Post by brumguvnor on Aug 9, 2019 15:30:37 GMT
We are introduced to our cast of heroes in a glossy, expensive title sequence:
Jonny, playing Tuo'Ka, a male Arokocra rogue;
Tony, as the warforged ranger, Masvo;
Dave, as the female human mystic, Landry;
Kris, as the warforged Paladin, Cog;
Lawrence as the Drow shaodow-sorcerer, Dravid;
Steve as the male gnome rogue, Nicodemus.
The party consists of this seasons youngsters who will all come of age at the next solstice. They have been living in the same dormitory in the Special Circumstances tower for the last half-year, learning everything that the Clan thinks that new members will need to fulfill missions out in the world. This training covers all of the basics for your class, together with extras: armed and unarmed combat training for those who might not usually need it - like sorcerers; the basics of magic item usage for those who usually stick to the mundane arts; how to pilot and crew airships, the basics of wilderness survival, geography, history, the basics of economics, city life, diplomacy and field medicine.
The day of your initiation ceremony finally arrives: Tannhauser gives you his customary brief pep talk: "Don't fuck up" and leads you to the Archmage's Tower. This is the first time you have ever been in there, and it is as impressive as you expected. The ritual chamber has the mystic pentangle inscribed in the floor in gold, silver and gems, and it occupies an entire floor of the Tower, with massive vaulted ceiling and windows that let in sunlight that were not there on the outside of the tower.
All of your families and friends are seated in silence to watch the ceremony, as the Archmage enters with the Ring on his finger. A silver bowl levitates in front of each of you in turn, and the Clanmark is etched onto your cheek. The bowl collects your blood as it drips. When the last mark is cut into your cheeks the Archmage stands with his arms spread wide, and cuts appear on both of his writs with no discernible cause and the blood from them is also caught in the bowl.
Then there is a feeling of immense magical power being drawn in as the Archmage uses the ring to summon esoteric ingredients and adds them all to the mixture in the bowl. He then uses this to paint over the cuts in your cheek, imbuing you with the Clanmark.
After the ceremony he leads you down some stairs - and keeps going down, much further than the cellars of the tower could reasonably be expected to extend. You come to a door that is secret in both mundane and arcane ways, and the massive stone door grinds slowly open. Behind it is a clan iron golem, whose eyes send forth visible beams of light that probe and test your clanmarks. You know that if you did not have the clanmarks you would have been attacked on the spot.
You continue down even further until the stairs open out into what you are told is the Clanhold: a massive chamber even wider than the caldera above, where the Towers extend down as supporting columns. This is the true secret heart of the Clan - the final redoubt, that is kept absolutely secret from everyone who does not have a Clanmark.
Everything the clan does in the caldera above is also done down here - duplicated for redundancy and so that if they are ever attacked it is only the maskirovka above that can be taken. Here is the true, hidden strength of the clan. It is an amazing place - both in terms of the size of it and the resources it contains and also the fact that it was kept totally secret for your entire lives.
The lake in the caldera above that surrounds the Archmages tower has a clear, crystal bottom, and the sunlight shines through it, lighting the whole area with an ever-shifting, warm light.
The characters are left to their own devices to celebrate on this their first night of full clan membership.
The next day Tannhauser briefs them on their first mission. First of all they are introduced to Zahel, the female half elf who will act as their control / liaison. She sits in a room with 3 large boards in front of her, where she can plot the locations and actions of up to 3 teams in the field at any one time. When you visited, the other 2 boards were covered up with a cloth. She gives you the 2 halves of a pair of sending stones. Each stone can send a message to the bearer of the other half once a day, of 25 words. She has maps, reference books, scrolls and a couple of people on hand to act as runners to whoever she needs to contact in the clan. She has half of 8 different pairs of sending stones in a harness, so that she is considered to be the "bearer" of them.
After introducing you to her, Tannhauser takes you next door to a briefing room where he lays out the details of the mission. He introduces you to Anhej, another half elf who is the pilot of the clan airship, "The Mailed Fist". He tells you about a unique geographic feature of 7 hexagonal basalt columns that appear to be the home base for a lot of flying reptiles. Their numbers have increased very quickly and they seem to have riders, so the thought is that this is the base for someone with some magical ability who is working up to attacking clan airships. This must be stopped. If you can capture the magic-user doing this and bring them back to be another permanent contributor to the power of the ring, then that would be good too.
The pilot tells you all that he currently knows from simply overflying the columns and not conducting any detailed reconnaissance:
- each tower has lush plant life at its top
- the central tower is half again as tall as the others
- they seem to be perfect hexagons – perhaps from volcanic activity
- the winged reptiles have humanoid riders and seem to launch from cleared areas on 2 of the outer towers
- the passages between the towers seem to be blocked at ground level – and 2 of them seem to have some large white wall or something similar blocking them.
The characters decide to overfly the columns on the first leg of the journey out to the Empire border city of Karnhold to see what can be seen, and then make entry on the return trip that will be at night. Anhej tells them that his airship is tasked for this journey as its main focus and they do not want to get into a fight that they themselves did not instigate.
Masvo had selected the Eyes of the Eagle as his magic item for the mission and was able to fill in more details: mostly that two of the lanes between the columns were blocked with what looked like a portcullis of dinosaur bones - and one had something very large and bloody in it - and the rest seemed to be blocked with very large stones. There were also definitely shapes moving around the inner lane that encircled the central tower.
The team decided to jump out of the airship whilst it was hovering over the columns and use single-use tokens of feather fall to get down safely. As no one had thought to help themselves to more than one when they initially got on the airship, Cog and Masvo ended up owing a favour to Anhej to get an extra one each.
They landed on the column with the rope bridge to the central one on it - but not before Dravid had a really bad day and managed to find a large tree branch with his crotch on the way down. Nic used his winged boots to investigate the bridge and the cave entrance it went into on the column opposite; it seemed to be a solid, well-built rope bridge. As he started to look further into the cave, an arrow came streaking out: he dodged it, but could not see in the darkness where it had come from.
Meanwhile, Landry used her own winged boots to cross the chasm and got to the cave entrance on the other side of the rope bridge from Nico. Cog was by now getting impatient for a good old fashioned frontal assault. Then Dravid set foot on the bridge and came across slowly: at the halfway point there was the sound of heavy blades hitting ropes and the bridge collapsed, its ropes cut on the side of the main central columm.
The drow used his magic item, a ring of jumping to try and make it to the far side - but came just short. The episode ends with the look of "oh shit" clearly visible on his face as he begins his 120 foot plummet to the rocks below...
Jonny, playing Tuo'Ka, a male Arokocra rogue;
Tony, as the warforged ranger, Masvo;
Dave, as the female human mystic, Landry;
Kris, as the warforged Paladin, Cog;
Lawrence as the Drow shaodow-sorcerer, Dravid;
Steve as the male gnome rogue, Nicodemus.
The party consists of this seasons youngsters who will all come of age at the next solstice. They have been living in the same dormitory in the Special Circumstances tower for the last half-year, learning everything that the Clan thinks that new members will need to fulfill missions out in the world. This training covers all of the basics for your class, together with extras: armed and unarmed combat training for those who might not usually need it - like sorcerers; the basics of magic item usage for those who usually stick to the mundane arts; how to pilot and crew airships, the basics of wilderness survival, geography, history, the basics of economics, city life, diplomacy and field medicine.
The day of your initiation ceremony finally arrives: Tannhauser gives you his customary brief pep talk: "Don't fuck up" and leads you to the Archmage's Tower. This is the first time you have ever been in there, and it is as impressive as you expected. The ritual chamber has the mystic pentangle inscribed in the floor in gold, silver and gems, and it occupies an entire floor of the Tower, with massive vaulted ceiling and windows that let in sunlight that were not there on the outside of the tower.
All of your families and friends are seated in silence to watch the ceremony, as the Archmage enters with the Ring on his finger. A silver bowl levitates in front of each of you in turn, and the Clanmark is etched onto your cheek. The bowl collects your blood as it drips. When the last mark is cut into your cheeks the Archmage stands with his arms spread wide, and cuts appear on both of his writs with no discernible cause and the blood from them is also caught in the bowl.
Then there is a feeling of immense magical power being drawn in as the Archmage uses the ring to summon esoteric ingredients and adds them all to the mixture in the bowl. He then uses this to paint over the cuts in your cheek, imbuing you with the Clanmark.
After the ceremony he leads you down some stairs - and keeps going down, much further than the cellars of the tower could reasonably be expected to extend. You come to a door that is secret in both mundane and arcane ways, and the massive stone door grinds slowly open. Behind it is a clan iron golem, whose eyes send forth visible beams of light that probe and test your clanmarks. You know that if you did not have the clanmarks you would have been attacked on the spot.
You continue down even further until the stairs open out into what you are told is the Clanhold: a massive chamber even wider than the caldera above, where the Towers extend down as supporting columns. This is the true secret heart of the Clan - the final redoubt, that is kept absolutely secret from everyone who does not have a Clanmark.
Everything the clan does in the caldera above is also done down here - duplicated for redundancy and so that if they are ever attacked it is only the maskirovka above that can be taken. Here is the true, hidden strength of the clan. It is an amazing place - both in terms of the size of it and the resources it contains and also the fact that it was kept totally secret for your entire lives.
The lake in the caldera above that surrounds the Archmages tower has a clear, crystal bottom, and the sunlight shines through it, lighting the whole area with an ever-shifting, warm light.
The characters are left to their own devices to celebrate on this their first night of full clan membership.
The next day Tannhauser briefs them on their first mission. First of all they are introduced to Zahel, the female half elf who will act as their control / liaison. She sits in a room with 3 large boards in front of her, where she can plot the locations and actions of up to 3 teams in the field at any one time. When you visited, the other 2 boards were covered up with a cloth. She gives you the 2 halves of a pair of sending stones. Each stone can send a message to the bearer of the other half once a day, of 25 words. She has maps, reference books, scrolls and a couple of people on hand to act as runners to whoever she needs to contact in the clan. She has half of 8 different pairs of sending stones in a harness, so that she is considered to be the "bearer" of them.
After introducing you to her, Tannhauser takes you next door to a briefing room where he lays out the details of the mission. He introduces you to Anhej, another half elf who is the pilot of the clan airship, "The Mailed Fist". He tells you about a unique geographic feature of 7 hexagonal basalt columns that appear to be the home base for a lot of flying reptiles. Their numbers have increased very quickly and they seem to have riders, so the thought is that this is the base for someone with some magical ability who is working up to attacking clan airships. This must be stopped. If you can capture the magic-user doing this and bring them back to be another permanent contributor to the power of the ring, then that would be good too.
The pilot tells you all that he currently knows from simply overflying the columns and not conducting any detailed reconnaissance:
- each tower has lush plant life at its top
- the central tower is half again as tall as the others
- they seem to be perfect hexagons – perhaps from volcanic activity
- the winged reptiles have humanoid riders and seem to launch from cleared areas on 2 of the outer towers
- the passages between the towers seem to be blocked at ground level – and 2 of them seem to have some large white wall or something similar blocking them.
The characters decide to overfly the columns on the first leg of the journey out to the Empire border city of Karnhold to see what can be seen, and then make entry on the return trip that will be at night. Anhej tells them that his airship is tasked for this journey as its main focus and they do not want to get into a fight that they themselves did not instigate.
Masvo had selected the Eyes of the Eagle as his magic item for the mission and was able to fill in more details: mostly that two of the lanes between the columns were blocked with what looked like a portcullis of dinosaur bones - and one had something very large and bloody in it - and the rest seemed to be blocked with very large stones. There were also definitely shapes moving around the inner lane that encircled the central tower.
The team decided to jump out of the airship whilst it was hovering over the columns and use single-use tokens of feather fall to get down safely. As no one had thought to help themselves to more than one when they initially got on the airship, Cog and Masvo ended up owing a favour to Anhej to get an extra one each.
They landed on the column with the rope bridge to the central one on it - but not before Dravid had a really bad day and managed to find a large tree branch with his crotch on the way down. Nic used his winged boots to investigate the bridge and the cave entrance it went into on the column opposite; it seemed to be a solid, well-built rope bridge. As he started to look further into the cave, an arrow came streaking out: he dodged it, but could not see in the darkness where it had come from.
Meanwhile, Landry used her own winged boots to cross the chasm and got to the cave entrance on the other side of the rope bridge from Nico. Cog was by now getting impatient for a good old fashioned frontal assault. Then Dravid set foot on the bridge and came across slowly: at the halfway point there was the sound of heavy blades hitting ropes and the bridge collapsed, its ropes cut on the side of the main central columm.
The drow used his magic item, a ring of jumping to try and make it to the far side - but came just short. The episode ends with the look of "oh shit" clearly visible on his face as he begins his 120 foot plummet to the rocks below...