Combat!

But first…

Ethan, completely unprompted, hands out early Christmas presents, but only to Rusty and Louie. Impressed with our flawless (?) role play last session he grants us each the following feat:

Polite. You are trained in arguing logic and communication. While in polite company (any social interaction that is non-hostile) you double your proficiency for any Cha skill check you make in which you are already proficient.

Unfortunately for Louie, his only Charisma skill proficiency is Intimidation, so using his Polite feat immediately prevents him from using it again. Rusty’s only Charisma skill is Persuasion, so it’s more useful - but both of them need to skill up on Charisma now.

Back to Combat! Two Monsters go down!

It’s Louie’s turn first, and he hits #3. The Trappers have a go at Cletus, and miss, so they give up on his insane AC, and decide to have a go at Rusty. Those poor, deluded fools. They miss Rusty too, of course. #3 then decides that maybe the Paladin could be hit? He’s half right, he hits one from two.

They then decide discretion is the better part of valor, and flee beneath the ground. Opportunity attacks all round! Cletus and Louie manage to kill #1 before it can submerge. Rusty Circlet Blasts #3, and Horus has a go at it too - but it survives to stalk another day.

The party was thinking that they would have to go on a long, difficult hunt - but the combat music never stopped, so we readied actions for when #3 reappeared. Which it did, attempting to latch on to Horus and drag him under. A goddamn blizzard of readied attacks went off, though, and it died an ignominious death.

Investigation

Rusty was concerned that the obvious abominations did not trigger Louie’s Divine Sense, so he took a close look at one to figure out why. Turns out that underneath all the radioactive mutations, these things are constructs. Rusty does note the signs of high radiation, though, and bundles the corpses up in a metal mining cart, which he seals up with a metal lid.

Cletus looted the bodies. We gather about 30 Lamodes. Rusty says we should put them in a metal pouch for a while, but it’s not too bad - the silver could have absorbed alpha radiation and become radioactive, but it would have turned into a layer of indium atoms on the surface of the silver. Indium has a half-life of 1.7 hours, and would have decayed to a safe level within 17 hours.

Cletus also looted the entire mine, and under one of the crates, found a locket with the photo of a young woman and her baby son. The woman in the photo was vaguely familiar - she’s the old lady out front of the mine asking everyone if they have seen her son.

Horus murders an old lady

As we leave the mine, we spy the old lady. Horus approaches and she asks if we have seen her son. Ignoring the frantic gesticulations of all the miners in the background, Horus calmly and compassionately informs the lady that her son has died and presents her with the locket we found. She instantly drops dead of a heart attack. Horus and Rusty briefly argue about the appropriate first aid response, but Horus still acts promptly, and successfully resuscitates the old lady. The miners take her off our hands and walk her home.

While this commotion occurs, Cletus completely ignores the poor woman’s travails and negotiates with the supervisor to sign off half of our community service. We are informed we can rest overnight, but in the morning we have to go into the mountains to stop the snowballs.

Crafting!

We wander back into town, and as we go we overhear some more rumors:

1. The Speakers of the Spark (some sort of evangelical group for Golems) are recruiting, and not only from the Golem population. They are allowing interested humans and gnomes to join. Some humans have travelled to their monastery on the Isle of Agony, but none have returned.
2. The Patchwork Bride has been seen near the Old Mill (apparently near Drudeglade). She is looking for her maker, but he has left Lamordia. She has killed a few people, but not on purpose - she just doesn’t know her own strength.
3. After dark, strange lights can be seen dancing in the sky to the south. They’re beautiful, but looking at them for too long makes your eyes hurt.
4. Old Gunthar dug up a piece of ore last week that was warm to the touch, and glowed blue. He sold it to the company for a tidy sum, but a week later, and Gunthar is dead.
5. The Sleeping Beast apparently isn’t just a mountain range. Some guys grandfather says he saw it breathe once.
6. Someone saw a 2-headed wolf in the forest, fighting with itself over an elk. The wolf died because each head wouldn’t let the other eat.
7. Tanner’s new son was born with 6 fingers on each hand. Rusty was about to tell them off for prejudice - polydactyly is normal, and people shouldn’t be judged for it. It turns out the fingers also glow in the dark. Fair enough, that is a problem.

The party sets up in the Inn, and Rusty rents a workroom for 8 hours. There, he works on some new tools, and attempts to make:

Then Rusty heads to bed for a full nights rest.

In the wee hours, Cletus decides to booby trap the exit to Rando McDickface’s room. Yeah, that shithead who falsely accused us of grave robbing is sleeping in the room right next to ours! Cletus puts some rolled up hotel blankets in front of his door to trip him as he exits his room. Cletus is sleeping at about 4am, with his door ajar for some reason, when he is awakened by Rando leaving his room, tripping on the blankets and banging his head on the corridor wall. The sword he stole from us falls out of his pack in the confusion, slides across the floor, through Cletus’ open door, and comes to rest under Cletus’ bed. Apparently the odds of this happening were exactly a million to one.

Cletus chooses not to alert Rando that he dropped his sword and goes back to sleep. Rando somehow didn’t notice, and we get away with it. Cletus returns the sword to its rightful owner (Raymond) in the morning. Raymond rolls a natural 20 to hide the sword in his mouth, so now - unless Raymond is actively using the sword - someone will have to beat a 31 sleight of hand check to notice that Raymond has it.

The hills are alive…or have eyes. You pick.

As we leave town in the morning, we are treated to further instances of Ethan blatantly violation the Law of Conservation of Detail, with the presentation of 2 more NPCs that the party will never care about. This time they were: an old miner who is more machine than man, with hydraulic arms pounding the street, for unexplained reasons; and a hopeful inventor who is desperately searching for investors for her new invention, a radiation detector. Rusty glances at her massive contraption briefly, wondering what superfluous parts she put in there to make it so large, and knowing that for a radiation detector to be useful, it has to be portable.

Rusty day-dreams most of the way up the mountain with ideas for a better device. All he needs is a supply of very thin glass windows (mica preferred), and a source of an ionizing gas (helium, neon, or argon). That last one is the hard part. The rest is just lightweight metal tubes and wires and a high voltage power source like the ones in his “Spare the Dying” and “Shocking Grasp” devices. Hook that up to a coil, a magnet and a light weight plate to amplify the voltage spikes and bob’s your uncle. He doesn’t see what the fuss is.

A few more hours finds the party a solid way up the mountain, and we all have to:

1. Make CON saves against cold; and then
2. Make DEX saves agains avalanche.

Most of us saved against cold - I think Louie may have failed. Everyone saved against the avalanche except Horus. We watches as he is whisked away by thousands of tonnes of hurtling snow and trees, and buried. Rusty could still sense his mind, so we knew he was still alive, and Horus’ doesn’t need to breathe any more. Cletus was alert enough to spot where he went, and started digging him out.

Horus was 80 feet down, yet Cletus managed to dig him out in 18 seconds. That’s a tunneling speed of 4 1/2 feet per second, which equates to a tunneling movement rate of 27’. He digs about as fast as he runs. Cletus should write that down. Anyway, Horus gets out and we continue on our merry way. Rusty took the opportunity to look upslope to see if he could spot the instigator of the avalanche, but it originated too far away.

Rounding a corner, the party finds itself face to face with a Roc eating an ox. Both parties are a bit surprised to see the other, but the Roc returns to its meal without fuss, dismissing us little people as harmless. Until, that is, Rusty decides to speak in its mind. Turns out, Roc’s are just smart enough to communicate with telepathically. They don’t like it much, though. I think it thought it was having a psychotic break, but Rusty used his shiny new Diplomacy feat to full effect, and not only convinced it that we were friendly, but also extracted the location of the Yeti, and got the Roc to agree to fly us up to the Yeti.

We flew up there without incident, and were dropped off in front of a cave. The cave had a stone table partially covering the entrance, and carvings on the door that were unreadable due to the thick covering of ice. Rusty asked Cletus to take Horus for a little walk which he Firebolted the door until the ice melted off. Once he did, we were presented with a puzzle! There is an engraving on the door and six runes:

It takes the party a startlingly short time to decipher the puzzle, and we come up with:

Beware the beast of Frost and Fear,
For it burns when Flame draws Near,
Only Fire breaks its Frozen might.

Funnily enough, if we just put the runes into the message in the order we found them, we would have been right. When the party correctly placed the runes, suddenly - nothing happened! But it happened suddenly, mark you!

Let’s just kick that Yeti’s ass.

With a feeling of anticlimax, we entered the Yeti’s cave. Cletus was grumbling and grumpy, and looking for any excuse to hit something. We rolled stealth to sneak in - successfully, for all the good it did. Of course the Yeti gets a surprise gaze attack on the party. Rusty is thinking he’ll trade in his Helm of Awareness for a different infusion. Worse, Rusty is the only one that fails his save against the effect, and is paralyzed. Initiative!

Horus 32, Louie 29, Raymond 26, Rusty 25, Cletus 16 and the Yeti stone motherless last on 8.

Horus goes first, and decides to try something novel - diplomacy! He whips out his Comprehend Languages translator, and asks the Yeti why it is throwing stuff down the mountain. We really need to find a solution to this problem, because he has sufficiently irritated the townsfolk that they sent us to kill him. He responds that his plan has worked. He’s hungry, because the Roc keeps kill-stealing from him. He threw the snowballs down the mountain in an attempt to get the townsfolk irritated enough to send food up to him, and here we are!

Horus says that there might be a better solution. What if we could get the townsfolk to send food up to the Yeti? After a very fine Persuasion roll by Horus (but he’s no Rusty), the Yeti agrees, but we only have one day to get food up here or he’ll be mad. The party readily agrees, except for Cletus who begrudgingly agrees. Our placid farmer is getting more murderhobo traits as he matures (“I prefer unhoused sociopath!”).

We leave the cave to head down the mountain.

Cletus gets his wish

As we exit the cave, there’s another surprise attack, this time on Louie (seriously, what is the point of this stupid helm?). He is bitten from behind, which forced him to make a CON save, which he succeeded at. It’s a werewolf!

Initiative! Horus 29, Rusty 25, Cletus 23, Raymond 21, Werewolf 16, Louie 15.

Horus and Rusty beat on it a bit. Cletus does the team play, and after hitting it once, uses his second action to grapple the werewolf, then shove it so it falls. He falls with it and holds on. Nice! Now it can’t move, and all melee attacks against it have advantage because it is prone! Raymond stabs it with Selune’s silver longsword. Louie then beats it to death with his silvered mace. These trusty silvered weapons that we have accumulated over the years are really starting to return on their investment!

Cletus loots the body. He had a note:

This stupid little sonofabitch was spying on us for TFMF! Well, he just sealed his fate. We feed him to the Yeti. The Yeti extends our deadline for delivering more food to 1 1/2 days.

We’ll be coming round the mountain when weeeeeeeeeeeee!

The Yeti, despite being able to talk to Horus (and Rusty) decides vague sign language is the most fun, and pulls a tree out of the ground for each of us. The party is confused as to how to use them, and Cletus is first to have a go as he jumps aboard his and uses it as a sled, relying on his land vehicle driving skill to save him. It does, because he rolled quite well, and the Yeti watches him disappear at high velocity with astonishment. The rest of the party concludes that this was not the way the Yeti intended us to use the trees.

There is a brief period where we attempt to extract useful information from the Yeti again, and he pantomimes using the trees as umbrellas to protect from snowfall. This doesn’t help.

Louie decides that his ride animals skill should work for this, as long as he is riding Raymond and Raymond is riding the log. Before anyone can point out the logical flaws in this line of reasoning, Louie and Raymond are off the cliff, Raymond hanging on to his tree with his tongue. It becomes apparent to Louie and Raymond (but not the rest of us) that these trees operate as a mechanical Feather Fall spell, and Raymond and Louie drift downwards.

Rusty decides to rely on himself. He gets Horus to climb up in a piggy back, and Gary clings to Horus’ leg. Rusty then takes a running jump off the cliff, knowing that his flying boots will allow him to safely land.

Ethan attempts to entrap Rusty by asking if he’s flying all the way down, and Rusty responds with “Well, I’m falling most of the way - just flying for the last bit.”

At this point Cletus is more than half way down the mountain and did not even attempt to stop at the Roc.

Note the order of things: Louie and Raymond jumped, and immediately started Feather Falling. Rusty jumped, and started falling, intending to activate thrusters just in time to prevent splatting at the Roc. Horus and Gary jumped off Rusty, intending to use Feather Fall just before they land. So Rusty and Horus should have arrived close together, and then had to wait a significant time for Louie and Raymond to catch up. Instead, Louie, Raymond, Gary and Horus all arrive at the same time, and have to wait a significant time for Rusty to catch up. Physics is hard, I get it.

So they all stand there looking embarrassed and awkward, because Rusty is the one that knows the Roc. Once he arrives, he explains the plan to the Roc - the villagers will put out 2 piles of food, the Roc gets to eat one for free, if it takes the other pile up to the top of the mountain to give to the Yeti. The Roc agrees, but warns that if the food isn’t there, it’s going to take a dump on the town. Rusty is of the opinion that this would not materially affect the town’s sanitation levels.

Back to Cleeeetuuuuussss!

At about this time, Cletus is approaching the walls of the town at terminal velocity. Cletus stands atop his log, waves to the crowd, runs along it from front to back, does a front flip, round off, back flip, second back flip, and presses up into the air doing a two and a half turn back somersault with half twist which brings him back around to face the front at precisely the right moment to catch a horizontal branch sticking out from a passing tree. He catches the branch, does a triple giant circle and releases to a double layout, and sticks the landing. He then looks around for the judges to bow to, but there’s nobody there except a big hulking guy in front of the city walls.

A big hulking guy who is right in the path of Cletus’ still racing log, which is looking more like a battering ram with every passing moment. Instead of leaping out of the way like a sane person, the guy holds up one hand and catches the log like f*cking Hela with Mjolnir. Then he gives Cletus a disgusted look and walks away. A bit harsh, I thought.

The rest of the party takes 3 hours to walk down the mountain from the Roc’s nest, and by the time we get there Cletus has managed to convince the supervisor that not only were we able to talk to a Roc and a Yeti, but that we got them to agree to our crazy plan. For some reason the supervisor thought it a good idea during this discussion to threaten to shoot his own dog, which is a debating tactic not seen since the early 1980s when Kristi Noem lost the inter-scholastic finals for her team and was simultaneously banned from all further competition.

Ivan is in incredible pain

We return to the inn, where we meet a few more violators of the Law of Conservation of Detail, and ignore them utterly. We do catch up with Hans, who is supposed to be selling his goods today, and finalizing our guard contract with him. He does sell his goods, to a highly shady character named Ivan Dragonoff. Once our business with Hans is done, he recommends us to Ivan, and says Ivan should hire us for his next monster hunt. Hans! I thought we were friends!

Anyway, the party agrees to go monster hunting with Ivan, and we immediately board the train (Ivan has an extra special rail Opal card) and return to Ludendorf - briefly - then, when the tide is right, continue on to Hope’s Heart on the Isle of Agony.

At the railway station, we are greeted by Malar Daragar. Rusty’s ears perk up, that name seems familiar, but he can’t place it. Louie can, though. Despite Louie’s thoroughly aroused suspicions, Malar seem very nice, though he doesn’t seem to like Ivan. He takes us to a local inn, called the House of Selune. On the way, we notice that the locals have scarred hands and wear silver medallions. Their houses are reinforced, and their gardens are full of wolfsbane. They also drink a lot of wolfsbane tea, to Horus’ horror. He knows that wolfsbane is toxic to all mammals, not just wolves and werewolves. He obviously doesn’t know the wolfsbane potion recipe - but Rusty does.

We arrive at the inn, and the innkeeper is a lovely lady by the name of Alara Moonwhisper. Unprompted, she brings us stew and ale. Malar excuses himself to have a private chat with Ivan.

The end, but there is a vision

A young boy, Adam, and his sister Ava are playing. Ava says that their parents don’t have to love Adam as much as her, as he isn’t their real child. Enraged, Adam tries to get her to retract her statement by dangling her out the window. Their mother enters and screams, startling Adam into dropping Ava. Adam, not knowing what to do, figures an appropriate response would be to beat the living crap out of his mother. His father rushes in to find his wife bleeding on the floor, and just in time to witness Adam leaping from the window himself.

And this is why nobody likes orphans.