Battle for the Doomsday
Apr. 13th, 2010 02:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothLast Friday we played some Shadake, finishing up the saga of the haunted super-weapon. OR DID WE?
The dragon stressed the need to attack *quickly*, so the more elaborate plans were shelved in favor of something simple -- everyone would gather in a room adjoining the bridge, where Teatime and Magnus would detect and project an illusion of peoples' locations inside the bridge. Then the wall would be made 1-way transparent with passwall paint, and the best thrower on the ship (one of the clockwork) would take the lead of a company of 100 people throwing gallons of spike growth ointment at the centaur, in the hopes that at least one dose would land, immobilizing him.
Then, the melee team would rush in, disable the hypnotized healers, kill the centaur, and save the dragons from whatever was going to take them over.
Yes, that was the SIMPLE plan.
It didn't work. The centaur had a modified 'blink' defense up that made the first throw teleport him into the room with the throwers -- the rest of the ointment splattered all over the bridge and destroyed the controls, at least the bits that didn't hit weird crystal dragonflies that hadn't been visible to telepathy in flight. Before he could kill everyone, one of the dragons did a dream-pulse along the lines of the lords of Morpheus' powers, putting almost everyone to sleep. Fortunately, this included the centaur.
In the dream, the crew of the Scythebear kicked the centaur's ASS. Several of them were citizens of Morpheus, which granted them power over dreams. The centaur was not.
In the real world, Kyngeah was one of the few people awake. She woke up Nico to deal with the crystal dragonflies, which were trying to crawl into peoples' mouths and take over their bodies while they slept.
There was lots of flashy but completely irrelevant pyrotechnics, and then the dragon who'd put everyone to sleep started interviewing Cane and Takara about how life worked. Why were they trying to kill the centaur? Why was Enka's forced obedience a bad thing? Their philosophy-fu was weak, and they ended up convincing him that he should fly off and try to build up as much personal power as possible.
Cane: "Well, at least we didn't convince him to destroy all humans."
At any rate, eventually Kyngeah woke everyone else up too, and they shot the centaur in the head repeatedly, since his armor was quietly absorbing the growth and fixing itself. The armor started quietly regrowing his brain and fixing itself. They ended up dumping him out the back of the ship, because they weren't sure how to kill him for real, and their bottle mage was busy.
Cane: "Maybe we could send him to Ix, with a note attached, 'Please store this for us'?"
The ship was moving, though, and their own ships were locked in the cargo bay, and the control room was completely destroyed. They managed to stop the ship moving by manually operating the vanes (since the hallways were more or less safe now, with the dragons freed and the centaur gone) and then were contacted by some elves who said they'd taken over weapon control and were going to destroy the ship unless they could make a deal.
Thinking that these were the escaped prisoners, they sent Kyngeah to negotiate and/or convert them. Unfortuantely, they were not the escaped prisoners -- they were the hypnotized elves, who'd survived the battle, been freed from control, and absconded with one of the dragons, which they had enslaved and strapped into the chair of death that powered the gun. A dragon's life force was far too powerful for the gun, and would destroy the whole ship if they fired.
Negotiations went poorly -- the elves refused to believe that someone as pacifistic and blase about military matters as Kyngeah could be in charge. So the party sent Cane instead, who offered them EXACTLY THE SAME DEAL which was actually better than their initial request (but less work for the party) -- they could leave on board the elven ship as long as they left the Argent Hand (as the doomsday ship was called) in the party's hands.
Of course, Cane added the clause that they'd strip off any weapons and other valuables from the elven ship before turning it over. He instructed the crew performing that work to also remove all the vanes but two -- that would leave the ship capable of controlled flight, but very very slow.
They also found a lot of creepy possibly military cargo in the elven ship -- dragon fetus skeletons in eggshells, a pentagram made out of grrlock hearts, and a whole, live scythebear in a block of comet ice. Nobody wanted to touch the scythebear, and after a vote they decided to let the Empire mages keep it. For 'good luck'.
The Empire mages also agreed to repair the ship's internal controls so that they could open the bay doors and actually leave. Xerxes and Nico monitored the work, to make sure there were no booby traps, and didn't see any foul play until the work was done, when the mages suddenly evacuated all the air inside the ship, leaving everyone choking in vacuum.
Cane and Faucet managed to get a breeze going in their own hangar bay to keep everyone from choking to death, but Xerxes and Nico were in the control room. They dispatched their fastest clockwork with a few doses of passwall paint (to get them out) and stoneform ointment (to make them not have to breathe).
Meanwhile, the elves sailed off, satisfied with their final betrayal. Slowly. Hopefully, taking the doom with them.
Oh, and then a while later (after regaining environmental control, presumably) Anagnoresis and Itsaboy came out of their workshop with a fully functional, selective magic anchor that would reverse (in theory) only changestorm effects. They had Takara generate a test effect, pointed the anchor at it, and BAMF!
...everyone was transformed into strange things, as the underlying effect that Cane's transformation potions was counteracting went away, leaving the transformation badly broken. Oops. Apparently, the anchor was AoE.
last session | next session
The dragon stressed the need to attack *quickly*, so the more elaborate plans were shelved in favor of something simple -- everyone would gather in a room adjoining the bridge, where Teatime and Magnus would detect and project an illusion of peoples' locations inside the bridge. Then the wall would be made 1-way transparent with passwall paint, and the best thrower on the ship (one of the clockwork) would take the lead of a company of 100 people throwing gallons of spike growth ointment at the centaur, in the hopes that at least one dose would land, immobilizing him.
Then, the melee team would rush in, disable the hypnotized healers, kill the centaur, and save the dragons from whatever was going to take them over.
Yes, that was the SIMPLE plan.
It didn't work. The centaur had a modified 'blink' defense up that made the first throw teleport him into the room with the throwers -- the rest of the ointment splattered all over the bridge and destroyed the controls, at least the bits that didn't hit weird crystal dragonflies that hadn't been visible to telepathy in flight. Before he could kill everyone, one of the dragons did a dream-pulse along the lines of the lords of Morpheus' powers, putting almost everyone to sleep. Fortunately, this included the centaur.
In the dream, the crew of the Scythebear kicked the centaur's ASS. Several of them were citizens of Morpheus, which granted them power over dreams. The centaur was not.
In the real world, Kyngeah was one of the few people awake. She woke up Nico to deal with the crystal dragonflies, which were trying to crawl into peoples' mouths and take over their bodies while they slept.
There was lots of flashy but completely irrelevant pyrotechnics, and then the dragon who'd put everyone to sleep started interviewing Cane and Takara about how life worked. Why were they trying to kill the centaur? Why was Enka's forced obedience a bad thing? Their philosophy-fu was weak, and they ended up convincing him that he should fly off and try to build up as much personal power as possible.
Cane: "Well, at least we didn't convince him to destroy all humans."
At any rate, eventually Kyngeah woke everyone else up too, and they shot the centaur in the head repeatedly, since his armor was quietly absorbing the growth and fixing itself. The armor started quietly regrowing his brain and fixing itself. They ended up dumping him out the back of the ship, because they weren't sure how to kill him for real, and their bottle mage was busy.
Cane: "Maybe we could send him to Ix, with a note attached, 'Please store this for us'?"
The ship was moving, though, and their own ships were locked in the cargo bay, and the control room was completely destroyed. They managed to stop the ship moving by manually operating the vanes (since the hallways were more or less safe now, with the dragons freed and the centaur gone) and then were contacted by some elves who said they'd taken over weapon control and were going to destroy the ship unless they could make a deal.
Thinking that these were the escaped prisoners, they sent Kyngeah to negotiate and/or convert them. Unfortuantely, they were not the escaped prisoners -- they were the hypnotized elves, who'd survived the battle, been freed from control, and absconded with one of the dragons, which they had enslaved and strapped into the chair of death that powered the gun. A dragon's life force was far too powerful for the gun, and would destroy the whole ship if they fired.
Negotiations went poorly -- the elves refused to believe that someone as pacifistic and blase about military matters as Kyngeah could be in charge. So the party sent Cane instead, who offered them EXACTLY THE SAME DEAL which was actually better than their initial request (but less work for the party) -- they could leave on board the elven ship as long as they left the Argent Hand (as the doomsday ship was called) in the party's hands.
Of course, Cane added the clause that they'd strip off any weapons and other valuables from the elven ship before turning it over. He instructed the crew performing that work to also remove all the vanes but two -- that would leave the ship capable of controlled flight, but very very slow.
They also found a lot of creepy possibly military cargo in the elven ship -- dragon fetus skeletons in eggshells, a pentagram made out of grrlock hearts, and a whole, live scythebear in a block of comet ice. Nobody wanted to touch the scythebear, and after a vote they decided to let the Empire mages keep it. For 'good luck'.
The Empire mages also agreed to repair the ship's internal controls so that they could open the bay doors and actually leave. Xerxes and Nico monitored the work, to make sure there were no booby traps, and didn't see any foul play until the work was done, when the mages suddenly evacuated all the air inside the ship, leaving everyone choking in vacuum.
Cane and Faucet managed to get a breeze going in their own hangar bay to keep everyone from choking to death, but Xerxes and Nico were in the control room. They dispatched their fastest clockwork with a few doses of passwall paint (to get them out) and stoneform ointment (to make them not have to breathe).
Meanwhile, the elves sailed off, satisfied with their final betrayal. Slowly. Hopefully, taking the doom with them.
Oh, and then a while later (after regaining environmental control, presumably) Anagnoresis and Itsaboy came out of their workshop with a fully functional, selective magic anchor that would reverse (in theory) only changestorm effects. They had Takara generate a test effect, pointed the anchor at it, and BAMF!
...everyone was transformed into strange things, as the underlying effect that Cane's transformation potions was counteracting went away, leaving the transformation badly broken. Oops. Apparently, the anchor was AoE.
last session | next session
