The Adventure

As the crew sails towards the Astral plane they suddenly see tons of flowers in the water as well as lots of sea creatures. Thomas checks the flowers, but they are normal. (ie not magical) Suddenly the current seems to “grab” the ship and start pulling it to an island. The Captain has everyone head to various stations where they can help with navigation and they help avoid any damage to the ship. The current carries the ship far up the shore and it’s beached. Thomas attempts to push the ship, but it’s way too heavy and too far ashore.

The girls notice the smoke and tell Thomas. They agree to head into the jungle. As they walk through the jungle they see someone dressed as a wizard running from a giant frog. With only two incredible hits Thomas slays the frog and saves Grath. The heroes question him about why he didn’t use his magic, but Grath doesn’t seem to know any spells. The heroes find this odd, but they accept his invitation to Home.

Amelia looks at the clothing being worn by folks at Home realizes they’ve been here for hundreds or thousand years. As Hazel speaks to Riguel, she realizes that Riguel is 200 years old

Eventually they’re taken to the leader who, inexplicably is an older child named Ombi. As they speak Amelia realizes Ombi’s tattoos are 1000 years old. As they interrogate him and get more and more of a clue that something odd is going on here, Thomas realizes they might be stuck here and Amelia speculates that they’ll lose their memory. They convince Ombi that they REALLY want to leave and so he says he’ll take them to see the spirit that runs the island, Velethue, once they help him gather flowers. The party goes to gather flowers with Ombi, but he is captured by someone. They chase this person and first Hazel falls into a spike pit. Then she avoids a second trap, but gets stuck in a net trap.

As they speak with the half-elf who kidnapped Ombi they realize that for some reason she still has all her memories. She doesn’t want to relinquish Ombi as her captive as she think he is her ticket off the island. Thomas intimitates her into giving Ombi over into their custody.

They go with Ombi to the top and are impatient he keeps wanting to stop and show them various pretty areas on the island. Velethue, speaking through Ombi’s mouth, tells the party that their nemesis, the Blackrift, have many ships converging on the island and will not be safe if they leave. However, they demand to go, even if that means lifing the island’s enchantments.

Velethue sets them on a quest to prove they should get the enchantment lifted. They have to get a dryad’s favor, dragon tears, and a satyr’s heart-song. They have to go to the fae realm to do this. The team agrees and they cross a portal into the fea realm.

When they arrive they see a druid and 2 knights torturing a sprite they’ve pinned to a tree by its wings. Thomas and Amelia kill the druid and the knights run away, sending the heroes are too strong to be worth fighting. The sprite agrees to help them on their quests.

They go to dryad area first and find it full of corruption. After fighting twig blights, dratches, and vine blights, the dryad lets them know that a demon is causing the corruption. They defeat the demon and its minions and get the dryad’s favor.

Afterward the sprite takes them to see soem faerie dragons. Thomas just barely avoids being splatted on by a berry in a trap set by the dragons. They say there’s no way that non-dragons could ever make them cry, but they might cry from laughing too hard. Both Thomas and Hazel tell a jokes and collect their tears.

Finally the Satyr challenges the heroes to a dance-off. Thomas and Hazel agree to the competition. They dance before judges and Thomas scores 8 while Hazel: 7 and the satyr scores a 4. He agrees to give them a heart-song but asks if they would share a song in return. Hazel shares a song.

They return to the mortal realm and Velethue lifts the enchantment. Unfortunately, this allows the Blackright sailors to come onto the island where they pillage and attack the villagers living there. The heroes tear through them on their way to the beach. There an evil Blackrift Admiral who has an arm that shoots out like a harpoon on a chain kills Velethue when the spirit commands him to leave and leave the island in peace. He says he will give the spirit’s heart to his diabolist to summon devil after devil to help the Blackrift win this battle for Shelly the Living Star as well as take over the world.

To keep Shelly safe and get Velethue’s heart back, the party climbs onto the enemy’s ship.They immediately get into a fight. Thomas drops berserker off ship when he gets knocked prone. The party proceeds across the deck. Thomas sets pitch barrels on fire. An enemy knocks it over to try and trap Thomas. The ship catches fire, but after the battle Amelia puts it out.

The team descends to the lower deck. There they free a Blackrift deserter. As they move towards the front of the ship, they find the Admiral and a sea devil. He mentions that he’s trying to stop them from reaching the diabolist so that she can use Velethue’s heart to summon an infinite amount of demons for Blackrift. Thomas decides to break through this fight to go fight the mage. He finds the mage has summoned one chain demon already. Thomas (along with some area of effect spells from Hazel) kills the mage. Amelia is struck down. Hazel manages to constantly dodge the Admiral’s range weapon and eventually kills him. Without the mage to direct him, the chain demon leaves the fight.

The team makes their way back to the beach and returns the heart to Velethue. It revives and Ombi says that now that the enchantment is over the former residents of Home will travel the and spread the message of peace .Everyone parties on the beach and passes out. The next day the heroes find that their ship is sailing away. They ask around and it wasn’t the half-elf who wanted to leave or a Blackrift sailor. Turns out there was a piratical Taxabi sneaking around last night. Once again Captain Catapult has struck! Velethue summons giant porpoises to help the team get back to their ship.

GM Notes

The first half of this adventure was very role play focused so the table had a great time (mine is more about RP than fighting). Now that they are level 7 (highest they’ve been in any campaign we’ve played thus far) the early fights were a cake walk and were usually resolved by the first or second person in initiative order. In general they’ve gotten a lot better at strategy over the past year. Sometimes they get a little recalcitrant with each other, but they’ll mostly heal each other during battle and make better use of higher level and more strategic spells. I just need to keep reminding them to take short rests whenever it makes sense in the story.

I got really worried when Sam decided to skip the Admiral Battle (marked in the adventure materials as Deadly( to go straight to the diabolist fight (ALSO marked as deadly). Sam and Scarlett’s characters have pretty high HP, but Stella’s does not. (She has about half the HP of the other two and she’s the healer) I thought we might end up with a TPK. But we got a bunch of lucky dice rolls where Scarlett’s character wasn’t hit by a 3d8+4 attack. Stella DID end up having to go into death rolls, but thanks to Sam’s strategic use of Second Wind and Scarlett using a few spells that affected all the enemies at once, everything went alright.

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