CotAB: Entry 13 (Yulash miserables)

One thing I think we forgot to mention about the annoyance of not being able to let Disposo die: his very name means expendable. Somehow he's now the least disposable out of all of us. That's irony, right?

We made our way to Yulash and were amazed to find it NOT inhabited by the same two huts with a brown fence and chickens in the road that look like ducks. Rather, we found an interesting city at war with the Zhentil gang. I don't know very much about Zhentil Keep, but I think one of our bonds is a Zhentil bond. Zhentil is beating up on the Yulashers, so it only made sense to approach Yulash in a friendly way.


Ha!


I can only assume that the girl who literally trod on Rexbasior's heart is the wonderful Princess Nacacia that saved our bacons back in Tilverton. Did she actually get kidnapped again I wonder? Every time she gets kidnapped she seems to have everything under control. Most other kidnap victims aren't actually able to apologize to bystanders. Maybe she had to flee the city in a hurry because she's not in good with them. Perhaps Yulash isn't a good place just because they're enemies to our enemies. Maybe there's something more sinister about her than we realize.

The coolness of the Yulash uniforms sealed the deal. We decided to be friendly with them.

Yeah. It was fun fighting the Zhentil crowd, but they were more difficult than some of the fights we've been doling out lately. Disposo could totally die soon.


After our battle and a few high-fives, we met up with the commander of Yulash. Friendly enough chap. Dresses well. He seemed to know our whole life story.


I'll be honest, when he said there was a swanmay with us, I just smiled and nodded. I HAD ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHAT HE WAS TALKING ABOUT. Later, I did a little research and back perusing of some of our previous adventures and I realized that way back in Entry 5, Amanda Overmyer bestowed such a title on one of us. I think it was Chlorine and I think she still has no idea. Turns out swanmays can turn into swans like lycanthropes can turn into dogs. No idea why the men of Yulash find such favor in this. Maybe it's because only chicks can be swanmays and there's an obvious amount of wet nudity inbetween swan and human.

Anyway, he goes on:
For the most part he was right, but there was at least one group of Red Plumes attacked us. Maybe he was being really literal when he said they wouldn't molest us. I dunno, though. Chlorine's virtue as a swanmay may have been challenged if they beat us in a fight. OMG! That was so funny that I actually implied that Chlorine has any virtue!

Here's the map he gave us. Obviously the Yulash magic copy machine is made by the same people who made the Tilverton magic copy machine. We couldn't read the map very well, but it does imply that Yulash leads to Moander. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the writing on the northeast exit says "To the Pit." The Pit of Moander is undoubtedly our next bond removal.


Here, of course, is our map, which is incomplete at the moment, but is gonna be way better than that pedestrian map they gave us.
Here are a couple of things we heard in the mess hall that the commander graciously gave us access to:


The dragons appearing in the waterfalls of the new age river is pretty interesting, but the gossip that Zhentil Keep terror teams are in the area seemed a little useless. I mean, aren't these guys in the mess hall already fighting the Zhentils every day?

It didn't take us long to find some Zhentils in town. Looks like good old fashioned urban warfare. I anticipate we'll finish cleaning up the city next week before hitting the pit. Tragically, the cities populace is most hurt by the warfare:

Tragic.Aw. This brings tears to my eyes.
Ha! In your face Silver! You know better than to keep your wallet off a chain around these no-good bums!

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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!

We're still here!

Shoot. Is it time to update the blog again? OhcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapOHCRAP!

Okay, there was a serious miscommunication on our part. Don't worry. We're all okay -- no need to come looking for us. About a month ago we were all pumped for the next entry, but we got totally loaded on some wicked mead and passed out for a week or so in the local tavern. Then we just sort of awkwardly sat around for a month or so.

Anyway, to state again -- THE BLOG IS NOT DEAD, so keep reading.

A new entry is coming shortly.

CotAB: Entry 9 (girl's underpants)

Now that I've achieved the 5th level "raise dead" spell, I think I'm going to be taken far less for granted in our little party. We've been shilling out over 5000 gp every time one of us dies, but now I can take care of that -- at a reduced price. 'Tis a shame that I'm constantly the first one to die.

It's not only expensive, but tedious to raise the dead commercially. I'm not there for it, but to re-animate my corpse at a temple, I need to actually have the gold on my person. Often my dilapidated corpse can't handle the extra weight, so we have to trade armors or whatever and then the party has to (I guess) set the gold on top of my body when they slide it across the temple counter.

Mapped out a little bit more of the Shadowdale dungeons.


The change in wall scenery from earthy to castle wall-ish struck us as a bit odd. I mean, we are underground right? Is this some kind of freaky underground castle? Plus there are like, really hard monsters down there. Black dragons and dracoliches. I thought there was only one dracolich, and we got rid of him. These, though, attack a bunch at a time and DON'T get entangled in trees.


I was unconscious at the time, but I guess the rest of the crew met up with this guy named Tarsus. Tarsus? Is that a religious name? It is a religious place. I suspect he's some kind of religious scam artist. Fortunately for him, our one really religious person was conked out cold. Yeah, I know I'm evil, but I'm still religious. Had they known how much a "tithe" is, they probably wouldn't have taken him up on his offer. I woke up and I seriously was like, you guys gave away 10% of our money?


Actually, we didn't even bother counting our money. We are so freaking loaded.

We decided to bail on mapping the rest of level three. There's gotta be some serious awesomeness down there, but we didn't even know why we were there in the first place and we were getting pummeled. Rex wanted us to set a timetable for pulling out, but we decided to just cut and run immediately. Even if we eventually would have found oil in those caverns, I'm pretty confident we made the right decision.

Just like that weird guy said, we journeyed northwest. Bumped into a farmer who had some ettin problems. After killing the giants, he gave us "the first home cooked meal in many days." After that we wound up in a town called either Dagger Falls or Daggerdale. We saw it spelled both ways.


We had to stay in the barn because the inn "doesn't think much of Zhentil Keepers." No idea what that's about. The bå® (Whoa! What form of typing enchantment made "bar" appear that way? Mental note: ask someone about magic typing.) also gave us trouble, but the farming community stood up for us and our ettin-killing ways.

Dagger****(s) did NOT have a notable cave nearby. Instead it had a wonderful magic shop! Finally there's a place for high rollers like us!


After the magic shop, we were ushered to a tower. Yes, it is a maze-y type place, but it's a tower! It's not caverns! It's the Tower of Oxam. Yeah. Never heard of it 'til now. We began mapping it, but didn't quite finish. There's a big chunk missing from the very middle of this map because of our strategy to "always turn left" to avoid getting lost.



Besides the curious "Zhentil squad," we bumped into some other nifty monsters here. Ogres are big, but soft and this particular medusa wouldn't be much without her assortment of griffins. She looks like a more presentable version of the medusa we encountered in Phlan.


Yet another gasping character let us know what was in store for us: beholders.


And not just a couple of beholders, apparently we're talking about a corps of beholders, possibly with their own freaky floating-eye barracks. Now, up until that point in my life, I had heard of beholders. I had heard that they were very frightening and difficult, but a part of me was just like, yes! Let's be rotten to the corps! Soon we encountered the emissary.


Only 75 hp? An ac of 0? Yeah. We got this overgrown sclera covered.


Um. That beholder freaking wailed on us.

We'll have to get the thing next time. Or maybe go back to that cavern with all the dracoliches.

Oooh! Almost forgot. Don't believe me about all this stuff I've talked about? Well we got proof. We recorded the whole thing. Stupidly, Disposo set the continuous video image to show an obnoxious text of the word "mapping" to spin in the foreground the entire time, but you get the gist. To sort of witness everything I've talked about, check this video out:



Feel free to dupe it a thousand times until I see it on late night cable. Yeah. We'll work on better quality.