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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sagiro" data-source="post: 5323809" data-attributes="member: 726">Run #42 was tonight.  It was one of the best of the campaign; possibly the very best.  Pure harrowing fun.  We were standing in a hall that empties into a huge room, 60 feet across and 80 feet long.   Opposite our hallway, 80’ away, were the exit doors.  We had just diffused a trap in this room; now it appeared empty, except for the four corners, which, if you read the previous installment, you’ll know contained a summoned mule, a shaman’s Spirit Companion, a wizard’s familiar, and Cobalt, respectively.  A raspy voice from the door had just uttered “death abides.”Cobalt took a step toward the door – and slid.  The floor was effectively frictionless.  He slid across the entire room and was stopped by a wall near the exit.  He failed an Acrobatics check, fell down, and struggled to his feet.That triggered the monsters arrival through the doors Cobalt was now next to.  They were four short humanoids,  seemingly made of iron and shadow,  who came charging out of the far door and into the room.   Battle ensued.  Notes thereupon:-    Unlike us, the “Abides” (as we called the monsters) had no problem traversing the frictionless floor.-    Worse, the Abides could, on their turn, move about 16 spaces, and deliver two highly-damaging “run by” attacks during that movement, so they wouldn’t end up anywhere near us.  There were four of them, which meant 8 of these attacks per round.-    After the first two rounds, we had managed very little damage against them, with poor hit rolls and even poorer damage rolls against them.   The rolls for the monsters only seemed average, but they had inflicted plenty of damage on us by then.   I was as convinced as I’ve been this whole campaign that we were headed for a TPK.-    Piratecat did cleverly/kindly use the NPC battlemind, Grimble Thimbletick, to show us it was possible to hit these things even with the floor – you just had to be crazy enough to move directly toward the monsters, and use them to stop yourself.   The basic rules for this were:  you could only move in a straight line, and you could either attack somewhere during your first 6 squares of movement, or at the end of your movement, wherever that was.  In other words, we could push off from a wall, slide 10 or more squares, and if our movement was stopped by an Abide, we could attack it.-    The walls evinced some odd properties.  If they stopped your slide, they felt like rough iron.  But if you tried to use them to slowly creep along next to them, they became as slick as the floor, and even a careful step would send you spinning across the room to the wall opposite.-    Not surprisingly, we had to make acrobatics checks pretty often, to not fall over.-    As if all this weren’t bad enough, two more monsters arrived on the second or third round – 9’ tall versions of the Abides, who appeared at the far door where some of the PC’s were.  Either because they didn’t have to, or because they didn’t have the sticky feet of the smaller Abides, they never actually came into the ice rink.  -    Due to player absence/lateness, we were down one PC for the first third of the fight.  We lacked two of our strikers (Logan and Gilran, though we had Thimbletick, a battlemind.  (Yay!  A Defender!))  When Logan’s player arrived, things started to turn around for us.-    Perhaps worst of all, the smaller Abides were smart enough to identify Bramble as our healer, and they targeted her every round when possible.  Her health was down in the single digits for much of the fight, and she and Caldwell struggled to keep her on her feet.  Somehow she managed not to drop, though there were about three different times I thought she was toast.    Even when she fled out of the room (the way we came in), with half the party between her and the Abides, one of them did a funky shadow-shift, got into our back rank, attacked Bramble, and ran back out again into the ice rink.-    Despite all of this, we won the fight with no deaths, or even anyone dropping unconscious.   The following factors contributed to our success:-    The creatures had low hit points – right about 100 each.  Once we started landing our attacks, we started knocking them off with decent efficiency – especially after Logan arrived.-    We emptied the bucket of all our healing.  Bramble used her Spirit of the Healing Flood, which gave half the party 10 health when they needed it, and regen 2 while bloodied until they did.  (We were collectively damaged enough that the regen probably healed an extra dozen points.).  She also burned her healing spirits on herself, and I think Caldwell healed her as well.  Cobalt used his Stanching armor’s daily power.  -    We did a pretty good job of focus-firing on one at a time-    We used most of our remaining dailies.-    We eventually got around to landing attacks that slowed or restrained the Abides, and that turned out to be their Achilles’ heel.  Each round one of them couldn’t move, it took 2d12 damage.  Each round one of them was slowed, it took 1d12. -    Cool visual effect when the Abides took damage, as their semi-shadow bodies got sucked into their wounds.   When they died, their entire bodies vanished into the wound left by the killing blow, leaving no remains behind.-    A note about this battle.  The slick floor, combined with the huge mobility of the Abides, made this a tough and exciting fight even though the bad guys inflicted NO states, and only used melee attacks.  Kudos to Piratecat for that.-    Finally, while the fight was going on, the poor summoned mule was sliding around the battlefield, braying in terror.So.  That was the first part of the game.  Beyond the double doors from whence came the monsters was a Classic Trapped Hallway of Death.   It was a long hallway full of spinning blades, protruding-and-retracting spikes, hails of darts, crushers – you name it.   Like the Abides, the moving parts seemed to be half-shadow and half-solid, but they sure mangled a torch we tossed in to see what would happen.  Piratecat modeled this as a skill challenge, as we studied the trap as best we could, thinking of ways to help someone through the gauntlet.   We hit upon things like:  Thievery to realize there was a repeating pattern in the moving mayhem; Perception to actually figure out the pattern and form a plan around it; Arcana to realize a well-placed Tenser’s Floating Disc could block some of the ouchie bits; and (a brilliant idea by KidCthulhu, Stron’s player) Cobalt Bluffing himself into increased confidence that he could make it across unharmed.   I don’t know exactly, but I’m guessing our successes and failures in those checks set the ultimate DC for the Acrobatics check needed for someone to get across.  Cobalt made the run.  Thanks to our creativity in the first part, and four assists from others (as they counted out the pattern, reminded him when to duck, placed a Tenser’s Disc in the way, etc.), plus a bonus from Bramble’s Speak with Spirits power) he barely made it across.  I only rolled a “3” on the check, but Cobalt has a +14 in Acrobatics, so the result was 3 + 14 + 8 (from 4 assists) + 5 (Speak with Spirits) = 30, which, if I recall rightly, was exactly the target number.   Whew!  We all did our best to describe Cobalt’s ducking, spinning and leaping as he tumbled through the traps, with everyone else calling out counts and warnings and reminders.  Incredibly fun.Once across, Cobalt turned the handle of a door at the far end, and the traps faded away.  Everyone else hurried across, and we entered the next area of the dungeon.  We stopped and slept in the first room; it had been a long day, and were exhausted, low on surges, and had blown most of our collective dailies.This was a maze of hallways and rooms, with little to indicate that one way was better than any other.  We picked a direction (toward a faint sound of water) which took us down some stairs to another room.   The sound of water was gone, which was odd, so we backtracked up the stairs… and found ourselves in an entirely different room.  Huh?  What?   Had we been teleported without our noticing?  More experimenting and exploration revealed that we’d never find ourselves where we thought, if we tried retracing our steps.  Caldwell used Eternal Chalk to leave a line on the wall, but following back his line led us to a previously-unseen torture chamber, with Caldwell’s chalk line on the wall.  Plus, all the walking around was making us exhausted.  Unusually so, really.Stron thought something here could be illusionary.  He closed his eyes and felt around, and discovered that he felt a wall nearby, a wall that no one else could see.  Caldwell closed his eyes and felt a skull by his feet, again invisible to the rest of us.   We had discovered the “trick” to this area; with our eyes closed, and feeling around, we realized we were in a small 10x10 room, with bones all over the floor.  On one wall was what felt like a stone mouth, and by poking a stick into the mouth, we realized there was a keyhole in there.  We guessed, correctly, that the key we had acquired early in the dungeon was now relevant.    Click!The illusion faded away, our Witchwater amulets glowed with an eerie light, and we were standing in a tiny room with one door out.  The floor was littered with the decaying bones of dozens of former victims.Also, we were utterly exhausted, the menfolk of the group had five days of unshaved beards, and we were ravenously hungry.   Mechanistically, everyone but the indefatigable Strontium was down 5 surges.  So, now we’re in this unusual position of being almost depleted in surges, but being topped off on daily powers.  Next game:  further into the dungeon!</blockquote>

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