Attendees:
Experience
Due to a cancellation by Jeff, a last minute PATRIN CAMPAIGN game broke out.
As there were three attendess (+ a GM) I'll go straight to the characters...
Jim's character... VIOX (Whose side effects may include sudden stabby-stabby pain in the back), is a rogue Ninja, a man who has left behind his corrupt masters with aspirations of building a better house.
Joe's character... KARTH, "the Empty One", ferocious practicioner of the tiger martial art. Sorry, don't recall his motivation.
Darren's character... DAVION, "Weaver of Fate", the tapestry maker turned power broker. The man who weaves tapestries that include scenes of the future (or perhaps just hold suggestions that are enacted upon).
May not look like your typical heroic adventuring group, but they are. No, really. Thief, Fighter, um... Publicist? Bard! Yeh, that's it. He doesn't sing or dance, but he talks and listens.
May not look like your typical heroic adventuring group, but they are. No, really. Thief, Fighter, um... Publicist? Bard! Yeh, that's it. He doesn't sing or dance, but he talks and listens.
There is a brief Pre-Pre-Game Prologue narrative by the GM. In it, he describes the trials of a group of heroes who were assembled from across the plains and performed such trials as going to hell, spending a week underwater fighting sahaugin, and witnessing the modron march. This plucky group had one of their kind become cursed; The druid would be transformed into a ravening beast over time but the team felt there was a cure in the beastlands. And so they traveled there... and failed to find the cure.
Then there is a brief Pre-Pre Game Narrative. Seems we are quite the adventurers. We've come to the current campaign city by way of a major butt kicking of evil.
And then something happens that leaves the team stunned. Mark gives us treasure. Yup, you read that right. Mark gives us treasure. And no small sum. Lots of money, lots of healing potions, a pretty solid handful of magic items, such as a monk's belt (which grants ambidexterity to the wearer), a gold lion statue (which turns into a live lion and fights for the team), an elephant statue (which turns into an elephant and... eats peanuts?), boots of striding (to Karth), boots of elven kind (to Viox), boots of levitation (to Davion), a handful of weapons, etc. We are however warned that later on these things will just be irrelevant to us.
We arrive at the town of Blythe with the other PCs in tow, apparently poisoned to a degree we cannot figure out (In other words, inactive until they actually show up for a game). Davion goes out to the taverns and talks up the deeds of the team. That way we are of some renown when...
There is a disturbance at the front gate. Those who approach find that outside are many, many bodies. It seems that no one who left the city during the night lived. Out on the field in a distance is a knight in black armor with a red glow and his hellish steed, a huge gray wolf, plus a little old lady. Seems she's their publicist. The old lady slowly approaches the gate. It's obvious that she is blind. When she gets close we can see the damage to her eyes is fairly fresh. Did he do that to her? No. She did it to herself, she says. Seems that when her lord raised his visor and showed his face to her she no longer had a need for eyes. She says that he is there to chew +2 bubblegum and kick ass. He wants to fight the best this town has to offer, and if he is defeated he shall leave. The city officials decide to send out their best trained soldiers (guys with greater skill than us at this point).
As you can guess, they might as well have been +2 bubblegum. He chewed them up and spit them out; he and his horse. We ran the troops (12 of them in all) while Mark used us for target practice. It was all in an effort to learn the mechanics again, as it has been a while. I believe one guy, commanded by Joe, actually did a point of damage to him. My last guy got furthest away before his death. They then send out armies. We didn't have the army rules, so we just wrote them off (we knew it was coming). Then the city's arch-mage shows up, tries prismatic spheres and such, and winds up being slaughtered by one shot from the knight who somehow saw through the impossibly bright glamour.
We know there's no way we can defeat this guy. The city elders meet. On the strength of our newly created reputation, we get in. They need volunteers to lead a large pack of people through the sewers. It seems the ancient and pretty much forgotten uncharted sewer system leads to the river 5 miles distant. If we can get out that way then we can take the refugees down stream to a bigger city and beg for help. Davion doesn't feel particularly strong about this idea, but it beats sitting there and waiting to die. So we drop into the sewers, organize the 300 'fugees into groups of 30. 2 skilled men lead and guard each cluster of 28 men, women, and children. We lead the way, carefully as we can, marking the way, should another group need to get out, or we need to backtrack. The Viox defeats a lock to get us past a heavy gate. Then we meet rats. Big ones. The two better combatants (Viox and Karth) defeat the 3 rats, then their momma shows up... a bigass plague rat (And there's nothing worse than being plagued with a big-ass). Old fashioned smacky-smacky.
We fight such perils as sewer-smell induced nausea (if you fail a save), morale issues with the travelers, and using an ancient map to navigate.
But then we come across a hideous hag. Ninja boy, with his lowlight vision, manages to spot her and moves in. We have to get closer. She's out on a little stone platform "island" in the middle of a large room of sewage with a walkway around it. She cackles, Viox smackles. We join battle, and Karth leaps across the sewage and lands on the little island. She fires magic missiles (Exalted version) and harms first Viox then Karth. Davion's arrows are deflected, so he enacts the Golden Lion statue and it leaps over. The trio engage the hag on her little island. She is indeed a night hag, with razor sharp iron fingernails, and with a staff of healing which she uses to heal herself (since there's no attacks-of-oportunity in hand-to-hand combat in this game). The tiger smacks her a little. Finally they throttle her and push her into the water so that the groups behind us don't know what we are facing. "Nothing to see. Just more rats. They're done."
We get to the exit and it requires smarts and occult knowledge to crack. Davion works it with the assistance of Viox, and the tricky lock opens and we get out. The troops don't give us time to look around, instead they rush out of the sewer and into the fresh air, and down toward some boats. There we find bodies neatly defiled, like the ones outside the city. Seems our wolf and/or knight have been here, vivesecting. At least that leaves us the boats. We pile in and head away as the wolf shows up, running faster than cheetahs on speed and expeditious retreat. He runs across the surface of the water, engages one boat, and destroys its occupants. As we're trying to figure out what to do, Viox takes his potions and flies and invisibility's himself out of harm. Karth takes a flight potion and strategizes. Davion takes a flight potion, moves upward and tries to figure things out but we're all pretty much at a loss. And we likely would have been the only survivors (by going straight up) if we weren't spared that ignominity by the knight whistling to summon his wolf. Seems he's decided to crash the city and wants his lupine helper. The wolf disengages and what people we have left make it to the city.
There we meet with people who interrogate us. Davion realizes that many of them are using spells to dig for more information. Especially when they discover that... the big city is under seige! No knight this time. Instead giant purple worms have come, ridden by ogre magi of some kind, and accompanied by ravening hordes of big-mouthed goblins (the infamous ravenloft Gobleenz). The city gets its most powerful people together and gets to setting up their defenses, but their big league mage is missing, the most powerful in the land, and along with the (present) Druid and Arch-bisop, comprise the city's three-headed magical triumverate. We are asked to go find him at his tower. We are given a rod that will open the door, and we go. As we crawl the wall (the only way to get to his tower), goblins climb over and we go 3-on-3 with them. They injure us, Davion uses the hag's staff of healing to try to keep everyone healthy, and the gold lion (which can be called weekly) tries to help. The group destroys the goblins as best they can and enters the tower.
However, in the interim, the hordes have assembled and amid them, one of these ogre magi uses "the howling whirlwind" spell to create a vortex that destroys magic in a huge radius (Modenkainen's disjuntion). Not only are the walls no longer warded here (they shatter under the thrashing worms) and all of our magical belongings destroyed, but the towe we are in is apparently assembled by magic. It collapses in on our heroes. And as we lay there crippled beneath the stoney structure, staring up from a hole that is filling with sand like an hourglass as our time runs out, we see the light.
And we change.
Not fully. No, we get the ability score bonuses, the Willpower and Essence bumps, and the Virtue bumps, but not the bonus points or ability score points and no charms. And we get one form. Viox... the black scorpion; Karth... the sabretooth tiger; Davion... the orb-weaver spider.
Thus ends the pre-game game.