Session 22: Player Thoughts

This past session, marked probably one of the biggest surprises so far. Some of us knew it was coming up, but know one knew exactly when, as it was completely left to the DM to decide. I believe it was two sessions ago that I told Eric secretly as to what was eventually to come about. And yet still I think it was a surprise to him since I have tried to intermingle truth with lies so that no one can figure out what is to occur next. So it was that my long lost character Glaive, finally joined the party again. At this point, there is so much I’d like to write, about where he has been, what happened to him, and why has he come back now? Sadly though, this would spoil some rather large surprises coming up in the near future. I am glad that it was Gustav who continued to persevere in getting to the truth ala Fox Mulder of the X-Files. But where one answer has been found, it has only led to a hundred other questions. Namely, how did Glaive acquire the Smoking Eye of Occipitus?

At the beginning of the campaign, I had a plan for Glaive. Before the first dice were rolled, I practiced Glaive’s interaction with his brother, throwing in a “yar” every so often. And through all the fun, I knew in the back of my mind that it was all a ruse, as there would be none of that for most of the first part of the adventure. Now through this return of the legendary Glaive, I went right back to how I had practiced him and threw sly word after sly word at Garland, only to have equal words thrown back. This should make things a lot more interesting for Eric and I as there will be a lot more word battles in the future; provided I can keep my character alive.

From the manifestation of Glaive, we went onto the classic dungeon crawl. For our party, this meant a very slow crawl, which is why I can only give the session 6 out of 10 swords. This is not the fault of the DM, it’s just the way we play our non-gun-ho party. We are a cautious lot. But when you’re dealing with cave after cave, caution can become pretty boring. Thank Veca that we had the incident with the badger being thrown into the portal to test the environment on the other side. It added a much needed moment of humor. Fifteen kopru who can dominate a weak-willed party? Let’s bypass. Over a hundred lizard slaves? Ignore them til we can save them. Twelve hook horror? Hide and then sneak by them. That’s the kind of party that the Thralls of Vasharan are. We keep it real, but we lose out on combat opportunities. We are pretty much trying to make it to the master of the place in order to deal with it right away, as we did with the Lemorian golem. Particularly since time is a bit pressing with Anzak, Orbius, and 300 other pirates likely to show up at any moment. What’s a little bit discouraging as well is that the portal to the boss that we thought we were going to enter, is a portal that leads to a maze of chambers greater than what we just went through. Meaning we’ll be doing a lot more searching and encounter avoiding, in order to find the Big Fish that’s runnin the joint. So Mr. DM, feel free to force some encounters on us.

In the end, it was still a fun day of rollplaying and adventure, meaning that the wait for the next session will seem as long as ever.