CotAB: Entry 12 (this one's quick ('cuz we died))

Voonlar...er wider than a mile -- I'm crossing you in style some day.

Voonlar: romantic name -- same exact city as every single other city west of Moonsea.

On the way in we were stopped by the forboding Zhentil Guard. They let us go because of our "cursed sigils." I think one of us has said this before (maybe it was me), but these cursed bonds may be a good idea to keep. Sure, sometimes they make us lose control of our bodies, but at the same time, the bad guys leave us alone because they think we're one of them.

Actually are the Zhentil guys bad? I keep losing track. I swear I'll keep up with the politics on the next campaign.


Hmm. We couldn't determine if they were speaking figuratively when they said that "Moander once crawled..." If they were literal, we figured that that would be good, because if we faced him we'd know that he was a cripple. Of course maybe they meant that he had a bunch of centipede legs, then I guess that would also qualify as a crawling action. Brrr. Freaky.

So after hearing about Moander and his swaths, we discovered the "war blasted" section of the city. Apparently Voonlar traveled into the future of artillery.

Voonlar Map!

Here's our first attempt at cartography with our new mapping spell collaboration. Like it? Yeah, the walls are a lot more straight looking. Plus, from what we could find, this is the only Voonlar map on record on record on the magical web!


Too bad the war-torn remains of Voonlar are vast, but dull. Look how much emptiness there is with the rooms! Best we can tell, this Moander guy or creature or whatever started some kind of environmentalist cult here. Guess it's hard to find true environmentalists willing to actually BECOME roaming plants. He got a couple. Looks like he cut them into several littler monsters after they converted. I'm just guessing. I can only imagine that they had something less gross in mind when they decided to become environmentalists.

So we dealt with these tree huggers in the form of shambling mounds and vegepygmies. The few cultists we found that were still human, collapsed to form a giant green mound of monster. It's tragic because the cult leader was a pretty hot woman. Check out her picture on the map. The big mound called itself "bit o' Moander." No idea what that means. Does that mean Moander is a collective or does that mean that a small part of him is able to possess a large group of people? Doesn't matter. The living mound is simply a dead mound now.


I guess this slash in the forest is related to the tavern tale we heard. Hmm. what could be at the end of this evil swath?


Hmm. Turns out it's a simple encounter with displacer beasts. Yeah. That's it. Nothing even remotely earthy. Environmentalists are just like rainforests. You just ignore them and they go away.

There's a lot more to talk about, but we're going to cast our "restore game" spell to put us before our little adventure in Yulash. Pilgrim and Disposo were totally killed in the battle. That's a bummer because Disposo is an elf and even though elves are like immortal or some crap like that, they're the only race that can't be raised from the dead.

Okay, correct me if I'm wrong, but if elves are the only race that can't be raised from the dead, doesn't that mean that every race is immortal EXCEPT elves?

Elves, man!

Freaking useless.

Here's our video:

You may notice that the video is even a bit more boring than normal. This is because we're doing the map at the same time rather than touching the map up after the adventure. Sorry. We know the video is nearly unwatchable, but at least it's not edited or censored by the man! Yeah, the man totally doesn't even acknowledge us.

CotAB: Entry 11 (tesh pains)

We journeyed to the town of Teshwave.

If I understand my pop music history, Tesh Wave was less important than the New Wave movement, but still plenty important in progressive new age circles.

We decided to take a river cruise to the city. The last thing I expected was for the ship to be taken by pirates. I was sorta hoping that The Tesh would make a concert appearance on deck. After dispatching the pirates, the captain gave us his own personal thumbs up, which is nice just in case The Tesh shows up on the way back downriver and dazzles us with some wicked piano.


Teshwave had its own share of boring tales.


Fortunately Teshwave also had its share of unexplained ruins just outside of town. Here is our map of Teshwave:


You'll notice from our map that the only real interesting stuff in the ruins happen near the beginning. We got into a skirmish with a wacko priest (lots of those guys around -- business must be good), some fighters and some hellbeasts. They were chasing around a map like a bunch of keystone cops. The map was described to us as a "cryptic map marked with an X." How cryptic is that? Everyone knows that a map marked with an X is not cryptic. The X is always treasure (unless it's porn). Maybe we should have just called it a cliche'd map.

Notice the question marked area in the middle of the map. That area led to a weird other area that we mapped out over to the left side. I don't know if the ruins are cursed or something, but we found ourselves infinitely going through doors to the south. We could get out by searching north, but we didn't find anything in the area besides the heartache of infinite trapping.

After nailing the treasure we bumped into beastie encounters right out of The Island of Dr. Moreau.

These cat things were at least part Connery.
These phase spiders actually didn't appear in battle, which was totally unfair. They get phasing powers and cloaking powers? It's just like that one episode of Next Generation where they come across an experimental Romulan ship that was trying to achieve just that. In this case, however, I think it was a bug in the bugs' programming.
Here is a margoyle. He's thinking.

So yeah. That's it. We still have bonds that control us. Or do they? They haven't done anything to us at all since we're "off the path." We could live out the rest of our lives as adventurers and the bonds wouldn't affect us at all as long as we stay in the right dive towns.

Anyway, Rexbasior carried a few sets of splint mail with him all through the ruins because he thought they were magical. They were only worth 40 gp. Ha!


In some exciting cartography news, we've hit upon an exciting new development. What has happened in the past is that Silver would use her magic quill of cartography, then Disposo would take the parchment and use his scanner of fortitude, then I would retrace the map into another mapbook, then Chlorine would add the calligraphy, then Pilgrim would cast a publishment spell into the blog. The process building the maps has just had too many steps. Well, just a couple of minutes ago, I found a really simple feature in my Book of Photoshop that makes the quilling of Silver and the scanning of Disposo obsolete. We also came across the Quill of Wacom that makes us all able to quill directly into our book of maps. We also overlapped the mapbook with the Book of Photoshop so that we have some serious grid going.

To sum up: a Wacom Tablet and actually bothering to flip the grid option on in Photoshop, should make mapmaking much much easier.

Here's the vid:

Voteth!

Hey y'all. This may be bad timing considering how inconsiderate we've been with the lack of questing and posts and all that, but we could use your help right now. Someone nominated our magical blog for some Blogger's Choice Awards and even though we have absolutely no chance of winning, we'd still like it if you would vote for us and our humble series of quests. Hopefully this will be a wonderful tool for us to grow the Blogging Forgotten Realms community. The work we do in the East Moonsea/Dalelands region does not need to be so niche! We nearly die (we often really do die, actually) for the work we're doing! Is it so crazy that we'd feel some kind of need to be recognized? Is it?

Anyway, here are some links. Clicketh away!

Vote for Blogging Forgotten Realms!
Best Geek Blog
Best Blog About Stuff
Best Hobby Blog
Best Pop Culture Blog

And we know we don't fit into the "pop culture" category of blogs that much. Plus I don't even know what "Best Blog About Stuff" even means. Fact is, we could be nominated in four categories, so whoever did it (obviously a very intelligent and handsome man) probably just picked the four categories that he felt best fit.

P.S. -- Also notice we put some voting buttons over on the sidebar for now.

CotAB: Entry 10 (tower records)

Aaaaaaaaackkkkk!

I'm so sorry! I know we've slacked off before, but not like this! Please, tell your friends that we're back to the adventure! Well actually, I'm about to talk about stuff we did several weeks ago, so I guess we're not really back in the thick of things. We're just back in the thick of talking about things.

Anyway, we had a couple of questions asked to us from the last post. One query asked us how many bonds we have left. Well, we've gotten rid of two. So however many left from that, I suppose. How many did we start with again? Let me hurry and check Wikipedia... Ah yes. We started with five, so I guess we're down to three.

The other question simply said that this blog is awesome. It's not really a question, but I do agree. I especially like our maps. Speaking of, here's the current map for our latest session:


Notice that I've taken great care in marking the new Tower of Oxam area we covered. The new stuff is in blue. This map is quite important because we ran into several rooms with beholders in them. If you happen to be in The Tower of Oxam, try to steer clear of beholders. They are exceedingly difficult to put down. On the plus side, if you flee in terror before you even engage them in combat, they tend to leave you alone.


We did bump into a few living things we didn't have trouble wiping out of existence. I'm not exactly sure why the beholders invited all these pansy villains. Are they just going to kill them after they take over everything? It's kind of like when Germany invited Italy to that whole world war thing. This Drow Lord, for example was someone we were able to bully around (to death, actually).


He left behind an invitation, but the conference of beholders still wouldn't let us hang out with them. We flashed the card, but they still came after us. Here's a funny candid:


Yeah, that's right. I just posted a picture of me running like the sissy I am. It's okay, though. Look how many floating heads of death there are!

This was all at the base of the tower, but at the top there is an underwhelming view and some ridiculously cramped space. Here's a half-assed map of the action:


On level 7 we did come to this interesting room full of people we killed. It was kind of funny since there wasn't much room to fight. We kept bumping into each other. It was pretty hilarious, but yeah, like I said, then we killed them.


So then we fled. Will we ever conquer the tower? I dunno. I'm thinking it's about time to head somewhere else, don't you think? We might come back later.


Isn't it great that I'm a level 11 now? I got to a point that I'm actually going to try the "friends" spell even though it's a sure bet that it's useless.


Here's our video log of this entry's adventure:

Webcast by Ustream.TV

Well, that's that. Let us know where you want us to head next!