The best place to sell the loot from the last episode was clearly the city of Klef - the shining city full of hundreds of mages, sages and dealers. Unfortunately, Klef is a magocracy where status is only given to arcane spellcasters, all others treated as serfs, or worse. For the purposes of pawning the booty, the party travelled to Klef and nominated Harold as their major domo. Giddy with his new status within the city limits, Harold took days at a time to carry out even the most minor tasks, so the others were left to spend some relaxation time in the outskirts of Klef, amongst the trading bazaars and markets.
Chops took the opportunity to broaden his mind and learned a new language. Crow started writing her travel guides. Jenny "Squid" Bryce ran into trouble with some paramours and Thelonius developed further his paranoid neurosis.
In what was to be their last day in Klef, the party toured Glassteel Row, one of the notorious tourist drags. Chops and Crow bargained with a merchant, whilst Squid hid from Fabio, an ex-, in an alley. Fabio tracked her and followed her in, and the ever-suspicious Thelonius darted after. The sky suddenly blackened with assassins leaping from the rooftops.
Making short work of the assailants, with Chops not even bothering to put down his kebab, the usual brutal interrogation followed, and the prisoner, a Raven Queen follower named Glimpse, spilled his guts (not literally) to the effect that there had been a case of mistaken identity, with the party wrongly assumed to be the custodians of the now-defunct Fey Engine. Demanding to be taken to his leader, Glimpse led the way to the Klef RQ temple, where the group engaged in a great deal of cruel mockery of the local cult lay people. What followed was not their finest hour, as the party was tricked into "meeting the superiors" via a teleportation circle, which turned out to be a one-way portal to one of the least hospitable parts of the Shadowfell.
Materialising a dozen or so feet in the air, the group succumbed to gravity and landed in a cold, dark, slick stone tower in the forbidden city of Moil - a cursed land thrown into the Shadowfell by Orcus, and its inhabitants long since a population of undead.
Immediately attacked by a group of Moilian Zombies and Winter Wights, a vicious fight ensued, with the tide being decisively turned by the late arrival of Fat Harold, who apparently followed the party and was similarly conned by the RQ Cult.
The city was mostly towers and aerial walkways. Travelling from ruined tower to tower, looking for a way out with some traps avoided resulted in entering collapsing tower inhabited by an animated undead "barrow" which proved to be an extremely stern test. Having defeated it, but low on health and resources, the final chamber appeared to be anothe stepping disk, but surrounded by wards. Disarming the many wards appeared easy at first, but a sense of urgency developed when an alarm triggered the arrival of a Moilian resident known as the Dark Legacy. Certainly not one to be trifled with, with a series of huge hits, the characters quickly disarmed the remaining wards and dived through the portal. The faster ones benefitted, but Crow and Harold were left lagging. Harold was hit and went down. Crow took some hits too, but procrastinated long enough to grab Harold's corpse before making the jump to lightspeed.
Insultingly, the matching portal was situated on the ceiling of a chamber, so yet again the party suffered a fall. The bad news was that they landed in a chamber decorated only by the visage of a green horned devil. The word "Devourer" inscribed on the floor by some previous visitor. Could they have wound up somewhere far worse than they could have predicted?
No comments:
Post a Comment