| GAME 1: 01/18/2025 - Lavinia's Ship | GAME 5: | |
| GAME 2: 02/01/2025 - Bunker of the Dead | GAME 6: | |
| GAME 3: 02/14/2025 - Taxidermy Shop + | GAME 7: | |
| GAME 4: | GAME 8: |
Pastor Galen Prasten (Jeff) Clarence Jepsen (Alan) Dr. Carl Martin (Jim) Everett Barton (Joe) Thomas Forsyth (Paul) Gray Summerland and his Leopard (Darren)
As part of the Aeon society, we gather in order to do our best t find ways to make the world a better place through application of our newly found extraordinary abilities. Toward that end we are asked to go to the home of the Aeon Society's founder's former fiance, Lavinia, and assist her with a problem she is having.
But before we get there, we have to remember how this whole thing works. So Mark has us run a couple test fights. First one is a "white room" combat against a bunch of dire rats, two to a hero. They start off immediately hurting a couple of us, but once we get going we're pretty good. Optimized Gray Summerland and his companion leopard shred many rats while jet pack pilot Doc Martin flies over the fray and first into it and Thomas Forsyth seems to be epicenter for many of hte rats, including when at one point his surrounded on all sides. It's fun an informative even if it doesn't go anywhere into the continuity of the game.
The second test was basically last-man-standing between us. But now that we've seen what we can do that creates some favorite targets. Obviously the leopard is the big one, and the guy who can fly out of reach is another. The priest can't quite reach the leopard to move and attack and so he settles on targeting the nearest guy, the hapless Clarence Jepsen who goes down quickly since he's a field scientist not a combatant. Gray's order to take out the priest makes short work of Pastor Prasten, but when Gray goes down, the leopard resorts to guarding him rather than just mowing through everyone, saving a few of them for certain (for now). Doc Martin is the first to employ dramatic editing to create a cloud of smoke around himself caused by his gear and obscuring sight of him in the air. This works for a while but eventually after a back and forth about who should be taking out who between Thomas, Everett and Doc Martin, Doc drops dynamite and misses but it disperses the cloud (more editing) making the Doc a target, who gets shot and hovers in the air (for now). Thomas gets in the last shot and wins.
Back to the game proper. Lavinia's problem is that she has a boat that had been seized due to debts her family incurred. The man of the house died recently. She took what she could muster and pays for the release of the boat but the unscrupulous bastard who seized it, Solar Vark, refuses to release it and pretends he was never paid. What's more we have a sense something illegal is going on there. Rather than wait and do some proper recon, the next day we basically waltz up to it, Everett tries to compel them to leave the ship using his mental powers, and a fight breaks out. Favorite moment of the night almost universally was Clarence trying to jump across a 5' gap and rolling a 1 and falling into ocean.
Much of the same stuff that happened in the rat right happens here (minus the Leopard) with lots of gunplay, a flying man, and ultimately a momentary stalemate as we try to force them to surrender the ship, but that doesn't last long and battle recommences. We are victorious and go below deck to see what the illegal activity is and find that the lower deck is full of animals! What's more, three men are setting the place on fire to burn evidence. Biggest mistake is setting the cage on fire containing... a chupacabra! Yes, a mexican goat sucker becomes irritated and mauls one of them and then comes at us! It gets gunned down but not before it mauls clarence, but he is kept from bleeding to death (though at our own pace...I mean, it's just Clarence).
So we either take the money recovered and keep it, take the money and return it to Lavinia and have her pay off her debt again, or some other option I forget. In the end the debt is paid and Solar Vark goes to jail for his crimes.
Thomas sets his sights on Lavinia but only for the purposes of using her as a mistress, since he's married. Most of us are holed up at rich-boy Everett's estate, except Clarence who is afeared of the leopard.
What's left was mostly roleplay setting up next game. Recovered in all this was Lavinia's ring which is used to unlock her family vault. Said vault of treasure it seems is in an Indian Jones-esque area laden with traps. We might have another PC with us (via Joe) who can handle traps because that's something none of us know how to do and it's most of next game.
Clarence Jepsen (Alan), Everett Barton (Joe), Thomas Forsyth (Paul), Gray Summerland and his Leopard (Darren), and Bianca Cattaneo (Created by Alan, played by Paul)
So last game we had all the oceanfront murder. We had to talk to the authorities, and since we didn't lie about anything we seemed to get past that, with the typical "We'll be keeping an eye on you" privisions. Next task is to go to Lavinia's vault and retrieve the treasure. It's popular for families to boobytrap their vaults to keep the family jewels (giggity!) safe, and since Lavinia's parents owned the vault they knew that traps and she does not. So we equip-up, and pick up another Aeon Society member, Bianca, a rogue-type to help us with traps.
We go to the facility, check in with the caretaker/banker, Lavinia proves providence with her signet ring and papers proving who she is. We go in and inspect every inch of the place looking for traps. It's a nice green marble vault with a snake motif, and an actual snake. This one is mechanical and Bianca failes her search and it comes to life and tries to bite her. We fight it for a bit and while Gray is slowly making some ground on it, Everett tries to use the signet ring to get the snake to stand down, which doesn't work, but when Lavinia does the same thing the snake backs off. The treasure in here has been looted! Checking withe the man in charge, it seems Lavinia's brother, Vanthus, has been here recently and helped himself. She's the heir so he shouldn't have been allowed, but nope, for some reason they did. Everette's mind reading tells us the guy is not lying or crooked, he just blew it is all.
So she takes what she has, forces a small reward on us, and we start looking for her brother. There's a thought that maybe he's being forced into something or he's stolen the money for... who knows... but she's concerned so we go looking. At first Gray strikes out when looking for a forger who might have made documents for him. Meanwhile Everett is checking out a lead with the "Seekers", an adventuring group who are less altruistic than ours, because there were signs at the vault that the parents were possibly involved with them (An 8-pointed start motiff that is on a Seekers meeting hall in town). He finds that they were indeed members and that they'd welcome Lavinia and possibly her brother, but don't know where he is. About then when Gray joins the more direct search for Vanthus, he is approached by Shefton, a local who knows where he is and will take us there the next night. We gather the troops and meet the next night and go to an island. Now mind-reader Everett can tell he's just eager to get in good with Vanthus, but it still feels trappish. Still, when we find the spot and he's willing to go in first, we follow and it turns out Vanthus was screwing him over too. He closes the opening of the bunker/tomb/hideout and leaves us 30' down there, with a parting comment about us messing with his sister.
What happens next is your classic dungeon crawl with zombies. We have to wade into water a few times since the place is flooded in spots, and the dead appear to be the pirates who used this place as a hideout. Oh yeh, Vanthus had also yelled something about meeting Pinkus's ghost. Yup, Pinkus the Pirate. We fight zombies in groups of (I believe) 1 to 4, and at one point have to deal with ravenous dog-sized crabs. Oh, and Shefton fell off the wall when trying to climb up to maybe open the vault, so Clarence is stuck hauling him around.
Oh yeh: Clarence did some inventing and made some of us (those he could afford to) some Silk-Steel garments (+4 AC, +2 DR). And after the vault we leveled to 2nd level so may of us have new feats, and all of us have more HP.
There's a spot where we have eliminated everywhere else in the dugeon, and find the water is too deep as we have only 1 swimmer int he group. But there seems to be a tide, so we wait and tide does go out and give us more area to investigate. It also gives us an area we have to swim across and when our swimmer is on that side he is assailed by a zombie and comes back to us so we can gank it. The final room holds the final boss: A deadite with an inverted cross around his neck and glowing eyes. He enjoys the luxury of ALL the DR! So nothing is hurting him. Eventually Gray gets in there with the silver knife and does some damage, and the tag team of Thomas and Clarence attempt to steal the cross in case it's aiding him, and Thomas succeeds. The final boss was standing over a bloated corpse of Pinkus the Pirate, who left us a note espousing his hatred of that thieving Vanthus and how if whoever finds it has any kind of spine they'll seek him out and get revenge for the pirates who were betrayed by him. Betrayed pirates are less a rallying point for us than him just being an ass to us and Lavinia. So we will continue the hunt for the thieving brother.
Clarence (Alan), Thomas (Paul), Everette (Joe), Carl (Jim), Gray (Darren)
Classic dungeon delving for a second game session.
We begin on the mean streets looking for information about the treacherous Vanthus. During out digging we get a warning message sneaked into the pocket of one of us, telling us to leave things alone. So naturally we don't. We return from last game in a state of exhaustion. We could just go to bed and recover but no, because Gray and Everette are out picking up food for Gray's Leopard, they decide to cruise into the neighborhood of the Taxidermy shop that we understand may have Vanthus hiding below it. This, naturally, is a mistake.
A kid pickpockets Gray and as they pursue at half speed (due to exhaustion) they are attacked by two guys on the roof of nearby buildings. One throws some alchemical gunk that hardens on Everette sticking him to the ground, but his retort is to compel one of the guys who shoot the other! The leopard gnaws Everette's leg gunk off letting him take cover and the rest is just gunshots, and a finale where Everette makes the guy jump off the roof. They have the tattoo of the Lotus, the very guys who protecting Vanthus.
Next day, we decide on the direct approach. In retrospect it might have made sense to figure out if there was a way in from below (which we now know there was) but this worked fine. The guy tending the shop analyzes Everette and Everette analyzes him looking and recognizing that each is inspired, a fight breaks out. First the guy goes invisible, then Carl stunts up a dust cloud to help demark where he is, then the shop guy animates the stuffed animals. The leopard picks the animals apart, the guy eventually gets taken out with considerable effort, and in come the next group of thugs, who frankly are a lot less trouble, which is good because when we search and discover a passage downward we will be going directly into a dungeon.
Too many encounters to detail. Here's the bulletpoints:
In the rock-paper-scissors world of D&D, large leopard beats small dinosaur, it turns out. Because of the hallway configuration it's hard to get at each other. Everette fixes this by making a hole in the wall. She then tries the same jedi mind trick on him that he used on the thugs the night before. She tells him to kill the leopard efficiently as possible. His most efficient method of doing that is to use his psychic mojo to compel Gray to do the dirty work, however, Gray saves, fires back through the hole and injures Rowan(?) and she uses a potion to turn into gaseous cloud and flees, to the dismay of her dinosaur. Seems he was intelligent and was protecting her by agreement. He goes down immediately to the leopard (who gets a shiny new AC buff from the dino's collar).
There are love letters between Rowan and Vanthus all about murdering his parents, hating his sister for taking his fortune, and trying to murder us, which he thinks he did.
From all this we gained a map with some indicators of who the factions are in this town and how they are aligned. Oh, and these guys carried heal potions. We scooped up a little more loot. We leveled to level 3 (3,050 xp total to date) and reset our monetary levels.