Interesting Sounds
Oops. Coitus Interruptus
Traded death for info
Hill Giants Arise
by Zasi’s will and new skill
Eaten by large gar
Bonsai tree rescued
home to spirits of forest
Kami are grateful
Category Archives: Journal Entries
Ivan’s journal Pharast 28
For a moment the world around me stopped and I could hear voices speaking in some foreign tongue. Suddenly I realized I could understand the words, it was Minkaian the language Dasi has been teaching me. I could not tell if the voices were male or female as they seemed to almost naturally blend together as if it was one voice. Just for a moment I thought that I could make out the figure of a man and then a woman but the area was so bright that it was hard to see. The voices told me that a hero can call upon strength from within to accomplish extraordinary things. These voices told me that one of the spells that I have been practicing could help turn the tide against the sound attacks. Suddenly I could hear Sesi’s voice telling me to call forth communal protection from energy and use it to protect the others. This voice went on to tell me details about the spell so that I was ready to use the spell immediately. Everything is kind of fussy but the last thing I remember is being told that I have to return followed by a kiss on the cheek. I thought that I was gone for a minute or so but it was as if it never happened. It’s not for me to question the methods of the gods. Wow this is actually the most information that I have ever gotten about a new spell without asking Qatana for help. I wonder what the 4 other spells from the gods will be, luckily I have Qatana to help me out and she doesn’t judge me. Since we are going into a dangerous situation I should make sure I know what my new spells do, even if it means asking Kali. For some reason Kali seems to expect that I should know every detail about a spell before even learning how to cast it, wizards are very strange.
It still puzzles me how the other spellcasters know all that information about their spells. Kali seems to spend a lot of time either reading or writing in her spellbook. I still don’t really understand how she can use a book to cast spells… The way they have to figure out which spell and how many to use each day seems very complicated. I don’t understand how they are able to figure out which spells they will need later in the day.
This day has been interesting, with a lot of sex and violence. Well to be honest we are reason for the violence although violence could be an everyday thing for hobgoblins. I am not going to put the exploits of the naked aroused hobgoblin Oni onto paper, some things are just best not written down.
Where to begin, Oh in the beginning there were two dead giants, Zosi through some mysterious power of alchemy turned them into golems. They did not make it through the entire day and were eaten whole by some type of water monster. Although soon after losing his golems we defeated an Oni riding a gorgon. Zosi instantly had to have the gorgon as his next golem. He was so excited that we stopped and packed up the gorgon, luckily Qatana has a spell that shrinks an area of stuff. She said that it consumes a carpet but it is still a cool spell, although it is on the expensive side for getting goods to market. I was considering seeing if Gorgon meat was edible but I don’t think Zosi wants his new toy butchered.
The lice infested living area for the Oni and Gorgon makes me wonder what other kinds of bugs are living on these hobgoblins. As with everything in life I am posed with the problem of getting rid of lice and other bugs and the gods provided the solution. On this day the gods worked through Kali to help me solve my bug problem. Standing in the poisonous cloud took care of any bug problem that I might have had.
I called upon my new protection spell to keep the others safe from the sound attack of these odd creatures. Clearly getting this spell early was a boon. These are not creatures that I would want to face by myself, luckily I don’t have to do this alone.
Annals of the Order of the Dragon
as told by the cavalier Olmas Lurecia, himself.
Oathday, 28 Pharast
The strangest thing happened today. I seem to have gaps in my memory. I have to wonder if there isn’t some sort of foul magic involved. I’m not familiar with the intricacies of magic spells so I thought I’d consult with Kali. She told me there are spells that can take away a few minutes of your memory, but not whole hours. I consulted with Suishen, who thoughtfully described me as a “substandard but occasionally acceptable samurai-like warrior likeness.”
I clearly remember flying silently to the far side of the lake to take out the two guards there. I’m PRETTY sure we did; I’m pretty sure I remember the look on their face when we descended (they were looking horizontal, not vertical). And, having taken care of that, we … we …
… did something more. Gods! It happened only a few hours ago, but all I remember is finding myself near a river or body of water with the rest of the party and … and … oh right! Zos’s giants had just become fish food. Right! and yes, we had killed a monstrosity called a gorgon, and then there were more hobgoblins who foolishly challenged our right to be there! Dead in a minute they were.
While searching the rest of the area, we found little except for a door which seemed to be swollen shut physically rather than kept shut magically. Not surprising in this moist environment but Radella and I forced the door open anyway out of sheer stubbornness.
And much to my surprise we found inside a struggling bonsai tree.
We carefully continued on and eventually found ourselves in a wide hallway while approaching us were more hobgoblins and at least one giant. This did not look to be a painless introduction, but Kali had been itching to send cloudkill at somebody and could wait no longer. I still had airwalk going and thought I might be able to travel above it near the ceiling, but it was too high. Ivan, on the other hand, utilized his Delay Poison and simply walked through it – repeatedly emerging from the cloud like a gruff siren, to lure creatures back into the cloud and their deaths.
And then … and then … there’s blankness again. I’m sitting here now, getting ready to rest, but I KNOW more happened.
This is disorienting. I hope this doesn’t happen again. Maybe a ward or something.
Kali’s Journal, Pharast 28, 4713 (continued)
Pharast 28, 4713 (early afternoon, The Penance)
The farther in we go, the more I see the echoes of a long-lost grandeur. I hesitate to describe anything the Five Storms have touched as magnificent, but this place has the feel of a once-great hall deep into its decay. How long were they held prisoner here? Hundreds of years? Thousands? That is a lot of time to excavate. The rubble in the hall suggests there was a collapse at some point. How much more was there? Are we just scratching the surface?
What did they do here? Did they entertain visitors? The kami said they were forbidden from leaving, but it was a prison with no guards save for the complicated rules that kept the oni from leaving. There was nothing stopping outsiders from coming and going as they pleased. You could build an empire that way.
It really begs the question, “why so lax?” Was it assumed the oni would just sit in here and rot for all of eternity? Clearly they had other plans. Whoever created their jail (and more crucially, this arrangement) was afflicted with a startling lack of imagination. And Minkai is paying the price.
Whatever this place once was it’s more mausoleum now; a crumbling monument to another time. It’s dark, dank and depressing. Even the oni that remain are depressing. The guardian of this checkpoint, as he called it, was as decrepit as the hall itself, though at least he was reasonably aware of the pathetic nature of his role. There was this moment when I was invisible, hovering just close enough to see him when he called out to us in the darkness. Qatana, for her part, managed a very credible impression of Ichirou’s voice and insisted on passing through. He tried to talk “Ichirou” out of this decision, reminding him what had happened the last time he’d visited his sisters. When “Ichirou” insisted on going anyway, he buried his head in his hands and just shook it sadly.
Can you imagine? Proud samurai Oni of the Five Storms, reduced to babysitting. Such tales of glory and fortune he must have had.
Wretched though he was, he was in our way. And he was mounted on a gorgon because of course he was, which also made him dangerous. We went for a reprise of yesterday’s trick: Qatana cast her spell, I walled them off behind a barrier of ice (because they can’t fly), and we let them beat each other to death while we took pot shots with arrows and bombs.
His living quarters was the height of elegance with its lice-infested bed and living, wall-to-wall carpet of beetles. I swear I am not making that last one up. What was even keeping them there? This place keeps challenging my notion of “the worst thing I have ever seen”. Repeatedly. It is not supposed to be a competition.
Speaking of “worst thing I have ever seen”, the decor in this hall includes an image of a hobgoblin nursing two snakes. Just in case there was any doubt about that.
(midafternoon)
One down, one to go: we found the bonsai tree, discarded and forgotten in a dark storage room that is leading the race to dilapidation. Like everything else here the tree is barely clinging to life, probably from days or weeks without sunlight. If it wasn’t for the water leaking through the walls and ceiling it probably would have withered and died.
Yet again, I am left wondering what the plan was here. Why bring a plant—one which quite obviously needs sunlight to live—to a place completely steeped in darkness? How were they planning on keeping it alive? The only light in here is in the fire pit, and even if that were sufficient it’s two stories up. The would-be gardener was obviously not thinking this one through.
Now that the tree is safely in our possession maybe we can afford to be more indiscriminate in our methods. (OK, fine, we were hardly careful up in the pagoda. But there were no hobgoblins there, and no hobgoblins meant no tree. It was solid logic, and as it happens, we were right.) Or maybe not. Yuka’s memories suggest Munasukaru gets personally involved when it comes to her prisoners, and that means there may be some down below. I’m guessing we’ll have to do this the hard way.
I probably should have thought of that sooner, before I sent a cloud of poisonous gas down that hallway. Fortunately, it was just a few hobgoblins, a hill giant, and these bizarre lizard things that were far more dangerous than anything else we’ve come across. Which makes me think they weren’t part of the original plan. That, and the pile of hobgoblin bones. They reminded me of that thing that attacked us up in the arctic. These lizards were blind, too, and they tore into us with huge blasts of sound. Except like everything else down here, they couldn’t fly (so maybe they were part of the original plan after all?)
Gods, it’s been a long day. I am spent. Qatana looks exhausted. Dasi’s voice sounds like it’s going out. We even lost Zosi’s puppets: they tried to walk across the bottom of the lake and something—we never saw what, but it was something big—extirpated them. They are utterly gone; there aren’t even any remains! I shudder to think what must be in that murky water that’s capable of (I assume) swallowing them whole. The pool is closed until further notice.
This underscores how unprepared we’ve been for water. We’ve mostly avoided it so far but it’s been a consistent theme and I wonder if our current tactics will hold. At the end of that hallway, where the lizards were, water pours in through cracks in the cavern walls and flows down the steps into a drain at its base. Which means we will have water to contend with down below, too. What if there’s something in the water that we have to confront?
The good new is that we have a few hours to figure this out as we are going to shelter in this hall for the rest of the day while we recover. Is this safe? Not really. Is there someplace safer? Not really. Not unless we want to leave and come back, which seems particularly unwise. If anything tries to come up from below, or descend from above, we need to be here for it.
Qatana’s Journal for Pharast 28, 4713
Oathday, Pharast 28, 4713 afternoon
Beneath the House of Withered Blossoms
Our plan for sneaking up and ambushing the the two guards at the bottom of “the drain” before they could make a noise went almost according to plan. We did sneak up and kill them, but in the process of doing so a blast from a flask of some oily explosive concoction gave us away.
From deeper within the cavern came the sound of heavy movement and a loud gruff voice called out, “Who goes there? None shall pass. Identify yourselves!”
By this time most of my companions had flown off to the far end of the pool, where there was some sort of commotion, and so to delay any attack from another enemy I answered, “It’s Icharou” while infusing my voice with as much oily obsequiousness as possible.
“Not today!” came the response.
“It is too Icharou! Yassu said to come see mother.” I was counting on the voice being familiar with just how craven and stupid Icharou was to aide in my deception.
“Oh, remember what happened to you the last time you saw Yassu? If I were you I’d keep away.”
Joy! You really can’t go wrong assuming everyone else thought Icharou was a worthless fop. “I’m more afraid of mother than Yassu!”
“If I were you I would be afraid of both, but do what you will.”
By now the rest of my companions had gathered near the entrance to the cavern. Most had a grim look about them, and Zos’ giant twins were absent (I later discovered that something had swallowed them whole!), but this was not the time for questions.
We carefully moved in to where we could just make out the owner of the voice. He was a large samurai mounted upon a gorgon. He seemed bored, as did the gorgon, and with little wonder: how many invaders could there have been that had made it this far over the centuries. Not many, I warrant, and so perhaps he was not quite as alert or suspicious as he otherwise would have been.Piles of gorgon dung (some still steaming) gave off a pungent stink of sulfur and rotting flesh.
Kali and I used our usual confuse and confine technique, which had the desired affect of the gorgon and samurai attacking each other. Meanwhile my companions used ranged attacks to wear them down even further. Eventually the samurai fell and the gorgon smashed through Kali’s wall of ice, but it was grievously injured and the combined efforts of Olmas, Zos and Ivan put it out of its misery and cleared the way.
There was a door to the west, which Zos opened and stepped in while I picked through what the samurai had been carrying.
| 587 | large master work katana |
| 588 | silver master work wakisashi |
| 589 | large composite longbow [+9 STR] |
| 590 | large master work tatami-do armor |
The room to the west had been the samurai’s bedroom. Zos said that the floor was a carpet of beatles and that the bed was full of over sized lice. I took a peek later, and really, I know I am not the neatest of people, but how could anyone sleep in a room like this?
“That’s just Gross,” Timber squeaked, and the others quickly agreed, except for Beorn who simply cooed, “Mmmm, bugs.”
There were some nice items in the room which are now ours.
| 591 | headband of alluring charisma +2 (Dasi?) |
| 592 | offering bowl set with rubies |
| 593 | gilded elephant tusks |
| 591 | jade and silver rooster funerary figure |
| 595 | 10 foot panel screen of the House of Withered Blossoms when it was still pristine |
We faced a small dilemma. While the panel and treasure could have fit inside a bag of holding the gorgon could not. Yes, we needed the gorgon’s body, or more specifically Zos did. As I had mentioned his giants perished back in the pool and to replace them he wanted a gorgon that he could ride.
I actually had a solution to this problem, and pulled a bolt of fabric from my pack. It unfolded to a ten foot square of silk which we spread onto the floor on top of which we were able to place all of the loot and the body of the gorgon. I then cast Treasure Stitching and the entire pile collapsed into an embroidered image of the same. I rolled up the silk and put it back in my pack.
And moments later we heard voices approaching from the north.
“Oh I can’t believe we’re doing that again. We should let the others…”
A squad of hobgob warriors came into view and started shooting arrows at us. Some of us fired back and the rest closed in and quickly reduced them and their pet giant into piles of gore and bone.
The hallway from which they had come was odd: there was a ramp that led up from a rubble strewn floor — the ramp had clearly at one time been a bridge, but the archway in the far wall to which it would have led was bricked in. The walls were decorated with scenes of oni-centric decadence and depravity, including the scene of a female oni suckling a pair of nagas.
Pools that probably led to the lake outside were to the west, and further north was an eastern door beneath the balcony from which the ramp descended. The door was wooden and swollen shut from moisture, but Radella and Olmas forced it open. The small damp chamber beyond was uninteresting except for the small potted bonsai tree that was withering within.
This must be the tree one of the kami had asked us to rescue. It looked to be in poor shape because of its prolonged exposure to darkness. Just why someone had bothered to steal the tree and bring it down here was a mystery, but we took it in the hope that it would recover once it was back outside.
We picked our way across the remains of a collapsed bridge that led us back east and into the western end of a long pillared hall that stretched east into the darkness.
We had hardly all moved into the hall when we heard the sound of hobgoblins and a giant approaching. A moment later and I was eye to eye with a giant (I was floating some teen feet up) and the brute walloped me.
Kali cast Cloud Kill, which stretched across the full width of the hall engulfing a number of hobgobs before moving eastward. We killed everything on our side of the cloud and then followed it along, swiftly slaying the occasional warrior that stumbled out, gasping and wheezing. Ivan aided us greatly here by entering the cloud (safe with Delay Poison) and luring the attackers on the other side of the cloud in to their deaths.
Nearly ten minutes and six hundred feet later and we finally reached the end of the hall and the cloud began to waft out over a pond to the southeast. We heard a loud “Crap!” from Ivan, who was still before the cloud. He had suddenly come face to face with a large wide mouthed hump backed lizard (his words) sporting a lot of razor sharp teeth, but having no eyes.
Moments later we were blasted with the force of one of these things screeching. Dasi was stunned, but Ivan managed to find his way back through the cloud to join us. Another, lower key shriek pounded us, and we realized that these reptilian frog, lizard like beasts were probably the most dangerous things we’d faced all day.
I placed a zone of Silence in the middle of the cloud to buy us some time to regroup and Kali put up a wall of force. We decided to let the poison cloud do as much damage as possible before pressing our attack.
Presently the cloud drifted out past the lizard things and dissipated. We moved in, but this time Dasi was prepared and matched his singing to counter the sonic attacks.
Even still the creatures were tough and took a lot of punishment before falling. We were all a bit tired by the time the last one dropped, and those of us who use spells were feeling a little depleted.
On the further side of the pond we could see what looked like a pile of hobgoblin bones on the shingles. So the lizard things ate the hobgoblins? Then which way had the group of hobgobs (plus hill giant) come from?
We must have missed a secret door somewhere along the hundreds of feet of hallway we had traversed. Radella seemed upset by this, but even she needs to focus a little more than was possible when we passed through.
We’ve decided to set up camp either at the far end of the pillared hall or maybe the chamber before that. While this seems risky, we do need to rest to regain spells, and it is a far better option than to drop back to some place “more safe” — or I should say “less dangerous.”