We begin on the island of misfit dead. The irony here is that we came to this island because of a note from Wittlesee which noted that there was a relic of some kind here. On this island is the ancient necropolis of the Sand King, Ten-Ap. Some recon is done by Mavin, via fly-over (with many protective and elusive buffs), and by Copan’s spirit sight, which keeps us from wandering into many very heavily populated rooms once we get to our reported destination. Meanwhile, Mavin finds us a blind to hide in and we sit in relative safety.
Aerial photos and satellite recon reveal the shape of the place, and we go in swinging. First building is pretty quiet; just a zombie caught in an endless loop of wandering back and forth. We don’t disturb him. (In hindsight, IF we had a means of speaking with the dead he might have been a good candidate).
In another chamber we find two large snakes that are put down pretty quickly by Rayson and Mavin. An interesting feature of this room is a relief on the wall of Apep (king of serpents), Set (god of evil and the night), and the crocodile god (whose name I forget). It is magical in nature, and it turns out that sacrificing an existing feat in favor of “Touchstone” feat allows one to use such locations, wherever they may be, to perform special magical abilities. Mathius does this and can now perform Monster Summoning VI of a Huge fiendish constrictor snake, up to 6 times (before having to revisit the thing and recharge with energy).
Another building has 4 rooms, each with undead in it. A wall of thorns seals up three of the rooms while we eliminate the inhabitants of each room. First room is taken down by fireball from Pon Pon. Second room, likewise. After that, fraidy-cat syndrome kicks in. The undead cause a number of PC’s to run away in fear, leaving the mop-up to more intimate means. This gives the party the opportunity to discover that Mathius may not be in his right mind; he summons a creature (first one he’s ever summoned in game) and a celestial badger appears, but it’s just wrong… it’s deformed and tentacled, an alien version of the familiar badger, but it does its job. One should now realize that should Mathius summon the Huge Fiendish Constirctor mentioned above, it would be some otherworldly “from beyond” version.
There’s another big room full of dead. However, Rayson realizes that there’s
yet another power on his magical item. It jams it into the ground and it is used
to detect all kinds of things, including the hords of undead inside this
building. So we send in the invisible-to-undead Zuka, who uses haste and various
protections, to look around then comes out. He of the holy power word emerges
unscathed, but during all this Mathius begins to get “the creeps”. That is, his
foresight ability, up the whole time, is now giving him all kinds of signs of
pending danger. The group pulls back to the forest as large groups of dead
become active.
During the night, a mummy comes out with a small contingent and waits. It seems
they want to parlay. Zuka goes and talks to them and discovers that their master
very much wants to leave this place and wants to reward us for doing so. Since
we don’t want to do that, he offers us a gift to simply leave the island. This
we accept, as Zuka’s communing with Anubis reveals that the item is one of the
more useful things we might gain. Zuka makes a point of mentioning to the mummy
that he’ll be back.
Votes ranged from “Take the item and get to heck out” to “Kill everything” to
“Take the item and kill everything.” We end up leaving.
The relic given us is a staff with an orb on the end, in which is some kind of
dust. The item has a bunch of desert related spells stored therein. No one is
sure that this is useful at all. I suspect that it might have more powers than
we know; much the way that our other items have special abilities that reveal
themselves when needed.
At sea we briefly play with the possibility of hauling up the ballista off of the ship that sank previously. We abandon this when it’s found to be damaged enough not to bother. Marcen is considering Dread Pirate as a profession. While this is contemplated, Copan goes off on his typical spirit quest, with many SpiritQuestions for his ancestors.
In a bit of retconning, it turns out that Copan’s “whore from the ether” of last game didn’t happen. Seems there was no girl. Invisible girlfriend? Well, in any event this trip to the netherworld seems to be about giving our ship the ability to drive on land? Just leaves me with lots of spiritquestionmarks?
We audition a crew. Mostly by saying “Hi Sailor, come here often?” and then looking for signs of lying. We retain the captain, whose last name has been changed to Oblongata, due to his captainy brilliance no doubt.
NEXT GAME: In two weeks, on 12/19. Jim will be unable to attend, so I will be pinch-summoning, chock-full of tentacled goodness. Have you hugged your shuggoth today?