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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bill T." data-source="post: 7787623" data-attributes="member: 6795693">Dramatis Personae<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Basel, an Innenotdaran (aka grey) elf evoker who has been attending Gabal's school and previously made his living as a baker.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Gusle, a seela bard who recently escaped captivity from a circus.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Jesús Tillamook, a half-elf cloistered cleric of the Stormbringer Phoenix, a sect of the Stormchaser Eagle that is dedicated to finding the Aquiline Heart so that they can reincarnate the Eagle.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Leeta, a woodswoman that looks like a human but with sharper edges. She was born in Gate Pass on New Year's Day.</li> </ul>Follow the Flaming Brick RoadWell, to be precise, the flames were beside the road, and the Elfroad is made of stone, not brick, but the heroes nonetheless follow it into the fire forest. The run across a body and fragments of at least another one lying in the road. As they inspect the bodies, the whole one grabs Leeta and cries out, "Kill me, please!"Someone on these forums -- sorry, I forget who -- mentioned the dirty trick of wandering around looking for miniatures and then grabbing a player when Durval suddenly moves. I certainly startled the grabbee by doing this, but the other players didn't seem to be that impressed."Hey, I know him!" exclaims Basel. "That's Durval, one of the married students from Gabal's school. Bit of a slimebag, too, if you ask me."After a great deal of discussion, attempts by Gusle to slip Durval a dagger, and more discussion, the heroes finally decide to put him out of his misery. But then he stands up again and keeps begging for them to kill him! They eventually do so, again, and this time he stays dead.A mile or so later, a small winged creature comes screeching out of the trees and takes cover behind the heroes as a flaming bat chases it down. The heroes have a wild time trying to beat off the bat as the winged creature (a "mephit", per Professor Basel) hides behind whoever is nearest.Bridge Over Troubled FiresThe heroes reach a stone bridge crossing a deep gorge. One side of the bridge has a big chunk of railing knocked out near the middle."Hey, I wonder what knocked out the side of the bridge." says Gusle. Maybe we should look down through the hole in the side." The rest of the heroes are willing to entertain Gusle's idea, and Leeta stands guard at the railing across from the break. "Huh, I can't see anything down there.""Oh well, let's keep going," responds Leeta. "Everyone, let's head AIIEEEEEEE!" A section of bridge collapses under Leeta's feet and she plummets to the bottom of the gorge!What a fiasco. I had intended to have a Crystin premonition about people plummeting to their doom but forgot. Everyone merrily wandered across the bridge without a worry. Things were looking bad enough that I either forgot or deliberately omitted the indomitable fire bat swarm. I don't think these heroes have any way to deal with such a swarm, anyhow, other than rebuking it.Gusle makes it safely to the far side, so everyone else follows the path she took, one by one, but for Crystin, who wants nothing of this whole collapsing-bridge nonsense. They manage to string a couple of ropes together so that they can lower Gusle to the gorge to help Leeta. Leeta, of course, is unconscious but, despite the sixty-foot fall and the fire, still breathing. Gusle isn't in any position to haul Leeta up, so she lassos Leeta and signals the men to haul her up. The men, it turns out, aren't sufficiently manly, so Crystin, in a huff ("Elves!"), crosses the bridge and hauls Leeta up with a little help from the men. They then do the same for Gusle, since she doesn't seem to have much of a talent for climbing rock walls. "Well, I guess it's pretty clear there isn't anything down there, huh?"I learned after the session that she knew there was something good down at the bottom of that ravine from the last time she played WotBS and was intent on finding it again. The sad thing is that she missed her spot check to notice the fallen wagon by only one or two when she got down there.Given the beating everyone took, the heroes decide to spend the "night" near the falling bridge before continuing deeper into the fire forest.Hell Of A...No, A Dog Of HellAs the heroes proceed down the road, they suddenly notice a burst of flame among the flames. "Odd, that was some sort of teleportation magic," Basel point out. After a bit of discussion, they continue anyhow, eyes peeled."Hey, look, there's a large dog at the side of the road with a bone in its mouth," observes Leeta."That's not just a dog, that's a hellhound, Leeta." The dog paws out onto the road with an air of cordial ferocity, drops the bone, and backs away.What can I say? "Cordial ferocity" is a cute enough turn of phrase that I have to use it any time I get the opportunity."Eww," says Jesús. "That's a thigh bone from a person. It's got writing on it: 'Leave the case containing the intelligence. Cooperate, and we might find an arrangement to spare your lives. Carry this with you if you wish to bargain.'"The hellhound licks its chops."Well, no case. Do we take the thigh bone?"The hellhound smacks its lips."May as well, maybe we can talk some sense into whoever this is."The Devil, You SayIn a burst of flame similar to what the heroes saw earlier in the morning, a devil appears fifty feet down the road. "Ah, so you don't want to bargain, then!" It stares at them, as if in concentration, and then horrifying, twisted-looking creatures form from flames surrounding Gusle. They immediately claw out at her, and she goes down.Kazyk surmised that Gusle, the seela in the party, was the least likely to agree to a plan of action that would result in the death of all the seela and therefore directed the lemures to attack her."She's been attacked by the damned!" proclaims Basel.Battle ensues, but the the heroes are hard pressed to do any damage. One of the damned monsterlets is dispatched, but the devil charges forward, clobbering Basel (Crystin?) and slashing Jesús in a single smooth slash with his glaive. Jesús flees down the road, as the devil continues his assault. Finally, having injured everyone, and getting more than a little of his own medicine from Leeta, he pantomimes tipping his hat and disappears in yet another chrysanthemum of flame.What a fiasco. Kazyk won initiative and was able to bring down two of the PCs before they even got a chance to act. Another round brought another one down. I was fortunate enough to forget his cleave feat that time, and decided to skip the wounding property of the glaive, or I would have most likely have had a TPK, Jesús's fleeing notwithstanding.The party once again heals their wounded and proceed down the Elfroad.Session break here -- we picked up again a couple of weeks later.Oh deer -- flaming deer!Flaming trees go "kablooie" and fall, blocking the path ahead.Crystin yells at Basel, "Look out! Move move!" Basel looks puzzled until he sees a spear of smoke appear right above his head, whereupon he takes a large step backwards. Crystin, on the other hand, appears to have been dazed by her vision.As a wall of fire advances, the heroes battle the miniature fire stags formed from the smoke cloud that resulted when the smokey spear attacked. Several of the heroes go down, only to be dragged back from the wall and/or healed.What a fiasco -- they were getting dropped by the stags left and right, didn't do a good job of tracking the wall of fire (so I had to pause it a round), and once again nearly ended up all dead. If this hadn't been the first encounter of the session, I think I would have been willing to let the TPK happen. Indomitability is testing the heroes, after all, and these heroes don't seem to be up to the task. One bit of cleverness I employed was to have the wall advance five feet every time the PCs took an action. That made the action smoother. I hoped it would give them a bit more of a sense of urgency about getting away from the wall, but apparently that didn't work.Eventually, they defeat the stags, and a voices booms out from the fallen trees:A fiery vision of a dragon's head with antlers appears and roars "Come! Follow the river. Set me free!""Erm, we've got wounded here, can we discuss this later?""Rest your flesh now in the ruins beyond the bridge. Then you must follow the river down to the singing lake. I lie trapped beneath its surface. Set me free!" replies the voice."Yeah, sure, whatever."Well, that didn't go over very well. Here's supposed to be their opportunity to learn about the Big Bad Evil Stag, but they were all so wrapped up in their own problems that they couldn't be bothered to interact. I don't recall having had that problem when I previously ran this adventure, so I don't know what, if anything, I did wrong this time.A tower on the riverLeeta searches the door for traps -- and finds one! The whole door appears to be trapped."Should we heal ourselves before we go in?""Mr. 'Free me now!' said we should rest here."I could have sworn Indominability told them to rest in the town, but whatever. The tower's a better place anyhow."Yes, but what if there is someone inside waiting to attack us?""The door's locked, and no one answered when we knocked.""What, you think they stopped to lock the place as they fled the burning forest?"Eventually, Gusle takes courage (and tools) in hand and, with tremendous difficulty, opens the door.Well, that was a bit disturbing. Since they don't have a dedicated rogue, the bard is pinch-hitting, and her Open Lock modifier wasn't enough to open the stupid door! I decided to fudge it and let her open it anyhow, and held the pantry with the dream seeds as too hard to unlock. Just today, I realized that "aid another" would have been enough to let her open the lock.Basel seems most eager to see what the flaming stone is just inside the door. He reads it, says "friend", and enters. As he gives the room a thorough scan for unwelcome surprises, Crystin hops in and starts up the ladder, but Basel chastises her and so she meekly waits for everyone else.Gusle then enters and uses detect magic in an attempt to, you know, detect anything magical. She makes her way to the top of the tower to discover that, like Zen, the only magic in the tower is the magic they brought with them. On the other hand, they do find a locked pantry in the upper floor. After an exhausting but futile attempt to unlock it, they decide to open the pantry "the half-orc way" to discover nothing but a seed packet with goblin writing on the front. No one speaks goblin, and no one recognizes the seeds, so they go back downstairs.The heroes briefly admire the wooden map of the city. Jesús recognizes the holy symbol on the desk as a holy symbol of an elven diety, but he must have slept through those lessons at cloister. The symbol, however, seems to be a stylized representation of the sun on the horizon.They look through the journal of Bhurisrava and develop a variety of wild theories.Dream seedsGusle decides to tempt fate: "Ah, heck, healing is overrated, I want one of those dream seeds. What's the worst that could happen?"So, Gusle quickly falls into a deep slumber and shortly thereafter yelps as a little blue dracoloid (Basel declares it to be a dream elemental) appears above the table at the center of the room. It blasts Crystin with an icy ray. Rather than refreshing her, the ray knocks her unconscious. Leeta responds with a well-placed swing to the creature's throat -- only to have the blade warp around the creature's neck and slice through her own neck!Not a fiasco! While exasperated that her first critical hit of the campaign happened to hit her own throat, she took it with such good humor that I felt no compunction about letting her die -- not that she expected to survive that damage anyhow, she ended up below -20 hit points. On the other hand, I have Gusle's player running Crystin, and she was a bit annoyed that Crystin went down as well. Oh, and she was horrified by the effects of Ego Whip -- the hazards of putting everything in the charisma basket.Realizing how desperate a situation they're in, and that the dream elemental needs a dreamer to exist in this world, Basel says, "Grab Leeta!" as he grabs Crystin and jumps downstairs, using feather fall to break their fall. Jesús takes a quick but good look at Leeta, determines she's unlikely to be alive, and jumps down without her, much to Basel's dismay.Clever enough for me. I figured that there was enough stone between the floors to block Detect Magic and therefore whatever it was that permitted the dream elemental to remain in the waking world.The dream elemental, obligingly, stays upstairs, although it does manage to chuck another icy ray in Jesús's general direction while he tends to Crystin's wounds. None of them have any good idea of how they might recover Leeta -- she's about as hard to get to as is possible given the layout of the second floor. Crystin, though, gets the clever(?) idea of banging swords together in hopes of waking Gusle.After about ten minutes, Gusle wakes up with the sensation of banging in her head. Her first sight upon waking is of Leeta, with a huge pool of blood around her head and shoulders. Her second sight is of a wildly frantic blue dracoloid, which attempts some sort of mind-affecting magic before vanishing.Someone knocks at the door to the tower and shouts, "Gusle, are you in there?" Basel, upon hearing Gusle's name mentioned, cautiously opens the door to see a woman wearing a chain shirt and a greatsword. "Hi, I'm Dämmek. Torrent gives her regards. She sent me to help you guys. Know anything about the voice demanding to be set free?"I brought along a few spare characters. Dämmek is a duskblade, which I think is how I came up with the name (apologies to readers who speak Luxembourgish). And here I was hoping that she would grab the cleric I brought along, given how much trouble they've been having with staying alive. The cleric's name, by the way, is "Torrent".   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60a.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":giggle:" title="Giggle    :giggle:"  data-smilie="27"data-shortname=":giggle:" />The heroes, afraid to cremate someone in the fire forest, instead decide to fill Leeta's pockets with rocks and throw her body into the river.Gusle's dream[Harp music signals a flashback]She soars above the tower on her strong wings, hearing strange singing in Sylvan. She sees a devil on the road as she heads back the way she came from Gate Pass. Upon reaching Haddin's place, she sees the inquisitor and a couple guards talking to the devil. The devil is carrying a sack. The inquisitor looks into it -- as does Gusle -- and they both see that the sack contains Haddin's head, crudely sawed off.On that cheery note, Gusle flies on again towards Gate Pass. She encounters Brooding Guy in a ravine where they battled a bunch of the Murderers. Strangely, he seems to have some notion that someone is nearby. Finally, she reaches Gate Pass. The western end of the city has been breached and is a total shambles. She continues out of the city to see that the Ragesians are attacking the west gate of the city, which stands firm, for the moment, against their assault. Then she notices a red-robed spellcaster flinging fireballs and other spells through the Ragesian camp, wreaking mayhem, until a red dragon lands on him, chews him up, and spits him out.[Harp music signals end of flashback]"Arrogant bastard," declares Basel. "That's the one thing Gabal and I vehemently disagreed on. I told him he should never go into an invading army's camp without back-up.""Yes, but, didn't they want to capture spellcasters alive?"Basel smirks and says, "You tell the dragon that!"How Ghastly!The heroes easily find the stone willow tree that they believe conceals the Shrine of Anyariel. Jesús and/or Gusle notice a couple of bodies hanging from the tree. Uninterested, they proceed to the tree's trunk to search for an entrance -- and the hanging bodies leap down to attack! Gusle starts singing a cheery song as one bites Basel, who promptly stands stock still. Jesús attempts to rebuke them -- and instead of affecting the ghastly things, a door opens in the trunk of the tree!Small mistake on my part -- rebuking shouldn't have opened the door. No big loss, but I think they would have been happy to try to pry their way in.Dämmek gives one of the slavering undead-enders a slice to the cheek and steps back; it responds by stepping forward and biting her, rendering her immobile as well! Things aren't looking good for our heroes, but Jesús's next attempt to rebuke them is wildly successful, and the two critters cower while everyone beats them to pieces.Fiasco dodged. It looked too likely to me that everyone was going to end up paralyzed and eaten, so I fudge the results of the second rebuke check (luckily, the player in the euphemism and someone else was rolling the rebuke check) and instead the heroes were able to trivially hack up the ghasts.The Shrine of AnyarielBasel peers through the opening in the tree trunk and sees a beautiful glowing ball of eldritch magic -- and, curiously, he steps back quietly to confer with the other heroes. "Psst, hey guys, that's a ghaele, a chaotic good whatsit from the outer planes.""Ooh, like an angel! Let's go see if it lets us in!" responds Gusle."No, no, you see, it's chaotic good!""Yeah, so?" says Gusle. "It's good! We'll be fine.""Yeah, but it's chaotic! It might declare us all evil and destroy us on a whim!"I get the impression that Basel has an extraordinarily guilty conscious -- anytime he encounters a good outsider, his first reaction is to flee lest he be judged as insufficiently good. Gusle, on the other hand, seems to feel the need to burnish her non-lawful credentials."Meh." Gusle walks up to the ghaele, with Crystin trailing eagerly behind. "Hi, wise and wonderful glowing ghaele! We want to pay our respects to the shrine and and I remember the tales of Anayriel from my youth. I have been a long time away and have not had the chance to visit before.""Sure, come on in. By the way, my name's Hubert. You look sort of beat up. A quick touch and -- presto!, you're all better."And you thought "Dämmek" was a crummy name!So, everyone parades into the tree, and Hubert heals all their wounds. They work their way down the spiral staircase to see a strange scene -- a statue of an elf woman with a wood-n-viney sword dominates the center of the room. Behind it is a broken display case. Two elves lie on the floor, one wearing a Shahalesti uniform and the other, a redhead in simple robes, lies face-down. He's been clawed up and there is a simple mace lying just out of his reach.First magic weapon of the campaign and, of course, no one is interested.The heroes ask Hubert about this and that, and learn that he was placed here by a god of healing, in answer to the prayers of an unknown priest. He doesn't know about anything outside the shrine -- he's to protect the shrine until those responsible for the destruction of Innenotdar are brought to justice.Gusle cast Detect Magic several items glow with magic in the temple basement, but surprisingly the body of the Shalalesti soldier glows the brightest.Basel attempts to search the body of the Shalalesti elf, but discovers that both the elf and the uniform are petrified, making a thorough search impossible, as even the pockets on the uniform won't flex to let Basel put his hand in them.The group decides to the mouth of the White River (northeast of the elf village), where Bhurisrava said he would "deliver the despairing" in his final journal entry.Well, all in all, these last two sessions have been rather frustrating for both me and the person playing Gusle. The last time I ran this adventure, the heroes didn't have nearly as much trouble staying alive, and so she's complaining that she doesn't feel like they are accomplishing anything this time around -- they're just struggling to stay alive. The previous group had the same size party, although the PCs all had a free level of aristocrat and were more skilled at D&D tactics and character optimization, which might explain the difference. On the other hand, flipping through the adventure, it seems like every encounter is at least CR 5. This is supposed to be for third-level characters? The next session seemed to go better, at least. One of the players has been typing up notes. Hurray, at long last, someone else is recording what happened! Edit: Speling.</blockquote>

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