A week ago, our Land of Azurth 5e game continued a week ago with the party coming to what they had initially take to be a hill at the center of the forest of stone shapes, but was actually a circle of close standing forms. There was one stone toppled over to form a platform over a deep abyss chasm beyond where floated the Singing Monolith. On this platform, the Cyan Sorceress had made her camp.
She tried to shoo the party away, but when they weren't having it, she threw a trinket into their midst that suddenly cause gravity to intensify, slamming them to the ground. Obviously, the time for palaver had passed!
The Cyan Sorceress had powerful magic and several strange devices at her disposal, but in the end their was only one of her against the entire party. With Dagmar's healing keeping Erekose and Waylon able to attack, the Sorceress was subdued. Belatedly some of the weird cyber-zombies attacked, but they were easily dispatched.
With a spell to compel her truth-telling, the party got down to questioning the Sorceress. They found out she and the other Chromic Witches were agents of Queen Desira of Virid, but they had become concerned that the Wizard of Azurth was exerting a strange influence over her, and struck out on their own to find magics to potentially counter his. Somewhere along the way, she fell under the influence of a Shadow. Who or what the Shadow was, she had difficulty describing she seemed to indicate that somehow it was displayed in time and possible world. It was somehow related to the book which was sometimes the Wondrous Wizard of Azurth and sometimes the Marvelous Monarch of Mu. The Shadow wished to use the book to remake the world, or perhaps had done so already. Somehow the revival of these action devices were going to help the Shadow do this. When the Cyan Sorceress was defeated, the Shadow seemed to have lost its influence.
The party was unable to stop the Monolith's emergence, meaning an increased revival of the ancient trinkets and related artifacts, but since the Sorceress was unable to complete the ritual it had been a less significant event than it might have been. The group emerged on to the surface of the Crooked Hills, more informed than before, but perhaps no more enlightened.
4 comments:
Interesting as usual.
Just out of curiosity, how are the view and comment counts on this sort of session report? There was quite a bit of discussion about play reports having lower readership and engagement than other categories over on the Grognardia blog last week, and I'm curious if you found a similar pattern. I was surprised to hear his Tekumel-based House of Worms campaign reports were doing so poorly but after reading others' comments there I've come to the conclusion that I'm one a minority who enjoy reading session reports, a lot of folks say they just skip them.
They tend to get fewer comments, but I don't know that the views are appreciably lower. I may never have looked at data over a long enough period to see patterns, though.
Really interesting "Man in the High Castle" vibe from the Monarch of Mu!
I hate to root against your players, but I'm hoping they'll fail to prevent the Shadow's plan, and be forced to set things right later.
@Trey Interesting, thanks for the reply. I've certainly enjoyed reading about your campaign even I don't always comment, FWIW.
Oh, and I forgot to applaud your choice of imagery here. The Monolith Monsters is one of my favorite 1950s creature features - in part because it breaks with the usual mold so much and manages to use cinematography to make its very non-traditional "monsters" into effective threats. Only film from the era that did anything similar was 1953's Magnetic Monster, but I don't think it pulled it off as well as Monolith did. Good stuff.
Post a Comment