Near TPK in my 4e game

Last Tuesday's installment of my 4e game ended with our heroes in very perilous straits.  We ended the session with Beautiful Bob the half-gibbering mouther psychic (Ardent) and Hammer the warforged barbarian both below 0 HP and surrounded by snakemindflayers, presumably about to have their intelligences consumed.  The party's other member, Tilia the albino minotaur warden, had previously merged her body into the giant honeycomb mushroom brain that the snakemindflayers worshiped and called MotherMind.   At the end of the session Tilia had entered a lucid dreamstate to attempt some psychic healing on MotherMind.  Tilia was trying to sooth the nightmares of MotherMind and she called upon the energy of Bob and Hammer (with whom she shares a permanent telepathic link that was forged with alien energy technology some time back) to help her.  Bob and Hammer had both just dropped below 0 HP that round and lost consciousness so I gave them the option of joining Tilia in the shared dream when she called upon their energy.  They both took me up on that, so we will start next session with all three PCs in a shared dreamscape with MotherMind.

A few notes on how we got into this predicament:

*  The party allowed themselves to be led to the caverns of the snakemindflayers by a guide, knowing the entire time that the snakemindflayers wanted Tilia to merge with the MotherMind to fulfill an ancient prophecy about a white cow that featured prominently in the snakemindflayer religion.  The party had also gleaned that the snakemindflayers intended to kill the rest of the party and consume their intellects.

* The previous session, the party had initially parlayed with the first few snakemindflayers that they ran into... until suddenly jumping them and massacring them in one round.  For some reason the party decided to take a five minute rest in the same cavern that they just fought in, apparently deciding that no alarm had been raised despite knowing that the snakemindflayers and the mushroom men thralls that they had just killed had a psychic connection with MotherMind.

*  When the party's five minute rest was interrupted by a legion of approaching snakemindflayers and thralls, they decided to confront them rather than attempt to flee (although to be fair the only obvious direction to flee would have been deeper into the caverns of the snakemindflayers and toward MotherMind).

*  Faced with overwhelming numbers the party willingly marched with the snakemindflayers deep into their living mycelial city and Tilia willingly merged herself with MotherMind.  At that point the rest of the snakemindflayers politely asked Hammer and Bob to accompany them back to the ritual sacrifice chambers so they could fulfill their destiny of being consumed.  Hammer and Bob didn't want to comply.

*  The party soon learned that the metallic rods that the snakemindflayers all carried were some kind of technological laser weapon.  Hammer learned that getting shot with lots of lasers hurts.

Siss-Anor Dungeons pt. 1

Last session in my 4e game the players were exploring the dungeons underneath the royal palace of Siss-Anor for the first time.  Magical wards prevented teleporting into or out of the area underneath the palace, so for the first time in a long time the party didn't have the safety net of being able to open a portal back to their orbiting spacecraft with their portal coins.  I am going to post some maps of areas of the dungeons, because by the end of last session Beautiful Bob had wrested control of two cambion (half-devil) slaves from a royal sorceror.  These two cambions are now totally loyal to Beautiful Bob, and they are intimately familiar with the areas of the dungeon occupied by the devil-pact Order of the Horned Bull as well as the network of passages and caverns that link from the order's temple to the ancient ritual caverns in the lowest level of the dungeons.  I am going to post some maps soon, but first some back story.

For the last few months of game time, the city of Siss-Anor had been oppressed by the snake men who suddenly arrived in their flying golden city/meteorite over the palace and activated sleeper cells of snake men loyalists within the royal family and royal inquisitors.  The royal bloodline of House Al Treez was revealed to be of snake man scientist creation - genetically modified to be susceptible to snake man telepathic command.  Squadrons of large humanoid lizardmen with green shadows instead of heads abducted most of the ranking leadership of both the other royal houses and the named merchant houses.  Unprecedented numbers of blood sacrifices were demanded of all the houses, and several resulting uprisings were put down with brutal efficiency by the legions of the snakemen.  Then just as suddenly as they arrived, the snake man city flew away upriver into the jungle and has not returned.

Without the backing of the snake men, the collaborators within the old royal government soon were besieged in the palace.  When the palace fell the old loyalists/snake man collaborators retreated into the dungeons below the palace.  The royal sorcerers, while not of snake man blood and in fact chafing under the new order, had not openly resisted the snake men and indeed had helped put down the uprisings.  A secret society within the royal sorcerers known as the Order of the Horned Bull had formed a pact with the lords of hell many generations ago, and they called upon the minions of hell to protect them as they retreated into the dungeons.  The upper level of dungeons, mostly consisting of barracks for the royal guard and extensive prison cell blocks, are now flooded with devils - at the moment keeping the forces of the uprising houses from capturing the collaborators.

The party has a man on the inside, a member of the royal family and a royal inquisitor himself, Kaaz al Treez.  Many sessions ago Kaaz allied himself with the party because he had been investigating secret plots of the snake men in the royal house of Siss Anor for quite some time.  He had been investigating a secret order within the inquisitors known as the Order of the Serpent.  This secret order passed down the knowledge of the snake men for thousands of years, conducting rituals in hidden caverns far below the surface where a strange race of snake-mindflayers (snake man scientist creations) live in a network of tunnels honeycombing a sentient mycelial mass.  Even after the the snake man citadel left, Kaaz observed snake man scientist activity in the lowest levels of the dungeon where the snake-mindflayers live.  Literally taking the form of a fly on the wall, Kaaz observed a snake man scientist entering a secret doorway in the Cavern of the Blood Sacrifice.  Following the scientist in his insect form, Kaaz discovered a snake man scientist installation hidden underneath the caverns.  A large circular chamber was filled with the golden machinery inset with gem buttons and festooned with levers that is characteristic of the snake man scientists.  In the center, some kind of energy vortex or singularity danced suspended in mid-air.  Kaaz observed the snake man scientists walk directly into this energy vortex and disappear.  When Kaaz followed after a discrete moment, he found himself on a clear platform far above the floor of an immense chamber.  Hairless blue skinned humans and snake man scientists of unusual coloration busily crisscrossed the floor of the chamber to and from the eight archways ringing the chamber.  Something in the atmosphere felt wrong, and he had difficulty maintaining his insect form.  He was unable to communicate with the party from in this chamber through the magical wasp ear rings that he and Beautiful Bob wear for this purpose.  When he attempted to fly down into the chamber he lost his insect form and crashed into a far corner of the immense chamber.  He had difficulty using any magic at all and was unable to assume any of his tattoo forms.  Eventually he was able to figure out how to activate an elevator lift to take him back to the platform, where he stepped back through the energy vortex.  He contacted the party after this and told them the whole story.  He explained to the party how they could access the lowest levels of the dungeon through a long flooded passage connecting to the old sewers, and that is how and why the party came to be entering the Cavern of the Blood Sacrifice underneath the palace of Siss Anor last session.

Snake Man Scientists and Servitors (part one)

Snake Man Scientist:  A four-armed sterile caste that occurred through random mutation shortly after the Prime genome was expressed from a clutch of Temple Servitor eggs on Celestia, the Snake Man Scientists propagate their species by cultivating the mycelial egg mats which hatch under the correct conditions.  Unlike the Primes who emerge from the egg in amphibious tadpole form, Snake Man Scientists burst from their eggs as a tiny version of their adult form.  Several molts are required before they attain their adult size, and the coloration of each of these molts identifies several juvenile stages.

Snake Man Servitor:  The result of many years of controlled breeding and experimentation by the Snake Man Scientists, the Servitors are bipedal, four-armed and covered in brilliant purple and violet scales.  The Servitors are an attempt to recreate the original Temple Servitor created race that served the pan-universal religions of the Celestian temple cultures.  Despite the origins of both Snake Man Primes and Snake Man Scientists as mutant variants of the Temple Servitors and the bloody rebellion that freed them from temple servitude, creating their own servitor race was a high priority of the Snake Men.  Ancient Snake Man Proverb:  Treat others as you would not desire to be treated yourself :)
Servitors are bred with a servile nature and an unfailing belief in reincarnation into Prime form upon death.  Servitors are quite intelligent and serve both as lab assistants to the Snake Man Scientists and ranged fire support on the battle field.  Unlike Snake Man Spawn (which are never outfitted with weapons or armor to denote their inferior status compared to the Prime and the Primelings of their line), Servitors wield blast cannons and wear energy armor into battle.

As a side note I stumbled upon this DeviantArt page by JGood8 which seems to contain drawings of the snake man scientists lifted directly from my cranium.  I figure if he can telepathically invade my mind like that, I can post his drawing here - at least I linked to him!  And I will gladly remove this picture if requested, but I had to post it.  This is EXACTLY what a 3rd molt juvenile Snake Man Scientist looks like, on the left in color:

Snake Man Spawn

Snake Man Primes constantly emit spores that grow into mycelial mats which produce fruiting bodies and ultimately tadpoles that eventually metamorphosize into the adult snake man form (see Snake Man Prime post).  These are referred to as snake man spawn to differentiate them from the Prime of their line.  Snake man spawn are marginalized and live in constant fear of being slaughtered by their own Prime or a Prime of another line.  When a snake man spawn is killed, all line allies within 50 gain a temporary +1 bonus to hit and damage until the end of the encounter (stackable up to +5 for other spawn, no limit to the bonus the Prime of the line can gain in this manner).  For this reason Primes enter battle in the middle of a vast convoy of their spawn, who lend their life energies to the Prime and their clone brothers even in death.  It is not uncommon at all to see a Prime cutting down swathes of his own spawn to get pumped up before a battle.  Spawn are not given battle armor or weapons, relying on the snake man martial arts (heavy on tail sweeps, knockdowns, strangulation, punches and elbows) and their deadly venomous bite in combat.

Snake Man Primeling

Snake man spawn have no rights or protections in snake man society, and are considered only barely above the created Servitor race that assist the snake man scientists.  Only if a spawn survives for long enough to be one of the 100 oldest spawns of the line, one of the next in line for Primehood, does it receive any rights at all.  The 100 oldest spawn of the line are referred to as Primelings and they are never allowed to be in the same vicinity as the Prime of their line, so that if the Prime falls the line will not fall with him.  Primelings begin to develop a tumor in the left shoulder that becomes the fetal twin sister that will awaken upon the Prime transformation.  Even though the twin remains nascent and unconscious until the Prime transformation, they do lend some psionic abilities and protection to the Primelings that sets them apart from the other Spawn of the line.  Primelings are also outfitted with magic armor and weapons in the style of their line. Primelings are trained in the snake man weapon arts by the Prime of another line.  Each line has a traditional relationship with another line that shares the same weapon style, the Primes of each line training the primelings of the other.  Killing a Primeling is considered a mortal insult to the Prime of the line, and a duel to the death between the Primes involved usually follows.

Snake Man Primes

Snake Man Primes are the warrior and dominant caste of snake men.  They only have male snake sexual organs.  There are 7919 lines of Primes, a number that has not changed since the original mutation in a batch of temple servitor eggs on Celestia birthed the species.

Each line has a Prime, the eldest living member of the genetic line.  When the previous Prime is killed (a Prime is effectively immortal and will not die of natural causes) the next oldest member of the line becomes the new Prime.  Only the Prime of each line can reproduce; upon achieving Primehood the four organ tentacles constantly emit spores that grow into a fleshy mycelial mat in the presence of energy and moisture.  These mycelial mats produce fruiting bodies with a water filled pod on top.  Connections through shadow to Shadow DNA (sDNA) cause mycelial tissue in a specialized node to turn into animal flesh and a tadpole is formed which swims up the stalk of the fruiting body and lives in the pod, eating algae blooms in the water if there is light present or pieces of the fruiting body itself which decay and fall off in the absence of light.  A fully grown tadpole bursts from its pod and wriggles to a dark place to metamorphosize into the adult snake man form.  Each snake man is an exact genetic clone of the Prime of its line with whom he shares a telepathic link of unlimited range.

When a snake man becomes Prime a set of genes are activated which cause a dwarf female conjoined twin to grow along the arm and left shoulder.  One eye opens in the palm of the left hand from which the female twin can see.  It takes many years for the newly developing female twin to achieve adulthood, and many more years to fully access the memory of the previous female twins.  A fully mature female twin has full access to the memories of all her clone-sisters before her.  Even newly forming female twins have powerful psychic abilities which add to the battle prowess of the Prime.  When a Prime raises its left hand in battle and the eye of the twin opens, enemies cower and flee.  Over long centuries the female twin's continued growth causes a hunchbacked deformity that saps the physical strength of the Prime even as the psychic powers of the twin continue to expand exponentially.  The lines of the Primes are ranked according to the longevity of the Prime of the line.  The oldest Primes are completely dominated by their female twins in normal life, existing in a kind of vegetable slumber while the twins hone their mental skills.  The 10 oldest primes have not stirred for over 20,000 years.  If roused the combination of deformed male Prime warrior and ancient female psionist would be perhaps one of the deadliest combatants in the multiverse.

Snake Man Biology Pt. 1 - Introduction

I introduced the Snake Men in my 4e campaign in Session Numero Uno through the wild tales of a swamp trapper who told of a "city made of gold" that he and his friends had discovered, which he claimed was inhabited by snake men.

A handful of sessions later the party was in an alien spacecraft made of pure energy and they were accessing the data logs of several linked satellites in stable planetary orbit.  In the course of observing several billion years of planetary formation they also caught a relative blink-of-the-eye in time highlighted by a meteorite slamming into the exact center of the formation of alien spacecraft, forming the depression now filled by the swamp.  Yes, the many minareted and domed city which stood on the meteorite was made of gold. A circular rocky ridge in the center of the swamp, thrown up by the impact, conceals the city of gold. Mushroom life sprouted across the meteorite shortly after the crash, and from the mushrooms sprang tadpoles which metamorphosized into snake men.  To the party's horror they discovered that all of the humanoid races of the planet had their origin as experiments released by the snake men scientists into the swamp.

When the party thought to look for the visual evidence of the swamp trampers finding the city, they observed two snake men meet the three trappers on the top of this ring.  A snake man held up its hand and two of the trappers disintegrated into dust.  The third trapper soiled himself as the other snake man grasped him solidly for a moment before releasing him.  The party's informant fled promptly.

Curious, the party kept investigating that moment in time through satellite footage and discovered that the outbreak of the white death plague could be reliably dated to shortly after the return of this swamp trapper to the settlement.

Several sessions later, the party had crossed the mountains and was exploring the verdant rainforest beyond.  They found an artifact of the snake man, a flying laser shield meant to be worn by a snake man warrior.  This shield revealed that the snake men had four small organs that could interact with four circular depressions on the inside of the shield, like four sensitive finger-tentacles that stick out of the snake man torso.

Using ritual magic to look into the shield's past, they watched its creation by snake man scientists, all of whom had four arms.  The scientists tended to mats of mycelial tissue which they grew in molds in the shape of the shield and many other items (I just realized that the use of the word "mold" in the sense of a 3-dimensional negative shape that you pour or push a substance into to form a sculpture could be confusing when the substance that fills the mold is mycelium!).  When the molds were full of mature mycelium the snake  man scientists activated a complex arrangement of pearls and gemstones that transferred energy through shadow and turned the mycelium into many different substances, gold in the case of the enchanted flying shield.  The discovery of this shield was the first step in the party's current understanding of how to manipulate energy through shadow, the foundation of a true understanding of magic.

When the party began to piece together the history of the city states of the great human civilization on the other side of the mountains they realized that the influence of the snake men had crossed that great natural barrier long ago.  They discovered the fingerprints of the snake men in the blood tattoo magic that raised their hackles.

Even Manu Jablitu, the ancient technomancer lich who has become number one on the party's most wanted list for quite a few sessions in a row now, was first encountered because his services were procured by the snake men to solve a dimensional instability.  A while back the players in my Mutant Future campaign discovered an alien installation in a strange dimension that had a machine in it containing the entire 4e probaverse in a controlled singularity.  A player running PCs in both campaigns looked at the machine and infamously said "I'll flip some switches".  I asked him to roll d100 and he rolled a critical failure "01".  As a result, the machine began powering down and the stars started going out in my 4e campaign and many monumental constructions of the ancients that drew their power from the stars no longer worked.  The snake men were pissed and Manu Jablitu was brought in to fix things, but interestingly the 4e party managed to stabilize the probaverse without resorting to reprogramming the machine like Manu Jablitu intended to do.  All Manu Jablitu has done since is rise to near mythological status as the party keeps encountering more evidence of the crap he has done in the past.  Much of which was done under the patronage of the snake men, evidently.

I bring all this up because last session Beautiful Bob used the psychic enhancing module in the radiant energy vortex that he was accessing from the energy bath of the lich Pay-Gon to split his consciousness into 16,000 pieces to simultaneously accept a telepathic information feed from the 16,000 intellect-equivalent crystal gas mind the party encountered.  It may take him a while to process, but Beautiful Bob actually received the entire genome of both the warrior or "snake man prime" caste and the four-armed scientist caste in this telepathic transmission from the crystal gas mind.

I plan to write several posts about the biology of the snake man now that the party would definitely know the ins and outs.

Dream Physics and the Bizarre in Gaming

I have run PCs through dream sequences in almost every campaign I have ever DMed.  In my early days as DM (we ran 2e and loved it) I used dreams as plot hooks and a way to introduce demonic and magical influences in ways that made the players think beyond the dungeon.  I started exploring gaming in active dream state with an adventure I wrote involving four pocket dimensions contained within the rubies on a ring the players found in a treasure trove.  Powerful entities in these dimensions reached out to the PCs in their dreams and planted the seeds which would ultimately result in discovery and exploration of the pocket dimensions in the ring.  This was an example of my "gaming" in college, when I was not actually playing but still compulsively wrote D&D material.

  My games tend toward the extremely bizarre by almost any standards, so perhaps the dream state is the platonic ideal that my games strive toward.  Long before the recent dream adventures of Tilia, I introduced many other situations in my 4e game that are analogous to the lucid dreamstate; I have always liked the results when I give the reins to the players and let them come up with the limits of their actions.

The first time this happened in my 4e campaign was toward the end of the players' exploration of the Temple of Tamoachan.  Naturally I had placed the temple above a long-since-covered-in-solid-rock-by-tectonic-processes alien spacecraft, which radiated the energy used to power many of the crazy magical networks the party had discovered throughout the temple (I have to crazy up even a crazy tournament killer death trap 1e module, of course).  A near climactic battle in a sub-level I created featuring a massive worship hall with "benches" that animated into minions and huge statues that animated into huge demons that kicked major ass was close enough to the energy-emitting alien vessel that I allowed the PCs to take a full rest and refresh all their powers as a minor action by focusing on allowing the alien energy into themselves. Once the PCs got into the swing of things it was a spectacularly fun combat, with me hurling far greater numbers and more dangerous opponents against the PCs than they could have ever expected to survive, and them blowing daily power after daily power and refreshing all damage each round in a whirlwind of death and destruction.

 This was just a primer for when the party managed to teleport inside the spacecraft.  Finding themselves floating in a sphere of white energy that responded and conformed to their expectations, the players soon figured out they could "operate" the spaceship using whatever method they were best at. Hammer the barbarian fired lasers from the energy sphere at far away targets by visualizing his target getting blown the fuck up and using special 4e style attack powers with his ax to cleave the space where he was visualizing the target; meanwhile Beautiful Bob talked the white energy into doing what he wanted and soon gained access to the "ships logs", the total input the energy field had ever received from its former alien users as well as the myriad of sensors scattered throughout the solar system the ship was connected to.  Beautiful Bob soon absorbed the entire history of the world from birds eye view, seeing the continents split and join and the oceans rise and fall and the eventual beginnings of plant and animal life.  This is when the party learned that all intelligent humanoids were the failed byproducts of alien snake man experiments to produce a superior race of bipedal snake warrior servitors, cast off from the golden city on the meteorite into the swamps and forgotten about by the snake men.

Unlike bending reality in the alien spacecraft, I usually make limits to dream physics beyond simply what the player thinks to accomplish.  When I ran Tilia through her dream recently, I made a few notes about the physics of each stage of the dream journey and also improvised details on the fly.  Once Tilia became lucid, I allowed her more control over the dream but I did not give her 100% freedom.  Early on, she mostly walked because that was what her player expected her to do.  I had made a note that she could fly by walking or running on air in most of the dreamscapes, but Mike never thought to try that.  Floating in the mist and the great fall were examples of dreamscapes that started out with the presupposition of not standing on solid ground as part of the beginning dream description, but in all of the other scenes that unfolded in two long dream sessions, Mike assumed that Tilia was standing on the "ground" the whole time.

I assign a sort of elasticity to dream physics; they mostly resemble normal physics at first glance, but prolonged prodding and investigation will soon push them far past the normal state.  More accurately, the act of prodding and investigating shapes the direction in which the dream is pushed past normal expectations; the elasticity is a way to describe the resistance when approaching the limits of human comprehension (which a dream cannot stray beyond), and the resulting snap back into a more normal state of affairs.

There are limits to the bizarre in Dream Physics which do not exist in my alien and trans-dimensional gaming explorations (both are also strong recurring themes in my gaming).  A dream is after all a product of the mind, which experiences and processes reality while awake, and then deals with it while asleep.  Even though the sleeping conscious is not constrained by physical laws, physical reality forms much of the basis of dreams and provides a general framework past which a dream cannot be stretched too far.

Magical Circuitry pt. 1

I have been having a blast lately exploring how magic works in my 4e game with some very receptive players.  I touched on the foundations of a logical understanding of magic in this post a few weeks ago; last session, I introduced a new wrinkle to the subject - shadow transformations of magical energy.  The party had already figured out how to create magical "circuits" with organs that they harvested from the larval spawn of Kariki-Kalos (man, I really need to write a post about how the party accidentally freed Kariki-Kalos and started the end of days happening and all that...); if you point the energy-emitting "light organ" at the "dark organ", the dark organ converted the energy into invisible broadcast energy that could be used to power devices within range.  The two organs, when joined in this fashion to create a circuit, seemed to be capable of generating and broadcasting raw magical energy indefinitely.  As long as the light organ was within about five feet of the dark organ when it was first shined at the dark organ, the circuit would be established and the two organs would begin hovering in place.  As long as the circuit remained unbroken, the two organs moved as one and maintained the same relative position in relation to each other that they were in when the circuit was formed.  The party subsequently created some magical items that relied on this broadcast energy for power, most notably a magical propeller and air heater for the party's hot air balloon.

Last session, the party learned some much more sophisticated ways to create magical circuitry.  A tiny, very fast and very powerful magical monkey (tsoro-tsoro) that the party had rescued from certain death had been collecting spirit beetles (the most powerful single use "magical item" that I have introduced into my campaign, spirit beetles grant wondrous boons when eaten or powdered and smoked but are HIGHLY addictive) for the party in repayment.  The date had come for the party to collect on the debt, but the little tsoro-tsoro was not to be found at its sentient tree home when the party came a knockin'.  The tsoro-tsoro had left them a message with the tree though, regretting to say that he had been ordered to return to the cloud city with his entire spirit beetle stockpile; apparently the elder tsoro-tsoro sorcerers foresaw some calamity coming and were circling the wagons.  Only four spirit beetles had been left behind for the party, but this initial disappointment was soon forgotten when the tree revealed that another object had been left behind as well - a great curved golden shield, inset with an inward curving circular mirror at the top, in the center of which was a great faceted ruby.  The object, buried in the dirt beneath the forest floor for thousands of years, radiating magical energy, had caused this tree to become self-aware after hundreds of years of feeding on its energy through its roots.

The party set to examining the object, and soon were very confused by it.  It weighed far too much and was too tall to be useful as a shield in battle.  A strange tube like structure on the back seemed to indicate that the device could be mounted on something about the diameter of a telephone pole.  Two matched sets of small rubies and black pearls adorned the back of the tube, and an indented square with four circular depressions was set on the inside edge of the tube.  Two structures that seemed to be handles protruded out from the top of the tube to the edges of the shield, and upon grasping them, the party realized that the entire thing was flexible and could be twisted 45 degrees around the central tube (despite it being made of magically hardened gold).  Squeezing the handles caused a visible beam of light to emit from the large ruby in the mirror - this beam shifted slightly to fall on a startled squirrel in a tree, then tracked the squirrel as it ran for cover.  The party surmised that this was some sort of assisted aiming system, and soon verified that through further experimentation.

Tilia examined the object with her Goggles of Arcana (magical glasses she made from the small dark crystal lenses she found behind the eyes of the larval spawn of Kariki Kalos) and realized that a powerful U-shaped magical battery was inserted into the base of the tube and linked to the four small gems, and then to to the large ruby mounted in the mirror on the front of the shield.  Following the path the magical energy took from the battery, Tilia traced it first to the small rubies (two separate magical circuits, one on each side of the tube), then from the rubies to the dark pearls.  From there, the energy seemed to disappear and reappear in the large ruby; Tilia surmised that the black pearls must perform a similar function to the dark organs and broadcast power.

At first, no one was able to figure out what the four circular indentations on the inside of the tube were for - they each had a bunch of tiny raised dots on their bottom surface, which felt soft and organic.  When Tilia completed the ritual requirements to become a shabori of the fierce people a few sessions ago, she summoned a hekura to live inside her chest.  Her hekura was a nature spirit, and grants her the ability to speak with plants and animals (and take the better of two throws on Nature checks).  Tilia stuck her finger in one of the holes and instantly realized that the textured surface was some kind of mycelial structure.  Speaking with the tissue, she realized that it was a control interface with four separate "communication channels" running from the four indentations.  There was also a fungal "brain" node that seemed to contain a basic physics engine.  The purpose of the mycelial structure seemed to be to activate and control two separate functions of the large ruby; Tilia, after some difficulty in communicating with what was apparently an alien fungal species (which of course made the party think of the satellite footage they had seen while inside the energy ship under the hidden shrine of Tamoachan, when they saw mushrooms sprouting from a fallen meteor, then releasing spores which grew into yuan-ti!), determined that the object could be used both to shoot out a laser blast and to fly, and the propulsion for the flight seemed to be some kind of force ray emitted from the ruby.

Tilia was confused by this, as the ruby itself did not seem to be working any differently when looked at through arcana goggles when in flight mode or when it was blasting lasers.  Tilia could observe nothing at all different in the way the magical energy from the battery was being routed and manipulated in the object on the way to the large ruby that would explain the differing effects.  But there was that gap in the circuit, where the energy disappeared after entering the black pearl and reappeared in the large ruby...  the party had initially assumed this was simply an energy broadcaster or repeater.  But when they attempted to observe the energy as it left the black pearl, they realized that unlike the invisible energy broadcast by the dark organ (which the party could observe by detecting magic), the party could not detect any energy leaving the pearl at all.

Whatever was causing the ruby to emit propulsion rays one moment and laser blasts the next must be happening in the unknown gap in the circuit.  Now thoroughly intrigued, Beautiful Bob cast a ritual that allowed him to see five images from the objects past.  After seeing snippets of its creation, its use in battle (the strange tube part fit over the anaconda like lower body of the yuan-ti) and the spectacularly destructive last few moments of its former owners life, the party had a few more insights into the yuan-ti artifact.  The party had observed yuan-ti scientists carefully using dark-crystal implements to weave shadow sigils over the dark pearls.  

Tilia got out some incense that (in addition to creating a long lasting euphoric and mildly sedated state) granted bonuses to Arcana and Religion and soon followed the magical energy into the spirit world.  Looking beyond the spirit world for the first time into the shadow world, Tilia realized that the energy was leaving the pearl and going into the shadow realm, where it traveled down one of two different paths before returning to the physical world in the ruby.  The shadow sigils traced by the yaun-ti artificers had laid down the path that the energy traveled on, and that path transformed the energy as well as transported it.

At that point the session broke down into a think tank, as the party rapidly grasped the promise of this shadow circuitry and started planning on what they were going to do with this new magical "technology".  But first they would have to get their hands on some more black pearls...