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| Current Owlbear dashboard... praise the hexes. |
NOTE FOR REFEREE - Remember to ask the players about the mule!
Loot
Hipsap got the following:
- A glass jar of Bear Jelly (1/4 slot). Smells terrible. Wards off smaller predators, but may attract big ones.
- A grimoire: ancient scroll, yellowed and flaking. To learn this sorcery, you must know what it is you must never know.
- A hand-written business card with an address of whoever the hut merchant's patron is. It reads:
ZYANTIC UNDERPRINXES
FREE LEAGUE OF FLESHSCULPTORS' GUILDHOUSE
STREET OF TORMENTED FLESH
SILVER CITADEL
Gemini got:
- A runed emerald spear (2 slots, heavy weapon). It deals magical damage. It has one True Strike, which you can spend to deal maximum damage across all of your damage dice. True Strikes refresh when you take a DOWNTIME turn.
You also recovered one hoverbike (big post with vehicle stats incoming) and 3 copper pieces from the bandits.
Session Report
4th of Lastmonth, Year 1V39
We picked back up with the Company emerging to the surface after their foray into the mysterious sword-choked temple. They promptly acquainted themselves with the shiny new hex map. In order to smooth the transition between travel rules as well as account for information the referee forgot to include last session, a formal retcon was issued. The party noticed that the trail of Breezy Pete they had been following (identifiable because his horse's shoes were initialed with BP, and his powerful cyborg stallion had punched the mark into the sodden earth with great force) actually forked off to the southeast seemingly before it entered the cave. The party spent the first Watch of the day following it into the sedge.
While traveling the party was ambushed by three bandits riding atop two screeching hoverbikes that peeled out from behind the treeline, beelining for their iron mule Mischief. The Company seized initiative and felled a nearby tree and tangle of branches, forming an obstacle in their path. The two brigands riding double were caught in the brush and pulled off of their bike, which went speeding away out from underneath them and skidded out on a nearby pond. The last brigand deftly wove around it and struck Mischief with his chrome lance, attempting to trip the top-heavy beast, but his efforts were unsuccessful. Gemini responded by smashing the front of the bandit's bike in with a mighty blow that severed the bike in twain and sent the pilot careening forward in a tangle of wreckage. He did not survive.
The two remaining brigands surrendered in a panic having lost their bikes and their buddy Craig. One brigand was a human tomb-robber cowboy type, but the other was a mutant with three eyes and orange ooze-like skin. They exchanged confused words with the party and dropped the name of their gang, the Better Ought Nots, before running off. The party let them go and looted the one intact hoverbike, which had three copper pieces in a saddlebag. The party observed they were not very successful brigands.
Combat completed the party returned to their journey and arrived at a strange hut in the wilderness with smoke coming from its chimney and a stable built into the side. The party checked the stable and saw a sleeping giant tortoise with a skull for a head and a top-of-the-line cyborg stallion, clearly a new model, in hibernation mode, but decided not to tamper with it due to fear of setting off an alarm.
The party speculated that the man they were searching for, Breezey Pete, was himself hiding out in this hut, and spent a good while debating possible manners of entrance. So long that the inhabitant within the building heard their voices and a wheezy voice from within loudly asked if it was already time to 'collect the quota'.
The party said they were not here to collect the quota, and the inhabitant opened the door, revealing a small heavily robed gnarled masked figure. He excitedly asked if players were here to sample his wares. They said they were. He welcomed them into his squalid dwelling and showed off a sundry of oddities, asking for 'points of physique/skill/mind/presence' in exchange for them. The party refused most of them, even a fetching telescopic eye tendril which would bring them closer to the grace of a slug if they implanted it in their heads, but the occult Hipsap purchased a tin of 'bear jelly', said to 'ward off small predators', and a tattered scroll (a grimoire) in exchange for a point of physique and mind respectively. The payment was processed by laying a hand in the merchant's cold clammy one for a moment. The Occult inquired after 'the quota,' saying it sounded stressful to manage, but the merchant assured her that it paid dividends in the centuries it had lengthened his own life. She asked if these people had a card, and he scrawled down the following address on a scrap of paper:
ZYANTIC UNDERPRINXES
FREE LEAGUE OF FLESHSCULPTORS' GUILDHOUSE
STREET OF TORMENTED FLESH
SILVER CITADEL
Business concluded the undead merchant was happy to answer the party's questions about their quarry and welcomed them to share in his gruel.
He told them that Breezy Pete was the last visitor he had had, stopping by about a month ago, and he asked him to look after his horse for him, promising to be back the next morning. 'Don't scuff the paint' were the last things he said to the merchant before riding off. The Occult observed that Pete is cool. The merchant also mentioned it was only after Pete disappeared that the swords started appearing at Rat Creek. The party rifled through the saddlebags of Pete's cyborg horse and found his journal. They discovered he was a terse bullet journaler who had written 'that waiter at the Hostel is cute'. Most of the pages were about bounties he hunted and the cool drugs that him and his boys spent the reward money on, but they took a dark turn towards the end, reiterating that 'That Prophet' had done him nothing but wrong and he planned to settle the score no matter the cost.
The party departed from the merchant's hut and went back to the cave, passing by the same group of duck-mutants screaming while doing swordfighting exercises in the cathedral-like central room. The ducks asked the party if they had slain the queen of the fish yet; the party assured them they were in the midst of fulfilling their duty and had only departed to take strategic exercises to further enhance their killing abilities. The ducks were approving and returned to their exercises.
Gemini struck up a torch and led the party through a dark tunnel to the west, passing by a grimy-looking door. Arriving at fortified saloon-style door they found that it was barred but the gaps around it allowed Gemini to easily slip her polearm through it and unhook the side that was barred - whoever had barred it didn't seem to think too hard about it. Inside they found a dozen more duck men who were entrenched behind a barricade of mud and rusted clumps of swords - the duck-men rolled a 2 on their reaction and were extremely rude to the party. The party claimed to be the 'warriors against the fish queen' or something similar and they backed off of immediate violence but still treated them in a despicable manner. The Occult surreptitiously asked them about 'the Glaive of the Prophet', to which the duckman captain replied by tossing a sword from his pile at her, which she failed a SKILL save to grab and was hit by for 4 damage. Another question was asked after the prophet and one of the duckmen pointed to the northern passageway and said, 'you mean that dead guy over there?'. The players quickly took their leave and continued deeper into the tunnel to investigate.
At the end of the hallway the players arrived at a small crossroads chamber where a priestly corpse laid face-down in a pool of its own blood, pierced through by a massive spear. The players investigated the corpse to find its priestly hat had fallen off and its scalp was gray and hair white and stringy. The Violent removed the spear from the corpse, after which the Prophet Wight rose to life and attacked them.
In the first round of combat the players attempted to attack the undead creature with their mundane weapons but found that they did no harm to it. The wight attacked the Violent with a ghostly touch that drained 2 of their physique score. The Occult then did something that surprised me. We had recently finished hashing out the mechanics of one of her spells, Absorb Mind, that allowed her to eat the flesh of something to absorb its memories - I had mostly thought of this as something that would occur outside of combat, but she said she wanted to just take a bite out of the wight right then and there. I ruled it would get a free attack on her if she did so, which she consented to, draining her of 3 points of physique. Then she ate of its flesh and rifled through its memories, able to ask it two questions.
The first: what was the relationship between the duck people, the fish people, and the Prophet?
With judicious use of the module's nifty timeline the referee was able to answer that the two mutant groups had been established within the temple before the Prophet even arrived, but the Prophet was not really concerned with their feud - it was clear that the Prophet was content simply knowing that the two were locked in a Forever War, as his belief system found the constant conflict something good and proper and natural to be happening in this location.
Next she asked where they could find Pete. The Prophet's mind was hazier on this manner, only able to recall fragments - the first where the Prophet nobly cut down every last one of Pete's men, and the second a brief glimpse of his face after he stabbed the Prophet through the back in this very room. However, in his dying moments, he saw Pete being drawn deeper into the temple by a mysterious force. Curiously, Hipsap also noticed that the temple in this image did not appear piled high with rusted swords as it was presently.
At that the first initiative turn was concluded, and the session was ended, the party still locked in battle with the prophet wight.
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| The party's exploration thus far. |
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