Unlikely Heroes: Nightmare Carnival

Game Date: 1/28/2012
DM: Rusty

The Party:
Dalia Lockwood (Matt): Human Ardent
Derp DuDerp (Cliff): Half-Elf Bard
Keyanna (Chere): Half-Elf Sorcerer
Marrick (Greg): Dwarf Knight
Starr (Star): Eladrin Paladin
Teddi & Sid (Ted):  Dwarf Warlock & Homunculus Familiar

The Session:
We continued our enjoyable romp through the carnival.  Various members of the party competed in games like the egg toss, a sack race, a pie-eating contest, and even a maze where we had to take rings from gnomes wearing minotaur masks.  For every game we won, we were given some creepy-looking kewpie dolls.  Sometimes we won them just for participating - they carnival employees seemed quite happy to give these things away.  We gave some of the dolls to the various orphans we'd been entertaining, but we also kept some for ourselves.  These dolls had eyes that would follow us around the room.  We did arcana checks on them, and found that they were magical, but we couldn't discern the full nature of the enchantment.

At one point, Derp entered a tent and met a fortune teller.  She predicted that he would have his throat torn out by the end of the night.  She offered to sell him a magic collar to protect his neck, but he didn't have enough money on him.  He went to get the rest of the party, but they were skeptical.  Teddi entered the same tent to get his own reading, but she was gone.  

After taking a wrong turn in the maze, Dalia got separated from the rest of the party, and wound up outside the fair.  While outside, she saw a light off in the woods, and a friendly fox tried to get her to follow him.  Dalia was afraid to stay too far from the rest of the party, so she paid to re-enter the fair.

It was now dark, and the fairgrounds started the fireworks show.  Some of the party members started to see things differently.  Everything around them was covered by an illusion, and the true fair had a much darker nature.  The fireworks were really leeches falling from the sky, and the gnome employees were really goblins.

Still oblivious to the illusion, Dalia made her way back to the party.  Along the way, she saw someone offering free sleigh rides to children.  She finally met up with the party near the pie-eating tent, and everyone exchanged information.  Things were getting worse - Starr's face was starting to resemble that of a kewpie doll.  Immediately we started to get rid of our kewpie dolls.  There was a furnace nearby at the tent, but as we tried to burn the dolls we were accosted by a large pig-man.  We fought the pig-man (a fey creature called a Swineomancer) and some lumberjacks who now had pig faces (Craven).

We noticed that most of the crowds were not reacting to the fight.  Nor did they notice the strange changes to the fair.  After we beat the Swineomancer and burned the dolls, we also destroyed their meat-pie machine so they couldn't feed their evil food to any more carnival-goers. We headed back towards where Dalia had seen the sleigh.  We saw more nightmarish imagery - the ticket booth had the faces of fair-goers nailed to it, the lollypops they were handing out were really eyeballs on a stick, the fair tickets were really skinned fingers and tongues, Teddi and Dalia started to develop a case of kewpie-face... and yet most fair-goers couldn't see the world for what it really was.  Even we could see things either way depending on how we focused. 

The sleigh pulled up again, and the driver called for more children to come aboard.  We asked if we could ride.  The driver resisted at first, saying it was just for children, but we talked him into it.  He took us through the fair - we noticed a lot of cries of pain as we passed the mechanical trade show tent - and finally the sleigh left the carnival altogether and headed into the woods.  When it finally stopped, we fought a gaggle of gnomes. 

After the fight, we saw a light in the distance, like the one Dalia had seen earlier.  When it got close, we saw that it was a naked elven woman, who identified herself as the Fey Queen.  We asked if she was responsible for all the terrors we'd seen, but she denied it.  She said that while our foes were fey, they had been corrupted.  She wanted us to go back to the fair and defeat the source of the corruption.  We were to look for a large armored man with a stag-horned helmet, riding a beast... really, we can't miss him.

We prepared to head back to the carnival, and our first destination was to be the mechanical trade show tent.  That's where we ended the session.