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Story Hour
Erkonin (Campaign #1) [Session 46: Making Deals with Devils is Stupid as well as Bad]
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<blockquote data-quote="prabe" data-source="post: 8227008" data-attributes="member: 7016699"><p>Session 36: In the Kobold Warren</p><p></p><p></p><p>Dramatis Personae:</p><p>Orryk - Forest Gnome Monk (Way of the Four Elements, variant)/Wizard</p><p>Mo - Goliath Bard (College of Lore)</p><p>Fiona - Half-Elf Wizard (Evoker)/Cleric (Knowledge)</p><p>Taman - Human (variant) Rogue (Inquisitive)/Ranger (Horizon Walker)</p><p>Joybell - Forest Gnome Paladin (Oath of the Ancients)</p><p>Thneed - Wood Elf Ranger (Hunter Conclave)</p><p></p><p>GM - Everyone Else</p><p></p><p></p><p>7 Harfastin 748 (Campaign day 98) (immediately after)</p><p></p><p>We were led away by the kobold escort/guards past the u-trap entrance. Our escort consisted of one of the human-sized, burly over-muscled (“Steroid kobolds”) kobolds, one human-sized kobold with a shield (“Shield kobolds”), one normal-sized kobold who looked perhaps a bit more on the ball than your average kobold (“Sorcerer kobolds”), and one entirely normal looking kobold. The hallway was worked stone and we could see some arrow slits, at kobold height, in the walls as we passed.</p><p></p><p>As we were walking down the corridor, Joybell, hoping to find a language in which we could talk freely, started cussing in Gnomish. She used all the curse words she’d heard Orryk use, insulted the kobold’s parentage, called them the dragon’s anal beads, all the worst things she could think of about kobolds in general and the one nearest to her in specific.</p><p></p><p>Orryk started laughing. Taman walked along just staring into the infinite distance. The Lizardman shaman, named Ssythrov, chuckled. (Yes, by special request, the Shaman has a name, since he’s apparently going to be with us for a while.)</p><p></p><p>The kobolds however, didn’t react.</p><p></p><p>Once she’d established that Gnomish was a language that at least part of the party could use to talk freely, she had no idea what to actually say and just sort of floundered. We got about 100’ down the hallway past the u-trap with Joybell swearing and then just stammering.</p><p></p><p>Thneed, in Elvish to Fiona: We don’t need to make a plan now. We can make it later.</p><p></p><p>Thneed then started talking to Ssythrov, telling him a joke about something.</p><p></p><p>While Thneed was talking to Ssythrov, Mo was watching for a good moment. When he saw that the corridor ahead of us widened out and our escort had entered the chamber, and we were past all but the last arrow slit, he used the wand of web to tie up the four escorting us.</p><p></p><p>As soon as the web hit, Thneed yelled out for people to get down and drew her bow, waiting for a clear shot. Mo started mocking one, leaving it looking deeply wounded by his insults.</p><p></p><p>Some of the kobolds were stuck in the web and struggled against it. The Sorcerer started firebolting the web he was stuck in, burning it and himself.</p><p></p><p>Orryk ran up and shivved the one that Mo had mocked, dropping it, then attacked the Shield kobold. Omnath breathed a cloud of dust on the Steroid and Shield guys and blinded them both. Fiona followed up with Toll the Dead.</p><p></p><p>The Steroid guy, blind, ripped himself out of the webbing in a burst of brute strength then ran right into the wall.</p><p></p><p>Joybell, confused: Wait? We’re attacking now?</p><p></p><p>Then she attacked the Shield guy and dropped it.</p><p></p><p>Taman cast ensnaring strike on the Sorcerer and caught it in his ensnaring vines, then he crouched down to get cover behind Orryk, and to get below the last arrow slit, because an arrow from it had narrowly missed him.</p><p></p><p>Ssythrov dropped to the ground, giving Thneed a clear shot, which she took at the Sorcerer, dropping him. Then she was able to fire again and took two shots at the Steroid guy. Mo then immediately mocked him.</p><p></p><p>Mo: Steroids are going to shrink your testicles.</p><p></p><p>Orryk pummeled the Steroid guy with fists of unbroken air, staying out of the webbed area. Fiona stepped over Ssythrov, prone on the ground, and Tolled the Steroid guy.</p><p></p><p>As soon as she did that, someone on the other side of the arrow slits cast a shatter spell, causing a clap of thunder that the dragon certainly heard back in his chamber that did damage to Fiona and less to Ssythrov.</p><p></p><p>Joybell peeked in the arrow slit -- there was an unarmed kobold running away sort of in the direction of the dragon cave (but at an angle that looked like it might be going around) and another, puzzled looking kobold with a shortbow. She fired magic missiles from her wand through the arrow slit, dropping the archer and hurting the sorcerer, but not killing it.</p><p></p><p>Taman killed the Steroid guy, the last kobold standing, with arrows. Mo immediately dropped the webbing and ran into the chamber.</p><p></p><p>Mo, yelling: Let’s teleport out of here.</p><p></p><p>Then he threw up a rope trick and we all climbed up, handing Scooby up into it as well. Mo used prestidigitation to to make a circle on the ground and Orryk used his power over the elements to reinforce the effect of us having teleported out of there.</p><p></p><p>Once we were all settled, and Fiona had been cured with the bead from Joybell’s necklace, we started talking.</p><p></p><p>Orryk: What’s your plan?</p><p>Mo: First, I apologize. This is at least 30% my fault.</p><p>Fiona: ::eyeroll::</p><p>Taman: We weren’t going to walk away to do this deal…</p><p></p><p>Before the conversation could go any further, a group of four kobolds (looked like 2 sorcerers and 2 shields) came running down the hall into the chamber. They saw the corpses and the fake teleportation circle on the floor. They looked a little puzzled at the circle and the two sorcerers started talking about it. Thneed reported that they’d never seen one that looked quite like this, but maybe it was possible. They couldn’t rule it out for sure.</p><p></p><p>Thneed: They don’t know we’re still here or where we are. That’s an advantage.</p><p></p><p>We asked Ssythrov if he knew of any other way to get to the dragon chamber, but the only other time he’d been taken to see Tallyxtillon, he’d been brought the same way.</p><p></p><p>Thneed: Once the coast is clear, we can try to get into the side tunnels.</p><p></p><p>The kobolds below us started brushing the circle out and as they did so, Orryk let his mold earth drop and Mo let his prestidigitation drop. The kobolds then went away down the tunnel.</p><p></p><p>After we’d rested for an hour, and were all feeling a bit better, we came out of the rope trick. Orryk had Omnath explore down one of the arrow slit tunnels to see if we could figure out how it connected. Omnath followed the tunnel that Joybell shot magic missiles into and found that it connected up with the passage we were in a ways ahead. Omnath also saw one shield kobold and one sorcerer kobold walking along, talking, and heading sort of in our direction. Orryk popped him back into his pocket dimension before he was spotted.</p><p></p><p>We all did our best to move into sneaky-type positions - Joybell failed terribly but Scooby nudged her into a better spot and covered for her. The two kobolds walked down the tunnel toward us, talking with one another. They were clearly expecting no trouble and their weapons weren’t out.</p><p></p><p>Orryk popped out of hiding, hit the Shield kobold with his fists of unbroken air, then popped back around the corner out of sight. While that kobold was looking around, very confused at having been punched by air out of nowhere, Thneed shot it twice and jumped back around her own corner. Joybell galloped up on Scooby, dropping the Shield guy and hitting the Sorcerer with a “glancing crit”. Other party members tried to hit the sorcerer, but missed, until Fiona cast acid splash on him and then Orryk punched it to death with his fists of unbroken air.</p><p></p><p>We put the bodies into Joybell’s bag of holding.</p><p></p><p>Joybell: ::sigh::</p><p>Mo: Before we go into this fight that I started, I have plenty of potions of healing.</p><p></p><p>We continued down the tunnel on the other side of the arrow slits from the corridor to the u-trap and the dragon chamber. Ssythrov the Shaman wild-shaped into a very large snake, which was pretty cool.</p><p></p><p>Thneed and Taman did ranger stuff to keep us from getting lost.</p><p></p><p>(Player: Mo’s subplot is to fight this dragon.)</p><p></p><p>We proceeded along the tunnel -- it only had one arrow slit onto the corridor to the dragon chamber, then it pulled away from that corridor and continued off at an angle and a slight incline. We proceeded along it for about 15 minutes, getting way past where it could possibly hook directly up with the dragon chamber.</p><p></p><p>We weren’t surprised when the 5’ tunnel we’d been moving along widened out into a large chamber with three other exits. A group of five miners (ordinary kobolds) were working on one side of the room and there were two clusters in the vicinity of the other three exits. Each of these clusters had a Sorcerer, a Steroid and a Shield. (The three other exits went off the irregularly roundish room roughly at 10 o’clock, 12 o’clock, and 2 o’clock. There was a Sorcerer- Steroid-Shield cluster at 11 o’clock and one at 1 o’clock. The miners were in an alcove at 7 o’clock. Our tunnel entered the room around 5 o’clock.) The Sorcerers and miners were completely unaware that we were coming down the hall, even with Joybell leading the way, but the Steroids and Shields did hear us approach.</p><p></p><p>Joybell ran into the room then jumped on Scooby and charged the nearest Steroid. Mo used the wand of web to catch the miners and the more distant Sorcerer-Steroid-Shield cluster then dropped to the ground so people behind him could see and shoot. Taman and Thneed waited for the party in front of them to clear a bit so they could dash into the room, but were bottled up in the hallway in a manner quite reminiscent of the staircases in the boarding house in Embernook.</p><p></p><p>The two Steroid guys attacked Joybell, but both of them missed -- then Orryk created a bonfire right underneath one of them. If that weren’t enough problems for him, Taman then stepped into the room and attacked him as the flames licked around him.</p><p></p><p>Thneed climbed over Mo and squeezed past Fiona and took two shots at the guy in the fire and the Shield Kobold next to him.</p><p></p><p>The two miners who were stuck in the web got free (three of them were trapped by the web into the alcove they’d been digging out) moved out of the web toward us. The other ran away down the hall away from us.</p><p></p><p>All of us were keenly aware of the problem of that one miner running away and getting the word out that we were still there, but there wasn’t much that Joybell could do except attack the guy in front of her. Mo had Checkers attack one of the Steroid guys and threw a fuzzy thing from his back of tricks into the web, just as he let the web drop. A baboon landed and looked around for a moment, before being killed by the Shield kobold that had been trapped in the web.</p><p></p><p>There was some fighting and combat, shuffling and scuffling. Orryk let the first bonfire drop then cast it again on one of the miners. We were all trying to get through the combat without using any spell slots or items that we needed to worry about recharging.</p><p></p><p>Taman chased after the running miner to keep it from getting away.</p><p></p><p>There was more combat -- Taman got hit, Joybell failed to drop someone. Mo cast another web, catching the miners, a Sorcerer and a Shield.</p><p></p><p>Fiona, fed up and realizing that we’d gotten into the realm of a false economy in prolonging this combat rather than using spells, cast fireball, getting almost the entire room and everyone in it. The miners and Sorcerers died instantly in the flame. One of the Steroid guys, who’d been taking a lot of blows, died. The other one survived, but looked hurt. One of the Shields died in the fire.</p><p></p><p>The other Shield got dropped by Orryk who then turned to the surviving Steroid and hit him as well. Thneed dropped the Steroid shortly after.</p><p></p><p>All that was left at that point was the fleeing miner, who Taman had caught up to at that point. After a shriek and another attempt to run, Taman dispatched him with his scimitar.</p><p></p><p>While FIona used her firebolt cantrip to reduce all the kobold bodies (including the two in Joybell’s bag of holding) to ash, Taman and Orryk sneaked down the hall the miner had fled down to see what they could see down there. The passage opened into a small, natural-looking chamber with two other exits. The chamber looked semi-abandoned -- it appeared that the miner had simply been running away, rather than running toward anything in particular.</p><p></p><p>The rest of the group headed down to the small chamber. Listening for noises at the two other exits, we heard lapping water and smelled fresh air at one of them. The other was quiet and smelled like nothing more than the air we’d been breathing (parfum de kobold cave). So we headed toward the lapping water and fresh air.</p><p></p><p>We came out at a small cavern open to the cenote above the lake. We saw a couple of humanoid skeletal remains in the cave with lime crusting the bones. One of the skeletons was wearing a bright green knit cap that was in good shape considering the condition of the bones.</p><p></p><p>Fiona spent 10 minutes casting detect magic (yes) and then ten more minutes casting identify. As soon as the spell gave her the information that this was a cap of water-breathing we all heard a voice.</p><p></p><p>Voice: Are you here to kill the dragon? Good. I was hoping someone would find me.</p><p></p><p>We realized that the cap was speaking to us. Mo put it on, to see what happened, but he was not possessed and nothing bad happened.</p><p></p><p>Cap: I’m hoping you have better luck than these guys. My name is Suutha. They tried fifteen years ago -- I cast water-breathing on all of them.</p><p>Fiona: How strong were they?</p><p>Mo: On a scale of one to twenty.</p><p>Suutha: They were proud that they’d just figured out how to polymorph into animals and such.</p><p></p><p>(Note: They were seventh level.)</p><p></p><p>Taman looked out the mouth of the cavern -- the water level in the cenote is about twenty feet below the ledge.</p><p></p><p>Mo, to Suutha: Weird question, why do you talk?</p><p>Suutha: Magical accident, I think. That’s how items get sentient.</p><p>Orryk: The people you came with had items of their own that are now in the dragon’s horde. Is there anything we should be running to grab and use in a fight?</p><p>Suutha: No. The dragon seemed to have a ring of fire resistance though -- they weren’t expecting not to be able to use fire against it. The dragon is also a druid, just so you know.</p><p></p><p>Through conversation with Suutha we realized that it wants to go to the Plane of Water. That made it sort of a kindred spirit for Orryk, so he got the cap. The further information from Fiona’s identify was that the cap would make a bubble of breathable air around the head of the wearer. Suutha can also cast the water-breathing spell, which will be enough to allow all of us to get to the dragon’s cave without having to worry about drowning.</p><p></p><p>Suutha reported that this was an abandoned cave that no one had come to before us in the 15 years it had been there. We decided to take a long rest and attack the dragon first thing in the morning.</p><p></p><p>We will wake the next morning at 9th level.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="prabe, post: 8227008, member: 7016699"] Session 36: In the Kobold Warren Dramatis Personae: Orryk - Forest Gnome Monk (Way of the Four Elements, variant)/Wizard Mo - Goliath Bard (College of Lore) Fiona - Half-Elf Wizard (Evoker)/Cleric (Knowledge) Taman - Human (variant) Rogue (Inquisitive)/Ranger (Horizon Walker) Joybell - Forest Gnome Paladin (Oath of the Ancients) Thneed - Wood Elf Ranger (Hunter Conclave) GM - Everyone Else 7 Harfastin 748 (Campaign day 98) (immediately after) We were led away by the kobold escort/guards past the u-trap entrance. Our escort consisted of one of the human-sized, burly over-muscled (“Steroid kobolds”) kobolds, one human-sized kobold with a shield (“Shield kobolds”), one normal-sized kobold who looked perhaps a bit more on the ball than your average kobold (“Sorcerer kobolds”), and one entirely normal looking kobold. The hallway was worked stone and we could see some arrow slits, at kobold height, in the walls as we passed. As we were walking down the corridor, Joybell, hoping to find a language in which we could talk freely, started cussing in Gnomish. She used all the curse words she’d heard Orryk use, insulted the kobold’s parentage, called them the dragon’s anal beads, all the worst things she could think of about kobolds in general and the one nearest to her in specific. Orryk started laughing. Taman walked along just staring into the infinite distance. The Lizardman shaman, named Ssythrov, chuckled. (Yes, by special request, the Shaman has a name, since he’s apparently going to be with us for a while.) The kobolds however, didn’t react. Once she’d established that Gnomish was a language that at least part of the party could use to talk freely, she had no idea what to actually say and just sort of floundered. We got about 100’ down the hallway past the u-trap with Joybell swearing and then just stammering. Thneed, in Elvish to Fiona: We don’t need to make a plan now. We can make it later. Thneed then started talking to Ssythrov, telling him a joke about something. While Thneed was talking to Ssythrov, Mo was watching for a good moment. When he saw that the corridor ahead of us widened out and our escort had entered the chamber, and we were past all but the last arrow slit, he used the wand of web to tie up the four escorting us. As soon as the web hit, Thneed yelled out for people to get down and drew her bow, waiting for a clear shot. Mo started mocking one, leaving it looking deeply wounded by his insults. Some of the kobolds were stuck in the web and struggled against it. The Sorcerer started firebolting the web he was stuck in, burning it and himself. Orryk ran up and shivved the one that Mo had mocked, dropping it, then attacked the Shield kobold. Omnath breathed a cloud of dust on the Steroid and Shield guys and blinded them both. Fiona followed up with Toll the Dead. The Steroid guy, blind, ripped himself out of the webbing in a burst of brute strength then ran right into the wall. Joybell, confused: Wait? We’re attacking now? Then she attacked the Shield guy and dropped it. Taman cast ensnaring strike on the Sorcerer and caught it in his ensnaring vines, then he crouched down to get cover behind Orryk, and to get below the last arrow slit, because an arrow from it had narrowly missed him. Ssythrov dropped to the ground, giving Thneed a clear shot, which she took at the Sorcerer, dropping him. Then she was able to fire again and took two shots at the Steroid guy. Mo then immediately mocked him. Mo: Steroids are going to shrink your testicles. Orryk pummeled the Steroid guy with fists of unbroken air, staying out of the webbed area. Fiona stepped over Ssythrov, prone on the ground, and Tolled the Steroid guy. As soon as she did that, someone on the other side of the arrow slits cast a shatter spell, causing a clap of thunder that the dragon certainly heard back in his chamber that did damage to Fiona and less to Ssythrov. Joybell peeked in the arrow slit -- there was an unarmed kobold running away sort of in the direction of the dragon cave (but at an angle that looked like it might be going around) and another, puzzled looking kobold with a shortbow. She fired magic missiles from her wand through the arrow slit, dropping the archer and hurting the sorcerer, but not killing it. Taman killed the Steroid guy, the last kobold standing, with arrows. Mo immediately dropped the webbing and ran into the chamber. Mo, yelling: Let’s teleport out of here. Then he threw up a rope trick and we all climbed up, handing Scooby up into it as well. Mo used prestidigitation to to make a circle on the ground and Orryk used his power over the elements to reinforce the effect of us having teleported out of there. Once we were all settled, and Fiona had been cured with the bead from Joybell’s necklace, we started talking. Orryk: What’s your plan? Mo: First, I apologize. This is at least 30% my fault. Fiona: ::eyeroll:: Taman: We weren’t going to walk away to do this deal… Before the conversation could go any further, a group of four kobolds (looked like 2 sorcerers and 2 shields) came running down the hall into the chamber. They saw the corpses and the fake teleportation circle on the floor. They looked a little puzzled at the circle and the two sorcerers started talking about it. Thneed reported that they’d never seen one that looked quite like this, but maybe it was possible. They couldn’t rule it out for sure. Thneed: They don’t know we’re still here or where we are. That’s an advantage. We asked Ssythrov if he knew of any other way to get to the dragon chamber, but the only other time he’d been taken to see Tallyxtillon, he’d been brought the same way. Thneed: Once the coast is clear, we can try to get into the side tunnels. The kobolds below us started brushing the circle out and as they did so, Orryk let his mold earth drop and Mo let his prestidigitation drop. The kobolds then went away down the tunnel. After we’d rested for an hour, and were all feeling a bit better, we came out of the rope trick. Orryk had Omnath explore down one of the arrow slit tunnels to see if we could figure out how it connected. Omnath followed the tunnel that Joybell shot magic missiles into and found that it connected up with the passage we were in a ways ahead. Omnath also saw one shield kobold and one sorcerer kobold walking along, talking, and heading sort of in our direction. Orryk popped him back into his pocket dimension before he was spotted. We all did our best to move into sneaky-type positions - Joybell failed terribly but Scooby nudged her into a better spot and covered for her. The two kobolds walked down the tunnel toward us, talking with one another. They were clearly expecting no trouble and their weapons weren’t out. Orryk popped out of hiding, hit the Shield kobold with his fists of unbroken air, then popped back around the corner out of sight. While that kobold was looking around, very confused at having been punched by air out of nowhere, Thneed shot it twice and jumped back around her own corner. Joybell galloped up on Scooby, dropping the Shield guy and hitting the Sorcerer with a “glancing crit”. Other party members tried to hit the sorcerer, but missed, until Fiona cast acid splash on him and then Orryk punched it to death with his fists of unbroken air. We put the bodies into Joybell’s bag of holding. Joybell: ::sigh:: Mo: Before we go into this fight that I started, I have plenty of potions of healing. We continued down the tunnel on the other side of the arrow slits from the corridor to the u-trap and the dragon chamber. Ssythrov the Shaman wild-shaped into a very large snake, which was pretty cool. Thneed and Taman did ranger stuff to keep us from getting lost. (Player: Mo’s subplot is to fight this dragon.) We proceeded along the tunnel -- it only had one arrow slit onto the corridor to the dragon chamber, then it pulled away from that corridor and continued off at an angle and a slight incline. We proceeded along it for about 15 minutes, getting way past where it could possibly hook directly up with the dragon chamber. We weren’t surprised when the 5’ tunnel we’d been moving along widened out into a large chamber with three other exits. A group of five miners (ordinary kobolds) were working on one side of the room and there were two clusters in the vicinity of the other three exits. Each of these clusters had a Sorcerer, a Steroid and a Shield. (The three other exits went off the irregularly roundish room roughly at 10 o’clock, 12 o’clock, and 2 o’clock. There was a Sorcerer- Steroid-Shield cluster at 11 o’clock and one at 1 o’clock. The miners were in an alcove at 7 o’clock. Our tunnel entered the room around 5 o’clock.) The Sorcerers and miners were completely unaware that we were coming down the hall, even with Joybell leading the way, but the Steroids and Shields did hear us approach. Joybell ran into the room then jumped on Scooby and charged the nearest Steroid. Mo used the wand of web to catch the miners and the more distant Sorcerer-Steroid-Shield cluster then dropped to the ground so people behind him could see and shoot. Taman and Thneed waited for the party in front of them to clear a bit so they could dash into the room, but were bottled up in the hallway in a manner quite reminiscent of the staircases in the boarding house in Embernook. The two Steroid guys attacked Joybell, but both of them missed -- then Orryk created a bonfire right underneath one of them. If that weren’t enough problems for him, Taman then stepped into the room and attacked him as the flames licked around him. Thneed climbed over Mo and squeezed past Fiona and took two shots at the guy in the fire and the Shield Kobold next to him. The two miners who were stuck in the web got free (three of them were trapped by the web into the alcove they’d been digging out) moved out of the web toward us. The other ran away down the hall away from us. All of us were keenly aware of the problem of that one miner running away and getting the word out that we were still there, but there wasn’t much that Joybell could do except attack the guy in front of her. Mo had Checkers attack one of the Steroid guys and threw a fuzzy thing from his back of tricks into the web, just as he let the web drop. A baboon landed and looked around for a moment, before being killed by the Shield kobold that had been trapped in the web. There was some fighting and combat, shuffling and scuffling. Orryk let the first bonfire drop then cast it again on one of the miners. We were all trying to get through the combat without using any spell slots or items that we needed to worry about recharging. Taman chased after the running miner to keep it from getting away. There was more combat -- Taman got hit, Joybell failed to drop someone. Mo cast another web, catching the miners, a Sorcerer and a Shield. Fiona, fed up and realizing that we’d gotten into the realm of a false economy in prolonging this combat rather than using spells, cast fireball, getting almost the entire room and everyone in it. The miners and Sorcerers died instantly in the flame. One of the Steroid guys, who’d been taking a lot of blows, died. The other one survived, but looked hurt. One of the Shields died in the fire. The other Shield got dropped by Orryk who then turned to the surviving Steroid and hit him as well. Thneed dropped the Steroid shortly after. All that was left at that point was the fleeing miner, who Taman had caught up to at that point. After a shriek and another attempt to run, Taman dispatched him with his scimitar. While FIona used her firebolt cantrip to reduce all the kobold bodies (including the two in Joybell’s bag of holding) to ash, Taman and Orryk sneaked down the hall the miner had fled down to see what they could see down there. The passage opened into a small, natural-looking chamber with two other exits. The chamber looked semi-abandoned -- it appeared that the miner had simply been running away, rather than running toward anything in particular. The rest of the group headed down to the small chamber. Listening for noises at the two other exits, we heard lapping water and smelled fresh air at one of them. The other was quiet and smelled like nothing more than the air we’d been breathing (parfum de kobold cave). So we headed toward the lapping water and fresh air. We came out at a small cavern open to the cenote above the lake. We saw a couple of humanoid skeletal remains in the cave with lime crusting the bones. One of the skeletons was wearing a bright green knit cap that was in good shape considering the condition of the bones. Fiona spent 10 minutes casting detect magic (yes) and then ten more minutes casting identify. As soon as the spell gave her the information that this was a cap of water-breathing we all heard a voice. Voice: Are you here to kill the dragon? Good. I was hoping someone would find me. We realized that the cap was speaking to us. Mo put it on, to see what happened, but he was not possessed and nothing bad happened. Cap: I’m hoping you have better luck than these guys. My name is Suutha. They tried fifteen years ago -- I cast water-breathing on all of them. Fiona: How strong were they? Mo: On a scale of one to twenty. Suutha: They were proud that they’d just figured out how to polymorph into animals and such. (Note: They were seventh level.) Taman looked out the mouth of the cavern -- the water level in the cenote is about twenty feet below the ledge. Mo, to Suutha: Weird question, why do you talk? Suutha: Magical accident, I think. That’s how items get sentient. Orryk: The people you came with had items of their own that are now in the dragon’s horde. Is there anything we should be running to grab and use in a fight? Suutha: No. The dragon seemed to have a ring of fire resistance though -- they weren’t expecting not to be able to use fire against it. The dragon is also a druid, just so you know. Through conversation with Suutha we realized that it wants to go to the Plane of Water. That made it sort of a kindred spirit for Orryk, so he got the cap. The further information from Fiona’s identify was that the cap would make a bubble of breathable air around the head of the wearer. Suutha can also cast the water-breathing spell, which will be enough to allow all of us to get to the dragon’s cave without having to worry about drowning. Suutha reported that this was an abandoned cave that no one had come to before us in the 15 years it had been there. We decided to take a long rest and attack the dragon first thing in the morning. We will wake the next morning at 9th level. [/QUOTE]
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Erkonin (Campaign #1) [Session 46: Making Deals with Devils is Stupid as well as Bad]
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