Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy" data-source="post: 9746877" data-attributes="member: 4036"><h3>2/12/22</h3>In the morning Brain and his new big brother, Shroom, speak with Gribitz briefly and mention that the patriarch wishes to speak with them.  Gribitz is in no hurry to leave and takes his time getting ready.  Grath too spends his morning in prayer and asks about the nature of the master of the tower but receives the cryptic answer of “A friend.”  There is some consternation and puzzling over this with some hand waving and others having a sense of dread.Eventually the party assembles before the patriarch of the myconid colony.  He warns of a purple creature that sends his minions to take over the minds of others.  A squid faced creature in robes with spindly hands that is incredibly close by.  Gribitz asks if the myconid are part of the Green.  They aren’t sure, but they live in harmony with living things.  They have been here for five of their generations of seventy years but the patriarch has persisted from the beginning.  Gribitz asks if the squid creature is killed if his immortality will persist.Over fifty years ago some other humanoids came down here for plunder and spoke with the myconids.  At the mention of their books Gribitz goes off on an unhinged diatribe on the nature of books how they are the flayed corpses of trees and plants tortured and scarred with dark markings until they give way to portals to the Far Realms in their pain.  This is somewhat founded in the goblin's experience with the possessed cultist writings that functioned as portals to madness that consumed the eyes of their brainwashed devotees but Gribitz almost never provides any context.  The patriarch is disturbed by this tangent but Gribitz reassures him that he has come down here to rid this place of all the book monsters.  The patriarch acknowledges the spirit with which the promises are made and gifts the party 4 healing toadstools that heal 1d4 HP each.  Gribitz asks about how the myconid spores work and the Patriarch explains as best he can.  Veldra is creeped out knowing that the reason she can hear the thoughts of the mushrooms is that their spores are infiltrating her brain. Gribitz is kinda excited by their connection to the Green and tries to inhale as many spores as possible to Grath’s horror who clamps his mouth shut and tells him he’ll give him a bath if he keeps this up.The party resumes their exploration of the subterranean sections of the wizard tower.  Gribitz comes across some empty bookshelves that he sets on fire.  The group continues to discuss the ramifications of the tentacle monster the patriarch had describe possibly being a friend with much confusion and indecision.  Grath opens a door to find two mind controlled creatures, a goblin and a duergar.  They are completely unresponsive as if ensorcelled but are still breathing.  Grath studies them to see if they are living creatures that are being controlled or if they are animated corpses.  None of his theories bring him any comfort so he closes the door and asks for suggestions.Grath suggests waiting for them to come to us, Gribitz suggests Rho holding the door while the others blast the horrid puppets from the safety of the hall.  Veldra sends in her dimensional echo and decapitates the first of the sentries only for a four-clawed brain monster to burst out of its skull like hatching from an egg and work its way to its slimy feet.  While the duergar meat puppet dispatches the echo, the brain creature leaps up and flings itself up at the disgusted and surprised Veldra who can’t get her shield up in time.It begins vibrating in place and tries to take over Veldra’s mind.  Veldra’s face squints with pain as blood begins to trickle from her nose and ears, her eyes go bloodshot, but with a hint of angelic halo behind her, she fights off the invasion of horrible aberration.  Kith shoots it off her and it falls dead and twitching to the ground.  Rho dispatches the second guard but again a horrible creature brain monster emerges from its cranium however this time Grath reacts swiftly and puts it into a magical slumber.After pondering what to do for entirely too long for Gribitz’s liking, Rho finally smashes its sleeping form like an overripe melon.  Rho scoops up the one Kith shot and places it into his bag for the mad alchemist while Gribitz incinerates the remains of the smashed one along with the horrible bookshelf beyond it [[at the cost of a magical scroll that was supposed to be treasure]].  The door to the north is locked but Grath searches the sentrys' bodies for the keys to their master’s chambers.  Beyond is a long eerily silent hallway.  The hallway comes to a closed door with the sounds of scratching feet, gurgling speech, and turning pages.Grath suggests Banishing the master while the rest of us deal with the minions to grim nods all around. Grath prays and the light around him dims to twilight as he goes to open the door.  But the mindflayer beyond has been forewarned by his eyes and ears throughout his demesne and when Grath opens the door he is greeted by a horrifying psionic scream that scrambles the brains of Ratty, Grath, and Rho.Gribitz scoots up and sees the horrid monstrosities beyond and calls out to the Green to devour these horrid aberrations from beyond and roots and vines burst forth from the ground to hold the brain creatures fast.  One of them manages to wiggle free eventually but Veldra rushes in to manifest her echo and unleashes her incarnation to slash magically at the twisted body of the illithid.  She wounds it repeatedly over and over but the creature does not fall.Urdullak gathers itself and unleashes another horrible mind blast that rocks everyone but Veldra who holds strong.  Gribitz tries to help his friends and burn the mindflayer down as the minions of the illithid begin tearing at the mental defenses of Veldra, trying to worm their way into her mind.Grath struggles free of his haze as Veldra begins to falter, unable to hold back the unending psychic onslaughts just as Rho finally regains his senses and roars into the room.  His fiery breath incinerates the remaining minions.  Grath summons all of his holy power and unleashes an enormous beam of radiant light but Urdullak’s form twists away from it and vanishes from sight as he turns briefly invisible.Veldra rushes around the remaining tangle of roots and vines searching for the weakened illithid before her echo manifests itself and severs the illithid’s head from its shoulders.  Grath comes into the room, chugging potions but seeing no sign of the “Friend” his divine oracle spoke of.  He gestures and touches his eyes, peering into the ethereal plane but doesn’t spy any other lurking creatures.Gribitz moves to set the library ablaze before its books can infect and unleash more monsters from beyond the natural, the goblin is convinced all these brain and alien creatures are the result of so many books being left to do as they wish.  Rho however gently takes Gribitz's hands and closes them, shaking his head and bidding him wait until Grath can find more answers.  Grath uncovers a modron in a crate which he doesn’t recognize and motions Veldra over, but her head is still splitting from all the psychic assaults she endured.  Veldra locates a potion of regeneration.  Gribitz and Rho sit down at a table to recover and Gribitz dumps out some of his pockets for him.  Grath starts going through the books that Urdullak was working on, most of them are arcane, some of them deal with physiology and anatomy, and finally a few are alchemical in subject matter.  Grath dives into them with a vengeance and notices Urdullak’s notes and journal where he was working though it is oddly marked as owned by someone abbreviated only as A.  Grath starts at the beginning and reads of the wizard who founded the tower, he pockets the journal much to Gribitz’s fear.Gribitz recounts again the necromancers and wizards and cultists they have repeatedly witnessed being taken over by books but Rho points out that that requires a magical book.  Grath insists the journal he pocketed was not magical and Gribitz believes him.The twitching headless corpse of the mind flayer on the floor has a tome chained to his hip, a spellbook.  Grath begins to suspect that Urdullak was attempting to study the former master of the tower’s arcane writings and copy his spells into his own formulae.  As things are wrapping up, Gribitz asks again to torch the remaining books.  But Grath defends them as learned treatises that are non-magical and burning them would be wrong.Grath learns that the unnamed wizard trained Steve and the other now dead sages we encountered earlier.  Grath suggests that he believes the wizard still exists in some form somewhere in the structure.  Gribitz suggests asking the "golem" (the modron the priest had unconvered).  It introduces itself as Manasdras.  Grath asks it if it knows where its master is or if it can lead us to where he was.  The modron leads off to the wizard’s bedchamber.  The bed there radiates evocation magic but Grath cannot figure out what for.In the first chest in the bedchamber is a pouch and a slab of iron.  Gribitz asks Manasdras what his master’s name was and he explodes.  Disappointed, the party continues on.  The slab of iron has runes on the bottom similar to the golem ring.  There is a small golden key in the pouch.  One of the other chests is locked, the key unlocks it and crumbles away.  Inside is an old leather tome.  The other half of A.’s writing.Gribitz rolls his eyes and mutters that this is going to take a while and hops up on the bed only to be electrocuted.  He flies off the bed and cursing closes himself in one of the chests instead.  Grath reads on and finds that the bed is trapped and the runed iron is the protection against it.  He smugly points out to Gribitz that books are useful.  Gribitz opens the chest just enough to flip Grath off before closing the chest again.As the journal continues, the handwriting deteriorates as does his tone of frustration with his apprentices.  He switches to golem assistants and begins digging his subfloors.  By the end of the memoir A. turns to complaining about running out of room and needing a third volume.  Finally Veldra and Grath discuss how A. would access these chambers quickly and begin exploring again.They find a room with two shattered pots and three goblins.  The room is filled with mist.</blockquote>

Verification