MAL Ep. 28

Wow, even with an unscheduled detour to the Fey lands, you guys got a LOT done this session!

To recap:

1) Zadkiel, Aler and Red decoded Lochrann's message, learning from it that Shyra is indeed the fey Lann Lasanta, and surmising from the text that she has shapeshifting ability.

2) On their way to Delsin, the party was ambushed in the middle of the night by an explosion of wildfire, causing much damage and chaos. They were then attacked by two creatures of Limbo Jon identified as "starbeasts," which did only modest amounts of damage but were incredibly difficult to injure.

3) During the fight, Bay noticed something inside her and Aler's burning tent. Zadkiel flew in and perceived somebody invisible going through Aler's backpack, but then was hit by a Power Word Stun. Aler used True Seeing to catch sight of the culprit stuffing the crystal skull into his bag: it was the feysworn sorcerer with woad tattoos who had been involved in Seven's kidnapping. The party surmised that he had summoned the starbeasts to distract them while he purloined the skull.

4) Angara managed to wrestle the sorcerer's bag with the crystal skull away from him. Having taken a lot of damage despite his hefty magical protections, he invoked the power of his tattoos to flee to the Fey lands without the skull. However, Aler used Seela's blacksilver arrows to shoot him through the Veil, and then Jon planeblazed through and totally killed his ass with a Shout spell.

5) Jon quickly searched his body and returned to Malachi with the following loot: a ring of protection +3, boots of elvenkind, a magical joker card, and some cash. He also admitted to the party that he had been studying planeblazing with Tisha, which the party reacted to positively.

6) Vanima Kaimelar expressed certainty that no one had entered the campsite from the Fey lands. Aler tracked the sorcerer's footprints through the trees to a muddy clearing where he found some huge footprints like those made by an enormous dinosaur or bird. A stealthy set of PCs sneaked ahead to try to scout the maker of these footprints, and found a magical Baba Yaga-style hut with giant chicken legs waiting behind the hill.

7) The party climbed up to the patio and examined the magical door, which asked them "Authority?" in Fey. Zadkiel and Jon decided to tell it "Lann Lasanta," causing the door to bolt and refuse to open. The rest of the party arrived, and after some discussion, decided the house must belong to the feysworn sorcerer they had just killed. Zadkiel searched his notes and found that Philsin the Fixer had given this guy's name as "Manathor," and trying that name caused the magical door to open.

8) The interior of the hut seemed to be significantly larger than the outside. The party found a large black cauldron bubbling and emitting warmth despite the coals being unlit, a blank black screen, two ornate silver doors barred against entry, and a shelf full of curious magical reagents (nine unmarked jars of powder and a chicken egg in a cracked dish.)

9) Red cast Wood Shape on the wall based on a clue Jon had provided about Fey magic being much easier to redirect than dispel. She succeeded at reshaping the wall allowing entry into the room beyond the silver doors.

10) In this second room, the party found another blue eye sigil, which Adriel covered with her cloak; a summoning circle Jon identified as Fey from its open design; and a desk which animated and broke Aler's wrist, but where he found a letter from Shyra to Manathor and a druidic torc later identified as conferring the ability to project psychometric impressions from the land.

11) The hut suddenly started moving, which the party interpreted as being caused by Jon taking a jar of fairy dust off the shelf (though they actually had no evidence of this.) Jon, Aler and Bay disembarked, but Adriel rallied the other PCs to stay and see where it was going. The hut then shifted to the Fey lands. Jon heroically plunged through the Veil after them, leaving Aler and Bay behind to wait for their return.

12) As the hut strode through the Fey lands, the party pulled Jon back up to the patio and replaced the fairy dust on the shelf, but this did not stop the hut from moving. Jon identified the sprinkling of herbs into a cauldron as witchcraft of lore. Red tried sprinkling some Malachian plants into the cauldron in an attempt to get the hut to shift back to Malachi, but this just caused it to dance in place madly for a minute.

13) I didn't write down which reagents the group identified or tested, but I believe it was: Additionally, Red realized she could use the Purify Food And Drink cantrip to remove reagents from the cauldron and end their effect (though this never caused the view screen to turn off for some reason.)

The house seemed to respond to verbal commands in Fey, at least in theory; however the only things Jon asked to do were to stop once and to return to Malachi repeatedly, and it seemed unable to comply, giving him "error" and "something is missing" messages whenever he tried.

Note, this was a fast and chaotic scene, definitely not scientifically controlled, and not everything you saw happen may have been for the reason you suspect.

The party did NOT bring any of the reagents with them (Jon replaced the fairy dust on the shelf, and Red deliberately dropped the cremains while being expelled from the hut.)

14) Jon sent Vanima Kaimelar with a message for Lochrann which, while it was not an EXPLICIT plea for help (a significant distinction when dealing with Fey,) was nonetheless pretty clearly a plea for help. (The word "urgent" was used.)

15) The party began retracing their steps back towards the point where they had entered the Fey lands, since Jon told them they would need to exit from close to the same point they had entered in order to arrive in the same location, due to spatial disjunctions between the Fey plane and other planes. He assured Khirg, however, that there were no appreciable temporal disjunctions between the Fey plane and Malachi.

16) After avoiding being hit by a speeding bullet train with kaleidoscopic lights, the group talked to a pixie at the crystalline ticket station, who was very confused by their requests for a ticket to "Malachi" (a location she did not recognize) and "Lochrann" (whose name she recognized, but averred is a Fey Lord whose position is not fixed and therefore has no train station.) Jon said but surely she has a home in the Fey Lands to which we could travel? and the pixie said No, it is all her home. She comes and goes as she pleases.

17) At that moment Lochrann herself arrived with Vanima Kaimelar, who had successfully delivered the message in a bottle. (Little foxy earning her keep here.) The party all began talking at once about their woes: being lost, having no way to get back to where their friends are waiting for them, being ambushed by Manathor, not knowing how to control a magic hut they found, and trying to show her the crystal skull which Shyra apparently had some interest in. Lochrann reacted with distaste, not unlike an older gentleman at a bus stop being besieged by a group of kids all clamoring to tell him about who had bothered them the most at kindergarten that day. Jon surmises after the fact that Lochrann really does not like it when humans all start talking at once, nor when they deluge her with details. She said the hut sounded like "a walking hut," but had never heard of Manathor and saw nothing a fey would find intriguing about the crystal skull. She suggested you investigate these things yourself on your own world, walked back with you to your point of entry, and opened a portal for you, where Aler, Bay, and Cartino were reunited with the group.

18) The party finally got some sleep and carried on to the mining town of Delsin, where they found themselves being rather pointedly ignored by the townsfolk. Zadkiel brought the group to the stately dwarven temple of Moradin and asked the high priest, Dareth, to help put him in contact with his deadbeat angel father. Dareth was surprised but not shocked, and told Zadkiel the angels of Moradin speak only to those who have done a great service for the dwarves. Zadkiel manifested his angelic form and attempted to lift the hammer of Moradin from the pool it was resting in--unsuccessfully, but it did cause the pool to star glowing and the statue of Moradin to speak to him. “Go thou to the volcano of Abresor, and bring back to this temple the Forge of our Master. Only with this forge can the Children of the Mountain craft arms to defend our land. Do this service, and the Angels of Justice will come to answer thy questions.” Adriel recognized Abresor as the name of a volcano near her childhood village of Berranan. Jon also asked the dwarven priest about the mad mentalist Anselm they were searching for, but the priest had no idea about that.

19) The group decided not to speak to anyone else in Delsin at this time and instead decamped immediately for Berranan, hoping to learn why, other than sheer orneriness, Chavalk would have attacked such an ordinary bucolic village. Adriel told them the story of the attack from her then-8-year-old perspective, and also said that Chavalk and her father had long been enemies, so it isn't impossible that Chavalk would have attacked merely to take revenge on her father.

20) No one seemed to have set foot in Berranan in years. The group encountered a spectral Haunt with many ghostly voices lamenting their untimely deaths. Some complained of their bones lying "scattered like the dust" or "abandoned," though there was clearly a consecrated mass grave here where victims had been laid to rest, and others complained that the knight Martin Valenal had ridden away in their hour of need, left them to be slaughtered, etc. Adriel, who had been with her father at the time of his death, maintained that he had fought bravely against Chavalk himself and been slain in battle.

21) Exhorted by the haunt to go to the schoolhouse, the group found only a crater overgrown with weeds. While the party cleared the weeds to get a better look at it, Red used the druidic torc to get past images of this land, getting images of normal happy village life interspersed with images from battle and destruction. She got one clear conversation between Adriel's father and a younger knight. Apparently the haunt and Adriel were both sort of right--Chavalk had caught Martin Valenal in a fork position, attacking a group of villagers including Adriel down by the river to draw the knight away from his position defending the rest of the townsfolk, especially a boy named Marek. Valenal did charge into battle against Chavalk at the second location, saving Adriel's life but dying in the process.

22) Clearing away the weeds, the party noticed an unusual blast pattern, with individual bricks and beams from the schoolhouse scattered across the ground in no close proximity to each other, rather than clumps of rubble or chunks of walls as you would ordinarily expect. The party quickly associated this with Bay's entropy force, and she confirmed that when she was first stricken with this force that "no two things were left touching one other in my vicinity." Putting together what Adriel remembered of Marek and the letters about Chavalk and the Chaos Hounds, the party hypothesized that Marek may have been the first Chaos Hound which Naruah said Chavalk already controls.

23) Searching the site further, the party found many human bones, also torn apart and scattered like the bricks and wood. Realizing that it would be an impossible task to dig them all out of the earth individually, the party decided to honor the dead in their own ways. Zadkiel prayed to his goddess Altaris, Red communed with the land and caused the earth to flower here, while Jon started to play a requiem on his eldritch pipes with the intention of calming the emotions of the ghosts. Adriel asked to play the pipes herself, since this was her village and her friends. Jon was very reluctant to let her play his special pipes, stating that he didn't know how they would react, but after consulting with Piper, decided to let her try. Having no bardic abilities, though, Adriel was only able to blow a few notes which did not have the desired effect. Red and Bay talked her into letting Jon play on her behalf. Jon played a hauntingly calming air, which in combination with the clerical and druidic rituals seemed to calm the restless ghosts.

24) Adriel knelt in the crater and pledged her service as a knight to Bay, as her father had been unable to save Marek from his fate as a Chaos Hound and she feels responsible for that, she is now determined to save Bay from hers. The ghost of the schoolteacher manifested and gave Adriel her blessing in her quest.

25) In coda, as the party set off for the volcano of Abresor, a pigeon arrived from Red telling her of the druid unit's successful rendezvous with Tisha, Tanya and the King of Clocks. Barken has been rescued, but was considerably disoriented, reporting being "drugged and interrogated by “a woman in her underwear,” who asked him questions about ghosts but seemed to be ignoring his answers." A guard was also taken prisoner, who claimed to be a mercenary from Norwall (not actually a Ducal soldier at all) and not to know who hired him.

And there we broke for the day. Onwards!