Commissions During Break: Wildtouched Part 4

So, I thought I would be able to start up again this week with normal comic posting, but I need more time after what happened last week. And I'm unable to work while I'm out of town.
Letting Arrow take this one again.

The picture above is what Endymion became during Arrow's RP plot. Arrow decided he should be like an anthro version of a behemoth from Final Fantasy Games, but with wings. I decided to make him a fantasy tiger/bull/eagle mix with a dragon-type tail.

So for my part, I used to run plots with everything planned, and then things would fall apart when the PCs did something I didn't expect. this plot was more...a wing and a prayer. I had specific scenes I wanted to cover, and Jakkal helped with the overarching ideas, as well as the initial plot seed, but a lot of the development was on the fly. I had originally gotten the idea years ago but I'd never been happy with it, but Jeremiah's injury allowed me to crash-launch the plot. I'm happy I did.

So now alone in the antechamber, the characters started to explore, cautiously. There were four different rooms they could visit, a great dining hall, a garden, an armory, and a library. I have relatively little plans for each. Expecting the garden would lead them out fastest, they began entering. Jeremiah had lost a leg, again, somehow, in the interim, and was slow. Exploring, they came across many things from a great range of periods. A petrified conquistador and other statues, plants far larger, and they realized that the dimensions of the location itself were...variable. They shouldn't have all fit into the area they were in.

After a while they came across the sound of crying; investigating, they found an alarune named Jasmine. She was approximately tweenage, and was upset because nobody would play with her. They talked a bit, and for a while she seemed hopeful they'd stay and play with her. However, after a brief discussion, they refused, focusing on escaping. Jasmine...well, there's a saying about a woman scorned, and tweens are even more emotional. This was probably the weakest combat scene in the plot; the characters left relatively rapidly, but not before Jeremiah got a plantlike symbiote attached to his leg. (To explain why a benefit like this would be given as an attack: His injuries were limiting the plot advancement, so it became important to at least allow him his leg back. But everything has a price...as he found out later.

Retreating back to the hall, the characters cleaned off a bunch of pollen and plant gunk they'd gotten on themselves, then moved for the library. As they entered, a drawbar above their reach sealed the door behind them. This was where they got a deeper dig into the overarching lore of the plot, including hints at geneaology being done by the fae lord, as well as advanced medical equipment, a contract for a bribe to a local hospital administrator to 're-evaluate' an employment application, some coordinates and dates that tracked back to Augusta Falls, Maine, and to Salem, Massachusetts. (Oddly enough, at the time of the Witch Trials, Maine was part of Massachusetts!) They also found maps of ley energies, particularly strong in Augusta Falls as opposed to nearby areas.

During their explorations, Endymion found what looked like an astrological codex, and he knew that some sort of event was going on soon that involved the stars. It called to him...and as you might expect, it was a trap. As he touched it, it flew apart into hundreds of pages, and books from all over the library flew in, burying Endymion in more knowledge than even he ever wanted! As the PCs finished avoiding incoming books, they began to unbury Endymion, harassed by spectral knives being stabbed out of the books, only to find Endy in a paper cocoon.

Endymion, for his part, started screaming as the aether of the pages soaked into him, turning him into a massive beast that I'm sure Jakkal posted on this journal. And from there he broke out of the cocoon after this painful transformation. But he seemed to still have some of his mind...and now, Endymion had a taste for knowledge, being a literal bibliophile, eating words off books and memories off objects.

Starting back into the anteroom, Endymion, now 10 feet tall, removed the drawbar and then headed towards the armory. Inside, the characters found a large amount of armor and weapons. Most of it was medieval class. Endymion consumed the memories from a suit of armor, causing someone's third death. A few other characters armed themselves; Ernest with a shillelagh, Caius a short sword. Kaga and Jeremiah already had weapons. But then Endymion, activated by his new master, attacked the others, aided by two armor spirits, that would inhabit the armor suits in the room and use them to fight the characters.

This was a good example of an IC Morton's Fork. I had secret win and lose conditions for the PCs, and while it wouldn't overmuch affect the plot since this was all a test by the fae lord, it was an interesting exercise. However, in this case, the fight went rough, and teamwork was somewhat lacking, so Endymion was able to achieve his victory condition of capturing and restraining Richard. (And by that point almost everyone else was incapacitated.) Darkness overtook them...and then they found themselves waking up, healed and cleaned, in the fae lord's chamber.

(To this day I still don't know what was in the dining hall.)