Eyes Unclouded - Session 8
Virginia Richards. Madame Jumel's Garden (detail). ~1936.
These are the records of a lightly modified game of Cairn 2e that I am playing with an in-person group. I've expanded Eyes Unclouded, a now out of print collection of Studio Ghibli themed 5e adventures, into a more open-ended sandbox. You can find our last session here. I'll try to keep these spoiler free, so enjoy!
Evading the Statue
This week our dramatis personae were:
- Flame, tiny fire elemental in an automaton body
- Nanaki, "no-face" spirit and artificer
- Ambrose, mountebank with a cart full of sundries
- Jubilo, Eleutherian snail bard with a tuba for a shell
Having arrived at one of the ancient ruins of the giants, the party had triggered an alarm. A stone shutter dropped, sealing Madrigal, Sir Percius, Airen, and Sir Horsius in a side chamber while the two statues the rest of the party were investigating sprang to life. September was still asleep in Nanaki's arms.
Flame grabbed the Mirror of Perfect Apology from Ambrose' cart. It was unclear what the mirror said to the two stone statues, but one turned and returned to its niche while the other took a gentler approach. Instead of hurling the fire elemental bodily from the building, it began politely but firmly ushering Flame out the door.
Jubilo ducked into his shell and scooted across the room, leaving a trail of slime in the statue's path. Nanaki cast a Silent Image, conjuring the figure of a hamster running with stolen goods. The distraction plus the tripping hazard worked - as the statue crossed, it began to slip and slide. Flame managed to duck away in the confusion.
The Laws of Mel-Aqat
In the meantime, Ambrose (perhaps motivated by self-preservation as much as curiosity) had dashed back into the giant structure and around the corner into a dimly lit room. There they could make out text that had been frescoed on the wall in the Language of the Giants. He called Jubilo to come translate.
As the snail arrived, Ambrose lit a torch. The room was a dead end but filled with a sculptor's tools and materials - chisels, slabs of stone and clay, a portable cart winch for hefting heavy objects. Jubilo quickly translated the text:
THE LAWS OF MEL-AQAT: DO NOT STEAL DO NOT HARM DO NOT FALL - - -
The last law seems to have crumbled away over the ages. Jubilo grabbed some tools and quickly tried making an alteration - DO NOT STEAL into DO NOT SEAL. As he deleted the text, the shutter sealing the rest of the party into the opposite chamber retracted upwards.
The party began rapidly spitballing other alterations to make before the struggling statue could right itself. They eventually settled on:
THE LAWS OF MEL-AQAT: DO NOT SEAL DO HAM DO FALL - - -
With those changes made, the statue collapsed to the ground and began to pantomime distress.
Inspecting the Gem
With danger seemingly averted, the party went back to figuring out how to use this structure to travel to the Verdurous Court. They figured the answer either had to do with the fresco in the far side chamber or the gem and inscription in the central hall.
The fresco provided few answers. It depicted a multi-tiered structure hovering at an angle over a sea of trees. The structure looked yam-like in the same way the giant ruins did, but it didn't seem to be exactly the same building. It was born aloft by a fire in a basket chained underneath, like a hot air balloon.
Nanaki went to place the Nap Stone in the central chamber to keep the giant chandelier moths that hung from the ceiling asleep. As they did, they got a closer look at the emerald in the middle of the floor there. It was a little larger than the Nap Stone (some 8" across) and set in a circular mount. Nanaki's experience as an artificer allowed them to deduce that this was some kind of mechanism.
The party gathered around the gem in case this was some kind of portal. The artificer tried pressing down on the gem, when they did it clicked, then rose up on a rod. They pulled up on the rod and it came free, revealing a hollow that must have aligned with a post in the floor. They put it back.
They tried rotating the gem. After a quarter turn clockwise, it turned red like a ruby. After another quarter turn, blue like a sapphire. Turning it any further clockwise produced slight resistance. Rotating back the other direction produced the same transformations - sapphire into ruby into emerald then resistance.
At the urging of the rest of the party, Nanaki turned the gem past the resistance. With a click, the outside world vanished from the doorway to the south, replaced by distant stars. Air began to whistle out of the room and the prone statue began to grind slowly towards the exit. Nanaki hurriedly clicked the gem back to sapphire.
When they did, the party looked through the door and saw a strange garden.
The Verdurous Court at Last
The yam-shaped giant ruin appeared to be fully inside of a colossal tower. It was situated on a small island surrounded by a ring of water which in turn was surrounded by small plots of vegetable garden. Looking up from the entrance, they could see an onion dome overhead made of colorful glass that seemed to intensify the sunlight inside. About 50' up the interior of the tower were two archways - one to the east and one to the west that seemed to open into corridors.
The party produced their two ropes. Jubilo coated them in slightly sticky slime and then launched each with a blast from his tuba-shell. They flew true and stuck securely close to the two entrances.
Flame took the lead going east, climbing the rope up to the entry to a narrow corridor about 40' in length. At the far end was a diminutive figure made of swirling smoke. At the sight of Flame it retreated back through an archway into what looked like a library.
The rest of the party followed, though Madrigal, Sir Percius, Sir Horsius, and Airen were left to watch the giant ruins until the way was safe. Jubilo went west to scout that way before catching up with the others.
Ambrose, torch in hand, led the way into the library to the east. The room had two stories and the walls were covered with bookshelves. Rolling ladders provided access to a mezzanine to reach the higher tomes. Study tables were laid around the space and a spiral staircase coiled into the ground in the center of the room.
As the mountebank entered, a book sailed at his head, flopping harmlessly to the floor. The smoke person had thrown it from the top of a nearby shelf. Undeterred he walked on towards the nearest ladder to go say hello. As they did, more and more figures emerged from the shadows, throwing book after book. Ambrose scolded them and they scattered, seemingly melting away.
Meanwhile, Jubilo found himself in a laboratory with similar layout - a spiral staircase downward and lab stations with measuring tools and vials of strange looking liquids scattered around the space. The room was filled with a thick green smoke. The snail could barely make out two more smoke people busily throwing chemicals into a low-burning fireplace set into one wall. As the figures noticed Jubilo, they hurried as if trying to burn everything before the snail got over there.
Jubilo also noticed a strange apparatus - a bullhorn mounted onto the wall with a copper pipe emerging underneath it. They quickly scooted over to it, coughing from the smoke and tooted their horn into the pipe. When they did the voice of an elderly man came rumbling over what was clearly a PA system.
Aviquin, I Presume?
At first the voice scolded Jubilo as if he were one of the smoke people for making so much ruckus. When he replied, it apologized and introduced itself. This was Aviquin, elder wizard of the Verdurous Court.
The PA system was also audible in the library. Ambrose shoved some books aside to reveal a similar apparatus in one corner there. The party introduced themselves and said they were responding to Aviquin's letter. The wizard welcomed them, but said the Court was under emergency lockdown until whatever was going on with the smoke people subsided. He suspected it had to do with Igneous down in the boiler suite or Anais, a wizard of the court with a penchant for conjuration. He had sequestered himself at the top of the east tower until things calmed down.
Ambrose used their talent for gossip to get Aviquin to enumerate the other members of the court and what he thought of them. There were five:
- Aviquin was the oldest wizard, primarily focusing on his philosophical research into a universal theory of magic.
- Evius was a young upstart, somewhat newly arrived. He didn't see eye-to-eye with Aviquin and was sequestered in the top of the east tower as well.
- Ophiane was an evoker - cold and calculating. She had gone down to the boiler suite to sort things out.
- Ismene was an alchemist, usually in charge of the laboratory in the west tower. She was away at the moment on a field excursion. Aviquin found her a little inscrutable, but mostly left her to her own devices.
- Anais was an older member of the court, nearly as senior as Aviquin. He was an expert on conjuration and abjuration. He was usually dependable and steadfast but was currently missing.
Flame pushed on who Igneous was. Aviquin was nonchalant - Igneous was the tower's boiler spirit, bound to provide power to the Court. Perhaps another fire spirit like Flame?
GM Notes
I'm writing these notes a couple days after the fact so apologies to any of the players if I have missed or miscredited any of their contributions. I think these were the big beats, but this was really a session about looking closely at things and speculating on their origins or function.
I feel like the pacing was a little tighter this session. We got a little bit of action, a little bit of puzzling, a little bit of adventuring, a little bit of socialization - all in short increments that didn't (to my mind) overstay their welcome.
I was a bit worried about the two puzzles here. I figured text alteration would come naturally to this particular group of players, but the gemstone door system was entirely miss-able if the party decided never to touch it. The echo of the door in Calvero Brightflame's house was one clue, but they could also have pressed the hermit nearby for more clues if they needed to. A little bit rough as puzzle-design goes, but workable here.
For next session, we probably need to zero in on what exactly Jubilo's slime can do. Is it slippery or sticky? Can it carry a signal or current (two other ideas floated this session)? Some of these are good, but too much and it starts to be a catch-all solution.
I also noticed a continuity issue writing this recap! Now that we're in the Mundane World, Jubilo should be snail-sized. Perhaps its a gradual effect? We didn't see Whimwick change size, after all.