2020/04/05: Mask Replacement Part 2 Report
General Summary
Humphery, Knight, Pele, Rodger, Terana, Sith
The new session began with a bit of a dilemma. The group had two potential targets: the Radiance, who they knew they'd have to fight sooner or later, and the White Palace, which... well, they weren't really sure why it was there, but it's best not to leave things unresolved in one's soul, and Knight hadn't seen the Hollow Knight's shade in a while, so they figured we might need to go in there to free them.
The party got the feeling that the dream would end immediately after defeating the Radiance, so if they wanted to deal with the White Palace, they'd best do it now.
The White Palace, unfortunately, is a... rather unpleasant place for the unwelcome. Knight had faced a dream of the White Palace before, and it had been filled with terrifying defenses, appearing more as a monstrous maze of thorns, spike traps, and ever-present buzzsaws than any sort of regal palace.
Within that old White Palace had been a side route known as the Path of Pain, an even more sadistic trial that Knight had eventually given up on in favor of completing his mission.
This new dream of the White Palace... was significantly worse.
After some experimentation and theories, we discovered that the buzzsaws in this one weren't just physical killers; they were soul-rending as well. You did not want to get hit at all, under any circumstances. We had the advantages of magical flight and shrinking spells, but even then the gaps were narrow and the timing difficult. And then, through scrying, we discovered that the single visible path was a dead end, as was the path behind the one secret door we'd found; in the end, thanks to additional scrying and the find the path spell, we found that the palace was a twisted maze of secret doors and dead ends, with secret passages having one or more secret doors and passages of their own. Trying to find our way through normally would have taken days of meticulous searching, with any serious mistake being disastrous.
Fortunately, find the path let us bypass that deadly tedium, and in the end we only had to make five save-or-die rolls each to get through. These rolls represented hours of carefully picking a safe path through the mad, paranoid death traps and staying alert to the plethora of traps, tricks, and ever-present deadly soulrending buzzsaws. There were some close calls, but we made it.
And with that, we found ourselves dropping down into an arena. There were four statues of adult Vessels... and then, with no fanfare, the Hollow Knight appeared and attacked.
This fight was reasonably tough. The Hollow Knight was remarkably fast, getting two initiatives and thus two turns per round. It barely bothered to dodge or parry, simply focusing on magically lengthened slashes with its nail, ground slam attacks that filled the room with giant nail blades from below, and Soul-dagger flurries that did little damage individually but were horribly difficult to dodge. Fortunately, Pele had time to cast Coruscating Shield, providing us with very tough ablative barriers that were able to take everything the Hollow Knight had time to throw at us.
Tough as the Hollow Knight was, Terana and Humphery are damage-dealers of the highest order, and Humphery was able to push the Hollow Knight backwards into a weapon/shield lock. One of our absent friends, the saint and dimensional mage Rodger, who was supposed to act as a light counterpart to Knight in this mask replacement ritual but who had been mysteriously absent (because his player was unavailable for two sessions) suddenly arrived, having been tossed into the dream realm by Sith's god Chaz-Achk-Thuum, who was acting as Sith (the god) while the real Sith enjoyed being mortal.
Rodger put a box of dimensional walls around the Hollow Knight, Knight grabbed Rodger and pulled him into Knight's own Coruscating Shield (because Rodger is fragile, Knight likes him, and Rodger only showed up after the shields had been cast), Pele cast an enhanced Glitterdust on the Hollow Knight (which filled the dimensional box with the most annoying glitter imaginable), and then Sith waded in with his sword.
Now, something to know about Sith: As previously mentioned, he is (or was) a god of Chaos. He is also a wild mage, which means his spells will occasionally do strange (and often very unpleasant) things. In keeping with this theme, custom-crafted sword, a massively oversized thing that could reasonably be equated to a very sharp couch, produces wild magic effects on hits.
And summonings had been having very strange effects in this dream realm.
What this meant, in the end, was that when Sith hit the Hollow Knight five times with his sword, the following happened:
1. The Hollow Knight was partially healed.
2. The Hollow Knight was set on fire.
3. The Hollow Knight was hit with a baby grand piano.
4. The Hollow Knight was drenched in acid.
5. Sith accidentally summoned an Aerial Servant as the Hollow Knight died.
The end result was that, thanks to chaos, the Aerial Servant was summoned in the same place as the Hollow Knight's soul, which proceeded to reincarnate into it, and then they/it faded away while staring at Knight.
So now Knight was going to have to spend some time trying to find the sibling he fought the Radiance to save and then try to figure out how to get them back into their proper body/existence. (There's a reason people are very wary of letting Sith help with things. He has a reputation for unexpected collateral damage that's very difficult to fix.)
One way or another, the group had very little time to think about what had just happened, because that's when the four statues on the room's borders animated, and we found ourselves out of position and up against four soulless copies of the Hollow Knight.
Those first few seconds were almost the last. One knight attacked Humphery, only failing to achieve a killing blow thanks to the remains of Humphery’s Coruscating Shield and his sheer resilience. The next two charged Pele and Terana and were only barely stopped by the Turbo Elven Ginsu’s full effort and speed. The last false Vessel went for Knight.
Knight, who was busy dragging Rodger into his shield before another room-filling surge of blades could skewer him, and was thus badly out of position and unprepared to parry.
Knight attempted to activate the Beautiful Black Belt of Blackblink, and reality diverged.
In one reality, Knight was a fraction of a second too slow. The false knight’s first two strikes were spent on the last of Knight’s Coruscating Shield. The third strike took off part of his hand. The fourth strike bisected him, and the world went dark.
In the other reality, forced into existence by a paradox cast by Sith less than two seconds later, Knight and Rodger disappeared in a flash of black and appeared safely on the far side of the room before any blows could land.
And with this closest of calls, the danger posed by the four false knights was spent.
Over the next few seconds, Rodger established a safe zone with his dimensional fields, Knight set up to defend him, and Pele brought the Coruscating Shields back up to full. The false Vessels tried to breach the defenses with everything they had, from barrages of blades to piercingly perfect swordsmanship, but they were soon cut down by the unstoppable duo of Humphery and Terana, now freed of the need to defend themselves or their friends.
As the last knight fell, the arena found itself peaceful once more, and the Seal of Binding blocking the single path forward finally faded away.
The party took the opportunity to assess their resources and wounds. Despite the brutality of the battle, they had actually taken only minor injuries in the end, and they had plenty of spells left to cast. Knight Focused his remaining wounds away, Terana healed those who lacked regeneration of their own, and the party ventured on.
The stairs beyond the doorway were, in keeping with the rest of the White Palace, winding and lengthy, rising up towards the uppermost floor of the Pale King’s home. And at the top, in a fitting echo to Knight’s first journey through the dream of the White Palace so many years before, was the throne room. As in that older dream, the room was darker than the rest of the palace, perhaps tainted by the Pale King’s experiments with the Void. As in that older dream, the Pale King sat on his lonely, high-backed throne.
Unlike in that older dream, this Pale King was no mere corpse.
The Pale King rose to his full four-foot height (about half of which was the crown formed by his horns) as the adventurers approached. He called out to Knight in the language of Old Hallownest, incomprehensible to the rest of the party. The precise words have been lost to time, but it went something like this:
“So, you made it through. I had been planning to take your body for my own eventually, but I suppose I can move forward with that now. Surrender, and your allies will be allowed to leave.”
Knight simply flourished his sword in a familiar stance of challenge.
“Do you truly think you can defeat me, your creator?”
Firmly, the clockwork parrot on Knight’s shoulder replied: “Yes.”
And though the words may have been unfamiliar to Knight’s fleshy teammates, the tones and the stances were clear, and everyone present readied themselves for combat.
The Pale King made the first move. He raised his hand, and a wave of screeching buzzsaws dropped from the ceiling. The party dodged as best they were able, fitting themselves into the narrow gaps between blades, but the gaps were narrow and the blades were sharp, and aven the most flexible were left with serious cuts. Terana attempted to pursue the Pale King as he stepped back towards his throne, but only barely managed to avoid killing herself on a wall of yet more soul-rending buzzsaws that suddenly appeared between the party and the king. Seeing the wall, Humphery and Sith promptly devised plans of their own: With his usual finesse, Humphery launched himself shield-first through the ceiling and into the sky, while Sith called out to the others:
“I’ve got this! Buy me a few seconds!”
Knight took position next to him, ready to grab him and dodge, while Pele cast an additional set of defensive spells. Rodger, after taking a moment to inspect the situation, decided to see just how malleable this dreamworld was to a master of dimensions.
Rodger’s plan was to create a tunnel through the wall of saws with his dimensional fields. He would hold back the blades with his mind while his teammates went for the king.
What actually happened was that the otherwise-indestructible saw blades bent and mangled themselves against the dimensional distortion until, in a burst of sharp pain in Rodger’s mind, the saws and the shield tore each other into nonexistence.
The next few seconds were something of a blur. Sith used his Chalkboard to twist a breach defenses spell, ripping apart the Pale King’s defenses for the next few moments and opening up a window for his allies to strike. Simultaneously, he used his magical preparations and expertise to blast the king with an instant death spell and a powerful blast of dark flame, both of which failed to kill but still caused serious damage.
The Pale King responded by attempting to reach out and take Knight’s body. When Knight’s Amulet of Soul Binding offered resistance to the control, he forced Knight to tear the amulet off and toss it away. Terana tried to cut off the grasping tendrils of darkness by cutting off the king’s arm; though the arm fell to the stone floor with a metallic clatter, the immaterial tendrils reaching towards Knight ignored the loss entirely. Terana, acting fast, dashed across the room and caught the thrown amulet with her sword before flipping it around and launching it back onto Knight’s head. With the return of partial independence, and aided by reality-rending blasts from Rodger, Knight unloaded on the Pale King with all the nail strikes he could muster, before dashing through him towards the far side of the room in hopes of being too far from his friends to easily hurt them if the possession continued.
Pele rescued Rodger from being fully dragged into the pit of Void and teeth the king had sucked him into in retaliation, and with a last few blasts and strikes from Rodger and Terana, the Pale King’s crumbling form finally shattered. In its place floated a Shade: a black, ghostly counterpart to the shining Pale King, formed of the very Void he had so eagerly experimented with. It seemed he refused to be brought low by something as petty of the destruction of his body.
And then Humphery crashed back through the ceiling above the Pale King and landed on him shield-first with the velocity of a particularly angry airplane, unloading Rodger’s blunderbuss into the king’s head as he pinned him to the ground.
There wasn’t much left beyond dissipating wisps of darkness at the bottom of the resulting crater.
The party moved to collect themselves. Humphery stood up and stretched, Pele and the others moved to inspect the crater, and Knight walked back to rejoin the group.
And then, as Knight arrived, he drew his Dream Nail and buried it to the hilt in Humphery’s back.
Now, a few things should be noted here. First: The Dream Nail, in Knight’s hands, is not actually a weapon. When its blade strikes someone, no harm is done; rather, the bearer gets a peek into the target’s mind, the bearer's Soul reserves (if they use such) are refilled, and a hostile target may be pushed away.
The Dream Nail that punched through Humphery’s chest was not nearly so gentle.
Second: Humphery is part tree (thanks to a long-ago instance of Sith’s “collateral damage”), has been throwing himself at the scariest things he can find for years, and knows that Terana would never forgive him for dying to something as petty as a sword to the chest. He is, however, mortal, and so is still understandably concerned about stab wounds that would be lethal to practically anyone else.
Altogether, it should not be too surprising that Humphery’s response was to (slightly) panic and shatter the unfamiliar weapon protruding from his chest with his Sword of Kings.
The figure behind him dropped the now useless hilt and drew the Nightmare Nail, the Dream Nail’s dark counterpart. The follow-up strike saw that shattered as well, as Terana reacted to save her husband’s life by parrying the second attack with Lumenceil, the Sword of the Moon.
Sith reacted quickly to the shock: He waved his hands and did something magical, and Knight’s mask (which made up most of his head) was torn off and flung across the room. The body, or more accurately the Pale King, stayed standing. Rodger, climbing out of the remains of the Void pit the king had sucked him into earlier, ended it by summoning his fields and crushing the body into dimensional goop, the remains of which seeped into the floor.
The party took a moment to collect themselves once more. The Pale King clearly had little interest in staying dead, and they could only hope that their friend hadn’t just been overwritten completely in that last-gasp attempt at possession. Given that the Pale King's control had punched through the effects of Knight's soulblade and a mind blank cast by Pele, each of which should have provided immunity, they had no way to know for sure.
Still, they only had a moment to consider all this; the Pale King still had no interest in staying down. The King formed himself a new body out of the available Void and attacked them once more. This time, it seemed, he’d given up on ranged buzzsaws and manipulation; the new body was a burly 8 feet tall, with a nail the size of a surfboard and a mask some mixture of an adult Vessel and his usual crowned self.
Over in the corner, within the hollow of an empty four-eyed mask, darkness began to gather.
In the earlier fight against the false knights, the party had seen the results of the Pale King’s efforts to impart (or, perhaps more accurately, program) perfect swordsmanship into his creations. In this new body, he’d evidently seen fit to apply that perfection to himself. His swings, though slow, cared not for armor or reflexes, and attempts to parry his enormous blade led only to partial deflections at best. His own defenses were similarly uncaring towards the skill and strength of his opponents; only sheer luck, power, and will had any hope of getting through. And even then, his constructed form had little in the way of vital organs to target.
The redoubtable Humphery and Terana tried anyway, of course. They left a few new gashes in the “Masked Knight’s” body for their trouble.
Discarded in the corner, a mind focused, fueled by hatred and righteous fury and empowered by a mask formed of the mind's own solid willpower. The specks of darkness that had been congealing inside the mask turned into a torrent, and even as a torso and limbs began to form, the mask started drifting back towards the battle on a gathering tide of Void.
Terana, Pele and Humphery formed up in a virtual wall of steel and skill. Long acquaintance through adversity allowing them to coordinate to an almost superhuman degree. Still, it wasn't enough, and the virtually unstoppable attacks sometimes got through. The intensity of the melee was sufficient to keep those involved distracted, with injuries mounting on both sides. More partial parries, more partial healing. Only Sith, standing back to provide magical support, noticed the growing form of his not-quite-dead teammate, and similarly realized that teammate’s complete lack of equipment. So he stepped in to lend a hand, and with a twist of telekinesis and an effort of divine willpower, he reformed (or perhaps transported) Knight’s remaining equipment and pushed his reforming body to completion.
Knight almost stepped forward to return the King's backstab. He once more had limbs and a nail, and there was a hated enemy in front of him… but as he tested his slightly-too-liquidy form and felt the Void around him respond, he realized that in this moment, the limits of his form were more flexible than before. There was further he could go. And against his father, he might need whatever additional strength he could gather while he had the opportunity. He stepped back again and focused, and grew further. His form took on an aspect not unlike the familiar Shades, but larger, and with an odd backlighting…
While Knight continued to focus, the battle took a turn for the worse. The Masked Knight cut through Terana’s Diamondskin spell as if it were paper, and Pele almost fell to a brutal slash to the chest. The shieldline (with, admittedly, only one shield) was no longer working when their opponent could hit all of them through pure willpower. Sith managed to slow the knight’s weapon through his own effort of telekinesis and will, and with Rodger providing cover fire and blowing yet more holes in the Masked Knight’s body, the rest of the group fell back to begin skirmishing.
And then Humphery, with his flying crossbow providing some ineffectual ranged fire on its own, began to wave his hands and called out a warning.
“Get back! Solar Flare incoming!”
It should be noted here that Humphery is primarily known for two things. The first, as previously mentioned, is being extremely dangerous with a shield (even though he’s also carrying a sword). The second is enormous explosions.
As such, the rest of the group wisely decided to get some distance.
Knight had been planning to try to turn the horror movie backstab back on the horror movie backstabber, but he found himself hampered by several factors. First, the shieldwall was no longer there to keep the king distracted. Second, with the solar flare incoming, being next to the king seemed like a bad idea. Third, Knight couldn’t seem to locate his hands; he just kept finding more Void tendrils. As such, he defaulted to using what he had in the way that felt most natural, which in this case meant lashing out with the tendrils from some thirty feet away.
To his mild shock, this worked, with three of the four lashes passing through most of the Masked Knight’s defenses and tearing at his animating force. (The fourth tendril missed as Knight tried to find his new reach, so it spent a few seconds trying to chew on the floor.) The attack in fact proved so successful that the Masked Knight turned to chase Knight down and bury his nail in the Void puddle Knight had defensively flattened into. This had about the damage effect of stabbing a bowl of pudding, i.e. very little. It seemed that even beyond Sith slowing the blade down, the semi-ethereal, semi-liquid appearance of Knight’s new form wasn’t just for show.
Knight was now immediately next to the target of the incoming solar flare, though, so Sith caused a minor paradox and made Knight have been on the other side of the room, which was very nice of him.
And then Pele hit the Masked Knight with her enhanced, super-reflective glitterdust, and the solar flare landed with a blinding flash.
When the glare cleared, the Masked Knight was still standing. His form was withered and burned, his torso missing chunks, his mask cracked. And yet, as with all his previous forms, there was still no guarantee that he was anywhere close to truly falling. Rodger decided to remedy this, and reached out with an incorporeal banishment, hoping to grab hold of the Pale King’s soul and prevent it from migrating yet again.
The existence he grabbed a metaphorical handful of proved to be dramatically larger than he’d been expecting.
Rodger pulled anyway. The monster on the other end pulled back. In the middle, some chunk of the identity Rodger was holding onto tore free, and the connection snapped. And then the room began to shake.
Well, not just the room.
The palace.
And as it shook, the ceiling and walls of the throne room crumbled, and the party found themselves gazing upon the Pale King’s true form.
From far below the palace to hundreds of feet above curled a towering white worm, one end a vast mouth surrounded by teeth in the same formation as the king’s tall crown. Ringing that circle of teeth were eyes, and then massive Void tentacles, a physical manifestation of the king’s Void corruption.
And the Wyrm’s vast mouth was filled from edge to edge with buzzsaws.
Fortunately for our heroes, as vast and terrifying as the Pale Wyrm was, distance and forewarning meant the Wyrm wasn’t upon them before they had a chance to react. With his magically enhanced response time, Knight chose his course of action about a second before everyone else. He was tired of the king claiming control over the Void. And to the bearer of the Voidheart, those black tentacles coming from the Pale Wyrm’s head seemed an opportunity.
Knight stepped forward (having slipped back into physical form to pick up an odd nail from the Masked Knight’s corpse), planted the Banner of Bound Shadows in the stone floor, and called out to the Void.
And the Void eagerly responded.
True, it seemed the Wyrm’s tentacles were out of reach. But the rest of the Void Sea? The pooled regrets of two civilizations, the tens of thousands of Siblings the Pale King had sacrificed? All of it heard the call.
Darkness began to gather.
As Knight focused his will, Lume (the intelligent artifact sword wielded by Terana) devised his own plan and prepared to dream travel, reaching out to the rest of the party with an offer to join him. Sure, the Wyrm was big, but being that big just meant it made a wonderful stabbing platform. Of course, dream traveling inside this soul-based dream realm might have some odd effects…
And speaking of odd effects, against an enemy this large and dangerous, Sith decided that survival was far more important than concerns about collateral damage. He called upon the most dangerous spell available to him: Maw of Chaos. And then, because he’s Sith, wild magic kicked in and things went weird. For a few moments, Sith was very confused as something familiar seemed to shut down his spell halfway through. No effect, no spell expenditure. He then became much more concerned as a whirling, ravenous, chaotic maw began to open below and behind the Pale Wyrm regardless.
He took a second to inform the rest of the party that the real Maw of Chaos had decided to hungrily intervene, and then he got into telepathic negotiations to try to keep it from eating the rest of Knight’s soul after it finished chewing on the Wyrm.
Rodger, with nothing but a few swords between him and the looming Wyrm, decided survival was the better part of courage and put a few dimensional shields around himself. And then, after those few seconds of frantic spellcasting and reality warping, the Pale Wyrm made its anger known.
Even before it truly acted, the sheer presence of the twisting, eldritch monstrosity that was the Wyrm was an assault on the mind. Veteran adventurers all, the party stood strong in the face of this Thing That Should Not Be and the madness it brought, though they did perhaps gain a few small revelations in the process. Then the Wyrm focused its gaze, and Knight began to petrify.
Under this monster’s gaze, instead of the usual stone, Knight got to watch his arms turn to Pale Ore before everything went dark.
Dark... but not gone.
After a few more moments of confusion as to the reason for his continued consciousness, Knight slipped his tentacled Shade form free of the crumbling statue his former body had become, shifted to physical form once more, and retook his place at the Banner of Bound Shadows as the Sibling army approached.
Lume, meanwhile, finished his dream travel, pulling Rodger, Pele, Terana, and Humphery along with him. The four adventurers found themselves in a lucid dream on top of the Pale Wyrm’s back. Despite the vague unreality of their situation, they promptly got to digging.
Rodger, partially unbound within his dream-within-a-dream, summoned his forcefields somewhere deep inside the Wyrm’s head. What he hit was unclear, but what was clear was that it hurt a lot. Pele, similarly uninhibited within the lucid dream, tried to turn herself into an embodiment of the purifying effect of her Seven-Flame Sword, and instead found herself sharing Sith’s body.
As Sith and Pele took a moment to adjust, Knight’s army of shadows finally got close enough to charge. As thousands of Siblings swarmed the massive Wyrm, Knight flexed the power within the oversized nail he’d pulled from the corpse of the Masked Knight, and a moment later he was on the Wyrm’s head along with the others, eagerly carving his way into one of the Wyrm’s vulnerable eyes.
Sith and Pele, not to be outdone, pooled every flame-enhancing and multicasting power they could muster, and the sky rained fire.
The Wyrm flailed and screeched, smashing Siblings and battering the warriors tearing into its head, but the onslaught could not be stopped. Gradually, painfully, the writhing monstrosity was blasted and pushed towards the ever-growing Maw of Chaos. Finally, the Wyrm reached the event horizon. With a sound reminiscent of someone slurping spaghetti while running a paper shredder, the Wyrm was sucked into the hole in reality. And slowly, reluctantly, the maw began to swirl closed, and silence fell.
The Pale King was finally, truly dead.
Exhausted but victorious, the party made their way over the crumbling palace walls and back to the entrance platform. They couldn’t leave the dream quite yet, but the pressure had been eased. The Radiance could wait for tomorrow.
Rewards Granted
For excising the Pale King, Knight gained a level in Voidform Nightmare. Knight also got 6 XP at the end of this session. (Others also got XP, but amount was not recorded.)
Missions/Quests Completed
Destroy the Pale King once and for all.
Character(s) interacted with
Notes
DM notes:
On the backstab on Humphery: "It was only 220 damage or so, it’s good to be an epic level fighter."
On Knight being possessed through immunity: "Being a phylactery of sorts to a dead nightmare king god thing has its downsides."
Report Date
05 Apr 2020
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