Eyes Unclouded - Session 19
Returning to our regularly scheduled programming, last week we picked up again with our Studio Ghibli inspired Cairn 2e campaign. You can find our last session here.
The Knight
This session, the party was composed of:
- Madrigal, halfling forager and werebear
- Flame, tiny fire elemental in an automaton body
- Sir Percius, law-abiding knight
- Nanaki, "no-face" spirit and artificer
- Ambrose, mountebank and would-be flirt
- September, a flying squirrel druid and practicing violinist
We rejoined the party as Sir Percius encountered a familiar face. As the rest of the party hid around what remained of an ancient villa, a figure clad in plate armor and a high, frog-like helmet strode into the room. He challenged Sir Percius, but then the two knights recognized one another, and the stranger removed his helmet to reveal a sweaty, mustachioed face beneath.
This was Sir Egerain (a name that the players had a great time riffing on), a Knight of the Inner Circle of Queen Istaria VI and a professional acquaintance of Sir Percius. He proved to be a good-natured, if condescending, fellow. After a round of introductions, he invited the party to join him for breakfast.
Sir Egerain had been camped in the ruins of Mal-Aqat for some time, awaiting the return of his squire, Dorian, whom he had sent to Wealdstone for supplies. In the meantime, he had thoroughly explored the ruins and was happy enough to share what he knew:
- This was only the upper layer of a larger complex. To get deeper, they would need a significant amount of rope or to find an alternate route down.
- The stone automaton that the party had been tracking regularly patrolled between the garden they had entered through and some sort of freight shaft a few rooms from their present location.
- A device like the teleporter the party was looking for could be found in the extreme west of the ruins, inside a grand dome.
The knight eagerly revealed his own reasons for searching the ruins. He had been tasked by his queen with finding a legendary spear that he believed to be somewhere in the lower levels of Mal-Aqat. He believed the spear to be guarded by a great dragon, though the party wondered how such a creature had gotten down there in the first place, or if it ever came out. The spear was rumored to be utterly immovable, a fact that only raised more questions.
We also found out more about Sir Percius and the realm of Queen Istaria VI:
- Sir Percius had a brother, Sir Gregorius, who was another Inner Circle knight.
- Sir Egerain likewise had a brother named Sir Gravain.
- Queen Istaria VI sees the Duchy as a notable political rival, but considers Wealdstone and the nearby woods to be beneath her concern.
- The knights of her realm are prone to internal conflict when cooped up, especially over the winter, so are often sent wandering for years at a time.
- The northern part of her realm is home to giants with whom Egerain once formed a treaty.
Scouting Ahead
While most of the party interrogated Sir Egerain, Flame trundled away in search of the shaft the knight had mentioned. Flame left the villa, passed through the tower the party had explored previously, and out the far side. An exterior ramp there overlooked the surrounding trees, curving left up to a small loading dock with an aperture into a deeper room in the ruins.
The loading dock was currently empty but thoroughly scraped up. Its location on a raised tower raised questions as to how any carts that supplied this place ever got up here.
Passing through the door, Flame entered a large, circular chamber dominated by an open shaft. Lighting some loose scrub and tossing it in, Flame observed something like a 100' drop down to a metal platform below. The edge of the shaft was ringed with concentric circles engraved into the stone floor and flanked by a large stone apparatus that looked like a cross between an abacus and a scale.
Five other exits left this room. One was another stone passageway opposite the arch Flame had entered through. It opened onto a hall that dipped at an alarming angle, a collapsed tower that seemed particularly unstable. Flame could hear the rustling of something alive within. The other four doors were metal hatches set at each diagonal.
Flame decided to report back to the others before exploring further.
Next Steps
In the meantime, Sir Egerain led the rest of the party back into a small kitchen in the ruined villa. The smell of burnt eggs wafted from a strange kiln-like oven that glowed with a blue light. A disc-like device was socketed into its face. Nanaki quickly identified this as a power source.
Nanaki set to work tuning the oven while Madrigal produced some nice mushrooms from her pack. Sir Egerain volunteered a few more eggs from his personal supply, and soon they had a nice mushroom souffle cooking.
Sir Egerain then led the party back to his camp, up a rope in a nearby tower. There, he had nestled into the wreckage of a giant mechanical fish. The thin brass skeleton of wings emerged from its sides. Two bay windows and a burnt-down campfire suggested this was the source of the light the trolls had seen the night before.
Over their meal, the party decided to join with Sir Egerain and explore the lower levels of the ruins. They would help find the spear and the teleporter they sought at the same time. Sir Egerain packed up his camp and left a note for Dorian, and they set out.
The Descent
Back at the mouth of the shaft, September dove down to scout ahead. The flying squirrel glided down 50 feet of shaft before emerging into a 50-foot-tall dome. In the faint light from above, they could make out rows and rows of sculpted seating areas, a cordoned-off area full of brass drums, and several exits along the chamber's broad rim. Alarmingly, the room was half-collapsed, chunks of dome and a tangled mass of stone seating meeting at rickety angles along the north wall.
The squirrel druid checked a few of the exits, finding that many were collapsed. One, however, revealed the teleportation device the party was looking for, a metal rod set in the floor with a gem at its tip. Unfortunately, the doorway into this room had mostly given out, leaving only a squirrel-sized hole for access.
September flew back up to join the others, and they debated various ways of getting down. Eventually, they settled on a plan where the party would combine their various ropes, then Ophiane the Evoker would conjure an energy hand to hold it aloft. The party would climb on, then she would gently lower them down to the surface below. Ophiane would have to stay behind, but the elder wizard seemed not too unhappy about that.
After a bit of preparation, the party, plus Ismene and Egerain, mounted the rope and began their descent. As the first of them touched the metal plate below, they heard a strange sound in the distance to the south, a pneumatic hiss and a steady whir.
GM Notes
This was a bit of a brief session. We spent a big chunk of our time setting up a Discord call for one of our players to join remotely and ordering takeout. That's all fine, of course. The goal is first and foremost to have a nice time hanging out as friends. It just means we more or less only explored two rooms and talked to a single NPC.
Sir Egerain seemed like a modest success. I do not usually do character voices, at least not well, but I found a comfortable one for this annoying knight. He gave some good hooks for Sir Percius' player to riff on and helped expand our setting a little bit. I am excited to loop in more of the other characters' backstories, but more pressingly, I am curious whether the party will suspend their quest to help this wayward knight or commit to the urgent matter of the god they unplugged a few sessions ago.
I know I sung the praises of the Underclock last session, but I think we ran into a few of its limitations this time. First, this dungeon was designed with a 1-in-6 encounter roll and thus has its fair share of empty rooms that might be activated by an encounter. Second, there is a timing issue where, with our short sessions, the clock almost always ticks down exactly at the end of play. A cliffhanger now and then is nice, but it feels a bit rote if it happens every time. Next session, I might switch back to a more typical overloaded die.