Princess, when you enter the cave, your eyes adjust to the darkness a fraction faster than the minotaurs'. You see Stybar struggling to his feet, and Shattertooth bleeding on his hands and knees. Behind the immolator is a tall, lanky, female humanoid, with a bloodied claw and long black hair that hangs over her face and chest. Behind her, the glowing blue eyes of her cave troll entourage illuminate the darkness slightly as they lick their lips in anticipation.
"Shattertooth! Wench, what did you do?!?" Princess cries. "Vordo, Shattertooth needs healing!"
She holds her staff defensively, waiting for the others before starting a fight.
The hag looks visibly frustrated when she recognizes that Princess is an ogress.
"Is there no end to the fodder troops the sunlovers will send forward? COWARDS!" she shrieks in anger, pointing at Princess and addressing her with her claw that is bloodied with Shattertooth's wound.
"You, my beauty...tell your masters to come and face me, if they want this portal for their uses! I will swallow their eyeballs and drink their blood as a chaser!" In her free hand, the one without the enormously outsized talon on it, the hag begins to conjure a threatening spell.
"No, no, no! You've got it all wrong! We're here to kill the sunlovers! I'll bet we hate them just as much as you do!"
Under his hand Shattertooth Simmons searing flame to seal the wound closed.
Lur thinks for a moment about whether he should go through the portal as well. He ends on, They probably will get into more trouble than I could..I kinda want to break something. So he proceeds, strolling up to and through the portal.
Once on the other side, Lur's eyes have to adjust, but once they do he sees the scene. Mostly though his eyes can't get away from Shattertooth lying on the ground bleeding form the neck. Seeing this, he immediately bursts out into a deep mirthful laughter.
Hearing that all is well, Vorgo passes through the portal.
When his eyes adjust, he takes in the scene.
He looks to the hag, then hisses in her language
Oh, hello friend crone. I’m on a divine mission from Tiamat. Drop your weapon and lay upon the floor or I’ll slay you dead in her divine name.
Stybar gets to his feet and draws the spider dagger while scanning the room for a the trap he knows is there.
• Is there a trap here and if so, what
activates it?
• What does the trap do when acti-
vated?
• What else is hidden here?
"I thought I was going to scout...hey!"
Wek spends a moment turning into a bat, then flaps through with Vorgo. When he appears, he does his very best to just appear like a normal bat and roost upside down on the cave ceiling.
The hag's frustration turns to growing confusion, then panic, as more and more non-sunlover races come through. She seems almost willing to listen to Princess' entreaties, then Lur comes through the portal and starts laughing.
"NOOOO!!! HUMAN!!! You can't fool..." she starts, then cuts herself off as more of you step forward through the portal, and Shattertooth stumbles back to his feet again, his wound in his neck closing. (Shattertooth, your hands and forearms are wet with your own blood.)
"No...this is wrong...all wrong! This isn't how it's supposed to be!" she's backing up as she's speaking, and her entourage step forward to place themselves between all of you and her.
When the bat-druid flies through the portal last, and while Stybar is climbing to his feet and looking about him for traps, Vorgo steps forward and hisses Tiamat's truth. His authoritative voice, and use of her secret language, as a profound effect on the hag. Her face drains of all color, and her mouth goes slack behind her ratty hair.
With a wail of terror like a banshee, the hag reaches into her satchel and uncorks a vial. Instead of liquid, the vial appears to be filled with a thick smoke that billows out rapidly!
Only you two are positioned to see this, Uek and Stybar, because the smoke and her Troll bodyguards obscure her from the others' view, but she yanks on a handle protruding from the wall before fleeing out of the room through a corridor. You hear her feet slapping on the cave floor as she flees, followed immediately by the sound of rushing blades. The hag appears to have activated some trap to cover her retreat...
A trap that Stybar has only ever heard described to him by his father. It's a Bladed Hallway trap, practically guaranteed to eviscerate anyone passing through after it has been activated. Your father told you that once the trap's activated on one side, it needs to be deactivated at the other side of the hallway in order to be safe to pass through. Still, you're confident you can find a way to bypass the mechanism and stop the blades...if you can deal with the trolls first!
Also, since you're glancing around you, you see that on the far side of the portal from your party and the trolls, there is a large black curtain drawn across the cave. There's faint light shining around the edges of it, light that doesn't penetrate to the back of the cave. It's not immediately relevant to the present danger, but you still notice it - you can never turn your brain off when you get into detective mode.
Trolls can be found nearly everywhere, as their legendary regenerative rates and ability to digest nearly anything renders them one of the world's most adaptable species. Because of their species' innate recklessness and adaptability, many trolls wind up injuring themselves numerous times on the local environments of their homes and regenerate looking more like their homes afterward.
Case in point are these three cave trolls before you. Cave trolls, or "Rockbiters," have adapted to consuming special ores that can be found in caverns deep below the earth. Their skin is knobbly and spiked, they stand hunched over nearly double at 7 feet tall, and their arms are long and lanky. When they walk, their knuckles scrape the floor, and their lower jaws jut outward as they leer at you. Cave trolls don't normally exhibit any magical qualities in particular, but these three have glowing blue eyes for some reason.
Princess raises her staff warily but looks to Shattertooth. "How do you want to handle this, handsome?"
Peacefully, if possible. Unfortunately, I don't speak troll. Does anyone here speak Troll?
"It's not too far off from Ogrish. I'll give it a shot."
Wiggling her wide hips seductively, Princess takes a step forward.
Vorgo doesn’t speak troll and has no idea how to help princess seduce these heathens.
Seeing her flail, he moves in to defend her, should things get violent.
Shattertooth doesn't know what she's saying, but it sounds intimidating. He does his best to stand tall and be imposing.
Stybar tries to slip into the shadows and hide while the attention of the trolls is on his more heroic friends.
The intention is to sneak past the trolls to the corridor.
The trolls glance at each other, but don't make any aggressive actions. Their posture is defensive rather than aggressive; bouncers rather than soldiers. One of them opens his mouth, but ash spills out, and looking inside his cavernous mouth, you can see that only a stump of a tongue remains. Whatever happened to these trolls burned their tongues away and blocked their natural regenerative processes, leaving them permanently damaged...
Though they aren't actually charging you, they appear more than eager to inflict violence on any of you who step forward. They aren't holding any weapons, but they're trolls. Weapons are superfluous.
Behind the trolls is a billowing wall of smoke that magically holds its position in one place, obscuring the view (for most of you) for whence the hag fled. Coming from within the smoke are the sounds of blades shearing the air at a steady rhythm.
Stybar, roll me a Defy Danger using Dexterity to see if you can slip into the smoke without being noticed.
Lur steps up behind the crew and begins rotating his shoulders in preparation.
"Oh, dear. I don't think these brutes care much for wordplay. We may have to resort to violence to get past them after all."
Lur smiles a surprisingly sharp toothy smile at that statement.
That's unfortunate. I want to kill the raiders, but if these are hindering us in that aim... He spits a bit of blood.
Shattertooth, your eyes have adjusted to the dimmer light by now. Right now though, it's difficult to tell where the cave entrance is. There's open blackness behind the portal (Stybar has recognized that there's a curtain blocking the view there, but you haven't yet) and in the other direction is trolls and obscuring smoke, where the hag fled.
Wek crawls on the cave ceiling until he can peer into the whirling blades. If he cannot -peer- due to smoke, he will spend 1 Hold to send an ultrasonic chirp down the passageway to -hear- the obstructions.
Who’s really in control here?
Despite the hag being absent, she is still in control. That much is obvious from the trolls' actions; they are not normally the "stand still and defend this position" type of creature. The glowing blue eyes and ashtongued symptoms are also dead giveaways.
What here is useful or valuable to me?
Peering more closely at the trolls, you spy a vial embedded in the backs of each of their necks.
What here is not what it appears to be?
Your echolocation tells you that the curtain exists at the back of the portal altar.
As for the blades, I can tell you what you see without needing to answer one of the questions to do it. They're an ancient Minotaur trap designed to keep out all manner of invaders, including little climbers like goblins. Simple bladed pendulums would be child's play for an invading force of goblins to disable. Not so for Minotaur labryinths. These blades swoosh through the air in wide arcs that include the entire hallway, top to bottom.
You can time your movements, starting and stopping at the exact right moments, to avoid being eviserated...but each blade will require a separate Defy Danger Dex to make, and you count 4 blades in the hallway.
Lur, grabbing the two-handed sword with both hands, lowers the blade so that the tip is lightly touching the ground and adopts a ready stance. As he does these things his muscles flex and relax showing the true power beneath his hairy chest.
Vorgo watches the trolls. The trolls watch Vorgo. Vorgo continues to watch the trolls.
They're not moving aggressively. They're here to block our progress...but their will is not their own.
Stybar sucks in his belly sidestepping towards the smoke.
That's within range of an Aid another roll if someone wanted to roll +bonds with Stybar to cause a distraction, opening themselves up to risk.
You see, Stybar, that the trolls are standing about 6 feet in front of the bladed hallway, and all 6 feet is filling with opaque smog from the hag's potion.
The troll furthest on the right glances in your direction in the shadows of the cave, but you manage to duck behind a small stalagmite before his blue-glowing gaze catches you. You manage to get into the smog, but at either a cost or a risk. Your choice.
The cost would be an injury or loss of an item to the swinging blades, when you get too close to the other side of the blinding fog. The risk would be you triggering an unknown DM action that is even worse, but you get another Defy Danger roll to try to mitigate it. It could also just make it worse, who knows.
Make your choice. :)
I chose cost :)
Wek glides to the floor behind a troll, as tiny bats are wont to do, and then shifts back into full lizardfolk form, his crest low and the forms of fish dark in his skin, like the depths of an unknown pool, all pointing in the same direction.
His nictating membranes blink backwards and white once. He then uses his spear to shear out a vial from one of the troll's necks in a single savage thrust.
Stybar, when you duck against the wall nearest to the trap's activator mechanism as you can, you fail to account for one of your new appendages growing out of your back. One of your tentacles that's growing from the middle of your spine wanders too close to the hallway, and is shortened by half with a sudden slice through flesh.
Though the tentacle was spawned via alchemy, it's still very much a part of your body, as you now learn when the pain rockets through your body. Take 1d8 damage as you bite down hard on your lower lip to avoid giving your position away!
Uek, your spear lodges precisely where you intend it to, as you are not being threatened and the troll was unaware of you. However, the vial you're trying to eject like a Nintendo cartridge is really stuck in that trollflesh good. You're going to need to apply some strength to your spear to break it loose. Let's see a Strength roll!
Wek prises that vial like a dwarf naggling after a prized green diamond!
The vial embedded in the back of the rightmost troll's neck is prised free with a violent application of force to a lever and fulcrum! In a dazzling display of physics, the vial goes spinning through the air and crashes with a tinkling sound of broken glass on the ceiling, before raining back down on the same troll's head.
The troll reacts to this stimulus the same way it reacts to most painful experiences - dull surprise. The big beastie's blue eyes blink a few times, shielding the blue glow for several instants, as one of its hairy hands reaches up to scratch the back of its neck. Already, its legendary troll regeneration is kicking in, and knobbly raw trollflesh is growing before your very eyes over the wound the vial used to inhabit. The troll's eyes are losing their bluish glow apace. "Haahh..." the troll mutters, unable to articulate any more than that with his tongue-stump. Ash spills out to the cave floor as the stunned troll's jaw hangs open.
The center troll, nearest to the one you just ambushed, Uek, notices you after your little stunt! With a roar, he's reaching out, his long arms with too many joints and fingers reaching for your throat! Defy danger!
Princess blinks in surprise when Wek suddenly dislodges the troll's vial. It seems to have restored the creature to its senses, but the others are none too happy about it.
"Come on, boys, do what he did!" she calls. "Pry those vials out of their necks!"
While the central troll reaches for Wek, she trundles up behind it and tries to wrestle its vial free.
Vorgo watches the princess move toward the Troll and shifts to stay in position to protect her.
Lur seems to show pure joy as he rushes the leftmost troll, swinging his large sword.
Brute strength the ogress does possess, but she has the occasional klutzy moment. She stomps forward toward the disintegrating Troll defensive line and lurches for the central Troll that is currently attempting to throttle her new Lizardfolk ally, but she stumbles in the attempt, and her grasping hand is snapped up in an iron grip by the leftmost troll. It pulls her close and stares at her with wide-open, glowing blue eyes, and sprays her face with ash when he opens his tongueless mouth to roar.
Violently, the ogre wizardess is yanked off her feet by the vice grip on her wrist! You're prone, Princess, and take 1d6 damage. The troll is trying to situate himself straddling your body, so that he can be positioned well enough to pull your arm from its very socket! What do you do?
Vorgo, when you or the thing you defend is attacked you may spend hold, 1 for 1, to choose an option:
Redirect an attack from the thing you defend to yourself
Halve the attack’s effect or damage
Open up the attacker to an ally giving that ally +1 forward against the attacker
Deal damage to the attacker equal to your level.
Feel free to rewrite what I wrote as happening to Princess, using your Defend move, according to the options you have available!
A wide, feral smile spreads across Lur's face as he faces combat for the first time since his imprisonment by the adventurers. However, his first swing is betrayed by his muscles that have not warmed up in too long. A momentary flash of weakness gives your swing not quite enough oomph to penetrate the rockbiter's thick hide. Violently, the troll that is wrestling with Princess - the one you attacked - wrenches the sword out of your hands! You stumble a few steps forward when your sword's grip is yanked. You take no damage from your failed attack, but your sword is stuck in the troll's shoulder and what's even worse, it's ignoring you and attacking someone else instead!
This insult will not stand. What do you do, Lur?
Vorgo isn’t quite positioned to take the hit, but he slams his shield into the troll to throw it off balance while it tries to pull Princess in half.
"I will NOT BE IGNOOOOOAAARRR..!" Lur's yell turns into a roar as his body almost doubles in size, hair, teeth, and claws. He comes down with his new, powerful maw around the arm of the troll.
Princess, the wind is knocked out of you when you're pinned, but Vorgo immediately leaps to your defense. As he struggles with the troll's overpowering strength, you both hear Lur roar in rage, and hear his voice change mid-roar from human to something else.
The werebear latches on with a lurching bite to the arm that Vorgo just pulled off of Princess. Vorgo, you look on surprise at Lur's sudden transformation as the werebear tears the troll's arm off instead!
All three of you are sprayed with troll blood as the rockbiter howls in pain, staggering back from the force of the shifter's assault. The one-armed troll disappears into the shifting fog-wall that the hag erected, grabbing at its stump and growling...
As the other two attempt to dismember the center troll, and succeed, Shattertooth focuses his attention one the one currently not getting assaulted. He focuses a point of origin on the flask in the troll's neck and tries to bring enough flame to bear quickly enough to shatter the glass!
"Oof!" Princess grunts at she hits the ground, though Vordo's intervention prevents her from being badly hurt. She watches in wonder as Lur tears the offending troll's arm off and it staggers away.
"That's my man-bear!" she coos as she gets back in her feet, watching as Shattertooth attacks.
Lur gives chase into the fog-wall following the trail of troll blood.
'Uek, too fascinated by the troll's transformation from witch-possessed troll to standard mutilated angry troll under its own sovereign reign but choosing to attack him, fails to move out of the way! "Gak! says the lizardfolk, none too eloquently.