The Adventure

The living star, which takes the shape of a turtle, is named Shelly by the crew. It becomes over-excited while playing with the crew and causes some of the wood on the ship to sprout leaves and branches and attracts the attention of a squid-like sea monster. After the heroes get rid of the sea monster, the Oahtu who joined the journey a while ago help repair the ship.

A mage named Nora astral projects herself to the ship to talk to the crew about Shelly. (They also find out she has a cat named Jonathan). She tells them she’s a dean at a floating college. In fact, the crew met someone from that college when they were at Aurora’s mother’s islands. The mage they met had been granted permission to learn first-hand about the red dragon’s court. She convinces them to come up and shrinks the ship and the NPC crew members so that they can fit in a ship bottle (like the kind typically used for model ships). Hazel is handed the bottle and told that if it’s broken the ship will return to normal size, so she needs to be careful with it.

Dean Nora answers questions about turtle and the crew finds out that it has to go to the Astral Plane to reach maturity. Additionally, if it doesn’t get there in 3 weeks’ time it will die. However Nora doesn’t know how to get there. She says she will petition the other deans for the heroes to be granted access to their library because it will surely have a way to get there. The deans speak to the characters and learn about their journey and desires. The access it granted.

As Dean Nora is leading the heroes across the bridge the Iron Chain Far Elves arrive to once again cause trouble for the heroes. They start attacking the university and a few land on the sky bridge currently containing the heroes and Dean. As they fight Thomas throws and elf off the bridge and then uses misty step to finish crossing the bridge to the library. Hazel ran across while doing a fog cloud spell to give cover to Amelia.

They enter the library which, exactly opposite to what usually happens in a magical building, it seems SMALLER on the inside. The heroes don’t know this yet, but the library is some kind of 4D building (like a tesseract) and is folded upon itself. After they prove themselves worthy by solving a logic puzzle, the Clockwork Sphinx lets them through. They wander around various rooms, but eventually find the name of the explorer who knows how to get to the Astral Plane. They then view her stored memory to learn her story and find out that her map is cursed.

On their way to the cursed archives they team up with an automaton known as The One Who Turns the Page. Together with him they go further into the library and help a mage who is trying experiments to get homunculus to run mazes. Finally they arrived at the cursed artifacts area. Unfortunately, the curse on the map makes it illegible (as well as making all other maps illegible). They run into someone who is chained up and possessed by a demon who claims they can reverse the curse. But they need to be set free. The crew decides it’s better to let her free to make sure that Shelly can live so they pull the lever that frees her. Unfortunately, it’s the same magic that keeps the library floating in the air. As it begins to plummet they get the person to remove the curse. As the heroes fall, Hazel breaks open the bottle and the ship returns to normal size. It splashes into the water and the crew begins to follow the map to the Astral Plane.

GM Notes

As I’ve said before, my table prefers role playing and solving puzzles to fighting (well, 2/3 of them do) so they really enjoyed this one. They liked trying to figure out if they could trust Dean Nora and they had fun with the various logic puzzles.

• Dungeon-in-a-Box
• Voyage-of-the-Fallen-Star
• DnD
• Dungeons-and-Dragons