IA characters square off against Phil’s Pathfinder Party in my Dargos campaign.
As a key plot point in our last adventure the party of adventurers including Phil’s rogue Taylar found themselves in a surprise combat with some familiar faces, here’s how it went down.
So a bit of background—our Pathfinder party has for years been in conflict with the crawling menace, a hive minded species named Dargos which I represent at the table primarily with Tyranids models (as you’ll gather from later in the post I’ve got a crazy obsession with models). The Dargos menace is served by a loose cult of individuals notable for severing and sharing fingers with each other. The so-called finger cult puts a degenerate human face on an otherwise impersonal menace.
Opening Cinematic:
The party, presently level 16, found themselves in a battle royale with a Dargos army in the midst of the Empty, a great hundred-mile-radius, featureless plain in the northern reaches of Auldelia. Though the party was faring well, their allies, proto-steampunk industrialists from the city-state Rittenratch and dragon sages of the Drazind enclave, were at the very cusp of being slaughtered wholesale. The battle was a defense of a newly wrought Nojan gate, a planar portal designed to bring allies to oppose the swarm army.
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Map of Auldelia, our little corner of Tarakis
Fighting their way to the top of the tower amidst a depleting knot of survivors the party held the line long enough for the ritual opening the portal to be completed and were immediately joined by an elite phalanx of the Gray Legion. True to their reputation the new allies were able to turn the tide in the battle, at least temporarily, and further offered gifts to the survivors, powerful weapons designed to obliterate the swarm. But a new threat beckoned—powerful quakes shook the empty plain, sowing fears of burrowing swarmlings. Runners reached the party telling of a dragon killed in one such quake and the heroes followed them back to find a dungeon unearthed by a deep rend in the earth. Investigating the dragon’s corpse in the sunlit portion of the dungeon the party found signs that he was killed by an assassin, his blood pooling in a sundered icon combining a circle and a cross; then, figures emerged from the darkness on the far side of the rift.
Dungeon encounter map
The battle was swift and brutal. A blue-robed elven archmage cultist called forth the truename of lightning, deafening half the party in the blast. Taylar, crossing the rift quickly, tore into the mage on the right, while a kilt-wearing cultist highlander leapt across the void to engage the PCs with his jade claymore. As the battle wore on, more figures joined the fray: an elven warrior maiden in deep violet armor. Only in the third round, when a white catfolk cleric with a long staff bearing that same cross icon stormed in, did Phil finally figure it out.
IA character models, Silvise, Keth, Brach, and Hallyr all custom converted and painted for this purpose
On the other side of the rift Brach, despite taking a beating, began smashing the weapons granted by the Gray Legion, freeing the party’s minds from the spell that had clouded their vision. Keth fared less well, succumbing to a dirty trick upon looking Taylar face-to-face and realizing all too late the invisible rogue has a symbol of death scribed on his forehead, causing the elf to vanish in a flash of light. Sylvise held her ground and while Hallyr used the best of his chronomancy to hold the murderous assassin at bay.
The party managed to convince Taylar to lay down arms during a stalemate with Hallyr’s spells. Brach began to explain the perils presented by oblivion and the Gray Legion. This breed of oblivion is unique to the world of Tarakis, but comparable. The Gray Legion is counterpart to Geos’ Scorpion Legion. Keth, reasserting the astral projection, wove a tale of Geos ravaged by the power of the void and explained the power of the Void Eye, Tarakis’s answer to Inritius. The two groups forged a pact, mutual cooperation against servants of the void in both realities, for both worlds the battle for all creation is about to come to a head.
(My special thanks to all the IA players who helped furnish me with character notes. I'd like to extend my sincere apologies to Smare who shared Coral with me. I lost her converted character sheet at the 11th hour and needed to run the encounter without her much to my great regret.)
