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Gaming!
Kevin's D&D3 campaign started last night. Four players: me,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
keshwyn, Darker, and one of Kevin's gaming friends.
The Setting: The PCs are associated with a semi-nomadic human tribe that's expecting a bad winter -- a bad winter worse than the last couple of bad winters. They're settling into winter quarters, cleaning out the site, that sort of thing; a few of the youngsters in the tribe are settling down to grab something to eat after doing a lot of running around all day: the loremaster's apprentice, one of the chief's nieces (who nobody's overly sure what to do with), and the apprentice of the local dwarven smith (dwarves are rare and somewhat . . . warily treated . . . given that there was a Big Ol' War a while back and the dwarves were more or less on the Other Side). A little random kibbutzing, and who should wander into camp but someone who disappeared mysteriously two years ago, bearing a mark of the druids, who are of no tribe.
There's a little of this that and the other, and then the loremaster calls the four kids over to have A Little Talk. Apparently he's been having disturbing dreams for, oh, the last fifteen years, finally figured them out two weeks ago, and is trying to figure out how to deal with the fact that these four kids (well, okay, the dwarf is older than he is, but he's still a bit of a kid by dwarf standards) have been summoned off into the distance to find a perfectly symmetrical mountain with storm clouds around it, larger than any normal mountain might ever be.
My character, clan mischiefmaker, wanders out of the meeting muttering, "This is the sort of trouble that can't be fixed by doing extra chores. . . ."
So after some dithering and muttering, the mixed group heads out a few days later: the loremaster's apprentice with the eagerness of an awestruck kid whose teacher has said, 'Go', the druid in the knowledge that she was sent here, and presumably this was what she was sent here for, the dwarf feeling overhasty in only three days of preparation, but supposing that after thirty years of travel and twenty years of being settled he's due for a bit more travel, and my poor Thiara not at all sure she's happy about this at all -- but since the loremaster's apprentice pointed out that if they stayed with the tribe, the trouble that the loremaster saw reaching out to them might hit the tribe, she's resigned. She thinks it's a bit excessive for avoiding watching cows, though.
They walk, carefully avoiding a Local Cursed Landmark. There are wolves in the distance -- and it has been bad for humans for several years, so how hungry are wolves?
Hungry enough. They're barely more than animated skeletons covered in fur, and they come in despite the fire. One jumps at the dwarf (who has displayed a certain amount of Impressive Arcane Power in levitating a burning brand; unfortunately, when tackled, he drops it). Fighting happens. Mostly, the druid scares them off by snarling at them; they're pretty twitchy wolves. Unfortunately, once they've regrouped, they decide they're angry. . . .
There isn't really a defensible place shy of the Local Cursed Landmark. Which, of course, nobody's ever come out of. The loremaster's apprentice has been telling stories, all of which end, "And none of them were ever seen again." But the wolves will be coming back. . . .
We pack up camp and head for the tower. It's maybe a single story tall, full of rubble, nowhere near as dark and menacing and large as reported in the stories. Karas looks at the sky when glowered at for explanation, which is very unsatisfying; some apprentice.
And as we approach the tower, there's a flickering of some strange, eerie feeling, and the Tower of Wind is encased in the column of a cyclone. Inside the spiralling winds, it's perfectly calm, but they're spinning so fast that a rock thrown at the column bounces off. Investigations reveal that whatever trigger it was that turned on the wind has gone away. (Thiara's private explanation is that this is some weird dwarvish mechanism; after all, the familiar dwarf is carrying a strange bow with a mechanism on it, and for that matter blew fire at some of the wolves to make them run away. And made the branch float around. And he sits around a lot staring at a book, which is just bizarre. And Adosar is being very thorough in peering at the stonework, or what's left of it.)
The wolves gather around the edges of the windstorm. One tries sticking a paw into it, and apparently the resulting whiplash discouraged them from trying anything else. So there was a cold dinner, and a somewhat scraggly camp, before investigating the hole in the ground. (With a metal railing. Admittedly, the iron was so rusty that a bit of it broke off when I tapped it with my dagger, but I'm keeping the bit anyway.) It seemed easier than trying to dig a passage under the windstorm, though the dwarf did some calculations to figure out whether that bit of engineering was plausible.
Three passages. Thiara goes up again, works out which way is north, and comes down; north is the way that doesn't have a passage. Still, she feels much better about the world when she knows which way north is. They pick the first corridor they saw to explore (it has the closest door), and she mutters, "East". It's got a bunch of abandoned rooms -- completely cleaned out. Karas finds a shard of strange pottery and puts it in his bag, to remember the place by. The corridor turns south -- the place is shaped like a square figure-eight, and all the rooms are on the inside. Bedrooms and storage on the east side, except down the central corridor there's a Big Double Door.
There has to be water, right? I don't know if they take rainwater down from up top or if they have water flowing through here, but stagnant water makes people sick. So if we find the water, we might find a way out. Right?
Anyway, we go through the big double doors to finish off that side of the eight. Shelves down the sides of the room, all empty; six big tables with chairs; and a dias at the end. It's glowing. And as we go into the room, four globes hanging from the ceiling start glowing.
Thiara climbs up on to a table so she can see what's on the dias better: a big stone table with a book on it, and a sword and scabbard hanging on the wall.
The shadows under a couple of other tables coalesce into creatures. Not friendly creatures, attack-y creatures. That hurt. Hitting them with the chairlegs we turned into torches seems to work though. (Thiara makes a point of looking under all the tables in the rest of the place. No other creatures.)
The book and the sword are old, old, old. Like, old like the legends from before the God Wars. When we get up onto the dias to look at them, the glow of the protective magic over them stops.
There isn't even dust.
The book has a picture of a perfectly symmetrical mountain on it. Thiara is just thrilled by this confirmation that there's Something Going On.
The other half of the place seems to be mostly kitchen and eating-area. Storage all empty. The cistern has clean water that seems to run out of the walls -- more dwarvish mechanisms.
The winds, above, have stopped.
This is all very, very unhappy.
When the dwarf sits down to try to read the book, the text is longer than it was before. He reads the last page and finds . . . a summary of our investigations of the Wind Tower.
Very, exceptionally unhappy.
And now I've got this sword, because I'm really the only one who can use it well. I don't trust it. Magic is one thing, but magic stops. This is magic without anyone doing anything to it. Maybe some dwarvish thing. Or, worse, Alar. The book is all about Alar at the beginning, which is plenty reassuring, given that the clans don't bother Alar in the hopes that Alar won't bother the clans, and mostly it works. At least since the Wars.
And anyway, if I used it, that would be, like, accepting that this is happening. . .
Kevin's D&D3 campaign started last night. Four players: me,
keshwyn, Darker, and one of Kevin's gaming friends.The Setting: The PCs are associated with a semi-nomadic human tribe that's expecting a bad winter -- a bad winter worse than the last couple of bad winters. They're settling into winter quarters, cleaning out the site, that sort of thing; a few of the youngsters in the tribe are settling down to grab something to eat after doing a lot of running around all day: the loremaster's apprentice, one of the chief's nieces (who nobody's overly sure what to do with), and the apprentice of the local dwarven smith (dwarves are rare and somewhat . . . warily treated . . . given that there was a Big Ol' War a while back and the dwarves were more or less on the Other Side). A little random kibbutzing, and who should wander into camp but someone who disappeared mysteriously two years ago, bearing a mark of the druids, who are of no tribe.
There's a little of this that and the other, and then the loremaster calls the four kids over to have A Little Talk. Apparently he's been having disturbing dreams for, oh, the last fifteen years, finally figured them out two weeks ago, and is trying to figure out how to deal with the fact that these four kids (well, okay, the dwarf is older than he is, but he's still a bit of a kid by dwarf standards) have been summoned off into the distance to find a perfectly symmetrical mountain with storm clouds around it, larger than any normal mountain might ever be.
My character, clan mischiefmaker, wanders out of the meeting muttering, "This is the sort of trouble that can't be fixed by doing extra chores. . . ."
So after some dithering and muttering, the mixed group heads out a few days later: the loremaster's apprentice with the eagerness of an awestruck kid whose teacher has said, 'Go', the druid in the knowledge that she was sent here, and presumably this was what she was sent here for, the dwarf feeling overhasty in only three days of preparation, but supposing that after thirty years of travel and twenty years of being settled he's due for a bit more travel, and my poor Thiara not at all sure she's happy about this at all -- but since the loremaster's apprentice pointed out that if they stayed with the tribe, the trouble that the loremaster saw reaching out to them might hit the tribe, she's resigned. She thinks it's a bit excessive for avoiding watching cows, though.
They walk, carefully avoiding a Local Cursed Landmark. There are wolves in the distance -- and it has been bad for humans for several years, so how hungry are wolves?
Hungry enough. They're barely more than animated skeletons covered in fur, and they come in despite the fire. One jumps at the dwarf (who has displayed a certain amount of Impressive Arcane Power in levitating a burning brand; unfortunately, when tackled, he drops it). Fighting happens. Mostly, the druid scares them off by snarling at them; they're pretty twitchy wolves. Unfortunately, once they've regrouped, they decide they're angry. . . .
There isn't really a defensible place shy of the Local Cursed Landmark. Which, of course, nobody's ever come out of. The loremaster's apprentice has been telling stories, all of which end, "And none of them were ever seen again." But the wolves will be coming back. . . .
We pack up camp and head for the tower. It's maybe a single story tall, full of rubble, nowhere near as dark and menacing and large as reported in the stories. Karas looks at the sky when glowered at for explanation, which is very unsatisfying; some apprentice.
And as we approach the tower, there's a flickering of some strange, eerie feeling, and the Tower of Wind is encased in the column of a cyclone. Inside the spiralling winds, it's perfectly calm, but they're spinning so fast that a rock thrown at the column bounces off. Investigations reveal that whatever trigger it was that turned on the wind has gone away. (Thiara's private explanation is that this is some weird dwarvish mechanism; after all, the familiar dwarf is carrying a strange bow with a mechanism on it, and for that matter blew fire at some of the wolves to make them run away. And made the branch float around. And he sits around a lot staring at a book, which is just bizarre. And Adosar is being very thorough in peering at the stonework, or what's left of it.)
The wolves gather around the edges of the windstorm. One tries sticking a paw into it, and apparently the resulting whiplash discouraged them from trying anything else. So there was a cold dinner, and a somewhat scraggly camp, before investigating the hole in the ground. (With a metal railing. Admittedly, the iron was so rusty that a bit of it broke off when I tapped it with my dagger, but I'm keeping the bit anyway.) It seemed easier than trying to dig a passage under the windstorm, though the dwarf did some calculations to figure out whether that bit of engineering was plausible.
Three passages. Thiara goes up again, works out which way is north, and comes down; north is the way that doesn't have a passage. Still, she feels much better about the world when she knows which way north is. They pick the first corridor they saw to explore (it has the closest door), and she mutters, "East". It's got a bunch of abandoned rooms -- completely cleaned out. Karas finds a shard of strange pottery and puts it in his bag, to remember the place by. The corridor turns south -- the place is shaped like a square figure-eight, and all the rooms are on the inside. Bedrooms and storage on the east side, except down the central corridor there's a Big Double Door.
There has to be water, right? I don't know if they take rainwater down from up top or if they have water flowing through here, but stagnant water makes people sick. So if we find the water, we might find a way out. Right?
Anyway, we go through the big double doors to finish off that side of the eight. Shelves down the sides of the room, all empty; six big tables with chairs; and a dias at the end. It's glowing. And as we go into the room, four globes hanging from the ceiling start glowing.
Thiara climbs up on to a table so she can see what's on the dias better: a big stone table with a book on it, and a sword and scabbard hanging on the wall.
The shadows under a couple of other tables coalesce into creatures. Not friendly creatures, attack-y creatures. That hurt. Hitting them with the chairlegs we turned into torches seems to work though. (Thiara makes a point of looking under all the tables in the rest of the place. No other creatures.)
The book and the sword are old, old, old. Like, old like the legends from before the God Wars. When we get up onto the dias to look at them, the glow of the protective magic over them stops.
There isn't even dust.
The book has a picture of a perfectly symmetrical mountain on it. Thiara is just thrilled by this confirmation that there's Something Going On.
The other half of the place seems to be mostly kitchen and eating-area. Storage all empty. The cistern has clean water that seems to run out of the walls -- more dwarvish mechanisms.
The winds, above, have stopped.
This is all very, very unhappy.
When the dwarf sits down to try to read the book, the text is longer than it was before. He reads the last page and finds . . . a summary of our investigations of the Wind Tower.
Very, exceptionally unhappy.
And now I've got this sword, because I'm really the only one who can use it well. I don't trust it. Magic is one thing, but magic stops. This is magic without anyone doing anything to it. Maybe some dwarvish thing. Or, worse, Alar. The book is all about Alar at the beginning, which is plenty reassuring, given that the clans don't bother Alar in the hopes that Alar won't bother the clans, and mostly it works. At least since the Wars.
And anyway, if I used it, that would be, like, accepting that this is happening. . .
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It's interesting seeing it from this perspective -- particularly, seeing the GM's hand in arranging for things to go a certain way and the interplay between needing things to happen and having characters that are unpredictable....
- Brooks
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He was not expecting me to snarl at the wolves and exert dominance over them and make them run away because I was a bigger, more threatening wolf. He thought we would fight them until they gave up.
Druids prefer not to kill hungry animals, though. After all, they're just doing what what they're supposed to be doing.
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If I were less cranky right now, I'd be more coherent, but it was not intended as a slight on the GM, in spite of coming out like that.