![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothLast Friday we had a session of the Golden Compass themed Shadake game.
The Order spent a couple days with the bears, forging or reforging their weapons. It required a great deal of willpower to successfully complete the task, but Jana got it right on the first try, and Eric and Caihong didn't really care if their weapons shattered into bits and had to be remade from scratch. The bears remade them better anyway.
Taegan spent the two days studying Lord Asriel's notes and (mostly) scavenging his tower for spare parts to build a daemon-powered power supply like the Intention craft used. His wasn't quite as powerful (although it would still be enough to zap a spectre most of the time) but was a lot more portable. He'd also wanted to build some capacitors to shoot at people or things and a specter-detector based on some of Lord Asriel's equipment that he'd used to study the interdimensional barrier, but the others were finished before he got to that.
There was also a pack of cliff ghasts waiting to eat him when he finally decided to come out, but Jana outflew them, and went back and got Eric to make big puppy-dog eyes at the bears. Cliff ghasts were (justly) afraid of the bears, so that let them extract Taegan without a fight.
So they headed back to the village, with their daemons in polar-bear form to drag the huge cart of stuff Taegan was salvaging from the tower. They explained to Wren that their new weapons were also potential portal-openers, which didn't make him very happy. Eric talked about their plan to go find a voodoo priestess to bind them against opening portals, which reminded them that they'd never examined the intention craft to see just what had made him go so wonky.
Sure enough, there were signs of a magical trap. An *active* magical trap. Wren tried to exorcise it, but he wasn't much of an exorcist (belief wasn't *necessary* for the ritual to work, but it would have helped) and screwed it up, setting off the trap instead. KABOOM! It wasn't a charm spell this time.
The intention craft wasn't destroyed (the enemy witch didn't have that kind of power over that kind of distance), but the controls were wrecked. Taegan wasn't *sure* he could repair it, but they did have a couple other wrecks to scavenge for spare parts if they could find them again, and what choice did they have? No one even knew when another boat would come...
Oh, wait, there was steam on the horizon -- a surface ship was, in fact, on its way in, although it would be a few hours.
While they were waiting, they decided to try to take care of the specters -- more adults on the boat would be more targets to try to guard. The village had been relatively unmolested because the specters had learned to fear the probes (unfortuantely, they'd only gotten zapped with the small ones, so they hadn't actually been killed), but that made it hard to hunt them. The first patrol showed that it was going to be even harder -- the specters *instinctively* feared the Order's new weapons, and wouldn't get anywhere *near* them.
But Jana was a fast flyer, and Eric's weapon was a gun, so they thought that there was a good chance they could still kill a specter from outside its alert range, if someone was willing to be bait.
The villagers drew straws, and the furrier, John Bateman, won the draw. He wandered out onto the tundra, weaponless but with a detector that Taegan thought would beep when a specter got close, with Jana flying far overhead.
Unfortunately, when the detector beeped, Mr. Bateman looked at *it* instead of at the specter, and Jana saw him freeze up, as if he was being eaten, with no indication of where the specter was (he was supposed to point, but remembering that sort of duty was hard when your soul was being devoured). But using her new energy power and anti-specter sword, she managed to do a short cone blast of energy like she'd seen Eric doing before, that made the specter visible. She parried its counterattack, and sliced it in half.
Bateman was only a little bit specter-eaten, but he was sobbing as he ran back to camp, locking himself in his shop before Caihong could even try to heal him. No one else volunteered to be bait, which was bad because there was at least one more specter out there somewhere (the villagers had seen two).
Taegan sent a message in morse code using a lamp to warn the incoming ship about 'hazardous conditions' and that they should wait, but he didn't want to get more specific and they assured him they had plenty of lookouts watching out for icebergs.
last week | next week
The Order spent a couple days with the bears, forging or reforging their weapons. It required a great deal of willpower to successfully complete the task, but Jana got it right on the first try, and Eric and Caihong didn't really care if their weapons shattered into bits and had to be remade from scratch. The bears remade them better anyway.
Taegan spent the two days studying Lord Asriel's notes and (mostly) scavenging his tower for spare parts to build a daemon-powered power supply like the Intention craft used. His wasn't quite as powerful (although it would still be enough to zap a spectre most of the time) but was a lot more portable. He'd also wanted to build some capacitors to shoot at people or things and a specter-detector based on some of Lord Asriel's equipment that he'd used to study the interdimensional barrier, but the others were finished before he got to that.
There was also a pack of cliff ghasts waiting to eat him when he finally decided to come out, but Jana outflew them, and went back and got Eric to make big puppy-dog eyes at the bears. Cliff ghasts were (justly) afraid of the bears, so that let them extract Taegan without a fight.
So they headed back to the village, with their daemons in polar-bear form to drag the huge cart of stuff Taegan was salvaging from the tower. They explained to Wren that their new weapons were also potential portal-openers, which didn't make him very happy. Eric talked about their plan to go find a voodoo priestess to bind them against opening portals, which reminded them that they'd never examined the intention craft to see just what had made him go so wonky.
Sure enough, there were signs of a magical trap. An *active* magical trap. Wren tried to exorcise it, but he wasn't much of an exorcist (belief wasn't *necessary* for the ritual to work, but it would have helped) and screwed it up, setting off the trap instead. KABOOM! It wasn't a charm spell this time.
The intention craft wasn't destroyed (the enemy witch didn't have that kind of power over that kind of distance), but the controls were wrecked. Taegan wasn't *sure* he could repair it, but they did have a couple other wrecks to scavenge for spare parts if they could find them again, and what choice did they have? No one even knew when another boat would come...
Oh, wait, there was steam on the horizon -- a surface ship was, in fact, on its way in, although it would be a few hours.
While they were waiting, they decided to try to take care of the specters -- more adults on the boat would be more targets to try to guard. The village had been relatively unmolested because the specters had learned to fear the probes (unfortuantely, they'd only gotten zapped with the small ones, so they hadn't actually been killed), but that made it hard to hunt them. The first patrol showed that it was going to be even harder -- the specters *instinctively* feared the Order's new weapons, and wouldn't get anywhere *near* them.
But Jana was a fast flyer, and Eric's weapon was a gun, so they thought that there was a good chance they could still kill a specter from outside its alert range, if someone was willing to be bait.
The villagers drew straws, and the furrier, John Bateman, won the draw. He wandered out onto the tundra, weaponless but with a detector that Taegan thought would beep when a specter got close, with Jana flying far overhead.
Unfortunately, when the detector beeped, Mr. Bateman looked at *it* instead of at the specter, and Jana saw him freeze up, as if he was being eaten, with no indication of where the specter was (he was supposed to point, but remembering that sort of duty was hard when your soul was being devoured). But using her new energy power and anti-specter sword, she managed to do a short cone blast of energy like she'd seen Eric doing before, that made the specter visible. She parried its counterattack, and sliced it in half.
Bateman was only a little bit specter-eaten, but he was sobbing as he ran back to camp, locking himself in his shop before Caihong could even try to heal him. No one else volunteered to be bait, which was bad because there was at least one more specter out there somewhere (the villagers had seen two).
Taegan sent a message in morse code using a lamp to warn the incoming ship about 'hazardous conditions' and that they should wait, but he didn't want to get more specific and they assured him they had plenty of lookouts watching out for icebergs.
last week | next week
