Bugs!

Game Level: 20

Players
Tranc (gestalted)
runos (gestalted)

Backstory
The 'barbarians' of the north exist within the Val sphere and north east of New Haven.
Their native land is a mountainous terrain with bitter cold winters, though just west of the great sand pass is a desert that hold in the other extremity of weather. All tribes carry and pledge to their tribal totems, which tend to be largely of preditor type animals. A title is added as a prefix to create some names at "Sleeping Owl", "Black Bear", and "Swift Deer". In addition, each family has their own sub-totem they display along side the tribal totem. Tribes are lead by three people; the shamen, the warchief, and the wise women. A disease stuck the tribes hard, having no way to heal it them selves the sicked became pariahs and lived until death in the southern are of the so called barbarian country. After a manifestation of a large ghostly cat the pariahs continued down into the winged brothers lands, around the great mountains, and into the desert. Months later the pariahs appeared on the border of the barbarian & winged brothers lands, having taken the totem and name of Ghost Cat. They are the only tribe to openly trade with outsiders unwilling to bear the harsh winter mountains.

Intro
Quintember 23rd
The barbarian tribe of Ghost Cat held it's first equinox of the year festival. This is one of the two major trade times for them. Hundreds, if not thousands of traders come, each bringing their own caravan and trade goods. This of course attracts thieves which in turn brings armsmen for hire as protection.

Please refrain from posting in this thread.
I will make a new post per session instead of a risk crashing out and losing everything single post.

Session one.
When the shamen was about to start the major celebration at midnight, he turned the crowd and demanded everyone to run, shortly after that the moon took on a blood red hue and the shamen had dozens of clawed worms break out from underneath his skin killing him in a mess of blood and gore. Clouds came and took a spiral funnel shape towards the moon as worms spring up from the ground chewing their way though the panicked crowd. Tranc gave a tribesmen a way to lead him to the outcamp meeting place and offered to tell them what was going on for a mere one hundred thousand gold. Sandi the shamenfoot (a title denoting one to become a shamen) of course refused the offer. Before things could turn hostile, chieffoot's body which was dragged in to show Sandi was officially in charge of things, took on life of its own attacking Tranc & the tribesmen. After the battle and bloody murder on Tranc's part, one of the killed tribesmen decided death was not good enough for him, as he stood up and embraced his new tribal leader. This infected with an advanced stage of the wasting and Sandi was forced to broker out a deal. In exchange for 10% of all trade goods for the rest of her life Tranc (and all other adventurers) was to retrieve water from the desert and return to help kill whatever was doing this.

Metacorner.
The creature faced was a varient diseased zombie coupled with a negative energy draining attack and the ability to cast waithstrike. I really expected his roll of 30 on his touch attack to hit and trigger all kinds of nasty debuffs on Tranc.

Session 2 (about a two hour game)
PalyLeto & Snappyapple joined in.

Sandi, not trusting Tosshiro (Tranc) sent two people after him. Having met up they continued along the path flying at a high enough altitude to attract the attention of two undead creatures. They set them selves up in an ambush but they were hardly successful. After camping until midday under the protection of a wall of energy our adventurers set out once again. Around 5pm they found an obelisk sticking up out of the sand and... to be continued!

Metacorner
The creatures faced were two Angels of Decay (LM), their aura was extended out and lost it's ability to nauseate every round. They also gained the ability to fire off a twinned Enervation once per day and an increase on ranged attack rolls. While sporting almost 200 HP & DR 10, Snappy's 88d6 breath attack was completely unexpected on my part so they were defeated faster than I thought they would be.

On a side note, I lose creativity before 3am, we need to start earlier in the day.

Session 3
runos & Snappy

Having no clue what the stone said, our so called heroes charged in the new land the obelisks marked. They were challenged by a cloaked humanoid he let a bit of knowledge slip. He/She/It called the the place with the water "Fharlanghn's Garden" and offered help if they should pass a test. A great mound of sand took the shape of a man to attack them but was soon entrapped by spells. The stranger let known his/her distaste for fighting though proxys like that and Snappy was more than happy to point out the same to him/her over using the golem. Using a mere illusion to hold his/her place, (s)he moved to their backsides and let loose a chain of minor spells and combos. Weakened by Snappy's breath weapons (s)he was forced to flee, but not before letting information of troubles ahead.

Metacorner
I need to toss a rogue at Snappy, or anything with evasion lol. The beyond the rules editing this time around was a lot simpler. An advanced sand golem sporting over 50 HD (CR 21) with item based energy resistance (which the items are buried in the sand and will be claimed by creatures with burrow speeds ). The spellcaster only had a major image after their contingcy triggered to provide the tips.

Largely so far their fights have been of the melee focused mostly using golems (+4HD per CR) as even the spellcaster was not directly out to kill them. This is mainly due to Tranc & runos having such high melee focused characters and Snappy's saves being low enough that dominate monster has only a small fail chance to a full caster. Snappy could turn and blow Tranc to little tiny chunks without blinking if he faced off with an enchanter., something I'm not quite that evil to do. After this next mostly direct battle this trend will fade off as the game will take a turn from playing fetch to what is happening back in the tribal camp.

Session 4

Not really a game, more like plot filler.
The sand dweller (lets call him Bob) rambled on filling some plot gaps and planted the seeds of knowledge about the whole blood moon thing.

According to Bob almost 700 years ago he sealed It within the desert due to no one living, or even traveling though it. The obelisks were the seals, and the three days worth of pure desert sand was meant to create the idea nothing was out there at all. However, Bob had no clue about Fharlanghn's Garden at the time and this lead to the problem. Due to the traffic of the barbarians fetching the enchanted water the barrier was weakened enough for It to start leaking out. Bob asked the adventurers to destroy some of the obelisks so he could escape and plan to rebind It into the desert.

Metacorner
While what It is has not been said, lets recap on what it has done.
It effected the weather & turned the moon red.
It controlled below-ground creatures to murder the tribe that freed it.
It can infect people with advanced stages of the original disease that drew the tribe here.
Bob was willing to trap him self to cage It. ... Oh, and Bob is over 700 years old.
Interesting? I hope so.

Session 5

Should be the final part of the desert section & main plot intro.

After the desert section is over, what next?

Well I have some good ground work laid out for a rather entertaining plot, but who do you wish to experence it? Click Here and check out my post and discuss it.

Also, our discussion thread where you can tell me how cool I am and share other points of interest.
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