#i too burst into flames when standing within 30 feet of sunlight so i feel you

[pastafossa]

Do you think Matt would smell someone getting sunburned? Matt would try keep my ass out of the sun because I start to fry the moment sunlight reaches me.

I tell myself yes because like you, I really need the help. 😂 I'm pale af and due to some meds, I also burn in about 30 seconds. I imagine he may hear a faint little sound (skin contracting, blood shifting to rush to the burn), or smell your skin kinda cookin' a little. I know for a fact though that he'd be able to feel the temperature shift as your skin began to burn and all the blood rushed in; burns are HOT, and we know he's incredibly sensitive to variations in temperature. Hell, maybe he could even sense the vibrations of your cells going AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHFUCCCCCKKKKKKI'MDYINGGGGGGGGGGGGHELPMEEEEEEEE

BUT either way, he'd absolutely sense it! And he'd be the first to become your shady tree (watch this boy get burned cause his pale Irish ass is trying to shield you), herd you inside, or literally hold your little sun umbrella i have one they're great.

[zippdementia]

Part 34 Alignment May Vary: As She Remembers It

Rayden’s backstory and the reason for his betrayal of Karina is something I’ve thought long and hard on, not only as to why it happened but how to present it. The following session was my solution, turning exposition into gameplay with some new mechanics.

“There is a fortress ahead,” Rayden tells them. “It was a Gulug fort but we took it from them and now we are expected to hold it.“ He grins. “That’s the price we pay, I suppose.” He looks over the group. “I was supposed to bring reinforcements, but I expected more than this.”

Karina remembers: in reality, the team of recruitments had been attacked. She had been the only survivor and had told Rayden this when she met them. He had taken her to the fortress, where... she shudders. Something bad happens at the fortress, she recalls.

But this time is different. Traki and Tyrion have followed her into this memory, and so she indicates them as well when she says, “We are all that you have.”

Rayden smiles his easy smile. “Do you have equipment, at least?”

Karina is about to tell him no when suddenly Tyrion steps forward. “We do,” he says. Karina turns to tell him to shut up, that rags do not count as “equipment” when she sees he is wearing a half plate of armor, the very one he had lost in the Tombs of Haggemoth. Strapped to his belt are two fine longswords along with a pouch he used to hold his potion.

“It’s what I was hoping to wear,” Tyrion tells her, stressing the words I was hoping. And suddenly she understands.

This is part of the new mechanics I am gradually introducing into this dream world. I have the party tell me what they wish to be wearing and what weapons they want and then use their desires to set a DC between 10-30. Then they roll Intelligence and see if they can “remember” this equipment into existence. Tyrion gets what is described above, while Karina ends up with mended mariner’s armor and her magical handcrossbow. Traki desires nothing except some decent clothes: as a monk, his weapons are always with him.

Siege

The fortress of Hankari sits on a hill of solid obsidian overlooking the edge of the obsidian plains as they shift from black glass to sparse flecks of green. This is the edge of the Gulug border and it is here that Karina fought her first battle in the war. She is about to fight it again.

As the companions enter the fortress, they are taken to Commander Gregor Sampson, who is briefing the men on the situation. He takes an immediate dislike to Karina’s appearance (”They’ll let anything in the army these days,” he grumbles about her Tiefling ancestry) but Rayden chastises him into silence, defending the new recruit as “the terror of the borderlands,” a moniker he has just made up for her.

Sampson explains that this fortress hides a secret, some power that the Gulugs use to make their abominable machines, but the commander has been unable to find it. Worse, the Gulug army has been spotted diverting a section of their force to take back the fortress. “You ever been in a battle against the Gulug, girl?” Sampson asks Karina. “Machines that look like men, but with too many arms and fire coming out of most of them. Things falling down on you from above, bugs that burrow like flying razors through your skin and into your organs, killing a man from within. Wait till the army gets here, then we’ll see who the terror of the borderlands is.”

Soon enough and sure enough, Karina and her companions find themselves on the battlements staring out at the badlands, across which marches a host at least twice their own size. Sunlight glints off metal and as the army comes closer they can see that mixed in among the footsoldiers are large crablike machines, more neck than body, with mandible-like jaws and four arms, two of them mighty pincers like a giant crab. They walk on four legs and cross the battlefield at a brisk pace, making directly for the fortress. Archers around Karina fire arrows into the sun, to send them raining down among the beasts, but even from afar they can see they are having little effect, and they aren’t slowing them at all. Before long, the machines are on the walls, their spider like legs digging into the stone as they begin to cumbersomely rise into the air and pull themselves, step by step, up the wall.

“We are doomed,” an archer near Traki says.

“I have survived worse,” Traki says quietly, though he is not sure if he is being honest.

“I have not,” the archer says, and gives him a queer look. “You don’t understand. I die here. Every time, I die here. It never changes. I can feel them inside me, already, eating me away from the inside out.”

“Last time you did not have us here,” Traki tells him.

“No, I did not. You have brought something, too, something different. Something which could give me a way out. I agreed to let it give me a way out...” even as the archer trails off his features are already contorting, changing color to a sickly green while fungal tendrils of moss begin to sprout all over his body. Traki recoils from the abomination, whispering the green death, before striking out once, hard, to the side of the archer’s now completely covered face. The blow lifts the archer off his feet and he tumbles off the wall down towards the mechanical beasts. One grabs him and rips him in two, flinging the pieces aside as it continues its way up.

The Dark Crystal

The battle quickly turns against them. Tyrion is not fully up to health, due to his illness and infection, and he falls quickly in battle to a swarm of mechanical beetles, who begin to make good on Gregor Sampson’s warning as they worm their way inside his body. Gregor himself leads Rayden and a number of troops out on horseback to meet the foe that has trailed behind the mechanical monsters, but it is a poor decision. With the main force of the defenders gone to fight, the ones left are simply not numerous enough to deal with the mechanical monstrosities. Karina manages to nearly destroy one of the four beasts climbing the walls with her necrotic magic, and does manage to knock one off the wall completely, but is forced to fall back when one ascends while blasting fire ahead of it from devices hidden in its maw. Traki tries to rally the other defenders and manages to long enough to take the fight to one of the machines that ascends, but then a Flyer arrives, looking like a mechanical dragon and breathing flame down on the battlements. All is clearly lost, when suddenly Karina has an idea.

“This isn’t what happened,” she tells herself. “I did not die here. This battle was not lost.” And even as she has the thought, the battlefield begins to melt away in front of her...

This is an extension of the equipment gaining mechanic I introduced earlier. I’ve been waiting for one of the players to try something big and situation changing like this. With a successful Intelligence roll, Karina remembers how the battle really happened...

They were all standing in the courtyard, Tyrion was back alive. Around them, the bodies of broken machines and dying men lay strewn on top of each other, the black oil mixing with the red blood, small fires burning in the setting sun. Karina recalled now what the battle had truly been like. Gregor had never, in true history, ridden his troops out of the gates. They had massed in the courtyard and defended it to the last man (and woman). Karina herself had taken down the Flying machine with a single shot through its eye, a feat that Rayden himself had applauded and named “Karina’s Mark.” Over the years of the war she would leave her “mark” many more times.

This isn’t to say there aren’t consequences for dying in the dreamworld. Tyrion has taken a permanent -1 to CHA, WIS, and INT as his mind is torn apart by the experience of “dying.” But the goal here is to get the players through this long-awaited piece of lore, so permanent death is on hold for a minute.

The three companions watch as a captive is dragged before Rayden, a young woman who curses at Rayden and the General in the guttural Gulug tongue. Gregor doesn’t speak Gulug but he reads her expression enough to take offence and smashes the woman’s face with a gauntleted fist, knocking her unconscious. Rayden doesn’t like it, but Gregor reminds him he’ll be the one interrogating her and that Rayden will end up doing far far worse. That makes him silent, though out of agreement or shame, Karina does not know.

But there is a memory here too that is not her own and it shortly plays out. After the battle, Karina had gone off to help pick up and bury the dead. But Rayden had descended beneath the earth of the courtyard, broken open by the battle to reveal the secret passages Gregor had been looking for. Only now Karina, Tyrion, and Traki follow them and pass through a long tunnel to a small cave where a crystal dominates one wall, its glow illuminating their features.

“These are how they make and control their machins,” Gregor said with amazement. “These are what will change the war in our favor!”

Exaltations are cut short however as the room grows hot, too hot to believe. Rayden, Gregor, and the soldiers that came here with them burst into sudden flame and then turn their burning features towards the companions. At first they think it is some trick of the crystal but quickly realize that, no, this is the fever catching up to them. The memory itself is burning away and they risk getting caught up in it.

Fighting their way free of the flames, the companions race back through the tunnel, only to find it extends forever with no end in sight. Traki is the first to challenge the situation: “If we need an exit, then we must make one!” he exclaims and concentrates on “remembering” a door in this tunnel. It works: a door they are not entirely positive wasn’t there before is in the tunnel wall and they wrench it open and pile through...

... into a gorgeously furnished sitting room. Two familiar figures are here: Rayden is explaining something to a much younger and healthier Zennatos (considering the last time they saw him he was on his deathbed from the cursed book). Rayden continues to speak...

“... she has told me about the crystals. I know how they work and despite my best efforts, the Alliance will know soon, too. This is why we started the war, Zennatos. It was to get their power.”

“And so,” Zennatos says, bringing Rayden a cup of something golden with steam coming off the top. “You wish to defect.”

Rayden sips carefully at the drink. “I have no choice.”

“Ah ah,” Zennatos chides. “You always have a choice. But, I suppose in this case, if you want to be with her, there is nothing else you can do.”

Rayden looks about to object, but Zennatos cuts him off, sharply. “I am not blind and I am not stupid. You hire my men to rescue this girl, this prisoner, from your own torture chamber, then say you must be the one to escort her back to Gulug. Unless this is part of your greatest spy mission of all time, then I would say you are truly defecting.”

Rayden looks uneasily at Karina and the others. “We should have this conversation in private,” he says.

“You paid them, they will keep silent,” Zennatos responds, then his voice becomes more sympathetic. “Have you told Karina yet?”

“No,” Rayden says.

“Told me what?” Karina asks, but Rayden does not respond to her. Of course not: in his memory she is not here, just a few assassins, or thieves, or whomever he hired to save this girl they speak of.

“I cannot tell Karina,” Rayden goes on. “She would not... she would not understand.”

“You mean she would try to stop you,” Zennatos says. “Ah, well, she is a better friend than I am.”

“You know what you are to do?” Rayden asks the companions, and then proceeds to tell them

The companions are being tasked with carrying out the next part of Rayden’s memory: a heist at the huge prison where Rayden’s prisoner is being kept. The companions will be in disguise as guards. Rayden will make sure they have a way in. The prisoner is to be freed and given a piece of the crystal that they saw underground. She is a Gulug and one of the few who knows how to harness and use the power of the crystal. When taken to the roof of the prison, she will use her power to create a gate and warp herself to Gulug, where Rayden will meet her. The companions will then escape in the confusion. Even as he finishes telling them the plan, before they can ask questions, the room is already fading, turning into an inky darkness that becomes a wide body of water, in the middle of which looms a prison upon a stone outcrop.

Pursued

Each successive part of this adventure has moved a little more towards free form. At the prison, the players are given more free reign. Find the prisoner, they are told. Rescue her.

Truth be told, there is a little bit of a stumble here. It is one of those sessions where the group is tired from a long week, we are approaching the holidays, and everyone is a little distracted. Seeing this, I speed the scene up a bit. The players encounter commander Gregor again, now oveseeing this prison. Their disguises keep him from suspicion and they use a decent ruse to get to the prisoner, playing on Gregor’s apparant dislike of Rayden (which they perceived back in the seige) to hint that they are here to do his job for him and need to interrogate the prisoner so Rayden won’t do it.

“If you ask me,” Gregor says, “He’s gotten too close to her. He’s letting a pretty face get in the way of his duty.”

With this ruse, it is easy to find their way to the prisoner’s cell and get her into their custody. By mentinoing Rayden’s name, a word she clearly understands, they gain the young woman’s trust and begin to lead her through the prison.

The prison was envisioned as a very open layout, with about four stories of cat walks and indoor towers used to watch over the prisoners. A cold stone place interspersed with metal catwalks, the feel is like that of a meat factory. The players make it unhindered almost to the roof and are walking along the highest level of catwalks when they are commanded to stop. Gregor is striding towards them along the catwalk, flanked by two guards, while from the other end of the catwalk three more come, one dressed in the robes of a battle priest. The companions are trapped! But before they can try to make an attempt to keep their cover and continue on their way, Gregor’s face contorts and he and his companions begin to change, green mold errupting all over their bodies.

The infection has found them again.

The following fight is quick, though it has some excellent moments. Tyrion begins using his magic, holding the line against Gregor, Traki takes the lead, using his incredible monk fighting skills to shove the priest and one of his comrades off the catwalk, where they fall to their deaths seventy feet below on the hard stone. Karina takes the woman and runs, forcing her way through the opening Traki has made and heads for the ladder that leads to the roof. Her plan is to get there, activate the portal, and force them onto the next memory and it is a good plan... but not one that works. Karina disappears up the ladder and Traki and Tyrion are left alone to face the remaining monsters. Traki knocks one more off the catwalk, but the others are too strong. Gregor especially has become a monster, tentacles of whipping green vines pushing out through his armor, his face no longer visible under a forest of moss, his hands burning with an acid touch as they tear at Tyrion and Traki. A few failed rolls from Traki is too many and the two are overwhelmed.

I’ve said that the penalties here are not about permanent death, but rather about the infection and fever taking over the bodies and minds of the players. This “death” is due to the infection, and both Tyrion and Traki will have a permanent effect from it, but they will live to continue on in this memory that has become a nightmare.

Darkness gives way to light, as Traki and Tyrion both lift themselves from a ground that is no longer metal but instead cobbled stone. It is cold, there is a light dusting of snow in the air, and all around them looms a city unlike any they have ever seen. Glass and metal fuse together to make buildings the size of castles. Streets are wide as small rivers and some of the people who walk them show metal on their bodies, whenever their thick winter clothing allows a rare glimpse of their skin.

Ahead of them, the tallest building of all looms, a gigantic tower made of metal but with one whole side, the one facing the street, made up of a thick dark blue glass. Coming off of either end of this tower extends a sixty foot wall. Giant torchlights that seem to give off no flame shine down from the wall, illuminating the street in the twilight.

“Where is this?” Tyrion asks.

“This is Gulug,” Karina says. “And this is not Rayden’s memory. It is mine.”

Next time, What She Remembers Part II.