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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Altalazar" data-source="post: 3748360" data-attributes="member: 939">Sir Cordozo – Chapter Two-Hundred Forty-Three – Into the Dragons’ Lair    Our group numbered nine as we ventured in.  Morwen and Nimue brought up the front, along with Ee.  Nin, Larch, and his Dire Bear companion brought up the middle.  And Higgins and myself brought up the rear.  And then, behind both of us, was another friend, one summoned at great cost by Higgins.  A little surprise for the dragons.      Higgins cloaked all of us in an enchantment making us undetectable to dragons.  It supposedly covered every means a dragon could have to detect us.  And apparently it was utterly useless.  We did not venture very far into the cave before a dragon appeared and began sending forth magic against us.  Higgins quickly determined it was a projected image, though one that was still deadly from its magic.  I could also see that it was but a phantom, using my true sight, but that did not tell me where the dragon’s meat body lay.      The cavern narrowed and branched, and so we split up, still within sight of each other, and very quickly we found the second dragon.  Yes, there were two black dragons, both ancient, thankfully neither wyrms.  I could feel the dragon fear emanating from both of them, washing over me and beyond me, to little effect.  My companions were equally unaffected.  Except for one of us.      “Oh darnit, me sick of dragon’s fear!” I heard Ee exclaim with a barbarian sigh.      The image of the dragon then cast a spell against Nin, attempting to possess his body.  Nin shrugged it off, the spell ineffective.  The other dragon similarly tried to possess Ee.  Ee, in a rare showing of mental fortitude, totally shrugged it off as well.      “Me shrug off him spell!”  Ee yelled, triumphant.  “Him just scare me!”      Not wishing to further test our luck with the image, Higgins dispelled it.  And our ninth companion, taking up the rear, sent forth dancing lights ahead of us, to illuminate the cavern.  (We had not brought light sources, hoping to surprise the dragon while sneaking in under the extremely powerful, though apparently utterly useless, enchantment).      I bided my time, mentally enhancing my own protections, hardening my body to iron, and preparing for the epic combat that was about to unfold.      The image’s real body was found down another tunnel.  Nin and Ee chased it down.  The dragon there sent forth a line of acid against Nin.  The acid washed over him, totally ineffective, our earlier preparations bearing fruit.  Nin did his best to appear hurt, but the dragon apparently did not buy it.  For some reason thereafter, neither dragon ever tried to use its breath weapon against any of us again.  Perhaps they just assumed we were all immune.  Such draconic assumptions can prove very handy in the future.      Ee gave chase to the dragon, but it vanished, only to reappear behind Morwen, placing her between both of the huge beasts.  The dragons then proceeded to rip the flesh from Morwen’s body, nearly killing her not once, but twice, as Larch intervened in between, restoring health to her nearly dead body.      We were soon locked in an epic melee, the dragons in the middle, Morwen tumbling out to the rear.  Higgins hasted us all, and the dragons were apparently also moving more quickly than normal.  I concentrated and unraveled the enchantments protecting one of them while Larch unraveled the other’s protections.  Higgins sent spells to weaken one in both muscle and scales, to make him easier to fight.  Yet the dragon still proved almost impossible to harm.  Weapons glanced off harmlessly.  Then I brought up our ninth companion.      Swimming right up to the second dragon, he struck.  Our ninth companion was none other than a dragon himself.  A blue.  Large, but not nearly as huge as the blacks we faced, it was still a formidable companion.  He sent his lightning breath again and again into the flesh of the dragon.  But his claws never found purchase.  For one brief moment, one of the dragons turned its attention to my blue, severely wounding him, but then they turned their attention to the barbarian, who became more and more able to pierce the thick hide of the first dragon as his scales were weakened and his reflexes slowed by magic from Higgins.      For one brief moment, we had a scare as one dragon put up a dispelling wall for the other to swim through, in an attempt to end all of Higgins’s enchantments.  It worked for only one before Higgins brought down the wall with some magic of his own.  For good measure, I then penetrated the dragon’s mind, smashing his ego down to a pulp, ending any further enchantments from him.  Then I did the same to the other dragon, ending any threat that their sorcerous ways posed and also cutting off any spells of escape.  This would be a fight to the death.          Sir Cordozo – Chapter Two-Hundred Forty-Four – Fight to the Death    Surrounded, and with no means of easy escape, we wore down the first dragon until, in a vain attempt to flee, it tried to swim away, over us, and beyond us.  Larch quickly followed, as did his Bear, and they tore the remaining flesh from the draconic bones, leaving a floating corpse in the water.  We then turned our attention to the other dragon.      This dragon was barely scratched, and perhaps seeing its companion killed, it decided it would rather live than risk our combined wrath.  Unfortunately, any enchantments that could have seriously slowed it were all used up.  Then Higgins remembered that he had one spell left that might slow the dragon down, if only a little.  Higgins pointed his finger at the dragon and a ray of green light sailed forth, striking the dragon’s huge hide.  The dragon was barely shaken, but it was noticeably slower.  That gave us all the lead time we needed.  We quickly swarmed around it and ahead of it as it made a bee-line for the entrance to the cave.      Briefly, Higgins sought to wall it in, but then the entrance was so vast that no single spell could cover it.  Higgins started to lower its defenses little by little, giving the others a chance to scratch it through its thick hide.  But it looked like it was sure to escape the cave, if not our grasp, despite its near total collapse into clumsiness from Higgins’s last spell.      Not wishing to risk losing the dragon, and despite the long odds on it working, I summoned forth all of my mental energy and then brought to mind an image of the dragon’s death.  Then I forced that into the dragon’s mind, in an attempt to get the dragon to recall it as if it were fact, ending his life.  Given the huge mental prowess shown by this dragon, no doubt enhanced by magic (as we discovered later it was), there seemed little hope of affecting it.  And yet, the dragon, perhaps in its haste to escape, had a momentary lapse of its mental defenses.  A distraction, perhaps, a tinge of worry at its own mortality after so many decades of dominance.  And that tiny little opening was all it took.  I slammed the image of its death through that little crack and into its psyche.  Moments later, the dragon’s barely scratched, lifeless body lay floating near the entrance to the cave.      We found well over 100,000 coins worth of gold, platinum, and art within the dragons’ lair.  The dragon’s themselves had matching sets of enchanted items to protect themselves, including rings, bracers, and a vest.  With any luck, such items will fetch over twice that of the coinage we had already found.  We also found the jeweled egg and returned it to the Merfolk.  It was a good day.  Perhaps our moniker is an apt one, after all.      And thus we “Dragonslayers” returned to Cauldron, laden with loot and further tales to enhance our legend.  ===============================================Metagaming note - yes, that bit at the end was Cordozo trying a 'Recall Death' attack on the dragon.  Given the dragon's saves (enhanced by a +5 vest of resistance) the only chance the dragon could possibly have failed that will save was on a '1' - and sure enough, right there in the open, the DM rolled and the roll was a '1' - Of course, we probably could have chased the dragon down and eventually killed it (though it had like 500 hit points left), that just was too sweet not to savor, particularly since we managed to get it before it got out of the cave (which it would have in another round).  That was a nice capstone to go with the beginning of the combat, when both dragons tried to Magic Jar from afar both Ee and Nin, and both of them rolled natural '20's on the save.  (Ee usually fails will saves - he failed his save against dragon fear...)    I just wanted to share - sometimes the metagame is apparent from the text, but I thought it would be fun to elaborate.</blockquote>

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