Day #230

Hi all.

So today we had another absence sadly, it was the Deva Shaman. She got called back to her post in deva-world. Either way the adventurers were set to enter the mountain. However! They had no clue what was going on. So they were unsure what to expect in the mountain as a seemingly evil king sent them to kill 'cultists.'

Anyway they arrive to the mountain and see a crazy gnome. He has a really dirty black beard full of bugs and beetles and dirt! He's like "Hey what you want?" The players inform them of their quest. He responds with "Oh, well I know of some humans/elves and the such that live in the mountains. I'll tell you where they are for like 20 GP OR if you go kill some hyenas for me and bring me their corpses. I want to eat them."

They do the latter and the gnome says go to a camel-shaped rock, it's only about 5 minutes up. They do, they enter the room and this is where I get to show off my new map made on maptool (online mapping program). It should make us able to play online if we ever plan to. The players are confronted immediately with shouts such as "The king has sent another group to kill us! Defend the position, etc. Get reinforcements!"

Now, what happens now is A LOT of back and forth from everyone. First off, the guard captain was accusing them of being proponents of the tyrannical rule of a evil king, etc. Then Mini laid down her ARMS (get it). And Sel refuses to do the same, as does Dwinn-Rae. Turok shifts to mouse form and flees the scene. The guards attempt to kill the warlock first, for they hate him the most. However, they are unable to. Dwinn-Rae kills one of the guards and nearly kills another before they halt the fight as reinforcements kick down the door.

They are reluctant to give up the fight, but they must as Sel and Mini would have been captured even if Dwinn-Rae can escape. So they continue (1 hour later) to meet the leader of these people. Turok meanwhile scouts out the whole dungeon and finds two rooms: the first being a sleep quarters of some sort; the second being a room full of statues and possibly the figurine they sought. He falls into one of the soldiers chests as the fight continues in the other room and discovers 100 GP.

Dwinn-Rae is accused to be the warlock of King Hyrien's high court by the leader of the 'enemy'. He claims to be the rightful king to the throne of the kingdom. The players are like okay and Sel "tells the story." Assuming, the king would believe the entire story because he is very charismatic. While, the king believes most of the story he is still suspicious of the warlock, for they are known to be quite evil on this continent. However, Dwinn-Rae explains away these suspicions as Turok comes into the room to raise questions.

The king explains the figurine that Hyrien seeks is one of great power that his own great-great-grandfather had once wielded to take his power. His great-grandfather had to defeat his own father to take the power away. He further explains the figurine's power can only be harnessed by a cleric of the god Asmodeus. Yeah, but the adventurers are like this whole thing is getting very very complicated. Who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? What should we do?

The king suggested that they go on to the other half of the continent to gather support from the other kingdom against the king Hyrien. He explains that the resistance is weak because Hyrien had came to power with the support of the nobles and that most people have no issue with him.

May update this to clarify/spice it up as I left out details.

Double Post

So long updates require double posts. I'm just going to outline the current position of the party to supplement the future up-to-date posts. I may even get one of the players to update this for me, lol. Anyways, the most recent developments are:

• Dwinn-Rae has persuaded the guard captain that he is indeed an evil-warlock. The guard captain informs him that his services would be of use to the king.
• The party unites within the castle town, the heart of the kingdom. They meet the king and he seems childish. He talks only to Dwinn-Rae, and he says listen to me: Go to this mountain get me this artifact. Because I need it to weild the power of the immortal God Asmodeus in the body of a mortal. It is guarded by some crazy cultists.

The party has decided? Possibly I'm not sure to go through with the quest. I believe we ended with them right at the mountain. I mean: Finally reunited, they proceed to the mountain. Everyone thinks that Dwinn-Rae is turning Evil because he extorted an expensive armor from a shopkeep by Eldritch Blasting his store front with a natural 20. The guards were like, "Give him the armor, so he can get the hell out this town." They seemed bitter because in Dwinn-Rae's escape he killed one of their own.

But everything else was peaceful OR WAS IT.

Day 3039

So, some of my most loyal of followers have complained that I haven't been updating this blog often enough. Okay, so I do have a few things to mention before we get on to the exciting conclusion of the first arc. Let me mention that a lot has happened to our Yet-to-be-named group of adventurers. Consider yourselves warned as you will experience the ups and downs as the party experienced them.

Okay after being able to get past the tricky mysterious ghosts the adventurers moved on to the next room almost prematurely. I believe they decided to engage in battle, while half the team was trapped in a long hallway. They were forced to attack these mumbling hovering creatures that look like THIS:

Pretty sweet, there were like six? of these. However, the party fought them valiantly and I believe only the Dragonborn fell unconscious. Let me describe for you what I envisioned for this room. I made it into a REALLY big triangle, like SUPER big. Within the room was a platform of natural stone also shaped as a triangle that three bridges connected to. The players entered at one base of the triangle, etc. The monsters were kind of just hanging around and then they got killed by the good old ask questions later team of good-doers (I've hit a a Lawful Good phase in my DnD career).

The idea behind the room is that it was an ANCIENT stage for performances, which one of the players did a successful history check to discern. I love how these guys want to KNOW everything, they did like 15 religion, history, arcana checks, you name it they did it. Anyways, the room had three means of moving on. One was a trap door, which the players had to have like looked for to find, or roll an incredibly high history check to discern that wooden stages such as though typically had trick doors, etc. Well, they decided to take a natural path that would lead them straight to the big bad boss.

The boss was of course a Psion! You know that race that can control people's thoughts and stuff. So he was influencing the ghosts and even the fell taints (above) by excising full mind control. For the sake of fun I also made him part necromancer. Or somewhat necromancer. He was pretty cool, I forgot to give him a name, I think I settled on Josh. But, the coolness factor got tossed out the window with that blunder (the issue of names may become a theme).

But yeah, he was all like "I knew you guys were here" (gasp!). In my world, a villain will never reveal his plans, although I think this one may have. I don't remember. I try to keep the story spicy you know? Anyways, I was afraid that he was going to totally wipe the floor with these guys. So I may have done some last minute adjustments, which may have made him reasonably weaker. Not to mention the first two attacks on him were critical hits by Dwinn-Rae (Mike Lefors) and Dazzler formerly known as the Deva Shaman. They like basically made me realize exactly how much stronger PCs are then any NPCs. But, the rest of the battle proceeded quite interestingly. I had to make a lot of on-the-fly calls.

For example, Dwinn-Rae used an infernal grasp (or whatever) to push Josh into his open bone chest. The bone chest was full of gold to the brim and dead baby corpse. So then Balfogore (his time was so short) jumped on top of the chest and screamed, and then so did Turok (Ryan). I gave them some damage modifiers, etc. Then Josh was like oh hell no and he used a force push to knock off both Turok and Rogue. (Of course reigned in the 'I told you so's' from Sel, who was like let's kill the 15 skeletons.) Oh did I forget to mention there were 15 minions hacking at the cleric in the back of the room. Well guess what there were. Anyways, Josh and his little mind controlled corpses were all made easy work of and he like died. His last words were, "You are making a mistake..." (I think these are good default last words, please let me know as this is like my favorite part of DMing so far. The newest adventure is going to have so many more humanoids ^_^.) Yeah ANYWAYS.

I believe what happened next was a lot of exposition about the changelings history. She was all like, wait that's my daughter give her to me. I'll take her to her father, etc. They were like NO LIAR. But, then she was like Azbere (the old dwarf from the beginning) is my husband. I have been in the form of a dwarf for at least 10 years. This was our daughter. Etc. She explained that Josh had been sent by an evil king from the land of Astoria? (I know, I know, I'm gonna run out of places in Queens.) Oh em gee, the players got hung up on the changelings personal life, as she had wished to be left alone to sort it all out. But, she was rejected by Azbere. She never told him she was a changeling, but she never would in fear of his hatred even more. His rejection was because she left him to mourn over his daughter alone. :'(.

Eventually the players resolved that they should go see what the deal was in the other country. So they tried to go, fought some random encounter I made up and then had to get on a ship. They negotiated a deal with a crooked sailor, who turned out to be REALLY nice. So they were taken to the other land despite crazy storms in those parts. They got there, and all hell broke loose.

Yup, you guessed Dwinn-Rae stood up at a tavern and screamed "FUCK THE KING!" In this new kingdom where the Evil King reigns. Well, 15 guards pour in instantly and accuse Dwinn-Rae of treason and that he would be taken to the prison nearby. He of course is WASTED, so he can't resist. Sel surprisingly comes to his defense and is also taken away. The other players sulked in the corner. (Oh around now is when Balfogore is sold into slavery.)

Dwinn-Rae used his level 2 utility power to teleport out of the prison cell. Upon which, the guards pour into the prison cell to only find Sel (Mike Lipkin) cowering in the corner. They look at him and demand to know where Dwinn-Rae went. He cries "I don't know." They respond with "We'll know how much you know by tomorrow. MUHAHAHAHA."

Okay so over the next few weeks the players would have to decide how to proceed. They spent I believe two weeks doing the following. Wandering around the little harbor town they were in attempting to glean any information they could. There was a small resistance, but nothing organized in the town. They found that the king had recently lost a princess? Or something like that. But all in all, eventually Dazzler and Minerva (Savi) are arrested for being associated to Dwinn-Rae. Eventually, everyone makes it to the next town.

Lol, I'll update this post when I get a chance to fill in more details.