More gaming.

[kiya]

Okay. This entry not only contains a session summary, but a work-in-progress sketch of my character as I suspect she'll look something like ten levels from now.


Current working title of the sketch is, "Does it surprise you that people don't look up?" For those who came in late to my gaming explanations (or, for that matter, people I don't babble at, as I'm not sure that I actually explained my character all that much in the past), Thiara is a ranger who just (as of this gaming session) manifested sorceric ability; among those abilities is the spell called "spider climb", which enables one to pull this sort of Spider-man trick.

(If the pose in the drawing looks a little like Spider-man, incidentally, that's because it is; after I spent an hour angsting at oneironaut about being utterly unable to figure out the perspective and body-positioning for this, gtst gently suggested that I look at Spider-man images. A while rummaging through google and some really distressing superhero porn later, I found an image that would do for a start.)

Anyway. Thiara (and the rest of the party) seem to, fairly regularly, encounter large spiders that climb walls and ceilings and fall on people and cause them significant amounts of damage. Given this, and her new capacity to climb walls, it seems a bit far-fetched to me that she wouldn't think of climbing walls and falling on people to cause them significant amounts of damage. The odd markings are because in teinedreugan's world, sorcerors manifest their magic outwardly as well as in spellcasting ability, with, in essence, magical tattoos. As of this drawing, she's a fifth or maybe sixth level sorceror, therefore able to hang from the ceiling for about an hour and getting to the point of being significantly marked.

I am, at this point, trying to come up with a name for the flying snake. I have a horrible urge to name him something derivative of Loiosh, given that he currently calls me "Mama".



When we came out of the mountain, Adosar wanted to make his amulet. When he was done, he went all to sleep. I spent a while working with herbs and water in my pot, and when I got something that should work and needed it to cool down so I could put it in bottles, I went out for a walk.

The headband thing that Semtek gave me lets me see things. I wanted to look at everything -- it's all bright and real, and I can see the flows of energy from here to there and everywhere. I can see the magic in everything. Some of it has more than others, more consciously, more real, but not all of it. I'm seeing and making sense of things Adosar told me about when I asked him about magic; it's like I just needed to see what he meant before it made sense, but now that I see, it's all obvious.

I went up onto the mountain after a while, over the building over the tunnel we went through to see Semtek. I sat for a while, and then I introduced myself to the mountain, and talked to it for a while. I told it who I was, and asked it about what sorts of things it had seen, where it had been, what it remembered of Semtek's fight here at the end of the God War. After a while, it seemed like I was sort of falling away from things, floating, and I heard an explosion, an explosion from everywhere. I heard the pulse of the mountain. Or maybe the world. I don't know. It was long, and slow, and each beat felt like a lifetime. Or at least a season. It told me about how it saw us come to it, too. And a lot of other things, some of them I got some of. Some were just colours, sounds, images that flickered, especially towards the end. I think it got a little overexcited and wanted to tell me more than would fit in my head.

It was nice to find a hill that would talk back to me when I talked to it, even if it did give me a headache with all the shouting at the end. I went back down to where everyone else was and made some willowbark tea. Karas wanted some too, so I gave him some. He had a headache, and he wanted to be alone. I told Renn I didn't think he was all right.

I put my stuff in bottles, and gave one to everyone. I told them that they should be good for healing getting hurt. Because the druids gave us healing potions back when we left home, and they were really, really useful. Adosar asked me if they were magic (well, when he woke up and got his), and I said no. They'd probably work better if they were magic, but I think they'll work all right even so.

Renn went looking for arrowhead stuff -- she'd come back from her walk with lots and lots of perfect arrowshafts without a cut on them -- and came back looking confused but with lots of obsidian to chip. She said she'd been thinking of obsidian, and it was like thinking of home and feeling like you're there for a moment, only what it was was seeing a big piece of obsidian. And she had a big piece of obsidian as a result.

When Adosar got up, he was sort of grumpy. I wonder if he had a headache, too, but he didn't ask for any tea or anything. He snapped at Karas, and Karas shouted at him, and everyone sort of stared at each other a lot. And then Karas said that he was feeling overwhelmed by feeling what everyone else was feeling, and Renn offered to teach him some druid skills because they might help. And she kept telling him to concentrate on his breathing when it was too much. They went off to practice, and Adosar suddenly said, "Ah-ha!" and started doing lots of writing in his actual book of maps. When he was done he told me that he'd been trying to map magics he'd never seen before, and couldn't figure it out, but now he just had, and he was writing it all down so his map was finished.

"I can sense our confusion and frustration. . ."
"That must be confusing and frustrating."
"Yes. It. Is." --Karas, Thiara

We stayed a little while longer, talking about what we wanted to do and remembering things about Alar that we'd never known before, and then started walking back towards the cliff ridge. We were partway there and I saw a snake, curled up under a tree. When she noticed us, she uncurled, and she was moving like she was hurt, and then we saw she had wings, and one of them was all ripped up. Renn went forward to look at her, and Karas too -- I guess he was feeling that she was hurt. Renn healed her wing with magic, and she flapped up, and nudged Renn in thanks, and flew off. A few minutes later, we were walking more, and she came back carrying something wound up in her tail. She looked at all of us, and looked at Renn and then at me, and then at Hethian, and buzzed over to me and dropped an egg in my hands.

I wrapped it up so it was safe and snugged in into a place inside my jacket where it'd be sure to stay warm. Though when we got to the cliff I put it in my pouch so it wouldn't be hurt when I climbed. We talked to Clancy about the climbing magic, and eventually he started going up, so I climbed the wall so I could help him over the top.

We went over the mountains and started over the plains. There were hobgoblins there. And this time they had friends -- a man of some sort -- I made the seeing magic so I could see him better, and he wasn't a race I've seen, he had a muzzle like an animal -- and a big wolf with something on its shoulders, maybe wings. And maybe fifty hobgoblins, too. The hobgoblins started shouting and chanting and cheering, and Karas shouted that we'd let them live if they went away now, and they just jeered. So Renn made the grass grab at them again with magic, in the middle with the wolf-thing and the man-thing. The man-thing came out of the grass-tangle, but the wolf was stuck for a long time. The hobgoblins just shouted, though.

I waited until I could see the man-thing clear, and then I shot at him. So did Renn. He made a magic of some sort right about then, but not one I could recognise. We kept shooting at him a lot for a while, but I couldn't hit him at all. Eventually the wolf-thing got out of the grass and jumped and glided down next to the man-thing. Adosar was sort of behind me so I couldn't see what he did 'cause I was protecting him some (I need to ask him what that dwarvish word was again, maybe sometime we're talking about the right names for rocks), but I heard him make a magic, and then he ran to one side and threw lightning at them. They jumped mostly out of the way, but that was really loud. Then the wolf-thing ran at Karas and tried to bite him, but it couldn't.

I gave up on trying to shoot the man with the magics, because I couldn't hit him anyway. I was going to go hurt the wolf-thing; I turned and glared at it, and I threw lightning at it. Well, a little lightning, next to Adosar's lightning, but he says it nearly hit him so he got a good look at it. (It didn't go anywhere near him. It was going to the wolf, because I told it to.)

Adosar went up to hurt the wolf-thing, and I went up to hurt the wolf-thing, and somewhere in there Karas got bitten, and it was like smoke came up from where it bit him. He was wobbling pretty badly and looked really battered; I tried to get between him and the wolf-thing at least a little so he wouldn't get hit again. Renn came charging up on Hethian and pulled out the staff that Semtek gave her to make him better, and he took a step back and blew a tremendous noise out of his horn that made the wolf-thing put its ears back and whimper (so we hit it). We had it surrounded after a moment, and it was scared, so it bit Adosar and tried to jump and run away, but I hit it and Karas hit it and Renn shot it with her bow as it jumped, and it fell over.

The hobgoblins had stopped chanting. Karas turned and shouted that it was their last chance to survive, and they thought it over, but they charged us anyway. Renn made the grass catch them up again, and I shot at them, and Renn shot at them, but there were a lot of them. Then some of them slowed down, and pointed, and arrows started pouring down on them from out of the sky, and they ran.

And a giant eagle landed next to us, and Karas collapsed. I wasn't sure if it was the poison or something else, but eventually we sorted out that he'd gotten the fear from all the hobgoblins and it was just too much for him for the moment. Renn looked at the eagle and said things made sense now. (Session quote: "What exactly am I feeling right now?" --Shane, Karas's player)

Riding on the giant eagle was an elf. With a bow, of course, since he'd been shooting hobgoblins. We greeted him and he greeted us and he said that he had a message for us from the Queen of the Elves, and he gave it to us. Other people read it, but the gist was that the elves were sorry for mistakes they'd made in the past, and they weren't going to do it again, and they knew of our chores, and they were going to help this time.

He went to look at the dead wolf-thing, and muttered a lot. I went to look at the dead wolf-thing. It looked . . . wrong. In an icky way, like it was a bad thing just by itself. Other animals don't look like bad creatures, they're just alive. This wasn't alive, but it looked bad. Karas went and looked at the magic-maker. The magic-maker was a lizard, but man-shaped, which explains the nose. Renn cut a bone out of the wolf-thing to make a sword out of. She'd gotten a bone out of a deer earlier, but she wasn't sure if this would be a better sword.

He told us where we might be able to camp and get better, and we told him things we knew that might worry the elves, and he said they knew, and he went back to bring back the message that he'd found us. So we went where he said, and Adosar asked me about whether I'd made the little lightning, and I said I thought so, and he made funny faces at me a lot. But we got to the camp, and we looked at the things Karas had gotten. (A cloak, an amulet, some bracers, a potion, and some magic-maps.) The amulet didn't have any magic, but it had writing or symbols or something on it. The elf didn't know what it was. I don't think Adosar did either. Well, Adosar didn't say, and I forgot to ask.

I did ask Adosar to tell me about the magics on each of the things, so I could know what magic things looked like now that I could see magic. He asked me questions about what I understood a lot and then started to explain. The potion was an illusion-protection (which was a funny conversation with Karas, because we couldn't figure out if it was an illusory protection or a protection made up of illusions). Renn asked Adosar if he thought the bone would stay bad, and he said he didn't know, and she went away to wash it off and let us talk about magic.

He told me about the spell-maps, and that there were two of each kind, and he could figure out what they were, and he gave me one of each of them to see if I could figure them out for myself. So I kept them and studied them. And then we talked about the magic things. And I looked at them and told him I didn't think they were bad things, just things. And he said that protective magic things don't usually be bad. (And the magic-maker was wearing them anyway, so they probably wouldn't be bad. Unless he didn't know what they were either.) Adosar guessed one of them was like magic armour, and Karas said that the shield Semtek gave him makes magic armour, so he knew what that was. And he guessed the cloak was a sort of protection against things that don't hit people. Renn asked if that was for invasive things, and he said that was a good way to put it -- he says it protects against poisons and magics and things like that.

Then Renn asked me if, since I can see bad things sometimes, if the druid work she'd done with the wolf-bone made it clean, and I went and looked, and it looked fine. And then I took out the sword to see if it was a sort of thing or just a thing. And it was a good thing, or looked like one. I think that makes sense, since it really doesn't like things with holes in them that make the world bleed out.

In the morning, Renn made magics to help with the poison from the wolf-thing. Karas looked much better, and Adosar wasn't looking so thin. (Adosar shouldn't look thin and wobbly. It's just wrong.) Adosar wanted to see my summoning magic, so I showed him -- one of the magic-maps was a map to a summoning magic. I called a badger. It was a little confused, but I rubbed its head, and then it went wandering off and went away again poof. I think Adosar was confused by this, but I'm not sure why.

So we kept going. Sometimes we saw hobgoblins. Sometimes hobgoblins saw us. None of them bothered us though.

The egg hatched out into a little tiny snake with damp wings. He snuggled up in my hands. Renn caught crickets for me to feed him, and that made him happy. He curled up in at the back of my neck where it was warm and he could peek out at people without them seeing him.

A few days later, we were camped and Adosar was taking the first guard duty. He shouted to wake us up, but one of the things from under the table sort of fell over me and hit me just as he shouted, which was just as good for waking me up. I got up and went snap and made lightning at it, but the cold hit and the fear and everything was all shaky and bad and I couldn't hit it at all afterwards. There were three shadow-things from under the table, and a big, black, nasty shadow with a sword, or I think it was a sword, I couldn't see it very well. Adosar made himself go very very fast again, and made lightning and fire and light.

Karas used his whip to trip up the big shadow with the sword, which probably helped; I really don't remember any of this very well. Then Adosar put a spell on me, and the thing from under the table couldn't hit me, so I sort of backed away from it and drank the healing potion I made, because I was hurting, and the shadow with the sword had hit me, and I felt like I was going to fall over. It was very cold.

Then Karas pulled the shadow's sword out of its hands with his whip, which made it mad. It went to pound on him with its fists. I didn't feel much better after my potion, so I stared at the shadow thing and made magic at it. Zap. Only one of my little lightning bolts hit it and just disappeared, which was really, really strange. Eventually, people hit it enough for it to dissipate. Karas couldn't find its sword where it fell, so I guess it melted too, like ice made up of shadows. I asked Adosar where my magic went. He said some things are like that.

Nothing else bothered us that night, and we started off again in the morning. No hobgoblins bothered us either. I guess we scared them or something. We had gotten almost as far as the Elf-Wood when Renn said, "Oh!" and pointed up at a hawk that was flying over us. She said she could see what it was seeing. (I wonder if this is special druid magic, or something else.)

I couldn't figure out the magic maps. Sometimes I felt it was almost like I nearly understood one or the other, but it wasn't ever quite right. Adosar told me that there were magics that one could use to see what sort of magics things were; I thought about it for a while and tried to read it in the morning, and that made it make sense. He said, "Ah! You did that with land-magic!" So that was what that was. The map I had was one for calling things, like the magic I used to call for the badger to come. I thought about it for a while as we went, and worked on figuring out the differences. The map was to a bigger magic, for one thing, ut it also calls things from a different place. I'm not sure where the place is. I'm not really sure that whoever made the map knows that either, just how to shout for things to come.

We got to the river, and there was an earth wall built with halflings on it guarding the ferry. We shouted back and forth a lot, and they went to get the Captain of the Guard, and he recognised us, and finally we got the ferry to come and take us across so we could go to Wave's Rest and talk to the mayor.

We talked to the mayor. We had him get some wine to drink while we talked to him, because we thought he'd need it. He was really not sure about how to deal with things. Eventually he sent the captain to go get someone, and then the bard who had been performing in the tavern when we were here last came in. So we told him everything, too, and he didn't seem so doubtful. And we traded news, and he said he'd tell the other bards and tell the right sort of stories to get people ready and willing to listen to us when we warned them about war and hobgoblins and Alar waking up and everything, and he went out like he had to get somewhere really fast.

And we went out into the town to see things. I went to a weaver and a basketmaker to talk to them about their craft. They didn't want anything I could bring in trade right now, but they'd take me as an apprentice, only I don't have time to apprentice right now. But some of the things they want are things in Breveddi lands. So if we can get here and there peaceful and talking to each other, they'd have something worth talking about.

Adosar says that this place is the center, here and home, and Fingul is in between the parts of the center. If we can keep the center from being threatened, maybe we can make things all right. But the baronies are nearly having real war themselves, and the hobgoblins are organised, and we don't know what's behind them.

We have an invitation to talk to the elves, and maybe get their help. Maybe we'll go up and see if a dwarf city will help us; they've been losing their sky-wagons, but we don't know if they know to what. I want there to be peace here in the baronies.

I want to know what's going on at home.

But to get home we have to go through Fingul.


I think I'd rather think about weaving. They want our yellow dye here. That's something I can think about all right. Semtek wanted me to think about weaving.