In this week's action-packed adventure, the party found themselves resting up a bit in the City of Reasonably Efficient Plumbing, as guests of the Supreme Council of the Presbyterian Church. They'd just gone through enormous effort to save Alice, a young girl who's possibly the last surviving Ancient, from being murdered by Gnomes. Of course, unbeknownst to them, the latest addition to their numbers is none other than the nefarious Bill the Elf, in yet another new body! He is on a mission from Sezrekhan to kidnap Alice.
Then:
-3 guys appeared. Never doubt the GM's ability to explain how 3 guys appear where they have no sensible reason to.
-A couple of PCs run into Pepito the talking rat, who tells them that he knows the location of a dungeon that guards the last surviving Wish Parasite.
-They learn that a Wish Parasite is a kind of particularly ugly worm that, if eaten, will grant you a single Wish. They also hear that a Wish is like a 9th level spell, which in a world that has no spells higher than 5th level is very impressive.
-Pepito won't talk when presented to the Presbyterian Council, leading the Presbyterians to wonder if the Dwarf Wizard (who brought him) was really not so much destined to be teleported to a dungeon as he was destined to be committed to a mental health facility.
-"The Ancient Girl can imagine she's deciding for herself about where she wants to go, she has just as much of an illusion of free will as the rest of us do."
-"Blade", aka Bill the Elf, tries to take Alice to see Sezrekhan; first by some ridiculous efforts at sign language and then by pretending to cry. He doesn't speak Ancient and she doesn't speak Common, or he'd have understood when she told him that actually she wants to go see Sezrekhan, and that he should man the fuck up.
-Finally, he calls in a Service Presbyterian who can speak Ancient, and tries to cast Charm on her.
"You rolled a 20. You definitely Charm the Service Presbyterian; do you want to Charm Alice too?"
"No, I mean she already wants to go with me, so I don't need to mentally control her to force her to come.. aw, fuck it, sure!"
-When Bill tries to Invoke Sezrekhan, he fails his saving throw and goes into an insane bloodlust. When he comes out of it, he's sliced the Service Presbyterian in half, and murdered Alice.
"You ran Alice right through with your vampiric blade, she's dead."
"Are you sure? I check her pulse!"
-Bill's plan to avoid getting the blame for this involves writing "Bill Did This" in blood on the wall, and then throwing himself out a window.
-Sezrekhan is, to say the least, not pleased. He threatens to rain meteors on the entire city and to destroy Bill's phylactery; but he's willing to give Bill 24 hours to accomplish the seemingly impossible and somehow save Alice. After all, 6th level henchmen are hard to come by, even if they've fucked up every major mission.
-"Don't you see that if we work together we can achieve more?"
"You've achieved NOTHING!"
-The Prebyterians find the corpses, and quickly inform the rest of the PCs: "You must come quickly! A terrible tragedy was always meant to happen right now!"
-"So you saw Bill the Elf kill Alice... how did you know he was Bill?"
"Um... before he threw me out the window he said 'I'm Bill'!"
-"OK, let's stop vainly looking for inconsistencies in Blade's story and go do this Wish Parasite thing!"
-"Bill's had some good plans, but they never seem to come through. Come to think of it, Bill's mishaps have become the main driving force of the campaign."
"It's not just Bill, it's all of us. We're on a neverending quest to fix our last fuckups!"
-"Well, you do have a purpose: you guys usually stop a Really Horrible thing from happening, by making merely Horrible things happen instead".
-The PCs get teleported to the dire mountains, on the northern continent which separates the Sea of Grass and the Mad Kingdoms. Guided by Pepito the Rat, they find their way to a mountain; after some effort they discover that part of the cliff-side is actually an illusory wall.
-Pepito suggests that although the wall feels very solid, the PCs might be able to get through it by running right at it at high-speeds, "Harry Potter-style".
-Ack'Basha tries to murder Pepito the Talking Rat!
"You crazy man! You been staring too long into the abyss, man!"
-When the other players object, he casts Word of Command to prove his suspicions, and true enough, when ordered to "CONFESS!" Pepito admits that he's actually a wizard who got permanently polymorphed into a rat, and was going to steal the Wish Parasite after the PCs did all the hard work, to wish to become a Daemon.
-Ack'Basha strangles Pepito to death. This time no one objects.
-The PCs get past the illusory wall (all except BOLT-O who apparently can't because he's a robot), and there find themselves attacked by a pair of onyx living-statues dressed as samurais!
-Meanwhile, BOLT-O and the one PC who stayed outside, a 0-level barbarian fire-maker, end up encountering another adventuring party! They call themselves the Super Adventure Buddies, and consist of three Hipster Elves named Peter, Geoffrey and and Archie, and a Sloth disguised as an elf (who goes by the name of Arturo "Hot Rod" Rodriguez).
-Figuring the party needs more cannon fodder, they team up with the Super Adventure Buddies; but in the fight with the living statues the elves prove to be as useless as everyone assumed they would be. All three elves trip and fall in the dirt when they try to hit anything. "Hot Rod" is pretty handy with a 9mm automatic, though.
-The party moves on to find a bunch of Troglodyte guards, and a brutal battle ensues. In it, the party starts dropping like flies.
-Dwarf Wizard: "Every wizard is an asshole but me"
Butler: "So, every wizard is an asshole, then?"
-Moments after his contentious claim, the Dwarf wizard gets wasted. Ack'basha, protected as usual by his Holy Sanctuary spell, loots the wizard's corpse in mid battle.
-Some of the party managed to flee outside, where Bolt-0 was waiting.
"BOLT-0 HAS NEVER FELT SO USELESS!"
Ropework: "I know that feeling."
-With almost all his allies dead or fled, Ack'basha is left with no choice but to actually fight now, so he uses divine aid to create a ring of fire that immolates most of the Troglodytes.
"You realize this is just Sequester in reverse, right? Ack'basha has literally become the anti-Bill".
-Geoffrey, the last surviving actual elf of the Super Adventure Buddies, manages to actually kill one Trog before getting impaled by another Trog. Then Kragnar impales the Trog, in a "grotesque daisy chain of death".
-Bill/Blade meanwhile had hidden himself and went into the Trog house, only to find another 30 or so trogs, most of them women and children. Being familiar with humanoid behaviors at this point, the party take no chances and burn down the house with all in it.
-"See? What can't be solved by religious genocide?"
-In the battle, the fake-elf/sloth "Hot Rod" has slipped away. This before Ack'basha could paranoically murder him. He's a clever sloth.
-The surviving PCs continue, eventually reaching a cavern where they encounter an old companion who had been lost for a while, the Blog-Swine named Chu. It appeared the Troglogdytes had strung him up to be offered as some kind of blood sacrifice, but to what was not clear.
-They use Second Sight to play 'hot & cold' as to what's the closest direction to their goal, but it leads them into a room that appears to be empty. That is, until they figure out there's yet another illusory wall.
-Krognar the Fire-Maker decides to run right through the wall, and he does, and right into the eruptive fire-trap behind the illusion. Ironically, the Fire-Maker is burned to death.
-They find themselves in what appears to be another dead end, until they realize there's another false wall, which instead of being an illusion is actually a trap, as it collapses on top of Ropework.
-The wall reveals a large central chamber, featuring a pool of shit surrounded by a magic circle of runes (not 'weird shit' or something like that, I mean literal feces).
-Chu throws a coin in the pool of shit, and nothing happens. Then he throws a coin onto the runes, disrupting the circle, and the pool of shit turns into Orgluz the Shit Demon! Fortunately for the party, it seems that Orgluz is now bound to serve Chu. Chu is of course quite pleased to have a massive pile of shit at his side.
-The liberation of the poop demon also opened yet another secret door, which Orgluz claims will lead them to the Wish Parasite, and their chance to save Alice. So, on the party will go.
But not today, as we had to end there for the day.
Stay tuned for more adventures shortly!
RPGPundit
Currently Smoking: Dunhill Amber Root + C&D's Crowley's Best
Classic Bill...
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