NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Richards" data-source="post: 8720383" data-attributes="member: 508">In today's "Dreams of Erthe" campaign session, the PCs went to the manor house of a nobleman, where they believed the next dreamer they were to rescue was located.  The dwarven bodyguards who answered the door said there was nobody there trapped in their dreams, and even after a bit of light flirting from the dwarven priestess PC, they turned the PCs away when the Lord of the manor, Andrus Vesperman, wasn't interested in seeing them.However, as they were returning to their horses and wagon, a maid summoned them over to the back of the house and snuck them into the laundry room by way of the kitchen.  There, the main housekeeper informed them she had overheard their conversation with the dwarven bodyguards and they believed the Lord's wife, Lady Angelica Vesperman, fit the description of the person they were looking for: no one had been allowed to see Lady Angelica for the past week and the maids hadn't gathered any laundry from her in the past week; Lord Andrus insisted on bringing her her food, claiming she was resting up.  (She was eight and a half months pregnant with their first child.)  The maids had never heard of the dream sickness, but it explained a lot if it were true.So they waited in the laundry room until Lord Andrus's business partner arrived and they went off to discuss matters in the parlor.  Then the housekeeper snuck the PCs upstairs into the master bedroom, where they hoped to fetch Lady Angelica and teleport her into their extradimensional lamp, where they could perform the ritual to awaken her.  However:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The three-dimensional carving of the Vesperman family crest (a wasp about to sting) on the bedroom wall was in fact a mechanical wasp construct, Lord Andrus's familiar.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">There was an alarm spell centered all around the bed where Lady Angelica lay.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">When the half-orc cleric/paladin summoned an air element hippogriff to fight off the activated mechanical wasp familiar and got Lady Angelica into the extradimensional lamp, it turned out she was not in a dream coma after all - this became apparent when the grub inside her ate its way through her belly and crawled to freedom, while she was paralyzed and unable to move.</li> </ul>They captured the grub, healed Lady Angelica, and high-tailed it out the window via a gaseous form spell, leaving the hippogriff to fight off the familiar, Lord Andrus, his two dwarven bodyguards, and two dread guards.  But then, figuring out Lord Andrus had used his wife as an incubator for his grub-monster and fearing for the housekeeper and the four young maids back in the manor house, they decided to go back and attack.  The half-orc rescued the maids and housekeeper and got them inside the extradimensional lamp, while the others attacked through the back door and via the maids' room (which they had entered through a window).  They then had to fight Lord Andrus (a werewasp wizard), his two dwarven bodyguards, the two animated dread guards, the mechanical wasp construct familiar, a summoned fiendish giant wasp, and a wasp swarm summoned by Lord Andrus.  Eventually they killed everyone (with the help of a summoned celestial bison and fiendish praying mantis), then figured out the trapped dreamer wasn't Lady Angelica (who had awoken from her grub-induced paralysis) but a teen stable boy they'd assumed had run off two weeks ago.  (He'd actually hidden behind a pile of hay in the stables to shirk work and fallen into a dream coma.)  They did the ritual to awaken him...just in time to meet up with the hive drake Andrus had summoned via a whispering wind spell before he'd been slain by the PCs.  The hive drake - a horse-sized dragon with a swarm of wasps living in its throat bladder for a breath weapon - was eventually slain and the women of the manor returned safely to their home.The name of the adventure was almost identical to that of a band my son listens to (and which I've come to enjoy as well):  "Birth Day Massacre."  (The band goes by "The Birthday Massacre.")Johnathan</blockquote>

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