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terryclothToday was the DM switching game at Tom's house, with Ed still DMing. We wasted a lot of time searching empty rooms, triggered an undetectable and unavoidable death trap, and gave up and went home. Then we argued for hours over whether the 3.5 rules were even remotely fair, with much drama and posturing, then finally made a compromise and went back into the fray.
Let's see if I can actually remember names this time...
Autumn - my character, a druid/wizard/mystic theurge.
Hiko - Tom's bastardized monstrosity: part fighter, part samurai, part BESM.
Arie - Eric's sorceress.
Breya - Michelle's rogue.
Tordak - Dave's cleric.
Dae - Josh's 'tripping fool'.
After Autumn teleported away from certain doom, Hiko and Dae turned their attentions to the spiky devil, while Breya and Tordak finished off the chain devils, although not before one of them animated Dae's spiked chain against him. The spiky demon was soon forced to flee, or at least decided to flee, and the slowly regenerating chain devils were hacked to bits and gnawed on by dire wolves and eventually put out of the party's misery with holy water.
Afterwards the party spent a long, long time searching the building room by room. They found a room full of blood, as if someone had exploded, and some trapped chests with magical treasure inside, and a room where a pair of erinyes tried to trick the party into setting them free, with no success... especially since they didn't seem to realize that the magic circles were keeping them in their true forms.
Eventually, though, they found the trap door they were looking for, and Breya, after carefully searching it for traps, opened it and immediately triggered a symbol of death, which had been on a part of the door she couldn't possible search without opening it first, and was thus undetectable and impossible not to set off. It killed her.
Arie, angry at the world for being unfair, flew over and stared down into the hole, triggered another symbol, and also died. At this point it was obvious that the party couldn't continue, especially since Arie managed to squeak, before expiring, that there were *dozens* of symbols of death in the corridor below.
Still, before teleporting back -- Autumn could take everyone, now that two of their number were luggage instead of passengers -- Autumn decided to use up all his druid spells and trigger as many of the symbols as possible on throwaway cannon fodder. To his surprise, they ran out of symbols before he ran out of creatures. Apparently, most of the symbols were fake.
There were more symbold painted on the walls down the very long corridor, so he summoned a bat, had Tordak light-cantrip it, and sent it down as far as it could go before its duration expired. It failed to set off any more symbols.
Then they teleported back, and haggled with the church over the price of True Resurrection, since Arie (via speak with dead) refused to come back for anything less, and didn't want them to sell off any of her equipment. By using all the treasure they'd found so far, and all the cash and cash-equivalent spell components everyone had, they were able to scrape together enough money to pay the church's discount rate of 10,000gp per true res.
They then teleported back to the nearby town, and re-approached the keep the next day, loaded for demon. Worried that the demons might have put more symbols everywhere, they decided to burrow through the roof with a thoqqua (the keep was only one story tall), then send a hawk down and back to check for lingering death fields. There were none, but there were chains.
Dae experimented, and managed to pull one of the chains loose with little effort. He then spent the next few minutes clearing away all the chains he could hook with his own spiked chain without actually dropping into the tunnel, handing them off to the rest of the party, who removed them from the vicinity.
Eventually, though, he had to drop down into the tunnel to continue clearing chains, and that was when the chain devils struck, surprising no one. Dae, Tordak, and Hiko rushed down to fight them.
Around the time the last Kyton was about to fall, a loud rumbling was heard coming down the tunnel. In coordination with Arie this time, Autumn sent a light-cantripped celestial giant bee down the tunnel to see what was coming and act as a road block.
What was coming was a fiendish purple worm, and the giant bee did, indeed, act as a road block, buying the party about a round to prepare for its arrival. They turned out not to really need the time, and their preparations were in vain, as the creature abandoned the tunnel and burrowed through solid rock to lock Dae in its jaws. Autumn quickly gave Dae a spell to resist acid, just before he was swallowed, but it was only a few seconds before concentrated fire from the rest of the party killed the beast.
Unfortunately, the creature weighed about 40,000 pounds, and was completely blocking the tunnel. A quick vote revealed that about half the party absolutely refused to consider hollowing out the worm while Dae's resist acid was still up, which left only digging down into the tunnel somewhere else, behind the worm. Tordak, as a dwarf, was given the task of picking the spot to begin digging.
last session next session
A lot of rules lawyering, a lot of boring searching of completely empty rooms, a little combat, and one utterly unfair deathtrap. Who cast those 8th level spells, anyway?
Let's see if I can actually remember names this time...
Autumn - my character, a druid/wizard/mystic theurge.
Hiko - Tom's bastardized monstrosity: part fighter, part samurai, part BESM.
Arie - Eric's sorceress.
Breya - Michelle's rogue.
Tordak - Dave's cleric.
Dae - Josh's 'tripping fool'.
After Autumn teleported away from certain doom, Hiko and Dae turned their attentions to the spiky devil, while Breya and Tordak finished off the chain devils, although not before one of them animated Dae's spiked chain against him. The spiky demon was soon forced to flee, or at least decided to flee, and the slowly regenerating chain devils were hacked to bits and gnawed on by dire wolves and eventually put out of the party's misery with holy water.
Afterwards the party spent a long, long time searching the building room by room. They found a room full of blood, as if someone had exploded, and some trapped chests with magical treasure inside, and a room where a pair of erinyes tried to trick the party into setting them free, with no success... especially since they didn't seem to realize that the magic circles were keeping them in their true forms.
Eventually, though, they found the trap door they were looking for, and Breya, after carefully searching it for traps, opened it and immediately triggered a symbol of death, which had been on a part of the door she couldn't possible search without opening it first, and was thus undetectable and impossible not to set off. It killed her.
Arie, angry at the world for being unfair, flew over and stared down into the hole, triggered another symbol, and also died. At this point it was obvious that the party couldn't continue, especially since Arie managed to squeak, before expiring, that there were *dozens* of symbols of death in the corridor below.
Still, before teleporting back -- Autumn could take everyone, now that two of their number were luggage instead of passengers -- Autumn decided to use up all his druid spells and trigger as many of the symbols as possible on throwaway cannon fodder. To his surprise, they ran out of symbols before he ran out of creatures. Apparently, most of the symbols were fake.
There were more symbold painted on the walls down the very long corridor, so he summoned a bat, had Tordak light-cantrip it, and sent it down as far as it could go before its duration expired. It failed to set off any more symbols.
Then they teleported back, and haggled with the church over the price of True Resurrection, since Arie (via speak with dead) refused to come back for anything less, and didn't want them to sell off any of her equipment. By using all the treasure they'd found so far, and all the cash and cash-equivalent spell components everyone had, they were able to scrape together enough money to pay the church's discount rate of 10,000gp per true res.
They then teleported back to the nearby town, and re-approached the keep the next day, loaded for demon. Worried that the demons might have put more symbols everywhere, they decided to burrow through the roof with a thoqqua (the keep was only one story tall), then send a hawk down and back to check for lingering death fields. There were none, but there were chains.
Dae experimented, and managed to pull one of the chains loose with little effort. He then spent the next few minutes clearing away all the chains he could hook with his own spiked chain without actually dropping into the tunnel, handing them off to the rest of the party, who removed them from the vicinity.
Eventually, though, he had to drop down into the tunnel to continue clearing chains, and that was when the chain devils struck, surprising no one. Dae, Tordak, and Hiko rushed down to fight them.
Around the time the last Kyton was about to fall, a loud rumbling was heard coming down the tunnel. In coordination with Arie this time, Autumn sent a light-cantripped celestial giant bee down the tunnel to see what was coming and act as a road block.
What was coming was a fiendish purple worm, and the giant bee did, indeed, act as a road block, buying the party about a round to prepare for its arrival. They turned out not to really need the time, and their preparations were in vain, as the creature abandoned the tunnel and burrowed through solid rock to lock Dae in its jaws. Autumn quickly gave Dae a spell to resist acid, just before he was swallowed, but it was only a few seconds before concentrated fire from the rest of the party killed the beast.
Unfortunately, the creature weighed about 40,000 pounds, and was completely blocking the tunnel. A quick vote revealed that about half the party absolutely refused to consider hollowing out the worm while Dae's resist acid was still up, which left only digging down into the tunnel somewhere else, behind the worm. Tordak, as a dwarf, was given the task of picking the spot to begin digging.
last session next session
A lot of rules lawyering, a lot of boring searching of completely empty rooms, a little combat, and one utterly unfair deathtrap. Who cast those 8th level spells, anyway?
