Act II started with the party heading into Zesbalam only to be stopped at the Great Desert Gate. Cassandra and Alek departed here. A number of caravans had been stopped at the gate, waiting in nearby Nasshan - the tribal gnolls of the desert had entered a berserker funerary state known as the Mourning Wail. The gnolls' cries were carrying across the desert, and according to the gate guard this process had been going on for more than a week. The party forged ahead anyways, and soon found themselves met by the gnolls. In the desert they faced a group of the beasts, one riding a sand-swimming shark. They defeated them rather handily, but found themselves faced with a much greater threat when they chased the gnolls off.
A large force of orcs came up to them on boarback, and their leader, Commander Gubari, demanded they return to his camp with him. The party were brought back to the orcs' camp, and found to their surprise that there was dissension in the orcish ranks. The "greenskins", Gubari's subjects, followed Tem'jai with fervent zealotry, but a veteran like Gubari knew better - Tem'jai's plans would cost his men their lives, and he could not allow an entire generation of orcs to be wiped out. Gubari proposed that the party slay him in battle; if Gubari were to be killed, his men would be obligated to return to the Untamed Wilds to bury him with his ancestors. He offered up his shield to Thomnall as incentive to prevent the orc-hating paladin from just killing the rest of the orcs when he fell. They fought Gubari and his most trusted chieftains. Upon Gubari's defeat, the party was allowed to leave the camp peacefully after the chieftains explained the situation to the rank-and-file, and the orcs set on their way back to the Untamed Wilds - it seemed that Tem'jai now had his loyal ashen orcs and a select few zealous greenskins at his side.
The rest of their journey was uneventful save for an encounter with a pack of scytheclaw drakes. The party reached Zesbalam and were immediately escorted by the guards to meet the sultan, Manasseh the Glorious, as well as his advisors, the Vizier Zaid Ganrubai, and the Grandmagus Nuha Raad (Grandmagus signifying his position as the grandmaster of both the Arcanistry and Alchemy schools in Zesbalam). Manasseh and Zaid proved to be quite distrusting of outsiders, dismissive of the party, and highly reluctant to listen to their pleas in light of the multitude of problems affecting his empire. At Nuha's advising, Manasseh permitted them to explain their reason for coming - though it proved difficult, the party eventually convinced Manasseh to allow Nuha to aid them. Nuha led them to his personal chambers to explain the situation they faced.
Nuha explained the nature of the leylines to the party: the six leylines are a set of elemental conduits which encircle the world, fluctuating as such a rate as to be everywhere at once. Invisible even to the most powerful mortals, a given leyline can only be made visible by heading to the portal and using a Great Cipher to attune the leyline to the portal. At Nuha's mention of "a" Cipher rather than "the" Cipher, the party asked what he meant, and found that there was in fact a second Cipher in Zesbalam's possession - Nuha provided this to the party to use in their quest to stop Tem'jai. Nuha went on to explain that if the destabilization of the leylines were to occur, it would throw Zesbalam into chaos, and the rest of the world would soon follow. The only way they could repair any further destabilizations Tem'jai may have caused would be to defeat the portal's elemental Guardian, which would've been created by the Gods using the unspoiled essence of the leyline - the release of this essence from the creature would put the leyline into a stabilized spherical form.
The party then learned that the next leyline, the elemental leyline of water, lay at the bottom of the Great Oasis, in a structure known as the Oasis Temple. Made by Quzar in Zesbalam's golden age, the underwater temple was a marvel of engineering - the party's visit was spoiled, however, when they arrived to find the attendants and guards slaughtered by the temple's greenscale lizardfolk guardians, who had turned on the Zesbalami. The temple was also found to be largely destroyed and flooded, but they knew not by what. The party was forced to enter the temple's sluice chamber, which trapped them inside and threatened to drown them with a flooding trap. A pair of sharks with keyrings pierced through their dorsal fins proved to be the party's key to escape - but in order to successfully escape, they had to flood the room they'd come from as well.
The party discovered that they could use the shafts through which the room had been flooded to travel around. They defeated a number of lizardfolk and aquatic beasts called sahuagin who were clearing out the treasure room, then faced a great sahuagin known as a sahuagin baron, along with his guards and his other subjects. Upon the baron's defeat, they began to understand what had caused such destruction in the temple - a great beast roared and crushed the baron's chamber just as they fled it. They finally got a look at the massive creature when they reached the temple's control room; the party barely escaped with their lives as tentacles crushed the glass chamber, but they managed to successfully activate a device meant to drain the temple in the event of the flood. This allowed them to enter the final chamber, and there they faced the elemental guardian of water, an ancient kraken. Curiously, the party found the portal already attuned to the leyline and destabilized. Unable to pay much attention to this curiosity with the kraken present, however, the party fought and defeated the beast, releasing the energy from it and stabilizing the portal. After the beast's defeat, Nuha and a contingent of guards came down the elevator, which had stopped working upon their arrival in the temple.
Nuha introduced the party to a new group member, a gnoll from one of the distant mountain tribes by the name of Kivuli, a ranger of the Majabali tribe who offered his aid to Zesbalam in exchange for assistance against the rival Bloodpaw tribe. Nuha also explained that the elevator had not simply malfunctioned - it had been sabotaged. Though he had no evidence to cast suspicion on Zaid, he had long been mistrustful of the vizier's xenophobic ways and the effect they had on the sultan. The party was again asked to come before Manasseh for an audience, and Manasseh demanded of them an explanation of what had occurred down in the temple. They explained the situation - Zaid asked a number of questions about the nature of their mission under the pretense of ruling them out as the perpetrators of what had happened in the temple, though the party sensed Zaid meant to paint them in a guilty light.
After this audience, the party took a well-deserved respite. This brings us up to the current point in the story; currently, Nuha is researching Malowren's book, the one which Erdan recovered from defeating Mazerant. Nuha believes he can locate Malowren's arcane sanctum with this book - this looks to be the party's next task while Nuha researches the location of the next leyline, believed to be somewhere in the Floating Gardens of Zafira over the city of Al'kinah.
No comments:
Post a Comment