Paddy bends down close to the ground, trying to discern any tracks or the like.
I'm alright with going down. Want me to lead in case of traps?
Hisao attempts to aid Paddy in finding tracks
Iommi-Tyr Magnusson observes as his fellows search for Tracks so as to learn for what to look.
If we cannot find his tracks in this dimly lit chamber I vote going down.
Darkness often lies below the lighted places of society.
Finding little in the way of tracks to follow, the party decides to venture back down into the catacombs. By stair or by trapdoor, and in what order?
[dice=Survival]1d20+5
Tracks of booted or slippered medium-sized feet can be faintly traced in the thin dust on the flagstone floor of this cellar, along with odd drag-marks of something less concrete in form, almost as if a giant snail trail had been left by something amorphous in nature....
The footprints lead everywhere--upstairs, downstairs, to the trapdoor (but never from), etc....
The snail trail leads between the stairs and the trapdoor and around that general area....
Nacht follows the paths until he finds what he guesses is a trapdoor... and shows it to the party.
When the group decides where to go Hisao will offer to scout and go invisible to do so.
Paddy checks the trapdoor for traps.
Paddy checks the trapdoor for traps.
[dice=perception]1d20+8
The way appears free of traps....
The trapdoor opens downward with more than 50 lbs of pressure, dropping its employers into a 5-ft-in-diameter cylindrical slide or chute that angles toward the spiral stair, lending further evidence of connecting with the same deeper chamber below....
Nacht ...shows it to the party.
Hey, look, it's the trapdoor that Paddy found earlier!
Nacht shakes his head and points at it again but with the leadup from the paths
" Dies scheint durch eine Schnecke Wesen gemacht wurden . Lange Wanderwege ohne Füße. Wir sollten diesen Eingang oder vielleicht beides gleichzeitig verwenden , würde nicht erwarten. "
Nacht nods to Hisao's earlier plan and equips himself for battle. He wields the Greatsword given by the man in armor and two Gladius'
But what if they don't go to the same room but instead different rooms on the same level?...
I think we should all go down the same way -- though I agree the Stealthy of us can go first and the rest can wait until either we hear a report or the sound of alarm.
"Splitting up seems like an incredibly bad idea. Especially since so many of our group have disappeared without a trace while we've wandered down here."
Aye, Alphonse has the right of it. Splitting up is not a good idea. I think we should go down the stairs.
And so our intrepid band of heroes descends the spiral stair.... Passing down through the most superficial level of the catacombs, they descend to a deeper, damper level, which seems subject to occasional flooding by the algae and water marks on the stone walls of the 40-ft-by-50-ft chamber the stairs end at....
Dark archways, 10-ft-wide-by-15-ft-high, open into corridors on the north, south, and west walls.... To the west, the sound of falling water burbles and echoes faintly....
Something roughly the size of a large dog or a pony shifts in the shadows of the stairwell, glistening wetly in the party's light.... It's shape seems to shift like a formless blob.... It's wet surface seems pale and slightly translucent.... It has no discernible limbs or other features.... It oozes into the party's light!
Glurrrp! Blurrrrp!
Initiative
.
.
*Clank clank clank clank*
What in the nine layers of Hell is that?
I am zee Le Goop!! Zees buffoon does not know who I am!? Moi!!? Le Goop!!!???
Glurk!! Burble!!!
I have no idea how to fight this beastie....what in the world is it?
Le Goop is a gray ooze!
No surprise round, straight up initiative....
INITIATIVE MONKEY!!!
Sorry, boss! EEEEK!!
Round 1
Paddy!
Iommi-Tyr!
Nacht!
Le Goop!
TBD: Alphonse, Hisao!
An immortal fly buzzes down from Asgard to Midgard, following Bifrost, The Rainbow Bridge, to its base in Mannheim, in the lands of what men now called the Holy Roman Empire....
It hovered over a still pond in the midst of a meadow blooming with wild flowers, flitting over to the shore, and then transformed into the lithe, darkly handsome youth in black leathers--Loki the Trickster!
Gazing a moment at his reflection in the pond, the god chose a fitting guise for his next mission, transforming into a beautiful woman who bore a haunting likeness to a teenaged Princess Philipa....
In "her" hand, she held a lump of agate blessed with the uncanny luck of the Svart Alfar....
Now to Paris, to find my little plaything and give him this token of my affection....
Round 1
======
Nacht looks at the blobbed creature and narrows his yellow eyes. He gives a cascade of chittering as a aura engulfs the weapons he wielded. Simultaneously his carapace hardened and muscles in all four arms bulked up as he moved forward.
In the spacious yard behind his forge in Tours, Master Ironbender stands at a great adamantite anvil, clad in a magical leather and brass apron that renders its wearer impervious to heat or flames, a massive adamantite hammer gripped in gauntleted hands....
The Lady Aurelianthalantas loomed over the dwarven master, her golden head resplendent in the morning sunlight, towering several stories over the yard, a steady jet of dragonfire streaming from her open mouth to bathe the crescent of white-hot adamantite lying on the anvil....
The hammer shapes the crescent, making the inner curve flatter....sharper....
RIIIIINNNNNGGG!!! RIIIIIIINNNNNGGG!!! RIIIIIIINNNNNGGG!!!
In Tours, around the yard and smithy of the famed dwarven weaponsmith Gloin Ironbender, a crowd of amazed, awestruck townsfolk gather to behold the greatest spectacle many of them have or will ever see: a great golden dragon lending her fiery breath to heat the crescent of star-metal on Master Ironbender's yard anvil, and the dwarf master standing unharmed in the blazing flames, hammering furiously at the crescent to forge an unbreakable, razor-sharp scythe blade....
In the hills outside the ancient city of Jerusalem, the Archangel Gabriel in the guise of a poor day laborer with a spade descends to the ancient, blood-soaked hill of Golgotha, where fourteen centuries earlier, the Lamb of God was crucified upon a cross of wood.....
Glancing surreptitiously about and seeing that none of the closer shepherds tending their flocks in the nearby hills were paying him any mind, he plies the spade with unearthly alacrity, excavating fourteen centuries of sediment replete with skulls, bones, and fragments of wooden crosses soaked with the blood of generations, all in the span of an hour....
His spade strikes hard against that which he seeks: a long crossbeam that neither fire, nor mold, nor the ravages of time had been able to corrupt over fourteen centuries.... The crossbeam of the True Cross!
Dislodging the sacred beam with preternatural strength, Gabriel rips it from Golgotha, and the very earth seems to groan like a mother giving birth....
This shall make a fine haft for good Alphonse's Saintly Scythe....
Deep in the waters that send out tenebrous currents through the non-Euclidean streets and plazas of sunken R'lyeh, at the Nemo point in the Pacific Sea, an ineffable foundry belches forth a wondrous and terrible creation, caught in the nets of the Deep Ones, who swim up through the depths with it to the sunlit surface....
A fine, unique coat of mail, more supple than fish scales, seemingly forged to fit a man-sized humanoid with more than two arms, rises from the briny waves on the fork tines of the Deep Ones' tridents, where a cloaked, robed Denizen of Leng astride a great shantak catches it on the end of a long, hooked pole....
The shantak-rider snaps the tattered reigns, the shantak howls an unearthly howl, beats it's great, leathery wings, and ascends into the storm-swept Sky, wheeling westward toward the lands of Europa....
We are waiting on your init.
Ah! Good! Lots of meat for Le Goop! I am famished! I hope zis meat is not hard to remove from zee shiny shell like zee last meat....
Paddy moves forward to bolster Nacht's defenses.
Alphonse, having nothing else useful he can do, moves in and slashes the thing.
Holy Heimdall! A Gray Ooze!
Those things are very slow but they will melt you weapons and armor to nothing -- and if they get close to you they will try to grab onto you and dissolve your flesh with their acidic mucus.
If you DO swing at it with your weapon make sure you jerk it back quickly before any acid gets on it.
We can kill it by throwing acid on it!
After his shock at seeing a frickin Gray Ooze, Iommi-Tyr Magnusson steps closer to the hideously transparent blob, delivers his quick oration to his comrades, and then draws his single flask of acid and hurls it at the thing.
Crunch
Damage = +1 Point Blank Shot
AND 1 HP to whatever is adjacent to the Ooze -- which should be NO ONE, correct, because only Paddy goes before Iommi-Tyr Magnusson in Initiative and he waited to aid Nacht (meaning he Held and went after Nacht). Correct?...
EDIT: G0Ddamnit a Nat 1
Acid huh?
zzzzzZZZZZzzzzz.... SNORT!!
Mon Dieu! It is my turn!!
Slam at Alphonse slaps hard for bludgeoning plus acid and attempts to grab
NOM NOM NOM!!!
Yum!! Zis shiny one, he taste like creme brûlée....