Session date: Monday, July 1, 2019
Game date: Saturday July 23, 211 to Sunday, July 24, 211
PCs:
Gulleck Stonefoot, Dwarf 7, hp 41, xp 73397/140000
Caryatid, Magic-user 5, hp 24, xp 22926/40000
Simon Sackwell, Halfling 4, hp 15, xp 11821/16000
Adrien, Fighter 4, hp 16, xp 11897/16000
Retainers:
Manley "Meat" Smythe, Fighter 5, hp 17, xp 17925/32000
Father Chase Pike, Cleric 3, hp 13, xp 5602/6000
Orin, Elf 1, hp 4, xp 2348/4000
Boe, Fighter 1, hp 5, xp 921/2000
There was a notice on the bulletin board of the Rusty Lantern tavern that said that Professor Zinn would pay for evidence of giant ants mining nuggets of gold deep underground.
The group took their usual path down below. On the way they met a quartet of gnomes, who told them that some of the gnomes from their clan had been recruited away to work on some kind of mining project three dungeon levels below here. (Planting plot hook seeds that were never to sprout, alas!)
They visited the Judge, and Simon fed him a gemstone to ask about the "giants" in the garden area. The Judge told him that once their ancestors were the caretakers of the gardens, but left isolated and alone over the generations they reverted to brutish savagery.
They headed east to the shore of the underground lake, getting their canoes out of their wizard-locked storeroom on the way, and paddled across to the north shore of the lake. A natural cave passage led into the rock to the north. A short ways in, it widened and split left and right. To the right, strange mushrooms and other types of fungus grew on the ground and the walls. Cautious and wary of that, the group chose to go left instead. They hadn't gone far before they came upon three people standing oddly in a widened area of the cave. They slouched awkwardly as if uncomfortable in their own bodies.
"Er... howdy!" said Gulleck. One of the figures turned around, revealing a human face, but covered in mushrooms and fungus that grew in its hair and entwined its neck. It wheezed and coughed, and Gulleck could see that its mouth was choked full of small pale mushrooms. It falteringly extended a hand at Gulleck.
The group turned and ran back to the big Y-intersection. Then they composed themselves and decided to charge them. I mean, it was 8 against 3, right? Caryatid started to cast the Web spell, and was confused to see the creature in the front imitating her, waving its hands as if casting a spell. Then the strands of sticky spider silk shot from her hands and entangled all three of the creatures. A cloud of spores erupted all around them. Caryatid coughed as the spores filled her lungs. Gulleck ran up to one of the creatures and hacked its arm off. It let out a horrible wheezing cry, as more spores filled the air (but Gulleck's dwarven constitution was up to the threat). They put the arm in a sack as a sample, and hightailed it back to their canoes.
On the way out they visited the Judge again and fed him a piece of amber to ask about the fungus. "Bor was here to visit the other day, and he mentioned he saw a spreading fungus on the other side of the lake." But he had no useful advice, so they went home to seek a cure for Caryatid, who was looking green around the gills and wheezing.
Back above ground, they made their way through the bustling streets and alleys of Idalium to Father Chase's "temporary clerical staffing" chapel and waited to be seen by High Elder Flimwitz. Caryatid balked at the "requested donation" of 1,000 gold darics for a Cure Disease spell, but after a restless night full of strange and alien dreams of mushrooms and mycelium and the unearthly beauty of decay, Caryatid scurried back to the chapel the next morning to cough up the cash and get healed of whatever the spores were that had lodged in her lungs.
Wednesday, April 13, 2022
Idalium Game 113: Change and Decay in All Around I See
Idalium Game 112: Lullaby to Nightmares
Session date: Monday, June 10, 2019
Game date: Sunday, July 3, 211
PCs:
Gulleck Stonefoot, Dwarf 7, hp 41, xp 73282/140000
Caryatid, Magic-user 5, hp 24, xp 22782/40000
Simon Sackwell, Halfling 4, hp 15, xp 11670/16000
Adrien, Fighter 4, hp 16, xp 11753/16000
Orehoe Hüfflestüff, Elf 1, hp 3, xp 1226/4000
Frosty Beans, Fighter 1, hp 5, xp 1696/2000
Retainers:
Manley "Meat" Smythe, Fighter 5, hp 17, xp 17853/32000
Father Chase Pike, Cleric 3, hp 13, xp 5526/6000
Orin, Elf 1, hp 4, xp 2276/4000
Fritzenbürg, Cleric 1, hp 1, xp 24/1500
The COVID-19 lockdowns caused the Idalium campaign to fizzle out, sadly. We tried playing online via Discord and Roll20 for a few sessions, but it just wasn't the same. (And don't tell anyone, but I was reaching the end of the levels of the dungeon that I had mapped and keyed, and not feeling motivated to design the next level or two.) In an attempt to catch up on the campaign journals and, after writing 111 journal entries, get some proper closure on the campaign journal at least, I'm going to try to write these in a more abbreviated form. Hopefully, the lack of vivid description doesn't disappoint too much. (Also, it's been almost three years since these sessions and my memories are vague!)
Unusually, we picked up the story one day after we had left off, for the Queen of Nightmares' curse had left the vast majority of the party unable to sleep! They tossed and turned all night, and felt a strange compulsion drawing them back to the palace of the Queen of Nightmares. Only Caryatid, Simon, Meat, and Frosty were unaffected. Even Marcel the monkey and Norman the giant demon ferret spent a miserable night awake!
Caryatid experimented with the crystal ball they had taken from the Queen of Nightmares' treasure room. First she was able to remotely view her goose (that in theory lays golden eggs when provided with the right feed). Then she turned its gaze to the Queen of Nightmares' throne room. To her grim horror, she saw the Queen of Nightmares, reconstituted in human form, stalking her rooms in a rage.
They descended below to finish the job and hopefully restore their ability to sleep. First they stopped in to see "The Judge". The talking stone face told them that a large group of tall lanky goblins (bugbears) had come this way yesterday, heading upstairs, but returned in the middle of the night talking about how they were unable to sleep. They made their way towards the palace of the Queen, stopping to speak with the bewildered and delirious hermit Bor through the door of his chambers. Bor was of little help to them and eventually told them to go away. They pulled out the crystal ball again and viewed the Queen of Nightmares' bedroom. Through the open door they could see her speaking to a group of her bugbear slaves.
Making their way into the grand hall of the Queen's palace, they cleared away the piles of broken furniture that made a barricade in front of the door to the throne room. This snagged a tripwire that caused a portcullis to drop at either end of the hall, but other party members on the "good" side of the portcullis had previously found the crank to raise it, and quickly went round to do so.
The group entered the throne room of the Queen of Nightmares, which seemed empty until six bugbears stepped out from behind the stone columns that supported the ceiling and attacked! A bugbear snared Fritzenbürg with a garrotte and strangled him into unconsciousness. Gulleck and Adrien managed to kill a bugbear, and Orin cast a spell to put one to sleep. Boe fell to another bugbear's vicious strangulation. Caryatid cast sleep and another three bugbears dropped, and Gulleck put an axe in the chest of the last one.
Fritzenbürg and Boe turned out to be still alive and able to continue, barely. The adventurers collected a few gold coins and two ears from each bugbear (the latter to sell as bounties to the dwarves upstairs). Then they carefully made their way beyond the throne room to confront the Queen of Nightmares herself.
"How dare you intrude again in my domain!" The Queen of Nightmares stepped out of her room, dressed again in her tattered black robes. She began casting a spell. Caryatid slipped on her invisibility ring, and Frosty (who had borrowed Simon's) did the same. Stepping out from behind the Queen of Nightmares was the horrifying visage of a medusa. This turned out to be an illusion cast by the Queen, but Adrien and Meat failed their saving throws, and went rigid and still, believing themselves to have been turned to stone! Caryatid cast Magic Missile on the Queen of Nightmares, rolling the big green d30 for 17 points. Next round both I and Orehoe's player rolled the d30 for initiative, as it was important for both sides to get an attack off first. I won initiative, for once. The Queen cast Sleep at the party, and Orehoe, Orin, and Chase all fell to the ground in awkward heaps. That left only Gulleck, Caryatid, Simon, and Frosty to finish the fight. The Queen of Nightmares attempted to charm Caryatid, who made her saving throw, but only barely! Caryatid used her wand of fear and the Queen of Nightmares recoiled in panic and began to run away.
At this point there was a long discussion of what to do. They assumed she would just get away again and they'd have to do this all over again, if they didn't decisively end things now. Caryatid seriously considered just fireballing the entire room. That would probably kill several of the party members with low hit points, but at least it would solve the problem. But then Frosty Beans (our newest player) ran up invisibly, and stabbed the Queen of Nightmares in the back with her own magical dagger!
Almost shocked at their own victory, the adventurers cut the head off the Queen, burned her body with oil, and headed back to the surface for a well-deserved and long-deferred sleep!
Tuesday, April 12, 2022
From Out of the Darkness?
But suddenly I felt the desire to reopen this creaky trapdoor. John Arendt (formerly known as Beedo) has been recently posting again on his Dreams in the Lich House blog. (Ironically, he has also moved from B/X to 5e.) And I figured, I have this blog and it doesn't have to be limited to the one campaign, so why not use it? I haven't stopped playing D&D and this blog was never meant to be solely a campaign journal.
As my Curse of Strahd campaign nears the end (the party just hit level 9 and has one last area to explore before they tackle Castle Ravenloft and the vampire Count Strahd himself) my thoughts turn the next campaign. I'll probably offer the group a vote on a selection of the 5e hardcover adventures, but I've also been giving a lot of thought to running a very free-form, sandbox style campaign in the Forgotten Realms. Since we would be using the 5e rules, I'd probably set it in the "current" era of the Realms (1489+ DR) but increasingly, I've been attracted to the idea of leaning most heavily on the original AD&D (1e) Forgotten Realms Campaign Set as a baseline, and using later materials (including 5e material) on a pick-and-choose basis. One of my issues with the Forgotten Realms has always been the immense amount of materials available for it. It's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, this is a major attraction of the Realms, that so much of the world building has been done for you and you can let your players just roam around and it is easy to just wing it using the existing materials. On the other hand, all this material (and the history of "Realms-shaking events") tends to pile up and become a tangible weight on the setting. With so many demigodlike NPCs walking around, is there really room for adventuring? So I like the idea of rolling back all that cruft and leaving it as a "what if" or a "maybe it happened that way, who knows?" Rather than have Elminster be an immortal and nearly omniscient demigod and the Chosen of Mystra, I'd rather have the players meet Elminster the eccentric sage who is more concerned with his project to comprehensively catalog the butterflies of the ruins of Myth Drannor than in saving the multiverse from the latest and greatest apocalypse.
But we'll see! Maybe I'll even find a place on the map of Faerûn to plop down the city of Idalium. We never did explore too much of the world outside the city.
If I end up going ahead with the sandbox campaign idea, I might use this blog to post some world-building ideas as I put together my version of the Realms. In the meantime, I'm planning on posting a couple of the new monsters I created for the Idalium campaign. And maybe (no promises) I might be able to catch up on some of the Idalium campaign journals. Writing full journals is a bit of a time sink, and I might do these (as well as any future journals) in a more abbreviated format. It would be nice to have closure of the campaign for the handful of loyal readers that I did have.