DavesGaming

We proceeded into the Drow city of Ust Natha, undercover as Drow ourselves. This is truly a dark and twisted place, and a deranged parody of civilization. Worse, we have to play like we fit in. In different ways this will be hard on all of us. Hopefully we can escape without compromising ouselves in any ways that matter.

First off, we were sent to rescue a daughter of some of noble.

Of course the woman we rescued was an unlikable entitled brat. We returned to the city, to find that she is apparently our boss of sorts.

The worst of it was when she tried to have us kill a group of Deep Gnomes. Fortunately this was well clear of her oversight and we arranged a fake killing with the cooperation of the gnomes. They were confused by our kindness.

This will eventually catch up with us. I hope to make a clean get away, I shudder at the amount of bloodshed we may soon be responsible for.
Phaerie now directed us to meet her mother.

We were able to find the Silver Dragon eggs, and a demon killed Phaerie and Ardulace for us. We duly returned the eggs to their mother and vacated the Underdark.

We came to the surface near a group of elves. Surface elves, refugees from a missing city. This has something to do with whatever Irenicus is up to. We will apparently need to retreive the “Rhynn Lanthorn”, which is presumably in our favorite vampire’s possession. We all agreed a few days back at the Castle would be a good idea first.

On our next visit to Athkatla it became clear Keldorn needed a little time with family. We gave him a few days and set out to investigate the trouble in the Umar Hills. We haven’t yet got to the bottom of it, but we did come across a Ranger hiding from the Cowled Wizards. He asked for our help, the large sphere thingy (technical term!) in Athkatla’s Slum District was a sort of family heirloom. And he needed help to investigate it.

It was an extra-dimensional sort of space, much bigger inside than out.

There were several groups living within, the most difficult was some sort of feral Halflings. There was no reasoning with them, they fought everytime they saw us.

After an unscheduled stop by the Abyss we were able to gain control, and get it back to Athkatla. This involved defeating some ancient ancestor of Valygar’s, who had been possessed by something very evil.
This all did attract the attention of the Cowled Wizards. They would “let us” retain control in exchange for training a few young mages. That sounded fair to me! Imoen and Aerie are both up for it, and perhaps we can influence the next generation of Arcane casters in this city to be more reasonable. At least towards us!

From here, we set off for a ruin known as “The Wailing Dwarf” in the Troll Mountains.

*****

The “Aerie hitting Imoen with acorns” thing is from the “Wings” mod. Amongst other things, it has a cute and funny friendship develop between Imoen and Aerie.

Big thing this time, I’ve been playing more with OpenArt, the newest Renderer (SeeDream 4.5) is brilliant. Possibly superior to DALLE-3 in most ways? Some renders (like the solo of Keldorn and the second Valygar) were just done from text like DALLE-3. I even used Zeno_42’s written descriptions from his website for the characters (backgrounds are on me). But SeeDream has a significant twist. It allows for adding multiple reference images. So that image of Imoen and Aerie is from previously done renders in DALLE, then describing a scene for the two together. I don’t know yet what the limitations of this might be, can I reference (Character 2) shakes hands with (Character 4) while “(Character 1) and (Character 3) snicker behind their backs, standing in (Setting 1)? It says you can add up to 14 images of characters, settings, items. This could get very exciting. And complicated…

I’ve played further into the game than this, but I’ve done enough renders for today. I will work on another post (and play around with SeeDream some more… trying for a full team render).