Remnants of the last war
Aug. 6th, 2005 02:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothHad a game at Lazar's new place, which was mostly empty. They've just started moving, and basically had the bare minimum set up for us to play the game.
Everyone got lost trying to find it, but that didn't matter because Lazar was late anyway. It's about 10-15 minutes farther than his old place using the route I normally take, but it's closer to the freeway (or at least, closer to the freeway than it is to the old place), so it might be worth braving I-405 traffic now. Technically, it was already faster to use the freeway -- it just *felt* slower because of the 15 minutes spent creeping along at 5 mph.
The skeleton escaped during the night (or, possibly, before that -- it got away while no one was looking) even though they'd taken its gibbet with them. How annoying!
But the bounce they got from having the boat tied down while they ferried up the Luzezango did get them over the rest of the cracked mesa area, and into a place with more ordinary vegitation than they'd seen for... well, ever. Jirae was on the very edge of the habitable zone from the magical storms, and they expected to find better land the further west they went. Well, until they got to the glowing lands, at least.
Ahead of them, off the coast, was a large island, more than a thousand feet high and with a several mile deep overhang around sea level. What made it interesting was the smoke plumes coming from the top, that looked like campfires -- someone lived there! It would be slightly annoying to visit, since it was above their ship's cruising altitude and they wouldn't be able to land on top of the island (and, if they somehow managed to land, they wouldn't be able to get off safely) but that wasn't an insurmountable problem, due to the sky mantas.
Before reaching the island, though, they were distracted by a large battlefield -- for five miles, the coastline was studded with skeletons and the wrecks of ships and other war machines. They decided to anchor the ship near this field and go down to scavenge. Because the people on ship would probably be able to see danger coming a mile off and call for help before it got close (few things were faster than the sky mantas), and the people on the ground were expecting trouble, all the combat capable people headed down in the away team. And also Balthazaar.
As they headed down, they noticed how intact the skeletons and many of the machines were -- there were signs of rust and damage on their armor, but no *holes* like a weapon would have made. No missing bones. Nothing like that. It was creepy! Had some death magic killed them all instantly before they had a chance to wound each other? Was it still around? Perrel didn't see any magic, but that didn't necessarily mean anything.
Jardin was volunteered to go down first to see if anything would attack him, since the Cytherians were too fragile and Perrel was the doctor and thus not a good person to get hurt first. Nothing instantly reacted. He started trying to salvage some apparently rust-proof chain mail, and a small creature, like an undead Kalmar infesting an undead dog (only with cloth draped over the bones instead of hide), ran towards him! Jardin tried to hold it off with his polearm, but it dodged past and started reassembling the skeleton.
This pattern continued -- the little constructs would zip around fixing anything the party disturbed or broke, but didn't actually stop their salvage efforts or try to steal from them to fix things. Balthazaar wanted one, and so started a comedy of errors as the students failed miserably to capture them many times -- they tried grappling, dropping boxes on them, setting traps, but nothing worked. Eventually, they sent Roshan back up to get a blanket to set a massive trap that would require less precision to pull off... and before she got back Jardin finally managed to get hold of one and trap it in a box.
They also explored one of the nearby ships -- it was empty, except for the constructs, which had stripped everything internal to fix the hull, in a losing battle against corrosion. They did find a lot of (now worthless) paper money (but hey, free paper!) and some strange, tiny brass vials full of tightly packed gunpowder (aka 'bullets'). Roshan's blanket came in handy as a makeshift sack to carry back all the loot.
There were still dozens of ships to check, and checking them seemed like a good idea -- obviously, the creepy constructs had scared away the more superstitious looters. But the construct they'd captured had been let out of the box to start 'fixing' the ship, and at some point it decided to salvage some extra wood from one of the barrels of gunpowder. Then, after tracking gunpowder everywhere, it started to weld the wall of the danger room back into place...
The fire destroyed about 20% of their ordinary supplies, and the construct was blown to bits. Luckily, the other still fairly-tightly-packed barrels of gunpowder didn't ignite, so the ship was still structurally sound...
last session | next session
Everyone got lost trying to find it, but that didn't matter because Lazar was late anyway. It's about 10-15 minutes farther than his old place using the route I normally take, but it's closer to the freeway (or at least, closer to the freeway than it is to the old place), so it might be worth braving I-405 traffic now. Technically, it was already faster to use the freeway -- it just *felt* slower because of the 15 minutes spent creeping along at 5 mph.
The skeleton escaped during the night (or, possibly, before that -- it got away while no one was looking) even though they'd taken its gibbet with them. How annoying!
But the bounce they got from having the boat tied down while they ferried up the Luzezango did get them over the rest of the cracked mesa area, and into a place with more ordinary vegitation than they'd seen for... well, ever. Jirae was on the very edge of the habitable zone from the magical storms, and they expected to find better land the further west they went. Well, until they got to the glowing lands, at least.
Ahead of them, off the coast, was a large island, more than a thousand feet high and with a several mile deep overhang around sea level. What made it interesting was the smoke plumes coming from the top, that looked like campfires -- someone lived there! It would be slightly annoying to visit, since it was above their ship's cruising altitude and they wouldn't be able to land on top of the island (and, if they somehow managed to land, they wouldn't be able to get off safely) but that wasn't an insurmountable problem, due to the sky mantas.
Before reaching the island, though, they were distracted by a large battlefield -- for five miles, the coastline was studded with skeletons and the wrecks of ships and other war machines. They decided to anchor the ship near this field and go down to scavenge. Because the people on ship would probably be able to see danger coming a mile off and call for help before it got close (few things were faster than the sky mantas), and the people on the ground were expecting trouble, all the combat capable people headed down in the away team. And also Balthazaar.
As they headed down, they noticed how intact the skeletons and many of the machines were -- there were signs of rust and damage on their armor, but no *holes* like a weapon would have made. No missing bones. Nothing like that. It was creepy! Had some death magic killed them all instantly before they had a chance to wound each other? Was it still around? Perrel didn't see any magic, but that didn't necessarily mean anything.
Jardin was volunteered to go down first to see if anything would attack him, since the Cytherians were too fragile and Perrel was the doctor and thus not a good person to get hurt first. Nothing instantly reacted. He started trying to salvage some apparently rust-proof chain mail, and a small creature, like an undead Kalmar infesting an undead dog (only with cloth draped over the bones instead of hide), ran towards him! Jardin tried to hold it off with his polearm, but it dodged past and started reassembling the skeleton.
This pattern continued -- the little constructs would zip around fixing anything the party disturbed or broke, but didn't actually stop their salvage efforts or try to steal from them to fix things. Balthazaar wanted one, and so started a comedy of errors as the students failed miserably to capture them many times -- they tried grappling, dropping boxes on them, setting traps, but nothing worked. Eventually, they sent Roshan back up to get a blanket to set a massive trap that would require less precision to pull off... and before she got back Jardin finally managed to get hold of one and trap it in a box.
They also explored one of the nearby ships -- it was empty, except for the constructs, which had stripped everything internal to fix the hull, in a losing battle against corrosion. They did find a lot of (now worthless) paper money (but hey, free paper!) and some strange, tiny brass vials full of tightly packed gunpowder (aka 'bullets'). Roshan's blanket came in handy as a makeshift sack to carry back all the loot.
There were still dozens of ships to check, and checking them seemed like a good idea -- obviously, the creepy constructs had scared away the more superstitious looters. But the construct they'd captured had been let out of the box to start 'fixing' the ship, and at some point it decided to salvage some extra wood from one of the barrels of gunpowder. Then, after tracking gunpowder everywhere, it started to weld the wall of the danger room back into place...
The fire destroyed about 20% of their ordinary supplies, and the construct was blown to bits. Luckily, the other still fairly-tightly-packed barrels of gunpowder didn't ignite, so the ship was still structurally sound...
last session | next session
