RQ Meeting Summary.

As the group settles into their new digs, Lucky has some decisions to make: three heads of the local collegiums (mobs) say that since Lucky inherited Nicodemus’s property, he also inherited his debts, Lucky now owes them 80,000 silver and that he needs to pay them off within the year.  Since these are the men believed to be responsible for the lamentable demise of Nicodemus the Unlucky, late owner of what is now Lucky’s Place, and the group doesn’t know how the emperor would react, Lucky takes them seriously, instead of just whacking them and starting a gang war.


The Collegium heads and the amounts they claim are owed to them are:

Braxus – 30,000 silver
Timones – 30,000 silver
Salmoneus – 20,000 silver

Lucky says “Sure, I’ll pay you.   Before one year has passed.”



The Founding of the Pyramid League

Lucky begins organizing a combined casino/shipping/smuggling/pharmaceutical operation.  He galvanizes his hench…employees with a vision of money flowing upwards (to Lucky) and happiness flowing downwards to his faithful legbreakers, I mean, followers.

The Argan Argar trolls are put in charge of traditional trading opportunities.
Arre is encouraged to maximize his alchemical productivity.
Smuggling and gambling processes are streamlined, and the entire joint is given a thorough search.  Not necessarily at the same time, the following are found:

15,000 silver worth of edible salt.
A magically sealed wine cellar that contains centuries old wine, rare dyes and 2 strange containers, one which seems to contain a liquid firestorm and the other which has a strange little creature floating in a cloudy liquid.  The party will eventually find that this thing is called “The Seed of the Titan”.



Not long after the casino reopens under Pyramid management, the joint has its first big loser.  He’s in the hole for 6000 silver, but if Lucky forgets that and coughs up 10,000 more, this joker says he’ll tell you where you can find the sons of Prince Michael, who went missing on the night that his wife was assassinated.

Leon’s humakti can bespell the guy so he only tells the truth, but Aurelius casts a spell and determines that there is an active enchantment on the informer, one that looks pretty disgusting.
It goes off when the informer tells where the children are being held: an island to the SE of Crete, in waters not claimed by any one in centuries.  As he starts to give up his information: he screams and blood starts running from his eyes, ears, nose and mouth.  Only a quick reaction from Kelvin’s skald enables him to cast a heal 6 on the dying man, and he lives long enough to write the name of the man holding the children hostage on the floor in his own blood: Stauracius, their uncle and the crown prince of the Byzantine Empire.

Unfortunately, the spell was active AND contagious and begins to climb up Aurelius’s arm after he touches the dying informer.  Lucky thinks quickly and manages to remove the spell from Aurelius with a quick motion of Lucky’s magic sickle; he also removes Aurelius’s arm at the elbow.


The party loses no time in journeying to find Prince Michael and tell him that they have a clue that might lead to his sons.  They board his one remaining ship along with the prince and the Paladin Oliver, and set sail.  After eluding several storms and at least 2 squadrons of Muslim ships, the party spots the island they seek; it is quite small, no more than 5 or 6 acres in size and it has its own fog bank.  The group lands on the north shore and head inland, and find themselves climbing a steep, rugged hill that is the center of the island.  At the top of the hill, they are able to look down to the SE side of the island and spot its only inhabitant: a huge male sphinx (an Assyrian sphinx, with a beard).  Instead of rushing out to attack the party, the sphinx withdraws into its lair (and down a ramp, so that only its head and upper limbs are visible.  The party shouts questions at it, but the sphinx only replies:

I know who you are.
I know what you want.
No.

It refuses to bargain, ignores threats and pleas, and the party is forced to enter the cave and fight the sphinx on ground of its choosing.  It gets real ugly after that.  The sphinx is big (size 58), magically strong, tough and fast, and it’s very old, so its attacks are very skilled.  It starts off by playing combat handball with Theleous and Grumfar, and it mauls most of the rest of the party too.  The party’s rearguard is attacked by afreets when some of the people in the rear have to move up to heal and fight.  The afreets are destroyed, and eventually the party manages to hack the sphinx to pieces, but it costs in time and power.  At the bottom of the tunnel that is the lair of the sphinx, the party finds the graves of Prince Michael’s sons.  They died of some kind of disease.  Prince Michael takes his sons’ bodies and returns to the ship, while the rest of the party cleans up.  Arre manages to harvest some sphinx feathers and Carl’s troll shears off the beard.

Aurelius and some of the others are examining the glowing sigils carved into the inside of the cave arch of the lair, and the sorcerer casts Mystic Vision at max intensity to determine what they are.
He finds out that the creator of those sigils had enchanted the Sphinx with unnatural strength, toughness, protection from magic, even the ability to regenerate deadly damage, but also establishes a connection with the creator: Ashurbanipal, greatest sorcerer of the East and the real power behind the throne of the Caliph.  He is not amused and sends a blast of magical fire down the link to engulf Aurelious and all who are with him.  Half of the party is seared by the blast, but everyone survives, mostly.

The party returns to the empire, worried that Prince Michael will do something rash, and they’re right, except that the paladin Oliver knocks the prince out before he can do something that gets the entire party outlawed for treason.  There is a state funeral for the sons of the prince, and after a private audience with the emperor, Prince Michael is posted to the frontier in southern Italy, on the opposite side of the empire from his veteran troops.  The emperor launches his own investigation of the boys’ deaths (they were his grandsons) and eventually finds the wreckage of a ship in the sands on the western side of the island of the sphinx, that the party did not see.  A log book retrieved from this wreck states that the ship had been stricken with smallpox soon after leaving Byzantine waters, and eventually all passengers and more than 90% of the crew died from it.  There is nothing in the log book to tie that ship to either Stauracius or Ashubanipal, so there is no way of knowing at present if they are guilty, in cahoots or whether the eastern mage just stumbled on the island after the sick had died, and created an elaborate trap for anyone who found the island.

Not long after Prince Michael leaves for Italy, the Emperor Nicheporus summons the party to his palace.  Since the party has proven themselves capable of penetrating bulgar territory and surviving when anyone else would be killed and have shown themselves to be both resourceful and deadly, the emperor wants to hire you to go into the bulgar lands and kill Khan Krum.  He doesn’t really have a deadline for the deed to be done, but he would like the party to be on their way as soon as possible.  He then asks the party to name their price.  He then signs a formal agreement to pay the party (or its survivors) 5 million silver pieces if they kill Krum.  He also agrees to supply the party with whatever they need as far as supplies, horses, a ship, etc., and ensure that their business enterprise is still here when they get back, less taxes owed, of course.  Since they really have no choice and since this ties into their search for the People of the Horse, the party agrees.


The party sets sail with a ship, supplies and horses from the emperor and heads north along the coast of the Black Sea, all the while seeking signs of the People of the Horse.  Once outside the land boundaries of the empire, they discover that bulgar raiders are systematically sacking and burning every single village along the coast of the Black Sea that is within their reach.  They don’t want any working port facilities or docks that could be used by the Byzantine navy against them, and the bulgars have no navy of their own.
At one village, they party catches a group of bulgars dumping rocks into the mouth of a harbor to render it unusable by shipping; the bulgars spot the party too late, and none of the bulgar boats make it back to land.

The ship sails on, up the west coast and then east along the north coast of the Black Sea.  This is what was Pecheneg territory, but they see no one until they reach the western Crimea, when they encounter  2 small Turkish clans in the ruins of what 10 years ago was a thriving port town, desperately defending themselves from three score pecheneg horsemen.

The party joins the fight on the side of the turks, and slaughter half of the nomads.  The rest retreat, but return that night to recover the bodies of their dead.  The party discovers them and sets a trap with those characters who have night vision moving in behind the nomads while the rest of the party drives them from the front.  The Pechenegs are driven off after losing more than 75% of their number and the turks rejoice, thanking the party and welcoming them as kinsmen.  They tell the party what they know of the land from their travels; they are the western most edge of the tribes drifting west from the lands currently occupied by the Turkish tribes north of the Caliphate.  These clans are moving back east, the Pechenegs are too many and are being pushed east by the Bulgars.  They warn the party that there are many pirates raiding the shipping lanes of the eastern Black Sea, and tell the party of those places where they have seen the sign of the People of the Horse.

The party says farewell to their turk friends and sails east.  Of the coast of what is now southern Crimea, the party encounters 2 pirate ships, who attack what they think is a fat pigeon.  It ends in disaster for the pirates.  They lose their leaders to missile fire, including a javelin shot to the head of one captain from the varangian skald, before they bring their ships alongside.  They grapple the party’s vessel from both sides and send in 30 borders in the first wave to overwhelm the party.  This first wave is butchered and members of the party board one of the pirate ships.  The other ship panics and cuts lines and attempts to flee after throwing fire into the party’s ship.  Thanks to extinguish spells and a liberal wetting down of the ship before combat, the player’s ship survives but with some damage.  The first pirate ship is captured intact, the other is burned to the water line.  Two pirates are captured alive, perhaps a dozen more make it to shore and start running east.  The two captives are interrogated and then released, after giving the party conflicting information.

The party continues moving east along the northern coast of the Black Sea, and reaches the southern tip of the Crimea, a region that was a rich grain producing area since before the time of Alexander the Great.   It is abandoned  and the rich pastures and farmland lie fallow.  In the ruins of a city that was old before Carthage was founded, the party finds 4 pedestals holding granite plinths marked with the sign of the People of the Horse.  They also find a partial world gate, a big one, that needs a great deal of magic points before it will open; the gate is located in the center of the area delimited by the 4 pedestals.  The party investigates, but are prepared to fight at a moment’s notice, which is given when a dozen pirate ships show up outside the city’s harbor.
The pirates send in a single boat, with an old pirate captain as a spokesman.   They want to talk, after hearing truly horrific stories of how the party butchered nearly two full crews without losing a single fighter.  They had been expecting some kind of pirate hunting expedition from Constantinople; a small one they would have crushed, a big one they would have either try to buy off or allow themselves to accept a bribe for a (temporary) halt to their operations.  What the party represents (a small group that is difficult to track and which can destroy many times their own numbers with magic)  is more than the pirates had planned on.  Men willing to risk bad food, disease, shipwreck and a death in battle by arrow, spear or sword will turn and run from magic.  If the sorcerors who dwell in the star-topped towers of Byzantium have taken a hand in the game, the pirates don’t want to play.

You can imagine their surprise and relief when they find that the party consists of well-known adventurers whose fame has spread even into the cities and towns on the east coast of the Black Sea.  When the famous gambler and musician Lucky offers them a deal that would allow them access to the markets of the Great City itself, they can hardly believe it is true.  The fact that the party is known to be supporters of Prince Michael and that the prince is on the outs with the emperor is a point in your favor; the spokesman for the Council expresses approval, but says they must present the proposal to all the captains before they can give you a solid answer.  The pirate squadron ups anchor and heads east.

The party is continuing their investigations of the world gate when they receive more visitors.  A flock of geese circle the party’s camp and then lands, transforming into the astral projections of the shamans of almost all the Turkic tribes.  They have information for the party about the power of the red magicians helping the bulgars and of the demonic power rising (or returning) to the lands of the Caliphate.  The Lunars are using earth and  fire elementals in combat for the Bulgars.

The Turkic tribes want to move west if they can, but the omens aren’t good.  They have searched the lands where they have tribesmen, and they say that they cannot find anyone who matches the description of the People of the Horse.  They do say that they have found ruins in many lands around the Black Sea with the symbol of the Horse, but those ruins are all at least 1000 years old.  To continue the search to the east would be futile.

The party decides to turn back and head west into the Bulgar lands.  They sail west past the mouth of the Dneiper river and spot a lone horseman on a headland, a pecheneg warrior who holds aloft a lance to the tip of which has been tied a freshly cut branch, the common symbol of a request to parlay.  He is alone and he bears a message and gift from the Pechenegs, if they go to fight the Bulgars.  The bulgars and their red robed allies were too much for the nomads, and they have been driven far from the borders claimed by Krum; the pechenegs lost a third of their territory and almost half of all their warriors in a series of bloody battles that saw the lunar heroquesters unleash lunes (lunar elementals that wield madness as a weapon) on the nomad shamans and warlords.  The nomads now face a hard winter and a bitter spring, but they have one last chance to bleed Khan Krum and his bulgars: the Belt of Blood and Woe.
It is a large, broad belt woven from the hair of bulgars and slavs killed in those battles, and the shamans of the Pechenegs have imbued it with a great deal of power, power drawn from the shades of those whose hair was used to make the belt.  If the party promises to use it against the Bulgars and their allies, its power is theirs, if they try to use it for anything else, its power will fail.  The party agrees to the bargain, and the pecheneg warrior hands over the belt and rides off to the north, cursing the Bulgars.

This kind of power (magic points in excess of 1000) attracts attention, and because it is blood magic, it acts as a magnet for those deities associated with blood, battle and disorder.  There are two deities like that among those followed by party members: The Morrigan (celtic goddess of battle) and Zorak Zoran (troll god of war and berserker fury).   Because of the link Lucky and Carl’s troll have to their deities, both take an active interest in the party: The Morrigan expresses her approval to Lucky by giving him a magical silver hunting horn, but warns him to only sound the Horn of the Hunt when he really needs to.  Zorak Zoran is more direct; he pours his magic down the link through Carl’s troll and into the belt and it is more than the troll can handle.  Without Arre’s quick healing, the troll would have died and become undead (a mummy), with no goal but to serve Zorak Zoran’s will.  The party leaves the ship and continues from this point on land.

The party continues west and enters a valley that had been the site of one of the battles between the nomads and Krum’s alliance.  The Bulgars and their allies pinned the pechenegs against the sea and ground them to pieces.  There are bones everywhere, and the party swings north to avoid the valley of the dead.  They are caught in the open when a storm comes down from the north, but it is not a natural storm, but a spirit wind similar to the Eternal Battle in Prax.  The party endures the Ghost Winds that engulf them and are able to gain strength from the experience.

The session ended with the party on the eastern border of the territory claimed by Khan Krum, Lord of the Bulgars and the Slavs.  It is now March, 810. A.D.
This message was last edited by the GM at 20:04, Tue 15 May 2007.