. Eventually they did appear however (the timer seems to force you to this place). But for some reason Lord Sorden did not appear. Probably just as well for his sake.
The hallway was black to the limit of my vision so I moved down slightly. As I did, I stepped on a pressure plate that was fairly obvious once you saw it. I stepped off and nothing bad happened though, and flew another few feet forward. The smell got stronger as I got closer. Sixty feet ahead the hall ended and there was a statue that was a crude depiction of Acererack himself. It was holding something that looked like a part of a sword blade, but it was far too large to be a fragment of True Death. The hallway was in poor repair and mildew marked the uneven tiles and ceiling cracks.
Someone asked why Valanthe wasn’t checking this hallway. I had a suspicion but I quickly consulted the riddle and it confirmed my memory. “In this case, there’s a good reason,” I said. And moved closer. There was a grating sound and the hand of the statue holding the blade began to move and grind. This produced a shower of sparks that sprayed onto the slime, which (as we guessed) ignited down the length of the hallway in a flash.
Fiery breath. Got it.
This was what we were expecting, and was why I was inching down the hall. Thanks to a trinket lifted from the Durance Vile, the fire couldn’t harm me. I fired at the statue but it didn’t have nearly the impact I was hoping for. Aethramyr closed in, and the fight began in earnest. As the statue moved, the pressure plate started to wiggle. Valanthe quickly held it with an immovable rod – we expected it would rise up from the floor and cut us off. It turned out that was not entirely accurate. Or even partially accurate.
There was some kind of mechanism between the area the statue stood, the pressure plate, and the wall near where we arrived. And once the statue had moved fully, the wall collapsed on Scorch and Bolo.
Mostly Bolo.
[OOC: the amusing part here is that when placing ourselves on the map, Scorch and Bolo were at the back near this wall. And Scorch said “Hm, no I don’t like standing there.” And switched positions with Bolo. And five minutes later the wall collapsed, leading us to the positive conclusion that the universe has it in for Bolo.]
The statue was slow but it hit very hard and after soundly pounding me, it was clear I couldn’t take much more of that abuse. Aethramyr stepped up in front of me, and bore the brunt of the punishment. The pounding of the fists was brutal, and in the narrow space the thing could hardly help but hit you. Aethramyr took hit after hit, returning each in kind.
But in case you were worried, this is not the point where Aethramyr died. The creature broke apart before it could do the job.
We searched the rubble and the blade-fragment it was holding. It took some time but we realized that the part of True Death we needed was encased inside the larger blade the statue was holding. We checked that off our list and moved on. There was no apparent exit, but we did eventually find a large pit carpeted in poisoned spikes. Inside the pit was a small crawlway that lead to a hallway where chanting to Therizdun could be heard.
We crept up and Valanthe peeked past the door. Beyond was a vaulted chamber fifty feet long and lit by flickering candles. The room was dominated by a large black altar at the far end, and of course the dozens of shadowy apparitions floating about the room. Four statues flanked the altar and behind it was a dessicated figure in shining armor wearing a white tabard depicting a set of scales. The symbol was perhaps of Pelor, or perhaps of Rao, god of balance. The armored figure was apparently a lich, so I quickly muttered an incantation to enchant my arrows. Unfortunately the lich heard something and silenced the chanting.
Boot leather was then liberally applied to the door area, and Dravot destroyed the undead.
Except that it didn’t work. The light sprang forth as usual, but then turned shadowy and the undead drank it in like nectar.
“That’s not right,” he quipped.
I was ready to fire and did so. The lich was struck soundly enough, but the many enchantments on my arrows were warped in flight, and in the end the lich just brushed the arrows away, barely inconvenienced.
“The Scales will be balanced!!” it shrieked. And the statues groaned grudgingly to life and began moving towards us.
This wouldn’t be the first time that quick thinking saved the day. Hopefully it won’t be the last. Today, it was Scorch’s turn to be both brilliant and quick to react. He dispelled the magic on the altar. Now at this point, Scorch is an Archmage, with a power and competency that places him on a very short list of people with that type of skill. And even so, the altar resisted him. It relented in whatever it was doing, but it wouldn’t last more than a few seconds, and Scorch said “It won’t hold long – act fast.”
Dravot again destroyed the undead. This time everything worked as it should, and the apparitions faded away. I fired again at the lich, and he collapsed in one volley, rather to my surprise.
The statues turned out to just be animated stone and, not being rugs, were no threat.
The altar on the other hand was a work of singular quality. Scorch stared at it, and examined it, careful not to touch it. He concluded it had the power of artifact quality, and was the Altar of Reverse Polarity. It would warp anything that came into its reach. Only by its suppression were we able to defeat the guardians so handily.
Oh, and I should mention that it was in here that Aethramyr died. The lich cast a spell at him, and Aethramyr’s body was crushed by it. And he died. We took him back up to the hallway and Dravot brought him back to life.
That isn’t to say he returned without… alterations. His skin had a more golden hue. And I don’t mean sunned – I mean metallic sparkling. The symbol of earth on his forehead was gone, and instead there was now a triangle. A similar triangle was on each palm. Even Shatterspike had been changed – no longer vitaesis, it was now isometril, with a triangle etched at the crossguard.
We looked at the changes in total, shrugged, and moved on. Frankly we've been at this too long to get hung up on the little things.
Unsurprisingly, there was a secret door behind the altar. The riddle is proving almost too easy to follow. Beyond the door was a long spiral staircase, and a corridor ending in a door, decorated with a large relief of a raven’s head.
The Raven’s maw. As prophesized.
A Fool’s Errand – Chapter 6
OOC Notes:
Exp: For 24th, 1600. For 25th, 1200.
Loot:
4 rubies, 200gp ea
+3 brilliant energy shortsword
+2 small metal shield
+2 chain shirt
Wand of owl’s wisdom, 17 charges
Full plate – Chaosbox - +3, +6 profane bonus to wisdom.
Shield – Chaosplate - +2 heavy steel shield, Fire resist 20,
Periapt of wisdom +6
Figurine of wondrous power – Onyx dog
This Week’s Adventure:
It finally happened. The best of us has fallen. Aethramyr is dead.
It’s remarkable partly because of the sheer uniqueness of it, and partly because of outside of that, it was pretty much a non-event. When I say “Aethramyr has fallen”, it’s more literal than one might think. Yes, he died. But here it was more like he fell. As in “tripped over a loose flagstone, fell down, got up, brushed himself off and said ‘Hm, I should watch out for that.’” The elf was dead for what was, I believe, a grand total of five minutes, and four of that was just moving him away from the altar. After he sat up and shook his head, he looked at me and said “When we get out of here, we’ll have to organize the wake.” I smiled and handed him my flask, and only after a long swig did we move on.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
After searching the library, we were out of directions to go. We went back to the octagonal room, thinking it was perhaps some kind of elevator as well but after a half an hour, we were convinced it held no other secrets. The only other area we hadn’t fully checked was the room full of mad prophets. The timer forced us to depart and left the question of what would happen when time ran out. So that’s where we went.
We spent some time at the door thinking, and finally re-entered the room. The thirty minute hourglass again appeared. The prophets were about as helpful as last time. We tried to ask various prophets which one might be able to help us, and a typical response was
“All the prophets paint the way. The man of green…the man of blood…beneath the heart. All the prophets paint the way.”
We turned our attention to seeing if we could get one of them to say something coherent. Scorch was able to break the insanity imprisoning one of them, and his screams immediately changed in tone. This likely had something to do with the fact that his leg was fixed to the floor with a huge spike. Once that was resolved, he was markedly calmer and more helpful.
His name is Lord Sorden, a prophet from Nyrond who disappeared some 400 years ago. He was now sane and reasonable and still held his prophetic gifts. We explained to him where he was and he asked the expected questions. Then his gifts began to show him things.
“I see your purpose takes you to the green man. The man of blood,” he said.
“And how do we get there?” Dravot asked.
“I see… blood that is not blood and the man who… I see a shadow that is green and I see a shadow of blood but neither are truly anything but shadows of the man. You burned down the tree of the green man.”
I looked at my fellows. “There’s only one tree we’ve burned down, a few years ago as I recall. Gulthias.”
“Yes!” Lord Sorden said. “That name speaks to me. He is the man of green and the man of blood. You burned his tree and drained his blood. You broke his heart.”
“Actually we did not defeat him,” I said. “We never faced him.”
“Well, there was that copy we fought near the map,” Dravot pondered.
“You defeated… you sent him to autumn. You killed him. You killed the green man, but you did not defeat the man of blood. You merely drained him. He has become shadow.”
“So does one of these portals lead out?” Scorch asked, eyeing the hourglass.
“No,” Sorden said. “No this is the past.” He was quite lucid and remarkably helpful, within the limits of what his gifts would show him. I was wondering how we would get him out of this place.
“So where does our future lead?” Scorch asked.
“To the dark heart.”
“And how do we get there?”
“You must obtain True Death,” Sorden said. I had heard this song before, and suddenly felt we were nowhere.
We concluded the only thing to do was wait for the timer to run out and see what happened. I spoke to some more prophets to pass the time but their ravings were much the same. I could not even begin to fathom what purpose Acererack would have in gathering them.
Aethramyr, while waiting, wondered if we were able to leave the room the way we came in. Out of curiosity and not expecting anything unpleasant, he stepped back into the hallway.
And disappeared.
In case you were wondering, no, this is not the point where he dies.
As soon as he winked out, I muttered an un-lady-like word or two, and stepped out after him. I appeared next to him in a new hallway. It was narrow and stretched out into darkness. The walls were rough stone and worn with age – rather different that the stone work we’d seen in the tomb so far. Sludge was seeping through cracks that scattered in delicate webs through the stone, forming puddles here and there, and the place smelled faintly of perfume.
There was an inscription on the floor but I didn’t recognize the language. And then Scorch appeared with Bolo soon after. Scorch looked at the inscription and recognized the infernal script.
“It says ‘Temur’”. And he disappeared. Back to the prophet room it seemed, because he returned a second later. “Right,” he said.
The timer was due to run out soon but we still didn’t know what would happen. Valanthe and Dravot were still in the prophet room, but we weren’t entirely sure why they didn’t follow. Eventually they did appear however (the timer seems to force you to this place). But for some reason Lord Sorden did not appear. Probably just as well for his sake.
The hallway was black to the limit of my vision so I moved down slightly. As I did, I stepped on a pressure plate that was fairly obvious once you saw it. I stepped off and nothing bad happened though, and flew another few feet forward. The smell got stronger as I got closer. Sixty feet ahead the hall ended and there was a statue that was a crude depiction of Acererack himself. It was holding something that looked like a part of a sword blade, but it was far too large to be a fragment of True Death. The hallway was in poor repair and mildew marked the uneven tiles and ceiling cracks.
Someone asked why Valanthe wasn’t checking this hallway. I had a suspicion but I quickly consulted the riddle and it confirmed my memory. “In this case, there’s a good reason,” I said. And moved closer. There was a grating sound and the hand of the statue holding the blade began to move and grind. This produced a shower of sparks that sprayed onto the slime, which (as we guessed) ignited down the length of the hallway in a flash.
Fiery breath. Got it.
This was what we were expecting, and was why I was inching down the hall. Thanks to a trinket lifted from the Durance Vile, the fire couldn’t harm me. I fired at the statue but it didn’t have nearly the impact I was hoping for. Aethramyr closed in, and the fight began in earnest. As the statue moved, the pressure plate started to wiggle. Valanthe quickly held it with an immovable rod – we expected it would rise up from the floor and cut us off. It turned out that was not entirely accurate. Or even partially accurate.
There was some kind of mechanism between the area the statue stood, the pressure plate, and the wall near where we arrived. And once the statue had moved fully, the wall collapsed on Scorch and Bolo.
Mostly Bolo.
[OOC: the amusing part here is that when placing ourselves on the map, Scorch and Bolo were at the back near this wall. And Scorch said “Hm, no I don’t like standing there.” And switched positions with Bolo. And five minutes later the wall collapsed, leading us to the positive conclusion that the universe has it in for Bolo.]
The statue was slow but it hit very hard and after soundly pounding me, it was clear I couldn’t take much more of that abuse. Aethramyr stepped up in front of me, and bore the brunt of the punishment. The pounding of the fists was brutal, and in the narrow space the thing could hardly help but hit you. Aethramyr took hit after hit, returning each in kind.
But in case you were worried, this is not the point where Aethramyr died. The creature broke apart before it could do the job.
We searched the rubble and the blade-fragment it was holding. It took some time but we realized that the part of True Death we needed was encased inside the larger blade the statue was holding. We checked that off our list and moved on. There was no apparent exit, but we did eventually find a large pit carpeted in poisoned spikes. Inside the pit was a small crawlway that lead to a hallway where chanting to Therizdun could be heard.
We crept up and Valanthe peeked past the door. Beyond was a vaulted chamber fifty feet long and lit by flickering candles. The room was dominated by a large black altar at the far end, and of course the dozens of shadowy apparitions floating about the room. Four statues flanked the altar and behind it was a dessicated figure in shining armor wearing a white tabard depicting a set of scales. The symbol was perhaps of Pelor, or perhaps of Rao, god of balance. The armored figure was apparently a lich, so I quickly muttered an incantation to enchant my arrows. Unfortunately the lich heard something and silenced the chanting.
Boot leather was then liberally applied to the door area, and Dravot destroyed the undead.
Except that it didn’t work. The light sprang forth as usual, but then turned shadowy and the undead drank it in like nectar.
“That’s not right,” he quipped.
I was ready to fire and did so. The lich was struck soundly enough, but the many enchantments on my arrows were warped in flight, and in the end the lich just brushed the arrows away, barely inconvenienced.
“The Scales will be balanced!!” it shrieked. And the statues groaned grudgingly to life and began moving towards us.
This wouldn’t be the first time that quick thinking saved the day. Hopefully it won’t be the last. Today, it was Scorch’s turn to be both brilliant and quick to react. He dispelled the magic on the altar. Now at this point, Scorch is an Archmage, with a power and competency that places him on a very short list of people with that type of skill. And even so, the altar resisted him. It relented in whatever it was doing, but it wouldn’t last more than a few seconds, and Scorch said “It won’t hold long – act fast.”
Dravot again destroyed the undead. This time everything worked as it should, and the apparitions faded away. I fired again at the lich, and he collapsed in one volley, rather to my surprise.
The statues turned out to just be animated stone and, not being rugs, were no threat.
The altar on the other hand was a work of singular quality. Scorch stared at it, and examined it, careful not to touch it. He concluded it had the power of artifact quality, and was the Altar of Reverse Polarity. It would warp anything that came into its reach. Only by its suppression were we able to defeat the guardians so handily.
Oh, and I should mention that it was in here that Aethramyr died. The lich cast a spell at him, and Aethramyr’s body was crushed by it. And he died. We took him back up to the hallway and Dravot brought him back to life.
That isn’t to say he returned without… alterations. His skin had a more golden hue. And I don’t mean sunned – I mean metallic sparkling. The symbol of earth on his forehead was gone, and instead there was now a triangle. A similar triangle was on each palm. Even Shatterspike had been changed – no longer vitaesis, it was now isometril, with a triangle etched at the crossguard.
We looked at the changes in total, shrugged, and moved on. Frankly we've been at this too long to get hung up on the little things.
Unsurprisingly, there was a secret door behind the altar. The riddle is proving almost too easy to follow. Beyond the door was a long spiral staircase, and a corridor ending in a door, decorated with a large relief of a raven’s head.
The Raven’s maw. As prophesized.
dravot
First Post
Random points between game night and the as-usual, well written story by Zad.
In no particular order:
1) Dravot and Valanthe believed that we needed to stay in the room with the timer running out in order to figure out how to move onward. We wound up engaging in a contest of wills ("Go ahead and chicken out!" - "No, after you!"), which is why we were there so long.
Zad accused us of breaking up the group in a dangerous location ("I know...lets all split up and search the cemetery!"), but I pointed out that Aethramyr did so by walking through the door without reaching group consensus.
It was that kind of night. =)
2) Aethramyr was hit by an Implosion spell - as in 17th+ level cleric. You can bet your bottom dollar that made me sit up and take notice. The save was something like DC 25? 29? Aethramyr rolled a '2' and got a total of 23.
3) It was actually me that pegged the altar as the source of the problem for the lich room. When I become an evil lich, the source of that power will be in a random paver on the floor, hidden by various obscuring spells. =)
4) I did a hastened turning, and wiped out almost all of the wraith thingies in one shot, followed up a repulsion spell. The one remaning wraith thingy then did it's best mime-in-a-box imitation.
In no particular order:
1) Dravot and Valanthe believed that we needed to stay in the room with the timer running out in order to figure out how to move onward. We wound up engaging in a contest of wills ("Go ahead and chicken out!" - "No, after you!"), which is why we were there so long.
Zad accused us of breaking up the group in a dangerous location ("I know...lets all split up and search the cemetery!"), but I pointed out that Aethramyr did so by walking through the door without reaching group consensus.
It was that kind of night. =)
2) Aethramyr was hit by an Implosion spell - as in 17th+ level cleric. You can bet your bottom dollar that made me sit up and take notice. The save was something like DC 25? 29? Aethramyr rolled a '2' and got a total of 23.
3) It was actually me that pegged the altar as the source of the problem for the lich room. When I become an evil lich, the source of that power will be in a random paver on the floor, hidden by various obscuring spells. =)
4) I did a hastened turning, and wiped out almost all of the wraith thingies in one shot, followed up a repulsion spell. The one remaning wraith thingy then did it's best mime-in-a-box imitation.
WizarDru
Adventurer
Zad said:
DM Note #1: Once the shard of True Death was recovered, the portals would allow passage beyond. Prior to its retreival, attempting to leave the room by the entrance would result in automatic penalties, and a return to the 'wheel' room.
Zad said:
Doing more than 80 points a hit, in fact. Heal spells flew.
Zad said:
DM Note #2: And by 'crept', he means 'rolled an 84' on Move Silently and a 'rolled an 85' on Hide. Oy. Several times I made the mistake of asking for a Spot check. After the second '65, I think', I just cut to the chase.
Zad said:
DM Note #3: Aethramyr, meet Implosion. Implosion, Aethramyr. He rolled a '2' on a Fort Save and Done Up And Died. I did a little dance.
- Status
