We rejoined our heroes still in the room with the large lake. We spotted some of the bullywugs swimming under the lake and into an underwater passage. After some examination and comments by the lizardfolk, we realized that they were swimming with the current to a point outside of the castle. We decided they were fleeing in defeat, so we continued on.
We reached the room below the crane. The floor was covered in mist up to three-feet deep. Thok managed to waft some away with a few waves of his shield and a successful athletics check. There was nothing of interest under the mist. We crossed the room headed towards the portal room, when Pharblex Spattergoo and his honor guard attacked us. Pharblex was a larger than average bullywug with some spellcasting ability and wearing the jaws of some fanged aquatic creature as a headdress.
Despite the mass of bullywugs, twelve all together plus Pharbles, the fight did not last long. Spirit guardians, my premiere crowd-clearing spell can last up to 10 minutes! So I still had it up for this fight, catching almost half, including Pharblex, in the initial wave. Censura also manged to clear a clump, and do a fair bit of damage to Pharlbex, with a well placed burning hands spell. The positioning of the bullywugs forced an unfortunate splitting of the party. However, they ended up being pushovers. Censura activated his dagger of venom in anticipation of stabbing Pharblex with it, but never managed to make an attack.
We found Pharblexes lair and a chest trapped with a dead fall dropping clay pots filled with a hallucinagenic compound that made the victim think they were a frog. According to the text of the adventure, the chest was otherwise empty. D.J., however, decided that the designers had been too stingy with the magic items, so he rolled to have one randomly be found within: a wand of winter, which looks and feels like an icicle and casts various ice-themed spells: ray of frost, sleet storm, and ice storm.
Wands, and magic items in general, bear some discussion at this point. First, 5e and encounters have returned to the more old school method of magic items where the details are DM-facing. However, D.J. has opted for a model like 4e: just give us the rules for how they work so we can use them without having to refer to him to look it up. I prefer this method, both as player and as DM. It saves me work as a DM, and as a player it shows that the game designers trust me to not abuse the system. Don't get me wrong, there are good reasons to keep the exact mechanics of a magic item obfuscated from players. But those are narrative reasons, so the rules usually amount to "it does what you want it to do, customized for maximum entertainment value." (Or at least that's how they ought to read. Other DMs will argue that there are other reason; none of them are good.)
But back to wands. Some wands, like the wand of magic missile and the wand of winter are available for use by characters regardless of spellcasting capability. In this case, the to-hit rolls and save DCs for the wand are determined by the wand, not the wielder. This being the case, once we had a chance to identify it during a short rest, the wand was given to me.
We took that short rest to identify the wand after returning Pharblex's headdress to Dralmorrar. He then took us up on an offer to take down the otyugh in the ruined tower. He opted to leave the spectres at the top of the same tower alone.
We positioned ourselves at the entrance to the tower and the pile of rubbish housing the otyugh. We sent Egan to find a sturdy board, planning to use it to reach a chest perched precariously on some broken, rotted rafters on the tower's second floor. As Egan ran to fetch the board, however, a straggler band of bullywugs appeared in the outer barbican to flank us.
I was not having any of that shit. I used 4 of the wand of winter's 7 charges to hit them with Ice Storm. Although its damage is a bit lackluster compared to fireball (4d6 cold damage and 2d8 bludgeoning, leaving behind difficult terrain), it still did the job, dropping all the bullywugs in one round, allowing us to focus on the otyugh.
The otyugh even contact Sandi and Thok with telepathy, pointing out how terrible it was of us to come into its lair and start attacking it. My friend Steve S. would pull similar tricks in his game--when looting corpses we would stumble upon cards from children reading, "I miss you, Daddy. I hope your extra hours at guard duty will pay for my operation." In case, through focused fire we managed to deal over 170 points of damage to the otyugh over the course of two rounds. It still managed to get in a few hits on its turn with multiattack. It even managed to hit and poison Thok. However, protection from poison negates poison already in the system, so I cast it on my next turn.
With the otyugh out of the way, we made our way to chest. It was also trapped, this time with an arrow mimicking Melf's acid arrow. It contained mixed coins, and another random magic item: a cloak of elvenkind. We decided to give it to Sandi.
We'll be reaching level 6 at the start of next session and taking a long rest before going through the portal and on to the next stage of our journey.
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