This is gonna be big. But probably not long.
…that’s what she said.
The session began with the party planning how they wanted to acquire the shard from the train. They went back and forth, but in the end, they decided to plant an Instant Fortress (a magic item that they acquired a few sessions ago which sprouts an adamantine tower) directly on the tracks to force the train to stop. Basically, this would circumvent the likelihood of derailing the train, getting shot out of the sky, or missing it entirely and going splat by trying to board it while in motion.
That was the plan, anyway.
Enacting their plan, the party flew well ahead of the train and landed by the tracks, where they planted the Instant Fortress, dug themselves some hiding spots, and set about waiting. Unfortunately, they decided to do this at night, and even with Brakken planting a gem of brightness on the tower, the train did not see it. What happened next was basically an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object.
Big boom.
After the resulting derailing and explosion, there wasn’t much left of the train or the tower but wreckage. The party did find three arcane cannons in one of the few remaining whole carriages, which Mortimer later disassembled and brought with them to the airship. Other than that, all they found were bodies. Many of bad guys, but many also of what appeared to be civilians. Oops.
However, one of the bodies they found was not dead. A half-orc, with more than half his body replaced by arcano-robotic augmentations. And, as it turned out, one tough cookie.
He attacked the party, and they brought him down with some but not too too much issue. However, with a burst of flame, he got back up again and the fight was back on. And then the party brought him down again, with Monk striking the finishing blow. In a rare, bloodthirsty move for Monk, he actually tore the half-orc in half, tearing his fleshy side away from his robotic side. An understandable move, to be fair, considering this was the being directly responsible for the massacre at Dawnperch.
After the half-orc was defeated, Mortimer found the shard hardwired into his chest. The gnome then set about harvesting some of his choicest robot bits before getting to work on the cannons while Brakken and Monk took care of the dead. Many hours later, the party returned to the airship.
And then, later that night, after the others were asleep, Brakken wrote a letter to his sister and a note to Monk, stripped himself of his equipment and armour, and under the weight of the guilt at intentionally or inadvertently murdering innocent after innocent since pretty much the start of the campaign, stepped off the airship as it floated high in the sky. And we ended the session there.
So that is what you might call a significant development. Brakken made sure the airship was high enough to be impossible to survive, so… yeah.
It was a slightly shorter session this week, not excessively so, but after the party managed to bypass about ninety percent of encounters and interactions on and with the train by blowing them up, they managed to get through things faster than expected. And then Brakken’s decision at the end there pretty much dictated the session’s end.
But yeah, next week is going to be very interesting, methinks. Be sure to tune in to see how things turn out.