Spark of Chaos: Mission report by Kelvin PDF Print E-mail

Mission Brief

As the guardians of the Chaos Vortex abrogate their responsibility to contain the Chaos within the Drow lands the task falls to King Paullandiss. Therefore King Paullandiss needs a group to take a message to Semnack Bloodheart Patriarch of House Valdurim and collect a box from him. Semnack Bloodheart has requested that King Paullandiss sends a group of new recruits only, no-one with Status....

We also had a secondary brief to find out information about the attitudes of the Drow in the area.

Party members


Myself (Kelvin), John Barleycorn, Gomeric, Ivak, Voktan, Drokkal, Doshan, Skafta, Nyx, Tarquinn, Kylar, Sigurd.

First evening


Accompanied by our guide, Snowflake (an ice golem generously provided by the White School of Magic), we travel to the area, passing through a warded gate, and fighting wild Drow. We come to the Patriarch’s base of operations and negotiate with the slave master for accommodation in the slave barracks. During the evening we are attacked by various groups of wild Drow and local beasts.

We are also visited by a number of individuals:

Allesandro

A human from the Reader tower, trading in the area. He offers to pay us for a

couple of jobs. Firstly to get rid of a Melnibonean in the area and also to

ensure that a particular member of House Morphaeglin stays healthy.

Aljas Twistknife, 6th Sorcerer of House Morphaeglin

Thinkbek Swiftkill, 10th Warrior of House Agrathan

Offers to pay us to deliver two messages to two different Drow.

Bracken

A human pathfinder and member of the KVA. He acts very strangely and says he is an envoy to the Patriarch. It transpires that he has cosmic invocations in effect on him and physical signs that he has been gotten at by a creature the Duergar in the group refer to as a “Mindflayer”.

First day


Lordorrey Warptaint, 1st Assassin of House Valdurim comes to tell us about the arrangements for the box. We will be given an empty box and we must obtain 6 chalices in total. 5 family heads will come to give us tasks in return for chalices and the Patriarch will provide the 6th chalice. The Patriarch is getting ready to move to Orrin Rakatha and it seems that both House Drannath and House Duralak are plotting against them. He also tells us that they suspect there is a traitor in their house and that a contact for this traitor may be found in the vicinity of a nearby lake. He would like us to retrieve the contact’s head.

We are tasked to collect some mushrooms by the cook for the Patriarch’s banquet.

We travel to the lake fighting various wild creatures. At the lake we find a Green School Wizard by the name of Darcy who is conducting experiments into the nature of the poison which has afflicted green magic on Orrin Rakatha. His companion, Tristan, has gone missing and he would like us to keep an eye out for him. We find a number of mushrooms in the vicinity for the cook. As we continue our search we are attacked by several groups of chaos creatures and a number of the group are badly affected by disease, reducing our fighting capability significantly. While recovering from one such fight two Drow appear. The one from House Durulak attacks Nyx and is promptly dispatched by the group. The other is Ezreloth Nightwhisper, 42nd Assassin of House Morphaeglin. He has been come from the manor to see if we need assistance. For a fee he provides strength spells so that we can fight a group of wild Drow with a Troll. We return to the slave quarters. The slave master brings in a slave who it turns out is Tristan, the missing Green Wizard. We pay for 15 Gests for his release along with his equipment. He cures our diseases and replenishes our magic.

Over dinner we are once more visited by a number of important individuals:

Maximus

Human mercenary captain who will pay us 10 Gests to kill some bandits in the area. His lieutenant, Stefan, will come to pay us.

Cleave Doomfist, 3rd Warrior of  House Valdurim

He wants us to find a lost patrol. For the return (dead or alive) he will pay us 1 Gest per member of the patrol plus give us a chalice.

Chebel Graveclaw, 2nd High Priest of House Valdurim

He wants us to retrieve 2 whole skeletons and 10 skulls from a nearby graveyard for which he will give us a chalice.

Sir Macharius Nighthand, 2nd Warrior of House Valdurim

He has three tasks for us in return for a chalice:

1. Collect some scrolls from Lordorrey Warptaint
2. Disrupt a ritual being carried out at Moonray Fairrune’s nearby laboratory
3. Some Melniboneans from the Vanishing Tower (which is now on Murandir) have arrived in the area and he wants us to kill them.

Eyomir Darksoul, 2nd Sorcerer of House Haldurim

He extracts a blood oath from Tarquinn in exchange for a magic sword that will harvest the essence of some shades he wishes us to kill in return for a chalice.

Moonray Fairrune

I didn’t talk to him but he was playing with a deck of cards.

Lordorrey Warptaint offers to trade the scrolls for information about what tasks we were given and by whom. He also tells us that the messages we were given by Thinkbek Swiftkill are an open contract on a member of House Valdurim. The scrolls are a ritual to summon a snake avatar and a description of the use of other control rituals we don’t have. We had been attacked by some forest creatures that said we’d killed some boar creatures and disrupted the balance with the snake and that we should redress the balance.

Snowflake tells us that there is someone nearby that we should go to meet. It turns out to be Khandis Greycoil, a Grey Wizard in the alliance. As he does not wish to enter the Valdurim controlled area he offers to reward us for two tasks. Firstly to kill Thinkbek Swiftkill, for which he provides us with some charged items to debilitate the warrior enough that we can deal with him, and secondly to retrieve some knowledge from Moonray Fairrune’s laboratory which is not written down but stored in some ritual components. Having observed a lit building in the vicinity we go there fighting chaos creatures on the way. The entrance is protected by a magical ward and it demands that you speak your name and enter. After a short but entertaining period where Drokkal managed to feed half the party into the hut to be told they were intruders and were promptly weaknessed into oblivion we decided to use the building owner’s name. This got me inside unfortunately upon going through the door I touched some spider webs and was paralysed. After much ado we managed to get everyone out and loot the building.

Once back at the slave quarters we are paid a visit by Sorcerer Bloodice, 8th sorcerer of House Valdurim. He says he recently forgot his first name, very careless for a Drow. He claims that our guide, Snowflake the golem, has been possessed by a Drow spy. We get Tristan the Green Wizard to investigate her and he finds nothing. She has no power in effect on her so we decline his offer to “remove the possession”.

The 1st High Priest of House Valdurim arrives and enlists the help of a couple of party members to perform a ritual to cleanse himself of chaos taint but he dies after completing the ritual. We ascertain that he has spirit strength left so can be resurrected so we look after his body, not wanting to get into any more trouble than we are.

We discover that Braken is the ambassador for Mind Flayer and that the slave’s food is poisoned to stop them running away.

Second day


Thinkbek Swiftkill, 10th Warrior of House Agrathan arrives to pay us for delivering the messages. We conclude our business then set about collecting the reward from Khandis for killing him. We travel to the site where we need to carry out the snake summoning ritual and defeat the forest creatures there. We complete the ritual and summon the snake creature and its minions. After a tough fight we defeat them although Tarquinn was poisoned to death by the snake creature. We take an alternate route back to the slave quarters and on the way we run into a Melnibonean controlling the lost patrol of Drow. We defeat them and complete two tasks for the price of one. Back at the slave quarters we are attacked by chaos creatures then approached by a group of House Valdurim Duergar. There is an extended period of abuse and insults being traded between them and our Duergar which ultimately leads to a fight between the two groups with most of the rest of us staying right out of the inter-clan dispute and talked to the 1st High Priest who had returned. He tells us that the cards we had retrieved from Moonray Fairrune’s lab must go back to where they were found as they are attracting creatures of chaos to them and they have tainted the people who have touched them. (John, Nyx and Kylar)

Stefan, Maximus’ lieutenant, arrives and only pays us 5 Gests, short changing us by 5.

Nyx, John and Kylar disappear so we hasten out to look for them and find them accompanied by a group of chaos creatures being led by another creature in a jester outfit. He inflicts a number of strange maledictions on various party members (most humorously changing Kylar into a cat and Nyx into a dog which resulted in her chasing him up a tree) although I’m not sure many people noticed Ivak speaking like a pig. We defeated the jester’s minions whereupon he summoned more and we fought them again then defeated the jester himself.

Back at the slave pens a discussion ensues and it is concluded that Clan Greyspire’s new motto is Brieus Nil Lubricadum as apparently Brie cheese is not to be used as a lubricant. This conversation also saw the dawn of a new era in that the game of “Shlop” was invented. In the interest of decency I won’t go into the details of this game apart from to say that it involves fruit, bodily orifices and also has “travel” and “table” variants.

Once it is dark we head to the location of the shades and, due to our very limited resources of magic, Doshan is given the magical sword and has to kill all the shades himself while the rest of the party protect themselves as best they can. The various family heads who had given us tasks turned up to hand over the promised chalices. Cleave Doomfist comes to tell us that the Patriarch has been poisoned and that we may torture and/or kill up to three slaves in order to find out “the truth”. Later that evening we travel to the nearby graveyard and fight our way through numerous undead while collecting the vile trophies for Chebel Graveclaw. After returning with our grisly cargo some slaves are brought back to the quarters after their toil and despite my objections the Duergar get a confession out of one of them who seems to have dealings with a dark clad stranger. He tells us where he has agreed to meet with the individual again so we set off into the fog to try to locate him. Much random wandering later we come across the individual who turns out to be the 26th Assassin of House Drannath. He tells us that it was the slaves who collected and refined the poison themselves to carry out the poisoning. Hmm. Resourceful these slaves…

Third day


We collect up our gear and set off on a patrol of the perimeter area to kill off any annoyances to the Patriarch’s progress which involved killing a number of groups of Drow. Then back to OR and a sizeable pay packet thanks to our wheeling and dealing.
Last Updated on Thursday, 21 January 2010 17:52
 
© Copyright 2009-2021, All Rights Reserved