Monday, February 3, 2014

D&D Session 31: In Which They Encounter Spiders, Elves, and a Dragon, yet Don't Get Into a Fight

(Continued from Session 30)

Reid couldn't make it to this session since his parents were in town, but the party didn't want to wait another two weeks for a session (since Jeff and I will be at Rockage this weekend), so Tyriron went on auto-pilot for this session.

And boy did he miss out.

With the ninjas gone, the party finished their "night" in peace and reached the ferry crossing early the next day.

Unfortunately, the crossing was quite backed up due to the numbers of refugees attempting to flee to the south. The wait time was over a day and a half for the party's turn in the ferry, so they began hunting for an alternative.

The river was very wide and its current looked powerful. Add that to the fact that the party came from a realm in which water was incredibly scarce, and it became clear that there was no way they were going to swim across.

Buck attempted to ingratiate himself with a traveling merchant in the hopes that he would help them cross sooner, but the merchant saw right through Buck's ruse and the conversation amounted to nothing. Other party members had similar luck.

Finally, John Freeman, the party's human sorcerer, decided to simply bribe the ferry master. Although the next ferry was totally full, the one afterward had a fellow on it who was waiting for some friends. If those friends never showed up, then their spot would belong to the party. And, if that didn't work out, the third ferry ought to be able to take the party across. The ferry returned to this shore every four hours or so, so they would only have to wait a maximum of 8 hours or so.

The party haphazardly began to concoct a plan to ambush the waiting guy's friends or something, but it quickly fell apart when they realized that they didn't know who the guy was, much less what his friends looked like. So, instead, they simply waited and watched.

Several days prior to this, as the party traveled from the orc village to the land of humans, they were walking around the rim of a lake when the ground began to shake below them. Soon they began to see something writhing in the lake, something massive and serpentine.

Ysbrydwyn, the party's druid, transformed herself into a hawk to get a better view and noticed someone walking near the lake, apparently unaware of the danger. Unable to do much in hawk form, she shrieked an alert to the party.

Buck threw caution to the wind and ran to the figure, who turned out to be an old man, dressed in gray clothes, walking with a staff, with a misshapen hat upon his head. He seemed quite daft, fighting with Buck as he tried to save him.

Soon an incredibly large, green, frightening dragon emerged from the lake and blocked the party's way. The old man, annoyed, proceeded to sing a song to the dragon, which seemed to hypnotize it and alter its menacing personality into something more akin to an overbearing butler.

The party dubbed the old man "Helvetica," which worked for him since the old man couldn't quite remember his own name anyway. The party parted ways with Helvetica shortly after entering human lands.

As it turned out, the man who was waiting on friends turned out to be Helvetica, and the party was the friends in question. How convenient!

The party, unused to water travel, largely got sick during the ferry ride. On the other side of the river, the dragon emerged from the water, apparently hungry for Helvetica's flesh. As the people at the ferry landing ran away in fear, Helvetica once again began his song, which went a little something like this.

After doting over Helvetica for a few minutes, the now-docile dragon returned to the river. Buck then attempted to take advantage of the apparently deserted camp site around the ferry landing by procuring some of the abandoned equipment. However, it turned out that many of the tents were occupied by terrified travelers. Still, Buck managed to pressure an elven merchant into giving (well, selling really) his two spiders to the party. The elves of this realm use massive, tarantula-like spiders as pack animals in this realm. They're very versatile, but also very temperamental. It took some coaxing from the druid to convince them that the dragon was, in fact, gone and wasn't going to eat them.

Along the road to the city of the elves, the dragon emerged from the ground and flew into the sky, then he landed and handed over a messenger bird carry the following message:

Dear humans,

As I understand it, you people believe that the stars are where the dead look down upon us from above. I miss my wife an awful lot. Would one of your priests be willing to visit me and tell me about your beliefs?

Sincerely,

Tellis QuarkHelvetica claimed the letter, saying it was intended for him. He responded thusly:

I'm on my way. -Human PriestHe attached this note to the messenger bird, which took off toward the elven city.

As it turned out, the Quark family was the elven family who ran the weapons trade. The party worked out a deal, thanks to their contact, in which the goods would be ready to go within two days if the party helped get the work done.

Meanwhile, Helvetica made friends with the family patriarch, Tellis, who left the running of the business to his children while he focused on trying to build a way to travel to the stars. The result, it turned out, was rockets, though he could never get them to travel very high. Helvetica proceeded to give him pointers on how to shoot rockets higher and have them explode more brilliantly. Tellis didn't really want the rockets to explode, but Helvetica assured him that the rockets would merely attract the real vessel they would use to travel to the stars.

After working with the elves for maybe half a day, the party decided it had something more important to do: get Akito, the party's elver fight, laid. In their efforts to accomplish this task, the party crashed an elven noble's outdoor party and attempted to woo Tellis's youngest daughter, all to no avail. Akito, the buff elven warrior who had brought assassins to their knees with the power of his abs alone, unfortunately lacked any real social graces (much less status) to attract a noble elven female. Instead, his buff charms, no doubt very effective on human women, simply came off as brutish to the elves of this realm.

And so, defeated, the party prepared to leave the elven realm with naught but hundreds of pounds worth of weaponry.

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