Aside from the giant cat...
Sep. 3rd, 2006 10:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothFriday night we had a session of the Shadake game. The party decided to cast themselves into the lion's maw, where they discovered bunnies. And skeletons.
The plan was to travel north of the Carnival's giant tree, so that if Kantrigar was angry when they summoned him, he'd attack the tree first. Explaining the plan to the hunter's guild got Bella a sack of catnip to try to tempt and/or drug the giant cat god of the mountains with... for some reason the guild full of teleporting cat-folk had plenty of catnip on hand. Go figure.
Alex and the random hunter who'd given them the catnip tried to follow, but the hunter lost the trail when Zedd started teleporting the group in 2-mile hops [he failed his roll to trace the teleport] and Alex was left behind because he'd hidden himself in the trees to 'cover them', and so when the unicorns arrived there wasn't one for him.
So, right, unicorns. Den used what he knew of communicating with animals, and his ability to psychically project images into the animals' minds, to get the noisy birds to summon cats instead of squirrels to attack them, and then to get the cats to take them to Kantrigar. Which wasn't exactly what he'd asked for, but there you go.
Kantrigar himself was... somewhat incapacitated by the catnip, which Bella had suddenly grow into a massive (mile wide) field just as he was sniffing at them to see if they'd been contaminated by the Carnival. So he teleported them away, without the normal 'I EAT YOU!' special effect, and they ended up somewhere underground, in a dark semi-natural cave.
There was a table there, with three bottles, two pink and one green, labelled 'drink me'. It was obvious which was for who, so Zedd drank one of the pink ones, and although it made him tingle it didn't seem to do anything else. Den decided to drink the green one, to be contrary, but it burned and made his mouth numb, so he gave it to Bella and drank the other pink one instead.
A woman's laughter from no apparent source filled the cavern, and they were praised for being obedient children.
So they started making their way through the maze, trying to head up. They passed faux egyptian-style murals (Den could tell they were fake because the hieroglyphics were gibberish) and then emerged into a large room that looked like it might be inside a pyramid, where they were attacked by five skeletons. Bella threw some kudzu seeds at them to entangle them, and then kept them tied down while Den and Zedd blew them apart with ranged attacks.
Then they started exploring the pyramid, with Zedd in front because he was best at tele-dodging the many traps -- falling blocks, spears from the walls, pits, and stuff like that. The first tunnel they tried dead-ended at a giant goblet of fire, with a diving board positioned so that one could jump into it if they wanted. Zedd tested the fire with a finger, and while it felt like he was burning, his finger wasn't burned afterwards. The plants they tested with next *were* burned afterwards, though, so when the voice returned, asked if they trusted her, and asked them to leap into the fire, they declined.
The other tunnel led around back, past a waterfall pouring down a vertical shaft (they could see something like sunlight from the top), to an egyptian-style tomb with a fox-faced sarcophagus. No one wanted to enter the room.
The voice told them a story about the pharoah buried there, how he'd spent his life making laws to fix the problems of his nation and his servants, but even though the problems were solved, the laws that fixed them seemed unrelated and insane, so no one liked him. But he had the last laugh, in a way, as the laws somehow resulted in a giant pyramid being built in his honor after his death.
"Aren't you here to rob the tomb?" the voice asked. The party wasn't. "Well, why are you here?" They explained that they wanted to get home, but they didn't know the way out. "Well, maybe there's a secret entrance somewhere in the tomb, you never know..."
There wasn't, though. There was a mummy with fiery eye-beams, that Zedd just teleported away, and a poison gas trap that they mostly avoided.
Since that seemed to be a dead end, they decided to climb up the waterfall. Zedd concentrated on continuously teleporting the water past them, while Bella lifted them up the shaft on a platform of growing vines.
The sunlight was coming in through shafts cut in the ceiling, and appeared to be there to let the real palm trees in the fake grotto grow. They spent some time exploring the side passages, fighting off a trio of vampires (that really, really didn't like Den's laser pistol), then headed downriver, which was also up-aquaduct, following the source of the water to the top of the pyramid.
There, they found the source of the voice that they'd been chatting with all along -- Easter, an ordinary looking rabbit, who could talk. She had a meadow, a spring, and another sarcophagus, this one of an ordinary looking human -- one who looked a lot like Bella, in fact -- that she called 'Doctor Stephenson'.
She told them that they weren't worthy of being her agents -- because they didn't trust her -- but she offered to send them home. Den asked if she could just send them to the Oracle, and she warned them that the oracle might not be trustworthy. She'd sent agents to talk to it before, and they'd never been able to determine which side it was on.
Apparently, she and Kantrigar were engaged in a struggle of sorts with the Web (who'd sent the carnival out to kidnap people, etc). Easter said that she was trying to save humanity and allow them to determine their own destiny, but Den remarked (in his own thoughts) that it sounded more like that was what the web wanted, and Easter et all couldn't stand for.
The main objection was that the web used 'unacceptable technology' and enslaved the gods, but everything Easter said was framed in terms of protecting humanity. 'We need to stop them so that they don't infect more cities that we'll have to destroy', and stuff like that. She didn't think that the priestesses' plan of controlling the web's children would work, since Easter herself had originally controlled their reproduction and it hadn't helped her much at all.
She also couldn't actually teleport the people away from her pyramid without Kantrigar's help, and Kantrigar was still drunk on 'nip, so the party got to spend the day in her meadow and chat with her about science and stuff.
last week | next week
The plan was to travel north of the Carnival's giant tree, so that if Kantrigar was angry when they summoned him, he'd attack the tree first. Explaining the plan to the hunter's guild got Bella a sack of catnip to try to tempt and/or drug the giant cat god of the mountains with... for some reason the guild full of teleporting cat-folk had plenty of catnip on hand. Go figure.
Alex and the random hunter who'd given them the catnip tried to follow, but the hunter lost the trail when Zedd started teleporting the group in 2-mile hops [he failed his roll to trace the teleport] and Alex was left behind because he'd hidden himself in the trees to 'cover them', and so when the unicorns arrived there wasn't one for him.
So, right, unicorns. Den used what he knew of communicating with animals, and his ability to psychically project images into the animals' minds, to get the noisy birds to summon cats instead of squirrels to attack them, and then to get the cats to take them to Kantrigar. Which wasn't exactly what he'd asked for, but there you go.
Kantrigar himself was... somewhat incapacitated by the catnip, which Bella had suddenly grow into a massive (mile wide) field just as he was sniffing at them to see if they'd been contaminated by the Carnival. So he teleported them away, without the normal 'I EAT YOU!' special effect, and they ended up somewhere underground, in a dark semi-natural cave.
There was a table there, with three bottles, two pink and one green, labelled 'drink me'. It was obvious which was for who, so Zedd drank one of the pink ones, and although it made him tingle it didn't seem to do anything else. Den decided to drink the green one, to be contrary, but it burned and made his mouth numb, so he gave it to Bella and drank the other pink one instead.
A woman's laughter from no apparent source filled the cavern, and they were praised for being obedient children.
So they started making their way through the maze, trying to head up. They passed faux egyptian-style murals (Den could tell they were fake because the hieroglyphics were gibberish) and then emerged into a large room that looked like it might be inside a pyramid, where they were attacked by five skeletons. Bella threw some kudzu seeds at them to entangle them, and then kept them tied down while Den and Zedd blew them apart with ranged attacks.
Then they started exploring the pyramid, with Zedd in front because he was best at tele-dodging the many traps -- falling blocks, spears from the walls, pits, and stuff like that. The first tunnel they tried dead-ended at a giant goblet of fire, with a diving board positioned so that one could jump into it if they wanted. Zedd tested the fire with a finger, and while it felt like he was burning, his finger wasn't burned afterwards. The plants they tested with next *were* burned afterwards, though, so when the voice returned, asked if they trusted her, and asked them to leap into the fire, they declined.
The other tunnel led around back, past a waterfall pouring down a vertical shaft (they could see something like sunlight from the top), to an egyptian-style tomb with a fox-faced sarcophagus. No one wanted to enter the room.
The voice told them a story about the pharoah buried there, how he'd spent his life making laws to fix the problems of his nation and his servants, but even though the problems were solved, the laws that fixed them seemed unrelated and insane, so no one liked him. But he had the last laugh, in a way, as the laws somehow resulted in a giant pyramid being built in his honor after his death.
"Aren't you here to rob the tomb?" the voice asked. The party wasn't. "Well, why are you here?" They explained that they wanted to get home, but they didn't know the way out. "Well, maybe there's a secret entrance somewhere in the tomb, you never know..."
There wasn't, though. There was a mummy with fiery eye-beams, that Zedd just teleported away, and a poison gas trap that they mostly avoided.
Since that seemed to be a dead end, they decided to climb up the waterfall. Zedd concentrated on continuously teleporting the water past them, while Bella lifted them up the shaft on a platform of growing vines.
The sunlight was coming in through shafts cut in the ceiling, and appeared to be there to let the real palm trees in the fake grotto grow. They spent some time exploring the side passages, fighting off a trio of vampires (that really, really didn't like Den's laser pistol), then headed downriver, which was also up-aquaduct, following the source of the water to the top of the pyramid.
There, they found the source of the voice that they'd been chatting with all along -- Easter, an ordinary looking rabbit, who could talk. She had a meadow, a spring, and another sarcophagus, this one of an ordinary looking human -- one who looked a lot like Bella, in fact -- that she called 'Doctor Stephenson'.
She told them that they weren't worthy of being her agents -- because they didn't trust her -- but she offered to send them home. Den asked if she could just send them to the Oracle, and she warned them that the oracle might not be trustworthy. She'd sent agents to talk to it before, and they'd never been able to determine which side it was on.
Apparently, she and Kantrigar were engaged in a struggle of sorts with the Web (who'd sent the carnival out to kidnap people, etc). Easter said that she was trying to save humanity and allow them to determine their own destiny, but Den remarked (in his own thoughts) that it sounded more like that was what the web wanted, and Easter et all couldn't stand for.
The main objection was that the web used 'unacceptable technology' and enslaved the gods, but everything Easter said was framed in terms of protecting humanity. 'We need to stop them so that they don't infect more cities that we'll have to destroy', and stuff like that. She didn't think that the priestesses' plan of controlling the web's children would work, since Easter herself had originally controlled their reproduction and it hadn't helped her much at all.
She also couldn't actually teleport the people away from her pyramid without Kantrigar's help, and Kantrigar was still drunk on 'nip, so the party got to spend the day in her meadow and chat with her about science and stuff.
last week | next week
