MAL Ep. 42

In this session, the players arrived in the Fey lands and got a quick lesson in this mutable plane and its denizens not always being what they seem.

1) First, the party tried to navigate the eldritch winds of the mana field they arrived in, directly across the Veil from the geomystic springs where the Sibyl made her home. Tanya expressed her shock and dismay over Khirg's disappearance, on which she could not shed any further light, and the other PCs comforted her and pledged to find him.

2) Then Jon noticed the three wrath demons from the ambush party arriving in the mana field, trailing silver Astral cords behind them. He suggested cutting these cords, which he believed would send the demons back to the Abyss.

3) A combat engaged, during which the demons engaged in progressively more and more unexpected behavior. They tried to possess Angara despite a divine spell blocking possession, one of them targeted Aler with an attack despite his demonmark, Tanya's dispels did not take down their forcefields, Zadkiel's antimagic shield did not stop them from spellcasting, Cartino's holy smite did not work properly, and cutting the Astral cord of one of the demons caused it to be stranded in the Fey plane, not returned to the Abyss as Jon expected.

At first the confused party wrote these things up to the well-established variability in demonic powers on Malachi, to the fact that Malachian magic is known to sometimes behave oddly in the Fey lands, or possibly to this group of demons being affiliated with Orcus in some way. However, eventually the truth came to light: they were actually illithids using psionic manipulation to masquerade as demons, and all the "magic" they were using was actually psionics.

Looking back on the ambush fight from last session, the party concluded that those enemies HAD been real demons, since holy smite had worked on them and the marilith dispelled Red's magic, which illithids are incapable of doing. These illithids had presumably mimicked the demons from their fight with the thought that the PCs would find that too believable to react to quickly, in which they were correct.

The remaining illithid was dispatched and looted.

4) The party continued on to a bucolic Sylvan village populated by satyrs and dryads. A satyr named Peridot hailed them, told them the town was menaced by an undead curse, and asked them to talk to the mayor about helping them to end it. He also directed them to an inn in the main square.

5) Arriving at the main square, the party saw a group of four Malachian adventurers, calling themselves the "Mercenaries of Malachi," demanding payment from the mayor for taking on the lich for him, and then slaying him when he offered them too little gold.

6) Outraged, the party attacked the mercenaries, who also seemed to have a strange set of capabilities: they all had stoneskin, all their blows did 1d6+6 HP, and they had magic resistance. They also seemed to alternate strangely between loud trash talk about killing you all and quiet admonishments to lay off them.

7) Aler and Bay shot one of the the mercenaries dead. Red, well past the end of her rope, delivered an impassioned speech about how she was busting her ass to save Malachi from evil extraplanar invaders, only to find these Malachians being evil extraplanar invaders themselves. One of the dryads called out a safeword, and everyone in the village froze in place, while a voiceover announced an intermission and the overhead lights blinked out.

8) Robin Goodfellow aka Puck appeared on the scene, revealing that the entire scenario had been a theater in the round performed for other fey lords. Zadkiel found that the murdered mayor was actually alive. The mercenaries were actually satyr actors with illusion spells. Puck reincarnated the dead actor as a kangaroo.

9) Jon, still a bit confused as to what was going on, sang a song to the Fey god Lugh, who some of the dryads had been calling to for help, beseeching him to answer his followers' call. Puck found this hilarious and said "He's not here any more." He told Peridot, who revealed himself as the leader of the acting group, to revise the script for the second act to include the showdown between the two groups of mortal adventurers. The actors questioned a few of the PCs about their motivations, then departed with the kangaroo.

10) Puck dispelled the stage set, revealing the Fey terrain. The party is standing by the edge of a ravine into a chasmic void. Behind them is an eldritch forest, sparkling with golden lights. On the other side of the ravine, they can just make out the outline of some structures.

11) Puck and the party talked for a little while. He didn't seem too upset with them for interrupting his play, being rather more proud of himself and his actors for presenting a convincing enough scenario to fool real Malachian adventurers. Red huskily asked him for advice, saying that she was realizing that the mortals could not take on the threats against Malachi by themselves, that she had to admit she needed help, and that she still felt torn about whether to enlist the aid of the elementals or not. Puck took a rare serious attitude for a moment and told her that he would reward her for her fine monologue by telling her a secret: "Even we Lords of Fey cannot do everything by ourselves, much as we might like to pretend otherwise. Everyone needs a little help sometimes." He then told Red there was an archfey named Feachan in the area who was into planar magic, who might be able to give her more information about elementals.

12) Jon asked Puck whether he knew where Lochrann was, and Puck said no, she hadn't been in the audience for his play. He seemed unconcerned with the question of where she was beyond that. Tanya asked Puck about whether Fey magics might help to locate Khirg on another plane. Puck said Feachan might be able to help, or that Tanya might be able to use a "Fey Mirror" to get more information, since these artifacts show you your desires. Aler asked about the Windriders of the Sidhe, Puck had never heard of this and suggested in might be a riddle, perhaps something to do with fey air spirits. Jon asked Puck for advice about the prophecy the Sibyl gave about Piper. Puck suggested that since he and Piper were NOT married, but the Sibyl had called her his wife, that perhaps he could get around the prophecy by simply putting off marrying her, since then she wouldn't die till after the marriage! Jon is aware that this might make a better script for a comedic farce than a real-world plan, since trying to outwit Fate on technicalities usually makes everything 100x worse...

And there we broke for the night. Onward!