Kingmaker: Sound of a Thousand Screams, Session 1, Part 2

Over the week that followed the 1st bloom, the rulers of Caerelia frequently checked in via sending with Feywatch, the town/garrison they had built outside the Castle of Knives. But Feywatch’s commander reported no activity at the infamous ruins in the Thousand Voices forest. Other corners of the kingdom similarly reported no unusual activity.

During that week, Aakif the arcanist hit the books, and Orseen the gnoll warpriest held a celebratory feast with one of the fey black swans as the main dish. The feast briefly became the talk of the town when the participants were rendered horribly ill by the experience. Save for Orseen, whose heroic constitution saved him from harm. Luckily for the rest, they lived in D&D land, and some remove disease and lesser restoration prayers were all that was needed to erase the lingering effects of Orseen’s ill-considered dinner.

The 2nd Bloom

Late in the 7th day after the whirlpool incident (day 8 in the adventure’s reckoning), a messenger arrived from Tatzylford – the forests east of town had been replaced by giant mushrooms! The PCs had seen this before, and immediately sprang into action – they wanted to nip this incursion in the bud before it swallowed another town! The party teleported to the edge of town and then flew over to the affected area, arriving close to sunset.

The group explored the area on their flying carpet, and here I ran into a bit of a problem. The mandragoras populating this bloom have very good Stealth checks, and can hide underground on top of that. They can’t fly and they have no ranged attacks. The PCs failed their Perception checks, and… then what? They didn’t land the carpet because they didn’t find anything of interest, and the mandragoras didn’t reveal themselves because the PCs didn’t land. This is the sort of thing that makes me feel like not much thought gets put into these high-level adventures, with regards to how high-level PCs operate.

At a loss, I rolled a First World random encounter for the group to run into, and got pixies. That provided a brief distraction but didn’t move things along, so I tried again and got… a unicorn. They ignored the magical equine and kept flying around.

Exasperated, I finally just had the little plant people appear. The carpet rounded a bend and – there they were! Thousands of mandragoras! The PCs did what I expected them to do, which was to go up as high as they could and still be in range and start fireballing. The mandrake folk burrowed into the ground. Impasse.

The frustrated adventurers flew around some more. Satampra the swashbuckler got it into his head that he was going to chop down a mushroom – I’m not sure why, exactly, but I was grateful for the opportunity – and so they landed. Or rather, he got off and the others remained on the carpet, hovering.

Naturally, the bloom’s inhabitants popped out of hiding/the ground and attacked, leaving the swashbuckler poisoned and partially drained of blood. He leaped up to the carpet and Aakif teleported them back to Tatzylford.

That Plant is Poison

Back in town, Aakif wracked his big brain for information on the plants and recalled that they became sluggish in the dark. I was going by the writeup in the adventure, though I see now that when Paizo published the mandragoras in Bestiary 2, they changed their weakness to supernatural, and not just regular, darkness. In any case, the adventurers resolved to go back in the dead of night (end of day 8/start of day 9) to take advantage of that, this time loaded up with delay poison and plenty of area of effect spells. The delay allowed the bloom to spread into an adjacent hex, which luckily for them was not the town’s!

This time the arcanist directly teleported the group to the spot where they had last been attacked, and used his circlet of mindsense to find a burrowed mandragoras. Orseen yanked one out of the ground, causing it to shriek! (everyone saved) Then thousands of the little buggers came out and swarmed the group! Swords, firestorms, and fireballs had soon destroyed two swarms’ worth of plant people. When that happened, the rest of the mandragoras suddenly fell over, dead! There was high-pitched keening sound once again (only properly heard this time, as they weren’t underwater) as greenish energy bled out of the earth and the mushrooms. The glowing stuff mostly evaporated into the air, but some of it was sucked down into the mandragora bodies. Then the light show ended, and the terrible noise with it. All was silent and dark.

The dead mandragoras radiated the same type of magic as the swan corpses. Aakif claimed one for study, and out of fear of the unknown, the rest were burned. It was now Day 9.

The arcanist took the little dead plant person over to Last Hope, the town with the best Lore bonus in the kingdom, and did his best to figure out just WTF was going on. Unfortunately, he uncharacteristically flubbed his Spellcraft check (as outlined in the sidebar on page 11 of the adventure) and had not yet formed a workable theory. All he could do was speculate that the corpse was infused with First World energies, but what that meant he did not know.

The Clock Keeps Ticking

When the Emperor returned to the capital, he was immediately informed that the castle had received word from Feywatch! A large group had appeared at the ruin gates, it was reported, and then flown away! This was the 3rd “bloom”, the Horned Hunter and his hunting party, setting off to find the sword Briar. But the players did not know that yet.

Next: hunted!