Shattered Star: Looking For Lust In All The Wrong Places

Game Date: 2/14/2015
Location: The Game Keep
Campaign: Shattered Star, Session 16
System: D&D 5e
DM: Rusty

The Party:
Bjertha Brawlbaker (Matt) - Dwarf Fighter
Maruca (Daniel) - Human Ranger/Cleric/Rogue
Sa'oa (Angela) - Elf Monk/Warlock
Shemus (Cliff) - Elf Ranger

The Session:

We're still looking for the Shard of Lust.  Last session we finally approached the lighthouse called the Lady's Light, and we started exploring some Bullywug-infested tunnels.  Today we continued searching those caverns.  Around one corner we found a room filled with mud.  We were soon attacked by three giant frogs and their bullywug master.

Sa'oa and Meruca were hit by the bullywug's fear power.  One of the frogs grappled and restrained Bjertha, who took a lot of damage over the course of the fight.  Fearing for the safety of our tank, Sa'oa finished the boss off with a Sleep spell, allowing Meruca to perform a coup de grace.  After the battle, we looked around the room.  We found two glass jars, filled with some sort of weird bug-repellant substance.  We took the jars with us and kept on going.

Sa'oa scouted ahead and brought us back news of the next chamber.  It was infested with insect creatures.  Most of them were just bug-sized, but there were three huge Albino Cave Solifugids on the walls.  While Sa'oa was hoping to ask them for directions, Bjertha rushed in and attacked the only one she could reach.  Maruca set the insecticide jars on the ground and removed the lids, and threw them on the Solifugids that ventured too close.  It was SUPER EFFECTIVE and by the end of the battle, all three insects were unconscious.  We tied them up and tried talking to them.  Unfortunately they didn't understand us.

There were three more exits from the room.   Sa'oa scouted one, which eventually led to a hydra.  It saw Sa'oa, but luckily it couldn't fit through the tunnel.  She sauntered back to the main chamber.  The next tunnel didn't go anywhere interesting, but the final tunnel led to a square room with a pit in the center.  There were several statue-shaped columns surrounding the pit, four of which came to life while we were examining the pit.

This fight was difficult because attacking them could potentially break ours weapon.  We discovered this when Sa'oa hurt her hands with some unarmed strikes.  Not wanting to do any more punching, she pushed one of the statues into the pit.  Rather than seeing it fall all the way down, it vanished after about 10 feet.  Jasper and Slancio both broke their weapons attacking enemies, but luckily the fight didn't last much longer, and they were able to fix their weapons with a mending spell.

Now that we were safe, we examined the pit.  We experimented with dropping various objects into it.  Everything disappeared about 10 feet down.  Sa'oa and Shemus secured some ropes and climbed down.  Once they entered the dark area, they found they couldn't speak.  As they got closer to the bottom, they saw the statue Sa'oa had pushed.  It was still fine and tried to attack her.  Unable to use vocal spells, she fired an arrow at it.  The arrow flew too slowly to do much damage.

They climbed back up, experimented a bit more, and realized that inside the pit was a zone of darkness, silence, and feather fall.  Sa'oa climbed back down, got low enough to be out of the zone, and used Eldritch Blast on the statue.  It jumped up and grabbed the rope.  Sa'oa cut the rope beneath her, dropping the statue.  The statue picked up a magically-lit stone our party had dropped earlier, and threw it at Sa'oa.  Sa'oa finished off the statue with Eldrich Blast.

She came back up and convinced us to follow her to the bottom of the pit.  At the bottom, there was a room with several statues and a a sarcophagus.  Bjertha and Sa'oa worked together to remove the lid, revealing a body.  The body was of a beautiful woman, who looked just like the statues around the room.  She didn't look dead, so we nudged her.  Suddenly Sa'oa was stricken with images of her estranged family, and took a huge amount of psychic damage.  Bjertha pulled her away from the sarcophagus and tried to help her.

Every time we healed Sa'oa, she took more psychic damage on the next round.  Maruca and Shemus tried doing various things to the woman in the sarcophagus, like stabbing her or removing her jewelry.  Nothing we did broke the psychic connection, and Sa'oa soon died.  Then the woman in the sarcophagus opened her eyes, sat up, and looked around.  She told us to let go of her body, meaning Sa'oa's.  We soon realized that Sa'oa's mind was in this new body.

The woman Sa'oa now possessed was human, with purple eyes and long black hair.  She turned out to be the Runelord Sorshen, who Maroux had told us about last session.  Or at least she used to be.  Now, she's Sa'oa.  We agreed to take Sa'oa's old body back to the surface when we're done down here.  We kept looking around.

There were two tunnels to choose from.  One dead-ended at an underground river.  The other one led to a door, which opened after Sa'oa pressed some panels on the wall.  The doorway led to a beach on the same river, with two skiffs tied up.  After a little bit of reconnaissance, we all took the skiffs down the river into a large open room.  There was another beach along one wall, and there was a seven-sided island in the middle of the room.  On the island was a large glass statue of Sorshen.

We tried casting detect magic on the statue, which came to life and attacked us.  This was a long, difficult battle.  We discovered early on that most of our weapons could not hurt it, giving some of us little to do in the fight.  Those of us who couldn't damage it played support for those that could, providing healing potions to those who needed it. At one point Carlie fired off a Shatter spell, which wasn't as effective as we'd hoped it would be.

Eldrich Blast hurt it some, Thunderwave spells also worked, and Slancio's sword worked pretty well.  When Slancio finally went down, Shemus grabbed his sword while the bard recovered.  Shemus dealt the final blow, bringing the statue down.  We ended the session there.  We each got 500 xp for the session, bringing a couple of us up to level 5 (as soon as we get a chance to take an extended rest).