Our team needed to get into the tombs of Athkatla, to clear out Bodhi and her coven of Vampires.

This all went pretty quickly. Vampires are one of those things, they aren’t so tough as long as you know you’re facing vampires.

Towards the end we faced Bodhi, who managed to confuse me a bit. She claimed to know some things about the thieves we didn’t. Like they weren’t being honest with us? Maybe thief means something different where she’s from? Maybe next she’ll expose that my hair is a funny color?

Bodhi seemed annoyed that she gave me a good case of the giggles.

Christopher mentioned it was interesting she claimed to be Irenicus’ sister. Sorry, I missed that while I was laughing.

We made a last quick run to the Castle. We decided to leave Nahlia there. She had real experience running the place, so we decided she should run the business part of things. There’s a technical name for her job, that I don’t remember.
We returned to the City and found Yoshimo, who joined with us when we went to report our findings to Aran.

This seemed to wrap things up in Athkatla for now, we were ready to heads out to find Imoen. She was apparently at a um… crazy place where they store mages. We were going to break her out!

Aerie thought the town of Brynlaw was cute.

We sailed into a small fishing village. Jaheira and Christopher thought it looked like pirates had over run the town. I was briefly worried what that meant, but Keldorn mentioned this was a lawless and dishonorable place. This might work out well for us?

We were attacked by vampires again right as we got off the boat. We swatted them like the mosquitos they are! I just made that up. Not funny?

We saved a poor working girl who was about to be killed by her boss. What a jerk lady! We reunited her with her husband and they told us how to get into the mage prison.

When we got there we found it had been taken over by Irenicus. Then we found out Yoshimo had poisoned us. I knew it! I mean, I never got any of his jokes. He had to be evil, right?

I had some sort of weird dream while I was asleep. Imoen and I fought Sarevok again. Or was it Bhaal? Whatever.

When I woke up Imoen was there! It was really her! I guess we’d learned we really were sisters. I apologized to Imoen for that. But it doesn’t matter, we were always sisters anyway.
A lot of this place was in ruins. But will still had to pass the crazy/not crazy tests to get out.
The boss at the end had been dead a long time. But he still was running his tests. He said I wasn’t crazy… which seemed like a crazy thing for him to say.

After we found Irenicus we recruited a bunch of the prisoners to help us fight him. He got away.

We went back to town, and joined back up with our ship captain to get out of here, he said he knew where Irenicus had fled to. Wasn’t I mad at him for something? Too much going on. I think I was more annoyed with him, like he’s a weasel more than a villain? Later I’ll ask Christopher to help me sort this out again.

Then a bunch of fish men, oh we met these guys before! Under Dragonspear Castle! But they destroyed our ship.

Keldorn said these guys are really evil. They raid villages and take people to eat them.

Jaheira wanted to argue with him about it. But I think Keldorn was right, they kept killing each other. And they talked about killing us. We were supposed to go kill one of their king’s sons for him. Really not nice people! Errr, fish?

At one point we needed a treasure that a beholder was guarding. We fought some smaller beholders before, they are a little tough. Fortunately this guy was nice. And funny. He helped us get the treasure he was guarding.

When we escaped the fish-men we were really in the Underdark. This is sort of a place of nightmares, we’ve all heard stories. But we stuck together and did okay. We learned Irenicus and Bodhi had fled to a Drow city. The bad kind, not like Mr. Drizzt. Some gnomes told us how to meet a dragon who could help us get into the city. But they didn’t tell us she was dragon! She was big and silver and beautiful.

Adalon’s eggs had been stolen. She needed us to go into the Drow city and find them. Hey! We were just heading that way!
Adalon made us all look like Drow to enter the city.

Christopher and Imoen kept telling me not to laugh around the Drow. We should be serious! No funny business.

Then Christopher said “never mind, it looks like Adalon’s illusion has that covered.”

“You can smile if you want to honey, just don’t point it at me!”

*****

One little tidbit not covered in the text, the party now has a second strength device. So Jill will be keeping in the number 1 slot. Even with lousy hit points she is *very* tanky. And she will have Grand Mastery in Short Sword soon enough. I think Jaheira will still hit harder? But Jill hits fast and often.

2 responses to “Jill: Update 9”

  1. Zeno Avatar

    The laughing movie is great! As are the Kuo-toans. Never would have thought of a movie of one of my characters trying to do a drow sneer. That’s a fun effect!

    The beholder movie is amazing! How on earth did you get that??

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    1. atcDave Avatar
      atcDave

      This was a fun set! The laughing one was last minute, I was writing it and thought “that could be an interesting video.” It was easy, came out great on the first try.

      The Drow sneer was more of an accident. I wanted something of Jill trying to keep a straight face. But when I saw that *I* couldn’t keep a straight face! It was so perfect to think Adalon planned for that! “I’ll show that giggling girl what a Drow looks like!” Hah!

      Okay, the beholder. I’ve been trying a little with GPT-40. Its detail and sharpness are amazing. Characters look real. But its really slow. It only does one at a time. And I hadn’t liked its sense of style.
      I decided to try it after a few ugly beholders with DALL-E 3. I described it as a beholder, with most of the description you had posted parenthetically. I did change the skin description to red-brown with a brick-like texture.
      And holy smokes it looked good! One shot! It must know what a beholder is? I thought I’d seen it screw up some weapons and other tech, so I don’t think its doing a web search or anything? Maybe its licensed D&D? Funny because it seems to struggle with fantastical atmosphere.
      Anyway, Jill’s hair came out so dark it was almost black. Very dark render. So I moved it over to OpenArt and did the Inpaint to make it more vividly purple.
      Making a video of it took three tries. I wanted the beholder talking and Jill responding. First try the beholder was moving way too fast? So I just added “slow” to the description and that fixed it. The bigger problem was Jill, she kept turning around. And the video Jill looked nothing like my rendered Jill (Usually when you see her face its an OpenArt model). So I specified “the woman stands in place, places her hands on her hips. Next try she turned around again! I decided to try again with the same descriptor, and it came out as you see.

      I feel like we’re getting a lot of tools to work with. My brain hurts thinking where this heading.

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