Meet 57, Adv 4.2, 8/4/18

The group made their way further up Damlagast's Tower, finding what was to be found and being careful about it. So far they've had some good luck and decent dice rolls, making what combat and traps here achievable with being too difficult. One of the players had mentioned that it seemed "easy" but they were then reminded that a single bad roll with the ghoul fight and we would have had a TPK.

Write up follows:

An emaciated greyish skinned orc bust from behind the table at Connal’s side, the Monk somersaulting backwards to stand side by side with his companions, scrabbling at the air before charging forwards. It hit the line and bit scratched and snarled at Einar, the half-orc druid grunting in pain before his limbs froze in place. In return the ghoul was assaulted by magic and blade but most weapons just bounced off it’s skin. Meanwhile Barb reported that ANOTHER ghoul was in kitchen and trying to get out! The barbarian dug in her feet and raged, swelling up in anger and shoving the ghoul back inside.

The combat continued with the first undead getting hit again by flying bullets and Connal’s fists, but it angered the wobbling dead thing who turned its anger on the monk and paralyzed him with numerous scratches and bites. Shimlagesh begged it with a blast of cold and then a final sling bullet from Darius’ enchanted weapon tipped it over sideways.

They pried Mettle, the enchanted blade from Einar’s hand and slid it to Barb who grabbed it, waited for the party to get ready, and then moved back so the group could assault the last ghoul. It had a large metal pot cover that it used to block one of the bullets, was hit with the second, and spells finished the damned thing off as it fell over finally dead.

Healing was doled out and we had to wait a few minutes for the paralysis to wear off. From there Shim and Avulstein went over the undead being deciding to take the two hearts and 4 eye balls for now for possible alchemic purposes at another time. It was a bit after 6 based upon our best guess when we left the dining room, kitchen, and pantry area (picked over long ago) and made our way up to the 5th floor.

This was the first floor and landing where we did not see broken dwarven skeletons or signs of violence. The door was shut here and a peer under showed no heat sources beyond. Feeling squeamish, we continued on our way up the stairs and decided to come back to this floor at another time.

At the 6th floor we saw 3 blasted dwarven skeleton’s here, bits of melted metal around them. The door was blasted open and fire and lightning score marks littered everywhere. Just inside there were even more dwarven remains scattered around what we assumed was the orcish wizard’s private chambers. From the placement of the many bodies we could tell he was backing up to the next room here and looking inside the entire chamber which was once the wizard’s library, had been the victim of a terrible fireball. Five more dwarven skeletons had been blasted into the shelves and walls, and in the center of the room was a pair of worn but still in good condition orcish made high soft boots.

Barb braved the boots, picked them up and tried them on. As she slid them on they changed color from dusky brown to forest green and shrunk down to better fit her feet. Some tests showed that while wearing them, her feet felt no effects from fire or heat, but had nothing to do with the rest of her body. Weird but ok.

From here we went to go further up to the 7th floor but around the 3rd or 4th step up, Darius ended up disappearing! As for the fighter, he was actually downstairs and stepping off the last step to the 1st floor. Odd. He turned to go upstairs. Others also tried it and they too ended up down at the base of the tower. We tried throwing rocks, stepping over, jumping – nothing allowed us to get past the 3th or 4th step.

We decided to go back to the 3rd floor and try out the two doors in the statue room while Shim gave the pictures on the 2nd floor a once over, seeing nothing new. Back in the statue room, Barb tossed the parts of the statue down the steps while we listened to the scratching from the north door. We decided to check out the south door instead. Once sure it wasn’t trapped, Barb opened it and got out of the way just in time before she was immolated by a flame blast – getting singed, not burned. But an animated chain floated out of the room and attacked Barb who was getting whipped about the neck. Shim froze a section of the chain and concentrated on hitting that part, while the half-orc fought with it. It took a few minutes before it was over and we could take better stock of things. The door to the room had shut again during the fight.

Darius wanted to try it next, but we figured on maybe blocking the door in some way so that it might impeded the potential fire. While the fighter was making a set of thin shims, the party was getting bits of wood tossed down from the 4th floor to the 1st so we could eventually light the furnace. After a half hour of fiddling around, Darius went to open the door and the fighter received a full on blast of flame before we tried other ways on opening the door. Ropes and chains and looping it around the statue bases helped and we got the door open.

It was a study but it had been lightly picked over. Two dwarven skeletons were here, necks crushed. We looked around the desk, eventually discovered a secret compartment, and took a handful of old orcish silver coins and a partially dissolved and concentrated potion labelled Flight. Nice. There were two scroll cases in here but both of them had only fragments of dried paper within.

We went back to the room, opened the north door and a stone lizard head and arm statue piece came flying out towards the statue! Only the head made it as Darius was able to smash the arm before it could attach, and we fought the statue here, eventually smashing it to pieces.

Some healing was dispensed and we checked out the room, another study but this time the secret desk part had been listed up and the dwarves had left a nasty note for anyone to find.

It was about 8 and we were getting tired. The tower was cold, just under 50 degrees and we were going to work on the furnace, but wanted to check out the 5th floor with the closed door just in case. Once there we opened the door, seeing a shirt hall with three doors at the end, all of them had been forced open. The first room on the right was a servant’s bedroom, ransacked. Closet door was closed.

The next room on the left was set up similar, bedding slashed and closet busted in. Some orcish underwear still in decent shape – not much else. The center door showed a slightly larger servant’s chamber – an orcish skeleton near the back in a set of faded robes and three flatbow bolts in her chest. Dreadlocked hair and necklace led us to believe it was a woman. We checked out the room while Barb looked over the fallen orc.

Found a secret false bottom in one of the drawers that had a small scattering of coins and some dangle copper earrings that looked like lightning bolts. Barb was sure the girl was wearing an orcish whistle and she eased it off, and in her pocket were a pile of battered letters she had been communicating with her boyfriend at some not too distant village. We read the letters and got some ideas of what the surrounding defenses might have been like, thinking that the orcish fort mentioned might be a good place for the third Kobold Warren to be.

We took everything that we wanted to check with us to the bedroom that had to the closed closet door and were going to detect magic here before heading downstairs to screw around with the furnace.