The spores sting Sköllji's face as he charges at the fungus creature.
After cleaning through the creature, Sköllji uses the blades momentum to spin around and plant the axe into the creature's side.
Sköllji surges forward, his ax driving into the fungal monster. The beast explodes into a cloud of harmless spores, which slowly drift to the ground likenlight green snow.
Jexen remains motionless, still somehow standing on his feet.
Brinda rushes over to Jexen, her expression concerned. "Jexen! Are you all right? She does her best to examine his wounds and diagnose his state of well-being.
Ouch
Jexen is incapacitated and shut down.
Turning his key helps bring him back, but it's.much slower than usual. Typically he comes back right away when you turn his key, but this time it took several moments for it to kick in.
Who am I?
Wait...I am...Jexen.
The fog lifts, and Jexen creakily begins to move again.
"The creature...is gone?", he asks, a note of confusion still remaining in his voice.
As you move beyond the fungal growth, you realize that the other room you fled from leads to this same tunnel. The two rooms reconnect in the opposite Y pattern, leading to a room with smooth floors, walls, and ceilings. It has a glazed ceramic look to it.
Smooth ceramic columns are placed seemingly at random, connecting the floor to the ceiling.
As soon as you enter, the hallway behind you closes; plates like the apeture of a camera circle in to seal the room off from exit.
"I am still close to collapse. But so long as I can fight, I will.", Jexen says before moving towards the next room.
Considering no one has replied since Sunday (and posting rates have drastically dropped), I'm going to make the assumption that everyone is too busy to play or has gotten bored with this campaign.
Unless I get some strong support from all remaining players, then I'll be writing up a post soon which will tell the rest of the story for this module and followed with closing the campaign.
If anyone is still interested in playing, I am in two other SotDL games which you may be able to join (either with this PC or a new one). You've all been wonderful players and have made absolutely fantastic characters and stories. This is seriously some of the best RP I've ever seen in a game, and I've been playing for almost 30 years and PBP gaming for almost 20.
Thank you for your participation. We had a good run.
Thanks for running the game sorry it didn't last
The cave is not a natural cave, but rather a very long living demon who has taken the shape of a gigantic work like creature and just sits at the endge of a lake, slowly feeding off of whatever wanders into it's mouth. The opening of the cave had stalagtites and stalagmites that pop out of the ground to try and keep creatures in. The fungal Chambers are the "lungs" that have been overgrown with fungus. The relationship is not harmful to the demon, so they stay. The glazed room is the stomach, which has stones to help madh food up.
Moving beyond this is a parastaltic passage which moves food down further into a digestion champer which is filled with living tar. Rising up from the ground are tenticles holding the children aloft.
The children are trapped in this final room. They're all alive, but barely. You can rescue them here, but it requires doing something special to ensure each of them is not permanently damaged in some way.
Let's skip to this part. Roll dice as necessary or tell me what you do.
Auri is alive, but he’s bloated almost beyond recognition from the strange growth hormones the tentacles pump into him. His clothes hang from him in tatters and his left hand is a vivid purple, constricted by a silver ring. It takes several minutes of gory and painful cutting to get Auri free. The bloating starts to disappear, but the hand (especially the ring fi nger) starts to turn black.
Byron clings to life by the thinnest of threads. He’s dying, and unlike most dying creatures, he’s conscious (the tentacles are seeing to that), and he wails piteously.
Most of the tentacles holding Vanessa can be easily brushed away—except for the three attached to her face. Removing them requires a success on a Intelligence challenge roll followed by a success on an Agility challenge roll. The Agility roll must be made the round after the Intelligence roll, but it doesn’t need to be made by the same character. The tentacle comes off either way, but it leaves a hideous permanent scar if either challenge roll fails.
Jexen is enraged at the sight, and determined to deny the cave-demon its prize.
"I will cut Auri free! See to the others!"
He cuts Auri free, then sees the state of his hand.
More poison!
Without hesitation, Jexen strikes with his sword, aiming to cut Auri's left hand off at the wrist before the blackness can reach the rest of the arm.
As you take Auri off, he still screams in pain from his hand. Cutting his hand off stops the pain, but throws him into shock having lost his entire hand. Nonetheless, it worked.
Brinda moves forward swiftly to Vanessa, inspecting the tentacles attached to her face. Confidently, she raises her hands to begin working them from the girl's flesh, trying to figure out how they're attached and how best to remove them while causing as little damage to the girl as possible..
Brinda successfully removes the tenticals from Vanessa, avoiding scaring the teenagers face.
Let's see how Byron's fate plays out:
On the first roll, he regains 1 HP and is awake, although still in pain. Cutting him down is easy enough.
Looking over the children, it seems at least some of the legends are true. None of them have the disease anymore. The demon cave must have eaten the disease away before it fed on the children. Or perhaps the fungus did that on their way in. More investigation would be needed.
Getting back out through the mouth of the cave is difficult. Both you and the children are in no condition to get past either the peristaltic passage or the climb up the slope to the cave mouth.
Instead, you must continue through the rest of the tunnels and while a lot less dangerous, it is much grosser.
The passageway has about a foot of black, slimy feces at its start, and as it climbs to the surface, the passage narrows and the feces accumulate.
By the end (in both senses of the word), you must crawl through a passageway less than one yard in diameter, pushing your way through a wall of black feces.
You emerge in a fetid swampy bit of shoreline to the south. The feces are a natural disease vector, and you don't know if you've caught something or not. The days and weeks ahead will determine that.
Once out of the cave and on the way back, the children are all quiet and withdrawn. They speak very little, and seem to have little interest in the world around them.
You bring the children back to the castle, and Lord Garnach is overjoyed at the sight of his children, though it is tempered with sorrow by Auri's missing ha
He gives you your rewards and offers permanent employment for those who wish to stay.
This concludes the stories of Jexen, Brinda, Crashing Waves, Sköllji, and Durnik.
Durnik heads back to Fletcher's Rest. He finds Cyrenik and T.A.S. there and they live a long life as friends protecting the small village and temple.
If you like, you can write a conclusion for your PC, dictating what happens to them after this.
Jexen is relieved that all three children survive. Though he does understand on some level that their suffering is not over.
He accepts Lord Garnach's reward, though declines a permanent position.
"My place is on the front line, wherever that may be."
He has only respect for those (if any) whom remain but it is not a life for him.
He will return to Fletcher's Rest, if only to see what became of it.
The clockwork fighter is cheered that the village has such guardians but again, he feels he can not remain.
"Whatever cause I once had, it has distilled to this: To fight. To battle the evils in this world. I will return but I can not remain. Good bye, friends and may the gods watch over you."
He seeks companions who wish to venture into the darkest of places. For if nothing else, he remembers the value of those who stand together. And those happy to wind his key.
Whether he does manage to return, is another matter...
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In the end, Brinda chooses to travel on with Jexen, in part because his plans involve seeking out the darkness in order to fight it; Brinda is happy to fight it, but she also believes she can learn from it. But more importantly, she feels a companionship with the clockwork that her brutal life has never allowed her.
Over time, she would reveal her true nature to Jexen, once she felt that he would, if not understand, at least accept her strange origins. At some point, the persona of Brinda would be ripped away from Toy, and it would have to find another person to be. But now, for the first time, Toy was beginning to feel that there was something to it that was more than just pretending to be somebody - with its growing power came a growing self-awareness. Toy began to realise that all the personas it had worn had left something behind, had contributed to its personality. Toy realised that it was a caring and sensitive creature, one who abhorred cruelty to the weak and defenceless, but also desired the power to both protect itself and those it cared about from evil.
The ending to Toy's story was never clear. That it would continue to accumulate arcane power was a given, but how would it use that power? To protect and serve the weak and innocent, or for its own gain and betterment - or both?