Hook:
The tower stirs as repairs begin again. Floors above and below may unlock, if the recruits can avoid the eyes of Rector 9
040 - 250811 - Level By Level - Tower Descent I
Date:
446 PC, Brightwane 39
Players:
Die-Anna (Kate)
Raven (Danielle)
Sorrel (Blu)
Dev the Wizard (Paul)
Odett (Nadia)
Loot:
NA
After Actions:
Die-Anna
Brightwane 39 Report for the higher ups, Me, Dev, Raven, Sorrell, and Odett decided to go to the tower. And we definitely HAD A PLAN…. Well we mostly did but luckily Dev spotted a to do list of sorts by the maintenance hatch on the first floor. So we set about aligning the attunement crystals. The tunnels were prettyyyy tight, but not for me and Raven! Shorty squad forever
So we set about looking for the crystals. We found this cart corral of sorts with 4 carts… which would have been helpful with going down the tunnels but unfortunately they were all pretty rusted! so we had to go by root. After crawling the right tunnel about twenty feet on our stomachs we had a nice short walk of about two hours… we really wished that those carts were working. But if they had maybe we wouldn’t have spotted this little trinket on the side of the tunnel.
It was some strange frame with glass panels that was in the shape of a poly-poly-… uhh like a 3D octagon. I thought it was a cool paper weight but after I showed it to dev (idk he could use it for tomes) but he spotted that there were runes on the frame, ones for mending, light, and communication I’m pretty sure. Sorrel also spotted that the area we found it in there has been a scuffle, like someone ambushing this poor paper weight. As we went down the tunnel we found another one, a little worse in condition but we picked it up anyway. (I’ll make sure to leave these with the egg heads). So anyway we kept our pace and finally we ended up in this larger area where poor odett, Dev, and Sorrell could finally stand up. There was a ledge and when we looked down there were a bunch of these giant crystals! They were all different colors and these octo-guys we found down the tunnel were floating around the crystals. They were floating around and bumping into said crystals.
Luckily we didn’t have to scale down as someone before made a ladder going down the ledge, there were tunnels in the cliff as we went down, more access points from different parts of the tunnel. There was a plinth at the bottom of the cave which Sorrell was able to make work. It gave us a strange message (I WILL POST LATER I AM AT A DRIVE IN) and let us know we had 1,530 tasks left after we aligned the crystals with a stunning rendition from the bard William of Joel. All in all it seems like we’re gonna need to work more at this tower.
Dev the wizard:
Die-Anna had an idea to go back to the Tower’s sublevels to see if we could get it working a little bit better. I’m fascinated by the knowledge that the Tower represents – the old magic of the past still feels alive to me there – but I feel like I’m in over my head when it comes to understanding exactly how all of its systems are supposed to work. Fortunately, Sorrel was planning to tag along – and our artificer has skills that don’t involve pyrotechnics. Blokk and Glokk only presented a minor impediment. They’re just bullies that wouldn’t be worth anyone’s notice if they didn’t have the threat of Rector-9’s authority backing them up. We also ran into Nettie, who seems to be friends with Odett. I don’t think I’ve met her before, but she had the most beautifully braided beard and the soul of a poet. She pissed someone off badly enough to get stuck on guard duty to monitor anyone who visited the revivification chamber. She clearly wanted to ditch the boring job to tag along with us, but duty (or more likely fear) won out.
I forgot just how cramped the access tunnels are in the sublevels. Raven had no difficulty with them, of course, and Die-Anna decided to copy Raven so she could easily pass through them as well. For Odett, Sorrel and myself, they proved to be much less accommodating. Maybe I’ll get the crick out of my neck before my curiosity convinces me to do the next damn fool thing… I remember the old work orders and notes near the access point and pointed them out to Sorrel. He felt that they indicated that the Tower systems could use some work. We continued onward in hopes of a more concrete plan of action. Instead, we found tunnels that required most of us to literally crawl through. There were tracks for some kind of cart system, but working carts were in short supply. And nothing was designed for tall people, anyway. On the bright side? We didn’t run into any of the memory-eating eels that attacked us the last time we were here. So, at least there was that. Something was attacking the magical-mechanical drones that were responsible for maintaining the place, though. We found a couple of destroyed ones during our travels.
Eventually, we found a large chamber filled with crystals – green, teal, opal, and violet. There were a lot more of the magical-mechanical drones, but these were working – flitting around and bumping into the crystals. It was quite beautiful – I wish I could share it with you, Sophia. We descended to the bottom level of the chamber and found a plinth, which seemed more vibrant than the ones that we had interacted with before. Die-Anna (I think… it might have been Raven) started to interact with it and I suggested that she check to see if it could tell us what it wanted to be fixed. And it had quite the list – 1,536 open tickets. Sorrel took over, and got some kind of cryptic recording to play and there was a code. Hopefully he remembers it, because by that point, my brain was fried. He managed to figure out that none of the crystals should be violet. I climbed up to take a better look at the closest violet one, and it sounded wrong when the drones bumped it.
Die-Anna thought the power of the songs of the famed bard William Joel could re-align the crystal harmonics. None of us had any better ideas, so we let her try. Her harmonica rendition of “Piano Man” did something, but it wasn’t working. She passed her harmonica up to Raven, who also played. The rest of us joined in, singing in hopes that the power of song and friendship might heal the discordance in the crystals. And it worked! We closed six tickets, and left the place working a little bit better than when we found it. It almost made it easier to slog back through the cramped tunnels to get out of the Tower and go back to camp. Almost. I wouldn’t have traded the experience for anything else, though.
056 - 251117 -Duct Duty - Tower Descent II
Hook:
Let’s do our best Handy Manny impression and fix the tower!!
Date:
446 PC, Highflare 29
Players:
Die-Anna (Kate)
Raven (Danielle)
Donk
Dev the Wizard (Paul)
Draylor
Loot:
Magical carving tool [Dev]
After Actions:
Dev
High Flare 29
Was I this annoying? Actually, don’t answer that – I’m sure I was worse. Merry hasn’t set anything on fire yet. They’ve found a new experiment – tea brewed from rhinuffalo wool. I haven’t tasted it, but it smells like boiled socks. More to the point, everything in my tent also smells of boiled socks. Including me.
So I was out early this morning – I made it to the mess tent in time for breakfast and a show. Draylor was trying to keep a low profile – literally lurking on the floor in hopes that Cook wouldn’t notice him from behind the counter. Raven and Die-Anna got him a breakfast sandwich, and then kept asking him questions. They got louder every time he shushed them. I figured I’d join in the fun, and placed a big blinking arrow right above Draylor’s head. Cook must be mellowing, though. When he finally noticed Draylor, he just glared… no thrown vegetables today.
Die-Anna suggested we could go on a Tower repair mission. There are still hundreds of uncorrected faults after our last trip. Who knows? Maybe if we can get the Tower’s brain working well enough, it can help me figure out a way to get out of the Rift and back home.
We stopped by Sarna’s tent for supplies before we left camp. The fairy was still in a very mellow mood today. She supplied Draylor with three headbands enchanted with a light spell that had been found in some forgotten temple, gave Donk a dolly and a lot of shea butter, and even loaned me her set of amulets of psychic resistance.
When we got to the Tower, we noticed Rector-9’s goons were conspicuously absent. Donk mentioned seeing something about preparations for him to leave the Rift tomorrow for the rest of the month. I’d love to know whether he’s finished with his fact-finding mission and he’s going home for good, or if he’s just leaving to perform some dark ritual for his patron and will be back worse than ever. It’s probably just some bureaucratic nonsense – but when have I let the truth get in the way of a good story?
We approached the access point to the sublevels, only to be stopped by an elderly Tabaxi named Six Bull. He’s a friend of Nettie – a very concerned friend of Nettie. She went exploring into the sublevels yesterday, and hadn’t re-emerged almost a full day later. We promised that we would look for her.
Draylor said he saw a weird green lizard on the wall that looked directly at him and then evaporated. No one else saw it. I can think of a few possibilities: 1) more weird shit happening because the Rift is where weird shit goes to happen; 2) Draylor wants attention; 3) Draylor is going insane; 4) Draylor is god-touched. Really, after writing them down, I suppose any or all of them could be true.
I really need to learn a spell to shrink if we’re going to keep exploring the sub-levels of the Tower – they were designed for the gnome engineers, not humans and especially not Goliaths. At least I had a better time of it than Donk. I cast Tenser’s Floating Disc and rode that around – he greased up and we pulled him on the dolly. But I’m glad he came along – we wouldn’t have been able to open several doors that had swollen shut without him.
Nettie accidentally discovered a teleportation device and inadvertently trapped herself in a recycling room. She was famished when we found her.
Draylor performed our one actual repair of the mission. We found a room with a rune carved into the floor, partially filled in with powdered quartz. In a storage cabinet, we found a small bag with more powdered quartz (and a magical carving tool that I added to my collection). It was just enough to fill in the rune and complete the engineers’ project that had gone unfinished for decades.
The rune’s faint glow turned into a thick syrupy light that rose up into a glowing blue ball. There was a smell of sandalwood and a click, and we heard a voice say “System memory restored.”
We noticed a plinth panel that had activated. Die-Anna poked at it and triggered another memo. It mentioned enrollments on the rise even as suitable faculty was on the decline, but the most unsettling thing was the way the Tower system talked about itself – like it was aware and capable of independent action.
We explored a little more, and Draylor almost got us stuck in a permanent deep freeze. The gnome engineers or the wizards or somebody had used elementals to power a cooling system for the Tower. The containment unit had cracked some time ago, letting them escape – but they were just chilling in the room. Until Draylor decided to catch one in his sleeping bag – then the others started moving towards us to attack.
Raven sliced the sleeping bag open to free the sprite, and we made our escape. But Nettie said she saw them join together as one entity as we fled.070 - 260316 - Fault in the Mage Tower - Tower Descent III
Hook:
Dev attempts to delve deeper into the sub levels of the tower. Searching for something that needs to be fixed.
Date:
446 PC, Ashfall 12
Players:
Die-Anna (Kate)
Dev (Paul)
Draylor (Raph)
Sorrel (Blu)
Fisher (Ben)
Loot:
Spider-Leg Harness [Die-Anna]
Other items TBD
After Actions:
Fisher:
Ashfall 12I suppose it is long past time that I began keeping a journal as well.
I’m gradually coming to terms with it—and he taught me that one must first name a thing to begin to understand it—I may not be the mage I thought I was. Barnabas, there is more of the cutpurse in me than the mage apprentice you would prefer. When caught betwixt my quick knifework and my book learning, the knifework seems to win out. Call it instinct or thickheadedness if you will, I find the theoretical mysteries of the mage to be less practical. Even after years of study, my limited command of Draconic means that I can hardly make heads or tails of the grand designs Barnabas laid out in his sketchbook.
No, I have had a breakthrough of a rather more mundane sort than the kind the mage would have through pouring over his tomes. If I can’t hope to follow in Barnabas’s footsteps—gods know what happened to him after that fire—I should play to my strengths. I may be the coward for running, but I've always worked better with a crew. After the forest people twisted my mind with their enchantments, I raided Barnabas’s book of spells to learn spells of defense and mental command. Gods be good, that will not be happening again. Let the mages of my current company outpace me with spells—magic is just a tool same as the knife or the crossbow. I’ve gleaned enough to protect myself and others for as long as this contract binds me, which is enough until I can learn more of Barnabas's fate and rally a rescue.
Enough internal monologuing. Maybe thoughts such as these are what made me pick up my head and notice the general sour mood at camp. Perhaps since realizing magic can only help me so far, I’ve started to see Dev's mood shift, or maybe its just the crummy weather lately on this plane (demiplane?). Dev’s been positively devilish ever since I prevented the others from interrupting that ritual a few weeks past. Even Draylor seems to be struggling since he gave up the drink, and is lacking an outlet for his ribaldry since that tiff with Cook barred him from the kitchen. I know one thing that is bound to cheer everyone up—getting some scouts together and learning some more about the depths of that mage tower. I'm heading off to Draylor's to gather the others with his "beetle signal" at Dev's rooftop. Hopefully, we discover something that can cheer us all up, and don't find anything dangerous again.
Dev:
Dammit, nothing in The Obsidian Ledger of Hells’ Arrears seems helpful, either. I can’t take being stuck here in the Riftspan knowing that Sophia is being threatened back home.
Die-Anna surprised me when she climbed in my window. I should probably upgrade my warning spells even if I’m trying to get out of here as soon as possible. She said something about Draylor activating the Beetle Signal – I still can’t believe that became a thing. Before she could tell me what Draylor got into this time, we heard multiple thumps like something fell off the roof and hit the side of the building a couple of times before hitting the ground.
We went outside and found Sorrel laying on the ground, bruised and bloody. Apparently, he tried to jump down from the roof. Fisher and Draylor – still in beetle shape – soon joined us. Die-Anna made a pitch for us to go find Nettie and see if we could fix anything at the Tower because it might cheer us up. I don’t know, it didn’t make a lot of sense.
But part of me is happy that my friends see that I’m hurting and want to try to help, even if they don’t really understand everything that’s going on. And there’s every chance that some of them are also having issues too – I haven’t been the most observant person since I got Sophia’s letter.
So I said, “let’s go.”
The Tower has never been a silent place, but today it felt different. I sensed something beneath us. The mage lights flickered slightly in a rhythmic way. The gaping hole in the floor that Thalia’s team left when they removed a plinth months ago has never been repaired. Someone did a half-assed job of covering it over with a wooden pallet. Today, it felt like an even bigger violation – the shadows just felt wrong.
Die-Anna spotted some specks of light that were moving almost like bugs. She tried unsuccessfully to catch one. They seemed like some kind of feedback resonance caused by decaying magical infrastructure. Draylor thought they were some kind of soul-powered tubes. He said that Ragnum has a theory that after the collapse, the Tower took souls to power parts of the city.
We found Nettie still watching over the revivification chamber. It looked like this is her regular assignment now – she’d found a more comfortable chair and was working on some unidentifiable crochet project. Nettie asked us to keep an eye out for something that she lost. She was very cagey about what it was – she just told us that it had her name on it and we were not to open it under any circumstances.
We made our way down to the recycling room, where Die-Anna found some parts that might work for the car she is building, Sorrel found some pleasant-smelling oil, and everyone found some weird bolts. Oh, and I found Nettie’s journal.
I was a little tempted to see what she’s been writing about, but curiosity is not a good enough reason to break my word. I put it in my pack unread, much to Draylor and Sorrel’s disappointment.
Draylor noticed a hatch in the floor that had been opened recently. Sorrel pulled the heavy hatch open again. Stale air carrying the scents of ozone and oil escaped. We went down.
Pipes and conduits lined the walls. Crystal housing hummed with magic. There was a mechanical hum, but Sorrel confirmed it sounded wrong – rough somehow. He grabbed one of the smaller crystals. It flickered to life briefly before dying completely.
We saw six numbered doors and a bunch of faded safety warnings in gnomish. Draylor, the only one of us who can read gnomish, intuited the numbers were just a navigational aid and were not part of a puzzle.
We decided to try the door that looked like it had been used the most, and we found the gnomes’ break room. The cramped room had dusty benches and faded safety posters. Draylor found a note that talked about repairing an anchor point in Hall A.
Inside, there was a gnome-sized observation deck. From that vantage point, she could see enormous conduit rings circling a central platform under the center of the Tower. She watched the arm of a mech come into contact with the wall over and over again, but from this distance she couldn’t discern what it was doing.
Die-Anna spotted a catwalk that led out to the structure, and she led us to it. A glimmer of arcane energy crackled along the floor. Draylor tossed a bolt down. Partway through its fall, it was zapped by a bolt of arcane energy… and it took a long time to fall. When it reached the bottom, the room flashed.
Draylor wanted to fly over to where the mech was, and at first thought that he might be able to carry a small version of Die-Anna with him. However, we discovered that Die-Anna retains her mass when she shape-shifts and Draylor isn’t strong enough to carry another person through the air. The rest of us walked carefully along the catwalks.
Sorrel was unhappy that the engine? System? Device? had been repaired several times over the years and was "not up to code." I am awestruck that something this complicated could be imagined and constructed. The idea that it’s still running at all this many centuries later is amazing.
Draylor ungracefully landed on a gimbal arm about 15 feet above the automaton. It was making repetitive motions, trying to trace a carving. The only problem? Part of the carving was missing and each time it reached that part, the automaton started over from the beginning.
Sorrel made his way over to where the automaton was working and mended the gap. He repeated this process a number of times until the mech was able to finish. When it was done, it ascended to a wire cage where it spit out a long ticker-tape covered in gnomish shorthand. Draylor and Sorrel worked out that it was 300 years of error reports that were finally fixed.
We went back to look at the other doors. One rusted shut, but Sorrel was able to magic it open to find a gnomish locker room. While we were waiting, Draylor told a variety of bad jokes. With each one, a light flashed and a number on a display went up. Draylor eventually told us that it was labeled “number of terrible jokes” in gnomish.
We found [cool stuff TBD]. We also found an old political leaflet, about the pride and honesty of the gnomish people. It decried the bigkins that stifled the gnomish spirit – including the gnomish sense of humor.
Draylor led us to another door, and it opened without a problem. Something activated and a massive frame lowered a cage from the ceiling. There was a crab-like device with six legs inside it. Sorrel identified it as a gnome-sized climbing harness. Die-Anna decided to give it a try and just started punching buttons. For one moment, it looked like it was made for her. She’s going to have to put in some time to practice if she really wants to use it. We managed to get it into Sorrel’s bag of holding to bring it back to camp.
On the way back, I gave Nettie her journal. She had almost finished a mitten while we were exploring, and as soon as she got the book, she crocheted it inside. Then she made the mitten disappear into her beard. I really wonder what she wrote about in the journal.
Nettie invited us all to a reading of the first part of her new epic poem in a couple of nights. I’m going to go unless some new disaster has me occupied. I can’t help my sister if I lose myself, and I feel like that’s something that was starting to happen. Thank you, Die-Anna, Nettie, Draylor, and everyone else for reminding me that people care about me.
I kinda wonder if Nettie is really going to work a Draylor & Cook slash fiction plot into her poem… I saw her making notes after Draylor said that he loved Cook.