Toad (Alan), Arashi (Joe), Trystyn (Paul), Riku (Will), and Agrilon (Darren)
So we start with the traditional “how the hell do we play this game again” white-room battle between the PCs and many wolves. Well, it was 15 wolves, but then almost instantly dropped to 10 wolves because that was a lot. Then it dropped to 5 wolves because it still felt like too much for a test fight against guys with likely one trick each. The heavy hits are from Riku, with Agrilon doing well, so they each get a reward afterward (a free level 2 resource item).
This is followed up with the more amusing battle royal with some obstacles on the course (one of each element). Arashi’s plan is to make alliances with people until it suits her to no longer be in an alliance. Toad is the first to break such an alliance, but winds up paying for it. Of course several people had already targeted him so he was taking the heavy fire. Agrilon and Riku exchange some shots with no real effect on one another. Trystyn has hidden in the nearby pond to take cover. Arashi uses his wind Anima power to force the water into a whirlpool, removing the cover for everyone to shoot him, which works. After that Arashi picks between his two alliances who and opts for the Earth guy, so he and Riku chase down Agrilon and take him out. In the end, Riku is triumphant and takes another Resource 2 item.
But wait, that’s not all. We stage a social combat. We roll off for
partners. Toad wins, but selects the wrong foe—Arashi, who had a better dice
pool for this than the others. Doesn’t matter though… They would opt to watch
the others, tabling their own social combat, which basically timed out like an
untended video game. Worse, actually, because when Trystyn scored a crazy
number of successes with 4 10s, he scored on Riku and not only caused an
intimacy of respect in him, but also in the two bystander PCs. So everybody
loves Trystyn (except Agrilon… so far).
So then we get to the game proper. Out houses have sent us out across the sea.
We are being sent to an armpit of a town (compared to our big city tastes… I
mean except toad, who loves armpits). On the way we do some Crafting (Riku and
Toad), Snooping on the crew (Agrilon), trying to ingratiate himself to the
captain (Trystyn) and…can’t remember what Arashi was doing.
Anyway, our voyage is interrupted by a massively powered sea with, a goddess with much more essence than we have. Custom is to sacrifice things. The captain has things, but SeaBitch also wants a baby that’s on board (We should have seen the bumper sticker). The captain wants to negotiate but asks us to back him up—not in a fight the ungodly powerful god (paradox?) but in convincing it that it doesn’t want a baby.
Watery Tart says “okay, but I want you to torture this sea nymph”. Not sure why she enjoys having us do it rather than doing it herself, but we relent. She grants Agrilon a whip with special properties but since he doesn’t have skill in melee he passes it off to Riku who can use it, and does. It’s not easy to hit this woman as she has all kinds of DV and special effects to interfere with us, but once she takes some hits and Trystyn decides to actually use a neglected game mechanic—teamwork—to help us bump down our foe’s defense value through coordinated attack, we actually do some harm. Riku finishes her off with a massive whip hit and it’s gone. SeaHag is so pleased by the spectacle that she lets us keep the whip and pass.
We get to town and it’s a dump. They don’t even have a Prada or Gucci store,
just Burlington Coat Factory. Two days in we meet with the Mayor for dinner, at
which point we do some social rolls.
Oh, and the social rankings within the group are this: #1 Agrilon, #2 Trystyn,
#3 Arashi, #4 Riku, #5 Toad. I guess this gives top-down bonus doing social
things within the group dynamic.
The locals, and things we can note about them that I can remember off the top of
my head, are:
We social without any serious social faux pax this time. Game ends
after the in-game dinner. Oh, and we were sent a few things by our house (based
on rolls we make for allies, family, etc.)
Trystyn (Paul), Riku (Will), Toad (Alan), and Agrilon (Darren)
I got Will’s name wrong in the last recap, I’m noticing. Well, onward! This recap won’t take long, fortunately.
We started with another “white-room” scenario because we hadn’t done mass combat yet. Well, that was ugly. It was the four of us acting as units trying to take each other out. Like every other once of these we’ve done, Toad was out first, then Agrilon, leaving Riku to fight with another finalist (Trystyn) and ultimately win another level 2 treasure. Took us a few hours, and a lot of yelling at one another, as is our custom.
After that we reconvene in the town, at a festival. It is beset by wyld mutant goblin types who seem bent on causing damage, and since we are near the town manse it is the likely target. The goblins themselves aren’t a big threat, but their shaman leader does a charm that makes him harder to hit unless you spend a couple will. Everyone manages to take out some goblins (except Agrilon) and once the shaman is down there’s only one goblin left, who naturally tries to flee. But we get word that the city is under siege by goblins at the gate. So we do another mass combat, this one counting, but much simpler with us all as one unit, with Trystyn in charge and the rest of us acting as heroes and snipers, and I believe Riku annihilates the enemy doing the lion’s share of the damage, before will had to run off to a real world event.
That leaves 3 of us. We are contacted by the Sheriff with a concern about a tomb that has been plundered during the event. It was the interment location of the previous priest of this town, long dead. He doesn’t want to tell the current priest, Trystyn’s mentor, about it because he might panic or there might be other repercussions, so we investigate it. On the scene we are attacked by three undead: one is a skeleton who takes a fraction of damage from slicing/piercing, and two more meaty zombie types who take be slashed/stabbed but are heartier. Trystyn will do a good job of pecking away at his foe, and Toad gets pretty smacked around by his AND Agrilon’s, and takes a point from Agrilon’s double-botch attack. Toad manages to damage both of his foes enough that they can’t do much offense anymore, and backs out of range, so if nothing else Agrilon can stand in the way of them while Trystyn finishes them off.
Seems these three were likely raised by the tomb raiders, who made offf with the body of the priest. We report this information to the lord sheriff, who is reticent to pass the information on. We will settle all that next game.
Toad (Alan), Arashi (Joe), Trystyn (Paul), Riku (Will), and Agrilon (Darren)
So we speculate on what to do next as we figure out how to track the wyldlings, but this gives us a week to heal (and craft). During this time Trystyn happens across a young woman, daughter of the general store owner, who enlists him to help her with their "rat problem" in the basement. The rat problem is less about rats than about seducing Trystyn, who is does not dodge such efforts. But before it gets anywhere, Dad shows up, and he's a local hero, a former war hero. Trystyn manages to calm him only just enough to be ushered out (rather than go to fisticuffs). But his reputation takes a hit, and with that goes our rep as a group, the newly found respect of the town now neutralized. Fickel m-fers. Noticing this shift in town and being an inveterate snoop, Agrilon goes out and feels around and finds out that Trystyn may have had a less than favorable interaction with a local, and when asked about it he couldn't care less about his rep or ours where pretty girls are involved. Later this will cause some friction with Riku, who is trying to build public works with the assistance of the locals but finds them less than helpful, and pretty much underscore why Trystyn may have been sent away by his family.
A lord who was in town during the seige is a fan of ours and invites us out to his place to have dinner and asks if we'd like to hunt with him. Trystyn turns down the dinner but shows up for the hunt. The target is wild boar, but we end up in countering a local legent, a boar this is wyld-touched. It proceeds to gore Agrilon pretty good before (and slightly after) Toad tackles it, and this will plague Agrilon's activities for the rest of the game. The boar has a great defense so it takes a little bit of damage at a time before falling under the combined blows. The head is donated to the local Inn after craftsman Riku mounts it (...on a plaque).
We are in the Inn when a panicked mom shows up claiming her son had said he was seeing monsters and that when she went to his room tonight he was dead. We go to her house and upon investigation find a hole in the ground. If it were wider we'd probably go right in, but becasue it will involve crawling and the likely wyldling (we're guessing) infestation therein would have a lot of advantages, we hem and haw a while and tell the sherrif about the hole and sleep on it because we plan to investigate the town for other holes by which the seige of the city might have happened next day. Nothing comes out that night, and when we check the city we do indeed find holes, as do citizens when enlisted to check their homes. Now there's an undertone of "those terrestrials can't even protect us" because of the child's death and the presence of the holes, even if those holes were there long before us.
Fed up, Trystyn and Arashi decide they are going in the hole, and aso Riku and Toad relent and go in with them, while slowly-healing Agrilon stands up top and listens. Turns out there's just one wyldling in here, a guy who apparently dug a hole here when he coudln't get out of town in time and has been hiding and he'd been coming up for food. The other holes are also just temporary hidey-holes. So somehow they got into town, dug holes, and waited for their moment to attack. We don't know how they got in yet. We get one of their explody flame-pots from the dead Wyldling.
Next problem rears its head when an angry local who is drunk shows up and berates his daughter, Amiko, who runs the Inn we are in. (Agrilon knows from earlier snooping that Amiko may have once been an adventuring hero but has not passed that info on to the group.) Amiko's dad is angry that his daughter should be a "lady" and not an inn-keeper. He shames her and then leaves. Amiko is currently inconsolable, despite efforts, and retires to her chambers. Next morning we are alerted by an inn worker that Amiko is missing. When we check out her room we find a note from Amiko's brother entreating her to meet him at the local glassworks at midnight and to use a specific knock pattern to let him know it's her. We go there and repeating the knock on the door gets no response, but does alert the 10 goblins inside that we are there, so when Trystyn unlocks the door and opens it we are immediately under fire. It's not hard to take them apart, primarily with Arashi leaping into the fray headlong, and the rest of us shooting and stabbing our way in from the doorway.
Next room we find the natural denizen of the glass factor, a Grizzly bear. A real one, not one of those little glass blown ones you get at Knotts giftshop. This one is identified likely as a familiar, not a wyld-touched beast. So he's obviously been odered in by a greater intelligence. Once the bear is put down, the room he had been in the foundry. Once inside we find a large elemental, a flaming mercury spider! And that's where we leave off for next time, eyes-to-eyes with the creature.
Toad (Alan), Trystyn (Paul), Riku (Will), and Agrilon (Darren)
Essence and Health are reset to start this game despite being mid scenario, which is good or I'd have been (even more) useless. We are in the glass factory facing the mercury ant, a large super-heated ant that lives in the furnace but has come out to visit it. Trystyn takes to the ceiling to be out of its reach but it doesn't care and climbs up to the ceiling. A few ranged shots go wide. When it finally gets stabbed (by Trystyn) its molten blood pours out and nearly takes out his special weapon, but he takes splash damage. It moves under the ground, comes up and and targets Agrilon, but we circle it and terminate it like a can of raid!
Next encounter is downstairs, as everyone upstairs has been burned by the fire ant. In the cellar we encounter a genuine godblooded hero, a half-elemental who calls himself the Glassmaster and taunts us with corny lines before hurling shards of glass created by shattering his war fans over and over again. His two minion mutants approach and try to firebomb us to minor effect. The story of this game will be that Toad takes up the Alan tradition of grappling everything, and to great success! When he grabs the bad guy and trashes his DV we are able to beat him down, despite his tricks. Clues here point to this place being used as one of the focal points for invasion from below as there is a tunnel downward further (which is blocked right now). We take the captive bartender back to her business. There's a prolonged discussion about who is related to whom as far as glassmaster/bartender/innkeeper/etc are concerned that after a while I tuned out so I couldn't tell you the family tree.
We head for the other below ground facility and find it is the TEMPLE OF WRATH. Lamasu (the mother of monsters) has a few children here as well as a cathedral. On the way in we fight one of the low-levels who isn't all that hard to defeat BUT induces rage which causes minuses to your DV if you fail the save and also can cause you to attack random targets (ncluding allies) unless you burn a willpower, so some of us have to do that on a failed save. This will add up over the course of checking out the temple. We find in the next room a pair of those same guys plus a "child of Lamasu" who repeats his name continually in 3rd person (...Corvasu? Something like that) and says he cannot be harmed. So we harm him and his little friends. Once past them we reach the cathedral, a large room with a fountain in the middle and an elevated platform at the far end upon which sits a quasit/imp type badguy who bids us welcome and then summons 2 more of the low level hate minions, and can do that every round. So it's a lot of hacking them down so another one can show up. Wisely, Trystyn goes right after the big (little) bad and starts hurting it right away. Once it is killed and its summoned minions, we have one more encounter involving a flying head with wings which shrieks at us and gets clobbered for its trouble.
This game was a lot of: Agrilon not hurting much of anything (until the flying head), Toad grappling everything in sight, Trystyn doing a jump-and-stab manuever at twice the pace of any other attacker, and Riku soaking up all the damage since he's made of rock and driving ahead.
There was a lot of XP updates including essence 2, charms, abilities bonuses, etc.
Toad (Alan), Arashi (Joe), Trystyn (Paul), Riku (Will), and Agrilon (Darren)
Between games we have a couple weeks during which Toad makes some potions and Riku makes some armor, all for other PCs.
We are asked to an event with the Local Lords, but before we have that dinner we are asked to attend one with the lady whose glass factory we saved last game. She wants to give is a share of it, specifically, 5 shares (10% each). So now we have an investment in the community that will likely come back to haunt us.
The dinner with the lords is mostly for them to pat Riku on the back (appropriately enough) for this water project. They pledge to invest in it and so we set to hiring workers and getting the job going. During one dig, a geyser is struck which hurts workers because of the steam, so next time we go to break through we are all on hand. This time it pops, no one is hurt, but then out come three steam wraiths, which proceed to scald the diggers, so we leap into the fray and do battle with them. Trystyn is immune to them, being water-boy, some of the rest of us take some scalding but over all it's not bad as we put them down.
Immediately on the heels of this come two people shouting for help. Seems there's something at the glass foundry causing trouble, so we run there immediately and find there is a large glass construct of some sort cutting a path our way, so we engage it and it is both incredibly sharp and pointy (making it harmful to grapple) and its pretty hard despite being glass so it soaks a lot of damage. Eventually we plink-plink our way through it and it shatters, sending out harmful shards. Not long after this we are told there is something going on back and the hole we dug, so we reverse course and go there to discover...
Odontus, a local god who is both fire and water. He berates us for disrupting the geomantic ley-lines, and now we've freed the Leech God which he keeps trapped through his willpower and fire/water power. Riku, he of the water project, bargains with it promising that if Odontus allow the project to persist and the town get water, that he will see to it that they honor him with worship. Odontus likes this but requires she banish the Leech by defeating it so he can again suppress it. We don't have incredibly long, but we haver overnight to rest up a few levels of injury, then we head to the last disturbance sight which was our glass factory. Therein we find it amid a group of dead workers. It's a giant leech, as expected, in the middle of a pool of blood which is helping feed its vitality. It summons minor leechy minions which try to suck some life but suck at it. Many of us run into the room to deal with it, but they have to contend with a disruptive aura of leechiness that drains those in melee range. It takes a while but it is defeated.
There is word that up the coast in Thistletop, there is likely a gathering of forces of evil-mutantdom. We know this is home of the mistress of the late evil glass factory owner's girlfriend, the likely true leader of the evil forces. She was mentioned in some previous missives we found in which the writer details her gathering of forces and corrections to her physiology that she saw as ugly (seems she's very vain). So we head that way. Toad has some navigation problems and so we run out of food before we reach there but we stumble into a group of mutant goblinoids holed up in the forest, so we murder-hobo them and question one of the goblins and that is where we end the game for this go-round.
Toad (Alan), Arashi (Joe), Trystyn (Pual), Riku (Will), Agrillon (Darren) and introducing Cinder (Jim)
Having just exterminated a group of goblins in the forest we continue on deeper into the woods. It's not long before, in a thickly wooded path that forbids travel outside the path, we arrive at another goblin camp. It's suggested that we speak with the dirty wretches and gather info, with only one or two PCs ballking, so after sneaky Trystyn managed to look in on them, we send an envoy in. After a lot of "no kill I" on their part, we negotiate passage and leaave them alive, but any further information is impossible given language barriers, we pass and Trystyn sneaks back to listen and discovers that they are sending out runners to alert other tribes.
Ahead of us we run into a goblin shaman with his pet leopard. This goblin as an anima banner, indicating he is part terrestrial. So we fall into combat and after her does some area effect thorn attacks, many of us close in, with Trystyn doing his spring attack, and others getting up close and personal. It takes a while to cut down the cat before we turn on the shaman and eliminate him.
When we find the community of thistletop we see only an enormous castle with no signs of movement. There's a bridge across that is questionable. Agrilon sends Trystyn across to scout. While he's crossing, Riku assesses the bridge and deems it unstable and calls out. When he does, four goblins with axes emerge from their hiding place with intent to cut down the bridge. Trystyn leaps across and starts hacking them in short order. They really didn't prove much trouble for him, and after he drops all four we cross.
The castle is pretty barren overall. We go room to room, Agrilon taking the lead (Mostly because he's one of the few PCs with higher than a 1 compassion and he almost got Trystyn killed by sending him ahead). Well, this almost gets him killed when after meandering the grounds and examining many rooms we happen across a door where Agrilon hears people speaking on the other side. Trystyn makes a noise and a goblin comes to see, at which point a fight breaks out with 4 typical goblins and one who is the king. The king mounts his giant gecko and takes to the walls, riding around a la spider climb. When Agrilon enters the room, a tatcical mistake, he gets swept up by the gecko's tail as it is now overhead; he would get free after flaring his anima banner and burning the gecko for several ticks of the clock. The lesser goblins are pretty easy but it takes a while to kill the gecko and as the King drops down we eliminate him too.
We search the upper floor, hand-wave dispatching some relatively easy goblins, and find there's nowhere else to go but down.
On the lower floor we arrive at a room with several exits. From one emerges a bugbear, a fearsome creature which Arashi promptly does a ton of damaage to and soon after he's gone. Three female goblins rush in from another room and they prove to be better fighters, or at least just greater numbers. We defeat them and before we can do much, in comes the next boss. This one is a famed hunter of terrestrials (named something like Oreck). He aunts and we engage. This time with space to work with and him rushing to us, we manage to get any figher on him who wants to be, except for Toad trying to taunt him to come out after him. It's death by a thousand paper cuts! Everyone survives this game, and while a lot of people took a lot of damagae, it's a rare game where everyone stayed up.
Toad (Alan), Arashi (Joe), Trystyn (Pual), Riku (Will), Cinder (Jim), and Agrilon (Darren)
We pick up in the castle where we seek the mother of monsters or her representatives. Having cleared the rest of the place and done a small delve into the bottom level, we now continue in.
We came to a set of double-doors that once opened revealed a large temple with a fresco at the far wall from which births an enormous monstrous spider. Seems this wall can do this regularly. The spider proceeds to cover the entire chamber in acid and webbing then spits another loogie of acid at us, hurting everyone who wasn't hiding around a corner. The spider moved in and once withing reach of the door got taken down. It was determined by Riku that the wall had to be destroyed or deconsecrated in order to disable it, so we cumulatively blessed it into submission.
We went back upstairs to rest since some of us (me) were badly damaged and most of us were low on essence. While we were upstairs, they came to see us instead! A half-demoness and her ogre buddy tried to burn down the stable we were sleeping in. So we had to deal with hellfire, then after the first round those who weren't burning with hellfire had to deal with regular fire. The half-demoness is defeated by the bigger guns (Arashi, Trystyn, Riku and Cinder) while Agrilon flailed futiley and Toad kept the ogre busy by trying to grapple him while on fire. Eventually everyone pecked away at the ogre until he dropped.
The rest of the lower level involved three chambers below and the showdown with the big bad. Two of the chambers we hand-waved searching and went to the main event. Opening the door there is a pit inside full of burning coals. The door had been warded to keep the creature in. Only reason we were opening it was because if we just left it alone the wards had been weakened and eventually it was coming out. It would be a problem now or later. Seeing nothing in the room and with Agrilon detecting nothing with his extra senses, he broke out the mirror and looked for spirits, spying one and directing traffic that way. But that was useless as it teleported behind the group and we fought it in the hallway. First thing it does is completely trash the already injured Agrilon putting him down and on fire! So that became a concern while they're trying to focus on the monster; fight the bad guy or put your dying friend out. A few attempts were made but it's not a "given", with Cinder eventually putting Agrilon out. The rest of the conscious team plinked away at the spider doing one and two points at a time, eventually killing it, at which point it faded into nothing.
We looted the place, Agrilon was carried up to the surface to convalesce for months. We hit essence 3 and our families called us back to the world as conquering heroes. I imagine Agrilon woke up on the ship, since there are no medical steps to speed up the worst of the damage.
So the game ends(?) here.