Cleaning Up
May. 21st, 2003 12:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothTonight was my underdark D+D game, in which the players managed to pretty much do everything right and mess up the plot by killing the villain. But that's okay, I hadn't written the plot yet, anyway.
One player was absent, so his character was feeling a bit under the weather. Easier than me trying to play him without a character sheet. Grumble grumble. I should make them all give me electronic copies or something.
After making sure the clerics in Haelen's Reach were on top of the Xill Egg problem, May and Abbey tried to convince Belrath that his 'wife' Kasmine was really a Succubus. He refused to believe them, and eventually stormed off in a huff to go sulk in his (still planeshifting) tower.
The party stuck around town in case the Xill came back, but they seemed to actually be exterminated. In the morning, they went to see Belrath about tracking down his demonic wife and killing her, although they didn't plan to tell him that.
But he'd already left, and his tower looked slightly more ransacked than the party had left it on their first pass through. So they let it shift them to the alternate plane, and searched the rooms they hadn't gotten to while rescuing the villagers. The rooms looked emptied out, as if whoever had been there had decided to leave, taking all their things.
Sakura, who had batwings, flew up to the ceiling of the cavern and found a passage leading outside, which revealed a not-quite-so-smoky vista of what appeared to be the side of an infinitely large volcano, with another volcano floating in the air overhead, an unknown distance away. Strange demonic creatures prowled the landscape, as if hunting for something. After a bit of argument about the futility of tracking someone who can fly and/or teleport, they flew back inside, trusting that the illusionary wall over Kasmine's little lair would continue to fool the no-doubt powerful creatures outside.
Sakura then decided to use her ranger training to look for tracks. Over the course of an hour, she managed to piece together a partial sequence of events. A creature shapeshifting between demonic and humanoid form had left the empty bedroom/torture chamber, flown to Belrath's tower, either fought with or had sex with Belrath, and then the two of them had walked out the front door into the underdark, where they skirted the town and headed for Haven. Imp tracks were also found scattered about.
So the party decided to follow immediately, taking the road through the uranium mines, through the unknown alien crypts, and across the metal catwalks spanning the void inside a giant geode until, tired and sore from a very long day's march, they came to an inn carved out of a geode crystal (the third inn they'd passed on their journey). Asking after a married couple carrying a large load of supplies, they heard that perhaps Belrath and Kasmine were sleeping in that very inn -- and a locate object cast on a memorable diagram from Belrath's research confirmed it and pinpointed the room.
A little quick talking let them specifically rent two rooms near their targets', and they began plotting their assault. Halfway through the planning, Abbey noticed something invisible watching them, which changed the plans a bit. Through it all, listening at the wall of the adjoining room revealed that the pair was still in their room, apparently waiting for the party to attack.
So the attack was planned out as a complete surprise. Abbey got 'see invisible' cast on her, and Slee opened the door for her so that she could rush out and slaughter the imp on guard before it could squeak a warning telepathically, at the same time as May knocked the door and Sakura slammed it open, carrying a silence spell, at which point Loren cast a circle or protection against evil, focused inwards, into Belrath and Kasmine's room to prevent them from simply teleporting away.
It all went off without a hitch, and Kasmine and Belrath found themselves hedged into a tiny room and silenced (completely ruining thier plan of teleporting behind the party to get the jump on them as soon as the imp shouted a warning -- stupid imp). There were four more invisible imps flitting around, but they couldn't leave either, and without access to their spells Kasmine and her imps were slaughtered without even really injuring the party, and Belrath was tied up and gagged.
The imps regenrated, but only one of them got conscious before Loren's Bless on Abbey's rapier brought a permanent end to their evil. It hid in a bag in a pile of crap, but was eventually ferreted out and killed as well.
Belrath was livid, but a Charm spell was enough to get him to at least *talk* to the party. He cried over Kasmine, and once ungagged (stripped of material components and still bound, and with Loren standing over him ready to bonk him if he tried casting) told a somewhat plausible story, about how the clawey, batwinged form Kasmine has reverted to after her death was her true form, because she was a Cambion. Like Sakura. Everyone had thought she was evil, but only Belrath had known the truth.
"So why was she keeping you prisoner?" they asked. Because her abusive father had kidnapped her mother and spirited her away to Gehenna. Kasmine and he had been researching a way to open a gate to Gehenna so they could travel to reach her, but had accidentally opened a more permanent portal in the form of the flickering tower. Also, her father had been waiting for them, and had captured them both and subjected them to horrible torture while kidnapping villagers and turning them into Xill.
"So if she's not a demon, why did she have five imps serving her?" they asked. The imps, Belrath related, had freed her after the party had killed off the major demons guarding the complex, since they needed someone more powerful to serve. Kasmine and Belrath and the imps had been heading off to make a new life in Haven when the party had assaulted them and slaughtered her.
The party finally secured Belrath's cooperation by agreeing to take Kasmine's body to a temple in Haven, where they'd pay to have her raised if she was, in fact, a Cambion, but if they identified her as a Succubus Belrath would have to come to terms with the fact that he was an enchanted dupe that she'd been using to get at the villagers. Since he had no other hope of getting his true love raised, he agreed, even though he hated the party.
So the party shoved Kasmine's body in a Handy Haversack, cleaned up all the blood and ichor with Prestidigitation, and had Abbey bluff her way past the inn guards with a sack full of dead imps to toss over the edge of the catwalk. ("Um... I'm just tossing some rotting food." "That doesn't... smell... like food..." "Yeah, it's really crap. That's why I'm tossing it.") Since the entire fight had taken place under a spell of silence, no one else in the inn really had a clue that anything had happened, and they slept the rest of the night in peace.
The next day, after six more hours walking through winding caverns, past tent-city slums, they reached Haven, where they were immediately arrested.
Or at least, Abbey was arrested, for possession of contraband Drow artifacts in the form of the Drow hand crossbow still strapped to her arm. She managed to talk the guards into letting the party complete some urgent business before being taken to the station for a thorough search, so they went to the temple while she went to prison.
At the temple, a low-ranking priest identified Kasmine's body as a Devil, specifically an Erinyes, and Belrath as an enchanted dupe, although not apparently with magic, at least not anymore. He noted that Devils were patient creatures that worked for the long term, though, and over the long term simple charm spells never cut it -- the target had to be actually corrupted to evil.
Belrath still refused to accept that Kasmine had been evil even then, but a deal was a deal and he at least claimed to accept the ruling. The priest offered to deprogram Belrath for a worthy fee, but the party demurred, either because they were unsure that deprogramming was ethical or because they were skinflints, take your pick.
Then they reported to the station (badgered by the guard who'd gone along to make sure they reported back to the station) and more Drow artifacts (the adamantium shortswords) were discovered in Slee's possession, so he was arrested too. The others were free to leave, for the moment, but the guards offered a friendly suggestion (since the party were the documented liberators of Halen's Reach) that they get a lawyer to defend their case, and maybe get the court date moved up so that Abbey and Slee wouldn't have to rot in jail for a week.
Sakura and May were in no hurry to spring Abbey and Slee, though, and instead decided to fly back to the Geode and see what was really at the bottom, since the gnomes had only ghost stories about the hapless wizards who'd tried to find out.
To conserve magic, they used a ring of featherfall to float down. For four hours. After four hours, May noted that he'd need TWO fly spells just to get them back up to the top, so if they were going to explore any further they might want to consider resting here.
A lateral fly spell quickly revealed that they were near the bottom, though, so down they went, following the crystal-encrusted wall of the geode. With the crystals for referents, they managed to stop in time, just before plunging into a flat black expanse of nothing, out of which emerged a trio of purplish tentacled creatures to assualt them. Their fly outran the critters' natural levitation, though, and May plinked them to death with fireballs and magic missiles.
Further experimentation revealed that the bottom of the geode was a pool of negative energy, or possibly a portal to the negative energy plane, or something along those lines, as everything that touched it -- except for the geode crystals, some of which protruded out of it like islands -- quickly rotted away and was destroyed.
They did a quick flyover of the center of the blackness (dangling a rope to allow them to avoid flying into it by accident, since 'nothing' looked like 'nothing' even under darkvision) but failed to find a creepy floating city of evil. More Xeg'yi emerged to menace the party, but they just flew away, easily outdistancing the pokey energons.
Eventually, May cast a few Fly spells and after several hours they got to the top, in time to check into an inn and sleep again, dreaming of patenting the purple crystal as a negative energy shield, since the gnomes seemed to believe in that sort of thing...
last week next week
One player was absent, so his character was feeling a bit under the weather. Easier than me trying to play him without a character sheet. Grumble grumble. I should make them all give me electronic copies or something.
After making sure the clerics in Haelen's Reach were on top of the Xill Egg problem, May and Abbey tried to convince Belrath that his 'wife' Kasmine was really a Succubus. He refused to believe them, and eventually stormed off in a huff to go sulk in his (still planeshifting) tower.
The party stuck around town in case the Xill came back, but they seemed to actually be exterminated. In the morning, they went to see Belrath about tracking down his demonic wife and killing her, although they didn't plan to tell him that.
But he'd already left, and his tower looked slightly more ransacked than the party had left it on their first pass through. So they let it shift them to the alternate plane, and searched the rooms they hadn't gotten to while rescuing the villagers. The rooms looked emptied out, as if whoever had been there had decided to leave, taking all their things.
Sakura, who had batwings, flew up to the ceiling of the cavern and found a passage leading outside, which revealed a not-quite-so-smoky vista of what appeared to be the side of an infinitely large volcano, with another volcano floating in the air overhead, an unknown distance away. Strange demonic creatures prowled the landscape, as if hunting for something. After a bit of argument about the futility of tracking someone who can fly and/or teleport, they flew back inside, trusting that the illusionary wall over Kasmine's little lair would continue to fool the no-doubt powerful creatures outside.
Sakura then decided to use her ranger training to look for tracks. Over the course of an hour, she managed to piece together a partial sequence of events. A creature shapeshifting between demonic and humanoid form had left the empty bedroom/torture chamber, flown to Belrath's tower, either fought with or had sex with Belrath, and then the two of them had walked out the front door into the underdark, where they skirted the town and headed for Haven. Imp tracks were also found scattered about.
So the party decided to follow immediately, taking the road through the uranium mines, through the unknown alien crypts, and across the metal catwalks spanning the void inside a giant geode until, tired and sore from a very long day's march, they came to an inn carved out of a geode crystal (the third inn they'd passed on their journey). Asking after a married couple carrying a large load of supplies, they heard that perhaps Belrath and Kasmine were sleeping in that very inn -- and a locate object cast on a memorable diagram from Belrath's research confirmed it and pinpointed the room.
A little quick talking let them specifically rent two rooms near their targets', and they began plotting their assault. Halfway through the planning, Abbey noticed something invisible watching them, which changed the plans a bit. Through it all, listening at the wall of the adjoining room revealed that the pair was still in their room, apparently waiting for the party to attack.
So the attack was planned out as a complete surprise. Abbey got 'see invisible' cast on her, and Slee opened the door for her so that she could rush out and slaughter the imp on guard before it could squeak a warning telepathically, at the same time as May knocked the door and Sakura slammed it open, carrying a silence spell, at which point Loren cast a circle or protection against evil, focused inwards, into Belrath and Kasmine's room to prevent them from simply teleporting away.
It all went off without a hitch, and Kasmine and Belrath found themselves hedged into a tiny room and silenced (completely ruining thier plan of teleporting behind the party to get the jump on them as soon as the imp shouted a warning -- stupid imp). There were four more invisible imps flitting around, but they couldn't leave either, and without access to their spells Kasmine and her imps were slaughtered without even really injuring the party, and Belrath was tied up and gagged.
The imps regenrated, but only one of them got conscious before Loren's Bless on Abbey's rapier brought a permanent end to their evil. It hid in a bag in a pile of crap, but was eventually ferreted out and killed as well.
Belrath was livid, but a Charm spell was enough to get him to at least *talk* to the party. He cried over Kasmine, and once ungagged (stripped of material components and still bound, and with Loren standing over him ready to bonk him if he tried casting) told a somewhat plausible story, about how the clawey, batwinged form Kasmine has reverted to after her death was her true form, because she was a Cambion. Like Sakura. Everyone had thought she was evil, but only Belrath had known the truth.
"So why was she keeping you prisoner?" they asked. Because her abusive father had kidnapped her mother and spirited her away to Gehenna. Kasmine and he had been researching a way to open a gate to Gehenna so they could travel to reach her, but had accidentally opened a more permanent portal in the form of the flickering tower. Also, her father had been waiting for them, and had captured them both and subjected them to horrible torture while kidnapping villagers and turning them into Xill.
"So if she's not a demon, why did she have five imps serving her?" they asked. The imps, Belrath related, had freed her after the party had killed off the major demons guarding the complex, since they needed someone more powerful to serve. Kasmine and Belrath and the imps had been heading off to make a new life in Haven when the party had assaulted them and slaughtered her.
The party finally secured Belrath's cooperation by agreeing to take Kasmine's body to a temple in Haven, where they'd pay to have her raised if she was, in fact, a Cambion, but if they identified her as a Succubus Belrath would have to come to terms with the fact that he was an enchanted dupe that she'd been using to get at the villagers. Since he had no other hope of getting his true love raised, he agreed, even though he hated the party.
So the party shoved Kasmine's body in a Handy Haversack, cleaned up all the blood and ichor with Prestidigitation, and had Abbey bluff her way past the inn guards with a sack full of dead imps to toss over the edge of the catwalk. ("Um... I'm just tossing some rotting food." "That doesn't... smell... like food..." "Yeah, it's really crap. That's why I'm tossing it.") Since the entire fight had taken place under a spell of silence, no one else in the inn really had a clue that anything had happened, and they slept the rest of the night in peace.
The next day, after six more hours walking through winding caverns, past tent-city slums, they reached Haven, where they were immediately arrested.
Or at least, Abbey was arrested, for possession of contraband Drow artifacts in the form of the Drow hand crossbow still strapped to her arm. She managed to talk the guards into letting the party complete some urgent business before being taken to the station for a thorough search, so they went to the temple while she went to prison.
At the temple, a low-ranking priest identified Kasmine's body as a Devil, specifically an Erinyes, and Belrath as an enchanted dupe, although not apparently with magic, at least not anymore. He noted that Devils were patient creatures that worked for the long term, though, and over the long term simple charm spells never cut it -- the target had to be actually corrupted to evil.
Belrath still refused to accept that Kasmine had been evil even then, but a deal was a deal and he at least claimed to accept the ruling. The priest offered to deprogram Belrath for a worthy fee, but the party demurred, either because they were unsure that deprogramming was ethical or because they were skinflints, take your pick.
Then they reported to the station (badgered by the guard who'd gone along to make sure they reported back to the station) and more Drow artifacts (the adamantium shortswords) were discovered in Slee's possession, so he was arrested too. The others were free to leave, for the moment, but the guards offered a friendly suggestion (since the party were the documented liberators of Halen's Reach) that they get a lawyer to defend their case, and maybe get the court date moved up so that Abbey and Slee wouldn't have to rot in jail for a week.
Sakura and May were in no hurry to spring Abbey and Slee, though, and instead decided to fly back to the Geode and see what was really at the bottom, since the gnomes had only ghost stories about the hapless wizards who'd tried to find out.
To conserve magic, they used a ring of featherfall to float down. For four hours. After four hours, May noted that he'd need TWO fly spells just to get them back up to the top, so if they were going to explore any further they might want to consider resting here.
A lateral fly spell quickly revealed that they were near the bottom, though, so down they went, following the crystal-encrusted wall of the geode. With the crystals for referents, they managed to stop in time, just before plunging into a flat black expanse of nothing, out of which emerged a trio of purplish tentacled creatures to assualt them. Their fly outran the critters' natural levitation, though, and May plinked them to death with fireballs and magic missiles.
Further experimentation revealed that the bottom of the geode was a pool of negative energy, or possibly a portal to the negative energy plane, or something along those lines, as everything that touched it -- except for the geode crystals, some of which protruded out of it like islands -- quickly rotted away and was destroyed.
They did a quick flyover of the center of the blackness (dangling a rope to allow them to avoid flying into it by accident, since 'nothing' looked like 'nothing' even under darkvision) but failed to find a creepy floating city of evil. More Xeg'yi emerged to menace the party, but they just flew away, easily outdistancing the pokey energons.
Eventually, May cast a few Fly spells and after several hours they got to the top, in time to check into an inn and sleep again, dreaming of patenting the purple crystal as a negative energy shield, since the gnomes seemed to believe in that sort of thing...
last week next week
