Sessions 20 & 21 of Tomb of Annihilation
Managed to get a bit behind, here are three weeks of play over a little over a month or so, I think. The party managed to get Adran killed in their third (or was it fourth?) assault on the Yuan Ti temple complex. He ended up getting zombified by the Yuan Ti so the other party members had to kill him again to open up their escape route. They managed to hang onto Ras Nsi's spellbook but had little other loot with them as they fled once more through the underground lake, hiding to rest a bit in the poison fungus cave and within the lake itself. The Yuan Ti nearly killed Vorn but the construct survived with one hit point before getting to the bottom of the lake and regenerating. They in fact waited long enough that the Yuan Ti fled out the front at about the same time the party was fleeing out the back, Ras Nsi deciding his losses had been severe enough already that he did not want to sit around waiting to be attacked again. Shaun the kobold also decided he had had enough of risking his life with this mad band of explorers, and joined the kobold tribe, and began working to convert them to the faith of the fire god. Another elf wizard, following after his friends with the Company of the Yellow Banner, also joined forces with the party (replacing Adran).
They then decided to enter the tomb. I'll try to avoid spoilers here, but they did manage to clear out the zorbo god's tomb and obtain the magic item, and they also retrieved a skeleton key. They soon after found a passage to the second level through a secret door (Sembian Sam the ranger/rogue was back with the party for week 21) and they got into a battle with a good portion of the tomb's undead maintenance crew along with a tomb guardian construct, and the head of the undead maintenance crew was also there. By looting his office they discovered a substantial amount of lore on the history, design, and purpose of the tomb and the soulmonger. After some more battles with wights and tomb guardians they also found (and clouded/fouled with mayonnaise from the alchemy jug) the scrying pool used by the tomb dwarves to keep tabs on the Tomb, and prepared to continue their delve...
This past weekend tried something different, as we were missing a couple of regular players, notably including the player of the ranger/rogue. And I have not yet read the new AL rules, and I think we want to keep our ToA game AL legal (or if we don't we should all at least have a chance to weigh in on it). So I started running a mini-campaign I'd sort of sketched out, using the skeletal Innistrad setting released for free by Wizards of the Coast awhile back - mostly I wanted something human focused and I liked the human variants used there, and the Nephalia region seemed to work for what I had in mind. As the coastal trading region, I figured they also had ties to other places if player want to make characters from elsewhere and I imagined Innistrad being kind of like a Romania/Bulgaria type region on an inland coast with mountains along the other borders. Instead of a saltwater connection to the outer world like the Bosporus, I decided it would be a freshwater sea with a river passing through a land to the south that does border on a larger saltwater sea, controlled by what was known as the "Old Empire," a mash-up of Tokugawa Japan and the Byzantine Empire that had once dominated Innistrad (and still dominated international trade and contact with the outer world) but had pulled back after the rise to dominance of things like vampires, werewolves, and other monstrosities and left the people of the region largely to their own devices. The campaign would start in Varno, a trading town in coastal Nephalia of 4-5,000 or so. Creating PC's, half of the players made local clergy (two clerics and one acolyte who was actually a warlock), along with a fighter who was a wandering mercenary now protecting a rogue from a merchant family who were relatively recent arrivals in town, and a noble wizard with close ties all the local power brokers. Trying to simplify the world's religion, I said the official clergy basically served and worshiped various angels who seemed to have lately pulled back from the world, but there were cults following darker powers. They also all came up with an NPC each was tied to, following a suggestion I had read on shared world building that was indeed quite helpful for grounding everyone in the setting.
It turned out that a local magnate named Ikazizzle (perhaps Snoop will soon appear as well) with a substantial estate (including several honey producing bee colonies) outside of town had just revealed himself as the leader of a cult dedicated to a bee headed deity. This caused consternation amongst the official church leadership as several locals seemed swept up in it. There were also some missing people, including a merchant from the Old Empire, a child admirer of the warlock PC, and a beekeeper (who did not work for the cult leader, apparently).
Leaving town to investigate the Ikazizzle property, the several PC's were attacked by a pack of jackals. After killing several jackals, they retreated back to town, deciding to go to the manor the following day. The next day they ran into a jackalwere mourning the loss of his pack, and they had another fight on their way to the manor. The noble character had a long chat with the lord about religion and other topics while the clergy were directed to wait with the horses in the stables. Feigning interest in the new religion, the noble wizard was presented with a tract to take home. The party then returned toward town, and managed to follow the tracks left by the jackalwere they had killed, which led them to the body of the missing beekeeper. One mystery solved! Back in town, research in the church library led to the discovery of the bee headed god Beezleblix as a demon referred to in old texts, and the party decided they needed to find out just what might happen at the mystery rite of this "diety" happening the next night at midnight.
They didn't spend much time observing, and were soon attempting to interrupt the rites as they found the other two missing people tied to posts near where Lord Ikazzizzle was presiding. In the course of the ensuing battle they killed several cultists who turned out to be local citizens, along with a giant bee and two bee swarms. Ikazzizzle surrendered, and his quasit familiar disappeared. The bejeweled head of Beezleblix flashed during the ceremony and the party a felt a sense of unease as it did so, but nothing had appeared to happen, and they marched their captive with them back into town to turn over to authorities who could hopefully deal with him, while the merchant from the Old Empire was returned to his colleagues for a small reward. The great bee head was also stripped of jewels and precious metals before being burned. Then they bedded down for the night, gnawed by worries about whether the local authorities would actually take their side against Lord Ikazizzle, and about all the local citizens they had been forced to slay while rescuing the captives...
