GM: Stras Acimovic
Players: April Walsh, Jeremiah Frye, Sean Nittner, Lily Eisner
System: Spell and Blade by Stras Acimovic
Loddi, who had taken care of the animals, had to sneak across the frost plains past the Bone Mothers. His suit protected him, provided sustenance so he didn’t need to breathe, and changed his temperature to match the chill outside.
Aboard the Skyship Skanya talked to Lah’kir. They were a similar age, and La’kir was accustomed to earning his mother ire, though not quite so profoundly as Skanya had. From him she learned:
- The ship is the Tempest Star
- The Necromancer’s name is Razakar Asheart
- His mother owes him a debt and takes her compacts very seriously.
- A compact is not bound by the deep, it is only your word. For some this means that it is easy to break, but for Lah’Ranna it means that it is more important than an Oath. She does not follow the compact because the Deep forces her to, she does it because of her own personal integrity.
- A compact may be broken, but it is complicated. If you save someone’s life, usually you’re square. Perhaps after three generations of service you should be as well, but that was a thought Lah’kir entertained but his mother would not.
Skanya turned her attention to the companion before her. She had been trying to get information from him, but hearing his story, she started to wonder more about the man himself. What did he want? It wasn’t this, but he didn’t know any alternative. He liked most of the raiders and might consider joining them, but his mother has told him for years that he needs to keep studying because some day he’ll need the knowledge. He’s been going along with it, but he hates it.
“Sounds like your mother loves you very much and wants what she thinks is best for you.” Skanya’s resolve to convince Lah’Ranna that they could be allies faded. Maybe she’d done too much harm for that. She found her thoughts lingering more on Lah’kir, wondering what he would do if he had the chance.
Talking to Lah’Ranna, the Maintainer
Zhara, Rulgara, and Skanya found Lah’Ranna at the side of the burned raider, watching over him. When Skanya asked if they could enter to talk with her more, she said her unconscious friend wouldn’t mind. Not an invitation, but not a rejection.
“We are going to fight the Necromancer. If we survive, we would like to stay in contact with you. Is that possible?”
“You do not have wings.”
Skanya chose to take the statement of the obvious as an inuquiry regarding other methods of contact rather than an outright dismissal. It turned out Zhara did not have a surgical implant that also would have worked.
When we discussed a possible allegiance, the Maintainer was doubtful. “Raiders are complicated. In order to raid they need to convince themselves that those who they are raiding aren’t people. It might be hard for them to ever feel at home among the Iskani.”
Rulgara proposed an avenue for further cooperation. “I spared your captain for a reason!”
Lah’Ranna scoffed. She seemed to think this wasn’t the boon Rulgara meant it to be. “Watch out when you sleep.” She said as a warning. “But I do hope we meet again.”
Skanya proposed a rendezvous. “Two weeks from now in the tower the raiders currently hold?”
“I will ask the captain.” Somehow that seemed like a big step.
Zhara, who had been reading what she could in Brazhiah’s journals, asked Lah’Ranna about dragon hearts. The woman held up one fist, then two. We were confused, but she was trying to find out what size of heart we were looking for. She told us there are people who steal them from dragon graveyards. “If you have a lot of coin, you could buy one, or you might be able to find someone to ferry you to the graveyard yourself.” She seemed to indicate her ship and crew might be open to this latter service.
Loddi’s Guilt
At the lake we saw Loddi, perched in a tree waiting for us. As we hailed him we flashed back to when he was on the Tempest Star.
He approached Lah’Ranna with his eyes downcast. “I owe you a great debt, and I don’t know what to do.”
She crossed her arms, appraising him for a moment. “My heart is filled with so much grief and rage that I can’t give you an asnwer.”
“If you think of anything, it is yours.”
Blackwater Lake
Together again, we appraised the situation. Blackwater lake had been drilled into like a mine shaft. There were undead carrying carts out of it, but they did not seem especially alert. Maybe we had bypassed all the defenses and they were only instructed to perform these simple tasks. Or maybe we just weren’t close enough yet to find out what happens if one of them spotted, or worse, smelled us.
We also noticed a disturbing illusion placed upon them. The visage of life cast over death. Their bodies appeared whole, even seemed to laugh or talk amongst themselves, but it was all a veneer. Though their shapes moved akin to the living, we could see where the illusions created glitches and phantom gestures that were divorced form the undead within them. From what Zhara know of undead and necromancy, illusion is not their forte. The necromancer was expending a great deal of energy to make this illusion possible.
From what we knew of these shamblers they could sense body heat and smell blood. Skanya had collected rime spider fluid, with the notion of making a serum that could hide a hunter from an Ice Wyrm, but thought that might work for this as well. It worked, the serum lowered all of their body temperatures, which would hide them from the undead, but also made their limbs feel a bit numb and slow to move. Skanya is going to call it Rime Heart!
We also had to do something about Rulgara’s wound. Zhara had tended to it, but the smell of blood would still be detectable to undead senses. Loddi had the wound breath he retrieved from the cache south of Kitarn and we knew it was good at preventing undead from eating meat stores. So Skanya went back to her “laboratory” (just a few alchemical tools she brought along) and with the help of Loddi chewing it up, made a tincture, Essence of Widow’s Breath. When applied it seem to cover all smell, in fact, once applied, we couldn’t smell anything either. A real numbing of our senses!
During all of this we had a short discussion. Lah’Ranna had said that dragon hearts are the gateway to the Everstorm. Sorcerers called this the Aether. But that made Skanya wonder, do all magics have some gateway into their source? And if so, what was the gateway into Dreaming? People dream (lowercase) and it seemed that the ancients needed a person to use as a conduit to operate their machines. So maybe a person, perhaps and ancient-touched like Zhara, could be a gateway to Dream as well. What would it mean if it were true? Just some idle speculation.
Beneath the Lake
We passed by the undead undetected. The tinctures worked!
Below the water there was a series of buildings that looked of imperial construction. Great black edifices emblazoned with a spiked hexagon, the Black Sun of the Empire. The paths between them had been carved out by the undead, and in the center we saw a grand building that was emitting the “aurora mortalis”, a sickly yellow-green miasma. Above the great building the ice seemed particularly clear as though it was the center point of some great event.
The channels themselves were narrow, only cut wide enough for the undead to pass. Occasionally we found places were things has been extracted, perhaps this was where the bone mothers came from. We also saw inert skeletons holding tools and with a strange black silhouette of them standing on the walls next to them, as if a massive blast obliterated them ages ago.
Loddi found us a building that wasn’t been accessed by the undead and we stopped there to rest for a bit. While we partook of our rations Loddi asked Rulgara what she had done with the guilt she felt after killing someone or causing them harm. She told him she didn’t have an answer for him, but that “you wouldn’t be wracked with guilt if you weren’t a good person.”
Loddi nodded thanking her for her wisdom. “You sound like my grandmother Ulna.”
Inside the building we found a few strange items. A bone table with a large animal scale on it. The plaque next to it said “Beast Scale, 24 Stone.” There was also several Empire crates that looked like they hadn’t been opened. Most of them had common tools, but one of them had a clay pot labeled in the necromancers dialect of Nh’Khat (the Empire’s language). Zhara was able to translate some of it. It meant something like Prime or Original Onixium, which was a stone-like substance the Empire used to amplify necromancy. This pot was probably 500 years old!
Skanya found strange liquid running through walls. It had the consistence of oily with a green hue. She collected some of it in a vial for future examination.
Loddi touched the beast scale and suddenly his suit disappeared. It took several minutes for it to return, and when it did, it registered the scale as “NO DREAM.”
Rulgara was curious and so she listed to it, the way she would listen to metal. Everything in the world has a song, but this object had no song. It had some intelligence however. when she touched it she felt inside it a hunger. She felt inside herself a hunger. Something that wanted to consume life. All life. Could it be the scale of a great beast cursed with necromancy? She resisted its hunger, and stored it safely in her pack.
Zhara spend a few minutes attuning to her mystic sight and then went to examine the blasted skeletons. She used her final aetheric suspension (the clock was on now!) and used the seven-circuit claw to examine the substance. When she looked at Necromancy it looked like a black void lined with a green flame. Whatever magic happened here was so long ago that that it had faded away. But the residue left behind was pure necromancy. Necromancy doesn’t have physical form, but here it was. The necromancy had been BLASTED out of these skeletons. What could do that? And what could do that at such an incredible scale?
Rulgara mused. We know that hundreds of years ago necromancy changed, from the ritual process that infused the dead with animation at the whim of their necromancer to a feral contagious infection that created the ghouls that plague Verrard today. Could this explosion have some something to do with that change?
Razakar Asheart
Outside the center building we saw eight great onixium obelisks, of which all we could reach were completely inert. Perhaps the blast destroyed them as well.
At the entrance Skanya prayed to Akta for two blessings. One to ward the building from undead entering (she knew that if the necromancer wanted to he could summon all those creatures attack them) and the other was to protect Zhara. She would have cast a protection on the entire group but her connection with Akta was weak here. She felt not that she was just below the surface, but that she was in another realm.
We crept inside, quiet as we could, hoping the same protections that hid us from the undead would work on the necromancer.
When we came to the center room we spotted him sitting down on the ice studying several figures. The corpse of a man on a throne surrounded by eight armed and heavily armored figures. The necromancer had dawn a line in the ice and was careful not to cross over it.
Zhara studied the scene with her mystic sight and noticed several things as the blackness of necromancy ate away at all things here:
- The armored guards around the corpse on the throne were Eclipse Guards, normally only assigned to guard the First Emperor himself, or members of his family. Whoever was here was very important. The materials need to make the Eclipse Guards were so rare, that there were probably only a hundred of them ever made, and eight of them were here. Of them however, she could tell that all but two were inert. The blast again? The were know as wizard killers, so no wonder the necromancer was being so careful.
- She also saw that the necromancer was pouring out mystical energy to control the undead around him and to maintain his own illusion of life. He was using the only still functional onyxium obelisk to amplify his power.
Loddi noticed that in this place he could see almost nothing with the suit. It was all a void to him despite the ambient light.
Without any better plan, Skanya tried to sneak up to the necromancer in the hopes of shoving him over the line. Though she was silent, when she got within ten feet he sat up and spoke “The thing about being a necromancer is that I can smell the life force of people. ” I guess the tinctures weren’t enough in this case!
He turned as if ready to do battle but Skanya asked him a question that made him pause “What is it that you want to do here?”
He was please to have someone to converse with, even if he planned to turn us into corpses momentarily. He told Rulgara not to advance any further and gestured to the man on the throne “I want this corpse. He tried to do something and it destroyed everything, but I’m more clever than he was.”
The necromancer appraised us all. “I’m surprised you got this far. I don’t suppose I could hire you. I have coin. A lot of coin. All I need is for you to retrieve that corpse for me.”
Skanya shook her said. Rulgara held her blade. Zhara’s seven-circuit claw twitched. Loddi remained hidden in the shadows. The Necromancer understood the shift in our demeanor and held up his hand “Have you ever fought a necromancer before?”
Skanya started to charge, he started chanting a curse for her skeleton to tear itself free of her flesh tomb, but Loddi was faster than either of us!
He shot an arrow into the Razakar’s chest and sent him staggering back, over the line. Almost immediately one the void guardians impaled him with a massive metal spear, the same kind the Brazhiah used! The necromancer fell and the guard withdrew the spear only to run it through him again, pinning him to the ice below.
Any celebration we might have made however was cut short. The necromancer opened his mouth and the glowing light of a hundred souls poured out and into the void guardian who clawed at her face as though she still had feelings, as though she still had eyes. She would have screamed if she had the lungs and the vocal cords to do so. She shook for a moment, wracked in pain, and then burst forth eight long ghostly arms from her center, and transformed into a spectral spider knight!
Oh boy!
For next time
Thanks Loddi for saving Skayna’s life!
Use Finn’s Firestarter to burn the necromancer.
Does the spider knight still have a reservoir of blood under it’s armor? If so, let’s burst that thing open.
One thing the camera caught that our character didn’t notice. A giant eye beneath the surface of the ice they were standing on. A scaled wolf’s eye!
Confirm how many coins we got from Brazhiah’s quarters.
