Attendees:
ENEMIES: Sleestak, Tyrannosaurs, Magma Lizards, and Goofy patrin (Mark)
Entering this world, we begin by immediately riding down a falls that has been modified by the previous patrin so as not to be a deadfall. However, it was close enough. Piloting rolls are required. As it was Wits + Sail at -4D; That means take command and burn a will to save your ship, or live with the captain's roll. Those of us who couldn't muster a die roll had to live with the captains roll, as did those who were "not present".
We get to shore and set up a camp. Over the course of days we fish what we can of our sunken gear from the sea, and try to gather food from the usual land sources. We build an alarm (of ropes and vines) to alert us of approaching things, and then build a palisade inside that.
Our first contact with the local wildlife is when a small pack of four Magma Lizards decide to descend upon a group of our folks. As they become agitated, they create rifts in the ground beneath and behind them with magma in them. We rush from the water and engage. We discover that Lyta (given essence and such from Defender) actually is a pretty good fighter. She manages to stick one with a trident to good effect while Truthspinner dangles one with his new artifact chain, from a tree. Defender and Lyta then trade-off on smacking down the last two.
Recon reveals that this dimension only seems to be 9 days across. But there's no obvious gate. And there are no border marches, deep wyld etc. Nope, just PURE CHAOS at the edges. Something's up.
The second contact with locals involves the Sleestak, who perform guerilla raids on the camp. Turns out their spears are pretty effective, if primitive. They're made of crystals, which causes them to be as effective as our iron and steel weapons. But their fancy crystal spears mean nothing, as Lyta and Truthspinner dispatch of the majority, and a few flee.
We make friends with a few other locals. These are monkey-men named Taa, Chaa, and Chaka. Yup. We make friends and we manage to learn what local fruit is edible by watching them forage. One day they come by and try and encourage us to follow them, so Marhsall, Will, and Holly... er, um... Defender, Truthspinner, and Lyta... go out and follow. So the monkey folk lead... and lead... and lead... Apparently there's something 9 days away that they want to show us...
There is a Pylon, and it seems that what it does is not only keep the chaos at bay, but it acts as a bridge from one pocket of non-chaos to the next. It's a complicated device and requires rearranging crystals in a different pattern for each jump. A blown attempt could send us to the wrong bubble (at the least), cause odd phenomenon such as storms, or cause the chaos to flow in further to the pocket. Requires some Lore rolls to decipher. And once figured out, it's good for one use, then the combination changes.
As we camp, Lyta and Truthspinner sleep. Suddenly Laughs-at-Death, a Hyena patrin appears and begins to smack the turtle. Defender is nailed by a cheap shot and taken out of the fight. Best Truthspinner can do is snag him in a chain once and drag him into the fire. Lyta chooses to disarm him, rather than smack him, and so he instead switches from blunt to lethal damage and carves up the remaining two.
But he was only playing. When we recover, we are bruised (and cut up). He's been around here for quite a while. He tells us about all this stuff with the pockets of relative safety. We ask permission to be in his territory.
Then we lead our rag-tag fugitive fleet across sleestak infected space, searching for an exit!
At one gate we send Invisible-Recon-Guy, Stings, through. He finds that there are a couple tyrannosaurs wandering about. We decide we should clean house on these things, wheel up the magical arbalest (which had been salvaged from the ship), and prepare to fire it. The big lizard decides to poke his nose through the gate. At which point Truthspinner fires the arbalest through the gate. After some discussion, we wheel through, and do battle with what is actually 3 lizards. Seems a botch by Stings caused another one of these guys to spawn. So we kick some butt on them, but it turns out that while they seem full-grown, they are just the pups. Here comes GRUMPY, their parent.
We start off well, but after it starts to maim us and we can barely hurt the thing, we retreat, Lyta and Defender pushing the Carbalest back through the gate. Stings runs far, far away, luring the angry dino away from us. Truthspinner brings the 25 carts and 250 people through. We move toward the mountains and find some caves. During the migration, Defender flies off to find Stings, and they loop back to the gate. Naturally the gate is closed, so they have to do some searching. They eventually find the area we headed to and rendezvous.
After much reptition (actually, much GM hand-waving) we make our way to a zone of EDEN. There's a zone perfectly clear of monsters. Naturally we start searching for the patrin that owns it, because that's the only way this would happen. When we find him, he's a congenial fellow, the Silver Cobra. He tells us about how he constructed the pockets by making the pylons (artifacts).
One of the last zones is a cavernous area that is held by some nasty gold sleestak. They proceed to fire on us with crystal arrows, doing notable damage. After they're slain, we cross over and ultimately exit the world.
There is some narrative for the next few worlds.