Session 25 - Up The River - Mafaldine's Notes

General Summary

We decide to camp by the river overnight
Voroc sees an extremely large crocodile on his watch but thankfully he leaves us alone
In the morning the party chooses to walk along the river instead of through the forest.
Rakki decides to use his portion of lunch jerky t try and befriend a very large snake.
The snake leads rakki to his hole, a fruitless gesture as rakki cannot enter.
Around 2pm rakki spots wooden pylons and planks in the water, a ruined dock perhaps…
I make myself invisible and cross the river, everyone manages but shiv has some issues
I investigate a large raft. It seems to have scorch marks on it and a few dead vulkoori on it.
This has been sunk recently. Apparently one to two days ago.
Bodies have burn marks.
I use Levitate to raise the boat and we have a further investigation
We manage to decide to ride the boat on the river
Shiv and Illalai use the poles. Apparently, we are making excellent time
We see the ship streaking across the sky again.
We set up camp in a non-flooding location thanks to Shiv.
Rakki and I have a few unpleasant words over dinner. He shoves me.
During watch Lucy detects violin and piano music. There seems to be a chandelier coming down the river.
Ok yep there’s an underwater ballroom that Deborah investigates without telling us.
“come home child” in Sylvan comes from the ballroom
The next day is FUCKING HUMID
The current seems to be becoming stronger and the river is becoming cleaner.
We see a huge mountain range in the distance.
After reaching a fork in the river Ilalai contacts Kevra to ask advice. We get some advice but seem to annoy her as we don’t have permission to message her.
Christ it is fucking hot today
The boredom of the day is broken by pillars of black smoke appearing.
We run the raft aground and decide to investigate quickly.
Shiv almost runs into an alpaca
We hear voices so I turn invisible and stealth out
Despite having disadvantage Shiv thinks it’s a good idea to follow me
I see a very varied group of people who are all wearing similarly coloured attire. There are a few burning carts and a lot of dead drow. The new people seem to have two sleds with wriggling bags on them. They speak in an ancient Giant dialect.
As I go to tell the others what I saw Shiv alerts them to her presence. FANFUCKINGTASTIC.
Combat ensues. Over the course I make several tactically unsound decisions such as not being within 60ft of both spellcasters as to avoid being noticed and allowing the party to get hit with a  fireball.
I also unload my wand of magic missile on the enemy who seems to be the boss. Retardedly forgetting that as a mage he would have shield. Shield negates all magic missile damage. I knew  this. Fuck.
That being said I managed to almost single handedly rescue both of the wriggling bags from the enemy. Also, I kept the enemy from summing something very scary looking.
Turns out the sleds are the vehicles I saw a few days ago. The seem to be powered via elementals and dragonshards.
The enemies identified themselves as ‘The cleansing embers’. That’s ominous. Apparently one of them (possibly the leader) is named Makhad?
The enemies seem to look down at us and refer to us as savages. While I can understand why it’s still hurtful.
After a fucking slog of a fight the enemy manages to escape only losing one member. However, we didn’t sustain any casualties so that’s a win I suppose.
I need to get much stronger to prevent this in the future.
The one enemy we managed to take down bled out because Shiv cut her arm off for whatever fucking stupid reason.
Both enemy sleds headed in a Southwest direction
Turns out the bags contain two untattooed drow children. One male and one female.

Report Date

09 Dec 2019