The Bleak and The Pearl [SoloDark] Part 17 - Past the Salamanders to the Second Shrine

 

Passing the Salamanders

A tribe of Salamanders make their home on the south edge of the valley in some of the slower moving lava pools. The road between the two shrines acts as a sort of edge to their hunting grounds and sometimes a few hunters will camp out here or there to snare a fire beetle backing in the road or to catch a cultist who dares wander south from their usual digs in the more northern arc of the valley. 

The road itself is amazingly well kept. Jonias Grunkheart used fuelstone in the cobble and unbeknownst to him the technology "feeds" off the Light (of which the energy is massive abundant here) and repairs itself slightly over time ("Does fuelstone itself feed off the light as a side effect of its alien origins?" 13, Yes, but... the full control requires an interface which is mostly lost (but might be regained)). 

Since the road does not connect directly to the Salamander tribe and since the tribe is not extremely sizeable and therefore unlikely to patrol the whole 15 or so miles of road, the chance to just randomly encounter is pretty small. There will be two encounter dice per "round" (once per six miles traversed). The first one is for non-Salamander encounters. The second is for Salamander encounters.  This second dice starts with a 1:6 chance for encounter. Once any sort of serious noise has been made, it goes up to 2:6. Once any kind of encounter that might agitate the Salamanders is made, it gets to be either 3:6. If the Salamanders are actively hunting the party, it gets even worse. 

Note: Salamander stats are on page 249 of Shadowdark. One adjustment is their flame aura. As long as the adventurers are wearing dragonsilk armor, DC9 at advantage will be the roll. 

The Old Oakburn Tree

In the time of Jonias, a Sulphur Dryad lived in this tree. In the hundreds of years since... (Does the sulfur dryad still live in the tree? 4 --> no..) she has passed on and the tree is now (Shadowdark room content table, 2 - Empty) mostly just a husk of its former glory. The everburning wood still catches fire but the tree itself is hollow and the leaves are long gone. The party will be able to camp here (without need of a campfire). 

There is one more round of encounter checks past the tree before they get to the second shrine.

Encounter checks:

• On the path to the tree: 6,6 --> No encounters
• First watch: 5,4 --> No encounters
• Second watch: 4,6 --> No encounters
• On the path from the tree to the shrine 3,6 --> No encounters [Doug's Note: there will be adventure in this adventure game, right?]

The Second Shrine

Like the first, it is a monolithic structure built out of a single large piece of fuelstone after Jonias Discovered *something* post-construction of the Lighthouse. It again appears to be a small stone building with a large cupped hand. Unlike the first one, though, this one is occupied (ShadowDark room contents --> 10, boss monster!) A Fire Elemental has moved into the structure feeding off the ever increasing pulse of Light. 

Fire Elemental

AC 15, HP 30, ATK 3 slam +6 (2d10) or 1 inferno, MV near (fly), S +4, D +3, C +3, I -2, W +1, Ch -2, AL N, LV 6 Impervious. Only damaged by magical sources. Fire immune. Inferno. All within near DC 15 [12 for the dragonsilk] DEX or 3d8 damage.

At the time they are approaching, the Fire Elemental is... (11 --> Guarding) guarding the entrance to shrine (is it pretty openly? 18...so yes, very openly). It likes its home very much.

Was it told to guard the shrine? (disadvantage) 15 --> Yes, but... (1-3: recent, 4-6 Jonias' time: 2, recent (Did the Efreet summon it? 19 --> Yes, but... Alloces summoned it and told it to guard the shrine but... )). Can it leave the shrine itself? (disadvantage) 6 --> No. Why did he summon it? 67 Secure 71 Magic + 12 Disagree 68 Kindness. He summoned it to help him manage the Light energy flowing into the valley but the elemental did agree with Alloces' "kindness"...Alloces wanted something like a friend and the elemental is way too...elemental.. for that, so Alloces bound it to the shrine and left it there to help protect it. 

Will it allow the characters to pass as long as they do not approach the shrine? 9 --> No, but... they could in theory convince it (this would likely require them to actually know about Uuld Alloces or to convince it). 

In some years recent, Uuld Alloces, an Efreet and once Jonias Grunkheart's ally, summoned forth a lower fire elemental to help guard the road and shrines. Over a few months, Uuld kept trying to have conversations with the strange creature and found the elemental simply did not respond besides in very basic, very logical sorts of ways. He could command it to cook dinner for him or to fight alongside him but it was not even a pet. It was simply a being of primordial fire. 

A little shocked at his own lonesomeness, Uuld decided to bind the elemental to the eastern Shrine and to report any activity that might indicate that Jonias' "battery" was being interfered with and to help dissuade anyone from pushing north into the forest. 

The four have been moving slowly but steadily along the road for nearly a full day now. Last night, in the strange light of a burning hollow oak tree larger than any tree they have seen before, they made camp. The forest has been quiet since that initial encounter. There are signs of life. Beetles reflecting the fires as they run into the underbrush, strange jeweled snakes, bird cry like a deep horn. But by the very nature of its anti-Bleak energy the strange warping effect that no doubt would have created an entire host of creatures was denied. Meaning most life that lived here before the cataclysm that made this valley died years ago and has only be partially replaced. 

The adventurers did hear sounds of activity in the night. To the north, at a good distance, were drums and chanting. To the south and west, and at a much smaller distance, the sounds of joyful shouting and something like song if it was sung by a creature with a mouth full of burning rocks. Neither sound got closer. The four have seemingly passed unnoticed through the valley of burning trees and lava pools. 

At least down here, along the bottom of the valley, the smoke tends to be high enough above their heads to clean out the air. [1]

Approaching the middle of the day, they see the large cupped hand of the second shrine and coming around the corner find themselves only a few yards from a pillar of fire. One that seems quite agitated to see them there. [2]

"Ah," says Rance. "That bonfire seems to be irritated at our presence."

"What is it?" asks Grusk.

"A fire elemental. Not a particularly massive one, but big enough to make me want to avoid it." [3]

"Ok, fine," joins in Tom, "we avoid it." 

"The path is past the shrine, we could back up and try going the long way around, but...," Rance says, broadly gesturing at the woods around them which are also randomly on fire. Going off the beaten path here can be a death sentence. 

"You know, I wonder," says Inar, "Do you think this place has flaming quicksand?" 

"Almost definitely," responds Tom. 

"Good, good. That sounds fun" And the halfling, still ready to try and save the Lighthouse and full of new found courage, finds himself giggling uncontrollably. 

"Can we kill it?" asks Grusk.

Rance ponders a bit. "I mean, sure. We killed a minotaur. We killed a...slime-cyclops. It's just..."

"Just what?"

"It's just, why would we kill it?" Tom once again brings up the moral question. 

Grusk sighs. The other three know the half-orc has been a bit bored these past few hours but they also know he will not engage if the others oppose, especially not after the events with the gnolls. All four back up slightly while the big of the pillar of fire that looks the most like a face tracks them the whole time.

They debate for a while and the eventual vote is 3-1 for backing up and trying to track towards the workshop the long way round. The dissenting vote is surprisingly Rance. He is nervous about going too far off the planned route and also feels they will eventually have to handle it but Inar and Tom both hold that it can be faced when it comes. 

Making some calculations about the new directions to take, Rance is able to find the way to the Jonias's lab... the structure stands large and feels out of place in the stark orange and yellows and blacks that dominate much of the color palette. The front door is missing - allowing any number of things inside - but the structure remains brick and industrial and pale in places. [4]

The lab remains functional and powered by fuelstone for 300 years. 

"Well, boys, here we go." Grusk walks up to the front door and walks inside. 

== MECHANICAL NOTES ==

1. Checked, here, to see if Rance noticed the road was made of fuelstone. He did not. 
2. Tom cannot be surprised so they were going to see the fire elemental before they got too close but I did a broad awareness check to see if any spotted it far enough back and no, the general answer is no. They are aware of it about the time it is aware of them. It is still bound to the shrine.
3. Rance rolled a 2 on his INT check but since he has "Primordial" as a language it would make sense that he has exposure to elementals in his training, so I decided to say he would recognize one. Of course, the last time he tried to be the "face," it ended up with two critically wounded characters. 
4. Rance Nat 20'd the remapping roll. "Is the door sealed to the lab?" 5 --> No, but.. there are sealed portions. 

== DOUG'S NOTES ==

This one got delayed from a Sunday posting because I had it mostly finished besides these notes when I realized I needed to update my hexmap. Not required, really, but I like having it all in place.

I put off playing this particularly episode because after the the random breakdowns back during the stuff with the gar people and then with the gnolls I wanted to give this one plenty of space to breathe if I was having to figure out how to get through the forest while being hunted by angry Salamanders, if the Salamanders had some deep quest, etc. Then, each moment since leaving the tower was "Nah, no worries, no encounters." I even wrote in a method to double the chances of encounters at one point and rolled high. All to find an actual fight (the elemental) and work around it because good lord that one could have sucked. But also, there is a clear Doug-OSR hybrid here. These are four orphans from the collapse of a massive empire in its final days. There has generally been a stance of working with everyone (and it often failing). These aren't the guys who will kill a elemental if they can walk around it. 

Each of my ongoing campaigns has its own structure. The Bloody Hands is closest to how I would play a solo game without a blog (the one change would be that I would probably write even more dialogue and graphics into the actual notes portion). The Alabama Weird is a bit different in that I write out more extended fiction with one or two game points added in to force me to change up the narrative. 

This one allows me to work out campaign design and then switch over and play in my own campaign and sometimes it leads to sessions like this where if I cut out the adventure design portion it would be about 5 minutes of "not much happens" but the joy of the campaign is that I spend at least half, if not more, in campaign design mode where things like a elemental not moving from the door of a shrine becomes a bit of backstory about a lonely Efreet who misses his long gone friend and a quick image for a shrine ends up hinting that at the time of this legendary scientist/lord's death there was some massive project. 

For instance, the fact that fuelstones regenerate was based on the post where I was working on the hexmap and found out the the road between the two shrines was in much better condition than most other things in the forest. I was trying to think how a place that eats other structures through harsh conditions could lead to to a road remaining open and easy to traverse. We have established that Light is not a positive force (in other words, Light wouldn't fix or heal things) but instead one that cancels out two other forces. Hence the notion of fuelstone, which is at least somewhat related to a crashed space ship, being powered by the same energy that the Ancients used to run their Atlantean empire. Does this mean the Bleak and the Pearl are both energies that derive from a Roadside Picnic situation? I mean, it's me so probably but I'll leave those specific to some future session or not at all. At this point, all we know is that visitor's craft changed the material in this valley so that the raw energy has reshaped the land and a later but still early Ancient scientist (techno-priestess in their language) harvested that, along with the new material found in the valley, to create an engine that could power an empire for thousands of years until they had drained the land. 

Now we also know that Jonias had made some large discovers at the end of his life about how to bring back Ancient technology but most of his research seems to be lost. What we do not know is if the alien visitor was an isolated incident or if it ever left, so...stay tuned.

== CREDITS ==

This campaign is played primarily using Shadowdark and SoloDark, both by Arcane Library and Kelsey Dionne (et al).

Additional sources include a variety of things for tables, especially Knave 2nd Edition and Maze Rats (both by Ben Milton), Random Realities by Cezar Capacle, Universal NPC Emulator by Zach Best, and various pieces from Worlds without Number and Scarlet Heroes (both by Kevin Crawford).

The illustrations are created by me using GIMP and Hex Kit (featuring the Lil Hex Pack and Strange BW Hex Pack). The sources of the images I edit to make the "two color" splashes range from personal photographs to Pixabay stock art and bits from other public domain and CC-0 sources.