![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Dramatis Personae:
Viepuck, smart and psychic (and Es*tiaslos, purple and psychic)
Robin, resolute about saving everyone (and Greymalkin, fierce about saving everyone)
Celyn, firm believer in weaponized optimism
Izgil, who is stubborn, smart, and wants to talk about extraplanar nonsense, and whose player had other things going on
When we left off we had departed Celyn's home village on the way to visit the elven kingdom to the southeast.
As we were following a ridgeline because it was much easier going than the tangled forest below us (this area is ... not NOT cursed) we saw the flicker of a campfire. And then it was gone. And then it was back. It was like a strobe in slow motion. So Viepuck sent Es*tiaslos to go look to see what would happen, and got back that there was a camp, and there was danger.
So, like any sensible adventuring party encountering strangers in danger in the not NOT cursed wilderness, we broke and ran that direction. By which I mean: Viepuck cast 'fly' on himself and flew that way, Robin on Greymalkin flew after, and Celyn could run almost fast enough to keep up, leaving poor Izgil stumping along behind in his dwarfy way.
In any case, we saw two people in the camp— a fighter and an archer— who were engaged in combat with what appeared to be a giant semi-amorphous shadow weasel. Or at least, Celyn spotted this when he got close enough. Celyn spotted three weasels and managed to pass that on to Izgil who was being psychic. Robin started out with just the one weasel, but since he could divebomb it into paste that was fine.
Then he was told to DEFEND THE ROPE. (There was a rope half-staked out along one side of the camp, next to a stone cairn and a cookpot over the fire.) Perplexed, he went to DEFEND THE ROPE. Meanwhile the other two shadow weasels leaped out and attacked the rope? So? Sure? One of them also wrecked the cairn.
After some exchanges of violence largely dominated by the fact that Viepuck thinks that things should get smacked around hard enough to get knocked away from stuff like THE ROPE and Celyn and Robin both hit things very vehemently we dispatched the shadow weasels and also Izgil managed to catch up.
Then: the explanation. The two in the camp were survivors of a group of Rangers who had gotten caught in some kind of pocket dimension in which belief can reshape reality and time behaves nonlinearly, and their three compatriots were trapped inside still. They believed that these things— the rope, cookpot, and cairn— were anchors helping them hold the way open, which was a matter of will and intelligence. Izgil buried the rope with magical earthmoving powers to shield it from future giant shadow weasel attacks. They were very impressed by our 'we're going to Orenlas to see about how the trade in dragon parts we cut off the dead dragon turned out' explanation of why we were going to the elf nation. They also wanted to retrieve their compatriots from the void labyrinth, but lacked the manpower.
Fortunately we had a supply of manpower. Izgil remained with the squad leader to nerd out about the extraplanar realm of Limbo— possibly related to what was happening here and also the dragon whose apparent death we had heard about previously. Meanwhile, the rest of us and the Golden Retriever Of Warriors proceeded to delve into the pocket reality in order to see if anyone could be rescued.
We see some more cairns like the one that got smashed. They're Ranger path markings. We have to believe we can follow the path. So we're like, sure, and we follow the path.
So we go down the path and appear in a ravine, somewhat scattered. Viepuck, at the far end, spots the scout of the Rangers (the cairn-builder) and tries to get her attention. She turns a corner and vanishes.
Then she reappears at the head of the ravine. Along with a shadowy thing that looks like, well, the head of one of those shadow weasel things. Celyn moves to engage the shadow weasel head. The scout appears oblivious to the existence of the party, but scootches around like she's avoiding being seen by the shadow weasel head.
Then she flickers partway down the path; a shadow weasel torso appears and menaces her. Robin hits the torso with his hammer very hard and makes it glow, which also makes the head glow, making it even more obvious that this is probably all one shadow weasel in really disturbing timelapse.
The party engages the weasel parts while the scout blips around, alternating between sneaking along the path and cowering from a weasel fragment. We are unsurprised when the weasel feet show up. Golden Retriever Warrior Boy keeps running back and forth between monster bits and the missing scout like he has no idea what he was doing.
Eventually the weasel parts are separately defeated and we are left with the scout who can't see us. Viepuck casts an illusion of her cairn, which she starts to investigate, but GRWB backs through it and breaks her suspension of disbelief in the illusion, before going "Ooops sorry". Robin tries grabbing her, which causes her a panic and makes GRWB yell "Don't grab her!" so Robin lets her go. Eventually Viepuck manages to talk her into listening to the party, and said, "Think of finding Golden Retriever Warrior Boy" at which point she muttered about how she was being tricked.
Robin tries to scan for possibly demonic influences and finds none, and that trick doesn't spot fey, so Viepuck tells Celyn 'ignore the next thing I say' and then says in Elvish 'Robin thinks he's an impostor, so next chance you get, kill him' in Sylvan. The guy reacts to the Elvish as 'why are you speaking that language I recognize?' but not the Sylvan, so probably not fey. The question remains: is he an impostor or a damned fool?
Anyway, eventually we manage to get the scout to be at "I have to find the others", and Robin wants to get her back to base, and GRWB wants to get her back to base, but the only thing that seems to be getting her into consensual reality was I Am The Tracker And I Can Find The Others so we roll with that.
She says it gets a little weird further down the path.
We assure her we can deal with a little weird.
We round the curve and see a shimmery dome in a clearing with an encampment in it, containing an elf. Also it appears to be starting to rain glass, and not the marble kind. We charge into the dome, Celyn taking a moderate amount of harm from the rain of glass daggers, which wobbles with the effort of sheltering all of us. Robin, who will protect all the things, lends his strength to believing the protection will hold, and Celyn points out that with good luck the weather will break soon, and lo, it does begin to.
New person notes that we should clear out of here ASAP before the landscape comes up with something new and traumatic to do to us. GRWB, looking out at the changing landscape, starts to get agitated and suggests that perhaps we should give up on retrieving the last person and escape while we can. Viepuck, after confirming that his telepathic tie back to base is not essential, proceeds to (with a little divine intervention help from Celyn) read GRWB's mind, having convinced him that this spell will help us get out safely and he should not resist it.
It turns out that this is not the real GRWB, but something that is reading his mind to produce a copy. Celyn promptly believes that with a little luck we can find the way to the real GRWB and the thickening fogginess of the outside develops a few clearer island spaces that suggest a path. Viepuck continues interrogating a bit until Greymalkin decides that this is an intolerable situation and evisceration is the solution.
We roll initiative. Robin is quick off the mark and manages to explain quickly how this guy is clearly a fake GRWB, so that we don't have to deal with his allies being alarmed. They, however, note they can't do anything other than hold the shelter steady against what appears to be the air outside turning into something with the consistency of unbreathably sticky toffee.
Viepuck promptly punts the fake GRWB out of the side of the shelter, where he sinks halfway into the air toffee and gets stuck. Celyn, who had been on team 'let's get the fuck out of here' originally, goes "Okay I guess it's stabby time while the guy's immobilized" and proceeds to stab. GRWB-monster gives everyone a massive headache and particularly vindictively stabs Viepuck in the brain with psychic powers because, you know, Viepuck was the one reading his mind.
Generalized chaos ensues but eventually the fake is beaten down and turns into a grey, slightly malformed corpse of a department store mannequin. Unfortunately, Celyn's way out faded out because he was thinking about stabbing rather than getting out (and for a bit there was thinking about how he needed to heal himself because his eyes were bleeding from psychic damage).
Outside the ground is sparking like it's about to catch fire.
Viepuck goes, "Wait. This is a mental madness-and-thought-control construct realm, right?"
"Right?" says the GM.
"I MIND PROBE IT."
At which point the GM had to sit there for a minute to figure out what magically connecting Curious Chthulhu Looks At The Material Plane to a brainwarping eldritch hell labyrinth dimension would do.
Celyn works on re-establishing the passage towards Real GRWB because he found it once, he can find it again, the power of eternal optimism is how he survives madness under normal circumstances. In this he is assisted by Es*tiaslos, which has reacted to the connection of Viepuck's patron with this location by suddenly going through a variety of unfamiliar morphs, then spinning around and barfing water like an audition for The Exorcist, in a manner that primarily clears a path through the proto-fire right along the way that Celyn was sure we had to go anyway.
We leave the Zone of Weird, and find a campsite containing a very confused GRWB and the dead-long-enough-to-be-cold corpse of the remaining Ranger, who has no marks or injuries on her and thus was clearly killed by psychic damage such as was caused by fake-GRWB-the-Grey/Auton-hybrid. It is dark and unpleasant and we need to get out, so Robin pulls out his magic lantern to provide guidance, and Celyn lights up a pebble from his pocket because honestly Celyn never turns down an opportunity to light up a pebble from his pocket, that's why he has a pocket full of pebbles. After a few rounds of "what happened?" "STORY TIME OUTSIDE", "where'd you get that lantern?" "STORY TIME OUTSIDE", "Did someone give it to you?" "STORY TIME OUTSIDE" we proceed to pick up the deceased and start hiking back out of the labyrinth.
This entails crossing the Weirdness Zone which we accomplish with further weaponized optimism, general belief that we are getting the fuck out of here, and Viepuck backing that up by casting a nice illusion of a clear path in a plausible direction.
This dumps us back in the ravine, which has turned into a four-way exit with presumably three certain deaths and lacks any doorguards for us to ask "Which door would he say we should go through?" of. The scout looks around and says "Well that way's clearly not it" and when asked about it notes off like seventeen tells for it being some kind of illusion. Then she and Celyn and Greymalkin poke around and via tracks eliminate one of the others, leaving us with the original time-space-Möbius ravine to deal with.
At which point I go "We're down to an either-or choice and I have a second list spell left" so Celyn asks his god, "Is that way a good way to go" and gets the answer "FUCK NO" so we go the other way and leave the labyrinth. The space collapses behind us and the already rather battered-by-combat campsite promptly ages about half a year.
We flop down and get some storytelling time— Robin's lantern had belonged to a hero that GRWB actually knew the story of so we get some more backstory in play, hence the "what are you doing with that thing?" stallout— as well as some advice for how to enter elven lands safely, which includes "be honest with the trees".
Robin is at "That will not be a problem, I am very forthright."
Celyn is at "That will not be a problem, I am not forthright at all but I'm honest."
Viepuck, smart and psychic (and Es*tiaslos, purple and psychic)
Robin, resolute about saving everyone (and Greymalkin, fierce about saving everyone)
Celyn, firm believer in weaponized optimism
Izgil, who is stubborn, smart, and wants to talk about extraplanar nonsense, and whose player had other things going on
When we left off we had departed Celyn's home village on the way to visit the elven kingdom to the southeast.
As we were following a ridgeline because it was much easier going than the tangled forest below us (this area is ... not NOT cursed) we saw the flicker of a campfire. And then it was gone. And then it was back. It was like a strobe in slow motion. So Viepuck sent Es*tiaslos to go look to see what would happen, and got back that there was a camp, and there was danger.
So, like any sensible adventuring party encountering strangers in danger in the not NOT cursed wilderness, we broke and ran that direction. By which I mean: Viepuck cast 'fly' on himself and flew that way, Robin on Greymalkin flew after, and Celyn could run almost fast enough to keep up, leaving poor Izgil stumping along behind in his dwarfy way.
In any case, we saw two people in the camp— a fighter and an archer— who were engaged in combat with what appeared to be a giant semi-amorphous shadow weasel. Or at least, Celyn spotted this when he got close enough. Celyn spotted three weasels and managed to pass that on to Izgil who was being psychic. Robin started out with just the one weasel, but since he could divebomb it into paste that was fine.
Then he was told to DEFEND THE ROPE. (There was a rope half-staked out along one side of the camp, next to a stone cairn and a cookpot over the fire.) Perplexed, he went to DEFEND THE ROPE. Meanwhile the other two shadow weasels leaped out and attacked the rope? So? Sure? One of them also wrecked the cairn.
After some exchanges of violence largely dominated by the fact that Viepuck thinks that things should get smacked around hard enough to get knocked away from stuff like THE ROPE and Celyn and Robin both hit things very vehemently we dispatched the shadow weasels and also Izgil managed to catch up.
Then: the explanation. The two in the camp were survivors of a group of Rangers who had gotten caught in some kind of pocket dimension in which belief can reshape reality and time behaves nonlinearly, and their three compatriots were trapped inside still. They believed that these things— the rope, cookpot, and cairn— were anchors helping them hold the way open, which was a matter of will and intelligence. Izgil buried the rope with magical earthmoving powers to shield it from future giant shadow weasel attacks. They were very impressed by our 'we're going to Orenlas to see about how the trade in dragon parts we cut off the dead dragon turned out' explanation of why we were going to the elf nation. They also wanted to retrieve their compatriots from the void labyrinth, but lacked the manpower.
Fortunately we had a supply of manpower. Izgil remained with the squad leader to nerd out about the extraplanar realm of Limbo— possibly related to what was happening here and also the dragon whose apparent death we had heard about previously. Meanwhile, the rest of us and the Golden Retriever Of Warriors proceeded to delve into the pocket reality in order to see if anyone could be rescued.
We see some more cairns like the one that got smashed. They're Ranger path markings. We have to believe we can follow the path. So we're like, sure, and we follow the path.
So we go down the path and appear in a ravine, somewhat scattered. Viepuck, at the far end, spots the scout of the Rangers (the cairn-builder) and tries to get her attention. She turns a corner and vanishes.
Then she reappears at the head of the ravine. Along with a shadowy thing that looks like, well, the head of one of those shadow weasel things. Celyn moves to engage the shadow weasel head. The scout appears oblivious to the existence of the party, but scootches around like she's avoiding being seen by the shadow weasel head.
Then she flickers partway down the path; a shadow weasel torso appears and menaces her. Robin hits the torso with his hammer very hard and makes it glow, which also makes the head glow, making it even more obvious that this is probably all one shadow weasel in really disturbing timelapse.
The party engages the weasel parts while the scout blips around, alternating between sneaking along the path and cowering from a weasel fragment. We are unsurprised when the weasel feet show up. Golden Retriever Warrior Boy keeps running back and forth between monster bits and the missing scout like he has no idea what he was doing.
Eventually the weasel parts are separately defeated and we are left with the scout who can't see us. Viepuck casts an illusion of her cairn, which she starts to investigate, but GRWB backs through it and breaks her suspension of disbelief in the illusion, before going "Ooops sorry". Robin tries grabbing her, which causes her a panic and makes GRWB yell "Don't grab her!" so Robin lets her go. Eventually Viepuck manages to talk her into listening to the party, and said, "Think of finding Golden Retriever Warrior Boy" at which point she muttered about how she was being tricked.
Robin tries to scan for possibly demonic influences and finds none, and that trick doesn't spot fey, so Viepuck tells Celyn 'ignore the next thing I say' and then says in Elvish 'Robin thinks he's an impostor, so next chance you get, kill him' in Sylvan. The guy reacts to the Elvish as 'why are you speaking that language I recognize?' but not the Sylvan, so probably not fey. The question remains: is he an impostor or a damned fool?
Anyway, eventually we manage to get the scout to be at "I have to find the others", and Robin wants to get her back to base, and GRWB wants to get her back to base, but the only thing that seems to be getting her into consensual reality was I Am The Tracker And I Can Find The Others so we roll with that.
She says it gets a little weird further down the path.
We assure her we can deal with a little weird.
We round the curve and see a shimmery dome in a clearing with an encampment in it, containing an elf. Also it appears to be starting to rain glass, and not the marble kind. We charge into the dome, Celyn taking a moderate amount of harm from the rain of glass daggers, which wobbles with the effort of sheltering all of us. Robin, who will protect all the things, lends his strength to believing the protection will hold, and Celyn points out that with good luck the weather will break soon, and lo, it does begin to.
New person notes that we should clear out of here ASAP before the landscape comes up with something new and traumatic to do to us. GRWB, looking out at the changing landscape, starts to get agitated and suggests that perhaps we should give up on retrieving the last person and escape while we can. Viepuck, after confirming that his telepathic tie back to base is not essential, proceeds to (with a little divine intervention help from Celyn) read GRWB's mind, having convinced him that this spell will help us get out safely and he should not resist it.
It turns out that this is not the real GRWB, but something that is reading his mind to produce a copy. Celyn promptly believes that with a little luck we can find the way to the real GRWB and the thickening fogginess of the outside develops a few clearer island spaces that suggest a path. Viepuck continues interrogating a bit until Greymalkin decides that this is an intolerable situation and evisceration is the solution.
We roll initiative. Robin is quick off the mark and manages to explain quickly how this guy is clearly a fake GRWB, so that we don't have to deal with his allies being alarmed. They, however, note they can't do anything other than hold the shelter steady against what appears to be the air outside turning into something with the consistency of unbreathably sticky toffee.
Viepuck promptly punts the fake GRWB out of the side of the shelter, where he sinks halfway into the air toffee and gets stuck. Celyn, who had been on team 'let's get the fuck out of here' originally, goes "Okay I guess it's stabby time while the guy's immobilized" and proceeds to stab. GRWB-monster gives everyone a massive headache and particularly vindictively stabs Viepuck in the brain with psychic powers because, you know, Viepuck was the one reading his mind.
Generalized chaos ensues but eventually the fake is beaten down and turns into a grey, slightly malformed corpse of a department store mannequin. Unfortunately, Celyn's way out faded out because he was thinking about stabbing rather than getting out (and for a bit there was thinking about how he needed to heal himself because his eyes were bleeding from psychic damage).
Outside the ground is sparking like it's about to catch fire.
Viepuck goes, "Wait. This is a mental madness-and-thought-control construct realm, right?"
"Right?" says the GM.
"I MIND PROBE IT."
At which point the GM had to sit there for a minute to figure out what magically connecting Curious Chthulhu Looks At The Material Plane to a brainwarping eldritch hell labyrinth dimension would do.
Celyn works on re-establishing the passage towards Real GRWB because he found it once, he can find it again, the power of eternal optimism is how he survives madness under normal circumstances. In this he is assisted by Es*tiaslos, which has reacted to the connection of Viepuck's patron with this location by suddenly going through a variety of unfamiliar morphs, then spinning around and barfing water like an audition for The Exorcist, in a manner that primarily clears a path through the proto-fire right along the way that Celyn was sure we had to go anyway.
We leave the Zone of Weird, and find a campsite containing a very confused GRWB and the dead-long-enough-to-be-cold corpse of the remaining Ranger, who has no marks or injuries on her and thus was clearly killed by psychic damage such as was caused by fake-GRWB-the-Grey/Auton-hybrid. It is dark and unpleasant and we need to get out, so Robin pulls out his magic lantern to provide guidance, and Celyn lights up a pebble from his pocket because honestly Celyn never turns down an opportunity to light up a pebble from his pocket, that's why he has a pocket full of pebbles. After a few rounds of "what happened?" "STORY TIME OUTSIDE", "where'd you get that lantern?" "STORY TIME OUTSIDE", "Did someone give it to you?" "STORY TIME OUTSIDE" we proceed to pick up the deceased and start hiking back out of the labyrinth.
This entails crossing the Weirdness Zone which we accomplish with further weaponized optimism, general belief that we are getting the fuck out of here, and Viepuck backing that up by casting a nice illusion of a clear path in a plausible direction.
This dumps us back in the ravine, which has turned into a four-way exit with presumably three certain deaths and lacks any doorguards for us to ask "Which door would he say we should go through?" of. The scout looks around and says "Well that way's clearly not it" and when asked about it notes off like seventeen tells for it being some kind of illusion. Then she and Celyn and Greymalkin poke around and via tracks eliminate one of the others, leaving us with the original time-space-Möbius ravine to deal with.
At which point I go "We're down to an either-or choice and I have a second list spell left" so Celyn asks his god, "Is that way a good way to go" and gets the answer "FUCK NO" so we go the other way and leave the labyrinth. The space collapses behind us and the already rather battered-by-combat campsite promptly ages about half a year.
We flop down and get some storytelling time— Robin's lantern had belonged to a hero that GRWB actually knew the story of so we get some more backstory in play, hence the "what are you doing with that thing?" stallout— as well as some advice for how to enter elven lands safely, which includes "be honest with the trees".
Robin is at "That will not be a problem, I am very forthright."
Celyn is at "That will not be a problem, I am not forthright at all but I'm honest."
From:
no subject
Took me three tries to not read "weaponized opossum".
There is allegedly a Finnish cookbook with a title that translates something like "With proper preparation, many can endure a diet of boiled weasels." I expect this is apocryphal but I was reminded of it by this account.
From:
no subject
His familiar is a raven/weasel minigryphon, though, vastly more weaponizable. (She did not have opinions about the shadow weasels, however, aside from them not being up to her standards of fun.)
From:
no subject
I find myself wondering whether your GM had recently read Jo Walton's Everybody's Perfect.
From:
no subject
He was just riffing https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Limbo.