We play as the foremost adventurers of the city of Haeum Sung, having started out as Haeum Sung Certified Level 7, relatively recently having upgraded our status to Level 8.
We started out escorting a caravan of goods and supplies to Ara Sung, Haeum Sung's sister city - they put us on the job because anybody lower than Level 7 didn't report back, and neither did the caravans. So we were put on the job, and a likely adventure began where we ran into an enterprising crew of zombies, the rather more intelligent fellow leading them and their lovely zombie elephant. And a stinking cloud one of the zombies vomited onto us. It was something of a fun escapade where we hijacked the elephant due to Command Undead being hilariously effective against unintelligent undead, a lot of people had to vomit profusely and an explosion of souls occurred. A fun time for all.
Then we arrived to Ara Sung! They didn't need the supplies, as it turned out. Whole town had been invaded by vampires (how this really occurred we never managed to find out), as we found out from a rather charming woman named Bae Sung-ah we rescued from a pack of marauding vampire spawn. We looked around town and discovered a miracle farm - it's where they use divine magic to grow plants, you see - full of vampire spawn lying in ambush. A lot of them got vaporized, needless to say. A couple were successfully commanded and interrogated for vague references to terrible masters (including, rather creatively, one that we distilled from vampire mist with a holy water drip after trapping it in a Stone Shaped box). Oh, and we also found out that apparently there's a holy crown of the sun hidden somewhere around!
Nevertheless, there were just too many damn vampires. So we tried to vacate the premises, only to get nearly exploded by a marauding gang of vampire adventurers and their legions of vampire spawn! Namely, the full metal asshole Anh Chul-su, sorcerous halfling dickweed John Stone and an archer-magus whose name did not quite make it on record. We captured the first, drove off the other two and blew up the spawn. We also found out that Bae Sung-ah was a very cleverly disguised vampire herself, her boss vampire having been killed which left her with curiously free will (she's also an 8th level sorcerer, which is handy). She detects as evil, of course, but she turned out to be cool so we took her along on our trip back (she split from us before the gate, mind you, because her advanced illusions that let her present as alive do not hold up against Haeum Sung's anti-magic checkpoints).
The way back held no terrible surprises and no amazing encounters with the forces of evil, and we arrived in Haeum Sung to be paid massive amounts of gold for our excellent work and incredibly disturbing news. There was lamentation and murmuring, it was excellent. A goblin named Eydis went and tried to stab us in a tavern, but we taught her the error of her ways (nonlethally!). And we got a job! See, what we were carrying was a crystal that we were supposed to recharge in Ara Sung's lovely crystal charging underground complex. These are very important for magic and such. We claimed the office of local head paladin Park Mina for ourselves (she didn't seem to be using it and didn't see the need to lock the door), negotiated a contract for what we were to do next - get into Ara Sung's underground and recover the badass magic power source they had down there, which was a conveniently portable crystal of unimaginable arcane power. To get into the underground we had to undertake our most terrifying quest yet - asking an epic-level elven wizard for a moment of her time. It went well, although some of us had to get unfortunately disrobed in the process. We did get our hands on an Epic scroll though, so our time there was well-compensated.
So we set off once again, pausing briefly on the road to Ara Sung to rescue some poor Level 5 schmucks who ran into a vampire summoner and couldn't help but try and fight her despite her being a good-humored sort with only a slight penchant for the blood of the innocent (and then a rampaging pack of homebrewed ghoul wolves that could really push your shit in if you gave them half the chance). And then we made it back to Ara Sung, where we witnessed the most magically beautiful sewer opening ever as Epic dispelling worked its charms on Epic abjurations. That done, we headed in! Property damage, ineffectual drowner ghosts and nearly dying to invisible magma oozes in a trash pit followed. As did a strange battle against rubber golems in an area of high, yet inconsistent gravity. Ara Sung's sewers are a strange place.
And then we found a kobold! And ran him down and subdued him, of course, because you can never be too sure. A round of questioning established that luckily the place we were looking for was quite close, and so was the sun crown! Happy days. We sent him to fetch the crown in return for letting him go and not destroying his livelihood as a scavenger in the down under, and surprisingly he came through (was only half a crown, but turns out you really can't recover fabled artifacts just like that).
So what we did was proceed to go ahead and destroy his livelihood by stealing the thing that kept the undead out of the catacombs (by way of an Anti-Unlife Shell on a grand scale). It proved to be guarded by, of all things, a mechanical serpentine steam-breathing dragon. We taught it what we do with things that breathe steam on us and wrecked its shit as best we could (which proved to be both a quick and efficient process). Then we filched the fabled crystal of power and narrowly avoided getting electrocuted by it, which deactivated the underground's defenses. We nearly made it out undisturbed, only to run into a pack of jacked-up mutant vampires with a lot of varicose veins and that sort of thing. We decided to make a flying, hasted charge right past them and straight out the sewer pipe, and made off into the perpetual twilight.
Shortly (that is to say about a week) after we got back to Haeum Sung and were extraordinarily well paid for our successful efforts. The city is extremely generous for anything done in its service. We also sent in the crown for elaborate magical analysis by the Sun Church! They discovered that, much as you'd expect, half a legendary sun crown said to return the sun to a sunless world provides a not particularly useful effect of shooting off a lot of light and blinding people in the room. And we could already do that. So we needed the other half as well, for which we enlisted the help of a diviner, Lee Jez - an adventurous sort among the normally scholarly bunch in the Academy. Backed up by a small detachment of inquisitors and paladins, we went outside of Haeum Sung with the sun crown to try and discover where the other half might be with a divination (an unfortunately required measure, since Haeum Sung is sensibly warded against scrying).
It paid off! And, unsurprisingly, something took notice! A distressing-looking vampire fellow with a sweet tooth for spells, to be specific, who appeared to be the maker of those veiny vampire folks we did not bother to fight off. He sent us a trio of extremely deadly mechanical spider constructs to contend with, which we dispatched with a bit of difficulty and a lot of luck. It was a good day out, all in all. We figured out where the other half of the crown was with a little bit of context clues we figured out that where we needed to look was in the elven fortress of Linxuecheng, a longtime favorite dungeon of many an adventurer on account of it being the place where That One Asshole brought about the end of the world as people knew it with his Locate City Bomb. So popular in fact that one of us had already been there once on an unrelated low-level adventure. Seems some rough customers had moved in since then.
So we deposited the crown with the Sun Church, figuring about even odds of us all dying on this quest. And we set off over roads and mountains, taking along Lee Jez as our utility support (it's her first adventure and she's excited!) as well as Bae Sung-ah who we decided to check up with on the way (we asked her if she wants to go into the castle full of mutant vampire monsters and giant robot spiders and she said fuck no but she'd be okay with going on the hike thataway). And in not very long at all we made it there!
As expected by now, place was full of goddamn vampires (there was also an ornery tribe of giants on the mountainside, but we avoided those). And had metamagic artillery (it's a lot like a metamagic rod, but bigger and more horrible and without a limit on uses per day). We picked an angle of attack and swooped in on the walls mostly invisibly, and took over the nearby artillery tower with a minimum of trouble (many tentacles and a lot of stakings were involved), at which point we set the vampire (presumably) village in the outer courtyard on fire, mostly exploded a patrol and ineffectually blasted the gate to the inner keep where the sun crown and the labs should be! The keep was alerted, horrible spiders took to the skies, vampires went on high alert!
And it was on this that we left off, about to make a suicide run into the belly of the beast, about half-there on spell slots and expecting the worst. It could go either way! Will we rescue the other half of the sun crown and presumably use it to build an artificial sun to illuminate the world with arcane magic that will surely have no bad repercussions whatsoever? Or will we die ignominious deaths at the hands of the vampire hordes of Linxuecheng? Did I forget something crucially important? I expect we'll find out rather soonish!
EDIT:
The story continues here!
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Topic: [Pathfinder] Haeum Sung (Game over, thanks for playing!) (Read 37807 times)