5-30-09 log
From Shadowfell Geographic Society
Kurgan's run, 5/30/09
We're in the main chamber at the well of demons. Peter and Tom's players are back, so we have a discusson about why we're fighting through Baphomet's proving grounds instead of going to fight the gnolls.
We decide to check out the glowing pools again. Selene pulls Tempest out of the bottle she's been carrying about. Item get: New Player! Tempest Thundar, Ph.D in Killology, is a stormsoul/watersoul genasi swordmage! He checks out the red pool. It's magical. If you drink from it, you will gain a +1 to attacks, and a -2 to AC and Reflex in the next fight. We can't tell anything about the blue pool. The green pool is resist 5 poison for an hour. The yellow pool is ongoing 5 poison damage, save ends.
Tom drinks from the rage pool. Selene drinks from the poison resist pool. So far we feel fine. We decide to go in the direction that we thought had gnolls, instead.
“Mm, demonade. It's only one letter off from lemonade.”
We head off to what we think is gnollville. We sneak through a door at a party sneak of 20, which is pretty good. Then we detect the faint smell of a surprise round. We've achieved surprise, but we can't see any enemies.
1:59 – combat begins.
Peter walks up and sees three gnolls in a side dining room, who start yelling something in Abyssal.
2:04 – surprise round over. First real round of combat.
The gnolls move up. One of them hits Tempest; the other two can't get close enough. Peter moves up and looks down the other corridor. It's a long corridor with some side passages, but no notable monsters.
Selene Fire Shrouds two of them. Shay shifts crazily behind the farthest-away gnoll, and Oath of Enmity-s it. He crits. Woo. Oh, right. Vicious high-crit weapon. He does 30 damage with his at-will. Tempest does a close-blast-3 power, Fire Vortex. No, sorry. “Flame Cyclone.” The far-back gnoll is now bloodied at 46 damage. Tom discovers that the battle rage water does kick in, but he unfortunately misses with his attack.
Then a gnoll archer comes out of the door at the farther end of the corridor. (This door is in the side wall – uh, I'm not even going to try to describe the geometry. If I had xfig or something I would upload maps.) The archer has a torch, which lets us see that even farther down the halllway, there are some bars, inside which are barking hyenas, which want to eat us, apparently.
Khantar sets all the enemies, plus Tom, on fire. Er, well, all the melee gnolls.
2:22 – round 2 starts
The gnolls smack us. Actually, they all mob Tom and do their terrible pack-attack-extra-damage thing, but Tom does a utility power to reduce damage from the first attack, and Tempest teleports the second one, which causes him to attack one of his allies instead.
Peter critically Commands the archer gnoll. Selene puts up a Stinking Cloud around the hyenas and the archer gnoll, since Peter moved him into the cloud area. Shay moves up into what will be Khantar's doom area and murderizes the bloodied gnoll. Tempest shifts into the center of the two other dudes, and then kills one of them and injures the other. Now there is one melee gnoll, and a bunch of other dudes in a stinking cloud. Between Tom and Khantar, they totally murderize the last melee gnoll.
2:41 – round 3
Peter runs up and Lance of Faiths the dazed gnoll, who undazes at the end of Peter's turn. Selene moves the stinking cloud to cover the hyenas again. Shay does some crazy avenger thing to move a million squares and hit the archer gnoll, killing him. We can see into the room the archer came from. It was a small barracks. Between Khantar and the stinking cloud, we kill them all.
Okay. We do not take a short rest. Nor do we loot the room. Instead, we move up, with the stinking cloud following behind us. There's an encounter behind the first door we open. There is read-aloud text. Go us. Okay, the walls are painted with pictures of naked minotaurs beating the crap out of the civilized races. At the far end of the room are some gnolls with bows hiding behind some haybales. In a cage at the near end is a dire boar being shot full of arrows. There are also a bunch of hyenas biting at the boar.
Combat!
3:10 – round 1
We try to figure out the optimal place to put the cloud. Peter does a Sacred Flame on a hyena, which gives the boar some temp hp. We're all in the doorway. The hyenas all charge us. Selene moves the stinking cloud over the hyenas. (er, and the boar.
3:28 – round 2
The hyena archers decide this stinking cloud business is stupid, so they go around the back and appear at the end of the corridor we're standing in. Yay. Now they're not behind haybales. They miss a lot. Selene action points to shoom the stinking cloud down on top of us. The fighter dude in the big room comes out to attack Tom. He hits once. We kill all but one of the hyenas.
Uh, I lost track of when round 3 started. At 3:50 we're somewhere in the middle of it.
4:00 – round 3
The fighter guy does a special attack that lets him attack Tom and then get away so Tom can't do his “you can't get away” fighter moves. However, Shay and Peter both get op attacks and Shay crits and does 47 damage (with a melee basic attack! Holy god!), murderizing him.
4:25 – fight's over
Okay. We totally won. Now we're doing a skill challenge to try to make the boar not hate us. It's a four-successes-before-three-failures skill challenge. We totally calm it down. (We get four successes and two failures.)
Now we take a short rest and loot the rooms. We find keys to the boar on one of the dudes. There isn't anything interesting in the boar room. We find 42 gp in the mess hall. We get 76 gp in a foot locker in the barracks, and a 150 gp topaz. We also find a +2 cloak of resistance in the hay in the kennel, which is a little weird but whatever.
Okay. Cool. We rest. The boar will follow us around but won't participate in combats, and we're fine with that.
All right. More scouting.
Now we're in a corridor of black stone. There are doors of black wood with minotaur-face door-knockers. There are red-stone accents. We hear voices down the end of the corridor. Shay makes a good listen check and they seem to be talking about some deal someone else was making. They're talking in common.
We go with plan “get 'em”!
Surprise round, we just move up. 4:52 – round 1
Shay moves up enough to see two tieflings around a little table chatting. “I take a minor to hate him.”
For the record, Eddy has decided that Khantar is a Skeksis (from Dark Crystal) and has been doing the voice as appropriate. It is very disturbing.
The tieflings are like, “No, wait don't kill us you want to kill the gnolls you're adventurers, right? Go fight the gnolls they're over there there's a priestess and she'll probably come out soon and it will be ack don't kill us!”
Then the gnoll priestess comes out. She's like, “What's going on out here?!” in Common. Then she charges Tom. She doesn't do a huge amount of damage, but she hits a 32 AC. This puts her right next to Tom, of course.
5:10 – There is an earth-shattering kaboom and the center doors fly open, and a terrible hairy monkey terrible thing appears. It's a bar-lgura, a demon. Large elemental beast, level 8 brute. It's got reach 2 but not threatening reach. It was in a little side room with an altar. The altar contains a book.
The gnoll priestess doesn't have that many hit points. We drop her pretty easily.
“I say nice soothing things to the beast.” - peter “I say angry things. It's a frakking demon!” - tempest
We also drop the demon reasonably easily, and the tieflings are too intimidated to stab us in the back.
The gnoll had a locked chest in her bedroom. It contained some shadowfell gloves. We also find a gold necklace with diamonds and rubies, worth 450 gp. Also a jade bracelet worth 100 gp. And 62 gp of gold.
The altar is made of humanoid bones wired together. The book is “The Book of Wrath Unveiled.” It's a treatise on being a cultist of Baphomet or something. Also it's one of the four things we were supposed to get.
The tieflings tell us that they're adventurers, but there were too many gnolls, so they decided to try to deal with them instead of fighting, since there are, you know, only 2 of them.
We convince them that we're lunatics, and they wander off.
Okay, so we've now exhausted everything that we thought was outside the Well of Demons, although of course this was inside, since it got us the book, and the red water worked.
Now we try to follow the directions to the Mask.
We pass through some stone doors and find ourselves in a 10x10 chamber, with creepy black curtains blocking further progress. Shay attempts to peek through the curtains, but rolls a 1.
Roll intiative. Shay disappears. He finds himself in a room with no exits, and a starving gnoll. They start fighting each other.
Selene glances through the curtains. There's a big chamber full of mirrorred pillars. She closes the curtain. Tempest heads out into the room. She scouts it a little more. Then she accidentally looks into a mirror and is sucked in. Khantar and Tom walk forward with their eyes closed. Peter and Selene decide to go into the room with their eyes closed, Peter left, Selene right, and scout out the walls.
Selene comes up along a pillar, which she feels. It doesn't suck her in and feels like a smooth mirror. She keeps her eyes closed.
Khantar walks forward and comes up against a pillar. He smashes it with his dagger and cracks it somewhat, but doesn't explode it. Tom walks straight into a pillar and smashes it. This breaks it. Now it's a stone pillar with four frames and a bunch of shattered glass, but Shay and Tempest don't reappear. (We can't hear them and have no idea where they are.)
“Is it just me, or does this feel like a particularly stupid game of Robo Rally?”
Tom and Khantar keep wandering around smashing mirrors when they find them. Peter manages to work his way up to the far curtain.
After they kill the gnoll, Tempest checks out the room. It's unnaturally smooth, and when she listens, she can hear absolutely nothing outside. She tries to attack the wall and crits. It has some resist for being stone, but she does chip at it.
Selene picks up a mirror shard and walks up to Peter. Peter pulls aside the curtain and opens his eyes. (Selene keeps hers closed.) There's an altar with a masky thing on it. Also there are some statues of minotaurs. Uh, and some skeletons. Peter, turning around to report, sees himself in a mirror but doesn't get sucked into the tiny room. Instead he teleports back near to the entrance.
Khantar goes through the curtain and takes the mask off of the altar. Underneath is a hand-shaped indentation. Tom goes through and puts his hand in it. This warps Shay and Tempest to the altar.
We bloody one of the skeletons, which causes it to explode. Then we kill it. Tom gets critted on both of these attacks. Tom is a zombie magnet.
There is some craziness with moving around because Khantar is at like 4 hp and Peter got teleported back to the beginning of the room again and we have to get Khantar away from the skeleton so that he can go away while Shay who has plenty of hp kills the exploding skeleton.
Eventually Shay kills it. He scouts out the altar room. There isn't anything interesting. This altar is brass, if that turns out to be relevant later.
The DM informs us that the little room was the “Oubliette of the Empty Mind.” Apparently there were life-draining mirrors, teleport-to-each-other pillars, and teleport-to-the-terrible-room-of-traps pillars.
Tempest Arcanas the mask. It is a magic item beyond its ritual uses. If you wear the mask you gain darkvision. Non-minotaurs wearing the mask who are bloodied select their combat targets randomly. Okay, well, we won't wear that.
Uh, during our short rest, a random effect occurs which causes us to HORRIBLY GLIMPSE THE ABYSS. It's a will attack which causes us to take a -2 to will defenses until we complete a different short rest. (this does affect selene)
