The third session of my ongoing Ultraviolet Grasslands campaign has come and gone! In this post, I present a link to the video, as well as a written session synopsis, for the readers' edification. Also, here is a link to get yourself a copy of the dungeon I ran for this session: Glitch Spire! It's PWYW on itch.io :)
The Video
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| Click here for YouTube video of session |
VIDEO CHAPTERS:
The Written Synopsis
This session marked a descent from caravan crawling into good old fashioned dungeon crawling. At last, the party brought Rouge Lombardo—the eccentric architecture enthusiast and disowned trust fund baby—to his latest inheritance: an ancient 70 meter-tall tower of marble-swirl-alloyed bone and obsidian. Camped outside the tower was the toothless, waxy-skinned, fair-breathed lone survivor of an ill-fated Caravan—jOn’s character, Chad. Chad asked the party for food to help quell his near-starvation, and Alroy gave him a bottle of healing Vodye Bocye bee druid ambrosia. Chad neglected to drink it immediately, but joined the party as a tentative tag-along. C
The party espied a snoozing Scorpion-King-style vomish spider-centaur sleeping in a treasure strewn-giant web hammock. They called out and awoke him. E.L. Spidre, as he was called, was initially hostile and hocked loogies of ominous venom toward the party. Peptid’s friend Boner called up to the monster, seeking a drug trade. This brought E.L. Spidre scuttling down to hash out a deal for a portion of Boner’s ever-almost-gone nug of Purple Haze.
Once the spider-centaur reached the ground level, Loyalty Dorian 17 promptly shot him point blank in the head. (In retrospect this probably should have killed E.L. Spidre. Huh. As it happened, it merely exposed his microchip-studded brain). E.L. Spidre retreated behind the base of the Tower, and Alroy pursued. Alroy asked the severely outnumbered man-spider to enter the tower through an apparently wall-less segment on an upper floor, come back down, and unlock the tower's front door—in exchange for the party not killing him. E.L. Spidre agreed to this arrangement, climbed up the tower, and proceeded to disappear and NOT let the party into the spire.
While all of this transpired, Hathak strayed from the tower to try and communicate with a pair of slowly approaching bronze-bark baobab trees. Due to a plant-awakening curse Hathak caught at the Porcelain Citadel, these trees had begun to distantly tail the party. Through the application of expert phytomantic dance-speak, Hathak conveyed meaning to the motile trees—who froze and considered how to respond. Hathak left the slow-thinking baobabs to rejoin the party at the tower’s locked front doors.
After ascertaining that Rouge's mages Horney and Korney (no relation) had left their unlocking wand back in the Rainbowlands, Miela used her magic honey of dismemberment to deconstruct the lock. Signage indicated that the first floor had once been “The People's Meat Market,” complete with bloody altars, cracked stone kegs, and grain stalls overgrown with glowing radioactive berries. The party harvested the berries and strapped them to their megapede mount. Unfortunately the meat market also housed a tangle of animate biomechanical roots, which snatched the deed to the tower out of Rouge's hand!
Against all odds, polyglot Alroy was able to carry on a screechsome modemish encoded audio signal handshake with the roots. He determined that the roots were vomish, and spoke with their nest mother: Jane Machine, Nest Creator from the Void. Alroy learned that Jane Machine had sent her roots up through the floor to investigate “the Hessaline,” a mysterious entity living in the tower. “The Hessaline” had been broadcasting and communicating with Jane Machine and her neighbor Sandra NAME ERROR, the nest mother of E.L. Spidre. Alroy promised to investigate the Hessaline and report back, in exchange for a chest full of cash chits.
Loyalty grew bored with this diplomacy immediately after it commenced, and led the way to the second floor of the tower—a library. Loyalty immediately wrote off library as also boring, and led the way to the third floor. Here, Loyalty, Hathak and Peptid (Miela, the black gold industrialist, stayed behind with Alroy to learn whether the biomech roots had any info on nearby sentient minerals) encountered a gladiator imprisoned in a tapestry. The gladiator had been imprisoned by the ancient tower’s owner, the tyrannical warqueen Katyu s’Amethyst. The gladiator had refused to continue gladiating for her and so was woven as a punishment.
From the tapestry man, the party learned that Katyu s’Amethyst had told her subjects they'd become addicted to water if they had too much of it, as an excuse to dole it out in meager portions. They also learned Katyu was now trapped in time and bound to this tower, etcetera, etcetera. They grew tired of the long-imprisoned pit fighter and turned his tapestry around to face the wall. (Later, when Alroy heard of the tapestry, he brought it down to the caravan, intending to raise the talking textile as a flag for their caravan company).
The tower’s third floor also housed an “analysis rig,” fueled by black liquid catharsis, which Loyalty used to enter Boner’s unconscious. Therein, Loyalty beheld a ponderous titanic camel with giant, swaying teats. Loyalty stepped into the scene and encouraged a discombobulated dream Boner to try lucid dreaming. This brought them out of the Insight Realm and back into the analysis office. The party purloined this analysis rig and a few tanks of liquid catharsis, hoping to sell psyko-analysis services for a profit.
Recalling that Katyu s’Amethyst had imprisoned a gladiator in a tapestry, Miela searched the analysis office for other such people-turned-into-things. Sure enough, she discovered that an autumnal drug draped over the armless analysand couch contained an immured thief with a mutant rabbit head. The thief, after stealing the warqueen’s time-shifting Rod of Economic Supremacy, was captured, woven, and made to listen to the inane free associations of countless aristos for the past several centuries. The rabbit-faced burglar had grown surprisingly insightful during the span of his imprisonment, and was able to tell the party that Katyu s’Amethyst was still in the tower, having been trapped in time by resentful and mistreated court chronomancers, though she was unwilling fully to admit her predicament to herself.
Thus informed, the party left the imprisoned thief to go loot another room: a storeroom. Here, Loyalty found three giant transparent crystal lenses and decided to look through them at his fellows. Making eye contact with Peptid, Loyalty was suddenly paralyzed as his mind was transported into Peptid’s last dream: Peptid tilled bloody legume Fields, practiced “safe driving” by whipping shitties around his estate, stared in awe at a swarm of fish-shaped balloons, and was chastised by his vampire father for not being a full-blooded, “true” vampire. After becoming aware of this intrusion into his unconscious fantasies, Peptid gave his head a little shake, dispelling the lens’s effect, and walked away. Loyalty held on to one of the giant crystal lenses of dream-viewing, and the other two lenses were brought down and loaded onto the megapede.
One last sweep of the third floor revealed an unassuming wooden crate—full of Ultra Jay needles, the most valuable trade good in the Grasslands!! While loading these onto the caravan, Loyalty saw the awakened bronze bark baobabs stirring and approaching the tower. Hathak and his Butler decided to descend the tower to investigate the baobabs, a momentous happening, as it marked the first Hathak made a free decision on his own and his keeper—I mean, butler—followed along! Hathak decided to grab the tapestry with the insightful thief and drape it around his shoulders, hoping to have a wise voice in his ear while navigating both the spooky tower and his growing fear and confusion around the themes of time, imprisonment, and freedom.
Outside the tower, Hathak found a gang of tiny wicker fetishes contemplating an orb. He decided to engage them before dealing with the bronze baobabs. Communicating with one of the fetishes through touch and telepathy, Hathak learned that the fetishes were controlled by a mage named Hessaline, who was living in the tower, researching the vome mothers, and seeking the cure for violent-machine source code corruption. The linchpin to Hessaline’s cure, Hathak learned, was the brain case of a living vomish factory named Source Fac Johnny-7.
After divulging this, Hessaline felt she had said too much, and had her fetishes surround Hathak. She demanded his allegiance to the anti-vome cause. Immediately after Hathak swore this allegiance, his magic butler immolated the bulk of the threatening fetishes with a fireball spell. This use of magic revealed that Hathak’s magic butler fuels his spellcasting through the parasitic draining of Hathak’s energy.
In spite of the impressive deadly fireball display, the one remaining wicker fetish attacked Hathak and his butler with surprising strength, and they were forced to flee up the tower
On the tower’s fourth floor, Hathak and his butler rendezvoused with the rest of the party, who had plundered a spellputer containing two niche rat-related spells (rats-to-clams and ferment rat milk), as well as a regeneration spell. The party had just decided against interfering with a garrison of dormant biomechanical porcupine-jellyfish proximity defense drones. Hathak and his butler then appeared, the wicker fetish hot on their tails.
The mighty pit-droid-sized fetish traded blows with Loyalty, latching on to the latter's head. Alroy sued for parlay and spoke with Hessaline through the fetish. He learned that Hessaline could not leave the tower because she was using its time glitch properties to arrest the advance of source code corruption she suffered due to her close work with vomes over the years. Hessaline promised to reward the party with powerful spells and a sack of anti-vome spray and to leave the tower if they brought her the head of Source Fac Johnny-7 from the Trail of Vomish Dreams. She also promised to peacefully cohabitate the tower with Rouge Lombardo and his entourage.
Loyalty, characteristically stultified by this peaceful conversation, charged ahead into adjacent chambers, wherein he met a helmeted mercenary named Oriono. After out-drawing him in an almost-shootout, Loyalty convinced Oriono to abandon his bounty for Hessaline (who was wanted for smuggling infectious vome cadavers into the Rainbowlands) and instead to join their party in the employ of Rouge Lombardo. He tempted Oriono with a share of his caravan’s full tower-looting rights. Loyalty and Oriono then helped themselves to a pair of keening, ghost-cutting crystal spears from an armory, before running afoul of a gun cabinet mimic, which the fast-legged Loyalty quickly disarmed.
After welcoming Oriono into their midst, the party got into a discussion with Ramba Tam, Rouge's loyal bodyguard and unhappy girlfriend. Ramba reminded the party that Rouge had contracted with the party to “clear out the tower” for €1,500, three sacks of sanguine porcelains, and a party-wide per diem. BUT, Ramba insisted, the “clearing out” of the tower did not entail full looting rights. She was adamant that her weeks of desperate, near-fatal wandering through the irradiated steppes should not end with her and her lover living utterly destitute in an old tower. She insisted on keeping half of the loot. The party agreed to this arrangement, with the caveat that they keep the unassuming crate from the storage room. Ramba was ready to accept this deal when Chad the new guy piped up for the first time. He pointed out that, actually, the crate was the most expensive thing in the tower! Ramba insisted on investigating the contents of the crate, and Loyalty agreed to escort her down to the megapede to do so.
En route to this inspection, Ramba and Loyalty encountered the time-lost warrior queen Katyu s’Amethyst, who appeared out of thin air in the library. Loyalty used a dream dream-vieweing crystal lens to view the war queen’s last dream: the point of view of a well-armored giant tree, looking out over eons of passing time. Civilizations rose and fell, people came and went, but none made any contact with the impressive but lonely tree.
Loyalty entered into this dream and found, within the hollow trunk of the tree, a proud adolescent Katyu s’Amethyst. Loyalty kowtowed reverently to win the adolescent warqueen’s approval. As the pair stood in the middle of the vast hollow tree trunk, a child’s sobs echoed from behind a distant chamber door—the cries of a younger Katyu.
Dream Loyalty produced a dream dream-viewing crystal and invited dream adolescent Katyu to look through it at her dream younger self. He told her she would find that they did not need to be separated by that door after all. Warily, the teen tyrant looked through the lens…
Loyalty was shunted back into the waking world of the library, where he beheld the adult warqueen teary eyed and dissociated into a reverie of profound intrapsychic reparation.
After this, Katyu welcomed the party to move through her tower unmolested, and bestowed upon Loyalty the knightly title of Dreamwalker of the Timeless Court. When Ramba again raised the issue of fairly divvying up the tower’s loot, Loyalty reluctantly admitted that the unassuming crate was indeed full of “really valuable stuff.” Loyalty vowed on his honor as a hexad insurance adjuster to draw up a ledger, and to strike a fair balance with Rambo, Rouge, and their wizards, in the name of the god Steno…
The rest of the party came down to reconvene with Katyu, Ramba, and Loyalty. Katyu took a liking to Chad and his preternaturally good breath. She offered Chad her hospitality, and Chad asked if there was any food. The warqueen led Chad upstairs to a brass kitchen. Unfortunately, it was better equipped for cannibalistic meat smoothies and magically-conjured sweets than for Chad's vegan diet, and the snack run came to naught.
The next floor of the tower was apparently wall-less and open to the elements—a crumbling stone restaurant full of ancient whispers. Peptid attended to these echoes of bygone gossip, and learned that the creator gods of old—the Demiurges—had not in fact given the world to the Viles and Lings (forebears of the half- and quarter-lings) as myth supposes. In fact, said the ancient voices, the bloodless Machine Humans, and they alone, restored the world after the first bio-humans destroyed it. “Lings” and “Viles” were mere myths, said they, confused references to these Bloodless Ones. Nodding smartly to this revelation, the party proceeded up a rope ladder, away from the historical whispers.
In the session’s finale, the party ascended to the sixth floor, where they found a map of the region, and a small library of tricolor agit. prop. decrying the various civilizations of space and time, and promoting life in Katyu’s Timeless Kingdom. They also found a hair salon, in which Chad got a new haircut from a robot barber (he now has a widow's peaked faux hawk) while the rest of the party tried in vain to curry the favor of a trio of snake-rats playing in an overturned hair dryer.
Huzzah for grand adventure!
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