Heart of Orange

Preparations

Purple Guy fades out; Scout fades in.

It’s the morning after the Party. Scout is disappointed that he missed exploring the Secret Mine Under the Lord’s House. Maybe less disappointed in having missed the party.

Lord of Fire and Earth is Carlo Picanti

The party tells Scout we’re going to look for the Lord of Fire and Earth. Okay. Do we have a plan? Well, they hoped Scout would find him.

Nesh gives Carlo some reflect-incoming-magic, and he tries to find Carlo, but bounces off of Carlo's way-much-higher resistance. "Not even close." OK, we can try again tomorrow with the narrative pathfinding way as opposed to the physical location way.

The X on the map is in the desert north of the mountains. Managaratha realizes that using Orellian Coordinate Math to find the X is hard, however– because if the pool was part of the Rainbow River, it’s supposed to be at the Spire. Oh. Hmm. So he has to re-do the math for 10s. With a good roll, he thinks he’s figured it out. So we have co-ordinates now.

But first, we want to go to Red briefly (“Wait, what?!?” says Scout), to get the coordinates for the heart of Red. We find out that the Heart of Red is west of the Great Valley, between King Richard’s lands and Darstan, about halfway to the coast.

We teleport again! We’re in a sandy desert. Blue spells are +2 difficulty here. Nesh puts up his AoE defense, and stands near Gale in case Orange is as vengeful as Blue was. We start heading towards where we think the Heart is, and make Fortune rolls with Orange magic. Stella rocks it, and a jeweled horse appears in her pocket.

At the Heart

The path turns from sand to stone, and we’re in to Orange level 3. When we get to the place of the X, we’re just standing on stone. Huh. Scout thinks it’s very Orange here, and suggests the Heart is probably down. Stella looks around with Orange. She’s pretty sure there’s a big Creation effect on the rock we’re standing on. It’s not currently active or anything. Diomarche thinks it’s solid down a good ways.

Stella creates a fire, which works, though she has to make sure it’s not Too Big. She then analyzes the rock, and thinks it’s about 1000 hit points of Wall between us and the Heart, and the Creation effect will cause it to start repairing it. This is a Vault-level Wall, but it’s hit points, rather than successes, so we can potentially manage it. Diomarche could potentially invoke Rush to help break through. Hmm. Let’s do some more experiments.

Stella makes pickaxes (and one pickaxe/shovel hybrid due to awryage), and 67 points of damage It chips away at the rock. At the end of round 2, it tried to heal, but gets thwarted by Nesh’s AoE. We do some damage to it over a number of rounds, when Gale brings out the Dagger of Destruction. That seems to help counteract the healing, at least.

Managaratha tries a weird Orange-Blue spell to turn Diomarche’s pickax frozen, which causes two of his Magic dice to turn Orange and can’t be used for Blue.

On round 18, we break through! Berserking pirates and magic pickaxes for the win! Out comes the Forbidden Desert mechanic.

We’re in an area that looks like a forge. We need to find things. There is a lot of fire and around.

Scout makes it easier for him to see Magic, and then moves into a square, where he finds a vial of Orange water! Stella searches, and finds out there’s something in the middle column, and we’re looking for four things. Nesh finds a vial of Orange water!

All of a sudden there are a lot of storms and we take serious damage, and Nesh, Managaratha, and Gale fall down. Scout makes his death check and stays up. He manages to get to the crystal and wilds a nature spell to prevent us from getting hit by the environment. This lets Stella cast an actual resist-fire spell, which helps. Everyone unconscious passes; diomarche explores and finds out the location of a Magic Compass. Scout grabs the power crystal and Diomarche grabs the compass. Managaratha grabs an in-mechanic magic item (move people between tiles).

But the next shuffle through the deck is full of storms and sun, so we fleet - the crystal and the compass and the mechanic item all remain in the mechanic, but we have two vials of orange river water. So at least a minor win?

We ponder next steps. We’re tired enough [read: it’s 4:30pm] that

The Goddess thinks Viktor is apparently the worst choice (although not a terrible choice; he won’t blow up the world, or anything); Richard could be a good choice, or a problematic choice– he will require shepherding; Leopold is fine, he will keep things stable; and there’s nothing on Pyotr with only 11 successes.

Managartha brews some healing potions (2 each of potions that heal 12 hit points, decays after 6 days).

Loot

• +12 EPs
• +8 SPs
• +2 vials of Orange water