Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Heroes of Weaverham, Parts 3 and 4


I'm switching the session report up from the "narrator" style to running over the fourth wall and backing over it a few times with a backhoe because 1. I'm not sure how long I'd be able to keep it up and 2. the reports would have become increasingly cryptic/short on content as the party spends extended sections of time outside of town.

The group:

  • Beefcake Piledriver, charismatic dwarf (earlier I identified this character as "Beefsteak Piledriver", my mistake, as "Beefcake" is correct)
  • Forest Woodtwig, elf with Buddy Holly glasses
  • Olin, who delights in attacking the helpless
  • Hankella, hirsute warrior and Brazz, her hireling who is beginning to think that he should have included some terms on harassment in his contract

After some discussion and hitting up of bars, the party decided to head out to the ogre cave, where they'd previously discovered that the cave continued past the initial chamber; however, they also discovered that it was dark and that while they had plenty of torches, they didn't actually have anything to light the torches with.

This time, they remembered to bring some flint and steel and upon heading deeper into the cave, they discovered a large flat rock that uncovered the "backdoor" to The Goblin Hideout. After heading down into the hideout, they openly assaulted the goblins in the kitchen and when the noise brought shouts from goblins elsewhere in the complex, the party had the dwarf reply in Goblin to try and put them off. This wound up with the dwarf antagonizing the other goblins, leading to another melee at the top of the ledge above the mushroom cavern. The party killed these goblins without taking much damage, although a couple goblins ran away, now in the knowledge that there were intruders in the cave.

The party reacted to this by going down to the mushroom cavern and investigating the hanging cage. An extended argument on what to do with the myconid followed, only interrupted by an ambush led by the goblin shaman, who had some nasty spells that required only a successful touch attack. After killing Brazz, the goblins started rolling terribly, with only the dwarf suffering significant wounds and the shaman failing completely to touch any PCs. Again, a handful of goblins fled once it was clear the battle was turning against them. The party celebrated by having Hankella sample some of the local fungi, resulting in her falling unconscious.

And so ended the third session.

The fourth session picked up with the party trying to remember the basic layout of the caverns and exactly what had happened. They decided to free the myconid using the key that they found on the shaman and were rewarded with the myconid presenting them with three healing (1d4+1) chunks of mushroom. Hankella regained conciousness soon after and hearing snarling and growling to the north, they moved to investigate, finding the wargs barricaded in a room. Noting their apparent hunger, the party hid random bits of mushroom inside random bits of goblin, which they then flung into the room until the wargs ate the right combination of mushrooms to render them unconscious, at which the party entered and slew them.

After investigating the equipment in the "foyer" room, the party returned to the mushroom cavern with the goal of hunting down the remaining goblins (the amount of equipment indicated that there were more of them than they had killed before). Heading down to the shaman's room (the shaman and one of his bodyguards having been killed already) the party discovered the scroll cases, took the scrolls without even glancing at them, threw all the small stones into the pool, tried to plumb its depths with a rope and debated having the dwarf swim down it before grumbling about the lack of treasure and preparing to return to the unexplored areas off the foyer.

Upon leaving the bodyguard's room, they were ambushed by the remaining 5 goblins, including one of the bodyguards. The goblins tried to use a net and failed, although Beefcake was reduced to near-death by a mighty blow from the bodyguard. Hankella then threw the net back at them with spectacular results, taking out three of the goblins in a single attack. The bodyguard was quickly felled and the remaining goblin attempted to flee before being cut down from the shadows by Olin, who had sneaked past the melee in order to coup de grace the goblins stuck in the net.

The party then discovered the skull/pedestal room, where the thief made his Dex check upon attempting to remove one of the skulls and avoided the poison needle trap. More careful investigation ensued, until one of the party members remembered that there were a number of skulls worked into the walls on the way down to the shaman's room. They figured that one or both of the stone skulls might be among those and since I hadn't decided on a place for the second skull, I decided that this was an excellent piece of logic on their part and they thus found the dwarf skull in the shaman's corridor, although they were still missing the skull (which they correctly guessed should be an elf skull).

Trying to force the final pedestal with use of clay molded into the depression and applying force did nothing, so the party decided to take the other three skulls and go back to town. The half-day of travel went uneventfully and a night out carousing and questioning resulted in the discovery that some folks remember seeing a stone skull in the trophy collection of the town sheriff, dating back to his adventuring days. The fourth session then came to a close, with the party discussing how best to progress.

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