Resistance is Futile
Jun. 4th, 2003 12:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothTonight was my Tuesday no-longer-very-underdark-themed D+D game, in which the players went to great lengths to avoid facing any challenges, and as a result spent most of the night hiding in rope tricks and running away. Then complained about not getting much XP. They also gave up on returning to their own time, and instead marooned themselves on the Plane of Sheep.
The party looted the bodies of all the strange 12-eyed guards they'd killed, then revived the unconscious technician, polymorphed him into a kobold, and charmed him, asking him to help them get home.
He just repeated what he'd said *before* all the killing started -- as far as he knew, getting them home was impossible, but added that if anyone could do it it would be the scientists living in the mirrored tower in the center of the south face of the cube, which could probably be reached by teleporter if the other team had finished setting up the 'send' half of the pair. He offered to lead them there...
...instead they asked him to take them someplace they could hide. He didn't really know any good hiding places, not being native to that section of cube and not ever really having had the need to hide, but led them out of the cube entirely, showing them the glassy outer cube beyond which swirled strange gray mists. He led them a bit over and around and into a section that looked like a brackish sewer, where they found a closet and put up a 27-hour rope trick, in which the party rested to regain spells (although that mostly applied to the sorcerer who'd been spending polymorphs and fireballs like water).
They chatter with the technician for a while, getting a rundown of the general purpose of the items they'd looted -- belts that acted like mage armor, necklaces that gave a deflection bonus, and of course little rods that shot beams of assorted elemental energy.
They also got a very vague explanation of the cube's layout -- there were six towers, each stretching from the middle of one face to the center of the cube, and each serving a different purpose. 'Above' each tower, outside the glassy wall, floated a vast portal.
Normally, the portals led to elemental planes from which the cube drew energy, but occasionally the cube would 'dock' with some other plane and the Tximisti (as they were called) would swarm out and do whatever. Each face of the cube could dock independantly, although only one at a time as when the cube was docked the mists outside would partially fade and reveal a misty glance of the area in which it was docked on all faces.
While refreshing the rope trick, May spotted some people in the distance and immediately fireballed them. The next rope trick was set up some distance away, but not all that far away, since the party didn't want to risk moving too far and running into more 'guards'.
Once the second rope trick was up, and over the technician's objections ("teleporter technology is new... I don't think anyone outside the mirrored tower really understands it.") the party restored one of the slug guards (after charming him) and had him lead May, who polymorphed himself to look like a Tximisti, to the vicinity of the mirrored tower to try to find an independant scientist who could invent a time-travelling teleporter like the one they'd come through.
May and his 'friend' managed to find a scientist soon enough, barging into his home on the pretense of searching for signs of magic use, which was highly illegal in the cube since it often led to the summoning of demons, a perennial menace. This scientist, picked at random, was not in fact an expert on teleporters -- he was an 'alchemist' working on ways to 'chemically expand ones perceptions'. After being charmed, he offered May some 'tea' from his alchemy set, and May decided to drink it, after checking it for poison...
...but couldn't find where his mouth was located in Tximisti form. So he 'accidentally' dropped the 'tea' on the floor and grilled his new friend for information on teleporters. The best lead the alchemist could give him was to point him towards the local bar where scientists usually hung out.
On the way, though, May and the charmed guard ran into a magic checkpoint, where the enchantments on them were spotted. They fled, and by sacrificing his charmed companion May managed to throw the pursuit off and turn himself invisible. Then he changed his mind and went back for the guard, rescuing him and eventually turning them *both* invisible, and fleeing far enough to blend into the crowd again.
"Hey," noted the guard, pointing to a sign on the commerce level on which he and May now found themselves, "That's a library. Didn't you mention earlier you were looking for a library?"
May decided not to investigate the library, and instead headed 'home' to the rope trick, where the technician was warily watching the people who had not charmed him and were thus deadly enemies. Emphasis on deadly. Thus no overt resistance occurred despite May's absence.
On the way to the rope trick May had to pass a pair of guards, set to watch the spot where a pair of techs had been fireballed a while ago, probably by a demon. He was in disguise, and they weren't equipped to spot magic, and so he did so easily and without raising an alarm, with his charmed guard's help.
After a bit more discussion, May decided to take the technician with him back to the library (a four hour trip each way) to look for a schedule of when the cube was slated to dock, so that the party could leave it, as it was obviously a hostile place. He did so without incident, memorizing several times and faces that landed on the prime material. He also got a short history of the cube, which was extremely uninformative, but told him that the gray mists outside it were the deep ethereal.
Meanwhile, the rest of the party murdered the charmed guard, who didn't trust them at all and spent the time up until his death crouched in a corner of the rope trick with his energy rods trained on them. Abbey managed to distract him enough to stab him in the back (well, okay, the front), then Vashti cut his throat, and his body was dumped in the river of sewage to float away.
So when May returned, the guards on the sewer refused to let him and the technician past without an escort, since this area was too dangerous -- not only had the techs been fireballed, but the body of a high-ranking guard had come floating down the stream, right past them, from the area the pair was heading back into!
So May fireballed the guards, and webbed them, and magic missiled his tech friend just for the hell of it, then fireballed the guards again and killed them. One of the guards got to swing his quarterstaff at the sorcerer, but it failed to paralyze him, and once the web was up it was all over but the screaming.
At this point it was obvious to the whole party that they had to move on before resting, and they did so, avoiding packs of guards as they heard them approaching, winding their way deeper into the cube.
Eventually they ran across a patrol they didn't spot in time -- an invisible assassin, which attacked Abbey (missing her) out of nowhere. Loren had been warned that invisibility was a posibility, and lit up with an invisiblity purge. Vashti had been waiting for that, and sliced into the hapless Tximisti, but didn't kill him -- and the assassin's next move was to tumble away from the party and flee out of the area of the invisibility purge.
The party was having none of that, though, and put a fly spell on Loren so that he could follow. There were too many corners to ready a magic missile or anything to take him out, and eventually the passageway branched, and Loren chose the wrong branch, and the party lost track of their assailant. After continuing on a little ways, however, Abbey's keen ears heard the assassin trailing them, and Loren was sent back in a lightning strike to reveal the creature. Slee also turned into a bat, so that he could spot the thing with blindsight. The May webbed the invisible rogue, and Vashti finished him off with an energy ray. Then Abbey finished him off again with an arrow. Then the party sliced their way through the web and looted him, and killed him again just for spite.
Still, they needed to move even farther before resting now, and eventually decided to stop just out of sight of a guard post, since bypassing it would require a long backtrack. On the plus side, they *had* spent the whole day doing stuff (although for most of the party 'stuff' was 'lying around the rope trick') and it was time to rest, at least.
The party decided to take precautions upon exiting the rope trick this time, since they'd camped so near the guards, which was a good thing since the guards were camped outside the rope trick waiting for them. With fly spells and 'polymorph to Tximisti' and 'resist electricity that sometimes paralyzes' up on everyone, and a darkness from Vashti to cover their retreat, the party zipped away -- although May, who'd opened the door to let everyone else exit first, got caught in an area dispel and lost his polymorph. He didn't lose his fly, though, and with a web to cover the party's retreat they easily escaped.
Once they were out of immediate danger, they started looking for a way out of the cube. None of them had any idea which direction they were headed, but they eventually decided that 'down' was the direction they wanted to go, since they had to still be near the bottom since they'd mostly been moving sideways. They had a run in with a guard, and accidentally set off some alarms, but eventually they found their way down and out of the cube, and took the 'gecko express' as they called it along the glass wall to the Gray Tower (a 45 mile trip), which was scheduled to dock with the prime material in another day's time.
They then hid inside a closet, in a rope trick, until the time was right, then swooped out, flying and invisible, and left the cube behind, hoping that there was more to the plane they'd found than the field they were in and the herd of sheep being abducted by the Tximisti behind them.
last week next week
Luis played remotely, which took a while to set up on Ed's machine, and the webcam I bought yesterday turned out to be the only webcam there, although it wasn't needed so much this time as no really complicated battles happened.
Vashti's player wanted to interrogate the locals before quitting for the night, until I pointed out that I had no idea where they were, since they'd actively run away from the plot I'd prepared, and that if they made me make something up on the spot after midnight it was likely to be silly.
Then I got home, and for the second week in a row found a note on the door informing me that my apartment was going to be inspected, since they hadn't actually gotten around to doing it last week. The bad news is, of course, that I have to WORRY more about whether I'll pass, since I have absolutely no idea what the fuck they're looking for. The good news is that it's only been a week, and most everything is still reasonably clean.
Still, I hate them.
The party looted the bodies of all the strange 12-eyed guards they'd killed, then revived the unconscious technician, polymorphed him into a kobold, and charmed him, asking him to help them get home.
He just repeated what he'd said *before* all the killing started -- as far as he knew, getting them home was impossible, but added that if anyone could do it it would be the scientists living in the mirrored tower in the center of the south face of the cube, which could probably be reached by teleporter if the other team had finished setting up the 'send' half of the pair. He offered to lead them there...
...instead they asked him to take them someplace they could hide. He didn't really know any good hiding places, not being native to that section of cube and not ever really having had the need to hide, but led them out of the cube entirely, showing them the glassy outer cube beyond which swirled strange gray mists. He led them a bit over and around and into a section that looked like a brackish sewer, where they found a closet and put up a 27-hour rope trick, in which the party rested to regain spells (although that mostly applied to the sorcerer who'd been spending polymorphs and fireballs like water).
They chatter with the technician for a while, getting a rundown of the general purpose of the items they'd looted -- belts that acted like mage armor, necklaces that gave a deflection bonus, and of course little rods that shot beams of assorted elemental energy.
They also got a very vague explanation of the cube's layout -- there were six towers, each stretching from the middle of one face to the center of the cube, and each serving a different purpose. 'Above' each tower, outside the glassy wall, floated a vast portal.
Normally, the portals led to elemental planes from which the cube drew energy, but occasionally the cube would 'dock' with some other plane and the Tximisti (as they were called) would swarm out and do whatever. Each face of the cube could dock independantly, although only one at a time as when the cube was docked the mists outside would partially fade and reveal a misty glance of the area in which it was docked on all faces.
While refreshing the rope trick, May spotted some people in the distance and immediately fireballed them. The next rope trick was set up some distance away, but not all that far away, since the party didn't want to risk moving too far and running into more 'guards'.
Once the second rope trick was up, and over the technician's objections ("teleporter technology is new... I don't think anyone outside the mirrored tower really understands it.") the party restored one of the slug guards (after charming him) and had him lead May, who polymorphed himself to look like a Tximisti, to the vicinity of the mirrored tower to try to find an independant scientist who could invent a time-travelling teleporter like the one they'd come through.
May and his 'friend' managed to find a scientist soon enough, barging into his home on the pretense of searching for signs of magic use, which was highly illegal in the cube since it often led to the summoning of demons, a perennial menace. This scientist, picked at random, was not in fact an expert on teleporters -- he was an 'alchemist' working on ways to 'chemically expand ones perceptions'. After being charmed, he offered May some 'tea' from his alchemy set, and May decided to drink it, after checking it for poison...
...but couldn't find where his mouth was located in Tximisti form. So he 'accidentally' dropped the 'tea' on the floor and grilled his new friend for information on teleporters. The best lead the alchemist could give him was to point him towards the local bar where scientists usually hung out.
On the way, though, May and the charmed guard ran into a magic checkpoint, where the enchantments on them were spotted. They fled, and by sacrificing his charmed companion May managed to throw the pursuit off and turn himself invisible. Then he changed his mind and went back for the guard, rescuing him and eventually turning them *both* invisible, and fleeing far enough to blend into the crowd again.
"Hey," noted the guard, pointing to a sign on the commerce level on which he and May now found themselves, "That's a library. Didn't you mention earlier you were looking for a library?"
May decided not to investigate the library, and instead headed 'home' to the rope trick, where the technician was warily watching the people who had not charmed him and were thus deadly enemies. Emphasis on deadly. Thus no overt resistance occurred despite May's absence.
On the way to the rope trick May had to pass a pair of guards, set to watch the spot where a pair of techs had been fireballed a while ago, probably by a demon. He was in disguise, and they weren't equipped to spot magic, and so he did so easily and without raising an alarm, with his charmed guard's help.
After a bit more discussion, May decided to take the technician with him back to the library (a four hour trip each way) to look for a schedule of when the cube was slated to dock, so that the party could leave it, as it was obviously a hostile place. He did so without incident, memorizing several times and faces that landed on the prime material. He also got a short history of the cube, which was extremely uninformative, but told him that the gray mists outside it were the deep ethereal.
Meanwhile, the rest of the party murdered the charmed guard, who didn't trust them at all and spent the time up until his death crouched in a corner of the rope trick with his energy rods trained on them. Abbey managed to distract him enough to stab him in the back (well, okay, the front), then Vashti cut his throat, and his body was dumped in the river of sewage to float away.
So when May returned, the guards on the sewer refused to let him and the technician past without an escort, since this area was too dangerous -- not only had the techs been fireballed, but the body of a high-ranking guard had come floating down the stream, right past them, from the area the pair was heading back into!
So May fireballed the guards, and webbed them, and magic missiled his tech friend just for the hell of it, then fireballed the guards again and killed them. One of the guards got to swing his quarterstaff at the sorcerer, but it failed to paralyze him, and once the web was up it was all over but the screaming.
At this point it was obvious to the whole party that they had to move on before resting, and they did so, avoiding packs of guards as they heard them approaching, winding their way deeper into the cube.
Eventually they ran across a patrol they didn't spot in time -- an invisible assassin, which attacked Abbey (missing her) out of nowhere. Loren had been warned that invisibility was a posibility, and lit up with an invisiblity purge. Vashti had been waiting for that, and sliced into the hapless Tximisti, but didn't kill him -- and the assassin's next move was to tumble away from the party and flee out of the area of the invisibility purge.
The party was having none of that, though, and put a fly spell on Loren so that he could follow. There were too many corners to ready a magic missile or anything to take him out, and eventually the passageway branched, and Loren chose the wrong branch, and the party lost track of their assailant. After continuing on a little ways, however, Abbey's keen ears heard the assassin trailing them, and Loren was sent back in a lightning strike to reveal the creature. Slee also turned into a bat, so that he could spot the thing with blindsight. The May webbed the invisible rogue, and Vashti finished him off with an energy ray. Then Abbey finished him off again with an arrow. Then the party sliced their way through the web and looted him, and killed him again just for spite.
Still, they needed to move even farther before resting now, and eventually decided to stop just out of sight of a guard post, since bypassing it would require a long backtrack. On the plus side, they *had* spent the whole day doing stuff (although for most of the party 'stuff' was 'lying around the rope trick') and it was time to rest, at least.
The party decided to take precautions upon exiting the rope trick this time, since they'd camped so near the guards, which was a good thing since the guards were camped outside the rope trick waiting for them. With fly spells and 'polymorph to Tximisti' and 'resist electricity that sometimes paralyzes' up on everyone, and a darkness from Vashti to cover their retreat, the party zipped away -- although May, who'd opened the door to let everyone else exit first, got caught in an area dispel and lost his polymorph. He didn't lose his fly, though, and with a web to cover the party's retreat they easily escaped.
Once they were out of immediate danger, they started looking for a way out of the cube. None of them had any idea which direction they were headed, but they eventually decided that 'down' was the direction they wanted to go, since they had to still be near the bottom since they'd mostly been moving sideways. They had a run in with a guard, and accidentally set off some alarms, but eventually they found their way down and out of the cube, and took the 'gecko express' as they called it along the glass wall to the Gray Tower (a 45 mile trip), which was scheduled to dock with the prime material in another day's time.
They then hid inside a closet, in a rope trick, until the time was right, then swooped out, flying and invisible, and left the cube behind, hoping that there was more to the plane they'd found than the field they were in and the herd of sheep being abducted by the Tximisti behind them.
last week next week
Luis played remotely, which took a while to set up on Ed's machine, and the webcam I bought yesterday turned out to be the only webcam there, although it wasn't needed so much this time as no really complicated battles happened.
Vashti's player wanted to interrogate the locals before quitting for the night, until I pointed out that I had no idea where they were, since they'd actively run away from the plot I'd prepared, and that if they made me make something up on the spot after midnight it was likely to be silly.
Then I got home, and for the second week in a row found a note on the door informing me that my apartment was going to be inspected, since they hadn't actually gotten around to doing it last week. The bad news is, of course, that I have to WORRY more about whether I'll pass, since I have absolutely no idea what the fuck they're looking for. The good news is that it's only been a week, and most everything is still reasonably clean.
Still, I hate them.
