Date:
Demmasday, 20th of Jelenius, 2993 AE
Weather:
Hot, dry
Player Characters:
Ioannes Grammatikos Byzantios, Archontean cleric of Demma (Demented Avenger)
Vallium Halcyon, Archontean fighter (Greybrown)
Michael J. Dundee, Thorcin barbarian (Adam)
Ashe "GOAT" Maykum, Goblin mercenary druid (Sharp Frank)
Merenuithiel "Lacrymosa" Armaris, Elven mercenary archer (Archon Shiva)
Significant NPCs:
Camilla, primary summoned goat
Various summoned goats, black bears, and bat swarms
2 rock reptiles
2 giant crabs
3 stirges
giant centipede
6 beastman troopers and a beastman sergeant
2 giant lizards
3 small spotted mushroom creatures
1 large blue mushroom creature
6 emaciated ogres
3 scrags
Michael returned from his latest hunting trip into the mountains, but Uvash was busy trying to convert humans to dwarven monotheism, and Vael was still in Newmarket. So the Left for Loot / Right for Riches company (I'm not sure anymore which is the real name and which is the alias) again recruited two mercenaries from the Grudge Brigade, GOAT and druid and Lacrymosa the archer. This time they decided to revisit the Great Cavern, rather than diving behind the waterfall.
Vallium suggested filling their wheelbarrow with food in case they wanted to trade with the beastmen. They set off early on a hot summer morning, made it to the Cliff Face without encountering anything more interesting than wild goats, and climbed up the Long Stair without problems. They went in the secret entrance the beastmen had told them about, and followed the usual circuitous path through the eastern caverns. This time, they ran into a couple of man-sized rock reptiles. Vallium, Michael, and Lacrymosa made short work of them, while GOAT was trying to maneuver some summoned bears into position to help. The only thing that went wrong was when Lacrymosa accidentally shot Vallium in the back, leaving a big ugly hole in his armor and a big impaling wound that took Ioannes's Major Healing to patch up.
Leaving the side caverns, they entered the Great Cavern proper, with its giant mushrooms. After a brief discussion about the odd wizard in his throne, they decided to go north across the lake and explore some more of the eastern caverns. GOAT cast Water Vision on himself and Vallium, who looked through the now clear water and saw some gold glinting on the bottom, 40 or 50 feet down. They also saw a couple of giant crabs down there. Lacrymosa formulated a plan: she would cast Walk on Air and look like food just above the surface, while Vallium dove underwater with the Ring of Free Action and grabbed the loot.
One of the two giant crabs took the bait and came to the surface to eat Lacrymosa, and instead ate several arrows and became crabmeat. The other giant crab stayed underwater. Meanwhile Vallium jumped into the lake with his armor on, ran along the bottom until he reached the gold (which ended up being a nice statuette of a dwarf), grabbed the treasure, ran back up the shore until he approached the southern dock, and then swam for the surface.
Lacrymosa ran around on air for a bit longer while the spell lasted, looking for anything interesting. On the eastern side of the lake she found a very foul-smelling cave up above, but declined to go into it alone. She ran back over to the small island in the middle of the lake, didn't see any treasure, then ran up to a ledge about 40 feet up on the western side of the cavern, south of the lake. There, 3 stirges were waiting. They surprised her and swarmed her. A couple of them managed to wound her badly, as she retreated and filled them with arrows. While her friends ran to the general area to try to help, she kept loosing arrows while maneuvering herself above a giant mushroom, so that if she fell she would at least land on something soft. Vallium drew a knife, Michael drew a boomerang, and GOAT sent a couple of bat swarms up at the stirges, as Lacrymosa finished 2 stirges off. She passed out atop a mushroom, as the swarm of bats ate the last stirge. Ioannes cast a couple of healing spells to patch her up, as she apologized for running off alone without orders.
With the stirges dealt with, the group discussed how to cross the lake for a while, and finally piled into a skiff despite nobody having any real boating skill. Lacrymosa, with her dexterity temporarily boosted from an Agility potion, was nominated as the most qualified boat captain. The boat wasn't quite big enough to hold all the people, let alone all the summoned animals, so she took two trips, and managed to cross the small lake 3 times without any serious problems.
The next challenge was making it up a 50' cliff without flight magic. The beastmen had drilled a hook into the top of the cliff to hold a rope, but nobody had a great idea for getting the rope up there, besides climbing. Lacrymosa tried climbing, but fell off the cliff from about halfway up. She made an acrobatics roll to reduce the severity of the fall, and Vallium and Michael caught her to cushion the blow some more. She was still banged up, so Ioannes healed her again. At that point Vallium decided to try the climb. He made it about halfway up when a giant centipede emerged from the rock, tried to bite him, and failed to penetrate his armor. He decided that falling was a bigger danger than the centipede, so ignored it and kept climbing until he made it to the top. Once he got to safe footing, he drew his sword and chopped the vermin in half. He then pulled the rope out of his pack, tied it to the hook, and dropped it over the edge -- to discover that he'd brought a 30' rope to a 50' cliff. He yelled down to see if anyone had more rope. Someone did, so he climbed down the rope, then down the cliff, grabbed the additional rope, climbed the cliff then the fixed rope, pulled the rope up, tied the other rope to it, and dropped the combined rope down so everyone else could climb up more easily.
With everyone finally at the top, they explored the northwest part of the Great Cavern above the cliff. They found a bunch more mushrooms and a locked beastman observation cage with a door into the rock wall to the north. Vallium made a bunch of noise outside the cage to try to attract beastman attention. A few minutes later one sheep-headed beastman came out of the door into the cage, and asked in very broken Archontean what Vallium wanted. Vallium told him something that he didn't quite get, so the beastman said to wait and came back with a pig-headed beastman with better language skills. The second beastman showed interest in Vallium's offer of food, and went to fetch a sergeant and the rest of his banda. The rat-headed sergeant asked Vallium what he wanted for the food, and Vallium asked if they had any maps of the cavern, but the sergeant said the Long Range Cavern Patrol might but he did not. Not wanting to carry the food back, Vallium gave it to the beastmen for free in hopes of future goodwill. The beastmen took the food, said goodbye, and locked the door.
The group walked around a bit to map the area, didn't find anything particularly interesting, then went west to a secret door they remembered from their last visit. It took a minute to find out how to open it from this side, then they went in to the cavern where they killed some giant lizards last time. It was empty, but the next cavern to the west contained 2 more giant lizards. They finished off both lizards pretty quickly, with a Concussion spell then a combination of sword blows and arrows and a few bat bites. Continuing southwest, they saw a few wounded mushroom creatures, with the large one missing a giant-lizard-mouth-sized chunk from its side. The mushrooms wanted nothing to do with the group that had just wrecked the giant lizards, and fled south. The group let them go, and went north up some stairs, into a room featuring a skinny dead ogre impaled on a large spike.
After searching the dead ogre and the rest of the room, they continued west, into a cave whose floor was lined with many, many bones. They poked around in the bones a bit, but didn't find anything interesting. However, there was a gold necklace with a red gem, just hanging on the north wall. This was very suspicious. But it was also obviously valuable, so they couldn't just ignore it. Ioannes took a close look and declared that the necklace looked magical. Vallium got ready to grab it using a blanket, but Ioannes suggested letting him use his new Apportation spell instead. It took him about 5 tries to cast the spell (mostly because he already had 4 Bless spells up), but he successfully removed the necklace from the wall without anything obviously bad happening. Vallium then wrapped it up in the blanket and put it in his pack.
Heading south, they smelled cooking meat. The passage turned east, and then a trap dumped some rocks on their heads. Vallium, in the front, was wearing a lot of armor, so it didn't hurt very much. At the end of a passage were six skinny ogres roasting something over a fire. They grabbed their clubs and jumped to their feet, as Lacrymosa asked the others to make room then threw a Concussion spell into the room. This was devastating, stunning all six ogres. She then started filling them with arrows, while Vallium and Michael chopped other ogres with their swords, and some bat swarms flew in to try to help. Only one ogre managed to recover from the stunning, and he was outnumbered and went down a couple of seconds later. The thing the ogres had been cooking turned out to be a halfling. Nobody was hungry, so they went through the ogres' stuff and found some human-sized leather boots, the magical head of a statue (with empty eye sockets), and a sack with some copper coins, a few gems, and a rusty iron necklace. They took everything except the dead halfling and the ogres' heavy clubs, and went west. There they saw some feet sticking out under a pile of rocks. Vallium and Ioannes again said this looked like a trap, but again decided they needed to check it out just in case there was loot. It was a trap, with another rockfall trap above the fake rockfall trap. Ioannes was looking up when it triggered, and dove out of the way while yelling a warning. Vallium had his head down pulling rocks off the body, and didn't manage to dodge the falling rocks, but once again heavy scale armor saved the day and he wasn't hurt too badly. Ioannes cast a Stop Bleeding spell and the group was ready to go.
They went back north to the room full of bones, then southwest to a sandy river beach. They saw the underground river running west to the east south of them, and the plinth and legs and feet of a magical statue that seemed to match the head they'd found earlier. Unfortunately, they did not have the torso. While discussing the statue, some scrags hiding in the river snuck up to the shore to surprise them. Unfortunately for the scrags, Vallium and GOAT still had Water Vision spells active, so they easily saw through the water and warned everyone about the scrags, so there was no surprise. Once again, Vallium and Michael fought with swords while Lacrymosa ran around shooting arrows into the scrags, and GOAT's bat swarms got in a few nibbles. Two of the scrags went down quickly with grievous wounds, and the third one decided it was time to dive back into the river. Lacrymosa fired some arrows into the water, but the water was deep enough to slow their flight. Vallium had the Ring of Free Action though, which let his sword swings work at full speed underwater, so he ran into the river and continued chopping up the surprised scrag until it was knocked out. All three badly wounded scrags appeared to be regenerating. Someone first suggested burning them, but nobody had any fire magic. The next suggestion was to chop their heads off and see if they grew back, and they did not. With the rude interruption over, the group decided to take the statue head back to Gosterwick with them rather than leaving it here, so that nobody else could take or use it.
They left the beach room to the northwest, and found a room with a few more bones and no treasure. They went west into a room with some abandoned mining tools and a couple of corpses. One had a magical shortsword and a magical blue gem eye that resembled the magical silver eye they'd found previously. The other had a parchment with Archontean writing saying "red-black-yellow-blue-green-white", which Vallium thought had something to do with the colored glass teleportation squares. It also had a map, of an unknown area with 9 rooms and some stairs up and down.
At this point they decided they'd explored enough and it was probably time to head home. They went back out the secret door, down the cliff, across the lake, and back through the southeastern side caverns to the exit onto the Long Stair. On the way home, they saw the wild goats again, but didn't run into anything more dangerous.
GM's Comments:
7 fights in a 4-hour session is a lot. They went pretty quickly though.
Lacrymosa actually got into quite a bit of danger getting surprised by 3 stirges while 40' above her friends, and was knocked to 0 HP and eventually fell unconscious, but maneuvering above a giant mushroom to reduce falling damage was a nice trick. And having a good healer like Ioannes nearby means that if you survive the fight, you can be back to full HP in a few minutes.
A flying archer versus non-flying opponents without ranged attacks is just unfair. The giant crab never had a chance.
The combination of Water Vision and Free Action means that treasure hidden underwater actually gets found and taken. (A Swim spell would also work, if they didn't have the Ring of Free Action.)
The Concussion spell is just too good. The damage part is totally fine, 1d per 2 FP with damage dropping quickly away from the center like most explosive missile spells, but nobody actually uses it for the damage. The "everything within 10 yards has to roll HT-3 or be stunned, then HT-3 every second to recover" is broken. Too big and too exact a blast radius, too much penalty to the HT roll, and there's no reason this flavor of stun should be 3 points harder to recover from than every other flavor of stun, both in terms of game balance and having a new flavor of status to track. ("We've had stun counters, yes, but what about second stun counters?") I think I'm going to nerf it, and let casters learn a different spell if they think that's unfair.
I was amused that they found where the statue head went, but then took it home because they didn't want anyone else using it and finishing the puzzle before they did. Adventurers are like little kids.
Achievements:
None
XP:
- Exploration: 10 new locations, 1 XP
- Loot: the magic shortsword, gems, gold dwarf statuette, and magic necklace were valuable enough for everyone to get 1 XP and some PCs to get 2 XP, depending on how they split it and how much of the treasure they sell.
- Total: 2-3 XP each
Next Week:
They had the druid along this week so could have gone back behind the waterfall. They had three good fighters this week so could have fought the halfling toll collectors. But they chose the Great Cavern instead. So my guess is they will keep exploring the Great Cavern, but who knows?
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