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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 1993041" data-attributes="member: 143">I consider beholders to be one of the nastiest adversaries in the game. I mean, in one round, they can launch ten attacks, of which seven take a foe out of the fight if he/she fails the save. Plus in Vhalantru's case, he can also launch a nasty spell-power each round, thanks to his fiendish abilities.  While the group has two holy weapons, they are less effective at range (especially when Dannel's taken out). This encounter could easily have been a TPK, but for a crazy-desperate tactic. But I get ahead of myself... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />* * * * * Chapter 317“You monster!” Fellian shrieked, tears flowing down his face as he fired arrow after arrow at the beholder.  The missiles failed to harm it, sticking harmlessly in its outer hide or glancing off to clatter to the ground below. “Now, too late, you understand,” the beholder cackled.  Its great jaws opened again, and a gob of green muck the size of a man’s skull fell to splatter on the ground below.  The projectile did not hit any of them, but as it struck it exploded out into a noxious cloud of greenish vapors that quickly started to spread throughout the room. Cloudkill! Zenna’s mind screamed, as she drew back from the cloud that had already engulfed Arun and Beorna, and would soon envelop the rest of them as well.  She’d readied a spell to blast the beholder, but hastily shifted to a dispel aimed at disrupting the conjuration.  For a moment she felt a surge of terror as her spell impacted the potency of the beholder’s magic, augmented by the bizarre ritual that had infused it with fiendish power.  But then she saw Dannel in her mind’s eye, killed by Vhalantru, and with a surge of rage her dispel knifed through the energies sustaining the spell, dissipating the evil cloud. But their situation was not far improved.  Three of them were already out of the fight, and with those deadly eyes able to pick them out at will...Forcing herself to turn her gaze away from the beholder, she turned and ran toward Beorna. A small object rose from the periphery of the chamber, where Mole had taken cover in the shadows.  The awkward missile arced up and impacted the beholder near the top of its body, hitting and sticking with a soft ‘plop’.  There was no explosion of alchemist’s fire, no dramatic sizzle of acid, but as the beholder turned violently several of its eyestalks appeared to be stuck within a spread of brown goo that had spilled from the bag on impact.  “Take that!” the gnome chimed from below.  But she quickly had to evade as a green line shot down from below, narrowly missing her.  The ray distintegrated a swath of the floor behind her, opening a pit that she leapt out of even as it formed, tumbling forward into a desperate arc.  Spinning in an attempt to bring its other eyestalks to bear, fighting against the clinging mess of Mole’s tanglefoot bag, the beholder fired a soft rose ray at Zenna.  The ray struck her, but the tiefling easily fought off the somnolent effects of the sleep attack.Another wave of fiendish power filled the room.  Zenna felt a sharp attack upon her mind that she fought off with an effort of will.  She saw that Arun was likewise unaffected; the paladin had unlimbered his bow, and unleashed a barrage of powerful but thus far ineffective shots at the beholder.  Archery had never been the dwarf’s strong point, she knew.  But a quick glance was enough to show that Mole had been neutralized, the gnome standing there staring up at the beholder with a vapid look on her face, and the fire from Fellian over in the entryway had ceased as well.  She turned to Beorna, readying her remove paralysis spell, but the dwarf, her face straining from the effort, managed to spit out a few words.  “Attack... attack!” Zenna saw the fierce conviction in the other woman’s eyes, and nodded.  She looked up to see Vhalantru already tracking its eyestalks toward her.  She didn’t hesitate, unleashing an empowered fireball that rose up to meet the beholder, filling the entire upper half of the dome with flame. A wave of heat rushed down over her, but as the flames cleared, she saw that she hadn’t done as much damage as she’d hoped.  The beholder’s ugly hide was scorched, true, but it was still hale, and all of its deadly eyes were still active.  Resistant to fire, she thought, knowing that now she would face the full fury of the creature, knowing also that her own significant defenses would not be enough to overcome all of its varied and deadly attacks. “Have faith,” a voice said to her. She looked down to see Arun, standing beside her.  There seemed to be a glow around the paladin; as she looked upon him, Zenna felt as though she was looking upon a different man, filled with the shining light of divine wrath.  The paladin dropped his bow, and drew his sword.  Even as Vhalantru raged above them, the paladin drew back his holy blade, and with a single mighty snap of his arm forward he hurled the sword straight up.  The blessed steel shot through the air like a spear from a ballista, entering the beholder’s body from below, stabbing deep until the crossguard of the weapon caught on its body. Vhalantru screamed, a twin sound of agony as both the beholder and the fiendish symbiant were sundered by that sacred weapon, and by the power of the man who had driven it through them.  Then the beholder was falling, plummeting to the ground.  Arun drew Zenna and the paralyzed Beorna back with him, a moment before the beholder impacted the floor with a sick squish of bloated flesh.</blockquote>

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