What You Missed: Feast of Blackwood VIII by Gerry "Gray" Chartier

Gerry Chartier here, player of everyone’s favorite sorcery-slinger, Gray Erikkson.  Because I’m a sucker for punishment, I attended another full-weekend event just three weeks after Folkestone weekend.  So, you, gentle reader, now benefit from my after-action review!

    The site for Feast of Blackwood can be found on Google Maps as Camp Chenoa.  It is in the middle of nowhere.  I came up from Connecticut, and about two thirds of the trip was on little state highways winding through rural communities.  If you attend, bring what you need with you.  There are a few restaurants in Antrim, but not a lot.  Nor is there a lot of options for shopping.  Even Walmart isn’t particularly close – the nearest one is 40 minutes away in Marlborough.

    The sight itself is a very pretty, hilly wooded 300-acre former girl scout camp next to Gregg Lake.  As such, there is an abundance of cabin space.  I went to the event with a pair of friends, and the three of us had a cabin to ourselves.  Several other cabins also seemed to be under-occupied, and some were not used at all.  There are shower facilities on site that are much nicer than the ones up at Folkestone’s site.

    I arrived Friday night and had plenty of time to get settled in, garbed up, and head to the tavern (the camp’s dining hall) to await the beginning of the night quest.  Thus began a weekend full of walking.  Did I mention the camp was a hilly 300 acres?  The site is very spread out, and one winds up walking a lot.  There is a shortcut between the upper field and the tavern that can cut down a lot on the walking, but I didn’t know where it was when we first arrived.

    It always takes a while for quests to begin, and that night was no exception.  For this event, I debuted a couple new behaviors for my character, Gray.  One was keeping an in-character journal, to write down notes about plot, vital information, observations, and so on.  The other was to start demanding tasks of anybody who came to me asking me to sign their spellbook for a spell I know.  I was able to start with the latter right away and consistently whenever there was down-time at the event.  It was a lot of fun, and as it helps create player-generated content, I highly recommend it to all spellcaster players.

    On that note, I cannot tell you how excited I was when someone asked me to sign for Lightning Bolt.  I was giddy with the possibilities – then that unbelievable bastard Tuilli snaked it on me, signing the spellbook without asking for so much as a donut!  You’re breaking my heart, Tuilli!

    The plot for the weekend was a continuation of the plot from Folkestone Questing, so we PCs were still stuck in what can usefully be termed as Bizzaro-Realms.  Bizzaro-Bones turned up to ask us to find and assemble the pieces of the Planar Shield Stone, something that in Prime-Realms had been assembled some years ago.  The more thinky PCs confabbed on the notion.  Those more familiar with the Prime-Realms’ PSS thought assembling it could block our ability to get out of Bizzaro-Realms, but there was also the possibility it could be tweaked to send us home. It was the best lead we had, so we set out to pursue it.

    The first thing we encountered out in the night were silver-faced golems that initially mimicked everything we did.  They weren’t particularly hostile, but we soon learned they were learning spells from us.  They also started to get more sophisticated the longer they were with us.  These were ominous developments, pointing to trouble once we wound up having to fight something.  I was investing effort in getting them to develop in a benign fashion when a pack of hostile werewolves showed up.  They just sort of did a cruise-by, but some encounter at the lakeshore went sour.  The mimic golems hive-minded up, declared themselves Celeste, and went all Borg on us.

    This presented me and the other sorcerers a dilemma – we could affect the mimics with our lightning bolts, but doing so presented the danger of having them pick up our props and cast them back at us or the other PCs.  Under the circumstances, I didn’t dare use the lightning on them, so I fell back on my Channeler spells – particularly Ward Enchanted Beings.  The mimics started using it when I was using it, but they were still affected by it, and while they were mimicking my warding, they weren’t attacking anybody.  They also had forced regeneration and got harder and harder to scalp, making warding possibly the most effective way of keeping them at bay.

    As I was busy warding warding warding (at one point I wound up rearguard all by my lonesome), I wasn’t in on the particulars of the encounters we came across, but after some slogging back and forth across the lower end of the site in the dark (and it is so very dark at that site), we wound up with a couple fragments of the planar shield stone, and lost Rillan, as the mimics somehow learned Banish Conjured Being and sent him home.  On the way back to the tavern, we found a paladin of the One True God, from New Verai, and a non-hostile werewolf.

    At the tavern, we worked on deciphering the runes on the fragments we had.  I’m told they were in wild elf script.  I think the Northern Alliance had some translations of words which gave us a good starting point on the characters, and others were worked out.  Wild elf script isn’t just a straight substitution for common lettering, by the way.  It has several unique symbols for sounds common combines letters for.  It also doesn’t lend itself very well to writing quickly, which is why I snarled “Go away!” at the guy who sat down next to me while I was in the middle of copying these things into my journal and asked me to teach him Protection from Missile without even introducing himself!

    By the way, if you’re going to ask a stranger if they can sign for a spell in your spellbook, introduce yourself first.  You’re apt to get a more positive response.

    Anyway, when I got done with that, I noticed that a yellow cloth had appeared, covering the next table.  It had writing all over it, and Janna Oakfellow-Pushee hovering around to marshall.  New players take note, if you ever see Janna marshalling something, it is probably worth your while to poke your nose into that.  The cloth turned out to be the medium through which some spirit communicated.  One could converse with the spirit by writing on the cloth and reading the responses that appeared (by way of Janna writing them on the cloth).  The spirit wanted to pass on to me (Gray) some information from Lucian, who as you may recall from my previous What You Missed is the god of the Dreaming.  What the spirit told me did not seem to be immediately relevant to the plot of the weekend, so I’ll be looking out for future developments.

It was nigh unto 2am at that point, so I joined a group stumbling back to the cabins, and I do mean stumbling.  We took the shortcut, but all we had were crappy Light spell props that barely illuminated the ground in front of us, which was rocky dried streambed.  Miraculously, we did not get lost, and I availed myself of the shower facilities before crashing.

The next day, having gathered at the tavern, we were visited by Bizzaro-Nos, who was Bizzaro-King of Bizzaro-Blackwood.  When he appeared, there were raised voices, denials of kinghood, and a beat-down prior to setting out.

    There were all manner of encounters to be had during the day.  We met a druid gathering acorns for daily rituals, and a fortune teller offering vague prognostications.  There were also giant spiders, a mummy, and a ghost menacing PCs, and puzzles at the shrines to solve.  Those who turned in solved puzzles gained small but useful boons.  Having attuned to the four elements, one could then enter and fight one’s way through a pretty long dungeon.  Pieces of the planar shield stone and elemental pillars got policed up along the way.  This was mostly-assembled at the tavern, and mostly-translated, leaving out a few key bits so we wouldn’t inadvertently trap ourselves out of our own plane.

    During dinner break, event staff provided a meal, a simple but solid repast of spaghetti and meatballs.

    During the night quest, we had to go retrieve the elemental shrines by attaching them to their pillars, then use the pillars and ley line rope to make a giant, circle of protection-esque trap for a thing called a Pustulent Mugworm, lure it in, activate the trap, then defeat the thing.  Doing so would reverse the blight here, and let us know how to do so back in New Verai.  This sounded like a fairly simple, straightforward plan while we were discussing it in the tavern.

    Executing it in the dark event site was another matter entirely.  We had to fight our way to the shrines, with mimics and tainted animals we could barely see coming out of the night at us.  Retrieving the shrines proved to be the easy part.  We found the Pustulent Mugworm in a field full of light sticks.  It proved to be the ever popular big boss monster, and it certainly made a credible impression.  Besides having that thing slithering around laying indiscriminate smackdown, all the aforementioned lesser monsters were running around in the dark laying into us from all directions.  We were actually losing the fight until we got a spell reset, which gave back enough healing spells to get our forces back in action.

    Once we set up the magic trap, we lured the Pus-Mug into it with the only bait we had available – ourselves.  Fortunately, we could cross the lines of the trap, whereas the Pus-Mug could not.  With it secure in the trap, we then had people powering up at the pillars, which granted them 10 points of armor and a single call of Obliterate.  Pus-Mug took multiple calls of Obliterate to bring down, but we finally put enough on it to do the job.

    I don’t think anybody thought to try out an Obliterate shot on a PC.  I’m guessing that’s why the EH informed us about the Final Death call at the beginning of the event.

    Killing the Pus-Mug seems to have sent us back to the prime Realms, or at least a plane much more like it than Bizzaro-Realms.  Kay was king again, at least.  Saka speculated that our actions in Bizzaro-Realms may have pre-emptively contained the blight back in New Verai, but time will tell.

    After the night quest, I was in dire need of a shower, which is why I happened to be in the showers building when the Northern Alliance showed up to shower-quest.  If you’ve ever wondered when the NA breaks character, they used candles to light their way.  Also, I can tell you Loken has the best eye-liner in the NA, even after showering.

    The actual feast part of Feast of Blackwood began Sunday at noon.  One thing Blackwood knows how to do is put on a feast.  There was salad, bread with five different kinds of butter, two different kinds of soup, two appetizer courses, a main course, and dessert.  Staff timed the courses so people had time to partake of the tournaments, try out latex weapons, gamble at the gambling tables, or simply socialize with each other.

    For my first time ever, I tried out the gambling.  I sat myself at the blackjack table and bought 20 gold worth of chips.  I found myself up a little, and told myself if I doubled my money, I should walk away.  It appeared to be my lucky day, because I did indeed walk away 20 gold richer than I’d been when I sat down.

    Another thing I decided to do at the feast was interview people, not for any publication purposes, just to get to know the people and the nations of the Realms better, and to add more cool notes to my journal.  I’m glad I did, because I had several neat in-character conversations, and I learned a lot of nifty things.  Among those I spoke to were a vampire, a sentient fungus, and (I sh*t you not), a were-octopus.

    Of course, there was court business.  King Kay got gifts, Pilbus was accepted into Blackwood, there were Knights of Chaos shenanigans, and Wrath’s award for winning the day’s tournament killed and scalped him because he put it on as Sir Matthias was saying, “Before you put this on…”

    There were also some hints of future plot.  A vague announcement was made about Sayeh delivering a package to the Ambassador to the East, representatives of a group of refugees asked for permission to winter in Blackwood (which King Kay granted), and a New Verai contingent extended an offer of alliance to Blackwood.  It seems we’ll be hearing more from New Verai at future events.

    As they say, all good things must come to an end, and it was starting to get dark by the time the feast ended.  I left exhausted, the kind of tired that lingers and makes one drag ass all day Monday, but it’s the good tired of a weekend spent playing hard as a member of an amazing community.  I’d like to thank everyone who ran, staffed, and attended the event, because each of you were part of an amazing weekend!