Succeeded at an experiment that killed my Arcana Cleric twice (intentionally), but he gained the knowledge of how to harvest infinite magical monster materials without harming a single monster. Which was a stepping stone to the bigger goal, which we are absolutely going through with:
Next session we're going to max out our ability scores to 30. We're level 15. I'm going to be able to round out my build in the most hilariously, normally ill-advised way.
Mystra also got sick of yes-no-maybe ping-pong via Commune, so she responded to one of my questions by teleporting a Mechanus-aligned tuning fork to me. Got to have a chat with the boss directly. My poor Warforged wept like he was a StigmataBot.
So this session was about one thing: Tomes.
In 5e, Tomes are my colloquial group term for a set of 6 very rare magic items, three of which are 'tomes', three of which are 'manuals'. These books, when studied for 48hrs (over a max of 6 days), raise your respective ability score by 2, but also raise the maximum by 2, up to a hard cap of 30.
Everyone except me took the chance to use one offered tome to increase their main stat (my Cleric giving up the Wis Tome to the Druid, his partner, and heart of the party), instead trading his chance at a tome for an opportunity to read all six tomes, once, quickly. He also has the Keen Mind feat, which effectively gives him a month-long eidetic memory. Between this and expertise in the Arcana skill, he was able to reverse engineer the formula for crafting each book from this one reading. The problem was, the material was dragon skin. Hunting ~200 dragons was... Not an option this party was willing to consider, esp. given some of them are Good Aligned Dragons.
So, the goal was thus: find a way to acquire the needed dragon skin without needing to genocide dragons. The experiment that followed nearly ended in disaster, but it worked, and is repeatable.
Divine Intervention -> Wish: duplicate spell: Clone: ignore all requirements for casting the spell, including targeting 'a living creature'. Targeting a creature explicity requires the target to not only be in line of sight, but to exist (and for the caster to have a cube of their flesh as one of several expensive material components, all also ignored by Wish).
The target of the Clone spell was my Arcana Cleric, Spark, comma, '[Colour] Dragon'. This... Worked. A clone of Spark, with the full, functional body of a (young green) dragon worked. This was followed by his Simulacra doing the same thing, but creating a standard clone of him. The process would involve dying, entering the dragon clone, dying again, and entering the complete copy clone.
First problem that came up was super interesting and unique: the issue of dying with multiple existing clones. Turns out, in this world, it causes the soul to split like digital packets along the Weave's thin threads, and they all take the as-the-Weave-Crow-flies path to the nearest clone... Which is never based on real-world distances. So souls always split with more than one clone. Which is disastrous. So, gotta go one by one, which is totally fine. (Spark asked the ex-end-game-boss-turned-resident Kirilla how she got around this. Turns out, she just staggered the Clone's 120 day grow time so only one would ever be up, but more would be on the way. Clever, but useless, as Spark is skipping the grow-time via Wish.)
After that, the process worked flawlessly, except... Something was missing. Some memory. Some hole in his mind. Even in his perfect duplicate body, it turned out to be the memories of his soul's former owner, which are imprinted on his original body, not on his soul. This would have been a significant loss, so, using some quick thinking, and a very clever interpretation of the Clone spell's last sentence, Spark managed to Magic Jar his way back into his original body, no worse for wear. (That being that the original corpse is only inert because 'the soul has somewhere else to be'. Fixing that makes it a valid target for reviving.)
Better yet, the dragon body will work for crafting!
Which means we'll be going HAM next session!
We DID have an impromptu meeting with Mystra, when she got tired of trying to answer Yes/No/Maybe to Spark's increasingly complicated yes/no questions. So she sent him a tuning fork attuned to Mechanus. And they went and had a very nerve-wracking chat.
Turns out, between encroachment of Outer Beings on Realmspace and the whole 'I'm the third Mystra to have picked up the job' situations, Magic is... Broken as Fuck in the world, and Spark has constantly been on a path to try and change that. She not only agrees, but is proud of his efforts. She supports him, fully. He'll have to go above her paygrade, so he'll need all the help, and power, he can get.
It all really put the frankly tiny powergrab they originally asked for Mystra's opinion on (the tomes and ability scores) into perspective, and made it that much more a necessity.
We're going up against the rest of the Gods to try and not only prove the whole system is fundamentally broken, but that we can fix it, together.
Still got our work cut out for us.