Borrowing More Trouble
Apr. 9th, 2004 12:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terrycloth...because that's what adventurers do, goshdarnit. We had another session of Jeff's Dragonlance campaign tonight. We expected Patrick to skip the session, but it turned out that (like Tom) he'd given *extremely* advance notice and not been overly clear about which session exactly he was missing, although it turned out that he had included the date.
Luis was missing, though. We're pretty sure he was gone this week intentionally. We didn't actually try to contact him, because Ed forgot the power cord for his laptop again. I guess he just carries it around under his arm, without any sort of carrying case? It wouldn't be the first time that I found I'd been taking what apparently is considered unwarranted measures to avoid some mishap.
Anyway, the game went pretty well, except that Sonnet and Mike were arguing continuously, in a tone that sort of hinted that they were realy hating each other player to player instead of character to character. And we got silly monte-haulness of treasure and XP. And a character died. And my character was reduced to int *4*.
How the hell do you play int 4 and cha 14? Maybe I can start being extremely absentminded or something; memory is a function of intelligence in D+D.
It's a good thing I don't know any area-effect spells.
In the morning, Kelwick showed the party a map he'd drawn of the forest they were heading to, the Forest of Woe. Morgan was distressed by the names of the landmarks within the forest. The chasm of wailing souls? The pit of sorrow? So Kij asked to see the map, and started renaming them -- who could be afraid of the chasm of happie souls, or the pit of joyye?
Kelwick was a bit annoyed at that, and took his map back, and they headed on through Nightlund, staying the next night inside a village to avoid random undead attacks.
The first bit of trouble the party decided to get itself into was found the next day while travelling down the road, when they happened across a group of humans and orcs laboring to excavate a hole in the side of a hill. Kij wanted to approach, until he saw that there were *dwarves* with the group -- he was convinced that all dwarves were really Sivaks in disguise.
"But you were with all those dwarves in Thorbardin for a week after that, and none of them turned into draconians."
"Well, they could hardly turn into draconians right in Thorbardin! They'd be caught!"
No one could argue with that logic, but everyone else wanted to find out what these folks were up to anyway, so they headed down to chat, and discovered that they were grave robbers, digging up the tomb of the only emporer of the plains nomads. Of course the party wanted in on that action.
The first door's opening mechanism was cleverly concealed, but a concerted effort by Morgan, Kelwick, Jasper, the two dwarves, and the head grave-robber/historian managed to find the way to open it after taking 20. Beyond was a rune encrusted hallway, with two niches filled with platinum and steel. Sonnet carefully searched the piles, finding some potions and scrolls, and started looting them.
"What are you doing? That's not ours!" Kijj objected. "Oh, take it, I don't care," said the historian, so the party did, hoovering it up into Mike's bag of holding.
The next door had dire warnings about death befalling the accursed fools who disturbed the rest of the dead, yada yada yada. Morgan handily disabled the glyphs on the door, and swung it open. Most of the party filtered into the room to investigate the well-preserved body on the bier and the two chests in the far corner.
Sonnet was inspecting the bier for hidden compartments when Morgan finished brushing the poison off the first chest, and opened it, setting off the trap he hadn't found, which reanimated the corpse. The monster got up off its bed and attacked the nearest target, Sonnet, who tried to fight back with her rapier, but was unable to so much as scratch it before it pounded her into jelly.
The creature's frightful presence paralyzed Thor and Murphy with fear, but Thor at least soon recovered. Mike came out of the rope trick he'd hidden in to snipe at the enemy, but kept missing. Thor and Kijj and Morgan faced the creature down in melee, and did some damage before Thor was turned into a vegetable by charisma drain... but it was Murphy's scorching rays that took it down.
Nerilka was able to restore Thor's drained stats, and to cure his mummy rot after the party found its wands and cure-light gloves failing to help him. She even had a scroll of raise dead to bring Sonnet back to life... none of this came cheap, but the party could afford it out of what they'd just found in the tomb.
The chests and the body itself held the bigger treasure, anyway -- a bunch of magic items, which Murphy spent a day identifying while Morgan summoned a familiar, and the historian investigated the remains of the now-safe tomb. Everyone got a useful magic item to help them fight -- Thor a suit of admantium armor that greatly increased his AC even though it was crappy banded mail, Kijj a belt to increase his strength, Morgan some gloves of dexterity, Mike a cloak of charisma, Murphy an amulet of insight (which he set to give him a +5 insight bonus on attacks; it could give that bonus to AC instead), and Sonnet... well, a ring of protection +3 and a trident +3 that no one else wanted. And Kijj's belt of many pockets that he could no longer use (back to the trees with you, Raven). She promised to sell the trident for cash to get herself raised if she got killed again.
So, after that digression, they continued on to the last village before reaching the Forest of Woe (Kij hadn't gotten around to changing that name before the map was taken back). There were many empty houses in the village, and few children, but the innkeeper seemed unconcerned, even when the party was woken up in the middle of the night by a terrified wail. "Eh, my inn is warded, and so is everyone's house that matters. Besides, the elders went to investigate the screaming, and none of them ever returned."
So the party set out to find out what was wrong. The village was small, so they were able to locate the house the screaming had come from. "Jasper says there's no one living left in side, just three shadows," Kelwick reported, so Mike and Murphy blew the hut up with a barrage of fireballs. Yes, the party was now making life or death decisions based on the advice of a kender's imaginary friend.
Jasper was able to track the shadows, so the party followed Kelwick to a ruin a bit away from the village, which Jasper said was FULL of shadows -- 30 of them. And a 'fire shadow', a much nastier, corporeal creature, which could set you on 'fire' to burn away your CON, or just point at you and disintegrate you.
The fire shadow was trapped inside, and hated sunlight at any rate, so the party decided to come back in during the day and use Kelwick's offer to 'make a hole' to chuck as many fireballs as they could in to kill the shadows, so that they wouldn't eat any more children. It was a long argument before they decided on this plan, with bitterness on both sides -- Morgan, for instance, felt that the innkeeper's indifference to the plight of the less fortunate meant that the party should just leave without helping the sure-to-be-ungrateful villagers.
But they went with the fireballs instead, Kijj helping out (a little) by reading a scroll, and many shadows were destroyed before they could react. The rest came out into the sunlight and failed to hit Kijj or Thor, at which point Kelwick turned half of them to dust, and the last few were taken down by various methods. The village was safe, at least as long as the Fire Shadow didn't figure out how to disintegrate nonliving matter.
But that wasn't enough for Jasper -- Kelwick's axe floated down the hole and started hacking away at the fire shadow. Mike floated a mirror down so the party could see what was happening, and that was enough for the mages to aim a few magic missiles at the creature -- doing a little damage, but not much next to Jasper's frenzied hacking. At any rate the fire shadow too was dispatched.
The good deed for the day done, the party headed on to the Forest of Woe, and rested near the entrance. The next day, they headed into the tunnel-like path winding through the impenetrable mass of trees. They decided to skip the Chasm of Happie Souls (whose wailing they could hear from the crossroads), but detoured to pick up the dragon skull marked on the map. Dragon skulls were valuable!
While everyone was busy shoving the mature adult silver dragon skull into a bag of holding, and wondering idly where the vorpal sword that MUST have been responsible was hiding, Sonnet scouted a little farther down the path and came to a clearing. Morgan, following her, spotted the rest of the dragon's skeleton seemingly at rest deeper in, behind sporadic trees filling the clearing (it wouldn't have been considered a clearing in any forest but this one) and the sound of bubbling water.
Curious, the party decided to investigate the clearing, but it was obviously a trap, so they had Sonnet pull a lion out of her bag of tricks and send it into the -- oh, no, wait, at the very entrance to the clearing it was sliced clean in half by a pair of admantium blades.
"Hey, I can disarm that," said Kelwick, and with Morgan's assistance and Sonnet's inspiration, he carefully got out his tools and triggered the trap, losing an arm and falling unconscious. Sonnet healed him to stop the bleeding, and Mike mage-handed the severed arm back to their side of the trap (getting it sliced in half again), but it was Jasper that saved Kelwick's arm, manifesting and casting Regeneration on the kender.
Oh.
Having revealed himself, Jasper explained that he was a ghost of a dwarf, and that the axe was just a ghost touch weapon that he was able to wield while fully ethereal. Apparently, he was a mystic (a clerical sorcerer type) specializing in healing, who could have saved them a LOT of money if they'd known about him before hiring Nerilka.
On the second try (yes, he tried again) Kelwick did manage to disarm the trap, and the party then proceeded to disassemble it and loot the two large admantium blades -- enough of the valuable metal for two suits of heavy armor. Or, presumably, a bunch of weapons, or a not-insignificant amount of cash. But not until they got back to a city.
"Hey guys," Morgan said, noticing something, "The dragon's gone." Jasper scouted, and found that it was actually a three-headed, winged chimera/dragon, guarding a magical fountain. A VERY magical fountain. Radiating universal magic. Everyone's eyes lit up -- that had to be a Wishing fountain! Kaching!
So they attacked and destroyed the guardian. It was tougher than they expected, but wasted most of its fury destroying a charging rhinoscerous out of the bag of tricks. Murphy got a Slow off on it, vastly reducings its threat, but it was already almost dead by that point, so it didn't matter much in the long run.
So that left the fountain unguarded. Mike immediately bent down to drink a small sip, and instantly fell unconscious. When he couldn't be woken up, Murphy and Sonnet rushed to be the next to drink... and fell unconscious as well. Morgan, Kijj, and Thor looked at each other and said, "WTF?", not understanding why the two of them would do that still not knowing that the fountain did anything but put people into a coma. Kijj ordered his familiar to drink, hoping to feel the effect through the empathic link, but he got nothing.
8 hours later, the sleepers awoke, and found themselves subtly changed -- Sonnet was quicker but less wise, Murphy was smarter but less healthy, and Mike was more charismatic but less dextrous. Kijj's familiar was faster but stupider, although still smarter than the minotaur.
So Kijj, Thor, and Morgan decided to drink after all. Thor and Morgan made out okay, but Kijj got EVEN STRONGER -- almost redundant at that point, with the belt and all -- and EVEN STUPIDER. Mike forced his guard dog to drink, but it got a critical failure on its save and fell into a permanent coma, with a wisdom of zero.
Overall, though, the fountain was no Deck of Many Things, and the party felt more prepared for the challenges ahead, whatever they might be.
last week next week
Luis was missing, though. We're pretty sure he was gone this week intentionally. We didn't actually try to contact him, because Ed forgot the power cord for his laptop again. I guess he just carries it around under his arm, without any sort of carrying case? It wouldn't be the first time that I found I'd been taking what apparently is considered unwarranted measures to avoid some mishap.
Anyway, the game went pretty well, except that Sonnet and Mike were arguing continuously, in a tone that sort of hinted that they were realy hating each other player to player instead of character to character. And we got silly monte-haulness of treasure and XP. And a character died. And my character was reduced to int *4*.
How the hell do you play int 4 and cha 14? Maybe I can start being extremely absentminded or something; memory is a function of intelligence in D+D.
It's a good thing I don't know any area-effect spells.
In the morning, Kelwick showed the party a map he'd drawn of the forest they were heading to, the Forest of Woe. Morgan was distressed by the names of the landmarks within the forest. The chasm of wailing souls? The pit of sorrow? So Kij asked to see the map, and started renaming them -- who could be afraid of the chasm of happie souls, or the pit of joyye?
Kelwick was a bit annoyed at that, and took his map back, and they headed on through Nightlund, staying the next night inside a village to avoid random undead attacks.
The first bit of trouble the party decided to get itself into was found the next day while travelling down the road, when they happened across a group of humans and orcs laboring to excavate a hole in the side of a hill. Kij wanted to approach, until he saw that there were *dwarves* with the group -- he was convinced that all dwarves were really Sivaks in disguise.
"But you were with all those dwarves in Thorbardin for a week after that, and none of them turned into draconians."
"Well, they could hardly turn into draconians right in Thorbardin! They'd be caught!"
No one could argue with that logic, but everyone else wanted to find out what these folks were up to anyway, so they headed down to chat, and discovered that they were grave robbers, digging up the tomb of the only emporer of the plains nomads. Of course the party wanted in on that action.
The first door's opening mechanism was cleverly concealed, but a concerted effort by Morgan, Kelwick, Jasper, the two dwarves, and the head grave-robber/historian managed to find the way to open it after taking 20. Beyond was a rune encrusted hallway, with two niches filled with platinum and steel. Sonnet carefully searched the piles, finding some potions and scrolls, and started looting them.
"What are you doing? That's not ours!" Kijj objected. "Oh, take it, I don't care," said the historian, so the party did, hoovering it up into Mike's bag of holding.
The next door had dire warnings about death befalling the accursed fools who disturbed the rest of the dead, yada yada yada. Morgan handily disabled the glyphs on the door, and swung it open. Most of the party filtered into the room to investigate the well-preserved body on the bier and the two chests in the far corner.
Sonnet was inspecting the bier for hidden compartments when Morgan finished brushing the poison off the first chest, and opened it, setting off the trap he hadn't found, which reanimated the corpse. The monster got up off its bed and attacked the nearest target, Sonnet, who tried to fight back with her rapier, but was unable to so much as scratch it before it pounded her into jelly.
The creature's frightful presence paralyzed Thor and Murphy with fear, but Thor at least soon recovered. Mike came out of the rope trick he'd hidden in to snipe at the enemy, but kept missing. Thor and Kijj and Morgan faced the creature down in melee, and did some damage before Thor was turned into a vegetable by charisma drain... but it was Murphy's scorching rays that took it down.
Nerilka was able to restore Thor's drained stats, and to cure his mummy rot after the party found its wands and cure-light gloves failing to help him. She even had a scroll of raise dead to bring Sonnet back to life... none of this came cheap, but the party could afford it out of what they'd just found in the tomb.
The chests and the body itself held the bigger treasure, anyway -- a bunch of magic items, which Murphy spent a day identifying while Morgan summoned a familiar, and the historian investigated the remains of the now-safe tomb. Everyone got a useful magic item to help them fight -- Thor a suit of admantium armor that greatly increased his AC even though it was crappy banded mail, Kijj a belt to increase his strength, Morgan some gloves of dexterity, Mike a cloak of charisma, Murphy an amulet of insight (which he set to give him a +5 insight bonus on attacks; it could give that bonus to AC instead), and Sonnet... well, a ring of protection +3 and a trident +3 that no one else wanted. And Kijj's belt of many pockets that he could no longer use (back to the trees with you, Raven). She promised to sell the trident for cash to get herself raised if she got killed again.
So, after that digression, they continued on to the last village before reaching the Forest of Woe (Kij hadn't gotten around to changing that name before the map was taken back). There were many empty houses in the village, and few children, but the innkeeper seemed unconcerned, even when the party was woken up in the middle of the night by a terrified wail. "Eh, my inn is warded, and so is everyone's house that matters. Besides, the elders went to investigate the screaming, and none of them ever returned."
So the party set out to find out what was wrong. The village was small, so they were able to locate the house the screaming had come from. "Jasper says there's no one living left in side, just three shadows," Kelwick reported, so Mike and Murphy blew the hut up with a barrage of fireballs. Yes, the party was now making life or death decisions based on the advice of a kender's imaginary friend.
Jasper was able to track the shadows, so the party followed Kelwick to a ruin a bit away from the village, which Jasper said was FULL of shadows -- 30 of them. And a 'fire shadow', a much nastier, corporeal creature, which could set you on 'fire' to burn away your CON, or just point at you and disintegrate you.
The fire shadow was trapped inside, and hated sunlight at any rate, so the party decided to come back in during the day and use Kelwick's offer to 'make a hole' to chuck as many fireballs as they could in to kill the shadows, so that they wouldn't eat any more children. It was a long argument before they decided on this plan, with bitterness on both sides -- Morgan, for instance, felt that the innkeeper's indifference to the plight of the less fortunate meant that the party should just leave without helping the sure-to-be-ungrateful villagers.
But they went with the fireballs instead, Kijj helping out (a little) by reading a scroll, and many shadows were destroyed before they could react. The rest came out into the sunlight and failed to hit Kijj or Thor, at which point Kelwick turned half of them to dust, and the last few were taken down by various methods. The village was safe, at least as long as the Fire Shadow didn't figure out how to disintegrate nonliving matter.
But that wasn't enough for Jasper -- Kelwick's axe floated down the hole and started hacking away at the fire shadow. Mike floated a mirror down so the party could see what was happening, and that was enough for the mages to aim a few magic missiles at the creature -- doing a little damage, but not much next to Jasper's frenzied hacking. At any rate the fire shadow too was dispatched.
The good deed for the day done, the party headed on to the Forest of Woe, and rested near the entrance. The next day, they headed into the tunnel-like path winding through the impenetrable mass of trees. They decided to skip the Chasm of Happie Souls (whose wailing they could hear from the crossroads), but detoured to pick up the dragon skull marked on the map. Dragon skulls were valuable!
While everyone was busy shoving the mature adult silver dragon skull into a bag of holding, and wondering idly where the vorpal sword that MUST have been responsible was hiding, Sonnet scouted a little farther down the path and came to a clearing. Morgan, following her, spotted the rest of the dragon's skeleton seemingly at rest deeper in, behind sporadic trees filling the clearing (it wouldn't have been considered a clearing in any forest but this one) and the sound of bubbling water.
Curious, the party decided to investigate the clearing, but it was obviously a trap, so they had Sonnet pull a lion out of her bag of tricks and send it into the -- oh, no, wait, at the very entrance to the clearing it was sliced clean in half by a pair of admantium blades.
"Hey, I can disarm that," said Kelwick, and with Morgan's assistance and Sonnet's inspiration, he carefully got out his tools and triggered the trap, losing an arm and falling unconscious. Sonnet healed him to stop the bleeding, and Mike mage-handed the severed arm back to their side of the trap (getting it sliced in half again), but it was Jasper that saved Kelwick's arm, manifesting and casting Regeneration on the kender.
Oh.
Having revealed himself, Jasper explained that he was a ghost of a dwarf, and that the axe was just a ghost touch weapon that he was able to wield while fully ethereal. Apparently, he was a mystic (a clerical sorcerer type) specializing in healing, who could have saved them a LOT of money if they'd known about him before hiring Nerilka.
On the second try (yes, he tried again) Kelwick did manage to disarm the trap, and the party then proceeded to disassemble it and loot the two large admantium blades -- enough of the valuable metal for two suits of heavy armor. Or, presumably, a bunch of weapons, or a not-insignificant amount of cash. But not until they got back to a city.
"Hey guys," Morgan said, noticing something, "The dragon's gone." Jasper scouted, and found that it was actually a three-headed, winged chimera/dragon, guarding a magical fountain. A VERY magical fountain. Radiating universal magic. Everyone's eyes lit up -- that had to be a Wishing fountain! Kaching!
So they attacked and destroyed the guardian. It was tougher than they expected, but wasted most of its fury destroying a charging rhinoscerous out of the bag of tricks. Murphy got a Slow off on it, vastly reducings its threat, but it was already almost dead by that point, so it didn't matter much in the long run.
So that left the fountain unguarded. Mike immediately bent down to drink a small sip, and instantly fell unconscious. When he couldn't be woken up, Murphy and Sonnet rushed to be the next to drink... and fell unconscious as well. Morgan, Kijj, and Thor looked at each other and said, "WTF?", not understanding why the two of them would do that still not knowing that the fountain did anything but put people into a coma. Kijj ordered his familiar to drink, hoping to feel the effect through the empathic link, but he got nothing.
8 hours later, the sleepers awoke, and found themselves subtly changed -- Sonnet was quicker but less wise, Murphy was smarter but less healthy, and Mike was more charismatic but less dextrous. Kijj's familiar was faster but stupider, although still smarter than the minotaur.
So Kijj, Thor, and Morgan decided to drink after all. Thor and Morgan made out okay, but Kijj got EVEN STRONGER -- almost redundant at that point, with the belt and all -- and EVEN STUPIDER. Mike forced his guard dog to drink, but it got a critical failure on its save and fell into a permanent coma, with a wisdom of zero.
Overall, though, the fountain was no Deck of Many Things, and the party felt more prepared for the challenges ahead, whatever they might be.
last week next week
