5-16-09 log
From Shadowfell Geographic Society
Murder-Based-Solutions, Inc. Run 5/16/09
We're picking up another team-member this week. We received a letter from a recruitment center offering us our choice of seven different warriors. Tempest (who will be joining us next week) and I looked over the list and wanted to interview the three who looked like heavy-hitters (ie. Strikers). One of them also looks like a bard, which seems kind of interesting. Shay is enthusiastic about the bard.
Okay, Jon's here. He made two warlocks, two rangers, a rogue, a sorcerer, and a bard. So Chris and I were off on some of our guesses. :) Discussion ensues; he decides to play the dragonborn sorcerer.
Eddy is going to take care of loot from now on. Yay. After having gone through everything, he tells us we have 2000ish gp.
When last we left the party, we had a giant fight in a room with some pits. There are slaves down in the pits.
I apparently have no idea how many hp I have. Oh gee. Uh, time check. It's 2pm. We've just started.
We loot the room! We find some keys and some mundane equipment. We also find a secret door into the back of the fireplace of the dude we killed before (the crazy Asmodeus paladin.) There are also a bunch of slaves. There are 14 of them, manacled to the walls. 13 are human and 1 is a goblin. Holy cow. It's Splug, back from Keep on the Shadowfell. They're kind of stunned, but hey, there's alive.
“Hey, a test goblin. We can cross that other bridge now!” - Tom
10 of them are 10 of the remaining 12 captives we were looking for from Riverdown. Unfortunately, this means 2 are still not here. The two who are missing were hawt chicks. (er, “pretty girls”) They were sold to gnolls. They describe a symbol on the gnolls' armor – a red tooth dripping blood on a black background.
Tom makes a really good Nature check: “Gnolls are nomads. They raze everything when they take stuff over. They wear bones. They wear patchwork armor. They can't be bribed or reasoned with. They keep hyenas as pets, and detest physical labor and keep slaves. Slaves have pretty terrible lives under gnoll masters. Sufficiently strong and crazy slaves might be made honorary gnolls.”
The other 3 are human prospectors who got snatched. And Splug, who got sold to the duergar by the Blood Reavers.
Shay goes to check out the door we haven't opened. We find a burial chamber with a bunch of minotaur statues, and a shrine with a big minotaur statue. The statues are to Baphomet, the demon god of berserkers. There's nothing worth looting, and the encounter that would have been in here wandered away due to boredom.
We head back to town and pay our guide. Kurgan describes the Seven-Pillared-Hall again, since we have two players who haven't seen it yet.
“Now might be a good time to check your Quest Log.” - kurgan Quests: return the slaves (2 slaves left) map the labyrinth, bring back artifacts (partially done) find the missing boar from the Deep Gem Company (not done) Gendar wanted us to find his skull scepter (which we have, but have to return) Tom has a fetch quest to finish, but we have to get back to Fallcrest to finish that
Okay, so everything we have to do leads towards “find the gnolls”.
“Wait. The gnolls have kidnapped ... two pretty girls ... and a dire boar. What the hell are they trying to do?” - eddy
“This game is strictly PG-13!”
“Even on a crit fail?”
“This game is PG-d20! Roll it!”
- roll**
“Well, it's PG-14. So ...” - eddy, kurgan, and jon
We hire a dragonborn sorcerer. His name is Khantar. Cue the obvious “Khaaaan!” reference.
“Thank you for retaining my services.”
“What sorts of things do you smash?”
“I burn and freeze things.”
“But what about the smashing?!”
“After he freezes things, you can smash them.”
“I like him!” - jon, nyren, and diane
Jon comments that Dayak Iban is in fact a literal headhunter, and the fee for hiring Kantar permanently (eight pounds of flesh) is a human head. Ah, fantasy.
We do a transfer enchantment on the flaming maul to give Khantar a flaming dagger. Note: Selene has enough components for 2 more arcane ritual, and 2 more divine rituals. Uh, wait. I have enough for 2 comprehend languages, 2 gentle repose, and another 50 gp worth of arcane components.
We go back to Gendar the drow. He gives us 300 gp and we're done. QUEST COMPLETED.
We go back to the DeepGem company, and Althan DeepGem. He's happy we killed the duergar. Tharlen DeepGem can probably point us towards gnoll-land.
We're about to head out to gnoll-land, and Splug comes up to use and gives us a letter from someone.
“Your actions against the door-guard are consumable. You will - ”
“GIVE ME THAT!” - eddy and diane
It's from “someone” who's “high up” in the “evil organization” behind the duergar. And he “wants to leave” and wants to meet with us in secret and talk to us about escaping.
“Well, guys, you know what we do with traps!”
“Splug?” - diane and nyren
All right. Time to go spring some traps. Shay sneaks off in front to scout out whatever's going to kill us.
It's a cave. There's a ledge running around the inside, ten feet off the ground. Some dudes ambush us. Fortunately, we rolled a 20 on our party stealth (shay got a 28 on his special extra stealth), so we all get to participate in the surprise round.
There's a giant bronze minotaur ... unfortunately it's moving.
Combat start: It's 3:10.
We spend the surprise round moving up. Shay's the only person in range of combat. A tiefling readied-action attacks shay as he's charging forward to attack the terrible bronze thing. Actually, two tiefling warlock-things attack him. One hits.
The big bronze guy has some kind of DR. Khantar hits one of the tieflings and makes it vulnerable to cold.
It's 3:30. We are on round 2. (I'm trying to see how long it's been taking us to get through fights.)
The terrible bronze things knocks Shay prone and does a crazy sweeping blow that attacks everybody around him in radius 1, although that's only Shay. And it misses because Shay's AC is 26 right now.
Shay hits the terrible bronze thing and teleports them both off to the other side of the room.
3:42. We're on round 3. We bloody the tiefling everybody's attacking. The terrible bronze things moves away from Shay and spends his action point to run around the room so he can hit everybody in the party with his terrible sweeping attack.
Hits only selene. 10 damage and ongoing 5 damage. I take the 5 once then save.
The tieflings both attack Selene but miss.
3:56 round 4.
4:07 round 5. uh, wow. That was fast.
“How heavily armored is he?” “He's made of bronze.” - the continuing refrain of this fight
4:22, round 6
4:38, round 7
Peter takes 5 damage. Tom finally connects with an attack and does 30 damage, which is probably 20-25 after its resistance, but that's still a lot so far. And then it gets its turn and dies from Tom's damage aura.
4:48: combat over. So that combat was an hour and a half.
We search the room and find a scroll tube with two scrolls. We also find an amulet. It's the control amulet for the bronze wonder we just killed. It does us no good, because it was keyed to the wonder we killed. Also we would have needed a password. The scrolls contain one letter to the assassins telling them to kill us no matter what, and a map to where they should deliver our bodies. Also there's a sealed letter in abyssal which none of us can read. Grr.
Peter and Selene both spend a healing surge. This puts Peter at full heal and Selene down 4.
We rehash the “should we take a long rest argument” for the seven millionth time. We compromise by carrying Tom, who needs to rest. Okay, Tom gets his long rest and we make it to wherever the next fight is.
5:03. The GM has drawn out another map. There are 5 columns in the big square room. There's a well in one corner, and two other passages leading out. The columns have leering minotaurs carved into them.
We enter the room, and several things happen at once. One of the pillars starts talking. “Greetings, seekers of Baphomet's power and glory.” Okay, um .... “mask, bell, blade, and tome.” Also, some crazy tentacles with mouths burst out of the ground. Shay notices a figure skulking, um, on the ceiling. Actually two. Actually, no, wait. He doesn't see them. He sees some undead. Ghouls. Great.
The ceiling guys get a surprise round. It's 5:12.
The two chokers on the ceiling grab Shay and Tom, so they're both immobilized and being choked. Then the ghoul walks up and stuns Shay, and bloodies him, because Shay was down 10hp when the fight started.
Selene takes 9 damage for trying to do something. She's grabbed by the tentacles. Spend an action point to do two different attacks.
It's 5:33. We're all in our first turn.
Selene takes another 3 damage for starting her turn next to the tentacle terrible thing. Then it does a tentacle flurry, but misses most of us.
5:46, round 2.
Peter is stunned.
5:55, round 3. Shay teleports the fallawhatever (the tentacle monster) five squares away, ungrabbing everybody.
Tom makes a Heal check to stand Khantar up. Khantar uses his goggles of aura sight. The ghouls have 63 hp. Khantar then beats the crap out of one of the ghouls. Er, well, I mean he bloodies the ghoul that Shay already attacked. Better than nothing.
Peter takes 4 damage. So he's down ...9 damage total. He takes another 11 damage from the tentacles. So he's down 20 total. Another 9 damage from starting his turn.
6:29. Round 4, maybe round 5.
regain 4 hp for starting my turn. I sit in the consecrated ground until I recover my hp up to “not bloodied”.
Peter crits a lance of faith, and then rolls max damage on his bonus damage, which totally kills the last ghoul.
6:40. Combat over. Wow, that was terrible.
We decide to sleep right then and there. During first watch, a little glowing man shows up. He doesn't attack us. He's like, “Oof. Adventurers are so loud.” This is a quasit, a minor demon. Fortunately, we left Peter asleep. He's trying to figure out if he's our ally or not. Shay says we're going to “trade with the gnolls”, by which we mean smash them and take their stuff. He offers to answer three questions for us, and for each question, we can pay him 100 gp, or a healing surge, which we wouldn't get back tomorrow.
“What traps will we run into during our quest to kick the stuffing out of the gnolls?” “You don't know very much about this place, do you? There are way too many for you to get all that in one question, but I'll give you an overview. There are five areas in which the well of demons will attack you, to make your challenge difficult. One at each of the four cardinal directions, and then the center at the end. Each will provide a different kind of hazard, just in the location.”
“Out of poison or ice, which element would we rather have?” (ie. Which daily power should Selene take?) “You will find creatures which can resist both. You will find a few creatures immune to poison, but not very many.”
“Where's the mask?” (out of mask, bell, blade, and tome) “The face of Baphomet is in the Hall of Forced Introspection. It's that way. If you follow that passage and follow the right wall, you'll pass through the central area. If you open the first double-door, you'll find what you seek.” (he points us in a direction.)
We go back to sleep and successfully make it through the night.
We go back in the direction that the quasit didn't point us. Shay peeks through the door. There is read-aloud text. There's a terrble smell of rotting food, and some everburning torches on the walls. There are a couple more halls branching off. There are some double-doors in the side of the wall, and the hallway continues into some large wall that isn't lit.
That way kind of looks like where the gnolls are, but we decide to go towards the mask anyway. It looks more exciting. We walk into a skill challenge.
“Blood stains the floor here. It feels cold. Three ghostly figures raise their hands in greeting. There's a male human with a thick black beard, clad in ripped chainmail. There's a dwarf-sized suit of plate-mail with the helm down. There's an elf in green robes with a staff.”
“Is it Selene's mom?” - jon
“You look like adventurers, like ourselves.” They offer to help us if we can convince them we're doing something reasonable.
We make some Diplomacy checks telling them that we're here to free some slaves of the gnolls, and to get some terrible artifacts of Baphomet, so that nobody else can do anything bad with them. We roll pretty high.
The chainmail dude is Valdrog the Brute, cleric of Kord. He asks us if we're brave enough and strong enough to overcome the challenges of this place. Khawhatever tries to intimidate the guy to show how cool we are, but this is an auto-fail, because you're never supposed to intimidate named npcs unless you're in combat.
Kurgan tells us there can be partial successes, though. Tom does well on an athletics check. Nyren fails a religion check, to describe how smashy he is.
Surteris, the dwarven paladin of Pelor, asks us about our heroics. Selene tries to make an insight check to figure out what he wants, but fails.
Khantar tries to meta-bluff them. This somehow works. We then try to roll Diplomacy, but a 20 is a failure, so we're totally pathetic.
But three successess doesn't get us nothing. We at least don't get attacked, which is better than nothing! They kind of expect us to die, but they may as well help us in case we survive.
“This place is the proving grounds. You have to place each of the four items on the rune circles *at the same time*” oh great. Split the party. They don't tell us where the rune circles are. “three of the items are found within chambers designed to test baphomet's followers. The fourth item is, um, I didn't catch where. Some confusing direction.” Oh, no, wait. They give us directions to the center.
Then they leave. We head out towards the center section. We find some kind of permanent ritual circle, which is tied to the location. There are four nondistinguishable ritual circles around the room, although they're each surrounded by different bizarre dungeon features (one is by colored pools, one is by skeletons ...)
