DF Whiterock Session 20: Red Dragon

Date:

2018-09-14

Weather:

Hot, Mostly Cloudy

Player Characters:

Elias (Wiggles), Wood Elf Cleric, 199 points
Garreth (Zuljita), Half-Orc Fighter, 244 points
Ibizaber (Demented Avenger), Human Thief, 232 points
Polly (Kalzazz), Wood Elf Archer, 218 points
Seépravir (Archon Shiva), High-Elf Wizard, 254 points

Significant NPCs:

Hugin, Human mercenary

Katanya Glimer, Gnome sorceress

Colossal spider

Skeletal Wyrmling

Red dragon

Cave Moray (a.k.a. Ceiling Snake)

We started in the dungeon, in combat time.  In the previous session, Elias had found a secret door, and Elias and Ibizaber had started exploring and found some huge webs behind it.  But we didn't have time to fight a huge spider, so we paused there.

Now, Elias tried burning the webs with his flail with Flaming Weapon cast on it, while Ibizaber backed away from the smelly smoldering webs, and Polly acrobatically jumped off the dragon statue she had been climbing on to come join the party.  Ibizaber spotted a trap door under some of the webs.  (It wasn't easy to spot through all the webs and smoke, but he had crazy-high magically enhanced Perception, and I rolled a 3.)  Everyone clumped up and waited for the webs to burn.

Eventually, the colossal (SM +2) spider that was waiting above the pit decided that nobody was going to fall in it, and got impatient and decided to hop down and bite Seépravir.  Garreth had taken a Wait maneuver, so he got to attack its front legs as they came into range, and he lopped off both of them.  Fortunately for the spider, it still had 6 legs left, so it got to keep moving, and tried to bite Seépravir, and rolled a critical hit.  Unfortunately for the spider, Seépravir used her Luck to negate the crit, and the spider rolled a 16 on one of the forced rerolls, a whiff.  Polly then fired a couple of bodkin arrows into her best guess at the spider's skull area, and guessed right, and killed the spider.

After waiting for more spiders, which didn't appear, Ibizaber dissected the spider's poison sac and collected some poison.  Then Garreth chopped up the spider corpse into manageable bits and moved them away from the pit, so that Zaber and Polly could search inside.  They didn't find anything good in there.  Then Zaber and Polly went around the room searching for secret doors, and didn't find any of those either.  Polly got herself stuck in a web once, but was able to wiggle out.

Eventually the PCs decided there were no secret doors, and Seépravir recast Invisibility and Mage-Stealth on Zaber and then they all returned to the giant room where they had killed the dragon/trog cleric.  Zaber started methodically searching all the walls for secret doors, and found one.

But while that was happening, somehow Elias got lost and wandered outside the room, and ran into a wandering monster.  It was a human-sized skeleton of a dragon, and it tried to kill him, while he tried to kill it.  The other PCs heard the commotion and tried to come to Elias's aid, but he was several seconds of running to the west, and by the time they got there, Elias had destroyed the skeleton, with two solid hits.  (Its bones appeared rather brittle and vulnerable to crushing damage, and he had a flail.)  The party started trying to loot broken draconic skeleton bones, but they seemed pretty crushed and worthless.

Zaber encouraged everyone to stop smashing stupid bones and come with him to the secret door, and they eventually did.  On the other side of the secret door was a narrow, hot, humid passage, which opened into a huge cave.  The cave contained a big pile of hot rocks, and big broken cage, and a red dragon.  (Invisible) Zaber and Polly and Elias were all next to each other, and the dragon ran up and breathed a cone of fire at Polly that happened to also threaten the other two.  Fortunately for them, the dragon missed, and the cone went in a direction where no PCs were standing.

Polly responded by firing a couple of bodkin arrows at the dragon's skull, and it only dodged one of them.  Invisible Zaber started moving into an ambush position, the others moved up, and the dragon breathed fire again, this time in the direction of Elias and Zaber.  Both managed to jump out of the way.

Polly kept shooting bodkins at the dragon's skull, but this time one missed and the dragon dodged the other.  Garreth charged forward and tried taunting the dragon, but this had no effect even though he rolled a 4!  Elias took a swing at the dragon's snout (all that was within reach), but the dragon retreated and dodged.  Seépravir started casting Death Vision, which takes 2 turns to cast.

The dragon breathed a third cone of fire, this time at Polly, Garreth, and Seépravir.  All three dodged, and Seépravir even managed not to mess up her concentration on the spell in progress.  Polly fired two more bodkins, and this time the dragon decided to Drop and Dodge.  It dodged one, but the second slammed into its skull.  Garreth ran up and Rapid Struck the dragon twice, and it failed to dodge either, and the dragon was very badly wounded, but still alive.

Seépravir stopped maintaining a bunch of spells (Dark Vision, Keen Vision, Mage Stealth, Invisibility) to reduce her penalty, then cast Death Vision on the dragon, mentally stunning it with no resistance roll.  (She initially rolled an 18 which would have been a nasty critical failure, but her Luck had recharged, so it worked.)  The dragon's turn came immediately after, and it recovered from mental stun, but that cost it its turn, so it didn't get to breathe fire or try to escape.

Polly put two more bodkins into the dragon's skull, resulting in another death check, which the (very resilient) dragon passed.  Garreth smashed his katana into the dragon's skull twice more, resulting in another passed death check.  Finally, Zaber ran up and All-Out attacked the dragon's eye.  This hit, resulting in a brain shot, and enough damage to bring the dragon past -5 * HT, where it didn't get to roll any more death checks.  (This particular dragon didn't have a Nictitating Membrane over its eyes, though some do.)

There was a pile of coins inside the broken cage, so Zaber went over to investigate.  In addition to the coins, he found some jade strings, a long knife, a silver scroll case, and some gems.  Garreth and Seépravir also searched the pile, and found a couple more gems.  The scroll cast contained a scroll written in Dwarf.  Zaber reads Dwarf (not very well), and figured out it was 3 wizard spells.  The jade strings were magical and Seépravir suspected they were part of the harp they needed to help free the air elemental.  Zaber and Garreth checked out the knife, and decided it was fine and balanced, a pretty nice weapon.

The hot rocks contained a bunch of eggs.  Seépravir took a close look and decided they were probably troglodytes.  With the obvious treasure found, the group decided it was time to harvest dragon bits.  Polly used Garreth's penetrating Katana to remove as much dragon hide as she thought they could fit in their wheelbarrows, and Seépravir extracted a gland from the dragon's throat that she thought might have something to do with fire breath.

They searched the dragon's room for secret doors, didn't find any, and considered heading home.  But they had some time left, and decided to instead explore more of the maze of tunnels where Polly had earlier been attacked by a "ceiling snake" that came out of a hole in the wall.  Invisible Zaber took the lead, with Polly right behind him, and once again a cave moray surprised Polly and bit her from behind.  It was a pretty solid bite, enough that she needed to make consciousness checks.  After some discussion on whether Bless would prevent that attack (it didn't because Polly didn't get a defense roll because it was a surprise back attack), everyone started recovering from surprise.

Zaber moved closer, then the Cave Moray attacked him, despite his Invisibility, but he critically succeeded on his dodge and it lost its balance.  Polly stayed conscious, then drilled the moray with impaling arrows twice at close range.  It tried retreating into its hole, then lost consciousness from the arrow wounds, and Garreth stepped up to cut it into pieces, then pulled the pieces out of the hole and looked for treasure.  Unfortunately there wasn't any.

Elias cast Stop Bleeding on Polly, and rolled a rolled a 3, a critical success.  I ruled that it healed 4 HP instead of the usual 1-3.  That was enough to get Polly out of the passing out range, and also out of the reduced Move range.  Everyone then packed up the loot, fetched Hugin and Katanya and their wheelbarrow, and headed home.

GM's Comments:

The spider's ambush was foiled by Zaber rolling a crit on the Perception roll I gave him to detect the pit.  The spider then got mad that Elias was burning its webs, and tried to pounce on Seépravir.  It probably would have been better tactics to Web some people first.  But one spider, even a really big one, was no match for this party.

Elias getting lost and having to fight the skeletal wyrmling solo was mostly a Roll20 fail.  Our group has a hard time keeping their tokens together.  I've decided that if they give a strict instruction like "ignore where I move my token; I'm always next to Garreth" then that works.  (Unless they put their token somewhere unexplored and reveal something new, in which case they're there.)  Otherwise, if you move your token randomly down the hall, your character is wandering randomly down the hall.  This was the first wandering monster I'd rolled in a long time.  (I roll pretty often, but the likelihood per short time period is usually pretty low, and I always fail to roll low.)

The dragon was supposed to be tough, but the combination of good dodges and attacks to the skull and eyes took it out.  I deliberately had it fight from the ground instead of the air because it was a small dragon who'd lived in a cage most of its life and had never had to fight anything tough before.  If it had stayed out of melee range and concentrated its fire on Polly, it might have done better.  Amusingly, Polly and Garreth beat it to within a few HP of automatic death, then Zaber stabbed it in the eye to get the glory.  (If it had had Nictitating Membrane it might have survived that eye stab and lived a fraction of a turn longer, but one more arrow or katana slash would have finished it anyway.)

The "ceiling snake" that was probably the wimpiest monster they fought all session did the most damage, thanks to ambush.

Next week: a new player joins the party.  We'll see if they manage to break into the Clockwork Academy, or get stuck fighting more Ceiling Snakes.