Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Delvers Guild – Session 19 – The Desert Ruins

[The Delvers Guild start exploring the city ruins in the desert to the south, across the Opal Sea.]

[This game uses the Fifth Revised Edition of the Hero System rules along with the Fantasy Hero supplement.  This session happened August 17, 2020.]

 

Player Characters:

Jala – human female – a person of discretion, studying aspects of the Law [to avoid them] at the Dusk Academy

Ricky the Astrologer – human male – has a thirst for knowledge but doesn’t know what he’s searching for, currently studying Astrology at Monarch University

Zarek the Red – fox male – a cerebrally-unfettered spell researcher [read: Mad Scientist] turned into a talking fox, studying Natural Philosophy at Monarch University to find a way to become human again

Vorgand – human female – professional porter and Adventurer’s Aide, irregularly attends classes at The Tested military academy, practitioner of Steel Serpent martial arts, and Guildmaster of the Delvers Guild

Via Roll20

Clarence – human male – studies Religion in Temples district, coincidentally the group healer

Nick Stalwart – human male – part of the Stalwart family of merchants, studying Mathematics at The Interesting Institute of Profitable People, a college at Monarch University

 

Non-Player Characters:

Torsten, Fish, Harek – ex-bandits, now torchbearers for the Delvers Guild

Konrad Moonclub – Stalwart family factor in Little Wythford

Orm Oxdriver – driver of the guild’s over-sized, double-decker vardo

 

 

Yggsday, November 2nd, 1st year of the reign of King Vladik the Gamesman

1:00 PM

Rested and with full stomachs after a passable lunch, the Delvers Guild set the Gate to address 5.0.0, the desert city ruins, far to the south of the Moon Manor Ruins [their current location].  Vorgand asked Zarek to go through the gate first to verify that the air there was breathable.  Not having a set of the magic ear rings that provided communication and breathable air, Zarek was somewhat peeved to be asked this.  To make his point, rather than float through the gate head first like normal, he slowly backed into the gate, maintaining eye contact with Vorgand the whole time.  Once on the other side, he sniffed around before returning and confirming the air was normal air, if a bit warm and dry.

The guild members and the Torchbearers walked through the portal to the ruined city.  The gate area was in a partially sheltered courtyard/structure between three large structures: an amphitheater, a two-story large building, and a one-story sprawling building.  Zarek flew up higher to get a feel for the ruins and saw two other clusters of buildings, one to the northeast next to the shore, about a half a kilometer away and one to the south a couple hundred meters away.  There were other, individual structures scattered around and some noticeable craters, now mostly full of sand.

Jala walked up the wall of the adjacent two-story building [spiderwalk spell] to find a patch of shadows to sit in.  She used her new shadow gaze spell to look from this shadow to other shadows inside the building and the nearby one-story building.  The one-story building was full of small stalls and probably an old market.  The two-story building had rooms of different sizes, mostly full of junk and debris.  Jala used her shadowjump spell to teleport into one of the rooms and grabbed part of a broken chair to bring back with her.  This caused some noise and woke something up under the debris!  Jala jumped back to the outside shadow and reported her finding to Vorgand, who was not happy about the development.

Hearing that Jala “woke something up”, Clarence cast sense the unholy and saw multiple undead in both the two-story and one-story buildings.  They were all skeletons of some sort and the one Jala awoke was on the second floor.  The group discussed how they wanted to start their exploration of the city.  They decided they would start with the adjacent two-story building.

They entered the building through an open doorway.  The doors were long gone and there was inches of sand covering the floor of the foyer they entered.  There were three doorways out of the foyer: the door across led to a collapsed courtyard and the doors to either side to other rooms.  Clarence’s sense the unholy spell indicated there were three skeletons in the room on the left, so the delvers went that way.

The wall to this room was breached and there was sand covering most of the floor, from a foot deep down to a couple inches.  Three skeletons, glowing a faint blue in color, stood up from the sand.  The delvers discovered fairly quickly that the glow was a damaging aura.  Vorgand was effectively immune to the aura due to the skull-shaped ring she wore and attacked directly.  Spells and bladed weapons were not as damaging as blunt attacks, although Ricky’s withering blast spell was effective.

After breaking the skeletons, Vorgand collected their still-glowing femurs.  Zarek touched one of the femurs and took some sort of burn on his paw, which caused some of his fur to fall out.  Vorgand wrapped the bones up and placed them in her backpack.

The group continued searching the building, making their way around the interior.  The ceilings were heavily coated with soot from a fire long ago.  They found some stone stairs up to the second floor at the end of a hallway halfway down that side of the building.  Clarence’s sense the unholy spell indicated there was another cluster of skeletons on this floor, down at the corner of the building they could not get to.  A side door led to the debris choked central courtyard.  The group removed some of the debris so they could get into the courtyard.

Once in the central courtyard, they could see there was once a balcony that ran around the interior of the courtyard up on the second floor.  Long girders of some sort of metal once supported the ceiling that covered the central courtyard, but those had fallen in at some point and now there was varying amounts of sand covering everything.  Doorways in the walls of the second floor suggested similar doors might be available on the first floor, but covered with debris and sand.  The group started excavating for a door to the rest of the first floor and quickly found one.

Once back inside, they searched several rooms that were empty except for broken furniture and other debris.  At the corner of the building they reached the door to the room containing the next cluster of skeletons.  Jala shadow-stepped into the room while Vorgand, Ricky, and Zarek took a slug of Zarek’s potion of speed before stepping in.  Nick held back as support.

End of Session

 

[Why did the guild start hunting skeletons?  Because according to Vorgand and her experience, hunting undead is what adventurers do.  That and looting tombs, so hey.]

[It's been a while, so I feel I should explain about the potions of speed.  Zarek has alchemical skills and regularly brews potions to cover his expenses.  He provides a vial with four doses of the speed potion to all the Delvers each expedition.  This is actually a stripped down version of the potion as listed in the Fantasy Hero Grimoire.  It provides a +1 boost to Speed for 1 Turn.]

 

Delvers Guild

Session A, Character Creation Part 1

Session B, Character Creation Part 2

Session 01

Session 10

Session 11

Session 12

Session 13

Session 14

Session 15

Session 16

Session 17

Session 18

 

Session 20

 

 

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