Epilogue (WHAT?)
May. 8th, 2010 10:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothFriday night we played a little Shadake, until Lazar decided that there was no way we could lose and decided to summarize the rest of the game.
They didn't want to anchor the moon they were on, so the party got far enough away from Takara not to be in the blast radius (they hoped) and shut down the anchor to let her try to absorb Enka's crystal. There were strange noises and flashes of light, then nothing. So they approached carefully, and saw her sitting there as a little cat, surrounded by multicolored sand. Kyngeah looked at her on the astral plane, and confirmed that it was *probably* Takara. Only, she was a Lord now.
With that out of the way, Nico checked the beacons, and they were on a moon that they knew where it was! They were on Tycho. Dice gave them the travelogue summary -- the society was caste-based, but you could transcend your caste if you were lucky enough, sometimes. Since it was the moon of luck, everything was based on games of chance. He'd gotten rich enough to buy his ship (which he was annoyed not to have with him) by cheating at those games with his utility-sight power.
It'd take two weeks for a ship to get to them to take them to the fleet. The big battle was happening in less than two days.
Cane: "I don't suppose you can use your new powers to teleport us to the battle in time, Takara."
Takara: "Meow."
Cane: "Um... does anyone speak cat?"
Nico: "I do. She said 'meow'."
At any rate, Takara *was* able to open that sort of portal, and opened a portal to the location where they'd planned to have the battle, which was empty, of course.
Cane: "That's not what I meant!"
Takara (being translated by Nico properly now): "What, you wanted me to transport you a day into the future, too?"
GM: "You know, you *could* do that. It's not even any harder than teleporting hundreds of thousands of miles."
Cane: "Seeing the future would be useful... if we see how we lost the battle -- I mean, or won it, I'm not *certain* we're going to lose or anything."
So Takara opened a time portal, and they snatched through a small fighter-craft, planning to interrogate the crew. This proved to be extremely easy, given that the crew was their backup pilot and Sgt. First.
First: "OMGWTF?"
Cane: "We're doing a divination."
First: "Then we'll be back in the battle, after you're done?"
Cane: "That could be arranged."
First explained that the battle was not yet lost -- they'd been outnumbered twenty to one, but the Doomsday's main weapon (before it was destroyed) and the anchor had seriously messed up the enemy's order of battle. Unfortunately, evening the odds hadn't evened the relative skill levels, which were seriously in the enemy's favor.
Unfortunately, even if they won it wouldn't stop Enka, who'd run off first thing.
First: "So... could we stay here, instead?"
Cane: "That's easier, actually. We'd have to open a portal to send you back, which would take hours."
So they got to thinking about ways to change the outcome of the battle in their favor.
Cane: "We could ask the comet to intervene. It's a huge battle -- the priestess wouldn't want to miss it."
Kyngeah: "Whose side would she be on, though?"
Priestess, activating a random magic mirror to talk to the party since they said her name: "Yes, whose side *would* I be on?"
Kyngeah convinced her that even though Enka's tactics were brutal and violent, his victory would lead to peacefulness and harmony, and therefore he was the one she should oppose in order to push her agenda of violent warfare. So she agreed to bring her comet to the battle, and Kyngeah was pretty sure she'd be on the Scythebear's side.
Cane also had a couple ideas for how to change the course of the battle using ungodly powerful alchemy -- they could teleport to the Scythebear to use one of his good alchemy labs, and he had people there that could help him research and produce some targetted effects. He decided to go with a wide-area aerosol potion that made it impossible for people using ranged weapons not to get critical hits (difficulty: 20) (based on Utility-Sight; it would have been 30 without the special ingredient from Ython), and a wide-area aerosol potion that applied itself to anything flying through the cloud, that reflected all physical attacks (well, specifically, metal or earth-based, since it was based on a combination of Caravan Miracle Cream and Mirrorsheen) so that the enemy's cannon fire would turn back on them.
Oh, and they'd of course target the ships nearest to where Sgt. First said Enka was hiding with the first shots from the Doomsday.
The short summary [which is all we got] is, it all worked, more or less. The Doomsday survived long enough to get off a lot more shots, although everyone on it who wasn't a clockwork was driven permanently insane after it switched to rapid-fire mode. The priestess flew around (presumably outside the anchor) destroying things randomly, but most of the targets present were enemy ships. The comet was eventually destroyed, although witnesses attested to her personal escape. Itsaboy used his magic to stand off *all the enemy wizards*, and since the side of, um, well, since his side won he didn't get killed in the process, like he had in the version First remembered.
...and the party, on the Scythebear, charged after Enka, who still got to run off, after a ship who'd happened to be missed by the Doomsday shots aimed at him picked him up. Nico souped up the vanes so that they could catch up, and then the party presumably fought off the few remaining personal guardians while Cho showed up to deal Enka himself the death blow, once he was stripped of his followers and vulnerable.
Without Enka's power, Rii was back under the control of its lords, and no longer loyal to the Empire. That left Paladine as the last major moon (the burning husk of Gaia didn't really count) under the Empire's control -- they continued to call themselves the Empire, but weren't really in any better position to defeat everyone else than they'd ever been. So the status quo -- of constant war between independant moons -- was restored, which I guess had to count as saving the world.
The end.
...well, until Itsaboy and his Realists went on a lord-killing spree and started destroying moons. But that's a story for another time.
last session | next session, different campaign
Me: "...you promised *not* to destroy the world, Lazar. We were going to set the next game in this world."
Lazar: "Well, we didn't say it couldn't be set in the past. You've got a thousand years to work with!"
They didn't want to anchor the moon they were on, so the party got far enough away from Takara not to be in the blast radius (they hoped) and shut down the anchor to let her try to absorb Enka's crystal. There were strange noises and flashes of light, then nothing. So they approached carefully, and saw her sitting there as a little cat, surrounded by multicolored sand. Kyngeah looked at her on the astral plane, and confirmed that it was *probably* Takara. Only, she was a Lord now.
With that out of the way, Nico checked the beacons, and they were on a moon that they knew where it was! They were on Tycho. Dice gave them the travelogue summary -- the society was caste-based, but you could transcend your caste if you were lucky enough, sometimes. Since it was the moon of luck, everything was based on games of chance. He'd gotten rich enough to buy his ship (which he was annoyed not to have with him) by cheating at those games with his utility-sight power.
It'd take two weeks for a ship to get to them to take them to the fleet. The big battle was happening in less than two days.
Cane: "I don't suppose you can use your new powers to teleport us to the battle in time, Takara."
Takara: "Meow."
Cane: "Um... does anyone speak cat?"
Nico: "I do. She said 'meow'."
At any rate, Takara *was* able to open that sort of portal, and opened a portal to the location where they'd planned to have the battle, which was empty, of course.
Cane: "That's not what I meant!"
Takara (being translated by Nico properly now): "What, you wanted me to transport you a day into the future, too?"
GM: "You know, you *could* do that. It's not even any harder than teleporting hundreds of thousands of miles."
Cane: "Seeing the future would be useful... if we see how we lost the battle -- I mean, or won it, I'm not *certain* we're going to lose or anything."
So Takara opened a time portal, and they snatched through a small fighter-craft, planning to interrogate the crew. This proved to be extremely easy, given that the crew was their backup pilot and Sgt. First.
First: "OMGWTF?"
Cane: "We're doing a divination."
First: "Then we'll be back in the battle, after you're done?"
Cane: "That could be arranged."
First explained that the battle was not yet lost -- they'd been outnumbered twenty to one, but the Doomsday's main weapon (before it was destroyed) and the anchor had seriously messed up the enemy's order of battle. Unfortunately, evening the odds hadn't evened the relative skill levels, which were seriously in the enemy's favor.
Unfortunately, even if they won it wouldn't stop Enka, who'd run off first thing.
First: "So... could we stay here, instead?"
Cane: "That's easier, actually. We'd have to open a portal to send you back, which would take hours."
So they got to thinking about ways to change the outcome of the battle in their favor.
Cane: "We could ask the comet to intervene. It's a huge battle -- the priestess wouldn't want to miss it."
Kyngeah: "Whose side would she be on, though?"
Priestess, activating a random magic mirror to talk to the party since they said her name: "Yes, whose side *would* I be on?"
Kyngeah convinced her that even though Enka's tactics were brutal and violent, his victory would lead to peacefulness and harmony, and therefore he was the one she should oppose in order to push her agenda of violent warfare. So she agreed to bring her comet to the battle, and Kyngeah was pretty sure she'd be on the Scythebear's side.
Cane also had a couple ideas for how to change the course of the battle using ungodly powerful alchemy -- they could teleport to the Scythebear to use one of his good alchemy labs, and he had people there that could help him research and produce some targetted effects. He decided to go with a wide-area aerosol potion that made it impossible for people using ranged weapons not to get critical hits (difficulty: 20) (based on Utility-Sight; it would have been 30 without the special ingredient from Ython), and a wide-area aerosol potion that applied itself to anything flying through the cloud, that reflected all physical attacks (well, specifically, metal or earth-based, since it was based on a combination of Caravan Miracle Cream and Mirrorsheen) so that the enemy's cannon fire would turn back on them.
Oh, and they'd of course target the ships nearest to where Sgt. First said Enka was hiding with the first shots from the Doomsday.
The short summary [which is all we got] is, it all worked, more or less. The Doomsday survived long enough to get off a lot more shots, although everyone on it who wasn't a clockwork was driven permanently insane after it switched to rapid-fire mode. The priestess flew around (presumably outside the anchor) destroying things randomly, but most of the targets present were enemy ships. The comet was eventually destroyed, although witnesses attested to her personal escape. Itsaboy used his magic to stand off *all the enemy wizards*, and since the side of, um, well, since his side won he didn't get killed in the process, like he had in the version First remembered.
...and the party, on the Scythebear, charged after Enka, who still got to run off, after a ship who'd happened to be missed by the Doomsday shots aimed at him picked him up. Nico souped up the vanes so that they could catch up, and then the party presumably fought off the few remaining personal guardians while Cho showed up to deal Enka himself the death blow, once he was stripped of his followers and vulnerable.
Without Enka's power, Rii was back under the control of its lords, and no longer loyal to the Empire. That left Paladine as the last major moon (the burning husk of Gaia didn't really count) under the Empire's control -- they continued to call themselves the Empire, but weren't really in any better position to defeat everyone else than they'd ever been. So the status quo -- of constant war between independant moons -- was restored, which I guess had to count as saving the world.
The end.
...well, until Itsaboy and his Realists went on a lord-killing spree and started destroying moons. But that's a story for another time.
last session | next session, different campaign
Me: "...you promised *not* to destroy the world, Lazar. We were going to set the next game in this world."
Lazar: "Well, we didn't say it couldn't be set in the past. You've got a thousand years to work with!"
