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Once we got to a certain point in the fetch quests for Baba Yaga the party decided in order to defer conflict someone should pretend to be Elvania. Long story short Mikhail was best qualified mostly by class choice, incidentally he had also gained Int bonuses and put some points into bluff. One hat of disguise (may have been the greater hat) later we traipsed through most of the encounters with little incident.

A stove tried to set Emma on fire but, well, fire oracle. We also passed a dapper dressed troll. It wasn’t until later that Hemming mentioned that eight of the trolls nine heads were hidden under it’s fashionable vest. Then there was a linnorm that Hemming needed to fight solo so he could become king. He killed it and Mikhail froze it to preserve it. The next thing we encountered was a single witch, no familiar, no spells. Mikhail false faced and flustered some info out of her, then Emma essentially negotiated with her and brought her to the PC’s side of potentially taking over Irresen. I'm not sure if these was the right place in the timeline of events but we encountered a half-fiend dire crocodile at some point. Latigo essentially asked if the reptile had heard the good word of raptor jesus. The crocodile responded with do you have a herald yet? (The CR was identical to that of standard heralds of the gods, so the GM thought it fit rather well.)

Then we ran into the past queens of Irresen. Turns out Baba Yaga is a terrible person, shocker I know. Mikhail was able to convince the queens to let him end their suffering and he does so.

Now we just need the blood part of the spell to free Baba Yaga. Once the party clearly understood that life blood meant we would need to kill Anastasia the party agreed to just killing Elvania.

The last boss fight was pretty standard. Elvania had summoned some demons and they were stopped by a communal protection from evil. Most of the party made it through with middling damage, I think Emma came pretty close to dead. But everyone made it out OK.

Once we freed Baba Yaga she said she would give us some wishes essentially so she wouldn’t be in our debt. Some more party talk and here was how the wishes turned out:

Mikhail: King of Irresen

Emma: Wanted to have a growing season in Irresen, but Baba Yaga refused that request. We did get cold resistant crops which basically came down to the same result. Irresen could grow food.

Hemming: Protection for Anastasia and any of her future line. Basically making sure she wouldn’t end up like the past queens of Irresen.

Dorjia: No reprisals for anything the PC’s did. No actions could be taken against us by Baba Yaga. (we almost missed this one, and Baba Yaga seemed very disappointed that we caught it.)

Latigo: Wished for his mount to also be celestial. Still not sure how the Chaotic Evil person pulled that off.

After the wish negotiation was done everyone started their epilogue journeys. Mikhail froze and Emma negotiated down linnorms respectively so the PC couple could also be seen as royalty within the eyes of the Linnorm Kings. We made appearances and Hemming claimed the border on the Linnorm side of Irresen. Mikhail and Emma claimed Irresen itself. Bounties were placed on evil fey, hags, trolls and the like. Ulfen started migrating over for the bounty and started the evil cleansing. All of the NPC’s we had accumulated along the way were essentially welcomed into Irresen. Only one decided they would stay behind.

Dorjia went home and Mikhail made her home a protected land for Strix. Latigo moved back to the Mammoth Realms and started on the path to godhood. Mikhail and Emma got married, Emma’s family was invited to show off to her mother. Anastasia was formally adopted by the royal couple.

A few months went by after Baba Yaga’s departure and a strange thing happened. The Chicken Hut returned. Upon investigation there was no one inside. Our GM told us that once we left Baba Yaga alone, back to her mostly mortal self, the daemon of old age finally got to her. Having no other guidance the hut returned to the PCs.

Mikhail: (during character descrip) I do carry a little fox in a BabyBjorn on my chest.

Hemming: If you've decided to come with us, other than sarcasm, what is it you do?
Mikhail: Glare at things and laugh mostly...

Emma: I've never even set anyone's clothes on fire.

Mikhail: Well, causation is not correlation. ...wait.

GM: At this point the invisible frost skeletons attack.
Everyone else in the room in unison: Invisible. Frost. Skeletons.

GM: The blood is...minty fresh and somewhat blue.

GM: For the record, Emma just soloed a level 3 encounter with one cantrip.

Hemming: Can I attach a bear trap to my fist?
Mikhail: Here, I can do it for you. Now gnaw it off 'cause you're a wolf.

Mikhail: Um, Detect Weasel.

Hemming: I'm not a smartass! I'm more of a dumbass.

Mikhail: Do you actually know how to get answers?
Hemming: ...stabbing...?

Mikhail: That's not a cloud, that's a birds!

GM: Bad News Owlbears

Mikhail [about a male winter witch]: You're not running into that ice ceiling?

Latigo: IGNAN, M$%$&%%~!%&~. DO YOU SPEAK IT?

Emma: Anything that's beautiful and wants to have sex with you in myths is usually evil. Including women.

Emma, in the corner laughing softly to herself: I could buy so many pigs!

Latigo: Does anyone have something like a kosh? Because I don't.
GM: We are all Kosh.

GM: Saps cost 1 gold piece. I choose to believe that that means one copper piece for the sock and 99 copper pieces to go inside.

GM: The mirror man gets 5 words in his message per turn. I think it's going to be "Imposters and dinosaur in fish".

Latigo: *as illiterate character, mimes turning the menu around several times in incomprehension*
Mikhail: No, that's your napkin.

Dorjia: Now, Nick, you know the rules of snowball fights; you're not allowed to hide claws in them.

Hemming: Wait kids, before you go, take this axe.
Mikhail: YES, TAKE THIS BATTLEAXE YOU'RE NOT PROFICIENT WITH
Emma: I like the idea of a team of three children wielding this axe.
Mikhail: Well good, because Aid Another is the only way they're gonna hit anything.

Mikhail: Do you have multiple nipples?

Emma: #FirstWorldproblems

GM: What's your initiative modifier?
Mikhail *dazed*: Yes. What's next? 4.

Dorjia: What would a bird that's blind and deaf do?
Latigo: Run into a window.

Hemming: I taste everything in a 15 foot radius.
Latigo: There's a dinosaur in there, that sounds horrible. There's a donkey.
Mikhail: It tastes like ass.

Emma: Eh, as long as they're not children tortured to death and forced to eat each other it's not the worst thing we've seen this week.

Emma: Question I feel like I shouldn't have to ask: is this its only ribcage?

Mikhail: I ask the ettin to...sign the receipt.

Emma: I attempt to disbelieve "cow".

Hemming: So we give all the goats a chain shirt...

Hemming: No, I found her pretty attractive, but she was also trying to kill me. I find that a turn off in women.

Latigo: You speak Draconic?
Mikhail: Of course! It's the- ...I almost just called it the language of love.

Latigo: You smell like wet dog.
Hemming: Only sometimes!
Latigo: When you get wet.

Mikhail: You become a protean werewolf
Hemming: A protein werewolf?
Emma: You're already made of meat!

Latigo: It's the touching story of a World War II nurse who fell in love with a shaved bear.

Mikhail: Does the eagle speak...air-ean?
GM: ARYAN IS NOT THE LANGUAGE OF AIR ELEMENTALS

Hemming: In my defense, she was a pretty lady at the time.

Latigo: Holy s+!+, I'm playing Raptor Jesus!

Emma (to Hemming, after Reicarnate caused him to turn into an Undine and lose 2 Str) So you are a very slightly watered down version of yourself.

Hemming: Is she Treaxian?
GM: No, she has skin.

Hemming: Is gourmet dino chow just, like, live monkeys?

Mikhail (after his fox familiar died): I have no f~%*s left to give.
Latigo: You have no fox left to give.

GM: Okay, [the grim reaper demon] warms up to you.
Latigo: Oh good. Death warmed over.

Hemming: Actually, I have a lot of human blood.
Mikhail: What, in a jar somewhere??

Hemming: I'm not peeing on the corpses!

Dorjia: So where are we now?
Emma: Tanks. Hut ate tanks. Zorka tanks tea party.

Latigo: First, we acquire a giant mole, then I ride it to freedom.
Emma: So what would be the cost of a Summon Monster scroll that can summon a dire badger?

Hemming: If they had a Druid with them, they could be Mighty Morphin' Yeti Rangers.

Hemming: On a scale of 8 to 10, how likely are they to drown us in the well.

Hemming: Does a 27 hit a shadow demon?
GM: Yes.
Hemming: Does a 25 hit a shadow demon?
GM: Yes.
Hemming: Does a 22 hit a shadow demon?
GM: Yes.
Hemming: Everything hits a shadow demon!
Latigo and Mikhail: You're like Oprah!

Latigo: Dragon eye for the dead guy.

Hemming: Mikhail died as he lived: covered in wasps.
Latigo: And in women's clothing.

Mikhail: If you turn into a goat, do you lose the grappled condition?

Latigo: I vote we turn Mikhail into a sexy catboy.

Hemming: And then hopefully I've got enough wolves by the time I fight Gorum.

Mikhail: G%%$$$mit, I'm cross-dressing again!

Mikhail: There's something wrong here.
Hemming: Because you're a half-orc and a man pretending to be an ice witch?

Hemming: So are we leading in a goat pretending it's the queen of Irrisen now?!

Hemming: Because she was really lonely and I don't know when to stop.

Emma: We can just ask the dragon if the bond broke.
Latigo: That makes so much more sense, I heard “ask the dragon if the BONG broke.”

Mikhail: No, I specifically wasn't wearing pants that one time.

Emma: Flesh to Stone Cold?
Mikhail: ...Steve Austin?

GM: The fact that the truth also would have gotten you where you needed to go does not retroactively mean you told the truth!

GM: Gorum would make for a very angry evangelical church.
Hemming: Gormanism?

Emma: I'll just cast fireball on you when you need a shower.

The last time we asked the hut to do something it happened to eat our enemies to death. Then proceeded to drop them on top of us inside the hut in the current room we were in. We were hoping the tanks would protect the people in side. Mikhail tried using some form of diplomacy and was attacked by the hut for his effort. We then let Latigo make a wild empathy check and that got the results we wanted.

After the tanks were gobbled up Mikhail made sure to poke his head in the door and request the presence of the chicken hut’s maid. I can’t remember her name but she is the fey with the weird beak that is essentially the worst housekeeper ever. He just wanted to make sure that the people in the tank weren't pranked or taken advantage of by the mischievous fey. He said to “serve them tea and make them feel at home. Don’t be mean to them.”

Latigo then proceeded to ride the hut to the concentration camp in the middle of the clearing. The hut refused to approach any more and less killing was preferred. Emma and Hemming rode up to the edge of a camp in an attempt at diplomacy. Unfortunately the guards weren't up for negotiating and used their machine guns to gun down Emma. She nearly died but Hemming managed to bring her back to the group.

The party just kept running into a wall. We couldn't find a way to get in the camp without killing everyone. I think the players were all pretty frustrated at this point and we decided the best course of action would be to destroy their machine gun squads and see if they had enough people to refill the defenses for the next morning. Emma and Mikhail unloaded all their AoE spells they had and we rested for the night and were going to re-evaluate in the morning.

Everyone then piled into the hut to rest for the night and we went in to check up on the tanks. And they were having a tea party. There were three tanks around a small table with a pot of tea and cups. The cups were even moving all by themselves. After the initial shock of the absurdity of it all we discovered the tanks were brains in a can with special mental powers to guide the vehicles. At three per vehicle there were quite a few human lives messed up by this situation. If they gave us information we would deal with them favorably. We planned to reincarnate them either way and intended to offer them safe passage if they came out not human.

The tanks basically gave us the low down on the camp and how everyone was being controlled by vampires. Once that news was out both casters whinged with guilt. Now we knew that hundreds of people were murdered only because they were under mind control. This made us all the more determined to not attack through the people to enter the camp.

After much brainstorming I think it was Emma’s comment of, “ How much would a trained dire badger cost?” That started us on the path of digging tunnels into the camp. The group settled for a scroll of burrow, or a few of them. The end result was a series of tunnels that essentially honeycombed through the entire camp. Knowing about the vampire’s we decided to come up under the cathedral first… right under the tiger pit trap that was laid for foolish adventures trying to explore the cathedral. It didn't hurt us but it was pretty hilarious that a group of flying dragons and their riders sprung out of the floorboards to assault the holy site.

When we discovered that a double headed eagle was one of the keys to moving the hut it didn't seem like a big deal at the time. That is until we had to drown it in the cauldron. The image of our werewolf barbarian holding it below the water just waiting for the bubbles to stop is one of the most disturbing things I can imagine now. (It doesn't help that after the hut was transported to the next location the double headed eagle was alive again in the rafters. Staring at us. Judging us...)

After drowning a helpless bird we were sent to a room full of oddly shaped cages that held tiny old men shaped things that rhymed at us. It was creepy. It was weird. It was mostly just a Tuesday for us at that point.

We decided to move on after noting down the unusual rhyme. Hemming went through the next door first and disappeared. And the rest of the party stopped and was like WTF? Turns out each doorway is like it's own dimensional portal. Hemming found himself in a delightful room made of candy. Shrugged a bit and sat down and started eating the candy, no worse for wear.

The rest of the party came up with a plan. Mikhail was going to investigate next. (Out of character I have a bad habit of volunteering the fighter/barbarian/rogue to go first into dangerous situations. Mostly because they can either handle it or would be prepared for it. If I was playing that character I would gladly go first. I just don’t happen to be playing that character in this game and the werewolf’s player was annoyed that I did that often. So I volunteered to go in next.) Mikhail had a rope tied around his waist and was supposed to tug at it if needed and he would be pulled back.

Mikhail went through the door and saw the candy, felt an urge to eat it. After making his will save he saw the candy for what it was rotten and full of maggots. Hemming happily greeted Mikhail offering him some candy. Mikhail declined and managed to get the rope from his waist around Hemming and tugged so the Barbarian was pulled to the other side. With a spellcraft check Mikhail knew he would need to make another will save if he entered the room again. Not wanting to fall to the trap of being forced to eat said most likely poisoned candy, he resolved to figure out how to get rid of the compulsion before letting other people endanger themselves.

He cracked off a slab of chocolate and carved a message into it saying, “Don’t enter. Room dangerous. Trying to make safe before you come in.” He threw it back through the door to the rest of the party. It was at that point that Mikhail passed out. The candy was obviously poisonous. Unfortunately, it was also a contact poison. Essentially left for dead at this point Mikhail’s fox shaped snow/ice elemental familiar Reynard pokes his head out of the familiar satchel to go tell the other party members something is wrong. A will save later and Renyard stops acting.

Cue the other party members trying to restrain Hemming("but guys that candy is soooo delicious let me go get some more...") and waiting for Mikhail to fix whatever it was that was wrong in the other room. A good five to ten minutes pass before the party thinks something has gone wrong. This time Latigo went in solo. The room was clearly dangerous and he didn't want his dinosaur coming in. Latigo, with a rope lifeline entered the room. One of Latigo’s mythic abilities was being able to detect exactly where something he had smelled before was on any given shared plane. He noted the odd candy and a mysterious puddle in the middle of the room and started following the trail to Mikhail’s location.

Upon reaching where Mikhail’s body should be he fumbled around and found it on the ground invisible. Latigo was then promptly sneak attacked into unconsciousness. The rest of the party saw the rope twitch and jerk as Latigo entered combat and when they were done pulling the rope it was cut with no Latigo or Mikhail to be seen.

Party enter’s screw this mode. They point the dinosaur in the right direction and say find your master. Dusty tromps off and everyone follows. They get to the the party members bodies. Combat then breaks out with the creepy clown boogeymen who have taken Latigo and Mikhail hostage. The party manages to kill the fey creatures and wakes up the sleeping members. Mikhail wakes up and says, “ I just had the worst nightmare. I saw my familiar killed right in front of me… where is Reynard?” He was actually affected by the nightmare spell the boogeymen had cast on him.

Mikhail at this point goes to the puddle on the floor and uses his winter witch abilities to turn the puddle into an ice sculpture of his familiar and gently puts it in his familiar satchel. I don’t remember if he openly wept but there were definitely tears on his face at this point. Somewhere in this drama Hemming grabbed even more candy and put it in a bag “for later.”

I can’t remember if there were intervening rooms ( I may have been distracted at the time looking up how screwed I was without a spell book.) The next room I do remember was one with a mirror. The party investigated it, or at least Emma did. Once the cloth that was covering it was taken off she promptly disappeared. With all of her equipment left laying on the ground. Dorja managed to warn everyone else and they stopped looking at it.

Mikhail walks up to it and spellcrafts his way into understanding how the mirror works. He then started playing mirror roulette. The first thing that came out of the mirror is a daemon. At this point Mikhail was done with everything. He just yelled at the thing to "get back in the gods damned mirror". And some how it worked. The daemon sort of shrugged and walked back in.(The daemon turned out to be loyal to the bloodline of Baba Yaga. It was an amazing stroke of luck that it even followed Mikhail's orders. Also hilarious and an entire relief to the party.)

We started shoving creepy old men fey things from the first room to try and spit out Emma. Once success was achieved there was an awkward moment. Emma came out stark naked. Her charisma is through the roof at this point. Although Mikhail had been adventuring with her for some time this was the first time he actually looked at her in a “she is a woman” sort of way. It was weird, confusing and lasted a little too long. Emma was also caught off guard after being sucked into a magic mirror, suddenly being disrobed in front of, in her mind, a potential suitor under less than favorable circumstances and proceeds to yell, “Why don’t you go and deal with your dead fox.”

Ah, drama. There was some tension in the air. At that point the party needed to rest. The session ended there and is pretty close to universally voted as the worst session in Baba Yaga’s hut. Blue booking after quickly fixed the party infighting and turned it into a romantic subplot. (We also sold our mirror to the always reliable merchant Zil Zav Vizot, who got the best of deals at the most prompt of times. And deserves a better explanation somewhere down the road.)

Next Time:

-The chicken hut VS tanks with tea time

I can’t remember if our contact happened to be a fishmonger or we decided that piles of fish would be the least likely to be inspected. Either way we hid our less subtle compatriots in the back of a wagon covered in fish. Poor Dusty didn’t really understand the concept of hiding but was placated by the fact she should eat as many fish as she wanted on the trip there.

Once we came upon the initial gates we ran into the guard who happened to be a full winter wolf and a female barbarian. Hemming used his position to get us into the city while also getting himself in good with the guard. Most of the party tried to convince him once out of earshot of the winter wolf how stupid an idea that was but it fell on mostly deaf ears. (There are some good quotes about this on our quote list and I’ll make sure to get that full list posted once the game is complete.)

At that point we were essentially in the clear inside the city until we ran into a mirror man. It got curious enough that the group decided to put it down. The combat was relatively swift and full of surprises jumping out of fish.

The kicker of this story really comes from the GM side of things. We were later told that mirror men have the ability to send messages similar to the sending spell. The party was able to take down the enemy so fast that the GM couldn’t really justify sending a whole message back. He decided it would only have been five words. “Imposters and dinosaur in fish.” Apparently the guard/watch persons didn’t know what to make of that and chalked it up to a broken mirror man.

-Our worst experience in Baba Yaga’s Hut
-The chicken hut VS tanks with tea time

Up to this point there was a romantic subplot growing between the Emma and Mikhail. Mikhail wanted to be King. Emma wanted to marry into a good station. Essentially proximity and narrative tropes decreed they would be together. They had talked about this and had displayed some platonic affection. But the first time they kissed was right now, in combat, under magical compulsion. Emma needed no explanation and kissed right back. “We can do that again right?” were her next words either during combat or after, I can’t remember.

This clearly pissed of the demon/daemon even more. Mikhail was then subjected to an enervation, which of course crit. Feeling pretty pitiful about the eight negative levels he just suffered, Mikhail’s witty retort was to call her a goat f%#!er.

Finally at the end of the round it was Latigo’s turn. He activated Dusty the Allosaurus’ anklets of spider climbing and dino walked up to the ceiling and right over Rasputin, jaws open and waiting. Latigo then used his magical item for flight and headed to Rasputin. Still trapped in the effects of levitate and reverse gravity the poor goat essentially tumbled helplessly end over end. Latigo’s player, claiming that this is just the sort of thing he was raised to do with his herding background, managed to wild empathy in the only combat situation I have ever seen it used. Rasputin was pushed into range of Dusty and the mauling began.

The rest of the combat was pretty uneventful. The shadow stealing demons tried casting spells and affected no one, each of them being killed off quite easily. The girlfriend daemon/demon may have gotten another spell off but it didn't affect the combat as far as I remember. Then everyone converged on the goat and let the dragon mauling commence. Fittingly Dusty managed to get the last bite in and Rasputin was dead!

But (surprise!) the next round he came back. When the GM announced this the entire party was stunned. He explained that the adventure path followed the folk lore that Rasputin had to be killed multiple times before it actually took. The good news was he came back as a goat, because of the level of resurrection that was being used. Once everyone recovered from that hilarious turn of events we hand waved the subsequent rounds of combat and Rasputin got what was coming to him.

Coming up next time we have:

-Our worst experience in Baba Yaga’s Hut
-Smuggling reptiles into the capital of Irrisen
-The chicken hut VS tanks with tea time

This past week has been gruelling torture out of character. Our GM had told us about how we had fought several enemies that had managed to escape and all of them managed to retreat into Rasputin’s lair. This included a set of demons that had stolen each of the party members shadows and Rasputin’s girlfriend. It sounded like a tough fight I was personally torn between maximizing party survival and taking out Rasputin as fast as I could.

The scene was set thusly. We kicked down the double doors and found Rasputin floating in the middle of the room. The very first, and last, thing Rasputin managed to cast was reverse gravity. Not to big of a problem. Each of the party members managed to bond with dragons in the fourth book, except for the reptile cavalier. He started this game with a “dragon” mount.

Hemming charged in head first riding his dragon into the antilife shell Rasputin had up. Breath weapon from the dragon to Rasputin’s face, a fast dismount, and his shadow demon disappears in gore. Emma flew her dragon into range for breath weapon and uses an oracle ability to place most our enemies in a persistent fire. Our Strix archer flies into the room and shoots Rasputin unimpeded by the antilife shell.

My witches build is based off of debuffing and SoS spells magnified by my winter witch specialization. The ability of choice was typically misfortune, my GM’s bane, which had often prevented crits on my friends and caused quite a few fumbles for my enemies. Mythic hexs don’t allow for saves unless the target is mythic. Typically our GM made the big bads of each book mythic to compensate for our power level. I had decided to play it safe and misfortune as many targets as possible to maximize our chance of survival.

Mikhail used misfortune on both Rasputin and his girlfriend (split hex is your friend). I waited for the inevitable roll of the die signaling that we were indeed fighting a mythic creature. It never came. I reminded the GM that if Rasputin was mythic he should get a chance to shake off my misfortune before I did my next action. Nope. Rasputin is currently in the process of obtaining mythic power. The hex sticks.

This was it. Mikhail couldn't pass up the opportunity to utterly humiliate the crazy fanatical distant relation of his and Baba Yaga. The whole book leading up to this point was just terrible death camps and ravaged Russian countryside. We tried avoiding conflict, mostly trying not to deal with the crazy shenanigans that comes up in these adventures seems to work out better for us. But our attempts at diplomacy were brushed off.

At this point I should explain the goat thing. Dusty the allosaurus had a healthy appetite. Even from the start of the campaign we had a string of goats following our party around so we could feed the dinosaur. We had a fateful encounter with another male winter witch who had a goat familiar we essentially murdered. There was also a point where goats almost became a currency we traded them away so often to NPCs and such for various reasons.

Mikhail cast Mythic Baleful Polymorph on Rasputin who rolled a natural 20 and then a four for his Will save, thank you misfortune. Rasputin became a goat to which Mikhail replied, “Hey, Dusty! Dinner time!”

Next time on Baba Yaga's Witch Hunters:

Lessons learned in part II of the fight with Rasputin.

-Don't piss off Rasputin's girlfriend
-Making out during combat is bad...sometimes
-Goat Herding with Mammoth Lord nomads
-How are goats like cats