DND write-up from 11/8/2014
Well let me tell you, this was my first game played as my new character (transformation to be revealed shortly!) AND the first time we've had babysitting in a long time. So I was free to fully engage with the game, and that made a lot of difference. For one, it turns out I am rather impatient and playing a rogue is a good match for that. Anyway, back to our story...
Our party, having recently finished a battle in the vast and terrible dungeons of Rappan Athunk, found no other good option but to head into the hole in the tumble-down wall that smells like orcs (ew). We find ourselves in a tunnel that seems to have recently flooded, with magical flickering scrolls on the walls that show mysterious images. We've been to this corridor before, it seems. But this time we can hear someone pounding on the scroll trying to get out! YingLing peers in and sees...our mentor Tattersail! Who we've been searching for! But all she does is look at us and then scream at me, in desperation, Marika -- it's not worth it! Drop the illusion!. I panic and my illusion drops, and I no longer appear as the gnome sorceress I once was, but as my true form, a human rogue. Shylock is instantly suspicious and tries to find out if anyone else is under an illusion, and they question me. How did I come to be disguised? I explain that many, many years ago, I was granted a one-time boon by the deity I worship, Sivanah, goddess of veils and illusions. This allowed me to pass as a wizardborn gnome for many years, including all my years of schooling under Tattersail with my companions. None of them have ever known me to be anything else, but apparently Tattersail was more canny than she let on.
We are all rather apprehensive at the idea that Tattersail knew how to reach us, and that she thought we were in such danger that it was worth it for me to drop this illusion. What could be ahead of us? The magic, as it left my body with the illusion, appears to be an almost tangible force that hovers around our party, not touching or affecting anyone, but perhaps to have unknown future effects.
Meanwhile, as we walk up to the door at the end of the corridor (with no other avenues to pursue), Shylock faints! When he awakes, he said he tried to send a message to Tattersail, but there was...feedback? on the channel of communication. A girl appeared to him, with blond hair, in a white dress, with garish bruises at her neck, wrist, and ankles. We're not certain, but this may have been an avatar of the evil god Orcus, because the message comes from him, somehow: he doesn't have Tattersail, but he's looking for her, and he's following us. Keep an eye for the Crucified, dark elf, he said to Shylock. At this point, YingLing remembers her vision of Orcus and his avatars -- we have already killed the Knight, and we are perhaps going to encounter the Crucified pretty soon. Ugh.
I get very suspicious of how Orcus is following us, and we remember that he played a hand in the resurrection of our dwarf friend, Marvin. I search his belongings and find a darkly glowing magic sigil in his pack, which I shove deep into a crack in the wall.
Moving on, I open the door ahead of us and we find ourselves back in the round room where we found a portal guarded by gargoyles before. But this time there are three wizards surrounding the portal, holding it open by magic forces. Pillars of smoke appear behind the wizards, and flying knives emerge to stab each wizard in turn! One wizard is beheaded, then another bellows HAIL ORCUS and the portal begins to crack, and then falls to the ground in a massive rumbling fall of stone.
As this rubble crumbles, we hear a high-pitched whine, and then a *POP* that hurts our ears, and we find ourselves in a shallow, smoky crater, outside, in the rain, surrounded by dead and dying soldiers, groaning and pleading for death, or struggling with grievous injuries. What happened here? Where are we? Is this outside Rappan Athuk or somewhere else entirely? The armor looks rather antiquated...but before we have time to discover any answers ourselves, a woman peeks over the edge of the pit and throws us a rope to climb out. Playing as dazed soldiers from whatever calamity created that crater, we ask the year? She names a date 4,000 years prior to our own time. Stunned, we follow her as she beckons us to return to the camp, as the sounds of a massive battle echo across the foggy, rainy field.
As we walk, a group of horse-mounted soldiers come up, and the apparent leader addresses the woman as Sergeant Tattersail. We are further stunned in silence and slowly dawning apprehension. As the soldiers question her, they ask for our names -- everyone gives their real name but I give her a fake name, not quite willing to commit. Shylock takes this opportunity to try to warn her someone is looking for her (well, a god, but let's not quibble) and that she may be in grave danger, but she is rather dismissive of this. Of course she's in danger, we're at war. We make our way back to a sort of palisaded camp.
She is further convinced we are battle-addled when we ask her who we are fighting against. We ask about Orcus, guessing he’s involved somehow, the bastard. She asks, do we mean Councilman Orcus, who died ten years ago? There is a cult that sprang up after his death, which slowly took over the nearby city, Tsar, at whose gates our battle rages on. We come to realize that whatever else happens, we must protect Tattersail, that perhaps Orcus is in pursuit of her to prevent whatever she does here.
As we stand around, Tattersail’s superior, Commander Plate, comes up and commands us to follow him to his tent. As we follow, a massive fellow on a horse, with an axe nearly as long as his torso, gives us a blank, bored look. With him, on her own horse, is a rather striking woman with a rifle. She is covered in tattoos and speaks in a lazy drawl. I immediately take a dislike to her. We continue to question Tattersail on the way to Plate’s tent, but she gets agitated with our questions and we get no satisfactory answers. She tells us she received a battle commission, after volunteering with a friend. Later her friend died.
But then we are at the tent, receiving our mission from Commander Plate, with little choice in the matter. We are told the Tsaurians will be transporting something large by a known path in the nearby woods, and we are to intercept it and bring it back. Kant, the large man with the axe, will lead our group, with Tattersail as his second. Tattersail asks the name of his ladyfriend. “Number Six. Don’t you remember me?” We get a little of her backstory (meanwhile Shylock does a motive check on Kant and learns only that he thinks this task is way beneath him), she saved Kant in Numeria when he fought a village in order to keep the axe of black, glittering glass that he found. Kant says, Six is my friend. She is not human, but she is my friend. She saved my life. He also reveals that she was created, not born, and none of us know quite what to make of that.
We pass more than half a day by horse to a small wooded canyon, where we set up a simple ambush for the caravan that will pass this way. Six informs us that her weapon has a special power (an enchantment of some kind, we think?) so that whatever target she hits will be easiest for the rest of us to hit, too. We track the caravan entering the narrow canyon, where we have left our drunkard friend Marvin the dwarf passed out in a heap on the ground. As the nearest caravan guard passes directly below my hiding place, I vault off the cliff’s edge and stab the guard for 33 damage. Another guard throws off his cloak, and is revealed to be a cleric, who casts a spell that fills Tattersail, Kant, and our orc warrior Twila with fear and doubt. After that, Six hits the cleric with a shot from her gun, two hits for 19 and 25 damage! Despite the spell’s ill effects, Twila manages to charge the cleric for 24 damage. YingLing and Tattersail both get in another 7 and 8 points of damage. Shylock launches an energy missile at the guards. Our ambush is so successful that we easily overpower them, with Silver Hammer the bard killing the first guard with fire arrows.
I then leap onto the wagon, but before I can do anything further, Six shoots and kills the guard near me. I hiss with malice. I keep making jokes about her accidentally falling off the cliff and getting trampled under the cart wheels, but nothing doing. Twila cleaves through the third and fourth guard and kills them both instantly. A satisfying, if short, battle.
From my position on top of the caravan, I pull off the tarp, and we find it conceals a large cage containing a human man, who appears unconscious. He is bolted to the floor of the cage, spreadeagle. We find this a bad omen, remembering the wagon containing a mysterious weapon that we had guarded and then lost at the beginning of our adventure, so we cover him back up while we clean up from the battle, finding a small locked chest and a key. But then we hear the man come awake, and he begins shouting that his name is Icarium, and he was kidnapped from a library where he had been with his friend Mappo. (Dramatic looks all around: Mappo is the warrior who had accompanied that first caravan with us, and who had quickly disappeared with its mysterious cargo in the confusion that happened after the cultists attacked the town.)
Meanwhile, we find a set of armor in the small chest, once I pick the locks. It’s too big for a human, and would maybe fit Twila. It clearly doesn’t belong to Icarium, and it doesn’t have any sort of ill aura emanating from it, so we keep it. Icarium begs us to take us to Tsar so he can find Mappo. I am somewhat suspicious of Icarium, why would he be bolted down in the cage like this? But Kant interjects that the Tsaurians are known for torture, so we must let him go. And Tattersail says she knows how to get us into Tsar…but should we just go there directly, or should we bring the caravan back to camp and then ask to go to Tsar to help Icarium?
I question Icarium about time travel, without revealing our origins, wondering if he has any clues to why we have come here. He says time travel is possible, mumbling in a kind of fog, about the mechanics of time, marking time…but insists we must find Mappo, he’s always there to help. Kant is inclined to say we cannot go off on a fool’s mission, but as we leave the canyon we suddenly see how close we are to the City of Tsar. Even in the dark and the rain, it is tantalizingly close. We all feel the pull of Mappo, wondering what answers he could provide, especially regarding how in the fuck we are supposed to time travel forward to where we are supposed to be finding Tattersail.
But the only way into Tsar is through the main gates. Six laughs and explains that’s the secret of this whole war: the gates are open completely! Or they were, until very recently. Because Tsar wasn’t really at war, they were merely holding off a small, troublesome rebellion! It’s only recently that they’ve come to close the gates and attempt to quell the rebellion in earnest. Bitterly, Tattersail comments that it’s not right, what the Tsaurians do. Six replies, Well, might makes right. A million Tsaurians believe they are right. How can we hope to liberate slaveholders who have no desire to forsake their riches? Tattersail says we must focus on the slaves.
We are beginning to make some sense of when and where we are. In our time period, Tsar is only known as the Tsaurian Plain, a dead region where the earth had been salted completely. The argument about Tsar continues on but as a party, we come to the uneasy consensus that we must sneak into Tsar to find Mappo, not merely to help Icarium, but to get answers for ourselves. After some more negotiations, because Tsaurians regard non-humans with some loathing, I come up with a plan. Shylock will follow Tattersail on the route she knows that enters through the sewers, and they will steal clothing for us. Then the main party will enter by the main gates, me dressed up as a gentlewoman and slaveholder, Tattersail dressed as my waiting woman, everyone else as my slaves.
And that is where we’ll start this Saturday, when the party reunites.
Our party, having recently finished a battle in the vast and terrible dungeons of Rappan Athunk, found no other good option but to head into the hole in the tumble-down wall that smells like orcs (ew). We find ourselves in a tunnel that seems to have recently flooded, with magical flickering scrolls on the walls that show mysterious images. We've been to this corridor before, it seems. But this time we can hear someone pounding on the scroll trying to get out! YingLing peers in and sees...our mentor Tattersail! Who we've been searching for! But all she does is look at us and then scream at me, in desperation, Marika -- it's not worth it! Drop the illusion!. I panic and my illusion drops, and I no longer appear as the gnome sorceress I once was, but as my true form, a human rogue. Shylock is instantly suspicious and tries to find out if anyone else is under an illusion, and they question me. How did I come to be disguised? I explain that many, many years ago, I was granted a one-time boon by the deity I worship, Sivanah, goddess of veils and illusions. This allowed me to pass as a wizardborn gnome for many years, including all my years of schooling under Tattersail with my companions. None of them have ever known me to be anything else, but apparently Tattersail was more canny than she let on.
We are all rather apprehensive at the idea that Tattersail knew how to reach us, and that she thought we were in such danger that it was worth it for me to drop this illusion. What could be ahead of us? The magic, as it left my body with the illusion, appears to be an almost tangible force that hovers around our party, not touching or affecting anyone, but perhaps to have unknown future effects.
Meanwhile, as we walk up to the door at the end of the corridor (with no other avenues to pursue), Shylock faints! When he awakes, he said he tried to send a message to Tattersail, but there was...feedback? on the channel of communication. A girl appeared to him, with blond hair, in a white dress, with garish bruises at her neck, wrist, and ankles. We're not certain, but this may have been an avatar of the evil god Orcus, because the message comes from him, somehow: he doesn't have Tattersail, but he's looking for her, and he's following us. Keep an eye for the Crucified, dark elf, he said to Shylock. At this point, YingLing remembers her vision of Orcus and his avatars -- we have already killed the Knight, and we are perhaps going to encounter the Crucified pretty soon. Ugh.
I get very suspicious of how Orcus is following us, and we remember that he played a hand in the resurrection of our dwarf friend, Marvin. I search his belongings and find a darkly glowing magic sigil in his pack, which I shove deep into a crack in the wall.
Moving on, I open the door ahead of us and we find ourselves back in the round room where we found a portal guarded by gargoyles before. But this time there are three wizards surrounding the portal, holding it open by magic forces. Pillars of smoke appear behind the wizards, and flying knives emerge to stab each wizard in turn! One wizard is beheaded, then another bellows HAIL ORCUS and the portal begins to crack, and then falls to the ground in a massive rumbling fall of stone.
As this rubble crumbles, we hear a high-pitched whine, and then a *POP* that hurts our ears, and we find ourselves in a shallow, smoky crater, outside, in the rain, surrounded by dead and dying soldiers, groaning and pleading for death, or struggling with grievous injuries. What happened here? Where are we? Is this outside Rappan Athuk or somewhere else entirely? The armor looks rather antiquated...but before we have time to discover any answers ourselves, a woman peeks over the edge of the pit and throws us a rope to climb out. Playing as dazed soldiers from whatever calamity created that crater, we ask the year? She names a date 4,000 years prior to our own time. Stunned, we follow her as she beckons us to return to the camp, as the sounds of a massive battle echo across the foggy, rainy field.
As we walk, a group of horse-mounted soldiers come up, and the apparent leader addresses the woman as Sergeant Tattersail. We are further stunned in silence and slowly dawning apprehension. As the soldiers question her, they ask for our names -- everyone gives their real name but I give her a fake name, not quite willing to commit. Shylock takes this opportunity to try to warn her someone is looking for her (well, a god, but let's not quibble) and that she may be in grave danger, but she is rather dismissive of this. Of course she's in danger, we're at war. We make our way back to a sort of palisaded camp.
She is further convinced we are battle-addled when we ask her who we are fighting against. We ask about Orcus, guessing he’s involved somehow, the bastard. She asks, do we mean Councilman Orcus, who died ten years ago? There is a cult that sprang up after his death, which slowly took over the nearby city, Tsar, at whose gates our battle rages on. We come to realize that whatever else happens, we must protect Tattersail, that perhaps Orcus is in pursuit of her to prevent whatever she does here.
As we stand around, Tattersail’s superior, Commander Plate, comes up and commands us to follow him to his tent. As we follow, a massive fellow on a horse, with an axe nearly as long as his torso, gives us a blank, bored look. With him, on her own horse, is a rather striking woman with a rifle. She is covered in tattoos and speaks in a lazy drawl. I immediately take a dislike to her. We continue to question Tattersail on the way to Plate’s tent, but she gets agitated with our questions and we get no satisfactory answers. She tells us she received a battle commission, after volunteering with a friend. Later her friend died.
But then we are at the tent, receiving our mission from Commander Plate, with little choice in the matter. We are told the Tsaurians will be transporting something large by a known path in the nearby woods, and we are to intercept it and bring it back. Kant, the large man with the axe, will lead our group, with Tattersail as his second. Tattersail asks the name of his ladyfriend. “Number Six. Don’t you remember me?” We get a little of her backstory (meanwhile Shylock does a motive check on Kant and learns only that he thinks this task is way beneath him), she saved Kant in Numeria when he fought a village in order to keep the axe of black, glittering glass that he found. Kant says, Six is my friend. She is not human, but she is my friend. She saved my life. He also reveals that she was created, not born, and none of us know quite what to make of that.
We pass more than half a day by horse to a small wooded canyon, where we set up a simple ambush for the caravan that will pass this way. Six informs us that her weapon has a special power (an enchantment of some kind, we think?) so that whatever target she hits will be easiest for the rest of us to hit, too. We track the caravan entering the narrow canyon, where we have left our drunkard friend Marvin the dwarf passed out in a heap on the ground. As the nearest caravan guard passes directly below my hiding place, I vault off the cliff’s edge and stab the guard for 33 damage. Another guard throws off his cloak, and is revealed to be a cleric, who casts a spell that fills Tattersail, Kant, and our orc warrior Twila with fear and doubt. After that, Six hits the cleric with a shot from her gun, two hits for 19 and 25 damage! Despite the spell’s ill effects, Twila manages to charge the cleric for 24 damage. YingLing and Tattersail both get in another 7 and 8 points of damage. Shylock launches an energy missile at the guards. Our ambush is so successful that we easily overpower them, with Silver Hammer the bard killing the first guard with fire arrows.
I then leap onto the wagon, but before I can do anything further, Six shoots and kills the guard near me. I hiss with malice. I keep making jokes about her accidentally falling off the cliff and getting trampled under the cart wheels, but nothing doing. Twila cleaves through the third and fourth guard and kills them both instantly. A satisfying, if short, battle.
From my position on top of the caravan, I pull off the tarp, and we find it conceals a large cage containing a human man, who appears unconscious. He is bolted to the floor of the cage, spreadeagle. We find this a bad omen, remembering the wagon containing a mysterious weapon that we had guarded and then lost at the beginning of our adventure, so we cover him back up while we clean up from the battle, finding a small locked chest and a key. But then we hear the man come awake, and he begins shouting that his name is Icarium, and he was kidnapped from a library where he had been with his friend Mappo. (Dramatic looks all around: Mappo is the warrior who had accompanied that first caravan with us, and who had quickly disappeared with its mysterious cargo in the confusion that happened after the cultists attacked the town.)
Meanwhile, we find a set of armor in the small chest, once I pick the locks. It’s too big for a human, and would maybe fit Twila. It clearly doesn’t belong to Icarium, and it doesn’t have any sort of ill aura emanating from it, so we keep it. Icarium begs us to take us to Tsar so he can find Mappo. I am somewhat suspicious of Icarium, why would he be bolted down in the cage like this? But Kant interjects that the Tsaurians are known for torture, so we must let him go. And Tattersail says she knows how to get us into Tsar…but should we just go there directly, or should we bring the caravan back to camp and then ask to go to Tsar to help Icarium?
I question Icarium about time travel, without revealing our origins, wondering if he has any clues to why we have come here. He says time travel is possible, mumbling in a kind of fog, about the mechanics of time, marking time…but insists we must find Mappo, he’s always there to help. Kant is inclined to say we cannot go off on a fool’s mission, but as we leave the canyon we suddenly see how close we are to the City of Tsar. Even in the dark and the rain, it is tantalizingly close. We all feel the pull of Mappo, wondering what answers he could provide, especially regarding how in the fuck we are supposed to time travel forward to where we are supposed to be finding Tattersail.
But the only way into Tsar is through the main gates. Six laughs and explains that’s the secret of this whole war: the gates are open completely! Or they were, until very recently. Because Tsar wasn’t really at war, they were merely holding off a small, troublesome rebellion! It’s only recently that they’ve come to close the gates and attempt to quell the rebellion in earnest. Bitterly, Tattersail comments that it’s not right, what the Tsaurians do. Six replies, Well, might makes right. A million Tsaurians believe they are right. How can we hope to liberate slaveholders who have no desire to forsake their riches? Tattersail says we must focus on the slaves.
We are beginning to make some sense of when and where we are. In our time period, Tsar is only known as the Tsaurian Plain, a dead region where the earth had been salted completely. The argument about Tsar continues on but as a party, we come to the uneasy consensus that we must sneak into Tsar to find Mappo, not merely to help Icarium, but to get answers for ourselves. After some more negotiations, because Tsaurians regard non-humans with some loathing, I come up with a plan. Shylock will follow Tattersail on the route she knows that enters through the sewers, and they will steal clothing for us. Then the main party will enter by the main gates, me dressed up as a gentlewoman and slaveholder, Tattersail dressed as my waiting woman, everyone else as my slaves.
And that is where we’ll start this Saturday, when the party reunites.