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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scorch" data-source="post: 3084570" data-attributes="member: 1502">Adventure 16 SummaryThe group had finished up all their shopping and after running through the city adventure were ready to head back to Barakus to kick some butt.  We had a full house for this game session which was seven players plus myself.  We had to find some extra chairs to seat us all around the table.  The mini-fridge was packed full of caffeinated products and dice were warmed up with practice rolls.Keldin’s player approached me about some possibility of laying an ambush for the evil adventuring party.  He was convinced that they would try to follow.  I told him that he believed an attempt was made to follow them two trips back but the last trip no one attempted to tail them.  Dagon Ziss and company were no longer attempting to follow the party.  They had leveled up to 4th level doing some of the city adventures the party ignored or never got a chance to find out about.  They were waiting for Curley’s body to be put into the grave and the main group to leave the city so they could grab the corpse and perform “Speak With Dead” upon it.  More on that later…In order to speed things up for the trip to and fro I started playing fast and loose with the wilderness encounter charts.  I was now skipping over small encounters that would be an annoyance to them.  When they hit a major one that was their only encounter for the rest of the trip to wherever they were heading.This time I rolled up a troll.  They encountered it at night and those keeping watch woke everyone before it closed the distance with them.  The group was a finely honed team at this point.  Ivo seemed to click right into place as another magical support member.  They whittled it down while Adson provided fire to burn the remains the moments they cut it down to zero.  I no longer felt bad about throwing CR5 encounters at them.  Which was good because there are some doozies they walk into later.Their entry into Barakus was uneventful and they made their way back down to the second level outside the entrance to the old goblin lair.  This time they decided to head down the stairs to the east into the room filled with statues of kings and queens.  After a few minutes of examining them, they decided to head to the north.The room they were approaching was inhabited by a wight.  Even though Absinthe was silent as death, Micca and Aislenn were like a walking scrap heap.  The wight easily heard them through the door and hid in some rubble nearby.  Absinthe checked the door over and opened it and started creeping forward.  The wight waited until she passed and then leapt out and attacked the main body of the group as they entered.  It landed a solid blow on Aislenn and she failed her save.  She was stuck with a negative level.  A good rule of thumb when dealing with level drain is to say:  “Anything that involves you rolling a D20, subtract the negative levels from.”  The group managed to kill it before it did any more damage.  Micca had was able to restore Aislenn’s lost level from a scroll he had handy.  The group looted the room and seeing that it was a dead end, headed back into the statue room to go east.They stumbled upon the vast hall whose northern end was a collapsed heap of rubble.  Recent signs of excavation attempts intrigued them but without time and equipment they were not going to be able see what was being excavated.  The goblin wizard and her body guards were already dead at the hands of their orc interrogators a few adventures back so the group would have no way of knowing what they were doing digging here for.  The large iron doors to the south piqued everyone’s interest so Absinthe check it out.  She discovered the trap there but guessed that she would have little chance of disarming it without setting it off.  The group decided to leave it for later.The passageways that split southeast and southwest was their next destination.  Absinthe was guessing that there was another ways past the iron doors this way.  They headed southeast and were attacked by the two half-orcs hiding in the secret passageway.  These two hapless foes were taken down quickly.  They then bashed through the arcane locked door and ran right into the orcs in the old library.  I decided that all the orcs they had missed when they cleared out the orc lair earlier were now holed up here.  There were 9 orcs plus their new leader.  Ivo was wondering if he should try to cast fireball off of a scroll but the others noticed they were in a library and quickly convinced him otherwise.  The orcs were defeated and the room looted of items of interest.Allow me to pause a second and talk about mapping.  With Curley gone, the group decided to expand his maps of the area as they explored.  To make this easier for them, I downloaded the map booklet and converted the first and second floor maps into TIFF files.  I then used Paint Shop Pro to open the files and white out the sections they had not explored yet and printed it out for them.  They then penciled in areas as I drew them on the larger one-inch grid map that we used for tactical miniature combat.  It really helped move things along.Consulting the map, the group decided that they were not getting any closer to getting to the area behind the trapped iron doors.  The group headed back and decided to have Aislenn set off the trap.  Aislenn did so and was hit by the 3d8 lightening attack.  (“That’s all?!?” yelled Absinthe.  She was expecting something more.)   While the trap reset, Absinthe quickly picked the lock and got the door open.  I described the duplicate set of iron doors behind and the group groaned expecting to have to deal with another trap but a quick search show these doors were neither locked nor trapped.Absinthe opened the door and peeked into the large, pillared hall beyond.  I took my time with the flavor text, describing the mace set atop the platform and the two large, deformed creatures that started lumbering forward the moment the doors were opened.  “Golems!” yelled Ravenspur and Ivo.  The group quickly closed the doors, ran out into the other room and closed those doors as well.  Absinthe locked the doors and trap reset itself.  They waited for the flesh golems to come bursting through the doors but after five minutes decided they were safe.  Since they had not taken the mace, the golems had returned to their guard positions.The party began arguing about if they wanted to take on two flesh golems or not.  The stakes were high since the mace beyond was of obvious high value.  Ivo, Ravenspur, and Micca were able to translate the glyphs on the outer doors which spoke of the great Gromm.  This led them to believe the items within was some sort of artifact of power.  Since it was getting late, we called it a night but the group had a lot of food for thought weighing whether the mace was worth the risk.Next adventure:  BURN IN HELL, MUMMY!</blockquote>

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