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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!

Jim is starting a new series on his blog called “Spotlight on Valt,” where he details the different countries in his D&D world.  I know I, for one, will be reading it.  He’s got a very realistic political background unfolding while Natalia and Iema are off adventuring, so it would be good for me to know.  (And for other gamers to use.)

Also, the contest is still going on at Dakka Dakka.  For anyone who is a member of that forum, vote for Jim!  His army is called the Tombstone Sentinels.

I guess I should post something in here other than “Homebrewed” posts, particularly because 1) the last two posts have been “Homebrewed” posts, and 2) I plan on posting another one tomorrow.  That’s the key word, by the way: plan.  As we all know, I plan for lots of things.  Doesn’t mean much.

However, I’m not so good at the wedding-planning.  Jim and I did decide on a date, though:  April 30th, 2011.  It was kinda random.  We were driving to get some lunch, and I just suddenly flipped open my checkbook and said, “Okay, Jim: spring or fall?”

I thought for sure he would say fall, since it’s his favorite season (hold the Spring jokes, please!) and, being a guy, I thought he’d want to push it off as long as possible.  Silly me.  Jim is not the typical guy.  He really wants to get married sooner rather than later, and he was very specific about the time frame, picking either April or May.  He knows I don’t want to do the typical “June bride” thing.

Funny thing: It turns out that although we hadn’t discussed it before, we both had been thinking April 30th in the back of our minds.  WEIRD.  What are the chances of that happening?  (Yeah, yeah, one out of 365.  I know.  Smart ass.)

So we have a date, and today, Jim gave me a ring.  We’ll have to have it resized.  We actually took a peek at wedding bands for the first time online today.  Jim likes the silver-looking ones better than the gold ones, so we’ve agreed to price them, and if we find some we like, we’ll just get the setting on my engagement ring changed to something that somewhat matches.

And…yeah, that’s as far as we’ve gotten on that subject.  Every once in a while, I try to look at dresses online but…well…I hate clothes.  And dresses.  And I get bored and go do something else.

You know how there are some women that you suspect might be only getting married for the actual wedding?  Yeah, I am not one of those women.  This all just sounds like work.  I can’t understand why we can’t just get hitched in someone’s backyard, eat Boca Burgers (meat for the carnivores), and eat Hostess Cupcakes instead. 

(Well, Spring, that would be because Hostess Cupcakes have beef fat in them, which we don’t eat.)

(Good point, Spring.  You know-it-all bitch.)

Okay, then!  Other stuff.  Um.  This weekend was busy.  When I wasn’t being bitchy, that is.  And I really was.  Even I was like WTF?  What happened to me?  But when I wasn’t being a total jerk, I was cooking.  The menu for the weekend?  Chocolate chips cookies and homemade macaroni and cheese.  Proof of the process:

It’s a little blurry, and no, I didn’t take pictures of the final product.  The only reason why I have this is because I became bored and remembered that I had a digital camera, and that, you know, I really should use it sometime.  Which is how I also got the following picture:

I have to admit, I mostly made the cookies because I was such a brat this weekend, Jim deserved an apology.  Did I have some of this “apology”?  Damn straight I did!  I cannot tell a lie: I make some pretty good cookies.

In other news, Jim got into a contest over at Dakka Dakka.  (I guess it’s limited to only so many people.)  But he got in, and I got some pictures of him working on his Space Marine logo thingamabob.  I got pictures of that as well, like this one:

Muhahaha!  Look at me, I’m totally getting use out of my digital camera.  I’m pretty sure that Jim’s gonna kill me for putting that up.

Oh, and speaking of contests, I apparently won the Hearthstone soap contest over at Chronic Geek.  WOOT.  And I didn’t even mean to, I just wanted to tell my creepy-weird-funny Warcraft story.  But next time, I’m gonna smell good while telling it.

Er, okay, I gotta go.  Jim wants me to get off the computer.  He actually wants to–gasp!–hang out with me.  Who’da thunk?

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.

Well, our game is tonight, and I never managed to get last week’s “Homebrewed” up.  Bah.  The overtime is just kicking me in the butt.  I’ll try to catch up this weekend, but as tired as I’ve been, it’s best not to promise anything.  However, Jim has updated his blog here and here about Grugor’s and Iema’s gods respectively.  Yay for supplemental material.

Why, yes, it IS another “Homebrewed,” and yes, so soon.  The day after our game, in fact.  Gotta pick my brain while the pickins are good.  Right now, Iema and Natalia are still at the mage fair, enjoying their friend Raelan’s presentation and searching for more clues on Chenestes.  However, every time we’re moseying along, minding our own business, something gets in the way.  Most recently: Some suspicious-looking guy standing over our new, disintegrated friend, Althris.  Lost?  Catch up with part 15, located here.      

Briezen the 4^th      

This game is brought to you by…CTHULHU!  Seriously.  Look:      

A big shout-out and thank you goes to Ruth, from whom I ordered this crocheted awesomeness.  I was opening the package right when we were getting ready for our next “Homebrewed” game.  And I have to say, we were all very impressed with it.  It’s even cuter in real life than in the pictures.  Initially, when I told Jim that I was ordering a crocheted cthulhu, he was doubtful.  But when I handed it to him, he was like, “WOW.  That IS cute.”  Good thing he loves it, since I really bought it for him, heh.  Phil also took a look at it, said he’d like one for his desk.  I’m half-tempted to order another one later on.  For anyone else who is interested, Ruth’s Etsy store is here.  Help fund a fellow geek!  I highly recommend it.       

But, alas, as bad ass as Cthulhu is, I doubt he can take on Gremlin.  I’ve seen what that kitten has done to my crochet swatches.  And Gremlin was already circling the scene, so Cthulhu didn’t stick around for the game–he went up on the bookshelf, where he would be safe.      

So, onto the game:  Iema and Natalia wake up in the PORTABLE MASION.  Sorry, but you cannot say PORTABLE MANSION without caps.  Or shouting at the top of your lungs.  It’s just too awesome.  So we wake up and go downstairs.  There, we find the kids already up.  The little girl is playing with Beta, while Corin is fiddling with a multi-colored disk that looks like the one The Thing tried to use during our encounter with him.      

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that part, didn’t I?  The Thing had a disk that he was trying to use to Plane Shift out of there when he realized that being mauled by a dire lion and a druid-gone-wild wasn’t exactly what he wanted out of life.  Well, Thing, sorry, but if I cannot Plane Shift my ass out of my cubicle during the week, you don’t get to Plane Shift your ass out of your untimely demise.  Only fair.      

Anyway, that is another clue that, perhaps, you D&D veterans out there can use to identify The Thing.  I, however, am the noob that I am.  I’ve absolutely no idea what it was.      

Iema asks Corin if he can look at the disk and examines it.  It’s about 6″ in diameter and 1/2″ thick.  He tries to do a spellcraft check on it, but it doesn’t go so well.  He decides to show Uliver once he wakes up.      

We don’t have to wait long.  Uliver finally comes downstairs, ready for his morning coffee.  You’d think that with all the spells wizards can learn, they’d find a better way to wake up than caffeine.  Then again, why mess with what already works–and is already good?      

Uliver carefully turns the disk over in his hands.  He tells Iema that he thinks it’s something that sort of creates energy–something casters can use when their powers are tapped out.  This makes sense.  Initially, The Thing tried to Plane Shift without it.  It only tried to use the disk after his own Plane Shift failed.     

Iema debates who could best use it.  Uliver looks at him strangely.  “You don’t understand.  It’s good for spontaneous spellcasters.”     

Which, obviously, would be Iema, who is the only spontaneous spellcaster in our little crew.     

Iema wants to test the disk out.  We debate where to test it out.  We talk about trying it out later, when we’re away from the kids–     

“But I want to go with you!” Corin cuts in, in his Jade Islander accent.  (Which, incidentally, sounds Irish.  Or Scottish.  Oh, lord, I don’t know–it sounds funny, okay?  And good.  I didn’t realize my man was so good at accents.)     

Iema explains to Corin that it isn’t that he doubts Corin’s skills at all, but Iema is concerned for Corin’s safety.  He is only 13, after all.  He had planned on leaving Corin with Uliver at times to learn some things during the times we’re gone.     

“But I don’t want to stay with Uliver!  I don’t want to be a wizard!” he protests.     

“He wouldn’t be teaching you how to be a wizard,” Iema tries to explain.     

“We’re worried you’re going to die,” Natalia says.  “And even though I can cast Reincarnate on you, you probably won’t come back human at first.  And you’ll come back with something wrong.”     

“Although, I guess Raelan could always just polymorph you back to a human,” Iema says.     

Corin shoots a wry look at Natalia.  He turns back to Iema.  “If something happens to me,” he says, ”can’t you just take me to a cleric or someone who can do a real resurrection?”    

“HEY!”  Natalia says sharply.  “Whaddaya mean, a REAL Resurrection?”    

Iema and Corin debate.  Corin says he can use a dagger.  And it becomes clear that Corin is not going to back down on this, so it’s settled:  Corin is going to be coming with us from now one.  I guess this would be Phil’s character’s official first “follower.”    

“Well,” I say, once things are decided, “I do not care, the little girl is not coming with me.  SHE’S FIVE.”    

We can all agree on that.    

Everyone turns their attention back to the disk.  Iema tries to use it to cast an invisibility spell on himself.  And that’s when things go horribly wrong.    

KABOOM!  (Gotta love Jim and his sound effects.)    

After the dust settles, we all find ourselves on the floor.  The table is charred, destroyed beyond recognition.  Iema is the first to rise, looking for Corin.  The bard finally finds the kid under the coffee table, unconscious.  Iema pulls him out from under the table and starts healing.  Corin snaps upward, coughing, sputtering.    

“How do you feel?” Iema asks.    

“Alive.”    

Natalia crosses her arms.  “You still wanna come with us, hm?”  Corin pointedly ignores her comment.    

Iema is still checking on everyone and finds Uliver nearby.  “Hey, you need some healing, too?”    

Uliver sits up.  “Um, no.  I’m just fine.  How about we don’t do any more spells before our morning coffee?”    

The only ones missing are Beta and the little girl.  Natalia finds Beta slammed into the wall.  The little girl had been behind him before the explosion.  Natalia scrambles over to Beta, shoves him up, looking behind and underneath him for the girl.  She’s nowhere to be found.    

Finally, we find her.  She has been slammed through the wall into the next room.  Jim says she’s pulverized.  Natalia’s heart sinks.    

“We have to Reincarnate on her,” Natalia says desperately.  “She’s only 5.  She didn’t even get a chance to live.  Of course, the chances of her coming back human…”    

“She might actually prefer not to be human,” Iema points out.  “You saw how much she likes animals.”    

My brain is already whirring.  “I can cast Speak with Animals, too, so if she does come back as an animal, I can find out if that’s how she wants to stay.”    

“We could always take her to a cleric,” Iema says.  “Since her death is really my fault, I’ll foot the bill for it.  It’ll be expensive, though.”    

Natalia shakes her head.  “Let’s do it the free way,” she says.  She turns her attention to the girl and casts Reincarnation.  I roll the dice to see what she comes back as; Phil happily looks at his Player Handbook so he can know right away.  To all our amazement, she actually comes back as a little girl.    

When she comes to, her eyes grow big.  Then she curls up into a ball and starts rocking back and forth.  Soon, we discover she’s also wet herself.    

Uliver comes over, peering over our shoulders to look at her.  “Uh oh.  That’s not good.  You broke her.”    

Iema leans over to sing a lullaby, one that inspires courage.  She relaxes and falls asleep.  Natalia scoops her up.  “I’m going to change her clothes,” she says.  “Uliver?”    

He points her in the right direction.  Natalia turns to leave.  Behind her, she can hear Uliver say how he’s never been dead, that he never plans to.  Natalia wonders about how men can make jokes about lichdom after seeing a kid died, but maybe that’s just this world.  She goes to change the little girl.    

She finishes up, brings the little girl back into the room.  We discuss what we’re going to do with her.  I had already known that Natalia wouldn’t be able to keep the little girl; my druid’s lifestyle just isn’t what one could call child-friendly.  But I wanted to be very careful in selecting a caretaker for her.  I didn’t want to just dump her on the first person who promised to take care of her.  I wanted someone who could keep her safe, who could take care of any issues that might crop up (out of character, I know about the curse; Natalia doesn’t, though), and who would make her happy.  The kid’s had a shitty enough life as it is.  Secretly, I’d been mulling between Elianra and Roan as being possible adoptive parents to the little girl.    

But now we have an added issue:  The little girls got some severe mental trauma from being brought back from the dead.  We decide to first decide what exactly were were dealing with–what exactly went wrong when Natalia Reincarnated her.    

Natalia hoists the dozing little girl onto her back.  We say goodbye to Uliver and go to find Ressin, the cleric that had sold us the wands, to see if he could help us figure out what’s wrong with the little girl.  Ressin suggests that we find a necromancer.  Natalia worries aloud about necromancers being evil; I’m informed out of character that not all necromancers are evil, although it certainly seems to draw some pretty nasty people.  To calm my nerves, Phil rolls a Bardic Knowledge check to see if Iema knows any way of identifying a goodly-aligned necromancer.  Luckily, he does well, and Jim tells him that Iema knows that good necromancers worship one of the good gods.  I think he gave a name of one, but I didn’t catch it.  Anyway, they often wear a symbol of an orchid with a sickle across it.    

Corin, smart kid that he is, speaks up.  “If we want to find a necromancer, why don’t we go to the Wizard of Titles?”    

Iema looks at Corin, interested.  “The Wizard of Titles?  How do you mean?”    

“I heard Raelan talking to you guys about him the other day,” he says.  Perceptive kid.  “Wouldn’t he, out of anyone, know a goodly-aligned necromancer?”    

Good idea!  So we head over the the Wizard of Title’s booth.  Turns out the Wizard of Titles is a Gravekin, whose name is Axien, and who is currently flipping through pages of a book.  He has pieces of flesh hanging off in bits.  Natalia shifts her weight with the little girl still on her back, staring at the Gravekin.  Which, yes, is kind of rude, but Natalia’s not exactly the polished sort.  I imagine she would probably stare at amputees, too.  I know.  Not classy at all, right?     

Iema takes the strangeness of the Axien in stride, though, asking him if he knows where we can find a goodly-aligned necromancer.  When Axien speaks, he sounds kind of like a frog.  He gives us a list of names, but strongly suggests we talk to the Wizard of Scales, Toris.  We thank him and turn to leave.    

“Wait,” Axien croaks.  “Before you leave, I need you to tell me: Is the Wizard of Ribbons dead?”    

Iema looks at Natalia.    

Natalia says, “Sorval?  Yeah, she’s dead.”    

“Are you sure?  She’s gone?  She’s not coming back?  You saw a body?”    

Now I’m getting unsure.  “Yes.  Why?”    

“Because there’s a young sorceress that’s interested in taking the Wizard of Ribbons title,” he explains.   

Oh, okay.  That actually makes sense he would be asking about it, then.  Damn, he had me worried.  I was nervous that she wasn’t dead and that she’d be hunting down Raelan with that annoying little steam mephit again.   

We then hurry off to see this Toris person.  I swear, most of this mage fair is just looking for people.  Nobody is at the Wizard of Scales’ quarters, save a boy who is brushing a horse.  We ask for Toris, and he starts to scamper off to get him.  Iema calls out that we’ll just follow him and go to Toris –no need to drag Toris back to us, away from whatever he’s doing.   

The boy leads us to a tent.  Jim says when we enter the tent, we realize that it is enchanted, so sound cannot leave.  Within the tent, there is a group of people gathered in a meeting, many of whom are shady-looking characters.  However, the man we discover to be the Wizard of Scales is not one of them.   

He comes over to find out what we want.  We show him the little girl, explain the situation.   

He holds the sleeping child, examines her.  “First of all,” he snaps at Natalia, “you should leave the resurrecting to the clerics.”   

I’m about to snap something back–Natalia is sick of the anti-druid crap–but quickly decide against it, lest we piss the man off and he doesn’t help the little girl.  The little girl’s mental health comes before Natalia’s ego.   

“I’ve seen this before,” Toris says, handing her back to us.  “She remembers being dead.  Now she’s aware of everything that could kill her.  She’s afraid of everything because she remembers.”   

Natalia cradles the girl.  “So, really, she’s lost her innocence,” I mutter.  Well, I guess it was in-character, so I guess Natalia muttered it, too.  But the thing with kids is that they’re not so aware of their mortality–not the way adults are.  I don’t know about you guys, but I used to do all sorts of crazy shit as a kid I would never do now.  For one, I used to be quite a climber.  Now, you’re not getting me to climb anything.  All I can think of is a thousand ways a head can split open.   

I miss being a kid sometimes.  But back to the game.   

Toris says that several things can help the little girl, refocusing being one, like taking on an apprenticeship.  Natalia immediately remembers the Wizard of Animals.  The second option, he says, is to take her to a cleric of a benign faith.  The third option is discipline.  That, he says, he can offer.  She can join his entourage, the Gray Phalanx, which consists of warriors, clerics, and paladins, amongst other things.  They will make use of her natural talent (I automatically think of her affinity with animals) and train her.  

Natalia is hesitant to hand over the girl to him, even though Jim tells me out of character that his group is a lawful good group.  Natalia tells Toris that she wants to check with the Wizard of Animals first.  That, I think, would be the girl’s first pick.  Toris understands, states that he’s there if Elianra doesn’t work out.  And it’s a good thing that option is left open because when we go to see the Elianra…well, things haven’t been so good for her.  

When we get to Elianra’s, the portal to go to her little pocket jungle-realm has smoke coming out of it.  The guy standing outside it tells us that it’s closed.  We tell him that we need to speak to Elianra on a personal matter.  He allows us to go in.   

Inside, everything is a mess.  Elianra comes to greet us, but she looks stressed.  She explains that when the Dragon Council was underway, with all the dragons there in their humanoid forms, a latecomer showed up.  She didn’t catch everything because she was at a distance, but she could tell that the rest of the Dragon Council was, at first, shocked to see the latecomer, and then most of them refused to believe him to be who he said he was.  The commotion quickly escalated into combat, which is why the jungle-realm was destroyed utterly.  

We told her of our own combat with The Thing.  We told her another thing it was doing that we found odd: It was ripping up Althris’s druidic scrolls.  We were trying to compare the times of the incidents, trying to figure out if they coincided at all, but we quickly realized they took place at completely different times, and, honestly, were most like unrelated.  

At any rate, we told Elianra why we originally had come, but now, we don’t think playing foster mother/master would be such a good idea.  “If you think this is the best place for her, of course, I’ll take her,” Elianra says.  “But my own life is in danger.  Several members of the Dragon Council believe that I lured them into an ambush with the newcomer and have threatened my life.  My own safety is in jeopardy; I cannot guarantee hers.”  

Well, the little girl’s safety is number one priority for Natalia, and honestly, the Wizard of Animals cannot take much more stress.  The decision’s pretty much made for us what to do with the little girl.  Still, I can’t just leave Elianra without extending some kind of help.  “If they’re after you and you’re needing a place to stay,” Natalia says, “I have a tree house.  You’re welcome any time.  And…I have myconids living underneath my tree house.”  

“Thank you,” she says.  “And I would definitely be interested in the myconids.  Do you think you can talk to them, have them look at my realm?  Maybe they can see it, help regrow everything.”  

Natalia agrees.  Elianra gives Iema the scroll to use to call her when we’re ready for her.  

We say goodbye and good luck, head back to Toris.  Now, he’s outside the tent with a man in full plate armor.  That man appears to be a paladin.  There’s also a female fighter decked out in chainmail.  We tell Toris that with him appears to be the best place for her.  But, first, Natalia wakes the little girl up to meet her new family, of sorts.  She’s not going to let the little girl wake up to find herself among strangers, of course.  

At first the little girl is frightened and clings onto Natalia.  The paladin steps forward.  The little girl relaxes.  The paladin holds his arms out.  She scrambles into his arms and holds onto him tightly.  

I feel better about this decision already.  Still, Natalia feels a little glum.  She has gotten attached to the little girl.  “She likes animals,” Natalia offers feebly.  She pauses.  “And she doesn’t have a name.  Are you going to name her?  Just…just so I know who to look for later.  I would like to visit her again.”  

“Of course,” the man says.  He looks at the little girl.  “I’ll call her Keala.”  

“Keala” means “kitten” in Upper Numbraran.  It seems kind of perfect.  Natalia knows the girl will have a good life, probably training as a paladin, with the Gray Phalanx.  Although the girl would have made a damn good druid when she got a little older, too, I think.  

Before we leave, Iema gets the name of the fighter’s husband, who is also a bard.  Then we go to a skiffing game, particularly for Iema and Corin.  Corin especially seems to be really into sports.  Skiffing is a game that is like jousting, but it’s in the water, and people are riding humanoid water creatures rather than mounts.  “You know,” Iema says to Natalia, “you would probably be very good at this game.”  

Natalia wrinkles her nose.  Ugh, sports.  With teammates and all those people?  No, thanks.  Still, we enjoy the game, especially Corin–the Jade Islanders are dominating the game.  It’s the only one where the Fasset team isn’t the force to be reckoned with.  

After the game, we head out to see the shypsies.  They’re out by the sea.  They’re a very dark people, with very dark hair, and the men have styled, greased-up facial hair.  We seek the captain, who has poofy pants and some long gun thing tucked into the waist.  Jim says Natalia’s never seen anything like it before.  (Note: I don’t think guns are too big in Valt.  In fact, I think they’re supposed to be pretty damn rare.)  

Iema shows him the magical ring we got from that giant we saved him from.  It seems so long ago now.  Iema could tell it was shypsie craftmanship, but he couldn’t tell much beyond that.  The captain looks at it and announces that it’s a ring of thieves.  Phil gets excited because, based on Jim’s description, he knows what kind of ring it is.  (I guess it’s a Ring of Mind Shielding?  My noobish state is proven when I failed to see why this was such an exciting find and Phil had to explain it to me.)  The captain invites us to buy from him.  He prices are crazy, but Iema and Natalia pool funds together to get Corin a dagger, a Fog Razor.  Corins’s eyes get big when Iema hands it to him.  

“For me?” he asks incredously.  “Really?”  He tucks the Fog Razor in his boot, puts his crappy, old dagger in his sheath.  Corin may only be 13, but he’s a sharp kid.  Really sharp.  Seriously, I know.  Jim let me see his character sheet, heh.  

We all still want to find out about the The Thing, so we leave the shypsies and head to the admin tent to see if Jovos can make heads or tails of it, based on our description.  First, he just listens to us, our descriptions based on what we remembered.  “That’s impossible,” he says.  He points to a nearby crystal.  “The amount of magic to do what you say would have to be great.  We have that crystal set up to go off if any Master spells are used.  It will zoom in and show whomever is casting it.  It never went off last night.”  

Iema also shows Jovos the disk we had found the The Thing.  Jovos says it’s some sort of chromatic disk and warns us not to use it–it will detonate if we do.  

“Yeah, too late,” Iema mutters.  “We already found that out the hard way.”  

Jovos is still troubled by our encounter with The Thing.  He turns to Natalia.  She feels something flipping through her mind.  “Do you mind?” he asks.  

It occurs to me that Jovos probably can’t do that with Iema, since he has that Ring of Mind Shielding thing.  “Um…okay,” Natalia says.  He flips through her mind faster, as if going through index cards.  Is it really a good idea to have an arch-devil flipping through your brain?  Probably not.  Hmmm.  

Then Jim says, “Spring, what is Natalia’s worst memory?”  

“Uh, do you mean after our game started?  Or something that is in her background?”  I immediately think oh shit oh shit oh shit.  I didn’t put that much thought into Natalia’s background.  

“Either.”  

“I guess when Beta died the first time.  She wasn’t so used to it then.”  

“Okay,” Jim says, “Jovos finds that memory and plucks it out.”  

Just like that, eh?  

Since Jovos can go through everything in Natalia’s mind, he can see all the events that she might have not necessarily remembered.  “This is troubling,” Jovos says.  “Whatever did that would have had to have done it within 6 seconds in order to keep the crystal from going off.  From what I could tell from Natalia’s memory, 20 spells were discharged in a span of 18 seconds in a very small area.”  

Damn, that’s a lot.  We try to think of anything else can show him.  Iema reminds Natalia of the Ioun Stone that we found on The Thing–the one that adds +2 to her Wisdom, the stone that is currently orbiting around her head.  Jovos reaches out to take it, but it bounces away from him.  “May I?” he asks Natalia.  

She plucks it out from the air and hands it over to him.  Jovos explains that Ioun Stones are usually manufactured, but this is a natural one, which occurs only in the Outer Planes, and frequently in the Loom, which is the elemental plan of magic. I thought I heard Phil groaning about this, but don’t ask me what it means.  I’m sure it’s another thing that veteran gamers know.  I’m too dumb to know better and am instead asking why the hell we can’t just go there, haha.  

Jovoes hands the Ioun Stone back to Natalia, who places it near her head and lets go.  The stone immediately begins circling her head again.  We say goodbye to Jovos.  For an arch-devil, he isn’t so bad.  I should be careful, though.  If there’s anything my super-religious Southern Baptist parents taught me, it was that Satan has sneaky ways of SLIPPING INTO YOUR SOUL.  

Of course, my Southern Baptists parents also told me that D&D was Satanic and was the reason so many kids became possessed by demons.  So, obviously, listening to my parents isn’t my strong suit here.  

Jovos suggests for that the armor and dagger looted off the giant, we go to an item identification booth.  He gives us directions to one.  There, we find a very strange elf, whose eyes are half closed and is swaying back and forth.  It’s like…a hippie elf.  Natalia is immediately suspicious (remember her distrust of elves) and hangs back, while Iema wakes him out of his stoned-like state to give him some money to identify the items.  The elf says the dagger is a +1 dagger.  It’s better than what Iema has, so Natalia convinces him to keep it–not that it takes much convincing, heh.  The armor is glamoured, meaning that it can look like regular clothes, which we end up selling later on for 4,000 gold.  

Now, we’re discussing The Thing again.  How else to find out something more about it.  Based on what Jovos has said, it sounds like we have at least narrowed down The Thing’s origin to the Outer Planes.  Finally, Natalia has an idea.  

“Hey,” she says.  “You know the Wizard of Titles?  Well, there seems to be a title for everything, doesn’t there?  Why don’t we check with the Wizard of Titles to see if there is a Wizard of Planes or something?  That wizard could probably tell us if there is anything on the Outer Planes that matches The Thing’s description.”  

Iema agrees.  We go to the Wizard of Titles, who confirms that there is a Wizard of Planes, but the wizard himself isn’t here–just his apprentice.  Still, that will do.  We head off to see the apprentice of the Wizard of Planes, whose name is Orin.  However, Orin can’t give us much information.  Like, at ALL.  Natalia’s disappointed.  Before we leave, though, Orin whispers, “Be careful…someone isn’t who he says he is!  Someone is a devil.”  

“We know who that is!” Iema says to Natalia under his breath, thinking of Jovos.  

After we get some distance from Orin, Corin says, “For a guy who specializes in this stuff, he sure didn’t know much.”  

“I agree,” Natalia says.  “Maybe he’s the one who isn’t who he says he is.” 

So, there is more specalation about The Thing and what could have caused Althris to disintegrate within the 6 second time frame that Jovos said that person would have had to have had.  Natalia suggests–well, I, I guess, because I was really not “in character” when I said this–but I suggested that maybe it wasn’t magical at all.  Maybe it was a machine or scientific, but I’m not sure if that’s even feasible in Valt or even D&D in general.  We got back to Althris’s campsite and throw more checks.  Natalia succeeds pretty well in her’s and makes an interesting discovery:  

The standard druidic spells were merely ripped; the non-standard and unique druidic spells were utterly destroyed.  

Corin remembers something else that he thinks would be helpful.  We had bought and sold with Althris the day he was murdered.  Iema had given him some Shotan coins, which aren’t exactly common around here.  The killers took Althris’s money, so they should have the Shotanese coins on them.  We go back to the admin tent to see if anyone can point us in the right direction to even begin such an investigation.  

Jovos is, again, the one we’re dealing with.  He tells us we don’t need to go any further.  He had just gotten some Shotenase coins that day–from the Fasset team.  

Now I am sorry I didn’t give you the gory details of watching the Fasset team play in Break Ball and Scramble.  First of all, Fasset is supposed to be a bad ass city, full of bad ass people as is.  It’s supposed to be next to impossible to get into the city or attack it.  Secondly, the Fasset team, if I remember right, is the freakin’ prison team.  And we saw them do some pretty nasty things during the games.  They’re impressive–and scary.  

We think of all the spells that had to be cast in Althris’s dwelling.  “Is any of them a spell caster?” Iema asks.  

“The manager,” Jovos says.  “Furthermore, they have paid the shypsies large sums of money for fast passage to Fasset.  I thought it was strange that they still managed to make it here just for a couple of games when half their team died on the trip over.”  

Iema nods.  “Almost like they were here for something else.”  

Jovos continues to tell us that murder at their mage fair does not look good, and he suggests we find whomever did this.  We agree, run off to find Raelan (who, of course, agrees to go with us), and rush off to catch the Fasset team before their boat leaves.  We have to deal with the shypsie captain first, though, who says that the team has specifically stated that they do not want any visitors.  Iema politely offers gold to let us on.  The captain is concerned about damage to his boats.  

Finally, Natalia gets annoyed.  “Look, you do business here, right?”  

“Yes,” the captain says.  “It’s all right.”  

This would work better if business was kickin’, but Natalia keeps going.  “Well, the people heading this fair are very angry about people being killed here.  We think those people are on those boats, and they will not be happy if you let them go.  They might not let you come back if you let those guys get away.  Think of all the future business you’d be losing.”  

“Aaaaaaaaah,” the captain says, wagging his finger at Natalia and grinning, “you speak very clever!”  

Yet he still charges us to get on the boats and makes us promise to pay for any of our damages.  

We get on the boat.  And, yes, we do believe we find the killers.  They’re all wearing eagle feathers, and the bird itself is roasting on a spit.  Jim reminds me that Natalia specifically remembers that Althris’s companion was an eagle.  

OMG.  JERKS.  They have offended my delicate druidic sensibilities. 

And then Jim starts drawing on the battlemap.  Never a good sign.  

At this point in the game, it was getting late, and I was nodding off.  My notes here start getting worse.  I do have this: The Fasset team consists of a brutish-looking woman, a Kuo-toa, a Sahuagin, an Orc, a Hobgoblin, and a human–presumably the spell casting manager.  As soon as they see us, they draw their weapons.  Iema is disappointed, as he was going to try a more, uh, non-violent way to get them off the ship so we wouldn’t have to worry about damaging it, but alas, there is no way these guys are letting us off now.  As soon as they see us, they know the shypsie captain sold them out.  

I don’t have all my notes from the encounter–busy trying to stay awake and all–but I have pieces.  The brutish-looking woman went first, running toward us, jumping down the platform and pulling out a freakin’ warhammer.  The orc tries to jump down from where he’s at, but he’s not so graceful (I believe that would be the nat 1 Jim rolled) and falls.  I cast Greater Magic Fang on Beta (when am I ever going to learn to cast that OUT of combat?) and he charges forward.  The woman hits him, and then the Kuo-toa climbs into the rigging, preparing to jump, I’m assuming.  I’m keeping an eye on him.  

Meanwhile, the human casts Obscuring Mist.  So he is the spell caster.  Iema, concerned for Corin’s safety, puts Haste and Improved Invisibility on Corin.  Jim says that as Beta is chomping on the orc’s leg, Natalia sees blood suddenly spring forth on the orc’s head.  It’s from a knife wound.  Natalia is impressed–apparently, our little Corin has a little bit of rogue potential in him.  

Beta gets knocked out.  He stays out for the duration of the fight.  Raelan turns his attention to the human’s Obscuring Mist.  “Screw this,” he says, “I’m dispelling your penny ante tricks.”  (I’m not so sure if this was so much Raelan saying it as it was Jim, heh.)  He dispels the mist, and then turns his attention to the Kuo-toa, who is bouncing around everywhere.  “Stand STILL,” Raelan says. 

The Kuo-toa hops down a little further to mock Raelan.  “Here I am,” it says.  The Orc, who isn’t far, joins in, punches Raelan in the face.  Iema starts his singing and attacking with rapiers.  (I think Phil said he’s going to take some levels of rogue with his bard.  Or maybe he already has.  Either way, should be interesting.)  Meanwhile, Natalia turns into a brown bear and Raelan unloads Magic Missiles into the Kuo-toa.  It drops down and bashes Raelan in the face three times.  The woman wisely realizes that Natalia-the-brown-bear is going to become a problem, so she turns her attention to the druid and smacks her in the face with the warhammer. 

Which, incidentally, isn’t so bad.  Not as a brown bear.  Note to anyone who is thinking about playing a druid: Once you get Wild Shape, it seriously kicks ass.  Ask Phil.  He said he quite enjoys the brown bear, although I think he secretly wants Natalia to turn into an orca at some point. 

The Orc comes behind Raelan and gets him behind the head.  Natalia attacks and kills (rather easily, I might add)  the Kuo-toa.  This lets Raelan turn his attention to the Orc.  Raelan is SICK of being smacked around.  Before he does anything, though, Iema quickly heals Raelan and throws a Blur on himself.  Raelan casts Stoneskin on himself.  Then Raelan reaches out for the Orc–and combusts him.  Seriously.  Flames were coming out of his eye sockets.  It was a wickedly impressive sight. 

Sometimes, Raelan almost makes Natalia wish she were a wizard.  Almost.  She wouldn’t give Beta up for anything. 

The Sahuagin is a brave one, attacking Raelan after that.  Luckily, Raelan’s Stoneskin spell soaks some of the damage.  We hear the woman screaming during all this, but it’s in a language we don’t understand.  The woman then tries to run past Natalia, but I take the attack of opportunity and not only manage to get a swipe in, but I grapple her as well.  (Kinda hard to compete with the brown bear’s +20 on that!)  She yells again, telling the human spell caster to hijack the ship.  And I’ll give him this: He tries.  He really does.  He runs up to the front, put his hand on the steering wheel thingy, and as soon as he did, we heard a shot. 

The shypsie captain is standing on the shoreline with his gun.  He’ll be damned if anyone hijacks his ship.  I could learn to like that man. 

So now, the human is down.  Iema is still going himself, and he does 10 points of damage to the Hobgoblin.  Raelan turns to the Sahuagin, says something to it in a language that the rest of us don’t understand, and the Sahuagin starts laughing like crazy, losing his turn. 

Then Raelan reaches out to the Hobgoblin with his hand.  But the Hobgoblin had seen what Raelan had done to the Orc.  “Nononono!” he says in horror, scurrying away from that evil hand. 

Natalia doesn’t even get to see this.  She’s still got the woman grapppled.  Natalia gets another bite in before the Hobgoblin attacks her.  Raelan fires Magic Missiles at the woman, finishing her off, then turns the rest of his Magic Missiles on the Hobgoblin.  Iema crits on the Hobgoblin, so he does a lot of damage.  Good thing, because Natalia only gets one measly bite in before rolling a nat 1, failing the rest of her attacks.  At any rate, that’s the end of the Hobgoblin. 

Raelan turns his attention to to the Sahuagin.  He summons something that looks like a lion.  Natalia is surprised.  I didn’t realize that wizards could summon monsters.  Jim says the lion-thing lands on the Sahuagin with “all five pointy ends.”  It does enough damage that all Natalia-the-Bear has to do is step on its head with her massive paw to squish it. 

So now everyone on the boat is dead, and with no damage to the boat to boot!  Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to roleplay going to Jovos about our job well done; it was nearing 12:30 AM, the time when they start towing visitors out of our parking lot, so Phil had to get going.  But we did at least loot.  Not much to loot, though:  Just some personal belongings of Althris and some spells he had on him. 

And that’s all, folks.  Oh, except for one thing: Iema and Natalia made it to level 11.  Barely.

Welcome back to the 15th installment of “Homebrewed,” an on-going series documenting the D&D game that my super-sexy DM (and boyfriend) Jim is running for Phil and me.  Currently, our characters are at the mage fair in the world of Valt, mostly doing the meet-and-greet thing.  Yeah, still.  Natalia is starting to miss her tree house.  However, we have a nasty (and intriguing) surprise encounter at the end of the game.  If you need to catch up on the last “Homebrewed,” catch it here.  Otherwise, read on.

Briezen the 3^rd

You know, I’ve come to realize that I envy my druid’s life.  Well, except for the dying part.  And the part where my beloved pet transforms into a centaur, gallops into the sunset, dumping my other beloved pet and leaving me to pick up the pieces.  That part is not so fun.  However, the part where Natalia starts off her morning waking up in Uliver’s freakin’ PORTABLE MANSION and at a kickass mage fair, to boot…well, it just makes it that much harder to trudge off to work on Mondays to quote benefits and adjust insurance claims, ya know?

But, alas, it is not Monday morning, it’s Friday night, and right now, we’re Iema and Natalia waking up in a portable mansion.  We get up, and Iema, whose memory is infinitely better than mine, immediately tries to find Raelan to find out when his presentations are.  (Meanwhile, I’m all like, “Oh, yeah, Raelan is the whole reason why Natalia’s here.”)  Raelan has already left for the day, so Iema pumps the information out of Uliver, who tells us that Raelan has three presentations at the 7th, 11th, and 2nd bells.  I’m confused exactly how time works until Jim tells me out of character that it’s just 7 AM, 11 AM, and 2 PM. 

Oh.  Somehow, I thought it would be something more original than that.

It’s just after the 7th bell, so Iema and Natalia hurry off to the ampitheater, where Raelan’s presentation is already underway.  We settle down.  The subject Raelan is presenting is very…wizardly.  Iema seems to be catching most of it. Natalia is mostly just dozing in the bleachers, as I imagine she would have done in high school.  The topic is ley lines.  More specifically, ley lines within the body and how intersecting ley lines create sockets.  Raelan talks about how his now deceased master had discovered new ley lines in the ears.  This is all apparently good stuff because it means good things for gear.

There is quiet applause when Raelan finishes.  Everyone gets up, mills around.  We find Uliver there.  Uliver goes over the presentation with us, explaining that the discovery wasn’t a total surprise–it’s something that the community had known was coming, but Raelan’s late mentor is the one who beat everyone to the punch.  He adds that most apprentices would also take credit for their late master’s discoveries, whereas Raelan gave full credit to his.

As we’re getting up to head out, Iema and Natalia decide the best use of our time would be to find out more about Chenestes.  I don’t even know where to start.  Uliver points out it’s a mage fair, full of magic-users–everyone here probably knows something about Chenestes.   The question, really, is where to start.

We decide to start out with the Guild of Scholars, a group of sages, to see what they know about Chenestes.  Before we go, Natalia tells Iema he should probably do the talking.  This wasn’t my way to get Phil do all the heavy-lifting, by the way.  Some wizards aren’t fans of druids, and in Valt, almost nobody is a fan of any of us nature-folk.  Bards, though?  LOVED.  All because they do the pretty songs and stuff.  I feel like Velma to Phil’s Daphne.  Regardless, if we’re gonna be pumping for information, it should be the bard doing it.

Speaking of the beauty and beast syndrome, we see a similiar pair at a tent behind a booth.  Jim describes a man that everyone is gathered around.  He’s very pretty-boy sounding, from the white gold-trimmed armor to the long locks that, Jim says, are ”fluttering in the breeze that may or may not actually be there.”  He sounds like Fabio.  Unsurprisingly, he’s a paladin.  Not far away, though, is a woman who is being ignored.  We make a bee-line for the woman.

The woman, whose name is Shariel, agrees with us to trade information for information.  She gives us some background:  Chenestes was a mage kingdom that existed before the Godstorms, a city where all branches of magic were considered to be equal.  Nobody’s been able to detemine its location, but there’s circumstantial evidance that it was everywhere.  This is because they had portals everywhere that all linked to Chenestes.  They also had many portals that opened into different planes, often in temples.

Out of character, Jim says to me, “Sound familiar, Spring?” 

Yes, yes, it does.  The one to the astral plane, the other to the fire plane.  The portals with the funny writing, the funny glow, at least one located in a temple–and that portal, thankfully, hidden by Raelan with tree brush.

Jim-as-Shariel continues with the background.  After the outbreak of the Godstorms, Shariel explains, communications broke down between many cities.  Bards were helpful filling in that role; hence, why bards are so loved in Valt.  However, the connection to Chenestes was lost, and only some written records survived the Godstorms partially.  No digs have turned up any Chenestik archeology.  Still, everyknow “knows” that Chenestes existed.  They also know it had contact with an emperor of Numbrar, but there have been four different emperors by that name.

Now, it’s our turn.  Shariel grills us about news on Derrikol.  I find it especially odd that she asks Natalia whether or not there is any Numbraran nobles in either Stilldale or Devies.  Natalia admits that Julium is in Stilldale. 

Shariel gives Natalia a stern look.  “Julium Caesus Numbra?”

I’m not surprised she knows his name.  Doesn’t everyone?  “Um…yeah,” Natalia says.

She nods.  “He led an attack on Numbrar,” she says.  “He’s wanted.” 

Something to note:  Central and Upper Numbrar both consider themselves the main “Numbrar.”  But the woman is actually from Upper Numbrar.  Wisely, Natalia doesn’t go into details about her friendship with Julium.  At first, she frets a bit about revealing Julium’s location if he’s wanted, but let’s face it–if they didn’t know already, they would find out, anyway.  Julium’s plans to take over and unite an empire aren’t going to exactly make him unnoticed.

The woman’s knowledge about Derrikol is sketchy.  She knows that the forest is between civilization and something very evil.  That makes sense–Natalia remembers Gudger (remember the foul-talking ranger with the crocodile named Boots?) telling her scary things were being run into the forest by even scarier things in the Wasted Lands.  Natalia tells Shariel about the dread guards, the undead constructs with Chenestik writing in their armor, being in the forest.  Turns out they’ve been found in other areas as well. 

Somehow, in all the twisting conversation, Shariel has managed to get Natalia to admit to at least one portal that has been since destroyed (the astral one).  Natalia also admits to killing a gnome wizard who was pulling things out from the fire plane, but she stops short of telling her anything about the portal or its location.  She figures Raelan hid it for a reason, and quite frankly, while Shariel seems nice enough, Natalia doesn’t fully trust her yet.  Still, Shariel can tell Natalia isn’t telling her the full story.  Finally, Natalia refers Shariel to Raelan for more information.  Raelan is better at handling this stuff.

Eventually, the conversation turns to politics, who is at war with whom.  Iema and Shariel talk while Natalia tunes this stuff out.  I simply cannot roleplay Natalia as being interested in politics when I have zero interest in it myself.

Finally, it’s half past the 10th bell, so Iema and Natalia say goodbye to Shariel to go see Raelan’s second presentation.  This is the presentation that Raelan had asked Natalia for her help on.  He meets us outside.

“Natalia, I need you to prep any direct energy attacks you have,” Raelan says.  He turns to Iema.  “Hey, you don’t have direct energy attacks, do you, man?”

It turns out that while Iema can play a mean fiddle, he cannot CALL LIGHTNING, FOO’!  Which, incidentally, this foo’ preps, along with Produce Flame, at my tiny dragon skull clasp’s prompting.  Iema resigns himself to a seat, getting ready to enjoy an original Wizard of Vengeance production.

And the production, admittedly, is pretty cool.  Raelan presents his invention, the guantlet of reflection.  It just looks like a glove to me.  He goes into the construction of it, what it’s made of, yadda, yadda, yadda, and finally, the good part–Natalia gets to hurl flames at him.

At his go, Natalia does Produce Flame and throws fire at him, which he neatly catches in the gloved hand with no harm done to him.  He explains how it works to the audience.  (This part, I don’t remember too well; I think depending on the time you keep the spell in your hand, you can either have it dissipate or you can redirect it entirely.)  Then the big spell: Call Lightning–which he catches again in his hand with no harm done to him.

His presentation gets a pretty good response.  After it’s over, everyone gets up and does the chatting together thing, much like after any other performance.  Raelan comes over to us, we tell him about Shariel, and he suggests that we seek out someone named Harsam.  Raelan had sent Harsam one of the Chenestik coins under the pseudonym of Wyrmling.

Iema and Natalia agree to go do that–after we catch a Scramble game.  We do that, it’s all fun–Corin was impressed by the Jade Islander team–and then we head back for Raelan’s third and biggest presentation yet.

If you’re getting the impression that it’s all about Raelan right about now, I’m inclined to agree.  But it’s a mage fair, so it seems to make sense.  It’s also cool to see what Raelan’s been doing in his spare time.  Because he’s always doing something in his spare time.

Raelan appears on stage.  Everyone sits down.  “Today, I’m going to present a new spell,” Raelan tells the audience.  “But first, I would like to ask you this: How many of you were brought into this profession by means of the Children’s Auction?”

Hands go up.  Quite a few, actually.  That seems to be a popular way to gain entry as a wizard’s apprentice.

“How many of you were brought there because you lost your parents, or your mother died in childbirth?”

More hands go up.  I guess pregnancy is dangerous for women in this time.  Remind Natalia to keep her legs crossed.

Iema leans over to Natalia.  “Hey,” he whispers, “did Raelan’s mother die giving birth to him?”  I had to ask Jim if Natalia knows anything about this because I certainly don’t remember this ever coming up.  Jim insists that it had and Natalia does know this information.

So Natalia says yes.  They continue listening to the presentation.

Raelan goes on about how horrible it is knowing that your birth is the one that killed your mother, and how he has come up with something to help circumvent this scenerio in the future.  I remember the scroll of Reincarnation that Raelan had asked from Natalia quite a while ago.  “Oh,” I start muttering to myself, “I know what this is.  I know what spell he’s presenting.”

 ”Thanks in part to Uliver, the Wizard of Portals,” Raelan is saying, “and Natalia the Stillwitch”–I cringe (DRUIDS AND WITCHES ARE NOT THE SAME THING, ARGH!)–”I present Vanoshi’s Timely Salvation spell.”

Two women in simple garb and cloaked with hoods to disguise their faces come out.  One is very obviously pregnant; the other is not.  Raelan explains that the pregnant woman wishes to terminate her pregnancy; the other woman is barren and wants a child.  They have agreed to the spell, which Jim describes in great, dramatic detail (and which I failed to take notes on and have forgotten the details since, so you suffer the consequence), and the pregnant woman’s belly shrinks while the other one grows.

For this presentation, Raelan gets a standing ovation.  After the presentation, the women go off their seperate ways.  Raelan is beaming, happy with his new spell and how it was received.  He decides it’s time to enjoy the mage fair–by hitting the nearest bar to meet some chicks.  Iema and Natalia follow suit, but in a different bar where we can hunt down one of the players from the Jade Islander Scramble team that Corin wants to meet.  We take the kids (yes, Natalia still has Nameless Girl with her–like Natalia, the little girl doesn’t talk much) to a bar. 

That’s how you know something is a work of fiction, by the way–you take kids in the bar, and the 12 year old orders the drinks.  (Well, it’s either fiction or somewhere that is not America.)  Corin at least did get fruit juice for the girl.  After they got a little food and drink in their system, Iema and Corin try playing a little fiddle for the crowd.  Phil doesn’t roll too well, though, and Jim’s assist as Corin is a 1, so the outcome is that Iema and Corin are laughed off the stage.

Finally, we go to see Harsam.  We find a guy dressed in a turban and with what sounds like a heavy, stereotypical Indian accent.  He has a hookah in front of him.  “Hullo!” he greets us in his too-thick accent.  He sweeps his arm up in a dramatic wave.  “And how can I help you?”

Iema says, “We came to see you.  We’re friends of Wyrmling.”

Harsam’s ears perk up.  “Wyrmling?” he repeats.  “Let me close the tent up so we can talk.”  And, not shocking to me as I detected BS with the accent, as soon as the tent’s closed, Harsam drops the fake-Indian accent.

“An act, huh?” Iema says, waving to all the props.  “And a hookah?”

Harsam looks at the hookah disdainfully.  “I don’t even smoke.”

And then we start our talking about Chenestik stuff.  Harsam says he knows of the Chenestik buildup in Derrikol Forest, and that Cadram is keeping the flow of information between guilds at a minimum.  There are three sites in the mountains.  He does know about the astral portal, but Natalia’s telling him of the fire portal is the first time he’s ever heard of it. 

“There are more that survived than I realized,” he says, scratching his chin.

We talk about more happenings the Derrikol region.  He describes the mountains as being “red with blood” because of an adventuring group going after giants there.  Natalia realizes that he’s referring to Reneat’s group.  Among other gossip, Harsam tells us that while we’ve been gone, there’s been some big action in our neck of the woods: Julium has attacked Devies and declared himself the rightful heir to central Numbrar.  Nobody is stupid, though.  We all know Julium isn’t going to stop with just central Numbrar, and that he’ll eventually turn his sights south.  And although Harsam is from Cadram, which has a holy war against Numbrar in general, their real problem is with Lower Numbrar, so yes, he’s rooting for Julium.  For now.

Meanwhile, Harsam suggests we go talk to the Wizard of Animals.  He thinks Natalia specifically will be interested in her philosophies regarding Chenestes.  We bid farewell to Harsam, he goes back to his fake hookah and turban, and we wander out to find the Wizard of Animals.

Iema graciously pays for our entrance fee once we get there.  We step into the portal and into the jungle again.  Elianra, the Wizard of Animals, quickly spots us and comes over to welcome us, remembeing that we had left an old gorilla in her care.

We don’t beat around the bush, telling her quickly that we had been advised to seek her out regarding her philosophy on Chenestes.  Elianra gets excited.  “Yes,” she says.  “See, I believe that the Chenestines believed that the world was not orginally evil.”  (Note: Not sure if I ever mentioned it, but the actual world of Valt is inclined toward evil, including nature, which is why townspeople tend not to like druids, rangers, or barbarians.)  “I believe they believed it was neutral.  Furthermore, I think the Chenestines knew what caused it–what made Valt evil.”

This does perk Natalia’s interest–and mine.  Often, I’ve mentioned to Jim that it didn’t make sense to me that nature was evil in this world.  Even if Natalia is neutral-good, she recognizes that nature is inherently neutral.  Well, it’s supposed to be.  And it’s often bugged me that this isn’t the case for Valt.

Elianra tells us that she believes that Chenestes had an idea how to reverse this.  The problem is that, in everything she’s read, it hinges on a word that nobody has been able to translate.  She thinks that’s it’s something that was so pervasive in the Chenestik world that, in their texts (what survived of it), nobody bothered to explain what ”it” was.  She suggests we investigate for the Tam-wu scrolls.  Tam-wu was a monestary located in Shoten and a sister-organization to Chenestes.  Their scrolls were being written during the actual fall of Chenestes.

Somehow, I think if it was that easy to find these scrolls, someone would have already done so by now.

Another alternative:  She’s been trying to get ahold of a dragon by the name of Lastromexanuissidy (pronounced LASS-tro-MEX-an-NOOSE-ity).  This dragon suffers from a form of insanity where he places an abnormal amount of value of things that are not necessarily valuable.  However, he does boast the biggest library in the world.  He will probably kill us if we approach him, though, unless we give him something that he considers valuable. 

And then she mentions that the Dragon Council is being held in her little jungle-realm.  Um.  Yeah.  We’re out of there fast.

So, now we go off to find that druid Althris we met before from the Palm Circle, the one that’s trying to help other druids out of Fasset.  It’s night time now, but we go to his booth because we know that he’s also camping there.

It’s dark, very dark.  Jim says we see green and orange lights ahead. 

“Uh oh,” Iema says.  He turns to Corin.  “Corin, you and the girl need to go.”  He casts some invisibility spell on Corin.  “Sorry, I only have enough for one,” Iema says.

The little girl is lifted into the air by an invisible Corin, hear his footsteps as he scurries off with the little girl to hide in some nearby bushes.

Iema and Natalia go to the campsite to investigate.  We hear a ripping sound, see purple light, and see a figure cloaked in a long, navy blue robes.

It turns around, spotting us.  It makes clicking-croaking sounds, and looks like it’s starting to cast some spells.  We roll spellcraft checks.  Between Natalia and Iema, we’ve determined he’s used blur (okay), haste (eh, not too bad)–and protection from good.

HMMM.  Yeah, we’re straight into combat.

Natalia turns into a bear.  Unfortunately, I have developed a really bad habit of never putting Greater Magic Fang on Beta, so when he attacks, he’s pretty lame right now.  (But give him a break.  He’s still heartbroken over Tango, after all.)  Iema, ever quick-thinking, casts haste on us, but then he has to do a reflex save against whatever The Thing is doing.  I guess he didn’t do too good because he feels himself choking.  Makes it very hard for a bard to do much, ya know.

The Thing also does something to reduce my strength.  Unfortunately for him, I’m a bear right now, so even weakened, I’m still all B.A.  The Thing then touches the ground, creating some illusion that changes what it looks like around us, making the scenery look hellish and frightening.  He also manages to dispel Iema’s Haste.  Beta attacks, crits, but despite that bout of luck, cannot manage to trip Thing.  Thing whirls around on Beta and blinds him.

Natalia thankfully has Wild Spell, which allows her to cast while shape-shifted.  Using this, she summons a dire lion.  It immediately jumps into the fray, getting a claw, bite, and rake into Thing.  There’s a LOT of scuffling going on, but finally, between Beta, Bear-Natalia, and the dire lion–with help of Iema’s songs–Jim says Bear-Natalia pops Thing’s head off “like a grape.”

Ew, I didn’t need the description.

We tear Thing apart.  For a moment, Beta and the dire lion look like they’re going to fight for pieces of Thing.  Jim reminds me that Beta has that need to bury the dead, so I dismiss the dire lion and let Beta do his thing.  Might as well–there’s no hope of identifying what this thing was with these itty-bitty pieces, anyway.

Iema searches for Althris.  He finally finds the druid’s boots with a little bit of legs.  Jim says there’s sorceror sand (?) around the area, a ton of it.  I don’t even know what that is, and I doubt Natalia would either.  The only thing I got from his explanation is that a lot of magic had been expended in this area.  And, also, there isn’t enough of Althris’s body left to reincarnate. 

I’m depressed by this.  There are only a handful of other druids I like, and Althris was one of them. 

Natalia changes back into human form and finds that she’s choking on something.  She pulls the object out of her mouth.  It’s a blue marble that Iema identifies as an ioun stone, but he’s not sure what it does.

We call the kids back.  Iema makes Corin visible again–and sees that he’s carrying a fancy, jewel-encrusted axe.

Iema looks at him in disbelief.  “Corin,” he says, “where did you get that axe?”

“Well,” Corin says, “you were in trouble.  And I was invisible, sooo…”

“We have to find the owner,” Iema says.  “We have to return it.”

“No need,” we hear someone behind us say.  We turn around to see a wizard standing nearby–the owner of the giant axe.  Who would have thought that wizards carried axes?  Luckily, the wizard isn’t too much of a douche about it, and he even identifies the ioun stone as being one that enhances wisdom for us.  He does say, though, that we’re lucky the kid didn’t use the axe–he has it rigged so it would strike anyone else using it with a bolt of lightning.

(This, if I recalled correctly, was filed under Iema’s lesson to Corin about “why we don’t steal things from powerful wizards.”  Corin’s gonna start peeing his pants when he meets a wizard, if these lessons keep up.)

Iema keeps searching the site.  Eventually, he manages to find two hands.  Correction: Two left hands. He realizes that Thing had anywhere from 4-8 hands.  The hands appear human.

Like this isn’t getting weirder by the minute.  The only things we find around the area are some pamphlets about Fasset.  We give up, head back to Uliver’s.

When we get there, Raelan is still gone.  “Where is he?” we ask Uliver.

Uliver frowns.  “He left with a woman named Shariel.  She says that you sent her to him?”

Iema, who didn’t seem as skittish as Natalia did about Shariel, suddenly grows concerned.  “You know,” he says, “she seemed nice, but I really want to check it out and make sure he’s okay.” 

We hurry out.  And we find Raelan.  And Shariel.  Dancing. 

Yeah, he’s fine.  We go home.  Behind us, we can hear Raelan, drunk, bragging, “…and then I told that dragon, TAKE THIS, and unloaded some Magic Missiles into him!”

This is where we called game.  Phil went home; Jim and I talked.  One thing that Jim said later, after the game, that bugs me:  “Spring, didn’t you notice that The Thing never actually attacked you?  It only used defensive type of spells.”

Uh oh.  Now I’m wondering what we did–what we killed.