Session 31¶
Date: March 9, 2023
- Finished the fight, killed the dogs, all of which turned into smoke.
- Pasha let the one mortally wounded Aldarion Unlimited guard bleed out.
Recap¶
A bit over a year ago in the town of Cauldin's Point, you joined to attend Dauriel Aldarion's 462nd birthday party. While staying in an inn paid for by Dauriel, things began to seem a bit off. A young girl's ghostly apparition led you down to the inn's basement where you found a tunnel leading to a tomb. Here, you uncovered blue cloaks and golden daggers and signs of a cult following an unknown deity named Amalchi operating in the bowels of the town.
The next day, Dauriel revealed the real reason he invited you to the party: he needed you to check up on Gadot's father, Phillipe, who had been missing for a while now in faraway Marram. Dauriel feared that the company he founded, but retired from, now had something to do with the ongoing Tabaxi genocide taking place there. He had sent Phillipe to investigate and now his son and his friends in turn.
At night, Wolf was visited in his forest camp by a lady carrying a swaddled baby. She wanted to sit by his fire to warm up. Wolf agreed and noticed that the baby was made of soil. When he looked up in the sky, he saw that the world's five moons were coalescing into a single point of bright light, turning night into day for just a moment. When he looked back down, the woman was gone.
Dauriel's birthday party was the next day. In a passionate speech in the ballroom of his mansion, Dauriel's husband Moreus, revealed that he knew about his husband's secret desire to go adventuring again. He also knew that the reason he didn't was because of him, being merely a weak mortal. He told the gathered crowd that he heard a voice talk to him from a blue glass sphere in Dauriel's office. They had been talking for a while, becoming friendly, building trust. The voice, he said, promised to give him the strength to allow him to come along on his husband's adventures. Moreus produced the sphere from behind his back, and, while Dauriel screamed in protest, he shattered the sphere in his hand.
Moreus became enveloped in tendrils of blue light coming from the shattered orb while one of the tendrils smashed Dauriel into the floor, unconscious. Moreus began to float and you followed his body. Sah-Sauj carried Dauriel and laid him to rest on a couch. His body was badly hurt and encrusted with black stone where the tendril had touched him. Dauriel implored him not to let Moreus descend before he passed out. However, Moreus floated through doors and down a hallway to the basement of the mansion where you found a passageway leading deep into the earth.
Far below the mansion and the town, you emerged in a cave with carved out chambers and a tall spire leading up, surrounded by a moat of lava. Here you met a woman who Wolf recognized as the same woman who had visited him at his camp. She revealed herself to be Bhreia, the deity previously thought to have been only a personification of the earth. She offered those who would accept it a gift: a connection with her through nature, and Sah-Sauj a new destiny as a protector of life. She turned Sah-Sauj's holy symbol into a staff resembling a branch with 10 leaves containing healing powers. She disappeared and you continued your pursuit of Moreus.
But he was already nowhere to be found. Once you made your way up the spire, you saw Moreus in the hands of cult members wearing blue cloaks, feeding him blood, nurturing something inside him. His skin cracked open with blue energy, his eyes glowing wildly. Something alive gestated within him. All the while you fought the cult members, but despite your valiant efforts, you were unable to stop the inevitable. Moreus burst open like an overcooked sausage and from within, an enormous blue dragon appeared. Amalchi had risen.
Amalchi, in dragon form, looked down at you and in Draconic, said: "I shall grant you the same courtesy that your kind has shown me."
He enveloped you in his wings and the next thing you saw was a blue void of absolute nothingness. Here you floated until you found what appeared to be a boundary. A sphere. Sah-Sauj remembered dreaming of a place like this where his friend Fred lived. Eventually, you cracked the sphere and for a moment seemed to be observing a conversation between a man and a woman, talking about strange things you didn't understand. Then, suddenly, you were back in the blue void, which appeared cracked all over.
You shattered it, broke through, and emerged on a small island in the middle of a debris-cluttered lake. From the remnants there, you deduced that the lake was a crater where the town of Cauldin's Point used to be. Nearby, in the bushes, you found a female corpse, dressed like the strange people you briefly observed in the void. Tiran found a mechanical construct that he vowed to take with him once you made it out safe.
You spoke to the survivors of the apparent disaster that struck the town one year ago on the exact same day. A dragon had burst from the earth, destroying the town and locking the sun in the sky. The sun hadn't set for a year. Hundreds had died with more missing and presumed dead, including yourselves as you later found out.
Tiran's mother had taken up hold in her family's forge a few miles outside of Cauldin's Point. You reunited with her and her new friend, Agorius, a survivor of the disaster who was helping out at the forge. Here, the two of them constructed semi-magical clocks powered by a crystal that kept track of the actual time now that the sun could no longer do that. These clocks were distributed worldwide, and placed in the centers of cities and towns.
You retrieved Tiran's mechanical construct from the crater and brought it back to the forge. However, on the way back, you were ambushed by a young one-eyed dragon, who called Pasha a traitor. The battle nearly killed the dragon who was barely able to escape with his life. Agorius was knocked out and brought back to the forge unconscious.
When Pasha and Sah-Sauj laid him down in his bed, they went through his belongings and found items tying him to the cult of Amalchi. Agorius was not who he seemed and was revealed to be Phidippus, one of the cult members they had fought and a powerful magic user who had disguised himself. Pasha and Sah-Sauj found out and restrained him. When Sah-Sauj went to tell the others, Phidippus told Pasha "I didn't mean for this to happen just yet." While moving him outside, Phidippus broke free from Pasha's grasp and disappeared using an invisibility spell.
While inspecting the clocks, you found out that the crystals embedded in the devices were corrupted. The crystal was a black obsidian instead of white. When touching the it, some of you were met with visions of a jungle and a foggy ravine holding a shadowy creature within. Tirans mother worried that Phidippus was responsible for it and didn't know why he did this. All she knew was that they had been distributing these devices for almost a year to important settlements all over the world.
After some shenanigans in town, which ended up with burning the forge to the ground, you met Sebastian, who turned out to be Tiran's cousin from Taïni. He had traveled all the way to Cauldin's Point to retrieve Tiran on order of his father. He mentioned that Tiran's father had shown up with a badly hurt elven man, encrusted in black stone all over his body and missing limbs. The elf was kept secretly in a back room of Sebastian's home.
With the forge burned down, Tiran's mother returned home and you set out eastward on your way to meet Tiran's father in Taïni. On the road, you once again faced the same young one-eyed dragon and finally defeated it. Once dead, it dropped its glowing eye, which when looked through, revealed magical objects nearby. That day, the sun set for the first time in a year.
A night, while making camp, Bhreia appeared to Pasha and set him on a journey up a nearby mountain to visit an oracle. In the forest on the foothills, he encountered familiar faces who tried to lure him off his path. But Pasha refused. Eventually, he made his way through the forest and up the side of the mountain where he met a young half-elf girl named Kassie, who he helped up the peak even though she wouldn't stop asking him questions.
After she finished asking her barrage of questions, they instantly appeared at the temple at the summit. She jumped off Pasha's back and ran inside. Pasha followed and the temple's doors closed behind him. In the darkness, Kassie, the new oracle, revealed visions to him about the past, the state of the present, and potential futures. His experience ended with him being brought back to the camp where Bhreia still sat waiting for him. Only a few minutes had passed while he was gone.
Bhreia explained that the world was in peril with her brother Amalchi no longer controlling the sky. She provided a choice for you: The first option was to travel to Amalchi's original plane of existence and somehow seed it with life. The second, to hatch her from an egg, transforming her into a dragon who would help defeat Amalchi. You accepted the second one.
On the road, Tiran's mechanical construct, now named Clank picked up on a radio signal from a person named Remo who lived in Rivoni Springs and sounded excited to meet another Earthling. He said that whoever was listening should come visit him.
While camping, Sah-Sauj noticed a familiar sick man who held a box that he really really wanted. Using the cover of night, he went over and demanded the box from the man. He refused, so Sah-Sauj killed him and took the box instead of waiting for him to die, which he clearly would have that same night. When going to sleep that night, Sah-Sauj found himself flying through the sky with dolphins and having a great time. The voice of his friend Fred who had been missing from Sah-Sauj's dreams for a while reappeared. Fred told him that he'd have a gift for Sah-Sauj in the morning and that he'd be back in his dreams again from now on.
The next morning, Sah-Sauj found that his staff given to him by Bhreia had withered and died. Instead, he was filled with newfound rage and strength that he tried out on the corpse of the person who he'd killed the night before, throwing him across the field on which you had set your camp.
While cleaning blood off a statue in the center of the field, you found a tunnel leading down into a chamber that held the imprisoned Korban, namesake of the country you now inhabited. He'd been down there for the better part of a millennium, magically kept alive by his unbreakable prison. In this room, you also found what seemed to be a portal rotating through several destinations, all of which looked unfamiliar except for Cauldin's Point. Though you tried, you could not break Korban free from his prison and were forced to leave him behind, setting back out onto the road.
A few days later, you arrived in Korban's Landing, a port city and gateway to your next destination, which brings us to the previous session.
Anxious about the bounty on his head, Tiran disguised himself as a woman named Tonya and the rest of you moved through the town towards its center where the wanted posters hung on a board. When you arrived, you found your poster amongst a sea of other wanted posters. Pasha tore the poster from the board and walked off without anyone seeming to care.
Tiran remembered that the Minotaur's wife back in Midway had told him about a place where they could stay: Madame Mollisher's. She'd mentioned to tell them that "Passi" sent you.
Pasha led you to the docks where you entered a tavern named "The Salt Lick," a place frequented by sailors. Though there were a few barflies early in the morning, there weren't any that Pasha recognized. Meanwhile, Sah-Sauj tried to hook Tiran, still disguised at Tonya, up with the half-orc bar maid Ana. They both were very uncomfortable.
While having some drinks at the bar, you made plans to do some shopping, investigate Ix's locker, and what to do with your mounts and wagon once you secured passage on a ship.
And that's where we left off.