JollyDoc's Kingmaker-Updated 7/4/2011
Joachim
First Post
Velox/Giovanni gathered Iomedae’s/Kyuss power to him, and conjured a roaring wall of fire that engulfed the two undead horrors/anything that moved. As they writhed in the flames, he hurled a searing blast of light/searing blast of green light(and occasionally a startled paladin) through one, blowing it into a thousand fragments.
Gotta love it, battlefield control!!
Yeah, Havok still gets a lot of talk at the table...basically anytime I cast Wall of Fire, it seems. And yes, I use it a lot.
R-Hero
Explorer
Age of Worms was a fun ride.
If I find a gameing group soon, I'll have to play a warlock and steal a few of Havoks tricks/ideas.
the_mighty_agrippa
First Post
I just noticed that the kingdom was named Kardashia. Nice.
JollyDoc
Explorer
Did you notice the towns of Lohan and Fort Spears?? And just wait...coming soon to a kingdom near you...Cougar Town!!
JollyDoc
Explorer
THE WATCHER WAITS
The crooked stair they climbed higher into the mountain was uneven and hewn from the living stone. It wound upward, apparently following a natural seam in the rock. Finally, it ended at a large pair of double doors, beyond which was a large chamber paved in patterned tiles of different-colored slate and subdivided by a pair of pillars carved in the likeness of leering fiends. Beyond them, friezes on the walls depicted processions of animal-headed creatures marching along a black river’s banks toward dual shrines in opposite corners of the chamber. These each depicted a shadowy individual standing in a sinister longboat. Between them stood another bronze double door, its face decorated with a mosaic of a winding river crafted from obsidian tiles.
Davrim slowly approached the friezes, examining each in depth.
“These are depictions of Charon,” he said, “ the Ferryman of the Underworld.”
“This is fresh,” Velox commented.
He stood by one of the altars, where an unlit oil lamp stood beside a stained cup.
“This is blood,” he said. “Still tacky. Less than a week old I’d guess.”
“Yes, well,” Mox replied, “as much as the blood stained altars flanking the doorway to the afterlife look so welcoming, I think we should try the other way for now.”
She nodded towards a second, plainer door that stood on the far side of the chamber. Her companions could not dispute her logic.
The plain door opened onto another long hallway, this one hewn and worked. Another unmarked portal at its end revealed a chamber whose walls were composed of burial alcoves. All were empty save for small stone shelf ledges which held assorted bits of pottery. No sooner had the companions entered the darkened chamber, than two forms emerged from behind a pair of pillars. The smoky figures and clawed hands were all too familiar, especially to Mox.
“Souleaters!” Selena cried. “Destroy them! Quickly!”
Though Mox’s heart felt like a cold hand had wrapped around it, she didn’t hesitate as she hurled a fireball at the pair of demons. The creatures split to flank the group as they sought to avoid the scorching flames, one darting towards Tungdill, and the other towards Selena. The latter reached out one grotesque talon and raked it across the witch’s face. Selena screamed involuntarily as she felt her mind flayed open. Instinctively, she called the lightning to her hand, and struck out at the souleater. Its misty form writhed with electricity, and then, from behind, Davrim attacked. His sword struck the ephemeral friend as if it had struck a solid wall. The souleater dissolved into a pool of mist. Meanwhile, Stevhan and Velox put themselves between the first souleater and Tungdill. Between the two of them, they made fast work of the creature, and a few moments later, the crypt was silent once more.
________________________________________________________
There was only one other exit from the crypt, but Stevhan prowled the perimeter once more, and his eyes picked out a well-hidden seam in the back of one of the alcoves. Working his fingers around it, he pulled, and a section of the wall swung away, revealing a small sacristy. A stone bench sat at shoulder height against the far wall of the room, and upon it lay a number of stone vessels and bronze stools. A man-sized statue of a cyclops, one hand clamped over its single eye, stood against the far wall.
Once more, Stevhan discovered another hidden exit from the room, but this time when he tried to pry it open, it didn’t budge.
“It’s magically sealed,” Mox said. “An arcane lock.”
“Can you undo it?” Velox asked.
The sorceress shook her head. “Whoever placed it surpassed my abilities.”
“Well, good thing I brought my universal key then,” Davrim said as he hefted his sword.
The inquisitor began hammering at the section repeatedly, each time knocking several chunks of rock free. Within a matter of minutes, he had smashed a sizeable hole completely through.
A vestibule, its walls covered in lime plaster that bore a series of vibrantly colored frescoes depicting one-eyed humanoids, lay beyond the ruined portal. Beyond this was an empty chamber. Its walls were decorated in eye-shaped patterns and carvings, all of which seemed to be looking at a point on one wall where a single carving of a giant, stylized eye loomed. The eye’s pupil was an intricately engraved relief roughly the size of the palm of a hand. Mox stepped cautiously into the chamber and closed her eyes, scanning the room for traces of magic. Her eyes flew open suddenly.
“The power here,” she murmured, “it’s overwhelming! It’s some sort of…divination focus, but there’s also conjuration here, as if it were meant to summon something. Gods, what happened to the people of Varnhold?”
_______________________________________________________
There was nothing more to be discovered in the oracular chamber, so the companions backtracked to the crypt. There was only one other door leading from that room. Beyond it, however, was a naturally hewn tunnel, not worked stone. The passage wound several dozen yards before it opened into a wide, naturally formed cavern. Its ceiling was festooned with stalactites, and the stink of sulfur and tar were strong in the air. A huge lake of bubbling black goo dominated the chamber. On the far side, a stony shelf provided purchase for a door stoop before a black wooden door swollen in its frame. The broken stumps of two support posts protruded from the rock of the shelf as well as that of the main entrance near the pool’s edge, showing where a wooden bridge once spanned the inky soup.
Both Stevhan and Davrim saw the shadowy figure floating among the stalactites at the same time. What might have once been a human, was currently a living corpse. It still bore the wisps of a beard, but its flesh was foul and blackened, and its jaw hung slack. It wore the tatters of what may have once been a robe.
“I am he who was once called Cephal Lorentus,” the corpse rasped in a voice as dry as parchment. “I once served Maegar Varn as his magister, but now I serve a different master, and to my eternal regret, he has decreed your death!”
Fiery energy began gathering around the zombie’s hands, and it flung an orb of crackling flame that exploded among the companions with a deafening roar. Stevhan rolled with the blast and came up on one knee, his cloak still smoldering and his bow in his hand. He let fly with a shaft that pierced Cephal through the chest, yet it was the twin blasts of fire and searing light from Velox and Mox that sent the undead wizard spiraling into the boiling black tar.
It was at that moment that the others noticed the screams of agony coming from the tar pool…and they did not belong to Cephal. The wizard’s fireball had blown Davrim directly into the morass, and the inquisitor was literally being burned alive. He tried to rise to his feet, but quickly fell back to his knees. As he started to collapse completely, Tungdill quickly shifted his form into that of a great eagle, and swooped out to snatch the half-orc by the shoulders to drag his unconscious form back to the shore. Selena quickly ran to his side, and Tungdill resumed his true form to assist her. Together, their magic healed the worst of the inquisitor’s burns, and once he was stable enough to walk on his own again, Mox gathered the companions around her and instantly transported them all across the chamber.
____________________________________________________________
Another crypt stretched away into darkness. The floor was strewn with rubble and the filth of open graves. Sprawled on the ground was a fairly fresh corpse, that of a middle-aged Ulfen man, no more than a week or two dead at the most.
“Wasn’t Varn’s warden Ulfen?” Davrim asked.
“Gundarson?” Stevhan replied. “The one who found the bracelet, right?”
“Looks like someone took the theft personally,” Davrim said.
“It also looks like the dead around here don’t rest easy!” Selena cried as she pointed towards the corpse.
A spectral shape rose from the body like a cold mist, an ephemeral incarnation of Willas Gundarson. Its hollow eyes sought out the living, whose life’s blood it could smell like an intoxicant. Its mouth gaped open in a mournful wail as it floated towards them, reaching out its gnarled fingers hungrily.
“Stay back!” Mox warned, but if the spirit heard, it gave no sign. The sorceress snapped her fingers and sent mystic bolts swirling towards it. Though its form was translucent and incorporeal, the missiles struck as if they’d hit a solid body, and Gundarson recoiled in pain. In rapid succession, Selena sent fire, Velox sent holy light, and Tungdill loosed lightning. In the violent clash of energies, Willas Gundarson screamed as his soul found eternal peace.
________________________________________________________
Across a hallway from the crypt, a door opened onto a short dais that looked out over a large chamber. Thick pillars ascended to a high ceiling, while a wide stone staircase climbed to a darkened gallery above. The true purpose of the chamber was apparent from the great stone table that ran across its center. Dozens of seats had been set about the massive affair, and propped upon them was a feast of horror. Each chair held the corpse of a human locked in its death throes, its mouth agape in anguish, the top of its cranium brutally removed, and the brains within excised.
As the companions stood aghast at the tableau, a quartet of undead cyclopes stepped from the shadows beneath the gallery. Davrim gave an inarticulate cry of rage, the knowledge of the terror of what the townsfolk had faced overwhelming him. He charged wildly at the zombies, but before he reached them, one of them stepped forward and smashed him with its blood-stained axe. The inquisitor went sprawling at the feet of the undead, and they loomed menacingly over him. Suddenly, a volley of five arrows sprouted from the chest of the nearest giant, and it toppled like a felled tree.
“Get out of there!” Stevhan cried.
Davrim struggled to his feet and moved back towards his friends, the three remaining cyclopes close behind him. Velox stepped in front of them to give his friend a chance to get clear, but one of the brutes swatted him easily aside. As he rolled to his feet, Mox’s mouth yawned wide, and she spewed a gout of acid at the zombies, sending them reeling and roaring in pain. Davrim turned and rushed back towards the disoriented giants. As he swung his sword, however, one of the cyclopes grabbed his arm and bit down. He cried out involuntarily, but quickly switched his sword to his off hand and drove it through the monster’s single eye. Just as the last two recovered for a second assault, Velox stepped forward, his hands outstretched, and a moment later, a wall of coruscating flame erupted between the cyclopes, immolating them both.
The crooked stair they climbed higher into the mountain was uneven and hewn from the living stone. It wound upward, apparently following a natural seam in the rock. Finally, it ended at a large pair of double doors, beyond which was a large chamber paved in patterned tiles of different-colored slate and subdivided by a pair of pillars carved in the likeness of leering fiends. Beyond them, friezes on the walls depicted processions of animal-headed creatures marching along a black river’s banks toward dual shrines in opposite corners of the chamber. These each depicted a shadowy individual standing in a sinister longboat. Between them stood another bronze double door, its face decorated with a mosaic of a winding river crafted from obsidian tiles.
Davrim slowly approached the friezes, examining each in depth.
“These are depictions of Charon,” he said, “ the Ferryman of the Underworld.”
“This is fresh,” Velox commented.
He stood by one of the altars, where an unlit oil lamp stood beside a stained cup.
“This is blood,” he said. “Still tacky. Less than a week old I’d guess.”
“Yes, well,” Mox replied, “as much as the blood stained altars flanking the doorway to the afterlife look so welcoming, I think we should try the other way for now.”
She nodded towards a second, plainer door that stood on the far side of the chamber. Her companions could not dispute her logic.
The plain door opened onto another long hallway, this one hewn and worked. Another unmarked portal at its end revealed a chamber whose walls were composed of burial alcoves. All were empty save for small stone shelf ledges which held assorted bits of pottery. No sooner had the companions entered the darkened chamber, than two forms emerged from behind a pair of pillars. The smoky figures and clawed hands were all too familiar, especially to Mox.
“Souleaters!” Selena cried. “Destroy them! Quickly!”
Though Mox’s heart felt like a cold hand had wrapped around it, she didn’t hesitate as she hurled a fireball at the pair of demons. The creatures split to flank the group as they sought to avoid the scorching flames, one darting towards Tungdill, and the other towards Selena. The latter reached out one grotesque talon and raked it across the witch’s face. Selena screamed involuntarily as she felt her mind flayed open. Instinctively, she called the lightning to her hand, and struck out at the souleater. Its misty form writhed with electricity, and then, from behind, Davrim attacked. His sword struck the ephemeral friend as if it had struck a solid wall. The souleater dissolved into a pool of mist. Meanwhile, Stevhan and Velox put themselves between the first souleater and Tungdill. Between the two of them, they made fast work of the creature, and a few moments later, the crypt was silent once more.
________________________________________________________
There was only one other exit from the crypt, but Stevhan prowled the perimeter once more, and his eyes picked out a well-hidden seam in the back of one of the alcoves. Working his fingers around it, he pulled, and a section of the wall swung away, revealing a small sacristy. A stone bench sat at shoulder height against the far wall of the room, and upon it lay a number of stone vessels and bronze stools. A man-sized statue of a cyclops, one hand clamped over its single eye, stood against the far wall.
Once more, Stevhan discovered another hidden exit from the room, but this time when he tried to pry it open, it didn’t budge.
“It’s magically sealed,” Mox said. “An arcane lock.”
“Can you undo it?” Velox asked.
The sorceress shook her head. “Whoever placed it surpassed my abilities.”
“Well, good thing I brought my universal key then,” Davrim said as he hefted his sword.
The inquisitor began hammering at the section repeatedly, each time knocking several chunks of rock free. Within a matter of minutes, he had smashed a sizeable hole completely through.
A vestibule, its walls covered in lime plaster that bore a series of vibrantly colored frescoes depicting one-eyed humanoids, lay beyond the ruined portal. Beyond this was an empty chamber. Its walls were decorated in eye-shaped patterns and carvings, all of which seemed to be looking at a point on one wall where a single carving of a giant, stylized eye loomed. The eye’s pupil was an intricately engraved relief roughly the size of the palm of a hand. Mox stepped cautiously into the chamber and closed her eyes, scanning the room for traces of magic. Her eyes flew open suddenly.
“The power here,” she murmured, “it’s overwhelming! It’s some sort of…divination focus, but there’s also conjuration here, as if it were meant to summon something. Gods, what happened to the people of Varnhold?”
_______________________________________________________
There was nothing more to be discovered in the oracular chamber, so the companions backtracked to the crypt. There was only one other door leading from that room. Beyond it, however, was a naturally hewn tunnel, not worked stone. The passage wound several dozen yards before it opened into a wide, naturally formed cavern. Its ceiling was festooned with stalactites, and the stink of sulfur and tar were strong in the air. A huge lake of bubbling black goo dominated the chamber. On the far side, a stony shelf provided purchase for a door stoop before a black wooden door swollen in its frame. The broken stumps of two support posts protruded from the rock of the shelf as well as that of the main entrance near the pool’s edge, showing where a wooden bridge once spanned the inky soup.
Both Stevhan and Davrim saw the shadowy figure floating among the stalactites at the same time. What might have once been a human, was currently a living corpse. It still bore the wisps of a beard, but its flesh was foul and blackened, and its jaw hung slack. It wore the tatters of what may have once been a robe.
“I am he who was once called Cephal Lorentus,” the corpse rasped in a voice as dry as parchment. “I once served Maegar Varn as his magister, but now I serve a different master, and to my eternal regret, he has decreed your death!”
Fiery energy began gathering around the zombie’s hands, and it flung an orb of crackling flame that exploded among the companions with a deafening roar. Stevhan rolled with the blast and came up on one knee, his cloak still smoldering and his bow in his hand. He let fly with a shaft that pierced Cephal through the chest, yet it was the twin blasts of fire and searing light from Velox and Mox that sent the undead wizard spiraling into the boiling black tar.
It was at that moment that the others noticed the screams of agony coming from the tar pool…and they did not belong to Cephal. The wizard’s fireball had blown Davrim directly into the morass, and the inquisitor was literally being burned alive. He tried to rise to his feet, but quickly fell back to his knees. As he started to collapse completely, Tungdill quickly shifted his form into that of a great eagle, and swooped out to snatch the half-orc by the shoulders to drag his unconscious form back to the shore. Selena quickly ran to his side, and Tungdill resumed his true form to assist her. Together, their magic healed the worst of the inquisitor’s burns, and once he was stable enough to walk on his own again, Mox gathered the companions around her and instantly transported them all across the chamber.
____________________________________________________________
Another crypt stretched away into darkness. The floor was strewn with rubble and the filth of open graves. Sprawled on the ground was a fairly fresh corpse, that of a middle-aged Ulfen man, no more than a week or two dead at the most.
“Wasn’t Varn’s warden Ulfen?” Davrim asked.
“Gundarson?” Stevhan replied. “The one who found the bracelet, right?”
“Looks like someone took the theft personally,” Davrim said.
“It also looks like the dead around here don’t rest easy!” Selena cried as she pointed towards the corpse.
A spectral shape rose from the body like a cold mist, an ephemeral incarnation of Willas Gundarson. Its hollow eyes sought out the living, whose life’s blood it could smell like an intoxicant. Its mouth gaped open in a mournful wail as it floated towards them, reaching out its gnarled fingers hungrily.
“Stay back!” Mox warned, but if the spirit heard, it gave no sign. The sorceress snapped her fingers and sent mystic bolts swirling towards it. Though its form was translucent and incorporeal, the missiles struck as if they’d hit a solid body, and Gundarson recoiled in pain. In rapid succession, Selena sent fire, Velox sent holy light, and Tungdill loosed lightning. In the violent clash of energies, Willas Gundarson screamed as his soul found eternal peace.
________________________________________________________
Across a hallway from the crypt, a door opened onto a short dais that looked out over a large chamber. Thick pillars ascended to a high ceiling, while a wide stone staircase climbed to a darkened gallery above. The true purpose of the chamber was apparent from the great stone table that ran across its center. Dozens of seats had been set about the massive affair, and propped upon them was a feast of horror. Each chair held the corpse of a human locked in its death throes, its mouth agape in anguish, the top of its cranium brutally removed, and the brains within excised.
As the companions stood aghast at the tableau, a quartet of undead cyclopes stepped from the shadows beneath the gallery. Davrim gave an inarticulate cry of rage, the knowledge of the terror of what the townsfolk had faced overwhelming him. He charged wildly at the zombies, but before he reached them, one of them stepped forward and smashed him with its blood-stained axe. The inquisitor went sprawling at the feet of the undead, and they loomed menacingly over him. Suddenly, a volley of five arrows sprouted from the chest of the nearest giant, and it toppled like a felled tree.
“Get out of there!” Stevhan cried.
Davrim struggled to his feet and moved back towards his friends, the three remaining cyclopes close behind him. Velox stepped in front of them to give his friend a chance to get clear, but one of the brutes swatted him easily aside. As he rolled to his feet, Mox’s mouth yawned wide, and she spewed a gout of acid at the zombies, sending them reeling and roaring in pain. Davrim turned and rushed back towards the disoriented giants. As he swung his sword, however, one of the cyclopes grabbed his arm and bit down. He cried out involuntarily, but quickly switched his sword to his off hand and drove it through the monster’s single eye. Just as the last two recovered for a second assault, Velox stepped forward, his hands outstretched, and a moment later, a wall of coruscating flame erupted between the cyclopes, immolating them both.
Neverwinter Knight
First Post
Very nice going so far. Really looking forward to the next session!
JollyDoc
Explorer
It will be fairly epic! It was touch and go for a time.
JollyDoc
Explorer
Heya Doc. I took a hiatus from these boards for a few years, but when I come back lo and behold! it seems you've got another story hour going. I'm looking forward to digging in to see what I've been missing
Welcome back!! Took a hiatus myself for awhile, but felt the call once more. Glad your back with us, and hope you enjoy this one!
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