We were on leave in a nice little village when people started dropping dead all around us. our dragon newt player analyzed the situation and discovered a pattern in the deaths -- essentially a trail that we followed. Unfortunately, it led us to the village earth temple, then stopped. We couldn't find anything there, so we waited. The villagers started showing up before dusk with their dead, for a worship service. Just at dusk, the horrible chaos monstrosity attacked the temple, by oozing through the back wall of the temple. It looked like spam - kinda pink, squishy, and greasy. The shaman (I think) had cleverly figured out that it would probably show up in the dusk transition between light and dark, so he spotted it first. It shot out beams of energy into the heads of all the dead people laid out outside the temple. Their brains leached out, making little piles of spam that started forming themselves up into someting we didn't really want to meet. (So, now you know: spam is made from brains.) All of the villagers panicked, so it was difficult to get into the temple to fight it. It took me forever to get there, because I had sited myself badly: I was outside the temple, with no line of sight into it and with the crowd blocking my view of the little spam piles. Our Humakti started killing the little piles outside, very effectively, though there were a lot of them. Our valiant earth magician tried to fight the big beastie with a wall of stone, but was overcome by a couple masteries difference, so sank into the healing earth to hide. A couple other players stepped up and fought individually, with little effect, so had to retreat towards the door, where I met them. Being an animist, I popped a fetish (see the rules for how powerful this is) of a freezing wind spirit and asked everyone to augment me instead of fighting individually. That did the trick and we killed it. We gathered the villagers together so that they could clean and reconsecrate their temple.
Then we followed the pattern backwards to see where it came from. (The dragonnewt changed into a flying form and did an aerial survey.) The same pattern recurred over and over. At the next village back, we found a hugely towering spam-beast -- so large you could see it from outside the village. We also discovered that the pattern seemed to originate from within the empire. We immediately ran to report it to Argrath (using someone's new-found "nephew of Argrath 10W2"). He gave us a bunch of troops to sort it out and we did. I don't recall all the details there, because we were all tired (it being about midnight), so Greg graciously fast-forwarded to the denoument. We had proven ourselves in Argrath's eyes, and would receive plum assignments later.
Chris
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