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Week 56 - Friendly fire

A14. Tomb
This family tomb consists of a diamond shaped antechamber and two symmetrical square crypts. Four desiccated corpses dressed in the tattered remains of fine clothes lie on stone slabs in both crypts, beyond wrought-iron gates. Both the gates and the walls themselves bear intricate carvings and flourishes of a human skull wreathed in fire.
A13. Ancient Entrance
A central column carved to resemble a gnarled tree trunk supports the ceiling of this dark, octagonal chamber. A five-foot high breach in the west wall seems to be the only way out besides the north stairway.
A12. Dragon’s Stairway
A steep stairway climbs southward under an ogival vault decorated with stone latticework. A series of brass flat-reliefs on the side walls depict the leering countenances of fanged dragons in threatening poses.
Gauthakan opens the bricked-up crypt with his rod of opening. All is as it should be - no magic, and nothing moving that shouldn’t be. So Jericho does a thorough search and finds a door concealed in the back wall. Behind this is a rough dirt passageway, leading down at a steep angle. Our team are quite paranoid, and proceed carefully.

At the base of the dirt passage is a small chamber of worked stone and to the north, stairs leading steeply down. The room and its column are nonmagical, but the stairway down glows with magic obvious to Flash’s Greater Arcane Sight. It is heavily trapped, with a set of powerful energy evocations. Jericho attempts to disarm the trap and he is pretty sure he has succeeded. He selflessly assays the stairs first, trusting to his nearly inhuman reflexes.

I ruled that just because the trap was disarmed, doesn’t mean it becomes nonmagical. Jericho got a 43 on a DC 40 disarm check, so I simply ruled that he “thinks it’s disarmed”.

The stairs remain quiet, and he arrives at the door at the bottom. This one is sealed, too, so once again Gauthakan does the honours.

A4. Broodfiend Pod Storage
The ceiling of this vast, thirty-foot-high chamber is supported by a square array of green marble pillars ten feet apart from each other. The stone floor is covered in a multitude of dragging scores and dents. This vast area is almost empty, with just a few ten-foot-tall strange statues against the walls. The statues resemble stubby, winged monsters curled into fetal positions with boneless limbs and oversized, sphincterial mouths.
Behind the door, they see a room with some statues looking just like the broodfiend they killed above. Everyone lines up and on the word go they begin casting spells and hacking away. Nothing much seems to happen. Gauthakan smashes one open, and inside is some sort of membranous thing crawling with kyuss worms which spills out onto the floor in a splash of fluid and lays there, feebly flapping its unformed wings. Gauthakan kills it, and does the same to each of the other statues.

We are going to be playing Cthulhu this year, and I have been reading some of the source material.

But while this is going on, something, has come to investigate the noise. A ghost - but the ghost of an avolakia priest! It glares at (I think) mend, or possibly Frith, but they shake off the effect. Then it retreats down the short corridor from which it came. The party forms up, and pursues.

— † —

A2. The Unlife Vortex
A circle of thick metal pillars supports the seventy-foot-high ceiling of this enormous chamber. Four massive mechanical arms extend from niches in the walls at the cardinal points to the center of the chamber, where they connect to a thirtyfoot- wide platform with a chain and pulley system. This machinery is evidently meant to raise the platform within the circle of pillars, although no apparent place for it to go is visible in the ceiling above. The green light that illuminates the chamber comes from a dozen ghostly bonfires lit on the floor around the platform. The flickering flames of the bonfires form haunting designs in the air. In the space just above the central platform floats a whirling vortex of black wind shot through with red lightning.
A1. Teleport Entry
This is a spacious underground hall. The humid, heavy air reeks of mold and death. The chamber itself is a seventy-foot-wide octagonal platform under a fifty-foot-high domed ceiling. Thousands of blue and green semi-precious stones are embedded in the tiled stone floor to form a thirty-footwide magical circle of arcane ciphers in the platform’s center. Two diametrically opposed arcades lead to grandiose chambers to the northeast and southwest. The one to the southwest is lit by reddish glass lamps and looks like a bizarre workshop. The other one, spangled by strange green bonfires, is similar to a domed warehouse and contains a colossal cranelike machine.
A3. Statuary Workshop
Lit by spherical lamps of reddish glass mounted on tall tripods, this irregular, forty-foot-high hall seems to be a huge statuary workshop. Models of building components and body parts carved in white marble and greenish granite lie scattered here and there. Among heaps of discarded and raw materials near the middle of the hall stands a large sculpture of a humanoid figure. A huge bookshelf of stone stands against the southwest wall. Several large workbenches with alchemical equipment and the tools of sculptors sit at the foot of the pillars that support the vaulted ceiling.
Through the short corridor, they see - well, you can read it yourself - and yup, that’d be it, then. There are also three more ghostly avolakia priests.

It has been a few weeks since we had our game - DND has been off the menu for a while, for reasons which my players understand. I will try to remember what I can. A pity - as it was a good combat.

Well! There is quite a bit of “You go first! No, you go first!”. Mend and Flash lay down a pair of Walls of Fire, and Jericho is in there somewhere, too. But these ghosts have the power of telekinesis, and begin dragging Frith through the walls. Ouch! Meanwhile, the liches down in area A3 spot the combat, and begin moving up in two waves.

Well, obviously, a lot happens. Mend takes out several of the liches with Fireballs, and Flash lays down his Bolts of Glory. There’s Mass Heal, there’s Black Blade of Disaster, and assorted other 9th level spells being tossed around, there’s s Greater Turning or two happening, as well.

The various undead take refuge: the liches cluster in the teleportation entry - protected by an Antilife Shell, and a ghost preist that survived the initial assault takes refuge in the aura of the negative energy vortex itself - it’s power healing him. But, clustering together in a compact group is just - just a bad idea when AOE spells are being thrown. The liches are toasted, cut in two, and healed; the ghosts are healed, turned, and otherwise zapped.

Meanwhile, Gauthakan Spider Climbs along the walls and roof to take care of the vortex generator using his own special brand of magic. With his Goliath Hammer of Being a Goliath Hammer, he destroys the device at the base of one of the four pillars attached to the vortex. As the last undead dies, Mend and Flash yell at him to stop.

The party take stock. The undead are no more. All is quiet, except for the vortex itself which is making an unhealthy whine, accompanied by the occasional nasty little black lightning bolt zap. Mend looks at the machinery. His prodigious talent make it easy to figure out the controls … but with the amount of damage done, no amount of talent is going to make this a sure thing.

I split the device’s hp into two, and Gauthakan took out one half of those. Therefore, I ruled that Mend had a 50% chance of choosing what happened, and a %50 chance of random as per the table in the module. Took me ages to persuade the players just to roll the dice and see what happened, the wusses. As it happened, they rolled badly. Cool as!

Everyone except Mend gets the hell out of there. Mend actuates the controls to commence an orderly shutdown of the vortex, but the broken machinery fails, and begins to - well, go very wrong. The vortex begins to expand, and Mend gets the hell out of there as fast as his shiny metal ass will go.

The party head up and out the entrance, but before they get there, there is a silent tremor in the ground, everyone’s ears pop with the sudden drop in pressure, and a gust of wind issues from the entrance they came in.

Then after a moment … nothing. Nothing except a palpable sense of freedom and relief, as the oppressive aura of desecration over the whole city lifts.

The party head back to the vortex room. Where there had been a great chamber filled with machinery and the carvings and frescoes of an ancient nature religion, there is now a perfectly spherical cavern, the rock mirror-smooth as if it had been meticulously polished. There are openings where they stand and to the teleportation platform to the southwest. But it all seems stable enough.

There are doors to the east from A4, and to the north, south, and west from A3.

— † —

Well! Mission accomplished! But oh, for a skateboard! Even just an old hessian sack, to slippery-slide the 90-ft diameter hollow, smooth as an inside-out ball bearing. Negative energy is kewl.

Will anyone notice, do you think, that the negative energy portal is closed? Will anyone, like, investigate? Will the party loot this dungeon, or will they head straight off to the new spire? Are there other subquests that they haven’t figured out yet? All will be revealed … well, eventually. Certainly some will be revealed next time we get out various acts together and play.

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