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We pick up the next session almost immediately after everyone has woken up from their disturbing Scarwall-inspired dream. It’s still the middle of the night, but everyone shuffles out of their respective corner of Rholand’s pavilion tent to sit around the smoldering campfire, sharing a drink and commiserating over what they had seen.

Cid confirms with Azizel that what he had seen was more or less what happened, and while the reformed outsider’s memory was still fuzzy, he did remember that Eurydice did have a sister named Cassandra, back when they were all human. Trinia does her best to cheer up Vaz’em and shake him out of his post-family-conflict funk, which he tends to wrestle with whenever having to deal with his family, even in an oblique situation such as Bellshallam’s challenge. Jennifer keeps her thoughts mostly to herself, save for a few of her customary non-sequitors. Rholand is understandably perhaps the most disturbed by his dream even though he had largely resigned himself to having to put Ileosa down to stop Kazavon at this point – it still stung to have it thrown back in his face.

Zellara pops out at around this point to offer the Book Five Harrow reading, not particularly lightening the mood with her own grim tidings but at least giving the group something else to collectively ponder. Unfortunately, with all of my notes fried along with the hard drive, I don’t recall a lot of the details save Scarwall was hyped up even more as the party’s looming doom. I *do* recall that for perhaps the first time ever, the Foreign Merchant card was not drawn, so there were no visits from the mad merchant. I had plans for him to potentially pop up in Scarwall at some point with an emergency satchel of goods for the party “on the house”, right before Scarwall scarfed him up like it was going to do to Zellara.

Talk then turned to the path that the party would take – or rather, Gwen with the party riding on her back – would take through the Holds of Belkzen to reach Tamrivena. While it would only take a few days to reach the shrouded city with Gwen’s insane flight speed, flying around on a dragon was hardly subtle and there were a *lot* of orcs too stupid to live in Belkzen, who probably would try to rumble with the party if given half a chance. Of particular concern to Gwen was the Wyrmbreaker Tribe, who has the name might suggest liked to enslave wyverns and small dragons (like Gwen in her whelpling phase) as war beasts and beasts of burden. With the trailer scene of having a mid-air battle with a bunch of orcs riding a white dragon fresh in their minds, the party was also leery.

In the end, they were given two basic options – they could take the more direct route of 3-4 days, which would lead them to passing by dangerously close to a major settlement in Belkzen, an orcish town known as Urlaim (pronounced Ur Lame – orcish humor at its finest)! Or, they could take a more roundabout route through some canyons – some of which were the old stomping grounds of the Wyrmbreakers – and take 5-6 days to get to Tamrivena but were less likely to bring the whole countryside of orcs down on their head.

Being big damn heroes and respecting Gwen’s past trauma, the party opted for the direct approach, and dared the orcs to bring it on! Well, as it turned out, the orcs had much bigger problems of their own at that moment . . .

A day or two later, and as the party neared the vicinity of Urlaim they discovered great plumes of smoke waiting for them. While the orcs were not huge fans of proper ventilation and counted more than a few pyromaniacs amongst their number, these hanging clouds of black smoke were more indicative of a battle and widespread destruction than business as usual in the orc settlement. Deciding to risk investigating, the party had Gwen fly closer and discovered that the entire settlement appeared to be abandoned, after some sort of battle had leveled a sizable portion of the crude buildings within the walls.

This continued to pique their curiosity so they had Gwen land outside the wide-open gates and advance into the settlement on foot to thoroughly investigate what had happened here. This investigation brought them to the attention of the ruins’ primary remaining tenants – a pack of chimera who had arrived a day or two earlier to pick over the remains of the settlement and finish off the handful of orcs remaining inside its walls. Being a bunch of brutes, the chimera did their best to stage an ambush from the darkened portions of the buildings still standing, but Rholand and Vaz’em saw them coming and foiled that simple plan.

The Chimera Battle Theme – The Skies Above by The Black Mages

Now in the first actual battle she’s really had, Jennifer showed some of the problem-solving utility of a proper arcane caster, which is something that the party has sorely lacked throughout the entire campaign to this point (Cid and Cyrus’s efforts notwithstanding). To wit, she opened the fight by casting Charm Monster on one of the chimera, and while this didn’t stop the beast from strafing the party with a breath weapon, it did ultimately open a path to negotiations with the chimera (after Jen’s player cried a bit of foul with the chimera still being hostile to the party).

Having no real desire to slaughter a bunch of monsters who were just scavenging and waste precious resources when they did not need to, a dialogue was eventually established where the chimera got to live, and the party got a few of their questions answered. While the Chimera were not here at the time Urlaim was attacked, they had interrogated a couple of the orcs they found still living amongst the ruins, and so were able to explain to the party the most basic gist of what happened. To wit, a beautiful human noblewoman, along with a handful of heavily armored warriors, appeared in the midst of town without warning and wrecked havoc, slaughtering half of the fort-city’s population after the orcs reacted violently to the unannounced arrival. The other half was ensorcelled by the noblewoman somehow, and directed to escort her and her bodyguards to parts unknown somewhere to the East.

With this troubling knowledge in mind – the description certainly fit Queen Ileosa and a cadre of Grey Maidens – and wary that an ambush was still lying ahead of them somewhere, the party left Urlaim behind and continued on the journey East to Tamrivena. As it turned out, the rest of the trip was uneventful despite their fears, and they arrived at the fog wall separating Tamrivena from the outside world a couple days later without further incident. And that is where we ended the session.

Battle with the Wyrmbreaker Clan Musical Theme – Attack from Final Fantasy X OST

No matter, with the Wyrmbreakers left untouched behind them, that simply left open the opportunity for a certain group of bug-themed assassins still doggedly tracking the party to come across them, and propose an alliance . . .

Which is unfortunate, for the shades that visit the party in each of their dreams tonight are actually each one of the spirit anchors that currently bind the ancient curse of Scarwall to the land, and give the chained spirit of Mithrodar Andachi the strength to maintain the curse Kazavon laid down at his death at Scarwall six centuries ago. I had sort of paired each of the spirit anchors up with one of the party members, trying to hold them up as a dark reflection and warning for what they could become should they stray from the narrow and perilous path they currently walked.

Then again, it’s not as if any of these shades actually introduced themselves like “Hi! I’m [Name of Anchor here]! I’m going to be a major boss you’re going to have to fight in Scarwall in like a week or two of in-game time!” It was all inexplicable and creepy dream logic here, so I suppose I can forgive my players for shrugging it off as mood-setting background noise nonsense (which it basically was anyway), and could be safely ignored and then forgotten. Ah well! It did give me a chance to introduce each of their Book Five themes, all of which were taken from Silent Hill soundtracks just like the main theme of Book Five - One More Soul to the Call (which will be mentioned once again when we actually get to Scarwall, as the lyrics inspired one of the mechanics I introduced there).

Rholand’s Book Five Intro Theme – Love Psalm Remix from Silent Hill Book of Memories

We open Rholand’s intro inside of a brightly lit chapel, with him standing up by the altar in fine clothing while a bearded man that Rholand doesn’t recognize, dressed in the priestly robes of a bishop of Desna (pretty sure it was Desna, anyway), smooths out a set of holy texts and clears his throat. Turning to look towards the back of the church, Rholand sees Bruno, the party, and other friendly faces gathered in the pews, while at the back stands Ileosa, no longer wearing her Crown of Fangs but instead a white bridal veil and frilly bridal gown.

She walks forward to join Rholand at the altar and smiles as the Bishop Zev Ravenka (yes, *that* Bishop Ravenka *insert if you know you know meme here* ) clears his throat one final time before announcing that today they were here to witness Ileosa Arabasti and Rholand J’skar be united in holy matrimony. No more royal duties, no more cities to save, to stand between them now. The Bishop concluded his sermon and directed Rholand to “kiss the bride”, but as the two embraced it was not wedding bells that rang out, but a funeral dirge. Ileosa gasped and choked, spitting out a spray of blood that painted her wedding veil (not yet lifted by Rholand for the intended kiss) crimson. As she stumbled back in shock, it was revealed that she had been run through the heart by a sword . . . a sword clenched in Rholand’s white-knuckled grip!

As Ileosa collapsed, Rholand caught her, and lifted her up in his arms, carrying her towards the front doors of the chapel as she bled and continued to die, leaving a trail of blood streaking behind them and washing over the assembled guests as the two passed each pew, washing them away. The bishop followed along behind them, rapidly growing older as his skin withered and then began to flake away. As the trio went, Bishop Ravenka admonished Rholand, stating that he could have had this happy ending, but he chose to throw it away. Instead, Rholand had chosen to fight against Evil, to make any sacrifice necessary to continue fighting the good fight, but he was a fool. He cannot win the battle in the end, no matter how great of a pyre Rholand built from his life to burn it away.

The front doors boom open to allow Rholand out into the open, now smoke-filled front entrance of the chapel. Beyond stands the city of Korvosa in ruin, screams rising up in the distance as smoke wafts up from countless fires. At the base of the stairs leading down from the chapel’s front entrance looms a massive burial pit, within which now lie the broken bodies of the party and the rest of Rholand’s friends, carried there by the river of blood washing out from Ileosa. Descending down to the edge of the pit at the bottom of the stairs, Rholand hefts Ileosa up over his head as a conflagration suddenly sparks below inside the pit, consuming everyone below in an instant. Rholand tosses Ileosa down to vanish into the flames with them, and then is grabbed from behind and forced to turn around to see the Bishop face-to-face, the flesh totally gone now and just a skeletal figure ranting at him from beneath the bishop’s chapeau. Zev Ravenka’s final words are that Evil cannot die, for as Rholand at last gives up his very soul to fight it, he shall become that which he hates most of all!

(The missing context here is that the lich Zev Ravenka was in life a faithful priest of Desna who fought a losing battle against the Whispering Tyrant. He sacrificed everything in his crusade against the greatest evil of his life – friends, family, his own wife, until at last he offered up even his own life to stop the Whispering Tyrant’s advance. He failed, but rather than allow him to die in his failure the Whispering Tyrant resurrected him as a lich, because it amused him to force the fallen holy man to serve him in undeath. When the Whispering Tyrant was eventually defeated, Zev Ravenka was cut free to make his own path in the world again. Now reborn and reconsecrated as an acolyte of Zon-Kuthon, the bishop eventually found his way to Tamrivena, ultimately drawn there by the growing darkness of Kazavon’s possession of Count Mithrodar Andachi. Even there, his attempt at flipping the script and being a successful villain ultimately ended in failure, as Kazavon was struck down and Zev Ravenka was trapped inside the temple of Zon-Kuthon within Scarwall, bound to the curse. In his despondency, he withered away even further into a demi-lich over the centuries. Hence his beef with Rholand here, who was at risk of following in his footsteps by sacrificing everything – even his former love Ileosa – in order to stop Kazavon’s return.)

Cid’s Book Five Intro Theme – Soldiers Orders from Silent Hill Homecoming

Cid’s intro dream is even more inscrutable, as he finds himself back in Kaer Maga. Only this is not the run-down slums built upon ancient and weathered stones, but a thriving magical metropolis, part of the great Thassilon empire! Cid was apparently a part of an elite magical-knight (i.e. magus) unit in the service of Sorshen, tasked with guarding the tomb of her fallen love (i.e. the vault where the Mantle of Ashes had been stored). There were tensions with Karzoug and his nation of Xin-Shalast, as he had been going around attempting to reclaim all of the artifacts that had been in the care of his predecessor.

With Cid in this dream sequence were Abigail and Laori, although it was clear that none of them were actually themselves in this dream. Illumination was forthcoming, however, as during conversation the names of each person who they were representing got dropped – Laori was an unfamiliar person named “Cassandra” who seemed to also be sisters with “Abigail” . . . who was called “Eurydice” (yes, *that* Eurydice, the peri angel who led Cid’s redemption into a paladin at the cost of her own capture by the devils chasing him), and Cid . . . was called “Azizel” (yes, *that* Azizel, the damned soul/former devil trapped into Cid’s Bound Blade, who had likewise been redeemed . . . sort of, at least to the point of being reincarnated as a Silvanshee – winged cat outsider thing – that now served as Cid’s familiar).

Now aware that he was watching some sort of jumbled-up dream replay of Azizel’s memories (. . . maybe?), Cid did his best to follow along through the next couple scenes that played out. Eurydice and Azizel were part of the unit of mage-knights, but Cassandra was not, despite having a close bond with each of them (sisterhood with Eurydice and friendship? Maybe something more? with Azizel). The brewing conflict with Karzoug was rapidly set aside as time advanced rapidly within the dream, and suddenly they were all staring up into the sky at the looming arrival of a giant meteor that was destined to crash into the surface of Golarion – Earthfall. Sorshen and Karzoug had gone into magical torpor to wait out the impending world-ending disaster, leaving our trio and the rest of the unit of magi to find their own means of salvation.

Such salvation was offered in a dark monkey’s-paw way a few moments later, as Azizel and Eurydice’s commanding officer, Mavrokeras arrived. Mavrokeras announces that he’s found a means for them all to survive . . . and all it had taken was signing their souls away to the Hells. They could ride out Earthfall there, in service to their new infernal master . . . unfortunately for Eurydice and Azizel, as their commander officer, Mavrokeras had already signed the contract on their behalf, and so they both needed to come with him immediately to get dragged down into the Hells by the waiting devils.

Freaked out by this betrayal and not wanting to abandon her sister, Eurydice is distraught and refuses to follow Mavrokeras’s orders, although unfortunately it was too late to back out now as Mavrokeras uses the oaths of obedience and service she had sworn to the overall Order – these being magically binding oaths because Thassilon - against her to force her to comply. It’s at this point that Cassandra steps in, offering to take Eurydice’s spot within the unit and serve Mavrokeras in her place. Ultimately, Mavrokeras agrees and accepts her as Eurydice’s replacement – but then earns his evil boss stripes as he declares that sorry, only members of the unit were going to be accepted by the devils, so Eurydice could not come with them now – she’d just have to stay ahead and die in Earthfall instead! As Cassandra and Azizel are dragged away by Mavrokeras, Cassandra turns to Cid, a shadow falling over her face as her limbs elongate and she grows taller into a hunched over, winged devil form (now called Nihil – yes, *that* Nihil from Scarwall, the assassin devil spirit anchor).

Nihil seems to be addressing Cid directly now, flatly stating that while sacrificing yourself for others seems to be an act of love freely given, it’s nothing more than a self-destructive mistake. Round and round they all go, each sacrificing themselves to save the others in turn, but eventually the music of this carousal was going to stop, and someone was going to be left holding the bag. And Cid should make sure that it’s not him when that moment comes, or he *will* live to regret it – first mistake there Nihil, Cid already regrets a whole lot of things he’s done!

(The missing context here is less about Nihil’s backstory – since assuming these were actual events, it was made pretty clear she was Cassandra, Eurydice’s sister when everyone was still human, and volunteered herself as tribute to the devils in order to save her sister from the mistakes she had made in signing up for this unit. Which essentially makes Eurydice much like Cid, who had to be saved from her self-inflicted damnation by someone else giving themselves up to the devils – and why she was so willing to “pay it back” for Cid in the Valley of the Ascendant Spire, and how she knew Mavrokeras and Azizel. Instead the missing context is mostly about what relevance it has going forward – in that despite having been part of Mavrokeras’s devils, she somehow ended up getting trapped in Scarwall and was waiting ahead within the citadel now for Cid to come along and encounter her, as sort of a dark infernal mirror of Eurydice.)

Jennifer’s Book Five Intro Theme – This Sacred Line from Silent Hill Homecoming

(As you can see, Homecoming was a gold mine for these theme songs. :D )

Jennifer’s dream was also a sort of replay of the past, as she found herself back at home in the Citadel of the Order of the Griffon. It was six hundred years ago, and as had happened in reality, she had been left behind by her parents Parashial and Sera, as well as her sister Elisae, as they left for the catastrophic final confrontation with Kazavon in Tamrivena. Now aware from her recent experiences with the party how that worked out for the Kalissreavil family, Jennifer was even more emphatic that she not be left behind this time, but her pleas fell on deaf ears and she soon found herself alone in the citadel’s study.

It was here where she had made the initial discoveries that had lead her to begin traveling the planes in search of further answers on how to permanently defeat Kazavon and the so-called “prophecy” that involved our party of current heroes. What was different this time, is that she was not alone in the study as there was an intruder in her dream, a gaunt dark-haired young human man with a scar running across his face. This was Castrothane, Viscount of Tamrivena and son of Mithrodar Andachi (yes, *that* Castrothane), and he sympathized with Jennifer’s frustration and desire to help her father. But there was no way to help them now, any of her family – they were gone beyond all help, and she was going to have to accept that now. There was no secret lore to explain why this had happened, no spell to fix things, this was just the way it had to be. And as if to underline this point, Castrothane’s face burst into flames, revealing a flaming skull as the library caught fire and combusted around them.

(The missing context here was obviously they had never heard anything up to this point about Mithrodar Andachi even having a son. This was another twist from the AP as-written, since I believe Castrothane was just a random lieutenant in Kazavon’s armies. Here, he was Mithrodar’s son who rebelled – unfortunately, a little too early as he confronted his father alone, and got beaten to death by the Kazavon-possessed Mithrodar Andachi for his troubles. He was then re-animated as a skeletal warrior so that Kazavon-Mithrodar could control him using the command circlet, although for a short time during the Order of the Griffon’s attack on Scarwall, Castrothane managed to break free and run amok until Kazavon’s death curse bound everyone to the accursed citadel, and Castrothane was again brought to heel by the anchoring chains of the cursed chained spirit. Because it amused me and it seemed fitting with Castrothane’s troubled relationship with his father, I used a picture of Kylo Ren for his token, so picture Adam Driver walking around in a suit of plate mail for his human form, and then I guess going all ghost rider when he transforms into his true skeletal warrior appearance.)

Vaz’em’s Book Five Intro Theme – O.R. T. from Silent Hill Zero

(I liked this one for Vaz’em because it had sort of a “secret agent on a mission” sound to it, and the lyrics felt like something Vaz’em might say to Glorio/Bahor.)

Vaz’em finds himself on the manor grounds of Arkona Manor, sneaking through a hedge maze toward the looming manor in the distance. As he skulks his way through the shadows, he gets whispered at from the darkness, commenting that he hunts his enemies through the shadows, but is he sure that he is after the right target?

Emerging from the hedge maze into a clearing, Vaz’em finds Vimanda standing there in the moonlight. Leaping out of the shadows, he cuts her down, only to find Glorio/Bahor emerging from the shadows as well to stand before him, waiting expectantly. Again the voice from the shadows hisses at Vaz’em, challenging him again – if he sees his own bloodline as his enemy, then why does he hesitate to strike now? There is a rustling in the wall of hedges as a long serpentine head pushes its way through the wall of foliage, and unleashes a dark blast of energy that consumes Vaz’em and Glorio/Bahor as Bellshallam makes his presence actually seen.

(The missing context here is again Bellshallam’s backstory, which was again changed from the AP as-written. Rather than an outsider umbral dragon who found Scarwall and was ensnared after the curse was enacted, Bellshallam was actually born within Scarwall. An experiment by Kazavon while he was still bound to his human host of Mithrodar, Bellshallam was injected while still in his egg with alchemical solutions of Mithrodar’s Kazavon-infused blood. After Scarwall fell to the curse, Bellshallam’s egg hatched, and while the whelpling managed to inflict quite a bit of carnage in the dread fortress, he was ultimately bound to the chained spirit’s will and made into a spirit anchor. Six hundred years later after having spent the majority of that having the lingering spirit of Mithrodar pissing in his ear, and the dragon is quite confused as to his origins and where his loyalties should lie. He sees Kazavon/Mithrodar as his “father” due to the experimentation and subsequent gaslighting, but chafes at his imprisonment as part of anchoring the curse to his birth-home. In that sense he sort of sees a kindred spirit in Vaz’em, who also has a very complicated relationship with his family, and prefers to hunt his prey in the shadows alone rather than relying on anyone else. Of course, unlike Bellshallam, Vaz’em has been growing and changing through the adventure path, becoming much less of a loner and something more than just a killer thug for hire that he started the campaign as.)

I believe these intro dreams took up basically the entire session, so any actual progress towards Tamrivena would have to wait until the following session.

The practical non-narrative motivation was to give the party some locations other than Scarwall to explore and delve into, most of which would be considerably “softer” than the torture machine the titular fortress was going to be. So, after a certain point of smashing their head against the fortress of Scarwall, they could go deal with some other less stressful adventuring location as a bit of a break while keeping Scarwall itself in view “on the horizon”. And, while not exactly friendly to start, the denizens of SOME of these locations would be neutral to the party and willing to talk, adding more opportunities for roleplay within the middle of this harsh dungeon crawling focused book. And, of course, more opportunities for garnering some treasure, which included not one, not two, but up to FOUR potential Wishes. I figured they would need such powerful magic at their disposal to potentially unf**! themselves from the horrors that Scarwall could inflict on them which would require pretty much that exact level of powerful magic to fix.

Of course, my players have never encountered a side quest that they didn’t like, so most of the side stuff that I created here ended up getting done first before even setting foot into Scarwall . . . at least until they discovered that I had placed a hidden timer, of sorts, on their stay in Tamrivena Valley. Once that timer ran out, they got the hint to be about their actual business here *immediately*, and dove into Scarwall almost right after the timer rang out its first “warning”. We’ll discuss what that timer was in a little bit.

The narrative reason for moving Scarwall into the middle of a city was to put the ultimate fate of Korvosa in front of my players, front and center, if Kazavon’s corruption was not stopped. If they didn’t continue with this desperate, mad quest to delve into a massive fortress of evil that they had heard mentioned now and again throughout the campaign up to this point, including a literal prophecy that going there would kill at least one of them, all with only the vague direction of “there’s a holy sword in there somewhere that’s one of the only things that can hurt Kazavon and his relic bearers”, Tamrivena’s fate would be Korvosa’s. In the end, the city of Korvosa would be tortured to death and left a scarred ruin, all of its people consumed as fuel for Kazavon’s full resurrection – and then ALL of Golarion was going to have a real big problem. So, they had to endure the crucible of Scarwall so they could stop Kazavon, because they got to have a front-row seat to what the consequences would be if they didn’t do it.

For non-natives, magical lanterns attuned to the fog’s magic could guide visitors through to the actual Valley, and would have been a plot point for the party in Book Four if they didn’t already have the aid of Laori and Sial – as members of the Brotherhood of Bones, they already had just such a lantern. Of course, Laori and Sial had wandered off to find their own way into the Valley after Sial finally lost patience with the party’s propensity to complete any and all side quests offered to them. If I recall correctly, that had also been the motivation to complete Oliver’s side quest at the end of Book Four even though Oliver himself was no longer “with” the party – there was a magical lantern kept in the hidden treasure alcove within the Order of the Griffon’s fortress. As it turned out, they wouldn’t have needed the lanterns at all, but we’ll address that revelation when we get to it.

The wall of fog itself had been erected by Karzoug to conceal the magical laboratory he set up to study the stolen, er, “reclaimed” Fangs of Kazavon. It was maintained by a group of powerful Fey native to the Valley. Eventually, some human natives of Ustalav fleeing the Whispering Tyrant somehow stumbled their way through the fog to the other side (perhaps called there by the Fangs?), and seeing a rich Valley of untapped resources, humans do what humans do and established a settlement. Safe from the Whispering Tyrant as he either didn’t detect or care about the hidden Valley, this settlement gradually flourished into the secluded city of Tamrivena.

Unfortunately, orc raiding parties from the nearby Holds of Belkzen soon became a problem as they were drawn to rumors of the flourishing city’s wealth after the Whispering Tyrant fell and the city of Tamrivena became a key component of Ustalav’s reconstruction. They couldn’t get into the Valley itself, of course, but they were quick to siege the general vicinity of the Valley and block off the trade roads, and it was just a matter of time before they hit upon the idea of forcing a Tamrivena native to walk through the fog ahead of them.

Desperate for a way to save his people, Count Mithrodar Andachi went delving into those mysterious ancient Thassilon ruins that had been discovered near the city. He found the Fangs of Kazavon right where Karzoug had left them, and the rest as they say was history.

Astute readers of other fantasy/horror settings will pretty quickly go “wait . . . isn’t this just (Ravenloft/Silent Hill)”? Congratulations! You discovered two of my main inspirations for this Valley of Tamrivena, more or less, although leaving the Valley itself would not have been a major problem for the party if they had really felt the need. So consider the adventure-filled fog-shrouded Valley a sort of homage to Ravenloft, the adventure filled fog-shrouded ruined city of Tamrivena a tribute to Silent Hill, and Scarwall itself . . . well, Scarwall was its own unique beast, as you will eventually see.

In hindsight, I do kinda wish that I had looped everything back to Korvosa here in Book Five instead of continuing the world expansion Paizo did by placing a second book outside of the magnificent city campaign’s actual city. In that case, Tamrivena would be the ruined city buried in the rubble beneath Korvosa, which adventurers delving deep in the ancient ruins below the city, in addition to the Thassilon ruins from Sorshen’s Xin-Eurythenia, would sometimes come across in bits and pieces. Presumably the curse over Scarwall would also be bleeding up into the new city of Korvosa built atop it, feeding into the titular Curse of the Crimson Throne. With the ongoing theme that Kazavon’s returns and defeats were just waves in an endless cycle of war and horror, having all three locations he had menaced over the millennia piled up on top of each other would be quite fitting. On the other hand, while a massive cavern containing the heart of an ancient ruined city would be cool, it would have also been difficult to have quite so open of an adventuring location full of side places to explore like an open enchanted valley was, and with Korvosa directly over their heads it may have cut down on the sense of isolation as if the need was great enough, the party could always retreat if necessary back to their home city. On the other other hand, placing things directly back in (or rather underneath) Korvosa could have also opened the possibility to having side adventures within the city directly, taking the initial first steps of forging the Resistance against Ileosa’s rule and getting to watch first-hand in mounting horror as they saw the warnings signs that said history was repeating right in front of their eyes. In any event, we’ll talk about what I actually had available within the Valley when the party actually reaches this exploration feast in a couple sessions.

First, they had to cross the Holds of Belkzen, and before they could do *that*, they had to deal with that most pernicious of foes . . . budget cuts . . .

We begin with a majestic shot of the party, now reunited from the Citadel of the Order of the Griffon with the others, climbing aboard Gwen’s back and taking off into the air with their next stop being Tamrivena and Scarwall beyond that. And . . . cut!

And just like that, the spell of movie CGI magic is broken, and our party of heroes is no longer a band of mighty heroes riding atop a massive dragon, but a pack of actors sitting on a big stuffed dragon hanging from the ceiling on wires, surrounded by cameras and Gwen in her “nerdy human anime girl” guise standing off to the side providing her parting voice-over line. Standing up from the director’s chair, Oliver comes over and congratulates the gang on a job well done, but admits that while he just got promoted into this job at the studio, he’s afraid that he has bad news for everyone. Unfortunately, due to severe budget cuts at Inspectre Pictures, the Powers that Be had decided to cancel the Curse of the Crimson Throne show before even the first scene of Season Five was shot and the end of Season Four, which they had just got done with, would be on air. Sadly, heroic fantasy was just on its way out these days, with the kids loving Twilight re-enactments and similar romantasy slop.

So, everyone was getting the axe, but not to worry, Oliver had managed to pull some strings and got everyone new gigs in some up and coming new shows that the studio was just starting production on. Bad news, each person would be getting split off into their own show – good news, they were the *star* of each of their respective shows!

Vaz’em:

Vaz’em’s new show was, predictably, another trashy bottom-of-the-barrel reality show, “Golarion’s Next Top Ninja”, sponsored by Meow Chow Cat Food – remember, Meow is Cat for Chow! Similar to the dating love triangle show he had stared in a few April Fools ago, Vaz’em had to deal with various hijinxs between Cinnabar and Trinia as they vied for his attention by becoming the next top ninja, while Adonis Kreed died horribly in the background.

Rholand:

Apparently someone in the upper ranks of Inspectre Pictures was a huge fan of a certain comic superhero TV show on Netflix, and decided that having played a Blind Oracle in Curse of the Crimson Throne, Rholand was somehow qualified to be the leading man in their totally legally distinct, not copyright infringing new crime-fighting TV Show. And so Rholand reported to the new set for the pilot episode shooting for Young Devil Dare! His excitement at still having a job and even getting top billing this time is dampened when he arrives on-set to find Togomor waiting for him, having been cast as his adversity the Pin King. Before shooting can even start, however, a dark shadow looms over the set, and a deathly quiet falls over the studio as The Rat himself comes bursting into the room. Furious at the audacity of anyone trying to muscle onto his “turf” the Rat doesn’t waste any time before with a cry of “Copyright Infrigement THIS!”, he pulls out an old-school Tommy Gun, and in the words of Danny Devito, starts blastin. Screams fill the air and bullet-riddled bodies go flying in every direction all around the two lead actors, but as the bullets track their way towards Rholand, he is suddenly pushed down and out of harm’s way as Togomor throws himself in front of Rholand. The pudgy behemoth’s bulk absorbs all of the bullets meant for Rholand, albeit at a terrible cost as Togomor collapses a moment after Studio Security finally bursts in and does their job, taking out the Rat in a hail of gunfire of their own. Reaching up a bloody hand to Rholand, a dying Togomor confesses that he has always (at this point Rholand’s player is emphatically going “oh HELL NO! Do NOT FINISH THAT!”, but his pleas fall on deaf ears) LOVED RHOLAND.

Cid:

Cid’s new show was literally inspired by this movie trailer. But lest you get excited too much, no, Cid did not get to pilot a gigantic mecha into battle. Instead, it would be more accurate to say that Cid’s new show was inspired by the music snippet that played *during* the above movie trailer. And so it was that Cid showed up the next morning to the set of War Teddy (pronounced Whorrr Ted-E), a show about a combat unit of stuffed bears fighting in Fantasy Vietnam. As the new human( half-orc, human, same diff) recruit in a “crack” unit of fighting teddy bears, Cid was predictably hazed and mocked by his new team mates of Doc, Bubbles, and some other bears whose names I now forget. Not that their names were really worth remembering, as in the very first scene the unit is ambushed by a group of unseen attackers, heavy machine gun fire and sniper bullets sending wads of stuffing flying in all directions and blowing off fabric limbs. Cid tries to drag one of the injured bears to safety, only to watch as its literally blown apart in front of him, the stuffing protecting him from the worst of the explosion as he falls back into a trench with the last surviving member of the unit, Bubbles. Well, shocker, it quickly is revealed that Bubbles was actually a traitor, selling out the unit to the enemy for a few lousy bucks. And as the last surviving member of the unit now, Cid was the only one left in Bubbles’ way to collect his paycheck. Unfortunately for Bubbles, teddy bear versus half-orc is a terribly one-sided match in a hand-to-paw combat, and so Bubbles was literally ripped limb from limb before being disembowed with Cid’s combat knife and all of his padded guts ripped out through the wound, one wad of stuffing at a time.

Jennifer:

Jennifer’s new show was called A Witch in Time, which was pitched as some sort of time-traveling Dr. Who meets Quantum Leap sort of thing, but in actual practice was basically an exploitative booty-show as the only nine stitches saved here was on Jennifer’s new revealing costume. Jennifer’s player played along here by making Jennifer the actor, unlike her Curse character who was a very intelligent if a bit strange and eloquent elf, a complete ditz in “reality”, mostly interested in just earning her next dime bag of coke. The director for this show was also some sort of coke-up airhead, as he kept chortling about “A Witch in Time saves Nine!” without ever really explaining himself beyond that. I think they both ultimately wandered off together to go see their dealer without actually shooting any real footage.

Wrap-Up:

With all of their new shows either being canceled due to set issues (such as the death of Rholand’s nemesis co-star in an undisclosed “accident on set”) or absolutely slaughtered by critics and fans alike after the first episode aired, all four of our actors were called up along with Oliver to the Executive Producer’s office to explain themselves. Whereupon the tiny dragon-like lizard named Kazavon the Producer pulled out a revolver, shoved it up against Oliver’s head, and with a growl of “this is the price of failure!” blew his brains out all over his cushy executive desk with extreme prejudice. Kazavon then revealed that it was Oliver who had pitched the idea of saving on costs by canceling the very expensive CGI-fest that was Curse of the Crimson Throne in favor of spinning up a bunch of crappy-but-cheap other shows using the funding instead. That plan had spectacularly failed, and as a result now Oliver was dead-for-real. But congratulations! Season Five of Curse of the Crimson Throne was back on the production docket, and if any of the four of them wished to keep breathing, Kazavon explained as he continued to wave the gigantic revolver around in his tiny reptile claw, pointing it in turn at each of them, they had damn well better turn in the performance of a collective lifetime together!

Surprise!

And with that, we then cut to a final surprise scene for my players, as I acted out a trailer containing a selection of very real (but technically only potential) scenes from the actual upcoming Book Five!

Book Five Offical Theme – One More Soul to the Call from Silent Hill Homecoming

Unfortunately as I mentioned, I no longer have the notes for that trailer as they were gobbled up in the hard drive crash. But I can recall that the trailer featured a monologue by Kazavon, taunting and threatening our heroes, each line interspersed with a different expected scene from Book Five which included I think Vaz’em and Trinia kissing, Cid kneeling before an unidentified woman and offering up a sword to her, and several similar inscrutable-out-of-context scenes and “look at this cool place!” vistas of different locales around the Valley, and concluding with the looming bulk of a headless dragon rising up before the party as the Kazavon voice-over bellowed “YOU WILL KNEEL BEFORE THE NEW GOD OF CRUELTY, SUFFERING, AND FEAR!”

Essentially, this was Kazavon’s “Dread It, Run from It, Destiny Still Arrives” Thanos speech. And with that brief moment of levity concluded, followed by the tiny teaser taste of what was waiting for the party, we concluded the session. And from here on out, it was nothing but PAIN that awaited the party with bated breath and eager DM cackles.

The great hall, formerly used to celebrate victories of the Order of the Griffon, was now a museum to commemorate Zarmangorf’s victories over the Kalissreavil family. In this case, the displays were the broken bodies of Parashial’s various children, strung up on chains from the walls, each with a crude memorial plaque displaying their name, where they had fallen, and Zarmangorf’s parting thought of them. Some were merely witty epitaphs for his defeated victims, such as “Sharp sword, dull wit”, while others were fairly explicit hints that the black dragon was quite the pervert and ensured that the bodies were quite thoroughly defiled before they were added to his little collection.

Things went from bad to worse when it turned out that these weren’t merely corpses on display, but re-animated zombies who stirred and writhed from their mounted places along the wall at the party’s arrival. And it just continued to get worse from there as it became clear that the re-animated corpses had been returned some measure of sentience, being juju zombies or the like rather than the usual brainless zombies. None of the bodies were in good enough shape at this point to put up a fight, and most were also too broken mentally or physically to speak intelligibly either – so rather than a security or monitoring system, the re-animated bodies of Parashial’s children were just some sort of grotesque unliving performance art piece, existing solely for Zarmangorf’s amusement. The dragon was also hoping to bring Parashial back alive to witness this “artistic masterpiece” before his end, hence the old warrior’s determination to stay *far* away from his fallen home since he suspected something like this . . . although actually seeing the abominable horror was far more impactful than Zarmangorf’s taunts could ever have conveyed.

The party was understandably appalled by Zarmangorf’s taste in art, and there was pretty much immediate agreement that this whole place had to be cleansed with fire, ideally enough to burn the entire fortress to the ground and the earth beneath melted down into molten glass. Jennifer was understandably the most shaken up by this, as members of this macabre display were not just Parashial’s half-elven children sired after the climatic battle in Scarwall that left him a broken drunk, but several full-blooded elves as well – Jennifer’s direct siblings whom she knew personally. As mentioned before, most of these were not in good enough shape to hold a conversation with, but one of the more recent additions was still capable of intelligent speech – Jennifer’s youngest sister Elisae.

A paladin of Abadar, she had marched to Tamrivena/Scarwall with Parashial and Sera, and thus was there at Kazavon’s last downfall. She had the inscription “She took my father’s arm. I took everything.” – an oblique reference to the Bound Blade, which she had spirited away from Scarwall as a big bony dragon arm after Kazavon’s last defeat. In a nod to the as-written legend for the Bound Blade, this paladin of Abadar had hidden the arm away until Zarmangorf eventually caught up with her several centuries later, and in desperation to keep the malign artifact from him she plunged the claw into her own heart with a final prayer to Abadar. Perhaps she hadn’t paid the merchant god enough over her life or the dying wish simply got corrupted by Kazavon’s presence within the relic, but instead of being destroyed or sealed away the arm got transmuted into a heavy two-handed sword, “permanently” peace-bounded into its sheath with adamantine chains. Zarmangorf simply shrugged, picked up her body and the now Bound Blade, and flew back home, eventually handing the Bound Blade over to Sabrina rather than claiming the relic for himself. As while fanatically loyal to his “father” Kazavon, Zarmangorf was still a dragon and thus self-centered enough that while he was happy and willing to *serve* Kazavon, he didn’t want to condemn himself to *becoming* Kazavon.

Elisae’s concerns, however, were not for the lost relic of Kazavon (which went unmentioned pretty much), but instead for her own daughter (i.e. Parashial’s grand-daughter and Jennifer’s niece) Amaranth, who had been living with her at the time of Zarmangorf’s attack. She had been captured alive by the dragon, who had taken great pleasure in tormenting Elisae with updates of her daughter’s suffering as the dragon’s “guest”. The only thing really keeping her alive at this point was the typical Kalissreavil die-hard stubbornness and Zarmangorf holding out hope that news of a living captive family member would be sufficient to stir Parashial into action and come out of hiding to come here and die like the stubborn cockroach that he was to Zarmangorf now (it wasn’t) – but not before he crushed Amaranth to a pulp in front of her granddad, of course.

With news that there actually was a living captive to rescue here and not just a treasury to loot and an abomination to put to the torch, the party refocused on more than just the immediately desire to burn this entire place to the ground. Elisae was able to direct them to one of the higher towers within the citadel as where her daughter was being held, due to several references by Zarmangorf of keeping the “little bird” (Amaranth is a flower, you idiot dragon) up in a cage “high in the sky”. However, neither Elisae nor any of the other Kalissreavils wished to be spared from the flames, as Elisae wished her daughter to remember her as she was, and everybody here had pretty much long given up hope for the sweet release of final death, so going up in a final blaze of glory sounded good to pretty much everyone. Jennifer dropped several fireballs into the hall, cleansing away Zarmangorf’s little art project in several bursts of cleansing fire, wiped away any last tears, and moved on with the party to climb the high tower.

They were greeted upon arriving at the small cell at the top of the tower with the usual Kalissreavil greeting – a whole lot of swearing and several thrown objects, including a chamber pot – so Amaranth was definitely still alive, and definitely a Kalissreavil! The half-elf daughter of Elisae was badly dehydrated (Zarmangorf’s plan if Parashial didn’t eventually show up was to essentially turn her into jerky), and missing a leg (Zarmangorf had gotten himself a little snack after Amaranth nearly managed to escape and flee the citadel, to ensure she couldn’t run away again), but still defiant and definitely still alive, so the party managed to preserve at least one more member of Jennifer’s family beyond her drunken mess of a father. I don’t quite recall how the party got her out of there, as while Cid could give her a piggyback ride out of the citadel itself, Jennifer didn’t have the spare slot for her teleport to get back. Presumably she either made two trips over the next couple days once the party was sufficiently far enough away from the citadel to make a secluded camp, or they shoved Bruno into a bag of holding after Rholand told him to hold his breath or something.

In any event, with the captive saved, the only thing left was to go down into the basement of the citadel and access the hidden treasury, which didn’t have much loot, beyond Oliver’s reward for completing his “I’m special” quest – a powerful elemental gem imbued with the power of Earth. This Titan gem would have allowed Oli to wield his favorite hammer one-handed (essentially giving him the old Monkey-Grip feat from 3.5), so he could use The Hammer and his shield, instead of his customary cutlass and shield. I’m not sure if that would have been a happy upgrade for him given the amount of feats and such he had sunk into ye olde sword and board, but I’m sure he wouldn’t have minded some of the free spells that the gem would have been able to cast, like the other intelligent items that the party had each gotten for their “I’m special” quest rewards. For Jennifer, it slotted into one of her wizard staves, giving her a few extra Earth-related spells like Create Pit and the like, as well as a capstone that as a reflexive action upon being reduced to 0 hit points, instead of dropping to dying she could instead be turned into stone – normal healing spells in this unique case cleansing the Petrification . . . assuming anyone survived the battle that saw the wizard getting gibbed, anyway. It was a thematic capstone ability, given Jennifer’s backstory, but one she was loathe to actually put to use given the risk that she could potentially again be imprisoned in a bubble for hundreds of years with little hope of rescue if that healing spell didn’t come . . . but it certainly proved useful a couple times in the bowels of Scarwall to come!

And with this final session wrapping up the last of Book Four in a final semi-narrated exploration of the Order of the Griffon citadel, rather than an extended mini-adventure, we came to the official end of Book Four, at which point we went on hiatus for a while so that I could pour myself entirely into creating the horrors that awaited the party in Book Five! Which I will begin to cover next time!

Made of shadow stuff, the clones were nonetheless solid enough to actually affect the physical world, meaning that every time Oliver was hit, he essentially spun off fully independent and combat-capable copies of himself. The clones *were* notably weaker than the real thing, only ever getting one attack and having 1 HP per HD (which was still 12 HP at this point, and would rapidly grow to the max of 20 HP as Oliver gained *very* accelerated leveling thanks to Kazavon’s presence). But considering that he could spawn a nigh-infinite number of them just by stabbing himself with a knife and bleeding all over the place, this made Oliver a very literal one-man army.

He discovered this ability completely by accident upon attacking the Pyre N’ Slag slaver compound, after getting hit by one of the guards for no appreciable damage save for some blood splattered onto the ground – that quickily evaporated into the first shadow clone. But by the time he was done “single” handedly burning the compound to the ground with everyone but Pyre dead inside of it, there was a nice little platoon of Olivers available to enforce his will. As time went on he learned how to sense and speak through any given clone, and even learned how to . . . let’s go with “modify” the clones with his growing shadow powers later on. The only real drawback was that the clones did *not* inherit the blood cloning powers, so it was at least a linear growth curve on the number of Olivers present in Kaer Maga at any one time.

The party was unaware of this exact process at this point, but quickly surmised that however this army of Olivers had come about, it was bad news and while they had never much liked Pyre, they had fought and spilled a whole lot of blood when Gwen had tried to take down the city so just letting Oliver murder the fire giant now would have been a waste. And getting to watch the formerly arrogant slaver who had lorded it over them when they first arrived in Kaer Maga, now humbled and begging for their help was reward enough to help him, I suppose. Obviously, Pyre could no longer live in Kaer Maga as the army of Olivers would find him sooner or later. So for now at least, he needed to flee the city – which was currently under attack by an invading army of orcs and a too-big-for-his-britches black dragon. Just another day for the PCs, as they armored and armed themselves before ducking out onto the streets, leading the way while the Starweavers served as the rear guard.

Outside, the city was in absolute chaos as the orc hybrids smashed through the city and the chaotic mish-mash of races, undead, and monsters within Kaer Maga struggled to rally together to fight off these newest invaders as they had all the rest. The party caught sight of a few such clashes in the distance getting broken up by gangs of Olivers, who pretty much were just running in and bashing everything to death with the two-handed Hammer that Oliver had found in Arkona’s Harse manor (yes, the shadow clones also got shadow-stuff copies of all of Oliver’s gear as well – Kazavon’s relics grant artifact B&!*%&!# powers). Sticking to the side streets, the party managed to steer clear of most conflict and out of sight . . . at least to anything at ground level.

Eventually, a massive dark shadow passed over the party, followed a few moments later by an even more massive (read: Gargantuan) black dragon crashing down into the street they had just left. Zarmangorf peers into the narrow, easily-fillable with an acidic spray breath weapon, alleyway with a sneer, demanding to know where Parashial was as he could smell the old elf’s stink on them, but he was not with them, so where was he? And failing that, where was that obnoxious half-breed whelp that had been traveling with the party, as Zarmangorf would settle for Parashial’s latest half-breed bastard instead. Fortunately, Jennifer did not volunteer that she happened to be a full-blooded daughter of Parashial’s or things could have gotten very ugly rather quickly. Never ones to be intimidated, even by a dragon that could snatch them up and swallow them in one gulp, Cid and Vaz’em snarked off as usual which only amused the dragon rather than angered him. Probably because he knew he could eat any one of the party whenever he wanted, and basically said as much as his rebuttal to the party’s taunts. As the dragon moved on to “who would like to go first?”, Oliver showed up with a growl of “how about you?”

Upon seeing the actual Oliver – and smelling him (and his “father” Kazavon upon him through the Shedskin), Zarmangorf was shockingly suddenly very differential, offering an alliance and that together they could destroy these upstart heroes. At which point Oliver revealed that he was not entirely gone yet – or perhaps he simply hated dragons as much as his father Parashial - as he said “nah, I’m good” and explained that Kaer Maga was *his* city now, as it’s new Overlord, and Zarmangorf and his assembled orc freaks were not welcome in this city. And they could either leave now, or stay in the city permanently, as the new foundations for the buildings they had destroyed once he got done pulverizing their skeletons to make cement. It didn’t take more than a couple cracks to the face from Oliver’s hammer to convince Zarmangorf to take option A, leaping up into the sky and flying off at top speed.

The fallen warrior then turned his attention to the party, as several more shadow copies entered the other end of the alleyway, blocking off the party’s path. Oliver was not happy, to say the least, about the party trying to save Pyre the worthless slaver trash, but understood that they were just doing their usual sappy do-gooder act of letting the bad guys walk free. Well, not this time, not on Oliver’s watch as he sentenced Pyre to death for the crime of peddling slaves in *his* city of Kaer Maga. Unfortunately, with just a handful of 12 HP shadow clones here to try and enforce that decree, Oliver was going to be out of luck there as the party swiftly cut through them. As the last one fell, however, Oliver growled out some ominous comment about going to have a “final conversation” with dear old Dad, making it clear that Parashial was decidedly not safe yet, even with the omnicidal dragon with a hard-on for extinguishing his entire blood line having been kicked out of the city.

Much more concerned with Parashial’s health than Pyre’s, the party pretty much dropped the fire giant off at the next sewer grate they found with an insincere “bon voyage”. Pyre was decidedly not impressed with their level of concern for his continued well-being, but took the win of surviving to fight another day as he disappeared into the depths of Kaer Maga’s sizable undercity. One problem solved for now, the party turned its attention to finding Parashial. Fortunately, he wasn’t too hard to find, as the party had an idea where he might be – drowning his sorrows in a gallon of alcohol at the old Freemen compound and bar.

Sure enough, that’s where they find him, although somewhat sobered up as he had heard Zarmangorf bellowing while looking for him, and while Parashial had no intention of going out to face his draconic nemesis, he had taken one of his drunk cure-all panacea potions as a just-in-case he needed to think and run fast to make a getaway. The party, as usual, was a bit disgusted with the fallen hero’s flagrant disregard for the harm being done to everyone else while he cowered inside, but there wasn’t much time to argument the point with the old coot. Jennifer also got to meet her dad again after six hundred years, and had a decidedly different reaction to meeting him again. Unlike Oliver who clearly despised his absent father, Jennifer dearly loved her father and made that difference clear by immediately running forward to embrace him, nose wrinkling a bit at the smell and making another one of her odd non-sequitur remarks about smelling like a Latrine in the Hells or some such. Parashial was simply agape at suddenly being reunited with his lost daughter, and for once seemed to be a bit ashamed at how he had let himself go since the last time they had been a family six hundred years ago.

Unfortunately there wasn’t much time left to reconnect and fill each other in on what had happened to them over the past six hundred years, as Oliver roared from outside for Parashial to come out and face his beating-to-death like a man. Standing protectively in front of Parashial like a human shield, the party marched out to confront their former comrade-in-arms once more. This time, it seemed to be the real Oliver, along with his henchman Carpenter, who was cackling non-stop and revealed that when he had been calling Oliver “Emissary” before, it had never been as an “Emissary of “the HAMMER”, or no – it had been as “Emissary of KAZAVON”, and now finally Oliver had stepped fully up into the role.

Oliver for his part was still annoyed that the party had sided with Pyre, and was going to be much less patient this time if the party stood in his way from finally proving himself to be the bigger man than his father (by beating him to death, apparently). Of course, the party refused to comply with that demand, and despite knowing they couldn’t actually beat Oliver without Serathiel, moved forward to engage him and his back-up squad of shadow clones anyway.

Oliver vs. Parashial vs. Party Theme (Particularly from about the 1:00 minute mark onward)

Despite the powers of the Shedskin, however (he was just learning them having gotten the cloak less than 24 hours ago), Oliver was still only a 12th-level fighter at this point, and DR 30/Epic was still ignored by paladin smites – a fact that only proved the previously True Neutral fighter had fallen far and fast since donning the Shedskin yesterday. The party did get a first-hand look at how Oliver was generating his clone army as with each hit, whether it penetrated the DR or not, a new shadow clone emerged. But with only 12 HP apiece, they were little more than fodder at this level. For a little bit, the DM was a little concerned behind the scenes that maybe they would manage to beat Oliver down despite all of his advantages and figure out a way to rip the Shedskin off him, as Rholand had done with Togomor’s staff yesterday.

So . . . the party managed to beat some sense back into Oliver, as he relented in his blood lust a bit. Stepping back away from the party and agreeing to a ceasefire despite Carpenter howling that a proper tyrant never compromised, Oliver explained that he still needed the party. While he brought Order to Kaer Maga and organized it into an army capable of fighting Ileosa, the party could go to Scarwall and bring back Serathiel, so that *Oliver* could then put it to use and cut down Ileosa – as he had dealt with Domina before her. He’d offer whatever support to the party that he could offer as Kaer Maga’s new ruling Overlord. Parashial, meanwhile, could take a hike and go be exiled somewhere else, and get out of Oliver’s sight for good. The Starweavers and Vencarlo could stay, provided they retired and let him handle running everything and protecting the city with his army of shadow clones. Likewise, the council of Kaer Maga – with the notable exception of Pyre – could stay alive as well, so long as they understood that they were no longer in charge and that they were now serving as Oliver’s administration. It was an imperfect solution that was highly likely to get worse as Oliver’s mental health followed Ileosa’s steady decline, but for the moment at least aside from his murderous impulses against slavers and his father, Oliver actually seemed to be reigning in Kazavon’s worst impulses. And with more shadow clones closing in from all directions, the party reluctantly had to accept the imperfect solution of leaving Oliver in charge, as they didn’t really have a way to stop him if things got serious.

And so the party with Jennifer got ready and set out from Kaer Maga to head to Scarwall, while the Star Weavers, Vencarlo, and Vox stayed behind to keep an eye on Oliver and hopefully manage to blunt any worse ideas that he came up with while he waited for the party to return with “his” new sword. It was during a final conversation with Parashial that it was brought up that Zarmangorf had been seen flying away in the direction of Korvosa, rather than the old Citadel of the Order of the Griffon he had taken over. And with most of his army having been expended attacking Kaer Maga, only for most of it to get cut down by the army of Olivers, now was the best chance the party had of getting into that sealed-off cache of gear that was in a secret vault in the basement of the citadel. Which might prove to be useful to the party’s efforts.

And so with a new Kalissreavel in tow, the party set off to finally accomplish Oliver’s “I’m special” quest for Book Four, sans Oliver. Fortunately, having lived there for quite some time, Jennifer was familiar enough with the place to just teleport them inside the citadel, so whatever token guards Zarmangorf may have left behind would be none the wiser. Rather than, y’know, blatantly flying up to the place on the back of their own giant dragon. Appreciating the need for speed and discretion, the party agreed and Jennifer teleported them to the great hall of the citadel. What the wizard hadn’t considered, however, was that Zarmangorf had made some rather disturbing modifications to her ancestral home since taking it over . . . but that’s a story for next session, the final one of Book Four!

In addition to fretting over what to do about Oliver – which ultimately boiled down to basically just a “wait and see what happens, and stay on his good side” – the party got to debrief Vencarlo about being Blackjack and his captivity in House Arkona. Vencarlo explained that Seneschal Neolandus had been captured by the the Arkonas, and he had gone to their manor to attempt a rescue and deal with Glorio Arkona who had been behind all of Korvosa’s recent woes, a confrontation that went about as well for him as the last Blackjack. The last Blackjack, who was Vencarlo’s mentor, and was revealed now by Vencarlo as Kroft’s father – hence his interest in looking after Kroft all these years despite the likelihood that she would have clapped him in irons the second she discovered that he was Blackjack. He urged the party not to say anything about this to Kroft when/if they saw her again, as the upright and uptight guardswoman would likely be shattered to learn that her beloved and lionized father had been a vigilante.

Vencarlo also admitted that Neolandus was dead now, literally eaten by Vimanda in front of him, which was the last straw that had broken his mind and gotten him under her mental domination control. Conveniently for Vimanda, getting rid of the last potential political threat to Ileosa’s rule, which had been Glorio’s last trump card, was one of the things that had helped smooth out Vimanda’s relations with Ileosa - even as Vimanda was still secretly working with Domina after the whole “subvert Glorio’s plans to up-end the entire city and have Domina come back to be beloved by the populace as their savior in this crisis”, and working with Togomor on the whole “let’s get the Shedskin and overthrow Ileosa/Domina” plan. Basically Vimanda had a whole lot of plans working with all of the Relic Bearers, and unfortunately for her, instead of ending up with her own soul-destroying relic of Kazavon as a reward, she just got blown up in a volcano.

The party also checked in with the rest of the NPC menagerie of allies that they had gained over the past little while.

Gwen was feeling pretty invigorated after having finally told Togomor off to his face, and lived to tell the tale. She finally felt free of his influence now.

Trinia was a little shook-up over the near miss of getting the Shedskin, although relieved that she wasn’t cursed with that burden like Oliver now was.

Laori and Sial had gone off to Scarwall ahead of the party as Sial was finally tired of the party’s meandering path to “rescue all the kittens stuck in trees”, as he phrased it, so they weren’t around to check in with.

Abigail and the rest of the Starweavers were doing okay, although Abigail was still getting used to her new half-balor body. Still, they were available to keep an eye on things in Kaer Maga while the party was away, and were happy to help their journey in whatever way they could.

The party was going to check in with the Council of Kaer Maga one last time before heading out to Scarwall, so that could wait through the night.

There was one last wrinkle that the party got to deal with during the night before sleep, however, as without warning or ceremony, a portal opened up in the middle of the room where they were, vomiting forth an elven woman before rapidly sealing closed behind her. Dusting herself off, the strange elven woman wearing clothes several centuries out of fashion looked around, saw the party and immediately addressed them by name, claiming that they matched their descriptions in “the prophecy”. What prophecy? Well, the ones that had been prophesized to defeat Kazavon, of course, and so she was in the right place! How fortuitous. This was followed by some rambling about arcane principles and a non-sequitur anecdote about traveling on a plane with time dilation.

This was Jennifer, the replacement PC for Oliver since Oli was about to be unavailable as a PC . . . for a WHILE. While not discussed in-depth at this point, the backstory for Jennifer is as follows.

Jennifer is the full-blooded elf daughter of Parashial Kalissreavel and Sera, the paladin who slew Kazavon last time. While the two of them led their cobbled-together alliance of Shaonti, Order of the Griffon, Palatine Eye, and rebellious knights of Tamrivena against Count Mithrodar Andachi, the host for Kazavon back then, Jennifer and her sister remained back home at the Order of the Griffon’s citadel to await their return. Wanting to do something instead of just sitting around, as a capable wizard in her own right, Jennifer left and traveled various outer planes, seeking knowledge that could help defeat Kazavon. She stumbled onto various snippets of arcane lore – likely left-overs from the time of Sorshen who had also fought Kazavon – and from there came across various prophecies from before the current Age of Lost Omens – which apparently referenced the party and their struggles. Seeking more knowledge, she eventually found her way to a library ran by a bunch of Axiomites. Asking a few too many questions for her own good and being a bit too arrogant in her own abilities, Jennifer ran afoul of the Axiomites and was captured by them, locked up in a magical hibernation crystal for the past six hundred years. Having just disappeared without much of a word, a devastated Parashial came back without his wife to find Jennifer gone, and only his one daughter Elisae left, who had listened and stayed put in the citadel. Things only got worse for poor Parashial after that, leaving him the broken drunkard that the party (save for Oli, his half-elf son) knew and loved(?) today. As for Jennifer, while the intervening six hundred-ish years went by in a blink, she was suddenly released from her crystal prison for reasons unexplained to her by the Axiomites, and then cast out back here to the material plane - how fortuitous indeed that she had landed in the right time and place to join the party on their journey! And while Jennifer was therefore interested in traveling with the party to Scarwall, the party wasn’t entirely sure about traveling with her . . . but having a powerful wizard who hated Kazavon come along seemed like a good idea to them. So welcome to the party Jennifer, new PC lady!

It was at this point that the party finally got some well-deserved sleep, although as usual things went awry while they slept, and a whole host of problems was waiting for them when they woke up – no real surprises there. First, a strange army of horned orc-things (Zarmangorf’s orc-taur hybrids) was pushing their way into the city through the gates in the Warren, after coming in out of nowhere from the Cinderlands – and an absolutely massive black dragon (Zarmangorf himself) seemed to be leading them. Second, Oliver had never come back to the old DeVires manor house estate to sleep – so he was still out there doing gods-know-what to who-knows. And third and finally, a badly wounded Pyre came staggering up to the gates of the estate, bellowing and demanding to see the party immediately.

When the party assembled and finally got around to seeing the fire giant slaver, Pyre revealed that his brother Slag was dead. Their compound had been attacked in the middle of the night and their assailant and slaughtered their way through all of the guards before killing Slag and nearly killing Pyre before he managed to – somehow – get away. When pressed who this mystery assailant was, Pyre of course revealed that it had been Oliver – only not just Oliver, but a whole LOT of Olivers. Well, that explained mystery number two from above – what Oliver had been busy doing overnight – but . . . multiple Olivers? The hell was that all about?

Well, the party was about to find out - next session!

The party appears inside of the glass box in the middle south position. Standing down on the central pillar below the party, arrayed around the Shedskin’s sarcophagus on one side is Togomor, flanked by two Grey Maidens. Across from him on the other side is Vimanda Arkona, now no longer bothering to hide her true nature as a rakshasa, but instead openly appearing as a fox-headed female. She is flanked by her own twin bodyguards of Devargo, and . . . Blackjack!? Yes indeed, their cowardice in Book Three by abandoning Korvosa before rescuing Neolandus finally comes back to bite them, as the likewise-imprisoned by the Arkonas hero has been broken and mentally enslaved to be Vimanda’s newest attack dog! And as if all of this wasn’t enough, a hulking leonine/reptilian form is squeezed into the north-central glass box directly across from the party, filling most of the space with its bulk – this must be one of Hazmarduk’s freak magical experiment pets that Vimanda had recovered from the Arkona summer manor outside of Harse before the party arrived to stop the looting.

Both Togomor and Vimanda seem more bemused than bothered that the party has arrived to try and thwart their retrieval of the Shedskin, and they order their sets of bodyguards to attack while they continue to focus on removing the Shedskin from the last of Sorshen’s protections keeping the relic of Kazavon locked up. Both Devargo and Blackjack hurry over to a rune etched into the north side of the pillar’s top that teleports them back up into the maze of glass boxes. It seems that all of the eight boxes are interconnected via teleport runes that rest on the various cardinal faces of each room’s walls. Technically speaking, any one box could teleport to three other given locations, the fourth side being reserved as essentially the “arrival” spot. Essentially, while a bit of a maze to make it not quite a straight line, the teleport runes allowed the party (and the bad guys) to move from box to box, either circling around the central pillar to the right side or the left side, with ways to jump from one side to the other.

It’s then Togomor’s turn to add to the party’s woes, and a familiar pain stabs into Rholand’s chest as one of the Grey Maidens flanking Togomor seems to melt and reform briefly into Laori, and then Trinia, and then Rholand himself – the Second Claimant of Rholand’s soul, the strange ooze assassin known as a Mezlan, has returned!

But rather than join the others in assaulting the party, the last Grey Maiden smirks and raises a hand as she draws her sword, fingers deftly working through the motions of a magus spell, before delivering a combination series of sword strikes into Togomor’s back and a Force punch spell, sending the wizard flying over the edge and down into the lava far below! . . . Or at least, that was clearly the traitorous Grey Maiden’s hope, only for it to be dashed a moment later as Togomor levitates back up into view, having some sort of Flight spell active. The seneschal glowers down at his ex-subordinate, demanding to know what the meaning of this was, and how she had thrown off his magical control. The Grey Maiden’s answer is to simply laugh, ripping off her helmet and tossing it aside to reveal the youthful face of Mina, the clone of Domina that the party had found in the former queen’s study!

Domina’s Theme – Lady of Worlds by Miracle of Sound

But it’s clearly not the remorseful clone in control anymore, but Domina herself now in possession of her clone’s body, as she answers back with cold authority that she was never under Togomor’s command, but had come here of her own volition, and now she would claim what is rightfully hers, followed by reclaiming the throne of Korvosa itself! And Togomor could either kneel at *her* feet now, or be swept aside into the dustbin of history! And so while the party fought their various lackeys to the death, a titanic magical duel between the two Relic Bearers of Kazavon served as the backdrop fireworks! And what a fireworks show it was, with high-level magus and wizard Evocation spells being thrown back and forth – things like Disintegrate and Meteor Swarm – which while highly destructive, both relic bearers were ironically almost immune to thanks to their DR and Regeneration granting nigh-invulnerability to, even when inflicted by another relic bearer (so *clearly* drawing upon Kazavon’s power to defeat Kazavon was NOT the answer to the party’s problem, right?) Fortunately for the party, they were essentially protected from the collateral damage of all these high-power spells by the walls of the glass-steel boxes . . . although that protection was not absolute, as a nearby blast left a spiderweb of cracks in the surface of one crystalline wall.

With that “DM hint” that going outside of the boxes to try and get to the Shedskin directly was a really. BAD. Idea. The party reluctantly discarded the direct approach of Dimension Dooring outside of a box and flying directly down to the central platform where Domina and Togomor were battling. Instead they played along with the encounter as intended by proceeding along the left-hand side of the boxes around the platform. Blackjack and Devargo started to move back through the teleport maze, but low initiative rolls meant that they didn’t get the opportunity to use the “warp back to start” rune to drop in on the party’s heads. Unfortunately, the only two runes available to them at that point where the “go back to start” and “go to the last box, with the only teleport rune down to the platform”, so they had no choice but to proceed and warp in just after the party left the starting box. So instead of managing to work back through the teleport maze to block the party’s progress, they ended up having to play chase instead – oops, bad tactical mistake forced by the DM not designing the “maze” every well. ^^

As the party moved into the lower-left box of the arena, Sorshen’s voice shouted out a warning over the din of Togomor and Domina’s magical duel in Thassilonian – which Rholand interpreted as basically “Shedskin containment breaking, countermeasures activated!” Basically a “get the hell out of there” warning, right before the lava far below began to bubble ominously, signaling some sort of eruption that would probably fill the whole magma chamber within the next couple minutes in cleansing 20d6 fire damage. Several of the glass boxes likewise started to fill up with sprays of various elemental damage, as the “testing” founts of magical energy got turned to the “cleansing” setting and started trying to extinguish anyone inside as a last-ditch attempt to maintain containment on the Shedskin (since someone was clearly messing with the wards). In the case of the lower-left box, that meant gouts of fire, only lightly singing the party before they pressed onward into the mid-left box. Unwilling to follow the party through fire, Devargo and Blackjack went around the right-side side of teleports to attempt to get to the end before the party got there to cut them off.

Meanwhile, the mezlan cut straight to the point by not bothering with any of this teleportation shenanigans. Bending its legs backward in a disgusting grasshopper-like manner, the ooze sprang up onto the side of the mid-left box, smashed a small hole in the glasssteel surface, and then poured itself inside through the tiny hole like the T-1000 rip-off that it was. The party had no real desire to go for Round . . . Three? Four? With this assassin, especially when they could clearly see Vimanda still standing next to the sarcophagus. She was clearly attempting to pry the bars of force aside to free the Shedskin, while the bony fang-like protrusions that served as the relic’s shoulder clasps scraped against her hands and wrists with frenzied eagerness. Togomor and Domina were too busy blasting the hell out of each other to notice and stop her, and so it seemed as if there might soon be THREE separate relic bearers in here for the party to deal with. So the party hastened onward to the next box, with Cid volunteering to stay behind to keep fighting a rearguard action to hold the Mezlan back and prevent it from following the party to try and single-mindedly murder Rholand.

Now a paladin with actual armor instead of a magus trying to use mirror images to shore up a glass jaw – which the Mezlan could just ignore with its immunity to illusions thanks to Ooze type – Cid faired better than previous attempts at this. As most of the party moved onward to the upper-right box – which was the penultimate box, leading to the final mid-top box where Vimanda’s hulking magical beast pet still waited – acid begin to rain down from the ceiling on Cid and the Mezlan. That hurt Cid a bit, but the Mezlan wailed and staggered as the acid began to melt straight through it – the crucial fatal weakness in how to permanently kill the ooze assassin revealed, as its previously unstoppable Regeneration got turned off in the Acid bath! Even so, the focus remained on stopping Vimanda (and Togomor and Domina) rather than finishing an old grudge, so Cid started making good on getting out of there and rejoining the party rather than continue the fight amid taking a bunch of Acid damage each round.

Looking ahead to see Vimanda’s hulking pet waiting for them with the air of a hungry predator awaiting its next meal, Trinia who had been traveling with the party through all of this, decided to volunteer at stopping Vimanda. Using her newfound Vaz’em-taught Ninja Trick to vanish from sight with a whisper of “Trust me”, Trinia disappeared from the battlefield and began sneaking her way into the next box and past the monster to the teleport rune down to the platform while the party geared up for Ye Olde frontal assault melee blender on it.

This was about where Session One Hundred Forty-Four ended. Things only got more hectic in Session One Hundred Forty-Five, as another surprise guest joined the fracas. With a roar of defiance, Gwen’vor’stila, Togomor’s former green dragon apprentice and the party’s latest ally and current high-speed travel vehicle, swooped down out of the darkness and into the fray, unleashing a gout of acid of her own to cover Togomor and Domina and do . . . pretty much absolutely nothing permanent to either of them. It’s the thought that counts though, right? And this was indeed the payoff for the party (Rholand especially) befriending and encouraging Gwen to step out of Togomor’s abusive shadow, as rather than continuing to cower far away, here she was fighting alongside the party and outright stating to Togomor’s face that she was done serving him (complete with kickass theme song for the moment!)

Gwen Rejects Togomor Theme

Togomor, for his part, was fairly unimpressed by Gwen’s heartfelt rejection, flatly stating that since he already Geas’d her into obedience once, he would easily do so again. And demonstrated the foolishness on Gwen’s part by showing her scaly face here by unleashing a Meteor Swarm in her general direction! Fortunately for her, the left-center box holding Cid and the Mezlan was near enough that she could duck behind for cover, and she had plenty enough HP to weather the explosion damage from the meteors. The glass-steel box and chains holding it up, however, took a direct hit from the meteor plus the explosion damage, and while they were designed to take a beating . . . not that much of a beating. The crystalline walls began to rapidly crack and splinter apart in a cascading failure, exacerbated as the chains on one side of the box had their links blasted apart and failed, leaving the box to begin to dip and slant sideways as more of the damaged chains began to pull apart under the strain of the box’s now unbalanced weight. Cid wisely decided that *now* was a good time to get out of there, and staggering away from the mezlan, up the rapidly slanting floor, and touched the teleport rune (or he cast Dimension Door to rejoin the rest of the party in the next box, I’m not sure which). A few seconds later, and the glass box broke free of its moorings entirely, went flying off to crash against one of the pillars it had been chained to, and shattered into a thousand pieces, pitching the Mezlan head-long down into the lava, where that was *surely* the end of it this time . . . right?

Now reunited, and encouraged by the presence of Gwen who continued to swoop around the room, harassing Togomor and keeping his attention away from the party steadily moving closer to the platform and the Shedskin, the party advanced into the final box to face down Vimanda’s newest pet. And boy, did that fight not go how they were expecting! The party had diced apart many a monster over this book that I thought for *sure* this time would make them sweat, only to discover that melee blender of Cid + Vaz’em + Oliver (with some spell support from Rholand) had no breaks and gave no f#!@s (Oliver solo’d the CR 14 Red Reaver, if you recall)! So I made sure that Vimanda had found something . . . special . . . left behind by dear old Dad (i.e. Hazmarduk), and which coincidentally also explained why Togomor was tolerating her “help” here.

The leonine reptilian was a monster known as a Bandersnatch, a relatively standard CR 13-ish monster save for an obnoxious aura of some type, with various CR versions scaling up from there with nastier auras. I don’t particularly like monster abilities that crowd control players as not getting to play is not much fun, and an AoE stun/daze aura sounds like the opposite of fun, which is what the CR 13 version has. So I replaced it . . . with the aura that the CR 20 version of the Bandersnatch has. Which is anti-magic field. All the buff spells that the party had thrown up before teleporting over, and had been casting as they pushed their way through the glass boxes? Gone. Boosts to-hit, AC, and saves from all their magic items? Gone too, as the Bandersnatch snarled upon seeing their approach, turned on its aura, and just turned . . . the magic . . . off.

What followed was carnage as the Bandersnatch ripped into them. The melee blender coughed to life and bit back, as Oliver was still a badass warrior even without magic, but Hazmarduk had modified this Bandersnatch further, grafting armor plates over its vulnerable joints and softer places in its armored hide, giving it Medium Fortification (50% Crit/Sneak Attack negation, at the cost of the Bandersnatch gaining *some* bleed damage as the struck armor plates tore at its skin). That made it difficult for the crit-focused Oliver and sneak-attack focused Vaz’em to operate at their usual brutal efficiency, even beyond the lack of magic now. And as the s~$$ cherry on top of this sundae of pain I had cooked up, the damn thing had Fast Healing 10 as well, so the wounds that they did manage to inflict slowly started to seal themselves, while the party could not repair the damage that it was inflicting to them. Seeing them struggling with the abomination, Gwen flew over, punched a hole through the glass steel wall to make a hole big enough to shove her front end through, and tore at the bandersnatch’s back side. Her reward was getting the monstrosity’s spike-covered tail to come in on her partially-blind side (somewhat blinded in her right eye from getting blasted in the face by a Disintegrate from Suthevan Gyves the Kaer Maga council member back during her attempt at destroying the city) and nearly smash her head in, eating a x3 crit from the damn thing for 50+ points of damage!

Things go from bad to worse still when Blackjack and Devargo finally catch up to the party, making it back through the maze to come in and hit the party from the rear. At some point in all this Blackjack had lowered his hood on Vimanda’s taunting orders, revealing himself to be Vencarlo Orsini, to only minimal surprise from the party. Although they had never found any proof linking Vencarlo to Blackjack, it had been a running suspicion of the party for some time. The party’s always had an interesting relationship with Blackjack and Vencarlo Orsini, as Vaz’em and Oliver distinctly disliked the hero due to his meddling way back in Book One when they were hunting Gaedren Lamm (and Rholand wasn’t a huge fan of Blackjack’s public disapproval of the queen . . . up until the point where he and Ileosa split apart, anyway). But they all got along pretty good with Vencarlo, whose good cheer and sense of humor the party appreciated.

Those good old days of camaraderie were gone, unfortunately, as unmasked Vencarlo ruthlessly attacks the party now that he’s caught up with them, although his effectiveness is somewhat blunted, as being a human NPC reliant on magic items the anti-magic field slows him down just as much as the PCs. Devargo, on the other hand . . . was something else.

Vaz’em had learned that Auntie Vimanda had taken *two* monstrosities of Hazmarduk’s construction from beneath the manor in Harse. One was obviously the anti-magic Bandersnatch, while the other was the swarm of memory-eating spiders that had been utilized by the Red Mantis (on loan from Vimanda, because she loved f&!&ing with her “favorite nephew”) to winter-soldier Cinnabar back to “default settings”. What Vaz’em didn’t know, however, was that the nightmare eater swarm, as it was called, had been put to another use by Vimanda – but he found out pretty quickly as Devargo the King of Spiders waded into the party and every strike caused his form to shift and waver, revealing that his old human face was just an illusionary façade, and that beneath it was nothing but a walking mass of spiders (including his weapons that he stabbed people with – “eeew!”). Yes indeed, Auntie Vimanda had been quite busy since the end of Book Three, not only cozying up with Queen Ileosa and smoothing over House Arkona nearly destroying the city (largely by putting the blame for Eodred’s death and the Blood Veil plague and sundry solely in Bahor/Glorio’s lap), but turning Vencarlo into her brain-washed servant and Devargo the King of Spiders *into* a giant mass of memory-eating spiders!

The memory eating worked essentially like level drain – i.e. fail a Fortitude save, gain a negative level if hit by Devargo, only with one extra twist – Devargo also got some of their memories and skills, gaining a point of “essence” for each hit he landed, and essentially gaining a positive level (+1 BAB, saves, etc.) for every 2 essence he got. He could also utilize some of the party’s unique feats and skills, although I don’t think he ever got to show off the tricks he got from eating some of Vencarlo’s memories, like the Swashbucker’s Panache Parry-and-Riposte . . . heeheehee. Devargo could also, of course, discorporate himself, dissolving his “humanoid” body into a standard swarm of spiders that crawled all over anyone in the surrounding squares and auto-hit with the memory draining poison. Unfortunately, Devargo didn’t get a lot of opportunities to land more than a couple hits and really get wild with the level-boosting he got from it. I know he did clock Vaz’em at least once, as he ate some of the memories from the night that Vaz’em and Cinnabar spent together, and remarked on it, saying that having both sets of memories was like “having sex with yourself!” Apparently, eating Devargo down to a mindless husk had corrupted the spider swarm to having not just his mannerisms, but his crude personality as well – not quite the upgrade Vimanda had been hoping for!

With the party now bogged down fighting Vencarlo and Devargo (and the DM wanting to have a little mercy by giving the party a slight breather from the terrifyingly-effective walking anti-magic field), Vimanda called out to her Bandersnatch pet, ordering it to get down here. Apparently able to understand speech, at least to the extend of commands and magic interacting with its anti-magic aura, the Bandersnatch turned off its anti-magic aura, reached a claw over to touch the rune teleporting it down onto the platform, and reactivated its anti-magic field. This was what Vimanda had brought the monstrosity along for, and what had made her valuable enough for Togomor to bring along, as the Bandersnatch had helped circumvent a number of the magical protections Sorshen had erected throughout the Vault (and Togomor/Domina, at least, could just walk through any damaging magical traps to nearly zero negative effect – although Togomor had brought along a gaggle of mentally-dominated Grey Maidens to throw into the traps for him to spare himself most of that pain).

As the anti-magic aura went up, multiple things happened at once – the rods of force holding the Shedskin down into the sarcophagus blinked out of existence, Domina fell to her knees and collapsed with a scream, as the Magic Jar spell allowing the real ex-queen to possess her clone got disrupted, allowing Mina to partially regain control . . . and Trinia shimmered into view directly across the sarcophagus from Vimanda. Both women immediately dove down into the sarcophagus, grabbing for the writhing cloak as it squirmed its way free after millennia of imprisonment with a grating, unearthly shriek, fang-like clasps scrambling and scratching at both women’s arms as they wrestled for control of the living cloak. And with the anti-magic field up immediately around the sarcophagus, there was little Togomor could do to actually interfere now, which probably was an outcome that he had not planned for when he brought the ambitious, back-stab happy rakshasa with a handy anti-magic abomination in her back pocket. Despite being a genius nigh-immortal archmage, sometimes the fat bastard had his moments of sheer stupidity.

Meanwhile, exposure to the Bandersnatch’s anti-magic field from earlier had disrupted Vimanda’s mind control magic over Vencarlo, and a bunch of high-as-usual diplomacy checks from Rholand managed to finally get through to him. At least enough to get the old superhero to stop fighting them and fall to his knees in confusion and bleak despair, anyway. Ignoring Devargo, as it seemed like the best strategy for dealing with the bug-man was to just run away from him, Cid, Oliver, and Vaz’em piled down onto the platform after the Bandersnatch. Cid and Vaz’em continued to engage the beast along with Gwen, while Oliver, being the first to teleport down just before the anti-magic field went back up, leapt for the two ladies wrestling over the horrific magical artifact. Although Vimanda was no slouch in hand-to-hand combat, Oliver rolled well and so with Trinia’s help managed to tear the artifact out of her hands. And then Oliver shoved Trinia away and swirled the leathery mantle over his own shoulders, wincing as the bony shoulder clasps flexed and borrowed into his shoulders as he willingly put the Shedskin ON.

As the shade of Eodred had appeared before Ileosa, almost immediately a heavily-scarred Gaedren Lamm swirled into Oliver’s field of vision out of the shadows, taunting him and welcoming him into the fold (of the damned). Information about the cloak’s abilities began to trickle into his mind, drowning out the flashes of pain as the clasp fangs bit deeper and shifted under his skin as the Shedskin settled itself onto its new owner. Having willingly put on the Shedskin and deliberately opened the door in his soul to Kazavon’s power, Oliver very quickly gained knowledge of what he could now do – including the ability to cast Shadow Walk, giving him a way to get the entire party out of this mess as Sorshen’s voice screamed out again that Containment had failed, and the Failsafe was activated – prompting the slowly rising lava to now surge upwards rapidly, building up rapidly now to a critical mass explosion that would consume the entire chamber and anyone within it in a last-ditch attempt to stop the Shedskin from escaping.

In the background of Oliver’s dark awakening, Cid, Vaz’em, and Gwen manage to combine their efforts to bring the Bandersnatch down, Gwen shoving it over the side of the platform and down into the rapidly rising lava, obliterating it to prevent any chance of its fast healing managing to revive it. Rholand teleports down onto the platform to join the others, leading the traumatized and out of it Vencarlo, and shouts that they need to go, NOW. But go where? Presumably Gwen had found some alternate route down into this facility from some crack in the earth (or found another convenient teleport circle – Sorshen’s secret backdoor exit from her top secret research laboratory?), but that wasn’t a route the party could use now to get back out at any good speed to outrun a literal volcano eruption. Regardless, they had to try to get out of here somehow, and flying out on Gwen’s back seemed better than trying to do it on foot, so everybody started piling onto Gwen’s back for the escape. Vaz’em grabbed the confused Mina and threw her onto Gwen’s back as well, hoping that there was an opportunity here to save her and undo his failure back at the end of Book Three that saw her captured by Marlessa and turned into this unwilling host for the real but Kazavon-corrupted Domina.

Seeking to put his thumb in the eye of his by-now MUCH hated rival (sending a gang of soul-eating abominations after you tended to breed enmity, I guess), Rholand reaches out at Togomor, and casts Pilfering Hand. On his Staff of the Slain Kazavon relic. And because it’s the godsdamned Rholand . . . the bastard nat 20s the roll, ripping the Staff of the Slain out of Togomor’s hands, sending it flying end over end of the intervening distance . . . and directly into his own hands. Screaming in outrage at this humiliating thievery, the blood archmage stabs a finger out at Rholand, and a by-now familiar thin green ray spears out to lance Rholand through the chest. Moderately wounded from the fighting thus far, Rholand takes over 100 points of damage after failing his Fortitude save against the spell, and looks down to find his heart and surrounding region of his chest flaking off into a formless grey dust. Staggering to one side as he struggles to keep on his feet, Rholand is momentarily surprised to discover that rather than spreading from that sizable hold in his chest to Thanos snap the rest of him, the ash-ification that is supposed to follow after being reduced to 0 HP has halted . . . or rather, been stopped.

Now it is Rholand’s own turn to be visited by a shade of Kazavon, as the seed of madness and evil he had just spent Book Four pulling out of his mind gets replanted by contact with the Staff of the Slain. A heavily scarred Ileosa, right eye plucked out and left eye practically glowing with an eerie cobalt blue aura, steps out from around behind Rholand, caressing his cheek with one hand for a moment before raking her fingers down along his cheekbone. Kazavon-Ileosa gleefully announces that he was dead, about to be reduced to a mere puff of ashes in a few seconds, unless, of course, they reached an accord. Glancing down at the Staff of the Slain in his hands as this mere moment stretched out into half a dozen non-existent heart beats, Rholand considered his options, and then with a sharp exhale pulled his arm back and threw the Staff of the Slain off the side of the platform and down into the lava with the last of his strength. He collapsed a moment later, falling back onto Gwen as she raced forward to catch him, his body breaking apart into rapidly dissolving clumps that in return disintegrated into mounds of ash, flowing through Gwen’s claws and floating off on the shimmering heat currents from the lava, gone.

But Rholand had one last trick to play to defy fate – his Mantle of Ashes had the ability to cast Breath of Life on him. And while normally those slain by a disintegrate were simply gone, dust in the wind, Breath of Life would normally work to restore a creature to life, even one reduced past their negative HP total for dying – assuming, of course, that the spell brought them back up above that threshold. And given that the capstone ability of the Mantle of Ashes was for Rholand to literally discorporate himself into a cloud of ashes and teleport to the side of someone he cared for, well . . . why couldn’t he just reform himself now from disintegrated ashes? Rule of Cool demanded that the potential narrow escape from certain death be granted, and Rholand rolled well on his Breath of Life “healing” . . . bringing himself a few HP above 0, and thus the threshold for Disintegrate’s death clause to be triggered.

And so Rholand’s legend for somehow foiling Kazavon’s plans by the slimmest of chances – and being known as the Runelord of Ash - only grew, as his ashes drifted for a moment on the heat currents, and then swirled back towards Gwen, circling around each other and condensing themselves back down into living flesh as Sorshen’s cleansing artifact of ashes saved him from Kazavon one more time.

And now, it really was time for everyone to get out of here as the chamber began to shake with the build-up of pressure heralding the imminent arrival of the explosive eruption of magma. Gwen takes off into the air, leaving Vimanda stranded on the platform, shrieking in outrage at them. Mina groans and grits her teeth, warning the party that she was trying to hold on, but that Domina’s grip on her body was starting to tighten again as the anti-magic field faded. While always the True Neutral pragmatist and opportunist, there was a dark air to Oliver now as he took in his information, and then scooped up the weakened Mina in his arms, and then tossed her off Gwen’s back and down into the lava below! While bolstered by the influence of the Throne of Night relic that Domina controlled, Mina’s body had not yet been steeped in the dark powers of that artifact. And thus, without Domina in direct control of the clone’s body and able to serve as a bridge to the relic, Mina screamed and burned as she vanished beneath the lava flow, gone for good.

Cursing Rholand’s name, Togomor teleported himself out of the chamber, leaving Vimanda and Devargo to helplessly watch as Oliver stretched and followed up his brutal execution of Mina by casting Shadowstep, pulling everyone with him into the Shadow Plane. The party’s last glimpse of the Shedskin’s magma chamber tomb was of Vimanda glaring up at them and screaming in furious defiance and disbelief that she had just lost, an instant before the lava surged up in a final, all consuming explosion. And Vaz’em just gave a satisfied smile, as this marked the completion of his lingering quest feat that he had gotten at the start of Book Four as part of his “I’m special” questline, and had only partially completed with the defeat of Hazmarduk – Revenge against his twisted family of House Arkona.

Safely in the Shadow Plane, the party quickly moved out of, or perhaps a better term would be through the earth, leaving the magma chamber behind as Gwen flew on through the bleak void space, returning them to the surface and making significant progress back towards Kaer Maga to report their success of, well, perhaps not quite actually stopping the building of the road through Bloodsworn Vale as they had been commissioned by the Council to do, but setting back both Togomor and Domina and surviving them was quite the victory. Indeed, *both* relic bearers of Kazavon had been dealt grievous blows, Domina losing her new youthful and not-crippled body, and Togomor literally losing his relic beneath tons upon tons of molten rock. But in their place, a new relic bearer silently began to rise, for Oliver had willingly given himself over to the Shedskin, and there would be drastic fallout to come over that shocking decision . . . in the “Oliver is no longer a PC but a villain under the DM’s control” category of fallout.

If the party had remained loyal to Queen Ileosa in Book Three and had somehow stuck with supporting her despite the growing evidence that something was very, very wrong with her, Book Four would likely have been about the further shadow war between Ileosa and Domina (with Togomor looking to third-party the weakened victor), which would have still probably culminated here in Domina’s attempt to power herself up further by claiming a second relic of Kazavon.

In this hypothetical scenario, even if reclaimed safely by the party, the Shedskin would probably been taken by Ileosa and put to use empowering some other NPC for the showdown with all the relic bearers of Kazavon in Book Six. Technically speaking, with the Crown of Fangs Queen Ileosa was already the strongest relic bearer, as the Fangs of Kazavon are the oldest of the relics, having come from the original Kazavon’s death, while all of the other relics have been created a handful at a time during each of his follow-up deaths (and ostensibly, although this is a tiny difference in power level, weaker with each new defeat). The Staff of the Slain, The Throne of Night, and the Shedskin were all of the relics created when Sorshen slew Kazavon, and so it made a certain thematic sense that they were all drawn together here for this climatic battle at the end of Book Four.

Of course, I hadn’t planned on the PCs actually managing to so thoroughly screw over BOTH Togomor and Domina. Domina lost her new body, leaving her back at square one, confined in the broken down, crippled body of an octogenarian, where she had started the campaign – if not worse off for having foiled every single one of her schemes in the first three books of the AP as well. Togomor lost his relic, it having essentially abandoned the “loser” in favor of offering Rholand its support in his dark hour of need, only for it to be rejected and abandoned in turn. I sort of implied that as an archmage, Togomor had the resources to eventually retrieve the staff, even from the lava-filled remains of the chamber, as while the magma would have cleansed almost any living being inside of the chamber, Sorshen had long since proved from previous tests of the failsafe that it would not be able to destroy the Shedskin, so it wouldn’t have destroyed the Staff either.

Nonetheless, with both relic bearers so weakened, it made it rather easy to declare that Queen Ileosa rolled over both of them at the start of Book Five, bringing them both under her heel and essentially winning the relic bearer war. With Sabrina taking up the Bound Blade thanks to Zarmangarof – or as I have spelled his name in yet another dyslexic DM moment, Zarmangorf – that made four relic bearers accounted for. The only ones left not under Ileosa’s control therefore were the new bearer of the Shedskin, Oliver, and Leo Astares the bearer of the Armor of Skulls – ostensibly under control of the devils of Belzeragna, who seemed to be interested in serving Ileosa as their best chance to revive Kazavon so they were unlikely to rock the boat, so to speak (and certainly not after seeing what had just happened to Togomor and Domina). There was also a final seventh relic unaccounted for but not yet claimed, the Howling Horns, which were actually in the possession of Laori and Sial’s organization, the Brotherhood of Bones – you’ll see eventually how that one drifts into the grand showdown as we get into Book Six, many upon many sessions from now.

My original plan for who this mystery Shedskin relic bearer would be was likely Cinnabar or Mistress Kayltanya, as the shadow powers granted by the cloak seemed to be in line with the Red Mantis creed of striking from the shadows. After the party ran away from Korvosa at the end of Book Three, Vimanda had the opportunity to advance from merely another corrupted pawn of Domina (likely the original recruit into her service who then went on to knock over Gaedren and Andaisin in turn to continue the subversion of her brother Bahor’s ambitions) into a center stage villain on her own merits. And it would give Vaz’em’s own personal nemesis a connection into this whole twisted hydra-head gaggle of hosts that Kazavon was juggling and playing off against each other to ensure his ultimate return and triumph.

And then I had the twisted idea that since Trinia was coming along with the party, and had an uncanny knack for getting herself into trouble that the party had to bail her out of – it’s been a running joke that I’m determined to have her kidnapped and have to be rescued from *some* one once in each Book, in a sort of reflection of Fishguts Jim I guess – that perhaps she would make an even better relic bearer than Vimanda. And of course, there was that delicious harmony of making a *second* PC’s love interest corrupted and likely in need of being put down (with the slim hope that she could still be saved, perhaps in a rebuttal of Rholand’s slow abandonment that Ileosa could be saved). So I decided that I would put them both into a wrestling match over control of the Shedskin, and while in a hand-to-hand contest the monk Vimanda should probably have headbutted Trinia’s face in, I was going to give them fairly equal chances of either one managing to win out control long enough to don the cloak and win the contest, with the PCs perhaps being able to sway the odds one way or the other depending on the exact circumstances and actions taken at the time.

If Vimanda had won the toss-up, she would be the new Bearer of the Shedskin and firmly take her place as a major villain within the story instead of merely being a lackey of one, although given how Kazavon operates one imagines that she would swiftly find herself regretting this final ambition of hers.

If Trinia had won the toss-up, much like Oliver she would have enabled the party to escape their desperate certain-death situation by casting Shadow Walk. Her corruption would have been somewhat slower than Oliver’s, as she would have continued to adventure with the party into Scarwall, following a path down into madness eerily reminiscent of Ileosa’s but likely much faster and harsher due to willingly invited Kazavon in rather than fighting him every step of the way as Ileosa had done. Likely, at some point she would have crossed a line as she continued her rapid slide into darkness that would have caused her to break from the party, and move away to be her own burgeoning villain plans back in Korvosa in Book Six. To use the TV Tropes quote, in this scenario Trinia would essentially be a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds – someone who had suffered so much trauma and loss (and stoked on by Kazavon’s manipulations through the relic) that they broke, only it was *everyone else’s* problem then, as Trinia sought to burn down the entire world that had so tormented her. I even had the perfect new theme song for evil Trinia’s slide into darkness!

Trinia, Destroyer of Worlds Theme

Alas, it was not meant to be, although I found another avenue through which to bring back and recycle the idea of “Dark Trinia” (including the theme music), although that is a discussion for another day.

What really threw a monkey wrench into my plans was Oliver’s player, who had seen Trinia and Vimanda going after the Shedskin cloak, and said privately to me that he wanted Oliver to go over and grab it, and then put it on himself rather than let either of the ladies damn themselves. It was more of an act of desperate “f%$@ this I’m out” than charity on Oliver’s part, however, and after discussing it we agreed that Oliver would be getting put on the NPC shelf for a while and that was okay with his player. Apparently he had been getting a little tired after ten+ levels of Oliver just running in and melee blundering stuff, all day every day, and wanted to try something new. The new character he came up with to replace Oliver – whether just through Book Five and through the rest of the campaign, at the time we did not know – was quite interesting. But that will have to wait until the *next* session’s write-up.

Vault of the Shedskin Musical Theme

Arriving back at the field of bones, the party ventures into it this time and soon finds themselves standing in front of the rune-covered doors set into a hillside that clearly seems to be the entrance to the Vault. Togomor has clearly already been here, as the doors have been forced open, but that makes the party’s own entry as simple as cautiously stepping through the ajar doors into the space beyond. Unlike most dungeons, this one is apparently designed to be easily traversable as a pale glow from the very stone walls provides normal levels of illumination throughout the chamber beyond the doors. But being able to clearly see your surroundings does not make them safe, as the body of a Grey Maiden impaled on a ludicrously large stone spear a few feet inside the chamber amply demonstrated.

Cautiously advancing further into the chamber and ducking under the massive pillar-sized spear shaft pinning the Grey Maiden against the western wall, the party discovered three sets of doors leading elsewhere in the complex, each with a metal plaque seeming to identify what lay beyond in Thassilon – translating which proved to be a trivial task to the party as Rholand now spoke Thassilon via his Mantle of Ashes.

To the west was the “Barracks”, a locale quickly deemed as unimportant by the party - and left largely undetailed by the DM, although it was likely only to be fairly uninteresting as simply sleep quarters and a dining area for the staff of guards/research acolytes Sorshen had set up in here to conduct research on the Shedskin and other Relics of Kazavon.

The door to the north was labeled “Vault”, and featured another dead Grey Maiden slumped in a bloody pile next to the name plaque, although there was no immediately obvious sign of the trap mechanism that killed her. Decided to save that clear but potentially still dangerously trap-laden passage further towards their goal for last, the party turned to the door to the east, labeled simply “Laboratory”.

Beyond the stone doors next to the Laboratory plaque was a considerably smaller chamber that featured nothing except for a teleportation circle etched into the stone floor. Having dealt with these before back in Book Three to get from the dungeons of Castle Korvosa into Sorshen-turned-Domina’s study, the relatively arcane-challenged party had a decent idea of how to activate it. After giving the runic circle a cursory once-over for it being a potential trap, the party decided to chance it and activated the circle, teleporting themselves to another chamber.

Although no one in the group was a dwarf, the heavier claustrophobic air of the new chamber they now found themselves standing in the center of suggested that they were now far, far underground. A thick layer of dust coating the stone floor of this chamber that lay undisturbed also suggested that Togomor had not come this way ahead of the party. Otherwise, for a “laboratory” this chamber was surprisingly featureless, save for the abnormally copious amount of dust across the floor, mingled here and there with the splintered remnants of wooden workbenches, and two partially collapsed stone plinths at one end of the room.

Detective work to decipher what had happened in this room ultimately proved to be unnecessary, for as soon as the party stepped out of the teleport circle to move about the room, the disturbance triggered the “Haunt-lite” that caused ghostly after-images of a half dozen tattooed Thassilon acolytes to rise up from the dust scattered about the room. The party watches as the shades bustle about various alchemy workbenches set up throughout the room, conducting some sort of arcane research, seemingly focused on the objects that the two plinths at the end of the chamber are holding contained – a set of dragon fangs (the Fangs of Kazavon, precursor for the Crown of Fangs) and several long jagged shards of some sort of shattered blade, clearly only remnant pieces rather than the full weapon.

As the party continues to watch the scene play out, the chamber suddenly shakes violently in a replay of history, and a shrill alarm starts to sound a moment before there is the flash of a teleportation spell in the back corner of the room as a tall gaunt-man in resplendent golden robes and with an arrangement of iuon stone embedded in his forehead appears. The man introduces himself as Karzoug the Claimer, the new ruler of Xin-Shalast, and as the new Runelord of Prosperity, he was here to lay claim to what was rightfully his, and stolen from his predecessor by Sorshen. He then immediately proceeds to turn all of the acolytes to desiccated dust with a Horrid Wilting spell, stepping around the rapidly shriveling bodies of the acolytes as they all collapse to the floor and continuing turning into the dust that coats the floor in the present era. Another spell disintegrates the two stone plinths, freeing the fangs from containment as well as leaving the broken sword shards to clatter onto the ground. Karzoug only spares the broken sword bits a moment of sneering scorn before carefully telekinetically sweeping up the Fangs of Kazavon into a waiting bag. The Runelord of Greed spares one last moment to summon some sort of monster with orders to smash everything left standing in the room into a fine mess of tiny pieces before teleporting back out, having acquired what he had come here for.

Here again was probably an opportunity to have a nasty Haunt effect like “save or get blasted by a Horrid Wilting spell”, or have the summoned nasty still living down here, having been blocked from escaping after the summoning spell wore off by some magical sealing property of the stone walls (which Karzoug just punched through because they weren’t really designed with stopping a fellow Runelord in mind, but he certainly wouldn’t have spared a thought to how any summoned hired help was getting back out). But I was sort of slapping this section together as I went so in the interest of keeping things moving towards the climatic encounter that I had actually spent time prepping, nothing dangerous threatened the party here in this rather underwhelming one-room arcane laboratory.

The one other thing of note that the party did pause to investigate further before leaving was the small handful of long metal shards that had also been held down here and were being studied alongside the Fangs. A quick study of the shards suggested that they were quite brittle, but a lingering and *very* powerful aura of magical power surrounded each of them. Consulting with the echo of Sorshen within his Mantle of Ashes, Rholand learned that these shards were pieces of the weapon that Sorshen had used to slay her lover-turned-Kazavon, and while much of the power had gone out of them as the weapon had been destroyed upon killing Kazavon, the pieces that they now held should still prove effective in overcoming the protection granted to Kazavon’s relic bearers. In essence, the party now had 3-4 shivs that they could use to stab someone like, oh, say, Togomor with who wouldn’t be able to just shrug off the damage and regenerate with his DR/30 Epic & Regeneration 50 like he could laugh off everything else. It wasn’t much, but given the party was about to throw themselves head-long into some mysterious hellhole dungeon that they had heard whispers about throughout the campaign, all in the vain hope of getting something that could actually hurt relic bearers like Togomor and Ileosa, having 3-4 one-shot shivs to truly hurt them at all was a pretty good find! . . . Particularly when they were aware that Togomor was more or less in the next room over.

Reactivating the teleport circle in the middle of the laboratory returned the party back to the entry series of chambers, allowing them to exit the Laboratory “wing” and return to the entry chamber. From there, they opened the doors leading to the “Vault”, after confirming that the trap that had dismembered the nearby dead Grey Maiden had not reset itself. The next chamber was another teleport circle room, but if the party wasn’t already wary of these things the fact that the walls of this chamber were also soaked in relatively fresh blood, and the floor literally with meaty giblets and scattered pieces of Grey Maiden armor was a pretty strong hint to be careful here. Essentially, rather than a teleport circle actually going anywhere, this was essentially a telefrag circle, rendering any group attempting to use this trapped circle inside out and merged with each other like the Fly before the resulting conjoined mass of meat exploded into a fine paste splattered all over the room. A careful examination of the room by the sharp-eyed Vaz’em and Rholand revealed a secret door leading to a smaller hidden chamber which held another, non-blood-soaked teleport circle. Admittedly this one could have just teleported them to the heart of a volcano or something instead, but trusting that their DM was playing a fair and continuing story campaign rather than a tomb-of-horrors gotcha simulator, the party activated this teleport circle. Hrm, about that whole “teleporting into the heart of a volcano” bit . . . more on that in later.

The party did not reappear in the middle of a lake of lava, although the oppressive air of a chamber miles underground returned, along with a notable dry heat to the air. This new chamber was little more than a long hallway, leading to a raised dais etched into which was another teleport circle. Blocking the way there, however, was a shimmering wall of force, and blocking the party’s path to the wall of force was a quartet of heavily armored clay golems that rumbled to life and prepared to pummel the party into a bloody paste to paint the walls with the hard way. A half dozen Grey Maidens scattered around the room served as a preview for the party of the carnage to come . . . except, just after activating, the four golems caught sight of the swirling cloak of ashes around Rholand’s shoulders, and immediately stood down, dropping to one knee to let Sorshen’s heir-apparent pass through their ranks unmolested. The wall of force similarly melted away at a touch from Rholand’s hand, leaving the path to the teleport circle unimpeded. Getting the sense that they were about to reach the pinnacle moment of Book Four, the party paused a moment to ensure that they were ready for whatever awaited them beyond this final teleportation circle, and then activated it.

. . . I believe that the second half of this session did include the opening round or two of the ensuing climatic Book Four End Boss fight, but given the spectacle of it – as I *had* actually spent most of my prep time for these last couple of sessions on preparing this encounter - I think I will wait until the next session write-up to describe what they found waiting for them on the other side of this final teleport. Suffice it to say, the ensuing battle lasted through the end of this session, the next, and concluded in the one after that. And in one final exasperating note of forewarning, after this grand battle, the party would never be the same again . . .

And that’s how the Fangs of Kazavon, which originally corrupted Sorshen’s lover Haphrama, the original councilor of Prosperity in Xin’s Thassilon Empire and who was eventually replaced by Karzoug, got from Varisia to Ustalav. And then the Fangs got brought back to Varisia from Tamrivena by the Shaonti after they helped put down Mithrodar Andachi, the Count of Tamrivena who found the Fangs and was corrupted by them into Kazavon’s next host.

In hindsight, what I probably should have done was wipe out the Ustalavian connection entirely, and ignored Paizo’s desire to expand the world in favor of placing Tamrivena directly below Korvosa. Thus, Korvosa would have been built atop the ashes of not just one empire plagued by Kazavon (Sorshen’s Xin-Eurythnia), but two (Tamrivena as well). Close followers of the CotCT AP as written may be scratching their heads over my references to Tamrivena as the site of Kazavon’s near-return thanks to Mithrodar, rather than Scarwall as Tamrivena is a major city in Ustalav, while Scarwall is a distant fortress near the border of Ustalav that served as Kazavon’s base of operations before he was taken down. Like everything else with this AP, I’ve twisted and combined details, locations, and characters for my own insane ends, but there is a specific reason for this change of combining Scarwall with Tamrivena which I will explain in depth when we reach Book Five in a few more sessions.

The fort itself was a squat box of stone walls, decidedly shabby-looking and hastily assembled due to its construction from Fabrication, Wall of Stone, and similar Conjuration spells. But despite the relatively slap-dash construction, it was still a fortress with a sizable contingent of guards visible on the walls . . . some of which were clearly not human Grey Maidens, but rather bearded devils and Erinyes. Rather than attacking the fort head-on, which probably would have been counter-productive to having a conversation with Beautrice, the party decided on discretion and sent Vaz’em in to infiltrate the place.

Unfortunately, devils don’t have a good counter to invisibility, unlike daemons who tend to have See Invisibility as a constant effect, so the Called/Summoned help didn’t do the Grey Maidens much good here against the ninja. Vaz’em did his usual ninja trick of turning invisible, climbed the walls, and slipped into the fort’s keep. Still undetected, he made his way up into the commander’s office on the upper levels of the keep, and found Beautrice reviewing various scouting reports and daily progress reports on the bridge that the Grey Maidens were trying to build across the second river cutting through the Vale (construction having already completed across the first one).

This proved to be a bit of a conundrum now for Vaz’em, as usually after slipping into a heavily guarded location, he was not there to have a chat with his target – and surprising them by leaping out of the shadows tended to be a poor way to start a conversation with most people. And there was also the fact that there wasn’t really a good way to know ahead of time how Beautrice would react to seeing the exiled ninja who was largely seen as a traitor in Korvosa along with the rest of the party. All she would have to do is start shouting for the guards and things would get ugly, although admittedly once again it was unlikely the grey maidens and devils would be able to stop Vaz’em from leaving once he chose to go.

Ultimately, Vaz’em decided to trust their old Grey Maiden ally, and stepped out of the shadows while quietly addressing Beautrice. His trust was rewarded this time, as while startled by his sudden appearance Beatrice proved herself to be one of the few friendly faces left in Korvosa as she got up from her desk and ran over and hugged the ninja after recovering from her shock. However, an extended conversation between them inside of the fort was unwise as sweeping patrols of grey maidens and devils frequently checked in on her office due to increased security from all the fey trying to sneak into the fort to cause mischief. Beautrice also wanted to see and speak with the rest of the party, not just Vaz’em, and so discussion quickly turned to how to get her back out of the fort to join the rest of the party waiting out in the forest. Vaz’em couldn’t turn her invisible, and despite being the commander Beautrice just walking out into the forest alone after all the trouble the Grey Maiden had experienced with local fey would be very suspicious to all the guards, so they ultimately came up with the fig-leaf explanation that Vaz’em would “kidnap” Beautrice from her office, carrying her out of the fort over his shoulder in a open and over the top flight that would alert the guards but hopefully buy the party enough time to have a five-minute conversation with her before the guards could mobilize to search the forest and discover them.

Proving that he could have escaped from the fort just as easily as he slipped inside it, Vaz’em did just that, carrying the grey maiden commander over his shoulder as he dashed out onto the walls, jumped off the side (ninja jumping skills for the win), landed outside the fort, and dashed off into the trees while the various guards tried to process what had just happened. I suppose the devils could have made pursuit a little more difficult with their ability to teleport at-will, but they didn’t follow Vaz’em into the forest – perhaps they had also learned going alone into the fey-infested forest was a bad idea, even with DR and the ability to teleport at-will. (It probably didn’t hurt that the DM didn’t particularly want to spark an actual fight here with a bunch of low CR mooks that any member of the party could splatter in a hit or two).

A few minutes later, Vaz’em and Beautrice were reunited with the party, whereupon the grey maiden greeted the rest of the group with a round of hugs and smiles, exclaiming how good it was to see them, and peppering them with questions about why the hell they were marked as traitors to the crown now, working with Kaer Maga of all places. The party didn’t go into the entire explanation of what they knew, but did summarize it that the queen was not well, having fallen under the influence of a malign entity, which had twisted their entire homeland against them after they tried to break its hold over the queen.

This prompted Beautrice to remark on what she had also seen in the Grey Maidens – the first couple generations like her had all been volunteers, eager to serve Korvosa’s new queen but having their own desires and personality. The latest generation of new recruits that she was now in charge of, however, were barely more than automatons, fanatical and unquestioning in their service to Queen Ileosa to the point that seemed to be their entire personality and reason for existence. It deeply troubled her, and so an assignment to a remote locale outside of Korvosa and the corruption she felt beginning to creep into the Grey Maidens was a priceless opportunity to her.

With her explanation as to how and why she was here in the Vale, that led into Beatrice asking what they were doing here in the Vale, and if there was anything she could do to help. That led into Beautrice explaining that yes, the Grey Maidens were clearing a trade route into the Mindspin Mountains that would not require Janderhoff or Kaer Maga, but she hadn’t heard anything about circling around to invade Kaer Maga (yet). The seneschal Togomor, however, had also accompanied the expedition, and seemed quite interested in some of the Thassilon ruins that dotted the Vale – in particular a facility that was apparently out in the massive field of bones the party had seen on their way into the Vale. Togomor had left for that location several days ago with a handful of Grey Maidens and had not yet returned.

Painfully aware that whatever Togomor was looking for out there, it couldn’t be good for anyone else, the party decided that investigating that facility and hopefully stealing whatever Togomor was after before he could get his hands on it was now the party’s primary goal. Not an unreasonable stance to take, frankly, given that Togomor had found his relic of Kazavon, the Staff of the Slain, in a different Thassilon ruin and was clearly desiring another one (or similarly powerful artifact) to add to his own power – with Togomor’s attempted assassination of Rholand at the end of Book Three, they knew the Relic Bearers tended to be following their own personal path to power, although the ultimate end for all of them was the same – the resurrection and return of Kazavon. And while Queen Ileosa had been twisted into insanity by her relic, Togomor managing to scrape together enough power to overthrow her (and potentially gain the power of a *third* relic with her Crown of Fangs) was an outcome the party knew they had to stop at all costs.

This confrontation with Togomor had been intended to be my conclusion to the party’s involvement with the Vale and Book Four as a whole – sans Oliver’s still-due “I’m special” personal quest which as yet remained untouched (the party was planning on tackling that as the very last thing they did before finally heading out for Tamrivena and Scarwall). But with only some more Fey wrangling in my head as potential further developments within the Vale, I was not particularly opposed to them skipping ahead to focus on the most worrying threat – that of Togomor getting hold of another relic of Kazavon (or some other ancient Thassilon weapon). So after knocking Beautrice out (they had “kidnapped” her, after all) and leaving her for the guards to find after they finally got organized and started searching the forest around the fort as so to maintain her cover as a loyal servant of Ileosa, the party made a beeline for the ancient battlefield that surrounded Sorshen’s ancient laboratory. Within which did indeed wait another relic of Kazavon, the Shedskin, for some poor fool to claim its power and thereby seal their fate as another of Kazavon’s corrupted hosts. The stage was therefore set for a climatic confrontation that held the promise of drastically shifting the course of the campaign . . . but not even this rat bastard DM could plan out how things were to actually shake out for the party in the end . . .

Hoping to get some more information about how exactly screwed they currently were, the party managed to “rescue” a Grey Maiden captured by the Roseblood sprites, along with their old buddy Fishguts Jim, and after moving some distance away from the sprites’ rose-lined hole-in-the-ground home, the party made camp along the shore of a small lake and began interrogating the two for more information. Fishguts was happy to part with what little information he had, which wasn’t much given he was essentially just a press-ganged manual laborer. The party *did* learn the location of the Grey Maiden expedition’s primary base of operations within the Vale, a compact stone fort assembled by spammed Fabrication spells from Togomor and other spellcasters within the expedition’s support train.

Marking that as something to investigate next (and largely ignoring the Rose King’s “quest” of going around and murder – er, requesting from the other tribes of fey their keys to free Ragnarok and drive out all the invaders from the Vale), the party turned its attention to the Grey Maiden . . . and found her a surprisingly difficult nut to crack. Despite being saved from the slow torturous death by exsanguination that the roseblood sprites were inflicting on her, the Grey Maiden seemed intent on spitting in the party’s faces, seeing them as traitors (in particular Rholand, who got the dubious honor of being singled out as the monster that broke the queen’s heart by his “betrayal” near the end of Book Three). But rather than the professional disdain of previous Grey Maidens like Captain Droksin, this almost mechanical refusal to cooperate with the party and answer simple questions was something disturbing and new to the party. Over and over the answer to almost all of their questions was a flat refrain of “This is irrelevant and so am I.”

Their initial attempts at establishing a discord with their new captive/traveling companion stymied by her refusal to engage in conversation, the party eventually worked around to trying to humanize her by removing her Grey Maiden helmet so they could see her face. The collective disquiet of the party only grew when removal of the standard-issue grey maiden helmet revealed that they were conversing with a young girl of perhaps sixteen or seventeen years, her face a twisted mass of mostly healed scars . . . which meant they had *not* been inflicted by the sprites, but rather had been inflicted some time before this teenaged girl had been deployed to the Vale from Korvosa as a rank-and-file Grey Maiden soldier (in Rholand’s estimation as a healer).

There had been some mention before about the Grey Maidens ritually scarring themselves as an initiation rite, but previously it had been more of an honor thing and a homage to their commander Sabrina Merrin, who still carried on with a heavily scarred face after getting a blunderbuss to the face back in Book One. Somewhat like some of the current-day dueling clubs, the idea was to get some minor facial scar as an initiation to prove your determination and strength - *not* to seriously disfigure yourself by running your face back and forth a couple times through a cheese grater.

What had been inflicted here on this young woman was the later, and suggested some very horrific changes had been made to the Grey Maidens’ organization, including seemingly that they were no longer a volunteer force but rather were now expanding by recruiting any female they could get their hands on to indoctrinate and brainwash via torture and charm/domination magic into new foot soldiers. Still clinging to his goody two-shoes routine, Rholand kept trying to break through the indoctrination, while the rest of the party continued to set up camp.

At some point during this break in the interrogation, the party became aware of a large swan floating on the surface of the nearby lake, giving them the stink eye and several warning honks. Largely they ignored the obnoxious animal until it eventually flew off deeper into the forested lake shore – which, of course, was a problem because in a fey-infested enchanted forest, a swan was never a simple swan. No, instead, this was actually a swan maiden by the name of Odette who largely kept to herself in a valley filled with mostly chaotic evil s+~!ter fey like the roseblood sprites, but had been intrigued by the arrival of the heavily armored all-women force of the Grey Maidens. As a fey concerned with goodness and the defense of womanly virtue, naturally the swan maiden was not happy with the party dragging around and interrogating a heavily scarred young woman.

So after the party gave up on the interrogation and went to sleep, Odette returned to the camp in swan form, wiggled her way into the main pavilion tent where most of the party was sleeping, turned back into her humanoid maiden form, and set about cutting the Grey Maiden free. Hilarity (for the DM) ensued thereafter, as not interested in escape, the Grey Maiden immediately grabbed Odette’s sword and started trying to stab the sleeping Rholand to death. She didn’t manage to kill the increasingly exasperated healer, of course, but she managed to inflict a few good stabs before she was disarmed and subdued while the rest of the party roused to the alarm and confronted Odette. Once Rholand was no longer getting stabbed by the Grey Maiden, diplomacy managed to prevail over further violence, but the ensuing conversation was decidedly frosty as the party had to explain themselves to Odette and Odette had to explain to the party why they shouldn’t just cut her down where she stood after sneaking into their camp and nearly getting Rholand killed. They eventually managed to convince the swan maiden to essentially “piss off” and stop sticking her long fey nose into their business (and largely panning the idea of handing the Grey Maiden over to her care).

I don’t quite remember the exact sequence of events after that, but I believe a last-ditch effort by the party/Rholand in getting through to the Grey Maiden was made, which included the discovery of the charm/domination magic holding sway over her mind. A lucky Dispel Magic from Rholand (of course) managed to break the spell, and while it wasn’t quite as dramatic as flipping a switch, the young Grey Maiden recruit’s icy demeanor finally broke as the conditioning driven into her mind started to unwind. Now more confused and broken than defiant, the Grey Maiden finally revealed that her name was Janice, and that she was at a complete loss now that serving her queen (largely by trying to murder the party, Rholand in particular) was no longer the overwhelming sole drive to her entire existence.

Ultimately, she didn’t know that much more than Fishguts about the larger picture going on in the Vale, but she was able to confirm to the party that the overall commander of the Grey Maidens here in the Vale was Beautrice – the same Grey Maiden the party had aided several times throughout Book Two and Three, now promoted to the rank of “Major” from “Captain”. Hoping that their old friend had not likewise been brainwashed and could give them some better answers on where Togomor was and what the Grey Maidens were really up to here in the Vale, the party decided to sneak into the Expedition’s main base of operations and make contact with Beautrice. The question then turned to what to do about Fishguts and Janice, since the party really couldn’t take them along into the heart of the Grey Maidens’ operation here in the Vale, and an everyman commoner with a knack for getting into trouble and a broken teenager didn’t seem likely to survive on their own in a valley of evil Fey (one nosy swan maiden do-gooder notwithstanding).

Fortunately, Cyrus had a solution as he was able to cast Teleport, and while a couple levels lower than the party was still high-enough level to get himself and the two hapless NPCs teleported over to Janderhoff where they could find asylum. Fishguts Jim promised to look after the broken Janice while she tried to recover from the tortures and indoctrination that had been inflicted on her, a daunting prospect but nonetheless probably a better task to leave in his NPC hands in a minor city rather than in the hands of our “Kill problems to solve problems” would-be heroes in the middle of the wilderness. So off Fishguts Jim goes, to be encountered again with some new problem in Book Six (I couldn’t really figure out a good way to get the poor bastard trapped in Scarwall, not after the party dumped him off in a semi-friendly city).

And with the problem of dealing with the NPCs they had rescued solved, the party turned its attention to the Grey Maidens’ main base of operations within the Vale, and hopefully getting some answers out of their old erstwhile ally Beautrice, who apparently is leading the expedition.

Moving on to the base of the King of Roses, the party walked up to the small wall of brambles and roses, saw the thorn snare at the entrance, saw the several Roseblood sprites hiding in the brambles, and called out to them. The CR 3 sprites wisely decided that the party of badass-looking, heavily armed and armored adventurers who had clearly seen them and their little ambush were not to be f+~%ed with, and agreed to let them come down and see the King. Particularly after the party opened with that they weren’t here for a fight, but were seeking an audience to discuss a possible alliance against the Grey Maidens invading the Vale.

Descending down the winding stair into the earth, the party stepped down into the main audience hall to find a large group of sprites waiting for them, along with two hulking troll-like fey (CR6 Darklings, essentially here as the sprites “muscle”) standing on either side of a wall of brambles blocking the way to the back chamber where the King of Roses was. A great deal of dried and not-quite dried blood formed a sticky pool in the middle of the floor that the sprites were gathered around, sampling and taking turns “opening a fresh tap” from the bound-with-brambles figure hanging by their feet from the ceiling.

To the party’s great surprise, a closer inspection of the man’s scratch-covered face revealed the victim was none other than their old random NPC fisherman buddy from Korvosa, Fishguts Jim! My party loved this guy, and I indulged them by having them bump into him to help him out of ever more outlandish situations throughout the campaign. The last time they saw him, he had been badly mangled by Marlessa in a plot at revenge-by-proxy against the party towards the end of Book Three. He survived that attack, but his new-wife Tiora (also rescued by the party from the Dead Warrens back in Book One) had not. Unfortunately, the party had left the distraught widower Fishguts back in Korvosa when they had needed to flee for their lives at the end of Book Three. Here was his Book Four appearance, after the unlucky NPC had gotten hired/drafted by the Grey Maidens to serve as a helper/porter for the road-construction efforts across the Vale.

Lucky for the sprites, the party managed to keep their murder engine shifted to “Neutral”, as I doubt the dozen CR3 spirtes nor the CR6 Darklings would have done more than die messily if the party had decided it was time for violence in the name of saving Fishguts. The sprites explained to the party that Fishguts Jim was a “prisoner of war”, as the mortals invading the Vale called it, and that they had taken several more such prisoners, mostly workmen like Fishguts but also a lone Grey Maiden (somehow). Being chaotic s$**s as Fey tend to be, however, rather than attempting to extract useful information out of them the fey had been bleeding them and torturing them for s+&&s and giggles, and to drain out all the tasty blood to nurture themselves and the rose fort (they are called Roseblood spirtes after all).

True to the module, the sprites also said to the party that the King would not speak with them unless they could present a proper gift to him – namely, a root from their cellars over there. Only the largest and most bitter would do! Well, this didn’t prove to be much of a challenge for the eagle-eyed and Nature-loving Rholand, who marched through the nearby archway, passed through the beat-up other workmen and grey maiden that the spirtes were saving “for later”, found the roots, and picked out the correct one almost immediately.

Coming back to the group, the King of Roses wisely decided not to test the party’s patience further, and granted them an audience rather than continue with the as-written request that they now needed permission from his “mother” (the largest rose bush down in these depths, with everlasting roses and very long, sharp thorns). The party cut right to the chase with the discussion of an alliance, promising to help drive out the grey maidens in exchange for the sprites letting their prisoners go. There was some back and forth negotiation here, but getting the sense that our heroes meant business again the King of Roses wisely decided not to push things too much. He agreed to let the Grey Maiden and Fishguts Jim go into the party’s custody, and promised to let the other workmen go as well. Of course, the party never actually went back to check on whether or not the untrustworthy King kept his word, so true to form (as given in the AP), he almost certainly had the remaining workmen prisoners sucked dry and let his sprites play bowling with their skulls or something. None of the other workmen had names though, so they didn’t actually matter though, right guys?

In exchange for this magnanimous gesture of goodwill, the Rose King revealed a gem-like key, which he explained had been left in the care of his people by the great Sorceror-Empress (Sorshen), who had gifted this entire Vale to his people and other tribes of Fey in exchange for their service in protecting it – and the secrets kept within a vault located within that horrid field of bones along the Vale’s western edge. (This vault was essentially a secret laboratory that Sorshen had set up after the final battle to study the relics of Kazavon, and was Togomor’s goal here.) The gem-like key, however, was not to the vault itself, but rather a powerful last-ditch weapon that Sorshen had also hidden here, codenamed “Ragnarok”, and had the Fey swear to unleash upon their enemies should it seem as if the Vale was going to be conquered. Unfortunately, the Rosebloods only had this one-third of the key, and it would require the keys from the other two tribes (a group of Redcaps and a tribe of Boggarts) elsewhere in the Vale in order to unlock and free Ragnarok to protect the Vale. In truth, again being a chaotic evil little bugger, the King of Roses basically just wanted to unleash this weapon and see what would happen. He thought the party was his best chance at achieving this, since his Rosebloods couldn’t overpower the boggarts or the redcaps to take their keys, but maybe the party could accomplish unleashing Ragnarok in his stead.

Making vague promises about looking into this, the party took the key, their new Grey Maiden prisoner, and Fishguts Jim, and got out of there. Fishguts Jim was naturally quite happy to be saved yet again by his PC best buddies in the whole world, while the Grey Maiden – a low-level footsoldier named “Janice” wasn’t particularly happy to have traded one set of captors for another (it was debatable whether she hated the literal bloodthirsty sprites more or less than the infamous traitors who had broken the heart of her queen). But as the party went off to set up camp a little ways off from the Roseblood sprites fortress, they got to find out just how unhappy with them the Grey Maiden trooper was – in the next session!

If they had assembled the trio of keys and then went onto where Ragnarok had been kept chained, they would have discovered a rather unsettling stairway leading down into darkness. At the bottom would be a writhing black mass of shadows, swirling around a stone pedestal with three key slots in it. Putting all three keys into their respective slots would have then freed Ragnarok, a rather nasty CR13 Grimm fey, who was there as a final failsafe to keep the Vale protected . . . by killing every living thing in it, including the Fey. So, probably good for the Roseblood Sprites and their King to have his curiosity go unresolved by the party! Although I imagine since Ragnarok would have tried starting with the party who has just freed him, things would not have ended well for the Fey Killer.

I did have a somewhat unsettling musical piece selected for Ragnarok’s theme, although I think it was chosen more for the unsettling lyrics (a final warning that maybe it was better to let chained Fey lie) rather than any thematic consistencies with the character of Ragnarok, who was essentially just a big “kill everything” monster.
Ragnarok Musical Theme

So the party decided that they’d go poke at the Vale, rather than go on Oliver’s “I’m special” quest and loot the hidden vault within the old Order of the Griffon stronghold, right out from under Zarmangarof’s (for some reason his name eventually got mutated into Zarmangorf, perhaps in an inadvertent homage to Ganondorf? I dunno, my brain is like that sometimes) nose. It was at this point that Sial finally decided enough was enough, and threw up his hands and refused to go on any more adventures with the party, declaring that he would set out for Scarwall on his own. Laori was not happy about this, particularly when Sial declared that she would be coming with him, and putting his foot down here as well that as the Shadowcount and her immediate superior within the Brotherhood of Bones, she would obey his orders. Cid wasn’t particularly happy about this decision, either, especially after having worked so hard to reunite the sisters, but ultimately accepted this rather than strangle Sial and throw him off the nearby cliffs of Kaer Maga.

For her part, Abigail was going to remain in Kaer Maga to try and get used to her new body and reunite with Sergio and the rest of the Star Weavers. Vox also agreed to stay to keep an eye on things, particularly in the event some new disaster befell Kaer Maga while the party was away. With their numbers slightly diminished in terms of the NPC menagerie following them around, the party set out for the Bloodsworn Vale.

With Gwen available as a ride, the trip to the Vale from Kaer Maga would be pretty short and uneventful, although I have put my DM foot down and repeatedly told the party that while riding Gwen around is fast, it is *not* stealthy even with Invisibility magic available. The other issue with the “just fly into the Vale” plan was that Gwen was absolutely TERRIFIED of being anywhere near Togomor, because she was convinced that he would enslave her again with Geas magic. So while she would take the party *to* the Vale, they were going to be on their own once inside while Gwen stayed far away outside the Vale and awaited their return – that was her plan, anyway. Not having a Limited Wish scroll handy again to un-Geas her should Togomor somehow get his magic claws on her again, the party accepted this and proceeded on foot.

The first difficulty they found waiting right at the entrance to the Vale, in the form of a hastily constructed stone wall, gatehouse, and Grey Maiden barracks (made by Fabricate and Wall of Stone spells supplied by Togomor) that completely blocked off the primary canyon leading into the Vale from the western Korvosa side. They initially decided that they would try to slip through the gate somehow, but after they learned that the gatehouse was being commanded by the Captain Neda Droksin that they had met in Harse, they decided to try and talk their way past her.

Talking to the captain proved to be a mistake, as after Vaz’em slipped out of ninja invisibility near her and revealed himself, she bitterly called him a traitor and that she should have never trusted them – apparently, the good Captain had finally gotten the message that the PCs were officially declared traitors in Korvosa. This led to a fairly one-sided fight after Captain Droksin started shouting out an alarm to the garrison where Vaz’em ripped out the captain’s guts all over the ground, worked the lever to swing open the gates, and the party rushed through while the rest of the Grey Maiden garrison sounded the alarm and struggled to ready themselves to repel the attack. Except, of course, that the attack had already come, killed their commander, and gone in the space of about fifteen seconds – hurray D&D/Pathfinder combat in six second rounds! So the party was through the first obstacle, and hurried on into the Vale.

Stopping briefly on a cliff shortly past the canyon-blocking base, the party got a good look down into the Vale itself, discovering that the Grey Maidens were making speedy progress on getting through the Vale – there was already a (Fabricated) stone bridge across one of the two rivers running through the Vale, with a sizable Stone Fortress set up nearby, and a partially finished stone bridge across the second river. They also noticed a strangely barren region off in one corner of the otherwise very lush Vale, which certainly piqued their interest.

I don’t quite remember now how the party learned this information – likely in the brief discussion with Captain Droksin, but they had learned the Grey Maidens were facing some difficulties in crossing the Vale. A group of bloodthirsty sprites serving a Fey known as the King of Roses was evidentially giving the Grey Maidens a hard time, abducting lone Grey Maidens and a number of the workers that the Grey Maidens had brought with them to actually do the work of building the bridges and fortifications.

With the idea of maybe finding some local allies within the Vale, the party decided to go investigate this King of Roses first, and set off deeper into the Vale to locate his strange, small little kingdom. Which they did in the following session!

The party had also sneaked into the fortress through the Bebelith-infested tunnels beneath it, had a vaguely untrustworthy guide in the form of the succubus Jadith (who would be VERY untrustworthy if they hadn’t just saved her from getting eaten and discorporated possibly for forever by a Bebilith, and more importantly to her, had Laori with them who was just ITCHING for an excuse to carve some more scars into her), and Laori had her own memories of the place to guide them. So, for the aforementioned reasons for not wanting to drag this out into an extended dungeon crawl and their relatively good planning (i.e. sneak in and acquire a denizen to guide them) the party got a pretty straight line up into the fortress and over to where Abigail was being held.

Which isn’t to say that Abigail was completely unguarded – guarding the door to where she was being held was a pair of Balban demons. Laori apparently recognized one of the two, greeting him as “Phil”, although whether this was the demon’s actual name or a nickname Laori had given the creature in her years of growing up in this strange place was unclear. Regardless, Phil and his buddy were not particularly accommodating to the party’s presence here in the sanctum of their master, and quickly rushed forward to attack. Of course, at this point the CR8-ish demons were not particularly threatening to our heroes, particularly now that Cid had access to evil-be-gone AKA Smite Evil, and so were swiftly dispatched.

Kicking the set of double doors that the demons had been guarding inwards, Cid led the way into the next chamber, where a massive (i.e. mechanically Large size) crystal sat atop a dias, held upright by several thick chains hanging from the ceiling. The crystal glowed with a sickly green inner light, backlighting the silouhette of a feminine form curled up and suspended/preserved within the crystal like a bug in amber. Trusting this was indeed Abigial and not some sort of trap or *other* captured-to-be-corrupted paladin, Cid ran forward into the room and called out to the crystal while looking around for some way to open it without needing to smash the crystal and possibly harm its contents. Before he could get too far into some sort of insane PC plan to cart off the crystal or dissolve it or teleport Abigail out of it, Elzeer-Ka teleported into the room in his stylishly-dressed human guise, presumably alerted through some sort of alarm spell set up in the room (or merely telepathically alerted by Jadith the succubus/Phil the Balban door guard).

The balor lord revealed that he was not angry at Cid’s presence here, in fact he welcomed it, although he was a little annoyed that Cid was so early. Apparently, Elzeer-Ka had been planning on telling Cid himself in a little while (read probably a couple months/years in the Rift of Eons, given the time dilation here), inviting him here to be reunited with his beloved Abigail. This explained why the outside portion of the fortress had been decorated, as Elzeer-Ka was directing his minions to prepare a celebration to welcome Cid in the typical human style. Indeed, if the party had gone in through the main doors, I had planned on an encounter with several vrocks wearing paper birthday party hats, having photoshopped literal party hats onto the tokens and everything – along with, of course, the requisite succubus hiding inside a big birthday cake. But since Cid was here now, Elzeer-Ka reluctantly accepted that his preparations were clearly for naught.

Gesturing to the crystal, Elzeer-Ka confirmed that Abigail was inside, but that she was not “done” yet, as his “gift” to her of a new, more fitting body was still growing inside of the crystal. Interrupting her metamorphosis at this juncture would be potentially quite hazardous to her health, and the balor lord claimed that Abigail didn’t want to see Cid anyway, given the way he broke her heart. But when Cid was adamant that he wasn’t leaving without her, Elzeer-Ka called out to the crystal as well – “Oh Abigail! Your former lover is here! Do you have anything you wish to say to him!?” In response, the crystal cracked as the silouhette within stirred, the sickly green light giving way to a shining corona of fire from within the crystal. And then, the crystal explosively shattered, and the reborn Abigail was revealed as she leapt at Cid.

Surprisingly delicate ram’s horns curled back from Abigail’s brow now to sweep along either side of her head. A long tangled mane of familiar golden blond hair hung down in front of amethyst-colored eyes. But the biggest change, of course, were the massive bat wings that now hung from her back, flaring out to their full extent as the reborn Abigail half-lunged, half-flew at Cid. She crashed into him hard and they rolled across the floor, Abigail screaming curses and accusations at him as she pummeled him with her bare fists, gouts of magical flame bursting out of her clenched hands as she lashed out. For his part, Elzeer-Ka merely stepped aside, clearly amused by this violent reaction from his newest protégé, although presumably he would have intervened if anyone else in the party had moved to help Cid.

I had planned for this to be some sort of combat encounter, Cid and Abigail basically beating the hell out of each other until they worked out their issues and Abigail vented her initial round of demon-enhanced anger, while additional lesser demons flooded into the room to attack the rest of the party and Elzeer-Ka just watched and laughed at the carnage of his latest convoluted plan to make his enemies kill each other. In the end it worked out to be more of a roleplaying encounter between Cid and Abigail as Cid basically flat-out refused to fight back, even to defend himself as Abigail pummeled him silly, having gotten a *significant* upgrade to her strength with her new body.

I had planned out several musical numbers for this encounter, sort of representing different “phases” in the back-and-forth conversation between Abigail and Cid as the magus-turned-paladin owned up to perhaps the last of his dumb mistakes from his previous life. Unfortunately, I lost the document where I was storing the song names and Youtube links when my computer hard drive died unexpectantly on me (*always* backup your stuff folks!). Thus, the only theme music I have for this particular confrontation is the one song that I can remember, from Papa Roach (Cid’s theme band), which was to serve as sort of the “climatic ending” theme.

Theme Music – Wish You Never Met Me by Papa Roach

Eventually, Cid’s refusal to fight back and calm apologies for what he had done get through to Abigail, although not before she literally throws him *through* the stone exterior wall of the citadel, leading to the fight concluding out on a narrow cliff face overlooking the Rift of Aeons descending ever deeper out of sight into the Abyss. Laori revealing herself to be Abigail’s long-lost sister Lucinda also cut through the demonic rage haze, although it earned Cid a couple extra punches to the face for sleeping with Abigail’s literal little sister first. Eventually though, Abigail’s blows slowed and then softened, turning from bone-crunching hits intending to kill to just angry thumps on Cid’s chest, to Abigail clenching Cid in a bear hug and crying out the last of her rage and grief onto his shoulder. Elzeer-Ka was disgusted and disappointed by the display of emotion and Abigail’s pseudo-forgiveness, having promised Abigail a place by his side in the archetypical villain speech of “strike him down with all your anger, and take your rightful place at my side!” Having lost interest in the display at this point, the balor lord left with a final admonishment that there would be consequences for Abigail being released from stasis before she was “done” (and secretly smiling to himself along with the DM as Cid once again took the schmuck bait, hook-line-and-sinker).

Deciding that getting out now before the mercurial balor lord changed his mind on killing the lot of them, the group formed up in a circle with Abigail in tow and Laori cast Plane Shift again, returning them all to the material plane. Technically there should have been an added complication here with Plane Shift putting them 5-500 miles off target from where they were intending on coming back to, but with Sending and Sial having Teleport and Gwen being a dragon with supersonic jet fly speed, this forming back up with the rest of the party and their return back to Kaer Maga was largely just handwaved.

Once they were on safer ground again, Abigail still struggled to come to terms with her new body. Her experiences as a vampire and now as a half-demon had irrevocably altered her worldview, pushing her from a paladin that was at times struggling to remain a paladin due to her anger issues, into a full-fledged ex-paladin. However, while Sarenrae would no longer call Abigail Her champion, the Dawnflower nonetheless offered some hope to her rescued discipline in the form of new divine powers and spells to augment Abigail’s new bare-fists approach to combat. She also still was mad at Cid, confessing she was still mad at him for sleeping with Laori and needing time to process that the Zon-Kuthite was actually her long-lost sister as well (and thus putting a pin in Cid’s player’s “Sister Wives” plan . . . although it wasn’t a hard no, either . . .)

There was one upside to her new demonic form that Abigail discovered upon returning to Kaer Maga – she could now fly with her wings. She no longer needed to strap herself into a rickety overgrown kite and leap off the cliffs of Kaer Maga in order to experience the exhilaration of flight. And it was on that scene of Abigail giggling and shouting with mounting delight as she ran along the cliffs of Kaer Maga and then jumped skyward that we closed out the session.

While not perfect, Cid had done a good thing in rescuing Abigail, and while no longer paramours (for now *eye roll* ), their relationship at least had a chance to heal in the absence of Elzeer-Ka poisoning the wound further. With this last piece of Cid’s “I’m special” quest complete, attention returned to the remaining business that the party had in-hand prior to venturing out in search of Old Tamrivena with Sial (and Laori, technically, even though she was practically fighting Trinia and Gwen for the role of party mascot at this point). Namely, they could either fulfill the Council of Kaer Maga’s request to go investigate and disrupt whatever the Grey Maidens were doing in the Bloodsworn Vale, or complete Oliver’s “I’m special” quest by venturing to the conquered fortress of the Order of the Griffon, the organization that Parashial – Oli’s father – led before becoming a washed out drunk. Ultimately, the party made the fateful decision to follow the “main” plotline sorta-side quest of investigating the Bloodsworn Vale. And what awaited them there would have staggering repercussions for the rest of the campaign, even beyond my ominous hinting through seers that when they went to Old Tamrivena and Castle Scarwall, one of them would die.

After considering a few she-demon tokens to represent the new Abigail, I decided I would continue the tradition of characters being reincarnated to anime versions by henceforth representing Abigail with Yang Xiao Long from RWBY – they’re both blonds with flaming fists and anger management issues, so it seemed to fit nicely!

Mechanically, to represent the slowly growing influence of her demon side, I swapped Abigail from LG to NG, stripping her of paladin status. Since Cid got a free class rework, I gave her one as well, swapping her from a paladin to a sacred fist warpriest of Sarenrae. And I gave her one HELL of a stats boost by turning her from a human into a half-fiend, with the half-balor subtype template – which is one helluva CR boost template, so at least Elzeer-Ka spared no expense in creating her new body! Of course, there was always a catch when this particular balor lord was involved, and so the DM had already planned out some future complications for Cid and Abigail to deal with later on, in Book Six and Seven as a result of this transformation, Elzeer-Ka’s plans for Abigail, and Cid waking Abigail up “early” from her transformation into a demon.

With her memories restored, Laori knew how to Plane Shift the group to the Rift, and fortunately as a demi-plane within the Abyss they should appear relatively on-target despite Plane Shift’s notorious lack of accuracy (something like 5-500 miles from your intended target). The party wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about going to the Abyss on a potential rescue mission for someone who might not even want to be saved now, but Cid was adamant that he make the attempt to save her. And ultimately, after it became clear that Laori and Cid would plane shift and go without the others if they had to, the party relented and agreed to come along to help Cid on this last extra leg of his “I’m special” quest.

With Laori needing to prepare not one, but two Plane Shift spells to get the party there and back again, the party risked one more day to rest up and prepare. There was one additional complication here, in that Laori could only take six other people with her, as Plane Shift could transport a maximum of eight people at a time, including the caster, and they needed to leave an extra spot open for Abigail, assuming they could convince her to return with them (and of course, that nobody died on this little field trip to the Abyss….which would have been quite a complication, given the whole “soul is stuck in the Abyss then”). Sial, as usual, didn’t give a rat’s ass about this latest “cat stuck in a tree” (he especially found Cid grating on the nerves, particularly following his transformation into a paladin, and Cid likewise no longer found Sial’s dark edgy snarikness amusing, so no love lost between them here). So he would continue to stay beyond, along with Oliver’s henchmen Righty and Lefty, and unfortunately Gwen (the party really didn’t need a dragon flying around in the Abyss to get them any more extra attention from the locals). Vox would likewise remain behind to keep a LG watch on all the evil people and henchmen, while Cyrus (as Cid’s new cohort) and Carpenter (as Oli’s cohort) came along for the ride with Laori, Cid, Vaz’em, Oliver, and Rholand (Azizel also got to come along as Cid’s familiar since, as is typical for familiars, they don’t exist at all until someone remembers they’re around and the party needs them for something. :D )

As expected, Laori’s Plane Shift was effectively right on target, putting them in the midst of a barren purple rock-strewn plain. A shimmering aurora borealis filled the “sky” over their heads, and seemed to be the only source of eerie light here as there were no other celestial bodies up in the sky – floating islands hovering overhead in the distance, on the other hand, were plentiful. A short distance away, the rocky soil began to crack and break apart, revealing a more flesh-colored substrate that looked disturbingly alive and organic, like muscle poking up through the plane’s cracked purple skin. Like a deep wound cracked in the surface of the plane, an immense canyon had been gouged into the surface of this plane – the namesake “Rift of Eons” that decorated the 333rd layer of the Abyss. Vein-like strands of planar substrate stretched between both sides of the rift, essentially serving as the pathways that would allow foot traffic to pass back and forth between both sides of the Rift. Carved out of the far wall of the immense canyon from the party was an imposing fortress, no doubt their destination. Strangely, no demons were “frolicking” about looking for trouble, and the imposing fortress on the far side of the Rift was brightly lit up with several colorful banners awkwardly slung above what otherwise would have been an ominous-looking front entryway.

Unsure what the decorations were all about, the party decided caution was the best approach here on their first real extraplanar adventure, and so they agreed to enter the fortress through some side tunnels that wormed their way around beneath and eventually up into the main fortress – tunnels that Laori remembered for some reason, presumably from some half-hearted escape attempt during her stay as Elzeer-Ka’s guest (and definitely not implanted there by Elzeer-Ka himself as part of his various mucking about in Laori’s brain with Modify Memory spells….) Uncertain therefore about whether Laori’s memory could be trusted not to lead them into a trap (the party still trusted Laori at this point, just not her memories of a place as Chaotic as the Abyss, and when it had already been confirmed Elzeer-Ka has been messing with her memories), the party reluctantly chose to make use of the tunnels given the only other alternative was a head-on assault on the front gates of the cliff fortress.

Following the narrow ledge leading further down into the chasm, the party filed down in single file, eventually crossing the canyon itself on a narrow vein-like outcropping that stretched from one wall of the canyon to the far side where Elzeer-Ka’s fortress hung. Still finding nothing but gloom and the eerie dim glow that suffused the air of this demiplane, the party ducked into the crack in the far wall of the canyon that seemed to lead into the tunnels. Only a short distance into the fleshy rock of the Rift of Aeons, and the party arrived into a web-lined chamber. A hulking many-legged horror lurked in the back corner of this chamber, making a half-hearted attempt to hide for an ambush but a house-sized demon spider was not skilled enough to avoid detection by Rholand and Vaz’em who were on high-alert upon seeing the leading edges of the web-coated tunnel. It’s ambush foiled, the Bebilith nonetheless leapt forward to attack with an unearthly shrieking hiss.

Battle Theme – Spider Dance from Undertale OST

Unfortunately for the demon-eating spider, while it was more than a match for the lone demon that strayed too far outside of its master’s fortress, it found Cid considerably harder to hit and it had no answer for Vaz’em tearing its guts out while Cid cleaved its face in half with a smite evil. Of course, the thing was only a CR 11 advanced monster versus a hardened 12th level adventuring party (with friends/cohorts) so it was always going to be little more than a speed-bump to them regardless. After the beblith was reduced to a splatter of ichor all over the walls of its lair, the party moved on to checking out its larder in one web-packed corner of the chamber before moving onwards. They did not find any treasure, more’s the pity, but they did find a cocoon of webs confining some sort of human-sized demon (presumably the bebilith’s webs blocked teleportation or something otherwise it would find hunting demons that could teleport at-will rather difficult). Cutting into the cocoon, they discovered the bebilith’s prisoner was a maimed and heavily disfigured succubus, although the scars criss-crossing the demonness’s once-pristine face seemed to be older wounds than the missing arm that the bebilith had gnawed off.

Laori immediately recognized the succubus, spitting out her name in clear disgust and half-remembered rage – Jadith. The succubus likely would have tried to play the “oh thank you kind adventurers, is there anything I can do to repay you for saving me life, teehee *wink* “ card if not for the presence of Laori, who the succubus likewise recognized and was blatantly quite afraid of.

The basic backstory here is that while Laori was growing up here in the Rift of Aeons, Jadith had been put in charge of being the child Laori’s caretaker/nursemaid. And of course being a demon the succubus had abused her position of power and terrorized and tormented the young Laori in her care . . . at least until said child snapped and carved into the succubus’s face with a cold iron dagger, leaving her in her badly disfigured state to this day, as Elzeer-Ka found the whole thing amusing and forced Jadith to keep her scars as a punishment for harassing his guest/surrogate “daughter”. So Jadith wasn’t particularly happy to see her old protégé here, particularly as a skilled adventurer with a lot of powerful adventurer friends, even if they had just inadvertently rescued her from being slowly devoured by the bebilith.

For Laori’s part, while she still hated the succubus and wouldn’t mind seeing her dead, Jadith did have a better idea of all the secret passages and routes up into Elzeer-Ka’s fortress, making her a valuable if even less trustworthy source of information. Still, the succubus did offer to lead the party up into the fortress through a secret passage (the same one that she had followed to be down here before being jumped and captured by the bebilith) that would get them relatively close to where Elzeer-Ka was keeping his newest “guest”.

Eager to make a deal to save her own life and with the party having few options still to get into the fortress discretely so that they could find Abigail and plane shift out, Jadith and the party each reluctantly chose to work together, and we closed out the session there as the party prepared to head “upstairs” into the fortress proper.

They did not have to wait long, as more of the proto-devils came crawling up out of the ground and closed on the crumbling fortress from all directions. Shortly thereafter, they are joined by Mavrokeras teleporting in, apparently aware of the party’s presence through some innate connection to the proto-devils (they were spawned from his blood, after all). With Mavrokeras is a trio of barbed devils who introduce themselves to the party via their own sung theme song – the Yallop Bros! Mavrokeras nearly knocked his own head off, he face-palmed so hard at the brothers ‘ridiculous entrance undercutting his aura of menace. Recovering, he ordered them to attack the party while he engaged Eurydice in a spell duel, the angel finally shrugging off her cloak to reveal a set of flaming wings (revealing her to be a Peri-type angel).

For once, the party had a bit of difficulty in blundering their opposition, in part due to the fact that as special named devils, I adjusted the Yallops’ feats from the standard barbed devil list, and gave them Blind-Fight, making Vaz’em have to work for his sneak attacks for once. Still, with Hazaali’s Lawful-outsider bane effect, Vaz’em could still cut through their DR, and Cid’s newfound smite evil certainly laughed at any DR, and Oli was . . . well, Oliver. They manage to take out one of the Yallops Brothers, sending him screaming back to Belzeragna, although that still leaves two more – and now Zerix comes in stomping through the trees to join the battle, the retriever unable to just teleport wherever it wanted like its masters.

Meanwhile, the duel between Eurydice and Mavrokeras is certainly not going in Eurydice’s favors, as Peri angel tended to do a lot of fire damage, which of course Mavrokeras was immune to, and the leader of the ancient order of magi was still more skilled than his former subordinate.

I had expected the group to ultimately lose this confrontation, thus forcing Eurydice to take drastic action, but as before the dice actually gave me a convenient excuse to call the fight before PCs started dying. Shortly after entering the fight, Zerix unleashed a bout of his eye rays, including the Petrification one on Cid, and despite having Paladin saves, well a Natural one is always a failure, so . . .

The fight comes to a screeching halt after Mavrokeras boasts about planning on deleting that arrogant smirk from Cid’s face forever by shattering his head off his statue shoulders, prompting Eurydice to call out to him to stop! In exchange for sparing Cid’s life (along with the rest of the party) and vowing to leave them all alone after that (effectively abandoning his claim on the souls of the three ex-Hellknights forever), Eurydice would sign a contract with him to take their place. As “the one that got away” from damnation all those millennia ago, Mavrokeras was actually intrigued by the deal, and agreed.

As almost an after-thought, Azizel was also included in the deal, with Mavrokeras frankly glad to be rid of the rebellious devil. Azizel screamed as his soul was drawn out of Cid’s old black blade, transformed into a writhing mass of black goo that ultimately would coalesce and reshape itself into the shape of . . . a winged cat? Getting his own form of redemption and rebirth here, Azizel evolved from a black blade spirit into a silvanshee, marking his own ascension out of the darkness of Belzeragna and onto the side of good.

Once freed from the petrification, Cid was understandably upset at the idea of the angel sacrificing herself for him, but Eurydice was insistent. She revealed that her escape from damnation to Belzeragna was due to the sacrifice of her sister, who offered herself up in Eurydice’s place. Today, Eurydice would repay that debt she owed to her sister by sacrificing herself for Cid and the others. Before she did, however, her last act was to take her holy sword and stab it into the earth of the Valley, remarking that this sword was given to her by the Valley, and thus was not part of their deal – whoever was chosen by the Valley would wield it next (winks at Cid). Mavrokeras was annoyed that he wouldn’t also be getting a holy sword to corrupt, but ultimately decided that one angel in the hand was worth an entire party of PCs and upheld his end of the deal, withdrawing his forces and teleporting away with Eurydice in chains.

Going over to the sword, Cid found that he could withdraw it from the soil of the Valley easily, the sword naturally choosing him as its next wielded. And thus Cid got the big payoff item from his “I’m special” questline, Aurora, the Blade of the Redeemed. A +3 holy longsword, Aurora would serve Cid well in the battles to come, and like the other items had an intelligence and could cast a variety of buff spells on him. Mostly all spells that he enjoyed casting as a magus – once per day: Shocking Grasp or Shield, Mirror Image or Scorching Ray, Fly or Fireball. The capstone ability was that he could either turn Azizel into a celestial dire lion, *or* (and this was pretty much the one that he always ended up picking) Cid could upon dropping to/below 0 HP have a modified Deathless spell cast on him. Thus, he could not die for the next minute of combat until his hit points reached a negative value equal to his hit points (thus slightly nerfing the Deathless spell which has no limit on how much damage you can just shrug off). Thus, Cid’s days of constantly dying were pretty much behind him, although he still occasionally would find himself in trouble in the battles ahead.

As the party recovered from the battle and considered their options of where to go next, it seemed pretty obvious that there was only one place they could go – to the Abyss, and the Rift of Eons. They had their own paladin to save from damnation now! And, as it turned out, they had their own way to the Rift, as Laori knew Plane Shift and something about her time in the Valley had restored her memories from Elzeer-Ka’s mind wipe – she knew where she came from now, and remembered her time in the Abyss. As such, she knew how to navigate back there, and even had a tuning fork that would allow her to teleport them all into the Abyss (why did she have that? It’s Laori, best not to ask!)

Uh!
I said, "beat by the brothers!"
Chigga-Chigga Chigga-Chigga

Yo, yo ass is bout' ta get beat
So jus' sit back and accept yo defeat
Get ready for some horror and remarkable feats
You'll feel pain and torture, just like all the others
Mess with the brothers n' you'll git beat by da brothers!

To da bridge!

Yet again
Beat, I say
Ohhhhhhh

The brothers!
The brothers!
The brothers!

So with last session being almost entirely Cid focused, this session was primarily focused on what everyone else was doing while Cid was battling for his soul. We started with Oli and Vaz’em who were back down at the base of the spire, cooling their heels with Ignatius and Agatha while they wanted for Eurydice to cure Cid’s soul or whatever. Sensing something, Duras the hound archon teleports away, leaving the two PCs with the various other human denizens of the Valley who had come here to be redeemed. Oliver and Vaz’em aren’t particularly interested in that whole seeking redemption bit at this point, and so the conversation pretty rapidly dies out, leaving the two to wait in relative silence.

We then fast forward to Mavrokeras polluting the Valley with his own blood, prompting the ground after the base of the Spire to start splitting open and vomiting forth deformed diabolical gribblers (as mentioned, just reskinned gargolyes basically), who immediately leap to the attack. Which turned out to be a bad idea for them, as Oliver and Vaz’em did their usual melee blundering in fairly rapid order, taking out the half dozen or so proto-devils that came out to bother them. Ignatius and Agatha also did their best to contribute to the fight, revealing that they also had (low-level) paladin powers. Hearing shouts and screams from elsewhere in the Valley, it was clear that this whole devils-popping-out-of-the-ground thing wasn’t just localized to the Spire, and the pair got geared up to go find Cid when we cut to how Rholand was doing.

Cut to Rholand, Trinia, Gwen, and Oliver’s henchmen, who are flying over the rim of mountains to get into the Valley. Gwen manages to just fly her way in, as there’s no magical shield or anything besides the high stone mountains blocking entry into the Valley. Except, of course, for the aforementioned defense of the Valley that Cid’s group had discovered with Laori – evil creatures fall asleep once inside the Valley itself. And Gwen, while a little repentant for her actions now that she was no longer under Togomor’s Geas, was still presently the typical LE-aligned green dragon. Which meant it was sleepy time for her . . . while she was still in mid-air. Cue Rholand and company crashing down into the Valley from the sky, taking a boatload of falling damage as their ride falls out of the sky, fast asleep!

I believe that Carpenter managed to do something to keep himself and Oliver’s henchmen alive, although I don’t recall now what that actually was. Rholand, Trinia, and Gwen definitely had a hard landing, however, Gwen getting impaled by several tree branches and Trinia getting a nasty bump on the head. But the fall was survived by everyone, and now it was Rholand’s turn to whisper “please don’t die please don’t die” in desperation as he pumped healing spells into the comatose dragon to fix the worst of her injuries.

The hound archon Duras popped in about this time, displeased to see the Valley’s defenses being penetrated by an evil dragon, but willing to listen to reason from the Good-aligned Rholand and Trinia who were welcome here. Technically I think Carpenter should also have passed out at this point as he was a pretty shady character (more on him a lot later), but I can’t recall if he also went to sleep at this point or if he was just immune to the Valley’s effects for . . . reasons, and passed it off as being Neutral like Vaz’em, Oli, and Cid.

Rholand managed to explain that he was part of Cid’s group as well, prompting the hound archon to direct him towards the Spire . . . and it was around this time that the ground split open to vomit forth some proto-devils for Rholand to deal with. They had a bit harder time dealing with the proto-devils without the melee blender, but Rholand summoned some help and Duras certainly wasn’t a slouch against evil creatures either. Towards the end of the fight Gwen also woke up, as the Valley’s magic began to fade with its corruption. Duras teleported away to rally the rest of the Valley’s inhabitants, while Rholand and the others climbed aboard Gwen again to go fly over to the Spire and find the rest of the group assembling.

We finally cut back to Cid, who is not immediately attacked by any reanimated bits of Ragathiel’s devil flesh, but can hear the screams and shouts of battle below. First he checks that Cyrus and Vox are okay – they are – and then goes to check on Laori, who is now awake and asking what is going on and where are they. She gets, in typical Laori fashion, excited when Cid explains that they’re in the Valley and probably about to get into a fight with a bunch of devils. In preparation for that, Cid considers his new-found holy powers.

No longer a magus, Cid has undergone a full-fledged class change to paladin (a mix of the Chosen One archetype and half-orc racial Redeemer archetype). I also permitted Cid’s player to adjust his stats slightly, upping his previously terrible charisma to at least passable in exchange for getting a bit dumber (he needed the charisma boost to his saves and wouldn’t be casting too many arcane spells anymore).

Checking with the other former Hellknights, Cid learned that Vox had become a Cavalier of the Star, forsaking magic entirely (in favor of charging people to death with a lance), while Cyrus had changed to be a White Mage Arcanist (Cid’s player had picked this out for him, as Cyrus was still Cid’s cohort at this point).

In gearing up for battle, Cid realized that his Hellknight gear was no longer appropriate (afterall, he had paladin levels and heavy-armor training now!) But he was still carrying around Abigail’s +2 plate armor, shield, and weapon as a parting gift from her . . . a final gift that he would finally put to good use by wearing it into battle, as the magic armor resized to fit him perfectly.

It was around this time that Azizel, the devil-spirit that had been stuck in his magus black blade, finally reclaimed the last of his memories. It was revealed that he also knew Eurydice and Mavrokeras, as they had all been part of Sorshen’s arcane knight/magus guards millennia ago, Mavrokeras being their knight-commander. Their order was abandoned and left to die with the coming of Earthfall, and to survive Mavrokeras made a deal with a devil known as Sermignatto, damning all of them into becoming the devils of Belzeragna – all except Eurydice, who escaped this fate somehow and fled here, seeking her own redemption.

Thus equipped and coming to terms with their newfound holy powers, the ex-Hellknights (and Laori) went down the spire to join up with the rest of the party to make a final stand in defense of the Valley, as it becomes clear where Mavrokeras went – to get the rest of the devils that had been pursuing the party as a black arachnid shape scuttles up over the edge of the mountains and down into the Valley proper – Zerix the Retriever was here to complete the devils’ long chase of Cid and the others. But this time, rather than simply get on Gwen and fly off to escape, the party was going to make their stand to protect this (admittedly not especially anymore) holy place. Or at least they would try, next session!

Discussion then turns to breaking the hold that Belzeragna holds over the souls of Cid, Cyrus, and Vox. While not an expert on infernal contracts, the masked angel does have an idea of where to start – namely, summoning an infernal arbiter from the Hells itself to adjudicate the legality of said contracts. Cid already knew from his conversations with Sial (a former Asmodean infernal contract writer) that his contract, the clauses of which that consign his soul to damnation in Belzeragna via invisible ink, are considered outdated and considered obsolete by the Hells, as Asmodeus has outlawed such puerile trickery in the favor of fairly open deals – sign away your soul, in return get X, with only the minor details really getting interpreted “creatively”. Unfortunately, Sial no longer had any contacts in the Hells after switching his allegiances to Zon-Kuthon, and just being a mortal dude had no power to dissolve the contracts. Hence Eurydice’s plans to summon an infernal arbiter to flat-out confirm whether or not the Hellknights’ contracts were even valid to begin with.

Cid voices a few objections to the plan of summoning a devil into such a holy place of redemption, but Eurydice points out that the Valley has always served as a bridge between the Hells and the Heavens due to Ragathiel’s ascension, and so is sort of a “neutral ground” where both sides are welcome to come and meet in peace. And besides, the infernal envoy Eurydice would be summoning will be bound within a summoning circle and thus unable to inflict any harm to them or the Valley (something something pride before a fall). Leading the group into another room of the tree house with a sand-filled pit, Eurydice begins to trace out the necessary runes and arcane barriers of a summoning circle, revealing that the still somewhat mysterious angel has some knowledge of arcane magics . . . and said knowledge looks eerily similar to the methods employed by the Order of the Nail magi (themselves as the group learned back in Kaer Maga, a twisted offshoot of ancient arcane knights from Thassilon, which the Belzeragna devils apparently preserved and evolved into the magus techniques they passed along to the Order’s Hellknights).

Activating the circle after completing it, the room darkens for a moment before a pillar of smoke boils up from the floor, a man with hooved feet and wearing a well-tailored three-piece suit stepping out of the gloom as the smoke filled up a cylinder-sized space within the room, bound by the runic circle. Larenthon, a contract devil from Asmodeus’s infernal contracts and acquisitions, introduced himself and greeted Eurydice warmly, suggesting that this was not the first time they had spoken. The devil’s jovial mood darkens as Eurydice explains what the devil has been summoned for, and Sial’s statements on current infernal law are confirmed, straight from the devil’s mouth – binding souls using trickery such as clauses written in invisible ink are now officially forbidden by Asmodeus’ agents – the devils have no need for such things these days, as they are doing EXCELLENT business in Cheliax and elsewhere just through (vaguely) open deals. Of course, what a devil considers an “open and equal” contract is rather prone to legalistic interpretation, but blatant trickery like invisible clauses in a contract that involve the sale of a soul at least are now considered verboten.

Unfortunately, while Cid could repeat the once-hidden clauses in his contract that were revealed to him in Belzeragna, he did not have the actual signed infernal contract in hand. And after mentally checking with his subordinates back in Hell, Larenthon could confirm that neither was the contract stored properly in the archives of the Hells’, incensing the devil further. A copy of all infernal contracts was ordered to be stored in Asmodeus’ vaults so as to be at least vaguely under his purview and review – by not having a copy of these contracts stored there, whoever was making these contracts was doing so behind Asmodeus’ back.

But despite these contracts being considered illegal and void by the Hells, without the actual contract in hand Larenthon was unable or unwilling to break it’s magic. Instead he advocated getting the enforcer of these contracts – a devil known as Mavrokeras – to appear and justify the legal standing of these contracts. Cid only knew of this devil by reputation, but Eurydice again seemed to know more than she first let on as she reluctantly thanked Larenthon for his time and asked him to stay as an official representative of the Hells, which Belzeragna *should* technically have fealty to. The infernal arbiter politely allowed himself to be shunted to a secondary magic circle that Eurydice sketched out before redrawing the primary one and using it to bring forth this Mavrokeras.

Cue the appearance of a hulking (mechanically Huge) form covered in plate armor, some sort of blackish oil occasionally leaking out through the joints in the armor – Mavrokeras, Belzeragna’s enforcer. Again, Mavrokeras greeted Eurydice with some level of familiarity, implying a joint history that Eurydice seemed ashamed of (she wasn’t here in the valley of redemption for no reason, after all!) The armored hulk then turned its venomous gaze on Cid, promising him that his rebellious flight was at an end, and one way or the other he would find himself back in Belzeragna for good by nightfall. Rather than be intimidated Cid was his usual blunt, snarky self, taunting back that Mavrokeras’ hunters hadn’t gotten the job done yet, prompting the infernal warlord to remark that perhaps then it was time he got involved personally.

Eurydice managed to get the conversation back on track by bringing up Cid’s contract with Belzeragna, which Mavrokeras insisted for perfectly legal despite the invisible ink chicanery as per ancient Hellish law. Cue Larenthon speaking up here about how such laws had been since updated and changed, and Mavrokeras arguing that despite the “updates” made by Asmodeus the ancient infernal laws were still valid – i.e. get the souls through the gates of Hell by whatever means necessary. There was also some prompting from Larenthon about under whose authority Mavrokeras was operating under, which the armored monstrosity refused to answer (incensing Larenthon even further).

Cue some taunting arguments from Cid (using this song as a hilarious backdrop for) about how Mavrokeras created this problem for himself by revealing the truth to Cid upon his death. If he had never discovered that his soul had been damned using trickery in his contract, he likely never would have recanted his dark path and attempted to redeem himself in the first place. But Mavrokeras’ devils couldn’t help themselves, and had spilled the beans to Cid the instant he died the first time all the way back in Book Three during the Palin Cove Punishers fight.) This seemed to finally push the diabolical general to his breaking point, as he ominously announced that their contracts didn’t matter anyway – they were all bound to the darkness, inexorably drawn to it, and they would ultimately end up in Belzeragna anyway as they could not resist the temptations of its power. And to prove that they would forever damn themselves, all things being equal, Mavrokeras proposed a martial trial by combat to settle the matter. An ancient rite as noted by Larenthon, but one still occasionally permitted by even the Hells to settle contract disputes. After glancing at Cid and the other two Hellknights, and getting only nods of confirmation in return, Eurydice agrees to Mavrokeras’s terms – if they failed to defeat his champions, then their contracts stood and their souls would be consigned back to Belzeragna, where as if Cid and company own, then their contracts would be revoked by Mavrokeras and they were would freed from damnation – to Belzeragna, at least.

At which point Mavrokeras announced that his chosen champions were already present, and spoke a word of arcane power that despite the summoning circle’s wards seemed to trigger something within each of the Hellknights. Cid, Cyrus, and Vox all collapse convulsing to the floor as their guts writhe in sudden agony, forcing them to expel a thick vicious black goo from their mouths – not entirely dissimilar to the oil leaking out from Mavrokeras’s armor. The puked-up oil slicks grew and changed shape, becoming humanoid and solidifying into exact copies of Cid, Vox, and Cyrus in their original human forms, though clearly twisted and pure evil judging by their malevolent grins.

Here was the consequence of each of them consuming the goblet of blood from Leo Astares, the Armor of Skulls corrupted founder of their order, during their post-death dream sequences – each of them had been forced to drink his Kazavon-infused blood, further cementing the hold that Belzeragna had on them, and now that corruption was before them in the flesh, as a literal avatar of what they once were as Hellknights.

Everyone squares off against their evil twin, the two Cids tossing taunts back and forth at each other non-stop. Here was their chance to prove that they had truly risen above the evil people that they had once been. And as the rather spot-on (imo) theme music for this duel kicked in, the battle for their souls began.

Cid got off to a good start, nearly cutting his evil twin in half with a hallmark Shocking Grasp crit . . . except that the avatar for his corrupted past was not so easily overcome (in large part due to the cheatering going on by Belzeragna/Kazavon/the DM here, by giving Evil Cid something like DR 10 and basically complete immunity to his spells (both due to Kazavon’s influence giving Evil Cid immunity to electricity, and also just in general “your spells came from the Hells, and now you’re rejecting those gifts, so f$@% you buddy they don’t work on me” – this included ignoring Cid’s own defensive spells entirely, such as the Mirror Image Cid threw up before closing in).

Cid gave it his all against his diabolical doppleganger, but things swiftly turned against him as Evil Cid got his own turn and displayed that he could ignore Cid’s illusionary doubles, which tended to spell a whole lot of trouble for the magus in the past whenever some opponent could get around them. After taking an equally nasty series of hits and heavily wounded, the redemption-seeking magus fought on, glancing around to see that Vox and Cyrus were similarly faltering against their evil doubles. In the end, the power that they had gained from Belzeragna could not save them from Belzeragna. Evil Cid’s blade bit deep into Cid’s chest yet again, and the magus collapsed to the floor in a pool of his own blood, a final strike to the back damning his soul for good. Or at least, so it seemed to those watching the duel from the sidelines. But while mortal power and strength from infernal contracts alone could not save Cid’s soul, there was still the possibility for another Power to intervene and offer a final hope for salvation. And so She did.

Rather than the fiery torture chambers of Belzeragna, Cid awoke to find himself standing in a grey empty expanse – perhaps a section of Pharsma’s Boneyard borrowed for the occasion, or perhaps simply a construct of his mind. A blindingly bright pillar of light shined down on him from above, spotlighting him in the empty gloom. But he wasn’t alone, as a figure stepping out from around behind him into his field of vision, moving up to the edge of the bright pillar of light . . . Abigail?

The being who at least looked like Abigail prior to her vampification lightly chastised Cid for getting baited into a fight to the death when it should have been obvious that Mavrokeras would cheat, and joked about what was She going to do with him when he kept getting into trouble like this. Rather guarded as he strongly suspected another trick of some sort, and a little peeved at whoever it was taking Abigail’s face, Cid was his usual snarky self in response. At least until “Abigail” apologized, stating that She had hoped by adopting a face familiar to Cid it would set him more at ease, and answered his questions of “well, who was she then” by intimating that She was the one he had been seeking aid from all this time, and who he had been referred to by Densa after his brief contact with her in the Acropolis – Sarenrae, goddess of light, mercy, and redemption!

As with Desna before her, Cid was considerably more respectful once he realized that he was talking to a goddess, especially the one that he had been turning for aid. Sarenrae explained that She was aware of Cid’s efforts to become a better person, and that he was making positive in-roads on convincing others to change from their Evil ways as well (i.e. Laori). Cue further chastisement at Cid’s choice to sleep with Laori, however, and so soon after Abigail’s death – Cid had made things considerably more complicated (and soap opera melodramatic, Cid’s player and mine’s mutual guilty pleasure!) by doing that. More than he knew, unfortunately, but Sarenrae was happy to explain the situation to him.

The goddess cautioned that he would likely find this revelation guilt-inducing, but it was necessary in order for him to understand the entire situation so that he could try to fix it. While Her vision of the Abyss was limited, the goddess was nonetheless always aware of Her ardent followers, and so one of them suddenly appearing in the depths of that dark place caught her attention. With a gesture from the goddess, the grey void around Cid shimmered and vanished, replaced by the far more disturbing fleshy wastes of the Abyss. Hurdled a short distance away in a shallow cave cut into a fleshy cliff was a bloodied and bruised figure – another Abigail, the real one this time. Victae hadn’t been bluffing when he had taunted that he had condemned Abigail’s soul to the Abyss as part of turning her into a vampire after all.

As Cid continued to watch, there was the scrape of a shoe on the fleshy stone outside the cave, and a man with long fiery red hair and wearing a well-tailored suit stepped into view of the huddled and terrified Abigail within the cave. I believe this was only the character’s second appearance “on-screen” in the entire campaign, and the first in his human guise and so Sarenrae pointed the man out to Cid and explained that man was one of the demon lord Baphomet’s most cunning and dangerous generals, the balor lord Elzeer-Ka. The same Elzeer-Ka who had attempted to invade Korvosa during the course of Book Three as a result of the planar portal being opened by the Rovagug cult. And the same Elzeer-Ka who had cast a long shadow over Abigail’s family. In terms of appearance and venomous civility displayed here by Elzeer-Ka, I like to use this scene of Ardyn from Final Fantasy Kingsglaive as an example (whose likeness I used as Elzeer-Ka’s human guise here).

Cooing over the already-injured paladin, the balor general held out his hands from his sides in a placating gesture, explaining that he was simply a potential friend who wanted to help. Given the current state poor Abigail found herself in, she could certainly use a friend right now. Particularly when her previous friends had all abandoned her to this horrid fate. Mmm, but was that simply an unfortunate turn of events that had befallen her, or had she been merely replaced? Cue Elzeer-Ka summoning his own little globe of clairvoyance, showing Cid’s bedroom after Abigail’s funeral . . . in bed . . . with Laori. Perhaps it was the lingering effects of being a vampire, the corrupting effects of the Abyss already starting their twisting of her soul, or just good old-fashioned soap opera betrayal-induced rage, but Abigial immediately went from distrustful of Elzeer-Ka’s offer to howling in rage that she was going to kill Cid for this!

Sarenrae went on to explain that while she could no longer detect Abigail’s soul after it ventured deeper into the Abyss’s many layers, but She was aware where Elzeer-Ka would take her – to his fortress in the Rift of Eons, a strange layer of the Abyss where time flowed at a greatly accelerated rate. The few days that had passed since Abigail’s death on the mortal plane would be stretched into week, months, possibly even years there – plenty of time for Elzeer-Ka to further twist Abigail’s soul with more poisonous words of betrayal and abandonment. It would be up to Cid, assuming he survived this duel, whether or not he wished to pursue an attempt at rescuing Abigail from this fate, but he was going to have to act immediately if he wanted any hope of success.

But wait! As usual, there was *more* complications to this situation! Now we come to the real roller coaster into insanity moment of the session, as Sarenrae went on to explain Elzeer-Ka’s motivations for “helping” Abigail. The balor had long cast a shadow over Abigail’s family, due to the fact that Abigail’s mother had once been a cultist of Baphomet and a loyal servant of Elzeer-Ka . . . until Sergio and the other Starweavers at that time drove his cult out of Kaer Maga and convinced Abigail’s mother to abandon her service to the Abyss. An unusually cunning and deceptive balor, rather than outright destroying his enemies Elzeer-Ka often liked to corrupt and use his enemies against each other. Which explained his interest in Abigail – ever the opportunist, he was now attempting to replace her mother with a new servant in Abigail.

But that was not the start of Elzeer-Ka’s revenge against Sergio and the Starweavers, as Sarenrae gestured and the scene around them changed again, this time from the Abyss to the streets of Kaer Maga (an only marginal improvement in order and cleanliness, it must be said). Cid saw another familiar face step into the nearby alleyway ahead of them – Nicodemus, the slaver who Abigail thought had abducted her younger sister Lucinda and sold her off (as the party had learned after dealing with him back in Kaer Maga, Nicodemus had sold her off to some place in Nidal). And slung over one of Nicodemus’s shoulders was an unconscious young girl that Sarenrae again helpfully identified as Lucinda Nightstar – Abigail’s sister. Stepping fully into the alleyway now, Nicodemus dropped the child onto the filthy cobblestone at the luxury-shoed feet of Elzeer-Ka. The two discuss business for a moment, the balor gifting Nicodemus with a hefty sack of coins and remarking that he was planning on taking the girl to see Nidal, which was absolutely dreadful this time of year.

Cue the scene shifting again, this time to a gothic manor of some sort, and Elzeer-Ka meeting with a pair of elven nobles, pushing the shy young girl out from behind his legs to them. Here was the daughter that they had requested, since they were unable to have children of their own. But no! This child was a human – they had specified an elven child! A human brat simply would not do! People would talk, and the name of House Vaus would forever be a source of mockery then!

Struggling to hide his irritation now, Elzeer-Ka took the child and left, prompting another scene shift to some dark and dismal druid’s grove. Elzeer-Ka hands a bag of money off to an unscrupulous druid, who carries the struggling Lucinda into a nearby pool of water and drowns her. Then casts reincarnate. Lucinda comes back up as a young dwarf child. Back under the water she goes, drowned again. Reincarnated again, halfling, drowned. Kobold, drowned, half-orc, drowned. Over and over again until finally a young elven girl with bluish-black hair bobs up gasping to the surface.

Again Elzeer-Ka takes the reborn Lucinda before the Vaus couple, and again they sneeringly explain that no, this won’t do either! They wanted a young lady, a daughter they could show off at all their parties, not some brat that they had to raise and educate themselves! Elzeer-Ka again leaves with the elven girl in tow, presumably going to the Rift of Eons where time (conveniently) flows much faster. The scene fades back in to show Elzeer-Ka arriving back again a third time, this time with a slightly younger but still identifiably Laori, who he presents as the new Vaus daughter.

This time, the snobby nobles accept the balor lord’s “gift” of a daughter, although it predictably doesn’t end well for them. Again some unspecified time later, the scene shifts again to show the manor in flames, the Vaus family brutally cut apart and decorating the rapidly-combusting building with their pieces. Covered in blood and numbly holding a large knife, Laori Vaus stumbles through the snow just outside the manor, collapsing at the feet of a waiting Elzeer-Ka, enjoying the show of the manor burning down. Stroking the elven girl’s hair, Elzeer-Ka compliments “his” daughter on her fine work, clearly having implanted some sort of Suggestion-magic to brainwash her into some sort of sleeper-agent time bomb to destroy the Vaus family from within (presumably another of his many enemies who had slighted him at some point or another). In an unusual display of “mercy”, Elzeer-Ka then magically commands Laori to *Forget*, implanting the memory that it was an orc attack that butchered her “family” instead. He then gets her up on her feet and sets her off down the road, where she runs afoul of another band of slavers, who take her in to ultimately sell off to the local Church of Zon-Kuthon as a sacrifice (and setting her on the path that led to her eventually becoming a cleric of Zon-Kuthon in the Brotherhood of Bones instead).

Yes indeed, it wasn’t bad enough that Cid had decided to cure his grief over Abigail’s death by jumping into bed with her rival for his affections, that same woman happened to be Abigail’s long-lost sister Lucinda, reincarnated and twisted by Elzeer-Ka into Laori Vaus (cue the dramatic soap music!) And now Elzeer-Ka was endeavoring to complete his destruction of the Nightstar family by corrupting Abigail as well. Understandably freaked out by this discovery, Cid vows to do whatever he can do to ensure that Abigail is saved – after all, her long-lost sister has finally been found!

With his time growing short indeed, Sarenrae had Cid voice a new oath to replace the one he had sworn upon becoming a Hellknight – typical Sarenrae stuff, like offering mercy to those who ask for it, endeavoring to see the potential good in people, etc. etc. And then after taking Sarenrae’s offered hand, Cid’s surroundings went from drab grey to blinding white. Cid the Hellknight magus died . . . and Cid the paladin of Sarenrae rose in his place (thus fulfilling the Fey Seer’s prophecy to Cid way back near the start of Book Four that “one shall rise, and one shall fall” (which could also, unplanned at the time by the DM, have been referring to Abigail’s own descent into the Abyss and Cid/Laori’s redemption).

Back in the cabin atop the Ascendant Spire, the mocking laughter of Evil Cid slowed to a halt as it sensed . . . something . . . shift in the dark air of the cabin. Mavrokeras likewise snarled within his imprisoning summoning circle as he felt the briefest touch of a holy presence dispel the menacing gloom. And then Cid sat up, asking if his evil doppleganger would like to try that again. Elsewhere in the room, Vox and Cyrus likewise picked themselves up and dusted the blood off their clothes, all three Hellknights miraculously healed (both of them later confirming with Cid that Sarenrae had also spoken with them and offered them an escape from their certain damnation).

Cue the power-up theme music as the duel(s) resumed, although this time with much different results. Turns out DR/Regeneration Good doesn’t work so well when your opponent has Smite Evil, as Cid slashed his opponent nearly in half with the first smite-evil powered hit. The duel didn’t last much longer past that initial clash, Evil Cid howling in pain and rage as the real Cid’s new holy powers quickly proved a match for the infernal magics available to old Cid. With a final follow-up blow, Cid cleaved his doppleganger in half completely, splattering the black ooze across the floor as the humanoid form crumpled back into a foul-smelling mess. Evil Vox and Cyrus quickly followed suit, leaving the reborn Hellknights victorious in their joint duel to spare their souls.

Seething within his summoning circle, Mavrokeras declared that while the duel might have gone in their favor (somehow, despite his cheating with the evil clones), they all still belonged to Belzeragna, and Mavrokeras would be dragging them all screaming back there personally! Guess devils are just sore losers like that, but as it turns out this wasn’t just an empty threat. Digging into his armored wrist, Marvokers clawed open his flesh with the claw-like gauntlet, turning the slow oozing drip of black oil from his armor into a torrenting spray of foulness onto the sand beneath him. That corrupting ooze sank down into the sand, staining it black, and then starting to melt down through the floor as a violent shudder passed through the Ascendent Spire as some sort of alchemical reaction occurred. Once a piece of an archfiend, the calcified flesh of Ragathiel’s torn wing reacted with the corruption in Mavrokeras’s blood, and began to awaken! The treehouse began to come apart around them as more violent tremors passed through the Spire, and the summoning circle was disrupted enough that Mavrokeras was able to teleport away. Larenthon likewise decided that this seemed like a good time to leave as well, and disappeared back off to the Hells to report to his immediate supervisor that things were not going according to Asmodesus’s plans in Varisia.

Down in the Valley, Oliver and Vaz’em are roused from this bored passing of the time as rifts began to tear themselves open in the ground around them, belching forth smoke and then hunched, misshapen figures with bat-wings (proto-devils, as I called them . . . really just reskinned gargolyes basically). It seems that the peace of the Valley had been broken, and once again our heroes would have to fight their way out of a death trap – in the next session!

Player advocates can cry foul here a bit if you wish, but Cid’s story has been angled to be a sort of cross between Faust and Final Fantasy 4’s Cecil for a long time. And so while outwitting the devil and using his own power against him to win could have been a valid story beat, the through-line I’ve always been aiming for is closer to Faust - of Cid making the mistake of selling his soul for power, realizing his mistake and attempting to redeem himself, but ultimately failing to save himself through his own strength. It’s not until after he gets essentially a merciful “hand up” through Divine Intervention that he actually can escape damnation. Which also sort of resonates with a recurring theme of the entire campaign in that no one – not even the PCs - can actually save themselves. It’s only through the help of others that each character (again, even the PCs!) can be saved and escape from the various perils they find themselves in.

Which probably makes it a good thing that my players have been going around helping every NPC they come across that has even a cat up in a tree, despite Sial’s sneering over it. :D

But I think it should be clear by now that I like wild, convoluted backstories for my NPCs, and honestly while I had wanted Lucinda to make an appearance at some point, I had no idea who she could be, so . . . I tossed Cid’s player a bone and had his wild theory be the correct one! It just required the convoluted twisted plan of a demon general, a ridiculous time dilation planar adventure, and a horrific series of reincarnations! Not a problem at all for this DM!

And, of course, having learned NOTHING from this experience, Cid’s player immediately started plotting how he could turn this into a knock-off Sister Wives episode *face palm*.

Before Vaz’em was able to make his final selection, however, he entered the Challenge Round, in which Adonis Kreed burst onto stage and challenged Vaz’em for his right to go on any date at all with anybody. With a cry of “pants off, dance off mother-er!” (a reference to another even more obscure and TERRIBLE dating show) Adonis Kreed began his challenge with an impressive break dance . . . which swiftly left Vaz’em the winner by default after Adonis got his legs caught while trying to remove his pants at the same time as spinning around on his head, resulting in him snapping his own neck and reducing him to a twitching dying mess on the game show floor. Glorio Bahor Glenn Bob quickly called for a commercial break, and as the Meow Chow – “Remember Meow is Cat for Chow!”TM commercial played, he mercy killed Adonis by pulling out a pistol from within his glitzy jacket and put two bullets into the back of Adonis’s gasping for breath head. Grumbling about the price of getting new clones for this guy onto the show, Glorio went back to his spot and resumed the show as the commercial ended and Adonis’s remains were unceremoniously swept off the stage floor.

When asked to make his final selection after having gotten to ask two, maybe three, questions to the ladies, Vaz’em sarcastically grumbled about having learned basically nothing about them, and so he was just going to pick Mittens because why not. At which point the curtain to Mittens’ booth was rolled up, and it was revealed Vaz’em, you fool! The contestant known as Mittens was a complete fabrication, not even a baby kitten at all but instead was just a digital image created and voiced by Baby Groot voiced by Vin Diesel! As the studio audience graced Baby Groot voiced by Vin Diesel’s performance as Mittens with a standing ovation, and Baby Groot gave a final “I am Mew!” before scampering off the stage, Glorio presented Vaz’em with his consolation prize - a trip to the studio’s back lot pool with Cinnabar and Trinia, along with a year’s supply of Meow Chow cat food – “Remember, Meow is Cat for Chow!”TM,

Unfortunately, things didn’t go well back there either, as Cinnabar and Trinia almost immediately got into a drunken cat fight, which spilled over and got Adonis Kreed’s latest clone, coming fresh from the cloning vats out behind the studio, to get caught up in the fight. This led to Adonis Kreed getting his neck broken and thrown into the pool, where he unceremoniously drowned while Glorio Bahor Glenn Bob once again mourned the costs of having to make yet more clones of the poor bastard for next week’s show. And with that he signed off, with a final salutation of “Remember, Meow is Cat for Chow!”TM

The channel then blurred with static like a bad parody of Robot Chicken as we switched to a new “channel”, this one featuring the grimmest dark future of Golarion that ever grimdarked, 40 million, and perhaps just 40 thousand years into the future, who can say? Here we have Cid being woken up from suspended animation to go on a ripping and tearing rampage against the demons who had overrun Golarion, armed with his trusty blunderbuss, gatling crossbow, and the Big Fricking Sword 9000. I seem to recall his crusade getting started immediately after getting equipped with his new weaponry, as a demonic bulldozer (or, “Helldozer”) smashed through the wall and ran over the scientists who woke him up. Cid quickly blasted the demonically-possessed vehicle with a barrage of attacks form his new weapons, and then advanced out into the wasteland.

Following the trail leading to an ominous fortress in the distance, Cid entered to find himself in an ampitheater where Elzeer Ka was waiting for him. The demon general welcomed him, and then announced that a demonstration of his latest horror, just for Cid, was now ready to be unveiled. Calling out to the nearby stage, Elzeer Ka sat back as the curtains rose to reveal . . . Steve Jobs! (Cid’s player had mentioned once that he found the late Apple CEO’s appearance unsettling for some reason he couldn’t quite put his finger on – so, let a good rat bastard DM, I had him make a cameo appearance here). The CEO went on a brief spiel about how happy he was to be here in the future, and unveiled his latest invention – the iPaladin! Cue the cloning tube on-stage swinging open to reveal Abigail, who mechanically stepped out to join Steve while declaring in a Siri-style voice “Hi! I’m Abby!”

Screaming in horror at the abomination before him, Cid unleashed the BFS 9000, and destroyed the entire amiptheather in a barrage of wild slashes with the massive weapon, obliterating them all as the ceiling collapsed in on their heads. Cue the static as we switched to another channel.

Now we follow Rholand caught in media res as part of some sort of musical theater production. Unfortunately for him, his latest production “Curse of the Crimson Throne” was heavily in the red, his lead actress Ileosa was a spoiled, drunken diva, and his primary source of funding, a fat-cat by the name of Togomor, was riding his ass about opening night being a smashing success – because if not, Rholand’s theater company was out of business and Rholand was out on the streets!

Fed up with Ileosa’s drunken demands, Rholand ultimately fires her, leaving him without a leading lady . . . at least until he manages to convince Togomor’s nerdy wallflower secretary, Gwen’vor’stila, to try out for the part. She is predictably horrible at the role, not being able to act her way out of a paper bag, but she’s all that Rholand has to work with. And in typical 90s high school movie fashion, once you get the glasses off her face and straighten out her hair, she’s at least charming and cute if not drop-dead gorgeous.

So opening night comes around with Rholand having to fill-in for the leading man, and in the opening act goes out on stage to meet “Queen Ileosa” for the first time (a rehash of meeting the queen in Book One), only for Gwen to trip over the hem of her dress and come tumbling head over heels down the stairs on stage to land unceremoniously at Rholand’s feet. She then ad-libs a line, offering Rholand her hand with a false chipper “Mind giving me a hand up?” The play continues from there, with Gwen continuing to give a horrible but heart-felt performance, and the crowd unexpectedly eating the performance up as they see the play as a comedy rather than the intended drama Rholand had planned after Gwen’s unintentional prat-fall to start the show off. In the end, the performance is a rousing success, and Rholand is able to pay back the seething Togomor’s investment with ease.

The channel changes one final time to the scene of a black-and-white noir flick, in the city of Kaer Maga. Ronda (Oliver’s former bard henchwoman-turned-kobold) is the star of this show rather than Oliver, as she gets her first big case with her new detective agency within the city. It was getting rather late at this point in the session, so things got a bit blurred and rushed, but basically her case involved a goofy mix of aliens and terminator as someone was infesting the city of Kaer Maga with Grey Maidens, by turning various members of the city into Grey Maidens (hence the title of this “show” being “Ronda the Kobold in – The Case of the Grey Goo Maidens”). And basically they were replicating out of control, and the only way to stop them before they converted the entire city into more Grey Maidens was to kill the original one (like some sort of vampire or werewolf curse I guess). Cue Ronda somehow tracking down Sabrina to a warehouse and blowing it up, thus causing all of the Grey Maiden “copies” to melt into goo . . . or did they all die, as horror movie ending style a grey-maiden silhouette can be seen in the distance!

And thus ended the silliness of yet another April Fools game!

These shades were essentially a security mechanism for the Valley, and the main reason why the devils were avoiding the tunnel. Good-aligned characters would be permitted passage unmolested, while neutral characters (which everyone present qualified as) would be tested and questioned by the shades to judge whether they were repentant for past wrongs and thus were here to be cleansed/redeemed. Unrepentant and Evil-aligned characters, such as Laori, however . . . well, you’ll read in a bit what happens to them.

Oliver was confronted with shades of Gaedren Lamm (of course), his old buddy Dodger, and Cressida Kroft. Oliver wasn’t particularly apologetic (and was definitely foul and rude to Lamm, as expected) to any of the shades confronting him, but he was at least conflicted enough for the shades to deem him “too unrepentant” to fail and be barred from the valley.

Vaz’em was confronted by Adonis Kreed and Marlessa, then Melyia Arkona, and finally Cinnabar. While Vaz’em was a hired killer with hands stained with blood, most of the blood recently was in defense of Korvosa and its people, and so he also got a pass . . . much like Oliver, begrudgingly by the shades.

Finally, Cid saw shades of those who he had killed with his own hands – Jostiliana, Isabelle the maid from the castle that they hunted down early in Book Three, and finally . . . Abigail. While he was most sorrowful over the still-recent mercy killing of Abigial, Cid also regretted killing Isabelle (also arguably a mercy killing given what the Grey Maidens would have done to her), and even Jostiliana got some modicum of sympathy. The shades judged him to be the best candidate for redemption in the Valley – which wasn’t unexpected given this was Cid’s redemption arc anyway, and he had been making steady efforts to go from LN (with evil tendencies given his Hellknight status) to LG. The shades gave him some supportive words and urged him to step forward into the valley to be fully repent of his sins before fading away.

As they came out of their respective spirit-generated dazes, our heroes found Vox and Cyrus similarly shaken, having been confronted with their own past mistakes. Laori, however, was . . . sound asleep? It did not seem like a particularly troubling slumber, either, as the elf cleric was relaxed and did not seem to be having any sort of troubling nightmare, she just was sound asleep, and nothing the party did could seem to rouse her. It seems that Evil creatures, upon entering this tunnel/the Valley of the Ascendant Spire, fell into a deep sleep – a magical defense for the Valley that could allow its defenders to easily deal with any malign creatures coming to attack it, killing them as mercifully as possible while they slumbered unaware.

With Laori out of commission for an unknown amount of time, Cid scooped her up into his arms and carried her the rest of the way out of the tunnel and into the sunlit exit to the passage that the party could now see awaiting for them ahead. Upon exiting the tunnel, they found themselves on the outskirts of a small valley tucked into the mountains, a serene set of well-maintained farmlands and orchards surrounding a large twisted spire of rock jutting up into the sky in the rough middle of the Valley – supposedly the fossilized remains of Ragathiel’s wing, torn off by his father Dispaster (I think it’s Dispater rather than Asmodeus in the lore?) as he renounced his evil past and became an Empyrean Lord. As they are taking in the sights, they are greeted by a pair of humans, who introduce themselves as Ignatius and Agatha and welcome them to the Valley to be cleansed of their past sins. As the pair explain that they are humans who have also found their way here to be redeemed of past sins, there is a brief flash of a teleportation spell before a tall, muscular humanoid with the head of a dog appears, a massive greatsword slung across his back.

The hound archon introduces himself as Duras, explaining that he is alerted whenever new arrivals step into the Valley (and to dispose of any evil-doers coming to cause mischief and ending up asleep on the Valley’s doorstep). He also explains to the party that Laori is merely asleep, and that it is a defense of the Valley, but she will be otherwise unharmed by the experience – so long as the party takes her with them when they leave this place.

Cid then asks to speak with Eurydice, the angel who had directed him to come here, and it directed to the top of the spire. A scaffolding walkway has been built up in a looping path around the outside of the spire, leading up to a sort of treehouse near the top of it, which is apparently where Eurydice lives and welcomes visitors. As petitioners seeking redemption and help with their devil pursuers, Cid, Vox, and Cyrus are permitted entry up to speak with her, Cid continuing to lug Laori along, while Vaz’em and Oliver, not particularly seeking redemption themselves (at least at this moment) wait down at the base of the Spire.

It's a long but not especially arduous climb up and around the spire to Eurydice’s house at the pinnacle, where the strange masked angel greets Cid and the others warmly, explaining that now that they are here, she can begin to help them free their souls from the contract that binds them to Belzeragna. And with Cid having finally successfully arrived at his destination and the focal point for his “I’m Special” personal quest in Book Four at last, we closed out the session.