TTRPG Night S1E6

To the Casino

Just like I mentioned when I ended the last article, the players found themselves back in the Dragon Bar, within the Fortune’s Wheel Casino.

The first thing they noticed was the nasty relatively well dress Ghast named Dire was in the Dragon bar, seemingly awaiting the return of the player characters. Two ghouls what I once again described like the hooligans from A Clockwork Orange were there with him, giggling and slobbering while the Ghast grinned a mouth full of murder teeth at the party. Q’or suggested maybe they take their chances with the Dead Nation instead of telling Shemeshka they had failed. Ultimately, Varek arrived and ushered them away

As Shemeshka was exiting the space, she was told that a representative of the Dead Nation was giving them shit. She flippantly suggested that she would have them taken care of. Almost immediately upon her vacating the room, the team noticed a commotion in the direction of the Dragon Bar leading into the casino. As they made their way back to the Dragon Bar on their way up to their rooms, they passed by the scene of a minor massacre: the two ghouls were broken against the paneling of the Bar and the Ghast was nowhere to be seen. The Mezzoloth guards were milling about, dress wear rumpled and caked in gore, and the Oni guard was bleeding out on the floor: they didn’t have to worry about the Dead Nation for the immediate future. They passed a group of imps on their way down with tools and paint.

In the morning, Varek ushers them back to Shemeshka where they learn that Kheloseos has fled to the outlands, and are tasked with retrieving the crown before it ends up in the hands of her rival, the Ultroloth Rearrordan the Schemomancer, which is a title that I thought sounded great until I read it outloud. Anyway, Shemeshka presumes the Yugoloth adversary is behind the plot to rob her of the items she seeks merely to mess with her and raise his own personal standings. She assumes its Rearrordan because powerful magics are concealing the location of the wayward wizard.

Knowing full well that they have been less than forthcoming with her, she finally breaks them on the whole “black armored guy and his big sword killing them” thing. For the briefest of moments, she visibly loses her composure, stating that she has only heard of such a thing once. The outcome was less than desirable.

In the end, all Shemeshka verified was the specific portal Kheloseos has moved through and that he has not traveled through another yet. She will continue to gather information about their “condition” and formulate some form of plan in regard to the upcoming bank heist while they go get the crown.

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To the Gate

They are handed a lapis lazuli shaped like an eye and informed that it will get them to the Outlands. Shemeshka informs them that she has an informant or connection in one way or another within each gate-town: They are expected to check in regularly. Lastly, she cautions the characters that time does not necessarily work the way one might expect when in the wilds of the Outlands.

She suggests they avoid the Harmonium on their way out of Sigil. Dum Dum Duuuuuum.

One of the standard Peacekeepers produces a bag of holding and starts collecting the weapons that were tossed to the ground as each character is locked up with magical manacles. But the fun wasn’t over. Bodies are cast into the air from amidst the onlooking crowd of gawkers. As the onlookers run screaming by, a grisly scene erupts: the Orthon hunter that found them as they emerged into Sigil had once again located the party, and the devil was killing everyone between it and them. Heroically, the Harmonium Captain ordered half of her squad to stay with the prisoners and the rest were to join her in battle against Detrateradon. We’ve heard that name before.

Things escalate quickly and one of the Harmonium yells to go help, and the rest of the soldiers run into the fray. Using the distraction, the guard with the bag of holding rushes in to release the characters. The guard has a distinctive birthmark, and, after several months, I have to point out that Farrow had the same. A good spy indeed. She urges the party to get going: Brick Says he will help with a distraction while they get out of here. he fears what will come of them all if Shemeshka doesn’t get what she wants, and also they are leveled up enough and have a back up character plot device to help them survive the increasingly difficult encounters to come, so it was time to leave them on their own. With haste, they make it to the portal and depart to the City of Doors.

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To the Outlands

Here again I find myself using module assets, because, well, why not? It’s far less work to read a chapter, and adjust the reason the players are going somewhere to fit my needs than to build a whole thing myself. This lets me focus on the fun aspect while playing instead of being exhausted by endless prep. In addition, I am less concerned with shit going sideways, since I am not strictly “running the module” i can more easily adjust if the players move away from published work.

The characters arrive in the middle of a rather exotic nowhere. Quickly the group recognized the stone spire that stretched upwards into infinity as that spire below the city of Sigil. They found tracks that were not that of an animal, and with no other option than presume it was Kheloseos, and some other oddly enormous impact craters. They set off to follow in his footsteps.

It wasn’t long before the characters found themselves with a clearing in the strangely colored woodlands. Surrounded by a field of what apparead to be artfully crafted pillars fallen to the ground, a round multi-leveled castle stood solitary before them. Of course the trail led right to the stairway up into the castle.

Upon the first level, they find themselves first within a paved ring, and then move into a splendid hall. Choosing to go right, they come across a massive stone door. Bitzie nat-20s her check to unlock it and they are in: the best part was that the door on the other side had already been bashed in. They didn’t determine that until they were inside the immense library. They found the original caretaker encased within a crystal sarcophagus and stumbled across the fact that if they asked a question, the creepy bronze eyes of the corpse would look at the books on the wall where the answer could be found.

Creeping up the spiral staircase to the next level, the party was lucky enough to hear the less-than-suble screaming of two tieflings. Arguing about how they were going to get the information they needed to move the thing, and how one had a perpensity to bite fingers off that may be needed later, the party decided to take the cautious route: Bitzie snuck in with a killer stealth check, and stabbed the living fuck out of one of the two. They got into a good ol’ fight, with Z upon the table the Tieflings here at, literally crushing one to death with a flail and the benefit of a crit roll. Chad cut the other one down.

Fearing they would move upwards without checking the office, as the party had detected movement above, I had the hidden enemy in the next room crack the office door open. They went to investigate, found nothing, then got attacked by an invisible nycaloth. The thing did some serious damage, burned through a lot of their resources and ultimately went down. It was a good fight, and technically above the suggested difficult encounter level. What can I say, I don’t hand out levels as copiously as the official module suggests. It’s fine. They lived.

I didn’t explain the mysterious event: I just had a cool thing happen and moved on.

Then I done fucked up. I was supposed to have the incubus in the next chamber use its disguise self spell and look like a gnome, who would pretend to be someone that was supposed to be there. You know, maybe offer his assistance so that he could figure out how to activate the contraption in the room below or otherwise fuck with the characters. But, I didn’t I said “There is an incubus in the room” Fuck me.

I quickly resolved to attempt to get the incubus out alive to get back to Rearrordan and casue mayhem later, as one CR 4 bad guy was just going to be a time-consuming speed bump at this point. So, he informed the group that the caretaker was in the room above, in good condition and offered the key as a trade to peace out of there. They let him go: they found Zaythir, the current Githyanki caretaker of Iedcaru the Walking Castle.

Back in the study, after killing the initially invisible devil, they had found a broken Mimir: a skull make of colored glass, gold and silver sat fractured upon the desk. Since it was not really the time to stop and attempt to fix the damn thing, they pocketed the magic skull apparatus and moved on. Having cleared the castle of do-badders, Hobbler made a arcane check and passed the DC required to repair the Mimir.

I had co-opted the adventure for my own uses: instead of chasing after a Modron gone rogue, they were looking for a wizard that had casually fucked them over. Very little effort was needed to adjust the adventure to make it work, and with the heavy lifting done for me, I got to focus on the fun part, generating fun non-player characters for the players characters to interact with and finding ways to keep the session fun and engaging. It was working quite fine.

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To the Gate-Town of Their Choosing

And just like that, the party found itself in a walking castle, with a caretaker that owes them a favor. The repaired talking skull, sorry, magic knowledge repository talking skull has somehow forgotten some information and the characters figure they can help the Mimir out while figuring out where Kheloseos got off to.

As things were coming to a close, I told them that they each got a once-a-day use of the alternate version of their character in a sort of team-attack. I hinted that as they gained more knowledge of what was going on, they would gain even more remarkable powers (the better to toss reality ending terrors at and still have a built in extra character to fall back on when their main dies for a while. That sounds like a thing I might do. Mwahaha!)

At the end of the night, they picked their first destination and the castle, it got to walkin’. They’re ganna go see Blanka. If you wanna know where they chose to go first, you’ll have to come back here and see for yourself.

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