Our epic fourth session, 31 July 2011:
Tony: Rast the Amazing Spellcaster
Eric: Foliage the Warped
Hector: Gurgrock the Assassin
Hiro: Balto the Warrior-Scholar
Michie: Seppo the Thief
Sam: Aldan the Righteous
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City of Madness
The session began a week after the characters killed the Magister Hienimi. During this time, the atmosphere in Poori had devolved into a combination of madness and fear, as reports and rumors flowed daily of ghosts, crazed animals, townsfolk driven insane, apparitions, and disappearances. Of course this desperation gave the PCs a chance to lay low, as their role in the murder of an ostensibly respectable citizen would not be welcomed by most.
Indeed, while resting at the Old Oak Inn after reclaiming their welcome there, screams from the street outside led to their investigating a giant blue ghost terrorizing the people. An ox had been driven mad and broke loose, charging the PCs and leading them to both roast it with magical fire and chop it up with swords.
Aldan, forbidden from contact with both meat and female flesh, found himself with a damsel in his arms (resulting in a mandatory ritual hand-washing). In the process of the struggle with the mad ox, though, the ghostly spirit flew right into the mouth of poor Balto, possessing him, leaving his skin with a blue pallor and flickering blue flames in his eyes, but otherwise apparently normal and no worse for the wear.
The Magister's House, Revisited
The PCs pretty much determined that the death of Hienimi was connected to this, so they trapsed back to his now-vacant house, which they'd left in a hurry after the fateful encounter and the noble sacrifice of their beloved companion Samaras the Unlucky in the humble greatroom fireplace.
After charming the lone Baron's guard to allow them entrance, they poked around the house, finding a library with books on spirit conjuring and binding magics, various arcane devices, and a half-fist-sized deep blue Crystal. The last of these radiated strong magic and inspired covetousness of all who witnessed it: Upon grasping it, Rast felt his chest suck in and heart stop, then start again. Truly this was a thing of great power at the cost of one's physical strength. In turn, Foliage tried it and feigned his own death to release it; Gurgrock snatched it in an argument as Aldan threatened to destroy it and its concomitant evil (instead he settled for wrecking the library), but in the end it landed back in Rast's possession, with clear side effects but unclear powers.
During the house call, Aldan discovered in the kitchen Gorbo, a rail-thin teenage apprentice of Hienimi, hiding when he heard their approach. He confirmed that the Magister had used his very life essence to bind the spirits he had conjured and controlled over the decades. But the binding power of the Magister's soul now gone, the evil of these otherworldly apparitions was roam free and wreak havoc in Poori.
Foliage discovered a trap door to a tiny basement room, where Gurgrock was completely sure not to disturb a chalk magic circle on the floor and the Wizard summoned an unseen servant to fetch the mystical Book of Control without leaving a trace.
Flames in the Distance
At this time the charmed guard called out to the PCs as a mob of angry townsfolk was marching on the house to track down the PCs, now suspect of having a hand in the recent unfortunate events. Rast, with a glamour and a booming voice, turned them back to town, where they marched with pitchforks and torches and turned their fury on themselves, perhaps aided a little bit by demonic intervention.
Despite the wind and light rain, in the distance from the hill every few minutes the heroes witnessed a thatched-roof house go up in flames. Although the town's guards had been dispatched to fetch help and calm the mob, all hell was breaking loose in town.
Thinking quickly, local boys and childhood friends Gurgrock and Seppo, Balto in tow, rushed to town to save the mother of unfortunate Nikko (whose son was melted by Rast when he tried to heist the Pelt from the Spellcaster's curse-greedy hands, but they'll never tell her, or Seppo for that matter). In the chaos, they repelled a handful of crazed fire-wielding townsfolk and rescued their foster mother, although her hovel would go up in smoke.
While the others were rescuing innocents, the remaining Foliage, Rast, Aldan, and the weakling Gorbo (now deputized as Rast's apprentice) cast what was the the first half of the Spell of Control. They were fairly sure not to have broken the chalk circle or mispronounced any of the spell's arcane phrases. Indeed, a miniature image of the countless conjured wicked specters emerged in the circle's boundaries, hopefully in anticipation of the Spell's completion.
Assault on Evil Island
Gorbo said that the second half of the spell would need to be cast from the magical power point on the just-offshore Evil Island, once a lookout post in the bay but now an abandoned stone and wood tower.
Now midnight, with the town fires no longer raging and exhaustion slowing the spread of the riot and madness, the six heroes commandeered a rowboat meant for five; Foliage taking fox form ensured only the higher swells from the bay lapped over the sides.
Most of the way to the Island they were nearly boarded by two aquatic lizard-man beasts (who were discovered to have taken over the abandoned fort) from below the waves. The assaulting beasts nearly foundered the vessel; the heroes, were it not for good teamwork, sea legs, creative uses of oars, and a couple well-placed crossbow bolts and magic arrows, to witness some of their number dragged into the water, just deeper than a man's head. Indeed, Rast's phantasmal impersonation of his impression of their primitive reptilian deity cowed the opposition and gave the PCs the chance to land the boat and counterattack on land.
The battle continued from the tiny shore to the damaged watchtower, stone on the first story and wood on the second. They scrambled and struggled their way up, at last climbing a ladder onto the precarious wooden platform and nexus of magic energy. As the ghosts and spirits began to congregate and spiral around the site, the heroes were attacked by flying hawk-women of a more corporeal form, in a mad melee leaving Aldan falling twice from the perch, Foliage battling in the skies as an outmatched druid-hawk, and Gurgrock and Seppo struggling in close quarters with oversized lizard-men at the base of the tower, ground gained through expert crossbow shots and a poisoned dagger in the vitals.
The Spell Completed
Balto, now actively possessed by the ghost that entered his body at the beginning, suddenly turned on Rast as he prepared to cast the Latter Spell of Control, and nearly stopped the wizard's heart with an expertly timed Death Fist. As he was being pitched off the wooden platform, Rast let loose a gout of flame from his fingers, scorching his friend-turned-mad to nearly the end of his thread of life.
Rast recovered his ground, and was able to cast the Spell, despite near-distractions from flying claws and dismembered hawk-woman drumsticks (from Aldan's perfectly-timed swing of the bloodthirsty Back Talker) which would have ruined the spell and made for an eventful evening, as the gathered evil spirits knew who to focus their vengeance on.
But in the end, the spell was complete, at which point the soaring spirits (plus the one inhabiting Balto's body), furious but drawn to the charcoal circle on the wooden platform, were bound into its midst and flushed, as it were, into the circle and abjured to the world beyond.
This would be a long row home; few were left unbruised, between lizard-maw bites, hawk-gashes, near drownings, broken ankles and other falls, and ally-inflicted third-degree burns; the town will take a while to recover but it is hoped that the party's heroics would not go unnoticed. The matter of the cursed deep-blue Crystal is yet to be resolved completely -- perhaps it is from its life-force-drawing effects that Rast was able to finish the Spell of Control at all.
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