CotAB: Entry 15 (Alias, Dragonbait and bread)

As mentioned before, we decided to leave Yulash before heading into the pit to free up some inventory. We figured this would be a great time to hit up our old stomping grounds: Phlan!

Disappointingly, what once was a huge city full of prestige and culture has become just a couple of stone shacks with some chickens or ducks or something. The housing development company that developed the city designs of Shadowdale, Essembra, Voonlar and Teshwave must've gotten their paws on Phlan, razed the town and put up the same track housing they've put up in the rest of the Dalelands.


We established our cromulence in the Moonsea. After killing our first batch of pirates on the way to Phlan, the second batch heard of us and turned tail and ran. Ha!

Still, on the way back to Yulash we were followed by some green-robed religious weirdos. They said they were "following the 'chosen ones' to Yulash." It may have been a good idea to kill them right then and there. Looking back it seems pretty obvious that the "chosen ones" they were following were actually us and that they hoped to take part in our "sacrifice" later (i.e. "kill" us later).

The Pit of Moander has thus far been filled with a lot more dialogue than I thought it would have. Excellent bonus. It's like the most social cave we've ever been in.


There were smells all over the place. Not necessarily bad smells.


I could not figure this out. Often the smell of bread would accompany the company of giant slugs. I'm no baker. Do slugs have anything to do with bread? If so, I'm only eating meat from now on. Does bread have anything to do with death? Did you ever see that episode of M*A*S*H
where Winchester has a near death experience so he puts himself around patients who are about to die so that he can ask them what they're going through? He gets no results until he finally finds a guy about to die at the Battalion Aide Station and just before the soldier dies he says "I smell bread." Maybe it's like that and we were smelling the bread of the slugs' minds before we squished them.

We also smelled tar just before we met the chick. Can't explain that.


Around the corner we met this pretty bird named Alias and her pet lizard. She's the official image of Curse of the Azure Bonds. She's the girl. Although in the promo picture her hair looks like she just stepped out of a salon, but now, in the middle of the Pit of Moander, her hair is pretty agitated. She does wear some armor that totally exposes her HEART, but I totally don't mind. As soon as she appeared, Rex and I glanced at each other. This wasn't a "hey, check her out" glance. This was a grimacing "alright, it's on pretty boy" glance. He actually thinks he has a chance over me? Ha! The simple fighter doesn't know that there's a distinct advantage to being a fighter/cleric/magic-user. I can be whatever the ladies want me to be.

Her lizard is from some other dimension.

Okay. Follow that? I don't get it either. If she's already gotten rid of her Moander bond, what's she doing here now? Since when do bards have enough power to build giant golems? Why would anybody be named Dragonbait? Isn't that just asking for trouble?

Alias finally spoke something that I understand. She mentioned the matter of treasure behind the main altar.


Thankfully the hallways thus far have been surprisingly empty. We really had an easy time exploring around. Alias mentioned that it gave her the creeps since just a short time sooner, the place was "crawling with monsters."


It's stuff like this Zhentil letter that makes me think that our job would be a lot easier if we just waited for all the bad guys to kill each other.


Looks like Alias is also part of the Swanmays. Probably even more original than that dark elf who tattooed Chlorine. Alias was like "So the dark elf has taken the name of the organization I supposedly belonged to. That's something I'll have to investigate." Hmm. An organization composed entirely of hot tattooed chicks? Now that's something I'll have to investigate!


The major battle on level 2 took place right in the middle of some crossroads. It took a lot out of us. The slugs have this 60 hp erasing acid spit thing going on.

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CotAB: Entry 14 (us: 1, Yulash: 0)

I'm pleased to announce the completion of the map of Yulash. It came with much hard work. There were robed weirdos, green moundy things, bad guys, good guys and beggars that we totally had to mow down with our killer fighting moves in order to map this place once and for all for the good of humanity. It's not like we like mowing people down, but society should have thought of that before they thought the crappy map they gave us was good enough.


I don't like slum life. Everybody hated us there! It's not our fault we eat well and have nicer clothes than they do. I pity them. I pity them for their ignorance, not their extreme poverty. Some of them shared a little bit of information that would have been useful if we weren't anal about mapping every inch of town for ourselves anyway.


Ok, maybe I'm young and I'm not "getting it," but what's up with the "checkpoints?" The looters and the pink plumes went out of their way to explain where the checkpoints were, but once we got there we couldn't rest or anything. The plumes would rouse us and tell us to move along. What? Are the checkpoints just to rub it in our faces that they can take a nap in the city, but we can't?

Speaking of the plumes, not all of them are very nice. At least they'd rather fight us than whatever is in the pit. I'm incredibly brave and everything, but while fighting and killing the plumes that were deserting their duty, I considered something pretty disturbing. These guys actually felt that they had a better chance of beating us in a fight than whatever is in that hole. It's simple mathematics, really. We might be screwed.


Near the entrance to Moander's Pit, some shambling mounds were arguing over some kind of clerical wand. No idea what this is about. I didn't even know clerics used wands. It's called a wand of defoliation. That either means it melts plants or it's good for your face pores. Why do I care? That's why I became a fighter -- a lot less schooling.


So here's the pit.


Demesne: land attached to manor and retained for the owner's own use.

Seeing the pit itself, I'm not so scared anymore. I mean, it's just a hole, right? He could have at least put the pit in the mouth of a giant skull entrance or something. This, this is just weak.

I'm pretty sure we're going to head back into town to sell some of our loot, and uh, rest up a bit first though.

The video this time around has a sneak peak on what we may be up against next time. We sort of unofficially goofed around after we officially finished with this blog post's session. Looks like our next entry ought to be pretty exciting.

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: