If there's nothing more of interest in the three rooms, let's try the other door that looks like it leads to some stairs.
The ceiling of this strangely cold chamber arches to a vaulted height of twenty feet. The floor contains eleven wooden lids strewn haphazardly over eleven five-foot-wide pits in the floor. From the darkness within these pits echo up strange shuffling sounds and, every so often, a low moan.
I'll open up the pits. One at a time.
Lym performs another round of Detect Magic on the new area, just to be safe.
The first lid you remove reveals a 20-ft deep pit, holding a human zombie. Each pit you reveal afterwards contains the same thing.
Are these zombies just trapped in these pits? Praxim would love to put them to rest, but doesn't really relish wasting what would likely be a lot of arrows, nor is he keen to jump into a narrow pit for hand to hand. If the zombies have no way of getting out, he's content to leave them there.
Yes, they're trapped.
Lym, you have acid splash or ray of frost ready? You could just keep it up until they drop.
Lym shrugs and starts shooting one of the zombies with a freezing ray, turning it into a popsicle. It cries loudly, and the other zombies begin wailing as well, filling the room with echoes.
After the first zombie is frozen through, Lym moves to the next hole and begins again.
"There's someone coming." Markum warns
Praxim pivots towards the direction of Markum's gaze, smoothly drawing and knocking an arrow. He positions himself so that there is at least one zombie pit between himself and the source of the sound.
The sound of the footsteps get louder and everyone can hear the sound of a humanoid charging towards the pit room. Lym stands ready at the top of the stairs with a piece of butter between her fingers, then lets loose her spell, coating the top of the staircase with grease.
When it gets to the top, you can all now see what advances. A large, mutated goblin, wielding several weapons, slips on the greased steps, but leans on the wall to keep himself from falling.
Init
Markum moves to the square in front of the entrance (B9) and waits for the goblin to come to him and Vuvo
Scimitar
Damage
Bite
Damage
Trip
Init:
Arrow attack: Point blank shot
Arrow damage: Point blank shot
The goblin tries to climb the last few stairs, but slips and falls, hitting his head and busting it open on one of the steps. Lym takes advantage of the opportunity and shoots flames from her fingertips. The fire hits the goblin and grease coating it ignites, burning the goblin's flesh. Varg, still foaming at the mouth and in obvious pain, can barely manage to draw his weapon.
Praxim and Lym fire at the mutated goblin, Praxim's arrow hitting. With the creature fallen prone and wounded, Markum steps forward and slashes his sword through the goblin's skull, ending its life.
Afterward, Lym freezes the rest of the zombies. After five minutes, all the zombies are dead. When the flames have died, Lym chill the goblin's corpse, and Lona searches it. All she can find are the weapons it wielded: a masterwork scimitar, a masterwork hand axe, and a silvered dagger. The spellcasters detect faint magic from the scimitar.
Praxim has no real interest in any of those weapons, though he would take the silvered dagger if nobody else really wanted it.
Markum will take the scimitar if no one objects.
I'm a little lost as to where we are right now. Let's continue on to the next area.
aid another from Vuvo
Perception
Perception with aid another
You head south down the hallway until a path splits off to the left. You can see the top of a spiral staircase and, when you investigate, you find that, several steps down, the staircase has blocked off by a wall of rubble. You don't detect anything magical here.
Back in the hallway, you continue south and come to a door. You don't hear anything coming from the other side. Opening the door reveals the room beyond.
This strange room consists of a fifteen-foot-diameter sphere. Several objects float in the room, spinning lazily in space - a ragged book, a scroll, a bottle of wine, a dead raven surrounded by a halo of floating and writhing maggots, and a twisted iron wand with a forked tip. Yet perhaps the most unnerving aspect of the room is the walls, for they are plated in sheets of strange red metal that ripple every once in a while with silent black electricity that seems to coalesce into strange runes or words far too often to be the effect of chance.
I'll have Vuvo stay while I cautiously enter the room...
As soon as you enter, you begin floating in place.
I backpeddle. If that doesn't work, I'll try to grab hold of something and pull/push myself out of the room.
Praxim will quickly extend his bow out for Markum to grab hold of, and pull him in.
You're able to pull yourself out of the room.
Unless one of the arcane spell-geeks want to examine the room, Markum is done with it.
Lona and Lym examine the room, Lym detecting magic permeating the room. Lona enters and pushes herself back and forth across the spherical room. She eventually collects the book, scroll, iron wand, and wine bottle, before leaving the room for good.
The scroll is identified as a scroll of burning hands. The twisted wand is a wand of shocking grasp. The book radiates unidentifiable magic, is marked with a religious symbol, and is written in Abyssal. The bottle of wine seems normal.
Even though he is concerned for his companions' silence, Markum is determined to explore the complex further. "Come on, Vuvo, let's finish this."
The stairs at B5
After several flights of stairs you reach a small circular room. Water ripples quietly in a circular stone pool lined with skulls here. Smears of what looks like blood mar's the pool rim in places.
Suddenly, your ears are assaulted by a horrible, almost-deafening shriek.
Markum: You look up and toward your left and see a vargouille. As it shrieks, you feel your body tingling, and then starting to go numb at first, but you shake off those effects.[/ooc]
Initiative: Vargouille, everyone else
Round 1
The vargouille descends towards Markum and bites him on the shoulder (2 dmg).
Point blank shot over Markum's shoulder
Attack:
Damage:
Vuvo leaps at the vargouille allowing Markum time to recover from its attack.
Scimitar: to hit
Scimitar: damage
Bite: to hit
Bite: damage
Bite: trip is this possible with a flying opponent?
Round 1
Praxim shoots the vargouille, clipping one of its wings. Vuvo's bite injures it heavily, and Markum is able finish it off with a slash of his scimitar.
Markum looks to make sure everyone is ok before he continues up the stairs.
Markum Perception
Vuvo Perception Scent, aid another
Continuing further...a flight of spiral stairs winds up around a circular pillar into darkness above. On the way up you run into a wall of rock blocking further passage.
Go back to B5 and down the 'southern' passage that we have not yet explored.
Markum Perception
Vuvo Perception Scent, aid another
The passage going south branches into two passages going east. Which do you take?
The upper one.
The tunnel widens here into what appears to have once been a small shrine...to the northeast steps lead up to a platform of gray stone. Sitting atop the platform is an ancient altar, little more than a jagged block of black marble with a shallow concavity on top of it. This basin is filled with what appears to be filthy water.
Markum detects magic
Praxim frowns and points at the filthy water at the same time as Markum.
"There's something evil about that water. I'd recommend giving it a wide berth."
Go open the double doors just up the hallway.
Markum Perception
Vuvo Perception Scent, aid another
This huge room looks like nothing more than an immense underground cathedral. Stone doors stand to either side of the main entrance, but beyond this, the walls are carved with strange, spiky runes. In the center of the room is a large pool, a ring of polished human skulls balanced on stone spikes arranged in circle around the deeper midsection. At the far end of the room, a pair of stone stairs leads up to a pulpit on which a second pool, this one triangular and filled with chuming, bubbling water that looks almost like translucent lava. Yet while wisps of what look like heat and stream rise from the strange orange liquid, the room itself is deathly cold.
Just then, a quasit appears out of nowhere, next to the pool of orange liquid. It scream at you, "You dare intrude upon the Mother's sanctum!" before slitting its own wrist with a dagger, allowing its blood to drip into the bubbling pool. "Let's see how you deal with sinspawn!" Almost instantly, a wrathful humanoid, like the ones you've already fought in these catacombs, forms from the liquid and sets its gaze on you.
Initiative: quasit, PCs, sinspawn
Round 1
As soon as the sinspawn forms, the quasit disappears.
Praxim moves in to H6, knocking an arrow as he weaves his way into the room, then readies an attack for when the sinspawn moves within 30 feet.
Arrow attack:
Damage: