NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Eccles" data-source="post: 4045577" data-attributes="member: 5675">In discussion with Zollchin the Sublime Chord, we learned that Thessellar dabbled with ‘experiments’ mixing magic and biology – in ages past he was the mage responsible for such abominations as the owlbear, the rust monster, the grick and the mimic. As she handed us a small painting of the liche, she explained that he had been utterly obsessed with her in the past. On her instructions, we picked our way carefully across the floor of the Wormcrawl Fissure, reaching the base of another towering mesa. A sliver-thin wall of stone spanned several hundred feet to connect the mesa to the edge of the fissure, dropping a lazy thousand feet to drop down into thick clouds where it joined the mesa top. Through glimpses in the cloud, we could see an almost organically shaped mass of red marble. As we closed in on it, I noticed that Fez looked rather nervous, and had managed to find a length of timber from somewhere and was hefting it rather than his usual array of enchanted weapons.“Rust monsters,” was all he had to say when I raised an eyebrow at him..oOo.We split up, leaving Bob and Flynne behind a short distance whilst Fez, Janga and I approached the fortress. Once close enough, we could dimly make out a pair of titanic draconic bodies with their heads replaced with a single toothy maw ringed with seven or eight long snapping mouth-tipped tentacles. The two writhed and snapped as they wound around one another.Close enough, I decided and hailed the fortress. I pulled my lute from over my shoulder and sang a song of forgiveness and hidden curiosity, hoping to tempt the liche out of his castle, but after a full three minutes of singing, there was still silence. I turned to my companions and said loudly “I guess Thessellar doesn’t want to hear Zollchin’s message.”I was then immediately drowned out by a towering voice from the fortress. “WHO ARE YOU?”I bowed to the building, and announced that we were none other than J. Peasemold Gruntfuttock and associates, here representing the interests of one Zollchin who was interested in settling their difficulties. The voice simply laughed. “MY PLANS ARE NEAR RESOLUTION – THERE WILL BE NO SETTLEMENT. PERHAPS, THOUGH, YOU COULD BE OF USE. I AM MOST WEALTHY, ALL I REQUIRE IS THAT… BITCH.”Declaring that we didn’t deal with faceless fortresses, we backed away, and as we went I muttered out of the corner of my mouth to my comrades. “Plan B, chaps.”As I delivered an inspiring speech and then cast a spell of hastening to aid my comrades, I turned to see Bob and Flynne fire a massive volley of arrows through the air. Their shots soared with pinpoint accuracy over the walls and into the two draconic hydras. Fez joined in with a couple of heavy stones launched from his sling which sailed up and over the walls before dropping onto the leftmost hydra’s body with bone shattering force. Suddenly, the bridge we were on, several thousand feet of delicate stonework, erupted into flames which leapt 15 feet into the sky. We leapt away, finding clear spots within the inferno which rippled up and down the bridge, and only Bob was burned in the fires. At the same instant, a green beam lanced out of the air and burned deeply into Fez, who roared in pain as a clean hole, perhaps an inch in diameter, was burned straight through his shoulder. A second, darker, beam struck him in the chest, and he sagged with weakness.As the portcullis grated open and the two dragon-hydras rushed out to meet us, Janga cast a powerful healing spell on Fez, who straightened considerably as the hole through his shoulder closed. Janga then clutched a powerful metamagic rod and then transported himself and the raging barbarian through space to stand near where the two spells had come from. As I dived off the ledge and activated my boots of levitation to hang in the air, I pulled a scroll out of my bag and read it – summoning a thin wall of stone which blocked the healthier hydra from closing on us and left the wounded one still in sight. Flynne capitalised on this to fire a rapid salvo of shots, slaying the beast, whilst Bob fired through the air to where the liche had been – it had now moved. The little goblin stepped off the bridge to stand on its edge, protected from the flames by ignoring gravity. Flynne, meanwhile, relied on his phenomenal reactions, stepping between the roaring flames as they leapt around him. At that point, there was an unearthly wailing noise, and for the third time in my life, I died.</blockquote>

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