Pastor Galen Prasten (Jeff) Clarence Jepsen (Alan) Dr. Carl Martin (Jim) Everett Barton (Joe) Thomas Forsyth (Paul) Gray Summerland and his Leopard (Darren)
As part of the Aeon society, we gather in order to do our best t find ways to make the world a better place through application of our newly found extraordinary abilities. Toward that end we are asked to go to the home of the Aeon Society's founder's former fiance, Lavinia, and assist her with a problem she is having.
But before we get there, we have to remember how this whole thing works. So Mark has us run a couple test fights. First one is a "white room" combat against a bunch of dire rats, two to a hero. They start off immediately hurting a couple of us, but once we get going we're pretty good. Optimized Gray Summerland and his companion leopard shred many rats while jet pack pilot Doc Martin flies over the fray and first into it and Thomas Forsyth seems to be epicenter for many of hte rats, including when at one point his surrounded on all sides. It's fun an informative even if it doesn't go anywhere into the continuity of the game.
The second test was basically last-man-standing between us. But now that we've seen what we can do that creates some favorite targets. Obviously the leopard is the big one, and the guy who can fly out of reach is another. The priest can't quite reach the leopard to move and attack and so he settles on targeting the nearest guy, the hapless Clarence Jepsen who goes down quickly since he's a field scientist not a combatant. Gray's order to take out the priest makes short work of Pastor Prasten, but when Gray goes down, the leopard resorts to guarding him rather than just mowing through everyone, saving a few of them for certain (for now). Doc Martin is the first to employ dramatic editing to create a cloud of smoke around himself caused by his gear and obscuring sight of him in the air. This works for a while but eventually after a back and forth about who should be taking out who between Thomas, Everett and Doc Martin, Doc drops dynamite and misses but it disperses the cloud (more editing) making the Doc a target, who gets shot and hovers in the air (for now). Thomas gets in the last shot and wins.
Back to the game proper. Lavinia's problem is that she has a boat that had been seized due to debts her family incurred. The man of the house died recently. She took what she could muster and pays for the release of the boat but the unscrupulous bastard who seized it, Solar Vark, refuses to release it and pretends he was never paid. What's more we have a sense something illegal is going on there. Rather than wait and do some proper recon, the next day we basically waltz up to it, Everett tries to compel them to leave the ship using his mental powers, and a fight breaks out. Favorite moment of the night almost universally was Clarence trying to jump across a 5' gap and rolling a 1 and falling into ocean.
Much of the same stuff that happened in the rat right happens here (minus the Leopard) with lots of gunplay, a flying man, and ultimately a momentary stalemate as we try to force them to surrender the ship, but that doesn't last long and battle recommences. We are victorious and go below deck to see what the illegal activity is and find that the lower deck is full of animals! What's more, three men are setting the place on fire to burn evidence. Biggest mistake is setting the cage on fire containing... a chupacabra! Yes, a mexican goat sucker becomes irritated and mauls one of them and then comes at us! It gets gunned down but not before it mauls clarence, but he is kept from bleeding to death (though at our own pace...I mean, it's just Clarence).
So we either take the money recovered and keep it, take the money and return it to Lavinia and have her pay off her debt again, or some other option I forget. In the end the debt is paid and Solar Vark goes to jail for his crimes.
Thomas sets his sights on Lavinia but only for the purposes of using her as a mistress, since he's married. Most of us are holed up at rich-boy Everett's estate, except Clarence who is afeared of the leopard.
What's left was mostly roleplay setting up next game. Recovered in all this was Lavinia's ring which is used to unlock her family vault. Said vault of treasure it seems is in an Indian Jones-esque area laden with traps. We might have another PC with us (via Joe) who can handle traps because that's something none of us know how to do and it's most of next game.
Clarence Jepsen (Alan), Everett Barton (Joe), Thomas Forsyth (Paul), Gray Summerland and his Leopard (Darren), and Bianca Cattaneo (Created by Alan, played by Paul)
So last game we had all the oceanfront murder. We had to talk to the authorities, and since we didn't lie about anything we seemed to get past that, with the typical "We'll be keeping an eye on you" privisions. Next task is to go to Lavinia's vault and retrieve the treasure. It's popular for families to boobytrap their vaults to keep the family jewels (giggity!) safe, and since Lavinia's parents owned the vault they knew that traps and she does not. So we equip-up, and pick up another Aeon Society member, Bianca, a rogue-type to help us with traps.
We go to the facility, check in with the caretaker/banker, Lavinia proves providence with her signet ring and papers proving who she is. We go in and inspect every inch of the place looking for traps. It's a nice green marble vault with a snake motif, and an actual snake. This one is mechanical and Bianca failes her search and it comes to life and tries to bite her. We fight it for a bit and while Gray is slowly making some ground on it, Everett tries to use the signet ring to get the snake to stand down, which doesn't work, but when Lavinia does the same thing the snake backs off. The treasure in here has been looted! Checking withe the man in charge, it seems Lavinia's brother, Vanthus, has been here recently and helped himself. She's the heir so he shouldn't have been allowed, but nope, for some reason they did. Everette's mind reading tells us the guy is not lying or crooked, he just blew it is all.
So she takes what she has, forces a small reward on us, and we start looking for her brother. There's a thought that maybe he's being forced into something or he's stolen the money for... who knows... but she's concerned so we go looking. At first Gray strikes out when looking for a forger who might have made documents for him. Meanwhile Everett is checking out a lead with the "Seekers", an adventuring group who are less altruistic than ours, because there were signs at the vault that the parents were possibly involved with them (An 8-pointed start motiff that is on a Seekers meeting hall in town). He finds that they were indeed members and that they'd welcome Lavinia and possibly her brother, but don't know where he is. About then when Gray joins the more direct search for Vanthus, he is approached by Shefton, a local who knows where he is and will take us there the next night. We gather the troops and meet the next night and go to an island. Now mind-reader Everett can tell he's just eager to get in good with Vanthus, but it still feels trappish. Still, when we find the spot and he's willing to go in first, we follow and it turns out Vanthus was screwing him over too. He closes the opening of the bunker/tomb/hideout and leaves us 30' down there, with a parting comment about us messing with his sister.
What happens next is your classic dungeon crawl with zombies. We have to wade into water a few times since the place is flooded in spots, and the dead appear to be the pirates who used this place as a hideout. Oh yeh, Vanthus had also yelled something about meeting Pinkus's ghost. Yup, Pinkus the Pirate. We fight zombies in groups of (I believe) 1 to 4, and at one point have to deal with ravenous dog-sized crabs. Oh, and Shefton fell off the wall when trying to climb up to maybe open the vault, so Clarence is stuck hauling him around.
Oh yeh: Clarence did some inventing and made some of us (those he could afford to) some Silk-Steel garments (+4 AC, +2 DR). And after the vault we leveled to 2nd level so may of us have new feats, and all of us have more HP.
There's a spot where we have eliminated everywhere else in the dugeon, and find the water is too deep as we have only 1 swimmer int he group. But there seems to be a tide, so we wait and tide does go out and give us more area to investigate. It also gives us an area we have to swim across and when our swimmer is on that side he is assailed by a zombie and comes back to us so we can gank it. The final room holds the final boss: A deadite with an inverted cross around his neck and glowing eyes. He enjoys the luxury of ALL the DR! So nothing is hurting him. Eventually Gray gets in there with the silver knife and does some damage, and the tag team of Thomas and Clarence attempt to steal the cross in case it's aiding him, and Thomas succeeds. The final boss was standing over a bloated corpse of Pinkus the Pirate, who left us a note espousing his hatred of that thieving Vanthus and how if whoever finds it has any kind of spine they'll seek him out and get revenge for the pirates who were betrayed by him. Betrayed pirates are less a rallying point for us than him just being an ass to us and Lavinia. So we will continue the hunt for the thieving brother.
Clarence (Alan), Thomas (Paul), Everette (Joe), Carl (Jim), Gray (Darren)
Classic dungeon delving for a second game session.
We begin on the mean streets looking for information about the treacherous Vanthus. During out digging we get a warning message sneaked into the pocket of one of us, telling us to leave things alone. So naturally we don't. We return from last game in a state of exhaustion. We could just go to bed and recover but no, because Gray and Everette are out picking up food for Gray's Leopard, they decide to cruise into the neighborhood of the Taxidermy shop that we understand may have Vanthus hiding below it. This, naturally, is a mistake.
A kid pickpockets Gray and as they pursue at half speed (due to exhaustion) they are attacked by two guys on the roof of nearby buildings. One throws some alchemical gunk that hardens on Everette sticking him to the ground, but his retort is to compel one of the guys who shoot the other! The leopard gnaws Everette's leg gunk off letting him take cover and the rest is just gunshots, and a finale where Everette makes the guy jump off the roof. They have the tattoo of the Lotus, the very guys who protecting Vanthus.
Next day, we decide on the direct approach. In retrospect it might have made sense to figure out if there was a way in from below (which we now know there was) but this worked fine. The guy tending the shop analyzes Everette and Everette analyzes him looking and recognizing that each is inspired, a fight breaks out. First the guy goes invisible, then Carl stunts up a dust cloud to help demark where he is, then the shop guy animates the stuffed animals. The leopard picks the animals apart, the guy eventually gets taken out with considerable effort, and in come the next group of thugs, who frankly are a lot less trouble, which is good because when we search and discover a passage downward we will be going directly into a dungeon.
Too many encounters to detail. Here's the bulletpoints:
In the rock-paper-scissors world of D&D, large leopard beats small dinosaur, it turns out. Because of the hallway configuration it's hard to get at each other. Everette fixes this by making a hole in the wall. She then tries the same jedi mind trick on him that he used on the thugs the night before. She tells him to kill the leopard efficiently as possible. His most efficient method of doing that is to use his psychic mojo to compel Gray to do the dirty work, however, Gray saves, fires back through the hole and injures Rowan(?) and she uses a potion to turn into gaseous cloud and flees, to the dismay of her dinosaur. Seems he was intelligent and was protecting her by agreement. He goes down immediately to the leopard (who gets a shiny new AC buff from the dino's collar).
There are love letters between Rowan and Vanthus all about murdering his parents, hating his sister for taking his fortune, and trying to murder us, which he thinks he did.
From all this we gained a map with some indicators of who the factions are in this town and how they are aligned. Oh, and these guys carried heal potions. We scooped up a little more loot. We leveled to level 3 (3,050 xp total to date) and reset our monetary levels.
Clarence (Alan), Everett (Joe), Thomas and his
Gorilla Melvin (Paul), Gray and his Leopard Iyanga (Darren)
“Don’t worry, Jim, It’s not a Cthulhu Game.”
-Mark
Armstrong, pitching the game
Newly buffed to level 3 we go back to the notes and
things we found last game. Villainous Vanthus it seems has gathered up
another lady he has seduced and headed to a peninsula to take out a rival group
and sink ships. Well, seems he succeeded.
We arrive by boat as Thomas can now pilot a ship for
us, and travel by land. It isn’t long before we are finding the remains of
various creatures. Examination shows that they are bitten and rendered
apart but not necessarily eaten. Eventually we encounter rabid monkeys
that have somehow mutated, grown additional eyes, mouths, tentacles, etc.
When they bite there is a chance you can be infected with the same virus.
And when they die they spray acidic blood in a radius. So… keeping them
alive and killing them are both problems.
We arrive on a beach and quickly encounter more
horrors, but these are pirates that have been infected as well. Oh, did I
mention that to make them stop killing us and get to the point where they
explode all over us we have to take them well below 0 hit points because they
are berserk?
We do a classic dungeon crawl, the caverns being
mostly occupied by sea thugs under the influence of madness. We end up
exploring all the rooms except one which is barricaded and we decide it’s
designed to keep something in, not keep us out. One mad person is Vanthus
girlfriend who is on a beach eating urchins and sushi and calling out for her
missing beau, so we put her out of her misery, else deal with teeth and such.
We find some chests which we have to set aside while
we search. And we end up with a few magic items (+1 rapier, +1 studded
leather, some rings, etc.). The finale is when we reach the last cave and
find the Pirate Queen staving off eight diseased pirates, at which point the
party tries to blow itself up with a grenade. But we survive and Pirate
woman Harliss Javel takes down a few more pirates before giving us a soliloquy
about how a black pearl was broken, and managed to infect everyone with madness,
except apparently her, Vanthus, and her first mate, who apparently have better
saving throws. She then before our eyes succumbs to the bites she’s taken
and we gun her down just before she transforms. But not before she relays
to us that the first mate and what’s left of his crew are on their way to murder
Vanthus’ sister, our benefactor.
Clarence (Alan), Thomas (Paul), Carl (Jim), and Gray (Darren)
We're off to save Lavinia, but between us and the manor house is a city gripped with Mardi Gras festivities. The streets are filled with dimes, nickels, and quarters (aka NPCs), and in their midst we run into a few encounters.
Leading the way, Gray accidentally brushes a little person in the streets and he goes ballistic and picks a fight, accompanied by a much larger fellow who steps in to defend his friend. Realizing we need to get to our destination quickly, we go right into "hurt them good" mode. Carl pleads for self control so we just control the situation instead, largely through Thomas intimidating the now very injured men with a gun.
Next up we encounter a float that has broken loose on the hill and is coming our way. Three of us try to alter the situation to try and stop what seems like a pending catastrophe and all three of us fail, leading to the float crashing into some fireworks and causing a huge fire and lots of burned people. We do our best to put people out and try to help, but the damage is done and we have an heiress to save.
Next up is a group of folks there specifically to deal with us. These are 7 people on stilts, armed with molotov cocktails. Because we are in a crowded area we are hindered for movement but they are not. And they have no compunctions about hurling flaming things into a crowd. Of course molotovs are touch attacks so they are largely hitting everything with ease, and then we continue to burn each round unless you take a full action to put it out AND manage to succeed on a roll. Gray goes down in flames (literally), leaving his leopard to purely defend itself. A few of the bad guys go down in gunfire but largely they retreat even though they were kind of ahead on points.
At the manor it seems the gate is unattended so we head in. Our first encounter is with three frogmen who leap out and attack. They weren't so hard to take down. Lavinia is not in her office so we head up to her room and find a scene of a fight but nobody living. Eventually we find her bedroom where she is tied to the bed and a pirate and a frogman spellcaster are ready. Thomas summons the earth elemental using an object we got previously but after he summons it but before it manifests Thomas goes down to the horrible might of the pirate, who can charge and attack and has a scimitar so he's hitting critically. When he finally drops, it's largely due to a lot of bullets and the leopard noms. Frogman caster brings in his own summoned wolf but it goes down too. We free Lavinia who says her servants and the mercenaries guarding her were hauled away to the basement.
In the basement we deal with the Frogman boss, his bannermen, and a rust monster who takes out Carl's flight gizmo, although of course that's always temporary. We win, free whoever is left, and collect some minor loot. I think it was a med cure wounds, a scimitar +1 (I think), and a magic belt of +2 STR.
So that was like, 6 fights in half a night, so we called it there as Mark wasn't sold on the next part of the game and might re-work or ditch it and move on to the next.
Clarence (Alan), Thomas (Paul), Carl (Jim), Everett (Joe), and Gray (Darren)
We have about a week in which we do a few maintenance things. Clarence and Carl and invent, and Thomas an retrieve a replacement for his late departed gorilla. But not long into this we are contacted by the local socient of duelists. Seems someone is doing some underground dueling or otherwise dueling outside the rules of the league which is illegal; Dueling without rules is just murder. They want us to find out who so they can shut it down so that legislation doesn't roll through that will outlaw dueling, which, obvioulsy, is kind of their thing.
It's not long before we come upon a fresh scene of murder that shows the tell-tale signs of a duel gone wrong. A duel definitely happened here, but the deceased did not bleed out here because there isn't enough blood. A witness claims the deceased lost a battle to a woman, then tossed his weapon into the nearby well before she could take it. Rather than stick around the murder scene and retrieve the weapon she ran off. Gray goes down the well and retrieves the blade which it turns out... can speak! Not mentally, no he just starts talking. The blade takes an instantly dislike to Everette, though both seem to think they are good aligned. The blade tells the tale of the (Wish I'd asked for spellings on these words) Cabonites and the Awkons. The sword is allied to the latter, while the former are seemingly evil aligned weapons. He says their side has been trying to murder his side and then claim all the weapons and imprison them in cement. It's all a little shady to Clarence, who makes no secret of his thoughts.
Eventually we do agree to check out the scene to which the sword thinks the murderer has fled. It's a large building that looks more like a manor house that is serving as a bath house. We make entry and the presence of our animals (now a full managerie including Gray's Leopard, Thomas's Ape, and Everette's Dire Wolf) scare the receptionist into catatonia. We head to the room from which Everette's magical sense is telling him the magic weapons likely are, and there we encounter three womn in towels only whom we proceed to try to murder. But it was the right move because they had swords within reach and have intent to murder us. We we get to the mutual stabbing and take those three down but they aren't the real problem, that is the next three which backstab Clarence, disable Gray with hideous laughter (and thereby his un-commnaded pet), and level Bobo the ape. There's a pretty good brawl that takes place before we finally get in the requisite dismembering. We retrieve their assorted weapons and find another major weapon hidden in the mud baths.
On the way back home we are approached by a courrier with a note which says to meet a stranger at a location thate evening regarding the dueling dueling weapons and to not bring any of them. Some of us move to blow the whole thing off since it feels like a distraction where we go to him and someone takes the unattended weapons. The message sender, Lorkos, is mentioned to the smart-sword who claims he's a traitor who once was on their side and joined the Cabonites. Lorkos meets with just Everette, who returns with a story about how the weapons are at war with one another and that he had been at different points controlled by each side and that we should destroy them, which involves capturing a rust monster and bringing it to his trap where we will bait the weapons (who are seeking each other out) wih more weapons and have the rust monster dispose of them.
There's a pretty long period of trying to bait the rust monster into a cage without actually going into the dungeon before we relent and head in with our wagon. At the bottom of the mines we find the beast and an environment corrupted with Telluric eneergy making it analogous to a toxic dump. We capture the beast through a combination of baiting it with magical metals and Carl's mage hand moving various things.
Back at the new trap site we deal with both groups at once in a 4-way battle: Cabonites, Akwons, Rust Monster (who is large, not normal sized), and us. Without belabouring the whole thing with a play-by-play, I'll just say there was some animal-induced murder, gunplay, grenade fire, and the demise of a whole lot of sentient magic items. We win and I believe everyone is still up at the end, which is unusual for us.
And we go to level 6.
Clarence (Alan), Thomas (Paul), Carl (Jim), Everett (Joe), and Gray (Darren)
The Jade Ravens (the mercenary company that Lavinia employs for things we aren't expected to do) have retrieved a ship and she has given it to us on the condition that we help her out on a mission. Her parents long ago discovered an island which they named the ISLE OF DREAD, and she wishes to go there. She wants to take her ship (The Blue Nixie, I want to say?) and the new ship, the Sea Wyvern which we will use. There are a lot of crew, us, and a lot of animals because Thomas, Everett, and Gray all have animal minions. Among the others on board that are of note are:
Rowdy and unrestrained Captain Amelia
Lord Avner, the benefactor of the mission and entitled a-hole
Urol, who was... the professor? I think? Maybe?
Lirith, a crew woman disguised as a crew man
Conrad, a cabin boy, I think. Or was he the professor? Doesn't matter really.
Skald, a servant who is obviously an elf (to us)
Once we finally leave port (having been held up by Lord Avner's entitlement) we hit the open water and have a meal the first night with Lavinia. Crossing back to our ship from Lavinia's, Everett is halfway across the makeshift rope bridge when a bottle surfaces in the water and from it springs a Mephit who proceeds to try and murder Everett and eventually the rest of us. It spits acid, which dissolves people and the rope between the ships, causing Everett to fall in the water. Clarence tries to throw him a line, we shoot at him but the mephit appears to be healing, and it keeps creating clouds of toxic gas. Eventually Gray pulls his silver dagger and leaps into the water stabbing it on a kamikaze dive. Then Carl blow'd it up real good with one of his magic bullets.
Carl gets poisoned. He deduces when very lown on CON that someone put aresenic in his food, and so a prolonged investigation breaks out which results in fingers being pointed at Skald, who was serving food that night (resulting in a beating from the ship cook). The true criminal however waits until an inopportune moment fro Clarence to try and murder him. We all come running and find that the female thieve's guild pirate from an earlier mission had decided in her vengeful madness to try and assassinate us. She summons a wolf who uses Clarence as a chew toy. Things aren't going too well until Joe manipulates the scene by spending a couple inspirations to alter the environment causing the ship to rock suddenly enough to throw the pirate off balance. It's still not easy but eventually we kill her.
With paranoia at a high we take up our own watches. Gray is on watch up on deck when something proceeds to bump the boat much like striking a sand barb, but then it reaches up and yanks a crew member over. It is a big gooey sludge on the surface of the water filled with debris, and now a crew member. He also subsequently pulls in a couple of PCs and the leopard, with the ape choosing to leap in and attack it. As those in it fail their saves their weapons become subdued. It takes a metric shit ton of damage before it dissolves and we haul everyone back up on deck.
We dock in a harbor for resupply. Goes fine so long as we turn back from the forest after the animals get itchy about something lurking therein (Turns out it was redcaps, though we don't meet any). The professor, who is the only person who has been to the Isle of Dread, came on this trip on the condition that he be allowed to investigate a hidden shine, so we have to go along to keep him alive because he will be valuable to our mission. He tells us a few things abou the legends of the Isle, which includes that the shrine's entrance is guarded by massive reptile that is said to be able to turn men to stone with a gaze.
This is proven true when Gray, who is at the front of the party, gets stoned. But the basilisk is defeated and the professor had a salve that cures stone-ism, so the party is back and mostly full strength. We test the ground as we walk because supposedly there are holes here, but we do not find any. Once inside the first of the two entrance areas, we come into contac with a Gibbering Mouther, which proceeds to try and 1) blind and dissolve some targets, 2) burn anything that physically atttacks it with acid, 3) drive players insane with it's noises which are a repeated echo of any sound we make, including our pained screams as we dissolve. It gets killed eventually, but not before it damages at least half the party.
Altering our path and going in the other way, we find a steep stair-stepped chamber which leads to a trap (that the GM didn't want to run) and then eventually a room attended by a servant/offspring/whatever of the bat god, which on many occasions sets the party on fire. It's immune to anything non-magical. Carl ends up using his rockets to fly up and grab it and rock-bottom it on the ground where a dogpile ensued, holding it down while Gray stabbed it with his silver dagger 'til it died.
There is a massive pit with a dark pool at the bottom. We stopped there, at its edge (3000 xp richer).
Clarence (Alan), Thomas (Paul), Carl (Jim), Everett (Joe), and Gray (Darren)
The voyage continues toward the Isle of Dread, as we wonder what the Island Tourist Bureau was thinking with that name. I'm not sure I'll remember all the encounters at sea. The order of events are likely wrong:
One of the shipgoers, the "Priest", is ill. Doc Martin determines from talking with him that he's full of shit. He is not actually a priest and has boarded with intent to act as a courier for an ancient scroll. Physical examination including scanning for Telluric Resonance reveals that he has a parasite in his gut. Doc Martin assisted by Clarence cuts him open and tries to remove the parasite. Well, the second it hits air it swells up to giant frogman size. Seems it was a blue Slaad, a frogish creature which then attacks and ends up embedding an egg similar to the one he came out of (except RED) into Clarence. It's a nasty creature but we defeat it. Now that Dr. Martin has the knack of removing them he gets a chance to remove a second one. The fake preist will evacuate the ship at our next port that's populating opting to end his mission and handing over the scroll which he never wants to see again. It's a CALL OUTER PLANES spell. So, God magic that defies our scientist's knowledge of the world.
We are at a stop and so some of our folks decide to swim. Soon we are set upon by what at first (to Gray) appears to be a bunch of sea serpents, but which is actually a hydra. Whenever we do damage with regular weapons we might cut off a head but it comes right back. The only guy getting things done is Everett who can breath fire and therefore burns them and cauterizes them in the process. We end up doing some more damage when we start gathering lanterns and throwing them at it to do more damage. It flees when it has one head left and has only a few hit points. But there was a problem in this combat... Getting out of the water, Thomas decides to draw fire by climbing not the ship causing it to do a ton of attacks of opportunity, which helps out others climbing on, but dooms himself. EXCEPT... he has the daring feat "Death Defiance" and he has an inspiration point, so while he looks dead, we don't see him for a while until we arrive in the next port and find he washed up there in advance of us somehow, as is the magic of this feat.
But in the interim we have another problem which is that Bobo, his beloved pet gorilla, slowly becomes feral. We end up subduing it after a fight, and then when it snaps its chains we subdue it again. Some are pushing for it to be disposed of, but some are detremined to keep it alive in the honor of its late lamented master, at least until we can release it somewhere on an island. It is alive when reunited with Thomas, but it is now feral and would need to be retrained. He opts to release it when we get to the next port.
Also, Thomas abdicates leadership of the group. He feels he failed. No one steps up to command, so we'll have to figure that out as we go.
We are on the ship and the sea has grown still when we are attacked by two plant like creatures that come at our ship from opposite sides. They begin by creating smaller versions of themselves on the deck. A fight ensues and there's lots of entangles and grappling but we manage to defeat them. Bu ti's a sign of things to come.
There's a storm and when it settles we are seperated from the other ship so we fend for ourselves and continue on toward the island. Or we would, if we were not now trapped in a sargosso sea of kelp so think our ship is completely stuck, as are many other ships that have been here a long time. We try to hack our way free but don't get much progress and next day the sea has undone this and extended itself. During the night we have a fight with plant men who assail the ship, and as always (uusal?) we win. Observing that destroying the leader plant men gets rid of the ones they create, we decide to head into the sargasso on foot in search of a creature that might be causing the kelp yard, and since it's incredibly thick we can walk there slowly.
At the core of the place is a ship whose telluric resonance is so strong that we know that it's the one we likely have to enter. Inside we fight a shambling mound that is the Plant Lady, her taunting whispers of "outsiders" ringing in our ears. We defeat her and her minions and the ocean clears up. We head back to the ship and gather everyone together.
There's a terrible storm and we end up dealing with a giant worm-like creature, but at the finale of the fight our ship is clobbered by a massive wave and we awaken on shore of the Island of Dread! (Yay?)
Clarence (Alan), Thomas (Paul), Carl (Jim), and Gray (Darren)
Last game we were shipwrecked and this week we awaken at roughly the same time on the shore...Just in time to be immediately attacked by a T-Rex! The T-Rex, being a lover off odd foods, decides to eat Clarence, and does! He then tries to swallow the Leopard, and succeeds but within a round the Leopard has clawed its way out of him! The fight continues then eventually the T-Rex then swallowing Gray, but he can't eat more. What's more, his crushing intestines and dissolving juices proceed to start breaking things we have on us... such things as potions (Invisibility, Restoration, and Swimming). That's right, the T-Rex turns invisible, would be healed any attribute points (had he been down any) and could easily swim! He goes down after gray (uses a token and) finds a sharp bone and uses it as a weapon to try and dig his way out. After that the heroes are liberated and the NPCs show up.
The Professor can tell where we are by comparing the area to the map. We are at the top right of the map and need to follow the coast then head through the mountain which has some kind of passage under it, Moria style, and eventually we will get to the village we seek.
Camping overnight we are attacked by three ostrich-like beasts called Terror Birds! They do a lot of grabbing and trying to run away with their targets, including Thomas's new sidekick, a Harpy Eagle (aka Bigass Bird). Not too easy but we get them.
Carl goes up to survey the area and in the area of some ruins we are near (at dusk) he sees an old woman seated on a throne. Confused, he waves. She gives some kind of gesture (not openly obscene) back to him but doesn't seem outwardly agressive. So we confer and then send him in a translator for Thomas and stories are exchanged. Seems she's a priestess of the Spider God, but agrees to let us sleep on her grounds. None of the many, many spiders bite us during the night.
More Terror Birds, picking on a small dinosaur. The professor pleads with us to help, but since three of those were a problem and here there are six, and we have a lot more fighting to do, we decline. He is not happy and mopes the rest of the trip.
We reach the mountain passage we need to enter, but the side is dotted with Terror Birds and their nests. We use our wiles (and skill rolls) to engineer an easier fight with just the lead bird, luring the others away. He is peppered with bullets and grenades. Afterward we take some eggs and run through the entrance to the mountain tunnel.
There's a tunnel in which there is a mummy pinned to a wall by a spear, which Carl retrieves along with a gold necklace. Then there's a walkway that splits, each ending at doors. We (Gray really) picks a direction and we go, and that's when two Giant Centipedes descend upon us. They are nasty, and also like to grab (which is common this game), but we defeat them. One set of double doors leads to a simplistic maze with a hidden door beyond which is a sarcophagus. Yes, we do trigger the mummy, who shrugs off a grenade, so we smack it around despite it's Word of Despair, which causes bird sidekick Henry to be paralyzed with fear, but the rest of us stick with it, and through a combination of Carl having retrieved the mummy's items and us just peppering him with shots, allows us to destroy the mummy and move on.
Next room is obviously the antechamber to the exit, but the doors require two items, only one of which we have, so we check on (what turns out to be) the final room. Here's where the wheels come off the wagon.
A smoke grenade tossed into the pool at the far end of this new chamber yields nothing (it peters out). So Gray approaches the pool and a pudding emerges from it and attacks. Now it ends up splitting once on its own, then when one of those are struck by arrows it splits again. So we have three of them to deal with. Reasonably enough a retreat is called for, but as Gray has indicated the thing we need is in the pool (a staff with a ruby rod on it), Carl decides to fly up so he can see the staff and mage-hand it out of there. Because it's not coming out very quickly, Gray decides to pop a potion and turn invisible and move in to meet the item half way. Problem is, he has not considered that these guys don't need eyes to find him, which makes him very injured, and now he's invisible so no one has any idea where he is, and can't see him when he goes down in the fight. The PCs retreat and try to figure out if they can find him. They have the rod but not the companion. Ultimately they decide he's probably been dissolved. They move out the exit and find him in the surf outside. Once again, a coin has been used to power the "Defy Death" feat and Gray has jumped/falled into the pool and found a passage at the bottom which he uses to get sucked out to the ocean outside, ending up in the bay. We are out of the mountain and not far from the end of this journey.
Clarence (Alan), Thomas (Paul), Carl (Jim), Everett (Joe), and Gray (Darren)
End of last game the group recovered Gray from the beach outside and headed off. About then they rendezvous with Everett (missing last game) who was off collecting his new pet--a dinosaur called a blood striker. We continue on our way, this time along a beach. We make camp and during the night the group are enshrouded in darkness out of nowhere. Nothing attacks, but their sleep is broken up twice by such incidents, and here foreward we seperate into two camps on the same beach so we will always have a group not in the darkness. We check the area out mostly with our sky surveillance drone named Carl, but find nothing. During our travel while alongside a cliff we encounter an ambush of gargoyles. The four of them descend on us and we defeat them in a pretty good fight, no real casualties on our side. We will have a similar scenario later on, after encountering a section of the road that seemed to be an ambush point for travelers like us. This second group of gargoyles include their king, a bigger gargoyle in a crown. This fight is tougher, but when we win we collect the crown, which Gray now has (It can be used to gain temporary DR and to rage). There were also the crucified birds. Seems someone had captured seagulls, tied them to wood and left them on the path. We would see this motiff later...
Subsequently we find a ruin wherein dwells(?) a man tied to an X in a similar fashion, upside down. The dead man speaks to us telling us about how we will be staying forever. We are set upon by a trio of demonic gorillas who select our gnome/professor NPC as the target, grabbing him and teleporting away. We fight the others until they vanish too. Apparently they just wanted to bait us to come after them, but they don't do a good job of telling us where they are. And the talking corpse won't tell us because Clarence puts an arrow through his head without any real objection from anyone present. Gray alters the environment to find a strip of cloth belonging to the gnome which we can use to have his leopard track the gnome's path. He leads us to some caves and inside we find a wet bloody tiny handprint. We end up at a couple of doors with a demon-monkey motiff. Beyond that is a room with a pair of thrones on opposite sides of the room, and on the far wall are two mirrors which also oppose each other, and a couple of candles. Now the trick to pass from this room to the temple proper involves lighting a candle, touching a mirror, and then sitting in the throne, and then you teleport from the chair into the temple. But we don't learn this until a couple fails: First is just lighting both candles which causes a burst of flame near the altar, which doesn't hurt anyone because Carl was mage-handing the lighting. The second fail was when Thomas sat in a throne and we lit the candle, and then he was replaced by an berserk version of Thomas who attacks the group with grenades. It seems like he's simply possessed by then we notice that in the mirror on that side of the room is Thomas, pounding on the glass and shouting instructions to us. So we defeat the duplicate Thomas and a healing potion he took earlier brought him back.
When we pass through to the temple and end up being attacked by three more teleporting sometimes invisible demon monkeys. There's a very long fight with quite a few highlights. There are actually too many individual beats to this fight to detail, but the broad points are:
When we defeat the monkeys we move on to the next room with another throne in front of a secret door. Eventually we make our way to a room with a Naga who is angrily feasting on one of the demon gorillas who failed in its attempts to take us down. The Naga does a lightning bolt down a line of us, but once it is pinned back into the corner it has no where to go and we smack it around to good effect.
Along the way we have collected a couple keys which are the iron cast left and right hands of a gorilla. Those are what we use to pass through doors. The final room has a fire pit at the middle, a gnome cowering in the distance beyond the a statue of the Demogorgon itself. Upon our entry, the statue animates and we fight it.
It is as difficult as you would guess fighting a statue of the demo-bobo would be. It can attack with four limbs, can grapple two people simultaneously if it wishes, has the same soak as the demon gorillas, and has an amazing grip. So we fight and grapple and get pretty well beat up. It's death by a thousand cuts and even the leopard retreats once because it's so lown on HP. Whe the statue is defeated it shatters and everyone sighs in relief because that was really something.
We collect the gnome, feel the magical essence that was coalescing in the area fade, and level up.
Clarence (Alan), Thomas (Paul), Carl (Jim), Everett (Joe), and Gray (Darren)
Upon arriving at Farshore, our destionation where we are to meet up with Lavinia and her ship (if they survived the earlier storm that seperated us), we find the city is under seige! All sorts of madness in the street must be addressed.
Lavinia is in town and we meet up. There's a lot to be done. There's a pirate armada heading out way that will bring more men than we can deal with. We need to do a whole bunch of things (that I will not attempt recall from memory):
The first item leads to a sidequest. When we show up at the first and most important tribe they are involved in a ceremony, but unexpectedly during it the avatar of their bat god appears and declares that we should return that which we took and that is his. He then explodes into a mess of firebats that swarm us. Yes, burning stirges, because we're so good with the regular kind. Once those are defeated we talk with the locals and believe that an idol that we recovered when fighting a batgod priestess early on in the campaign is in the custody of the NPC professor and that we will return it. But we can't just hand it over, we have to take it to the temple in the volcano, which is now active! We retrieve it, head that way, and find a steaming tunnel that is so hot it requires 6 fortitude saves to descend, but Paul spends some chips and it seems the whole thing is mitigated to one roll because of, I don't know... a rogue arctic front that is pumping cold air in a stream all the way to here and down the tunnel.
Once at the bottom, the stinky bat avatar appears along with a horde of firebats and we engage, but the statue on the far side of the room appears to have a place to put the batgod idol. This causes a sequence of passing the idol until it gets plugged into the statue, at which point the Bat-vatar thanks us for returning its thingie and grants us a quick browse for one item each from a treasure trove. Of the eight items, it seems 5 or 6 are magical. We end up with an assortment of magical items (Invisibility ring, Amulet of protection, luckstone), a valuable but non-magical cat statue (because of Gray's need to pay tribute to his recently fallen leopard), and one fang wrapped in leather with is not only magical but extremely powerful but of unknown use. While Thomas considers a Vecna-style application of the fang, we set off for the tar and the raccoon people.
We find the Phanatons losing a combat with a T-Rex who is even bigger than the last one we faught. And he's muuuuuuuuch tougher. He starts by eating Gray's new cat minion (who claws from the inside for many rounds), then Everett's dinosaur creature, then Thomas's legendary wolf. The rest of us pull back far enough that it considers leaving but Clarence shoots it which brings it back, and he escapes by Jim's judicious use of chips to create a tar-pit obstacle, and Clarence going invisible. And it considers leaving again but Carl shoots it some more from high above and it angrily turns on those who fled. Everett passes off an invisibility potion to Gray so they can both disappear, and Carl then spends more rounds shooting it from above until the dino is dead and we the Phanatons celebrate ewok style. They also tell us they can show us to where the cat people used to live, at a temple of the Jaguar god.
Time to summon some more animals and head to the temple next game.
Clarence (Alan), Thomas (Paul), Carl (Jim), and Gray (Darren)
Encounters, Encounters, Encounters! The voyage to and through the temple of the Jaguar God, back to the village, then to our damaged ship and back, is long and rife with encounters. We had 7 fights versus 9 types of foe, and every one of them was horrible!
It seems that the area we are headed toward has animals that are corrupted by strange enrgies. As a result the animals we encounter are more...shall we say... Fiendish in nature.
1. Right out of the gate we are stormed by a Demonic Dinosaur with wings. It proceeds to run over all of us and when we split up to make it harder for it to do that it concentrates on Gray, kills his newest Jaguar, and leaves when it is badly injured, though it could have kept mopping the place up with us as the DM discovered he'd been forgetting to do the "trample" effect every round. Praise Senility!
2. We are hacking a path through the jungle when a venus fly trap attacks the middle of the party. It brings the jungle alive to attack us, AND it creates a mist we cannot see through unless we are adjacent to it. Jim uses several inspiration points to create a gust of wind to dispel the sight impediment--which was also trying to dissolve our equipment. The plant tries to swallow Thomas but finds him unpalatable. That and we kill it before it can finish. That's the problem with taking bites that are too big.
3. We arrive at the pyramid and at its entrance we are attacked by a giant constrictor. It can grapple multiple people, which seems to be something we have trouble with. It proceeds to completely crush and swallow Gray before it is defeated. But I have plenty of chips and so Gray is excreted from the remains and revived.
Inside the temple, there's an illusionary statue which covers a hole. We descend and Thomas takes the nearly unprecedented step of talking to the giant serpent here. When it finds out we are all about hacking the evils, it volunteers its weapons as its people are long dead. We take an arsenal of masterwork weapons back to the people.
4. On the way back, are collossal(!) spider, which had an outrageous reach, proceeds to try and web us all, but Paul uses an inspiration to ground-zero a lightning strike that fizzles all the webbing. Jim's ally, wind, also makes an appearance when the spider tries another round of webbing, causing it to drift one direction and miss us. Ultimately the spider was somehow defeated entirely through ranged attacks, including Carl teleporting grenades and explosives into the creature's proximity.
By now I should mentione Paul and I are churning through animal sidekicks at an alarming rate as they are not able to keep up with the ferocity of our foes.
We get to the village and drop off the goods, grab ship and crew, and head back to retrieve our crashed ship and the labs of our scientists.
5. We are boating to our old ship when a giant squid proceeds to try and grapple people. It succeeds in killing 5 of the six crew that were on deck within two rounds, and pulls all but two people into the water. We have calamari for dinner. Or maybe the rations of all those people we just lost.
6. Still sailing, a Roc appears and does a straffing run on our ship and is able to grab two people at once and continue flying off. The lucky saps are Gray and Clarence. Gray does a lot of damage to it via punch/power attack, and it ultimately drops him, but he only had a few hitpoints left and he's crushed by the waves, except that another inspiration point is spent and Carl grabs him as he has been flying after and pew-pewing the monster from a distance. It drops Clarence in its nest and goes up to circle, as the predatory Carl, it's natural enemy, is near. Somehow Clarence is retrieved (I think via stealthy escape and making it think he's dead?...I'm not sure as I was reading up for future pet replacements).
7. We get to the ship and while it is being worked on, we are attacked by three creatures at once? I can only guess that the main creature (which looks like an Aboleth but had a different name) was commanding the others I'm guessing? Becuase it had mind powers. And a tail slap. And a flaming sword. YES. It was mind controlling sea life with help and a flaming sword...AND IT FLIES! I think Carl took out the thunderbird, the plesiosaur eats more crewmen and takes a bunch of damage from Gray but Clarence blows it up. The aboleth-thingie is a bigger and more persistent problem. Because it is grappling Thomas we have aiming 50/50 issues, causing Gray to have to burn a chip every round to avoid the 50/50 roll. In the biggest moment of fudgery, Gray uses his trickshot feat and the GM lets him use it to shoot the sail loose so it drapes over the flying thing, and Clarence climbs the sail to get in close and hit it. Carl does a point-blank shot on the creature until it uses it's electrical pulse to harm those in proximity, ruin the sail (freeing it) and harm itself! Then I think Carl finished it off.
We take our ship back to town and continue preperation for the impending onslaught of pirates.
Clarence (Alan), Thomas (Paul), Carl (Jim), Everett (Joe), Gray (Darren) and returning combatant Galen (Jeff)
Upon return to town we find Brother Galen in the house! He has been off evangelizing and it didn't go well and so he has caught up with us. We have a few days to do our things, including training the locals and our Sci's do their thing to replenish our used potions and upgrade their own stuff. But then...
Alarms go off in the night and we are under siege. First wave are the Frankenstieians... four flesh golems show up! Seeing we're about 5 rounds from the others arriving as well, Jim burns two tokens to create wind and choppy seas to push the ships off course, which has an unforeseen benefit. The Flesh Golems are bad enough, but they can be pumped up by proper application of electricity and the intent of the bad guys was to send them on shore then shoot them with lighting, but their ships being f'd with was enough to belay that. It takes us a while to cut down the dead guys.
As we're dealing with the last one, a ship pulls up piloted by four Yuan-Ti, and one of them lightning bolts the assemblage damaging some of us and raising two of the Golems, which we then have to knock down again. The ship takes a blow when Everett uses his psychic powers to slam it good. Carl and the Yuan Ti are both doing tricks with invisibility, the Yuan Ti are firing arrows completely unseen by us so we're getting peppered. One of the golems had wrecked the wall of the closest building and gone after the inhabitants before being defeated. The Yuan Ti are also doing tricks with mirror images, which are getting foiled with grenades. When they are finally defeated we soon meet the next wave, consisting of more conventional pirates. They get absolutely mauled, mostly due to Galen and his cross easily trashing many of them. But our biggest opponent is yet to come.
Simultaneously three demonic Vrock teleport in and attack. They have a special power: It requires all three but as the simultaneously cast they try to invoke a ritual that would cause massive harm to everyone in the area. On a minimal damage roll all the locals would die, and on an average roll most of us would die if we were unhurt, but we've been fightings so it's unlikely any of us would survive. So we set to focusing on one of them to break the ritual until it falls. They have LARGE amounts of soak vs. powers that are not holy. So we spend a lot of time shooting at these floating guys who will only come into reach when someone is up on a roof top. Once Galen gets in close with one he hurts it. The last one finally dies when Everett manages to use his mental powers to compel it to come down and get smacked around a little. Of course until that point the Vrocks had been using their psychic powers to push people off the rooftops or toss them into the air.
Ten rounds after the last one falls, the final boss shows up. Vanthus Vanborne, Pirate bastard and brother to Lavinia, has resurfaced and he's apparently converted to demonism. He has demonic wings and after a short speech he gets smacked good and hard by Clarence, hard enough that he jumps straight to his endgame which is a nuke, or the medieval equivalent of a nuke: A black pearl, like the one that was shattered in one of the early games driving everything within a mile to degenerate into savagery. Demon Vanthus applies some of his blood to it and drops it toward the ground. Before it hits ground there is a quick flurry of activity (reflex saves) to catch it, with Thomas barehanding it like a pro and running away with it. Vanthus tries to compel some of us to go after him and retrieve it but many of us make the save.
Thomas runs into a building (the golem damaged one from earlier) and Everett follows. Thomas spends a token to find a bucket of water to wash the blood off (because with blood on it, it becomes fragile enough to break and plague everyone). However, the blood won't come off. We need holy water! A coin is spent to make the local church be very nearby. Everett plays decoy, running out of the building and shouting that he needs protection, as he pretends to carry the pearl. He runs for the church then realizes he'll be there before the actual guy with pearl, so he changes course. Galen fails the save and tries to come after the pearl but he gets carried out to the water by Carl. I believe Clarence took out Vanthus.
We have days of cleaning up, but there are people in the town quibbling that perhaps Lavinia is not trustworthy. It's worth mentioning that when Vanthus showed up he tried to compel Lavinia into being his possession and succeeded in whatever suggestion/mind-control/etc. he attempted. So the locals are afraid there's some kind of curse on that family. Lavinia devises a plan to win them back. Apparently this wasn't a big enough win: She wants us to go out and defeat a dragon turtle that menaces a cove. We, for some reason, agree and set sail.
During that voyage we get another sea monster, a kraken who manages to eventually pull all but two targets off the deck. The animals do a lot of damage to the tentacles, but I believe the body was obliterated by Galen.
We are at sea currently.
Clarence (Alan), Thomas (Paul), Everett (Joe), and Gray (Darren)
Without our Air Support (Doc Marten) we continue our voyage and soon as we enter the bay we are appraoched by the massive Dragon Turtle. Everett talks to him rather than trying to fight him and we try to appease him with goods, including some extra wealth levels. This plus some proper obsequience gets approval by which he will not destroy any ship flying our colors for a year. Everett tries to press his luck and asks for direections to the "Dread Lords", the ones responsible for the black pearls, but the Dragon Turtle leaves.
We sail the bay coast and find a cavern that we decide must be it, with a dock out front. Once on the dock, we approach the caverns, wary of the rickety makeshift dock, and are confronted by mid-sized dinosaur who growls threateningly enough that we default to fighting. At the gate appears some Troglodytes, one of whom asks why we are attacking them and what happened to the deal? Well, apparenlty them's fighting words becuase we continue killing their dino gate-guard and them too.
Looks like the cavern goes deep. Also, virtually everything living here is diseased. This means every time you get tagged by something or punch/stab it you wind up with a chance of disease, so true hand-to-hand combatants have a problem. But forutnatley Clarence helps keep neutralizing the effects on Gray, who pretty regularly gets it.
Our next major encounter is with a quartet of HUGE spiders, which proceed to block out path, web the party, and try to poison us, which it does relatlively successfully for a while, and though we didn't come terribly close to death, we did wind up pretty beat up due to the poison. Also, I believe we lost Everett's pet on this one, but then Everett was the only good way to get out of the webbing due to his magical fire; normal torches weren't cutting it. Since the big-ass spiders are "vermin" they are eligible for recruiting, and so Everett enlists a monster spider as his new minion.
Next up, we run across a murky bit of cavern that we approach and which sprouts a gibbering mouther! What's more, it not only burns with acid that it spits, induces madness with its noises, and anytime you hit it you get burned by its acidic touch. And to make it more complicated, it has two fellow mouthers that appear, AND as they approach they emulsify the ground beneath those they approach, causing us to keep backing up in order to get out of it. Thomas's wolf is the only one who ends up mired in the muck for any protracted period, but I believe it was saved after the put down the mouthers.
End of the tunnel is a portculis with a Trog guard who alerts the citizens of the entire village of people nearby that they are under attack. We go right to the combat, and with the portculis acting as too much cover for our ranged attacks, Gray charges it and knocks it down. The real damage done to this 40+ group of angy citizens is by Everett with his "mind hammer" ability, which destroys them. Priestly types among them keep trying to induce paralysis in the group, only affecting Clarence (causing us to go a few rounds without noticing our support in the back is down). After we muder-hobo the village, we find two individuals locked in cages. One is a Trog that is considered a heretic becuase he realizes they are harming themselves by delving into the charnel pit of disease, so he is the only one among them who is not diseased. The other is a captive human who recovers and asks us all kinds of information about the surface world. He winds up heading back up to the ship while we continue, led on by the Trog who claims to know the way to our goal.
He warns us that up ahead its hard to breath, so we mask up as best we can, but as we cross this chamber full of acid pools we encounter a gargantuan (20x20) black pudding! First arrow it takes splits it in two so we deal with two huge puddings, at least until one of those eventually gets split into two. Some of us run across the room, but the big problem is that our wagon full of supplies is being pulled by the huge spider at half speed, so its totally vulnerable once it gets there. What ensues is a lot of gathering vital lamp oil and dousing these things and hitting them with torches, having Everett flambe' them with his fire, and a lot of running around. It/they managed to grab a few PCs, and they kill the leopard pet of Gray. Once it is obliterated in smoke and fire, we have to recover a day. Did we lose the spider here? I'm not sure. I don't remember him making it to the next encounter...
Next leg of the journey will take us to a massive cavern about 70' across and so deep we can't bullseye lantern the bottom. We're told one of the stalactites expects tribute. You're supposed to give it a victim and then move on quickly, but we don't have any (that aren't helping ot guide us). As bait we send in Thomas and his wolf down the winding path but before long at all he's accosted by a Roper! The roper eventually has pretty much everyone in the air in its tentacles so everyone who can do so takes their potions of flight, and when it is destroyed we are able to fly down.
Carl (Jim), Clarence (Alan), Thomas (Paul), Everett (Joe), and Gray (Darren)
We continue into the depths in search of the Lords of Dread, which is obviously a heavy metal concert festival circa 1995. Telluric Resonance is headlining. Our guide says we will soon approach the Cerulean Wall, but can’t tell us much more.
As we arrive we are rushed by a host of cloakers! Six of the bastards swarm us but overall we acquit ourselves pretty well. They are far less trouble than the next encounter, within sight of the cerulean wall, which is a group of six hook horrors who had set up an ambush. They are hiding below a layer of gravel at the entrance to an area made up to look like a tiny village. Everything these days is something grabby, so there’s a lot of wrestling. And these guys sincerely might have kicked our ass if it weren’t for the insight that they have issues with light. So once the area is properly lit up, four of them descend back into the gravel from which they emerged, leaving two for us to deal with. The concentrated attacks help. No equipment was lost/crushed.
The Cerulean wall is some sort of barrier, likely erected to keep something in or out. It seems that it was erected long before anyone currently living was around, to inhibit an Aboleth. If you get mentally controlled it is instructed that the possessed be taken back and passed through the barrier to break the effect.
I’m going to list the rest of what we fought because there was a LOT.
Once the wraith is (even more) dead, we meet with the Troglodyte who dwells in this chamber and find out what we have to do next. We must destroy Teloc’s Tear (Tier?), invade the lair of the Lords of Dread, and dispose of pears and whatever makes them.
Carl (Jim), Clarence (Alan), Thomas (Paul), Gray (Darren)
We arrived at Gorismorgisbord or whatever it’s called. It’s a sprawling underground city that makes little sense. There are ramshackle huts, nonsensical buildings, staircases that go nowhere, broken bridges, walls that are stone, or flesh, we’re not sure, and upon exploration, a smattering of trogs wandering the buildings. With Carl as our invisible air support we set up a system where we wander and explore and if we are coming up on trouble he drops a pebble from above to alert us that something is wrong.
We get to a cavern that juts off of the city and almost immediately we encounter a group of trogs carrying four of the Lords of Dread on litters. A fight immediately breaks out. The Lords of Dread prove their names by trying to use mind control PCs to attack the others. They compel Gray to smack Clarence around while he commands his ape to attack Thomas, and Carl is made to drop a (relatively ineffective) grenade on us. That was terrible back at level 2, but here it’s not much effect. Gray briefly gets free when they kill one dread lord, so another picks up the slack and takes control again. All lords and trogs are killed, but it sets up a precedent we will say many more times this game: PC’s either directly controlled or under a “confusion” spell and thereby attacking or fleeing from their own party.
Further down this tunnel we have drawn a wandering monster, a sort of large skeleton with an otherworldly fetal creature in its chest controlling it, which proceeds to confuse some of us (Gray, and some of our pets) into alternately attacking PCs or fleeing. It takes an arrow to the creature in the chest and we eventually return to abnormal.
We rest and then explore the city looking for the Tear of Teloc, which we seek to destroy in order to draw out the Lords of Dread. Our next encounter is two hideous tentacled beings that can’t be struck directly without harming yourself and which can engulf targets. Additionally, we know that gunfire will draw more creatures so we have to keep that noise down. I believe Carl killed them with fire.
At one point we encounter a vaguely spider-like creature with a penchant for eating brains. Despite the lack of cuisine among us, it moves in on the party and does a sort of ranged spectral bite on intelligent targets (PCs). It chases Carl around a while but eventually gets tired of missing. Some of us on the ground have to wait for it to come close, but fortunately the combo of Thomas’s bats, Carl’s attacks, and Clarence’s archery pick it apart.
But that was only the baby as we will find out later on. When we finally find the Tear of Teloc, it is a large lizard head statue that is in a crater of sorts. There are four specters who rush us and could have been a big, big problem… if they didn’t miss us an awful lot. We defy the miss chance for attacking ghosts and destroy them, especially due to half the party being able to crit undead. But then shows up the big brain eater, the momma of the earlier one, and it does such things as psychically toss Clarence into a pool of yellow fungus, create mirror images, and ice the party with a massive cone of cold. And then it confuses the bats and gray into a triangular battle amongst themselves (though gray comes to his senses for one round and gets the kill shot on the big bad; a highlight in a game where he otherwise had more success beating up players but not the bad guys).
Carl dynamites the Tear of Teloc and that will draw out the Dread lords… next game.
Carl (Jim), Clarence (Alan), Thomas (Paul), Everett (Joe), and Gray (Darren)
Continuing through the caverns, having destroyed the Tear of Telloc, we make our way toward the pearl making facility. During said travel we are beset by a pair of Nagas who spot us, turn invisible, and try to electrocute with lightning bolts. This tactic is pretty good, but Carl, our air support, is able to return some fire. Somehow they are able to spot him insibile and in the air, and try to shock him as well. First Naga was obliterated in short order by, I believe, Clarence. The trend of this game is that if Clarence can get a crit he wastes creatures, and Carl regularly can hurt things badly, while Gray misses a LOT, Thomasand Clarence regularly take friendly fire from posessed pets and PC's (Mostly Gray and his Ape, Coco). Anyway, this bout, the Nagas get slaughtered by the heavy hitters while the rest of us try to dodge lightning.
We find the home of the pearls, which is a pyramid, with at its peak... an enormous flesh globule which in shorthand we dubbed "the nipple". Naturally this lead to a bunch of other anatomical terms for the pyramid. Up on the top are three Kopru (the so-called "Dread Lords") who typically use their mind control to pick apart our party, and they do indeed do some of that. But we start with Clarence doing some truly nasty sniper attacks on them, which draws two of them toward us. The first one is annihilated halfway to us. The other gets taken out not long after, but not before trying to get Everett to kill us. The Dread Lord controls Clarence who then tries to control Clarence--who resists! But Everett's pet Giant Spider does put clarence in webbing for a while before Clarence does enough damage to the mind controller, and back under our own power we are able to encroach on the third one, who is hiding on the far side of the boob. I think Carl damaged him pretty badly, and they were at a height where Coco could reach out and finish him off.
We enter the pyramid through the nipple and find inside is the Kopru high priest, who causes all sorts of chaos. He gets first man in (Gray) to try to kill the others through use of his guns and Coco. Wiseley, after taking some damage from Coco, Thomas invisibles himsself, except Coco still gets in a few shots because he can track by scent; still the 50/50 does deflect some shots and my epically bad attack rolls allow him to escape the most harm. Likewise, Gray himself is firing guns at Everett and missing, though it helps that Everette is fleeing and in full defense mode for the extra AC. Carl and Clarence dispatch the high priest and we return to normal, though now most of the extra attacks Gray had were used trying to take out fellow adventurers, and of course we're dinged up a little bit.
The final boss is in the next room, a lovely creatured called a Bilewretch, which is essentially a huge centipede with tentacles on its head. The room is filled with pools of black bile that we can not tread into. The creature spits acid that will keep burning indefinitely unless you stop to remove it. Everyone is flying due to fly potions, except Clarence who is in its tentacles for a while. Damage to PCs is pretty evenly distributed, until our hit-point-cannons can mow down the enemy.
At this point there was more adventure but due to unforseen circumstances regarding the ill health of sweet pup Roxy, we called it a night early.
Game ends here (for now).