Procrastinators Unite!

Well, I intended to make this post on Tuesday and then I just didn't. But now that the snow has piled up outside to over a foot of snow (it's very hard to judge it properly as the wind is strong and the snow is drifting) I have nothing better to do until I go home tomorrow.
Oh, right. Right now I'm house/pet -sitting for my Uncle and Aunt who are down in Virginia for a birthday party. They only have three animals right now: a very needy and hairy cat named Sneezed who does NOT SHUT UP EVER and two purebred rottweilers name Hocus and Pocus. The dogs are almost entirely outdoor dogs, and are not allowed to roam the house. In all fairness, they are so large that they might accidentally rip up the carpet with some gentle playing, but I feel terrible letting them out into this weather. They probably love it though, and those dogs are huge muscular beasts.
Oh, and a side note here. I just spent half an hour thigh-deep in snow that I was NOT prepared to leap through because my uncle forgot to mention that his dogs escape (despite the invisible fence that shocks them when they get too close) and run down the street to play with the neighbors.
How nice.

But! Onward, to TAWD stories.

Taelir was up early that next morning, kicking in doors and waking everyone up. It was about six in the morning, and Morrigan had been up most of the night studying every book she could find on item enchantment. In the end, she was only able to learn how to fortify things, but that extra strength could be the difference between a shattered shield and one more blocked attack. As everyone trudged downstairs to get whatever breakfast might be had at the Green Tree. We asked a special favor of Daven, the owner, who agreed to help us lead our rag-tag army in return for our help in leaving the town without difficulties. The general strategizing began then, interrupted only a few minutes in by a winded messenger reporting that about 50 Troglodytes were marching on the city, and they would make the walls in an hour. Our talking became fast, and our warlord Kailen demonstrated his leadership abilities well here, and quickly organized everyone into doing what they do best.
Morrigan gathered all of the possible healers she could (four field medics) and set them up at the inn, where she had a few people lining up beds and tearing old sheets into strips for bandages. She also helped herd the women and children into the Captain of the Guard's quarters, where she took a few of the oldest, strongest boys to be stretcher bearers for her.
Eris, being very dexterous and good at ranged attacks, led a small team of archers up to the top of the barrier wall, preparing to meet the force head-on as they passed her to reach the entrance, deterred by Xable's clever illusion. He didn't manage to trick them all away from the wall, though, and a few set to work breaking through the strong wood.
Sel'zanath met this force head-on as they broke through, with Daven and about 50 men to back him up. Eris and her archers managed to take out about 10 of the 30 Troglodytes that passed by her, though she lost just as many archers.
Up at the Western gate, where Kailen and the Captain were waiting with Matthias and the rest of the troops, things were going okay. There was a large cauldron of boiling oil waiting for them to get close enough, and even though the two archers responsible for setting them on fire managed to catch themselves on fire, they also managed to fall to their deaths onto the troglodytes, thereby igniting the oil. So, even though they lost their lives, they still did their job.
Morrigan managed to save most of the archers that were injured; they will lead mostly productive lives, though it is likely that none of them will really ever be able to wield a weapon well again.
Taelir was watching from the background, as he so often does, when down from the southern wall we hear a gigantic crash. Women and children come fleeing from the now-damaged captain's quarters, screaming and terrified. Morrigan managed to direct them to the Inn, which was the next safest place, and our party turned to watch as something that we had hoped we'd left behind at the Pillar faced us down angrily.
The Stairs.
A Behemoth that took the malleable shape of Escher-esque stairs had made its home inside the Northern Pillar of Order. Presumably, it had done this to trick prey into dying within it's maze, but with a bit of luck, we had made it out alive without even knowing that it was a monster we were walking on. After our talk with Theo, as we were fleeing the Pillar, the stairs came alive behind us and began a chase. We ducked through the exit portal and ran for our lives. We never heard anything from that monster again, yet here it was, weeks later, staring us down and ready to fight. With another 20 Troglodytes left at the Northern wall and the Western gate, this was the last thing we needed.
We are divided, flanked, and in trouble.

And that was where we cut off for the night. This week's session might not happen, since the parking lot of Bob's apartment doesn't get plowed and with almost two feet of snow, there are very few people who have a tall enough car to make it through. We'll see, though.

"Give me the strength to carry on
With all our love, we can't go wrong
Only together we face the fight
Nothing can stand against our might

With all our strength the battle's won
With all our love, we can't go wrong
We have the strength to carry on"
~"Carry On" from the American Sailor Moon
It's mostly suiting for the fight... just replace "love" with "sarcasm" or maybe "snarkiness". Possibly even "hesitant trust".

The Story Up Until Now...

This week there are going to be two posts about D&D. One today, that will catch you up onto what shenanigans we've been up to until now, and then one tomorrow that will detail tonight's session.

The journey started with Taelir and Morrigan, meeting by chance on the road in Bastion. Morrigan, who had just left home, explained to Taelir that she has left the orphanage to travel the plate and learn as much as she could while spreading the word of Frejya and doing the work of Kivati. Taelir tells her that if she travels with him, he plans on visiting all the continents on the plate. Morrigan agrees, and they move on. After a small adventure with some Dwarves, The headed West. After an undisclosed amount of time and difficulty, then end up on the south-eastern coast of Wulfheim, in a port town name Othello. As they depart their ship, the figurative opening sequence rolls and there is a montage of all the players. Selzanath, paddling his little dinghy in to dock with his hands; Matthias, waking up with the most wicked hangover in the bilge of a ship; Eris, slipping down the gangplank with a roguish grin on her face; Khonshu (a genassi swordmage), departing in a standoffish way; Relic (a warforged[read:organic-matter robot] warlock), activating in a crate in the same bilge as Matthias.
There's a short fight with the head of the dock, after which Taelir invites everyone to join his group and work for him. With nothing better to do and a few ulterior motives in evidence, everyone agrees.
They travel north through Wulfheim, fighting, camping, and encountering all sorts of situations. Relic left our party after a little while, deactivating himself as we slept. We defeated a centuries old elf... kind of. He's not really dead, but considering he was about three times our level, I think we did pretty well. Our northward quest took us to the town Sikelkaust, where Nibelung was stirring up trouble in the ports trying to intimidate people in that "Either you're with us or against us" kind of way. We picked up a Githyanki Psion here named Xable Juxtapose, who seems to have a frequency problem between the natural world and the other dimensions. He is constantly slipping in and out of them at random. After a bit of collaboration with the thieves' and the warriors' guilds, we created a diversion and managed to sneak on board the flagship if the Nibelung fleet, where we defeated and killed the captain. With the town relieved of the annoying Nibelung soldiers, some of us (Matthias) partied all night and then we were off in the morning. The ship we were on, the Woglinde sailed out East towards the norther coasts of the Nibelung peninsula. Unfortunately, a little while into our trip we sailed straight into the TAWD equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle and were assaulted by James the Bitchin' Giant Squid. Yes, that is really his name.
He sank our battleship and we woke up pretty much right on the northernmost tip of the peninsula, found by a barbarian from a mixed tribe living just off the coast. We spoke to the leader and she told us about the Sahuagin (big frog-people) who had taken over their temple and stolen the most holy Raiments of the Windfish. Well, says we, we can't let that happen. And off we go after a day of recovery to get rid of the problem.
The Sahuagin take minimal effort, but when we reach the basement and find one doing some terrible evil ritual that makes Morrigan physically ill with the dark energy radiating from it (a sure sign of the Spellplague), we take the fight up a notch, but don't make it in time to stop one from sacrificing itself to the evil swirling vortex of doom. We run for it when the dungeon starts to crumble.
And outside, much to our various horrors and jubilations, we run into a dragon. One of the most evil kind, too. It kicks our butts without much effort, but with some luck and a +10 fire resistance to Patrick, we manage to kill it. The raiments and the much-trashed temple are returned to their rightful owners, we set off to the northern pillar.
There, we find ourselves inside a world of pure, bright white. Surrounded by fantastical ballon-turtle hybrid creatures called Dirigiloons, we make our way upward and encounter what the locals call the Main Stage, an island floating in the middle of the pillar. The inhabitants are all Dragonborn, slightly crazy, who follow a man named Theo, who is a mithril dragon. We go up a few levels to meet him.
Theo challenges us to a fight to see if we are worth of gaining his knowledge. He kicks our butts, but we manage to get a few good hits in on him as well. In the end he wiped the floor with us, but agreed that we could ask him questions. It is from him that we learn that Taelir is searching for people called "Bookmarkers", who know pieces of the location of the "Bookman", keeper of the plate's one, true history. Why we are searching for this person Taelir won't say, but now we at least have some idea of what's going on.
On our way out, we are assaulted by some Escher-esque behemoth stairs and make a run for it.
And run some more.

From there, we head south and slightly west through Nibelung until we reach the town of Grentz near the border of Nibelung and Duskhelm where we have just encountered the troglodytes and roused the entire populace into doing our bidding. It took some skillful bluffing and a few well-placed diplomacy and religion checks, but now they believe that Eris is, in fact, one of the Popes of Nibelung. They follow us devotedly and now we are about to lead them into battle against the remaining troglodytes and the trolls that seem to be controlling them.

I will give you more about tonight's session tomorrow after I get home from work.

"Were you prepared at all for us to pull something like this? The Pope Incident will go down in TAWD history as one of our most ridiculous escapades ever."
"Are you kidding? I've been waiting for you guys to do something like this since we started!"
~Bob and I discussing our antics in Grentz

Monday Night Madness! (It Begins)

So I decided that, for my own fun and since a few people who read this have expressed a desire to sit in on our sessions (which is difficult to work out) I'm going to make weekly posts about our Monday Night D&D sessions. I think the basic layout of these posts are going to be a summary of last week, this week's story, and then my commentary on it. This may change. But it's going to be fun writing all our adventures out.
Before I do all that, though, I'd like to give you guys an idea of what our world is like in TAWD.

TAWD, the name of our campaign, stands for Turtles All the Way Down. If you have read any of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, you'll have a clue of what this means. The idea stems from the ------ belief that the world is just a disc sitting on the backs of four elephants, which are in turn sitting on the back of a giant turtle. This turtle, known in TAWD as the Patient One, is swimming silently through the luminescent aether to who knows where.
It would look something like this. The only difference between this illustration and TAWD, though, is that TAWD has three discs on a turtle.
The lowest plate, Hel, supports the base of the four Pillars or Order and also is the base of Mount Chroma, the source of all life on the plates. Resting midway up the Pillars and Mount Chroma is Midgard, the mortal plate. This is where all mortal beings begin their lives. Resting atop the Pillars and held in place by the spire of Mount Chroma is Valhalla, the god-plate. Legend says that if a mortal could climb Mount Chroma to the top, he would become a god. However, even the most obsessed mythologists dismiss this as purely superstition, as the mountain is such that no mortal could hope to reach the top.
But, since our campaign for right now focuses only on Midgard, let me talk about that a little bit more.
First off, a map for you. Yes, I drew it. Isn't it pretty? You can say no, I would agree. But it functions.

So. Starting in the Northwest quadrant of Midgard is the country known as Wulfheim. It is primarily neutral, and it is notably the most racially and religiously integrated country on the plate. Due to many political pressures in the past, most races end up fleeing to this country, which in turn causes tension amongst the many inhabitants and triggering the Race War between the many factions of Wulfheim. Many are afraid to repeat this generations-long war and stick firmly to their beliefs of equality and neutrality, making them the only true republic on the plate. Wulfheim is home to eight primary races: Human, Dwarf, Halfling, Elf, Dragonborn, Genasi, Drow, and Tiefling. The country's flourishing market trade with most other countries exposes it to a wide range of beliefs as well as a large influx of books and magical items, making it one of the better regions to study the arcane arts.

Over in the Northeast quadrant is the hardy nation of Bastion. To approach this country, one must be willing to deal with the high clif face that surrounds all but the Straight of Adonna. Bastion is very much a religious country, predominantly worshiping figures of justice and knowledge (Bahamut and Frejya in partcular) though they accept any religion that does not blaspheme against life. Many of the country's inhabitants are clerics, paladins, and invokers, and most take on either an arcane or a divine profession. The predominant races are Human and Dwarf, with a minority of Elves and Dragonborn. Bastion has virtually no Warlocks, and those that are there have simply not been discovered. This is due to a war between Bastion and the other nation that makes the other side of the Straight of Adonna: Edgewater.
Edgewater was a nation of almost nothing but Warlocks with a smattering of other arcane sorts. Legends claim of the dark rituals they were part of and their attemps to snuff out life on Midgard. Bastion defeated this group, however, and has guarded the ruins of their dark land ever since. Bastion is ruled by a lineage of monarchs who have ruled for generations since the original defeat of Edgewater, and their advisors are traditionally clerics of the House of Adonna, descendants of the first king's companion cleric.

Moving south from there is the jewel-shaped island nation of Tama. Primarily populated by humans, the only other apparent race common to the small country are the Genasi. This is partly due to the isolationist traditions of the inhabitants who feel that such intermingling with other countries will harm the teachings of their heritage. There are no gods worshiped in this nation. Rather, many dedicate themselves to inner harmony via meditation and physical training to master both their minds and bodies.

To the very Easternmost area of Midgard is a small landmass attached to the Easter Pillar known as Germaly. The inhabitants of Germaly defy common logic, their society and economy not backwards, but rather completely outside the realm of understanding. Many of their products result in death with use, and this is generally their intended purpose. Most lands avoid Germaly, though they seem to prosper fine regardless.

Moving into the Southwest of Midgard sits a patch of islands known for their fertile jungle, volcanoes, and laid back inhabitants. These islands are known quite simply as the Burning Isles and are home to a handful of humans, and a primary population of Halflings, Shifters, and a unique subset of Trolls, lankier in appearance, and very laid back. Many alchemical ingredients come from the fertile islands, as well as many intoxicants, both of which are popular exports. This combined with a thriving tourist trade keeps the Burning Islands in a state of prosperous neutrality.

The central continent wraps around Mount Chroma and is therefor central on the plate. A small mountainous region divides the western side of the mountain and a swampy river area divides the east, both places being used as the borders between the warring nations of Nibelung and Duskhelm. Nibelung, sitting on the Northeast sections of the central continent, is a land of pious fanatacism. They consider their war with Duskhelm a holy war, serving Bahamut and Ra in wiping evil from the face of Midgard. They have the largest and most powerful military on the Midplate, their forces kept at bay due to the monstrous creatures that roam Duskhelm's plains. Nibelung consists of Humans, Elves, Dwarves, and as a minority, Dragonborn.
The plains of Duskhelm sit on the southwestern side of the central continent, a shroud of darkness keeping the country in perpetual twilight. Here roam the Drow, Tieflings. Rakshasa, Orcs, and other creatures otherwise considered maligned. Contrary to what one would expect, Duskhelm has a unified form of government, with a monarch sitting at its top. This person is known as the Baron of Duskhelm, a terrifying entity given the nickname "The Lord of Nightmares", as this position is decided through strength. He who kills the current Baron becomes the Baron himself. This country was the first to feel the effects of the Spellplague as it spilled forth from Fafnir to the Southwest, thus its unusual nature. Some say there are many weak walls leading to other realms such as the Shadowfell in Duskhelm, so one must be wary and tread carefully.

To the South of Duskhelm is a stretch of land known as Serpent's Back, a mountainous and hilly region, nearly untouched by the spellplague despite its close proximity to the aberration known as Fafnir. This is because this is the holy land of the Dragonborn, protected by their patron deity Bahamut. Here is where many first generation Dragonborn are conceived, though it is a region not even they consider a country or homeland. This place is simply the staging area for those brave enough to take on the horrors of Fafnir.

Fafnir itself is a grand desert with many craggy outcroppings and countless underground tunnels. It is surrounded by the Sea of Tears, and both are home to terrible aberrations, many of which would scare off even the most devout of Nibelung's pious military. There is little to be said of the place because of this. It is known only that Fafnir is not native to Midgard and came many years ago in a great catastrophe.

Directly east of Nibelung and Duskhelm is the Silent March, a long stretch of land that is so called because of the tendency for Fafnir's creatures to flood its shores. However, if one braves the dangers across this land, they will find themselves in Afirca, an entirely unique nation that is wrapped around part of the Western Pillar. Afirca's people, entirely native Humans, do not need to eat to live. Instead, they seem to subsist by absorbing nutrients out of the air. They are deeply inbred, and this has caused a line of degenerative genetic diseases that keep most Afircans from reaching their older years. Despite their difficult lives in the tropical jungles, the average lifespan of an Afircan is 85 years.

Well, is your brain melted yet? It wouldn't surprise me. And before you ask, this is NOT the world that Wizards of the Coast devised for Dungeons & Dragons. Granted, they tell you often that a DM has free reign over their world, I am sure that they didn't quite intend for us to go this far. But it was ridiculously fun to create this complex world and all the history behind it. Bob and I spent perhaps three months mapping our plates and timelines. What do you think? Currently, our party is riling up a town in Nibelung near the western border of Duskhelm, not too far from the entrance to the Silent March.

I'll update more next week!