Session date: Monday, December 17, 2018
Game date: Saturday, January 29, 211
PCs:
Gulleck Stonefoot, Dwarf 7, hp 41, xp 71702/140000
Caryatid, Magic-user 5, hp 24, xp 20761/40000
Simon Sackwell, Halfling 4, hp 15, xp 9547/16000
Orehoe Hüfflestüff, Elf 1, hp 3, xp 1177/4000
Retainers:
Manley "Meat" Smythe, Fighter 5, hp 17, xp 16982/32000
Orin, Elf 1, hp 4, xp 2189/4000
Fritzenbürg, Cleric 1, hp 1, xp 0/1500
Moonpetal, Elf 2, hp 12, xp 4652/8000
Finally, some regained momentum; we managed to meet two weeks in a row for the first time in six months! Adrien's player was unable to attend, but Orehoe's player was able to join us, and rolled up a retainer for herself: a cleric named Fritzenbürg, to offset Father Chase's absence after the last session. Caryatid decided to temporarily replace her retainer by hiring Moonpetal, the naive and dimwitted elf, whom the adventurers had rescued from the party of the cutthroat dwarf Rugger.
Down into the dungeon they went, seeking to explore more of the third level. In the big town square near the entrance from the new city, they encountered four stirges, perched on the rubble of the statues surrounding the dry fountain. Gulleck and Simon attempted to use their rings of animal control, but were disappointed to find that stirges don't qualify as normal animals. Moonpetal, full of unexpected bravery, charged in and dealt a massive blow to a stirge with his sword. Unfortunately, he was then bit by one of the other stirges and grew pale as it sucked away his blood.
Caryatid cut the whole thing short with a Sleep spell, and after stabbing the slumbering stirges they proceeded on their way. In the Temple of Hedonism, they were surprised to find a pair of dwarves engaged in a fight at the far end of the room with several giant bees in the hallway beyond. Remembering how the dwarves had been content to watch their battle with the dancing dolls last week, only to sarcastically applaud them at the end, the party decided to stand and watch. Both dwarves were then promptly stung by bees and with terrible gurgling screams, fell to the ground dead. The bees then buzzed into the room towards the adventurers. Orin cast a Sleep spell, but before he could complete it, one of the two bees stung Moonpetal, who twitched spasmodically before collapsing in a crumpled heap, his face pale in death. Then the last bee fell asleep under the effect of Orin's spell.
The adventurers weren't sure if Moonpetal had ever been revived in the pool of resurrection, but they figured it was worth a shot. Meat hoisted his spindly body over his shoulder, and they proceeded down to the second level, gingerly stepping over the two dead dwarves without a thought of bringing them to the resurrection pool. Cold!
They quickly made their way to the resurrection pool, stripped off Moonpetal's plate armor, and dunked the elf waif into the slippery liquid of the pool. He came up a few moments later, sputtering and gasping, and thoroughly besotted with Caryatid for bringing him back from the doors of death. Once he had a moment to recover his composure and put his armor back on over his sodden undergarments, they moved on, heading down the mossy stairs to the third level.
No sooner had they opened the door at the bottom of the stairs, they were surprised by a group of black-robed men and women. One was murmuring words and tracing patterns in the air as they walked in, and before they could react, she finished her spell, and turned to Simon with a broad grin on her face.
"I'm so glad you're here! We've been looking everywhere for you! I need your help!"
"Uh, sure, what do you need? How can I help?" said Simon, who recognized this lady as one of his dearest friends in all the world (although he couldn't quite remember her name at the moment).
"We really need you to catch us a bugbear! We need one for our... rituals... but we haven't been able to catch one unaware. But you and your friends are so strong, I just know you'll be able to catch us one!"
"Absolutely, friend, I'm on it! I won't let you down!" promised Simon, while the rest of his party rolled their eyes and sighed audibly.
The black-robed cultists reminded Simon to bring the bugbear alive to the Temple of Diana, just down the hall to the west, and then left with knowing smiles. The party then paid a brief visit to "the Judge", feeding him a gemstone and asking him if he had any suggestions about catching a bugbear.
"Hmm... The Queen of Nightmares keeps an entourage of bugbears slaves, but I don't suggest making an enemy of her."
Leaving the Judge behind, the group explored a new area to the west and then south, where they found a largely empty room that was eerily full of tiny white moths fluttering about. There were silken cobwebs draped throughout the room. Another doorway led west to another room, where the moths were even thicker in the air. The doorway was partially shrouded in strange curtains of silk threads. The group cautiously approached this room, to find it choked in silk webs. Scattered among the silk, the party could see a number of silver coins, a polished bit of ornamental stone, and what looked like a scroll case. On the ground were a number of what looked like enormous silk cocoons, pulsating grotesquely. The air was thick with moths here, and as the adventurers looked around, the small white moths suddenly gathered together, coalescing into eight giant moths, each with a four foot wingspan.
The moths surged towards the adventurers, lunging at them with their rasping proboscises. Gulleck and Moonpetal were both bit by the enormous moths. Gulleck swung her axe at the nearest moth, but found to her dismay that the moth's body parted like water around the axe into hundreds of its constituent tiny moths, reforming immediately after the axe passed through.
The party backed away into the main room, and the moths followed. There was a lot of arguing at the table around what to do. Orin read from a Sleep scroll, and managed to put three of the moths to sleep. As they fell to the ground, they lost their shape and dissolved into a mass of tiny moths again. Gulleck tried to swat a moth with the flat of her axe, and while this was very clumsy it did seem to do some damage, dozens of tiny moths dropping dead from the body of the giant moth.
Then Caryatid decided to shortcut everything with a fireball. This was a tricky situation, because she was trying to carefully target the spell to erupt at an exact point where it would hit the moths but not her fellow party members, and also she needed to launch the fireball between several people who were in melee with the moths. I ruled that she would need to roll a d20, and on a 1-6 the outcome would be bad (the fireball would explode premature on Gulleck or Simon's back) and on 7-20 she would hit her intended target. Caryatid's player rolled the Big Green d30 for this, and successfully hit her target. A fiery bead glowed at the tip of her finger, like a glowing ember, and then streaked forward between Gulleck and Simon, impacting on the floor at the far end of the room. The western half of the room went up in roaring flames. Curtains and cobwebs of silk ignited instantly, and three of the five moths were instantly destroyed in the conflagration. The other two moths failed a morale check and fled back into their nest, dispersing into hundreds of small moths as they flew away.
Cautiously, the adventurers crept past smoldering silk and charred moths to peer into the room. All seemed still, with the remaining moths clustered in the southern portion of the room. The coins and scroll case were quickly gathered up, Gulleck went around stomping the pulsating cocoons into a grisly pulp (hundreds of malformed, immature white moths oozed out as the cocoons were crushed), and the party made their return to the surface, with only a few coins to show for their disturbing experience.
The scroll case later turned out to contain not a scroll, but a fragment of a map and a note. The map showed a columned room labeled "throne room hall" and several rooms off of this hall, with an X in one room. The note was from a man who had been enslaved by the Queen of Nightmares, and who had hidden a potion of invisibility in a barrel in a pantry of the Queen's Palace, and sketched out this map in hopes that someone might be able to use it to free him and his fellow slaves...
No comments:
Post a Comment