October 22, 2017
The Continuing Visit to the Castle in the Sky
From my left:
Nicholas playing Merrick the 7th
level human fighter
Mikey playing Ivan Lok'tar the 5th
level dwarven fighter
Zack playing LaVeya the 6th/3rd
level human druid/magic-user
New Connor playing Iloxiron the 3rd
level half-elven spellsword
and the DM playing Ydee the 6th
level half-elf thief for the absent Catherine
After using LaVeya's healing spells and
resting, the adventurers were mostly ready to face the trials of the
Proving Grounds again. Merrick and Ydee were trying to untangle
Flever from his pack and harness, but LaVeya said “We got this.”
and the druid led the dwarf and spellsword out to explore the second
level of the Proving Grounds.
Some random wanderings led them through
some rooms where they had been previously they ended up back in the
thirty by thirty room north of where they appeared when they used the
chimes to arrive on this level. The adventurers knew where the three
doors to the south led but not the single door in each of the other
directions, so they decided to explore one of the other doors,
following the right hand rule. Taking the east door out of the room
led them down a short hallway which had a door on both the north and
south walls at the dead end. Right hand rule said go south, so they
followed the hallway beyond this door through two empty twenty by
twenty chambers that were side by side, and through the door on the
far side of the second chamber. It led to another thirty foot long
hallway heading east which ended in a door. Opening that door
revealed impenetrable darkness beyond, so the party turned back and
returned to the original square room with three southern doors and
another in each wall.
The north door from this room led them
into a thirty by thirty foot room with a large dry fountain basin
taking up the enter of the room. From the center of the basin stood
a roughly five foot tall by six inch diameter stone pillar with a
mixing bowl sized basin on the top of it. LaVeya poured some water
from her waterskin into the base of the fountain, but it just pooled
there in the dust. She then cast a create water spell in the upper
basin of the fountain. The upper bowl filled and overflowed a bit.
LaVeya went to look in the bowl but wasn't quite tall enough to see
into it. Ivan picked her up and she could see that the water had
turned a pinkish color. About this time Merrick and Ydee showed up
without Flever who was still hopelessly entangled in his equipment.
LaVeya shifted into bird form to fly up and perch on the rim of the
bowl so she could investigate further. She took a little sip of the
water but found it to taste bitter and somewhat unpleasant. Since
there was nothing to be found here, the adventurers decided to move
on.
Reentering the room with six doors, the
adventurers turned to the west and found themselves entering in the
center of the east wall of a thirty foot by forty foot room. A stone
column was in each corner of the room, and a throne with a shadowy
figure on it was against the far west wall. Carefully they
approached the throne and the figure which didn't seem to react to
them. Ivan took it on himself to smack the shadowy figure and after
a couple of attempts succeeded in doing so. The contact was
unpleasantly cold and the shadowy figure reacted to it aggressively.
A brief battle began and the shadowy figure soon dissipated leaving
nothing in its wake. Examination began of the throne but was
interrupted by Iloxiron sitting on it, certain in the fact that
SOMETHING good would happen from sitting on random thrones sooner or
later. There was a small dark flash from behind him as some sort of
spell activated, and for a moment his eyes went dark before returning
to normal. He insisted he was fine, but the others were not so sure.
After Iloxiron left the seat Ydee
finished her examination, disarmed a trap, and then had the dwarf
open the seat. A small stone coffer was underneath and after an
examination and the usual by Ydee it was opened. Within was a simple
scroll tube. Ydee checked it out, and then LaVeya opened it. Inside
was a simple scroll with a message written on it that started with
the pleasant message “For you it is too late...” The remainder
of the brief message referred to a place “...where no one could
go.” before it crumbled to dust. But Iloxiron insists he is fine,
so there you are.
Slightly concerned by this, they
returned to Ivy to ask some questions about the shadow on the throne.
Ivy gave the verbal equivalent of a shrug to this. Some more
questions were asked and among the information gained was that the
chimes only took adventurers to a small and enclosed section of the
third level. Stairs were the other way to descend to the greater
part of the third level. When asked she replied that the nearest set
were in the northeast section of the dungeon beyond the darkness,
though there was another set in the southern section of the dungeon
if the adventurers did not want to go through the darkness. Closer
sounded better than further, so the party decided to go into the
darkness once again.
On their way to the dark hallway that
they had just discovered, the party began to notice a shadowy shape
following them at a distance. Attacks against it did nothing
obvious, and it avoided being attacked by merging into nearby doors
and walls. Though it had no facial features it seemed to always be
facing Iloxiron. This caused some more concern for the party
members, but they continued on.
Returning to the newly discovered
hallway to darkness, the party roped themselves together and
proceeded along, keeping their left hands against the wall on that
side and carefully moving forward. They followed the wall as it
wound around through the darkness until they discovered a door.
Opening it revealed more darkness beyond, so they went through the
door and explored further. Wrapping around what they took to be the
inside of a room they came to another door in an alcove on the far
side. Opening it they continued on following the wall until they
came to another door. Opening this one and sticking his head through
the door revealed a naturally dark room to Merrick's eyes instead of
the impossibly dark area they had been in. Lighting a torch since
LaVeya's continual light lantern was no longer lit, the adventurers
realized that the room had eight ghouls in it who leapt to attack.
Some paralysis occurred, but LaVeya's
lesser curing spells kept the party mostly upright and in the fight.
The horror was that Ivan fumbled his weapons twice, first his
silvered bastard sword, then the silvered short sword that was his
backup weapon. One of the ghouls picked up the weapon and proceeded
to use it successfully against the dwarf more than once before being
destroyed.
Once the ghouls were killed, the party
decided to amuse themselves by dissecting them looking for anything
of interest within their corpses while Iloxiron recovered naturally
from being paralyzed. They did find two odd objects, one in each of
two ghouls, that looked like blackened peach pits: hard and slightly
bristly. Ivan thought that they were made of stone. No one had any
ideas of what they might be, so LaVeya tucked them into a pouch for
further study and they continued looking for any stairs down.
The ghoul room had two other doors out
of it, one to the south and another to the east. The south door was
opened first and a short hallway to the east was beyond. At the
eastern end of the hallway the word “BAD” was engraved on the
wall. Noting this the party went back and took the other door.
The eastern door led to a twenty foot
hallway with a door at the far end. Opening that door revealed
another twenty foot hallway with a door at the far end. As Merrick
started down the hallway Ydee recommended against it as she had
noticed a hinged pit trap in the floor. She tried to jam it but
suggested that the party stay on the foot-wide ledge on each side to
traverse the passage. The party was semi-successful crossing except
for LaVeya who stumbled back, failed to catch her balance and
recover, and the jammed pit trap opened anyway and dropped her into a
ten foot deep pit flat on her back with a splat. She made a save and
was not paralyzed by the orange-brown goop she landed in. She tried
to scramble out of the goop that was starting to try to flow over her
and absorb her. Merrick threw the end of a rope down to her, but it
landed close by and as soon as it touched the goop it started to
disintegrate. LaVeya grabbed the rope in a panic and tried to haul
herself out, but the weakened rope snapped. Ydee had been busy doing
her own thing during this and on the next action she handed Merrick
the rest of her rope, one end of which she had tied around her waist.
She then leapt into the pit, took some damage but made her save,
grabbed the druid by the arms, and the human and dwarven fighters
hauled them both out of the pit to safety. (P.S. Zack, remind me to
make some rolls to see what may or may not have been damaged by the
ooze's acidic touch.)
Through the door on the far side the
adventurers found a thirty by twenty room with a door on the far
wall. The room also had a blue wall to the north and a red wall to
the south. The room was searched and a secret door was found in the
west wall in the northwest corner, just north of the door the party
had entered through. No traps were found and the secret door was
opened, setting off the trap (oops?) and firing dozens of small
needle-like missiles from the blue wall. Everyone took some damage,
and beyond the secret door was a twenty foot long hallway with a door
at the far end. After carefully examining the hall for traps, the
party opened the door revealing another twenty foot long hallway with
a square notch roughly one foot on each side and a foot deep cut into
the far end of the hall. As the party moved closer they found a
golden key hanging suspended in the notch. A trap was suspected, so
LaVeya cast resist elements on Merrick to help protect him from any
damage. Grabbing it got Merrick badly shocked but not too badly, and
he now had a gold-colored key that must be useful somewhere, maybe.
Returning back down the two halls and
into the red and blue room the party opened the door in the eastern
wall. The room beyond was thirty by thirty with another door in the
center of the south wall. The only other feature of the room was a
ten foot tall statue of an arrogant looking gnome looking down his
nose at the party. The statue's hands were on its hips and it seemed
to be sneering at the adventurers. Driven by his anti-gnome bigotry,
Merrick went to push the gnome over. The result of this act was a
small bead of fire coming from the gnome and exploding into a huge
fireball that filled the room. Massive damage was done, dropping the
spellsword to the brink of death. Merrick's fury drove him onward
though toppling the statue seemed impossible. Making the attempt
caused another fireball to leap from the statue seemingly
incinerating the spellsword who had just been healed back to
consciousness by LaVeya and badly scorching the remainder of the
group. However this time Ydee realized something was wrong. The
fireballs were illusions and the party's belief in them had made them
react as if they were real. The party was not even slightly singed,
so they ignored the statue and moved on, with Merrick muttering
curses about gnomes.
Elsewhere, tangled in the straps of his
backpack and the chicken-children harness, Flever was totally unaware
of the things being said about his race.
Through the southern door stretched a
hallway with a branch off of it to the west just a few paces away.
At the intersection the western passage went for twenty feet before
ending in a door while the southern branch went thirty feet before
ending in a door. Keeping to the right hand rule the party went
west. Through the door was a thirty by thirty foot room with a door
in the center of the north wall and two doors in the south wall, one
in the southeast corner and the other in the southwest. The
southeast corner's door, being nearest, was opened first. Beyond it
was another southern passageway that branched to the west a few paces
down. Not wanting to continue south, the southwest corner's door was
opened next revealing absolute darkness. Having had more than enough
of that, the party closed the door and checked the northern door.
This door led to a western passageway that turned south. Following
it the adventurers discovered that immediately after the south turn
it turned west again, and then immediately after that it turned back
north and dead ended quickly after that. At the dead end in the
north wall were three iron levers, all in the up position. Carefully
considering the matter, LaVeya decided that she would pull the right
lever because that was obviously the right choice. While her logic
was irrefutable, no one liked it much. The right lever was pulled
and a section of the floor where they stood began to sink in
sections, creating a circular stairway leading downwards.
And there we ended for the day.
Experience points for the adventure
Merrick – 635
Ivan – 585
LaVeya – 535
Iloxiron – 535
Ydee – a positive number
Comments
Post a Comment