The Tail of Panda

I have to begin by saying that Robin turned out to be something of a power player.

When Arthur began his Roll20 campaign Ilvantar, it was mainly for our family, and he was working out the kinks in the system.  We were his playtesters.  I ran Cage (ranger-type), Anita had Rosa (heavy magic and stealth), Kyrie was Somura (stealth/diplomacy), and Robin recreated Maxwell (magic and healing -- mostly healing), one of her first D&D characters and a longtime NPC in her own game.  The kids played when they could muster the attention for it.

Maxwell...overdid things.  I won't sidetrack this story by telling about all the things he overdid, but there were a lot.  If he had the choice of setting a duration of a spell for hours or days, he chose weeks.  Or months.  Or millenia.  

I'll give you an early example.  One of our early campaigns was to rescue a village of humans from a tribe of gnoll captors.  We established a base of operations in a nearby grove of fruit trees, and Maxwell thought it would be a good idea to set up a "healing point" at our camp.  He centered it upon one of the trees, anyone in a certain radius regenerates a huge amount (it's been so long I've forgotten how much, I think 70 hp per round), and he set it to last for millenia.  He burned up all his Power doing that, and dipped into health reserves if I recall correctly -- this was before I started making detailed notes, but somebody has them and can correct me.  That tree became a key part of future events, and for all I know, it is still there, spread throughout the entire world of Ilvantar by now.  That's when we began calling Maxwell "Miracle Max."  It's also when Arthur began modifying his magic system.

Enter the Bitter Trees.

These were paricularly nasty plant life that spread themselves via their addictive, mind-controlling fruit.  One taste hooked any creature, making it the slave of the tree.  Our first encounter with one of these nasty things, after we killed it, we rescued a creature which resembled a red panda.  Somura adopted her, and named her (of course) Panda.

Fast forward to another encounter with a veritable Bitter Tree cult.  This tree had managed to graft a dryad's tree onto itself, making it much more powerful, and the slaves were making Bitter wine for export.  A sinister plan, indeed.  The fight against them was epic, and Panda took extensive damage.  The little one was about to die, but Robin pulled a Miracle Max, casting a regenerative spell directly on Panda.  58 hp per round, duration 500 years, if memory serves -- anyway, far beyond a normal small critter lifespan, and far beyond small critter hit points.  This made her effectively immortal.  Also, we won the battle, rescued the dryad, and transferred her to the aforementioned immortal fruit tree (we just happened to have some of THAT fruit with us), making IT pretty much actually immortal and the dryad more or less a goddess.  Miracle Max rides again.

Journey Around the Edge of the World

Ilvantor, as we first knew it, was flat.  Then we found magic portals to other worlds, and later learned that Ilvantor was tiered like a cake.  Later we learned that our little tiered world floated above a huge basin from which it had long ago been ripped, leaving the basement below barren.  And further along the line we learned that there was more yet to the world, maybe it's a cube?  I still don't know.  Is any of this relevant?  Only to tell you that, much later, our OCs went over the edge, somehow.  To the Land that Time Forgot.  Dinosaurs, and Dog People, and Cat People...and Werewolves.

By now Panda had gained some experience, and a few levels.  Still an animal, but Kyrie had given her some Power-based attacks.  She now had a sonic-based attack (CHITTER!) which wasn't all that strong, but once in a great while stunned opponents, and once in a great while her bite actually made it through natural defenses and she contributed, dangit!  If nothing else, she was still unkillable, and that unnerved nearly every enemy.  Especially when she got swallowed whole and started chewing her way out...

In this campaign, we found ourselves once again in a rescue operation (see the Tales of Sumi for detailed accounts).  A mixed lot of cat people and dog people were being taken away by werewolves (to be turned or killed, we weren't sure.  it was bad).  They had stopped at a way station and we had a bit of time to plan.  So our plan was to come at them from different sides, with Cage sniping, the rogue-types sneaking people out, everyone else fighting as needed.  But it would be great if we had a distraction...

And then someone got the idea of casting an illusion on Panda.  By this time we'd seen one of the big carnivorous dinosaurs.  Arthur called it something else, but we all called it a T-Rex for the same reason Panda was a red panda.  So we made Panda look like that.  She went stomping through the werewolf camp, using her sonic CHITTER! all over the place, scaring the cat pee out of everyone who failed to disbelieve.  And almost everyone failed to disbelieve.  We won that battle, largely because of one small creature who was having the time of her life.

What Arthur didn't tell us right away:  

1) Panda learned how to cast that illusion herself, from having it done for her once.

2) During the fight with the werewolves, Panda took damage and contracted lycanthropy.  So had a few others.

The next day, we had to scramble because Panda turned aggro -- and we weren't fully recovered.  If we hadn't managed to cure her, she might have wiped out our high-level party.  Or she might have escaped and started a lycanthropy plague.

Unfortunately, we never finished that campaign and probably never will.  With Robin gone, the joy is too diminished.  Thus we end the Tail of Panda.  For all we know, she yet roams the many worlds of Ilvantar.