Friday, December 02, 2022

The flickering forest

• We follow the raven/hanged man and find ourselves in the woods where trees and shadows seem to flicker in and out of our vision
  • It reminds me and Blaze both of a horror movie we worked on a while back
  • The challenge is represented as the Fool, and the raven shows us the Magician and High Priestess cards
• We follow a path that eventually dead ends, and backtrack to take a look at some of the things that could be side paths
  • While looking around, we all catch sight of shadowy figures in our periphery that flicker out/trees flicker in blocking our view of them
• Moira starts sidling off the path, trying to get closer to one of the figures, keeping it in her peripheral vision
  • I follow her as the others start going down one of the side paths, the two of us getting separated by trees that flicker into existence
  • Moira creates a chimerical flame that dispels illusions, and its light makes it evident that some of the trees are illusory
• Blaze recalls the name of the movie, They Come from Beneath, and shouts that out and immediately after evil mole people start clawing their way up from the ground
  • Agnes sees Christopher who is being chased by the mole people and opens fire on them
  • Blaze briefly runs off after the mole people, but as Moira and I rejoin the group we are able to call her back to us
• Moira's flame helps us navigate through the illusions and we find our way out of the strange flickering woods
  • As the flame flickers out once we're clear the Magician card appears at her feet

The whispering fog

• We then find ourselves walking through a fog cloaked landscape filled with distant plaintive whispers of a child, and spy silhouettes of people which as we approach realize are rocky outcroppings
• The challenge is represented by The Empress and the raven/hanged man holds up three cards:
  • Temperance
  • The High Priestess
  • Strength
• We hear the noise of stone crashing and Agnes creeps up towards it and see a large stone elemental of some sort who is smashing other stone formations
  • The formations it's destroying are shaped like mother figures, and the childlike voice seems to be coming from it
  • It seems like the child is wanting to move and the mother is trying to keep it with them
• Agnes touches some of the stones and hears a voice of the mother and convinces her she has to let the child go and move on
  • When she does the High Priestess card appears in her hand

The endless stairs

• We come out of the fog and find ourselves at the foot of a long set of stone steps carved out of the face of snowcapped mountains
• Justice is the challenge
  • The raven/hanged man holds up the Temperance card
• We climb the stairs and it gets increasingly colder as we go and we start to see the bodies of people who have frozen to death
  • We get the distinct impression that they were people who were exiled from someplace and left to freeze
• We eventually come to a giant set of ice covered scales standing before a massive set of double doors that close off the cave, with many frozen bodies huddled around it
  • Blaze, by giving herself a terrible friction burn, uses a cantrip to try and melt the ice from the scales
  • She hears a voice talking about justice and learns that the frozen bodies were cast out because they were servants of the Wyrm
  • She ends up with the Temperance card

The crystal caverns

• We continue through the double doors that opened and find ourselves in a large cave
• The challenge is represented by the Chariot
  • The only card is Strength
• Moira starts trying to pry some of the crystals out of the wall and Agnes gives her her pistol to use as a hammer
  • She breaks off some pieces and then a thickly robed figure wearing a mask covered in serpentine design comes out from the section of wall that was opened up
  • Several other figures start pouring out of other passages and combat ensues
• Aoife gives a speech, telling the figures to backdown and flee and unleashes Sovereign
  • Her unleashing makes our chimerical weapons and armor all manifest suddenly and we lay into them
  • We kill them all and when the fight ends Aoife has the Strength card in her hand

Seeing a phoenix about a prophecy

• We head further into the cavern and follow the raven/hanged man out into a rocky desert
  • It perches on an outcropping of rock before transforming into the hanged man and gives a thumbs up before turning into a flock of crows and flying away
• We hear the sounds of massive wings before a giant phoenix descends from the sky and perches on the stone outcropping
• The phoenix says she wasn't able to digest Cathesig because the gifts her sister had put on him
  • She believes he is now with her sister in the Dreaming now
    • "Sister" is an artful term, meaning the three parts of herself that were split when the walls came up (dividing the Dreaming, the Umbra, and the real world)
  • She has foreseen that we would stop her sister (imprisoned under Stone Mountain
  • She says the garou should help when they are able, but this is a prophecy and problem of dream, and so they can only help where things overstep the bounds
    • She mentions that she has made us the closest thing to a Silver Pack in our world
• The phoenix leaves us in a great burst of blue hot flames which engulfs us and we find ourselves where we started
  • We all feel a burning on our left shoulders and find we have a brand of a blue flame there

Saturday, December 03, 2022

Back to reality

• Dreamcatcher guides us back into the real world, where we come out in the woods behind Oglethorpe in small hours of the morning
  • Just a few hours have passed since we left, which aligns with how much time we seemed to spend traversing the Umbral landscape
• We make our way back onto campus proper, passing a somewhat confused security guard
• Pneumatic meets us there via an Uber with our keys after we message her, and take the Uber back to the cars at the office park