Saga of Shagast Session One: Basically the Part of Ghostbusters Where They go in the Library and Then Run Away

I have given up the reins of my campaign, surrendered them to another dm. It’s pretty wild. He blew up most of my wizard tower, but let’s not dwell on that. Lets’ talk about the adventure from my narcissistic perspective. Plumb Bob, the second level thief (that’s my character) and the other losers from Lidevin decided to visit Zander Scuttletoes. They arrive at the cool tower inhabited by Zander’s friends and discover that not only is he not home but that he prefers to live in a ditch. Classic Zander.

Here is a beautiful sketch of the possessed woman
that made my character go insane for an hour.

So a bunch of us are hanging out at the tower presumably doing team building exercises, when some possessed villagers show up. Possessed villagers were a bit of a theme for the session. They attacked and when defeated the gave off red smoke which caused temporary madness. It was a huge bummer. Plumb Bob spent an hour or so running laps around the town. Herbert the Half-Hearted became more listless than usual after a dose.

Despite these setbacks the party was determined to find the cause of the disturbance. Luckily there was a guy whose name a don’t remember (ok, turns out his name is Zeez Brightbow) who saw the whole thing, Xylarthen’s apprentice.  This guy showed up followed by some possessed villagers and gave us an info dump, nice guy:

It's a cultist. We briefly wondered whether the
red face paint would make us immune to the
spooky red gas but gave up on the idea.

·      Xylarthen was messing around with some crystal in his cool tower (formerly Raglom’s tower)

·      Turns out this crystal called the Chyridion was a prison for an entity called Shagast

·      Xylarthen accidently freed Shagast (oops)

·      Shagast locked Xylarthen, Zander Scuttletoes andFablon Wagshank in the crystal.

·      Now there are a whole other set of cultists besides the corpse worshippers in town and there is this weird red smoke everywhere.

Very cool.

The party journeys to the tower we fight some cultists and here is where things get interesting. There is a big schism in our playing group between those that have grown up playing Dungeons and Dragons and those that haven’t. Paul, the new dm has. I have. The rest had not. For tactical ‘thiefy’ reasons my thief was separated from the party when we saw the beholder taking part in some inscrutable demonic ritual in the center of the town by the tower. My character could not communicate with the rest of the party. He tried to gesture to call off the attack but none of the other party members understood the signal. They attacked the group of cultists led by the beholders. We all escaped due to some lucky rolls and some restrained refereeing.

I spent a long time thinking about what was going on in this tower
and how it connected to the dungeon underneath. Now it's been turned into a
giant red mist creature (cultists for scale at the bottom there). 

It did make me wonder though. When I am dming, one of our players, Erika has her own Monster Manual, which she will check because she doesn’t trust me. Here she neglected to look up the basketball-sized eye beast when it revealed itself. Does she trust Paul more than me? Had she forgotten the book that day? Was she merely negligent?

I didn't give the beholder a stupid enough look on its face
but otherwise it is pretty close to the original illustration

Anyway we all almost died. Then the beholder followed us home and scared the crap out of us, the end, sort of a ‘Saturday morning cartoon to be continued vibe.’