Piratecat's Updated Story Hour! (update 4/03 and 4/06)

[Piratecat]

The Defenders stand in triumphant silence around the smoking bodies of almost 400 ghouls. Someone whistles softly, a rising tone of impressed admiration. The fire elementals crackle merrily as they try to get through the acid fog, and vile humours drip from Velendo and Malachite’s armor. Everyone takes a big sigh of relief.

The moment is broken by the sound of applause from behind them. Everyone spins, expecting the worse and raising their weapons. Instead of evil (Mara checks) undead (Malachite checks), they see a group of people standing at the base of the hill, looking up at them excitedly. There’s a dwarven woman, several bodyguards, some clerks and a servant or two. The dwarf is wearing cloth of gold decorated with lace and silk, jeweled chains adorning her slight beard, and she’s leading the applause by clapping her silk-gloved hands.

“Get out of here!” snarls Nolin, his voice carrying. “You’re in terrible danger!”

The female dwarf answers, her voice a rich contralto. “There was no one in town to accept our goods, and we saw the light from our boat. We heard the fight, too! What happened here?” She holds a silk cloth up to her nose; apparently, her sense of smell is enough to tell her that the Defenders were slaughtering some sort of foul monster instead of hapless townsfolk.

“Ghouls,” the Defenders answer, “hundreds of them, and it isn’t safe yet. Please return to your boat.” The dwarven woman twitches her handkerchief in dismissal, and TomTom’s keen ears hear her whispering to a clerk beside her “…ones I was telling you about, that the Council…”

TomTom sighs. When the Defenders quickly decide that they need to head underground to assure that the problem is dealt with, he volunteers to stay up on top, to watch the civilians and keep his eyes out for any more tunnels appearing. Tao sinks briefly into a clairvoyance thanks to her magical helm. “There’s more down there,” she reports, “with more tiny glowing eyeballs. And they’re retreating!”

A little more than a minute has passed since the beginning of the combat, and everyone is still mass hasted. Most of the Defenders gather around the huge oak tree that Mara created, and Nolin is the first person to crawl down the tunnel it has grown up through. He is preceded by Agar’s prying eyes spell (serving as an advance scout to seek out fleeing undead), and he's followed by his fellow adventurers.

At the bottom of the necropede-carved tunnel, Nolin crawls around the huge roots of the magical oak tree into a largish cavern. He has darkvision up, but he’s still surprised when what he thought was a boulder in front of him rises up to a height of almost ten feet. Startled, Nolin stares at it, and his gaze takes in the half-rotted eyeballs in its insectoid face. Wait! Are those eyeballs? Because there are smaller eyeballs farther in… but those big eyes must be eyes, they’re leaking fluids… but those little eyes could be eyes, too…. Four eyes, more and more and more….

Confused, Nolin doesn’t snap out of his daze until the ghoulish umber hulk grabs him around the neck with one massive claw and tries to peel his face off with half-rotted mandibles. Nolin screams a warning as blood streams down his face, but his muscles don’t freeze up from the intense cold seeping through his bones.

The Defenders rush down the narrow opening, and Malachite’s descent is aided by his githyanki-crafted boots of skating. Moving at high speed as he reaches the tunnel’s bottom, he cannons into the monster and hits it with his sunsword Aleax one, two, three times. Aleax shouts in exultation – it’s the first time that Malachite has ever used him against undead - and glows with the heat of the sun as the blade shears through tendons and rotting flesh. Malachite skids to a stop, the beetle-like monster in three pieces in front of him, and gives Nolin a steely look as the bard fully snaps out of the confusion effect.

Moving as quickly as they can, the Defenders advance across the cavern and into another burrowed tunnel dug by the necropede from the earth itself. They move in three horizontal battle lines through the 15 ft. wide tunnel, the two paladins and Tao in the lead, the spellcasters and rogues taking up the middle. Raevynn is in dire bear form, taking up the rear. “Watch out,” warns Malachite. “There's another undead within 60 feet. I can sense it.” Everyone slows, weapons out.

Tao is the first one to see it: another ten foot tall insectoid monstrosity, moving from an alcove into the middle of the tunnel ahead. Its two huge claws swing forward… but instead of attacking the Defenders, it rips at the walls and ceiling. Tao reacts first. “It’s trying to collapse the tunnel on our heads!” She charges forward, even as clods of dirt begin to fall from the weakened tunnel ceiling.

To be continued….

 

[Piratecat]

Hasted, she charges the monster with both swords drawn. It isn’t hard to hit, as its shell-like carapace is cracked and flaking, and Tao’s swords seek out the weak patches in its natural armor. Within seconds she hits it a full five times, and with a hideous croak it collapses backwards. Chunks of dirt shower down on Tao’s head, but the ceiling doesn’t seem like it’s going to collapse just yet. Tao must have destroyed the thing in time.

She looks back at Malachite. “You cut that other one in pieces in just three swings!” she accuses. “I had to hit this thing five times, and even then I just barely….”

“Come on,” says Malachite brusquely, and pushes past her with Mara beside him. The rest of the Defenders follow, and the dire bear shrugs at Tao as if to say What are you going to do?

Tao shrugs back and pushes her way back to the front of the battle formation. She stops for a second to stare at Agar; he had summoned two celestial bears. Unfortunately, he’s an alienist, and so the bears both have spider-like tentacles instead of legs and eyes on stalks. Agar is riding one of them. “This is Proudclaw,” he says happily, patting the bear he’s riding upon its wriggling head, “and this is Mightyfang.“ Tao and Raevynn trade another horrified glance as the tentacled bears scuttle forward.

The tunnel winds slightly to avoid rock outcroppings, and then takes a sharp dip downwards. The group is highly aware of the tons of earth above their head that could collapse at any time. There is no light, as the heroes are relying on a mass darkvision spell, and noise seems amplified down here below the earth. Ahead of them down the sharp incline, Nolin can hear Them waiting. There’s no breathing, just the sound of scores of mouths salivating at the scent of living flesh, the faint scrape of talons on stone, the scattered moan of hunger or giggle of delight. “Heads up, guys,” he warns. “There they are.” Mara raises her mace Lightbinder and calls forth a daylight spell; in the hundred or so foot radius of pure light, she can see the first line of ghouls far down the tunnel. It looks like they’re mostly deep gnomes, rotting bald heads and powerful stubby legs, bone javelins clutched in greasy claws. Behind the four rows of twenty ghouls, another group squats, tower shields raised to provide full cover for whatever is behind them. Forked tongues dart in and out of bloodless mouths, licking sores, as the gnomes almost mewl in anticipation of the fresh food in front of them... but they hold their formation.

From somewhere in the darkness, something streaks towards the group, and the air is suddenly alive with razor-sharp jabbing bones. As the energy passes, most of the Defenders are bleeding badly. “What was that?” Tao asks. No one knows. Agar sends his two bears forward to attack, eager that they act as a distraction while they soften up the foe.

Nolin pulls forth the “Shara Ball,” a magic item created by Shara that contains a little piece of her soul and her power. “What we need,” declares Nolin as he shakes the ball to activate it, “is some fire power.” Then he gazes down into the ball. “Hello, Shara! We’re battling hordes of undead, and we’re in need of your assistance. Can you please aid us?”

A tiny image of Shara appears inside the ball. Her voice sounds tinny as she answers tartly. “Of course I will. Hold me up. I wouldn’t want you to get hurt, Nolin.” There is just a calculated trace of amused sarcasm in her voice. Your sister wouldn’t forgive me if I did, thinks the magic item to itself, and as Nolin holds the ball upwards a chain lightning streaks out of it to decimate the front line of foes. The thunder is deafening in the narrow tunnel, and the smell of ozone overpowers the reek of rotting flesh. The ball goes dark, its energy spent.

Velendo casts true seeing and then summons a Huge fire elemental named Conflagratis. The elemental ignites into life and gladly crackles across the rock and dirt towards the ghouls and the two tentacular celestial bears. It leaves a trail of dying fire in its wake, and the flame from its body casts hellish illumination upon the undead. It strikes an undead, incinerating it. Insects rise up and buzz away from the burning body, disturbed from their home in the undead flesh.

Malachite unleashes another positive energy burst. Instead of the wide-spread damage from before, however, the emerald green light causes only three of the six visible ghouls explode. The other three remain upright, smoking, and the creatures behind the line of shields seem uninjured.

“There must be something special about those shields!” offers Velendo, and then the shield bearers make a remarkable maneuver. Someone behind them yells “Now!” in a croaking, hideous dwarvish voice. As one, the shield bearers pull aside, revealing the faint glimpse of more creatures behind them. A massive bone ballistae bolt streaks forward, slamming into Conflagratis and ripping a rent in his flaming body. At the same time, a dull gray line of energy shoots forward from the darkness, exploding into an ice-cold ball of shrieking spirits that seem to rip life energy away from the Defenders caught in the blast. Then the shieldbearers close up ranks, closing off the view and reestablishing full cover.

“Split up! We’re in fireball formation!” Mara cries.

“Split up where?” Nolin answers. “It’s a 15 foot wide tunnel. Let’s hope they don’t have a lightning bolt.”

Malachite is taking it in stride, but Velendo and Nolin are goggling at the ghouls' tactics. "Can stupid undead DO that?" Nolin asks to no one in particular. No one answers him, as the answer seems obvious: these don't seem to be mindless undead.

Raevynn has shifted into dire bat form, and flies forward near the ceiling. She’s at a high enough angle to be able to “see” over the shields with her blindsight. She realizes that there’s some eighty more undead back there, along with a ghoulish flying dwarf and some sort of horrible bone construct that looks like a ballista with legs. Raevynn flies back towards the Defenders, a plan forming in her head.

Velendo is injured, but quickly realizes that he needs to remove the shield wall. Flying, he swoops close. His intent is to turn undead at a high enough angle to affect the ghouls holding the shields, thus destroying the formation, and then fly 90 feet backwards to safety. The first half of his plan works beautifully. He moves into position, summons his faith, and turns. The ghouls are blasted from existence, and their shields – made from some hardened mushroom fiber – clatter to the ground.

Velendo didn’t anticipate that eighty ghouls would be readying their actions, poised to throw their bone javelins at the first enemy that revealed itself.

The hail of sharpened javelins rains down upon Velendo, and even his armor and powerful shield can’t fully protect him. With eight weapons sticking out from his body, he drops and bounces off of the cold dark earth, blood fountaining up from his body.

Squealing with delight and unrestrained hunger, the army of ghouls surges forward.

To be continued…

 

[Piratecat]

What else do they need to do in Eversink?

• Finagle their way out of slavery (half the group are technically slaves for the next five years, as a sentence for a crime.)
  
• Find out whether or not Tao legally owns the city's massive prison and the island it stands on, as per a deed she inherited; and if she does, whether she gets to (or has to) keep it, and whether she owes back taxes on it, and whether the city owes her rent for it, and whether she's responsible for the prisoners, and whether or not this can be leveraged into obtaining freedom for people enslaved to the High Council of Eversink.
  
• Dispose of a minor relic they hold from the church of Korok, God of Luck.
  
• Collect the small army of 30 dwarves that is marching towards Eversink.
  
• Deal with training; everyone went up a level, but Nolin (for instance) needs 9 weeks of down time to achieve this. Uh oh....
  
• Deal with fallout, if any, from the destruction of the Dockside Royals.
  
• Make sure that the baby-shields were returned to their mothers, or at least to good homes.
  
• Make sure that the evil weapon-breaking trident was destroyed.
  
• Find out if Lord Griggan is still trapped in a demi-plane, sealed off by a forbiddance spell and totally without food.
  
• Get ambushed and eaten by Brinedeath, the massive black dragon.
  
• Pick up any magical items they're having commissioned.
  
• Find out whether Mara intends to keep her ties to the Church of Aeos.

I'm probably missing a few things, but that's the heart of it!

 

[Piratecat]

Get ambushed and eaten by Brinedeath, the massive black dragon.

Whoops! How'd that dragon thing get in there? Sorry, ignore that, it's a complete mistake. Not relevant at all. Seriously.

I do training time as taking one half your level in weeks. They're looking for a magical way around this; they know Hagiok the lich has invented potions that cut the time to several days, while your mind replays and absorbs everything that has happened to you. They're hoping that Lord Ioun can create something similar. Velendo is also considering rigging a Calphas' Comfortable Castle up as a training facility to allow them to train on the road.

The Shara Ball didn't cast control undead because Nolin asked for blasting (and because I didn't think of it!). There's always next time!

The dwarves are led by a dwarven fighter named Splinder, a former follower of Tao's back in the 2e days. He was given a tremendous amount of treasure from the dracolich's hoard, with which he left to pay the dowry on the girl he wanted to marry. In exchange, he offered to raise as many dwarves as he could into a small army for taking on undead. Denied entry to the Kingdom of Gaunt (which has a dim view on mercenary forces ever since one tried to conquer the capitol), they've set off to find the Defenders the long way.

 

[KidCthulhu]

• Get ambushed and eaten by Brinedeath, the massive black dragon.

Hold on just a moment there, bucky! (Checks Palm Pilot) I don't remember scheduling a claw/claw/bite. I'm not showing any appointments for a Mr. Brinedeath. And I don't care how many hit dice you have, if you don't have an appointment, you don't see the Defenders!

Remind me to post the 47a/410-c form "Requisition for Enemy Engagement - Evil" for the Defenders. This is the form our enemies have to fill out if they want us to spend some of our valuable time kicking their a**.

 

[Piratecat]

Velendo, lying unconscious on the rough ground 40 feet in front of anyone else, is in terrible danger. If the quantity of blood pouring out of him is any guide, Velendo is seconds from death, and any more damage will surely kill him. Malachite moves towards him, but he’s afraid that he may not be in time.

He ducks as two fireballs and two lightning bolts flash out from the hasted Nolin and Agar, battering both the flying dwarven wizard and the huge skeletal construct with red-hot flames and crackling arcs of iridescent electricity. The fireballs also blast away dozens of ghoulish troops and leave cracked flesh and sooty corpses behind. Ozone, and the odor of spoiled, burned meat, fills the smoky air.

The wizard still hangs in the air, skin smoking. He barks an order to the scores of ghoulish troops that remain, and they begin to surge forward. Too far back for the others to easily see, Raevynn watches through her dire bat form’s blindsight as the undead siege engine plucks a massive bony projectile from its own body and begins ratcheting back its tremendous bone ballistae. She tries to shout a warning, but is still wildshaped.

Tao focuses on the wizard, prays, and points. Her first searing light ever streaks from her finger. The brilliant beam of light sizzles down the tunnel and strikes the flying dwarf square in the belly. Already weakened badly from the fireballs and lightning bolts, his wispy beard and his stomach all disappear in an incinerating flash. Decomposed innards spray the ghouls beneath him, and he drops.

Several squads of deep gnome and dwarvish ghouls rush forward, but only ten or so are able to get past the huge fire elemental and tentacled bears. The ghouls are clearly focused on Velendo and the smell of his blood; the Defenders, however, are waiting for them. Malachite reaches the cleric in time and spins Aleax in his gauntleted hands. The holy sword lays on hilt, its healing energy flooding through the elderly cleric’s frame. Not a moment too soon, either; the front line of gnomish ghouls leaps upon Velendo’s body, burying him with their maggot-riddled flesh as their mouths begin to rip and tear. Mara, standing next to Malachite, turns undead; a handful of the ghouls are blasted into steam, but not nearly enough. Velendo tries his best to fly away from the clutching and clinging undead, but they’re too strong for him. “Bugger this,” he thinks, and casts mass heal.

The ghouls are hanging on him, pinning his arms and legs as they try to chew souvenirs off of his body, but the crystal belt that TomTom constructed for him keeps Velendo’s mind exquisitely focused. He shrugs off the distraction, finishes the spell, and the wounds of everyone nearby close completely as Calphas’ blessing pours forth. The ghouls nearby aren’t so lucky; the positive energy blasts most of the remaining flesh from their bones, leaving them horribly injured. They’re quickly destroyed by the other Defenders, but there are still close to a hundred undead surging forward in a rotting wave that threatens to overrun the Defenders’ front line.

And then Raevynn acts.

Switching back to elven form, she casts one of her most powerful spells: a fire storm, using her knowledge of metamagic to switch the fire for acid. She can feel the energy swirling around her, drawing from some unknown plane as she transmutes the fire into acid, filling the tunnel’s smoky air with telltale shimmers before snapping into life. And just like that, the area just beyond Velendo and Mara becomes a maelstrom of acid-choked death, stretching hundreds of feet back down the necropede’s tunnel!

When the storm of acid passes, the skeletal construct is just a half-broken pitted hulk, and there is little left of the ghoulish army other than acid-eaten teeth, bits of fingernail, and the powder of bone. Even the tiny flying orbs seem to have been destroyed. It took two minutes from start to finish, but the Defenders have managed to finish off every single ghoul in the invading force. All of them, returned to the earth.

“Well, that wasn’t so bad,” offers Agar.

“Hah!” shouts Velendo. He gazes skyward, hands spread, as if daring Calphas to comment as well.

Later that night, the townspeople are back in their beds. Observers are posted, but the menace seems to have been destroyed. Oddly enough, the people watching the graveyard claim to have seen the ghostly forms of hundreds of people, drifting up towards the sky, but no one is sure whether to believe them or not. The heroes might have been able to tell… but after a feast, they’re sleeping the well-deserved sleep of the just.

 

[KidCthulhu]

The ghouls are hanging on him, pinning his arms and legs as they try to chew souvenirs off of his body

I can see Pappa Ghoul now, returning home to his clamouring ghoul children. "What did you bring us from the surface?"

Smiling, he hands them each one of Velendo's ears.

"My parents went to the surface world, and all got was this lousy gobbet."

 

[Piratecat]

You see, our party is undeground (kinda stuck) and we too are fighting ghouls. we killed about 30-40 in one battle (level 6, 7 PCs).

That's really good! Remember, it's easier to kill low-HD undead when you're 15th level... even when they have turn resistance and a competent commander.

The really delightful thing about this session was when Raevynn's player thought of the acid storm. I look over from dealing with Velendo (who was at -7 hit points) and Blackjack and Raevynn are shaking with laughter, chortling and rubbing their hands together. "What's up?" I ask. "Nothing!" they answer together. Apparently, they were figuring out the area of effect for the spell, and had just figured out that in the 15' wide tunnel it reached from the middle of the battlemap, off the long end of the table, all the way to Raevynn's shirt. Filling all the space. Doing 15d6 to everything in the area. Everything. They wouldn't tell me yet... safer that way, I suppose!

*sniff* Man, that was a cool skeletal siege engine, too. Sigh.

KidCthulhu wishes me to point out that the only other way they could have gotten this effect was to kill Nolin. With the phoenix sharing his soul, he erupts into a 19d6 fire storm the round or so after he gets killed. Standard party procedure is that if Nolin dies, everyone runs.

 

[Piratecat]

Speaking of which, how did Nolin end up with a phoenix inside him?

He was wearing a unique item called a phoenix cloak when he was killed by inch-tall goblins. Finalist, "most embarrassing death ever."

Mind you, he was only 2" tall at the time. In the adventure Chadrathar's Bane, the whole group was shrunk to the height of two inches. Arcade had been captured by the goblins living on the ceiling beams, who were about to sacrifice another prisoner. Nolin swooped in to save Arcade, fumbled and stabbed himself with his frostbrand dagger, and (since he was considered a flame-using creature when wearing that cloak) really hurt himself badly. Arcade got away with the captured girl, but the goblins closed on Nolin and cut him down. They threw his body off the rafter, and it fell a tremendous sidtance to the floor.

And then, while the party stared in horror, it exploded in a huge gout of flame. When the fire cleared, Nolin was standing there again, naked, his hair on fire and carrying the soul of the phoenix that had been bound into the cloak.

 

[KidCthulhu]

I don't know if Pkitty intended it. I do remember asking hopefully "Hey, a cloak of the phoenix. Don't suppose I blow up and get born again."

And the goblin thing wasn't comic at the time. It was brave and foolhardy, the stuff of legends. Nolin gave his life to save Arcade. It only became goofy when we thought about it later. "Killed by 1" tall goblins? Maybe I won't write a stirring ballad about that."