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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DMZ2112" data-source="post: 6662702" data-attributes="member: 78752">Dragons of Menace - Dragonlance Session Report 3 - 2015 Feb-JunDragons of MenaceSession Report 3 – 2015 Feb-JunBracha, the 5th of Deepkolt, 352 ACThe upper levels of the Rayne’s Drop mine were empty of any threat beyond idle Red Dragonarmy soldiers who were more than happy to let the party risk their necks in the caverns below.  The reason was made apparent after Arn lowered the party into the lower reaches of the mine on an old crank elevator in a natural cave shaft, making the descent himself by way of Bryn’s Featherfall spell.  A pile of corpses, still in their red livery, lay hacked and mangled by primitive weaponry not far from the drop.  The tunnels beyond were infested with kobolds and their clever traps, but after their initial ambush failed thanks to Tuttle’s reckless casting of Shatter, the party pushed further into their territory, coughing dust from their lungs and leaving the collapsed ruin of a storeroom behind them.Bryn disguised himself as a kobold and ventured deeper into the mine with a ranging patrol, realizing his error too late as he became lost in the twisty maze of passages, all alike.  Killing the two kobolds was easy for a black robed Wizard; finding his way back was not.  He exhausted numerous spells in creative but ultimately fruitless endeavors to speed his return to the party, but was rescued by Arn and Dale ranging out in a more organized fashion to locate him.While Arn and Dale were absent, however, the rest of the party stumbled upon the entrance to the kobold warren, a place where the little dragonkin had widened the mine tunnels to specification and created a kill zone for their archers.  After being peppered with arrows from all directions, half the party fell into one of a number of cleverly disguised pit traps and found themselves in a foul-smelling midden -- or so it seemed.Arn, Dale, and Bryn returned to find the party missing and their last known location pitted with mantraps.  Flashes of light and the sounds of combat came to them through the floor, so they threw themselves down into the midden with abandon, finding their comrades locked in struggle with stinking troglodyte hunters.The troglodytes were not expecting organized resistance, however, and were quickly dispatched despite their malodorous mien.  Beyond the rough tunnels leading out of the pit, the party found more natural caverns troglodyte warriors, killing them in the dozens.  The primitive creatures’ sacrifice was not in vain, however, as they successfully covered the retreat of their females and young to deeper caverns.The party’s final encounter with the troglodytes was with the tribe’s shaman of Laogzed, who attempted to keep them from re-entering the kobold warrens, per their longstanding compact with the dragonkin.  Despite his clever use of Laogzed’s gifts, the shaman’s retinue was devastated and Dale cleansed the evil creature with Mishakal’s light.Leagh led the way up a rough wooden stair into the kobold warren, and was able to dispatch the perfunctory guard at the top, but unquietly.  Soon the party was fighting for their lives on a flaming ladder while being pelted with arrows and firebombs.  The kobolds, sacrificing many lives, managed to funnel the party back out of their home and into the entryway kill zone, where the harried and exhausted party re-entered the mine of their own accord.Back on the surface, the party provided some much needed diversion to the Red Dragonarmy soldiers and their black robed commander when it was realized they had emerged with no evidence of their kills to trade for bounty.  Too tired to be dejected, the party returned to the inn and slaked themselves on the town’s thin beer.Dolbinn had finally located his niece, Breccia, and had set up a meeting with the party on the town’s mine tip.  She and her master were known to the Dragonarmy as resistance fighters, and so some care was required.  Once Breccia was convinced of the party’s good intentions, however, she agreed to take them to her master to see what the old monk knew of their hidden monastery.Battling their fatigue at every precarious step and ascent, the party made their way across an untamed rock face to the ledge where the monk had made her camp.  A simple yurt stood by itself there, and when Breccia announced the party’s presence, a strange creature greeted them.Breccia’s master was a githzerai, a visitor to Krynn from the alien realities beyond the Abyss, and a fellow seeker of the lost monastery.  She introduced herself as Arzana, and revealed that she knew the location of the temple, but was helpless to reach it.  The monastery had been cast down a great crevasse in the mountainside by the Cataclysm, and the descent by rock climbing was still beyond her skills despite years of training.Arzana believed there might be a way to access the bottom of the crevasse through the Rayne’s Drop mine, but negotiations with the miners to open the tunnels leading to the kobold warren had been over before they began -- the miners had lost too many to the dragonkin and would not budge.Almost in unison, the party informed Arzana that the tunnels had been opened, presumably to spite the occupying Dragonarmy forces.  Excited, Arzana charged the party with re-entering the mine and seeing if they could find a route through the troglodytes’ caverns to the bottom of the crevasse.  She presented them with a mindshard imbued with her knowledge of the location of the monastery, to guide them if their senses of direction failed deep beneath the mountains.Chased by the dawn, The party returned to Rayne’s Drop with the crystal, re-energized with the thought of discovering the ancient monastery and completely oblivious to the fact that they had been tailed to Arzana’s hut….  Linaras, the 6th of Deepkolt, 352 ACLate in the morning, the party set out once again for the mine but the ease with which they fooled the Red Dragonarmy on the previous day was not to be repeated.  Flynt, in his white robes, sought to use the same disused side entrance he had the day before but was spotted by a sharp-eyed baaz draconian.  He was forced to conceal himself with a hasty Darkness spell and try to slip away.His companions, near the main entrance, heard the commotion and realized Flynt was in danger.  Turning on the soldiers nearest them, they cut a swath to their ally while Arn pegged shut the door to the mine barracks with a fallen Dragonarmy short sword.  The battle was long and bloody, and one soldier nearly escaped through Flynt’s side entrance to warn his fellows in town, but Leagh and Breccia made short work of him in an alley behind the inn.The door to the barracks did not hold permanently, and soon the party was outnumbered and beset from both sides.  While all fought valiantly, and no soldiers survived the day, a draconian ruthlessly executed Tuttle after the brave and foolish bard charged into the barracks, despite (or perhaps because of) the pitched fighting inside.  Believing correctly that they had kept the battle in the mine secret from the rest of the soldiers in Rayne’s Drop, the party divested the Dragonarmy corpses of their wages and hid them down the cave shaft.  By grim necessity of stealth, Tuttle’s rent body suffered the same ignominious fate.  The party occupied the barracks for a few hours while the elves rested to regain their spells and Arn, Leagh, and Breccia watched the mouth of the mine for any sign of curious Dragonarmy soldiers.  By some stroke of luck, none came, although a young Solamnic named Poezimius did appear at the entrance, claiming to have been summoned to Rayne’s Drop by a vision of Kiri Jolith.  Upon hearing that the party was in search of the same dragonlances he had been instructed to find, the paladin of vengeance gladly joined the party.  At the entrance to the kobold warren, the party found itself confronted by an old kobold with an unexpected proposal.  The kobolds anticipated the party’s return, but gathered from the ease with which they were driven off that their purpose was not to eradicate the kobolds from the mine.The party confirmed that they had no quarrel with the kobolds specifically, and the kobold sorcerer offered them safe passage through the warrens so long as they harmed no more kobolds.  The elder made it clear that while the party was formidable, his people would not tolerate deceit, and that they could put up a defense that would give the party pause if pressed to do so.The party agreed, and passage through the kobold warrens was uneventful.  The troglodyte caves were still abandoned, and so it wasn’t until the party passed into the long gallery beyond the troglodyte caves that they first encountered resistance.The party became aware that they were being followed fairly quickly, due to the clicking and scratching sounds above them, but their stalkers remained out of sight until the gallery narrowed to the point that the party was forced to travel single-file.  Then the hook horrors struck, attacking from the walls and using the prodigious length of their curved limbs to attack without fear of reprisal.First Arn fell, and then Flynt.  Bryn was not far behind.  Desperate, Tharivol tried the spell Tuttle had used above to collapse the mine -- Shatter.  The ear-splitting shriek of his lute rebounded off the close walls of the gallery and sent the hook horrors fleeing up them, clicking in panic as they were partially blinded by the sound.  Taking advantage of the break in the assault, the party picked up their fallen and dashed for the daylight they could now see at the end of the gallery.  They plunged through the keyhole into the crevasse, blinking in the sudden brightness at the crumbling roof of the ancient Solamnic monastery beneath them.Palast, the 7th of Deepkolt, 352 ACThe party slipped through a hole in the roof of the monastery and found a nearby cell in which to hole up for a much-needed rest.  The following morning, they set about exploring the ruin around them.  They were hunted by a nest of phase spiders as they attempted a challenging traversal of a scree slope that had once been the monastery cloister, and nearly lost Arn to the slurping mass of an opportunistic black pudding while the rest of the party did battle with the incorporeal remnants of the monastery’s adherents.  A hall full of massive and nearly pristine statues of the greatest of the ancient monks gave Leagh some pause, but it turned out to be just nerves.  And finally, through a arched window in the ambulatory of the monastery’s hall of worship, the party caught sight of their prize -- ghostly white torchlight illuminated racks upon racks of weapons, only a few of which -- lances all -- had survived the rigors of the centuries.  In the middle of the armory, however, sat a lone figure, wrapped in a faded brown cloak.Rather than find the top of the stairs that were clearly visible from the window, the party decided to secure a rope to a nearby pillar and descend through the window -- an act that proved to be more difficult for some than others.  Once Dale and Poe had checked the less agile companions for concussions, Flynt sought to approach the seated figure.  Nothing could disturb the monk -- for that is whom the figure turned out to be when his cloak disintegrated at Flynt’s touch, an ancient, mummified monk, seated as though he were still meditating after centuries.  Flynt moved instead to gather the dragonlances, and it was only then, predictably, that the monk was roused.  The monk stood, shaking the remnants of his cloak off dessicated flesh and impossibly immaculate leather armor.  He challenged the party to a trial by combat, to determine their worthiness to carry the dragonlances, and did not give them a chance to refuse.The fight was short but brutal -- every one of the monk’s attacks knocked the lights out of one of the members of the party, and if not for Dale’s continuous stream of healing, they could never have defeated him.  Upon being struck by one of Bryn’s spells, the monk cried out in rage that such evil should have been brought into the monastery, and challenged the party to rid themselves of it even as he felled Bryn with an almost lethal blow.In the end, however, none of the companions were lost, and Flynt’s Scorching Ray burned the monk away to nothing, leaving only his final admonition that the lances would never serve the party as long as they were tainted by evil.  Exhausted again, the party thought to set up camp in the cramped armory, but in the process discovered that the monk’s onslaught had blown a thick covering of dust off a trap door in the middle of the floor.  Beneath the trap door the party found uncounted riches in ancient coin and a collection of powerful magic weapons and armor.  As they armed themselves with the fortunate windfall, a great roar shook the ruin and a wave of heat rushed down the narrow staircase into the armory.Magically amplified, the voice of the Wizardess commander demanded the party’s surrender of the dragonlances.  Resigned and unrested, the party climbed the stairs into the monastery’s worship hall, there to find the wizardess astride her red dragon mount.  To Breccia’s horror, the red dragon let the shattered and scorched corpse of Arzana fall from its jaws, and as one the party prepared for combat.Although the battle seemed all but lost from the beginning, the spirit of the monk guardian fought alongside Poe and the young dragon was naive to the devastating effects of even lesser dragonlances in the hands of trained warriors.  The party emerged victorious, slaying the dragon and forcing the Wizardess to use an Invisibility spell to escape their vengeance.  The journey back to Rayne’s Drop was uninterrupted, and once there the party found that what remained of the Red Dragonarmy presence there had either been taken care of by the town’s resistance in the absence of the dragon or had deserted once it had seen the writing on the wall.  The miners thanked the party for liberating the mine and defeating the Red Dragonarmy commander and her dragon, and Dolbinn agreed to honor his commitment to supply the party with high-quality dwarven weapons as soon as he could retrieve them from Garnet.  Breccia expressed her desire to found a new monastery devoted to Kiri Jolith and the memory of her late master.  Their tasks in Rayne’s Drop complete but their mission far from over, the party prepared to return to Maelgoth.</blockquote>

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