We open up the session with our group having no real clue as to where to go and with only a vaguely important dagger and note. We're still en route to Casollin, but run into a different village. This time Snat is held down by LEE while the rest go into the village and do various stuff. La'quin eventually comes back and mentions the town had been terrorized by a dragon for the the past few weeks and wanted it gone. Level one adventurers fighting a dragon? Sure why not? I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
Turns out it was a baby dragon. That's still pretty damn dangerous, mind you. A red fire exhaling one in fact. Actually, an idea occurs to our Kobold player while we're exploring the cave. Since he knows the draconic language, he could possibly persuade the dragon to fly us up to the ships above in exchange for promising to bring back riches.
Snat passes the diplomacy check with ease, within the next hour, we're all dropped off on the nearest passing ship. Two by two, with LEE take a solo ride for being so dang heavy. So we're on the ship. Basically, take a sphere, cut off the top half and then attach a bunch of propellers on towers to the top. And there you have it! We make our way to the center where a door into the ship is and proceed to sneak in. Appears we're on a military ship, the Casollin flag is everywhere and all of the passengers seem to be wearing a bright red uniform. Repressing my urge to kill one of them right off the bat, we explore until we run into a map. Vosh takes a quick look at it and thinks the the main engine room is is in about the center of the mass of the ship. Makes sense I suppose.
Some where along the line, we run into a couple of soldiers. One fight later and they're splattered against the wall. With that, we've got four uniforms. La'quin uses Disguise Self and the rest of get dressed. We then steam line it down to the engine room. It's a large, open room with what looks to be a giant, stone hear beating in the center. The place is crawling with dudes in blue uniforms, probably engineers, of the artificers and wizards variety. Snat sneaks off and finds the locker room for the rest of us and comes back with uniforms. Vosh and Niffen are voted to go down since they won't look completely obvious, unlike tentacle arm, shorty, and big hulking robot. Well, actually, no, Vosh critically fails a bluff check anyway and an alarm goes off. Thinking fast, Snat used Song of Courage (+1 morale bonus to pretty much everything that matters) and LEE berserks and runs right at the heart and brings the axe down on it. This cracks it pretty badly. La'quinn breaks it the rest of the way with a magic missile and suddenly the ship gives a heavy lurch and then starts falling. Ain't we geniuses.
We begin to run back up the levels to find a control room. At this point, the walls glowing with various runes as a bunch of emergency magic kicks in to slow the fall. The crew doesn't even seem to care about us, they're running to the nearest escape points (which makes me wonder, why didn't we do that?). We make it to the control room in about three minutes, just about when the runes begin to fade. Vosh takes the control and critically fails a skill check AGAIN. The ship somehow managed to turn ninety degrees and is not only falling and but driving a straight line into the ground. Neffin takes her luck bonus and proceeds to get us out of the direct descendent and instead we're only falling rather rapidly at a forty five degree angle. Using their remaining spells, Snat and La'quinn casts feather fall on everyone.
We hit the ground, apparently somewhere in Mandra and manage to roll over several times, and skid right into the nearby ocean. LEE manages to survive and remains conscious. Vosh, though was flirting with death at a -8 HP. Neffin gets him and the others back up and running and we decide to rest there for the night. Since the ship didn't flood over night, we decided it was safe to continue to explore. The entire place was upside down and the controls didn't seem to work at all anymore. There were a few bodies here and there of crew members who probably didn't have feather fall. You better bet we looted every last one for gold and weapons. Oh right and Snat's trumpet was dented beyond repair during the fall, so he's basically useless right now.
Finally, at the engine room again, we get to see the results of breaking the heart. There's large chunks of it beating all over the place but now there's ghosts sort of floating nonchalantly about the room. Since we didn't see that anywhere else on the ship with the rest of the dead crew, we assumed it had to do with the heart. La'quinn decided to pick a piece up. It seemed harmless enough and so we stored every last piece we could carry and continued downward. We eventually found a way out of the ship, via one of the escape hatches. Around then we started to discuss what the heart did. I mean, still beating stone just ain't natural. Vosh makes a successful arcana check (finally) and tells us it was made using necromancy. Yeah, the ship was powered by dead people. I guess that's a hooker for this plot. Anyway, the DM decides to call it a session right there.
Everyone leveled up but I don't think LEE has anything new to customize. We've got Uncanny Dodge now (retain dex AC bonus when attacked by invisible dude or caught flat footed), some more fortitude, and HP, but that's about it. Still, if you guys have any ideas of what we can do with the stone heart pieces, please do mention, I'm open for whatever. (No collecting four doesn't mean we'll get a stone heart container.)
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