Sagiro's Story Hour Returns (new thread started on 5/18/08)
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Sagiro
Rodent of Uncertain Parentage
Hi everyone!
Sorry I don't have an update yet -- I've been chipping away at the next one in my scarce free time, and I wanted you to know I haven't abandoned the story. I'm in the midst of transcribing a particularly chaotic and harrowing combat from tape, which can be time consuming. I don't have an ETA for my next post, but I'm aiming for "within the week." (This estimate can obviously be altered by work emergencies and severe toddler-induced sleep deficiency.)
To quickly address some questions that have been asked and not yet answered:
- If the party were to suffer a TPK (and this has nearly happened on more than one occasion), I'd leave it up to the players to decide how they wanted to handle it. I have no idea what they'd choose.
- I don't remember exactly when we switched from 3.0 haste to the 3.5 version, but I much, MUCH prefer the 3.5 version. Allowing casters to cast two spells every round was too overpowered, and slowed things down as well. I like how the 3.5 version plays, both in theory and practice.
- We play, on average about 1.5 times a month. (And our next game, scheduled for mid-November, will pretty much mark the 11th anniversary of the campaign!) In the early days we usually played on weekends for about 6 hours a stretch, once every other week. More recently we've been playing on weeknights, for about 2.5-3 hours per session, and about once every three weeks. But while the pace has slowed, the game marches on.
- thatdarnedcat, thanks for remembering our anniversary! It's more than I can say for the two of us -- we both forgot until the night before, and didn't actually go out to dinner to celebrate until a month later.
-Sagiro
Sorry I don't have an update yet -- I've been chipping away at the next one in my scarce free time, and I wanted you to know I haven't abandoned the story. I'm in the midst of transcribing a particularly chaotic and harrowing combat from tape, which can be time consuming. I don't have an ETA for my next post, but I'm aiming for "within the week." (This estimate can obviously be altered by work emergencies and severe toddler-induced sleep deficiency.)
To quickly address some questions that have been asked and not yet answered:
- If the party were to suffer a TPK (and this has nearly happened on more than one occasion), I'd leave it up to the players to decide how they wanted to handle it. I have no idea what they'd choose.
- I don't remember exactly when we switched from 3.0 haste to the 3.5 version, but I much, MUCH prefer the 3.5 version. Allowing casters to cast two spells every round was too overpowered, and slowed things down as well. I like how the 3.5 version plays, both in theory and practice.
- We play, on average about 1.5 times a month. (And our next game, scheduled for mid-November, will pretty much mark the 11th anniversary of the campaign!) In the early days we usually played on weekends for about 6 hours a stretch, once every other week. More recently we've been playing on weeknights, for about 2.5-3 hours per session, and about once every three weeks. But while the pace has slowed, the game marches on.
- thatdarnedcat, thanks for remembering our anniversary! It's more than I can say for the two of us -- we both forgot until the night before, and didn't actually go out to dinner to celebrate until a month later.
-Sagiro
thatdarncat
Overlord of Chat
hey, no problem 
Seri and I forget ours all the time, I just happened to be reading the right part of the thread on the right day 
Seri and I forget ours all the time, I just happened to be reading the right part of the thread on the right day
Sagiro
Rodent of Uncertain Parentage
Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 266
A Nasty Surprise for All Concerned
The Company discusses plans for their imminent subterranean journey. Wind walk has been their preferred travel method of late, and it’s still cast upon them, but in a series of underground tunnels and caves they’d be forced into the spell’s slower mode. Besides, they’d rather be battle-ready. They could be facing the defenses of a powerful Earth Mage, against whom having airy bodies might prove no defense at all.
Aravis casts mass darkvision so that they won’t need to carry attention-attracting lights, and they plunge into an abandoned mine entrance, connected mentally by Morningstar’s telepathic bond. Dranko, scouting ahead, notes that while old equipment strewn about has become rotten and rusted, the wood beams and walls of the tunnel are solid and withstanding the test of time. Kibi notes the quality dwarven construction with pride.
After an hour or so Dranko pulls up at the lip of a gaping hole in the ground – a small natural fissure in the rock. He peers down but sees nothing within the range of his darkvision. When the rest of the party has caught up he hands a rope to Grey Wolf.
“Here, hold this. If you hear me scream, it means something’s attacking me.”
The ground turns out to be about seventy feet below; Dranko descends into a large (and empty) natural cavern. It looks vaguely familiar to him, which makes sense: they’ve been in a very similar maze of caves and passages before, when they found and slew Restimar posing as the legendary Chun Aggrat.
It’s only after Flicker has also been lowered down that they remember they still have wind walk going, so the rest of the party wafts down slowly to the cavern floor. Once solid again they look around the large space and see no way out of it. Kibi scratches his beard.
“Aravis, which way did your vision say to go?”
Aravis points at a featureless wall to his right, and Kibi walks that way.
“Guys, over here!”
A narrow exit tunnel was camouflaged and hidden by some natural folds in the rock. He closes his eyes and tries to sense if any source of Wild Magic is near. Nothing.
“You know what?” says Ernie, as they walk single file into the new tunnel. “We haven’t been underground since the beast cave where Step died. The first time, I mean.”
The tunnel does get steadily wider, until they can walk three-abreast. They hear a constant squeaking sound in the background and catch occasional glimpses of dog-sized cave rats scurrying in the darkness.
“Maybe we should talk to one of them,” laughs Morningstar.
“I don’t speak rat,” says Dranko. And to show his contempt for a rodent whose language he doesn’t speak, Dranko flicks his whip and slays the rat in a single blow.
“Well done,” says Grey Wolf dryly.
Dranko shrugs, lights a cigar on Ernie’s armor, and they press on into the darkness. They hear only the sound of their footsteps, the squeaks of rats, and the distant echoes of an underground river. Despite the warnings of Hagglehock there are no signs of monsters or other dire perils. Kibi thinks that these caverns have some good mining potential, mostly in iron.
They are following the map as Aravis recalls from his vision, but Aravis, while brilliant, has not done much spelunking recently. After an especially labyrinthine series of connected caves he’s no longer sure they’re still on target. Morningstar casts find the path targeting the location of “the last clearly-marked location on Aravis’s mental map,” and through this discovers that they’ve been off-course for the last half hour. They backtrack and pick up the trail, following it until the spell wears off some two-plus hours later. By this time they’ve put in a full day of traveling and decide to make camp. At Dranko’s suggestion they wall themselves into a corner with a wall of stone and then sleep in rope tricks. Ah, the comforts of home.
* *
Nothing disturbs their sleep, and the next “morning” the stone wall is still intact. After a cramped heroes' feast Dranko listens at the stone and hears some rats squeaking.
“I hope they’re not hungry,” says Ernie. He’s mostly kidding, but he still harbors terrible memories of his very first underground adventure, in which he stumbled into a pit of live, hungry rats. Dranko makes the Company an egress with stone shape and crawls out. There are some rats outside – four of them – but they’re drinking from a small puddle and paying the party no mind.
“You know,” says Kibi, stroking his beard. “I could make us all look like rats. We’d fit right in.”
That’s a plan with great appeal, since something that might take exception to a party of armed surface dwellers might not bat an eye at a group of cave rats. Kibi casts veil, making everyone look like plain old rodents. Morningstar casts another find the path and off they go.
The sounds of water get louder as they progress, and as the tunnels begin to grow damp, the rats become more numerous. Dranko, still out in front, pulls up short at a strange sound – a loud, wet thump from up ahead. He waits for the rest to catch up, and they all hear it a second time. Thump!
“That was not a cave rat,” says Grey Wolf.
Indeed not! Dranko scoots silently ahead, and after a couple of turns the tunnel opens into another large cavern, over sixty feet across (the range of his darkvision) but with a (relatively low) thirty-foot ceiling. Near the edge of his visual range, at the left side of the cavern, a ten-foot-tall giant – or ogre, or troll, or some giantish humanoid, he’s not sure which – is pulling a net out of a small pool. A second giant is slamming a full net against the stone floor to stop the fish from flopping around. Thump!
The only other interesting feature of the cavern is a giant-sized ladder, extending down from the ceiling in the middle of the cave, about fifty feet in. Dranko relays all of this to the others, and they decide that Dranko will check out the ladder and ceiling shaft while the others move up close enough to cast some detection spells. In order to get close enough the rat-looking party must emerge into the cavern a bit, and in doing so someone’s armor clinks. One of the giants looks toward them and grunts in its own guttural language. The party freezes – all the giant sees is rats, right?
The giant drops its net and picks up a large club that had been resting on the ground. It strides toward the party, licking its lips. Yoba squeaks: “Evil!”
The giants aren’t wearing armor, and while the clubs look plenty dangerous the Company is confident that they can take care of this problem quickly. A bit of that confidence wavers as one of the giants swings its club into Snokas, sending him flying backward onto his back. The giant looks a little bit puzzled – that was a surprisingly heavy rat! – but there was a meaty “thunk,” and that’s good enough.
Dranko is about forty feet up the shaft – the ladder continues up into it beyond his sight – when he hears a strange sound.
DM: Dranko, make me a reflex save.
Dranko: Why?
DM: To avoid the goat.
Dranko: goat?
DM: There seems to be a goat plummeting down the shaft toward you.
A falling goat carcass clips the twisting Dranko in the shoulder, knocking him off the ladder. He starts to feather fall downward and soon lands standing on the body of a large dead goat.
Kibi opts for a bit of distraction. He flips the top card from his deck of illusions onto the cavern floor, and up springs... another giant! This one is a classic hill giant, about a foot taller than the cave giants, and at Kibi’s thought it shakes its club menacingly.
“Make it give the other giants a rude gesture!” thinks Ernie over the mind-link, and Kibi does just that. The illusionary hill giant backs off a few steps and waves its club suggestively from its midsection.
Aravis has a more painful salvo in mind, and unleashes a prismatic spray on one of the giants. Only the red beam strikes, but it gets the giant’s attention away from the new foreign hill giant. It looks toward the source of the spray and sees... a cave rat. What?
There’s a very quick discussion now over the mind-link, during which it is decided that rather than waste more combat resources on these befuddled giants, they should just flee squeaking into the darkness. Dranko looks into the back half of the cavern and sees that it bends in an “L” shape, out of sight. There’s a tunnel leading out of the cavern, also at the back, on the opposite side from the leg of the “L.”
“One more distraction, to cover our escape,” says Grey Wolf. He starts to cast summon the pack. The plan is to gather at the back of the cavern and flee through the tunnel. Morningstar first casts a cure critical wounds on Snokas.
Of course, as with most plans, things don’t go according to plan. Dranko hears something in the dark back half of the cavern, perhaps hidden from his sight by a cluster of boulders, cast a spell. A blade barrier springs up across the center of the cavern, cutting Dranko off from the rest of the Company.
“Plan B!” thinks Morningstar.
“Which plan is that?” asks Ernie.
“Get ‘em!”
“I’m going invisible, and I’m going to sneak up and ambush whatever just cast that,” thinks Dranko over the mind-link. But he doesn’t get the chance, as a creature emerges from the shadows and steps toward him. It’s an eight-foot-tall humanoid figure, covered head to toe in narrow bands of steel armor. It holds two long barbed chains, one in each hand, and the chains dance and swing of their own volition. And if that wasn’t enough, the creature is surrounded by a cloud of animated swords and daggers, flashing and slicing the air.
“Oh,” says Dranko. “That’s bad. There’s a...”
Whatever Dranko was going to say tails off into silence, and then over the mind-link the rest of the Company hears Dranko let out a roar of mindless rage.
Thinking the giants are part of a carefully plotted ambush, Ernie lets loose Beryn Sur and then drops a flame strike that gets one of the giants and the chain-wielding humanoid. The giant bellows in pain (what kind of rats are these?!) while the chain-thing hardly reacts at all.
“Dranko, what’s the plan?” thinks Morningstar.
“Reeaaaaargh!” answers Dranko.
A third giant comes sliding down the ladder from the vertical shaft. It looks around in confusion, and there’s some giantish blather and commotion for a few seconds. Kibi summons an earth elemental directly adjacent to the chain-thing; it swings a rocky fist, misses, and then starts making strange incoherent noises.
What happens next is worst of all. A small glass globe comes soaring out from the shadows at the back of the cavern and shatters on the ground in the middle of the melee. Black vapors bubble out of it, which immediately congeal into a cluster of null shadows! The wizards feel the horrific stinging nausea of the foul creatures wash over them, while the divine casters feel it to a lesser degree.
“Oh, CRAP!” exclaims Aravis.
Dranko no longer has full control of his mind. He is filled with an all-consuming wrath toward all things, and only cares about inflicting the most damage possible on whatever is closest to him. Spells are out of the question – too much concentration required – but magic items are simple enough. He uses a magical ring to drop an ice storm on the chain-thing and one of the giants, who happen to be the two closest creatures. Flecks of spittle fly from his mouth.
Flicker remembers what to do in the event of Null Shadows. He pulls out a non-magical sling he keeps for just this purpose and fires a bullet at the closest shadow. He’s rewarded with a puff of black smoke at the point of impact, though the null shadow survives.
“We should get out of here!” says Aravis.
“Yeah!” agrees Ernie.
“Reeaaaaargh!” says Dranko.
Grey Wolf’s summoning spell finishes, and three Dire Wolves appear along with a pair of regular-sized wolves. The smaller ones immediately attack the null shadows (to no effect, they being magical creatures) while the dire trio snap at the calves of the giants.
(At this point things have reached a near fever-pitch of chaos. The cavern now holds three giants, an illusionary hill giant, ten null shadows, three dire wolves, two normal wolves, an earth elemental, nine cave rats with strange abilities, a chain-wielding blade-surrounded armored guy, and a dead goat. And there’s still whatever it is that threw the null shadow globe.)
Aravis’s new plan is to dimension door to Dranko’s rescue (taking as many others with him as possible), have everyone else meet him there, and then have everyone teleport the heck out of there.
“Yoba,” he thinks urgently, “run over to Dranko.”
“Are you crazy?” says Yoba. “Through the blades?”
“Sorry,” says Aravis, “but you see those black things? They eat spellcasters.”
“They’re very, very dangerous,” adds Ernie.
“More than a blade barrier? asks Yoba.
“Much,” says Aravis.”
“I’m taking this on faith, you know,” says Yoba, as she grimaces and leaps through the wall of blades to Dranko. Her scream of pain en route lets the others know she didn’t dodge as well as one would hope.
Snokas, lacking a non-magical weapon, falls back to stand next to Aravis. Morningstar fires a darkbeam at one of the giants, blinding it. It yells and waves it club around at nothing in particular.
Somehow it gets worse. A second armored chain-thing rises up from the giants’ fishing pool, where it had been lurking unseen since the start of combat. It wiggles its armored fingers and another blade barrier springs up, further partitioning the battlefield, separating party-members from one another and making an orderly escape even less likely.
One of the two non-blind giants pastes a wolf with its club, while the other actually does some good and obliterates one of the null shadows with a single swing.
Ernie takes a moment to cast true seeing, while Kibi dismisses his enraged earth elemental. Aravis, sticking to the grab-Dranko-and-flee plan and finding lots of his comrades within arm’s reach, casts dimension door... blindly into the back half of the cavern! They arrive in a mostly open section of cavern, but there’s a small pile of rubble where Ernie would have ended up. The spell shunts him to a near-ish open space, which as luck would have it plops him down right next to the mass of null shadows!
“Sh*t!” he yells. “Aravis!”
Ernie feels a wave of pure evil wash over him – and no, it’s not from the null shadows – as painful black pustules burst all over his skin. Then he’s mobbed by null shadows, who leave him covered in smeary black wounds. The pain is intense, and he screams in anger and frustration.
Dranko tries to bull rush Yoba into the nearest blade barrier but the paladin holds her ground.
“Dranko? What are you...”
“Reeaaaaargh!”
“He’s gone crazy!” says Yoba, in case anyone hadn’t figured that out by now.
“I’ve got to do something about Dranko,” says Grey Wolf. Since chains seem to be all the rage these days, Edghar grabs a pile of small chains from Grey Wolf’s belt and drops them near Dranko. Grey Wolf then casts dancing chains on them, and several manage to wrap up and grapple Dranko. The half-orc bellows in anger.
“Flicker!” yells Morningstar. “Go help Ernie!”
“That’s what I’m doing!” answers Flicker. He continues to fire sling bullets at the null shadows, and manages to bring one down.
Morningstar decides that Dranko needs more than a grapple if they’re going to escape. She uses her diamond of recall to fill an empty spell slot with break enchantment.
One of the chain-things moves toward Grey Wolf and Aravis. Aravis resists the descent into madness, but Grey Wolf feels the rage take over his mind. He screams in anger and then glares menacingly at Aravis. The second chain-thing puts up a third blade barrier, further carving up the battlefield.
Ernie notices that the blade barriers don’t extend all the way to the ceiling of the cavern, so he actives his winged shield and flies upward. Unfortunately this provokes attacks from the null shadows, attacks which leave him nearly dead.
The original giants would now like nothing more than to flee the insanity, but there are whirling blades everywhere they look. (Clearly that hill giant is the ringleader, but his army of wolves, armored chain-wielders and magic-using rats is too much!)
Kibi puts up a wall of force, hoping to shield Ernie from attacks by the chain-things and giants. He tells everyone where it is over the mind-link, and has just finished when he sees a shadowy humanoid form detach itself from the mass of boulders in the back of the cavern. Flicker sees it too, since the person is coming straight for him.
“It’s him, it’s him!” yells Flicker. “The guy! The shadow guy that had the dragon!”
He’s right. Guztha has returned. He had waited in careful ambush for the Company to appear, and had feared that all his preparations might be ruined by a stupid giantish fishing expedition. But the added chaos doesn’t appear to be hurting his chances. Now Guztha slashes Flicker with his sword, and then does some nasty evil mojo that makes Flicker’s skin erupt in painful black suppurations.
“Reeaaaaargh!” yells Dranko again. He’s wrapped up in chains, but still tries to roll into Yoba. She hops back as he bites at her ankle.
Grey Wolf, just as mindless, attempts to attack the nearest chain-thing through a blade barrier.
“Grey Wolf!” admonishes Bostock. “What has gotten into you? You’re going to get your hand chopped off!”
“Reeaaaaargh!” answers Grey Wolf. He swings through the blades and Bostock is knocked from his hand. It skitters to a stop on the far side of the barrier.
There follow a couple failed attempts to get rid of pesky enemy spells. Yoba uses the dispel magic ability of her Holy Avenger but it fails to either cure Grey Wolf or drop any blade barriers. Morningstar’s break enchantment also does nothing about Grey Wolf’s mindless rage. Miffed, she pops off a quickened searing darkness at the closest chain-thing, leaving a clean hole in its armor. Ernie, hovering above most of the battle, heals himself.
It’s sometime around now that the giants decide they’ve had enough. Blades be damned, they flee from this nightmare of flying spells and magic rats. Aravis grumbles as they go.
“Great. Our best weapons against the null shadows are running away!”
Kibi casts hold monster on one of the chain-things and discovers the hard way that it has spell resistance. Aravis decides to skirt that issue and casts maze on Guztha. The shadow-servant of the Emperor vanishes into an extradimensional pocket.
Dranko figures he can do the greatest harm to the greatest number by dropping another ice storm on everyone around him, including himself. Maybe it’s the pain of falling ice chunks, but immediately afterward he comes abruptly to his senses, with full realization of what he’s been doing.
“Oh, for crying out loud!” he thinks to the others.
“Are you back?” asks Ernie, rubbing a bruise on his head.
“Yes,” Dranko grumbles.
Having lost Bostock, Grey Wolf draws his backup longsword, a magical blade with an undead bane enchantment. He swings at Aravis, but misses. While Flicker starts to gingerly unwrap Dranko’s chains, Ernie thinks to Yoba: “I need you to keep me on my feet while I take down those null shadows!” He lands to allow Yoba to touch him.
Yoba responds by laying on hands, giving Ernie almost everything she has, including a double entendre.
“Praise Yondalla,” says Ernie. “Yoba, you’ve probably just saved my life.”
As if the bad guys hadn’t filled the cavern with enough annoying walls, a new one springs up. This one’s a wall of fire, which scorches Aravis. (It might have burned Kibi as well, but his mantle of spell resistance protects him.) Aravis is just patting out his robe when a chain-thing steps toward him... and his mind is overcome with a blinding anger. He turns to his most immediate nemesis: Grey Wolf.
Morningstar calls down a flame strike on a chain-thing, though a follow-up quickened searing darkness fails to penetrate its spell resistance. Ernie draws his non-magical gartine sword and hacks a null shadow with it. Snokas notes the tactic and grabs a non-magical morningstar out of Morningstar’s pack.
A second goat falls out of the shaft and lands with a meaty thunk under the foot of the ladder, but no one notices.
Kibi casts xorn movement to go under the blades, emerges, and casts a quickened earthbolt at a chain-thing but he is also foiled by its resistance. The frustration and trepidation among the Company grows more and more palpable by the second, and it occurs to more than one party member that there may be no good way out of this mess.
That doesn’t occur to Aravis! In a frenzy he bull-rushes Grey Wolf but merely bounces off the spellsword’s armor. Grey Wolf grins a manic grin and slashes back with his longsword. Null shadows continue to swarm around Ernie, while some sense the now-closer Kibi and attack the dwarven arcanist instead. Dranko casts a ranged cure spell on Ernie, while Flicker draws a dagger and joins Ernie and Snokas in taking on the null shadows hand-to-hand.
Yoba tries another dispel magic from her sword, hoping to remove at least one of the blade barriers. Alas, as ill-luck would have it she only succeeds in removing the effects of the morning’s heroes’ feast from Aravis and Grey Wolf. Argh.
One of the chain-things annihilates two of the wolves, and a third chain strike scrapes off of Grey Wolf’s armor. Morningstar tries to cast a mass cure moderate wounds but loses her concentration among the ever-escalating chaos of battle. Not to be denied, she quickens yet another searing darkness and drills a new hole in a chain-thing’s armor.
Ernie finally gets a chance to launch a full attack at the null shadows around him. One Cleave later and he’s killed two and wounded a third. Snokas lays down the smack with his morningstar and kills another. Kibi fires off two spells at the closest chain-thing – coldfire and a quickened earthbolt – and the latter gets through its spell resistance. Its banded armor rattles painfully.
Another giant slides down the ladder and lands in the middle of the melee. He looks around, blinking in confusion. He had considered a few possible explanations for all the racket he was hearing, but this wasn’t really what he was thinking of.
Aravis snarls at Grey Wolf, takes out his vampiric rod, and strikes Grey Wolf in the chest. Life force is drained from one wizard and deposited in the other. Sensing his strong arcane nature, the remaining four null shadows converge on him. One is finished off by Snokas but the remaining three bludgeon Aravis with their black vaporous fists. Worse than the damage, his most potent prepared spell – another maze – is wiped from his memory.
And speaking of which, Guztha finally finds his way out of the previous maze and takes stock of the situation. Annoyingly, none of this pesky band of do-gooders has been taken out yet. More than half his null shadows are gone, which means his foes must have figured out their weakness incredibly quickly. Grrrr. And his fearsome armored servants look decidedly beat up. At least their rage-inducing power has resulted in two of the enemy wizards trying to beat each other up. That’s a plus.
Dranko tries to whip one of the chain-things through two blade barriers, but all he gets for his trouble is a nicked-up whip. The armored thing ignores him and lashes Grey Wolf twice at range with his chains, badly raking his face. Grey Wolf gets even more angry, if such a thing is possible. The second chain-thing moves toward Ernie, and while the halfling doesn’t become enraged, he does get a barbed chain to the chin.
Flicker pops another null shadow with a sling stone, while Morningstar makes the decision to pull out her biggest gun. She shapes a firestorm to scorch her enemies, and when the black flames subside one of the chain-things collapses into a smoldering ruin. (This reveals that there’s no body inside the armor, which doesn’t actually surprise anyone.) Guztha, however, dances between the flames and seems entirely untouched by the inferno.
Ernie finally catches a glimpse of Guztha with his true seeing up, and does a double take. Guztha is no human being, that’s for sure. In fact....
“He’s a tiger-man!” Ernie thinks loudly over the mind-link. “The shadow-hopping guy is a tiger-man!” And it’s true – Guztha is of a rare species of Rakshasa, less magic-resistant than his brethren, but possessed of other dark powers. One of which, apparently, is the power to get pummeled by a holy smite from Ernie.
(The new giant comes to the only logical conclusion, similar to the earlier giants: the hill giant must be the leader. He swings his club at the illusion with gusto, over-balances, and nearly falls over. He ends up spending the rest of the combat furiously swinging at the illusive enemy before fleeing back up the ladder. The Company never sees him again.)
Out of desperation as much as anything, Kibi decides to cast hold monster on Guztha. He knows that his hold spells almost never work, and Guztha is probably all kinds of immune to this sort of thing, but he tries it anyway.
Guztha comes to a sudden halt, his features frozen in place.
“I got him!” cries Kibi exultantly. “I got him!”
And after that, it’s mostly just a matter of mopping up. Oh, there’s some additional excitement before the end. Dranko ends up getting enraged again, but he takes out most of his anger on the conveniently-stationary Guztha before moving on to the wily hill giant. The remaining chain-thing gets a few more licks in on Dranko and Kibi. Aravis and Grey Wolf continue to trade blows, all the while ignoring the fact that they’re taking continuous damage from the wall of fire. And the null shadows get a few more hits in.
But Snokas and Flicker slay the remaining null shadows, Morningstar’s mass cure spells keep up with the escalating damage, and the chain-thing is struck by an earthbolt from Kibi, a powerful magical dagger attack from Flicker, a flame strike from Morningstar and (finally) a searing light from Ernie that finishes it off.
As for Guztha, he endures attacks from Dranko and Kibi before feeling life return to his limbs, but before he can take any actions Dranko delivers a final barrage of whip-strikes that knocks him unconscious. And when Dranko’s enraged attention then turns to the hill giant, Ernie grabs Beryn Sur and finishes off the evil Guztha with one swift stroke.
It seems incredible, but the Company has emerged from the ambush with everyone still alive.
Whew.
...to be continued...
A Nasty Surprise for All Concerned
The Company discusses plans for their imminent subterranean journey. Wind walk has been their preferred travel method of late, and it’s still cast upon them, but in a series of underground tunnels and caves they’d be forced into the spell’s slower mode. Besides, they’d rather be battle-ready. They could be facing the defenses of a powerful Earth Mage, against whom having airy bodies might prove no defense at all.
Aravis casts mass darkvision so that they won’t need to carry attention-attracting lights, and they plunge into an abandoned mine entrance, connected mentally by Morningstar’s telepathic bond. Dranko, scouting ahead, notes that while old equipment strewn about has become rotten and rusted, the wood beams and walls of the tunnel are solid and withstanding the test of time. Kibi notes the quality dwarven construction with pride.
After an hour or so Dranko pulls up at the lip of a gaping hole in the ground – a small natural fissure in the rock. He peers down but sees nothing within the range of his darkvision. When the rest of the party has caught up he hands a rope to Grey Wolf.
“Here, hold this. If you hear me scream, it means something’s attacking me.”
The ground turns out to be about seventy feet below; Dranko descends into a large (and empty) natural cavern. It looks vaguely familiar to him, which makes sense: they’ve been in a very similar maze of caves and passages before, when they found and slew Restimar posing as the legendary Chun Aggrat.
It’s only after Flicker has also been lowered down that they remember they still have wind walk going, so the rest of the party wafts down slowly to the cavern floor. Once solid again they look around the large space and see no way out of it. Kibi scratches his beard.
“Aravis, which way did your vision say to go?”
Aravis points at a featureless wall to his right, and Kibi walks that way.
“Guys, over here!”
A narrow exit tunnel was camouflaged and hidden by some natural folds in the rock. He closes his eyes and tries to sense if any source of Wild Magic is near. Nothing.
“You know what?” says Ernie, as they walk single file into the new tunnel. “We haven’t been underground since the beast cave where Step died. The first time, I mean.”
The tunnel does get steadily wider, until they can walk three-abreast. They hear a constant squeaking sound in the background and catch occasional glimpses of dog-sized cave rats scurrying in the darkness.
“Maybe we should talk to one of them,” laughs Morningstar.
“I don’t speak rat,” says Dranko. And to show his contempt for a rodent whose language he doesn’t speak, Dranko flicks his whip and slays the rat in a single blow.
“Well done,” says Grey Wolf dryly.
Dranko shrugs, lights a cigar on Ernie’s armor, and they press on into the darkness. They hear only the sound of their footsteps, the squeaks of rats, and the distant echoes of an underground river. Despite the warnings of Hagglehock there are no signs of monsters or other dire perils. Kibi thinks that these caverns have some good mining potential, mostly in iron.
They are following the map as Aravis recalls from his vision, but Aravis, while brilliant, has not done much spelunking recently. After an especially labyrinthine series of connected caves he’s no longer sure they’re still on target. Morningstar casts find the path targeting the location of “the last clearly-marked location on Aravis’s mental map,” and through this discovers that they’ve been off-course for the last half hour. They backtrack and pick up the trail, following it until the spell wears off some two-plus hours later. By this time they’ve put in a full day of traveling and decide to make camp. At Dranko’s suggestion they wall themselves into a corner with a wall of stone and then sleep in rope tricks. Ah, the comforts of home.
* *
Nothing disturbs their sleep, and the next “morning” the stone wall is still intact. After a cramped heroes' feast Dranko listens at the stone and hears some rats squeaking.
“I hope they’re not hungry,” says Ernie. He’s mostly kidding, but he still harbors terrible memories of his very first underground adventure, in which he stumbled into a pit of live, hungry rats. Dranko makes the Company an egress with stone shape and crawls out. There are some rats outside – four of them – but they’re drinking from a small puddle and paying the party no mind.
“You know,” says Kibi, stroking his beard. “I could make us all look like rats. We’d fit right in.”
That’s a plan with great appeal, since something that might take exception to a party of armed surface dwellers might not bat an eye at a group of cave rats. Kibi casts veil, making everyone look like plain old rodents. Morningstar casts another find the path and off they go.
The sounds of water get louder as they progress, and as the tunnels begin to grow damp, the rats become more numerous. Dranko, still out in front, pulls up short at a strange sound – a loud, wet thump from up ahead. He waits for the rest to catch up, and they all hear it a second time. Thump!
“That was not a cave rat,” says Grey Wolf.
Indeed not! Dranko scoots silently ahead, and after a couple of turns the tunnel opens into another large cavern, over sixty feet across (the range of his darkvision) but with a (relatively low) thirty-foot ceiling. Near the edge of his visual range, at the left side of the cavern, a ten-foot-tall giant – or ogre, or troll, or some giantish humanoid, he’s not sure which – is pulling a net out of a small pool. A second giant is slamming a full net against the stone floor to stop the fish from flopping around. Thump!
The only other interesting feature of the cavern is a giant-sized ladder, extending down from the ceiling in the middle of the cave, about fifty feet in. Dranko relays all of this to the others, and they decide that Dranko will check out the ladder and ceiling shaft while the others move up close enough to cast some detection spells. In order to get close enough the rat-looking party must emerge into the cavern a bit, and in doing so someone’s armor clinks. One of the giants looks toward them and grunts in its own guttural language. The party freezes – all the giant sees is rats, right?
The giant drops its net and picks up a large club that had been resting on the ground. It strides toward the party, licking its lips. Yoba squeaks: “Evil!”
The giants aren’t wearing armor, and while the clubs look plenty dangerous the Company is confident that they can take care of this problem quickly. A bit of that confidence wavers as one of the giants swings its club into Snokas, sending him flying backward onto his back. The giant looks a little bit puzzled – that was a surprisingly heavy rat! – but there was a meaty “thunk,” and that’s good enough.
Dranko is about forty feet up the shaft – the ladder continues up into it beyond his sight – when he hears a strange sound.
DM: Dranko, make me a reflex save.
Dranko: Why?
DM: To avoid the goat.
Dranko: goat?
DM: There seems to be a goat plummeting down the shaft toward you.
A falling goat carcass clips the twisting Dranko in the shoulder, knocking him off the ladder. He starts to feather fall downward and soon lands standing on the body of a large dead goat.
Kibi opts for a bit of distraction. He flips the top card from his deck of illusions onto the cavern floor, and up springs... another giant! This one is a classic hill giant, about a foot taller than the cave giants, and at Kibi’s thought it shakes its club menacingly.
“Make it give the other giants a rude gesture!” thinks Ernie over the mind-link, and Kibi does just that. The illusionary hill giant backs off a few steps and waves its club suggestively from its midsection.
Aravis has a more painful salvo in mind, and unleashes a prismatic spray on one of the giants. Only the red beam strikes, but it gets the giant’s attention away from the new foreign hill giant. It looks toward the source of the spray and sees... a cave rat. What?
There’s a very quick discussion now over the mind-link, during which it is decided that rather than waste more combat resources on these befuddled giants, they should just flee squeaking into the darkness. Dranko looks into the back half of the cavern and sees that it bends in an “L” shape, out of sight. There’s a tunnel leading out of the cavern, also at the back, on the opposite side from the leg of the “L.”
“One more distraction, to cover our escape,” says Grey Wolf. He starts to cast summon the pack. The plan is to gather at the back of the cavern and flee through the tunnel. Morningstar first casts a cure critical wounds on Snokas.
Of course, as with most plans, things don’t go according to plan. Dranko hears something in the dark back half of the cavern, perhaps hidden from his sight by a cluster of boulders, cast a spell. A blade barrier springs up across the center of the cavern, cutting Dranko off from the rest of the Company.
“Plan B!” thinks Morningstar.
“Which plan is that?” asks Ernie.
“Get ‘em!”
“I’m going invisible, and I’m going to sneak up and ambush whatever just cast that,” thinks Dranko over the mind-link. But he doesn’t get the chance, as a creature emerges from the shadows and steps toward him. It’s an eight-foot-tall humanoid figure, covered head to toe in narrow bands of steel armor. It holds two long barbed chains, one in each hand, and the chains dance and swing of their own volition. And if that wasn’t enough, the creature is surrounded by a cloud of animated swords and daggers, flashing and slicing the air.
“Oh,” says Dranko. “That’s bad. There’s a...”
Whatever Dranko was going to say tails off into silence, and then over the mind-link the rest of the Company hears Dranko let out a roar of mindless rage.
Thinking the giants are part of a carefully plotted ambush, Ernie lets loose Beryn Sur and then drops a flame strike that gets one of the giants and the chain-wielding humanoid. The giant bellows in pain (what kind of rats are these?!) while the chain-thing hardly reacts at all.
“Dranko, what’s the plan?” thinks Morningstar.
“Reeaaaaargh!” answers Dranko.
A third giant comes sliding down the ladder from the vertical shaft. It looks around in confusion, and there’s some giantish blather and commotion for a few seconds. Kibi summons an earth elemental directly adjacent to the chain-thing; it swings a rocky fist, misses, and then starts making strange incoherent noises.
What happens next is worst of all. A small glass globe comes soaring out from the shadows at the back of the cavern and shatters on the ground in the middle of the melee. Black vapors bubble out of it, which immediately congeal into a cluster of null shadows! The wizards feel the horrific stinging nausea of the foul creatures wash over them, while the divine casters feel it to a lesser degree.
“Oh, CRAP!” exclaims Aravis.
Dranko no longer has full control of his mind. He is filled with an all-consuming wrath toward all things, and only cares about inflicting the most damage possible on whatever is closest to him. Spells are out of the question – too much concentration required – but magic items are simple enough. He uses a magical ring to drop an ice storm on the chain-thing and one of the giants, who happen to be the two closest creatures. Flecks of spittle fly from his mouth.
Flicker remembers what to do in the event of Null Shadows. He pulls out a non-magical sling he keeps for just this purpose and fires a bullet at the closest shadow. He’s rewarded with a puff of black smoke at the point of impact, though the null shadow survives.
“We should get out of here!” says Aravis.
“Yeah!” agrees Ernie.
“Reeaaaaargh!” says Dranko.
Grey Wolf’s summoning spell finishes, and three Dire Wolves appear along with a pair of regular-sized wolves. The smaller ones immediately attack the null shadows (to no effect, they being magical creatures) while the dire trio snap at the calves of the giants.
(At this point things have reached a near fever-pitch of chaos. The cavern now holds three giants, an illusionary hill giant, ten null shadows, three dire wolves, two normal wolves, an earth elemental, nine cave rats with strange abilities, a chain-wielding blade-surrounded armored guy, and a dead goat. And there’s still whatever it is that threw the null shadow globe.)
Aravis’s new plan is to dimension door to Dranko’s rescue (taking as many others with him as possible), have everyone else meet him there, and then have everyone teleport the heck out of there.
“Yoba,” he thinks urgently, “run over to Dranko.”
“Are you crazy?” says Yoba. “Through the blades?”
“Sorry,” says Aravis, “but you see those black things? They eat spellcasters.”
“They’re very, very dangerous,” adds Ernie.
“More than a blade barrier? asks Yoba.
“Much,” says Aravis.”
“I’m taking this on faith, you know,” says Yoba, as she grimaces and leaps through the wall of blades to Dranko. Her scream of pain en route lets the others know she didn’t dodge as well as one would hope.
Snokas, lacking a non-magical weapon, falls back to stand next to Aravis. Morningstar fires a darkbeam at one of the giants, blinding it. It yells and waves it club around at nothing in particular.
Somehow it gets worse. A second armored chain-thing rises up from the giants’ fishing pool, where it had been lurking unseen since the start of combat. It wiggles its armored fingers and another blade barrier springs up, further partitioning the battlefield, separating party-members from one another and making an orderly escape even less likely.
One of the two non-blind giants pastes a wolf with its club, while the other actually does some good and obliterates one of the null shadows with a single swing.
Ernie takes a moment to cast true seeing, while Kibi dismisses his enraged earth elemental. Aravis, sticking to the grab-Dranko-and-flee plan and finding lots of his comrades within arm’s reach, casts dimension door... blindly into the back half of the cavern! They arrive in a mostly open section of cavern, but there’s a small pile of rubble where Ernie would have ended up. The spell shunts him to a near-ish open space, which as luck would have it plops him down right next to the mass of null shadows!
“Sh*t!” he yells. “Aravis!”
Ernie feels a wave of pure evil wash over him – and no, it’s not from the null shadows – as painful black pustules burst all over his skin. Then he’s mobbed by null shadows, who leave him covered in smeary black wounds. The pain is intense, and he screams in anger and frustration.
Dranko tries to bull rush Yoba into the nearest blade barrier but the paladin holds her ground.
“Dranko? What are you...”
“Reeaaaaargh!”
“He’s gone crazy!” says Yoba, in case anyone hadn’t figured that out by now.
“I’ve got to do something about Dranko,” says Grey Wolf. Since chains seem to be all the rage these days, Edghar grabs a pile of small chains from Grey Wolf’s belt and drops them near Dranko. Grey Wolf then casts dancing chains on them, and several manage to wrap up and grapple Dranko. The half-orc bellows in anger.
“Flicker!” yells Morningstar. “Go help Ernie!”
“That’s what I’m doing!” answers Flicker. He continues to fire sling bullets at the null shadows, and manages to bring one down.
Morningstar decides that Dranko needs more than a grapple if they’re going to escape. She uses her diamond of recall to fill an empty spell slot with break enchantment.
One of the chain-things moves toward Grey Wolf and Aravis. Aravis resists the descent into madness, but Grey Wolf feels the rage take over his mind. He screams in anger and then glares menacingly at Aravis. The second chain-thing puts up a third blade barrier, further carving up the battlefield.
Ernie notices that the blade barriers don’t extend all the way to the ceiling of the cavern, so he actives his winged shield and flies upward. Unfortunately this provokes attacks from the null shadows, attacks which leave him nearly dead.
The original giants would now like nothing more than to flee the insanity, but there are whirling blades everywhere they look. (Clearly that hill giant is the ringleader, but his army of wolves, armored chain-wielders and magic-using rats is too much!)
Kibi puts up a wall of force, hoping to shield Ernie from attacks by the chain-things and giants. He tells everyone where it is over the mind-link, and has just finished when he sees a shadowy humanoid form detach itself from the mass of boulders in the back of the cavern. Flicker sees it too, since the person is coming straight for him.
“It’s him, it’s him!” yells Flicker. “The guy! The shadow guy that had the dragon!”
He’s right. Guztha has returned. He had waited in careful ambush for the Company to appear, and had feared that all his preparations might be ruined by a stupid giantish fishing expedition. But the added chaos doesn’t appear to be hurting his chances. Now Guztha slashes Flicker with his sword, and then does some nasty evil mojo that makes Flicker’s skin erupt in painful black suppurations.
“Reeaaaaargh!” yells Dranko again. He’s wrapped up in chains, but still tries to roll into Yoba. She hops back as he bites at her ankle.
Grey Wolf, just as mindless, attempts to attack the nearest chain-thing through a blade barrier.
“Grey Wolf!” admonishes Bostock. “What has gotten into you? You’re going to get your hand chopped off!”
“Reeaaaaargh!” answers Grey Wolf. He swings through the blades and Bostock is knocked from his hand. It skitters to a stop on the far side of the barrier.
There follow a couple failed attempts to get rid of pesky enemy spells. Yoba uses the dispel magic ability of her Holy Avenger but it fails to either cure Grey Wolf or drop any blade barriers. Morningstar’s break enchantment also does nothing about Grey Wolf’s mindless rage. Miffed, she pops off a quickened searing darkness at the closest chain-thing, leaving a clean hole in its armor. Ernie, hovering above most of the battle, heals himself.
It’s sometime around now that the giants decide they’ve had enough. Blades be damned, they flee from this nightmare of flying spells and magic rats. Aravis grumbles as they go.
“Great. Our best weapons against the null shadows are running away!”
Kibi casts hold monster on one of the chain-things and discovers the hard way that it has spell resistance. Aravis decides to skirt that issue and casts maze on Guztha. The shadow-servant of the Emperor vanishes into an extradimensional pocket.
Dranko figures he can do the greatest harm to the greatest number by dropping another ice storm on everyone around him, including himself. Maybe it’s the pain of falling ice chunks, but immediately afterward he comes abruptly to his senses, with full realization of what he’s been doing.
“Oh, for crying out loud!” he thinks to the others.
“Are you back?” asks Ernie, rubbing a bruise on his head.
“Yes,” Dranko grumbles.
Having lost Bostock, Grey Wolf draws his backup longsword, a magical blade with an undead bane enchantment. He swings at Aravis, but misses. While Flicker starts to gingerly unwrap Dranko’s chains, Ernie thinks to Yoba: “I need you to keep me on my feet while I take down those null shadows!” He lands to allow Yoba to touch him.
Yoba responds by laying on hands, giving Ernie almost everything she has, including a double entendre.
“Praise Yondalla,” says Ernie. “Yoba, you’ve probably just saved my life.”
As if the bad guys hadn’t filled the cavern with enough annoying walls, a new one springs up. This one’s a wall of fire, which scorches Aravis. (It might have burned Kibi as well, but his mantle of spell resistance protects him.) Aravis is just patting out his robe when a chain-thing steps toward him... and his mind is overcome with a blinding anger. He turns to his most immediate nemesis: Grey Wolf.
Morningstar calls down a flame strike on a chain-thing, though a follow-up quickened searing darkness fails to penetrate its spell resistance. Ernie draws his non-magical gartine sword and hacks a null shadow with it. Snokas notes the tactic and grabs a non-magical morningstar out of Morningstar’s pack.
A second goat falls out of the shaft and lands with a meaty thunk under the foot of the ladder, but no one notices.
Kibi casts xorn movement to go under the blades, emerges, and casts a quickened earthbolt at a chain-thing but he is also foiled by its resistance. The frustration and trepidation among the Company grows more and more palpable by the second, and it occurs to more than one party member that there may be no good way out of this mess.
That doesn’t occur to Aravis! In a frenzy he bull-rushes Grey Wolf but merely bounces off the spellsword’s armor. Grey Wolf grins a manic grin and slashes back with his longsword. Null shadows continue to swarm around Ernie, while some sense the now-closer Kibi and attack the dwarven arcanist instead. Dranko casts a ranged cure spell on Ernie, while Flicker draws a dagger and joins Ernie and Snokas in taking on the null shadows hand-to-hand.
Yoba tries another dispel magic from her sword, hoping to remove at least one of the blade barriers. Alas, as ill-luck would have it she only succeeds in removing the effects of the morning’s heroes’ feast from Aravis and Grey Wolf. Argh.
One of the chain-things annihilates two of the wolves, and a third chain strike scrapes off of Grey Wolf’s armor. Morningstar tries to cast a mass cure moderate wounds but loses her concentration among the ever-escalating chaos of battle. Not to be denied, she quickens yet another searing darkness and drills a new hole in a chain-thing’s armor.
Ernie finally gets a chance to launch a full attack at the null shadows around him. One Cleave later and he’s killed two and wounded a third. Snokas lays down the smack with his morningstar and kills another. Kibi fires off two spells at the closest chain-thing – coldfire and a quickened earthbolt – and the latter gets through its spell resistance. Its banded armor rattles painfully.
Another giant slides down the ladder and lands in the middle of the melee. He looks around, blinking in confusion. He had considered a few possible explanations for all the racket he was hearing, but this wasn’t really what he was thinking of.
Aravis snarls at Grey Wolf, takes out his vampiric rod, and strikes Grey Wolf in the chest. Life force is drained from one wizard and deposited in the other. Sensing his strong arcane nature, the remaining four null shadows converge on him. One is finished off by Snokas but the remaining three bludgeon Aravis with their black vaporous fists. Worse than the damage, his most potent prepared spell – another maze – is wiped from his memory.
And speaking of which, Guztha finally finds his way out of the previous maze and takes stock of the situation. Annoyingly, none of this pesky band of do-gooders has been taken out yet. More than half his null shadows are gone, which means his foes must have figured out their weakness incredibly quickly. Grrrr. And his fearsome armored servants look decidedly beat up. At least their rage-inducing power has resulted in two of the enemy wizards trying to beat each other up. That’s a plus.
Dranko tries to whip one of the chain-things through two blade barriers, but all he gets for his trouble is a nicked-up whip. The armored thing ignores him and lashes Grey Wolf twice at range with his chains, badly raking his face. Grey Wolf gets even more angry, if such a thing is possible. The second chain-thing moves toward Ernie, and while the halfling doesn’t become enraged, he does get a barbed chain to the chin.
Flicker pops another null shadow with a sling stone, while Morningstar makes the decision to pull out her biggest gun. She shapes a firestorm to scorch her enemies, and when the black flames subside one of the chain-things collapses into a smoldering ruin. (This reveals that there’s no body inside the armor, which doesn’t actually surprise anyone.) Guztha, however, dances between the flames and seems entirely untouched by the inferno.
Ernie finally catches a glimpse of Guztha with his true seeing up, and does a double take. Guztha is no human being, that’s for sure. In fact....
“He’s a tiger-man!” Ernie thinks loudly over the mind-link. “The shadow-hopping guy is a tiger-man!” And it’s true – Guztha is of a rare species of Rakshasa, less magic-resistant than his brethren, but possessed of other dark powers. One of which, apparently, is the power to get pummeled by a holy smite from Ernie.
(The new giant comes to the only logical conclusion, similar to the earlier giants: the hill giant must be the leader. He swings his club at the illusion with gusto, over-balances, and nearly falls over. He ends up spending the rest of the combat furiously swinging at the illusive enemy before fleeing back up the ladder. The Company never sees him again.)
Out of desperation as much as anything, Kibi decides to cast hold monster on Guztha. He knows that his hold spells almost never work, and Guztha is probably all kinds of immune to this sort of thing, but he tries it anyway.
Guztha comes to a sudden halt, his features frozen in place.
“I got him!” cries Kibi exultantly. “I got him!”
And after that, it’s mostly just a matter of mopping up. Oh, there’s some additional excitement before the end. Dranko ends up getting enraged again, but he takes out most of his anger on the conveniently-stationary Guztha before moving on to the wily hill giant. The remaining chain-thing gets a few more licks in on Dranko and Kibi. Aravis and Grey Wolf continue to trade blows, all the while ignoring the fact that they’re taking continuous damage from the wall of fire. And the null shadows get a few more hits in.
But Snokas and Flicker slay the remaining null shadows, Morningstar’s mass cure spells keep up with the escalating damage, and the chain-thing is struck by an earthbolt from Kibi, a powerful magical dagger attack from Flicker, a flame strike from Morningstar and (finally) a searing light from Ernie that finishes it off.
As for Guztha, he endures attacks from Dranko and Kibi before feeling life return to his limbs, but before he can take any actions Dranko delivers a final barrage of whip-strikes that knocks him unconscious. And when Dranko’s enraged attention then turns to the hill giant, Ernie grabs Beryn Sur and finishes off the evil Guztha with one swift stroke.
It seems incredible, but the Company has emerged from the ambush with everyone still alive.
Whew.
...to be continued...
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Jackylhunter
First Post
Holy cow, that was a tense one. I thought for sure someone was going to die.
Were those Null shadows somehow more powerfull?
I can totally imagine KC's reaction to having Hold Monster stick, it almost never does when my characters cast it either.
Great story as always
Were those Null shadows somehow more powerfull?
I can totally imagine KC's reaction to having Hold Monster stick, it almost never does when my characters cast it either.
Great story as always
RangerWickett
Legend
Nifty. Haha, you have super rare monsters that no one will know how to hurt. Too bad your foes are time travelers!
I hope one of the PCs invests in Microsoft while he's in the past.
I hope one of the PCs invests in Microsoft while he's in the past.
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