Expedition 17: An Avalanche of Ones

We escort Uzra'Alum to the top of Frost-Stone Mountain, quite ineffectually, as he sets up a ritual rug. Arha collects strands of possibility from the suns and loses her divine sight.

### Detailed Writeup

We meet in the Dozen Dogs, Calliope showing up early to precast a Detect Magic ritual. Uzra’alum, our employer, doesn’t show up right away, so Brightstaff leaves to look for him—just in time for the Uuronian evoker to descend the stairs and greet us. After a round of introductions (during which Brightstaff vaults back inside through the window), we decide to rent a galley through the Blackwater Swamp in lieu of braving the umber hulks of the Bluewood.

Brightstaff remembers his forgotten sailing skills a bit too late in the trip, and it takes us a few hours to sail into the swamp. Eventually, we reach a point where the large galley can’t maneuver in the narrow swamp waterways between mangrove trees, and we decide to proceed on foot.

In a marked contrast to how the entire rest of the session will go, trudging through the swamp goes fine for everyone but Uzra’alum, who falls behind, getting exhausted, and generally has a miserable time of it. Brightstaff offers to take his backpack, which is surprisingly light.

We find the remnants of wooden docks deeper into the swamp, but decide not to investigate. As we begin to move out of swamp and up the slopes of Froststone, we see a green, verdant-looking forest stretching out past the swamp, weirdly bereft of aerial life.

We begin a skill challenge. Brightstaff leaps ahead with our pitons, letting down rope for the rest of us. With a natural 1, Jamie tries to pull Uzra’alum up but loses his balance and both topple from the mountain face. Uzra’alum feather falls them both. The bad luck continues with two sequential natural 2s from Arha and Calliope, the latter of which triggers an avalanche. Nexrin bears the brunt of it while Brightstaff grabs Uzra’alum and jumps nimbly out of the way.

A bit more ably, Brightstaff leads the way around the steep mountainside. Ra’al’s light beats down upon us as we reach hundreds of feat above sea level, lightly damaging us.

Calliope almost falls with another natural 1 and has to be saved by Uzra’alum. With yet another natural 1, Brightstaff is sure he’s found a safe surface for us to rest in front of a snowdrift (hahahaha). Uzra’alum takes one look at it and pales. "That’s no snowdrift."

A single catlike eye opens on the side of the supposed snowdrift, followed by the luxurious stretching out of two massive scaled wings as an adult white dragon rouses itself before us.

Uzra tries to greet it in Draconic, telling the dragon we’re just passing through, and in respond in takes in a deep breath (cue screams around the table).

Initiative!

Calliope casts expeditious retreat and runs back around the corner. Jamie backs up and readies his javelin. Arha’s new metallic owl companion Tofree surrounds Nexrin in a bubble of impenetrable force. Brightstaff leaps over the dragon and tries to distract it, but it doesn’t even notice. It breathes out at Nexrin, Jamie, and Uzra, who are all nearly frozen alive. (Nexrin would have likely died on the spot had he not been protected in Tofree’s invulnerability bubble).

Panicking, Uzra casts Charm Monster. "Ah! Old friend! I knew you from when you were but a chick in the egg."

The dragon looks confused. “Hello...?”

Uzra’alum, trying to conceal his panic, starts motioning us forward. “It is so good to see you again! We just need to get past you and we’ll be on our way.”

The dragon gazes down at us awkwardly. "Do you… need anything to eat?"

"No, we just need to get past. That’ll be just fine."

"...Happy travels."

We scoot past the dragon as quickly as possible without looking too suspicious. Miraculously, it lets us pass. Once well out of earshot, we take a few minutes to recover from the brush with death and heal ourselves.

We’ve now crossed onto the opposite side of Froststone Mountain, and a wide vista of unexplored lands opens up before us. To the northwest, we see the vibrant green waters of the Emerald Reef. Past the water stretches a large expanse of green forest followed by a strip of open grassy fields. Far in the distance we can see some sort of city, tall buildings of stone thrusting into the horizon. The keen-eyed Nexrin makes out the movement of some sort of humanoid creatures within the city. Further east, past the Bluewood, lies a rolling valley, rich with tilled fields—apparently in-use farmland. Past the valley stand another set of mountains, these gray and red, and a series of lakes dot the landscape.

To the north stand more hills and mountains, with a single gargantuan mountain (even larger than Froststone) dominating the horizon. To the east, past the Far Hills, we can see another range of hills underlit with an eerie red glow. To the southeast rises a single square tower of black stone, which must be massive to be visible from this distance.

We continue up the mountain, Nexrin managing to lead the rest of the way without incident with a natural 20. The suns appear have grown in the sky above and beat down upon us relentlessly as we trek into the upper reaches of the mountain.

Once we reach a flat place most of the way up the mountain, Uzra pulls out a beautiful rug festooned in magic runes and performs a brief divination ritual with it. He then produces an intricate bronze sphere and warns us he’ll need an hour to cast his second ritual.

Arha hears a whisper in her ear. "At the highest peak you'll find the strand."

Jamie and Calliope volunteer to go along with her—Jamie knowingly, Calliope less so. Along the way, we discuss Arha’s new companion Tofree, a celestial owl with brass talons.

To make it to the summit, Tofree finds a path, Calliope investigates for handholds, and Arha rolls a 20 on Acrobatics, closing her eyes and letting the presence of Allocer guide her. At the top, the suns loom massive in the sky, so close that we could almost touch them. Arha reaches out towards Ra’al, burning her flesh but pulling a strand of red-hot wire out from the sun itself. It hisses in the snow, cooling and becoming a white strand of something like silk. The whisper sounds again in her ear: "Just one more." She reaches out towards Nerulla, frost biting into her as she draws out a frigid strand.

Calliope and Jamie are awestruck at this sight, and Calliope demands to know what’s going on. After getting her to promise to keep her secret, Arha tells her about her mission to free a buried god. Calliope has many more questions but agrees to wait until after the expedition is complete to ask them.

Down below, the hour passes without incident and Uzra completes his ritual. An earth elemental tears itself out of the ground towards the evoker’s orb. Uzra swiftly weaves a spell and blasts it into the elemental, ordering it to guard the ritual rug until he returns. Brightstaff and Nexrin question him, but he refuses to divulge the nature of this ritual.

Before descending from the summit, Arha tries to divine sense the suns and gets blasted with divine energy, losing her divine sense ability and all of her hit dice. Through the pain, however, she senses the presence of two celestials. The gods are actually up there.

We’re looking at a lengthy trip down the mountain with only 4 hours of daylight left, so Uzra offers to feather fall us down. We all jump off and safely descend into the swamp.

We find ourselves in quicksand, and struggle free with a combination of levitation magic and athletics. Nexrin navigates through the swamp and finds our ship where we left it, undisturbed.

As Brightstaff pilots our ship out of the swamp, Calliope (in a rare flash of spatial awareness) catches sight of 7 humanoids swimming through the water towards us. They’re horribly twisted creatures—blue-skinned, hairless, with eyes like black orbs and footlong tongues. Uzra incinerates most of them with a Wall of Fire, and we swiftly clean up the remaining ghouls (although Nexrin gets paralyzed and knocked off the boat, Jamie quickly dives in and saves him).

Back in Port Vrall, Uzra’alum decides to reduce our pay by 25% based on the fairly indisputable fact that he escorted us through danger rather than the other way around. We can’t really complain, having made it out without being a dragon’s dinner.