Inspectre's Curse of the Crimson Throne Alterations (Spoilers!)


Curse of the Crimson Throne

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Awesome as always! (And if not exactly a cliffhanger, a good lead into the next session.) Keep it coming!


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Session Fifty-Nine:

So when we last left our “heroes”, they were standing in front of one of Arkona’s Midpoint warehouses, this particular one storing all that was left to tie him to the conspiracy that put Ileosa on the Crimson Throne and nearly destroyed the city (twice). They had learned from Melyia that it was under guard, although she was frustratingly vague on what the exact protections were, save that the whole place was ready to be burnt down at a moment’s notice. Given the party’s preferred method of dealing with things was direct confrontation, the need for stealth now was a little concerning to them.

Fortunately, they had Vaz’em, master assassin and Red-Mantis-in-training, so they just sent him in to deal with things (with Cid sneaking around Invisbility as back-up). A quick scouting trip revealed that there was apparently four guards in the complex total, two walking around the outside, and two patrolling inside on the second-story of the building (visible periodically via windows around the top of the building). An opportunity to deal with the outside guards offered itself when one of the guards ducked behind an empty wagon left in the small “storage yard” in front of the warehouse to . . . take care of some private business. As soon as he was done (Hey, Vaz’em is a polite assassin!) but before he could rejoin the other guard, Vaz’em lunged in for the kill from his ninja-trick invisibility.

He did a pile of damage, deciding to deal non-lethal since these guards hadn’t really done anything to merit death, and the guard immediately crumpled (nearly dying in the process anyway due to the ¼ non-lethal = lethal damage rule – level 1 warriors don’t have many hit points!). Vaz’em was dumbfounded that he managed to drop one of the guards in one blow – clearly they were expecting much tougher resistance here! (And justifiably so, given the brutality I’d been sending their way throughout the game thus far!)

Pleased with his success thus far, Vaz’em quickly re-vanishes and sneaks over to the second outdoor guard (after leaving the knocked out guard stabilized and hidden beneath the wagon from the guards upstairs). He drops him in one punch as well, and then the rest of the party moves up to the door after the guards upstairs make their next sweep. Of course, the sudden absence of the outdoor guards does not go unnoticed, and as the party slips inside the warehouse’s first floor the guard upstairs begins to call out the window to the two missing guards.

Cid and Vaz’em go upstairs to deal with the guards, while Oliver and his cohort Trevor, and Rholand and his pet lion Flank attempt to remain hidden from the guards by hiding behind the tall rows of stacked crates and shelves that fill most of the warehouse’s cavernous one-room ground floor. On their way up onto the second floor, Cid and Vaz’em notice the strange sight of a birdcage hanging down from the ceiling a little ways out from the second-floor landing that goes around the outside of the room (allowing the guards up here to walk around and see outside from nearly all directions).

Seeing nothing inside of it at the moment, they decide to ignore it and investigate later after the last guards are dealt with. Vaz’em and Cid drop the last two guards pretty much as easily as the outside two, and then since they’re clearly visible up on the second floor relative to the invisible creature inside the bird cage (a no-good dirty IMP!) after taking down the guards, things go to Hell pretty much immediately from here. With a shriek of indignation, the imp inside the bird cage starts cursing up a storm, and tosses a stone from the bottom of his birdcage down onto the hard stone floor below. CRACK! And just like that, there’s a Large Fire elemental standing there in front of Oliver & Rholand as the Elemental Gem shatters.

It becomes clear pretty quickly what the failsafe to burn down the warehouse is, as the fire elemental flows around and through the stacked crates without impediment to get at the group, lighting them on fire through contact with its formless body of flame. While Oliver and company scrambling to deal with that one, and Cid & Vaz’em moved back down to the first floor to help, Kaxit the imp threw another elemental gem down. CRACK! Now there are two Large fire elementals rampaging about. And then the next round, a third!

In the end though, these are only CR 5 monsters trying to fight off a party of 8th level adventurers. The outcome is not really in doubt about who is going to win, but the fire elementals running about setting fire to the whole place does add an additional complication that does not make it a cakewalk for them. The fire begins to spread from where the fire elements start it, and while Oliver and Trevor make a few efforts to swat the flames out a few squares at a time with their cloaks, the real MVP for this fight is Rholand. Thinking quickly, he uses the old cleric stand-by of Create Water . . . only at level 8, he creates a LOT of it! I rule that the spontaneous splash of water manages to put out a larger area of fire at one time (something like a 2x2 square instead of a 1x2 square of fire), and more importantly, the water soaks the crates enough that there are unlikely to catch fire again, limiting the remaining fire’s ability to spread.

Kaxit is a bit obnoxious to deal with since he remains invisible (as he’s technically summoning the fire elementals and not attacking directly, which would break the invisibility), but eventually they manage to get him before he shatters his fourth (and last) Elemental Gem (he was just a normal CR 2 imp – this fight was all about obnoxious low-level trash armed with terrifying magical summoning power! :-D ) The fire elementals take a bit of time to grind down thanks to their DR/- and high hit points, but eventually the last of them is banished back to their home plane and the last of the fire is swatted and washed out.

Rholand’s bursts of water have made a mess of things, but considering that his quick thinking saved the entire building it’s a relatively small loss. A quick search of several of the crates allows the group to find what they need – sealed ledgers and documents detailing the financial transactions and correspondence between Glorio, Jeggare, and several other merchants within Korvosa, as well as this “Silver Concordant Trading Company”, which they identify (at some point, can’t remember if Ileosa mentioned it after Vaz’em’s run-in with Jeggare during his intro or if they investigated later) as a merchant company front for the Kaer Maga branches of House Poryphia (long since exiled from Korvosa) . . . and House Arabasti – apparently even Eodred’s extended family did not care for him or his wife.

The party also found something else very interesting and troubling within the warehouse. Stacked conspicuously amongst all of the other crates was an empty one labeled as coming from Numeria. Although nothing of interest was actually stored inside, a cursory examination of it suggested that components for a very large, complex bomb had been stored inside. The same sort of bomb that could have been used to blow up Ileosa and the rest of the stage at Togomor’s nomination to seneschal.

They had gotten assurances from Cinnabar that neither the Red Mantis nor their client (Glorio) were responsible for that bomb, and nothing they had seen thus far suggested either of them were lying about that. Which suggested that whoever was responsible had deliberately smuggled this crate into this warehouse in an attempt to implicate Glorio Arkona for it. That much I pretty much just handed to them since it was fairly obvious, but who had done it remained a mystery (in part because I was still wavering about who had actually done the deed, and the party had been too busy with everything else to really try and investigate that plot thread any further).

Before they could try and puzzle out much of anything else, the group heard the sounds of alarm out on the street (someone had seen the smoke from the brief flames, and the sounds of fighting inside the warhouse), and now a patrol of Grey Maidens was on the way. The group had a moment’s debate whether to stay and bluff the Grey Maidens off (“We’re all good down here! How are you today?”) or flee into the night, taking the evidence (including the Numeria crate) with them. Given that they were increasingly acting against Ileosa’s wishes, they chose to flee into the night rather than deal with the hassle of explaining to the Grey Maidens what had happened and why they were here (and avoid the risk that they might be stubborn and see something they shouldn’t, like the Numerian crate).

That encounter with the fire elementals took up most of the session, but I believe we had a few brief scenes of the following morning. Everyone went back to their separate residences, which for Rholand now meant Castle Korvosa. In the morning, he stumbling on Queen Ileosa and Marquis DeSilva having a breakfast meeting which was clearly growing heated. The main point of contention seemed to be one some location named “Bloodsworn Vale”, off to the southeast of Korvosa. Apparently Kaer Maga still staked a claim on the Vale, even though literally EVERYTHING (with the nominal exception of Janderhoff) between Korvosa and Kaer Maga currently belonged to Korvosa after the last war. And the Bloodsworn Vale was untamed harsh wilderness and rocky hills anyway, so Kaer Maga’s claim to it was nominal at best.

Nonetheless, DeSilva was adamant that the Vale still belonged to Kaer Maga, and if he simply relinquished control of it the other members of Kaer Maga’s ruling council would have a fit, as it would allow Korvosa access to a possible route up onto the Storval Plateau, something that only Kaer Maga had control over at present. Both from a trading and defense perspective then, maintaining the only route up to the plateau was of vital interest to Kaer Maga’s ruling council.

Mostly, this argument was just to introduce the concept of the Bloodsworn Vale, and that Kaer Maga currently claimed it, and Ileosa had an interest in taking it for Korvosa (mostly just because Kaer Maga had it, and for the eventual road that could grant Korvosa trade with the nations beyond the Mindspin Mountains. There was another reason, one that Kazavon put in her head as an instinctive desire to claim the Vale, but delving into the Vale itself was a task for Book Four, where I was planning to weave a heavily modified version of the Conquest of Bloodsworn Vale into the plot – likely with the party as supporters of Kaer Maga, sabotaging Korvosan efforts to tame the wilderness!).

While she was growing increasingly unstable, Ileosa was not entirely unreasonable yet. She eventually agreed to table the matter in the interests of peace, and Rholand went on his way to join the others. From there, the party met back up together with each other, and determined that their next step needed to be getting into Old Korvosa. The Emperor was there, summoning demons and hiring adventurers to kill them and gods knew what else. Senaschal Neolandus was also there, a “guest” of Glorio Arkona. And it seemed like for the moment at least, there were no other fires that had to be put out beyond whatever was waiting in Old Korvosa. We had, more or less, finally run out of the new plot threads that I had been pulling out of my posterior every week since Book Three started.

From here on out, the action would be centered on Old Korvosa, and as a consequence the plot got to be a little coherent as events were no longer jumping back and forth between a half dozen subplots. Unfortunately for the most part, this also meant that various unresolved plot threads, like Domina and the who set us up the bomb investigation, were dropped almost completely until near the very end of Book Three. Even so, I think the next sessions were better for the more singular focus on one plot point (Old Korvosa), and we started the build-up to what was meant to be the pre-finale event (essentially a fake finale to throw the party off), although it worked out as a decent way to end Book Three after the party fled Korvosa for their lives like chickens after those events (still, at this point, like twenty sessions away!)


Session Fifty-Nine:
Itching to see in detail what makes them chicken out ~20 sessions in the future!


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Session Sixty:

There was one other wrinkle that encouraged the party to go into Old Korvosa that I introduced at the start of the session. As they all gathered that morning to discuss what to do next, the city was abuzz with the sight of a writhing, hellish portal hanging in the sky over Old Korvosa. Now and again, dark shapes emerged from the portal, although they were too far away for clear identification. Nonetheless, it seemed clear that someone in Old Korvosa had opened a stable (for a certain definition of stable) portal to the Abyss.

So now the party’s primary objective was to get into Old Korvosa and investigate this portal ASAP. This was going to be a difficult task as all of the bridges, even the stout stone bridge spanning the canal separating the district from the rest of the city had been destroyed during the quarantine.

They considered going via the sewers, as they had learned from Wilhelm at some point that the stream of refugees from Old Korvosa had stopped – they couldn’t get through via the usual routes due to some group calling themselves “The Empire of All Korvosa” collapsed or flooded most of the tunnels, and guarded the one or two left, letting no one pass. So that would have ended in a fight with the Empire for sure, and as a result they decided against that route. (Probably for the best, as I had a handful of Imperial Guardsmen behind a barricade – Level 5 Warriors – along with a captured “Warbeast” they would have sicced on the party and then ran away. Said warbeast was a 7-headed Cyrohydra, which might have taken a couple people out with its ice breath unless Rholand cast Resist Elements IMMEDIATELY).

They probably could have just swam across the canal or hired a boat to row them there despite the mess that the Old Korvosa docks had become (Fishguts Jim, maybe?), but for whatever reason they decided not to go that route either. They also, for obvious reasons, didn’t want to get Ileosa involved with this if they could help it, so avoiding having to rely on anyone that might send word back to the queen (like the Grey Maidens) was also a consideration here.

Ultimately, they decided to make their own bridge across the river, using Rholand’s Stone shape. I had already been rather lenient with that spell before now, and perhaps I should crack down on it a bit given their reliance on it but eh – with all of the city’s cobblestone streets and stone buildings, I didn’t think they had any shortage of material to work with if nothing else! It took a bit of time to do the math, but eventually we determined that while it would use up virtually all of Rholand’s third-level spell slots, he could indeed cast enough Stone Shapes to create a long, narrow stone bridge across the canal.

They were a little worried still about attracting attention to themselves, so they walked along the street that ran alongside the canal on the Midpoint side until they found a spot that seemed relatively secluded, with only occasional patrols from Grey Maidens on the wall high above. Using part of said wall as the raw material for the bridge (careful not to draw off so much stone that the wall collapsed), Rholand made his narrow bridge across the 100’ or so canal, and the party carefully walked across the narrow structure to the far side. They were now in Old Korvosa, and a month after the plague and its chaos the district’s streets were a sobering sight.

Old Korvosa Streets – The Dead Sea from Chrono Cross OST

The streets were completely deserted and filthy, trash and ash from a number of burned out buildings the only things moving within sight. The party felt that they were being watched at times from boarded up windows and fortified doorways, but they nonetheless saw no one as they proceeded in the direction of House Arkona. At one point they did see a couple people standing around outside a fortified building, likely some sort of gang. The two groups sized each other up silently, and then the party went on their way without comment.

The party also came across a blind man sitting along in the middle of a street, calling out that he would happily shine shoes for a few copper. Vaz’em went up to talk to the old man, as he seemed harmless enough, and in a rare display of generosity, offered the man several silver coins instead of the “going rate” (he figured it was a good investment for information). The old man unfortunately didn’t know much, and indeed his mind seemed to be largely gone as he kept repeating the same piece of old news (about the plague over and over). Although near the end he did spit out a few additional pieces of more recent news involving the Empire, and several gangs warring for territory over on the west end of town. Mostly this was just more somber scene-setting for Old Korvosa’s condition, and the oppressive nature of the post-apocalyptic sort of devastation the district was languishing in really started to weigh on the party. So it was time to change things up a bit again.

As they approached a small intersection up ahead, the party finally found some signs of civilization. A group of people were standing around the small fountain at the center of the intersection, while a man pretending to be a merchant hawked some wares on behalf of “Our glorious Emperor”, and two heavily armed men in patchwork armor stood guard, with another pair leaning up against a nearby wall. It was pretty clear that the new economy was bartering, and each person in turn went up to the merchant to try and hawk valuables – gold jewelry and the like – that just so happened to have been in their family for years (or days after they looted another empty plague house >> ).

In the ruins of a burned out building right next to the intersection, a group of Varisians had set up camp amidst the rubble. As the party watched, one of the women attempted to sneak over to the fountain to get some water, only to be rebuffed by the merchant (and slapped around by one of his guards). The merchant told the woman that she needed to pay if she wanted water . . . and it was pretty clear from the lecherous grins of the guards what sort of payment they were expecting from the woman.

Well, that was pretty much enough for the party to decide to go and interfere, but before they got a chance to pick a fight a loud set of cries came from behind them. “Make way! Make way for the Empire of Old Korvosa!”

Empire of Old Korvosa Theme – The Imperial March from Star Wars (Thug-Life Dubstep Remix!)

(Oh yes, I went there! :-D The remixed version was perfect, as while in their own mind and the minds of Old Korvosa’s surviving citizenry, the Empire was an unstoppable force, the party saw them as they really were – a bunch of undisciplined thugs with delusions of grandeur.)

Coming up the road behind the party was a patrol of half a dozen men, clad similarly in patchwork armor and with a hodgepodge of weapons, led by a scar-faced man in chainmail carrying a greatsword who looked like the only one who had ever been in a *real* fight. Skipping along in the middle of the patrol’s formation was Laori Vaus, her hands shackled in front of her and connected to a long chain one of the guardsmen was holding. The strange elven cleric didn’t seem to have a care in the world, and cheerfully greeted the party while the patrol’s captain demanded to know who the party was and why they weren’t moving out of the way and displaying proper respect to soldiers of the Empire.

The party quickly learned from Laori and the guardsmen that she was being taken to see the Emperor himself, to be judged guilty of crimes against the Empire, where she would likely be found guilty and executed. Laori added that there might be some rape along the way as well, although none of the guardsmen seemed particularly eager to try to remove the elf’s spiked armor. (Note that this was not meant to be a joke in very poor taste, simply an indication that Laori’s perspective on her situation was very . . . odd, and that despite her very serious situation where likely the best possible outcome was she just got her head chopped off by Pilts’ guillotine, she seemed her usual cheery self and almost eager to get to the Emperor’s palace to start the trial and execution).

Laori’s crime? Punching one of the patrol’s guardsmen in the face, and then immediately surrendering to them. Clearly there was something else going on here, but of course this party was not one to stay out of something that they did not understand. Plus the Imperials’ behavior was really getting under the party’s skin, so they decided that now was as good a time as any to cut the Imperials down to size. Getting the cue that violence was imminent, Laori cheered “Let’s have some fun! Violence it is then!” as she gathered up the slack in her chains and looped it around the neck of the man holding the other end. Several of the guardsmen moved to get the crazy she-elf off of their friend, while the captain and the rest moved to engage the party, along with the four guards hanging out with the Imperial Merchant.

Thugs though the Imperials may be, they were surprisingly tough for a bunch of guys in patchwork hide armor and equipped with wooden-plank shields, crude javelins, and clubs (level 5 warriors, captain was a level 7 fighter). There was one other interesting feature about the Imperials – while chaotic and not especially effective, they did try to work together to take down the party. In other words, I gave them all a bunch of the Villainous Teamwork feats, which usually involve dealing damage to an ally adjacent to your target in order to pull off some effect, like rerolling a touch attack.

For the most part the Imperials went down before they could really put their feats to much use, but the party identified a couple different “types” – you had your flankers, shield guys who got into melee and tried to provide flanking (and could redirect missed thrown weapons to essentially give a reroll), breakers who were big guys with sledgehammers (power attack mauls), Shooters who fired their crossbow wildly into melee (allowing their ally to make a free attack against the target, in return for being possibly shot in the back!), and finally Bombers, who used two-weapon fighting & quick draw shenanigans to throw two vials of Alchemist’s fire at someone, hopefully with a Flanker nearby to grant a reroll if the touch attacks missed.

The party *really* hated the bombers, as even though it was only a couple d6 of fire damage a round, apparently being set on fire *really* annoyed them. The breakers and captain went down before they could dish out too much pain with their two-handed weapons, but not before the captain realized they might have bit off more than they could chew and called for backup. Pulling out a whistle from under his armor, the captain gave three shot staccato bleats – which were answered the following round as three beefy Chokers (the same kind that nearly killed the party during the fight with the Cult of Rovagug) came bounding over the rooftops from a nearby side street.

While the party continued beating the stuffing out of the Imperials, Trevor took care of the newcomers single-handedly because they made one fatal flaw – they approached from where Trevor could see them. He opened up on the Chokers like a heavy machine gun emplacement on an infantry charge, screaming wildly like Rambo as he mowed all three Chokers down over the two or three rounds it took them to run along the rooves of nearby buildings, jump down to the street, and approach the party across the intersection. It was actually a pretty damn impressive display, and probably one of Trevor’s fleeting moments of glory (as while a powerful artillery piece, he had a bad tendency to get caught in melee and mauled – including the humiliation of getting bound like a hog for slaughter by one of the chokers during the Cult of Rovagug fight. Most likely this was why he was so devastating here – he REALLY hated these things).

Laori, meanwhile, despite having her hands shackled together and having three of the Emperor’s goons attempting to hold her still long enough to wrap her up in the long length of loose chain, gave an impressive accounting of herself. Though the guard she was choking managed to slip out of her grip a turn or two later, every time the three guardsmen together managed to get a good grip and Grapple her, she would break out of it and usually break someone’s face or slice them with the hooks and serrated edges of her armor. It bought her another measure of respect from the party, Cid in particular being impressed that she managed to hold her own given the circumstances. Perhaps Laori was not so delusional not to feel particularly threatened by the Imperials after all.

Cid finally finished off the last of the guardsmen, and came over to the threaten the three guardsmen still wrestling with Laori, who at this point were the only Imperials left standing. He told them to back off, and for once someone took his advice as the three Imperials all turned and ran for it after they realized their whole unit had gotten massacred in less than 30 seconds. Laori played up the role of the damsel in distress, but before she could give her “hero” a kiss there was one last threat to the party.

With a maddening, ever shifting chorus of growls, unearthly trills, and agonized moans, an ever shifting mass of flesh slithered out of a nearby alleyway, sending the citizenry that had been watching the fight flee in screaming terror. This was a Chaos Beast, scavenging nearby and attracted by the sounds of the fighting. Only CR 6, this thing wasn’t that much of a threat on its own, *except* that is had an absolutely horrifying curse that it applied on a melee hit – you had to make Fort saves every round, else your body literally melted into a puddle of goo, that could only reform if you then passed a Will save, in which case you were good for a minute or so until you had to make more Will saves to avoid reverting back into a puddle of goo. While a puddle, you took Wisdom damage, and (re-added back in from the 3.5 version) if you dropped to 0 Wisdom, you instantly died and became a chaos Beast yourself!

For the hell of it, I also added a random d10 roll at the start of each round, which determined what strange mutation the chaos beast manifested that round – an extra set of claws, gain Reach, an acidic breath weapon, etc., although one result was also “turn back into human form and scream in agony (Stunned) for one round” . . . so they weren’t all bad results?

Clearly recognizing this horror for what it was, Laori started calling for them to get these chains off of her, NOW, so that she could start casting spells. Unimpressed by this roiling mass of flesh, Cid and Vaz’em went over to engage the creature while Rholand ran over and used his “Destroy objects” ability from being a Nature oracle to immediately destroy Laori’s chains. She in turn blasted the abomination with whatever the Lawful equivalent is to Chaos Hammer, dealing heavy damage. Cid found the thing was *not* immune to electricity, and Flank and Vaz’em tore through its remaining HP in short order. Although not before the thing did manage to land a tentacle claw hit on Flank, threatening the lion companion with the “Flesh to Goo” curse – sadly the damn animal made its save. (DM Pout)

The session was reaching its end time at this point, so we wrapped up with the party healing up, most members politely declining any hugs from Laori (wearing spiked armor tended to be a strong deterrent to that). Trevor nonetheless got a Cure Wounds spell from Laori, and then a hard slap across the face – “And that’s for being a sexy beast!” She declared, apparently impressed with Trevor’s Rambo-impression. The party also learned that Laori was attempting to secure an audience with the Emperor, as he was apparently holding a local artist known as Salvator Scream in his palace, and Laori wanted to meet Scream . . . as she was a HUGE fan of his work . . . yeah . . . that’s all . . . Unfortunately, the Emperor’s goons had the whole palace barricaded off, and getting arrested was the only thing Laori could think of that would get her in to see Emperor Swastel, hence the guard punching.

She tried to convince the party to go with her to just smash through the barricades and fight their way in to see the Emperor instead, but they were a lot more interested in meeting up with Arkona at this point. Reluctantly, Laori agreed to travel with the party and help them out some more, because she liked them, if they promised that they would eventually help her go meet Emperor Swastel, and through him, Salvator Scream. Sadly, despite *all* of these prompts to go deal with the Emperor that I kept giving them, the party stubbornly continued to ignore the man in favor of other, arguably more serious threats (like the portal to the Abyss). It, like so many things the party chose to do during Book Three, ultimately came back to haunt them by the end (and I’m planning some additional fallout in Book Four).


Session Sixty:
I'm so used to thinking of Hell and the Abyss as different things (though both bad) that when you described a "hellish portal" I thought was a portal to Hell rather than the Abyss, until I read on a bit.

Good job on soundtrack selection this time!


Campaign still on?


Indeed it is - we just started it back up a few weeks ago!
So, the good news is that I will be having more sessions to write-up!
The bad news is that we will continue to be much further behind where the game is actually at.

Hopefully, I can find some time to get the session recaps rolling again (terribly sorry about that, just been very busy with the game starting back up and just life in general).


Woohoo! I tell you, you need to apply for a job at Paizo . . . .


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THIS is especially for you.


And here's the official followup.


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Okay, we’re back! I did see the announcement of the Hardcover – not sure if I’ll get it yet but it certainly is exciting! And it seems like the announcement will also draw some more traffic to this section of the Paizo boards – I should probably do some spring-cleaning around the place to spruce it up for our new arrivals!

Heeheehee – I also saw James Jacobs’ thank-you to the boards for providing 1,000+ threads of suggestions and reviews of what worked and what didn’t, which he apparently at least skimmed through all of them. I like to imagine when he got to this one, he read the first post and said “ARGH! MY EYES, WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST READ!?” *closes thread immediately* ^^ More seriously, since the hardcover is simply a polishing and not a rewrite I imagine that most of my material was simply unusable. Which is fine – my particular brand of madness is my own, and I’m just happy to provide some entertainment to an audience and perhaps give some other aspiring Curse DMs some ideas to mix (likely sparingly) into their own campaigns.

Now let’s see if we can get back up to my previous rate of a couple session write-ups a week, else we will never catch up! But first, I just realized I COMPLETELY forgot the most critical part of Session Fifty-Seven!

Session Fifty-Seven Bonus:

So, this session happened to fall on the same week as April 1st, better known as April Fools’ Day. April Fools’ Day tends to be one of my favorite holidays, not for the mean-spirited pranks but the ridiculous and humorous “announcements” that some gaming companies put out on April Fools’ Day. In the spirit of that, I’ve made it a habit to do a similar thing each year in my own games, and Curse of the Crimson Throne is no different (although I guess I basically missed the first year when the game was still starting).

Anyway, Session Fifty-Seven fell on the week of April 1st, and so I started that session with a quick recap, namely that they were still trudging through the snowy fields surrounding the yeti-king’s castle in order to reach him and put an end to his Reign of Winter. This was a throwback to the fact that the game started out alternating with another DM’s Reign of Winter campaign (which lasted for all of one game session before the guy flaked out *sigh* ). People were, of course, understandingly confused by this opening since we weren’t doing alternating with Reign of Winter anymore, at which point I mentally “shook” myself and switched back to the “other game”.

At which point we switched to individual scenes for each PC in the City of “Carcosa” (chosen for its vague similarity to Korvosa) – if you’re a Lovecraft fan, you might recognize it as the city that the King in Yellow comes from, if I remember correctly. Some of the players got it, of course, and that filled them with dread at what was coming but they needn’t worry - this time the surprises were more hilarious than horrifying.

Rholand woke up to find himself in bed with Ileosa, who wished him a good morning and then climbed out of bed. With a declaration of “this castle won’t clean itself!” Ileosa got dressed in her maid uniform, and one-by-one Sabrina, Cinnabar, and Gwen all made an appearance in the bedroom clad in similar attire. I knew Rholand’s player had some level of interest in anime, although I don’t know what sub-genre particularly, but he was able to figure out that Rholand was the male star in a harem anime.

It wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be, though, as a few moments later one of the walls exploded and out stepped none other than King Eodred, who pronounced in badly dubbed English that Rholand had defiled his honor and that there was only one way to settle this – “WE MUST KUNG FU FIGHT!” Cue Eodred roundhouse kicking Rholand through a nearby wall, at which point the “dream” sequence switched over to Vaz’em.

Vaz’em had Adonis Kreed tied to a chair and was torturing him with the cruelest means known to man – he was tickling the man’s feet with a feather. Through the helpless laughter and tears of forced mirth, Adonis vowed that he would never tell Vaz’em where he hid the other bomb. But, Vaz’em only had another twenty-four minutes to find it! Followed by me providing a running countdown 24:00 . . . 23:59 . . . . 23:58 . . . etc. Basically if Rholand’s was a harem anime, Vaz’em’s dream was a bad episode of “24”. Which led into the other TV-inspired dream for Oliver.

In this one Oliver was getting briefed by Trevor that most of the other gangs had agreed to pay tribute to him in return for his Shiver deliveries. The last hold-out was Devargo, who was setting himself up for a winner-takes-all underworld drug trade war. It was meant to be a Breaking-Bad inspired dream but I think it fell a little flat, sadly.

Fortunately, Cid’s dream was the last one, and it’s descent into the depths of my madness instead of relying on mimicking TV shows pulled the effort as a whole back up, I think. Cid had recently learned that there was another, even more vile order of Hellknights that the devils were intent on creating (he had at this point only just heard of the “Order of the Bleeding Eye”, which is the order that the devils hoped to create from the Order of the Nail). This order was known as the Order of the Bleeding Gums, and Cid was on its way to confront its master.

Cue kicking in the door to the master’s chambers to discover Lord Gingivitis (using a token made from a picture of the Mouth of Sauron from the lord of the rings movies, because if anyone needed proper dental care it was that guy). Upon seeing Cid, Lord Gingivitis cried out, “Come forth, my Cavity Knights! Destroy his mouth!” Retribution urged Cid “Use the mouthwash, Cid! It is your only hope!”

And with that, everyone woke up with an oath to never let Oliver choose their drinking hole again, and we proceeded with the actual Session Fifty-Seven.

And now let’s actually try to move things forward here.

Session Sixty-One:

With the Imperials defeated and Laori “rescued”, the party presses on to Arkona Manor, where assuming Glorio was true to his word they would find a safe haven. It didn’t start out that way when they got to the old walls – the outermost ring of the original fort - that separated the oldest part of Korvosa from the rest of “Old Korvosa”. The Arkona guards there were not particularly friendly, but if you’re the only thing keeping everyone behind the wall safe from chokers, madmen, and now otherworldly abominations like the Chaos Beasts, you would be picky who you let in too.

Fortunately, Glorio *had* alerted his men of the party’s likely arrival, and so they were allowed into the small section of Old Korvosa that was still functioning close to normal, and was not an anarchic, burnt-out urban wasteland. However, the captain of the guards insisted on being difficult, announcing that Lord Arkona had given descriptions of them, but that Laori was not part of that. As such, he still didn’t trust her and demanded to perform a customary inspection to ensure that she was not some crazy the party had picked up in the ruins who had a concealed bomb with her to unleash havoc beyond the walls (he was right on the first point, at least!)

After a quick DM-screen contested roll of Laori’s sleight of hand versus the guard’s perception (which he nearly crit, I believe), the guard captain discovered the holy symbol that Laori had been hiding underneath her armor on a chain – a symbol of Zon-Kuthon. Apparently the guards had at least heard of the dark god, as they immediately freaked out and pointed nocked arrows at Laori and demanded she put her hands up, and now the captain had a “good” excuse to bar her from continuing on to the manor.

Apparently used to this treatment, Laori calmly said that she meant no harm, and if being vouched for by the party wasn’t enough she would agree to remain shackled while visiting the manor. Shen then asked the captain if he would like to use hers or his own as she produced a set of shackles and snapped one around her right wrist, and then gave the captain the finger with her left hand. The captain demanded that her arms be behind her back, and pouting Laori slipped her arms behind her back and closed the shackle on her other wrist. (What the guard captain failed to notice was that these were those trick shackles that the “helpless prisoner” could slip out of whenever they wanted to.)

Vaz’em was impressed with the guards’ panicked reaction to the revelation of Laori’s patron, and muttered something along the lines that he wished the party was treated as this serious of a threat by people. At which point I reminded him that the party was supposed to be guests of Arkona, and that the guards would be only too happy to drag them all to Glorio in chains if he wanted. He decided not to take me up on that ( ^^ ) and the party was allowed in the gates.

The area of town beyond was actually fairly normal, although there were a lot more people than could comfortably live in this space, the result of many refugees seeking House Arkona’s protection and receiving it before Old Korvosa completely collapsed into madness and anarchy. Led by the guard captain and a handful of his men (guy *still* didn’t trust them or Laori), the group passed through another wall that separated this preserved section of town into Arkona Manor proper. The grounds of the manor were a stark contrast to the city streets, as it was more or less a small jungle, left largely wild and untamed. Through the trees and foliage, the party could occasionally see animals, like giant cats, prowl alongside the party, although none of them emerged to attack while the party carefully followed the brick pathway leading through the jungle. Vaz’em and Flank both felt at home here, not surprisingly, and a few minutes later the group emerged to find themselves standing in front of a small manicured grounds at the center of which sat a squat black marble structure – Arkona Manor.

The guards with the party announced their presence to the guards standing in front of the manor doors, one of them went in to announce their arrival, and shortly thereafter Glorio Arkona himself came out to greet the party. Upon seeing Laori, Glorio questioned the group, learned of the “welcome” she had received, and gave the captain an admonishing look while instructing him to release her – any ally of the party was welcome here. For once, Laori was actually flabbergasted, and was unusually quiet as the group followed Glorio into the manor itself – she was too busy looking at all of the fancy and pretty things to make any hilarious but inappropriate remarks.

Before the party sat down with Glorio and his bodyguard Avidexu to hear about his problems, however, they insisted on seeing Neolandus as was agreed. After a bit of hemming and hawing (having hoped they had forgotten about that little detail), Glorio left and returned a few minutes later with “Neolandus” (actually Vimanda in disguise). He shook Rholand’s hand and said that he was well and Glorio was taking good care of him . . . before leaning in to whisper into Rholand’s ear “Don’t trust Arkona” (Vimanda’s ongoing effort to drive a wedge between Glorio and the party).

Of course, the party didn’t just meekly go along with Glorio’s plan to have them all sit down together so he could feed them some more b!~*#@%+. Rholand wants to examine Neolandus to confirm that the man is alright, which Glorio reluctantly agrees to. Since Vimanda isn’t perfectly familiar with Neolandus beyond appearances (and she’s more used to shapechanging into women), and Rholand is a skilled healer he notes that something is . . . off about Neolandus – ribs not quite where they should be, etc. “Neolandus” of course passes it off as merely old injuries from his escape from the Red Mantis, and Rholand believes him . . . for now.

Although, whether it’s this or something else that makes him suspicious, Rholand decides to cast Detect Magic while everyone is in the room, perhaps to detect charm magic or just to stick his nose in where it doesn’t belong as Rholand is want to do. Casting a spell unannounced is a pretty big no-no around nobility, so of course Avidexu freaks out and holds a blade to Rholand’s throat, Cid pulls out his sword, and the two of them were about ready to throw down with Rholand in between them until Glorio finally gets a bit angry and orders both Avidexu and Cid to stand down. Rholand, meanwhile, scans with Detect Magic and notices Glorio, Avidexu, and Neolandus are all protected by Nondetection, partially blocking his divination magic. Sadly, he makes the check to bypass the protection around “Neolandus”, so he detects the magic of Vimanda’s shapechanging (which I decided since it functioned “as Alter Self”, it should probably be detectable like the magic). He doesn’t identify it as some sort of shapechange, of course, just Transmutation magic, but the seed of suspicion had been firmly planted.

Cid, however, continues to be verbally abusive to Avidexu, laughing at Glorio when he insists Cid have some respect for a knight in his service, until eventually Cid gets himself thrown out of the meeting and ends up outside. Laori follows him outside and the two have a discussion out on the manor’s entrance, while the rest finally have the sitdown meeting with Glorio.

Cid confesses what he’s discovered about the Order of the Nail, how he’s signed his soul away, and while Laori is somewhat sympathetic she also sort of laughs in his face when the idea of getting out of the contract comes up in the conversation. Laori’s viewpoint is more along the lines that he’s made his bed, so he might as well get to enjoying it because she certainly doesn’t know any way to get out of an infernal contract, even if it was an underhanded one like an invisible contract on the back of the one he actually signed (which did not include a “your soul belongs to Hell” in plain writing).

Meanwhile, the party learns that Glorio is aware of the portal, and that it appears to be hanging right above an old lighthouse along the northern edge of Old Korvosa’s harbor. Unfortunately Glorio doesn’t have much else in the way of intel, due to the fact that this old lighthouse is heavily behind the defensive lines set up by the Empire of Old Korvosa. He does, however, have an arcane expert who is researching the portal and attempting to devise a method to close the portal. The party was welcome to talk to him about it, and Glorio had this expert brought up to meet them.

A few minutes later, and Glorio’s expert comes in, escorted by a couple guards and in chains – it was Rolth. He, of course, immediately recognizes the party with a spat “You!”, but before any more hostilities could break out Glorio explained that he had the necromancer firmly in hand, and that assisting by being his expert on arcane matters such as this portal was a way for Rolth to repay his debt to society for his part in the Blood Veil plague. Rolth was none too pleased about this deal, of course, but imprisoned and forced labor was better in his mind than death. Working with the party though . . . that was certainly pushing it.

Nonetheless, Rolth was able to divulge a bit more information on the portal that he was able to theorize based on what could be observed from the Arkona battle lines. The portal was slowly growing, although it remained unstable, switching between various planes of existence along the Chaotic axis (so the Abyss, the Limbo Proteans and Slaad hang out in, and rarely Arcadia or whatever that CG afterlife plane is). It was taking an enormous amount of power to keep this portal open, and they believed they had located the source of that power. Some of the water out in the harbor had been pushed back, revealing the river bed – and jutting up from it was the twisted black stone spires of some sort of Thassilon structure, throwing energy up into the lighthouse where some sort of focus was being employed to direct the immense energy into opening the portal and keeping it open.

It wasn’t as simple as just storming the structure and cutting off the flow of power, however – Thassilon artifacts were notoriously unreliable due to age . . . and reacted rather badly to being struck by a sword (Rolth didn’t have much faith in the party’s arcane ability). Without *properly* shutting down the power source, an explosion could be unleashed that would vaporize most of Korvosa, worst case scenario. Until Rolth had more time to study the problem and figure out how to deactivate the Thassilon ruins safely, and Arkona came up with a battle plan to breach the Empire of Old Korvosa lines, the party needed to cool their heels for a bit.

Instead, Glorio suggested that they focus on some of the other potential threats (to his rule) that had surfaced in Old Korvosa recently. Along the docks, there was apparently a ship full of Grey Maidens who were trying to discretely monitor the situation, and their presence was making Glorio nervous given that if Queen Ileosa figured out Arkona’s part in the plague and Eodred’s death Old Korvosa would likely be *immediately* re-annexed to Korvosa by the entire force of Grey Maidens swarming the island.

There was also Devargo, who was still squatting in Eel’s End and thus far was trying to remain distinct from Pilts’ Empire of Old Korvosa and House Arkona – as one of the few remaining forces on the island that wasn’t just a two-bit gang, his support could swing things in the favor of whoever he *did* choose to ally with.

And finally and most worryingly, there were some reports of men dressed as plague doctors running around the western end of the island. Andaisin’s forces should have been completely wiped out, and so the fact that there were still people in plague doctors outfits running around was very concerning – no one sane wanted a second round of Blood Veil tearing through the island, although zombies probably still existed here and there that hadn’t yet been wiped out.

And there was always Pilts himself to deal with, but despite Laori’s continued insistence that she really had to meet him so she could in turn meet with Salvator Scream, the party continued to ignore him. Despite being the lynchpin of the Empire of Old Korvosa and sending the Palin’s Cove Punishers to kill them, the party figured he would wait until they were ready to deal with him.

Quite sensibly, without the ability to put an immediate end to the portal, the party decides to go investigate these “plague doctors” sneaking around. And due to time, that was about where we ended the session.


YES! Back in business!

Session Fifty-Seven Bonus:
Out of curiosity, which year's April 1 are we talking about?

And I would have LOVED to have been there to see and hear the badly dubbed English scene . . .

Session Sixty-One:
Interesting how in both this and a (presumably more standard) CoCT PbP that I have been following (although that I am WAY behind on), Laori comes across as more likeable than you'd expect for a Zon-Kuthon worshipper . . .

I tell you, you gotta get a job at Paizo. The Curse of the Crimson Throne Anniversary Edition window has passed by, but apply the same method of madness to another AP . . . The next one that is most likely to be done is Second Darkness, which James Jacobs has reportedly said that he wants done, and which is also a D&D 3.5 AP and thus needing conversion (as well as being old enough that print copies should be running low if not out).


Inspectre wrote:
Okay, we’re back!

Glad to see you back on your writing horse.


So, this is not a post detailing another session write-up, unfortunately.

But umm . . . guys . . . I think I'm getting ready to do it again. (At some later date after Curse is finished, of course!)


^Now THIS I've got to see . . . .


By the way, off-topic, but just in case you decide to do some mashup that includes Second Darkness, I just stumbled upon a very useful resource thread for this.


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Well, there is a reason why Laori tends to be the most popular NPC from Curse of the Crimson Throne, or at least in the top three (unless of course you play as one of those huffy “paladin stick-up-butt” groups that just give anyone with Evil in their alignment the brush-off if not kill-on-sight. This reason tends to be the fact that she *is* pretty much completely the opposite of what you’d expect from a Zon-Kuthon worshipper – bubbly and cheerful even as she’s hip-deep in guts (*especially* when she’s hip-deep in guts). Generally the tonal dissonance makes Laori absolutely hilarious, if a bit creepy (the really unique anime goth chick artwork for her probably also helps). 90% of the time, if your players find an NPC funny, they will love the s%## out of them.

I may have played Laori’s happy-go-lucky nature up a little bit too much, as the group thought she was more NE or CE than LE, but eh – I’ve always seen her more in the upper-right corner of the LE alignment anyway, making her quite open to eventual redemption. The most important thing for me was to get the players to like her so they would want to hang out with her later on in the AP, and it just worked out as convenient to keep weaving her into the story here and there. As for Laori’s generally agreeable nature, well . . .

Laori’s Past:

The book leaves some of Laori’s past and motivations blank, but the general gist is that her parents will killed and she was one of the few survivors of a massacre in her home village. She ended up falling in with a group of Zon-Kuthon worshippers at some point, and the religion became a sort of new family for her. Getting to inflict horrific violence on anyone that annoyed her probably also appealed to her rage over what happened to her family and her powerlessness at the time to do anything about it. (The party hasn’t discovered any of this information as of yet, mostly due to not really ever sitting down and talking about her past, not that she would just cough up her life story on a whim).

Even so, she still rather blatantly doesn’t fit in well with the other Zon-Kuthon worshippers, and they don’t like her terribly much, both facts that she is slowly coming to accept as a problem. But between them being the only family she’s ever really known beyond faint memories of her family, and suffering from a crushing loneliness that she covers up by being perky, she doesn’t really have anywhere else to go.

Although I haven’t thought of it until now, I probably would give Laori the heretical archetype for cleric as well, given her difference in beliefs from a bog-standard Zon-Kuthite. If pressed on details of philosophy, she might cough up that she believes along the same lines the Yungzhon Vong from the Star Wars Extended Universe do – pain is nature’s way of telling you that you’re still alive. And rather than focus on the joy of inflicting pain on others, Laori’s more focused on her own personal experience, and that pain is part of her life and she is strong enough to endure it and anything else that comes her way with Zon-Kuthon’s help since he knows all about masochism as well as sadism. So more focused inward and enduring pain rather than focused outward and inflicting pain on everyone around her, if that makes sense (which it doesn’t necessarily have to :-p ). Of course, that doesn’t mean Laori doesn’t enjoy bashing someone’s head in if they have it coming, just that she tends to do it more in moderation than your typical Zon-Kuthite always on the look-out for fresh victims.

Session Sixty-Two:

So with the decision to focus on this second wave of plague doctors(?), the party gathers themselves up and heads out in the direction of the western end of the island. Before they get that far, however, we have a bit more roleplaying to wrap-up. Cid continues his conversation outside the manor with Laori, and basically decides that if being a Hellknight means he’s damned, then the Order of the Nail has failed him and he wants no part of them any longer – basically “you can’t damn me, I quit!”. Of course, it doesn’t work that way, the Order being more like a gang or mafia group – once you’re in, you’re in, and there’s no way back out except permanent death (and in this case, permanent damnation to boot). Even so, Cid has resolved that he will no longer be the good little soldier, and will focus his efforts on finding a way to escape from his damning contract – thus more or less officially setting into motion the start of Cid’s redemption arc that we’re still playing out (yes, we’re using the Final Fantasy 4 redemption of Cecil as a big blueprint for this).

Somewhere in here, either while at Glorio’s manor or at some point thereafter, Oliver also gets a Sending. A sending from, of all people, Adonis Kreed. My plan was for him to reveal himself after the group killed Pilts as a “haha, suckers! Meet the *real* Emperor of Old Korvosa, the one propping up all the fake heads for Glorio and the Red Mantis to chop off”. But . . . the party never played ball since they never, ever, went after Pilts, so I figured I’d get this exposition in anyway. It was unfortunately underwhelming used in this manner, as the party had largely forgotten who Adonis Kreed was at this point (or at least they acted like it), and he basically made some vague threats that he was going to be paying them back for what they did to him. Which was a little confusing to them since they got him pardoned and released from prison in return for learning Andaisin’s location – what they didn’t see was Cinnabar’s reaction to him outing himself as a member of the Red Mantis and just generally being an embarrassment to the organization. Anyway, he made some threats about inflicting harm on them and Korvosa from a good safe distance beyond their reach, that he had a powerful new patron who was orchestrating all of this Empire of Old Korvosa/demonic portal business, and he was looking forward to seeing them fail to stop it. Considering he was having to cast Sendings off of a wand or use up a bunch of scrolls in order to pull off this long-winded taunting, Oliver was pretty much content to just give it all a hearty “meh”. Like with ignoring Pilts, this came back to bite them (Oliver in particular) in the ass a bit later.

Anyway! . . . After all of this additional jawing, the group set out for the western half of Old Korvosa. As they get near to the midpoint of the island, however, they come across another “random” yet quite fortuitous encounter as they hear the sounds of battle and shouting come from a nearby street – punctuated by the occasional roar of a musket. Moving to investigate, they find a group of Imperial soldiers surrounding a small house and arguing amongst themselves whether it was worth it to kick down the door or just burn the whole thing down along with whoever was trapped inside.

The party learned who had been “tree’d” by the Imperials a moment later, when a musketball winged one of the Imperials standing around on the street outside the building, followed by a continuous stream of curses, insults, and explicatives that the party would recognize anywhere – the Grey Maiden Beautrice had made her inauspicious return to the spotlight, once again in need of the PCs to bail her out. Something which they were quite happy to do, as Cid, Oliver plus Trevor, and Rholand plus Flank (with Laori too – always happy to crack a few heads!) all merrily waded into the Imperials while Vaz’em sneaked down a nearby alleyway to hit the ones closest to the hut.

As with the last fight against the Imperials, while they were tough enough to take a hit (or *maybe* two) from our heroes, they pretty much went down like chumps before a *real* fighting machine. Which is pretty much why after a round or two of combat the Imperials called in some more back-up, this time in the form of a wagon cart pulled by some sort of spine-covered cat/dog . . . thing (a Howler – what, it’s Abyssal! . . . They could have gotten one out of the portal and tamed it . . . somehow :-p ). Mounted on the back of this wagon was a ballista, one of the big ones used to keep the river clear of any unwanted boats and that sank the Direption back in Book 2. Two Imperial engineers mounted on the back manned the “big gun”, and as the cart came screeching around the nearby street corner into sight the ballista opened up on Rholand. He got hit, taking 4d6 damage . . . which is a pretty hefty hit compared to what the rest of the Imperials were capable of but only a minor annoyance to Korvosa’s Grey Thugs! (A nickname Andaisin mockingly called them - “Ileosa’s Grey Thugs” - that stuck, in part due to DM fiat of everyone calling them that and the players not complained overly much.)

Even so, Rholand had little desire to get hit by a ballista again, so he threw down an Obscuring Mist over his location, blocking the street from the gunner’s line of sight, not that lack of visibility stopped them from continuing to blindly fire the ballista several more times over the remainder of the fight. Sadly, they never got lucky and actually hit anything after that first shot to Rholand’s gut. Eventually Cid got tired of this nonsense and fireballed the whole thing, destroying the ballista, killing one of the gunners, and convincing the other that now was time to get out of there in favor of the better part of valor.

In between Rholand getting shot and the cart getting a Cid fireball however, the gunners decided they liked this position so much that they cut the Howler loose and let it go tearing into the mist cloud after Rholand. Whereupon it met Flank, and the two had an “animal companion clash of the titans of doom!” in the middle of the obscuring mist cloud while Rholand beat people up with his halberd or something. Sadly, it wasn’t as exciting as it sounds, as thanks to the mist a bunch of attacks ended up missing and the howler, being CR4, was hilariously outclassed by the b#%#!&$& dps machine of a gigantic house cat. Even so, the Howler hung in there a surprisingly long time, jabbing Flank several times with its quills and making the poor lion just miserable in general. Eventually Vaz’em came up behind it and ripped its head off, but eh, that’s pretty much what Vaz’em does to EVERYTHING.

The Imperails once again hilariously curbstomped by PCs, their attention turned to Beautrice, who opened the barred door to reveal that she had been protecting another, injured Grey Maiden. Unable to outrun their pursuers due to the woman’s injuries, they had holed up in the house and Beautrice got ready to make a last stand before the party showed up and cleaned house. They learned a few interesting bits of information from her – she was now CAPTAIN Beautrice, and was leading a light “infiltration” unit of Grey Maidens that had indeed been sent by Queen Ileosa to keep an eye on things in Old Korvosa.

They were hiding out in a small frigate harbored along the docks, disguised as a broken-down boat, and there were about a dozen of them in all including a mage from the Acadamae who had been sent along for magical support and for some reason or another. Apparently the young man had thought it was his lucky day being stationed on a boat with a dozen beautiful women – at least until Beautrice had threatened to take him swimming under the river . . . and not come back with him. His exact reasons for being here were still a bit of a mystery to Beutrice, although apparently he wanted to conduct some magical research in the area and they were supposed to protect him (the Acadamae was trying to find that same Thassilon ruin below the river that had been activated to power the demonic portal), but that objective quickly went pear-shaped due to the Imperials and the portal opening up.

Now the Grey Maidens were just trying to survive and figure out what they could do to help before needing to flee in order to get word back to the mainland – fortunately the PCs were here now! They also had the additional objective of securing the ballistas along the river bank of Old Korvosa, which was a possible threat to the shipping lane if some madman got control of them and started taking potshots at anyone trying to leave the river out into the ocean. Of course, as it turns out, the Imperials had made good use of salvaging the ballistas already to make battle-wagons – the likes of which the party had just encountered (so that’s one ballista accounted for, out of several dozen . . .).

While the party was only too happy to help patch up Beautrice and her comrade, they would not be dissuaded from their objective. Wishing Beautrice good luck, they asked her to keep them informed of developments as best she knew them (given the Grey Maidens at this point were more in “hold up in the boat and hope we survive” mode than “infiltrate and investigate the island” mode), and let the two Grey Maidens wander off back toward their boat along the docks on the east end of the island (Beutrice was confident they would be able to evade the Imperial patrols and barricades and get back safely – they had just gotten unlucky here).

And it was at about this point that we ended the session, as the party healed up and then continued their journey to the western end of the island. And of course, they didn’t have to work too hard to find more trouble to get into. Although the next session promised the start of another new, very interesting wrinkle in the plot and planted the seeds for the big finale of Book Three, even if it was cut short to what was supposed to be the faux climax. 


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And now, just to show that my latest update was not, in fact, a fluke, here’s *another* write-up! \o/

Session Sixty-Three:

So after helping Beautrice out again and proving to the Imperials *again* that they were no longer the toughest sonsofb%%+!es in Old Korvosa, the party continued on in search of these mysterious plague doctors seen moving about the western half of the island. They didn’t have to go too far before once again the sounds of battle could be heard coming from the street ahead.

Rounding the corner, the party saw quite the unexpected sight: the adventuring party from Kaer Maga, The Star Weavers, were engaging a group of mutated, twisted people led by one of the plague doctors, apparently in defense of some structure that the band had been attempting to break into. The party hadn’t gotten to really get to know the Star Weavers very well yet, and I had been toying with various ideas for how the Star Weavers’ visit to Kaer Maga’s rival city should play out. I wanted them to be seen as sort of a rival party to the PCs, Kaer Maga’s own band of highly trained heroes (although if I recall correctly the Star Weavers were lagging a level or so behind our Grey Thugs at the time). That being said, I didn’t want a repeat of the Palin’s Cove Punishers unless the party deliberately decided to pick a fight with them.

Eventually I settled on this idea as an opportunity for the party to get to know the Kaer Magan adventuring party better before any sort of hostilities broke out between the two cities and the two parties might find themselves on opposite sides. (Of course as we know, the party is expected to abandoned Korvosa at the end of Book Three, and by their treasonous actions thus far the party seemed angling for that fate by this point as well.)

So, the party hears combat, rounds the corner, and finds Abigail and Granthor pounding on a bunch of mutated citizens with a plague doctor hanging back and trying not to get cut down next. Sergio meanwhile throws out heals as necessary (I mostly narrated the Star Weavers portion of the fight, having them slowly cut down their attackers while the party dealt with their own portion of the sprawling fight).

Speaking of which . . . the party watched as a second group of the strange once-human creatures shuffled into view from a nearby side street, clearly intending on joining the battle. The party pretty much didn’t hesitate as they move forward to engage this group and keep them and the plague doctor leading them from engaging the Star Weavers. At the same time, due to a “lucky” perception roll, Vaz’em hard another group shuffling forward from a nearby side alley. While Vaz’em, Rholand, and Flank moved to deal with this side street group, Cid, Laori, and Oliver plus Trevor moved to deal with the group going for the Star Weavers.

Getting closer, they saw that these “mutated” creatures were actually once human, citizens of Korvosa that now were covered in gangrenous growths and tumors, leaving their fists swollen bony protrusions and their eyes completely swollen shut, rendering them blind. These were the Plaguetwisted, a custom monster based off of ogrekin. I wanted something really weird and unique for these creatures, but relatively simple to run, so I made them basically ogrekin warrior 5s with Blind-Fight and Improved Natural attacks. Basically they’d waddle up to somebody and swing wildly with both of their fists, using Blind-Fight to reroll any misses due to concealment (from being blind), and threatening a Fort Save or be inflicted by a random disease from a d6 Table upon a hit. The fact that they had Blind-Fight also meant that Vaz’em needed flanking in order to eviscerate them, an important fact that I have since forgot when building new monsters that Blind-Fight/Improved Uncanny Dodge renders Vaz’em much less effective (sneak attack and Improved Invisibility trick at level 10 are a brutal combination!) Anyway, while unique, the Plaguetwisted are just another bunch of mooks to the party, and although they can take a beating they start going down.

The “plague doctors” are a little different story, although they are not much more effective than their minions. Built as oracles of Destruction, I gave them the harsh Consumed curse (take an additional one-half of the damage you just took as non-lethal). To help counter this, I made the plague doctors were-rats to give them DR 10/Silver (only helped a little, especially with Oliver still keeping his silver cutlass from the last bout of wererat mayhem in Book 2, but every little bit helps), and gave them a profane version of Martyr’s Bargain, which basically meant they could eat one of Cid’s shocking grasps . . . in return for exploding when it dealt maximum damage to them when the spell expired 6 rounds later. I’m not sure if they ever actually got to use that one, mostly because Cid just beat them down with regular old falcata crits. Most of their spells were based around buffing themselves to be hard to hit/damage, and inflict creepy illness-themed status conditions – Ray of Sickness, Contagion, Disfiguring Touch, etc. Sadly the party all saved against those, so they really didn’t do much else but stand around and get pounded. They did have a Balefire 6d6 acid blast they could throw . . . once, and a zone of difficult terrain they could create (which one used to “seal off” the side alley after Vaz’em moved in to engage) from their oracle of destruction class features.

They did have one other pretty disgusting trick that freaked the party out though. When they “died”, each plague doctor burst apart from the inside, as a shrieking mosquito-faced insectman leaped out like an Alien xenomorph fanboy. These were Blightspawn, a boss monster from I believe the Feast of Ravenmoor module. The module implies that one of these things is a big deal, but at these levels a CR 5 beastie was still just a mook. I had thought about some of these hanging around in the priests of Urgathoa back at the end of Book 2, because Andaisin seemed like the sort of nut who would infect her followers with hideous plague abominations to re-enact that scene from Alien for her amusement. The Blightspawn had some abilities though, including an aura that inflicted a Will-save-or-Slow, and various spell-like abilities including Hold Monster.

So the party cleaved through the plaguetwisted, and the plague doctor that had been leading the Star Weavers’ group turned and ran. Cid and Laori gave chase, cut down the fleeing plague doctor before he could make good on his escape, and the Blightspawn popped out. It pegs Cid with its Hold Monster spell, Cid continues his trend of failing against these “Hold” spells, and becomes paralyzed with a giant mosquito-man standing right next to him with a hungry grin on its horrific insectoid face. Laori yells about coming to save him, and manages to take the thing down while Cid continues to fail his saves against the spell (can’t remember how exactly, I think she just beat it to death with her spiked chain over a round or two). Then she taunts Cid who is still completely immobile, and decides that since he can’t really protest he probably wouldn’t mind her stealing a quick kiss while he’s like that, right? And thus the crack pairing of Cid and Laori gets its start, although nothing else has come of that (as yet).

Meanwhile, Vaz’em rips open the other plague doctor in the alleyway, helping the Blightspawn in that wererat break free of its fleshy prison. It rewards Vaz’em by grappling him, and in a series of really good rolls for it and poor ones for Vaz’em, manages to get its probiscus buried in his chest for some good clean fun Con damage due to blood drain. Rholand or Flank move in to provide a flank as the rest of the fight is over, and temporarily DMPC’d since his player stepped away, Vaz’em goes ape on this foul creature for daring to drink his blood, rolling one critical hit and nearly a second one on his next round. With a cry of “Get your s@$* out of my chest!” Vaz’em rips the Blightspawn’s head completely off, rips it out of his chest, throws it to the ground, and stomps it into a bloody slurry.

Despite the relative ease of the fight despite the couple close calls for Cid (yet again), it actually took up pretty much the entire session. And so we ended there with the party walking up to the Star Weavers, who had likewise been victorious over the one group they had been battling before the party and the plagued reinforcements ran into each other.

The Star Weavers:

Just to provide a clear reference point for who the Star Weavers are, they are a group of original NPCs I made from Kaer Maga who are famous heroes of the city in the same way the PCs are by this point pretty famous in Korvosa. At the time I wasn’t fully aware of Kaer Maga’s . . . unique . . . blend of factions and races living together within the City of Strangers (as Kaer Maga is called), so the Star Weavers are a little bland humanocentric bunch (some reincarnates will spice that right up though!). Like our heroes, the Star Weavers are a four-person party with a relatively balanced make-up, if lacking in the thievery department (not a surprise with a paladin leader!) One thing I did want to make pretty clear with this group was that they were all unequivocally Good, if a few were not quite as lily white as the paladin. Sort of the opposite end of the contrast spectrum to the party’s semi-neutrality (with Rholand being the one “good” anchor) from the Palin’s Cove Punishers, who from the rogue’s interrogation were a pretty rough and unpleasant bunch.

Abigail – Female Human Paladin of Sarenrae. The nominal leader of the group, although that may be only due to Sergio’s support and trust. She started out a bit brash and opinionated, having formed her opinion of the party ahead of time by the rumors she heard about them. Not wanting her to become labeled as the stereotypical paladin stick-in-the-mud, I had her warm up to the party pretty quickly once it became clear that the PCs were actually heroes and not just the lapdogs of Queen Ileosa . . . who had been proving herself to be a psychotic b*~*$ as feared in her dealings with Marquis DeSilva, whom the Star Weavers had been assigned to protect while he attempted to negotiate with her on behalf of Kaer Maga.

Sergio – Elderly Male Human Cleric of Desna. One of the founding members of the Star Weavers and the father of Abigail. Essentially he’s working on passing the flame of the Star Weavers on to Abigail, and while they have some philosophical differences he’s still very proud of his little girl all grown up. That being said, he also makes it a point to attempt to temper Abigail’s occasional bluntness with diplomacy and caution.

Granthor – Male Dwarf Barbarian. If anyone is the loose cannon of the group, it’s Granthor, a wise-cracking, foul-mouthed, low-brow dwarf with anger management issues. He takes quite a bit of joy in needling Abigail with his antics and crude jokes, but his loyalty to the group is absolute. And underneath the rough-and-tumble exterior Granthor is a pretty good guy who just wants to help other good people by punching bad people in the face.

Edwin – Male Human Wizard. Yes, this was a shoutout to the Edwin of Baldur’s Gate fame. However, unlike *that* Edwin*, *this* Edwin is a solid good guy who wants to help others with his magical knowledge. He’s the most antisocial and intellectual member of the bunch though, preferring his studies and doing his best to be crazy prepared with supplies in the event the group runs into a difficult scrap. He was not present for this session due to staying with Marquis DeSilva in the event that they needed an emergency teleport out of the city to keep DeSilva safe.


Yeah! Back in business!

Laori's past (and Star Wars and StarCraft references):

Well, after that, I had to go look up the Yuuzhan Vong, and they sound like a cross between Kytons and the Zerg . . . Or maybe more like a cross between Kytons and the Protoss-Zerg hybrids.

Anyway, I definitely get why Laori seems like a candidate (if not at all a shoo-in) for redemption.

Session Sixty-Two:

Seems like Ileosa is running low on competent help . . .

Was the Acadamae mage sent with the Grey Maidens at all competent?

Edit: Ninja'd by Session Sixty-Three! Got to read this first . . .

Session Sixty-Three (and the Star Weavers, and Reign of Winter spoiler):

Pretty cool to introduce another competing fairly well balanced party. I wonder how weird the PCs feel now, seeing anothe c ompetent party?

I was thinking of doing something similar fora Reign of Winter modification (I think I even mentioned this many posts back, although I have thought a bit more about the specifics since then), to let the PC party off the hook from having to accept Baba Yaga's boons while enabling them a way to proceed through the AP -- a Hellknight party from Cheliax has the same idea as the PC party, and has no qualms about accepting Baba Yaga's boons from her Rider, and in fact beats them to it, but then is lacking certain skills (and I do mean Skills) that they need the PC party for, and so the 2 parties have to form an uneasy alliance.


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Yeah, an unfortunate side effect of making Korvosa’s enemies actually competent was making the Grey Maidens look generally incompetent. Which isn’t really fair to them – the sort of extreme threats to the city that the PCs are dealing with (the Blood Veil plague, the demonic portal) required heroes of their caliber to deal with. If the PCs failed, nobody else (well, except maybe the Star Weavers) could stop what was coming and Korvosa would have been destroyed. It’s similar to the dilemma of the high-level NPC that needs the help of PCs – is s/he lazy, incompetent, or both for not dealing with the problem that the PCs at their low level could handle?

Anyway, unfortunately there never was chance to expand on the Grey Maidens, what they were doing here, or their mage support. The gist was that Togomor was looking for the Thassilon ruin, knew it was somewhere in Old Korvosa, and arranged to have someone with magical expertise sent along to discover where it was so he could swoop in and claim it for himself. But he’s a lazy high-level NPC, so he got someone else to do the searching for him. ;) The Acadamae’s real masters (devils) had an inkling of what Togomor was up to, so they sent along pretty much one of their schlubs who might get the job done, but hopefully not before the devils got there first. Of course, both sides lost out because the Rovagug cultists got there before either of them and turned the ruins into a battery for Worldwound 2.0.

At which point the Grey Maidens were completely out of their depth and gave up on trying to finish the survey with their mage accomplice, and the devils pretty much couldn’t get anywhere near the portal without getting jumped by a squad of demons determined to mark their new territory as theirs, and no other extraplanar force’s. There was also probably a couple Blink Dogs and azatas and similar CG outsiders that got sucked through the portal when it did one of its random shifts to a CG plane, but those tended to get torn apart *immediately* before they even knew what happened. If I had more time to play around with the portal I might have had the party run into one of those on the run and being hunted – that could have been fun.

Anyway, in short – no, the Acadamae mage was just some 5th level schlub that died like a pig off-camera a little later when the Grey Maidens had some more trouble and the party decided not to bail them out (to be fair they were *really* busy at that point, as you will see in about six more sessions).

As for the other adventuring party, yeah, things were a little weird between the two groups at first, but they all bonded pretty good over the coming couple plot arcs. Speaking of which . . .

Session Sixty-Four:

So with the plaguetwisted and blightspawn all dead, the party finally got to confront the Star Weavers. They were understandably wary, and I think a couple of “this is our turf!” comments were made OOC, although they were more polite and curious about what the Star Weavers were doing here in IC. And here the Star Weavers showed their true colors, as Abigail and Sergio simply shrugged and said that the people of Old Korvosa were clearly suffering. The Star Weavers had come over here to try to lend what aid they could, since Kaer Maga had not offered official aid during the plague and relations between their cities were too strained now for any aid to be forthcoming. They had discovered about a dozen people hiding in this boarded up house, with the plaguetwisted pounding on the doors, and so they stepped in. Didn’t realize there were so many of them though – thanks for the help.

As to how the Star Weavers actually got over here to Old Korvosa, I can’t remember if they flew over or traveled through the sewers, fighting their way through an Imperial outpost (an encounter I had prepared in the event the PCs ever tried to use the sewers – a barricade of a half dozen Imperial grunts, along with a “war beast” – a seven-headed cryo hydra locked up nearby that the Imperials could unleash and then run away. In any event, it was not a method that the Star Weavers wanted to attempt with a dozen civilians, so the conversation turned to how the party got across and whether it could work to get these people out of this anarchy nightmare.

The party, of course, had crossed over on a stone shaped bridge across the river that Rholand had made, and assuming it was still standing, should be more than sufficient to get all these people back across to civilization, although it would probably be an unpleasant trip for them, walking across a narrow stone bridge without railing with the Jeggare river far below! So after talking a bit more, and Abigail snapping at Granthor in exasperation after he made several lewd comments, the two parties joined forces and escorted the group of civilians back towards the stone bridge.

As part of this conversation, the party also interviewed the civilians that they and the Star Weavers had saved. Which provided them with a very interesting piece of information – one of the civilians, in a desperate but dumb move, had followed one of the plague doctors around hoping to find where their base was so he could steal some food from them. This led him to the gates of the Ironworks, a gigantic industrial compound in Old Korvosa where scrap iron was melted down and purified into a higher quality for use by blacksmiths throughout Korvosa.

Obviously during the plague the facility had been forced to shut down and was abandoned – leaving it ripe for some never-do-wells to snatch up the real estate for their own purposes. Of course, the unlucky bastard who had followed the plague doctor there was seen, and while he managed to escape, it was quite possible that he was the reason the civilians had been attacked (besides the plague doctors always wanting a fresh supply of people to turn into Plaguetwisted, of course).

Both the PCs and Star Weavers thought that this was very interested, and agreed to check it out – together – after they got the civilians to safety. So they handed back towards the bridge at which point I rolled to see if the bridge had had any random encounters for the past day, as something that like was likely to be noticed by someone on the island of Old Korvosa, for better or worse. And as it turned out, I did roll a random encounter. So after a bit of thought, I sketched out a quick map of the narrow 5’ bridge going across the river, plopped a Vrock token down on top of it about halfway out, and told them that the party saw a familiar looking demon squatting on their bridge, examining it and experimentally rapping its claws against the stone. (Oliver had given this thing a rather derogatory name – C++$otron – to the exasperation of the party because now the thing had a name and was sure to come back and bite them. Well, here he was, the vrock come home to roost!

A vrock balanced on a narrow stone bridge out over a river is a pretty obvious sight, so fortunately the party saw him before the vrock saw them. After a bit of debate, they come up with a plan for hopefully dealing with the obnoxious demon – Cid would turn invisible and fly around to the far side, Vaz’em would ninja trick invisibility and walk out onto the bridge, and together ambush the beast. Meanwhile, after they had engaged the demon, the rest of the party would break the cover of the buildings and attack – Abigail in particular was pretty confident she could nail it with her longbow (damn paladins and their DRless Smites!).

The ambush pretty much went off perfectly – Cid landed a decent blow with his falcata, Vaz’em landed a nice sneak attack, and then Abigail came out and started shooting it with 20-some damage arrows thanks to Smite Evil. By the end of the second round or so C~%%otron was in serious trouble, and so it decided it was time to get out. But the party had made one mistake in their planning – Vaz’em had to walk out onto the bridge. The narrow, 5’ wide, fragile stone bridge over which the Jeggare river waited a not inconsiderable distance down. So the Vrock full-attacked the bridge, dealing *just* enough damage to destroy the mid-point of the bridge and send a good 15’ section tumbling down into the water. That included Vaz’em, and the Vrock itself but the demon could fly and Vaz’em didn’t. That meant Cid had to fly down and collect the ninja after he tumbled down into the river (having failed his reflex save to jump back onto a stable section of bridge that was left), leaving the vrock to once again make a clean getaway at critical health after another barrage of blessed arrows from Abigail.

The destruction of the bridge was a set-back but not an absolute one – since he had Fly now running Cid simply ferried the people across to the far side. The party and Star Weavers could have followed suit, of course, but they were heroes so with the threat of the plague doctors still present none of them were going anywhere.

Thus far, all they knew about these plague doctors was where they were hiding, that they were abducting survivors to turn into infectd monsters, and that apparently they were wererats infected with some sort of freakish humanoid parasite. The first point was of course the most important one, because all other concerns would become moot after the plague doctors were all dead. And so the two groups of heroes teamed up and set out for the Ironworks.

Included in their interactions with the Star Weavers of course was Laori, and it didn’t take long for her to start clashing with Abigail. For her part Abigail tolerated Laori’s presence, but she did pull someone aside . . . Rholand, I think . . . and mention that she had detected a strong evil aura about Laori (the result of her being an evil cleric of an evil god, of course). Rholand was willing to vouch for Laori and reassured Abigail that she would not be a problem, but Laori’s presence remained a source of tension between the two groups. Particularly as Laori continued to goad Abigail now and again during conversations throughout this joint mission. (While Laori was willing to live and let live for the most part if left alone, she didn’t like paladins much due to their common desire to stick their nose into her business, try to kill her, or just generally be unpleasant to her. It also was a good opportunity to remind everyone that while she was their buddy, Laori *was* evil and thus there were unpleasant aspects of her personality despite her usually bubbly friendly nature).

Fortunately, insults was as far as the conflict between Abigial and Laori got, and soon enough the joint party was in front of the Ironworks without further incident. The heavy gate separating the street from the entry courtyard to the southern part of the complex was closed but not locked, and the place *seemed* deserted. Of course, the place wasn’t deserted in fact, as the party learned after sliding open the gate and entering the courtyard. A few moments later the doors to the long shanty buildings on the east end of the courtyard slammed open, allowing half a dozen of the Plaguetwisted to come swarming out. But the worse came a moment later, as the massive iron doors leading into the Ironworks facility proper slammed open with a torturous metal shriek, revealing a hulking bear-like creature as big as a house, lightning crackling from its eyes and paws. This was a daemon, a Greater Ceustrodaemon to be precise.

(There were basically three varieties – lesser, standard, and greater. The lesser and greater versions were meant to be younger or older versions of the standard daemon, starting as a lesser and growing as it continued to consume souls. Stats-wise, this gave the lesser version the Young template, and the greater version the Advanced template (changed to the Giant template by me to preserve the shifting of size with each “age category” – man-sized (Medium), horse-sized (Large), up to finally house –sized (Huge). I also changed feats and such around to give them all slightly different builds and actions in combat. Lesser were frogs that tried to grapple with tongues and had an ice breath, standard were giant ape things that pummeled people, bullrushed, and had fire-breath, and the greater were huge bear things that wore light armor and breathed lightning. )

This was the first time that the party had actually fought a Huge-sized creature (one of the big reasons why I changed its Advanced template to Giant). It’s size combined with its pretty darn-high AC due to the armor it was wearing made it a pretty intimidating gatekeeper while the Plaguetwisted just flailed around as usual. Still, it was only like CR 7 or so and thus our eighth-level party of heroes dealt with it fairly handily once they got into melee with it.

The Star Weavers meanwhile got distracted from the fight by another door leading into the facility bursting open near the beginning of the fight to disgorge two plague doctors and another daemon, this one a lizard-like thing wrapped up in barbed wire and with shrapnel sticking out of its body like spines (which it sprayed at people - Genthodaemon).

Soon enough, all of the daemons and plague-twisted abominations laid dead on the ground, and everyone was starting to get an inkling as to who was *really* behind this plague doctor resurgence (at least in a general sense – i.e. the daemons). It was starting to look like a three-way outsider war was going to break out in Old Korvosa between the devils, daemons, and demons. That kept the party anxious as they prepared to move deeper into the Ironworks . . . next session!


Love the way you adjust the monsters too.

Session Sixty-Four:
About the 3-way Outsider war, With Laori around, who says it's just going to stay 3-way? Kyton company!

More on the Star Wavers:
What levels are the Star Weavers now, compared to the PC party?


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I was incorrect earlier – the Star Weavers were level 9 when the party met them – allowing Edwin to cast Teleport to get the group back and forth to Kaer Maga . . . although I’m not sure he could actually take everyone with him in one Teleport by RAW. Meh, oh well – not a cause for concern in any event.

After breaching the Ironworks and slaying the welcoming committee, the party leveled up to level 9 (Trevor hit 7) as well, matching the Star Weavers. Haven’t decided yet whether they will keep pace with our heroes or not, although sooner or later they will drop behind (by the time of Book 6 the PCs will be the only ones who have even a ghost of a chance against Kazavon and friends).

Session Sixty-Five:

So with the welcoming committee of daemons and plague abominations dead, the two adventuring parties were now faced with a conundrum – the Ironworks was a huge complex (much larger even than the facility map that I put together), inside which the threat could be hiding anywhere, or even fleeing out the back door. Of more immediate concern was that there were two points of entry into the complex – the large front doors that the house-sized daemon had thrown open, and the side bay doors that seemed to lead into an ore/raw scrap storage room.

How convenient, then, that we had two distinct parties of adventurers here who could each enter the complex via one of the two doorways and explore deeper in that direction, hopefully linking back up at some point and not just getting dead. Any arguments about not splitting up would have fallen on deaf ears, and the party may have found it difficult to fight in the hallways with so many meleers anyway. Fortunately, the PCs got the hint that this was a way to keep the Star Weavers out of their hair, and not steal all of *their* kills, treasure, and glory. I’d have come up with some contrived attack from the rear for them to deal with anyone if the party had insisted on moving as one big slow obvious group through the complex. :-p

So, with the decision to split up made, the Star Weavers volunteered to take the side door, leaving the party with the honor of the frontal assault (it was their city after all). So the party said it’s good-byes to the Star Weavers for now, and headed into the abandoned Ironworks. They found a fairly large lobby waiting just inside the doors, along with what appeared to be a reception kiosk off to one side. Vaz’em scouting ahead, the party decided to clamber through the kiosk window rather than move on to the double doors at the opposite end of the lobby. A door at the back of the small reception kiosk led into a hallway with a number of offices that the party cleared one-by-one, expecting an ambush at any moment. Only silence greeted them, and I would say that rather than be boring this fruitless exploration was actually quiet tense.

Leaving the office hallway behind, the party next found themselves in a long hallway with several hallways branching off from it. Signs in Common provided direction as to each hallway’s function – infirmary/mess hall, foundry, workshop/shipping. And of course this hallway also connected to the offices they had just left, and also to the main lobby.

Ultimately, the party decided to go investigate the workshop/shipping area, and as they got closer to the doors leading into that part of the facility they heard the sounds of battle in the room ahead! Throwing open the doors, the party was greeted with an unexpected sight – instead of the Star Weavers, the party found a party of devils locked in combat with a group of daemons! Two bearded devils did their best to stand guard in front of an Erinyes and hold off two man-sized frog daemons and a horse-sized daemonic ape (2 Lesser Ceustodaemons and 1 Standard), while another shrapnel lizard (Genthodaemon) pelted them ineffectually with shrapnel, and a Bone Devil and another gigantic bear daemon wrestled a short distance away, the bone devil climbing up and down the daemon’s back and jabbing it repeatedly with a stinger. For the most part, thanks to DR neither side was making much head-way against the other, but that was about to change with the party joining the struggle.

Unfortunately for the poor Genthodaemon, it was standing right next to the door that the party threw open to take in this scene of outsider carnage. So it was the first to die as Vaz’em, Cid, and Oliver swarmed over it before moving on to the ape-daemon. Throwing the party for another loop but also explaining where the devils came from, the bone devil greeted them warmly (as warmly as a devil got anyway) upon seeing them. It explained that Senaschal Togomor had told them to expect the party to maybe show up, given their PC-knack for showing up to thwart the plans of those wanting to harm Korvosa. Of course, the party wasn’t the most trusting sort, particularly of Togomor (Rholand’s naiveté in trusting him to help him with Ileosa not-withstanding).

So they had a bit of a discussion about whether or not to purge *all* the outsiders in this room, and while they ultimately decided in-character to deal with one faction at a time, Oliver’s player for whatever reason decided to have Trevor go off the reservation. To wit, when his turn came up, he pumped a hasted full-attack into the Erinyes, which included a crit that struck the hell angel directly in the left eye. Unfortunately for Trevor, this dropped the Erinyes to critical health but did not kill her. The Bone Devil shrieked about treachery, and that Togomor was sure to hear of this, and so the party decided to just kill everybody not mortal at that point.

Although perhaps the deciding matter was the fact that the Erinyes’ turn was next, and she pumped a full attack back into Trevor, including a crit of her own. As is tradition by this point, Trevor became the companion character offering for book three as he slumped to the ground with an arrow in his own eye, from full health to straight up dead. Since Oliver still had a silver weapon, and devils and daemons both are weak to silver, and both Vaz’em and Cid hit like trucks and generally don’t give a s+@# about DR, the party cleaved through daemons and devils alike in a couple of rounds, while the bear daemon and bone devil continued their fight off to the side. Both daemon and devil alike burnt away into ash upon death, revealing that they had been summoned, not Called, and thus were not physically present (which might have been pushing it with the daemons, but eh – there was some sort of special DM b&$@~*!+ daemon long-duration summoning going on here).

At some point in this mess, the doors leading from the workshop to the foundry directly boomed open, revealing the Star Weavers making a fighting retreat into the room from another group of daemons. They held the line with a little bit of help from Flank, and as the fight began to swing strongly in the party’s favor the Star Weavers’ own battle started to wind down. All that was left now was the Greater Ceustodaemon and the Bone Devil, who by this point was quite pissed at the party.

Unfortunately, the exploration and fight up to this point (even though it was only 4 rounds or so) was enough to burn through our time for the evening, and so we paused there until next session to finish this battle.

Ironworks Encounters:

So, despite the party’s paranoia, I avoided setting up any ambushes in the corridors, as I have learned from previous failures that hallway fights are almost unequivocally BORING AS HELL. So I do what I can to avoid slugfests in hallways and around doorways if possible. I also set up things with the intention that whatever direction the party went in, the Star Weavers would go explore in the opposite direction and complete one of that area’s encounters.

Waiting in the foundry, as the Star Weavers discovered, was another group of daemons, including a couple frogs hiding in the large foundry melting pots, waiting to hop out in ambush, along with an ape and a couple more oracle of destruction/blightspawn combos.

The infirmary wing had a pair of frogs eating a plaguetwisted in the mess hall, and then two more plague doctors/blightspawn and a genthodaemon guarding a dozen people in the infirmary who were in the late stages of being turned into a plaguetwisted.

The shipping docks beyond the workshop/shipping area were empty except of bodies, of course, as that was the way that the devils entered the building, and they encountered some initial resistance in the form of a daemon or two and some plague doctors/blightspawn with plaguetwisted cannon fodder.

And as the party’s wanderings took them, they ended up doing the workshop encounter, which was the devil infiltration team versus more daemon defenders. There was another workshop encounter coming up, where the finished iron ingots were worked on by the in-house blacksmiths – and the only door leading there was inside the first workshop, so there was a little bit of route-shaping going on there on my part where the party was almost certainly going to cross paths with the devils.

They were meant to be a source of information and potential if untrustworthy allies, but I wasn’t especially surprised when the party decided they didn’t want or need Togomor’s “help”. Largely the devils were just there to let the PCs know that Togomor was aware of what was going on in Old Korvosa and they would be getting some “help” from the mainland. More subtly, their presence was also meant to hint of the shadow war going on between the one organizing all of this misfortune in Old Korvosa and Togomor/Ileosa.


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Session Sixty-Six:

So resuming the fight where we left it off, the party tried to finish it off by dealing with the Bone Devil and Greater Ceusodaemon. Pissed off at the party but determined to finish off its prey first, the Bone Devil snapped the bear daemon’s neck, and then vanished from sight (quickened invisibility spell-like ability). I’d like to say that the devil managed to put up a good fight, given that it was CR 9, but really things didn’t go its way.

It tried to erect an ice wall to isolate half the party in with itself, but the wall had to go through a square adjacent to Vaz’em, who easily made the Reflex save and thus stopped the wall from forming at all. Then Cid and Oliver got into melee with it, and it pretty much just got pasted without much excitement. Not a particularly thrilling way to open the session – oh well, can’t win them all. The Bone Devil got a chance to have some revenge in Book Four though, as you will see whenever we finally get there *quite* a few session write-ups from now!

So the party healed up the minor injuries they had sustained in that fight (other than Trevor, the devils and daemons had mostly been busy fighting each other, and then they just all got dead before being able to do much to the party). They checked Trevor to find that he was quite dead, sadly. Laori made it known at this point that she had a scroll of raise dead (a back-up on my part in the event someone died in Old Korvosa), but she wasn’t willing to just use it willy-nilly.

She had put her blood, sweat, tears, and a whole lot of diamond dust into making that scroll, and damnit, she expected to be reimbursed for it – and maybe a favor done for her on the side too (like taking her to see Pilts Swastel so she could meet with Salvator Scream finally, damnit guys!). Here was Laori’s evil side coming out, as she was coldly indifferent to any pleas to just help the party with their dead companion problem out of the “goodness” of her heart. For his part, Oliver was indifferent to Trevor’s fate, as he had “disobeyed orders, and deserved what he got”. (Apparently Oliver’s player had been distracted while the party was discussing whether or not to attack the devils, and thus when Trevor’s turn came up he just had Trevor attack the devils even though the party had “agreed” to leave them alone for now).

The Star Weavers weren’t too pleased with Laori’s display, and ultimately they departed to go check out the infirmary while the party went deeper into the complex. Perhaps they would find something there that would facilitate Trevor’s resurrection, although it seemed unlikely that something as valuable as a Raise Dead scroll would be kept on site. Trevor was left where he had fallen, and remained dead – Oliver went minion shopping again after this plague 2.0 matter was resolved.

Healed up and ready to proceed deeper into the complex, the party opened the doors to the blacksmith workshop, and immediately ran afoul of another group of daemons and their plaguetwisted/plague doctor backup. Having heard the fight through the door, the daemons were aware trouble was coming, and had adopted defensive positions. Which in this case meant the nearly half-dozen plaguetwisted clustered up near the doorway to choke it with their bodies, while two genthodaemons, a standard ceustrodaemon, and a plague doctor flung spells and shrapnel blasts at the party as soon as they entered the room.

For the first couple rounds, this was a pretty brutal ball-kicker of a fight, as the daemons threw everything they had at the party clustered around the door. But even though it looked bad with the plaguetwisted landing a couple hits, and the gentodaemons’ shrapnel bombs pounding the party with AoE (I adjusted their shrapnel spray to be similar to a manticore volley – 4 separate shrapnel attacks against targets within a 30’ area), no one went down. The plaguetwisted started dropping, and Vaz’em swung around the flanks (only to be hit – and fail - with a couple lesser Confusions from the Ceustodaemon as I remembered that these guys had spell-like abilities) to cut down the plague doctor/blightspawn. Sadly, despite getting Confused Vaz’em was never in a position to flank an ally with a daemon while under the effects of a “attack nearest ally” part of the confusion effect. I had really been looking forward to him sneak attacking his friends . . . ah well, perhaps some day.

Laori in particular got pounded by a bunch of the shrapnel sprays, and a couple claw hits from either the ceusto or one of the genthos, which while it did not drop her she was definitely hurting by the end of the fight. Which led her to wander out loud how the party managed to do this sort of stuff day in and day out – being a hero saving cities was definitely not something Laori had ever considered. She was an investigator/infiltrator – in and out, avoid fighting where possible except when it was fun or somebody needed their ass kicked. But she definitely was unused to wading through wave after wave of outsiders and their pet abominations. Even so, she had come prepared with her wand of CMW, so she was back to her perky old self soon enough (Rholand might have given her a cure as well).

After this stiff resistance, the party had a feeling that they were getting close to the lair of whatever evil was behind this threat. Against the back wall of the room was another set of doors leading to something (I don’t think I had ever bothered to define what function that final room served in the original Ironworks – it had been, ah . . . *very* retooled for its new function). As a hint that this might be the center for whatever evil was being perpetrated here, a thick carpet of ooze was leaking out from under the doorway into the workshop where the party currently stood over the bodies of the last daemon defenders. They got the hint that there might be a boss fight beyond those doors, and so were a bit cautious before opening them (healing up and such).

And that was about the point where we ended this session, as wrapping up the daemon/devil fight took a while, and the final layer of defenses actually took a surprisingly long time for the party to crack (about 9 rounds or so before the last daemon fell).


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Sixty-Seven:

So, gathering their courage (and without waiting for the Star Weavers – although as it turned out that was actually a good thing) the party threw open the doors to reveal the final room, the disgusting pulsating heart of this corruption. They were not to be disappointed, as whatever purpose the room beyond had once served, it now served a much more disturbing purpose.

The room beyond had been turned into a hive, of sorts, with a thick mucus-like carpet of slime coating the floor and walls. Hanging in cocoon-like structures throughout the room were plaugetwisted . . . although they seemed to be undergoing some sort of transformation (each one was gestating an immature blightspawn, which would soon “hatch” from the unfortunate soul). In the middle of the room, a gaping hole yawned in the floor, mucus dripping down into a chamber below.

A few moments after the door was opened, the party each felt a presence enter their minds, as some creature made contact telepathically. “Greetings and welcome to my abode. Please, descend down into my throne room so that we might speak.”

*Definitely* freaking out at this point, the party nonetheless decided to humor this disembodied voice, and after securing a rope in the filth, clambered down into the chamber below, a hollowed out chamber in the earth beneath the Ironworks. The chamber was set up in a crude mockery of a throne-room, with a raised dias at the back (complete with stairway leading up to it), and a throne made out of dozens of bones. Like the room above, the wall and floors were covered in slime, and there were even more plaguetwisted hanging in coccons here – perhaps 30 or more.

Waiting for the party was another group of daemons – two apes flanking the stairway, and seated up on the throne of bones was a strange humanoid creature with a rotted stump of a leg, and an ox skull for a head. (Thre was also a genthodaemon and three lesser ceustodaemons that would have been summoned in had this turned into a fight). The creature seated on the throne rose, and greeted the party again telepathically, introducing itself as “Lord Bile”.

This Lord Bile explained that it had its brothers had been summoned to the mortal plane and bound by Andaisin, to be used to help grow her plague . . . and then be slaughtered like cattle to anoint her plague bombs as a final ingredient! Lord Bile was the only one to escape this fate thanks to the party’s intervention, and indeed even manage to escape as the cultists had heard the party coming and had foolishly broken his containment in preparation for the party kicking in the door (which never came due to the fact that they fled Ramoska without even talking to him.  ) And thus, Lord Bile owed his survival and freedom to the PCs, for without them he would have been killed, his essence scattered with his death until it reformed . . . an unlikely event as daemons had no sense of community the way devils and even demons did – his dissipated essence would have almost certainly been devoured by lesser daemons immediately upon his banishment back to Abaddon.

And so, the daemon was actually grateful for their assistance . . . and having seen what they were capable of, had no desire to engage the party in combat (particularly since it was still here physically, and thus if it lost a fight its existence was over as mentioned above). Unfortunately, Lord Bile still had a problem – namely, that he was stuck on the mortal plane, and could not return home under his own power (Leukodaemons indeed do not have plane shift on their spell-like abilities, so he was legitimately stuck in Korvosa). After escaping Andaisin in the confusion of the party fleeing and the Hellknights finally making their way down into the temple, Lord Bile made his way into the sewers, and stumbled about this strange human city quite lost and directionless, and acutely aware that nobody was going to help him return home except on the point of a sword.

All except Andaisin’s disciple (Adonis Kreed, although Bile never used his name), as Lord Bile called him, a man who he should have killed on sight for being allies with his imprisoner. But this old enemy had found him with an offer that caused Bile to stay his hand – he offered Bile a way home. He had found a new master with the power and will to make it happen . . . but Bile had to do something for them first. He had to create an army for them. And so Lord bile had made his way to Old Korvosa, and started growing an army for this new master’s use – blightspawn grown from the bodies, and daemons summoned from blood rituals. Nearly a hundred blightspawn was the goal, to be unleashed on Korvosa, presumably around the same time as the demon portal got finished summoning whatever demon army it was letting through into the city as well.

Lord Bile was completely indifferent to this plan though – if the party could offer him a way to return home in peace, he would go. He would even offer a way to thwart this part of the plan – although he could not control the growth of the blightspawn now that they had been implanted, he did know of a cure that could save these people from their fate, and kill the plague army before it could be born. And, without Bile around to summon the daemons, they would likewise fade away back to their home plane.

The party was expecting a bit of a double-cross here, so there was some negotiation and back and forth. But, a bit surprisingly, they ultimately went for it – the cure and Lord Bile’s word that he would not return to Korvosa of his own volition (being summoned here again was something Bile had no control over, and the party acknowledged that) for the next 100 years. And this is why it was good that the Star Weavers weren’t present, as if they had been there’s no way Abigail would have accepted any accord with a daemon.

Laori wasn’t super thrilled about this either, but she did provide the solution – I think she conveniently had a scroll of Plane Shift that she could use to send Lord Bile back, if that was what the party wished (or she just happened to have one memorized, I can’t quite remember). In any event, while I briefly considered having Laori cast some other sort of spell on Lord bile, or perhaps send him to the “wrong” plane just to be a b##++, she went along with the party’s wishes and send Lord Bile home after he searched the formula for the blightspawn infestation’s cure.

I’m not sure how this agreement will come back to bite the party in the ass, or even if it will. I feel like making a bargain with a NE outsider should result in some sort of ultimate horrific outcome, but I’ve yet to figure out a good method. Perhaps I’ll have Lord bile should up in Kaer Maga or something. The thing is while he’s a terrifying opponent in Book Two, or even now with a bunch of other daemons for backup . . . his ability to be a scary opponent drops off pretty quick past this point as he’s only CR 9 or so. He *does* have some really mean abilities though, including a Harm (I was planning on having him combo the Harm with his breath weapon on the following round, which probably would have killed someone if the Harm succeeded). Furthermore, Lord Bile is pretty smart and is not a coward – he knows he got lucky to escape a certain end to his existence thanks to the party taking out Andaisin, and he probably wouldn’t get so lucky in combat with the party. So staying as far away from them and pestering some other mortals was probably the best course of action for him, and he knows that. Which brings me back to not being sure how to have this decision ultimately bite the party in the ass.

In any event, the daemon was sent home, the party climb back out to find the Star Weavers, on the way back from the infirmary. With the supplies in there, they manage to cure about a half dozen of the infected before they run out of the very specific supplies required for the cure. As a result, they needed to make a trip back to the mainland to go purchase some more supplies. Which they did, going to about half a dozen different herbalists and buying the necessary supplies. It amounted to something like 700 GP or so, which in another surprise move, Cid paid for out of his own pocket.

Abigail and the Star Weavers offered to reimburse him, but he said that saving those people was its own reward and he didn’t need the money. This scored him some *major* points with Abigail, who was shocking to find an honorable Hellknight who cared about the common folk. They chatted a bit on the way back to the Ironworks to cure the remaining people, and Abigail tried to encourage Cid that he was doing the right thing and was walking the right path, and Sarenrae would forgive him of his sins – perhaps She could save him from damnation (planting further seeds there for Cid’s desire to become a paladin himself).

And so the party cured all of the infected, putting an end to the plague 2.0 threat, and ruining completely one prong of the efforts of Adonis’s new master to undermine Ileosa with a new plague/demon invasion crisis. The party was pretty pleased with themselves as they returned to the mainland to regroup and rest before making another sortie into Old Korvosa. But fate had other plans for them.

At this point, I was getting pretty tired of Book Three, and there was still quite a bit of material left to cover – there was the whole resolution of the potential war with Kaer Maga, the demon portal, pilts, what was going on with the grey maidens, and a potential threat to the blood clone of Queen Domina that the party had rescued and hidden away with Fishguts Jim. Rather than let the party deal with all of those in turn as I had let the party meander their way through Book Three thus far, I decided now was a good time to really up the ante. A nice side effect of which would be to make it seem like they were at the finale of Book Three, when instead I had planned to yank the rug out from under them instead (culminated in them fighting their way through Arkona manor as written in Book Three for the *real* finale).

This plan of mine manifested as Zellara manifesting in front of Vaz’em that night (as he was the one still carrying around her deck), and instructing him to get everyone together. Gathering at Zellara’s house, the ghost fortune teller informed the party that she had been told by Pharasma (likely not directly, of course, but being a fortune teller supposedly everything she said came to her direct from the goddess) that a maelstrom was coming their way. Tomorrow was going to be a very dark, very important day indeed, for the fate of Korvosa and many of its people would rest on the actions of the party. Tomorrow was Judgement Day. (Theme music – Doomsday by Globus)

Tomorrow, many people would come to the party for aid, as everything fell apart at once. The party would hold their fate in their hands. Those they aided might escape a horrific fate, but they likely wouldn’t be able to save everyone. Zellara was sorry that this was about to happen, but there was little else she could offer except that warning.

We concluded the session with the following morning, and the very beginning of Judgement Day. Laori insisted that the party take her to see Pilts, and go rescue Salvator Scream from his clutches, RIGHT NOW. When they were skittish to agree to do so yet again, Laori stormed off in a huff, determined to handle it herself. Cid got contacted by Vox, saying that she had retrieved their contracts from Citadel Vraid, and was on her way back to Korvosa – could they meet up to go over them? Vaz’em got contacted by the Star Weavers – they needed the party’s help to get out of Korvosa safely, as last night Ileosa had apparently lost her mind completely and had attempted to arrest Edwin and DeSilva – they had narrowly escaped and now the Star Weavers were together, hiding and waiting for Edwin to rest enough to memorize some Teleports to get them out of town. I can’t remember if they just needed the party to help them evade the guard or what specifically was preventing them from just gtfoing of the city on their own. Rholand was greeted by Ileosa upon waking up in the palace with a request for the party to help the Grey Maidens locate and arrest the Star Weavers. Ileosa had learned of the “Silver Concorde” alliance between members of House Arabasti and House Polphyia (which had been exiled from Korvosa) located in Kaer Maga. She was also wanting the party to go there via Teleport as a strike team and execute the guilty nobles, a sure act of war if ever there was one. The party also got messages from Glorio, saying that they had an idea now on how to deal with the portal and he needed them back here at Arkona manor, and a message from Beautrice saying that they needed some help as some Imperials were nosing around the docks and she got the feeling they were about to get hit. I’m not sure if they had a message sent to them or what triggered it, but the party was also aware of potential trouble coming for Domina & her hosts Fishguts Jim and Naomi/Tiora/who-cares-what-her-name-is.

So basically, everything was happening all at once, and the longer the party took to resolve a particular issue, the worse the outcome got. A couple were also mutually exclusive, of course, like obeying Ileosa and arresting the Star Weavers, or betraying her by helping them flee Korvosa. I left them pondering this laundry list of problems as we concluded the session. Next time – Judgement Day begins in earnest!


Nice, I should try this sometime, Dump all the remaining plot hooks on the PCs RIGHT NOW!!! and see how they react.


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Heeheeheee, you really should! Enjoy the pants-wetting terror on their faces as they realize they actually have to make a hard decision with no default “right” answer! Recently, long after the fact, when I brought up Judgement Day Cid’s player mentioned that it had been one of his favorite parts as it really ratcheted up the tension in the story. It’s probably not something you want to do outside of an arc’s finale, but it definitely helps make said finale memorable!

Sesison Sixty-Eight:

So over the week the party had discussed what challenge they wanted to tackle first, and they decided to get the Star Weavers out of town first. Their interactions with that party from Kaer Maga in dealing with the plague daemons helped, I think, in convincing them that Ileosa was just being crazy accusing them of being spies, and that arresting the Star Weavers and Marquis Luis DeSilva was not in everyone’s best interests.

While the party reunited and got ready to go meet with the Star Weavers (their message had indicated to come to the Three Rings tavern in North Point), Vaz’em went to go see Fishguts Jim and Domina. I recall now that I hadn’t sent a message to them about this plot point yet – the intent was that while they were gearing up to deal with the portal, Kreed would contact them with not-so-subtle threats about sending a few “friends” over to visit Fishguts Jim (he wasn’t aware of Domina’s existence, but he knew the party was friends with Fishguts). That would have put the party in a nice pincher decision – drop everything to go save Fishguts Jim, or press on and shut down the portal before more demons could come through.

So – Vaz’em going and just visiting Fishguts Jim out of the blue threw a bit of a spanner in the works, as he warned them that things might be able to get *very* bad in the city and that they should probably pack up and leave. Immediately. Not helping this justified paranoia was the fact that as Vaz’em was approaching the fishery, he nailed a high DC perception check, and noticed nearby a strange woman hiding in an alleyway, clearly watching the “All the World’s Meat” butchery that Fishguts Jim had taken over. This was Marlessa, the leader of the Dusters who was still pissed off about the whole “murdering Kynndor Thok and leaving him in the street” thing way back in Book One. Adonis Kreed had recruited her into his little family of people the PCs had pissed off over the past two books – which was a fairly short list, given the PCs rarely left any enemy alive.

Noticing Marlessa prompted Vaz’em’s danger sense, as upon realizing she had been seen, Marlessa slipped back into the alleyway and disappeared. So, he advised them to pack up and get out of town immediately, and after a bit of discussion with Domina, it was decided that she would accompany the party. She wanted to finally help fight to protect her city, and assuming she didn’t catch a stray arrow in the knee while with the party, being with them was probably the safest place to be. So, that took care of that potential plot point pretty neatly – or almost. Vaz’em didn’t escort Fishguts Jim and his wife out of the city as they still needed to pack and there was no time to waste waiting for them to get ready. So he left with Domina.

I secretly rolled some dice to determine if Fishguts got out in time before Marlessa came back after Vaz’em left – can’t remember if it was 40% or 60% in their favor, but either way they lost. Marlessa came back shortly after Vaz’em left, just as Fishguts Jim and his wife were walking out the door. She captured both of them, brutually tortured Fishguts Jim within an inch of his life, and murdered his wife in front of him. And then left Fishguts Jim clinging to life so that he could deliver a message to the party – she was coming for them next. This was actually a good decision for her, as several of the party members (Cid in particular) who loved Fishguts for whatever crazy reason, vowed they would have dropped everything to hunt Adonis Kreed and Marlessa down to the ends of the earth if Fishguts Jim had bought it. I think they were only half joking, they loved this random fisherman with absolutely crap luck that kept crossing paths with them (players will be players sometimes).

Meanwhile, Oliver met up with and hired his new minion “Ronda”, a whip-focused bard who could provide various support magic and trip/disarm things (she was pretty good at her job, I might add with a few DM grumbles). She was, indeed, basely loosely on Ronda Roussey of UFC fame, and knew Oliver from before the start of the AP, when he tried to rob her and she kicked his ass (back when they were both level 1). Getting his ass kicked earned Ronda his respect, and they had been acquaintances and occasional “business” (as in crime) partners since then.

Anyway, with Domina in tow the party joined up and ventured to the Three Rings tavern, a well-known watering hole run by a former Halfling adventurer. The tavern was pretty well-known in Korvosa, particularly for its discretion regarding its patrons. Evidentially the Star Weavers had made friends with the proprietor at some point, or she just wanted to help out fellow adventurers, as when the party arrived she directed them to a private back room. The tavern itself was also relatively deserted, save for a old woman drinking some tea in the main room’s corner (no one beat the perception check to notice that this was actually Cinnabar in disguise) and a couple of adventurers that turned out to be old characters that myself and Oliver’s player used to play back in the day in another homebrew game. The cameo here was mostly just for a private laugh and to give the impression that the tavern had a few patrons in at the moment so they weren’t mysteriously closed, but people were being encouraged to stay away to limit the risk of the Star Weavers being exposed (too bad Cinnabar had already found them).

So they find the Star Weavers and Marquis Luis DeSilva in the back room, basically just killing time and hoping they aren’t discovered while Edwin finishes memorizing a fresh set of spells to teleport them all out of here. The party mentioned that they were on their way to close the portal, but they would help protect the Star Weavers until they were able to flee.

And the Star Weavers were going to need protection, as a ruckus in the main room outside got the party’s attention, and they opened the private room’s door to find four men in crimson armor and mantis-shaped masks standing there. In the back corner, the old woman removed her wig, revealing Cinnabar, who called out to the party – the Red Mantis were here to collect the Marquis DeSilva, who they had been hired to kill (by Ileosa). But Cinnabar saw no reason for excess bloodshed, so anyone who stood aside, including the Star Weavers, would be spared. Anyone who got in between them and DeSilva, however, would die.

The party made various threats, and Vaz’em played what cards he had, basically pointing out that the Red Mantis never gave up on a job once accepted – they would keep coming after a target until that target was dead, and they would ensure said target stayed dead. But because of that relentlessness, they could always kill DeSilva later. But if they went after him right now, here in Korvosa, Vaz’em’s city, and tried to go through him to do it, they would make him an enemy forever.

That argument was surprisingly effective on Cinnabar, who started to waver in her conviction that DeSilva had to die this instant. One of the Red Mantis assassins at this point – Davos – spoke up, arguing that the Red Mantis knew no mercy – DeSilva was here in their grasp, and they should strike now instead of negotiating. Cid was quick to verbally smack down the upstart underling, asking Cinnabar if the Red Mantis tolerated such dissention in the ranks – the Hellknights certainly didn’t let underlings talk back to superiors like that (yeah right, Mr. “I’m quitting the Hellknights!”).

Cinnabar had no desire to fight the party to get to DeSilva, due to their impressive reputation and for . . . other reasons that made her not want to get on their bad side. But of course, while as their leader the Red Mantis would follow her orders, Cinnabar cautioned the party that there would be consequences if she allowed DeSilva to slip away now. The party was willing to accept those vague consequences (not knowing, of course, that Davos was right, and when Cinnabar’s own superiors learned about her deliberate withdrawal here instead of attacking it was going to end badly for her). And so Cinnabar ordered the Red Mantis to withdraw, and they obeyed, allowing the party to avoid one fight for the day at least.

If it had come to a fight it might have been a fairly nasty one too – two Red Mantis assassins against the party with the other two picking on the Star Weavers, while Cinnabar went invisible, skirted around the fight, and Death attacked DeSilva. (This was essentially a remake of the encounter with the Red Mantis at Vencarlo’s residence, as there are supposed to be two assassins there waiting for the party as a fairly nasty intro fight to Book Three as-written).

I rebuilt the Red Mantis fairly extensively from how they are depicted in the book, making them ninjas instead of Fighter/Rogues and giving them one level in Oracle with the Tongues curse (they speak Auran, or whatever the air-elemental language is, while in combat – hence why Cinnabar was spouting gibberish during the fight on Arkona’s boat). This seems like a pretty strange design choice, I know, but it gives the Red Mantis some vestigial religious trappings, and more importantly, gives them Obscuring Mist . . . and the ability to see through mist via the Waves Oracle revelation. So one of them pops an Obscuring Mist, and the rest get to enjoy free concealment from which to launch attacks on unfortunate victims. Specifically, a whole lot of Dex-poisoned shuriken using the ninja Ki ability to throw an extra two shuriken a round (the Red Mantis also took the ninja power to deal Dex/str damage on a sneak attack). So basically their own strategy now is to spam opponents with shuriken from the concealment of an Obscuring Mist. I have no idea how well it will work out in practice, but with various buffs (Bless, for example) and masterwork weapons the Red Mantis have a pretty damn high attack bonus, even if their BAB is complete s$@& due to all the multi-classing (Ninja, Oracle, and the Red-Mantis prestige class are all +3/4 BAB so having three of those classes is just brutal).

With the party managing to talk their way out of this fight, however, it pretty much meant that the party would only be fighting the Red Mantis in Book Four onward, so hopefully the assassins are not completely underwhelming, but manageable in the numbers that they will be fighting them. We’ll see – I may bump up the bog-standard Red Mantis one more level in the prestige class so that they can all summon mantis – a swarm of a couple dozen of those crashing into the party ahead of the Red Mantis themselves ought to make for a hilarious and unpleasant tactic, even if the giant mantises are going to be completely useless except as body blockers/flank partners at this point.

The Red Mantis was also the big fight I had planned for if the party went to go protect the Star Weavers, so with Cinnabar forcing them to back down the Star Weavers’ plot line was pretty much resolved without any violence. Edwin completed his studies, and teleported the group back to Kaer Maga. The party figured that was the end of it, but as they got up and headed for the door, there was another teleport displacement of air as the Star Weavers came *back*.

They had fulfilled their duty of getting DeSilva safely back to Kaer Maga, and now they were here to aid the party in closing the demonic portal. Even if Korvosa was about to declare war on Kaer Maga, the Star Weavers would not abandon the people of this city to a potential demonic attack. Plus, they kinda owed the party something after them saving them from the Red Mantis, so helping them save their city seemed like a good way to honor that debt. What a bunch of great guys, those Star Weavers.

But there was more – teleporting back to Kaer Maga had also allowed Edwin to collect his “I’m crazy-well-prepared” stash of rainy day emergency consumable supplies, which he proceeded to dole out to the party (keeping a bunch of scrolls and the like for himself). Rholand got a wand of Cure Critical Wounds (10 charges), Vaz’em got a Wand of Fireball (also with 10 or so charges left), Cid got a Bead of Force, and Oliver got a Stone Salve (cure Petrification or grant Stoneskin). I think everyone also got a potion of Cure Serious Wounds or something as well from the Star Weavers’ stock of supplies.

And with that, the two adventuring parties (plus Domina) set forth for Old Korvosa. First, to meet up with Glorio Arkona to learn of whatever plan he had come up with for disrupting the portal, and then to the Lighthouse itself. It was time to put an end to this latest threat to Korvosa, hopefully nipping it in the bud before it could even get started, unlike the last two disasters that had befallen the city (Lamm’s rampage, and Andaisin’s plague).

And we ended the session there, as the party crossed over into Old Korvosa, and I mentioned that they “happened” to have a “random encounter” on their way to Arkona manor. This was originally planned to be a random encounter while the party was walking around in Old Korvosa, but of course we were cutting the Old Korvosa portion of Book Three short in favor of Judgement Day, so I figured I would shoehorn it in now. What was the random encounter? I’ll tell you all about it in the next writeup. :-p


Sessions Sixty-Five and Sixty-Six:

Interesting response to Oliver's player to finding out about doing the wrong thing by not paying attention -- made a story element out of it, of Trevor having disobeyed orders.

Session Sixty-Seven:

Yeas, that Daemon, Lord Bile has GOT to come back to haunt them, even if not in the flesh. I have a deeeeeeevvvvviiiooooooouuuuusssssss idea -- the Plague cure that they got with the Daemon's help is actually not a cure -- it just makes the Plague temporarily go into remission, and the victims become asymptomatic carriers, as do those that they infect . . . Until the time is right, when the plague comes back with a vengeance.

And by the way -- another great choice of soundtrack, although unfortunately my high-school Latin vocabulary has LONG since degenerated to basic unusability.

(Almost Ninja'd by) Session-Sixty-Eight:

Unchained Fractional Bonus Progression alleviates the multi-3/4-BAB-classing problem. Depending upon feat starvation or lack thereof, another option would be VMC Oracle (replaces the 3rd level character feat with the Revelation, and still grants the Curse); it doesn't grant spellcasting except for an Orison at level 7 assuming non-dumped Charisma, but Wands of just a few charges each would compensate for that). And yes, the Red Mantis Assasins will probably need another level next time.

And . . . A cliffhanger!


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*Leaves recap on cliffhanger. Doesn’t post for a month. Bad DM.

Lord Bile:

The thing about the plague cure not working as advertised, at this point, would actually be a net benefit for the party overall as it would cause disruption in Korvosa, drawing Ileosa, Togomor, and company’s attention away from killing them.

Session Sixty-Nine:

So, last time I promised you an ambush “random encounter” (that was indeed originally a random encounter before I scrapped what was left in Old Korvosa in favor of making our heroes deal with it ALL AT ONCE). And that’s exactly what the party got, as they moved into Old Korvosa with the Starweavers and Domina’s clone.

They were walking down a random street minding their own business when their old friend Ezram the Rovagug cult leader appeared atop a building at the end of the street. Vowing that this time there would be no escape, their city was about to be destroyed by pawns of the Master, blah blah blah, Ezram finished his brief rant with an introduction of one of the Master’s “children”. Cue the front part of the building Ezram was standing on exploding outward as an immense (okay, just Large-sized technically) four-limbed freak with a head that split vertically in a massive oversized maw full of teeth crashed out onto the street. This was a Gug, a hideous aberration of Lovecraft fame that I *thought* would be a pretty nasty encounter at CR 10 versus a level 9 party.

And to give the Star Weavers something to do while the party fought this least spawn of Rovagug, and maybe to give the Gug a couple buddies, cultists started pouring out of nearby buildings on either side of the street that the party was standing on. Their contribution to the fight was immediately nullified when the Star Weavers took the left side and Rholand sealed off the right side entrances with a wall of stone shape (I really should make them stop using that spell. Meh.)

The Gug advanced slowly towards the party, confident in its ability to rend them all to shreds. Vaz’em got a little too far ahead of the others, and after landing one sneak attack on it he got backhanded nearly a dozen feet back behind the abomination (Awesome Blow). And . . . that was pretty much the only cool thing the Gug did.

It got one full attack against Oliver on the following round, which given the last time a big melee dude with four attacks (Vrock) pounded on him, Oliver got shredded. But Oliver had upgraded his armor and shield a bit in the time since, and the Gug didn’t roll very well, so only one claw managed to get through (no Rend damage even). And that was it.

The party swarmed over it, Vaz’em ripped out its internal organs, Cid shocking grasped it for a decent chunk of damage, Oliver slashed it a couple times, and it just died. 150+ hit points don’t go anywhere at this point, even with a decent AC. Ezram blinked in shock and then with a curse that their victory was meaningless and their city would still burn, he dropped out of sight and got the hell out of there.

The party was understandably wanting to chase him down, but I put the kibosh on that pretty quick because I didn’t have anything beyond the immediate area prepared and didn’t feel like throwing out the future encounter of the final confrontation with Ezram at the lighthouse after my big melee monster got trashed in like 2 rounds. So f@$@ it, he got away by DM Fiat. The players wisely didn’t decide to press the matter, so they just shrugged and moved on. (If they had really insisted I would have gone with my plan for Ezram’s escape that I never bothered mapping out, which was that the building had a hole down to the sewer that Ezram jumped into, and they’d have to wade through like 6,000 fanatical cultists that came out of nowhere to block the way while their leader still escaped.

Following the random encounter, the combined parties moved on to Arkona manor, where they got all of the remaining information on the lighthouse that Arkona and Rolth were able to piece together. Namely that there was a focus at the top of the lighthouse that was keeping the portal to the Abyss open, and destroying it should cause the energy from the Thassilon ruin within the Jeggare River bed to release the rest of its energy harmlessly without blowing up a significant chunk of the city.

All of the Empire of Korvosa’s forces had taken up defensive positions around that region of Old Korvosa, creating a wall that would be difficult to break through, at least in the time they probably had left before the portal when nuclear and an army of demons came through. Fortunately, Glorio had figured out a possible solution – his forces would strike the western barricades with everything they had, drawing as much of the Imperial presence in the area as possible. Meanwhile, the party would block inside a building just outside the Imperial perimeter, use an old smuggling tunnel that Glorio “just happened” to know about, which led to a warehouse just inside the southern perimeter.

The party would have to take down the Imperial forces within the warehouse quickly, and then move towards the lighthouse before any nearby positions could realize their perimeter had just been breached.

And that was pretty much the session – nothing really exciting, but it bought me another week to frantically try to prepare the map for the next series of encounters – an immense map that detailed pretty much the *entire* four or five city blocks that led from this southern warehouse north to the lighthouse. The plan was for the party to pretty much be fighting non-stop city block by city block all the way, with constant demons, Imperials, and cultists pouring in from all sides until they finally reached the warehouse. The party came up with a different solution at first, treating the map more like a Metal Gear Solid homage than a Doom level, but that only got them a couple city blocks before the fighting finally had to start. We’ll talk about the first part of that slog next month – I mean, session.


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Haha, just kidding – I wasn’t really going to make you wait a month for the next update! I would *never* do that. >>

Session Seventy:

So, with a desperate plan in place, the two party of heroes sneaked into the building, went through the narrow tunnel one-by-one, and found themselves in a small concealed room beneath the warehouse floor. They could hear Imperials above them, making idle chit-chat with no idea of the hurt that was about to be unleashed on them. When the party was mostly through the tunnel and they heard the shouts of alarm as the diversionary assault on the western barricades began, they burst up into the warehouse with a vengeance.

In all, ten Imperial grunts and another swordman officer awaited them, but these guys didn’t even really slow the combined group down at all. They tore through the assembled Imperials like a tank through tissue paper - something that Oliver’s player actually appreciated, since it was good every now and then to just completely maul an encounter. And that was pretty much the intent here – the Imperials and lesser demons individually didn’t pose much threat at all to the combined party, and thus they could wade through a sea of them on their way to the lighthouse.

Looking out through the warehouse’s windows, Vaz’em could see that nobody seems to have noticed the party’s surprise attack (and given how quickly the Imperials were all mowed down that should hardly be a surprise). However, there was a guard post of more Imperials only a little ways away from the warehouse, at the next intersection over. It seemed likely that they would be noticed as soon as they exited the building.

And here is where the party decided to turn this session into a spy thriller instead of an action movie. Instead of swarming out of the building and yelling out the question of who’d like to die first, they decided to sneak out one of the side entrances as far away from the outpost as possible, running from collapsed building to collapsed building until they were past the outpost. I tried to throw a potential monkey wrench in this plan by having a chaos beast sifting through the rubble nearby, but they managed to roll well enough on Stealth to sneak past it.

Moving a little bit further to the north, the party saw more monsters wandering about (one of the reasons why I didn’t expect the stealth approach was that inevitably, the party was going to have to move past a group of Imperials or monsters just hanging out amid the devastation, and that fight would make noise which would bring in the next nearest group, and so on). At this point, they came up with the logical idea of getting up inside one of the buildings, getting up on the roof, and then using the Old Korvosa Shingles (the network of catwalks and rope bridges above the city streets) to get around.

I rolled some dice to see if there was a building with roof access nearby, and sure enough the party’s luck continued to hold as they found such a building immediately, allowing them to get up onto the roof. This allowed them to move around on top of the cluster of buildings up to the next block intersection, but not before they ran into a Gibbering Mouther that was just hanging out up on their roof. Again, I was going to have it start screaming nonsense and make a racket that would bring the wrath of the district down on their heads, but they were pretty quick in butchering it (it was only a piddly CR 4) so once again they managed to escape detection.

Finally though, their luck gave out, as the party reached the roof overlooking the next intersection, just in time to watch a group of citizens come running down the street from the north screaming at the top of their lungs. From the north, came a group of what was basically goatmen from Diablo (modified Schir demons, but they’re essentially Diablo goatmen so I just went with that, including using pictures from Diablo as their tokens) running after them with magically enhanced speed, and rapidly gaining ground on the unfortunate citizens. One woman got skewered from behind and pinned to the ground, and another man at the back of the fleeing group got cut down.

The Star Weavers urged that they could not ignore this and simply let the unfortunate citizens be slaughtered, and the party more or less agreed with that sentiment. And so the party came out of stealth mode as they leaped down/climbed down, and such to engage the goatmen before they could kill the rest of the citizens. And that’s where we ended the session, as it was running late and we didn’t have time to run this encounter – which was pretty sizable!


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Session Seventy-One:

So with a group of Korvosan citizens trying and failing miserably to outrun a group of goatmen demons, the party at the Star Weavers urging decides to break the cover of stealth and intervene. The handful of citizens still on their feet runs past them as the party descends to the street, blocking the intersection. The goatmen (heavily modified advanced Schirs) are all too happy to have something more . . . challenging to play with, and battle is quickly joined. Abigail and Sergio go down to stand alongside the party, while Edwin, Granthor, and Domina stay up on the roof to provide ranged support (well Domina & Edwin – Garrathor there as a bodyguard for them).

Battle Music - Brothers in Arms from Mad Max Fury Road

Prior to the fight they buff up a bit, Domina tagging most of the group with Haste while Cid casts a magus spell to let everyone’s weapons function as cold iron, bypassing the Schir’s weak DR – although the Schirs don’t really need the DR as the combination of their thick hides with chain shirts is enough to ward off a surprising number of blows. It doesn’t stop Ronda from disarming the demons of their halbreds or tripping them up, nor Oliver from getting crit after crit after crit (he was definitely MVP of this fight).

While the battle still rages in the middle of the intersection, *another* group of goatmen come speeding in from the east street that feeds into the intersection (lighthouse to the north, party came from the south). At least, they do until a wall of Ice slams down into the middle of the street, cutting the demons off from the group, courtesy of Edwin. But the ice wall doesn’t last very long as the schirs start chipping away at the ice wall with a good bit of success (they hit decently hard with their halbreds, enough to break down a ~10 HP section of ice wall a round). The lead goatman also summoned a trio of dretches to help out, which chewed through the wall even more quickly. None of the demons seemed to particularly mind the cold damage from walking through the broken wall sections, either (yay resist 10 Cold!).

As holes started appearing in the wall, Flank moved in to block the way while Rholand stayed back to heal the rest of the party in case anyone went down. While he was near enough that he probably could have walked over to Flank and healed him, for whatever reason he didn’t and this would ultimately lead to tragedy. Alone, Flank tried to hold the line against a trio of dretches, a trio of schir, and their squad leader. While his AC was pretty good thanks to mithril barding, and he was a ridiculous dps machine also known as a cat, this time neither helped him as the schir high AC meant that Flank didn’t land a lot of blows, the DR reduced the damage, and the Schirs quickly moved around to surround flank and attack the lion from all sides.

The last straw came when the lead schir stepped forward with its ranseur and knocked the legs out from under Rholand’s cat friend, leaving him vulnerable to the others who wasted no time in pouncing. Flank went unconscious, and the dretches, being a&#~+$$ demons with nothing better to do, finished the job with a full attack from each of them, literally rending the poor lion limb from limb. RIP Flank (and huzzah, I met my quota of killing one animal companion a book!)

While Rholand was struggling to deal with this sudden loss from a most horrific event, the party had other potential problems as from the west street, reinforcements in the form of Rovagug cultists came charging towards the intersection. In the lead were two more gibbering mouthers, a cultist playing a flute that seemed to grant him limited control over them, along with another beefy cultists wielding a greataxe and mounted on some sort of lean, faceless beast, like a cone-headed velociraptor (a destrachan).

The Star Weavers had this handled though – Edwin greeted the lot of them with a fireball, frying the two gibbering mouthers and their bard handler, and singing the other cultist and his mount. With a fierce cry, Granthor followed that up by leaping down from above at the mount, dealing it a huge gash with his waraxe. The destrachan retaliated by screaming in his face for a bunch of sonic damage, but that only got its head cut off on Granthor’s next turn. The last cultist leapt free of his mount and started having a “let’s hit each other with our axes back and forth until one of us falls over” contest with Granthor.

Before Edwin could help anymore, two Imperial snipers who had been sneaking along the rooftops closer to the fighting to see what was going on made *their* move, pumping the wizard pull of arrows and badly injuring him. Edwin wisely decided now was a good time to retreat down inside the building to chug a couple potions, while Domina engaged the now-revealed pair of snipers, and Cid flew up after them with an annoyed curse. He demanded that the two of them surrender upon landing on the roof (and pointing at the demonic chaos going on down in the streets and asking them if that’s *really* what they were fighting for). The snipers refused, at least until Cid pummeled one of them unconscious and threatened the other one with a similar fate – that finally got a sensible reaction (I surrender!). Cid stabilized the dying one and tied them both up, trying to convince them both that what they really should be doing is helping their fellow citizens survive this demonic invasion instead of fighting alongside the demons and cultists who both just wanted to destroy everything and kill everyone. That pretty much took up the rest of Cid’s time in the fight, although thankfully at this point the number of Schirs was finally starting to drop as Oliver continued to crit his way through them, and Vaz’em occasionally landed a helping blow.

Finally (although it took a bit into the following session), the last of the demons lay dead, black blood oozing out to coat the cobblestones as their bodies did not fade away into a cloud of ash. Like the Vrocks, these demons were actually here in the flesh, drawn through the portal. Overhead, the portal continued to flash and grow, with periodic streaks of fire lancing down from it – more demons coming through. It wouldn’t be long now before an entire army of the things were present, and after patching themselves up a bit, and spending a moment to mourn Flank, the party moved on. Cid convinced the two Imperial snipers to take a stand and escort the small group of survivors to safety, while the party and the Star Weavers continued on to the lighthouse to end this before it could get any worse.

Thankfully, the party was pleased with the Star Weavers contributions during the fight, which were helpful (and a little impressive with Edwin and Granthor annihilating an entire wave of enemies by themselves), without stealing the show from our heroes. Cid’s player remarked at one point that it felt like a superhero team up, and that was pretty much exactly the intent here. Sadly, I wasn’t able to find the theme that plays during the big climatic fight at the end of the Avengers, but I was humming it as we went through this session and the next.

Schir:

So, normally the goatmen are a somewhat unimpressive CR 4, but with a few modifications I made them surprisingly dangerous. Like the greater creustrodaemon, I swapped out one of their feats for light armor proficiency, and I gave them the advanced simple template to bump them all up to CR 5. For the leader of each squad, I slapped an extra two levels of fighter on them, giving them combat expertise, improved trip, and ranseurs instead of halberds. This resulted in the grunt Schirs having an impressive AC 27, and the elites AC 30 (32 while using combat expertise) – not something you want to throw at a low-level party on a whim, but for a well-oiled melee death machine like the Grey Thugs, the schirs gave them a pretty solid fight.


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Session Seventy-Two:

With the last of the demons and cultists lying dead in the street, the way towards the lighthouse was momentarily clear for our two team-up parties of murder machines. Unfortunately a number of my Maptools files from here through the end of Book Three got corrupted somehow, as Maptools can no longer open them (curse words). So we’ll just have to go with my vague recollection of events from here on out.

The group continues to advance towards the north, heading in the direction that the civilians had fled from. At the next intersection they find several smashed buildings, likely where the civilians had been hiding, and the two giant demons who had done the smashing. Sergio identifies them as Balbans, big, dumb living siege engines that the demons sometimes used. He urges Rholand to make use of one of the scrolls he had given him, which contained a Dismissal spell – because now would be a good time to use it!

As one of the Balbans lumbers forward to block the party from getting into the intersection, the second one uses its teleport at-will ability to blink in behind the party, trapping them in a pincher maneuver between the two intersections (not so dumb now, are they?). Sergio tries a dismissal but it fizzles against the thing’s SR. Rholand manages to breach the thing’s SR from the scroll Dismissal, but the thing makes its somewhat unlikely will save to resist – darn. So . . . back to the hard way of getting rid of these things.

While most of the party moves up to deal with the one Balban, Edwin decides he’d rather be flanking than getting flanked, and offers anyone who wants to come with him and Sergio a lift – the elderly cleric already placing a hand on the wizard’s shoulder. No one takes him up on the offer as it turns out, and the Star Weavers dimensional door forward to get away from the rear Balban before it can move up.

At some point one of them snatches Abigail up and starts lifting her up and bodily smashing her against the pavement (one of its abilities lets it pull a “Hulk vs. Loki” moment if it makes a grapple check). While it certainly looked painful, the paladin merely grunts and continues hacking at the thing’s arm with her smite evil-infused longsword until the beast eventually collapses (pretty much this was her “I’m a badass NPC!” moment like Edwin & Granthor got last time).

The party dispatches the other one in fairly short order – despite the momentary panic of the teleport pincher, it wasn’t a particularly involved fight (certainly not compared to the sprawling schir brawl from the previous session). Abigail picks herself up off the ground, Cid asks if she’s alright, and she nods while using some of her lay on hands to numb the pain of her entire bruised body. Then the party presses on to the north again, the lighthouse looming near now – another block or so and they’d be at the foot of the structure.

Unfortunately, the last intersection before the lighthouse is the site of an unexpected brawl between more goatmen and a squadron of bearded devils and a familiar Erinyes (the same one the party dispatched during the daemon fight at the Ironworks). With their superior armor the schirs were definitely coming out ahead in the fight, not that the party really wanted either side to win. With both sides focused on exterminating the other, though, the party only stopped briefly to fight them. Basically, Oliver, Cid, and Rholand cut down the ones that were in the way (before getting bogged down a little bit as the schirs turned their attention on them), while Vaz’em scouted ahead to the lighthouse.

This was a little bit of a mistake as it turned out, since it technically “aggrod” the next encounter, which was the cult of Rovagug’s line of defenses at the base of the lighthouse. The cobblestones in front of the lighthouse were soaked with blood and littered with bodies – sacrificial victims to the demons, and each life taken allowed another demon to step through the strengthening portal immediately. Two more pipers worked full time to chain fresh victims down to the two makeshift altars set up just in front of the lighthouse’s door, while four beefy axe cultists stood guard. And at the center of it all, of course, was Ezram, ranting and screaming that the hour of destruction of all things was at hand for this tainted city.

The worst part of this situation, however, was the fact that the cultists had run out of civilian victims, and were now preparing to sacrifice Beautrice’s team of grey maidens that they had captured, Beautrice included. Bound thoroughly with leather thongs, the grey maidens were unable to resist as the pipers dragged the first two onto the altars, and slit their throats. Immediately two fiery streaks came down from the portal, slamming into the ground in front of the lighthouse to reveal two fresh Schir grunts (Beautrice would summon another Balban if she were to be sacrificed, but “fortunately” she was to be the very last sacrifice on the docket of half a dozen other grey maidens).

Vaz’em also catches sight out on the “dry” riverbed of the Thassilon structure that’s powering the lighthouse’s portal. It’s surrounded by devils, and Togomor was sauntering into it, Gwen at his side. So – that’s where those devils had come from, but why the seneschal was here (unless he was planning on deactivating the ruins), the party had no idea and were frankly a bit too busy to care about at this point.

It was about at this point that we wrapped up the session, with the party preparing to assault the lighthouse before Beautrice and all of her grey maidens would get their throats slashed. Since Vaz’em was still in the lead at this point by himself (with a think a couple of the Star Weavers), help seemed pretty far away at this point.


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Session Seventy-Three:

So with the cultists sacrificing grey maidens and simultaneously bringing in more schir reinforcements, the party was on a bit of a clock here and unfortunately they had tripped themselves up a bit with having Vaz’em and a couple other people run ahead while still bogged down in the previous encounter. Still, Vaz’em did his best to throw a wrench in things by popping out of invisibility to tag Ezram with a couple arrows, which was enough of a threat to prompt the cultist leader to retreat to inside the lighthouse where the catfolk ninja couldn’t sniper him anymore. Fortunately, the swarm of axe-wielding bloodrager cultists with schir backup could handle this, right?

Well, even if they couldn’t, a dark shadow lifted off from one of the high windows of the lighthouse, and with a shriek a by-now-obnoxiously familiar vrock descended on the group to delay them a bit longer. Yes, for the third time, C~%%otron, Destroyer of Bridges, came face to fist with the party, and this time only one of them would be walking away! . . . Okay, yeah, he landed, got his screech off and maybe a full attack or two, and then Cid and Abigail gutted him like a fish. But he still held them back while Vaz’em got dogpiled by cultists and had to go full defensive (putting his AC up around Oli levels), while the pipers hauled the dead grey maidens off of the altars and started dragging fresh ones over for sacrifice (a process that took about 3 rounds to complete from start to finish, which was pretty damn fast when you think of it as 18 seconds rather than 3 rounds – combat time is so weird.

Granthor joined up with Vaz’em shortly thereafter, getting a majority of the cultist’s attention and giving him a flanking partner to fillet people with. It wasn’t so easy though, as the axe-murderer cultists were tough (bloodrager HP, yay!) and had the sticky blood spell that caused any melee weapon hitting them to risk getting stuck on a failed reflex save (resulting in Vaz’em getting his claws stuck once or twice I think, along with Cid’s falcata at one point). And, of course, more high-AC Schirs coming in every three rounds to fill the gap.

Hoping to stop the pipers from continuing to execute the grey maidens, Rholand summoned a hound archon who teleported over (I’ve been really lax about letting summoneded outsiders keep their teleport at-will ability – seemed only fair to let the good guys enjoy that too) and started whacking the pipers. Unfortunately the archon wasn’t entirely successful at his job – most of the grey maidens were still sacrificed, and only two were left soon enough – Beautrice and one of the others.

Switching tactics, the hound archon targeted Beatrice’s bonds instead, partially freeing her and allowing her to start fighting back. In a fairly improbable turn of events, the piper who had been trying to sacrifice her rolled like gangbusters on his grapple checks, and he swiftly had her tied back down to the altar ready for sacrifice.

Meanwhile, Granthor had taken a pounding from the cultists, to the point that if he was hit again he’d go unconscious and die due to the whole temporary Con thing barbarians get. So despite raging, I decided he had *just* enough presence of mind to use the Withdrawal action to fall back for healing rather than fight to the bitter end (as there were still several axe-murderer cultists up at this point).

By this point everyone was finally participating in the fight in front of the lighthouse though, and the tide quickly turned as the weight of a whole lot of high-level people poured into the immediate area and slaughtered everything. Determined to fulfill his purpose in life as a throat-slitter, the last piper tried to bring his knife down on Beautrice’s throat despite Cid standing right there, and got his head chopped off for it from the AOO. Beautrice slumped against the altar in relief at the last second save, and a few moments later a wing of Hellknights flew overhead, cleaving through the random demons flying around above like a battering ram. Immediately behind them were two large manticores, carrying a full squad of grey maidens who swiftly dismounted (the new grey maiden replacements for the Sable Marines – manticore riders instead of griffons).

Vox and Cyrus were among the Hellknights present, and they said that they were here to help. There was a brief confrontation with the grey maiden commander when she recognized the Star Weavers and that they were to be arrested on sight, but Beatrice quickly took command and forced the lieutenant to back down. And then as if aware that their meal ticket to a city full of innocent victims was in danger, with a joint scream all of the demons in Old Korvosa started heading back to the lighthouse. The Grey Maidens and Hellknights started taking up defensive positions while Vox and Beautrice urged the party to get up to the top of the lighthouse with the Star Weavers and put an end to this threat in the way that only PCs could (with judicial application of murder).

The party healed up and got ready to breach the lighthouse and the portal’s very *last* line of defense, and we called it a night there.


Sessions Sixty-Nine - Seventy-Three: Okay, I'm caught up to the next cliff-hanger!


Spoiler in case you ever have a session that has to depict Pharasma and/or The Boneyard:
THIS is the soundtrack you want, and not too far off from being the video track you want also.


Spoiler in case you need to depict more Undead:
The WarCraft III (both Reign of Chaos and Frozen Throne) Undead music -- any of these soundtracks, but especially Reign of Chaos Undead #3.


Too bad we haven't heard from you in a while, Inspectre. I hope you're well.


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Hello again, Paizo board and friends!
I have been away for so long – it’s good to be back! I am in good health, and I apologize for my unannounced absence these past few months. I was simply very busy this past summer with a variety of projects, and at some point it all became too much and I instinctively downsized my list of activities in order to keep the few most important things still running. I am sorry that this journal/AP change log/DM moustache twirling was not one of the projects that was kept going, and that I just dropped it without a word.

That being said, one of the important projects that I *did* manage to keep running was this game, so I am once again an impressive number of sessions behind! I will attempt to rectify that, and hopefully more tales of my unfortunate players will serve as an acceptable offer of apology for my disappearance.

Session Seventy-Four:

So, it’s been a while since I last wrote of this campaign, but should you need a refresher course you merely need to look up a bit to find the previous session log. To summarize, the party had bought their way to the base of the lighthouse, killing all of the cultists of Rovagug present and forcing their leader Ezram to retreat inside. Above, the demonic portal continued to grow as arcane lightning flashed across the sky – if the party was to put a stop to this before it was too late, they would need to do so soon.

With a mixed force of Hellknights and Grey Maidens holding off any demons or cultists attempting to reach the lighthouse to reinforced its remaining defenses (and attack the party from behind), the party healed up a bit and then charged inside, the Star Weavers and Domina right behind them.

They entered the bottom level of the lighthouse to find that the cultists had done some redecorating – namely, they had painted the walls and floor with blood, tracing foul runes with the crimson “paint” all of which were glowing with an eerie light. Presumably, all of this blood had been provided by the small mountain of human corpses that were currently stacked up along one wall of the circular room, forming a makeshift barricade of sorts (merely difficult terrain). At the back of the room waited Ezram and two more great-axe carrying cultists. Ezram did his typical ranting and raving, but before the party could bum rush him to get him to shut up he played his trump card.

Theme Music – Lil’ Slugger from Super Meat Boy OST

With a scream Ezram yelled for something called Fester to arise and consume these troublesome meddlers. Tentacles (of course there were tentacles!) burrowed up through the stone, bursting through the floor to anchor themselves into the walls as the middle of the room’s floor collapsed, revealing a seemingly bottomless pit within which something massive stirred. A gargantuan mutated otyugh, to be precise – Fester, the spawn of Broodmaster Pestilience (the giant colossal otyugh that attacked Castle Korvosa with Andaisin, that the party never fought and had to be put down by Togomor). I never give up on a gimmick fight, simply move it forward, and since the players had dodged the Pestilience fight in Book 2, now it was time to pay the piper for that.

This time, rather than fight a massive otyugh in a Mario Bros. esque platformer fight over a sea of molten Blood Veil, the gimmick was to get up to the top of the tower before Fester managed to pull himself up to their level and actually join the fight, at which point he would simply eat them and they’d probably die (it’s a gigantic mutant otyugh nearly the size of the lighthouse itself, come on, I know adventurers kill things like that for fun but there’s got to be a limit somewhere). Fortunately, it would take Fester several rounds to pull himself up onto their level, and they could delay the otyugh further by severing the thick anchor tentacles spaced around the edges of the pit that were Fester’s primary means of pulling himself up. Meanwhile, Fester would harass them by “spawning” grappling constrictor tentacles, and throw up Large-sized “barrier” tentacles to block their path.

The good news is that the party got the heavy-handed hint that fighting Fester wasn’t a very good idea. The bad news was that Ezram won initiative in the opening round, and decided the best way to deal with these interlopers was to drop a Evard’s Black Tentacles on the doorway, snaring the whole group. And he rolled really, really, really well on the grapple check. So the entire party got wrapped up in more tentacles while their doom winched itself a little bit closer, and the two axe-chopper cultists moved around the pit to block the way further. Satisfied with his work, Ezram decided now was a good time to move up to the second floor, because he really didn’t want to stick around and get turned into a pincushion by Vaz’em (that one sneak attack arrow outside had convinced him quite strongly of that).

It took a whole lot of dispel magics before one finally stuck (Domina blew through *a lot* of Arcana points), but eventually she or Cid managed to dispel the tentacles, freeing the party and allowing them to engage the cultists. Meanwhile Fester had thrown up tentacles everywhere, and I had burned through my entire pre-made batch of tokens for the first 5 rounds or so. It was at about this point that I realized this fight was going to take way, way too damned long if Fester kept spawning tentacles every single round, so I made him stop. Likewise, I decided that instead of chasing the party all the way up to the top of the tower before it finally collapsed under the damage from all the tentacle burrowing and the otyugh’s weight, if the party severed all three anchor tentacles that was enough to drop Fester back down the pit to fall to its doom(?).

So, they took out the two cultists relatively easily, hacked through the various tentacles Fester sent up after them, and hacked their way through the tentacles anchoring it in place. With a panicked roar, Fester fell back down into the pit and went splat at the bottom (presumably? Can’t remember if I explicitly said he went splat, now that I think about it . . . *evil DM grin* )

With the massive otyugh off their backs, the party ascended to the second floor to find Ezram in discussion (if it can be called that when you’re an insane gibbering cultist to a god of destruction) with the mad derro Varrelo. The fated rematch was now ready to begin, only this time the Rovagug side didn’t have their b+~*~+~! grabby chokers to slow the party down. Even so, Varrelo was still a buzzsaw, as the party learned to their discomfort as he torn into Cid, mirror images or not. The kukri-wielding derro was rather terrifying thanks to his impressive series of attacks – 4 I think – each of which did a sizable chunk of damage when they connected. Cid went down, and I believe would have died if Varrelo had continued his full-attack into Cid or used his next round of actions to go after the fallen Hellknight. But I am a “kind and merciful DM” (in the style of Xerxes from 300), and so after Cid went down to the second or third swing in the second or third round of full-attack beatdown I had Varrelo shift the rest of his attacks to Vaz’em instead.

Despite his minor victory, Varrleo was still one derro against a combined two party’s worth of adventurers (he was meant to be merely a speed-bump while Fester continued to climb after them and Ezram ran up to the third floor to summon a small platoon of dretches). He went down, and the party swarmed over Ezram before he could get away (despite casting from the bottom of the stairs leading up to the third and final floor of the lighthouse). Taking a severe beating, Ezram withdrew up the stairs, and went past a waiting Rholand who got an Attack of Opportunity. And as is typical for Rholand, he delivered a crushing blow to the cult leader’s sternum with his Bec De Corbin, there was a meaty crack, and the cultist mastermind who had gotten away so many times before slumped down onto the stairs, dead.

Keenly aware that their work was not yet done for the portal was still going, the party ascended up to the third-floor, and from there up one last flight of stairs to the attic of the lighthouse, where the spotlight itself was kept. Standing at the far side of the room watching them were a trio of strange, ogre-sized reptilian creatures – two big crocodile brutes and behind them something else – a winged snake creature, a halo of arcane runes floating above its head. This one, the apparent leader of the three greeted them with a note of amusement and introduced itself, all in raspy but perfectly understandable Common.

“Greetings, mortals. I am Xoqual, Imentesh.”

After a bit of study, Cid recognize the strange snake-like creatures as Proteans, beings of pure chaos and raw energy. Despite its nature, however, Xoqual was quite amicable and open with the party, willing to discuss its purpose here. So rather than attacking it immediately, they parleyed, and learned a few interesting things in return.

They learned that Xoqual had indeed by Called here by the cult of Rovagug, but he had come on his own initiative because he wished to spare the city from a worse fate than a demon invasion (yes, seriously). Namely the return of Agonybringer (Kazavon) as he was called in the ancient tongue. Xoqual was aware that he was awakening here, and having seen the horrors that he unleashed upon the people he conquered six hundred years ago, Xoqual had come to help the cult of Rovagug destroy this city out of mercy as its citizens would suffer a far worse fate than what the demons could ever inflict (a fate that the party would learn first-hand about come Book Six, and their return to Korvosa, heh heh heh heh).

Xoqual also explained that he himself was the locus for the portal – destroying him would close the breach, and if done in the next five minutes or so, should prevent the demonic armies of General Ank-rah (I think that was his name), scion of Baphomet, from pouring through to conquer Korvosa and open up a second front in the war on the Worldwound – not that they need worry about that too much – Xoqual had no love for demons, and so would not permit himself to be use to keep the portal open indefinitely.

Despite their attempts at diplomacy, Xoqual was adamant in his (quite correct) convictions that the people of Korvosa were better off dead and/or enslaved by demons for eternity than allow Agonybringer/Kazavon to do as he wished with them, and use them to fuel his return to threatening the entire world with domination.

The party had a quick conference with the Star Weavers – since this was their city, the party had first swing at Xoqual – the Star Weavers would handle the other protean bodyguards. Despite their difference of opinion, Xoqual was a fair sort, and so allowed the party time to cast any buff spells they wished (he of course did the same thing) before the duel to decide the fate of their city began.

When both sides were ready to begin, Xoqual cast Polymorph Any Object on the walls, dismissing them into a storm of crows that flew off in every direction and exposing the combatants to the portal storm’s energies. Bolts of arcane energy flashed directly overhead, and the portal itself hung less than a hundred feet directly above them, the eager cries of demons as they strained against the last feeble bonds of reality echoing all around them. Xoqual flew up off the platform and directly up into the storm of chaotic arcane energy, daring the party to follow him. Sergio cast Air Walk on the party ,allowing them to ascend up into the sky after the Imentesh.

All this pageantry from the past several sessions, and the scene of fighting in the sky around the demonic portal, was all meant to be simply a fake-out of the big final Book fight that I tended to throw down at them. But this wasn’t meant to be the end of Book Three, not yet, for I intended for our heroes to experience their greatest fall just after the moment of their greatest triumph after completing this fight. Sadly, the very brutal, very personal beating that I leveled at each of them immediately following this fight made them very gun-shy about a-going dungeon crawling through the Arkona residence, so they fled the city instead and we had a rather anti-climactic end to Book Three. But at least we had this very dramatic fight against Xoqual to serve as the final battle in Book Three instead – thank goodness I provided all of this build-up for a “fake out” (that turned out to be the *actual* final fight of Book Three), else the ending of Book Three would have been simply flat!

Unfortunately we ran out of time to actually run this fight, so we completed it the following session. In between this session and the next, however, I ran each person’s downfall as a separate private session. They were most effective as a surprise kick-to-the-balls (despite me taunting them all that misery was coming their way for a number of sessions now), as evidenced by their following admittedly quite reasonable and prudent cowardice and flight from Korvosa. Rather than recap those private torture sessions here, since in-game they occurred chronologically after this fight (I expected them to survive Xoqual after all, and figured if they won even with casualties Ileosa would be happy to resurrect them since they were the Heroes of Korvosa yet again – the *last* time she would be happy with them at all.) I will cover those after next session’s write-up. Hopefully it won’t take me another three months to write it up!


^Now what's coming up next I've GOT to see . . . .

Session Seventy-Four:

And did Fester fall back in with a splat or a splash? This could make a big difference . . . .


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Session Seventy-Five:

I honestly don’t recall, although I’m pretty sure that I gave the impression that it was quite dead. I suppose I could always have a Huge-sized Otyugh show up in Book Six that is the spawn of Fester, the spawn of Broodlord Pestilience, just for laughs.

So for the most part we had gotten the pleasantries out of the way last session, and thus this session started with the fight against Xoqual pretty much immediately. While the Star Weavers did battle with the two lesser Proteans (Naunets for those curious) on the lighthouse’s new open roof, our heroes ascended up into the storm to do battle with Xoqual the Imentesh. A battle that quite quickly revealed some unique environmental details.

Theme Music: God in Fire from Dissidia 2

Ahead of the battle, I had created several template images of the sky arena that I could copy and paste into place, one over top of each other in the background layer. Each image had its own unique pattern of lightning that I had rolled up ahead of time, filling different rows and columns of the map each round randomly. Xoqual was able to read the patterns in the lightning and thus positioned himself to frequently get hit by the lightning and gain one of the unique “power surge” benefits that the lightning granted. The lightning came with a cost though – getting struck by a bolt did 4d6 damage of random energy damage (Xoqual was resistant to a number of different elements, but as it turned out he kept getting hit by electrical damage, which did full damage >< ). The benefits were pretty significant though, as I wanted to incentivize getting struck by the lightning, either deliberately or accidentally (although no one generally went out of their way to get the benefits, more’s the pity.) The “power surge” granted a random benefit, determined by a 1d6:
1) Vitality Surge: Gain 8d6 temp HP. During your turn, you may dispel this as a free action to gain Fast Healing 5. Benefit ends in 2d4 Rounds
2) Power Surge: Add 1d6 damage of the energy type you juse took to all weapon attacks. May dispel upon landing a hit to deal 3d10 damage of the same energy type. Lasts 1d6 Rounds.
3) Mobility Surge: Gain a Fly speed of 100' with perfect mobility. Dispel at the end of your turn to dimension door to any spot within the arena. Lasts 1d8 rounds
4) Trickery Surge: Gain a Blur-Like effect (20% miss chance) but not concealment. Dispel at the end of your turn to gain 1d4+2 Mirror Images. Lasts 1d4 Rounds.
5) Speed Surge: Gain the benefits of Haste for 1d4 rounds. Dispel at the start of your turn to gain a +5 speed bonus to your to-hit rolls for that round.
6) Insight Surge: You can foresee where the next set of energy bolts will be, and gain a +2 Insight bonus to AC. Dispel when struck by an attack to automatically negate that hit (you see it coming and dodge). Lasts 2d4 Rounds.

Proteans have a number of fun abilities, including a 50% resistance to sneak-attack/critical hits, a favorite of the party given most of them had the Outflank teamwork feat, Oli & Cid were crit-based, and Vaz’em was a slice-and-dice ninja. In addition to that resistance Xoqual had pretty good spell resistance and AC, and the various storm effects give him another boost in effectiveness. Even so, the first couple rounds of the fight did not go well for him, as the party was really starting to hit its stride of being a swarming cloud of melee death. I began to grow worried that perhaps this was not going to turn out to be a good (pseudo-)final fight after all.

And then, it happened. As he approached half health, I had Xoqual unleash his most powerful and dangerous ability (perhaps after his Polymorph Object spell-like ability) – the Warpweave, a burst of chaotic energy that he could unleash as a swift action if he was willing to risk affecting himself – with a good Fort save and desperate he was. I was concerned about him using this ability from the get-go, as there are some *very* unpleasant effects on there, including being turned to stone – but that was literally a one in twenty chance since there’s twenty possible effects, one of which is even beneficial (it casts Heal on you)! And, of course, the effect also requires you to fail a Fort save.

Well . . . Cid failed his Fort save. So did Vaz’em. And what came up on the die roll for effects? Polymorph on Cid (turning him into a crow, whereupon he happily flocked with the other bunch of crows flying around in the chaotic storm), and Petrified on Vaz’em (who crashed back down onto the top of the lighthouse, taking falling damage but not enough to kill, and thus, shatter him). *That* swung the fight rather dramatically back into Xoqual’s favor, as he only had Oliver (who being a fighter just didn’t give a single f*%$ and kept hacking away at him, whittling down Xoqual’s hit points), Ronda Oli’s bard cohort (who was staying far away and shooting crossbow bolts to basically no effect while singing), and Rholand (who spent most of his time healing Oliver with that wand of Cure Critical Wounds they had gotten from the Star Weavers).

Meanwhile below Domina and Edwin kept trying to dispel the Polymorph effect on Cid, and kept failing, while the rest of the Star Weavers struggled against the two Naunets. Eventually, they managed to get Cid turned back into a person, and not wanting just Stu to be sitting out the rest of the fight (Save or Die/Be out of the Fight really sucks), Edwin pulled out another Stone Salve and rubbed it into his statue, turning him back to flesh (which was another use for the Stone Salve I had given the party, but since Oliver had it he was a little busy to go help out Vaz’em at the moment).

Xoqual pulled out a few other tricks, like using his shapeshifting power to turn into an Air elemental, jet away from the party, and give himself a moment to breathe (as well as recover a bunch of hit points from the shapeshift). But in the end, Oliver wore him down, and once Cid & Vaz’em got back into the fight several rounds following being CC’d, Xoqual fell from the sky and crashed down onto the roof of the tower, splitting apart and showering the area with his silver blood. The two Naunets were also cut down around the same time – Korvosa had been saved once again.

Overhead, the portal rippled and began to shrink as the storm dissipated – until a pair of massive claws burst through the portal and grabbed hold of the edges, attempting to hold the portal open with physical might. For a few brief moments, the party was faced with the terrifying sight of the Balor general, Elzeer-Ka (that was the name I wrote down now that I found my notes) himself attempting to hold the portal open with brute force. But that didn’t go so well for him, and before the Balor could risk stepping through the portal himself, it slid the rest of the way shut and the Balor was forced to relinquish its grip lest it lose some hands as the portal slid the rest of the way shut.

Below, the party watched as Togomor and Gwen escaped the Thassilon spire just in time before the energy barrier broke and the waters of the Jeggare River rushed back in to cover up the spire once more. From there, the rest of the session was spent on clean-up. The demons were mopped up by the Hellknights, the party went and met with a friendly-for-the-last-time Ileosa, who rewarded the party with another 10,000 GP for their efforts.

They also decided that now was the perfect time to *finally* deal with the Emperor of Old Korvosa now that his cultist/demon backers were out of the picture. They arrived at the theater to find it in flames, and no Imperials in sight. Making perception checks, they were just barely able to make out the faint sounds of Laori calling out for help. Braving the flames to enter the blazing theater, they managed to make it to the stage where they found the elf cleric strapped into the emperor’s tall knife (guillotine), left there to die as the theater burned down around her (evidentially he didn’t like what she had to offer). They managed to free her and escape from the theater just before it completely collapsed.

On the way out, Laori insisted that they find Salvator Scream, who had also been left behind, locked in his “studio” with several of his paintings. Once they were safely out in the streets, Laori finally explained her reasons for searching for Scream in the first place – she was a member of a Zon-Kuthonite sect known as the Brotherhood of Bones. They had an interest in what was going on in Korvosa, and the party got a glimpse of one of Scream’s paintings – unlike the paintings as given in the AP, this one directly featured Kazavon and his relics. The painting depicted a seven-headed hydra, each set of its jaws yawning wide and revealed some sort of horrific scene – a woman plunging a set of fangs into her own head (Ileosa), a man removing his own spine (Togomor), and so on. Each one representing one of the relics and its eventual owner, although the party didn’t seem to catch the significance of any of this.

Deciding that this confirmed her suspicions, Laori turned Salvator loose to go do whatever (the party had no real interest in him anyway, particularly as they already knew Arkona had the seneschal). Pulling out a small pinewood box from her pack, Laori opened it to revealed a withered ear, which she whispered into, calling out in a singsong voice “Oh Shadowcount!” She was, of course, reporting to Sial what she had learned, and after hearing his message’d reply, Laori took her leave of the party.

From here, the party was contacted by someone – I think maybe Kira Nightshade, the cleric of Pharasma they had met back in Book One (the Blackjack fangirl). She alerted the party to the fact that the city guard had called her in to treat a man’s injuries who had called for them. The man, of course, was Fishguts Jim, who had been tortured to within an inch of his life. He ranted to the party about some “devil woman” who had barged in just as he and his wife were going out the door. She killed wifey-what’s-her-face, and tortured Fishguts Jim, but left him alive so that he could deliver a message to the party “You’re next”.

And it was about at this point that we ended the session. The party were once again heroes, saving Korvosa from the terrible threat of a demonic invasion. And although there were many unanswered questions (like what Togomor was up to in the Spire and who had arranged all this? Xoqual had hinted at there being *two* heads to Agonybringer now, going to war with each other in the shadows to determine who would inherit his legacy. He was slightly incorrect on his count, as with Togomor running around there were at least three relic bearers free at this point, although that number would continue to rise rapidly). But as my players had already learned, such questions were for the moment irrelevant, as that very night, in the hours following the height of their glory as Korvosa’s thrice-saviors, they would all fall.


Session Seventy-Five:
What did they have to do to help find Salvator Scream?


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Downfall:

As they say, what goes up must come down, and the party’s star had risen very high indeed. That very night following their victory over Xoqual and the cult of Rovagug, the party’s downfall came at last. It came without warning, hitting all four of them without mercy, and this sudden karmic adjustment was very brutal and unpleasant for them all. Each of them started their private session in between Session Seventy-Four and Seventy-Five alone, and ended it stumbling into Zellara’s House were they all met the following morning.

Although I did not use this actual song during any of the private sessions, this was definitely a song I listened to as I planned out their fates. And laughed. A black, heartless rat bastard DM laugh. Sadly, unlike the book three intros, I did not keep a copy of the chat logs from those private sessions, so these will be abbreviated write-ups.

Failure by Breaking Benjamin

Rholand’s Downfall:

Rholand’s began predictably in Castle Korvosa. He had dinner with Ileosa, who despite her growing fascination with random corners of the room (where phantom Eodred – Kazavon – stood “advising” her) still was reasonably pleasant with him. Aware that his pet lion Flank had been killed in the fighting, she generously offered to try and find some magic to resurrect Flank (there’s a druid spell that can revive dead animal companions – seemed reasonable the queen could get her hands on a scroll of it in relatively short order). To both her and my surprise, Rholand declined the offer, preferring to remember Flank as he was through the fang that he kept on him (perhaps he also feared Ileosa would use her blood and turn Flank into some sort of abomination). He didn’t say no to spending some quality time alone with Ileosa later that evening though, and the queen left to attend to business (and make some “special” preparations for their evening).

After Ileosa left the grey maiden Davinia, the other grey maiden that the party had saved from Andaisin’s dungeon, found him. She seemed a little . . . out of it, as she emotionlessly asked Rholand to accompany her to see Togomor – Korvosa’s new seneschal wanted to see him. Traveling to Togomor’s quarters, Rholand found the archmage seneschal in good spirits. Getting right down to business, Togomor stated that he had found a spell that *should* allow Rholand to remove the crown from Ileosa’s head. It was, of course, a risky endeavor, and one that Ileosa would likely realize what was going on as he did it.

Therefore, Togomor recommended that he get Ileosa alone (done easily enough) and restrain her (some sort of kinky game, perhaps – it wasn’t strictly necessary but it would make Rholand’s guilt even more plain, a definite plus in Togomor’s eyes) prior to enacting the ritual. Rholand had his own plans to keep Ileosa distracted until it was too late (bow-chicka-wow-wow!), and pressed Togomor for the details of the ritual. Which turned out to be relatively simple – Rholand needed to smear a little bit of Ileosa’s blood onto the crown, then a little bit of his own on top of it, creating an arcane connection. Then he merely needed to recite the following words in Thassilon as the final step, and he should be able to remove the crown. Rholand practiced the incantation several times, until he was confident he could repeat it accurately despite not knowing the language.

Thanks to an elixir of glibness taken before Rholand arrived, of course, he had no idea that Togomor was fibbing – the whole ritual was something he made up just to get Rholand to make an attempt at removing the crown. The one thing that was likely to destroy his relationship with Ileosa, and thus his ability to counter Kazavon’s influence and keep Togomor from (trying to) take over himself. Even the “incantation” was a mockery, with its translation into Common going something like this little ditty song “Stupid Whore Queen Ileosa, stupid Whore Queen Ileosa. Fell in love with a thief named Rholand. Fell in love with a thief named Rholand. He stole her heart, he’ll take her crown, but of her virtue, none can be found.” Nobody ever said Togomor was a good lyricist, but he definitely has a sense of humor!

Armed with the means to free Ileosa at last (*snicker snort*), Rholand takes his leave from the seneschal and heads to the bedroom. He gets pulled aside by Sabrina at the door, and he explains that he thinks he can help Ileosa now. More concerned for Ileosa’s wellbeing than any supposed “cure”, Sabrina warns Rholand again not to do anything rash that might hurt her, or they were going to have words. Rholand pretty much brushes her off, and sees himself into the bedroom where Ileosa is waiting, dressed in a fancy diaphanous nightgown that left nothing to the imagination (one of Eodred’s favorites).

They start making out, Rholand using the opportunity to carefully scrape a fingernail against Ileosa’s skin behind one ear, drawing a tiny bit of blood that he rubs onto some of the bone spikes of her crown. From there it’s just a matter of scratching his own palm on the countless edges and spikes, and rubbing the blood over the same spot on the crown while continuing to kiss Ileosa. Pulling away for a moment as they stumble over to the bed, Rholand shouts out the incantation Togomor gave him . . . and something happened but it definitely was not what was intended (in fact even Togomor had expected nothing to happen – but a blood bond *had* been forged, and thus Kazavon invited himself into Rholand’s mind for a little chat).

Rholand’s vision swam, and suddenly he was somewhere else – a dark room where he stood surrounded by the mutilated bodies of Andaisin, Trinia, Sabrina, and Eodred, hanging from the nearby walls from coils of barbed wire wrapped around them and running through them in some places (in particular out of their eyes and mouths). The bodies writhed as if in agony, but Rholand had only a moment to take this horrific scene before his attention was drawn to the last figure in the room – Ileosa.

Like a predator stalking prey, Ileosa approached Rholand, taunting him and saying things like “now you get to see the real me”. Coils of barbed wire unfurled from the depths of her mouth, coiling around Rholand and holding him fast while the bladed tips danced in front of his eyes before plunging themselves into his eyes. For a moment, a rush of images flashed through Rholand’s head – a bloody battlefield, a scarred man standing before an army clad in dark armor shouting “THIS IS MY WORLD NOW!”, etc. (a rush of scenes from Kazavon’s various lives).

A few moments later, he came to on the floor of the bedroom, cradled in Ileosa’s arms as she stared down at him in confusion and concern. She informed him that he had just suddenly started screaming – was he alright now? The horrid vision of barbed wire uncoiling from Ileosa’s mouth gives Rholand a bit of pause before answering, and in desperation he tries to reach up and pull the crown off of Ileosa’s head. It remains firmly stuck on her head, and now it’s Ileosa’s turn to scream as she slaps the disoriented Rholand’s hands away and scramble back up to her feet.

A moment later and shouts are heard outside the bedroom door – Sabrina and Togomor, an instant before the door flies open (thanks to a Knock spell from Togomor). Ileosa demands to know what the meaning of this is, and Togomor informs the queen as he strides into the room that he is here to save her from Rholand’s treachery. He confesses that he gave Rholand a fake ritual to try to steal the Crown of Fangs, and that wasn’t Rholand’s only crime. Togomor goes on listing the various actions that the party took against Ileosa, hiding the Domina clone, helping the Star Weavers to escape from Korvosa, and other such things. The entire time, he stares at Ileosa and her rather notable lack of garb, making no secret that he very much likes what he sees.

Sensing that things are about to go very badly for him, Rholand makes one last attempt to destroy the Crown, lunging for Ileosa and attempting to touch the Fangs to use his Oracle destroy objects power. He fails to hit Ileosa’s touch AC (fortunate, as I wasn’t sure whether he could even damage an artifact with that power or not, but he might have been able to weaken the Scarwall metal holding the crown together, and I didn’t want to deal with that!)

An instant later, and Sabrain tackles Rholand, pinning him to the bed while he screams at Sabrina to let him go. After being betrayed by so many of her close allies (Devaulus, Andaisin for starters), Ileosa was crushed by the news – but also furious. Wrapping the bed sheet around herself after Sabrina drags Rholand up to his feet, she commands the small unit of grey maidens to take him down to the dungeons. She would decide his fate later. Togomor was openly pleased by this news, and discretely waved as Rholand was dragged away.

Later, Rholand sat in the old unused dungeons beneath Castle Korvosa, his hands shackled behind him and two Grey Maidens standing guard right outside his cell. Togomor stopped by to visit with Devinia, and after greeting Rholand and being met only with a harsh glare, he cast Hold Person on one of the grey maidens while Devinia drew her sword and slit the other grey maiden’s throat. Cackling, Togomor explained that he was here to break Rholand out – he might be able to talk his way out of this with Ileosa yet, but if he were to simply disappear never to be seen again, well, that would be the final nail in the coffin of his guilt.

Togomor then ordered the dominated Devinia to kill the other grey maiden, while handing over Rholand’s Bec-de-corbin to her. Devinia wavers, hesitating as she clearly fights against the magic, and then with a grunt drops the weapon with a groaned “No!”. Togomor shrugs, drawing the held grey maiden’s sword from her belt. He then kisses the helpless woman, sticking his tongue down her throat, an instant before he rams the sword up into her chin, the roof of her mouth, and through into her brain. Laughing, Togomor drools black blood as he confesses that he nicked his tongue by doing that.

Having seen enough, Rholand dissolves the shackles with his oracle power, and then the cell door itself, rushing Togomor. The wicked mage laughs as he slashes wildly with the grey maiden’s blade, drawing a gash for the AoO and knocking Rholand aside from his charge (fortunate, as I didn’t want to deal with Togomor being grappled). More amused by this turn of events than annoyed, Togomor cast a spell at Rholand, and a moment later the oracle feels very strange as the world grows larger and larger all around him, and his consciousness fades away as his body is turned into a small rag doll by the Polymorph Any Object magic.

Rholand awakens sometime later after the magic wears off to discover himself bound head to toe like a mummy in a dark, viney rope (there’s an alchemical rope that has an impressively high break DC – Togomor buys it in bulk for Gwen so he had a surplus). He finds himself on the ramparts of Castle Korvosa, on the edge of them in point of fact, a thick mist obscuring the city street that was no doubt a long way down. Togomor looms over him, playing with a wicked looking dagger. He draws the dagger across his palm, holding it up so that Rholand can watch it reseal in a manner very similar to Ileosa’s injuries. Wiping up the black blood with the dagger so that it is coated in it, Togomor goes on to explain that he is indeed very much like Ileosa, and he expects that they will have much in common. The only difference is that his blood has a much different effect than bringing someone back from the dead.

Togomor muses that while he is seneschal for now, perhaps one day soon he would become Ileosa’s new king. But since he wasn’t willing to just disappear, Rholand wouldn’t be alive to see that come to pass. And then without further hesitation Togomor stabs the blood-coated dagger deep into Rholand’s chest, puncturing one of his lungs. With a final cheery “Good-bye!” he then rolls Rholand off the edge to plummet down through the fog to his death.

Drowning in his own blood from the punctured lung, poisoned by Togomor’s blood, and falling to his death. Rholand was a man thrice dead, he had failed to save Ileosa, she would remember him as yet another traitor, and there was pretty much nothing he could do about any of it. He was going to die, but as he plummeted to the cobblestones below, a flash of green appeared through the fog. Gwen managed to cast Feather Fall before Rholand hit the pavement, and landed beside him, shifting into her human form as she pleaded “Please don’t die please don’t die”.

Rholand was able to wheeze out to remove the dagger and cut the ropes, while making Fort saves to remain conscious from the suffocation and making Fort saves to avoid taking Con DRAIN from Togomor’s blood (it is an *extremely* nasty posion). He loses something like 7 points of Con before Gwen is able to cut him loose, but then Rholand immediately goes to work after Gwen hands him a satchel with his gear in it. He manages to dump a bunch of cure potions and neutralize poison potions into the wound, washing out what was left of the poison (it was enough to give him a bonus to his Fort save sufficient to pass a second time and “cure” the poison), followed by a Restoration to cleanse the Con drain.

It seemed to be enough to save his life, and as his vision began to swim and grey, Rholand did his final act, wheezing a thank you to Gwen and then kissing her on the lips. The last thing he heard was her sputtering in confusion and muttering about “Mammals not making any sense”. Some hours later, Rholand awakened to find himself in Zellara’s house, his chest bandaged, and a note from Gwen explaining that she had to return to Togomor so that he did not suspect anything was wrong.

(Apparently the kiss was Rholand’s player hedging his bets in the event that his relationship with Ileosa was truly done. Although after some further thought, he decided that he was giving up too easily on Ileosa. Although RholandxGwen may yet happen if those damn shippers have anything to say about it.)

Cid’s Downfall:

When Vox and the Hellknights showed up at the lighthouse, she mentioned to Cid that she had successfully traveled to Citadel Vraid and discretely retrieved both of their contracts for review. Hopefully they could confirm whether or not there was in fact hidden written on the contracts that stipulated additional clauses (such as being damned to Hell for sure after death).

Now that the city was safe, Cid spent his evening going to the small tower that the Hellknights had taken over. Cyrus was again manning the downstairs post, and allowed him up to see Vox. The Mistress of Blades had already started, both in studying the contracts and in downing most of her last bottle of Hill Giant ale. Cid gratefully accepted a glass of the potent alcohol (second mistake there, if the first one was being born in the first place >: ) ) and joined her in studying the contracts.

They accidentally discovered the infernal ink on the back of the contract, I believe after holding it a little too close to a candle and activating the heat-based ink. The words of the previously invisible part of the contract were written in Infernal legalese, which Vox could read but had difficulty making heads or tails of as of course the wording was deliberately ambiguous and obtuse as only an infernal contract could be. Nonetheless, she understood it enough to confirm that Cid’s post-death experience was legit – the devils owned all of their souls upon death. Which naturally pissed Vox off to no end.

Unfortunately, neither of them was going to get a chance to act on this information, as Vox suddenly slumped over face down onto the desk. Cid was asked to make a Fortitude save as well, as the knockout poison laced into the alcohol he had just sampled kicked in. Fortunately for my plans, Cid whiffed the Fort save, and crumpled to the desk as well before he could do much more than blink in surprise as Vox’s sudden collapse.

Some time later, Cid awoke to find himself still in Vox’s room, bound to a chair with a rag shoved into his mouth. About ten feet away, Vox also sat in a chair facing him, bound with a matching set of masterwork manacles and fetters, several coils of rope to hold her in the chair, and a leather gag (their abductor had come prepared to deal with a high-level character like Vox – the manacles *just* higher than her CMB, but had to improvise to nab Cid as well).

With a pleased chuckle and “ah, you’re awake”, their captor came into view – some sort of devil (a salikotal – vengeance devil. Basically a diabolic assassin based on the description of its purpose). The devil mocked the two of them, asking them if they really thought that their meddling curiosity had gone unnoticed. The devils had been content to let Cid get away – he would be back in their clutches soon enough given his dangerous lifestyle, after all. But then he went around talking to anyone who would listen about how all the Hellknights were damned, and the devils couldn’t let *that* go. So now, the salikotal was here to clean up the mess – he had planned on starting with Vox to figure out who she had in turn contacted, but since Cid the ring-leader of this mess was here as well, that was a nice bonus!

The devil also explained how this was going to go – they had all night, and no one would be coming to investigate their screams (he had cast Silent Table off of a scroll after the two of them had passed out, so screaming wasn’t going to get anyone’s attention outside the room). He was aware Hellknights were a tough bunch and trained to resist torture, but he was curious to see if that extended to watching comrades in arms be tortured. So – he would ungag each of them in turn, they’d have a chance to answer his question, and if they refused or lied to him (Discern Lies scroll as well), the other one would suffer for it.

Since Cid was the ringleader of this mess, he got to go first. The devil ungagged him and asked him who else he had told about this. Predictably, Cid told him to go back to Hell, and other defiant things. The devil merely laughed, regagged him, and then walked over to Vox while making the conversational remark that they *were* the Order of the Nail, so this next bit ought to be apropos. Producing a long nail and a hammer, the devil drove the nail all the way through Vox’s shoulder, until the tip emerged from her back and started sinking into the wood of the chair back. Vox screamed and thrashed to little avail, but while the devil was busy inflicting this torment Cid summoned Retribution to his hands (damn Bladebound magus’s and their teleporting sword b+~~~@%+!).

Fortunately for my evil DM plans, Cid flubbed the stealth check to hide the sizable falcata behind his chair, and so when the devil turned back to see his reaction the devil saw it. Holding a dagger up to Vox’s chin, he ordered Cid to drop the weapon, and after a moment Cid reluctantly obeyed. Removing Vox’s gag, the devil moved over to Cid, kicking Retribution away while holding up another nail. He asked Vox who she had told about the order’s dirty little secret, and she tried to play it off that Cid meant nothing to her and that the devil was free to do whatever he wanted, it wasn’t going to bother Vox in the slightest. Shrugging, the devil hammered the nail into Cid’s right knee – the pain was excruciating, and it cut Cid’s speed in half until he received medical attention.

Regagging Vox and ungagging Cid, the devil relentlessly repeated his question – who had Cid talked to. Barring his teeth against the pain, Cid continued his defiance, and so the devil walked around behind Vox, carefully positioning the nail behind her ear while remarking that he had to get this just right if he wanted it to go through her skull and come out of her eye. The devil pulled the hammer back, but just as the hammer descended the devil winked out of existence, his extended summons conveniently ending just at this moment.

Whacked in the back of the head by the hammer instead, Vox was dazed for a moment, until she realized their good fortune and started trying to slide her chair (bulrush) over to Cid so they could attempt an escape. Unfortunately she rolled poorly, apparently her shoulder wound and the lingering effects of the knockout poison leaving her weak and unable to slide the chair more than a few inches closer. Not bothering with that crap when he had a magical summoning sword, Cid resummoned Retribution and cut himself loose. He was just getting out of the chair when the devil, resummoned to the mortal realm, teleported back into the room.

Theme Music: Seven Devils by Florence and the Machine

The devil and Cid looked at each other for a moment, and then Cid lunged for the devil while the devil lunged for Vox. Again fortunately for my evil plans, the devil won initiative, got to Vox, pulled out a falcata, and plunged it into her chest (coup-de-grace. There may have been a round of attacks by Cid there, but not enough to kill the devil before it could pull off the coup).

Vox slumped (failed the massive fort save from getting hit by a x3 critical coup), the chair tipped over from the force of the blow, and with a shriek of rage Cid hacked into the devil with renewed fury, ignoring the pain in his leg from the nail still stuck in his knee. It wasn’t much of a fight, sad to say – cid is a buzzsaw and the devil was only some CR 7 or so chump. After a couple frantic rounds, Cid hacked the devil to pieces, and then turned back to Vox.

She still clung to life (DM fiat), but even a cursory glance made it clear that she was beyond normal healing magic. A talented healer like Rholand *might* have been able to save her, but Rholand was not here. Coughing up blood, Vox asked if Cid had gotten the devil before he managed to get away, and admitted that she was frightened now that she knew what awaited her. She told Cid that he needed to get out of here – he’d probably get blamed for this (the devil had used a falcata to kill her – and Cid was the only one who used a falcata in the Order. Thanks for pointing out that was unusual UnArcaneElection – that’s what triggered the idea of using it as part of a frame job for Vox’s murder! :-D ). There was a sack of money hidden beneath a false floorstone – he should take it and go. But first . . . would he mind staying? Cid held Vox’s hand and prayed to anyone who would listen to have mercy on her soul while she wheezed out the last of her life’s breath, drowning in her own blood. It didn’t take long, and there was no answer to Cid’s desperate prayer (which did not mean that it went unheard).

He left Vox’s body to be discovered in the morning – it was too risky to move and since this was a frame job anything Cid did could be twisted to make him more guilty. He found the coin pouch, and then slipped out the window and flew off into the night. Somehow, despite being in a daze he found his way to Zellara’s house, where he found a bandaged Rholand waiting for him.

Vaz’em’s Downfall:

If you recall, Domina had traveled with the party to the lighthouse, and so was not there for Marlessa’s arrival and subsequent torture of Fishguts Jim (as was my original plan – darn clever players!). Of course, they still needed to hide her existence from Ileosa, and so Domina had slipped away after Xoqual’s defeat, to meet back up with Vaz’em who was in charge of finding a new safe house to stash her in. Fortunately, this was a task that Vaz’em was perfectly suited for, having a number of safe houses scattered about Korvosa. Unfortunately, someone with a bone to pick with the party had spent a very long time and a lot of resources in tracking down each and every single one of Vaz’em’s safe houses – namedly Marlessa, with the support of Adonis Kreed.

So while that doom closed in around them, an unaware Vaz’em took Domina to a safe house in the Shingles. Since the safe house was not met for long stays, it wasn’t stocked with much to eat, and so Vaz’em handed over some change and told Domina where she could find some food at a nearby market, and then went to attend to other business with promises to return to check on her later that night.

At some point, although not directly at the safe house to avoid his suspicions, Vaz’em received a letter from another hidden threat to the party. The message inside the letter was simply and to the point, and yet it was brutally effective. It read simply “Glorio Arkona is responsible for the death of your mother”.

Vaz’em was an orphan. He never knew his parents, and they were never mentioned in his backstory. So this was me hijacking that part of his backstory to fill in the blanks – which just goes to show that pre-emptively killing off anyone your character cares about is *not* going to save you from me. I’ll still figure out some lever to pry loose to beat you with. >:) Thankfully, Vaz’em’s player was quite willing to go along with this, and in fact did something that Vaz’em as the consummate assassin *never* did – he went on tilt.

Instead of investigating this matter discretely in the morning, Vaz’em made a beeline for Arkona’s residence IMMEDIATELY. I was a bit surprised at how gung-ho Vaz’em suddenly was about this, but ad-libbed together an assassin-creed style sequence where he climbed over the walls cutting off the Arkona manor from the rest of Old Korvosa and sneaked past some guards. But Vaz’em didn’t roll so well on his stealth – clearly that simple letter had shaken him badly. Still, despite getting noticed by the guards, he led them on a merry chase around the outer city streets surrounding the manor proper, and simply brazenly ran past a patrol of guards coming out from the inner manor grounds to reinforce the guards after the alarm was raised. He lost them all within the manor grounds, which wasn’t all that hard given the place was a jungle with live tigers roaming around, free to eat anyone that wandered off the clearly marked pathways through.

Making his way to the manor itself, Vaz’em circled around it, looking for an entry point. I had half expected him to storm in and confront Glorio directly, but here Vaz’em’s traditional caution came back a little bit. He found Melyia Arkona out for a midnight stroll on a balcony, and after he revealed himself to the Arkona (and the actual originator of the note that triggered all this), they got to talking about Glorio.

Melyia/Vimanda was shocked to see Vaz’em here so soon, but recovered quickly and easily hid her glee as she sold Vaz’em a sob story of Glorio not seeming to be himself any longer, between his abusive moods and this whole mess with funding the assassination of Eodred. She also subtly guided him toward the goal she had needed him for which prompted sending that note in the first place.

There was a vault in the manor, a secret hidden vault (the one hidden behind the illusion of the Vudran Tree and all those other magical protections) that held Glorio’s greatest treasures and darkest secrets. To protect herself from Glorio, Melyia needed Vaz’em to go and steal a ledger from it – the last proof in existence that Glorio had conspired with Eodred’s other murderers like Jeggare and Andaisin. With that, she could protect herself from Glorio (yeah right, she was planning on turning that over to Togomor/Ileosa first chance she got to save her own ass/get Glorio chased out of Korvosa, leaving her in charge).

Losing the last remnants of his customary caution, Vaz’em agreed to do it, in return for the promise that Melyia help him find out the truth about what Glorio did to his mother. Smiling inwardly to herself at the irony, Melyia agreed and explained the vault’s defenses – the illusion, the forbiddance spell, and the secret code word that would open the vault. Unfortunately Glorio also had scrying sensors in the vault, and so he would undoubtedly know that it was Vaz’em who was stealing from him (which was exactly why Vimanda didn’t want to go in there herself). That didn’t seem to bother Vaz’em (who clearly wanted Glorio to know who was screwing him over).

And so Vaz’em sneaked into the vault, doing his usual ninja thing and managing to slip past the handful of patrolling guards. He took some damage from the Forbiddance spell, but managed to get through that and the illusion, and opened the vault with the code word Melyia had given him. Inside he found the ledger, along with numerous other ones detailing Arkona’s holdings throughout Korvosa, although he only took the one Melyia asked him too. He also found a familiar-looking holy crossbow – Blackjack’s – apparently the hero had fallen afoul of the nobleman, which presumably explained why he had never shown his face again after the Book Three intro. After some debate, Vaz’em decided to leave the crossbow behind (a mistake given its usefulness against the Arkona family, but another plus in Vimanda’s book!)

He returned to Melyia, dropped the ledger into her lap, and then decided that since Glorio had probably seen him inside the vault it was time for him to leave. He left the Arkona grounds much the same way he had come in, and we just hand-waved the exfiltration so that we could move on to the next act of Vaz’em’s downfall.

Deciding it was late and that he should check on Domina, Vaz’em returned to the safe house. Again, the note about his mother had shaken him all up, and so instead of scouting the safe house out ahead of time he just blundered on in. Blundered on in to find Domina tied down to the bed, bleeding from several shallow cuts, a woman leering over her and half a dozen burly four-armed imps waiting for him. The devils pounced on him immediately, able to see through his invisibility, and proving impressively clingy (these were Magaav and Gaav, host devils that get a bunch of bonuses to grapple checks). It was pretty much exactly like that scene from the animated Sleeping Beauty, where Prince Charming goes into a house and immediately gets jumped by a bunch of goblin things and hog-tied before he even really knows wtf just happened.

Even tightly bound, Vaz’em makes a lunge for the woman, only to be pulled up short by the devils as they haul back on his ropes. The woman (Marlessa) taunts him as she makes another shallow cut in Domina’s arm, wondering if she should make him watch as she cut his lover to pieces (okay, swing and a miss there Marlessa, but I guess you can afford to be wrong about this one thing). She decides against doing that though (likely due to deciding she needed to okay killing Domina with Adonis first – smart move there because he very much wanted Domina alive once he realized what she was!). Instead, she commands her minions to put a leash on this dog, and one of the devils obeys, wrapping some more rope around Vaz’em’s neck and choking him into unconsciousness.

Vaz’em awoke some time later to find himself in a boat. If it was possible, he was even more tightly bound that before, tied spread-eagle to an anchor. Marlessa and several of her devil flunkies were in the boat with her. Marlessa finally explained herself, at least enough to reveal that Kynndor Thok was someone important to her, and she was pissed off that he was dead. And now, she was finally going to have her revenge, as she watched the man who murdered him die a slow, horrible death.

Without much further preamble, the devils picked Vaz’em up, and tossed him over to the side of the boat. His bonds were tight enough that they exceeded his CMB, but not his Escape Artist. So, at a rate of one check a minute, he got to make three escape artist checks to escape his bonds beneath the waves. He flubbed them all, but just as he was running out of air, he was pulled back up to the surface. Lungs burning, he got to listen to Marlessa taunt him some more, and then he was tossed back into the water. Again, he got to make a couple escape artist checks to try and free himself, but he was unable to make it this time either.

For a second time, he was pulled back up to the surface as he clung to the edge of consciousness – it was clear to everyone that Vaz’em couldn’t take much more of this repeated drowning. With a note of finality, Marlessa said good-bye and had her minions throw Vaz’em back in for a third dunking. This time, he only got one check to save himself as his battered lungs simply couldn’t take the abuse any more. He failed, and just as the pressure in his chest grew to be too great, a slender shape moved in from the gloom.

Cinnabar pressed her lips up against Vaz’em, pushing fresh air into his lungs, as she made short work of his bonds with a dagger. As he clung limply to consciousness, the Red Mantis assassin leader dragged him away from the anchor and together the two of them escaped. Vaz’em awoke to find himself in a decently comfortable bed inside a small one-room apartment below street level somewhere in Midpoint. Cinnabar was there seated nearby, now clad in a simple red kimono and just watching him. The clothes Vaz’em and Cinnabar had been wearing hang near the apartment’s small fireplace, now nearly dried out.

Vaz’em was grateful for the rescue, but a little suspicious as always – particularly since they had nearly fought over De Silva a number of hours ago. Cinnabar explained that unfortunately the cost for that withdrawal, as she had cautioned at the time, was already coming due. Davos, the red mantis who had questioned letting the party and De Silva go at their confrontation, had managed to get a message out of the city despite Cinnabar’s best efforts (how exactly it got all the way back to Red Mantis HQ in a few hours was not explained. Meh.).

As a result, one of the Vernai, the head honchos of the Red Mantis was coming here to Korvosa to assume command and straighten this all out. In fact, Cinnabar was certain that it was her mother (Mistress Kayltanya), and from experience Cinnabar knew that there would be no mercy. While her reluctance to engage a target with two adventuring parties of city-level heroes was understandable, it would nonetheless be seen as weakness. Weakness that her mother would purge out of her daughter through brutal torture and brainwashing, as she had done with Cinnabar as a child. Vaz’em, however, despite being only an honorary member/potential initiate trainee, would undoubtedly be labeled a traitor, and traitors suffered a FAR worse fate. It was therefore imperative that Vaz’em got out of Korvosa and as far away from the city before Kayltanya arrived.

Until Kayltanya arrived, however, Davos had been placed in command, and he had made it his first order of business to hunt Cinnabar down (he wouldn’t mind catching hold of Vaz’em to present to Kayltanya when she arrived, either). Cinnabar would not attempt to escape her fate – she knew her mother and the Red Mantis well enough to know that running now would only condemn her to a futile life on the run until it inevitably came to an unpleasant end. By surrendering now, Cinnabar would affirm her dedication to the Red Mantis (and right now the worst she was guilty of was perhaps prudent cowardice, not incompetence or disobedience). She expected that Davos would find this safe house of hers in several more hours, shortly after morning (or maybe she sent a message this was where he could find her at daybreak – can’t remember). Vaz’em should not be here when he and his new lackeys arrived.

But . . . there was one last request Cinnabar had – would Vaz’em like to spend the rest of the time until then here? With her? Although it was clearly difficult for her, Cinnabar explained in a rare rush of emotion that when she had first come to Korvosa and heard of him, she thought Vaz’em was a joke. A hero assassin? One who chose who he would kill instead of anyone and everyone he was offered money to kill? Ridiculous.

But then Cinnabar met him, and as she saw more of him over the past weeks (since their meeting in the Book Three intro), she slowly began to understand. And that idea, of an honorable killer, an assassin with morals who could choose whether or not to kill, it was a shining ray of light that had broken through the fog of mindless obedience that had surrounded Cinnabar all her life. Her mother had systematically killed her ability to feel anything, and for the longest time Cinnabar had served the Red Mantis as little more than a machine, a sword in someone else’s hand to kill as they wished without thought of her own. But now with Vaz’em . . . Cinnabar felt something again when she was around him (she called it love but psychologically speaking it was probably more like desperation-inspired clinging to any sort of emotional stimulus after living in its absence for so long). And so . . . she would really . . . like to spend these last few hours with him.

Vaz’em was exhausted, emotionally drained, and rather battered and bruised from his near-death experience. But who’s going to say no to an offer like that from the setting’s version of Black Widow (yes yes, a paladin would but this party sure as hell weren’t angels despite steadily standing further and further on their side of things). And for a killing machine, Cinnabar was surprisingly gentle given Vaz’em’s battered state.

Several hours later, it was dawn and time for Vaz’em to go. Cinnabar cautioned him that should their paths cross again in the future, it was likely that her mother had brainwashed her again and sent her after him. He was to expect no mercy in that event and should be prepared to kill her. Vaz’em wasn’t happy about that, but agreed to end her suffering by whatever means necessary should they meet again.

As Vaz’em started getting dressed, Cinnabar produced several coils of rope from under the bed and began to bind her own legs. Essentially tying herself up was to be a further demonstration of surrender to Davos – basically a way to say “see, this isn’t a trap, I’m putting myself completely at your mercy”. Nonplussed, Vaz’em asked her if she wanted any help with that, and Cinnabar quickly agreed upon realizing that this would allow her to honestly state that Vaz’em had betrayed her, by tying her up and leaving her for Davos to find. It was a ruse unlikely to hold up very long, but it might allow Cinnabar to sow a little more confusion (in a “wait, wtf? Who is on which side around here!?” way) and buy Vaz’em a little more time to run.

Unfortunately, given that Cinnabar was higher-level than Vaz’em and a bit stronger than him, her CMB was several points higher than his, which meant mechanically speaking at least, Vaz’em could not render her helpless by tying her up (yes, yes, rules vs. sanity and all that). However, with a few circumstance modifiers (Cinnabar essentially using Aid Another due to being a completely cooperative and helpful captive) and an equipment bonus (I believe silk rope in 3.5 used to give a +2 bonus to Use Rope, and I know masterwork tools can be bought to give a +2 equipment bonus, so it seemed reasonable high-quality rope could give an equipment bump to the escape DC), Vaz’em got *just* high enough in the end to exceed Cinnabar’s CMB and truss her up like a turkey.

Figuring this out mechanically was actually important as well – because I wanted to plant the idea in Vaz’em’s head that Cinnabar’s CMB was not actually all that great (rogue-types never fare well in grapples due to ¾ BAB and generally low-to-mid strength). As a result, while he might not be able to manhandle her, Oliver probably could. And so getting Oli to come in and hold Cinnabar down while Vaz’em did his damnedest to break the brainwashing was theoretically a possible non-lethal way to stop Cinnabar. There was still Escape Artist, of course (and Cinnabar wouldn’t be so passive about getting tied up next time), but generally that’s more of a minute/attempt thing rather than inevitably breaking out via round/attempt CMB checks to break the rope’s “pin”.

Once finished tying the final knot, Vaz’em departed the apartment without much else said between them, guilty over leaving Cinnabar to her fate but believing her when she said that having her along would only put Vaz’em in absolutely terrible danger. He slipped away invisible just as the first Red Mantis came into sight at the far end of the street, and made his way to Zellara’s house. Where he found the rest of the party, battered and demoralized like him but at least alive. (Given Vaz’em arrived the latest due to being “busy” until dawn, we joked that while the rest of the party was licking their wounds and commiserating, and spending the last few hours of the night wondering what horrible fate had befallen Vaz’em that he wasn’t here, here he comes walking and whistling up to the group at dawn like he just had the best night ever.)


Oliver’s Downfall:

And so we come to the last member of the group to fall (and the last one to have their private session). Oliver’s evening started off well enough – he was at his home with Ronda and his gang, drinking and celebrating his latest success. Although in Oliver’s own words, there was something off about him tonight – he was drinking a little too hard and was a bit wilder than usual (apparently the stress of recent events was starting to get to him). He was also in his back-up suit of light armor (chain shirt – which would become important shortly), rather than his normal plate mail.

In the midst of this revelry, a knock came at the door. Oliver sent one of the gang over to answer the door, who opened it to reveal Adonis Kreed standing there. Adonis Kreed held up a white rag and mentioned that he was just here to talk, and he wasn’t happy about it, but orders were orders. Drunk, Oliver was overjoyed to see his old “friend” Adonis, and walked over to the door to greet him warmly – which included a friendly punch to the groin. Surprisingly, it felt like punching a brick wall to Oliver – evidentially Adonis had been working out (lots of squats, and lots of magic abomination blood – mostly the abomination blood will do that for you!).

Clearly not comfortable being here nor appreciating Oliver’s unique brand of friendliness, Adonis nonetheless stepped into his house to announce that he had an offer for Oliver. He had impressed the force that Adonis now worked for – to the point that it wanted to extend a job offer to Oliver. In return for his service, he would be rewarded with great power beyond his wildest dreams, and a seat at the table with the one and true ruler of this city.

Oliver was unimpressed by this offer, and sensing their boss’s disdain the other gang members didn’t hold back in joining in on the faux-friendly ridicule of Adonis who just had to stand there and take it. Frustrated, Adonis eventually pulled a dark orb out from under his coat, holding it up with the announcement that fine, he could talk it over with the power he served directly. The light in the room dimmed significantly, and the room grew notably colder, as the image of a giant, bleeding eye filled the center of the orb.

While this display intimidated some of Oli’s gang members (including one who shamefully soiled himself, and shortly thereafter effectively quit the gang by running off into the night), Oliver was still not impressed. Eventually the person on the other hand of the orb gave up on trying to intimidate the drunk hero and abandoned the pageantry, dismissing the image of the eye to reveal her true form. Although withered and ancient now, with only one intact hand, the person now visible within the orb was unmistakably Domina Arabasti, the *real* Domina Arabasti, seated on a twisted throne of bones and sinew (The Throne of Night).

Tossing aside all pretense now, Domina was blunt – Oliver could either join her side, or continue to serve as Ileosa’s attack dog and suffer the consequences. When Oliver still refused to offer anything but insults and taunts, Domina hissed and closed the connection, instructing Adonis that he knew what to do as her image faded away. Tucking the orb back into his jacket, Adonis bid Oliver a good night, and left. And a few seconds later that, the floor of Oli’s house caved in, dropping him, Ronda, and his four gang members down into the carefully excavated chamber below.

A full dozen vampire spawn immediately swarmed over the group, grappling and seeking to drain the entire lot of them dry. This was a pretty serious problem, as in his light armor and without a shield Oliver’s armor class was considerably lower than normal (and *much* lower than I had planned it to be, since the vampire spawn brought along things like scrolls of magic missile!)

While the vampire spawn were more interested in making grapple checks to drain his blood than simply level-draining slam attacking him to death, Oliver still got hit with several level-draining slams from AoO after attempting to stand back up following a lucky trip attempt by one of the vampire spawn. Ronda and the other gang members were fairly little better, most of them getting grappled by various degrees and getting the blood sucked out of them.

The situation was very bleak, but then they just took a turn for the strange as a heavily-armed male elf jumped down from the wreckage of Oliver’s house above and started cleaving into the nearby vampire spawn with a khopesh. Oliver recognized this elf – it was Parashial Kalissreavel, the ambassador to Korvosa from the elf community in the Mierani Forest. Otherwise known as Dad to Oliver. At Oliver’s confused “Dad!?”, Parashial simply grinned and nodded with a “Son.” as a reply.

At this point, however, I was aware that there was still a not-insignificant chance that Oliver would get level-drained to death by the swarm of vampire swarm who were not dying very quickly at all thanks to their DR and fast healing. Between that and the slowness of the fight with so many combatants, I decided to simply hand-wave the rest of the combat, saying that Parashial, Oliver, and Ronda were eventually victorious, although not before the gang members that had fallen into the pit with Oliver were gobbled up by the vampires.

We cut to the aftermath of the fight, where Parashial led Oliver & Ronda up onto a side street, and a shocked Oliver demanded an explanation from his father. A father who had never acknowledged his bastard son, even after Oliver had fought his way back to Korvosa from Cheliax (after being sold as a child slave by Gaedren Lamm) and tracked down his parentage, visiting the ambassador’s residence on several occasions.

It was here that an interesting character wrinkle developed. Although I hadn’t fully planned out Parashial’s personality ahead of time, as their “talk” devolved into a screaming match in the middle of the street, I came to the realization that Parashial *was* Oliver, just with an extra 600 plus years of experience. Which meant that he was a drunkard, womanizing, sarcastic a%*&+~@ – like son like father I guess. It was pretty fun organically coming to the realization that they were both pretty much exactly alike, minus Parashial’s survivor guilt/messiah complex.

Parashial explained that he never acknowledged Oliver because Oliver had never been worth his notice or time before now – he had sired a *lot* of children over the years, after all, and eventually they just all sort of blended together. But now that Oliver was the big-time hero of Korvosa, well . . . maybe he would be worth something if he could stay alive a bit longer. In any event, Parashial had no choice – his six hundred year vigil over the Fangs of Kazavon had ended in failure and now he had to figure out a back-up plan.

Said back-up plan involved hosting a council of war with what was left of allied organizations who also had an interest in stopping Kazavon, such as the Brotherhood of Bones (yes, like everything else their role is different in my game from the AP. Instead of seeking to reunite the relics of Kazavon to return him to life, the Brotherhood of Bones was essentially one of his jailers, keeping one of his relics – the Howling Horns – under lock and key and seeking for the others to safeguard them as well.) The council of war would be held several weeks from now in Kaer Maga – Oliver and his fellows were expected to attend.

Oh, and one other thing – if Oliver could manage it without screwing it up, perhaps he could retrieve seneschal Neolandus from whatever dark hole he was stuck in, and bring him along to the meeting? Parashial needed to ask him some questions, and hopefully figure out a way to use his influence to sever Ileosa’s political support. And with that, and a few more exchanged insults at the top of their lungs, Parashial and Oliver said good-bye to each other.

Oliver went looking for his fellows, stopping by Zellara’s house out of some instinct, and found the wounded and battered rholand & Cid waiting for him. We hand-waved the negative levels from the vampire spawn away, saying that Parashial gave Oliver a scroll of Restoration to handle that, which Rholand used on him ASAP before the negative levels became permanent and even more of a pain in the butt to remove.


Downfall Introduction quasi-soundtrack:
Whoa . . . This song sounds like it was inspired by Daemons . . . .

Too bad Daemons get so little attention in the Pathfinder Campaign Setting (only example I can think of off the top of my head is at the end of Book 2(?) of Legacy of Fire).

Rholand's Downfall:
Rholand . . . Rholand . . . you really should have seen this coming . . . .

Cid's Downfall:
Impressive frame-up. I guess we don't yet know who summoned the (unusually talkative) Salikotal Devil, although a few primary suspects come to mind.

And that soundtrack gives me a vision of seven artistically inclined Devils circling a bound prisoner for some vile ritual, only instead of Salikotal, they are Erinyes . . . .

Vaz'em's Downfall:
Vaz'em . . . Vaz'em . . . you really should have seen this coming . . . .

Awesome use of backstory blank for this purpose.

Oliver's Downfall:
Would have liked to see less hand-waving of stuff (make it really down to the wire, but I see a potential for opportunity here: What if the Brotherhood of Bones really was like they are described in the AP, but even some of their own members (including Parashial) DON'T KNOW?

And does Oliver's player realize the similarity between Oliver and Parashial?


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Rholand:

Yeah . . . he really, really should. It's not like I made it a secret that Togomor was a very bad dude. I *think* what Rholand had hoped was to use Togomor's greed and evil to get him to help with Ileosa, expecting to get the Crown of Fangs for himself, and then destroy it and deal with Togomor after.

Unfortunately . . . even prior to his visit that brought up the idea of soliciting Togomor's help, the new senaschal was plotting ways to get rid of Rholand (who he recognized as a positive influence on Ileosa, without which she would have succumbed to Kazavon much quicker).

I toyed with a number of ideas, from maneuvering Rholand in conversation to take the side of Kaer Maga, prompting a severe overreaction backlash from Ileosa, to framing him for something (like the Book 3 opener bomb)/exposing all of his activities behind Ileosa's back like finding Domina's clone and hiding her.

To the most personal idea, which was to send his pet succubus after him - on a few occasions when one of our heroes would visit Togomor, he'd be sitting watching a succubus and erinyes that he summoned wrestle each other. Built for combat, the erinyes would win about 90% of the time, except when the succubus got lucky and managed to get a suggestion of "let me win" through the erinyes's SR and Will save. This succubus would impersonate Ileosa, lure Rholand to the royal bedchambers, and then hit Rholand with an Unnatural Lust spell while shapeshifting into Gwen. Ileosa would conveniently walk-in at this moment, find Rholand tearing "Gwen's" clothes off while trying to eat her tongue, and fly into a love-scorned rage. There were a lot of problems with this plan, aside from Rholand's good Sense Motive and Will save. The biggest being that Ileosa has True Sight, so she wouldn't see Gwen, but instead a seductress outsider which would raise all kinds of questions as to how said outsider got there in the first place. There was the option of sending Gwen herself to do the seduction, but there really wasn't a guarantee it would work at all.

So when Rholand came to Togomor for advice, he and I both leaped at the opportunity. Going after the Crown of Fangs was the *one* thing that would turn Ileosa against Rholand without fail. And it was something authentic to Rholand that he couldn't just deny and would appear out-of-character for him, such as leaping into bed with "Gwen".

Cid:

The devils used one of their lackeys in the Acadamae (like the Order of the Nail, they had been co-opted by the devils they claimed to be able to boss around). The exact person who did the repeat summons is more or less irrelevant.

It was another reason for Cid to get out of there though - the summoner *could* have had yet another casting left, and brought the Salikotal back for Round 3 since summoned devils don't actually die.

Vaz'em:

Eh, yeah he was warned there would be consequences for getting the Red Mantis to back down. Cinnabar was always a bit of an enigma so her feelings for him were rather a surprise (and she could have always been lying but that would beg the question what she had to gain from that given what this whole mess had cost her).

As for Melyia . . . well, she played Vaz'em like a violin. But it was just as well that she succeeded, as with that final bit of evidence in her hands, she could turn Glorio over to Ileosa, and play the loyal subject when the Grey Maidens stormed the Arkona Manor IMMEDIATELY. While, of course, our heroes were attempting to extract Senaschal Neolandus from it - at least that was the plan!

Oliver:

The only thing I'm going to say about the Brotherhood of Bones is "Hail Hydra." That, and that Parashial is most certainly NOT a member of the Brotherhood of Bones (they pretty much hate each other). He is pretty much a very high-level free agent with his own unique way of handling things, while the Shaoti and Brotherhood of Bones handle their own problems. Which has been part of the problem all along - the coalition that put Kazavon down 600 years ago no longer exists, and most of its members have been either wiped out (an order of knights that Parashial *was* a member of 600 years ago, the Order of the Griffon) or are merely a shadow of what they once were (the Shaoti).

And oh yeah, he knows. We talked about it right there and then and we both loved it, that Parashial just sort of spontaneously became a "grown-up" version of Oliver.


Tangentially related: Have you seen the Curse of the Crimson Throne Hardcover Edition yet? I haven't, but even so, I'm wishing that they had hired you to do this.


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Session Seventy-Six:

So, everyone had their private torture session, and we had finished them saving the city from the Cult of Rovagug’s plans (although their backer and the real mastermind of this plot, ex-Queen Domina, was still at large). We therefore opened this session on the aftermath, our four battered heroes finding each other at Zellara’s house, battered to within an inch of their lives but all still kicking for the moment. Morale was at a pretty low ebb, understandably, and so like any good DM I kicked my players - in the face - while they were down.

After allowing them a brief respite to chat with each other and share what details they wished, I opened with the voice of Ileosa booming across the city. The party peered outside to find a gigantic image of Queen Ileosa standing in the street nearby (nor was this the only image – Ileosa’s message was across the entire city, spread by a dozen gigantic illusions of Korvosa’s queen). Ileosa got right to the point, announcing that the people’s heroes, the Grey Thugs, had betrayed them all. She went on a brief rant against the party, followed by an admonition to report any sightings of the party to the nearest band of Grey Maidens. And speaking of the Grey Maidens, here came a sizable band of them, making a beeline straight for Zellara’s house. Guess their “secret” base wasn’t that much of a secret after all.

Well the party managed to dodge the grey maidens relatively easily, eluding contact by fleeing from Zellara’s house pretty much immediately. They found somewhere else to hide for a bit – can’t remember if it was the Three Rings tavern (where they had helped the Starweavers protect Margrave Luis DeSilva from the Red Mantis the day before), or Lamm’s old fishery that Oliver had taken over and was now being run by the Scarzni. In any event, they sat down once they found a new place to lay low and plotted what their next best course of action was. Korvosa was on heavy lockdown, enough that even just trying to fly over the wall invisibly might have been difficult to pull off – the gates were also barred and a number of Korvosa Navy ships were out in the river, blockading the far shore.

Despite this, everyone in the party but Vaz’em was in agreement that they couldn’t stay in Korvosa any longer. Vaz’em was the only one who wanted to stay long enough to go back to Old Korvosa and confront Glorio – he still had answers for Vaz’em regarding his mother’s death, and of course he still had Senaschal Neolandus under his thumb. And, more or less as intended, he was the only one left in Korvosa that the party could vaguely consider an ally. Which was the intent – I planned on driving the party to Glorio’s to seek refuge, and then hit them with Vimanda turning over the evidence Vaz’em collected, prompting Ileosa to send a full-force invasion to Arkona Manor. Thus they’d have ended up having to fight through Arkona Manor (collapsing into a civil war between Glorio and Vimanda) while simultaneously fending off Grey Maidens coming up behind them.

Unfortunately as mentioned above, Vaz’em was the only one interested in dealing with Glorio further (as the party did NOT trust him, and with good reason). And as usual, Vaz’em’s player didn’t share *why* Vaz’em was so interested in confronting Glorio, so the party had no idea this was potential important backstory stuff for Vaz’em that they were skipping out on.

Desperate to lend more support for them staying behind, I had Zellara pop out of her deck to give an impromptu Harrow reading, warning the party that two flickering lights languished in Glorio’s possession (Neolandus and Blackjack/Vencarlo), and if they were not rescued then they would be twisted into darkness. That did not sway the party, and so all attention turned towards finding a way out of Korvosa (they really didn’t feel up to potentially going to war with Glorio while their backs were up against the wall after the previous night’s events and going immediately from saviors of the city to pariahs. I suppose I can’t blame them for that.)

I thought that perhaps after seeing how difficult it would be to escape the city right now with it on full lockdown, the party might change their minds. It was clear that the gates were not an option, and the roving bands of Grey Maidens flying around overhead on manticores (their replacement for the Sable Marines’ griffons) made flying over the walls risky as well. So they settled on a sea option – after all, Oliver was in bed with a bunch of smugglers, right?

So they went to the fishery, and discovered who was managing the efforts there now but Silas Kroft, Cressida’s brother who had been in jail (for selling fake cures during the plague). Until he had agreed to serve as part of a work crew repairing the bridges to Old Korvosa, an effort that Oliver had suggested! Silas was sure to make mention of the fact that Oliver was responsible for that bit of luck, and Silas had weaseled his way from there until now here he was, a free man once again. But he felt that he owed Oliver a favor for that, but Silas suggested that smuggling him out of the city right now wasn’t going to work.

Cue Silas pointing out the small fleet of navy frigates sitting out in the river, blockading the inner city from the outer shore. They weren’t letting any boat past without a thorough search (the Grey Maidens were really determined to find the party and get them). There was simply no way that one of his slow smuggling boats would be able to outrun one of those high-end military frigates.

Of course, players will be players, and they were determined to gtfo of Korvosa. So they came up with the idea of going at night, using a much smaller boat (one of those feather token boats, in point of fact). Cue DM hemming and hawing over whether such a token was available for purchase, but eventually I decided to cave to player desires and roll the standard metropolis chance for any given magic item (usually 75%). And of course, there was one available – the Grey Maidens hadn’t managed to clamp down on that option yet, apparently.

So the party escaped Korvosa in the dead of night, traveling all the way up the Jeggare River to some point about halfway in between Korvosa and Citadel Vraid before camping for the night. All thanks to a f!@!ing 50GP item. The entirety of Book 3 had been ignored or skipped by the party – only my own custom material had been played through. Oh well!

Unfortunately, this sudden and utterly anti-climactic ending to Book 3 meant that I was completely unprepared to start Book 4. Which meant no fancy set of intros to talk about Ileosa and other relic bearers (which is unfortunate as I had the entire very mood-whiplash series of musical themes laid out for the various scenes I had intended to write). To this date, over a year later, I haven’t managed to write that set of intros. I’ll post it if I ever manage to do them.

With nothing ready to go for Book 4 (and rather disappointed at how this had turned out), we called the session there.

Book 3 Dropped Plans:

So, *if* the party had managed to suck it up and go confront Glorio, as I mentioned they would arrive just before the bottom fell out for him thanks to Vaz’em handing over that ledger full of incriminating evidence that Glorio was responsible for the city’s misfortunes. Vimanda would have been preparing for the arrival of Ileosa’s forces as well, and so the manor would quickly erupt into civil war between the rakshasa while grey maidens swarmed into the residence.

The party (likely with Glorio in tow to continue his kinda-sorta alliance with them, depending on how Vaz’em reacted to Glorio’s explanations for his involvement in the death of his mother) would have fought through this mess, made it into the Villified Labyrith, and then had to traverse its rather unique rotating layout while Sivit and Vimanda stalked the party, employing relentless hit-and-run tactics. They would have eventually found Vencarlo and Neolandus, rescuing them both, and then boarding Glorio’s private ship, the Moon Dancer – the same one they had fought the Vrocks on – to escape Korvosa with the river.

The *true* final and climatic battle of Book Three would have been the party-driven Moon Dancer making a run through the Grey Maiden blockade, frigates closing in on all sides along with manticore air support/troop transports while the main theme of Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier played (incidentally I really liked that end credits sequence and spent a fair bit of time picturing how various characters from CotCt would be displayed – I came up with a few interesting ones, such as Ileosa seated on the titular throne, a draconic shaped shadow spreading out on the wall behind her to loom over her, and Sabrina standing with her mask in one hand and a sword in the other).

The “boss” of this encounter would be a three-way combination of Beautrice, hopping aboard from one of the frigates to demand their surrender/try to reason with them before they made things worse, and Gwen swooping in, Cyrus astride on her back – Gwen with orders to kill and Cyrus wanting bloody vengeance for Vox’s murder. It would have been quite a difficult encounter, as is typical with my final encounter to close out each book. And hopefully, they would have been able to take all three of them prisoner/the NPCs would have instead been the ones who ultimately surrendered (I had already planned Gwen to shift into her naked human form with a cry of “I surrender! I surrender!” upon reaching low HP – Cyrus and Beautrice would have been more stubborn and it would have been up to the PCs to knock them out with non-lethal damage/reduce below 0 but not negative Con to avoid killing them).

So much for all of that! Vaz’em’s player was also quite disappointed that no answers would be forthcoming, quite possibly for a very long time now, if ever, about what was going on with Glorio/his mother’s murder. Fortunately, I managed to come up with some ideas on how to rework some of these plans back into the game in Book 4.


A Cliffhanger where

Session Seventy-Six:
the party parachuted off the cliff!


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Let’s keep things moving – into Book Four! In which I pretty much give up, tear the AP into little pieces, and throw them over my shoulder as the train completely derails and I try to steer the wreckage towards the looming shape of Scarwall on the horizon. (Don’t worry – this was more or less planned, as the various changes made previously – including Book Three’s non-ending – pretty much made the Shaoti redundant to our heroes’ task of saving the world. It has, however, taken a very, very long time and we’re *still* at it!)

Session Seventy-Seven:

So, as I made it a habit (two books is a habit? – quiet you!) of opening each book with a series of individual intros, so too did I start Book Four off with a series of personal intros. Of course, it’s a little hard to do a series of intros when the party was sitting at camp by themselves along the Jeggare river many miles outside of Korvosa and far from any civilization. So we turn to the old stand-by of looking inward – aka dreams! Each person had a dream – nightmare really – to serve as their intro. As it turned out, this took pretty much the whole session, along with covering the basic rules for their overland travel to Kaer Maga.

Cid’s Dream Intro – Shadow of the Ash by Miracle of Sound
(Incidentally this song was the whole genesis for Retribution, Cid’s broken Black Blade that he found during his intro to Book Three.)
Cid’s dream took him into the past, where he acted out parts from Retribution’s past life as the devil teacher/advisor to General Leo Astares, the founder of the Order of the Nail. It was more of a cutscene than true interaction, and the scenes were disjointed and piecemeal, much as Retribution’s memories were now – although they were steadily getting better as Retribution remembered more and more of its past life as a devil.

Most of the scenes focused on what led Retribution to becoming what it was when Cid found it – a broken blade hidden away in a cell beneath Citadel Vraith. Retribution – or Azazel as he was called – had been instructed by his overlords to guide Leo Astares, but most importantly, to ensure that Queen Domina completed the Crown of Fangs. The devil’s overlords’ motives for such was not revealed, but it was clear that the devils were supportive of the idea of Kazavon’s return.

Unfortunately, Leo Astares had other plans, and the scenes quickly shifted to a confrontation with Queen Domina shortly after the Crown was completed. While Parashial retrieved the crown (and locked it away beneath the palace – sorry Leo, but you don’t get ultimate power either!), Leo and Azazel went to confront Queen Domina. Together the two of them fought the power mad queen, alongside Yzahnum who had created the Crown in the first place. She put up a good fight, but ultimately was struck down after Leo cut off one of her feet and a hand (leaving her hobbled and crippled, as Oliver saw her through the orb last session).

Before the killing blow could be struck, however, she dimension doored away (straight down, towards her secret study, but ending up in an unexplored section of that underground Thassilon complex that held the Throne of Night, which preserved her life). And it was at this point that Azazel implemented his own betrayal, as ordered by his overlords. He skewered Leo Astares through the back, killing him. And as the general slumped to the floor, crying out in confusion at this sudden (but reluctant!) betrayal, Azazel ordered Yzahnum to burn the room. This explained the fire that broke out within the palace, resulting in Domina’s apparent death – but the skeleton they found belonged to Leo Astares. Charred beyond recognition, and with bits of Domina’s own skeleton in there (from her foot and hand), it was easy to see how the mistaken assumption could be made that Domina had perished in the fire that Yzahnum set, swiftly engulfing the room and several nearby others.

Yzahnum and Azazel then went after the Crown of Fangs, only to get curbstomped by Parashial who was expecting some sort of double cross. Azazel got dead, and Yzahnum got trapped in the brass lamp the party found in the study (and subsequently released him from – doh!). Azazel’s superiors were not happy with this failure to control Leo (who rebelled from their plans for Domina and killed her), and even more seriously the loss of the Crown of Fangs (which Parashial put in a magically sealed box and hid beneath the Palace). And so they punished him by hammering his very soul into a sword, and then breaking it into pieces, shattering his soul and mind along with it.

Cid awoke from this badly shaken, and Retribution, its memories now mostly returned, confirming that what he had seen in the dreams was real. Retribution was a former devil named Azazel, and when pressed, confessed that he was unsure if he could be trusted not to betray Cid in a similar fashion. Although he did want revenge against his diabolical masters, it didn’t change what he was – a devil, a damned soul who had chosen his fate a very long, long time ago. Cue Cid being suspicious of his own sword for a very long time, to the point of even considering burying it and leaving it behind somewhere! Ultimately though, he decided that they had come this far together, and until Retribution actually betrayed him some modicum of trust was in order.

Vaz’em’s Dream Intro – His Father’s Son by Miracle of Sound

(Note the song’s title – it’s pretty important! Enough that it was worth using despite the tonal dissonance to Vaz’em’s nightmare.)

Vaz’em’s nightmare was pretty straightforward – he dreamed of being a child – a baby actually, watching his mother’s murder. The figure who had done the deed was bent over his mother’s corpse, but as it rose the figure looked at him. The face was unmistakably that of Melyia Arkona, blood streaking down her chin after she had savaged his mother’s throat, tearing out a large chunk of flesh and eating it. As the dream finished, Melyia’s face shifted into that of a strange fox-like creature (her true rakshasa form, not that anyone actually knew the Arkonas were rakshasas just yet!) I don’t recall there being much else to this dream – it was fairly short and to the point as far as nightmares go.

Rholand’s Dream – The Distance by Poets of the Fall
(I had originally thought to use this theme for Rholand’s Book Three intro, as the music lends itself well in my mind to a dark bedroom scene, if you catch my drift. But looking at the lyrics, it’s clearly more about the end of a relationship, than the beginning, and so I saved it for now. Yeah, if you thought breaking up by text message was bad, how about via a DREAM!?)

Rholand found himself in one of the gardens back in Castle Korvosa – likely the same one where Ileosa’s coronation was held although it was not specified. Predictably a few moments later, Ileosa emerged from a dark doorway, calling out to him. She expressed her sorrow at Rholand’s betrayal, demanding through her tears to know why he had turned away from her. Rholand tried one final time to get through to her, to explain that she was not well, and that the twisted crown on her head was manipulating her.

Eodred, his face scarred and mutilated, appeared from the darkness to rebuke Rholand, stating that his time was over, that he had failed – Ileosa was his, mind, body, and soul, and there was nothing he could do. Ileosa nodded, wiping away her tears as she said her good-byes – but before they parted ways once and for all, would Rholand be willing to grant her one final dance?

Rholand agreed without hesitation, and for one last brief moment, the two of them danced together on the terrace. Then the sun rose, and Eodred shrieked that now his time was over! And that this WORLD SHALL BURN! Flames washed over Rholand from Eodred’s mouth, consuming him, and he awoke to a start to find himself in the party’s camp.

Oliver’s Dream – The Legacy by Iron Maiden
Oli’s dream was largely meant to be a homage to this cool sequence from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, featuring each of the series’s villains appearing to lecture one of the characters in sequence. It started with Zellara appearing before Oliver, followed by Lamm, Andaisin, Ezram, Parshial, and ending with Oliver himself. Largely these shades lectured Oliver, demanding to know what sort of legacy he intended to leave behind. Would he save himself and flee from the ever growing shadow consuming Korvosa? Or would he choose the fool’s path and try to be the hero to save the day?

Given Oliver’s True Neutral nature, this was an important question – he had played the role of hero up to this point, but largely that was self-serving (revenge on Lamm and keeping his home city intact while building up a small criminal power base). Now that he was fleeing Korvosa, however, a lot of that power base was in questionable shape, and it wasn’t entirely out of the question to simply abandon everything and save his own hide. Hence his subconsciousness bringing up these shades of former allies and enemies to question him as to what his intents exactly were, and to impress upon him that he was at a very important crossroads now.

Largely, Oliver was unimpressed by the shades, yelling at them to take off their shirt (his shade double obliged him, flexing manly while Oliver complimented him on his pecs). By and large, Oliver’s player took the piss out of these scene, but that was how Oliver tended to roll, so it was a pretty typical Oliver moment, insulting and belittling anyone or anything that tried to tell him how things were going to go (including his own subconsciousness it would appear).

After each of them had finished their dream, we very briefly went over a world map of the Varisia region, showing where the party was starting on the shores of the Jeggare River to the east of Korvosa, and the rough path that they would have to follow to get to Kaer Maga. It was a pretty long way, but Oliver had planned ahead and bought some horses for himself and Ronda, along with two gnome minions from his gang that he brought along – “Lefty” and “Righty” (yes, it’s a testicle joke. This *is* Oliver we’re talking about here). Cid could also summon some horses for himself, Rholand, and Vaz’em via Mount spells, so at least the party would be able to travel relatively quickly. Although the roads were more likely to result in encountering Grey Maiden patrols, they were also far faster and so the party headed towards the main road leading north from Korvosa to Harse, which would be their first major stop on the journey to Kaer Maga. And this is where we ended the session, with the first day of travel towards Harse, which turned out to be relatively uneventful as far as random encounters were concerned. The next few days, however, proved to be somewhat more interesting – although not very exciting as it turned out by the party’s continued reluctance to do anything but flee screaming through the woods. But that’s for next session’s write-up to explain further!


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Session Seventy-Eight:

I spent quite a lot of time coming up with potential “random” encounters that the party might have on their way to Harse, and Kaer Maga beyond. Probably a bit too much, but considering the amount of work it takes to make a map, token, macros, etc. for a given session, it was pretty important to do this prep work ahead of time. And since this was their first big time out of the city, I did want to play the wilderness up as somewhat dangerous, and perhaps even growing a little more dangerous than usual as Kazavon’s influence spread, and certain dark things took notice. Also, I had rolled up that the party would have no less than two random encounters on their next several days of travel to Harse, so I had to come up with something to fill the session. I might as well have not bothered, as it turned out.

First up, as the party was traveled through the countryside back towards the road leading to Harse, they came across a small farm. They found the Halfling owner of said farm up in an apple tree close to the small dirt road they were following, who called out to them. He begged them for help, saying that a bunch of owlbears just over the hill were completely wrecking his fields, and had nearly eaten him before he had fled to the safety of the tree. Would the party be interested in dealing with these beasts in return from some old gear from his aborted career as an adventurer?

Well, they peeked over the hill to see no less than seven owlbears rummaging around in this poor farmer’s field, and Oliver summed up the group’s feelings pretty succinctly with a “Hell no!” They had little need for some old adventurer’s musty +1 shortsword anyway, and in a recurring pattern for the party this session they avoided the fight and left the farmer to his own devices. Oliver was particularly adamant in his convictions to keep moving and avoid doing anything that might draw attention to them (like butchering a pack of owlbears by themselves) – the “evil” part of his TN alignment expressing itself right now in extreme self-interest, particularly the interest in getting as far from Korvosa as possible as fast as possible. It wasn’t an entirely unreasonable fear after the events of the party’s fall from grace when their very powerful enemies finally decided to do something about them. So the party left the farmer cursing behind them and continued on to the next bit of material that I had prepared, the scene for their second random encounter.

Reaching the main road, the party continued on it for another day until they came to a fork in the road – the left branch going to Harse and the right branch looping around to go to Janderhoff by way of Crystalrock. The Janderhoff route was somewhat circuitous, and they had already decided to go on to Harse anyway, so there wasn’t much debate there. What was of interest here was the decently large inn that had been set up next to the crossroads, a small sign proclaiming the structure to be the Silver Griffon Inn. Several large circus tents had been pitched on the grounds directly across from the inn, and seemed to be a point of contention between the inn’s owner and the circus’s ringmaster as the party rode up. Apparently the inn’s owner was not appreciative of the circus pitching their tents right next to the inn without paying for rooms, while the ringmaster was trying to smooth things over (while still not paying anything).

The party wasn’t particularly interested in playing peacemaker, and after a bit of thought decided that they weren’t interested in staying at an inn right at a major crossroads (too likely a patrol would wander by and find them). But before they wandered off, they did engage the innkeep and the circus ringmaster in conversation.

The inn’s owner, a husband and wife, introduced themselves as Mikhail and Leliana Sasperio – yes, *that* Sasperio. Cue awkward glances amongst the party when they asked if, since the party was coming from the direction of Korvosa, if they had heard anything about a Jostiliana Sasperio who had gone to Korvosa to study to become an acolyte of Shelyn (Jostiliana’s backstory was that she was a minor acolyte of Shelyn who ran afoul of Lamm. He took her necklace – hence the symbol of Shelyn in his cache of ill-gotten goods – and passed her off to his old friend Rolth who tortured her until she broke and became his nutty sorcerer/rogue girlfriend.) The name triggered a memory in Rholand’s mind of the fight with Jostiliana in Carowyn manor, and the lightbulb finally went off amongst the party about who the innkeep was talking about. They wisely decided to keep their mouth shut as to what had happened to their daughter (Cid Shocking Grasp spellsword to the face!)

The ringmaster introduced himself as Lord Bellingham Fairweather, proprietor of Fairweather Circus. The circus had a handful of performers and animals, and looked as if they had fallen on hard times. Nonetheless, the circus was here to provide an important purpose – namely, to give Rholand a new animal companion since poor Flank the lion wasn’t coming back. They had a tiger, a drake, an elephant . . . and the Amazing Bruno, a brown bear. Naturally, with a name like that, Rholand was drawn to the bear, who was a little thin but didn’t seem to be mistreated, and was intelligent enough to know a few tricks (offering Rholand a paw with a loud snuffle after they had a stare-down contest). Rholand bought Bruno from the circus for a decent sum of gold, and the ringmaster was quite happy to part with his bear, even one as special as the Amazing Bruno, as it was more gold than the circus had seen for a long time.

Vaz’em also had an encounter of his own with one of the innkeep’s hired hands, a dimwitted man who was convinced that he was Blackjack. Vaz’em didn’t know what to make of the poor addled man, although he did convince him to change his name from Blackjack to Sulos for some reason (I can’t remember why – secret identity maybe?)

The party then moved on from the inn, pitching camp about an hour away down the road and a little off of it. So where was the random encounter? Well, that night, Vaz’em was on guard when he heard screaming and shrieks coming from the direction of the inn. Deciding to go investigate (I think after waking someone up – maybe Oli?), Vaz’em went back towards the inn, moving fast and eventually coming to find a scene of slaughter.

A small pride of manticores had descended upon the inn and circus, killing everyone and all of the animals in a particularly vicious manner. This was beyond usual hunting, even for sadistic manticores – they all seemed agitated, and determined to kill every last person, as the largest manticore (the Alpha) was on top of the inn’s roof and smashing holes in it to try and get in at the people cowering inside. Again, there were quite a few manticores to this encounter – eight in all – even if most of them were young adolescents clearly just learning how to hunt.

So Vaz’em was well within his rights to just hide in the darkness and watch the slaughter unfold for a few more minutes, before turning around and just leaving. He went back to the party, talked with Oliver about it, and they both decided “f%@& those guys”. Hurray Neutral alignment after being big damn heroes for several AP books. In the morning, the party moved on, and observed as the manticores flew off from the smoldering ruins of the inn – and promptly diverted course to head towards a nearby farmstead. It was a last ditch attempt to get the party to get involved in one of the random encounters by making it clear that the manticores had no intention of stopping their aggression, but the mystery of why they were doing this wasn’t enough. And so the party pressed on to Harse, where I had absolutely no material prepared because I had put together the two random encounters with the Owlbears and Manticores instead *sigh*. Again, Oliver’s defense – the most vehement proponent of avoiding these fights - was that he didn’t want to attract any attention to the party until they were farther away from Korvosa, and whatever meager coin a farmer or an inn could scrape together was not worth the risk or trouble.

So, whatever, I winged it and had them reach Harse without further incident (I didn’t roll any other random encounters on the way there anyway). They arrived to find the city’s palisade closed for the evening, as the sun had just set prior to their arrival. The party obviously didn’t identify themselves by name when challenged, by a Grey Maiden no less, but eventually they managed to talk their way up to the captain of the local Grey Maiden detachment, a Captain Droksin, who eventually relented and let them inside.

Going to the local inn for the night, the party found a familiar face waiting for them inside, cracking jokes to entertain the locals - the infamous Natiri Brosa (I mean, Trinia Sabor)! Trinia explained that she was actually a member of a local adventuring party now, the so-called Horsemen of Harse (her choice of name for the group, anyway). Her leg was bandaged up, and Trinia explained that she had injured it during a fight with some ettercaps (which, like everything else in the countryside, were getting a little agitated by the waves of EEEEEEVIL coming from Korvosa these days) – as a result, she was staying here in Harse while the rest of her party was off patrolling in the surrounding forest.

Being separated from the group was just as well though, as Trinia had heard that a short distance away from Harse in the nearby forest was a sizable manor owned by House Arkona. A sort of summer vacation home, if you will, that the Arkonas visited from time and time and likely had all sorts of riches hidden away in. Trinia, having no love for the Arkonas as most Korvosans viewed them with distrust, wanted to rob the place now that she was a full-fledged adventurer, and that was the sort of thing adventurers do, right?

Finally, with the promise of riches, and a stern throat clearing from the DM that this would be Vaz’em’s last best chance to get some answers (and in fact exploring the manor was his “I’m special” personal quest for Book Four), the party agreed to do something other than run away. And so the next session promised to see some action (hopefully), and for the party to finally bite some sort of plot hook beyond just steaming toward Kaer Maga as fast as their legs could carry them, their tails firmly between their legs. As it turned out, my encounter plans for next session *also* were all for naught, but it had some very interesting developments nonetheless!

The Manticores and Owlbears:

Of course, I can be a vengeful DM when the mood strikes, and so these skipped encounters would come back to bite the party in the ass sooner rather than later. The owlbears were more or less a truly meaningless random encounter, but the manticores did have a purpose – they were a fleeing pack, escaping from the cliffs near Citadel Vraith where the Grey Maidens had begun a program to “domesticate” them to serve as flying mounts, replacing the Sable Marine’s griffons. Of course, since they skipped the end of Book Three when they’d have had to deal with the Grey Maiden’s manticore troop transports, and avoided the manticores here – and later when they made another appearance, technically – the party never learned about this little detail. I’m sure I’ll surprise them with it at some point, heheheheheheh.


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So, despite the party’s frustrating surprise departure from Korvosa, I managed to come up with a back-up plan for handling Vaz’em’s unanswered questions about Glorio’s role in his mother’s death. This took the form of Vaz’em’s “I’m special” personal quest for Book Four. Each PC would have their own (sorta optional) personal “I’m special” quest that they could embark on during Book Four, generally resolving some important personal conflict for them and resulting in a *very* nice reward customized for them specifically. I may have went a little overboard on Vaz’em’s personal quest given how many sessions it took to resolve, but that’s partly a function of how it was laid out – go break into a huge nobleman’s manor and steal all his stuff.

Seventy-Nine:

So the party, while disinterested in helping poor down on their luck commoners, were perfectly happy to go break into Glorio’s summer home and steal all of his stuff. Partially out of greed, and partially out of a desire for revenge given the slippery snake had left an overall bad taste in the party’s mouth (a bad taste well deserved given he was the self-confessed mastermind behind Eodred’s death and Korvosa’s woes, and apparently responsible for the murder of Vaz’em’s mother).

They spent the evening at the inn, and because they were still a little concerned about the Grey Maidens, Vaz’em did some investigation to make sure they weren’t able to have the long arm of the law snatch them up. Sneaking around the miltia barracks, Vaz’em did some eavesdropping and learned that the Grey Maidens numbered about a dozen, and were a patrol that had been sent to help the local militia with their various bandit/dangerous wild animal problems. They had been here for several weeks, and despite Captain Droksin wishing to return to the capital, she agreed to stay a little longer and continue to help the militia ensure Harse was safe. So that was a huge relief – the Grey Maidens didn’t even know about their “betrayal” of the queen just yet. Still, just to be safe they used different names and gave all the Grey Maidens a wide berth on their way out of town alongside Trinia Sabor, I mean, Natiri Brosa.

Trinia only had a rough idea of the manor’s location, but it was a nobleman’s manor – not exactly hard to miss. Apparently the Arkonas hadn’t been to the manor in a number of years, so it might even be abandoned for all she knew – but that didn’t mean that there weren’t still valuables to be had there. And since it was a nobleman’s manor, there was a road winding through the forest that eventually led to the manor. Eventually, the party reached a narrow cobblestone road separating from the dirt road they had been following, lined along the edges on each side by a series of runes carved into the stones. A worn sign next to it proclaimed that ahead was the Arkona Manor – remain on the path to reach it. Do not under any circumstances leave the marked path.

I had wanted to use the vision layer of the mapping software we were using to set up a dense series of trees along the path, resulting in the party literally catching small glimpses of a large structure ahead along the path as they moved down it, but sadly the ever-shifting shadows from all of the trees ended up stressing some people’s computers a little too much, and so I had to abandon that plan for a clear map without the vision layer. Oh well, so much for artistry! :-p

I had figured, PCs being PCs, they would scoff at the warning and go walking through the woods rather than allow themselves to be funneled into a single file line directly into wherever the mysterious path wanted to lead them. But I guess that shaken confidence from their fall from grace had really gotten a good hold on them, because they actually just listened to directions for once and stuck to the stone path leading through the forest to the manor grounds. Righty and Lefty did stay behind with a couple horses to await their return – which was wise considering they were just level 1 hirelings and would have immediately died at this level if a monster so much as breathed at them.

And so yet *again* for basically the third time in a row (if you count fleeing Korvosa as the first time) the party decided to bypass a bunch of encounters I had prepared for the session, expecting them to be their usual belligerent selves. Although they got a pretty strong hint that staying on the stone path was a good idea as a short distance along the path, some sort of invisible creature leaped from tree to tree on opposite sides of the path, nimbly crossing the stone path without having to walk across the warded stones. So those stones were there for a good reason!

Which is not to say that I didn’t anticipate the party’s caution. About halfway down the path, they came across a stone bridge crossing over a small bridge. From beneath the bridge, the voice of a young boy called out, begging for someone to help him in the most blatant trap ever. The sound of the boy’s voice had a magical effect on Cid, but he shrugged the effect off before it could convince him to step off the path to investigate. *That* pretty much sealed the deal to avoid this trap, with the young boy calling insults after them as they crossed the bridge and left the “boy” behind. Through the trees, they also spied a tangle of trees coated in thick webs, as well as a barren patch of ground with a series of stone obelisks set up around the outside (basically a mini Stonehenge). Focused on the manor ahead, they ignored both of these other distractions and plowed ahead to the imposing stone gates that blocked the path at the edge of the forest. There was no wall, just the gates blocking the path.

The gate was an imposing wrought iron affair, the iron bars that made up the gate spiked and gnarled. Two sphinx-like stone statues were perched on either side of these gates, one carrying a long spear and the other one a falchion. As the party approached, these statues rumbled to life, calling out to them that the manor was closed, and to either leave or present identification. Identification, in this case, was clearly a blood offering as a small bronze basin was set into one of the pillars that a sphinx-guard sat on, along with a small blade for ritual cutting.

They did a bit of debate (still having NO interest in trying to walk around the gate, which would have meant leaving the warded path), until finally Vaz’em decided to be a bit precipitous for once (he’s almost always cautious and suspicious, expecting trouble), and bled himself into the basin on a whim/hunch that maybe any old blood sacrifice would do? To everyone’s shock, however, after a moment of silence, the statues rumbled to life again to announce “Welcome home”, the iron gate swinging open before them.

Answers, as it turned out, were actually forthcoming as the party crossed into the manor’s front yard, circling around the fancy fountain that the path diverted around before coming up to the front door. It was protected by a similar bronze identification basin - or perhaps it was simply unlocked, can’t remember now. Either way, the party had no trouble opening the doors, and after a moment’s hesitation, left the horses standing around outside to nibble on the front yard grass – didn’t seem likely that anything was going to bother them in the warded area (they hoped!).

Inside they found an immaculate foyer – and the sounds of movement coming from the half-open door to their right. Moving to investigate, they found none other than Glorio Arkona, muttering curses to himself as he dug around in an old liquor cabinet at the far end of the room. In between them on a table rested his rapier, which Glorio sprang for as soon as he heard the party barge into the room at him – only to stop short at a “just try it” from Cid. Not that poor Glorio was in any shape for a fight – his clothing was torn and filthy, and one arm hung uselessly at his side, wrapped up in a crude and bloody sling made from part of his shirt. It looked like someone had butchered him (or, y’know, he had a run-in from a certain someone with a Holy handcrossbow).

Glorio gave them a surly greeting, wondering aloud if Vaz’em was hereto finish the job or if they were just here to rob him blind after they screwed him over. Cue his explanation that *someone* had broken into his vault, that *someone* had handed the evidence of his misdeeds over to his “wife” Melyia, who had promptly handed that evidence over to Ileosa. And then tried to kill him alongside a very angry and free Blackjack while the Grey Maidens closed in on his manor. He escaped, of course, but it was a near thing and he had to do it with very little resources or preparation. Hence why he was here – to loot his own manor before disappearing to greener pastures.

The party was less than sympathetic about Glorio’s situation, but they weren’t here to kill him – yet. Vaz’em then got to ask his question that had been eating at him since he received that note that started this whole domino chain of events at the end of Book Three – why did he have Vaz’em’s mother killed?

Glorio sighed, and for once seemed to show some signs of genuine regret. He explained that when he was younger and a little more foolish, he met a beautiful young peasant girl named Reana who was a servant in the manor. They fell in love, which might not have been so terrible – nobles had dalliances with commoners all the time – but Reana became pregnant. And that posed a problem for Glorio, because a child of their union could expose a terrible secret of the Arkona family. A secret that he would – had, actually – to kill to protect. And so at Melyia – Vimanda’s – threatening urgings, he sent her to deal with the problem by disposing of mother and child. Apparently she had taken care of the first but not the latter, seeking her own advantage, as here that child was before him. Yes, Vaz’em . . . I am your father. Glorio made a lampshade remark at how awkward that sounded coming out of his mouth, and then all of the doors in the manor, including the front door and the door to the room that they were currently standing in, slammed shut. And the menacing sound of maniacal laughter echoed through the building. End session!

Missed Encounters:

So, the first missed encounter was the reason for the warded path – a pack of dweomercats that roamed the forest, conditioned to attack anyone who strayed off the marked path. They’re a really fun monster – I was looking forward to Cid trying to blast them with a fireball only for them all to teleport as an immediate interrupt and taking a flying leap into his face instead. They were invisible thanks to absorbing illusion magic from the fake stream traveling under the bridge, which also concealed a well (a secret entrance/exit to the manor’s basement level).

The “boy” crying out for help was a Leucrotta hiding under the bridge – with a pack of crottas (dire hyenas basically) hiding in the illusionary waters of the stream.

The webbed section of trees was an expeditionary force of ettercaps and a couple big spiders – I had this idea for an Adherer (creepy spider-web mummy thing) having taken over and organized the local tribe of ettercaps and was attempting to expand its power base, but the idea never got touched as the party never actually dealt with any ettercaps. So I guess the Horsemen of Harse took care of it off-screen.

The mini-Stonehenge was probably my favorite encounter of the bunch (so much so that I recycled it for use inside of the manor in an even *creepier* encounter. Basically entering the circle of stones triggered a ritual sacrifice Haunt – those in the area had to fight off a suggestion to go over and chain themselves to one of the stone monoliths using the rusty chains set into them. The following round, a group of skeletons would animate and attempt to sacrifice any shackled characters with coup-de-grace attacks. Meanwhile, a Bone Golem guardian would also arise to run interference for anyone who passed their save versus the Haunt and tried to stop the skeletons.

And finally, the gate and its guardian sphinxes were a Gargantuan Animated Object. Trying to go around the gate without giving it a wide berth or messing with it would cause it to animate and start kicking ass. The wrought iron fence would attempt to skewer and grapple victims, while each sphinx pounded away with long spear and falchion attacks. It dealt a TON of damage thanks to being Gargantuan, but since it was totally immobile it was a limited threat once the surprise attack was over (assuming it failed to grapple anyone to hold them still for the beatdown).


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Session Eighty:

So, as we started up the session, we did a quick runthrough of the party’s current situation – Vaz’em was part rakshasa, being Bahor/Glorio’s son, they were trapped in Arkona’s summer manor after venturing there to loot the place, and some malevolent force had just slammed all the doors in the building shut with an evil laugh. That being said, Glorio hadn’t yet revealed himself as an actual rakshasa, just that he had non-human lineage that had gotten expressed by Vaz’em (hence making him a threat to the Arkonas in human-centric Korvosa).

This malevolent force was recognized by Bahor, and although all of the sordid details weren’t spelled out immediately, the gist of it was that this was Hazmarduk. Hazmarduk was Glorio’s father (the original rakshasa who impersonated the original Arkona when he went to Vudra). Hazmarduk was killed by Glorio, and his immortal spirit imprisoned in the basement so he couldn’t just reincarnate and hunt Bahor down for revenge later. Now of course Hazmarduk had slipped his bindings enough to come back as a ghost, and was haunting the s$#* out of the manor. And he wanted revenge on Bahor, although he had no hesitation about ruining everyone else’s day too (Hazmarduk, as my players came to learn, was a real a%#$~+@).

So as Hazmarduk was ranting away at the group and threatening to do bad things to them all, Glorio explained what the plan was. Hidden throughout the manor’s first floor were a series of item caches, each containing a handful of generally useful items and one specific item that would be helpful in dealing with Hazmarduk (anti-ghost items among others). They could hit all or none of them, but Glorio was of the opinion that they would need to deal with Hazmarduk being escaping (just like a horror movie, you can’t escape the haunted house before dealing with the ghost – although I’d probably have let them “nope nope nope” out of their if they really insisted.

Of course, that wouldn’t stop Hazmarduk from getting more free, and sooner or later he’d be free to leave the house and come after them wherever they tried to hide, and next time they wouldn’t see him coming. So the party agreed to the new updated quest of “get loot, re-kill the s!&~ out of the rakshasa sorcerer ghost before he can escape” pretty readily when Glorio put it like that.

Once they had their fill of gear, the group would go down into the flooded basement where Hazmarduk’s body was and bring the fight to him. If only it would be that easy, considering that Hazmarduk was growing in strength and was happy to use the house as a weapon against them. That being said, an interior door might be a serious barrier to a group of scared teenagers, but barely a speedbump to a heavily-armed team of adventurers. Oli chopped down the door and they filed back out into the foyer, deciding to head north to the ballroom first to pick up an item Glorio believed would help with all of these now-sealed doors (a Chime of Opening).

As they passed underneath a stereotypical foyer chandelier, it stereotypically fell crashing down towards them, landing directly on Glorio as several members of the party jumped clear. Glorio was of course unharmed by the impact, a fact that Hazmarduk made sure to point out to the group while lecturing them for protecting a “monster”. Nevermind that they were protecting him from the far worse monster that Hazmarduk was. Evidence of which was forthcoming as they stepped into the ballroom after smashing that set of doors down.

The cavernous ballroom was set up with a clear area for dancing in the middle (complete with more chandeliers hanging perilously above, just waiting for their chance to be turned into a missile by Hazmarduk). Two stages were set up in opposite corners of the room, and atop one a large serpentine figure sat slumped, softly crying to itself. As the party filed in, this figure stirred and sat up, starring at them in disbelief.

The creature had the upper body of a woman (or perhaps an angel given the feathered wings jutting from her back) and the lower body of a snake. A metal collar was locked around her throat and manacles around her wrists, long chains attached to them that snaked to anchor points beneath the stage. For additional security, a ring of runes was carved into the periphery of the stage (a binding circle of Protection from Good 10’ Radius). Cid, master of studying weird beings from other planes of existence, correctly identified this creature as a Lillend Azata, the CG equivalent of an angel that were generally artists, poets, and musicians (and encouraged such artistry in mortals who they favored).

The Lillend hesitantly identified itself as Cassiopeia, but grew more sullen when she saw Glorio slinking around at the back of the party, berating him for leaving her here. Leaving her bound to this place and alone for the past several decades after he abandoned the manor (following killing Hazmarduk), to be exact (okay, so Hazmarduk wasn’t the only a#~@~%$ in the Arkona family tree).

Hazmarduk interjected around this point, attempting to order Cassiopeia to kill the group (reinforced with a Suggestion spell I think), but Cassiopeia shrugged the magic off and refused. She didn’t want to fight, she didn’t want to do the biding of any Arkona, she just wanted to go home after spending decades, if not centuries, as a captive band/plaything for rakshasas. The obvious solution of just killing her to end the summoning was put forward, but Cassiopeia’s obvious horror at that idea squashed that as the go-to plan. Additionally, it was revealed that she wasn’t merely summoned, but Called, and thus her death would, while not permanent, it would scatter her essence across the CG afterlife and it would take decades for her soul to reform from that.

Breaking her chains and letting her just walk/fly out was also an idea that was considered but quickly squashed after it was pointed out that Cassiopeia was also the subject of a (slightly tweaked) Binding spell, Chaining her in place, and while the party could be around her (no antipathy portion of the binding spell to make people go away) breaking that spell wasn’t so simple. In fact, the only way that Cassiopeia knew how to break the spell (because Hazmarduk told her, confident it was impossible – a~*#!*!!) was for her to lose a legitimate “battle of the bands” musical contest (no throwing the contest). Ronda (Oli’s bard cohort) perked up at this, and immediately volunteered (this was also another reason I had Trinia tagging along, even though she ended up playing second fiddle to Ronda as it turned out).

Touched at the willingness of this band of strangers to help her (she had been around Hazmarduk too long to expect any sort of kindness), Cassiopeia thanked them but warned that she was pretty good, and she couldn’t just throw the contest (although she kinda did since I bombed her first three perform checks with nat 2s & 3s). Mechanically, I explained that the two competing bards would make perform checks for 5 rounds, totaling their results together – whoever had the highest total at the end of those 5 rounds was the winner. Ronda and Trinia mounted the empty stage in the opposite corner from Cassiopeia, and on a whim rather than staying on the ballroom floor the rest of the party climbed up with them. They debated trying to make Perform checks of their own to help Trinia (Aid Another), but as it turned out Hazmarduk/the manor itself had other ideas in mind.

As the lillend produced a harp and began plucking away, and the two ladies started a duet, ghostly flames burst into existence around the two stages and in front of all the doors leading in and out of the ballroom, sealing the group off (good thing they had all decided to stick close to the ladies to protect them!) In addition, the ballroom quickly filled with the pale ethereal forms of party guests, dancing and talking around the periphery of the room. The ghosts weren’t entranced by the music for long – in twos and threes they turned towards the group and charged the stage.

Music Theme - The Devil Went Down to Georgia by Charlie Daniels Band
(We exchanged a number of songs after this one, sadly this is the only one that I remember, as I started the fight with the above song).

Originally the expectation was for the party to be down on the dance floor in the middle of the ghosts, and have to sidestep dancing couples who paid them no mind – plus the chandeliers overhead crashing down on them thanks to Hazmarduk. They avoided those two complications neatly by being up on the stage, so all they had to worry about was the ghosts coming after them one group at a time.

These ghosts were just level 1 experts (well-to-do members of Harse from a hundred years ago that Hazmarduk invited to his manor for a party – and an after party slaughter). But incorporeal is a pretty big buff, and I cheated a little by replacing the ghosts’ default corrupting touch (which would have just done 1d6 damage, meaningless at this level) with the stat-draining alternate power they can have, targeted to Charisma. Given that my party is a bunch of crass thugs (minus Rholand), getting their Charisma damaged was a pretty unpleasant threat (although it would have just knocked them out, not killed them – Hazmarduk wanted them alive, after all). Taking half damage also kept the ghosts up for a surprisingly long time despite only having HP in the mid-teens.

Still, the party held their own (it wasn’t a horde of ghosts, only about a dozen in total) and musically the Ronda/Trinia duet was kicking Cassiopeia’s ass (thanks to those low rolls she got in the first three rounds of the competition). The lillend started making a comeback in the last half of the competition though, as the baying of hounds from the nearby hall filled the room. The flame-shrouded doors boomed open to admit a trio of ghostly hellhounds, and the assembled ghosts guests screamed in horror. The haunt that had spawned all of these ghosts in the first place then played out a brief scene for the group, of what happened in this room – the assembled guests in the past screaming as the hellhounds were turned loose on them, Cassiopeia sitting on her stage sobbing as she was forced to continue to play through the slaughter while Hazmarduk watched and enjoyed himself (he’s such an a@~@!!@!).

The ghostly hounds weren’t that much of a threat, sadly, as while they did have their breath weapons (which Hazmarduk supercharged a bit with ghostly flames), the party took them as a more serious threat than the guest ghosts, and even at half damage, a shocking grasp crit is a shocking grasp crit. The ghosts only stuck around another two rounds anyway, as at the end of the fifth round Cassiopeia lifted her hands away from her harp and the ladies stopped singing. There was a flair of magic from the lillend’s stage, and then the shackles snapped off of her wrists and throat, leaving the outsider to look around in stunned amazement – she was free! Then the tears of gratitude started, while Hazmarduk verbally pouted, although he assured the party that it was a meaningless victory – he’d just resummon her and rebind her to this place after they were dead and gone.

Meanwhile, Glorio had gotten done with his part of the fight – prying up the floorboards on the stage to get at the stash of goods he had hidden beneath it, including a chime of opening (so much for all those arcane locked doors!) Cassiopeia was amazed that she had been beaten by mortals, but gladly handed over her harp (a harp of shattering, in fact) over to Ronda as a reward for her impressive performance. She also asked if there was anything she could do for the party before she returned home – she dared not stay here (she was deathly afraid of being rebound by Hazmarduk, and longed for her home plane).

Cid made some sort of comment about his problem with being damned, and Cassiopeia was sorry to learn of the hellknight’s fate but was unable to help. Well . . . she couldn’t fix it, but she *did* ask if she could have a few private moments alone with Cid to help him forget about it . . . *ahem* (from my perspective, it was part of a running joke since the Erinyes in Domina’s chamber that female outsiders found something about Cid deeply intriguing – call it the bad boy effect?) Cid eventually figured out that the lillend didn’t just want to talk, and politely turned her down, at which point the lillend pulled out one of her feathers from a wing and handed it to him. He could break the feather to summon her for a brief time, in case he ever needed her help – or wanted to take her up on that offer some other time.

And with that, the lillend faded away from existence in a bright flash of light as she returned home. Armed with the Chime of Opening that Glorio had gotten from the stash (along with some money and gems if I recall correctly), the party turned their attention to the rest of the manor. But that would have to wait until the following session.

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