In other D&D news. My players finally got their ship powered up. Plus they have the ability to have two outfliers. It's a living ship/elemental airship hybrid created in direct defiance for WOTC saying in spelljammer that if the ent in a living ship died it can't be replaced by another one. The players love it and are excited to get underway to the next part of the adventure, their first offical job on their first offical airship. Escorting some traders to the kite festival in Cara Cara where they will play through a home brewed, beneath the hills of crooked sleep. Deep beneath the crooked hills something ancient is awakening...and the players have all shared dreams of a singing amber monolith....the rest of the multiverse waits and watches for there is a prophecy that when the monolith rises it heralds a reawaking of ancient numenara across the multiverse.
Looking back they just left the Town of Gumption with an open invitation to come back anytime on the house. They arrived to find the town surrounded by night by an army of the dead, the leader of which a Banshee; the ghost of an archfey known to one of the players's characters who spent 2000 years petrified and was released from stone in an art gallery of historical statues when a spell went awry and several statues turned out to not be works of art, but magical petrification. A manticore, a chimera, a griffon, and a few people were thawed. <The ship's navigator.
The ship's captain, who spent several years in their backstory possessed by a demon, only to return to themselves and find that their wife had vanished without a trace...a few sessions back they ran into a hag in the swamp who seemed to recognize him, and spoke glowingly about what a wonderful negotiator he was, and what a hard bargain he drove, and how most mortals would balk at doing her kind of business but he'd made her an offer she just couldnt refuse...and how well it's worked out for her, and made an off handed comment about doing business again. (The party was hunting some rogue "Commodore Drakes" (Komodo Dragons) that had once been well trained by a drake warden ranger, but after having somehow escaped from their pen, they consumed a gnoll and were infected by the demonic ichor, as the infection took over the drakes were xenomorphed into shoosova and were hunting and killing large beasts in the swamp, including a young black dragon and a Catoblepas(which is how they ran into the hag) the captain gave the hag one of their riding lizards in exchange to let the party go unmolested, and she turned the lizard into a new catoblepas. Well the party teamed up with an enclave of rangers that i had the players each play one during combat so instead of five level four characters going up against two shosoova they had 9, and one loaded with explosives...(my players were out of character really worried they were gonna get tpked((mainly because the monk has nearly died(and one time died died in almost every session lol)))Anyway...they ended up defeating the giant telepathic demon dogs and finding out that they'd not killed anyone inside the walls of the town, because the army of the dead protected it from them...so the party started to put together some things they'd discovered over the last few sessions...the drakes had grown too large to have left the kind of tracks found around the town, and there had been some sabatoge inside the town, and the druid had noted that the tracks left by the lizardfolk ranger had looked familar...as the kenku rogue ranger was gathering their explosives that hadnt been used during the ambush (the party wiped the fiends before they made it to the boom traps) he rolled a one to disarm the trap and so he blew up, and because he was literally laden with explosives and bombs...he red misted into black feathers. When the party confronted the lizardfolk he failed his deception check and the party succeeded their insights, and so he tried to shape shift into a giant frog and swim away but the party caught him and brought him back to town for trial, where in he was kicked into the garbage pit in the center of town and before Kevin the Ootyeh(a local tourist attraction) made short work of him, he looked up at the party and swore that the Lord of Hunger would hunt them till he tasted their flesh, a gnoll ripped out of his flesh and the party artificer disintigrated him with a natural 20 using her laser pistol. Session ended with the Night hag watching them celebrate with the townsfolk from her cauldron while talking to someone. "We'll be seeing them again soon, and he might not survive the coming test...that won't be a problem for you will it?" And the captains Missing wife all sithed up steps out of the shadows and says: "Not with me." The players loved it which was fun for me. Well last session the captain had a lucid dream where he got to role play through some of his amnesia for his missing time...discovering that the demon who'd possessed his body was a servant of the Demon lord of hedonism and pleasure(a good one for a bard) Graaz't and thanks to the captain, this prince of desire had gone from 3 levels of the abyss to four, with more expansions going well ahead of projection. While the captains body was possessed his soul had spent most of its time in the Argent palace as a VIP guest and during that time managed to put themselves in a postition to learn things that will come in handy for future campaign things; but they spoke with an avatar of the demon prince himself, his true form is beyond the captains mind to process, so a "presnetable human looking avatar steps out of the giant shadow form and is connected by a tether of shadow, and speaks to the captain like an old confidant(which the bard player loved) they made a deal of sorts. (nothing like the disingenuous legalese weighted contracts of the devils...no this...is an agreement among businessmen and gentlemen, because the captain reminds the demon prince of himself back when he was a mortal eons ago...so the captain asks for a way to deal with some "old friends" who tried to have him killed, and a soul to trade to the hag for his wife back... he wakes up with a bottle with a demon soul inside and an obsidian dagger(an artifact known as a vestige of divergence, the blade of obsidian mirroring, given to the Champion of the Prince of Desire...