Eyes Unclouded - Sessions 30 & 31
Two more brief session reports from our ongoing Studio Ghibli-inspired Cairn game.
Session 30: The "Stairs"
Having gotten a good night's rest, the party decided to dedicate some time to investigating the fifteen silver pillars in the entry to the Inverted Woods version of Mal-Aqat. They were:
- Ambrose, mountebank and would-be inanimate object
- Nanaki, "no-face" spirit and artificer
- Sir Percius, law-abiding knight
- Flame, tiny fire elemental in an automaton body
- September, a flying squirrel druid and practicing violinist
- Leder, a bonekeeper and reformed necromancer
- Madrigal, halfling forager and werebear
And they were accompanied by:
- Ismene, botanist and wizard of the Verdurous Court
- Merlina the Crow, the Cat King's magical advisor
They experimented with various configurations of pillars and, with each adjustment, one flickered out of existence. They noticed that some configurations caused the stairs on the far side of the entry chamber to materialize.
The Spider
In one such configuration, September donned a rope and flew down the steps. They disappeared into the darkness and emerged in a long vertical shaft. Above and below, spiral staircases spiraled away to vanish into the distance.
They didn't have time to look closely though, as they had to pinwheel to dodge a lancing strike from an unseen assailant. Above the door was perched an automaton shaped like a giant spider, plated in the same pearlescent white shell that the structure was made of. It seemed content to wait above the door, watching September's rope intently.
After some efforts to communicate through the rope (the gap between rooms in this unnatural space blocked sound completely), the rest of the party just barreled through the door as well. All managed to avoid the deft strokes of the spider.
What followed was a somewhat confused battle with this spider automaton. Some party members decided to wander up the stairs to investigate; Sir Percius fled, calling for his comrades to follow and carrying September to safety. Madrigal took decisive action: she quickly scaled the wall and jabbed a trowel into the thing’s segmented neck, bringing it crashing to the ground. Once she did, the spider clambered over the ledge and began to crawl down the spiraling shaft.
Watching it go, the party realized the space looped. The retreating spider was visible four flights below and eight, and so on. They looked up and saw the spider crawling down from above as well. It seemed to be making a beeline for Flame, who had traversed up to another landing on the stairs.
As it crawled, the spider revealed a barbed sting, a harpoon that it launched ineffectually at Ambrose. Sir Percius returned, picked up the sting, and hucked it back at the construct, knocking it from the wall and dropping it into the looping void. The spider flew past four times as it repeated its fall, then vanished.
The Loop
With the coast clear, the party began to investigate the room. Flame and Madrigal had discovered a set of silver bricks inlaid into the wall in a triangular formation. They matched the pattern and shape of the pillars in the gateway room. With the spider's death, one had vanished. The party theorized that this sign might represent the spider.
Flame decided to test running up and down the stairs, chugging along in their automaton frame. The fire elemental sprinted up four times, then down four times, but in each case returned to the entrance (and their bemused compatriots).
Nanaki decided to jump over the ledge. They fell 10 feet and landed hard on a translucent surface one story below. The fall knocked them unconscious.
Cautiously, the party moved out onto the surface to retrieve Nanaki, and the artificer quickly came to. September flew around to investigate. Flying under the surface, the squirrel was able to fly upwards and loop through the space. Flying downwards, carefully with arms outstretched, they ran into the smooth shell-like surface of the invisible platform.
September flew upwards four times in rapid succession and emerged into a new space: a dark, sewer-like tunnel with a long sluice cut through the middle of the floor. Something wet sloshed down the hall to the druid's right. They quickly returned to the others through the outline of a manhole cover rather than risking further exploration.
Another Room
The party retreated back to the entry hall with its writhing silver gate. They decided to spend a little more time with the pillars, deciding that the different symbols represented different spaces. They identified one (an arch-like curve) as representative of their current room and realized that placing another symbol adjacent sometimes caused the stairs to materialize, allowing descent into that symbol's room.
One such symbol looked a bit like a face. The party went down the steps to investigate, led by September. The squirrel flew out into the dark, emerging into a narrow hallway of orange terracotta. To their right, a carefully dismantled automaton was suspended in a nook. Other empty nooks lined the hall until it came to an arch leading into the darkness beyond.
Session 31: The "Face"
The rest of the party followed behind, except for Sir Percius, Madrigal, and Leder, who stayed back to guard the entrance (their players not being available).
When Merlina the Crow entered, she emerged the size of a normal bird, fluttering to land on Ambrose’s extended hand. That meant this space was in the material world.
At the party's prompting, Ismene conjured a mote of green light and sent it dancing down the hall. It emerged into a larger room filled with rubble. Most of the party followed into a chamber cracked like a crushed eggshell. Huge slabs of masonry were wedged into an uneasy arch overhead.
The party set to work thoroughly examining this new space:
September found in a small hole in the rubble and wormed their way through until they found soil and a protruding root. They cast Speak with Plants and asked the root about their surroundings. It only had a vague sense of the structure, but confirmed they were underground in the Blue Woods. The root referenced a bear somewhere above, leading the party to speculate that they were under a specific part of the surface ruins of Mal-Aqat that they had visited previously.
Nanaki set to work investigating the defunct automaton. One of its legs had been neatly dismantled, perhaps for maintenance, revealing the complex marquetry of fitted parts that made up its seemingly solid form. Using this information, the artificer cracked open the automaton's torso, eventually extracting a warm copper cylinder for further study.
There was one other door in the chamber: a huge, heavy stone shutter with a copper bar along the bottom. Ambrose and September listened at it, hearing a deep, distant breathing larger than any creature September had heard before. Ambrose, an expert on desire, noted something strangely grasping about it.
Flame pursued their nascent archaeological interest and tried to figure out what this room was for. The fire spirit noticed a few features that were hidden amidst the rubble: a gap that cut the chamber’s floor in half and the conspicuous absence of any furnishings like those they had seen in other parts of the ruins.
Company
The party reconvened to discuss their next move. Some expressed concern that the breathing beyond the door was the dragon that Sir Egerain had warned them of on their last visit. What had happened to him? Did they need to go find out?
The party decided to try to open the shutter, but even with their combined strength, they couldn't shift it more than an inch. Ambrose suggested polymorphing into a palette jack, and Merlina said she could try to conjure a Wall of Force to use as a wedge. Before they could attempt any of this, though, the door began to move on its own.
It shifted upwards, revealing a huge, humanoid foot. Then a curious, bearded face peeked under the door, as large as a barrel. Then another, joined to the same shoulder. The two faces shushed the party and asked who they were.
The giant creature(s) seemed friendly enough. Ambrose asked what their names were, and they responded they had none, "never needed 'em." Ambrose offered to name them and called them Thorn and Ham. They seemed to like this well enough.
Thorn and Ham revealed that they were exploring the ruins looking for treasure. They had climbed down the vertical shaft that the party had descended on their last visit. They helpfully gave a rough description of the ruins, describing this as a lower layer beneath a "mushroom layer," then the upper ruins, then the surface.
The party asked about the dragon, and Thorn confirmed. They had seen it sleeping not far from here in a huge pit at the center of Mal-Aqat. That space was strange, seemingly having little or no gravity as you approached the bottom. Ham shared that they had met Sir Egerain, and that the knight had descended into the pit a few days ago. He had not yet returned.
The party asked what treasures the duo had discovered so far. The giant(s) bragged about their haul: many bats, a giant copper fish, and heaps of spears. Ambrose and Nanaki recognized the fish as some kind of vehicle based on a crew compartment with seats on top.
The giant(s) helpfully wedged the door with a slab of stone and agreed to let the party through on one condition: they would need to pay a finder's fee on any treasure they discovered in the ruins. The fee could be negotiated when next they met.
The party thanked the giant(s) and passed through the stone shutter, emerging into Ham and Thorn's larder. Spears, barrels, and shiny scrap were stacked around the room. Another doorway opened onto a dimly lit street, complete with sidewalks and a broken shop window across the way.
GM Notes
These are slightly dry accounts of what were otherwise pretty lively sessions. We didn't get a lot done exactly, exploring just a few rooms in the complex, but the party learned a lot about the structure of the space and seemed to have a good time both fighting the spider and chatting with Thorn and Ham.
Mal-Aqat is something like a kilo-dungeon. It's sprawling, and the Inverted side version adds a lot of complexity in layout. In Session 30, Sir Percius' player mentioned they could spend 15 sessions here, and I believe it. Every once in a while, I nudge the players, either above the table or in character via Ismene, to consider what they are trying to achieve at the moment, but if exploration in and of itself is satisfying, then it seems like the D&D of it all is working.
Ham and Thorn were a random encounter table roll, and they happened to max out their reaction. Odds are there would have been some kind of social encounter there no matter what, but it seems like a lucky stroke that these memorable characters happened to be helpful friends in an otherwise pretty relentless environment.
For the last few sessions, we've been playing with the stock Cairn 2e encounter table. I'll admit it is better than my initial assessment. We have not run into the potential problem where the party keeps rolling that they are hungry or lose something over and over again, which I still consider to be an issue. I suspect I will simply read back-to-back results as "Quiet" as a stopgap.