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@roll-for
Lu, Irakan (tiefling form), and Niak from the D&D group I’m in, Tales of Waterdeep’s Finest.
Paintings all done on Clip Studio Pro and colorized in Petalica. All art done by me, Bee, and housed here on my tumblr blog and DeviantArt - do not remove this post if you reblog.
Still to come: Lian (in progress), Loretta (in progress), Sylvar (not started).
May draw: Crescius, Kratmun, Nyloth and the other party, Thay’s Most Wanted.
😍 Find me one!
Definitely a Sylvar performance look.
@light-and-magic
This is Fine
A recap of Waterdeep's Finest.
I forgot to write Part 2 of last week’s recap because of job stuff and COVID-19 stuff - forgive me. Suffice it to say that we ended pretty peacefully save for a new mandate (borne by prophecy) to travel BACK to the High Forest to resurrect our fallen comrades, and having met two new people: Aradek the Flying Axe, and Lu.
Aradek is Chultan, good-natured, and very handy with an axe. Lu is an sylph (air genasi) that seems keen to hit on anything with two legs and is very pissed off at a former master that ghosted him.
But!
We began last session with last minute preparation to leave Silverymoon and retrace our steps. We all went to a bank and showed the leader of the refugees, Dasan, how to money. Niak and Aradek, her husband (?), went back to his house to pick up food and other supplies; Lu waited in Loretta’s summoned cart, and Loretta and Lian went to a magic shop because someone was wheeling out a statue of a naked man and this apparently caught the wild mage’s eye.
Anyway - we go in, and to our surpris we see a very familiar face. (This leads me to tell the story of “Crazy” Habib. He started as silliness in my college D&D sessions [“Crazy” Habib’s Discount <Potions/Scrolls/Magical Equipment Emporium> was where we said we’d be going for any purchases we didn’t want to RP out but did want to note ICly]. In both Tales of Waterdeep’s Finest - set in Waterdeep - and Thay’s Most Wanted [set in various parts of Thay and Thesk], we’ve run into a series of “shops” run by what seem to be clones that hate each other, and that sell items of varying quality at nonsensical prices. They refer to one another as brothers, thieves and rascals and try to undercut each others’ business - and they're ALL terrible at business.)
Well, we met the original Habib last night in Silverymoon. Or if he’s not the original, he’s close to it. One, that man is beautiful and two, his items seem to actually be of quality with reasonable discounts. Three, we found out that he has a problem with simulacra gone terribly wrong. Four, we bought a box from him. Well, Loretta did; but he demonstrated the box’s ability to take items and change them to something of equivalent value, such as a platinum piece to ten gold coins.
This is significant for a few reasons:
A. We need diamonds to raise people. We have gold. You see where I’m going with this.
B. Three of these boxes were made, and now three have been sold.
One to us - duh
One to a fisherman (possibly significant with regards to Noktyn, a PC who is on hiatus atm but who came from a fishing village?)
One to “a Thayan mage with a funny accent several decades ago”. We happen to have a book that once used to be a Thayan mage and he has a funny accent. The book backed up this claim but he has no idea where it is, probably “stolen by some snake of a former friend”.
Anyway, after getting the box off of Habib, we all set off on our adventure back to the High Forest. Lu and Loretta exchanged spellbooks and tips; Lian sulked, and Niak and Aradek sat in the back and made small talk about spices.
Fast forward and we get to the entrance of the forest and see mages at the forest’s edge trying to fight a blaze that is still somehow burning. A few groups are there - the Order of Mages and Protectors from Waterdeep, the Harpers (they’re widespread but big in the Silver Marches), and the Spellguard of Silverymoon. They inform us that more groups are potentially coming from as far as Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter. They also mention that this blaze isn’t natural… it’s hellfire. We did not apply hellfire to the tree - just normal and (in Lian’s case) holy fire - but the fact that the blaze isn’t going out is a clear indication this was more than your garden variety of corruption.
Anyway, Loretta starts talking to the mages and mentions we’re going back in. One of the mages in particular - the Spellguard - has a mighty funny accent that’s very reminiscent of our book, The Vizier. They just caution us to be careful though, and after some spell jiggery we make our way into the blaze. It is a complete hellscape. From a place that was lush but felt “off” before, we’re now surrounded by blazing trees everywhere and twisted, fiery skeletons that attack us. We left off after an encounter with a blazing forest spirit whom we managed to talk down out of outright hostilities, but not before attempted mind control from four angry, flame-y dryads and their javelins.
More to report this weekend. @light-and-magic , did I miss anything?
Not just fiery skeletons, but fiery skeletal wolves and a bear! And the blazing forest spirit screamed like he was on fire (duh) and that its pain was directly related to the grandfather tree continuing to burn. And to be fair, that mind control was just to get us to fuck off.
Self Knowledge Test!
➡️Test here!
Sylvar:
INDEPENDENCE
You don’t set out to be different for its own sake; you are more easily guided by what interests and moves you. You are more concerned about what is right for you than about the pressure to fit in. In sex you are more aware than others of impulses which are not entirely conventional. You know the value of selective irresponsibility, of forgetting occasionally about being ‘good’.
EXHIBITIONISM
There’s a strand in your nature which loves making an impression – perhaps with your clothes, or conversation, or in a self-revealing blog or a novel. You like to dramatise yourself, to pose as a unique, perhaps mysterious person, to joke or exaggerate your part in adventures. Though you might more than once have been called a show off, it is actually a generous tendency: you want to please and entertain others. It could be the start of good teaching and leadership.
PLAYFULNESS
You are good at seeing what’s funny, at relaxing and finding the pleasure of the moment. Play is random, whimsical, fantasy-driven behaviour which releases internal tension. Because it is detached from some pressures it allows you to act on weirder, perhaps neglected, parts of yourself. The downside is that it is no help in sticking with things that are not much fun but which need to be addressed. So it is well complemented by its opposite, Stoicism.
Lu:
RATIONALITY
You like clarity and intelligent simplicity and you get frustrated at messy thinking. This can make you seem unreasonably pushy to some, but it is actually a virtue: you are motivated by a horror at pointless effort and a longing for precision and insight into how things and people work. Your ability to synthesise and bring order is essential in producing thinking which is truly helpful.
AGGRESSION
One part of your character is anger in all its forms: frustration, outrage – and when anger is suppressed – bitterness, grumpiness, and bodily aches. Fundamentally, frustration comes from hope: you get upset because you expect your life will be more than a valley of tears. One way to deny aggression is to direct it inwards, as self-criticism. But you’re at your best when you acknowledge anger, and act it out clearly and in a focussed way, with honour.
PLAYFULNESS
You are good at seeing what’s funny, at relaxing and finding the pleasure of the moment. Play is random, whimsical, fantasy-driven behaviour which releases internal tension. Because it is detached from some pressures it allows you to act on weirder, perhaps neglected, parts of yourself. The downside is that it is no help in sticking with things that are not much fun but which need to be addressed. So it is well complemented by its opposite, Stoicism.
@the-real-arcanist-val I did it for Sylvar & Lu, too.
Silverymoon's Most Wanted
Or, how our epic party of idiots appears to share a single brain cell and even that is glitchy.
Player note: another great RP session but the thing that really stands out is how organically everything flowed last night. That's the dream, right?
Waterdeep's Finest finally made it to the gates of Silverymoon, the Jewel of the North. We were not particularly jewel-like ourselves - sitting atop our summoned wagon with 8 half-staved refugees from Grandfather Tree, the guards gave us the side-eye but were WAY friendlier than they were in Everlund.
(Sidenote: because we felt really guilty, we gave the refugees all of our platinum to help them start anew. I can't stress how ludicrous an amount of money this is - most people don't see 200 gold in their lifetime much less get handed 7000. This seemed like a good idea at the time but in retrospect, Lian, Loretta, and Niak realized that maybe loading 8 rubes with gold and releasing them into an unknown city was a bad idea. So... we're staying a few days to help them get settled and let us recover.)
To start: we get our rooms and decide to all bunk up. The three remaining party members, depressed and broken, decide to share a carafe of wine. This eventually turns into a 3 platinum bar tab and three subsequent rolls on an EPIC carousing table. The results are... well...
Lian wakes up on the floor of their shared inn room with a pig in his bed. He and the pig are covered in lipstick. I'm not sure Lian understands lipstick but I've decided to interpret this as a drunken Thallian rescuing a pig/multiple pigs from slaughter, confessing his horror and guilt and sorrow to his new porcine friend, tucking the pig in, passing out on the floor, and one of his drunken party members drawing on them in the middle of the night.
Loretta appears to have joined a mage sorority and woke up with paddle marks from hazing in a wrecked observatory. She did the walk of shame back, but only AFTER finding normal clothes and washing 2 lbs of makeup off her face.
NIAK... hahaha. Niak wakes up next to a lovely man, in a lovely house, with a golden wedding band on her finger. The lovely man turns out to be Irakan's player's new character, and he ROLLED with it.
The party meets back up, now severely hung over. Except for Lian because eladrin are dicks like that. He has his pig; Loretta wants to die, and Niak brings her new spouse. They decide to formulate their plan for the day. Niak and hubs go to the shrine of Tempus to relieve her haversack of one (1) body and his stuff; Lian and Loretta seek out a Seldarine shrine to get a priest to talk to Sylvar, his recently departed sister.
I had SO MUCH FUN playing a bitter, morose Lian who is just thoroughly defeated and 90% sure he's now cursed, especially in light of that when he went to prepare his druid spells, only half of them came. You have no idea how much planning I'd done for this and how much got thrown out the window the night of. It was glorious.
Niak and hubby (whose name escapes me rn >.>) take Irakan's body to the shrine of Tempus, where they're initially warmly greeted for bringing back a fallen comrade. That warmth cools quickly when she brings out Irakan's effects- for our fallen comrade had been visited pre-mortem by the mysterious entity Zuriel, the Horseman of War, and in the aftermath of that encounter found the holy sigil on his shield mysteriously inverted and defiled.
Horrified, the priest serving them almost sent them away, but for Niak's quick thinking and explanation of how he fell. Unfortunately, she also accidentally let slip that we caused the Great Fire in the High Forest. So now there's a bounty on our heads (oops) and at least two priests around town know that we're the ones that caused it.
Turning this over to @light-and-magic if she wants to add anything - part 2 for me will involve the Siblings' (and Loretta) conversation, our new Genasi friend, Shit Going Down in Waterdeep, and whatever I forgot from here!
This is an accurate summary of the first half of the night, before the Big Sads™.
Writeup - Session 41(?) - 2-25-20 - The Aspect
Wherein I try to process everything that happened in D&D because yikes. That was a session.
Realtalk: this was probably one of the most stressful sessions I’ve ever played in the <redacted> number of years I’ve been doing D&D. (This includes the game in which my [evil, post-grad school] party allowed a horrific demigod to ascend to true Godhood; the fight in the Abyss versus an old party member who it turned out had been working for Demogorgon all along [same party]; the time we took down the Githyanki queen when she and her ilk invaded Faerun [good, undergrad party] AND the time we all got shunted to Ravenloft and we had to get out before we were all horribly corrupted [same game as before, also we drove the Simbul mad - whoops].)
We didn’t TPK last night. We got CLOSE, though, uncomfortably so, by which I mean we did exactly the thing we weren’t supposed to do: we fought a god.
‐--
The session opened up with a brief retelling of the events from Into the (Fae)wild. Lian (@oracle-of-the-wastelands ) and Sylvar (@light-and-magic ) argued over her decision to sacrifice herself to the Protector of Yore to set right what she’d done 40 years ago. We all learned that the Protector was deeply corrupted, and very angry that the village had hunted forbidden elk, which is why it wanted the heart of the village elder. So! Our oracle decided to do a very sensible thing and cast Speak with Plants on the hollowed Grandfather Tree to see what it’s deal was.
The tree, it turns out, was not very nice.
Even though it was a mere echo of what it used to be, it threatened Niak and demanded its sacrifice, along with promising her powers beyond her reckoning. Naturally, this seemed fishy; so Lian sacrificed one of his third level spells to prepare the same thing, and while the rest of the party was talking and trying to figure out what they could do, he approached the tree himself. Instead of bargaining, though, he had some specific stuff he wanted to know. Chiefly, why Sylvar and everyone else who had been sacrificed? The aspect wanted the ones who would go highest - and this struck a nerve. So he got defiant and in doing so, accidentally revealed that he had been in contact with the Protector Tree of Waterdeep, enraging the thing even further.
It’s right at about this time that the utterly douchey head of state comes out of the Faegate with three centurion from Mal Asari and informs us that the ritual will begin now.
It’s worth noting that Grandfather Tree, the “town” we’re in, has been granted a blessing of protection from predators and other sketchy things from The High Forest - Lian asks, but doesn’t get an answer to the question of whether the Protector is being kept out, or whether he’s penning the humans and the Faegate in. His ritual involves using the tree as a beacon point for the Protector of Yore, since it can’t come through the enchantment itself; this leaves the party 10 minutes to figure out what to do. Near as I can tell, the plans go about like this...
No, but really, each party member approaches this situation in an entirely different way. @light-and-magic , let me know whether I’ve got the gist of this:
Sylvar (elven bard): calm, quiet acceptance with the occasional poignant question to Lian (“Do you know how to use a bow? I’ve never seen you shoot one…”) and a clothing change to a lovely sacrificial gown and headpiece...
Niak (catperson [tabaxi?] Oracle): freaking out, trying to talk to the tree more to little avail, thinking about the best way to distract the eladrin leading the ritual...
Irakan (Goliath warpriest of Tempus): no idea of how to act, also thinking about trying to disrupt the ritual in slightly less helpful ways...
(Note: less helpful means "involving farts")
Loretta (human wild mage): was T-posing for much of this due to being on the road, but when the player DOES log in, she starts running through the different possibilities of what they CAN do to either distract the eladrin, or get Sylvar out of harm’s way...
Lian (eladrin druid): utter dread, mixed with the seeds to several different plans including (but not limited to) a) a mass teleport out of there; b) casting dispel magic on the ritual* [more on this later]; and then what he actually did, c) giving The Vizier (our VERY un-good intelligent magical item) to Loretta while also asking for forgiveness.
Loretta takes the book, who VERY much likes what it sees in our chaos mage, gives it a bit of her blood, and joins the Crazy People Who Talk to Books Club™. The ritual ends and the DM gives us exactly ONE round to act. Sylvar keeps acting with quiet acceptance of her fate, Loretta erects a mass ward around where they’re standing to protect from evil, and Lian does the first of several inspired things of the night and uses an Urban Druid ability to imbue The Vizier with Dispel Magic.
And now, I turn this over to @light-and-magic for their commentary, and so I can eat lunch.
Hoo boy, where to start?! The session was intense from before it even began.
The ritual’s almost complete, Sylvar did her best to get Lian to understand the necessity of fulfilling her duty and keeping up the Eladrin’s end of the bargain, since he was tossed out of the fey wild young enough that he didn’t fully comprehend the importance of a fey bargain. Not to mention the Eladrin leader was going to make sure she went through with it this time, one way or another, and she wasn’t about to let it be on his terms. She was also under the assumption that if the Defender took her, then Lian’d have another 60 years to fix whatever was wrong with it and the Grandfather Tree, so there would never have to be another sacrifice. It was a long and heartfelt conversation in which Lian’s morals were unwavering, much to Sylvar’s frustration. The bow question would’ve been a little worse if he’d answered differently, since their mother was a sharpshooter and Sylvar wanted to make sure he at least had that much of his traditions.
She also listened in on the group book conversation and tried to discourage all of That™ without getting too much attention from the centurions, who were guarding the dude doing the summoning. As for the tree’s answers to Lian... Sylvar and the Eladrin leader both assume it means Eladrin in general, because obviously they’re superior by nature of being Eladrin. OOC, I’m not so sure, and this’ll probably come back to haunt you later.
@light-and-magic : If Lian can be counted on for anything, it’s (1) not understanding how platinum and silver are functionally different when they look the same, and (2) being stubbornly, obnoxiously good (usually to his detriment).
Also, I forgot a key thing in my last portion concerning the tree. When talking to it produced nothing but mockery and anger, Lian attempted to heal the tree. It’s corrupted, right? So in theory, it’ll help bolster the tree against its offensive corruption, or it’ll damage it. When he does so, the bark where he is melts away to reveal a horrifying mass of poisonous ichor - definitely not the stuff you’d expected to find in an ancient aspect of protection.
Fast forward again:
The creature gets summoned and it’s horrifying - think gaping abdominal wounds, rotting flesh, a skull face, and as tall as a tree. The veritable stuff of nightmares, which coincidentally, both Lian and Niak have been having. It rushes forward to breach the wards, picks up Sylvar, and makes to devour her when initiative begins. I’m a little hazy on the turn-by-turn replay, but the front line fighters (Niak and Irakan) rush forward, Lian and Loretta ready their spells, Sylvar is grabbed, and the eladrin stand by and watch the sacrifice.
Loretta is a BEAST in combat. She utilizes a Spheres of Combat alternate ruleset and her player has a freakishly good memory for rules and mechanics. Incurring a ton of wild magic penalties (which set her Con to 8 :/), she throws everything she has at this beast as does Lian for the first round. Irakan lands a mighty hit but then the creature swings at him and does a devastating amount of damage.
Note: we are still fighting a god. This was not supposed to happen. This is the worst case scenario.
Round two goes much the same way except that I as Lian decide to be stupid and noble and heroic - because I have a hero point. He rushes the creature and shouts, then uses it to get his attention, offering himself, his memories, and the power the creature imbued within him. This only manages to get him picked up too, and I spent this round pretty much convinced that this was the end of Lian Trashpanda Anudore, so in retaliation, he threw as large a healing spell on this awful creature of rot as he could, knowing positive energy would damage it.
Loretta attempts a targeted teleport to get Sylvar out of its clutches but doesn’t succeed the saving throw (because @light-and-magic chose not to passively accept the help!). Irakan and Niak attempt hits that do some but not a lot of damage to the creature. It drops Lian...
And then it eats Sylvar.
We have completely failed to save our party member.
It’s a horrible, demoralizing moment for our relatively fresh party, and there’s a moment of horrified silence on our end before the Protector of Yore turns to try and do the same to Irakan and the eladrin, also horrified, shout that the Protector of Yore has gone back on its deal. And this is when we find out that this awful, rotten corruption does what it does - and has for over a millennium! - because of a Fae deal. A fucking agreement of children for protection. (Note: the significance of this hasn’t hit Lian yet.)
The eladrin immediately turn hostile to the Protector and the fight begins in earnest. Irakan weathers a few more hits but stoically fights on. After one of them, the Protector releases a swarm of vermin, which also gang up on Irakan. Hits from the elves releases a swarm of flies which converge over Niak. Loretta remembers the corruptive ooze from the tree, and proceeds to call up a mighty jet of flame and sets the tree ablaze and Lian - in a horrible, gut-wrenching decision - joins her and Flamestrikes the tree, hoping damage to the aspect’s home will weaken it and turn the tide of battle.
The aspect fells Irakan next, and the situation is GRIM. All around us, the forest is starting to catch and this thing advances on the party. Loretta throws a mighty jet of ice at the thing but the wild magic surge accompanying it backfires spectacularly and she gets turned into a staff(!). Grandfather Tree is going to get decimated by this thing as are we, so Lian has his SECOND flash of inspiration for the night and calls out to the eladrin to lure it to the Feywild and take it through the Gate. After all, ancient fae have a better chance of withstanding this thing than a group of starving humans and a now party of two plus staff. Right?
Two things of note here. One: Lian was told he was an eladrin, and with that came the ability to take himself to the Faewild without the use of the Gate. I was banking on this because I couldn’t get to the gate in time to outrun the Protector of Yore.
Two? The Vizier had a dispel magic imbued onto it.
Lian + Loretta!staff pop into the Faewild and he readies the book, bleeding himself to get the damn thing to work. The eladrin plus Niak go through the Fae Gate and the creature follows, ripping the Gate open…
But then Lian disrupts the portal as the Protector of Yore is halfway through, bisecting him and ending the fight.
(No lie, that is probably the COOLEST thing I have ever done in D&D, and I once rode in a hollowed out elephant corpse hot air balloon through the Abyss with @edmund-valks . That was dope.)
Everything else moves quickly after this:
Sylvar is posthumously restored as an eladrin and sees her parents in the afterlife; Niak and Lian (and Loretta!staff) go back through the gate after Lian agrees to visit and not forget his heritage. We stuff Irakan into Niak’s magical haversack, watch the souls of (presumably) the tainted and consumed be freed, and then help the folks of Grandfather Tree escape the inferno that’s now become the High Forest. Loretta pops back into existence after the fight and is suitably horrified at the whole situation, and we undertake the slow, agonizing march of moving the remaining 8 people from Grandfather Tree to the closest town. And this is probably the saddest whole group bit - we get to watch the forest burn as we trudge north, 2 party members down, keenly aware that we’ve destroyed these peoples’ way of life and their god, that Lian has lost family for the third time (and is no closer to getting his memories back), and that we’ve been reduced to being comforted by an evil book.
(Meanwhile Flinse, the only other original party that isn’t dead or gallivanting with barbarians, is playing with fire kittens and learning how to magic from a kindly old efreet. Lucky bastard.)
Next session: Silverymoon, rehoming refugees, talking to the dead, and Lian’s probable emotional breakdown!!! Also, Thay’s Most Wanted, our sister group of Bad Ladies.
Lian is amazing and Good and I love him.
Now this thing isn’t something meant to be fought. This was a terrible decision. Completely in character and appropriate, but still not a good idea. Sylvar’s picked up by this thing, and trying to get Lian to stop being stupid because it already didn’t eat him once, so he’s just going to get himself hurt. It wants her, and told Lian and Niak exactly that. She’s fully aware that this was her destiny, written in blood a thousand years before she was born.
So when Loretta tries to teleport her out of the beast’s grasp, she also knows that if this thing doesn’t get her, it’ll kill everyone else present, just as it did to her parents. That’s why she was not a willing target of the teleport, and hot damn did I roll well to make that save. I was ready to burn my own hero point to prevent that level of devastation. As we said after the session: the only thing worse than a TPK is a near-TPK with a single surviving member. Which would have almost certainly been the outcome if Sylvar had disappeared just then.
It devours her. Not a meal into a gullet, but directly into its being. The sacrifice was complete, forty years after it had been promised. And it enters a blood frenzy. The eladrin (and Sylvar) had completed their part of the bargain, but when the Defender broke his end by continuing to attack, the eladrin were freed from the pact entirely and are able and willing to join the fight against this corrupted deity. No punches are pulled but this thing isn’t going down. It’s a damned god, and we’re level eight. Poor Irakan had 9hp, and got hit for nearly 50 damage, so he was obliterated.
Lian... is a goddamned genius using the portal itself to destroy the thing.
He’s also super gross because he dug through the corpse to try to find Sylvar’s body (what a good brother he is). He didn’t find it, so there goes the hopes of a resurrection and it seems like it was a death effect, so no reincarnation or raise dead, either. The only option would be a true resurrection, which has material components an order of magnitude out of the party’s price range and nine levels out of casting reach.
Good on The Vizier, though, for trying to help Lian keep it together while they escape the burning forest.
It was so damn intense for the entire extended duration of the session, and I can’t wait to see what y’all do next week!
Lian should never have been given a sibling.
That said, I am LIVING for this more cartoony style that’s developing.
She-elf belongs to @light-and-magic. @oracle-of-the-wastelands ‘ Lian is mine.
My elven bard for D&D!
Into the (Fae)Wild, II: That Escalated Quickly
We decided to play out the rest of Lian's subplot last night. Being over 30, I'm exhausted, but geez: worth it. The highlights:
The trees
The horrible nightmare creature haunting Lian and Niak's dreams is one and the same with The Grandfather Tree, who protects the wee settlement whose town square we're currently camping in.
It's a brother to the Protector tree in Waterdeep, the sleeping watcher that Lian visits (and who gave him his sick tattoos) and who set him on the path to start learning more of who he is.
The Grandfather tree got tainted centuries ago and instead of, say, curing it... the eladrin on the other side of the Fae Gate were like, "Oh, it wants sacrifices? Okay."
In a similar vein, the humans were like, "This creature demands blind obedience, even when it could kill us? Okay."
Lian obviously thinks this is deeply fucked up.
It did lead to the best closing line of any D&D session ever, though, which was Lian knocking on the tree, and saying, "Um. Guys - this - uh - this tree is hollow."
The Feywild
When Teenage Elf Brigade (tm) approached the Gate, it became receptive. We tested this with a few other party members to no avail, but we did annoy the watchers behind the Gate.
In retrospect, why we were let in so readily without sacrifice of blood or mind should have been more apparent. RIP.
@light-and-magic used her way better charisma to bargain to bring herself, Lian, and one other across the Gate. Niak ended up being the lucky one; Irakan and Loretta stayed and interrogated the humans to find out why the forest is taking their revenge on them.
The Eladrin city, Mal Asari, is beautiful and utterly cold. Not the temperature, either. The geography doesn't quite match up with the rest of Abeir-Toril but we're roughly co-located with the Prime Material Plane.
Upon crossing the Gate, Lian introduced themselves to the Watcher whom they'd annoyed into letting them in. He announced, "The Children have returned!" All were rightfully wary and/or very confused.
We were led to a PRIMO douchebag eladrin (I'll give our DM a lot of credit - he did a great job being an insufferably highborn eladrin), who took one look at Lian and Sylvar, and then asked @light-and-magic if she was ready to atone for her crimes.
I'mma let her - if she wants - elaborate more on her backstory because wow.
OH MAN LET ME TELL YOU.
So. I like having a vague skeleton of a backstory for my D&D characters, especialy when I trust the DM, because then we can pull shit like this. What I knew was that she was a runaway, and didn’t know if her family was looking for her or not. That’s why she was always cagey when talking about her family, and used a fake name. The fact that she couldn’t quite remember where she was from, or her real family name, was something she didn’t (or couldn’t) think too hard about or question.
The DM slides into my DMs and is all “Hey... would Sylvar ever do this thing??” “Yeah, probably, especially under these circumstances.” “Good.” And that’s when you know shit’s going to go down. I knew just enough to know her emotional reaction when Mayor Douche dropped the magic, and the reveal.
Through The Gate
They make it through this magical doorway into the Feywild, and Sylvar had already started down the train of thought that they were elves - that was close enough to maybe open the gateway themselves, or maybe whatever had been watching from the other side had opened it for them (Elf Privilege, y’all)
She’s just floored at the scenery, it’s everything she’s ever dreamed of, and it feels like home. She’s also a showman and a bard, so she uses her sleeves of many garments to get herself some clothing to fit in.
They’re brought before the leader of Mal Asari, and starts to get indignant at being called a child, when he says he didn’t expect her to return to answer for her crimes. And that’s the moment the magic fades, the memories return, and Sylvar breaks. She blanches and starts crying, realizing her friend standing beside her was the younger brother she’d left to fate, to die in her place. She’d been meant to be sacrificed to the forest lord, to keep the rot & corruption at bay for another hundred years. Instead, she ran away, knowing that someone else would have to be sacrificed in her place - likely her newborn brother. She was too young to open the gate herself, so she had to pay the price - in her case, a sliver of her soul, and the all memories of the Feywild itself.
On the material side of the gate, the human village gave her a meal and a good night’s rest, then brought her to the edge of the forest where a traveling caravan took her in and headed west.
Lord Doucheypants explains the whole thing to Lian, with great emphasis on Sylvar’s betrayal and abandonment of duties, and how she gave up her memories and was no longer Eladrin, but Lian’s were stolen from him. He asks Sylvar again if she’s here to atone for what she’d done four decades prior, and she says she is.
Lian & Sylvar are informed their parents have since been killed by the forest lord, and Mayor McDouche offers to bring Lian to what is now his house.
Sylvar tags along, and no one stops her, so they visit the home she grew up in. Lian nicked a portrait of their parents, and Sylvar wallowed a bit in nostalgia and guilt.
Elrond’s Douchier Cousin says he’ll join them when they face the forest lord, to make sure things are seen through. Sylvar assumes he’s going to make sure she dies like she was supposed to, even if he has to slit her throat himself. She doesn’t tell Lian this.
They come back out of the portal, Sylvar’s still upset, and Loretta asks wtf happened. Sylvar just starts blurting out how it was all her fault while Lian does his best to get her to stop talking so he can explain more rationally.
This is the first time Sylvar’s really shown emotion in front of the party, and she gets a Goliath bear hug from Irakhan, which does a lot to make her feel better.
That’s about the time Lian knocks on the tree and shit’s hollow.
There’s going to be a costume change but I’m just putting this point here because @the-real-arcanist-val doesn’t know that yet.
It’s been a ride, yall!
Right?!?!
Like, full disclosure: I made Lian with no backstory because I'm a lazy SOB and told the DM, "He has amnesia. Surprise me."
Welp, surprise me he did. I think one of the more amusing things about this whole scene is just Lian's utter confusion over basically everything, followed by anger. He and Sylvar combined went through all the stages of grief but in the wrong order.
Reasons Lian is vexed, vexed I say
There's a statue of Lian (but not Lian) in front of their house. "Every sacrificed child gets one. It's what you could have been", he was told. "But... I'm not. I'm me," was his response, which basically got him an indulgent pat on the head and a 'you'll understand when you're older'.
Why would a massively powerful race of fey elves be okay with sacrificing a child every hundred years? Or anyone? For a race that prides themselves on their civility and superiority that seems off.
Why are we punishing people for being people? Of course a 14 year old girl would run away given imminent death. Of course people are going to hunt forbidden things when they're on the brink of starvation.
What good is asking someone to sacrifice themselves 40 years too late? How does that fix anything?
He has a house - in Feywild? And a surname and family history? Remember, Lian is the urban druid who grew up in an orphanage in Waterdeep's South Ward among the poor and forgotten.
He has a SISTER?! Who happens to also be the tight- lipped bard that he met in the Underdark? What drew them together?
Wait, he's a blooded eladrin and not an elf? Then why doesn't he look like... well, an eladrin?
Why didn't the protector kill him if it demanded a sacrifice? Instead, it marked Lian (with the Seed, which gave him dominion over nature), carried him to the forest's edge, and dropped him off whereupon he somehow made his way to Waterdeep.
And a separate question here but... what makes a sacrifice a sacrifice?
Why does he still have problems with his memories?
Clearly, there's a lot to untangle here.
Also, basically, Lian has suddenly gained a family, lost most of it, and is going to lose the rest soon. Again. That's neat and mildly heartbreaking. :/
That said, being eladrin while also being Lian presents a very fun opportunity for me, Bee the player, to annoy the douchey elves with my druid's particular brand of practical neutral goodness.
Into the (Fae)wild
Well, last night we learned...
The owner of the Fainting Goose in Red Larch is a douchebag but he makes good ale an our mage cannot carry said ale without help
That Kryptgarden Forest sounds delightful but we're not going there. Yet. But an old elf asked @light-and-magic and I - the Teenage Elf Brigade (tm)- to come back and sit with him and talk. He's lonely.
That without a negative int modifier, Lian's ( @oracle-of-the-wastelands ) skills went way up. Huh.
That you shouldn't try to be nice to horrifying fae spirits (eyes the party Oracle)
That the High Forest is Not a Friendly Place, and forest folk are weird. Super weird...
Important? That Lian's surname isn't actually Goldwillow, like he's always gone by. It's Anadore - "Under the starlit sky", in elven. A quick cast of Blood Biography yielded that, and a few amusing matter of fact responses.
The horrifying fae creature haunting Lian and the Oracle's dreams wasn't always bad*, and really started going off the wire a year ago.
This same creature tore apart Lian's family, or so he suspects. He's linked with it - the Ancestral Tree in Waterdeep told him so.
Coincidentally (?), the Drow invaded Waterdeep... about a year ago... and there are potential passages to the Underdark in the mountains nearby. There's another theory about Thay involving them too.
Oh, yeah: there's a Gateway to the Faewild in the village the party's at right now. So, that's a thing.
Big Lian reveals I didn't cover above...
So, the boy has no real memory until a few years back. Small reveals, lucky rolls, and putting together the pieces have yielded that he:
Definitely wasn't born and raised in Waterdeep. He knows Elven, and has somehow picked up Druidic.
A horrible nightmare he recreated last night using, um... "medicinal" mushrooms let him revisit the memory of his parents and watching this fae creature rip them apart. It then picked him up, and brought him to the edge of the woods, and left him near a road.
The dryad in the Ancestral Tree said he walked... for so many miles. Alone as a child, from "the forest", and was eventually brought to George, his caretaker who is in jail. She also said that he is tied to this awful creature, which tried to devour him in a nightmare a few sessions ago. I have theories.
In the forest last night, everything was familiar. Like deja vu, from both hits nightmare and before.
The seer at the Grandfather Tree told a story from after they shortly settled there, about how a small elven child came through the Fae Gate alone, hungry, and frightened... and how they kept it overnight and took it to the edge of the woods and dropped it off with a caravan. The time period matches Lian's story -
-but the child was female. O.o
????????????
Guess we gotta go visit the fae now...
(@light-and-magic - did I miss anything?)
I think that’s everything that happened to The Elves™. Sylvar’s suitably freaked out by Niak now, though, with the liquid-claw-hand-venom-thing, And being a little too friendly with Mr. Forest Murder Monster. I’m so hyped to get through that portal and see what’s waiting for us on the other side!
Oh! The invisible watcher!
Something/someone in the Feywild has been watching us from the other side of the portal, and we saw their footsteps, but not them and couldn’t otherwise detect them even with magic!
