Dale's Campaign - Session #6

Ok, I’m going to make a feeble attempt at making this short.

No Brian this session, so Aaron played Culan.
We later teased Brian that Culan became very brave that session, almost recklessly so.

We are starting to toss around the idea of “if you’re not here, neither is your PC”. But Dale isn’t going for that.
I don’t have a problem with it really. If there’s a TPK with this group, I doubt it will be caused by 1 less target.

And, for two sessions in a row Justin showed up. And he brought his usual sound-bite comments.

Mike returned as well, and we found out his career; a psychiatrist.
Sean: “You’re a doctor?”
Mike: “Yeah, I’m a psychiatrist.”
Justin: “Really? I’m a bartender. It’s kind of the same thing.”
[Laughs]

And later, while discussing night watches and how much sleep is needed:
Dale: “I used to play D&D until 3am and have to sing the next morning at 7:30 mass.”
Justin: “ Wow, what a wild man you are. Mother lock up your daughters. A wild man is on the prowl.”

Anyway, we last left our group when they rested inside the tower of the forest mage Llewellyn.

We started from there and while we walking 20’ to our swamp raft, that gargoyle attacked us. Oh, and thanks to the DM scaling the encounter, that gargoyle became 3.

Kal was in a bad position. He was in the back of the party, meaning closest to gargoyles, he had no protective spells cast yet, and he was last (or near last) on the initiative stack.

The gargoyles were handily taken out, but Kal took a lot of scratches from a very persistent gargoyle. He only had 3hp remaining before it was all over with.

After we healed up, we decided to move on through the swamp for a couple of hours, but we chose not to travel too far to make sure we’re not stuck in the swamplands at dark for fear of what lurks out there at night.

By the time the night was over, our Wand of Cure Light Wounds was drained of it last charges. Not bad for a 750gp item.

As we traveled along the swampy river we find a small island with 4 wizard looking types, an armored troll, a rogue picking a lock to an ancient-looking, solid-gold door, and a small building that said door was attached to.

They all registered big evil. Well not the door or building.

Since an armored troll alone could probably wipe us out, we chose to parlay with them. That’s one of those silly things we have about our PCs, we like them not to die.

Their spokesman was very nice and slimy. Even the words he spoke felt like greasy. But no, he wasn’t an aristocrat NPC, he was an enchanter type.

We found out that these four “Brothers Grimm” had hired the rogue, Gebb, to pick the lock on the door. And that they were searching through ancient buildings and talked of “old gods”.

So Kal mentioned something about pictures they’ve seen with man bodies and animal heads.

That got their attentions.

We stood on the raft most of the time until mentioning the gods, then we stopped and got off the raft.

We showed them a couple of the scrolls along that had the pictographs/hieroglyphs. That bought us some more information and some potential aid when we allowed them to copy the scrolls.

Kal also mentioned Lindepohl and Ian de Magi.
They said that they have had dealings with Lindepohl.
But they also whispered they could possibly take on Ian to get the stuff from him that we sold to him.

They told us that this continent use to be part of another larger continent. But it broke off and floated here. And the original continent had a very powerful civilization, whose gods had the bodies of men, but the heads of animals (Egyptian-themed of course).

One of the civilization’s inventions was true-gold.
We knew that true-silver is more commonly known as mithril. But we had never heard of true-gold. They told as that it is so strong that spells bounce right off of it.

They let us know that there were signs of this civilization in many hidden places. You just had to know what signs to look for.
The signs are of things that should not be, like golden sand.

Since we were so nice to them, they gave us a magical tile that could summon them to us for a one time aid.

These guys were pretty spazzy, especially when ancient civilization stuff came up.

They let us know that there were several of these ruins scattered throughout the area, we but had to look for them in the right places. And they wanted us to let them know if we found any ancient scrolls, especially spell scrolls. They’d gladly buy them from us.

Crisis of alignment vs. survival encounter was worth quite a bit of XP. We just have to warn Ian de Magi that the Brothers Grimm know we sold him some ancient civilization magic.

And we found a ruins not much later.

The ruins we found looked like it was about to fall over, but we entered anyway.

Inside is a statue of a woman, who we later found out to be a statue of an ancient goddess, named Isis. We found that out thanks to a comprehend languages spell on a scroll that Kineo had and he read a book with it.

The floor had several very nice tiles on the floor and the statue stated that we had to pay homage to Isis to move through.

It also told us a story about a king and his problems. He had yet to have children, so he sacrificed his wives to Isis. In addition to that not helping you get babies, it ticked off Isis. So she cursed him.
Guess where that left us.

It took us a long time that we had to spell out Isis on particular tiles, and if you stepped on the wrong tile all of your current work had to be started over and you got blasted with 8d6 damage from a Flame Strike. It was a very painful learning process.

Once we figured that out, the door beyond opened.

In the next room is a ziggurat that goes up higher than we are below ground – so we believe ourselves to be in an extra-dimensional space.

And that was odd because I don’t remember entering a blue British police box.

And of course there was something in there waiting to feed on us – harpies 2 of them.
All of us except Kineo failed at least one of the charm saves.
Luckily Kineo was able to save us from them by using his wand of lightning bolts and frying one them – then the other had a limited life span remaining.

We found a masterwork canoe. Odd thing to be near a ziggurat, but hey, it’s better than a raft.

The next room required us to take out a yuan-ti caster whose life-span was shorter than my attention-span.

Then a mummy (the king in the story) joined us in combat as the yuan-ti bought it.

He had a magic item that allowed him to avoid melee damage, so it took us longer to bring him down.
He had the Mark the paladin down to 0hp and gave him mummy rot.
Mark used his lay on hands on the mummy.
This brought Mark to -1hp, but it also dropped the mummy.

It was late so we had to spend the night in the ruins. The next morning we immediately headed back to town to get Mark some help.

Session end.