In the last session, the party was assaulted by a shadowy demon, learned about the dreadful Thirty silver coins, and split: half has traveled up river to embark on a holy quest, while the other half has remained in the city. Will they every reunite? Will Team Holy survive their mission? Join this week's journey to find out...
The Party
Agatha, human paladin with a smiling-masked samurai helm, played by Anne
Innus Entus, goblin cleric/fighter with a bishop's mitre, played by Cao Linh
Nachman, human mage with an open-faced plain helm, played by Ali
Sidonius of Willow Creek, very buff fighter
Dany Mossé, human ranger with a spike-and-plumed helm, played by Finn
Dra'kon Deznitsz, beetlefolk cleric with a spiked, tasseled helmet, played by Felix
Casualties
Sidonius (heart stopped, recovered)
Loot
300gp
4*1000gp sun disks
Potion of ethereality (consumed)
Scroll of raise dead
Wand of magnetic attraction (not identified)
Wand of Circe (not identified)
The Game
15 Mid Summer 1113 (Team Holy)
- After arriving in Chamrousse, the religious arm of the Order of the Perfect Circle settled in and reequipped for the coming challenges. Agatha and Innus Entus recruited a warrior of exceptional strength named Sidonius, whom they ultimately assigned to Nachman: the mage spent a week learning find familiar, but ultimately failed to summon a familiar by a hair's breadth! Dany attempted to get closer to Inquisitor Michel, but crashed against the paladin's stony facade.
22 Mid Summer 1113
- After a week of rest, the Order headed west, following up a lead on an abandoned pagan temple; the anticleric Corby's bestial servants came down from the mountains in the summer, and rumor had it they were infesting the temple and even digging around it.
23 Mid Summer 1113
- As they picked their way through alpine crags in the morning light, the party heard great footsteps coming from around a ridge. They hid, and spotted a gigantic figure in green and black silks hefting a huge sack over its shoulder; a stone giant.
Agatha: Is the sack shaped like a friend?
- Nachman instructed Sidonius to hail the giant while the rest of the party waited in the shadows. Charismatic and strong, but not especially bright, Sidonius did just that, and his brash approach caught the giant's attention.
- In no time at all, the two were communicating, as the giant spoke the rudiments of the common tongue. Seeing it wasn't hostile, the Order stepped out of hiding and introduced themselves. The giant's name was Sinead, and he had recently fallen out with his partner, Kethlîn, and was off finding a new place to live.
- Building on Sidonius' rapport, the Order convinced Sinead to travel with them for a short time and enjoy camping under the summer sky. The giant was not willing to fight alongside them, but was happy for the company.
- That afternoon, they arrived at the ruined temple, making good time with Sinead's knowledge of the area. Watching from behind a crag, they spotted several beastly creatures, like huge bipedal hyenas wearing armor and bearing polearms. They were guarding the entrance, and there were doubtless more inside.
- The party made a plan: Nachman, Dany, and Sidonius slipped around the side and scaled the wall while Agatha, Innus Entus, and Dra'kon made their presence known, masquerading once again as 'architecture enthusiasts'. Innus Entus spoke the tongue of dogs with a spell, and they gained entry with insistence and a good bribe.
- While the 'face' group got a sense of the internal layout and estimated the gnolls' numbers (several dozen at the least, too many to fight up front), the stealthy group made its way onto the roof and found an open-air pool and courtyard, into which they descended. The courtyard featured a secret door which had been forced open, and beyond it was a great idol to the temple's old cycloptic goddess, flanked by fruiting trees and holding a golden apple aloft.
- They got quite close before noticing the bodies of dead gnolls at the feet of the statue, which rose from the grave to attack!
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| Not what you want to meet in the pale moonlight Source |
- The two smaller gnoll zombies were dispatched swiftly, but the largest, a great beast still wearing plate armor, gave them far more trouble, and in a moment of ill luck, Nachman's shocking grasp missed and hit Sidonius by accident, dealing maximum damage and stopping his heart!
- Luckily, Dany was able to fend off the beast while Nachman restarted his henchman's heart (and took advantage of the confusion to pretend the injury had nothing to do with him). Having made a great deal of noise, the stealthy party hid in a secluded tomb, and were passed over by investigating gnolls, who shunned the area beyond the secret door.
- Through that commotion, the face group was pushed out of the temple, and everyone reconvened that night to coordinate and let Sidonius recover.
24 Mid Summer 1113
- Among the treasures Dany recovered from the body of the huge gnoll was a letter, written by none other than the anticleric Corby! The instructions within were vague, but confirmed that the gnolls were searching the temple for an item called the Wand of Circe.
- The party returned to the temple the following evening, taking the stealthy route over the walls. They confirmed that the zombies had killed one another, and the party decided to avoid the golden apple. Elsewhere in the temple, beyond the reach of gnoll patrols, they discovered a strange sphere of magnetic clay and claimed a strange magnetic wand. An inscription on the roof of the idol chamber led them to investigate the area more closely, and they recovered various golden sun disks.
- Using a potion which seemed to make things phase in and out of reality, Innus Entus scouted around the temple ethereally, and led the party (after ambushing and silently destroying a gnoll patrol) to a chamber wherein the disks condensed sunlight into a bowl of golden liquid, which they fed to the cyclopean idol. As the marble cracked open, they found their quarry within: a thin but sturdy willow switch, likely the Wand of Circe.
- The session concluded there. Will the Order flee the temple or fight their way out? What does the Wand of Circe do, and why was the anticleric searching for it? Join us for next week's session of Cascabel!
Takeaways
This was my first session in a long while, and I felt a little bit rusty. The initial section, in which the party did a week of downtime in Chamrousse, went by slowly and awkwardly, in large part because the party wasn't fully acquainted with the downtime rules. Hopefully that will be remedied soon.
Improvised NPCs continue to be my players' favorite part of sessions: the party is now very invested in Sinead and his romantic entanglements.
I've tried to make this session report a bit shorter and more abstract: these take quite a while to write, and as a result I end up waiting right up until the next session to put them together, even though writing them is a big part of preparing for the next session. Hopefully I can build better habits around this.
That's all I have for today. Until next time, have a great week, and keep warm!
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