In this session, they are joined by another adventurer, who plays a dragonborn fighter. That rounds out the party as a high elf Great Old One Warlock, half-elf Circle of the Land Druid, half-orc Totem Barbarian, wood elf Thief Rogue, and copper dragonborn Battlemaster Fighter. Since everyone else has darkvision, I just decided that it was a recessive racial trait that the dragonborn managed to inherit, too.
In this session, they try to track down some missing townsfolk, and end up in some serious doo-doo. Also, they decided about halfway through to just start calling this cult "Catholics." I ran with it.
On waking from their well-earned
sleep, Glüur, Ryn, and “Sylvan” went down to have breakfast at the Peg-Leg Inn
in Boggrove. There, they caught up with Cosai, who had an extra grappling hook
that he would proceed to not use in any way despite making a whole thing about
going out and getting it from “the item store” aka Wavelance Adventuring Gear,
inc. Medieval coffee and breakfast was had.
In the town square, Glüur made
himself useful by approaching Aeryn, the leader of the town guard, and offering
to help train the new recruits. His orcish technique proved too much for the
puny farmhands to master in a mere five seconds, and one recruit got hurt
pretty bad. Sensing that perhaps Glüur’s talents might be best used elsewhere,
Aeryn asked him to scout the town’s perimeter if he got a chance, so that they
could tell where to post the guards once they were trained.
The group then approached
Bartollomeo ‘call me bart’ at the Fey Whisper distillery, where they learned
that brigands seemed to be routinely harassing shipments of booze too and from
Boggrove, but that this wasn’t technically
Bart’s problem since the distillery doesn’t provide its own shipping or guards.
The group bought a couple bottles of booze at ‘a reasonable price’ when they
realized they didn’t have the cash to start moving weight.
Returning to Antonio’s Potion
Emporium, Ryn noticed that a haggard tony had been up all night making potions,
considering that they were probably going to come in real handy in the
beleaguered town in the near future and there was some money to be made.
Antonio did make some money, and the group got some healing potions at a
discount since they were about to go and rustle up some missing supplies and
maybe also some missing supply-gatherers.
Everyone continued to ignore the
fact that a skeleton ran out of the town’s temple last night. Seriously.
On the way out of town to go and
find Darric and Georg, the party rolled up on a random encounter ahem
discovered a cart of Bart’s spirits that were being shipped off to Kibaram, a
large city to the West. It turned out that sneaky Cosai discovered that the
cart was about to be set upon by brigands. Just to be sure that the brigands
were really brigands, he let that happen, and the naer’s-do-well slew the
cart’s driver with arrows. Cosai then decided to do a run-by-stabbing, biffed
it, and ran out of the woods to signal his new traveling companions. In the
ensuing battle, a ruffian was slain handily by the cart’s guards (with a little
help from a Glüur chop), and then suddenly, as if from nowhere, but really just
from right up the road, a late-for-the-tournament Dragonborn fighter by the
name of Gandrakk grabbed onto a bandit and started asking who the hell everyone
was. Thanking him for the grab, the guards slew the bandit, whose friends began
to run off into the woods. Sylvan’s magical entangling vines stopped them, but
not for long enough for the party, the guards, and the warrior to sort out wtf
was going on and also stop the cart, and the bandits hacked their way free and
beat a quick retreat into the woods. They sent the guards and cart back towards
Boggrove. After figuring out that one of these elves spoke dwarvish, Gandrakk
seemed super pumped! He also said some stuff if draconianglish, which Sylvan,
who speaks draconian in the proper broodmother’s dialect, couldn’t understand
at all. But! They figured out that they were all probably about to do some
do-goodery and help the town out, so since the tournament was canceled anyhow
and Gandrakk couldn’t sell some of his well-forged weapons, he might as well go
use them to bash up some badfolk.
On arriving at the cave where
Antonio said Darric and Georg would be, Sylvan used his intuition about the
natural world to discover that some of the mushrooms in the cave were probably
poisonous, and some were probably good for potions. But which ones were which?
There are so many kinds of mushrooms, you know, and they’re all sorta squishy
and white underneath, and they mostly taste the same unless they kill you, so
it’s hard to know. Cosai found a pouch half-full of tall skinny ones, so the
group gathered up a bunch more of those, closed up the pouch, and followed
Cosai’s as he tracked a handful of footprints and heel-dragging-marks to a
circle of standing stones. It didn’t take an arcana check to realize that a
tortured and murdered body in the place opposite a knocked-down stone meant
that someone was up to no good, but Ryn’s 3-D magic warlock eldritch eyesight
confirmed that some dark magic was afoot.
Seizing the opportunity to make
what was, honestly, right on the face of it, a pretty terrible decision, which
was totally in keeping with the life choices they had made so far in terms of
becoming adventuring types rather than just staying home on the farm like their
parents would have wanted, they rushed down the stairs that had been conjured
in the midst of the stones, into darkness.
There, they discovered some bitching heavy metal
paraphanelia, which, Ryn accounted, was also definitely magical. Seeing some
skull shaped cups in a cupboard, a saucer of brackish water, an empty basin,
and some black flags with silver rings encircling a silver, downturned,
open-mouthed silver skull, Ryn walked right over to the glowing-est
magical-seeming cup he saw behind the glass doors of the cupboard. Grabbing it
set off a trapdoor that revealed a pair of skeletons. DUH. Gluur took right to
this development, and punched a skeleton that had been released, and the party
found out that skeletons are vulnerable to bludgeoning damage as his brass
knuckles that say “MA$E” on the fingers bashed one up really good, as did
Sylvan’s quartershilleileigh and Gandrakk’s warhammer, which flopped one
skeleton’s bones into a basin of brackish water. Seizing the opportunity to
continue using his eldritch sight, Ryn filled his skully cup with the nasty
liquid and poured it into the empty basin, causing a door to magically appear
in the back wall of this room.
Taking the left hand path in a
hallway that forked out and away from the entry-altar-room, the group
encountered a zombie, chained like a guard dog to a wall with a door nearby it.
They discovered that, though they have a real shitty AC, zombies are pretty
hard to kill, since despite slicing it lengthwise, nailing it to the door with
an arrow, and cutting its last remaining leg off by smashing Glüur’s greataxe
through it and into the door, the zombie was still somehow coming after the
group, however ineffectually. The loud thump of Glüur’s knock was answered with
“is that you Darric?” from the other side of the door, and half of Darric’s
zombie-body was pulled by the chain back up against the wall beside the door.
Cosai sent an arrow through Darric’s squishy brains, and ended him, just in
time for the door to open and a man in black robes with the same skully
markings as the flags out front to appear.
This guy, sensing that a one-on-five fight with three elves, a half-orc with a massive axe, and a dragonborn in full chainmail was probably not the best tactical decision, ran like hell, releasing a zombie from its previous place lashed to a table. This zombie was dispatched much more quickly, and the group ran past a book that looked really cool but that Sylvan didn’t really have time to read at the moment, despite stopping in his pursuit for six seconds to flip through it and discover that it was, indeed, a zombifying manual. The necromancer fled up a staircaise, and, after giving chase, Glüur managed to miss slicing him with his big ol axe. Seizing the moment for magic, Ryn straight up exploded the cultist’s brain with magic whispers, and gooey guts rushed out from the openings in his chainmail armor.
This guy, sensing that a one-on-five fight with three elves, a half-orc with a massive axe, and a dragonborn in full chainmail was probably not the best tactical decision, ran like hell, releasing a zombie from its previous place lashed to a table. This zombie was dispatched much more quickly, and the group ran past a book that looked really cool but that Sylvan didn’t really have time to read at the moment, despite stopping in his pursuit for six seconds to flip through it and discover that it was, indeed, a zombifying manual. The necromancer fled up a staircaise, and, after giving chase, Glüur managed to miss slicing him with his big ol axe. Seizing the moment for magic, Ryn straight up exploded the cultist’s brain with magic whispers, and gooey guts rushed out from the openings in his chainmail armor.
None of this, however, stopped the
ongoing ritual in the chamber that they hand just entered! Oh NO! A HEAVY METAL
RITUAL AND THERE”S A DEAD DRAGON IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROOM! The leaderless
cultists continued their prayer [the lyrics from a Coffinworm song-you should
check that band out, very heavy], and attempted to drain their veins into
ritual basins to re-vivify the dragon whelp. One faltered in his devotion,
while another slit his veins with aplomb. Blood flowed in channeled grooves
towards the long, low, stone altar on which the weensy dragon lay. An arrow
from Cosai pierced a cultist, who nonetheless continued in his ritual. Gandrakk
released his acid breath against two cultists, which was totally awesome, and
caused a crusty, scorched plug of bubbling acid to run, just behind some of the
blood, in the same ruts in the floor. Glüur can’t help but find in all of this
the opportunity to use his axe, and jumped off the high perch where he was with
the party and slew a cultist in the front row. Sylvan burnt another with a
fireball produced and hurled at him, but still three were left. Running out of
time, Ryn used the whispers on another, who also exploded his brain in terror
and confusion. Without armor to contain the blast, however, his blood pretty
much all went into his basin, which worked out contrary to what the group was
hoping for. Gandrakk leapt down from his perch and bashed a cultist to death,
and Cosai’s bow brought down another. Sylvan saw that blood continued to run
towards its goal at the dragon’s altar, and jumped down to try and push the
dragon off. Running to his aid was Gandrakk, but the two couldn’t push it off
until Glüur added his strength, and they heaved the heavy beast off just in
time, as cultist blood started spraying through a set of spikes inset into the
altar. Dragon-zombie averted… for now…
Glüur has its head, Gandrakk has a claw, and Sylvan took a few scales.
Because, why not. Ryn ran back to the room with the big book and discovered
that it contained a zombie ritual of “Catholic” origin. He took a mean-lookin
knife, too.
Everyone snatched up a clean
cultist robe from the cultist barracks, and went on a little trip into a cave
on the left. Seeing some spikes facing inward, and another sheer drop-off,
Sylvan tactically flung a fireball into the darkness, revealing a massive
cavern, an underground river lapping against a stony shore, and a large shadowy
shape. This got the attention of a voice in the distance, who screamed out for
help. It also got the attention of something big, which maneuvered just on the
edge of the Cosai’s vision. Winging it, he shot an arrow into the darkness
roughly where he thought the noise was coming from, and actually thumped it
right into something. That something then started moving towards the group.
Glüur hucked a couple of torches down into the cave, revealing a
big-ass-skeletal minotaur. Cosai whipped a flask of oil at it as the rest of
the party unleashed their javelins, shortbows, and light crossbows. Seeing a
minotaur covered in sticky oil, Sylvan blasted it with fire, hurting it with
the impact and setting it ablaze. The minotaur jumped up towards the party, but
was unable to climb past the spikes on its first leap. Gandrakk smacked it in
the face with a hammer, and Glüur disloged the spike it was hanging onto. On
its second leap, the minotaur vaulted up to the group’s level, and with a two
handed swing of its greataxe, it cut nature boy sylvan down low and near to
death. It was then heroically bashed to death by everyone else nearby. Glüur decided that it was more badass
to use his enemy’s greataxe than his own (he was right) and now he carries a
meaner-looking bust statistically identical greataxe in addition to the one he
had before. Sylvan snapped off a horn from ‘ol minnie’s skullbones, and the
party put a terrified Georg to sleep in the cultist quarters.
Heading out, the party chose the
low road, slew a patrol, and skipped the chance to enter a wooden structure
built into a higher level of the cave. Instead, they entered a room filled with
stalagmites and stalactites so thick a person could hardly see, and heard the
sound of axes cracking into wood. “Sneaking,” Cosai discovered a bunch of stout
wicker huts and a dry riverbed, which apparently he is allergic to, because he
sneezed right then, alerting a pair of cultists and a zombie. While the
cultists were quickly dispatched with stabbing and slashing, another foe
presented itself, and Cosai found his mind overrun with the insane,
unintellibile whispers of a Gibbering Mouther. He stood still as it squished
its slug-like, pink, all aberrant eyes-and-teeth body closer. Sylvan was then
blinded by exploding spittle from the beast, which had responded not-so-happily
to his firey attack. Gluur took this moment to impale a zombie who had grappled
him upon a stalagmite (definitely not killing it), giving him just enough time
to get himself disoriented by the mouther. He ran, unknowing, straight past it,
triggering a series of snapping bites that, lucky-for-his-orcy-hide, didn’t get
to him. The party wised up, encircled the slow-slinking goopy yuckbeast just
out of its range, and brought it down with a series of spells and arrows. Whew!
What will they encounter next time? Who knows! Probably more gross, badass
monsters though, since they’re definitely not out of the dungeon yet, and
they’ve decided for some reason to leave a handful of half-dead or
incapacitated zomb-o’s just groaning around the place. Adventurers, sheesh.
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