(no subject)

[ralphmelton.livejournal.com]

Let me save effort by presenting my memories of last week's session in the form of a recap for the players:

Since returning to Shepford, you've been exploring the tunnels beneath the town, past the cave-in the rat-men have triggered. The passages are twisting and irregular, and the walls are damp and slick in places. There is no light other than what you bring.

You've been fighting strange slimy creatures that look vaguely like large men, made of a grayish-green glutinous slime that resembles pus. Sharp weapons slice through their bodies with ease, like carving into pudding. You've also encountered large versions of more normal creatures, also infected with the same slime.

A rat-kin cleric/rogue named Tobin has joined you on your work. He is brave, but he is not on a level with you.

In our last episode, the party came back up to the tavern to rest and recover. During the night, a couple of the pus-men came out. Turok and Larissa defeated them, but they hit Turok with their arms a few times.

In the morning, the party went down into the tunnels again. At an intersection of two passages, they found a giant spiderweb, tinged with sticky slime. (Good eyes allowed them to avoid actually wandering into it.) They managed to defeat the spider, but it got a few fierce bites in, and its poison was so fierce that they retired back to the surface for another day.

The slow progress of the slime creatures up to the surface continued overnight, though again the PCs defeated them.

On their next trip down into the tunnels, they encountered a pair of dire weasels in one of the caverns they had explored before. The weasels were showing signs of the slime infection. Prolix tried to speak with them and incline them to peace, but before he was able to, one of them had managed to sink its teeth into Kyle and thirstily drank his blood. That weasel had to be killed, but the other one was sufficiently intimidated by the heroes to form a sullen cease-fire. (And it was demonstrated that dire weasels really did justify a CR of 2...)

The PCs left that weasel behind and went on. They encountered another gang of the slime-men and fought them with ease. One of the slime-men had two heads, arranged one behind the other.

Larissa's diary

[cellio]

September 20 (Friday)

Rain, rain, rain. What a miserable day. Rain and slime.

We got into Shepford this afternoon. Tobin, the rat-kin that Brion has been working with, met us near Jehan's tavern. The rest of the town was deserted.

Tobin has learned a lot of our language, though we still had a lot of trouble communicating. We asked what happened and he said some "goo creatures" came up from the hole and attacked. They come up at night, and they are the same creatures that chased the rat-kin here in the first place. He said these monsters have killed more rat-kin than we did, so they've done a lot of damage to the tribe. (We killed about a dozen of them, I think.) These sound nasty!

We asked where everyone is and Tobin said they're all at the farms. We went with Tobin to my parents' farm and saw Jehan and Brion along with my family. The place is very crowded, and it's made worse by the animals all being in the barn because of the rain. That means the rat-kin are having to stay out in the fields because there's no room in the barn. The rat-kin are pretty low on the pecking order in Shepford, it seems. That's sad, as Brion told me they're doing a lot to help out. And they have gold to spend.

My mother is just as nuts as Brion described in his letter. She kept going on about how I need to stay here and get married and settle down and so on. (Meanwhile, I noticed that Maria has moved her stuff into my room. I bet Mom's not happy about that. Makes sense to me; why share with Sal if she doesn't need to?) But the townsfolk in general, and even my family, were also much more respectful of me than they've ever been before. Dad seemed downright proud. They've all heard some stories of our escapades and they wanted to hear more. I told them I'd come back later and tell them stories, but right now we wanted to hear about the monsters.

Jehan was there when they came up, as were some customers. These large, slime-covered monsters just walked up from the hole and started attacking everyone in sight. Jehan was nearly killed by one of them! Fortunately, a bunch of people beat the monsters with chairs and clubs and stuff and eventually killed them, but more came up the next night. Everyone fled out of town, and the monsters have been roaming around at night.

Jehan said that the slime from the monsters stings badly when it touches skin. Alcohol seems to get it off, so we raided my parents' shed for a couple jugs of the stuff. Jehan also said that clubs seemed to work better than knives against them.

We decided to go in right away, before it gets too dark, and Tobin came with us. We went through the caves that the rat-kin lived in (until the monsters came), and down to where a cave-in had blocked the path before. That cave-in has now been cleared away. We met some humanoid monsters that seemed to be made up of slime (not just covered in it) -- pretty gross! And one of them had two heads -- weird. Turok's sword didn't have as much of an effect as it usually does; it was like cutting through pudding. My missiles worked well, though, and the flame balls worked really well. Acid, lye, and alcohol also all seem to hurt them. We eventually killed six of these things. Then as we went farther, we came across some slime-centipedes. Centipedes? So it's not just humanoid monsters. These ones didn't seem to be entirely made up of slime, though they did bleed slime rather than blood when we hit them. They were nasty; their bite was poisonous, and they hurt Kyle and Turok. Liandra says they'll be ok, but they need some rest. Tobin was very brave in these fights. I'll have to compliment Brion.

After we killed the slime-monsters Prolix was digging around in the corpses. Ew. Each monster had a hard "core" that was sort of like a rock. The ones in the humanoids looked sort of like mother of pearl. The ones in the centipedes were much uglier. Prolix collected them. I wonder what he's going to do with them.

We decided to leave after the centipedes; we'll go back tomorrow after we've rested. We're going to stay at the inn and take turns guarding the hole tonight. It was still pretty early when we came out, so Tobin and I went back to the farm while some of the others started drinking and just hanging out at Jehan's. (I guess we still get free drinks there.) I spent a couple hours catching up on local news and telling stories of our adventures in Duvik's Pass and Edwest Burrows. The less said about Treefall, the better.

September 21 (Saturday)

Last night some slime-monsters came out of the hole, but we killed them. I'm glad we kept watches, though. Conclusion: watches aren't as dangerous as taverns.

We discovered something strange last night. We were trying to determine if Prolix's souvenirs are magical (they are, faintly), and we noticed that the mace Turok has been carrying isn't magic any more. (He said it wasn't spinning in the fight last night like it had been before.) But now his sword is magic. How odd! I hope it's good magic and not bad magic.

Meanwhile, Prolix has been experimenting with those stone-like things we found in the slime. I didn't find out about this until this morning, but last night he took one and embedded it in a hunk of raw meat he found in the tavern. And this morning that hunk of meat had turned to slime. So these aren't effect, but cause.

This morning we went back in, but we came out after one big fight with an enormous slime-spider. It took a while, and it bit Turok really badly, so we came out to lick our wounds. We found a rat-kin skeleton in the spider's web, so we'll have to let the rat queen know about that.

This afternoon I found Brion and we had a long talk. I really needed that. I didn't know how much I missed having him around until we left. He's a kind and generous person who has helped me a lot in dealing with the changes in my life recently.

Six weeks ago, I'd never been more than a few miles from Shepford. No one here has, almost. A few people have travelled a little -- Brion has made the pilgrimage to the temple of Pelor, for instance -- but I've travelled more in the last few weeks than most people here ever have. The world out there is different from what I'm used to here in Shepford. And Brion pointed out that this really isn't home any more. When we left for Duvik's Pass a part of me thought that I might be coming back here to live before too long, but that really doesn't seem likely now.

There are things going on out there that, somehow, my new friends and I are better able to deal with than anyone else around. That is really surprising and peculiar, but it seems to be true. No one else in Shepford can do much against the slime-monsters. Something bad happened in Stross not long ago -- Brion says travellers are saying that giant lizards or dragons came up from below ground into someone's orchard, though he thinks "dragons" might be an exaggeration. But is there anyone in Stross who can deal with that sort of thing? It doesn't sound like it. And closer to home, these slime-monsters are coming from somewhere, and there might be something chasing them nearby. I wanted more excitement in my life, but this wasn't quite what I had in mind. But we have to help these people, because we can and not many others can. I hope Prolix doesn't fight this again. I think everyone else realizes that this is the Right Thing to do.

I told Brion about what happened in Duvik's Pass (I had written some to him already about this), and I told him about Treefall and how scared that made me. We killed people -- enchanted people who were attacking us, yes, but people nonetheless. And before that we killed that cleric, and we killed many of the rat-kin. Is there something we should be doing differently to reduce the amount of killing? Brion said we did all we could, which is kind of him, and he's probably right that sometimes you need to do damage to prevent even more damage, like amputating the limb to prevent the poison from killing someone. But it still feels, I don't know, wrong somehow.

When I told him about that cleric in Duvik's Pass, I described the dragon statue that was the source of the water. Come to think of it, there's also a dragon statue in the tunnels here (where we fought some skeletons), though it's a little different. Anyway, Brion asked me if I remembered any other symbols, and I described the eye with three drops falling from it. He said that the eye is usually worn by followers of Gruumsh, an orc god, but he doesn't recognize the drops. Well, an orc god would explain why this didn't fit in with any of our gods. I would have thought that Brion would have mentioned if we had bad gods. He said that there are lots of other gods out there, not just Pelor's family. Ooh, I wonder if this means Pelor and the others might end up fighting Gruumsh and his kind. Do gods fight each other? Clearly I don't even know as much about my own gods as I should, but Brion said he could help me with that.

Somewhere in all this I mentioned the zombies that the cleric sent against us and the skeletons we fought here. Brion stressed that these "undead" are inherently wrong and must be destroyed. This is not about bringing people back to life; this is about violating bodies that ought to be in graves. He seemed quite firm about this, and he told me that there are much worse undead out there, including vampires that can drain your life force. Eeek!

I haven't seen a lot of rat-kin out and about, so I asked Brion how they've been doing. Most of them are still frightened of the light, but they can't live in their caves now because of the slime-monsters. Brion said that some are living in the woods and others under people's houses and scattered about. They are better hunters than farmers, Brion said, so settling them on a farm doesn't seem like a good idea. Still, if we could build them a house of some sort here with the rest of Shepford, that would be much better protection for them. Especially when winter comes and it gets cold. Brion asked me if my magical skills include building a barn overnight. Sadly they don't, but maybe I can take that "mage hand" force manipulation and somehow enlarge it. If I could make, say, some temporary workers, maybe they could build a barn. We'd need someone who actually knows how to build barns involved, and we'd probably need some other help, but we wouldn't need the entire town like we did for the last barn that went up. It's a thought.

Some people (like Jenkins) are giving the rat-kin some grief. He probably thinks they're freeloaders or something, even though, according to Brion, we're going to have our best harvest ever because of their help in the fields keeping the vermin out. A home would help; if Jenkins finds rat-kin sleeping under his house he'll probably go nuts. I gave Brion some gold to take care of the rat-kin and ease tensions. <p