Beyond the Bizarre Armoire Session 4: It All Returns to Nothing, It All Comes Tumbling Down, Tumbling Down, Tumbling Down

Session 1

Session 2

Session 3

Joining for this session were:
-Maxcan7 (https://weirdwonderfulworlds.blogspot.com/), as Mr. Fox and his War Dogs (less one)
-TheisticGilthoniel (http://pilgrimtemple.blogspot.com/), as Ibrahim the Adept
-Renefor (https://falseidolstla.blogspot.com/) as Velasco the Heterodox Monk
-Oblidisideryptch (https://oblidisideryptch.blogspot.com/), as Sieur Alastair the Knight

This one was a doozie.

Things kicked off by rushing the 2nd in command of Lanky's crew to find the guy before he burned the barge down, and then some bickering on what the end game of their time on the barge was. Velasco insisted on saving Brindle (and only Brindle), the War Dogs wanted to become the puppetmaster, and Sieur Alastair was fed up with the criminal sorts that surrounded them.

They settled on setting up a murder triangle/quadrilateral by convincing Vodyan that the aristocratic mannequettes wanted to kill him. This would not be too difficult, as they really did want to kill him (see: last session).

The party sidled up to a drunken Vodyan at the barge's makeshift bar. Velasco pulled a double-cross on the mannequettes, revealing the poisoning plan to Vodyan, and Alastair won his trust by sharing a few rounds of drinks and playing an oracular dice game.

Vodyan's condition swiftly deteriorated with the amount of turnip-liquor he was chugging, so Alastair carried him up to his suite. Before passing out Vodyan entrusted the knight with a big iron key, which would unlock the pen of the pride of his goose-breeding endeavours, a "very big goose". Alastair also steals a bottle of turnip-liquor from under the drunkard's bed.

Perhaps seeking some heavy support to go with their more subtle intrigues, the party made their way to the goose-pens in the barge's belly. Some quick talk and flashing of the key convinced the mannequette guarding the door that they were here on Vodyan's business. The mannequette's day was ruined by this, as they had always wanted to be entrusted with the very big goose.

The bogoblin who had been beaten by Vodyan's thugs last session is found hung up and badly beaten. The party cut him down and made their way to the huge, iron-barred door which held the goose they were looking for.

-My description of this door, and the feeding/viewing slots it held, was not the best. This led to a brief and retconned fight with the goose because I thought that the party had opened the door to look at it. A lesson in clearer communication of imagined spaces, and smoothing over differences in understanding-

Peeking through the view-slot, they see that it truly is a very big goose, perhaps comparable to a smaller elephant, with curling horns of beak-stuff crowning its head. In my notes I have it listed as 'the hell-goose', but the party settles on calling it 'Demogoosegon'. Sieur Alastair is immediately enamoured with it and begins to desire it as his mount, despite how much this might hurt his horse's feelings, and the goose's own diabolical temperament.

After interrogating a worker patching up the barge's hull damage, they learn that the formerly strung-up bogoblin "Counsin Jimerty" was Demogoosegon's handler, so Alastair gave the little guy some water to rouse him, then carried him off on what was claimed to be Vodyan's orders. The workers were all thoroughly terrified of the party by this time.

Deciding to give the wheels of intrigue they set in motion some time to spin, the party prepared to head off to the giant boar corpse that the scent-merchant Killian had mentioned. A raft is built with requisitioned repair materials to hold some of the quickly-growing party who wouldn't fit in the boat, and they set off to a relatively uneventful journey.

Before sundown they come across their destination: a dead and rotting boar big enough to dwarf the I Wanna Die with an equally rotting tree piercing up out its back. The party investigates the corpse and the tree, attempt to talk to the tree for some reason, and discuss possible entrances (the eye-sockets? the nostrils? the anus?) before Ibrahim brought up the possibility of using his magic to simply blow it to kingdom come.

-Ibrahim has access to biomancer and necromancer spells from Skerples' Many Rats on a Stick version of the GLOG. The spell he would use is Explode Corpse. This spell has no size limit. Thank you Skerples-

Agreeing that that would be the simplest and quickest way to fulfill their mission, the party retreated some distance to a floating turnip on the edge of the crater in the swamp's vegetation left by the boar's death throes. Alastair removes and covers his armour, the animals and cargo are battened down, and Ibrahim conducts his fell ritual, permanently sacrificing some of his own health to fuel the detonation. And what a detonation it was.

Unbeknownst to the party, an entire nascent civilization of maggot-people was flourishing in the giant boar's meat and bowels. I had a whole dungeon written up for them and everything. Alas, the best laid plans of DMs are nothing before the ingenuity of players. The boar disintegrates into a reeking mushroom cloud and the party is showered in pink mist and the obliterated material culture of the maggot-people. Cousin Jimerty, shocked out of his half-conscious state by the shockwave, begins to see Ibrahim as something akin to a god of destruction.

Brindle questions Velasco on why the archons, if they are really benevolent and loving divinities, would allow such an atrocity to happen. Velasco and Ibrahim agree that the archons prefer to let people have free will even if it means evil on a scale such as they just perpetrated could happen, thus solving the problem of evil forever.

The session and even our call ended here. Where usually there is some post-game shooting the shit, then there was only grappling with the enormity of their deed.

Will Ibrahim continue his trend of exponentially-increasing massacres? Who will be left alive on the I Wanna Die when the party returns? Where could the Countess have ended up by now? Find out next session of Beyond the Bizarre Armoire.