The Side Quest Session 17

Fan. That’s where we left things in our last session as in the you know what was about to hit the fan. Morgraen and Callie had just had the floor fall out from under them. Some nasty undead creature had begun to break the ropes holding it inside its sarcophagus and, if that wasn’t enough, Grim had spotted something skulking in the dark down one of the unexplored corridors. It was a pretty classic “Oh crap!” moment and a perfect spot to end a session.

This week we had a pretty full house with Muse, Rachel, RJ, and Thomas (so Callie, Grim, Morgraen, Riordan, Rurik, Bronn, and Lilly) and we were joined by a new player, Miles. Miles created Luther, a human fighter. Luther had been traveling and got caught in a bad storm. Seeking shelter, he spotted some ruins not too far from the trail he was traveling. Heading in to find shelter, he passed through an archway just as lightning struck it! Blacking out, assuming it was the end of both his travels and his life, Luther was a bit surprised to wake up to find a small halfling administering aid to him. It was Lilly! She and Bronn had just returned from chasing after Katerine who had run off unexpectedly (as both Thomas and Bridgett weren’t at the last session). Perhaps still dazed from the lightning strike, Luther followed the diminutive duo down some stairs and through some passageways and chambers until they found the rest of the party hitting that fan.

Spoilers: There are spoilers for the Dungeon Magazine adventure, Fiendish Footprints, below the break.

My GM comments, as usual, are in [italics and brackets].

As the floor dropped out from underneath them, Callie was able to nimbly leap back into the corridor she had just exited. Morgraen, on the other hand, was not so lucky and had no nearby corridor of safety. She fell some ten feet or so, narrowly missing being skewered upon a large spike–one of many–at the bottom of this pit. Despite her narrow miss, smacking the hard floor left her unconscious. Rurik, meanwhile, had leaped atop the now thumping sarcophagus as Luther and the halflings came into the same chamber. Yelling for help, he got Luther to come over and sit atop the stone casket and further weigh down its lid.

Coming quickly to Morgraen’s aid, Riordan dropped himself down into the pit. The chest that had been on the “floor” of the room previously lay smashed amongst a bunch of other debris, including some sacks shoved up against one corner of the area. A small tunnel in one of the walls of the pit offered one way out. His first order of business, however, was to get Morgraen to safety and so lifted her up to the waiting grasp of Callie and Grim who dragged her up to their level. A rope was then lowered to aid Riordan in his ascent. As he headed up, a hissing sound could be heard from the small tunnel and a pair of glowing red eyes were spotted but Riordan scrambled up to the others without encountering the thing in the tunnel.

As this rescue was occurring, some clever attempts were being made to deal with the creature in the sarcophagus. A series of looping ropes were again put in place to secure the lid. Before they were made taut, the lid was leveraged up a bit so Luther could stab into it with his sword. He did this a couple of times but then the creature within grabbed his blade and held it. With a might heave, Luther was able to recover his sword as it sliced through flesh but came away with no blood upon it. Bronn then tossed in a flask of oil, followed by a torch, and then another flask. The contents clearly on fire, the lid was lowered after given a few moments to burn. A second sarcophagus lid was recovered from the empty one that the prior creature had come from and added to the top of this one, all then secured with ropes.

The party regrouped and stashed the still unconscious Morgraen beyond the burned out coffin for, um, safety before setting off to do some more exploration. Heading down the corridor from which Grim and previously spotted movement, they found it ended in yet another chamber with a sarcophagus. Nothing popped out as the party headed in. This room also had a serious of empty niches carved into one of the walls, possibly some sort of funerary niche that had never been used or had been previously plundered. A pile of old and rusty digging tools sat in one corner right under a small tunnel leading out of the chamber. The tunnel, however, only led back for between five and ten feet before it had caved in. Not wanting to disturb whatever might be in the sarcophagus, the party left it untouched and headed back out to retrieve Morgraen and head elsewhere.

Their dwarven companion, sadly, was no longer where they had left her! Now they had two things to find…the cloven hoof, the original object of their quest, and their missing friend. Hoping that both might be found in the pit, they party circled around to one of the corridors leading to it. As they passed through the chamber with the double-lidded and rope secured sarcophagus, Bronn, noticed the ropes securing the thing had been torn…it was no longer secured! [Yes, something had ripped through them from the outside.] Both lids went flying off and a creature similar to the one they had fought before nearly flew out. Stark naked and smelling of a bonfire, the creature had no obvious wounds despite having been in its own private crematorium for a brief period of time, courtesy of Bronn.

Like the prior creature, this one didn’t seem to be as badly harmed by most of their weapons…only the magical ones seemed to be fully effective. Additionally, the wounds that were inflicted continue to heal at an alarming rate. Taken a bit unawares by this turn of events, Lilly elected to buy the party a brief breather and rebuked the creature with the holy smoke of Silvanus. The creature fled and the party pressed it, hoping to catch it in a more advantageous location for their battle. Eventually, it retreated into the room with the large and previously animated suit of armor. As it had with the party, the armor animated and attacked the undead thing. A couple of grievous wounds were inflicted but ended Lilly’s hold on the thing and the undead retreated back to attack the party and escape the armor.

Another dangerous battle ensued and the creature was eventually defeated. Lilly, however, was wounded and incapacitated by the thing. With no healing magics still available, the party looked to the three unlabeled potions that Lilly had been carrying since they were found in Castanamir’s alchemical lab. If the unattached labels found with the three bottles were correct, one of the potions was of healing while the other two were diminution and the other ESP. Apparently, a halfling’s luck holds even at death’s door for the first potion administered brought Lilly back to consciousness, feeling a bit better.

As Lilly recovered, Riordan heard a “thump” from down the corridor that led to the room with the sarcophagus [pretty much every chamber here] and collapsed tunnel. Looking over, he saw Morgraen’s body limply hitting the floor and then being dragged out of sight. A trap? Perhaps. But what choice did they have. As they reached the room, Morgraen’s body could be seen getting dragged into the now open sarcophagus by another of the undead creatures. Riordan also spotted a cloven hoof hanging from a cord around the thing’s neck! At least one of their hopes was realized…both Morgraen and the hoof were together. The creature disappeared down a hole in the bottom of the sarcophagus with the dwarf’s hopefully still living body.

The party began to crawl down into the tunnel, one by one. Before Riordan, one of the last, could climb in, he heard another thump coming from down the same corridor they had just traveled. Morgraen’s body was lying on the floor. He quickly headed that way and called for the rest to come back up. Before he could aid Morgraen, however, the creature dropped down from the ceiling above and its attack knocked Riordan unconscious. The thing then quickly went back into the room and proceeded to “assist” the party in backing out of the sarcophagus’ tunnel. Like Riordan, Grim was knocked out by the creature’s attacks which also plunged the chamber into darkness as his light spell ended. The creature had a significant advantage as long as the party kept backing out of the small tunnel.

Fortunately, one of the party members [sorry…I forgot who] was able to push the creature back a bit to give everyone a bit of room to get out of the tunnel’s confines. Already depleted in numbers and resources, things did not look promising for the party and the creature probably was probably destined to defeat them until Bronn tumbled past it. He tried to grab the cloven hoof from around its neck but was unsuccessful given the creature’s chaotic dodging and ducking during the fight [I’m sure Bronn’s short stature had nothing to do with it]. He was poised to try again but before he could, Rurik reached up and grabbed the hoof itself and yanked it off of the creature. The thing immediately collapsed as Bronn shouted out disappointed. Midoritosh had been quite clear that no one should actually touch the hoof and that’s why Bronn had tried to grab the cord. For his part Rurik looked…

[And that’s where we ended the session. Midoritosh had, indeed, made it a point to inform them not to touch the hoof but, instead, to scoop it up with a pouch or recover it in some other way without touching it. But can you blame Rurik for having done so in the heat of the battle. I’m sure that he had just forgotten the instructive warning…or had he. Perhaps Rurik actually knows something about the hoof or is seeking whatever power it might have for himself. In this age of texting, private messaging, and otherwise communicating surreptitiously, perhaps RJ received some insider information from yours truly and acted upon it. It wouldn’t be the first time that a player had his character do something along these lines. Hmm… ;)]