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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Richards" data-source="post: 9754837" data-attributes="member: 508">ADVENTURE 4: THE SINISTER LAIRPC Roster: Amris Goodwitch, celestial elf witch (wizard) 2                     Avoroth Bleakborn, fiendish human cleric 2                     Gonkle Bu'Onk, fiendish orc fighter 2                     Wilbur Von Schattenwalde, shadow human druid 2Game Session Date: 10 September 2025 - - -Two days after leaving the slain hobgoblins where they lay and staying to a northern trajectory, the group of planar scouts encountered a cliff wall towering some 50 feet above them.  Tamaskan led them along the cliff face, heading to a cave opening at the base of the stone.  Before the cave stood a pile of rotting bodies, food for swarms of hellish flies and a place for them to lay their nasty eggs.  As the group approached, they saw a bone devil coming towards them from the other direction; it dragged two more humanoid bodies by their ankles, one in each skeletal hand.  Tamaskan ignored the bone devil, bounding happily over to the cave opening and looking back to see if the others were still following; they, in turn, had stopped advancing and held their ground with weapons readied, waiting to see if they were about to enter combat with a bone devil - a creature, they reasoned, who would likely wipe the floor with the four of them.  Still, Gonkle raised his warhammer and called over to the fiend, threatening it if it tried anything with them.Fortunately for them, the bone devil ignored the orc's threats and simply tossed each of the two corpses onto the pile of festering bodies.  Then it turned away, headed back the way it had come."Did you see that?" Avoroth whispered to the others.  "That bone devil was no longer alive - I think it was a zombie.""A rotting corpse in charge of piling up rotting corpses?" asked Gonkle.  "That doesn't make any sense."Avoroth approached the festering pile and gave the bodies a quick look-over.  There were representatives from a wide variety of species, with both demons and devils counted among their number, although a good deal of them were fiendish humanoids like Gonkle and himself.Amris sent Pivot to do aerial reconnaissance, ensuring the undead bone devil didn't suddenly return, while she and Wilbur approached the cave.  It was a fairly shallow cave, curving in an arc for about 20 feet before ending in a flat, vertical surface that looked to have been carved from the rock of the cliff.  There looked to be some words engraved on the flat wall, but their attention was drawn to the pair of little humanoid forms battling it out near the back wall: a winged imp and a hunched quasit.  Neither was able to deal any appreciable damage to the other, so their "battle" had devolved into an alternating slap-fight and pushing contest.  They were putting their all into it, though, as if the results of this battle would sway the outcome of the Blood War itself.Avoroth approached and loudly cleared his throat, demanding their attention.  "Stop that ridiculous fighting and attend to your betters!" he commanded.  They stopped fighting immediately, startled by the authoritative tone in the cleric's voice (although the quasit, creature of chaos that it was, took the opportunity of the brief cease-fire to slap the imp on the back of his head when his attention was elsewhere).  "Ah!" cried the imp.  "My reinforcements have shown up!""Piddlewhiskers!" chortled the quasit.  "These are obviously the forces I called forth to deal with the likes of you!"  (Neither the imp nor the quasit had done any such thing; each was simply trying to bluff the other into thinking he'd soon be in over his head.)"Enough!" demanded Avoroth.  "You will cease talking unless it is to answer my questions.  Now then, which of you can tell me about the pile of corpses over there?""I'll tell you everything you need to know about them," promised the quasit, "if you'll first slay this troublesome imp for me.""And why would I do that?" sneered Avoroth.  "He's the local denizen, and more likely to be able to tell me about the surroundings nearby.  You, as an intruder to this hellish realm, are less likely to be of any use to me at all.""Yeah!" immediately agreed the imp.  The quasit, however, not liking how this encounter was playing out, bounded like a monkey and leaped into the air to attack the Boccobian cleric, biting at him with his venomous fangs.  Avoroth clonked him on the top of his head with his quarterstaff, but the quasit still managed to get in a healthy bite at the cleric's unprotected neck.  Fortunately, not enough venom made it into the cleric's bloodstream to do any harm.Amris shot a ray of frost spell at the quasit but, characteristically, missed by a mile.  Avoroth sighed; when would the silly elf ever learn to stick with magic missiles?  They, at least, did all of the targeting for you.  But then Gonkle, Wilbur, and Tamaskan all got their licks in against the hapless quasit, using a warhammer, scimitar, and bared fangs as appropriate.  As a demon, the quasit enjoyed a manner of resistance to physical damage, but the multiple attacks were enough to drive it back from Avoroth and slide into invisibility.Avoroth figured it would try to escape and vowed not to allow that to happen; it had attacked his person and now it must die!  He stepped back and raised his quarterstaff like a club, listening for the sound of the invisible quasit trying to sneak past him.  He heard the sound of batlike wings flapping and recalled quasits could alter their forms; swinging for all he was worth, he hit the quasit-bat a glancing blow and it made it past him.  "Imp!" called out Avoroth.  "Track down that quasit and bring him to me!""On it, boss!" agreed the imp, and took to the air.  Once outside the narrow cave, he struck off in a random direction, never to be seen again.  Cursing wildly, Avoroth dropped his quarterstaff at his side and raced after the sound of flapping wings, leaping into the air and bringing his arms together, hoping to grab on to his invisible tormentor.  But he caught nothing but empty air, and landed face down on the ground while the taunting laughter of the receding quasit rang in his ears.  Brushing off his robes, he grabbed up his staff and stormed back to the others.They, in the meantime, had been examining the inscription carved into the back wall.  It was in the Infernal script (a language familiar only to Amris and Avoroth among the group), and it read:"Tamaskan said Asharen never did figure out what that meant," offered up Wilbur."Asharen apparently couldn't read Infernal, nor could she channel negative energy," scoffed Avoroth, channeling a surge of negative energy through his holy symbol of Boccob, aiming it at the back wall.  The wall moved silently to the left, revealing a series of rooms beyond.  "The clue was in the word 'rebuke'," he sneered, stepping into the unlit chamber beyond.  Amris followed, instructing Pivot over her link to keep an aerial watch over the vicinity.The entry corridor was a 10-foot-wide passageway leading to a central chamber composed of five pillars carved to look like the skeletal fingers of a massive hand reaching down from the ceiling.  A stone orb lay on the floor, smashed to pieces (each piece still glowing slightly) where it landed when it fell from the ceiling, who knew how long ago.  Between each adjacent set of fingers stood the opening to a different chamber, four in all besides the entryway.The chamber on the right, Avoroth saw, was a small library filled with shelves of books reaching to the ceiling on every wall and also in the room's middle, forming a shape like two H's standing side by side.  To his left stood a small study, while forward on the left stood what looked to be an alchemical lab, its arcane paraphernalia dusty from disuse.  Straight ahead was the largest room, a necromancy lab from the looks of it, with dead bodies lying upon stone slabs, waiting to be given the unholy semblance of life.  Also present in this room, and partially visible form where Avoroth stood, were a small number of humanoid skeletons, standing upright.The skeletons wasted no time in attacking.  They surged forward, three of them ganging up on Avoroth while three more followed behind, not attacking the cleric only because there was no room for them to do so in the now-crowded corridor.There were the sounds of spellcasting in the library, and a wave of energy surged throughout the chambers.  This was a desecrate spell, empowering the undead in the spell's area of effect and bolstering their combat abilities.Avoroth fumbled with his holy symbol as he stepped back, sending a second surge of negative energy through it in an attempt to rebuke these undead - perhaps, he thought, he could get one or two of them to obey his commands.  But the negative energy fizzled out nearly as soon as it exited his Boccobian symbol, with no effect whatsoever upon the skeletons.  Avoroth cursed aloud at the unpleasant turn of events.Tamaskan rushed into the chamber, snapping at a skeleton threatening Avoroth and clamping her teeth down upon a shin bone.  Gonkle finished it off with a skull-bursting overhead smash of his warhammer.  He then expertly cleaved over to the next skeleton, cracking a few undead ribs in the process.  Wilbur stepped up and swung his runestaff at the second skeleton, but missed.Then, behind the skeletons, four zombies shambled forth.  They had been further back in the necromancy lab, hidden from view until now.  They were unable to attack - the skeletons were all in the way - but their very presence caused the heroes to realize this was a tougher fight than they had expected.Amris cast a spell that destroyed the second skeleton.  (Avoroth noted with approval it was a magic missile - finally!)  But the remaining skeletons were all moving up to attack their foes, dealing a great amount of damage to Avoroth and a lesser amount to Wilbur and Gonkle.  Then an undead cleric stepped out from behind a stack of books and hit Avoroth with a quarterstaff of his own; when the cleric went to face his undead counterpart, he saw the rotting flesh, the heavy plate armor beneath his tattered tabard, and the unmistakable holy symbol of Boccob, God of Knowledge, hanging on a chain around his neck.  Avoroth's brow frowned in puzzlement, but he was forced to back off from combat so he could cast a quick cure light wounds spell upon himself.Tamaskan leaped into the space Avoroth had just vacated, snapping her jaws at the undead cleric.  Her flaming tail came forward to brush against his ancient robes, setting them instantly ablaze.From that point on, there was a whole lot of back-and-forth fighting in the cramped intersection between the five rooms of the hidden lair.  The undead cleric was forced to follow Avoroth's tactics and heal himself with an inflict serious wounds spell, but he had no sooner completed his spellcasting than Tamaskan was biting him again, and Gonkle was adding the swinging business end of his warhammer to the mix.  Tamaskan finally brought him down, allowing the flames to burn his no-longer-active corpse.Avoroth had terrible luck against the skeletons, but as soon as they had been taken out and he switched over from his quarterstaff to his dagger, he had much better success against the zombies.  Amris kept up a string of combat spells from the back ranks, and Wilbur and Gonkle stayed in the front ranks, slashing with their bladed weapons and using their bludgeoning weapons against the skeletons.  Gonkle in particular was a whirlwind of combat action, swinging his weapons this way and that and occasionally striking more than one foe with a single blow from his warhammer or falchion.  But eventually, the undead were overcome, although Avoroth had had to back off again once to deliver a much-needed cure light wounds spell to Gonkle, who seemed to be oblivious to his wounds in the heat of battle.Patting down the fire that threatened to completely engulf the undead cleric, Gonkle noted the full plate armor he wore underneath looked to be a decent fit for him, and started unbuckling it piece by piece, swapping out his own damaged armor for this new set.  Amris obliged the orc by casting a prestidigitation spell to clean it up a bit.  She also cast a detect magic spell that indicated that while neither the undead cleric's armor nor his quarterstaff were magical, a book he had on his person most definitely was.  Avoroth claimed the quarterstaff, which had been expertly crafted and had Boccob's emblem carved into it, for himself, and likewise took possession of Boccob's tome of knowledge once it became apparent that was what it was.  But the others weren't too disappointed, for in the necromancy lab there were a pile of black onyxes valued at 4,000 pieces of gold, and Avoroth judged about half of the alchemical equipment in the smaller lab was still perfectly usable.  All of that went into the extradimensional space of the Heward's even handier haversack Avoroth carried on his back.  However, when he tried adding the arcane tomes and scrolls from the shelves of the library, they each teleported back to place as soon as he tried stuffing them into the pack.  "We'll have to leave them here for now," he sighed, "and get someone with a bit more spellcasting power to dispel this magic effect."He decided the secret lair made a perfect place for the group to camp out in overnight, once the undead bodies had been dragged outside and added to the pile of corpses.  While the others were tending to that detail, he had started reading scraps of a diary the undead cleric had been keeping, learning that he'd been slain and reanimated against his will as a corpse creature by a lich cleric of Vecna, God of Secrets.  This had been the lich's lair at one point, but he'd been destroyed many centuries back.  Fortunately, Boccob had seen fit to continue to provide the now-undead cleric with spells in his new form.  The diary never gave the cleric's name; eventually Avoroth learned the lich had enjoyed tormenting the corpse creature and refused to return his name to him; how his name had been lost was still unclear, but it had been a great source of anguish for the undead Boccobian cleric.  Left being forced to obey the lich's command to stay within and guard the library, the cleric felt his mind slipping from boredom over the centuries."So, what's the plan?" Amris asked Avoroth, which pleased him, although he made sure not to make any outward sign of it.  But at least she was learning who to go to for the answers among this ragtag group of Elsewhere scouts."We rest up here overnight," the cleric replied.  "Then tomorrow, we start back to Elsewhere.  We'll want to inform them about the stash of arcane knowledge stored here, so they can send someone capable of freeing the books and taking them back into town.  Our own libraries were lost in the fight against the fire elementals all those years ago; this might well be a big start on replacing some of the knowledge that was lost.""Sounds good," affirmed Wilbur.  Avoroth almost snapped back at the druid - of course it sounded good, Avoroth had come up with the plan! - but he kept his thoughts on the subject to himself.  And he had better things to do than argue with underlings; there was a whole library to peruse!  Avoroth knew he'd be getting very little sleep that night.... - - -Boccob's tome of knowledge is a handy bit of magic for a Boccobian cleric: not only does it allow Avoroth to use all Knowledge skills untrained, but it also grants him a +2 bonus to all Knowldge checks, and - best of all - by channeling a rebuke undead blast through it, he can "reverese the polarity" and convert any previously prepared spell into a cure spell instead of his normal inflict spell (as he's an evil cleric).  Nice!</blockquote>

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