OSR: Veinscrawl Session 7 & 8

Last session, the party discovered they were being hunted by a cave giant, several people encountered the dEr0 Conspiracy, and almost everyone went to a lovely dinner party with a Ghoul Baron.

The party consists of:
Cazael the spiderling fighter. The leader of the group by default.
Bill the wormling Orthodox Wizard. Has antlers, telekinesis, permanent wizard vision, etc. Is slowly growing even stranger.
Swainson the Garden Wizard. Formerly a hawkling, currently a dryad. Sensible wizard.
Christen Bell the weasel-ling Bell Exorcist. Keeps vanishing and returning, possibly on secret errands. Many Goblins. Full of teeth, bad plans, and poor impulse control.
Tuck the Flealing Summoner. Wants everyone to be his friend.

Just a reminder; these maps are player-created. Some information may be missing, mangled, or illustrated oddly.

The full map is getting difficult to read. Here's a zoomed-in section of just sessions 7 and 8.

Starting in the bottom right.

1. The party left Ghoul Baron Sulyvhan's fortress. They decided to head to the Fungid Valley, reasoning that fungus = cheap food and cheap food = easy money.

2. While traveling, the party finds a long shallow lake. A temple lit by green flames can be seen on the other side. Cazael falls in a pit while traversing the lake and nearly drowns. He is saved by Tuck the Summoner and his summoned rope.

3. The party cautiously enters the Temple of Arithane. An invisible oracle, dwelling in sulphrous fog, tells them it will trade spines for answers. The oracle can tell them the location of any person or object. It wants diseased, deformed, or unusual spines.

4. After not looting anything in the temple, the party follows the water down. After hiding from some sort of cave bear (who may or may not have been a dEr0 construct), the party found a path next to the river. On the side of a river, they encounter a traveling group of masked medicine sellers. Clad in heavy robes and carrying many strange bundles and flasks, the medicine sellers greet the party on friendly terms.

Swainson: "Potion seller, I am in need of your strongest poisons."
Medicine Seller: "You don't know what you ask, traveler. My strongest potions will kill a dragon let alone... tree... person.."
Swainson: "Perfect. I said poisons. Got anything that can kill a cave giant?"
Medicine Seller: "We may. Our strongest poison could kill a cave giant or a lesser being... and their entire family."
Swainson: "Excellent. One giant-killing poison please and thank you!"

After swaddling the flask of giant-killer potion (a waterproof clay jar marked with four skulls), Swainson left the medicine sellers alone. Bill, however, was negotiating his own deal.

Bill: "I'm tired of sleeping. Terrible things happen whenever I fall asleep. Do you have anything that will let me stay awake forever?"
Medicine Seller: "We do, but I must warn you..."
Bill: "Done. Yoink!"

And so, Bill the Wizard can no longer fall asleep on his own.

5. The Many Goblins were temporarily unsupervised. They explained to the medicine sellers that they wanted a potion to, "make more pig", pointing at their sonic piglet pet. The medicine sellers took most of the gold the goblins had and handed over a glowing green flask of something volatile and rattling. They then ran away with as much dignity as they could muster.

The next few things happened in quick succession. It's important to note that the party was on a narrow downward-sloping path next to a rushing river.

6. The goblins fed the duplication potion to the sonic pig. The sonic pig split into 2 sonic pigs. The goblins squealed with delight.

7. The rest of the party realized that the goblins were up to something and moved closer to investigate.

8. The pigs split again into 4 sonic pigs. They also started glowing slightly. The goblins cheered again.

9. The pigs split again into 8 sonic pigs and began attacking the goblins in mindless bloodlust. The characteristic dubstep wub wub wub of the sonic pigs, the screams of the goblins, and the consternation of the party filled the air.

10. Swainson decides that things are getting out of hand. She uses woodbend on herself to make her hand gigantic and slaps it down over the rambunctious pigs. One accidentally detonates on impact, filling a 30' cube with spam-flavoured foam.

11. Bill panics and fires prismatic ray at another pig. He suffers his first DOOM, loses all magic for a day, and also panics. The pig explodes into a further 30' cube of pink oily foam.

12. Chaos ensues. Swainson hangs onto her pig. Tuck attaches one end of  his summoned rope to the ceiling and the other end to a pig, then hoists himself above the foamy battle below. Cazael, sick of pigs and goblins, starts hitting them left right and centre, adding more foam to the battle every time he explodes a pig. His enchanted ice sword starts freezing the foam and the mist from the river, adding to the environmental chaos.

13. Bill, now devoid of magic, realizes he's leaking poison gas from his ears. His capture wind spell that he'd banked many weeks ago had three hours of poison gas from a trap inside it. It was now boiling out of his brain. Heroically, but perhaps not wisely, Bill leapt into the river to save his friends. He would spend the next three hours clinging to a rock, periodically dipping his head into the water, and shivering.

14. The foam briefly cleared to give the party a glimpse of the sonic pigs signing a formal treaty with the goblins. No one was sure if that actually happened, but when the foam finally faded into a thick layer of spam-grease, the goblins were just as excitable as before. They also has 12 identical pig spines to trade to the Temple of Arithane.

15. Secretly, the goblins ran back to buy a second duplication potion from the medicine sellers "for later".

Sherbakov Stanislav

16. The party returned to the Temple of Arithane. On the way, a strange swarm of void wisps, little semi-magical creatures, swarmed the party. They demanded they break their oath to Yorminthal the Giant and kill him. The party readily agreed. When strange little elemental things tell you to do something, you do it, especially when you're down a wizard and up several coats of pig foam.

17. Only Swainson and Cazael had questions for the oracle. They banked the rest of their spines for future questions. Swainson wanted to know where Yorminthal was. "Just 200 yards away". And where was Tschana, the knight Cazael had once served? "In the land between life and death. Not dead, not dying, but living neither."

18. After resting overnight, the party continues their journey along the river. They get lost, hear screaming, and encounter a belligerent Beholder. The multi-eyed horror began firing eye-rays at everyone. As, once again, panic broke out, Christen Bell used her magic bells to put the creature to sleep. 

"Hurry friends!" Tuck said, handing one end of his summoned rope Postidon-Pru to Cazael. The two ran in opposite directions around the slumbering Beholder, wrapping it in 230' of rope. As the Beholder, now wrapped like a ball of yarn, began to wake up, Tuck connected the two ends of the rope. It began to rapidly contract to 5' long, squeezing the surprised Beholder. It tried one last burst of disintegrate, but the rope held. The Beholder... burst.

Magical chunks of meat and strange fluids rained down on the party. The Beholder's meat was too tempting for Swainson, Bill, and the Goblins to resist. Despite Cazael's protests, they gulped down gobbets of octarine-tinged flesh.

Swainson became more charismatic. She also gained a second face on the back of her head, a smile that lingered in the air like a floating crescent, and a few other minor mutations and perks.

The Many Goblins became wizards, sort of. Mechanically, they gained a magic dice and a spell slot. No one was quite sure what happened, but the goblins all started wearing pointy hats, cobweb beards, and going, "hrrrm, wozard stuff," from this day forward.

Bill tried a few lumps of flesh and only felt a bit wiser. Disappointed, he gorged himself and went permanently insane.

19. Luckily, Bill still couldn't cast spells, and he was physically unimpressive. The party tied him up, gagged him, and Christen Bell put him to sleep with her bells. They debated what to do next. Cazael seriously suggested leaving him behind, but Tuck had a better idea. He had a silver key that let him access dreams.

"My cult once used this key to enter the dreams of... initiates. We would feast on their dreams of food and emerge fully nourished. Nice boring dreams, nice boring initiates. And drugged too. But..."
"No," Cazael said.
"To rescue your friend?" Tuck said, playing on the fighter's sympathies.
"Fine," the spiderling sighed. "Anyone else want to go into the wizard's dreams?"
"I should stay out here," Christen Bell said hastily, "in case he starts to wake up."
"And I'm the only wizard left. Besides, putting one wizard inside another one is probably a sin or something," Swainson said.
"Yap," said the goblins, nodding in unison.

20. And so it was that Cazael, Tuck, and an entire string of goblins grasped the silver key, stuck it into Bill's ear, turned it, and vanished in a smooth schlorp of magic.

21. Inside Bill's fevered and nightmarish visions, the diverse and terrified group battled through fragments of memory, delusions, and false paths to reach the metastasizing beholder-madness clawing at Bill's mind. The goblins blinded it while Cazael, dream-ice-sword in hand, smashed it's central eye. The anti-magic core shattered, blasting all magic out of Bill's head, but also all magically-induced magic.

It was very lucky indeed that Bill was cut off from magic. If the dream-explorers had entered while he still had spells in his head, the spells would probably have devoured them. If he'd been fully charged with magic when a dream-beholder's anti-magic burst went off inside his mind, he would no doubt have died, or been driven mad. But for 24hrs, thanks to his Doom, he was a mundane wormling.

Cazael, Tuck, and (one can only hope) all of the Goblins were ejected from Bill's ear. The wizard woke up refreshed and at least as sane as he'd been before his Beholder-induced madness.

During their escape, the goblins had grabbed a dream-spellbook from dream-Bill and, somehow, brought it into the real world. The dream-spellbook contained only dream spells which, ordinarily, wouldn't have any effect in the real world (because they use dream-logic and dream-physics), but in the hands of the goblins...

22. Continuing their journey, the party ran into two leather-wrapped squidlings setting up a trap. The party set up an ambush of their own. While they suceeded in dispatching two of the servile humanoids, they did not expect a strange tentacled creature in black robes to slither around the corner. It fixed the party with a hungry, inhuman glare, and unleashed its full mind powers.

23. The party proved too stupid for its psychic assault (none of the characters have an Int above 11). It took control of Bill, but the wizard still lacked magic and could only flail as the rest of the party beat the tentacled horror to death. They looted several valuable occultum pieces from its purse along with a few articles of strange technology.


What else would they find on their journey to the Fungid Valley? Can Bill continue to avoid his well-deserved demise? How many dangerous items can the party carry at once?

Find out next session.