Expeditions in Urutsk

SESSION 7

After paying off Anjalik's creditors, the group decided to head over to the space-port, which Anjalik identified as the largest center of civilization in the area. On the walk over, Anjalik explained a bit about how the Vrun (the largest local human population) now lived in the remains of an earlier and much more glorious civilization founded by their ancestors. She attributed this preference to the Vrun's generally obedient and literal-minded personalities. Slunk and Merope eventually came to understand that Star Port used to be a working dockyard for metal ships that came from the sky (like the Wrecked Ship,) but that it had been innumerable generations since anyone on Urutsk had the ability to fly between the stars. The Vrun now saw a return to their ancestor's former glory as a kind of species-level or civilizational project. The Star Port itself had been transformed into a major city, with old working buildings being repurposed into homes, government offices, and bazaars.

Upon arriving at Star Port, Anjalik offered to help the pair get "credit bracelets" that would track their finances, and to introduce them to some of the guilds and "caste-clans" that organized employment throughout the Port. Anjalik revealed that she herself was a member of both the "Free Scouts" and the "Red Blade" guilds, and offered to vouch for her new friends if they wanted to join. Merope decided to get inducted into the Free Scouts, and also gained a contact with the "Scout Services" who said they planned to keep an eye on her. Slunk was interested in the "Esoteric Order of Starry Wisdom," and found that the guild was quite interested in learning more about his travel between dimensions, and about the Red Cube that had brought him to Urutsk.

It was soon time for Anjalik to return to Trade Tower, but Slunk and Merope gifted her with a sliver chopstick-like wand she could use to create an illusion of black skulls, spiders, and bats. Anjalik was very pleased, and tucked the wand into her hair before departing.

Slunk and Merope explored a bit, including touring a bazaar inside a huge lobby-like room. They found that anything left over from the past was incredibly popular with the Vrun, in particular "Ancient Grains" granola bars.

The pair first visited the Esoteric Order of Starry Wisdom's guild headquarters, where Slunk shared more of his story and was invited to browse some of the guild's spell books. (Which resulted in both silt-blooded Slunk and ice-blooded Merope selecting spells from Wizards of the Coast's free Elemental Evil Player's Companion.)

Next they visited the base of the Free Scouts, who threw Merope an induction party that involved drinking a cloudy white hallucinogenic liquor. Merope drank deep from the ceremonial cup, and entered a dream trance where she described a "shining obelisk on the edge of the waters" and then pinned a marker to a map, revealing the location of the spot she had envisioned. This session drew to a close with Merope drifting into a stupor, while the Scouts around her raved about the accuracy and potency of her vision, and made preparations for her to travel to her dream site.


SESSION 8

Merope awoke the next morning with a splitting headache, and found the Free Scouts still eager for her to initiate herself to their order by completing her dream quest. She and Slunk decided to hire a couple of mercenaries to join them, and after asking around a bit, settled on Lairnos (a proud young woman armed with a bow) and Vard (a slightly pudgy, devious looking man with a pair of knives.) They explained their plan to travel through the jungle to the Ancient site.

The group set out into Urutsk's jungle again, following the trail the Free Scouts had plotted to the location of Merope's dream site. Relatively early on, they were ambushed by a pair of brightly colored humans, one with orange skin and one with green. The green-skinned human was shorter, and reminded Slunk of the cannibal he'd met in the jungle. Merope, Slunk, and Lairnos quickly defeated the highwaymen, and realized that Vard had disappeared during the fight. They called out for him a few times, and he came loping back from the brush. He claimed that he'd been circling around to attack the bandits from behind, but had fallen in some quicksand. Merope and Slunk felt skeptical of Vard's story, but left him with Lairnos while they followed the trail he pointed out to them. A few minutes later, they found a pit of quicksand, seemingly vindicating Vard's story, although the friends considered him to be much more probationary than Lairnos.

They continued traveling, but were intercepted again, this time by a giant white scorpion, at least 30' tall. This was obviously an alien monster, and it reminded both Merope and Slunk of the robotic centipede they'd fought on the wrecked ship. The scorpion towered over them and both incredibly dangerous and heavily armored. Slunk and Merope quickly agreed that they couldn't hope to prevail in test of sheer strength, and that they'd have to out-think the alien with strategy. Unfortunately, the monster seemed to have some kind of psychic powers that let it anticipate and foil any plans the group made. Vard quickly gave up any pretense of loyalty, and openly ran for his life. Lairnos offered to retrieve or kill the cowardly man, but Merope and Slunk urged her to stay and help defeat the scorpion.

Finding themselves unable to penetrate the beast's armor with most of their attacks, Merope and Slunk hit upon a risky strategy of incapacitating it, by turning the ground beneath its feet to mud and then freezing it in place. This plan required both to spend dearly of their elemental blood, weakening them further, and the strategy failed with the monster danced out of reach just as the ground froze where it had been standing. In a last desperate attempt to stay alive, all three moved underneath the monster's belly, out of reach of its great claws and stinging tail. This last idea finally bought them victory, as they attacked the relatively vulnerable belly of the creature, while staying out of reach of its worst reprisals. A lucky break as Merope fired magical missiles at the monster allowed her to hit it with critical accuracy, and when combined with her mutant vision that let her see the microscopic weaknesses in things, the magical damage was too much for the beast to survive. Merope, Slunk, and Lairnos emerged shivering and on the brink of death from beneath the carcass just before it collapsed to the ground.

Merope tasted some of the alien meat, and believed that if she continued tasting unusual dishes, she might learn some resistance to dangerous substances. Slunk got Lairnos to help him carve huge flank steaks out of the beast, planning to offer them to the Esoteric Order, or sell them to the highest bidder back in the Star Port. Too weak and too tired to continue on their journey, the trio returned back to the city, wondering what had become of the traitor Vard.


SESSION 9

Merope and Slunk didn't think much of their battle with the alien scorpion. It was a setback on their journey to the Shining Obelisk by Crystal Waters, certainly. It was yet more proof of how dangerous and untamed the wilds were here on the alien world of Urutsk. And perhaps, it was a relief to come away alive after their second encounter with one of the conquering aliens who had devastated human civilization here.

But to Lairnos, the battle was a revelation. She had just survived a battle that she should not have walked away from, against an alien enemy that no one who wasn't part of a guard battalion should have defeated. Her employers, although strange, were obviously much more competent than they appeared to be. These foreigners, who seemed ignorant of the Vrun and the Star Port itself, who seemed not to fully understand the importance of their victory, also must know more than they seemed to, maybe know more or different things than the Vrun themselves.

When Merope and Slunk went to market to resupply and hire more mercenaries, they found that rumors of their victory had spread across the Star Port overnight, fueled by Lairnos telling enthusiastic tales over drinks at the bar and by shoppers encountering the startling proof in the form of Slunk's discount scorpion steaks appearing alongside the other wares in the marketplace. Much quicker than they expected, the pair hired "Inky" (a heavily tattooed assassin type,) "Blinky" (a nervous fellow,) and Clyde (big, dumb Clyde.) Although they were nervous about whether or not Lairnos would rejoin them after the disaster the day before, they found her absolutely eager to resume the quest.

The newly enlarged group of adventurers set out on the same trail as the day before, following the route Merope had mapped on her dream quest. Near the site of their first ambush, they found a rusted out antique air car. The car was covered in vines, and inside, they saw the duplicitous Vard, looking pale and bloated like a corpse. The dead bodies of the orange and green assassins lay in the back seat, and Vard, despite being dead, also appeared to be moving and attempting to exit the car. The group doused the vehicle in lamp oil and setting it on fire.

Continuing on their way, they eventually came to the site of their battle the day before. The white shell of the scorpion was there, and the ground nearby was littered with the corpses of dead animals, all scavengers and predators that must have come to taste the alien meat. Slunk felt a little nervous about having wholesaled so much of the meat to the Star Port merchants, but their newest hires were simply staring in awe. "See, I told you," Lairnos whispered to the others, as she recounted the fight again for a breathless Inky, Blinky, and Clyde. Merope and Slunk began to appreciate that their exploits were having an effect on the local balance of power, and that the consequence-free life of the itinerant treasure-seeker might not be what was in store for them.

The group continued following the trail in Merope's mind, blazing a new path through the jungle. By evening, they arrived in clearing filled with ruined buildings and curling vines. They also spotted a large, slow-moving herbivore munching contentedly at the vines, and a jaguar-like predator stalking it. The predator looked annoyed when the group entered the clearing, and broke off its hunt to get away from the humans. Approaching the herbivore, the adventurers realized it was mildly psychic and mildly (very mildly) intelligent. "Nummy!" the herbivore said to them all telepathically, and nodded at and pantomimed eating a particular berry, "Nummy nums!" Merope decided to try one of the berries, and Lairnos followed her lead. Both discovered that the nummy berry made everything else around them smell and taste delicious. (And Slunk discovered that the berry had an intoxicating effect, seemingly reducing the intelligence of anyone who ate it. He tried to communicate this fact to Merope, but found her temporarily too impaired to understand.) Merope and Lairnos gorged themselves on rations, vines, and other local greenery, all while conversing with the contented herbivore. Slunk decided that the nummy berry might make an excellent cash-crop. He collected samples of the berry, vines, and roots, planning to start a garden back in the Star Port, and hoping to sell the berries as some kind of (expensive) novelty appetizer.

The herbivore appeared somewhat menacing to Slunk ...

With his partner mentally out of commission, Slunk took charge for the rest of the night. He ordered Inky, Blinky, and Clyde to help make a camp on one of the ruined rooftops, hopefully out of reach of the predator they saw earlier, or any other hunters in the clearing. He also led the three new mercenaries on a sweep of their surroundings. They encountered another campsite, with a burned out fire and other signs of habitation, but all the campers were dead. The corpses appeared to belong to a party of treasure hunters, dressed much like the mercenaries from Star Port, but heavily mutated. The dead adventurers looked as pale and bloated and Vard had, and were surrounded by more vines like Vard's air car had been. Slunk felt the back of neck prickle, and had the distinct sensation that someone was watching him. He thought that it wasn't somebody present, but rather some kind of magic user with some sort of remote viewing or scrying technique. Slunk and the others quickly burned the dead bodies, and fled the abandoned campsite, making sure to cut down the vines around the side of their building to avoid being overwhelmed by plant life in their sleep. He tried to explain what he'd seen to Merope, but found her too stupefied to communicate with effectively, and tried to keep watch while meditating, feeling the sinister watching sensation again in the night.

... but looked much friendlier to Merope.

The Slow-Time Dungeon on Urutsk

SESSION 5

In the morning, after the rain and the night spent with their unnerving visitor, Anjalik seem desultory, and smoked heavily as she, Slunk, and Merope continued walking toward the Trade Tower. Slunk claimed to recognize the smoke as being popular with the local halfling population near his village, and he and Merope contemplated the weird world they found themselves on, while Anjalik rambled, “I'm not a good person. I've killed people. I've eaten people. Nah, I'm just foolin' with you, you guys are great!” Merope thought that Anjalik was suffering from the effects of her drugs and the influence of the cannibal hunter from the night before, but Slunk remained convinced ever after that their companion was a literal man-eater.

The walk that day was uneventful, and eventually the group found a decent place to make a campsite. They were in a small clearing dotted with ruins, though only a foot or so wall remained to show the outlines of where the buildings had been. After making camp, Anjalik announced “I'm gonna smoke a bowl. You two take care of yourselves.” Slunk and Merope decided to search the grounds for any evidence of nature of the ruins, and instead found a trapdoor that opened to a staircase leading underground. The pair called out to announce their plan to Anjalik, then headed down into the ruined basement.

Underground, they found themselves immediately at a crossroads, with two large identical hallways branching off away from the stairs. One side looked odd to Slunk's elf vision, so he threw a pebble down the hall, or tried to at least. The pebble crossed the threshold to the hall, and then froze in midair. Looking closely, Slunk and Merope saw that it was still moving, just very, very slowly. Slunk theorized that the hall led to a kind of “slow-time dungeon” that might hold treasures from before whatever disaster had befallen Urutsk. Without meaning to, Slunk had moved too close the threshold and crossed over. Merope saw her comrade suddenly freeze in place. Fearing there was no way to rescue him from the outside, she crossed over as well.

Merope and Slunk agreed that they should try to spend as little time as possible in the slow-time area, and that they should start their explorations by ensuring they had a path back across to the normal-time side of the threshold. Slunk first tried tossing the stone back across, but it bounced off the air as though it had struck a wall. He next tried pushing his hand though, and felt terrible friction. He theorized that the air particles on the other side of the threshold were moving so fast relative to him that they seemed both to create a barrier and to be super-heated. Although he expected it to hurt, he thought the solution was to get a running start and jump through as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, when he tried, he caught fire and ended up suspended in mid-air above the threshold. Merope quickly dragged her friend back into the slow-time side, rolled him on the floor to extinguish the flames, and tried to awaken him. She saw that he'd stopped breathing, and immediately administered all the aid she knew. Slunk survived his brush with death and awoke feeling temporarily feeble and in need of a night's sleep.

By this time, Merope had become not just a fighter, but an arcane knight, with an elemental bloodline of frost. She cast a shielding spell on herself and started to cross the threshold. This seemed to protect her from the friction, although the world looked weird and shimmery as she stood in the junction between the two time zones, and she thought she saw ghostly monkey fetuses floating at the periphery of her vision. She stepped back from the threshold to rejoin Slunk, unable to maintain the spell any longer or to cast it again until she'd rested. The pair slept fitfully that night, imagining what must be happening in the world overhead. The imagined Anjalik waking to find them gone, and continuing on without them. They imagined the centuries or millennia that must be passing as they slept, and feared that they'd become lost again, unable to return to a world they were just starting to know.

In the morning, with Slunk recovered from his injuries, and with the opportunity to return safely seemingly already foreclosed to them, the pair set forth to explore the slow-time dungeon.

SESSION 6

Slunk and Merope made their way out of the stonework foyer to the slow-time dungeon and into a hallway with finished walls and floors. Not fully understanding what they were seeing, they theorized that they were inside a starship which had landed (or perhaps crashed) on the surface of Urutsk and was then covered over by dirt and debris. They theorized as well that the time dilation effect might be some kind of security mechanism activated during a boarding party, and that the people onboard the ship might believe themselves to be mid-emergency. They tried asking Slunk's electronic familiar, Clippy, but she reported a massive clock-discrepancy between herself and the local computers that made it impossible to synch up properly.

Continuing down the hall, they found a branch that led to a strange room with dozens of ramps and walkways. They weren't sure what sort of room it was, but did find a security panel that Merope was able to open with a handprint. Inside the panel were new outfits that they put over their white coveralls: rubbery dark blue body suits that seemed to offer protection against fire. They each picked up a handheld fire-suppression device as well. Returning to the main hall, they found that it terminated in a room. Merope devised a plan to go in with their gas masks on, report a fire down the hall, then drop one of the gas-grenades they'd found on the big ship. She hoped that wearing the local armor and covering their faces would provide enough confusion to distract anyone they met long enough for the gas-grenade to go off, which would then provide either an even better distraction, or a major tactical advantage in a fight. (We later learned that this was not a ship, and that while the time dilation effect was a security measure, it wasn't activated as an immediate response to a bombardment or boarding party. As a result of this misunderstanding, the subterfuge element of Merope's plan was pretty much doomed from the outset.)

We all like to imagine that in times of stress or violence, we'd react like action heroes, moving gracefully and fearlessly into the fray, effortlessly doing what needs to be done. The reality is far different. One of my favorite aspects of low-level D&D is the way that it often resembles a comedy of errors, with every action the characters attempt going hilariously awry all at once. Low-level characters rarely act like action heroes, more often they act like Keystone Cops.

Merope and Slunk entered the room at the end of the hall together, gas masks hiding their faces, a grenade in Merope's hand. “We're under attack!” Merope shouted, “There's a fire in the engine room! We've got to get out!” The three occupants of the room didn't devolve into panicked fleeing though. Instead, their leader, a short-haired bulldog of a woman drew her weapon and pointed it at Merope. “Put the grenade down! Get down on the ground now!” Merope and Slunk exchanged glances, then attempted a coordinated maneuver to slide over and dive behind a countertop, using it as cover to open fire on their opponents. Instead, both of them failed to clear the counter, and both shots they fired missed entirely. They were quickly outmatched, and quickly surrendered. The leader of the dungeon residents instructed the other woman present to disarm Slunk and Merope and tie up their wrists. Slunk allowed himself to be captured, but Merope grabbed the woman, rolled them both onto the floor to use her captor as a human shield, and re-drew her weapon. The tough-nosed woman responded by shooting Slunk in the head, killing him.

Merope returned fire, clipping the leader's head, killing her as well. Merope rushed to Slunk, covering herself with her gun. She pulled two medical stimulants from her waist. “I've got medicine,” she said, “I'm going to save my friend, and we're going to go down the hall. You're not going to follow us. Let us leave, and I'll save your friend, too.” The two lackeys assented, and Merope injected first Slunk and then the slow-time leader, bringing them both back from the brink of death. She helped her friend limp out of the room, and good to their word, the dungeon residents didn't follow. Together, Slunk and Merope made their way back down the hall to the time-dilation barrier, and enacted their plan to escape.

Merope cast a shielding spell over the pair of them, and Slunk cast a spell to let them take a misty step across the veil. They passed through the barrier as though it weren't there, and made their way back to the surface. The world around them appeared strangely rainbow hued, and as they returned to the surface, they saw dozens, perhaps hundreds of ghostly monkey fetuses flying toward them. Merope pushed Slunk to the ground and threw her body over his to protect him, then tried the only thing she could think to return them to the safety of the real world, and let the shielding spell go. When she looked up, the sky was its normal color again, and nothing was chasing them. Anjalik looked over from where she'd been packing up the campsite. “Did you two spend the whole night down there? We're pretty close to the trading tower now. We should be there by this afternoon.” Merope thought of a story she'd heard of a man visited by ghosts who lived an entire extra lifetime in one evening. “All in one night!” she cried out, and wept. Merope and Slunk were both amazed to see Anjalik again, and neither could explain how the time-dilation effect had returned them to the same time they'd left.

True to Anjalik's word, by mid-afternoon, they reached a clearing dominated by an enormous structure. It looked like a steep terraced hill, or an overgrown ziggurat. It looked like it had around 20 levels, and each one was crowded with people, market stalls, and bustling commerce. As they approached, they saw that the ground level was dominated by heaps of garbage and heavily mutated people. Anjalik referred to them as “the trashy people,” and suggested that they'd be able to sell their Sensorium on 14 at least.

Unfortunately, they were quickly accosted by a pair of toughs who seemed to know Anjalik. They demanded that she repay a debt she owed them. Anjalik showed them the Sensorium the group was about to sell and convinced the two mercenaries to accept her share of the sale. The toughs initially tried to demand the entire Sensorium, but Slunk improved their negotiating position by conjuring an illusion of spiders and bats pouring from his cuffs. The pair of bravos agreed to Anjalik's proposition, and Anjalik herself was delighted by the trick. The enlarged group took to the stairs that spiraled around the structure and began climbing up. On the stairs, Slunk suggested to Merope that they repay Anjalik for her help by crafting a magical bracelet to create a similar illusion, and Merope agreed to split the cost with him out of their proceeds from the sale.

As they passed the sixth level, they noticed a great commotion going on in the market around them. The first part of the bazaar was nearly empty, then they saw a mob running away, and then a man with a glowing sword that seemed about to burst with power shouting “Everybody get back! It's gonna go off!” By the time they got to the seventh level, Merope had decided to try to help with the situation downstairs. She believed that the man had accidentally come into possession of a cursed sword, and that it was laying waste to the tower against his will. (Nope! Wrong again!) She asked Slunk to use his skills as a charlatan to negotiate a good price for the Sensorium on her behalf, and to start on the bracelet as soon as he had the funds.

Slunk, Anjalik, and her creditors continued up to 14, where the first salesman to inspect their goods concluded that it was the finest Sensorium the tower had ever seen, and that it needed to go up to 17. He spoke to some guards and got them an escort. In comparison to the slum-like conditions on the ground, 17 was a veritable bastion of luxury, with all the market stalls well-appointed and everyone healthy and well-dressed. The road-weary travelers got a lot of sideways glances from the locals, but found an electronics dealer willing to appraise the device. He made an offer that was several thousand higher than even Anjalik had expected. She managed to renegotiate on the fly. “It's four shares now. My friends get two, I get one, and you two get the other. It's still more than I owe you.” A menacing look from Slunk that intimated the return of his illusions helped to seal the deal, and the bravos left with Anjalik's debt repaid. Anjalik offered to lead Slunk on to a nearby space-port, the largest settlement in the area, and he agreed. The two went back downstairs, intending to pick up Merope on their way to the ground level.

As this was going on, Merope had returned to 6 and gone looking for the man with the sword. While trying to find someone who knew which way he'd gone, she found a group of people who looked like they were either so gothic they were actually undead, or like the Addam's Family if they were not merely ghoul-ish but literally ghouls. They pointed Merope in the correct direction, and pressed a bag of gemstones into her hands, saying they were hers if she killed him. Merope's plan had been to free the man from his curse, not kill him, but she acknowledged that he might die in the attempt, and reluctantly accepted their payment. Following after the man, Merope caught up to him in an alley.

“That's quite a sword,” she told him.

“It's my heroic burden.”

“Where did you pick up that burden?”

“It was a gift from my patron. I'm using it to bring justice to the tower.”

By this point, Merope was getting second thoughts. Whoever this man was, he didn't seem like the unwilling victim of a cursed weapon, and further conversation reinforced her impression that he did not seem amenable to surrendering the weapon to her. Around that time, the gothic ghouls were approaching from behind Merope. The man drew his sword and it started powering up again, and the two factions prepared to face off. Merope left the scene, dropping the bag of gems at the feet of her erstwhile patrons, and headed back to the central square to meet up with Slunk and Anjalik.

Into the Jungle in Urutsk

I've been playing in an ongoing campaign set in Urutsk, with The Grand Tapestry serving as referee, and Fantasy Heartbreak Workshop as my teammate. I like to take a few notes as we play, and I've had a little more free time lately, so I'm trying to turn a few more of my notes into session reports.


SESSION 3

Waking once more in the security office, Merope and Slunk decided to continue exploring the ship. By this point, they had deduced that they were on a vessel engaged in a generations-long voyage, that something had gone wrong causing at least the partial collapse of ship-board society, and that perhaps relatedly the ship had been invaded by monstrous outsiders. At this time, it seemed to Merope and Slunk that parts of the vessel's crew were still wearing the uniforms and following the rules laid down by their ancestors, but that other descendants of the initial travelers had fallen into savagery. They also assumed that the ship was still on its long journey, possibly traveling between the stars themselves.

Poking around a bit in the security office, Merope and Slunk found gas masks and canisters of some kind of crowd-control gas. Out in the hall, they met a badass warrior woman whose body was adorned with paint and tattoos and a scanty outfit made of colorful fabric that was also tied as streamers at her joints. The warrior woman wore a headdress of two wings that appeared to have been made by cutting up a metal can from one of the ration packs. Assuming that she was a native of the ship, Merope attempted to trick the warrior woman with one of her many failed gambits. (Throughout the time I played her, Merope's attempts at subterfuge never worked, usually because her lack of knowledge about her situation forced her to make many assumptions, and whenever one of those assumptions proved false, it also proved to the person she was talking to that she could not possibly be who she claimed.) Merope initially claimed that she and Slunk were part of the crew of the ship, but that they had become disoriented when the invaders attacked. The warrior woman said that was unlikely, since the attack had occurred before the ship crashed. Surprised to learn that the ship was no longer traveling, Merope tried to recover her lie by claiming that of course, it must have been the crash that confused her and caused her to forget that the ship was no longer being invaded. The warrior woman again demurred, pointing out that the ship had been crashed for a thousand years, and asking Merope and Slunk who they were really, and how they could be so unaware of their situation.

Slunk took over the conversation, using his smooth charlatan speaking voice to reveal how he and Merope had come to be aboard the ship. The warrior woman seemed impressed with Slunk's story, and introduced herself as Anjalik. When Slunk inquired how she'd learned these things, since the crew they'd met earlier seemed unaware, Anjalik revealed that the ship was not only crashed, it was broken open, and that she had enetered from outside on a scavenging mission. She was very interested to see the red cube that Merope and Slunk had arrived in, "the breach" as she called it. Slunk agreed to guide her to the cube in exchange for Anjalik guiding Slunk and his companion out of the ship when they'd finished. They successfully navigated their way back to the red cube's location, but when they arrived, it wasn't there anymore. Merope and Slunk expected a cube-shaped hole in the ship where it had been, but there was none. Somehow the cube had been able to pass through the solid matter of the ship as easily as two hair combs intertwining their teeth.

With "the breach" a dead end, they decided to consult Slunk's electronic familiar, Clippy, to find some high-value salvage to haul out of the ship. Clippy located a janitorial storage closet nearby. Their initial search of the room found mostly cleaning supplies, but on further questioning, Clippy pointed them to a pair of large boxes, which turned out to contain Sensoriums, ancient high-tech audio-visual entertainment units. Anjalik said she knew a place they could sell them, and thought that the pair of Sensoriums would fetch a pretty high price. Since the objects were fairly large, about the size of a small bookcase each, Slunk decided to test one before they went to the trouble of carrying them out. He found the interface a bit confusing, but was able to ask the machine to produce some "barbarian entertainment."

The three immediately found themselves in a cave, being attacked by neanderthals. Partway through the battle, Slunk was gored almost to death, and they realized that they were inside an immersive holographic illusion, and were able to shake off the most convincing aspects of the experience. They also realized that several animals had wandered into the open closet while they'd been experiencing the illusion, and that it was these alien beasts that had injured Slunk. Merope fired her handgun at the nearest one, and the super-heated projectile it fired annihilated one of the creatures ... and splashed enough molten metal around to set the whole room on fire. The other two alien quadrupeds broke morale and ran from the burning room. Anjalik managed to rescue one Sensorium, while Merope helped Slunk escape the room. In a moment, a fire suppression system turned itself on, dousing the room in wet foam. Slunk insisted on collecting a few cleaning supplies to sell from the now-soggy room, trying to salvage a few more coins once they learned that the second Sensorium had been rendered inoperable by being exposed to fire and then drenched in water and foam. Anjalik offered to carry the surviving Sensorium out strapped to her back, and encouraged her new companions to follow her to the "trade tower," where they'd be able to sell it.


SESSION 4

After finding an exit from the ship, Merope, Slunk, and Anjalik almost immediately found themselves in a humid jungle. The ground around the ship was swampy, the trees nearby had orange and yellow leaves. Over the course of the day, these changed to yellow and green, then green and blue, as they traveled away from the ship. Merope and Slunk were amazed by the double canopy overhead, and by the riot of life that buzzed around them. Merope saw six-legged lizards and furred snakes, alongside nearly every mundane variety of small forest creature she knew from the forests of her home.

Once in the morning, the trio crossed a game trail, but didn't see whatever beast had made the tracks. Around lunch, a mist of drizzle filled the air, and the group took shelter under a large tree. Anjalik explained that rain was common here. After the rain tapered off a bit, the group set out again, and crossed another game trail as they continued on their way. Late in the day, a heavy rain started, then deepened into a thunder storm. Anjalik spotted a treehouse, perhaps a hunting cabin, and the three took shelter for the night, a decision that seemed particularly wise as the storm worsened.

Partway through the night, the door to the cabin opened, and a figure let himself in. The figure turned out to be a short man, seemingly wizened with age, wearing only a loin cloth and teeth, revealed when he smiled, that had been sharpened to points. Anjalik seemed respectful, perhaps even frightened of the man, and explained that the cabin was available to any traveler, and that sharing during storms was not uncommon. The man seemed pleased to see the group, and cleaned under his sharpened, pointed nails with his wicked hunting knife. Slunk decided to offer the visitor a ration pack from the shipwreck. Merope debated trying to convince him to overdose on stimulants, but Slunk and Anjalik were both frightened of what the hunter might do if he became agitated from the stims. (This is another of Merope's failed stratagems.) Slunk managed to indicate how to open the can of potato crisps to the hunter, who seemed pleased by the popping sound of the lid, and by the salty flavor of the chips. Seeing that he was pleased, and hoping to avoid any violence, Slunk offered him a second ration pack, which the hunter happily accepted. Later, with his hunger sated, and the rain stopped, the visitor turned to leave, then turned back, and spoke to the group.

"It's interesting to see how people will treat you when they think you can't understand them," he said to the three, then explained that he and his brothers were master hunters, that they had killed many men, and become strong by eating the flesh of their enemies. The man also claimed that he had grown to become the strongest of all his brothers by hunting other versions of himself from other worlds, killing them, and eating their strength. Slunk hereafter dubbed this visitor "the fine old cannibal." (The referee also confirmed that this NPC was a fairly high level fighter, and that our only chance to survive the encounter had been to make nice. The world of Urutsk is filled with high HD dangers.) In the morning, the three friends prepared to head out again.

Adventures in Urutsk

Over the past few weeks, I've been playing an online game that takes place primarily in The Grand Tapestry's world of Urutsk.

Urutsk is a couple of things.  First, it appears to be one of only a handful of examples that I'm aware of, of a person having a particularly well-developed fantasy world as a child that they never abandon, and that they continue growing and expanding and creating for into adulthood.  Other examples of such worlds, and their creators, are the Brontë sisters' shared worlds of Gondal and Angria, Henry Darger's worlds of Glandeco and Angelinia and his Realms of the Unreal, and MAR Barker's world of Tékumel.  Like Barker's Tékumel and JRR Tolkein's Middle Earth, Urutsk also seems to include one or more constructed languages that seem to be more or less linguistically complete.

Second, Urutsk is a post-apocalyptic science fictional game setting.  Information I've learned in-game suggests that the time period my sessions have been taking place in are approximately a millennium after some kind of interstellar cataclysm.  In this way, too, its similar to MAR Barker's Tékumel and to his Empire of the Petal Throne game, to Kevin Crawford's Stars Without Number game, and I'm sure to any number of other stories that take place on an alien planet amidst the post-cataclysmic civilization of human(-ish?) people whose ancestors once built societies on dozens or hundreds of planets across the galaxy.  Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus, Larry Niven's Integral Trees and Smoke Ring, and Jack Vance's "Miracle Workers" are also all set under similar conditions, and so by a process of convergent evolution or multiple discovery, have noticeable parallels to the world of Urutsk.

I'm creating a bit of a record now, because when I started this online game, I expected it to be a one-off, or to last only two or three sessions.  That's been the general fate of the online games I've played in, where either scheduling problems or the difficulty of arranging and running online sessions has led to something more like tournament-style play than to ongoing campaigns.  We've played ten sessions together so far though, and we seem likely to be able to continue for awhile.  As a result, my memories of the earliest sessions are now a bit sketchy.  I'll probably keep the more recent session reports brief as well, but since this is going so well, I wanted to preserve a small portion of it.

SESSION 1

The first session begins with Merope the troglodyte-speaking woodcutter, Fantine the sickly guild beggar, Magdalene the grave digger, and Florence the poison-resistant healer awaking inside a large red box along with a dozen or so other 0th-level commoners.  The box is something like 20' to a side, and its occupants awake lightly dressed and entirely un-equipped.

In this session, Fantine was initially my favorite character, so she led most of my team's actions.  Knocking on the walls of the red box quickly revealed that doors would appear when searched for, and the first door opened into what looked like an alleyway, facing a brick wall.  Fantine was the first of several brave souls to venture outside, revealing a world of great brick buildings, smoke stacks, and plumes of black industrial smoke.  Fantine felt comfortable in this familiar-looking world, but the many of bewildered commoners wondered if the other walls would open into the same world, or even if this door would reliably lead back to the seemingly-Victorian realm, so they all returned into the box and shut the door.

When the door was re-opened, it was not into a Victorian alley, but instead into a strange open roadway.  Several wheeled metal carriages sped past at unbelievable speed, and I believe that at least one peasant was lost when he stepped outside and was struck by one of the horseless carriages.  Other carriages veered out of the way, trying to avoid the box that had suddenly appeared in the middle of their path, and a spectacular collision and explosion resulted.  The peasants noticed that they were surrounded by some kind of coliseum filled with a great audience, and that they were being approached by shouting men in some kind of black uniforms.  If my memory serves, another peasant was lost to a gunshot wound delivered by one of the uniformed men, although he may have been saved by first aid after the door was closed.

The next door that was opened led into a bright and vividly colored jungle, but the first two commoners who stepped out of the cubed were burned by the heat and acidic humidity of the air, and one of two possibly died after being touched by a poisonous leaf that wafted down from one of the many trees.  Once their companions were back inside, the group quickly closed the door on those inhospitable environs.  Florence the healer may have attempted to save one of the injured explorers.

The following door opened only a crack into a world of waist-deep snow.  The peasants feared they were too lightly dressed to survive the frigid cold of that world, as their initial glimpse showed lights only in the far distance.  Unfortunately, the weight of the collapsing snow kept the door from closing properly, and the cube itself began to grow uncomfortably chill.  Another door was opened, revealing some kind of cave.  Fantine and her companions joined an expedition into the cave, while another eight or so peasants stayed behind in the cube to try to re-close the door leading into winter.

The cavern Fantine and her friends entered was poorly lit, but a tunnel that possibly led to the surface was visible across a great crevasse.  The peasants decided to attempt to descend into the canyon, in the hopes of ascending the other side, and then taking the tunnel to the surface.  They located a wooden scaffolding that might have been left over from some kind of mining operation, and began climbing down.  As they did, they were assailed by a dozen or so blue creatures that had bodies like monkeys, but with beaked turtle-like faces.  Merope the wood-cutter acquitted herself admirably in combat, but Fantine the beggar, having only 1 hit point, was felled by one of the weird beasts.  First aid, possibly delivered by Merope or Florence, resuscitated her from her injuries.  Fearing that this cave was too dangerous, the commoners returned to the red cube to check on their friends.

They arrived to find that their fellows who had stayed behind had managed to close the door on the icy realm.  The snow turned out to be only frozen water, fortunately, and not frozen methane or helium, and so the commoners had been able to brave it for a few moments to hand-shovel the snow back out of the doorway and shut the door firmly.

Another door was tried, this one leading into the interior of a building.  When Fantine and some other peasants found a window, they soon realized they were hundreds of feet above the ground inside a tower so tall it scraped the sky itself.  They also soon met a balding man with injured feet who called himself "John McClane" and who appeared to believe that he was hallucinating the peasants.  The peasants followed McClane as he explored the hall and adjoining rooms, but after more gunfire from McClane's enemies, they decided to return once more to the cube.

The final door the peasants tried opened into a fairly featureless white hallway, but quick exploration turned up a locker room.  Each peasant pressed their palm to a door to open a locker, and each found supplies related to their profession, including some white coveralls, a computer tablet, and a gun.

At this point, the session ended and we all leveled up.  Merope became a fighter, Fantine and Magdelane became thieves, and Florence became a cleric.

SESSION 2

In this session, and for the rest of the sessions that take place in Urutsk, I was one of only two players.  We each chose one character to advance.  I chose Merope, whose 0th level characteristics reminded me of JK Rowling's depiction of Voldemort's mother, and my fellow player chose Slunk, a wood-elf charlatan and snake-oil salesman.  Merope graduated from being a 0th level Dungeon Crawl Classics woodcutter to being a 1st level 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons fighter.  She also rolled for a random characteristic on the Arduin Grimoire's "Special Abilities" Chart.  She got +1 with all axes and -3 against all dragon's breath, which seemed appropriate for some kind of reptile-loving forest-dwelling recluse.  Slunk became a warlock and swore a pact of allegiance to Lord Worm, a demonic entity aligned with elemental silt.  (I later learned that all magic users and magical creatures in Urutsk are associated with one of a few dozen elemental bloodlines.)  Slunk also acquired a familiar in the form of a holographic projection of a woman from his tablet computer, quickly dubbed "Clippy."

Shortly after deciding his intention to make a pact with a magical entity, Slunk received a vision of Lord Worm, a silt-blooded demon king.  Slunk discovered that he too had an elemental silt bloodline, and soon swore a pact to Lord Worm, gaining various magical abilities in the bargain.

Merope and Slunk exited the locker room and began exploring.  In one room they found some emergency rations and ration cards as well as some med kits.  They also found evidence that the crew might be abusing stimulants, and a quick peek inside a ration revealed twice the safe daily limit of stimulants available alongside one day's worth of food.  In another room they found some humans in similar white coveralls who revealed that they were on a ship, and had been for their entire lives.  Merope and Slunk decided that they were dealing with the degenerate inhabitants of the original crew of a generation ship and decided to look for some form of shuttle craft or escape pod.  Consulting both Merope's tablet and Clippy soon revealed that the crew only controlled a relatively small area of the ship.  They also discovered that Merope's handprint would open any door with palm-reader, while Slunk's elven hand was denied access for some reason. 

A bit more exploring revealed a kind of interstitial space, a kind of scaffolding of walkways the appeared to run behind the walls and between the levels of the ship.  Slunk and Merope tried climbing down a couple of levels, outside of the crew-controlled area, in search of valuables.  I think our reasoning was that anything salvaged from an abandoned portion of the ship would be valuable to the occupants who no longer had access to that particular supply.  Once in the uncontrolled portion of the ship however, they were quickly set upon by a towering centipede-like robot.  Slunk was injured, while Merope was quickly felled and had a near death experience.  She used what she thought was her dying breath to tell Slunk to run.  Slunk decided to stand his ground however, and fired an overloaded blast from his stun pistol, seemingly knocking the robot out of commission.  Slunk's CPR, and a bit of good fortune, brought Merope back from the brink of death. 

Slunk helped Merope into the first room they could find on this lower hallway, where they found a number of crates labeled "Cedar."  With Merope still at death's door, Slunk opened a crate and found a foil packet filled with some kind of glowing liquid, which he poured into Merope's mouth and encouraged her to drink. Merope did, and recovered a bit of her health, she also mutated becoming mildly radioactive.  Her physical stamina permanently increased, and she became mildly resistant to injury.  She also gained a kind of Ren-and-Stimpy-style detail vision that allowed her to inflict more damage with her attacks by striking her enemies' weakest points.  The mutagenic liquid frightened both Slunk and Merope, so they decided to look for treasure in another room.

As they re-entered the hall, they saw that the giant robot was reviving itself.  Merope put her newfound detail vision to work and fired her security gun at the robot.  The super-heated round splashed liquid metal after striking the creature, revealing the source of the strange damage to some of the walls Merope and Slunk had seen earlier.  Slunk called upon his patron and shot malevolent blasts of elemental silt at the centipede.  Between these two attacks, the robot deactivated again, although this time the pair was unwilling to believe that it was permanently disabled.  They continued attacking its prone form for another 20 minutes before rolling it off the walkway and into the bowels of the ship below.  Merope managed to break off a few of the creatures legs to use as a short sword, a long sword, and a pry bar.  Slunk was able to pocket a few of the shinier bits of the machine to try to trade later.

Concerned that the noise of this encounter might bring additional combatants, the pair abandoned their plan to look for valuables and re-ascended to a higher, and safer floor.  They located a security office and used Merope's clearance to enter it.  Inside they found a variety of colored jackets that seemed to reveal one's crew rank, along with a couple of gas masks and tear gas canisters, and a safe place to rest for the night.  Merope settled on a purple command jacket, although a panel of the jacket, located where a name-badge might be placed, turned orange to identify her as security personnel. Slunk discovered when he wore a blue jacket this panel turned green, and in a green jacket it turned blue, so he left the green jacket on.  The pair felt a bit better disguised and protected in their new jackets, and decided to take a long rest to recover from their injuries.