Glorified Mercenaries: The Rebootening

"So, we're just kind of going to wander off without making any plans or discussing anything? Or even waiting for an explanation?" Giles rolls his eyes. "Have fun, kids."

He turns to Sylvain. "Anything we oughta know here, chief?"

"I have already told you what you will know." He seems to consider something, then: "You may still ask questions."

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Naisse and Kairui: d10 (1) + combined INT bonus (3 + 5) + combined skill bonus (1 + 3) = 13
Challenge Rating: 15

Naisse/Kairui: Magically lighting the way, you manage to progress for a while via the hug-the-left-wall method. The layout of the maze somehow manages to twist you around, though, and you eventually end up right back where you started. Sylvain jots down a couple notes.

"Alright, fair enough. Can't think of anything worth asking."

Giles leans against the wall and preps a couple of spells in succession: first, one to locate the maze's exit and lead him to it, then another one to warn him if he approaches any traps (informational magic).

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Giles: d10 (5, 3) + INT bonus (4) + skill bonus (3) = 12, 10
CR: 10/15

Giles: You approach the problem similarly, this time hugging the right wall. As you do so, you notice that the left wall has a fair amount of traps on it - Naisse and Kairui must have been very good at avoiding them. Strange that this wall seems to have practically none, though.

Regardless, you follow your spell towards the exit, but you only seem to find dead ends and paths that loop back to the beginning.

"This is going well, I think. Alright, I'm gonna go ahead and see exactly how bullshit this maze is."

Naisse pulls out her sketchpad and starts making a grid.

"I'm gonna try making a map and if it turns out we're in some weird non-euclidean space, I'd be both impressed, and out of ideas."

Bart turns to Naisse, "I'll track you from here. Spare a page and pencil for notes?"

He prepares a Life spell to sense her location relative to him.

Naisse tears out a page, and takes out a spare pencil and hands them both to Bart.

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Naisse: I was going to post with your mapmaking and trap avoidance rolls but then the forum went down but basically the upshot is you succeeded both.

Bart: d10 (1) + INT bonus (5) + skill bonus (3) = 9
CR: 16

Naisse: You carefully draw the map, noting the location of traps as well, but it conflicts with itself - you keep finding corridors where dead ends or walls used to be, dead ends where intersections used to be, traps appearing and disappearing. You're almost certainly not in a non-Euclidean space, though; if you track your position against the entrance, or use a dropped item as a marker, you're the same distance away as your notes claim. It seems only the paths themselves are the issue...

Bart: You manage to get a bead on Naisse with little issue. You jot down several notes on her position, paying particular attention to when she doubles back or pauses.

Sylvain shrugs and scrawls some more notes, careful to keep the clipboard out of Albert's reach. "Not too long, usually. Depends on the group. Is time a concern?"

"Everybody."

Everybody groaned and turned to the asshole priest.

"I am going to blast a few holes through these walls."

Surprised looks slowly appeared on everyone's faces, and some people said NO slowly. But it was too late.

Kairui prepared a few explosion spells and let loose.

Naisse was actually impressed. She didn't take him for the kind to take that kind of, er, let's call it a direct approach.


Nonetheless, she still made her to the nearest wall corner for cover.

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Kairui: d10 (1) + INT bonus (5) + skill bonus (1) = 7
CR: 5

Kairui: The walls are mostly unscathed by the explosion spells, but they do... spin?

A lot of the walls spin around, some having walls attached to them spin too, forming new paths. Some of the "new" walls you can see have traps where there were none previously; others lack traps that were there.

"I had a feeling. I mean, after trying to map it out it was pretty blatant that the walls were moving. Er, Kai, nice one."

She looked at her now largely useless map.

"So... we should try to get as far as possible, and if we start getting turned around, try to trigger some wall shifts until we can get further more?"

Bart eyes the moving wall suspiciously. "Surely it can't be that simple."

To Naisse: "It's Kairui, if you please."

To Albert: "Don't order me around, peasant. But yes, obviously there's some movement magic going on here. I, however, have little experience in such petty tricks like illusion magic. Nevertheless, I will try."

Kairui walks to a wall he saw spinning before, and casts an Illusion spell (without the Magical Expertise skill).

Aaaand back to unimpressed. Regardless, she's studied a bit of illusion magic. Naisse is ready to try her own hand at it if Kairui fails.

Kairui and Naisse: The two of you create a large field of undirected illusion magic, which should be enough to cancel out any movement spells within a wide radius.

"Right then. Onwards?"

Bart sighs; "Guess so. If this is really that simple..." He shakes his head. "I must just be taking this whole thing far too seriously. Not that I'm going to walk around blindfolded by any means, of course."

He returns the paper and pencil to Naisse, looking to the others to take the lead.

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Mass roll: d10 (4, 2, 5, 7, 10) + INT bonus (5, 3, 5, 4, 3) + skill bonus (1, 3, 3, 3, 0) = (10, 8, 14, 14, 13)
CR: 13

Bart and Giles: As your group wanders through the labyrinth, you both peg onto something strange - some organism or another becomes briefly noticeable, then disappears. Stretching out your magical fields, you manage to figure out that the creature spends most of its time up high, tailing the party, then suddenly flees and quickly descends for a while before eventually coming up again...

The paths continue to vex you; the illusion field doesn't seem to be stopping the rearrangement of the paths... in fact, Naisse feels a bit like the test is designed such that the illusion field is actually making it harder to navigate. But that doesn't make sense, because the energy is undirected, and shouldn't be causing any actual distortion of perceptions...

"Okay, okay, so the illusion stuff isn't working. I'm pretty sure it's actually working against us here. Any ideas?"

Bart jumps as Naisse speaks, far too preoccupied trying to watch the thing following the group in case it tries to eat him or something. "Er... I got nothing. I'm not really good with anything other than Water or Fire magic."

"Maybe it's interacting with some of the traps? Or some traps could even be triggered by it, or... boosted... I don't know."

Kairui ceases the illusion. He looks, and then he looks again. Then he shudders as he is overwhelmed with sensations.

"Ugh. Even I have to admit there's way too much magic going on here. The solution is obvious. Anti-magic."

Kairui unleashes a burst of Void magic, hoping to disarm pretty much every magical trap in the vicinity.

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Kairui: d10 (7) + INT bonus (5) + skill bonus (1) = 13
CR: 9

Kairui: Basically all the traps within sight appear to be disabled, a couple of them sparking slightly. From what you can sense, though, none of them would give off any Illusion interference...