I'm not going to spoil anything about what my adventure's about, but I recon that anyone from the D&D forums are eager to read about D&D for a change. We've had a break for months now, and we were all kind of rusty and had forgotten a lot of what we were doing and what items we had. One guy even swapped character (but that was because his previous character got messed up; He started naked and his stats were misbalanced).
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| Imagine Gimli from Tolkiens Lord of the Rings. Only without the clothes. |
I got kind of suprised when I found out we were playing today, and I first got noticed about it when school ended, but I luckily always bring my character sheets and a few dices with me where I go, so I was ready to play at the short notice, and luckily everyone else were too. All five of the people playing had the things they needed with them, and the DM (The person who's referred to as XR) had prepared the dungeon maps a few days ahead, so we got right to playing when we arrived at The Owl's Nest (Where we play D&D. It's actually just MA's room, but it's really big so it's great for D&D).
We settled down in chairs and the sofa around the playing table, which actually consists halfly of cardboard boxes, and got our pencils, character sheets, spell notes, etc. ready for playing. The current campaign is a published adventure which takes place in the Eberron campaign.
We entered the city of Sharn after saying farewell with Olaf, a dwarven paladin that started out playing naked (This was due to the person playing Olaf being unprepared for the first session), but eventually started scooping up and equipping himself with the armor of the kobolds we killed in our first adventure. Disturbingly enough, him being naked was actually a better mental image than in the too small leather harness of the kobolds.
After entering the city, Misery, the half-elf rogue of our group, got called over by some stranger she walked up to without us noticing. When we finally did notice that we lacked the fourth person, and that we were reduced to three people, the dragonborn fighter and tiefling warlock agreed that we needed more people if we were to be able to survive in the wild. I, the eladrin wizard of the group, held no opinion regarding this, and we went on to search for more people to join us in our adventure. Shortly after deciding this, a human and his strange alcohol-smelling horsewagon ran into us.
He had been sent by Olaf (who we jokingly referred to as ''Brolaf''). He showed his friendliness towards us by offering us drinks, but only the tiefling accepted. The wagon of the human had a tent on top, and we found out that it was actually a portable inn, complete with a very simple sleeping area, a small bar and brewing area. The human told us his name was Abraham, and that he was a bouncer, as his father had been before him, and his father again before him. The human had for some reason though, started out his own inn, and making his own drinks with the ingredients he could find.
He offered his fighting services for money, that the others agreed to, but I refused that we should pay him to come with us, and instead give him parts of the treasure. The other three agreed to this, and we decided to rest up after the encounter with the giant beetles known as kruthik outside the city. We tested out the human's inn, and regained our strength.
Being eladrin, I awoke before the others, and decided to take a walk around town before the others woke up. I didn't find anything specific, but I got a general idea of the city. When I got back to the cart, the others had awoken, and we decided to head over to the foundry. When we got there, we ran into some guards, that I decided to ask if had any quests for us. They told us that if we were interested in that kind of stuff, we should go meet Molrik, one of the overseers, at The Slagpit (a sort of inn).
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| ''The Slagpit''. |
We went to The Slagpit, where we found out Molrik wasn't there yet. Since it's usually a good thing to know about the people you're going to interact with, I decided to walk over to one of the workers who were resting in the bar, and asked him what he could tell me about Molrik. I was told he was a rough man, and very little refined, but there was nothing about him that was really bad. When I asked the worker if Molrik had a taste for alcohol, he proceeded to stand up, raise his mug of ale up for a toast, and yelled ''Who doesn't?!''. The workers around us also went roaring, and the mood got a lot more lively.
That's about when Molrik entered the room. He was a dwarf, looked the way I was told he was, and had a goblin walking behind him. He shouted out for us, as he appeared to have heard that we were looking for him to get a quest. We gave him a drink, and sat down with him by a table, where he told us about the task he had for us.
Not long time ago, some diggers had dug themselves into the wall of the entrance to a crypt that had been long since forgotten. Not long after the diggers had entered the crypt, kruthiks had come swarming at them, and found their way out to the open. Not many of the diggers had returned, and those who had were too shocked to be able to say anything about what had been inside.
The dwarf proceeded to ask us if we could kill the swarm, and its hive, inside the crypt, to hinder them from attacking any more people. But we were warned that these weren't the usual big bugs that people thought of kruthiks as, these ones were special. These bugs had, in opposition to the other kruthik swarms, started developing wings. Why he didn't know, but he told us he would pay us a fair sum of money for the bug-slaying deed. We managed to negotiate for him to add some days of rations to bring along into the crypts, and we got on our way to the crypt.
We rode the carts with horses we had over to the entrance, and were lucky enough not to run into any more bugs on the way there. We parked the carts outside, and entered the crypt carefully, to avoid drawing any more attention to us than necessary. The crypt entrance was a large room with columns supporting the relatively high roof, small, hovering magical moats lighting up the room, and corpse remains in cut-out areas in the wall. In the center of the room was a giant pile of skulls, with a sign up in front of. We noticed that there were tunnels, that most likely belonged to the kruthiks in the walls, and proceeded with care. We were as silent as we possible, but, as it turned out, the kruthiks were more alert than we thought they were, and we soon heard the chattering sounds we had come to recognize as kruthik sounds, emanating from the walls.
ENCOUNTER 1!
(If anyone knows if I'm legally allowed to post pictures of the encounter rooms, please let me know)
Moriag had snuck over to the pile of skulls to read the plaque in front of it, and was therefore a bit away from the rest of us. The kruthiks weren't yet here, but we could hear them rapidly coming closing from the tunnels. The dragonborn shouted at the human (who is a monk) to cover the nearest dungeon entrance, who proceeded to do just that. The dragonborn and tiefling ran over to the area between the old entrance and the pile of skulls, and decided to make their stand there. I, being a wizard, didn't have much to do without some defence, and instead readied a cloud of daggers at an entrance on the opposite side of the room.
The kruthiks poured out of the walls. One with wings from the tunnel to the right, near the entrance the miners had carved out, but got blocked by the monk standing there. It launched an attack at him, and attached itself in his face, where it chittered and started biting, dealing extra damage to him. Three more kruthiks emerged from the tunnels on the opposite side of the room, two of them smaller than the third. They all ran over to the tiefling, who lacked protection on that side of him, most of them hitting him with their attacks.
The human monk used his martial ability to jump over me, standing directly behind me, across the room, and over to attack the kruthiks attacking the tiefling, still with a bug attached to his face, in an attempt to get the warlock safe. He kicked one of them with a crane kick, and proceeded to take some sort of sweeping strike after that (by using his action point), and got rid of two of the bugs, damaging and knocking the third to somewhere else. The dragonborn proceeded to damage the last bug by the tiefling with her flail, but didn't kill it. No kruthiks emerged from the hole in the wall I was preparing my attack from, so my readiness was wasted.
I cast an icy spell on the floor, on the kruthiks close to the tiefling, leaving the terrain difficult for a while. The kruthiks didn't appear to bee too harmed, though. I then ran near the pile of skulls, to try get away from the tunnel I was standing dangerously close to. The tiefling threw a spell at the bug, but it still wasn't dead, which was when something really bad happened. Another wave of bugs emerged into the room from the walls.
One bug emerged from the top left tunnel in the room, and ran over to the rest of the group in an attempt to inflict damage to them, but luckily missed its attack. After that, since I'm the ''lucky'' person I am, another kruthik popped up from the upper tunnel, and ran over to attack me. It did a rather solid amount of damage, and the pain from its bite was more than I had thought it would be. To my extended luck, two more of the smaller kind ran out and attacked me, and blocked me in by using the warlock who had moved closer to me. I couldn't move very much, but the attacks somehow still missed me in the small area I was standing in.
It was then I decided enough was enough. I shouted to my allies to get away, which they did after launching some attacks at the closest enemies they could find. I fey stepped a few squares, to stand in the place my spell would deal the optimal amount of damage. I raised my staff, and planted it firmly in the ground, sending a wave of electricity along the ground outwards from me, hitting the monk, who hadn't moved far enough away, in the process of attacking the bugs, but my attack wasn't powerful enough to damage them. I decided that I would make another effort at it, and spent much of my strength and magical stamina on sending another wave through the ground, this time powerful enough to be similar to thunder.
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| I did a whooping 54 damage! As a level 2! |
The kruthiks (and the monk) were blasted about 15 feet away from where they had been standing, where four of the six bugs died in the blast. One of the last two became covered in its own goo-like blood, while the last didn't seem as affected by all the attacks, but still seemed harmed. I felt a small satisfaction in the damage I had dealt to the pests, but shook it away as quickly as I could, both in respect to my eladrin heritage and because I remembered about the last two, who were still very much alive.
It didn't take us long to finish off the bugs, though, and after some attacking forth and back, we managed to finish off the kruthiks at the entrance. The vinegar-smelling blood of the slain bugs luckily scared away other bugs, as we had learn earlier, giving us some peace for a short rest to do some basic healing, before we proceeded. I looked around the room, and found a small leather bag in the skull pile, filled with a portion of healing, 11 gold coins and an old journal. I took the potion of healing, as I felt I was the one who would need it most during combat, and gave the journal to the tiefling and the gold to the human, who said he wanted it.
The tiefling soon gave up on the book, though, and gave it back to me. I spent about 10 minutes on reading through it, and I found a small leather notice inside it with some sort of hand imprint on it. Though the leather notice was of a hand, it appeared to be carved out with the usage of tools. I put it in my pocket after showing it to the group, along with the book, and didn't think too much about it for then. The human gathered up some of the moats in a flask, to use for his brew, and we decided to move on.
We noticed a crack above the door into the next room, and the dragonborn lifted the tiefling up to peer through it. He said he could see some sort of runes in a grid at the bottom of some stairs in the center of the room, statues scattered across the room, and some braziers at two of the rooms corners. The dragonborn then dropped him down for some reason, opened to door, and walked into the next room, with us others close behind her.
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| Just for reference, the leather note looked roughly like this. |
ENCOUNTER 2!
The room seemed as described by the tiefling, with the same type of carved out holes in the wall filled with skeletal remains as in the entrance room, five statues, where four stood above the lowering in the room, and on big one was sitting at the right wall from where we entered.. I decided to look closer at the statues, and noticed that the big statue had eyes made of valuable gems. I realized that there was some kind of magical trap around the gems, and told the others to stay away from them. The monk then went to a wall and laid down to sleep, for some reason.
We found out the meaning of the runes easily, and we decided it must've been some kind of riddle to get through the doors at the end of the room. The words on the tiles were seemingly random, but also appeared to have some kind of relevance with each other. The words were east, north, west, south, hell, fire, right, hand, open, unlock, up, down, right, and a few other words. I tried pushing the one marked ''unlock'', but it was too heavy to do anything about. Moriag stepped onto one of the tiles, and with some effort managed to push it down.
It was though a short victory, as we shortly after heard a ticking sound, and noticed that the plate was moving back up to its original position. We figured that it must be some kind of mechanism behind the tiles, and a correct combination needed to open the doors. I and Moriag proceeded to push down two tiles at once, to see if the ''unlock'' and ''door'' were the right tiles for opening the doors at the end of the hall. ''Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick'', we heard, as both the tiles returned to their positions, presumably due to a wrong combination.
I came to think of the leather piece I had found earlier, and took it out of my bag. I felt like the bottom triangle piece was some kind of hint. I pushed the tiles labeled ''hand'' and ''down'', and to my joy, they stayed pushed down. Nothing else happened, but at least we now knew that we needed a combination to pass. Moriag tried pressing a third tile, but ended up resetting all of the tiles. I pushed to ''hand'' and ''down'' tiles again, and luckily they still worked.
We took some time to experiment with the buttons, but Moriag luckily noticed something else about the leather note after a while. It was a right hand. He pushed the ''right'' and ''open'' tiles, leading to the combination of ''right'', ''hand'', ''down'' and ''open''. We heard a grinding stone noise, the torches went out, and the big statue moved forward, revealing an opening behind it we could step through. I entered the room, followed by the dragon and the tiefling, but the monk decided to push his luck, and stole an eye. He got lucky, and nothing happened.
We entered a well-lit tomb, filled with the glowing magical motes that had been at the entrance. In the middle of the room were four saluting goblin statues. Else in the room was a grave at the one end of the room, on a slightly raised area, with some stairs leading up to it, and four statues on similar platforms. I noticed two chests by the grave, and I went to look at them. When I had taken a look for about 10 seconds or so, the room suddenly went pitch black. We heard the grinding of stone, the cracking of statues, and a voice shouting at us. It claimed us grave robbers, and was enraged we did not salute him when entering his tomb. I quickly lit up my staff, revealing the grave to have opened, and the corpse of a 5000 year old hobgoblin hero to have stepped out of it.
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| HAI GUISE! |
ENCOUNTER 3!
The corpse of the old hero looked at me, and I knew he was going to launch an attack at me. I ran down the stairs, and cast a spell that caused the ground between me and the goblin corpse to become covered in ice. He didn't seem too hindered by it, and caught up with me, delivering a powerful strike to me with his sword. I got badly injured, but was still able to stand.
The statues holding the swords had cracked open, and the remains of goblin soldiers had cracked out of them. The human lit up a torch near him, and we saw that the saluting four goblin statues in the center of the room were spinning, and that two of the undead goblins ran to the statues, and used them to launch themselves towards us, but luckily they didn't manage to reach us very quickly, leaving us time to make another attack.
I raised my staff, and planted it firmly in the ground, causing a lightning wave out from me, knocking the goblin hero and his soldiers away from me, and the two who had launched themselves from the statue had been knocked back into it, causing it to hit them and render one unconscious on the ground, and the other knocked prone right next to the other one.
We exchanged many strikes forth and back, but nothing out of the ordinary happened, except for the of the statues to launch the monk to deliver a kick to one of the goblins. That is, until shortly after we had killed one of the undead soldiers. The goblin hero let out a blood-curling shrike, leaving me on the brink of life and death. I luckily got stabilized and healed, but I ran away, after moving my light to the ground, and summoning a Great Sphere of Fiery Doom near the undead goblin, causing a lot of fire damage to them. The fireball turned out to be extremely usable, and was one of the most damaging things done by us, in total damage.
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| Me + GSOFD = true |
I didn't notice what my group did after that, but I healed myself so I could take another strike from the goblin hero, and summoned a cloud raining daggers down on the undead soldiers, while moving my ball of fire to follow the enemies, causing a constant burning damage to them. Somehow we managed to kill all the other enemies than the goblin hero, but we had taken serious damage to the group, and two of us had been knocked on the brink between life and death, much due to our lack of healing. There was nobody to heal us but the small amount of healing we could improvise on each other, but since none of us were trained healers, we could only heal for small amounts at a time.
We somehow managed to muster enough strength to (re)kill the goblin hero, and my ball of fire did the last shot on him. We took a long breather after that, and healed up what we could, before looking through what we could find. The sword used by the goblin hero was a broadsword, but aside from his armor and the keys to the chest, there was nothing else in the room. In the chests were some gold, which was taken by the human, and some armor, that I got a skull mask from.
This was as far as we got in our quest, but we're going to play on Sunday, so it won't be a long wait until we get further on in our quest. We won't play on the same location, though, and we're planning on also swapping DM, as XR got tired of it, and the plan is for MA to replace him now. We'll try to get the swap logical, even though it's kind of hard at the moment, and XR is going to easy things up a bit for us by playing as a healer, which we've needed badly.
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Post script: This is all based on my memory, and much of the encounter is missing, as evident by the difference in the amount of words in each encounter part, so I'll apologize if I've forgotten anything, or something's different than it was. We don't have the books with the stats of the newly acquired armor either, so we don't know the stats of the loot we got. We don't even have ''broadsword'' as a weapon category in our current books, but we'll get the recquired books soon.
I'll also apologize for rushing the summary at the end, but there's not long time until next time we're playing, so there's not much time to write this before I got to write the other one. In addition to that, it's late at night now, and I'm tired, and even though I got something I got to do tomorrow, I've written some thousand of words in order to complete this post for you to read.
I promise I won't forget writing down anything important when I'm DM, and I will reveal pretty much everything then, but until I am, please don't think too badly of me. I'm doing my best to remember things, and if I ever leave out anything important, I'll make sure you know what I left out, or remembered wrongly.
P.P.S: The human took a mushroom from the crotch of the goblin hero to cultivate, and make drinks from. I doubt I'll be accepting any of the drinks he offers to me, especially the free ones.
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