NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charles Rampant" data-source="post: 6772015" data-attributes="member: 32659">By contrast, my group managed to get back on track. I think that in my last post I had commented on how they got smacked around in the Earth Monastery and lost two party members. Well in the (two? three?) sessions since this, they fled out into the hills, rested in some brush, and then went back to Red Larch. Here they resupplied a bit (still resenting the loss of the magical dagger to the Air Cultists) and picked up a new character: a Zhentarim Gold Dwarf Cleric of Chauntea. It is an interesting mix, and one that is proving entertaining in play thus far. At this point we had only four players, as the Bard's player decided to drop out. They headed back to the monastery, where they made an attack through the garden. They began by eliminating the Gargoyles in the garden, two Monks left to guard the altar, two more Gargoyles, and finally a the Duergar who were sent to find them by Hellenrae, alerted to their presence. After this the party was fairly beat up, so they exited the building, and camped out in a hidden hole underneath some brush in the hills. The cultists took stock at this point, realised that basically the top floor only had Hellenrae and a half-dozen Monks left, and decided to keep watch from the front door and concentrate their guard in the altar room. Well, the next day, the players returned and started methodically investigating (and looting) the monastery, finding the stairs down into Jurth's room. He had naturally been alerted to the attacks on the monastery, and so him and his mates attacked on sight, but the players were able to defeat him without too much trouble. After some discussion of the confusing passages they found, they went south and turned to the right, before following their left wall until they reached the various passages and doors in the top left of the map. Curious about the stairs down, they decided to first check out the battered steel door... and were not really happy to face an Umber Hulk. Defeating it in a bit of a slugfest, the players then got into a rather amusing debate over whether it was a good idea to eat the Umber Hulk's corpse, as the Warlock had been telepathically instructed by his Great Old One patron. Disgusted at this, the Chauntean Cleric stormed up the stairs, only to run face-to-face with a roomful of Monks and Hellenrae. Did you know that Hellenrae has Stunning Strike? The Cleric didn't. Happy days. This was a REALLY tough fight; the players had not taken any time to prepare or heal after the Umber Hulk fight, and now they were swarmed by fast-moving opponents that knocked the Cleric out in the first round. By the end of the fight, the only PC standing was the Barbarian, who was on 2 HP: but Hellenrae was also dead, having been negated for most of the fight by a Phantasmal Force spell and then chopped to bits by said Beserker. The remaining monks looked at the Beserker, and decided that perhaps they would try their chances another time. In other words, I didn't want to TPK the party (uh, again) and felt that the monks would retreat to their temple below rather than throw their lives away against the nutjob with the great sword. So the party were quickly woken up by the Beserker, and they conducted a check of the rest of the tunnels and building. They found, and freed, the prisoners, including not only a Delegate but also a new PC: an Air Genasi Waterdhavian Noble Swashbuckler, who joined the party when she heard of all the exciting fights and treasure that they were getting involved with. The Zhentarim cleric promptly tried to recruit her.We ended with the players meeting the Lich, who told them to piss off, and after briefly considering their chances the players did so. They then left, escorting the prisoners, and returned to Red Larch. There they touched base with Harbuckle, and made their plans to take the fight back to the Feathergale Spire, and finally reclaim all their damn equipment. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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