Session 15 Recap – Something Followed
Session 15 Recap – Something Followed
The party's ride back from the Black Ivory Inn should have been the easy part. Instead, dusk on the outer-city road turned into the hardest fight the table has faced yet — four lumbering horrors, one thing that had been shadowing them since they left the Inn, and a single burning eye that nearly ended the night early.
Location: The outer-city road between the Black Ivory Inn and Emberwood Village
Objective: Get home to Emberwood with the horses intact
Major Discoveries:
- Something had been trailing the party since they set out from the Inn, patient enough to wait until dusk and the open road to strike
- The Haze's mists thin after dark, and whatever lives in it grows bolder for it
Major Encounters: - A brutal ambush on the road home: four Broodling Hulks, a Hunter Hulk that struck from invisibility, and a Cyclopean Hulk whose eye laser tore through the party
Factions Involved: - None — this one was all teeth, tendrils, and one very bad eye
Party Advancement:
All six horses kept alive despite being targeted; a haul of rare aberration components harvested from the kills; the party back in Emberwood for a long rest — though not everyone rested easy
The Mist Thickens
The road out of the ruined city was quiet at first — the ordinary kind of quiet, hooves on broken stone, the horses restless but manageable. Then the light started to fail, and the fog along the roadside began clinging low instead of drifting past. Not the violet haze of Delerium itself, just plain mist — except that whatever was moving in it wasn't staying still, and it clearly wasn't small.
Four at Once, Then Two More
The Broodling Hulks came first — four of them, mindless and charging, more weight than finesse. They weren't the real danger and they didn't last long once the party actually connected, but they forced everyone to spread out and commit before the fight's real teeth showed themselves.
That came next as a Hunter Hulk, unseen until it was already on top of someone at the back of the group — tendrils lashing out to grab and reel a target in close, its bite following right behind. It had clearly been shadowing the party since the Inn, waiting for exactly this stretch of empty road to make its move.
The Eye
The worst of it was the Cyclopean Hulk. Its eye laser tore into the party hard enough to make the fight genuinely dangerous, and its ability to teleport itself out of trouble and back in behind the lines kept it a moving target all night. The horses drew fire too — more than once — but the party managed to keep every mount alive through it, which was its own small miracle given how the rest of the fight went.
Six's Chromatic Orb ended up being the fight's quiet MVP, chewing through the Hulks in a way nothing else at the table matched.
By the time the last of them dropped, the party was worn down but standing — and so were all six horses.
Harvest on the Road
Rather than push straight on to Emberwood hurt and depleted, the party took the time to strip the kills for parts. What came off the Hulks:
- 2 Rare Aberration Animus
- 1 Rare Aberrant Dust
- 1 Rare Hide (Skin)
- 1 Rare Tentacle
- 1 Rare Eye
Emberwood, and a Dream That Won't Let Go
The rest of the ride passed without incident, and the party reached Emberwood Village to finally take a long rest. Six is still carrying two levels of contamination from earlier exposure, and it caught up with him again during the night — another entry in his ongoing Apocalyptic Vision. What exactly it showed him, he isn't saying yet.
Session 15 ended there, with the party safe behind Emberwood's walls, a bag full of rare components to sort through, and something still unresolved behind Six's eyes.