Our session started with plans. We left off in a place of options, we recapped the important bits and discussed the best course of action. Telgeddis the sphinx gave the group a staff of sendings, allowing the team to send three sending spells. The group has allies abroad. From Abigail Triffts, the reporter from a far away world, to the Lapidary Prince and his allies, Oranthus and the cloud giants, the other group of heroes still at Argentheart they last saw on Kaatarith, and Avamere the hag all were potential contacts for assistance. They also had the option of calling upon the Astral elven nobility from Din’s past, Din’s evil brother, and others.
They also talked with their closer allies in the Chimeric Collective and fellow clones about goals after getting to Argenthome. Their first goal was to save the young sphinx and other creatures from getting eaten by Argentheart. Another goal was disabling the engines, another was disabling the security stations on the space station, and another was letting loose other magical monsters on the ship that had been captured. There was a secondly goal of also taking out the cloud giant, Gatliner, that worked for Argentheart making the clones, which would hamper his goals in the long run.
First, they called the lapidary prince with the staff of sendings. Din persuaded the prince to send forces and attack the academy side of the space station in two and a half hours, which is thirty minutes after the group would be arriving.
While planning they were on the move, flying their borrowed Argentheart ship, Corsair Glade. They each had a momentary vision while resting, each seeing strange moments of their past. Brux saw a blade, much like his own, in a gauntleted hand and heard possibly his patron calling out for help. Quasar saw a vision of his creator working on him, his maker explaining that there was an ancient threat to the worlds he was not able to stop. There was a chalice, or holy person he fought alongside. There was a dragon, an ally, possibly a mage. There was an archer, the old gnome in his younger days was a fierce warrior. He asked Quasar to help defeat this ancient foe. Din saw visions of leaving her family, leaving her brothers side, and walking with dinosaurs in a peaceful existence and suddenly Avamere’s head floating along side her. she asked how the pact was working for her. Din asked Avamere to go talk to the giants to see if they could either turn Gatliner to their side or assist in taking her out. Avamere would help where they could. They briefly explained what they each saw to each other.
After their vision quest Din got a sending from the giants, they would try to send help but were concerned revealing their existence to Argentheart in a frontal assault. Din and crew persuaded them to help a little more directly.
The team decided they would take out the security office and work on disrupting the meal. They sent clone team A, Feldimire, Kmet the minotaur, Rokthed, and Alcied to go disrupt or destroy the engines. They send Clone team B to rendezvous with Oranthus and his giants to go let loose big monsters from the science labs as well as recruit or destroy Gatliner. Telgeddis and the Spelljammer pup rode adjacent to the group and were set to hide behind a nearby moon until needed, leaving means to contact them with the party.
The group approached Argenthome, the place the adventure started, and were greeted by two smaller spacecraft that immediately used a sending spell to talk to the pilot, Din. Din told them they were from the planet Glebn and had cargo to drop off, the scout ships escorted them to the space station, having them land amongst the other multitude of ships on board. They could see other Back Griffin ships as well as a tent belonging to the Fate Organization. They landed and were greeted by two Argent Knights, dragonborn with heraldry of Argentheart. They told the knights they were there to deliver new security measures to the local security office. The group was still in their frog disguises from last time and the knights let them past, mentioning to make sure not to eat anyone while on the ship, the frogmen were known to be cannibalistic. The group also had an illusionary cart cast by Feldimire, which was stretching the major illusion spell but worked in the groups favor.
Two more guards waved them into the security offices and sent them down an elevator. In the offices they were met with five humans, one dwarf, and many broken tablets they were trying to fix. Din had hacked the system and the space station tech support had to unretire old tech to use instead of the scanning type tablets. Quasar took charge of the cart and started pushing it to a back room and the stations IT halfling entered the room and wanted to see what they brought. Quasar made an illusionary sound in the box to make it sound dangerous and not to be touched, which seemed for a moment worked until the cart disappeared, the caster Feldamire losing concentration. At that very moment the security team could see on the monitors that something had just entered their air space, a collection of Lapidary vessels that were attacking the academy. One of the humans went to push the alarm trigger and was put to sleep by Brux. Din ran over and attempted to stop the other two men from hitting the button. Quasar torched three of the guards, knocking them unconscious. Din leaded into her pact and sent one of the fallen men at its ally, it stood up, charged over, and swung, injuring them, which distracted Din’s attention from the button, which both remaining men hit. The alarms blared until the group was able to knock out the rest of the guards and Din hacked into the system. Brux took this chance to steal a pile of tablets for Din to hack later. They also found there was an Autognome in another room that had no interest in fighting, more on him later.
They deactivated the alarm modified the recorded message to send as many troops to the academy, knowing the lapidary ship was about to drop a payload there. Having a few moments to breathe the started talking with the autognome. He mentioned being experimented on by the dragon, not feeling whole, his multitudes of siblings, and just feeling down. The group had him open his chassis and was concerned he had a crimson scale instead of a mechanical heart. They pondered the effects of removing it or even Quasar touching him, realizing this is most likely one of his clones. As they wrapped up another interrogation they felt the ship lurch, the lights went out, they could feel their magic effects running pause or end, and realized the Lapidary ship had made impact.
We ended the session there for the night.
I worked on giving the party more agency in who and what the allies would be doing, where the group wanted to go and accomplish, and how they would achieve this. I could have planned more in the security office but it turned into a combat instead, which was fine.
