2023/09/06: Continued Adventures in Space Part 2 Report

General Summary

Buzz, Lillith, Johann, Kal'vus, Union, Sith, Zaran   Sith was doing some divining and determined that this party was going after Necrosa and actually had a chance of doing something, so he decided to step in and help. Naturally, when he showed up in his "bad idea" plate armor, he found that the party seemed to have tried to replace him with the other big guy in black armor with an oversized weapon.   Union also suddenly appeared, very confused. He was not happy to find out he'd found his way to Spelljammer.   Rather than heading straight ahead as the black knight had indicated, Lillith convinced the party to try heading to the left, following the sound of a voice repeating the word "Bob". Before they could, though, they found themselves facing a divine ward across the passage. After some investigation, Lillith took the ward down and the party continued. After a winding passage there was a cavern with a chasm across it, with a couple of bridges crossing the chasm. Inside the cavern were a variety of large, colored tents, patterned in stripes or checkerboards. Different shapes of tents in various places in the room.   A 10' tall, muscular man was tending the meat in the closest vendor tent. "'Babs for Bobs!" He might be an ogre magi. He's selling huge kebabs, with sticks about 6' long, and selling them for 10 gold. An identify just identified it as "mystery meat". Zaran ate an entire skewer worth. It tasted similar to cow meat, though well-cooked (with is an oddity for a dragon). All of Zaran's spells had reset and he felt rested.   The ogre said this was the "villains' black market". It turns out they get around the supply issue by hiding in a pocket dimension when people aren't around. This ogre is running four shops at the moment.   The bridges are stone cobble. The chasm goes down 100-120 feet, with some smoky purple liquid something at the bottom. Very scenic. Somewhat glowy.   There are signs outside the various tents, written in some largely unfamiliar language. "Monsters & Mayhem", "The Magic Shop", "Minions R Us", "The Lieutenants' Guild", "Hag's Fortunes".   Sith, with some ability to recruit minions, went to visit Minions R Us. Buzz and Lillith stayed hovering near the ceiling at the entrance, where they noticed a number of skulls impaled on stalactites, some with little candles in their eyes.   Minions R Us were offering gangs of goblins, imps, intelligent skeletons, and two varieties of kobolds (one from 2nd Ed., one from 3rd). The proprietor is a villainous looking man with a moustache, a top hat, and a suit. Basically Snideley Whiplash with slightly better posture and grooming.   The shop usually doesn't deal in gold. The dark knight did have some store credit, though, so he was able to get Sith one of the new and improved 3rd Edition kobolds. The proprietor offered to gate the kobold to wherever it was desired. Sith had it sent to the ship with a note Kal'vus gave it saying it was not to be shot.   The party visited The Magic Shop next, mostly out of curiosity. There was an old woman sitting behind an empty table covered in purple cloth. At the back of the room were four glass cases, each containing a charm or an icon. Most had a serpentine theme to them. One looked like a snake curled up into an infinity sign. The proprietor has something approximating a heavy Russian accent. After some back and forth with Kal'vus: "I make art. These... are art. They are worth life itself." She accepts huge quantities of gold, souls, or vouchers.   Her pieces: The Retreat (which allows you to escape in a stylish fashion when you most need to), Fortune Itself (when you most need it, affecting probability and/or your skills), Life Itself (which takes you beyond death, and back to life), Extraction (like The Retreat, but a professional extraction and victory instead of a lucky escape). She says she's well known in the planes. Some select planes.   The party decided they'd had enough, so they returned to the entrance that Lillith had held open.   Buzz demanded that Sith get the kobold off his ship. Sith sighed and spent some transport castings to go and drop the kobold back at his tower. Or rather, as he discovered, one group of 18 kobolds.   As the party headed along on the path the black knight had originally pointed them to, the passage turned to brick, with a mix of brass tubes poking out of the walls. Inspection suggested they were for messages or ventilation, not traps. It was possible they could be used to pump poison gas in, but if it was happening, it was happening far enough behind the party that it presumably wouldn't do much.   The party started hearing voices, apparently being relayed through the pipes. Two young men complaining. Villainous complaining.   The party continued on, and the passage transitioned to metal. It ended in a walkway over a massive cathedral-like room, containing an enormous and complicated pipe organ. It appears the pipes in the walls are part of the organ.   In the room were two handsome young men in robes. One was dripping stars, while the other had a brown/gold robe and a knife and rod/cane. The cane has a large crystal in it. Part of some complicated arcane design.   Suddenly, Johann and Union noticed an unfamiliar person had joined the party, listening in on the men below as if she was always part of the group. An attractive female with white hair (or white jester's cap?) dressed in a yellow and white jester outfit.   Meanwhile, Kal'vus and Lillith were focused on inspecting the men below. Kal'vus calculated that these were remarkably dangerous fighters, despite their mage gear.   By the time Lillith noticed the mimed conversation happening behind her, Johann had handed a piece of paper to the jester and received one in return. The jester had quietly crumpled the first paper up, put it in her mouth, and then "pulled it out of her ear", despite her hat having no ear holes. This second paper had a hasty crayon drawing of the two men and the jester herself, with the men having the words "Bad Guys" and the jester having "Good Guy". The jester did her best to shush anyone who looked like they were going to make noise. Johann almost filed the note away in his pockets, but after a moment he thought better of it and passed the note to Sith with good humor.   Johann, after checking with the jester, cast sound bubble. The jester immediately and loudly exclaimed that "Now we can't hear them. Great."   Jester is Jay-Aliel. The black knight is Zeltheon. "Poor bastard" who got the black knight stuff placed on him by the guys down below. Jay-Aliel is also a god (of chaos), and part of her role is to mess with the guys down below.   Netheir and Xaversam. Respectively a god of madness and darkness, and earth and exploration (and greed). At least technically gods. Maybe godlings.   This mountain is the wreck of what would have been the home of an evil god, but now it's just a place Jay-Aliel and co. hang out and mess with each other.   Apparently the pipe organ is a relic of some kind. Mostly summons villains, but hasn't been very successful so far. Poor Zeltheon is one of the unfortunate products.   Lillith proposed getting down there and letting herself play the organ, using it to channel her song that "does bad things to bad people". That plus the intervention of two gods of chaos, a piece of an elder god, a former god of whatever Kal'vus was god of, and Buzz... yes, that might have the desired effect.   Netheir and Xaversam have something of a routine. They stand around and complain, maybe try a few chords, summon some monster that will wander the halls for the next thousand years, and then go home and come back the next day. Apparently they were the ones who made this artifact, but they don't have an artistic bone in their bodies.   Apparently Jay-Aliel and co. made a pantheon, made a planet, then the planet blew up, it's a long story. She has experience being screwed over by overpowers.   While the rest of the party was going through their pockets in search of weird magic items that might be useful for saving Zeltheon from his curse, Union ascended briefly and saw that the dimensions were sort of weird around here, with routes into lots of other planes. The pipe organ was in many dimensions at once, and possibly all dimensions and places at once, making it nigh-indestructible.   The two evil gods left, and the party prepared for the main event. Kal'vus readied to defend the group, Johann and Lillith wrote lyrics, Sith prepared all manner of probability management magic, and Buzz tried to stay out of the way.   Union, guided by his scroll, joined in on the playing as the ritual began, sometimes playing with Lillith, sometimes against her. Monstrous shades began to form around the party and ritual, and Kal'vus launched himself at them, dashing from target to target as fast as he could. A few rounds in, Union stopped playing, picked up the wizard juice Sith had added to the pile, and started pouring it over Zeltheon.   The shades were increasingly large and spiky as the song went on, but fortunately Kal'vus never let them form all the way.   Netheir showed up near the end of the ritual, standing just outside and looking shocked and confused. Union was off down a tunnel, sticking his hands into holes in what is presumably an attempt to make mythium. Kal'vus and Buzz engaged Netheir in combat, hoping to prevent him from interfering in the last few seconds of the ritual.   Buzz took hold of the ambient magic around him and channeled it into the biggest divinely boosted laser he could manage. Netheir, it turned out, did about the same thing at the same time. There was a colossal KABOOM. When the flash faded, there were spaghetti-like cracks coming out of the walls of the dungeon, there was a blast shadow on the wall behind Netheir, and Netheir's own attack had apparently been cancelled out. Netheir was still standing. It seemed Chaz-Achk-Thuum had had to use what he had on hand, and at the time he was being given a plate of homemade spaghetti by Sith's wife. He threw the plate at Netheir. The blast shadow is reminiscent of it.   Kal'vus followed this up by slashing the god a bunch of times and then grabbing him and planting his face into the ground. No spellcasting like that. Jay-Aliel ran in from a side passage, used a bunch of cartwheels to apparently increase her speed, and then went for the nut shot on the prone god. He had contingencies for her, though, apparently; he blinked out of the way, and she missed like Charlie Brown missing the football.   Zeltheon charged in as well. He only had one attack, but when that attack leaves a 12-foot-deep hole in the ground beneath his target, that doesn't much matter.   Buzz filled the hole above Netheir with the densest wall of stone he could manage. The walls came up just before Netheir's superpowered fireballs hit the underside. The walls liquified from the heat. Netheir found himself at the bottom of a hole now filled with magma. Kal'vus tossed a wind blade down into the hole and through sheer luck managed to find Netheir's throat. Netheir's retributive death explosion briefly tossed up a tower of magma that singed Kal'vus and drenched Zeltheon, but it managed little else.   After some attempts to get the magma off Zeltheon, the party found that under the top layer of forming stone, poor Zeltheon was covered in a layer of mythium. The party was able to chip some off with effort, though, and the evil armor came off with it. And fortunately, as long as he had the armor on, he could breathe, and by the time enough of the armor came off for that effect to fail, he would be free enough to breathe normally. And around the party, the dungeon was rather wrecked, and some bits of treasure were poking out here and there.   All in all, a job well done.

Rewards Granted

3 xp

Character(s) interacted with

Zeltheon, Jay-Aliel, Netheir, Xaversam, the proprietors of the Villains' Market

Created Content

Netheir, Xaversam, Jay-Aliel, Zeltheon

Notes

Sith description: Human, 5'10", brown hair and eyes.   Union: 5'8", humanoid, big bone headdress, cloak, slippers, North Face (or possibly Columbia) black and red fleece.