Plynck
August
22, 2009
XP Starting Out: 62,943
Pail 18, 5040
No rain. Leave dragon lair. Go until something attacks us
Mid-afternoon:
Ar'tes notices a beastie; Beri says it is a GulgutHydra: six bitey
heads, two venus flytrap arms, destroy the extremities before attack
the body.
1. Beri casts Empowered
Fireball for 47; Ulfgar attacks hits a lot; Ar'tes charges GH
and does 9; Ben casts Prayer; GH
moves into group, Ulfgar AoA for 33 on head-3; Ar'tes AoA on head-3, GH
bites Fuori for 10, bites Ar'tes; bites Kes, bites Fuori; arm-1 hits
Ulfgar, grapples Ulfgar; Fuori steps back 5', retreats, casts Electric Orb at all eight extremities,
head-2 dies; Jenna casts Flame Strike
on heads- -1, -5, -6; Zora hits arm-1; Kes uses a Fireball wand on head-4, head-5, and
arm-2.
2. Beri casts Lightning Bolt
on heads- -1, -4, -5, -6, moves out of range; Ulfgar breaks grapple,
criticals on arm-1; Ar'tes hits head-3 twice; Ben casts Flame Strike on heads- -1, -4, -5, -6,
heads- -1 and -6 dies; GH bites Ar'tas for 18, Ulfgar for 6, 15, arm-1
hits Ar'tes for 6, fails grapple, arm-2 hits Ulfgar for 8, succeeds in
grapple for another 9; Fuori watches for other targets; Jenna casts Searing Light on arm-2 for 32; Zora
pulps head-5 ("Zora! Kill it! Kill it good! Kill it hard!"
shouts Beri), cleaves and hits arm-2; Kes uses Fireball wand on head-4 and arm-2.
3. Beri casts Magic Missile
on head-4, kills; Ulfgar breaks grapple, hits arm-2; Ar'tes hits head-3
twice; Ben charges arm-2, misses; GH bites Ar'tes, hits Ulfgar but
fails to grapple, misses Zora; Jenna casts Summon Monster IV: Lantern Archon; Zora
criticals on arm-2, kills, cleaves on arm-1; Kes criticals on head-3;
Ar'tes Opportunistically hits head-3.
4. Beri casts Magic Missile
on arm-1, kills; Ulfgar steps, hits head-3, kills, then bloopers and
loses rest of round; Ar'tes tumbles to flank, hits GH; Ben misses GH;
BH bull rushes in Ar'tes's direction, Ar'tes evades, Ar'tes AoO on GH;
Z criticals, kills.
859 XP Running
Total: 63,802
Beri knows that each of the two arm suckers can be used to make four
potions of SureGrip [T&B p.73] -- that's 8 total.
Ben casts spells to cure Ar'tes for 41, casts Heal to deal with Ulfgar's 95 points of
damage; Jenna uses a wand to cure Kes for 7 (out of 12) and Fuori for
17.
We go, night falls, we camp, we wake up.
Pail 19
Clear weather; no issues
Pail 20
Morning
People relearn spells.
Ulfgar flies up to see landscape. Around 4,000':
0. Ulfgar attacked by translucent female from, makes Will
save;
1. Ulfgar says "hi" to it in many languages; X attacks,
Ulfgar fails save: paralized; X kisses Ulfgar, Ulfgar makes Fort save;
2. X kisses paralized Ulfagar; Ulfgar makes Fort save;
3. X kisses Ulfgar; Ulfgar makes Fort save, realizes he is
kissinig a naked female, kisses back;
this goes on for a few rounds, until Ulfgar gets bored and kills it.
470 XP
Running Total: 64,272
Mid-day
Most of us see a wagon pulled by six poorly dressed humans. Human
driver on the wagon bench, no sign of reins, must be using vocal
commands to the humans pulling the wagon. Ben says, '"That's just
wrong, let's go". Jenna disbelieves but still sees everything
the same. Group heads towards wagon, Fuori and Beri deliberately
lag behind. Jenna casts Detect Evil way out of range,
concentrates on keeping it active until she does get in range. As
we get closer the driver halts the wagon. He has a longbow in
convenient reach of the bench. There are six large barrels in the
bed of the wagon. The driver is looking at us very nervously.
1. Jenna, now at 60', feels there is evil ahead, she nudges
Ben and nods to him. Ben says "Be prepared". People pulling
wagon look resigned.
2. Jenna detects seven auras of evil, driver is strongest:
medium level
3. Ar'tes waits, Fuori reserves for hostile action; Zora
reserves for signal to attack; Drives looks even more alarmed and hops
out of wagon on far side from us, grabbing bow and retreating about
30'; Ben yells, "Stop -- no reason to fear us.", moves forward; Ulfgar
moves to front of wagon to see the rigging on people: they look freely
or voluntarily tethered, and not obviously armed; Jenna's detection
tells her that the six hauling people are also (in addition to the
drive) evil, but nothing in the wagon is, says to the driver, "We're
not here to hurt you"; Ben, "Why are you running away?"; driver:
"You're all scarry"
4. Ar'tes reserves; Furoi reserves; Zora reserves; Driver
says, "Why don't youall back up and go around and leave us alone?"
Then, to his haulers, "I think we're stopping here; get out.";
the other six take off their harnesses; Ben, "Where are you going?
Who is your deity?"; Ulfgar, "Do you really find using slaves as
efficient as horses? Hey, I worked in the markets of Runjourn, so
it's professional interest: does this work as well as horses or oxen?";
Jenna, "Got anything to trade?"; Kes looks around for other potential
dangers.
5. Ar'tes reserves; Fuori reserves; Zora reserves; Driver
says, to Ben, "I have no interest in discussing those things with you."
to Ulfgar, "Yes, I do, don't you?" to Jenna, "No, nothing to trade."
generally, "Please go away"; six haulers move away from the
harness; Ben, "What makes you think we want to debate?", moves up;
Jenna, "I'm Jenna, who are you?", tries to disbelieve again but fails.
6. Ar'tes reserves; Fuori reserves; Zora reserves; Ben
says "get them"; Zora hits CB-1; Beri casts Chain Lightning; Driver casts Chain Lightening on Ben for 39, Jenna,
Ar'tes, Ulfgar, Zora for 21 each; CB-5 on Ulfgar hits, hits, miss; CB-6
on Jenna hits, misses, misses; CB-4 on Ben hits, hits, misses; Disguise Undead spell drops, revealing
that all haulers have leather armor and bastard swords, and the tattoo
of a cauldron on their left cheek: Cauldron Born; Ben tries to Turn but fails; Ulfgar charges Driver,
CB-5 AoO on Ulfgar, CB-4 AoO on Ulfgar, hits Driver, demands "Call off
your dogs!"; Jenna casts Flame Strike
on CB-3 and CB-4; Kes uses wand to cast Fireball
on Driver but spell fizzles out 15' from him.
7. Ar'tes tumbles to behind Driver; Furoi moves to Kes;
Zora takes a 5' step, hits CB-6, hits CB-1, hits CB-6; Beri casts Orb of Acid, kills CB-5; Driver tumbles
out from between Ulfgar and Ar'tes, casts Chain
Lightning on Ulfgar and Ar'tes, Ulfgar takes 19, yells to the
CBs: "Get the fighter"; Ulfgar is hit six times, dies (-30); Zora hits
CB-2; Ben casts Flame Strike on
CB-2, CB-3, and CB-4, CB-3 and CB-4 die; Jenna casts Blade Barrier, everyone saves and is
pushed out (except Ulfgar's body, which is under the blades); Kes casts
Slow on CB-1 and CB-6
8. Ar'tes criticals on Driver, drives uncouscious; Furoi
casts Fireball on on CB-2, kills;
Zora hits CB-1; Beri casts Lesser Acid
Orb on CB-1, kills; CB-6 hits Jenna for 26, but only strikes
once: must be slowed; Ben casts Holy
Smite on CB-6; Jenna hits CB-6, misses; Kes shoots, misses.
9. Ar'tes uses a potion to heal the Driver, stablizes but
still unconscious, holds up body and taunts CB-6; Fuori casts Lesser Acid Orb on CB-6; Zora hits
CB-6; Beri casts Magic Missile on
CB-6; CB-6 hits Jenna; Ben casts Bull
Strength on Zora; Jenna hits CB-6, then backs up; Kes starts to
sing Inspire Greatness on Zora,
shoots and hits CB-6.
10. Ar'tes threatens the Driver; Fuori casts Lesser Acid Orb but misses; Zora hits
CB-6 then moves to Jenna; Beri casts Magic
Missile on CB-6; CB-6 hits Ben, he falls; Jenna heals Zora; Kes
moves to Jenna and Ben, casts Dimension
Door, takes Jenna and Ben away, Inspire
Greatness kicks in on Zora (will last through round 14).
11. Ar'tes still trying to manipulate CB-6 by threatening
the Driver; Fuori casts Magic Missile
on CB-6; Zora hits CB-6; Beri casts Fireball
on CB-6; CB-6 hits Zora; Jenna heals Ben; Kes uses wand to cast Fireball on CB-6.
12. Ar'tes taunts; Furoi casts Magic Missile; Zora hits, hits, misses;
Beri casts Mordenkainen's Lucubration
to recover a spell; CB-6 hits Zora; Ben casts Healing Circle; Jenna casts Flame Strike, CB-6 killed.
Ar'tes tosses the Driver's unconscious body into the Blade Barrier,
kills.
4,711 XP
Running Total:
68,983 Twelfth Level!
Ben casts Raise Dead on Ulfgar,
who is now alive with 12 hit points. He then casts a Heal to bring Ulfgar up to full hit
points. Various healing is done on other people.
Searching the bodies finds:
On the Cauldron Born:
six bastard swords [mundane]
six suits of leather armor [mundane]
On the Mage:
very nice bow, Mighty, equal pull with Zora's, thus Mighty +2
[medium magic]
bracers [major magic]
amulet [major magic]
cloak [medium magic]
boots [minor magic]
On the wagon:
29 days worth of food
barrels each contain three corpses
Ben declares that we'll dig a mass grave for the bodies. Kes
writes "free for the taking" on the wagon
Zora is going to use bow; everything else goes into storage
Leveling up
Pail 21
Mid-afternoon
We come across a swatch of destruction, discontinuous, jumps around,
gets wider and narrower, mostly runs north-south
Get through day
At end of day's march, Ulfgar flies up again, at 4,000 runs into his
girlfriend (or someone exactly like her). Ulfgar charges,
criticals, kills; comes back down.
343 XP
Running Total: 69,426
From Ulfgar's description, Beri identifies the 'young lady' as a Breath
Drinker, a kind of Air Elemental.
Make camp.
Pail 22
Get throught the day. Ulfgar flies up to only 3,000 feet, sees
nothing - except more prairie - over the next 30 miles.
During the night the winds pick up
Pail 23
Heavy winds during the day: 30 - 40 mph. Get through the day, but
don't travel as far because horses (both of the ones still alive) hate
walking into the wind.
Winds die down again overnight.
Pail 24
Day starts out calm. Ulfgar flies up. Sees nothing.
Flies back down. Asks Fuori how big this prairie is.
She's never been here, but from the stars she can give rough
estimates as to how far they've come from Greater Woodknife
(1,200-1,400 miles), and how far it is yet to Addernectar (1,000 -
1,200 miles).
Jenna and Ben cast Wind Walk on
all the people and both horses.
One hour into flying, see straight line against horizon ahead (in
East). Keep flying: line rises above horizon, gets taller, like
large wall. Fuori knows nothing about this. Flying close to
it, it's an almost sheer wall of granite. Flying up we find that
it has a flat top that goes off to the East, as well as stretching to
right and left hands (South and North) further than we can see.
Fuori says that mesa-like upthrusts of solid rock -- only
immensly larger than ordinary mesas -- are sometimes called "shields".
Go up to 1,000 ft (above shield) and find that it extends at
least 10 miles East (also North and South). Start flying East.
Two hours later still over it. Go up to 2,000', still don't
see any visible structures. Two hours later, still nothing.
One hour later, reach Eastern edge: another sheer drop back down
to prairie.
Group moves back from the edge then lands. All turn back to
normal. Fuori immediately stumbles and catches herself, mutters
that she can't "find north". Knows where it is from the sun, but
some internal reckoning system has apparently been affected by her
proximity to the shield. She is disoriented: -2 on everything.
We fly again: South of West, returning over the shield. Two hours
later, going up to look around, we see some sort of structure -- or at
least the shadows cast by something that isn't smooth flat granite
"tabletop". Two hours later we reach a row of menhirs and
capstones. Twelve of them, lined up such that one could shoot an
arrow through them all, running roughly East to West. On close
examination, they seem to have been Stone
Shaped out of, and still contiguous with, the granite of the
shield, with the menhirs and capstones not being separate from each
other. The menhirs are 6' x 6' and 20' tall, and a pair has 20'
of space between them; each capstone is 6' higher (above its menhirs),
6' deep (matching its underlying menhirs), and 32' wide (exactly
covering both its menhirs). The distances between one menhir pair
plus capstone, and the next, is 32' between the first two
(Eastmost) "arch", and increases by 8' between each next pair of arches
to the West: 32', 40', 48', 56', 64', 72', 80', 88', 96', 104',
112' -- for a total of 858' from end to end.
In the center of each capstone, on the West side, is a 4' tall etching:
Beri does a Sepllcraft check, with an emphasis on Stone Shape -- finds that it doesn't
really fit. While some aspects seem quite in line -- in
particular the seemless lack-of-joins between what would normally be
separate stones, and the melding of the menhirs to the shield top --
others don't add up. Specifically, a normal (well, as cast by a very
high level spell user) Stone Shape
could have created an arch, but in doing so there would of necessity be
a loss of stone nearby. And there certainly doesn't seem to be
any such loss of granite within sight.
We fly on for one more hour (the duration of the spells) along the line
indicated by the lined-up arches. Flying up to 1,000 feet, before
landing, shows us nothing within 10 miles.
Make Camp. Fuori resumes being disoriented as soon as she stops
being etherial.
Third Watch
Everyone on watch sees a lightning strike far to the North.
Ulfgar and Fuori are dazzled for one round. We all go inside,
watch out through windows and doors. About six minutes later a
very rattling thunder arrives. Jenna asks Fuori how far away the
strike was, Fuori thinks about 75 miles, but has never known the
effects of lightning to travel that far. Ulfgar ventures back out
to chalk an arrow in a rough indication of the direction of where the
lightning bolt was. Five minutes later a beam of pale red light
is suddenly nearby. It appeared too rapidly to be able to say
which direction it came from, and vanishes again almost immediately,
but it seems to have been running East and West, and there is
speculation that it would have gone straight through all the arches.
Jenna has no idea, from Spellcraft as to what it might be.
Fuori also has never heard of anything like this in her
Wilderness Lore.
Pail 25
Clouding up - possible storm later.
Ben and Jenna cast Air Walk
again.
Ulfgar says if we follow the line he drew, we'll probably get to where
the lightning struck. One hour towards strike, we go up to 2,000
ft to look around. See two new sets of menhir & capstone
lines of arches: one to East and South, the other to East and North,
not parallel to each other, seem to be converging to the West.
Ar'tes thinks they form a roughly 30º angle.
We fly at 3,000 ft towards the common point indicated by their
converging lines. At a guess, will need to fly about an hour and
a half to get there.
After flying for about an hour, everyone can see that there is
something not flat ahead. From about fifteen miles away, it seems
to be a depression in the granite. At five miles we see it is a
very regularly shaped bowl ?carved? into the granite tabletop. At
one mile we can estimate it as being hundreds of feet wide and across.
From roughly 1,000 feet away and 500 feet up Ar'tes estimates it
to be 1,500 ft across, 1,000 ft deep. There is a small sphere
apparently hovering at the exact center of the bowl, bisecting the
ground level. Ar'tes estimates it as being about 20' in diameter;
it looks to be made out of solid granite, and there are no visible
supports for holding it up.
About 300' to the North of the bowl's North edge is a ruined structure;
Ben thinks, just a feeling, that it used to be a temple.
Flying around it, the first impression may have been exaggerated.
Most of it looks to be in good shape: walls solid and standing,
roof entact. But what was once a tower has fallen in on itself
(which perhaps is what gives the building its ruined appearance).
We land, all become corporal again (Fuori is again afflicted with her
disorientation). Jenna casts Detect
Evil and does: one, covering as much of the building as her
spell's limit, major.
We all enter the building through its main doors. Immediately Ben
and Jenna feel a disconnect - as though they've lost a connection with
their deities. Ben tells the group that he can no longer feel
Pelor's presence; and Jenna says that's true for her with Ehlonna,
also. Ben thinks that anything which could interfere with the
connection between a deity and one of his clerics, could also act as a
shield that would keep out Celestials.
Ben casts Bless on the group --
the spell works. There is discussion, however, about whether Ben
would be able to recharge that slot tomorrow morning.
Everyone goes back outside to set up camp, and consider what to do next.
[As requested, Birath (the Celestial who removed Ulfgar's Soul Nibbler)
is, retroactively, giving the group better, clearer,
instructions as to what they need to do to fulfill their "return
favor". Birath wants them to find a structure, on top of a
shield, to the East (from the place he destroyed the Soul Nibbler)
along their path, "you can't miss it". "It" is a structure he
cannot "see" inside. The group is to explore and map it,
providing him with a detailed plan of the layout of rooms, items in the
rooms, and inhabitants. He has no objection to the group removing
any of its items from the structure, or any of its inhabitants from
this plane of existence.]
Run stops here.
750 XP for roleplaying: specifically interacting with Driver, and then
respectfully dealing with bodies found in wagon.
500 XP for cleverness: using Air Walk to speed up traveling; orienting
on the menhir arch rows to find the "center".
Running Total: 70,676
