Characters and Retainers at the start of the session:
- Ash - Xiaverine, Level 2 Grimalkin
- James - Tomkin, Level 4 Hunter
- Marcus - Melysee, Level 5 Knight
- Peter - Chadwick, level 1 Mage
- Ythan - Clement, Level 5 Enchanter
- Max (Hunter, level 2) follows Clement.
- Petra (Thief, level 2) follows Clement.
- Ella (Bard, level 2) follows Clement.
The Giant is Death, Death to the Giant!
The session opened with the party scattered across the Observatory. Clement and Tomkin stood at the base of the Weighing Station. Xiaverine lingered below with the Salt Dryads. The rest—Melysee, Chadwick, and their companions—remained in the Mirror Cell, still carrying the unease of what they had glimpsed there.
Those in the Mirror Cell chose caution and began retracing their steps toward the Nightingale Hall. Hearing movement below, they descended the Weighing Station to reunite with Clement and Tomkin.
Elsewhere, Xiaverine crossed the Nightingale Chain shaft and slipped into the Geo-Samples room. From there, he climbed to a chamber stacked high with crates. Ever curious, he scrambled atop the pile and pried at one of the boxes—only to awaken what hid within. A roll of precious silk burst free, propelled across the floor by skeletal thumbs, scuttling like a monstrous textile centipede. It hissed and lunged.
Xiaverine did not stand his ground. He retreated swiftly to the Salt Dryads’ chamber, positioning himself at the doorway with the crystalline figures behind him. The creature followed but hesitated at the threshold, unsettled by the presence of multiple humanoids. It stalked the edge of the Nightingale shaft instead, hissing and twitching. A well-placed crossbow bolt and the threatening flare of Xiaverine’s lantern were enough to drive it off, and the silk horror retreated upward along the chain.
Here I made an error reading the map. Xiaverine should have reached the Hall of Silk; instead, I made him reachthe Boxed Art section. When I realised the mistake, I did not retcon. I simply swapped the locations of the two rooms. For context, in my prep, I chose to change Hall of Silk: in my game, the Cludcraddle Golems seek to retrieve the Tapestry of Pain, which is instead hidden inside the Boxed Art section.
Back at the Weighing Station, Clement and Tomkin advanced cautiously to the Cervit storage. There, they found only a pool of Albert’s blood from the previous session—no body, no monster. They gathered the lamellae already stacked and began collecting more.
Greed and misfortune converged.
They failed to notice the faint, unnatural snoring drifting from above, and they made just enough noise to wake it.
Canonically, the Giant should not sleep. But when it devoured Albert in the previous session, it also swallowed the kilogram of opium the woodgrue had carried for a long time—loot from one of the Crows. I ruled the drugged colossus would sleep for 1d6 hours. The die showed six. Yet its rest was light and easily broken, and its stupor imposed a penalty on its attacks and saves.
The Giant
The adventurers chose to flee. Tomkin was swift. Clement was not. Laden with Cervit, he stumbled as the Giant’s vast arm burst through the Nightingale shaft and seized him mid-stride. Bones cracked audibly as the creature squeezed.
The killing blow did not come from the Giant.
Petra, trying to shoot the hand that held her master’s limp body, critically missed. Her arrow struck Clement instead.
The Magpies, desperate, resolved at least to recover the body—and the treasure it carried. They hurled themselves at the titanic hand, inflicting enough pain to force the creature to shift its grasp. But the Giant responded by seizing Melysee. One squeeze brought the knight to death’s threshold. With Clement dead and Melysee near crushed, the spectre of total annihilation loomed.
The party rallied. Every blow fell upon the hand, crushing Melysee. Somehow, they forced it open. She dropped free, barely alive. The Magpies fled up the spiral stairs of the Weighing Station to the Nightingale Hall as the Giant began climbing the chain after them.
In the Hall, retreat turned into audacity.
Chadwick unrolled a scroll and cast Passwall, but instead of carving a doorway, he used it to sever the Nightingale Chain itself while the Giant clung to it. The colossal chain tore free, crashing down the shaft and dragging the Giant with it. The monster managed to arrest its fall before plummeting into oblivion, but not before suffering terrible damage.
Passwal should only work on stone, but that was a cool and creative way of using a spell. I decided to go with it. Using their objects and the environment to level the plainfield against overpowered enemies is exactly how I want my players to behave.
The snapping of the Nightingale Chain by Ythian
Down with the Salt Dryads, Xiaverine vowed to kill the monster and retrieve Nacla's heart, exited their hall and attempted to hit the creature from below with his crossbow. Immediately after his shot, the mastodontic chain gave way, dropping through the shaft, accompanied by the giant moans of pain and drips of black, tar-thick blood. He immediately claimed credit before the astonished Dryads, who rewarded him with a dagger of salt crystal and urged him to finish the beast and retrieve Nacla’s heart.
Xiaverine had no intention of dying heroically. He stepped out boldly—then slipped into the Geo-Samples room opposite and concealed himself. While hiding, he manoeuvred a heavy stone rod into position near the shaft.
Above, the wounded Giant resumed its climb.
The Magpies, thinking quickly, poured oil onto the mechanism that turned the massive wheels supporting the broken stump of the chain. They heaved. The wheel shifted just enough. The precariously balanced links—each the size of a man—slid free and cascaded into the shaft onto the ascending Giant. More moans. More blood.
At last, the creature began to retreat, descending to nurse its wounds. As it passed Xiaverine’s hiding place, the grimalkin waited. He let it drop two floors lower before pushing the stone rod into the shaft. It struck the Giant’s shoulder, unbalancing the already weakened colossus. The monster lost its grip.
It fell. The darkness below swallowed it.
Xiaverine returned to the Salt Dryads triumphant—only to see several of them dive into the shaft in search of Nacla’s heart. He then explored the lower chamber and discovered it filled with shells of strange and varied kinds. After careful searching, he found a completely transparent shell of a human-sized predatory shrimp—awkward, cumbersome, and undoubtedly valuable. He dragged it laboriously back toward the Dryads’ hall.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Magpies, elated by victory, explored the greenhouse above the Cervit storage. There, they recovered four luminous, alien crystalline micro-ecosystems sealed within glass spheres and began hauling their accumulated treasures back into the Nightingale Hall.
The Giant—the central terror of the Observatory—had fallen. But the sailors of the Laputa draw nearer. It is only a matter of time before they begin their own descent into the Deep Carbon Observatory, and the Magpies will not have the dungeon to themselves for long.
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