I’m gonna say it right here: this is the most important session of the campaign thus far. It had highs, it had lows, and it had some seriously key character and story developments. So, without further ado, let’s get into it.
The session began the with the party deciding, in light of suddenly finding themselves with only one shard left to recover, not to make any stopovers on the way to the location of the last one – which their map was indicating was at or near Brakken’s home, Fort Wartooth (I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned that before now) – and instead complete the set, unlock the power within the Temple of Mists, and work on resurrecting Brakken back into a real body at a later date. So, they flew straight to the fort, luckily not encountering any setbacks along the way. And, for clarification in regards to what comes next, while Brakken had not left his home on good terms, things were not so bad with his large family that he was expecting to be murdered or anything upon returning either. And, for reference, I’ll be referring to Brakken as Brakken again, instead of Bull, since he began to do so himself in this session for reasons.
However, when the party arrived, Brakken noticed that things had changed in the five years since he was there last. For one thing, the fort was heavily fortified, including the addition of several familiar-looking arcane cannons. For another, his family were now all cyborgs.
To explain Brakken’s family (since I don’t think I’ve done so before now), basically, his father, a human, wanted a powerful mercenary force, plus had a thing for half-orcs due to their innate power and all, so he took a bunch of orcs as wives and fathered a bunch of half-orcs whom he had trained to become an expert fighting force. Brakken left because he had too much of a conscience to agree with his father and the cutthroat mercenary business he was running, and because his elder sister, Seri, was the only true family he had there, despite having close to a hundred other siblings. Also, because it will help what comes next make more sense, Brakken’s father, Ivar, had such a passion for half-orcs that he had had metal tusks implanted in his jaw (which, incidentally, was a big part of the reason why Brakken had hated having one of his tusks replaced with metal back when he became a cyborg).
Entering the fort, no one seemed to take much notice of Brakken or the party. Recognising one of his half-brothers, Brakken asked where his father was, which got a brief, wordless response indicating the keep in the centre of the fort, and he asked where Seri was, which got no response. Indeed, in general, the cyborg half-orcs seemed to be inhumanly unresponsive, setting about whatever tasks they were on with a single-mindedness that reminded the party more of their mechanical crew than of normal people.
Entering the keep, Brakken spotted his father. Now a good two feet taller than he was the last time Brakken saw him, Ivar was an eight-and-a-half foot giant with massive, bulging muscles and his entire lower jaw replaced by metal, with much larger tusks, and a pair of horns, one bone, one metal, that appeared to have sprouted from beneath the skin of his forehead. And his demeanour was as aggressive as his stature, greeting Brakken with arrogance and insults.
After a brief conversation between them, where Brakken asked him what had happened and inquired about the shard, to which Ivar sprouted some tosh about how he had made new friends that had shown him that technology was the only god worth serving and once Brakken joined his siblings in being upgraded his army would finally be complete, Brakken decided he had heard and had enough and challenged his father. Ivar accepted, showing that the shard the party was looking for had been implanted into his chest and stating it would be good to finally put Brakken in his place once and for all. And then, as Brakken instructed Mortimer and Monk not to get involved, Ivar attacked.
The fight was short and brutal. Brakken pumped everything he had into each attack, using all his spell slots on smites while Ivar hammered at him with a massive adamantine glaive. Towards the end of the fight, Ivar taunted Brakken by telling him that Seri had been the first of his children to undergo the process of being ‘upgraded’ and since it was yet to be refined at the time, she was left brain dead, completely under the control of the augmentations, as he proved by wrenching Brakken’s head to the side by his horns to show that she was standing nearby, completely passive and nonreactive to what was going on around her, with a dead look in her eyes. Then he ‘killed’ Brakken by slashing into him with his glaive, then stabbing it down into Brakken’s body and giving it a twist for good measure before beginning to walk away.
These two things only served to piss Brakken off even more. Absorbing some health from his father and the world around him before leaping back to his feet, Brakken charged his father and slashed into him twice with Godslayer. The first slash almost killed Ivar, but the massive human seemed to resist the blow with inhuman resolve, but with his second slash (and final smite), Brakken smashed his father to the ground, ending him with a bellow. And then he kept on slashing.
Brakken’s father was a bloody pile of meat on the ground before Brakken was done. Finally relenting, he checked Seri, only to conclude that she just wasn’t there any more. Meanwhile, everyone else in the room (except Mortimer and Monk) continued on with whatever tasks they were seeing to as if their leader/husband/father hadn’t just been brutally hacked to pieces in the same room.
A little investigation revealed that there was a control rod similar to the one that controlled the party’s crew which could be used to instruct the cyborg half-orcs. However, Brakken was unable to instruct them to regain their former selves, and upon further examination, Mortimer determined that they could possible be ‘fixed’ but it would take an awful lot of time. However, he also determined that there was no mechanical fix for Seri.
Thinking quickly, Brakken realised they did have one option. He asked Mortimer to shut Seri down and remove the mechanical parts, effectively killing her, which Mortimer did. While he was doing that, Brakken attuned to the Rod of Resurrection.
What Brakken realised once attuned to the rod was that it could only be used to resurrect someone once, so by doing this, it would not be able to be used on himself, which, as far as he knew, might be the only way for him to get a real body back. Still, he did not hesitate. Using it on Seri, the rod disintegrated into golden light which infused her body, growing brighter and brighter until it blinded everyone in the room. But as the light faded and his vision returned, Brakken looked down to see his sister, now whole and alive, staring back at him.
They had a joyful reunion in which Seri revealed she was ‘upgraded’ about one year after Brakken had left and had no recollection of the last four. She knew less about what had happened than Brakken, but together they spent the next couple of days trying to fill the gaps in their knowledge. She also met Mortimer and Monk and learned of the party’s various adventures up to this point.
After remaining for long enough for Seri to fully recover from being brought back from the dead, it finally came to the point where the party needed to depart. Seri insisted that Brakken complete his quest, but also, at the suggestion that she go with them, insisted that she must stay with her family and see them looked after. Mortimer gave her some names of people who might be able to help them should he not have the chance to return, and with one final goodbye, the party returned to the airship and set off towards the Well of Mists.
The party’s journey was once again uneventful, and upon arriving, Mortimer decided not to be patient and dived headfirst into the massive, mist-filled canyon, casting Feather Fall on himself to keep from splatting on the ground below. The others, taking the more conventional route down, got lucky in finding him wandering in the fog, and together they entered the Temple of Mists and met/reunited with Tim.
After a bit of a chat, the party told Tim they had recovered all the shards, but when he asked for them so he could get on with the ritual they refused and asked for the shard he still had instead. You see, Mortimer had build a device using the other shards and the bronze that had once covered Brakken’s body for the express purpose of capturing his soul so they could somehow transfer it to his resurrected body (once they managed to resurrect it, of course), and needed the final shard to complete it. However, Tim won the ensuing conversation and Mortimer begrudgingly disassembled his device and gave him the shards. Which was just as well, as he hadn’t rolled high enough when assembling it, so if they had tried to use it the consequences could have been dire.
Beginning the ritual, Tim had the party stand by their corresponding shards as they were set into their places (Mortimer just stood by Brakken) before he placed the final shard and the floor began to open, separating everyone (again, except Mortimer and Brakken) across the hole. A great wind began to blow through the room, but Tim had warned the party of this and informed them that part of the enchantment of the ritual was going to lock their feet to the ground, which it now was. So, as they were all buffeted but not thrown into any walls or through any windows, the party watched as the ritual proceeded.
Of course, if you know anything about D&D, you’ll know it was around here that everything went tits up. Because, if you know anything about D&D, you’ll know that this was all One Big Setup!
As the party watched on, they suddenly found their entire bodies, not just their feet, frozen in place. So, they could do nothing but watch in shock that turned to horror as a titanic dragon (larger than even the larger-than-Auric-Goldtooth silver-coloured dragon that Tim was suddenly morphing into) with scales made of a purple-tinted gemstone began to climb out of the hole. As he did, Tim began to shout that he, ‘Arcanite, Slayer of the Primordial, King of Dragons, Oldfather’ had returned.
Still with the wind rushing throughout the chamber, Oldfather thanked Tim (calling him ‘Mithral’) before gloating at the party for a bit and then asking each of them whether they would join his new empire. And, because the party had no way of communicating, it was here that I had the players message me individually with what their answer was, as they realised Oldfather would understand the answer as they thought it. I thought it would be a fun sort of gamble, to see how the characters would honestly respond to the situation, without the chance of their answer being affected by any other’s.
The answers came back, one at a time, and in response, Oldfather thanked Mortimer for his (albeit conditional upon not being beholden to anyone or anything) support and spurned the others for their refusal. The enchantment holding Brakken and Monk to the ground weakened, while the enchantment holding them frozen remained, leaving them helpless as the wind drew them forward and down into the hole. And, finding themselves now trapped in the black, endless void of a completely empty pocket dimension, with Mortimer remaining behind to join with the enemy, we ended the session there.
Woof! Amiright? That was a lot to deal with. The session started pretty bleak, what with everything that had been done to Brakken’s family and especially his sister. But then it started looking brighter and brighter, with Seri’s resurrection and the completion of the quest they’ve been on for months. And then it was frikkin’ guillotined!
We’ll be picking up with things next week. I’m not going to say anything about what’s coming, as I want it to be a surprise, but rest assured, it’s going to be interesting times ahead. And, of course, we’ll be gaining a new party member as well, since Mortimer is out of the picture now. Obviously, that does suck a bit, since he was such an entertaining character, but at the same time, it does make certain things easier for… reasons, and it might make things very interesting should Brakken and Monk ever encounter him again.
I honestly didn’t know which way Brakken and Mortimer were going to swing when faced with the option of joining Oldfather. I was fairly confident that Monk wouldn’t take a deal, as he’s been the most consistent member of the party in holding to his values and trying to do good, but with the way Brakken’s been acting lately, and Mortimer being an outright wildcard, I was curious to see how things would go. Although, in hindsight, Brakken’s reaction made a lot of sense, since his answer was basically ‘fuck all the other gods that have already pissed me off anyway but fuck you too because you’re just another one’.
So, to recap, the party unleashed the most ancient, most powerful, most evil being in existence and two of them are now trapped in said being’s empty prison dimension. They’re facing the seemingly impossible task of escaping from said dimension (after all, that ancient, powerful, evil being couldn’t even do it without external help) and at some point in the near future will be gaining a new third party member after the last one decided that that ancient, powerful, evil being was cooler than they were. I think wherever this goes from here, it’s gonna be a ride, so be sure to tune in next week to see just what the heck happens next.