In which, the party delves into Emmy Allen's Stygian Library in search for the Greatest Joke.
Dramatis Personae:
Alma Tumbler (level 5) Aspirant Ranger, purple feather mutation, Wielder of the Unknown Blade and the Lightning Bow, Chronicler and Sole Survivor of the first session
Olga Derippe (level 3) Body builder, Hammer Enthusiast, Haunted by a Revenant, Death Defier, Hoardmaster
Pepper Slorah
(level 3) Expert Archer, Herbalist, Bell Priestess, Blindshot Expert,
expedition leader and freshly returned from work with the Bell Priests
(now retired to the status of Henchman as the player is no longer in
town)
Stratford Slee (level 3) Member of the Hunter's Pact, Arguably Australian, no longer stuck at 6 HP, ex-pirate
Godwin Le Marque (level 2) Sword swinger with a Napoleon complex
Minerva Hardwick (level 2) Abandoned coward
Oswald Needle (level 2) Exotic mercenary, replaces Minerva after her untimely demise.
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| Pawel Kot |
We were joined by two new players who took on Godwin and Minerva (and then Oswald), joining the party in media res at the shack in the violet soaked dunes. The party made their acquaintance and then carefully crossed the shifting grey dunes, hearing the sounds of slithering on sand and seeing vague shapes roaming the dunes. Luckily, they reached the citadel unscathed.
The citadel itself was worn grey stone, half flooded with grey sand and sinking into the dunes themselves. Climbing the entrance, they descended down a long, steep staircase until they reached an archway of black obsidian. Everything that passed through the archway slowed down, and they had to fight to cross its threshold, but ultimately they all passed and entered a small dark foyer. A sign on a desk read "ring for service" and pointed to a silver bell, the otherwise unremarkable room had only a single simple exit. Here, the grey stone floors gave way to dry wood boards with the occasional carpet while the walls were a simple cream colored plaster.
Here, Pepper Slorah decided to quaff the potion of doom treading and forsee her potential deaths. She rolled and got three portents:
Opening a book chained to a lectern and disappearing.
Walking along an endless bookshelf strewn corridor when the floor opens up and she has only a glimpse of a terrible spider.
Asleep in a tent in a grand library, a man with tentacles drooping from his face enters the tent- and all else she hears is the slurp of something being extracted and then nothing.
Thoroughly perplexed by this, the party opens the door and gets their first glimpse at the library. Dark, with the occasional light in the far distance, maybe forty or fifty feet to the nearest ceiling. In all directions out and at haphazard placement and angles there were only bookshelves, crammed with books. The shelves all had a strange numbering system and the books contained mostly jumbled letters in endless variations.
Godwin rings the bell at the urging of Olga, and the party takes up defensive positions as a diminutive figure in a black cloak appears from the dark shelves and sits at the desk in the foyer. After some prompting, the librarian explains the various orders of librarians and their purposes in the library, and then explains how the party should go about finding the Greatest Joke in this endless library.
For those unfamiliar with the Stygian Library, it contains everything recorded, and endless variations on everything. I treated it as a Library of Babel-esque Escherian labyrinth. Depending on the rarity of the knowledge being looked for, the party sets a progress goal. In this case, their goal was 40- the highest recommended. To get progress, they need to get hints from creatures in the library, descend deeper, etc. Additionally, each time they descend there's a series of rolls made to randomly generate the next rooms and encounters- then link them all together. Each room descended into increases a depth score by one, and the party needs to reach their target progress and a depth of progress-20 to find their book.
After this explanation the librarian leaves and the party decides to descend to the next room. En route, they realize that some of their weapons have gone missing- which causes a panic as several magical weapons have disappeared. Suddenly, even weapons they're carrying disappear, and Olga catches glimpse of a great, distended hand appearing from above and stealing her beloved warhammer.
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| Sandra Ristau |
With this, the party sees a great, distended heron-headed beast with long human arms, one clutching a collection of stolen weapons and the other reaching for more. Minerva runs to the beast before it can steal more of their gear and casts Body Swap, temporarily becoming the Bandersnatch while the Bandersnatch takes control of her body. She releases the weapons and the party rearms, but her old body grabs a weapon and sprints into the dark. Minerva grabs the fleeing body swappee and then suddenly swaps back into her own body- now clutched by the beast.
The party gets to work fighting the beast and do some damage, causing it to flee into the night- taking Olga's hammer with it. In the process, it also slowly, horribly, squeezes Minerva to death and drops the bloody pulp to the ground (causing the new player to begin rolling up the replacement character). Miraculously, the group manages to catch up to the bandersnatch and finish it off- and then are shortly later joined by Oswald Needle. They continue their journey and end up in a room filled with pipes, gears, and four grey librarians maintaining the machinery- which all supported a computer terminal.
After some trial and error, the party finds out that the terminal is part of a great calculation machine, and they ask the machine questions about where to find the Greatest Joke- increasing their progress significantly. Speaking with the librarians proves equally helpful, and they show the party a shortcut to a lower depth.
The party takes the shortcut and end up in a grand map room, descending through a hidden ladder in the ceiling. Checking out the room reveals a mysterious bronze globe whose clockwork machinations reveal their vague location in the library and gives some ideas on how to get to their goal. The maps on the walls are of strange and mythical lands, including central Europe in 1914 and the Ohio State Representative District number 9.
As the searching of the room goes on, a cluster of desks stacked with paper turns violent, as the paper shapes and expands into two large Origami golems. Battle commences and the party finds their effects with nonmagical weapons to be largely ineffective, the most successful attacks being using torches to burn the golems or, in the case of Godwin, shoving one of the golems into the fireplace. Spreading fire is shortly a concern and the party scrambles into action and manages to get it under control. The desks themselves prove to contain a strange glass violin that, when played, causes a sphere of silence centered on it. There's a short discussion here about the rules of the library as they were read to them, notably don't steal from or damage the library, and the party decides that it doesn't count as stealing unless you remove it from the library and then carry on their merry journey.
A great cone of metal and glass vials filled with varicolored mists dominates the next central room, and the party makes the connections that this must be a device for harvesting and cataloguing souls and used by the white librarians. While investigating the room, there is a scuffle where Oswald and Olga are nearly devoured by giant bookworms, but they prevail and the party acquires a spellbook from the worms' hovel which contains six spells in one item slot (but has the same casting restrictions).
Into the next room, the party finds a hallway of statues with a staircase at the end. The statues are all lifelike and some are reclining or resting. Pepper plays the violin as the group moves through slowly, but when Alma discovers the plaques on all the statues are biographies that end with "Deceased in the hall of statues" she prompts the group to run and they make it to the staircase.
Descending the stairs for some time, they eventually end up in front of a great stone door. Opening it reveals a room of bookshelves that contain no books, but instead large objects wrapped in white cloth that smelled of vinegar. Additionally, the room contains two chained books on lecterns which Pepper recalled for everyone as being something she foresaw killing her. They move hastily through the room and pause only long enough to see the titles on the chained books, A Way Out and Soulfire.
Now, Godwin opens the trapdoor and provides room for everyone else to attack the spider crammed into the hole, but they make note of strange glass tubes filled with a pink mist that run through the nest. A terribly unlucky strike from the spider breaches one of these tubes and four horrid phantoms pour out from the tubes, causing a litany of distresses to the groups and, most tragically, one runs through Pepper, killing her on the spot.
Two misfortunes hit at the same time. The first, Pepper falls backwards- shattering all her potions in the fall. But just as the light in her eyes fades away, her eyes turn inky black and she lets out a horrid death rattle, standing back up as flesh and muscle expands and her bones poke outwards, spiky and black. At the same time, the seven unidentified potions she was carrying mix and mingle- soaking into her wounds. Terrible octarine light pours out from her as Pepper's body warps and mutates, becoming enormous and horribly insectoid- and then disappears. But this is quickly revealed to only be an invisibility, as Not-Pepper begins attacking all around her indiscriminately.
Alma kills the spider and the phantoms with a terrific shot from her lighting bow, but then the second misfortune hits. With a guttural and horrid laugh, a dark, hulking figure sprints at the group from beyond the light of the lanterns and grabs Olga, running into the darkness as it tries to strangle her. The revenant, returned once more, was the same one that had been slain by Olga's death ray way back in Gnarledshore and now chooses to strike again. The party flees Not-Pepper and run after the revenant whose strength proves too great for Olga to break free from. Just before the party arrives to rescue Olga, the revenant drains 600 experience from her and throws her to the ground before fleeing into the dark of the library once more, cackling the whole way.
Lamenting the loss of Pepper, the party comes to the conclusion that they must return to the trapdoor area if they want to keep their progress, as they are very close to finding the Greatest Joke. Binding what wounds they could, the gang creeps back to the trapdoor and discover a stinking, rotting mass that was once Pepper. It does not appear to move anymore, and closer inspection reveals the mass to be dead- but also the skull is missing, a fact which is accompanied by a nefarious cackle in the distance.
The trapdoor nest reveals a shortcut through a horrible small tunnel as well as a bounty of jeweled rings from some of the desiccated dead. Choosing to take the shortcut, the party crawls out into a large, warped wooden room with several normal exits but dominated by a horrid, gnarled black door with a lock on it and crowded with glowing red symbols.
Something on the other side of the door knocks.
It offers them the book they desire, or any wish, in exchange for one of their souls.
The party refuses and heads off through one of the other exits to find the book on their own. Behind them, they hear the grinding of metal as of a door swinging open, and then closed again.
Some Notes
I should have run this using this generator, it would have been much easier. The random nature of the library was originally something I was concerned about running, but it was pretty smooth once I got generating the rooms. I'm also pretty liberally giving the party additional progress and letting them find shortcuts to cut deeper into the library than would be normally allowed.
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