Session 3
Again, been a couple weeks, not going to be perfectly accurate.
We had a guest this session, my father, whose AD&D stories got me started playing in the first place (“So we found this enormous pile of treasure, and my elven assassin who had a magic figurine that could turn into a nightmare steed found a ring of invisibility! But then a lich came around the corner and fireballed us, and we all died.”). True to form, he was interested in playtesting my my nightblade hack. So Amestra, elven assassin fleeing to her fairy-ring extraction point after a botched hit, came to join the party for a while, along with her explorer henchman and guide, Grettir the Unwashed.
The party spent quite a bit of time planning on how to engage the mummies safely before this session; some of their plans were quite amusing. My favorite was this: Have the mage use the scroll of ward against undead that they had found, then blindfold himself so that he cannot be paralyzed by mummy-fear. The bearsarkers, who are immune to fear and very strong, carry him into the room full of mummies. The witch blindfolds herself and holds a Protection from Evil spell in the doorway to contain the mummies. The bearsarkers aim the wizard like a cannon, instructing him when to fire Burning Hands so as to catch as many mummies as possible, and the bearsarkers throw military oil on anything left. If this proved insufficient, the bearsarkers were to grab as much loot as they could carry, drag the wizard out, redistribute the loot for encumbrance purposes, and then the party would flee at top speed.
As they say, though, no plan survives contact…
Their travel up the mountain was uneventful, and they arrived at the gates of the Temple of Dusk in the late morning. They entered through the scriptorium door, and cautiously entered the library. Here their fears that the mummies had wandered were realized, for they saw a mummy down the hallway, and it began advancing towards them. The PCs entered the libray to engage it, and most or all were paralyzed except the bearsarkers, who fear not death. Particularly amusing was Amesta’s paralysis, which took effect in mid-air during a magic-assisted jump. No sooner had this first mummy engaged the bearsarkers and most of the party been freed from their paralysis than the remaining three mummies shambled around the corner and into view, re-paralyzing almost everyone. PCs gradually came back online as the mummies attacked, but James and Amestra both contracted mummy rot, and Scarth had to web two of the four mummies to keep them off of the paraluzed James and prevent a breakthrough. This enabled the party to handily slay the first two mummies (one in the library and one in the web), and the bearsarkers decided to split off and reenter the temple through the chapel entrance to engage the fourth, who had been cut off in the hallway behind the web. Meanwhile, the party lit the web just as the third mummy broke free, to be quickly felled by a flurry of attacks and acrobatically-assisted backstabs. The bearsarkers, leading the party’s dogs, made contact with the final mummy a few rounds later with shape-strength active, and tore it to pieces without sustaining significant injuries.
They then gathered the loot from the reliquary, and there was much rejoicing, for there were two magic shields (+1 and +3) which went to the bearsarkers, a suit of magic plate +1 which James claimed, some magic crossbow bolts, and an enormous amount of minor relics and trade goods. These they relocated to the abbot’s quarters, in case they couldn’t bring them all down, and there they rested and licked their wounds. The party’s best fighters now had ACs in the 8-9 range. Galinda’s Delay Disease spell came in handy for healing the party members afflicted with mummy rot.
Amestra was sent on a surveying expedition, using gaseous form and infravision to reconnoiter the dragon’s tower, the cavern beneath the well, and the spider barracks. Rumors of the dragon were substantiated, insufficient treasure to justify the risk of poison was found in the spider barracks, and something was seen glimmering at the bottom of the filthy green water in the cavern beneath the well.
Meanwhile, in the abbot’s quarters, James noticed an anomaly in the stonework and determined that there was a secret door opening into a passage inside the fortress’ wall. On one side a heavy iron door blocked passage towards the dragon’s tower, while on the other a tunnel descended into the mountain.
Having achieved their primary objective and hungry to get their treasure home safely with minimal risk, they proceeded back down the mountain, and resolved to engage the dragon on their next expedition. They paid a visit to the nearby town of Ostergot, where they shared their delicious trade goods with the townsfolk, but learned of of sightings of ghouls and yetis, reported to be eating the local farmers. They felt sort of bad about this, since they had killed the constabulary nominally keeping such beasts at bay, but decided to deal with it next session, after the dragon. Dr. Owl and Galinda attempted to cure disease on those afflicted with mummy rot and I guess they succeeded eventually. Most of the henchmen leveled up. Amestra helped them translate one of the treasure maps from the War Room, which turned out to by the Tale of Saint Svein the Rash, a storied paladin of the Order of the Flame who slew many beasts across the countryside. He was gifted a great sword by the dwarves, and his god blessed it, so that it often disintegrated any undead it might strike. He is called Rash because, in the dead of the First Winter of the Blight, against the orders of his abbot and commander, he journeyed alone into the Blighted Vale, from whence he never returned. This evoked quite a bit of interest, but again the dragon held priority.
Back up the mountain they went, mostly healed and hungry for more treasure. Their plan this time had Scarth climbing up the outside of the dragon’s tower and dropping a vial of yellow mold spores into the tower, to be followed with a fireball or using fly and a potion of invisibility to escape while the party’s fighters engaged. Again, things went awry. On reaching the top of the tower alone, Scarth found the dragon, who had heard him climbing, waiting perched on the far side of the tower’s rim. They bantered, and Scarth concluded that he was probably going to die. Amestra noticed the delay, and climbed the tower invisibly. She too was detected on reaching the top (although in error). At this point the fighters, sure that something was wrong, decided to rush into the tower and start stealing as much treasure as possible. On their way in, the Elder Bear threw a vial of yellow mold at the dragon, hitting it, but not slaying it as had been hoped. While the dragon responded with a cone of fire against the fighters on the ground (all of whom made their saves :\ ), Scarth slipped back down the edge of the tower and Amestra dove off, taking some fairly substantial damage on landing. The dragon was quickly slain with arrows from Cass and Grettir, along with a shape-strength propelled barrel of lamp oil found as part of the treasure. Its corpse fell inwards, through the missing top floor of the tower, and landed on James, who had just picked up a magic shield from the hoard, inflicting light damage. And so the day was won. They gathered the treasure, butchered the dragon corpse (the Elder Bear now sports a dragon-skull hat, Roger has a dragonscale cape, and Scarth has a good supply of preserved viscera for research purposes), gathered the loot (less than that the mummies had had), and back down the mountain they went, happy to have turned a situation where their sole wizard seemed almost certain to die into an unmitigated victory.