TP... oh, okay, I'll be nice.
Sep. 17th, 2004 12:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothWe had another session of the Dark Sun campaign. We desecrated a sacred halfling holy site (which we mistook as an ancient abandoned ruin) and were nearly all killed. In the end, though, only one of us died. Because the GM was nice.
See if you can spot the divine intervention!
After the battle against the neanderthal types, the party, bolstered by the addition of four surviving Pterrans, continued on through the forest, until an earthquake opened a chasm right underneath them! April and Laika were able to float or fly, but the others only tumbled 25 feet into the dusty depths... Zehara was mostly unhurt, but Ducati and Saurian were in bad shape, and decided to stay back and guard the noncombatant Pterrans while the others explored the chasm.
For the chasm looked very interesting -- it was mostly filled with a large, strangely organic building, like a series of globules glommed together in a cluster. There were two entrances, one a door ten feet up the wall, sphinctered shut with a small hole that looked like you could put a hand into it, the other a crack smashed in the wall by the earthquakes.
No one wanted to stick their hand in the hole to try to open the door, so they went in through the crack. Inside was a room with a model of a submerged city -- the water represented by bluish crystal -- with the same sort of buildings as this one, and a fist-sized sapphire floating overhead, glowing slightly, as if it were the sun, suspended by a column of air blowing up from tiny holes.
Laika poked at the sapphire, to test if it was trapped or alarmed, and a halfling appeared, a civilized looking halfling, with a strange growth on his arm. The halfling repeated the same simple phrase over and over, but no one had the slightest inkling what it said. Eventually, he vanished, and the party figured it was an illusion along the lines of a magic mouth. So Zehara snagged the sapphire.
To go further required going through a sphincter door like the one outside, so Laika bit the bullet and put his hand into the hole... which closed around it snugly, but not painfully, and a few second later released it, and opened the door.
The door led to a tube-like hallway, with a locked door at one end -- of a different material than the others, with a glyph and some sort of soft spot in the middle. A keyhole? There were also two standard doors, and the party chose the one at the far end from the glyph door to go through.
That door led to the main set of hallways for the building, in a sort of figure-8 pattern surrounding two main rooms, with an offshoot leading to the door they hadn't gone in. They proceeded into the room directly across from them, which was filled with glowy multicolored spires, set around a central brilliant white spire. The room was designed to look like it was outdoors, sort of... the sky was *blue* instead of red, and the sun was small and bright.
Laika, feeling a bit claustrophobic, flew up to perch on the white spire, and tried to convince himself that he was outdoors. It didn't work. While he was up there, though, a door opened across the room from where the party had come in, and a wild-looking halfling told them in broken common that they'd desecrated a holy place, and would all be killed!
So the party chased after the halfling, but lost him. They proceeded into the other main central room, which was full of organic-looking tables and chairs, and there were forced to make their stand, as the halflings opened BOTH doors, surrounding them, and attacked!
Laika thought the leader of the halflings looked like a caster, and stood ready to shoot him when he tried to cast a spell -- but never got the chance, as poisoned arrows from the halflings peppered the party, and Laika and Tellac (the Pterran merchant they were guiding, who'd come into the building with them) were both put to sleep by the poison. This left only April and Zehara to face down seven halflings, including a druid -- not good at all.
Worse, April's Color Spray was sucked through two doors into the white spire from the other room. Feeling useless, she cast a Sanctuary so she at least wouldn't be *killed*, while Zehara cut her way through the halfling underlings screening the druid, and followed him out into the hallway, and out of sight. As they were unable to attack April (they tried, but failed) that left six halflings against only Zehara, while April picked up Laika's sleeping body (he was lighter, hollow bones and all) and started dragging him towards the exit.
It was not to be, though. The druid, feeling his wounds, retreated from the raging Zehara, leaving her to his five minions, and moved to block the exit -- so as April approached the smaller tunnel leading to the map room, the druid was there, with his produce flame spell still active, and zapped her.
Zehara downed a second halfling, then spotted April in retreat and ran to join her. April healed her, just as the druid blasted the lot of them (including the sleeping Laika) with a Flame Strike. April and Zehara both went down.
Fortunately, the shock of the flame brought Laika to consciousness, although it was an extremely heavily wounded consciousness. ("Oh great, now I get to *see* my death coming.") Even more fortunately, Tellac, who'd been stabbed repeatedly by halflings who never quite had the time to coup-de-grace him, awoke as well, and charged to aid in the fight.
Laika closed the door between them and the druid, and at Tellac's suggestion locked it -- he wondered how Tellac knew *how* to lock it, but he *was* a strange lizard creature from a strange land. The druid tried to blast the door open, but only succeeded in jamming it shut.
Meanwhile, Tellac had intercepted the surviving four halfling warriors, who engaged him in melee while Laika started picking them off from a distance -- because if Tellac went down, he knew he wouldn't last long, and whatever the druid was planning to kill them would be beside the point. Together, they took down three, and Tellac confidently said he'd be able to handle the last on his own.
So Laika squeezed a potionfruit into the still-bleeding April's mouth, and while she turned and healed Zehara, he ran to lock the other door -- arriving just in time.
Zehara and Tellac did manage to finish off the other halfling, at least. But now they were trapped! The druid they'd locked out was blasting away at the door with fearsomely powerful magics -- magic that they'd been fools to risk facing in combat. Fifth level spells! But it was all to no avail.
The party didn't know that at first, though, and explored the rest of the area they were trapped in to look for another way out. They found a room with webs and spiders in it, and shot the spider to death to search for hidden exits, but there were none. They also found a room with a giant two-headed lizard creature that seemed to have dug a tunnel out. At Zehara's request, Tellac mindlinked with it to try to see if they could convince it to dig its way out -- but it was too stupid and aggressive and hungry for that to work.
So, after it was obvious that the druid wasn't going to be able to get in, and more to the point had given up on getting in, and instead had stone-shaped the door shut, they looted eighteen vials of sleep poison from the halflings, and used twelve of them to poison a halfling body, which they fed to the two-headed lizard, putting it to sleep. (36 saving throws later) Then they coup-de-graced it, and explored its tunnel. Which went nowhere. They were still trapped.
Deciding that they were probably trapped for the night -- the one door the druid had damaged was slowly healing, but it was *really* slow -- they feasted on sleep-poisoned lizard meet, and had a nice, deep, restful sleep. Zehara slept on the oozy, squishy, slimy, VERY VERY comfortable halfling beds, while Laika slept in the sky chamber...
In the morning, they gathered around the door and waited for it to heal. When it looked ready, they powered up, and unlocked it... and nothing was behind it. Drat.
That let them explore the rest of the rooms, though. The secure door, that used to be glyphed, was now unlocked (the doors Laika had locked had also had glyphs on them, while they were locked), but they left that for last, instead exploring first a ruined classroom, from which they snagged a single intact slate tablet with writing on it, and a chamber that looked like the heart of the complex -- and which was apparently the source of the faint beating heart noise they'd been able to hear all through the building.
Out of the heart came the illusionary halfling again, but this time he spoke perfect Pterran. He told Tellac that the people who lived in the city ('Oolan, the city of water', or something like that) had created a terrible evil, which was trapped behind various portals, and that no one should ever let it out, or horrible things would befall the world.
Hmm, could that be talking about the strange gray portal, the last they hadn't explored? It was the last hope for finding a way out of the building, as the druid had stone-shaped shut the exit from the map room as well, so Zehara decided to open it and find out.
Yep, it was. A horrible gray ooze, with the druid trapped inside, attacked Zehara with a hammer and a ray of lightning, formed from out of its constantly changing body! Zehara's weapons had little effect on it, but Tellac's dagger -- the only magic weapon in the party -- seemed to hurt it badly, so Zehara borrowed it (drawing its attacks back to herself in the process) and started chipping away at its health, while April shot magic missiles into its backside.
There *was* an exit from the room the creature had been hiding in, though, and as the tremors got worse and worse the creature AND the party tried to retreat through it, at more or less the same time. Getting out involved climbing up a massive pile of rubble, and while Laika was able to just fly out, the others had some trouble. Zehara had the worst of it, though -- although she was well able to climb the pile, the final blast from the creature hit her full on, and knocked her steaming corpse to the ground, where only Tellac remained. Until April fell off the pile and joined him.
Just as it looked like the creature might get away (although Laika *was* outside to try to shoot it -- his arrows wouldn't do much against it, though) Tellac picked the magic dagger up off Zehara's corpse and threw it at the gray oozy creature, killing it. It rolled back down the pile, and the gray ooze left the druid's body which it had been sort of animating, and returned to a metal sphere in the corner.
It was really really obvious that the whole place was going down, though, so April snagged the druid's body and Zehara's, and went ectoplasmic to float out (instead of risking falling again by trying to climb). Laika swooped down to retrieve the dagger, Tellac climbed out, and the whole building collapsed into a much deeper sinkhole, falling into a vast underground sea with a SPLOOSH. Then the hole filled in, leaving no sign of the place but a massive rock-filled sinkhole.
Laika flew around to try to find the others that they'd left behind, and found them tied to stakes while halflings danced around, obviously intending to eat them! It looked like he had some time, though, so he fetched the rest of the party, and they had him decoy the halflings away (by dropping their leader's body into the festivities and taunting them) while April and Tellac performed their rescue.
Laika stayed out of easy bowshot, while taking potshots back at them, but a lucky hit convinced him to stay out of range entirely (as succumbing to the poison again would mean his death, if he fell from 90 feet). The halflings still followed, and the others were rescued, along with two newcomers -- a telepathic psion, and 'Grateful'. Who started eating the dead halfling druid. Eww.
At any rate, they buggered off, and at camp that night decided to decipher the stone tablet. It took some doing, but in the end they decided it read:
"In the fourth age Rhuniti shall return. The gray age becomes the blue age. And the wanderer shall return."
No one knew who Rhuniti was, although Tellac thought it sounded similar to the name of a tribe of civilized halflings living on the edge of the great cliffs, near his village. The Wanderer was a well known legendary figure, though -- a human with a lizard tail and hand, who... well, wandered.
last session | next session
The telepath is, of course, Patrick's replacement character for the falled Zehara. The sad thing: adding up all the loot we've gotten up until now, INCLUDING the magic sword from the druid's body, just about equals the loot from Zehara, since we started with 2500 ceramic in equipment. Sheesh!
Actually, no, wait, we got that giant sapphire. It's too big to *sell*, though, at least without heroic effort.
We'll be missing the next two weeks of this game, unfortunately -- the 23rd both me and Ed will be gone for various reasons, and the week after that Ed and Jeff. We plan to reconvene on the 5th of October, switching to Mondays since it's better for Ed.
See if you can spot the divine intervention!
After the battle against the neanderthal types, the party, bolstered by the addition of four surviving Pterrans, continued on through the forest, until an earthquake opened a chasm right underneath them! April and Laika were able to float or fly, but the others only tumbled 25 feet into the dusty depths... Zehara was mostly unhurt, but Ducati and Saurian were in bad shape, and decided to stay back and guard the noncombatant Pterrans while the others explored the chasm.
For the chasm looked very interesting -- it was mostly filled with a large, strangely organic building, like a series of globules glommed together in a cluster. There were two entrances, one a door ten feet up the wall, sphinctered shut with a small hole that looked like you could put a hand into it, the other a crack smashed in the wall by the earthquakes.
No one wanted to stick their hand in the hole to try to open the door, so they went in through the crack. Inside was a room with a model of a submerged city -- the water represented by bluish crystal -- with the same sort of buildings as this one, and a fist-sized sapphire floating overhead, glowing slightly, as if it were the sun, suspended by a column of air blowing up from tiny holes.
Laika poked at the sapphire, to test if it was trapped or alarmed, and a halfling appeared, a civilized looking halfling, with a strange growth on his arm. The halfling repeated the same simple phrase over and over, but no one had the slightest inkling what it said. Eventually, he vanished, and the party figured it was an illusion along the lines of a magic mouth. So Zehara snagged the sapphire.
To go further required going through a sphincter door like the one outside, so Laika bit the bullet and put his hand into the hole... which closed around it snugly, but not painfully, and a few second later released it, and opened the door.
The door led to a tube-like hallway, with a locked door at one end -- of a different material than the others, with a glyph and some sort of soft spot in the middle. A keyhole? There were also two standard doors, and the party chose the one at the far end from the glyph door to go through.
That door led to the main set of hallways for the building, in a sort of figure-8 pattern surrounding two main rooms, with an offshoot leading to the door they hadn't gone in. They proceeded into the room directly across from them, which was filled with glowy multicolored spires, set around a central brilliant white spire. The room was designed to look like it was outdoors, sort of... the sky was *blue* instead of red, and the sun was small and bright.
Laika, feeling a bit claustrophobic, flew up to perch on the white spire, and tried to convince himself that he was outdoors. It didn't work. While he was up there, though, a door opened across the room from where the party had come in, and a wild-looking halfling told them in broken common that they'd desecrated a holy place, and would all be killed!
So the party chased after the halfling, but lost him. They proceeded into the other main central room, which was full of organic-looking tables and chairs, and there were forced to make their stand, as the halflings opened BOTH doors, surrounding them, and attacked!
Laika thought the leader of the halflings looked like a caster, and stood ready to shoot him when he tried to cast a spell -- but never got the chance, as poisoned arrows from the halflings peppered the party, and Laika and Tellac (the Pterran merchant they were guiding, who'd come into the building with them) were both put to sleep by the poison. This left only April and Zehara to face down seven halflings, including a druid -- not good at all.
Worse, April's Color Spray was sucked through two doors into the white spire from the other room. Feeling useless, she cast a Sanctuary so she at least wouldn't be *killed*, while Zehara cut her way through the halfling underlings screening the druid, and followed him out into the hallway, and out of sight. As they were unable to attack April (they tried, but failed) that left six halflings against only Zehara, while April picked up Laika's sleeping body (he was lighter, hollow bones and all) and started dragging him towards the exit.
It was not to be, though. The druid, feeling his wounds, retreated from the raging Zehara, leaving her to his five minions, and moved to block the exit -- so as April approached the smaller tunnel leading to the map room, the druid was there, with his produce flame spell still active, and zapped her.
Zehara downed a second halfling, then spotted April in retreat and ran to join her. April healed her, just as the druid blasted the lot of them (including the sleeping Laika) with a Flame Strike. April and Zehara both went down.
Fortunately, the shock of the flame brought Laika to consciousness, although it was an extremely heavily wounded consciousness. ("Oh great, now I get to *see* my death coming.") Even more fortunately, Tellac, who'd been stabbed repeatedly by halflings who never quite had the time to coup-de-grace him, awoke as well, and charged to aid in the fight.
Laika closed the door between them and the druid, and at Tellac's suggestion locked it -- he wondered how Tellac knew *how* to lock it, but he *was* a strange lizard creature from a strange land. The druid tried to blast the door open, but only succeeded in jamming it shut.
Meanwhile, Tellac had intercepted the surviving four halfling warriors, who engaged him in melee while Laika started picking them off from a distance -- because if Tellac went down, he knew he wouldn't last long, and whatever the druid was planning to kill them would be beside the point. Together, they took down three, and Tellac confidently said he'd be able to handle the last on his own.
So Laika squeezed a potionfruit into the still-bleeding April's mouth, and while she turned and healed Zehara, he ran to lock the other door -- arriving just in time.
Zehara and Tellac did manage to finish off the other halfling, at least. But now they were trapped! The druid they'd locked out was blasting away at the door with fearsomely powerful magics -- magic that they'd been fools to risk facing in combat. Fifth level spells! But it was all to no avail.
The party didn't know that at first, though, and explored the rest of the area they were trapped in to look for another way out. They found a room with webs and spiders in it, and shot the spider to death to search for hidden exits, but there were none. They also found a room with a giant two-headed lizard creature that seemed to have dug a tunnel out. At Zehara's request, Tellac mindlinked with it to try to see if they could convince it to dig its way out -- but it was too stupid and aggressive and hungry for that to work.
So, after it was obvious that the druid wasn't going to be able to get in, and more to the point had given up on getting in, and instead had stone-shaped the door shut, they looted eighteen vials of sleep poison from the halflings, and used twelve of them to poison a halfling body, which they fed to the two-headed lizard, putting it to sleep. (36 saving throws later) Then they coup-de-graced it, and explored its tunnel. Which went nowhere. They were still trapped.
Deciding that they were probably trapped for the night -- the one door the druid had damaged was slowly healing, but it was *really* slow -- they feasted on sleep-poisoned lizard meet, and had a nice, deep, restful sleep. Zehara slept on the oozy, squishy, slimy, VERY VERY comfortable halfling beds, while Laika slept in the sky chamber...
In the morning, they gathered around the door and waited for it to heal. When it looked ready, they powered up, and unlocked it... and nothing was behind it. Drat.
That let them explore the rest of the rooms, though. The secure door, that used to be glyphed, was now unlocked (the doors Laika had locked had also had glyphs on them, while they were locked), but they left that for last, instead exploring first a ruined classroom, from which they snagged a single intact slate tablet with writing on it, and a chamber that looked like the heart of the complex -- and which was apparently the source of the faint beating heart noise they'd been able to hear all through the building.
Out of the heart came the illusionary halfling again, but this time he spoke perfect Pterran. He told Tellac that the people who lived in the city ('Oolan, the city of water', or something like that) had created a terrible evil, which was trapped behind various portals, and that no one should ever let it out, or horrible things would befall the world.
Hmm, could that be talking about the strange gray portal, the last they hadn't explored? It was the last hope for finding a way out of the building, as the druid had stone-shaped shut the exit from the map room as well, so Zehara decided to open it and find out.
Yep, it was. A horrible gray ooze, with the druid trapped inside, attacked Zehara with a hammer and a ray of lightning, formed from out of its constantly changing body! Zehara's weapons had little effect on it, but Tellac's dagger -- the only magic weapon in the party -- seemed to hurt it badly, so Zehara borrowed it (drawing its attacks back to herself in the process) and started chipping away at its health, while April shot magic missiles into its backside.
There *was* an exit from the room the creature had been hiding in, though, and as the tremors got worse and worse the creature AND the party tried to retreat through it, at more or less the same time. Getting out involved climbing up a massive pile of rubble, and while Laika was able to just fly out, the others had some trouble. Zehara had the worst of it, though -- although she was well able to climb the pile, the final blast from the creature hit her full on, and knocked her steaming corpse to the ground, where only Tellac remained. Until April fell off the pile and joined him.
Just as it looked like the creature might get away (although Laika *was* outside to try to shoot it -- his arrows wouldn't do much against it, though) Tellac picked the magic dagger up off Zehara's corpse and threw it at the gray oozy creature, killing it. It rolled back down the pile, and the gray ooze left the druid's body which it had been sort of animating, and returned to a metal sphere in the corner.
It was really really obvious that the whole place was going down, though, so April snagged the druid's body and Zehara's, and went ectoplasmic to float out (instead of risking falling again by trying to climb). Laika swooped down to retrieve the dagger, Tellac climbed out, and the whole building collapsed into a much deeper sinkhole, falling into a vast underground sea with a SPLOOSH. Then the hole filled in, leaving no sign of the place but a massive rock-filled sinkhole.
Laika flew around to try to find the others that they'd left behind, and found them tied to stakes while halflings danced around, obviously intending to eat them! It looked like he had some time, though, so he fetched the rest of the party, and they had him decoy the halflings away (by dropping their leader's body into the festivities and taunting them) while April and Tellac performed their rescue.
Laika stayed out of easy bowshot, while taking potshots back at them, but a lucky hit convinced him to stay out of range entirely (as succumbing to the poison again would mean his death, if he fell from 90 feet). The halflings still followed, and the others were rescued, along with two newcomers -- a telepathic psion, and 'Grateful'. Who started eating the dead halfling druid. Eww.
At any rate, they buggered off, and at camp that night decided to decipher the stone tablet. It took some doing, but in the end they decided it read:
"In the fourth age Rhuniti shall return. The gray age becomes the blue age. And the wanderer shall return."
No one knew who Rhuniti was, although Tellac thought it sounded similar to the name of a tribe of civilized halflings living on the edge of the great cliffs, near his village. The Wanderer was a well known legendary figure, though -- a human with a lizard tail and hand, who... well, wandered.
last session | next session
The telepath is, of course, Patrick's replacement character for the falled Zehara. The sad thing: adding up all the loot we've gotten up until now, INCLUDING the magic sword from the druid's body, just about equals the loot from Zehara, since we started with 2500 ceramic in equipment. Sheesh!
Actually, no, wait, we got that giant sapphire. It's too big to *sell*, though, at least without heroic effort.
We'll be missing the next two weeks of this game, unfortunately -- the 23rd both me and Ed will be gone for various reasons, and the week after that Ed and Jeff. We plan to reconvene on the 5th of October, switching to Mondays since it's better for Ed.
