DavesGaming

This will be an update with all mod content. The team is now partnered with the Shadow Thieves to find Imoen. But since I had the cost of cooperation turned up a little it cost a lot! So now Brad is focused on earning some coin so they can equip themselves better for their ongoing adventures.

The team is also nearing its final form now. Last time they added two new team mates.

Skie comes by way of Lava’s “Cost of One Girl’s Soul” mod to finish the story from SoD. I have re-imagined her as a single class Fighter… her only actual training and experience comes from her time with the Flaming Fists. She will primarily be an archer, but can also be the rear guard’s emergency defender.
Of course Keldorn is a classic character. A wise and good natured veteran paladin. He primarily uses the two-handed sword Lilacor for now. But I just know he’ll have a better sword than that!

*****

The next morning we met up with the mage Thalass down by the docks. He had a cog ready to take us out to the isle where the light house stood. It had gone dark, and the small rocky isle was a navagation hazard with no light. So we will see what’s going on.

It seems they were bewitched by a siren who we also had to fight. We followed a trail around the edge of the isle, that gradually sloped upwards. We could see the dark tower was up higher yet. We fought another small group of scrogs commanded by a siren. Are sirens behind whatever has happened here?
We came to a split in the trail, to the right would take us up to the light house. But a cave loomed ahead. I decided we would first check the cave.

This was home to several more sirens.

The leader stood on a large crab shaped platform. There were several other sirens in the cave, and more scrags under their control.
At this point most of the team is resistent or immune to the type of Charm the sirens have, so the scrags were the bigger threat. That is, this was not a big threat.

We traveled up towards the darkened light house. Here we fought a hag and some more scrags. A mage way up at the top of the lighthouse offered taunts. It took a few minutes, but we succeeded in clearing things away.

Nalia had discoved an odd magical crab claw back in the siren cave, and now she was figuring out its purpose. The Identify spell had told her “digging”, and now she had a good idea of *what*. The magical claw cleared out the doorway pretty quickly.
Inside, we faced a mage, a guardian. Fortunately he had several scrolls on his person that let us figure out what was happening here. Some dark cult was planning to sacrifice the light house’s light element to open a permanent portal to the shadow world. We would need to get there to stop them!
The interior of the tower was heavily trapped, Nalia was working hard for us today! We found exactly where the tower light was supposed to be, its mount was empty. Back on the ground floor there had been a locked, sealed trap door on the floor. We found a special key where the mage had been staying, that let us through the trap door. This was plainly a place of dark magic, some twisted process. Aerie discerned that we needed to replicate a brick of pure shadow here.

The world we stepped into looked exactly like the isle we had left, except it was all in dark shadow. We explored slowly, it was dark! And found our way back to the curving path back down to the dock.

Siren’s and scrags wholly turned to darkness.
As we neared the dock, we could dimly see a great temple raising where our ship had been.

Atop the main platform, a cult was summoning a being of pure evil and anarchy, Tharizdun! Oh I’ve read that name before. An ancient evil. His true agenda is unknown, at least in the works I’d read. But we could all feel his evil.

It was a brutal and exhausting fight. In the end, we had destroyed the cult and the fragment of Tharizdun. And we found, wrapped on an altar, the light for the light house.

We rushed back to the tower and back to our own world. We were able to disable the access to the shadow realm. For how long? We don’t know. We took the light back up to the top of the tower.

It was good to get back to Athkatla after this trip into the dark.
We are still a little light on funds. I suggested some exploring around town the next day. We can maybe pick up a few little chores, which will mean more resources.
Our first stop the next day was near one of the gates out of the city. This time to the south, where a small community had sprung up around the gate. This lead to a few little errands we could do, we found a couple of merchents with some useful gear. The main thing here came to be an adventure around a cursed book! As a child of Candlekeep, you just know I had to investigate a cursed book!

Yeah it was. We stopped a spirit that fed off people’s darker impulses.

Then Nalia was eager to show us Oak Isle. Its an older community, once seperate from Athkatla that has now been absorbed into the greater city. It was a quiet but scenic little community. But their tree was sick! Guess what! It was another big deal! A sort of undeath was seaping into the tree. It was a domestic tragedy, a murder that is the business of that small community. But we helped solve it, and had to put an ancient dragon spirit back to rest.

But its nice when not everything involves bashing heads.

We did some shopping back at the Promenade after. Aerie came out the best, we have her in a pretty old but powerful robe worn by an ancient mage… that I think I won’t mention here…

I don’t begin to understand how all that works! But then, that’s why I couldn’t follow my father’s footsteps. Dang it! This was about Aerie’s new dress then I get all weepy…

*****

It amuses me that a team with Skie on it will involve periodic fashion shows.