Dale's Campaign - Session #18

Ok, I know I haven’t put up anything for the podcast yet, and there’s not much at the moment I can do about it.

The hosting service I’m using only uses PayPal, and for whatever reason, I have to wait 3-4 days before money is moved from my bank account to PayPal’s account, then to my hosting service.

And I’m not quite sure I’m willing to put the recordings out there just yet. This is all very new to me and the learning is a lot of trial and error.

Of the two recordings I’ve made, neither sound very good. The second recording sounds much better than the first one, but it still has a lot of hiss to it.

So if anyone wants the first recording, let me know and I’ll give you the link to download it.

This whole thing is a learning process, and I know how fickle people can be. People might listen to the first recording and hate it because of my lack of experience. They may never listen again, and I don’t want that.

Being in the middle of a campaign probably isn’t the best place to start either. But Dale will be taking a long break from the game soon for his son’s football/band season. It will be best for us as a group to stop his campaign at a convenient point rather than in the middle of something big.

That should give me time to learn how to work with recording equipment properly to be ready for a proper send off for Aaron’s Forgotten Realms campaign.

This session there was no Brian and no Justin (whose appearances will still be random). Since we didn’t have Culan’s character sheet, he was not around this night either.

We started off with deciding where we wanted to head.

Brian (playing Culan) had made it clear that he wanted us to stay in Whitehall and work out of there. But he wasn’t at the table when we made the decision, so “ha-ha”.

Mike (playing Mark) thought that we should go to the northern lands because his character is a “new man” and wanted to see more of the land.

Aaron (playing Kineo) wanted to leave the lands of the new men, but didn’t want to get into the politics of the land either.

I felt Kal would, at the minimum, want to leave the lands of the new men, but would also want to expel the Rulership of the new men. In fact I had already told Dale privately that Kal would not be staying in Whitehall, period. If the group were to stay, then he and Jaxil would leave in the middle of the night to start a guerilla campaign to remove Baron Kordt from power and work towards removing the new men from the land.

That would also mean the removal of Kal from the campaign and I would have to create a new PC. I was split on a fighter/rogue who specializes in daggers or a wizard/sorcerer with enough spell power to flatten a small city.

But we decided to head north back to our homelands, except for Mark, who will be visiting our homelands.

So we traveled the main road from Whitehall to the city of Trademeet.

Trademeet is a central city between the lands of the indigenous men and the lands of the new men. It is simply one giant bazaar of goods from all over the continent.

But before we made it to Trademeet, there was an incident at a farmhouse.

A child came running to the road we traveled and begged us for our help. The child’s sister was acting funny and talking in weird voices.

We were directed to the farmhouse and it created a suspicion in me - Dale had just seen The Exorcism of Emily Rose.

I could be wrong on that though.

We found a young girl, about the age of 6, who was most definitely possessed. She ranked “overwhelming” on the evilometer (a.k.a. Mark), she had amazing strength, she had a smoker’s voice, and she knew us by name.

We tried to reason with the demon inside of her, but it only wanted to destroy the girl, or possibly trick us into destroying her.

Everything else we tried failed, so we decided to get help.

We tied her up, almost into a cocoon, and took her to the nearest temple. The temple was to Saint Leonard, Jaxil’s deity. We were hoping for someone of a sufficiently high level that could take care of this problem, but nope. The highest level clergyman in the temple was Jaxil. The next highest was a fellow named Richie, who was at best level 3.

Long story short, we spent several days of Jaxil memorizing Dismissal, Dispel Evil, and Assay Spell Resistance then casting them on the demon in the girl. First he had to beat the demon’s spell resistance, and then the demon had to fail a save versus the spell. Jaxil beat the spell resistance many times, but the demon never failed his save.

As we were getting sick of this challenge, we called in bigger guns. Kal summoned a Hound Archon and had it teleport to a temple in Trademeet where it would find someone that could exorcise the girl because we weren’t getting anywhere.

A few minutes later the problem was solved, just not by us.

After everything was settled Richie came to us and asked for our help. He had heard some weird sounds coming from catacombs beneath the temple and knew that we were the type of people that could take care of things like this.

Apparently no one had been cleaning up down here recently.

You would also think that most societies in any D&D world would be sure to cremate their dead. A dead body in a D&D game is more than just a host to decomposition bacteria, it’s a plot hook.

One desperate plea later and we were in the catacombs.

It was your basic catacomb set up; a 5’ wide hallway with several areas cut out for interred bodies.

For quite a few minutes there was nothing to find, not even a sound, other than a few gold pieces that Kineo decided not to take.

But then Kineo opened a door and a dread wraith was on us. It attacked Mark with its standard spring attack (who used an ankh charge to avoid the hit) and fled far down the hallway.

Had it not decided to play ring-around-the-rosy with us, it would have died much sooner than it did.

The most irritating bit of this combat is that Kineo did three times the damage to the wraith with an orb spell than Kal did with a Scorching Ray and a Quickened Scorching Ray in one round thanks to the 50% miss chance of the wraith and poor rolling by me.

The next area we opened caused a thick mist to roll around our feet and fill the area we just cleared.

The first antechamber we entered had a large and strong undead creature in it and had a slightly lower floor filled with water. And whenever it hit someone it tried to grapple them and pull them in the water.

First it grabbed Kineo and dropped him into negative hit points and was then pulled into the water to be later saved by Kal and Jaxil.

First Kal cast a Regroup spell. Regroup allows you to do a short teleport of all of your allies and bring them right next to you. He placed Jaxil in a good healing position, Mark into a good attacking position, and rolled well enough on his Spot check to bring Kineo into a safe spot out of combat.

And Dale finally got his wish to have Jaxil cast an offensive spell when he cast Mass Cure Light Wounds on everyone and the undead.

Mark and the undead giant exchanged a few hits, but it still grappled Mark and was going to drown him. But Mark got the last laugh when he used his Lay on Hands to “heal” 55 points of damage on the undead and finished it off.

After that we called it a night.