Date:
Weather:
Player Characters:
Elias, Wood Elf Cleric, 400 pointsGarreth, Half-Orc Fighter, 462 points
Ibizaber (Demented Avenger), Human Thief, 462 points
Polly (Kalzazz), Wood Elf Archer, 456 points
Seépravir (Archon Shiva), High Elf Wizard, 467 points
Significant NPCs:
Fiendish Polar Bear
4 Duergar warriors
Manticore
Flesh Golem
3 Drow
We started with Zaber and Polly, scouting ahead, just having opened a door and spotted a huge white bear inside. The bear looked angry. Polly checked to see if it was natural, but she wasn't sure. It had a collar and a chain. Polly headed back to the others to see if Seépravir could tell her anything. Zaber, invisible, sat there, as the bear decided to run past him after Polly. (The chain had apparently been broken already.)
When the bear came around the corner and Elias saw it, he immediately saw in its eyes that it was an evil demon bear, not a regular polar bear. Garreth threw a sai at the bear and did some damage. Seépravir then cast Death Vision at the bear, which caused the bear to start jumping in place like it thought the floor was trying to eat it. Polly attempted to flying tackle the stunned bear, but it was too strong, and didn't fall over. Zaber tried calming the bear with Animal Handling (his specialty is mustelids not bears, but he tried anyway), but the bear was not impressed.
Elias's turn finally came, and he screamed that the bear was an evil demon and double smashed it in the skull with his flail, killing it. This saved the other elves a lot of guilt about fighting a poor animal, and they turned their attention from saving nature to harvesting its pelt. Elias was having none of it, and started trying to set the demon bear corpse on fire with his flaming flail. Helpfully, the other end of the bear spontaneously combusted while he was doing this. This finally convinced the others that maybe Elias knew something about demon bears after all.
After a minute, Zaber and Polly went back to the room the bear had occupied. The room had one brick wall, and the broken remnants of the bear's chain. It also had a table covered with needles and bottles and spilled blood, and a grotesque statue of a human male with no skin, and another door. Seépravir tried to identify the contents of the bottles with Alchemy, and decided they were different colors of dyes. Polly pickaxed the brick wall, but didn't find anything.
Seépravir cast Seeker trying to find dye-based art, and got an image of two tattooed Derro, running up some stairs. Zaber was about to open the door, but then saw a trap. There was an almost-invisible wire leading to the doorknob. He snipped it, and then they opened the door, finding a small room with a couple of small beds, a lot of small clothing, more needles, and a strong smell. Garreth decided the brick wall needed more investigation, so went into full vandalism mode, smashing as many bricks as possible. This still didn't reveal any secrets. Apparently someone just wanted a brick accent wall.
Leaving the bear den, the group circled around the arena concourse some more. They found one room that was empty except for some bits of stale mushrooms. Then they circled back to the south and opened the portcullis they'd skipped before. Behind it were two doors in sequence. Continuing his theme of wanton destruction, Garreth smashed the portcullis.
After opening both doors, they saw a huge cave, with a narrow bridge leading south, flanked by two huge (maybe 40' tall?) statues of duergar. The bridge led south to a small guard tower. On the roof of the tower were several duergar manning huge spear-throwing crossbows. (None of the PCs are experts on siege engines so I didn't get too technical: "crossbow big enough to probably kill you if you fail to dodge" is close enough.) Two of them spotted Zaber and/or Polly and fired spears at them. Fortunately for Zaber and Polly, they dodged. The spears were followed up by tail spikes thrown by a manticore on the tower. Zaber and Polly dodged those as well.
Polly returned fire with her bow, but the duergar blocked or dodged all her arrows. Zaber put on his Ring of Invisibility. Garreth chucked a sai and missed. Elias used his Heroic Might and Heroic Grace and got +9 ST and +11 DX, becoming temporarily Super Holy Death. Seépravir cast Great Haste on him. The duergar ducked below the parapets on top of the roof to hide while they reloaded. The manticore lobbed another volley of spikes at Polly, but she dodged again. It then realized it was the only target, and also dipped behind cover.
Unfortunately for the defenders of the tower, all the PCs had Flight. Polly flew up and forward until she regained LOS to a couple of duergar reloading a crossbow, then loosed arrows, and killed one with an arrow through the liver. The manticore popped up from behind cover and tried to spike Polly again, but she dodged. (Just barely, and only due to +1 for solid tactical advice from Seépravir, who'd warned her about the manticore.) The manticore didn't have time to regain cover, and yelled something in Undercommon about how it was arrow bait. Polly took the bait, and attacked the manticore, who she didn't realize had Missile Shield. Luckily for her, she rolled a critical hit, so when it dodged anyway, she knew it was cheating with magic. Polly gave up on shooting it, fast-drew her rapier, and slashed it to death instead, then pointed out that the manticore had a magic ring through its nose. (Like most elves, she has a bit of Magery and sometimes notices such things.)
Garreth flew up and landed on the tower, seeing no live targets, but some stairs leading down inside. Elias didn't want to waste his time with Great Haste and Heroic Might and Heroic Grace and flew right to the back of the tower and down the stairs. Seépravir cast Great Haste on herself. Zaber, with See Invisible active, noticed an invisible duergar hiding behind a merlon, still trying to reload a giant crossbow. He flew over and tried slamming the duergar, but he blocked. Now knowing there was a live target remaining, Polly flew over behind the duergar and shot an arrow. Somehow, the duergar dodged the rear shot. The arrow missed Zaber, who'd been standing on the other side of him. Polly followed up with a couple more arrows, and the duergar's luck ran out, as he was hit, wounded, hit again, knocked out, and then hit once more time and killed.
Inside the tower, Elias didn't see any duergar, but that's because they were invisible. One of them chopped for his face. Elias heard the attack coming and blocked, despite the penalty for an invisible attacker. The now-visible duergar took a second swing, which Elias parried. Elias didn't hear the second invisible duergar, who thought he landed a vicious blow on Elias's neck. Elias's Bless decided to expend itself, causing him to dodge a blow he never saw coming. As the duergar appeared, Elias managed to parry the follow-up attack. Polly reached the top of the stairs and shot an arrow at one of the duergar, who blocked it. She then fired another one, which landed and managed to kill the duergar. That left just one victim for Elias. He went for all-out attack (feint), first feinting the duergar out of his shorts, then smashing his head in with a flail.
Continuing into the tower, Elias found a door. Not wanting to wait for Zaber to come pick it for him, he tried just opening it. Surprisingly, it was unlocked. On the other side was a monster that looked like several pieces of human corpses stitched together. Elias was pretty sure it wasn't a zombie though, at least not the kind he knew about. He again went for all-out attack (feint), feinted the flesh golem out of the shorts it wasn't wearing, and then smashed it twice with his flaming flail, hitting it hard enough to make it come apart at the seams.
Seépravir flew up onto the roof and cast Great Haste on Garreth. Garreth was worried about more invisible duergar so went into full paranoia mode preparing to defend from attacks he couldn't see. Not wanting to waste time while fully powered up, they quickly opened more doors without stopping to rest. A door to the west led to another bridge, which went a long way to another door at the other end of the bridge. A door to the east led to a bunkroom, full of duergar-sized beds. Another door to the north was locked, and led to the bridge back to the arena. A door to the northwest led to a small kitchen, containing some spilled and half-eaten food. Failing to find any more duergar, the PCs next started thinking about turning the giant crossbows into personal weapons. They were a wee bit heavy for that, though. That led to discussions of building battle carts.
Next the group investigated the moat near the tower. A Continual Light arrow thrown down showed that it was about 50' deep, and there was nothing interesting inside it. Polly flew down to recover her arrow. The two huge statues were a duergar warrior with a hammer, and a duergar wizard with a scroll. Nothing hidden was found behind or under them. Garreth thought wrecking the bridges would be a good plan, since the PCs could all fly and maybe the duergar could not. Seépravir used several castings of Shape Earth to basically remove the western bridge. (The stone was still there; it was just uselessly decorating the bottom of the moat rather than acting as a bridge.)
After wrecking the bridge, Polly and Zaber headed back north toward the arena. They went back to the rust monster room, which had stairs up to the upper concourse level. On the upper level they found an old brown couch and a bookshelf. The bookshelf had two books, one about why all surface elves should be eradicated, and one about caring for giant bugs. Zaber took both books. Once their companions caught up, they headed east around the concourse, exploring.
Zaber spotted a door, and listened at it. He heard a conversation in Elvish, and a barking dog. After everyone was ready, Zaber opened the door. Unfortunately for him, it exploded. Both Polly and Zaber managed to dive away from it, but still took some damage. They saw three drow and a dog inside the room, angry at the intrusion. And then we stopped for the evening.
GM's Comments:
The players were excited to meet and kill a manticore. There is a lot of nostalgia for classic D&D monsters among gamers.
I was unhappy with the duergar tower fight, because the tower was two levels (roof level and ground level) but I tried putting all the tokens on one map and just remembering which level each was on, which confused the players. I actually had a separate nice map of the roof, but it was on a different Roll20 map, and Roll20 isn't good at splitting PCs across two maps. With hindsight, I should have done a copy of the tower roof map as an inset on the same Roll20 map as the ground level of the tower, to make things less confusing.
Zaber is really good at finding traps, but failed to find the one on the drow apartment. (It was quite well hidden, for a large penalty to the Per-based Traps roll.) I think that's only the second trap he's missed, at least in recent memory.
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