Play Report 22: Recovering

With various members tired and injured, the party sleeps the morning away. Their campsite in the woods is tucked far out of the way and they remain undisturbed by interlopers. The one interruption comes in the form of Cleo swearing loudly and taking something into the woods to throw it away — the party did not investigate, but what she had discovered was that the horseman meat had turned into loam. She did not particularly want to eat this.

In the afternoon, the party packs up and heads back to the collaboration. When they reach it late at night there is a celebration in full swing. It is Corsairs Day, a holiday originating as a celebration of naval might and the execution of dangerous pirates by the royalty, but coopted by the anarchists as an opportunity to dress up as unrecognizable flamboyant figures and have clandestine meetings or (more likely) wild parties. Hant lurks amongst the revelers, brooding. He listens for a while before climbing into the abandoned towers of the town to pass the night undisturbed.

Almuund has a deal to keep: the contact who had payed off his cult debt was promised an opportunity to have his employer examine the next anchor the party returns with. Almuund ends up having to bring Akela along as she doesn’t want to let the trash crown potentially be stolen. The contact is a little irked at this. “Next time, warn me before bringing a friend,” he says. He keeps the bargain though: his employer arrives the next day, hooded and disguised, and gets to spend a few hours examining the crown before returning it to the party. Akela and Almuund then turn it in to Nougat and co, to the tune of a whopping 3,500 coins.

Akela visits her horse, and spends time talking to Vashti, who has been taking care of the horse. “Why don’t you take the horse with you? A horse can handle danger — I fought a war with mine, saved me a bunch of times,” she says. Vashti is a little jealous of Akela’s adventuring – she loves her life with her wife Farina and can’t in good conscience leave all the work at home to her but wants to see some sort of action again. The painted horse is happy to see Akela, but Vashti notes that it got very startled several nights ago, looking north and seeming panicked. This was the same night as the party destroying the nightmare that was identical to that the horse came from.

After spending four days recovering his lost attributes, Almuund undergoes his agency’s typical spell purification ritual, to fix the corruption of Immobilize Monster. He sets up one of Nougat’s communication lanterns in the office-temple basement, and it projects the image of an underpaid intern on the wall, where they slowly and methodically walk him through the various steps of a purification ritual syncretized from various elements of spiritualist cultures that the agency absorbed for their own use.

After five days of rest the party is now in a good condition to do some shopping and determine their next steps.

This weeks session ended up being much more downtime-y than I had expected in part because every discord hosted image I had uploaded to roll20 simultaneously broke! A wretched thing to happen. I had to simply tell my players that hey I don’t have much in the way of dungeon maps usable and I have a world map I replaced but it is annoyingly off center. I am annoyed by this and will have to spend time fixing it, but alas — such is the way of running games sometimes.

The influence of the stranger who wanted to see the crown is an idea I have kicking around the works. He is a wealthy industrialist who loves to collect memoribilia as trophies under the guise of “protecting history.” I think his interest in the trash crown could easily lead into an interest in the party as worth employing, and interest in Almuund’s cult as a business partner or source of lackeys.

The Occult-Futurists now occupying the north need some attention, I am deliberating on how best to go about that.