Saturday, August 16, 2014

D&D Session #41: The Hall of Mischeif

After over a month without any D&D sessions due to one event or another, we finally got the chance to pick up where we left off!

The party was exploring a cave beneath the Citadel, a star they flew toward after escaping from a land crawling with huge, seemingly invincible titans. They planned to simply kick their human and elven passengers to the curb, but their supervisor Kirtan was interested in the Citadel and wanted some more information about the place. So, he offered the party an extra runic tattoo as a reward for checking it out. When the gate to the citadel turned out to be closed and unopenable, the party found a cave below the city that might offer answers.

The cave turned out to be uninhabited, with a sign outside that warned of "AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY" in the language of the Ma'ari, the god-like beings who sundered the world into multiple different realms ages ago. The party recognized the sign from their homeworld, the Realm of Air, where they found similar signs outside of restricted, "sacred" places in the Dwarf-inhabited, mysterious mechanical monstrosity known as the Gearbox.

Inside that restricted area, which the party termed the Halls of Judgment (since the Dwarves believed that the party was a group of gods that had come to them to pass judgment), was a clean, angular maze that was confusing to navigate. There were also rooms in the place inhabited by mechanical humanoids that called themselves B0B. They never fully explored the place, just using it as a way to escape the dwarves for a while.

The caves here below the Citadel in the Realm of Fire were completely different. The paths were roughly hewn from stone, a rare element in this realm. The passages and rooms were populated with traps rather than robots, and the passages curved and intersected at odd angles rather than the clean system of parallel and perpendicular hallways of the Halls of Judgment.

The party encountered traps ranging from pendulums and tripwires to flooding rooms and gas chambers while exploring these caves They found one curious chest which contained nothing more than an innocuous-looking stone along with a note reading, "May it bring you luck!" The aprty took not only the stone and the note but the chest itself as well, which has since become Tyriron's "home."

In each dead-end room, writing on the wall informed the party that they had missed a hidden passage, along with a series of turns to hint as to the secret's location.

It was the sorcerer John Freeman who suspected a hallway of hiding the secret, and with the help of his fellows they uncovered a secret passage that led to a room full of lights.

In this room figured and data scrolls along the walls. In the center of the room stood a lady made of light, and above her was a translucent globe of light with four balls of bright light at the center, surrounded by an expanse of blue, a relatively thin layer of green and brown, and a perfectly smooth surface of crystal.

The lady greeted the party, noting that, strangely, they were not Ma'ari and that they reeked of the Halls of Judgment. The party mentioned that they were trying to get into the Citadel above, so the lady unlocked the door (or, at least, stated that the door was now unlocked). They proceeded to get into a conversation about this lady, who claimed to "go by many names, most of which are best left unspoken," and how she knows many people by their pranks. She claimed to know Buck very well.

Eventually, though, she vanished, leaving only the strange globe floating in the middle of the room. The cleric Ere-sat considered that perhaps she was a representation of the Goddess of Mischief, though her limited knowledge of that religion bore little else in the way of useful information.

What does the globe represent? What's going on outside now that the door is open? We'll have to find out next time.

MVP this session was the Sorcerer John Freeman whose Spider Climb spells helped tremendously against several of the traps, and whose deductive reasoning led to the discovery of the hidden passage.

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