Our heroes, the last time we looked in on them, had returned to the ruined temple with the healing fountain in the hopes that it would heal them of the “Blight.” They found the temple to be re-inhabited by goblins and spent much of the session clearing it out. Oh, they also realized that Maeve was about as both Hannil and Romulus had been fed upon. After clearing out many of the goblins, they reached the entryway to the inner temple to find even more bad guys hunkered down…orcs with ballistae! Grabbing a makeshift door made of logs as a tower shield, Clarissa was making her way into the fray.
This write up is from RJ.
Clarissa was getting ready to walk into the room again, she had picked up the palisade and started forward. Bryn stops her and says, “I hear a door opening in there.” We think about what that could mean but continue forward. She steps in the room with the palisade in front, she is stopped and feels that someone is trying to pull the palisade away. She resists it, but whoever is pulling is very strong and pulls it away from her.
She sees that it is an orc and moves to grab her weapon. Shory steps up and shoots at the orc but misses, Bryn fires and hits. Drogar in his weaken state steps in and is knocked out of the fight. Clarrisa gets her sword out and finishes the orc. As she moves in the room, she sees a big orc-like creature (His name is Spot, at least that is what Bryn understood) step up and they exchange blows. Clarrisa goes down and the orc like creature moves closer to the group. Shory fires another shot and takes another orc down, but she doesn’t see Spot until its too late and she is out of the fight.
Meanwhile, Reamus comes into the room, he tries to help but when he sees Spot he drops to the ground. We aren’t sure if he is out or not. Bryn attracts the attention of Spot and tries to get her. She pulls her dagger and slices him. He topples over. Reamus stands up and is starting to check on others when the goblin cleric comes in and spits at him. Reamus looks like he has seen a ghost and runs out of the room. As he gets in the other room he sees Shory heals her and they go back into the room. Bryn moves towards the goblin cleric and gets spit at but she moves quickly out of the way and stabs at him. He takes the hit, sees Shory and her bow come into the room and moves back threw the door behind him (the fountain room).
Reamus heals Clarissa and stabilizes Drogar. Shory lights a torch and throws it into the room with the fountain and follows it in. She doesn’t see the goblin, she sees the fountain, and Wyvern statue on top. Bryn and Clarissa comes in and start to look around the fountain. The goblins comes around and spits again at Bryn but misses and runs back around the fountain. Bryn starts around the fountain sees the goblin and shoots her bow and hits it. Clarissa moves in and strikes the goblin but it is still up and climbs onto the fountain. As it is getting ready to spit at Clarissa, Shory sees it and shoots. She hits it and it falls off the fountain and to the floor.
Unfortunately, as the goblin was going down, the Wyvern statues eyes shift and it moves towards Clarissa and claws at her. She goes down. The Wyvern then turns its head and sees Reamus enter the room and it flys toward him and again out come the claws and he is down. It then flys back to the fountain and is still once more. We try to scoop some water (due to its healing powers) into Clarissa and Reamus but before we can do it, someone speaks from the other room “Bryn can you come out here?”
Bryn and Shory step out of the room and find Hannil standing over Drogar. His hand is resting on Drogar’s chest, “Drop your weapons and give me a pendant or I will suck out his soul.” Bryn says “No” and comes up shooting. She misses and there is a flash of light from Hannil’s hand and a horrifying, blood curling, soul sucking scream from Drogar as his soul is leaving his body. Bryn charges in and Shory comes up with her bow. Hannil runs back to the room with Romulus and again demands that we give him a pendant and drop our weapons. We come out shooting and Bryn takes Hannil out. We bring Rommulus in with us still unconscious, and check on Drogar. He is dead (In actuality he was still alive but Shory and Bryn thought they stabilized him but didn’t try to get him to the fountain first so he has passed from this mortal world…sniff, sniff)
[We have a rule that a down character must be tended to within three rounds or they die. Just a single action will stabilize them. We also use Bennies (largely a la Savage Worlds) and one other use is to automatically stabilize after being reduced to zero hit points. Sadly, RJ was all out of Bennies and the other players, in the heat of the moment, didn’t think the having his soul sucked out and fed upon would require that he need to be stabilized. There were some definite GM hints about it and I did give Drogar ten rounds instead of the normal three, even counting down.
So we now chalk this death up to poor triage.]
After realizing Drogar is dead, Bryn and Shory gather the party in the fountain room along with Hannil and Drogar’s body. We try to give them some water but it doesn’t seem to work. We decide to rest for the night and hope the others wake up in the morning. We kept watch but it was an uneventful night.
In the morning, everybody wakes up (except for Drogar and Hannil) and take a drink from the fountain. Everyone looks better and all our wounds are healed except for Romulus. Romulus also is having a hard time praying to the twelve, like they aren’t listening as well.
We are still recovering and think we need to stay an extra day here to use the fountain again to heal from the plague that has infected us. We decide to move the goblin bodies out of the room, have to hack up spot to move him. We fix the ballista and move the pillars around in case more goblins come back to set up a more defensible position. As we are doing all of this some questions come to mind, Why the statue didn’t attack Spot? It was I there and there was no necklace on the beast.
We set up in the fountain room, close the doors, and set guards. As Bryn is on guard duty, Mave tries to speak to her threw the door, but Bryn refuses to answer. Later, she speaks to Romulus and he says “What do you want?” She offers to help him and then she threatens him, “there are only three necklaces two of you will be unprotected. I will feed on you until there is nothing left. Your soul will be cast into oblivion.” Romulus gets Clarissa up and she tells Mave to leave us alone. As she leaves she leaves with a parting shot, “Romulus don’t forget our deal.” Romulus stammers that he hasn’t made any deal and Clarissa believes him.
In the morning, we all take another drink from the fountain and hope that was enough. We move out and realize someone was in the other room last night, the pillars were moved and the door is blocked with something. Clarissa moves up to remove the blockage and triggers a trap. A club with a spike swings down and hits her hard. We hear goblins laughing and running away. Romulus heals her and we continue out, a bit more cautious.
We come to the secret door and check it for any traps, we don’t see any but open the door cautiously and stand to the side. A crossbow bolt slams into the door when we open it slowly. We decide to get the palisade, and Clarissa and Romulus hold it in front of them and walk down the hallway. (I forget when we built a carn Hannil and Drogar). Nothing happens and we slip into a room and climb over the wall and head into the woods.
As we are heading back towards the keep and Glennis, Shory realizes that we are being followed by goblins on wolves. She is not sure how many, because she only catches one out of her corner of her eye and then it disappears. We decide to hurry up, because they might attack us and we could use a better defensible position.
As we are rushing through the woods, Romulus trips as he was jumping over a tree and tumbles down a ravine. He hits at the bottom, threw a pile of leaves and keeps going. He stops and fells around under the leaves and there is some stone. The rest of us come down and look around and find a hole where he went through.
We jump down and Romulus casts light there is some moss on the ravine. We move the moss to the side and it opens up to a small hallway with a stone door. Bryn checks for traps and doesn’t find any. We open the door and see a table with five place settings, steaming hot food, flagons of wine, fruit, a full course just put out on the table. There are also five doors from the room, all with wreathes of roes on them. There is also a vase with roses in them and all the roses are fresh. My mouth starts watering and we all move forward……our cliff hanger.
[As RJ indicated, that’s where we ended the session.]
