Run #43 was a couple of nights ago. It featured more traps, some unexpected diplomacy, and an enormous can of whup-ass opened up on a solo monster. As usual, this will be more of an executive summary than a true narrative. Due to personal time constraints, it will be shorter than other such posts; Piratecat will doubtless want to fill in lots of little details.
The only door out of the revealed-illusion room opened into a dark tunnel, from which the sounds of wind were emanating, though we felt nothing on our side. Some experimentation revealed that the doorway was actually a portal (to a section of the Feywild, it turns out), and that the tunnel was filled with a hurricane-force wind blowing away from us. We tied all of our remaining rope together – about 150’ worth – and anchored one end in the room with Sovereign Glue.
We crawled down the rope (effectively, due to the wind, it was like descending into a pit), hoping that 150’ would be enough to get us safely to the tunnel’s terminus. Alas, no such luck. So, there we were, strung on our rope in the 100+ mph, with an unknown distance still to go. Our solution? After much kicking and contorting, we used another dose of Sovereign Glue to stick a patch of the rope near to us to the ceiling of the tunnel. Then Cobalt climbed back “up” to where we had come from, and cut the rope. This bought us another 150’, though it also meant Cobalt was whip-sawed from one end of the tunnel to the other. He barely held on.
300’ was enough, it turned out. Cobalt was flung into the room beyond the tunnel – another deadly puzzle chamber. The others finished climbing “down” the rope and soon joined him. This new room was a large dome-shaped cavern, brightly lit by a small floating “sun” up near the top. Hovering in the air between this sun and the floor were many large boulders, like small asteroids slowly drifting in space. At the top of the dome was an inverted lake; if gravity were suddenly to reverse, we’d fall into it, assuming we avoided the rocks and the sun.
The deadly part? The sun was hot!. Every round that we didn’t hide in the shade of one of the floating boulders, we were severely burned. Worse, the sun and rocks were actually nature spirits, and the sun-spirit could order the rock-spirits to move aside. So, we madly dashed from shadow to shadow while the sun tried to fry us alive. (Stealth checks, made much easier by our use of the Traveler’s Camouflage ritual before heading into the wind tunnel.) There was no obvious exit from this cavern, so we guessed we had to make it up to the lake, some 50’ above our heads.
Some experiments showed that as one left the ground, gravity became progressively weaker, until there was no gravity near the center. Then gravity picked up again as one neared the lake, but inverted. We just needed to clear the half-way point in order to start falling “upward” toward the water.
Bramble, our shaman, bought us the time we needed to think of and implement a solution, by plying her diplomacy with the sun spirit. She tried to convince it not to fry us alive, and at first it seemed hopeless. The spirit, while bound, was happy in its role as guardian of this room, and it delighted in trying to find and incinerate us. But Bramble kept working it, and found a solution through flattery. She begged it to show off its versatility – it could twinkle as well as scorch. And while it was twinkling, we made our move.
Strontium, the heaviest member of the party, is also a wizard with the ability to teleport. He teleported straight up 5 squares, such that he was just over the gravity inversion line. As he started to fall slowly upward, he tossed down one end of a rope, weighted with a rock. Bramble, the lightest person the group, grabbed it. Stron’s weight was enough to pull Bramble upward, and the further he fell, the stronger the gravity pulling him became. We made a chain, each member grabbing the ankles of the previous person as they rose, lightest-to-heaviest, and in this way we all managed to fall upward into the water before the sun spirit realized what we were doing. Splashdown! (Or Splashup, technically.)
Spluttering, we bobbed back up to the surface, but this time in a wholly different room. We were floating in a moat that formed a ring around the outside of another cavern. The wet floor of the cavern was flat and rocky, with a large Witchwater pedestal in the center. On that pedestal was loot! At last!
We didn’t have much time to admire it, though, as the final guardian rose up from beside the pedestal. It was some kind of water/fire elemental hybrid, towering over us. And here we were with most of us down to our last one or two healing surges.
We needn’t have worried, for although we were down in surges, we were also fully rested, powers-wise, which meant we had 21 dailies just waiting for a target. Holy cow, did we pour on the damage!
As it happened, we all got one free round of attackswhile it was still coalescing, and during that round we did over 100 points of damage to it. It had about 530 hp altogether, but I think we dispatched it in about four rounds, despite that it itself could attack three times and also teleport each round.
The biggest single attack was our Sorcerer Gilran landing a critical hit with Dazzling Ray , which was over 50 points. Cobalt also was able to pull off the Knockout/Bloodbath combo with an Action Point, which, while it used up 2 dailies, added up to 75 points of damage plus ongoing 21.
I don’t have many tactical takeaways from the battle, so I’ll just make this observation. A full party, even one that’s not highly optimized for damage, has incredible damage potential if they’re willing to go nova in a single battle. With all the little modifiers stacking up (Hooray again for Bramble’s War Chieftain’s Blessing, that gives us all +2 to hit a single creature for the entire encounter!), and the monster constantly afflicted with states, it never really had a chance. Piratecat told us it was a Level 10 solo, and we’re a party of seven Level 9 PC’s.
So, 530 hit points later, we slew the beast and claimed the loot. The pedestal dissolved, leaving another portal as an exit. Are we actually done with this gauntlet, or is there more still to come? We’ll find out in a couple of weeks!
