Yay Travel
May. 30th, 2010 10:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothI hadn't actually gotten around to making up a map of the dungeon the party was heading for, so... er... that is... in order to give a sense of distance and desolation and danger, I had them run into a few flavorful encounters along the way that I absolutely did *not* make up on the spot. Although I might have made up the details on the spot. I'm sure nobody noticed!
When the party got sufficiently bored, they stopped to light a bonfire and get drunk and stuff, then Armitage stayed up all night with his Vigil ring doing enchantment. He made bless +1 amulets for the party, which worked fine, then tried to make a staff for Serene (as the previously unnamed healer was called) that didn't go exactly right, although the result was good -- instead of a staff that counted as part of the mage's body for spell ranges, she got a staff that formed the spell into a glowing ball on the end of the staff, which could be flung at enemies (or friends, or random points in space that you wanted to target) -- normally, a throw spell item would be a lot harder to make than a simple staff! It didn't actually work as a staff, though.
Eventually, everyone woke up and they moved on. The wasteland (as pretty much the entire dark side of the moon was marked, on their map) got more and more heavily forested -- as in, they found themselves travelling through a forest of dead trees instead of a bunch of dead brush. But then, they saw a light ahead, and noticed that some of the trees were actually alive! Checking the compass -- yes, there were magic items of some sort at the light. They also heard a buzzing that sounded like bees -- Serene thought they sounded like *large* bees.
Serene could turn into an invisible ghost, and Armitage had a 'body of shadows' item that was at least *less* visible, so the two of them travelled through the forest to scout. They found the trees and flowers getting larger and larger as they neared the light, and started occasionally passing giant bees with glowing stingers. The source of the light was the bees' hive -- 30 feet high, in the middle of the clearing, with the glow coming from within.
The bees weren't acting especially aggressive, but getting near the hive seemed like a bad idea, and they *did* notice Armitage when he tried to get closer in his body of shadows, although they didn't know what to make of him and didn't attack. Serene was in face invisible to them, and got inside the hive, and used a technicality involving the 'hide object' enchantment to steal some honey (by sticking her non-material hand into a honeycomb, unhiding the belt of holding which she then immediately dropped, and then sticking her head into the now-empty honeycomb and giving a verbal command for it to hide). They didn't want to bring the honey out anywhere near the bees, though, so they headed back to the wagon and unhid the belt there, pouring most of the honey into the empty keg from the previous night's party.
They stared trying to identify the honey, but noticed that some of it had spilled on the floor, and a giant bee was buzzing around outside the autowagon, trying to find the source of the honey-scent. Gamble and Carnelian held their fire, while Armitage enchanted a 'clean' wand and identified it, which took *hours*. By the time they were done messing around with that, there were *four* bees buzzing around, and... um, the wand wouldn't do cleaning. It'd do 'lighting bolt', hitting the weilder of the wand as well as the target. Armitage had an item that gave himself immunity to lightning, though, so the wand wasn't useless. Just, not useful to clean.
"Don't we have soap and water or something?" someone asked. They did, in fact. So they cleaned the damn honey up naturally and then teleported the honey-soaked sponge hundreds of thousands of miles away. The bees didn't instantly leave, so they, um, drove away. Faster than the bees could fly. Why they didn't do that *two hours* ago, I don't know.
Oh, and the honey was poison-aspected enhancement honey, basically. If used with a powerup, it'd add a poison-related enhancement, good for the user. If eaten straight, it would alter your DNA so that your children would be larger. The bees had been not-exactly-suffering from this effect for several generations, and were only going to get larger...
Also it looked like the whole area had been caused by someone setting off a strange variant of a 'plant growth' powerup, whose power was then collected and concentrated by the bees. Oops.
So, moving on. A little bit down the road, Armitage spotted a hidden treehouse (with his 'auto-spot hidden things' glasses). He turned into a body of shadows, and climbed the tree to investigate. Carnelian also climbed the tree, but lacking a body of shadows had to wait underneath the floor. Where he (or possibly she) was able to hear Armitage getting into a scuffle with the treehouse's inhabitant, who'd been hiding until Armitage physically invaded his lair.
Armitage talked him down from continuing to attack, although the guard did summon reinforcements -- more invisible miner cats, who scolded Armitage for invading their treehouse, and the guard for reacting so drastically. Anyway, they ordered Armitage to take his friends and get out of there. So Armitage decided to spy on their camp. The trail to the camp was hidden, which meant that it was trivial for him to follow. There he found guards with guns, cannons mounted in guard towers, and strange experiments being done on huge stacks of powerups... before being chased away by the guards, who'd come back after him once they discovered that the party still in the Autowagon didn't know where he was either.
They moved on for another couple hours, then stopped to party again. This time, they were joined by a pair of scruffy female satyrs (a cat-satyr and a weasel-satyr), emerging from the darkness, drawn by their fire and the sounds of cheerful partying. They were a menace -- they kept scarfing down all the food and drink, trying to sleep with everyone, and randomly do destructive things like grab a flaming log from the bonfire and tossing it randomly into the underbrush or possibly at someone's face. In other words, they were obviously Maenads, but with only two of them they didn't seem like much of a threat, so the party humored them (especially Sebat, Armitage's familiar, who was a lecherous son of a coyote and actually slept with the skanks) until they passed out drunk, then teleported them away. Only 2 miles away, though -- they didn't want to risk hurting them, since they were a *pain* and not actually a threat.
Five hours later, though, while Armitage was in the middle of identifying one of his enchantments, one of the girls (the cat-girl) staggered drunkenly into the campsite, where she was attacked by Armitage's invisible dancing dagger, that he'd left on guard. She had no idea what was happening, and would have been killed if he hadn't called it off. After doing that, though, he jumped into the autowagon (where the others were already sleeping) and drove off as fast as he dared!
He did manage not to drive into the river, which came up pretty shortly. He did turn and head upriver, though, not wanting to risk the scary woman getting any closer. In the 'morning' -- according to his watch, that is, since there was never any sun on the dark side -- he woke up the others, and they decided they'd have to cross the river, because the road was just taking them farther away from their destination at this point.
Gamble had been given one of Armitage's magic items to borrow, which made her strong enough to lift the autowagon... but there was a cliff down to the river that she'd have to climb, and she wasn't a very good climber. Until Armitage had her drink a couple of his potions, which made her a very good climber indeed, for long enough to carry the autowagon down and set it afloat in the river. Serene glided down, Armitage used body of shadows to make the climb, and Carnelian, well... took a while climbing down on her (or possibly his) own.
But they made it, and the other bank didn't look very steep. It didn't have a road, though, so Armitage ordered Serene to drive them downriver until they got back to the broken bridge, while he took a look at Gamble. She hadn't been feeling well, and had been hearing hallucinatory voices, and Serene's examination revealed that she was, well, a very lifelike golem. And that the problem was with her enchantment. She wasn't hard for Armitage to fix, although he'd have to keep doing touch-ups every week or so. Which involved very literal touching, to her disgust.
After that, but while they were still heading downriver, they were surrounded by a school of glowing fish. Gamble and Serene took out a huge fishing net, and tried to catch some -- only to have the fish dissolve into a swarm of glowing beetles! The beetles flew all around, creeping people out, then reformed into a large cat, which meowed angrily at the party until Armitage scared it off with a snow-jet wand. As it jumped back into the water, it turned back into fish.
But they made it back to the bridge, and they could see the glowing spotlight illuminating their goal off to the left, not very far now at all!
last session | next session
When the party got sufficiently bored, they stopped to light a bonfire and get drunk and stuff, then Armitage stayed up all night with his Vigil ring doing enchantment. He made bless +1 amulets for the party, which worked fine, then tried to make a staff for Serene (as the previously unnamed healer was called) that didn't go exactly right, although the result was good -- instead of a staff that counted as part of the mage's body for spell ranges, she got a staff that formed the spell into a glowing ball on the end of the staff, which could be flung at enemies (or friends, or random points in space that you wanted to target) -- normally, a throw spell item would be a lot harder to make than a simple staff! It didn't actually work as a staff, though.
Eventually, everyone woke up and they moved on. The wasteland (as pretty much the entire dark side of the moon was marked, on their map) got more and more heavily forested -- as in, they found themselves travelling through a forest of dead trees instead of a bunch of dead brush. But then, they saw a light ahead, and noticed that some of the trees were actually alive! Checking the compass -- yes, there were magic items of some sort at the light. They also heard a buzzing that sounded like bees -- Serene thought they sounded like *large* bees.
Serene could turn into an invisible ghost, and Armitage had a 'body of shadows' item that was at least *less* visible, so the two of them travelled through the forest to scout. They found the trees and flowers getting larger and larger as they neared the light, and started occasionally passing giant bees with glowing stingers. The source of the light was the bees' hive -- 30 feet high, in the middle of the clearing, with the glow coming from within.
The bees weren't acting especially aggressive, but getting near the hive seemed like a bad idea, and they *did* notice Armitage when he tried to get closer in his body of shadows, although they didn't know what to make of him and didn't attack. Serene was in face invisible to them, and got inside the hive, and used a technicality involving the 'hide object' enchantment to steal some honey (by sticking her non-material hand into a honeycomb, unhiding the belt of holding which she then immediately dropped, and then sticking her head into the now-empty honeycomb and giving a verbal command for it to hide). They didn't want to bring the honey out anywhere near the bees, though, so they headed back to the wagon and unhid the belt there, pouring most of the honey into the empty keg from the previous night's party.
They stared trying to identify the honey, but noticed that some of it had spilled on the floor, and a giant bee was buzzing around outside the autowagon, trying to find the source of the honey-scent. Gamble and Carnelian held their fire, while Armitage enchanted a 'clean' wand and identified it, which took *hours*. By the time they were done messing around with that, there were *four* bees buzzing around, and... um, the wand wouldn't do cleaning. It'd do 'lighting bolt', hitting the weilder of the wand as well as the target. Armitage had an item that gave himself immunity to lightning, though, so the wand wasn't useless. Just, not useful to clean.
"Don't we have soap and water or something?" someone asked. They did, in fact. So they cleaned the damn honey up naturally and then teleported the honey-soaked sponge hundreds of thousands of miles away. The bees didn't instantly leave, so they, um, drove away. Faster than the bees could fly. Why they didn't do that *two hours* ago, I don't know.
Oh, and the honey was poison-aspected enhancement honey, basically. If used with a powerup, it'd add a poison-related enhancement, good for the user. If eaten straight, it would alter your DNA so that your children would be larger. The bees had been not-exactly-suffering from this effect for several generations, and were only going to get larger...
Also it looked like the whole area had been caused by someone setting off a strange variant of a 'plant growth' powerup, whose power was then collected and concentrated by the bees. Oops.
So, moving on. A little bit down the road, Armitage spotted a hidden treehouse (with his 'auto-spot hidden things' glasses). He turned into a body of shadows, and climbed the tree to investigate. Carnelian also climbed the tree, but lacking a body of shadows had to wait underneath the floor. Where he (or possibly she) was able to hear Armitage getting into a scuffle with the treehouse's inhabitant, who'd been hiding until Armitage physically invaded his lair.
Armitage talked him down from continuing to attack, although the guard did summon reinforcements -- more invisible miner cats, who scolded Armitage for invading their treehouse, and the guard for reacting so drastically. Anyway, they ordered Armitage to take his friends and get out of there. So Armitage decided to spy on their camp. The trail to the camp was hidden, which meant that it was trivial for him to follow. There he found guards with guns, cannons mounted in guard towers, and strange experiments being done on huge stacks of powerups... before being chased away by the guards, who'd come back after him once they discovered that the party still in the Autowagon didn't know where he was either.
They moved on for another couple hours, then stopped to party again. This time, they were joined by a pair of scruffy female satyrs (a cat-satyr and a weasel-satyr), emerging from the darkness, drawn by their fire and the sounds of cheerful partying. They were a menace -- they kept scarfing down all the food and drink, trying to sleep with everyone, and randomly do destructive things like grab a flaming log from the bonfire and tossing it randomly into the underbrush or possibly at someone's face. In other words, they were obviously Maenads, but with only two of them they didn't seem like much of a threat, so the party humored them (especially Sebat, Armitage's familiar, who was a lecherous son of a coyote and actually slept with the skanks) until they passed out drunk, then teleported them away. Only 2 miles away, though -- they didn't want to risk hurting them, since they were a *pain* and not actually a threat.
Five hours later, though, while Armitage was in the middle of identifying one of his enchantments, one of the girls (the cat-girl) staggered drunkenly into the campsite, where she was attacked by Armitage's invisible dancing dagger, that he'd left on guard. She had no idea what was happening, and would have been killed if he hadn't called it off. After doing that, though, he jumped into the autowagon (where the others were already sleeping) and drove off as fast as he dared!
He did manage not to drive into the river, which came up pretty shortly. He did turn and head upriver, though, not wanting to risk the scary woman getting any closer. In the 'morning' -- according to his watch, that is, since there was never any sun on the dark side -- he woke up the others, and they decided they'd have to cross the river, because the road was just taking them farther away from their destination at this point.
Gamble had been given one of Armitage's magic items to borrow, which made her strong enough to lift the autowagon... but there was a cliff down to the river that she'd have to climb, and she wasn't a very good climber. Until Armitage had her drink a couple of his potions, which made her a very good climber indeed, for long enough to carry the autowagon down and set it afloat in the river. Serene glided down, Armitage used body of shadows to make the climb, and Carnelian, well... took a while climbing down on her (or possibly his) own.
But they made it, and the other bank didn't look very steep. It didn't have a road, though, so Armitage ordered Serene to drive them downriver until they got back to the broken bridge, while he took a look at Gamble. She hadn't been feeling well, and had been hearing hallucinatory voices, and Serene's examination revealed that she was, well, a very lifelike golem. And that the problem was with her enchantment. She wasn't hard for Armitage to fix, although he'd have to keep doing touch-ups every week or so. Which involved very literal touching, to her disgust.
After that, but while they were still heading downriver, they were surrounded by a school of glowing fish. Gamble and Serene took out a huge fishing net, and tried to catch some -- only to have the fish dissolve into a swarm of glowing beetles! The beetles flew all around, creeping people out, then reformed into a large cat, which meowed angrily at the party until Armitage scared it off with a snow-jet wand. As it jumped back into the water, it turned back into fish.
But they made it back to the bridge, and they could see the glowing spotlight illuminating their goal off to the left, not very far now at all!
last session | next session
