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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Menexenus" data-source="post: 3322429" data-attributes="member: 8951">Session 7: Assault on the Ebon Triad, take 128th of Planting.  Before heading to the Feral Dog, Tarric went back to the militia garrison to buy some cheap potions of Cure Light Wounds.      Upon arriving at the Feral Dog, the party was escorted to a back room where Smenk gave them a final run-down of what little he remembered of the cult complex.  Although he had been blindfolded for a great deal of the trip, he recalled going down a creaky hand-powered elevator.  At the bottom of the elevator was a dark cathedral.  On 3 of the walls were doors with evil insignias painted on them.  When he was led through the back door with a hand and eye symbol, he had to follow a twisting path through dark corridors with the sound of strange skittering feet moving around him.  At the end of this trip he was intimidated into providing the cult with supplies by a man in green robes wearing a metallic mask over his face.  Smenk reminded the party that when he receives this faceless man's head and mask, he will release Katawan.  The party members were then packed in crates which were rigged so that they could easily bust out.  Although the party could no longer see anything, their sounds and feelings told them everything they needed to know about what came next.  The crates were loaded onto a wagon which was pulled by a team of horses to the Dourstone mine.  The mine guards gave them admittance.  The crates were off-loaded and carried through a locked gate to an elevator shaft.  The elevator made several trips up and down.  When all the elevator noise stopped, the party members heard a door open and strange voices of 2 or 3 men entering.  They spoke in a harsh language that none of them could understand.  Killian felt his crate being dragged by one of these men.  He chose that moment to bust out.  Upon hearing Killian bust out of his crate, Alexander did the same, but the rest of the group found that they were unable to break out immediately.  Killian and Alexander found themselves in a darkly lit subterranean cathedral with vaulted ceilings, ornate pillars, and ancient stonework.  The elevator shaft (which is of much newer construction, mostly of wood and iron) came down out of a hole in the vaulted ceiling to the floor in the middle of the vast cathedral chamber.  There were short passages leading to doors on the north, east, and west sides of the room.  Each door had the symbol of a different evil deity painted on it - Hextor, Vecna, and Erythnul.  The south end of the cathedral chamber was domed rather than vaulted.  Beneath the dome was a large rectangular pit filled with a thick black liquid.  A winding staircase led to a platform 30 feet above the black liquid.  They saw that about 12 crates with the Feral Dog insignia have been piled near the elevator.  Near the crates stood two dumbfounded TIEFLING GUARDS with horns on their heads and battleaxes at their sides.    Killian commenced the attack as the others made their way out of their crates.  One of the guards put up a magical area of inky blackness, giving one of them time to buff up while the other one ran to the door with a symbol of Hextor on it and began pounding and yelling.  Alexander webbed the western door while Alees tied a rope to the door knob of the northern door.  A group of 8 SKELETONS in rusty full plate came lumbering out of the eastern door.  Killian attempted to turn them once, but failed.  The second time he was successful and 7 of them were instantly destroyed.  The last skeleton emerged into the cathedral chamber and was quickly destroyed by a shower of attacks.    A group of 8 CULT FANATICS wearing studded leather and carrying long spears emerged from a room at the far end of the hallway.  They tried to taunt the party into charging forward.  When that failed, half of them surged forward to meet the party.  Alexander cast a spell that sent 3 of the 4 who charged forward running away from the battle.  The party quickly dispatched the last charger, and then moved in to finish off the remaining 4 fanatics.  Once the party entered the large room, a DIRE BOAR charged in.  The party flanked it and dispatched it with surprising ease.    The 3 fanatics who had run screaming away from the battle before seemed to suddenly come to their senses and opened a double door into a large lit room at the far end of the corridor.  One of the tiefling guards is with them using a longbow to shoot at the party from afar.  Killick, Tarric, and Alees follow them into the large lit room.  As they enter, the 3 party members realize that this room is an arena with sand on the floor, a large statue of Hextor in the middle of the room, and a 15 foot high catwalk along 3 walls.  Suddenly the double doors closed and locked behind them!  The party was split in two!  Three clerics of Hextor, 2 troglodyte zombies, and 2 tiefling guards with bows appeared on the catwalk above.  The clerics began casting spells and the tieflings began shooting down on them.    The three trapped party members began fighting the cultists who had led them into the arena, but it quickly became apparent to everyone involved that remaining in the arena while their enemies attacked them from above was a recipe for disaster.  Desperate to open the double doors, Tarric launched himself at them and miraculously broke the lock!  At almost the same time, Killian took out the Wand of Shatter that he had looted from the Whispering Cairn and blew one of the doors to splinters.  These actions gave the three party members a way out of the kill zone.  The head cleric summoned a FIENDISH APE to pursue the party.  Alees, who had been backed into a corner, tried to tumble toward the door but was hit by a spear and fell unconscious.  At almost the same instant Killian was felled by a tiefling arrow.  The party withdrew into the hallway and used healing potions to revive their unconscious comrades.  The Hextorites pursued the party into the hallway.  Alexander cast a Color Spray that ended up incapacitating one of the clerics and stunning the head cleric.  After the head cleric recovered his senses, he cast many spells at the party, like Sound Burst, Hold Person, and Spiritual Weapon.  After the party dropped 2 tieflings and a zombie, the two groups seemed to reach a stalemate.  However, eventually a tiefling got in a lucky axe blow that struck Killian in the heart.  With no magical healing left in the party, Killian died moments later from this mortal wound.  The party was shocked and enraged by the savage loss of a childhood friend.  They wanted bloody revenge against the Hextorites.  However, when the cleric of Hextor that had been knocked out by Alexander's Color Spray revived, the party realized that their only hope was to withdraw via the elevator and fight again another day.  Alexander quickly grabbed Killian's Circlet of Wisdom and his Wand of Shatter.  Then the party made haste back to the elevator with the Hextorites in hot pursuit.  With the remaining Hextorites jeering at them, Killick, Tarric, Alexander, and Alees crowded into the elevator and pulled themselves up to safety, mourning their lost comrade.When the got to the top of the elevator shaft, the found themselves in a dark, rough-hewn mine shaft.  They blocked the elevator mechanism so that it could not be lowered.  They scouted the mine shaft in both directions.  In one direction, they found a cave-in that blocked the shaft.  In the other direction, they found a wooden gate that was apparently locked or barred from the outside.  They had no choice but to camp for the night in the darkness.  The party's situation was dire, and the party members' spirits were low.  Not only had they lost their childhood friend, but they had also lost the party's only healer.  In addition, they could only wonder about the fate of their other childhood friend Katawan who was being held captive by the honorless Balabar Smenk.  Without help, the party's future looked grim...</blockquote>

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