Maus Yi Yos!

"Maus yi yos!" was, of course, the traditional Driftmas greeting, in Ilya of old, before Archbishop Usla of Banor waged the War for Driftmas and commandeered the holiday for Numiel's glory, followed by the Inundation erasing all trace of Ilya from the world (...or did it? DUN DUN DUN).

Some Numielites have kept the words as a generic Driftmas greeting, though the common people have no idea what they might have once meant in the Ilyan language (like how a person might sing along to "Feliz Navidad" with at best the barest understanding that it's just Spanish for "happy Christmas", without any understanding that in Spanish they call the holiday "Navidad" which is cognate with "Nativity" (any -ty word tending to turn out to be -dad in Spanish -- eg, "gravity" is cognate with "gravedad", and also I have an idea what the next necromancer I wind up using calls himself), and "nativity" really just means "the process or circumstances of being born", though of course nobody anymore frequently refers to any nativities but Jesus's).

ANYHOW, "Maus Yi Yos" is of course just a generic placeholder name for a Driftmas session... or is it? DUN DUN DUN

On Driftmas Day, the 25th of Ices. The good ship Lollipop has arrived in port. Disembarking, five crew members (Roger, Patty "Doc", Helko "the Axe", Raine, and Rylen) are met by a courier.

"I've been looking for you. Got something I'm supposed to deliver - your hands only." Mumbling, "Let's see here... A letter... not sure who from. She wouldn't say. Just that she was a friend of yours. Looks like that's it. Got to go."

The letter turned out to be a magic scroll. They read the scroll, and it turned out to be a scroll of plane shift, which brought them to what turned out to be the Driftmas Demiplane, all snow and pleasant chill.

The party ended up outside  a cave. The cave is surrounded by inactive (variously permanently disabled, bugged out, and/or entirely dispelled) clay golems.

They saw a peryton flying high above, scared it off, and set off for the source of puffs of smoke on the horizon.

They found Driftmastown, where the Driftmas Fey (drunkenly distracted, as it is their day of celebration, all their work for the year has concluded and they have not yet begun next year's work of crafting toys) greet them with curiosity -- not often they have visitors. Donner, one of Saint Usla's sleigh-pulling perytons, was also there. A chat occurred.

The cave isn't anything any of Saint Usla's minions are allowed to talk about. It may, information wheedled from the Driftmas Fey, have to do with the folks that owned Driftmas before Usla conquered it away from the Ilyans.

Returning to the cave!

It turned out to be the dwelling of Dujha the yeti (?), one of the Argles Get, where she has dwelt since the War for Driftmas -- her 5 siblings, uncle, and grandmother (the previous Embodiments of Driftmas) were all slain by Usla in the War; Dujha managed to escape unnoticed.

As it transpires, Dujha has spent the last many centuries inventing, tinkering, and divining. She is not really a proper spellcaster, is why it took so long.

She got her hands on one or more Golem Manuals and cobbled together invention of a new spell (which she calls disable construct), of which she has one scroll.

She did many divinations, which eventually narrowed down the who, where, and when of recruitment to help with her task. (The specific time of year was always obvious: Saint Usla uses all her store of power on Driftmas Eve, leaving her depleted; the Driftmas Fey have the last 6 days of the year off, as vacation, before working the rest of the year -- an obvious time to do something Usla might not like. But which year, specifically, was harder to pin down.)

Dujha was cagey, but eventually, she revealed that she wanted to retake Temple Zamet, a temple that had been taken by Archbishop Usla in the War for Driftmas, the most sacred Driftmas-related temple on the continent of Kryia, which Usla's Banorite army had seized, put a fortress around, and guarded with various golems and constructs.

She wants to use disable construct to temporarily disable a golem, hack it, and use its help to retake the temple.

She has knowledge of a secret back tunnel into the temple/fortress, which could take them nearly straight to the boss golem: a platinum golem. (The other four golems are gold.) So the party decided to go in that way, not in the front, try to seize the platinum golem and use it on the gold ones.

So Dujha plane shifted them back to the Material Plane, to a ravine on continent Kryia near temple Zamet, and they went up a tunnel to the temple. There was a broken and defiled altar discarded amongst rubble on the way, but the party was in a hurry because there was a gold golem (embossed with the name Rincona) coming, and didn't notice the altar until later.

Into the main temple chamber, where there was a platinum golem embossed with the name Phensipicho, and a gold golem embossed with Sorgiga! Raine cast the disable construct spell successfully on Phensipicho, and Dujha headed over to pop its carapace with a hammer and start hacking! The rest of the party attacks Sorgiga.

Raine notices that the scroll, unlike a normal scroll, has not faded away into illegibility after use.

With the help of Phensipicho, the party took down Sorgiga! Just as Rincona arrived!

But the scroll was successfully was used, and now Rincona was on the party's side, too!

The scroll, ultimately, worked 6 times before fading (6 being a number sacred to Morozz).

(Speaking of sacred numbers: there was 1 platinum golem, 4 gold golems, 9 sunlight-lazer-blasty turrets on the walls, and 16 animated objects that mostly just do upkeep -- any perfect square number is sacred to Numiel. The upkeep constructs weren't doing so hot, after a few hundred years plus 600 underwater. There were shovels, dusters, one was a salt-scatterer construct, diligently trying to scatter salt, its salt store long since depleted.)

Anyway, the party took away the Numielite altar and accoutrements, restored the Morozzite altar. They ended up selling the Numielite iconography to churches of Numiel back north. "Doc" was allowed to peruse Dujha's book collection in detail. Dujha took up new residence in Temple Zamet, to maintain the golems and other constructs, trying to keep it under Morozzite control this time.

Maus Yi Yos!