At the close of our previous
session, our adventurers were feeling preeeeety tuckered out after slaying a
van-sized undead dragon and clearing out most of the cult of Catholic wizards
that had dug up and reanimated its corpse. They had also been fiddling with the
stuff they’d found laying around the dungeon. What was that stuff, you ask? Oh
intrepid reader you have foreseen what I was about to describe! As though in a
crystal ball, even.
So, Sylvan realized the link
between his shillelagh spell and the magical, undead-dismembering vines of his
new staff. Coasai, despite his best efforts and with a little help from his
more magically inclined friends, couldn’t get the longsword he’d taken from the
cold dead hands of a slain, mind-controlled enemy to work its magic powers. It
was as if the sword wanted nothing to do with him, and didn’t care for his
attentions. As if there were, shall we say, some sort of restriction on who
could wield such a weapon. Ryn’s time with his new cloak was more well-spent,
and he discovered that, when wearing it, he was essentially reverse-blind! Eyes
closed or not, he could always see what was going on, and in every direction.
And the eye-like patterns on the cloak look like creepy-ass staring eyes now,
so there’s that. Oh, and he could see the ethereal plane (which is the
right-on-top-of-us but invisible copy of our world, which can’t usually see
into our plane and vice versa, and where pretty much nothing but ghostly
spirits and the memories of ruined places live their ghostly lives,
occasionally visited by wizzzards and extraplanar beings of great power).
With their new stuff all ready to
go, they burst out of their hiding spot to find that the cultists had got wise
and vacated the place, taking all their cool shit with them. Sylvan cleared up
the whole blocked up stream thing, and ideally saved a big olde tree. Gandrakk
found a genealogy of the dragonborn families of Troidet, the southernmost city
on this continent. The book ended with a history of the war, over for twenty
years or so, between the northern nations. As the tide was turning towards the
nation of Kibaram, an assault by draconic forces led by the young wyrm Aztaron
the black brought Springward and Kibaram together to repel their common enemy.
They were able to drive the evil dragon back, but many villages and towns along
the northern coast were destroyed in the battles. Towns specifically related to
the backstories of a fair few of our adventurers, no less.
Also, Georg, the townsman they’d
saved and stashed away in cultists’ barracks, had been bustled away again. Poor
Georg.
As they left the cave/druid
training ground/makeshift dragon revivifying zone, they also grabbed up the
mutilated bodies of some dwarves they’d found tortured and dismembered inside.
Gandrakk was able to identify the family sigil in one of the Dwarves’ tattoos, which
hopefully he wrote down because otherwise their names are Robert Paulson, their
names are Robert
Paulson…
The party saw a boat heading
towards the north, but with no way to pursue, dragged the rotting dwarven
corpses along the coastline towards Boggrove. The stank of said bodies
attracted a pack of wolves, several of whom were stabbed, pincushioned with
arrows, and smashed with hammers until their pack alpha decided it wasn’t worth
the trouble, and they fled back into the treeline.
Back in Boggrove, the party acted
legitimately surprised when Wulfa, local barman and owner of the peg-leg
tavern, didn’t want to keep said predator-attractant bags of mutilated flesh in
his basement. Gandrakk summoned up his knowledge of Dwarven burial ritual (he
was raised by Dwarves, you’ll recall), and burned the bodies on the beach,
storing their ashes in emptied bottles of strong mead. Everyone was pretty sure
that the Dwarves would be cool with this.
At the bar in the tavern, Sylvan
discussed the state of the cavern with Wulfa, who seemed, by turns, shocked at
the attack and desecration of the important druidic location, happy that things
had been set right, and concerned about what his next move would be. Wulfa, a
veteran of the last war, let on that, after the magical crystals had been used
to create a dragon-warding spell and a storm that wrecked the Astaron’s
minions’ fleet, they had been split up and sent to several locations: Boggrove,
Sleekfront, and other parts, north and south, that he wasn’t sure about. He let
on that he would be meeting with other powerful druids from the area to discuss
their next move. Glüur, unable to understand this conversation in druidic
language, slammed a bunch of ales. Wulfa also told Coasai that a local sailor
and fisherman was right over there, and if they wanted to try to buy his boat
for the purpose of giving chase to the fleeing cultists, they could talk to him
about it.
It turns out said fisherman was
really, really tired. He kept nodding off, but seemed to be fighting the urge
to sleep. Ryn asked what was up with that, and was informed that the poor man
had been having nightmares of being chased by a terrible beast, and that last
night, when the monster slashed him with his claws in his dream, he awoke to
find the wound persisted into his reality! Ryn, recalling his studies of weird
tales about fishy stuff, asked if there had been any strange catches in recent
days, and learned that, indeed, a two-headed squid had been caught. Rather than
send such an abominaiton back to the depths, the fisherman split it in two,
thinking he’d been fortunate in his wet, tentacly harvest. Sleepy Sleeperson
was easy to convince to sell his boat, which he let go for a gem worth 50 gp,
having been conned into thinking the gem was worth 500 by the ever-so-beguiling
Coasai. Our adventurers took to bed, looking forward to a morning of
derring-do.
Little could they have known, that
the fisherman’s dreams would be a really big deal for them that night. They
were roused from their sleep by the sound of the man hollering, louder and
louder, a lovely song to the tune of “Y’AI I’NG’NGAH YOG-ORASTUR H’EE L’GUG G’A
THORDOG UUAAH” As they ran downstairs to help the poor man, they found his eyes
rolled back in his head, and mysterious bulges popping up all over his body.
Thinking to kill the alien before it exploded from his guts, Coasai grabbed up
his rapier and slammed it into the man’s back. The blade slid in just like
normal, but never emerged from the front! Ryn’s cloak granted him a vision of a
starry sky expanding from the hole in the man’s back, seeping out in all
directions. In that very moment, a terrible claw tore open the man’s middle,
and first one, then a second pair of long, muscular arms with tri-clawed hands
emerged. The beast’s mouth, nestled where a neck should have been, opened
vertically to reveal rows of razor-sharp teeth, above two small, lidless, entirely
pink eyeballs. It was yucky, and about 9 feet tall, and when it stepped out of
the poor fisherman’s body it scared the ever loving shit out of Glüur and
Coasai.
The beast turned toward Ryn and
grabbed him up in one claw, slashing and biting at the poor warlock. Gandrakk
hammered at the monstrosity, and Sylvan hucked a couple fireballs in its
direction, but the sucker was tough. A few javelins and arrows from Gluur and
Coasai tumped into its hulking mass, but didn’t seem to slow it down. Ryn
panicked, and invoked his elder patron to lash out with tentacles of
otherworldly darkness at the beast that held onto him, hurting it but smacking
Gandrakk and Sylvan in the process. Sylvan was the next target of the beast’s
attention, and was grappled as well. With both casters in his lower arms, the
dream-invader thrust them into the tavern’s fire-pit, leaving the slumped and
bleeding form of the druid in the tavern and running out the door to deal with
Ryn in some terrible, terrible fashion, as far as the group could tell.
Gandrakk valiantly gave chase, and witnessed the beast smashing Ryn into the
tavern’s wall and screeching some unintelligibly foul words into his dying face--to
Ryn, it sounded like “emissssssary of the ssssssleeper, YOG-ORASTUR SENDS HIS
REGARDS”, but to everyone else it was mostly just really gross spitting and
croaking sounds--before dropping him to the ground. Gandrakk’s hammer-blows
sent the beast reeling back into the tavern through the window, towards Coasai,
a more lightly armored and easier-seeming prey. Gluür finally got over his
fear, though, and before it could lay its hands on another member of the party
he swung his greataxe mightily into the bastard, damaging it beyond its ability
to exist outside of the dreamlands. Rather than slump to the ground and get cut
to bits by you trophy hunting freaks, the monster’s limbs pulled, vacuum-like,
into its chest, and it quickly crumpled to a single point, then exploded green
goop all over the tavern. Wulfa stumbled out of his bathroom, looked around,
shook his head, and went back to bed. Coasai picked up the gem he had used
earlier to buy the boat, seeing as the fisherman probably wouldn’t be needing
it at this point. The group retired to a night of relatively restful sleep,
considering.
In the morning, a grumpy Wulfa was
busy cleaning up his inn, so he bustled the adventurers out the door. They
restocked on potions, Coasai bought a new rapier to replace his one that had
got done eaten up by a magical dream-plane monster-beast, and talked with a local
smith for a while. Gandrakk realized this young smith's potential when he saw
his journeyman's hammer, and the group decided that this was the guy to leave
their trophies with to have them turned into cooler stuff than just bones,
scales, and chunks of horn. In particular, Gluur is set up to get a totally
awesome dragon-helmet out of the deal in a week or so.
They easily found the boat they had
bought, and set sail towards the island to the north. It took a long time, but
the weather was nice and they were mostly just straight chillin on a boat. As
they drew near the shoreline of the island, they saw that it was lush with
tropical vegetation, palm trees and the like, and at the treeline at the end of
the beach a group of lizardfolk were waiting patiently. The party tacked right,
and were followed by the lizardfolk, who seemed in no big rush. When they
landed their boat on the beach, the lizardfolk made gestures ushering them
away, and were very surprised when Sylvan struck up a conversation with them in
draconic. There was a bit of an accent variation, but through their hillbilly
accent it was determined that those same catholic jerks in their black robes
with the silver trim were in the process of making a raid on the lizardfolk’s
holy site, a temple of Nerganu.
Nerganu, it turns out, was an evil
wizard and a bit of a dick, who had been extorting the lizardfolk to bring him
hunks of dragonstone in order to contain a storm elemental, which he threatened
to release if they did not bring the dragonstone. Dragonstone, btw, is a very
rare rock, always mysteriously in the shape of a dragon’s tooth, and a powerful
alchemical ingredient. The only mine for the stuff on the island was near where
these lizardfolk lived, so they had the unfortunate task of dealing with
Nerganu. They had stopped receiving messengers from the wizard a few years
back, and assumed he had died, and abandoned their mining operation, but,
looking over their shoulders now, they indicated that a gathering storm was
likely a result of not sending any dragonstone to Nerganu for the past few
years. Why the catholics were here, they had no clue, but it was probably
because the temple must house some pretty badass magical gear in order to hold
a storm elemental back, and people occasionally came to the lizardfolk’s island
only die in an attempt to harness that power for themselves. At the lizardfolk
guard’s urging, the party agreed to go lay the smack down on the catholic
acolyte and his minions, since they actually seemed capable of putting the magic
there to even more evil uses. They were given a list of instructions for
visitors to the temple, and a handful of dragonstone bits, and happily charged
forth towards the danger.
The catholic wizard had fought his
way past some construct-like skeletal lizardmen, and collapsed the entryway to
the leftmost wing of the temple just as the heroes were rolling up to the
place. Well, only one way to go, so they headed towards the right-hand door.
Rembering to approach Nerganu
groveling like worms, Gandrakk and Coasai used teamwork and knife skills to
disarm a spear trap at the door to the temple. Whew!
Once they got inside, they saw an
old temple hallway with three alcoves, and along wall filled with candles in
all the colors of the rainbow. They spent about 10 minutes worrying about who
should go around the corner first and see what was in the alcoves, only to
discover three little statues and no bad guys whatsoever. This dungeon was
acting weird. Where were the bad guys!? A gold statue to a thunder god, a blue
statue to a god of the sea, and a white statue to nerganu, each identified by
the draconic-reading members of the party through their poses and inscriptions
below. With a candle of the corresponding color placed beneath each statue,
acknowledging Nerganu’s place among the gods, a hidden door opened and allowed
the heroes to pass on. [had you fucked that up, that’s when the bad guys would
have showed up, btw]
The next room had a grate, a pillar
with a frozen key in it, an electric generator, and a pair of levers, one of
which was inside an iron cage. They threw a rope around the lever inside the
cage, and pulled on it. This lever opened a door to some zombies—quickly
dispatched by some eldritch blasts and hammer blows—turned on the electrical
generator, and let down a ladder that led to the door out of the place. After
Coasai climbed up the pillar and used a torch to melt the key out of place,
water started filling up the room. Everyone bolted before the water got over
the electrical generator, but it was dicey in there for a minute. Teamwork
saved the day!
In the last room of this temple,
the adventurers found themselves showing up at just the same time as the
cultists. Damn those kids! This room held a big pool, separating the near and
far sides of the room, and in the center of the pool a giant crystal cylinder
held a storm, in, a bottle, but, literally, cuz it was the storm elemental.
Atop the crystal cylinder, the group saw one of the magical crystal shards,
like the one from boggrove they’ve been carrying around, and decided that would
probably be something worth having. They also made a show of running to each of
four burning braziers of the room and torching their dragonstone in them at
various times. Their first move was to test this out on the nearest brazier,
which they discovered set the container holding the elemental spinning, and
brought the giant axles of his container nearly close enough to grab, before
the spinning slowed down and left the axle just out of reach. The elemental
didn’t seem to like that, since it squished him down inside the crystal just a
little bit more.
Then, the catholic acolyte shouted
to them: “stop! Let’s work together! We can harness the crystal’s power!” That
obviously was never going to work, and as Gluur ran towards the pack of
cultists axe in hand they bolted for the far platform, where they were greeted
by some skeletal lizardfolk guardians encircling an upright tomb. Eep! A volley
of javelins took out some cultists, but before they could return the attack,
Sylvan dropped his dragonstone in the second brazier, igniting a sigil in the
shape of the phylacteries around the guardian lizard-eletons necks, and two of
the monsters dropped!
By this point Coasai and gandrakk
were across the water as well, and made their way to the third brazier, where
they deposited yet another load of dragonstone. This one opened a door on the
cultists’ side. Seeing the opportunity to bail, the catholic acolyte ran out
the door. Instead of letting the rest of the enemies fight it out, Sylvan used
his next action to unleash a badass moonbeam, torching the acolytes and lizard
skeletons no matter where they ran. Wisps of crystalline moonlight enveloped
the bad guys lo in so many white-hot flames that they succumbed in a matter of
seconds to his druidic powers. Running away seems to have been quite a good
idea for the acolyte! When the party reached the final brazier, they dumped the
last of their dragonstone into it, and the crystalline prison holding the
elemental was destroyed. The freed elemental stormcloud shot lighnting all
around the room at the fallen phylacteries, shattering htem and destroying
their dragonstone cores, before re-assuming half-human form and gunning it
superman style for the exit himself. Gluur took a moment to loot Nerganu’s body
for its fancy robe, and Coasai climbed up and took the crystal shard, bring the
groups total to two of the known five magical stones they think that a black
dragon is looking for.
Without hesitation, ryn zapped the
catholic acolyte in the back as he ran away, and he fell, unconscious to the
ground.
What will happen next? Will he wake
up? Will the party discover the identity of the dragon? Is the dragon aware
they’ve got these stones? Will he be mad about if he finds out? What other
nefarious baddies live on this island anyhow? And who gets slain next? Find
out... when I post the next recap.
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