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Short roleplay-focused session today before a longish break before we found more schedule space.
Dramatis Personae:
Izgil, who is mostly engaged in a research project due to player absence
Viepuck, who is intermittently cosplaying a villain
Celyn, who is having a very long day
Robin, who is out of patience
When we left off we had killed the Hag, though there were consequences to doing so.
Mostly Izgil dug us out of the lair though it was easier when he wasn't trying to hide the hole. Also he made sure to mark the area of the potential sinkhole in case of the Hag being a load-bearing boss and her lair collapsing, because we didn't want anyone to fall in and get hurt.
Celyn declared, "I need to go fix my clothes or I will stab someone and we are out of people I can legitimately stab." Celyn's nerves are a little bit frayed given the curse thing and all.
The party troops up to the manor house something like a half hour after Izgil and Robin and Greymalkin had pelted out with a "Take heart!" Celyn immediately stomps upstairs. The people there sort of stare and ask if people are hurt (everyone is visibly injured), and Robin says, "Yes, not repairably" and goes up after Celyn, leaving Viepuck to explain to the lord and his household what's going on. Which is fine; Viepuck does most of the talking anyway.
(For the record: Celyn needed to fix his binder, which has gotten dislodged from proper positioning in the chaos; he and Robin talk out enough of their issues while upstairs that he is much, much more stable coming back down, though still notably short-tempered compared to his usual sunny affability.)
Viepuck, meanwhile, goes up to the sheet of glass set up as panopticon, sticks his tongue out at it, and says, "I can say whatever I want because it's dead neener neener", basically. One of the ladies climbs up on the table to dance; the lord smashes the glass with a chair; general explanations are had. The staff try to feed Viepuck more food because he's so small no matter that we had breakfast here literally less than an hour ago. Robin and Celyn eventually make it back downstairs.
People wander in and out and the news that the Hag is dead starts to spread; we decide that the sensible thing to do is roust out the Captain of the Guard from his drunken stupor, clean him up, and let him feel useful again by going to arrest the ferryman who was in league with the Hag (or at least terrified into exclusively doing her bidding). The guardsman - Roland - asks Robin if he'll come along, and the party makes their way down, though Celyn vanishes into the crowd and moves stealthily because he's of the opinion that someone should be prepared for This Fucker To Do A Runner.
Instead he spots a different fucker, who, when he sees the visible people coming down from the town, clearly starts to sneak down towards the docks, and is stopped by Celyn interposing himself and suggesting that maybe he doesn't want to do that. ("Hi.") After some extensive conversation in which the guy at least pretends to be willing to turn state's evidence for the ferryman's complicity in crimes, we make our way to the docks to find the ferryboat has just pushed off.
When the ferryman mimes being unable to hear people telling him to come back, Celyn - who I will remind is still cranky - goes 'fuck this noise' and teleports into the boat to say "Turn back." The guy puts a hand on his shortsword, to which Celyn growls, "Don't try me."
While the guy tries to decide if tangling with this one guy is worth the effort (it would not have been), Robin achieves hitherto unseen levels of For Fuck's Sake, stomps across the surface of the water (as he currently has the water-walking ring that Viepuck often borrows for shenanigans), grabs the mooring rope off the end of the boat, and drags the damn thing back to shore. The ferryman drops his pole in a feeble attempt to stop this; Celyn adds, "You really don't want to try his patience either."
The ferryman is interrogated. He is sweating bullets about something in it, particularly when Viepuck asks questions about Gareth, the bandit who he had previously impersonated to come across the river. Eventually we troop back up towards the manor with our prisoner and our nominally-not-prisoner in tow; Celyn spots the prisoner trying to pass a message to the other guy and lets people know later. The nominally-not-prisoner has been issued a weird purple scarf - which happens to be Es*tiaslos in disguise - to keep an eye on his behavior because he is clearly a squirrely bastard not to be trusted.
The village, meanwhile, is sort of dissolving into celebration, which is, blessedly, not actually focused on the party so much as 'we're free, hooray!' There are rumors about what people can do - Viepuck is baffled by the idea that he has telekinetic punching abilities but really what does an eldritch blast with knockback look like to the uninformed? There are rumors that Robin destroyed the Hag with holy fire, and rumors that no, no, Celyn did that, and Celyn actually did do that but he is not commenting. He and Robin stick to the edges of things, mostly, while Viepuck does talking, dancing with the teenagers, and so on.
Izgil is diverted out of his research to find the mirror that was being used to run the panopticon; the magic is gone out of it but it's still a nice, saleable mirror, a reflective surface that quality is premium work after all. Then Viepuck spends some time being The World's Most Dedicated Telegraph, contacting our people in various areas and collecting the news.
The news is kind of a lot!
Our friend the Duke has been charged with treason and sentenced to death, and is currently in the process of fleeing the capital with his troops that he brought along because he expected this sort of turn to fall back to Fellburn for a possible civil war. Rosalind, the ruler of Cleenseau, is with him with her forces. They have asked for reinforcements to be sent to Fellburn.
The people we had in the north clearing out the zombies from the caves have more or less finished that mop-up and will thus go to Fellburn. Some of the forces from Cleenseau will go to Fellburn. Rinault is happy to be included in the checkins.
The guy we're supposed to be meeting up with - Raoul the very powerful Night Queen cleric - is also in touch; we originally say we will meet him in Rinburg but when Izgil comes out from his research in an agitated state saying he needs another day, it's the new moon tonight, his fancy new-moon-themed bracers are doing something interesting and he has to understand it, we update that to 'please meet us in Peydon' and get a 'somewhere quiet nearby, I'll let you know'.
Our next crisis of course involves the baroness - who Viepuck has the locket linked to, theoretically, and who could theoretically contact him. At one point in his ongoing nonsense he activates it, says, "Does this thing still work?" and sings the cultural equivalent of 'Baby Shark' at it until he runs out of space in the sending.
Discussion of our next layer of problem (the baroness may be a necromancer, is at least verifiably necromancy-curious, and is hostile to the goddess of Oh No You Didn't Do A Necromancy, Bitch, Don't Make Me Come Down There and her people) has Robin relieved that the problem may in fact be perfectly ordinary necromancy, because, he says, we have done enough dealing with fey problems, maybe it can be someone else's turn, this has cost too much. Celyn is touched by this particular crankiness.
Celyn also conveys the gist of the information the Hag gave him in exchange for his trauma: The Gloomshaper, the boss of these excessive fey problems, made a deal with some other entity to permanently hold the portal in the Cleenseau Wood open for him so that he could go back to his favorite hobby, making mortals miserable in ways he finds funny. The Gloomshaper was apparently betrayed in this deal - fairly recently, mid-January to early February - and it is broken off, but he still thinks he has gleaned enough to hold the portal open himself. With the ritual sacrifice, apparently, of two "special" Tyrwinghans, which was why he was quite so set on abducting Robin (and Celyn). (While he does not need those two in particular for his thing they are particularly potent individuals and also particularly inconvenient ones.)
Robin and Celyn, who have in their discussions agreed that what they really need is a night's sleep and everything will be better in the morning, have gone to bed by the time Viepuck is done being a telegraph. Unfortunately for this plan, Es*tiaslos reports that there has been some chaos in the warehouse that was being used as a temporary jail and everyone is woken up to deal with the fact that the suspect has escaped.
Celyn is cranky enough to actually swear and then add, "... a night's sleep is too much to ask?" with obvious annoyance. Robin, equally annoyed, says, "Apparently it is" and they go off to deal with the damn problem that has, once again, tried their currently-nonexistent patience.
With guidance from Es*tiaslos, light spells in hand, and borrowed horses (aside from Greymalkin), we pursue the crew, reaching them just as they have scattered into hiding. Viepuck has once again disguised himself as Gareth the executed bandit. They are far enough apart that Celyn, who spots three of them, can't meaningfully faerie-fire more than one of them, so he just hucks his light spell stone at the feet of one of them to reveal her to the group, instead.
Robin charges the ferryman and thumps him soundly with a warhammer, as Celyn comments, "I told you you didn't want to try his patience." The lady with the axe he hucked the light at lets out a battlecry and misses Celyn, but the guy with the boar spear that Celyn didn't spot stabs him successfully. Viepuck drops a sleep spell and takes out that guy, so Celyn, whose patience is also worn thinner than gossamer, teleports off the horse to behind the axe lady and drops her to like two hit points with a single strike, saying with grim cheerfulness something like, "I've had the sort of day where I really want to stab something and I appreciate the volunteering". Robin wheels Greymalkin, targets the bandit who had thrown two knives ... well ... vaguely in his direction, and just obliterates her in a flash of divine rage.
The one bandit left standing turns to Viepuck-as-Gareth, clearly trying to figure out if he's going to help or what, and Viepuck says, "I got a better deal". We try to get her to give more information - Celyn standing there with an excellent 'don't try me again' expression, though I didn't roll intimidation this time (Celyn can only, I think, succeed on intimidation when he has already stabbed someone, look, he's short and blond and looks largely harmless), Robin checking the fallen bandits to see if anyone survived.
Robin, to Celyn, indicating the sleeping bandit who stabbed Celyn: Do you have any objections if I just ... handle this?
Celyn: Not today.
And having found the one survivor, making sure that problem was solved.
Viepuck-as-Gareth claimed he escaped from the jail and left another gang member behind, which the woman is clearly not pleased about, but sort of at 'if it was a choice between abandoning him and just also dying with him I can see why you made that choice' caution around it.
The last one standing notices Viepuck trying to mind probe her, freaks out, flings herself at Robin's feet - after he finished killing her compatriot - to beg him for his mercy and protection from That Apparition The Hag Sent After Her. There is a whole lot of complicated back and forth in which she starts gushing information to go with her vicious bleeding wound, is asked if she knew anything about the child-abduction-and-sacrifice ring that Gareth was involved with that's what Viepuck mostly cares about, and she is very plausibly horrified by the whole idea. Celyn suggests we drag her back to Roland and let him figure out if he wants to take her on or just kill her, since she's being Very Forthcoming at this point, and we do so; Robin wants no particular part of any sort of responsibility for her because he is Just Plain Done with banditry and people being terrible.
She does drop the name of Mim, a member of their gang who did not choose to run, and so we round up Mim and deal with her, and Viepuck helps himself to some of her poisons on the way out. The guy who claimed to have turned state's evidence had actually bribed someone to let people out or something, and was branded and run out of town.
Izgil, upon completing his research on his bracers, appears to have had them meld with his skin. This isn't alarming or anything. We're sure it will be fine.
Also, the party does eventually actually get a night's sleep, which may mean that the peace-loving paladin and the perky optimistic rogue/cleric are a little less fucking stab-happy in the morning, when a messenger arrives from the baroness. (ETA: She has issued a proclamation praising the heroes of Cleenseau for murdering all those pesky fey and calling upon us to come to the capital to get what's coming to us. I wasn't going to include that because we will be recapping it next session but when I said it to someone else it was super funny so I have added it.)
... which is where we will pick up in our next session.
Dramatis Personae:
Izgil, who is mostly engaged in a research project due to player absence
Viepuck, who is intermittently cosplaying a villain
Celyn, who is having a very long day
Robin, who is out of patience
When we left off we had killed the Hag, though there were consequences to doing so.
Mostly Izgil dug us out of the lair though it was easier when he wasn't trying to hide the hole. Also he made sure to mark the area of the potential sinkhole in case of the Hag being a load-bearing boss and her lair collapsing, because we didn't want anyone to fall in and get hurt.
Celyn declared, "I need to go fix my clothes or I will stab someone and we are out of people I can legitimately stab." Celyn's nerves are a little bit frayed given the curse thing and all.
The party troops up to the manor house something like a half hour after Izgil and Robin and Greymalkin had pelted out with a "Take heart!" Celyn immediately stomps upstairs. The people there sort of stare and ask if people are hurt (everyone is visibly injured), and Robin says, "Yes, not repairably" and goes up after Celyn, leaving Viepuck to explain to the lord and his household what's going on. Which is fine; Viepuck does most of the talking anyway.
(For the record: Celyn needed to fix his binder, which has gotten dislodged from proper positioning in the chaos; he and Robin talk out enough of their issues while upstairs that he is much, much more stable coming back down, though still notably short-tempered compared to his usual sunny affability.)
Viepuck, meanwhile, goes up to the sheet of glass set up as panopticon, sticks his tongue out at it, and says, "I can say whatever I want because it's dead neener neener", basically. One of the ladies climbs up on the table to dance; the lord smashes the glass with a chair; general explanations are had. The staff try to feed Viepuck more food because he's so small no matter that we had breakfast here literally less than an hour ago. Robin and Celyn eventually make it back downstairs.
People wander in and out and the news that the Hag is dead starts to spread; we decide that the sensible thing to do is roust out the Captain of the Guard from his drunken stupor, clean him up, and let him feel useful again by going to arrest the ferryman who was in league with the Hag (or at least terrified into exclusively doing her bidding). The guardsman - Roland - asks Robin if he'll come along, and the party makes their way down, though Celyn vanishes into the crowd and moves stealthily because he's of the opinion that someone should be prepared for This Fucker To Do A Runner.
Instead he spots a different fucker, who, when he sees the visible people coming down from the town, clearly starts to sneak down towards the docks, and is stopped by Celyn interposing himself and suggesting that maybe he doesn't want to do that. ("Hi.") After some extensive conversation in which the guy at least pretends to be willing to turn state's evidence for the ferryman's complicity in crimes, we make our way to the docks to find the ferryboat has just pushed off.
When the ferryman mimes being unable to hear people telling him to come back, Celyn - who I will remind is still cranky - goes 'fuck this noise' and teleports into the boat to say "Turn back." The guy puts a hand on his shortsword, to which Celyn growls, "Don't try me."
While the guy tries to decide if tangling with this one guy is worth the effort (it would not have been), Robin achieves hitherto unseen levels of For Fuck's Sake, stomps across the surface of the water (as he currently has the water-walking ring that Viepuck often borrows for shenanigans), grabs the mooring rope off the end of the boat, and drags the damn thing back to shore. The ferryman drops his pole in a feeble attempt to stop this; Celyn adds, "You really don't want to try his patience either."
The ferryman is interrogated. He is sweating bullets about something in it, particularly when Viepuck asks questions about Gareth, the bandit who he had previously impersonated to come across the river. Eventually we troop back up towards the manor with our prisoner and our nominally-not-prisoner in tow; Celyn spots the prisoner trying to pass a message to the other guy and lets people know later. The nominally-not-prisoner has been issued a weird purple scarf - which happens to be Es*tiaslos in disguise - to keep an eye on his behavior because he is clearly a squirrely bastard not to be trusted.
The village, meanwhile, is sort of dissolving into celebration, which is, blessedly, not actually focused on the party so much as 'we're free, hooray!' There are rumors about what people can do - Viepuck is baffled by the idea that he has telekinetic punching abilities but really what does an eldritch blast with knockback look like to the uninformed? There are rumors that Robin destroyed the Hag with holy fire, and rumors that no, no, Celyn did that, and Celyn actually did do that but he is not commenting. He and Robin stick to the edges of things, mostly, while Viepuck does talking, dancing with the teenagers, and so on.
Izgil is diverted out of his research to find the mirror that was being used to run the panopticon; the magic is gone out of it but it's still a nice, saleable mirror, a reflective surface that quality is premium work after all. Then Viepuck spends some time being The World's Most Dedicated Telegraph, contacting our people in various areas and collecting the news.
The news is kind of a lot!
Our friend the Duke has been charged with treason and sentenced to death, and is currently in the process of fleeing the capital with his troops that he brought along because he expected this sort of turn to fall back to Fellburn for a possible civil war. Rosalind, the ruler of Cleenseau, is with him with her forces. They have asked for reinforcements to be sent to Fellburn.
The people we had in the north clearing out the zombies from the caves have more or less finished that mop-up and will thus go to Fellburn. Some of the forces from Cleenseau will go to Fellburn. Rinault is happy to be included in the checkins.
The guy we're supposed to be meeting up with - Raoul the very powerful Night Queen cleric - is also in touch; we originally say we will meet him in Rinburg but when Izgil comes out from his research in an agitated state saying he needs another day, it's the new moon tonight, his fancy new-moon-themed bracers are doing something interesting and he has to understand it, we update that to 'please meet us in Peydon' and get a 'somewhere quiet nearby, I'll let you know'.
Our next crisis of course involves the baroness - who Viepuck has the locket linked to, theoretically, and who could theoretically contact him. At one point in his ongoing nonsense he activates it, says, "Does this thing still work?" and sings the cultural equivalent of 'Baby Shark' at it until he runs out of space in the sending.
Discussion of our next layer of problem (the baroness may be a necromancer, is at least verifiably necromancy-curious, and is hostile to the goddess of Oh No You Didn't Do A Necromancy, Bitch, Don't Make Me Come Down There and her people) has Robin relieved that the problem may in fact be perfectly ordinary necromancy, because, he says, we have done enough dealing with fey problems, maybe it can be someone else's turn, this has cost too much. Celyn is touched by this particular crankiness.
Celyn also conveys the gist of the information the Hag gave him in exchange for his trauma: The Gloomshaper, the boss of these excessive fey problems, made a deal with some other entity to permanently hold the portal in the Cleenseau Wood open for him so that he could go back to his favorite hobby, making mortals miserable in ways he finds funny. The Gloomshaper was apparently betrayed in this deal - fairly recently, mid-January to early February - and it is broken off, but he still thinks he has gleaned enough to hold the portal open himself. With the ritual sacrifice, apparently, of two "special" Tyrwinghans, which was why he was quite so set on abducting Robin (and Celyn). (While he does not need those two in particular for his thing they are particularly potent individuals and also particularly inconvenient ones.)
Robin and Celyn, who have in their discussions agreed that what they really need is a night's sleep and everything will be better in the morning, have gone to bed by the time Viepuck is done being a telegraph. Unfortunately for this plan, Es*tiaslos reports that there has been some chaos in the warehouse that was being used as a temporary jail and everyone is woken up to deal with the fact that the suspect has escaped.
Celyn is cranky enough to actually swear and then add, "... a night's sleep is too much to ask?" with obvious annoyance. Robin, equally annoyed, says, "Apparently it is" and they go off to deal with the damn problem that has, once again, tried their currently-nonexistent patience.
With guidance from Es*tiaslos, light spells in hand, and borrowed horses (aside from Greymalkin), we pursue the crew, reaching them just as they have scattered into hiding. Viepuck has once again disguised himself as Gareth the executed bandit. They are far enough apart that Celyn, who spots three of them, can't meaningfully faerie-fire more than one of them, so he just hucks his light spell stone at the feet of one of them to reveal her to the group, instead.
Robin charges the ferryman and thumps him soundly with a warhammer, as Celyn comments, "I told you you didn't want to try his patience." The lady with the axe he hucked the light at lets out a battlecry and misses Celyn, but the guy with the boar spear that Celyn didn't spot stabs him successfully. Viepuck drops a sleep spell and takes out that guy, so Celyn, whose patience is also worn thinner than gossamer, teleports off the horse to behind the axe lady and drops her to like two hit points with a single strike, saying with grim cheerfulness something like, "I've had the sort of day where I really want to stab something and I appreciate the volunteering". Robin wheels Greymalkin, targets the bandit who had thrown two knives ... well ... vaguely in his direction, and just obliterates her in a flash of divine rage.
The one bandit left standing turns to Viepuck-as-Gareth, clearly trying to figure out if he's going to help or what, and Viepuck says, "I got a better deal". We try to get her to give more information - Celyn standing there with an excellent 'don't try me again' expression, though I didn't roll intimidation this time (Celyn can only, I think, succeed on intimidation when he has already stabbed someone, look, he's short and blond and looks largely harmless), Robin checking the fallen bandits to see if anyone survived.
Robin, to Celyn, indicating the sleeping bandit who stabbed Celyn: Do you have any objections if I just ... handle this?
Celyn: Not today.
And having found the one survivor, making sure that problem was solved.
Viepuck-as-Gareth claimed he escaped from the jail and left another gang member behind, which the woman is clearly not pleased about, but sort of at 'if it was a choice between abandoning him and just also dying with him I can see why you made that choice' caution around it.
The last one standing notices Viepuck trying to mind probe her, freaks out, flings herself at Robin's feet - after he finished killing her compatriot - to beg him for his mercy and protection from That Apparition The Hag Sent After Her. There is a whole lot of complicated back and forth in which she starts gushing information to go with her vicious bleeding wound, is asked if she knew anything about the child-abduction-and-sacrifice ring that Gareth was involved with that's what Viepuck mostly cares about, and she is very plausibly horrified by the whole idea. Celyn suggests we drag her back to Roland and let him figure out if he wants to take her on or just kill her, since she's being Very Forthcoming at this point, and we do so; Robin wants no particular part of any sort of responsibility for her because he is Just Plain Done with banditry and people being terrible.
She does drop the name of Mim, a member of their gang who did not choose to run, and so we round up Mim and deal with her, and Viepuck helps himself to some of her poisons on the way out. The guy who claimed to have turned state's evidence had actually bribed someone to let people out or something, and was branded and run out of town.
Izgil, upon completing his research on his bracers, appears to have had them meld with his skin. This isn't alarming or anything. We're sure it will be fine.
Also, the party does eventually actually get a night's sleep, which may mean that the peace-loving paladin and the perky optimistic rogue/cleric are a little less fucking stab-happy in the morning, when a messenger arrives from the baroness. (ETA: She has issued a proclamation praising the heroes of Cleenseau for murdering all those pesky fey and calling upon us to come to the capital to get what's coming to us. I wasn't going to include that because we will be recapping it next session but when I said it to someone else it was super funny so I have added it.)
... which is where we will pick up in our next session.
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