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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Richards" data-source="post: 7601580" data-attributes="member: 508">ADVENTURE 44: AN OFFER YOU CAN'T REFUSEPC Roster:  Daleth Stormsea, elf wizard 13             Galen Thorne, human paladin 14             Kaspar Hardstrike, elf monk 14             Orion Nightsky, halfling rogue 14             Syngaard, human fighter 14Game Session Date: 1 May 2019- - - Galen walked out the back door of the upper story of the Enchanted Flagon and went down the stairs.  He was dressed in his full armor - not because he was expecting any particular danger, but rather because his order stressed the virtues of preparedness and because by wearing it nearly all the time he was becoming used to the extra weight and more proficient in moving about in it.  Such experiences would only make him that much more nimble in battle when it counted - and could one day spell the difference between life and death.Arriving at the tavern's front door, the young paladin was surprised to see a note pinned to the wooden exterior by a small nail.  Plucking it from the door, he read it to himself.  It said: At the bottom of the page was a drawing of an hourglass tipped on its side.  The lower half of the hourglass was colored in, using a red ink to indicate blood.  Galen recognized it as the symbol of an undead offshoot of the Seekers of Eternity; he'd seen the emblem tattooed on the back of the neck of a vampire or two.Frowning, Galen used his ring to gain entry to the locked tavern, expecting to be the first one up, and was surprised to see Orion already in place and putting together a simple breakfast.  He hadn't heard her come down the stairs, but then he belatedly realized she must have ridden her ghost-dog Carl and the two of them phased right through the floor of the upper level while he was taking the stairs.  Sure enough, there was Carl in the corner of the tavern's main room, his head lying on his front paws as he watched his mistress prepare breakfast.  His wistful expression said he'd learned that in his ghostly state he was unable to eat food, and he missed it.Skevros entered the room from the back of the tavern - where he kept an entrance to his Mordenkainen's magnificent mansion - and Galen showed him and Orion the note he'd found on the door.  "'Straggler without' - that's got to mean Syngaard," the halfling observed."I agree," replied Skevros.  "You go upstairs and fetch the elves; I'll summon Syngaard through his ring."  Orion whistled for Carl, leaped onto his ghost touch saddle, and went back upstairs to fetch Daleth and Kaspar by way of the Ethereal Plane.  Skevros, in the meantime, used his ring to send a message spell instructing Syngaard to come to the tavern at once.The assembled conscripts pored over the note while eating.  "Pffft!" snorted Syngaard, reading the first sentences while stuffing a biscuit into his mouth.  "They're claiming proof of good intention 'cause they didn't kill us!  Hey, Orion!  I didn't kill you yet - that proves what a good guy I am!""This is seemingly the work of the vampiric Seekers," remarked Kaspar."Seemingly, yes," agreed Skevros."Oh?  You think this a possible ruse?" asked Daleth."If it is, it's by someone who knows of this branch of the Seekers of Eternity," observed Skevros.  "There's really only one way to find out for sure.""You mean go there, meet them at midnight?" asked Galen.  The king's adviser nodded his assent."It could very well be a trap," pointed out the Hieronenan paladin."Agreed," admitted Skevros.  "But we have the rest of the day and until midnight to check the place out for ourselves.""You know where the place they're talking about?" Orion asked."I know the area," replied Skevros, pulling the crystal ball out from behind the back of the bar.  He then spent several minutes in concentration, with Daleth looking intently at the proceedings while Syngaard got bored after a few seconds and redirected his attention to a slab of ham.  After a few minutes, though, Skevros gave a little chuckle.  "They made it rather easy to find," he said.  "Look."  Peering over his shoulders, the others saw a ruined building, with a set of stone steps leading up to it - and a series of white rocks placed in such a manner to form several large arrows pointing at the ruins."Well, if it is a trap, we have faced vampire assassins before," reasoned Kaspar."Indeed.  I think you should make the meeting and see what they have to say.  This could be on the up-and-up, and we might gain valuable information about the Mithral Mage.  Or, as you say, it could be a trap - and then you have the opportunity to slay some of our enemies.  In either case, I'm willing to make this an official paying mission.""All right!" said Syngaard between a mouthful of food."You have the rest of the day to yourselves, then," said Skevros.  "Return here when you're ready for me to teleport you to the site of the ruins.""At midnight?" asked Daleth."What?  'Course not at midnight!" scoffed Syngaard.  "Use that noggin, Wizard-Pants!  I wanna check that place out good ahead of time, make sure there's no traps waitin' to catch us, or handy coffins nearby or nothin'.""Then let us meet here before sundown," suggested Galen.  "I wish to pick some things at the marketplace and spend some time at the temple prying for a successful outcome.""Pick up some torches," suggested Syngaard."Torches?  I have sunrods," replied Galen."Never mind - I'll get 'em," the bald fighter answered.  "See you chumps before sundown."  And with that, Syngaard walked out the door, heading for the marketplace.When they met back at the Enchanted Flagon several hours later, Syngaard passed a torch to each of the conscripts.  "Here," he said.  "I sharpened the ends.  Wooden stakes," he explained to Daleth.  "You can kill a vampire by stabbin' it in the heart.  I figure we oughta each have one.""And supposing there are more than five vampires?" asked the wizard."Then we just keep on stabbin', Wizard-Pants!  Sheesh!  This ain't that hard of a concept!""Actually," replied Daleth, puffing out his chest and holding the front of his robes in full lecture mode, "after stabbing a vampire through the heart with a wooden stake, you must leave it in place - subsequent removal allows the vampire to return to its unholy life.""What?  Says who?""It's standard vampire lore.""It's true," agreed Galen.  "We learned of such things at the temple.""Well, crap - at least I'm taking care of the first five vampires!  You guys figure out how to kill the rest, if there is any more of 'em."Once the conscripts had confirmed they had everything they wanted with them, Skevros led them to the city's gates and cast a teleport spell that sent them to the ruins described in the note.  Syngaard wasted no time giving the ruins a good once-over, sending the elves all over looking for hidden passages and secret doors and such - they were good at winkling that sort of stuff out.  Orion had Carl fly up and down along each of the walls, looking for hidden runes, panels, and the like - the building's ceiling might have crumbled many years ago, but most of the 20-foot-tall stone walls were still in pretty good condition.  While the halfling busied herself with the ruins, Galen and Syngaard checked out the perimeter of the area; the grasses, they noted, were still green, although the blue vegetation of the Azure Glade was well within sight.  There were clumps of trees on either side which warranted attention; no point in letting any ambush sites go unnoticed.  But despite all of their searching, they found nothing out of the ordinary.Orion kept an eye on the time by observing the stars once the sun went down.  As midnight approached, the spellcasters began casting their normal "get-ready-for-possible-combat" spells.  After having summoned his dire lion Burt to his side, Galen cast magic circle against evil and detect undead spells on himself.  Daleth cast his customary stoneskin spell, following it up with a fly spell and a magic circle against evil spell of his own.  Orion passed the elven wizard a scroll of stoneskin she'd purchased so he could cast it on her, then the halfling fed Carl a potion of mage armor.  As usual, Kaspar and Syngaard just watched the frantic activity, the latter with a smirk on his face."You guys gonna be ready with all them preparations any time soon?" he asked."One last one," Daleth replied, casting a Rary's telepathic bond spell that encompassed the whole group.  <Now we can communicate amongst ourselves without the vampires knowing what we're doing.>  He hadn't bothered including his pseudodragon familair in the link; Todd was naturally telepathic by nature and could already talk to the entire group without making a sound.<Yippie-skippy, Wizard-Pants.  Just where are they, anyway?> groused Syngaard.  <I'm gettin' tired of waitin' for 'em.><We should take up our positions,> suggested Galen.  He stood guarding a large hole in the western wall, while Burt crawled forward and got down on his haunches, hiding himself among the tall grasses.  Syngaard stood at the top of the stairs, his enchanted morningstar out and ready for business.  The two elves stood in the shadows of the ruins' corners, while Orion and Carl slipped into the Ethereal Plane where they could see the area while remaining unseen themselves.At what must have been midnight, three vampires teleported into the middle of the ruins, right behind Syngaard and Galen's backs, where they couldn't be seen by the two sentries.  Fortunately, Kaspar and Daleth saw them appear and warned the others over their link.<They're not undead!> reported Galen, spinning around at the elves' mental warning and sensing nothing from his magically-enhanced vision, which would have caused him to see flashing red auras emanating from them had they been undead.  There were three of them, a woman flanked on either side by an armored man, each looking like former-human vampires judging by their pale skin tones, which almost looked like ivory in the moonlight.  <They are evil, though!><Dominated slaves, maybe?> Daleth guessed.  <Sent to check us out before their masters approach?>"We came, as you asked," Galen called out to the trio.  "Now what's this about a common enemy?"The female did the talking for the group; Syngaard automatically assumed she was their leader and the two men her bodyguards.  "You know him as the Mithral Mage," she said.  "His escape from Hell has caused complications that the one we serve doesn't like.""And who would that be?" Syngaard pressed.  "The Blood Queen?"The woman merely smiled mysteriously and pressed on as if the scarred fighter hadn't interrupted.  (Syngaard had noticed over the years that quite a few people did that.)  "We are authorized to swear a blood pact with you that we will use all of our resources to recapture or destroy the Mithral Mage.""I am a paladin of Hieroneous; I am not in the habit of signing blood pacts with vampires...or with those pretending to be vampires."  Orion and Carl phased back into the Material Plane at that point, allowing the halfling to snap back into the mental link they shared.  <They're alive,> she confirmed.  Syngaard stared intently at the woman's mouth, trying to see if he could see any fangs.  But while he was focusing his attention on her, he noticed her shape starting to fade a little along the edges, blurring away to allow another competing image to be seen: another woman, this one with not quite so pasty skin, and - surprisingly - with a pair of white-feathered wings sprouting from her back.  He looked at the bodyguard nearest her, and started seeing through his illusion as well: this guy was as bald as Syngaard, with quills or spines growing all over his body.<Hey, guys--!> he started to say, but then, surprisingly, he was cut off - and by none other than the winged woman.<Well, that didn't work,> she said over the telepathic bond Daleth had created to join the conscripts' mind together in a silent communication link.  <Looks like we just kill them all!>  And with that, she dropped her illusion entirely, flapping her wings to bring her straight up a good 20 feet above the stone platform, and then sending a quartet of flaming arrows flying down at Galen all at once.  One hit his shield as he belatedly brought it up high; the other three struck true, and the paladin staggered out of the ruins to slump behind the wall, where he hurriedly unstoppered a potion of cure light wounds and chugged it down.  "Get her, Burt!" he called to his dire lion.Burt needed no further prompting.  With a graceful leap, he flew through the gap in the ruined wall, landed on all fours, and sprang straight up into the air, swatting at the flying erinyes with his sharp claws.  He pulled her into him close enough to bite down on her leg, but then gravity took over and he didn't have a tight enough grip on the female devil to pull her back to the stone floor with him as intended.But before she could react, Daleth cast a chain lightning spell at her, sending arcs down to strike her two bodyguards below.  All three cried out in pain, the two male devils dropping their human/vampire disguises to appear in their full, barbed glory.  Kaspar dashed up to the nearest barbed devil and struck out at it with his right hand, the one wearing the tenryutsume; it smashed into the fiend in an explosion of fire and lightning, none of which dealt the monk any harm.  However, in dealing his blow Kaspar had managed to impale one of the devil's barbs into the side of his forearm, drawing blood."These things devils?" Syngaard asked as he approached the fiend battling Kaspar, the bald fighter's morningstar out and ready to strike."She's an erinyes; they're hamatulas; they're all devils!" Daleth answered."Workin' for the Hope Ender, no doubt!" Syngaard sneered.  "That's quite a boss you got there - can't even keep one lousy wizard-lich stuck in Hell like he's supposed to!"  And then he sent the spiked head of his weapon crashing into the hamatula's body three times in rapid succession.  The weapon's spikes cut into the hamatula's flesh as the fiend's barbs stabbed into Syngaard's hand and arm; still, of the two, the barbed devil had gotten the worse of that deal by far.The other hamatula rushed in to attack Burt, who had had the audacity to attack their strike leader.  The devil's claws ripped lines of blood across the dire lion's flank, causing Burt to roar in pain.  The other hamatula did the same, choosing Syngaard as his target; Syngaard refused to give the devil the satisfaction of crying out aloud in pain.  An electrified dagger went speeding by the first hamatula's head, Orion having uncharacteristically missed her target.<Things would have been so much easier for you all if you had reactivated Hirek's blood pact!> the erinyes announced telepathically to everyone in the area.  <Doing so would have reopened the breaches in the Baator's Breath Mountains.  But you had to do this the hard way.>  She targeted Daleth, Kaspar, Syngaard, and Orion with a flaming arrow each in rapid succession.  Kaspar simply snatched his out of the air, snapped it in half, and contemptuously tossed the two broken pieces aside.  Orion ducked low in Carl's ghost touch saddle, avoiding the incoming missile completely.  Syngaard and Daleth weren't as fortunate, each being hit a solid blow.Galen then rushed back into the fray, entering the ruins through the gap in the western wall.  Channeling the power of the god of valor through the sword of Zehkar, he brought his blade crashing down upon the hamatula menacing his dire lion mount.  He impaled his arms on a few of the devil's barbs but altogether was pleased with the trade-off.  Burt also attacked the same devil, learning the hard way about the dangers posed by the creature's barbs.Daleth, realizing the erinyes was the greater threat - and the one fewer of the conscripts could successfully target - cast a cone of cold spell her way.  He could tell as it hit that it failed to do as much damage as he might have hoped - he was aware that many devils were partially shielded from temperature extremes - but he was willing to take whatever he could get.  He took the opportunity to follow up the first spell with a quickened ray of enfeeblement spell almost immediately, but this time he failed to hit his target.Kaspar, steeling himself for the pain to come by striking a barbed foe with his bare hands and feet, sent a flurry of blows crashing down upon his hamatula foe.  Syngaard did likewise with his morningstar, wishing its shaft was just a little bit longer than it was so he wouldn't have to worry about cutting up his hands as much as he was doing.  (If he kept it up, his hands were going to be as scarred as his face!)  But surprisingly, the hamatula, bleeding from a dozen wounds at this point, apparently decided a century of torment for his failure was better than being slain here on the Material Plane, where death meant instant obliteration and an irrevocable end to his existence.  With a mental command, his body vanished from the material world, returning to the Hell from which it had come.The other hamatula noted his comrade's sudden desertion but was goaded into staying by the hated symbol of Hieroneous painted on Galen's shield and on the holy symbol the paladin wore around his neck.  He might have to escape back into Hell himself soon, but he was going to try to kill that wretched do-gooder first if at all possible!But then Orion and Carl snuck up silently (as only a ghost can) behind the barbed devil and the halfling let fly with one of the electrified daggers from her bag of blades, catching the hamatula in the back of the neck.  It cried out in pain and grabbed at the embedded weapon with a clawed hand, tossing it to the floor in rage (and not even noticing when it disappeared back into nothingness).From her aerial perch, the erinyes could see the conscripts had bunched up together such that she could catch almost all of them in an unholy blight spell.  Activating the power, she was disappointed with the results; of the entire group (but for Daleth and his pseudodragon familiar, who were out of range), only the damned lion seemed sickened from her spell.Galen channeled another smite attack through his holy longsword, cutting deep into the hamatula's flesh (which bubbled and blistered from the holy power of Hieroneous) and then following it up with another blade-strike.  Despite his sickness from the unholy blight spell, Burt managed to knock the hamatula out with a swipe of his front paw.Daleth targeted the erinyes with a new spell he'd only just recently mastered: a prismatic spray which could have one of several variable effects.  To his dismay, the spell flashed red upon striking the aerial foe, covering the erinyes in a blast of fiery energy against which she was entirely immune.  However, Kaspar reached into his robes and grabbed a handful of shuriken, throwing them with his right hand, the tenryutsume infusing the barbed weapons with fire and electricity.  Seeing their only foe was twenty feet above him, Syngaard whipped his Dick from his pants, activated him, and then leaped upon the bronze-feathered griffon's broad back.  Dick flapped up to the erinyes and clamped down upon a shapely leg with his powerful beak.Orion sent Carl up into the air as well, approaching the female devil from behind.  She had her nightflame short sword in hand and sent its black blade deep into the winged devil's back.  That was enough for her to come to the same conclusion as her first bodyguard had just reached seconds before: a century of torment in Hell was no picnic, but it beat the total oblivion that death on the Material Plane would bring.  Dick snapped at her arm; Syngaard swung his morningstar at her head; Orion stabbed forward with her blade; but the erinyes pierced the planes and escaped back to Hell, her mission a failure but her potentially eternal existence no longer in immediate danger."Well, drat!" grumbled Galen, seeing the erinyes escape.  He punctuated his disappointment by a decapitating blow with the sword of Zehkar, causing the unconscious hamatula lying before him to die a most permanent death.Once it became clear the other devils weren't coming back, Galen released Burt back to the Beastlands and the conscripts all grabbed hold of the ring of return Kaspar held out to the group.  A word of activation and the conscripts were back outside the city gates.After filling Skevros in on the events at the ruins, the king' adviser presented his theory on what had just occurred.  "Hirek's blood pact with the Hope Ender to imprison Alexandros caused the breaches in the Baator's Breath Mountains," he explained.  "With Alexandros' escape, the Hope Ender has failed to fulfill his side of the pact, thus possibly sealing the breaches.  He probably sent his agents to renew Hirek's pact as a way to keep his door into this world intact.""So if we had signed the pact, the Hope Ender and his minions could re-enter our world at will," Daleth recapped."Good thing they were dealing with Syngaard," Orion offered."Damn right!" the scarred fighter agreed.  "I know better than to agree to work with devils - or vampires, for that matter.""It's also unlikely you have the requisite intellect with which to perform the signatory requirements of said blood pact, requiring as it would the capacity of autographing one's full nomenclature using a calligraphic method unlikely to be found within the limitations of your simian cranial capacity."  Orion's careful word choice had the desired effect: Sygaard had absolutely no idea what she had just said."That's sure a lot of big words for such a little halfling," he noted, feeling that he'd gotten the final word on the subject.  Orion just smiled quietly to herself, content in knowing she'd certainly won that exchange. - - - This was a much harder battle than we've faced in recent adventures.  Galen got cut down to less than a third of his full hit points early in the battle and had to retreat; had he not, he'd likely have been slain - and that would quite easily been the start of a cascade effect, as we rely upon him as our primary healer.  It's also fortunate for us that these devils hadn't simply been summoned to the Material Plane, for slaying a summoned creature just returns them to their home plane, none the worse for wear.  Had that been the case, they would have fought to the "death" instead of retreating while they still could.Logan used two cards from Paizo's "Altars" Map Pack for the ruins.  He initially used three D&D Minis to represent the vampires, swapping them out with appropriate devil minis once their true forms became apparent.</blockquote>

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