First, the loot

Lil Louie, Rusty and Horus begin our adventure in future Horus’ library, selecting our cool stuff. Lil Louie picks up a feat book, I think, but it is unspecified which one it was. This becomes relevant later.

Rusty and Horus both take the magnanimous path of selecting power-ups for their familiars/sidekicks. Rusty takes a feat of Shadow Touched for Wit, and Horus gets an upgrade to a familiar feat for Gary.

Second, the market

At the market, Louie convinces his Mum not to deal with Asmodeus until we have exhausted all other avenues of bringing Kristen back.

A group of passing Giff wolf-whistle at Zaesta, lasciviously complimenting her butt. Zaestra is actually pretty pleased, and asks them what they like about it. They foolishly respond that it’s going to provide a lot of food when they eat her. This is astonishingly stupid - sure, they didn’t know she was an Astral Dreadnaught, and instead thought she was only an infinitely long snake tailed demon, with a beautiful female torso sporting six arms, each wielding a sword. What did they think was going to happen when they picked that fight, the brainless fatties. They got ate.

While that light entertainment was progressing, Vexith offers to sell us some souls. We didn’t buy any, but she did satisfy our curiosity of what, exactly, other-planar creatures actually used them for. Not much, as it turns out.

Back to the library

Horus is deeply impressed with himself for making the clock at some unspecified future time. I’m sure the bootstrap paradox will be fine.

Wit, excited with his newfound abilities, casts Sending to Dennis to ask where he is, and once he gets a response, casts Guiding Hand to lead us directly to him. This was problematic for Ethan, who still needed to get Louie and Dennis through some of their own stuff, so at this point we learn that the adventure has not, so far, been contemporaneous. While the Sending happened “now” for Rusty and Horus, it is a week or so in the future for Dennis.

Ethan tries to distract from this blatant Deus Ex Machina by having the fabulous Astral Dragon pop back up. He asks Horus the question that Louie couldn’t answer:

“I have no beginning, for I was never born. I have no end, for I cannot die. Yet every moment, I am created anew and destroyed in the same breath. The gods themselves cannot escape me, though they may bend me. What am I?”

Horus gets it correct with “the Present”. He rolls fantastically for his reward, and while he actually got a Vorpal Sword, that is revised into a protective sheath for his Spellbook, which makes all his spells with spell attack rolls Vorpal. Any spell he casts which requires an attack roll, if he gets a natural 20, it takes the targets head off.

This gives us some really amusing possibilities:

Spells that require an attack roll

Spell	Commentary
Bigby's Hand	Rips the targets head clean off
Contagion	Depends on the disease. Their head rots off? Catches fire? The possibilities are endless.
Dispel Evil and Good	You force a creature back to its home plane, but not all of it makes the trip.
Inflict Wounds	You know that scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark? Like that.
Shocking Grasp	Lightning to the head, which POPs.
Vampiric Touch	Like Inflict Wounds, with the added bonus that you get healed the damage you do. How many hit points did that guy have?
Chill Touch	Movie nostalgia again. Jason X kills Adrienne by freezing her head in liquid nitrogen, then smashing it on a countertop.
Chromatic Orb	Chromatic Orb. Pick your poison! Choose the damage type you want!
Eldritch Blast	Force damage. An invisible punch to the face so hard the head comes away. This one could be really good for crit farming. It's a cantrip so you can cast it forever, and you get 3 rolls per cast.
Fire Bolt	Classic! Just a body with a charred neck stump!
Guiding Bolt	Radiant damage! Like firebolt, but holier!
Ice Knife	Slices the head off and freeze-cauterizes the wound. Tidy.
Produce Flame	Not a fire blast so much as just convincing the whole head to spontaneously combust. Maybe the scariest one.
Ray of Enfeeblement	Huh. This spell doesn't even do any direct damage. You make the guy so tired his head falls off.
Ray of Frost	See the entry for Chill Touch - but at a range.
Ray of Sickness	I'm thinking that scene from Robocop where Clarence hits Emil with the car after he is inundated with toxic waste, and he bursts.
Scorching Ray	Like Firebolt, but potentially targeting 3 people. Heh.
Witch Bolt	Like shocking grasp, but ranged.

There are some obvious ones - all the Smites, Flame Blade, Spiritual Weapon, Thorn Whip, Lightning arrow, Melf's acid arrow, Mordenkainen's Sword - that work much like an ordinary vorpal weapon.

---

The Dragon asks Rusty:

“I grow stronger the more you share me, yet weaker when kept alone. I can topple empires or build civilizations. I outlive stone and steel, yet can be extinguished in a single generation. Scholars hoard me while tyrants fear me. What am I?”

He gets up to about “outlive” before Rusty answers “Knowledge”, which is correct. Rusty rolls poorly, and gets an Amulet of Proof against Detection and Location.

The Dragon throws out one more riddle. This is technically for anyone, but I think Horus takes pity on Rusty’s pathetic booty so far and leaves it to him:

“I am the canvas upon which reality paints itself, yet I have no surface. I am what remains when all existence is removed, yet I am not emptiness. All things emerge from me and return to me, yet I never change. Name me, and you prove you do not understand me. What am I?”

Rusty has a shot with Spacetime, which requires some explanation. It turns out that isn’t correct, but its really close, so the Dragon lets them continue - with some clarifying hints. Eventually Rusty gets it correct with “Nothingness”. He rolls poorly again, and gets a Potion of Invisibility.

Architect of Doom

Louie and Dennis, along with Francesca and Seldrid, head in the direction of Godfrey’s castle. Dennis noticed at the start of the session - and pointed out to Ethan - that he had an ability, granted the last time he visited Godfrey, to have advantage on any INT roll required to find Godfrey’s castle again. Nice concept, poor execution, I suppose.

We get waylaid on the way - again - this time by a disintegrating crystal palace floating above a black hole, orbited by a wisp, and at a further perihelion, a drafting pencil. The wisp and the pencil are connected by a silver cord which Dennis immediately recognises, and it gives him an itch in his whipping hand.

As we approach, the castle recedes, but the pencil - now in Dennis hand - gets longer. Dennis spins it around, knowing that when it will only appear straight when it is pointing at the singularity that is affecting it. Hanging around with Rusty rubs off. It points directly at the wisp.

The space between the pencil and wisp solidifies into Dennis’ poison workshop in Mordent. Dennis and Seldrid enter. The poisons are real, and work. Then the world destabilizes - the vials of poison animate and pour their contents on Dennis. Dennis is not worried - he’s immune to poison - but here, he isn’t. He slaps his chest with Hand of Healing to remove the conditions, but it doesn’t work. Dennis is pretty sure this is illusionary, but Ethan is convinced that illusions can’t be solid. He’s close to right - it’s amazing how many illusion spells they nerfed in 5e - but not completely right. None the less, this chitchat convinces Dennis that Ethan is not using an illusion that can be disbelieved.

It transpires that Dennis also does not get an initial save against the poisons, nor does he get to re-save at the end of his turn. This is not how the real ones work.

Outside, Louie is avoiding looking into the room that has obviously appeared for him, when he is approached by the wisp. It transforms in the astral form of a Githzerai monk called K’resh. As the monk apologizes, two pulses of psychic power explode outwards. Dennis, with the assistance of Louie’s aura, makes both his saves. Louie makes at least one - I think he failed the second, but I don’t know what it did. After they pass, the monk offers to help get Dennis out, which he succeeds in doing.

Once outside the exposition begins, and this guy is a complete idiot. We thought Horus messed shit up with his self-esteem issues, but he’s an amateur. This guy is giving a masterclass. He was contracted to build a meditation temple a few hundred years ago, and was pretty much done when he died while meditating inside. His soul was bound to the temple, and it has been escaping his control over it ever since.

Dennis wants to know how he built it, thinking - logically - that this was the Astral, and it would be a construct of thought. If we could find some sort of lynchpin or keystone, we could destroy the entire edifice with a single stroke. That was way too optimistic. This guy shipped matter in, and contractors, and actually built the stupid thing. No easy answers there.

Dennis does notice, though, that despite the fact that K’resh has his pencil in his hand, the silver cord is still stretching away behind him.

Hold that thought

It is at this moment that Dennis gets a phone call. This has never happened before. He picks up and hears Wit’s voice asking where he is, and what the nearest landmark is. Then the line remains open, waiting for a response. He takes a look around, and in the distance sees a Beholder in a beret doing an eerily accurate impression of a used car salesman trying to sell a painting to some rando. He says to Wit that he is at the crystal temple of meditation, near a beret-clad beholder painter.

Wit whips up a Guiding Hand, but the walk would be tedious. Horus and Rusty attempt to combine their magic to teleport the whole party there. It has mixed results. Rusty manages a natural 20, diametrically opposed by Horus’ natural 1. This casts Confusion on Ethan.

When the spell wears off, we find that we have teleported there, with 2 effects. Firstly, Lil Louie was pulled apart by the gravitational forces in the wormhole (or possibly ejected through the wormhole boundary and lost in space). He was, at the time, sitting in the gunners port of Rusty’s armour (where Minion usually fires Thunderwaves from), so his belongings were left behind in the armour cavity. Remember that unspecified feat book from the first paragraph? It’s here.

Secondly, Rusty and Horus swapped personalities for the rest of the session. This was either a genius move or total idiocy on Ethan’s part - the effects are yet to be determined. While both players did their best, their impressions of each others characters are probably - lacking nuance? Jim is under the impression that Rusty is an overconfident pseudo-intellectual. Scott appears to think that Horus is a timid milksop. I hope we can agree that neither position is representative of truth, and beg forgiveness for anything offensive that may have been done in the pursuit of comedy.

The gang’s back together!

Now we are all back together, Dennis mentions that he can still see K’reshes silver cord, and maybe he’s not really dead. He asks Rusty for his professional opinion and is baffled by the waffling he gets in response. Peering suspiciously at Rusty, he wonders if he is a Changeling, Doppelganger, Succubus, or something like that. He figures probably not - those monsters are all much better at impersonation. He puts that on the back burner, but will keep an eye on Rusty.

He mentions to K’resh that if he were alive, he should be able to return to his body by tugging on the silver cord and following it back to his body. Has he tried that? Turns out, no, he hasn’t. Intelligence is this guy’s dump stat, apparently. So we get him to, and start following him back into the temple. After wending our way deep into its bowels, we find the other end of the cord is attached to a living, but deeply meditating Gitzerai monk. Dennis and Louie have different approaches to reuniting his soul with his body. Louie concentrates on trying to push his soul back into his body, while Dennis smacks him in the face repeatedly yelling “Wake! Up! You! Stupid! Motherfucker!” It is unclear which strategy worked, but one of them did.

K’resh is very grateful, and asks if he can pray for us. We consent. His prayer confers on each of us advantage on one death save in the future. In addition he teaches Dennis a Githzerai meditation technique which can confer either proficiency in Insight, expertise in Insight if you are already proficient, or +1 Wisdom. Dennis asks if that +1 Wisdom overrides the 20 stat cap, and when he is told it does, immediately takes that one. 22 Wisdom! Got that +6 bonus, baby!

Wit wanders into a side room while this is going on, and sees a room from his past in Bluetspur, showing the process of his creation. It’s not nice. Towards the end of the vision, a crown fades into existence in the corner of the room. Wit is quite taken with it, and uses his telekinesis to carry it out of the room. The room slams shut behind him, but the crown remains. He gets a “Belashyrra’s Beholder Crown”. Sweet!

Rusty loans Louie his portable hole, and Louie puts his stuff back into it. Wit convinces him to take a barrel out of it, and half fill it with water. Just enough so that if he climbed in, he would be completely covered. Then he casts “Widogast’s Vault of Amber” and compresses it down to a small amber bead, which he gives to Louie for emergencies.

Finally, we get to Godfrey’s

We all make it to Godfrey’s place. He welcomes us in, and says he would be happy to look after Francesca for a while as she deals with her grief.

While there, Horus wanders outside and watches unperturbed while a golden mote floats through the atmosphere into his lungs. Subsequent spell castings are supercharged. Horus is unphased.

The long road home

We leave Godfrey’s, seeking a colour portal. Almost immediately we stumble across a killing field. The bodies of humanoids are everywhere, being systematically butchered by a bunch of 2 faced Smurfs. They immediately take notice of Horus. Apparently he has a shard of the power of their Goddess in him. So, a quick rundown of the theological history:

• Lakal was a goddess of Healing. The Quom were her followers, a race of peaceful healers.
• A battle between Bahamut and Nihil, the primordial of nothingness and destruction, raged across the heavens, and spilled into Lakal’s domain.
• Bahamut managed to slay Nihil, but Lakal was shattered by the ricohets. Her essence was flung far and wide across the cosmos.
• The Quom immediately changed entirely into a ravening horde of murderous psychopaths whose only purpose was to re-gather all of Lakal’s essence, and restore her to life. The lives of any other creature was of zero importance. They launched a jihad across the multiverse.

Their captain, Tholis, seems to be marginally reasonable, but her crew are barely sentient murderhobos. They reach an agreement to kill Horus to have their high priest extract the mote, but don’t clearly explain that they are going to:

• Kill Horus first, and then transport him;
• Not let the party near the body.

Rusty, justifiably untrusting that the high priest will actually follow through with Tholis’s promise to resurrect Horus, wants to cast Gentle Repose on the body so the party can resurrect him when (if) we ever get the body back.

The Quom (with the notable exception of Tholis) go fucking apeshit at this. No amount of attempts at diplomacy have any effect. The ship fires upon Rusty, who makes his save and takes minimal damage. Rusty also Nat 20’d his initiative, so finally gets to go first. He locks down the entire enemy force with Hypnotic Pattern and then attempts to negotiate with Tholis from a position of strength. She is useless, and despite the best efforts to allow her to regain control of her crew, she is pretty sure nothing will work. Literally the worst ship captain since Bligh.

Just as we are reaching the point of pulling the Quom out of Hypnotic Pattern one by one and fucking executing them, time stops and this mysterious, blindingly handsome guy shows up, with seven golden canaries fluttering around his head. Rusty turns to him and greets him like an old friend. “Hey, B.”

The end

Worth noting that nobody else recognised who the mysterious guy was. Scott feels like he finally knows something. Thankfully, the lore of Bahamut stretches back to AD&D days, so he is familiar with it. Though originally, Bahamut preferred the visage of an old man. Not sure when he got self-conscious about his age.