OK context bc a couple of y’all asked—apologies in advance because a LOT of context is necessary.
our level 7 party was confronting a lich known as the Arch Mage to try to get him to stop using his undead army to kill masses of people, and it turns out 900 years ago the lich had been artificially turned into the god of death by a different guy, who used the lich’s dead/dying 10ish-year old daughters as his phylactories. his daughters are also stuck in time, living each day like it’s the first after their undeath, with no memory of the past 900 years.
as phylactories, the girls run on the power of souls/deaths, and the cost has grown exponentially with time. but, as their loving father, the lich can’t bear to kill them himself, to have someone else kill them, or let them run out of souls and die “naturally,” because what loving parent can watch their children starve? it doesn’t excuse the thousands of deaths caused, but it’s a heartbreaking situation.
while talking, it’s revealed that we have an item that the lich could use to track down the fates, aka the daughters of the guy who turned him into a god, and boy would he really like to kill them! which seems like a really bad idea. in desperation, my character vanetta suggests that before we mess any further with divinity, whether creating or destroying it, that because she is a book character that came to life, maybe the lich could create his own world/dimension like that and live there with his daughters.
the arch mage went cool idea, i’m gonna study you like a bug now.
he dragged vanetta into his temporal magic circle and teleported the rest of the party into another chamber full of vampires to keep them busy. while trapped in the circle, my girl rolled a 29 in arcana (she has 19 intelligence and expertise) to get a feeling for the magic circle she was trapped in, all while the lich is actively doing time experiments on her. this is not the nat 20.
she beseeches the lich—tells him that he doesn’t need to do this, that she would help him find a solution. as a fictional character, her existence in the real world is unstable, which has previously manifested in a few ways—primarily, she has an at will version of alter self that lets her become alternate versions of herself. usually this is used for her to dress appropriately to the time period and region our party has been time traveled to. in this case, it made her appearance glitch out so as she spoke, she temporarily took on her childhood visage, to be around the same age as the lich’s daughters.
and in that moment, the lich’s daughters, who had only ever seen his human-looking disguise, enter the room and see his full lich form. even knowing that they won’t remember this tomorrow, the pain of their fear and the exhaustion of 900 years of futility take their toll. he starts to break down.
vanetta, now back to her normal appearance, tries to interpose herself between the girls and their dad, to shield him from view. she says she knows it’s an impossible situation, the worst possible trap, that she knows intimately that there is no pain worse than losing a child. that she understands him. it’s not stated explicitly (and the party doesn’t know this), but part of vanetta’s backstory is that she suffered a miscarriage after being targeted for Political Reasons™ and lost a baby she desperately wanted.
the arch mage says “i can’t lose them.”
vanetta says “you already have”
nat fuckin 20 persuassion babeyyyyyyyy
sometimes the dice just know. anyway that’s where the session ended (with the implication that the conflict has ended and we’re about to work together) and wowie i cannot wait for the next one!
blakekathryn
annaxmalina
turnnoffyourmind
izzy806
2087
germansingergirl
