Session 8 - Mushrooms
After resting to ensure everyone was ready we opened the tomb. Carefully checking the door revealed nothing of concern but when we opened it we were surprised when a dead body fell on us. There was nothing of particular interest on the body but his half elven features suggested that he was exploring the Underdark, or perhaps in a similar plight to ours.
The first room only hada diorama that had similar motifs to the tapestry we found earlier. We could discern nothing from this matching theme. There is a strange yellow haze that permeates the air. According to Ilfer, it is called fazeriss and this isn’t itself dangerous, but often indicates other dangers.
Heading deeper leads us to a desecrated alter room and burial charmer. My enthusiasm for loot motivates me to open one of the sarcophagi which awakened some guardians. A brief fight ensued which ended abruptly when Boreial tuned the creatures and send them fleeing back to one of the sarcophagi. After checking out the others we determined that the one the spectres fled to was in fact a secret door.
The secret room is below us and is completely dark, but when I try to cast light I find myself suddenly eight times my normal size. Something is making magic unpredictable.
The secret chamber is finely decorated and houses a large sarcophagus. As we enter another spectre rises and implies she has a use for us – possession of our bodies perhaps – but none of us are willing to let her. The fight proves tough as much of our weapons are not effective against such a monster, even my magic proves less effective.
The fight over, I start looting anything that looks valuable, the gold inlay in the walls pries out easily, but the real treasure is inside the sarcophagus. A perfectly preserved humanoid corpse is holding a sword hilt, that appears to be talking to Ilfer. Some investigation leads us to believe this is Dawnbringer, a powerful sword capable is casting light as bright as day – a potent thing in the underdark, as many creatures are sensitive to sunlight.
We seem to think that the corpse is of a Nethese, an ancient civilization powerful in the arcane arts. I would like to find out more about this civilization, but there seems to be little here to learn.
The rest of the tomb is unguarded and we find a magical bow as well. We also discover that there is a curse on the tomb, but by this time we had lifted the curse by banishing the spectres that were haunting the place.
Returning to our raft, we find that our trust in Jimjar and XXXX is not misplaced, the raft and out money is still there, though Jimjar now wields a weapon that looks suspiciously like the whip that the drow priestess used to beat us with as prisoners. He claims to have found it under the decking of the raft, but I wonder if he has been holding out since we escaped.
We decide to head to Neverlight Grove and drop off stool, he has been invaluable to us and I feel we owe him that much. Unfortunately, along the way we are swept over a waterfall, which damages the boat somewhat. I think it was only a web spell, cast to hold the raft together, that stopped us from sinking.
As we near Neverlight Grove, Stool starts to direct us, leading us to a shore, past a large mushroom forest to the hidden entrance to Neverlight Grove. There is a great sense of peace here and it is easy to forget that we are still in the Underdark.
According to Stool, we need to find the Sovereign, the leader of the grove. It doesn’t take us long to find a group of Myconids, led by Lubommob. He is welcoming and shares with us the recent news of the grove. Neveright Grove, unusually, has two Sovereigns, Filo, the newcomer and Bisido the original Sovereign of Neverlight Grove. Lubomoob tells us that there are creatures in Neverlight Grove that hurt the myconids, and the recently a group of humanoids have been taken to see Sovereign Filo.
Filo is trying to change the way the Myconids in this grove live. Every day the Myconids join in what they call melding. Under Bisido, all the Myconids meld every day but Filo wants to change that so that only the leaders of each group meld, then go and meld with their own groups separately. I am not sure what this means for them or how significant this would be, but as a group we choose to visit Bisido first.