Fate in Flux Part 1: Bringing the Circus to Town, Sort Of

A Random Start

The randomly rolled starting scenario was that our characters were in a potion shop. One of the potions exploded, blowing the whole place up. Our injured characters had to fight a color-changing slime that grew from all the shattered potions that spilled out on the floor. When it was dead, they found a die in the colorful puddle of ooze. It was a blue eight-sided die, the kind that’s usually part of a roleplaying set. The shop owner, who miraculously still lived, said it was one of the Dice of Fate™. If the whole set were to be collected, it would have the power to control the laws of probability. This sounded pretty good to the party, since it would make their circus a guaranteed success.

One who might know more about the dice was a wizard named Varko, which I misheard as Barko, which became her new name. She wasn’t home. Apparently she’d gone to a place that we rolled up on the location table: the inverted spire. It was south of the city, so south the party went.

The inverted spire was described as a tower hanging from a hill. After some confusion, we realized that the hill was shaped like a giant tsunami wave, with a massive overhang. There was a tower hanging from it. Not actually upside down—it had been built to hang rather than rise into the sky. The confusing part was that the door was at the highest point of the tower, just where it attached to the hill’s overhang, making it inaccessible.

For Gore, this was no problem. Due to what’s probably an oversight in the D&D 2024 rules, a wizard can have a rideable flying mount at level 1. There’s a creature called Giant Fly that qualifies as a familiar for the purpose of the Find Familiar spell. Of course, I asked the DM if this was okay, and he thought it fit perfectly into his crazy adventure. So Gore summoned a giant fly to fly him down to the door, Pilskki had claws (somehow) which he used to climb down, as did Lee, but the other two struggled to reach the door. Gore got to use his time magic for the first time when Äör slipped and fell. He rotated his hourglass, and she flew back up and got another chance. Eventually, everyone made it into the tower.

Inside, they found another die of fate. It was stuck in a glowing force field encasing a column. They learned from Barko, whom they found in the tower’s library, that a comet was coming soon, and it would likely disrupt the force field long enough for someone to grab the die. Gore found a holographic map orb¹ of the universe (as one does), and used his huge brain to determine that it would crash down in five days. Apparently, the DM didn’t want us to know this, but I rolled really high.

Gore and Pilskki, both compulsive eaters with players desperate to earn ducks, stole all of Barko’s cookies. She was still kind enough to tell the party what she knew about the dice of fate. There were seven of them in total. One of them belonged to an astronomer named Vaelthar, whom we called Welfare because it sounded similar and was easier to remember. He lived on a floating island. Another belonged to the queen, and there was a guy in the town jail named Jonas who had been imprisoned for his knowledge of another die.

There was also a puzzle involving a catwalk in the tower, which Pilskki greatly enjoyed. Pilskki’s player surprisingly managed to play a drag queen in a way that didn’t feel insensitive. I guess he just channeled his inner queen with sincerity. Anyway, we solved it with brute force and found some potions and a note with the phrase “The librarian snores louder than the books,” which we never could determine the meaning of.

At the bottom of the tower, which was hanging a few stories off the ground, was the reason for Barko’s presence in the tower: a man named Nostralis who was trapped there and couldn’t escape. The party couldn’t get into his locked room, so they went back up to the door. Pololoz and Äör climbed up to the overhanging hill. Gore flew down the tower, and Lee and Pilskki climbed. They reached Nostralis’ window and said hello. Nostralis had nose hair all the way down to his knees. Gore thought this was gross and cast a spell to set it on fire.

The group returned ground below where Äör and Pololoz stood watching, and informed them of the situation. Gore remembered that he knew the spell feather fall and shouted at Nostralis to jump out the window. He did, at which point I remembered that while Gore knew feather fall, he didn’t have it prepared. There was actually nothing he could do. He announced this to the group, and Äör dashed toward the tower to try and catch Nostralis. Just as she was about to catch him, Nostralis was somehow teleported right back into the tower. He really couldn’t escape. With no way of saving him, the party returned to the city. They would return in five days to grab the die from the force field as the comet passed. Before then, they’d try to find all the other dice, so that when the comet passed, they’d have them all. Then they could use the probability-altering powers of the dice to prevent the comet from crashing down and destroying the city.

The DM said that the comet was going to crash into a swamp north of the city where no one lived, but we forgot about that and spent several sessions believing that we were fighting for a noble cause. In the end, the comet crashed into a city, killing thousands. However, at that point, Gore was powerful enough to out-bullshit the DM. But more on that later.

The Velvet Phantom

The party invited themselves to sleep in the tower’s guest rooms, and headed back to town the next day. On the way back, they heard a distant rumble, like an earthquake, followed by a voice saying “Sorry!” We realized that it was “the volcano that apologizes,” another randomly rolled location. The group visited the prison where this Jonas person—the guy who knew more about one of the dice—was locked up. The DM gave us some pretty detailed descriptions of the other prisoners, but we didn’t interact much with them. Äör, who’s player had managed to roll up a much more pleasant personality than the rest of us, bribed the guards to let Jonas out. He thanked the group, and told them that a man called The Velvet Phantom was in possession of another magical die. He was the owner of a casino called The Golden Mirage. Before heading there, the group went to a tavern where they found a strange door leading to a desert. They were the only ones who seemed to think it was strange. Gore attempted to steal an old woman’s lunch.

The Golden Mirage was a building made of white stone, several stories high, with an airship parked by the penthouse apartment on the roof. Lee used his druid powers to turn into a small insect, climb up to the Velvet Phantom’s private quarters, break open a safe, turn back into a lizardfolk, steal thousands of gold worth of trinkets, turn back into an insect, and return unnoticed. But he’d found no magic die. Meanwhile, Gore was trying to get into the casino without buying any chips. He did this by telekinetically flinging flower pots around the casino to distract the guards. They caught him as he snuck in, and escorted him off the premises. Then he remembered he could teleport. He vanished and reappeared at the top of the stairs to the second floor, where the high rollers played poker with dice.

Äör, quickly becoming the goody-two-shoes of the party, bought chips to get in. She wasn’t allowed up to the high roller floor because she was, well, a low roller. I suspect the DM wrote himself into a corner here, because the casino staff let her borrow enough chips to play upstairs. This made very little sense for several reasons, but apparently she wasn’t allowed to cash them in, and that included any winnings earned from playing with them. The rest of the party followed her lead and bought some chips to get in.

The group played a bit of dice poker with the Velvet Phantom. I imagine he looked like the Phantom of the Opera. He had a shining blue die that he would fidget with, no doubt using its magic to manipulate the odds at the table. Gore hatched a plan and positioned himself by the large window overlooking the street below. Pilskki and Äör were playing at the Phantom’s table. Äör waited for the Velvet Phantom to get distracted and tried to snatch the glowing die from his hand. The Phantom was prepared, and pulled his hand back, but Pilskki used a spell to freeze him in place. As Äör grabbed the die, Gore teleported her down to the street below. Then he jumped through the window.

Shards of glass crashed all around him as he twisted in the air, turning and extending both his middle fingers at the Velvet Phantom. Then he summoned his familiar—the giant fly, which he landed on. The others ran for the window as well. Pololoz got beat up by the Phantom and his cronies, and dropped unconscious. Gore teleported her onto the back of the fly, and surprised the party, as well as the DM, when he flew up instead of down.

The reason was simple: the party needed a getaway vehicle. Since they’d already pissed off the Velvet Phantom, why not steal his airship that he parked on the roof of his casino? After all, his personality was “moral opportunist”. Not knowing what was going on, Pilskki and Lee climbed out the window and up the side of the casino wall to follow. They got on board the ship as Gore untied the ropes holding it in place. The Phantom’s guards burst out of a door to the roof, but Lee and Pilskki kept them off with spells and arrows. With the ship freed, Gore swooped down to pick up Äör with a rope ladder. It was a clean getaway—relatively speaking.

Kobolds for Dinner, also Soap

With the airship stolen, the group took to the skies in search of the next magical die. The two they had found already let them manipulate fate in some minor ways, and they were eager to find more of them. The next one, if Barko was to be believed, belonged to the astronomer wizard named Vaelthar. He lived on one of the floating islands near Pinecoast City. But there was one problem: the floating islands were small in size and large in number, and all of them were shrouded in a mysterious fog that made it unreasonably difficult to navigate. The group didn’t know which island he lived on, so they set down on the first one they could find, and stepped off the ship to investigate.

The island was rocky and had only one notable feature: a massive stone quarry. They followed a narrow path along the side of the quarry, leading down to the bottom of the pit where all the mining supplies were. The group hid behind a shipping container to avoid being spotted by a group of elven miners. Pilskki snuck off to investigate the opening to a mine. Gore opened the container door and peeked inside. It was full of dead kobolds.

At this point, the adventure’s third session was nearing its end, and I still hadn’t checked off five of the duck-yielding questions. Consequently, I let the allure of the ducks guide Gore’s actions, and decided that, being a compulsive eater, he might want to try a kobold snack. After checking the rules and making a few web searches, we determined that Gore should be able to carry a pile of twenty-seven kobolds. He picked them up and ran for the ship. Lee, being an omnivorous lizard, grabbed a kobold as well and followed. Pololoz objected to this for moral reasons, and attacked Gore and Lee when they refused to drop the kobolds. Gore cast hypnotic pattern to make her freeze, but she made the saving throw. Gore used silvery barbs to force a reroll, and she failed.

All this commotion had alerted the miners, who were engaged in conversation with Pilskki. He had been spotted, but managed to talk his way out of suspicion, and was doing a rather good job of infiltrating the miners. Now that the jig was up, he excused himself, citing gastric distress, and ran toward the others. Instead of running up the path, he simply climbed the quarry wall.

Pololoz eventually broke free of the spell and chased after the group, ahead of the miners. Gore and Lee made it back to the airship, and brought it up in the air so Pololoz couldn’t get on. Then they started a poorly planned bonfire on the deck to grill the kobolds. With Pilskki running from his life, having the ship hang unreachable in the sky wasn’t the ideal scenario. Before Gore and Lee would bring it back down, Pololoz had to promise not to attack them for eating the kobolds. After all, it wasn’t their fault the kobolds were dead. Pololoz, with the threat of deadly violence from the miners, reluctantly agreed. Gore brought the ship down just long enough for the others to get on board. Then he brought it back into the sky as Pilskki bombarded the miners with fire spells until they were as crisp as the kobold roasting over the fire.

Having apparently killed every miner in the quarry—including their manager, whom we would later learn was Danny Elfman from Gustav’s previous adventure—the party set the ship back down and went to investigate. Turns out the elves were mining kobolds². The party headed inside and set all the living, un-mined kobolds free. Then they stopped to eat a suspicious mushroom, which caused them all to fall asleep.

Gore found himself in a dream from his past. A past that the DM and I had slightly different ideas of because we hadn’t really discussed it, but that was fine. In this dream, Gore was in the kitchen of a castle, holding a bottle of poison and watching a waiter walk away with a plate of food. The waiter brought it into a banquet hall and served it to a prince. I figured this had to be the memory of Gore’s randomly rolled secret: the one called “regicidal slip” on the random table. But poison wasn’t Gore’s style, so Gore went up to the prince, shoved all his food off the table, and challenged him to a duel.

Meanwhile, Lee was dreaming of a tree. A man showed up and started cutting it down. Lee told him to stop. The man said no, and chopped down the tree.

Pilskki dreamed of a festival in the city. There were all kinds of people there, and he didn’t quite know what to do, so his player improvised. There was a bard there, singing and playing a tune, and Pilskki shouted out to him in anger. The bard was now called Gustav, much like the DM, and he was Pilskki’s rival. Pilskki’s personal quest was to humiliate a rival, and now he had one. Then his dream faded away. The other two players weren’t there that day, so they didn’t get any dreams.

Then, the group found themselves, still dreaming, together in a dark arena. There was as monster there, and I have no memory of what it looked like. The party killed it and woke up³.

After some more investigation, the group determined that the miners had been killing kobolds for Danny Elfman to make soap out of. I got to borrow the DM’s notes for this session to help me write this whole thing, and they just said “Pilskki ninja warrior soap, killed Danny Elfman,” so I guess Pilskki got his hands on some cool soap or something.