Sunday, November 22, 2015

Dungeons and Dragons Number 14



We played DnD last week!  In advance of today’s game, here is a recap!

So, two weeks earlier we were preparing to enter a fortress entrance that was carved into the side of a hill on the outskirts of the Gnome village of Barrelhelm.  Rereading the letter written concerning dark magics about to go down in the fortress, we decided we better not waste any time farting around, so we needed to head into the fortress ASAP.  It seemed that the Orcs (and the snake people they were hanging out with) were planning to take the corpse of the copper dragon that had once guarded the village and use it to conjure some dark forces.  We were panicking about having to fight an evil lich copper dragon. 

Seeing as how the villains were all Lizard-like and Orcish, the party fake-tied up the Human Bard (who wasn’t here yet), Ulfgar the Dwarf, and Nory the Gnome, and Dragon Man the Dragonborn and Hannah the Half-Orc marched them towards the entrance, which was guarded by a pair of Orcs.  The Orcs demanded a password, so the party attacked, with Ulfgar starting things out with a magic missile, which killed one of the gaurds right off, but not before he managed to knock on the portcullis entrance. 

Finishing off the other Orc, Hannah and Dragon Man lifted up the Portcullis, and the rest of the party attacked the band of four Orcs and a magic using serpent person on the other side. 

Pretty soon, they were all dead, even though Hannah briefly got mind-controlled.  Inside they found a room with three doorways, one in each of the facing walls, and since the Bard wasn’t really in a position to tell the party to always turn left, Ulfgar suggested just taking the door straight ahead and charging deeper into the mountain. 

On the other side of the door was a track and a cart, just like in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, (except the cart was on just one rail due to fancy gnome engineering).  The party really couldn’t get the cart back on, so they headed down the tunnel, until the track split in two.  This time, they took the left path, and soon came upon another band of four Orcs and a serpent-lady. 

The party kicked ass as Eric finally showed up to get his bard in on the action (having been briefly waylaid by a beer explosion).  The party continued on, and met and kicked ass on another band of Orcs and serpent people (which we didn’t bother roll playing because time).  By the end of this endeavor, the Dwarf was just standing on the sidelines, on account of wanting to save some spells for later.  Eventually, the tunnel looped back around to the right entrance, and the party came back out to the initial room they had entered the fortress from. 

This time, the party took the room on the left.  However, Dragon Man had decided the party needed to be careful to search for traps, and lo, it turned out that this doorknob was covered in poison!  But, Dragon Man solved the issue by tearing some cloth off of one of the dead Orcs lying around, and opened the door using that, and the party continued on. 

There was another cart and tunnel, and this one opened into a series of rooms.  The party walked down a hallway, past a room of mining supplies, and came to a door that had some kind of rune of transformation on it.  The Bard used Mage Hand to activate it, and the door started turning to stone!  But, the Bard thought fast, and cast Dispel Magic on the door, halting the progress of stonification, and the Party was able to open the door with ease.

Inside was a large room with two doors upon and far wall and one upon the right.  Ulfgar walked over to the one on the left of the far wall, but it was locked.  So, Dragon Man kicked the door in.

Inside, three of the scantily clad snake people were trying to open a stone chest. 

Ulfgar didn’t feel like wasting time on things like initiative or anything, or waiting for a bunch of magic users to cast mind-control spells on them, so he just cast fireball on the room. 

Well, that fireball not only hurt the serpent-people, but also caused the explosive booby trap in the stone chest to explode, and that just straight up killed them.  The party then found about 500 gold worth of gems in the remains of the chest. 

Dragon Man then tried opening the next door over, and found a kitchen covered in gunk.  When Dragon Man went into the kitchen to investigate, the gunk started attacking him, so he ran out, and the party closed the door and vowed to deal with that later. 

The next door, Ulfgar opened because why not, we all have to go some time. 

Through the sliver of the opening door, he saw a Beholder.

He quickly closed the door and passed this information on to everyone else.  Beholders were enormous floating eyes with tentacles.  They fire disintegration rays at you.  If the disintegration rays drop you to zero hit points, you automatically die.  They are scary evil bad things and you do not mess with them lightly, especially since Eric had just gotten his other character killed by one in a different campaign. 

The party debated turning around and fleeing, since they might not really be up for fighting a beholder just about now, (or ever) but then someone pointed out that Beholders usually guard things of importance, so whatever lied beyond this beholder must be critical to the quest. 

So they came up with a plan.  The Bard would throw open the door, then Ulfgar would cast Fireball on the Beholder, and then the Bard would jump in and cast Thundarwave on it, knocking it into a corner.  Then the party would run in and fight it as best they could. 

So the Bard threw open the door. 

And saw in the room not, one, but five Beholders. 

For a brief moment, the party all thought they were dead.   And then Ulfgar sent in the Fireball, and the three Beholders that were within its radius all exploded, causing a rain of shards that cut up the Bard as he stood in the doorway.

The party then deduced that these were not actually Beholders, but just some kind spore that only looked like Beholders, but weren’t actually that dangerous.  Dragon Man went into the room and guided the spores into a corner, then the party cast spells that blew them up outside of the range of the exploding damage. 

There were two doors on the far wall of this room.  The door on the left opened onto something that looked like a temple, but all the shrines were defaced with the gnome figures carved there being given mutilated snake heads.  The room on the right contained three tubs full of water and a brazier, and seemed to be some kind of bathing room.  There was a door on the wall to the right.  This door opened onto a cave filled with water that stretched out into darkness vast enough that the characters (all possessing darkvision) could not see the far end of, but could see an island on the edge of the gloom and in the middle of the lake.  A waterfall was falling to the left, and on the right side of the island, a mutated gnome dressed in rags was hovering near the edge of the water. 

Since Nory seems to hate all other gnomes he encounters or something, he hurled an Eldritch Blast at the gnome, and the gnome immediately jumped into the water and disappeared.  The party then sent Hannah to fly across to the Island and spot around.  She found some fish bones on the island, but little else.  Then Dragon Man swam over to the island, and just was he got over there, a whirlpool appeared in the water.  Dragon Man jumped out of the water and onto the island, just as a Water Elemental appeared. 

The Bard jumped into the water to swim across and do battle, but ended up almost drowning instead.  Dragon Man and Hannah attacked the Water Elemental as Nory and Ulfgar hurled spells at it, and by the time the Bard managed to stop drowning, it was defeated. 

The party then all traveled over to the island and began looking around, and one of the party (I think Dragon Man, but it might have been Hannah) found a hole underneath the island, into a cave.  The party swam in and found the weird Gollum-looking gnome underneath there, who was trying to hide a ring on his finger.  Dragon Man found this all suspicious or is chaotic evil or something, so he killed the Gollum gnome, and Ulfgar took the ring and put it on, because why not, and immediately started hearing the voice of the crazy hermit gnome in his head, which Ulfgar just went with because why not be crazy now?  Everyone else in his party was.   

After Ulfgar determined the waterfall didn’t lead further into the cave complex, the party left the underground lake and retraced their steps back to the entrance way, and finally took the door on the right. 

And the door on the right, after passing through a tunnel with a cart, took them into a wide opening, where a trio of serpent people were using giant braziers full of green fire to cast some long involved spell on the murdered corpse of the Patron Copper Dragon of Barrelhelm.  His gutted body was writhing as if filled with snakes.

The party rushed in and began attacking the serpent priests.  Ulfgar, Nory  and the Bard managed to kill the middle one pretty quickly with a Scorching Ray, an Eldirtch Blast  and a Thunderwave, which unfortunately failed to knock over a brazier, while Hannah and Dragon Man ran towards the far right one, while the Bard ran for the far left one. 

With a three pronged attack from The Bard, Nory, and Ulfgar’s last offensive spell (a first level Magic Missile), The one on the left fell first. Shortly thereafter the one on the right passed out after blows from Hannah and Dragon Man, but not before finishing off a truncated version of the spell they were casting.  At this a giant creature with a snake-like body, but with arms, emerged from the corpse. Hannah and Dragon Man were terrified, and dropped their weapons and ran for the exit.  The Bard tried to fight the Creature, but eventually just stood there taking damage and trying to heal himself to stay up, while Nory and Ulfgar, who had completely used up all his non-cantrips, ineffectually hurled spells at the creature that didn’t hit it. Eventually Ulfgar, realizing the Bard was in rough shape, starting walking towards it while casting and hurling insults at the creature, insulting his snake god and so on.  This only proved consequential after The Bard dropped, at which point that Snake Creature rushed onto Ulfgar and started wailing on him. 

It was at this point, after several rounds when the party had seemed completely undone, that things bounced back.  The Bard jumped right up from his dropping (for Eric rolled a 20 on his death save and returned to one hit point).  Meanwhile, as the three Magic users and spent time missing with spells and serving as meat shields, the two fighters managed to overcome the fear instilled in them and ran back into the cavern and unleashed attacks on the Snake Creature.  And after about two rounds, it died!  The Creature had only a third of its hit points, due to the spell having been interrupted!

The creatures in the Gnome Keep were now all defeated.  The party searched the room of the Copper Dragon.  Dragon Man tore out the copper dragons’s teeth because, hey, dragon teeth.  Ulfgar noticed that the last of the serpent priests was actually still alive, and cut off his head.  Meanwhile, Hannah flew up into the air and discovered a ledge filled with treasure!  Yay!

Nothing happened for the rest of the day!  The party healed and regained spells and got a lot of loot, plus some magical items that weren’t that great!

And the party Leveled!  Yay!