Session 3, Part 4

By Shamus Posted Friday Sep 30, 2005

Filed under: D&D Campaign 8 comments

They return to the door inside. The door frame and the lock are still there but the wood inside the frame is burnt away. Thordek is chosen to go in because he is smallest. He peaks in. He sees no one but sees another set of doors. This is a small vestibule. This area looks well-traveled. There is a series of switches on the north wall. Skeeve and Thordek flip a few switches out of curiosity. Eomer is irritated, but says nothing.

They enter the next room. This well-lit room was once the lower meeting hall and has now been converted into a sacrificial chamber. There are three stone slabs on the floor, tilted towards the middle of the room, two with children lying upon them. Grooves have been carved in the stone floor, leading into a drain in the center of the room, in which a large bronze cup has been placed. As they move towards the children they hear a voice from the front of the room, “Leave the children be! You can’t help them now. Go back to the town.”

At the front of the room is a table with jars and evil books and other nasty stuff. There is also a large spell-book.

The children seem to be under a spell of dreamless sleep. Eomer moves closer to the children.

“Leave them be, none of you have the power to help them now,” the voice says as Eomer leans closer to see if they yet live. He can feel no pulse. He places his mirror in front of the mouth of the boy, and confirms that he is breathing very slightly. The children look deathly pale.

“I am prepared to do what none of you would against the Alidians. It is time that we return to our former glory”, states the voice.

“Murdering children will do that?”, asks Thu’fir. The others continue to look for the source of the voice.

“It’s time that we go back to our roots. We’ve abandoned the ways of magic and that’s how we lost the war,” the voice persists, moving around the front of the room accompanied by footsteps.

“Go back! You want to take these children back to their parents? Take them back, so they can become slaves or killed by the Alidians? Their death here will be quick, painless, and nothing like the horrors they would suffer at the hands of the Alidians. If you want to help win this war, go and bring me one last child. “

Eomer figures out pretty much where the wizard is. He nonchalantly chats to the wizard, wanders over to the workbench, and starts tossing and knocking over the stuff on the table. Eomer pulls the leg out from the table and knocks it all over. The wizard appears near Eomer and Enoch suddenly can’t move. Enoch held, Thordek trying to figure out what is wrong with him, starts shaking him trying to get him to wake up.

The battle with the wizard begins. The wizard casts magic missile at the them. Eomer and Skeeve fight him. Thu’fir picks up one of the kids and runs from the room with him. Skeeve has been seriously wounded by the magic missles, but summons his strength and casts lightning on the wizard. The wizard is thrown back, badly injured. He responds by hitting Skeeve with an acid attack. The acid splashes all over him, and he passes out.

While this is going on, Thordek dashes into a side room, looking for something he might throw at the wizard.

A quick glance around the room reveals this to be a workshop of some sort. He grabs a hammer, and heads out of the room. Eomer attempts to grab the mage but slides right off. Thordek sees that Skeeve is down, drops the hammer, and tries to pick up both the kid and Skeeve. He can’t, so he just takes Skeeve. He realizes that Skeeve has acid burning him and throws off the acid-soaked cloak. Thu’fir continues to try to save the children. The wizard yells as they take the kids. He looks and sees that the battle is against him. He casts another spell and vanishes. Thordek screams for Beck to come help. Eomer uses Endo’s staff to swing in the area that he heard the wizard’s footsteps (who is now invisible) and hits, bringing forth many yells of pain and frustration from the location of the wizard. Thu’fir blows his horn and affects both Eomer and the wizard. They are stunned.

Thordek takes Skeeve out of the room and sets him carefully in the rubbish room. Skeeve stabilizes. Thu’fir drops the kid gently outside of the room and pulls the doors shut, hopefully trapping with wizard inside with the party, and away from the kids. Thordek stays with Skeeve, trying to heal him. The others listen for the invisible wizard, trying to keep track of him. The wizard kicks at Eomer when he tries to grapple him and loses his invisibility. He slips away and shuts himself in the little workshop.

Eomer begins chatting at him through the door. Beck comes in yelling, “What the heck is going on in here?”

Finally Thu’fir kicks the door in and slays the Wizard with his massive blade.

This was the most confusing battle I’ve ever seen. The party was caught off balance and didn’t really know what to do. Pat (Eomer) was the only player to have faced a wizard before. Making things worse was the fact that they entered the battle injured and low on magic. Enoch had no healing power left, and Skeeve was nearly spent as well. Since they didn’t know how to fight a wizard, they didn’t have any sort of plan. As it ended up, their wizard and Rogue faced the enemy wizard while the fighters ran off? What a mess.

If you think this is confusing to read, you should have tried to follow it in person. They couldn’t form any sort of strategy and stick with it. Save the kids? Kill the bad guy? Escape? They sort of tried to do all three at once.

The result was that a very ordinary battle turned out to be almost too tough for them, and Skeeve was very neary killed.

-Shamus

Continued in Part 5…
 


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8 thoughts on “Session 3, Part 4

  1. wow… God this is nice :D You are a great dm m8! I will try to copy this dungeon myself (in the honor of you of course) and try men at it ^^ Great story.. just GREAT!

  2. guy says:

    awful late to be responding, but this reminds me of a comment made by a wizards employee. He saw a TRK happen against a mindflayer necromancer with wights, because the players couldn’t get their act together to run away properly. and because level drain+ mindflayer= doom.

  3. Kiri Xaperion says:

    I see you’ve had acid, you’ve had pits, but no acid-filled pits? Come on!

  4. Seve says:

    Ah the classic monster waits next door when party heals for hours is here tho they did face one wandering monster.

  5. Chrysagon Dailacrue says:

    I’ve seen an encounter similar to this in a campaign I’m running. The party had entered a cave inhabited by a tribe of goblins and fought and killed most of their warriors. They retreated immediately after the fight to rest and return the next day. The goblins having no where to go and little time to discuss what to do about the adventurers, were still in their cave. The goblins were all in the deepest chamber with the few remaining warriors, the chief, a shaman and the females and young. They suspected the goblins might be responsible or know something of the water-logging problem in local farmlands, the reason they were searching the area. They decided early on to try and talk with the goblins and during the course of diplomatic relations tried to physically threaten them, politely question them on their knowledge of the water issue and openly discuss amongst the PCs if they should just kill them all. The shaman was being very quiet and seemed nervous but despite hints at his mannerisms alluding to the fact he knew something, they wasted lots of time interrogating the chief. Ultimately they finally were clued in on, meaning I practically told them, the shaman was the key. Even then after asking literally only two or three questions of him, they grabbed him and took him out of the caves, trying more of their brand of “diploma-gation”. This resulted in throwing him down the hill the cave was set into and taking his magical ring they suspected might be the cause and solution to the water problem. All of this took at least 2 hours of play time. I’m still shaking my head over that one.

  6. Hmott says:

    that was great narrative

  7. Geoff says:

    I am pretty sure they sold the stunning horn that can be heard for about two miles for 50 gold some time ago. Loved the lotr narrative, both this story and the lotr series were very entertaining.

  8. Gandaug says:

    They kept the horn and gave the blacksmith 50 gold for it.

    How to fight a wizard in a small room when you have him outnumbered five to one and he opens with magic missile against your wizard? This enemy wizard is obviously not very experienced. But maybe he is incredibly powerful and is just bluffing! Best to run around confusedly to throw him off his game. See the party really had a plan. A very complex and strategic plan. It worked didn’t it? Skeeve got hurt but you must expect some casualty when facing a powerful wizard. The fact it was only one of the party shows just how brilliant their plan was.

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