Attendees:
"If
you can teach a bear to ride a unicycle, you can teach a monkey to use a
flaming sword."
-Gaedin
We begin in the woods not far from the site of where we fled the vampire after he had slain our NPC. We journey, rest, gather our strength and spells, etc. We're going to have to clean house on the other vampires in the area, even if we don't seem to be able to handle the big one.
So we do a house-to-house in a village and manage to find more bloodsuckers, all of which are easily dispatched in their torpor.
That night, as we sleep, some of us are visited by dreams. All make their saves and merely lose HP due to the horrific visions, but Roseblood, who misses her save and is "shaken" for an entire day (or until Vernal can cast remove fear).
As we get closer to home, we decide to do a little character swappage. Ashen and his beholder are traded in for Leif. Krayden is changed in for the now very nerve-wracked Roseblood.
We return to Oblivion, the hidden town that had boasted pixies, a troll farmer, and some Lilans (serpent women) who co-existed peacefully. We find however that all is not well. It seems that the vampire has sent his minions out to turn or destroy those who live here.
Our first straight up fight wound up being a doozie.
We encounter three vampiric types, one of which is the big boss. Krayden hurts the nightly one a bit but Khouzam utterly destroys him with one of his sculpted flaming wonders of a spell, and the big guy is barely singed, and his remaining sidekick is slightly more burnt.
The battle continues on, with the player surrounding and making various hand-to-hand and spell attacks. Eventually, the sidekick goes vaporous, and is trapped by vernal in a spherical "wall of stone". The big vamp seems a tad worried. He decides to go invisible in the midst of us, avoiding all attacks of opportunity, and flee. As he does, the beholder deactivates his magic making him visible for a bit. Ultimately, the only one who can fully see him is Morningstar, who winds up disrupting his invisibility.
Now if he wasn't bad enough, suddenly the vampiric lilans show up. They proceed to strangle party members; I'll mention Krayden specifically, since he was actually sent to about -9 hp on the squeeze and had to be healed back to life.
There's plenty of swinging and missing, burning by sunlight-related spells, etc., and the lilans go down one by one, but the vamp winds up going gaseous and heading away (very slowly). We trail him until he gets back to his home, which it turns out, has it's own VAMPIRIC BEHOLDER.
More spellcasting and burning with light, more missed punches to the eye(s), and we eliminate the beholder. Morningstar spots the vamp, so we all plunge in after him, krayden first. The problem is, once we're all down there, he mutters the Blasphemy spell and paralyzes the entire party(!!!!!)
At that point he's got options: Snap the neck of each person, a full round action, which when you add movement, means he'd (at best) kill everyone or (at worst, with a low duration roll on the spell) kill only a few before the rest came after him. He could take out a few and then run. In the end, he decides to flee completely. When we snap out of it, 10 rounds later, he's long gone.
Searching the area we take care of any other vamps. Vernal asks his god about where to find the vamp and he says "Look under ground", which seems exceeding weak. Some god that is!
We find the shards of a crystal (I think this is the Crystal the Lilans were using?). There are 8 pieces, but only 6 of us.
We get into a nice long philosophical discussion about destruction of treasure. "Do we have a precedent involving destroying treasure if it's evil?", "Do we have a precedent involving destroying treasure if it's by agreement of all?", "Can one of us overrule?", "Can Vernal overrule all of us, as leader?", and so on...
In the end it seems that Morningstar wants to destroy the "Evil" shard. Krayden wants to destroy the "Chaos" shard. Gaedin thinks that if you destroy either of those then you should also destroy it's antithesis. The shards, as I recall, are Evil, Good, Chaos, Law, Luck, Death, Destruction, Magic? (I'm not sure about that last one). So we do a lottery for pieces to see who gets what.
We have no idea how to find the vamp.
We have new shards with powers associated: (1 domain spell from the shard/day, even for non-casters; The "granted power" listed in the Player's Handbook under the spheres)