Post by Malri 'Taffeta' Thistletop on May 8, 2018 23:16:12 GMT
Hi all. I've got a busy week coming up so not going to have much time to craft a write-up, and also Taffeta understood so little of what happened to her party that I'm not quite sure how I would even render an informative account from her point of view. So I'm just going to paste my raw notes from the session and others can add or make corrections. Where I've put things in square brackets, that was to remind myself that Taffeta wouldn't have known that it happened.
---
Nowhere (N)
Grimes (G)
Dorian (Dor)
Daisy (D)
me
Rholor (R)
It’s three days after the loss of Daring Heights. We’ve had a lot of conversations with people asking to hear the story, trying to understand what happened. Also lots of messages have been going back and forth trying to coordinate and find allies. Mayor Dapples is gone, no one knows where. So no one is in charge. Aurelia has been doing administrative stuff but doesn’t want to make strategic / policy decisions. Rumours that different merchant factions are thinking of taking control of the Kantas venture. But we have some latitude to do what we think best. A couple of nobles have even said we should do whatever we can to fix it.
R has found N who was off-plane. R has seen a few of the fort party taken captive.
One option is the Eladrin. Other is the 400 remaining xvarts, who now have no mission and only one leader – could defeat the leader and try to take over. They’re currently heading west over the mountains. The orcs are going north-west.
We agree to try the Eladrin. Aurelia can transport us via teleportation circle. She sends us to the hill in Kantas, near Daring Heights, where the feywild overlaps. Purple flowers. From the hill we can see smoke from the town. NW of there we see some rubble where the fort was: Aurelia couldn’t sustain the magic that built it so it collapsed. On the hill we see some fairies floating around. They’re curious and ask us questions. They say there are no orcs round here.
We cross into the feywild on foot. Everything is bigger and more. I’m gobsmacked and awed. In the distance is a vast inky dome and in another direction a weird grey space where DH should be.
R & D explain about Regis, an Eladrin diviner who sent us some troops for the battle at the fort. As R & N discuss how to find him, he appears behind us. ‘I knew you’d come. I sent you some people to fight the orcs. You know my cousin is in jail now? It’s horrible there. Haven’t I given you enough?’
R & D persuade him to try to help. Nothing he can personally do but he knows people and things. He summons a large green thing that unfolds itself into a large and pleasant marquee with table and chairs. Some drinks start pouring themselves. He mutters for a while and then says he’s sent out some messages, and then he sits and waits.
R steps back onto material plane and scries on [Xvad (the remaining xvart leader), stomping up and down dragging his huge axe with the third ‘shard’ in it. He’s in a green valley, apparently alone. There are some caves to be seen in the hills around. He’s muttering about what to do and how to get to Raxolor(?) now. Doesn’t seem to have much of a plan. R scries on Granny. Gets a voice in his head saying ‘If you want to say hello you only have to come by. You aren’t even far away, darling.’ R scries on the captives. They’re going to be moved north-west today, to the orc encampment.] He comes back and tells us Xvad is alone, mumbling that he doesn’t know what to do. N says don’t need to kill him, just persuade him to do what we say. Also whispers something to N.
A silver-haired male eladrin in light blue clothes embroidered with a picture of a sheet cracking jaggedly, long fingernails, looks like Lucius Malfoy suddenly appears and sits down. Regis greets him. A few minutes later, a big broad human(??) woman with shaggy red hair, wearing pelts, with a totem of a bear’s paw on her shoulder. Something animal about her. She sits down. Regis thinks that’s everyone. Introduces Alyssa Honeysuckle from kingdom of the Bear King, who roars massively in greeting, and Byron Rhineshadow from the realm of the Snow Queen, who bows floridly. They take seats at a central table. Byron starts. Asks what we offer for the Snow Queen’s aid. She will ask only what is fair, he says. Offer is to clear the town of orcs by nightfall. Price is to take three stones and place them at specified points around the town. Byron swears they will cause no harm to the town or its people. Also asks for 200 corpses from the battlefield to raise them from the dead and make a small army. Swears they wouldn’t be used against DH. Alyssa says Byron’s offer is a bit ‘unseelie’ (Byron protests that this is uncivil). Says the Bear King is magnanimous. For his help, we must place some of his stones around the town and leave them there, and also would give the Bear Kind three per cent of DH’s income forever. They will clear the town with bees.
R asks for help also rescuing friends from the orcs. For that, Alyssa asks for eight per cent of the town’s income. If friends try to kill the rescuing bears, the deal’s off. N counter-offers ten per cent of net profit. Alyssa refuses. Must be income. But also would be willing to establish trading relationships between DH and the city of bearfolk on the material plane to the north of DH. R counters four per cent while re-establishing the town, rising to six per cent over five years. Alyssa says five and a half per cent from the beginning plus a mutual defence pact with the Bear Kingdom. If attacked, each must defend the other to the full extent of their power. N asks whether the kingdom is currently in any kind of cold war with anyone – no.
R asks what the stones do. Alyssa says they change the light that DH emits in the feywild, make the light bigger. Byron says his do the same. Pressed, he says they will also draw off some emotion from the town to the Snow Kingdom.
Byron offers to rescue friends and to lend services of half a dozen stone giants for six months to rebuild the town. They can build a keep that isn’t outside the town. In exchange, they’d place an effect on the town so that anyone who resides there for three weeks would age imperceptibly faster, amounting over a whole life to a loss of two years.
R offers 600 orc corpses in exchange for the stone giants. Byron suggests 800 orc corpses plus one of the shards for twelve giants for a year.
We confer. I have reservations and uncertainties. We agree to accept Alyssa’s offer for clearing DH and rescuing friends. Vote of three to three on accepting Byron’s offer of corpses for giants so agree not to take it. Byron accepts that and is about to leave but, leaving, offers a single giant to repair the library and the temple of Selune in exchange for 100 orc corpses, not to be used against DH. N not interested. R says he’ll think about it. Byron disappears.
We agree with Alyssa that DH will pay 5.5% of income until DH goes into profit and then 6% for five years. And defensive pact with the bear town. And the stones. The bearfolk will clear out the town by nightfall with bees and will send were-bears to rescue as many captives as possible. R identifies the stones: they will modify the energy to make the fountain of light bigger in the feywild by thinning the boundary between the planes. Can’t tell what effect that will have.
… [stuff happened while I was ordering pizza] …
We go into the xvarts’ cave. Xvad is there. R has located him magically. D casts ‘pass without trace’. We’re very very stealthy (apart from N). We pass lots of xvarts of various kinds, just hanging around, some arguing or fighting. N knocks a bucket over and alerts a berserker-type xvart. N goes still and the xvart can’t find him. We emerge into a valley, 50’ across, 100’ long. An enclosure in the mountains. Xvad is there just hitting a boulder with his hammer.
… [stuff happened while I was collecting pizza] …
N persuades Xvad that he’s an emissary from the god Raxovor(?), who wants the axe back so Xvad can show what he can do on his own. Xvad hands over the axe to N and immediately shrinks to a normal xvart. N leaves. All the other xvarts have turned back into normal xvarts. N persuades the other xvarts that Raxovor now wants them to help rebuild DH. Appoints one of them foreman, who then delegates tasks at random to others.
After conferring with Dorian & R, N goes back to the xvarts and tells them now to take instructions from Dor. Dor instructs them to kill the orcs. Alongside an army of bears. Also the orcs have lots of treasure and wagons. Just free the captives (anyone who isn’t an orc). The xvarts agree, The foreman starts giving out military ranks. Dor promotes the foreman to Captain Number One.
[About half the orcs have gone back to their main camp. The other half are heading back that way. There are eight tribes in total, each with a war wagon, each wagon presumably with loot from DH.]
We wait for nightfall.
Conversation turns to politics. There are merchant factions. One from Port First, named Kensington. Another from the Emerald Tradition.
N is talking cryptically. Thinks Granny has people’s souls, including the mayor’s. DOn’t know whether there are any more shards than the three we have. Important that Granny not get them. Assuming she knows we have them, we’re targets.
[Xvad’s axe is a lightning great-axe +1 that can also cast ‘enlarge self’ once a day.]
N proposes a ruling committee. He proposes that he, R, and Dor should be on it. D suggests Aurelia too. Dor suggests Grimes. Dor suggests representative(s) of the merchants. R doesn’t like Emerald Tradition. Propose Kensington. N says the council should represent various elements of DH. I suggest there could be others who aren’t here who would be good too e.g. some who are currently captured.
We lead 350 xvarts and about 50 were-bears to intercept the orcs as they head north. The captives are chained up by hands and feet, walking. Chained together.
Dor uses teleportation and invisibility to concentrate on releasing people from chains. Daisy fights with the bears as a bear. They all roar very loudly. R is firestorming the orcs that are accompanying the prisoners. (One of the captives, not sure of character name) tries to gather fellow captive warriors and heads towards the bears. Barden has magically located his possessions, which are with the marching company. Grimes is covering Dor. Amongst the orcs is Shamog Skinflayer. Barden puts a fog-cloud on him. Tuvark goes at him. I pick off orcs tactically to free a chain of captives and lead them to safety. Tuvark defeats Shamog. About 150 orcs killed. We free a lot of captives.
When we get back to DH, the town is cleared of orcs. There are a few bees wandering around for the next couple of days. Most of the corpses have disappeared.
Over the next few days / weeks people can come back to DH (Aurelia and others can teleport people in batches). Clearing the rubble takes a while. The fires were mostly in the residential district – a lot of homes destroyed. Stone buildings fared better. Significant damage to library, temple, gardens. The Three-Headed Ettin is charred and trashed. Orcs used it as accommodation. The table in the centre of the Ettin with the carven map is fine because it was fire-proofed.
About 200 xvarts are left. Captain Number One (Ivo) survived and ready to get on with the building work. They captured some orc war wagons. All the captives’ gold and valuables have gone with one of the other parties of orcs.
Population of DH was around 3,000. Not all want to come back. Maybe half.
I ask the others about Idari’s visions and why we might be in DH, whether it’s worth coming back. R advises that visions are not uncommon and can come from various sources, not all of them benign. Suggests bringing Idari to temple of Selune when it’s rebuilt, he can try to help.
---
Nowhere (N)
Grimes (G)
Dorian (Dor)
Daisy (D)
me
Rholor (R)
It’s three days after the loss of Daring Heights. We’ve had a lot of conversations with people asking to hear the story, trying to understand what happened. Also lots of messages have been going back and forth trying to coordinate and find allies. Mayor Dapples is gone, no one knows where. So no one is in charge. Aurelia has been doing administrative stuff but doesn’t want to make strategic / policy decisions. Rumours that different merchant factions are thinking of taking control of the Kantas venture. But we have some latitude to do what we think best. A couple of nobles have even said we should do whatever we can to fix it.
R has found N who was off-plane. R has seen a few of the fort party taken captive.
One option is the Eladrin. Other is the 400 remaining xvarts, who now have no mission and only one leader – could defeat the leader and try to take over. They’re currently heading west over the mountains. The orcs are going north-west.
We agree to try the Eladrin. Aurelia can transport us via teleportation circle. She sends us to the hill in Kantas, near Daring Heights, where the feywild overlaps. Purple flowers. From the hill we can see smoke from the town. NW of there we see some rubble where the fort was: Aurelia couldn’t sustain the magic that built it so it collapsed. On the hill we see some fairies floating around. They’re curious and ask us questions. They say there are no orcs round here.
We cross into the feywild on foot. Everything is bigger and more. I’m gobsmacked and awed. In the distance is a vast inky dome and in another direction a weird grey space where DH should be.
R & D explain about Regis, an Eladrin diviner who sent us some troops for the battle at the fort. As R & N discuss how to find him, he appears behind us. ‘I knew you’d come. I sent you some people to fight the orcs. You know my cousin is in jail now? It’s horrible there. Haven’t I given you enough?’
R & D persuade him to try to help. Nothing he can personally do but he knows people and things. He summons a large green thing that unfolds itself into a large and pleasant marquee with table and chairs. Some drinks start pouring themselves. He mutters for a while and then says he’s sent out some messages, and then he sits and waits.
R steps back onto material plane and scries on [Xvad (the remaining xvart leader), stomping up and down dragging his huge axe with the third ‘shard’ in it. He’s in a green valley, apparently alone. There are some caves to be seen in the hills around. He’s muttering about what to do and how to get to Raxolor(?) now. Doesn’t seem to have much of a plan. R scries on Granny. Gets a voice in his head saying ‘If you want to say hello you only have to come by. You aren’t even far away, darling.’ R scries on the captives. They’re going to be moved north-west today, to the orc encampment.] He comes back and tells us Xvad is alone, mumbling that he doesn’t know what to do. N says don’t need to kill him, just persuade him to do what we say. Also whispers something to N.
A silver-haired male eladrin in light blue clothes embroidered with a picture of a sheet cracking jaggedly, long fingernails, looks like Lucius Malfoy suddenly appears and sits down. Regis greets him. A few minutes later, a big broad human(??) woman with shaggy red hair, wearing pelts, with a totem of a bear’s paw on her shoulder. Something animal about her. She sits down. Regis thinks that’s everyone. Introduces Alyssa Honeysuckle from kingdom of the Bear King, who roars massively in greeting, and Byron Rhineshadow from the realm of the Snow Queen, who bows floridly. They take seats at a central table. Byron starts. Asks what we offer for the Snow Queen’s aid. She will ask only what is fair, he says. Offer is to clear the town of orcs by nightfall. Price is to take three stones and place them at specified points around the town. Byron swears they will cause no harm to the town or its people. Also asks for 200 corpses from the battlefield to raise them from the dead and make a small army. Swears they wouldn’t be used against DH. Alyssa says Byron’s offer is a bit ‘unseelie’ (Byron protests that this is uncivil). Says the Bear King is magnanimous. For his help, we must place some of his stones around the town and leave them there, and also would give the Bear Kind three per cent of DH’s income forever. They will clear the town with bees.
R asks for help also rescuing friends from the orcs. For that, Alyssa asks for eight per cent of the town’s income. If friends try to kill the rescuing bears, the deal’s off. N counter-offers ten per cent of net profit. Alyssa refuses. Must be income. But also would be willing to establish trading relationships between DH and the city of bearfolk on the material plane to the north of DH. R counters four per cent while re-establishing the town, rising to six per cent over five years. Alyssa says five and a half per cent from the beginning plus a mutual defence pact with the Bear Kingdom. If attacked, each must defend the other to the full extent of their power. N asks whether the kingdom is currently in any kind of cold war with anyone – no.
R asks what the stones do. Alyssa says they change the light that DH emits in the feywild, make the light bigger. Byron says his do the same. Pressed, he says they will also draw off some emotion from the town to the Snow Kingdom.
Byron offers to rescue friends and to lend services of half a dozen stone giants for six months to rebuild the town. They can build a keep that isn’t outside the town. In exchange, they’d place an effect on the town so that anyone who resides there for three weeks would age imperceptibly faster, amounting over a whole life to a loss of two years.
R offers 600 orc corpses in exchange for the stone giants. Byron suggests 800 orc corpses plus one of the shards for twelve giants for a year.
We confer. I have reservations and uncertainties. We agree to accept Alyssa’s offer for clearing DH and rescuing friends. Vote of three to three on accepting Byron’s offer of corpses for giants so agree not to take it. Byron accepts that and is about to leave but, leaving, offers a single giant to repair the library and the temple of Selune in exchange for 100 orc corpses, not to be used against DH. N not interested. R says he’ll think about it. Byron disappears.
We agree with Alyssa that DH will pay 5.5% of income until DH goes into profit and then 6% for five years. And defensive pact with the bear town. And the stones. The bearfolk will clear out the town by nightfall with bees and will send were-bears to rescue as many captives as possible. R identifies the stones: they will modify the energy to make the fountain of light bigger in the feywild by thinning the boundary between the planes. Can’t tell what effect that will have.
… [stuff happened while I was ordering pizza] …
We go into the xvarts’ cave. Xvad is there. R has located him magically. D casts ‘pass without trace’. We’re very very stealthy (apart from N). We pass lots of xvarts of various kinds, just hanging around, some arguing or fighting. N knocks a bucket over and alerts a berserker-type xvart. N goes still and the xvart can’t find him. We emerge into a valley, 50’ across, 100’ long. An enclosure in the mountains. Xvad is there just hitting a boulder with his hammer.
… [stuff happened while I was collecting pizza] …
N persuades Xvad that he’s an emissary from the god Raxovor(?), who wants the axe back so Xvad can show what he can do on his own. Xvad hands over the axe to N and immediately shrinks to a normal xvart. N leaves. All the other xvarts have turned back into normal xvarts. N persuades the other xvarts that Raxovor now wants them to help rebuild DH. Appoints one of them foreman, who then delegates tasks at random to others.
After conferring with Dorian & R, N goes back to the xvarts and tells them now to take instructions from Dor. Dor instructs them to kill the orcs. Alongside an army of bears. Also the orcs have lots of treasure and wagons. Just free the captives (anyone who isn’t an orc). The xvarts agree, The foreman starts giving out military ranks. Dor promotes the foreman to Captain Number One.
[About half the orcs have gone back to their main camp. The other half are heading back that way. There are eight tribes in total, each with a war wagon, each wagon presumably with loot from DH.]
We wait for nightfall.
Conversation turns to politics. There are merchant factions. One from Port First, named Kensington. Another from the Emerald Tradition.
N is talking cryptically. Thinks Granny has people’s souls, including the mayor’s. DOn’t know whether there are any more shards than the three we have. Important that Granny not get them. Assuming she knows we have them, we’re targets.
[Xvad’s axe is a lightning great-axe +1 that can also cast ‘enlarge self’ once a day.]
N proposes a ruling committee. He proposes that he, R, and Dor should be on it. D suggests Aurelia too. Dor suggests Grimes. Dor suggests representative(s) of the merchants. R doesn’t like Emerald Tradition. Propose Kensington. N says the council should represent various elements of DH. I suggest there could be others who aren’t here who would be good too e.g. some who are currently captured.
We lead 350 xvarts and about 50 were-bears to intercept the orcs as they head north. The captives are chained up by hands and feet, walking. Chained together.
Dor uses teleportation and invisibility to concentrate on releasing people from chains. Daisy fights with the bears as a bear. They all roar very loudly. R is firestorming the orcs that are accompanying the prisoners. (One of the captives, not sure of character name) tries to gather fellow captive warriors and heads towards the bears. Barden has magically located his possessions, which are with the marching company. Grimes is covering Dor. Amongst the orcs is Shamog Skinflayer. Barden puts a fog-cloud on him. Tuvark goes at him. I pick off orcs tactically to free a chain of captives and lead them to safety. Tuvark defeats Shamog. About 150 orcs killed. We free a lot of captives.
When we get back to DH, the town is cleared of orcs. There are a few bees wandering around for the next couple of days. Most of the corpses have disappeared.
Over the next few days / weeks people can come back to DH (Aurelia and others can teleport people in batches). Clearing the rubble takes a while. The fires were mostly in the residential district – a lot of homes destroyed. Stone buildings fared better. Significant damage to library, temple, gardens. The Three-Headed Ettin is charred and trashed. Orcs used it as accommodation. The table in the centre of the Ettin with the carven map is fine because it was fire-proofed.
About 200 xvarts are left. Captain Number One (Ivo) survived and ready to get on with the building work. They captured some orc war wagons. All the captives’ gold and valuables have gone with one of the other parties of orcs.
Population of DH was around 3,000. Not all want to come back. Maybe half.
I ask the others about Idari’s visions and why we might be in DH, whether it’s worth coming back. R advises that visions are not uncommon and can come from various sources, not all of them benign. Suggests bringing Idari to temple of Selune when it’s rebuilt, he can try to help.