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Pathfinder, sessions 1-2
Oct. 4th, 2012 09:49 amMy memory of how things played out might be a little off, but talking about it makes me happier, so...
Our paladinic heros had just been sent towards the small and largely charmless mining town of Baltwell to hold the shared mission station there, after the mission's single priest, Father Trantis, had disappeared - leaving an enigmatic message that he'd found something big.
A day from their destination, the party noticed dust clouds, horses, and a single camel carrying crude wicker cages - Mournhorn slavers, so called for their habit of wearing animal horns attached to their headgear to give them a more frightening demonic aspect. In their first attempt to work as a group they downed their adversaries with astonishing speed - Yland dispatched slavers with a deadly shower of arrows, Flowerbell outmaneuvered a rogue trying to flank the group, and while Paiva was fighting her opponents, they yelled something to each other. She was able to remember the phrase, which later turned out to be a very old term for "eye."
When the paladins made it to town, it became pretty obvious that things were getting steadily uglier. Heavily armored mercenaries, their shields and tabards bearing the Tudor style rose of the Steel Blossom company, stood guard on corners, keeping close watch on surly off-duty miners. One entire row of shops stood empty - testimony to a predicted boom that never arrived. A dog darted out of an alley with a severed human hand in its mouth. And from the narrowed windows overhead, from the corners and the dive bars, a lot of people were staring daggers at the party - and specifically at Flowerbell, who thought their anger might've related to the last priest (like Flowerbell, Fr. Trantis had served Desna, and out of all the paladins, only Flowerbell wore a really huge display of her faith). They decided they'd investigate further, after they'd set up the mission station.
The mission station was pretty much secured when the characters got there, but while they were exploring the main temple - the sanctuary - they were attacked by weird little vicious constructs made from bone, twigs, and scraps of illuminated parchment. Tupilaqs (I reskinned chokers rather than used the official version). Dakaz held one of them up until Paiva could kill it; Flowerbell, who isn't very good at evading grapple attacks, got caught but was able to use her whip to swing away; Yland climbed into the rafters to snipe at point blank range. Further investigation proved that the tupilaqs had broken in through a grate on one of the chimneys and had rifled through all the papers in the desks and in the library. Someone had sent them to look for something.
Our heros then started investigating their new home over the next few days. The mission itself was older than most of the town, and the sanctuary featured huge, beautiful stained glass windows - surrounded by scaffolding. It seems that the old priest, Edrigar, had been paranoid and walled them up, and when Trantis took over the mission station, he started unbricking the windows, but vanished before finishing the job.
One of the stained glass windows portrayed an angelic figure facing a horde of daemonic figures, with the motto FAITH IS THE KEY. The other stained glass window portrayed four cloaked figures, looking at a single spot on the ground and with heads bowed as though weeping. This window bears the motto THE EYES BEHOLD THE GATE. Just looking at that window caused a feeling of vague discomfort - and a closer check found that people could vaguely make out something beyond the window that was definitely not the hills outside the temple. Flowerbell tied a rope to herself and poked at the window, which gave way like a viscous syrup before her - she could tell that on the other side there was some small room made of stone definitely not from the sanctuary, and where someone had graffiti'd a small mark of Desna. (The goddess' faithful tend to leave her symbol as a placemarker when they travel.) She also found that only going partway into the room saved her from being stuck there - objects could go through the sanctuary into this extraplanar space, but stuff from there couldn't come through into the sanctuary.
The party also investigated the vault under the sanctuary. Dakaz has a fine understanding of engineering and architecture and noticed something that few people other than a dwarf would twig to that immediately - the vault didn't just pre-date the temple, but it'd been carved out by giants. One end of the vault had been blocked by a cave in centuries prior, and goes nowhere. There was nothing remarkable about the tombs of the prior priests.
From there, the group also started talking to locals about their new home. They found out a little more about the conflict between the mine owners and miners on the brink of unionizing or total warfare; about the Steel Blossom mercenaries; and about why everyone seemed so hostile to Flowerbell. Turns out that the humans and even some of the town's few dwarves were fairly hostile to gnomes in general. The little folk frequently served the mine owners as engineers, creating bracing and pumps to drain mines, which already cast them in a bad light with a lot of the people providing the muscle; but recently mysterious cloaked gnomes had been seen here and there about town, possibly responsible for a rash of robberies, and definitely guilty of digging up the grave of one of the town's better-loved residents - a dwarven minerologist - and making off with the body.
This minerologist, Bori Berkssen, had worked with the town's sole wizard to figure out how Baltwell had gained such rich diamond deposits. Turns out that, counter to old theories that diamonds only showed up in old alluvial areas, the town sat pretty close to an old, long-closed, dimensional rift. Material had welled up through the rift from the Plane of Elemental Earth and been hardened and compressed to diamond.
No sooner had our heros learned more about that then there was new and horrible news. The town's sole wizard, Yadishaz Imrir, had also died from heart failure, and was scheduled to be buried later in the week. Suspecting something fishy, the paladins resolved to get in on the funeral and investigate further.
Next time; a funeral, weird gnomes, and a horrific cult based out of an abandoned slaughterhouse!
Our paladinic heros had just been sent towards the small and largely charmless mining town of Baltwell to hold the shared mission station there, after the mission's single priest, Father Trantis, had disappeared - leaving an enigmatic message that he'd found something big.
A day from their destination, the party noticed dust clouds, horses, and a single camel carrying crude wicker cages - Mournhorn slavers, so called for their habit of wearing animal horns attached to their headgear to give them a more frightening demonic aspect. In their first attempt to work as a group they downed their adversaries with astonishing speed - Yland dispatched slavers with a deadly shower of arrows, Flowerbell outmaneuvered a rogue trying to flank the group, and while Paiva was fighting her opponents, they yelled something to each other. She was able to remember the phrase, which later turned out to be a very old term for "eye."
When the paladins made it to town, it became pretty obvious that things were getting steadily uglier. Heavily armored mercenaries, their shields and tabards bearing the Tudor style rose of the Steel Blossom company, stood guard on corners, keeping close watch on surly off-duty miners. One entire row of shops stood empty - testimony to a predicted boom that never arrived. A dog darted out of an alley with a severed human hand in its mouth. And from the narrowed windows overhead, from the corners and the dive bars, a lot of people were staring daggers at the party - and specifically at Flowerbell, who thought their anger might've related to the last priest (like Flowerbell, Fr. Trantis had served Desna, and out of all the paladins, only Flowerbell wore a really huge display of her faith). They decided they'd investigate further, after they'd set up the mission station.
The mission station was pretty much secured when the characters got there, but while they were exploring the main temple - the sanctuary - they were attacked by weird little vicious constructs made from bone, twigs, and scraps of illuminated parchment. Tupilaqs (I reskinned chokers rather than used the official version). Dakaz held one of them up until Paiva could kill it; Flowerbell, who isn't very good at evading grapple attacks, got caught but was able to use her whip to swing away; Yland climbed into the rafters to snipe at point blank range. Further investigation proved that the tupilaqs had broken in through a grate on one of the chimneys and had rifled through all the papers in the desks and in the library. Someone had sent them to look for something.
Our heros then started investigating their new home over the next few days. The mission itself was older than most of the town, and the sanctuary featured huge, beautiful stained glass windows - surrounded by scaffolding. It seems that the old priest, Edrigar, had been paranoid and walled them up, and when Trantis took over the mission station, he started unbricking the windows, but vanished before finishing the job.
One of the stained glass windows portrayed an angelic figure facing a horde of daemonic figures, with the motto FAITH IS THE KEY. The other stained glass window portrayed four cloaked figures, looking at a single spot on the ground and with heads bowed as though weeping. This window bears the motto THE EYES BEHOLD THE GATE. Just looking at that window caused a feeling of vague discomfort - and a closer check found that people could vaguely make out something beyond the window that was definitely not the hills outside the temple. Flowerbell tied a rope to herself and poked at the window, which gave way like a viscous syrup before her - she could tell that on the other side there was some small room made of stone definitely not from the sanctuary, and where someone had graffiti'd a small mark of Desna. (The goddess' faithful tend to leave her symbol as a placemarker when they travel.) She also found that only going partway into the room saved her from being stuck there - objects could go through the sanctuary into this extraplanar space, but stuff from there couldn't come through into the sanctuary.
The party also investigated the vault under the sanctuary. Dakaz has a fine understanding of engineering and architecture and noticed something that few people other than a dwarf would twig to that immediately - the vault didn't just pre-date the temple, but it'd been carved out by giants. One end of the vault had been blocked by a cave in centuries prior, and goes nowhere. There was nothing remarkable about the tombs of the prior priests.
From there, the group also started talking to locals about their new home. They found out a little more about the conflict between the mine owners and miners on the brink of unionizing or total warfare; about the Steel Blossom mercenaries; and about why everyone seemed so hostile to Flowerbell. Turns out that the humans and even some of the town's few dwarves were fairly hostile to gnomes in general. The little folk frequently served the mine owners as engineers, creating bracing and pumps to drain mines, which already cast them in a bad light with a lot of the people providing the muscle; but recently mysterious cloaked gnomes had been seen here and there about town, possibly responsible for a rash of robberies, and definitely guilty of digging up the grave of one of the town's better-loved residents - a dwarven minerologist - and making off with the body.
This minerologist, Bori Berkssen, had worked with the town's sole wizard to figure out how Baltwell had gained such rich diamond deposits. Turns out that, counter to old theories that diamonds only showed up in old alluvial areas, the town sat pretty close to an old, long-closed, dimensional rift. Material had welled up through the rift from the Plane of Elemental Earth and been hardened and compressed to diamond.
No sooner had our heros learned more about that then there was new and horrible news. The town's sole wizard, Yadishaz Imrir, had also died from heart failure, and was scheduled to be buried later in the week. Suspecting something fishy, the paladins resolved to get in on the funeral and investigate further.
Next time; a funeral, weird gnomes, and a horrific cult based out of an abandoned slaughterhouse!