Merry The Drunkening To Everyone

Sorry about no updates for a while, but with Christmas and New Years and work keeping me busy for a while things are a bit annoying.

I think I'll put the game on hiatus until after I come back from traveling, which will be around 18 January. I don't think I'll have either the time or the internet access to provide updates anyway.

So, well wishes for the New Year and hope you guys don't forget to come back.

On a related note, I'm going to be ending the game during the first half of 2010; work is going to be eating up a lot more time than before, so I'm going to have to cut down on side projects like this. However, I don't want to just drop this without finishing it, so I'll get you to Vladimir for a rather... interesting battle which I've had planned for some time.

How long the game lasts will depend on how often we do "live" IM RP sessions (the more we do, the faster we get through the material). Ideally the final battle with Vladimir will be done in one of these.

Late Evening, Day Three - Part 3

As the party stand debating what to do, the armed warrior woman looks over at the party, and shouts towards you, "Hey! You out there! Help me deal to these rampaging beasts and I'll assist you in your endeavours! I need two of you to fight alongside me!"

[There won't be an update later this week, obviously, as its Christmas, and I'll be away for a week. However, for those interested, here is the partial summary of events. Anyway, I hope you all have a good holiday, and I'll update you next week.]

Late Evening, Day Three - Part 2

The party heads around the corner, at first continuing to the right, then turning south following the sounds of combat. They stop outside a doorway, just as an almighty collection of cheers, growls, howls and other more monstrous sounds erupts through the open arch with the force of a strong breeze.

Inside the chamber, you see a ring of staggered seating ringing the outside, where a vast number of humans, animals, monsters, and all sorts of in-betweens have assembled, cheering (as best they can) to the two combatants in center of what appears to be some kind of combat arena: the floor, covered with sand, is splattered with blood, severed digits, rotting limbs and even scorched skeletons. The edge of the seating is surrounded by some kind of shimmering magical barrier.

The most recent combatants are still in the center of the ring; a large minotaur, and a pair of centaurs lie dead in the middle of the floor, slowly being dragged away - rather uncoordinatedly - by a team of wererats who seem to spend more time squabbling and hitting each other than on their actual duties. Two werewolves lie on the ground; one dead, and one clearly wishing he was. The sole "survivor" of the battle appears to be a tall, strong, muscular woman in leather armor that does a lot to hide her femininity. Still wielding a very big sword, she glances around before stabbing the wailing werewolf in the neck. He dies not long afterwards. She appears to be very tired, but is determined and continues to hold on to her sword.

Around the arms of the woman and the creatures, you see colored bands. Around the woman and the werewolves are red bands; the minotaur and centaurs have blue bands, while the wererats have rather stained white bands.

The "boss" wererat starts slapping and knocking together the heads of the wererats dragging the bodies over to the far left corner of the room (the north-eastern corner) where there is a hollow cavity in the staircase. The wererats finally get back to work, and begin stripping the monsters bodies and pushing them into the cavity, where you begin to hear some rather alarming sounds. One of the wererats pushes another inside the cavity as they argue over who gets to keep something taken off of one of the werewolves. It disappears into the darkness with a cut-off scream and a loud "crunch".

The call goes forth from an amusingly pompous fat wererat who shrieks a few barely discernible words into a black orb he holds in his hand. From a black box hanging from the roof in the center of the room, a slightly more intelligible voice cries, "Next challengers, enter the ring!" You watch as the force field begins to flicker.

Late Evening, Day Three

[Leremy casts Probe at a cost of 12 MP]

Leremy learns the following information about the room, its inhabitants and its contents:

• The mirrors appear to be a special type of superluminary mirrors; that is, they are mirrors specially treated with a magical potion that increases, rather than decreases, the luminosity of light reflecting off of it. The mirrors also seem to be removable; after all, if one breaks it would be much easier for any nefarious evil villain to send a lackey to stick in a replacement than go down himself to fix things.
• The candle, which is hanging in a small glass-framed lantern in the middle of the room, appears to be non-magical. It is about half the size of a standard candle. The lantern itself, however, does appear to be magical, or at least the glass is: it appears to be the type to filter out certain magical objects, so that there may be something else inside the lantern other than just the candle that cannot be observed either through regular sight or with more magical "visions".
• The walls and ceiling of the room appear to be normal; the floor however is pressure-sensitive.
• The young boy reading the book looks to be about ten. He had blond hair which is beginning to show signs of darkening, is dressed in a t-shirt and shorts. He does give of the noticeable magical markings of being a werewolf, and the book he is reading, "The Lycanthropic Omnibus" reaffirms this. He has a determined, if somewhat sad, look on his face. The book is not inherently magical, although obviously would be of interest to magical users.
  
• The middle-aged woman tending to the roses is oddly dressed in a light blue ballgown, which has become dirty and torn from tending to the thorny plants. Her shoes appear to be made out of some kind of golden material. The roses she is tending to are definitely magical, but there are a lot of them, each appearing to have a different magical property which changes every second: their scents seem to have either a restorative or punitive effect on the body, the petals and leaves would be useful magical ingredients, while getting pricked by one of the thorns would appear to have some kind of random transformative effect.
• The old man appears to be a little tipsy, though otherwise he seems to be just as he appears. The rocking chair appears normal, although the contents of his silver-lined flask appear to be some kind of fairy-mead-laced beer, so would also have some kind of magical effect if drunk.
  

As Reginald examines the doorway, he notices that there appears to be a gap in the wall. Examining it with his fingers and eyes, he sees that there is a sliding door, though how it operates he cannot tell from any sensory examinations he can make at the moment.

[I'm inferring that you guys want to move along the corridor rather than go into the room. So...]

The party heads along down the corridor for a short walk before coming to another intersection, branching east (the way they had just come down), south and west. To the south-west they can hear the muffled sounds of fighting: screams of pain, the clash of weapons and bodies, the snarls, growls, and cries of attack, and the thunk of heavy bodies hitting the ground.

[I'll be working on the "catch-up" document for those who are a bit lost, which will be of all the actions since the introduction of Reginald and Ferron to the previous update, including the IM RP session.]

Evening, Day Three - Part 3

Continuing to their right down the corridor presented, the party soon stumble across a doorway to their right [the west]. Through the doorway, shining through candlelight reflected through carefully positioned mirrors mounted on the walls, light trickles out in an almost celestial image.

Inside, wandering around, you see three people doing various, disparate things: a young boy with holding a large book, slowly reading through the outsized pages; a wiry, attractive middle-aged woman who tends to a large planter filled with red roses; and a wrinkly old man slowly creaking in a rocking chair, drinking out of a small metal flask.

To the south, the corridor continues on, though from the rather bright light emerging from the room the party can barely see the end of the corridor not too far from where they are standing; there appears to be a right turn in the corridor ahead.

Evening, Day Three - Part 2

[Sorry about the delay, it took me a bit longer than expected to get out from being under the weather. Also, I'll start working on the recent summary for those interested once my current work commitments for this week are over.]

The rather large party head off to the east, following the right-hand wall away from the room with the once-spinning floor plates. Continuing a little past the intersection of hard gray stone as the flickering light of their light source shows that the eastern end of the wall, the party see on the northern side of this corner the ancient curved scripture of the Arcana language.

After a few moments of translating, the party manage to discern that the text seems to say "The fountain is as vivid as gold." A quick search of the area reveals nothing else.

Evening, Day Three

[Re Character Sheets: Kit generally makes actual character sheets, though I can send you a possibly unintelligible spreadsheet page of your character.]

[Also, this will hopefully be the last of the short updates. I'd write more, but at present I'm actually sick and tired.]

The party steps out into the corridor, where they see stone passages branching off to the north, east and west.