![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
So...
... our heros had successfully made it to their mission station in Baltwell, secured the place, and were working on winning hearts and minds when they found out that the town's only real wizard, Yadishaz Imrir, had died.
Being player characters they instantly assumed that there was some connection between the wizard's death and the earlier (off-screen) death of his longtime friend, a dwarf minerologist named Bori Berkssen, whose body had been stolen away by insidious little cloaked gnomes - or at least everyone thought they were gnomes. They didn't become less suspicious when Yland broke into Imrir's modest house and discovered that someone - probably the same tupilaqs whom the paladins had fought before - had come down the chimney and rifled all the papers in the wizard's desk. While Yland was staying in touch with his rogue skills, Yukiko and Paiva talked to the town's undertaker, Threnton Kaast, and learned about his giant helper. Yukiko was diplomatic enough that the undertaker quickly accepted help managing the funeral - unable to resist the offer of bodyguards, music, and help with the liturgy for someone who, as far as anyone could figure out, had never professed any particular faith.
That brought our little band of paladins to the cemetery outside town, marching alongside the undertaker's cart, the wizard's only apprentice, a group of miners sent to pay their respects, and, not to be outdone, a lawyer sent by the coalition of mine owners with a few fully armored Steel Blossom mercenaries. The PCs were able to spot that the miners had come packing weapons. It looked like things were about to become ugly and they promptly did.
Just not in the way that by now people were expecting. Just as nearly everyone was tied up in helping halt and unload the hearse, the mysterious cloaked gnomes which'd caused so much trouble attacked from cover in a burst of magical pyrotechnics, using slings to launch clay pots of acid which did terrible things to NPCs and hurt some of the PCs as well. The funeral party dashed for cover among the tombstones as the vicious little gnomes threw spell effects and grew to giant size to pummel opponents. It didn't work though - the spriggans were defeated, in part because they were fighting people literally immune to fear.
With the NPCs healed, buried, and searched accordingly, the characters set off down the nearby arroyo to track the cloaked spriggans. Paiva and Flowerbell both had high enough Survival skills to help them do the tracking. Although I put in a roadside shrine to Lamashtu, Mother of Monsters and goddess of gnolls, purely as a thematic detail and a reminder of the everpresent threat gnolls play in Katapesh, the characters dismantled the shrine and kept the crude sandstone statue of Lamashtu. This is about to be significant.
The trail led the characters to a vast, seemingly abandoned structure out in the hills, all decaying corrogated roof over dry, rotting wood and parched brick. Huge empty pens surrounding the building helped the PCs identify it as an old slaughterhouse, but the vague acrid stink of something being processed gave them the impression that it wasn't truly abandoned.
Like any adventuring party, the paladins started investigating room by room - abandoned offices, a boiler house, an echoing place whose stained floor and collection of rusted sledgehammers suggested its former purpose - until they confronted a crazed little spriggan priest and his underlings near a conveyor belt. The priest fled to a long-dried cistern, once bath-house for sweaty, blood spattered workers, and started chanting. The paladins finished up the guards and burst in just as the cistern began flooding with foul viscous petroleum mass, a black pudding. Arrows and swords were useless, so Dakaz wasn't slowed up at all, while the rest of the paladins started tossing the Lamashtu statuette about the room to use as a crude club. By comparison to the pudding, the priest was pretty easy for the characters to deal with - his best defense was an unholy breastplate which brought on horrific mind-bending visions, but high will saves took care of that for the most part.
Nothing apparently terrifies paladins - especially paladins bolstered by sneak attacks and bardic magic - as much as oozes.
With the difficult part of the dungeon over, the characters were all relieved when all they had left to deal with were clay-pot-throwing spriggans on narrow catwalks over the big open vats now being used to refine dead oozes for acid, and when one closed vat was ruptured, the skinless, scroll-wrapped corpse of the former dwarf minerologist, reanimated by strange and alien magics.
The paladins also read through the jumbled, rambling, incoherent diary of the ooze priest, and found out that he'd had his religious experience high up in the mountains at an old, old temple - reborn in the name of Abhoth the Unclean, realizing that since all cells consisted of a lot of protoplasm that the truly primal form of magic, and life itself, was in fact protoplasmic oozes and slimes. For what the priest had learned there, in that place, was as nothing compared to the cold and alien knowledge possessed by far older and more experienced cultists.
Being paladins, the PCs made the Will saves to avoid temporary insanity, and resolved to mount an expedition to the temple and put the cultists to the sword immediately.
Battered, wearied, and more experienced, they came back to their home to find a half-orc - older than any half-orc they'd ever met, so in her sixties - in tears and begging them for aid because her children had been stolen, and all plans to attack the ooze cultists were suddenly on hold.
Next time; a weeping half-orc, a crashed flying fortress, a witch, constructs, and maybe - if there's enough space - total DM fail!
... our heros had successfully made it to their mission station in Baltwell, secured the place, and were working on winning hearts and minds when they found out that the town's only real wizard, Yadishaz Imrir, had died.
Being player characters they instantly assumed that there was some connection between the wizard's death and the earlier (off-screen) death of his longtime friend, a dwarf minerologist named Bori Berkssen, whose body had been stolen away by insidious little cloaked gnomes - or at least everyone thought they were gnomes. They didn't become less suspicious when Yland broke into Imrir's modest house and discovered that someone - probably the same tupilaqs whom the paladins had fought before - had come down the chimney and rifled all the papers in the wizard's desk. While Yland was staying in touch with his rogue skills, Yukiko and Paiva talked to the town's undertaker, Threnton Kaast, and learned about his giant helper. Yukiko was diplomatic enough that the undertaker quickly accepted help managing the funeral - unable to resist the offer of bodyguards, music, and help with the liturgy for someone who, as far as anyone could figure out, had never professed any particular faith.
That brought our little band of paladins to the cemetery outside town, marching alongside the undertaker's cart, the wizard's only apprentice, a group of miners sent to pay their respects, and, not to be outdone, a lawyer sent by the coalition of mine owners with a few fully armored Steel Blossom mercenaries. The PCs were able to spot that the miners had come packing weapons. It looked like things were about to become ugly and they promptly did.
Just not in the way that by now people were expecting. Just as nearly everyone was tied up in helping halt and unload the hearse, the mysterious cloaked gnomes which'd caused so much trouble attacked from cover in a burst of magical pyrotechnics, using slings to launch clay pots of acid which did terrible things to NPCs and hurt some of the PCs as well. The funeral party dashed for cover among the tombstones as the vicious little gnomes threw spell effects and grew to giant size to pummel opponents. It didn't work though - the spriggans were defeated, in part because they were fighting people literally immune to fear.
With the NPCs healed, buried, and searched accordingly, the characters set off down the nearby arroyo to track the cloaked spriggans. Paiva and Flowerbell both had high enough Survival skills to help them do the tracking. Although I put in a roadside shrine to Lamashtu, Mother of Monsters and goddess of gnolls, purely as a thematic detail and a reminder of the everpresent threat gnolls play in Katapesh, the characters dismantled the shrine and kept the crude sandstone statue of Lamashtu. This is about to be significant.
The trail led the characters to a vast, seemingly abandoned structure out in the hills, all decaying corrogated roof over dry, rotting wood and parched brick. Huge empty pens surrounding the building helped the PCs identify it as an old slaughterhouse, but the vague acrid stink of something being processed gave them the impression that it wasn't truly abandoned.
Like any adventuring party, the paladins started investigating room by room - abandoned offices, a boiler house, an echoing place whose stained floor and collection of rusted sledgehammers suggested its former purpose - until they confronted a crazed little spriggan priest and his underlings near a conveyor belt. The priest fled to a long-dried cistern, once bath-house for sweaty, blood spattered workers, and started chanting. The paladins finished up the guards and burst in just as the cistern began flooding with foul viscous petroleum mass, a black pudding. Arrows and swords were useless, so Dakaz wasn't slowed up at all, while the rest of the paladins started tossing the Lamashtu statuette about the room to use as a crude club. By comparison to the pudding, the priest was pretty easy for the characters to deal with - his best defense was an unholy breastplate which brought on horrific mind-bending visions, but high will saves took care of that for the most part.
Nothing apparently terrifies paladins - especially paladins bolstered by sneak attacks and bardic magic - as much as oozes.
With the difficult part of the dungeon over, the characters were all relieved when all they had left to deal with were clay-pot-throwing spriggans on narrow catwalks over the big open vats now being used to refine dead oozes for acid, and when one closed vat was ruptured, the skinless, scroll-wrapped corpse of the former dwarf minerologist, reanimated by strange and alien magics.
The paladins also read through the jumbled, rambling, incoherent diary of the ooze priest, and found out that he'd had his religious experience high up in the mountains at an old, old temple - reborn in the name of Abhoth the Unclean, realizing that since all cells consisted of a lot of protoplasm that the truly primal form of magic, and life itself, was in fact protoplasmic oozes and slimes. For what the priest had learned there, in that place, was as nothing compared to the cold and alien knowledge possessed by far older and more experienced cultists.
Being paladins, the PCs made the Will saves to avoid temporary insanity, and resolved to mount an expedition to the temple and put the cultists to the sword immediately.
Battered, wearied, and more experienced, they came back to their home to find a half-orc - older than any half-orc they'd ever met, so in her sixties - in tears and begging them for aid because her children had been stolen, and all plans to attack the ooze cultists were suddenly on hold.
Next time; a weeping half-orc, a crashed flying fortress, a witch, constructs, and maybe - if there's enough space - total DM fail!