NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gideonpepys" data-source="post: 7891570" data-attributes="member: 79141">Mini-Session 252DM's Note: I was fairly confident my group would enjoy sitting through each others' solo missions (or, at the very least, put up with it). But it helped that the solos got started around the patchy Xmas/New Year period. As it happens, one of the players was going to a miss their 'slot' in the regular sessions, but a bunch of us were round at his house playing Gloomhaven, so I ran his solo mission at the end of that.SentosaWhen Gupta first translated herself into the Temple of Hewanharimau, her senses seemed to be magnified by the act of invoking her own divinity. Although the temple was dark and quiet, she could sense turmoil, noise and arcane energy without. Her mundane senses registered the immediate stench of death. Bodies littered the floor of the temple; more dead eladrin. Gupta saw that they were covered in disfiguring buboes: a plague had taken them. She stood in wonder and realised that this plague had been introduced deliberately. Maybe one or two of those quarantined here were still alive, but they remained beyond her power to heal them.Just as she made to leave, a light bathed the chamber.  She turned to see a bright object hovering above the altar, over the bowl full of tiger’s blood Gupta had once drunk from.  It was the arsenal of Dhebisu, which once belonged to Uriel.  It’s presence her served to confirm his absence; Uriel would not be returning from the Gyre, it seemed. Gupta reached out and claimed the arsenal.She went outside, and found a raging storm and rains so heavy she could barely see her way. There was no one close by, so she oriented herself and headed for the Temple of Srasma.  As she went, despite the storm, she could see that some of the buildings here in Rumah Terakir had been restored to their former glory; or rather, had been supplanted by their echoes in the pocket plane of Sentosa, when the plane had been ‘emptied’ by the Great Eclipse.  She also noticed glyphs of warding and other, physical landmines that ought to have been hidden from her, and was thereby able to avoid them. “How are you able to sense all these things?” asked Xambria, but Gupta did not know.As she negotiated her way through the muddy streets, a pair of rajput emerged up from hiding and challenged her. They were weary and twitchy, but slightly mollified when one of them recognised her.  He went to speak to the matriarch while the other waited with Gupta.  She maintained a military professionalism and in that way, coaxed him to open up a little.  He told her that the forces of the Obscurati were camped in the jungle just outside Sentosa. (They were calling it ‘Sentosa’, then, this mish-mash of two cities.) The glyphs and mines served as their only ‘wall’, but there were enough humans – ‘over ten thousand’ – that they could enter the city at any time. Instead, they waited for the matriarch to surrender, while subjecting the populace to a variety of horrors:  First, they bombarded the outskirts, which was why they were abandoned now; the matriarch could raise magical shields, but only in a much smaller area. Then came the storm, which had raged for weeks. And the humans had sent a plague, too…This part of his story was interrupted when the other rajput returned. The matriarch wished to speak with Gupta, and so they led her through to the centre of the half-ruined city, to the foot of the Temple of Srasma. They passed by the remaining inhabitants along the way, who came out to look at her despite the storm. They were exhausted and starved. Most were clustered in homes beneath the great tree of the Akela Sathi, which made Gupta think of poor Helandra.At the foot of the Temple of Srasma stood a magical dome of force.  Inside was Athrylla Valanar and her closest advisors. Gupta could see that the storm had denied them rest and so they had few spells remaining.  They were helpless. The Ob forces could sweep in and take them at any time. Though weary, Athrylla remained beautiful, proud and austere.   “Gupta Porras. I last saw you leaving Sentosa in the company of Kasvarina Varal. " (It was nice of her not to mention Helandra's murder.) "Our situation since then has deteriorated somewhat. Can you give me a reason not to regret my decision to free Kasvarina?”Gupta said that those responsible for the Great Eclipse were camped outside the city. Kasvarina was now a foe to them, not an ally.“Shortly after the initial bombardment that began this siege,” said Athrylla, “a child messenger came to Sentosa bearing a letter. It purported to be from Kasvarina and demanded our surrender. I am to hand control of all the lands that were once Elfaivar over to Cula Ravjahani, who was for many years Kasvarina’s second-in-command at the enclave Ushanti.”Gupta remembered Cula Ravjahani from the Convocation.  She had led the Miller’s Pyre faction, and been a ruthless participant in the purge of the Colossal Conclave. Matunaaga had felled her and taken her vekeshi blade, but he must not have finished the job. (“She’ll be the focus of the hivemind,” whispered Xambria.)“It was only a few days later that we realized the child had been magically infected with a plague that rapidly spread through the city. We depleted our stock of scrolls and other healing items in a fight against the disease, and those whom we could not cure we quarantined at the temple of Hewanharimau, without anyone to tend them.”“They’re all dead now,” Gupta confirmed.  She noticed as she spoke that one of Athrylla’s older male advisors had been staring at her intently, wide-eyed. He leaned in to whisper to Athrylla who then said, “I am told you bear a spark of the female divine. Not the curse you stole from Hewanharimau - another.”Gupta told her, matter-of-factly, that she had claimed that spark from Srasma herself. “I am not Srasma,” she said, “I am the god that is needed.”With that, she raised her hands and shared healing around the dome, restoring the vigour of the exhausted eladrin elders. It was only really a very small thing.  Practically speaking, it would not help at all, but it was sufficient to alter Athrylla’s mood to one of positivity and optimism. Maybe Gupta was the answer to their problems after all? So when Gupta asked if there was any way Ravjahani could be convinced to come to Sentosa, instead of dismissing the idea, Athrylla embellished it: “No. But she would come out into no-man’s-land to accept my surrender. …”* About an hour later, Athrylla Valanar and her retinue walked out through the same gate where the unit had faced the ten-headed-lion, and came to a halt in the deep footprint left before the gate by the colossus, Borne, as he searched for his ‘mother’. Among Athrylla's retinue was an unusually short, female rajput, bearing a very bright, silver spear. (It was most unusual for eladrin to risk their women in combat –perhaps this was a sign of their desperation?)The magical storm abated suddenly and the tree-line shook, as Ravjahani’s army advanced to observe the surrender first hand. As they stepped out from the jungle, their line stretched out for a mile in either direction: thousands of soldiers drawn from every colony in Elfaivar.The vekeshi apostate, Cula Ravjahani walked out to meet the matriarch, accompanied by bookpin bodyguards.“There are no ghost councillors with her,” said Xambria.  “But she is the focus of the hivemind.”Gupta made her mind up to strike before Ravjahani could even begin to speak, but even as her body put her plan into motion – to use the icon of apet to teleport behind her foe – it did so in a way Gupta could not have bidden, nor anticipated.  Since the revelation of her divinity, she had noticed a frisson of power within her – as more and more eladrin began to hear that Srasma had returned.  (Xambria had said how strange it was to be inside her head right now. Like witnessing a miracle first-hand.)Instead of teleporting, her body began to grow, to expand, until, in an instant, she towered over twelve-feet tall. Her skin was blue, with green tiger stripes, her eyes blazed with fury; her rajput’s helm became a towering crown; the arsenal a flaming sword. Her other hand reached out for Cula Ravjhani, who quailed and sank to her knees.When the goddess touched her, her whole personality was stripped away. She was suddenly no one, just like Catherine Romana.End of Mini-session</blockquote>

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