Session 9B -- Dreamscape

Because two players couldn't make the session, I decided to run a side quest for the other three (typically I just run a missing player's PC as an NPC to keep them in the party and help with combat...with their permission, of course).

I ran a dungeon that was generated room-by-room as the PCs went through it from a sheet (see below).

Tiv awoke to find herself breathing liquid in a glass cylinder of some kind. She managed to break out of it to see Murchad and Jack in two other cylinders in the very strange room. She broke them out. Everywhere were little glowing crystals embedded in the metal walls. The walls, floors, and ceiling seem to be made out of metal. By manipulating the crystals, they were able to get the door to open (it didn't swing or slide open, it dilated.

In the next room, they were met with three clockwork automata. Murchad had actually seen these "machine elves" in a similar dream, long ago. Jack tried to fire his arquebus only to discover that his gunpowder was fouled by the fluid in the cylinder.

After combat (in which the PCs got their butts kicked but prevailed), the PCs looked around the room. There were several large pieces of metal furniture built into the walls, covered in those colored crystals. Jack gravitated toward a glass plate in the wall. It looked to be a map of the Earth (the MappaMundi map on the home page of this blog), but it was like a 3/4 view of a flat disc. In the extreme west and east, large gears rotated a sky-dome over it. As that was moving, he could see what appeared to be a map of the Feywild and a map of what appeared to be its mirror-opposite, rising and falling through the disc of the Earth and through each other. Very curious. Tiv pried up some of the gemstones. Some cracked like glass, but she managed to get a couple out.

The party found its way through several more rooms and battled clockwork machine elves as well as clockwork "dogs." In one room, they found a human rogue on a table. He was dead, but Tiv determined that it wasn't as if he had died and passed out of life, but rather that he had not yet been alive. Very curious. Murchad took his magical leather armor, as he thought Vedica might be able to make use of it.

In the next room, they found six more clockwork "dogs" that were just waking up. They quickly figured out how to close and lock the door, sealing them off. They followed another path.

In one large room, they met with a clockwork "beholder." After another tough fight, they manged to prevail. They opened the door in that room to find a white-light void on the other side. After testing it with some objects, they decided to jump through. When Tiv jumped into the light, she was met face to face with St. Michael. He didn't say anything, but he showed her in her mind the battle between him and Satan and Satan falling to Earth. After Satan fell, he took his sword and held it out. The sword dissected into seven pieces and also fell to Earth in a long line, with a bright flash at the point of each impact. He then handed her a tiny scroll. When Tiv opened the scroll, she woke up.

In that moment, Tiv, Murchad, and Jack found themselves right where they left off, packing their bags outside of the Tummel Mine, preparing to head northward to placate the water elemental. They had all just kind of "zoned out" for a minute or so from the perspective of everyone else. It was in that moment that they remembered all the events described above, and realized it was their forgotten dream from the one night they spent in the Feywild (just before finding the Centaurs for Disease Control). Each one rummaged through their bags and found the things they had acquired in the dream, which maybe wasn't so much a dream after all. Murchad, realizing he still had the magical leather armor, gave it to Vedica. Tiv, finding the scroll she had been given by St. Michael, unrolled it to find that it contained a map: