Demon Slayers

A Pathfinder campaign run by Arch Gamemaster.

## Characters

* Rocc Hamptin/Zeke Aefind (ArcaneBacon)

* Puddle (Zerxrez, Looweeja)

* Torako Naida (TacoCat)
* Charles Bunting (Tropingenie)
* Yurina Sellenor (Looweeja, Zerxrez)
* Ronnoc Darkflame (Zerxrez)
* Gene Bison (Zerxrez)
* Drascilla Naida (Looweeja)
* Marcavius GemBeard (ArcaneBacon)
* Fuji (TacoCat)
* Douglas McDougalbeard (Tropingenie )

## Campaign

### Session One

The party had been traveling for some time on their self-made quest. They were steadily nearing a column of smoke, after detouring from Rocc Hamptin's travel plan. A jolly conversation amongst adventurers drew to a close as an ominous chanting grew louder; as he had done many times before, Chuck began to scout ahead.

Drawing near a column of undead carrying a macabre box, Chuck followed them until Torako gave the signal to attack: a tossed rock, their favorite ploy. The party engaged, Chuck taking out the leader and a number of what they had assumed to be cannon fodder minions. That assumption was their mistake; the party took heavy casualties and had to flee.

Reconnoitering in a patch of gnarled trees that Rocc had deemed safe and

    secure, they broke camp. Healing the injured, the night passed without incident.

In the morning was a fairly cheery scene. While Chuck , forgetful as always, searched for his lost equipment--this time it was his naginata, grappling hook, and pavilion--Torako and Yurina conversed by the fire, and Rocc began reading his map and planning the course the party was to take next--the literal course, as it was evident the party had its own plans, morally.

Their first stop was the former battleground. Stained with blood, and the ground trampled, there were signs of a burial: A larger grave with tent poles speared around it, and shreds of fabric embroidering it, with smaller graves surrounding. On each grave lay a crude axe, chiseled out of iron. After Rocc retrieved Chuck 's remaining two "throwables"--evidently, the pavilion had been dismantled--and a brief fiasco between Pud and Yurina over the morality of taking the axes, the party continued onwards towards the surviving settlement marked on Rocc 's map.

Entering the mountains, Torako had a bit of trouble maneuvering, but with Chuck 's help was able to make it through without incident. The rest of the party also had little trouble with the mountainous terrain. Entering a large mountain goat migration, Torako cleared the way and the party again passed without incident. They then saw an older, monk looking figure, who introduced himself as Senjin . After proper introductions, and shows of goodwill, and the like, the man revealed himself to be a sentry for the very town they had been venturing towards. Deeming the party safe, he led them through the chasms and caves to the shantytown hidden in the mountains.

### Session Two

Before parting ways, he gave the party a few tips on what they could do in town, and answered a few of their questions. Chuck immediately went to the merchant's quarters, and the rest of the party sansRocc.

Searching for a tent merchant, the creature that appeared from the tent was a ratfolk--seeing as Senjin had referenced the merchant as the Ratpack, it was no surprise. The merchant introduced himself as Neb Aslo, and Chuck began inquiring about purchasing a new pavilion. Hearing Neb Aslo 's markup on the pavilion, Chuck began inquiring about other, similarly massed objects at a lower cost, to which Neb Aslo replied by offering slaves.

After doing a bit of bartering, the party talked with the guardmaster of Ratpack, a scarred fellow named Gauntlet, with a very special looking gauntlet to match. In response to their queries of drakes and monsters, he gave them a bit of advice as to where they could find things to fight, and they set off happily across the mountains.

On the way, they found a ruined folly, and upon entering it, found a strangely crafted dagger that Tora decreed to be terribly evil. After a bit of debate over what to do with it, Yurina decided to take it with her, and as they left the citadel, the shadows rippled and conked them over the head.

This prompted a quick investigation for evil and terrible monsters hiding, whether such monsters were associated with the dagger, and a second debate as to whether they should take it with them, to which Yurina, presumably by now rolling her eyes, settled by stuffing the dagger in her pack.

Tora's paladin senses very quickly picked up a new thing for her to occupy herself with, though - a dark, chocolaty sense of evil wafting from a ridge some ways away. After running over there, the party found a field of large, white, four-petaled flowers with gold coins glinting from amid the roots. Pud opted to slither in and see if he could grab some of the gold, and - likely not entirely to his surprise - the ground opened up beneath him as he reached the middle of the field, and the hand-like roots of the fiendish flowers tried to throw him in! Pud, being a sticky sort, was having none of it, and held on as best he could while the rest of the party tried to throw him a rope. What followed was a tug-of-war, a lot of flowers being torn away from the false field they had created over this deep pit, and a very effective casting of defoliate.

After the flowers were significantly reduced in number, the party went down into the hole, where they found a few items of note, namely a sword of Asweir, a healing charm, and a weird shrunken head charm with silver poured on top, as well as a significant amount of gold.

Two members of the party had fallen further underground due to a waterslide-like tunnel, so after summoning Neb Aslo and bargaining with him for about six hundred feet of rope, the rest of the group went down with them, emerging in a cave full of colourful and joyful little oozes. Upon exploring further, the group found a way into a strange mine, where undead like those they had encountered before were mining out stone under the watchful eye of undead mages of the same variety, who were draining multicoloured dust from the bits of gravel via the use of metal orbs.

### Session Three

The party decided to attack the mages, and they burst through the wall of the tunnel and had a rather impressive dust-up, culminating in the mages opening a ton of portals via the orbs, and trying to stuff the party through.

Mages defeated, the party took custody of the orbs and the random bits of head-dresses and so on the mages had, and scampered back through the tunnel, for the fight had not been easy.

They returned to Ratpack a day later sold the bits of ornamentation to Neb , and turned in the orbs to Gauntlet, who had two researchers attempt to discover the exact use of.

Yurina had a few teeth put back in, Tora found out how to activate the dash ability of the Asweiran sword, and the party set out once more, now to find the evil box that they encountered a week before. Rocc used his ranger skills to track the remnants of the column of undead to a ruined town, where the group found the remaining undead enacting a ritual to awaken whatever power the box contained.

### Session Four

The group decided to attack, and found that whenever they slew a participant in the ritual, they did not stop their chanting, but simply rose into the air and continued, even when beheaded. Around this time, Yurina opted to touch her cursed dagger to the box, and ended up getting her hand marked by a strange, swirling symbol that Tora would later tell her was super evil.

During the battle, the group was bathed in flames by exploding torches around the ritual area, had possessing shadows seek them out (and temporarily switch the allegiance of Yurina Sellenor and, more briefly, Tora the Paladin, who both did a good bit of damage to the party with their weaponry and new shadow-stepping abilities). However, Pud the slime soon discovered, by dint of sitting in one of the flame vents left by the torches, that the possessing shadows would not cross bright light. Tora then put an end to any new shadows being created by blasting the blob of darkness hovering over the ritual altar with her fire breath.

Noting that the box sitting on the altar was transforming into a flat-topped obelisk that looked made of quicksilver, Tora decided to ram her hand into it and let loose with her lay on hands ability to see if she could stop things. That didn't work so well, so Tora decided to follow it up by using the charge ability of the Asweir sword on the obelisk, along with her tiger companion. This resulted in the two of them flying through the obelisk, putting a rather large hole in it, and becoming wrapped in spiky silver armour.

Yurina, still possessed by shadows, was overjoyed to see the intellect within the obelisk take the field and was immediately healed significantly by her dark master. The two of them did their best to lay into the rest of the party, and would quite possibly have killed one of them if Tora's strength in holding back the suit of armour had faltered.

Soon enough, though, the armour detached from Tora and her tiger, flew back to the obelisk and rejoined it, and after Yurina wrested control back from the possessing shadows, the group managed to finish off the last of the undead, and were treated to the sight of the obelisk fading to an iron-grey and settling down to wait - for what, who can say?

Rocc traveled back to Ratpack to find out if he could secure guards, but on finding that Gauntlet had only ten people of varying skill under his command, the decision was made for Tora to leave her tiger as a guard. The group briefly returned to Ratpack afterward, only for Tora to get into a bit of a spat with the rest of the group, as it turned out that Pud had found a strange imp-like thing within the torch flames, and Rocc had given it a shrunken head covered in silver to use. The 'Oracle aflame ' as it called itself was quite chatty, and told Yurina of the purpose of the signs on the hilt of her cursed dagger, before Tora decided to shut it up (and prevent it from alarming the townsfolk) by the simple expedient of growing to twice her size and hurling both it and Pud up and over the edge of the rocky depression Ratpack is located in.

### Session Five

Afterward, the group made their way towards Mt. Beckett , during which they encountered a river of moving thorns that Rocc dubbed 'Rubeus Flow', and the abandoned shrine of an agricultural god named Herkann. While they were at the shrine, tensions between Yurina and Tora were reduced somewhat when Yurina got drunk on some of Rocc's mead, which he had been passing around, and told Tora her rather sad life story, and expressed remorse for leaning towards the darkness.

Upon reaching the mountain, they found an abandoned village and old lady in grey searching for poisonous flowers, who seemed rather interested in the mark upon Yurina's hand, and performed some sort of rite on it to try to mask it's presence - though Tora noted that it wasn't performed properly.

The group then descended into caves below the village and found an eerie, faintly glowing alabaster statue of a hunched, almost gargoyle-like man sitting at the bottom of a pool full of pale algae. It seemed familiar, but no one could remember what it was, though Yurina thought it might have been from a children's fable, and went off to summon Neb Aslo for more information.

Venturing further into the caves, the group came upon a pale elf who was sleeping in the caves and looked starved. Upon questioning her, they determined she had been down there at least 160 years, was strangely vigorous despite her appearance, and had large gaps in her memory. They kept looking, and eventually found about 60 people down there, some having been asleep in what looked like shelves in the rock. The differences in time ranged from a 12-year old human girl who named a date 600 years ago as the last she could remember, and a young man who named a time 5 days ago, and claimed to have fallen into the ground behind the wall holding out the demon king's forces.

Upon finishing their task, Yurina informed them that she had found a reference to the statue in a story called 'Cannibal village' involving a visitor who brought a mysterious statue from the east to a noble family, and that a daughter of the house demanded it, upon which the visitor parted from it with relief, claiming it was her burden now.

The people in the village slowly vanished, until only the head of the noble family was left, and he went from house to house searching for them, then eventually down into the caves, where he found his daughter and the rest, all pale, and they ate him alive.

The party, now suspecting that this was the statue mentioned in the tale, went to sleep and found themselves waking the next dawn alongside the people from the caves, all of them spread out in neat rows on the floors of the houses in the village, and upon exiting the building, finding the roofs re-thatched, the streets and buildings swept, and the fields tilled all across town.

### Session Six

Naturally, they were rather worried about all this, and decided to head back down to the caves and see if they could destroy the statue. Yurina whacked it into eight pieces, and after the first one tossed into the cavern pool became an odd algae-covered lump, she hurled the rest in as well and dove in after them, emerging with all the colour drained from her and eight wriggling, pale gargoyle-type creatures about a foot tall.

Pud took to them immediately, and Rocc claimed one to experiment on. He and Tora left the cave, and Rocc promptly cut the head off the one he brought with him and sliced it down the middle. This revealed that the creatures were entirely hollow inside, and that their skin surrounded the goopy white liquid within much like the rind of a fruit. Pud, upon seeing that the creatures weren't really alive, gave up the rest of them to Rocc's experiments.

After a bit more experimenting, Pud tried to drain the pool of water and became a milky white. Stumped, the group rejoined, and headed back to the hut of the old lady in grey, intent on finding answers.

After a short conversation, the lady revealed that her sisters would be arriving in three days, and the group decided to wait until then to act. Something was fishy, but they weren't sure what.

During that time, Rocc flew as far as he could from the village, and confirmed that the world around them had not changed. Since Tora had summoned her celestial tiger back from guard duty, Rocc also checked on the obelisk, which had attracted a crowd of undead that formed an encampment there.

Upon Rocc's return, he noticed that the old woman's sisters had joined her, and were speaking in a dialect of Auran. He did some discrete eavesdropping, and realized they were discussing the ingredients for some kind of spell.

The three sisters went up the mountain, and the party could see they had lit a fire up there. As it got dark, Pud, Yurina and the tiger snuck over there, yet one of the sisters - who were clearly witches - somehow noticed their presence, although she clearly could not pinpoint their exact location.

She invited them over, and they all sat down and munched on blackberry-cranberry muffins, with the rest of the group shortly joining them.

Once the hot tub sized cauldron began to boil, the witches threw various ingredients in and began a strange dance, which everyone but Rocc joined. They began to whirl around the cauldron, lifting off the ground with the fire changing colours beneath them. The lot of them, cauldron included, rose up into the air, and perhaps as a result of the group throwing a number of their items into the cauldron, including a fortune cookie, were whisked into a flying saucer.

Rocc, now very confused, followed the saucer as it rose higher and higher, until he could follow it no more.

The rest of the party ended up in a strange white room with hovering blue circles that acted like windows, from which they could see the world of Pthfnder beneath them. A strange being that looked like an elf made from polygons appeared, and told them it was an Axiomite from the plane of order, and wanted the group to help the powers of order come back into ascendancy on Pthfnder. Yurina, as a response, summoned Neb Aslo.

The being was clearly rather confused at this point, but the group ended up agreeing to channel the powers of order, and as a parting shot, Yurina nailed the poor Axiomite with a fortune cookie. The group vanished, as did the room around them, and they re-appeared in a clearing with the witches and the cauldron once more.

The witches noted that order has been redirecting planar travel a lot lately, and that they should have expected this. They then did a bit of divination, during which each member of the group had three questions answered truthfully, and among other things, found out that Tora's father was the one who had gotten the witches (Who seemed like lovely people) to help them in this manner.

As a parting gift, the witches painted symbols on the back of everyone's hands, granting them each a low-level witch hex, before sending them back to the area the ritual had happened.

While all this was happening, Rocc raided the house of the first witch they met, obtaining a number of strange potions, some odd items from inside little boxes that he ingeniously cracked open with an 'Allfood' spell, and an awful lot of diseases from mosquito bites orginating from mosquitoes summoned by the defences on one of the boxes. (The other defensive charms he had neutralized by drinking one of his stolen potions.

### Session Seven

Upon the Party's return, Rocc rejoined them, and they set off on a side trip to find a drake and kill it. A mountain nearby had a drake lair at the top, so the group braved the whirling snow and ended up in a short duel with an ice drake, which was ultimately killed by Rocc's arrows, after Tora used her Asweir sword to get on top of it and piledrive it into the ground.

The group then settled down, butchered the drake, and began to cook it around a campfire. Pud discovered the drake's hoard, frozen in ice at the back of the cave, which Tora melted away to free the cascade of gold, gems and other items, likely the result of decades of raids on the trading caravans that went through the area prior to the war.

### Session Eight

Neb Aslo was summoned, and Rocc did a bit of bargaining with him for spices to preserve the drake. However, it wasn't long before Rocc began to feel terribly ill from the mosquito bites he sustained earlier, and collapsed on the ground.

Yurina used her skill in healing to help him, and whether it was her skill or sheer luck, her treatment of applying hot and cold compresses, followed by the unorthodox move of using the accursed mark on her palm (Which by now had turned into a blister that, as Rocc found out when he tried to lance it for her, spewed liquid carrying negative energy) to draw the diseases out from Rocc's body. Amazingly enough, it worked, and Yurina's barbarous constitution allowed her to crush any illness that may have transferred to her.

Rocc, now much drained by his ordeal, slumped senseless to the floor. In the interest of getting him back to Ratpack so he could recover, the group packed everything up, tied Rocc to Tora, had Pud hide inside her armour, and got Yurina to hold on while Tora used her Asweir sword to hurl them through the sky to Ratpack, keeping a steady 300 feet in the air.

It didn't go so well.

The group crashed through a drifting cloud of electricity, probably left over from some spell, and after that, Tora was broadsided by a flaming tree trunk with two skeletal warriors ramming their swords into the chest of a skeletal wizard, hurtling through the air at high speed. Yurina lost her grip, and Pud overestimated his in his attempt to catch her.

As a result, the group was separated. Tora and Rocc crashed into the side of a hill, with the former's Boots of the Cat making the landing far softer than it could have been otherwise. Pud spread himself out to catch the air, and managed to survive landing, though he skidded for about 20 feet, leaving a slime trail behind him.

Yurina used her Billowing cape to catch the air and safely land in a blast crater surrounded by trenches - and disguise herself as an undead via a hat of disguise picked up from the frost drake's hoard, just in case.

#### YURINA'S JOURNEY

Shortly after Yurina landed, she was 'collected' by a group of undead, who treated her as one of them, and brought her back to the main group of them walking across the wasteland. Yurina, once there, realized that they had an altar with them, a couple hundred undead, and a metal box identical to the one that had spawned the previous obelisk.

She also realized that she was going to have to tough this one out - undead, after all, don't sleep, don't eat, and don't rest. Thoughts of sneaking away danced in her head, but she never got the time to try it, as she was immediately taken into the middle of the group of undead. There were red-robed undead mages with the group, and two of them were very interested in the mark of darkness upon her palm. They ended up casting a spell that caused it to grow in size, and used the disguised Yurina as a healer, moving her across the army to reinvigorate the dead.

After about a day and a half of that, Yurina hit upon the idea of telling the two red-robes with her about a fictitious paladin group she saw over a ridge - and as is happened, the undead were inclined to believe her, due to an aura of good some of them were picking up on.

Thus, Yurina, the two red-robes, a swarm of bat-winged undead and a 'necro-dancer' mage flew off to see what was going on.

They bumped into Tora, flying along with her Asweir sword, and without Rocc. The necro-dancer came forwards, revealed himself as Abel Naida, and one of the red-robes was revealed to be Cain Naida, both of them now full-fledged undead. The other red-robe cast a spell to allow Tora to hover in midair instead of bouncing up and down, and the conversation that followed was a rather creepy one, as it focused mainly around Abel, having disguised himself as a living being, trying to seduce Tora, who, he reasoned, was probably not related to him, since the Naida name is so wide-spread.

Cain Naida put a stop to that, however, when a discern next of kin spell revealed that he and Abel were in fact Tora's uncles, thrice removed, and that Yurina's next of kin were merfolk, promptly ruining her disguise, despite her attempts to use her hat of disguise to quickly become an undead merfolk and claim it was a fins to feet spell wearing off.

Yurina then tore herself from the grip of Cain and the other red-robe, and plummeted towards the ground, cloak billowing to slow her fall, and bat-winged undead racing after her.

Tora finalized an agreement for her distant undead kin to leave them alone until the next time she saw them, and swooped down to save Yurina. In doing so, she left their field of vision, and when she swooped up, it was, technically, the next time Abel saw her, and so he greeted the two of them with a maximized fireball as they flew off.

#### PUD'S JOURNEY

Pud did quite well. He landed near a lavender flame spouting from the ground that, upon closer examination, granted him the ability to float a few inches above the ground. He then went across the wastes, made use of his great fortitude to just keep moving, followed the path the Rubeus Flow had dug out, and eventually crossed it, picking up some seeds it had left behind that orbited around him, and making it to Ratpack in the record time of a day and a half.

#### TORA'S JOURNEY

Tora ran along for a while, and re-summoned Avaa. While she bemoaned her mediocre navgation skills, the gods started speaking to her through Avaa, and said that although she was a pretty good Paladin compared to today's standards, they were a bit worried about her friend Yurina. Tora asked them what to do, and they responded by lasering something off in the distance, then mic-dropping out.

Tora, torn between immediately rushing at the sparkly new quest and sending Rocc to Ratpack, eventually decided to tie Rocc to Avaa's back and send him off, while she ran in the direction indicated by the light, eventually to end up bumping into Yurina.

#### ROCC'S JOURNEY

Consigned to being cargo, Rocc headed off on Avaa, was pursued by a cloud of animate military camp detrius for some distance, and ended up cutting the ropes and trying to fly away from the detrius while Avaa plunged into a river.

This didn't go well, as Rocc, still groggy from being diseased, toppled into the river and was swept downstream for some ways. Avaa fished him out, and the two then had an odd scene on the bank where Avaa tried to tell Rocc that he could sense Tora's presence coming back towards him, and Rocc began having flashbacks to the early days of the war.

#### THE GROUP RECONVENES

So, as this magnificent charades attempt is going on, over the high-water ridge of the riverbank come Ronnoc Darkflame and Arukas Catsi. Ronnoc is quite visibly distressed, and Arukas is trying to comfort her, as she has just been returned to Pthfnder from Shapzar after a three-year relationship with the wizard Ryoma Catsi ended horribly.

The two of them ran into Avaa and Rocc, and Ronnoc started acting as a translator, asking afterwards how far away she was from Urealms, and whether she could get back their shortly. As it happens, the kingdom they are in, Marandel, is the place in the world farthest from Urealms...

Things were then cut short by Tora making a landing in the river, and a crisped, screaming Yurina flying past in a cloud of ash and smoke to make her own landing a bit further downstream. Ronnoc was rather surprised to have her old adventuring buddy re-appear, and more so by her condition, since the last time she ran into her, Yurina was a paladin devoted to the powers of good, not this blistered, undead *thing.*

Yurina cackled and ran off, much to Tora's shock, and Arukas teleported back to Shapzar, leaving the rest of the group to return to ratpack, where Ronnoc ran into Neb Aslo, reminisced about old time, and shed a tear or two for the loss of Neneik, slain on his first mission after training as a Wizard of Shapzar.

### Session Nine

After a two-day pause, the group set out again, heading towards the first obelisk in the interest of stopping whatever terrible thing was supposed to happen in four days. A storm rose up, and they trudged through the muck for two of those days, eventually stopping a ways from the obelisk, where they stayed to watch a couple hundred undead and a smattering of vrock demons flutter around the obelisk, then begin to cheer at about noon on the fourth day, at which point the group slowly began to realize that it was the *second box* they should have chased down, instead of returning to the obelisk.

In the background, Tora sensed another flicker of powerful evil appear, and begin moving north. The group paused, did a quick turnaround, and began marching in that direction, reluctant to miss *another* obelisk ritual. Along the way, the group began running into figures frozen in time.

The first of these was a gnomish wizard, and stuck to him was a rude note to Ronnoc from Ryoma. This was followed by a rain of seven dwarfed, hairy, foul-mouthed humans stuck in luridly coloured leotards and dosed with a potion of lust, with another note for Ronnoc. Ronnoc and Rocc decided to slay the lot of them, as Ronnoc was (as one might expect) less than keen on their attentions, and all but one of them died, much to Tora's chagrin at the deaths of innocents. The one survivor was stored within Pud, where he promptly passed out from the pain of his broken legs, broken arm, and missing ear.

The last of these events was a clone of Ronnoc, taken to pieces and put on a table, with every piece unfreezing from time one minute after the last, triggered when Ronnoc read the note, which claimed Ryoma had recently been to Earth and was apparently inspired by the Saw franchise. The group summoned Neb Aslo, bought two wands of cure light wounds, and tried to heal the clone, but at the end, the clone's chest caved in, revealing that it had no heart, just a particularly nasty note left where the heart should have been, remarking on Ronnoc's heartlessness.

Pud, now fed up with Ryoma's cruelty towards Ronnoc, devised a cunning plan. Ronnoc had noticed a pop moments earlier that meant Ryoma was no longer watching the group with scrying, so Pud turned himself into a duplicate of her, had her hide, and fake Ronnoc called out to Ryoma to take 'her' back. When the scrying sensor reappeared, Ryoma portalled in, and after a conversation in which he made fake Ronnoc beg (With Pud most likely mentally giggling as he acted out this charade), fake Ronnoc leaned in for a kiss and smashed a fortune cookie on the back of Ryoma's head.

Ryoma became an exact duplicate of Dickenhorse, and after a lot of cussing, froze fake Ronnoc in time and took 'her' back to Shapzar with him, saying he would put her on display. (Ryoma will likely look like Dickenhorse for a long time - since he's likely to ask Pip to help him remove the effect, things can only get worse.)

Ronnoc creeped out of hiding, heaved a sigh of relief, and the group went onwards, collecting a wizard who had been turned into a series of blue tulips by wild magic during the intial defence against the demon king on the way. As they neared their destination, Ronnoc was chatting to Tora and toying with an odd coin she'd found under her pillow, when the coin lit up in response to a wish she made about getting away from the current situation. It shot a little burst of blue lightning at everyone, and in a poof of lavender-coloured smoke, the group appeared by a fountain with a stone frog spouting water. Around them loomed large trees sprouting out of a cobblestone floor, strewn with lanterns and colourful streamers and banners, and everywhere, happy music could be heard.

At the base of the trees, strange market stalls could be seen, where the vendors bargained not in gold, but in memories, senses, thoughts, emotions, and other, stranger things. This was the Witch market, run by fey, where you could buy almost anything, and sell everything.

Visiting a number of stalls, the group made some interesting trades, some of the most notable being Tora trading away her hope of redeeming anyone who was chaotic evil, her hope of surviving the deed of killing the demon king, and most importantly, her ability to feel empathy in exchange for more strength and charisma.

Avaa ended up trading away his stripes, which ended up being his name and identity as well, and having to get a name back from Missy, who dubbed him 'Lovemuffin' after charging her 'usual fee'.

Rocc also traded away his name for more empathy, giving him bonuses to certain social skills, and took the new name Zeke. He also helped the wizard who got turned into tulips (Mortimus) restore his form, who then got into a bit of trouble trading, became chaotic evil, got a spray to use on Paladins so they wouldn't detect it, and lost all his skin.

Needless to say, he stayed behind in the market when the party teleported out, though he said he would rejoin them shortly.

### Session Ten

Immediately upon leaving the witch-market, the party was attacked by Yurina Sellinor, now little more than a burned and shriveled undead husk that flew about in a cloud of smoke. Cackling maniacally, she used her shadow step ability to harry the group until Tora ran her through with a lance, and Rocc (Now named Zeke) filled her with arrows. Yurina, perhaps a bit surprised by the ferocity of the attack, discorporated into smoke, and then a dozen or so mini-Yurinas ran out of the shadows around the area, followed by shrunken Yurina heads with long dangly tongues.

Chaos ensued as one of the heads possessed Tora and another went for Ronnoc, causing the two of them to run after their comrades, and attempt to possess them. One of the mini-Yurinas tackled Zeke, who flew away from the chaos as soon as he broke free. However, due to a superhuman leap from Ronnoc, he now had a rapier-wielding passenger to deal with, who attempted to put a hole in his wing.

Tora managed to get Lovemuffin possessed, and the mini-Yurinas turned into smoke and lifted them all up into the air, pursuing Zeke. Zeke attempted to use a wand of Prismatic spray on his pursuers, botched Use magic device, and ended up with the beams of magic shooting through his eye, and causing vivid hallucinations, as well as burning away his empathy, tuning it into murderous psychopathy. Around that time, Ronnoc made her will save and became un-possessed, followed shortly by Lovemuffin. The group landed on the ground around the time Zeke became possessed, and the un-possessed took a look at the two possessed people, shrugged, and skedaddled.

Ronnoc and Lovemuffin met up with Neb Aslo, bartered passage to Urealms, and left the kingdom. "Teach her to treat me as only a class ability." - Lovemuffin

Zeke and Tora woke up in the ruins of Ratpack some time later. Buildings were burnt and had holes through them, and carnage was rampant. Yurina sat in the lotus position in the middle of the market square, a beatific smile upon her face. After a bit of questioning Yurina, massive guilt settling upon Tora, and Zeke really wanting a lie-down, Tora's paladin abilities dissipated, and her dragon father popped in with a telepathic link to congratulate her on becoming a monster, and offer to sponsor her to antipaladin-hood.

Tora, being quick to make her mind up about these things, accepted, and her father began instructing her in the ways of the antipaladin.

Yurina, all sparkly-eyed, drags the other two along with her to the village on Mt. Beckett, travelling via shadows. There, they find all but one of the villagers asleep in giant cocoons, which they set fire to, leaving the twitching, bleached and mutated bodies of the villagers to ooze out.

Around this time, Abel Naida phones in telepathically, and Cain causes a magical contract to pop up in front of Tora, within which 'Missy' was used as an adjective. Tora declines signing, then Yurina hijacks the chat, signs the contract, and uses her hat of disguise to look like Tora. Yurina then shadow-walks away to be with Abel.

Tora and Zeke shrug, return to Ratpack, and spend their time resting and going through a number of magic items. Tora putson a ring that feels nasty, which immediately spreads a terrible plague to her arm. Due to Tora's sheer fortitude and antipaladin disease immunity, however, the plague doesn't spread beyond, and she gets a new, weird entity in her head to talk to. Tora shrugs, and sits there while Zeke goes over his items, occasionally feeding Tora a potion. She gains the ability to turn into a banana tree, and, perhaps due to some vestige of guilt deep down, also attempts to drink the terrible, poisonous potion labelled 'Size up'.

It doesn't go so well. Massive, airy blisters form on her, she had to take off her armour in order to not suffocate, her skin sloughs away, and things that really shouldn't be on the outside of her body now are.

When Zeke peers in through an outside window, he sees an awful lot of shed skin, ooze, blood, and a little, shrivelled creature far too small to be Tora crawling out of the mess. He prudently walks away from the building they had made camp in.

Inside the building, Tora's shrivelled body crumbles. The weird entity in the ring, taking pity on her, chats with her a bit and brings her back - as an undead.

As Tora's rotten, shrunken body begins to move again, the fellowship shatters.

### Session Eleven - Dead Wedding

Yurina and Abel's wedding took place about a week after the intial contract-signing. The event was lovely. An area of the wastes the size of two football fields had been overgrown with blue-white roses growing on bone trellises, the mud underfoot had been replaced with black grass, and giant white moths with black skulls on their wings were everywhere.

The event took place at night, and had a row of bone benches in front of a chunk of marble with red-burning braziers on either side as an altar. Some ways away from that was a larger marble table with a variety of foods palatable to the undead on it, with Neb Aslo acting as caterer.

Unfortunately for the happy couple, there was a wedding crasher plot afoot! The PCs, Drascilla Naida, Gene Bison, Marcavius Gembeard, and Fuji infiltrated the wedding, sneaking in by hiding in the middle of all the guests.

The group chatted with Neb a bit, and Gene tried to ascertain which of the many undead milling about was Yurina. They snuck into the back, which was a rose maze, went into a spiraling magical ramp meant to catch people who always went left, and eventually bumbled their way back out behind Neb's caravan.

The ceremony began, and rather than taking seats, the group watched from behind the caravan as Yurina, resplendent in a dress adorned with finger bones, walked down the aisle. Grave shrouds trailed behind her as the tail of her dress, carried by pale undead bridesmaids.

As she approached the altar and Caine Naida, serving as priest, began intoning a very legalese-sounding ceremony, complete with blood sacrifice, the PCs leaped out and attacked, blasting a number of the guests to pieces with bombs.

(Have you ever noticed how similar PCs tend to be to terrorists?)

The wedding congregation charges them, they smash up a bunch of buxom vampire-types, and two tentacled constructs controlled by the Demon King and Tora's father, who unfortunately could not attend in person, wreak havoc amongst the PCs with tentacle attacks, even dragging Marcavius into the air.

Missy, who was standing in for Abel's family in the ceremony, being his many-greats grand-thing, threw a lust blast across the battlefield, and immediately took a dislike to Gene when she realized the giant orc was immune to her charms. Her solution to this was to charge him, supercharge her natural pheromones with lightning, and put her full effort into seducing him, an effort which eventually resulted in her pulling him into a portal and vanishing with him.

Antipaladin Tora smacks Drascilla a bit with her hands of harm, but is ultimately vanquished by Fuji, and she disintegrates into a pile of armour and deflated skin.

As the PCs approach the altar, where Abel and Yurina are well past the kiss and into something else strange, Yurina's parents get after Drascilla, who they knew from when she was a child, for ruining their daughter's wedding and becoming a paladin, which, as they said, was basically joining an extremist group against undead and similar creatures.

The PCs attacked the altar, and Yurina and Abel broke off what they were doing in order to attack them, Yurina shrieking about how Drascilla was an absolute monster for crashing her wedding.

### Session Twelve

The group goes up against Abel, Caine and Yurina. There's a long fight, Abel uses Cloudkill to create a zone where living creatures will die, and Yurina uses a fortune cookie to summon Chuck Norris, who decides to swim through the earth, placing the PCs underground. (Or under-shell, given that the wedding is taking place on the back of Vancouver the giant turtle).

(Drascilla also hears a dragon's voice telling her to return Tora's bones to the Northern Mountains, presumably to her father, and threatens magical retribution if she doesn't.)

The PCs do lots of sparkly magic things, such as phasing into the ethereal plane and a bit of tactical spellcasting, and eventually regroup under Vancouver's shell, where Chuck Norris has accidentally embedded Drascilla. Missy releases Gene the Orc, who helps Drascilla out, and everyone re-groups.

Death the Overdeity makes a brief appearance, and asks the PCs to tell Chuck that he's supposed to be dead. (Death seems reluctant to do it himself). Gene decides it would be a good idea to swing a battleaxe at Death, and when the battleaxe crumbles, Death gives Gene a 'deathier' battle-axe, which has guillotine blades instead of crescent ones.

Chuck decides not to listen to Death, and zips off to go whack Yurina at Drascilla's request.

The group climb out of the hole Chuck made, and return to the battlefield, where Gene ends up finding out that the 'deathaxe' is really good at killing things, allowing him to expand his 'spell-cutting abilities'. He cuts through the Cloudkill fog, and then when Abel fires a hold person spell at him, he cuts through that too.

Abel and Caine are mystified, and then Caine hurls an illusion at Gene, that of a copy of him. Banking on Gene's simple-mindedness, he has the illusion put its weapon down and hold out a friendly hand. Gene puts his weapon away too - but into its sheath.

Following this is a brief period of increasingly hysterical attempts by the three undead to overwhelm the party, followed by their subsequent ash-ification. It is not certain when, or if, they will return.

Gene then declares that it is time to return to Missy, and uses a witch market coin to strike the party with blue lightning and teleport them to a plaza with a frog-themed fountain in the middle, a lot of trees and lanterns, and many eager salespeople.

The rest of the group wanders about and makes some deals, eventually coming upon a tent of craftspeople with incredible skill. The craftspeople feed them quantum stew, which messes with their health, remark upon jobs they did in the past, including making duplicates of adventurers for what could only have been The Last Dawn, and then pull out a bunch of guns when Drascilla made the poor choice of spitting in their quantum stew. Drascilla is perforated, and Fuji, who was busy extracting a craftsman revealed to be an undercover agent for Shapzar, loses Drascilla to the craftsmen, who turn her into a construct.

Upon the party's return to the normal world, Fuji has acquired eyes that see into the ethereal, astral, shadow and fey planes, but not the material one, Marcavius has acquired plans for a chimerical construct that exists in six timelines at once, and Drascilla has been... upgraded. John just has a goofy smile on his face.

### Session Thirteen

Drascilla is now a partially mechanical being, complete with church organ, keyboard, defensive mechanisms, a tiny internal church with its own priesthood and the ability to turn into a large gauntlet. Before leaving the wedding area, she and the others have a look around for loot. She picks up the mortal remains of Tora, and the others find a hair of Chuck Norris, which causes some shenanigans centered around part of the group getting sucked into a sinkhole.

The group then gets it into their heads that the giant turtle Vancouver, which the wedding had taken place on, is either A. Evil, or B. They simply want to kill it, depending on who in the group you're talking to.

They travel for about two days, eventually reaching the head of the turtle, and then use feather fall to descend down the approximately 700 foot drop from shell to head. Upon reaching the turtle's skin, Gene begins hewing away with his axe, creating gouts of blood which occasionally become strong enough to wash him away, and the rest of the group makes camp whilst he continues in this way for about two weeks.

During those two weeks, Marcavius and Fuji have been talking about other ways to utilize this turtle, and have hit upon an odd plan. If they use air crystals to breathe, one or more members of the group can potentially swim through the turtle's veins (Probably Fuji, as he has the ability to go ethereal if things go haywire), access the brain, and then introduce a massive dose of opium to it. Fuji then went on to speculate on whether an opium-addicted turtle would go after the demon king if Fuji placed large amounts of opium around the Demon King's base.

In order to pull this plan off, the party needed one thing most of all - Neb Aslo.

They summoned him, had a chat, and determined that to obtain the vast amounts of opium they would need to give the turtle an effective dose, it would be necessary to make up the difference by bottling divine turtle blood and selling it to Neb Aslo. The mining operation alone would cost 300,000gp approximately, and while Neb is willing to support them to some degree in return for partial ownership, the fact remains that the group does not have the funds to begin such an operation.

Fuji and Marcavius thought about it, and considered potential sources of treasure. The land around them was stripped more or less bare, but there was the father of Tora and Drascilla in the north to think about, as well as gold in other kingdoms. However, they decided that in the interests of furthering their quest to destroy the demon king, they would head directly to the demon king's base and see what they had for gold.

So they set off, feather-falling down from the turtle's head (and hopefully John got a bath at some point, as he was dyed with gore). After a few days of trekking across the wastes, they cam across something rather odd - an area of shadows that seemed to be moving and rippling somehow. John swung at it with his axe, but it did little. Fuji and Marcavius looked up, and peeking out of the clouds, they saw the source of the shadow - an immense dark blot, peeking out of the clouds. Marcavius cast fly on Fuji, who soared upwards, past towers of cloud and airy pillars, and was able to see that the dark blot was in fact an immense island, its stony bulk suspended in the sky.

Fuji found a blue translucent squid in the sky, about two feet long, and tucked it away. His flight spell began to falter, so he entered the ethereal plane, and a short ways away, he saw a sky squid a hundred feet long diving in and out of the clouds. He ran after it, the ethereal plane granting him the ability to effectively fly, and popped out of the ethereal atop its back, which was covered by thousands of tiny, translucent blue cilia waving in the wind, about the length of a finger. He dug into the squid with his sword and grappling hook, and held on for dear life as it tried to dislodge him. Upon realizing that he was certainly not skilled enough to guide the squid to the ground, he dove off its sides, passing by its giant golden eye, and free-fell until he was a few hundred feet above the ground, where he activated his billow cloak, falling safely to earth.

He told his companions of the floating island, and they immediately bought a scroll of overland flight from Neb Aslo, and had Gene cast it, since the spell could only be cast on the caster. Gene is not the brightest, but he had a decent knowledge of spellcraft, and was able to stammer out the words to the spell without tripping over his tongue too much. Clouds started to boil up from his feet, and the group grabbed on as what John asserted was the world's 'second orc-rocket' took off, soaring upwards and doing loop-the-loops and twirling around on the way. When they reached the level of the island, Gene made use of his meager maneuvering ability to land them on the island, which resulted in them soaring over a forest and crashing into one of the trees - which, thankfully, the built-in featherfall in the spell softened.

A timata aproached them, and asked what was soon to become some very familiar questions - what they were, where did they come from, and some startled exclamations on hearing that something existed below the floating island. Notably, Gene felt quite at home, as everything on the island was on scale with him.

The group went to meet the monarch of the island in the main city, and were led through a rural farm area, where a velfmun talked to them, and told them of the PCs, and how they cut the grass short now, due to a PC who used to hide under the turf and leap out at people 200 years ago.

The group passed into the city, having been questioned at the gates, chatted with a devout priest about the god Zorg and his champion, and were admitted to a tall, spiraling tower reminiscent of a seashell that was the domicile of the royal family. They were admitted to a tan-coloured throne room with many curved edges and swirling mosaics of blue stone, and sitting on the throne was a chetinok named King Xandelf the third, who had dark brown fur and wore a blue gem on a gold chain. He questioned the group, and spoke to them of the PC scourge, and how the Heart of Zorg, as he named the jewel, was aiding his kingdom in preventing the PC menace, and how they had been at peace for more than a century, driving back the nastier flora and fauna of the island.

The group talked at length with the King, and eventually summoned Neb Aslo, who thought the island quite extraordinary, and began discussions of setting up a trade route between the island and the chaotic lands below.

### Session Fourteen

The group left Neb Aslo to talk to Xandelf III, walked to the edge of the island, and used feather fall to glide downwards. Drascilla picked up on a large wave of evil coming from the west, and the party took advantage of the enormous height they were dropping from to glide in that direction.

Unfortunately, orcs are not the most aerodynamic of creatures, and turning into a gnome did not help. Gene and Drascilla spiraled towards the earth out of control, and it took the timely arrival of a flying dwarf in plate armour to help them out though the use of a lot of ropes.

Gene lost his greater hat of disguise, and Fuji had to snag it back with a grappling hook, which may have caused some problems, as when Gene put it back on, his arms and legs stretched out like noodles. Drascilla, who had now slipped entirely off Gene's arm due to her guantlet form not being able to properly adjust to fit noodle arms, was then put to use as a sort of skyboard by Fuji, who hooked her with his feet to carry her along.

The sharp-eyed members of the group spied a gleam of silver in the west, where a massive obelisk was basking in the sun, with evil pouring off off it, and demon-y things swarming around it. The dwarf , who had not introduced herself, possibly in order to avoid the conversation all other races seem to feel obliged to have when they realize dwarf women have magnificent beards, ended up talking to Gene, who thought he should be shot into the obelisk so he could use the death axe to kill it.

The dwarf , who shall be referred to by the accurate moniker of 'Silver Valkyrie ', agreed to Gene's plan, and used a spell of force alongside her own fantastical abilities to pull off a mid-air charge, shooting Gene directly into the obelisk.

A large section of it crumbled as Gene went to work with the axe, and the rest of the group soared into battle with the Demon King's forces. Silver Valkyrie summoned a spirit version of herself, which flew at the masses of vulture-like demons hovering in the air, Marcavius turned invisible, and Drascilla flew down and into the first rank of undead with Fuji on top of her, releasing a blast of holy energy.

Silver Valkyrie used a spell to make many of the vulture demons fall out of the air to the ground a hundred feet below, and the rest of the group got down to the business of hacking their way through undead. Many dust clouds later, some shells of bone descended to the field and each released a skeletal warrior. One had a sparkly shield that reflected physical damage, one had a magnetic field that caused anyone with enough metal to be hurled into the sky, and one hurled a green ray at people, the purpose of which was never discerned by the characters, other than making them want to seek flowers.

The damage reflector approached Gene, and got the joy of watching Gene almost bisect himself with his own axe. Drascilla approached the magnetic one, and was dragged into the sky. (Marcavius had to drag her down, with a Nat 20 doing the job.) Fuji ended up tripping both the magnetic and tentacle one, though he lost his katana and grappling hook in the process, and they then fought back and forth for a while.

Marcavius, being a clever chap, had a look at these additions, and noted that there was a pinkish powder spread on their bones and armour. He thought back through his arcane knowledge, and deduced that there was a very peculiar tactic going on here - namely, the use of a powder said to be part of the remnants of an ancient kingdom that gave the user extraordinary resistance to damage, and could only be bypassed by the magic in a young girl's heart.

Marcavius then grabbed Drascilla, who while not super young, was still 20-ish and had recently been reborn as a robot. They had a brief conversation about the properties of her heart, which was in a jar, and then Drascilla advanced on the damage reflecting fellow, and fired away with her rays of holy energy.

There was a fight [1].

Then, after what was probably many days, fighting hit and run style against the demon king's forces [2], Adrian Gray took to the field. There were blasts of shadow. There were shrieked comments.

There were rains of shadowy spears, and shadow drills coming out of the ground, and an instrumental duel using organs between Drascilla and Adrian, the former only just managing to come out ahead, resulting in the pipes of her internal organ (The instrument, but to be honest, the distinction is pretty hazy with her) turning to silver, probably as spell backblast. After an awful lot of holy blasts from Drascilla and the Silver Valkyrie, and some rather dazzling attacks by Fuji, who was absurdly, absurdly hard to hit [3][4].

After being whacked a lot, Adrian threw Thressa at Fuji. Thressa extended her soul-stealing powers outwards, forcing a will save, and as Fuji's soul was torn from his body, he opted to utilize the cursed dagger that he had stolen from Yurina's wedding to carve a glyph on his arm and rend his shadow from his body. Thus, Thressa ate his soul, but he survived as an undead abomination. Adrian Gray just had to applaud.

Adrian eventually burst into filmy shadows, ending her threat to the kingdom, though Fuji did something freaky with the shadow essence she left behind, meaning there might just be a little bit of her inside his shadow. Thressa and Adrian's super-kunai-with-chain were likely claimed by the characters afterwards.

Gene, as far as we know, is still flying towards PC island, intent on trying to sunder the magic he thinks holds the thing up (It's actually giant flying mushrooms) and will probably be flying until he either reaches the island or the flight spell Marcavius cast on him fails.

And the wandering dwarfen cleric, whose name remains unknown, flew off to join another party in their final battle.

Thus ends Demon Slayers.

## OOC

The party started out at level 3. This campaign continues both Fallen Fortress, Frigid Hunt, and PC Island.

The second batch of characters began at level 9, close to what the previous batch had attained.

The campaign ended at level 11, which proved to also be the point where no one could reasonably deny that combat was getting extraordinarily bloated by all the abilities floating around, and that if we continued much longer, we'd end up with multi-session dice roll bonanza battles.

Note on Session 12:

Spell cleaving is the most ridiculous ability I have yet seen in Pathfinder. Somehow, flailing at thin air with a mundane chunk of metal has the ability to disrupt an entirely non-mundane, non-physical effect. This makes absolutely no sense, even within the context of PF's world. At the same time, kudos to Zerx for finding something so absolutely ridiculous that it breaks my suspension of disbelief in a world where we throw weaponized fortune cookies at each other.

### OOC References

[1] And a lot of it, since high level PF really goes for a while

[2] For the sake of time (the fight had taken until close to the end of the session) the fight with the undead had to be cut short, and the final boss brought out. Killing grunts wasn't too interesting anways, once we found out all the undead could be cleansed with channel energy. - Trop

[3] AC boosted to 53. Pathfinder is just like that. Fun fact: That's higher than PF Cthulhu's AC. Mix that with some truly incredible reflex values, and you have a recipe for an irritated boss monster. As for myself, I just note that yes, PF is horribly, horribly broken at the high levels. - ArchGM

[4] I think Cthulu has stuff other than AC to help him win, but yeah a high level character doesn't have a hard time with Elder Gods. Go figure. - Trop