Story of my life

Victory was so short lived! We did it, we actually defeated an aspect of a god. We did the impossible! I can't even believe that we survived! Two seconds after this hits me, the aspect hit me. Hard. Acid and vile evil exploded from its corpse, obliterating me. I can only think that in its last moments, it cast some sort of retributive spell, knowing that if it would die, it would take us down with it. I don't think my colleagues suffered the same fate, but I'm not certain.

Being a fey was amazing, better than my wildest dreams, being able to flit around the clouds. I wonder if this connection was always there or if my pact with witchthorn put something deeper inside me than I ever knew.

I'm having visions of fey, swirling around me and surrounding me.. hundreds of them in all directions and colors.

Perhaps this is the way I can show my house - our way out of our short lives. The old legends say that the elves and fey were cousins, and we know that the fey are immortal -- maybe in reconnecting with them instead of turning to necromancy.

Or, they can just be the sight of my revenge, building an army to destroy those who destroyed my family.

Dance with the devil in the pale moonlight

Maybe I should have told them a bit more about my powers, but then again, they didn't help me anyways. Those fuckers just left me unconscious in the middle of the glade. Durthy has chopped plenty of people in two and they happily stuff them in a bag of holding and question the corpse, but when I try to rush in, it's time to hold back and try to turn me into a newt. No thanks.

It all started 10 years ago. I was 20, an adult elf, but still young enough to feel invincible. And I was weak. Have you ever seen an old weak elf? Nope -- the weak ones are on the front lines, cannon fodder in conflicts. They don't make it to 30. Honestly, at that age, I didn't quite think I would either. I was stuck in the army as a pawn, and that just doesn't suit me one bit. As a powerful warlock I moved up quickly, gained power and comfort. I was able to start a family and have a real life. The bargain I had made was in the back of my head after a year - I got on with my life.

Warlock powers don't just spontaneously appear, they're granted. A deal with the devil, you might say. Or a verdant prince in my case. I got these magical powers and a special connection to the power of the fey. In return, I owed him an unspeakable amount of money and unspeakably evil relics. I had planned to kill him with my unit before I ran off. I didn't even realize how quickly it was coming up when I met these adventurers. They had to have known something was up with my powers though, they're so obviously unnatural.

It wasn't until we were in the city, after dealing with the cult of basc that I even thought to check a calendar. I figured I'd just come up with a dream one night, say I saw this guy doing evil things, maybe pretend he's linked into the Medusan Lords somehow. I've saved their butts enough they'd owe me this once. Besides, they usually seem gungho about rushing into kill evil things, ask questions of the corpse later. And with durthy's axe habit... But no, this one time they had to exercise caution. Obegard tried to stop me, ineffectively, but he did prevent me from blasting the shit out of Witchthorn. Until Witchthorn blasted the shit out of me and then entangled me in that damned plant monster.

Oh, and we happened to get into a huge fight with another evil alchemist, met the woman who kissed Obegard, found out she took his pendant to get us to kill said evil alchemist, traveled to some weird interdimensional library of people who know everything about our lands, found out there's some other land beyond our lands and you can travel to them somehow, and a few other minor issues. Nothing of importance really

Tongue tied

I'm really off my game today. All I needed to do was a simple bluff and then I fuck it all up by instead blabbing about the coin. What is wrong with me?

The day at least started well enough. Malakar couldn't talk to the dead aranaea. Maybe if someone hadn't cut her in two....

We went to the magical tower to try and figure out what was up with her. We found out she was the adopted daughter of the headmaster (oops!) but nobody seemed to suspect her. She was very studious and excelled at magic. It seems like it's likely that she was always an aranaea just wearing the form of a human and disguising it very well.

Then I went to the Basc trading company posign as an elven trader. I was told that Annie Basc would be with me soon. I really hoped that it was just a coincidence - what kind of crazy cultist would give themselves a nom de guerre that's a shortened name of their illegal evil cult? Obviously one that could flip around even my tongue. Well later on (after we had moved from the first hotel to a second one), I met her at a third hotel and convinced her (well not too well) that I wanted to trade in magic potions and other illicit substances. As she walked by the common room, Malakar sensed that she was a cultist of Bascaron (I wonder what other surprises he holds). So much for her subterfuge.

I went to meet her with Obegard as my manservant (I love that phrase, by the way). But she immediately figured out that I was not being completely honest. I really should have brought along a bodyguard as well. With scythes aimed for me, I was afraid that I would not be able to survive long enough to dimension door out of there. I lost my nerve for a second and suddenly somehow started blabbing about the coin. She didn't even know abotu the coin. At least I kept my wits with me enough to tell her that it was with the rest of my party (who was waiting around the corner). Thank goodness they were prepared and sprung a nice ambush. There was enough distraction for me and obegard to jump away safely. Malekar then cast wall of blades to trap them all in. We managed to capture alive two of the low level guards and I managed to literally scare the shit out of them. Dearthy of course split Annie Basc in two (again!) before we could talk to her. Doesn't he realize that talking with the living is much, much easier than talking with teh dead? I have to sneak in and dull his axe sometime.

Anyways we wound up making it down to the main temple (trap door underneath a crate,how typical) and are stuck in a battle with a creepy tentacle-face monster. Shouldn't be too hard to kill him, just long.... and hopefully durthy doesn't axe him like all the others

Interesting, yet pointless

This time there didn't seem to be as much rushing ahead, though I still question Durthen's intelligence. He may be of more use to us if his tongue was removed. I guess some of the more evil of my kin had some excellent ideas. It's time to get out of this city as quick as possible though, I have a feeling we have attracted far too much attention.

Obegard could once again sense his pendant and I was definitely in the mood to figure out what was going on. Who was that mysterious girl? I did like her style, distracting Obegard so he would lose his wits. And leaving an incredibly rare (and horribly difficult to track) coin has got to be the most interesting calling card I have seen. Rather subtle - like she wants to be found, yet she wants us to search around for a week or two... Is it a trap, these folks do have many enemies. It is always easier to kill a group without attracting attention if you draw them away, rather than some large explosions in a guard-rich city.

Surprisingly enough, a woman from Obegard's school came out of Durthen's room. Either they teach their students to fall for the first thing that crosses their path (like Obegard) or Durthen shelled out for a strong potion of charming (I hope for the sake of hundreds of wizards and sorcerors, it's the latter).

So, we go and intimidate the thief that has Obie's pendant - he truly seems to be clueless--- either a skilled liar or an idiot. He's also rather slippery - he even managed to crawl over a 20 foot iron wall (I really hope that it's not too noticable....) without much of a problem. We grabbed some of his stuff as collateral, unfortunately returning the best thing he had -- we needed something to keep him in line. I decided to try and disguise myself as him to deliver the forged documents for a bunch of crates heading out in the morning -- the captain appeared to be pretty strong and intelligent and I didn't want to risk interrogating him. I tried some of the ground crew - rumors usually get around to the grunts rather quickly, even offering some gold for good information but they didn't have anything. We decided to send borrow into look inside the crates - as a cloud of fog. He slipped in, identified a crate that appeared different than the others, but unfortunately, you can't tell one liquid from another too well by sight alone. We decided to send Obegard in to grab the crate.

Unfortunately, the main cargo entrance was protected by a spell I hadn't encountered before, detecting Obie's entrance and setting off an alarm - he grabbed the crate and we rushed out, unfortunately I'm certain that we left tracks. While the others were upstairs, preparing for sleep, I hung around outside around the inn (I had almost forgotten how long humans spend sleeping!). Thank goodness our telepathic bond was still going off, because I saw the captain and a band of thugs heading towards the group in the inn. This would definitely attract attention. In luck, a band of guards was just heading down. I lied and told them the thugs had some weapons. Pretty believable. It scared most of them away.

Then Durthen and Malakar became the spokespeople for our group with the captain. Bad bad idea. Durthen would not shut up. Malakar kept relaying the conversation to me, while I was hanging around downstairs, just in case anything happened. Obegard was detecting thoughts, so it was interesting, turns out he was smuggling magic potions and poison, but Durthen's diplomatic skills left much to be desired and we didn't get too much useful, or a chance to even mark the crate. It was priceless to see the mental picture of an angry minotaur as he is handed back a miniature crate, one that could fit into the palm of your hand.

Well, we still haven't figured out why that aranea tried to kill us, what the coin is for, or much else. And we are still no closer to ridding my people of the scourge of necromancy....

I think I am starting to empathize with Borrow, this band tends to rush into action too much when they should be holding back and trying to use subterfuge more often. It was pretty effective this time, even though we didn't get as much loot as we could have otherwise.

Interesting Group

These humans and dwarf don't seem to be quite as powerful as the rumors indicated, if they are telling the truth. They also have gotten themselves into the middle of quite a lot. Lycanthropic cultists, elven factions, and a mysterious woman who is a "medusan" whatever that is.

The wizard Obegard seems quite easily smitten with these women, he even let himself become so distracted that his symbol of his tower of magic was swiped - he seems to belong to some order that highly values their symbols - perhaps similar to an order of clerics.

I have to wonder if all men of the free kingdoms are so flighty. Obegard falls in love with any powerful woman he meets and Durthen seems to fall in lust with anything with two legs. He has a bit more muscle than brain(or face!), as evidenced by when he cut an attacker of ours in two instead of trying to injure her enough to disable her. Ever heard of subtlety ?

They weren't kidding when they said that they always seem to get attacked - there was a big bar fight, and instead of trying to talk the drunken brawlers down, instead durthy goes for a big fight. I of course got out of there - I can't imagine these lands are hospitable to elves.

Off we go to some more adventure, hopefully figure out what is going on with this group, maybe even figure out how to get them to help my cause