Session 27: Recap and the Take

Session 27: Recap and the Take

The last three sessions saw a return to old locales and earlier foes. Within the Temple of the Archons, they opened a portal in the shrine to Azmarane, Spinner of the Skeins of Fate. This took the party to an altar deep in the lair of the Weaver of Shadows, a bulbous spiderlike entity that inhabits the chasm in the Ruins of the Inquisitor’s Theater—the very first dungeon of the campaign. This being had the power to manipulate planar “webs”, potent magical artifacts, to produce potentially endless streams of murderous shadow puppets. It had defeated the party much earlier in the campaign.

The new angle provided by the portal gave them the jump on the thing, putting them in close proximity with it in its lair, largely negating its power to hover back and release hordes of shadow puppets to do its fighting for it. They slew the thing, and then spent two sessions hauling out the two planar webs with the help of mules, huge items of potent magic.

They had to leave one for a while in the dungeon, since it was too big to get through the door. During that time, it was chewed through by White Swine—the very first monsters faced in the campaign. The white swine seem to be reestablishing a lair in the burned out theater, where Chris Kutalik  Zak Sabbath Michael Wentzloff  and Joshua Blackketter  fought and slew the great Sow Mother in the very first session of the campaign. (This resulted in the very first PC death as well.)

The white swine’s gustatory contact with the web had produced shadow infected swine, capable of retching out streams of porcine hieronymous bosch-like shadow monstrosities. Through a (somewhat) tense tactical combat, the party was able to hold the monstrosities at bay, and haul the large web out after applying indirect heat to it sufficient to twist it up into a smaller form.

Having successfully extricated the webs, the party cooled its heels in Rastingdrung, while their patron, the child witch Adrianna completed her investigations. After a week of feverish work, she is bleary eyed and practically delirious when she speaks with the group.

She tells you that the essence of the demon of Kolail, taken from the True Temple of Vulgatis is virulent indeed. No doubt it has myriad potential uses in the weaving of powerful enchantments. But what Adrianna can manage now is to make 2 potions of Omnipotent Sensation. This grants the imbiber the following powers for 1d6 turns: infravision, detect magic, detect invisibility, detect alignment, detect good, detect evil, ESP, Clairvoyance, Clairaudience, Clairolfaction (remote smelling), Clairtangence (remote touching), and Clairgustance (remote tasting). The imbiber of the potion is at a -4 to all rolls during the duration of this sensory overload. This process is expensive, and the potions will cost 1000 GP each.

The small Planar Web is, as the party has known since Tim Other 's character first investigated, an artifact through the manipulation of which, shadow entities can be summoned. It's magic is intact, and she is willing to pay exorbitantly for it. She is not sure she can master its magic, but it could provide the key to her victory in the Trial of the Apprentices 6 weeks hence at the Festival of the Sybarites.

The larger Planar Web is mangled, and distorted. Its magic is unstable, and possibly dangerous. She will pay for this and the corpse of the shadow infected swine as well. She hopes that its substance may provide the basis for further experiments.

2 White Swine 20 XP
2 Infected Swine 100XP
20 Shadow Swine 100 XP
2 White Swine corpses sold at inflated prices 1500 GP
Small Arcane Web intact 9000 GP
Large Arcane Web, chewed on and twisted up 4000 GP

XP and GP is complicated, as we had play over three sessions with 6 PCs and 2 XP earning NPCs. So I've broken it down into 3 categories below.

Chris P.  Aleksandr Revzin  Eric Boyd 
XP: 2982
GP: 2933

cole long  Joshua Blackketter 
XP: 1300
GP: 1300

Gus L 
XP: 1682
GP: 1633