Branching Out: Campaign Diary

We started with the players trying to keep up with the sprinting ratatosk. Being on the Astral Plane, Ragados and M’narr found it fairly effortless, but 12-Bar struggled a bit. Eventually the party made it to the ratatosk burrow, and crawled through the narrow gap in Yggdrasil’s trunk to enter. 12-Bar had to be magically shrunk by Ragados to fit through. They met the chief of the ratatosk tribe, a depressed squirrel called Glittereye, who explained that something evil had damaged the tree, and offered to show them the damage. The party accepted, after 12-Bar had been shrunk down again to leave. The ratatosk call the three “human”, “small human”, and “ball human”. They’ve seen several groups of ball humans, they mention. On the way, they ran into a lone construct, who declared that 12-Bar had broken the Law of Death and must be “corrected”. Ragados used the Amulet of Tvashtri to heat the metal of the construct’s head, and the thing was killed without much difficulty.

Walking on for another 45 minutes, the party reached the thing that Glittereye had warned them of. A silent section of Yggdrasil, devoid of trees and all other life, with a colossally wide mark staining the bark. The mark, jet black in colour, seemed to ripple and distort. Something in its darkness infected Glittereye, who lashed out and attacked the planeswalkers with magic. Things looked dangerous when the ratatosk surrounded 12-Bar and Ragados; but Glittereye was successfully subdued, and the rest of the tribe stood down. Glad to have avoided killing the old shaman, the party rested and headed back to Crux.

On the approach, a column of smoke drew our heroes’ attention. Seeing that it was rising from the Woodworkers’ Guild, M’narr and Ragados sped off in its direction, leaving 12-Bar desperately trying to catch up. Outside the Guild, onlookers desperately tried to get water, or do something to help. But Crux is not a town known for its water reserves. Someone who escaped the blaze said something about people being inside, and Marlus going mad. The players ran in to help.

Inside, much of the Guild’s priceless carvings were already up in smoke. At the centre of it all stood Marlus: wreathed in flame, green shillelagh in hand, and wild anger in her eyes. The party would have to contend both with her and the smoke and fire that filled the air. In the end, it was the latter that proved more deadly. 12-Bar took down Marlus almost single-handedly with one venomous blow from his black rapier.  M’narr nearly succumbed to the smoke while searching for survivors, but within a minute or so all the woodworkers still inside had been dragged out onto Yggdrasil’s bark. An easy job for a bunch of astral speedsters, really.

By this stage, a crowd had gathered around the Guildhall, including Constable Jon and Veridis Mov, who thanked the heroes. The residents of Crux watched as the roof of the Guildhall collapsed in the flames; but thanks either to the strength of the World Ash, or the talents of its builders, the guild’s blackened walls outlasted the blaze. The building could be saved.

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