======= Captured by Hags =======
Grabbed from your sleep you only remember the impression of heading hands and your bodies falling away. A nauseating twisting out of body experience. The sense of being violated deep secrets plunged memories tasted by foul hags who leave you with a sense of loss and certain key memories that are hazy after having been gobbled up by hags.
Responses to what is a memory you have lost and why was it important to you?
Celadon : winning the Port Nyanzaru Dinosaur race
Hew: The reason why I went to the mine the first time
Bonnie: Why I fell in love with the sea
You can not see nor hear and yet you somehow perceive those who are handling you. A sense greater than touch but not quite on the level of scent or hearing. Yet you can feel them bickering and slowly pick out details to distinguish between the three.
The hags are extremely excited about the two princes and celadon is said to taste of two souls.
Cast:
Widow Groat has tarnished gold coins covering her eyes and ants nesting crawling all over her skin and out from behind the coins on the face. She stands near a collection of crudely shaped metal keys. Square, a flattened rectangle, a mis-shappen star...
Peggy Deadbells wears a string of chattering children's teeth and thumps about on a heavy peg leg. When she laughs, yellow gas billows out of her nose and ears.
Baggy Nanna has a squirming leather sack sewn over her head. The bag also contains a cockerel, a viper, and a terrier. One animal can emerge from the bag in place of her own head to speak on her behalf.
Mysterious figure vaguely perceived in room with hags.
(cutscene plays)
Baghead: *Mumbles something under her breath and then looks up from where she was trying to brush some silvery essence off of Celadon*.
(Hear conversation - perception 15): (floating) Your pet project is going well. No problems we haven’t been able to handle. Will check with sisters in case there is anything I missed
Baghead: (floating) Sisters our master wants to know how things are going with his pet.
Stumpy (pushy-forceful): Well Nanna i hope you had the good sense to tell him everything is fine.
Baghead: (floating) And bring any punishment down on my head alone? No, I told him I would check with you two and report back for all of us.
Insect swarm: (cutting) Why share blame?
Baghead: (floating) Why yes sisters, I make sure we are all in on this equally together. So how goes the hunt for our missing slave? And how goes your little project down at Camp Vengeance for that matter, Peggy?
Insect swarm: (cutting) Too slippery. stole keys and let herself out of our parlor.
Baghead: (pushy) Why why haven't you gone after her?
Insect swarm (Mentally cutting): I have in dreams but she locked the door. The best I could do was curse the keys to grow feet and so she can not come back but I was not able to get the keys to return of their own free will. I am working on crafting new keys but last time you insisted that I make them non replicable so it is HARD.
Peggy(AKA Stumpy): (forceful) Why not just recall them sister Groat? Is your skill with curses slipping?
Groat (AKA Insect Swarm): (mentally - cutting) No too many ambient souls. The cursed keys are practically alive and none are particularly obedient now. The air is so thick you can practically taste them. (all three sisters start slurping the air before peg leg starts speaking again)
Peggy: (forceful) It sounds like the master will be very displeased with you Widow Groat.
Insect swarm (Widow Groat still mentally - cutting): With me? Who was it that neglected to secure the prisoner properly before her escape was it Madam Deadbells?
Peggy Deadbells: (forceful) I was busy our puppet in the gauntlet camp died before he could complete his orders but I had a hold on his soul and now he is even better. Driven to madness and basically unkillable he will destroy our enemies or die trying. He got a taste of them and now knows ot be smarter in the future.
WIdow Groat (mentally - cutting): So what, he will just die again. He was a flawed tool to begin with an a distraction from our primary responsibility.
Peggy Deadbells: (forceful) But if he fails he will rise again and remember his mistakes. No sisters this is a better puppet by far and you can tell the master that. And his madness makes him even easier to control than before. But sisters he only died because it seems *Baggy Nana* told the skeletons to rise too early and messed up our well laid plans for those fools. Months of work wasted in an instant.
Baggy Nana: (floating) That makes no sense they were only to attack once the camp was empty or if someone attacked them first.
Widow Groat (mentally - cutting): well some idiot must have attacked them then.
Baggy Nana: (floating) I swear even our puppets are proving hard to control. I swear that those trickster spirits again. If the pet is not able to eat them yet we need to bind them into physical forms so they have less room to meddle and get them out of this room so they can stop tinkering. It will be weeks before the pet is strong enough for us to feed it another of them anyhow. Even weak gods take time to digest apparently. I still say we should have sold them off in hell. A few of them would have been worth a ton of pain.
Peggy Deadbells: (forceful) But sister we have more living spirit here. Let's keep the best for ourselves and feed the rest to the pet. Or make one or two into another puppet to play with like that one of Peggy’s.
In fact while the hags are bickering the sending stone stops glowing abruptly and the hags start fighting anew.
Peggy deadbells: (force) "You were supposed to keep it open what was so important to say that you closed the way?"
Widow groat: (cutting) "I said nothing out loud beyond a fourteen words so we must have been found out while you two bickered like spoiled children"
All three: *wistfully* mmmm spoiled children…
Widow groat: (cutting) Anyway I have an idea of the general area we can go check normally, how far could they get in a few hours? Let's store these ones in something so the atropal doesn't suck them in the moment we release them.
Peggy deadbells: (force) we can use some of our toys to house these souls while we go get some more. Our pet never plays with them any more and it will keep the souls occupied while we scoop up the rest. \
At this point one Undril, flashes and disappears. This startles the hags one screams that they need to hurry and bind the souls. They open a rich mahogany chest and grab some dolls from the table and do something and suddenly you can see and feel again. You are a tiny doll clutched possessively in the hags talons. Bonnie is stuffed into a stuffed monkey on a unicycle while Celadon gets a crude voodoo doll made of hay with needles stuck into his body.
Hew’s spirit starts to disappear but the hags are ready this time and Baggy Nanna immediately uses a counter charm to recall him. And stuffs his soul into a little ball of clay and uses it to mold into a vaguely human figure that beats its little fists on the hag before it is shocked into immobility at having two arms.
Given a physical form your perception suddenly becomes much more focused and more *real* and you get your first real impression of the space you are in. A sitting room with six doors and a staircase that is dominated by a large bronze cauldron.
Green smoke billows out from a bronze cauldron in the middle of this twenty-foot-high vaulted hall. Barely visible through the haze are three rocking chairs, several work benches heaped with haberdashery, a spinning wheel, and a rusty iron cage stands empty and several partially assembled dolls litter the table. Galleries stand ten feet above the floor to either side of the room.
Five wooden doors are set into the walls of the galleries, each carved with a geometric symbol: a triangle, a square, a pentagon, a hexagon, and an octagon.
To the south lies a twelve-foot-high, ten-foot-wide door is made of green stone, Jade perhaps? its surface carved with grinning goblin skeletons. A belt of smooth stone spans the door at a height of four feet, set with five golden seals engraved with crude geometric symbonls on the recessed circular seals.
Moments later you are all three stuffed into a giant chest and the chest is locked and you struggle to make sense of your new environment even as your toy form becomes more and more shaped by your spirit form until you can recognize one another as who you are…. Hew, Celadon, and Bonnie.
========= Into the toybox ===========
The toybox has many perils. Toy soldiers that animate and attack, bowling balls that grind other toys to dust. Shape sorters that crush. Yet these threats are bested via quick thinking and sound cooperation between the three toys. Until they reach the puppet theater and the devil possessed marionette. It tries to repeatedly posses Hew or Bonnie but in the end Celadon sets its wires and joints alight and it slowly burns away do to its inherent vulnerability to fire. Having taken some serious damage in the proceeding events the party rest for a while before continuing.
========= Jack in the box ========
Aside from the passage you have just passed through, there are no broken toys in the final room. Instead, the detritus and toys have given way to a collection of crates, boxes and barrels. This is the largest room you have entered in the toybox. Your mind is pervaded by maniacal cackling, and a menacing voice says to you "I'm ever so impressed you made it through my toybox. I hope you're ready for the real game!" The voice is muffled and keeps coming from different parts of the room as if the speaker was moving around but is hiding behind or possibly in a number of the crates scattered around the room. Eventually the figure is revealed a s a jack in the box and he can switch boxes at a moment's notice or to dodge attacks. And constantly he mocks, belittles, and insults causing vicious mental wounds.
But eventually Celadon gets a lucky scare forcing Jack to retreat to the far corner of the room where Hew and Bonnie pounce on him and do serious damage. Celadon again uses his trickery to try and set jack's wire on fire and cook him alive but Jack is able to shake off most spells. But with time and coordination the party barely manages to take him down and find a few things stashed away in the room as well as a way out of the room to the Hag's sanctum where the group grab a number of scrolls and the sending stone and are back on the ship in the lead lined box from which they quickly reenter their bodies and relay everything they had just experienced.
Inspiration
Celadon - Turning the final fight with a cleverly timed fear affect. Also using mage hand to neutralize traps dangerous due to size discrepancy.
Experience (challenge based) 1500 Individual => 12131 cumulative,
Toy soldiers - (easy) 250
Marionette - (medium) 500
Jack - (hard) 750
Challenge based XP notes from - https://dmdavid.com/tag/using-experience-points-to-make-your-dd-game-more-compelling/
Allies
Ortimay, Grigg, Bonnie and several deck hands
Seraph
Undril Silvertusk - in coma
Hew Hackenstone - in coma
Musharib
6 dwarven siege experts
Treasure
Puppet's Head Amulet - animates a 8" tall doll to serve you as (un)seen servant. can only be used once every 7 days. The amulet also gives you advantage on charisma checks, but disadvantage on deception checks. Creatures have advantage on insight checks to establish if you are telling the truth.
3 Potion of healing (immediately consumed)
4 Magical Scrolls
Booming blade (warlock, wizard - cantrip)
Protection from energy (cleric,wizard 3)
Private sanctum (wizard 4)
Death ward (cleric.paladin 4)
Sending stone