| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I thought I would continue updating our progress, as we plod through the Gut at lv. 5.
After a session that was very uneventful, our party reconvened to try to investigate a runed cavern. At the end of the previous session, my untethered eidolon, Eli, found some bodies spiked to the wall. While investigating, he dropped out of contact and when I blipped him back to the party, he was still catatonic.
At the start of this session, our druid commander requested that we investigate the occurrence, so we proceeded to the spiked bodies.
Spikes Round 1:
Yeah...TPK time. Therein lay a room. As the party booked into the room, we heard "everyone make a will save!" Several people and pets failed, and proceeded to shamble over and await...
Becoming more staked bodies for a gaunt dude with a hammer and a giant spike.
Three party members made their saves, including the archer paladin, who quickly had to put his new shiny magic sword to use. It was a brief tough fight. Our party sucks at combat healing and the "spiker" was a heavy damage dealer.
After finding a lot of boots, we decided that the runed caverns were just to unstable to continue exploring.
We continued down the gut for a while and then, of all things, daylight! And mushrooms! Lots of Mushrooms. Fortunately, we recently added a ranger to the party, and he identified some shriekers and yellow? brown? mold. The commander requested a pile of fire elementals to burn everything to the ground.
So, 10 elementals went in, the shriekers went off and 1 round later, 1 elemental came back to report that the other 9 had almost instantly perished.
My master summoner, recently recovered from the realm of the dead, was a little shaken by this. Our Duergar though, was unperturbed and proceed to waltz into the room and get surrounded by a pile of "shriekers" with four 15 foot tentacles apiece. That was not a good dungeoneering roll.
Fortunately, Duergar are immune to horrid gross rotting death and barbarians have damage reduction, so we began shooting and poking at the Violet Fungii.
The drow cleric, who is in love with the duergar barbarian, used shield other on her to mitigate some damage. This was a brilliant play until some crazy dude with a pile of spears came running into the other side of the cavern.
Described as having muscles on top of his muscles' muscles, Sir Musclesalot starting pegging the barbarian for 30 points a spear, at 2 spears a round...which killed the cleric through the 'shield other'. Though a magical DM intervention delivered a save, we dutifully filled out our obituary, for casualty number 2.
Many blows were exchanged, Sir musclesalot fled, a huge pack of ghouls joined the combat and eventually, the conscious party members won through.
Design note: The duergar is a very powerful race for being 9rp.
Design note 2: this was the most fun, deadly mushroom encounter I've ever faced. A party caught mid-room would certainly die in 1 round.
Spikes Round 2:
The master summoner, upset at losing an entire day's worth of summons to cooking vegetables requested that the party hunt down the badly damaged sir musclesalot, because "we can heal and he probably can't."
The party agreed and quickly tracked the fellow down, into...A scary dungeon! Has the party finally discovered RA?
Combat was quickly joined as Sir Musclesalot proceeded to grapple the 1200 pound enlarged barbarian and slam her over and over again onto a spike set in the floor. Holy Cow! That's a musclely man!
Then he doused the archer paladin with green slime, nearly dissolving him, and wrecking much of his equipment, including his bow.
Finally, Sir Musclesalot, spiker of barbarians, thower of nasty crap was reduced to exactly 0 hp and in his rage, put himself to -1.
After some study of various dm hints, it was deduced that the muscly dude is under the effect of cursey magic. This created a rescue/kill debate between the Paladin and Ranger (LG&CG) vs the Druid and Barbarian (NN & CN) with the summoner and cleric (NN&LN) abstaining.
Eventually, it was agreed to go back through the Gut and try to heal Sir Musclesalot. So now we are towing a crazy muscley dude with 6 coils of rope tied around him back through the Gut, using non-lethal damage and spells to keep him down and alive.
RA death count:2
Only two dead? DM must be shirking! I have had 1 dead and one with a permanent injury just in Castle Calaelen!