Eberron

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Eberron Recap, Episode 2: Red Queen’s Race

(Note: this session was a huuuuuuuuuuuge infodump. It was fun, and informative, but it doesn’t make for a snappy read so I’m going to be brief.)

The previous session ended with the party beginning its descent to level 12, the bottom of Cyrran Shelter #3. There was, I forgot to add, a repeat encounter with some shadows. They did not pose a serious threat but during the fight we learned that Guard, who had been happily immune to any and all threats on his home level (that’s level 6, yo) was susceptible to stat damage just like the rest of us anywhere else. Good to know. We proceed the rest of the way without incident and come to level 12, where we face a classic fork in the path. Left or right? One way houses the Red Queen, Guard tells us, and the other is home to the Living Document… whatever the hell that means. We choose left.

Success! We enter a large room with a dias on the far end. On the dias stands a humanoid figure composed completely of gently swirling paper. Sadly, the Living Document’s predisposition is to treat visitors as hostile, and so it unleashes an enchantment that leaves several people befuddled, listless, and incoherent… okay, more than usual. The rest of the group manages to maintain its composure and talk to the thing, rather than pay it back in kind. They keep a fight from breaking out, but the Living Document demands that we show our marks. Our what now? A brief frisking of ourselves later, it turns out that all of us except the Kalashtari have small tattoo-looking marks somewhere on our bodies. These being displayed to the Living Document, it explains that it is prepared to answer any three questions that any markbearer asks it. As an added bonus, unlike the stereotypically adversarial stance of, say, a djinni in granting wishes, the Document is happy to explain when a question is pointless and/or unanswerable without it costing a question. So why even have limitations? “Because that’s the way it is.” Dammit.

Funnily enough, while three questions doesn’t sound like much, we actually know soooooo little about our situation that we don’t even use all of our questions in one sitting. Nevertheless, the picture does get clearer. In no particular order:

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29Jan2009 | John | Comments Off | Continued
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Eberron Recap, Episode 1: Pilot

I don’t remember if I actually said this before or not, but I’ve gone from not playing any D&D to being a player (non-DM, even) in two different games! <- exclamation point indicates excitement… On Saturdays, my old group has been ably taken over by another player, who has set us down in the Eberron campaign setting; as far as I can tell, one other person has minimal knowledge of the setting and the rest of us are n00bs. In order for our real-life ignorance to flow smoothly within the game, he has integrated a combination of memory loss and stanger-in-a-strange-land displacement right into the story. To wit:

We have a cold opening (no warm-up or background) of our characters waking up to find themselves drenched in goo, standing in the midst of giant, broken glass(ish) tubes. Each of us is dazed and disoriented, but we can spend little time asking questions because there’s a more immediate problem. In the center of the room, several goblins are dead or dying at the hands of a pack of shadow-y undead. Not just shadow-Y, shadow-shadows! Right into initiative we go, where we discover that whatever we may not remember, our inherent skills and abilities are still right at our fingertips. Wallace Worthington V, a sneaky little halfling, plays dead and riffles through the pockets of the goblins, but the shadows don’t buy it and he gets whapped for ability damage. Meanwhile, Mekashtari (a human-ish woman who later tells us she is from Kalashtar) channels divine energy to force the shadows to flee, Corn (my human swordsage/warblade who is sure that that isn’t his actual name) tries to stab them without much luck, and Lucius Deveraux Minster (”you can call me Buck¹“) draws his pistols and shoots one dead. Wait, what?

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28Jan2009 | John | Comments Off | Continued