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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cerebral Paladin" data-source="post: 3501684" data-attributes="member: 3448">Finally, on the fourteenth day we approached the immediate surroundings of the lost Hastur tower.  Before we reached the tower itself, a group of the ratmen approached us.  Three enormous, but not fat, rats led their group, sniffing and scrabbling at the dust.  Shortly behind the rats came two extraordinarily large ratmen, each nearly ten feet tall, and then finally a human-sized ratmen.  All of the ratmen were in brown and green, which I assume but do not know is a sign of tribe or allegiance or so forth.  The human-sized ratman appeared to be in charge and wore a group of tools hanging from its belt.  It asked if we were here to join the army that was assembling, and when we said that we were, it ordered us to go straight to the intake point and report to the tanarii that was in charge there.   We privately resolved to stay far away from the intake point; a powerful tanarii might see through our lies, and that could be disastrous for the mission.  Still, we headed in the direction the ratman indicated until we were out of sight and then began surreptitiously approaching the encampment. Twang demonstrated that his sorcerous abilities were not limited to magic missiles and cast a scrying spell to study the encampment and the tower more closely.  [Actually, that’s only what Twang claimed to do.  In truth, he sent his quasit familiar forward as an invisible scout, asking it to report back on what it saw via telepathy.]  In its inarticulate way, the kobold reported that two to three thousand soldiers surrounded the tower in an encampment.  The soldiers were not particularly guarding the tower, however.  They were camped as if ready to move out. Twang said that there was a route that would take us to the tower without approaching many of the troops, and the soldiers left an empty ring immediately around the tower.  We resolved to send a scouting group forward to investigate the tower. [End of session 1] While we prepared our scouts, we saw two vrocks, the mighty vulture demons, flying north out of the enemy encampment.  Fortunately, they did not spot us.  Someday, if it be Paranswarm’s will, I may be able to summon devils that are sufficiently powerful to defeat vrocks, but I fear that they would have killed us all if they had seen us and attacked.  Still, to be safe we waited some time after they passed before our scouts headed out. Our scouting party consisted of Lady Gerda, Kenshir, and Siggus.  [We had a somewhat different party for the second session.  Stumm, Buzz, Spring, Twang, Toby, and Ulrich were not present, while Siggus, a male human rogue, joined us.  Also, Kenshir was rebuilt as a monk-ranger.]  As I did not accompany them, I cannot vouch for their account of what happened while they were scouting.  Nonetheless, I will set out what they reported. There was no army presence at all to the south of the tower.  However, traveling too far south to skirt the army would have been as dangerous as passing through the army, because the tower had formed part of the old Shadowline, before the fall of Caldefor.  Beyond that line, most of the land was Deep Shadow, the region of the Shadowlands where the top twenty planes of the abyss overlap with the Shadowland.  Passing through Deep Shadow to reach the tower would have run the risk of being lost in the Abyss forever. Our scouts sneaked forward, with  Lady Gerda concealing herself by simply phasing through the ground itself, while Kenshir and Siggus relied on their extensive training in stealth.  They passed through the old village that had surrounded the tower; some of the buildings were occupied, but the cover the buildings provided allowed them to pass through unobserved.  With some care, they reached the tower itself. The gate to the tower had been forced open, but there were neither guards outside nor indications that the forces of Shadow were within.  There was a musky smell, which Kenshir interpreted as indicating the presence of an animal within.  With a great deal of care, they edged through the gate and began moving up the stairs.  If the matrix screen were in tact, it would be at one of the top rooms of the tower.  They ignored the doors to the kitchen and proceeded upwards.</blockquote>

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