Innocent Bystander
First Post
At least one mass heal per encounter seems to be par for the course. But that's why I said it didn't sound easy, just easier.OTOH, someone used mass heal, so it couldn't have been too easy.
Sagiro's Story Hour: The FINAL Adventures of Abernathy's Company (FINISHED 7/3/14)
The_Warlock
Explorer
Our pre-emptory condolensces?
Sagiro
Rodent of Uncertain Parentage
It turns out the party didn't actually fight Octesian tonight. Since it had been two months since our last game, and because Kibi's player was stuck for a while on an emergency work call, the players collectively decided for a lower-key game, and to put off the Big Confrontation until next game.
To address the previous question: Octesian was a formidable opponent during the Battle of Verdshane, and while the party has indeed grown more powerful since then, so has Mr. O. In fact, the party learned this evening that [mouse-over for spoilers]
They'll just have to find out in two weeks!
-Sagiro
To address the previous question: Octesian was a formidable opponent during the Battle of Verdshane, and while the party has indeed grown more powerful since then, so has Mr. O. In fact, the party learned this evening that [mouse-over for spoilers]
he's capable of killing dozens or hundreds of civilians in their sleep, all in one night, scattered around the kingdom.
Plus, he's now augmented with Cleaner Tentacle Powers(tm). And he's insane.
So, yeah, the Company is terrified of him, and rightfully so. On the other hand, they realized today that since they'll be fighting him in Ava Dormo, they can leave their physical bodies in a room full of healers, and basically get healed for free in the middle of any violent confrontation. Now, will Octesian have also thought of that, and have some counter? Or not, since he's insane? Is he so powerful that the Company will need that kind of backup just to survive?
Plus, he's now augmented with Cleaner Tentacle Powers(tm). And he's insane.
So, yeah, the Company is terrified of him, and rightfully so. On the other hand, they realized today that since they'll be fighting him in Ava Dormo, they can leave their physical bodies in a room full of healers, and basically get healed for free in the middle of any violent confrontation. Now, will Octesian have also thought of that, and have some counter? Or not, since he's insane? Is he so powerful that the Company will need that kind of backup just to survive?
They'll just have to find out in two weeks!
-Sagiro
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Piratecat
Sesquipedalian
I can't tell you without some serious spoilers. He tried to use dream to go somewhere a human mind really, particularly shouldn't go. It has not changed him for the better.
That being said, we don't fight him 'til next game! After not playing for six weeks no one felt really comfortable with a complicated, crazy-dangerous brawl, and Sagiro had already prepped a fun and interesting side adventure. One die was rolled the entire session - I rolled it and it was a streetwise check - but we had to make decisions that would doom or save an ally that not everyone in the group likes. Good stuff.
Sagiro
Rodent of Uncertain Parentage
Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 303
Looks Like I Picked A Bad Day To Start Casting 'Status'
Morningstar, fifth in the marching order, concentrates for a second on the conditions of her party-mates. For the first time she has cast the spell status, which lets her know if any adverse conditions afflict her friends. At the moment, they're fine.
The staircase winds its narrow way downward, and it's a tight squeeze for those in bulky armor. The descent is steep and the stairs themselves – like the walls – are slick with damp moss. In places the stone has crumbled away. It's slow going, with Flicker and Ernie (who's following the find the path) in the lead. Ernie stumbles occasionally, but Flicker is always there to steady him.
After a few minutes of careful creeping, Flicker sees a greenish glow emanating from somewhere below.
“Oh, come on,” he whispers. “Could this get any more cliched?”
Dranko chuckles. “I'll bet it comes from phosphorescent mushrooms. All the best light in creepy caverns comes from phosphorescent mushrooms.”
Aravis agrees. “It's a classic. Though I wouldn't rule out undead lightning bugs.”
One final twist of the spiral staircase brings them to a opening looking out onto an enormous room, almost a hundred feet on a side and thirty feet from floor to ceiling. The opening is actually about half way up one of the longer walls, and there's a narrow wall-hugging staircase that leads to the floor. The place is depressingly familiar, but with some new touches as well. The first thing the party notices is the enormous black circle, fashioned of obsidian bricks set into the stone floor. They've seen something like this in almost every Black Circle edifice and ritual chamber they've visited, and it usually doesn't indicate anything good, but there are two other features of Nazg Hodeth that command more attention.
For one, the far wall is covered with smaller inlaid black circles and scrawled over with lines and equations. It's the same sort of arrangement the Black Circle had in Kallor for Mokad's ritual, though this one is vertical (being on a wall instead of the floor) and dotted with 4-inch holes. Black obsidian rods jut out from about a third of the holes, and a pile of additional rods sits as the base of the wall.
But even that is not what draws the Company's collective eye. At the far end of the chamber huge ribs, from something dragon-sized or larger, seem to grow up from the stone floor to curve over a tremendous obsidian slab set upon a granite pedestal. A bright green fire plays along the surface of the slab, casting out a flickering light that illuminates the entire enormous room.
There are also some open archways set into the walls at irregular intervals, but no light comes from any of these, and nothing stirs from them.
Grey Wolf gestures to the wall with the diagrams and holes. “Why can't they just get a blackboard?”
“We're here, by the way,” says Ernie, in case anyone had lingering doubts. “Nazg Hodeth. Now, before anyone goes down, let me check something.”
He casts true seeing and looks around again but detects no subterfuge, though the black circle on the floor has a magical aura, as does the wall with diagrams and of course the obsidian slab. Aravis casts greater arcane sight to get more detail: the wall radiates strong divination and necromancy, and the circle indicates conjuration and teleportation magic. The obsidian slab is an intensely strong focus of necromancy, which further strengthens their suspicion that it's the Necromantic Forge itself.
Morningstar casts hide from undead on the group as a precaution before Dranko goes into the room alone to scout. Down at ground level it's unnaturally cold, and he hears the crackle of the green flames which seem to offer no heat. He strolls toward them, a half-orc guinea pig fully cognizant that the first awful thing to happen is likely to happen to him.
By the time he gets halfway to the Necromantic Forge, he finds it impossible to look at it directly. The black slab with its poison-green flames is radiating the same palpable evil as the black book they found in Kallor, and the black-goo-infused column that housed the blue Eye of Moirel in Het Branoi. Still twenty feet out he cannot even will himself to take another step towards it. He returns to the others and gets a protection from evil and a death ward from Ernie. So fortified he returns to the Forge, and while its evil still beats upon his brow like a malevolent sun he is able to walk right up to it. The ribs tower overhead, casting shadows on the walls by the light of the flames. He peers as closely as he can at the flat obsidian table, squinting at the unnatural fire.
He turns back to the others and shrugs. “I don't see any instructions!”
The others beckon him back. He gives his report, and the Company decides to descend the stairs together and at least be closer to one another when they try messing around with the Forge. They skirt the black circle on the floor, entirely mistrusting. They still expect something horrible to happen. It's all too easy.
Something horrible happens.
Actually, to start with, two horrible things happen. There's a tiny hiccup in the flow of time around them, and when reality normalizes a split-second later there's an enormous bone construct looming over them. It's vaguely in the shape of a humanoid but has obviously been cobbled together from hundreds, maybe thousands of bugbear bones. Its complex interior is full of weird moving parts and rope pulleys that allow various sharpened bits to swivel around and stab outward. Animated bugbear arms stick out all over the place. The huge top section tilts down, allowing a synchronized array of over thirty bugbear skulls to look upon them – but they sweep back and forth, seeing nothing. Morningstar's hide from undead has foiled them for the moment.
The second awful thing is that Ernie has become entirely obscured by a cloud of greasy black smoke. For the first time Morningstar gets a ping from her status spell – Ernie's condition has changed to “undead.”
What?!
She's hoping she's just not sure how the spell works, but when the smoke drops from around Ernie like a magician's curtain, he has clearly been transformed. He still looks more or less like the halfling they know, but his face has become greenish and sallow, with glowing red eyes and fangs in a drooling mouth. He snarls at her.
“Let me get this right,” says Grey Wolf wearily. “Any attack, even on whatever just did that to Ernie, and the big thing sees us?”
“Yeah, that's right,” Morningstar confirms.
But whatever did cast the spell is not yet in evidence, so Dranko tumbles around to the far side of the bone construct and casts spiritual weapon (though for the moment he holds back its attacks). Aravis thinks for a second and postpones the tough decision: he casts maze on Undead Ernie, who blinks out. Grey Wolf looks about for whatever it was that cast time stop but sees nothing, so he casts dragonskin on himself.
Something new appears: an enormous fist dripping black blood. It congeals out of magic energy above their heads and comes smashing down upon Flicker, Morningstar, Grey Wolf and Kibi. None of them can dodge its brutal attack. Crunch! Aravis counts himself lucky for a second to have been spared by the crushing fist of spite, but he gets something worse. His heart starts to thump crazily in his chest and then – just stops. He drops unconscious from a sudden heart attack. In Morningstar's head his status switches to dying. Meanwhile the fist has not dissipated as hoped. Instead it hovers menacingly above the bruised bodies of its victims, poised to strike again.
But now there's a target, as Dranko sees a weedy little man in black robes who stepped into one of the darkened archways to cast his spells. And while only Dranko sees the invisible assailant, they all hear his high maniacal cackle.
“Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Welcome, welcome! You'll all make excellent subjects... except for the Yondallan. And what happened to the filthy little rat, anyhow?”
Morningstar drops a bomb of her own – a mass heal that restores to full health the four crushed by the fist, rouses Aravis to consciousness, and for good measure does massive damage to the bone creature. Bugbear bones are blasted loose inside its latticework construction and come bouncing down through its body like balls in a nightmare Pachinko machine. The whole construct lists a bit to its left, and twenty-some bugbear skulls swivel in unison to stare at Morningstar. She backs away.
Kibi summons a huge earth elemental and it attacks immediately, bludgeoning the bone creature with rocky fists. More pieces are knocked loose and its damaged tilt shifts to the right. Kibi then quickens a coldfire centered in the archway where he heard the cackling. Dranko gives him the thumbs up as he watches the little man wince in pain. Kibi then moves out from under the looming fist.
Ernie appears. Aravis curses. Ernie gurgles. Flicker looks frantically at the others.
“Should I do something to Ernie?”
“Incapacitate him!” answers Dranko.
“Can I do that to the undead?”
“I don't know... just do it!”
“I'm sorry, Ernie,” Flicker says, as he smacks his friend with the flat of his blade. Ernie responds by sticking out a long green tongue and making a grotesque panting noise.
The bone creature, damaged but still operational, swivels around to face Dranko. A number of out-jutting bugbear hands grasp Dranko's body and limbs and lift him off the ground. Dranko squirms and twists but cannot break free, and feels the pain of sharpened finger bones gouging his skin.
Aravis stands up and bestows a dimension door upon Pewter. “Climb up the earth elemental and jump over to Dranko. Get him out of there!” Pewter leaps from his arms and starts his climb. Dranko, grappled, makes himself useful while he awaits rescue. His spiritual weapon knocks a few of the bugbear skulls free from the construct's “head,” and with a magic ring he drops an ice storm on the black-robed assailant across the room.
Grey Wolf quickens a see invisible and gets a decent look at their enemy – 5' 4”, dressed in ragged black robes, pasty skin, practically a skeleton himself. If one could forget about the high-level magics he's been flinging around, one might mistake him for a homeless beggar.
The little necromancer cackles again. “It's been so long since I've had any volunteers! Thank you!”
Dranko bluffs. “If we can take out Parthol Runecarver, we can take out you.”
He expects this to have an impact, but the little man merely blinks. “Who?”
Dranko tries again. “Condor, then. We killed him too.”
This at least gets a response. “Ha ha HA HA HA! Volunteers with a sense of humor!”
Grey Wolf shoots an acid orb at the man but his aim is off, and the green glob splashes off the adjacent wall.
“Now, now,” says the man. He casts something on Kibi, who burns some charges of his ring of safety to resist what was probably a quickened feeblemind. The necromancer harumphs in disappointment but cheers himself up by casting maze on Morningstar. The Ellish cleric blinks out. He directs the enormous fist to swing over to Kibi before he himself steps back into the concealing darkness beyond the archway and out of sight. Kibi looks up but cannot scramble out of the way. The fist comes down with bone-crunching force and knocks him sprawling to the floor.
Morningstar has never been inside a maze before. She thinks she sees an immediate way out of the shifting labyrinth but it turns out to be a mirage, and as the spell's true complexity hits home it occurs to her that she'll be lucky to escape before the entire battle is over. Kibi, his bone-cracked body going on pure adrenaline, puts up a wall of force that blocks off all of the archways on the far side of the room. Then he casts xorn movement and sinks into the soothing embrace of the ground.
The earth elemental spots a huge crack in one of the bone construct's central femurs and takes two mighty swings at the weak spot. The second punch causes the entire thing to collapse in a heap and clatter of bones. Dranko, released all at once by the many hands that grasped him, tumbles far enough away that he's only partially buried.
Ernie points a moist, sickly hand at Aravis, his red eyes glowing with menace. With an inhuman gurgle he rips the disintegrate spell out of Aravis's head and then casts it back at the wizard. Aravis barely resists, though his body still shudders as the force of the spell rocks him backward.
“Let's try this again.” Aravis casts a second maze on Ernie, who again vanishes. Pewter reaches Dranko, but now the half-orc has a new plan.
“Pewter, take me to the other side of Kibi's wall of force. Right where we last saw that wizard.” Aravis's familiar does just that, and Dranko finds himself staring directly at the necromancer. Over his enemy's shoulder Dranko can see what's in the room beyond the archway – it's a long table on which rests a partially-constructed skeleton of some huge lizard. Each bone has been painstakingly tagged and labeled with pins and parchment.
“Ah, wonderful, wonderful!” exclaims the little mage. “You're so eager to start, you want to be first! Come in, come in!”
Dranko lets his whip do the talking, as he activates his boots of haste and unleashes a flurry of attacks, sending his enemy sprawling. The necromancer stands up, annoyed.
“You're not cooperating!” he yells at Dranko. “But that can be fixed. You can be fixed, and I can remake you properly. The sooner the better. Look at you. You're ugly! Ugly!”
“Say,” says Dranko, brushing off the insult. “What's your name? So I know what to put on your tombstone...”
“You don't know me?” gasps the man. “I am Zeg, Master of the Dead!”
To demonstrate his prowess, Zeg waves a rod at Dranko. The instrument squirms in his hand (uncomfortably reminding Dranko of Tapheon's rod Despoiler of Flesh) and some of Dranko's own flesh starts to rot. A piece of necrotized flesh falls from his arm.
“Now,” barks Zeg. “Wait right there.” He casts a spell and vanishes.
Grey Wolf looks around him, dismayed at the attrition. Morningstar is gone. Kibi has fled underground. Ernie is... well, best not to dwell on that. And Dranko is now out of sight as well. It's just him, Aravis and Flicker. He summons the pack, just in case.
Oh, and there's that one other thing. The enormous fist swings over and slams down on his shoulder, driving him to the ground and probably breaking some bones, judging by the sound and the pain. He could do with some healing, but all the party healers are AWOL. Morningstar tries one more time to escape the maze, fails, and decides upon a new tactic, though it'll still take a few rounds. Kibi chugs a healing potion, which turns out to be possible for him even underground.
Grey Wolf and Aravis spot Zeg lurking in the opening at the bottom of the stairs, where they first arrived in this place. Aravis pegs him with a disintegrate but Zeg largely resists.
“Just lie down!” screams the mad necromancer.
Dranko, left alone, has a few seconds to examine the lizard skeleton on the table. It must have taken Zeg years of work to assemble it; there are hundreds if not thousands of pins poking into the various bones, each with a little piece of parchment attached. The skeleton itself is huge – perhaps the creature when alive was a small dinosaur.
With a gleam in his eye, Dranko cracks his whip and snaps off a few carefully-labeled bones from the tail. Then, shouting across the room, he yells, “Oops, I broke your skeleton!”
Zeg's eyes grow wide. “Leave that alone!” he shrieks.
“I wonder what else I can break?” Dranko shouts back. He sweeps a large portion of Zeg's project onto the floor with his whip. “This looks like it took a lot of hard work!”
“Leave that alone, I said!” shouts Zeg. “Stop it. STOP IT!”
Dranko scampers up the wall and hides above the doorway.
Grey Wolf's dire wolves appear around the spot where Ernie will reappear if he escapes again from the maze. Speaking of which, Morningstar uses her gem of recall to prepare plane shift, then quickens that spell to escape. Upon arriving in a forest somewhere, she notes that Dranko's status has changed to rotting.
I'm never casting that spell again.
Dranko shouts again. “It would be terrible if anything else happens to this skeleton!”
“You know,” screams Zeg. “I can replace its bones with yours if I have to!” And thinking that sounds like a splendid idea, Zeg teleports back to the room with Dranko. He looks around and doesn't see the half-orc hiding in the shadows, so he steps back and quickens a second spell with no obvious effect. It's been a long, long time since he's been in a fight like this one, and it starts to occur to him that he might be badly injured. But more importantly that impudent creature is smashing up his project! Meanwhile Dranko's flesh continues to rot. He feels the tip of his chin fall away from his face.
Kibi emerges from the ground, makes a snap judgment, dismisses his wall of force, and casts glitterdust into the room with Zeg and Dranko. He knows that Zeg is invisible, and this should make him an obvious target to the rest of the party. But there are two problems with this: first, it turns out that Zeg had cast his own wall of force, which protects him from the spread of the glitter. Second, Dranko is also painted with sparkles, making it impossible for him to stay hidden.
“Ah,” says Zeg, seeing Dranko shimmering above the archway. “There you are.”
“Kibi!” roars Dranko. “Not helping!”
Aravis casts one more disintegrate, this time dissolving the wall of force protecting Zeg.
“Here I am,” agrees Dranko. “And now I'm going to finish off this lizard model you've got going.”
He makes as though he's going to whip off the head off the lizard, but it's a bluff. Zeg falls for it, jumping forward to protect his beloved model, and that gives Dranko the perfect opening for a devastating sneak attack. The first four of his whip strikes shear flesh from Zeg's old bones and knock him to his knees. As Dranko raises the whip for a final strike, Zeg says petulantly, “At least use my organs for something useful.”
Dranko stares at the crazed little necromancer.
“No,” he says, and his final strike snaps Zeg's neck.
...to be continued...
Looks Like I Picked A Bad Day To Start Casting 'Status'
Morningstar, fifth in the marching order, concentrates for a second on the conditions of her party-mates. For the first time she has cast the spell status, which lets her know if any adverse conditions afflict her friends. At the moment, they're fine.
The staircase winds its narrow way downward, and it's a tight squeeze for those in bulky armor. The descent is steep and the stairs themselves – like the walls – are slick with damp moss. In places the stone has crumbled away. It's slow going, with Flicker and Ernie (who's following the find the path) in the lead. Ernie stumbles occasionally, but Flicker is always there to steady him.
After a few minutes of careful creeping, Flicker sees a greenish glow emanating from somewhere below.
“Oh, come on,” he whispers. “Could this get any more cliched?”
Dranko chuckles. “I'll bet it comes from phosphorescent mushrooms. All the best light in creepy caverns comes from phosphorescent mushrooms.”
Aravis agrees. “It's a classic. Though I wouldn't rule out undead lightning bugs.”
One final twist of the spiral staircase brings them to a opening looking out onto an enormous room, almost a hundred feet on a side and thirty feet from floor to ceiling. The opening is actually about half way up one of the longer walls, and there's a narrow wall-hugging staircase that leads to the floor. The place is depressingly familiar, but with some new touches as well. The first thing the party notices is the enormous black circle, fashioned of obsidian bricks set into the stone floor. They've seen something like this in almost every Black Circle edifice and ritual chamber they've visited, and it usually doesn't indicate anything good, but there are two other features of Nazg Hodeth that command more attention.
For one, the far wall is covered with smaller inlaid black circles and scrawled over with lines and equations. It's the same sort of arrangement the Black Circle had in Kallor for Mokad's ritual, though this one is vertical (being on a wall instead of the floor) and dotted with 4-inch holes. Black obsidian rods jut out from about a third of the holes, and a pile of additional rods sits as the base of the wall.
But even that is not what draws the Company's collective eye. At the far end of the chamber huge ribs, from something dragon-sized or larger, seem to grow up from the stone floor to curve over a tremendous obsidian slab set upon a granite pedestal. A bright green fire plays along the surface of the slab, casting out a flickering light that illuminates the entire enormous room.
There are also some open archways set into the walls at irregular intervals, but no light comes from any of these, and nothing stirs from them.
Grey Wolf gestures to the wall with the diagrams and holes. “Why can't they just get a blackboard?”
“We're here, by the way,” says Ernie, in case anyone had lingering doubts. “Nazg Hodeth. Now, before anyone goes down, let me check something.”
He casts true seeing and looks around again but detects no subterfuge, though the black circle on the floor has a magical aura, as does the wall with diagrams and of course the obsidian slab. Aravis casts greater arcane sight to get more detail: the wall radiates strong divination and necromancy, and the circle indicates conjuration and teleportation magic. The obsidian slab is an intensely strong focus of necromancy, which further strengthens their suspicion that it's the Necromantic Forge itself.
Morningstar casts hide from undead on the group as a precaution before Dranko goes into the room alone to scout. Down at ground level it's unnaturally cold, and he hears the crackle of the green flames which seem to offer no heat. He strolls toward them, a half-orc guinea pig fully cognizant that the first awful thing to happen is likely to happen to him.
By the time he gets halfway to the Necromantic Forge, he finds it impossible to look at it directly. The black slab with its poison-green flames is radiating the same palpable evil as the black book they found in Kallor, and the black-goo-infused column that housed the blue Eye of Moirel in Het Branoi. Still twenty feet out he cannot even will himself to take another step towards it. He returns to the others and gets a protection from evil and a death ward from Ernie. So fortified he returns to the Forge, and while its evil still beats upon his brow like a malevolent sun he is able to walk right up to it. The ribs tower overhead, casting shadows on the walls by the light of the flames. He peers as closely as he can at the flat obsidian table, squinting at the unnatural fire.
He turns back to the others and shrugs. “I don't see any instructions!”
The others beckon him back. He gives his report, and the Company decides to descend the stairs together and at least be closer to one another when they try messing around with the Forge. They skirt the black circle on the floor, entirely mistrusting. They still expect something horrible to happen. It's all too easy.
Something horrible happens.
Actually, to start with, two horrible things happen. There's a tiny hiccup in the flow of time around them, and when reality normalizes a split-second later there's an enormous bone construct looming over them. It's vaguely in the shape of a humanoid but has obviously been cobbled together from hundreds, maybe thousands of bugbear bones. Its complex interior is full of weird moving parts and rope pulleys that allow various sharpened bits to swivel around and stab outward. Animated bugbear arms stick out all over the place. The huge top section tilts down, allowing a synchronized array of over thirty bugbear skulls to look upon them – but they sweep back and forth, seeing nothing. Morningstar's hide from undead has foiled them for the moment.
The second awful thing is that Ernie has become entirely obscured by a cloud of greasy black smoke. For the first time Morningstar gets a ping from her status spell – Ernie's condition has changed to “undead.”
What?!
She's hoping she's just not sure how the spell works, but when the smoke drops from around Ernie like a magician's curtain, he has clearly been transformed. He still looks more or less like the halfling they know, but his face has become greenish and sallow, with glowing red eyes and fangs in a drooling mouth. He snarls at her.
“Let me get this right,” says Grey Wolf wearily. “Any attack, even on whatever just did that to Ernie, and the big thing sees us?”
“Yeah, that's right,” Morningstar confirms.
But whatever did cast the spell is not yet in evidence, so Dranko tumbles around to the far side of the bone construct and casts spiritual weapon (though for the moment he holds back its attacks). Aravis thinks for a second and postpones the tough decision: he casts maze on Undead Ernie, who blinks out. Grey Wolf looks about for whatever it was that cast time stop but sees nothing, so he casts dragonskin on himself.
Something new appears: an enormous fist dripping black blood. It congeals out of magic energy above their heads and comes smashing down upon Flicker, Morningstar, Grey Wolf and Kibi. None of them can dodge its brutal attack. Crunch! Aravis counts himself lucky for a second to have been spared by the crushing fist of spite, but he gets something worse. His heart starts to thump crazily in his chest and then – just stops. He drops unconscious from a sudden heart attack. In Morningstar's head his status switches to dying. Meanwhile the fist has not dissipated as hoped. Instead it hovers menacingly above the bruised bodies of its victims, poised to strike again.
But now there's a target, as Dranko sees a weedy little man in black robes who stepped into one of the darkened archways to cast his spells. And while only Dranko sees the invisible assailant, they all hear his high maniacal cackle.
“Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Welcome, welcome! You'll all make excellent subjects... except for the Yondallan. And what happened to the filthy little rat, anyhow?”
Morningstar drops a bomb of her own – a mass heal that restores to full health the four crushed by the fist, rouses Aravis to consciousness, and for good measure does massive damage to the bone creature. Bugbear bones are blasted loose inside its latticework construction and come bouncing down through its body like balls in a nightmare Pachinko machine. The whole construct lists a bit to its left, and twenty-some bugbear skulls swivel in unison to stare at Morningstar. She backs away.
Kibi summons a huge earth elemental and it attacks immediately, bludgeoning the bone creature with rocky fists. More pieces are knocked loose and its damaged tilt shifts to the right. Kibi then quickens a coldfire centered in the archway where he heard the cackling. Dranko gives him the thumbs up as he watches the little man wince in pain. Kibi then moves out from under the looming fist.
Ernie appears. Aravis curses. Ernie gurgles. Flicker looks frantically at the others.
“Should I do something to Ernie?”
“Incapacitate him!” answers Dranko.
“Can I do that to the undead?”
“I don't know... just do it!”
“I'm sorry, Ernie,” Flicker says, as he smacks his friend with the flat of his blade. Ernie responds by sticking out a long green tongue and making a grotesque panting noise.
The bone creature, damaged but still operational, swivels around to face Dranko. A number of out-jutting bugbear hands grasp Dranko's body and limbs and lift him off the ground. Dranko squirms and twists but cannot break free, and feels the pain of sharpened finger bones gouging his skin.
Aravis stands up and bestows a dimension door upon Pewter. “Climb up the earth elemental and jump over to Dranko. Get him out of there!” Pewter leaps from his arms and starts his climb. Dranko, grappled, makes himself useful while he awaits rescue. His spiritual weapon knocks a few of the bugbear skulls free from the construct's “head,” and with a magic ring he drops an ice storm on the black-robed assailant across the room.
Grey Wolf quickens a see invisible and gets a decent look at their enemy – 5' 4”, dressed in ragged black robes, pasty skin, practically a skeleton himself. If one could forget about the high-level magics he's been flinging around, one might mistake him for a homeless beggar.
The little necromancer cackles again. “It's been so long since I've had any volunteers! Thank you!”
Dranko bluffs. “If we can take out Parthol Runecarver, we can take out you.”
He expects this to have an impact, but the little man merely blinks. “Who?”
Dranko tries again. “Condor, then. We killed him too.”
This at least gets a response. “Ha ha HA HA HA! Volunteers with a sense of humor!”
Grey Wolf shoots an acid orb at the man but his aim is off, and the green glob splashes off the adjacent wall.
“Now, now,” says the man. He casts something on Kibi, who burns some charges of his ring of safety to resist what was probably a quickened feeblemind. The necromancer harumphs in disappointment but cheers himself up by casting maze on Morningstar. The Ellish cleric blinks out. He directs the enormous fist to swing over to Kibi before he himself steps back into the concealing darkness beyond the archway and out of sight. Kibi looks up but cannot scramble out of the way. The fist comes down with bone-crunching force and knocks him sprawling to the floor.
Morningstar has never been inside a maze before. She thinks she sees an immediate way out of the shifting labyrinth but it turns out to be a mirage, and as the spell's true complexity hits home it occurs to her that she'll be lucky to escape before the entire battle is over. Kibi, his bone-cracked body going on pure adrenaline, puts up a wall of force that blocks off all of the archways on the far side of the room. Then he casts xorn movement and sinks into the soothing embrace of the ground.
The earth elemental spots a huge crack in one of the bone construct's central femurs and takes two mighty swings at the weak spot. The second punch causes the entire thing to collapse in a heap and clatter of bones. Dranko, released all at once by the many hands that grasped him, tumbles far enough away that he's only partially buried.
Ernie points a moist, sickly hand at Aravis, his red eyes glowing with menace. With an inhuman gurgle he rips the disintegrate spell out of Aravis's head and then casts it back at the wizard. Aravis barely resists, though his body still shudders as the force of the spell rocks him backward.
“Let's try this again.” Aravis casts a second maze on Ernie, who again vanishes. Pewter reaches Dranko, but now the half-orc has a new plan.
“Pewter, take me to the other side of Kibi's wall of force. Right where we last saw that wizard.” Aravis's familiar does just that, and Dranko finds himself staring directly at the necromancer. Over his enemy's shoulder Dranko can see what's in the room beyond the archway – it's a long table on which rests a partially-constructed skeleton of some huge lizard. Each bone has been painstakingly tagged and labeled with pins and parchment.
“Ah, wonderful, wonderful!” exclaims the little mage. “You're so eager to start, you want to be first! Come in, come in!”
Dranko lets his whip do the talking, as he activates his boots of haste and unleashes a flurry of attacks, sending his enemy sprawling. The necromancer stands up, annoyed.
“You're not cooperating!” he yells at Dranko. “But that can be fixed. You can be fixed, and I can remake you properly. The sooner the better. Look at you. You're ugly! Ugly!”
“Say,” says Dranko, brushing off the insult. “What's your name? So I know what to put on your tombstone...”
“You don't know me?” gasps the man. “I am Zeg, Master of the Dead!”
To demonstrate his prowess, Zeg waves a rod at Dranko. The instrument squirms in his hand (uncomfortably reminding Dranko of Tapheon's rod Despoiler of Flesh) and some of Dranko's own flesh starts to rot. A piece of necrotized flesh falls from his arm.
“Now,” barks Zeg. “Wait right there.” He casts a spell and vanishes.
Grey Wolf looks around him, dismayed at the attrition. Morningstar is gone. Kibi has fled underground. Ernie is... well, best not to dwell on that. And Dranko is now out of sight as well. It's just him, Aravis and Flicker. He summons the pack, just in case.
Oh, and there's that one other thing. The enormous fist swings over and slams down on his shoulder, driving him to the ground and probably breaking some bones, judging by the sound and the pain. He could do with some healing, but all the party healers are AWOL. Morningstar tries one more time to escape the maze, fails, and decides upon a new tactic, though it'll still take a few rounds. Kibi chugs a healing potion, which turns out to be possible for him even underground.
Grey Wolf and Aravis spot Zeg lurking in the opening at the bottom of the stairs, where they first arrived in this place. Aravis pegs him with a disintegrate but Zeg largely resists.
“Just lie down!” screams the mad necromancer.
Dranko, left alone, has a few seconds to examine the lizard skeleton on the table. It must have taken Zeg years of work to assemble it; there are hundreds if not thousands of pins poking into the various bones, each with a little piece of parchment attached. The skeleton itself is huge – perhaps the creature when alive was a small dinosaur.
With a gleam in his eye, Dranko cracks his whip and snaps off a few carefully-labeled bones from the tail. Then, shouting across the room, he yells, “Oops, I broke your skeleton!”
Zeg's eyes grow wide. “Leave that alone!” he shrieks.
“I wonder what else I can break?” Dranko shouts back. He sweeps a large portion of Zeg's project onto the floor with his whip. “This looks like it took a lot of hard work!”
“Leave that alone, I said!” shouts Zeg. “Stop it. STOP IT!”
Dranko scampers up the wall and hides above the doorway.
Grey Wolf's dire wolves appear around the spot where Ernie will reappear if he escapes again from the maze. Speaking of which, Morningstar uses her gem of recall to prepare plane shift, then quickens that spell to escape. Upon arriving in a forest somewhere, she notes that Dranko's status has changed to rotting.
I'm never casting that spell again.
Dranko shouts again. “It would be terrible if anything else happens to this skeleton!”
“You know,” screams Zeg. “I can replace its bones with yours if I have to!” And thinking that sounds like a splendid idea, Zeg teleports back to the room with Dranko. He looks around and doesn't see the half-orc hiding in the shadows, so he steps back and quickens a second spell with no obvious effect. It's been a long, long time since he's been in a fight like this one, and it starts to occur to him that he might be badly injured. But more importantly that impudent creature is smashing up his project! Meanwhile Dranko's flesh continues to rot. He feels the tip of his chin fall away from his face.
Kibi emerges from the ground, makes a snap judgment, dismisses his wall of force, and casts glitterdust into the room with Zeg and Dranko. He knows that Zeg is invisible, and this should make him an obvious target to the rest of the party. But there are two problems with this: first, it turns out that Zeg had cast his own wall of force, which protects him from the spread of the glitter. Second, Dranko is also painted with sparkles, making it impossible for him to stay hidden.
“Ah,” says Zeg, seeing Dranko shimmering above the archway. “There you are.”
“Kibi!” roars Dranko. “Not helping!”
Aravis casts one more disintegrate, this time dissolving the wall of force protecting Zeg.
“Here I am,” agrees Dranko. “And now I'm going to finish off this lizard model you've got going.”
He makes as though he's going to whip off the head off the lizard, but it's a bluff. Zeg falls for it, jumping forward to protect his beloved model, and that gives Dranko the perfect opening for a devastating sneak attack. The first four of his whip strikes shear flesh from Zeg's old bones and knock him to his knees. As Dranko raises the whip for a final strike, Zeg says petulantly, “At least use my organs for something useful.”
Dranko stares at the crazed little necromancer.
“No,” he says, and his final strike snaps Zeg's neck.
...to be continued...
Last edited:
theskyfullofdust
First Post
That sounded like it was an excellent fight. The multiple actions, are they just story telling or where the characters pulling off more than one action per round?
I do love this story hour. It's a novel in its own right, fun, exciting, and full of ideas. Thanks for sharing this with us over the years
I do love this story hour. It's a novel in its own right, fun, exciting, and full of ideas. Thanks for sharing this with us over the years
