Well, I wrote a ton of description on this post before Chrome crashed and deleted everything even though I'd been saving religiously and I don't have the energy to start over, so here are some pictures I guess.
I tried to keep the design of Shalai's armor consistent, but I did end up forgetting to draw his tail all the time.
Shalai's dead younger brother, Adenai.
The party. From left to right: Kree the grumpy Kenku rogue, Trixie the conflicted pixie spy, Shalai the angsty Tiefling paladin of vengeance, Nyxea the confused gnome tinkerer/frost sorcerer, Faern the knowledge-hungry drow wizard, Gray the sad half-elf ranger, and Gray's wolf companion, Blind Seer.
Went through several designs of Nyxea before settling on that bottom one.
Her early design had short blond curls, but then later she was described with long dark hair, so I tried again.
Kree, in both her Kenku form and human illusion disguise.
Faern, who I thought for sure was going to turn evil and betray us all but never did.
Gray, who just wanted to find her parents.
Trixie, who used to work for the Seelie Queen before the Faerie Courts got all upended and the Seelie Court became the Unseelie Court, putting Trixie in a bit of an awkward position of being mind-controlled by Ariel.
A few sessions after we met her, Erika described her clothing as sewn from leaves and vines and flowers, so I did some redesigning.
She and Shalai formed a close bond, mostly because Shalai has a soft spot for anyone younger or smaller than him.
Ah yes, Rhia the sad gay elven cleric. We met her after a nasty battle with Ariel in which they put a Geas on Shalai that forced him to try to kill everyone in the party. He did succeed in running Nyxea through, but then luckily the party knocked him out and Portaled him to Easthaven, where Rhia was able to lift the Geas before he regained consciousness. Rhia was definitely the mom of the group. She just wanted everyone to be happy, and of course to be reunited with her dead lover Lenore, who had become the goddess Rhia now worshiped.
But she could kick ass when pissed.
Oh yeah, so remember that little satchel with the protection charm in it that didn't work on Adenai or their mother? So I went to Evan and was like "hey what if that charm isn't completely useless like I told you earlier, what if it only protects you from dying if you WANT to die" and Evan's face lit up and he was like "I... can work with that." So during the whole battle at Easthaven when the zombies and harpies and basilisks were overrunning the city, I had Shalai repeatedly throw himself into fights in which he was wildly outnumbered with determined disregard for his personal safety, and he did in fact get turned to stone by basilisks at one point, complaining when Rhia healed him later that "at least as a stone I couldn't feel."
At the end of that session, Evan had the ancient lich known as the Old Master kill Shalai with a Disintegrate spell. He reformed with 1HP and none of his clothing or gear save the satchel, and the lich, disgruntled, immediately Planeshifted him to the Fey Wilds, separating him from the rest of the party.
The Fey Wilds had seen better days, as it turned out. There was a magical drain in the center of the ruins of the Seelie Court that had sucked the very soul out of the place, as well as all the Fae who had been living there.
Once the party showed up, we met Kree's deadbeat fox dad and fought a mulch monster called the Harvest God, who had apparently been a former party member from the first half of the campaign. After at least one failed attempt to Portal the party back to Elion, we made it back only to find out that because Shalai has the world's shittiest Perception, he hadn't been noticing Trixie getting weaker and weaker the entire time we were in the Fey Wilds. It turned out that because she was a Fae, the drain was affecting her too, leeching away her soul by degrees. She was nearly dead by the time we made it to a church to spend the night and Shalai actually finally noticed that something was wrong. And that's when she explained that she was the one who had mind-controlled the Council of Discipline to get Shalai's brother and friends killed, while under Ariel's control. She told him her real name was Juniper and she wanted him to kill her to fulfill his oath of vengeance and forge a new oath of protection instead, and that Rhia could Reincarnate her into a new body that wasn't tied to the diseased Fey Wilds. After quite a bit of arguing, Shalai did as she asked and snapped her neck, also destroying his satchel since it was tied to his vengeance oath, then waited for an agonizing hour until Rhia managed to conjure a human body for Juniper to reside in. Shalai and Juniper got to have a real hug then, which was nice.
Juniper spent the rest of the campaign wearing Shalai's tunic, since she didn't have any clothes of her own, and Shalai kept one of her tiny pixie shoes as a token of his new Paladin oath of protection to those smaller, younger, and less powerful than himself.
Some other shit went down with some Ugoloths and things, and then we were back in Easthaven, where the highest tower in the University was apparently full of dragons. Five of them, actually. Shalai had a good moment where he rolled a perfect crit on a Strength check to break the staff of a Scion of Tiamut over his knee, banishing her from physically materializing in Elion for at least the moment. However, Selene, the princess who had turned into a dragon in the first half of the campaign, was conflicted and warring with her human half, so Nyxea and Kree decided to enter her mind, which led to both of them nearly falling into a pit, below which were the five ravening maws of Tiamut waiting to devour them.
Shalai entered Selene's mind far enough behind Nyxea and Kree that he took a wrong turn on the path (by rolling shit Perception as usual) and ran into a baby dracling version of Selene who begged him to protect her from a dragonslayer she called Sir Angelo, who in real life had been her late father, the King of Elion. Shalai beheaded the crap out of him.
Baby dragon Selene decided she was going to stick with Shalai after that, because he has the world's worst Accidental Dad syndrome and can't resist collecting swarms of small children wherever he goes. He put her under his protection oath and continued along to find Nyxea and Kree and cast Courage on them, giving them the boost they needed to escape the hypnotizing terror of Tiamut's maws. They continued on to find the human child Selene, and between the three of them convinced both girl and dracling to sit upon Elion's throne together, giving both of them equal weight in Selene's consciousness so that she could be at peace with herself.
Meanwhile, in real life, Grey was having not the nicest of times. It turned out the huge swirling glowing cloud above the tower was the stolen names of everyone in Elion, presumably including the names of Grey's parents. She pleaded with the Scion to give them back to her, and he tried to get her to take the place of one of the dragons in exchange. Luckily the remaining party members talked her out of it, but then she had to watch him yank her parents' names back out of her grasp, which wasn't great.
When we all got back from Selene's mind, there was a fight to be had with not only the returning Harvest God but also the lizard-skeleton that was Tiamut's Scion, who was still wandering around. Nyxea took the kill shot with a hella Chromatic Orb on that one (and managed to not hit anyone in the party for a change.)
Now with two of the five dragons on our side (because one of them was another former party member, Sora), we headed off to prepare for the final assault on the real enemy, the concept of Namelessness itself, with which the Unseelie Court had allied itself. We stopped first in a church of Lenore, where Rhia, Nyxea, and Faern combined their spellcasting abilities to transfer some of Shalai's soul into Juniper, who had been running around at a permanent -1D4 penalty because of so much of her soul missing. They almost overdid it and killed Shalai (and he could have died, since he didn't have the suicide charm anymore), but stopped just short and gave him the permanent Bane instead. I may or may not be painting this monster.
That done, we headed off for our date with the end of the world. Grey did in fact become a dragon, Nyxea was taken over by the Old Master (and it happened so gradually and subtly that no one noticed until it was too late), and Shalai somehow adopted all the loose names of the people of Elion under his oath of protection. Kree fought her deadbeat dad and they both stealth'd so hard they couldn't find each other to fight, so he got away. Then we had to choose who was going to go through the drain and reshape the world in their image, and Rhia tried it but didn't roll high enough and her body burned up in the seal. Grey went through next and made it, and Juniper tried to get through too but Shalai held her back. In the void between worlds, meanwhile, Rhia's spirit and Grey were having a nice chat with the keeper of the void. Earlier, Grey had become the new Scion of Tiamut and gotten a wicked magical tattoo on her arm, which now gave Tiamut the chance to try to weasel her way back into existence, and the Void Keeper made it clear that if she returned, she would be the one reshaping the world, so Grey chopped off her own arm, banishing Tiamut much more permanently than before.
With Grey unconscious, Rhia and Lenore set off to reshape the world together, trying to make it much the same as it was, but nicer. That's where the campaign is sitting right now, since we haven't worked out a time to Skype in all together and finish it, but I'll honestly be surprised if we don't have to kill Nyxea/the Old Master before the whole thing is done.
Anyway, it was good.
- KP
Quote of the Day: "We need something loud and distracting!" "... I can get you loud and distracting." *Sabotage by the Beastie Boys starts playing* "That is a good choice."
