S07E02: The Gang Avoids Framing Themselves for Arson (Again)

## Session

We’re all hanging out eating our breakfast at the mess hall and Gearbox comes toddling up to the table and pulls on Nissa’s sleeve. “Qualish says to come by his office when you’ve got time later”

Nissa throws him in the air like he’s a baby a couple times, his wings that don’t work are flapping

> **Sorith**: Isn’t he the same size as you?
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> **Nissa**: I’ve been working out in the off season. Deadlifts, friends.
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Averlyth isn’t leaving until she’s done with her omelette, no one is letting custom omelette day go to waste.

The group starts asking if an omelette is a taco, Averlyth gets up and leaves.

We show up and Qualish says he has everything we asked for, who wants to go first?

There’s a beat, then Nissa volunteers to go first.

> **DM**: What’s your bracer look like again?
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> **Nissa**: It’s a sweet dragon belt buckle
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> **Qualish**: Uhhh it’ll be a little awkward for me to go over there, why don’t you hand it to me.
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When he hands it back, it has a retractable cord on it, and he points to a rubber flap on the back of Kanye’s armor. and now there’s a headphone jack. There’s a new ability in her bracer that now connects to the bracer. The power armor now has powered speakers, so as a bonus action, she can use one of the bracer charges to amplify her next audible spell. It makes it an auto critical hit, won’t work for all but will figure it out.

One other thing for her. He rummages around under his desk and pulls up a little gift wrapped box about the size of a baseball. Nissa goes YEEEEE and tears the paper open.

Inside the box is a miniature version of the helmet on her badger armor, about the right size to fit on Daals. It looks very ferocious.

Averlyth goes next. She pulls off the tarp and underneath is what used to be the walking coffin. Most of the shell has been removed, it looks a little more like a chariot with a roll cage, but still has spider legs.

She steps onto the platform, there’s an intuitive set of movement controls, will walk at her pace. Battery powered (same as Kanye’s suit and laser rifle), don’t need to worry about power just walking around. It charges its own battery when it walks a little bit.

Averlyth gingerly presses the blue button. The carriage settles down into the ground and all the spider legs start lifting up and moving around. As a minor action, she can press the defense button w/ one battery charge - it’ll give +2 armor while it’s active. Will last until the next turn.

Helps with all the line-of-sight spells, can put some sweet Bane decals on it or something.

> **Qualish**: Who’s next?
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> **Kanye**: I can go next, I don’t remember what i asked for
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> **Q:** You asked for 7 things, I picked one.
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Qualish asks him to go to the apple orchard, says there’s a camera and doesn’t want him to do it inside his lab. An awkward couple of minutes go by as Qualish pulls up one of the monitors and you can see an aerial view of Kanye walking up to the apple orchard.

Qualish grabs a ridiculous old-fashioned mic and says “Kanye can you hear me”. Kanye is instructed to pull up the list of actions that his suit can do; there’s a new one labelled glitterbomb. Kanye vigorously pushes the button; little tiny launchers pop up out of the shoulders and disperse an astonishing amount of glitter into the air.

It’s very sudden, it makes a very large bang noise. This will cause a distraction so he has advantage and the glitter will get everywhere.

> **Kanye**: This is everything I’ve ever asked for!
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> **Q**: This is literally only one thing you asked for.
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Qualish randomly picks Sorith since the last 2 are too quiet. The group briefly realizes we never found out what Sorith’s Drakeguard bracer actually looks like. It’s just normal bracers, he pops it off and hands it over to Qualish. As a minor action, he can now cast “I go first”, which lets him add 1d8 to initiative rolls for 8 hours without requiring concentration.

Qualish asks where’s our friend Um, he has to come down from the ceiling. His Drakeguard bracer is now canonically a watch (wrist?) band. He now has a modified version of Tensor’s floating disk. Normally you can think of it as a hover cart that just follows you around, 3 ft off the ground, not super useful. Now it creates a 3 ft wide disk, he can climb on it, or be under, etc. He can create it as an action using a bracer charge, and using a move action, he can move the desk instead of himself (at half speed) in any direction.

Won’t be fast, but should let him move pretty much anywhere.

Sorith has an unknown red potion, Qualish told him to go to spellcasting.

The group gets the fuck out of Qualish’s office now that we’ve gotten everything from him.

We all just finished eating our favorite omelette (it’s funnier to imagine we got one as a group that is our collective favorite) and we’re suddenly paged (we didn’t even know paging was a thing). Drakeguard senior operatives are suddenly asked to show up at the Director’s office.

> **Nissa**: That’s us!
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> **Averlyth**: Time to go, we’re on call.
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Apparently Kanye has upgraded from going nude to wandering the base in a loincloth. Right now he’s in an elaborate headdress from a cloak we stole at one point. It’s more like a backpack with feathery designs?

We’re going to the Founder’s office. We knock and we’re let in.

As we expected, we’re the only people answering the summons. Apparently we’re the only senior Drakeguard operatives?

Sitting behind the desk is Bosley looking impeccable in her spotless suit. Leaning against the table is Grandmama P wearing aggressively casual clothes. Like yoga pants, workout clothes, Lululemon. Bosley looks mildly offended.

Bosley: I know I told you that the intel teams were out looking for what happened with the rest of the Horsemen’s operations, we only saw a fraction of their people. They thought it was easy pickings to take the gems off you. We’re still not sure what happened with the rest of them, but our wild magic detectors picked up a huge surge of wild magic coming from a village a half day’s ride outside of neverwinter. We’re assuming that the operatives were instructed to open a portal if the Horseman didn’t come back. We need you to go investigate and report back.

This is a smallish farming village, a one horse town kind of thing.

We have heard of Bumblefuck; as the name suggests, there’s not a lot going on there, we’ve never been. There’s no library, Nissa isn’t impressed.

We’ve previously interacted with wild magic with the Pyramid of Peter the Perturbed, which was leaking wild magic. IT’s also the same type of magic that’s from limbo, where He Who Sleeps still is.

Kanye is fingering his feather hat? The founder makes eye contact with Nissa and points at Daal’s cute little hat.

The group takes 5 minutes to remind Kanye what our goal is. Averlyth asks if the Founder’s office should get a whiteboard.

Nissa asks if Gearbox should come with us, or if he’s got a job now. Apparently there’s less for him to do than he used to be, he no longer has the ability to teleport. We’re going to leave him behind, but we could Facetime him when we get there.

Also btw Nissa now has a writing tattoo so her finger writes as if it’s ink. Kanye might want a tattoo for next time.

Kanye wants to grab a small collection of MCVFD swag to give to the people of Bumblefuck. We think they may also have our MCVFD beer on tap, if they have a tavern.

Prompt for the group: Do our bracers have a shared logo to make other Drakeguard operatives recognizable? Ideas thrown out: Ouroboros, Skyrim logo. Maybe other bracers appear on the “devices connected” wifi list. There’s a suggestion that the bracers make a high pitch point when in close contact with other operatives, and produce the brown note if we have too many Drakeguards in the same room??

*The group takes a quick break to share their love of Wheel of Time and their hopes and misgivings about the upcoming show.*

In-universe, there is a subtle, stylized icon for all members of the Drakeguard.

Um arrives at the destination 15 minutes before everyone else, who arrive in staggered intervals. Averlyth is seat-belted into the Chariot, making sure it teleports with her. Kanye wants us to have a one-liner, it’s super awkward; Nissa doesn’t have a chance to correct since she was in the harness.

We appear shortly at the outskirts of town. There’s a larger tavern in the middle of town, there are various sheds and barns and stuff like that. What’s more noticeable is a weird sickly green light pouring out the windows of the tavern in the middle of town. Our trained eyes also spot the unmistakable signs of violence.

Someone has made some attempt to clean up (we don’t see any bodies) but there’s blood, drag marks on the ground, marks on the wall.

Nissa starts strumming gently to prove we’re not a threat. There is no response to the music.

While the rest of the group slowly pops in behind him, Um has already sneaked off. It’s late afternoon, heading towards evening, getting darker already so plenty of shadows for him to dart between. He quickly patrolls the outermost ring of buildings, which is mostly barns, a couple of houses.

Notably, they are all unoccupied. There are no farm animals, there are no people, there are continuing unmistakable signs of violence, but also no bodies.

Kanye starts putting our beer branded coasters at the doorways surreptitiously. Are we framing *ourselves* for this?

Averlyth casts Clairvoyance just inside the Tavern door. It’s a typical tavern, one great open room, there’s lots of tables and a bar against a wall. A big fireplace at one end of the room. What’s noticeable is all of the tables have been moved to one side. Instead of a roaring fire, there is a weird glowing green portal filling the entire oversized fireplace. There is wild magic leaking out of this, very similar to what we saw at the pyramid - pooling out and draining the way water would.

It’s having mild odd effects on the surrounded; the fireplace has sprouted a patch of leopard print fur, there are thumbs growing out the drain pipe, etc. there’s an astonishing amount of blood in the room, and piled in one corner is what can be assumed are the bodies of all the villagers in town. Scattered haphazardly around the room are the bodies of several cultists. There is not a single living cultist in the room.

Alarmingly, standing in the room are a number of Slaads. 2 Red Slaads, 2 Blue Slaads, and what we’ve never seen before: Green Slaad. None of them are able to see the orb, so none of them know we’re here.

Looking at the Slaads, they are as we remembered. Not particularly intelligent, they fight with claws and stuff like that. The Green Slaad looks a little different; he’s wearing what could arguably be called clothes or armor, he’s carrying a staff, he’s got various bit of kit on him. He’s noticeably more alert than the other Slaads, which are milling around. Looks like they came through, killed all the cultists, and now they don’t have a goal.

Reminder: The portals in Peter the Perturbed’s Pyramid were powered by arcane machinery, which we disabled. The portal that horsemen used before was powered by an ongoing ritual which we interrupted. It’s unclear what’s powering this portal, we see no machinery or rituals, and we have never closed a portal that was not being maintained by something. [1]

> **Um**: Can Slaads be burned?? I have a one-track mind right now.
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> **DM**: It’s a pretty fair track.
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Kanye makes another round back through the outer ring to go get the coasters back since the occupants are all dead and it would be a waste. Um checks the remaining buildings in town to see if anyone’s alive; there are no household pets, any barn animals would’ve run away, the village is effectively deserted.

In one of the houses, Kanye notices one of the dining rooms has food set out still - the food looks cold, but there isn’t yet mold. Our best guess is the cultists rolled into town and rounded up all the villagers violently and assembled into the tavern. Now that there are Slaad here, we guess they opened the portal and it went wrong.

Averlyth casts a Guardian of Faith anticipating a fight. A 7 ft tall lavender Slaad is now following us around town, with a sword and shield emblazoned with Bane’s gauntlet.

Kanye remembers that the Slaad might’ve impregnated the dead corpses. He also remembers that he has a flamethrower, which he just refreshed a charge for.

(Mechanically speaking, we’re planning out a surprise round before the Slaads get to react)

The group has remembered that we picked up Thessaltoxin from our last adventure. Um is lacing his crossbow bolts with the poison, and we are thinking about shooting a Slaad through the window before blasting the Tavern with every fire and lightning ability we have on hand.

Nissa and Averlyth notice a bit in the footnote on the spell that says polymorph does not work on shapeshifters. Red and Blue Slaad are not shapeshifters, but Green Slaads are.

We’re ready with our surprise:

* Um snipes a Blue Slaad with a Thessaltoxin laced crossbow bolt, using Guided Shot to ensure. He’s also now on his new disc, in the air, out of range of the impending fireball.
	+ The Blue Slaad fails the constitution saving throw, and is now polymorphed into a giant Constrictor Snake.
* Sorith explodes the front door of the tavern with Shatter, though none of them are close enough to the door to be hit by the damage.
* Nissa summons a Fireball into the tavern now that she can see through the doorway.
	+ Everyone in the tavern fails and takes 43 fire damage. The snake hasn’t yet taken enough damage to get knocked out of snake form.
	+ The tavern is well and truly on fire, the thatch roof is blazing, everything inside is on fire.
	+ **Um**: Imagine just hanging out a tavern and your friend turns into a Snake and then the tavern blows up.
* Kanye wants to use his flamethrower on the tavern and has been spending the last 10 minutes charging it up.
	+ The group briefly realizes we don’t remember how this mechanism works. It’s going to be a fiery version of lightning bolt it sounds like.
	+ Flamethrower: range 30ft, a line of fire forming a line 30ft long and 5 feet wide blasts out from you in a direction you choose, each creature in line must make a dex saving throw. A creature takes 6D6 fire damage on a failed save or half as much on a successful one. The fire ignites flammable objects in the area that aren’t being worn or carried. The flamethrower uses one canister of fuel per shot.
	+ He’s going to remain off to one side, not directly in front of Sorith, so he can watch for anything to exit the building. His triggered action is when one or more creatures are in position to be hit by the flamethrower, which is set up in as straight a line as possible, 30ft away from the door.
* Averlyth, standing back near Sorith as well, casts Flamestrike directly in the center of the tavern.
	+ One Red Slaad and the Green Slaad both succeed their saving throws and only take half of the fire and radiant damage.
	+ She’s just admiring the view.

We now learn that Slaad are resistant to fire damage. The snake doesn’t look so hot.

The snake slithers out a window on the side of the tavern. The 2 Red Slaads and the Blue Slaad all try to hustle out the front door at the same time.

Kanye yells an introduction while he fires the flamethrower. He makes a goading attack on them, and they fail their wisdom saving throw, so they now have disadvantage if they attack anyone other than him.

He “gently” moves the flamethrower out of the way and spends a charge to use the laser beam from the second attack in his multi attack.

The Slaads finish coming out of the building, still on fire.

The closest target, and the most viable one, and the one they are compelled to fight, is Kanye.

A Red Slaad misses trying to hit Kanye, who spends a superiority die to riposte with his glaive. Second one hits with piercing damage. He is not yet pregnant with Slaad babies. The Slaad tries to bite and misses.

Red Slaad 2 misses once, then hits, but he is still not pregnant. Another bite that doesn’t make it.

Blue Slaad manages to hit Kanye during his attacks, infecting him by chaos phage, which currently means that he can’t recover health.

The snake slithers to Averlyth, but then goes for the Guardian of Faith instead. It takes radiant damage from the swing; there is now a blue Slaad that looks pissed and *really really really* close to dead.

The Green Slaad has not left the building. It walks up to a window in the tavern facing us all. It looks completely unconcerned and it casts fireball centered over Kanye.

Um shoots the Green Slaad through the window with a non-toxic bolt. He is now bloodied, and Um is somehow hiding behind his disk in the sky.

Sorith goes to punch the formerly-snake Slaad. It immediately dies. 30ft away from him are 3 other Slaads menacing Kanye. They are all bloodied, though one of the Red Slaads looks worse off than the others. He goes for that one - it is now stunned until the end of Sorith’s next turn. Two are now stunned, the third (Blue) was close.

Nissa starts off giving Kanye a bardic inspiration, i.e. for pregnancy related throws. Then she’s able to successfully slow every single Slaad, so they now have reduced AC, dexterity saving throws, and number of actions per turn (only a bonus or regular).

Kanye glaives the most damaged looking Red Slaad, killing it in two strokes.

Averlyth casts lightning bolt with her bracer on the Green Slaad in the window, nervous about what it can do next.

All the Slaads regain a little bit of health. The unstunned Blue Slaad looks at Sorith, looking REAL tempted to hit him back, but he’s compelled to go for Kanye. He’s only able to make one attempt. He misses.

The Green Slaad looks out at Averlyth and swirls it’s staff around and hurls 2 critical flame bolts at her, dealing a fuck ton of fire damage. She survives!

Um shoots a sneak attack on the Blue Slaad by Sorith and Kanye. Sorith sends a barrage of blows at the Blue Slaad as well. The Red Slaad is no longer stunned.

Nissa sings a song to shame the Slaads about their poor parenting skills since she knows better from her own experience; they take psychic damage and have to move as far as they can away from Nissa, while still slowed. Also she had put the blinders down on Daal’s helmet to cover his eyes.

Kanye now gets to make an opportunity attack on Red Slaad, Sorith gets to make an opportunity attack on Blue Slaad as they try to run away. Sorith kicks Blue, who looks pretty poor. Kanye critically glaives Red, he goes to trip him but he’s really just pretty dead.

Green Slaad steps back into the burning building.

Kanye kills Blue who is now super dead.

*Cutscene activated now that only Greenie is left and it’s getting real late in the night.*

On the Slaad’s turn, we see a sphere of force ripple out from him. The building, already weakened by all the damage, explodes outwards. There’s still fire and burning stuff. Standing in the middle is this Green Slaad, near the portal, crackling with energy.

As we watch, 4 additional Green Slaads step through the portal - we experience pants shitting terror - and then something unexpected happens.

Then, following the Green Slaads through the portal emerges figures we haven’t seen before. We realize the Green Slaads coming through don’t appear to be backup, but more like fleeing something out of the portal.

A group of lean, muscular, almost emaciated monks with pointed ears, carrying swords and knives, come through incredibly orderly. Imagine special forces: incredibly calm, in control, like this is just another day. They don’t look like they’re in a fight for their life, they seem like they’re mopping up. This squad comes through escorted by another older, more serious looking monk.

They proceed to completely slaughter the five Slaads, incredibly quickly.

They look up at us and lower the weapons.

Nissa recognizes them as Githzerai, the other race of beings that live in Limbo. They are orderly, philosophers, martial arts monks, they live in the plane of limbo where they hone their mental powers to the point where they can create order out of chaos. They hunt Slaad among other things.

Averlyth and Um notice a very particular stylized dragon signal embedded into their armor.

The old monk walks up to us.

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> **Dak’kon**: *Know* that I am Dak’kon, and *know* that I am a member of the Drakeguard. Who are you?
> **Kanye**: *Know* that THAT’S what’s supposed to happen when I introduce myself.
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