#Hakim ben Asenath

[motheatenscarf]

Y'ALL.

I treated myself to some expensive dice to celebrate my space themed GOOlock reaching Level 20, and LOOK at them!

[motheatenscarf]

So, the spell Dark Star in 5e is fucking great, and my DM let me take it for my GOOlock because he had a big space theme through his pact with the Old Ones.

It's a big mean aoe that basically opens up an 80' diameter black hole in the middle of a room and does stupid amounts of damage while also creating difficult terrain and magical darkness in the same area.

Which, yeah, 8th level spell, it should be good.

But because it's basically a black hole, I would always visually describe the people who died from it as getting stretched and crushed into oblivion rather than just being "disintegrated" like the spell describes. This is a thing that black holes do and is called "spaghetification," and it would be a gnarly way to go.

I feel like this is relatively common knowledge and me explaining this seems unnecessary, but all of this is to build up to the saddest story which is that the last time I was able to cast this spell as my Warlock, Hakim, I cast it on a bunch of demons that were trying to steal the throne of heaven (endgame is epic, y'all) and to announce this declared;

"Welcome to Hakim's spaghetti factory!"

and nobody got the joke :(

[motheatenscarf]

Almenor D&D continues to go well.

Well... for the players, anyway, our characters are living through what's being called a GODSWAR, so it's... bad.

But there's another dead god to toll up in the godswar!

Not killed by us this time, most of them haven't been.

It was the guy whose job it was to sort the dead. So there's a huge backlog of dead souls who are waiting for judgement, basically everyone who's died from the destruction of this Godswar in the last week. It's fucking anarchy in the afterlife now.

The GOOD news is that means that the boundaries between the afterlife are broken down and people who have been separated can now reunite. Like our Cleric's dead mother and father who were assigned to different afterlives. We're taking advantage of that as an opportunity to jailbreak the Lich God's son and his wife so we can have a bargaining chip if the lich god tries to betray us.

The BAD news is the king of hell, uh, definitely stole the divine essence of the god of Judgement and the afterlife and he definitely is leading this invasion of the upper planes so he can steal the divine essence left behind by the Queen of Heaven, goddess of Glory, who had previously killed herself rather than allow Corruption to find her.

So.

Um.

We have a plan to weaken him, and it's already on our to-do list, but he's twice as strong as he ought to be now, and if he gets his hands on Glory, he will have definitely gotten that by going through our Cleric's goddess, the goddess of Compassion, who is the LAST god standing in the upper planes apparently! So, we're racing on our way to get to the Thing We Have To Do, and we teleported in blind, arriving we're not sure how far from our target destination, and everything is on fire, and we just heard a big monster roar???

So.... I'm sure that's normal.

[motheatenscarf]

Almenor D&D went really well tonight!

My boy successfully defended his thesis and we got official aid to help prevent the return of the setting's primordial eldritch god of chaos which we're just calling Tiamat!

Also a priest of the god we killed whose essence we banished into the abyss where Tiamat resides ran into the Temple of Bahamut screaming about "Five heads, one hatred, she is coming!" before barfing up bugs until he uh... deflated?? Into an Oogie Boogie style skin sack??

But I'm sure that's normal, nothing to be concerned about!

[motheatenscarf]

Almenor D&D went very well tonight and was intensely fun and memorable, the whole party managed to kill a god and we're not even at endgame yet.

So much backstory, but the shortest version is thus;

Our DM has established that some of the gods are mortals who used HORRIFYING fanes of immense and profane power to ascend to godhood, essentially merging themselves with the natural divine power of a concept given form. These gods are generally more powerful and less changeable than the naturally occurring ones who shift with mortal expectations and belief, and they also hate each other and have vendettas against one another. One of these bad dudes is a mortal once named Istaphon who merged with the concept of Corruption/Ruin and has been manipulating the Sun Goddess, the Sun Pope, the Sun Religion, and now there's a big war between the gods that's spiraling out of control onto the material plane causing untold destruction and their followers are deciding now's the time to be crazed zealots about it. I mean, they were before, but now even moreso to the tune of a full on siege and straight up plagues of Egypt type shit going on.

Notably, there is no gate or bulwark or veil or ANYTHING that can physically separate the gods from the material plane in this setting; they can come down whenever they want. The only thing that was ever stopping them was mutually assured destruction and the threat of the Material Plane's destruction meaning no more followers meaning no more power. The ascended mortal gods don't have to worry about that as much though, and ever since the Sun Goddess took her own life rather than allow Istaphon's corruption to reach her, her Pantheon and church started getting more paranoid and zealous, and her divine sidekick god, described as an archangel, went BERSERK in her absence and apparently had a semi-mortal daughter, whom we... y'know, killed, because she was full on Spanish Inquisition evil, so he went insane and tried to kill us, and then the divine balif god showed up to try and drag the archangel home, but he got ganked, and then the archangel's equivalent in hell went, oh sweet, no cops to stop me now! And then archangel killed HER before our lich god came to stop him, and then every other god went, fuck it, everyone else is doing it, and now there's a godswar, and we're in it, and it's... insane.

So, we're trying to pick up the pieces where we can, and currently in this session the Sun Pope was leading a siege against the city we'd JUST freed from the Sun Emperor (who was the husband of the archangel's lunatic daughter whom we murdered, so he's not happy with us either) and was vowing to make us pay for our apostacy. We brought the Orcish god of ass kicking, Sun Pope called down the god of Civilization, they duked it out in a field while we fought off hordes of angels and pitted straight up dragons against each other.

We're level 18, insane shit is happening!

We're only fighting HERE instead of being at any of the other like, FORTY places that are about this awful, because the Sun Pope has an artifact we need to forge a godkilling weapon designed by our lich-god buddy named Bel-Katash, whom we call B-Kats, because 1.) we have to break the fanes that turned these mortals into gods in the first place so no more can be made and also so that they can't be used to summon the WORST of the asshole gods, an ancient primordial being of chaos who takes on the form of a dragon, a reinvented Tiamat, and 2.) it would actually be great to have something to threaten these assholes with so they stop fucking up our material plane! We should maybe kill the gods, actually!

Anyway, B-Kats only designed this weapon because he was a mortal himself once, but he made a baaad deal with, essentially Istaphon, out of desperation to escape execution at the hands of his enslavers. B-Kats isn't a GOOD dude, he only ascended to godhood by snorting the souls of his empire of descendants like a line of coke after a thousand years of lichdom to gain enough power to kill the previous god of undeath and steal his job, but he isn't the WORST dude because at least all he wants is never to be a slave again with no one holding power over him or his soul. He doesn't want the world to be plunged into perpetual chaos and he has no interest in the petty wars raged by the other gods so... fine, we'll work with that!

Back to the present, we manage to finally punch a hole in the Sun Pope's defenses and incapacitate her in like 2 rounds with some of our hardest hitting tricks, and she calls upon her angelic guide to help her. And he answers!

Except her angelic guide is Istaphon, who wants to brag about his evil plan and thank her for starting his mission of ruin so thoroughly. Then he casts a plague on all of us because he also means ruin and corruption in the form of DISEASE and PESTILENCE, so that's fun! We've all got like maybe 10 rounds at most before this plague kills us if we run, and we have maybe ONE round before he obliterates us if we stay; what are we gonna do?

We all say fuck it, hail mary, go down swinging!

Sorcerer starts it off by using her 9th level spell slot to cast Wish and try to break the strands of weave stitching Istaphon to Ruin. She makes some STUPID high save to succeed and then another so as not to die immediately. She succeeds on both, but is knocked down to 0 hp and has her strength reduced from trying to control THIS much magic around, y'know, RUIN HIMSELF. My Warlock sees this and is close enough that he can try some insane bullshit, making a grab for the successfully untethered essence of Ruin and casting Plane Shift to banish it to the depths of the Abyss where Tiamat is still trapped. The hit lands, the thing is banished, but my boy fails his Con save and instantly dies from, y'know, Plane Shift being a melee spell and having to PHYSICALLY TOUCH the IMMATERIAL CONCEPT OF RUIN in order to banish it from the Material Plane.

With Istaphon momentarily weakened, our Cleric casts HIS hail mary and casts Gate, trying to call forth Bel-Katash so he can have his revenge. Bel-Katash comes through and is like, HELL YEAH, and restrains Istaphon, freeing up our Rogue to grab the artifact off the Sun Pope's rotting body and assemble the final piece of the blade before landing a fucking crit and shattering him on impact, the blow rupruting out and killing basically everything below a certain HP threshold in like a mile radius and instantly killing our unconscious Sorcerer and almost killing our Cleric and Rogue, who are still plague stricken and fucked up.

Bel-Katash says good job, I know you still need that blade to finish destroying the fanes, but that blade is a loaner and I'll be coming back for it. Ominous shit, but COOL, thanks, we'll burn that bridge when we get to it, I guess.

Cleric now only has like 3 rounds before he dies, and our DM just asks what he does. Thirty seconds of panicked spell scrolling and spell slot availability checking later, he can, in order, cleanse our Rogue, revive me and our Sorcerer, and then DIES, with like... one level 2 spell slot left and nothing else. Sorcerer and I wake up just in time to see him gurgling on his own diseased blood as our Rogue begins to panic because he thinks he's the only survivor. Rest in-

Just kidding, Death Ward kicks in and he's at 1 hit point! Fuck yeah, Clerics!

We head back to our headquarters in the recently liberated palace over a mile long march of corpses and we are all FUCKED UP with several levels of exhaustion and over the trek realize that my boy has a withered and nonfunctional main hand that he can barely cast spells with and is definitely cursed as fuck, but we did it!!... for now.

There is... so much else to do, but we assembled the god killing blade and it is OPEN SEASON NOW, BABY! Curses be damned!

It was a very cool moment where everyone got to show off and do what they do best, and it was very fun. I'm still super hype about it and this was like 4 hours ago. My Warlock is definitely getting a new fucked up looking cursed arm out of this and GOD, I wish I wasn't broke from Christmas shopping, I want to commission art of this new look so badly, my poor Warlock boy is like if Tyr were a stringbean nerd, sacrificing his arm to delay the fuckin wolf time and give the world time to prepare.

[motheatenscarf]

Had the final REAL session of Almenor D&D tonight, epilogue in 2 weeks, we did it!! \o/

Everybody lived! We successfully burned through the Shade of Tiamat's legendary resistances (with LOTS of help lol) and Hakim was able to banish her back to the Abyss. He fulfilled his pact with the Old Ones in doing so and even gets to keep his powers. Which is good, because my boy has PLANS.

Plans which we'll discuss in the epilogue, and to go into detail here would sound, uh, insane, considering the shit we got up to in a campaign which culminated in what is being dubbed "The Godswar" kicked off by "The Day of Wrath," so. You know. High level RPG nonsense!

[motheatenscarf]

D&D tonight was really fun, Hakim is exemplifying that scale of mage power growing exponentially with each level. Not to toot my own horn, but I went in wanting his theme and his build to be cohesive, the boy wanted to master Fate Itself, and uhhhh, he has done so, he is the master of probability in the math rocks game, you can't hit him, and even if you do, portents and luck say "No, you don't, fuck you."

Anyway, he got a lot of really cool moments and was rolling hot to make up for a campaign full of 1s and 0s and literally walking face first into caustic spider webbing and getting us so lost we wound up in the Feywild.

He got his glowup and had some good chats with the squad, we have maybe 2-3 more sessions left to go before the campaign is FINISHED, I'm super hyped up.

[motheatenscarf]

had almenor d&d tonight

and uhhhh

we stepped in it REAL BAD

[motheatenscarf]

Dumb update for D&D, but my Warlock got a broom of flying, except I got to redesign it to fit his Great Old One/telekinetic/space theme a little better and now he basically gets to hover around like Magneto complete with spheres orbiting around him like in the breakout scene from X-Men 2

[motheatenscarf]

I subscribed to Hero Forge Pro for a month just to play around in their photo booth settings and oh god, it’s so cute, you can do so much dumb cute stuff. I’ve already made like 3 more Hakims than I needed.

Here he is Eldritch Blasting his way out of all his problems like a proper Warlock

Bringing Minerva to the Library and looking for the hidden tomes of eldritch knowledge that he needs to reference for his thesis paper

Reading over his stack of research that he got from the library over a cup of coffee

Waking up and sending Minerva out to do some important business for the day. They don’t have flying owls available as base designs and his hands were already full with coffee and book, so Minerva has to be in cat form even though she hates being anything but an owl (she still has her cosmic color scheme tho dammit)

[motheatenscarf]

Hakim has the worst luck out of any character I’ve ever played, he consistently rolls so low that I have to use Portent features AND took the Lucky feat, and yet, AND YET, things like THIS still happen to him. 

[motheatenscarf]

Had a battle royale style PVP match in D&D today for the Almenor Squad. Hakim got 3rd place (out of 4) mostly because I cheated and picked some REALLY good items available and because I got really lucky with some of my rolls, but I made sure he made everyone hate him for every round he was alive for and that’s what really matters.

[motheatenscarf]

updated outfit portrait for my good good GOOlock boy by the wonderful talented @iratescientist!!!

I love it so much, Athena, you did such a good job!!! It looks too pretty, it’s too cool, he doesn’t deserve it!

[motheatenscarf]

And then i wasted the entire morning in Hero Forge.

[motheatenscarf]

Almenor D&D is at least going strong and Hakim got a BALLER new outfit. The DM asked us to work with him to make items for our characters that would scale with them in level, and I was able to sketch up a shitty idea for some new threads, which they were able to take and make into this drawing, which Athena was then able to take and color into this glorious masterpiece;

so with each person exponentially more competent than the last, we managed to make this happen!

Actual drawing itself by @jakey-beefed-it​, colors by @iratescientist​, dumb dumb GOOlock goodboy who plays with worms the unfortunate thought-child of yours truly.

[motheatenscarf]

Have been suuuper out of it for the last like, 3 weeks of D&D games, but Hakim accidentally killed a man with the Dream spell! 

Made a corrupt guard have a nightmare that he’d gone to hell and accidentally killed him with that 3d6 psychic damage.

WHOOPSIE!

¯\_(ツ)_/¯