kiya

Session 16: Man Bites Dog
Session 17: She's closing her eyes, she's starting to dream, she's pulling the strings. . .
Session 18: When Dwarves Hurry. (Hoom hum.)
Session 19: 'Scuse me, looking for a cliff to hang from.
Session 20: Wallops and Castor

Eventually we got to where the Plains Cat tribe was camping. They were being stubborn and refusing to get driven any further towards us, because they needed to retake one of their sacred spaces.

It was a fortress up in some craggy hills on the plateau, and it had once belonged to an Alar. They'd killed that Alar back in the Wars, all by themselves, and now used the place to initiate their shamans.

It was currently occupied by some renegade orks, fire giants, and creatures the orks called kordaro, which is orkish for "large, physical demon that's specifically right here as opposed to physical or incorporeal demons that might be elsewhere". The kordaro were huge things with leathery hides, four-footed, but they had the top half of a people where the neck would have gone if they were a normal animal.

Also, there were flying reptiles of some sort around that they said spat fire. I asked Adosar if those counted as wyverns (since he's supposed to kill wyverns and all) but he said they didn't.

Wren and I went to go look at the fortress. (Session quote: "Alar still lair in large rocks." --Thiara) While we were travelling, we saw a flight of the flying lizards coming our way. We tried to hide from them, but they saw us. They were a little smaller than the wyverns we've seen before, but they did in fact spit fire. They also acted like normal wyverns and tried to land on us and hit us with their wings and everything. (Session quote: "Oh, right, you were under the last wyvern." --

keshwyn)

We killed them, and took some of the hide, because there's no sense wasting it after all. And we looked at the fortress, and came back to say what it looked like and how many we saw and all. And then we went back.

Adosar made some armour from the hides that we gave to the orks. They were impressed, but I'm not sure if they were impressed by the armour more or the fact that he made it with magic. We think that it might help protect people against fire a little. Karas glowed at them a bit.

We spent a while planning how we were going to assault the fortress, and the orks gathered warriors from surrounding tribes while we thought about it. I got some spell maps from Adosar and Karas's last noisemaking rock for my part of it. I was going to climb over the wall on one side, and Adosar on the other, and Wren was going to fly in, and Karas was going to charge because he's really good at that.

So we went. It was cloudy.

At dusk, when the shadows were most confusing, I climbed up over the wall on the left side. The cleft of the fortress was blocked with an Alar-built wall, and there were a few buildings in the yard on the other side before the fortress itself.

I had the furthest to go to get in position, so I was making the signal to everyone to start. I got into the paddock for the horses, and threw the thunder-stone behind them. They didn't run, which meant they didn't create any diversion at all.

Wren threw lightning to hit right behind them. That time they ran.

I slipped out the gate, hiding in all my hiding-magics. Adosar made his magic from the other side, which was to take a spell that makes walls out of rocks and put it on its side, to make a ramp out of rocks that Karas could charge over with some of the orks. ("A wall of stone, er, a ramp of stone appears." --

teinedreugan)

I went to open the gate. Adosar joined me there, and we got the guards and let our friends and Conscience in. ("We spread furry chaos in our wake!" -me)

Wren was throwing lightning from the clouds overhead whenever she saw things starting to get organised in the courtyard, and Karas and his barbarians were doing pretty well on one side. Adosar and I started to work on our side, and attracted the attention of several kordaro.

The problem with kordaro is they try to knock you down and stomp on you.

We got some help and managed to avoid getting completely trampled, and the four of us got together in the middle of the battle and started fighting with one of the giants. Those hit hard.

jikharra

teinedreugan

Conscience managed to trip it and knock it over, and we all pounded on it until it died. I made a magic to hand to Shae, and Adosar threw a lightning bolt at the next giant "to get its attention". (Session quote: "Adosar is berserk again." --Thiara) I had Shae fly over to its other side, and we hit it at the same time. (Session quote: "I have a critical with the sword, two dagger strikes, and a loaded snake." --me)

Eventually we got to the other side of them, and their commander came out.

He was a giant, too, but even bigger than the rest of them, and he had huge dark wings and bright red skin and looked generally unpleasant. He had nasty magic, too; first thing he did was cast it, and I nearly fell down.

When he died, he exploded.

We cleaned up the rest of the fighting, and healed our allies as best we could. There were a lot of them dead. Adosar was pretty badly hurt, but it was hard to see because he'd made the magic that makes him look like a stone beetle and it's hard to see hurt under all the rocks.

We managed to take back the fortress, though, and the orks were happy even though many of them were dead. We were all very tired.