[Day 61 – Chamber of Grey Flame, the dorms, and dead ends?]
[This game uses the Pathfinder 1E roleplaying game. Game sessions happen once a week. This session happened August 9, 2021.]
[SPOILERS! If you are likely to adventure through the Shattered Star Adventure Path from Paizo, this campaign will be spoilers all the way down.]
Player Characters
Zitch Grimreaper – male ratfolk 6th level Witch with a donkey rat (capybara) familiar
Roscuro – male ratfolk 6th level Monk
Swamprover – female grippli 5th level Wizard
Marativy – female ratfolk 6th level Ninja
Via Roll20
Hrefna – female changeling 5th level Omdura
Templeton von Trapp – male ratfolk 6th level Summoner (Synthesist)
NPCs
Gridik Stormstride – male blue kobold 3rd level Wizard (Invoker)
Ariphi – female tiefling 5th level Rogue
Mel Sharples – male halfling Cook (Expert of unknown level)
Alice Hyatt – female halfling Bodyguard (Warrior of unknown level)
Flo’ Castleberry – female gnome Bodyguard (Warrior of unknown level)
Autumn
Day 61
Late-Morning
Somewhat recovered from the fight with the incubus and the two goat-headed demons, the Ratpack investigated the pair of double doors that were the only way out of the room they were in. The scanty knowledge shared by Helanda [way back Book 2, Session 16] stated that the next room was the Chamber of Grey Flame, so called because in the center of the chamber was a large grey flame. It was also the last room the Grey Maidens saw before “Sorshen” arrived and dominated/charmed the entire group.
Marativy checked the door for traps. She found none but noticed that the door was noticeably warm to the touch. With no detected traps, Roscuro opened the doors.
The chamber beyond was octagonal with a thirty-foot domed ceiling. The walls and floors were all polished marble like the rest of the dungeon rooms and corridors. The center of the chamber was raised with a ball of grey flame floating in the center of the room. There was a set of doors on the eastern wall and an open doorway on the south and western walls. The air had a noticeable heat shimmer to it, but no heat radiated out of the chamber. Hrefna activated a Resist Elements (Heat) aura [might be “Fire”, I’m not certain] to allow the group of adventurers to traverse the chamber safely.
When they entered the room, the adventurers immediately noticed it was warm and humid in the chamber but not actually painful [very similar to a Houston summer where both the temperature and the humidity are in the upper 90s (F and %, respectively)]. The adventurers moved clockwise around the outer edge of the room to the set of doors. They could see the open doorways to the south and west led to side rooms as they moved around the main chamber.
Roscuro, ever curious and willing to take a risk, moved closer to the center of the room for a better look at the ball of grey flame, stepping up onto the raised part of the floor. This provoked the grey flame to spark up and five motes escaped from it. The motes rapidly grew into floating orbs of flesh, each with a maw full of row after row of mismatched teeth!
Zitch quickly identified them as cacodaemons and started running down their defenses. Their defenses were were vulnerable to silver and good-aligned weapons, which brought a smile to Roscuro as he prepared to punch the tiny globes with his silver knuckles. Zitch also shared that more powerful daemons used cacodaemons to transform souls into soul gems and the cacodaemons might have soul gems in their guts. Weird.
The Ratpack quickly defeated the cacodaemons with Roscuro taking the only damage from the monsters. The last cacodaemon attempted to escape by turning invisible, but Templeton had clawed it so it left a trail of “blood” as it bled out. This allowed Gridik to work out its location and kill it with a Magic Missile spell. That was the only cacodaemon that the Ratpack was able to harvest a soul gem from [having broken the rest in the process of killing the monsters]. Zitch cast Cure Light Wounds to heal up Roscuro, who claimed the soul gem for safe keeping.
With no other threats, the adventurers returned to the pair of doors on the east wall. Beyond it was a set of stairs going down to a landing. The landing was a dead end but had a mural of Sorshen. There was text in Thassilonian that read, “Kneel before me and show devotion to enter my domain.”
This seemed dubious to the ratfolk. Roscuro suggested Zitch use the wand of detect secret doors to see if there was a hidden door [the wand had 12 charges left at this point, so it was a conserved resource]. Zitch found no secret door, so he used the duration of the spell to check the stairwell and the two side chambers off the Chamber of Grey Flame. In the western side chamber he located a secret door on the west wall. While Zitch did this, Swamprover and Gridik used Detect Magic on the mural at the bottom of the stairs and found a magical transmutation aura on the mural. They suspected it was some form of teleportation and led to another part of the dungeon.
Faced with a secret door or teleportation to an unknown location, the Ratpack decided to investigate the secret door first. After some experimentation, the adventurers worked out that the secret door needed a torch lit from the grey flame set in a torch holder on the wall with the secret door.
Beyond the secret door was a long hallway with ten doors at even intervals along it, five to each side. Investigating further, all but one had text on them that read, “Thou wouldst enter, then thou must touch.” Instead of that text, the first door on the right read, “Thou wouldst enter to enjoy the company of the Runelord herself? Then thou must touch.” This door had a thin rime of ice upon it – clearly a trap of some sort.
Ignoring the trapped door for the moment, the other nine rooms were investigated first. Opening the door involved touching the door. These rooms turned out to be bedrooms. Each had a single, large bed with luxurious sheets, all in excellent condition. The Ratpack quickly set to stripping the beds of their sheets and packing them away as loot. In the process, a single golden hairclip was found. It was non-magical but likely to be valuable [worth 600gp].
Having looted the other nine rooms [as much as they could without carrying the heavy beds themselves], the Ratpack turned its attention back to the tenth door. Swamprover and Gridik investigated the door for what kind of magic it housed. They found an aura of invocation – clearly a trap.
Not wanting to leave anything potentially behind or a path not taken, Roscuro decided he would open the door. The rest of the adventures retreated to the side chamber and waited at the secret door there. Gridik stood at the doorway to the Chamber of Grey Flame in case anything attempted to sneak up on the group. Roscuro then touched the trapped door to see if it opened. Instead, the door released a very large ice explosion! Roscuro was able to avoid the effects of the trap [made his Reflex save and had Evasion], but everyone else but Gridik, who was outside the area of effect, took cold damage to one extent or another. Hrefna immediately activated her healing aura and restored the group to good health. The door with the trap was a false door.
Done with this side area, the adventurers returned to the potential teleport mural. The group assembled a Team Teleport to try and trigger the magic while the rest of the group stayed at a safe distance. Team Teleport consisted of Templeton, Marativy, Roscuro, and Hrefna. Team Teleport first displayed the Lust rune, which was supposed to trigger the teleportation magic of the glass golem. It did nothing. They then prostrated themselves in front of the mural per the text. This did nothing, but allowed them to notice the feet of the mural showed wear. Perhaps “showing devotion” involved kissing the feet? Humans were weird, so they gave that a try and it worked, teleporting each person from Team Teleport individually.
Those teleported arrived on a stone jetty sticking out into a lake in a large underground cavern with a waterfall nearby. Templeton recognized the area as the cavern beyond the compulsion field where he initially found the undead giant bats. There were three boats tied up to the jetty.
End of Session
Rat Whispers
[This was pretty much as stated without much else to say.]
[I’m recovering from my health issue. I’ll be making a major change to my diet for a while to lose some weight, basically dropping all carbs from my diet. As carbs make up a huge part of my diet (they are cheap and filling) I need to see a nutritionist to work out a new diet that won’t be boring or repetitive. Whatever I end up eating, it will probably double our current grocery bill because it is expensive to eat healthy in the US. Sigh.]
Ratpack
Book 1:
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Book 2:
…
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