Session 45: Escape to Reality (3/29/26)

Desnova 25

Rickardt and Stellum move to the small island off in the distance where a rowboat was spied, and invisibly sneak upon a scene in the foliage above, where three of the surviving Lay Blade pirates are cooking and discussing the disappearance of their Captain. They are quite surprised when attacked, with the cook going down under a mighty swing from the storm giant, and then the powder monkey Taggit combusts all of his explosives at once, turning the whole islet into a fireball. Stellum takes a massive amount of damage while the plasmoid dives to safety, only to find out that the monk he thought he had beaten up was a wooden decoy. The real monk then calls Rickardt to a duel further up the islet from the conflagration, but is quickly defeated when his wooden style can't defend from the elemental attacks. The whole confrontation is witnessed by the other PCs from the shore, and the Golemeter.

Within the 'needle-like' tower of the coast of the Isle, the PCs find a hidden dock with some abandoned boats, and a level above that there's an old bedchamber and study for the place's last resident, a monk of St. Flume who passed some decades before. It mentions that many of the other brothers and sisters of his order had eventually been slain by pirate intruders or left to explore the rest of the Elemental Plane of Water, which the Isle of Skorbi is apparently a small part of. At the top of the needle, they find the glass windows they had seen earlier, and a strange mobile-like device of bones and wood handles. Bjork attunes to it and realizes he can start seeing through the eyes of the various golems that protect the place, so one by one he sets most of them to pursuit of the Golemeter vessel. Though it takes some time, Dr. Flargheist eventually has to set his vessel to circulate the demi-plane and stay ahead of them.

The PCs finally make use of the amulet of the planes to return home, but when cast, it throws them to a different part of their world, an endless span of russet grasslands near a small foreign village. They spy that the inhabitants are humans of a slighter build, and Aldren is sent in to communicate. Though the residents (of Hongyu) have a strange reaction, a bold farmer named Vin warms up to the half-elf, and eventually he and an elder gentleman with better language skills name Schuan accompany Aldren back to the rest of the party, where they exchange tales. It turns out the PCs are in the Tak'fang Empire, near the border of Caowan, on the vast continent of Shara-zai, southwest of Karnovya. After leaving the Tak'fangese hosts some liquor, the PCs use treeportation to return to Zolovny outside the Bloombark Tabernacle. Something is amiss...the wildflower fields show signs of trampling, red hoof-marks in the ground...and Old Shard has been murdered within its walls...

PCs: Aldren, Bjork, Nebol'shoy, Rickardt

NPCs

Navigator Heruway (human male): An unarmed man, slender and fit wearing a black-dyed vest and white cloths wrapped about his wrists. His hair is shaved to one side, the rest combed to the other and left in a series of cascading braids with bone baubles hanging in them, as well as a sharp bone piercing his septum. His broodish countenance and naturally tanned skin look foreign.

Schuan (Hsin male): An elderly man of some 70-80 years, a thin but long white beard flows down beneath a scarred nose, wizened eyes and thick white brows. His head is bare save for a few flecks of hair and moles, and he leans on a cane cut from a hoe.

Spoony the Cook (human male): A stout man wearing a blood-stained apron, arms swirling with tribal-patterned tattoos, a cleaver in his hand with bright feathers pinned through its hilt. He smokes a bourbon-scented pipe which seems to stay evenly lit and require little maintenance, an eyepatch with a single ruby at its center over his left eye, and has splotchy, pock-marked red cheeks glaring out angrily from a short but bristly brown bear.

Taggit the Powder Monkey (hadozee male): A wiry humanoid with thick membranes hanging below its arms to its back, it is otherwise decked out in a leather vest and crimson sashes. Its pointed jaw is thick with a goatee, its forehead is scrunched and its hair is formed into a skullet. Smoke rises from the creature in several places, behind its ears and from several objects carried in its sashes, vest and belts.

Vin (Hsin male): The primary 'speaker' of the Hongyu village, middle aged with skin tanned to chestnut hue from his work in the sun. He has short cropped hair beneath a wide-brimmed straw hat, and carries a fork, with a sickle slung through the sash of cream-colored farmers' garments.