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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Richards" data-source="post: 8646705" data-attributes="member: 508">Last night we played our penultimate session in my son's "Raiders of the Overreach" campaign.  We have one last Writhing Gate to destroy - and it's on a mysterious island with a rift to the Far Realm which is "leaking" chaos energy, causing the life on the island (local or otherwise) to take weird forms.So, shielded by magic circle against chaos spells, we landed on the island and quickly encountered a tent-village made up of the members of a previous expedition to the island.  But these poor souls hadn't known until too late about the fleshwarping qualities of the chaos energy; as a result, the two mounted men who approached us had not only grown into the bodies of their mounts (as in horse and man were now one composite creature), but several body parts had migrated around and been swapped about: the human heads were on the horses' necks and vice versa; one horse had a human arm and hand in place of its right foreleg (which was now growing out of the human's right shoulder) and so on.  We fought them and the advanced chaos beast that splorched out of a large tent, the merged remains of the rest of the expedition.  The chaos beast we took down with ranged attacks (nobody wanted to get close to the thing!), while the horse/men we took down with melee weapons and the pounding fists of the two Huge earth elementals our sorceress summoned.  (She actually had summoned three, but each had a 50% chance of being shunted to the Far Realm instead of the island and one didn't make it.)  And both my lizardfolk and the gnome cleric got hit by wriggling crossbow bolts that turned into leeches once they hit us; after we'd taken down the main foes I had my lizardfolk pull out his leech and swallow it down, then the cleric tossed me his as well.  That led to two Fortitude saves and sure enough one was a natural "1" - I'd have started mutating had the cleric not realized something was wrong and cast a heal spell on me.  (But in my mind, meat is meat and there was no point in letting those delicious leeches go to waste, especially after they'd been "seasoned" with lizardfolk and gnome blood...the gnome didn't really like the looks I was giving him after I realized just how tasty gnome blood can be....)The last encounter during the session until we made our way to the Writhing Gate was with a swarm of bees, each with human eyes.  They coalesced into a giant bee (which we dubbed the "Bee-hemoth") with a breath weapon made up of individual bees which then split up into two separate swarms.  We learned several things from that encounter:1.  A properly-placed maximized fireball can completely wipe out two separate swarms of bees with no problem. 2.  Even though it might look like a giant bee, a lizardfolk jumping onto its back at the end of a leaping charge attack is going to fall right "through" the individual bees making up its giant-bee body, since no matter how tightly you pack a bunch of bees they can't support the weight of a full-grown lizardfolk. 3.  A kindly DM will allow a charging dwarf fighter to flank a Bee-hemoth with a lizardfolk standing in the middle of its made-up-of-individual-bees body. 4.  Destruction might be a powerful cleric spell, but when you cast it against a Bee-hemoth the end result is...one dead bee out of the thousands making up its body.  Live and learn.In any case, we killed it and made it to the Writhing Gate by following the gnome cleric's find the path spell.  Next Wednesday we fight the guardian of that last Gate, likely a fleshwarped mind flayer of some sort, and if we can take it out and destroy the last Writhing Gate the crazed illithid Elder God whose 100 facial tentacles from its still-living, decapitated head made up the ten Writhing Gates, we'll have permanently severed its link to the Material Plane and saved the world from the destruction that would have been caused if it had forced its way back from the Far Realm, where it's growing a new body to try to do just that.  Whew!And then my son puts on his player hat for the next couple of years while the player of the gnome cleric tries DMing a campaign for the first time since AD&D 1st Edition was the latest version of the game.Johnathan</blockquote>

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