Alchemy and DEATH
Feb. 7th, 2004 10:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothLast night we had another session of the sci fi Shadake game. I think it went pretty well, although there was some argument at one point, where someone tried to pull a GOTCHA!
I can't really hold it against them, since I *want* people to come up with new and surprising things, and since I know some GMs -- especially in the more fleshed out systems -- do appreciate people springing the surprise at the last second, but when I have to invent the rules on the fly I reeeally need to know what you're intending to have something do so I can work with you and figure out how it should work.
I also ate the last pastry, and Sandy didn't get one. But I blame Snowwy for that. It was entrapment!
Adam didn't want to go talk to Taral immediately, Hesperius and Karana had had enough of wandering the dingy, unfriendly city, and Shadarack wanted to wait until next morning to go treasure hunting, so the only order of business for the rest of the day was for Jackie to make the alchemical items he'd promised Ozar to fix his fighter. Ozar wanted them quickly, because something had come up that he had to go attend to, and he wasn't sure whether he'd need his fighter fully fuctional to attend to it properly.
So Jackie started making a few batches of crystal healing salve. The first batch worked decently, but wasn't nearly as effective as they'd hoped -- it looked like it'd take four or five batches to fix it completely. The second batch had a slight side effect -- as Ozar applied it, and the cracks and chips healed from the focusing crystal, his own bones snapped and cracked. He stopped before he was severely impaired, but using that batch was out of the question.
The third batch worked wonderfully, but as a side effect summoned friendly hovering globes of light, one of which distracted Jackie while he was working on the fourth batch, and the half-finished concoction exploded in his face.
Suddenly, Jackie found himself hovering in the air over his dead-looking body. And Hesperius found himself perching on the shower curtain staring a glowing globe in the face. And Meepas (Jackie's familiar) found himself with a much larger body, trying to play a video game that he didn't understand. Shadarack and Adam switched bodies too.
After figuring out what was going on, and how Jackie could communicate with the others (he had a strong enough mental connection to Meepas that he could walk him through talking with these weird 'vocal cord' things), they tried shooting each other with magic-disrupting shells, which worked, sort of -- shooting someone with the shell would put them back in their own body, but you'd then have to shoot their body to get whoever was swapped into it to leave. Plus, as a side effect, the target lost a random sense.
But the main problem was that there were only three of those shells left, and not the five or more that they needed -- Kirrin (the 'little sister' illiski) was asleep on the bed, but they assumed that she might have been swapped with someone.
So they found a place specializing in spirit magic, which over the phone indicated that they'd be able to examine the situation and perhaps fix things, depending on what was actually going on. They piled out into a hired limo, headed over to the clinic, and on the way the effect wore off.
As soon as everyone forgot to keep him under guard, Jackie went back to his alchemy. The fifth batch of crystal healing also wasn't enough to finish the job (and summoned about fifty housecats to the storage shed), but it was the sixth that ended the endeavor, as it animated Ozar's fighter, which flew off to tease and harass the Ronin keeping guard over the city. Ozar flew off after it, and Jackie gave him his last area-effect 'strength/love' potion to maybe make the spirit sort of loyal to him, in case this effect was permanent.
There were random sirens and commotion all around the city for a few hours before it died down, and Ozar never came back, so they could only hope that this meant that he'd caught his errant ship.
The next day Shadarack led them off to the Cave of Death (not the official name) in the Rusty Hills, which was rumored to have ancient Martian treasures at the bottom... but from which No One Ever Came Out Alive. There was some excitement during the flight -- a bolt came loose from the half-modified burrower they were using as an aircar, and the passenger compartment started spinning around randomly, making everyone somewhat queasy. Shadarack, in the pilot's seat, didn't notice a thing until he landed.
The entrance to the cave was boarded up, with a warning sign: "Dangerous Magical Field, Do Not Enter". Shadarack used his digging tool to vaporize the blockade, and they went inside. It felt slightly creepy, but nothing that really bothered anyone.
Inside was a mostly natural cave, with a few manmade additions near the entrance -- just empty rooms, though, cleared out long ago. The cave was dry, and inhabited by native martian life -- 'trilobytes' and burrowing snakes. They ran into a collapsing ceiling that poured sand on them, a not-so-ancient abandoned teenager love nest near a pool of shimmering dust, and a very artificial shaft going down fifty feet to another cave.
At the bottom of the shaft, the aura got stronger, and Shadarack panicked and started firing wildly, until Jackie lit his sanity sparkler to calm everyone down.
The second level down was much like the first, although the creatures were larger, and they had to fight off a colony of burrowing snakes hiding in a sandfall blocking the tunnel they wanted to take. Shadarack was bitten, but he'd bought a tube of healing paste before going on the expedition, and for the most part they survived intact. Another shaft led down, and they took it.
This shaft ended in a square, obviously artificial room, filled with piles of relatively modern debris (mining equipment) and with a set of train tracks leading out one end down a square corridor carved into the rock. Again, the aura got stronger here, and even with the sparkler Adam and Shadarack were somewhat spooked. Adam's danger sense and Shadarack's trap skill both agreed -- they should leave this room immediately. The others trusted their judgement.
So they walked down the tracks for quite a while, occasionally spotting the odd giant trilobyte. Adam and Shadarack were convinced that something was following them, so Jackie shot a 'whipping flame' shell back down the corridor into the debris room. Somewhat to his surprise, it exploded into a fire elemental, which roared and attacked... something... and was cut down in a hail of gunfire. Someone *was* following them -- and no mere trilobyte!
They didn't seem to be following very quickly, though, so when they came to a side passage and Shadarack spotted a glint of something, they detoured to investigate... and found a very dead Hannah, skeletonized, still wearing a very nice suit of armor, and carrying a really huge-ass needler. Adam claimed the needler, Shadarack was encouraged to put himself in the armor, and then they headed back to the main tracks so as to not get overly sidetracked. They passed several more side passages, but didn't see anything enticing down them, and decided to continue on straight.
Eventually, the corridor they were following curved around to the right, then ended at a dark chasm. The tracks continued across it -- two metal ties, extending across the gap, with no visible means of support. Balancing on them would probably be possible, but they didn't want to try it just yet.
But could they go back? Shadarack could hear a mass of trilobytes following them -- and had been hearing it for some time -- but so far they'd fled the light. So he held his light up bravely and advanced back down the corridor at them. This time, they didn't retreat. They attacked!
The creatures were large, and tough, and while not the fastest things in the world, they were speedy enough to close the distance the light illuminated too quickly for comfort. The needler wasn't very effective on them (which shouldn't have been too surprising, since the person they took it off was dead, after all), but Adam's sword worked just fine. Hesperius summoned fractal helpers to distract and whittle down the enemies. Jackie found that they were big, but not THAT big, and bottled four of them. And Shadarack programmed his digging gauntlet to open a hole under them *just* long enough for them to fall in, then get trapped by the rock reappearing.
One of them clamped onto Shadarack's leg and started chewing through his armor, but Adam finished off his own share and helped out before any limbs were gnawed off.
But even as the last of the trilobytes were killed and turned to sand, a second wave appeared at the edge of the light, and the party decided to run for it! Jackie had no problem scampering along the narrow rails, and Hesperius just created a hoverbelt to hold him in midair, but Adam and Shadarack tried to crawl along on hands and knees to make sure they didn't fall, and the trilobytes, who were just the right size to travel along the track, were rapidly catching up!
Hesperius created magic flying belts for them, too, but not before one of the giant bugs clamped onto Shadarack's *other* leg. It was stronger than the belt, but with everyone flying around shooting and slicing at it it didn't survive long. The remaining trilobytes retreated when it was obvious the party could just fire on them with impunity from up in the air, while they were stuck on the track.
After that, the three flying people caught up to Jackie, who'd paused after seeing that the tracks seemed to lead right up into a giant set of teeth, and inside. Cautiously, they crept close to shed more light on what was up ahead.
last week next week
I can't really hold it against them, since I *want* people to come up with new and surprising things, and since I know some GMs -- especially in the more fleshed out systems -- do appreciate people springing the surprise at the last second, but when I have to invent the rules on the fly I reeeally need to know what you're intending to have something do so I can work with you and figure out how it should work.
I also ate the last pastry, and Sandy didn't get one. But I blame Snowwy for that. It was entrapment!
Adam didn't want to go talk to Taral immediately, Hesperius and Karana had had enough of wandering the dingy, unfriendly city, and Shadarack wanted to wait until next morning to go treasure hunting, so the only order of business for the rest of the day was for Jackie to make the alchemical items he'd promised Ozar to fix his fighter. Ozar wanted them quickly, because something had come up that he had to go attend to, and he wasn't sure whether he'd need his fighter fully fuctional to attend to it properly.
So Jackie started making a few batches of crystal healing salve. The first batch worked decently, but wasn't nearly as effective as they'd hoped -- it looked like it'd take four or five batches to fix it completely. The second batch had a slight side effect -- as Ozar applied it, and the cracks and chips healed from the focusing crystal, his own bones snapped and cracked. He stopped before he was severely impaired, but using that batch was out of the question.
The third batch worked wonderfully, but as a side effect summoned friendly hovering globes of light, one of which distracted Jackie while he was working on the fourth batch, and the half-finished concoction exploded in his face.
Suddenly, Jackie found himself hovering in the air over his dead-looking body. And Hesperius found himself perching on the shower curtain staring a glowing globe in the face. And Meepas (Jackie's familiar) found himself with a much larger body, trying to play a video game that he didn't understand. Shadarack and Adam switched bodies too.
After figuring out what was going on, and how Jackie could communicate with the others (he had a strong enough mental connection to Meepas that he could walk him through talking with these weird 'vocal cord' things), they tried shooting each other with magic-disrupting shells, which worked, sort of -- shooting someone with the shell would put them back in their own body, but you'd then have to shoot their body to get whoever was swapped into it to leave. Plus, as a side effect, the target lost a random sense.
But the main problem was that there were only three of those shells left, and not the five or more that they needed -- Kirrin (the 'little sister' illiski) was asleep on the bed, but they assumed that she might have been swapped with someone.
So they found a place specializing in spirit magic, which over the phone indicated that they'd be able to examine the situation and perhaps fix things, depending on what was actually going on. They piled out into a hired limo, headed over to the clinic, and on the way the effect wore off.
As soon as everyone forgot to keep him under guard, Jackie went back to his alchemy. The fifth batch of crystal healing also wasn't enough to finish the job (and summoned about fifty housecats to the storage shed), but it was the sixth that ended the endeavor, as it animated Ozar's fighter, which flew off to tease and harass the Ronin keeping guard over the city. Ozar flew off after it, and Jackie gave him his last area-effect 'strength/love' potion to maybe make the spirit sort of loyal to him, in case this effect was permanent.
There were random sirens and commotion all around the city for a few hours before it died down, and Ozar never came back, so they could only hope that this meant that he'd caught his errant ship.
The next day Shadarack led them off to the Cave of Death (not the official name) in the Rusty Hills, which was rumored to have ancient Martian treasures at the bottom... but from which No One Ever Came Out Alive. There was some excitement during the flight -- a bolt came loose from the half-modified burrower they were using as an aircar, and the passenger compartment started spinning around randomly, making everyone somewhat queasy. Shadarack, in the pilot's seat, didn't notice a thing until he landed.
The entrance to the cave was boarded up, with a warning sign: "Dangerous Magical Field, Do Not Enter". Shadarack used his digging tool to vaporize the blockade, and they went inside. It felt slightly creepy, but nothing that really bothered anyone.
Inside was a mostly natural cave, with a few manmade additions near the entrance -- just empty rooms, though, cleared out long ago. The cave was dry, and inhabited by native martian life -- 'trilobytes' and burrowing snakes. They ran into a collapsing ceiling that poured sand on them, a not-so-ancient abandoned teenager love nest near a pool of shimmering dust, and a very artificial shaft going down fifty feet to another cave.
At the bottom of the shaft, the aura got stronger, and Shadarack panicked and started firing wildly, until Jackie lit his sanity sparkler to calm everyone down.
The second level down was much like the first, although the creatures were larger, and they had to fight off a colony of burrowing snakes hiding in a sandfall blocking the tunnel they wanted to take. Shadarack was bitten, but he'd bought a tube of healing paste before going on the expedition, and for the most part they survived intact. Another shaft led down, and they took it.
This shaft ended in a square, obviously artificial room, filled with piles of relatively modern debris (mining equipment) and with a set of train tracks leading out one end down a square corridor carved into the rock. Again, the aura got stronger here, and even with the sparkler Adam and Shadarack were somewhat spooked. Adam's danger sense and Shadarack's trap skill both agreed -- they should leave this room immediately. The others trusted their judgement.
So they walked down the tracks for quite a while, occasionally spotting the odd giant trilobyte. Adam and Shadarack were convinced that something was following them, so Jackie shot a 'whipping flame' shell back down the corridor into the debris room. Somewhat to his surprise, it exploded into a fire elemental, which roared and attacked... something... and was cut down in a hail of gunfire. Someone *was* following them -- and no mere trilobyte!
They didn't seem to be following very quickly, though, so when they came to a side passage and Shadarack spotted a glint of something, they detoured to investigate... and found a very dead Hannah, skeletonized, still wearing a very nice suit of armor, and carrying a really huge-ass needler. Adam claimed the needler, Shadarack was encouraged to put himself in the armor, and then they headed back to the main tracks so as to not get overly sidetracked. They passed several more side passages, but didn't see anything enticing down them, and decided to continue on straight.
Eventually, the corridor they were following curved around to the right, then ended at a dark chasm. The tracks continued across it -- two metal ties, extending across the gap, with no visible means of support. Balancing on them would probably be possible, but they didn't want to try it just yet.
But could they go back? Shadarack could hear a mass of trilobytes following them -- and had been hearing it for some time -- but so far they'd fled the light. So he held his light up bravely and advanced back down the corridor at them. This time, they didn't retreat. They attacked!
The creatures were large, and tough, and while not the fastest things in the world, they were speedy enough to close the distance the light illuminated too quickly for comfort. The needler wasn't very effective on them (which shouldn't have been too surprising, since the person they took it off was dead, after all), but Adam's sword worked just fine. Hesperius summoned fractal helpers to distract and whittle down the enemies. Jackie found that they were big, but not THAT big, and bottled four of them. And Shadarack programmed his digging gauntlet to open a hole under them *just* long enough for them to fall in, then get trapped by the rock reappearing.
One of them clamped onto Shadarack's leg and started chewing through his armor, but Adam finished off his own share and helped out before any limbs were gnawed off.
But even as the last of the trilobytes were killed and turned to sand, a second wave appeared at the edge of the light, and the party decided to run for it! Jackie had no problem scampering along the narrow rails, and Hesperius just created a hoverbelt to hold him in midair, but Adam and Shadarack tried to crawl along on hands and knees to make sure they didn't fall, and the trilobytes, who were just the right size to travel along the track, were rapidly catching up!
Hesperius created magic flying belts for them, too, but not before one of the giant bugs clamped onto Shadarack's *other* leg. It was stronger than the belt, but with everyone flying around shooting and slicing at it it didn't survive long. The remaining trilobytes retreated when it was obvious the party could just fire on them with impunity from up in the air, while they were stuck on the track.
After that, the three flying people caught up to Jackie, who'd paused after seeing that the tracks seemed to lead right up into a giant set of teeth, and inside. Cautiously, they crept close to shed more light on what was up ahead.
last week next week
