A Magical Place (7/13/2026)

GM: Stras Acimovic
Players: April Walsh, Jeremiah Frye, Sean Nittner
System: Spell and Blade by Stras Acimovic

More and more this adventure felt like a pilgrimage. Every event along the way felt portentous and should be treated with reverence.

Rime Spiders!

Did you know that in most arachnids, hydraulic compression acts as the primary means of extension in several of their hinged leg joints? I did not know this. But Skanya’s knowledge of brewing and alchemy was that the fluid in their joints was something a little like antifreeze.

That was all good and well to know, but as our session started, she was being chased by the biggest one!

Stras set the scene. Three giant rime spiders glimmering in the moonlight, four oathbound adventurers, the and gravesite of a Wyrm Queen in a cave full of stalactites and stalagmites (“c” for ceiling and “g” for ground was another thing I learned this session). He asked what each of us were doing and the fight began.

Skanya ducked and dodges through the ribs, avoiding the razor sharp spider wire woven between then with help from the Eye of Akta. She lured the largest of the three behind her into an ambush. [Desperate Scramble. Success]

Loddi shot an arrow into the stalactite above the spider and it came crashing down, impaling the giant beast and pining it to the cave floor. [Shoot with a setup. Success]

Meanwhile Rulgara fought off two giant spiders at once, cutting through an ice wyrm rib and slipping between them to get cover the from the spider above. Her star metal sword bit into the spider beside her and frozen blood sprayed out. She blocked it with her shield and quickly cast it away even as the blood was freezing it. The shield shattered into dozens of pieces as it hit the cave wall! [Skirmish. Mixed success. Shield used to resist]

The spider above cold not reach her, but it didn’t cast down a web of ice cutting her off and trapping her in the ribs. [Beat]

Loddi studied the spiders for weaknesses and saw their thorax was vulnerable, but that anyone striking it would also expose themselves to the spray of icy blood Rulgara just had. He also noticed that their icy webs froze everything they touched except the wyrm bones, which might be used as protection. “The bones!” He shouted “They’ll protect you!” Finally he noticed that their many eyes were alert and being used to target his companions. [Study. Poor results]

Skanya held the Eye of Akta and asked her for a blessing of protection for Rulgara. She wasn’t sure what that would look like but Xravic put his hand on her shoulder and reassured her “say your blessing little moonshadow.” She heard a sound like flapping wings and Rulgara was surrounded by darkness that blinded the spiders but she could see them as though light by a purple light. [Blessing Trait. Channel. Mixed success]

Rulgara grabbed the severed rib and plunged the tip of it into the head of the spider beside her. [Skirmish. Success]

The spider above ran along the cave ceiling to attack us from above. [Beat]

Loddi shot the ice it was running along and the spider dropped to the ground in front of us. Still deadly but no longer ready to attack from above [Shoot. Mixed success]

Skanya knew that Heartflame, an alchemical her father concocted warmed the blood of people (and of bats!) and she wondered if it would work on rime spiders. She tossed a vial of it into the spider’s mouth, but that only seemed to make it angrier. The spider pounced on her with it’s terrible mandibles. Xravic stepped in her path but he had nothing to hold the spider at bay! Skanya wasn’t going to let him die to save her. She picked up a shard of ice wyrm bone, darted past Xravic and thrust between her and the giant mandibles, holding it momentarily at bay. [Shoot. Mixed success. Resisted a critical hit. We’d learn later that eventually hearthfire would put rime spiders to sleep, but not fast enough].

Rulgara pinned the spider she was fighting between the wyrm ribs. It was dead, it just didn’t know it yet, and she used both might and leverage to hold it at bay during it’s death throes. [Force. Success]

Loddi called Nyx to try and drag the the ice spider off Skanya. He bit into the spiders legs and pulled back, but she was still trapped beneath it [Whisper. Mixed success]

Gar, now free, slipped through the ribs and smashed into the spider, using a stalagmite as fulcrum to pry it away from Skanya, but the spider held fast [Force. Miss]

Skanya just tried not to die! Her head was banged against a rock but the ice wyrm bone continued to protect her [Resist. 1 Physical Harm]

Loddi found another shard of ice wyrm bone, this one shaped like a spear. He leapt in the air, flapped his great wings and flew down on the spider plunging the makeshift spear into it’s many eyes, ending the beast! [Scramble. Succcess]

Celebration for some

Gar howled with victory and seeing that Skanya was most unhurt picked her up and cheered for their collective valor.

When she was set down Skanya turned of Xravic. “What were you thinking? You could have been killed!”

Xravic showed her his ring and moved his hands in the shape of an X. A moment later of the stalagmite was cut in the same shape as though sliced by the finest of blades. “Seasoned adventurer. Legendary item!”

Xravic looked at Skanya as though that explained things but she was not content. She was only more frustrated “Then why didn’t you do that the first time?”

“There was a little girl in my way!” Xravic stalked out of the cave, outwardly annoyed but someone standing outside the cave would have caught a small smirk on his face as he couldn’t help but be impressed as well.

Collecting the Remnants

Skanya and Rulgara worked together to extract the hydraulic fluid from the joints of the rime spiders, collecting a good quantity of the fluid for future use [Craft. Success]

Loddi gathered the wyrm call and the sensory bone easily enough, but the vast supply of rock eating acid was inside the queen’s skull. With lots of rope and levers and heaving we pulled the scull from the cave and rolled it onto the deck of our boat. Skanya winced as the hull creaked when it landed, but the wyrm hunter’s ship held strong!

Resting in the cave

We spent the night resting in the cave and at some point Skanya pulled Xravic aside to ask him about Akta. First he scoffed that she thought she might ever be chosen “You’re not even marked!” but eventually he opened up a bit and shared some of the same things he told Rulgara. “She’s distracting. She pays attention to the things others don’t notice. She cares about people but she’s bad at communicating.” He then shared more “Gods can’t change. Akta is knowledge. She is protection. She can’t be anything else. I think gods choose people because we can make a choice. When your chosen you can choose if you want to do good in their name or have a life of your own. Having a family or anyone else you care about, is just another form of cruelty if your a chosen. Why do you want to be chosen?”

Skanya was reluctant to answer, but Xravic had shared personal things with her and she felt she owed it to him to do the same. “As long as I can remember I’ve known too things about my father. The first is that he loves me with all of his heart. The second is that he is so very sad. I’ve often wonder if those two things were intertwined. I’ve tried to many ways to bring him joy, but it is always fleeting. If I was Chosen by Akta, perhaps I would learn the source of his sadness and how to ease it. Please do not share that with anyone, even my sister.”

Meanwhile Gar asked Loddi about being a scout among the wyrm hunters. He hold her a story of when he was young and he found a Wyrm Queen that was alive. He thought it would be exciting, but it was terrifying. He fled and their ship was wrecked in the conflict. When asked why he was out adventuring now instead of being with his family he told her that this is what the beast touched do when they are young. Go on adventures to till the receive a sign it was time to return home. He just had no idea what that sign was supposed to be.

Skanya asked Xravic about the globe and what it might be tracking above. He chastised her for not reading more books. She showed him the slip of paper Rulgara had used to record its position through time. He curled the paper into a circle and Skanya craned her head around to try and discover the pattern. He poked her in the forehead and said “wrong eye” and walked off. She tried looking again through the Eye of Akta and at first she could not see the purple outline of the object above because it was so big. Eventually she realized that through the eye, some of the stars above were hidden, it revealed something invisible and truly massive above…the phantom moon!

A path not taken

The next day Skanya took a turn at navigation, using Loddi’s map to guide them. It revealed things to her and she added notes to it [Study. Crit]. They spotted Skyshear Drakes that swooped down mountains and caught the breeze to pull them back up to the top. Even though we took the longer route across the ice, we made good time and no longer saw the interlopers fires at night.

We did see however, the sky flame (aurora borealis). Akta’s gift! Shades of green, red, and purple coursed through the sky as thought it was a canvas for the gods to paint upon. To Skanya the light spoke of divinity and told us we were close to a holy place.

Xravic seemed agitated and distracted. He told us of a crevasse that he knew about nearby that was spiritually odd. We could make good time by going through it, but their were risks. People touched by the gods might get lost. Loddi was in danger as he was beast touched, so did Rulgara as she was Marked, and of course Xravic himself as he was chosen. Ironically, only Skanya would have her mind free. She of course was eager to explore this place but Rulgara was wary of any further adventures keeping us from the star fall. We decided to stay on the land route and keep safe.

Mammoth Riders

Eventually our path was blocked by a long wall formed by two sheets of ice that collided and erupted upwards ages ago. We could climb the wall on foot, the but the boat would never make it. Going around it seemed to be the only option.

When we parked the boat to evaluate it seemed that our animals were agitated by something. Nyx was making noises as though something was afoot. Tippi was darting his head as if trying to catch the scent of something. Akta did not reveal anything [Attune. Miss] and Loddi couldn’t tell with his keen senses [Study. Miss] what was causing them distress, but decided we shouldn’t stick around to find out.

Loddi spread his owl feather wings and took to the air to scout which direction (right or left) would get us around the wall in the shortest distance. However, to our surprise, on the other side of the wall he spotted an encampment burning fires hidden behind hills. They had tents with stylized animals painted on them. When Loddi described them Skanya recalled that symbol was of near-mythical clan, the Mammoth Riders! [Recall. Mixed success].

Skanya was once again aflutter with excitement. “They are mammoth riders. Nobody even really knows if they exist, but I guess they do. They have their own legends about how the world was formed. Mammoth Riders had a story about a tree that grew form a fire in the heart of the Land and held up the sky, and the stars in the night were it’s fruit. This echoes the more common Iskani belief that the Moon was once a part of the world (hence iceflame). It seems the Mammoth Riders believe the Sun was part of the Land or the Land was part of the Sun … it’ wasn’t completely clear because they have an unfamiliar way of speaking and use metaphors that are not commonly understood, but that’s what we gathered.

[For the linguists in the audience, Mammoth Riders speak a form of the language closer to a proto-Iskani. If you’d have to guess maybe modern Iskani is actually derived from their original language, but there aren’t many scholars in Spell and Blade deeply interested in this sort of thing.]

We climbed up the ice wall and greeted them, Skanya exuberant. They were courteous but did not immediately open their hearts. We realized after a moment that the hills around their camp were not hills but sleeping mamoths.

To gain their favor Rulgara boasted about our heroic exploits and how great our adventures have been so far, and the noble cause we have [Sway. Mixed success]. Skanya followed up by sharing the sad story of Rulgara’s father and how finding the star metal is a personal journey for all of us. [Sway. Mixed success]. Together, their efforts warmed the hearts of the at least one of the mammoth riders.

We asked for their help towing the boat up and over the wall, but they said that waking their mammoths was a slow process and it took much from them. It was important that they rested. Yulani, a young woman among them however told us her mammoth Stargazer was not like the others, she was still awake. She would help us but asked something in return.

Yulani took us into a tent and we met her grandfather, a man whose eyes looked like pools of silver. Rulgara could tell he had sworn the Oath of Starfall ages ago, but his eyes had failed him and now he was blind. Skanya realized this was a conversation for followers of Maya and excused herself from the tent.

Rulgara greeted the aged star smith and told him we must be destined to be here. The man touched her face and sighed “so young.” He told Rulgara that he wanted forge rulhim one last time, to make his granddaughter a tool for guiding her steed. “The world is full of noise, but the truest sound is the song of star metal. My eyes no longer serve me, but I will be guided by the song.”

Rulgara gladly offered to bring him some of the star metal we found and Yulani said her sister (which we realized was Stargazer) would help them. “She doesn’t sleep like the others because she likes to look at the stars.” The mammoth lifted the girl onto its back with effortless ease and practice. They truly were sisters.

When we returned to the boat, Xravic told us he figured out what was making the animals so unsettled. He pointed to the darkness in the east and for a long time we couldn’t see a thing. Eventually our eyes adjusted and we noticed a towering creature moving ever so slowly in our direction, a Rentulak, the Lichen Behemoth. These creatures were also thought to be mythical. They are colossal creatures that lichen grows all over. When the sun shines on them, it sustains them, but in dark times like these, the creature lures creatures that like to eat the lichen growing from it, and them falls down on them, crushing and eventually consuming them for sustenance.

Though Skanya very much wanted to collect a sample of lichen, she tamped down her curiosity so the adventurers could all make it over the ice in time.

Stargazer, who turned out to be a bit of a trickster, stealing things with her nose to inspect them, helped us first flatten the ice wall by stomping it flat and then towed our boat over the hump to the ice sheet above.

Yulani and Stargazer waved goodbye as the sailed further into the north.

Starfall

Under the lights of the sky flame we made it to a verdant crater where the stars fell. The land vibrated beneath our feet and the earth itself was magnetized. Skanya stared at the stars as they moved through the night, feeling enveloped by Akta’s gift. Rulgara closed her eyes and listed to the song of the starmetal vibrating inside the rocks below.

The land grew with strange plants, including the Wight Tree that grows amongst iceflame fields. Skanya collected it’s bark, which is used to make Silverthorn.

We pulled the wyrm queen’s skull from the boat and rolled into the crater (so much for having a great skull as a trophy from our adventure) and planned to use the acid within to eat away the rock that held the spidery rulhim (star metal) within. To achieve our goal, we needed to solve three challenges:

• How would we get the acid from the skull? Skanya’s extensive boat repair tools (the ones that cost 10 coin) included a drill with a bit strong enough to cut through ice wyrm bone. Thought the tip burned out when it touched the acid.
• How would we apply the acid to the rocks? Rulgara had kept one of the ice wyrm ribs from our fight and carved a channel in it so that we could tip the skull and let the acid flow down it like a rivulet onto the rocks.
• How would we pick up the razor sharp star metal withing. Loddi’s boat had a crane for hauling cargo into it. Using chains and hooks he was able to raise and move it. Using thick blankets he was able to gingerly place it on the hull without it cutting through.

Akta’s Blessing

Had stars fallen here before? They must have for such strange and verdant growth to be here. Skanya believed this was a holy place, one that should be hidden from others who did not revere it. She summed all her might, channeled the mana within her and cast a blessing of protection, a blessing of night, a blessing of luck, a blessing of comets, and a blessing of knowledge (secret knowledge) to protect the land. It was covered in a mirage of ice. Here companions and those with the Eyes of Akta could see the crater, but any passing by would only see more drifts of snow. [Blessing. Channel. Crit. Hell Yes!!]

We circled back before the claim jumpers could find us and by moving in the night, flying black sails, and covering the hull with white sheets, snuck past their line taking care to sweep the snow behind us to cover our tracks.

We dropped off a portion of starmetal in with the mammoth riders, picked up the young would be smith in the unnamed village on the way, and set our sails for Rul!

Thoughts on the Game

Hell to the fucking yeah. I loved all of of this and I wanted more. Like, there many not be another starfall, but Skanya marked on the map where the strange crevasse was (she didn’t mark where starfall field was, that was too precoius) and she wants to go there. She wants to collect lichen from a Rentulak, and more herbs and plants form the starfall field. She wants to return to the aurora borealis and gaze at the stars. She wants to track the movement of the phantom moon and learn its secrets. For every answer found, she had more questions. For every question, she has another quest.

Everything about this adventure felt profound to her, from the small moments at camp, to the epic moments of casting a blessing over an entire crater.

Time Passing

Our next session will be a town phase followed by time passing. My ideas for that:

• During town I want to train to finish learning attune. I’m strapped for coin, but perhaps the silverthorn or the ice wyrm bone, or the wyrm cull or the sensory bone will fill our pockets if they aren’t given as gifts. I really want to hold onto the rime spider fluid!

For Time Passes this is what I have in mind:

• Life changes. Skanya is deeply worried about the threats of the undead and she won’t let that go. I’m thinking of choosing the Powerful Allies (the Red Queen or perhaps the Arcanix Zahrana who is from Verrard and would know of such things) and either Deeds (to show her work), Permanent Gear (to reflect something she has acquired to stop them, maybe a blacksilver blade or the circlet of protection that Gar panned to make for her).
• Legend Grows. Skanya will gain a point of reputation Cunning (if she takes deed, she might gain Cunning, Might, and Honor since those are both 1 deed away). We’ll have to see what her deed-name will be.
• Master Your Craft. Assuming I’m able to train Attune during a town phase, I think I want to add the Lore trait to reflect what she’s learned form talking to those who have seen more than she has. As an acolyte, Lore would only cover Religion and Gods. If (and it’s a big if) she ever became a Chosen of Akta, the trait would cover all fields, which is wild. Alternatively, I could take either Resolute or Divination traits, or learn Tend, which also both feel right for Skanya.