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
The 3rd Watch have a late start to the day in the dark hallways beneath the castle they found. On their first foray out of the strange room that brought them down here, they took the hall to the right. This time, Fiaeorri suggests heading to the left. They Head down the tunnel, where they find a door to their left, leading into a large room with a door just visible on the opposite wall at the far end of the room. Extand sends his bat familiar in to check out the room - only to have it killed as some sort of strange rain begins.
In spite of having seen the rain, the floor isn't wet and there's nowhere in the ceiling for it to come from. They wait for Extang to ritually cast a spell to detect magic, and he can see that the ceiling is magic. They begin discussing what to do about this, but they don't get far before Logan charges across the room. The rain starts again, but he makes it to the door and opens it before being knocked to the ground. T'Zaric teleports across to the hallway beyond and manages to toss him a rope and pull him out of the rain.
The rain, which seems to switch between different types of elemental damage, vanishes without a trace. They begin considering other ways to get across the room when Fiaeorri runs out into the room, triggering the rain again and falling down halfway across the room. Patrick runs out to save her, and also falls down. T'Zaric trows a rope to Fiaeorri while Quib runs out and teleports himself and Patrick out of the room to the hallway with T'Zaric. Fiaeorri grabs the rope and is pulled in by Logan and T'Zaric. Seeing that he's the last one on this side of the room, Extang teleports halfway across the room and runs the rest of the way out.
Relatively safely on the other side, they continue through twisting and branching tunnels, often deciding which way to turn with the flip of a coin. They find a room with three creatures that look like floating brains with beaks and tentacles, which promptly attack. Then three more attack from behind, grabbing Patrick. Quib and T'Zaric rush to the rescue, but Quib's spell makes the creature holding Patrick run away - dragging Patrick with it. Partick is so terrified he bursts into a radiant light that hurts all the creatures close to him, but himself as well.
The creatures are slowly eliminated, and the room searched - revealing only rotted wood and rusted metal debris. They backtrack to take another route, and find another room with a summoning circle on the floor. Further up, the hall turns, but Extang notices some magical runes along the base of the walls using his detect magic spell. T'Zaric flies down the hall alone to scout ahead. Just as the corner behind him gets out of sight, something triggers. Suddenly, a big metal ball comes roaring down the hall and crashes into him. He dodges the brunt of the blow, but it still hurts a lot. He books it for the end of the hall, where he can see a magical portal and a corner to dodge around. He gets hit again as the ball crashes by again before he makes it around the corner. He sees the ball pass by one more time before the portal vanishes.
At the other end, the group sees the portal open and the ball go rushing past three times before the portal closes again. Pressing up against the wall in the direction T'Zaric went, Fiaeorri is able to make magical contact with him, learning that he's very badly injured, but still alive. She gets him to describe the halls and doors around him, and he offers to teleport back, but she suggests another option first, believing there may be a way to circle around and meet up with him. The group tries this, but upon the layout of the pathways being different than they expected, they head back and get T'Zaric to teleport over to them after all.
They then return to the path that they'd just explored to open a door to the new room, where Fiaeorri immediately sees a large number of what are probably pit traps covering the floor. Extang enters the room, poking around with his 10 foot pole hoping to trigger any traps without getting hit. Fiaeorri tries to guide him, but he doesn't see what she's trying to point out, so he falls into a pit-trap - but his belt of feather-falling lets him safely drift down, and his magical boots make it easy for him to jump out again. He combs the entire room, falling into many pits, but also finding the safe places. He also stumbles upon a pressure-plate that flares radiant energy through the whole room, hurting him and Fiaeorri - who backs out of the room. Extang finishes the job, with a clear safe path to the far door marked, then rejoins the rest of the group in the hallway.
There, they take a brief rest to tend their wounds - though Extang takes the time to re-summon his familiar, as an owl this time. They then move through the room, to the hall beyond, with another debris-filled room behind one door, and a huge, marble-floored room behind the other. They carefully enter this room, seeing another door on the far side, and to their left a huge pair of metal doors. In the center of the doors is inset a large ruby, surrounded by seven rings of stones, each carved with a variety of symbols and able to be turned. Below this whole structure is engraved in draconic, "Left to right, middle to top, reverse the bottom, then press and stop."
Most of the group immediately set to figuring out this puzzle, but Patrick takes a look around the rest of the room and finds a secret door. He needs to get help to find the mechanism for opening it, and then they decide not to open it right away - well... most of them do. Extang opens the door himself, and finds a dusty room filled with benches, a number of empty glass jars, and with various strange tools hanging from the walls. On a table in the middle of the room sits a large skull with a single large eye-socket, and a gaping, sharp-toothed mouth.
And that bring this week's game session to an end. Return next week to discover what happens in Episode 65.
No comments:
Post a Comment