Session 49: Entering the Mournlands Report

General Summary

The group travelled peacefully to Vathirond and the Mournland, with little to talk about and deep focus on the way ahead. When the wailing clouds were in sight, they all entered and began to be on their guards, with multiple ritual and magewright casts of safekeeping spells, from detect spells, false life and other safeguards. Then, to ensure they wouldn't perish in the strange, cold smoke, they made a chain of rope, with multiple ropes spanning about 200ft with a loose picket at the end. But once crossed to the other side, having passed minutes of thick, bliding and uneasy feeling fog, the group arrived to the other side, to find a greyscale aride landscape which at first glance, is dead. Dried bushes and trees pepper the caked dirt landscape, but after a closer inspection, life is found. Underground, centipede are spotted coming in and out, and Astara's detect poison picks up poisonous critters under the ground.   Trajan, pulled by the onsloaught of mind call and dreams overlapping reality was pressing forward, blinded to anything around him (all those perception nat 1...). Tied together, the group could only follow and ended up landing in a pack of abyssal chicken, with creatures from him being odd and twisted. With poor rolls all around, and these critters being resistant to both Trajan's fire breath and Senra's burning hands, the chickens survived to attack another round. Only, they had company in the form of a whistler, the creature the group had seen deep in the Vathirond lab a few sessions ago. Able to get a good view of it, Nina was able to pull from her experience on Argonth, patroling the Mournlands to inform everyone about what the creature can do, turn into people like a more cruel doppleganger, shedding some light on the events of the lab's end.   After some struggles and lots of bad roll, the fight turned around and the group came out victorious. With shield of faith and shield, the chickens were MOSTLY harmless, and silence plus blindness rendered the whistler mostly harmless as well. Still, the encountered did deplete spell slots from the group.   GAME BREAK   The adrenaline still high, and the memory now melding with an actual voice carrying in the wind calling Trajan, there was no stopping (only slowing and pacing) the dragonborn, who ended up rushing to the dragonborn silhouette pacing the fog of the Mournlands. There, they found a ragged brass dragonborn butler by the name Mr. Dortan (Gornuhl), looking for the toddler version of Trajan, seeming unable to remember than much time at all passed since the creation of the Mournland. Talking to him noted that his memory had some reset event, so they walked him away from his pacing space, using the fact that Trajan apparently looks like his dad, and was able to trick Mr. Bortan, who became worried that more time had passed, as this meant Trajan's sister (news!) was home alone too long. The sister, named "Jin", was an older sibblings, and hearing of her existance and her name brought back repressed memories back, of sibbling fights and happy family moments in a grand noble home in Argonessen, where Trajan is from.   Astara then spots a black cloaked creature with a white face in the distance, in the fog and hushers the group to go back towards the wall of wails, indicating the exit out of the Mournlands. Only, another memory triggers in Trajan and looking about... they find the Pompei-style petrified remains of Trajan's parents, standing there as they did in his dream, the last of the fragment at their feet. Emotions run high as everyone tries to contribute either with sympathies, or by keeping the Butler on the road. But another spots something in the distance, with recognition setting in. Just a few hundred feet further West, are the petrified remains of Eavaan's parents, on the other road off the fork, either heading or coming from opposite directions, but converging somewhere. Their parents were crouched low, forming a human shield around what all assumed was Eavaan, who, as damage shows, had to break through the corpses of their parents to escape when they were very little. This proximity, as most agree, connects Eavaan and Trajan even before Stokedown, in some way or another, tied by fate....   END GAME

Character(s) interacted with

Gornuhl Dortan (Mr.)