2023-11-25 Morningshade Winter Festival
Player Characters
- Hyacinth
- Alystin
- Amartherui
- Essa
- Green
Summary
Malivette's research revealed that in addition to evil and pain, spirits also coalesce in response to positive emotions. One such place to find elementals would be the Morningshade Winter Festival, where air and water spirits meet and dance when citizens were at their merriest. Conveniently, water and air were the remaining spirits needed for the spirit forge. Essa purchased a 1000gp topaz and sapphire for each elemental type, and set out for the festival along with other adventurers looking for a good time.
The party took the road to Morningshade City, and walked through the main gates. Shimmering garlands and colorful strands of candles were draped across buildings, and the scent of barbecued meat, popping corns, and fresh chocolate and caramel permeated the air. Gentle jolly hymns spread cheer to gleeful families, laughing friends, and excited children.
The PCs approached the main desk, where Essa bought a pile of tickets. The group walked to the festival games to play for tokens that could be exchanged for prizes at the prize booth.
Esssa won the Swingin' Bridges game with grace.
Green played Ring-the-Bell, but broke the bell. The merchant managing it awarded him a token and temporarily closed the game for repairs.
Amar noticed someone watching the party. The human man approached him and cryptically introduced himself as Ikuga. Ikuga asked about Amar's affiliations, and warned him not to cause trouble. He was aware that the group came from the Bazen Kingdom, and mentioned how Bazen soldiers were harassing Solakians in different cities. Amar made it clear that the group also hated that kind of disruption, and were just there to have fun. Ikuga returned to the shadows.
The party went to Jingle Jangle to form their own rhyming holiday couplets and sing. They each won a token.
They went to the Spicy Meatballs booth and won the meatball-eating contest, partly by distracting and scaring the other contestants.
While Green supervised the party, Lord Tunaro approached him, recognizing him from their encounter in the Shadowglade during 2023-10-18 The Ruins of Atla. Tunaro lended him a prototype of a device he was creating: a lens that could reveal the sentiment of the spirits in an area. He asked Green to help keep up the festival cheer so that the spirit could materialize, and requested that the lens be returned to him after the event. Green agreed to help.
Essa and Wiznt played Frozen Doom. On their first go, they helped a family with children cross the bridge, taking hits for them and entertaining them all the while.
While playing, Amar caught a snowball and threw it back, knocking out one of the throwers. He and the others won the game and a token.
On the way to the next game, Green checked the lens to find a dark cloud over a girl sitting sad and alone on a bench. He branched from the group to investigate. The girl told him how her boyfriend, Glace, had a special gift for her... that he had lost. Green found the boy, who was stressed out and searching high and low along the road over. Glace said that he was looking for a special flower bouquet he had prepared for her, and couldn't understand how he lost it. Green sprouted his angelic aasimar wings, and offered some of the feathers as a replacement. Glace happily accepted a few and gave them to his sweetheart, who seemed pleased with the gift. The cloud of sorrow over them vanished.
Alystin, Essa, and Hyacinth won Castin' Blastin' Conjurors after a few tries.
They played more of the festival games with a small dose of magical cheating. Alystin's invisible imp moved the bell to help himself and others win Ring-the-Bell.
Two nobles stepped onto a stage to give a speech, standing in front of a voice-enhancement stone. The man praised the season and its delights, and thanked the attendees for making the festival special. He also offered a thank you to House Vlommengar for providing the top-level prizes, but this angered the woman on stage with him. She cut him off, tersely reminding everyone that the festival was a time for the servants of each house to act as one populace without being divided by their affiliations. They wrapped up the speech and went backstage to argue about the point.
Green and Alystin approached the arguing nobles, who were bringing down the vibe. The man wanted to offer gratitude where it was earned, while the woman wanted to avoid any mention of the noble houses and thought he was trying to bring influence to his own. With Green's help, Alystin resolved it by suggesting that they give equal thanks to every house, and that that would be fair and avoid creating any advantage or division. The two nobles stepped on stage again to finish giving thanks to each noble house for their contributions, without favoritism.
The games continued. The PCs won tokens playing ring toss and guzzling huge amounts of cranberry juice.
The lens highlighted a distressed half-orc on a bench. Green approached him. Crumble, the man, told him how he was struggling to take his mind off his work. He was struggling to resolve an issue with Vlommengar tech, mentioning that a fuel tank kept exploding. Green offered him cranberry juice with a helping of Amar's moonshine, and the two played dragonchess for a while. Green let Crumble win. Crumble thanked him for taking his mind off work, and went off to play the festival games.
The party (mostly) won tokens from Eye Spy, where they had to spot differences between similar objects, such as two potatoes or two birds.
The PCs purchased any tokens they were missing from various citizens, who were happy to sell them for 2gp each. They each traded 10 tokens for a Winter Cap.
Air and water elementals began to materialize atop a few platforms stationed throughout the festival. Families gathered around to watch them dance, and Essa approached one up close.
Then, the spirits diminished and vanished, to the audience's confusion. Green peeked through the lens and saw a haze near the entrance to the city. The party walked there to find a gnome girl, shaken and afraid. She told them how a blue horned monster had attacked someone outside of the city gates. The PCs rushed out.
Down the road from the decorative outer gates, they found a large blue devil covered in icy armor. Kramplix, as he called himself, taunted the party from atop a mechanical sled. As the party drew weapons and staves, the fiend pulled two holiday treants out of a large bag. He blew a festive horn, which applied random holiday-themed debilities on anyone who didn't resist its power.
After the first round of combat, Kramplix and his treants soared off into the sky above the city.
Ikuga rushed out, giving the party potions of flying so they and their mounts could give chase into the clouds.
Swimming in the sky, they caught up to the devil, who was preparing to lob colorful bombs down onto the people of Morningshade City. The party rapidly destroyed the devil and his treants. As he burst and vanished back to the inferno, ice spread across the sky, and snow began to fall on Morningshade City for the first time ever.
The mechanical sled was unstable. The party pushed it and pulled it by rope, moving it away from the city, where it exploded away from any potential victims.
The people of Morningshade City cheered and played in the snow. Passers-by thanked the party for their help.
Essa conjured a permanent major illusion depicting a zone of falling snow with playful pixies.
Green returned the lens to Lord Tunaro, who gave the party 1000gp and a bag of beans for their heroic efforts.
The elementals returned to celebrate the snow with everyone. Essa convinced one air spirit and one water spirit to enter the gems she brought, completing the remaining tasks to upgrade the spirit forge.
Side mini-missions
Green planted one of the beans in his yard in @salmund. It sprouted a golden kiwi tree with six magical fruits.
Amar planted one of the beans in Greyhaven. Ten pink toads popped out of the ground. When he touched one, it became a yugoloth. The yugoloth threatened to touch the other toads and summon more monsters if Amar didn't cooperate with it. He was able to stun it before it could fulfill the threat.
Hyacinth gave a bean to Wiznt, who planted it in one of the citadel's farming domes. It sprouted a 60 ft x 60 ft pyramid with a dungeon and a mummy lord inside. Hyacinth led a party inside to avoid traps, solve puzzles, and vanquish the mummy, with some difficulty due to unfortunate haste incidents.
Malivette spent 3000gp on a ruby and recruited an ashmare, a fiery mount similar to a nightmare, from the Earth's Engine.
Entry for WorldEmber 2023
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