The Good, Bad And Ugly

aka: No Country For Old Mages
aka: Desperately Seeking Villagers
aka: Trust, Lust, and Must

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GM: Jeff Leddra
Session: Winter 813wk
Night: Wednesday
Location: Glenn's place
Level: Low

Party:

• Ahiga - Human Barbarian Rune Mage Warrior (good)
• Mîm the Pilgrim - Shapechanger Tiger cutie, Dark Mage and Thief (bad)
• Tallama - Giant Goblin female namer, Military Scientist (bad and ugly - PB5)
• Pug - diseased goblin ice mage, Military Scientist (bad and ugly - PB8)
• Elenna - E&E Mage. A shy human, not very pretty but quite practical (PB9)
• Rupert - E&E Mage
• Angus – Human, Illusionist, Troubador, and entertainment master

Employer: Elephant (a magic item maker)

Pay:

• 500 sp a week (standard guild pay)
• A week's iron rations (yum)
• A Magic Item

Guild Briefing

In one of those small stuffy guild rooms we meet Melody - young and female, looking distracted & wan, and a little bit translucent (odd). She's known as an interplanar transporter and an enemy of White Raven.

She's hiring on the request of a 'friend' , Elephant and will provide transport. It sounds like she is doing this for Elephant in return for something - something that may help her free her mother from the frigid clutches of White Raven.

Elephant wants us to investigate the spate of missing (and dead) villagers in the cold north of state known as Darwor, on the plane known as Sihode - and deal with the problem. He'll make a magic item for each of us if we succeed. Melody also has three 'resurrection' items which three of us can absorb - but it should be a good person, and she has a letter describing some constraints we need to be aware of.

Darwor has few mages, although once they were powerful and ruled there. Mages are known as lazy, greedy and ineffective or charlatans. Melody doesn't know, but it sounds like the nature of magic may have changed. Powerful Land Owners took over - with large estates.

Humans are the most common species in Dawor. Elves are rare and Orcs are scum.

A tired looking Melody has wants to leave immediately (she seems to be on a mission), but we pursuade her to lie down for a couple of hours while Ellena cast Greaters and we get some cold weather gear together.

Somehow we acquire an additional party member - the guild guard’s nephew. One Angus - who despite his stated skill as a blacksmith is a thin skinny teenager. I don’t think the guild guard likes Angus.

It begins

Duesday: Death on Ice

New Moon

Resurrection Eggs

Melony has three black eggs (DA: Highly magic, living) from Elephant for three members of the party. She doesn’t have much information, except they should be given to good members of the party - and she has a letter for those three that we will get once we get to Darwar. Ignoring the advice one goes to Ellena (good), Tallama (so-so) and the last to me (Mîm) (oh dear). As they momentarily blacken the skin of our hands and then are absorbed, my egg is heard to complain (oh dear)

We didn’t expect that

After a boat ride up-river, in the early evening a noticeably fading Melody riffles through the portals (as she does) until the way to Darwar is open. We all file through, blinking at the cold icy glacial whiteness – and Melody proceeds to eviscerate herself, her spilled blood quickly freezing where it hits the ice. Our healers can do nothing.

Our frantic attempts to revive the song are interrupted by the appearance of 20, then 30 then 50 ice shrouded figures, emerging from the cracks and crevasses that furrow the glacier. We prepare: I get some shadow wings up – but they seem to be sucked into the glacier. Pug casts ice traversal and Ellena makes us all invisible - at least that works. Rupert takes the rapidly cooling corpse, seeming to merge even more imperceptibly with his surroundings. They still approach – each armed (literally) with a long very sharp looking spear of ice.

After some quick bear-back flying (dodging ice projectiles) Pug talks with his spirit polar bear (only recently returned from spirit salmon-bingeing) who says The glacier is alive! … and promptly abandons Pug (again) to go and talk with it. The goblin is not happy - he gets the feeling that the bear won't be back soon.

Despite our stationery invisibility, all except Rupert is faced by a spear of ice, exactly targeted at our warm beating hearts. I check out the aura of mine: semi-sentient alive, with an ice projectile attack, 200 years old - controlled by an entity that is extremely close. Not good. Pug throws up an ice wall, but it too seems to be sucked onto the glacier.

Mr Big Approaches

Even bigger than Tallama, and taller than Rupert - a huge icey figure slides smoothly to face us

• Why are your spilling blood on me - on the ice? We explain
  
• Are you mages? Er, yes
  
• Are you lay lords? Ah, no
  

We find out the spirit of the glacier had an understanding with the Lay Lords (who ever they are) not to spill blood on the ice. We plead ignorance.

• Some villagers do come onto the glacier to collect ice – and I take them when I find them. Humm – so that’s where his ice warriors come from.
• Can the taken ones be returned to normal life? Yes, if they haven’t been taken for too long

We bargain – if you give us back one of the most recently taken villagers, we will try to convince the villagers to stay off the ice. He agrees.
We clean the ice and he moves us 20 miles to the edge of the ice – along with the de-iced villager, a cute teenager named Any (Best skill - Ice Sculptor). Of course, Angus thinks this absolutely marvellous (I'm sure some of his pimples burst with joy)

Rupert watches ...

... all this totally unnoticed, and moves off alone with his burden – to make a 20 mile trek across the ice. Mr Big spots dripping blood and moves him too - along with a kill-on-sight banishment (because Rupert can be sooo imperceptible)

Silent Night

Pug's magics protect us from the cold of the night, while we look at Melody's possessions and talk to Any.

• It doesn't look like Melody will be coming back soon - her eviscerating knife causes unresurrectable death (and if you possess it any attacker needs to make a Magic Resistance roll to hit). I take the knife.
• Her blood stained letter answers no questions.

There's something you must know about the device in you ... 

(the rest is washed out with Melony's blood)

• Tallama divinates me - but the egg has no apparent magical effect
• Any had a simple life before taken, but tells of a wizard's fallen flying city (Ryk) a couple of days travel to the east, where treasure hunters come away with a deadly wasting, mutating disease. Sounds like fun.

Overhead cold stars sparkle - extinguished by the coming dawn.

Moonday: Hot Villagers

Any guides us back to her village – but smoke in the distance alerts us to a large band of armed horse riders besetting a burning village. Up closer a mage is spotted – soon a target of Tallima’s nightmare illusion – but when the illusion reaches the mage it turns around and heads back to the big goblin. I go feline and go mage hunting too – but a perfect leap to take him off of his horse encounters nothing, and I have to shake off the impact of some pretty serious feeling magic. This mage is not what he seems.
Meanwhile, horsemen charge the rest of the party. Rupert goes feline and knocks some over, Ahiga hammers a few with well-placed arrows. Ellena keeps us moving fast while Pug prepares to engage.
Two strange effects are noticed: the sun seems to have dimmed a little, and we discover Angus is no simple blacksmith. He has some illusionist spells. The battle isn’t going well for us so we resort to mass fear and flashes of light. This turns the tide and Mim sees the real mage hiding in the rocks a few hundred feet to the south. She races over prepared to rip the sneaky devil to pieces but he turns into a rainbow and disappears, but not before casting some nasty spells on most of the party. Some have a burning green glob which needs to be scraped off, along with some skin. Rupert is a bit slow and the green effect seeps into his cell structure. We check him out and sunlight causes him massive pain.

In the meantime we manage to capture 10 raiders, 18 horses and save 71 villagers. Not a bad effort really. We begin to interrogate the first prisoner but he immediately dies. This was a bit premature so we pause to consider our next steps.

A band of 12 riders approach. Doakin is the leader and he greets us warmly. He explains that the “knifemen of Palin” (our prisoners) have stepped up their raiding efforts lately and his band races to any area where an partial eclipse is predicted (they have a hedge mage who can figure this out). The prisoners have some powerful magic on them. Any attempt to question them leads to their deaths. We all agree that this is unsporting !

The riders fill us in on the history of the place and we find out the ley lords used to be powerful magicians but they were betrayed from within. A huge magical battle was fought in their floating city before it crashed to the ground, killing all of them. The crash site is only 100 miles away anyone where enters comes out diseased and looking hideous (something like a goblin actually). There is a library in Akiro, the capital city of this region, which is 350 miles away. And there is a Sage in another village (alyeo) which is 150 miles away.

Mim passes her black marble from Melody to Rupert. The shape enters Rupert and comments on how much better it is in him than the evil Mim. It also says the algae bloom converts light to energy and so Rupert doesn’t have much time left.

Rupert has this odd plan to slowly to move his body into the sunlight and let his shapeshifter regeneration ability bring back pure cells instead of the infected ones. This will cause many hours of extreme pain and so most of the party agrees it is a good idea.

Pugs polar bear appears and starts talking to us in Common. He also looks a bit more solid than normal. We suspect the bear is now an agent of the sentient glacier. This reminds us to tell the villagers not to go near the glacier.

Elenna notices she is wearing Melodys snake belt. It tells us Elephant is in the palace of the dead and that the resurrection ability has a price. One of your loved ones will die to bring you back. Tallima starts to divinate the snake belt but gets bitten for her troubles and paralysed. Elenna convinces the snake to fix Talima. It seems the belt was tasked with protecting Melody but since she has already taken her own life it decided Elenna was the only female here worth saving.

At about midnight we notice a huge band of orcs approaching. We think there is about 300 and they have already surrounded the village.

Duesday:

We greet the orcs in a friendly manner since we had no other choice. The leader demands the rotting bodies from the attack and is annoyed when we tell him the riders had already burnt them. Angus (the shy young blacksmith who it turns out is a guild illusionist with a secondary mission) steps up to the leader and threatens him. Then he promptly bends down and kisses the orcs boots. This may have something to do with the massive sword being levelled at him. The orc then demands some slaves so we give him the 10 prisoners (including the dead one) and he goes back to the main group. They don’t leave though. This has us worried.

The snake belt tells us the orcs use the dead diseased bodies to extract some sort of biological weapon. We don’t really know what that is but we nod like we do.

We discuss Ruperts predicament again and the polar bear mentions his master (?!?) could help replace the cells. The master is the glacier and Pug feels a bit aggrieved. Pug suggests that he and Rupert go to the glacier and offer some service in exchange for healing Rupert. The debate is interrupted by the orc leader demanding to be shown the whole town. While we escort him around (and a small band of 20 orc bodyguards) we explain about the ley lords and how we chased one off. The mention of ley lords makes the orc go pale and he seems perturbed.

Pug then does something to offend the orc leader and receives a well deserved thrashing. Unfortunately beating Pug to a pulp only triggers a severe case of Chaos. Pug has a fungus which releases noxious vapours over the whole town. He then triggers a helmet of darkness which covers all the town and several hundred feet further out. The orcs take this as a bad sign and charge in to attack anything that moves. Mim has to trigger her mass fear again and we all head for the corralled horses. A few judicious flashes of light and some galloping sees us free of the town. Most of the band of riders get away with us but the villagers are a complete loss. We suspect the orcs will feast well for breakfast.

After another sound thrashing of Pug, the party are not surprised to see the disgusted band leaving, vowing to spread word of our evil deeds. Pug tries to defend himself by saying the glacier will be happy because the villagers are no longer a problem.

Just before the sun comes up we have a spirited discussion about how to help Rupert. Pug still wants to go to the glacier but the party doesn’t trust him (he doesn’t understand why). At 10am Rupert finally decides to go the way of pain and burning followed by regeneration. 5 hours of glorious pain later (at least Mim thinks so) and Rupert is his normal self. The sun is beginning to set again at 3pm. In the distance we hear an unknown number of wolves howling. When we spot a couple we can see they have 6 legs and look quite formidable. Rupert has the first watch.

Admin

Watches

• Evening: Rupert, Ahiga
• Middle (Lady's night): Mîm, Tallama, Any
• Morning: Pug, Ellena, Angus

Marching Order

• Meat Shields: Ahiga, Pug
• Cherished Flowers: Ellena, Mîm
• Cowards: Angus
• Bum Guards: Rupert, Tallama

Treasure

Melody

• Resurrection eggs x 3 (Ellena, Tallima, Ahiga)
• Dagger of Unresurrectable death (and make Magic Resistance roll to hit possessor)
• Snakeskin belt vs Male Molestation (it's alive and biting)
• Boots (?)

Horse Raiders

• Miscellaneous weapons and armour
• Horses
• Coinage

Calendar

Winter: Frost 813 (7)
	Moonday		Duesday		W'ansday		Th'rsday		Frysday		Reapsday		Sunday
		Samhain	1	Guild, Death on Ice	2	Hot Villagers	3		4		5		6
	7		8		9		10		11		12		13
	14		15		16		17		18		19		20
	21		22		23		24		25		26		27
	28		29		30		1		2		3		4
Winter: Snow 813 (8)
	5		6		7		8		9		10		11
	12		13		14		15	Solstice	16		17		18	Yuletide
	19	Days of Chaos	20		21		22		23		24		25
	26		27		28		29		30	Twelth Night	1		2
Winter: Ice 813 (9)
	3		4		5		6	First Plough	7		8		9
	10		11		12		13		14		15		16
	17		18		19		20		21		22		23
	24		25		26		27		28		29		30