(no subject)

[dragonoflife]

Twenty years later occurs! The DM releases the campaign as a mobile game, possibly as Twenty Years Later: Immortal. Archmage Carrick has summoned them to the wizard college.

C: Apparently racial slurs are still okay to use in your YTMNDs.
Ellerian: Off to the lesser college. The HUMAN college.
C: Yeah, that’s EXACTLY what I’m talking about.

Bex shares his information on Burning Blade poison. Nobix ponders if the poison would be in more common use if it weren’t so expensive, or if it was just that immoral.

DM: A little bit of both.
Ellerian: It was distilled from organs. Clearly not easy to make. That’s why it has a massive DC of 16.
C: Good one.
DM: It’s a bit higher, I’ll tell you that much.
C: 17.
Ellerian: 16.5.
C: Round down. I wonder why it’s so reviled when it doesn’t work on anything and half the things you come across are immune to it. I’d think smashing someone to death with a mace is at least as morally reprehensible as poison…

It gets very weird. They head off to the college and arrive at its gates, greeted by the warmage guards.

C: Ooh, is Cissy here? Is one of them very diminutive?
DM: No! They both are human.
C: We must find the chibi-mage at once!
Ellerian: Just look for the violence and carnage!
C: Surely the personality will not cause friction with any of our assembled party! ‘That one’s not speaking my language! I MUST NOT BE TALKING LOUD ENOUGH!’

The flavor text comes their way, not impressing Ellerian. Or anyone else, but he’s the only one called out.

DM: Knowledge(a little bit of history), maybe?
Ellerian: Nope! Don’t study history! I mean, there’s elves and then there’s other shit. I’ve been around for 142 years, I AM HISTORY!
Erik: That’s kind of young for an elf, isn’t it?
Ellerian: Yes, and yet it’s still older than all the rest of you combined (minus Nobix).
C: Why would Nobix be older?
Ellerian: He’s a dwarf.
C: Is he?
Ellerian: (a beat) To the best of your knowledge.
C: You almost lost it. You almost lost it!

Drusila rolls some history, and recalls that one of the initial builders was the Shar-Kali, explaining the unusual architecture. An acolyte greets them politely, and is promptly deemed to be Matthias no matter what anyone says. Marching occurs as they head upstairs and the acolyte raps. On the door.

DM: “Archmage, the group is here to see you, sir.” “Ah, thank you. Oh, by the way, has there been response from Ms. Skydreamer?” “No sir, there has not been.” “Shame.”
Drusila: Who?
DM: Skydreamer is the name he dropped.
Ellerian: One of the greatest terrors of the world. Any arcanist worth his salt is familiar with that source of chaos and despair!
Erik: Jesus!
Ellerian: I’ve heard the legends…

The archmage informs them that the body of Meat has yielded its secrets, and they know him now as Tyvren Sinelanast, a missing member of the college and former court mage of Vedic Orsova. They question what control Meat had over the non-zombies.

DM: …Mind magic!
Ellerian: Mime magic!
DM: I’m trying to think what…
Ellerian: “They seemed so controlled as to be dominated, but that strikes me as far more powerful an effect than he has access to.”
C: Does this character speak Elvish…?
DM: Yes, he does.
Ellerian: If not, Erik will translate for me.
Erik: (incredibly unenthused) Yeah.
C: Oh. Sorry.

The Orsovo name seems more and more suspicious to everyone, and they also tell Carrick about the lycanthrope transformation rod. Weirdly, Carrick offers to help the party!

Ellerian: GIVE US MAGIC.
Bex: I will share the information about the poison. Because they seem trustworthy.
Nobix: Are we just going to tell everyone about this thing?
Ellerian: What harm could it do?
DM: Mass hysteria!
C: Dogs and cats…
Erik: ‘Burning Blade found in body! Everybody’s gonna die!’
Ellerian: ‘Mind your organs!’
Bex: I mean I’m not gonna be like, ‘Hey, peasant down the street! Watch out for this poison!’
Erik: Of course you’d have the one asshole peasant. ‘I didn’t realize my wife’s cooking was spread out around the world! Haw haw haw!’ This douchebag peasant!

Carrick is alarmed! He ponders what this could mean…

Bex: But I don’t tell him how I figured this out. I just tell him I found this out.
DM: “How did you guys figure this out?”
Ellerian: Where did Bex go?
Nobix: Whatever you do, don’t miss Chemical X with Chemical Y.

Most of the party attempts force Ellerian to accept a magic item that will make him speak Common. Ellerian dissents. Erik, surprisingly, also dissents…

Erik: Just get him one of those slugs that just implants in his brain.
C: Like the Wrath of Khan?
Ellerian: A Babel fish?
C: An ioun stone that just floats around? OoooOOooOOooOoo you understand this language, OoooOoooOOoooo…
Ellerian: ‘Why is everyone saying OoooOOOoooOOOooo?’
DM: “We might be able to lend you a Helm of Comprehend Languages, if that would help you.”
Ellerian: “Why?”
C: Roll for initiative. I will subdue him and nail it to his head.

Erik remains convinced that Ellerian understands Common and just refuses to speak it, and has thoroughly gotten away with it.

Sable: Other elves would refuse to acknowledge if they knew that he had stooped to that lower understanding.
Ellerian: Drusila understands me!
Morzan: Sable.
Ellerian: No, Drusila. Sable doesn’t understand me at all.

The DM hints they should go check out the whole ‘broken into storage for the dwarven army’ thing, which Nobix seems to care nothing about. They remind him of what was going on, at which point he immediately starts caring and they hurry to check it out. They lapse into fantasy.

Erik: We meet a dwarf there who’s a little too happy. ‘Ah, it’s the elf-killing bullet! Only kills elves that don’t speak Common!’
Ellerian: How very specific! Damn dwarves…
Erik: ‘Oh, these bullet seem to be very attracted to you for some reason! You of course speak Common, don’t you, elf?’ The bullets are just moving towards you…
Ellerian: ‘Uh… oui.’
DM: You make your way out, your purpose now clear.
Nobix: I’m mumbling curses on the way.
DM: …did you say bumbling purses?
Ellerian: Mumbling curses.
Nobix: Curses. Curse words.
DM: Okay, that makes more sense.
Ellerian: He’s an incompetent thief…

The group being large, they question who is played by Sean Bean and thus doomed. Perception checks occur!

Ellerian: 21.
Morzan: 22.
C: 23.
Sable: 8. Assholes.
Bex: Oh, fuck. Oh, this is terrible. I’m gonna see dirt. Ah ha, 8. I’m staring at that dirt!
Erik: I’ll roll for what Anda sees… 21.
Bex: Damn! Even the large rat saw more than we did.

They hear screams and yells! Ellerian and Morzan immediately take off that way, leaving the others befuddled. Nobix charges the dwarven army, apparently. Morzan offers to carry Bex because he’s small, despite Bex actually being faster than her.

Nobix: I’m the slow one, I’m 20.
Morzan: I don’t know if I can carry you.
Nobix: No one carries a dwarf!
Sable: Sable can get a wheelbarrow, and just scoop him up… He can use his gun.
Nobix: Actually, that would be kind of hilarious.

The Chariots of Fire theme brings the game to a screeching halt. The party finds itself going through scared citizens to get to trouble. Nobix murders them all and Ellerian sucks up their life force, apparently.

DM: Ah, the good old shoot-and-suck.

Two skeletal monstrosities are stomping around the street! Of course, initiative immediately results. These are not undead, however, to Ellerian’s fury. The DM complies with Belgian rules and removes loot boxes from his campaign. Diablo Immortal bitching begins and will doubtless continue into 2020. Sable attempts to take off without rolling initiative.

C: Where did the Ouya go wrong? Goodbye, Ouya, you weird stupid beautiful little console.
Nobix: My roll was amazing…

Morzan, first to act, moves. C moves! Ellerian uses his wand of Enlarge on Morzan. Bex attempts to stealth forward! Erik fails to cut a cake.

DM: It IS a custard cake!
Erik: I can’t get anywhere! I feel like I’m gonna snap this thing in twine! Cake wins!
DM: Eh, Sable’s probably armored, right…?

Anda and Erik move into the battle. Ellerian continues to play with cardboard punch-out filler pieces, irritating everyone. Nobix moves up 20 and tries to figure out if he’s within 20 feet of the enemies; everyone laughs at him. Morzan casts Bless. Ellerian shoots into the fray.

Ellerian: I’m gonna take bets now on if one of these guys will jump like this. (tracing a path over Erik’s eidolon) Anyone want to take part in that?
C: Sure.
Ellerian: Great! What’s your bet on the over-Anda?
C: I’d love to take part if I can figure out what you just said.
Ellerian: The over-Anda? Like the over-under?
Erik: I wish I had a Stretch Armstrong, just to…
DM: He just says, ‘Believability’.

It gets worse.

Ellerian: A horrible teleporter accident fuses C and Erik’s summon. They become a Little Mermaid song. Anda the C.

Bex runs away to hide behind Nobix. The group continue to whale on the golem-things, despite them being just bone and sinew (as the DM often repeats). Erik misses, absolutely delighting the DM for some reason.

C: He’s just glad your turn’s over.
Erik: Easy there, Mathpocalypse.
C: Sorry, sorry…
Erik: Easy there. Next game I play you’re gonna have a weapon that has plus like five different dice and adds six different numbers, divisible by 3…
Ellerian: Algebra.
C: I’ll just do this. (rolling dice without looking) Oh, I missed.
Ellerian: So same as always then?
DM: Everyone with the exception of Nobix, Bex, and Ellerian, give me a…
Ellerian: Character sheet, you’re dead.

Fort saves occur, as the creatures spew acrid smoke into the party, but everyone saves. Nobix shoots an enemy as he finally gets into range.

C: More bone and sinew? Is there no end to this? Oh, blast, that’s another hit… and 9 damage this time. Ellerian misses! Bex, inexplicably, contemplates poisoning these creatures.

Bex: It’ll take an action?
C: Yeah, at this level.
DM: You have a bow or a crossbow?
Bex: I have a crossbow.
DM: I just want to say real quick, you happen to have a crossbow bolt that’s already monstered up.
Ellerian: Yes, use up the super-valuable Burning Blade. Don’t listen to the DM, he’s not on your side!

The DM is nearly given BARQ’S, to his horror. Erik mutters something about Ellerian’s puns which the latter apparently takes as a challenge.

Ellerian: I tried to store data in my root beer, but it didn’t work as well as an address on my hard drive. Because my Barq’s is worse than my byte.
Erik: That’s it! I’m done! It’s over!
C: No, that’s totally justified.
DM: It’s Erik and Anda next, but I don’t think they have the heart any more.
Bex: If I was drinking, took a shot every time—
Erik: We’d be dead!
Ellerian: In-character, this is how I drain life force.

Bex wonders if the creatures can be sneak-attacked; Ellerian argues no, Erik argues a surprisingly and inadvertently racist yes.

Erik: I just fucking threw a word out! ARE YOU SERIOUSLY FUCKING SURPRISED BY MY WORDS NOW?
DM: I just want to hear a definition! Make one up on the spot! It’s an ancient Asian pin that holds everything together.
Erik: A CHINK IN THE ARMOR! A weakness! Something exploitable!

Erik gets legitimately angry about everything. The monsters attack, injuring C but failing to wound Sable. Nobix shoots! Apparently 17 times! C finally cuts down one, and human hearts spill out of it. Ellerian spoils the dramatic impact with puns. They claim victory!

Ellerian: With this new information, I try to figure out: what the hell?

Arcana tells him that this is a product of a ritual! Nobix checks the hearts for signs that they’re dwarven, to the immense confusion of all.

Ellerian: They’re stealing the hearts of others… TO FORM KINGDOM HEARTS!

Silence.

Ellerian: Right?
DM: (refusing to acknowledge this)
Nobix: Damn it! I’ll have to be a Nobody.
Ellerian: Right?
Sable: Where the hell did these things come from, in the middle of town?
Ellerian: KINGDOM HEARTS!
DM: That is an excellent question. And there is an open cellarway nearby where they were!
Ellerian: I peer into it.
DM: Darkness prevails.
Ellerian: I have low-light vision.
DM: Still, darkness is quite prevalent.
Sable: Sable will light a torch. Unless some elf creates something with magic.
DM: Before Ellerian can light the way, a torch is produced!
C: A tiki torch!
Ellerian: I. Cast. Light.
DM: A brighter, more efficient light is used!
Ellerian: I have elven arrogance as a feat!

The scent of blood clogs the cellar, leading Ellerian to make puns no one likes. LOTS of puns, of lower caliber than most.

Erik: Listen – were you talking to a doctor earlier? Are you dying? You’ve been squeezing in more puns that usual, trying to get them all in before you die! What’s happening, Ellerian?! What’s going on?

They head down the steps to a door, while Ellerian makes more puns. The group is horrified.

C: You know what we should do is just stop interacting with him.
DM: Let’s shun him for the rest of the night.
Ellerian: Oh. This has put the entire rest of my life into perspective! It was the puns all this time. And the general personality. And the looks.
Bex: So the door seems to be—
DM: Ajar – sorry, it’s slightly open. There seems to be no traps, no tripwires, no bucket of lava up top ready to pour on you. It’s safe and sound. Thank you, Ellerian.

It gets weird.

Sable: …the hell is a shickle?
DM: You open the door and the light from the torchlight… light… torch that.. cast light – thank you, Ellerian. This is a conundrum all of a sudden.
Ellerian: I wasn’t even trying!

Ten cloaked people kneel before an altar with a hovering crystal. The paranoid group tries to figure this out. Ellerian attempts to snatch the crystal with Mage Hand.

Erik: It’s 5.1 pounds.
DM: You snatch the crystal and bring it forward. As you pull it into the light of the torch, it’s grey and cracked, though it still gives off a little light.

Nothing can affect these figures, and some investigation reveals they are quite motionless. They poke and shove the figures.

Ellerian: I’m sorry, you’re trying to manipulate it in the Elder Scrolls engine. (mimes a body flopping around)
C: Oh god!
DM: Its breathing is shallow, its eyes are wide and glassy-looking, but it is definitely alive. Further investigation, you notice there are lacerations on their wrists, blood trickling down.

Baffled, they keep investigating, pondering if they should outright heal one. The DM gives up and tells them there’s no direct heart-related correlations between these guys and the hearts. Ellerian, after an extended Globetrotter impression with the crystal as a ball, finally stops to examine it.

DM: A long slender crystal, tapered at the ends to a sharp point, cracked.
Ellerian: Oh. I was hoping it was a sphere.
DM: Nope.
Ellerian: Well this kind of puts my Globetrotter thing in a different light.
DM: I know, I was like, ‘I don’t think he realizes…

Erik demands a Dispel Magic from the level 4 arcanist. The DM confirms the ritual is done and they can just drag the people out.

Ellerian: “Evil in the very streets, just as we walk down them. Innocents dead.” Huh, I shoulda seen if any of them were still breathing.
DM: The ones on the street were very much dead.
Bex: Part of me is like, what if we hurt one of them and we see if something happens?
DM: He just shoved one down face down to the floor…
Bex: I mean hurt as in kill one of them.
Morzan: That’s not—
DM: That’s not a good act.
C: It’s very chaotic. Not quite neutral.
Morzan: Yeah, it’s not a good thing to do.
Ellerian: Still a lot better than Krixxix, who would already have his blades out and plunging them into throats…
C: Yeah, Krixxix would have killed seven of them already.
Ellerian: ‘They couldn’t defend themselves, so it’s their own fault.’

They start hauling bodies out (or slurping their souls and claiming they didn’t make it. Or slurping their blood to heal).

Ellerian: See, we’re the perfect team, I don’t know what your problem is.
C: I don’t kill people when I do that.
Ellerian: Yeah, you don’t kill them, the blood loss kills them.

Out they head into the eerily quiet street, which is pretty eerie in how quiet it is. The players immediately start panicking, questioning every little detail as they hunt for the catch or trap. Sable decides to go knock on a door, then bang on it, then struggles with its lock.

Ellerian: You’ve got a Strength. Pull harder!
Sable: You just told me I was breaking and entering, so now I’m feeling all self-conscious.
Bex: Or you could me…
DM: Breaking and entering is not a TERRIBLE thing in this situation…
Sable: Ah, crowbar!
DM: You look side-to-side, pull your crowbar out, and jam it in. Give me a roll.
Ellerian: This is totally an Elder Scrolls thing, where you come out of lockpicking and there’s three guards standing there.

Sable pops the door open and steps into the smell of rotten bodies. She finds the inhabitants of the house dead in the master bedroom, dead as if they’d passed while sleeping.

Sable: I’ll go back downstairs and report, to see if anybody wants to try to find the cause of death.
Morzan: Well, I AM an Inquisitor.
C: They don’t say much.
Nobix: I can tell if they’ve been shot in the head or not. Does that help?
DM: I think most people can…

Morzan deduces poison to be the culprit, and summons Bex to investigate. Bex, it turns out, knows nothing of poisons except how to apply them, though he tries to harvest the poison for later identification (in as creepy a fashion as possible, for some reason). They take detailed notes as Lieutenant Durham and soldiers show up!

Ellerian: I explain to him everything that happened. IN ELVISH!
Erik: I put my head down for a moment, sigh, and then proceed to translate, adding my own point of view and apologizing for my friends.
DM: As you explain, he kicks the corpse around a little bit—
C: (choking) Jesus!
DM: Not like a soccer ball kick!

Somehow they end up angrily erasing Durham’s memory? He reports other disturbances around the city, and after some discussion, he barks at his men and they start walking in place?

Sable: “Lieutenant, what I don’t understand is, if there are so many cultists and converts, where are the preachers? At the bakery, we hadn’t seen any weirdos preaching weird things, and we bakers are in touch with the people and what they’re feeling. Are these all foreigners?”
DM: “The problem with cults is that they like to hide, even from people who are incredulous.”
Nobix: “I don’t know, these people don’t seem well-hidden to me… considering their very first act is to bust out and start murdering dudes.”
DM: “But the fact that no one knew they were going to do this meant they were hidden quite well.”

The players continue to wonder what ties this act has to other plot points – and what they should do next. The dwarven investigation still weighs heavily on Nobix’s mind, and he urges them to keep going that way. Durham remains polite no matter how much he wants the damn adventurers gone. Off they go on the investigation that had originally begun this session – but the end of the game is nigh, so next time!