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Magic Workstation was down all day yesterday, but when I woke up this morning (after dreaming about finding old tapes with recordings of songs I'd done when I was young and creative, which were ridicuously awe-inspiring in the dream, but which I couldn't remember a line of once awake) it was working, so I played a bunch of games, mostly with the red-white pop! deck. I lost track of time, kind of, and was almost (but not quite) late for Tom's Sunday D+D game, which was happening today.

We continued the plot from last time, then started on another somewhat similar -- possibly connected -- story. During the second part, we kept careful track of accumulated experience, giving up our futile fight against the endless waves of undead only when we'd passed the threshhold of getting to level 4. Well, and when we started going up against things like Wraiths that we really weren't set up to handle.

The party chased down the fleeing zombies, cutting and zapping them to bits before the turn effect ran out... unfortunately, this gave the enemies plenty of time to prepare for them, and by the time they returned in the other direction, chasing after the living woman who'd fled, the scene was well prepared, with ranks of melee and ranged skeletons arrayed around an evil altar, next to a pile of dinosaur bones, with drumming skeletons generating an unholy field filling the room with doom, and waist-high mist, that was slowly rising as the party watched.

Noctus, being the hotheaded fighter of the group [and who had a death wish, as Josh wanted to swap out characters], charged straight for the boss, past all the skeletons, and was paralyzed by a Hold Person spell that he couldn't seem to break out of on his own. The rest of the party moved in more carefully, engaging the melee skeletons or using ranged weapons on the boss, except for Samuel, who couldn't enter the room at all, and had no spells with longer than 'close' range. Or that affected undead.

Most of the skeletons were turned or dusted by Rhiannon's first turn attempt, despite the unhallow... but as she continued forwards after the girl, she wandered into line of sight of another evil priest, this one with a flying, misty skeleton hovering over his shoulders. And got herself paralyzed. And then the mist filled the room entirely, so that no one could see, and then the pile of dinosaur bones assembled itself into a giant evil skeleton, to beat up on Rainne and Arcaton, or at least to flail vaguely in their direction in the mist. At least the female evil priest was already on the run, having taken a few too many arrows and zap-blasts...

Zanzibar, who'd been wandering around blindly far longer than the others, as he was that much shorter, happened to stumble into the paralyzed form of Rhiannon right next to the group of evil drummer skeletons, and put up a silence spell from one of his wands, which ended the unhallow. The second evil priest was annoyed, and decided that an area-dispel was in order. He managed not to take out his own hold person, and did drop the silence he was mostly hoping for (along with a shield on Zanzibar and a cat's grace on Rhiannon), but also took out the fog -- and Samuel had already entered the room while the unhallow was briefly down.

Rhiannon finally broke the hold on her, and used her ability to turn as a free action to use a Greater Turning, dusting all the remaining skeletons except the giant, including the drummers and the evil floating one -- this badly wounded the priest that was connected to it, and he ran off into his own room as well.

So, things would have been looking up, except that the giant skeleton finally got a solid hit on Arcaton, who collapsed -- and a GIGANTIC DEMON ripped its way out of her back, slaughtering the giant skeleton and then menacing the party. Zanzibar and Rainne were panicked by its sudden appearance, and it took attacks of opportunity on them as they fled, and on Samuel as well when he chased after the female priestess, who was making a run for it.

The female priest, Samuel, and Rainne all ran for the actual exit, but Zanzibar was unfortunately herded back into the deeper section of the temple by his panic, where Rhiannon and Noctus (who Rhiannon had freed with a spell) were taking on the main evil bad guy, who called on his god and got himself turned into a skeleton. As a skeleton, he was immune to non-bludgeoning weapons, but Noctus simply borrowed Rhiannon's mace, while Rhiannon went after him with a wand of cure light wounds. Together, they were able to finish him off, while Zanzibar cowered nearby, with the giant demon bearing down on him...

Luckily, the giant demon was satiated after devouring the evil altar, and shrunk and vanished around the same time as Zanzibar's panic faded. Far away, Rainne's panic also faded, and she was able to start fighting the evil priestess who was still near her, having run away by the same route. She didn't manage to kill her before she got out the secret door, and ended up skewering her with arrows in the middle of the crowded theater. The troupe was happy to feign ignorance of the evil temple under their feet, though, and didn't press charges.

So the party looted everything lootable, and freed the chained up ghosts of the missing adventurers, who were as solid as Samuel but knew they were dead, and refused to stick around as ghosts. One of them, 'Chini the Younger', was rich enough to get herself raised, the others were buried and went on to their final reward and/or punishment. The party collected the reward for finding them anyway, and split up the loot. There wasn't *that* much, but they each got a couple thousand to spend... Zanzibar used it commisionning a staff of fireball -- the cheesy kind that takes 25 charges per use, and therefore costs less than a thousand gold, and can be completed in a day.

At that point, Noctus decided to leave the party, and was replaced by some temple-associate with a spiked chain for the next mission, which was for the temple -- they were being asked to go to a nearby city and investigate a swarm of undead.

They got there just after dark, and found a cordon of guards trying to keep the undead confined to the quarter of the city they'd already overrun. "We can't keep them contained... a bunch of people are still alive in there, but not for much longer!" So the party headed in to see who they could rescue, following the screams.

The first house was relatively simple to clear -- just some zombies. Sure, one of them was full of green slime, so they just avoided *touching* it and set the slime -- and the house -- on fire. The people inside were rescued, at any rate.

The next building was the festhall. The front room was half full of undead, and half full of a lone elf who was entirely full of himself. When the elf refused to explain his presence and seeming nonchalance, Zanzibar loudly accused him of being a necromancer behind the attacks, but couldn't hit him with his rays, or even shatter his cup of wine, and was eventually talked out of attacking what was obviously a very powerful *good* cleric judging by the piles of zombie dust surrounding him. Rhiannon demonstrated the process by dusting every zombie in the room, and they rescued the people upstairs. The elf refused to come with them.

As they were taking the people they'd rescued back to the guards, they saw a flash of bright light from the graveyard. "Yeah, that happens every few hours at night," the guards told them. "Maybe during the day too, although we wouldn't be able to see it as clearly." Just in case it didn't happen during the day too, the party decided to go to the graveyard to reconnoiter.

As they made it to the road leading to the cemetary, they saw fourteen groups of undead arrayed before them. "Um... maybe we should try to sneak through the woods or something," someone suggested. "Nonsense! They're only zombies. We can cut them to bits with ranged weapons before they get close."

That plan didn't really work, since zombies are pretty hard to take down, but they managed to chop their way about halfway to the graveyard, with Rhiannon and the chain guy taking down the zombies that got past Arcaton, Rainne, and Zanzibar (and Samuel mostly just being along for the ride, as all his spells sucked). They took down a powerful and dangerous burning skeleton, which badly wounded the chain guy, then a group of *six* zombies that took a while to kill, before Rhiannon spotted a wraith in the next group.

Zanzibar thought he could maybe kill the wraith, given an infinite number of shots before it flew up and devoured him in short order, but no one else even had anything with them that could hurt it, so they decided to retreat for the moment, and come back in the morning with a better array of anti-undead spells and, more importantly, the bright light of the morning sun to keep most of the incorporeal threats safely hidden away.

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After the game, a few of us played a few rounds of 'Power Grid' before Tom's wife chased us out of the house.

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