Following the explosive conclusion of the battle in the sewers, the party stands amidst the gory remains of the Neolithid. Covered from head to toe in blood and viscera, they begin the grisly task of disassembling the carcass for valuable components. Mickle leads the effort, utilizing his medical knowledge and various toolkits to guide the harvesting.

The harvest results in several significant acquisitions:

• Tentacles: The group successfully retrieves four tentacles. The process is difficult due to their fragile and slippery nature, requiring the party to use a heavy rock as a “paper cutter” to ensure clean cuts.
• Acid Glands: By heaving the creature's mouth open with a quarterstaff, Mickle crawls inside to locate eight glands near the throat. After several failed attempts where the acid ate through glass jars and copper wire, they utilize a healer’s kit and sutures to successfully tie off and harvest four vials of magical acid.
• Neo-Hide: The party slabs off five square yards of the two-inch-thick armored hide. Due to the varied quality of the cuts, they end up with two “high-grade” and three “low-grade” sections.
• The Brain: Using a newly crafted surgeon’s kit, the party saws through the skull to retrieve the brain. They manage to harvest seven of the nine total parts intact.
• The Heart: The most valuable find is a basketball-sized heart pulsing with powerful psychic magic. A ritual identification reveals that the heart can be used to cast Foresight, though it carries a risk of inducing feeblemind.

While scavenging the cavern for “dead adventurer gear,” the party discovers several curiosities: a two-headed platinum coin, a Fido Whistle that buzzes with magic, a bear trap, and a bandolier with three grenades.

With the way they entered now collapsed from the explosion, the party discovers a new path out of the chamber. As they begin a multi-hour trek through the deep tunnels, their minds begin to wander, and the environment starts to feel increasingly realistic and jarring.

Unbeknownst to the party, they have been dosed with a massive amount of chemical residue from the destroyed Narcotics lab and from harvesting the neolithid carcass, triggering a collective and vivid hallucination. As they walk, each member falls under a different psychic compulsion:

• Drathus becomes convinced of his own godhood, demanding worship from the rest of the party and the environment.
• Mickle hears a constant orchestral score and feels compelled to perform everything in the form of a dance.
• Nebish finds his clothes painfully hot and itchy, leading him to strip completely naked.
• Blu perceives his weapons as snakes coiling around his body.

The party eventually emerges into a “library” or “study” filled with glowing gateways.

• The Purple Portal: Mickle enters a room of decorative chairs. He attempts to use magic to light them up, but the trial requires the party to sit together to succeed.
• The White Portal: Blu and Drathus encounter a massive stone tower in the clouds guarded by an angel and a Kirin. A combat ensues where Drathus falls through the clouds back to the library, and Blu is beaten by the angel before jumping through the floor to escape.
• The Black Portal: The party observes a mechanical factory producing Warforged and finds “Boggles” sorting through scrap metal. Drathus attempts to assert dominance over the boggles, leading to a skirmish where he is eventually thrown into a furnace.

Eventually, the party gives up on the trials and reconvenes at a table set with a “hearty commoners' meal”. After consuming the tasteless “sadness soup,” the hallucination finally breaks.

The party awakens aboard the Sloop Dogg to find that eight days have passed since they entered the sewers. They are tended to by their crew, Ormus and Gil, who have mysteriously returned to the ship. The long rest is complete, but the “trip” leaves the party with several bizarre side effects:

• Nebish is infested with fleas.
• Blu has 54 pieces of silver magically glued to his skin.
• Drathus has lost attunement to his Morningstar for three days.
• Mickle has a rose tattoo on his face.

Final identifications of their haul include the Fido Whistle, which summons a spectral dog with various effects (including “distracting” enemies or “peeing” on the user). Drathus also attunes to the Veil of Chains armor, which permanently burns out his left eye with green flames but grants him immunity to being charmed or frightened.

This is the end of Apocalyptica Arcanum - Campaign I. Partly because of scheduling conflicts, and partly because there were many aspects of the setting that had not been fully fleshed out and needed to be addressed. Issues of note were:

• Our homebrew weapons and class mechanics were wildly out of balance leaving combat extremely difficult to balance for such a large party. On average we had between six and 9 players at the table per session. It may not seem like it from the recaps but there was almost always one or two players “visiting” for a session or two and many of them didn't make it into the recaps.
• The entire theology of Choir and Legion was in a state of flux and many names/domains had not been settled on even during play. Some of these details have since been retconned in the recaps to better fit the larger setting.
• This campaign was always meant to be a testing ground for the setting as a whole and as such had all sorts of wild, experimental mechanics and lore. It relied heavily on random tables and did not set the stage for a cohesive storytelling platform.

Because of these reasons and more the group decided to take a break from D&D for a while and come back when the time was right. Thankfully we did.