Imma run a Numerian game and I've got players:
Rush: A half-orc gunslinger with amnesia who speaks in the third person and calls all animals "cockroaches".
Batu Bane: A human barbarian with druid ideas who's father was killed by the Black Sovereign.
Lucky: A first time player running an elven sorcerer of the efreet bloodline who likes whisky. As GM I ruled he was wearing a vest, puffy pants and pointy slippers, not sure if this'll stick.
They begin in the South East of Numeria in Gladshire, an ironically named town. About a hundred years ago there was a bandit fort there, then the bandits moved their families there, then merchants showed up, then the bandits kids stayed there, now it's a town of around 3,000. They pay tribute to the Black Soverign regularly and no one gets hurt.
The town has a quandary now. As the PCs sat in a bar with Rush shouting about wanting work, there are these weird android things hanging around. About three months ago they showed up. Being all android-y and not knowing where they came from or anything much. They work cheap enough and haven't made much trouble but they build a shanty town and by now there's over 200 of them.
So the players were hired by Malcolm Gladwell, assistant to the alderman, to go and ask the nice "bee-ladies" what to do.Apparently the town asked them for advice before and it's easy, just go and ask. We'll totally pay a bunch of money. A horse even when they get back.
Being not on their guard, the PCs were completely unaware that the Thraie want tribute for future.
With the promise of a horse, they headed out into the badlands.
Heading towards the hive was kind of fun. The players followed a stream, which they had been told would take them about three quarters the way to the hive. After five days or so they found a small scrubby valley. Inside there were many perception checks and they were ambushed by tiny poisonous chicken like dinosaurs. They took two points of damage to the whole party and not a single f#$# was given about the poison. Then a big fin-backed dinosaur came out and wrecked the barbarian's s+*%. Lucky put it down with a lucky shot from his short bow and much resting and heal checks were had by all.
While recovering the next day, the party stayed where they were because otherwise it'd be a bad scene. So Rush wandered off tracking the little guys to their now abandoned nest and found four eggs. Feeling the call of motherhood, Rush claimed two of them to raise while Lucky fried one egg up and Batu began caring for an egg.
Two days later the party, now with several hit points, began moving again and a few days led them to the headwaters of the river. A very odd underground guyser they assumed as the clean water came rushing out of the small pool with great force.
They were thinking about checking the source and even though I generously offered them a bonus on their swim check if they just jumped in and went down the hole in armor no one took me up on it.
Another day's march saw them now near a forest of leafless trees and some rolls found owlbear pellets around. Undaunted they camped before the trees and were attacked by some cute little owlbears.
I almost had a TPK but Rush got a lucky shot with his musket and they lived.
Thus ended the first session.
The second session saw Lucky's player not be there so he was run by vote with me acting as tie breaker. Hilarity ensued.
Three days more hiking saw them reaching the hive of the bee ladies. They knew they were close when they came to the fields of bee hives. [This is why the Black Soverign never came back, he tried once and his army drowned in wasps.]
In the field they met Johnson, a nice happy simple and plump man who was gathering honey, he gave Rush some then wondered why his bucket wasn't full. After refilling it he took them back to the big hive where they met the guards, Medea and Cassandra. There was some back and forth as the party realized that someone had to become the latest husband of the queen. Rush was excited about it and introduced himself as the father of the other players.
While the others went off to get their future reading, Rush was taken through the room of other husbands, peaceful pudgy men who seemed uninterested in the world but gave him honey-booze and was taken to the baths because he smelled bad.
At this point he got scared of being pressganged into staying there forever and told Medea that it was Lucky who was going to be the husband. Lucky was hustled off after a quick vote (2-0).
They got their prognostication:
They come from a million days from yesterday.
Castoff tools in an empty lifeboat.
Two menaces stalk in their shadow.
One casts its' eyes over all but does know what it sees.
Find the empty boat to the East yet beware the disease left within.
IT SEES US. THE GREAT EYE IS TURNED TO US. ALL IS LOST SISTERS.
And then her eyes exploded* and the other bee ladies rushed to help her as Batu tried a heal check (it did not fix her eyes).
They were escorted to their quarters while the Tharie discussed what to do. They had not seen Lucky in a while but assumed he was fine.
The next morning they were brought before the queen who told them that the Tharie were doomed and that was too bad. But she had arranged an escort for them back to Gladshire. There was some protests from the players, well from Batu, Rush wanted to start running, good survival skills on that one. They also reunited with lucky who was now in a yellow and black robe lounging at the feet of the queen.
The queen politely gave them Lucky back and they were on their way. But about two tunnels later the hive shook and things started to go bad.
They heard a shout and turning a corner found one bee lady shooting at a glob down the hall and another dead while small elementals swarmed from the glob (1/round). This was their introduction to the living spells which will keep popping up.
The battle commenced with the glob's damage reduction of 10/magic and spawning a small elemental each round it was an ordeal to survive, this would be part 3 in a multi-part series of "Batu's last stand" as he went down again. After that Lucky looted the bow from the fallen bee lady and they split up with Batu going back to try and convince the queen to come with them and Rush wanting to go back to the husband room to loot the stuff left in the cubbies.
In the throne room Batu saw the queen fighting two living cones of cold and he helped a bit with his bow. Then tried to get her to leave the hive. It went poorly but in the end the queen agreed to escort him outside.
In the husband's lounge there was a living charm monster spell slowly turning the husbands against the bee ladies and another hard battle ended with one bee lady and one husband alive and uncontrolled. Rush immediately looted everything he could and they ran away.
Outside the hive the escort for them was waiting with their pony, it was sixteen soldiers, three seers and three palanquins full of something. The others fled and Batu tried to get the queen to come escape with them. It didn't work as a huge glowing blog above them started wrecking the queen with a lot of spells too high level for lucky to identify.
Also outside were three other adventurers, (NPCs, replacment PCs or cohorts depending on need):
A female android with a bastard sword (magus)
A male dwarf with a warhammer and armor (cleric)
A male human with a longsword who was red (fighter/rogue) As in the dude looked like a ruster morph from Eclipse Phase, he's red.
They all had a good time running away as most of the hive ceased to be. then the PCs had a chat with the NPCs. Then they wandered over to the bee ladies to ask why the escort was so large and learned that the palanquins were full of Lucky's grub like children.
They saw the other NPCs were in a huddle and Rush demanded (intimidate) to know what they were talking about. The other NPCs left quickly for the Tin Holes and the PCs escorted the bee ladies back to town.
This is awesome!
"I shall name my children ... George."
"All of them?"
"Yes."
They arrived back in Gladshire after an uneventful trip, the bee ladies took their leave and went to secure lodgings for four months, apparently in that time they'll know where they want to put their hive.
The PCs met Gladwell again and none of them made their Sense Motive check so they didn't know he knew they'd have to trade a dude for the answer. He gave them money, except for Batu who they had a slightly immature horse for, Batu was not impressed and Gladstone promised to find a better one for him as soon as the horse traders came back (3d6 weeks).
They then took some time to learn about the "Tin Holes" place the NPCs had talked about, Rush was told that if they went there he could get his gun worked on with all kinds of metal and stuff and it would be awesome. Lucky bought a wagon and two mules (2-0 vote) for the party to stash their junk in. Counting Batu's allosaurus companion they were now pretty close to a circus as Rush's dinosaur eggs hatched and he was filled with motherly pride. Rush began to teach his new babies to stay in one place so they didn't get murdered by a cat.
The next day I introduced faction modifiers (bonuses/penalties with various factions) and the players immediately went to offer help to the bee ladies, (Lucky had a +2 bonus on this as he is the father of the next generation.) Then they met the town mage, James Allbright, a talented wizard with dreams of being an artist. In his studio/home they asked him about the blobby things and he told them he had no idea, they also pooled their money to get Lucky a wand of Color Spray. James promised them he'd keep his ears open for more talk of these glob things.
Satisfied they left and went to talk to the androids as part of the Talk to All the Things tour of town. Apparently the big thing with androids was learning trades, with many wanting to be adventurers as they'd heard many tales of adventurers doing quite well.
Wanting to earn rep with the androids, Rush took one on as an apprentice so the party got bigger with Lee (android male, 8hp +1 dex/int bonus -1 Cha bonus, pistol and 15 bullets). I promised Rush if he could keep the droid alive he'd get a +1 with the faction (a -2 if he dies).
Now having collected: one pony, two mules, two Compsognathus, one allosaurus and one android, the party set out on the ten day trip to Tin Holes.
On about day four, Batu noticed that the river was significantly smaller than he remembered it being. Maybe half the volume it should have. on the trail of a mystery they abandoned their goal and followed the river up.
The next day they found strange shrimp bugs in the water (isopods), Batu figured out that they were ocean, not river life and the party was kind of put off by the isopods creepy bugness.
The next night, on Lucky's watch he saw something big moving down the river, waking everyone else they all watched as something slowly moved down the river, stopping to attack things in the water every couple dozen meters.
It was a river drake and the party was kind of split on what to do, most thinking of running away. The drake didn't pay much attention to them but did stop to kill another isopod and the party decided to let it pass as it was big and scary and they were small and made of drake food.
The next day they found the river bank now strewn with isopods and fat vultures but no living bug things in the water. Further on they was circling vultures and below them a table someone had shaped out of the ground.
Thus ended game three.
Notes: I did the Tharie as fairly deterministic, in that they would never fight a vision of the future, to the point of some knowing where to stand and die. Live by the vision and all.
I think the river drake would not have killed them all. Not sure, as I had a bad habit of not properly making encounters for them with things like "Oh, it does have DR 10/magic, cool." So the party was extra wary of the drake.
Game Four:
Investigating the table the players found many fish, at the left end were some small native fish starting on the right of the table leading to more exotic fish from the south and ocean. Each fish was neatly bisected, some were missing organs and others had oddly shaped organs (the salt water fish had been altered to live in rivers, PCs didn't make the check to figure that out.)
The vultures circling lazily were quite talkative with a spell and told them that a big glowy thing had been hanging around the table, but he'd left a bad ammonia like smell so they were waiting for the fish to dry a bit and the smell to go away. Rush wanted to shoot one to make sure the others were telling the truth but Batu stopped him.
The players didn't know what to make of that but did notice that the river was empty of fish.
So they camped out there a bit away from the vultures. Because some things are not worth watching*
They were rewarded for their location by seeing a shooting star that night. It was real close, so close that it crashed within 20 miles to the West. Knowing that Numeria gets skymetal more than other places, they were off to see if it was claimable at first light.
About ten miles in they saw a plume of dust behind them, riders closing fast. They set up an ambush and Batu sauntered out to parley with whoever it was, they assumed someone else coming to claim the valuable metal. It was indeed four riders of one of the local tribes, the Grey Fang.
Words were exchanged and Batu challenged them for ownership of the assumed metal. The riders accepted his challenge while Rush waited to shoot one as soon as he was in range.
Then the riders announced the challenge was to get to the metal first and rode around the PCs and on towards the prize.
*A Sky Burial however is a thing to see, even only in photos.
Rush took the insult personally and they were off "chasing" the riders. Mollified that the riders likely could not run off with a significant amount they plodded onward by mule and pony.
After another five hours or so they got close and ditched the wagons, animals and android back while the three PCs belly crawled up to a mound about 50 feet away from the mounted guard (who messed up his perception roll) and the crater the meteor had caused. Since the riders were still there the players assumed mounds of glistening treasure awaited.
They planned their attack well, with Batu spelling the ones in the crater with entangle and Lucky and Rush taking out the sentry with musket and magic fire.
Batu immediately charged to get a view and attack the one archer who was separated from the others. But it was too far and he took three arrows which didn't kill him but was close. He cleft the third archer in almost twain and Lucky finished him off. Then they negotiated with the riders. Negotiate in this case meaning intimidate (with a +2 bonus for the two dead guys). The riders agreed to give up the meteor and run away after more threatening they agreed to leave their horses and take the pony, because the party thought it was funny.Then they had a five minute debate about running down and killing the escapees with Rush wanting to and Batu not wanting to waste the time and wanting to look upon his prize.
It was a long football-javelin shaped piece of Iron. That was stupid, it was clearly not natural and while "valuable" not nearly as much, but they did understand why the riders had given it up so easily. The group decided to camp there.
That night on the second watch, Rush spotted something glowing in the crater. After waking everyone else and putting on Batu's armor for a minute they sneakily as they could snuck to the edge to have a looksee.
Inside was the glowing blob thing that had attacked the beehive. It was casting some kind of spell on the javelin-football thing and paying the PCs no attention as they tried to puzzle out what to do. After about 10 min (good roll on the Legends/Lore spell time) the thing "looked" around a bit and vanished. Leaving it unsolved but at least not hostile this time. The players checked the javelin-football one last time and found that the iron had deteriorated significantly, Rush took a chunk which was now easier to break out with them to show a mage later and they went on to Tin Holes.
Before hitting Tin Holes, the party went back to the strange spring they saw earlier, Batu used air bubble and a big rock to swim down to the bottom, there he used a light spell to look around. He took a rope with him, the other end attached to a horse, on two pulls Rush would smack the horse and pull him back. He found a passage shoved by water from below and followed it. Through there he found a cavern with several magically sealed off tunnels, two drow corpses (drowned) and a large cylinder of unknown metal and markings. The cylinder's inside was lit up and there in he saw strange markings similar to the patterns of the androids. Also he saw about thirty of the small blobs, each one pumping out water at a surprising rate.
Unsure what to think or make of this, he grabbed the two corpses, shoved them to the rope, made a sled out of them and pulled twice. He took damage as the horse scrapped his back along the tunnel but he came out just moments after his second air bubble wore out.
Looting the drow was pretty profitable though the party wasn't sure how they had wound up there. Some spellcraft checks later they figured the blobs were creating water, but no idea why or how or any of that. Mystified but with loot now, they once again set off for Tin Holes.
Tin Holes was a mess. The above ground settlement was a sea of ruin, the stone buildings slagged into mud and the wood and people burned. The party spent some time rummaging the ruins of the inn, finding the cash box and a trapdoor. The trapdoor led to the wine cellar which also contained a little girl, her plush owlbear and makeshift shiv and some very stale food. The girl's name was Lauren and her parents had shoved her down the trapdoor when things got hairy, she just remembered beams hitting everything and was very scared.
Batu didn't know what to do so he told her he was her real father and he had come to get her. She believed him and now he had a daughter. Upstairs he kept asking her questions next to the burned corpses of her parents until she started crying loudly so he sent her out and searched what was left of the second floor, finding a key in her room and a lockbox in her parents room, the lockbox had some cash in it so score.
Leaving lauren with Lee and the other pets/animals the party went through the destroyed doors to the city, which was flooded with fresh running water. They made their way through the ruins, again seeing a lot of blasted corpses as well as following the current to a large melted hole in the end of one of the main streets. This seemed to be a runoff which kept the whole place from filling up. There the party spied a grappling hood, it had gouged a deep furrow in a floating corpse and caught on the hole but the rope appeared to have broken off. The party correctly assumed that the other adventurers had been here and were washed away.
Moments later they were set upon by a giant water bug but the party managed to put it down without too much fuss.
Thus ended game five.
Game six started with a slow loot of the abandoned city with the occasional attack of a fat carrion bloated bug. The big prizes were some masterwork axes (for selling) an extra pretty suit of Torag emblazoned ceremonial armor (Rush's god) and two ingots of hot Siccitite (sp? the starmetal) in a cold box. Also the cigars, bourbon and magical lighter box of a now dead dwarven plutocrat.
They arrived at last at the source of the water, a ten foot magic circle on a wall open the the plain of water. From rubbing knowledge checks on it they figured it had been open for a couple of months, was putting out hundreds of gallons a second and was all magic and stuff.
I was totally ready to sic a big ol water elemental on them but then Lucky got a 20 on his spellcraft roll to close it and it simply closed. They waited an hour or so for the water to recede and the current to die down then went through the city to the hole in the wall where the water had been spilling.
Using pitons they anchored a rope. Then Rush slid down because it looked fun. He took 2d6 damage and came to a stop about 200 feet down in a wet cave. The others used the rope and did not take damage.
Finding the caves wet and empty they moved on, seeing the place that looked like a small tunnel burned by something and opened by a constant stream of water.
The caves ended in a thirty foot drop to a large pool of water with three naked drow floating in it. The shore had a dead minotaur and the remains of a fire made of drow clothes.
Looking further down, Rush spied the beginnings of a drow city under the hole, they begin to think that the whole city had drowned/been flooded.
Following the tunnel, it began to lead to crude stone work built for large creatures. Warned by seeing the minotaur earlier, they moved cautiously forward until they found a long corridor with a branch and an end in a larger room. They could hear movement and Rush snuck forward to see.
The room was pretty deep, with four minotaurs camped out in the middle just behind a line of bloodstains. The minotaurs had nice perception checks and three came to check on what was going on back there. Because for some reason Rush spoke giant he understood their talk. They were worried about an escape or rescue party.
Digression, a minotaur is CR 4 which would make it a boss monster for a level one party. No. It would curbstomp a level one party, maybe one round per player, maybe faster.
So the minotaurs charged, Lucky fired color spray at them and rush musketed while Batu sworded. They were having some success bottlenecking the beasts until I called for perception checks.
They heard a loud metal sound from the next room and a minotaur who was more or less stuck waiting in the back ran off. Batu decided it was time to break the line so he raged, ran after and took an axe to the back. But he did chase the minotaur down.
Rush then got cut right in half from a 45 point critical hit. Lucky started to run away again.
In the room Batu saw the other adventuring party (android/dwarf/red man) charging madly from a room to overwhelm the single injured minotaur.
Then he went back and aware that I was getting ready to hand out the mythic powers (we're using that book). He just ran up to the minotaur and did nothing. I should have left him dead.
The other party mopped up the wounded while Rush and Batu glowed back together having achieved their first mythic tier.
When they rose, they saw each other enveloped in a whitish glow, the same glow seemed to be reflected in the eyes of the others there which seemed to annoy Batu's player. Which made me happy.
And that was the end of game six.
Ah hell, I forgot the most important part.
After they shut down the portal, the big glowing blob thing showed up. It enveloped them, ignored their attacks and attempted to communicate with them, each hearing first "Question?" and then "Who and what?" before it vanished.
Yay for mythic sources.
Game seven was much quieter.
The party met up with the other party, the android was her usual calm, the dwarf was happy to be out and the red man was mildly psychotic having claimed one of the oversized axes and a giant manic grin.
The story was that they had also tried to mess with the gate, they had failed, the blob appeared, enveloped them then the gate washed them down the hole.
So other party names, android is Astl, the red man is Sam Carter, the dwarf is Thorl.
Sam's grapple line broke when all three of them hit the end of the rope at once, they were washed into the pool (used to be the roof of the drow city a couple hundred feet below) and they managed to pull Thorl out of the pool before his armor drowned him. They found many dead drow and fought a minotaur. Over the next few days (Sam was unsure because there's no light here, "What's a day? There's no light. I don't know anymore!") they found more minotaurs, most of them apparently lived up here as servants/buffers for the drow. But now that the city had drowned, they were acting up and claiming new authority.
They found a drow and talked? to him, Sam was not exact in what happened. But they learned that something had attacked the city, moving in from the North and laying waste before flying off, then the city started flooding. That was about three months ago.
Infodump over, the party decided to go back up to Tin Holes, using Rush's new found mythic jumping it was pretty easy to get up and back to the rope they had set up.
With the portal closed, the city was slowly draining, but still a ghost town.
The party came clean about looting the Torag armor (since Thorl was the new head priest for the town. Sam immediately ran off to see the sun and get drunk.
The party talked to the other party a bit more and headed above ground. They found Lauren and Lee had moved back to the wine cellar for better hiding.
Some more talking, Thorl said that about fifty villagers had been out when whatever happened and that they were coming back, he had also made a deal with Astl to get some androids moving in as new citizins, Lee was to talk to the androids and choose the ones to go.
After a day the party took an uneventful trip back to Gladshire.
In Gladshire they sold much of their loot, told Gladstone about Tin Holes. Rush said goodbye to Lee, having kept him alive long enough for the guy to count as a level 1 gunslinger and future cohort bait. Before they split ways, Rush outlined what is important in life:
1. The gun is good
2. Sex is good too
3. Have a cigar after sex
4. Don't take no guff from no one
5. Meticulous care of your weapon and safety are important
And that was what Lee would use to build his new personality/outlook.
Also in town was a caravan of slavers, the party visited, saw many slaves and Batu bought an accountant. At first he was going to learn about the defences of the slavers so the PCs could kill them all. Rush didn't like slavers apparently. Then they found that the slavers had about 40 guards in various levels of arms and armor and the plan was abandoned.
Rush went off to build things and Batu went off to buy things and talk to NPCs. A contingent of about seventy androids left for Tin Holes though Lee stuck around. The party hired an android to be their wagon guard. There were some rumblings in the android shanty town about something but no one investigated.
Then the next day the slavers left and the android city was completely empty.
The next day the androids came back, they had en mass attacked the slavers. They lost about forty or so people but killed everyone, looted the guards of arms and armor and let the slaves go. In Gladshire this was good or bad news depending on what you thought of androids, there were now less but they were better armed and had a taste of combat. Rush was proud of them. He and Lee had a conversation about gunning down people in full plate and neither could explain why everyone didn't use guns.
After that the party decided to head off to investigate where the androids might have come from. Armed with the idea of checking in the North East or at least North of Tin Holes.
But first Batu needed to figure out what to do with his new daughter. So we pulled out I think it was Inner Sea Magic because it had a big list of training places to send people. After a while he decided against the Red Mantis school (too evil) and the Arcanamarium (the student's goatee looked too silly) the Hellknights (she seemed too happy to join) and several others he settled on shipping her to the White Grotto with an android warrior to guard her paid for by the loot from her parents' lockbox.
We had some diagnostic combat on the road, with the first day having an ambush by two ogres who rolled silly well on their stealth and slapped the PCs around for a few rounds before dying.
The next combat was a flying chupacabra which was one round away from permakilling Rush by draining his CON when Batu brought it down. Thus begins the section where I never manage to get combat right. Oh wait, that happened back in game one.
Thus ended game seven and begun game eight.
The party met an orphan on the road to Tin Holes, played by our returning player. He is a cackling witch and I hate him. Anyway, after he used invisibility to check the party's wagon for loot he introduced himself to them. He and some other orphans had been going to Tin Holes since it was empty and they could claim houses there. Then owlbears had killed them all and only he escaped. I forget his character name but I think it was Toad boy? he has a toad named Toader because I was a meanie and made them roll for hit points.
After initial mistrust the party kept going to Tin Holes where they talked to more people, most interesting was the android Astl who said she felt a pull from the North but could not explain it. Further armed with this clue to do what they were doing, the party waited nicely for the boy to finish his crime spree (he was looting abandoned houses) and then headed up north to look for more clues.
They found the first clue about three days north in the ground showing signs of life. Batu knew this part of the land was pretty inhospitable as it was a badland and all. But there was even a little bit of grass.
The area covered a few miles so they spent the next few days searching it (riding around in a wagon and getting bored). After a bit they found some circling vultures and below them dead drow and a lot of castoff platemail.
When they moved to investigate, as we see coming, the plate mail animated and attacked them. And I learned to hate the misfortune hex.
Then they had a little bit of loot and a good night's sleep. Except Toad Boy who was met on watch or in a dream or something by The Royal Pant who played the saxaphone and promised the kid that he was well below what he'd need to survive but it's okay, he can give him powers, it's what friends do right?
So the kid got a mythic upgrade from the soul of the crawling chaos and nothing can go wrong with that.
The next day they checked around the drow's location and found a concealed entrance to the underdark. Going inside they found a bunch more dead drow signs, no dead drow per se but a lot of blood trails leading down.
Naturally they followed it down.
Oh Lawd, this is great stuff. Absolutely nothing can go wrong.
Game nine started with a totally narratively justified trip outside to bump into a wandering alchemist. After noticing his PC halo they saw that he looked trustworthy and he joined the party.
Back in the tunnel they followed the drag marks further until they came to a great widening of the tunnel. There was a great chromed wall. Rising to fill the opening and clearly going beyond the space provided.
There was a great doorway from which a vast ramp came out. The whole thing glittered in their torchlight in Art Deco* glory.
The drag marks and dried blood lead in so obviously they charged in. Finding themselves in an outer ring they kept going past the inner barrier and found themselves in a vast open space/room.
Toad boy cast some kind of magic light spell and sent the light 100 feet ahead. They saw only emptiness. Leaving the wall behind the group headed straight forward with the light circling them to check for ambushes. They also spread out as though fearful a grenade or mortar would strike in their midst.
Instead they were swarmed by bugs. Large semi-roach-semi-beetle-semi-xenomorph looking things. With the mthic agile template and the "act on two innitiaves a round" power too. You wern't there to see it but I had my troll face on.
The battle was pretty brutal. The bugs didn't hit hard, but they hit often, slopped some kind of fort save requiring substance on the players** and buzzed around to swarm anyone who invoked any kind of arcane power. Oh and they resisted spells left and right while not being overly put off by the misfortune hex.
No one died but spells were cast, bombs were thrown and Rush's player was musing why they had chosen to die instead of hugging the walls and moving with something at their backs.
After the battle and a bit more blindly marching forward they came to the first three of eight "lumps" of material. Large, the size of a city block (from the Ultimate Campaign district grid) and about five feet tall it was an enigma. But the party did discover that they had come across three of them in a row.
Much more worrying was a corpse they found concealed under some black magic aura damping cloth. It was a man with some empty wands, an odd metal book that you folded more than turned the pages and a lot of dried blood. Whoever he was, he'd evacuated every bit of blood and everything else through any orifice.
Toad boy read some of the book with a read languages spell, it was a journal of a man named Tollan. He and Jolinar had been in the city and seemed to have come from wherever it came from. Things gleaned from the book:
"So far it is un-awoken but we both know that won't last and we don't have the tools to kill it."
"Perhaps it is not where but ..."
"THE MOON IS WRONG."
"180 degree defenses have been primed, something has approached the wall."
"They're here, a larva must have been dormant in the ark."
"Jolinar is immune, lucky bastard."
"The plague is at least quick, it hurts like I have never imagined."
The players seemed more nervous about the fort saves they'd been making (DC 36).
Onward.
After moving past the first of the lumps, they found two more with a great silvery tower rising to a rounded point. A little over half a mile past the door they had found the center and the tower.
Then they were ambushed by bugs, because it was still (to me) funny to just go "Wham, pounce and flank the witch."
Entering the tower, they were bathed in light as they moved through the gleaming corridors and long dormint magic effects came back to life.
Finding the choice between a ramp up and a ramp down, both spiraling along the outer edge of the inside rooms they went down.
*F$@$ yeah Art Deco, not only do I love the aesthetic but as this involves future things it was the perfect way to foreshadow/show such things.
**The "End Plague," a major part of the fall of a civilization. However it was not built to target normal humans, those didn't exist where it happened. Though I may have allowed it to target Azlanti humans.
So going down they found a large room, below the floor was a tank with a shimmering field above it. At one point in the tank there was a contraption with one of the glowing blobs in it. As they watched, some of the goop in the vat was syphoned off into the blob and an android was created. It didn't seem to be "awake" and then another glob rose from the floor, enveloped it and it vanished. Toad boy identified it as a teleport effect.
The players had solved the origin of the androids.
Also in the room was a vast hanging apparatus, designed to hold something large. It was empty.
But there wasn't much else in the room. So they went back up.
Bug ambush.
Going to the second floor, they found the floor coated with something horrible, some kind of goop. Bravely they carried on to the next landing and Batu looked over the rail and saw a very large monstrosity, sort of looking like a huge version of the bugs but with giant translucent glowing sacs bulging off one side and too large for the doors.
They had found the mother. They had also found the drow bodies, which were in said translucent sacs. one was fresh, one had half melted and the third was mostly bug. So they also learned where the bugs came from and how the mothers bred more.
Rush spent ten minutes telling them about the plan to only use ranged attacks and pop up from either side of the room, attack and vanish since it couldn't follow them. Then Batu charged it and the others followed.
Highlights of the battle:
So many bombs on the smaller bugs that kept coming up the stairs.
Rush complaining that no one listens to him.
Toad boy summoned a giant frog which pulled a drow corpse out of the mother and choked on it.
Batu took most of the damage as per usual.
When they killed it the mother crystallized and burst sending waves of some horrid flid washing over the party and down the stairs.
So the players had cleared the tower. Following the spire up to the top they entered a strange glass encased room. Through the glass they could see the city clearly despite the darkness.
In the center of the room was a single dias with green lights moving through it coming from several keys. Each key had different symbols on it, some the players recognized and others took a linguistics roll to identify as writing from far away lands. All of the words seemed to be at home together meaning very little to most of them.
So Rush and Toad boy began to press things while Batu yelled at them. Finally they managed to push one saying similar to "awaken" and the giant metal lumps slowly grew to the form of two story "blank" buildings*.
Toad boy figured out a command for "release light" and dozens of globs appeared in the dome creating a mini-sun [sunlight spell? don't have notes].
And they had taken the city with only a sadly unimpressive bug ambush when they slept left to go.
So they got another mythic tier and thus ended game nine.
*Batu's player has been bugging me to use Ultimate Campaign so here was their freebie, the blank buildings would serve to halve the cost of buildings within the dome.
Game ten began with the party going back to Gladshire.
With a quick detour to investigate some other travelers they had sighted on the trip. The travelers proved to be a band of about thirty rough looking men, about ten of them on horse and all of them well (and similarly) armed and armored. The players tried to figure out who they were, not locals at least as they moved to parlay with them.
Then Ribbit (I learned Toad Boy's name) cast a zone of truth which more or less no second level warrior can stand against. (DC 15 or 15 I think). The truth came out, this was a group of crusaders who were making a run for it after something had gone bad with their commander up in the direction of the World Wound. The players had a quick huddle and decided to make nice with the potential citizens/subjects. They told them where the valley from the first adventure was and told them to hand out there for a month or so and rest up and they'd be back. The deserters having nowhere to go and nothing to do but run took the advice and went off to camp with fresh water and catfish.
Afterword I was kind of musing about if a group of low level mookks could take the party or not.
Which proved not quite a challenge but the Technic League;s tribute train was in Gladshire, the outskirts full of freaks with metal arms or strange red eyes. The players gave them the stink eye but moved on.
Back in Gladshire at last they spoke to the androids (future citizens of the city, whatever they were going to call it) and bought some supplies. Then they stopped buying because we had a talk about when and how their new town would be discovered and what they could do to hurry or hinder that.
After that Rush went to see Gladwell to pick up the bounty on their very rotten chipucabra head and secure merchant rights to any new towns. Gladwell was drunk so not much of use happend otherwise.
Gladwell was happy to offer Rush any promises of contracts and the bounty for the Chupacabra (after he ordered his assistant to burn the head), he was happy drunk because the tribute train was rolling through, the various offerings had been accepted and life would go back to another generally corrupt year for him.
Batu saw the bee ladies again and they told him they were a few months away from finding their new hive location. Naturally they could not go now, it wasn't time yet.
After an unfriendly talk with some of the Technic League people Rush realized they could sell the piece of the meteor they found earlier as the League seemed interested in these things.
The selling took about an hour with Batu not wanting to sell to the League because f&~! those guys, Rush wanting more money and Ribbit trying to get in on the action. In the end Rush sold the piece for about 10 platinum, Ribbit put him to sleep and split it two ways and Batu had nothing to do with it. The player of the Alchemist was out that day so he sat in a corner and did drugs, which is what I assume alchemists do.
The players were now making choices about their city, they wanted it to stay secret, the League would take something that odd/advanced from them with no thought at all. They wanted to build a second city on top of it as a decoy. Ribbit wanted an orphanage so he could have more orphan friends, Rush wanted to become some kind of merchant lord and Batu wanted to raise an army to challenge the Sovereign.
After talking to Lee, he agreed to take 200 androids and make for the city, giving them a population of about 230 androids, 30 deserters and the PCs. Clearly they needed more people but they needed them quietly or at least in a way that didn't tell anyone they were building a city.
The answer was to go to the River Kingdoms, kill slavers and take the slaves as new citizens. Because once you count people as loot, the world becomes a much richer place.
So with a wagon the party set out for the River Kingdoms on a fairly uneventful journey. At last arriving at a ferry near Shorelake, a large city with a reputation for selling slaves and corruption. The party dicked around with the ferryman until Batu pointed out that one piece of gold was cheap for taking a wagon across the river (for them).
In Shorelake they spent a bunch of their money on farming/building things, far enough from the League to keep their plans from any ears. Then Rush gave a big bag of gold to a large policeman and suggested that the town guard get drunk and not respond to anything sounding like gang warfare. It was a good sack of gold.
So the players spent the rest of the day wandering through the various slave camps deciding which one to loot, they settled on a band called "Crimson Revenge" that seemed to have more middle/upper class people enslaved and the PCs wanted a more cosmopolitan base for their city. The rest of the day was spent buying weapons, mostly rusty machetes and clubs with nails in them with a few shivs thrown in.
...
So I was still struggling to get the whole combat thing to settle into challenging with a chance of death more than a cake walk or TPK. This would turn out to be the former.
The players waited until dark and Ribbit turned invisible because that's a thing Witches can do for fun apparently, to scout from the air. While Batu and Rush moved into position, Ribbit opened the locks on the slave pens and emptied all the weapons from his handy havesack into the pens. Then he opened combat with a lightning bolt, which was the signal for Batu to charge the guards while rush started shooting people.
A few quick rounds went by while the mythic gargoyle who ran the show drank his potion of invisibility and slipped out of his tent to mess the PCs up. It was important to my plans because I'd given him "Step Up" as well as his mythic power to use a surge to make a movement and grab an opp attack. Which surprised Ribbit quite a bit when a gargoyle showed up and ruined his day.
But Rush, being a dick, had said he was holding his action to shoot the next dude who he could since he didn't want to move around a bunch. And the gargoyle was now in his crosshairs.
Rush proceeded to crit him, spend legendary surges and one shot him. The End.
So yeah, the battle went quickly from there when the slaves surged out, Batu's player was a bit drunk, so he was trying to make a speech, the guards didn't understand and stabbed him. Which made him angry so he stabbed them and fed them to his allisorius.
The party took the slaves and ran off into the night after setting the camp on fire. Later they made diplomacy checks and talked to the people a bit to try and figure out how many they could get. In the end they wound up with about eighty people, mostly human and half-elf to join their new city and thus ended game ten.
Game eleven started as the PCs headed back towards their city, tentatively named "Toad Steel" for reasons of letting a child suggest names. Rush's and the alchemist's player were absent leaving Ribbit and Batu to navigate the land with a caravan of freed slaves and a map to a possible dragons sighting they had picked up back in Gladshire.
Taking the time to get to know them, they found a few who stood out of the various slaves, the camp they raided did have a rep for taking rich people from far south and selling them up here.
And I forgot most of their names but let's try:
Nia?- merchant's daughter, captured by orcs raiding trading companies
??? Von Graff - Cherlish poet, good with people (skills) but kind of useless, very happy not to be a slave.
Stubby - big human missing three fingers, was from a fancy cooking school before a rival drugged him and sold him up north.
Grig - blacksmith, kind of old.
And a gaggle of unskilled nobles with levels in aristocrat. Figuring they'd need all kinds to build a city the party kept moving for a week or so before finding the area around the lair.
After settling the caravan in the best defensible location they could find in the badlands they started searching for likely spots. Realizing they had no idea what kind of dragon to expect they needed about another week to find a passage leading down to check out.
They moved carefuly through the upper caves, seeing the signs of battle around but nothing worth taking and no bodies.
As they found the lower caves, it got hotter, unable to explain it they assumed it was the dragon's fault and kept wandering around. Eventually getting ambushed by a magma dragon. The fight was great, with highlights being:
Batu's player rolling for Rush, who missed every shot.
The witch getting too close while invisible and learning that not only do they have all the senses but dragons breath hurts.
The witch spending the rest of the battle running as fast as his little legs could carry him.
The witch trying to slow the dragon down with a swarm of toads, they didn't last long.
The party retreating to the upper cave to ambush the pursuing dragon, only to have the dragon dig up under Batu and chomp fest began.
Batu almost dying after killing the dragon when it disgorged magma everywhere (because: haha.)
The battle won, the players charged into the darkness ahead to find the hoard. First they found a large stage like area, some skill checks and fire damage later they learned it was impregnated with hot siccitite and apparently where the dragon liked to lounge, the players also figured out it was where people came to pay tribute.
Then they found the hoard and the blind guardian, Hurlom, a blind minotaur fire mage with a staff of fire.
Being in the "recruit all the things" phase of kingdom building the party spent a lot of time talking to him to get him to join them. He agreed, his tribe long ago eaten by the dragon and him with nothing to do except count and polish the dragon's hard anyway. The party also decided it'd be mean to make him keep track of their own treasure back at the city. [Full disclosure, I put him in because a minotaur mage seems neat and the staff of fire was there if the party was really weak after the fight, he could blast them for last laughs.]
Hurlom took his clan's old axe from the collection (the dragon had demanded each clan close enough to be afraid of it give it an axe with their clan's symbol on it as marks of fealty) and joined the party. He sucks with the axe but it's his.
Then the freed slaves got to work hauling the loot and dragon corpse out, the PCs menaced them a bit by doing a puppet show with the dragon's head about how all the loot was theirs now and only the foolish would touch it.
The nobles stole all the copper pieces anyway to have something to play cards and dice with.
Then the long trip home.
Oh Hai, it's us the Black Wind* tribe. We're also barbarians but we ride megaraptors. So 'sup?
The party encountered a raiding party heading off to the River Kingdoms in search of slaves and loot. It was pretty tense as they bantered back and forth with the Black Wind riders wondering if the party was raid worthy and the party learning that Diplomacy was not a good skill on them but Intimidate worked well.
In the end Batu talked them down and they galloped off on their dinosaurs and I didn't get to see if a party of 3rd levels or so could wipe the PCs. (I think it might have worked.)
The Black Wind Tribe will become important later on.
At last reaching their home they dumped the treasure in the tower, charged Astl with looking after it, made some city plans and sent Lee out with nebulous money to buy nebulous supplies for nebulous buildings. He'd be gone a while because they sent him good and far to get the supplies quietly.
Then they learned that there was a back door to the city and it lead down a tunnel. Naturally they went to investigate. Which lead to a few hours of walking down until they found a "guard cave" which had been boarded up with only a single large door. A knock got them a suspicious Minotaur who after some bribing allowed them into to see the "king" a giant with two heads and too much attitude. They bribed the king and were given the story of the place, a year or so ago the blobs came through sweeping aside defenses and murdering everything as they passed. Then came the unending flood (which ended a few months ago) and things got bad. Then the slaves uprose and claimed the high ground for themselves. Now they occasionally ventured into the post-apocalyptic city of their former masters to hunt the survivors and have fun.
The PCs bribed the king some more and were allowed into the hunting grounds but not warned about anything.
The PCs found a mile tall cavern, carved from black rock and filled with jagged spires and the ruins of spires. Water sat stagnant on the ground only a few feet deep filled with corpses from the initial attack of the blobs. The PCs checked a squat tower and found little besides looted corpses and an encounter didn't happen when I checked the monster stat book.
[Full disclosure: I had forgotten that a banshee was way too dangerous to sic on a sixth(ish) level party. Which is a shame because it would have fit perfectly.]
After a while they went to investigate a large intact spire. Being clever the Witch took the party's rope and went to the top to tie it off so they could do a crisis entry. Which worked fine until a trio of drow came out to ask what was going on. The kid spoke undercommon so it was okay for a bit, then he had to lead the drow around the top deck away from the rope so his friends could get up there without having the rope cut. At last they were at the top and the kid had managed to get an offer to negotiate from the drow. No one really knew what they wanted but it seemed like a good idea to talk so they went in.
Thus ends game Eleven.
*Which is a Masks shout out.
Game twelve started with Toad Boy gone and Rush back in. Which turned bad quickly because he wanted to murder the drow and take their stuff and the rest of the party had told me they were negotiating so while the players bickered I was frantically stating up some drow for a fight. Then Rush wandered off to loot corpses while Batu stayed and talked with what was left of the drow council and got the story on the place.
A bunch of months ago one of their tunnels to the surface had been blocked off by a shiny metal and then their scouts all died (they assume, no one came back) and then a bunch of blobs drifted into their city and ruined the hell out of it. One of the survivors identified the blobs as casting powerful spells over and over (disintegrate, flesh to stone, anti-magic field, chain lightning, earthquake) there was a really big glowy white one that kind of did anything and just drifted through obliterating anything that got in its' way. Then the water came, it didn't stop, so now that it's stopped the city is only under a few meters of receding water, but it was about fifteen meters at the height of the flood.
They were haughty and smug and didn't warn the party about why you leave the dead alone here. They did eventually agree to give the party the lair of the Minotaurs and their king but didn't have an opening to ask for the crown back. Batu decided that it would be a trading post like thing with the drow once they got their s#%! together again. They said they were going to, that a massive force of settlers and soldiers were on their way.
So Rush was making a nice mithral mace his when the corpse he was looting rose as a ghost. You see this was a problem here because not all of the blobs did immediate damage, some left surprises.
he fled the tower, used his big old acrobatics roll to go through a window on the main tower and run topside where he could make the ghost everyone's problem.
Batu raged at it, the alchemist bombed it, toad boy sat out and the drow all hunkered down until the party killed it.
Rush whined about wanting to kill the drow some more and the party got bored of the idea of fighting dozens of ghosts and went off to the lair of the minotaurs to kill them all.
At the lair they met the chief, a newly mythiced Ettin with an attitude problem. They started talking until Rush shot him in his right head and Batu charged up to get the other one. Then they slaughtered the minotaurs in the room (what a difference a few levels make) and they ran amok in the little place.
The raid over they found a thing of interest, a drow matriarch sans legs. She was a (higher than the ones in the city) drow but was also pretty scared because she had been captured and now her underlings would likely kill her. The party decided to take her back to their keep, with Rush coming up with the solution of strapping her to Hurlom the blind minotaur to make life easy for both.
Back at the city there were nebulous building materials bought from seven towns/outposts/merchants to spread the shopping around and keep a low profile. Also a letter to Rush from the Red Man Sam.
The letter told Rush that Sam had found the temple he had woken up in, a wat style place that only appeared during the full moon. It was in a giant mangrove swamp and he was off to see what it was. That was a month ago but the party decided they wanted to go check it out.
They set up the city a bit more, promoted Lee to marshal(?) I forget the UC term but the lawman, because he had a gun and stogie so he seemed like a good sheriff idea.
Batu declared free religious worship and Astl brought a small blob cult to his attention He was uninterested but Rush went to their shrine with great haste, waited for it to be empty and carved his face on one of the alters.
A few preparations later they set off with a wagon full of NPCs so the PCs didn't have to stand watch.
The trip through the East of the River Kingdoms was pretty uneventful and the party skipped Daggermark because who cares?
Then they found the swamp and we ended game 12.
So the alchemist showed back up and the party headed into the swamp to find the temple. They did swap their wagon for a swamp boat, for which they paid two gold and got the promise that they could switch back when they came back.
Moving through the swamp, the party was on guard and thanks to some 20's on perception spotted the nagaji (spelling?) watching them. Well, Rush and the alchemist did. They spoke in hill giant for a moment and then bombed and shot the dude dead. Batu and the NPCs were surprised.
Looting the body they found one of a kinsight goggle set. Rush put it on and saw another part of the swamp and an ambush party in it. As they figured out what it did, like the beginnings of tacnet, the alchemist stood on the corpse and gave a thumbs up. Then they saw the other goggle started moving.
The party moved on extra wary for an ambush. Which happened. The alchemist went nova pretty quick and the fight wasn't as hard as I had wanted.
They pressed on and after a day of floating along with mosquitoes and mangroves everywhere they found a totem pole like thing which was identified as a warning sign, apparently the locals didn't want to go past this point. More searching found another about two hundred yards off, they ringed a place.
The place was a giant flat slab of red stone, perfectly flat and empty, a good place to find such a temple. The party settled down and waited for the full moon that night.
And as the light of the moon moved across the water to strike the stone, the temple appeared upon the slab. Not huge but holding nine rooms connected by sealed walkways in the Wat style and all made from the strange red rock.
Ordering the NPCs to hold the door, the players stepped inside the first room.
Nice touch.
The temple glowed and inside was lit by lightning elementals circling the ceilings of the domed rooms. Each of the nine rooms was a large dome laid out in a 3x3 grid and connected with covered walkways all made from the odd red stone. Through each walkway and chamber ran lines of gold in the floor crackling with electricity The central dome was sealed and they could see that the electricity flowing along the floor wasn't going into the central dome.
They checked out the three first rooms and found them the same. Also finding some fallen stones blocking the flow of electricity to the center dome. A bit of damage to Batu later they had begun unclogging the power flow. But then they arrived in a new room where the elementals were fluttering oddly and flickering. As the party removed the blockage here the elementals swarmed down upon them.
And thus began one of the hardest fights the players had. The elementals were an appropriate challenge rating and the three on three seemed fair but poor Batu kept getting tripped and op attacked and Rush wasn't taking things seriously so he tried to stab them with his scimitar "Senior Burn" instead of shooting.
Rush figured it out when the alchemist stabilized at -4 hp and switched to his gun, Batu was already in rage killing his but down to all sorts of low hp. Being a giant softy I let the witch (player was off gallivanting the world) to give each of them a cure light wounds spell/hex.
The party went nova, spending most of their surges/spells/bombs to limp away from the fight. And now I have a new favorite summon.
The rest of the temple was pretty empty, just the occasional lightning elemental looking scary to make them jump and that's about it. After a bit more they repaired or at least unblocked the paths for the electricity to reach the middle and found the tunnels clear.
Cautiously following the paths into the middle chamber they found it vast, possibly vaster than the outside. The center was a large platform carved of grey-white rock and covered in Azlanti glyphs.
Then they were set upon by a very mummified Lamia matriarch and two copper automatons. The Witch translated the mummy as asking for tickets but the party didn't have any so they just had to fight her. She even had two magic swords, a lawful and a a human-bane sword because it was funny.
But the fight wasn't as pitched as I'd hoped. Even with her spells, the players were better placed and more concerned with focus fire and so the caretakers of the place finally fell.
From some of the glyphs and the tattoos on the lamia's corpse the Witch figured that the place had been some kind of transport station but was built to be hidden, they figured that hooking to to the light of the full moon meant that it could only be detected once a month giving people less chance to find it in a random or even focused sweep.
Figuring that Sam the red man had been this way the month before (they found some debris from his battle*)
The party stepped on the platform which started to glow softly, a magic mouth spell told them (in Azlanti) they had one minute until departure.
As they began to fade, time stopped. Not from the platform but just stopping. (Mythic Time Stop spell). Batu and Rush didn't notice for a moment that the mists had stopped moving or that their companions were frozen but then the giant blob appeared in front of them.
*He just used his stealth and UMD with some scrolls of dimensional door and exponential retreat.
The blob called itself "Twelfth" but didn't know why. It asked them why they were following the other eye to another world.
They didn't know what it meant.
It explained that it was okay, it still had two eyes on this world.
Things were not clearer.
It didn't know where it came from, it's memories were oddly constructed, it was aware that it had been "activated" and that it had followed others of it's kind but they were not it's kind, but tools.
Then it found the sunlight and drifted, unsure. It had seen them twice and they seemed to be in good order and were excellent eyes.
They at this point realized that listening to it wasn't going to get them any answers (they were right, it's alien) and asked why it attacked Tin Holes and the Tharie hive.
It said that it was not truly aware when it attacked the Tin Holes area but that it felt threatened. It attacked the Tharie because it felt things watching it through the protections it had woven about itself.
The players told it that it should not have attacked Tin Holes/the hive and it asked them if they would like the damage undone. They said yes and a lot of skulls appeared. Then five of them turned into naked dwarves and vanished back to Tin Holes. This kept happening, sometimes humans or tharie or others but over around an hour the pile of skulls shrunk and the resurrected were teleported back.
As it was doing this it asked them again why they were going to the other world. They learned a bit more about it (it didn't know much about anything but seemed to be able to both read their minds and build knowledge to answer questions as they asked).
As they came to the last few skulls, but before Rush could ask for a +5 to everything, something else walked into the room.
Two ghaele, one blue and white the other black and orange walked through the frozen time and began to move closer to the blob. The time stop spell stopped working.
The witch identified them as the Steward of Skein who serve the goddess of death. The PCs didn't know what they were doing there but then the teleport gate activated and they started to fade out as one of the stewards fired a bow at the blob. Rush yelled at the returned people that he was totally the one behind the resurrection and everything went black with swirling lights and a feeling of both being out of body and great vertigo overwhelmed the party.
And then they were in a red walled cave where the air was thin, it was cold and the wind did not move.
They made it to Akiton and got a level.
More or less, thus ended game 13.