Greetings Adventurererers,
When the dust settled after the defeat of Nerganu, it was
decided to peek around, and see if he had any good shit just laying about. He
did not. Because he was a spectral ghost monster with no real need for fancy
possessions. But, it did turn out that his phylactery cave was situated right
near an interesting place in the mining system.
After casting about for treasure for a while, the instead
party found a strange carving of a doorway, which contained indentations in the
shape of a large warhammer, surrounded by a triangle with sockets for the large
crystal shards that the party has been going about gathering up for the past
week or so at each of its vertices. They didn’t have a hammer that size and
shape, nor enough shards to plug into the sockets. They stared at the door for
some time, debating what to do next. What if we put in the crystals and we
can’t get them out? Should we try to break it down? Maybe we should cast magic
at it. Is it a trap? I roll for trap. And so on. Eventually, Ryn took out the
small chime that he had acquired after fighting the clockwork trash monster a
while back, and clanged on it. Bright light flared from behind the sockets of
the sculpted door, and it rolled up into the cave ceiling like a garage door.
Inside, they found a long, wide hall, with carvings on
either side depicting smithing accomplishments and battle victories of dwarves.
These included the forging of a hammer in a room that looks strikig like the
room they’re in at the moment, a shield that seems to be blocking dragon’s fire
breath, and a that same hammer being used to smite the crap out of various
enemies. At the far end of the hall from the door, they encountered an
elaborate half-anvil half-altar item, that, despite its ornate appearance,
looked totally functional. Behind it was another big carving of an archway,
surrounded by stylized tentacles and with rows of small, kneeling dwarven
figures in ascending rows facing towards the door, apparently praying towards
it. In the corner of this room was some crumpled armor in a heap around a
dwarven skeleton.
Based on the carvings, Ryn and gandrakk figure this place,
the whole mine really, was probably built by a sect of heretical dwarves who
gave up their mountain and earth gods in order to follow a god from outer
space. They were kicked out of the mountain, and vowed revenge against their
kin and all the earthly fools who refused to look to the stars for salvation. The
war with the mountain dwarves didn’t go well for them, and they were preseumed
to have been wiped out by the dwarven inquisition. This inquisition, thousands
of years ago, is reported tohave been the only reason dwarves even left the
mountains at all. Some inquisiton forces decided that the sky wasn’t so bad
after all, and got over their agoraphobia after a while and settled down,
becoming the ancestors of the hill dwarves.
As Gandrakk approached the anvil and Ryn approached the carved
back wall, the skeleton became wreathed in smoke, and a black, swirling mass
filled out its armor, and it stood, holding a warhammer and a shield covered in
a cloth depicting the same door motif as the one carved into be back wall. It
spoke in a very difficult-to-maintain low and scary voice “who approaches the Anvil
of Yog-Orcoth!”
“Um, hi, we’re just looking around. Who are you?”
-I’m the defender of this temple room. Where is everyone
else?
“who?”
-The other dwarves, we were under attack and I am here to
guard this room. Where is everyone? Has the enemy been defeated?
“well, we killed Nerganu.”
-What’s a nerganu?
-What’s a nerganu?
“He was a lizard-wizard. He was a dick. You’re welcome?”
-Cool Story. Hey you, you scrawny elf-man, what’s that
you’re carrying there? It looks like its magical. And a symbol of a lesser god
maybe. And we don’t tolerate heresy here.
“This little guy? Don’t worry about this little guy. Now
tell me Dwarf guardian, how does someone get this anvil to work?”
-well, if you’re here, you know about the crystal shards
right?
“Oh yeah. Hey, is that a symbol of Cthulu there on the
wall?”
-No! Cthulu is a pale shadow of his older brother, our
master, Yog-Orcoth, the portal and the key. Oh right. Cthulu, that’s what that
symbol you’ve got represents. I think you should leave now.
“Come on guy, let’s talk, I think we could help each other
out here.”
-Well, my job is to keep heretics out of here, so if you can
help with that…
“Listen, Cthulu is a pretty cool guy, if you’d just …”
The Shadow’s eyes flare with magical flames, he raises his
hammer menacingly, and moves to strike Ryn down. Suddenly, out of nowhere,
Gandrakk vaults the anvil and brings his own warhammer down in a perfectly
executed strike. His martial training and knowledge of armor-smithing really
came through, as he knew the perfect spot to hit to bypass the shadowy dwarf’s
magical plate mail’s defenses. From conversation to battle, the entire fight
lasts a mere second. There are only two hits: Gandrakk hitting the shadow and
the shadow’s hammer and shield hitting the floor as his magical body dissipates
into a thousand wisps of smoke that are blasted to the edges of the cave, only
to be sucked back through the engraved portal at the back of the room.
Gandrakk tears the symbol of yog-orcoth from the shield, and
picks up his groovy new weapons, noting that they are made from a very rare
metal called adamantium, and are inlaid with silver to boot. Not magical per
se, but super cool and possessed of interesting properties.
[We discussed this over email, and basically the hammer and
shield are like a lightning rod scenario – if he dodges a magical dex save or
gets missed by 1 by a magical attack, instead of taking ½ he takes 0 damage,
and the shield absorbs some of the energy, which flashes across his body to the
hammer, which is then briefly magical on its next strike. The downside is that
his body is the conducting filament, so it stings a bit when it happens. It’s
discharge-able though so he doesn’t have to use the absorbed magic if he
doesn’t want to. Also, it’s only usable by dwarves or dwarf-trained fighters,
so don’t get any ideas Gluur. Double also, if one of you magic dudes wants to,
you can charge up his hammer by blasting him. So long as he makes the dex save.
I’ll give him advantage if you tell him it’s happening. Tehehehehe. Can’t wait
to see how that pans out.]
Everyone decides to take a nap. What could go wrong? In the
night, they hear lots of bug-ish chitinous clicky noises, but they are not
attacked by anything. The characters holding crystal shardshad spooky dreams
where a dragon said to them “you’ve foiled my plans for now, but I will crush
you in the end.”
After they wake up, they exit the spooky room to find a
message written in a big spider web: “pretty cloak, very pretty”
They go, hey, what was in that cave full of spiderwebs? They
go back over there to check it out on the way out of the cave. It turns out,
the thing in the cave full of spiderwebs was spiders. They kill one of them, as
Gluur smashes it and turns it into a squishy pile of goo with legs. However,
there are still more spiders, and they’re gross. So then everyone turns and
runs like hell, because spiders are scary. As they exit the webbed area, they
turn around and set the webs on fire, turning the tunnel into a bigtime firestorm.
Over the flames, they hear the shrieks of bruning spiders and spiderlings. They
then return, and in a side-chamber, they find some really good dwarven
cask-aged beer and some explosive stone powder. Everyone throws away their
water and fills up their water flasks with explosives. Because obviously
explosive powder is more important than water. The last living spider left a
message, “you win this time, bitches”
They then go, hey, we’re murderers, right? I mean, um. Hey,
let’s make this mine safe for those lizard folks. We’ll see what’s up with that
Terry thing we saw earlier. They go back to Terry’s cave entrance, and proceed
to figure out a way to murder Terry. As they approach, they use their darkvision
to stealthily approach the cave, and they hear the sounds of bones crunching
and some wet drips. In Gandrakk’s heat-vision, he sees that a warm liquid is
slowly dripping from above an overhang onto the ground about 10 feet into the cave.
Gluur approaches the cave, crunching some bones underfoot on his way. The
noises and dripping from above stop. Abandoning darkvision, Gluur chucks a
torch into the cave. For a moment, he can see a large, oval shaped cave with
two exits, each of which seems to lead downward. The cave is empty but for
blood and bones on the floor. As he looks over his shoulder to see the rest of
the party looking legitimately spooked out, a goblin’s dismembered torso falls
from above onto the torch, extinguishing it with a wet slap and the stink of
burnt rotten goblin guts. There is now angry growling echoing lowly in the
cave. Sylvan throws another torch in there, and the growling gets louder.
Never one to let caution interfere with his murder-plans, Gandrakk
runs into the cave with another torch lit, and as soon as he clears the
overhang he hucks it, skyhook style, over the top. The party can now see a
gigantic humanoid shadow cast along the back wall of the cave. Terry somehow manages
to put this torch out also. Coasai follows this up with a pretty smart
attack-rouges being the thinking man’s fighter-and, recalling the success of
the fight against the minoutar skeleton, he throws a flask of oil, smashing it
on the rocks above Terry’s shadow, covering the thing with oil, which Sylvan
then ignites with a quick tiny ball of flame. Folks don’t have long to guess at
what the beastie is, since Terry takes this as his cue to jump down from his
overhang and charge Gandrakk, slashing him with his claws and biting him on the
face. Terry is, at this point, a Troll on Fire. It turns out that this is much
less cool than being “girl on fire” from those movies. Coasai is about to throw
the lit torch on the ground at Terry, since Terry obviously hates fire, but
doesn’t realize that his hand has still got some oil all over it, and as he
fumbles with the torch he sets his arm on fire. Ouch!
As Gluur charges in to help, terry trows Gandrakk through
the opening and down a slope into a puddle of water, and then runs to a narrow
cavern tunnel at the base of the slope. Sylvan rushes up, and throws another
torch into this new cave, which, predictably, causes Terry quite a bit of
consternation. You guys have so many torches! Are you fibbin me on your torch
stats? Terry runs down a hallway to ambush the party later, but not before
being barraged with Gluur axe-swings, eltritch blasts, and crossbow bolts. With
the fighters clogging up the tunnel, eventually Ryn’s only option was to spook
the poor troll, and so he made an illusion of even more fire appear. The troll
freaked out, and ran away. Gluur chased it and cut off its arm. Terry’s stump
healed over, but the arm kept attacking! Gluur took this as an opportunity to
chop off its head. THe head tried to bite him, squirming toward him on the
floor. Ryn used magic at this point to pop the head with the terrible truths of
“carcosa.” Thus Terry the Trooll was slain. Amidst the goblin guts and small
coins in his lair, the party finds a couple of potions.
Instead of going to finish off the goblins and their goblin-king
Thrank, the group decides “fuck these goblins” and agrees that the Lizardmen
can probably handle that instead. They decide to return to Lizard camp. They
figure out from lizard shaman that circular stone that Sylvan carries is a
druid walkie-talkie, and that Asumul the shaman was trying to get them to save
a lizardman fighter that they definitely allowed to be eaten by the kraken
beast a few fights back. Ooops. They lizards say thanks, here’s that boat we
said we would build for you, thanks for killing that evil wizard! If you need
us later, just use the multicolored stone to get ahold of us and we will send
Scale Force One to help you out.
They arrive on Boggrove’s shore to discover the town is a
total wreck. They ambush a patrol that they then murder to death. To start
things off, Coasai whips a sack of explosive miner-dust into a building and
explodes the shit out of a bunch of guys. Later, Sylvan is a wolf for a little
while, and Gluur tears down the second storey of a burnt up building in order
to get closer to some stupid archer types. Sylvan goes wolf on a couple of
guys, before getting cornered by an orc barbarian. This barbarian is weirdly
out of place in a group of human cultist guys all wearing those skull and cup
robes, but he is murdered in short order before anyone can get too close a look
at him. Realizing he’s outnumbered, the lone wizard of the ambushed group makes
a break for it. That goes poorly, and despite his magical attempts to use fog
etc., he is tracked down and stabbed a lot. Gluur examines the body of the orcish
barbarian, discovering that it is from the black rock clan, the same clan of orcs
that Gluur grew up in. It is also wearing some sort of neck ring and was
apparently being controlled.
They rush over to the smith’s workshop, but all his crap is
gone. They consider fighting a big ass dragon, but once its squads of
patrolling goons also show up, they think twice.
They run into the woods, where they meet up with wulfa and
some other folks from town.
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