MAL Ep. 30

In this session the party explored the pavilion of the mentalist Anselm in search for answers to some of their questions. This may be a recap particularly worth your while to read through; as the millipede suggested, there were many moving parts here.

Before they began, the party decided on three questions to ask Anselm:

1) How can we fight against the capabilities of the Illithids, both offensively and defensively?

2) What are the ways we can correct the Illithid deterioration of Jon's brain?

3) How can one activate all the powers of this crystal skull?

After accepting these questions, Anselm told the group to place three chalices in the tent as proof of their completed challenges, at which time he would return with answers. He declined to give them any more information about this, saying only that they would "find what they are looking for" in the yard. He and the house then completely disappeared, leaving behind a peculiar tent with a white stool in it. The party hesitantly began to explore the grounds.

1) First, they approached the red merry-go-round, which was creaking eerily in the breeze. Zadkiel decided to get on and asked Adriel to spin him clockwise. However, Adriel messed this up and spun him counter-clockwise instead.

2) All the humanoids and Vanima Kaimelar, but not any of the other animals, felt a feeling of vertigo and were immediately transported to a large playground surrounded by a flexible chain-link fence and a dense glittering fog. The PCs and NPCs all arrived in the form of 9-year-old children, with their armor and gear intact but scaled down as if affected by a Reduce Person spell. The playground included a sandbox, a bouncing horse, a slide, a swingset, a see-saw, monkey bars, a tree fort with a tire swing, and the merry-go-round.

3) The fog was observed to be flowing counter-clockwise around the playground and giving off an ominous feeling whenever focused upon. The party decided to ignore this and play with the playground equipment. They unfortunately got some really bad rolls while exploring, but did find the following things:

A) Adriel successfully went across the monkey bars hand-over-hand.

B) Khirg began searching the sandbox, eventually finding a large tin horn and a purse with tokens in it.

C) Red climbed to the tree fort and searched it, but did not find anything. She identified the tree as an actual Malachian tree, though there was something about it that felt a little off to her somehow. Adriel came over and started pushing Red on the tire swing.

D) Zadkiel burned his hands on the hot slide, then cast Resist Fire on himself and slid down it.

E) Jon examined the bright purple gate. He concluded that it was definitely not a magical portal, and did not believe the party were on another plane. He also noticed that while the fog was still dense in front of the gate, that it was starting to dissipate to the west of the playground as the PCs activated the toys.

F) Aler and Adriel tried to use the seesaw, but nothing happened. G) The party began to see the outline of a Ferris wheel through the fog to the west.

4) At this point Khirg decided to blow the tin horn he had found. Giant mutated Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls with a butcher's knife and a chainsaw emerged from the sand and attacked. The party in kid form dispatched the killer dolls and appropriated the chainsaw.

5) Aler rode on the swings to get a better look at the Ferris wheel, and spotted a boardwalk and a large wooden building down by the river. He got Khirg to push him higher and jumped over the fence from the swing, landing safely on the other side. Zadkiel moved the seesaw so that when Khirg and Adriel jumped on it it would fling him over the fence, then used the chainsaw to cut a hole in it from the other side which Bay squeezed through. The other PCs all climbed over the fence.

6) The party proceeded to the large wooden building by the boardwalk, whose sign said "Arcade." Jon searched under the boardwalk, finding more tokens there. Red pushed the door open, revealing a skeeball machine, slot machine, two video game machines, an air hockey table, a pinball machine, a large Newton's cradle, and a Zoltar the Fortuneteller booth. Zoltar was holding a chalice behind the glass display, and a sign in front of him said "40 tickets wins a prize."

7) The party immediately set about trying to win 40 tickets. Among the things that happened here were: A) Jon hit a jackpot on the slot machine B) Adriel and Zadkiel played the video games. Zadkiel became obsessively absorbed in his and had a hard time shaking loose from it. C) Khirg and Aler played skeeball. D) Adriel played pinball. E) Jon used the Newton's cradle, feeling a sense of serenity and gaining a temporary will save. F) Red and Adriel played air hockey. When Red won, the rune on one of the ivory pucks glowed slightly, and Red took it.

G) Jon asked Bay to help him break into the slot machine to see if they could get more tickets or tokens out of it. They moved the slot machine slightly away from the wall to get at the back.

7) At this point 17 zombies materialized in the arcade and began swarming the party members. Using the arcade machines as cover, the party of children withstood the onslaught, disposing of zombies via chainsaw, sun ray spell, trick shots, cleave feat, holy smite, spiked chain, dinosaur-on-zombie violence, and eventually, once Zadkiel was pried away from his QBert game, a mass healing surge.

8) Bay looked out the window and saw a larger horde of zombies swarming towards the arcade. The party quickly turned in their tickets, acquired the chalice (which was golden and inscribed with the word "YOUTH"), and retreated to the playground, where they spun the merry-go-round clockwise and returned to Anselm's yard.

9) The party was now back in their adult forms. They still had the items they had picked up in the playground/arcade, but those itemse appeared to have aged--the leftover tickets were yellowed, the tin horn had some rust on it. Jon used his planar abilities to sense whether time might have passed while they were away, but to his relief, he sensed no temporal disjunction whatsoever.

10) The party placed the chalice on the stool in Anselm's tent, where it disappeared.

11) The PCs next decided to go into the restful-looking little garden and have a closer look at the fountain in there. First, they noticed that the thin silver stream bordering the garden appeared to be continuously flowing in a clockwise direction. Approaching the footpath across the stream, which had a tall arbor overhead, the PCs  stopped to check it for magic and traps. Jon sensed elemental magic in the garden, but like Red had with the tree earlier, he felt there was something inauthentic about it.

12) Bay and Aler didn't find any traps, but as they were searching, a giant millipede burst out of the earth and came rushing towards the party. Red used wild empathy on it, and it stopped and began conversing with the party in Malachian. Apparently it calls itself "Ralph" and has been living here since before Anselm arrived, "though I was a fair bit smaller then." Ralph did not know what a chalice, where you could find one, or what you could expect to find in the garden. "It's different for each person," he said. Asked for advice, he said "Things in here can hurt you--sometimes. Depending on where you are and what's going on with you when you trigger it, the same fight could be a cakewalk victory or a deadly defeat. Or, completely avoidable. Too many moving parts to give really useful advice, I'm afraid. I guess I'd say don't be afraid to turn around and come at something from another angle if you need to. There are many more than three paths available to you here." The party thanked Ralph and offered to bring him back some mushrooms if they found any.

13) Passing through the arbor, the party was again transported to someplace different, in this case a much larger garden with a path leading to a bamboo bridge over a flowing river. There was a cascading fountain on one side of the bridge and statue of a water panther with an offering bowl on the other side.

14) The statue of the water panther spoke in Malachian, saying "Welcome to the Garden of Wisdom, travelers. Leave an Aquan offering, and pass safely." Jon attempted to speak to the water panther in Aquan and even sang part of the song he had composed for your water panther friend Lara, but it only repeated the same line--it appears to be simply an enchanted statue, not an actual water panther.

15) After searching their inventories and finding nothing Aquan, the party tried putting holy water into the bowl. Nothing seemed to happen.

16) Meanwhile, Adriel washed her hands in the fountain, feeling a sense of meditative grace and receiving a temporary will save bonus.

17) The party recalled that the water panther statue they had seen in Mendham Wood had sapphires for eyes. No one had one of those in their pockets either, but they decided to go back to the yard and take a sapphire from the bowl of jewels they had seen there by the lion statue.

18) Passing through the arbor returned them back to Anselm's yard without complication.

19) When the party took a gem from the bowl, they were transported again, this time to a classic looking dungeon room dominated by a big green demonic face with a round, jet black, 3' diameter hole for a mouth. There was a chest on one side of the room and a big pile of gold lying on the floor on the other. The inscription over the giant face was in Abyssal, which Jon was able to translate: it said WEALTH. There was also another lion statue here, this one with an empty bowl.

20) Khirg thought he had seen the green demonic face somewhere before. Making a bardic knowledge check, Jon identified it as an iconic design from a legend about a lich's abode called the "Tomb of Horrors."

21) Bay and Aler moved to search the chest for traps, but the floor in front of the chest turned out to be trapped, jutting poison spikes into them which both resisted. Somebody (I don't recall who) also stepped on a tile that triggered saw blades to spring out of the wall. Bay commented that the whole place seemed trapped, and that in the thieves guild she had belonged to, this kind of dungeon was referred to as an "SFL" location, for "set for life," because there was usually enough treasure in a place like this to live richly on for the rest of your life, and also enough traps to make the rest of your life very short if you didn't get out with the treasure.

22) The party successfully took some gold coins from the pile of coins without triggering a trap. However, a magical cloud emerged from the demon's mouth and coalesced into a huge crystalline dragonfly which began attacking. This dragonfly had the annoying quality of spawning a new, smaller dragonfly every time enough damage was knocked off its own total, causing the party to get swarmed with enemy attacks. However thanks to some extra buffing spells laid on Adriel she had an AC of 36 by now, so she just stood in the middle absorbing their attacks and dishing out like 8 blows a round till they were all dead (with assists from some well-placed Shout and Gust of Wind spells, force arrows, more cleaving, and a heckuva lot of healing.)

23) Having defeated the monster, the party quickly began shoveling all the coins they could carry into their bags, ending up with 6 bags of 750 gp apiece.

24) Bay identified that the lock on the chest was trapped. Rather than risk triggering it by defusing it, the party decided to back up into the alcove opposite the giant demon's head and cast Warp Wood on the chest. The phrase "pack together as tightly as we can" was uttered.

25) And the session ended on the giant fireball inevitably shooting from the mouth of the giant demon head directly into the entire party.

We will see how much damage they take when we reconvene in February. :-D

Onward!