Adjo's Journal (22 of N)
Jan. 14th, 2009 11:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluegargantuaHi,
Once my contract is up with the Commonwealth and I have put paid to the Six, I’m going to singlehandedly shove humanity into a dazzling new age of advancement and prosperity – or perhaps return them to it. It’s not for wealth or power or accolades. I simply possess prodigious amounts of that drive to know and learn and understand that all men have and thus I am compelled to excel. Also, I am anxiously looking forward to the new world I’m going to be building. It’s going to be a very big world too.
So after disposing of the undead, we trundle along to sneak into the fortress. The scouts up ahead hear a couple of creatures gambling. After a brief survey, they return with the information that the “secret entrance” is apparently well known and guarded. Also, the guards are apparently expecting some drow cleric of Illustrae to show up soon. Oddly enough, we happen to have a drow cleric of Illustrae to hand. Arranging ourselves as “temple guardians” we proceed to bluff our way past the guard and into the fortress.
Said fortress (now known as The Rookery) has undergone a great deal of reconstruction since the dwarves last held it. You can tell because it’s now bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. There are vast boulevards and marketplaces. It’s a sprawling city, stacked vertically inside. The populace is rather cosmopolitan as well. Aside from a large number of rifle wielding hobgolins there were any number of underground races including at least one Illithid.
We get escorted through the Temple District to the local temple of Illustrae. The head priestess (a giant of a woman – do drow molt?) recognized that Alanna was hardly the head of the caravan they were expecting and takes us in for a little chat. It was at this point that Thrace popped back into our midst. I suspect this helped our cause as we were identified as servants of Capricious and thus deserving of respect (or pity).
The short story is that this place is on the edge of the Corvus Empire (a drow concern) and is basically a Free City. Everyone is welcome if they don’t start a fight. All the gods are welcome if they don’t snatch people off the streets. Slavery is legal, but no one gets taken here. Thrace, upon hearing about the slavery gets riled up, but I’m quick to remind her of the educational fable of Sir Rush-To-Judgement and his splattery end and she calms down somewhat.
So we’re in a bit of a pickle. We have to move about 1200 men through a heavily armed free city. The head priestess says that with enough cash anything might be arranged. She says she’ll try and get us a meeting with the head honcho and we take a tour of the city. I, of course, have an interest in visiting any local mage hangouts where I might finally have an intelligent conversation, but am loudly shouted down and thus our guide takes us on a long tour of boring battlements and then on a long bar crawl.
It was mostly a big waste of time, but I did mange to find out where the local temple of Vecna was located. That could be really useful. There’s not a few secrets I might negotiate for, although they tend to charge an arm and a leg. It’s too bad really, because Vecna is an evil you can really respect. I mean, we’re spending more and more time fighting Orcus. Orcus is a demon with delusions of grandeur who’s pushing to become god of the undead. Then along comes Vecna, an undead lich, and he actually makes it into the god racket while Orcus never makes the grade. That’s gotta stick in his craw something fierce.
Obviously, I cannot condone Vecna’s stance on proprietary knowledge and I suspect I’d just be terribly depressed dealing with one of his priests. Guys, the whole point of Vecna’s story is that he built up his power on the strength of his own talents, not by asking for godly handouts. That’s the message to take away here. Well, that and if you’re going to turn your body into a magical artifact, don’t give your ambitious Lieutenant a magical sword that can lop off bits of it. But still.
It’s too bad because they might really be able to help me get a jump on tracking down the Six. Maybe if I find something good in the fane, they might arrange a swap.
I’m getting ahead of myself. So the others have a rousing carouse and I’m stuck not finding out more about how these multi-dimensional spaces are constructed. Does it even occur to one of my lunkheaded companions that if this type of construction were more widely available and implemented a great deal of trouble could be avoided? Simply move the Commonwealth population into large arcologies like this one and who cares about the Northmen any more? Heck, if you move them all into aerial fortresses like the one Dauntless took us to and it had a huge interior volume like the Rookery, then let the Northmen turn the whole world to ice. Who cares? We can have worlds of our own.
We walk back (I walk, the rest sort of stagger about in the same general direction), get a good night’s sleep and then have a lunch date with the leader of this place (a Colonel I believe). They escort us to a nice dining/reception area and a rather heavily ornamented kobold gets up into his booster chair. The kobold is Noob and he is the Colonel. We explain our predicament and introduce ourselves. We discuss various options. Taras, a red letter day for him, has the actually useful idea of marching the soldiers back through the tunnel, stopping them just shy of the chasm and then ferrying them across via Brawl so they don’t see the city within the fortress.
In the end, the Colonel generously agrees that we can go on to the Hook, retrieve the legion, march them back through the fortress and over to the other side. The price is that after we get the legions marching back, we go out into the underdark and track down this fane of Orcus. Once we find it, we wipe it out. This seems cheap enough that we agree to it and the holy-rollers sign vows to that effect.
(It suddenly occurs to me that since we’re marching back with, y’know, a legion of warriors, we could take a bunch of them along to help us raze this place, but I suppose most of them will be half dead anyway and the rest will seize upon my lapse in logic to point out that they didn’t sign any such vow. Although, come to think of it, neither did Kestrel and I. We could just bolt out of here (someone has to fly these guys home right?), but I suppose Hendel will act up again.)
The contracts will be signed over dinner. I am enjoying this place and it’s freewheeling leader the more I learn about it.
We sit down to a fabulous dinner and we’re just tucking into this amazing dessert (called Terran Misu I believe) and that’s when the guards patrolling the balcony over us go down and a mess of ghouls drops down to surround us. Disrupting dessert, that’s the pure evil of Orcus for you. I am, of course, immediately attacked and immobilized. Luckily, this time, I manage to thunderwave my attacker back into Noob’s pet dire wolverine and shake off the immobilization (I would expect I’m building up a tolerance by this point).
Noob leaps up onto the table and I step in front of him to unleash…well, it was supposed to set all the ghouls on fire, but instead it just sort of fizzles. Noob pulls out a gun and promptly shoots everyone in his line of sight – including Taras and me. Honestly, after my miserable performance I didn’t blame him.
The ghouls surge forward and Taras goes down. Alanna rushes over and puts up her sacred ground. I thunderwave a bunch off the table and step down to bask in the healing. Hendel was having a little trouble on the far end of the table so I sent scorching blasts down on his foes to give him a hand. Meanwhile, above us in the balcony, someone is yelling at the ghouls and trying to get them to attack Noob. It was nice to know someone else was having a bad day.
Eventually we turned the tide and I rushed over to teleport up to the balcony only to find that our assailant had disappeared and that the magical wards that should be in place were now coming back on-line. At this point the rest of the guard showed up and got a good dressing down from Noob. That was amusing, but Noob grandly declared that our victory demanded more dessert – the guy shot me yet I still want him to run the Commonwealth.
Alas, I suspect that saving Noob from a treacherous assassination will not get us out of our promise to clear the fane (or rather, get the holy-rollers out of their promise). Ah well, there’s time to worry about that after we get the men back from the hook. And there’s time to worry about them after we finish dessert.
[NOTES: I rolled a nat-20 on my streetwise roll to find the secret Temple of Vecna! I rule!]
later
Tom
Once my contract is up with the Commonwealth and I have put paid to the Six, I’m going to singlehandedly shove humanity into a dazzling new age of advancement and prosperity – or perhaps return them to it. It’s not for wealth or power or accolades. I simply possess prodigious amounts of that drive to know and learn and understand that all men have and thus I am compelled to excel. Also, I am anxiously looking forward to the new world I’m going to be building. It’s going to be a very big world too.
So after disposing of the undead, we trundle along to sneak into the fortress. The scouts up ahead hear a couple of creatures gambling. After a brief survey, they return with the information that the “secret entrance” is apparently well known and guarded. Also, the guards are apparently expecting some drow cleric of Illustrae to show up soon. Oddly enough, we happen to have a drow cleric of Illustrae to hand. Arranging ourselves as “temple guardians” we proceed to bluff our way past the guard and into the fortress.
Said fortress (now known as The Rookery) has undergone a great deal of reconstruction since the dwarves last held it. You can tell because it’s now bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. There are vast boulevards and marketplaces. It’s a sprawling city, stacked vertically inside. The populace is rather cosmopolitan as well. Aside from a large number of rifle wielding hobgolins there were any number of underground races including at least one Illithid.
We get escorted through the Temple District to the local temple of Illustrae. The head priestess (a giant of a woman – do drow molt?) recognized that Alanna was hardly the head of the caravan they were expecting and takes us in for a little chat. It was at this point that Thrace popped back into our midst. I suspect this helped our cause as we were identified as servants of Capricious and thus deserving of respect (or pity).
The short story is that this place is on the edge of the Corvus Empire (a drow concern) and is basically a Free City. Everyone is welcome if they don’t start a fight. All the gods are welcome if they don’t snatch people off the streets. Slavery is legal, but no one gets taken here. Thrace, upon hearing about the slavery gets riled up, but I’m quick to remind her of the educational fable of Sir Rush-To-Judgement and his splattery end and she calms down somewhat.
So we’re in a bit of a pickle. We have to move about 1200 men through a heavily armed free city. The head priestess says that with enough cash anything might be arranged. She says she’ll try and get us a meeting with the head honcho and we take a tour of the city. I, of course, have an interest in visiting any local mage hangouts where I might finally have an intelligent conversation, but am loudly shouted down and thus our guide takes us on a long tour of boring battlements and then on a long bar crawl.
It was mostly a big waste of time, but I did mange to find out where the local temple of Vecna was located. That could be really useful. There’s not a few secrets I might negotiate for, although they tend to charge an arm and a leg. It’s too bad really, because Vecna is an evil you can really respect. I mean, we’re spending more and more time fighting Orcus. Orcus is a demon with delusions of grandeur who’s pushing to become god of the undead. Then along comes Vecna, an undead lich, and he actually makes it into the god racket while Orcus never makes the grade. That’s gotta stick in his craw something fierce.
Obviously, I cannot condone Vecna’s stance on proprietary knowledge and I suspect I’d just be terribly depressed dealing with one of his priests. Guys, the whole point of Vecna’s story is that he built up his power on the strength of his own talents, not by asking for godly handouts. That’s the message to take away here. Well, that and if you’re going to turn your body into a magical artifact, don’t give your ambitious Lieutenant a magical sword that can lop off bits of it. But still.
It’s too bad because they might really be able to help me get a jump on tracking down the Six. Maybe if I find something good in the fane, they might arrange a swap.
I’m getting ahead of myself. So the others have a rousing carouse and I’m stuck not finding out more about how these multi-dimensional spaces are constructed. Does it even occur to one of my lunkheaded companions that if this type of construction were more widely available and implemented a great deal of trouble could be avoided? Simply move the Commonwealth population into large arcologies like this one and who cares about the Northmen any more? Heck, if you move them all into aerial fortresses like the one Dauntless took us to and it had a huge interior volume like the Rookery, then let the Northmen turn the whole world to ice. Who cares? We can have worlds of our own.
We walk back (I walk, the rest sort of stagger about in the same general direction), get a good night’s sleep and then have a lunch date with the leader of this place (a Colonel I believe). They escort us to a nice dining/reception area and a rather heavily ornamented kobold gets up into his booster chair. The kobold is Noob and he is the Colonel. We explain our predicament and introduce ourselves. We discuss various options. Taras, a red letter day for him, has the actually useful idea of marching the soldiers back through the tunnel, stopping them just shy of the chasm and then ferrying them across via Brawl so they don’t see the city within the fortress.
In the end, the Colonel generously agrees that we can go on to the Hook, retrieve the legion, march them back through the fortress and over to the other side. The price is that after we get the legions marching back, we go out into the underdark and track down this fane of Orcus. Once we find it, we wipe it out. This seems cheap enough that we agree to it and the holy-rollers sign vows to that effect.
(It suddenly occurs to me that since we’re marching back with, y’know, a legion of warriors, we could take a bunch of them along to help us raze this place, but I suppose most of them will be half dead anyway and the rest will seize upon my lapse in logic to point out that they didn’t sign any such vow. Although, come to think of it, neither did Kestrel and I. We could just bolt out of here (someone has to fly these guys home right?), but I suppose Hendel will act up again.)
The contracts will be signed over dinner. I am enjoying this place and it’s freewheeling leader the more I learn about it.
We sit down to a fabulous dinner and we’re just tucking into this amazing dessert (called Terran Misu I believe) and that’s when the guards patrolling the balcony over us go down and a mess of ghouls drops down to surround us. Disrupting dessert, that’s the pure evil of Orcus for you. I am, of course, immediately attacked and immobilized. Luckily, this time, I manage to thunderwave my attacker back into Noob’s pet dire wolverine and shake off the immobilization (I would expect I’m building up a tolerance by this point).
Noob leaps up onto the table and I step in front of him to unleash…well, it was supposed to set all the ghouls on fire, but instead it just sort of fizzles. Noob pulls out a gun and promptly shoots everyone in his line of sight – including Taras and me. Honestly, after my miserable performance I didn’t blame him.
The ghouls surge forward and Taras goes down. Alanna rushes over and puts up her sacred ground. I thunderwave a bunch off the table and step down to bask in the healing. Hendel was having a little trouble on the far end of the table so I sent scorching blasts down on his foes to give him a hand. Meanwhile, above us in the balcony, someone is yelling at the ghouls and trying to get them to attack Noob. It was nice to know someone else was having a bad day.
Eventually we turned the tide and I rushed over to teleport up to the balcony only to find that our assailant had disappeared and that the magical wards that should be in place were now coming back on-line. At this point the rest of the guard showed up and got a good dressing down from Noob. That was amusing, but Noob grandly declared that our victory demanded more dessert – the guy shot me yet I still want him to run the Commonwealth.
Alas, I suspect that saving Noob from a treacherous assassination will not get us out of our promise to clear the fane (or rather, get the holy-rollers out of their promise). Ah well, there’s time to worry about that after we get the men back from the hook. And there’s time to worry about them after we finish dessert.
[NOTES: I rolled a nat-20 on my streetwise roll to find the secret Temple of Vecna! I rule!]
later
Tom
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-01-15 01:50 am (UTC)er. except that the drow cleric of Eilistraee has spelled it "Illustrii" because seriously? Eilistraee? what the hell is that. I had to look it up on wikipedia.
kisses
no subject
Date: 2009-01-15 02:56 am (UTC)Adjo uses the Old Draconic spelling because he's kinda pretentious like that.
later
Tom
no subject
Date: 2009-01-15 06:55 pm (UTC)