Attendees:
Experience
Our next challenge: To travel to the gate at one edge of the world, then travel to the opposite gate. The first is the gate through which people entered this reality, and thus it is venerable and surrounded by chaos. The second gate is the one we will use to vacate this dying section of the labyrinth. It's more sturdy, but it has its own problems, as you'll see.
To complete the task we are given a compass that can be attuned by touching it to the gates, then it will find it no matter what. It has touched both gates so for a mere mote of essence we can head for one of them.
We hunt and adopt some long distance flying forms. Kren keeps his Albatross, Viox grabs a...bird of some kind, I forget what. And Davion becomes the wily and dangerous Flamingo, guardian of lawns.
The group decide to take a side trip to Caithness, where all this started. On the way there, we stop in a small village and discover that there's something amiss. The place is very sparse, everyone a bit tense. Some investigation, which includes some observation, some sneaking, talking to the city priest, and speaking with underworld contacts reveals that there is a dragon who has come to town and has eliminated anyone who might be a problem and installed a bard as his go-between. After some investigation we find out where the dragon is and it is suggested that as the town is slowly running out of supplies that maybe they should feed the dragon one last big meal. During said meal, we will be infiltrating his cave. Turns out the dragon has about 60K in goods in a heap on the floor, upon which he sleeps. The well-fed dragon comes back and the team, smeared with dragon poo (YES, that's the second consecutive game where we solved a problem through application of poo) to mask our scent, we descend upon him. (Davion literally descends, from above) The team plant a few good solid blows and it folds like an origami dragon.
The town wants us to stay with them, since they are leaderless. We spy a few likely candidates for replacement and convince them to step up to the task. Davion draws up a plan for distribution of the wealth back to the citizens, to get them back on their feet, and we continue on to the capitol. There we meet with the king, convince him the end is nigh and that he needs to build ships, and we continue on our task.
We do pretty well until Orcland, when we are shot at by artillery. Davion's alertness caste power helps keep him alert, but the others take some fiery projectile damage. We continue anyway. At the shore of Orcland Viox and Kren, use their super bird strength to steal a canoe so we can row out to the gate. During an attempt to forage, a double-botch by Davion leads to an encounter with a bunch of troops. Fortunately he can outrun them. As we get closer to the gate, we go through increasingly thicker areas of chaos. We start in the border marches, then the middle marches, then the deep wyld. Fortunately we don't have to enter pure chaos.
Upon proximity to the gate, we have our first contact with "past lives". Much like the solars always had those little bits of previous lives to draw on, we get our first glimpse of prior incarnations and of a specific, horrible death. It's the vibe given off by this gate, which is basically the seal between a dead reality and our current one. We take rubbings of the runes on the gate. We're told that the information there, in conjunction with what's on the other gate, will prove useful.
It appears these strange scratches are a form of writing. But it seems it's not all here. Go figure.
We head back across the world. We make another pit stop in Caithness, and continue the rest of the way. Off the top of my head I can't remember any unusual encounters, though I'm sure Alan or Jim can remind me if there was.
We hire a ship to take us the last length to the second gate, which should have less chaos due to being at the newer, more reinforced section of reality. We find an island in our path. We have the crew weigh anchor off the coast and we go ashore and give it a cursory look, but it seems our compass is pointing beyond it, so we head that way in a smaller craft. Once there, we have more flashbacks. These are visions of the rapture of reaching the new world in one of our previous exoduseseses. It's so overwhelming that Davion almost crosses through, but for burning a willpower to remain.
We rub the gate (so to speak) and continue back with our new information, only to discover our ship is gone. It is flotsam. No bodies. Examining the shore of the isle for washed up crew only reveals enormous snake tracks and the a path cut through the forest. We think we know what the being is. His name is Layden (Leighdon?) and he is one of the oldest, most powerful beings there is. He's a dragon with 100 heads. We send in sneaky mcsneak to look around and Viox nearly doesn't make it back as he's paralyzed for a time by the mere glimpse of the beast.
And a plan was born. "Hey, how about a ship of cows as bait." We go back to the mainland, load up a ship with cows, plant it in the same place where the dragon ate the last ship, and while Kren kept an eye on the bait, Viox and Davion did the big hunt inside the cave.
Oh, did I mention why? I didn't, did I? Well, the reason we're in there is because we feel he has a scroll we're looking for. The two sets of runes from the gates are the key to a language. With this Rosetta stone we can translate the scroll, which will give us some sort of vital info.
Yup, he had it. But both Davion and Kren are frozen by their glimpse of the hideous beast until Viox nudges us back. After that we found the scroll and flew away.
Now is the part where I rack my brain to remember what was on the scroll. It's less a matter of the content being significant (it was!) than me being very tired this morning.
We meet with our mentor and he is satisfied by completion of the challenge. So with time left, we start the next one.
Next Challenge: Convince a group of people by whatever means necessary that they need to migrate through the gate and into the next reality. We meet Ooka the Boar for this one. He tells us these people are special to him, which is not a surprise since in our preparation we discover they are boar worshippers.
We go to meet them, fairly head on. A group comes out to contact us and Kren tries to convince them we're here because of the end of the world. They laugh and tell us to leave. When Kren refuses, the two do a one-on-one fight. Well, not sure it qualifies as a fight if the guy draws his hatchets and twirls them and then Kren knocks him out with a single blow.
This gets us a meeting with the tribal chieftain, who is unconvinced, but to err on the side of caution, takes us to the big chieftain over all the tribes. He listens to us and weighs what Kren has to say (who is being very forthright). When he seems to be on the fence, Viox tries to give him a push by transforming into a boar (We took the boar wildshape before hand in preparation). This still seems to keep him on the fence as the shaman accuses us of lying. He says we are not from "the guardians". We all take that as meaning Strength-of-Many, Mantis-Guy, Foxy-Lady, and Ooka-fran-and-ollie. However it seems the guardians are someone else, because our tattoos don't seem to be proof, nor does anything we carry. The king tells us that only the guardians can convince them and he enlists the shaman to lead us to them.
There, we make a brief offering at the gate (something of meaning to us... most of us fake it, since the shaman has no idea what is meaningful to us). We meet with the guardians, who are more literally boar-people. These are obviously the children of Ooka, given the task of guarding the tribe. We convince them that Ooka has sent us to warn them to pass into the next reality. At this point they head back with us. We will move the tribes together, likely after modifying their canoes for deeper ocean travel. This is where we left off.
Our first free-form experience: 5pts, though most of use used it to pay off a debt we incurred for taking "Sailing", which no one had.
We will need to pack up the tribe, transport them to and through the gate,
and somehow keep the dragon off of them. That last one will not be so easy. I am
looking forward to Cow vs. Dragon II. Hope those cows can pull off the upset.