Session 340 - Set Fleshy Sail for the Pyramid!

Date: 25 April, 22 p.p.

Moon: First Quarter

Zenith: The Dead God

New Characters:
- Odo Grumblebelch, a "Dwarfbarian" on loan from the Mt Grumblebelch Co.

New Backstory:
- Grumblebelch was tragically left behind by his Dwarven outcast clan because he was slowing them down, and they abandoned him behind them. +1 to Fleeing rolls of allies ahead of you

New Mentors:
- Dorian has retired to become the owner of a Wyvern Sanctuary, breeding wyverns to make sure this rare creature takes to the skies once more! Mentor Power: Great contortionist - can basically squeeze through ludicrously small gaps.

- Grumblebelch has retired to create a new Dwarven hall and mining conglomerate in the mountains to the west. Mentor Power: Get Out of Blender Free Card - Escape a very obviously telegraphed death, once.

Events:

--- Jonathon Toast Comes in Clutch
- Some time has passed the destruction of Shub-Wizardwrath, and the dramatic nature of the intervening time is too dramatic to detail here.
- Suffice to say that the great symbiotic wizard combination was destroyed, the great fleshy airship named Jonathon Toast made its way round to the underside of Fortress-City Fate, and the party were rescued from the mechanical depths.

- They've been living the high life since, regaling the many LARPers of Fate with their tales of derring-do in the underworld.

- Notably the airship is now fully staffed. There's a little shop staffed by none other than the gold-masked demon Julgoor! He will be able to do all the usual buying and selling of a small town, plus he's got the access to the Gardens of Ynn that can be used to fast-travel between settlements!
- The requirements for access are twofold - a society that enforces free markets and private property under a capitalist mode of production... and a garden. Shrubberies are presumably a must!
- Julgoor also acts as a bank, since he is after all the ultimate source of the Obol-backed Debt Tattoos and the drug-peg that keeps them valuable. Swan sends money back home.

--- Down to Business
- Hyped up by all this talk of capital accumulation, Grumblebelch puts his vast fortune to work by founding Mt Grumblebelch Co. in the mountains west of Mt Death Frost. Strike the earth!

- Sydney spends their time working on some interesting new spells in the downtime, creating such stuff as Recolour, Animate Furnishing, and Control Zed.
- Jojo, inspired by Gimblewang's dyslexic spells, creates wonders such as Polymorph Elf and Earthcake.

- Swan the Swift opens up the Wheatlands Neo Spacedin Branch near the crashed spaceship in the shattered Dino-Dome, the serfs made up of savage human survivors and their loyal Mod Con allies. Finally, an alternative to poorly cooked pizza!

--- Bertha Returns!
- The party are called to the Sciotherico palace at the centre of Fate, it's once-bustling halls of penitent actuaries empty and silent.
- In the throne room the de facto rulers of Fate are gathered around a table that is clearly a repurposed miniatures game used to resolve some LARP-related conflict. In the absence of any real ruler, the people who'd been roleplaying Fate's rulers have been thrust into power!
- The inhabitants of Fate are, after all, simply sleeved copies of minds that were backed up into Fate during Styx's tenure. It's a long story, but basically it's the Matrix in the data stacks and those who want to live in the real world are sleeved into demon-clay bodies. They spend their time LARPing because they can't leave.

- More interestingly, Bertha has arrived! The Vampire Queen of Mt Death Frost is worried because her frenemy and sometime co-ruler of the vampires Cyrus has attached himself to the Darga and is now some sort of god-figure to the mutant nosferatu. Help killing him would be appreciated.

- She's also super interested in the POWERLAD novels collected by Swan and Dorian! She buys them at a fine price.
- Given that the Fate datastacks remain unfixed, the uploaded minds are slowly but surely being lost. The solution - uploaded minds are being incarnated!
- Most are being reformed into real actual fleshy beings from the flesh-sludge that remains of Shub-Wizardwrath, assisted by the Unravelled priests down there. They're pretty chill now that they're no longer under the wizard-boss' influence.
- A smaller contingent are being Remade into metal golem bodies with help from a certain family of fire robots from deep below. They call themselves the Firehearts.

- Grumblebelch works out a trade network between his mines, Bertha's undead, and Swan's Wheatlands. The Wheatlands will supply bread and beer to the mines and clean blood to Bertha's vampires. In exchange the mines get skeleton labour and the Wheatlands get stone for building on the rotting Meatlands and gems for a monetary system! It's a trade network baby!

--- Rumours, finally!

- "There's a place called New Moondin to the south that's protected by an energy shield and was completely untouched by the poison and the thorns! It's a miraculous place where they never even noticed the end of days!"
- "There's an insane version of Styx who lives in a huge tree north of the Dharga, surrounded by a thousand thousand iterations of himself which he keeps as slaves! He wants nothing more than to upload to Fate's mainframe and retake control... which is sure to disappoint him if it ever happens because Fate is completely broken."
- "A noble dragon as big as mountains roams the Drudge Wastes. Make sure not to wear metal around him, it offends him, and his legion of electric ghosts will eat it from your very body!"
- "The vampires that feasted upon the Dharga have become strange and mutated Nosferatu motherfuckers, and now they control the Dharga itself!"
- "A Styx iteration is burrowing into Fate's machinery and will soon activate the robots that will reset the whole place! They'll wipe everything and kill everyone who lives down there!"

--- Final Checks

- Dorian takes the wyvern eggs and sets up the Wyvern Sanctuary down on the savannah below Fate, eating one of the eggs first to absorb a Wyvern's maternal instincts.

- Grumblebelch heads off to begin mining in his new business venture, bringing at least seven freshly incarnated Dwarves with him.
- Some days later, his successor arrives! It is Odo of the Grumblebelches (Odo Grumblebelch for short) who is a worker in the Mt Grumblebelch Co located under Mt Grumblebelch under the management of Grumblebelch, and he worships the Old Grump. He's also more Barbarian than Dwarf.

--- Liftoff!

- With Admin Adventures over, the crew of the good ship Jonathon Toast unmoor and sail off into the sky! A summer storm rains against the taut sunburnt skin of the meaty airship, internal bladders full of extremely flammable lighter-than-air gas, and crewed largely by a bunch of people the party's never met under the aegis of Jonathon Toast's central brain!
- They float towards the ziggurat they saw on the map long ago, and from here they can spot the ramshackle goblin town that's grown up around it. More distantly they can see a high-walled and blimp-topped city... and roaming the wastelands is an enormous blue dragon wreathed in machinery and storms.

- Onwards into the Drudge Wastes!

Exp: 7000 exp

OOC:

- Chronicler: Carter

- Expedition Leader: George

- Paymaster & Vanguard: Tom

- Quartermaster: Ollie

Retired:

- Dorian "Ditto" DeMone
- Grumblebelch

Exp Calc:

- George / Swan the Swift, Level 8 Barbarian: 128560 (Level up at 256000)
Level Up! +1d8 HP! +2 Barbarian Powers! +1 to Saves! +Backstory!

- Carter / Sydney, Level 6 Magic-User: 49182 (Level up at 72000)

- Ollie / Jojo Fullbeard, Level 5 Muscle Wizard: 25926 (Level up at 36000)

- Tom / Odo Grumblebelch, Level 1 Dwarven Barbarian: 1600 (Level up at 2000)

- Kitty / Julian Aximander, Level 1 Languid Wastrel: 1400 (Level up at 2250)

Session 337 - A Cat is a Little Dragon

Date: 21 February, 22 p.p.

Moon: Crescent - Dragonwane

Zenith: The Allfather

Events:

--- Sailing the AT-RA-MEN-TAL-CRUOOOOORRRR

- We join the party at the edge of a pitch-black sea, deep in the mechanical brass bowels of Fortress-City Fate, on the lowest level of the dungeon. The edge of the lake is littered with coffins, and the group is fixing some of them together into a makeshift boat.
- Sydney looks out into the darkness, lit by the dripping rain of glowing red from above. The red liquid is juice of the cracked imp-pods somewhere above. Out there are a few islands, big chunks of broken machinery thrust up from under the slick blackness. On one there are bones around a golden glow, on another the hint of smoke and huge wings, and the last is the end of a cylindrical up-thrust piston. Somewhere there is the sound of metal on metal, like a blacksmith.

- Dorian catches a drop of red fluid on his tongue and tastes a memory! His Inheritor body of living demon clay has more in common with the black cruor than the others. He dips a finger into the cruor and it comes back pitch black... and his finger starts moving on its own...

- Swan's background in shipbuilding helps a bit, and soon they're off on their coffin-ship across the dark liquid. They row past the bone island, seeing that the golden glow is coming from a tomb in the centre of the island. The bones twitch and shiver in a non-existent wind, and when Dorian tries to streeetch his stretchable arm across the bones begin to reanimate!
- Maybe not then. Instead they aim for the big piston pillar. There are handholds leading upwards. Maybe later. For now, there's an opposite shore to investigate!

--- Dragons, Real

- On the broken metal of the shore they find some crushed coffins and small red scales rubbed up against the walls. Dorian investigates, skin shimmering translucent, and sees a puff of flame then another! It's not one but two red dragons! These are real dragons too, not the rune-dragons faced on previous occasions, and they seem rather under fed.

- The dragons think they hear something, so investigate the noise. Dorian shimmies around past them towards their pile of treasure, classic style. There's 1800 obolsworth of gems amongst the coins, so Dorian grabs those first! They can always come back for the rest...

- On the metal shoreline, Swan and Sydney are suddenly face to face with the dragons! The dragons are dead hungry, so it looks like this is the end of the line for these brave heroes...
- But do not fear! Sydney's backstory of unwarranted romantic advances activates, and the female dragon suddenly finds him rather fascinating, to the chagrin of the male dragon. They aren't a breeding pair or anything but, you know, they'd been spending so much time together you know, maybe there was something there? You know?
- They have a little argument and we discover that they're actually stuck down here. Like many of the other creatures on the lowest levels, they were in one of Fate's simulations until they suddenly found themselves born back into the real world. Glitch? Disaster? Who knows?
- Sydney offers a solution - since the dragons are too big to leave this chamber, wouldn't it be better if they were a bit smaller? He's got this Cat Ring that turns the wearer into a cat, you see, and the Metameat Necklace will allow one of the dragons to shlorp into it like a pokeball.

- The dragons agree, seeing as how leaving this place is probably better than a meagre meal of tiny people.

- The party have a quick root around in the treasure, finding such magical stuff as a shit book by Ayn Rand which bores people to sleep, Tupper's Ware which keeps food fresh, and a magnet bomb!

- As they're leaving, Cat-Dragon on Sydney's shoulder and Necklace-Dragon around Swan's neck, Swan himself gets hit by some of the swirling magic that's latent in this area! He's hit by Grotesque Healing which will heal at the cost of Charisma... so he carefully does not get hurt for the next little while.
- They pass by a crack or window that looks out over the black lake. Dorian extendo-arms his finger towards the pillar, which is just about within his extendo-reach. There's a pool of greyish liquid at the top, and he dips his blackened possessed finger in there. It comes back wet and tries to flick the liquid into people's mouths. Hmm.

--- Ring-A-Dong-Dillo

- They pass by a chamber containing... a tree! It's growing up through the battered machinery of the ground as if flung up from below, and it looks like it has a face...
- Swan slings a rock at it, and it makes an "oof" face but pretends it didn't. On its branches are acorns, some black some gold.

- We digress into the Bombadil Zone for quite some time.
- Dorian extendo-reaches towards an acorn and plucks it... which the tree does not like at all! It slashes at Dorian, growing rapidly to create a new smaller tree near his feet, which in turn grows more slashing branches!
- Swan and Dorian unsheathe their flaming swords and attack! The tree, despite its enormous attack bonus, keeps missing! It roars when the fire sears its branches, and Sydney suddenly realises that he speaks Tree!
- It doesn't go well at first, but after a big crit from Dorian the tree yields and begs for mercy. It reveals that the black acorns are infected with Cruor, and so will kill when eaten. The gold acorns grow more of his kind, little children.

- Swan is intrigued. Between the dragons and the enchanted forest of living trees and Grumblebelch the Pig-Dwarf, maybe the Wheatlands project can in fact turn this fucked up planet into a generic fantasy world!

- There are also a bunch of dead squirrels that either got killed or died from eating black acorns. The party scoop them into a bag, plus a bag of gold acorns and another bag of black acorns.

--- Troll Bridge

- They continue on, coming to a bridge. There is hushed talk from under the bridge, and a sneaky investigation reveals a little gang of Unravelled dudes living under there.
- Dorian sneaks across the bridge, but there's a weird K-THNK as he crosses the middle. Looks like it's a trapped bridge, and he's lucky he didn't set it off! The trolls heard that though, so come up to investigate.
- Seeing nothing, they decide to play some dice on the bridge. Sydney sends out his slime familiar to steal the dice and hide under the bridge... and it works!
- One of the trolls chases the slime, while the others look around to see if there are any other culprits! Swan starts intoning from the Boring Book while the trolls act aggressive! It's too late for them though, since Dorian has extendo-armed his hand to the lever that arms the bridge. It swings open on its hinges, sending the trolls into the Cruor below... alas.
- The others rope across the river as the Unravelled crawl back out of the cruor and onto land. It looks like they've gained new personalities, to the dismay of the one Unravelled who didn't fall in. He'll have to teach them dice all over again!

- Sydney attempts to trade with the new souls, but they don't really know what they have to trade and they certainly don't want ride tickets from the christmas special. The party moves on.

--- The Auto-Blacksmith

- They come to a big circular area which overlooks the Cruor. There's a big steam hammer thing which is banging away at an anvil. An array of metals are arranged on shelves on the walls, and below them they can see one of the islands - the misty one. From here they can see wyverns, and wyvern eggs!

- They test the anvil and discover that it basically swaps the metal in whatever you put in there. Steel swords to brass, silver bullets to iron, whatever to whatever really. There's also what is soon dubbed Atrametal - a black metal imbued with Cruor that drains the victim's Charisma until the Atrametal has absorbed their whole personality.

- Sydney binds his self-writing memoir in Atrametal and swaps over some of the bullets for his gun for various cold iron, silver and atrametal options. The flame spear is similarly enhanced!

--- Egg Heist!

- They could just leave but... wyvern eggs would also be great for the Wheatlands Generification Project.

- The following occurs:

- 1. Spiderclimb cast on Swan.
- 2. Swan climbs across the ceiling.

- 3. Dorian dangles down, invisible, to the island

- 4. Attach advanced Sydney's-blob-familiar-on-hand technology to Dorian.

- 5. Egg

- 6. Escape!
- 7. If attacked, stink bomb! If not, nice one!

- Dorian absolutely burns Meat Points on his invisibility, attempting to grab every last egg. When all seems lost, he chugs a few vials of Darga blood and refreshes his MP, allowing him to grab all but one egg...

- The last egg is too tempting. Luckily Sydney's got his Supreme Thief spell ready and casts it through the familiar, replacing the last egg with a perfect illusory copy!
- By the time the wyverns realise the theft, the heist crew is gone! Dorian dragged up to the ceiling by Swan's brawny arms! Wyvern eggs acquired!

Total: 7000 exp

Valuables Liberated:

- 10 wyvern eggs (5000 exp)

- Dragon scales
- Dragonscalified Armour

- Various metallurgic transformations to weaponry
- Gold and Silver Bars (25000 exp)

- 10 Squirrel Meat (10 exp)

- Bag of Black Acorns (Save or 1d10 Trauma)

- Bag of Golden Acorns (Grow into sentient acorn trees)

- 1800 obols in loose gems (1800 exp)

- Magnet Bomb (Pulls all metal into blast zone 30')

- Tupper's Ware (Keeps 5 rations fresh forever)
- Codex of Utter Tedium (Puts you to sleep after Wisdom rounds of reading or listening)

Total: 31810 exp

Foes Defeated:

- An angry tree, forced into surrender (1250 exp)

- 6 Unravelled, dunked in cruor (600 exp)

Total: 1850 exp

OOC:

- Chronicler, Cartographer & Paymaster: Carter (300 exp)
- Expedition Leader & Chef: Kitty (200 exp)

- Vanguard & Triage: George (200 exp)

Exp Totals:

- George / Swan the Swift, Level 7 Barbarian: 122156 (Level up at 128000)

- Kitty / Dorian "Ditto" DeMone, Level 7 Inheritor: 99890 (Level up at 144000)

- Carter / Sydney, Level 6 Magic-User: 43678 (Level up at 72000)

Level Up! +1d4 HP! +2 to Saves! +1 Mana! +Free Spell! +Backstory!

Session 336 - Dethorning Gifflewim

Date: 14 February, 22 p.p.

Moon: Waxing Gibbous - Dragon Face

Zenith: The Lady

New Backstory:
- Sydney was kissed by a cultist follower, who really shouldn't have given the power dynamics at play here! Once per session, cause someone to make a romantic advance on you.

Events:

--- The Gifflewim Gambit

- Down in the lowest level of the dungeons beneath Fate, surrounded by the slime-choked machinery that makes up the walls and corridors, Swan the Swift has been thinking deeply about the Grandfather Clock that affects the flow of time.
- He tells Sydney and Dorian his plan... to summon Gifflewim, chuck him in the clock, and reverse time until the Idea of Thorns is gone from his memories!

- It's a long shot, but it just might work! Especially since Swan the Swift has his anti-magic Globus Crucigor which protects you from magical effects as long as you hold it with both hands.
- They chant Gifflewim's name and he appears over the big G symbol they drew on the ground to add to the atmosphere! It's just his head at first, and he remembers them from the Christmas Special from a few weeks back!

- There follow many "quick cover your ears!" moments as Gifflewim tries to persuade them of the Idea of Thorns' ideology, countered by Swan's newly espoused doctrine of the Idea of Wheat!

- The conversation starts to stagnate, so Dorian engages the second phase of the plan - a Stun Cigarette! He blows the smoke into Gifflewim's face, and while the Elf reels Swan grabs at Gifflewim's robes with his teeth and drags him to the clock! They slam the door and immediately start spinning the clockface backwards and backwards as the oilslick blackness of Gifflewim's skin pulses and fades and surges and reforms and his green right hand turns back to red!

- Gifflewim collapses out from the grandfather clock and basically has no idea what just happened! More importantly, the Idea of Thorns has been purged! The last thing he remembers is someone flipping a coin, then suddenly he was inside a clock...

--- Trade?
- He is, however, bang up for a classic magic item trade!
- Sydney trades his Shield of International Day Of for a ring that turns him into a cat when worn!
- Dorian trades an electric toothbrush for a big tube of toothpaste.

- Sydney trades a holographic bridge projector for a flask of Mindflayer Juice that lets you eat brains to learn their information.
- Dorian trades a Hand of Glory for a golden Greed Demon mask that makes those nearby become cowardly.

- Swan wants to learn to Cleave but Gifflewim denies him on metagame grounds... but he could always get a Mentor.

- With that Gifflewim disappears in a puff of fragrance to go find some "memory orbs". Hmmm.

--- Next Stop: Train Derailment

- With a surprisingly huge campaign development finally sorted, it's time to keep going and maybe deal with this Shub-Wizardwrath they've been looking for!
- They follow train noises until they find a derailed London Underground train stuffed with dead commuters.

- They loot the train, finding several Rolexes, a somewhat out of place Holy Symbol of the Dead God which is made of silver set around a cracked bone, some rare inks, and a Spellbook! Very good for Sydney!

- An ill wind blows through the area, and Chaotic beings are forced to Save vs Chaos! Sydney passes, gaining a temporary extra Mana, but poor Dorian fails and has one of his powers activated against his will. Sydney casts Unseen Servant out of his new spellbook to carry their stuff at least.

--- G-G-G-Ghosts!

- They've got a branching choice between spooky ghost noises and a smell of petrol. Ghosts it is!
- The room is decked out like a sort of island colony. Spooky ghosts walk around following their former lives, and there is a big tree in the middle with something written on it...
- Dorian attempts to talk, is met with ghostly hissing, and attempts violence with his flaming sword. It is at this point that the fear hits him... the fear of Level Drain.
- They run in terror, both narratively and metanarratively, from the ghosts. Swan glimpses the words on the tree as they book it out of there - "CROATOAN".

--- Skull Cats

- Petrol smell it is, then. They go by a tar pit that neeeaarly reaches the path. They see pawprints in the tar.
- Dorian engages his Gelatinous Cube Stealth and sneaks past the pit. The big cat skull of a huge skeletal feline pokes up over the tar and watches the rest of the party. Then another... and another.

- Sydney flash-casts Spiderclimb and it goes wrong as a Chaos Burst! Happily it simply copies the spell onto everyone else in the area, that single person being Swan the Swift!
- Convenient indeed! They walk over the ceiling, avoiding the big cats, and slip away after Dorian.

--- Tadpoles and Cats
- Given choices between purple mist, more spooky ghost noises, and a sound like babies drowning, they obviously go for the babies.

- It's shallow pools with baby-headed giant tadpoles squirming around in them! One dies of bravery as it tries to bite the Greed-masked Dorian, the others simply sob.

- The next area has whip-cracking sounds in a sandy area. Giant scorpions crack their tails and burrow through sand! The party go not that way, come to a dead end... and there is a roar as they roll an encounter!
- Dorian's backstory ability activates and the encounter is with... an ordinary housecat?
- Honestly incredible that the Cat Ring was gained this session. Swan and Dorian schlorp inside-out into Metameat Necklaces, Sydney puts them on, then he puts on the ring and shrinks down to a housecat!

- It turns out that this newly met cat used to be a human, but he was playing in a cat-based world in the Styxtrix and something happened that made him get born into the real world as his character. He's got no clue what happened to the instances of his mind that are still in the data core, or even if they survived!
- In any case, he can take the party to the mighty Lord Mousebane that is his ruler. They pass through the scorpion room without incident, past some distorted people, and into the Realm of Lord Mousebane!
- There are like 30 cats in here along with Lord Mousebane himself who is a cat of noble bearing. Unlike the rest of the cats he wasn't once a human playing Cat Simulator, but a real cat awakened by the power of Shub-Wizardwrath! He left, and decided to create a little feline fiefdom down here because these human-cats clearly needed guidance and sympathy.

--- The Atramental Cruor
- Lord Mousebane offers to guide them as far as he can, so they set out on a remarkably safe journey through a turnstile, a potionarium, and to the shores of a black lake.

- They grab some random potions from the Potionarium as they go. They look... variable. But who knows?

- They reach the shores of the black lake and see a soft rain of imp matrix pod innards dribbling into a great pool of inky black. The shore is littered with coffins, because apparently putting a corpse into the blackness grants it new life.
- Dorian is fascinated by the cruor, seeing as its so similar yet different to his own clay body. He feels it drawing him towards it somehow...
- We end the session with the party constructing a crude vessel from bodged-together coffins. Next week perhaps they shall cross the threshold.

Total: 8000 exp

Foes Defeated:

- Gifflewim Himself, kinda! (1500 exp)

Total: 1500 exp

Valuables Liberated:

- Catform Ring

- Toothpaste

- Mindflayer Juice

- Greed Demon Mask (500 exp)
- 3 gold Rolexes (300 exp)
- Silver Holy Symbol of the Dead God

- Rare inks and parchments halve the cost of Spell Research

- Spellbook

Total: 800 exp

OOC:

Expedition Leader - George (100 exp)

Vanguard and Chef - Kitty (200 exp)

Paymaster and Chronicler - Carter (200 exp)

Exp Totals:

- George / Swan the Swift, Level 7 Barbarian: 111736 (Level up at 128000)

- Kitty / Dorian "Ditto" DeMone, Level 7 Inheritor: 89470 (Level up at 144000)

- Carter / Sydney, Level 5 Magic-User: 33158 (Level up at 36000)

Session 335 - The Case of the Greedy Pig

Date: 31 January, 23 p.p.

Moon: Waxing Gibbous - Clean Face
Zenith: The Dead God

New Backstory:

- Grumblebelch was a drummer in a Dwarven band! +1 Music

- Sydney swore never to bring life into the world... but broke that promise when he summoned forth his Familiar! +2 to your first Attack, Save and/or Skill Check each session.

Events:

--- Cancer Defeated
- The party are on the lowest level of the Brasshell deep inside Fortress-City Fate. The machinery here is twisted, pulsing, slimy. Very much broken and unmoving. In the room itself, moving around and through the pulsing slimy pillars, prowls the Cancer Monster that the Unravelled priest pointed out before leaving our intrepid adventurers here.
- Celebus greases up a skeleton with possibly-rancid butter and send it slipping out towards the creature. It attacks!
- With the monster distracted for just a moment, the party runs into the room which Iskander had previously scried into via potion and see the very gold that he saw!
- Grumblebelch sees the slimy altar, piles of gold bars stamped with twisting runes, horrible statue of a bloated tentacular entity with a man's face... and immediately grabs a gold bar.
- His body morphs and wobbles and collapses and reforms until... he has turned into a pig!

- The pig desultorily wanders out of the room, thoughts of suicide playing through his mind.

- Celebus orders a skeleton to grab another... and it's kind of fine! The gold bar is glued to its hands by magical force! Celebus realises that oh yes... he now has a skeleton with a curse attack!

- He sends the skeleton out to attack the cancer beast and it swallows the skeleton whole! Its eyes go black as it hallucinates vividly! They proceed to kill it slowly and carefully while it's too high to move.
- A replacement character turns up, an unnamed Magic-User. He picks up a gold bar, gets very depressed, and shoots himself in the head with a disintegration ray. RIP.

--- Tasty?

- Dorian devours the cancer monster and steals its cancerous regeneration.
- While he digests the horrible monster, the others decide to cook something!
- There is much discussion as Sydney refuses to eat anything containing a human bone, people trying to tell him that it's a skeleton troll bone so that's different plus it will make a good stock, and so on.
- They realise they don't have any water... until someone remembers about runes! Water is here!

- After all that it's bon appetit! Minestrolle Soup! All that careful talk around who's allowed to eat what has granted a boost to Tinkering!

--- Twisting Linearity
- After the fairly tasty meal, they head off. Luckily they've been joined by Roger's Loyal Lads, a band of Extras who found their way down here! Almost out of sight, a pig follows sulkily.
- The Lads delve further in, stealthily moving past a room with big purple shapes slithering around and heading through a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
- It's quiet going. They avoid a door like a cosmic sphincter and a cold room with gems frozen under ice, following a trumpeting noise.
- It's some big woolly mammoths! In a grassy room with entrances way too small for them! The mammoths are scared, protecting a baby mammoth in the corner of the room.
- The Lads scoot through, head round a wiggly corridor that turns and turns until it... secret doors back into the room? Odd. They all leave the mammoths alone.
- The next room has some howling holes that suck you into the void between voids! The extras run through, hundreds, even millions, of them falling into the infinite void until they clog up the holes and let everyone else through!

--- Dinosaurs?
- A loud roar, investigated, reveals a huge mechanical T-Rex! The Extras charge and are immediately consumed.

- The last survivor, the eponymous Roger, is swiftly pulled to safety by Swan the Swift.

- Jojo uses a magic punch to blind the T-Rex! The party rush through as its laser eyes flicker!

- Yeehaw

- They come to a fork. In one direction, the smell of gunpowder. In the other direction, an ominous ticking noise.
- They choose the gunpowder and come to bodies dressed as cowboys, all dead. There is a big gaping hole out the bottom of Fate, looking down at the jungles of the Dino Dome miles below!
- They spend some time talking to the spirits of the dead men and discovering their reasons for the fatal shootout. It's very silly. Then they grab the cowboys' six-shooters and head towards the mysterious ticking noise.

- Tick Tock on the Rewind Clock
- The ticking is revealed to be a big coffin-shaped grandfather clock! There's a human-shaped moulded into the back behind the pendulum.
- With a little experimentation, they discover it can reverse time for whoever's in the clock if someone else turns the hands! Why is this only worth 5000 obols anyway?
- The pig leaps in, hoping to reverse itself into a piglet and die. The hands turn back and...

- Grumblebelch appears! The clock reversed the curse!

- Roger recently of Roger's Lucky Lads runs to the big hole in the floor and plummets to his death. RIP. Tom has Grumblebelch back!

- With more of this menacing deepest level of the Brasshell to explore, the party continues on...

Total: 7000 exp

Foes Defeated:
- A Cancer Monster, killed while it was high. (500 exp)
- A mechanical T-Rex, blinded then avoided. (1500 exp)

Total: 2000 exp

Valuables Liberated:

- Time-Travel Clock (5000 exp)
- Cursed gold bars (20000 exp)

- Gold traces (2000 exp)
- 3 Wild West Pistols

- Blacksmith Tools & Gloves
Total: 27000 exp

Exp Totals:

- George / Swan the Swift, Level 7 Barbarian: 108302 (Level up at 128000)

- Kitty / Dorian "Ditto" DeMone, Level 7 Inheritor: 86036 (Level up at 144000)

- Charles / Celebus Uppytus, Level 7 Necromancer: 80134 (Level up at 144000)

- Carter / Sydney, Level 5 Magic-User: 29724 (Level up at 36000)

- Ollie / Jojo Fullbeard, Level 5 Muscle Wizard: 20422 (Level up at 36000)
Level Up! +1d4 HP! +1 Spell! +1 Mana! +Backstory!

- Tom / Grumblebelch, Level 4 Dwarf: 14273 (Level up at 16000)

Session 334 - The Unravelled

Date: 17 January, 23 p.p.
Moon: Waxing Crescent - Dragonwane
Zenith: The Dead God

New Backstory:

- Celebus was destitute and turned to petty crime - stealing chicken sandwiches from the nastiest chicken shop in New Moondin. Luckily when he was caught they punished him by making him a taste tester, and the rest is history! +1 Dexterity

- Tyler Lockheart has a secret crush on Celebus! If your crush would be damaged in combat, you can jump in the way and take double the damage instead,

Events:

--- War Preparation
- With the door out of the room locked, the party does a bit of prep to hopefully deal with the dangerous Unravelled on the other side. Dorian gets to slurping down one of the dead monks and stealing its stretchy powers, Celebus raises the remainder as zombies, and Tyler resets the big swinging trap that they set up last week.
- Outside the door, the Unravelled monks are not well pleased by the murder of their friends. There is a bit of back and forth through the door, until Iskander gets bored and crossbows the guy on the outside!
- They are even more not well pleased and start setting up barricades on the outside. The party is sad because now they're trapped in here with nothing to eat but skeletons and like 10000 old sausages that Tyler presumably has in a big wet bag. 

--- Take the Fight to Them!
- Iskander jumps on the swinging spike trap and launches himself out the door! He discovers that they're setting up barricades, but too slow! An unfortunate monk is in the way and gets spike trapped!
- The monks have stretchy arms and attack over their barricades, but to be fair Dorian now does too! He uses the arm like a spring, smashing his sword into the enemies' faces!
- The really tall guy who's compressed himself into a long snakey fellow tries to slip past Tyler into the room, but Tyler's surfcraft is too powerful! They wrestle nobly, Tyler getting his surfboard stuck right into the guy's craw.

- The party retreats back into the room, hoping to bait them in. The skeletons quickly close the door and Celebus quickly casts his new Bone Claws spell which does exactly what you'd expect!
- Tyler keeps nailing dudes with thrown rocks, just ludicrous accuracy. You love to see it.
- Iskander kills the big giant snakey guy with his insane Fish Blades which are made of actual fish.
- A chanting sound comes from outside in the corridor. What could it be???

--- The Unravelled Cleric
- The source of the sound is soon discovered - some sort of Unravelled priest. He calls a ceasefire and asks why the ceaseless bloodshed??
- Celebus engages him in a battle of wits... achieved irl by having a glass of water with salty lemon and another one with just lemon. Who will win the battle of wits!?
- It's Celebus, but he doesn't believe it when he actually wins, declaring that there's salt in his drink even though he doesn't.

- In any case, the deed is complete, and the priest grants the party amnesty (for now) and offers to take them to the stairs down to the final level where his god waits in the darkness.

- It seems all these people have different ideas of who the Unraveller is, and everyone has an inconsistent story about what they want from their worshippers. Very strange.
- They also see one of the monks starting to knit the big snaky guy back together, starting with the face.
- After being allowed to rest in the room, heal up, and have a sleep (very kind), the priest shows them to the big grand spiral staircase that leads down to the lair of the Unraveller. He warns that there are cancerous beasts down there, and weird things out of time.

- At the bottom of the stairs, the priest points out the big cancer monster that's roving around, and says it's too powerful for him.
- Iskander drinks a Potion of Clairvoyance and detects in all the adjacent rooms... even finding some gold! Once they've killed the beast, perhaps they can get the treasure....

Total: 5000 exp

Foes Defeated:
- Several unravelled Dwarf guys (500 exp)
- Big giant snakey guy (1000 exp)

Total: 1500 exp

Exp Totals:

- Kitty / Dorian "Ditto" DeMone, Level 7 Inheritor: 80036 (Level up at 144000)

- Charles / Celebus Uppytus, Level 7 Necromancer: 74134 (Level up at 144000)

- Ollie / Iskander Fullbeard, Level 6 Fighter: 59086 (Level up at 64000)

- James G / Tyler Lockheart, Level 6 Specialist: 24859 (Level up at 48000)
Level Up! +1d6 HP +2 Skill Points! +1 to Saves! +Backstory!