Unforunately Will couldn't make it, so Lop faded into the background.
The team traveled north, finding a room brightly lit by torches and set with a sumptuous feast. Because players assume that everything will kill them, they tested the feast and found it to be an illusion. Since the testing was Ap using mage hand, the missed something on the table that would have made that room a lot more interesting. I rolled to randomly determine if Ap's flailing discovered it, but he did not.
Moving on, the party found a crumbling balcony over the main temple with a pair of double doors beyond. Assuming (correctly) it might collapse, Ap once again used mage hand to rig up a rope bridge crossing the balcony and minimizing the weight put on it. As I'm looking back on it, with all the elves (or half-elf in Tathora's case), and skinny wizards, they probably couldn't have put enough weight on balcony to make it crumble (250 lbs was the threshold) unless more than one of them tried to cross at once.
Amrus got to do the rogue thing and scout ahead. He came to a shrine dedicated to a faceless god. It also happened to be a trap. The statue of that faceless god radiated a sympathy effect from the antipathy/sympathy spell. Unfortunately, Amrus failed his saving throw and moved closer to the statue and stood there. That spell makes a doozy of trap: the target makes a new saving throw every 24 hours and only has a 1 minute grace period after succeeding on a save.
Fortunately for Amrus, unlike the two corpses next to the statue, he had friends nearby. Tathora crossed into the room next and made her save against the statue's effect. So it was up to her to break the effect on Amrus. She tried smacking him upside the head. Although it did maximum damage, it didn't break the effect. (Yes, I was recalling that scene from The Gamers at that moment.) Eventually she just put her bedroll over his head and dragged him into an empty adjoining room. He got to make more saves, and eventually succeeded.
Aside from a dispel magic or Mordenkainen's disjunction, there wasn't a way to stop the statue. But if the spell allowed a save if the target could no longer see the source, it seemed logical enough that rendering the source no longer visible ought to work. So that's what the group did. And since I prefer player plans that at least make sense within the game world's logic, I let it work.
While they were messing around, Tathora noticed a secret door. They opened it up a whole wave of skulls just fell onto them. And there were still some left over. The party cleared the skulls out of the room, They found an iron chest on the ceiling.
That damn chest pretty much became the focus of the evening. Cugel cast levitate on Amrus, who found the chest locked a possibly trapped. The chest was sealed with sovereign glue and arcane lock. Eventually, they managed to rig a rope up to allow the whole party to cooperate and pull the chest off the ceiling. Eventually, Tathora used dispel magic on the arcane lock, to Sarra was able to (finally!) pry open the chest with a crowbar.
Of course, the chest was empty and opening it caused the floor of the room it was in to disappear. This was a problem because, once again, while they were messing around with the chest Tathora spotted another secret door. Once again, mage hand and a make-shift rope bridge allowed the party to continue.
They found themselves in the lair of animated, desiccated corpse dressed in fine wizards robes: a lich. This lich had lost its memories and some of it's powers over the centuries, and was a little coocoo for Cocoa Puffs, but not actively malicious. Blake actually decided to role-play the encounter. It was probably also good that Will wasn't there, he probably would have asked the lich to play joust. It wanted to know if anyone in the party could restore its memories. Tathora didn't have greater restoration prepared, but the lich didn't mind them taking a long rest in its chamber so she could. With his memory restored, the lich, Exethanter, decided to grant the party a boon. He told them more about the purpose of the temple and how to use some of its features. At that point they let Kasimir Velikov request the secret of restoring his sister to life.
Exethanter led them through a hidden door, into a secret library filled with books containing Thing Man Was Not Meant to Know. He then led them down into a chamber containing three large amber sarcophagi. One held the secret to vampiricism, one held the secret of lichdom, and the third held the secret of restoring the ancient dead to life. Kasimir used the third one. After some debate, the party managed to dissuade Cugel and Amrus from using either of the others. Although, Cugel was tempted to try the third one after seeing what happened to Kasimir: he took on the appearance of a corpse.
They returned to Exethanter's chamber and the lich returned to his studies. They emerged from the temple and earned another milestone. Once everyone had leveled up, they took stock of their allies and headed to Castle Ravenloft.
Although I could have used the Black Carriage, a classic Ravenloft element, I opted to leave it out, considering something like 11 people were approaching the castle. However, the storm did pick up as they approached the castle, encouraging them to take shelter in the entry hall. There, they met Rahadin, a dusk elf that betrayed his kind and served Strahd. He lead them to the dining hall, where Strahd was playing a massive organ (let's face it, some horror cliches are just too cool). After exchanging some taunts, the illusion of Strahd disappeared, the wind howled through castle, and doors closed (but didn't lock) behind the PCs. Amrus actually tried some of the food and wine on the table. He found it tasty.
At this point, Tathora (because she is a secret finding machine!) noticed some scratches on the floor in front of the organ. Using mage hand, Ap found that pressing one of the pedals caused the organ to swing open, revealing a secret door into a room that used to be an archer post, but was now filled with mirrors. They grabbed a few small ones for the party to use, but it was time to break for the evening.
Next time, deeper into Castle Ravenloft. Feel free to cue up the Castlevania SOTN soundtrack for those.
So awesome!
ReplyDelete