I really ought to start writing up more of my tabletop gaming sessions.

[brooksmoses]

This bit, though, I just have to share. We ended tonight's situation on a bit of a cliffhanger, as we'd just discovered some orcs that started shooting at us, but there wasn't time to actually play out the battle. And also a bit of a cliffhanger in that our wood elf was literally hanging off the side of a large rock. As I explained it in chat afterwards:

Our DM has put us in this underground basalt cavern. Lake of lava at the bottom, stairs curving around the side of the cavern from near the top where we are down to a bit above the lake, and then there's a bridge across the lake from there to a giant door (carved with a demon face, naturally). There are foggy fumes rising up from the lake, to about eight or ten feet above the bridge.

Our wood-elf ranger-type went first, and got halfway across the bridge before bits of it started floating off with her and nearly dumped her off, and about that point some orcs that had been hiding under the staircase somewhat away from the bridge starting shooting arrows at her.

Meanwhile, I have established that there is a clear surface to the top of the fumes (which is relevant, as I have magic boots that can "walk on any surface"). I have also established that the fumes are largely vaporized rock.

I am a Dwarf Bard.

This means I have two major strengths in magic. Rock, of the musical sort, and rock, of the stone sort.

And I note that this is a cavern, which means it echoes.

My plan is to find a spot on the staircase that's near the end of the bridge at at a point that will focus echoes on the orcs and is down in the vapors, pull out my axe, turn the gain on it all the way up, and play the "sonic blast" spell that I have renamed to "power chord".

And assert that I amplify it with the stone magic such that the sound waves compress the vapors into walls of stone crashing into the orcs.

We shall see if the dice let me get away with this, but my dwarf is having an 'I have trained ... all my life ... for this exact moment" feeling right about now.

Comments

[eeeeka]

I will say my first instinct was that basalt caverns aren't really a thing. Stupid geology brain.

But the axe?? BRILLIANT!!! :)

[keshwyn]

Excellent geology brain! :-) But as this is not the Real World (tm), who knows - maybe there was a dragon egg in there at some point, and the dragon has hatched and left a big bubble in the middle of the basalt. I mean, if I were a fire dragon, I would *totally* let Kilauea incubate my eggs for me.

And yes, brilliant on the Axe.

[eeeeka]

Fair enough. I tend to get sidetracked by real world sometimes.

Of course, I also have to spend a ridiculous amount of time explaining that physics doesn't work the way you want it to in Pathfinder. Just because someone is half your height doesn't mean they don't block line of sight. Yes, I know that's stupid, but that's the way it goes.

(On the gripping hand, I also need to get a gaming icon someday.)

[brooksmoses]

Hee -- entirely possible! I was assuming this was something that the Stone Thief (see reply to eeeeka below) had created, but it's entirely possible that it simply repurposed an existing cavern. We do have quite large dragons in this world, to the extent that one of them shows up on the world map.

[brooksmoses]

Thank you!

Basalt caverns aren't normally a thing, and neither are lakes of lava in caverns that are not heated thereby to blast-furnace temperatures, but ... this is not an ordinary cavern.

There is a class of living entity in this universe (13th Age, to be specific) that is, as far as I can tell, made primarily out of non-Euclidean geometry and probably magic. I don't mean that it exists in a realm of non-Euclidean geometry; I mean that its presence in the world as perceived by "normal" beings is basically just bubble-like warps in space. Also, it generally lives underground and surfaces every so often to swallow cities somewhat like a Sarlacc swallows bounty hunters, and is capable of manipulating sizeable chunks of rock or city within itself so that entire buildings or city blocks may end up within it unharmed or may be combined into absurd and strange new architectural edifices.

Luckily, there is no more than one of these in the world that is large enough to swallow cities. Unluckily, there is one that is that large, and the world has a finite number of cities -- rather fewer than a couple of months ago -- and we have reason to believe that this one is gathering energy from the magical things that it is able to incorporate into itself.

At least in the mythos of our game, this thing is called the Stone Thief.

We are inside it.

We are inside it voluntarily, even, but that's a story for a different post. Suffice to say that if the Stone Thief wants a basalt cavern inside itself for holding magically-contained (so that it stays hot without heating the air too much) lava, we're pretty sure it can make one. And manipulate the orcs inside itself to protect it, too.

[eeeeka]

Wow, that is a seriously epic storyline! And sounds absolutely amazing!! :)

[tiger_spot]

Oh fun!