Session 4: The Die-Wizard Tournament (1)

General Summary

Notes by Quinn

1 - Intro

-Evik, evocation island. Crazy dead wizards battling. Military hired us to solve this problem
-People have been evacuated to a smaller nearby island: Honours
-We were brought on board a military ship docked at Honours and met three officers
-Tall air Genasi: Torvin, captain of the Sea Military -Dragonborn woman (blue/purple galaxy skin): Privellundra, captain of the Void Military -Tabaxi with skin made of silver: Enn, captain of the Land Military -Dragonborn woman (white, icy, and old): Noma, a librarian from Evik
-They are trying to come up with a plan of approach
-We see that the coast of Evik is lined with gargantuan crab things (Astral Dreadnoughts]) who are super aggro and are preventing anyone from going in, even via magical means
-The military will cause a distraction and we will sneak in
-Noma will be our guide
-The Guardian of evocation, Euron used to summon dead wizards to fight them in a special arena. Noma suspects that one of these wizards or a spirit who haunted the library after 40,000 years of servitude to it, could have taken control of this room thing. There is also a bing called the Astral Menace who would have been the one to summon the Astral Dreadnoughts

2 - Infiltration and Approach

-The Navy creates the distraction and we land at the coast and sneak into the forest. If we need extraction, we'll send some sort of fire based signal
-We decide to go at a slow pace, to be stealthy at first and then to pick up the pace when we aren't near the Dreadnoughts. Decide to keep it to the woods.
-We sneak through the woods
-As soon as we are out of range of the Dreadnoughts, we enter the Wizard Battle Zone!
-When a wizard dies, they turn into a book
-We see a fight between a cyborg or android who puts his hands to the ground and sends a wave of icy spikes towards an elf, but the elf's skin turns to stone and she grows to the size of a building and squashes the spikes with ease
-Near the end of the day we find branches that have been torn off trees that are arranged into 12 piles of ten, plus one pile of three.
-We see a shadowy figure leaping from tree to tree. At first Ezre wants to fight it but then we see it go all weird and tentacley. Ezre changes her mind and casts pass without trace on the party. The creature seems to lose our scent and leaves, moving South-East. It had dropped some decapitated and blood-drained rat corpses as it leaped

3 -The Game

-Liam makes a small hidden camp in the woods
-While setting up, Circe and Blue both seem to be afflicted by the same thing: They fall unconscious. Then they sit back up, mouthing words silently at lightning speed, and and inky runes pouring from their rolled back eyes and crawling all over their skin
-Ezre plops them in front of Sieg and Del then she and Liam look around. Ezre finds another wizard around 200 feet away that seems to be similarly affected
-Del tries to Remove Curse, but when she touches Circe, the spell doesn't work and a red light moves up her arm, so she pulls away
-From Blue and Circe's perspective, they are in a weird dark space full of hundred of gray silhouettes of people with a book floating inside each. Blue and Circe can only see each other clearly
-A red orb flashes to life...and an eye peers out
-The voice of PvPizzard speaks. Wizard Spy. vs. Spy to determine who is the most powerful arcanist in fact or fiction

-RULES
-This competition will consist of multiple rounds of elimination. In each round, you will be assigned a target to assassinate within a certain time limit. If you are able to do so, you will advance to the next round. If you do not, you are out. -If you eliminate someone, you will get their target for the rest of the round, and can continue to eliminate more competition, however, as long as you eliminated your original target and survive, then you will still pass to the next round, where targets will be redistributed. -The single winner at the end will be granted the ultimate reward: manifestation. I will use my remaining powers to make you not just a projection of a book, but a real living person.
-The two living competitors (Circe, and Blue) will have their soul trapped in a book if they do not win

4 - The Hunt

-Circe and Blue awaken, each with a note in hand telling them their targets.
-Circe's target is Laurel: the Pest's Piper: a folklore ratter who was turned into a rat and now helps them devour people
-Blue's is The Count: a vampire who has an obsession with counting things
-We surmise that The Count is what we saw earlier. We go back to follow its trail. We find it goes to the village. Also, tracks of a humanoid and a bunch of rats. Probably the Piper
-Ezre turns into a giant rat to infiltrate the Piper's rat army. She will lead them to an ambush where the rest of us are hiding in buildings
-Ezre fins a large group of rats with a figure walking with them that seems to be leading them. Ezre approaches but finds an area where the ground is illusory. She finds a way around it. It seems like the rats have set up their ambush
-Ezre triest oget the figures' attention but discovers that the figure is an animated corpse: a decoy
-The rats seem suspicious of Ezre and they block her off as she tries to escape.
-She turns into a giant bird to get out of there but as she escapes, a figure leaps out of one of the houses and attacks her with tendrils (The Count)
-Ezre flees and The Count, the corpse, and four rat swarms pursue
-We get them right in our ambush. Liam right away goes for the Count, stabs him a bunch, but gets grabbed
-Blue Chain Lightnings and does some good damage
-The Count bites Liam, heals himself, and reduces Liam's HP max
-Everyone else gets fucked up by rats. Circe gets diseased
-The corpse tries to bite Liam, but is too weak and just kinda falls over
-Liam nearly dies. Sieg does 105 damage in one turn
-Liam kills the count
-Circe goes down
-The Piper mind controls Ezre and Blue. Has made them lie down and play with rats
-Liam goes down
-Del heals Liam. Sieg tries to heal Circe, but it does not work. He figures she has rat poison in her, so removes that and then successfully heals her
-Ezre kills the rat lady
-The Count and Piper are now grayed out silhouettes that float in the air. Their books are visible inside them and slowly spinning around. Circe and Blue finish off their targets and are granted the targets of those they eliminated. Circe gets Blue, and Blue gets basically Edward Elric. But since they already eliminated targets this round, they already qualified for the next round

5 - Rest

-We rest in town. During the night, we see two injured Dwarf Wizards moving through the village. They are the ones that Alvrond, head of the Seeker Society wanted to talk to. Ezre goes to help them and brings them in our house
-They seem nice. They say that they don't want to win this competition, that they don't want anyone to win. They're manifestations based off the bias and incomplete information of someone's writing. They're only fragments of what they're supposed to be. And what's more, the way they were manifested, they're filled with the need to fight and destroy, and they do not think that is who they really are. So they want to do what they can with the time they have less to stop this
-"Wow...you're like, meta" - Blue
-We turn on Alvrond's Shellphone Skype. These wizards are Alvrond's parents...!
-They died, but he thinks they are still alive, and wants these versions to tell him where they would be hiding.
-Ezre sees a figure on a hill in the distance. It grows, just like the elf from earlier, and throws giant arcane spears that kill Alvrond's parents mid-conversation.
-Luckily the giant wizard doesn't come kill us
-We finish our rest

6 - Round Two

-Next morning, we approach the city
-Blue and Circe are both taken to the void place again. Next round, new targets. 12 hours
-Blue gets Edward Elric again
-This is the description on Circe's:
From Sepharin's Encylopedia of Naval Disasters Most people join the Navy for reasons of duty: to make ends meet, or to protect their loved ones. Some join for revenge: haven had friends or family lost to sea monsters. Then there those fractious nuisances who join because they want to blow things up. Out of all the disasters I have had to deal with in my long career, there was no one who completely misunderstood the ideas of subtlety and restraint more than my first officer in 13978. We never knew for sure where she came from; she was placed here from above, and my pay grade was not high enough to waste time on this mystery. She said she had stone giant blood in her, and we were pretty easily convinced that was true do to her habit of growing to towering sizes to wreck havoc. In this chapter, I will outline what exactly led to the catastrophe that ended my career and the person who set it all into motion.
Your target is Ballistae Naido.

Campaign

DnD Vessels

Protagonists

Liam Lightstep

Ezre

Siegfried

Blueskin Cuculus

Circe

Del Naido

Report Date

12 Aug 2018