2017 04 12 Game Notes

Logistics and the Transport of a Sonic Nuke
The group spent a considerable amount of time debating how to move The Last Bell without risk of accidentally ringing it.

To and From the Shadow Plane
Paul did an experiment, and while on the nexus, near the bell, he was able to bring the whole party into the shadow realm. They spoke with Jane the Giant (Gwenllian the High Magister) about a couple different options, including a novel concept Dave had to enchant a lifting device underneath the bell and using the mana focusing feedback of the bell to supercharge the levitation effect enough to move the bell.

Later, Paul discovered that, with considerable effort and focus, he was able to bring the Jane the Giant into the material world. The effort of existing in the material world quickly exhausted her, and she snapped back to the shadow realm after about 30 seconds. With some practice, Paul found that he could rest, gather strength, and bring Jane over to the Material Plane about once an hour.

How the Giants Did It
The group wanted Jane to explain how the cloud giants first moved the bell. This happened before her time, but from what she knows, her predecessors stabilized the Bell in vibration-dampening material and transported it, first by ship from the north, and then at least twenty cloud giants physically carried the Bell across the arctic to the fortress they built at the South Pole.

The group was somewhat miffed that this option did not seem available to them. Jane strongly recommended using mundane or mechanical means to transport the Bell (and in particular, lift the Bell) because its magic amplifying effects were unpredictable and could lead to an unintended detonation. She recommended hiring some ingenious dwarves to build a transportation system.

Recent Ancient History of the Last Bell
Throughout the day, the group learned quite a lot from Jane about The Last Bell, and how it came to be at at the South Pole.

Apparently, it was discovered was discovered by the giants of Heligastenen 5000-6000 years ago. They were able to learn that it was created much longer ago than that, apparently as a weapon in a war between factions of a reptilian elder race. Elves, Giants, Dragons and Naga all served the elder race. The giants called the elder race the Elder Ones, the Scaled Ones, the Ancients, and various other monikers signifying old, mysterious and gone.

To the group, it certainly sounded like other things they had come across about Kela and her sister might square up nicely with this (possibly extinct?) elder race.

Demonic Designs
Once the giants discovered the Last Bell, they found themselves under attack! A subclass of demons called tanar'ri had designs on the Last Bell and wanted to secure it for their own purposes. For almost five hundred years the giant guardians of the Last Bell were attacked by the tanar'ri and their mortal servitors, until the giants finally completed the fortress at the South Pole and moved the Last Bell there. Unbreachable, self-reinforcing wards powered by the ley line super nexus of the South Pole proved to be too much for even the mightiest balor to contend with, and after a few more decades of defiant attempts, the demons seemed to give up on the Last Bell.

Thousands of years later, the demons made another attempt, this time succeeding in dropping the Last Bell and the castle that protected it a few kilometers through a borehole in the ice and impacting against the hard-packed earth and rock of the antarctic tip of Waritu. Even that wasn't enough to breach the giants' careful wards, and the demons have not made another attempt in the long years since.

Orc Investigators
The elf ranger, Mirja, was the first to notice that they were no longer alone at the South Pole. Some kind of creatures were at the top of the hole in the ice sheet at the bottom of the world.

Paul's familiar, Zach, was sent up to investigate, and came back reporting a group of wyvern-riding orcs. Changing himself in to the form of an air elemental, Paul flew up to confront them.

He met Thorok Son of Dwane, war leader of the southern mountain orcs. Thorok and his band of wyvern riders had been sent by their shaman (a shaman of Mountain, Thorok was proud to say) to investigate what had happened to cause a change to the South Pole.

Paul called himself Mendelblatt the Honest and did his very best to discourage the orcs from poking around, before jumps through the hole in the South Pole. Cloaked in darkness, he transformed into an air elemental again and drifted safely to the bottom.

Alarmed, Thorok and his two sycophant companions dove down (on their ice wyverns) to rescue Paul.

With a warning from Paul, Darius and Dave worked together to cast a Phantasm spell on the Stink Hat (in the courtyard) of a shadow dragon around its horde.

Paul (with the Dragon's voice) tell the orcs that he (the dragon) knows their shaman and managed to scare the orcs away, but in his heart, knows they'll be back.