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Flesh & Fakes

Last week, the party sent Ayala deeper into the tomb to scout ahead. She found a large room with a couple of idle golambs that ignored her. The room held even larger vats of raw golem materials, with two extra vats: one for ritual components used to fuel the actual ritual, and one simply marked "flesh". Ayala kept exploring and found a massive magic circle in the ground that was probably used for the purpose of golem creation. She also found a handsome wizard who welcomed her warmly and invited her to gather the others so they could discuss the nature of their arrival. Ayala put him in a bubble, but he mostly ignored it and continued trying to invite the party to talk, so they came out of hiding and agreed to talk.

The wizard introduced himself as Alistair, the master of the ancient temple and creator of the golems the party had encountered. He told the party he was happy that they had arrived so they could get to work together. The party expressed some confusion, and he explained what he had discovered about the source magic in the area. As far as he could tell, the powerful magical energy came from a collection of dragon bones, just like the party found in the Sekerren Ruins. What was not so obvious is that the dragon bones were not all from the same dragon - in fact, it was a collection of mismatched bones from dozens of dragons gathered together to make a complete skeleton. The magical essence of each dragon had been concentrated in a single one of its bones before the combination, making the combined magical power of all of the bones roughly similar to the combined magical power of all of the dead dragons, explaining the extraordinary magical power that both the Sekerren Ruins and the ancient dragon temple radiated.

Before explaining further, Alistair commanded Charlie to approach him, and Charlie silently obeyed and entered the center of the magic circle. As the party watched, Charlie's body dissolved into a pile of flesh! A small scroll floated from his body over to Alistair, and the party realized that Charlie had been a flesh golem that Alistair had created. Alistair consumed the scroll, granting him the complete knowledge of everything Charlie had experienced, and laughed with an edge that was just this side of maniacal before explaining himself in response to the party's horrified questions. Charlie had been an intelligent flesh golem that Alistair had created and sent out to the world to scout and report back to him - one of many, in fact. Charlie was special in that he had been created with the ability to make his own golems, and he had made Diplo on his own. Diplo tried to hide from Alistair, but it was no use, and Alistair trivially commanded him to approach and stop causing trouble. Alistair was intrigued by Diplo, since he was neither entirely Alistair's nor entirely Charlie's. He commanded the doll to be quiet so he could investigate it later. The party was disturbed by this series of revelations, but still held back from attacking while Alistair resumed his original train of thought.

According to Alistair's research, the latent power in the dragon bones had been awakened about a year ago by a powerful ritual. Two rituals, actually - one to awaken the magical power, and a second one to suppress that power. Alistair was unsure what the point of this second suppression ritual was, and he was eager to remove it to access the full power of the bones so he could complete his ultimate project: transferring his consciousness into a perfect golem so he could live forever. He did note that the suppression ritual was close to expiring on its own anyway, since it seemed to have been constructed with the intention of only lasting for a year. That was the task he wanted the party's help with, and he was eager to get started - except for Gregory, of course. He angrily blamed Gregory and the rest of the Nullwardens for putting this all together by gathering the dragon bones from their ancient Purges. Historians agree the Nullwardens spent hundreds of years running periodic Purges to remove dangers to Praxis outside its walls, and Alistair claimed that the true purpose of the Purges was to gather materials for these rituals. Gregory angrily denied the accusations, and said that the Nullwardens had done a massive amount of work to keep Praxis safe. Mikolash expressed some concern about the whole plan, and Alistair angrily lashed out at him, saying that Mikolash's concerns were what Alistair said his concerns should be. That seemed to be a tipping point, and Ayala and Gregory launched a suprise attack on Alistair to seal him in a bubble with a crossbow bolt in his face. He angrily mocked them and summoned a massive half-finished flesh golem from a nearby room, and the battle was joined.

The golemstrocity charged into battle, and Simon charged into the circle to meet it - alone, since Chort was still heavily wounded from the last fight and was hiding in the vat of flesh. Gregory rushed up to Alistair to fight him directly and minimize his spellcasting ability, while the rest of the party stayed back and peppered the golemstrocity and Alistair with spells. The party quickly realized that this "Alistair" was himself another flesh golem creation, and Gregory and Mikolash tried to keep both it and the golemstrocity disabled as much as possible. Diplo acted at Alistair's command, repeatedly sneak attacking Gregory. Ayala tried to keep everyone bubbled as much as possible, and occasionally lashed out with water jets when everyone was already trapped. The fake "Alistair" tapped into the power in the ruins to balefully polymorph several members of party, shrinking them and confusing them. However, Millie was able to reverse the polymorph and transfer it to the golemstrocity, rescuing Gregory from its mouth and making the golem a much smaller threat. After "Alistair" saw that, he tried polymorphing her to stop her from causing trouble, and then focused on conjuring unlimited waves of blades from thin air that hit everyone in the room. Chort saw the danger the party was in and emerged from his flesh vat to do battle with the golemstrocity, keeping it at bay with Simon. The party made good progress on injuring the fake golem, forcing the true Alistair to emerge from his study and put his true body at risk. Despite facing no less than four different powerful threats at that point, the party managed to destroy the flesh golem and break the true Alistair's attunement to his control of Diplo - aided by Millie's previously unseen ability to use other people's spells against them, which she used to summon her own massive wave of bladeworks. With Diplo apparently on their side again, the party managed to defeat the real Alistair. Before anyone could react, Diplo revealed Gregory's old death bomb and threw it at Alistair. Gregory tackled Ayala to make sure she was safe from the explosion that consumed Alistair's corpse completely and deactivated all of the golems he had created.

In the aftermath of the fight, Diplo seemed shaken, and explained his own perspective on events. When the party found Charlie being burned at the stake, the entire scenario had been set up to attract the party's attention so Charlie could join them. Diplo had never been an evil doll controlling Charlie. In fact, Charlie had been controlling Diplo, and he had compelled Diplo to murder the innkeeper to start the whole "burning at the stake" experience. Charlie was generally responsible for compelling Diplo to act evil to convince the party that Diplo was an evil doll. Mikolash eagerly rushed into Alistair's study room to understand what he had been researching while the rest of the party looted Alistair's corpse and checked a side rooms to confirm that there was nothing else interesting to find. Mikolash confirmed that Alistair had been accurately reporting his understanding of events based on his analysis of the dragon bones, and he unlocked the hidden room that contained the dragon bones.

Join us this week to figure out what on earth to do next!

Stupid Awards

Gregory: Charlie: Diplo: Chort: Camilla: Mikolash:
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