Dragonbane

We headed back to town, taking the most direct route and not getting lost for once. Aodhan learned some new spells and promised not to summon any more demons. Krisanna squirrelled the sunstone away in her bag, taking it out occasionally to marvel at its shininess. There was a bit of restocking and spending of money, with some new gold teeth ordered for Krisanna.

All rested, but everything was still dark as we took the north western path through the woods. After a days travel we set about making camp and encountered Longshanks the wizard, Garth Greyhackle the hunter and a weirdly bald centaur who agreed to team up with us to slay the dragon.

We came to a cave with dead bodies scattered around and a smell of sulphur. Krisanna sneaked in to see the dragon curled up in its own tail, fast asleep under a halo of stalactites. We came up with a plan of sorts and charged in. Krisanna tried to throw the sunstone into the yawning maw of the dragon and hit it on the snout instead, with the gem dropping to the floor. Orla fired twin arrows at its eyes, blinding it in one eye. Bastonn drove his sword into its chest with a solid hit. Makander hit with his axe. Aodhan cast a fireball leaving it blackened.

The dragon in turn spat black ichor at Makander severely injuring her. It reared back and roared, disheartening half the party. Krisanna managed to dash in to grab the sunstone again, but was stuck under the dragon. Makander was now able to use his massive blow with his axe, causing a huge wound. 

The dragon flapped its wings scattering the party, knocking out Aodhan leaving him mortally wounded. Bastonn then hit with a critical strike, severing its head and killing the dragon! Krisanna rammed the sunstone into its jaws causing the dragon to dissolve into ash.

We returned in triumph and were granted ponies and a summons to see the king himself. We rode to Starkhold and were greeted with a ticker tape parade and received by King Nivvold who knighted Bastonn as Baron of Wildland. 

We set off for our new castle finding it in a less than perfect state of repair - to be continued

No Man's Sky Cursed / Beachhead Redux

 Two short expeditions to report on. The first was a spooky setting timed to coincide with Halloween where the boundaries of reality were breaking down, time was speeding up and weird phantom creatures were attacking unless you managed to hold them back by crafting fuel for a reality stabiliser. There was a great sense of tension and strangeness to this one as you hopped from portal to portal in a race against time. The reward was a sweet Millennium Falcon style S class ship!

The second two week expedition was a chance to replay one of the early ones and was mainly freighter based with the final reward being a frigate based on the Normandy from Mass Effect - a very cool addition to any fleet!

The Temple of the Moon - DCC

 The rats swarmed our unfortunate thief Tortuga and she dropped to the floor in a critical state. Fortunately a swift burning hands to deal with the rats followed by a healing spell saved the day. We climbed up through the now opened gate to explore, finding a grim looking charnel house with a blood spattered butchers block. Grimbol went through another door and was ambushed by an insane looking fellow with a hook. Both Grimbol and the attacker swung wildly and missed, before Tamira joined the fight and reduced the butcher to a red mist with a critical hit.

We then followed the sound of chanting up some stairs and discovered a robing room where we disguised ourselves as cultists before being attacked by a phantom bull. Another surprisingly quick fight ensued and then we followed the ever louder chanting into a large chamber where some sort of sacrifice was in progress and saw the high priestess with the Argent Falx sword (capable of severing the bonds of death) that we were intending to steal. We used an invisibility spell to follow the high priestess through a secret door into an ante-chamber where the sword was locked in a chest. 

When the priestess and guards had left we made swift work of the lock (and the trap on the chest) and planned our escape route. Unfortunately the alarm was raised so we had to run for it, making it to a door that we could lock behind us in the nick of time! A most successful heist, all round!

Shadowdark - No Small Crimes in Lankhmar

This game was run by Shannon Ferguson as part of the Grogmeetish 2024 online convention using the Shadowdark rules - a new one to me, but easy to get into using the Roll20 interface. After a few glitches setting up the chat on Discord, we were away to Lankhmar!

As the title gives away, we were in Fritz Leiber's legendary city of thieves in the middle of a heist of the forgotten house of an ancient Lankhmarese nobleman called Lord Suttar who was rumoured to have stashed away a horde of gold and other secrets. Using the roll20 interface we were able to case the joint, making use of the inbuilt lighting effects to show what we could see as we cautiously edged around the boarded up building. This was a feature that was used to great effect several times during the adventure as our limited supply of torches would be extinguished at inconvenient moments, plunging us into gloom while our enemies could see in the dark.

The twist for this adventure was that as soon as we had broken into the supposedly empty house we were reduced to the size of rats, transforming a simple burglary into an epic fight for survival against a range of common household creatures. If you have read any of the Lankhmar stories then you will guess one of the plot threads here, but there is plenty to do in each room where half the battle is simply climbing the furniture or examining giant sized (to us) scrolls.

We didn't quite finish the adventure in time (only exploring the cellar and the ground floor), but we had a lot of fun and reached a suitably dramatic point to bring the story to a close. This was a whole lot of thievish fun and well worth playing if you see it on offer at a convention!

High-Rise by JG Ballard

This novel opens with a recently divorced doctor called Robert Laing moving in to a apartment on the 25th floor of a recently opened luxury high-rise somewhere on the outskirts of London. The building promises all of the modern conveniences, including a supermarket, a bank, a hair salon, its own school as well as two swimming pools and a gymnasium. In fact, you could live your life without ever needing to leave the building for any reason.

Very quickly the social order in the building begins to break down, with the residents losing the social mores that keep their base instincts in check. Rubbish piles up in the hallways, graffiti is scrawled on the walls, the pool is polluted and the infrastructure of the building starts to malfunction with lifts, plumbing and air conditioning becoming increasingly unreliable. The class hierarchy quickly stratifies with workers at the bottom, the super rich at the very top and a fractious middle class somewhere in between.

The story is told through three view points - Laing the educated professional who initially tries to make sense of the encroaching chaos as a detached observer. Wilder from the 10th floor is a working class documentary maker who resolves to show the world what is happening by climbing through the floors one by one. Finally, there is Royal, the architect of the building who lives on the 40th floor in detached luxury.

To say this is a grim read is an understatement. It is truly frightening to see how quickly the people in the building begin to revel in their own filth and accept violence, division and degradation as something to be embraced. No one makes more than a token effort to resist the collapse and it all feels horribly inevitable from the shocking opening flash forward scene to the unavoidable conclusion.

It is based in part in the author's experience of being interned as a child in a concentration camp in Singapore for several years during World War II, coping with casual violence, disease and squalor as the Japanese war effort came to a bitter end. 

I would still like to believe that people are fundamentally decent, but the truth is that the extreme political ideologies that would put people in camps whilst continuing to pollute the planet to squeeze a few more dollars of profit out of the ground are very much in the ascendent again. Can we avoid a collapse like the one seen in the book? I get a horrible feeling that we are about to find out over the next four years.

Jewels of the Carnifex

We found ourselves in some sort of crypt with a large stone with cryptic runes and a pit with three skeletons in it. By a process of elimination we worked out that the runes mentioned a sacrifice by four people and that we were being pursued by the fourth member of the quartet Azazel. We decoded the bindings on the stone and moved it, where we were greeted by the Carnifex herself, who granted us a boon for the battle ahead. By dint of some clever spell casting we were able to paralyse most of the attackers, finishing the fight successfully in record time.

We left the dungeon and returned to the city above and resolved to find a way to see the Overlord. Sneaking in failed miserably by we still managed to talk to him by some fast talking and were told of a way that we could resurrect a fallen companion by talking to the fortune teller in the market, which of course we did.

She dealt a series of cards revealing Death, The Fool, The Moon and the Beggar giving us a boost of luck and a trail to follow to the temple of the Moon. We decided on the classic approach of breaking in through the sewers being blocked by a locked grate which our thief was attempting to open when we were attacked by a horde of ravening rats! 

To be continued!

Dragonbane

 After the somewhat less than successful end to the previous quest, we restocked on supplies and retraced our steps following Roderick's trail to a mine with three entrances, choosing the largest one in the middle with a set of mine cart tracks that piqued Krisanna's interest. It opened up into a series of large circular caves with a fire burning in a pit in the second one. Krisanna sneaked through the gloom followed by Orla and climbed up a ledge where they had seen some movement. 

They were surprised to see a couple of goblin guards, and Krisanna offered them a biscuit in exchange for any information about the dwarf. In response, one of them attacked and the other sounded an alarm. They dealt with the immediate threat and climbed back down preparing for battle with sounds of oncoming feet. There followed a spectacular and bloody battle with goblins, orcs and they even bought a cave troll! Much slicing and dicing, before the remaining three orcs surrendered and were let go in exchange for telling us that the dwarf we sought was locked up further north.

We found some prisoners locked up in one room, and we freed the humans but left some bolshy dwarfs who took umbrage at us 'borrowing' their sacred axe. No Roderick though, so we followed Krisanna's treasure sense deeper in, finding two chests - one trapped which nearly poisoned Krisanna and the other stuffed with treasure, including gold, silver, a master forged sword and a grimoire with four spells.

The next room had a certain dwarf chained up and after thinking for one horrible moment that the sunstone might be concealed about his person, it turned out that the fire fairies (fuckers!) had stolen the jewel. We locked him up with the other dwarfs who were somewhat miffed with him. We left them food and promised to let them out and (maybe) return the axe when we were done with it. We left the mine on a minecart, much to Krisanna's delight - wheeeee!

Back through the woods, disposing of a bear en route, before arriving at a mirror black lake which Krisanna immediately skimmed a stone across, waking the fire fairies (fuckers!). Fortunately they seemed happy to trade us the sun stone in exchange for Makander retrieving their golden lyre from the bed of the lake. As Krisanna took the stone, a ray of light shot up, briefly bringing back the daylight before fading again.