Session 325 - Worship the Dragon

Date: 21 August, 22 p.p.

Moon: New - Dragonwane
Zenith: Minerva

Events:

--- My Friend the Lizard

- The party wake up on the straw beds in the blocked-off dungeon annex and they are HONGRY.
- The walls continue to ripple with strange gravitational anomalies.
- Everybody wants to eat the giant iguana they locked in the throne room nearby. 
- Suspiria slightly opens the door to the throne room, and a big lizardy tongue comes flicking and licking out! She Charms it and feeds it some butter, which it seems to love! Lizard friend! Her familiar is jealous once again, and the lizard seems averse to Celebus' snake skeleton with its captive skin kite.
- They check out the throne and find a book of spells laying on it. When Dorian sits on it he experiences snakey visions and gets more WIS!
- Summising that this is a Chaotic-only effect, the rest of the Chaotic characters sit on the throne and get some extra Wisdom. Nice one!

--- Dragon!
- They keep exploring, gingerly pushing over some double doors to find a large room with a well. Celebus collects a few samples in his Necromancer vials.
- There's some priestly chanting coming from one direction, so they go the other.
- Parabolus pushes open a side door and finds a room with cool snakeskin robes and fanged-mouth masks. One of them is extra fancy and shimmery, so Parabolus grabs it before Suspiria gets a hand on it! The fanged-mouth masks, however, glue onto your face and give you a poisonous bite... Parabolus is stuck! His eyes look slitted like a snake's behind the mask...

- Suspiria opens the next door and... it's the DRAGON! It warps space, head and teeth rippling through non-euclidean angles to bite her! She's down in one hit, organs crushed, bleeding heavily and...
- No she wasn't! She uses a backstory ability to avoid catastrophe! She leaps out of the way just in time, shimmering dragonteeth smashing into the just-closed door!

--- Cult Life
- They swiftly back away, walls shimmering with gravity whorls, and back through the well room towards the chanting. The rippling distortions on the walls are following them now, humming and thrumming.
- They tumble through a door into a room containing snake cultists in their snake robes! A draconic claw ripples through the wall, hunting for the party, and nearly gets the head cultist! The party save his life, and while he's grateful he's still unsure about them.
- No matter, Suspiria attempts to chaos-cast Nut and the spell goes horribly awry, nesting in her chest, tearing her own way out of her own body, shedding herself like skin. There are now two Suspirias.
- The cultists fall to their knees at the miraculous sight of shedding skin!
- Suspiria (the new, nude one) is given a robe and sits on the throne as the cultists praise her. She hears a voice in her head...

- "I require a new scion!" says the voice in a dragony tone, and Suspiria immediately accepts. She eats a nut and butter and the dragon tastes it through her mouth. It is pleased!
- She is now indoctrinated into the Drakencult, and Celebus joins too as a new cult disciple! Their connection to the Mass rune is strengthened, and Suspiria's black eyes now see the entropy of all things!

--- Down

- They poke around a few other rooms now that they're on friendly terms with the cult and, more importantly, the dragon. They find a book called Beyond the Aether in the priests' bedroom, and some wine in another. Suspiria drinks some wine and loses HP, but she can speak with snakes now!

- Using some gravity nonsense and a Passwall spell, Suspiria creates a portal in the floor (a wall to her, since she's standing on one) and creates a shimmering hole down into the next floor of the dungeon...

--- It's Brew Time

- They come down via rope and rune into a kitchen-slash-brewery, stocked with casks, brewing supplies, and bags of mushrooms marked Plump Helmets! They nab them.
- Hearing running water, they head out along a corridor to find a well! Suspiria jumps in, finding a small pipe and a handful of obols.

- She then offers to cook, and this one's a doozy. Parabolus insists that their meal should be a beer, brewed swiftly via handwavey timeywimey nonsense! They call it Save vs Poison Beer, and it contains a heady mix of Holy Water, Demon Water, Plump Helmet, Salted Butter, Dragon Claw and Snake Meat. Quite the beer!
- It goes fine, great even! The tasty brew that results even grants a bonus to Doom saves! Must be something about the way the Holy and Demon water create some kind of Neutral Water.

Total: 6000 exp

Loot:
- A snake-themed spellbook
- Boa skin (500 exp)
- Fancy snake cult robe (1100 exp)
- Book #174 - Beyond the Aether (100 exp)
- 100 Plump Helmets (100 exp)

Total: 1800 exp

OOC:

- Charles the Chronicler and Art Attacker (200 exp)
- Kitty the Expedition Leader (100 exp)
- George the Vanguard (100 exp)
- Tom the Chef (100 exp)

Exp Totals:

- Charles / Celebus Uppytus, Level 6 Necromancer: 62216 (Level up at 72000)

- Kitty / Dorian "Ditto" DeMone, Level 6 Inheritor: 44565 (Level up at 72000)

- George / Parabolus, Level 5 Specialist Ventriloquist: 15122 (Level up at 28000)
Level Up! +1d6 HP! +2 Skill Points! +Backstory!

- Tom / Suspiria, Level 3 Magic-User: 8334 (Level up at 9000)

Session 323 - Desperately Resting

Date: 21 August, 22 p.p.

Moon: New - Dragonwane
Zenith: Minerva

New Backstory:

- Peter Parabolus nearly died during an Indiana Jones-esque escapade. Luckily he saw the rolling boulder just in time, and leapt out of the way! +1 Awareness.

Events:

--- Crying Faces

- In the clanking darkness in the dungeon depths beneath within Fortress-City Fate, Peter Parabolus and Dorian "Ditto" de Mone pant as quietly as they can after their run-in with the tiger men and the demons. The sound of that battle can still be heard through the brass door.
- As silence falls once more, they take stock of their situation. Four, maybe five levels down into the Brass Hell. A corridor softly lit by Dorian's demonic glow. They hear the sound of sobbing from behind another door on the opposite side of the corridor. Maybe they should check it out?

- Dorian knocks. No answer, just more sobbing.
- They open the door and see two huge metal faces crying at each other from opposite sides of the room! Parabolus inspects one and finds multiple holes within the mouth.
- Alas! A trap! Crossbow bolts shoot from both faces, and the crying turns into a laugh!
- Parabolus, enraged, jams a rock into the laughing mouth of the face that shot him. It starts to weep... and having one laughing and one weeping opens the door out of the room! Lovely!

--- Surprisingly Chill Tiger People
- The next room is a guard room. Tiger people are lounging around. The leader of this little pack tells the pair that they must return to the demon chambers. It transpires that the tigers have a deal with the demons - they prevent anyone with emotions from leaving, and in return the demons get them cloned human carcasses to eat. A feast for a feast!
- Nevertheless, on discovering that the party is here to repair Fate, the tigers let them go onwards. It also turns out that these tiger-people are human minds who chose to be sleeved into humanoid tiger clones. They're furries, basically.

- Dorian and Parabolus take their leave, heading towards the roars which the tiger guys warned them about. Apparently the way down is over that way somewhere.
- They pass through the tiger-people's toilet room (smells bad) and go up another corridor. The walls shimmer with a rippling heat haze effect, though the temperature is still the same hissing warmth as ever down here in the bowels of the machine.

--- Cubic Sloth
- They continue onwards, almost walking straight into a few blue-masked demons! They are demons of sloth and take umbrage to the pair's blithe wanderings!
- A chase ensues, the Sloth field of the demons making their legs stiff and tired. The demons hunt them down and trap them in a dead end. The middle of the room has a big stone cube, rippled like jelly.
- A battle ensues with horrifying effect. The demons are strong! Attacks slap against their oozing sides with little effect, while their claws exact a heavy toll.
- Dorian rips the mask off of one of them and slaps it onto his own face. He is filled with strange demonic energies! It's not enough to protect him as a demon smacks him to the ground, and his return attack leads to his sword shattering into a thousand pieces as the energy courses through him.

- Nevertheless, the battle has hurt both enemy demons. Parabolus finishes them off, then crouches to help Dorian. He's an oozing wreck, legs failing to form and rich red ichor dripping from punctures in his clammy clay skin.
- Dorian scarfs down some fried snake and iron rations to rebuild his body, while Parabolus guards the entrance. They're both heavily damaged, even with Dorian managing to stand up again.

--- Night on the Cube
- They're exhausted and there's no easy way back up to the surface. They realise the cube might be their salvation, and assist each other in climbing up its rippled stone surface. In the claustrophobic gap between the cube and the ceiling, they finally get some rest.
- During their rest in the infinite hissing darkness of Fate, Parabolus briefly stirs in the artificial night. There's a slurping schlorping sound... and he peeks over the edge of the cube to see a slime digesting the demons' corpses.
- Later, there are some tiger people sniffing around, wondering where the Sloth demons are. Apparently they were meant to be patrolling this area, and they missed a couple of check-ins.

--- Beyond Human Burger
- Somewhat healed up by their rest on top of the cube, but out of food, Dorian decides on an excursion to the tiger-people to see if he can rustle up some food. He's got the Sloth demon mask, after all.
- After a fair amount of negotiation where Dorian persuades the tiger-boss that he needs to feed his slothful minion some food so he can continue to be sinfully slothful, he bags one of the clone corpses that the tigers feed on.
- He hurries back to the cube and they swiftly cook up some "Beyond Human Burgers" using clone-human meat, loads of marmite, and some mysterious embyros they found somewhere in the Meatlands. They use a bunch of Nullifier Spice though, so there won't be any downsides from eating man-flesh.
- They gobble the passable meal down, but the smell attracts a tiger-man!
- They buy him off with a burger... but then the fire sets off a fire alarm and water starts gushing from the sprinklers above! This wets the rest of the tiger-man's tiger party and, yowling, they run off to where it's dry. Safe for now!

--- Mushroom Muushroom
- They keep going and hear a sound like chickens clucking somewhere. Two and two are put together - that stone cube must have been a gelatinous cube that ate a cockatrice! Best to avoid those things.
- They head into a room that's a bit like an abandoned school cafeteria. Huge purple mushrooms glow with a faint light, countless suppurating holes peppering the caps that look unsettlingly like they're breathing.

- The mushrooms SCREM!

- Growls and yowling of a bunch of tiger-people come towards the pair. The mushrooms attracted them!
- The pair flee up a corridor, finding a barricade, and swiftly shimmy up and over before the tiger-people can get them.
- The roar of some great beast, closer now, roars out, sending ripples through the strange heat-haze distortion along all the walls. The tiger-people leave, assuming that whatever that is will eat our heroes.

--- Snake Stuff

- They look around the little room they've ended up in. The machinery of the walls has been smashed up and battered so it resembles a whole room made up of snakes. The door, covered in snake pictograms, has been smashed in.

- The next room once had mighty pistons between floor and ceiling, and these too have been battered until they look like snakes. There's snake poo on the floor.
- Since there's probably a snake in there, we wrap up for the night...

Total: 8000 exp

Enemies Defeated:
- Two Sloth demons (200 exp)
Total: 200 exp

OOC:
- Chronicler and Treasurer: Kitty
- Vanguard and Expedition Leader: George

Exp Totals:

- Kitty / Dorian "Ditto" DeMone, Level 6 Inheritor: 39481 (Level up at 72000)
Level Up! +1d6 HP! +1 Meat Point! +1 Mutation Limit! +2 to Save! +Backstory!

- George / Parabolus, Level 4 Specialist Ventriloquist: 12972 (Level up at 14000)

Session 321 - Return to Fate

Date: 21 August, 21 p.p.
Moon: Waning Crescent - Dragonwane
Zenith: Oberon

Events:

--- The Fated LARP

- The party are in Fortress-City Fate and it's much like old times, except that the brass-and-clockwork city is now full of clay-based maybe-demon people downloaded from the data stacks in the city's core. Other than that it seems normal...
- They ask the guards about what's going on in the city, major factions, that sort of thing. The current Fated Queen is Madame Black who won the throne after the previous incumbent was found to be having an out-of-character affair. She's part of the Masquerade faction, one of three "serious roleplaying" courtly drama types along with the Council of Viziers and the King's Men who are all in factional conflict.
- Other factions are having a bit more fun with it, like the deeply non-serious superhero LARP over at All-Prayer or the kinda-roleplaying-kinda-not Maintenance Crew who are doing a plotline and trying to work out why the data stacks are breaking down in the deep city.

--- Superhero Time

- The team take the train to All-Prayer to check out the superheroes. They're in luck! As soon as they arrive they see The Conductor, an electric supervillain, capturing POWERMAN in a magnet cage! Another hero called Devilman shows up too!
- Jojo decides her superhero name is Future Girl and she can see the future!
- Future Girl fights The Conductor and wins, getting him in a headlock! Guards turn up in an anachronistic Guber and take the villain away. POWERMAN and Devil Man invite the party to a party later - up on the walls is where people hang out when they're out of character.

--- What's In This Drink?

- They head up to the party and it's pretty cool! You can look down over the city from above, and they serve a bunch of drinks which are variants of the same thing - some kind of pale liquid clay.

- Dorian, being a demon made of clay himself, tries some of the stuff...

- It's basically watered down clay plus Alterket - the ketamine analogue - and it fucks him right up!
- The clay, it transpires, is from the body of the enormous demon that exploded into the city all those years ago, raining demon obols down on the place and splatting right down onto the former farm sector of the city!
- Dorian is mostly blob by this point, and happily follows the others along burbling away.

- They take the outer circle line to Verdance and its many stairs.

--- Demon Goop

- Dorian blobs down the stairs going wheeeeeeee.
- It transpires that the demon clay is what the people of the city are formed from now. If killed, they just chuck your kara back into the mud, upload your mind from a backup, and there you are! Low stakes all round for the people here.
- They borrow a barrel and bloop Dorian into it. He's pretty happy in there.

- Parabolus is pleased to discover that while there are farms, they're all set dressing and don't actually grow anything. Wheatlands monopoly continues!

- They decide to head back into the city via boat, then change over to the deep city line and check out what's going on with these data stacks. It's probably the only "real" adventuring to be had in the city, since everything else is a larp.

--- Enter the Dungeon

- The reach the deep city and head down towards the gatehouse, then on into the Brasshell dungeon beneath. According to the guard at the gatehouse, the first floor of the dungeon is for dungeon LARPers, then it gets progressively more dangerous and real the deeper you go.

- They check out a room that just has a spooky speaker playing canned evil laughter, then check behind a door that sounds like a ringtone. Parabolus keeps yelling out that they're real and not playing the game.
- Behind the ringtone door there's a wheel of fortune! Jojo spins the wheel, gets a sad face result, and gets hit by a minor curse that makes her worse at rolling! Dorian tries it, gets a happy face, and earns a free reroll in the dungeon! Parabolus spins it, gets a sad face, and gets hit in the neck by several thin darts.
- Another room is explored, there's a statue of the OG Fated King in a dry fountain. Jojo fixes it, and finds that it could have been set to spew noxious fumes! Instead she sets it to water, which begins flowing.

--- Kobolds
- At a crossroads they see a whole bunch of people dressed up as dog-like kobolds! Between Jojo's incendiary bolt and an alarmingly successful gambit combo from Dorian and Parabolus, it doesn't go well for the kobolds.
- The "kobolds" morale breaks and they decide to call it a day. Jojo fist-bumps the strongest looking kobold and Charms him. He says his name is Shishlak aka Brad, and he tries not to break character.

- Shishlak leads the team to the kobold market that they've got down here! Everything is mostly made from shaped clay, but there are fried snakes which are at least real food.
- Parabolus does a ventriloquist show to make a bit of cash, and then also borrows money off of Jojo to buy some weapons and armour.

- They also meet a mysterious stranger in the bar... they call him Trundler. His real name is Snorri Broadshoulders, and if the party can bring him 47 Dwarven Artifacts he can play a human as his next class. He can pay in premium currency!

- Seeing as it's relatively safe here, and Dorian is still feeling some of the after-effects of the ketamine clay, they decide to stay here for now and plan for the deeper levels tomorrow. Strike the earth!

Total: 7000 exp

Kills:
- A bunch of "kobolds" (100 exp)
Total: 100 exp

Exp Totals:

- Kitty / Dorian "Ditto" DeMone, Level 5 Inheritor: 30576 (Level up at 36000)

- George / Parabolus, Level 3 Specialist Ventriloquist: 4067 (Level up at 7000)
Level Up! +1d6 HP! +2 Skill Points! +Backstory! +2 to Saves!

Level Up! +1d6 HP! +2 Skill Points! +Backstory!

- Ollie / Jojo Fullbeard, Level 2 Muscle Wizard: 4067 (Level up at 4500)

Level Up! +1d4 HP! +1 Mana! +Free Spell! +Backstory!