Eyes Unclouded - Sessions 34 - 37
I've really dropped the ball on keeping up with these session reports, but our Ghibli-inspired, heavily modified game of Cairn 2e has been humming along. Here are four highly compressed session reports to bring us back up to the present.
Player characters come and go throughout these sessions, but the party generally consists of:
- Ambrose, mountebank and polymorpher
- Sir Percius, law-abiding knight
- Flame, tiny fire elemental in an automaton body
- Leder, a bonekeeper and reformed necromancer
- Nanaki, "no-face" spirit and artificer
- Madrigal, halfling forager and werebear
- September, flying squirrel druid and practicing violinist
Session 34 - The Shaft
Having narrowly escaped tumbling into the void after September dispelled the previous chamber, the party found themselves in a room dominated by a central forge automaton. They quickly split between two tasks: figuring out how the automaton worked and trying to find a way out of the celestial ruins of Mal-Aqat.
Nanaki and Leder observed the automaton. Over and over, it retrieved a block of starstuff and hammered it into glaive heads before tossing it into a shaft on the far side of the room. It sang a low and meandering song as it worked. Some of the bars were silver, indicating they were part of the symbol system that stitched this place together.
Nanaki observed a "tag" on the back of the automaton's neck that seemed to contain a detailed geometric description of the glaive head, punctuated with words in the Mal-Aqat language they didn't understand. Nanaki and Leder tried swapping the tag with a forged duplicate, but the automaton stalled and a bar from the silver stack flickered into nothing.
Meanwhile, the rest of the party explored the shaft. It connected downward into a black void. Timing their forays to avoid being hit with a glaive, September and Sir Percius delved down with a rope. They found that the darkness was magically dense and concealed a sliding hatch that opened into a lower chamber. They shared this information with the others, and the whole party dropped down.
The chamber they found themselves in was shaped like a long elevated colonnade. On either side, they could make out a distant (but also strangely close and artificial) night sky, dominated by a new moon. To the west was a starstuff wall, blank except for the outline of a door. To the east was a statue of a bearded man. His mouth was studded with a dozen silver teeth. Wet, muddy footprints approached the door silhouette.
As the party entered, they heard a hum that gradually grew into a crackling whine. Most party members dove for cover, except for Ambrose, who turned into a rubber lightning rod (though one of his arms remained flesh), and one other party member (who? I forget). The two moons shone with blinding radiant light, and the two exposed members were left with an intense sunburn. The footprints had been cleared away.
Session 35 - The Snail
Around this time, Jubilo dropped into the scene. An old friend of the party (and another player character), Jubilo was a snail bard, a traveler of the gray void between worlds, and an expert with languages.
Ambrose polymorphed into a starstuff ladder (with a human arm at the top), and Team "Mess with the Automaton" led Jubilo to translate its tag. With the snail's help, they recognized they had been missing a header on their forgery that interpreted the dimensions into forge-ready instructions. They successfully demonstrated this by drafting a simple cup. There was much excitement about the capacity to print almost anything in this nearly indestructible material.
Meanwhile, with the help of the wizards Ismene and Merlina, the rest of the party made a critical realization. When manipulating the silver puzzle that adorned each of the celestial Mal-Aqat rooms, they could simply move the room they were in to change its adjacencies. This triggered a room to disappear, but never the room they were in or the entrance. With that in mind, Flame and Madrigal connected the colonnade back to the entry plaza.
The party assembled and made their way through the newly opened door to the west. There they immediately encountered three orange ceramic, cherub-like drones that seemed to be searching the space. Despite a quick Silent Image and some stealthy moves by Jubilo, the party was detected and combat broke out. Madrigal lassoed one of the drones with her shawl while various party members used Ambrose (still in indestructible ladder form) to disrupt the drones' propellers. In the aftermath, Nanaki snagged one of the wrecked constructs.
The party rushed out the door and into the night of the Woods Inverted.
Session 36 - The Rainbow
Outside, the party made camp and discussed their next steps. Ismene decided to head back to the Verdurous Court. She'd had enough of the party's lack of clear direction.
Sir Percius led the group in a round of self-reflection, and the party gradually decided that they had done what they could for the Blue Woods by stopping the active threat of Fyrir and her corruption. The ruins of Mal-Aqat, while tantalizing to explore, didn't seem particularly pressing. They decided to pack up and head back to the material world by way of the Verdurous Court portal chamber, then from there to points unknown.
After a blessedly peaceful night's rest, Ambrose turned from a ladder into his "bearigible" form: a small dirigible with an underslung gondola and fuzzy teddy bear ears. The party boarded and set off.
Travel was uneventful for the better part of three days, though the party's supplies of non-spirit food grew alarmingly short. Flame powered a rotor, while Nanaki zigzagged along at the helm. Madrigal led the watch, but she was caught totally unawares by what happened next.
One afternoon, the party heard a thunk from the deck below them. September peeked over the side and saw a silver crow sticking out of the hull like a dart. Then another thunked in next to it, then another. A whole murder of silver crows was swirling below the balloon in an attack formation.
September flew to Nanaki and retrieved the silver egg they had taken from the nest belonging to the crow the druid had previously obliterated with Dispel Magic. They tried to give it to the nearest of their assailants. The crow took it, flapping away and cawing, "We have the egg! Get 'em!"
Flame and Nanaki attempted evasive maneuvers while the rest of the party swatted at the crows with their weapons. Madrigal slung fistfuls of Jubilo's slime at the approaching creatures, slowing and confusing them. September attempted to fly away as a distraction.
The party successfully warded off the crows, but September was not so lucky. Half the murder followed her, and she disappeared in a hail of silver wings and a puff of rainbow glitter.
Session 37 - The Return
With the crows routed, the party landed the bearigible to recover the remains of their friend. They found little to bury, but held a small funeral ceremony nonetheless, sharing stories of their time with the squirrel druid.
As they talked, a human-sized turtle wandered into the clearing. They introduced themselves as Tobias (or Tobi), a linguist and venerable wanderer. After a round of introductions, they agreed to accompany the party on their travels. In the meantime, Jubilo sauntered off to return to his wandering.
The party decided it was safer to go on foot than to take to the air again. After a few hours, Ambrose was able to return to human form (with a wooden bear instead of one arm). The party was surprised that nothing bad happened along the way, and soon they returned to the familiar woods just outside the Cat King's Court. Merlina split off from the party to return to her home with a polite goodbye, and soon the party returned to the yam-shaped teleporter they had travelled through a few weeks ago.
The Verdurous Court had seen better days. The lights were off, and only Evius, the master conjurer, was there to greet them. He informed the party that Aviquin had tried to compel the Court to travel, fleeing a dragon that stalked the land. That had taxed the power system Nanaki had implemented to its limits, causing a total failure. After that, Aviquin and the other wizards had been summoned by the Duchess of Valcendre and left.
Pressed for details on the dragon, Evius described it as white and capable of producing a colossal suction. It had been seen over Wealdstone not long ago. He advised the party not to tangle with it, and the party (minus Sir Percius) more or less agreed.
After an extended conversation about the theory behind conjuration and teleportation, the party decided they would resupply at the towers, then return to the Woods Inverted. There they could make their way to the teleportation chamber outside the Cat King's Court and back to Wealdstone.
They spent a night resting and exploring the library. Tobi found a useful book on the language of stone. Flame and Madrigal investigated records of Port Aubin, another major city just down the coast and a strong candidate for their next destination. They read that it was a major shipyard and that it was surrounded by pink salt cliffs. Those cliffs were rumored to have caves in them full of mysterious, ancient paintings and fishfolk.
The next morning, their pouches full of fresh rations, the party headed to the Cat King's Court. Ambrose had communed with the Eirnos orb and found that it wanted to be destroyed. The party decided to stay true to their deal with Merlina, returning the orb to her. They decided not to wake the Cat King (who was both long and asleep), but left him a polite note before heading on their way.
Back in the orangery just outside, the party clambered into the garden shed that disguised the teleportation rod. They activated the device, but something was wrong. There was the sound of shearing stone, and suddenly they found themselves on an exposed wooden platform at the edge of Wealdstone. Whole rows of buildings had been destroyed, replaced with heaps of tangled stone and lumber. Blue-coated guards hid in the eaves of the surviving structures.
Overhead, distant in the sky, the dragon loomed.
GM Notes
There are too many sessions here stretched over a whole month for the kind of detailed notes I prefer to write. Here are a few more summary impressions instead.
I think, in retrospect, the Mal-Aqat puzzle was more clever than it was fun. I enjoyed it making it, but its seems like it lacked either obvious enough early revelations or a pressing need to interact with it. Only by chance, when the party really cornered themselves, did they really make the first big moves in terms of understanding the structure and that took two (admittedly short) sessions. This is not a knock at their puzzling skills, so much as the experience design here.
In session 36, I put an ultimatum to the players: either we needed to revise the rules or plan to play something else. My hack of Cairn was designed to support a summer of sessions with no advancement system and about five players. By this point, we were approaching a full year, had grafted advancement on, and average something like seven. Sessions were starting to spread thinner and thinner as each player pursued their own interests and lines of questioning.
The players ended up choosing both, so we're planning to set Eyes Unclouded aside for a "season break" soon. Perhaps very soon!
Also in session 36, we had our first player character death. This was not the best bit of GMing I've ever done. I think the situation that led to September's end was reasonably telegraphed and the druid was already injured, so I wouldn't change anything about that. I do think the table got a little fragmented and rowdy, and I would have liked to have channeled the limelight a little better to give the squirrel a proper send-off. All this connects to a broader conversation about the roll of GM - steward or governor? - that may deserve its own post.
Session 37 felt rushed to me. Now that we know we're wrapping the game for a bit, folks seemed eager to move. The scene with Evius was a highlight, but it might have been nice to slow things down in the Cat King's Court and visit with those old friends. This has me thinking about how to revise my faction / settlement clock system for future games with this group.