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Last week, Natalia, Iema, Corin, and Sunshine visited a drow city, found a drow that was actually not completely evil (although certainly not good), and managed to get out of the Underdark.  Unfortunately, getting out of the Underdark means we made a deal with someone who is almost certainly evil, although the details of that deal are still unclear to us.  Oh–and our old buddy, Julium, is now emperor of Numbrar.  Lost?  Catch up with the last installment here.

Sterror the 15^th

So, we’re still on Sterror the 15th, to our surprise.  As mentioned in the last “Homebrewed” entry, our characters had all been on the Astral Plane to get from the Underworld to the Prime Material safely, so we really had no way to keep track of time there.  We lost five days.

And for a person who wakes up at 6 AM even on the weekends because she hates wasting time so much, this makes me a little grumpy.  Just a little.

Natalia, Iema, Corin, and Sunshine are standing at the capital of Numbrar, surprised to find their old friend, Julium, dressed in emperor’s clothes, and secretly hoping that some spoilsport kid doesn’t come out and point out that he’s actually naked.  Or maybe I’m the only one thinking that.  At any rate, Jim explains that in Valt, the 15th is Frost Feast day, and this is when the lord of each community feeds the entire town, and in the emperor’s case, this means the whole capital.  (Although, obviously, not in the same place.)  The Sterror the 16th is more like our Christmas, in the sense that people tend to have dinner with family and friends.

In the midst of all the people milling around, the crew run into another bard named Elyas while they were eyeing the feast and discussing the signficance of imported food.  (Is it a sign of abundance, of having enough money to get exported goods, a sign that Numbrar’s crops are doing so terribly that they have to go elsewhere–what?)  It becomes clear to us, though, that Elyas is anti-Julium.  How did we find this out?  Well, Iema jumps on a table and starts playing a song about the great, new emperor, right?  He was trying to get the crowd riled up about Julium, as well as get Julium’s attention in a roundabout way.  Soon after, Elyas jumps up on another table and starts singing counter songs about the “fake” new emperor, etc.

Natalia gets sick of it and pushes Elyas off the table.

Then an old woman approaches Natalia and the others.  “Lost in the streets,” she mutters.  Everything goes black around us.  Jim says that we quickly realize that Allista Renger is using the old woman to deliver a message.  She says that Julium wants to see them.  Now.

So the group leaves towards the castle.  We’re advised that we have to take a coach because it’s a long walk.  Sadly, this costs money.  Of course.  5 gold a head.

“I don’t take livestock,” the coach guy says, peering at Sunshine.

Natalia bristles.  “She is not livestock.”

If I remember right, Sunshine ended up flying over us.  During the ride, Natalia looks out the window and half-listens to Iema and the coach.  Corin is also quiet, but that’s mostly because Jim can only roleplay one character at a time, ha.  Phil-as-Iema is very good about pumping people for details about everything.  He got the driver to talk to him about everything from shypsies (“I met a shypsy girl once.  It was expensive but worth it!”) to how many soliders Julium has (two for show, two incognito, and probably many others hidden within the town).  The men gossip for a while until we finally get to our destination.

Suddenly, Jerth is next to us.  Remember Jerth?  Julium’s sidekick from his pre-emperor days, definitely with an evil bent, although he’s fought by our sides on more than one occasion.  Wonder where he came from?  Hell, so do we.  Jerth is sneaky like that.

Jerth leans over to the driver.  “Keep driving,” he says to the man.

“Um…okay,” says the newly-nervous driver.

We drive through the crowd of people.  Some are about to press up against the coach, until they see Jerth pull an arrow out on them.  The crowd backs away.

“What’s going on?”  Iema asks.

Jerth doesn’t answer.  We pull all the way up to the castle and are ushered out.  As soon as we’re out, we’re patted down, and more guards point arrows at us.

“Hi, Jerth,” Iema says.  And again:  “What’s going on?”

“Where were you at?”  Jerth demands, ignoring Iema’s question.  We gave the whole explanation of our capture, time in Fasset, and our escape through the Underdark.  Jerth listens to all this, and then he says, “Thirty people died trying to get you.”

Both Natalia and Iema are taken aback.  “Who?” we both ask.  “How?”

“Beta told Julium what happened.  He sent a ship after you.”  Jerth hands a package to Iema.  “This is for you.  Raelan sent it.”

“Raelan?” Iema repeats, surprised.  This whole day is full of surprises.  He opens the package.  It’s his herald cloak.  The cloak has obviously been through some…trouble.  It’s also been patched together.  Regardless, Iema seems happy to have it back.

We turn to go into the castle, but there’s just one more surprise.

Corin halts.  “This is where I get off,” Corin says.

We turn toward Iema’s apprentice.  “What?”  Natalia says.

Iema nods.  “Why?”

Corin waves to some bas relief nearby.  “See that?  That’s a depiction of the first time my homeland was conquered.”

Oh.  I get it.  It’s a matter of national pride.  Still, while Phil/Iema is bidding farewell to the boy, I’m asking, “Really?  Corin’s leaving?  No more Corin?”

“He actually stayed way longer than most apprentices do,” Phil explains.

Jim jumps in.  “The only reason why he stayed so long was because you guys were in the Underdark,” Jim says.  “Usually, once apprentices reach name-level, they go off on their own.”

I guess that makes sense.  And, storywise, it’s a good idea.  But, damn, it was nice having someone as smart as Corin working with us.  Especially since he was privy to DM knowledge, heh.  (Okay, not really.  Jim is very good about not doing that.)  Before Corin leaves, we give him his fair share of the party loot and make him promise to get ahold of us if he needs anything.

After the goodbyes are said, we turn to the castle and enter.  Jim describes the palace like a cross between a mansion and a museum. 

“Hmmm, I feel like we’ve robbed a place like this once,” Iema murmurs.

Natalia and Iema are taken to the council area.  We don’t even have to push the guards outside the doors to let us in.  They take one look at Iema’s herald’s cape and let us in. We open the doors to a lot of yelling.  Not the scared kind of yelling but the angry kind.  We spot Julium further ahead, in a heated argument with a man we don’t recognize.

Even with all the commotion, our entrance is noticed.  A man that we later find out is named Delphus Delphinius snaps at us for our names.  After Iema introduces us, the man spins around and yells, “See, the rumors are true!  Julium is consorting with druids and bringing in our enemies!”

“Maybe if you had help from druids, Delphinius,” Julium snaps back, “you could actually feed your people.”

Huh.  Uh…hell, ya!  YEAH.  TAKE THAT, DELPINIUS.

The grouch stomps off.  We go over to greet Julium.  Iema tells Julium of the prophesy that we got from the earth weird about him.  Natalia wasn’t going to tell Julium about it, but I guess I can see where Iema would want to.  Julium, unsurprisingly, is unwavered by the part where he would be known in history as the most bloodthirsty tyrant.  His goal to unite everyone is going to be seen, and for now, that’s all he cares about.

Aside from the prophesy, we trade other updates.  We find out that Julium intends to end the war on Fasset, that an outbreak of some disease is centered around Devies, and those anti-Julium criers around town were actually planted by Julium himself.  Remember the one that Natalia pushed off the table?  A plant.  Apparently, she had hurt him pretty badly doing that, and Julium ended up paying the man extra.

Oops.

And here we take downtime.  This is due to a new rule Jim’s enforcing about how we have to take downtime when we level up.  Since Iema leveled up last week, we have to take 30 days.

Icetor the 15^th

Icetor the 15th is the Winter’s Solstice, and, according Jim, a big holiday for druids.  Because it’s the shortest day of the year, druids consider it “out of balance” and tend to get a little wild on that day and do things they normally wouldn’t do.

Natalia is disappointed that she’s stuck in a town with people who would not appreciate this holiday.  Seeing she’s surround by people who are already suspicious of druids, she forgoes doing anything crazy.

We’re in a drawing room in Julium’s castle when we hear thunder.  Suddenly, Raelan appears with Grugor.  Raelan is well-dressed and now has followers flanking him.  (Ones that, I might add, he seems to LOVE bossing around.)  Grugor has even more tatoos and piercings than we remembered.  They greet us with enthusiastic hugs.  You’d think Natalia would be more excited to see them.  Instead, she forces a smile and simply says hi.  Iema, as usual, is cheerfully chatting away; Natalia is secretly wondering if either one of her friends is the one who sold them out to the drow.

Raelan, indicentally, says the drow are wanted in his castle.  But we shouldn’t worry about Zerik–he has captured him and has been torturing him.  In the end, Vaelika sold him out.  Iema wants at the drow, but he concludes that the Wizard of Vengeance can probably take care of the asshole better than we can.  Natalia mulls over the fact that Raelan has the drow.  She wonders if he’s just telling them this to hide his own guilt.

Curse Jim and his way of dividing people up in his games.

Iema hands Raelan the spellbook disguised as a design book.  Raelan flips through it; he knows all the spells already, but he seems interested in the book itself.  Natalia asks Grugor about Beta.  And this is where she hears news that makes her nervous.

The barbarian describes Beta as scary.  When a half-orc says something got scary, that’s never good.  Beta has gathered his own crew of people and will kill anyone that seems perceived to be a threat to the forest. 

We get more news:  Uliver died, Raelan got married, and we hear more about the plague.  We vaguely remember that people were starting to get sick about the time we were captured.  At first, I worry that when we brought drow into the town, they had done something.  Raelan assures Natalia that the drow had nothing to do with it; from the information he’s gathered, they were concerned about the plague themselves.

“By the way,” Natalia says, changing the topic, “do you think you could turn Sunshine here back into a dire hawk?”  Poor Sunshine had been dealing with being a bat this whole time.

“Sure,” Raelan says.  He calls an apprentice over to do it.  As the girl struggles to perform the spell, he reaches out with his staff and begins poking her in the back of the head saying, “WRONG.  WRONG.  WRONG.”  Seeing the look on Natalia’s face, he says, “Hey, this is actually a nice way to do it.  You should see what Uliver did with his apprentices.”

Eventually, the girl gets it right, and Sunshine is back to being a dire hawk.  Raelan, Grugor, and the herd of people that came with them leave.  Julium comes into the drawing room.  We stand up.

Julium is concerned.  There’s been a string of murders in the capital.  The first one was a homeless man that everyone assumed was a victim of a carriage accident.  Then another man turned up mangled, around the same area, and people started to worry.  The third victim was a little boy, also ripped to shreds.  Julium wants this resolved.  We agree to take a look into it for him.

(Can I just stop here to say, ugh, mysteries.  As a girl, I was pretty good at them, and I even quit reading mystery novels because I was figuring them out long before the main characters were.  As an adult, I suck at them.  I think I’m getting dumber as I get older, I swear.)

Anyway, we get directions from Julium and head toward the middle of the city, to a section called Oakdown.  We want to check out the spot where the second victim (a thief) was killed, but the guard who is responsible for that section of town is unavailable and cannot assist us.  So we go to the boy’s mother’s house instead.

We get to an alley.  Unlike most places in the capital, this area is mostly made of cast-off wood rather than stone.  There are a lot of carpenter shops.  It’s night, so there’s not a ton of people to talk to, and frankly, I don’t even know where to start.  So Natalia starts with asking Sunshine if she’s seen anything while she was flying overheard.

Sunshine hops towards us.  “I saw lots of things!  I saw a boy and a girl, and they were on each other and rubbing on each other and grabbing each other!  And I saw a man sticking another man with a knife!”

Okay, well, that’s just town life.  So we hunt down a homeless guy, give him some money, and bribe some information about what he’s seen.  It’s not much, but we do know that a someone in a gang called the Leymen was also asking questions.  He says someone named Ginnie Hag found the body, but she’s since left town.  The victim was stabbed, shot with arrows, and had an arm torn off about two weeks ago, right after the snowfall that grounded everyone.  Which, the homeless man points out, is strange in itself, since it doesn’t even normally rain in this section of town–it would warp the wood.  The Numbraran capital has potent magics which can, in some areas, exert limited control over the weather.

“I think it’s the corpse of Druid Jack,” the homeless guy concludes.  Natalia wonders herself.  “Druid Jack” is a local folk legend about a serial killer who was tied to a druidic order.  He was executed by the city but promised a horrible revenge.  Somehow I doubt that “Druid Jack” is responsible.

Iema heads down the alley to look around.  He finds a large wooden splinter, broken, which he can see where someone would mistake it for an arrow.  Natalia shapeshifts into a wolf and sniffs around, hoping to catch a scent.  The scent on the splinter doesn’t match anything else around, though.

We move on to the next crime scene, past a part with large monuments, until we get to a residential building.  We go to the alleged home of the boy.  It’s late, but the lights are one, so we knock on the door.  The door opens a crack and peers out.  Iema talks to the woman a little, and then she spots Natalia.  She opens her door wider.

“Why didn’t you tell me you had a druid with you?” she says in a thick Caelth accent.  (The accent from the Jade Islands, where they actually respect druids.)

Natalia is a little slow to react, surprised to find someone who is actually happy to see her.

We get some information from the boy’s mother  (her name is Madwyn) about her son.  He was going to be a fine soldier, she said.  He was a little bit of a bully, but he didn’t mean any harm.  He would pick on a little girl he knew, but that was only because he had a crush on her.  “He was that age, you know,” she muses.

I secretly remember the boy in sixth grade who threw spitballs in my hair all year, the one that later asked me to the sixth grade dance.  (Answer, by the way, was HELL NO.)  Apparently, boys are clueless in ANY reality.  The woman has also talked with the leader of the Leymen, whose name is Burne Leyward, but she chased him out because she doesn’t like him.  She also mentions that in addition to these murders, children have gone missing.

One thing at a time, though.  When the boy was killed, his mother had heard him outside screaming and run out.  He was torn apart.  We try not to make her talk too much about it–as you can imagine, it’s very hard on her–but we do ask her to point the direction and head that way.  Outside, Natalia turns into a wolf and immediately smells something foul, something like a combination of fecal matter and a dead body.  Iema noticed that the ground next to the fence is impacted as if something heavy had jumped over the fence and landed there.

We thank the woman for her time and leave.  Natalia promises that once they’ve finished hunting down the killer, she’ll come back to help Madwyn with her carpentry work.  Madwyn had mentioned that she was trying to finish her orders ASAP so she could leave, and, hell, Natalia might as well put her carpentry skills to use.

Next up:  We go to talk to a Corporal Murstes, someone Madwyn had mentioned and seemed to like.  He, also, was trying to find out what the killers were.  We hear the 10 o’clock bell ring and head that way, knowing from Madwyn’s description of him that we would find the man there.  We do find him there.  He’s clad in a breastplate.  Next to him is a bright yellow horse, which he introduces to us as Mustard.  Murstes is familiar with the murders, as well as the children disappearances.  He wonders if they’re related.  He also believes that someone is hiding in the lumber reclamation yard, a.k.a “The Dump.”

We decide to go there, but not before we go to the Burning Inn to speak with Burne Layward, someone that both Madwyn and Corporal Murstes have mentioned that has been investigating the murders as well.  We don’t get much from him, though.  The moment he sees Iema’s herald’s cloak, he’s hostile, lies to us, and tries to tell us that it’s a bunch of gnomes.  Burne says that he also believes that there’s something going on at The Dump, and that he plans on burning the whole place down to take care of it.

Iema huffs that setting a fire in a wooded area is the stupidest idea that he’s ever heard, and, in not so many words, tells Burne to go screw himself.  We go off to The Dump to take care of the problem ourselves.

The Dump really is a dump.  Jim says that just it’s piled with stuff, full of things  like pallets, slats, and some weird wooden things that look almost like plants.  Jim says that Natalia would know that these aren’t plants, though.  I tell Jim that Natalia is going to investigate them.  Iema also moves into the room.

At this point, Jim hands me an index card, telling me what the weird wooden plant-like things are.  Here’s what it says:

There is a kind of fey called a splinterwaif.  It’s a corrupted dryad, vengeful, bitter, and evil.  These bushy things are what happens to their victims.  (They prefer children.)  They have spell resistance, travel in packs, can spit sharp wood, and animate wooden objects.

Ah, shit.

The reason why Jim gave me the index card is so that I would know what Natalia knows about splinterwaifs–and doesn’t have time to explain to Iema because he gets jumped.

The fight is nasty.  These things do a lot of damage.  Luckily, they’re smart enough to know that the druid would be a bigger threat to them than a  bard.  I say “luckily,” because Natalia at least has more hit points than Iema does.  Unfortunately, though, Natalia hasn’t had time to shift into her dire bear form yet.  Before it’s even Natalia’s turn to go, they’ve already knocked her down a good chunk of her hit points.  Enough that when my turn comes, Natalia has to heal herself before going into her dire bear form.  The omnipresent carpet of garbage requires balance checks every round to be able to move.  As it turns out, Natalia does not excel at balance checks.

And Sunshine.  Poor Sunshine is trying to get into the battle, too, but because of all the piled up wood everywhere, it’s hard to just zip around in the air or get good footing on the piles.

Natalia manages to kill off a couple of the splinterwaifs with a Flame Strike.  (Not without making sure it wouldn’t catch everything on fire, though.)  They keep coming at us, though, and Iema dimension doors backwards, then attacks and kills one himself.  Natalia keeps trying to get across the junk, but, like Sunshine, she also has trouble getting a good foothold and falls. Because Jim is STILL rolling nat 1s for Sunshine, my poor companion isn’t fairing so well, either.  Iema kills more; Natalia decides there’s no point in trying to move across this crap and casts another Flame Strike.

Jim rolls another nat 1 for Sunshine.  That’s three times in a row.  I think Jim needs to take a page from Phil’s book and buy some of those game science dice. 

Suddenly, wooden objects spring up around Iema, boxing him into a corner, and try to grapple him.  Panicking, Natalia shifts into an eagle (better reflex save, better chance to to finally be able to MOVE across this shit!), and flies toward Iema.

“HEY,” Sunshine yells.  “WE ALREADY HAVE A BIRD!”

Damn, I didn’t peg Sunshine as the jealous type.  Iema casts Cure Critical Wounds on himself; Natalia uses her healing wand to help, then shifts into a dire bear.  The wood pile she’s on starts groaning under her weight.  Luckily, between the three of us (Jim finally rolled something other than a 1 for Sunshine), we kill off most of the things.  A couple flee; Jim tells me that Natalia knows that they’re smart enough to not come back.

Finally, we have time to catch our breath.  Natalia waves her hand over to the wooden “bushes” and explains that we’ve found the kids.  And, no, they cannot be saved.  (You can bet your ass I checked first. )  So, we’ve found out what happened with the missing children, but we still don’t know what happened with the murders–or if this is even related to it. 

That would be for the next game.

For those who celebrate it, I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving.  I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t want to spend the day after shopping.  Let’s talk Jim’s D&D game instead!  And I’ll tell you what Natalia is not thankful for:  Drow.  And if you recall from the last game, that’s exactly we left her, Iema, Corin, and Sunshine–about to bunk with some evil elves, admittedly Iema’s and Natalia’s worst kind of enemies.  Confused why we’re living out what seems to be a like bad episode of “Friends”?  (But, Spring, they were ALL bad episodes!)  Kidding aside, you can refresh your memory here.

Usually, when we start our games, it takes us a few moments to remember exactly where everyone was and what everyone was doing.  Although, admittedly, I think my “Homebrewed” series helps us all remember it, but even with that, there is some amount of refreshing to be done.  This time, however, we all remember very clearly:  There are drow, we’re going to a drow city, and Natalia is refusing to sleep in the same camp with drow.  I (firmly) tell Jim that yes, I’m aware that this means Natalia won’t get new spells, but I don’t care.  Once bitten, twice shy.

Or, in Natalia’s case, twice as likely to punch you in the face.

Figuring that he might as well take advantage of Natalia’s self-imposed insomnia, Iema announces he’s not going to bother with watch then and finally get straight eight hours sleep.  Makes sense.

So Corin, Iema, and Sunshine sleep for the night.  The drow do not go to sleep, but do go into a strange meditative trance a little further away from the group.  Like Natalia, though, they’re also wary, and they take watches.

Something odd is happening, though.  As the night goes on, Natalia gets colder and colder.  She knows it’s not the temperatures, though.  It’s her.  By morning, she’s so cold her teeth are chattering.

Sterror the 9^th

Iema wakes up, freezing and feverish.  Apparently, both Iema and Natalia are suffering from a disease (the shakes) and in Iema’s case, two diseases (the shakes and mindfire).  This is when Jim tells me and Phil that our characters take -2 to our dexterity.   Phil also had to take -5 off Intelligence for Iema.  We check with Corin and Sunshine, who seem fine.  At first, I’m all whiny about the new stats on Natalia’s character sheet and I’m saying there is no way she’s going to a drow city feeling like this and they probably had something to do with this anyway and I’m pretty sure they’re at fault for the bad economy too and GRRR BOO HISS.  Thankfully, Phil is way more knowlegable about all of this that I am, and he kindly reminds me that I have an item that will help fix this.  That shuts me up.

I flip through the notecards of the items Jim had made for us.  Aha!  I have some kind of Staff of Healing.  Natalia uses that to remove the diseases.  As I roll the dice, Jim roleplays the drow priestess.

“What are they doing?” she asks Hadrazain in almost a disgusted voice.

(Incidentally, Natalia can’t understand a damn word they say, so luckily, I get to ignore everything this bitch says.)

The Master of Arms isn’t sure himself, so he asks Iema.  Iema tells Hadrazain that he and Natalia weren’t feeling well, so Natalia was healing them up.

Hadrazain frowns.  “What exactly did you fight yesterday?  Describe it.”

And so we do.  Well, Iema does.  I feel so sorry for Phil sometimes because when it comes to talking, he does all the heavy lifting.  If I do it, I babble.  Seriously, I’m taking Jim’s advice next time I roll a character: My next character will have taken a vow of silence.

Wait…did Jim just say that to shut me up?  (Note:  Kick Jim’s ass.  Later.  Um, after game tomorrow so he doesn’t take it out on Natalia.)

The drow cleric quickly recognize one of the last things we had fought the day before.  “Pox walkers?” she exclaims.    “You guys fought pox walkers and you didn’t cleanse yourself afterwards?  Are you stupid?”

I glance at Natalia’s character sheet, her intelligence at 8.  Um, honestly…yes.  By the way, great thing for noob D&D players to hide behind is a dumb character.  Gives you an excuse for really dumb mistakes.

The drow priestess marches straight to Natalia and gets in her face.  “You infected us, now heal us,” she demands.  I don’t remember if this was translated for Natalia, but it wouldn’t matter–Natalia gets the gist.

Natalia looks at her Staff of Healing.  She wonders if it could still heal the drow if it were shoved in the woman’s eye.  But, of course, Natalia is a good (kinda) little druid, and would do no such thing.  “Fine,” she says evenly.  And I cringe for every charge I waste on them.

So now the drow priestess and wizard go off to prepare spells.  Meanwhile, Natalia and Iema hang back to talk to Hadrazain.  “Well,” Natalia says, “they’re off to prepare how they’re gonna kill us.”

Hadrazain grins.  “Probably.  Hell, they’ve been trying to kill me for two weeks.”

“Really?” Iema seems surprised.

“Oh, yeah,” Hadrazain says.  “Of course, they’re not gonna be up front about it.  They’re trying to make it look like an accident or something like that.”

Natalia grows thoughtful.  “Do either of them know any kind of mind control or anything like that?  Because what would be really perfect for them is to mind control us to attack you.  Takes care of two birds with one stone.”

Jim suddenly announces that one of us looks over to see the wizard, who we didn’t think could understand us, looking at us with sudden interest, and then turning back to his book, frantically flipping the pages.

“Shit,” I say.  “Don’t tell me that I just gave him that idea.  The one time Natalia says something semi-intelligent, someone’s actually listening?  I didn’t think he could understand Common!”

“Maybe that’s what he wants you to think,” Jim says.

Too late now.  We start rolling for encounters.  When we finally hit one, Jim says that very suddenly, the three drow split up in different directions, like what fish do when the bigger fish comes along to eat them.  And, me being paranoid, I think THOSE FREAKIN’ DROW SET US UP.  But I don’t say that.  None of us say that, although I’ll bet we’re all thinking it.  Instead, one of us says, “Well, this can’t be good.”

And it isn’t.  A nine-foot tall troll-looking thing rolls right up to us.  Jim says his arms are as long as his body with claws at the ends.  The thing has a long face, tannish-gray skin, and bat ears.  In other words, it’s ugly.  Later one of the drow will call it a dusk giant.

Oh, yeah.  And there’s four of them.

Phil must have rolled the best for initiative because he gets to go first.  He says that Iema is going to try Hold Monster.  It fails.  Instead, they charge.  Iema’s nifty boots give him a ten foot reach, so he ends up taking attacks of opportunity, and suddenly, the light on his sword dims.  I don’t know what this means, but I don’t like the sound of it.  Apparently, these giants have some kind of aura that dims light sources around them.

Quickly, the things attack Iema and Natalia.  The drow priestess and wizard start casting.  I secretly wondering if they’re going to blast us or the dusk giant.  To my surprise, Jim says that Natalia and Iema now get bonuses, and we’re filled with strength–albeit unholy strength.

Still, a pleasant surprise.

When Natalia’s turn comes about, she casts Greater Magic Fang on Sunshine and then shifts into her Dire Bear form.  But none of this is quick enough.  While she’s shifting, Corin jumps in, swings his mace around, punges it in troll-like thing’s guts, then yanks it out, swings it back around, and buries it in its head.

The dusk giants all turn on Corin, now determining him to be the biggest threat.  And what they did to him was awful:  They grab him by his arms and legs and rip him to pieces.  Literally.

Suddenly, one of the dusk giants freezes.  Apparently, the drow also tried Hold Monster like Iema did, except that theirs worked.  (Incidentally, Jim just now admitted that the wizard did try to do something similar to Natalia to get her to kill Hadrazain for him, but luckily, I had made her will save.  I KNEW IT.)  There is another one that is severely injured; Natalia finishes it off by ripping off its face. 

At least she gets to take some agression out.

Iema, on the other hand, is still swinging away.  He kills another one, then whacks at the remaining–and then something weird happens.  Jim says something the thing holds its fist up to Iema and a black ray comes out and hits him.  Oh, and guess what?  Iema gets a negative level.  As you can imagine, Phil is none too pleased about this.

Next up:  The drow wizard.  He lets a lightening bolt rip–right into Hadrazain’s back.

Except, as it turns out, the spell doesn’t actually hurt the Weapons Master, since drow have spell resistance.  Instead, it goes through him and into one of the monsters.  The wizard looks at his superior and shrugs.

The priest decides to step in.  She takes out her weapon, which has snakeheads on it.  I vaguely remember something similar in Homeland, so Jim and Phil catch me up:  Common for priestesses of Lolth, scary, and the more snakeheads on it, the more, uh, “dedicated” they are to their evil goddess.

“You mean the more fanatical they are,” I clarify.

“Yes,” Jim says.  He pauses for dramatic effect.  “And she has six.”

“Holy shit,” Phil says, immediately getting it.  It isn’t until Jim explains that three is about average before I understood:  This priestess is, as Jim puts it, “Out of her goddamned mind.“

Ew, and her dirty buffs are on me!

Okay, okay, okay, let’s wrap this up.  She kills one of the troll-giant-thingy with it.  Her little fight scene didn’t last nearly as long as our conversation about her weapon.  And with that, it’s over.  We gather pieces of Corin up, Natalia casts Reincarnate, and–get this–he comes back as a wolf.

Corin-the-wolf looks down at his new form and sighs unhappily.

The drow wizard, on the other hand, points at Corin and laughs and laughs and laughs. 

Natalia considers for a moment biting off that stupid finger, but instead, she asks Corin if he wants to stay a wolf.  Hey, you never know.  Unsurprisingly, though, Corin does not want to be a wolf .  The drow wizard offers to change Corin back–for 450 gold and Corin’s mirror.  Although I didn’t realize it at the time, according to the book, that’s a friggin ridiculous price to pay for a fourth level spell.

“His mirror?” we wonder aloud.

Hadrazain explains that in the Underdark, mirrors are rare.  Iema checks with Corin, who quickly agrees to give him the mirror, stating it wasn’t anything special.  Just turn him human, damn it.  We get that taken care of, and then Iema talks to Hadrazain about restoring his negetive level.  Of course, Iema doesn’t actually say that because, in-game, it makes no sense.  But I don’t remember how Phil roleplayed this.  What I remember was us looking over and catching the stupid wizard and priestess going through our shit.

SIGH.

We don’t confront them, though.  I don’t think we had much loot, anyway.  Instead, Hadrazain is saying, “You want some help, huh?  You talking willing help or unwilling?”

Phil is desperate for his character.  “Either.”

Hadrazain strokes his chin.  “Well, unwilling would be cheaper.”

“Then let’s go with that.”

The normally holier-than-thou, stick-up-her ass Natalia isn’t going to argue.  More than likely, it’s going to involve screwing another drow over.  Like she cares.

Hadrazain brightens.  “I’ve got an idea.  C’mon.”  And so the drow Weapons Master leads us to his hometown of Fenzybyl, to a building.  After we reach a gate outside a building, Hadrazain says, “Wait here.”

We wait, eyeing the other drow warily.

The doors to the building open.  Drow wearing robes come pouring out.  Hadrazain is leaning against the wall, arms folded.  Finally, he stands up and approaches one of the younger female drow, stopping her.  Not hard to do.  If you recall, Hadrazain is supposed to be very handsome.  So she stops.  He whispers in her ear; she giggles.  Finally, he leads her to us.

“Which one?” she says. 

Hadrazain points to Iema.  She casts, and yay!  Iema has his level back!

The girl turns to Hadrazain.  “So…ready to go back inside…?”

At this moment, Natalia was like OMG, LIGHTBULB, HE WAS OFFERING HER SEX.

“You know,” Hadrazain says, “I’ve changed my mind.  You’re not really my type.”

And we quickly leave, the female drow cursing up a storm behind us.

“Hey,” Hadrazain says, “why don’t you come to my place for dinner?”

“We wouldn’t be dinner, would we?” Natalia asks suspiciously.

Hadrazain waves his arm at her in dismissal.  “Nah, of course not.”  And so, stupid or not, we go with him because, well, what else are we supposed to do?  Hadrazain leads us to his house, where we are quickly greeted by a female drow priestess in armor.  Apparently, she’s one of Hadrazain’s sisters.

“You can’t bring them here,” she hisses at him.  The two of them start fighting.  Jim impresses on me the big deal that a male drow is beating up a female since females are superior in drow society.  Jim’s description of the way that Hadrazain is also punching his sister also reminds me that, yes, Jim is definitely a big brother.  He has big brother antagonization down to a freakin’ science.

Suddenly, we hear an older female drow’s voice asking about us in whatever language drow speak.  (Um…drow?  Ha.  Maybe?)  Suddenly, Hadrazain and his sister quit fighting before they get caught.  Natalia doesn’t understand what they’re saying, but Iema does:  The older female (Hadrazain’s mother) is commenting that we would make great sacrifices to Lolth; Hadrazain says he just wants to bring us to dinner.

She turns her back on her children, who immediately go back to punching each other when she’s not looking, and the matron mother inspects us.  Finally, she says, “Very well.  You are welcome at our table.”

Natalia leans over to Iema.  “I’m glad to hear she said at our table instead of on.”

“I noticed that, too,” Iema whispers back.

So we go inside.  At first, Hadrazain tries to talk Natalia into meeting his little brother, but she flat-out refuses.  “I’m staying with Iema and the others,” she says flatly, staring him down.

Iema, at this point, seems to be getting embarrassed by Natalia’s rudeness and apologizes on her behalf.  “We’ve had some really bad experiences with drow,” he explains.  “You know, trusting them, trying to help them, and then getting sold into slavery…”

Natalia doesn’t feel the need to explain herself.  Stupid drow.  She keeps staring at him.

Hadrazain, though, is unconcerned.  “Aaaaah, I see, I understand.”  He shrugs.  “That’s fine, then.  I just thought my little brother would really like to meet another druid, that’s all.”

For a moment, Natalia pauses.  Another druid?  she repeats to herself.  No way.  Damn it, do we not have standards?   She can’t deny her curiousity, though, although she doesn’t admit it aloud.

Instead, we go to Hadrazain’s weapons room.  At first, Iema is distracted by something calls the gythka–something that Natalia remembers being conjured by thri-kreen when she was fighting the Gith in the Astral Plane.  (Jim is quick to let me know, though, that there isn’t necessarily a connection between Gith and githka.)  After Iema admires the weapon, he tries to locate the companion to his weapon.  He keeps his hand on his weapon, hoping it will direct him.  He doesn’t want to pull it out for better help, though, for fear that Hadrazain will figure out that Iema’s weapons aren’t just any weapons.  They’re sentient.

 Finally, Hadrazain, realizing that Iema wasn’t finding the weapon, suggests that we check out his secret room.  He opens a door via a statue (a statue, I might add, shaped like Lolth that he makes out with in order to get the secret door to open–Phil and I had a laugh at that one), and we start downstairs.  There are voices in various languages, yelling and pleading.  At first, I’m worried that Natalia and Iema are being led into some sort of dungeon, until I realize that there are no people down here.  The voices are coming from the weapons.

Well, guess Hadrazain figured it out.  I half-expect the drow to jump us, steal Iema’s weapon, and lock us, but he does no such thing.  “Try here,” he suggests instead.

Iema looks and looks and looks, but he’s just not having any luck.  Finally, Iema comes clean and tells the whole riddle regarding the companion to his weapon.  Hadrazain says, “You know, it says ‘the son.’  Maybe it’s not referring to me.  Maybe it’s talking about Dineth.”

Hadrazain locates the nearest servant and asks where Dineth is.  We notice that he’s actually very polite to the servants; however, none of them know.  Finally, after looking around, Hadrazain finds another one of his sisters, yanks her hair, and start bullying her to tell him where Dineth is. 

“I don’t know!” she says.  “And I’m gonna tell Mom!”

Hadrazain laughs.  “No, you won’t.”

She gives up.  Dineth, she says, is in the wine cellar.  She sneers when she talks about him.  We leave, and later we find out why:  Dineth is a little, uh…”slow.”  The rest of his family had wanted him to be sacrificed to Lolth, but Hadrazain and his father put a stop to that. 

We also learn the secret to Hadrazain’s success in how he gets away with beating up drow women.  He doesn’t get caught.  He explains that as long as he doesn’t get caught doing it, he won’t get in trouble.  And none of the girls will tell because they’d be embarrassed to admit they keep getting their asses kicked by a boy.

Finally, we get to where Dineth is.  One side of his face is pulled back, like he’s had a stroke at some point in the past.  He’s crouched down, looking at rats.

“Hi,” Iema says gently.  “What are you doing?”

Dineth ignores us–until Natalia repeats it in druidic.  Then his head snaps up. Natalia and Dineth go into a long conversation about rats, what he’s doing with them, how he takes care of them, and (most importantly) how he’s protecting them from all the spiders.  Natalia asks to see what weapons he has that he’s protecting them with.  As you can guess, this was all a round-about way to find out if the child had Iema’s weapon.  Imagine our surprise, though, when Dineth proudly holds up a book covered in squashed spiders.

Natalia sighs.  “How about cats?  Something bigger?  Do you have a bigger weapon for something like cats?”

Dineth rocks a little bit.  “There–there no cats here.”

Eventually, Dineth decides to take us to what Hadrazain calls the boy’s “sanctum.”  Hadrazain groans and asks to sit it out.  “You guys will probably like it, but it’s really uncomfortable for me.”

We agree and leave him behind, following Dineth into a room.  We quickly understand why it would be “uncomfortable” for a drow:  It’s a room full of trees, grass, and most of all, sunlight.  It’s obviously a creation of magic, rather than an exit out of the Underdark but still, Natalia LOVES it.  Iema, really, doesn’t seem to care much. He just wants his companion weapon, but we look everywhere, we cannot find it.

Natalia keeps trying to find out if Dineth has anything else, but finally she grumbles to Iema, “I feel really bad, manipulating a retarded kid.”

“I don’t.  I want that weapon,” Iema says.

Natalia turns to walk away.  “Well, I’ve tried.  Sorry.  It’s not working.”

Suddenly, Dineth mentions a “secret” brother–one they’re not supposed to talk about.  We try to get him to talk, but he won’t.  We give up and leave the sanctum.  The original priestess had been waiting for us outside.

“Well,” she sneers at us, “I see Hadrazain didn’t waste time in telling you all our dirty little secrets.”

Hadrazain suddenly shows up, chases his sister away, and apologizes.  He had been called away by the matron mother, which, of course, was probably a ploy, so the priestess could get at us alone.  We ask him about having a “secret brother,” but Hadrazain has no clue what Dineth is referring to.  Out of character, I struggle to remember the crazy thing that drow can wind up becoming, and finally I get it.  “Drider!”  I say.  “Is it possible that your secret brother is a drider?”

Again, Hadrazain has no clue about a brother, but he does admit that if there is one, then the drider-route is a distinct possibility.  Finally, realizing that everyone is waiting on us, we go upstairs to dinner.  Not without some trepidation, I might add.

And it isn’t as bad as I thought it would be.  I guess it is a good thing we came with Hadrazain, one of the few male drow with some status.  Because he doesn’t want us messed with, we’re not.  Instead, we’re introduced to everyone: Matron Nisieth; her consort and Hadrazain’s father Pinic, who is a wizard; Zilla, the priestess we came with; Balath, one of Hadrazain’s other sisters; a middle-aged drow named Jaerac, who was the spymaster; and the captain of the house guard, Kynon.  Matron Nisieth finishes introductions by saying, “The House of Teldabazz welcomes you.”

We start eating.  From the sounds of it, dinner is actually good: Mushrooms and roth steak.  Hey, I might be vegetarian, but Natalia is not.  She loves it.

“So!”  Hadrazain says cheerfully to his mother.  “How many kids did you have?”

Iema and Natalia nearly spit out their food.  But, to our surprise, she’s forthcoming about the other child.  She even tells us about the ceremony where she sacrificed her newborn child, which is god-awful, and then she finally asks Hadrazain, “Don’t you have to prepare?”  I presume she’s talking about one of his tournaments or something.

“Oh, yeah,” he says.  He excuses himself from the table. 

I expected the worst.  Luckily, although haughty, none of the drow really want to piss Hadrazain off (well, I don’t understand why the Matron didn’t kill us–maybe she figured we weren’t worth the effort), so nobody, like, jumps up on the dinner table to run over and slit our throats or anything.  Thankfully.  Eventually, one by one, everyone leaves, until we’re left alone with Pinic.

Here, we find out a few things.  One thing we knew about ahead of time was that Pinic was a very powerful sorceror or wizard or something to that effect.  What we didn’t know was that he knew about Iema’s weapon Cruagh, and his quest for the companion weapon Rukh.  Another thing we didn’t know:  Once Iema gets the set, it isn’t going to work outside of the Underdark.  The weapons were made to kill Underdark creatures.

“Excuse me,” Iema says.  “I’m going to take out my weapon, but I’m not attacking, okay?”

Hadrazain’s father nods.

Iema pulls out Cruagh.  “Is that true?” he asks it.  Jim says the weapon flashes pictures that quickly confirm the drow’s claims.  Iema sheaths Cruagh.  “Well, damn.”

Natalia shrugs.  “Maybe it was meant to be down here.  Maybe you can give it to Hadrazain.”

Pinic agrees that Hadrazain will probably do a trade.  Finally, why the mage is hanging around to talk to us becomes clear.  The drow leans forward.  “I can get you out of the Underdark.”

“You can?” Iema asks, surprised.  “I didn’t think teleporting worked down here.”

It doesn’t quite work like that, we find out.  He plans on sending us to the Astral Plan where, of course, we’re going to have to find our way to the Prime Material.  “I will do this for you,” he says, “in exchange that you something for me in the future.”

Iema hesitates.  “I’m already indebted to another–”

“I’ll do it,” Natalia interrupts.  And, yes, I know what you’re thinking.  SPRING.  OMG.  It’s drow!  They’re evil!  He’ll have you do something EVIL.  Yes, I know.  I also knew Natalia wasn’t going to get out of the Underdark without something like this happening.  And you know what?  Natalia doesn’t want to flounder around the Underdark for a FREAKIN’ YEAR.  She’ll take the deal and figure out how to wiggle out of it later.  And if she can’t…

Well, let’s not talk about that.

“It’s something that you’d all have to be involved in,” the mage says.

“I guess I can’t get the same deal I got with the other guy, where it won’t be against my morals?” Iema asks.

“No.”

“I’ll do it,” Natalia says again.  Seriously, boys, evil or not, I just wanna go home.

So it’s agreed.  First, we need to say goodbye to Hadrazain.  The Weapons Master agrees to trade Iema Cruagh for the Fencer’s Friend, which sucks the life out of the victim and into the weilder.  Iema apologizes to Hadrazain for cutting out early.  “I know I said I was going to be your twos partner…”

Hadrazain waves him off.  “Don’t worry about it.”

Iema shakes Hadrazain’s hand and thanks him for everything.  “You’ve been nothing but good to us,” he says.

Natalia can’t deny that’s true.  Still, she doesn’t say it aloud.  She pauses for a moment.  “Thank you,” she says stiffly.  That is about as nice as she’ll probably ever be to a drow.  We all agree this is progress for the druid. 

They’re about to leave, until Natalia remembers something.  She turns back around.  “The drow that captured us…Vaelika and Zerich.”

“Ooooh, those guys are wanted,” Hadrazain says.  Although they are from a different city, he knows the history on those two:  They come from Houses of differing political stances, and they really did fall in love, which really did cause tension in their homes.  It sounds all very Romeo and Juliet–until the part where they tried to assassinate the heads of their Houses by calling them to a peace meeting, then pumping the room full of poison gas.

“Do you know where they are?”

“No idea.”

Damn.  Natalia says, “Well, if you’re looking for them, they seem to be deeply involved in the slave trade with Fasset.”

He nods, and then ushers us out.  “Better not keep him waiting,” Hadrazain says to us.  With that, we leave.

We meet Pinic upstairs.  The mage leads us outside, through many locked doors that, oddly enough, seem to automatically know who he is and unlocks themselves for him.  We finally stop at a portal.

“Now,” Pinic says.  “You agree to the terms?”

We do.  He gently prods us toward the portal, but not before we feel a weight of some kind in the back of our necks before we go through.

Phil exhales a deep sigh.  “Geas quest.”

Jim nods.  “And because you agreed to it, there’s no save.” 

The enormity of the grievous error that we committed–worse, knowingly committed–sits on us for a moment.  But there’s nothing to be done now.  The deal is done, and we’re in the Astal Plane.  Weary, we camp for a period that we assume is a night.

Sterror the 10^th

Iema loves being in the Astral Plane because, with flight speed being dependent on Intelligence, he’s way faster than Natalia.  Poor Sunshine, whose Intelligence lags even behind Natalia’s, flaps her wings as hard as she can, but she still doesn’t get very far.  We’re both frustrated.

After getting berated by Iema the day before (at least, we think it’s been a day–there’s no way to tell time in the Astral Plane) about not having Find the Path prepared, Natalia casts it immediately once they’re ready to leave.  They fly along for a while until the spell wears off.  After the spell wears off, we’re floundering in the darkness again, dependent on others for directions.  And, sadly, the Astral Plane is lacking in those as well.  We only run into an elf with fire eyes (actually a celestial called a firre) on patrol for demons, but he can’t tell us where the Prime Material is either.

We keep flying along.  Up ahead, we see Gith.

Natalia immediately attacks.  Jim will later laugh at me to tell me he can’t believe I quickly made a deal with evil drow but attacked neutral Gith.  Whatever.  All I remember about Gith is them kidnapping poor little girls and using their brains as a power-source.

Turns out, these Gith aren’t those Gith.  And when these Gith hear Iema say aloud to them, “I didn’t want to attack you anyway” in the middle of the fight, they turned away from Iema, attacking Natalia, telling him that they would free them from her control.  Quickly, realizing the mistake, Iema stops everyone and explains that 1) Natalia attacked them because she mixed up the Gith, and 2) she’s not a psionicist, he’s not under her control, he just meant that he didn’t want to attack them but was only doing it because his friend was. 

Natalia still gives them dirty looks.  She’s not apologizing for shit.  She really is a stubborn, pain in the ass.

The Gith reluctantly agree.  We ask for help getting to the right portal.    We exchange the Helm of Disguise for their help, and we’re careful to explain that we want to get to Numbrar.  Don’t send us back to Fasset!

The Gith agree, lead us to a portal, and I swear to god, they were snickering as they shoved us through one.  Because we landed in a city, a huge city, biggest one we’ve seen yet, even bigger than Fasset.  None of us recognize this place.

It seems nice, though.  There people hustling past us on the streets.

“Are there any, like, kids…?” Phil asks Jim.

“Tons.”

“Iema stops one and asks where we’re at.”

The boy Iema has stopped looks at the arcling strangely.  “Numbrar.”

“Northern, Central…?”

“Numbrar City.  You’re at the capital.”

We’re taken aback, and then Iema says, “One more question:  What day is this?”

Now the kid looks at Iema like he’s really crazy.  “Today?  Why, it’s Sterror the 15th!  It’s Frost Feast Day!”  Jim of course pulls off his best British waif impression for this because this is Valt’s version of Christmas.

“Wow, we were in the Astral Plane for five days?” Natalia mumurs.  But they don’t have much time to reflect on how time works differently in the Astral Plane.  Because suddenly, we hear a commotion at the emperor’s place, where a feast is being prepared and townspeople are rushing off to join the festivities.

“And now,” a voice booms, “presenting the Emperor of Numbrar…Julium Colsus Numbra!”

And out stops our old friend, in emperor’s clothes.

Don’t worry.  Our jaws dropped, too.

In this “Homebrewed,” Natalia, Iema, Corin, and Sunshine are being led by their dwarven friends to the entrance to the Underdark.  Doesn’t sound friendly, does it?  Yeah, we asked for it.  Yeah, we’re crazy.  Unfortunately, we’re stopped by some NPCs that, as it turns out, are the bane of Phil’s gaming existance.   Not sure how we got here?  Then get caught up here.

Huskyr the 28^th

If you recall from the last game, we left off on Huskyr the 28^th, late night, travelling with a dwarven thieves guild, whose members are leading Natalia, Iema, Corin, and Sunshine out of Fasset and to an entrance to the Underdark.  We were stopped on the bridge by people accusing us of being “smugglers.”  Before we know it, we’re surrounded by Halflings with crossbows, ogres with shields as large as walls, and your standard human guard stock.

Before I go further, I’m going to stop to mention something:  Jim and I were talking about how Natalia’s and Iema’s trip through the Underdark is going to contain a lot of combat, which are both boring to write and boring to read.  (Fun to play, though.)  We agreed that I would just gloss over most of the battles.  However, I want to specifically mention this one because it marks the return of two of Phil’s most-hated NPCs.

No, I had never run into them before, but in one of Jim’s previous games, Phil has.  Their names are Jakyl (whom Phil calls “Dick”) and Cogar.  I guess they’re a couple of undead guys who have clerics paid off to resurrect them when they die, so Jim torments his players with these guys from time to time.  Or, at least, he tortures Phil with them.  Phil says the worst thing about them is that you think you’ve killed them, only to find out that no…no, you didn’t.  They just keep coming back.

“Give up, Gurdren,” Jakyl yells.  “We’ve got you surrounded.  No more surprises.  It’s over.”  Jim says that the stitches in his body—yes, he has stitches in his body, ew—start glowing blue.

Gurdren raises his hands, but he smiles.  “No more surprises?”  And suddenly, with the flick of his wrist, he whips out the fancy gun that we had given him, and he shoots one of the humans.  The man falls, instantly killed.  “Surprise!”

I could totally learn to like Gurdren.

Of course, we go into combat at this point.  Both Iema and Natalia are hit with crossbows, but we make our saves, so Jim says that we hear buzzing noises but manage to shake it off whatever came along with those crossbows.  None of the dwarves, though, seem to fare as well, and they go deaf.

Sunshine, though , is a little slow to catch on that they’re deaf.  “OH MY GOD, GUYS,” she yells.  “YOU GUYS ARE ALL MUTE.”

Phil and I both got a chuckle out of that.

Iema does his Haste, does some flicking thing with his hand (everyone’s just flicking everyone off in this game), and some ram image comes out and knocks a Halfling off of the bridge.  Don’t ask me.  I guess it’s some spell Iema has.  Or a magical item.

Cogar, the other one Phil hates so much, yells that we’re all guilty of some sort of conspiracy to riot.  What the hell are they talking about?  I thought we were pretty sneaky and quiet.  Isn’t that exactly opposite of what you’d expect from a riot?  No matter; Cogar hocks a loogie at us that explodes in a gout of rancid seawater which pummels us for subdual damage.  And this, by the way, is when I started to dislike Jakyl and Cogar, too, because explosive loogies?  C’mon.  Even nasty D&D baddies should be drawing the line somewhere.

Anyway, I won’t bore you with all the details of this fight.  In-game, it was fun, but it was long.  I’ll give you the highlights:  Explosive loogie knocks out most of the dwarves who failed their reflex saves, Natalia does a bunch of damage with Ice Storm (great AoE spell, for any other druid-lovers our there) and gets down and dirty in her dire bear form, Sunshine gets her two cents in with a “dragging bite” (I had “Dragon Bite” in my notes, but Jim corrected me—I like “Dragon Bite” better), and Iema impresses us with his Wail of Doom.  Yeah, there’s more, but what you need to know is that we won—Jakyl and Cogar jump off the bridge and run away.

Oh, yeah.  They’ll totally be back.

It was a nasty fight.  We move along.  There’s some small talk.  Gurdren says Jakyl and Cogar have been coming after him for a while.  Guess Phil isn’t the only one they like to harass.

We move along.  Jim says we’re not at the Underdark yet; we’re walking along the overground or something like that.  Not really sure what that means or what that is.  I assume that it’s the ground over the Underdark, but hey, what do I know?

So, of course, we’re rolling our dice for encounters, and we get the doozie of encounters:  We walk smack into a city dotted with fires.

And Hobgoblins.

Like, 300 Hobgoblins.

“Oh, shit,” Gurdren moans.

Iema groans.  “Can’t we just…walk around them?”

Gurdren shakes his head.  “They’ve already seen us.”

Phil rolls a bardic knowledge for Iema.  Incidentally, that is a REALLY handy thing to have.  Phil is constantly rolling bardic knowledge for Iema and finds out all sorts of shit.  But I digress.  My point is that Iema knows that these Hobgoblins are nomadic, lawful-evil, and they’re more about survival than anything else.  They’re also extremely sexist and tend to like formalized duels.

Natalia actually knows about the duel part, even without the bardic knowledge; after all, she’s witnessed Hobgoblins demanding duels on more than one occasion herself.  Of course, she also knows that, being sexist, they won’t duel her.

Too bad.  I’m pretty sure she could tear one up, easily.

Several of the sentries come up to us and stare.  Iema sighs heavily.  “You’re not going to let us pass, are you?”

The Hobgoblins shake their heads.

“Let’s just get this out of the way,” Iema says, warily.  “No, you cannot use them”—he waves at Natalia and Corin—“as slaves.  You want to duel, right?”

Of course.  So Iema duels with a Hobgoblin.  Natalia watches with interest.  She feels a little bad making the bard fight, but like I said…the Hobgoblins are sexist.  And, as it turns out, Iema can take care of himself.

The Hobgoblin charges.  While he’s doing so, Iema quickly uses his Haste.  He then waits until the Hobgoblin gets close enough, then he does a spring-forward attack and then quickly springs back while slashing him.  Sounds cool, doesn’t it?  I think this is thanks to some of the super-cool gear that Iema got from the dwarves in the last game session.

Iema kills the Hobgoblin easily.  Once the fight’s over, he beheads the hobgoblin with its own sword.  He knows enough about Hobgoblin culture to know beheading it is a respect thing.  Iema bends next to the decapitated opponent to leave the sword with him.

When Iema stands up, the crowd of Hobgoblins part to let us pass through.  Say what you want about them, they at least fight fair.  We pass through.  Behind us, we can hear Hobgoblins pulling their weapons out on each other, ready to fight one another for the sword that Iema had left behind.

And so we move along.  A couple rolls later, we get another encounter.  Jim says that something like an angel appears in front of us.  It’s wearing dark gray mithril, gold, and silver armor.  Gurdren halts and stares, looking shocked.

“Is it an angel?  Is it an angel?” I ask excitedly.  Admittedly, I was thinking of the angels on Supernatural.  I like Castiel.  Hell, I want to name my first born son after him.

The Angelic Poser glances at Natalia.  “You and your bat may leave.  But I want the others.”

“Is it an angel?  It is an angel?”  I keep asking.  If Natalia was asking it, I imagine she’d be jumping up and down over the boys, trying to see it better.  Although I don’t know why I would imagine that.  Natalia is pretty tall at her 5’9”, and hell, one of those boys is a freakin’ dwarf.

Phil finally answers me to shut me up.  “No.”

Well, then, WHAT THE HELL IS IT?

And I cannot tell you.  Because Jim did not tell me.  Phil did, but I don’t remember.  What I do remember is that Jim said that Natalia felt an urge to leave, but I made my will save (not surprising, since Natalia’s will save is awesome), so she stuck around.

“I feel weird about fighting an angel,” I announce.

“It’s not an angel,” Phil says, probably secretly adding to himself that he was going to send me to meet some real angels if I didn’t shut the hell up. 

Okay, so it’s not an angel.  It’s something that I find out later doesn’t like anything with a chaotic alignment.  Apparently, I—er, Natalia—is the only one with a non-chaotic alignment.  (She’s neutral-good, if you recall.)

Again, I won’t go into the fight.  We won.  Yay.  But I will tell you say this:  Remember Gurdren’s glove?  You know, the one that turns things into stone?  Well, at a pivotal moment, Gurdren grabs at Angelic Poser and the thing turns into stone, wings spread out, looking very cool.

We’re all impressed.  Iema jokes, “Do you do all your art deco that way?”

“It is nice,” Gurdren agrees.  “Hell, I’m taking that with me!” 

So we lug it with us.  There are no more encounters for the day. Finally, we camp with no incidents until morning comes.

Huskyr the 29^th

New day, new person rolling for encounters.  I’m pretty sure it was me rolling this time.  When I finally get an encounter, Jim says that Natalia hears singing.  She stops.  “Do you hear that?”

Iema, Corin, and Gurdren listen.  “No,” they say.

Natalia turns to her dire hawk-turned-bat.  “Sunshine, do you hear that?”

Sunshine cocks her head to her one side.  “I hear it!  It’s PRETTY.”

Jim explains to me that, as a druid, Natalia knows of various things that sing, some good, some bad.  She can also discern that the singing is coming from the north.  We debate checking it out, until Corin points out that if it’s something that lures travelers off the road to their deaths…well, yeah, we should probably take care of that.

Natalia is secretly on board from the get-go—she’s gotten where she enjoys the fights—but the others look hesitant until Corin points out, “Also: Loot.”

Suddenly, everyone is feeling agreeable.

So we follow the sound off-path.  We go along the cliffs.  We can feel the air getting warmer.  Finally, we reach the mouth of a cave.  Strangely, wind is coming from the cave.  Natalia and Sunshine still hear the singing, but now, they can tell it’s in Sylvan.

“Does Natalia know Sylvan?”  Jim asks me.

I check her character sheet.  “No.”  I’m disappointed.  Natalia’s lousy intelligence score means she can’t speak a lot of languages.  Sadly, she still speaks more than I do.  D’oh.

Phil saves the day by pointing out that Iema does know Sylvan, so Natalia rattles off the words she hears in the song to Iema and Iema translates.  “It’s just a song about past things,” Iema summarizes, shrugging.

Iema and Corin decide to sneak into the cave while Natalia, Sunshine, and Gurdren hang back.  Unfortunately, there are stone giants right inside the mouth, and they instantly spot the bard and his apprentice.

The giants loom over the two, trying to scare them away.  And it would have worked—if they hadn’t started talking in Druidic, which Natalia can speak.  One says to the other, “Give them a chance to run.  They might not know what’s in there.”

Natalia steps forward.  “What’s in there?” she asks in Druidic.  They look surprised at being understood.  Trying again for privacy, they switch to Terran.  Which, JOKE’S ON THEM, because Iema speaks that too!

Some rock creature bounds up to the giants.  At first, I think that they’re going to unleash this thing on us, but Iema understands that they’re telling the stone dog to sit and stay.  It jumps around them happily, very much like a kitten.  They keep chatting to each other, and finally, they decide to tell us.

Inside the cave, they say, is an earth weird.  Iema immediately asks if we can get a vision from her.  I guess earth weirds have prophesies.  Awesome.

They agree to let Iema and Natalia inside; Corin, Sunshine, and Gurdren have to wait outside.  We’re led to the earth weird and ask again if we can be honored with a vision.  She asks us what we have to offer.  Iema double-checks with Natalia to make sure she doesn’t want to draw from the Deck of Many Things (HELL NO), and he hands the deck over.  The earth weird must be pleased with it because she offers us each one prophesy for ourselves and one for another.

You’d think when you get an offer like this, you’d be ready for what you want to know.  Well, maybe you would, but I was not.  I know what I secretly wanted to ask:  Is Iema going to betray Natalia?  IS IEMA GOING TO BECOME EVIL?  I’m totally suspicious.  I’m wouldn’t put it past Jim to slip Phil notes to pull shit over on me.  In fact, I know Jim does that.  I wouldn’t be shocked if Phil did the same thing.  If they haven’t yet, they probably will at some point.  This could be how I find out for sure.

But…Natalia really doesn’t have a reason to doubt Iema, so she has no reason to ask that question.  So, in keeping with the whole “role-playing” aspect of D&D, I chose not to ask that.  Yeah, I was disappointed.

So I have to mull over that one for Natalia.  Luckily, Phil is having difficulties, too.  Since it’s taking a while for Natalia and Iema to decide, they’re invited to stay for dinner.  Over dinner, they talk about possible questions they can ask.

Finally, after dinner, they’re ready.  Natalia decides to ask who betrayed Julium—and the rest of us—and what Beta’s future holds.  By that last question, she’s hoping to get insight on whether or not he actually has plans to get her, Iema, and Corin.

So she asks the first question:  Who betrayed Julium?  The earth weird concentrates, then her eyes widen in horror.  I don’t know if she’s telepathically linked to those around her, but there was a collective gasp within the room.

I’m on the edge of my seat, ready to hear the answer.  And, admittedly…a little fearful to hear the answer.

“I cannot answer that,” the earth weird says.

What.  The.  Hell.

“Which means,” she continues, “that the person who betrayed Julium and the rest of you is a worshipper of Tantori.  They are protected by their god.”

Ooooh, Tantori…I read Jim’s blog.  That’s a nasty god.  I had a feeling a Tantorite was going to show up in this game sooner or later.

So that leaves one other question for Natalia.  She was going to ask about Beta, but that would only affect her own future.  Julium’s fate is tied up with most of Valt.  Sigh.

“What does the future hold for Julium Caesus Numbra?” she asks.

The earth weird is quiet for a moment.  Then she speaks.  “There shall be no hand before him that can stop him,” she begins.  “And he will succeed in his mission.  He will unite everyone.  But history will forget this, and he will be known as the most blood-thirsty tyrant in Valt.  That is the price of unity.  That is the price of his vision.”

Natalia mulls over her words.  Iema’s turn.

“I have a weapon, Cruagh,” Iema starts.  “But it’s missing its companion weapon, Ruke.  Where can I find the companion weapon?”

“In Fenzybyl,” she answers.  “The hand that clasps it is the son of a matron house and does not know of its power.  Cruagh hungers for his blood.”

“And what about my apprentice, Corin?” Iema asks.  “What does the future hold?”

After she answers, I cannot help but think that his fate is possibly worse than Julium’s:  “Pain.  Knowledge.  Betrayal.  Death.  He will stand against the unstoppable, do the unthinkable, and he will never quit,” she says.  “But he will know great pain, and when the unstoppable comes to him, he will be destroyed.”

Damn, does this woman—do weirds have genders?—know how to spoil a party.  Sensing this, she pauses, then says, “Since I could not answer your first question, I permit you one more.”

Natalia looks at Iema.  He’s the smart one.  Let him ask it.

And he asks a pertinent one.  “Will we survive the Underdark?  Will we survive to see the sun over our home?”

“You will,” she answers.  “But a great evil is loose in your homelands, crafted by your own hands.  You have already influenced the blood-letting.”

God, we can’t win.  With that fun information, we eventually leave the weird and find Corin, Sunshine, and Gurdren.  We don’t mention the prophesies we were given.  Instead, we walk with the others until we reached our original destination, the one before we got distracted by fates.  Finally, we arrive at some cliffs.  Rock doors slide open; we’re greeted by dwarves, who exclaim over the stone Angelic Poser we’re lugging along.

They offer us a place to crash for a night, and we take them up on it, quickly falling into a troubled sleep.

Huskyr the 30^th

The next morning is full of activity as we prepare to finally enter the Underdark.  Some of the dwarves wake us up.  Gurdren is not one of them—he’s off doing something else.

One of the dwarves tells us that the elders are very appreciative of the things we’ve brought back.  (I secretly substitute “stolen” in my mind, but who am I to correct them?)    The elders specifically want to talk to Natalia.  However, another man wants to meet up with Iema.

Iema goes to meet the man.  The man has one eye, a burn scar on half of his face, a peg leg, and he’s missing a hand.  All in all, I’d say he’s had a rough life.

He’s knows something about the Underdark.  He explains that most of the Underdark is damp because it’s carved out by water.  It’s also very linear in design.  The first city we’ll come to is Fenzybyl.  This is good, since Iema wants to find his companion weapon there.

He gives us more directions that I won’t bore you with.  In general:  Keep down and east.  He also noted not to be fooled by anyone claiming anything related to Ziniel—those claiming they’re creatures of redemption, who were evil but don’t want to be.  Everyone down there is evil, period, end of story.

Yeah, I think we already learned that lesson the hard way.

The man also gives tips on drow.  And here’s the scariest thing I’ve heard so far.  Now, I don’t know if this is the case in other D&D games, but in Jim’s world, there aren’t very many psionicists because almost all of them are kidnapped by the Gith.  Nobody escapes.  The fact that Allista is up and around is a very unusual circumstance.  (A circumstance that, if you recall, was brought about by Natalia and her friends when they went to the Astral Plan and rescued her.)

The drow, however, actually do have psionicists among themselves.  Several.  Because they’re strong enough to fight off the Gith.  GULP.

I have a feeling that by the end of this little trip, I’m gonna hate drow as much as Phil.

Other things to note, the man says.  Drow don’t flinch.  Ever.  And there will be spiders everywhere.  Ignore them.  If we even take a little notice, they’ll know us as frauds in a moment’s notice.

While Iema is gathering information from this man, Natalia is whisked off to see the dwarven elders, whom, she is surprised to discovered, are druids!  They offer to answer any questions.  And, of course, she can’t think of a damn thing.  I have a feeling this is one of those times when Jim was setting something helpful up for me, and then I failed him miserably.  The only thing Natalia can think to ask is if they know which spells would be the most helpful in the Underdark.  I had her ask this because right before it was time for me and Jim to do our little “scene,” I had been flipping through the other D&D books Jim has and reading up on the spells that Natalia doesn’t have.  Asking the druids for helpful spells was my sneaky way to try to get them to teach Natalia some new stuff.

Sadly, they had nothing to teach me, no spells to recommend.

Sterror the 1^st

The first day of the new month, the first day in the Underdark.   A mere four hours into it, and we’ve already run into our first drow.  However, Iema kills the drow easily.  A little too easily, we think.  We hurry off.

A little later, we have another encounter from a creature that just PLOWS right into us, bonking Corin with his club.  There’s scuffling, of course, but we manage to kill it and find its lair.  There we find magic rings—glowing in poop, I might add.  Again, we don’t want to stick around, so we force march to get a little further away before finding a place to sleep.

Sterror the 2^nd-5^th

Phil and I trade off who rolls for different days, and these were the days we were lucky.  Normally, I like to have SOME encounters, but since Jim has told us it’s going to take about a year (game-time, of course) to get through the Underdark, I’m actually hoping for less.  It’ll make it go by faster.

The only thing to note is that on the 3^rd, we finally got to the split in the path that Iema’s coach told him about.  The path goes up and down.  Because the man told us to keep going down, we opted for that route.

We’re going to find out later that we made the wrong decision.

Sterror the 6^th

I’m pretty sure I was rolling when we started having bad luck with encounters.  The first one was when the percentage was 21% (eek) and Jim says we hear tapping.  Four shelled things with hooked claws and beaked faces are clattering toward us.  Jim says that they’re hook horrors.  Upon seeing us, they immediately charge and bite Iema.  Then they look disgusted and horrified.  It takes us a moment to understand why they’re acting all shocked, until they start clattering in Undercommon the word for “drow.”  I guess drow is NOT the other white meat.

They’ve also attacked Corin, who never seems to fare well these days, as the boy-turned-drow is down to 0 hit points.

Natalia heals Corin right up, only to find that they’ve brought Iema down. So she heals him up, and he tries talking to the things in Undercommon, trying to explain that we’re not there to kill them, as they believe we are.  They don’t believe Iema, and quickly wrap their hooks around Iema’s and Corin’s necks.  I guess somewhere along the way, Natalia must have shifted to her dire bear form for the fight because the hookworms demand that she not be a bear.  Or else, they say, wrapping their hooks tighter around the boys.

She shifts back.

At first, they debate eating us.  Then they decide against it.  Then they decide to steal our water and shove us in a cavern.  And this is the scene were Jim becomes all happy because while we didn’t die in this encounter, this is the first one where we’ve completely lost the fight.  In fact, he was so pleased, he wrote a whole post about it.

Hmph.  What kind of man gets off on seeing his fiancée and best friend getting beat up, I ask you?  See how long it is before I make him cookies again. 

Anyway, once the hooked assholes are gone, we go out the way we came.  This is where we realize that where the path split, we should have gone up, not down.  So now we have to backtrack.

Re-roll encounter!  And…it’s a 20.

This time, we run into a group of big, flabby guys –athaches—that look like they’re actually looking for the hook horrors.  And, of course, because everyone down here is a complete and utter DICK, we fight.  Here, Iema shows off a really cool trick, Wail of Doom, and he sends four guys off running.

Not to be outdone, Natalia casts Ice Storm.  Well, okay, Iema did outdo Natalia—Natalia’s Ice Storm is nothing new; we’ve all seen it a million times before.  Still, the Ice Storm is impressive, doing 22 points of damage on the remaining 8 assholes.

Sunshine decides to jump in, biting, winging over and out.  When it’s my turn again, I decide I’m going to summon something.  When Natalia casts any Summon Nature’s Ally spell, by the way, it’s something we all like to jump in on.  I always make the final call, but I definitely take Phil’s advice, since he’s a much more experienced player than I.

Although, admittedly, I’ve never summoned that orca whale that he wants to see in action so badly.

For this encounter, I decide on the Tendriculos again.  Natalia’s only summoned it once before, and she never really got to see it in action.

I’m much happier with it this time around.  Once she’s summoned it, it does tons of damage.  We’re disappointed, though, that even with all the dings we put into these things so far, they still have 102 hit points.  Sheesh!

Sunshine—poor Sunshine!—is still doing her best in her bat-form, but finally, at some point, she yells, “NATALIA, WHY DON’T YOU LOVE ME ANYMORE?”

Natalia stops long enough during the fight to say, “What?  I do!”

“WHY DON’T YOU LOVE ME?” she keeps hollering.  “YOU NEVER MAGIC ME ANYMORE.”

Oops.  Because Iema had mentioned wanting Poison on his weapon, Natalia swapped the Greater Magic Fang spell out for the Poison.  Her lack of Greater Magic Fang is what Sunshine is referring to.

Natalia tries to stammer out something that sounds half like an apology and half an explanation, but Sunshine keeps yelling, “YOU NEVER MAGIC ME ANYMORE! WHAT DID I DO WRONG?”

I felt really bad about this.  And then I felt really stupid.  Because I’m FEELING BAD FOR A CHARACTER THAT IS NOT REAL.  Okay, done feeling guilty now.

At any rate, the fight is nasty, everyone does their own thing, and eventually, we’re left with one that runs away.  We search the dead athaches, and WOOT.  Magical jewelry!  Just what a girl wants:  Natalia gets a new ion stone!  She promptly places it around her head, and it goes into orbit.

I hope that’s not indicating that my head is so big that it has its own gravitational pull…

Natalia also gets a ring and Moon Bracers.  She gets over her loots pretty fast, though, and settles in on removing the poison from Sunshine with a wand she has.  Meanwhile, Iema’s going through some things as well.  He finds a necklace that looks crappy until he puts it on.  Upon examination, he determines that the jewels can be used as explosives.

He also digs up a tin crown.  “That’s funny,” he says.  “It seems like it looked fancier on the athach that was wearing it.”

We all take turns trying it, but we can’t figure out what made it different when the bad guys were wearing it until Sunshine says, “Let me try!”

We shrug, then put it on her.  It just looks like a tin crown.  “Do you feel any different?” Iema asks cautiously.

“No.  Maybe if I think real hard!”  Sunshine squeezes her eyes shut.  And then, right before our eyes, we see it turn into a gaudy crown.  “Now I feel different!”

“That’s a Hat of Change Self!” Corin exclaims.  We’re all impressed with this item.  Of course, Natalia doesn’t need anything like that, since she changes herself more than I imagine she changes her underwear (sad but true), so that item stays with Iema.

And so concludes just another day in the Underdark.

Sterror the 7^th

Good grief, only 7 days since we’ve been here?  Natalia’s getting stir-crazy for some freakin’ SUNSHINE, and I don’t mean her animal companion.  The Underdark is depressing.

And disgusting, as I’m about to find out with this next encounter.

Some spectral creatures step out in front of us and cast a spell.  Phil immediately asks to do a check, but I assume he failed it because Jim announces that Iema can’t identify the spell the things are using.  Nonetheless, we take damage.  Iema attacks the thing, but he just goes right through it.

Aw, crap.

The spectral things disappear.  Jim, incidentally, has the layout drawn on a battlemap:  It’s a tunnel with several smaller U-shaped rooms off to the sides.  Natalia walks into one passage way, sees an elf of composed of light.  Sweet, right?  Natalia (overall) doesn’t care for elves, and here’s one sitting for her to kill.  She casts Produce Flame and gets ready.

Iema is still somewhere along the main hallway.  Unlike Natalia, he’s figured out that there’s someone behind this, and he’s looking for a spellcaster.  He hears where the spell is being cast from and inches towards it.  One of his items has some sort of dimension door ability to it, which he uses.

He ports his ass right into some liquid.

I’m very proud of myself—as soon as Jim said that, I figured out what it was.  No, I’m not just saying that to make it out like I know everything.  I’m saying it because I usually have no clue what the hell we’re fighting, and this is one of those few times I figured it out right away.  Only, of course, because I’d seen the things in action before.

I kept my mouth shut, though, just in case I was wrong.  I wish I had been.

In her location, Natalia hurls two produce flames at the glowing elf in front of her.  The flames seem to bounce off some kind of shield.  Natalia frowns.  The elf grins and flips her off.  Sunshine tries to fly in behind the elf and bite, but, of course, it goes through the elf.

Jim now say that at this point, Iema’s “in” some creature.  When Jim said this, it confirmed my suspicions: Gelatinous cubes.  Iema dimension doors out of it.

Natalia, hell-bent on getting the ghostly elf, chases it, but it disappears behind another gelatinous cube.  How many of these things are there?  She runs around the opposite way of the U-shaped room to get to the main hall, spots the elf, and before she can think, she casts Produce Flame and hurls it at him.  It, of course, goes through the elf and hits Corin smack on the back of the head.

“OW!” he yells.  He turns on Natalia, annoyed.  “IT’S AN ILLUSION.”

Oh.  Well.  Yeah.

Remember when I asked earlier how many gelatinous cubes are in this hallway?   Well, the answer is a LOT.  Here’s what’s worse:  They’re working with will-o’-wisps, who taunt us, then we walk into the cubes, the wisps feed on our torment.  Apparently, they also took levels of sorcerer, since they are casting Dancing Lights.  And the cubes are on all sides.  Iema and Sunshine pretty much get stuck and paralyzed right away; Natalia dodges it for a while, gets stuck but not paralyzed, then gets out of one to walk right into another cube again.  The only one who manages to stay out of the gelatinous cubes is Corin.

There are will-o’-wisps right in front of Iema, taunting him as he’s paralyzed in his gelatinous cube.  “Shall we kill him?” one asks the other.

Natalia starts for them.

“Stop,” they order.  “Come any closer, and we’ll kill him outright.”

Natalia stops, undecided.

Not Corin, though.  “DEATH TO TYRANTS!” he yells while running to save his master.

But, despite all his agility, he isn’t fast enough, and the will-o’-wisps kill Iema and turn invisible.  Corin and Natalia kill off the cubes that are around them.  Iema’s body lays on the floor.

Jim has us roll for another encounter.  Wouldn’t you know it, we roll a 1, so yes, we’re going to get another encounter.  “Shit,” I say.  “Are we going to have to fight something else with Iema lying dead over there?”

“No,” Jim says.  “They’ve heard you and are coming, but you’ve got a little bit of time to pull off a Reincarnation.”

So Natalia casts.  As I roll for what Iema comes back as, I say a quick prayer that he’ll come back as something useful and not a toad or something.  I read the number to Phil, and he looks it up.

“Human!” he reads, surprised.

“Awesome!  Wait—so he’s human now?”  I ask.

Jim shakes his head.  “No, it’s just a baseline.  When you roll human, it means you get to go back to whatever you were originally.  So he’s an arcling again.”

So that’s cool.  Next, Phil rolls on the “what went wrong” table.  Jim reads the results and tells him that Iema is now vulnerable to weapons of death.

I don’t really get that—isn’t EVERYONE vulnerable to weapons of death?—but I don’t have time to figure it out.  Already, we can hear someone approaching…

Of course, we’re not going to find out what it is until next game.

Back with another “Homebrewed,” which I’ll try not to ruin too much with my epic exhaustion.  In the last game, we left off with Natalia, Iema, and Corin in the middle of robbing a museum.  Hey, don’t look at me like that–you’re supposed to be rooting for us, remember?  Besides, we wouldn’t have to do this if they hadn’t stolen everything from us and enslaved us in the first place.  Unfortunately, the heist has had a couple of hiccups.  Natalia and Iema are in a world of hurt, and Corin…well, Corin’s dead.  Don’t remember that happening?  Well, go refresh your memory here.  Otherwise, read on.

Huskyr the 17^th

We pick up right where left off in the last game:  Corin lying dead on the ground, with Natalia, Iema, and Sunshine standing around him. 

“Hey, Natalia,” Iema says, “do you have Reincarnation prepared?”

“Yeah.”  She didn’t say what we were all thinking:  Wonder what he’ll come back as, though. 

Then we both notice Sunshine hopping closer to Corin, eyeing the boy’s fingers.  “No, Sunshine!”  we say.  “You cannot eat Corin’s fingers!”

“Why not?” she asks, confused.  “He’s not using them.  And he’s already missing some.”

Natalia decides not to address that question.  Instead, she focuses on Corin, casts Reincarnation, and Corin comes back.  And it’s not as bad as it could be.  Sure, he doesn’t come back as human, but he comes back as a Halfling.

At this point now, Natalia has only one healing spell left, only 80 hit points left while in bear form (keep in mind that being in bear form add somthing like 40+ to her hit points), and Iema’s down to a mere 17.  Since Iema is worse for wear than Natalia, she uses her last healing spell, Remedy Moderate Wounds, on Iema, and then we go snooping around the room we’re in.  We find a Deck of Many Things.  This is another one of those things where Jim has an actual “game prop” ready for us.  This one, though, I had known about ahead of time because Jim needed my Tarot cards to create the deck.  Since he explained what the deck was before the game, I already knew what it was and didn’t need to ask–and I had already known that there was no way Natalia was going to touch it.

“Ooooh, a Deck of Many Things,” Corin says.  He reaches out to touch it, yanks his hand back, reaches for it again…

Iema has already decided that he’s going to risk it, but we want to finish looking around for anything else that we can find to either use or sell.  Good thing we didn’t stop looking:  We find an ornate gun that we think we can sell for a lot of money, some keys (always good to have keys), and a wooden head in a box.

As it turns out, the head can talk.  It immediately starts yelling, “Thieves!  Thieves!”

Iema, ever suave, shuts the head up.  And, as usual, he gets the head talking, even gets the head’s name.  (Rintharios, if you were curious.)  And it doesn’t take long for Rintharios to start complaining.  He says that he’s been in the box for two and a half centuries and would like help getting the rest of his face back.  (I guess he’s missing some of it.)  Natalia says she’ll thinks she can help; between the skill points she has in woodworking along with her druidic spells, she’s got mad skillz.  So we chat with the head while continuing to loot the place, which also turns up a Hammer of Dwarven Kings. 

Impressed by the weapon, Iema tries to pick it up.  Immediately, he feels an overwhelming urge to drop it.  Neither Natalia nor Corin have any problems, though.  Natalia eyes Iema suspiciously.

And I’m not subtle about her suspicion, by the way.  In fact, I announce it:  “Natalia is SUSPICIOUS of Iema!”

“She should be,” Phil laughs.

I totally am, particularly because of what I know out of character.  In a nutshell:  Phil has told me and Jim that he’s not going to necessarily be so hellbent on keeping his character good.  I guess he’s played lots of straight and narrow characters in the past; now, he’s trying for a character that toes the line on occasion.  And the other night, when he came over just to hang out, I overheard him talking about lichdom with Jim.  Shocked?  YOU GUYS.  HE THREW ROCKS AT BIRDS IN THE LAST GAME.  OF COURSE HE’S GOING EVIL.

Actually, I don’t think he is going that way.   Not yet.  I just know he’s open to the idea, heh.

Okay, shut up, Spring.  Back to the game!

So, at this point, we’ve found all that can be found, and we’re debating whether or not to go into the next room or quit while we’re ahead.  We’re low on both health and spells.  And here is where Spring is not like Natalia:  Spring would play it safe, quit now, go home.  Natalia figures we’ve come this far and has confidence that she and her buddies can pull this off. 

Also, Corin and Iema really want to draw from the Deck of Many Things.  Understandably, though, they’re nervous.

“I can draw some cards for you,” Rintharios suggests.  We hand him the deck; he uses his mouth to select a card, although the cards seem to work with whomever’s drawing from the deck, as the cards he’s drawn float up in front of him on their own.  I can see that he’s drawn  The Magician and the 10 of Swords.  Those are the Tarot cards, of course; I’m not sure what they “translate” to in the Deck of Many Things.  But I do know that Jim says that the wooden head in the box now feels less lucky.  Nobody can figure how he can get any less lucky, but I digress.

Iema screws up his courage.  Phil-as-Iema draws The Sun.  Jim says that Phil gets 50,000 XP and a sable cloak..  Iema also feels luckier.  But his luck is short-lived when Phil draws 10 fo Swords and gets -1 to saving throws.  He also draws a 2 of Swords, which will automatically move him to the next level, provided that he can kill the next monster on his own.

We pause the game here to adjust Phil’s sheet.  Now, if we went based on the XP Iema was supposed to get, Iema would jump up something like four levels.  We were excited.  Then Jim did some research and found that the rule is you can’t go beyond one level.  I think you’re supposed to advance to the next level and be 1 point shy of the one after that.  I tried to argue the case that we overrule the book.  Natalia, I said, wouldn’t touch the cards; shouldn’t Iema gets rewarded by taking such a huge risk?  He could have keeled over flat if he had drawn the wrong card.

In the end, Jim laid down the law:  For game balance, he would go by what the book says.  We were disappointed, but we both knew Jim was right.  Still, it would have been cool.

Once Iema’s character sheet is updated and Phil has picked his new spells, Corin is next up to draw from the deck.  He draws the 4 of Cups, a card that allows him to reverse past events.  He then draws 10 of Swords (popular card, it seems) and he immediately uses the 4 of Cups card to reverse his drawing of the 10 of Swords.

“You sure you don’t want to draw from the deck, Natalia?” one of them asks.

I back away from the deck.  “Hell, no, Natalia’s not touching that.”  Jim and Phil look at me like a party-pooper.  “Well, SOMEONE here has to have common sense!  Natalia may not have high intelligence, but she’s got a ton of wisdom, remember?”

They shrug me off and we decide to move on to the next room.  Natalia leads the way.  Inside, there are many boxes scattered about.  We see a creature inside the room.  It has pointy teeth, pale white skin, and is wearing brown linen.  Phil groans as Jim describes it.

And because I have no imagination, I ask, “What?  What?”

“It’s a vampire,” Phil tells me.

Oh.  A vampire?  So what?

Yeah, I’m about to learn that D&D vampires are way more bad-ass than the glittery kind in Twilight.  (Although, admittedly, the Twilight vampires would make way better disco balls.  I’m just saying.)

The vampire lunges for Corin, sinking his claws into Corin’s new Halfling body.  Iema draw his sword.  Immediately, the sword tries to signal something to Iema.  Currently, there is a map of the Jade Islands on it, but Iema doesn’t know what that’s supposed to mean.

And the fight is on:  Natalia in her bear form, Sunshine doing her whole fly-by attack thing, Iema with his sword.  And we’re failing miserably.  For one thing, the vampire is grappling Corin, which is making the boy take Con damage.  I didn’t realize how crappy that is until this little fight, when I got to see it in action.  That’s when I remembered Jim’s post that he had written not too long before this game called “No More Kid Gloves.”  Damn.  So this is what he was talking about.

I confirmed it when Natalia tries attacking the vampire and consequently 1) takes -2 to all checks and rolls, and 2) accidentally heals the vampire.  Aw, crap.

Corin can’t break from the vampire’s grasp.  Sunshine and Natalia keep clubbing away at the vampire, although Natalia’s learned that trying to grapple him isn’t a good idea.  Meanwhile, Iema’s sword is frantically trying to communicate him him, changing the pattern on its blade to a flames.  Still, Iema isn’t sure what the weapon is trying to signal to him and instead just attacks with it.

Eventually, the vampire drops Corin.  Corin is out again at -5 hit points.  Natalia tries her Produce Flame along with her regular claw and bite attacks.  The bite fails, but finally, her claws manage to get through the monster’s damage reduction.  Jim says that she leaves a flaming hand scar on him.  WOOT.

The battle continues; so does Iema’s sword.  It keeps flickering  from gold to silver to copper and back, faster and faster.  Iema realizes he needs to say a command word.  He struggles to think of what it could be.  Then, he comes up with it:  “RUGOS.”

It’s the Jade Island word for fire.  Unfortunately, Phil has a bad roll for his attack, so it doesn’t do him much good.

The vampire steps back during the fight.  Jim says Natalia, Iema, and Sunshine hear scratching through the walls.  Soon, dire rats are swarming around us.  We start hacking away at rats until it’s Iema’s turn again.  At his turn, he yells the command word again, but this time, with much better success:  He lops the vampire’s head off.

Still, we have the dire rats to deal with, although they don’t seem too bad.  We’re killing them off easily until only a couple are left.  Once outnumbered, the remaining dire rats run away.  Iema looks to Natalia to see if she wants to chase them and kill them; she shakes her head no.  They’re just rats being rats, after all.

Iema starts singing and I roll some heal checks on Natalia; together, the two of them manage to stabilize Corin.  Once they do, they look for anything in the room.  We find some wizard’s staff.  Neither Natalia nor Iema can hold this one, though–we immediately drop it.

Natalia comes up with the idea of using Corin to try to pick it up.  “Just use his hand to grab it,” she says.

We do so.  Suddenly, Corin wakes up gasping and sits up.  “It’s talking to me,” he says in an awed voice.

“It’s talking to you?” we ask.  Is that bad or good?

“It says you already have soul weapons,” he continues.

Oh.  So that’s why we couldn’t pick it up.

Looking around the room, we find some sort of necklace made out of teeth.  Natalia was going to take that, but when Corin read the card and found that it was a magical weapon made by giant owls, we realized it would be better suited for Sunshine.  We put the necklace on the hawk, clasping it to her feathers.  She grins (as much as a hawk can grin, anyway), and bounces up and down, making her new necklace make a satisfying cha-ching! sound.  She looks good and she knows it, heh.

We also find a spellbook.  There’s information nearby (remember, we are in a museum) that says this spellbook was carried by an enemy of the state.  If you look at it, though, it just looks like a fashion designer’s sketchbook.  The theory is that it’s a code, so you have  to break it to find out what it all really is.

Nearby, we also find some spell component pouches that had been used during the centuries.  Don’t mind if we do…we also snatch up scroll and wand organizers that we have found, along with potion belts.  How handy!

Our work here is done.  We slip out of the museum (much easier than getting in, let me tell you), and we head back to the dwarven thieves’ guild place.  Gurdren greets us; Iema gives him the run-down on the monsters.

“Oh, there was a vampire?  THAT explains the death of the flower girl and the dwarven brewer,” Gurdren says.  He sees the look on our faces and explains:  “You can use a rose to kill a vampire–”

“–and dwarves brew their beer with holy water,” Iema chimes in, getting it.

I did not get it.  I mean, I get the holy water, although I didn’t know dwarves brewed their beer with it.  But I had never heard of the rose thing before.

Once we’re done gossiping about the monsters, we show Gurdren what we’ve scored.  Gurdren shows a particular interest in the hammer and the gun.  He seems a little too interested.  Suddenly, Natalia’s trust in this short guy wavers.

Still, it’s late, and when he says we can stay for the night to rest up, we agree.  We plan on locking ourselves in, but Gurdren beats us to it.  He tells us goodnight, closes the door, and we hear locks click from the outside.

Huskyr the 18^th-Huskyr the 27^th

And on these days, we rested. Hey, if it’s good enough for God…

Huskyr the 28^th

Opposed to what the prior date entry might indicate, we weren’t captured or held against our will or anything; we really were resting up.  We might have done other stuff, but if we did, I apparently didn’t think it was important enough to make note of.

Moreover, the day before, on the 27th, Jim says that the dwarves give each of us, save Sunshine, a wooden box with cool gear in it.  At this point, Jim handed me and Phil index cards with all the gear information on it.  The gear is awesome and tailored to our characters.  Phil and I oooh and aaah over our new loot.  Sadly, I can’t tell you everything I got because Jim took the cards back after the game and I don’t know where he’s keeping them.

Of course, the dwarves aren’t giving us these things out of the goodness of their hearts.  In exchange, they want those items that we stole from the museum.  To sweeten the pot, they say that while we can probably get more information about the Underdark from Dirtgut of the ogre thieves guild, the dwarves will lead us to the entrance.  Sounds like a deal to us.  We hand over the hammer and the fancy gun.

So now today, on the 28th:  The ogre thieves guild.  We disguise ourselves and go.  However, once we get there, we find out that “password” is no longer the password.  Somehow, we manage to let the guy at the door to let us in.  Kind of crappy security, if you ask me.  Then again, it’s full of ogres inside, so who really needs security, anyway?

Inside, the usual ogre stuff is going on.  You know, things like a dolphin eating contest.  There’s also a table with ogres taking turns stabbing each other.  Finally, one makes a small noise.  The others throw their arms up in the air and yell “Awwwww!”

These are some strange games they enjoy here.

Eventually, we find Dirtgut.  We show him the club, offer it to him in exchange for information.  He’s skeptical of the club, though.

“Hey, Mushok,” he calls to another ogre.  “C’mere.”

Mushok strolls over.

“Hold up dat shield,” Dirtgut orders.  Mushok complies.  The shield he holds up is impressive, being made of adamantine.  Dirtgut swings the club over his head, then plunges down in a swift, sure  motion.  The sheild cracks.  Dirtgut looks satisfied.  “Dat good club.”

Damn straight, Dirtgut.

So Dirtgut agrees to tell us what we need to know about the Underdark.  He says what the humans have on line, the drow have underneath.  We need to keep in mind that everyone lies there.  Everyone.  While the drow city is dangerous, the Underdark wilderness is even more so.  He says there’s a waterfall down there; if we find that and follow the river from there, it will lead us to the drow city.  He also adds that disguising ourselves as drow will give us an air of arrogance.  Our biggest problem, though, will be the lack of food and water.  We should stock up while we can.

Luckily, Iema thinks ahead and asks if Dirtgut has a bag of holding we can purchase to put food in.  Of course Dirtgut has a bag of holding!  He’s part of a thieves guild, isn’t he?  He sells the bag to Iema for 5,000 gold.

We get ready to leave, to go to the “barber” to get transformed into drow.  Dirtgut, though, has a few things to say about that.

“To be drow, must have air of arrogance,” he reinstates.  He points to Iema.  “You, I think can fool them.”  Then he points at Natalia.  “Not sure ’bout you.”

Natalia gets huffy.  “Why not?”  (Secretly, though, out-of-character, I was thinking there is no way I could pull this off.)

Dirtgut explains.  “Drow females bossy–”

“Oh,” Natalia interrupts him, understanding.  Neither Natalia nor myself are very good at being bossy.  So we come up with another plan:  Iema and Corin will be the drow, and Natalia will pose as Iema’s slave.  Sunshine’s awesome eyesight as a hawk won’t do well in the Underdark, so we decide she should be transformed into a bat.  We go off to the Barber’s to do that, go back to the dwarves to tell them of our plan, get a fake prisoner neck coller to sell the Natalia-as-a-prisoner thing more convincingly.

During the night, we slip out with several of the dwarves from White Stone Masons.  We go with them through the east gate, through some wilderness and some mountains, and start crossing a bridge.  But suddenly, some guards step out from behind rocks in front of us.

“Well,” one of them calls to the other cheerfully.  “Looks like we got some smugglers!”

And he calls the guards.

To be continued in the next game…

Woot!  Back already with the 22nd installment of “Homebrewed”!  This one will be shorter than the last because it’s (mostly) the first half of a fairly short dungeon.  I think it’s a dungeon, anyway.  At any rate, Natalia, Iema, and Corin just finished their last job and are eager for another, as they’re trying desperately to scounge up money to afford a nice all-expenses paid trip through the Underdark.  Can’t remember what their newfound chosen career paths were?  Refresh your memory here.

Huskyr the 16^th

We pick up right where we left off, on the night of Huskyr the 16^th, right after we’ve killed off the gnome thieves guild.  We got back to the dwarven thieves guild, which, incidentally, is called White Stone Masons, let them know that we’ve completed the job, and then start trying to brainstorm for other jobs to raise money.  Oh, and we finally learn the guild leader’s name, the one that turned Iema and Corin into stone to make sure that they weren’t found by people who would be looking for us.  (For further explanation that I skipped in the last “Homebrewed,” see Jim’s comment here.  You can also read about the glove that turned them to stone on Jim’s blog here.)  The leader’s name is Gurdren Whitecowl.  Gurdren overhears us trying to figure out what job to do next and admits that our idea about robbing the museum would be the best bet for some fast cash.

Interestingly enough, Gurdren says that he thinks the best time to rob the museum would be during the day because of the way the security is set up.  He says that the first and third floors have traps on them, so that if anyone comes onto those floors, they would automatically have the temporal stasis spell cast on them.  Still, the best stuff is on the first and third floors.  The second floor, he says, doesn’t really have anything worth stealing.  He recommends talking to the Dirt Children thieves guild, a guild consisting of ogres, for more information on how to break into the museum.

Iema, understandably, is reluctant to just go knocking on the door of an ogres-only thieves guild to ask how to rob a museum.  “Is there any way we can get an escort, someone to introduce us?” he asks.

Gurdren, seeing Iema’s point, says, “I’d recommend Durthak.  He’s a half-ogre.  I’ll have him take you in the morning.”

Speaking of morning, it’s getting late, and we all are tired after a long day of killing off short people.  (Thank god I’m not in this D&D world, right?  Otherwise, I’d be toast.)  We agree to go with Durthak and pay the Dirt Children a visit in the morning.

Huskyr the 17^th

After we wake up and eat, Iema gets busy trying to disguise us so we’re not recognized in the city.  Gurdren catches him doing this and suggests we go see a wizard that they call The Barber to cast polymorph on us rather than having Iema disguise us all the time.  It would be easier, he points out.

Corin likes the idea.  “Actually, we should go see him to polymorph us into something that has dark vision before we go into the Underdark,” he says.  “It could be cheaper than buying items to help us with dark vision.”

We all agree this is a great idea.  Before we go leave to pay the ogre guild a visit, we decide to give The Barber, Fezus, a visit.

Fezus runs his business in the poorer section of town.  Boards cover the establishment’s windows.   A sign is nailed to one of the planks.  It reads BARBER.

We go inside.  It’s dark.  We hear what sounds like something dragging across the floor.  After our eyes adjust to the dim lighting, we finally spot the source of the sound:  A gravekin coming towards us, dragging his leg across the floor.

“Hi,” Iema greets him.  “We’d like haircuts.”

Fezus pulls out his scissors.

Iema looks at the blades, then back at Fezus before he clarifies.  “No.  The expensive kind.”

“Ah,” Fezus says.  “I see.” 

He goes about transforming us, although I can’t remember what our new forms look like.  I just remember Jim saying to Phil, “Phil…you’re a black guy!”

“Sweet!” Phil laughs.

[Edit:  As Jim has pointed out in the comments, this is a reference to Family Guy.  Unsurprisingly, since I really don't like that show (shocking, I know), I didn't catch it, but I thought I'd include it here, because it IS pretty funny:

Lois Griffin: [Lois and Peter wait for a pregnancy test] God, I can’t believe we weren’t more careful. This probably happened that night we tried role playing.
Lois Griffin: [flashback] Oh, I need a spankin’. I’m a bad, bad girl.
Peter Griffin: I’m a paladin with 18 charisma and 97 hit points. I can use my Helm of Disintegration and do one D4 damage as my half-elf mage wields his plus-five Holy Avenger.
Lois Griffin: Paladins can’t use the Helm of Disintegration.
Peter Griffin: Oh. Then, I’m a black guuuuy.

Even dumb shows have there moments, but I digress.]

As for the rest of us, I don’t remember what Jim says we looked like.  I think Sunshine stayed the same, though.  But enough of our new identities, we’re off to go chat with some ogres.

We head off to where we’ve been told we can find Durthak.  We find him leaning against the wall.  He looks as though he has no legs below the knee.

Naturally, Iema is the first to speak to him.  “We want some information,” he says.

Durthak, probably knowing that we were coming, doesn’t give us too hard of a time.  It turns out that his legless appearance was just a trick, as he unfolded his legs from beneath him and stands up to his full height.  My own legs hurt just thinking about it.  He indicates we should go elsewhere.

We head to a door.  Durthak knocks.  An ogre opens a window to peer out.  “What’s the password?” he asks gruffly.

“Password,” Durthak responds.

We laugh.  Jim says we all go inside and see a place of “ill repute.”  (Jim’s words.)  Ogres are tossing coins and making bets.

“Betting on if it comes down heads or tails?” Phil guesses.

“No,” Jim says, “betting on whether or not it comes down at all.”

We laugh again.

Durthak takes Natalia, Iema, and Corin to an ogre they call Dirt Gut Maneater.  He’s a scary-looking mofo covered in tattoos.  The tattoos are testaments to Dirt Gut’s past, each one an image depicting some god-awful thing he’s done.  Durthak leaves us alone with Dirt Gut.  Natalia thinks that personally, she would rather deal with Durthak.

Iema tells Dirt Gut that we would like information.

“Then you need give me money,” he says.  “Either dat, or I shake money from you.  But if I do dat, den I be tired, den cranky.  I don’ like dat.”

We agree that we’ll just give him money.  We’d prefer he not be tired or cranky either.  So we fork over the change, and we’re told the following:

There are a couple of guards outside one of the floors.  He calls them “collaborators,” although I’m not sure what he means by that.  He says not to bother trying to bribe them—it can’t be done.  He claims the first and third floors cannot be touched.  He also tells us about devices set up to cast temporal stasis on intruders.  There’s an animal of some kind on the second floor, but he doesn’t know what.  Dirt Gut says he once sent a thief to go check it out, but the thief never came back.

Also in passing, he mentions that there’s a flower shop owner down the street who was killed in her sleep, but nobody knows why.  If that’s not weird on its own, then this will drive the point home:  About a block away, there was a dwarf that brewed his own beer, and he was also killed.  Both of these people had shops within a block radius of the museum.  We wonder if it’s connected.

Iema decides to ask Dirt Gut about entrances to the Underdark from the Emperor’s palace.  That, Dirt Gut doesn’t have any knowledge on.  But Dirt Gut quickly brings us back to the topic at hand, telling us that people deliver food the museum during the day.  He suggests we check that out.

We thank him for the information he’s offered and leave.  Before we go do our little heist, we decide to check out the shops.  Guess what?  We’ve got nothing.  We cannot find any reason for anyone to kill those shop owners.

Next, we plan on how to take care of the guards.  The plan is this:  Iema makes Natalia invisible.  Then he will put a guard to sleep while Corin fascinates the other.  Natalia will kill them as an invisible tiger.

Or something like that.

We go into the alley for buffs:  Invisibility on Natalia, Barkskin on Corin (I’m proud that I actually remembered to do this), Mage Armor on all of us, as well as Cat’s Grace.  Natalia also remembers to cast Greater Magic Fang on Sunshine. 

Our plan to take care of the guards goes off without a hitch.  After we kill the guards, we go into the museum.  We have to make checks (dexterity?) as soon as we go in.  Phil succeeds; me and Jim-as-Corin fail.

“Okay,” Jim announces, “Phil, Iema remembers the pit that is right inside the door.  You immediately step around it when you walk through the door.  Spring, Natalia and Corin forget and step right into the pit.”

Luckily, it’s only a five foot drop.  Granted, that’s just above my head in real life, but Natalia’s taller than I am at her 5’8”.  She falls right into a coffin.  When she gets herself together, she looks around and sees that there are bones scattered about.  She scurries out of the coffin, and she and Corin pull themselves out of the pit.

It doesn’t take us long to get into combat.  As soon as Natalia and Corin have climbed out, a blue-gray wolf comes padding out.  Jim says it would be considered a magical beast called a Tugren.  I guess this is something Jim made up, so let me give a quick explanation:  Jim says it’s just a wolf with a template added to them.  Its history in the world of Valt:  Tugrens are originally from Shoten.  They’re bred from storm elementals and normal wolves.

“Where can I get one of these wolves?” Natalia wonders aloud, impressed.  She doesn’t have a chance to be impressed for long, as we’re jumped by more of them.

Quickly, the wolves trip Iema and Natalia.  Sunshine, a little slow on the uptake, whips around.  “WHAT’S THAT?!  IT’S A WOLF!”

Seriously, she pretty much yells everything.

Corin, luckily, doesn’t get tripped, so he’s still standing.  Sunshine jumps into battle, attacks a wolf, and immediately gets shocked.  Natalia morphs into her brown bear form.  No dire bear here—she’d go through the floor.  Natalia then attacks the wolf that attacked Sunshine, but alas, even though she gets some nice swiping and biting in, she takes lightning damage.

Again, Natalia totally wants one of these wolves.  How freakin’ awesome.

Iema gets up and maneuvers himself behind the wolf attacking Natalia, putting himself in a flanking position.  He attacks, but again, he also takes electrical damage.

During the scuffling, Natalia is knocked prone.  I’m surprised by this; Natalia’s bear forms are usually difficult to trip.  So, naturally, I wasn’t sure how to attack from my position on the floor.

“Getting up takes a move action or partial action or something, right?” I ask Jim.

“You can always attack from your position on the floor.”

I frown.  “While lying on my back?  Like a desperate hooker?”

Jim starts laughing.  “Well, I was thinking more like when Gremlin rolls on his back and start attacking Emmy with all his claws.”

“Like a desperate hooker…I would have never thought to put it like that,” Phil adds.

Okay, so something apparently wrong with me and my analogies.  Nonetheless, I decide not to waste any kind of actions and stay in my desperate hooker position, attacking wolves above me.  It works: Natalia manages to kill off the wolf that she and Sunshine had been working on earlier.

Meanwhile, Jim says that Sunshine “goes to town” biting another wolf.  Iema also attacks, takes more damage, but manages to get himself over to Natalia to heal her up.  Natalia keeps her back on the floor, clawing at wolves around her.

Sunshine now does something a little different:  She flies away, flips over, and then flies back.  She attempts a bite but misses.  We’re still impressed by the flipping action.  Phil asks Jim if he can do a bardic knowledge check to see if he can identify what Sunshine just did.  He rolls well, and Jim says that Iema recognizes it as an aerial tactic normally used by dragons.

Wolves’ turn.  One of them attacks Corin and bounces off him.  Turns out that he just ran into Corin’s Protection from Evil spell.

“They’re evil!” Corin yells. “Kill them!”

We’re trying, Natalia grumbles inside her own head.  Of course, she can’t say that, being in bear form.  Secretly, she’s sad to find that these super-awesome wolves are evil.  I guess that dashes the chances of her ever getting one.  Wah.  But she gets over it, crits, and kills off the remaining wolf.

We all brush ourselves off and Iema compliments Sunshine on her flipping-maneuver.  She says thanks him, but says it make her look silly.  “I look like a turkey,” she complains.  “I am not a turkey.  I am a hawk!”

Yes, Sunshine, yes, you are.

Next, we move into what’s known as the War Room.  Jim immediately has us do reflex saves, which Sunshine fails.  The door explodes and she goes flying.  She seems okay, though.

Okay, that is, until we spot what’s within that room:  A creature with a stretched mask over its face, carrying a braided whip with pieces of glass in it.  Oh, shit.  And here we are, not knowing the safe word.

We roll for initiative.  For once, I kick ass, and Natalia gets to go first.  She charges in to do 52 points of damage.  Iema’s next, then Sunshine, who does her “turkey dance” again.  The creature gets to go soon, though, and whip-stuns Natalia.  He tries to use his whip to yank Iema’s weapons out of his hands, but luckily for us, he doesn’t do so well.  He does better with Corin, managing to yank the boy’s weapon out of his hand and throw it behind him.

Iema manages to finish off the S&M guy, and we enter the War Room.  There are locked cases, which Corin gets to work on.  He manages to get two of them open.  One has a wooden shield.  The other object is a belt with two clips.  One clip says RUKE, but whatever weapon is supposed to be in that is missing.  On the other clip, there is a sheath attached that says CRUAGH.  In it, there is a rapier with CRUAGH written on that as well.  Both the shield and the rapier are magical.  We decide to keep these items.

Next up:  The Hall of Artifacts.  We pop our heads in, but it doesn’t look like anything’s in there.  Corin does some snooping around, and he says it looks like there’s a ward.  Suddenly, red smoke spirals up, and something like a demon appears.  (Jim once told me what exactly it was, but I don’t know these things, people.  So I’m going with demon because it sounded demon-like to me.)

The demon thing looks at us, looks at the red smoke circle around himself, and sighs.  “Very well,” he says.

Because I’m demon-retarded, Jim has to explain to me that the demon can’t get out of his circle.  Hey, how should I know that?  I was a good girl growing up; I spent most of my time doing my homework and watching TV as opposed to summoning Beelzebub.  I wasn’t that bored as a teenager.

So, this demon tells us we’re going to play a little game.  (Yay, a game!)  The game consists of answering riddles.  (Boo, riddles!)  He has a box that has keys to all the other boxes in the room, but that box is protected by a prismatic sphere.  We proceed with the riddles, which I won’t go into, but Jim has them here if you’re interested.  (And you totally should be—Jim had some good ones ready for us.)  I personally don’t care much for riddles.  I’ve never done much of them and don’t really have the patience for them.  Phil, however, is pretty good at them, and got us through the trickier ones.

The last riddle, incidentally, is a trick.  This is how the last riddle plays out:

Demon: Three of one and one of another,
four from a sister and one from a mother.
Take away two when you visit the Hells,
and tell me out loud what your plundering spells.

Sunshine:  “Eat me”?  What kind of answer is that?

Demon [stepping out from the circle]:  Don’t mind if I do.

Yup, that’s right, people.  The answer to the last riddle is “eat me”—and, incidentally, the key words to free the demon from his little circle cage.  Curse you, Sunshine!

So we go into combat.  Once again, I roll highest for initiative.   I tell Jim that she’s casting Handfire and shifting into her brown bear form.  Sunshine attacks but only manages to get one bite in.  Iema starts buffing people. Natalia and Corin attack the demon-guy, but sadly, he resists Natalia’s Handfire.  Damn, I hate blowing a good spell.

The demon tries for Corin, but Corin’s Protection from Evil spell burns him.  The demon looks surprised.  “You brought a paladin on a thieving mission?  Are you guys crazy?”

Note that Corin’s not exactly a paladin; he just has some ranks in it or something, I guess.  At any rate, we’re not exactly in the mood to correct him, since we’re all bleeding from his stupid claws.

When it’s my turn again, I tell Jim that Natalia is going to summon a dire wolverine.  Sadly, I rolled a nat 1 and fail miserably.  Luckily, when it’s Phil’s turn to do something, he rolls much better than I and manages to successfully cast Improved Invisibility on Corin.

Soon, it’s my turn again, and this time (with Phil’s help), I decide I’m going to summon a Tendriculos.  Of course, Jim and Phil have to show me pictures from the book and explain its abilities because I barely could pronounce it, much less figure out what the hell a Tendriculos was.

While Natalia is summoning whatever it is, the demon casts a mirror image spell.  Sunshine nabs one.  “I KILLED ONE!” she yells excitedly as the mirage disappears.  Iema and Corin jump in, taking out images left and right.  Finally, the Tendriculos appears, and we’re like, HELL YEAH, IT’S GONNA KICK THIS DEMON’S ASS.

Except it doesn’t.  It misses all its attacks.  Damn.

So, whatever a Tendriculos is, it makes the demon nervous because he casts an invisibility spell on himself to hide from it.  We all start trying to guess where he’s at and are swinging wildly, only to hit air.  Finally, the demon appears behind the Tendriculos and summons more mirror images of himself.  Gah!  Again, we start furiously popping mirror images left and right.

Then the demon, succeeding on a spell to see invisibility, turns his sights on Corin.  Swiftly, he kills Corin outright.  “That’s what a paladin gets,” he sneers.

How awful.  Natalia’s come to like Corin a lot; I can only imagine how Iema feels about the loss of his companion.  However, we don’t have time to mourn.  Natalia keeps working on mirror images.  Iema has to do a will save, which, luckily, he succeeds at because something outside of his mind was trying to get at his newfound rapier.  The bard manages to fight it off.

However, whatever the demon does is enough to drop Iema.  Natalia casts Healing Circle, which, while it doesn’t get him up to a lot of hit points, it is enough to get Iema back up.  Which is great because Iema really steals the show here:  He draws his rapier.  On it, he notices that a map of the Jade Islands with fire behind it is glowing on the weapon.  He can feel that the rapier is willing him to do something.  Does he give in to it?

“Yes,” Phil answers Jim quickly.  We’re eager to see what the rapier wants Iema to do.

Jim says that Iema’s eyes suddenly turn all blue.  The rapier glows, then something happens—

The demon is gone.  The rapier has cast banishment on it.  HOW AWESOME.

Except, of course, Corin’s dead, and we still have another room to go…

And that, of course, will be continued in the next game.

And we’re back (finally!) with another two-part “Homebrewed,” a game that spanned between a Friday night and Saturday afternoon.  If you’ve read the last installment, you know that events have turned grim after Natalia, Iema, and Corin were tricked by a couple of drow and now are slaves in Fasset, home of the Scaled Emperor.  No idea what’s going on?  Feel dirty and ashamed, but then redeem yourself here.

Chilldenor the 24^th

If you’ve read the last installment and the corresponding comment from Jim, you’ll see I’m getting the timeline of our capture a little messed up.  I take notes as I go along, so it’s not a memory thing:  I’m just completely confused as to where Jim “has” us in Valt.    He said in the comments that the last game wrapped with us finally arriving in Fasset, but in the beginning of my notes for this game, I have started off with the following:  Spent entire day sailing.  Doc[k].

(Shut up about misspellings.  You try taking the obscene amount of notes that I take during a game.)

Anyway, my question is this:  If we were in Fasset by the last game, where the hell are we sailing now?  Maybe within Fasset?  My understanding is that part of the population is underwater, so I guess that could be possible.  So, Jim, my dear DM-and-husband-to-be, please enlighten all of us in the comments section, ‘cause I’ve got nothin’.

At any rate, this game starts at night, and Jim gives us a run-down of what we can see outside the boat, such ogres and other various races unloading stuff off the boat, an ogre with a long pole scooting people along, and, as we get off, a half-ogre checking people’s hands.  We find this curious.  Our “host” (funny word for SLAVE DRIVER) explains to us that the half-ogre is checking for Rings of Citizenship, something that’s very important to have in Fasset.  We will be getting temporary ones, and something to note:  You sure as hell don’t want to be caught wandering around the city without a ring, and creating a false one is punishable by death.

The so-called host’s name is Curnen, his name obtained by Iema, who seems to be taking his new slave-status in stride and is still making friends with everyone.  (As you can imagine, Natalia does no such thing.  Mostly, she mopes and snipes at people, behavior that I think, while unhelpful, is totally in character for a druid.)  Once we get to a building that is set in a cliff, Curnen tells us he’s going to take us to our rooms, and even asks if we would like our rooms separate or together.

Iema, remembering Natalia’s prudish tendencies, suggests that he and Corin should have one separately.  Natalia is grateful for this, although she does ask for them to be near.  You know—better to hear her friends if they suddenly get murdered in their sleep or something.  Curnen agrees and places us in rooms across from each other.  Very lovely rooms, admittedly, complete with fireplaces and flaming spheres to light the area.

Still, it’s no treehouse with a colony of myconids living underneath.  Natalia is completely homesick.  The least they could do is equip it with Internet.  Sheesh.

Almost as soon as Curnen leaves, Iema and Corin leave their room and knock on Natalia’s door.  She lets them in, and together, we all debate if anyone will come get us.  I think we all came to the conclusion that the answer is a big, fat no.  Beta knows where we are, but as awesome as he is, awesomeness alone will not help you break into Fasset if you’re not supposed to be there.

We’re still wondering who the traitor is that sold Julium out and who helped us get shipped off as slaves.  Corin suggests Jerth.  We all agree we could see that coming from him.  Jerth is evil.  Jim has left us no doubt of that, not that Natalia and I need reassurance—I got that impression the first time Natalia “met” Jerth, long before Jim, out of character, confirmed it.

But the point is moot.  We go to our separate quarters and go to bed.

That night, Natalia has a weird dream.  She dreams that hideous things are chasing her, unknown things, and she is without her magic, her gear, her friends.  Although she can’t see what’s behind her, she knows it’s Alesander, the werewolf that she and Raelan had killed so long ago.  Suddenly, Beta is running behind her, catches up, and knocks her to the ground.  She looks up at her wolf.  His one good eye is glowing orange.

He speaks to her in his low voice:  “Help is coming.”

Chilldenor the 25^th

We’re all woken up in the morning by Curnen for orientation.  Damn, Jim knows how to make a world realistic.  Even in a place full of wonders and wizards, there’s still a bunch of freakin’ red tape and bureaucracy and hoops to jump through.

Since Phil and I both work at an insurance company, we know all about the hoops.  Doesn’t mean we like them.

Natalia mulls over her dream, which she’s positive means something, but she doesn’t have a chance to tell Iema and Corin about it because we’re all whisked off in three separate directions by interviewers.

We’re not told (at first) what Corin’s interview is like, probably because he’s an NPC, but I do get to hear Jim roleplay Phil’s/Iema’s:  He’s taken somewhere where he’s shown a device, an hour glass, and a spoon.  Don’t ask me what the three have to do with each other (something else I’m confident Jim will elaborate on in the comments), but I do know that Iema was asked to cast Light  on the spoon.  Iema obliges, and then he’s asked to list all the spells he knows, as well as any unusual abilities.

Natalia’s interview has a similar feel to it, although she’s interviewed by another druid like herself named Vreyan, who also has a collar on her neck similar to the ones we have, showing her slave status.   Natalia eyes it cautiously, wondering what it means that another slave is interviewing her.  Natalia, for the first time since being captured, engages in some small talk.  She finds out the Vreyan is formerly from the Maple Circle and now in one called Gull, which apparently is the most prominent circle in Fasset.  Also, it’s appropriately named, as there are seagulls everywhere.

Natalia, remembering the druid from the mage fair, asks Vreyan about the Palm Circle.  Vreyan simply says that they’re ex-patriots.  Natalia toys with this in her mind.  She knows they’ve got to be here somewhere, although she’s not sure what she’s really going to do with that knowledge.

Then the tests begin.  Natalia is more glum than Iema about performing tricks like a freakin’ circus seal, but she goes through the motions, showing that, yes, she can Create Water like a good little druid.  (Sounds like potty training, doesn’t it?  Make water for Mama, now!  GOOD GIRL.)  She also is to list any unusual spells.  She has more in her arsenal than the other druid was expecting, having an unique spell called Ant Trap.  Also, Vreyan is impressed that Natalia is particularly skilled in woodworking, thanks to her long efforts on the treehouse.

Finally, the testing is done, and we’re brought breakfast—still separately from each other, of course.  The breakfast consists of seagull eggs and something that resembles hash browns but is green in color.  Jim appropriately enough, calls them “hashgreens.”   During her breakfast, Vreyan offers to teach Natalia new spells.  The deal?  They must be used for the betterment of the city.  Natalia hopes the betterment of the city isn’t something totally evil but agrees to it.  Who would pass that up?  So after her breakfast, Vreyan takes Natalia out of the building to learn a spell called Wings of the Sea, a level-1 druidic spell that increases a subject’s swim speed.

It’s the first thing that’s made Natalia happy since she’s been brought into Fasset, although that happiness will be short-lived.

Eventually, we’re brought back together and given lunch in our rooms.  With lunch, we’re also finally given our wooden Rings of Citizenship and warned again not go out without them.  Finally, we’re left alone.

Eagerly, Natalia tells Iema and Corin about her dream.  Phil asks Jim if he can make some kind of check—I don’t remember which kind—but it doesn’t matter because he doesn’t get a good result on the die, so Iema guesses, “It was a Nightmare spell that you managed to will out of?”

Jim rolls for Corin, getting an equally dismal result.  Corin says, “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

Positive that the dream means something, I ask Jim if Natalia can roll to make the same check.  He agrees.  I get lucky with the dice, and Jim tells me that Natalia knows better—the dream is something else entirely.

We discuss our interviews.  “I lied in mine,” Corin announces.  “I didn’t let them know about anything I could do.”

Iema and Natalia look at him, surprised.  “You lied to them?” Iema says incredulously.

“I thought we were supposed to be working against these people!” Corin protests.

We discuss our capture.  We apologize to Corin about his missing finger.  (“It was my third most favorite finger!” he says, showing us his first two favorite fingers by flipping us the bird with both hands.)  We talk about possible escape plans, including fleeing to nearby islands outside Fasset’s control.  However,  most escape plans involve playing nice for now until we’re trusted to be without the collars, so it’s seems we’re going to be here for a while.

Later, Curnen takes us out to see the city.  The city is impressive.  For details on it, I would recommend reading Jim’s post about Fasset.  What you need to know in a nutshell:  It’s built into cliffs and part of the population is underwater.  Curnen points up, saying that directly above us lays the Garden of Nobility, which is gated.  Peons like us cannot go in there.  Curnen doesn’t say it exactly like that—he’s tactful enough to not call us “peons” to our faces—but the meaning is still the same.

I almost think Curnen’s tour guide for us was to impress upon us the difficulties of escape.  He seems smart enough to try to impress that upon us.  I think this because the next thing I have listed in my notes was that we were taken to a roped bridge, that we saw a 20 foot wooden wall around the city with very few doors, and that the few doors that were there were heavily guarded.  Jim says we can see how hard it would be to attack the city because you would come in through the gates and immediately face a steep drop off.  

I would also like to note that while we’re given the description of the heavily guarded doors of Fasset, Phil starts groaning.  Turns out that those doors weren’t always guarded.  Once upon a time, Jim ran another game in Valt, and the character Phil had played apparently did something to make someone somewhere decide that guarded doors would be a good idea.  In other words, Phil says, the guards are his fault.

 “One thing about your fiancé, Spring,” Phil says, “he likes to rub salt in a wound.”

Jim and Phil try to give me a brief run-down of what happened, but as usual, I didn’t catch it.  Maybe one of them will enlighten us someday. 

Anyway, moving forward with other little tidbits about our new home:  Fasset has a LOT of ogres, and occasionally, it’ll see some action from younger giants throwing rocks into the city.  Mostly, Curnen assures us, it’s just property damage.  Rarely are there any actual casualties.  Still, good money is paid for giant ears.

We’re also educated that, technically, Fasset is at war with pretty much everyone, but that’s mostly on paper.  Er, parchment?  Whatever they use here.  Because the fact is that Fasset is such a good place to trade, even nations “warring” with them also trade with them.  And it’s not like other nations can get under Fasset’s skin by refusing to trade with them:  Fasset is amazingly self-sufficient, having everything they could need.

Our chances of escape, of assault, of anything are looking bleaker by the moment.

On the note of things being one thing in reality and another thing on paper, Curnen advises us that, if anyone causes a fuss about us being taken as slaves, on paper, we’ve been caught and captured for killing the Fassian team.  We, of course, protest this, stating that Jovos had wanted them taken care of for killing our new druid friend that we had met there.

“Actually,” Curnen says, “they didn’t kill him.  They found him that way.  They just took his stuff.”

“Oh.”  Iema pauses.  “Well, now I feel a little bad about killing them.”

Remembering the bird on the spittle, Natalia says, “I don’t.”

The tour continues with more facts:  Demonic cults frequently spring up in Fasset, nobody’s sure why; the slave trade is big here (duh—Natalia gives him  dirty look, but Curnen doesn’t seem to notice); the city is also home to many dwarves, but they live up in the mountainous area; rumors keep flying that there are Underdark connections within the city, which Curnen says is untrue, although the Underdark does run underneath the city; there are various temples, including one to Natalia’s god, Lolmoro.  Natalia cheers up a little bit at this bit of news, but only just that—a little bit.

After showing us around, Curnen returns us to our quarters.  We’re told that we’ll be working the next day.  Natalia is asked to make sure to only prepare regenerative and curative spells for the next day, things of that nature.  Natalia agrees, no questions asked.  Naturally, she’s curious, but she figures she’ll find out soon enough what exactly it is they want her to do.

Chilldenor the 26^th

We wake up and are given breakfast.  Corin is in an unusually foul mood.

“What’s up?” Iema asks.

The boy pouts.  “Remember how I lied in my interview?  You know, about what I could do?”  He waits for us to nod before continuing.  “Well, because I did such a good job of it, they’ve decided that I’m totally useless, so they’re going to send me to school.”  He scowls.

Iema laughs and laughs and laughs.  At that point, a woman that Jim describes as a “vapid kindergarten teacher” comes over to collect Corin.  She waves at him and practically baby-talks to him.

“Why does everyone treat me like I’m a kid?” Corin wonders aloud.  No matter to Vapid Teacher—she leads Corin away from us to go to class.

“Behave now,” Iema sing-songs to his apprentice. 

Corin turns to him and mouths Fuck you.

And then he’s gone, leaving just the grown-ups.  Not that it means much, as I’m pretty sure Corin is smarter than both of us put together.

After breakfast, Natalia and Iema are led down to the canels.  There’s a white ribbon roping an area off that contains a shipwreck.  Shipwrecks, by the way, are not uncommon.  Iema and Natalia are taken to the site and asked to help recovered victims.  Iema starts using singing using his Virtuoso feat or skills or whatever they are; someone catches on, quickly nabs him, and leads him down to the ER area for the more critically injured.

And I have to admit that Natalia didn’t think this was so bad.  If her job is now to rescue people from wreckage…well, at least it’s rewarding, right?

We do this until we’ve exhausted our spells, which Jim says is around noon.  We’re then advised that we’re free to leave and do what we want around the town, but we must be back by the 12^th bell.  So we do.  During our wandering through the crowds of Fasset, we spot a half-elf fleeing through a crowd and hear yells of him pick-pocketing.  As he’s about to run past us, Iema sticks out his foot to trip him.  The half-elf falls.  Desperate, he whips out a dagger, but not before guards come and beat him.  People clap Iema on the shoulder and congratulate him.

Natalia frowns.  She’s not too keen on how badly they beat up the thief, but she’s outnumbered, so she keeps her mouth shut.  Iema, on the other hand, doesn’t seem too concerned.

We explore some more.  Iema wants to check out the bars.  What a lush.  By 8^th bell, most people are off from work and filling up seats.  We also run into Corin again around 8^th bell.  Corin tells us he cut class, and instead, spent his day trying to checking out the criminal underground.  (Yup, that’s what happens when you drop out of school, kids!)  He managed to locate and join a thieves guild.  Sadly, they only allow humans, so it’s probably not something they’ll allow Iema in, since he’s an arcling and all.

In hushed voices, we talk more about escape.  Remember when our “host” told us that that the rumors that there were connections to the Underdark within Fasset weren’t true?  Turns out he either lied or is misinformed because there most certainly is a connection to the Underdark within Fasset.

We make an unconventional choice on how to escape:  We’re gonna go through the Underdark.  Later, after the game is over, Jim will admit that he didn’t see that one coming because who the hell would do that?

Us, that’s who.

We agree, though, that we’re gonna need money for special gear to get through it.  And what’s the best way to get money fast?  Why, performing a robbery of course.

And so begins our life of crime.  Le sigh!

 Chilldenor the 27^th

Natalia again is given a list of spells that she know will tap her out again, but since she knows that it’s going to be used to heal people, she doesn’t mind so much, although she does wish she could keep a spell for herself and her friends.  Iema, likewise, is taken back to the ER to do his thing.  While there, he keeps an ear out for the best places to rob in Fasset.   Not that anyone’s talking about it, but hey, you never know.

Natalia is taken back to the infirmary, as she expected, to heal people, but after she exhausts her healing spells, they take her back for something else entirely.

She’s taken outside to a body of water.  Another druid there casts a water-breathing spell on her, and she is taken underwater.  Natalia’s instructed to cast Wings of the Sea on some sort of shark.  I think it was a dire shark.  If I recall correctly (it’s been a while since this game now), Jim also told me they were having Natalia cast Awaken on the shark as well.

Now, Natalia’s not thrilled about helping out Fasset’s defenses, but that’s not what she took issue with.  What she took issue with was that they had brought down a human to be sacrificed so she wouldn’t  take an XP hit when casting the spell.  The man struggles underwater, trying to get air.  Natalia starts for him, but others immediately stop her.  And what can she do?  She is outnumbered, has no spells, and has this stupid collar on her neck to pretty much keep her from doing whatever it is they’re afraid she’ll do.  She’s informed that the man is a criminal who is sentenced to die anyway.  They insist that Natalia might as well put his death to good use, using the sacrifice of his life to help her perform her spells—and, in terms of game mechanics, keep from losing XP.

Natalia and I debate it.  At this point in the game, I had grown very quiet, and Jim was staring at me.  Finally, I say, “I’m not doing that, Jim.  I’ll take the XP hit.”

Natalia announces her decision.  They shrug and drown the man as Natalia watches helplessly.  She then performs her spell, losing XP.  Another sea elf nearby casts Permancy so the Wings of the Sea spell “sticks.”  When Natalia sees the druid that had cast the water-breathing spell on her, she gives him a dirty look.

The other druid looks defeated.  He shrugs.  “We don’t have a choice” is all he says.

Jim asks where Natalia goes next.  I think it’s kind of obvious:  She goes home, crawls under the covers, and cries.  Natalia hates Fasset.

Iema, on the other hand, is off doing his own thing.  After he’s done in the ER, he manages to make friends with some aspiring thieves and goes off to throw rocks at seagulls with them.  (Good thing Natalia doesn’t see this.)  And this is when he finds out that there is a museum in Fasset with some priceless stuff inside.  Others would pay good money for some of the items in there, but it’s very well-guarded.

Nonetheless, Iema decides the museum has a lot of potential.  He makes a mental note to tell Corin and Natalia as soon as he gets a chance.

Chilldenor the 28^th

We wake up and have a communal breakfast.  Despite Iema’s hangover (I guess he did a little more than pelt seagulls the night before), he musters up enough energy to tell us about the museum.  Corin has some information of his own, telling us that the bad news is that magical items, which we’ll need for our escape through the Underdark, are illegal for non-nobility.

Yeah, like we care.  Escaping is probably not considered legal either.

Corin, who has managed to score a little bit of money since joining the thieves guild, gives Natalia and Iema 25 gold each, mentions there being a library (don’t remember, though, if we did anything with this information), and everyone goes about their separate ways.

For Natalia, this morning is very similar to the last:  She’s taken to cast spells on a shark, she refuses the human sacrifice, and she take an XP hit.

Iema and Corin, on the other hand, spend a day at the museum, scoping out the place.  Corin is disguised as an arcling, complete with metallic dust in his hair.  Iema makes a note of both security and valuable items:  There’s a book in a glass cage which is said to contain 1,000 Horrors; in the Wizardry section, there is some kind of Staff of Power, a Deck of Many Things, and a Mace of Cumulous Blows…?  I’m not sure if I got that last one right, but that’s what it says in my notes.  Anyway, it is said that it was possessed by a Jade Islander wizard and has the power to destroy Fasset.  It’s worth approximately 300,000 gold—half a million, street value.

Regarding security, Iema sees the following:  Three front doors (the building is multi-level) which are the only ways in; parts of the floor are movable, so there are probably traps underneath; and there are claw marks along the baseboards.  Iema pretends to stop and tie his shoes to further investigate the claw marks, but he can’t tell the source of them.

Iema and Corin split at this point, Corin to investigate museum security further while Iema heads to the library to see what he can learn about the Underdark.  After a day of studying, Iema comes to the conclusion that there isn’t just one entry to the Underdark in Fasset, but there are many, although they’re probably closed off.  Further, at least one connection is in the freakin’ palace of the Scaled Emperor.

How convenient.

Through his reading, he realizes that we’ve got our work cut out for us:  We’re not just going to have to get through the cities, but we’re also going to have to go through Underdark wilderness, sea, drow metropolis, and other various cities, amongst other things.

However, there was someone who had done it before.  His name was Fashlin, who had done extensive traveling with a dwarf, a bugbear, and a drow.  Iema can piece together some of the route, and although it’s opposite of where we want to go, Fashlin’s route did go through the Jade Islands.

Iema finally returns home, meets Corin and Natalia, and tells them what he’s found.  Admittedly, the Underdark sounds daunting.  Corin suggests an alternative:  Killing the Scaled Emperor himself.

We have to sleep on that one.

Chilldenor the 29^th

We continue our conversation in the morning.  For his part, Corin talks about what he’s found out about security in the museum.  Also, he’s found out about items that would help us see in the dark, such as a Helm of Darkness, a Moonstone Mask, etc.

We debate between traveling through the Underdark or just overthrowing the Scaled Emperor.  Although he was the one who had suggested it the night before, Corin admits that we won’t survive a showdown with the Scaled Emperor.  Even if we got past him, we won’t get past all the guards that would swarm us.  There are simply too many. 

We decide faking our way through the Underdark is our best bet.  Still, we need money to get equipment to go down there.  Any ideas on how to get money?  Aside from robbing the museum, that is.

“Gambling,” Natalia says.

Iema and Corin look at her like she’s crazy.

So she explains.  “This is a city.  You know there’s gambling going on somewhere.  And I’ll bet there’s something like cock-fighting around here.”  Both Natalia and I shudder at the thought, but Natalia continues:  “I can pose as an animal and fight others.  Seeing that I’m a druid, I sort of have the upper hand on winning.  Others don’t have to know that I’m really a druid; they’ll just think I’m an animal.”

Corin and Iema/Jim and Phil look at each other, mouths open.  At first, I thought I said something incredibly stupid because neither Jim nor Phil said anything for a moment.  Then Jim/Corin says, “That’s a bloody BRILLIANT idea!”

Whew.

The problem, of course, are the collars that keep us from doing whatever we want.  Natalia suggests that surely with all the corruption about, one of the people who knows how to work our collars is caught up with the gambling world.  They help us fiddle with the collar, we give them a cut on the profits.  Iema also suggests that since Corin is already in a thieves guild, he should look around to see if he can’t find someone who would be able to pick our collars.

That’s the extent of our conversation.  We’re then whisked away by our appointed, um, well… “whiskers,” for lack of a better word, heh.  But my point is that the three are taken their separate ways.  Natalia is again forced to Awaken another dire shark, again presented the “opportunity” to use a criminal’s execution as a sacrifice for her spell, and again, refuses to cooperate, taking the XP hit instead.  Everyone around her thinks she’s crazy, but she’s stubborn, saying instead that she was not going to participate in men’s deaths just so she didn’t take some kind of lash back on her spells.

Still, erasing the XP on my character sheet to subtract points was pretty painful.  It also hurt to see that, almost as if to prove a point to Natalia, they hurt the man in a much worse way than he would have died being used for her spell.

Iema’s day was much better than Natalia’s.  He spent more time healing, then sniffing around to find out if there was any kind of gambling involving animal fights.  (Which, of course, there is.)  He also checks out the museum again, thinking that with the security involved, a fire would be a good distraction.  Of course, there are always risks with fires, too.

He gets bored of the museum and decides to go the animal fighting ring guarded by two ogres.  He gets past them and gets inside.  There are currently two dire rats fighting each other.  Iema scans the crowd.  His eyes settle on someone that he thinks is a bureaucrat there.  He makes a note of the bureaucrat, putting 5 gold on an animal.

Jim says other creatures fight each other; Iema places bets.  For kicks, Jim rolls the fight between the creatures to see who really would win in a battle.  I think it was indulging the desire for the geek battle—you know, the imaginary battles comic book shop geeks love to indulge in, like “who would win in a fight, Batman or Superman”?  I actually really hate that stuff.  Or maybe it’s the vehemence that comes with it.  At any rate, I find it annoying, but Jim and Phil are typical geeks in this sense and wanted to see how it played out.  (They like it enough that when Phil was just hanging out the other night and I was off crocheting in the other room, I came out to find them drunk and having various D&D creatures fighting each other.)

But I’m getting off-topic.  The point is, Iema places bets and wins.  When he goes to collect his winnings, he talks to a bookie, who didn’t do as well, and explains why certain ones will most likely win over others.  He offers to help the bookie note special properties to know which ones have the best chance of winning.

Next up:  Bum fighting.  Which, by the way, according to Phil and Jim, is a real practice.  We live in a really sick world.

Back in our D&D world, though, Iema spots the bureaucrat again and tails him.  He follows him outside.  Sadly, Phil fails his move silently check and accidentally stirs up some seagulls, sending them squawking.  The bureaucrat and some thugs see and approach Iema.

Iema quickly suggests they talk elsewhere.  They do, and he discusses the druid-fighting idea.  The men seem interested, but they say if they’re going to help us, we have to clear it with their employer first.

I don’t know about you guys, but I certainly did not like the sound of that.

Chilldenor the 30^th

I don’t have a lot of notes for this day.  I jotted down that Natalia was given another list of spells for the day, but this time, they’re requesting her remove disease spells as well as healing spells.  Before we leave for the day,  Iema tells Natalia that he was successful in finding an animal-fighting ring and people willing to be in on it.  He makes sure that Natalia is still okay with the animal-fighting idea, which she is.

Finally, we’re collected and taken to what I guess you would call our jobs.  This time, though, we’re taken to the town guards, many of whom are covered in claw and bite marks.  We’re told that this is the handy work of lycanthropes.  So that explains the request for healing and remove disease spells.  And, as I concluded in my notes, we “do our thing there.”

Huskyr the 1^st

Again, we’re collected to help victims of lycanthrope attacks.  We do our thing and leave.  Iema wanders about the town, trying to make himself “publically available.”  I don’t mean in the hooker-sense.  Iema’s not that easy.  I mean in the sense that he wants to make sure he’s easy for the bureaucrat to find.  And find him, the bureaucrat does, telling Iema to meet him the 11^th bell—with all of us.

Iema quickly gathers Natalia and Corin together, and we go to the designated meeting spot at the 11^th bell.  The meeting spot is a warehouse that looks like a temple, which we find curious.  Aside from having sconces along the walls, there is a bizarre pattern on the floor, which Jim draws out for us.

Phil and I peer at it.  “It looks like a beholder,” I say, thinking what a coincidence this was, since I had just read this post about beholders on Chronic Geek’s blog just the day or so before.

We’re warned that if we don’t convince their employer of our plan, then we won’t be coming out.

We follow our hosts into another room.  Lo and behold, the boss is a beholder.  HA.  I was right to be suspicious when I saw that pattern.

We tell the beholder of our plan.  He disintegrates Natalia’s collar but refuses to do Iema’s or Corin’s, telling them that we have not given a satisfactory reason to get rid of their collars.  Natalia is grateful to have that stupid collar removed, but there’s one little problem:  Not having one now marks her as a fugitive.

So we leave.  One collar off is better than none.  We go visit Corin’s thieves guild, but they don’t want to help Iema because he’s an arcling.  Apparently, they’re a racist guild.

We try very hard to convince them why they should help Iema.  Natalia even argues that Iema could be useful, pointing out that Julium Numbrar, one of the greatest strategists she knows, has used Iema as a key point in his plot against the Spruce Circle.

They at least hear some of it.  The main guy says he can’t help, but another says he will.  I believe this guy was a dwarf, though, so I don’t know if he was part of the guild or what.  (I was under the impression they were a human-only guild…?)  Anyway, this guy calls in an ogre, who cuts their collars off with gigantic  bolt cutters.

The guy who helped says, “I can hide these two”—he points to Corin and Iema—“but I’m not sure about you.”

Thinking there wasn’t enough room, Natalia agrees.  “That’s okay.  I can disguise myself as a seagull.  God knows there’s enough of them here.”

The guy agrees that’s a good idea.  “But come back in a couple of weeks,” he says.  “And meet us.  We’ll have some plan set up.”

Natalia nods, morphs into a seagull, and flies off.

Iema and Corin turn to the guy.  “Thanks for all your help,” Iema says.  They shake hands.  I don’t know what it was that gave Phil a hint—maybe Iema felt a prick or something—but Phil says, “Oh, shit.”

And Iema and Corin are turned to stone.

Natalia, of course, knows nothing about this.  This was a difficult part of the game.  I mean, I knew that Iema and Corin had been turned into stone, and as tempting as it was to have Natalia go back and check on them, there was absolutely no reason why Natalia would, since she had no clue as to what happened.  The guy that helped us gave us no reason to be suspicious or anything.  So, instead, I had a roleplay a clueless Natalia and what she did on her two weeks off.

The first thing Natalia did was decide to get another animal companion, since it appears we won’t be seeing Beta anytime soon.  I decide on getting something that will fit in around Fasset, so it won’t draw too much suspicion.  Furthermore, I would like something that can fly overhead and help scope out escape routes, bad guys, or what have you. 

I decide on a dire hawk.

Since there are plenty of them, Natalia doesn’t waste time in finding one.  She spends the day performing her Awaken spell (there goes more XP), and the dire hawk looks up at her.  “Hello!”  the bird says.

“Good morning, sunshine,” Natalia greets her cheerfully.

The hawk cocks her head to one side.  “Sunshine?  Is that my name?”

And that is how my dire hawk’s name came to be Sunshine.  Phil took great pleasure in this, which he explained:  Sunshine sounds, to us, like a nice, cheerful name, but in Valt, the sun is deadly and considered evil.  The only reason why life can exist on Valt is because of the constant, thick cloud coverage.  So Sunshine really is kind of a perfect name.

Except, as I’m going to find out, Sunshine is not very evil at all.  In fact, she’s one of the funniest characters in the game so far.  Originally, I was going to have her as a temporary companion for Natalia, but she quickly grew on both me and Phil.  I think Jim’s grown to like her a lot, too.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, as usual.

Since we’ve got time to kill, Natalia decides she’s going to go to the Chute and pick items off the corpses floating around there.  Sunshine picks off a dead gnome.  Turns out, she really likes fingers.  Natalia lets her go to town on it (as a Warcraft Horde-playing person, I hate gnomes, so I took a special pleasure in this, heh); meanwhile, Natalia gathers up loot and hides them in Sunshine’s nest.  Incidentally, her nest is ENORMOUS.  Natalia can lie down and sleep in her human form with no problem.

Natalia can’t really think of much else to do during her two weeks.  She does shift into a dire eagle and look for escape routes, although she doesn’t have much luck.  It occurs to her that she could easily escape Fasset—all she has to do is fly out.  However, she’s not about to leave Corin or Iema behind, so she stays in town.

Huskyr the 15^th

Time’s up.  Natalia and Sunshine fly back to where she last saw Corin and Iema.  Jim says that the day is Hallow’s Eve, so there’s definitely a party atmosphere about Fasset.  Natalia leaves Sunshine outside and goes into a bar full of dwarves.

Once inside, she asks someone, “Have you seen a man and a boy?  I’m supposed to be meeting them here?”

The dwarf she had addressed has a look of recognition.  “Ah, you mean the coaster and the coat rack!”

“Huh?”

The dwarf leads Natalia to a backroom and opens the door.  Inside, is the “stoned” Corin and Iema.  The dwarves, indeed, have been using them as a coat rack.

Natalia sighs.  The dwarf that had turned them into stone comes by and says he had to do it to make sure we weren’t double agents.  He takes away the stone spell, and Iema and Corin resume their normal selves.  They’re irritated at first about losing two weeks of their lives being stone statues, but upon hearing the dwarves’ reasons for it, they decide it’s understandable.

The head dwarf tells us that if we’re needing money for our trip to the Underdark, they have a job for us.  The next night, they’re going to initiate a gang war—and they want us to kill a bunch of gnomes.

Huskyr the 16^th

We prepare our spells, and while we’re waiting for night to fall, Natalia introduces Iema and Corin to Sunshine.  Sunshine, incidentally, has a very low intelligence score.  If I remember right, Jim told me later that it’s actually lower than Natalia’s.  (Natalia’s, if you remember, is a mere 8.)  However, she has a very high charisma, so it’s hard not to like her.  Also, something you can’t really tell from reading this:  Jim roleplays her as being really loud.  And cheerful.  I always envision her sentences ending in exclamation points for that very reason.

But enough of that.  Night finally falls, Natalia turns into a Wharf Rat, and she sneaks into the gnomes’ place through an air vent.  When she gets in, she runs into some barbed wire.  She uses Rusting Grasp to get past that, then hurries to the door to unlock it and undo all the trapped locks.  While doing this, she almost wakes up one gnome, but luckily, he falls back to sleep.

Natalia opens the door and lets her friends in.  Corin quickly redoes the door behind him, making sure the traps are back in place.  Then they both sneak up on gnomes sleeping in their beds.

Out of character, I look at Jim and say, “Dude, I am not killing gnomes in their sleep.” 

“I will,” Phil says happily.  Did I mention he also plays Horde on Warcraft?

Iema is successful at killing his gnome; Corin, however, is not.  Corin stabs at a helmet at the end of the bed.  Turns out that his gnome is rather clever:  He had put his helmet between his feet and his head was actually at the other end.

The clever gnome sits up, sees us, and starts yelling about how there’s an attack.

Well, now they’re awake, I can feel better about killing them, haha.

The room suddenly becomes alive with activity.  The clever gnome makes a go for Corin—logical, since Corin is nearby and just tried to kill him in his sleep—but before he can, Natalia whirls on him and casts Blinding Spittle on him, causing him to go blind.  Sunshine tries to run up to us, but sadly, she can only move 10 feet while on the ground, and there’s not exactly a lot of room for her to fly around here.

By now, the gnomes are out of their beds.  Luckily, Iema has managed to cast Invisibility on himself, and Corin has not only mage armor and some spell to improve his dexterity on him, but Natalia had cast Bark Skin on him as well before we came, so he has some protection.  The gnomes, though, sense that Natalia’s probably the bigger threat, and start circling her especially.  Suddenly, Jim says that she sees a Halfling lunge out at her.  It’s a creepy looking little guy who is malnourished-looking, has teeth filed to points, and has bones and other crap in its hair.

Natalia wastes no time and casts Ice Storm.  Might as well pull out the big guns early.  Sunshine flanks a gnome with Natalia and picks it off.  The gnomes, of course, fight back.  Meanwhile, Ieam attacks the monks (there are monks in a gnome thieves guild?), Corin gets stunned, and Natalia gets stabbed.  Then Sunshine gets hit in the back of the head.

“AAAAH!”  Sunshine yells, as if she had just been delivered a fatal blow.  (She wasn’t.)  “I’VE BEEN HIT!”

Phil and I started laughing at that.

Back in the game, though, one of the monks manage to pinpoint where Iema is and tries kicking him the nuts.  Luckily, he misses.  Another does some sort of stunning fist on Natalia, which he makes, but since I made my fortitude save, it’s not as bad as it could have been.  Still, Natalia’s taken some damage, so she quickly throws a healing spell on herself.

There’s more scuffling.  Iema kills a monk.  Sunshine gets hit again.

“AAAH!  I’M DYING, I’M DYING!” she squawks.  (Note:  She’s totally not.)

Natalia decides to quit screwing around and turns into a dire wolverine.  Yes, I love my dire bear form, but we’ve already determined that that form would be too big for this little house we’re in.    Because I got the feat that allows to shapeshift quickly, I still get a claw in my round, doing about 9 points of damage.  Sunshine attacks a gnome, and then Corin jumps in to help her, whacking at the gnome and finishing it off.

Sunshine looks at Corin.  “Thank you, tiny person!”

Corin doesn’t look too pleased at being called tiny, but he doesn’t have time to argue, either.

 There were some rogues attacking, some weapons being thrown at us, but in the end, the ones that are left try to run away.  One of the monks actually try for the door.  Remember, Corin redid everything when he closed it behind him.  The monk, in his rush, doesn’t notice this, and although he manages to dodge the traps, the door blows up. 

Well, that takes care of him.

So there was just a little bit of clean up.  I—er, Natalia—got to rage as a dire wolverine and take out another gnome.  Sunshine runs past Corin at her super-slow ground pace, panting, “I’ve got to do something!  I’ve got to do something!”  She jumps in and attacks, along with Iema, who takes out another gnome.

There is only one gnome left, who throws a dagger at Sunshine.

“THERE’S A DAGGER IN ME!” yells Sunshine, who dramatically falls over.

Natalia kills the final gnome; Iema heals Sunshine up.  Once healed up, Sunshine happily goes to work eating gnome fingers.  Iema and Corin look at her with morbid curiousity, but Natalia shrugs.  “Yeah, she really likes fingers.”

We let her finish, though, and then Iema and Corin go outside again.  Natalia locks up what’s left of the door, turns back into a Wharf Rat, and scurries back through the house to go back out the way she came.  Unfortunately, though, she runs into more wire, and she doesn’t have any more Rusting Grasp spells, so she just goes through and sucks up the damage.

Once outside, Sunshine looks at Natalia and says, “You’re bleeding!”

“Yeah, I ran into more wire,” Natalia says.

Sunshine blinks.  “Boy, I bet a snake would have had no problem with that!”

Natalia stares at Sunshine and her obvious solution.  “Shut up, Sunshine.”

“What?!  What?!”

And so concludes our first night of crime.  We go back to the dwarven thieves guild and are awarded handsomely: 22,986 gold.

I can see where this could get addicting.

This Homebrewed is a little different, in the sense that it’s actually two game sessions rolled into one.  We played Friday night and then, since Phil’s game on Saturday was cancelled, decided to keep rolling with this game on Saturday afternoon.  In the last game, we took on the Spruce Circle and seemed to have won—although Vueliss managed to get away—and wrapped up with the decision that we would push on to the hobgoblin fortress of Kugai, where the diplomat from Cadram had been kidnapped and is being held hostage.  Any questions?  Answers here.

Random quote from this game:

Phil:  Spring, can I take [such and such item] from party loot?

Me:  Sure, whatever, I don’t care.  WAIT.  Natalia’s now withdrawn and greedy after she died last time, remember?  GRRRRR–yeah, sure you can take it.

Phil [laughing]:  I want you to write that in your blog, Spring, just like that.

And so you shall have it, Phil.

We pick up exactly where we left off, right after our “participation” in the sudden, druidic civil war among the Spruce Circle.  That means no new spells.  I was reminded of this after nearly ten minutes of discussion with Phil as to what would be the best new spells to add to my list, completely forgetting that we were picking up on the same day (I had actually forgotten what had happened in the last game!) and Jim was half-listening to the conversation, saying mmhmm, yeah, until suddenly he snapped his head up, giving me a stern look.

“Are you changing your spell list?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I say, “what do you think we’ve been talking about for the last twenty minutes?”

“You can’t.  It’s the same night.  No new spells.”

Seriously, after all that time, listening to me and Phil talk about new spells, and he reminds me I can’t do this after I start erasing?

Jim, you are a butthead.  I love you…but it is what it is, heh.

Luckily, I hadn’t changed out very many, and (surprisingly) I remember everything I had changed.  So I had to change everything back.

Once in order, we get down to business:

Briezen the 14^th

It’s still the night of the 14th, right after the fight, and as we’re about to leave, Julium says, “By the way…we have a traitor among us.”

Huh?

He lays it out for us: In order for the northern Numbrarans to have gotten to the diplomat, someone had to have tipped them off that he was going to be there in the first place. They were given details of layouts, precautions, locations, etc. We’re all suspects, as well as Raelan and Grugor. Julium has ruled out Allista and Roan, stating that they have no motive.

“Eh? What’s my motive?” Natalia asks. My character and I are very much alike, where we’re not very motivated in the first place, and certainly not motivated enough to screw with a would-be emperor’s plans.

“You could have decided to align yourself with the other druids.”

Huh. Well, yeah, it’s true that the other druids were giving them grief in the forest, but that was under the old leadership. Did he not see Natalia help overthrow said leader?

The idea of Natalia wanting to help Vueliss in any way makes me chuckle.

Not about to be left out, Iema asks, “And me?”

Julium looks at him.

“Well, I am a bard,” Iema admits.

“And Shotenese,” Julium adds. “You could be helping them.”

Almost as laughable as me helping the evil druids, since there’s no love lost between Iema and his country.

Secretly, I wonder about Roan and Allista. I hope it’s not Grugor or Raelan, although I did say a long time ago that I could see Jim putting me in a situation where I have to fight one of them, simply because those two are my favorites. I’d be horrified to have to fight them.

“It could also be Beta,” Julium points out.

I’m surprised at this comment; I hadn’t even though of it, but now that Beta is Awakened, he has his own motives. Natalia glances over at her wolf. Beta doesn’t seem amused but doesn’t protest either.

Iema, Corin, and I shrug it off, and we all continue to Kugai. Finally, Jim says we’ve reached the town. Here, he breaks out his battlemap and starts drawing on it.  Sometimes, I think I should take pictures of the map when we play, or at least copy his sketches in Paint because I know I don’t describe the layouts well. There’s a reason for this. It’s because I don’t remember them.  Big surprise, I know.

On the map, there are three stables, a forge, and some building that we can’t identify. There’s hobgoblin stuff everywhere, and everything is covered in cobwebs, including the building.
Before I go further, one could be asking themselves, “Why, if Kugai is supposed so well defended, did the northern Numbrarans take it over so easily to hole up this hostage?” One can also ask, “Why the hell would they kidnap some boring old diplomat, anyway?”

Here are the answers:

1. The hobgoblins that were in Kugai have currently left it much more defenseless than usual, due to the war they’re having with the giants on the other side. Because they’re pretty much gone doing their war thing, it left Kugai wide open for others to take it. Now, you’d think they would have thought of that, but who am I to judge? My guess is that they had to make a choice, and their choice has left their stronghold in the loving clutches of some mighty prissy paladins.
2. Northern Numbrar = not a fan of Cadram. The feeling is mutual. Julium is from central Numbrar, and although Cadram doesn’t really see the difference between Northern, Central, and Southern Numbrar, thinking they’re all a bunch of assholes, Julium is holding out an olive branch to Cadram, hoping to unite with them and then, with Cadram’s army backing him up as well, turning his sights north. Northern Numbrar has figured this out, so they’ve kidnapped the diplomat during his visit to Julium, in part so Cadram’s already strained relations with Julium will snap, since it will look like Julium took part in it.

So now you know why we’re standing out here in a dirty old deserted kobold fortress covered in cobwebs.

Iema says, “Just a hunch guys…don’t touch the cobwebs.”

Suddenly, we hear someone bellow, “The only thing you’ll find here are your graves!”

We turn to where the voice is coming from. Opposite from us, on the other end of the fortress, there is a stone wall. We see a white -plated man peering over the wall. And that’s all well and good. It’s when his nasty spider mount skitters over the wall that we’re a little disturbed.

Iema recognizes the man as Talrich. He’s another big wig of Numbrar, I guess. He apparently thinks he’s a bad ass.  He’s apparently right: Not only does he pull out a shield in one hand, he pulls out a great sword in another. Really, a great sword in one hand. Now there’s something you don’t see everyday.

“Turn back!” he yells.

“As the rightful heir to Numbra,” Julium yells back from where he’s standing, “you should submit to my rule!”

Another form appears from over the wall, this time, a white-plated Halfling. He is also on a spider mount, although it’s smaller than his companion’s. Not quite as BA as Talrich, he carries a longsword. He throws in his two cents: “The rightful heir is Azelai Numbra!”

Julium says, “Then you leave us no choice.”

Jerth starts the combat letting an arrow fly toward Talrich, but it misses him.  Talrich just laughs.  Iema starts getting himself ready, moving closer to Corin, singing while doing so.  I don’t have in my notes what he cast first, but my guess is Haste. Usually Haste and some sort of Invisibility spell are the first things he throws up, with reason: They work well.

And then Beta goes. Beta is acting…weird. Jim says that because Natalia is a druid, she knows that Beta doesn’t actually have rabies, but he’s acting almost as if he does. He’s frothing at the mouth and behaving strangely. He stalks closer to Julium.

Natalia peers at Beta with concern. When she performed Awaken on him, did he become evil or something?

The men, of course, are not concerned with Natalia’s pet. You think they would be since he’s the size of a pony, but men being men, they just want to fight each other and do their little pissing contest thing. Talrich runs up to Julium and tries to slam his shield into him. Jim rolled a nat 1 for the NPC, so as you can imagine, it didn’t work out too well for Talrich.

The spider tries to attack Julium, but it also misses. And then it’s my turn. I have an idea. I tell Jim that Natalia is casting Handfire, keeping it in her hand, and moving closer to the larger paladin.

Corin sweeps past the Halfling, presenting an attack of opportunity. The Halfling starts at him and then stops. Jim explains that as a paladin, the Halfling can’t bring himself to hurt a kid.

“I feel very funny about fighting paladins,” I mutter to myself. Nevertheless, Julium is Natalia’s buddy—in that boring, humorless, will-turn-on-you-if-it-helps-him-become-emperor kind of way—and Natalia’s a loyal if not stupid girl, so if that means fighting paladins, then so be it.

Since the Halfling let Corin slide, Corin manages to get to Talrich and attacks him. Beta jumps in to help, still frothing at the mouth (my first thought was that he was raging or something), and when he bites Talrich’s armor, the metal immediately corrodes.

Talrich looks at Beta in horror. He’s not the only one—Iema and Natalia are shocked, too.

Talrich gets over his horror long enough to step back, whip his head up in Natalia’s direction, and point at her. “VILE SUCCUBUS!”

Huh? What? WHAT DID I DO? SO NOT FAIR.

Iema takes this chance to try to cast Grease on the Halfling’s sword, but Phil rolls a nat 1 and he misses. (If I remember right, there were a lot of nat 1s in this game.) Not giving up, Iema rolls for concentration in casting a blur spell, but sadly, he doesn’t do well on that either, and he blows the spell. Corin, not faring much better, tumbles and falls where he’s standing.

Damn. This is kind of embarrassing.

The Halfling, still refusing to hurt or kill a kid, instead attacks Corin for subdual damage and brings him down, unable to participate in the battle, but still unharmed.

At this point, Iema remembers that he still has a stone salve and downs it. Meanwhile, Natalia, who still has Handfire in her (literally) hot little hand, now shifts into bear form. MUHAHA! I’m a bear with great paws of fire! Well, one paw anyway. I have to do quick check with Jim to see how it actually works, but work it does, so we roll with it.  Sadly, though, I’m catching the nat 1 disease, and I miss.

Beta turns away from Talrich, deciding to go after the Halfling instead. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because there’s enough attacking Talrich, or that the Halfling is the one who knocked Corin out? We’re all a little protective of the kid. At any rate, he’s going after the Halfling, who is backing up toward the cobwebbed covered building and attacking Natalia. After seeing what Beta has done, the Halfling paladin casts something at Natalia—and then looks confused when it doesn’t work.

And I’m confused why he’s confused.

“He thought you were evil, baby, because of what Beta did,” Jim explains to me out of character. “He was casting Smite Evil on you and Beta, but, of course, it’s not going to work.”

Hmph. Of course not. We’re not evil. Drrrr, little pally, drrr.

Suddenly, an arrow plunges into the little doofus, and he goes limp and starts gasping. Guess Jerth didn’t miss this time. Iema jumps in with his own attack, and Beta—oh, this is gross—Beta reaches up, grabs the Halfling with his mouth, and crushes right through him with his powerful jaws. His eyes are glowing.  Er, eye–he only has one left, a reminder from one of the times he died before.

“I think I’m scared of Beta,” Natalia says.

Iema laughs nervously. “Me, too.”

So now we have one prissy paladin left on the field, but the mofo ain’t giving up. Not surprising. Natalia attacks as a Handfirey bear for a nice 31 points of damage. Talrich tries to whirl around to shield bash Iema but misses—good thing because Iema is down a lot of hit points—and then Beta leans over and bites the spider mount. And it does something very peculiar. It shrieks. Its legs twitch, then retract, and then it dies. Jim says it’s not slow or anything. Beta didn’t slowly kill this thing, nor had it suffered damage before. It’s like there was one little bite from Beta and its lights suddenly went out.

Beta is getting kind of scary. I know that once I did Awaken on him, he would start getting class levels, but now I’m starting to wonder class levels in what, exactly.

We don’t have time to consider it, though. Natalia finishes off Talrich, the Halfling’s small spider mount runs off, and we all split up, grabbing a different building, trying to locate the diplomat. Natalia finally finds him, but because she forgets to transform back to a human when she bursts through the door, the poor old man takes one look at her—a big, bloody bear bursting through the door—and pees himself.

Oops.

Natalia shifts back to her human form to reassure the old man, although I’m not sure he’d be very reassured knowing that a 23 year old girl just saw him piss himself. She calls the others over, we gather him up, and we flee to Stilldale, where we agree to spend the night.

Briezen the 15^th-19^th

We’re staying at the Lord Mayor Rengers’s house, so when we wake up and go downstairs to breakfast, we’re not surprised to run in Allista Renger, psionicist and future Mrs. Julium Numbra, at the table with her father.  She’s still as strange as ever, looking at everything but people and speaking in riddles.  Allista manages to focus on us long enough to tell us that Julium took his army to the capital.  She also clues us in on how Julium managed to butter up Cadram—he has agreed to let the leader of Cadram’s son marry his future daughter, thereby securing an heir to Numbra for Cadram as well.

Very clever.

And so this is how we learn that Allista is pregnant.  Allista, as it turns out, knows things already about the baby, which she knows is a girl.  She knows that what the girl’s name will be—and that her daughter will choose it for herself around five.  We question if she can actually see the future, but she tells us she doesn’t.  She just can read thoughts so well, she gets a pretty accurate idea what people are going to do.  Including unborn infants, I guess.

Then Allista starts her strange talk.

“It’s not your fault,” Allista tells Natalia suddenly.

“Uh…what isn’t my fault?” Natalia asks.

“You did the right thing.”  Allista suddenly realizes that nobody has a clue what she’s talking about.  “Oh.  I’m sorry.”

“There is no need to apologize,” Iema says.

“I wouldn’t apologize to you,” Allista says.  “You don’t deserve it.”

Surprised by such a blatantly rude response, Iema asks, “May I ask why?”

“You’ll find out soon enough” is all Allista will say.

We’re baffled, but Natalia has more pressing concerns.  Where’s Beta?  She turns into a dog, catches his scent, and follows it to the graveyard.  Beta is there, sleeping.

Natalia tries to wake him up.  He opens his eye and looks at her strangely.  Thinking that for some odd reason, he doesn’t recognize her as a dog, Natalia shifts back to her human form.

Suddenly, she hears screeching.  The graveyard guardian.  You know, the one that hates her and Roan so much.  Oops.  Forgot about him.

Phil didn’t.  “HAHAHA.  I saw that coming!”

Yeah, well, I didn’t.  Happens when you have no memory whatsoever.  I should have known that Jim was gonna lure me out to the graveyard for something like this.

Natalia gets ready by prepping Handfire, but she’s going to find out soon that it’s a moot point.  As zombies and skeletons start pushing themselves out of the ground and she shifts into bear form, Beta howls.  To Natalia’s surprise, the zombies shrink back, and the skeletons—with swords, no less—push past Natalia, rush the graveyard guardian, and press their swords to their throats.

He backs off.

Beta snorts.  “We should go,” he says in his low voice.  He turns to walk away.  Natalia snuffs out her Handfire and follows her wolf.

And this is how we found out what class levels Beta’s taking: Cleric.  I would have never thought.

We got back to the masion, where Natalia casts Greater Magic Fang on Beta.  You know, before I forget, like I usually do.

“Natalia, do you mind if we stick around Stilldale for a little bit?” Iema asks.  “There’s a lot of magic stuff in the party loot that I’d like to identify.”

Natalia agrees.  However, Iema needs some ivory and incense in to cast his spell to identify stuff, so we go looking for Roan.  Excuse me—it’s High Priestess Roan now.  She’s getting all title-like on us.

When we find her, she’s preparing for a priest’s visit.  She tells us that the priest is coming in to perform the marriage ceremony for Julium and Allista.  We’re surprised and ask why she’s not marrying them.

“My church won’t do it.  They’re marrying for love,” she says.

Natalia gives her a puzzled look.  “Love?  Julium?”  I can’t imagine Julium loving anything aside from power.  Maybe a good piece of armor.  Or socks.  All men love a good pair of socks.

“Well, Allista’s in love with Julium,” Roan clarifies.  “And we don’t support marriages based on love.”  She explains that her church believes that love is unpredictable and that a happy, stable home is built on responsibility and duty—not love.

Iema quickly grows bored of the marriage talk.  Typical man.  “Roan, I was wondering if you have some ivory and incense I could get for a spell I need to do?”

She points in him to the sanctum, where she said he can not only get the materials, but he can also cast the spell. 

Iema goes inside and gets to work, where he spends the next five days.  So, naturally, Natalia has to find other things to do.

Briezen the 20^th-Briezen the 22^nd

It’s the 20^th by the time Iema finishes identifying everything.  He asks Natalia if there’s anything she wants, but as it turns out, there’s really nothing in it useful for her.  “Deck the kid out,” she suggests, nodding at Corin.  The better geared he is, the better protected, and the less we have to worry.

Corin is eager to get his hands on some of the loot.  He picks out a slick chain shirt, some rings, and a magical heavy mace.

Natalia is too busy mulling over the past few days to pay too much attention to the loot.  While Iema was identifying his stuff, Jim did some specific role-play with me (of the non-sexual variety, sadly) to determine what Natalia did during those five days.  What did she do?  Well, she went around “blessing” crops and checking on the town’s animals, as usual, but she did have an situation that’s bugging her:  A man who asks for help with his wife and his unborn child.  Natalia, upon seeing his wife, knew that she had something that magic wouldn’t help her with, and only one of them could live.  Natalia was upfront about it, feeling making a decision as to who to save wasn’t hers to make.  The man left, unhappy at the decision he was about to face.

“You should have lied to him,” Beta had told her.

Natalia had remained firm with her decision aloud to Beta, but secretly wondered the same thing.  If she had made the decision, at least she would be the one they would blame and resent—not each other.

But back in the present, Natalia doesn’t mull for the family for too long, as there are rumors starting to get back to us that the heads of guards wearing Julium’s colors are being found on pikes outside the Devies’s gates.  We also hear about an outbreak of diseases, primarily along the road, although we don’t think one event is necessarily tied to the other.  Just more things to worry about.  Iema wants to check it out, but Beta has other ideas.

The wolf stands up.  “Home now,” he says in his low voice.  We don’t have a chance to ask him what his rush is; he turns around and starts for woods, toward the treehouse.  Iema and Natalia shrug and follow.

It’s been FOREVER since Natalia has been in her treehouse, and thankfully, Jim tells me that Natalia sees that the trees in her territory actually seem healthier.  Beta looks for his wolf pups—who, incidentally, while young, are about full-grown now—and goes hunting with them.  Before he leaves, he makes a joke to Iema about “showing them the faith.”

We decide to just relax a bit around the treehouse.   During this time, Iema crafts some new songs; later, he and Corin will discover the myconid tunnels under Natalia’s treehouse and go exploring.  Meanwhile, Natalia finds that her deeds around the woods have attracted some groupies (of sorts, heh) and they’re starting to move into her territory.  Among them, there is a grimalkin named Jervin, who turns out to be sociable.  He asks if he can stay in the area (of course) and tells her about other followers in the area, such as a moose and a dryad.  But then he gives her a bit of information that, in hindsight, I wished I had ignored:  He tells her about another follower in Natalia’s territory, an eagle, who had spotted a boy and a girl running in the forest.

At this point in the game, I was getting really tired and crabby, so we wrapped here.   Too bad.  Because the next day, I was awake enough to be curious about the lost boy and girl in the forest.

Briezen the 23^rd

The next morning, Natalia hunts down the grimalkin.  The day before, Jervin was in the form of a cat; now she finds him outside her window as a blue monkey.  “Hey, Jervin,” she says, “about the boy and girl…did the eagle say which way he saw them?”

“That way.”  Jervin points southeast.  Iema suddenly pops out of the window, trying to figure out who Natalia’s talking to, but Jervin pretends he can’t talk.  He makes monkey noises; Iema shrugs and walks off.  He’s not that interested in Natalia’s strange habits of talking to animals.

But we don’t need him to talk anymore.  Natalia suggests we look for this boy and girl; Iema agrees.  So we head southeast.  We don’t have a lot to go on, but it’s better than hanging around the treehouse all day.

We roll and finally hit an encounter.  Jim says about three miles away, Beta stops, sniffs, and glares at a tree.  Natalia looks up.  Jim has me roll a spot check, which I nail with a nat 20 roll, and he tells me that Natalia easily picks out blinds in the tree’s canopy.  She has to point them out to Iema before he spots them.  Iema tries to climb up the tree, falls, and we all laugh.  Then Corin shimmies up the trunk and climbs in.  He calls out that there’s a dead guy in it.

Natalia and Iema climb up after Corin.  The dead guy is an wood elf, his heart cut out, and from what we can tell of the wounds on his wrists and ankles, he was definitely butchered up by manufactured weapons—specifically, a scimitar.   He was laid out to bleed to death. 

“It looks like some kind of ritual,” Natalia comments.

Corin searches.  He finds bows, daggers, and a pendant of Hommirell.  “I think he was a ranger.”

Iema finds initials “TKR” on the tree, but it doesn’t mean much to any of us.

We decide there’s really nothing else we can do here, so we climb back down and press on.  After a couple more rolls, we get another encounter.  This time, we’re about halfway to a river when we hear a strange noise.   After a little snooping, we realize that it’s lizardfolk counting and hauling some trees.  We stop, offer to help, but they seem suspicious and ask why we’re offering.  It eventually comes out that we’re heading in the same direction because we’re looking for a boy and girl lost in the forest.  The lizardfolk warn us that there are drow about and to stay away from trees with shells—that marks their territory.  But once they hear of Natalia’s eagerness to kill some elves, they decide she’s all right and give her a club to go elf-killing with.

But we’re done here.  We’re tired of wandering aimlessly.  Natalia turns into an eagle, flies a little bit while Beta stays with the guys, and finally spots the boy and the girl.  They’re well dressed but very obviously lost.  Natalia flies back to the others, gathers everyone together, and they finally catch up to the boy and girl.

 We don’t want to startle them, so Iema starts playing his mandolin.  They spot us, and at first they seem nervous, but Iema quickly puts them at ease.  Soon, they’re telling us their dilemma:  They’re a couple from northern Cadram who wants to get married—

“—but your parents don’t approve,” Iema finishes.

The boy looks embarrassed.  “That cliché, huh?”  He composes himself before continuing.  “We’re trying to get to Derrikol.  But we’re being followed.  We didn’t get a look at them, but they had this on them.”  He shows us a little crossbow bolt.  Corin turns pale.

“Drow,” he hisses.

What they’ve also seen seems to fit the pattern:  They, too, have spotted a trapper with the heart missing.  Uneasy with the idea of letting a young couple wander around the forest by themselves—and certainly uneasy that there are drow about—we tell the kids that we need to hurry up and get them to Stilldale. 

Wouldn’t you know it, though, we run into eight ogres, complete with spiked clubs and some badass looking tattoos.  They demand the women, then just the civilian girl.  The boy guards her protectively, while Iema insists that they don’t want to mess with us. 

But of course they do, and we get into a big old fight while the kids hide in the bushes.  I’m not going to go into the entire encounter because this is already long, and we’re about to have bigger problems.  Suffice it to say, we walked out of it—the ogres did not.

We keep on truckin’ toward Stilldale.  And we’re close.  We can even see the lights coming up ahead when we hit another encounter.  I roll a nat 20 on Natalia’s spot check, so she sees—not quick enough, I’m afraid—the seven drow about to ambush us on either side.

Immediately, there’s a mass dispel cast on us and we’re all pelted with sleep arrows.  The arrows miss the young couple.  Several of us get hit and are down when the drow then cast Darkness and move in on us.  Beta grabs a scroll of Neutralize Poison off Natalia and uses it to get the poison off Natalia.   So Natalia wakes up, sees nothing but blackness, and thinks Ah, shit, not again.

Since she’s experienced drow before, she immediately knows what’s going on, and she’s much quicker about getting up and shifting into bear form this time around.  However, she gets a surprise:  The darkness disappears, and we finally get to see the results of the mass dispel:

The girl is a drow.  What.  The.  Hell.

One of the attacking drow in robes comes forward and casts Dispel on the boy.  Turns out he’s a drow, too.

The attacking drow start slashing the shit out of the girl.  She’s crying and pleading with them.  They turn around and start on the boy.  Beta and Natalia start killing some of the attacking drow.  But Natalia is pissed.  She’s wondering if the young couple lured us into a trap.  At one point, she whirls around on the couple, about to attack them, she’s so pissed.

Then, when  she hears the attacking drow yell to the couple to surrender, she wonders:  What if it’s another illusion?  Can they do that?

To be safe, Natalia decides against attacking the couple.  Better to kill the ones that we know are against us, right?

Besides, the couple’s not fighting against us.  The boy bull rushes one of the attacking drow to keep it from attacking Natalia; the girl throws herself on Corin, who is passed out from the poison sleep arrows, and gets hurt herself while trying to protect him.

Surely, I think, this couple can’t really be drow, protecting others like that.  Right?

While Natalia is debating, a drow wizard slaps a tree trunk and casts Darkness all over again.  Natalia’s a bear now, so she uses her scent to locate them.  Their scent is faint, and finding them is somewhat just plain luck:  when she does find them, she whiffs out the faint scent of aniseed to help protect them from getting sniffed out.

These bastards were prepared.

We finally kill off all the attacking drow.  Natalia whirls around on the kids.

“Are you really drow?”  she demands.  “Because if you are, I’m killing you.”

Jim tells me that they look really scared, but they admit to being drow.  “Our story is true, though,” they insist.  “But we have to be disguised because nobody believes us.”

Natalia, very obviously, doesn’t believe them.  She tells them just as much.  Iema is hesitant, then he says, “You did protect my apprentice, and for that I’m grateful.”  He votes to help them because, even if they are drow, he feels obligated to them for saving Corin’s life.

Natalia reluctantly agrees because, honestly, Iema is right.  “I still don’t trust you guys,” she tells them, but she reasons to herself that as long as they keep an eye on the drow couple, they can still escort the kids and clear their conscience.  They’ve just got to be careful.

Before we go, though, Natalia gets their names.  The boy’s and girl’s names are Zerich and Vaelika respectively, but they’re going under the fake names Serich and Vaela.

The drow couple put their illusion disguise back up, and we take them to Stilldale.  I’m not sure how Iema felt about it because, hell, I’m not Phil, so I don’t play his character, but Natalia does feel a little funny bringing drow into town.  We find an inn, we all sleep, until Corin wakes us up to tell us that a professional bounty hunter is looking for us—all five of us.

The drow couple is nervous, but they put their disguises back up.   We go to see the bounty hunter, who is this big, dark guy who looks like he might have some half-ogre blood in him.  His name is Drugle, and it turns out he’s a well-known bounty hunter—and his specialty is drow.

He has already heard that we’ve had some run-ins with drow.  The disguised couple feigns innocence as we describe our encounter with drow—and the corpses they’d left behind—that we’d seen just the day before.  Drugle thanks us for the information and tells us that he’s going to talk to the trees and animals in the forest to see if he can find out more.

Crap.  That will definitely get us in trouble.

Iema suggests we buy horses and get the hell out, which we do.  We fly out of town and head to Devies.  Right before we go into town, Iema disguises all of us and we head through the gates.  We find another inn.  Natalia, still very untrusting, decides she’s going to check out the wanted posters to see if Zerich and Vaelika are as innocent as they claim.

The couple wants to go to the inn.  They’re worried, telling us that their disguises won’t hold much longer.  Natalia doesn’t trust them to be alone, so she asks Beta if he’ll stay with them while she goes out of the town and Iema sells some stuff.  Beta agrees.

Natalia heads out, makes a beeline for the posters while Iema goes to sell some stuff in the party loot.  To Natalia’s surprise, the drow couple aren’t listed anywhere.  She’s not sure if she’s relieved or disappointed.  She turns around and is about to head back when she’s stopped by what she overhears some other bounty hunters saying.

“What the point?”  one of them grouses.  “Drugle is in town.  He gets all the good ones.”

What?  Drugle is in Devies already?  It’s too much of a coincidence.  Natalia and Iema come to the only logical conclusion:  Drugle knows about the couple and is following us.

We rush back to the inn.  On the way, we notice the inn has smoke coming out of it; we hear screams and growls coming from within  We panic.  Drugle apparently even knows where we’re staying.  We break into a run, burst into our room.

The room is full of smoke.  Jim tells us we have to make will saves.

Now, this encounter didn’t last long.  Even Jim thought the encounter would last longer, especially because both Iema and Natalia have pretty high will saves.  But we’re all surprised because it doesn’t matter:  Phil and I both roll terribly, so Iema and Natalia both fail their will saves.

And we’re about to find out just how terrible that is.

Iema can vaguely make out what looks like Beta fighting something humanoid.  Iema tries to attack whatever the hell, but having failed our will saves, we’re both frozen.  Beta then muscles between us and goes out the door.  We hear whispering.  We can make out someone saying, “I think we got them.”  Then, we hear the sound of the cork of bottle popping.  The smoke dissipates.

We see two demons in our room.  The disguise drops.  It’s the drow couple.

At this point, I’m going, “I KNEW IT.  I KNEW IT.”  And I’m mentally kicking myself because HEY, finding these little fuckers was MY stupid idea in the first place, and even when I SAID I was going to kill them, I DIDN’T, and WHY CAN I NOT DO WHAT I SAY I’M GOING TO DO, OMG, I DO THIS IN REAL LIFE TOO, OMG, I SUUUUUUUUUCK.

We weren’t totally surprised about the drow couple, but one that that did shock us?  Drugle, the drow hunter, sauntering into the room, obviously in cahoots with Zerich and Vuelika.

“Good boy,” Vuelika coos to Beta.  “See, I told you we wouldn’t hurt them.”  Jim says that we notice that Beta’s eyes are glazed over.

Phil groans.  “Mind control.”

Eh?  What?  I didn’t know drow could do that!  And this, people, is one of the many, many times I’ve screwed Natalia because of what I, as a player, don’t know about this damned game.  Grrr.

The Evil Trio quickly gets to work on us.  They strip the frozen Natalia and Iema of all worthwhile gear, leaving them only in regular old clothes.  They take all our gear, put something down our throats to make it difficult to talk (and, therefore, difficult to spellcast), and mage cuff us.  Beta, still mind-controlled, drags a passed out Corin into the room. 

Then it gets really bad.  

The drow freeze Beta and start pricking him with poison needles.  When they finish with him, they hover over Corin.

“Now,”  Vuelika says, “tell us where Julium is.”

We don’t say anything.

“Tell us where Julium is,” she repeats, “or we’re going to have to do something to the kid.”

Natalia sits there sullenly.  Iema, on the other hand, lies.  He starts making up various places.  The drow don’t believe us and pluck a fingernail out of one of Corin’s fingers.  Natalia is thankful that Corin is passed out and unable to feel what they’re doing to him—for now.

“Try that again,” Vuelika says. 

Finally, Natalia spits out, “Do you honestly think that Julium is going to tell us where he’s at?  He knows there’s a spy around him, and we’re suspects, too!”

The ranger butts in.  “You know,” he says, “I could always just rape the boy.”

Finally, Iema loses his cool.  This is the first time Natalia has ever seen him lose his temper, not that she could blame him.  “I swear to God,” Iema threatens, “if you so much has harm a hair on his head, I will kill you.  I will make you so sorry…”

Vuelika rolls her eyes.  “We will not do that to him.”  She orders the men out.  After they leave, she turns back to us.  “Whether you want to believe it or not, our story was true—once.  But everyone kept after us because of what we are.  Contrary to popular belief, we are not all the same.”

Natalia glares at her.  “Looks pretty much the same from where I’m sitting,” she croaks in her broken voice, thanks to that stupid pill they’ve jammed down our throats.

They keep on asking us questions;  Iema keeps lying about Julium’s whereabouts.  By the end of the night, they’ve made sure that we’ve had no sleep, and they have removed one of poor Corin’s fingers.

Briezen the 24^th – Briezen the 25^th

We’re exhausted after being questioned all night, but the drow aren’t done with us yet.  They cast their spell to make themselves looks human again.  Then Vaelika and Zerich cast the same spell on us.  I get a sinking suspicion, and Jim confirms it:  They make us up to look like drow.  The couple argue briefly what to do with Beta.  One of them—I don’t know who, but probably Zerich—thinks they should just kill Beta.  Drugle, however, won’t have it.

“That’s a strong wolf, good wolf,” he says.

So it’s decided that Beta will not be killed.  Natalia and I are both glad for that.    They shove the wolf under the bed.  I wonder how large the bed is, since Beta is a big damn wolf.

We’re led out the door.  People in the town are staring at us, believing the illusion, thinking we’re actually drow.  Some spit.  It’s pretty damn awful.  We’re loaded into a back of a cart and taken as prisoners. 

The next day, we have an encounter, probably a chance at escape with that encounter–one that we missed entirely.  We run into another group of travelers while camping.  They’re in awe of the “drow” and peer at us curiously.  When they’re not looking, Vaelika mouths Not one word.

We probably should have done something.  But we were too worried about what the drow couple would do next.  As it is, the travelers don’t make it out before Vaelika and Zerich kill them.

Briezen the 26^th

We’re back on the road again.  We pass paladins from northern Numbrar.  They eye us curiously.  Iema treats them respectfully, but the paladins don’t seem to consider that it’s odd behavior and let the cart pass.  We keep heading to…well, wherever the hell it is we’re heading to.  Finally, we make it to Derikkol.  We’re taken out to be put on a ship.  People are throwing rocks at us.  Iema spots Corin’s mother in the crowd.  She’s also throwing rocks.

Iema and Natalia get on either side of Corin, hoping to block his view so he wouldn’t see.

We’re loaded into a boat and thrown in a cell below deck.  After some talking around, we find out we’re not the only ones who have been fooled by the drow couple.  We’re all being taken as slaves to Fasset, home of the Scaled Emperor.

Ugh.

Briezen the 27^th

The morning comes.  The boat is still docked.  When Iema and Natalia wake up, they hear Corin crying.  Iema tries to comfort him with little luck.  We’re given bread for breakfast, which we find out from the other prisoners has crap in it to screw with our voices to inhibit our spellcasting.  Natalia seriously considers not eating it.  Hell, she considers starving herself to death just to piss them all off.

Instead, she eats the fucking bread. 

We’re about to pull out.  Jim says we hear a horrible sound outside.  We manage to get a look out the window.  Poor Beta is on the shoreline, looking forlorn and howling.

He must feel so guilty.  Not that it’s his fault the bitch had some charm thing she could work on him, but still…he must feel bad.

Corin must feel better after a little breakfast.  His skills as a rogue are starting to come in handy:  He starts to work on our cuffs.  Iema can’t really do his bardic stuff to help, so he does a little dance to help as best as he can, seeing that’s he’s cuffed and all.

Given our bleak circumstances, it’s pretty funny.

Corin does have some luck.  He’s managed to pick his own lock, but he doesn’t have success with Natalia’s.  He slips his cuffs back on to look like they’re still functioning.

We’re at sea for the next 20 days.

Chilldenor the 17^th 

We finally arrive in Fasset.  The first thing Natalia sees are the massive cliffs, about 400-600 feet high.  We come in through a channel, what’s called the Chute.  It’s supposed to be crazy-dangerous.  The boat anchors, and we take a peek out the windows.  We see a plethora of races:  Sea elves, marrows, some guy that is bluish-white with water dripping off his skin.  Some people wearing some simple robes with blue bands on the cuffs come in.  We find out they’re looking for spellcasters, checking all of us for any magic buffs or anything showing that we’re spellcasters.

In Fasset, spellcasters are whisked away to be taken to use their services for the city and for the Emperor.  Non-spellcasters, however, are whisked away to do much shittier things.  Once Corin extracts this information from Iema, he slips out of his picked cuffs, quickly puts a magic buff on Iema, and slips back into his cuffs.

The robed figures stop at Iema.  “You.”

Iema goes along with them willingly, and eventually, they get Natalia and Corin as well.  We have all come to the conclusion that it would be better to admit our spellcaster status rather than end up in the slavemines.

They question us about various things.  While doing so, they have a spell set up so that if we lie, the candle they have lit will go out.  Apparently, even sarcasm is considered lying:  Natalia makes a snarky remark about always wanting to meet the Scaled Emperor, and her voice suddenly comes out as a squeak.

The robed people tell the ogre captain that they’re taking us with them.  We’re taken to a slimmer ship docked next to the one we’re currently on.  Here, they put us in collars but the mage cuffs are taken off, at least.  We’re warned that spells won’t work with the collars on, and trying to take them off will land us in the Astral Plane.

Already, this ship is better.  We’re given dinner, checked on by healers, and taken to our rooms, which, as Jim describers, are about as nice as a motels.  Beats the cell, but Natalia is still grumpy about the whole thing.

We stay here for five more days.

Chilldenor the 23^rd

We all have our own guards assigned to us, mostly to find out what we can do.  Jim says Natalia’s guard is very considerately pointing things in the city that would be of particular interest to a druid.  Natalia is completely unappreciative and ignores most of what the guard is trying to show her.  No matter how nice the lady is, it doesn’t change the fact that WE’RE FREAKIN’ PRISONERS.

Iema, meanwhile, is given his first assignment.  He’s taken back into that room with a candle.  He recognizes that the truth spell is in effect.

“Arclings can recognize each other, right?”  one of the guards asks Iema.

Well, it’s not like Iema can lie.  He confirms that this is true.  They bring in a woman.

“Is she an arcling?”

Iema doesn’t look happy about doing it, but he says, “Yes.”

The woman freaks out.  “Traitor!” she yells.  “You traitor!”

Iema shrugs and points at the candle.  They take the female arcling away, who is distraught about being identified.

Yup, this looks like this is how life is going to be for a while.  Welcome to Fasset.

Damn it. 

 

 Well, I’d say “gear up for another ‘Homebrewed,’” but truthfully, this session was relatively short, due to yours truly getting exhausted at about 9:30 PM, a mere 2 1/2 hours after we started playing.  Working overtime all week and then doing game on Friday night after work…yeah, it’s rough.  But if you remember the last game, we ended it by preparing to go to war with the Spruce Circle.  Well, really, Vueliss; some of the other druids are actually okay.  So this game, we witness the show down.

Briezen the 14^th

It really is too bad that I was so tired during this game, as this one was the game I had been looking forward to:  The confortation with Vueliss, head of the Spruce Circle, our very own General Dick.  As we prepare, Jim asks to see my spell list.  After glancing over it, he says Natalia’s little dragon head clasp is suggesting that Natalia swap out Cure Serious Wounds with Rusting Grasp.  Now, I understand swapping out the Cure Serious Wounds–my necklace allows me to swap out any spell for that level of a Cure spell, but I don’t get why I would bother with Rusting Grasp.  Nevertheless, I comply.

Iema, Natalia, and Corin get to Raelan’s, the agreed meeting place.  Julium is already there, along with his follower Jerth, atop a skinny black horse.  As for Julium, he is wearing shiny armor.  On it, there is a symbol of a skull with a knife through it.  Jim says that we recognize it as the symbol of the Numbraran emperor–and only the emperor can wear it, under the penalty of death.

Julium sure as hell knows how to make a statement.

As we approach, Julium greets us and tosses Iema a cloak.  Iema examines it and recognizes that the images on it symbolize him as the messenger.  Remembering what pissed people tend to do to messengers, he gulps nervously, but he puts the cloak on.

“You’re the messenger,” Julium says, in case we didn’t catch on.

“All right,” Iema says, “but what’s the message?”

“This.”  Julium reaches for a bag and tosses it at Iema.  “That’s the message.”

Out of character, Phil tells Jim that he accepts it, but he’s not looking inside.  Good call.  Because, while it’s probably obvious to all of us what that message probably is, it’s still pretty gross.

It’s time to get going.  Since Natalia is the one most familiar with the Spruce Circle, she morphs into a horse and leads everyone to their territory.  Iema is nervous when she gets to a river  because he can’t swim.  When he looks again, she appears to be walking across the water.  He realizes that she’s taking them across a secret, invisible bridge that she and the other druids know about.  He relaxes.

We cross the river, and finally, we get to Spruce Circle territory.  There are lots of druids around.  They’re all around us, even some hanging in the trees.  Everyone falls to a hush as we approach.  Natalia reverts back to her human form.  In the back, she spots Vueliss (boo hiss), his asshole son Iverrios (who looks MIGHTY pissed), and Nieniemao, the red-skinned elf that Natalia, despite her distrust of elves, grudgingly has to admit she likes.  And there is another druid that Natalia hasn’t seen in a long time, since back when we first started:  Virbéné, the very first druid I ever met, the half-elf druid who hung out with the gnome Rosco, the one I called “Creepy Lady.”

I wonder what happened to Rosco?

Vueliss points at us.  “Kill them!”

“No,” Nieniemao is quick to step in.  “We are not going to kill a bard, especially one that has a message.”

Vueliss isn’t happy about it, but he gives in.  As Jim has told us before, bards are very highly regarded in Valt.  Even though Natalia is a druid, Iema would probably be considered more highly than she would be.  Notice that Julium didn’t give her the message?

(Probably doesn’t help that Natalia isn’t very subtle about her dislike for Vueliss, either, OR his son.)

Iema starts forward.  He gets about halfway between us and them before Vueliss stops him.  “That’s far enough,” he says.  “The message…take it out of the bag and show it.”

I don’t think Iema, suspecting what was in the bag, was too keen on having to reach in and pull it out, but he complies.  Phil tells us that Iema still doesn’t even look in the bag.  He just pulls the object out.

Jim confirms what we suspect:  “It’s an elven head.”

I’m secretly glad that Natalia doesn’t have to do this.

Phil says that, as Iema, he is very gentle with the head, still trying to show it respect.  See, this is why Phil is a better bard than I would ever be: I imagine Natlaia whipping it out carelessly, trying to use it as a sock puppet, speaking in a Cookie Monster voice the entire time.

So Iema gingerly handles the head.  The head turns to Vueless and the eyes snap open.  Suddenly, the elven head speaks–in Julium’s voice.

And this part is so awesome, I have to put it in a quotation box!

Vueliss of the Spruce Circle!  Some time ago, you gave me a choice: either withdraw all of my people and dismantle our buildings, or you would wage war upon us.

So in return, I give YOU an offer.  Surrender to me, or be destroyed.

If we do not have your surrender within the next minute, I shall march upon this forest with every man at my disposal.  We will level every tree, and march with engines of war built from your very homes.  We shall slay every creature of the forest, and use them to feed our troops.  Our battle standards will be painted upon canvases of your skin, flayed from you and your children.

I am engaged in a war against other forces, and can ill afford to have another enemy at my back.  Drop your weapons, withdraw your forces, and surrender to the rightful Emperor of Numbrar.

Upon hearing this, Vueliss grows pale.  This is the first I’ve ever heard of Vueliss being scared.

Virbéné starts to reach for her pouch, but she doesn’t get a chance.  Nieniemao springs on her and slits her throat.  He whips around.  “NOW!”

What does “now” mean to us?  Why, DRUID ON DRUID ACTION, THAT’S WHAT.  It’s a civil war!  All the druids in the Spruce Circle start attacking each other!  Apparently, Natalia wasn’t the only one of the Circle who was unhappy and frustrated with its leader’s evil leanings.  She’s as excited to be watching the druid on druid action as much as a school boy is to watch actual girl on girl.  Except, you know, without the Catholic guilt or the mess, heh.

We roll for initiative.  I think Jim’s happy because I’m ready with my dice, excitedly saying THIS IS WHAT I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR, I WANNA KILL VUELISS AND IVERRIOS!

Sadly, I don’t remember the order of our initiatives.  I doubt I went first, as Natalia’s initiative bonus is only a 1.  Personally, I think there should be certain scenarios in D&D where, if the player gets to a scene that their character has been DYING to get to–in this case, Natalia finally gets to openly attack the evil Spruce Circle members–then there should be, like, a temporary initiative bonus.  I mean, really, she’s been itching to kill this guy, then she gets her golden opportunity–and she hangs back just because I happen to roll lousy?  That doesn’t make sense to me.

But what do I know?

The first thing Natalia does do when it comes to her turn, though, is cast Barkskin on Corin.  I’ve been trying to remember to keep defensive skills on my list for the kid.  Another one I like to keep on my list is Invisibility to Animals, figuring that should we run a situation where animals are the bad guys, that would at least save Iema’s Invisibility spell.  Speaking of which, Iema casts Invisibility on Corin, in attempts to keep the kid a little safer in the ruckus.  Handy little spell; Natalia wishes she had it herself sometimes.  Although, honestly, given how I run my character, it wouldn’t suit her anyway.  This is one aspect where Natalia isn’t like me:  She doesn’t talk much (which, okay, is more like me), but damn, does she enjoy a fight.

Julium decides it’s time to jump into action himself.  “IMPERIUS REX!” he yells, whipping out a sword, lightning bolts crackling from it.  Iema rushes over to Julium and quickly casts Haste on the emperor before casting Invisibility on himself.  Jerth steps back behind Beta and seems to disappear.

Jim tells us that suddenly, it seems like the world around us has grown black.  Being that I’ve never experienced this before, I’m confused; I’m even more confused when Phil, getting suspicious, starts muttering, “Oh, no…”

Out of character, I wonder what’s so bad that it’s getting Phil worried.  In character, something rustles in the darkness, attempts to hit Iema–not that Natalia can see this–but she does feel something whack her for a good 10 points of damage.

I am not quick thinking; therefore, neither is my druid.  I’m utterly confused by why everything went black.  Jim ever so politely suggests that I could try getting out of it.  Get out of it? I think.  This seems absurd.  Didn’t he just TELL me that the world went black?

Well, turns out he didn’t mean literally.

I take his suggestion.  I move Natalia her standard move action on the battlemap (30 feet) and tell Jim that Natalia calls Beta out with her.

“You see a dome of blackness where the battle was,” Jim says.

This is where Phil gets animated.  “I KNEW IT.  I KNEW IT.  I KNEW THAT FUCKER VUELISS WAS DEALING WITH DROW!”

Oh.  Shit.  Now, I don’t know a whole lot about drow.  But when Jim and I first started dating, he bought me Homeland, so pretty much, everything I know comes from that book.  And what I know is this: Drow are evil, evil, evil.

But I don’t know much beyond that.  That’s going to bite me in the ass in the next game.  You’ll see.

Meanwhile, Jim says that although Natalia has stepped out of the darkness, the dome moves over and engulfs her again.  There are now two domes of darkness on the field.  In the other dome, where I know that they have both darkness AND silence going on (I’m not sure about the one I’m in), Iema gets hit and takes 20 points of damage.  Feeling desperate, Natalia blindly casts Entangle, hoping the area of effect spell with catch some bad guys in it.  And, yeah, while it slowed things somewhat, it also proved not to be the best idea I’ve ever had, either.  Why?  Well, for one, some good guys got caught in it, too.

Case in point: Julium, the Numbraran Emperor himself.  Jim-as-Julium rolled crappily for him, and Julium ended up stuck in Entangle for a while.

At first, Natalia and Beta are about the only ones who make their reflex saves and stay out of the Entangle.  Luckily, even though it’s dark, Beta can sniff out the bad guys, pinpoints one, tries to attack but misses.  Corin can’t help because he’s stuck.  Iema, I believe, is also stuck, and Phil rolls his ever-so-useful bardic knowledge (at least, I think it was bardic knowledge) to see if he could figure out why he’s caught.  Phil rolls well, so Iema identifies it as Entangle.  So he knows at least it’s one of Natalia’s spells.

One of the bad guys breaks out in Iema’s Dome of Doom.  Iema feels blood spray on his face, but he doesn’t know if it’s one of ours or one of theirs.  Phil says, “If this is drow blood, I’m licking my face.”

And this is how I found out that Phil really, REALLY hates drow.  Because that’s a pretty gross thing to say and, my guess?  You’d only say it if you really hated someone.

Or if you’re some kind of creepy stalker.  Which, you know, Phil isn’t.  Although if he wants to be a creepy drow-stalker, he can be my guest, because between this game and the next, I’m growing to hate drow with a vengeance myself.

Again, you’ll find out.  Meanwhile: Back to this game.

Natalia’s done screwing around.  She turns into a brown bear.  Sadly, she’s got a little more time to screw around because that pretty much uses her turn.

Beta attacks the guy he’s sniffed out again, bites, and manages to trip the enemy.  Score!  Julium, however, is still trying to get out of the Entangle.  Natalia and Beta attack, but with the darkness factored in, we’re not doing so hot and we miss.  Iema manages to wriggle out of the Entangle, but between walking over the vines and the darkness around him, he’s slowed to a quarter of his normal speed and can’t go far.

More reflex saves, more people Entangled:  Julium and Corin still, and now Beta and Jerth.

Natalia is still out and finally manages to get a swipe in on somebody.  So she’s happy about that.

Further away, Iema has managed to drag himself out far enough away to realize he can hear again.  He moves further away and surveys the situation.  He sees ahead of him two globes of darkness, one of them appears to be centered on the square Natalia’s in, almost as if something has been planted on her.

Back in the Dome of Doom, Jim rolls for Julium again to see if he manages to get out of the Entangled.  He does!  Then I roll.  Nat 1 on both my attack AND my reflex save, which means I’m caught in my own Entangle.  How embarrassing.

Iema can feel someone draw a bow back nearby, but he doesn’t see them.  He’s hit.  The arrow, turns out, does Con damage.  He’s at a -9 now.  He does a face-plant on the ground.

Natalia isn’t having much luck.  Thankfully, Julium is out of the Entangle and smarter than I am.  He does something with his sword–Natalia misses it and Spring-the-player didn’t catch it, either–but suddenly, it seems as if all the magic has been sucked into the weapon.  Natalia looks over and spots Iema, facedown on the ground, arrow in his neck.  It’s obvious that Jerth did it, presumably on accident due to the dark.

Presumably.  Not sure if I mentioned this, but neither Natalia nor myself trust Jerth a bit.

Besides Iema on the ground, we also see two dead drow.  And although we can at least see, we still can’t hear.  We move out of the area.  Nearby, the druids are still having their own battle.  Nieniemao is busy fighting Vueliss.  Jim says at this point, they’re not even using spells anymore.  I don’t know why.  Maybe they blew them all earlier.  But now, Vueliss and Nieniemao are down to fists, just beating the hell out of each other.

Elves or not, underneath it all, they’re still just men I guess, heh.

We hear booming footsteps and turn to see a forest giant running toward us.  I think Natalia peed her pants a little.  As luck would have it, Aquaeous drops down from a tree, slimes it, and it drops .  The Ooze Master is gleeful, sliming all his enemies in his path.  Many start clawing at their faces, trying unsuccessfully to get the slime off.  And let me tell you, the results are not pretty.  One of them gets crazy enough to stab himself in the eye.

Natalia is secretly grateful that while most of the other druids ostracized Aquaeous, she was nice to him.  She wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of that slime.

Ahead, Natalia sees a dire bear.  We wonder if she’s gonna have to fight him, but as it turns out, she doesn’t have to–Big Shroom bursts out and attacks him.  Did you guys know that fungi could be all B.A.?  Because I sure as hell didn’t.  Around Big Shroom, smaller myconid archers are peppering baddies with bows.

Gury–remember Gury, the old, naked guy?–runs up to us.  You’d think given our scenario, he’d be wearing gear, but nope, he’s still naked, just covered with mud.  “Hey, what’s up?” he says cheefully.  He sees Iema’s injured, heals him up entirely, and jaunts off to join the battle.

We don’t have much time.  An elf that looks remarkably like Iverrios comes storming toward us.  Jim says we’d guess him to be Iverrios’s brother, yet another son of Vueliss.  Julium quickly charges him, Jerth close behind, firing arrows at the doppleganger.

The lookalike does a curious thing: He drops his mouth, way lower than any elf’s should be able to go, like a lizard’s, and splays scaled fingers.  Phil calls it immediately: “A half-dragon?”

I’ve no clue what a half-dragon is, so Jim and Phil quickly explain it to me before we get back into the fight.  God, how many kids does Vueliss have?  Man, that elf is a slut.

Natalia jumps into the battle, misses, and then Beta gets a bite in.  Iema, remembering that the myconids had given us potions, quickly downs a potion that protects him from the elements.  Turns out it was a moot point, as Julium and Jerth together brought the half-dragon down quickly.

There’s a small break in the waves of baddies, and Natalia uses the time to put a rushed heal on Jerth.  Once done, we turn to see that the crowd has parted.  Iverrios is standing there, looking smug.  I don’t know why, since Julium and Jerth just totally bitch-slapped his way badder-looking brother.

Iverrias casts Flame Strike on us.  He pointedly laughs at Natalia.  “You think you control nature?” he howls.  “I control nature!”

Leopards and wolves bound away from their druid, quickly surrounding Natalia and Julium.  Julium shakes off one leopard, stabs it in the neck, and then turns to elbow a wolf back.  Beta kills another leopard.  Natalia starts summoning a dire lion.  Iverrios tries to counter-spell her summon, but luckily, he fails, and I got me a mighty big cat on the loose.

During all this–I don’t know when–Iema started singing one of his bardic songs.  The nice thing about bards:  They add to stuff, so we’re all doing extra damage in the fight.  Iverrios gets pissed and starts frothing.  This is when we realize that Iverrios isn’t just a druid–he’s actually raging.  Uh oh.

He turns into an even bigger bear than Natalia can ever hope to be, I’m afraid.  Sure, she’ll get Dire Bear next level, but even with that, it’s dependent on your actual size, and, well, Iverrios is just bigger.  The group is still trying to clear out Iverrios’s pets: Beta takes out a wolf near Jerth and the summoned dire lion kills another leopard.  The dire lion is now flanking with Natalia, but sadly, she misses.  Iverrios, spotting Iema nearby, attacks the bard, knocking Iema down half his hit points.

Julium then swings in on Iverrios.  The frothing druid, sensing that Julium is probably the real threat around here, turns his attention from Iema to the fighter claiming to be emperor.  On Natalia’s go, she misses the leopard RIGHT IN FRONT OF HER (how annoying) while Beta jumps in to help Julium with Iverrios.  Natalia sends the dire lion to assist on the evil-druid-gone-dire-bear, and holy shit, even though the dire lion did 60+ damage, it STILL didn’t take Iverrios down.  Iverrios, however, did manage to kill my dire lion.  I wasn’t thrilled about that, I must admit.

Before I can swear vengeance, Julium, Jerth, and Beta take Iverrios down.  I’m disappointed that Natalia didn’t get a piece of him herself, but I’m glad that Beta’s the one who did the final blow to that asshole.

Then Julium does something just nasty.  He gathers the two brothers, Iverrios and that unnamed half-dragon we “met,” from the ground, and spears their heads on his greatsword.  He lifts it up.  Around us is still pandemonium.  Alpen, the child druid, and his gray render Licky are nearby, along with Big Shroom, and they’re lifting stone statues and bashing bad guys with them.  (Well, Alpen isn’t, but Licky’s doing it for him.)  Despite our victory, we’re still surrounding by lions, eagles, and other various animals fighting each other.  There’s also what feels like a light acid rain falling, stinging our skin.

The elves are starting to scatter, though, and the evil members are trying to escape.  They run toward something, as if they’ve found a way out, then they slide, stumble, and lose their way.  We hear giggling.  Jim hints that it’s some fairy creatures’ doing.

I remember meeting the insect guy at the mage fair, the one trying to sell that instrument to Iema, and how he had warned Natalia that the fairy folk were getting sick of Vueliss bossing them around.  HMMM.  Allies I had completely forgotten about.

Virbéné makes another appearance here.  We thought she had died when Nieniemao slit her throat, but apparently, she survived it.  “We surrender, we surrender,” she says desperately. 

I actually feel sorry for her. 

Julium, however, doesn’t.  He kills her outright, and she crumples to the ground.  “Too late,” Julium says.  “No mercy.”

Natalia, for a moment, just looks at Julium, rolling that over in her mind.  Julium’s her friend, but…she doesn’t like this “no mercy” stuff.  Which, again, as you’ll see in the next game, will bite us in the ass…

Regardless, Natalia bites her tongue and after about 20 minutes, the fighting dissipates.  The battle is over.

Iema, Corin, and Natalia must have gotten separated from Julium somehow, but Jerth seeks them out, telling them that Julium wants to meet with them.  We group up with him, go to the Circle, where Nieniemao is now in the lead’s chair, where Vueliss used to sit.  Nieniemao, we notice, has lost a hand during battle.

Julium stands in front of the new druid leader.

“Vueliss escaped,” Nieniemao says.  “We knew about some of the stuff he was doing that we didn’t like, but even we had no idea that he was consorting with drow.”

Iema speaks up and tells Nieniemao about the “other brother.”  When Nieniemao looks at him questioningly, Iema describes the half-dragon.

“What kind?” he asks.

Jim reminds me that Natalia saw a resemblence between him and the black dragon that she had fought before.   She tells Nieniemao.  He shakes his head in disbelief.

Iema suggests showing Nieniemao the body.  “Did Beta already bury it?” he asks.

Almost as if on cue, Beta turns very suddenly and trots away.  We assume he’s getting the body, but when he doesn’t come back soon, we realize we’re wrong.

“Where’d he go?”  Iema asks.

“I don’t know,” Natalia says.  Beta doesn’t come back.

There’s a bit of clean-up going on around us.  Despite all the carnage, there are few bodies around us, a Aquaeous’s slime and ooze-things are taking care of it.  We see Aquaeous himself, petting a gelatinous cube containing prisoners.  The prisoners are frozen inside the gelantinous cube, faces contorted in horror.  Faces that, I might add, are dissolving.

“Good cube, good cube,” Aquaeous says lovingly.  He licks it.

Okay, he really is a messed up little guy.

Nieniemao and Julium get down to business.  Nieniemao says he won’t help Julium, but unlike Vueliss, he’s not going to hinder the fighter’s war efforts either.  Julium seems to think this is fair; I don’t think he actually expected druids (except Natalia) to help him, anyway.  But just having them not attack him and his men from the woods helps tremendously.

“Very well,” Julium says.  “But I have to leave now.  I have a diplomat to save.”  He turns from Nieniemao, huddling with those of us who will go with him.

He quickly lays it out for us:  The kidnapped diplomat was snatched by the Lord  Polsen Numbra, the same one who defeated Jovos 20 years ago.  I was surprised by this information.  Someone who took on Jovos is running around kidnapping people?  HUH.  We also learn that Lord Polsen Numbra had come in through Derikkol right around the time of the mage fair, so he could try to take over the hobgoblin fortress of Kugai and stop Julium.

Things start to click:  We now know why Jovos left the mage fair in such a hurry.

Julium says we have two options:  Go to Kugai where they’re holding him tonight, when they’re not quite prepared yet, or to go in the morning, when they will be.  We opted to push on for the night.  Sure, we’re down spells, too, but at least we’ll have the element of surprise.

Before we leave, we turn to spot Tango, wolf-turned-centaur and Beta’s former lover, talking to Nieniemao.

“Oh,” Natalia murmurs.  Suddenly, Beta’s leaving makes sense.  Poor Beta.

Iema, being the friendly one, greets Tango.  Natalia still has mixed feelings, torn loyalties between Beta and Tango.  I imagine it’s what divorced kids feel like with their parents.  Tango greets us both, but I notice she doesn’t ask about Beta or their pups.

I’m a little bitter about that.  I cannot lie.

As it turns out, being a former wolf makes Tango a bit of an outsider to the centaur that she now lives with.  As such, she has been serving as the liason between them and the druids.  The centaur sided with the fairy creatures to help drive out the evil druid.

Nieniemao turns to Natalia.  “Natalia, do you plan on staying with the Spruce Circle?”  he asks. 

Natalia doesn’t even think twice.  “I wasn’t going to, but if you’re in charge, yeah, I’ll stay.”  Then she pauses.  “That doesn’t mean I can’t go help Julium, does it?”

“No,” Nieniemao says.  “If you choose to help Julium, that’s your decision and we will honor it.  That’s what a druid circle is supposed to do.”

Natalia nods.  “Then, yeah, I’ll stick around.  But I’m going to help him.”

So it’s all arranged.  We heal up and, while it’s still dark, creep toward Kugai.

Note:  Special thanks to Jim for writing up Julium’s counter-demand to Vueliss, so I could post it.  I remembered it was impressive and wanted to have it written here, as close as possible to what Jim actually said in game, but knew I would never remember it right.  So…thanks, Jim!

Back with another rushed “Homebrewed,” although I’ll try not to rush it as much as the last one.  In the last game, we wrapped up our time at the mage fair, discovered that Iema and Corin are total arrow magnets, and had a cleric pretty much threaten to call DCFS on us for parading Corin in the forest in the first place.  But we gave her the age-old response, which is HE WAS ASKIN’ FOR IT, BITCH.  Now all we need are the wife-beaters.  Don’t believe any of this?  Beat on part 17, which you can find here.

Briezen the 11^th

Before we start the game, I realize that I need to update my spell list.  I’m horrible about my spell list.  I forget about updating my spells with new ones, and before you know it, I’m heading into the fire plane with nothing but fire spells on my list.  D’oh!

It’s all well and good because, as it turns out, Jim has some Iema-specific plans in mind.  So while I’m updating my spell list and consulting the Players Handbook, I’m also scribbling notes while I listen to Jim and Phil roleplay.  Here’s what I caught:

It’s the morning of Briezen the 11th, and we’re all at the inn in Stilldale.    Iema wakes up to someone knocking on the door.  He answers and has to look down to see the visitor, which is a halfling with a shock of bright red hair.  He introduces himself as Rendel and invites Iema downstairs for breakfast.

I can totally see Natalia snarling at this guy, I’m thinking as I’m jotting down the notes.  It’s a good thing she hangs out by herself in the woods because nobody would want to hang out with her anyway.

Iema is much friendlier and more curious than Natalia, though, so he follows Rendel downstairs and sits down to breakfast.  At this point, Rendel starts kissing Iema’s ass, big-time.  You know, how he’s a big admirer of Iema’s, how he’s heard of him and his great feats, and gosh, he hopes Iema’s heard of him before because it would be such an honor–

And then Iema calls him on it.  You know, the ass-kissing.

Rendel drops all pretenses.  “Okay, you got me,” he says.  “I was hoping you would do me a favor.  I want to you to talk to the graveyard guardian here.”

“Why?” Iema asks.

Rendel then launches into a rather long explanation, but here it is in a nutshell:  He’s trying to find an artifact that was last seen on a monk that passed through Stilldale 150 years ago.  He’s hoping the graveyard guardian, having the ability to “speak” for the dead people in his territory, can give him information about the monk, or, at the very least, set him on the path to follow the monk.

“But I screwed up,” Rendel says.  “I wanted him to talk to me, so I told him I was friends with more known people around here, like Natalia and Roan.  Turns out, he really hate those guys.”

Out of character, I’m still scribbling away, and now I’m rolling my eyes.  If you’ve forgotten, the new graveyard guardian was one of the conscripts that was killed in the 8th game.  He holds a grudge against me–er, Natalia–and Roan for his death during our battle with Mushroostopheles.  So what if he puked his guts out?  Big baby.

Iema, of course, doesn’t know any of this.  All he knows is that this sounds interesting, so he agrees to go on Rendel’s behalf.

So while Natalia’s snoring away upstairs in the inn, Iema and Corin go off to have their own little adventure.  Even though they’re newcomers to the town, they don’t have any trouble locating Stilldale’s graveyard.  They also have no trouble finding the graveyard guardian.

Iema goes straight to the guardian, Corin following closely behind.  Iema introduces himself and asks about the monk.  But because the guardian still has that whole, uh, innards-in-mouth problem, he has a bit of speech impediment now in his afterlife, so he’s difficult to understand.  It takes a few tries before Iema gets it: If he wants the guardian’s help, Iema has to agree to kill someone and bury them in the cemetary.  Iema doesn’t hesitate to agree to this; after all, there’s lot of dead bodies in our line of work.

Note that I just thought WOW, I WISH I COULD SAY THAT ABOUT MY JOB IN REAL LIFE!  And now I think I want to be a mortician.  But I digress.  Moving on.

The guardian says that 150 years ago, there was a man in black robes.  Presumably, that’s the monk.  Anyway, the monk challenge the miller (don’t ask me who these people are or their importance, I’ve NO idea), they fought and then the monk headed south.  After the guardian wraps up the story, he then demands that Iema kill Roan.  Iema hesitates before wisely not commiting himself, only saying, “If the time and opportunity presents itself.”

The guardian doesn’t question it, though, and Iema takes Corin and heads back to the inn.  He finds Rendel and gives what information he managed to get out of the graveyard guardian.  Rendel leaves; Iema waits for Natalia to wake up to tell her about his morning.

Out of character, my spell list is done, so it’s time to hop in character.  I tell Jim that Natalia wakes up, goes downstairs, and meets Iema.  There, Iema gets Natalia caught up with his conversation with the graveyard guardian.

“By the way, why does he hate you and Roan so much?”  Iema asks.

Natalia rolls his eyes.  “He died while we were fighting Mushroostopheles.  He thinks we could have saved him, but we couldn’t.  There wasn’t a damned thing we could do to help him.  I actually think the guardian is the one whose neck Roan snapped, trying to put him out of his misery.”

“Oh,” Iema says, understanding.  “I guess I can see where he’s mad.”

“Yeah,” Natalia agrees, “it was bad–he puked up his guts.  He’s wrong, but it’s understandable.”  She shrugs.  Can’t win them all.

“Well,” Iema says, “I there was a little bit of a catch to talking to the guardian:  He wants me to kill and bury someone in the graveyard as the price.”

“That’s easy enough.”

“But I’m worried that, uh, I’ll be fighting Beta off, with his need to bury the dead and all.”

Natalia and Iema look over at Beta, who, of course, is with Natalia, because he’s pretty much everywhere she goes.  “Beta,” Natalia says.  “Do you think you can hold off burying a body long enough to get one in the graveyard?  And not give Iema or Corin problems with it?”

Beta grunts at first.  He does a lot of that.  But then he answers.  “Yes.”

Like I said, the wolf doesn’t talk much.

Iema has another idea.  Rendel is after an artifact that, he says, is some kind of glove.  I believe it’s call the Coat of Arms.  He suggests that we head off the halfling and try to beat him to the artifact ourselves.  Natalia had been wanting to check on her treehouse since we got cut off last time, but she gives him.  She figures if something happened to her treehouse, it’s done, so there’s no rush.  Meanwhile, heading off the halfling to get this artifact requires that we get moving.

And so we head out.  There was one encounter that made me a little nervous:  While we’re out, we hear thundering hooves.  Iema and Natalia hiss to Corin and Beta to go hide.  As they do, a group of people pass by, about thirty of them, all on white horses and carrying white shields.  I wonder whose side they’re on as they pass.

We travel a ways before resting.  On the night of the 11th, Iema’s keeping most of the watch while we sleep.  Because of that nifty ring of his, Iema only needs two hours of sleep a night.  Damn, I envy that bard.

But not for long, because while Natalia is sleeping, Jim says that Iema looks through the fire and realizes that large feline eyes are peering at him through the fire.  As his eyesight adjusts, Iema discovers the largest sphinx he’s ever seen is keeping him company.

Phil-the-player seems a little panicky.  I’m pretty sure Iema-the-character is, too, but he plays it cool, asking the sphinx politely how to keep it from eating him.  The sphinx makes an obvious deal:  Riddles.  They trade riddles, and if Iema does well, he can live.

Secretly, I’m glad that Phil is the one getting the riddles, not me.  I’m terrible with riddles, mostly because I’ve heard very few in my life and don’t really have the patience to think about them.  Jim, however, is great at riddles, and from what I gather, so is Phil.  Which, Jim will tell me later, long after the game is over, is why he saves the sphinx for Phil.

The problem, though, is that Phil and Jim know most of the same riddles, being friends for well over a decade.  So most of the exchange is Jim and Phil trying to think of riddles the other hasn’t encountered.  Finally, Jim stumps Phil.  Uh, I mean, the sphinx stumps Iema.  And right when the sphinx is getting all gleamy-eyed, Jim says that Iema, Corin, and the sphinx hear the most horrible screeching in the distance.  Jim describes it as the most horrible sound they’ve ever heard, like something between a cat in heat and a woman screaming.

The sphinx glowers at Iema.  “You got lucky,” he says, and he takes off towards the sound.

As it turns out, some of the little tricks that Corin has picked up is ventriloquism!  Corin threw his voice, making it sound like a female sphinx’s mating call in a distance.  And, since I guess female sphinxes are kinda rare, our sphinx felt pretty pressured to answer it.

Iema and Corin don’t wait for the thing to come back.  Quickly, they wake Natalia, snuff out the fire, and we move camp.

Briezen the 12^th

By Briezen the 12th, we finally make it far enough south of Stilldale to make it to a town I have never heard of, Kalphur.  “Have I ever been here before?” I ask Jim.

“No,” Jim laughs at me, “you marched right up to the town, then turned around and went back.”

And then I remember: When Raelan and Natalia were going back and forth on the road, looking for clues about who was attacking people on the roads. Oh.  You’d think we would have noticed the town, heh.

Anyway, Jim gives us a little description about this town.  It’s right in the foothills of the Caldron mountains.  My Spidey sense starts tingling.  The Caldron mountains…aren’t these the ones big-assed giants live in and all sorts of nasty things? 

Actually, I’m probaby wrong, confusing them with some other mountains or something else entirely.  Someone should step on my Spidey sense.

Jim continues.  The town, he says, has four roads going through it, north, south, east, and west.

“Like a crossroads?”  Phil asks.

Jim nods.  “Exactly.”

“Well, now that we’re here,” Iema says, “that halfling gave me a great idea.”  He suggests we go look for Kalphur’s graveyard guardian.  Natalia agrees, and the four of us make a beeline for the town’s cemetary.  Which, incidentally, is even nicer than the one in Stilldale.  Except, that, you know, looking around, you can quickly discover it’s also a communal execution site.

Speaking of, there’s a man hanging in the gallow.  Ieam, not squeamish in the least (probably especially when there’s an artifact to be had, haha), marches right up to the hanging man and asks if he’s the graveyard guardian.  As luck would have it, he is.

The man takes the rope off, and his head immediately rolls around.  We hear bones cracking.  Natalia cringes and hangs back.  She and I have already learned that it’s best to let Iema do the talking.

Iema ignores the man’s condition and instead asks about the monk.  The man, though, only asks questions himself:  Why?  What?  Why what?  Why who?  Iema goes in circles trying to figure out how to “break” this man’s code, to get him to speak, but neither of us can figure out the trick.  The man finally sighs and gives up.  He puts the noose back around his neck and, um, returns to hanging.  Yeah, if that’s not an indicator that a conversation hasn’t gone well, I don’t know what is.

We head into town, find a bar.  Iema gets drinks, asks the bartender if he has any idea how to get that graveyard guardian to talk.

“Hell if I know,” the bartender says, “but I’ll tell you something.  Criminals that are hanged next to him…he rubs on them and kisses them while they die.”

Holy shit, that’s all kinds of disburbing.

The bartender keeps talking to Iema.  He tells Iema that he’s heard that the Northern Numbraran armies have been coming through.  Natalia remembers the soliders in white that we passed, and she sends Julium a warning message via her dragonhead clasp.  She’s not sure if who they had seen was the Northern Numbrarans or if they were coming to collect the bounty on Julium’s head, but she wasn’t taking chances, either.

As soon as Natalia sends the message to Julium, Jim tells me that Natalia receives a message from Grugor on her clasp.  Myconids under attack by elves and paladins.  Advise.

Aw, shit.  Natalia rushes up to Iema, telling him the message, telling him that we need to go back–fast.

Briezen the 13^th

Because Natalia’s dragonhead clasp will only allow her to sent one message a day, she has to wait until Briezen the 13th before replying to Grugor.  We head out, and she sends one to him, telling him that we’re on our way back to help defend the myconids.  I feel oddly irritated by this whole situation.  Who would attack little mushroom guys?!  EVIL PEOPLE, THAT’S WHO.  We keep going back toward Natalia’s treehouse, rolling for encounters along our way.  One of the encounters is where we run into a man who tells us that there are Caldram foreigners in Stilldale.  Huh.  Weird.  We press on until we get to Stilldale with no real problems.

Here, Jim says we need to rest for the night.  Sensing my unease at the idea, Jim says we could also do something called force march.  I had never heard of this, so they explained it to me:  It’s where you need to rest, but you need to keep going anyway.  You have to roll for checks, but if you fail, you take subdual damage.  And I was all like hey!  I remember subdual damage!  I’m all bad ass now!  But, of course, I forgot where the box was to mark that on my sheet, so Phil had to tell me.   D’oh!

Incidentally, I needed to know where the box was because, yeah…I didn’t make my checks or saves or whatever.  I was all “subdualled,” haha.

We get to my treehouse.  The myconids are there and, yes, they’ve been under attack, although they no longer are.  They tell us that they were attacked by men and elves, and that Grugor is at Raelan’s, battling over there.  Currently, in the main myconid cave, there are attacks.  We force march our way to the cave.

We hear the battle before we even get there.  At the cave, we find a group of elves with armo of bones and shells pulling the palisade from the mouth of their cave.  Behind it, the myconids were ready for battle.  Those are some tough mother-fungi.  SHIT JUST GOT REAL, MOFOS.

We rolls for initiatives, and I pray I get to go first.  I’m all huffy about someone attacking my myconids.  Luckily, my prayers have been answered (I guess Natalia should thank her god, Lolmoro, heh) and I get to go first.  I jump in first thing with an Ice Storm to five rangers on the right and three barbarians carrying great swords, causing 19 points of damage.  Not the best Ice Storm can do, but it’s not too bad, either, I guess.

Beta charges in and kills one of the great sword guys right off the bat.  Sadly, because we’ve caused so much commotion, the rangers start right in on us, and the barbarians rush us.  Jim says when we see them running towards us, we discover that they’re elves with painted faces and bones rattling in their hair.  He says we’ve never seen elves go psychotic like this, and we have to make will saves.  Natalia makes both of hers, but Beta fails.  Four of the elves end up on Beta, and they all hit, bringing my poor wolf down from 99 hit points to–I kid you not–three.  In one round. 

At this point, Corin, who is invisible, does another voice-throwing trick, mimicing the sound of something that sounds like a screech owl.  Jim says that the thing Corin is imitating is associated with Silduggis and is, and I quote, “evil as fuck.”

The myconids are up next.  They finally come out of their cave, but only to try to pull their fallen wall back up.

With all the chaos about, when it comes Natalia’s turn, I’m debating what to do.  I was thinking of casting Entangle to do a little crowd control.  Phil suggested that it might be time to bring out the brown bear.  So Natalia transforms into a bear, while Beta attacks another barbarian.  Iema casts improved invisibility on himself; luckily, the readied actions the archers to stop his spellcasting fail.  Meanwhile, a little further away, the barbarians drop Beta, bringing him down to -10 hit points.  Once her pup is down, they turn to Natalia and bring her from a shit ton of hit points down the 49.

This is when I realize that turning into a bear at this point in the game was a bad, bad move.  But it’s too late now.  Beta is now dead.  Iema tries his best to help Natalia, casting Cure Serious Wounds on her, but more arrows fly and bury themselves into Natalia.  Natalia dies, reverting back to her human form as she collapses onto the ground. 

Now it’s just Iema and Corin.  Iema, understandably, is nervous.  Luckily, both he and Corin are still invisible.  The myconids aren’t really helping out here, and they’re also not having much luck putting their wall back up.  Corin attacks the best we can, and we see–well, Iema sees, since Natalia is dead–a bad guy stagger forward.  Iema jumps in with a song to inspire courage and takes down another barbarian. 

It’s not like anyone can see where Iema and Corin are, so the rangers decide to turn their arrows on the myconids.  Iema and Corin keep at it, Iema stabbing one, and Corin finishing off another.  Suddenly, they hear a loud BOOM, BOOM, BOOM!  They both turn to see a gigantic mushroom guy running down toward them.  At first, they’re like oh shit because they aren’t for sure which side the Big Shroom was on–until he starts to body slam the elves.  WOOT.

Now the bad guys are turning their attention on the big fella.  They try to attack, but Big Shroom moves lightning fast, garroting one ranger with his own bow and stabbing the other in the eye with the same bow.  (Jim’s very descriptive with the details, as you can tell, lol.)  Relieved that Big Shroom appears to be on their side, Iema takes out yet another elf, and Big Shroom stomps through another one’s chest.   There are three elves left–and now they’re running.

Big Shroom throws a rock at them.  They’re gone.

Now it’s just Iema, Corin, the regular-sized myconids, and Big Shroom.  Iema and Corin make themselves visible to Big Shroom.  Iema realizes that myconids talk telepathically–and he needs to talk to Big Shroom.

“Corin,” he says, “if this doesn’t work…sing songs about me.”  And Iema takes off his ring of mind shielding.

Immediately, Big Shroom “spoofs” sports onto Iema so they can talk.  He demands to know where Iema is from.  He also wants to know who sent the elves.  While Iema can answer the first question, he cannot answer the second.  Big Shroom informs Iema that the psycho elves are called Hakal elves, who live deep in the wilderness and hate society.

Everyone suspects that Vueliss is behind this.  Iema agrees to help Big Shroom go after Vueliss and that he’ll get Natalia resurrected.  The problem is that Iema doesn’t know how he’s going to get her back to town.  Big Shroom says he’ll take care of the wolf, but “spoofs” an image to Iema of himself, back when he was a smaller myconid, yelling at Gurgor and Natalia while she was putting things in the portable hole inside her cloak.

“Oh, she has a portable hole,” Iema says, realizing why Big Shroom is conveying that image.  He walks over to Natalia’s corpse, rummages through her cloak, pulls out the portable hole, and dumps her body in it.  “Sorry, Natalia!”   Iema realizes that Big Shroom is gonna do some sort of undead thing to Beta and decides it’s best to let Natalia take care of him herself, once she’s alive again.  He dumps Beta in the hole with her.

Iema and Corin start heading back to Stilldale.   While rolling, Phil gets one encounter.  Jim says they hear clopping sounds.  Turns out to be white armored paladins donned in symbols of Lolmoro.  Lolmoro, incidentally, is Natalia’s god.  They stop briefly to talk to Phil and Corin.  A man named Sir Dauphis tells Iema and Corin that there’s much more afoot in the forest beside the Spruce Circle and that they should stay away from the woods.  Gee, thanks.

When the bard and his apprentice make it to Stilldale, they notice that there’s smoke coming from the small town.  They go into town, make a beeline for the temple, which now has doors battered in and houses injured people.  Iema looks around, but he doesn’t see Roan anywhere.

Iema doesn’t have a lot of healing spells left, but he uses what he has to help the clerics that are there heal people up.  One thankful cleric tells Iema that Roan went to Devies to tell Julium what had happened to Stilldale.  The cleric then (thankfully!) resurrects Natalia.  And, oh joy, I get to roll on the Shit Went Wrong table.  I roll.  Jim looks it up.  He then tells me that when Natalia comes back, she comes back withdrawn, selfish, and possessive.  He says I’ve got the withdrawn down–that’s pretty much me anyway–but that I would have to work on the selfish and possessive aspects of the roleplaying.  (I have a tendency to just let people take loot.)

After Natalia’s back up and running, a little more chatting reveals that the Cadram envoys, the ones that Julium is trying to work with, have been kidnapped.  Natalia half-listens while Reincarnating Beta.  When I roll to see what he comes back as, he comes back as a human man.  He’s completely naked.  And no, Beta is not interested in being a man, thank you very much.  However, polymorphing him into a human is something Natalia can’t do, so we agree that we’ll have to find a wizard to polymorph him.  However, for tonight, he will be a naked man.

“I guess we should go to bed,” Natalia says.  Then she pauses.  “Except, uh, Beta…I’m thinking tonight, you shouldn’t sleep with me.  Being a naked guy and all.”

So we sleep apart.  During the night, we notice that Beta thrashes around in his sleep.  And that’s how we find out what he rolled on the Shit Went Wrong table: He now requires more sleep.

Guess it could be worse.

Briezen the 14^th

This morning, Iema has an idea to find Rendel, since we don’t have Raelan around to polymorph Beta.  We hunt the halfling down.  It isn’t too hard to convince him to change Beta back to a wolf.

Once we’re done with that, Natalia sends Julium a clasp-message that we’re coming to Devies.  Turns out, I wasted my once-a-day message on the dragon clasp, as Julium shows up in Stilldale about 10 minutes later.  We meet up with him.  He says that things are going badly.  There are attacks from both the Circle and Northern Numbrar.  Northern Numbrar managed to bypass the cities and invaded Kugai, a very sturdy, well-defended hobgoblin fortress.  Also, Vueliss has issued an ultimatum that if every building is not dismantled and all the people gone very soon, the druids will start a war.

GRRRRR.  Talk about giving druids a bad name.

Julium also worries aloud to us that the kidnapped envoys will look like Julium was in on the scheme and his alliance with Cadram will be destroyed.  We all agree that the paladins and Vueliss cannot be working together–Vueliss is very definitely evil and a paladin wouldn’t work with him–and that Vueliss is the bigger threat right now.  And then for the agreement that Natalia has been looking foward to FOREVER:  We make plans to meet over at Raelan’s, and then head over for a little showdown with the Spruce Circle. 

Before we do so, we also make sure the the myconids are on board.  Big Shroom is definitely in, stating they’ll meet us on the Circle territory.  Before we leave, they stop us, giving us little mushroom puff balls that act like potions: one for protection from the elements, one of lesser restoration, and one that removes blindness/deafness.

We thank them for their generosity, then head over to Raelan’s, prepared for war.

DA DA DUM.  And the battle continues…in the next game.

Welcome to the 17th installment of “Homebrewed,” brought to you by exhaustion and Coke.  And not the illegal kind, either, although I suspect it would do something about my exhaustion.  At any rate, probably not a good combination, and certainly not as good as Cthulhu like the last game, but there you have it.  In this game, Iema, Natalia, Raelan, and Corin are still at the mage fair, which is quickly coming to a close.  Which is fine.  I think we’ve seen enough mystical carnies for a lifetime.  If you have no clue what I’m talking about, you can check out the last “Homebrewed” here.

 Briezen the 5^th

Okay, peeps.  Since I have to crunch out two “Homebrewed” in a very short period of time, we’re going to play a little game.  It’ll be called how much Homebrewed can Spring pump out super-duper fast?  Except it won’t be fun and it won’t be resembling a porn title like that name I just came up with.

So!  Without further ado:

It’s the final day of the mage fair.  I announce to Jim that I want to Awaken Beta.  I’d explain it to you, but I’m pumpin’, people!  Hence, the link, click it if you’re interested.  Long story short:   Beta now has human-like sentience.  Couple that with the warbeast template Jim used to “upgrade” Beta, he’s much more beefed up.  Jim says to tell you all that it adds 2 hit dice, +3 strength, +3 con, and trains him to accept a rider. 

However, this spell requires me to stare at my panting doggie in the dirt all day.  So that’s how Natalia spends her last day at the mage fair.  Which means that the last day at the mage fair saw way more action from Iema and Corin than Natalia.  Let us commence:

This is a story about a man and his boy…

Er.  Let’s not do that.  It sounds very, um…”ancient Greek,” yes?

This is a story about a bard and his apprentice…

You see how I “justify their love”?  Hahaha!  KIDDING.  KIDDING.  Okay, seriously.  PUMPING.  While Natalia is getting a faceful of dog-breath, Iema and Corin go to the admin tent to tell Jovos that the druid-killers are gone.    However, Jovos isn’t there.  Lasiter tells Iema and Corin that Jovos left in a hurry, only advising that Jovos thought it best not to stick around.  He then gives a lumpy black metal with some windy pieces sticking out of it to Iema as payment, tells Iema to do whatever he wants with it.  Lasiter isn’t in the mood for pleasantries; he’s also rushed.  Iema does detect magic, and by the third round of it, Jim says it shuts down.  Iema feels like his eyes are getting sucked out, like the object literally absorbed his detect magic spell.  Corin checks it out and announces that it’s fever iron, which is immune to magic.  Fever iron, he says, is adamantite that is hit by lightning.  There’s quite a bit of is in Corin’s homeland, the Jade Islands.

Iema decides he wants to show Raelan and Uliver his new prize.  He and Corin head back to Uliver’s.  Jim says there’s some sort of invisible shield in front of the door, so he can’t get in.  Which, Iema is about to find out, is lucky.  He calls for Raelan’s help, and as soon as Raelan sees him with the metal lump, he shrieks, “ARE YOU CRAZY?  GET THAT OUT OF HERE!”   He takes his staff and pushes Iema further back from the door.

And that’s how Iema and Corin find out that not only is fever iron immune to magic, but the larger the piece, the more unpredictable it is.  This one is large enough to undo Uliver’s PORTABLE MANSION (always in caps, remember?) and kill all of them.  Good thing they have the invisible shield, eh?

Iema explains where he got the fever iron and remarks that Jovos left in a hurry.

“That’s it!  Everyone get out!”  Uliver panicks, waving people out the door.  “If someone like Jovos was nervous enough to rush out of here, there’s no way I’m sticking around.”  As soon as everyone is shoved out of the door, Uliver teleports the hell out of there.

(Chicken.)

Iema wants to know more about the fever iron, and since Corin mentioned that there were lots in the Jade Islands, Iema decides that a wizard from the Jade Islands would be the best bet.  He meanders around the fair until he finds one.  When he asks her for her assistance, she seems suspcious at first.  She asks if he’s a “dine,” which I guess is a Shotenese noble. (Sidenote:  Jim describes the country of Shoten is being very Japanese-like in nature.)  Iema admits that he isn’t, that he didn’t always see eye-to-eye with his people and chose the bardic life instead.  He asks for information on the metal; or, if she would like, she can purchase it from him.  The Jade Islander wizard then talks to Corin in their native tongue.  Corin pulls out that nice dagger we bought him a couple games ago.  She turns to Iema.  “You know this is not an artifact, right?  It’s just a magical weapon.”

Iema did not know.  Neither did I.  Hell, in this part of the game, Phil and Jim had to explain to me what an artifact was in the D&D world.  Because I didn’t know already, I couldn’t share in Phil’s disappointment because I always thought it was just a nice dagger in the first place.  See, ignorance really is bliss!

The wizard goes back to talking to Corin in Jade Islander again.  Corin then turns to Iema and explains that since Iema came to her to buy the iron, he must want the sale more, and so she thinks Iema should offer her something.  Personally, while I was listening to this and taking notes, and I was thinking 1) what a money-grubbing bitch, and 2) she would totally be my mom’s idol, hehe.  (Not, uh, that my mom’s a bitch because she’s seriously the sweetest woman on the planet, but she IS the coupon queen.)  Anyway, Iema agrees to give her information on Shoten.  It’s not like there’s any love lost between him and his country, anyway, from the sounds of things.

Something that I noticed Iema is very good at:  People will demand information from him, and he’ll freely give it, but whether they mean to or not, they always end up giving him information, too.  I guess that comes with being a bard.  And I don’t think this woman intended to give him information, but she did.  She started talking about the Jade Islander legend of the Green Keel, which (she says), is not a myth.  The Green Keel is a boat that (again, she says) is alive.  She says it can do things that other boats cannot.  Example:  Long ago, giants sailed out of Fasset along the Nubraran coast and to Jade Islands.  Only the Green Keel was larger than any of their boats.  Turns out the giants weren’t completely stupid; upon seeing the Green Keel, they turns tail and left.  The Green Keel followed them, headed them off.  Eventually, the giants lost the Green Keel.  Or so they thought–when they finally arrived at their own ports, the Green Keel was waiting for them.  It sank every one of their vessels.

I was impressed listening to Jim-as-the-lady-wizard tell this story.  Now that is shit legends are made of.  That also explains why the Jade Islands are considered the masters of the sea in this world.

After they’re done swapping stories, Iema asks the wizard for her name.  She only introduces herself as the Gray Lady.  She leaves.

“Corin,” Iema says, looking a little embarrassed (or I imagine he does anyway, heh), “just so you know…it turns out that dagger isn’t an artifact.”

As it turns out, Corin already knows.  Hell, he probably figured it out before we did.  After all, he’s a smart kid–WAY smarter than Natalia.

Back in my dirt-patch on the night of the 5th, Natalia’s spell is complete.  I finally talk to Beta, aloud, like a human, for the first time.  Guess what?  He doesn’t have much to say.  

Briezen the 6^th-9^th

By the 6th, the fair is over, and Raelan chooses to go hang out with his wizard-friends at some bar rather than go with Iema, Natalia, and Corin.  I imagine he’s gotta rub robed-elbows or something to get ahead in the world.  Whatever–we’re leaving, but to make things go a little faster, Natalia turns into a horse so Iema can ride her (keep your dirty thoughts to yourself) and Corin hops on Beta.

In a day or so, we reach Derrikol again.  No encounters.  We keep going.  The second day is also uneventful.  We keep on truckin’.  Finally, Phil rolls a 12 on a D12, which means we’ve got an encounter, folks.  And a nasty one at that.

We don’t have have time to size up the enemy; we’re straight into combat as an arrow flies through the air and pins Iema’s arm to his side.  He falls off Natalia-the-horse and lands on the ground.  Another arrow sails through the air and hits Corin.  He slides off Beta and is also knocked out.  Natalia looks over to see who has attacked us.  She recognizes it as a forest giant, about 18 feet tall.  ZOMG.

Immediately, Natalia summons a dire lion, who charges the giant while Natalia shifts back.  Beta also lunches in, bets, and tries to trip the giant.  She just shakes him off, turning instead toward the dire lion, and killing it.

Damn.  DAMN.  Just like that, huh?

The giant then announces that this land belongs to the Spruce Circle.  Natalia shapeshifts back into her human form.  “I am part of the Spruce Circle!”  she spits out.  “Ask them!”

The giant eyes her warily.  “Then what is the leader’s name?”

In real life, this took scrambling on mine and Phil’s parts to try to remember his name.  Jim, by the way, was not going to help us on this.  After much swearing up and down to Jim that he would TOTALLY NOT GET LAID IF I DIE IN THIS COMBAT, I remember:  “Vueliss.”

Satisified with that answer, the giant says that she can leave but Corin and Iema can’t.  Then, deciding that would be too merciful, she changes it to Natalia can live but she has to kill Iema and Corin.  And, in typical Natalia-fashion, she refuses the giant flatout–and resumes combat.  Between Natalia and Beta, we get some bites in as well as a Poison and eventually bring the giant down.  Corin and Iema wake up.  While Natalia heals herself and Beta up, Iema collects the loot.  Turns out the giant has lots of loot.  I’d tell ya about it, but I don’t record the loot.  You’d have to ask Phil.

Now, the giant also had some interesting stuff on her that I did make note of:  Elven bread and leaf rations, furthering evidence that the Spruce Circle is, indeed, behind attacks on travellers in the forest.  Natalia explains to Iema what happened while he and Corin were out.  Corin seems quickly grasp how pissed Vueliss is going to be if he finds out we just killed his giant.

“Gee,” he jokes nervously, “it’s too bad she fell on her own club.”

We all laugh but quickly agree we need to get rid of the corpse.  Beta attempts to bury her, but she’s too big.  Finally, Beta suggests that we burn her.  We set up a funeral pyre and leave the scene as quickly as we can.

Brizen the 10^th

We finally get to Devies.  When we get there, the gates are closed.  The guards demand our names.  I’m not doing well with names today, and I try to remember the little nickname that the townspeople of Stilldale gave me.  Finally, I remember, and Natalia says, “Natalia the Stillwitch.”  Wincing while she says it, incidentally.

With that, they let us in  but quickly close the gates behind us.  As soon as we’re in, Beta dumps Corin on the ground.  Just because he accepts riders now doesn’t mean he likes it.

“Hey,” Natalia scolds him, “could you at least give Corin a little warning next time before dumping him like that?”

Beta grunts in response.

Around us, there are lots of people walking around in armor.  A guard approaches us, telling us that he’s been instructed to bring us into the hall.  We go with him.  The City Hall has changed since Natalia last saw it, as now it is covered in scorch marks.  We go inside to a room with a circular table and a map of the world.  Sitting at the table is Julium.

Awesome.  Just the person we wanted to see.

This is Iema’s first time meeting Julium.  He seems impressed.  Behind Julium is Allista, peering at Iema strangely.  She tilts her head.  It dawns on me at thsi point–and probably Phil, too–that Allista, the ultimate mind-reader, is probably wondering what’s keeping her from reading Iema’s mind.  (Remember his ring of mind-shielding?)  Of course, we’re also probably reminded of this because Jim suddenly asks Phil which hand Iema is wearing the ring on.  (Answer: right hand.)

At this point, Jerth, Julium’s cohort, steps forward and introduces himself, shaking Iema’s hand.  Suddenly, Jim has Phil run some sort of check, one that I didn’t catch.  I guess Phil failed it because he feels a rummaging inside his brain.  Apparently, Corin feels it, too.  “What the heck is THAT?” he says, shaking his head.

Jerth politely returns Iema’s ring to him.  Apparently, he had swiped the ring of Iema’s finger during the introductions.  “Sorry about that,” he says to Iema, “but we have to be careful.”

“They’re clean,” Allista announces.

Once it’s been verified to Julium that Iema and Corin aren’t traitors or out to get him, the gossip begins.  We tell him about the mage fair, Raelan’s presentations and their potentials, how he has potential allies in the Palm Circle, how we met a Lady Harod of the Guild of Scholars, who told us he was wanted–

“She’s dead,” Julium says.  “She was found rended outside on the gates.”

Oh.  Poor lady.  Even if I was suspicious of her wanting to get Julium, she seemed all right otherwise.

Julium continues that he needs to take care of Vueliss.  Julium is trying to deal with Cadram and bury a very old hatchet with them in order to proceed with his plans, but Vueliss’s attacks are making it difficult.  He wants to send Natalia in to talk to him.  She sincerely hopes by “talking” to Vueliss, Julium actually means skinning that evil elf Willow-style.  (Er, Buffy reference, if you didn’t catch it.  Sorry.  Just know that it’s gross and evil and he’ll be very, very dead.)

Before she forgets, Natalia sends  a message to Raelan via her clasp, letting him know to be careful in the woods.  Something that makes me infinitely more nervous:  The druids want everyone outside the Spurce Circle dead, which would include wizards.  Raelan’s tower is protected from being found by everyone but druids.  Ugh.  That’s a nightmare waiting to happen.

We decide to go to bed, as it’s in the wee hours of Briezen the 10th (I think) that we get into town, so we wake up on the actual morning-morning of Briezen the 10th the next day.  The first thing Natalia does is cast Greater Magic Fang on Beta.  I want to check out my treehouse to see how it’s holding up.  Iema agrees to go with.  On our way to the treehouse, we get an encounter. 

Jim says we hear arrows flying.  This scenario is eerily familiar.  But it’s worse:  This time, an arrow goes right through Corin’s temple, killing him instantly.  Iema soon after finds himself stuffed with two arrows himself.

Ahead of us, we find 13 people.  There’s a bunch assembled, 4 men across, 3 lines deep.  Behind them, there’s a sergeant or something of sorts.  They’re all human and in uniform.

The sergeant yells, “Surrender!”

“On whose authority?” Iema yells back, hopping of Natalia-the-horse.

Sensing that I’m being ignore because they think I’m an actual horse, I tell Jim and that Natalia is going to wander off into some bushes, shapeshift back, and wait to see if she’s needed for spells or anything.  Before she wanders off, she signals to Beta to stay with Iema.

The sergeant yells back that his name is Sgt. Oshwin.  Ever the diplomat, Iema asks if he can talk to Sgt. Oshwin personally to discuss our terms of surrender.

Suddenly, we hear footsteps of someone running wildly towards the scene.   Then we hear then screaming.  Then we see a tall, gangly orc with tattoos on his face jump in from behind and start going ballistic.

“It’s Grugor!” I say excitedly.  Grugor is defintely, by far, my favorite.  We haven’t had in our game in what seems like AGES, so I’m glad to see him back. 

Grugor jumps in on the sergeant and gets hit hard.  Iema quickly dives into battle by casting hast and improved invisibility.  Natalia, from the bushes, casts Ice Storm.  Which, by the way, is a lovely spells, causes lots of damage to lots of people–I highly recommend it for some awesome SLAUGHTER.

Another arrow comes from nowhere, but this time, it’s not on Team Evil–it actually is aimed for the sergeant’s neck.  It hits.  Blood pours out of his mouth and he keels over.  We quickly look around, but we have no idea who aided us. 

Not that we had much time to find out.  There is, after all, twelve other people to contend with.  Beta gets some bites and trips in.  Natalia is still at her secret spot, doing Flame Strike now.  Iema, invisible at this point, dodges the bad guys and gets Grugor back up and running.  One of the baddies tries to run away, but the moron gives Beta an attack of opportunity, which Beta took, killing the guy swiftly.  Good pup!

More soliders try to run away.  Iema casts haste on Grugor.  We think the idea of a hasted, raging half-orc barbarian is hilarlious.  Iema also heals Grugor up.  He’s doing way more healing in this battle than Natalia is, that’s for sure.  Speaking of, Natalia is now casting Entangle because the rest of the soliders are starting to flee.  Sadly, Grugor is the only one who fails his reflex save and thus the only one who actually gets entangled.  Beta runs toward the men and also gets entangled.

SIGH.

Still, though, Beta at least manages to get another guy nearby and kill him.  Meanwhile, Natalia casts another Entangle.  (Yes, I love Entangle so much that I usually keep about 3 on my spell list at all times.)  This time, the Entangle catches the remaining guy.  Iema sneaks up behind the remaining guy and, as Phil says, does “sticky sticky” with his weapon. 

Beta finally gets out of breaks out of his Entanglement and Natalia dispels Grugor’s.  (It took a little bit for me to remember that I could do that.)  Grugor doesn’t waste time.  He rushes towards the remaining baddie, lifts Beta out of the way (no small feat, considering that my wolf is the size of a horse), and finishes the last guy off.

The poor Grugor collapses to the gorund, panting.  Between me and Iema, we get the half-orc healed up.  We loot.  One of the objects is a signet ring, identifying the sergeant as the fourth son of…someone.  I don’t remember.  I’m sure Jim will remind me in the notes.

Speaking of Oshwin, when we check him and the mystery arrow out, which, incidentally, is still sticking out of him, we see that it’s causing his veins to turn black.  Creepy.  And ew. 

Finally, a moment for pleasantries.  “Hi, Grugor!”  Natalia says.

He waves.  “Hi, Natalia!”

Okay, moment over.  “Do you know where this arrow came from?” Iema asks.

“No,” Grugor says, “but I see dem before.  Never archer, though.”

We see no signs of the mysteriously helpful killer about, but we decide not to waste time looking, either.  The treehouse is going to have to wait.  Natalia turns into a horse, carrying Iema and the dead Corin back to town.  Grugor rids Beta.  At first, Beta looks grumpy about it, but Grugor whispers something to him, and suddenly, Beta goes racing off.  Later, Grugor will explain to Natalia that orcs are good with wolves or something to that extent.

Hm.  Wonder if Natalia should be jealous, ha.  The newly-awakened Beta seems to have taken more quickly to Grugor than Natalia, in some ways.

Instead of going to Devies, this time, we head to Stilldale, where we know Roan is.  We get there with no problems.  When we do get there and find her, she sees Corin, and the presses upon us the dangers of bringing kids on our adventures.

Iema is almost apologetic.  “I know,” he says.  “But the boy insists on coming with us.  It’s what he wants.”

“Besides,” Natlaia adds, “he’s at the age where he can decide for himself.”  Note, by the way, the SPRING does not believe that thirteen year olds can decide SQUAT for themselves.  But Jim had once explained to me that thirteen was considered an adult where Corin is from; therefore, Natalia feels it’s perfectly within reason to treat Corin as such.

Roan resurrects Corin.  He gets up, confused.  Then he walks around stiffly.

“Oh, no,” I groan, “Corin’s a zombie!”

Thankfully, I’m just stupid: After rolling on the Shit Gone Bad table, Corin just gets -2 to initiative.  Way better than a zombie.

While Corin is trying to unstiffen himself (not an uncommon dilemma for a 13 year old boy, I’m told, haha), Roan tells us that Stilldale hasn’t had any vistors recently.  We tell her the sitaution in the woods, how we were attacked by the forest giant on behalf of the Spruce Circle, and how we were ambushed while trying to get to my treehouse.  Suddenly, it makes sense to Roan why Stilldale hasn’t had visitors.  Personally, I’m starting to think it’s better if it doesn’t.

And here concludes the 17th game of “Homebrewed,” rushed, yes, but hey, I’m DONE WITH THE PUMPIN’.  Another dilemma Corin could relate to, I’m sure.