Planes of Discovery

 

SESSION (-1)

Valentine’s Day One-Shot

All of the characters awoke next to a massive desert temple, at least 80 feet tall, in the middle of a vast desert. There were giant-sized double doors with no handles, along with a gong and a mallet nearby. The giant doors each had a giant glyph carved into the outside of them. Nigel used a ritual casting of Comprehend Languages to translate the left door’s glyph to mean Love and the Right door’s glyph to mean War.

 

Latina took 30 minutes or so to sneak around the entire structure and found 3 other entrances, but then the party decided to just bang the gong and attempt to be cordial visitors to this place. As the gong rang, the gigantic stone doors began making a huge scraping noise. Behind the doors was a dusty entranceway, with huge 60-foot vaulted ceilings, and corridors leading to the northeast and the northwest; the big entranceway was the bottom of a V-shaped layout. The walls were also yellowed, ancient sandstone, lighted with reddish light from floating glowing bulbs that certainly were magic. 

The light shined upon a 30-foot-tall bronze statue of a goddess. Ulysses recognized the statue immediately as an ancient goddess known as Ishtar. She was a goddess of amorous love and vengeful war.  

Heading down the northwestern passage stealthily, Latina discovered a door at the end of the hall. Peaking inside she found a very large chamber at least 70 feet high, 100 feet long,  and 60 feet wide with pews and flying female humanoids that looked vaguely like a harpy except they were beautiful, clad in shiny metal armor, and held spears and pole-arms for weapons. 

One of the Ishtar harpies [NAME?] flew down next to Camus as he came down the corridor and seemed to be smitten by his rugged good looks. She agreed to take them to get some food and water. The group went eastward through the fortress and through a room full of desert warriors who treated the “harpy” with utter respect. 

Latina and the others went into what looked like some kind of dining and kitchen area. The friendly harpy was accosted by one of the warriors who seemed to be jealous of her attention to the party or Latina, it wasn’t clear.  A fight broke out between the harpy and the desert warrior. While that was going on, one of the desert warriors [NAME?] came up quietly to Ulysses and explained how people in the temple had been going crazy with lust and vengeance. 

Ulysses and the others followed after the not-crazy desert warrior. He took them to the water source of the temple, a large fountain, and down into the basement where there was a broken vase with a pinkish liquid in it that Calvyn saw magical residue on. It turned out to be some kind of cursed love potion, probably put into the well as a prank that severely backfired. The party used Ulysses’ move curse spell to purify the water, and after a few days, the crazy love-hate fest in the temple ceased.