DND writeup June 21st
I missed writing up last month's session! Never fear, my copious notes are here to reconstruct what happened. Also, it was a short session because two players out of our five couldn't make it. But a lot happened!
So! We last left off asleep in a safe room in the vast and terrifying Rappan Athuk dungeon complex. As we awoke, our canny bard Silverhammer sensed a low, machine-like humming. We decided to try the new east door exit of the safe room and found -- it was bricked up! Or is it? There is a brick surface with scrapes, and our stonework-savvy dwarf cleric Marvin says they are fresh scrapes. We grok that either the safe room or the dungeon beyond has moved as if on a vast clockwork machinery, so that it now faces elsewhere. What dark wizardry is this? I mark the stonework with a piece of chalk, just in case it moves again and is relevant later on.
We decide to exit back into the sarcophagus room, but oho! It too is gone! Replaced by an oddly clean and uncannily long hallway. As we venture forth, one side of the hallway appears to have magic visual portals to other spaces, showing us frightening sights, like torture cells, some blasted with fire or flooded, others with blood writing on the walls, others with chained down corpses. On the other side of the hallway there are windows: I bravely peep out one and see a vast sand plain. Frightened, our party begins to run down the corridor. Abruptly, we see one of the portals clear to show A MOTHEREFFING DRAGON THE SIZE OF A HOUSE, chained in a room. Another portal shows on a repeat the fate of the party of mercenaries we met back in the village--in a fateful loop we see them running from a swarm of dire rats, plunging into a pit, a hideous crunching sound, and then it begins again. Yet another portal shows us AN EVEN BIGGER DRAGON, staked to a canyon wall, bleeding. Finally, frightened out of our wits, we reach a door at the end of the corridor: there is a green lever and a red lever. The door is heavy, warm, and made of metal, with a complex glyph carved into it. Bubbles, our wizard pal, cannot read the glyph but says it is very creepy, done by hand, and remarkably symmetrical. Marvin pulls the green lever and the door opens to a small room with a desk, surrounded by racks and racks of vials of...is that blood? And the walls are covered in handwritten notes, each with a date, time and number. Some dates are from the past, some, confusingly, from the future? Yingling (the monk) is looking at a patchwork cloak on the wall and realizes...this is Tattersall's cloak! This is her work room! Our mentor, kidnapped by dark priests of Orcus, whose trail we have been following, was here! We don't know when. The blood vials small potent, some have dried up, others still liquid. Silverhammer find a journal in the desk, it appears to be full of records of the last words people spoke before dying, each a jumble of prophetic words about a god, with notations like "five seconds before death" notating when these mad ravings took place, apparently. Apparently, our mentor has been taking blood from people at the moment of their death. It's a grim realization. We hope she had some kind of good purpose.
Suddenly, the door shuts. We hear the vast machineries moving again! We open the door again to a massive spherical room, the perimeter strewn with garbage, and a massive round stone portal in the middle, guarded by statues. Yingling says she could swear the statue is looking at her....and then its eyes glow, both statues emit a piercing scream, and come alive! Gargoyles, yells Bubbles. One gargoyle flies up to the ceiling, the other lunges toward us. Battle: begin!
One gargoyle slashes with its giant claw at Twila, our half-orc fighter. Silverhammer and I have good luck with short bow and elemental ray, respectively. Yingling tried her new staff with no luck, but Twila hits for. 14 damage! Bubbles fires off a magic missile for 12 damage! We fumble around a bit mid-battle, lots of misses and such. Yingling gets in a good hit with her fancy talking staff and the first gargoyle falls over dead, turning back into rock, hitting stone. Bubbles and I get in some good fire and magic missile damage on the flying gargoyle, who is clawing and biting at Marvin as he tries to cure some light wounds here and there. Twila gets in one big hit for 19 damage and the gargoyle turns back into stone and falls over dead. We get no loot from the gargoyles themselves, but when we rummage around in the garbage we find 3 uncut rubies and 1000 gold pieces! And I find a beautiful wand covered in snake scales, dark green: it fires acid arrows! Silverhammer found a fancy bow and quiver, which Bubbles inspects, and informs him it's a never ending quiver! Handy. Twila finds a +1 AC ring.
Then there's nothing else to do but go through the portal, why not? We step through, our ears pop, and we're suddenly outside! In a circular clearing! With a smoking black mark beneath us! We can see the cottage from here! What joy and relief. We go to the cottage...where we find a strange individual on the threshold. He has silver hair and a long sword that hurts to look at, which makes Yingling cover her ears in pain. It turns out this is another old friend of Tattersall's, Animander Rake, come looking for her. We give him the bad news about how she was kidnapped, and we ask him about her workroom that we found. He tells us about her obsession with these so-called death rattle prophesies. We go into the cottage together, intending to talk further, but find a grisly sight: the daughter of the village inkeep, flayed and hung from a rafter, with dark ugly illegible writing on the wall, some kind of dark ritual to locate Tattersall, according to Animander. He said they used to work together to prevent the cultists from bringing back their god Orcus -- the same cultists who kidnapped her. We ask him, did she kill all those people whose blood she took? He won't quite say. He does give us a ring, a one-way portal ring back into the dungeon, perhaps out of pity. Between the flayed woman, the dark blood ritual, and the further background on our mentor, we're all a bit depressed.
Just as we prepare to cut down her body to bring it to the village, Animander gives us a piece of advice: if we ever run into a trell named Mappo, ask him if Life Stalker is safe. We tell him we've already seen Mappo, and he disappeared from Sandpoint with a mysterious box in a wagon. Animander is so furious at this that he simply disapparates in a puff of smoke. We are left alone to carry the body back to the village.
The town is bustling, so we scurry around behind the inn's stables with the wrapped body so as not to be seen. The innkeeper comes out and Yingling gives him the bad news. He is confused and thinks we are playing a sick prank -- he says his daughter is inside! We send Yingling in to talk to her, but Ying never emerges. So we all go in, what the hell is going on? We feel a sudden sapping of will...no one has the willpower to challenge or ask any questions of the innkeeper's daughter, who serves us tasty beverages, and we lose the whole day drinking. We have zero memory, suddenly, of anything to do with a flayed body or a blood ritual. Huh.
In town we take care of a few things, meanwhile. We deposit some money in the fancy extra-planar bank, and we take Yingling to the necromancer, who diagnoses her with Curse of the Wight! That's what sucked away a whole level from her last session. We pay an arm and a leg to remove her curse. We also sold the uncut rubies and get an amazing 15,000 gold for them! Wow. We head back to the cabin, which is clean and normal, just as it's always been, right? We all take a much-needed rest.
To be continued!!
So! We last left off asleep in a safe room in the vast and terrifying Rappan Athuk dungeon complex. As we awoke, our canny bard Silverhammer sensed a low, machine-like humming. We decided to try the new east door exit of the safe room and found -- it was bricked up! Or is it? There is a brick surface with scrapes, and our stonework-savvy dwarf cleric Marvin says they are fresh scrapes. We grok that either the safe room or the dungeon beyond has moved as if on a vast clockwork machinery, so that it now faces elsewhere. What dark wizardry is this? I mark the stonework with a piece of chalk, just in case it moves again and is relevant later on.
We decide to exit back into the sarcophagus room, but oho! It too is gone! Replaced by an oddly clean and uncannily long hallway. As we venture forth, one side of the hallway appears to have magic visual portals to other spaces, showing us frightening sights, like torture cells, some blasted with fire or flooded, others with blood writing on the walls, others with chained down corpses. On the other side of the hallway there are windows: I bravely peep out one and see a vast sand plain. Frightened, our party begins to run down the corridor. Abruptly, we see one of the portals clear to show A MOTHEREFFING DRAGON THE SIZE OF A HOUSE, chained in a room. Another portal shows on a repeat the fate of the party of mercenaries we met back in the village--in a fateful loop we see them running from a swarm of dire rats, plunging into a pit, a hideous crunching sound, and then it begins again. Yet another portal shows us AN EVEN BIGGER DRAGON, staked to a canyon wall, bleeding. Finally, frightened out of our wits, we reach a door at the end of the corridor: there is a green lever and a red lever. The door is heavy, warm, and made of metal, with a complex glyph carved into it. Bubbles, our wizard pal, cannot read the glyph but says it is very creepy, done by hand, and remarkably symmetrical. Marvin pulls the green lever and the door opens to a small room with a desk, surrounded by racks and racks of vials of...is that blood? And the walls are covered in handwritten notes, each with a date, time and number. Some dates are from the past, some, confusingly, from the future? Yingling (the monk) is looking at a patchwork cloak on the wall and realizes...this is Tattersall's cloak! This is her work room! Our mentor, kidnapped by dark priests of Orcus, whose trail we have been following, was here! We don't know when. The blood vials small potent, some have dried up, others still liquid. Silverhammer find a journal in the desk, it appears to be full of records of the last words people spoke before dying, each a jumble of prophetic words about a god, with notations like "five seconds before death" notating when these mad ravings took place, apparently. Apparently, our mentor has been taking blood from people at the moment of their death. It's a grim realization. We hope she had some kind of good purpose.
Suddenly, the door shuts. We hear the vast machineries moving again! We open the door again to a massive spherical room, the perimeter strewn with garbage, and a massive round stone portal in the middle, guarded by statues. Yingling says she could swear the statue is looking at her....and then its eyes glow, both statues emit a piercing scream, and come alive! Gargoyles, yells Bubbles. One gargoyle flies up to the ceiling, the other lunges toward us. Battle: begin!
One gargoyle slashes with its giant claw at Twila, our half-orc fighter. Silverhammer and I have good luck with short bow and elemental ray, respectively. Yingling tried her new staff with no luck, but Twila hits for. 14 damage! Bubbles fires off a magic missile for 12 damage! We fumble around a bit mid-battle, lots of misses and such. Yingling gets in a good hit with her fancy talking staff and the first gargoyle falls over dead, turning back into rock, hitting stone. Bubbles and I get in some good fire and magic missile damage on the flying gargoyle, who is clawing and biting at Marvin as he tries to cure some light wounds here and there. Twila gets in one big hit for 19 damage and the gargoyle turns back into stone and falls over dead. We get no loot from the gargoyles themselves, but when we rummage around in the garbage we find 3 uncut rubies and 1000 gold pieces! And I find a beautiful wand covered in snake scales, dark green: it fires acid arrows! Silverhammer found a fancy bow and quiver, which Bubbles inspects, and informs him it's a never ending quiver! Handy. Twila finds a +1 AC ring.
Then there's nothing else to do but go through the portal, why not? We step through, our ears pop, and we're suddenly outside! In a circular clearing! With a smoking black mark beneath us! We can see the cottage from here! What joy and relief. We go to the cottage...where we find a strange individual on the threshold. He has silver hair and a long sword that hurts to look at, which makes Yingling cover her ears in pain. It turns out this is another old friend of Tattersall's, Animander Rake, come looking for her. We give him the bad news about how she was kidnapped, and we ask him about her workroom that we found. He tells us about her obsession with these so-called death rattle prophesies. We go into the cottage together, intending to talk further, but find a grisly sight: the daughter of the village inkeep, flayed and hung from a rafter, with dark ugly illegible writing on the wall, some kind of dark ritual to locate Tattersall, according to Animander. He said they used to work together to prevent the cultists from bringing back their god Orcus -- the same cultists who kidnapped her. We ask him, did she kill all those people whose blood she took? He won't quite say. He does give us a ring, a one-way portal ring back into the dungeon, perhaps out of pity. Between the flayed woman, the dark blood ritual, and the further background on our mentor, we're all a bit depressed.
Just as we prepare to cut down her body to bring it to the village, Animander gives us a piece of advice: if we ever run into a trell named Mappo, ask him if Life Stalker is safe. We tell him we've already seen Mappo, and he disappeared from Sandpoint with a mysterious box in a wagon. Animander is so furious at this that he simply disapparates in a puff of smoke. We are left alone to carry the body back to the village.
The town is bustling, so we scurry around behind the inn's stables with the wrapped body so as not to be seen. The innkeeper comes out and Yingling gives him the bad news. He is confused and thinks we are playing a sick prank -- he says his daughter is inside! We send Yingling in to talk to her, but Ying never emerges. So we all go in, what the hell is going on? We feel a sudden sapping of will...no one has the willpower to challenge or ask any questions of the innkeeper's daughter, who serves us tasty beverages, and we lose the whole day drinking. We have zero memory, suddenly, of anything to do with a flayed body or a blood ritual. Huh.
In town we take care of a few things, meanwhile. We deposit some money in the fancy extra-planar bank, and we take Yingling to the necromancer, who diagnoses her with Curse of the Wight! That's what sucked away a whole level from her last session. We pay an arm and a leg to remove her curse. We also sold the uncut rubies and get an amazing 15,000 gold for them! Wow. We head back to the cabin, which is clean and normal, just as it's always been, right? We all take a much-needed rest.
To be continued!!