Dale's Campaign - Session #17

I have the final answer to the question “Should I podcast our sessions?”

The answer was given to me by my place of employment.

(Rant deleted - just in case.)

Thanks to their draconian views and blanket rules-making, I may no longer listen to my MP3 player at work.

Once again, mankind is lucky that I’m not a scanner. You’d be finding exploded head pieces everywhere.

And since I listened to our sessions at work and then typed them out at home while they’ve been refreshed in my memory, the blog entries are crippled now as I’m not about to spend that time typing it all out on the weekends.

I will still attempt to write up the blog entries for the remainder of Dale’s campaign, but when it’s over, I will be no longer blogging our sessions, but I will be podcasting them.

I apologize to those of you who can’t listen to our sessions, but I can’t see a better option that doesn’t drain more of my time.

But that out of the way I can give you the crippled write-up of Dale’s 17th session, which will be podcast hopefully sometime later this week. And remember, if the write-up of the session doesn’t match the audio of the session, it’s because I didn’t get a memory refresh of the session.

We had just defeated the sewer-water elder elemental when Arriseus joined us again. In other words, Justin joined us for this session.

We investigated the sewer passageways further and found an odd spherical room about 30’ in diameter with a pool of collected water at the bottom and some odd growths at the center-top that radiated evil.

Kal summoned an owl to investigate and grab one of the growths to bring back to us for investigation.

The last thing we saw of the owl was its corpse dropping into the pool of water.

So Arriseus hit the growths with an eldritch blast, with no effect.

By then we were pretty suspicious that it was a beholder floating upside-down and waiting for some prey.

We discussed having Kal, Kineo, and Arriseus blast it simultaneously with Lightning Bolt, but it disappeared the moment one of us began casting.

Arriseus flew up to the side of the hole it was in and used a mirror to look up into the hole. The mirror turned to stone. (We didn’t realize until later that Dale messed that up – beholders can only turn flesh into stone, not metal into stone.)

Well we weren’t about to hunt down a beholder into its own cramped areas, so Culan cast Clairvoyance. He saw the beholder in another spheroid room at the top of the hole, waiting for us to pop our heads in.

When we didn’t enter its backup lair it started disintegrating a new pathway so it could either escape or get to us in another way.

Well screw that, so we moved into some semi-protective positions and waited for it to show. But it never did. So we moved on, but were still on high alert in case it did make a showing.

The next room we entered contained an elder black pudding, but we couldn’t see it very well thanks to the murkiness of the water.

But eventually we did see it move and, having seen a black pudding before, Arriseus, Kineo, and Kal each cast a Lighting Bolt at it.

It responded by bursting out of the water and grappling Kal for half of his hp. Kal later escaped with a Dimension Door spell cast while being grappled.

The rest of the party made semi-quick work of the thing.

We found no treasure, and we didn’t have a surprise showing by Mr. Beholder.

Our final path led us to a new location.

This place had to lead to the boss of the Thieves’ Guild because the path leading there was trapped almost continuously with some very lethal traps.

Between Kineo’s searching skills (taking 20’s) and Arriseus’s infinite number of Voracious Dispel blasts, the traps were disabled and we moved into the Boss’s area.

Inside the new area we found a lich who demanded to know why we invaded his home uninvited. Some of felt like talking, the rest of us said “It’s evil, kill it.”

We all went after it, but it was able to use the Greater Blink spell to walk through a wall.

The only way to follow it was through a door. So Arriseus opened it, setting off a Wail of the Banshee trap which killed Kineo.

It’s alright; we have a walking band-aid with access to Spell Compendium spells. One Revivify spell later and Kineo was back up to one hit point. (Revivify is a 5th level Raise Dead spell that brings you back to life at no level loss, but it must be cast before one round has passed.)

The rest of us ran after the lich, but it was invisible and the Invisibility Purge was centered on Jaxil, who was busy with Kineo.

Kal, who had See Invisible on himself, tried to dispel the lich’s spells with a Greater Dispel Magic, but was only able remove the Greater Mage Armor spell.

Culan attempted to do the same, he had to cast it with the area effect as he couldn’t see the lich, but he failed.

The lich was smart, so it left with a Teleport spell.

We searched the area, found some minor trinkets and several books in the lich’s library, and moved back to the beholder room to carefully check the place out and take out the beholder.

But he was gone; all we found was a passageway up into the ground level in a full warehouse. We searched through everything in that place (in groups of 2), but found nothing.

Eventually we gave up looking and went back to the temporary home Baron Barcum gave us.

Later that day, while Kineo and Arriseus were attempting gather information about the lich and the beholder, our lawyer let us know that we were being sued by the lich we attacked.

Well that was the last straw for us. Kal, Kineo, Culan, and Jaxil stormed to Baron Barcum’s keep and threw a huge fit about how pathetic it was for a town to allow an undead creature rights to sue anyone, much less even exist.

The baron defended the laws and made it clear to us that things were not going to change.

Although Mark was nice about and Culan attempted to be nice about, we pretty much told Baron Barcum that he was “Lawful stupid” and he could go do something with himself. If I have to explain it to you any further, then you’re not old enough to listen to the podcast because we received an R rating for this session.

We took a voluntary exile from the realms of Baron Barcum and we have no intention of ever returning unless it’s to cause mayhem.

This also trashed Dale’s whole storyline. I’ll be curious to see how he comes back from it to maintain the continuity of this module.

We spent the rest of the night in a bit of chaos because we weren’t sure exactly where we were to go next.

So far I’ve listed two of the barons of this land, Baron Barcum the lawful stupid rules freak, and Baron Kordt the lawful evil despot.

There’s a third baron, Baron Andreas. He’s much more sensible and likeable person so we went to see him as a chance to prove to us that the leaders of “new men” weren’t entirely worthless and needed replacing. (There’s a short history of this land that I have yet to put on the blog yet, but might need to now that we’re getting into it.)

Our chat with him helped basically told us that not all of the new men were pathetic, just two of the three barons were.

We left the lands of the barons to return to the northern lands, where most of us came from. Our paladin Mark is a new man, and even he was disgusted with how things were set up.

Right now things are open to us.

The last thing I remember us dong was leaving Whitehall, the city of Baron Andreas, to return home.

We discussed many options which included destroying Baron Kordt and discrediting Baron Barcum to have him removed from power. We can’t attack Barcum directly as Baron Andreas would be required to help him.

There are more options out there for us of course; we just have yet to have them presented to us.

And believe it or not, I thought this was amongst the most fun of the sessions we’ve had.
There was a lot of good role-playing and Dale ran the monsters in a manner in which they should have been run.

I’ve been in campaigns where “a lot of role-playing” meant you had to role-play out every single thing you did. That isn’t any fun to me, but if it works for you, good for you.

To me, role-playing should be there to help move the story and plots along. And that is what we did.

Last week Dale asked us what we’d like to see in the campaign, and he gave it to us. He played the monsters right and expected us to go to court against a lich and defend ourselves as something new. The law thing was definitely something new and interesting, but just a little too far out there for our PC’s to accept.

So kudos to Dale for the attempt.
Too bad for Dale that we trashed his module.
But he will remake it to fit whatever it is we’re going to do.