Chapter Five: Golems

After successfully rescuing Bobbit from the Catacombs under Coldwake Pond.

4/13/19

{1st Denta 6737}

When the Lucid Dreamers comes back out of the water Markku and Broxx see a dude (a wight?) on the shore who contorts his top and bottom half of his body. He has piercing blue eyes and a helmet on. 7’ tall, super creepy. He disappears down an alley.

Party holes up in an inn now that it’s 2 am and gets some rest. Not the best part of town. Markku wakes up to find another letter from Heigel talking about a party at the college soon. Today is the 2nd of Denta, a Peaceday. The party is on Lergday, the 12th of Denta. Markku sees signs for this around town.

{2nd Denta 6737}

Broxx has some friends he is trying to find and spends most of the day investigating. A gnome helps us find them in the catacombs eventually but they are acting super crazy. Seem to be rationing food and scared out of their minds. Rangrim was able to calm them down though. They tell a story and it features this blue eyed scary creature who killed some of their guards and likes to stare at them all the time wherever they go. It apparently won’t let them leave the city too? They were attacked on the road which is when the guards died. It can tear you to pieces in seconds. Oor thinks we might have been followed but by something with yellow eyes this time.

Teft is a human fighter, Sigzil is a human wizard. Used to be in guard at Girdev (dwarven city, south of DRB, in Duthgar). Sigzil promoted to sergeant. Broxx & Rangrim from Girdev originally. Party leaves the catacombs once the gnome has negotiated his fee. Splitting up to see if we can learn how to defeat this blue eyed demon guy. Markku goes to a library in the Market area of town.

Rangrim looks into religious texts and finds out the first men were worshipers of ‘The One God’ from which the 7 Seen/Unseen were created during the Great Battle, to fight The Scourge (mystery). WarForged were made as servants/helpers during this time also. The Scourge destroyed civilization as the First Men knew it. Stone ones are from The Scourge but the silk ones are from the First Men. Created through divine godly power, not mechanical works. They are almost impossible to kill, and can rebuild themselves. The two types fight each other. These exist also in the Silent City (first city), Taljet (Tortal), Old Vashton (largest); all First Men cities.

Broxx looks in the Market and soon finds clockwork creatures and animals being sold. There is a bit of a range from wind-up toys to real high end animated metallic creatures, moving, talking (chirping) available for sale. Also sees white discs being used as floating carts. Horses are drawings these discs around holding a ton of weight. Sees odd clockwork automatons working around town as well. It seems gnomes are always the ones making the advanced ones. The larger these creatures are the less powerful and complex they can be. In Forgelight more automatons are around, lots of forges and temples to Torag, plenty of people selling armor and weapons and the like.

Markku discovers texts that mention creation of golems. There are advanced arcane texts that are often quite intricate and difficult to make as well as expensive. The easier ones to create are necromantic, like zombies and the like. This is looked down upon. Some people talk about harnessing human souls into golems. Some historic ones it is unclear if the golem creators were killing people to do it. Golem tech isn’t banned outright but heavily restricted to avoid demonically evil practices. Some texts about wild golems, or different types requiring different methods to combat. Research on WarForged vs Golems and trying to create WarForged Golems. Basically says they are incompatible, but veins that hold up Golems are what WarForged are really made of. Essentially, Golems are crude approximations of WarForged without their pure, elemental, souls or whatever. Unless they are made with human sacrifice, which is evil. The “Philosopher’s Stone” of Golem making is to create a WarForged version without human sacrifice.

4/27/19

{3rd Denta 6737}

Party spends time discussing what to do with new knowledge. Settles on going outside city walls and seeing if Golem creature follows/tries to attack. Teft and Sigzil are not keen on this idea, but party doesn’t just want to run and hide and wants to figure out this creature better. Party decides to go southwest of city and camp out near some sparse trees.

Party goes out next morning to camp. Oor sets up some traps or alarms with silverware and rope and party waits for something to happen. Eventually party sees a cloaked figure standing still several hundred feet to the northeast. Oor asks animals in the area to help find movement of another creature to the north eventually finding some sort of weird, metallic, spider creature which hums. Seems resistant to damage but Sliver of Roekosan helps it do more cold damage. We defeat creature just in time for the Golem (presumably) to get close and round 2 of battle will be next time.

5/4/19

The golem dude shows up and stands over the dead spider thing. Rangrim takes a step back and gets smacked down, dropping unconscious. Markku releases a Ray of Frost upon seeing this but misses.

Now that creature is close up and here, Broxx can tell it is very similar to mechanical arcane construct that ravished his party recently. Creature pulls away its cloak, revealing itself to be an arcane construct. Gaps in the armor reveal metal bars holding it together, as if someone put armor onto a construct. Its chest starts to open, hissing with steam, and reveals its hollow interior. It reaches forward and tries to pull Broxx into his gaping chest hole.

Markku discerns that complexity of creature is on border of evil soul and really advanced non-evil soul. If it starts talking, we’ll know it is evil soul creature. At the moment is solely focused on Broxx, bypassing Oor altogether. Rangrim does not believe this is a WarForged, but definitely a modern construct. Based on battle damage, non-magical weapons will probably do almost nothing to this creature, as well as poison and psychic damage.

So Markku continues blasting rays of frost, finally hitting. Rangrim and Broxx set up complimentary spells and wards to buff combat. Golem tries to bend down and engulf-hug Broxx again but fails to, so turns around and swings at Oor, missing. Markku tells the party to use magical weapons so they can actually do damage.

The construct keeps trying to eat-hug Broxx but isn’t doing any damage to him. Broxx is suddenly overcome with fright, reliving terrible memories, and runs past the construct, chucking a smith’s hammer but missing quite badly.

Oor drops the mace of demoralization next to the construct and attacks again. The construct keeps running, the party realizes, towards Sigzil, who is cowering, paralyzed in fear. Markku runs towards Sigzil and teleports between him and the construct. Teft runs towards the fray to help his friend and the rest of the party follows. Oor viciously mocks the construct and the buffs keep stacking.

The construct hugs and consumes Teft and then takes off running. The party follows in hot pursuit, blasting it with spells and attacks as possible. Markku calls out for Teft but hears nothing.

Rangrim is struck again and falls once more, but is revived by Broxx. Sigzil finally joins the fray and does plenty of fire damage, now that he’s done being scared.

5/18/19

Golem keeps running, Markku takes a wallop. Rangrim heals Oor and tries to keep the Golem from escaping. Sigzil finally joins the fight and fires an arcane acid arrow, barely hitting. Rangrim gets hit and falls again. The party is finally close enough to surround the golem and slow its escape. Broxx is struck by a needle when the Golem opens its chest again, pulling the syringe from Teft and shooting it into Broxx’s neck, who falls asleep, but is woken by Sigzil as he runs by. Oor and Markku continue chasing and attacking as their companions fall. Finally, the golem starts to fall apart as the rays of frost begin cracking ice up the back of the creature, breaking off parts of its body, including its arm, and opening the chest cavity. As the group hits it again and again the holes only widen and Teft becomes more visible, still curled in a ball not moving. Markku helps Broxx pull him most of the way out but he wakes up, falls back in, but manages to climb out himself.

Broxx investigates the Golem and sees it is mostly just iron, made by a smith in some way (showing hammer marks) as opposed to magically created, in some way arcane (no clockwork). Markku looks at the purple liquid in the jar (connected to the syringe) and determines it is probably not arcane or magical, but just a sleep-inducing poison. The construct itself is modern in design (not WarForged), crafted and then animated (so not self-healing). While damage can be done to the body, the arcane essence means that damaging the body doesn’t necessarily damage the creature/sentience/soul… Doesn’t appear to be highly sentient, so likely not created by soul infusion. Most likely, some means of arcane remote control to this creature, and something/someone was piloting it from afar. Only way to guess who it was is the direction it came from and where it was going (roughly from NE to SW). Markku suspects the college but doesn’t voice these suspicions, but does bottle a dose of “Sleepy Poison”. Failing to find the invisible spider back where we left it, the party heads back to town to The Cross and finds a shop with a gnome inside. He is disgruntled when we enter but quickly warms up when invited to investigate the interesting construct we brought in. Markku shows him the vial and he reveals it to be “Drow Poison”, which really only causes drowsiness when in the bloodstream. The gnome says what Markku suspected, that the machine was controlled, possibly by a circlet of some sort, from a great distance to control movement. The gnome isn’t the best person to ask, being trained in clockwork, not arcana.

After an unnecessarily long conversation about how to transport this thing, Markku spends a gp to rent a cart and our speed is much increased. We enter the Market District and head to an arcane store named “The Constructs Counter” which is filled with construct animals of all shapes and sizes and even a variety of humanoids. There are two gnomes and an elf inside; the elf comes outside and is quite surprised by the obvious military application. He explains how the circlet would work to help control this and multiple other constructs at the same time, examining the arcane symbols in the head and body. He also shows us several of the humanoid constructs in the back and explains the difference between immersive/sluggish constructs of lower quality and the higher quality constructs that are activated by thought alone and don’t require total immersion.

Oor is apparently looking for an Orcish noble to sell the broken construct to for the art value… Markku asks about distance, identity, etc. that could be known from just looking at the construct, but this is something that only can be known for sure by looking at the circlet. There isn’t generally an upper limit on the range, technically, so there’s no way to know for sure how far this could be coming from. Constructs can be directed to perform a variety of tasks, such as patrolling, following someone, travelling in a certain direction, etc. Some even continue doing their tasks after their master has died.

Oor buys a construct gorilla.

6/15/19

Party leaves the shop and heads to an inn. Because Teft and Sigzil aren’t comfortable staying in the same inn the party relocates to another inn closer to the wall: Jesse’s House. Jesse was a Halfling and the inn is now run by his great-great-grandson Dawson. The building isn’t the most up-scale; there are stains in some rooms and is “definitely-not-a-brothel”. Broxx, Teft, and Sigzil have restless nights.

{4th Denta 6737}

The next day, the party does some individual roleplay, starting with Broxx shopping. Broxx goes to Forge Light to buy a magic Greatsword and is sent to The Everburning Forge or The Everburn which is a giant, old forge. Very impressive. It’s also the temple to Torag in Forge Light. Broxx buys a really pretty golden +2 greatsword.

Rangrim investigates the temples and religious areas to check on his wanted status, essentially. More confirmation that the town guard is worthless and the House Denneth guards are the real deal. Finds a temple to Bahamut and starts asking a priestess about Gurdev and the temple there. She starts getting suspicious but he persuades her that he isn’t a threat.

Oor found information on working jobs – he tells Markku that House Orion is sending people below to find artifacts and is selling them to the Crimson Codex.

Markku tries his hand at playing cards to bolster his funds. He finds a decent establishment to gamble at and a small while later has earned about 5.5 gp.

Naydor shows up and politely declines an invitation to the card game but tells Markku that he has made some progress on his research on the orbs. He came to Old Vashton to research in the Crimson Codex library and found that a number of these orbs were housed somewhere in the Thebilum Empire.

The Thebilum Empire has a giant wall that can’t be crossed that runs the whole way around the country. Markku is smart enough to know that the wall isn’t entirely natural but the wildest stories about its abilities are likely untrue. There is a gate between Mer-Rein and Thebilum but hardly anyone is allowed through it. Markku does know that explorers and adventurers in the past did try to climb it but he knows of no one who has succeeded and or anyone who has tried in the last hundred years or so.

He isn’t sure exactly where, but travel between planes was apparently a common occurrence in the empire and likely there were many in the major cities. Possibly there may also be an orb down in the Silent City, which is south of Rameth, the capitol city of Carthorka (close to river and bay).

Some of Naydor’s friends (wink wink – The Fey), though not very precise with their magical ability, have been helping out and providing magical assistance with prophecy. It seems there is a tunnel or catacomb in Open Gate that eventually leads to the Thebilum Empire. According to “our friends”, the prophetic seers, certain actions will yield positive results for the quest of finding another orb. There’s no way to precisely determine what the positive results will be, but if fate is on our side we will be helped.

While Naydor is explaining, Oor, Teft, and Sigzil show up and Naydor starts re-explaining everything to Oor. Realizing his card game is over, Markku thanks the tablemates and excuses himself from the table. When Naydor is finished explaining, Oor brings up the work that House Orion is doing (with the Codex) and thinks it’s a great way to do 2 quests at once. Markku tentatively agrees but asks Naydor if he saw any sign of this while he was at the Codex. Nador says he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Markku brings up the upcoming University open house party and realizes Oor wasn’t listening when he first mentioned it. Markku decides to agree to Oor’s plan and the group heads back to pitch the plan to Rangrim and Broxx.

''[Markku has decided the best way to confirm or refute his fears about the Codex, his mentor Orm, and understand Heigel’s warnings is to perform this work for House Orion, learn what he can from them about the Codex, and be better prepared for the party in a few days. Also, finding another orb is very important.]''

''In Discord Role-playing – Naydor gives Markku a small glass ball that provides guidance on this quest (to restore the fae orb). Oor is sore about this and he and Markku spar''