FF/ASW: The Golden Spiral, Episode 104

Cast

• Asheal (level 3 ishim wizard)
• Hordac (level 3 tarchon battlemind)
• Waive (level 3 scion nomad)

Summary

With the bulky and clumsy Iodes in tow, the party continued gradually exploring the temple. The first room they came across was a kind of sparsely furnished kitchen. Numerous clay jars were filled with water, dried herbs, cloudfish stock, flour, and other surprisingly mundane foods, and there were two large containers: one made of stone, the other iron.

Waive cracked open the stone container to find it full of escargot, various types of meats, and butter. An attached elemental converter used ice cores to cool the interior. Another elemental converted was attached to the smaller, metal box. This one was powered by fire cores, allowing whatever was placed inside or on top to be heated.

For obvious reasons Waive wanted both containers and their converters, but there was no way the party could lug them around: thanks to Iodes it was already going to be difficult to sneak around the place, but once they defeated Ostona he could come back for them.

The party backtracked and came across another membrane. This time they tried walking through it. It felt weird, but at least there was no screaming, and it didn't seem to adversely affect them in any way. There was a large golden shell in the center of the room, and many more shells carved with strange symbols arranged on the walls. At the back of the room was a strange amalgamation of chitin and fleshy sacs, which they only recognized as a sort of pipe organ because it was currently being played by a robed figure.

Every mostly-normal cultist they'd encountered thus far had a snail perched on its head. This guy, near as they could tell, had a much larger snail that seemed to cover almost his entire head, and a necklace made of golden snail shells. He also had his own room and an organ, so it stood to reason that he was somebody important. The party entertained the notion of capturing him to at least get some information, but before they could react Iodes loudly proclaimed his imminent demise.

The figure whirled about, and they saw that he didn't have a snail on his head: he was either wearing the shell as a hat, or he was a mutated snail-human-hybrid thing that was fortunately mostly concealed by long robes. His milky eyes extended a few feet from his face on long stalks, and his amorphous mouth managed to sputter out a barely decipherable inquiry as to who they were and what they were doing.

Waive said that they were searching for the snail god, and when the snail-man asked why Iodes made it clear that they intended to kill it. This prompted snail-man to sputter out a few more words, causing the floor underneath the party to soften into an acidic slime. Waive and Asheal dash to safety, only losing their boots in the process. Hordac was pleased to find that the snail boots weren't affected by the slime, and along with Iodes charged towards snail-man. Snail-man responded by inflating and spewing a torrent of acidic slime at them, but Iodes summoned a barrier of stone to block it.

Hordac tried stabbing snail-man with the salt-spear, but as with the malleables his body wriggled about chaotically, making him difficult to strike. Hordac was able to maneuver snail-man next to the stone barrier, which Iodes then pushed on top of him, pinning him in place and allowing Waive to slice his head off. To their surprise his head was still able to move and speak, but it was only able to sputter out a few semi-comprehensible threats before Hordac drove the salt-spear through it.

Design & Development

The oven and refrigerator are a few possible things you can do with elemental converters from A Sundered World, though I didn't think of them until now for some reason. Curious what other GMs and players have cooked up.

Speaking of A Sundered World, Maria spotted this ad over on Roll20:

Dunno how it got there, but that's pretty cool!

I've been modifying the adventure as we play, and the Dungeon World version has been shared with those interested in providing feedback (if you wanted to and I didn't tag you on the G+ post, lemme know).

On the FrankenFourth side of things, we didn't get to play in the Age of Worms campaign this week, so the next time we get together for this I'm going to try changing armor to a random amount per someone's suggestions on the armor-as-damage-resistance-or-armor-class poll I've got running over on G+.

Announcements

If you're curious about FrankenFourth and/or Dungeons & Delvers, you can find public alpha documents here and here respectively.

A Sundered World: Player Fragments, the first supplement for A Sundered World, is finally out!

Hot on the heels of The Blackguard, The Troll is out! The Rogue is up next: we should have an alpha draft ready soon.

By fan demand, we've mashed all of our 10+ Treasure volumes into one big magic item book, making it cheaper and more convenient to buy in print (which you can now do).