Session 8 (I counted!)
Pretty sure Ackbar and Gilneas are gone for good, so I'll switch to stating if they are here instead of aren't.
As another aside, most of us have no practical experience with Dark Sun. Some of us played a couple sessions of a 2e AD&D game a decade or more ago and that's the extent of our experience with it.
We started with Thoon's misadventure after being pulled off the ship. When he disappeared, he clawed at the tentacle that had him until it let go, then was pulled to safety by a surviving crewman. They crashed into a rocky bit of land, only to be clubbed into unconsciousness by a Tarek (the "bat faced bugbears" from last session). He woke up to see what looked like some sort of Tarek shaman taking off down a passage.
On to the cave: the group enters to find a dozen half-eaten corpses and a Thoon, tied up against one wall. Walter promptly skittered over and chewed his master free. After a mutual explanation of how we got to the cave, we pressed on down the passage the shaman used.
There was a sudden crash and clatter in the passageway ahead as Thoon proposed we invent Zepplins and start Athas' first Zepplin transportation business. Further up the passage, we found a large room with a 25' pit whose floor was covered by a carpet of beetles. The room also contained a freshly-cut rope bridge.
The shaman appeared on the other side. Thoon shot him and he retaliated by detonating the ground behind everyone, sending Kyden flying off the ledge and into the pit, leaving him dying, between the attack and falling damage taking him unconscious - so much for his "consciousness streak" - where he promptly was chewed on by the beetles that did damage to anyone who started their turn in it. Afterwards, the Shaman stepped back through the hallway and dropped a massive stone door behind him.
After catching a heal from Jinn, Kyden hid out on a bug-free ramp on the side of the pit while Eberk jumped down, tied a rope to Walter (who had spider-climbed around the side of the pit) and had the spider climb up, walk around a bridge post and bring the rope back to Eberk, who climbed it, followed by Kyden.
We then sent Walter, with a rope still tied to him, across the walls back to the group on the other side. Jinn pulled up the rope bridge, we tied the rope to it, and pulled it across to the other side.
All that work and... 23 strength check doesn't even budge it. We climbed into the pit and headed to the ramp the Kyden had hid in before, to find side alcoves with a strange sticky liquid in it that Kyden dipped his finger in, tested to see if it was flammable. It wasn't so we pressed on to find a room full of webbing and three cocoons. Jinn probed one with his spear and a it exploded into a swarm of Kruthik.
They dispersed when bloodied, so it didn't take long to kill them, but it highlighted our lack of a controller. Jinn has his half-elf Burning Spray and a difficult-to-use unfriendly close-burst-1 and Eberk can Augment 2 Bulls Strike to make it a blast 3, and that's pretty much it.
On to the next room, zombies! Very quickly dead zombies. Bunched up zombies + Max damage from Burning Spray that hit all its targets + max damage from Augment 2 Bull's Strike that hit all its target = nothing left but mop up.
Thoon's player had to go, so Thoon tried to eat a zombie, became extremely sick, curled up into a ball, and went into some insectoid stupor with Walter standing guard over him.
The barred door leading onwards quickly suffered the same fate. The next room, a sun-symbol on the floor that equals trap, for a huge pile of damage. One of the doors out was blocked, so we took another room that led to another room with carved, dusty floor glyphs(that we avoided) and two doors, one shattered with the dead shaman lying before it.
Figuring there couldn't possibly be anything terrible beyond the door that killed the Tarek shaman, we continued on, finding a room with a large sarcophagus in the center of the room with a raised dais containing two chairs, one holding a corpse holding a promising-looking box. It looked up with glowing blue eyes. There was the following interchange to start the combat:
Eberk: "Give us the box."
Undead: raspy voice "What will you give me for it?"
Kyden: "A sword to the face." Immediately rolls a natural 1 for initiative.
Undead: blasts Kyden with a massive pile of radiant damage from across the room, dropping him instantly "Anyone else?"
The group attacked, missing with 25s vs AC and then were bloodied, dazed, taking ongoing psychic with the use of one power and taking -2 to saves due to its aura.
Undead: "Do you really want to continue this?"
Jinn: "Not really."
Kyden: standing up from being owned "Parley?"
Undead: "Good choice."
He asked us about stuff like The Cleansing Wars, Rajat and his champions, the Empire of Bodak, stuff none of us had ever heard of (in our out of game).
We find some common ground in that that Kalik (Tyr's dead sorcerer king) was one of the Rajat fellow's champions. He also showed us what was in the box, a lens-like semi-circular flat disk. All we had to do for it was act as his eyes and ears, go to the Empire of Bodach, and retrieve scroll of great arcane knowledge in exchange for the box, some power, and, of course, our lives. Since our choices were pretty much "Yes" or "Die" we chose Yes.
He powered us the lens and blasted us with a level, then gave us 1 month to finish our affairs, and teleported us to the entrance to the cave.
We headed back and gave the Dray the box and crashed. The next day we traveled south all day to a Silt skiff graveyard with a brown tower visible in the distance across only a few miles of Silt. It was getting dark, however, so we rested in the massive hulk of wrecked ship.
The next day, Obsidian Skill challenge to build ourselves skiff:
Round 1: Athletics + 2 x Endurance(all success) to drag usable bits of craft together
Round 2: History to research the broken craft and remember from previous ones we've seen to draw a plan that everyone can refer to to build it, Athletics(success via AP spent) and Endurance(fail) to begin building it.
Round 3: Athletics to assemble the last bits(fail), Diplomacy to keep everyone organized with the plan(success), Heal to keep us going during the blazing heat of the day(Natural 20).
Success!
After resting again, we commenced learning how to sail this thing we built. Obsidian Skill challenge 2 to get ourselves to Grak's Pool:
Round 1: Athletics(fail, with Adept's Surge AND AP reroll), Endurance(success), and Athletics(success) to pedal out into the silt.
Round 2: Athletics(success) to work the rudder, Endurance(success) to work all day managing the sails and lines, Diplomacy(success) to coordinate.
Round 3: Intimidate(Natural 20) to browbeat the others into getting us the last mile, Endurance(fail) to man the rudder, Endurance(Natural 20) to keep running about and getting us to solid land.
We reached Grak's Pool, jumping off our jerry-rigged skiff as it came apart around us to sarcastic applause from the watchmen standing on the mud tower and walls of Grak's Pool.
We stocked up on supplies(at desert rates of 5gp each instead of city rates of 2gp each), refilling Skitch's saddlebags that had gone empty the day before, then looked around for a money changer since Kyden was lugging around 45 pounds of coin.
Eberk ran into an ancient Dray named Mafoon who offered to tell his fortune in exchange for a drink from the pool, telling him it was 5gp for a drink and they offered 20gp for a thing called a bath. He also told us the Dray Sharsa was whom we met and gave the box and that it was a good thing that we had done something for her.
Eberk's fortune was that he was cursed and that his future was to become a slave in the afterlife, taken within the year unless he could cure himself. When asked who had cursed him, though he had never been told, Eberk replied suddenly that it was Uralek who had done it. He also told us "the Dragon of Athas would enter Bodach and if we followed it we could find our way in" and that the only way to remove the curse was to have someone even more powerful than Uralek remove us (which would put us in bondage to whomever that was).
With that optimistic news, we rested for the night and called it a night.
