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terryclothToday was the GM switching D+D game at Tom's house, this week featuring Ed as GM. Somehow, we managed to spend five hours NOT going to hell, even though we kind of knew that we'd have to even before the game started.
We started out threatening to do the campaign-skipping stuff that Ed always does to me, mostly because he basically gave us nothing but dead ends to go on, but after he started looking all deer-in-the-headlights we decided to let him direct us to the actual adventure with a Divination spell.
A headless body appeared in the temple of Tymora, a magic mouth asking the priests to raise it in return for a 50,000 gp award. The city guards got wind of this, and of course decided to send their best men on a chase for the sweet, sweet cash.
The body was naked except for a magic vest, and had little in the way of identification, but the bank account the magic mouth had mentioned was traceable to one Jonas Black, a diamond merchant of ill repute -- he was a lech and a liar and a cheat and a wizard, and everyone knew (but was unable to prove) that his diamonds were not real and that he used powerful enchantment spells to compel people to buy them from him.
[The older players in the group recognized Jonas as one of Ed's characters from several games ago -- the game had ended when the magical genie turned the bio-warfare missiles the robotic invaders were planning to use to destroy Faerun into a huge pile of diamonds]
With his name and his body, the party was in a good position to scry on Jonas' location (the priests had said that he couldn't be resurrected because he was still alive... somewhere), but so as not to waste the day before they could memorize those spells they decided to track down his associates.
The first stop was his office. While the party proper walked in the front door and spoke with his secretary/clerk/whatever, the party's thief snuck into the back room, opened the vault, and set off a loud, noisy pyrotechnic trap.
A wizard in the front team quickly charmed the secretary, and convinced her that they were all the guards and firefighters she needed. Which was true, as far the fire was concerned -- a spell put it all out in an instant. The culprit, of course, got away.
While she was down at the guard house filling out the incident report, they showed her the body, and she identified (even without the head) that it was indeed Jonas.
So the next day, they scried on him, and saw his head, still alive, attached to a tentacle on a Devil's stomach... or at least, presumably it was a devil since it was torturing Lemures to death by slicing them in half on the edge of a floating white disk. They planned to use a Commune to play 20-questions with God and figure out what plane this scene was on, at which point they'd plane-shift and then teleport directly to the room in question, but a Divination revealed a safer course of action than plane-shifting to a random point in Hell: find 'Eustace'.
After consulting with a sage, Eustace was revealed to be a small village halfway around the world, in the mountains just this side of the Unapproachable East. It was hard to find because it no longer existed -- one of the mountains had erupted and submerged it in lava.
For a fee, one of the temples teleported them close, and the druid/wizard turned them all into birds to fly the last 20 miles. As the townies had informed them, the only survivng structure was the keep, which had been up on a hill out of the path of the lava.
An imp spied on the party as they approached, but the druid/wizard sensed its presence and faerie fired it, the sorcerer shot it down with magic missiles, and it was then Suggested that the imp answer all their questions. It revealed that there was a trap door somewhere in the keep (it claimed not to remember where, as the devils were based in a cave up on the mountain, and not directly through the portal) which led to a long tunnel and then to the portal, on the other side of which was a small outpost of renegade devils, one of whom was the tentacle creature they were looking for.
So they entered the deserted keep and started searching around for a trap door. Just as they stumbled across the scene of a horrific battle, they were attacked by devils! The fighters and cleric and rogue set up a defensive line in the doorway and began chopping the chain-devils to bits, but a spiky devil teleported into the room and began menacing the sorcerer and wizard/druid. The druid's summoned dire wolves imapled themselves ineffectually on the spiky hide of the demon, and...
last session (different game) next session
...and we stopped there, as we'd run out of time. Doh.
Afterwards I spent the whole day playing Disgaea.
We started out threatening to do the campaign-skipping stuff that Ed always does to me, mostly because he basically gave us nothing but dead ends to go on, but after he started looking all deer-in-the-headlights we decided to let him direct us to the actual adventure with a Divination spell.
A headless body appeared in the temple of Tymora, a magic mouth asking the priests to raise it in return for a 50,000 gp award. The city guards got wind of this, and of course decided to send their best men on a chase for the sweet, sweet cash.
The body was naked except for a magic vest, and had little in the way of identification, but the bank account the magic mouth had mentioned was traceable to one Jonas Black, a diamond merchant of ill repute -- he was a lech and a liar and a cheat and a wizard, and everyone knew (but was unable to prove) that his diamonds were not real and that he used powerful enchantment spells to compel people to buy them from him.
[The older players in the group recognized Jonas as one of Ed's characters from several games ago -- the game had ended when the magical genie turned the bio-warfare missiles the robotic invaders were planning to use to destroy Faerun into a huge pile of diamonds]
With his name and his body, the party was in a good position to scry on Jonas' location (the priests had said that he couldn't be resurrected because he was still alive... somewhere), but so as not to waste the day before they could memorize those spells they decided to track down his associates.
The first stop was his office. While the party proper walked in the front door and spoke with his secretary/clerk/whatever, the party's thief snuck into the back room, opened the vault, and set off a loud, noisy pyrotechnic trap.
A wizard in the front team quickly charmed the secretary, and convinced her that they were all the guards and firefighters she needed. Which was true, as far the fire was concerned -- a spell put it all out in an instant. The culprit, of course, got away.
While she was down at the guard house filling out the incident report, they showed her the body, and she identified (even without the head) that it was indeed Jonas.
So the next day, they scried on him, and saw his head, still alive, attached to a tentacle on a Devil's stomach... or at least, presumably it was a devil since it was torturing Lemures to death by slicing them in half on the edge of a floating white disk. They planned to use a Commune to play 20-questions with God and figure out what plane this scene was on, at which point they'd plane-shift and then teleport directly to the room in question, but a Divination revealed a safer course of action than plane-shifting to a random point in Hell: find 'Eustace'.
After consulting with a sage, Eustace was revealed to be a small village halfway around the world, in the mountains just this side of the Unapproachable East. It was hard to find because it no longer existed -- one of the mountains had erupted and submerged it in lava.
For a fee, one of the temples teleported them close, and the druid/wizard turned them all into birds to fly the last 20 miles. As the townies had informed them, the only survivng structure was the keep, which had been up on a hill out of the path of the lava.
An imp spied on the party as they approached, but the druid/wizard sensed its presence and faerie fired it, the sorcerer shot it down with magic missiles, and it was then Suggested that the imp answer all their questions. It revealed that there was a trap door somewhere in the keep (it claimed not to remember where, as the devils were based in a cave up on the mountain, and not directly through the portal) which led to a long tunnel and then to the portal, on the other side of which was a small outpost of renegade devils, one of whom was the tentacle creature they were looking for.
So they entered the deserted keep and started searching around for a trap door. Just as they stumbled across the scene of a horrific battle, they were attacked by devils! The fighters and cleric and rogue set up a defensive line in the doorway and began chopping the chain-devils to bits, but a spiky devil teleported into the room and began menacing the sorcerer and wizard/druid. The druid's summoned dire wolves imapled themselves ineffectually on the spiky hide of the demon, and...
last session (different game) next session
...and we stopped there, as we'd run out of time. Doh.
Afterwards I spent the whole day playing Disgaea.
