The Tomb of the Fallen, part 3
Session date: April 21, 2008
Kyle had some real-life issues that prevented him from attending the session. Since Falco was dead, this was a good time for him to be absent.
In the morning, the group gathered their belongings and planned their next step. Sparrow knew that he would need to return to Tal Sabronus to ask Lord Ataslar to loan him the Heart of the Fallen. However, Osiris knew, from her interactions with clerics in Tal Sabronus, that the high priests of Inudah were not powerful enough to bring Falco back from the dead. (Since he had been killed by wraiths, he would require at least a resurrect.) In her opinion, the only clerics of Tethiaa the Beautiful in Valuria or the clerics of the Sacred Son (King Harold’s deity) in Nemeril would have the power to resurrect Falco. Not a single person in the party was willing to step foot into Thirmondas, so their only choice was Valuria.
The party decided to ride their horses to Valuria, then wind walk to Tal Sabronus. Upon arriving in Tarnas, the capital, the party found that the region had the heaviest presence of royal soldiers they had ever seen. While the people weren’t actually being oppressed, the soldiers dressed in royal green were conspicuous, as if to remind everyone that Valuria is in fact held by Chorenn. Vryn’s usual reconnaissance work revealed that while the people did not like being part of Chorenn, they no longer had the spirit to fight back.
During the three days spent in Tarnas, Mahdi headed to the famed Valurian magic school, to make contacts and see what spells he could purchase. It only occurred to me a few days later that the academy was actually in Irilyth, and we retconned this a bit — he found some quick way to Irilyth and spent his days there while the party was in Tarnas.
Osiris immediately set about arranging the resurrection of Falco. She went to the temple of Tethiaa the Beautiful and spoke to the priests there, and found that the head priest could cast the necessary spell. She returned to the inn to retrieve the bag of holding which contained Falco’s body, and asked Sparrow if he wanted to accompany her. He did, and together, they obtained the necessary resurrection.
(A few days later, Asia told me that if Sparrow had not accompanied Osiris to the temple, he would have had Osiris go through the motions of getting Falco resurrected and then tell the party that it had failed. His character was so suspicious and distrustful of the partial truths that Falco had told the party that she wanted to prevent him from returning.)
The newly-awakened Falco was so disturbed by the experience of being killed and revived that he decided he wanted to stay in Valuria for a few days, to think alone in the forest. This was a decision by Kyle to explain his absence from the party while he took care of his real-life issues. He would rejoin the party by taking the horses to Dryreach, where the party would meet him there is X days (where X is whatever number of days that worked).
Mahdi, Osiris, Vryn, and Sparrow then headed to Tal Sabronus first using a wind walk. At this point, I felt that the game needed to be sped along, so I allowed Vryn, masquerading as his alternate persona, the mercenary Zyz, to gain an immediate audience with Lord Ataslar. (In previous visits, the party had to work its way through a bureacracy to gain audience, which delayed them nearly a week.)
Sparrow revealed to Lord Ataslar his secret, to which the older man replied that he had already guessed it, having recognized the boy he once met in the man he saw before him now (and having worked out clues that Sparrow had dropped during their original meeting). Sparrow explained his quest to gain his throne and how he was seeking the Sword of Kings to prove both his identity and claim, and requested the Heart of the Fallen from the statue in Ataslar’s manor. The lord showed great interest in the legendary artifact, and after Sparrow told him of the sword and its supposed fate, he told them he would have the ruby removed from the statue and would allow them to borrow it, as long as they brought the sword back to him so he would have a chance to see it.
They then conversed briefly about Sparrow’s plans, and Ataslar mentioned that he would support Sparrow as the true heir, though he could not promise that his own heirs would do the same. Vryn and Sparrow then took their leave.
Immediately after they left, Vryn rounded on Sparrow, berating him for revealing everything he knew about the Sword of Kings to the lord. When Sparrow showed surprise, he told Sparrow that he can’t trust everyone, that he has no idea if the lord will be immediately sending his own men to retrieve the sword before the party could. It was very obvious that Nathan had not considered at all that the lord might be deceiving him. (GM’s note: I find more and more that I am enjoying lying to the players. While in this case, the lord actually is honestly interested in the sword and is not malicious, in other cases, I can make up lies and the party, except for Robert, will fall for them completely. It’s definitely fun for me, but I also think that I have failed to truly create a world in which the players see enemies under every rock.)
After a day, during which Ataslar’s craftsmen removed the ruby from the statue, the party obtained it and wind walked back to the Tomb of the Fallen and the odd map in the back chamber. Vryn placed the ruby in the ebon staff, then stood the staff in one of the holes around the map, but nothing happened. Similarly, he got no response from the staff in any of the other holes. Upon inspecting the murals on the wall, they found that the noon sun in the painting of the armies clashing was directly behind the staff when placed in the hole on the east side of the map. Sparrow held a lantern up near the sun, and its light was focused by the ruby, creating a beam that pointed to a spot on the map in Chondheim. After checking out other positions of the staff and lantern, the party decided that this was the most likely candidate for the location of the sword, and Mahdi spent some time drawing a reproduction of the map and the indicator.
The party then decided to meet Falco in Dryreach and head down into Chondheim to find the sword.
A journey through a land of fantasy... 
Comments»
No comments yet — be the first.