Loose Plot Threads

...for the D&D campaign, as of tonight.

In case of dead end, roll d20 for which sin comes back to haunt the party...

1. Mirror (Satine), one of the party's original thieves was resurrected in a temple in the Exotic East. Hasn't been seen since.

2. There is a dungeon beneath Deathfrost Mountain, inside the body of the dead god.

3. A frost giant princess of Nornrik is in love with Tizane (Mandy), the party's cleric. The other frost giant princes is totally not ok with that.

4. Tizane has no idea who her demonic parent is. Nor do any other tiefling party members.

5. The war between the Insect God and the Slaads proceeds quietly. There is that blue slaad in Cobalt Reach who wants the demilich Baron Vorgus for some unspeakable ritual.

6. The death knight released from the crypts of Omnithroxia is searching for something in the halls.

7. The warband of Baron Vorgus proceeds north from Cobalt Reach, in possession of 4 powerful tomes, toward the Hexenbrachen, to perform some whole other unspeakable ritual.

8. Akayle Ozph, demon of chaos, roams the Cobalt Reach, after being released by the online group.

9. A demon of love roams the wastes around Nornrik, after ensorcelling the frost giant pricess, Oscula.

10. Vornheim is beset from without by armies of the undead from Deathfrost Mountain, and from within by desperate warbands. The surrounding area has been flooded with a bizarre bluish substance.

11. Although lord Malekith is long dead, his brothers Gormengeth and Ettingeth yet live. Lord Ettingeth apparently has one of Vorn's eyes--last seen in the isles of Hakleth.

12. Of the three witches Thorn, Frost and Dread, Frost at least survived their run-in with the PCs, and hunts them, accompanied by white leopard men.

13. Several of the dozen Medusa Sisters remain alive. They want revenge.

1. Eshrigel of Vornheim (dead in Vornheim) and
2. Thrace, a nagadusa (location unknown)

3. Oscula, The Eel Medusa (wanted to interrogate Tizane)
4. Naxice, Empress of Hakleth (location unknown)
5. Dia Andine, a necromancer (location unknown after being seen in the Black Fortress at Hakleth)
6. Cylesia, the youngest sister, (location unknown)
7. Moroschka, the Ice Maiden, (the eldest sister) (slain in the Royal fist Monkey dungeon)

8. Vistula, (dead in a dungeon beneath Vornheim) 

9. Orgula, who lives on the Isle of Oth (attempted and failed to capture PCs)

10. Phrothphys (of Cobalt Reach) (dead in her Puppet Palace))

11. Princess Seela, a pirate queen (location unknown)

12. Unknown

14. Skorne, former Nephilidian vampire lover of Frankie's PC has left for parts unknown.

15. The warband of Annihilus Neroxx is still at large in Cobalt Reach, lead by a Thog warlord of some kind.

16. Good King Thrawl remains a captive of the Man-Scorpions of Ruined Nizaad.

17. While the PCs ruined their wedding, Bluebeard, Snow White, and their band of dwarven pirates are still at large.

18. Though her rolling fortress was destroyed, the Star Witch still roams.

19. Adam's PC's parents came through time to try to kill him and he doesn't know why.

20. Precisely what The Hex King of Bellet Osc's relation to the undead army is is unknown.

21.  The Goblin King of Gaxen Kane still wants revenge on the party for past humiliations, since his armies are mostly busy piling on Vornheim, he's hiring mercenaries.
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...and the lion and the lamb are laying down together and the beast has 12 crowns and in general it's all very during-apocalyptic. Chekhov's arsenal is full up.

Good place to be, around level 10.
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A Song Of Pterodactyls and Radiation

So there's the group here in Los Angeles, trying to find the Antikythera Mechanism.

And, on-line, there's the Kangarat-Insominiac Murder Society (Australians, New Zealanders, and Americans who do not sleep).

The LA group wanders the Cobalt Reach, west of the Blue Dragon's fortress.

The Kangarat-Insomniac Murder Society is hired by a goblin king to find them and kill them.

Except it's D&D, so no-one finds anything.

The LA group finds and then abandons the juggernaut-fortress of the Star Witch.

It crashes into a lake near a citadel of serpentmen and a goblin village.

Now, this next bit is hard to summarize. But...Ok, the Kangarats meet a the warband of chaos worshippers, run away from it, join it in attacking the serpentmen, win the battle, then betray and kill the leader of the warband, then flee, then have adventures, then come back and use some random poison from another GMs game to shoot the new warband leader, a fat goblin with jewel eyes, and it backfires and turns him into a demilich.

The LA group traces the wreckage of the juggernaut. Rolls into to some ratmen from the warband scavenging the wreckage.

Then like all the goblins and minotaurs and trolls and goatmen from the miniature shelf show up. Things get tense.

Luckily there's a new party member, Ulorin Vex....

...and she took points in diplomacy...

...so they manage to convince the freaks to take them to their leader.

Their leader is a skull in a box. Namely: the demilich that the Kangarats created.

Mandy wants access to the serpentmen library in the fortress that the demilich's warband took over. The demilich wants the Book of Vile Darkness that Mandy randomly rolled in like her second adventure ever.

So they made a deal: Baron Vorgus, Demilich of Cobalt Reach, agreed to give Mandy access to his library, Mandy agreed to give him the book then secretly come back later and kill him and take it.

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Some things I like about the game lately:

It Preps Itself

Whatever Team Makeout does is the background for what Team Kangarat has to deal with the next week, whatever Team Kangarat does is the background for what Team Makeout has to deal with the week after that.

Crazy High Level Warhammer Shit

Team Makeout's still running 1st and 2nd level PCs over in Rappan Athuk, so we get our crawlcrawlcrunchCRYrun! fix over there. Everything in Cobalt Reach has poison fangs or is thrice cursed or can see the astral plane or whatnot. And there's radiation.

Feels nice to pull the stops out, especially after all the time the party's spent getting there.

Scheming

Everyone's sneaking around and trying to cut deals and trying to play the factions against each other and the Kangarats are trying to build an army and Team Makeout is trying to make alliances with goblins and it's got all those Themes that people who write games with Themes in them try to get when they're not yelling at each other about consulting ninjas and all it took was smart players and a constant threat of immediate incineration.

It's all Game of Thrones, only with murder instead of soap. And Mandy has bigger tits than Daenerys.

It's All One Game

Scrap ran a game where Trent killed me and leveled up so he is now high enough level to lead an army in my game to take back the city that was lost in the game that the LA group lost last year because he was Quested with a quest after rolling on the table that Jeff made for his game and now he needs help from the assassins of the order of assassins that Zach W is part of but Zach W isn't an elf from my game any more he's a human because he got reincarnated using the potion from Ian's game which we had to use on him because he got pummeled by a half-giant wizard from the other Ian's game who I tried to kill with poison from Reynaldo's game that the half-giant helped me get and.......yeah.

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What's Up In Cobalt Reach

Ship just landed after narrowly escaping being incinerated half-way to port.
The girls decided to go to Cobalt Reach. So I'm deciding what exactly is in Cobalt Reach, and taking the group's temperature.

What I got so far...



(Of course, it's a plot she mainly created, so she doesn't have much trouble following it.)

…and then the cleric became a stomach

So our session begins with Ela Darling's ranger ably employing her charlatan background to continue to pretend to be the Black Knight, champion of the Black Wing Church of Tiamat. They walked into the Black Wing camp which was pretty much an '80s Realms of Chaos pain-carnival and, secure beneath a natural 20 Intimidation roll, took up residence in the black knight's tent, got the spellcasters some much-needed rest, told the concubines to take a hike...

...and then looted it. They scored lots of weird items including a set of teeth that:
a) Blind you when you're bit with them
and
b) When placed singly in your mouth, allow you to channel the dead souls of those slain by users of the teeth.
…which lead to a brief encounter with Unwerth the Obese, a dead jester of northern extraction, who was all "So carriage rides? What's up with those?"…anyway...

The group then sat around trying to decide what to do next.

Brian the wizard (aka Brian the Dragonslayer) then had a decent idea: since Laney was the Knight Viridian and Ela was pretending to be the Black Knight--why not try to take out a few of the the other five Knights of Tiamat before the upcoming tournament to even the odds? They snuck over to the next closest camp--the irradiated camp of the Cobalt Claw.

Knight and Thog of the Cobalt Claw

Brian the wizard (aka Brian the Dragonslayer) then had a terrible idea: walk up to the guards and say they were adventurers with information to sell.

This was a terrible idea because the dragon that Brian the Dragonslayer was renowned far and wide for slaying (and whom Brian has bragged about slaying in every town from Voivodja to Vornheim) was Ferox the Incinerator, god-dragon of Cobalt Reach.

So it's like…

"Take us to your leader we have information"
"Wait here…"
"Guys I totally got this"
"You say you have information for the Cobalt Knight?"
"Yes! I am Brian the…wizard. I have information to sell, but only to the most powerful faction, is that you?"
"Of course, the Cobalt Claw is renowned far and wide for its mastery of magics far beyond the fallow cosmologies of the other Churches"
"Oh yes, I know the Cobalt Reach well…"
"Indeed, Brian?" (Blue wizard succeeds in a history check) "Yes, I will hear your information, come right this way into my tr…I mean tent, …"

So then there was a magnetic trap. Everyone was caught, for the most part. There then ensued a combat, made hilarious by the fact Lunessa the thief had just found a ring which reverses the value system of everyone in a 15 foot radius (friend and foe) which got put on and taken off again twice.

To make a long story short, everyone eventually got away except the druid's owl (killed by a lizardman), the druid's dog (killed by a reptile woman) and the cleric, Mariah, who found herself scrabbling out of the tent into the gaze a passing cobalt beholder.

fuck.

…which resulted in this shit:

I roll that the beholder can get two of its eye rays to bear this round:

-Stone to Flesh
-Disintegrate

Crucially, the Stone to Flesh goes first.

Mariah fails her save.

Just as crucially, 5th edition D&D's Stone to Flesh works in stages: you get petrified a piece at a time.

Then the beholder aims the disintegrate at her.

Mariah fails her save again.

There is a wailing and a gnashing of teeth at the table, Mariah is turned to a fine powder that not even the 17th level cleric's Resurrection can turn back into a person…

….except the part of her that was just petrified. I roll the body part die…

…so the wizard manages to telekinese the stomach to safety.

With any luck and a day to rest, the players can prep Flesh to Stone or Greater Restoration, then turn the fragment into a disembodied stomach and then cast a full Resurrection thereafter on said stomach. Until then, Mariah the cleric is naught but a belly...

The Cobalt Claw of Tiamat

Of the five Tributaries of the Church of Tiamat--The Red Hand, The Black Wing, The Jade Fang, the Pale Eye, and the Cobalt Claw--the last has been the most active in recent months. Its blue is not the blue of daylight sky, it is the rich and unnatural blue of pollution, of chaos, of storms and other worlds.

The distinctive teaching of the Cobalt church is the Doctrines of Irreversible Disassembly. The Church believes in the primacy of entropy and its Order of Entropic Principals originated the concept of the exentomp. 

An exentomp is an object that is a result of the interaction of order and chaos.  Though, practically speaking, all things on the material plane are exentomps--the term is usually reserved for things with exentompic ratios approaching 1:1, like crumbling cities or mutants.

(Footnote by Noisms: There is some confusion among philosophers as to whether law and chaos themselves are exentomps. Some argue that since law is the antithesis of chaos and vice versa, the two do not interact and hence are not exentomps; others argue that since they both rely on their opposition to each other for their existence, this is a form of interactions and hence they are indeed exentomps.

Footnote by False Patrick:
Eternal or 'outside' things might be 'non-exentompic'. 'Exentompical' is 'reassuringly real'.

Footnote on False Patrick's Footnote:
The Cobalt Claw believes such 'eternal' or 'outside' things number only one: Her Pentacephalic Majesty herself.)

The Cobalt Claw is concerned with the creation of hybrids and exentomps of all kinds. Practically speaking, this means the Cobalt Claw is very big on mutants and inexplicable vandalisms (for example: disordering the pages of books in a library while leaving the order of books itself intact) as well as the kind of extended, esoteric rituals that make sci fantasy cults seem so exhausting to those of us not in them.

Its center of its activity is the radioactive jungle of Cobalt Reach, graveyard of demons, particularly west of the palace of the late Ferox the Incinerator, third daughter of Glittering Tiamat.

Until recently the leader of the Claw was the likewise-late Archbishop Sarpedon (a reskin of that lizardman lich in Caverns of Thracia) who failed in his attempt to establish a new cathedral around Ferox's abandoned nest.

Nevertheless, the warbands and covens of the Cobalt Claw cult remain, and their ranks include:

1. The Cobalt Knight
2. Maggie McCroke, pirate captain of the Ultramarine
3. The Star Witch and her rolling juggernaut
4. Blue clouded leopardmen
5. Cyanotic ooze
6. Trolls
7. Corrupted Gaxen Kane goblins
8. Beholders and gas spores
9. Pterosaurs
10. Doombats
11. Xag Ya & Xeg Yi
12 .Flailsnails
13. Miscellaneous deformed abominations
14. Librarians
15. Mind flayers
16. Thogs
17. Blue lizardmen and reptile women
18. Augmented beastmen
19. Lodestone golems
20. Armored thrall wizards

The Cobalt Claw is the most science fantasy of the Tributary churches, its schemes typically include:

1. Machines

2. Magnetism

3. Electricity

4. Mutation

5. Ooze

6. Dimensional distortions

The lizardmen and reptile women of the Claw speak in a language of excretions. The touch of their skin can cause:

1. Acid burns

2. Hallucinations

3. Dizziness

4. Rage

To quickly generate a warband of the Claw roll one of each die (a lot easier with a pop-o-matic bubble):

d4 = # of auxiliary creatures accompanying warband

d6= Main force: 1 Lizardmen 2 Reptile women 3-Cybernetic beastmen 4-Cybernetic beastmen with two heavy mutations 5-Librarians 6-Goblins

d8= To hit bonus of main force creatures

d10 (x5)=AD&D hit points or (x7)=3.5 hit points of main force
(The leader will be a wizard/witch with twice as many hp)

d12= # of main force creatures

d20= Type of auxiliary creature or creatures accompanying the warband. To find that creature, consult the Creature table above. Roll more than 1d20 if indicated creature's unique.

See also: Carcosa, Slaanesh, Tzeentch, Metal Hurlant