Undead Gremlins, Summoned Clowns, and Fey Persistence

Session Summary: 04/28/2024

Ahhhh, the Withering Man's PATIENCE has limits, and those limits have apparently been reached! The heroes had dismantled Gregor's operation, sealed the King in Yellow's shrine, and dispatched the crow-swarm musician. They had been efficient and thorough in their dismantling of everything the Fey lord had built in Lepidstadt through his human proxies. None of this had gone unnoticed, and the response came in the form of ANOTHER Fey musician, this one taking a different approach.

This musician revealed itself not as a swarm of crows but as a swarm of undead gremlins: small, chattering, rotting things that swarmed with the coordinated incompetence of creatures designed more for harassment than for actual effectiveness, their individual danger minimal but their collective nuisance considerable. While the heroes dealt with the gremlins, summoned clowns materialized: painted and grinning and wrong in the specific way that anything wearing the shape of deliberate joy while intending harm is wrong. They fought with the frantic energy of something conjured specifically to be as CHAOTIC as possible in the smallest available space.

It was, by the assessment of at least two members of the party, a deeply irritating session of combat. Effective but irritating. The grins on the clown faces didn't help. Nothing about clowns helps in a combat situation, and Aku endorses this opinion.

The player of Kiren and the player of Mutu were celebrating birthdays on this particular evening, which the universe acknowledged with this birthday gift of unusual opponents and the chaos they generated. Presents were presumably better elsewhere in their lives. The heroes received birthday bonuses alongside the experience of surviving the celebration.

When the gremlin-swarm and the clown-summoning were destroyed, the heroes assessed the pattern: the Withering Man was sending increasingly direct provocations. He had moved from subtly using human proxies to actively deploying Fey assets in the open. The escalation had a logic to it, and the logic CONCERNED them. Something was changing in his calculation of how much exposure was acceptable to achieve his remaining objectives!