DF Whiterock Session 24: Laundry

Date:

2018-10-19

Weather:

Cold, cloudy

Player Characters:

Elias (Wiggles), Wood Elf Cleric, 217 points

Garreth (Zuljita), Half-Orc Fighter, 264 points
Ibizaber (Demented Avenger), Human Thief, 252 points
Polly (Kalzazz), Wood Elf Archer, 237 points
Seépravir (Archon Shiva), High-Elf Wizard, 274 points

Significant NPCs:

Lady Chauntessa, innkeeper and amateur historian

Findle Glimer, Gnome gemcutter

Caswallon, Dwarf mining engineer

6 small Water Elementals

2 Ceiling Snakes

The group met at the Inn of the Slumbering Drake, with some treasure from last time to deal with.  The first order of business was finding a translator for a scroll written in Gnome.  While none of the PCs reads gnome, they're friends with a couple of gnomes who they rescued from slavers.  Garreth went looking for Findle Glimer at his gemcutter's shop.  Findle isn't a wizard, but was able to read enough to see that it was a Shrink spell, designed to make the caster smaller.  This excited Seépravir, since Shrink is a secret spell that she hadn't heard of before.  Seépravir went looking for Katanya Glimer to possibly provide a better translation and let her learn the spell, but Katanya was out of town.  However, Elias was able to cast Gift of Letters on Seépravir and keep it up long enough for Seépravir to get the gist.  She needed to learn a few other Body Control spells first though.

The giant tome written in Draconic was a tougher puzzle, as the PCs aren't friends with any dragons.  Lady Chauntessa mentioned that she knew a little bit, though.  She flipped through the tome, which had a lot of pictures of golem construction alongside the Draconic text, and announced that it was a manual on golem construction, that it was probably worth a lot of money, and that she'd pay her usual purchase fee for books found in Castle Whiterock just to rent it for a week, then let the party look for a buyer more interested in golems.  Garreth consulted with his friends then agreed to the deal.

The two huge scrolls of what appeared to be gibberish remaining gibberish after casting Gift of Letters, so Elias figured they were either pranks or decoys or the ramblings of a crazy person.  Lady Chauntessa offered to pay for them anyway, since she collects artifacts from Castle Whiterock.

Next, the group decided that they wanted to commission a 100' ladder to allow an easy way up or down the shaft Seépravir had dug (using Shape Earth) from the surface to the Clockwork Academy level.  A ladder was easy enough, but after more discussion they decided they really wanted an elevator with pulleys instead, and went looking for someone who could build one.  They got lucky on their roll to find an unusual hireling, and found Caswallon, a dwarf mining engineer.  He wanted $2000 to build an elevator, half up front, but Seépravir talked him down to $1500.  He said that he'd start building it, and then in a couple of weeks they could escort him to the castle so he could install it.

Elias borrowed enough money from the rest of the party to finally be able to afford the heavy dwarven plate armor of his dreams, and bought it from Alrux the armorer.  While the protection was nice, the real motivation was as a huge power item, enough (with a little help from Seépravir's Lend Energy) to cast Bless +2.  Elias promptly cast Bless +2 on the other four members of the party, though he charged them for it, since he needed to have his power item recharged after each casting.  So now the +1 to everything gang is the +2 to everything gang.

Zaber went looking for his nemesis Lord Flitwick, who was out of town, so the group finally decided to head to the castle.  They made it there unmolested, and headed down to the Clockwork Academy, which had one narrow chute that they hadn't explored yet.  Polly was able to squeeze in, and was smart enough (this time) to wait for Invisibility and Mage-Stealth before scouting ahead alone.  At the bottom of the diagonal chute was another hatch, and it opened into a large room with water on the floor.  As Polly observed, the water started moving around, and then lumps in the water headed for her.  That was enough to make her slam the hatch shut and climb back up the shaft.  As she told her friends when she got to the top, there were monsters down there and she didn't want to be selfish and kill them all herself.

Nobody else fit in the shaft (not even Zaber, who has decent Escape skill but rolled badly last time, probably because of all the beer he drinks), so Seépravir started casting Shape Earth to widen it.  It took quite a few spells, but eventually she widened the whole thing, and then some water started rolling up the shaft.  When it got close enough to attack Seépravir, Polly shot it with a couple of arrows, and Garreth parried its attack.  Seépravir was ready to close the passage with another spell, but before she had a chance, the water elemental was dead, so she aborted the effort.

The chute was kind of wet with dead water elemental, so Garreth and Zaber and Polly decided it was water slide time.  Elias held back a bit, and Seépravir decided that Levitation sounded safer.  Garreth rolled a critical success on his Acrobatics roll, so he slid to the bottom, kicked the hatch open, popped out, stood up, and moved deftly to the side.  The others merely succeeded on Acrobatics, so they made it to the bottom unharmed, but supine.

Once they saw Garreth, the five remaining water elementals charged across the room.  While they did that, Polly murdered one of them with arrows, and Garreth killed the first one that got into range with his katana.  Elias finally succumbed to peer pressure and went down the water slide, but he's not so acrobatic so he hit the bottom pretty hard.  Fortunately his new armor absorbed the impact.  Seépravir kept Levitating down at a nice safe pace, dodging Elias as he slid by.

Polly and Garreth finished off the last three water elementals fairly quickly, before the others really got into the fight.  The room was wet, with some big metal pillars and a lot of ruined mildewed clothes in the water.  Zaber started searching, and mostly found junk.  Polly started searching with her Magic-sensitive elf eyes, and found a magic bag.  She opened it up, and a wolverine popped out and bit her, then jumped back in the bag.  Zaber wanted to kill it, but Seépravir mentioned that it might be a useful weapon if they could figure it out, and Polly didn't want to hurt it because it was nature.  Nothing came back out of the bag, so they kept it, and Elias healed Polly's injury.

Seépravir cast Seek Magic and found three more magical things in the room: a gnome-sized cloak, a gnome-sized pair of gloves, and a gnome-sized cape.  They kept all of them, then headed back up the chute, with Garreth dragging Elias since he's not a very good climber.

At that point the group thought they had explored the entire Clockwork Academy level, so some discussion as to where to go next ensued.  Seépravir cast Seek Earth looking for various gems and precious metals, and found emerald and platinum to the southwest.  They went that way, back near the domain of the Ceiling Snakes, and cast it again to home in closer.  Elias wandered ahead a bit and got himself ambushed by a Ceiling Snake, but its first bite failed to penetrate his armor.  He smashed it with his flail, almost killing it, and then nearby Polly finished it off with an arrow.  Garreth asked the people with Survival to make him some snake jerky, but they ignored him.

Seépravir turned Zaber Invisible and he scouted the remainder of the twisty caverns.  He found a boulder used to make a secret door, probably a troglodyte bypass around the ceiling snakes.  He also found a passage sloping down to the south, probably going to the next level of the dungeon.  He then found a hole in the wall, right where Seépravir thought the treasure was.  A ceiling snake was there, and attacked Zaber, but he wasn't surprised and knifed it.  He rolled a 3 for a maximum critical hit, and got a one-shot kill despite his unimpressive damage roll.  He pulled the snake out of the hole and looked for the treasure, but didn't find any.  Seépravir cast Seek Earth again, and sensed that the treasure was inside the snake.  They gutted it and found a valuable platinum and emerald necklace, a treasure that would have been very difficult to find without magical help.

We were almost out of time, so the group decided to go back to town, after first discussing how to get the huge valuable wooden conference table out of the Clockwork Academy to the surface and back to town.

GM's Comments:

This week was spent mopping up two almost-cleared levels.  Only two fights this week, both of them pretty easy for this group.  The gnome laundry had a huge rewards-to-difficulty ratio, though the magic clothing is all gnome-sized, and so not directly useful.  (Unless someone decides to make a gnome PC!)

The PCs are developing long-term plans: to make more entrances to the dungeon, to extract huge and difficult treasure, to humiliate Lord Flitwick (who they think did them wrong over the matter of ownership of some sketches they hired him to make).

Next time, they'll probably be exploring a new level.