Mattiverse Next - Session 3

Crossing the mountain

• The party prepares to cross the pass, breaking the cart down into a minium size while preserving its hardest-to-replicate pieces.
• The trail is ill-maintained, and the weather is harsh: Severely hot, then severely cold, sometimes in the same day. The first half takes several days.
  • The weather and lack of appropriate gear forces exhaustion checks at increasing DC every few hours.
  • Near the top, Bobwhite gets hypothermia one night. The party spends the next day burning some cart and making a shelter to wait for better weather while he recovers.
• Continuing, the party manages to save some time on a game trail.
  • They get a choice: Skip an exhaustion check, or gamble it on hunting goats. Party chooses the latter, gets hides and food for the effort. The hides make checks easier.
• They hit the highest point of the pass shortly after. The view is beautiful.
• Shortly after, they run two hobgoblins who don't immediately eat them (it turns out to actually be two hobgoblins and some large number of hiding hobgoblins/kobolds/goblins in a defensive ambush position).
  • They invite the gang to come visit their monastery (monastery?!?), which intrigues them enough to accept.
    • Long story short, the Servitors are Gubbites.
    • Their Master was told by her Master to settle here from Monstertown [ed: they actually have a different name for it, I just don't remember], as a bulwark against Goodly Races and gnolls from the east.
  • The party gets a nice bath. Then, in the presence of the Master, they drink some weird-ass stuff. Bobwhite pukes everywhere, Banner and Four come out with a curse, it was a hell of a trip.
  • The curse compels Banner and Four to seek out someone who has never heard of Gubism every day spent in civilization. It's not all bad, though: it also gives them the ability to take monk levels, without meeting any statistical prerequisites.
• The Gubbites give the party some nice traveling clothes and send them on their way.
• The way down is much faster, and the clothes also make it much more pleasant. They make good time and suffer little hypothermia.
• Very near the bottom, they find tracks: Demihumans traveling with two large, shambling bipeds. Obviously, they have to check it out
  • They find halflings with ogre zombie pets. The ogre zombies are in terrible shape, and had already obviously seen fighting.
  • Each halfling wears a papier-mâché helmet in a spherical shape with a circle cut out in the front. Their faces are painted white within the circle, with a black area in the center.
    • (it is supposed to look like a beholder, not that anyone in the party necessarily knows what that is. It definitely looks weird)
  • One has a fancier helmet with more stalks than the others. Whatever occupies the end of the stalks are evidently some kind of consumable.
  • Battle ensues! The party re-kills some ogres, kills a couple of halflings (kinslayers!!) for the first time, and Banner repeatedly pushes the head cultist violently downhill until he dies. Also, Bartley makes up a sick pun (the leader of the nasty halfling beholder cultists is a hand-eye coordinator, getit?)

6 DAYS TO DOGMOOT (It is currently around noon on 25 Heavenfall)

Awards

• Beholder Cultists: 350 xp to all
• The Hand-Eye Coordinator: 50 xp to Banner
• Mountaineering Merit Badge: 75 xp to all
• All I Got was this Lousy Curse: 50 xp to Banner and Four
• Meeting the Red Door: 100 xp to all
• The Long Path Up: 150 xp to all