Take a walk on the wild side...
Jun. 11th, 2003 12:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothTonight was my Tuesday D+D game, in which the players joined the forces of Chaos in their quest to destroy the plane of sheep. And Vashti got killed by a MYSTERIOUS PLOT ELEMENT that the players remain unable to guess despite gradually escalating hints as to its nature (and also by extremely poor tactics).
The players found themselves in a large open plain, with a lake or bay about five miles away to the south, and a town ten miles to the west. Immediately behind them, of course, was the mile-wide portal into the Tximisti cube, into which great herds of sheep were being led by Tximisti workers of the gray tower, the erstwhile shepherds genuflecting at their feet and praying.
They decided to investigate the town. Slee did this by wild-shaping into an eagle and looking at the town from a great height. He saw that the town itself was small, but it was surrounded by a large, busy tent city full of very rich humans and dwarves and elves, while a celebration and feast of some sort was evidently planned from the large pavilion being constructed. Flying down lower, he heard people talk about how Chaos encroached closer every year, and complaining about all the refugees from Phasia.
Abbey scouted by walking right into town. Her tiefling defects were subtle enough to pass for human, so while she got a few stares, the most attention she attracted was when she tried to buy some food with her strange, otherworldly silver (round coins instead of the native hexagonal!). She tried to pass herself off as a foreigner from a distant land, but no one believed her. "Oh, sure, you're from the Shimmering Isles, right?"
Vashti decided to scout the town by walking into it, batwings spread, demonic countenance unmasked. The townsfolk stared at her for a few seconds before calling for the guards. And there were guards! Twenty guards surrounded her at a distance and told her to surrender and be cleansed in the name of the Tximisti. Eventually, a priest, with twenty more guards in tow, came up and chewed them out for not attacking immediately.
Vashti decided to pre-empt that by killing the priest. Splat. She was charged and surrounded by guards, several of them hitting her, despite their obvious lack of training or equipment, and despite her armor and prized +5 ring of deflection. She blasted them with unholy blight, killing everyone who'd been near her, and flew into the air, where the archers could get a bead on her and fill her full of arrows! Four of five arrows hit!
Abbey was nearby, but hid when she saw guards rushing towards the fight. Slee was watching the whole thing from a nearby tent, and after watching the arrows seem to twist in midair to seek out Vashti, let loose with a flamestrike and wiped out the archer brigade.
But that was hardly the end of the guards. More and more kept coming, half of them with bows. Vashti decided that discretion was the better part of running away, and hid behind Slee's tent, surrounding herself in darkness. Even in the darkness, several arrows hit her!
While the guards surrounded the darkness, or fired arrows blindly into it, Slee flew inside and shifted back to lizard form, and told Vashti what he'd seen the arrows doing. They both decided to cut and run, and got away clean as the guards were unwilling to spread out much or go far from the city.
They were contacted by a Sylph named Lox, who'd seen them being 'attacked' by the guards and offered to take them to the local resistance leader, Sophie. They agreed to follow, and spent the day walking north to a hidden base deep in a dark wood. There were kobolds, and talking hawks, and two more sylphs, one of which was Sophie. There was also a human sorcerer, native to this world, who was another new recruit of the forces of chaos.
Sophie told them all the story -- long ago, the Empire of Lantham had started a holy crusade to wipe out all chaos in the world, but it had backfired, and the gods of chaos trapped and destroyed the gods of law, and began remaking the world in their image. They'd been stalled for the last few centuries by the interference of the Tximisti, who'd set themselves up as new gods for the Lanthamites, imposing their repressive laws -- including forbidding the worship of any real gods, and the casting of magical spells.
The party also got a map of the world. It was a small world. Aside from the island they were on, there was the Kingdom of Lantham, the forest of Chirinide, the dragon mountains, and the fading land of Phasia. And there were legends of a land of wish-granting mages who'd walled themselves away from the world, somewhere across the now mist-enshrouded ocean. The rest of the world was covered by mist and infested with chaos beasts, and anyone who didn't wish to quickly and painfully become one with chaos would be a fool to venture there.
Sophie herself was a cleric of Chaos whose personal mission was to rescue as many kobolds as she could each time the Tximisti docked, building up an army of the scrawny little lizards to do her bidding. She offered to take the party with her back to her base, where she could either find some mission they could do to help her, or give them a hint of where to go next to find their way home. They agreed, and after a harrowing ride on a kobold-built boat (what's a keel?) were taken to her secret, or at least hidden, base.
They were told about how political struggle had allowed the forces of chaos to 'consume' the city of Ephae and shatter the nation of Phasia. They were told about how the druids had all gone over to chaos after the elven nation of Chirinide had turned the last remaining wood in the world into a twisted parody of nature -- a carefully ordered, managed park. They were given several possible leads, but the most promising seemed to be that old Tower of Sorcery that had existed in Ephae before its fall to chaos.
It wouldn't be wise to travel there without some way of dealing with the chaos beasts, of course, so Sophie offered to give the party some protection if they'd do a job for her. Since Vashti wanted something that involved straight-up fighting, Sophie asked the party to wipe out a new village Lantham was building on the edge of Phasia, to drive back chaos and reclaim the land for Lantham.
"You don't have to kill them," she replied, as the nominally good members of the party (Abbey and May) objected, "Just drive them away and destroy the temple. Oh, but make sure you kill the priests. They're the ones who keep the people in thrall, worshipping their false gods. They must die."
Vashti and Whiteash -- the mage from Lantham who'd been recruited at the same time as the rest of the party, and got lumped in with them for convenience -- decided to go destroy the village no matter what the rest of the party thought. They tried to convince the others to come with them, with such convincing rationalizations as "We're not just randomly killing people, they promised us potions!"
May decided to go along, planning to save the priests' lives by polymorphing them into slugs instead. Slee came along because he didn't care one way or the other. Abbey came along under protest, not wanting to be left alone with the depressed and suicidal Loren, who absolutely refused to do anything to aid the forces of chaos, let along attack and destroy a village.
With a mix of fly spells and winged flight due to being polymorphed into sylphs, the party quickly covered the 20 miles to the village. Slee scouted as an eagle, again, and saw many well armed guards, and a temple, but no priests.
Whiteash, impatient, flew into the compound and tried to parley. When the priests demanded to see the receipt for the fly spell he was using right off, he decided to say 'screw this' and attack, attempting unsuccessfully to polymorph the priest into a slug.
When that didn't work, Whiteash fled to the front of the compound, and outside of it, hiding behind the wall. This didn't work well, as the guards opened the front door and followed, but help was not far behind.
Vashti flew over the wall and attacked a guard, and was promptly surrounded and hacked at by half the guard contingent. Somehow, they could all hit her too! She tried her best to be defensive and fly out of the 'clusterfuck', but three AoOs hit her, two of them criticals, and she was killed outright.
A little after that the rest of the party arrived. By staying up in the air, they avoided the guards' greatswords, and only had to deal with a constant barrage of flaming rays from rods that looked just like the Tximisti's. The deadly accuracy the guards had had against Vashti didn't seem to carry over to the rest of the party, and while they took a few licks (and Whiteash ran through two mirror image spells, losing every image of both), they began to wear the defenders down.
Meanwhile, May and Slee watched as the second priest (who'd proved stubbornly resistant to polymorph) began to strip Vashti's corpse of valuable, starting with her rings. He took her ring of featherfall, looked at it suspiciously, and gingerly put it in his pouch. Then he took her prized ring of protection +5, and immediately put it on. This pissed May and Slee off, and they killed him with magic missiles and a dire weasel, which latched its jaws onto the priest (despite his new ring of protection) and drained away his blood.
By this time, the last few guards fled back into the compound, no match for a hasted sorcerer spewing magic missiles and a flying rogue, resistant to fire, who kept tricking them into looking over there so she could put arrows in their throats. Three of the six who tried to flee made it into a building, so Slee and May lit the building on fire.
Abbey tried to save the priest she'd taken down outside the walls, but Whiteash killed him with a ray from a looted fire rod for no apparent reason. He tried to do the same for the priest who'd been taken down inside the walls, but May had a little more time to work, and (after taking back the rings and stealing the nasty looking staff the priest hadn't managed to use on anyone) managed to heal that priest to consciousness and hide him inside a web. Whiteash set fire to the web with the last few charges from one of his looted fire rods, but there was no sign of the cleric or his body.
Whiteash then started going door to door, bashing them down with a greatsword and threatening the civilians inside. He killed four of five of them in the process, but got valuable information about a hidden space underneath the temple altar (that was still empty, for the moment) and the location of the 'blasting powder' they'd used to dig the hole -- in the building Slee was even then burning down.
About then the three guards who'd hid in the burning building came crashing out through a wall, and all caught on fire as they tried to dash for safety. They ran around screaming in agony, clutching small barrels. Two were killed by Slee and Whiteash in psycho-killer mode, and the barrels they'd been carrying exploded, taking out a section of wall and the temple dome. The last was almost saved by Abbey, until (once again) Whiteash killed him with a ray from a fire rod.
Abbey was not amused, and Abbey and May tried to convince the rest of the civilians to flee. But even that good deed did not go unpunished -- while running for the treeline, the civilians were picked off one by one by an invisible creature, which turned out to be Lox, the sylph who'd originally recruited the party.
"We don't take prisoners," he informed them, "Locking someone up is against our principles. If you're finsihed here..."
The party was finished -- at least finished looting, and finished caring about any civilians who might be left alive. They headed back for Sophie's lair, where Lox told them they could probably get Vahti reincarnated, or possibly raised. And of course, get paid for their bloody day's work. Abbey and May squabbled over who got to keep Vashti's rings, although of course they both pledged to give them back should Vashti be returned from the dead.
... [sigh]
Does anyone reading this NOT know what MYSTERIOUS PLOT ELEMENT killed Vashti?
last week next week
I... didn't expect the party to join the forces of chaos. They were supposed to join with Lantham and fight Sophie's minions. I had *stats* prepared for Sophie's minions. I had to make up the Lanthamites on the spot.
This is the second time Vashti's player has gotten killed in the second round of combat (although he keeps saying it was in the first round). He's decided he doesn't want to be a 'front line fighter' (although he's not much of one, with low damage weapons and poor armor and no shield -- only the ring of protection the party found in the vault where his first character died made his AC even reasonable) and wants to come back as a literally unkillable ghost archer, spending all his starting gold towards a ghost-touch bow.
Since Loren's player (Lance) quit, and told me that Loren was going to commit suicide if he couldn't contact his god, this leaves the party with two sorcerers, a mostly noncombat druid, and a rogue. Add an archer to that? I guess they plan to do a lot of flying around avoiding things...
The players found themselves in a large open plain, with a lake or bay about five miles away to the south, and a town ten miles to the west. Immediately behind them, of course, was the mile-wide portal into the Tximisti cube, into which great herds of sheep were being led by Tximisti workers of the gray tower, the erstwhile shepherds genuflecting at their feet and praying.
They decided to investigate the town. Slee did this by wild-shaping into an eagle and looking at the town from a great height. He saw that the town itself was small, but it was surrounded by a large, busy tent city full of very rich humans and dwarves and elves, while a celebration and feast of some sort was evidently planned from the large pavilion being constructed. Flying down lower, he heard people talk about how Chaos encroached closer every year, and complaining about all the refugees from Phasia.
Abbey scouted by walking right into town. Her tiefling defects were subtle enough to pass for human, so while she got a few stares, the most attention she attracted was when she tried to buy some food with her strange, otherworldly silver (round coins instead of the native hexagonal!). She tried to pass herself off as a foreigner from a distant land, but no one believed her. "Oh, sure, you're from the Shimmering Isles, right?"
Vashti decided to scout the town by walking into it, batwings spread, demonic countenance unmasked. The townsfolk stared at her for a few seconds before calling for the guards. And there were guards! Twenty guards surrounded her at a distance and told her to surrender and be cleansed in the name of the Tximisti. Eventually, a priest, with twenty more guards in tow, came up and chewed them out for not attacking immediately.
Vashti decided to pre-empt that by killing the priest. Splat. She was charged and surrounded by guards, several of them hitting her, despite their obvious lack of training or equipment, and despite her armor and prized +5 ring of deflection. She blasted them with unholy blight, killing everyone who'd been near her, and flew into the air, where the archers could get a bead on her and fill her full of arrows! Four of five arrows hit!
Abbey was nearby, but hid when she saw guards rushing towards the fight. Slee was watching the whole thing from a nearby tent, and after watching the arrows seem to twist in midair to seek out Vashti, let loose with a flamestrike and wiped out the archer brigade.
But that was hardly the end of the guards. More and more kept coming, half of them with bows. Vashti decided that discretion was the better part of running away, and hid behind Slee's tent, surrounding herself in darkness. Even in the darkness, several arrows hit her!
While the guards surrounded the darkness, or fired arrows blindly into it, Slee flew inside and shifted back to lizard form, and told Vashti what he'd seen the arrows doing. They both decided to cut and run, and got away clean as the guards were unwilling to spread out much or go far from the city.
They were contacted by a Sylph named Lox, who'd seen them being 'attacked' by the guards and offered to take them to the local resistance leader, Sophie. They agreed to follow, and spent the day walking north to a hidden base deep in a dark wood. There were kobolds, and talking hawks, and two more sylphs, one of which was Sophie. There was also a human sorcerer, native to this world, who was another new recruit of the forces of chaos.
Sophie told them all the story -- long ago, the Empire of Lantham had started a holy crusade to wipe out all chaos in the world, but it had backfired, and the gods of chaos trapped and destroyed the gods of law, and began remaking the world in their image. They'd been stalled for the last few centuries by the interference of the Tximisti, who'd set themselves up as new gods for the Lanthamites, imposing their repressive laws -- including forbidding the worship of any real gods, and the casting of magical spells.
The party also got a map of the world. It was a small world. Aside from the island they were on, there was the Kingdom of Lantham, the forest of Chirinide, the dragon mountains, and the fading land of Phasia. And there were legends of a land of wish-granting mages who'd walled themselves away from the world, somewhere across the now mist-enshrouded ocean. The rest of the world was covered by mist and infested with chaos beasts, and anyone who didn't wish to quickly and painfully become one with chaos would be a fool to venture there.
Sophie herself was a cleric of Chaos whose personal mission was to rescue as many kobolds as she could each time the Tximisti docked, building up an army of the scrawny little lizards to do her bidding. She offered to take the party with her back to her base, where she could either find some mission they could do to help her, or give them a hint of where to go next to find their way home. They agreed, and after a harrowing ride on a kobold-built boat (what's a keel?) were taken to her secret, or at least hidden, base.
They were told about how political struggle had allowed the forces of chaos to 'consume' the city of Ephae and shatter the nation of Phasia. They were told about how the druids had all gone over to chaos after the elven nation of Chirinide had turned the last remaining wood in the world into a twisted parody of nature -- a carefully ordered, managed park. They were given several possible leads, but the most promising seemed to be that old Tower of Sorcery that had existed in Ephae before its fall to chaos.
It wouldn't be wise to travel there without some way of dealing with the chaos beasts, of course, so Sophie offered to give the party some protection if they'd do a job for her. Since Vashti wanted something that involved straight-up fighting, Sophie asked the party to wipe out a new village Lantham was building on the edge of Phasia, to drive back chaos and reclaim the land for Lantham.
"You don't have to kill them," she replied, as the nominally good members of the party (Abbey and May) objected, "Just drive them away and destroy the temple. Oh, but make sure you kill the priests. They're the ones who keep the people in thrall, worshipping their false gods. They must die."
Vashti and Whiteash -- the mage from Lantham who'd been recruited at the same time as the rest of the party, and got lumped in with them for convenience -- decided to go destroy the village no matter what the rest of the party thought. They tried to convince the others to come with them, with such convincing rationalizations as "We're not just randomly killing people, they promised us potions!"
May decided to go along, planning to save the priests' lives by polymorphing them into slugs instead. Slee came along because he didn't care one way or the other. Abbey came along under protest, not wanting to be left alone with the depressed and suicidal Loren, who absolutely refused to do anything to aid the forces of chaos, let along attack and destroy a village.
With a mix of fly spells and winged flight due to being polymorphed into sylphs, the party quickly covered the 20 miles to the village. Slee scouted as an eagle, again, and saw many well armed guards, and a temple, but no priests.
Whiteash, impatient, flew into the compound and tried to parley. When the priests demanded to see the receipt for the fly spell he was using right off, he decided to say 'screw this' and attack, attempting unsuccessfully to polymorph the priest into a slug.
When that didn't work, Whiteash fled to the front of the compound, and outside of it, hiding behind the wall. This didn't work well, as the guards opened the front door and followed, but help was not far behind.
Vashti flew over the wall and attacked a guard, and was promptly surrounded and hacked at by half the guard contingent. Somehow, they could all hit her too! She tried her best to be defensive and fly out of the 'clusterfuck', but three AoOs hit her, two of them criticals, and she was killed outright.
A little after that the rest of the party arrived. By staying up in the air, they avoided the guards' greatswords, and only had to deal with a constant barrage of flaming rays from rods that looked just like the Tximisti's. The deadly accuracy the guards had had against Vashti didn't seem to carry over to the rest of the party, and while they took a few licks (and Whiteash ran through two mirror image spells, losing every image of both), they began to wear the defenders down.
Meanwhile, May and Slee watched as the second priest (who'd proved stubbornly resistant to polymorph) began to strip Vashti's corpse of valuable, starting with her rings. He took her ring of featherfall, looked at it suspiciously, and gingerly put it in his pouch. Then he took her prized ring of protection +5, and immediately put it on. This pissed May and Slee off, and they killed him with magic missiles and a dire weasel, which latched its jaws onto the priest (despite his new ring of protection) and drained away his blood.
By this time, the last few guards fled back into the compound, no match for a hasted sorcerer spewing magic missiles and a flying rogue, resistant to fire, who kept tricking them into looking over there so she could put arrows in their throats. Three of the six who tried to flee made it into a building, so Slee and May lit the building on fire.
Abbey tried to save the priest she'd taken down outside the walls, but Whiteash killed him with a ray from a looted fire rod for no apparent reason. He tried to do the same for the priest who'd been taken down inside the walls, but May had a little more time to work, and (after taking back the rings and stealing the nasty looking staff the priest hadn't managed to use on anyone) managed to heal that priest to consciousness and hide him inside a web. Whiteash set fire to the web with the last few charges from one of his looted fire rods, but there was no sign of the cleric or his body.
Whiteash then started going door to door, bashing them down with a greatsword and threatening the civilians inside. He killed four of five of them in the process, but got valuable information about a hidden space underneath the temple altar (that was still empty, for the moment) and the location of the 'blasting powder' they'd used to dig the hole -- in the building Slee was even then burning down.
About then the three guards who'd hid in the burning building came crashing out through a wall, and all caught on fire as they tried to dash for safety. They ran around screaming in agony, clutching small barrels. Two were killed by Slee and Whiteash in psycho-killer mode, and the barrels they'd been carrying exploded, taking out a section of wall and the temple dome. The last was almost saved by Abbey, until (once again) Whiteash killed him with a ray from a fire rod.
Abbey was not amused, and Abbey and May tried to convince the rest of the civilians to flee. But even that good deed did not go unpunished -- while running for the treeline, the civilians were picked off one by one by an invisible creature, which turned out to be Lox, the sylph who'd originally recruited the party.
"We don't take prisoners," he informed them, "Locking someone up is against our principles. If you're finsihed here..."
The party was finished -- at least finished looting, and finished caring about any civilians who might be left alive. They headed back for Sophie's lair, where Lox told them they could probably get Vahti reincarnated, or possibly raised. And of course, get paid for their bloody day's work. Abbey and May squabbled over who got to keep Vashti's rings, although of course they both pledged to give them back should Vashti be returned from the dead.
... [sigh]
Does anyone reading this NOT know what MYSTERIOUS PLOT ELEMENT killed Vashti?
last week next week
I... didn't expect the party to join the forces of chaos. They were supposed to join with Lantham and fight Sophie's minions. I had *stats* prepared for Sophie's minions. I had to make up the Lanthamites on the spot.
This is the second time Vashti's player has gotten killed in the second round of combat (although he keeps saying it was in the first round). He's decided he doesn't want to be a 'front line fighter' (although he's not much of one, with low damage weapons and poor armor and no shield -- only the ring of protection the party found in the vault where his first character died made his AC even reasonable) and wants to come back as a literally unkillable ghost archer, spending all his starting gold towards a ghost-touch bow.
Since Loren's player (Lance) quit, and told me that Loren was going to commit suicide if he couldn't contact his god, this leaves the party with two sorcerers, a mostly noncombat druid, and a rogue. Add an archer to that? I guess they plan to do a lot of flying around avoiding things...
