TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

[(un)reason]

All 6 regular players were present, although the githyanki's one had to leave a little early. Most of the characters stopped for a breather and a dip in the Binder's regeneration tank, just another of the many tricks she now has stored in her Enveloping Pit. Meanwhile, the githyanki did an ultra-quick plane shift and teleport to Tu'narath and back, spending half an hour picking up several scrolls, most importantly Discern Location. Another 10 minutes spent casting and they had a pinpoint location of the fungus lord, a mere 360' to the northeast of them, right in front of the forges in the dwarven fortress. They prepared a new set of buff spells and teleported over.

There, they found the fungus lord stretched out in front of the forges, with fungus-covered dwarves bustling over it, in the middle of fitting a custom suit of armor and horn enhancement fit for a giant worm monster. They tried to leap to attack it, but found that it had cast Antipathy on the area around to block their entry. Only the Githyanki made his save (and the binder is immune to mind-affecting powers, so she didn't even have to try) so only those two could actually move forward. The githyanki summoned some amnizu, who also failed their saves and headed out of the protected zone at full speed. On their turn, the dwarves pointedly did not leap to the attack, but instead said that the master was tired of this cat & mouse game and wanted to parlay. If they could beat him in an arena battle, he would leave this planet peacefully. They had no particular intention of honoring anything like that, but weren't given the choice, as on it's turn it simply used Transport Through Plants again to disappear into the fungus-covered wall to the east. This meant they had to waste a couple more rounds of their buffs getting the whole party back together and another 5th level spell slot teleporting back to J'bhulgolboth, coming out by the big shallow pool in area 17 that the kuo-toa once used for combat games.

When they arrived, they found that while Xhagevoxhab might not quite have had time to fully finish its new armor, it had been preparing in other ways. There was a full audience assembled surrounding the arena consisting of mold men, kuo-toa, grimlocks, a mind flayer announcer & umber hulk bouncer. In the centre of the arena was a massive humanoid body consisting of thousands of mold men that had bonded themselves together, (using the stats for the flesh colossus from the ELH without the profane bonus to AC and plant immunities rather than construct immunities, making it somewhat less able to no-sell their blasting magic) with the fungus lord curled up on top to form the head. They tried to have a brief moment of hyping up the combatants before the combat began (and so Xhagevoxhab could at least know the names of the creatures who had been slaughtering his minions for months now) but the PC's were in absolutely no mood to play along with his little psychodrama and just went into full attack mode straight away. The githyanki summoned more amnizu and set them to using their quickened fireballs every round until they ran out. The Drow cast anti-magic shell in the middle of Xhagevoxhab's bulk, which kept it from casting a spell in the first round, but as it was fixed in space, it could get out of it by stepping forward with the colossus and doing an area stomp that did a fair bit of damage to the priestess & winged kobold. It hit the githyanki once, but with his acid shield still up, it was obvious that direct attacks were a bad way to fight him, so instead it used reverse gravity to send him to the ceiling and do 20d6 points of damage in the process. Meanwhile, all the PC's were breaking out their best attacks, the binder was literally climbing up the body shredding as she went, and it only took three rounds of this before the colossus was reduced to negative HP by the final set of amnizu fireballs, with the priestesses acidic whip delivering the finishing blow shortly afterwards. Xhagevoxhab was sent toppling to the ground as the colossus lost cohesion and disintegrated into a fungussey mess. It tried to surrender, but the PC's had never intended on making any deal with it and kept on pressing the attack. Realising this, the audience rushed the arena in a last-ditch attempt to tip this fight back in it's favor. The illithid unleashed its mind blast, but only the winged kobold failed his save and got stunned. The drow got attacked from behind by the umber hulk and reduced to -9hp in a single round, which seems like a suitable cliffhanger to end the session on. But 4 of the PC's plus a bunch of summons are still able to fight and Xhagevoxhab is already down half it's hp. A few of them might still die in the process, but it's looking pretty certain that next session they'll finally finish off the big bad that has been their main challenge for a good 9 months of real time now. (and with a satisfying big multi-stage boss battle rather than an anti-climactic ganking in a corridor as well) But they still have to figure out how to break away from githyanki command, defeat the lich-queen and find out what else lies beyond the gate. When they do, they may find themselves wishing they were still just facing fungus ......

 

[(un)reason]

Dungeon Issue 85: Mar/Apr 2001
.. Since it doesn’t spin off of or merge with any of the magazines I’m already covering and I was never the greatest fan of Star Wars in the first place I think I’ll skip adding this one to my plate as well, even though it only lasted 10 issues.

I changed my mind. I'm finding the 4e issues so gruellingly samey and formulaic that I'm struggling to keep going with them, so I've decided to interleave Star Wars Gamer, followed by Kobold Quarterly, Gygax Magazine, and maybe Undefeated as well if I can get a complete collection of that, (still missing issues 3&8 at the moment if anyone reading has either of those) both for the sake of my sanity and so I have something I can actually post without disrupting the timeline of this thread. That does mean this journey will take even longer overall than expected, but better to get it done late but comprehensively than not at all. The first issue can be found here.

 

[(un)reason]

Everyone was present. The binder activated Rage and continued to shred Xhagevoxhab with even more attack and damage bonuses. Meanwhile the other active players concentrated on saving the two downed PC's. The githyanki summoned a couple of Bralani, placing one next to the drow and healing him back into the positives and the other next to himself on the ceiling. On her turn the priestess also headed that way, soaking up attacks of opportunity from the umber hulk and mold men along the way and brought him back to just under full hp. Since he was still surrounded, his next action was to activate levitate and try to get a bit of height. The sniper blinked out of the mold men surrounding him and reappeared invisibly on the edge of the arena, where he could focus on Xhagevoxhab and ready an action to disrupt it if it tried to cast a spell to escape. On the next round, the githyanki used transposition to get the stunned winged kobold up on the ceiling with him. The priestess wiped out a couple more mooks, the drow summoned a couple of osyluths and placed them next to the fungus lord to further lock him down and the binder continued to shred. The enemy illithid tried to charm him, but it failed against his spell resistance. The fungus lord continued to ineffectually try to attack the binder climbing up his body, while his mooks did the same to the priestess and all the summons, but those were mostly misses as well. On the third round, the githyanki teleported back down to the surface and smacked the fungus lord with his maul, which when combined with the binder's ongoing onslaught was finally enough to bring that second energy bar down to zero. He died messily and with him gone, all the other monsters lost cohesion, dying slowly over the course of the next 10 minutes. (those that weren't finished off prematurely by the still bloodthirsty binder) and then crumbling away as the remnants of the fungus turned to inert powder, (which they collected several sacks of for analysis just in case) leaving only their bones. (or exoskeleton in the case of the umber hulk.)

Since pretty much everyone except the binder was tapped out at this point, they retired to the enveloping pit for a good rest while she let out her low level minions to thoroughly loot the place. However, their sleep was interrupted halfway through by another group of githyanki arriving, all dressed smartly in black (mirrorshades optional), led by a cigarette smoking githyanki covered in obviously magical tattoos. They congratulated the group for handling the problem before they arrived in the mildly condescending way of special forces greeting regular army grunts, then told them they were taking over operations in this area, so they could just head on back to Tu'narath for their next mission. Since they had yet to recover their spells, the PC's were able to stall them, but they were definitely waiting around in an impatient manner for the other team to leave while running tests on things with strange magical devices. When debriefed and asked about what happened to the gate though, instead of taking them to the bottom of the lake, our githyanki commander teleported briefly with them to the deep caverns with crushing pressure where the tablets had been kept, lied (41 on his bluff check) and said that the gate was there, but it had closed when they defeated Xhagevoxhab. Since they were taking damage each round, they couldn't stick around there and investigate in detail, so they teleported back and it looked like they'd got away with the deception. Before leaving, the group also went back and investigated the dwarven fortress, checking that they had also died when their master did (leaving suits of armor frozen around the fortress in random places) and thoroughly looting the place. Between Jbulgolboth and the dwarven fortress, they once again have a pretty decent haul, with the single biggest thing being the massive chunk of adamantine the fungus lord had shaped into a horn enhancement, plus enough xp to bring one of them up to 15th level and the others close. Things have definitely moved a step closer to the climactic final confrontation. What will their next mission be? Will they ever find out what lies beyond the still-open gate? Just how long will they be able to keep up the ruse of being loyal soldiers, and what position will they be in when finally discovered? Still plenty to play for next week.

 

[(un)reason]

5 players present. This was a slow one almost entirely taken up by interparty roleplaying. They had a number of options for new missions available to them. They could continue investigating the world on the other side of the gate under Needlespire. (Two of the party independently did this sneakily anyway in downtime, finding it was indeed completely dead now the fungus lord was gone.) They could follow up on the plot hook about the blade of Aknar Ratalla. (General Zetch'r'r had also heard that tale and sent one party after it who never came back, and was very interested on getting his hands on the blade if it turned out divine ascension was indeed part of the lich-queen's plans) They could go for the more prosaic mission of helping to discreetly retrieve General Gythra-Kyharz's silver sword from the treacherous psion Lashmere. Or they could try a heist; Yu’thiol Mansecho had been scoping out the banking system of the free city of Greyhawk Redeagle and though the group might be able to pull off a heist that destabilised the economy of the whole region, rendering them easy prey when the big assault started in a couple of months time. The group was pretty split, but the heist got more votes than any of the other options, so that was their final decision. They then engaged in plenty of nitpicking over the info they had been given before even leaving Tu'narath, wth the drow casting Contact Other Plane to find out more details about how much gold was in there, what the most dangerous traps & guards were and if Yu'thiol planned to double-cross them to get the cash. (not as long as he thought they were still loyal to the lich-queen) They also had to make sure everyone had at least one disguise power active, plus mundane makeup on top, as none of them were of races that would be welcome there except the priestess. (who would simply have to take off the BDSM gear to be unrecognisable )

Once they'd exhausted all the preparations and research they could make without actually visiting, they headed back to Pharagos, making sure they arrived a moderate distance away from the city, came in the road and get themselves rooms at an inn. The binder came up with a surprisingly sneaky keystone to their plan. Use her sentient magic glove as an inside man, open up an account and deposit it there, then retrieve it again after three days and get a full accounting of the various defences it went through on the way too and from the vault. That would give the others plenty of time to scope the place out from other angles and find the best way to do the rest of the job. This nearly fell at the first hurdle as she rolled poorly on her initial diplomacy roll, but her forged credentials (and obvious large quantities of money) were good enough that they eventually let her open an account.

During the three day wait to make withdrawing the glove again not seem totally suspicious, the others kept busy. The two kobolds took sewer duty, seeing if there was any way of getting into the bank down there. Unfortunately, while many other big civic buildings did have connections to the sewers, including the wizards academy and the colosseum, there were conspicuously no tunnels anywhere near the mint. They did encounter thieves guild members down there discussing business, but their stealth skills far outstripped that of the NPC's so they just listened to them gossip for a while, hearing both some new info about the state of the city, and distorted tales of their own exploits northwards in L'trel. The githyanki also got in on the stakeout, investing in X-ray vision, which revealed a staircase leading downwards on the north side, but no visible tunnels underneath it, indicating that this was either where the heavy-duty shielding started or they went through a portal. This meant they had a clear target of where to head when they started action, but still no clear way of getting down there stealthily.

When they got the glove back, it became increasingly clear that there was indeed still a gauntlet of defences down there that they couldn't see with their divinations, as it had gone through a checkpoint guarded by pyrohydras, several trap systems, a couple of illusory walls and awkward vertical tunnels, to reach a central vault that was guarded by a beholder mage with multiple regular beholders as minions. (see Vlindarian's Vault, another adventure from future issues I've reviewed but haven't been able to post yet) This info would mean they could prepare spells to counter the most obvious problems and weren't likely to simply get stuck, but it would still be a challenge to get in and out quickly without being caught. They debated kidnapping one of the tellers or manager to pump them for further information, but decided against it. Eventually they decided that complete stealth probably wasn't going to happen, but if some of their minions staged a distraction in the lobby while the PC's used passwall to get through the back wall and down the stairs they might be able to keep the number of challenges they face at once to a manageable level. With that resolved, it seemed like a good place to end the session, and make sure that next one would be the action-packed one. We'll find out if their plan survives contact with the enemy next week.

 

[(un)reason]

4 players present. They continued on debating the details of the heist for the first half an hour before finally getting into the action, taking the time to jump some low-level thieves guild members, stash their bodies and put their cloaks on as part of their efforts to make sure someone else took the blame. The binder's chief follower Rei the Sha'ir went in the front way and started Karenning to occupy the receptionists, while the winged kobold (one of the players who wasn't here, once again giving me room to run a solo session elaborating on what happened up here later while the rest were going for gold) stealthily kept an eye on things from just outside. The other 5 PC's managed to wait until there were no guards patrolling around the back, slip over to the wall and passwall through it without any problems. That was as far as things went completely smoothly though. As they headed down the stairs, they passed through the portal to the elemental plane of fire where the actual vault is set, which meant they quickly lost the telepathic contact with the people on the surface that they'd set up. (although they still didn't know the exact cause. Knowing that time was now of the essence, they pressed on anyway, coming to their first challenge, the cave with the pair of pyrohydras in it. The first one fell before it could even react to the Binder's full set of sneak attack-enhanced strikes even without counting the fire damage. The others laid into the second hydra and that was gone by the second round.

Meanwhile, the sniper started his usual schtick of invisibly blinking ahead of the rest of the party to scout out the area. He did notice that the border ethereal was uncomfortably hot when he did so, but since they'd already packed magical shielding to deal with the hydras, didn't take any damage. He blinked through to the bottom of the pit with the teleportation circle in, peeked out the top and spotted the cornugons, who had heard the hydras being shredded and were already on full alert, but didn't manage to spot him. He blinked back and told the others, who prepared accordingly, then rushed forwards. Even prepared, this was a significantly tougher fight, as the priestess got stunned in the first round and the combo of DR, fire immunity and acid resistance was exactly what's needed to put the Binder's attacks down to plinks, letting the githyanki shine again with his heavy-hitting demonbound maul. While the others were occupied with this, the sniper was once again sneaking ahead around the awkward vertical tunnels leading down to the main vault area. He managed to roll well on his trapfinding, and avoid triggering the trapdoor with the greased chute dumping everything in the elemental plane of fire, getting to the point where it turned into a downward spiral with lots of little vaults on the outward side. He then headed back to the others, who had mostly finished subduing the cornugons and were running into the same problem they did last time - that none of them had good aligned weapons that dealt with their regeneration, so they could knock them down, but couldn't finish them off for good. They used the same method of explaining to them that they were going to cast Disobedience on them, so if they waived their save they would be released of all bindings and free to go. However, unbeknownst to them, these cornugons are not magically bound, merely being paid a fair wage for their employment, so they pretended to accept the spells and teleport away once back up to positive hp, but instead simply headed to the vault rooms to alert the rest of the guards, making the rest of this mission harder than it would otherwise have been.

Once they thought they were alone again, they used their various means of flight to get down the tunnels to the vaults. The sniper activated his ring of feather fall and floated down the greased pit to make sure there was nothing down there, only teleporting back up when he neared the bottom and realised this whole complex was inside a floating rock thousands of feet above a magma sea on the elemental plane of fire, neatly explaining why they'd lost contact with the others and even the border ethereal was a little toasty here. Meanwhile the binder took the lead this time, triggering the boulder trap, but with blink still active this was a trivial challenge and she just reappeared behind it and they all watched it roll into the depths. She then blinked into the first small vault. Finding it was underwater, she blinked back again, shook herself off like a dog and told the others, who used disintegration to open up a hole and send the water gushing downwards to wherever the boulder went and retrieved the decanter of endless water from inside. She did the same with the second one, which was empty, but had the anti-magic effect from a preserved beholder eye inside activated by motion, which deactivated a very large part of her buff effects and prevented her from blinking back out. Fortunately, they heard her scrabbling on the door and the sniper still had enough spell slots left for another disintegrate. Realising that going through each of these little chambers systematically would be a dangerous distraction from their true goal, and being reminded by the glove that the main vault was through another tunnel in the ceiling concealed by an illusion, they started heading up there, with the sniper in the lead again. He peeked down into the main vault and promptly became visible, as Vlindarian the beholder mage and one of his minions were just below, eyes trained on the opening ready to blink off the anti-magic eye and unleash hell with all the rest since they'd already been informed trouble was on the way. Somehow, he still managed to evade their sight with just his mundane stealth roll (they got a natural 1 on their spot check) and duck back to inform the others by sign language that they'd be going into the big fight here. This once again seemed a good time to call an end to the session, knowing things would go straight into action next time. (and make sure everyone had versions of their characters both with and without all their magical buffs calculated so that wouldn't slow combat to a crawl.) We'll see if the beholders manage to get any lucky shots in with their save or die effects before being annihilated and what challenges they'll face trying to get out again next session.

 

[(un)reason]

Duo session featuring winged kobold Zerr von Kopa (disguised as a halfling) and 3 of the binder's followers: (Rei the 6th level Sha'ir and two unnamed 4th level bards)

While the others were heading down into the vaults, these four came strolling boldly through the front door, dressed richly like their previous visits. It started off with Rei thanking them for their previous work and asking more questions about the nature of their security, which were of course politely rebuffed. Zerr took a slightly different tack from the one I assumed earlier though, and instead of watching stealthily decided to play up his childlike nature, dashing from one receptionist to another, asking what everything did in a hyperactive manner and generally being loud and annoying, but in an innocent way designed to get the guards attention rather than make them attack instantly. This managed to keep them busy for several minutes until the guards outside made another circuit around the building and found that the stairway was missing a wall at the back, but the door between the stairway and the main bank was stone shaped shut. They banged on the door and the bank manger tried to open it from the other side as well. When that didn't work, and casting dispel on the door did nothing (since stone shape is an instant effect with nonmagical ongoing results) she directed the clay golem in her office to smash it down, and ordered the guards to grab Zerr. He skidded away and past the main door, somehow managing to lock it at high speed as he did. After a few rounds, two of the guards managed to grapple him and pick him up by the arms, with Rei apologising profusely all the while. They tried to open the door to chuck him out, and found it locked, forcing the manager to divert her attention from trying to get through one door to get her key out and unlock the other one.

However, when they did this, they found three men in dark cloaks waiting impatiently on the doorstep. It was time to add another element of chaos to this scenario as I revealed that this wasn't merely based on a single adventure, but a mash-up of Vlindarian's Vault and Worms in the Exchequery. The shadowdancers immediately tried to put their own heist plan into motion, with Samuel and Coalfinger conjuring shadow illusions to give them something to shift through, while Snigrot tumbled through the two guards holding Zerr, grabbed him in the process and wound up in the southwest corner with his blade held to Zerr's throat. He tried to use Zerr as a hostage and demand that the tellers hand over some loot right now, which did not quite have the expected effect given everything else that was happening simultaneously. Rei and the other minions decided that anything that's a genuine threat to Zerr would take them out in a hit or two and hid in the side offices. The guards that previously had Zerr grappled tried to grab him back, which led to several rounds of comical back and forth with Zerr just letting it happen, still trying to hide his true power level. Meanwhile the shadowdancers shadow companions attacked Tiatyllin the manager, which worked quite effectively since she has a low strength score, so she only managed to get off one Flame Strike (which they took no damage from thanks to Evasion) before being reduced to zero. The shadows then terrorised the rest of the bank staff into the corner while Samuel looted her body. Rei broke the window on the office she'd barricaded herself into and shot her crossbow out at the shadows to show enthusiasm, but being nonmagical, the bolts just passed straight through them, as expected

At this point, the clay golem had finished smashing through to the stairwell and lacking contrary orders, started heading down the stairs. Rei decided it would probably be a good idea to send a message down to the others to let them know how things were going up here, so she scribbled a quick note and attached it to the foot of her bat familiar. On the way down it passed by both the golem heading down and one of the severely wounded cornugons from last session heading up, forced to walk at least some of the way due to the dimensional barrier. Zerr decided that this was probably about time he stopped putting up with the tug of war between the guards and shadowdancer and broke out his mind blade to stab Snigrot. Seeing this, the guards stopped trying to grab the ambiguously guilty halfling and instead concentrated on attacking the definitely guilty shadowdancer for now. The other two shadowdancers headed for the vault stairs with the keys they'd stolen from Tiatyllin's body, only to have the cornugon appear in front of them and tell everyone up here that the vaults were under attack. It started to sink in that they'd wandered into someone else's story and they hurled accusations at Zerr, who just did a slightly embarrassed shrug, then went back to stabbing Snigrot. Being the coward of the group, (and having just taken a quarter of his hp) Snigrot decided to cut and run, using his shadow jump power to pass through the wall and start running away. Zerr used the moment of freedom to tumble through the broken window into the bosses office where Rei was hiding. The cornugon unleashed a lightning bolt on Samuel and Coalfinger, who managed to evade it, but also weighed their odds now they were down to two, rolled poorly on their morale checks and directed their shadow companions to keep the cornugon busy while they made their getaway. The cornugon took several rounds to kill them due to the incorporeality miss chances and took 11 points of strength damage in the process, but the huge power disparity meant this fight was never seriously in doubt. Exit shadowdancers, pursued by the human guards. Once it had eliminated the shadows, the cornugon looked around and decided that since Tiatyllin was dead, it had better take charge here. It snapped at the cowering human staff to release the slaadi. One of them went up to the one room our PC's still hadn't seen inside and opened the door. 8 grey slaadi came out. The cornugon directed half of them to go downstairs and attack the people down there, while the other half had to stay up here, secure the building and watch out for any further attacks from the outside. Meanwhile, Zerr & Rei stayed barricaded in the manager's office, temporarily forgotten about due to the noisier adversaries. Zerr used his open locks skills to get the window to the outside open, ready for them to slip out. Whether he'll use that to try and get down to help the others or just get away, we'll see next session. It looks like that will probably involve a lot more chaotic action and fast flipping of perspectives.