Recap - 2025-06-13

After a harrowing adventure in Undersigil with the gang, they were given a couple of days off to recuperate. They each spent it as befits their personality:

  • Josiah spent his time exploring the ability to actually drink liquids and eat foods, and while exploring these experiences, kept an eye on the patrons in Chirper’s Inn to see if any stood out as the underhanded sort. Nothing panned out, but it was a pleasant way to spend some downtime.
  • Hankin Hummock spent his time working with the Bleak Cabal faction at their headquarters, lending his cleric skills to the underserved and helpless of Sigil. He earned some goodwill the Bleak Cabal, and made a couple of friends.
  • Angelus B Damned split his time between drinking in Chirper’s Inn and gambling at Fortune’s Wheel. He earned a little jink, but the carousing netted him a more interesting prize: He befriended a couple of Harmonium members by joining them in booing one of the acts onstage.
  • Chibro Roz spent his time hunting cranium rats, and thanks to his talents as a scout and a particularly high demand for the deaths of the sodding things, made good coin doing it.
  • Tagleri Sunrunner spent his time working in a borrowed stall in the Great Bazaar, offering up his services as a jewelry repairman. He earned a bit of money, but also spent time observing the jewels of the more well-to-do creatures in Sigil.

After their downtime was complete, Coats called them back in for their next job. They arrived, and he first insisted that the group do a little icebreaker by each sharing a joke. Most of the group refused to participate, but Josiah attempted a brief joke, and Chibro stepped briefly out of his normal taciturn attitude to share one as well. Angelus tried to get a chuckle from a pickup line, but Coats was either being intentionally obtuse to play for laughs, or genuinely didn’t understand the premise, to Angelus’ chagrin.

After Coats shared his own joke, which got a mild chuckle, he explained that they needed the group to go explore a competitor’s product: Orbys Bumblewing had invented a new type of flying machine from her observatory lab outside of Bedlam. Coats explained they just wanted them to find out information about the device and report back.

Small gave them two official mission objectives:

  1. Find out if the machine works, and
  2. Find out HOW it works.

After the briefing, Small called Tag, Chibro, and Angelus back to his office one-by-one and offered them extra money for a little bit of dirty work. He said he’d give them 50 GP more if they managed to make the machine unusable, and 50 GP if they made it look like an accident. He offered them to each of them individually, and made sure they each knew that the money would be split between however many creatures it took to do the job. Do it alone, you get the full 100 yourself.

Coats them took the group to the Lower Ward, and specifically to the Great Foundry. He walked them to a medium-sized steam vent and instructed them that the portal inside this vent led to the outskirts of the gate city of Bedlam. He explained that the key to this portal was a sharp gust of wind, and conjured up one with the spell Gust. Once the portal opened, all shimmering and orange, he hurried them through and waved goodbye as it closed behind them.

The group was dropped out into the The Outlands, and were immediately overwhelmed by the sheer oddity of the place. It was eerie and wildly disorienting. There is no visible sun, moon or stars, and the group could see far off in the distance a relatively clear line where darkness just…begins. Behind them, past the portal, they saw an enormous Spire that stretches up into the sky, almost out of view. At the top, they could just make out the massive torus of the city of Sigil, where they were just moments ago.

After recovering from this mental blow, they set off toward Bedlam. They made decent time, but slowed as they neared the city, as an enormous storm rolled up over them from the city proper. They were still a little under a mile out, but this storm crossed the distance in seemingly only a few seconds.

It surrounded them, a magical tempest of wild, clashing ideologies and broken logic. It looked like a stormcloud made of symbols, fragments of language, shattered laws of physics, and thoughts that don’t belong.

bedlamcloud{ width=“500” }

From within the reality-warping storm, a voice bellowed out a question: - “What is freedom, if law is just consensus?”

Gobbie engaged the cloud in philosophical discussion, but seemed to lack conviction in his words. Josiah spoke far more simply than Gobbie’s flowery rebuttals, but with a surety borne of experience, both his own, and the echos of his creator. Chibro and Tag, refusing to engage with the cloud, attempted to find their way free. They stepped out of the calm eye, and into the maelstrom. Immediately, reality began to come apart around them. Chibro, used to being able to shoot his way free of most situations, raised his weapon and fired into the storm.

The smoke of the gunpowder dripped out of the barrel, turning to acid as it hit the ground, and burned a hole through to show an endless expanse of stars beyond. Chibro stared into it, and watched as the stars became eyes, then the eyes became tunnels, and Chibro fell into them and fell and fell and fell.

Tag managed to drag him back into the center of the storm, but Chibro was beset by a mild madness, having glimpsed some aspect of reality his brain could not shore up. The storm continued bellowing questions at them, with greater and greater intensity. Finally, the group was able to find some surety in their convictions, and as they did, the storm spat them out, and blew away.

As they stood there, recovering, Chibro noticed the storm had deposited a woman with them. Very disoriented, she introduced herself as She Who is Tossed by the Winds, as she had forgotten her name. She was unsure how long she’d been in the storm, whether it was hours, days, weeks, or years. But she thanked the group for freeing her, and then offered to walk with them to Bedlam, specifically to the Eye and Dagger to recover her valuables and provide them a reward.

Upon arriving at the city of Bedlam, Angelus decided to accompany She Who is Tossed by the Winds into the city, to explore what the small tavern had to offer by way of gambling. In his absence, the rest of the group made contact with Orbys Bumblewing, and she told them Small was her cousin. She offered to let them see and ride on her flying machine, the Skittering Leaf, but warned them she would have no trouble “introducing them to Bedlam’s winds, up close and personal,” if they did anything untoward.

Chibro tried to go up the stairs to the raised platform where the ship rested, and instead accidentally broke the platform while freeing himself from where he got wedged. The flying machine clattered to the ground, and Orbys frantically checked it over, terrified it was damaged. Upon discovering it was unharmed, she instructed the group to shove it over the edge of Bedlam so it could get enough lift. The group complied, but rather than lifting off, the craft tipped over the edge, sliding into the city, smashing shantyhouses as it went.

Meanwhile, Angelus had discovered that the Eye and Dagger was set in a permanent silence spell, meaning none of his verbal charms would be effective in giving himself a boost at any games of chance. Unwilling to play on an even playing field, he instead opted to take a drink. He noticed the bartender was doing his best to keep Angelus’ attention on him, and whipped around to discover that his bag had been stolen by a thief making good use of the silence spell.

Giving chase, he barely missed bowling over She Who is Tossed by the Winds, who threw him his reward: A bag of Pandemonium Pebble Dice. He missed the dice in midair, and had to pause to scoop them up off the floor. It didn’t stop him enough for the thief to escape, however, and a quickly cast Hold Person spell managed to freeze the thief in mid-stride. He smashed, paralyzed, into a reinforced stall containing wind chimes. They shattered, and the overwhelming winds of Bedlam drove them toward Angelus, piercing his face and body. He still managed to make it over to where the thief was, and both recovered his backpack and looted the thief.

Taking the thief’s pittance of coin, plus a well-hidden spell scroll of Feather Fall, he proceeded to attempt to return to the group up on the lip of the crater. However, he was assailed by the winds and unable to make much progress.

The good news was the group ended up coming to him. The bad news was that they were coming very quickly, and on a one-ton airship.

At the last moment, Angelus managed to jump onto the ship, using the winds of Bedlam to buoy his movement up, and grabbing a rope that Chibro was dangling. Chibro grabbed both of the front wing shafts and held them fast, allowing them to catch the wind. The other members of the group shared the load on the back wings, and the ship jumped into the air as if it had been shot out of a cannon.

Orbys, very relieved to be flying at last, started chatting about the ship and its capabilities, sharing that the ignition (what would normally start the ship’s flight from the platform) was a trapped air elemental in the center cage. Angelus cast Zone of Truth and began to interrogate her further, but Chibro took the direct route and ripped open the cage and extracted the crystal sphere containing the air elemental. Upon removing the sphere from its metal containment sheath, the air elemental phased out of the sphere, and attacked the party.

As this happened, a particularly unsavory air genasi named Dust Devil led his group, the Nimbus Knives to take the ship. Orbys, having apparently dealt with the Nimbus Knives before, abandoned ship using her special emergency pack, offering to reward the group if they returned her ship to her.

There was a pitched battle:

  • Josiah used his flaming bladesong powers to burn the air genasi as he sprinted around the deck.
  • Chibro blasted them left, right and in the sky with his blunderbuss, knocking multiple limply off the ship entirely.
  • Angelus was surrounded by the air elemental, but managed to fight his way free.
  • Gobbie kept everyone up with his healing magic and smashed the genasi around him.
  • Tag and Cath worked the crowd, staying opposite each other, not giving the genasi any quarter.
  • Chibro managed to trap Dust Devil in his runic bindings, and Dust Devil quickly fell behind the ship.
  • The Nimbus Knives surrounded Chibro, trying to kill him to free their master, and managed to take him down. Unfortunately for them, the bindings stayed in place until Dust Devil was able to break them.
  • Finally, Dust Devil freed himself, but not until he was down to two remaining men. He attempted to flee, but through the combined efforts of Josiah, Chibro, and Tag, with Tag taking the final shot, they cut off Dust Devil’s cries of revenge and blew him out of the sky.
  • They let one get away, to share the story of what happened.
  • There was a brief discussion about what to do with the ship, and Chibro convinces Josiah to allow them to destroy it. They set the ship down hard in the city, damaging it beyond repair, at least in the short term.
  • Chibro loots the body of Dust Devil, and the group takes stock of their treasure and their next steps.

Loot

Song of the Session

Devils in the Canyon by The Strike

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