Topic: Veins of the Earth play reports
5 player characters are descending down a long, long chain, into darkness eternal around them. they begin to hallucinate. Some see stars flickering below them, others sea a giant bird made of darkness. After about 6 days on the chain the dwarf, Florey, puts her foot onto not another link in the chain, but something else. They turn on the lights.
there's a room-sized carriage attached to the chain below them. It seems heavily rusted. Loveable Truly, a PC, jumps in through the window. I say "The floor gives out underneath you! Well, a little, anyway."
Then there's discussion about how everyone will use ropes to keep afixed to the chain.
Inside the carriage, besides much rust, there's only a strange metal object, like an ironwork spine with ribs and bulbs on the ends of the ribs. In the bulbs, retrievable and rusted water, nada else. They move on.
Soon after, further down the chain, a moaning sound eventuates. Along with it: a strong, organic stench. Stench and sound grow louder as they descend, and eventually reach a mass attached to the chain.
The mass: 1,000s of carriages all linked up to each other and to the chain, forming a walkable surface dotted with tunnels. If you took a chain and had keychains and kept on linking the keychains to the chain and then to eachother... like 1,000 keychains like that, forming a veritable planet.
The "tunnels" were rusted out carriages they could climb through. Loveable Truly, 6 days starved, climbs to the end of the mass and down a tunnel, following the organic scent.
He sees: several more intact carriages he could break into, off the tunnel, and finally a large shipping container-thing embedded in the mass. He manuevers around it; the end of it is covered in fungus, which gives off the stench.
Loveable Truly feasts on the fungus! It's edible. He shares with the crew. Sinew and capillaries are revealed as they tear in. They package some fungus and withdraw.
Back on top, the crew abseils down the side of the mass. Underneath, horrifically enough: long thick strands of white faces in various expressions hang, trailing in the darkness. Like if I threw toilet paper on your house, 800 rolls, and then it rained, and then if gravity was reversed and it all hung down, and all the masses of toilet paper had faces. Some of the faces are screaming/moaning.
Seeing enough they decide to light it all on fire, which works, it's flammable. The faces burn and quickly cause a problem as the burning spreads into the planet of carriages. They quickly climb back up to the top and look around; some white crocodiles show up.
They run away from the crocodiles by hanging off the side of the carriages and climb around avoiding the hot parts; it works. The fire dies down, they climb down onto the chain below. Florey grabs a remaining still-living fungal face and tries to talk to it but it just bites her.
Further down the chain: visible below them: apparent flashlights, and a combat. The ground must be close! It's hard to make out what's going on with no lights, but there's a fight between what sounds like dogs and people, with bright flashlights involved.
They climb down further. A bunch more of the white-face fungus waits at the bottom, like a giant torn-up mass. There's no way to get off the chain without stepping on the fungus. They go back up.
They spend some time using a grappling hook to hook a nearby structure, some sort of ziggarat. There's a bunch of ziggarats between them and the flashlight/dog fight. They all climb to the ziggaraut. Florey kisses the stone ground.
The ground, stone as it is, appears to be entirely composed of carved, conflicing ziggarauts, as if 1,000 artisans carved stairs into the floor everywhere and made little towers and big towers outta stairs. There's a lot of different-sized doorways, too. Like a huge irregular waffle iron.
The flashlight dog fight has been resolved, they can hear, dogs tearing at something, little screaming voices retreat. The players move away from all that.
There's some question of when to turn on the lights. If they light their lanterns, they broadcast to everyone in this cavern their position; if they keep them off, they can't move quickly over the ziggaurat-studded floor. They keep the lights on in retreat, desperate.
They come across a sight: a giant, metal-not-wood, ship has crashed onto the ziggaraut ground, as if from a great height fallen. They investigate, they find a partially-working ballista and some suspiciously well preserved ballista bolts. Someone approaches, they hear! They hide within the ship.
Hiding, the PCs hear arguments outside the ship in a high-pitched tone. Then whoever it is leaves.
The PCs make a plan to snatch a "dog with a flashlight taped to its head" as a potential light source, considering. They get close enough to the dogs to see that there's probably 20 before giving up and fleeing again.
Heading into the unknown, stressed, the players find the ziggaruat floor transitions to a smooth cavern floor. Following that they stumble upon a golden slope; there is a giant, gold, inverted pyramid sunk into the cavern floor.
It's not actually gold, it's pyrite, and chipped in some places. They explore it; there's an elevator shaft at the pyramid's tip. Blocking the shaft is a wedged elevator. Florey cracks open the elevator's roof; a million black bugs and horrible smells come out the crack.
Florey is covered in bugs! -1 to everything. She scrambles out of the pyramid and they leave.
Next, confusingly enough, they find a large pyrite-gold non-inverted pyramid arising out of the cavern floor. It's about as large as an egyptian pyramid. It's got 2 huge unopenable iron doors. They try lighting some Cervit* packed in between the doors using flaming crossbow bolts. Inadvertantly they discover that their special crossbow bolts** give off a faerie fire on whatever they strike. The Cervit, however, does not explode when the flaming bolt hits it.
*Cervit is an unidentified white ceramic substance they found previously. They don't know what it does; it's not explosive.
**They also had previously found some special crossbow bolts they hadn't tested.
There's two more encounters this session: 1st, the players go to meet a sound of footsteps and see a bunch of apparently nonhostile little gray men gesturing at them; these the pcs scare off with barks and a flashlight-like lantern. 2nd, the pcs hear a booming sound like a t-rex approaching, this they flee.
They make camp in a little building they found near they pyramid. There's some large power tools and little dwarf-sized mechs with a screw-head top and some oozes trapped in jars with screw-head tops here. Loveable Truly manages to convince Florey not to screw in one of the little jars into one of the mechs.
They block the door, make camp, and Florey eats all the bugs off her equipment, they're delicious.