[More Day 65 – Blood Hall, Barracks, and the Puzzle Room.]
[This game uses the Pathfinder 1E roleplaying game. Game sessions happen once a week. This session happened October 25, 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
Via Roll20
Swamprover – female grippli 6th level Wizard
Roscuro – male ratfolk 7th level Monk
Templeton von Trapp – male ratfolk 7th level Summoner (Synthesist)
Marativy – female ratfolk 7th level Ninja
Zitch Grimreaper – male ratfolk 7th level Witch with a donkey rat (capybara) familiar
Hrefna – female changeling 5th level Omdura
NPCs
Gridik Stormstride – male blue kobold 5th 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 65 (Continued)
Zitch healed up Roscuro’s and Marativy’s wounds from fighting what might be the last of the Grey Maidens. Zitch applied his healing hex to both and then a Cure Moderate Wounds spell to both, bringing each to full health.
The group of adventurers entered the large octagonal room the Grey Maidens had attacked out of and looked around. There were four other doorways out (3 single doors, one each on the north, west, and south walls, and one set of double-doors, on the southwest wall) and a massive pillar in the center of the room with a staircase wrapped around it going up into the ceiling. The staircase, of course, had no bannister.
Marativy investigated all the doors, checking them for traps. Only the set of double-doors on the southwest wall was trapped and Marativy dis-abled the trap. The single doors had viewing slits at human eye level, so Roscuro had Hrefna peer into them and describe what she saw. Each slit provided a view of a different cell. Zitch used his wand to detect secret doors. While none of the cells had a secret door, the main room had one on the southeast wall. Marativy investigated it and stated it was not trapped. The adventurers set up around the secret door, expecting more Grey Maidens or something else to attack, and Roscuro opened the secret door.
The secret door opened to the northwest corner of a large chamber or hall with two rows of columns going west to east and supporting the ceiling. The walls were mostly covered with a huge mural that showed acts of blood-letting and blood-drinking. The mural was incomplete and the remains of scaffolding were against the western wall. The blood in the murals appeared to flow and the air was ripe with a coppery scent. A corridor exiting the chamber could just be seen on the east wall. Roscuro immediately dubbed the chamber “Blood Hall” for obvious reasons.
Hrefna cast Detect Evil from the doorway and sensed five sources of moderate evil, apparently in the mural. A casting of See Invisible by Gridik did not produce any results and Detect Magic only confirmed that the blood effect in the mural was magical – but the points of evil where not. Strange.
After a short discussion, the adventurers decided to cross the chamber single-file with Hrefna leading the way. The thought was Hrefna could lead the group through without getting too close to any of the evil sources. Unfortunately, as soon as Hrefna stepped into the room, the points of evil manifested as five separate mists that immediately moved to attack!
The mists were very quick and three of them immediately closed on Hrefna and started draining her blood [draining 2 points of Constitution each and causing the Bleed condition]. Zitch cast Protective Luck on Hrefna while Templeton held his action. Roscuro grabbed Hrefna and dragged her out of the room, hitting the button to close the secret door along the way. The rest of the adventurers held position as the secret door slowly closed. One of the mists got a final hit in on Hrefna before being sealed back in Blood Hall.
While the rest of the group held their breathe in case the mists somehow got past the secret door, Zitch quickly explained what they were and about them. He identified them as vampiric mists and knew they were corporeal and would take weapon damage and were susceptible to fire. They clearly fed on blood and acted as though under a Haste spell when gorged. They are extra-planar in nature.
Once all were certain the vampiric mists were not pursuing, Hrefna cast Cure Light Wounds and Lesser Restoration on herself. After several castings of each, Hrefna was back to full health.
The group decided to look elsewhere for now and Roscuro opened the double-doors on the southwest wall. These doors led to another barracks, undoubtedly for the Grey Maidens the adventurers had just killed. There were 14 bunks and most appeared to have been slept in. Marativy and Zitch searched everything, finding a total of 500gp hidden away in various places.
The only other path was up the staircase spiraling around the central pillar. Roscuro, Marativy, and Templeton led the way up the stairs, going ahead as a sort of stealth vanguard, but Roscuro and Marativy chit-chatted about the dungeon the entire way up. [We both rolled terrible on Stealth.]
After a total of 60 feet of climbing, the last 20-30 enclosed after the stairs pierced the ceiling, the stairs emerged in the center of a large circular, white-marbled chamber with an opalescent domed ceiling. Writing in Thassilonian was inscribed in a circle on the floor and there were 8 large alcoves, each at a cardinal directions. All but the one in the east contained a statue, but unlike every other statue in the dungeon, these were [mostly] of different people [only one was Sorshen in this set] and in color so they had a somewhat life-like appearance. Marativy and Gridik conferred on the writing and announced it said, “She who desires to ascend to the Lady’s Light must deign to embrace those with whom the Lady Lies.” Closer inspection of the statues resulted in them being identified as the seven Runelords.
The adventurers debated the meaning of the riddle. For a while. A long while. They were fairly certain that Sorshen had sex with all of the Runelords at one point or another, so limiting it to “those with whom the Lady Lies” seemed difficult. If it meant who she was sleeping with when their civilization ended, none of the adventurers were up on their 7000-year-old gossip.
Eventually, Roscuro decided to hug the statue of Xanderghul, the Runelord of Pride. This caused a golden glow to manifest in the empty alcove. Roscuro quickly stepped over to that alcove and hopped in, but nothing happened. After a minute, the gold glow went away. He then asked Marativy to hug the same statue while he remained in the empty alcove. She did, the glow returned, but nothing else happened.
The adventurers experimented. They discovered hugging Xanderghul and Karzug at the same time caused a stronger glow effect, but still no teleportation. When three of the statues were hugged, four elementals appeared in the empty alcove, one each of fire, earth, air, and water, and attacked.
After the fight, many of the adventurers needed healing and that was done. Clearly getting the combination wrong produced bad results. More thinking was needed.
End of Session
Rat Whispers
[Sorry for the delay on this one. End-of-year Day Job business combined with need to map a whole new dungeon level and stock it for my Adventures in the Green game took up all of my writing time. I’m squeaking this one out late this week as I think I’m finally past the end of year rush at the Day Job but need to gear up for running the next Monday Group campaign, starting on December 27th. I might talk about that in a later post next week – depends on how my schedule goes.]
[The puzzle room had us stumped for this session. We end up getting a lot of good data on the combat abilities of elementals next session.]
Ratpack
Book 1:
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Book 2:
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