Group A Session 6
Group A session 6
Kythorn 18, 1479 DR
Another morning dawns for our heroes. They enjoy a quick breakfast and go over the letter they got from Taran. Apparantly a woman named Dressa Drave got wind of the group's actions in Dragon's Delve and wants to meet them at her place. "We can check it out later." Roa mentions. First it is shopping time.
First of all Kharzak sets out for the temple of Vune. Once there he is welcomed by the right hand of the high priestess of the temple. She leads him to the high priestess, Iris. She takes Kharzak to her office, closes the door and speaks in hushed tones. Apparantly a good friend of the temple, Baine Strongbow, was brutally murdered by assassins recently. Baine had defended the temple from the attacks of a hag and her demons and the assassins must have been payback. Kharzak starts to wonder how this is specifically tied to him. Then Iris explains that Baine was a paladin of Lathander and his very essence was tied to his mace. If the mace was to find its way back to the temple, they might be able to raise Baine from the dead.
Iris has contacted the temple of Lathander and they sent Kharzak. Kharzak immediately agrees to help out and keep an eye open for the hag, the assassin's and the mace housing Baine's conciousness. Iris gives Kharzak a potion of cure light wounds. He thanks Iris, makes a donation to the temple, and heads back to the Lost Shepard.
In the meantime Summer and Roa set off to do some shopping at Fascher's. They make a few deals, good ones, and Fascher gets a promise out of them to tell them all their stories when they return. Outside Ravion waits until the ladies have made their exit. He moves in to woo Fascher with the ancient bottle of wine from Chordille Keep and the yellow agate. Fascher is not really interested in them, but points Ravion in the direction of Felstor, an elven sage living right here in town. Finally Kharzak also enters the store, having just returned from the temple. He tries to find something to exchange the masterwork longsword he has for, but fails. Fascher does point him towards Aesa's smithy for more metal work. Quite a morning for Fascher to say the least.
Summer, Roa and Ravion meet up and set off towards Felstor, master sage. A rather luxurious building with a sign 'Felstor Knovelli, master sage' tells them they are at the right place. A halfling opens the door. "Good morning, can I help you?"
"Why yes, we were looking for Felstor, master sage." Ravion asks in his best diplomacy mode. "Ah yes, of course, come in and I will see if he has time for you." [I changed the concept for Felstor around a little, since Ravion wants to be a loremaster and is an elf, I figured this would fit better.] They are led into a rather large study, a small library. It has a balcony and it filled with books on each side except for the lone window in the back. Several tables littered with books stand around the room, but an expensive redbirch desk stands in front of the big window. At the desk sits a moon-elf, reading an acient looking tome. The place is absolutely quiet, unnaturally quiet.
"If you could please wait here." The halfling whispers as he motions to a table and scatters off towards the elf. They exchange some whispers, a nod or two, and the halfling returns. "He will speak with you shortly, if you could take a seat." The halfling then serves some drinks, and takes a seat himself. And then they start waiting. Ten minutes pass, and the elf just keeps on reading.
"I think I am going to tell him-" Summer starts to say, "Sshhh" the halfling interrupts. Ravion and Roa make themselves busy with some reading. Ravion mutters "This is how I want to end up." [His player has his mind set on the loremaster prestige class.]
Finally Summer can't take it anymore, stands up, and starts heading towards the master sage. The halfling quickly cuts her off and quietly suggests she sit down. Muttering, she does. After 45 minutes the elf stands up and walks towards our heroes. "Welcome, welcome. Do excuse the wait, but I had business to attend to. Maybe a next time, an appointment before hand?" Pleasantries are exchanged.
Felstor turns out to be quite the nice guy, highly educated and interested in expensive wares. He and Ravion immediately strike it off. Ravion presents the aged bottle of Chordille wine. "You found this in the ruins of Chordille keep you say? Then it must be at least 90 years old." [He made his knowledge check easily.] Felstor, impressed, pays the party 35 gold for the wine. He also takes the agate off their hands for a price.
"If you ever need me to look into anything for you, my services are available." As Felstor finishes the conversation. The party takes it's leave.
Next stop, the smithy for Roa. The local smithy, Aesa's smithy, is bursting with productivity. Two apprentices are working on all kinds of metal items and a dwarvish silversmith is working on a workbench. Aesa herself is a huge woman, tall, light blue eyes, definitely not from around here. She carries a beautiful longsword on her side, even when she is working. "A souvenir from my adventuring days." she explains. [Since Roa's player wants to work towards the longsword weapon master prestige class I figured this would be a nice change to Aesa.]
Roa strikes a deal to buy a nice chainmail shirt and formfit it herself in the smithy the coming two days. Apparantly Aesa herself has to get out more the next two days. She explains how Erro, the sheriff, has requested the aid of the deputies to deal with the Bestial Host groups that surface around town more and more. Normally the sheriff and the two constables are enough to deal with matters of law. When more hands are needed the deputies, twenty in total, can be called in to help out. The deputies are mostly ex-adventurer types. If all else fails the militia can be gathered, normal peasants with pitchforks basically. That has never happened though.
The next two days are spend equipping themselves and finishing business in town to head back to Dragon's Delve.
Kythorn 20, 1479 DR
Another day, another breakfast. "Actually we should go talk to that Dressa lady before we head off." Roa suddenly remembers. Dressa seems to live in a nice house with a beautiful garden full of colorful flowers. She hails the party, quickly motions them in and explains her predicament. Apparantly her husband is not here, a lot. He works in Waterdeep, so she sometimes gets company by the brother of her husband, one Chasmal. A while back some people started dissapearing in Brindenford though and it seemed Chasmal was involved.
One night Dressa came home with her kid and she was confronted by Chasmal. He explained he had to leave, that he didn't want to hurt anymore people. He said he had become something dangerous, something wolflike. He then fled to Dragon's Delve, so he wouldn't hurt anyone else. Dressa blames herself that she didn't stop him, and now she wants him to come back to town and work out a solution. "There has to be a way to fix this."
She begs the party to help her, she even gives them a potion that gives strength to the imbiber. Something her husband used around the house. The party reluctantly agrees to help her, deciding it is the best thing to do, but unsure if they can pull it off.
Sometime later they find themselves back on the streets. "We got a lycanthrope." Ravion ponders. "No 'work around the house strength' potion is going to help us with that. He would tear you a new one Roa.", "We'll figure something out" Roa replies.
They set out for Dragon's Delve and after a quiet, almost dull, journey they arrive at the Delve when it has already gotten dark.
"We should check out the north tower, the butler's diary mentioned it." They decide, but there is not really anything left of the north tower. So they first rest up, to enter Dragon's Delve the next day.
Kythorn 21, 1479 DR
All ready to descent back into Dragon's Delve the party quickly memorizes their spells and goes on in to 'finish the Bestial Host wing'. They quickly peek in on the beast god temple, which is the same as they left it. Then they proceed to 'the bat cave'. They want to check the room out a bit more without the problem of bats. So Summer lights a torch and throws it into the room. "Fire in the hole!"
The sound of bats is defeaning. They quickly close the door and decide to wait it out. After a while it quiets down in the room. Kharzak sticks his head in to check it out. Something he should not have done. Bats immediately swarm him (and Roa, who is also in the doorway). The party tries to slash the bats as much as they can, but their weapons are rather ineffective against hundreds of little bats. Kharzak is bleeding from hundreds of small bites. To make matters worse he even fumbles with his weapon, twice, and keeps dropping it.
Eventually they do manage to wipe out all the bats. A few retreat through a hole in the bat cave, but Kharzak and Roa stand in a pile of bat corpses. "Stick MY HEAD IN!? Remind me to not listen to you anymore Summer." Kharzak grumbles.
Then he notices, his toad, Bartholemew the first, is dead. The bats bit him as well. "Nooooooo!", "Shhh!". [Kharzak's player is very convincing in portraying a sad, sad, dwarf.] Summer quickly checks the room, finds a collapsed staircase that must have connected to the keep in past days, scoops some bat guano in a potion, and then leaves. They decide to bury poor Bartholemew (the first) outside on the hills of Dragon's Delve. "Alas, we hardly knew him."
Kharzak is now out for blood. They decide to brave the room with the beholder, since the pool told them it was safe for now. The beholder is nowhere to be seen. In the middle of the room is a shaft surrounded by glass, which they hadn't noticed before. "I see." Roa gets it. Kharzak tries to detect magic on the shaft and sees it is overwhelming abjuration magic, blinding him momentarily. Two more doors and a corridor heading towards the mountain lions make up the room. Summer listens at both doors. One is silent, but the other... is cold, very cold. She hears howling winds behind the door. "Pass.", as they quickly enter the other door, bypassing the lions and the cold door. [They didn't notice the secret door just yet.]
A long corridor stretches before them. A single branch to the west ends abruptly in a door. They decide to check it out. Behind it is a room with two statues, another door and another corridor. Ravion hears a feint buzz, but nothing he can pinpoint. "Seems safe enough, but let me check it out." as Summer starts to search the room. The moment she has set a foot in the room though the statues crackle and zap Summer with some kind of blue lightning. It hurts, a lot, but doesn't actually leave and damage on the halfling. Roa quickly pulls Summer back into the hallway. "Zappy room! Zappy room is bad." as she closes the door. "This is now the zappy room, lets ignore it for now." Ravion names the room. [My players have a tendency to name certain rooms.]
They follow the rest of the corridor to the south and enter a room with four niches. Every niche has a statue, small table with some things like candles, pouches, etc. and two paintings located besides each statue. They are all labelled "Pholean Worldweaver", "Shakaran Titanslayer", "Lissandra the Enchanter" and "Caval the Conjuror".
Summer decides to check out the niche with Lissandra's statue. Immediately she notices something strange is going on, the paintings whisper to her to take her most dear posession and put it in front of the statue. Summer wasn't about to do that, but felt a strange urge to do so. Thankfully she managed to resist that urge. "Ok this is odd, let me see if I can get it to do that again." as the rest of the party moves into the room. Summer strips down her equipment and puts it in the hallway, Roa guards it. The moment Summer moves towards the statue again, she gets another compulsion. She still doesn't feel she has to, but she puts the only posession on her at the statue, a sling. The sling dissapears in a flash of light.
Kharzak wasn't so lucky. It seems the whispering affects everyone in the room. Kharzak takes out his silver holy symbol and starts to head towards the statue to put it down. "No!" Roa yells, but Kharzak ignores her, convinced he must put down his dearest posession. Summer will have none of that and grabs the symbol. Kharzak is then shaken till he pops 'out of it'. Close call.
"You know, we could be dealing with some apprentice of the mages four. This power would have been irrisistable if it was actually cast by one of them. And a strange kind of worship is going on here with the tables, that could be altars." Ravion remarks. [The player almost got it spot on.] They then take a look at the statue of Pholean Woldweaver. Nothing strange about that one, but there is a handwritten book on the table. It is quickly looted. It is a journal of a mage called Serestique that is apparantly trying to find the mages four. She has build these shrines and has apparantly dissapeared herself.
"Fan-girl sanctuary, I called it!" Ravion calls out. [Still, the player got so close with guessing what the room was before reading the book, very nice. They loved the book as well. Lots of hints about the other levels.]
They turn their attention to the statue of Shakaran Titanslayer and notice a staff he is leaning on can be removed. The moment Summer does so, the staff shrinks to a comfortable fit for her size. "What?", "Must be magic!", "...Awesome!" Summer grins and pockets the staff.
The final statue is of Caval the Conjuror, and through a detect magic they see the arms of the statue are radiating conjuration magic. "Let's not touch that." Summer mentions. The paintings here depict several creatures that normally should not get along, getting along. "This is a master of conjuration, chances are the arms will summon some kind of creature." Ravion concludes. "But I want to hit something!" Roa objects. "Ah fine!" as Ravion touches the arms. He hears a monster summoning spell being cast and a slightly larger then normal crocodile appears in the middle of the room. It is shades of red, has demonic spikes on it's back and roars as it attacks.
[We called it here, because we were simply out of time. Quite a cliffhanger. The PCs worry about that fiendish crocodile now, suspecting it to be CR 3 or 4. It is only 2, but hey. It also allows me to quickly paint the model, instead of it being unpainted. I am also prepping a large animated object build out of smaller items for another upcoming room. Here is a sneakpeak of the paintjob in progress.]
Kythorn 18, 1479 DR
Another morning dawns for our heroes. They enjoy a quick breakfast and go over the letter they got from Taran. Apparantly a woman named Dressa Drave got wind of the group's actions in Dragon's Delve and wants to meet them at her place. "We can check it out later." Roa mentions. First it is shopping time.
First of all Kharzak sets out for the temple of Vune. Once there he is welcomed by the right hand of the high priestess of the temple. She leads him to the high priestess, Iris. She takes Kharzak to her office, closes the door and speaks in hushed tones. Apparantly a good friend of the temple, Baine Strongbow, was brutally murdered by assassins recently. Baine had defended the temple from the attacks of a hag and her demons and the assassins must have been payback. Kharzak starts to wonder how this is specifically tied to him. Then Iris explains that Baine was a paladin of Lathander and his very essence was tied to his mace. If the mace was to find its way back to the temple, they might be able to raise Baine from the dead.
Iris has contacted the temple of Lathander and they sent Kharzak. Kharzak immediately agrees to help out and keep an eye open for the hag, the assassin's and the mace housing Baine's conciousness. Iris gives Kharzak a potion of cure light wounds. He thanks Iris, makes a donation to the temple, and heads back to the Lost Shepard.
In the meantime Summer and Roa set off to do some shopping at Fascher's. They make a few deals, good ones, and Fascher gets a promise out of them to tell them all their stories when they return. Outside Ravion waits until the ladies have made their exit. He moves in to woo Fascher with the ancient bottle of wine from Chordille Keep and the yellow agate. Fascher is not really interested in them, but points Ravion in the direction of Felstor, an elven sage living right here in town. Finally Kharzak also enters the store, having just returned from the temple. He tries to find something to exchange the masterwork longsword he has for, but fails. Fascher does point him towards Aesa's smithy for more metal work. Quite a morning for Fascher to say the least.
Summer, Roa and Ravion meet up and set off towards Felstor, master sage. A rather luxurious building with a sign 'Felstor Knovelli, master sage' tells them they are at the right place. A halfling opens the door. "Good morning, can I help you?"
"Why yes, we were looking for Felstor, master sage." Ravion asks in his best diplomacy mode. "Ah yes, of course, come in and I will see if he has time for you." [I changed the concept for Felstor around a little, since Ravion wants to be a loremaster and is an elf, I figured this would fit better.] They are led into a rather large study, a small library. It has a balcony and it filled with books on each side except for the lone window in the back. Several tables littered with books stand around the room, but an expensive redbirch desk stands in front of the big window. At the desk sits a moon-elf, reading an acient looking tome. The place is absolutely quiet, unnaturally quiet.
"If you could please wait here." The halfling whispers as he motions to a table and scatters off towards the elf. They exchange some whispers, a nod or two, and the halfling returns. "He will speak with you shortly, if you could take a seat." The halfling then serves some drinks, and takes a seat himself. And then they start waiting. Ten minutes pass, and the elf just keeps on reading.
"I think I am going to tell him-" Summer starts to say, "Sshhh" the halfling interrupts. Ravion and Roa make themselves busy with some reading. Ravion mutters "This is how I want to end up." [His player has his mind set on the loremaster prestige class.]
Finally Summer can't take it anymore, stands up, and starts heading towards the master sage. The halfling quickly cuts her off and quietly suggests she sit down. Muttering, she does. After 45 minutes the elf stands up and walks towards our heroes. "Welcome, welcome. Do excuse the wait, but I had business to attend to. Maybe a next time, an appointment before hand?" Pleasantries are exchanged.
Felstor turns out to be quite the nice guy, highly educated and interested in expensive wares. He and Ravion immediately strike it off. Ravion presents the aged bottle of Chordille wine. "You found this in the ruins of Chordille keep you say? Then it must be at least 90 years old." [He made his knowledge check easily.] Felstor, impressed, pays the party 35 gold for the wine. He also takes the agate off their hands for a price.
"If you ever need me to look into anything for you, my services are available." As Felstor finishes the conversation. The party takes it's leave.
Next stop, the smithy for Roa. The local smithy, Aesa's smithy, is bursting with productivity. Two apprentices are working on all kinds of metal items and a dwarvish silversmith is working on a workbench. Aesa herself is a huge woman, tall, light blue eyes, definitely not from around here. She carries a beautiful longsword on her side, even when she is working. "A souvenir from my adventuring days." she explains. [Since Roa's player wants to work towards the longsword weapon master prestige class I figured this would be a nice change to Aesa.]
Roa strikes a deal to buy a nice chainmail shirt and formfit it herself in the smithy the coming two days. Apparantly Aesa herself has to get out more the next two days. She explains how Erro, the sheriff, has requested the aid of the deputies to deal with the Bestial Host groups that surface around town more and more. Normally the sheriff and the two constables are enough to deal with matters of law. When more hands are needed the deputies, twenty in total, can be called in to help out. The deputies are mostly ex-adventurer types. If all else fails the militia can be gathered, normal peasants with pitchforks basically. That has never happened though.
The next two days are spend equipping themselves and finishing business in town to head back to Dragon's Delve.
Kythorn 20, 1479 DR
Another day, another breakfast. "Actually we should go talk to that Dressa lady before we head off." Roa suddenly remembers. Dressa seems to live in a nice house with a beautiful garden full of colorful flowers. She hails the party, quickly motions them in and explains her predicament. Apparantly her husband is not here, a lot. He works in Waterdeep, so she sometimes gets company by the brother of her husband, one Chasmal. A while back some people started dissapearing in Brindenford though and it seemed Chasmal was involved.
One night Dressa came home with her kid and she was confronted by Chasmal. He explained he had to leave, that he didn't want to hurt anymore people. He said he had become something dangerous, something wolflike. He then fled to Dragon's Delve, so he wouldn't hurt anyone else. Dressa blames herself that she didn't stop him, and now she wants him to come back to town and work out a solution. "There has to be a way to fix this."
She begs the party to help her, she even gives them a potion that gives strength to the imbiber. Something her husband used around the house. The party reluctantly agrees to help her, deciding it is the best thing to do, but unsure if they can pull it off.
Sometime later they find themselves back on the streets. "We got a lycanthrope." Ravion ponders. "No 'work around the house strength' potion is going to help us with that. He would tear you a new one Roa.", "We'll figure something out" Roa replies.
They set out for Dragon's Delve and after a quiet, almost dull, journey they arrive at the Delve when it has already gotten dark.
"We should check out the north tower, the butler's diary mentioned it." They decide, but there is not really anything left of the north tower. So they first rest up, to enter Dragon's Delve the next day.
Kythorn 21, 1479 DR
All ready to descent back into Dragon's Delve the party quickly memorizes their spells and goes on in to 'finish the Bestial Host wing'. They quickly peek in on the beast god temple, which is the same as they left it. Then they proceed to 'the bat cave'. They want to check the room out a bit more without the problem of bats. So Summer lights a torch and throws it into the room. "Fire in the hole!"
The sound of bats is defeaning. They quickly close the door and decide to wait it out. After a while it quiets down in the room. Kharzak sticks his head in to check it out. Something he should not have done. Bats immediately swarm him (and Roa, who is also in the doorway). The party tries to slash the bats as much as they can, but their weapons are rather ineffective against hundreds of little bats. Kharzak is bleeding from hundreds of small bites. To make matters worse he even fumbles with his weapon, twice, and keeps dropping it.
Eventually they do manage to wipe out all the bats. A few retreat through a hole in the bat cave, but Kharzak and Roa stand in a pile of bat corpses. "Stick MY HEAD IN!? Remind me to not listen to you anymore Summer." Kharzak grumbles.
Then he notices, his toad, Bartholemew the first, is dead. The bats bit him as well. "Nooooooo!", "Shhh!". [Kharzak's player is very convincing in portraying a sad, sad, dwarf.] Summer quickly checks the room, finds a collapsed staircase that must have connected to the keep in past days, scoops some bat guano in a potion, and then leaves. They decide to bury poor Bartholemew (the first) outside on the hills of Dragon's Delve. "Alas, we hardly knew him."
Kharzak is now out for blood. They decide to brave the room with the beholder, since the pool told them it was safe for now. The beholder is nowhere to be seen. In the middle of the room is a shaft surrounded by glass, which they hadn't noticed before. "I see." Roa gets it. Kharzak tries to detect magic on the shaft and sees it is overwhelming abjuration magic, blinding him momentarily. Two more doors and a corridor heading towards the mountain lions make up the room. Summer listens at both doors. One is silent, but the other... is cold, very cold. She hears howling winds behind the door. "Pass.", as they quickly enter the other door, bypassing the lions and the cold door. [They didn't notice the secret door just yet.]
A long corridor stretches before them. A single branch to the west ends abruptly in a door. They decide to check it out. Behind it is a room with two statues, another door and another corridor. Ravion hears a feint buzz, but nothing he can pinpoint. "Seems safe enough, but let me check it out." as Summer starts to search the room. The moment she has set a foot in the room though the statues crackle and zap Summer with some kind of blue lightning. It hurts, a lot, but doesn't actually leave and damage on the halfling. Roa quickly pulls Summer back into the hallway. "Zappy room! Zappy room is bad." as she closes the door. "This is now the zappy room, lets ignore it for now." Ravion names the room. [My players have a tendency to name certain rooms.]
They follow the rest of the corridor to the south and enter a room with four niches. Every niche has a statue, small table with some things like candles, pouches, etc. and two paintings located besides each statue. They are all labelled "Pholean Worldweaver", "Shakaran Titanslayer", "Lissandra the Enchanter" and "Caval the Conjuror".
Summer decides to check out the niche with Lissandra's statue. Immediately she notices something strange is going on, the paintings whisper to her to take her most dear posession and put it in front of the statue. Summer wasn't about to do that, but felt a strange urge to do so. Thankfully she managed to resist that urge. "Ok this is odd, let me see if I can get it to do that again." as the rest of the party moves into the room. Summer strips down her equipment and puts it in the hallway, Roa guards it. The moment Summer moves towards the statue again, she gets another compulsion. She still doesn't feel she has to, but she puts the only posession on her at the statue, a sling. The sling dissapears in a flash of light.
Kharzak wasn't so lucky. It seems the whispering affects everyone in the room. Kharzak takes out his silver holy symbol and starts to head towards the statue to put it down. "No!" Roa yells, but Kharzak ignores her, convinced he must put down his dearest posession. Summer will have none of that and grabs the symbol. Kharzak is then shaken till he pops 'out of it'. Close call.
"You know, we could be dealing with some apprentice of the mages four. This power would have been irrisistable if it was actually cast by one of them. And a strange kind of worship is going on here with the tables, that could be altars." Ravion remarks. [The player almost got it spot on.] They then take a look at the statue of Pholean Woldweaver. Nothing strange about that one, but there is a handwritten book on the table. It is quickly looted. It is a journal of a mage called Serestique that is apparantly trying to find the mages four. She has build these shrines and has apparantly dissapeared herself.
"Fan-girl sanctuary, I called it!" Ravion calls out. [Still, the player got so close with guessing what the room was before reading the book, very nice. They loved the book as well. Lots of hints about the other levels.]
They turn their attention to the statue of Shakaran Titanslayer and notice a staff he is leaning on can be removed. The moment Summer does so, the staff shrinks to a comfortable fit for her size. "What?", "Must be magic!", "...Awesome!" Summer grins and pockets the staff.
The final statue is of Caval the Conjuror, and through a detect magic they see the arms of the statue are radiating conjuration magic. "Let's not touch that." Summer mentions. The paintings here depict several creatures that normally should not get along, getting along. "This is a master of conjuration, chances are the arms will summon some kind of creature." Ravion concludes. "But I want to hit something!" Roa objects. "Ah fine!" as Ravion touches the arms. He hears a monster summoning spell being cast and a slightly larger then normal crocodile appears in the middle of the room. It is shades of red, has demonic spikes on it's back and roars as it attacks.
[We called it here, because we were simply out of time. Quite a cliffhanger. The PCs worry about that fiendish crocodile now, suspecting it to be CR 3 or 4. It is only 2, but hey. It also allows me to quickly paint the model, instead of it being unpainted. I am also prepping a large animated object build out of smaller items for another upcoming room. Here is a sneakpeak of the paintjob in progress.]