From Flannery, with love in the Demon Wastes

Off we fly toward another Eye. But I cannot be bothered with these things at the moment. All the lovely alchemical tidbits I found and liberated from that vile bastard of a wizard's clutches needed love and attention. That I fully intended to give them. Yet, I missed so much! Our warforged, who I have decided to call "Waffles" instead of W.F., somehow had babies.... don't ask me! I wasn't there! I don't know how this happened or why! And gods be blasted if I would rather have been there to document this strange event than with my eyes glued to magnifying glass and chemical compositions.
It's sulpherous!
Something splatted into our ship and Thunk the idiotic druid from the pit of morons decided to reincarnate it. To be fair I was actually quite impressed with his confidence and go-to attitude. However, wiping your finger across a goo covered deck, sniffing said goo on said finger, then declaring: "I wonder what this was." Before reincarnating it is actually quite stupid. Quite. If it were an Irfreet or Dragon or Roc or any other infantile creature we'd have more trouble and damage than our curiosity was worth.
Luck held out for the brainless bean bottle; the man, who is now a Dwarf thanks to the strange realm of divine magical quirks, was a wizard by the name of Clive Icarus. He is also an idiot and told of spells that could revolutionize travel, blaming some one for taking out the landing portion of the spell that had killed him when he, I'm most certain, was the one who forgot to put it in the spell to begin with. Idiot. It's probably his face that makes him stupid. When one is as symmetrical of look as he one can afford to be daft. Well he's Slash's problem now, not mine. And gods help him if the half orc ever loses her reign on him... I will turn his blood to acid in his veins if he gets in our way. Hehe.

We find ourselves in the Demon Wastes. A scarred and torched land worthy of such an unpleasant name. Though I'm beginning to wonder about our employers. What do they hope to accomplish by gathering these Eyes of the Tirant, little more than beholder eye stalks turned wand, and should they prove dastardly in intention how could we hope to overcome such strange power? I suppose those are thoughts for later.

No one knows what they are doing. In a dungeon such as the one we just departed there needs to be a clear line of thought, reason, perhaps even a touch of logic. But no, a perfectly round hole in the wall sends Slash and Won into fits. Slash is certain that we should be wary of a Beholder and Won.... well I honestly don't know what Won thinks. He's on a different plane of existence from the rest of the universe. He pulls me into the tunnel and wants me to make acid. Then he wants me to light his torch, hold a rope, throw a sun rod down the perfectly smooth, odd, tunnel that's 10 feet off the ground. As fascinating as it is I know that there are orbs of annihilation floating near by, and they are just as perfectly round as this tunnel. My curiosity is quite capable of being overridden by my self preservation. When Won asked me to throw oil of impact down the tunnel I couldn't help but scream "NO!" and leave him there to kill himself. I used Thunk's giant bear face to climb out of the tunnel before Won did something stupid enough to kill himself and me if I were too close.

Unsmelted silver abounds, ready to be hauled away, probably gathered by the gnome and the lizard man called 'Sam', though being absorbed in fairly important research and development of my own I can't imagine why they would do such a thing, or why the were here in the first place.
Thunk thinks the silver is Tuna. Which is fine as long as he allows me to measure  how much he eats so I can figure the ratio for turning one's skin blue.
While I'm measuring the silver and dreaming of the alchemical possibilities Slash opens a door and nearly burns herself to death. Afterwards Thunk practically throws himself down the stairs on the other side. I'm flabbergast that he's alive still. Not long after he disappears there's a thundering crack of sound followed by unearthly screams. I do not doubt that he's tripped another trap.
With some care, but mostly haste, the rest of us follow after the stupid, stupid, druid. On our way the screams stop. A long hall opens into a small room filled with doors, and shreds of some fungal substance covered in goo. Spent runes mar the wall opposite the door. So the crack was lightning; I deduce by the smell of ozone in the room. Surprisingly enough the cat form druid is whole; singed, bleeding from his ears, but whole. All the doors are locked with magic locks. From the way Slash is laying into one of the doors with an axe and not getting anywhere I believe they're probably bespelled in many more ways. Self healing, force wall... wait... force wall?
We all watch in stupified horror as the doors hinges are depinned, the door removed by a gnome, and then replaced while he laughs at us from the other side. Thunk goes at the wall of force and only manages to slam into it and slide down leaving a blood trail and a screeching noise that makes me cringe.
It's time to think around the box.
While everyone is blustering, well mostly Bitterbrew is blustering, I decide to blow up the wall around the door... I will never admit that Won, the strange korean monk, gave me the idea when he started to attack the stone around his door rather than his door.
My companions seem to be getting wiser. They clear out of the little room when they notice that I'm laying explosives.With a bang and a cloud of dust the wall gives way to a simple room. It looks like it may have been Sam's room. A sword and a bow are flung to the floor under a weapon rack my explosion managed to mangle slightly, those might be worth something. Beside it is what looks like a scraping pit. A simple bed and dresser and another door. Thunk announces that "Medusa's live here!"
Bord I go to see if I can reverse engineer the magic on any of the other doors.

Thunk and the others go through the secondary door in the small suite. I imagine it was quite a sight, before Slash started feathering her hoard by cutting down the crystal beads that hung from the ceiling. Vaguely I remember Thunk yelling something like: "Beads of Delayed FireBall?! I GOT DIS!" but seeing as how he can't tell Silver from Tuna it's easy to ignore anything he shouts at the loudest decibel possible.
I can easily imagine how they found the ice giant demi-god.
Thunk rushed in with his overconfident idiocy. Probably threw the door open with a triumphant "Ha ha!" then froze in his tracks at the sight of the massive form in front of him. We all remember the Oni. Slash more than the rest of us seeing as how she was literally decapitated for an instant before Bitterbrew's magic took effect. He's a blustery pimple of a being, but the stocky squalor face is a damned decent healer.
The giant must've thrown his mace at the poor door while Thunk was trying to shut it, otherwise I don't think he would've turned Direbear to face the thing. The booming voice announcing "Not Again." was hard to miss. I was told later that the giant had spoken to the fire elemental sealed inside Thunk's spine and it had power over it.
Of course I was called in by the time Bitterbrew was making groundless threats. "Better be clarifying yourself or I'll go through yer eye!" In his grouchy brogue. Thunk is conflicted, from the looks of him he's been well healed. Taking it for granted I took over command and told Bitterbrew to shut his face, half the ship is mine, and the giant will owe us something for letting him out of his prison. By the symbol on the ceiling and the wax solidifying around the door jam that wreaked of burning blood I could deduce as much. The dwarf butted out and the giant used his strange powers to make the gnome everyone hated for reasons beyond me get the Eye we were searching for. Nice, sweet, simple.
The giant gave Slash a coin the size of a dinner plate with his name scrawled on it in lovely dwarven lettering. "Ulric Skyson" whether or not we'll have to pay for letting him free will be attended to when the matter arises. For now whatever was drawing power from him with a blood seal has been stunted energy and I feel confident about that for some reason.
A classic argument starts up as soon as we get to the top of the stairs. No one knows how to work the boom, people are arguing about how to call the ship to our location, Ulric tells us we don't have much time since he's going to make sure there's nothing left of his prison. Again I save the others from their less than adequate wit and work the boom myself while Bitterbrew signals our capable captain.
Our Gnoll, 2 Ears, killed Sam the Lizard man. I'm pretty sure I'll smell rot before the body is done with. Poor Sam.
As we streak away we hear Ulric booming and angry voice. "I'm making a point. I WILL NEVER BE IMPRISONED AGAIN!!!!" With a shattering of ice crystals throwing a rainbow explosion into the air the place was gone. Leaving the Demon Wastes the ship took a balista bolt to it's hull. The 'doorf' is bent out of shape about it. But it's minor. I have other things to busy myself with. Other, more important things.

Hostile Territory

Geno's soul is being held hostage till the Sheildless can obtain the last item for the weird chaos thing that popped out of his sword a couple weeks ago. That item is in a place of 'untold' danger; the bahazaine crater. Where our dragon borne friend Kragon is from, where he can't go back to but took us to anyways to help out our friend.
Without event we hiked up and down mountains, Kragon holding a burning stick that would keep all the baddies off of us the entire way.
At long last we found ourselves in front of the BloodTalon clan's fortress thing. Kragon goes up and knocks on the door, gets knocked out, and dragged into the fortress while a whole legion of dragons and draco hounds (like rancor dogs) come pouring out. The rest of the team stared wide eyed and warred with themselves and each other over going in to the fray and saving Kragon or running. The incense stops burning and there's a bone chilling howl right before a hawk sized wyvern find us and starts spewing fire into the air to alert the dragons of our position.

Yeah we ran.

Ran straight into a herd of wild boar. Ran straight into the thick sticky mud of a river filled with crocodiles. Ran towards the more familiar parts of the jungle and maybe back to White Cliff to get the help of Tacit's aunt.

Then Verdant heard some women calling for help and had to run off and be hero. Idiot. Zii told him not to go, Kragon was their first priority after staying alive, but Mr. Knight-in-dented-armor had to go and save the day.
Turns out Zii was right. They were evil man eating dryads. The party got wrapped up in thorny vines and nearly killed till Eratar (who was the Sheriff from Dead's End in our campaign with Shawn and Missy) shows up and does his minotaurly awesome head bashing.
With a little persuasion, and Tacit's cute 16 year old puppy eyes, Eratar is going to help us find and rescue Kragon. Sweet.

Now we just have to come up with a plan.

Salty Dogs: Vol III The Final Chapter

In preparation of moving Jex has tried to get our DD4e campaign to a good stopping point. So we've had two really good, long, sessions with Missy and Shaun recently. Hopefully tonight or tomorrow we'll get to play World of Darkness... but I won't get my hopes up.

Here's the ending to our little story.

The dice were against us! They were! Rolling everything under a four during an entire encounter is proof enough for me. I started counting on failing and only using my one invigorating fighter power (crushing surge) so that I could get what we've dubbed "bubble points" (they're temporary life points/hit points).

The story though is actually pretty sweet.

While Mara is dragging the NPC Zeni across the dirt road of Dead's End the Bard Aard (Shaun) is freaking out, the Halfling we met in town (Missy) isn't quite sure what to do, so she starts locking the doors on Zeni's side of the town so that maybe she'll have to go to the Sheriff's office. Well then Aard tells Mara telepathically to 'trust him' and attacks her, pushing her 5 spaces away and breaking her hold on Zeni. He tries to play good cop bad cop but it doesn't work. Mara's pissed but she decides to try the whole diplomacy thing. Mara and Zeni have the same personality according to Aard the Shard Bard so when Mara almost talked Zeni to their side (mara has a -1 to diplomacy btw) everyone was really surprised. But that fell through. We kept going back and forth between trying to be diplomatic and trying to knock the crap out of the NPC. Zeni was so bent on beating Mara even once the encounter was kind of over and she found the door was locked she chased her and stabbed her in the back.

In response Mara stomps across the street the flings open the door to the armor shop, which connects to the general store who's door was locked. There on the other side stood Casey in all her 3 foot tall glory. Heavily armored Mara was more than enough to conceal the little Rogue. Mara told Casey to run before turning and flinging her arm at the open portal. "There! Go through and unlock your freaking door, it's not like there's people clamoring to buy your shiz. Leave me the hell alone!"

Zeni stomps passed her and says: "If I see anything amiss I'm coming after you."

"Whatever." Mara huffs and starts to walk away.

Well, the Bard had used his 'shard swarm' teleporting power to get into the general store (and Shaun's so good at NOT metagaming that he kept his knowledge that the fight was over between Mara and Zeni out of his character's head) and in an attempt at drawing attention away from Mara he breaks the window. Upon hearing the window break Mara face palms and Zeni comes after her.

Luckily, Casey and another NPC who looks like he could be Mara's brother, Telecor, are able to get Zeni off of Mara, who at this point is literally at 1Hit Point. After everyone decided to beat the crap out of Zeni she went down fairly easily. They brought her into the Sheriff's office and were like, BLEH!

Clide, the deputy that's been keeping the towns people from dying of the plague, asks the group if they'd be trusted with a secret. My character is like "no." Hooray for Shaun's Bard being all persuasive and stuff. In the end they all go down and the Sheriff is all chained up in a cell. He asks the group to be deputies and they're like "sure, why not." Except for Mara, who does NOT want to stay there and is like "Meh, let me sleep on it." They get locked in the cells and talk it over a little and then decide that it'd be a good thing to do. Hearing a noise Casey unlocks the cells and they all go searching for the noise, but don't find it.

The next morning they wake to the Sheriff (who's a big minotaur) all chained up with an apparatus in front of him that has 4 ropes, a frame, all attached to a sword. Clide tells us that all we have to do to be Deputies is kill the Sheriff. Everyone's like "Okay." Except Mara, who doesn't like it because the Sheriff is asleep. She tells everyone that she'll kill him if his eyes are open, but she's not an assassin. Clide won't wake him up. Mara won't kill the Sheriff if he's out like a light. So, she says. "Fine, the rest of you kill him, Clide lock me up down here till this stupid plague finishes me off. Whatever. But I won't kill a sleeping man!"

This is not good enough for Clide. Who then locks us all up and leaves. Then Shaden shows up and is all like "you guys are stupid. You should've killed the Sheriff. blah blah, i'm a dick, blah."

Aard 'victim of the faewild's Casey and Mara so that we surround Shaden and we try to kill him. But he goes all shadowy on us and gets away. Another smoke bomb gets dropped in and Mara can't get the trap door open even though she cracks the wood.

When they awake with an even nastier headache than before, a progressed plague, yay -4 to all rolls; no one is happy and all the locks are jammed so Casey can't work her magic. Out of nowhere the armless asian man from the infirmary shows up and gives us hall packages of nasty bread and water while saying: "I'm sorry my friends to see you so down, perhaps what I have to give you will lift you out of your sorrows. I'm sorry the only silverware I could find was a butter knife." When he leaves and everyone opens their pouches Mara's like "Yes! yes Yeeeesss! * Maniacal laughter*" Inside there's a crude, thick, kind of metal bar/flat head screw driver. And Mara knows exactly what to do with it. She excitedly tells the Bard (who was expecting magic levitation bread or something) to use it to get the pins out of the jail door so they can escape.

The Sheriff wakes up and asks what's going on. The Bard, who loves a melodrama, tells him. The Sheriff, with the aid of his creepy spirit falcon, gets us out then we all go searching for Clide. We find one of the missing guys in the rubble of the lower end of town. Keep searching, then find Clide fighting with the nasty tempered bar keep. Aard just loves his 'victim of the faewild' ability and teleports Casey and Mara to either side of him. But Clide gets away, not before Jex can throw in 'I shot the Sheriff, but I didn't shoot the deputy' to call Shaden to the fray out of nowhere.

We pummel Shaden, take a quick breather because in the process of pummelling him we used up most of our special powers and lost one of our party. After taking Telecor to the infirmary Jex called 'the low beds' we take off after Clide in a surprisingly tactical manner, considering our group's history of 'let's kill it!'

Casey is being all sneaky sneaky in the dark. Mara is trying to be. Everyone gets to an upper room above the stalls and Mara uncovers her Sun Rod. THERE! Right next to her is Clide he starts to say something like "finally you fools have~" and Mara is like "Gah!" and hits him in the face with the Sun Rod. Being as how Sun Rod's turn on and off via tapping the light goes out and everyone's confused. The Sheriff throws his Sun Rod in a corner, yay, now we can see.

Then we fight Clide, who not only likes to hit Mara and only Mara, but also has a whirlwind vortex of fail around him that keeps us from doing much damage.

He's near his end and says something like: "This isn't over." And jumps out the window only to be knocked flat by the creepy spirit bird.

Mara runs out to see if he's dead or not. She can't really tell until he says her name. She leans down to give him a few choice words before smashing his head in but he tells her about the cure for the plague and that he was really the one behind everything and gives her a message to tell the Sheriff. She says she'll fix everything for him. Suddenly he asks about a Scepter, if she's had any visions about one. When she says no he tells her not to touch it that he has a feeling it's... and the Sheriff's boot crushes his face and kills him.

Mara bolts up and is all indignant. "What the hell was that for, he was telling me stuff."

"We have no more need for his lies." The Sheriff replies.

Mara gets in his face and stabs him in the center of his chest with a finger. "You could use a little more mercy, and a lot more tact."

They all go to the Sheriff's office and Mara tells them about the cure. After a few misconceptions and a lot of character interaction Mara finally finishes the brew and drinks some.

It tastes like mint, then butt, then rancid butt, then back to a nice mint. Mara then takes some to Telecor, because her companions don't trust her alchemical skillz. The Sheriff is all like "meh, you're wasting your time." and Mara's all like "I didn't ask you!"

Everyone gets better, the bad tempered bar tender is suspicious, and now our little group can go one of twenty differing ways. Damn.

Mara goes back to the Sheriff and tells him what Clide said: "About acting on Faith despite all opposition." and it gets all emotional. Mara then leaves and proudly announces to the Bard that he should be proud of her because she made it through something emotional without making fart noises. All is well in Dead's End, and now, we have the world before us.

Sweet.