Journey to the East, session one
May. 21st, 2020 11:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
james_davis_nicollWhat was supposed to be a pleasant birthday party for Ameiko Kaijitsu, Baroness of Sandpoint and former murder hobo is interrupted by incoming fire and grim history lessons.
Cast:
Our patron (NPC) 24-year-old retired murder hobo Ameiko Kaijitsu, Baroness of Sandpoint. Fighter/rogue
Avi, an Aasimar with a heart of gold, unburdened by any particular intellectual distractions. Monk in a monastery not too far from Ameiko's household.
Emon, a half-elf with an interesting family past. Shadow Sorcerer.
Krispen, a bright, somewhat socially deficient, cook. Artificer.
Orilo, an unmemorable Goliath. Boring fighter. Fighter.
Setting: in a world with geography much like ours, long after a great calamity transformed the world and about four centuries after the collapse of the Empire of Evil Bastards. Sandpoint is in this world's Iberian Peninsula.
Introductory Fight
The party goes south as soon as the fireworks begin. Ameiko didn't order fireworks. On closer examination, they are not so much fireworks as this world's answer to Fire Arrows, individually fired rocket propelled weapons in this case filled with tasty explosive submunitions
Ameiko prudently flips the courtyard table and uses it for cover while she assesses the situation. Orilo, believing action is more important in this case than ensuring it is the correct action, grabs his glaive and races out far enough from the others that he hopes any fireball won't include his frail, petite companions, and deflects the rocket up to explode harmlessly above the town.
We pause for a flashback--Orilo has an odd dream about being visited by an older man, a dream of no clear consequence save the new, mysterious, pair of stripes on his neck. He also gets a subtitle! orilo, fighter. [all lower case, Arial font]
Emon can see in the dark, so what are at best vague shapes for the Goliath are clear to the half-elf: there are two Goblins preparing a second barrage. The smart thing to do is to magically snuff the fuse flame but Emon's magic does not have the range. Instead he runs toward the Goblin holding the match cord. A shuriken whizzing by his ear does not distract the sorcerer from knocking the little fellow off his feet.
Emon's flashback involves being handed an egg by an ancestor. Emon gets his own mark, a flaming egg that moves around his body. His freeze frame subtitle is "Emon, humble woodworker—-really."
Krispen spots another rocket on its way--just because the party has only spotted one pair of rocketeers does not mean there is only one pair of rocketeers--and since he's the sort of person who doesn't wear armour to a birthday party, he opts to detonate the rocket at range, which he does with a firebolt produced from one of his marvelous mechanisms. BOOM.
Krispen's flashback is to the recent past, when he caught a kid picking his pocket. Confronted, the kid apologized and handed Krispen a small gear, which sank into Krispen's palm leaving gear-shaped mark on his palm. From that moment, Krispen's technical skills were enhanced with magic! Which he is still getting the hang of.
Subtitle: Krispen, Seeker of Truth!
The shuriken that sinks into Krispen's chest underlines the downside of fashionable party clothes. Luckily, one of Krispen's new knacks is healing magic.
Avi moves in front of Emeiko (who, being of much higher level, probably has more hit points than all of the PCs combined), grabs his spear and casts light on it, illuminating the scene for everyone who _can't_ see in the dark.
Flashback to a meditation in which a shining figure appears out of the sun, informs Avi that "It’s time," touchs him on the forehead with key, leaving the mark of a key on his forehead. Avi suddenly knew he had to find the Sunstone.
Subtitle: Chosen of Mitra, defender of the righteous (not tremendously bright)
Avi strides forthrightly towards the goblins. Since they are 50 feet away this may take some time.
The Goblin Emon slammed into stabs at Emon but Emon reflexively gets his Shield spell up in time to deflect it.
The Goblin's buddy grabs a rocket, and looks for target. As the match cord smolders, the Goblin hesitates, unable to decide which tempting target needs a rocket to the face.
Orilo pads up behind Emon, surprisingly quietly for an eight foot tall, four hundred pound Goliath in chain mail (I rolled well on both dice). He scowls at the Goblin with the rocket. Rather atypically for Orilo, the Goblin is intimidated enough to flee, leaving the rocket sputtering away on the ground. Or perhaps the Goblin understood the gestures that Emon were making signified a thunderwave on its way: the fleeing Goblin escapes the blast but neither his team mate, Orilo or the box of rockets do. Cue figures being blown off their feet as rockets tumble across the street.
Orilo picks himself up, and notices the rocket sputtering away at his feet. Simple solution: he picks it up and throws it as from him as he can, in a direction that doesn't seem to have much that would be damaged by the coming explosion.
(At some point Emon snuffed out a rocket fuse, which as we will see was a better way of dealing with them than Orilo's method)
Avi confronts a shuriken-wielding Goblin, brandishes his spear, and shouts imprecations to intimidate the Goblin, and prudently dodges out of the way of a shuriken. His lunge with a spear misses but the monk boot-to-the-face does not.
A much larger goblin wearing an ornate helmet too big for him looms out of the darkness towards Orilo. Clearly experienced, the Goblin pauses to let Orilo come to him. Orilo rather boringly stops well out of reach of the Goblin and thwaps him on the side of the head with his glaive. Since he has yet to unsheath the blade end of the glaive, it does suprisingly little damage to the big Goblin. Rather than collapsing in a heap, the Goblin inconsiderately closes and sticks the pointy end of his sword through Orilo's thigh. This brave gambit earns the big Goblin a heaping, lethal, spoonful of necromantic magic from the shadow sorcerer.
Orilo glumly contemplates the wound in his leg but before he can bind it, the rocket he threw away ignites, races all the way back up the street and detonates at Orilo's feet. This time the tumbling figure does not get back up (at least, not until Krispen uses the last of his healing magic on him).
Elsewhere, firebolts and spear thrusts obliterate the hapless goblins. The surviving goblins flee, only to be rounded up as the city guard belatedly react to the fuss.
M tells us to check out the rest of the town. Heads off to do that. Two people come out. A caravan driver she knows, steffano, approaches us. Rogue. A tiefling co owner, mage or cleric, Chant. Runs off to check on their caravan. Guards include Grigor.
The Aftermath
Ameiko chews the sheriff out for letting Goblins infiltrate Sandpoint in force. Her tirade ends when she learns the munitions recovered from the Goblins have markings on them which Krispen translates as Kaijitsu Fire Forge, and Kaijitsu Ironworks, Brinewall. Brinewall is a city that used to be some distance to the north before all of its inhabitants died mysteriously and horribly during a storm thirty years ago.
As far as Ameiko knows, she and her father were the only Kaijitsus in this part of the world. As far as she knows, their homeland is far out across the Western Ocean. Her father, who showed up iin Sandpoint almost thirty years ago, never mentioned a Brinewall connection. Perhaps he was not entirely forthright. To add another element of mystery, the symbols on the rockets come from a known writing system, one used far to the East.
The Goblins come from Licktoad Clan, who are camped out in a swamp near Sandpoint. Where the rockets came from is unclear. The Licktoad Clan leader thought using them to attack Sandpoint was illadvised, if only because it would alert Sandpoint to the Licktoad Clan's presence. Unfortunately for the clan, the big Goblin had his eye on the top spot in the clan and thought attacking Sandpoint with commandeered rockets would give him an easy win.
The sheriff offers a simple, straight-forward solution: track down the Licktoad Clan and annihilate them. To this end, he offers a bounty on Goblin ears. Avi, filled with the fire of righteousness, is prepared to head out immediately on this task. Orilo, who finds the body part bounty extremely offensive, points out that all the raiders are dead or captured. The Goblins out in the swamp are the ones who thought attacking Sandpoint was a bad idea. Murdering the whole clan for being guilt-adjacent is unfair and also creates a perverse incentive, since it makes it clear there's nothing to be gained from not attacking nearby towns. Perhaps it would be better, the Goliath mumbles quietly, to encourage the Goblins to move somewhere else.
The sheriff is of the opinion that at best the Licktoads are innocent of this particular crime. In any case, at best the Goblins are a ticking time bomb because crimes have been committed against Goblins of a nature that nobody can trust Goblins or Orcs ever again.
Insert the lesson in commonly known history:
400 years ago, Not Western Europe was dominated by the Cheliac Empire. The Whisperman, the litch who ran the Cheliac Empire, had very firm ideas about the utility of the various races. The ones he had a use for, the Essentials, were allowed to remain within the Empire, where they were brutally exploited. Such Aasimar who could not flee were executed. The Non-Essentials (Goblins, Orcs and such) were crowded into reservations along the border of the Illithid's empire, to serve as expendable buffer states.
Several centuries of spectacular misery followed for the unfortunate Orcs and Goblins. One day, however, the Gith rose up against the Illithids. Once the Illithids were dead or fled, the two branches of the Gith turned on each other. Neither side cared to attack the buffer states, leaving the Orcs and Goblins free to turn on the Empire. This in turn gave everyone with a grudge against the undead who ran the Empire a chance to exterminate the undead, and shatter the empire.
The Orcs and Goblins dominate the central part of the West. Although it has been four centuries since they freed themselves, they have not forgotten how they were treated by the Humans, Elves, and other allied races. To the Humans, Elves, and allied races, this means killing Orcs and Goblins on sight, before they try to get even for Humans and Elves killing Orcs and Goblins on sight.
Now, Avi is an Aasimar, and as such part of a group that was treated even worse than the Orcs and Goblins. Unfortunately, all this was long before Avi was born and he's inclined to see the Orcs and Goblins as an affront to goodness. Also, Avi looks Human so it is unlikely Goblins would trust him more than they do any Human, which is to say not at all.
Orilo is a Goliath, a group that managed to stay independent of the Empire. Regrettably, they managed this with a combination of developing enough military prowess to make conquering them difficult and hiring themselves out to the Empire as mercenaries so that the Empire had a reason to see the Goliaths as useful. The long-suffering living Imperials were forced to serve the Undead. The Goliaths chose to serve the Empire out of expedience. Consequently, the Licktoads are very unlikely to trust a Goliath.
Interesting tidbit that Krispen is aware of: the Whisperman's living name was Alesandro San Michi. By a huge coincidence, Emon's surname is also San Michi.
Something has to be done. The PCs (including Grigor, a barbarian whose player was not available this week) set out to track down the Licktoads. Presumably each person has a different idea about how best to manage the situation. Orilo is going to do his best (Cha 8, cursed to roll all social skills with disadvantage) to convince the Goblins to leave the area, if only because Orilo has found that on the whole he bleeds less when people are not trying to stab him.
The Teaser
An hour into the swamp, the party finds a camp. In it, a flock of crows picking at the corpse of a Tabaxi (cat person). It's clear the camp had two people in it. The fate of the other person is unclear but the blood trail that leads out of the camp is suggestive.
The Tabaxi has a huge chunk bitten out of him. Krispen, who is the party genius, and well versed in many fields of knowledge, has no idea what killed the unfortunate. Perhaps more ominously, the cat person wore a pocketed bandolier. The pockets contain a white substance that to former Urban Bounty Hunter Orilo's trained eye looks a lot like narcotics. The creature, whatever it was, appears to have consumed at least one, perhaps more than one, drug filled pocket.
This means that somewhere in the swamp is a beast about which nothing is none except it is large enough to kill an adult Tabaxi with a single bite, and it could be off its head on drugs.
Cast:
Our patron (NPC) 24-year-old retired murder hobo Ameiko Kaijitsu, Baroness of Sandpoint. Fighter/rogue
Avi, an Aasimar with a heart of gold, unburdened by any particular intellectual distractions. Monk in a monastery not too far from Ameiko's household.
Emon, a half-elf with an interesting family past. Shadow Sorcerer.
Krispen, a bright, somewhat socially deficient, cook. Artificer.
Orilo, an unmemorable Goliath. Boring fighter. Fighter.
Setting: in a world with geography much like ours, long after a great calamity transformed the world and about four centuries after the collapse of the Empire of Evil Bastards. Sandpoint is in this world's Iberian Peninsula.
Introductory Fight
The party goes south as soon as the fireworks begin. Ameiko didn't order fireworks. On closer examination, they are not so much fireworks as this world's answer to Fire Arrows, individually fired rocket propelled weapons in this case filled with tasty explosive submunitions
Ameiko prudently flips the courtyard table and uses it for cover while she assesses the situation. Orilo, believing action is more important in this case than ensuring it is the correct action, grabs his glaive and races out far enough from the others that he hopes any fireball won't include his frail, petite companions, and deflects the rocket up to explode harmlessly above the town.
We pause for a flashback--Orilo has an odd dream about being visited by an older man, a dream of no clear consequence save the new, mysterious, pair of stripes on his neck. He also gets a subtitle! orilo, fighter. [all lower case, Arial font]
Emon can see in the dark, so what are at best vague shapes for the Goliath are clear to the half-elf: there are two Goblins preparing a second barrage. The smart thing to do is to magically snuff the fuse flame but Emon's magic does not have the range. Instead he runs toward the Goblin holding the match cord. A shuriken whizzing by his ear does not distract the sorcerer from knocking the little fellow off his feet.
Emon's flashback involves being handed an egg by an ancestor. Emon gets his own mark, a flaming egg that moves around his body. His freeze frame subtitle is "Emon, humble woodworker—-really."
Krispen spots another rocket on its way--just because the party has only spotted one pair of rocketeers does not mean there is only one pair of rocketeers--and since he's the sort of person who doesn't wear armour to a birthday party, he opts to detonate the rocket at range, which he does with a firebolt produced from one of his marvelous mechanisms. BOOM.
Krispen's flashback is to the recent past, when he caught a kid picking his pocket. Confronted, the kid apologized and handed Krispen a small gear, which sank into Krispen's palm leaving gear-shaped mark on his palm. From that moment, Krispen's technical skills were enhanced with magic! Which he is still getting the hang of.
Subtitle: Krispen, Seeker of Truth!
The shuriken that sinks into Krispen's chest underlines the downside of fashionable party clothes. Luckily, one of Krispen's new knacks is healing magic.
Avi moves in front of Emeiko (who, being of much higher level, probably has more hit points than all of the PCs combined), grabs his spear and casts light on it, illuminating the scene for everyone who _can't_ see in the dark.
Flashback to a meditation in which a shining figure appears out of the sun, informs Avi that "It’s time," touchs him on the forehead with key, leaving the mark of a key on his forehead. Avi suddenly knew he had to find the Sunstone.
Subtitle: Chosen of Mitra, defender of the righteous (not tremendously bright)
Avi strides forthrightly towards the goblins. Since they are 50 feet away this may take some time.
The Goblin Emon slammed into stabs at Emon but Emon reflexively gets his Shield spell up in time to deflect it.
The Goblin's buddy grabs a rocket, and looks for target. As the match cord smolders, the Goblin hesitates, unable to decide which tempting target needs a rocket to the face.
Orilo pads up behind Emon, surprisingly quietly for an eight foot tall, four hundred pound Goliath in chain mail (I rolled well on both dice). He scowls at the Goblin with the rocket. Rather atypically for Orilo, the Goblin is intimidated enough to flee, leaving the rocket sputtering away on the ground. Or perhaps the Goblin understood the gestures that Emon were making signified a thunderwave on its way: the fleeing Goblin escapes the blast but neither his team mate, Orilo or the box of rockets do. Cue figures being blown off their feet as rockets tumble across the street.
Orilo picks himself up, and notices the rocket sputtering away at his feet. Simple solution: he picks it up and throws it as from him as he can, in a direction that doesn't seem to have much that would be damaged by the coming explosion.
(At some point Emon snuffed out a rocket fuse, which as we will see was a better way of dealing with them than Orilo's method)
Avi confronts a shuriken-wielding Goblin, brandishes his spear, and shouts imprecations to intimidate the Goblin, and prudently dodges out of the way of a shuriken. His lunge with a spear misses but the monk boot-to-the-face does not.
A much larger goblin wearing an ornate helmet too big for him looms out of the darkness towards Orilo. Clearly experienced, the Goblin pauses to let Orilo come to him. Orilo rather boringly stops well out of reach of the Goblin and thwaps him on the side of the head with his glaive. Since he has yet to unsheath the blade end of the glaive, it does suprisingly little damage to the big Goblin. Rather than collapsing in a heap, the Goblin inconsiderately closes and sticks the pointy end of his sword through Orilo's thigh. This brave gambit earns the big Goblin a heaping, lethal, spoonful of necromantic magic from the shadow sorcerer.
Orilo glumly contemplates the wound in his leg but before he can bind it, the rocket he threw away ignites, races all the way back up the street and detonates at Orilo's feet. This time the tumbling figure does not get back up (at least, not until Krispen uses the last of his healing magic on him).
Elsewhere, firebolts and spear thrusts obliterate the hapless goblins. The surviving goblins flee, only to be rounded up as the city guard belatedly react to the fuss.
M tells us to check out the rest of the town. Heads off to do that. Two people come out. A caravan driver she knows, steffano, approaches us. Rogue. A tiefling co owner, mage or cleric, Chant. Runs off to check on their caravan. Guards include Grigor.
The Aftermath
Ameiko chews the sheriff out for letting Goblins infiltrate Sandpoint in force. Her tirade ends when she learns the munitions recovered from the Goblins have markings on them which Krispen translates as Kaijitsu Fire Forge, and Kaijitsu Ironworks, Brinewall. Brinewall is a city that used to be some distance to the north before all of its inhabitants died mysteriously and horribly during a storm thirty years ago.
As far as Ameiko knows, she and her father were the only Kaijitsus in this part of the world. As far as she knows, their homeland is far out across the Western Ocean. Her father, who showed up iin Sandpoint almost thirty years ago, never mentioned a Brinewall connection. Perhaps he was not entirely forthright. To add another element of mystery, the symbols on the rockets come from a known writing system, one used far to the East.
The Goblins come from Licktoad Clan, who are camped out in a swamp near Sandpoint. Where the rockets came from is unclear. The Licktoad Clan leader thought using them to attack Sandpoint was illadvised, if only because it would alert Sandpoint to the Licktoad Clan's presence. Unfortunately for the clan, the big Goblin had his eye on the top spot in the clan and thought attacking Sandpoint with commandeered rockets would give him an easy win.
The sheriff offers a simple, straight-forward solution: track down the Licktoad Clan and annihilate them. To this end, he offers a bounty on Goblin ears. Avi, filled with the fire of righteousness, is prepared to head out immediately on this task. Orilo, who finds the body part bounty extremely offensive, points out that all the raiders are dead or captured. The Goblins out in the swamp are the ones who thought attacking Sandpoint was a bad idea. Murdering the whole clan for being guilt-adjacent is unfair and also creates a perverse incentive, since it makes it clear there's nothing to be gained from not attacking nearby towns. Perhaps it would be better, the Goliath mumbles quietly, to encourage the Goblins to move somewhere else.
The sheriff is of the opinion that at best the Licktoads are innocent of this particular crime. In any case, at best the Goblins are a ticking time bomb because crimes have been committed against Goblins of a nature that nobody can trust Goblins or Orcs ever again.
Insert the lesson in commonly known history:
400 years ago, Not Western Europe was dominated by the Cheliac Empire. The Whisperman, the litch who ran the Cheliac Empire, had very firm ideas about the utility of the various races. The ones he had a use for, the Essentials, were allowed to remain within the Empire, where they were brutally exploited. Such Aasimar who could not flee were executed. The Non-Essentials (Goblins, Orcs and such) were crowded into reservations along the border of the Illithid's empire, to serve as expendable buffer states.
Several centuries of spectacular misery followed for the unfortunate Orcs and Goblins. One day, however, the Gith rose up against the Illithids. Once the Illithids were dead or fled, the two branches of the Gith turned on each other. Neither side cared to attack the buffer states, leaving the Orcs and Goblins free to turn on the Empire. This in turn gave everyone with a grudge against the undead who ran the Empire a chance to exterminate the undead, and shatter the empire.
The Orcs and Goblins dominate the central part of the West. Although it has been four centuries since they freed themselves, they have not forgotten how they were treated by the Humans, Elves, and other allied races. To the Humans, Elves, and allied races, this means killing Orcs and Goblins on sight, before they try to get even for Humans and Elves killing Orcs and Goblins on sight.
Now, Avi is an Aasimar, and as such part of a group that was treated even worse than the Orcs and Goblins. Unfortunately, all this was long before Avi was born and he's inclined to see the Orcs and Goblins as an affront to goodness. Also, Avi looks Human so it is unlikely Goblins would trust him more than they do any Human, which is to say not at all.
Orilo is a Goliath, a group that managed to stay independent of the Empire. Regrettably, they managed this with a combination of developing enough military prowess to make conquering them difficult and hiring themselves out to the Empire as mercenaries so that the Empire had a reason to see the Goliaths as useful. The long-suffering living Imperials were forced to serve the Undead. The Goliaths chose to serve the Empire out of expedience. Consequently, the Licktoads are very unlikely to trust a Goliath.
Interesting tidbit that Krispen is aware of: the Whisperman's living name was Alesandro San Michi. By a huge coincidence, Emon's surname is also San Michi.
Something has to be done. The PCs (including Grigor, a barbarian whose player was not available this week) set out to track down the Licktoads. Presumably each person has a different idea about how best to manage the situation. Orilo is going to do his best (Cha 8, cursed to roll all social skills with disadvantage) to convince the Goblins to leave the area, if only because Orilo has found that on the whole he bleeds less when people are not trying to stab him.
The Teaser
An hour into the swamp, the party finds a camp. In it, a flock of crows picking at the corpse of a Tabaxi (cat person). It's clear the camp had two people in it. The fate of the other person is unclear but the blood trail that leads out of the camp is suggestive.
The Tabaxi has a huge chunk bitten out of him. Krispen, who is the party genius, and well versed in many fields of knowledge, has no idea what killed the unfortunate. Perhaps more ominously, the cat person wore a pocketed bandolier. The pockets contain a white substance that to former Urban Bounty Hunter Orilo's trained eye looks a lot like narcotics. The creature, whatever it was, appears to have consumed at least one, perhaps more than one, drug filled pocket.
This means that somewhere in the swamp is a beast about which nothing is none except it is large enough to kill an adult Tabaxi with a single bite, and it could be off its head on drugs.
