Zeitgeist -- The Return of the Ob

[Andrew Moreton]

Some further details of the familiar.
It is not a Raven , it is a Thrush called Raven which self identifies as a Raven, has dyed itself black and has a prosthetic beak extension

The player originally intended to take a Raven familiar, I pointed out mechanically they are rubbish so he could have a Raven using the Thrush abilities . So he has a Thrush which cosplays as a Raven

Also Tyrannosaurs are REALLY bad at climbing down the narrow steep stairs on warships , and at medium size do d6 damage when they fall on people

 

[Andrew Moreton]

Session 2
El Jefe and Terry the Tyrannosaur are standing by the RNS Coaltongues superstructure, keeping an eye on things. Terry is munching on a Sea Gull which dared to defy an slightly small Apex predator. Rinakth is at the bow talking to several artillery experts about the latest developments in Rifled Breech Loading Artillery, Ka'vert is in the middle of the crowd keeping an eye on things. Finally Oxorin is chatting with Sorkana outside the door to the duchesses room.

Sorkana tells Oxorin that the Duchess will be heading on deck soon, and she needs to go and make sure that the stewards have the right drink prepared , Oxorin believes this as her sense motive roll is 8 and Sorkana's bluff was 24 . Fortunatly Oxorin's perception is better and see's Sorkana heading down instead of up , she stealthily follows. The borrowed Raven on her shoulder broadcasts vague confusion to its master.
At the same time Delft tells El Jefe to go and check up on the Duchess to make sure she does not 'accidentally' miss the King's speech.
El Jefe goes downstairs poor perception rolls mean Oxorin and him do not see each other. He procedes to the door to the Duchesses cabin, noone answers his knock but he hears someone moving around, he thinks there should be three people in there. He cannot open the locked door so goes back on deck to find Rinakth who can.
AAt the same time Oxorin is sneaking after Sorkana and a halfling servent who seem to be heading down to engineering , she is concerned and the Raven becomes distressed alerting Ka'vert. On Deck Ka'vert and El Jefe meet up, El Jefe heads back downstairs with Terry. Ka'vert fetches Rinakth.
Below decks the excited Raven blows Oxorin's stealth roll, Sorkana heads down into engineering, challanging Oxorin and tells her to get off the ship, the halfling vanishes as he uses his invisibility potion. El Jefe heads down the stairs , foolishly he lets Terry go second Digitigrate legs and little stumpy arms prove to be bad for climbing down a warships ladders and he falls on El Jefe.
On the deck below Oxorin heads after Sorkana and is backstabbed by the Hobbit who only fails to skewer her when the Raven uses its bodyguard ability, she lets out a cry of shock which is heard by El Jefe and Rinakth who have respectively just climbed out from under a dinosaur and come down the stairs.
Ka'vert and El Jefe rush to support Oxorin who bashes the hobbit with a mace, this time they let Terry go down the stairs first which he managed flawlessly. Rinakth rushes to the Duchessess room and picks the lock it will be some time before he catches up with the others he encounters the Duchess climbing out of the porthole with the help of an unidentified Fey and a giant squid, he decides not to fight them as that would be suicide.
Ka'Vert puts the halfling to sleep, Oxorin moves to the engineering deck and all the gears of the machinery temporarily stun her and she can't work out whats going on (1 on perception) Ka'vert and El Jeffe Follow. Sorkana casts mirror image and steps away.
Ka'vert puts 2 stokers creeping up on Oxorin to sleep, Oxoring charges and tries to grapple Sorkana to drive her away from the Furnace and fails because a 1 is rolled again. Ka'vert looks up realising he made a mistake and went down the steps before Terry , Terry lands on him. Little stubby arms flailing uselessly in the air.
There is a confused fight as people try to hit Sorkana , her aggressive thundercloud and Burning hands injures everyone, including Rinakth who is trying to work out how to stop the boiler exploding as she is the only one with a clue about how these things work. Sorkana is grappled by Oxorin and then mage cuffed. Terry eats one fire sprite and after another one flies into a wall and is stunned (1 rolled) falls over on top of it (1 rolled tripped over a deck feature) and crushes it to death
Rinakth is able to work out what is going on and as the sabotage was in its early stages is rapidly with help from the others to do the muscle work able to calm things down and stop the explosion

They are congratulated on their good work , the king makes his speech without a major interruption and the team starts on paperwork.

They are briefed by Drelf and Lya on Axis island, they decide the ruins will be of interest and agree with Drelf that there is probably a reason why the Duchess attacked this island and they will try to check the ruins or any archeology notes they can find. The idea of swimming to the island terrifies them (In previous campaign there was precisely one PC fatality, drowned trying to swim, the same bridge crossing nearly killed 3 other pc's due to bad dice rolls and bad swimming skills) The availability of water breathing cheers them up

 

[MrsMongoose]

Yup, after all this time: still annoyed.

Carry on.

 

[Andrew Moreton]

Arriving at Axis island the team prepare to support the elite infiltration team as they move into the water cave, unsuprisingly 2 minutes into the operation everything goes wrong as a cave in kills or incacitates all of the highly skilled professional npc's. The team moves into action , they rescue a crippled goblin rogue and then spend a lot of time trying to find traps or other sources of concern as to why the roof collapsed but after a while they decide that the freak hallucinationof frogs and swamp removed the water support for the roof and triggerred a natural collapse. Reassured they move in.

On arrival they are all distracted by the pretty rocks and cannot seeany problems in the mine entrance until they get shot at, the mining engineer proves to be a crack shot hitting every time but has weak powder loaded as he never does more than 1 pt of damage, Oxorin charges up to deal with him ,while the rest deal with the shadow which drains Ka'vert and Rinakth of their strength. Fortunatly they have a number of Ghost blanch bullets which work on incorporeal creatures and magic missile spells, how they decided these would be needed is unclear apparently the omnicient spirit which prepared their equipment lists thought they better be able to handle a shadow. An earth elemental attacks but Terry bites it in two and then whines about the dust in his mouth.

They interview themining engineer and get a feel for the situation on the island then set out on foot for the main fortress avoiding a patrol easily. The rampaging Iron golem concerns them as they don't think Danor should have many of them,the oil it is leaking also worries them as their Medium small Druid kobold El Jeffe can sense the spirits trapped within. However they sensibly decline to actually try and do anything about the Golem

 

[Andrew Moreton]

Last entry was cut short by work

As they moved past the golem they were suddenly in a strange marsh , with a purple sun and menacing looking yellow frogs. Thinking quickly Rinakth grabbed some leaves off a plant so they could try and study this later, he would have grabbed a frog but as all pc's know frogs are dangerous. Fortunatly the plant was not poisonous. They could not work out what had happened but figured it came under drelfts instructions to report odd things.

Arriving at the fortress they had to work out how to get in and eventually decided on a 2 pronged strategy, the air elemental from the minewas used to carry the Kobold over an undermanned sectionof the wall at night while the other three followed by a somewhat mutinous Terry went in through the Front gate pretending to be a patrol with a tiefling prisoner, despite some rough moments when they fought Terry was going to eat a gate guard they got in and Ka'Vert started to home in on the raven which had accompanied El Jeffe. En route they encountered someone they thought was El-Jeffe accompanied by an apparent raven he gestured them into a nearby building and then vanished , they discovered the building was some sort of fascinating Arcano-technical factory for manufacturing Adamantium which interested Rinakth in particular. The others tried to work out how someone had looked and smelled just like El-Jeffe (Terry had been fooled) and faked the raven's connection to Ka'Vert they will be amazed when they work it out. The real El-Jeffe was located and they settled down to wait for the time to open the Sea Gate. A diversion was to be used the Raven and Rinakth's clever little mechanical device were left with the groups napalm and would start several sets of fires to draw the guards reaction force away from the Sea Gate while they would approach underwater, the alarm horn and the wizard guarding it would be neutraised by El -Jeffe creeping up using a silence spell scroll and thenbeating up the guard. The rest of the team would then secure the gatehouse and open the gate. This nearly all worked skilled shooting, hitting and sleep spell use dropped the downstairs guards. However upstairs El-Jeffe forgot how to use his scimitar and waved it around a lot while the wizard on guard hit him critically with 2 force bolts from his class feature uneffected by the silence and El Jeffe was in distinct danger of losing when a long range sniper shot from an unknown source took down the wizard

The pyrotechnics went up and the marines arrived, the constables saw the burning figure of some sort of high level lunatic hacking his way out of one of the ships and through both sides before vanishing they hoped not to meet him.

End of session

 

[RangerWickett]

Yeah, I'm sure you won't have to deal with that weirdo.

 

[Andrew Moreton]

With things in chaos across the fortress the constables take up their political diplomatic duties and try to find the Danoran prisoners so they look for Nathan. They are lead to the prisoners and are sad to discover that Nathan is not there and they will have to follow up on the assault on the inner keep to find him. Negotiating with the prisoners takes place and they agree to arm the prisoners and allow them to support the assault, They do not consult the marines about that which would have been a nusiance for them if there had been more danorans, They also find out about a route through the sewers and are discussing how to get Terry with his superb sense of smell to go down there.

Then they witness Asraby using his magical globe to break through the fortification and take the opportunity to follow him and end up intimidatin the gardner to get past the hedge maze. And again work interrupts my typing to be continued (about 2 weeks behind)

 

[Andrew Moreton]

After avoiding a fight with the hedge faerie by threatening him with an incendiary sorceror and the possibility of his hedge burning down in a tragic accident they pursue into the central keep where they follow up the intimidating trail of bodies pausing when they came to a closed door and listen to a conversation between Asraby , the Duchess and Nathan Jierre. They find some of it interesting and all of it scary , they have just about built up the nerve to go in through the door when Asraby opens it.
A tense stand of follows as they try to talk Asraby down, he makes an offer to leave giving them the Duchess and taking Nathan, however they don't believe him. The players were really sweating as they knew he was a lot more dangerous than them. In the end they decided to got for it, Oxorin tried hitting him with a sword which did not work and he countered knocking her unconcious before taking a magic missile from Ka'Vert , a snowball spell from El'Jeffe and finally a musket shot from Rinakth collapsing unconcious. They quickly mage cuffed the duchess and Asraby before healing and interviewing everyone. They were quick to ship Nathan back to Risur as he wanted to defect and they wanted him off the island before Lya turned up. They also took further samples of the weird plane axis island was connecting to and later consulted at the university and it was confirmed that the frog and plants they had did not come from any of the known planets/Planes very concerning to the Stargazer. The handover to Lya went smoothly and they returned to Risur and confirmed to Drelf that weird stuff was going on on Axis Island and the Danorans were up to something , but they did not think it was necessarily a threat to the peace talks , and indeed could have been a plan to prepare for the next war cut short by these talks, the prohecy the Duchess recieved also concerned them and left them puzzled about what was to come.

 

[Andrew Moreton]

A few weeks later the constables were saved from the tedium of paperwork by the death of a young woman.
The constables were hurriedly briefed by Drelf on the incident at the Danoran consulate and told to go there and sort out what had happened but not to cause a diplomatic incident. Arriving at the scene they spoke with the Security chief LeBrix and initially found him helpful. However as their investigation continue they began to notice problems with the story they had been given and came to the conclusion they were being lied to . They did not tell LeBrix did. In particular they had come to the cocnclusion that she had been upstairs longer than they were told and there was evidence of a different sort of fight upstairs. Further Nilasa had access to unnusual flying magic and illegal invisibility potions.

After investigating the sight Rinakth and Ka'Vert accompanied the body to the autopsy, they had planned that El Jefe would do a seance in the morning before 24 hours had passed and after they had gathered information. El Jefe and Oxorin remained to try and interview any witnesses and they were able to determine that Doctor Von Recklinghausen had spoken with the Dying Nilasa and taken some stuff and further confiremd their opinion that Nilasa was shot outside the consulate and had already been injured , further they believed a shadow man had shot her. Thus certain that the Consular staff were decieving them they determined that their duty was to find out why things had happenned and what the consulate was hiding. The team at the autopsy received further confirming evidence and they remained puzzled by the necromanitc wound on Nilasa and had started arranging to meet with the professor of Necromancy at the University. I have not decided if he is already a lich or even if anyone knows he is a lich.
The team at the consulate had discovered the site of the scuffle in the alley and taken the carriage to the hostel, there they followed the Doctors trail until he vanished into the slums. They also decided they did not trust this police officer who seemed to be investigating, The carraige journey was notable for having Terry riding inside the carriage with El Jeffe while Oxorin rode on the roof, Terry who is a featehred Tyrannosaur journeyed with his head sticking out of the window snapping at Gulls and Pigeons. It had been decided that with his little stubby arms Terry could not hang on top and anyway that would attract more attention.

Ka'verte and Rniakth went to visit Hewards factory after the autopsy, speaking with him and examining the factory they came away with a favourable impression and a desire to visit his uncle the Stargazer and this would be what they would do tommorrow after the spirit medium had done his thing. They also visited the police station got Nilasa's records and asked for Officer Porter to be sent to the RHC HQ tommorrow.

Visiting the Speaking mans tavern in the evening they managed not to offend anypne and discovered that Nilasa had been corresponding with a Mr Cipriano and decided they should visit this probably Family Don and see what he had to say.


Next session began with the Seance

 

[Andrew Moreton]

We just started Book 4 and I will attempt to get back to write ups