Dale's Campaign - Session #20

We wasted a bit of time getting started.
I had not gotten around to working on my character sheets and other aspects involved in leveling Kal and Jaxil, so this time I was the main culprit for wasting time.

Not a good precedent for me since I’m the one that preaches things about being prepared.

Mike was still out this week, but should be in for the next session. Aaron controlled his PC.

When we finally got down to business, we started where we left off – the smoky, burned up temple.

We started off having Richie raised (we were more guilted into doing that though), but we were seen as heroes in the town (even though the reason all of this happened to the town was because of us making a lich mad at us – but we told no one that).

Kal wanted to leave the town as soon as possible, since he desperately wants to leave these lands, but fate had something different in mind for us.

The next day Kal was visited my Sylvya Mightyoak, the mightiest druid in the land, and his teacher. She requested a favor of him and his friends; she sought the powerful Staff of Winter’s Might (or something similar to that).

Kal agreed to do this, and convinced the other Brothers of Souls Honor to go as well. He did ask that upon completion of this task, that we all be teleported to Kal’s homelands. She agreed.

First we had to prepare. Sylvya was going to transport us to the very far north, to the Last Tree, located at the edge of the permafrost.

We bought all of the equipment we were going to need for a heavy winter trip, and the next morning Sylvya tree-ported us to the Last Tree. She pointed us in the direction of the nearest human settlement and left us.

Kal’s druidic nature made rolling for traveling through the near-arctic lands almost pointless, and by the next day we had found a nomadic human tribe.

We met with their muscle-bound leader, Ugg. He knew very little of magic, much less any “stick” that had some, but he might know something about where the staff we sought might be. He would tell us where it might be in exchange for solving one of his tribe’s problems.

Every night his tribe is haunted by the ghost of an angered frost giant named Jarl (yarl), and Jarl is ruining the tribe’s ability to thrive and grow (no sleep, scares away food). He wants us to put an end to Jarl.

So we go about the village asking questions, and thanks to Aaron’s amazing dice-rolling, Kineo found an old lady willing to spill her guts.

Long ago, the grandfather of Ugg betrayed a living Jarl by tricking him. The then-chieftain invited Jarl to peace talks, only to murder him instead with the very axe that Ugg now holds. Ever since then, Jarl has haunted the tribe.

With information like that, this side-quest was in the bag.

Without letting Ugg know, we had him wait out with us later that night until Jarl appeared.

Eventually Jarl appeared, yelling out “Betrayer!” in giantish (not that we could speak it).

We quickly swarmed him, and saved easily versus his attacks, or were immune to them.

Without warning, Kal cast a quickened True Strike and a Disintegrate to destroy the axe Ugg held.

We thought this would remove the earthly hold on Jarl, but nothing happened.

Uh-oh

Next we yelled out to Ugg to bow down and beg for forgiveness for what his grandfather did to Ugg. Ugg did so and Jarl stopped and began talking with Ugg.

We explained to Ugg what had happened and why Jarl was haunting him. Through Ugg, we found out the only way to remove the hold this world had on Jarl; we had to bury the axe that killed him and bless it.

Uh-oh

So we found the fine ashes of the axe, buried them in the snow and cast Bless on it.

Jarl solidified, saluted us, handed his axe to Kineo (who did the most combat damage to Jarl), and faded away.

Kineo handed Jarl’s axe over to Ugg and told him to either learn how to use it, or use it to make peace with any frost giants he might be at war with. He will choose the latter.

The next morning he thanked us for our aid, offered to one day repay us, and then told us where we needed to go find the magic we sought.

He pointed in a direction, told us to keep going that way until we came to an icy field that held many great ice worms (he describe remohrazes to us) and to follow a natural path to find a great wyrm of ice (obvious suspicion is a white dragon, but who knows).

So we rested up, and headed out.

We found a great icy crater with numerous large holes that we would have to pass near.

And, as expected, about halfway through the crater we heard a bunch of insectoid chattering.

We stopped in that cliffhanger as it was too late to get into a big combat.

Next week we start off with a combat.