It's been a while, ain't it? A couple of my players have had notable schedule problems, which has held up sessions (this is also why there haven't been any Borderlands write-ups in a while). Also, I tend to do these write-ups once the group has progressed through enough story to be worth telling, and we had a couple of sessions that were mostly taken up by combat that would result in a write-up too short to bother with.
So this write-up comprises three sessions, covering the last act of the fourth volume of the Dead Suns adventure path. As such, between that and the aforementioned scheduling issues, the usual disclaimers about members of the group seeming to fade in and out apply.
Also, in case you missed it, the Gencon event catalog is currently open. While you can't sign up for it just yet, the game I'm running on Saturday, Space Brigade's Legacy, is currently available to view. Even if you can't get into the game, feel free to seek me out at Gencon if you're going to be there!
So where we left off, we had N1-C0 and Virxidor trapped in the server room with a massive mound of fungus shambling at them. N1-C0 uses his stealth field generator to vanish and get around it as it lurches away from the door at Virxidor. The half-dead elf has just enough room to run around it, following his invisible comrade, and the pair of them manage to outrun the mound and escape.[0]
The group carefully returns to the main 'island' and make their way through the ruined city back to the repurposed community center where Herald Tzayl and her followers are set up, where they share the story of what they found. They also tell them that they've fixed whatever was wrong with the House of Renewal. They try to explain to the kish that the strangeness of these sacred sites is more from old mechanical/electronic failure than anything else, but the kish are quietly and politely skeptical.
Still, they spend the night there and the next day they go to check out the Temple Found. They head to the building, possibly the largest in town and certainly the most prominent. There's a big plaza out front with a fountain decorated in a hammer-and-anvil motif. The fountain isn't functional, but according to N1-C0, images painted on the sides of it suggest that the rain collected in the fountain has healing properties. A quick scan for magical properties determines there's nothing at all special about it, though.
There's a broken sign outside that says 'Found,' which is likely why the locals call it 'Temple Found,' but from what they've seen and heard so far the group is pretty sure that the sign originally said 'Foundry.'
They go around the side, down a small ramp leading to a downstairs entrance to the building, where there's a keypad. The group is ready to hack it out of habit, until they remember that they got the bypass code. So they punch that in -- a combination of buttons held down to put it into a maintenance mode -- and duck into the building. They come into a series of rooms with lockers and tables and chairs and before they can explore too thoroughly their presence draws the attention of an orange slime creature that has built itself a hermit crab-like shell out of bits of technology. Specifically, bits of weapons.
And as they quickly discover, those weapons are functional. It blasts at them with a laser weapon on its back. A short fight later, the group has managed to destroy the slime. Virxidor finds it easy enough to disengage the weapons from the back of the slime. The tech is universal enough to recognize -- a crossbow, a laser, and a plasma rifle. And as the race that created them are humanoid, it's easy enough to figure out how they're operated ("Standard point and click interface," to borrow a phrase). Virxidor quickly determines the only issue is compatibility with the batteries used in the Pact Worlds, but some time, tools, and an Engineering check (or as I refer to this process at the table, 'an hour with a multitool') will solve that easily enough.
The only way out of this collection of rooms (which includes a couple of offices, what might be some sort of briefing room, and a small break area) is a set of stairs that leads up. The group comes out into a larger chamber with a couple of half-open storage containers covered in warnings. Before they really have time to process said warnings, a fist of rock opens up one of the chambers and an earth elemental and water elemental emerge!
And as the group starts slugging it out with them, enhanced by Virxidor's supply of grenades, a fire elemental and air elemental emerge from the other storage container. Driven into an unreasonable frenzy by something -- possibly simply being stuck on the material plane unexpectedly -- each of the elementals gets broken down and dissipated.
They look through the junk in the storage container, none of which is useful, except for a single x-ray visor that needs some modding because the kish/kishaleen have three eyes. Between the junk and other stuff as they investigate a hallway with offices, Zar gets the distinct impression that this is some sort of weapons factory -- he's a drow from Apostae, he knows what that looks like. The offices are identical and basically empty, except for one with a recent-ish corpse in it. The corpse is burned in places and has some broken limbs, but Malesinder steps in to do a closer examination for some reason and determines that the poor bastard drowned, probably a victim of the elementals.
Ahead of the group is a room full of standing desks covered with dried flowers, bundles of grass, and assorted trinkets. As they go to take a closer look, they get jumped by a pair of animals that are vaguely canid but with a distinct 'baboon' vibe to them (local critters called eohis), while one of the kish tries sniping at them with a bow from across the room.
Zar immediately calls upon his Solarion abilities to float over the desks before wreathing himself in energy and rocketing across the room to lunge at the sniper. She drops the bow and engages him in close combat with an axe, which actually gets in a couple of solid hits. Meanwhile, Virxidor and Malesinder have to fight off the eohis.
They poke around the desks, and N1-C0 figures that the locals have interpreted the desks as blank grave markers and have left offerings for the spirits of the fallen. Zar pokes his head through a door and recognizes a weapons manufactory floor, and he earmarks some stuff to grab for the ship on the way out.
So the group goes into a little room with a table and some chairs and a shuttered window with a 'be back soon' sign on it, and follow a door into a library or records room or some such... where Huntmaster Xavra has set up shop with a bunch of his followers (in the wake of the recent attack by the Cult of the Devourer, which has inflamed a xenophobic streak).
Xavra, up on a balcony, holds a pistol of some sort in one hand, and monologues:
"I knew the ancestors would send further demons to test us. We were too weak and trusting at first, and many believed that you weren't demons but messengers. But why would the ancestors send such strange and foul creatures as peaceful emissaries? And what news did you bring? Nothing besides death of good kish, defilement of our sacred spaces, and corruption of some of our finest minds. You clouded their eyes and made them think our way of life wasn't under attack. I could see, though. I knew. When I send you back to the ancestors, you can tell them Xavra knows and he stands strong. I will always stand strong!"
He then uses his free hand to take hold of a red mote of energy floating around his person, and creates a suit of red energy armor out of it -- he's a solarion! He draws a sword and he and N1-C0 begin shooting at each other, the kish huntmaster using a 'zero pistol' (cold gun, basically) far beyond the weapons most of the kish carry. As he and N1-C0 shoot each other, Zar goes after one of the ones on the ground, using his own solarion abilities to quickly put him down. Virxidor, meanwhile, conjures up a disc of energy and bounces it off a couple of the ones in the room.
N1-C0 and Xavra continue trading shots while Zar chases one between two shelves full of kish datapads and shortly afterwards uses his abilities to float up to the balcony. Zar moves to engage and unleashes his supernova power on Xavra, who counters with a devastating strike from his sword.
"May your ancestors forgive your failure," Xavra sneers.
"May your ancestors never forget yours," Zar counters.
Zar and N1-C0 focus on wearing Xavra down while Virxidor engages with the last of the regular kish, trading blows and poisoning him with his implanted wrist-spur, until he uses a psychic attack to explode his head.
Up on the balcony, the fight ends when Xavra steps back to gather some energy for something but Zar interrupts him by rushing forward and driving his energy-wreathed hand into his chest[1], grabbing his heart and letting the rest of him dissolve away.
So now the huntmaster and his followers have been dealt with, and the group has free run of the records room. They poke around the archived datapads, which aren't all where they're supposed to be since the place was ransacked and not everything was put back right. (The kish don't actually understand the datapads, as they're highly technical, but they just read the big words and scientific passages and divine whatever meaning they have to from them, fortune cookie-style.) Eventually, however, they find a datapad on the Stellar Degenerator and learn its history.
EXPOSITION TIME!
So thousands of millennia ago (like, before the people of Golarion discovered fire), the kishalee civilization was at war with a race called the sivvs. Nejeor VI (where the characters are now) was the site of a place called the Foundry (where the characters are now, more specifically), where weapons were developed and built and the kishalee sought out a superweapon that could definitively end the war.
The sivvs developed it first -- the Stellar Degenerator, which does something very similar to the trilithium missiles from Star Trek: Generations. It kills stars, basically. The longer version of what it does is that it accelerates the rate of nuclear fusion in a star, quickly burning it out and turning it into a lightless black dwarf.
Before the sivvs could use it, a group of kishalee agents took control of it and took it away from the sivvs. Bankrupted by the sheer amount of resources lost in building a superweapon they could no longer use, the sivvs' civilization collapsed and the kishalee won the war without having to actually use the weapon. They studied it, and kept it in a demiplane they built, accessible only through a structure called the Gate of the Twelve Suns (which is literally made out of twelve suns), the coordinates of which are in the datapad. Eventually study of the Stellar Degenerator came to a stop as they learned pretty much everything they could.
Over the centuries, the kishalee got into conflicts with other civilizations, but they only used the Stellar Degenerator once. And, somewhat predictably, they were so horrified by the results that they swore never to use it again and just kept it sealed up in its demiplane.
Where, untold eons later (this isn't a bit in the datapad, this is for context), a chunk of it got snatched up by the Drift, and was later towed back to Absalom Station by the crew of the Acreon. And the Cult of the Devourer saw it on the news, connected it to some stuff from some old doomsday prophecies, and traced it back to Nejeor VI. And then they showed up, got the info, menaced the kish, and here we are.
But now the party has knows how to get to the Gate of Twelve Suns, and that each of the twelve suns has a planetoid containing some of the tech used to control the gate. And conveniently, it looks like you could operate the gate with a small crew of perhaps 3-5 people.
However, the Cult of the Devourer knows all this as well.
Zar's first thought is, naturally, the possibility of co-opting the Stellar Degenerator for his own use:
"First with my mother and then my people, nobody has ever loved me. But now I have the power to make the universe fear me."
The group heads back, swinging by Herald Tzayl's little community to inform them that the mess is taken care of. I'm not going to get into details, really, because Zar and Virxidor are just obnoxious, dismissive, and rude to them out of just simple lack of patience with what they see as backwoods savages as they head back to their ship. They return to Absalom Station, since it's always quick to get back there (just a single day, in this case) to grab fresh equipment and upgrade the ship.
And on that anticlimactic note, we're done with the fourth volume of Dead Suns! See you next time where I start Dead Suns Volume 5: The Thirteenth Gate.
[0]-- This may seem a little anticlimactic after the cliffhanger this left on last time. But there wasn't a whole lot the swarm could do to stop them leaving the room and I do leveling by story progression as opposed to monster killing.
[1]-- Step Up and Strike is a helluva feat.
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