Colonial Caerdia: Lark's Landing is a story being told through a 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign I'm running at a local hobby shop called the Devil's Bench. If you aren't familiar with this ongoing story, you can follow this link to Once Upon a Tabletop on YouTube to hear the start of it or read the brief summary I wrote when I switched from video to blog.
You can find the previous episode here.
5th of Waning Fall, 1AL
As the 3rd Watch continue their adventure, they find themselves split in deciding what they want to do next. So, while Fiaeorri and T'Zaric are focusing on solving the puzzle wheel on the huge doors, the rest explore the secret room. There isn't much to be found there. Quib climbs the narrow ladder and begins to open the hatch at the top, but retreats the moment he hears gruff voices from above. Extang then, with Logan and Quib close behind, opens the door on the far end of the secret room, which opens up into a large room filled with barred cells and hallways going off to either side. Extang traipses out to investigate the cells, but finds himself being charged by a madly flailing orc. He retreats to the doorway, but the sound appears to have attracted another orc, as well as some spiky, hunched, one-eyed humanoid creatures - three from each of the hallways to the sides.
Quib stuns the three spiky creatures to the left while Extang promptly retreats to the doorway, where Logan takes up a defensive position, and prepares to attack anything that gets near. He does so when the first orc follows him, which collapses to the ground in the flames of his magic. However, as if falls, there's a shimmer in the air beside it and a brain on four stubby legs appears. It rakes its claws across Logan's armor, then releases a screech that causes him to go slack, swaying where he stands.
Terrified by this little brain, Extang releases a fireball, which kills the brain, but also takes down the other orc - which causes another brain to appear. When Logan fails to recover from whatever it was the first brain did, he and Quib drag Logan back into the secret room and close the door, where they are met by the rest of the group coming to see what is going on. No matter what they try, Logan isn't snapping out of his dazed state.
Not wanting to risk more interactions with those creatures on the other side of the door, Extang and T'Zaric re-open the door, blasting the area beyond with fireballs and killing everything out there. After a search of the caves, and harvesting the eyes from some of the creatures, all attention is turned back to Logan. Patrick is unable to do anything for him and suggests rest as the only possibility. They strip Logan's armor and settle him down to sleep, but before they join him, they go to perform a couple last experiments on the door in the other room, where they have discovered that pressing the ruby in the center of the wheel seems to produce magic to harm them, and also seems to block their magical attempts to bypass it. T'Zaric hears a mysterious voice suggesting that they are missing a piece of the puzzle.
Fiaeorri is the first up after they have rested, and she wakes up Patrick who she had asked to prepare his spell for speaking with the dead. They have a brief conversation with the big skull in the room, hoping to learn about the puzzle door, however it doesn't seem to know anything about it, and ends up informing them that it is a beholder and that they should be worshiping it.
During the conversation, Logan wakes up - and while he's recovered a little, he appears severely lacking in intelligence, to the point where he doesn't seem to understand language. They tie a rope around him for his own safety. Then T'Zaric wakes up, and he's returned to his old half-elven appearance, can't seem to fly anymore, and he seems to have lost a good chunk of his memory.
After much concern and puzzling, the group decides to ascend the ladder into the room above with the orcs. Fiaeorri goes up first, flinging open the hatch (she's angry because T'Zaric no longer seems to share her passion for killing) to see a room with eight orcs in it. Quib pops up, attempting to dazzle them with his magic and only stunning one of them, before dropping back down into the room and pointing up the ladder and saying there are bad things up there.
Fiaeorri decides that this was, perhaps, not the best idea and also retreats, covering the opening with an illusion - which is destroyed a moment later as Logan stupidly sticks his head up through it, who is followed by Extang who rushes up to blast the orcs in the room with a fireball. The orcs close in on them, attacking, and two of the orcs begin casting spells. Patrick tries to heal his friends while T'Zaric... T'zaric, after a moment of inaction, turns back into his smoky state and flies up into the room, releasing a devastating fireball that finishes off half the orcs, but also hits himself and all of his friends, the fire billowing down into the hatch below. The startled Logan falls down the stairs while Fiaeorri rushes back up to help.
Extang, hoping to duplicate T'Zaric's impact, and figuring that if one of them is risking hitting friends it's fair to reciprocate, sets off another fireball - though he aims it so it doesn't go down into the room below. Once the fire and smoke have cleared, two of the orcs are still standing - and T'Zaric has fallen from the air, unconscious, and returned to his half-elven form.
And that's where this week's game session ends. Join us next week to discover how all of this will turn out in Episode 66.
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