Location: New Vasselheim, Othanzia, Issylra
Date: 30 Brussendar 845 PD (calendar of Exandria: https://criticalrole.fandom.com/wiki/Calendar_of_Exandria)
Occasion: Yay, it’s Old Vasselheim Day!
Party Members:
Rinn – half-elf sorcerer/rogue
Stubby – half-elf artificer
Tāmerai – gnome bard
Absent Party Members:
Bob the Therapist – changeling warlock with a couch for a familiar
Tunk – bugbear monk
The trio, who are not yet a party but are steadily working towards party status despite themselves, prepare for their journey to Old Vasselheim. During their daily stone call (it’s like a phone call, but using the communication stone instead), they ask if Keyleth can scry on anything in Old Vasselheim. She can’t scry on the old Slayer’s Take location, or the place where Vox Machina fought their rakshasa that first time, nor even on the Birth Heart tree. “Either all I know is destroyed,” she reasons, “or Old Vasselheim is as fucked up as New Vasselheim.” The group draws the conclusion that they are probably safe from scrying while they’re in the old city.
The group also ask Keyleth and all the other VM alumni present about the Sword of Kas. They confirm that the story Stubby remembers is the story that is still in effect for them — for everyone outside the Raven Queen’s temple, basically — in that there were three working trammels, not four, and that the Raven Queen’s trammel was the one that broke. Keyleth remembers throwing that sword into another plane, confirming what Stubby thought happened. Kas was indeed a paladin of Vecna who, despite turning on Vecna at the eleventh hour, was still evil AF.
Being still at the house, trying to talk the tree into letting her send things through, LV (Local Victoire) also verifies that ‘everyone’ knows the story about the three trammels. “It doesn’t make sense,” LV says. “We all know the story, and up until — well, the last time I visited the Raven Queen’s temple in Old Vasselheim, when they were still giving tours, there’s an actual, you know, literal blood bath… Anyway. Last time I visited there, they talked about how the Raven Queen gave her essence to Vax for a trammel, but it broke. I think your Saphy is right, the Raven Queen’s temple is what’s messed up. Maybe because breaking magical items fucks things up, just in general. If you were going to use all the power from all those magical items that used to be stored at the Platinum Sanctuary, doing all this is certainly something you could do.
The trio get their belongings in order, mostly in the Bag of Holding. They make sure all the perishable food is what they eat that day, and they don’t go out for more, though Rinn does make a provisions run for some travel rations.
Tāmarai finds a note in the tatami hidey-hole, exhorting her to stay as safe as she can, and signed “Mother” (which means she Sent a message and the Xhorhasian Embassy people delivered it on her behalf). Tāmarai takes the note and leaves one of her own:
29 Brussendar 845 PD
Ambassador Lanna Krynn-sama
Salutation
Summer insects sing.
A frog splashes in the stream,
entertained by her eventual dinner.
Lifting my gaze to the broad expanse of sky,
I witness the same moon
that bathes my sisters in its gentle light.
I am a stranger in a strange land,
coming to the water’s edge
to rest a while.
My companions and I will be traveling to Old Vasselheim for a few days to investigate on the empress’s request, and to seek the item of historical significance to Xhorhas.
It is my deepest wish that the kindness you have shown me will be shown to you by all, but most especially by my undeserving self. Should we return from this expedition, it would be a great honor and pleasure to present tea to your good self and any others you wish to accompany you; and after that, to offer tea to the entire Embassy staff who have been so gracious to us.
Please continue to take care of me,
Hanafusa no Tāmarai shikomi
The group’s stated errands:
* Check the Tomb of Champions for the Sword of Kas to provide physical confirmation of the history that the group knows, contrasted with the history known to the Raven Queen’s temple workers
* Seek and find the Luxon beacon in the remains of the Platinum Sanctuary
* Find a titan and kick it in the toe
The group wake in the blissfully uneventful morning. They dress, eat, and tidy their temporary residence, make sure that LV has one of the keys to the Tal’Dorei Embassy so she can get inside without issue, and set off. Rinn leads the way. Usually when leaving town he goes southward, and he has never been past the fields to the north of town. The trio cross the city bridge, walk past the inner walls, then the outer walls. They pass the Ivy Hall, the Copper Wall, and Chalkborough. Then they are out. There are no farms north of the city, despite the obvious fertility of the land. It’s just beautiful, open plains. Glancing back, the two girls realize that New Vasselheim isn’t much bigger than Whitestone. Old Vasselheim was touted as the Cradle of Civilization, but New Vasselheim is tiny and struggling. No one’s really on the roads, this early, either (other than Newt Boatman leading some guard trainees, calling cadence with his strident voice: LEFT! Your LEFT! Your LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT!).
They walk inland from the coast a bit, then northwards, heeding the advice everyone has given them: don’t cut across the fields, stay on the road. Not that they would have needed to be told, they all like to believe: the complete lack of crops or grazing livestock means there is at least one really, really strong reason no one’s farming this black, rich, fertile soil. As they travel, the roads go from fairly well maintained to old. Old, and then old.
The closer they get to the Crossroads, the more the landscape changes. As they pass by the Crossroads, every one of the three realizes privately that this is the furthest north they have ever been, as the original group had landed just south of there. There’s a sign at the Crossroads. To the east, an arrow points to New Vasselheim; to the west, Fort Viktor; to the south, Osgow. Someone has scratched Vasselheim off the north-pointing sign and painted, fairly sloppily, “This way lies madness.” The road continues on, mostly straight. The closer they get, the older the roads get. Above and beyond the quality of the road’s construction [OOC: think Roman concrete], the wearing of the road is telling. Millennia of grooves, worn in by carriage wheels and feet and hooves, are some of the most ancient things any of the three have ever seen. These roads are not precious relics housed in museums or kept for display in the homes of the wealthy, but everyday things that people walk — or at least, used to walk — every day, most probably without even thinking about it. They walk the patina of history.
Between the Crossroads and the old city lies the Vesper Timberlands. At the party’s current speed, they think they’ll get maybe 2 hours of walking in, once they reach the Timberlands, before they’ll need to set up camp. The walk is uphill, but at such a low grade that they barely notice. Stubby keeps an eye out for danger. Rinn hasn’t been here, but has listened to enough others that he’s comfortable navigating. Tāmarai divides her attention between both tasks.
None of them mention that they’ve been feeling watched.
They hear birds and squirrels, insects bragging about their virility and availability for mating purposes, but no sounds of people. This is the first time that Tāmarai and Rinn have ever not heard people, aside from Tāmarai’s brief time in Ravinia. It really is just the three of them in a forest older than time, an ancient but extremely well built road, and… something. Something watching, waiting for them in the forest.
Within about 50 years to the forest, they all get their weapons within easy reach. They approach, and… get distracted. Right before they hit the edge of the woods, there’s a shrine by the roadside, looking very similar to a drawing that Tāmarai found on a pamphlet in the dragons’ lair, one mentioning a deity she’d never heard of before: the Traveller. And the shrine looks… Well, from one angle it looks like a man standing in a hooded cloak, but from another, it looks like an anatomy textbook. Stubby leaves a muffin at the shrouded figure’s “feet,” and Tāmarai leaves one of her gems, one that is probably less valuable but much more interesting thanks to an oddly shaped occlusion.
Then Stubby sees eyes in the woods, maybe a foot and a half off the ground. To the right, Tāmarai sees much the same. Slitted eyes, and soon they hear a hissing sound.
Giant snakes. There had to be giant snakes. Why is it always giant snakes?
Rinn’s crossbow bolts find their marks easily. Stubby’s don’t at first (and Tāmarai’s never do), but Stubby’s Immovable Object spell keeps one of Rinn’s bolts where it is, thus causing the snake to be unable to move away from it without tearing itself badly. Tāmarai’s claws and teeth do occasionally strike true, but her chief utility is in encouraging [OOC: bardic ally inspiring] Rinn and Stubby. Both of the half-elves acquit themselves very well indeed, and Stubby delivered both killing blows.
In the moment of calm quiet as the trio are catching their breath, they all hear a male(?) voice saying “Well, well, well,” sounding amused; but nothing is there. Still, they’re all left with a feeling of approval as well as accomplishments.
Prestidigitation gets them all clean, and they stow the snake bodies in the Bag of Holding so they can keep moving. They all want to get an hour or two into the forest and away from the snakes’ lair in case there are more of them.
As they press on, the grass and trees begin to change color. Not in the normal ways that Stubby and Rinn, being from similar climates and terrain, expect (which in any case wouldn’t happen for another month or more, as it’s only summer). These are evergreens, not likely to lose leaves as deciduous trees would, yet the needles are a sickly orange-red, like somebody ate too many yams. Baby-poop orange. The ground is the same color, and it’s easy to tell that it’s not solely from iron-rich soil. It’s wrong. Completely wrong. This is the start of the Old Vasselheim fuckening. They’re within the weirdness now of whatever has spilled out and down from the old city.
Fortunately, the three spot a disused campsite off to the side of the road. Even Tāmarai and Rinn, not experienced trackers to say the very least, can identify the remains of the campfire. Stubby teaches Rinn and Tāmarai how to set a tent, lay a fire (it’s different from an oven fire or irori fire, which are the only fires with which Tāmarai has any experience), and so on.
Tāmarai doesn’t cook, but has seen people preparing and preserving meats, so she copies what she’s seen before. The snake skin she saves to be made into boots, belts, or whatever; the bones she boils for soup and to get the last of the meat off of them. The meat, she gets a little wrong. She slices it with admirable evenness, spears the slices on sticks that Rinn whittles down for the purpose, and sets them near the fire to dry and smoke. (However, she’s not done this herself, so she sets the meat a little too close to the fire, and winds up cooking most of it instead of preserving it. Still, it should be fine for three to four days, if they’re careful, which should be plenty of time for them to be attacked by something else that they can preserve equally poorly. It’ll be something of a learning curve. When she notices this in the morning, Tāmarai makes a note to get a book about food preservation once they’re back in New Vasselheim.)
Fairly soon, they all decide it’s time to bed down for the night. Stubby sets her Alarm and brings Sentri and Aegea to watch with her. Nothing happens. She turns Sentri and Aegea to their ‘watch’ mode and wakes Tāmarai, then goes to sleep.
Tāmarai’s watch is mostly uneventful as well, though she does see a herd of elk passing by, and becomes both impressed and delighted by their quiet largeness. She wakes Rinn after her three hours and goes to bed herself.
Rinn’s watch is only slightly more eventful. Near sunrise, as he’s watching the skyline ahead and trying to get a feel for Old Vasselheim, he sees — but does not hear — lightning. A bolt hits something to the northwest side of the city. Then the voice from that one disturbing dream encourages him, “Come.” Sentri and Aegea appear not to have heard it. At least, they don’t alert.
As the other two join Rinn in wakefulness, all notice, though none mentions, the lack of usual morning sounds. There are no bells announcing the hour, no calls to morning prayer from nearby temples. No Lightning Tetsuo walking by, whistling, carrying a ladder. No explosions from Clocks & Cogs. No fish seller hawking freshness, no flower vendors offering “A nice posey for your breakfast table, sir?” or “Something pretty to gift your love, miss?” There’s a bird in a tree nearby, screaming his virility to all the lady birds out there, but that’s about it. The morning mist evaporates. It’s creepy, in context, but also gorgeous in its way, if not for the weird color of the ground and the trees.
They walk, and walk, and walk. At one point, they hear a low “Excuse me” and see a bear crossing the road, walking on two legs, but otherwise just… being a bear. Tāmarai asks him if he was in New Vasselheim recently, and after being told what a New Vasselheim is, he says yes, he was. They all move on. He reminds Stubby of Trinket, and not only because he’s a bear.
Another fun moment happens when Tāmarai spots the remains of a cocoon which has had something ripped out of it and eaten. There’s a break for lunch, and more walking. And more walking. And even more walking.
Eventually, they round a hill, come out from the trees, and see what remains of Old Vasselheim. From books and stories, Stubby and Tāmarai at least know what they should be seeing here, and it is not there. The walls conceal some of it, but they’ve been pushed, broken in places, folded, spindled, and mutilated; most lean outward to varying degrees, a result of the explosion. There are no spires of temples or government buildings, just great gaping holes with pillars of smoke rising from them, including one which is a weird bluish color, sparking with fire or lightning or something, and not abating in the slightest despite the fact that it has been five years since the destruction. The location identified by that awesome, awful pillar can only be what’s left of the Platinum Sanctuary.
And still a mile from the city, they spy the Great Gates. They are still unbelievably beautiful despite one lying in pieces, some of which are badly bent or folded as if punched by some incredibly powerful entity. The other gate has been pinned to earth by a ginormous slab of rock. This took an enormous amount of force.
This is the last “safe” place to camp for the night. The trio were told to camp by the gates, so this is the place. As they set up camp, they find signs of others having done the same. Not many, but apparently it’s a “done” thing, or at least it was a few years ago. On the big slab of rock holding down the less-damaged gate, some people seem to have either painted or carved their own names, or had their names put here by others. Most of the painted names are faded. Stubby finds the name Victor V and some other words rendered mostly illegible by damage, but the length of the phrase and the remaining legible letters, “…mis…” indicate to Stubby that it probably once said, “Victor Vonn. Learn from my mistakes.”
They set camp for the second time. They have a great, creepy view of Old Vasselheim. The smoke and fires don’t move or abate in the least, it’s just an eternal pillar of unnatural flame. Whatever destroyed the city is absolutely still burning.
Nothing unusual happens overnight.
In the morning, they wake, make breakfast, pack up camp, and walk that last mile towards the old city. In the last 500 feet or so, they have a clear view. The gates are missing, as they know, so they can see into the city with a growing sense of foreboding. The road gets rougher, and at this point it becomes apparent that the roads aren’t just worn down: there are gouges ripped through the ground, one cutting completely across the road. They can get over it, but the sheer power of the destruction is intimidating. They’ve all heard songs and tales, seen paintings of Vasselheim, its gleaming pride standing the tests of time. And now it’s just rubble. Some roads, buildings, and houses appear mostly intact, but if this city were a house, a town guard would say “There appears to have been a struggle.” Actual craters pockmark the land before them. Whole neighborhoods are gone. Crevasses large enough to be called small canyons lead to the Platinum Sanctuary. Outcroppings of rocks seemingly erupted from the very bowels of the earth, even up through buildings and temples.
Speaking of temples, none are visible. Where they should be, there are no towers, spires, or steeples. The temples, they realize, were the targets. It began with the Platinum Sanctuary, but didn’t end there.
Take your meds.
Hydrate.
Don’t forget to love each other.
Is it Game Day yet?
Loot:
2 giant snake bodies — Have the skins made into boots, purses, et cetera, and sell the remainder to the leather worker. The meat will be food; ask a butcher for butchering lessons so we can do this more efficiently on the road. The bones can become jewelry, combs, tool handles, buttons, et cetera. I doubt there will be venom sacs on a constrictor snake, but I want to check, and keep the venom/poison if it does have that.