November 27th, 2016

Exploring the Proving Grounds of the Castle in the Sky

Will the party find themselves Imprisoned in the Castle in the Sky? This episode answers this question but offers many others in its place, such as what the heck are your characters thinking?

From my left:

Chris playing the elven spellsword Valandil the Survivor whose immunity to combat damage disappears when I put it in his character description.

Sarai playing the elven fighter Desorna the Overloaded whose encumbrance audit was entertaining to say the least.

Nicky-poo playing the human fighter Merrick the Multi-Talented whose sole ability to do massive amounts of damage is mitigated solely by his ability to go for stretches of time without hitting anything.

Nilo playing the elven, oops, halfling cleric Arden who often appears just in the nick of time to burn through all his spell points in one fell swoop of healing, only to need to do it again.

Hunter playing the elven magic-user Strix the Dirtmonger who can cast combat spells, but only with great effectiveness when the target is too powerful to be affected or when an ally can be affected.

Zackery playing the elven magic-user Ahri the Charming, who sometimes can charm an enemy, but doesn't always get the benefit of it.

And Catherine's half-elven thief Ydee the Disemboweler who can gut a bugbear quicker than an Inuit can gut a fish, played by the always kind DM whose players should know well enough not to dispute his self-descriptive statements.

The adventure started where the last one ended, with the players in the fountain room watching the non-working fountain that the party had tried to fill with a little bit of water tempered both with sacrificial blood and soap. With little else to do, and a paucity of spell points to work with, the party decided to sleep for eight hours or so and regain spell points. The time passed uneventfully and spell points were regained. Then came the question of where to go next.

Returning to the hall outside the door the party debated whether to go east or west. After some bickering the decision was made to go east. The party proceeded to go back past the southern passage they had come up by and continue east down the hall. The eastern passage was relatively short, only 20' long, with a door in the south wall in the first 10 feet and a door at the end of the hall at the 20' mark. The door to the south was opened first, and within the party found a half dozen gnolls, three with spears and the remainder with short bows. Battle was quickly joined and it went fairly well for the party, though some damage was done. Strix did cast a sleep spell which slept one of the monsters, but every little bit did help. Once the gnolls were killed and looted (and Strix collected a waterskin full of gnoll blood for some reason) the party continued onward.

The door at the end of the hall led into a 20'x20' room with its only feature being a small fixture that looked like an altar, roughly 3' wide by 1' deep and 2' high. As they looked it over it had three slightly raised symbols on the top of it, and when Desorna touched one of them the entire thing vanished completely. Befuddled by this, the party tried to understand what had happened to it, but in the end they were left without answers. That is they had no answers until they opened the door which they came in through and found that they were looking at a completely different hallway than before. They party quickly realized that they had been transported elsewhere in the complex, hopefully on the same level, and were effectively lost. There was some minor frustration with Desorna, pale elven queen of maps, at this juncture but that is the price of adventuring in the Proving Grounds.

The hallway outside offered a few different options. The party could go to the left, to the right, and after a few steps to the right, straight ahead. After another brief discussion, straight ahead won the day and the party proceeded that way. 20' down this hallway there was a door on the right wall and the passage continued on ahead. Following the right hand rule, Desorna threw open the door to discover that two corpsegrinders were charging at her!

Desorna was unfortunately reduced to one hit point and paralyzed by the monsters' attacks. In an attempt to put her out of her misery, Strix tried to push her prone body into the maw of one of the grinders. Well, Strix claimed that she was trying to pull Desorna out of the way and just failed badly, but it sure looked like a force feeding. Luckily the rest of the party made mincemeat of the monsters before they could feast on the downed fighter. After a brief while Desorna could move again and the party continued down the hallway.

After a zigzag in the hallway it came to a dead end, though there was a door in the left wall at the dead end. This door lead into the lower right corner of a 30'x30' room, with a passageway leaving from the center of the far wall and another door in the upper right corner in the right hand wall. A quick look showed that the far hallway went 20 feet before ending in a door, so the party decided to go through the upper right hand door first. Behind it was a short 10' hallway that opened up into a 20'x20' room. The party found a door in the lower left hand corner of this room which led into another 20'x20' room with a small altar like object against the far wall. Desorna was strongly instructed not to touch it, and she insisted that she wasn't going to anyway. Some examinations revealed no information so instead of seeing what happened if they touched it, the party decided to return to the bigger room and follow the 20' passage and open the door.

This door opened into another 30'x30' room with a door in the center of the left hand wall and another door in the far right hand corner of the right hand wall. This door looked vaguely familiar to the group, and they quickly realized that it was because it resembled the sturdiness and material of the door that they originally entered through. In a hurry to escape, especially since they knew they were likely running out of time before the teleporter went inactive for another three weeks, they burst through the door and went up the stairs into a tower that the inscriptions indicated was the Tower of Faith. However, a nasty surprise was waiting for them in the entry hall in the form of a minotaur armed with a pole axe.

The strong blows of the minotaur badly hurt the party, reducing several of them to single digit hit points, but Arden's spells were enough to keep them in the fight until the massive brute finally died. A magical collar was taken from the minotaur's neck by use of an axe and then cutting it free from the skin it seemed to be grafted to.

The party began exploring the ground floor of the Tower of Faith and they discovered some magical items for clerics, i.e. Arden. The scroll of sanctuary, cure serious wounds, and curing was a blessing, but the book that was later identified as a Tome of Healing, which would have been of great value for the party earlier, was the greatest find. Once the ground floor was explored, the party decided to exit through the front door and return to the Tower of Magic where the teleporter was. A quick jaunt across the courtyard to the doors and an inability to open these doors led the party to remember that they had barred the door previously, preventing their easy entrance. The fear of returning to the Proving Grounds was running high, but Ahri simply cast a knock spell removing the bar and the party was spared the return. Unfortunately, something nasty was waiting for them inside.

Six bugbears were inside the door, and the injured party leapt into combat, hoping to kill the monsters quickly and teleport out again. Unfortunately the bugbears yelled for reinforcements and nine more came to join them just as the last of the first set of bugbears died. A badly wounded group continued the fight, giving more damage than they took for the most part, though liberal use of magic aided in this. As the last bugbears were hard pressed, they yelled one more time and their leader appeared, ready for battle.

The leader, horror of horrors, was not a bugbear but was instead a greater wereboar in human form, though he still had pronounced tusks. He did serious damage with his battle axe, causing Valandil to be dropped to zero hit points for the first time in, well, maybe ever. But in time and with liberal use of magical and silver weapons, the wereboar was also vanquished.

Badly damaged and barely standing, the party dashed up the stairs as fast as they could. A group of land lampreys in the lecture hall waylaid them, but by this point Strix was terrified to the point of no longer caring, so she cast her sleep spell out of her spellbook as if it were a scroll, erasing it and unfortunately erasing the shield spell that was after it. But the sleeping land lampreys were quickly killed and the teleporter was reached. Valandil muttered the words and the party found themselves in the standing stone circle on the bluff over the lake and almost back to safety. It was late afternoon when they arrived and almost highmoon before they reached town and managed to get rooms at the inn before it closed for the night.

With 21 days to go before the teleporter would be open again, the party had time to rest up and to train before they could return to the castle in the sky, which was just enough time to allow at least one member of the party to be able to level up twice, if they could afford to do so...

And with training begun, item identification done, and some things sold for spare cash, the party began to rest before returning once again to the Castle in the Sky...

Total experience per character is 1,154 (577 for Ydee). So, yes, someone tell Hunter he made level 3 as well. Though it amuses the hell out of me still that after last week's xp he was one experience point short. I couldn't have planned on being that evil. Yet it delights me how it worked out.

And, since we have begun Nick's adventure, we will do that instead next week and possibly the week after too, depending on when Matt and Thomas of the original party will be back for Christmas Break. Once they are back, we will likely do some original party adventures.