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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 3942603" data-attributes="member: 63">4th Edition?A beleaguered village in the wilderness provides an evening of shelter for the heroes. While staying at the local inn, the party hears of monsters that lair in a ruined temple outside of town. If these monsters were slain, perhaps the heroes could bring a point of light to this dark world. The party heads out the next morning, guided by the town's priest Finnaeus. While climbing a cliff up to the temple, they're attacked by 4 mountaintooth crawlers (undead wolves that lurk on slopes) led by a worg warlock. The party's human warlord screams a battle cry, allowing the halfling rogue to use her Shadow Foot maneuver to sprint into the middle of the  wolf pack as an immediate action. Then the party's eladrin wizard uses her innate power to then swap the position of the halfling rogue and her dragonborn fighter ally via teleportation. The dragonborn fighter employs his Least Whirlwind Wallop maneuver to strike all four wolves at once, dealing some damage and knocking them out of pack formation.The warlord, rogue, and tiefling warlock then use their normal actions for the turn to hack, stab, and eldritchly zap the wolves. However, the worg warlock conjures the power of the Funion Miasma, trapping the fighter, rogue, and warlord in stinking tendrils. While the mountaintooth crawlers gnaw at the melee warriors, the wizard and warlock turn their attention to the hostile spellcaster. The eladrin wizard pulls forth her orb and conjures the power of the Iron Sigil to bind the worg in place, while the tiefling warlock strikes it with eldritch bolts, using the Spelldeath Tongue invocation to successfully dispel the worg's own magic when he strikes it.Freed from the miasma, the heroes chop the undead wolves to bits, and are angling to beat down the worg warlock when it turns to a swarm of shadowy bats and flees. The warlord says, "Good job everyone," and everyone heals back their damage. Combat has taken 24 seconds in game, 10 minutes out of game. Still nearly four hours of session left.The heroes soon make it to the ruined temple, a sprawling complex on three different levels, with some rooms built into the mountain. Finnaeus tells them there's a vault with treasure that can only be opened by securing the holy water from the main prayer chamber and pouring it out from the silver urn in the old priest's quarters. The priest stays behind, kneeling and praying at a sacred rest circle located outside the temple (there are many of these throughout the land, often next to dungeons; if you set up a tent here and say a ritual, you can stay for up to 12 hours, and nothing can attack you).The dragonborn fighter suggests that he could just hack through the vault door with a pick, instead of having to fight all the monsters, but the DM tells the player that walls and doors in this dungeon are impervious to damage. It's, um, ancient magic.The heroes go room by room, usually coming across 5 goblins, whose hoots and hollers call another 5 or 10 goblins from nearby areas, or occasionally a blackpelt urdwolf, special goblin-trained wolves that can climb on walls. The heroes recognize a strange similarity between these wolves and the mountaintooth crawlers. In each fight, the fighter does something awesome like tearing off a wolf's head and using its jaw as a climbing piton to impale another wolf into the wall or something, and the rogue quickdraws dozens of daggers and sneak attacks everything that isn't directly attacking her, while the warlock causes goblins to faint from fear one by one, and the eladrin wizard calls thunderbolts from the sky (even when indoors) to stun several goblins at once.The warlord does nothing on his own but shout encouragement like a cheerleader, letting everyone else do cool stuff.After 6 encounters, the heroes have used up a few of their per-day abilities, and it's been about two hours of game time. They then manage to defeat the goblin necromancer mini-boss (and his skeletal horde) to get to the silver urn, and slay the orc paladin of Orcus mini-boss (and his firemaw hellhound minion) to get the holy water. Against the anti-paladin, the dragonborn fighter wanted to break the orc's morningstar by chopping it in half, but he found out the weapon was invincible (it must've been made from the same material they make the doors out of).Finally it is time to open the vault, but just before they do the rogue's trap sense alerts her that there's a trap, and she stops the party. The trap is a convoluted mechanism that requires all 5 PCs to stand in different areas of the room to depress pressure plates that then open a panel which lets the rogue disarm the trap. However, she fails her third skill check to disable the final mechanism, and a tiny poison arrow pops out. The warlord was ready for this, though, and shouts, "Move!", which lets the rogue move 20 ft. out of the way before the arrow can reach her.When the vault opens, however, the heroes hear Finnaeus cackling from behind them. They turn and see the man has replaced his old holy symbol with that of Judas (god of betrayal), and he spits a curse at them. The warlock slays him with one blast, but then the curse summons a greenscale barghest of Tiamat, a truly elite foe. The heroes have a 10-round battle that takes half an hour to run, and by the end they have used up all their per-day abilities, but they have won the fight, and it is time to collect their reward.Inside the vault there is a +1 longs-, wait, the dragonborn fighter uses a pick? A +1 pick. And a +1 orb. And boots of jumping-a-little-better for the rogue, and a undergloom flamecrown for the warlock to let him deal +1 fire damage with his eldritch blasts, and a potion of big lungs for the warlock to let him yell even louder. There's also a map to the next town.</blockquote>

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