My regular Friday night gaming group has been playing through Gavin Norman's The Incandescent Grottoes. It's a dungeon that's full of caverns of glowing crystals, which is what it's named for, and also classic D&D monsters like fungi, slimes, and the undead. And, oh yeah, a dragon!
Leighton Connor from Akashic Library volunteered to be our referee for this one, since he's run this particular adventure before, for a group of kids and teens. Peter Kisner from Fantasy Heartbreak Workshop is the other player besides me in this game.
I want to shout out a fun incident that happened in one of our recent sessions. As ever in these kind of situations, it's not possible to tell this story without spoiling a few possible surprises from the adventure, although I've tried my best to keep that to a minimum.
After our initial party of four got cut in half by some early dangers, Peter and I each rolled up two characters to accompany Gone Girl the thief and Gildur the dwarf. One of my new characters became a terrible wizard, and I made the other into a pretty good elf. The elf got a bonus language, which I rolled to select at random, and the dice decided he knew how to speak Dragon. I decided to make that a focal point for his personality. I gave him magic missile as his lone spell, used his remaining cash after getting armor and weapons to buy oil, and named him Flamethrower. (The wizard also got a bonus language - Regional Dialect. Like I said, terrible.)
So, when our newly enlarged party learned that there might be a dragon living in one part of the dungeon, obviously I had Flamethrower suggest that we should go visit it, so he could try talking to it. Peter agreed, because why not? How often do you actually encounter the monster the game is named after? Plus, we hoped it would go well. I thought Flamethrower might be able to engage the dragon in conversation, offer to do it a favor in exchange for treasure, that sort of thing.
We experienced one ominous omen on our way to the dragon's lair - a random encounter with a shadow monster. This was a pretty tough fight. Gone Girl used her only silver arrow, Flamethrower used up his one casting of magic missile, and Gildur made very good use of the magic sword he found earlier. I can't honestly say that this encounter changed the outcome of what happened next, but like, it was a very bad sign, and depleted us of resources that theoretically could have been useful.
Okay, so we leave the tunnel and enter the cavern where we think the dragon will be. It's not there, but we see another tunnel exit at the far end. In a loud voice, Flamethrower starts declaiming a polite greeting, "Well met, noble dragon, allow me to extend our most felicitous greetings to your royal eminence," and so on.
The dragon Kramers into the room, rolling up looking absolutely crazed with hunger and fury. It turns out the thing has only bestial intelligence. It shouts the only phrase it knows "EAT YOU!" and lunges for us, causing everyone to try to scatter.
I imagine this dragon looking like this angry weirdo from Shin Godzilla
We all wanted to run away, but unfortunately, the dragon won the initiative, and let loose with its breath weapon - a cloud of knockout gas. Everyone lost their saving throw except for Peter's gnome, Schnoz, and they all fell unconscious to the floor.
It turns out there was one spell left that the party didn't cast when we were fighting the shadows, and Peter had Schnoz cast it now, an illusion spell called spook that inspires temporary terror. And, in what I can only describe as a Looney Tunes moment, it actually works! Picture Droopy the Dog holding up a grotesque Halloween mask, and this big angry dragon suddenly recoiling in horror and scampering away at top speed, whimpering like a scared dog.
Who knows what terror lurks in the hearts of dragons? The spook spell knows.
The spell has a very short duration, so we only had a couple combat rounds of safety while the dragon ran away, came to its senses, and then came thundering back, even angrier than before. Schnoz managed to wake up Gildur the dwarf, and they each lugged another character to safety by retreating down the tunnel we came in. They took lucky Gone Girl and Peter's third character, leaving my other two behind, including Flamethrower, because this was all his fault.
The dragon came back into its main lair and started savaging my two unconscious characters, I think starting with the terrible wizard. Schnoz tried to wake up the two he rescued we are still sleeping, but to no avail. Gildur lights a torch and throws it across the cavern onto Flamethrower's supine body. You'd think being lit on fire would wake him up, but no.
The dragon wins initiative again, finishes killing Flamethrower, and starts advancing toward the rest of the party. When the initiative passes to us players, the torch lights Flamethrower's collection of oil on fire, and he explodes in a giant ball of flame, harmlessly, a safe distance behind the dragon.
I should note that at no point have we made any attempt whatsoever to actually fight this thing. After our attempted diplomacy failed, Peter and I have just been trying to get our characters to run away. Everything that's happened so far has been based on saving throws and initiative rolls. The dragon didn't even need to roll to hit our unconscious characters, just for damage, and even that was mostly a courtesy, considering they're defenseless.
As the enraged dragon stomped toward them, Schnoz and Gildur lugged the other two down a side passage toward and underground river, hoping that the current would quickly carry us far enough away, as long as we could all float until we got to shore. In the first bit of good luck we'd had in awhile, the shock of the cold water woke the two sleepers up.
Now, swimming in armor is dangerous. Gone Girl was wearing leather, and got lucky again, so she survived to make landfall with Schnoz and Peter's remaining character. Gildur the dwarf was wearing plate armor, and he did not get lucky, so he sank and drowned, taking the magic sword (which was almost our only treasure up to that point!) with him.
This session was an absolutely magnificent failure, and I loved it!
Over the summer, I got really depressed. I've had major depressive disorder for more or less my entire life, and I mostly have it well-managed, but sometimes it grows out of my control. Summers are often worse, for whatever reason. And of course, the general state of the world has worsened, downgrading from this-is-fine-dot-png to not-great-bob-dot-gif, in ways too numerous to mention, which isn't the cause of my depression, but certainly doesn't help either.
While I was depressed, I took a hiatus from blogging. I'm feeling better now, but it's been difficult to restart all the things I stopped doing during the most difficult time.
In March, shortly before my absence, Josep Torra of the Tirant lo Dau blog contacted me about translating my essay Landmark, Hidden, Secret into Catalan and publishing it in a zine. This easily makes LHS the most famous thing I've ever written. The zine is available on itch.io as a free pdf, and there's an inexpensive print option on Lulu. Josep's translation of my writing is on pages 81-86.
Over the summer, my regular online gaming group met somewhat sporadically. Peter from Fantasy Heartbreak Workshop acted as the dungeon master, and ran us through Axo's Dungeon - which turns out to be quite a work of OSR collaboration, put together and keyed by Paolo Greco from Lost Pages, using geomorphs hosted on Dyson's Dodecahedron and Stonewerks, with updated art provided by Of Dice and Djinn. We used Peter's SKROP rules, which is his house ruled mashup of the GLOG and D&D 5e, and the game took place in his Owl Light setting, a science fantasy moon orbiting a Jupiter-like gas giant.
We started the campaign looking for human Reavers who'd been kidnapping villagers in a remote lake district, and found the dungeon on an island in lake. Inside we met an affable and nervous priest of Cthulhu, who wished to promote moderate worship of the Great Old One, but not so much worship that it might trigger madness in the worshippers or risk disturbing Cthulhu from his eternal slumber in any way. We also found a whole hoard of Reavers in a tenuous alliance with the Squid King and his Cephalopod army.
The dungeon has a lot of corridors and passageways, giving us an almost Metroid-like experience of rapid exploration. We rescued the Slug Witch from the Slug King, provoked a war between the Reavers and the Cephalopods that decimated both factions, and rescued the imprisoned villagers. Peter was amazed that we managed to navigate the dungeon so effectively to find the things we were looking for. I was amazed that our various disguises and stratagems actually worked and got the two armies to nearly wipe each other out. It was maybe my most efficacious campaign ever, in terms of accomplishing my character's goals during the game.
Recently we've started a new campaign with me as the referee. Ever since the new edition of Into the Odd came out, I've been wanting to run someone through the expanded version of the "Iron Coral" dungeon. Originally only a single level, it now has three! I actually ran the original as a DCC weird western adventure site, which I called "The Irontown Corral", but this is my first time running it using I2TO.
Peter and Leighton have just found an entrance to the second level, so I'm excited to see what happens next! So far Peter's Prize Breeder and Leighton's Sky Trooper have found 6 jars of "Dr Bronzeworthy's Fantabulous Frictionless Ball Bearings" and a very valuable crystalline sphere, thanks in part to some help from a couple of assistants that I rolled up using the Burnboss and Courier failed careers from Benign Brown Beast. (In the likely event of character death, the assistants will get promoted up to full player character status.) In the next section, I'm hoping they'll delve into territory none of us has seen yet.
The Iron Coral frontispiece by Johan Nohr
So that's how I spent my summer. Feel free to share what you've been up to in the comments!
Over the last 6 months or so, I've been playing on-and-off in a campaign using Candlekeep Mysteries, run by Jack Shear from Tales of the Grotesque & Dungeonesque. I made it to more sessions than I missed, though, and it was satisfying to have (what was, for me) a long-term campaign come to a conclusion recently.
The adventures in Candlekeep aren't really intended to be run as a single, linear campaign, I don't think. I believe the idea is that they're meant to stand alone, and that you can drop them in to other ongoing campaigns to add a bit of variety. They all involve books in some way, and I think most of them have a connection to Candlekeep Library set somewhere or other in the Forgotten Realms. Jack reskinned this to be Creedhall University Library, in his Krevborna setting.
I managed to play in 13 of the 17 adventures (although I missed the back half of one of them) and had an especially good run at the end. I played a paladin - a first for me! - and generally enjoyed getting to assist the other characters with healing and my various auras, and getting to smite my enemies with the power of divine magic.
Jack kept a running series of actual play posts on his blog, and a parallel series of reviews of each adventure. You can find links to the whole of both series here, in the appropriately titled "We Played the Whole Thing". I've gone ahead and linked to the adventures I played in below:
Since Jack's already written a good narrative of each session, I'm not going to try to reconstruct all of them now. My paladin Elsabeth had a good run, becoming friends with another lady knight NPC, getting magic muscles from a magic painting and managing not to suffer any consequences for it, slaying an actual dragon, and saving the world like 2 or 3 times. But I did want to say a few words about what I thought about playing through the campaign.
Too Many Demiplanes - If I had one critique of Candlekeep Mysteries, it would be that too many of the adventures have the same set-up where a magic book transports you to another dimension, and specifically a mini-dimension created by the book's author. (And way too many of those involved a rather tedious guessing game to figure out how to open the portal!) I mean, I get it, it's already metaphorically like every book has a secret world inside it, and like reading transports you there. It's a pretty good metaphor to make literal. But there are too many of them. And I also get that Candlekeep isn't meant to be played straight through. But there are still too many of them.
D&D is set in a magic-filled world, Forgotten Realms especially so - you don't need to travel to some wizard's pocket dimension just to set the adventure in a magical environment. The need is even less if the environment turns out to not be very magical anyway. It sometimes seemed like the only purpose the conceit of the demiplane served was to handwave travel time or to put up a wall around the playable area that the player character couldn't travel beyond. But if so, I would argue that's the wrong approach. Metafictional concerns like that don't need rules workarounds, they just need the GM and the players to agree on what kind of game they're running.
Complex Backstories, Linear Adventures - If I had a second critique about Candlekeep, it would be that the backstories that set up the adventures are often complex to the point of unintelligibility. The example that stands out in my mind is "The Book of the Raven". The PCs get a book delivered to them by some mysterious ravens. The book leads them to an old abandoned house with ravens flying overhead. The house is haunted, with some whole drama playing out among the ghosts as they continue to fail to resolve their unfinished business from life. Also it turns out the ravens are secretly human cultists who can magically transform into ravens. They were compelled to deliver the book to you by a different cult, who worship some kind of demon lord, and who then pull you into, wait for it, a pocket dimension, where a couple of demons try to kill you. There is, as far as I can tell, no connection between the ravens and the ghosts, the ghosts and the demons, or the demons and the ravens.
And while the backstories of Candlekeep can be convoluted, many of the adventures themselves are pretty linear. You arrive at the entrance to the adventure site, perhaps by being teleported there by the book, and then follow a straight-line path going from one encounter to the next until you reach the conclusion. That's certainly not true of all them, but more than you'd hope for in what's meant to be a flagship product. The worst offenders combine both - a terribly complicated backstory leading to a terribly simplified conveyor belt of encounters.
Options and Opportunities - That said, some of the adventures did provide some good chances for the players to make meaningful choices. While trapped in a grotesque fairy tale, we met some wolves and managed to befriend befriend them and enlist their help in fighting some terrible hunters by borrowing a page from Aesop. We met a dragon who might have killed us, but we offered to catalog his library, and he ended up offering us safe passage through his section of the dungeon. In a desert hideout, we met a giant worm, realized we'd followed the wrong clues and were in the wrong place, and left without needing to fight it. (Though sadly we did lose our camel to the worm's ferocious hunger!) Even the dragon Elsabeth fought and killed was avoidable - although this was another case of misunderstood clues, and having set it free from its ancient trap, we didn't feel good about just letting it seek unlimited vengeance on the world that had entombed it.
Because we played this campaign as an "adventure path", we didn't take advantage of any of the opportunities to follow up on details that could give rise to new side adventures. If I recall, replacing the missing books in "Mazworth's Worthy Digressions" could have occupied several more sessions of questing, if the book thieves hadn't turned out to have spare copies on hand in the back room. And the university tower that turns into a rocket ship absolutely cries out for a follow-up adventure where you get to use the damn thing and go into space. Jack repurposed the last adventure in the book and set it on one of Krevborna's moons, but if we'd just let it blast off with us inside, instead of preventing the space cultists from launching it, I don't know if there would have been any advice in the book about where it should take us. But that's not just an obvious follow-up, it's a necessary one - if you write an adventure where it's possible for the characters to steal a rocket ship, you'd better also make up a planet they can fly it to!
Better Boss Fights - Boss monster types in 5e get special "lair actions" and "legendary actions" that basically let them react by doing something every time they're attacked. I was really impressed with how well this worked out in practice. I recognize that the ideal military strategy to use against a big monster is to come at it with overwhelming numbers and the element of surprise, win the initiative, and kill the damn thing before it ever gets to strike a single blow. But while that's probably the ideal strategy, it's not necessarily the ideal gameplaying experience. With these special actions, the monster gets to alternate with the players; we get to see the monster doing cool, scary, monstrous things; our numerical advantage is somewhat balanced by the extra attacks; and the fight ends up feeling much more epic and narratively appropriate than it otherwise would. These are a 5e innovation I can absolutely get behind!
When keeping records and posting the results of an ongoing campaign, the last report is the hardest to write.
The earlier play reports have a certain momentum to them. Writing them down helps you add up the experience you need to award, keep track of the treasure they've collected, make note of the NPCs you've introduced.
But the last report carries no particular urgency. There is no "next game" that needs the report to be ready before it can start.
Too, whatever caused your campaign to end likely stands in the way as a barrier to keep you from writing. Did you lose interest in the game? Then how will you manage the interest to write? Did you become too busy, did your players drift apart? Whatever responsibilities pulled you away from the gaming table weigh heavily on your writing hand too, holding it down.
Did you start a new campaign? Your mind is there, your time spent preparing for and recording that, with none to spare looking backward.
And of course, as in all things, the longer you wait to start, the harder it gets to do so.
After the events of the Freshman Year and Sophomore Year dungeon delves, Jimbo, Deeringer, and Lunai had settled on robbing the vault on the 3rd level as their primary goal for their Junior Year adventure. Jimbo and Deeringer had also endeared themselves to the sorority sisters of Omicron Delta Theta, the so-called "Sisters of the Cell", so we decided to start this year off with a couple of recently-graduated 1st level sorority sisters completing a quest of their own before joining the others on their final delve.
The party had realized that in order to open the vault to steal the Eleventh-Hour Glass (so they could give it to Monica Doom, so she could trade it for her lost ability to change back from being a cat to being human, in exchange for her offer to help fence stolen textbooks for a higher price) they would need the combination to the vault's lock. Fortunately, Monica Doom knew that the Professor of Ethics and Contract Law over at the nearby rival Wizard Liberal Arts College of Soul Studies knew the combination and would be willing to trade it for a favor.
Sooooo, hoping to impress their new mentors, Birdie and Spellweaver set off across town to go back to college (but like, a different college) just after graduating from Gallax University.
This is what a spiderling wizard and a sparrowling wizard team-up looks like, right?
image by Super Team Family
Birdie and Spellweaver went to meet Monica Doom's contact in the Wealth & Hellness Office. Dr ZL Beebub the Infernal Professor of Ethics and Contract Law, was willing to trade them the combination to the vault deep under Gallax Hall in exchange for services rendered - specifically he wanted the pair to spoil his rival professor's demonstration of her new invention and humiliate her in front of their peers.
Dr Beebub explained that his rival, Dr BB Rosemary, the Liturgical Professor of Exorcism and Insorcism, would doubtless be rehearsing in the Chapel before giving her big presentation later that day in the Lecture Hall. He insisted on getting the agreement in writing, with the pair's souls held as collateral until the job was completed. (In retrospect, this would have been a great opportunity to sing "Poor Unfortunate Souls" from The Little Mermaid. Oh well.)
Wealth & Hellness was full of cheerful, if creepy, motivational posters: "Pay Your Debts - Or Else", "Broken Promises Cause Broken Knees", etc. Birdie was so impressed by how evil the place seemed that she signed an admissions contract to begin taking classes in the fall. Dr Beebub pointed out the door closest to the Chapel, and the pair set off on their mission.
They entered the Heart House, a great high-ceilinged chamber, with an enormous heart suspended from the ceiling, slowly beating and dripping bloody meat juice onto the floor. As a trained stalactomancer, Spellweaver eagerly crouched down to slurp some of the fluids off the floor, "Wow this is totally grody," and learning the mysterious secrets of electricity in the process! "Ew, that's like, really gross," opined Birdie, as she collected several vials of the same liquid to mix into her homemade polymorph potions.
They next entered the Chapel, carefully opening and closing the doors in time to the heartbeat. They saw Dr Rosemary standing behind the altar, facing away from them, animatedly rehearsing her lecture. It sounded like she had a machine that could remove the soul from one body and transfer it to another. Spellweaver and Birdie decided they could sabotage the machine. For good measure, they used their scrunchies to tie up the Chapel door-handles to try to delay Dr Rosemary from leaving.
The sisters retraced their steps back through the Heart House and Wealth & Hellness, and planned to approach the lecture hall by cutting through the Library. The shelves were stacked to the ceiling and seemed to loom and sway as they passed through. "Ugh, this place is really cramped!" An indignant librarian quickly honed in on the pair's whispers, so they rushed out the other side, arriving in the Bell Tower. They saw a rickety and railing-less staircase leading all the way to the top ... along with dozens of ghosts flying around the belfry. "I wonder whose office is up there? I guess we'll never know!"
Birdie and Spellweave next arrived in the Tutorial Laboratories, where they saw doors to three study rooms. Picking one, they found two badass wizard weapons, the Soul Gun and the Hell Gun, sitting out on a work bench. They also heard an ominous skittering sound coming through the air vents toward them, and so quickly retreated from the study rooms with their newfound weapons.
Finally they reached the Lecture Hall, only to be challenged by the small crowd of undergrads already filling the first several rows. "Hey, what are you two grad students doing in here? We're getting extra credit for attending this lecture. Don't do anything that would jeopardize our extra credit!" Thinking quickly, Birdie used a spell to disguise herself as Dr Rosemary, while Spellweaver used her newly (and deliciously!) acquired knowledge of electricity to tamper with the experimental device. "Like, I'm totally Dr Rosemary or whatever. What are you kids even doing here? There's like, no extra credit for this talk. Tell all your friends, okay? You get no credit for being here! I want you to learn to be like, intrinsically motivated, or some junk." The undergrads were aghast and when the sisters shut the door, they heard the students immediately erupt in a debate about how to continue.
Feeling confident that they'd held up their end of the bargain, Birdie and Spellweaver tried to head back to Wealth & Hellness without being seen by the real Dr Rosemay ... or facing whatever that skittering sound was again. They passed through the cafeteria, which was in an uproar over the issue of extra credit, and both heroines were pelted with food as they tried to rush through the crossfire. Spellweaver was hit with an exploding pie that blew off one of her legs! Birdie got struck by a "meat" loaf that hit like a brick.
By the time they reached Wealth & Hellness, Dr Beebub was already laughing to himself. He'd gotten the latest gossip from his staff. Only a handful of students attended, which flustered the poor woman, and made her look bad in front of her colleagues. Worse, when she called for a volunteer to help demonstrate her soul-swapping device, the machine didn't even steal the student's soul - instead it turned Dr Rosemary herself into a mindless zombie body. This certainly wouldn't look good on her tenure application! Pleased with the results, Dr Beebub gave Birdie and Spellweaver the combination to the vault, and the pair left with their new guns, knowledge of electricity, and giant-infused polymorph potions.
The Soul Gun and Hell Gun, seen here being wielded
by their original owners, Captain Soul and Hellwave
I ran the Winter Break using the "Stirring Up the Pot" table from the Wizard City Hex Crawl, and then having each character roll on the What Happened This Semester? table. Also, I believe I either had Josh make a saving throw or a Wisdom check to try to remove his last remaining mental mutation.
Jimbo, Birdie, Deeringer, Spellweaver, and Lunai went out on the town the very first night of the winter holiday, hoping to celebrate the end of their fall classes. Unfortunately, Lunai immediately noticed a problem. "Something's wrong with the moon," she said, "I'm from there, and it's not supposed to look like that!"
Indeed it was not! The Dead Jane gang had finally put in motion their long-held plan to summon the Zombie Moon! Corpses rose from their graves! Various townsfolk failed their saving throws and were converted to the living dead! But what started as a zombie apocalypse quickly turned into a gang war, when the Wizard Police, rather than solving the problem themselves, outsourced the zombie killing to the rival Black Dragon gang. "Eh whatever, these'll be public service homicides for a change."
The grad school chums spent the break holed up inside the Wandering Monster bar. In fact, virtually everyone who wasn't a gang member of zombie spent the break holed up wherever they could find a locking door. They enjoyed a sumptuous Winter Solstice feast of the last of the bar nuts and a handful of pretzels, split five ways. Lunai also managed to purchase a discarded zombie arm at a steep discount, giving her just the prosthetic she needed after losing her original arm to a carnivorous hat the previous year. Spellweaver considered buying a zombie arm of her own, to replace the one she lost over the summer, but decided she could do better.
Over spring break, a rogue graduate committee managed to ambush Deeringer and force him into an empty conference room for a coerced but impromptu masters thesis defense. Fortunately, as one of the last surviving citizens of doomed Atlantis, Deeringer had spent his whole life preparing for this moment. He pulled out a rolled up poster, with hundreds of instructional images connected by a maze of diagonal red lines, and lectured the professors for 10 hours on his magnum opus, "The Ocean Is Coming: And You're Going to Hell", until they finally relented and awarded him a degree. Jimbo was astonished: "you don't even go to this school!"
Spellweaver was impressed with her mentor. Without her really meaning for it to happen, the student loan officer who'd been pursuing Deeringer ended up falling in love with her. "It must be my irresistible pheromones. We like, use them for subduing inferior mammals, and stuff." She tried to convince the poor kid to cut off his arm and give it to her as a courtship present, but his affections didn't extend quite that far. "Yet!"
Jimbo's visits to Student Health finally paid off, and the counselors there cured him of the drinking problem he'd gotten after wandering into one of the Department of Torture laboratories. "From now on, I'm straight edge," he said, drawing Xs on the back of his hands. With a clearer head, he was also able think back on his many trips between the University campus and the Wandering Monster bar ... and realize that there was a hidden alleyway connecting them. If only he had any use for that information!
Over the winter and spring, Jimbo made several attempts to figure out the workings of the Soul Gun and Hell Gun. When fired, the Soul Gun let out a beam of angelic blue light, and the Hell Gun burst forth with a swath of sulfurous hellfire. Jimbo tried out the Hell Gun against an advancing zombie during the winter, but the fire didn't seem to burn the lifeless creature. Later he took both guns out to the University garden to try firing them at tin cans set up on fence posts. Visually they were incredibly dramatic, but the unliving cans (and fence posts) suffered no obvious effects from the weapons. "I guess I'll have to test them on something living..." he finally acceded.
Birdie was able to find a special of The Walking Eye student newspaper. Her issue was all about the Black Dragons gang, and has advice for selling futures of zombie body parts. "Ohmygod, I'm like, a total entrepreneur!"
A new challenger grad student has appeared!
At this point, Josh's friend and writing-partner Leighton joined our group, adding one final member to the party:
At 3rd level, all the GLOG wizards in the party got to choose one spell and give it a positive spell mutation. I think Jimbo chose Magic Missile and got a more powerful version, and I honestly don't remember what happened with Deeringer. Chordy decided to mutate Control Iron and was required to give it "new flavor", turning it into Control Stone, which proved to be enormously useful down in the dungeon.
Sessions 11-13: Third Year Final Exams
Before venturing into the dungeons for the last time, the group went over their plan. They had the combination to the vaults. They had a fake "hall pass" that had worked once before. They bought some rope to descend down the belltower, which they thought was too rickety to climb down before. They had a couple of badass hell weapons, even if they weren't totally sure how they worked. Was there anything else? "Uh, YE-ah," said Birdie, "we need, like, a human sacrifice!" Spellweaver agreed. "You know how, like, in undergrad, we would like, hire a really nerdy guy to our homework for us? We need that, but like, for the dungeon!"
Jimbo thought he knew just the guy for the job. He went into the student bookstore on a Saturday morning, when everyone else was still asleep from partying the night before, and sidled up to the only other person awake on campus - the poor chump stuck working the morning cashier shift. Jimbo stood near the checkout lane, his hands folded behind his back nonchalantly, staring up at the ceiling as though inspecting the tiles.
"Psst, Chordy," he whispered.
"Is someone talking to me?!" the toadling cashier enthused.
"It's me Jimbo," said Jimbo. "Listen, you know all those textbooks my friends and I sold you?" "Of course!" announced Chordy, "the bookstore is always happy to buy back legally acquired used textbooks!" "Uh, yeah, 'legal' ", Jimbo agreed. "Anyway, Chordy, my friends and I are going someplace where there'll probably be a lot more textbooks, and we could use someone with your expertise to-" "Wait!" cut in Chordy, "Friends?! Are you saying we're friends?!" "Well, no, that's not exactly what I..." Jimbo paused to consider his option. "You know what? Yeah, sure, friends." "Friends!" exclaimed an enraptured Chordy, who took off his bookstore apron, and followed Jimbo to the dungeon entrance.
The group passed through the now-familiar entrance to the dungeons under Gallax Hall. A quick peek into Dr Sitch's office revealed the professor staring forlornly at a photo of Arivaderchi Zeucchini, a single tear in the old man's eye. They headed straight for the belltower, wasting no time on detours or distractions. The custodians' sign warning of a "Grabby Floor" were still up, so the friends took a familiar path around it, passing by various statues to arrive at the boarded-up wall leading into the top of the belltower. They began hacking away at the wall with their weapons, only to be confronted by an angry custodian. "What the hell are you kids doing to that wall?!" the frustrated worker screamed at them. Jimbo cast a spell to calm the man's emotions. "With the overtime pay I'll earn from these repairs, I can rent that hat I've had my eye on. You kids are alright."
With the wall open, the group looked down the deep pit. The very top of the old belltower only reached here, to the basement bellow Gallax hall. The belltower passed down through the steam tunnels and (they hoped!) opened out into the ruins of the Old University. They secured their ropes and climbed carefully down. At the bottom, they discovered that all the old doors out of the belltower had been walled up. There was no obvious way out. "I know!" shouted Chordy, his already loud voice amplified by the acoustics of the tower. "I can control the stone to make a new way out!" The others winced in agreement. After some debate about which side of the square room to install an exit, Chordy faced the southern wall, and sent a tunnel through 10' of stone fill to create a new doorway into a hall. There was a closed door directly in front of them, to one side they could see the enormous room containing the statues of the founders and the (presumably) cursed Seal of the University. To the other side they saw a double-wide hallway.
Jimbo remembered the guardians of the previous double-wide hall, got out the forged "hall pass", and strode confidently out to meet the robotic guard. Glancing to the south, he spotted a carving of a knight in armor, and walked up to it. He slowed as he began noticing dozens of charred corpses further to the south. The carving's visor began glowing red. "Present hall pass," it intoned. "Certainly, certainly," Jimbo dissembled. "I'm sure this is all in order." The charred bodies began to stir and rise to their feet. The visor's red glow became almost blinding. "Hallpass rejected. Intruder alert! Intruder alert!" Jimbo turned and tried to run back around the corner, but he was shot in the back by a powerful laser blast that could easily have killed him a few years ago. The charred corpses began slowly shambling northward toward Jimbo and the others, waiting just around the corner. The statues visor returned to a dull red glow, and appeared to be recharging. Spellweaver rushed out to sabotage its electronics, barely avoiding the zombie vanguard. The group hustled into the closed door directly across from Chordy's tunnel. They heard the whine of the recharging robot reach a fever pitch, then heard an explosion as red light momentarily poured between the door and jam.
Turning from that near disaster, as Birdie gently patted out the last smoldering flames on Jimbo's back, the friends surveyed the room, finding themselves in some sort of catering staging area. A gang of 4 mean looking undergrads in fraternity robes were in the middle of shaving strips of meat off a pair of mummified kebabs, molding the strips into little gingerbread-man-sized puppets, then bringing them magically to life. Birdie and Spellweaver recognized their fraternity gang-signs from their own sorority days. "Ugh, its the Black Magic Bros. They're like, totally our rivals and junk." The Bros didn't look very happy to see the adventurers either. "Girls and grad students? Gross. Do you lift even?" A couple of the Bros came at the group with their carving knives, and Jimbo attempted to use his calming magic again. Unfortunately, he suffered a mishap, and vomited hemolymph all over the floor at their feet. Spellweaver eyed the liquid longingly. The Bros were disgusted, and shooed everyone out through the back door into the kitchen so they could continue their magic ritual uninterrupted.
In the kitchen, the group saw a zombie (a non-burned-up one this time) gnawing on another spindle of mummified meat. Deeringer tried to sneak up behind it, but his antlers accidentally knocked over a dishrack, raising a terrible clatter. One of the Black Magic Bros came in. "Yo! Are you bros interrupting our magic on purpose?" Deeringer explained that it was just an accident while trying to attack the zombie, but he wasn't able to harm it. The Bro was disgusted, but magically destroyed the zombie and then returned next door. "Yo, you bros are genuinely weak and pathetic. You sicken me. You need to lift and get swole!"
With the Bros distracted and the zombie defeated, the group decided to take advantage of the momentary calm to eat some lunch in the old kitchen. Jimbo felt much better afterward! After eating, they searched the kitchen for valuables, and turned up fine china plates worth 88 gp, and some good silverware worth 15 gp. Rather than risk interrupting the Bros again, they left the kitchen via the back exit, which deposited them in a small crossway with three other possible routes. Peeking into each room in turn, they saw a refrigerated room where a dozen zombies were trying to open a locked freezer, a cafeteria where a dozen zombies were tearing apart the corpse of a Black Magic Bro, and a blocked door that they eventually forced open. It was a supply closet, filled with tables and chairs, most of which had been piled up to prevent anyone from getting in. After finally weaseling inside, they pushed the stacked furniture back into position to keep out any zombies.
The group then listened at the only other exit door, and heard whispering about budgets. They worried that this might be another administrative ghost, but decided that was still safer than trying to fight through a mob of zombies. They emerged into a dusty hallway connecting the giant University Seal room to the old front entrance to the original Gallax College building. The hall was dusty, but it was clear that a lot of foot traffic was coming north from the old entrance, so they headed in that direction. As they approached the foyer, they were accosted by more Black Magic Bros, "Yo, this is our turf, frat brothers only past this point!" Deeringer stepped forward, "Well what if we joined your fraternity?" The Bros seemed excited by this idea, "Bro, are you pledges?! This is great! Alright probie, you wanna join our gang, all you gotta do is commit an unforgivable sin."
Jimbo stepped forward with his Hell Gun, checked the group to identify the shortest and nerdiest looking Bro, and straight up wasted the guy with a torrent of hellfire. That Bro's soul was condemned to Hell, and Jimbo knew with a certainty that his own soul was damned in that instant as well. The other Bros took one look at the smoldering corpse, then at Jimbo, then cheered. "Bro! That was epic! You didn't tell me you dudes were hardcore!" A round of chest bumps, high fives, and keg stands followed. Spellweaver amused the Bros by trying to harvest a prosthetic from the corpse, but it was too badly burned. Jimbo seemed dazed, and kept looking at his hands. "My god, what have I done..." he mumbled to himself. "I used to be so nice... I was going to be a farmer..."
While partying, the Bros explain the layout of their turf, and the group made a plan to get to the vault. They entered a room that they believed had door opening to the north, but found their way blocked by some sort of arcane puzzle. The wall was carved with some sort of large circular rune, the indents were filled with dried blood, and key spots on the rune were adorned with teeth and ears. "I have some teeth!" Spellweaver cheerfully announced. "What? Why?" Jimbo was disgusted. "I got my boyfriend in the bursar's office to give them to me while I was building up to ask for his arm." Jimbo insisted that they get ears from the zombie remains they'd left in the kitchen. En route, they encountered a dungeon cat! Jimbo remembered he'd stolen a laser pointer from the Torture Department's lecture hall, and used it to entertain the cat, who proved to be very friendly. "Wow boss," said Birdie, impressed, "You're like a real evil wizard now. You've got an apprentice, a familiar, plus that Hell Gun." Jimbo mumbled to himself as they returned to the room with the mysterious seal, "No... supposed to be nice... farmer..."
Birdie and Spellweaver experimented with adding additional teeth and ears to the rune, but couldn't get it to activate. Deeringer tried wiping away some of the blood, and they realized that this was a Custodian's Seal ... which made them question whether the bodyparts were needed for the ritual, or some sort of negative consequence of performing it incorrectly. "I have an idea!" announced Chordy, and used his spell to control stone to open another doorway right next to the secret door being blocked by the seal.
In the next room, they found a bloodstained stone altar next to a pit filled with the skeletons of undergrads, still wearing a few mouldering scraps of their old robes. Another skeleton was reaching out toward the altar, obviously killed by a sword stuck through its back. Deeringer inspected this corpse. He thought it was Administrator Hargrave. " 'No escape, Hargrave,' indeed," he said. He found a slip of paper in the skeleton's hand with clues for figuring out the vault combination, but since they already knew the combination, they didn't bother trying to puzzle out the three riddles. Spellweaver took the sword and swung it around a few times, "Oh yeah, I could really chop some arms off with this!" Jimbo took the demon-faced wizard's hat the corpse was wearing, beginning to accept his new identity as an evil wizard.
Deeringer felt around the northern wall, looking for a way through into the vault. As he did, the skeletons in the pit began stirring. Chordy used a spell for packing things securely to slide the altar into the pit, crushing the skeletons to dust. (Meanwhile, upstairs, every other skeleton in the dungeon reanimated and went on an indiscriminate killing spree!) Administrator Hargrave's skeleton rose up to attack them, but Spellweaver used the magic sword to put Hargrave down for a second time. Eventually Deeringer was able to force open a door that was probably somehow tied to the altar's magic. And with that, they were in the vault!
Deeringer used the combination Birdie and Spellweaver had secured to open a locked safe. Inside the found the mythic Eleventh Hourglass! They weren't really sure what use it might have, beyond securing their good relationship with Monica Doom. The room was filled with other treasure chests, but they were mostly open and empty. In fact, only one was undisturbed. Deeringer feared a trap, and used his spell that commanded coins to open the chest from a distance. Nothing seemed to happen, and they found two heavy gold ingots inside. Birdie and Spellweaver each carried one.
To leave the dungeon and return upstairs, the group decided to take a different way back so the Bros wouldn't see them carrying the gold. They went down the hall past Chordy's entrance to the blood-sealed room, and found a closet for storing contraband that had been confiscated from unruly undergrads. There were storage areas for knives, swords, staves, crossbows, and wands, but only a handful of loose daggers were left lying on the floor; everything else had been taken.
In the next room, they found a walk-in closet with a lot of dusty old Administrator's robes, and a lot more empty hangers. Rounding a corner, they saw a dying undergrad slowly dragging himself toward a farther door. Inspecting him seemed to reveal that he wasn't a ghost, but maybe someone trapped in slow motion and a time-loop. They used the Soul Gun to disperse the soul from his body one segment at a time, until he was finally released from the prison he'd been trapped in for hundreds of years. Spellweaver drank some of the blood off the floor and learned a bit of history - the graduating class of 677 had all been killed and turned into zombies which still wandered these lower halls. This lead to a worsening of faculty-student relations, culminating in a rebellion led by the class of 702. That was probably the source of the various battlefields they'd seen, and the reason the old university was abandoned and built over, as well as the cause of this poor fellow's death.
The group dressed in Administrator's robes and used a couple of spares to hide their gold ingots. Confident in their new attire, they found their way to one of the double-wide halls, where a knight statue greeted them in its robotic voice, "Greetings, administrators." They had no further trouble returning to the surface.
With the Eleventh Hourglass to use as a bargaining chip, Monica Doom was able to buy back her ability to return to human form. And with their gold bars, new magic items, and purloined dinnerware, the group was financially well set up to leave the University and start up their own wizarding gang.
Raku Chihuly - dragonborn guid artisan, 4th level battlesmith artificer - played by Emily Willibald Honrblower - halfling noble, 4th level college of lore bard - played by Steve Nehryx - centaur outlander, 4th level brute fighter - played by Corey Demic - minotaur entertainer, 4th level oath of the dragonlord paladin - played by Ben Crow - tabaxi acolyte of Nuula, 3rd level swashbuckler rogue - played by Lindsey Owyn Lavashield - hill dwarf hermit, 2nd level circle of the moon druid - played by Eli
After they defeated the masters of Castle Cragmaw, the adventurers returned to the village of Alpenshire to enjoy some well-earned rest. Travelers reported that the mountain trails were currently free of bandits. All goblin sightings showed them heading deeper into the Grosseberg mountain range. Black Iris received a number of mysterious overnight deliveries, and her storehouses were soon almost overflowing with merchandise.
For several weeks, the group members trained in their abilities and began spending some of their treasure. Raku turned the frog statue she'd found into a figurine of wondrous power, able to turn into a living frog and deliver messages. Willibald cobbled himself a pair of boots of elven kind, which would help him scout ahead of the party more stealthily. After being introduced by Raku, Nehryx was able to commission the artisan's guild to enchant his mighty greatsword to make it a weapon +1. Demic commissioned the guild as well, but he had them make a statue of his revered Dragon Goddess so that he could begin consecrating a shrine. Crow and Owyn spent time at the temple for the Nature Goddess they both revered.
All the same, they began to feel a bit of wanderlust. Willibald still longed to show up the Brandybuck family, who he believed may have sabotaged his vineyard. Nehryx and Demic enjoyed their status as local heroes, but longed to venture back into the mountains. Together, the party agreed to investigate a the legendary Under-Mountain in heart of the mountain range. The map they'd retrieved from Castle Cragmaw seemed to show one path there. The party convinced Black Iris to let them use some of her secret smuggling trails for extra security. Owyn Lavashield also located some fellow dwarves in Alpenshire, and persuaded them to write him a letter of introduction that he could use to let the party stay in any of the dwarven mining villages that dot the Grosseberg mountains.
For two more weeks, the group traveled the mountains, sticking the Black Iris's smuggling trails when they could, staying the night in dwarven mining towns when one was available. Their last stay was in Dworfsborro, only a half day from the fabled Under-Mountain. The next day they arrived at the entrance to the ancient dungeon. It appeared to be just a simple mining elevator. At the bottom they found themselves in a room filled with loose sand and broken shields. On one wall, written in blood, they saw a dwarven warning that a Mad Mage waited somewhere beyond a place called the Pillar Forest.
There seemed to be only one exit from this first room, a dog-legged passageway that eventually led to a wider hall. This hall ran to the west, and its walls were decorated with bas relief images of demons. The skeleton of a birdman lay in the middle of the hall, pointing at one of the demons. The group felt suspicious of whatever might have killed the bird creature. Demic investigated the skeleton but saw no obvious signs of what killed it. Checking the wall the creature was pointing at, he thought he could make out some loose stonework. Nehryx helped ram a shoulder against the wall, and a secret doorway opened!
Beyond the secret door, a curving and roughly dug tunnel led into a strangely slanted room. It was as though it had been build on a different floorplan (and a different definition of "down") - and it was half full of fetid water that smelled like sewage. While the others held back, brave Nehryx waded in, and was attacked by a blob of grey protoplasm, the same color as the dirty water. The ooze lashed at Nehryx with its tentacles, but with support from his friends who used arrows and magic from the doorway, the monster was quickly defeated. Acid from the ooze sizzled against Nehryx's new sword, but couldn't harm its fine magical craftsmanship. Pleased with his purchase, he wiped the blade clean.
After the excitement was over, Nehryx spotted an alcove with a statue in it. Demic investigated and discovered a statue of the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The statue was carved of black stone. One arm had broken off, and it was covered in melted wax and other stains. It had a screw on head that could be removed so that candles could be placed inside, allowing light to spill out of the Creature's eyes and mouth. Demic thought this was really cool, so he placed the rather heavy statue in his backpack, determined to use its special feature as a template for some additional decorations devoted to his dragon goddess.
After really thoroughly checking the room for additional secrets, ("There's got to be more to this place! It's too weird to just be standalone!"), they returned to the hall with the demon carvings on the walls. At the end of the hall, they descended down a double-wide staircase into an octagonal room filled with many pillars. The group theorized this might be the so-called "Pillar Forest" the graffiti near the entrance had mentioned. Several party members felt an unnerving sense that someone might be nearby, or might have snuck away just as they were entering. They spent awhile spreading out across the room to look behind every pillar to make sure no one could surprise them. They saw the skeleton of an enormous constrictor snake coiled around one pillar - and Demic smashed it with a rock. Owyn also found more bloody dwarven graffiti, this time warning of "certain death" down the south exit.
Besides the way the party had entered, the room had three other exits, all of them up a staircase, making this room a low-point within this part of the dungeon. Willibald climbed each staircase to peek ahead. He saw a short dead-end passage to the north, a hall lined with alcoves to the west, and a very long passageway to the south.
Gains
100 XP (grey ooze)
Creature of the Black Lagoon statue (no monetary value)
Session 8
Raku Willibald Nehryx Demic Crow
Taking stock of their options, the party agreed to avoid the passageway that was marked as "certain death". They felt curious about the alcoves and decided to investigate, but immediately felt worried about what might be hidden just out of sight. A single burnt out torch lying in the middle of the hall increased their anxiety. Willibald use a mage hand to float a lighted torch down the hall, and light seemed to reflect back from within the alcoves - mirrors! Raku decided to detect magic and saw that a couple of the mirrors were magical, and based on their placement, she thought one of the mirrors at the end of the hall might be magic as well.
As the group debated what to do about this situation, three giant centipedes entered the hall crawling on the ceiling and rapidly approached them! The centipedes seemed especially drawn to the smell of sewage clinging to Demic's and Nehryx's fur. Unfortunately for the insects, their chosen meals were quite capable of defending themselves. The party quickly dispatched one of the creatures and the other two began to scuttle away, but another was slain before it could escape. Demic and Nehryx both thought the creatures might possess some kind of poison, but since they'd withstood its effects, they weren't entirely sure what it would do to someone affected by it.
Still worried about the possible effects of the magical mirrors, Demic led the group the rest of the way down the hall. As he passed the final two mirrors, he looked in one and saw a distorted, funhouse reflection of himself that pointed behind him, he turned to see a similar reflection in the other mirror, then turned again - the distorted reflection was standing in the hall with him! Nehryx charged the rest of the length of the hall to help his friend. He wiped out the mysterious mirror creature in a single cut, but a mirror Nehryx hopped out to confront him too. Willibald magically shattered one of the mirrors. Crow ran past, hoping the spell might be broken too, but a semi-transparent and very angry mirror Crow appeared as well! Fortunately, with Nehryx's help, both reflections were quickly defeated. Willibald went up and down the hall shattering all the non-magical mirrors. He discovered that the other magical mirrors that Raku had identified were simply illusions, with no mirror present at all! Behind one, he found a bronze mask depicting the face of the Mad Mage. Raku carefully broke the remaining magical mirror without allowing herself to be reflected, then collected the magical glass for future study.
Past the hall, passages branched off to the north and south. Willibald scouted ahead, and thought that the northern passage had only a single dead-end room, while the southern branch led to a complex of several rooms. Entering into the rooms to the south, the group met a half-dozen goblins who were amusing themselves with a human skeleton they'd turned into a crude marionette. The skeleton looked very old, and a broken shield in the corner identified its bearer as "NIM - RATH".
The goblins were impressed that the party had fought their way through the "bad mirrors", and learned that the goblins never used that hall. Upon further questioning, the goblins told a sad tale of how they used to have a good life up on the surface, but a series of tragedies had chased them down into the Under-Mountain, where they still had no relief from their troubles. Once they had a simple life, living in a cave, robbing travelers, led by a bugbear boss. Then someone came in and killed their boss, flooded their cave, and stole back all spoils of their banditry. "It's probably that darned Black Iris," one of the goblins opined, "she never gives us no peace!" The survivors of that disaster had moved into a castle with some of their friends ... until one day someone massacred and entire dining hall full of goblins, and again, killed their newest bugbear boss.
The party members exchanged meaningful glaces with one another. "Gee, that's so sad." So now the goblins had resolved to leave the cruel surface world behind, but they were troubled again by a group of Draculas living to the north, who gave them all kind of hassle down here as well. The party felt alarmed by the report of Draculas, and took pity on the poor goblins, who at this point just wanted to live in peace far away from humans. Willibald and Raku used some simple illusions to create a disco ball, flashing lights, and ambient music playing "The Hustle". The goblins danced to celebrate their newly forged friendship, and got their skeleton puppet to disco dance, chanting "Nim-rath, nim-rath, nim-rath!" in time to the music.
Eventually, the goblins took the party to meet their newest bugbear bosses, who were also pleased to hear that someone else was going to kill the Draculas and save them the trouble. The bugbears agreed to deliver "big treasure" and to avoid bothering the town of Dworfsborro if the party was successful in clearing out the area to the north. The speed and apparent generosity of the bugbears' agreement may have struck some as inherently suspicious.
The goblins meanwhile were enthusiastically and unreservedly excited about this new alliance. They explained the layout of their group's "turf", which included several more rooms south of the Pillar Forest. The party worked out that the Draculas were somewhere to the north of that. But wait, how did the goblins get to and from the Pillar Forest if they never used the mirrored hallway? What about the sign warning of "certain death" to the south? The goblins couldn't contain their laughter - "hahaha! I can't believe you guys fell for that!"
Eventually, the goblins took the group to an empty room where they could camp for the night. It was the dead-end room Willibald had identified earlier. The floor was littered with trash, burnt torches, empty potion bottles, empty wine bottles of Chateau Brandybuck. In the distance, the party could hear the goblins disco-ing long into the night.
Gains
1200 XP (two carrion crawlers 450/each, three shadows 100/each)
bronze mask of the Mad Mage (50 gp)
sample of broken magical glass .
. . Session 9
Willibald Nehryx
The next day, the rest of the party stayed behind to disco with the goblins, while Willibald and Nehryx planned to scout out the so-called "Draculas". Based on the legends and folksongs Willibald had heard, and backed up by Demic's religious knowledge, vampires were believed to be incredibly powerful and dangerous, possibly moreso than the goblins seemed to think. The party was suspicious that something might not be as it seemed.
Willibald and Nehryx asked the bugbear bosses for their bravest goblin warrior to accompany them on their scouting mission, but the bosses were not entirely receptive to this request. "Ha! No. Tell you what, we'll give you our most expendable goblin." They were introduced to Pincushion, a goblin who sounded suspiciously like Don Knotts. When asked how he got his name, Pincushion explained that on several occasions, he'd somehow managed to shoot himself in his own butt. "Now they only let me have this one arrow..."
Nehryx and Willibald encouraged Pincushion to scout head as they went back through the Pillar Forest and into the northern hall. "Hot dog! I'm the leader, I'm leading the way!" Their first stop was a room just on the edge of Dracula territory. Listening at the door, Willibald heard voices coming from inside, so they steeled themselves for a fight. The room proved to be deserted though, and the voices were coming from narrow air shafts in the ceiling. Who knew where else in the dungeon those connected to? They also spotted some eye holes cut into the south wall. Peering through showed a view of the hall with the bas relief demons - in fact, the eye holes were probably positioned to be one of the demon's eyes.
The most interesting feature of the room though was a glowing sword nailed halfway through an upturned wooden table. The table itself was smeared with dried blood, and a skeletal forearm lay on the floor beneath. Nehryx held back the excitable Pincushion while Willibald investigated. He used mage hand to try to dislodge the sword from the table. It released easily, almost as if it wanted to be held, and flew toward Willibald's outstretched hand. He managed to dodge just in time, and the glowing blade clattered across the floor behind him. Willibald heard a scraping sound as the sword dragged itself across the floor toward him. He ducked behind the table, and the sword flung itself into the wood so hard it actually stabbed him coming through the other side! Deeply suspicious of the sword's apparent eagerness, Willibald offered the weapon to Pincushion, who felt no doubt or concern whatsoever. "Oh boy!' he exclaimed, waving the sword wildly from side to side, like a toddler with a sparkler, "My very own sword! Look out world, here comes Pincushion!"
A quick test revealed that it was impossible for Pincushion to let go of the sword, although the redoubtable goblin didn't see this as a drawback. "Set it down? I'm never lettin' this baby out of my sight! Hiyah! Ha! Take that!" Nehryx further spun the advantages of a blade that no enemy could ever knock from one's hands, while both he and Willibald kept a safe distance from Pincushion's enthusiastic practice swinging.
Past this room, the northern passageway branched again, with routes going east and west. Deciding to take the much longer passage to the west, Nehryx, Willibald, and Pincushion arrived in a room with black bone-covered pillars, its floor covered in the bones of goblins and some kind of beaked snake-like creature. Two large floating brains with nasty beaks of their own and dozes of wafting tentacles floated out of ambush positions and approached the two friends and their erstwhile sidekick. Pincushion rushed forward, eager to try out his new weapon, and was summarily decapitated by one of the floating brains, which crunched noisily on his skull. Nehryx had much better success with his greatsword, and Willibald used a combination of crossbow and magic to dispatch the other.
When they returned to the goblin hideout, Raku had just finished teaching the goblins to limbo under a rope.
Gains
1650 XP (cursed sword 4th level "medium" encounter 250, two grell 700/each)
Losses
Pincushion the goblin
Session 10
Raku Willibald Nehryx Demic Crow Owyn
After Nehryx and Willibald's scouting mission, the group was certain they knew the way to the territory controlled by the alleged "Draculas" and they were eager to learn more about the supposed monsters. After bidding a fond farewell to their disco friends, the party passed through the Pillar Forest and went north, then east, into a new region of the dungeon. At the end of the passageway, they found an alcove with more eye holes, and they realized they'd found a secret door into the entry chamber. Though there was no way to open it from the side of the mining elevator, they had discovered yet another hidden connector.
Backtracking slightly, they took a northern branching passage, and opened a door into room with three graffiti-covered statues ... and a crowd of vampires?! Half a dozen of the vampires were average human sized, obviously wearing white greasepaint, and simple black bandit's outfits that had been modified to look a bit like tuxedos. Another was a much larger man dressed much the same, and two were absolutely flawless images of Dracula! The smaller "vampires" brandished knives at the party. "Blah, blah!" they shouted, "I vant to suck your blood!" One seemed confused, ("I like to eat the peanut butter first!"), but he was quickly silenced by the others. "Blah!"
Nehryx rushed the crowd of smaller vampires, and rapidly struck down two of them. The others tried to run, but Nehryx managed to grab one before he could get away. The other party members concentrated on the surprisingly convincing Draculas, who unnervingly seemed to heal every injury only moments after it was dealt. One of these fled away too, but the party finally defeated the other. As it fell, it turned into a grey humanoid with fluid, clay-like skin. Another doppelganger, like they'd encountered at Castle Cragmaw! Now that it was dead, they could see that their attacks had injured it, but it had been using its shapechanging abilities to conceal the damage.
They questioned their prisoner, who admitted his name was Tony, and that he was not really a vampire. He belonged to a gang that used to be called the Jets, until their leader, Benny, met an actress and agreed to her plan to strike fear into the hearts of their enemies by disguising themselves as vampires. Tony was not altogether sold on this plan, ("I mean, it used to be, when you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way ... but now we're supposed to just give that up?"), but thought it was working pretty well against the goblins. Tony was also not enamored with the actress, Victoria, who in addition to leading the bandits into the Under-Mountain and rebranding their image, had also started building "a really gross flesh monster" in her dressing room.
Tony was able to explain a bit of the layout of the gang's territory. To the west were a small number of hangout rooms. To the north were a couple of hidden chambers they sometimes used for ambushes, ("plus there's an honest to goodness vampire coffin in there! it's just empty though"), and further north, a throne room where Victoria was likely to be found. Beyond that, Tony knew about a hallway filled with statues that led into a larger room controlled by a trio of lions with human faces.
With this information, and a tied-up Tony bringing up the rear, the group headed west into the vampire gang's hangout rooms. They found the surviving gang members hiding behind an overturned card table. Benny leapt out to fight the party, but was clearly outmatched, and then Willibald suggested that he surrender. Confronted with both the logic of his situation and Willibald's magical persuasion, Benny readily agreed and encouraged the other bandits to give themselves up. He helpfully offered to turn over his accumulated loot to the party, and agreed to hurry to Dworfsborro to turn himself in to the appropriate authorities. Before jogging off, Benny also confirmed the layout of the other section of the gang's turf, and again warned the party of the danger posed by Victoria and her "gross flesh zombie thing". The party debated what to do with the other bandits, but didn't feel able to take custody of a group of prisoners at the moment, and worried that they'd just escape, and possibly lead Benny astray, if they tried asking them to go to Dworfsborro. In the end, they released Tony and the other three bandits, on the promise that the Jets give up stealing.
Gains
1300 XP (doppelganger 700, six bandits 25/each, bandit captain 450)
21 gp in surrendered bandit pocket change
96 gp in bandit treasure (2 gp in copper, 9 gp in silver, 85 gp in gold)
dwarven rune ring (25 gp, given to Owyn)
Session 11
Raku Willibald Nehryx Demic Crow Owyn
As Benny jogged off toward Dworfsborro and the remaining bandits dispersed, the party returned to the room with the three graffitied statues and headed north, following the directions provided by their informants. In the northern passage, they spotted a pair of hidden doors.
Pressing his ear to the wall, Willibald heard someone banging around inside. The group burst in through both doors, and saw a giant, picture-perfect Frankenstein's Monster. Could this be Victoria's creature?! Their multiple attacks quickly subdued the monster. Upon death, it was revealed to be the other doppelganger from before. It's body showed both its previous injuries and the newest wounds.
Surveying the room, they saw that this was a bandit hideout, filled with bedrolls. In a side room, they found an ancient wooden coffin on a stone plinth. This must be the vampire coffin! Nehryx, Demic, and Owyn investigated the coffin by tapping on it and then using several magical senses. Eventually Owyn opened the lid and found it empty. The bottom of the coffin was covered in dirt, with a single vial of holy water inside.
Following a westward passage, they arrived at a more ornate looking doorway. Perhaps this was the throne room? Inside, they found large throne room. They had enetered just beside the large throne; made entirely of bone. In the middle of the room, they saw a small dragon skeleton surrounded by broken crystal or glass. Raku and Demic were both unsettled by the disrespectful treatment of a dragon's remains, and vowed to carry it back to Dworfsborro after they finished with the bandits. They saw another door just on the other side of the throne, and two more at the far side of the room. The group decided to check the nearest doorway.
Inisde, they found Victoria's dressing room! The walls were covered with posters of Victoria from various plays she'd appeared in. They saw her dressing table, costume trunk, changing screen, and of course, the woman herself, and her giant horrible flesh monster. Victoria was dressed in a much better version of the other bandits' costumes. The monster was an awful stitched together mess of various scraps of skin. "Blah blah!" intoned Victoria, "Who dares invade my sanctum? Blah! Get them, Frankie! Destroy them, my pet!"
For a few rounds, Victoria taunted the party as they struggled against her terrible creation ... until Demic channeled his deity to roar like a dragon, terrifying the woman. "Oh god, we're all doomed! He's gonna go crazy! I can't control him! He's going berserk for sure!" Ordinarily, she would have fled the room, but she was too afraid of Demic to try to run past him, and so just scrabbled backward against the wall. "Please! I surrender! Just take me in! Don't let him kill me!" Owyn changed shape to become a dire wolf and kept her cornered while the others fought. The monster, Frankie, did not end up going berserk, and eventually, the party managed to put down the horrible creature.
With Victoria in manacles, the group checked the side room and retrieved the remaining five bandits. The bandits volunteered to give up their life of crime, but the party tied their hands and prepared to lead them back to Dworfsborro to face dwarven law.
They also gathered the bones, realizing as they did that this was a wyvern, an animal that was related to dragons but lacked their noble intelligence. The broken glass appeared to be the remains of a display case that probably hung from the ceiling. Demic thought that he could begin consecrating a grotto to his Dragon Goddess in Dworfsborro, and this skeleton could be respectfully interred there.
When the party and their prisoners arrived in Dworfsborro, they found that Benny had turned himself in, and the group received a reward from the dwarven authorities for the capture of the seven gang members.
Gains
3075 XP (doppelganger 700, bandit captain 450, flesh golem 1800, five bandits 25/each)
22 gp surrendered bandit pocket change
1025 gp reward for captured bandits
Notes
Before the start of session 7 up there, I went ahead and totaled up everyone's experience and treasure from their previous adventures. The totals below don't include any cash that Nehryx and Demic made by selling used goblin weapons, and also doesn't include any deductions for purchases of armor, healing potions, and the like. I did go ahead and subtract out the cost of their magic items though - 500 gp each for Raku and Willibald to craft their own, 1000 gp for Nehryx to commission one, and 750 gp for Demic to commission his statue.
Raku - 3350 xp, 621 gp, figurine of wondrous power (same power as silver falcon)
Willibald - 4200 xp, 900 gp, boots of elven kind
Nehryx - 4200 xp, 400 gp, greatsword +1
Demic - 3225 xp, 650 gp, statue of dragon goddess
Crow - 2975 xp, 1275 gp
Owyn - 1850 xp, 996 gp
The party also started out collectively owning 3 healing potions that they'd found as treasure and not used, a scroll of revivify, and a scroll of silence. I think at the start of the next session I'll encourage them to officially divvy those up so that someone has responsibility for tracking when they get used up.
By my count, each party member got 194 gp from this adventure (1164 ÷ 6), Demic got a broken statue and co-ownership of a wyvern skeleton, Willibald got a brone mask, Owyn got a dwarven ring and a vial of holy water, and Raku got some magic glass and is the other owner of the skeleton.
So by the end of all of this, everyone's experience and cash are higher:
Raku - 9025 xp, 815 gp
Willibald - 11525 xp, 1094 gp
Nehryx - 11525 xp, 594 gp
Demic - 8900 xp, 844 gp
Crow - 8650 xp, 1469 gp
Owyn - 6325 xp, 1190 gp
