Gordian Nought

DnD 5e - Beginner's Game

Bah-bah, the moniker attributed to him by his late fiancée, Marcus, enjoyed the fog surrounding their new found objective, now seemingly decorated with young saps holding farm tools and wooden armor. They all stood, apparently caught awkwardly in the middle of an imaginary game of knights and maidens. The mist combined with his elvish ancestry provided his natural talent to easily utilize the environment to conceal his next action. Such stealth would be taken advantage of, to survey any potential vantage of the strewn out, supposed welcoming committee.

After Angela broke the obdurate silence with pure lips of the most profound salutations, the arcane trickster took it upon himself to depart from the troupe, whose unbeknownst patronage and patronizing courage had brought undesired fame. And with it, less of the opportune capabilities of subterfuge without more elusive swindling. However, he realized that his conversational maneuvers were likely to be wasted on these amateurs, though the bucket-head perforated with more slits than eyes prodded the charlatan almost to the borders of sheer laughter.

This theater of absurd meant these inexperienced proletarians shouldered a stake or claim in this cave, either losing family members or possessions, yearning and appealing to those to venture into its depths and recover who and what was lost. If this was the case, Bah’im was gonna listen in and decipher the motive behind this childish posturing, before venturing its worth and his part in its mission.

To do so, he continued further, without humming a breath, silently steering about, peering into the flanks of the cave to untangle any infiltrative ruse as the dragonborn and his mate began negotiations at the outskirts of this novel marvelous wonder.

Effects

Bah’im will employ the Naturally Stealthy ability of his Wold Elf subclass, in addition to utilizing his Passive Stealth of 19 and Passive Investigation of 14, specifically in order to enumerate those at the cave and any other possible dangers that lay hidden in this fog.

@Ermine@JBRam2002@Landaus Five-One

D&D 5E - Forgotten Realms

East of Waterdeep

"What causes the Spellplague?"

The Weave, behind all that we hold dear and arcane, was severed when Mystra, the goddess who kept its magical tapestry intact, was assassinated by Shar, through the hands of Cyric. For a decade, a storm of virulent blue flames swept across the face of Toril and into the planes, until it reached the world of Abeir, where it continued its devastation. The Spellplague reshaped entire regions, mutated thousands of people, and even the gods and reality itself were forever altered.

"Who is this Mystra?"

There are 3 that bore that title, but only one abides, but no longer by that name now. She has lived and died and lived again, first once wrestling against the now petrified Karsus, in efforts to cement the Weave against the damage from the raging empires of Netheril and Phaerimm. Mystra reawakened in time to save three of the four floating cities from their catastrophic plummet, but Thultanthar was salvaged into the Plane of Shadow before the Weave suffered penultimate pain.

During the Time of Troubles, she reincarnated herself as a young girl named Caitlin Moonsong, after securing a portion of her power with Midnight, who was slain by Cyric, that your inquiry now seeks. There will be a future that she will return to live and rule again after death, as she has done so thrice.

"Is there a way to stop or prevent the Spellplague?"

You have already tried, my daughters. Almost a century ago. And... You failed. Your minds were not your own, and your bodies have forgotten much of its power.

---
As you continue your interrogation, you sense the silt is up to each of your knees, with a rumbling from below. You note that you will have likely only a couple more questions before it is almost waist high.

@Ms Ravenwinter@corneredbliss

D&D 5E - Forgotten Realms

Round 4 – Wrapping up

Invisible Lady
Heeding the words of “Do not Follow,” she moves to engage Cerise, but the alteration of her stance receives a thunderous boom as her reward. Invisibly enraged, she punches the closest potential antagonist with each unarmed fist, dealing 32 damage, but leaving only 20 damage against Thanath due to his Stone’s Endurance.

Ysalain
Halflight has a feeling something is off, and heads over to where the others are heading. He currently has some of his bindings on, but his body and... vitals are still under the cover of the gown.

Heading down, he witnesses a rather bruised-up Thanath. Seeing as the others are too far off to have performed the attack, Halflight had come to assume that there is an invisible assailant in their midst.

"Cease this violence!" Halflight called. "Leave my allies alone, and..." Halflight suddenly rips his gown off.
"... You can have me, instead."

Round 5

Cerise
Cerise cures Thanath for 10 HP, missed with her Spiritual Weapon. Her Corgi will move them in front of the portal, readying an attack.

Uregaunt
Uregaunt's eyes flicker for a moment with life as he comes up with an idea. He throws open his pack and rummages around in it for a moment, desperately searching for something, only for his face to turn pale. He'd have to just try it and hope it'd work. Dramatically, Uregaunt raises an arm towards the invisible woman. "In the name of Kelemvor, you will bend to me so that you may aid my quest!" He shouts, hoping this is enough to demand the creature's will.

After a moment, Uregaunt quietly reaches into his pack and pulls out a potion of healing, drinking it and healing for 5 hp.

The footsteps of the Invis Lady walk towards Uregaunt (as a property of his action) circling Thanath without provoking an AoO.

AdAM 7 and 8
Assassinates Zana the gnome. Shhhh….

Mara and Fern

Beyond the portal. More secrets. Will be revealed in time.

Thanath
Thanath shrugged off the Invisible Woman's attacks like they were nothing before beginning to laugh and radiate with a dim aura that was becoming brighter by the second as he turned to face his attacker. But before Thanath could do anything, his attention was caught by Halflight telling the Invisible woman to leave Thanath be. Thanath turned to tell Halflight that he needed no saving just in time to see the man rip off his gown. The aura surrounding Thanath immediately dissipated upon seeing this. After everything else mention before this post, Thanath began to slowly walk backwards away from the scene and through the portal.

He also does stuff beyond the portal. Ceekwetz!

Zana
Fails First Death Save. Yummy poison.

Invisible Lady
Seemingly waiting for further instruction from her new lord and master: Uregaunt.

Ysalain is up next!

D&D 5e - The Lost Lands

"In case you didn't hear what she just said, there's a group of shadows up there before us. Any plans on how to do this?"

Yes. With pure fury.

The librarian realized her fettered hatred had to be curbed by higher faculties. A stratagem needed to be formulated quickly prior to their vengeful strike upon the gated entrance of the Hall.

And soon.

She swiftly herded words in the form of a whisper, in efforts to devise a blueprint, with furious hopes to undermine their forces.

“We should loose upon them a blazing volley in a cloud of fiery rain, burning the sky itself. Our arrows of light should be fletched with the feather of angels, but bear the wrath of demons.”

Mechanics

Wick suggests to the group to utilize their most effective, damaging long range attacks. Simultaneously. To cover those who charge in.

D&D 5e - Hoard of the Dragon Queen

The grizzly stood over their prey, foaming with iridescent saliva. The mucus formed helical strings, full of checked fury and restrained rage, a provocation transformed bestiality, reigned by nature’s blessing to the druid. It was a strange power, the reckoning that the Mother bequeathed to her adopted children. Fate engineered his rescue from Chult by Xaron, to arrange his freedom to fight against a much greater threat.

Why?

Nevertheless, the answers to his sole inquiry remained in the back of the bear’s mind, clawing and gnawing at the proverbial bit, hoping to be unleashed. This aspiration relished itself within the sanctity of a feverish fugue of a mind seed, planted by a jealous bard, now presumably banished from recent memory. The pinnacle and valley of the current siege of Greenest, with now their ambush upon this troupe, lead Torus to ask himself the rationale behind his existence, in the form of a horrifying growl.

Orchid, in time, applying the same stringent filter upon the runt left behind by the remnant litter, would yield a bounty, enough to feed his ravenous intellect.

D&D 5e - Hoard of the Dragon Queen

Sounds good to me. You can address him as your personal sidekick. Torus will go along with the ruse, @Lucius Cypher.

D&D 5e - Hoard of the Dragon Queen

Sorry. Didn't realize we were still in Initiative, nor that was my turn. I should have inferred from Brannor taking the last action.

I will not be currently pursuing the enemy at this stage. If you would like a post, I can scrounge one tonight. No problemo. @Hekazu

Ragnarov Fleet controlled space - Trespassers will be shot!

Yes, he was an excellent test subject. Just like the quarry next to her.

Gavin.

Their vessel had raced, at a near tenth of light speed, hopefully before Virne would catch word, during his illustrious scheduled revelry on Universal Nova. However, she knew this to be impossible. ACASIAS readily took advantage of transferring trillions of qubits to all the necessary recipients, sending via quantum entanglement, information born upon protons and atoms, by exchanging a myriad of electron orbital states precisely from one position in space to another. However, this physical massage of galactic data etched as a massive morse-like code to which each Scrounger’s suit could intercept, decrypt, and compile as local audiovisual files, if they had clearance and/or said info was declassified; the numbers ferried out fortunately were not superluminal despite resolution of the EPR paradox of special relativity, centuries before.

They still relied on the presumption of harmonic shell perceptions.

An appropriate analogy would be a telegraph employing subatomic preservation without hyperfine splitting, but relishing in the logical gates of relativistic swapping. As long as one could decipher such anticipated exchanges intentionally, information in a local galaxy was faster than the classical transmission of a spoken dialogue. Yet, biological life forms were too complex to translate over such a vast ether, due to risk of disrupting the Pioneer plaque limits of astrophysics.

Alas, all these actions could still be carried about with such rapid communication, even without, quantum teleportation, by ACASIAS before the pair even set foot inside.

With the aid of the gravity manipulator, Vropda and her new found shipmate finally met again the perpetrator. The other two carcasses had since been removed from the quarantined field and stringent biometric locks that were already placed on the frozen, rotisserie body. His corpus appeared packaged as a potential gifted specimen for her Xenoendoplantation lab, primed for dissection as a scion for future grafting and embedding among the Scrounger race. The Duke had denied her request before, but may now be more malleable with this third altercation being the incident racked on Nick’s rapsheet.

In his proverbial famous words: Three strikes. And you’re out.

The Captain still knew that Zelthis remained cognizant; he was more elusive than uncontrolled nanobots, and he would need not only physical restraints but mental ones. Since his cochlear cells were the most resistant to damage, Creft’s sister realized he could still hear.

Perfect.

She pressed a few buttons on her suit, which engaged several speakers, readied for their musical debut. Vropda had since cultivated such complex, self-perpetuating melodic fractals into sound, repeating a musical theme in a large symphonic framework. Similar to a cant or an elegy, her dirge would secretly, unbeknownst to Lobrom, appease and pacify the frigid man's disturbed mood, assuming their captive’s nervous systems utilized electric potentials and depolarization. The soothing tunes were low pitched, only consciously detectable with the correct diverting strata. All she needed was to reach the subconscious id that mounted upon the ego of this shapeshifter, altering his brain to reciprocally dance to their suggestions and orders. The Captain realized this could only last for an optimal twenty to thirty standard hours, before Nick would purposely negate the auditory signaling to release himself from these cerebral fetters.

Vropda, once satisfied that the bispectral index score from Zelthis equated and related to quiescent sedation, bellowed in a shrill voice.

“ACASIAS, bring the containment unit. Once he's imprisoned, please instill gravity once more, so our friend, Gavin, here, does not have to.”

> UNDERSTOOD

@Hekazu@Fer1323@JBRam2002@Zverda@Corporal Lance

Ragnarov Fleet controlled space - Trespassers will be shot!

Got unexpectedly busy. Post postponed within the next 24 hours.

D&D 5e - Hoard of the Dragon Queen

@Hekazu For Torus,' reaction, he will employ the Brown Bear's Claws, a Melee Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 11 (2d6 + 4) slashing damage.

It lands only for 6 damage.