[Adventure] Artemis' Pact

FourMonos said:

"Shale, the ghoul said it was here at the bequest of its master. The dark being that bound me to its service. I doubt it is done trying to kill me for trying to reject the pact."

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			That explains that interest in you over anyone else. We could use that if they try again. Also, I think those are flying animals. Which means they get out of the tunnels to feed. If we force them to get out, we may find out a way. Which could not be practicable for us, though.

"Brilliant Shale! I like that idea a lot."

Artemis picks up a hand sized stone.

"Lady Lilli, would you mind using the light spell on this rock?" After she does, Artemis tosses it into the mouth of the cave with the bats.

FourMonos said:

"Brilliant Shale!."

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"Much appreciated. I normally try to keep all your ingesting and excreting out of my conciousness. I find it disturbing."

[sblock=Skill Challenge!]
I am going to make Shale's Dungeoneering roll there the first SUCCESS in this SKILL CHALLENGE!

Please hold off on posting any further "important" actions until I get a chance to explain the challenge...

Also, you never officially posted that you were casting Make Whole, just that you planned to...
[/sblock]

Someone said:

"I normally try to keep all your ingesting and excreting out of my conciousness."

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Artemis leans toward Gil, "I think we were just officially lumped in with bats."

JoeNotCharles said:

[sblock=Skill Challenge!]Also, you never officially posted that you were casting Make Whole, just that you planned to...
[/sblock]

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[sblock=occ]Ah, I thought I'd better wait until I got up here (or should I was say hoisted up) after all and it would be better if we were next to Bob sooner than later. Plus, I was a bit busy with other things and thought I'd be stretching time a bit. I have the post written and ready, mind.[/sblock]

Lilli arranges the pieces of armour around her so that they look something like they should and begins tracing out what looks a bit like a tailor’s pattern on the floor around the pieces of leather. After a spending a brief while doing this, she draws into her hands the pieces of alchemical rock salt and begins to sprinkle them around the outlines that she’s drawn, singing an arcane chant as she goes. This chant reaches a sudden lilting crescendo and with a clap of her hands the pieces suddenly move and begin to knit together. The leather generally improves in lustre and turns from a ripped pile of leather into a more than serviceable suit of armour.

Lilli stands back and smiles at Bob. Then she turns her back and whistles...

A flock of bats startles and flaps off down the tunnel, squeaking madly. You scramble after them. The tunnel twists and turns, and you pass numerous side passages. Sometimes the bats dart into natural tunnels or through small holes in the rock that all but Lilli must force themselves through. At other times they enter wide galleries laid with cart tracks, whose rock faces bear the marks of pick and shovel. Most of the times the flock is out of sight in the darkness, but you follow the sound of wings. Eventually even that fades, and you follow fresh droppings. Usually the path leads clearly upwards, but occasionally you are led down a side tunnel that seems to wind back the way you came. Invariably, just as you are about to give up, the tunnel twists and heads upwards once again.

But soon you find yourself in a labyrinth of caves whose floor is slick with guano, with no way to tell which is freshest. You try a few exits by guess, but now the caves have turned on you, and every path which seems that it should lead up and out soon levels out and plunges steeply into the earth.

And now that you have no guide to follow, the caves have become far more confusing. Sometimes on entering a tunnel it will abruptly slant in an unexpected direction, or an opening that looked too small to enter will prove to be huge on approach - or vice versa. At last you turn into a dead end, retrace your steps - you are certain you retraced them exactly! - and find yourself in a different place than you were before. Either something in here is clouding your sense of direction, or the caves themselves are shifting behind you!

You find yourself at the foot of a great cavern, its walls honeycombed with tunnels. A rail track crosses the cavern floor, connecting a wide tunnel sloping up in one wall with an equally wide tunnel sloping downward in the other. Part of the wall has collapsed into a scree of rubble, and you can see another hole near the top, but climbing the scree to get to it looks tricky. The other tunnels are featureless clones of the maze you've been navigating since you lost track of the bats.

[sblock=Skill Challenge]
This challenge will use the Obsidian Skill Challenge system, which works like this:

There will be 3 segments. In each segment, every player posts 1 action and can make a Skill Check. At the end of 3 segments, if you have a total of:

8 or more successes: Victory!
6 or 7 successes: Partial Victory.
5 or fewer successes: Failure.

The DC for each Skill Check is 19. Yes, that's pretty high. So you'll want to increase your chances by being creative. Here are some options you have to increase your chances:

Good Roleplaying: If your action is exceptionally clever or well described, I'll give you a +2 to your skill check.

Primary Skill: If you use one of the primary skills for the challenge (see below), you get a +2.

Aid Another: You can skip your roll for the skill challenge to roll an assist instead. The DC for this roll is 10. You get no successes towards the challenge, but the next player to roll gets a +2, as long as their action is related to the skill you rolled (it doesn't have to be the exact same skill).

Critical Success: If you roll a natural 20, it's an automatic success and you get an extra success! (2 successes total.)

Bold Recovery: You may spend an Action Point to reroll a skill check. (Only one point per challenge, just like it's one per encounter for combat.)

Unburdened: You may spend a healing surge to ignore the Armour Check Penalty for one skill for the rest of the challenge. You can spend more healing surges to do this for more skills.

Go For Broke: In the third and last segment of the challenge, before anybody rolls, the group can decide that they're going for broke. In this case, all rolls are at -5, but if you succeed you get an extra success. (So if you crit, you get 3 successes!)

Rituals and Powers: Appropriate rituals will give either an automatic success or a bonus to a roll. Same with use of a Daily Power, if you can figure out how it would apply out of combat. Use of Encounter powers generally give a +2 if I feel it's appropriate, but they can only be used once during the challenge.

Primary Skills for this portion of the challenge are Dungeoneering and Perception. But this just means you get a bonus to use these - be creative with your skills.

Special Rule: For this Skill Challenge only, while you are navigating the twisting tunnels, any re-use of the same skill is at a cumulative -2. This is because the confusing nature of this place makes it especially easy to be led around in circles...

So far Shale has acted, with the +2 for Good Roleplaying, for 1 success. I'll be nice and let Shale decide whether to count the Dungeoneering or Nature roll - whichever he used will be at -2 from now on. (So for Dungeoneering it will cancel out the Primary Skill bonus, but for Nature it will handicap Lilli slightly since she has the only good Nature skill in the party...)[/sblock]

[sblock=Dungeoneering or Nature?]I'll make it a Dunegoneering check, since I have the same modifier for both[/sblock]

Ah, a shifting maze. Not only not a surprise after the hole they fell into disapeared, but also a classic among magical tricks - the books Shale was allowed to read back in the tower compile many variants, from illusions to teleportation to actual moving rock, and also the best ways to identify everyone of them.

The shardmind turn his psionically enhanced senses to the tunnels and the two points of light in his face flare for a moment. If there's magic to be found he's sure to see it.

[sblock=ooc]i realize many of us must have high Arcana scores, but in my case I very much doubt I could Bluff the maze into releasing us, and this is my only decent non-social skill.[/sblock]

Artemis starts to see the worry in the eyes of his companions. Heck, poor Bob is near rigid with fright. Now the twisting tunnels of the caverns are stymieing the group at every turn. There is only one thing left to do...

"Chin up there, Bob. I can see the worry building. I'm not going to lie, I'm a little worried, too. Everyone here is worried."

He turns and faces his companions, volume building, "But this isn't the moment to pause. To falter. To second guess ourselves. What we accomplish here... tonight... this is the stuff that bards make into tales. ...Nay, legends! This here situation, it is not something to shy away from. Not something to worry. Not something to fear!"

"This is our moment to overcome! We need to embrace this! To run into the next room grinning at what is to come next! We aren't going to fail! The group of us, together, we are going to succeed. We will overcome these pesky critters, these turning tunnels. This will be the most exciting night of your life! This is the night, Bob, that you can tell your kids that you looked the devil in the face and spit in his eye! Are you with me!"

[sblock=bluff] 1d20+10 → [18,10] = (28) Roll Lookup . [/sblock]