The Black Pyramid Campaign/Session 3

The session began with the expedition being assailed by strange, shadowlike monsters. Doctors Lungren and Sera decided that the sanest course of action was to ram the invisible horde with an armored car. Dr. Jonessi, Marcel and Godehard instead congregated around the machine gun, which was manned by the five janissaries. Sera and Lungren crashed, badly, and were nearly torn to shreds as they retreated toward the rest of the expedition party. Lucio, the troll, was getting chunks torn out of him about as quickly as he could regenerate. With the workers either fleeing into the pyramid or getting ripped apart by the shadows, the expedition leadership decided to enact a tactical retreat and ran into the pyramid after their men.

After a bit of running and gunning, they reached the center of the pyramid. By this point, a clever application of a peculiarly occluded glass shard to the front of an electric lamp allowed everyone to see the shadows for what they were — a horrifying mixture of bird and man. after expedition members reached the top of a gantry rising up over a deep pit, Lungren followed a chute directly above and reached some sort of panopticon (he failed his senility roll, though, and reached some highly erroneous conclusions). Everyone eventually followed him when it became clear that the shadows, though moving more slowly, were still giving chase.

Inside the Panopticon, they discovered what Dr. Jonessi identified as an Angel of Baradun (a nine-foot tall, mummified corpse with wires and gears still turning under its desiccated skin) seated inside a massive control throne. The party was running out of ammunition (this prompted a ridiculous one-liner from Lungren "They'll run out of blood before we run out of bullets" (Imagine this coming from an elderly gnome with a rifle bigger than he is...)) when the shadows suddenly began to recede. Then, a horrible dread took over the party members, an almost compulsive "call of the void", beckoning all into the pit far below. A strange shaking from the half-dead angel led Dr. Sera to conclude that the pyramid, which was apparently a superweapon that would generate a negative etheric zone and destroy vast areas in the ensuing calamity of reality, reshaping itself, was about to fire.

The group then saw Dr. Niels and his three mercs (who had been oddly absent for all of this) running up the gantry. Marcel and Jonessi overruled Lungren and kept the Panopticon open long enough for the four of them to rejoin the group. Unfortunately, this meant that they spent a crucial few seconds exposed to the full horror of the fabric of space and time being punctured somewhere below. Everyone made will saves, and everyone took sanity damage except Dr. Sera (who rolled a nat 20, and gained forbidden knowledge). Several members were suddenly exposed to a horrible absence of feeling when the chamber was finally sealed, and afterwards found themselves suffering from sensory overload. In essence, their senses become so heightened trying to find some sort of stimulus during those horrifying few seconds that they overcompensated (those affected now get +4 to perception, but intense light or sound requires a fortitude save to avoid being dazed (+4 to listen/spot)). They also took some sanity damage (11 points each).

When all this was over, the party took stock of its situation: Most of the workers were dead, one of the Janissaries was catatonic, and another was in the same sensory overload condition. The surviving workers, who were outside the Panopticon chamber when the firing occurred, had all gone irreperrably insane. All of Dr. Niels' mercenaries became hypersensitive (Niels seemed fine, as did the other scholars (high will saves, after all)) and, using the strange magnifying properties of the Panopticon, the party saw that the settlement of Gate Town was set ablaze by the firing of the weapon (Gate Town is about one hundred and sixty miles away).

The party gathered itself up and tried heading back. The radio came back online, and they tried hailing the airship's captain. He was incoherent and eventually hung up. They managed to reach Dr. Casimir, the librarian, but he was killed by two assailants, whom Marcel recognized by voice as the dwarf and the man he had slain at the tower. The Panopticon also revealed an oasis a few days' walk from the pyramid so the party headed there. En-route, the group broadcast a general distress call, which was was finally answered by, of all things, an officer of the Aeldrum Trade Company. It seemed that the ATC disembarked not long after the pyramid was fired. With few resources and almost no men, the expedition leadership told the ATC the party's current location and offered to trade knowledge for their assistance.

The ATC reached the oasis a few days after the party (in the meantime, Godehard and Jonessi concluded jointly that the oasis was actually the reflecting pool of a massive Church of Kirva). On arrival, Dr. Sera realized that the commander, Captain Pascius, was her former fiancee. What was already an awkward reunion was made still worse when Pascius arrested her on charges of "Dynastic Complicity in High Treason" (namely, her father and brother were implicated in an assassination attempt on the Serene Doge of Aeldrum, and later also convicted of laundering money for a separatist movement on Aeldrum).

So now the Saldanese expedition has joined up with the ATC for the time being. They seem to be interested in the pyramids and a possible etheric route over the planet's wastelands. Cpt. Pacius appears to be advised by a mysterious elf (definitely not Aeldman) in black, silken robes named Chenueva, who appears to owe the Company some sort of debt.

So to summarize this summary,:

* The party was attacked by what seem to have been the negatives of long-dead souls, flash-burned into the background ether by some massive release of energy
* The black pyramid is apparently a source of negative energy, used to rip apart the farbic of the ether and trigger a chain reaction of destruction as reality re-stabilizes (Sera and Jonessi theorize that a full blast could literally set the atmosphere on fire — what the party saw was a very, very, small taste of the destruction)
* The pyramid fired again shortly after the party's arrival; whether the party triggered it is unclear. In any case, a lack of etheric energy avoided the full chain reaction of the original firing (there may also have been other pyramids involved the first time)
* The ATC showed up, and the Saldanese expedition has now joined them as a survival measure
* The sky is now dark even during the day, and there's a massive rift far to the north