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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Richards" data-source="post: 8883447" data-attributes="member: 508">In today's "Dreams of Erthe" campaign session I ran them through an adventure called "Dead Man's Party."  The PCs arrived in the small town of Billingsway to awaken another dreamer - this one dreaming of being taken away by four evil clowns and three evil harlequins to be eaten - and found the village square being decorated and set up for a celebration of the life of a local wizard who had just died.  The PCs entered the dream, defeated the creepy clowns and harlequins (thereby awakening the dreamer), and then while they were in town they swung by the party.  It was hosted by the dead wizard's apprentice, who presented his master in a glass-topped coffin on a podium at the front of the gathering, explaining the wizard, Seamus Volossio, had suffered in life with a crippling shyness that had prevented him from engaging in partygoing and decided to have a party in his honor once he'd passed away.  Being intrigued by automatons, he had crafted beer barrel and ale barrel golems to provide free drinks at his "wake," and his apprentice hired the serving girls from the town's two taverns so everyone could attend.Of course, my players, being the suspicious buggers that they are, decided - all but one - that they weren't going to imbibe any of the free beer and ale being handed out, fearing this was some sort of nefarious plot.  (The half-orc cleric/paladin was the only one to drink with the villagers, which made him a very popular guy and earned him the nicknames "Beastman" and "Chugger.")But of course, my players were right to be suspicious, for all was not what it seemed.  There was nothing wrong with the beer or ale - it was perfectly fine and perfectly safe - but after several hours of revelry, with the full moon high in the night sky, the apprentice gave the signal and the attack began.  Four of the tavern girls had been wearing necklaces that they hadn't realized had an erinyes embedded within, and at the signal they swapped places with the girls wearing the necklaces: the girls were now in an extradimensional space while the erinyes had full reign.  They - and the beer barrel and ale barrel golems - all started attacking and killing the drunken villagers, because the first night of the full moon after his death was the only time to perform the ritual that would transform Volossio into a necropolitan - if enough sacrifices were made.  (He was an 11th-level wizard in life, so he needed 110 HD of sacrifices, among the roughly 200-250 people attending the "dead man's party.")The PCs started off by attacking the erinyes, but eventually they realized they needed to stop the golems as well.  The spellsword almost immediately killed the apprentice, and the elven sorcerer ran afoul of a tent he was sure held some sort of mechanical body for Volossio's spirit to inhabit (nope, it was a mimic, there to keep the villagers inside the "kill zone" - which he found out the hard way).  This was a difficult fight, for while the PCs were concentrating on taking down the erinyes and the golems, they were mostly content with slaying as many villagers as possible to get the sacrifice total high enough to resurrect Volossio in an eternal undead body; let's just say the body count got pretty high before the PCs managed to turn things around.  In any case, they took care of the attackers, prevented Volossio's transformation, and then checked out his keep at the edge of the village to make sure it didn't have any other surprises on hand.  There they took out a chain golem, electrical iron cobra, dread guard, plus some animated zombies and skeletons and two boneless (it turned out Volossio liked creating undead creatures as well as constructs), and cleaned out his spellbooks and personal treasure.Then it was on to the next town and the next dreamer, a dwarven mining town called Flamecleft four days away.  But the Billingsway morticians and gravediggers are going to busy for quite a while....[ATTACH=full]271652[/ATTACH]Johnathan</blockquote>

Verification