Unlikely Heroes: In the Gibbering Mouths of Madness

Game Date: 4/21/2012
DM: Rusty

The Party:
Derp DuDerp (Cliff): Half-Elf Bard
Flora Oakwillow (Matt): Hamadryad Seeker
Keyanna (Chere): Half-Elf Sorcerer
Lo-Kang (Ted): Warforged Barbarian
Marrick (Greg): Dwarf Knight
Starr (Star): Eladrin Paladin

The Session:
When we left off, we were one round into an epic battle against a Gibbering Mouther.  It wasn't an easy encounter, and we spent most of the fight dazed due to the monster's gibbering powers.  Once it was dead, we carefully traversed the rest of the eyeball-filled room, mapping out the rest of the pit traps on our way to the room's exit.

In the next room we saw a life-size copper-plated paladin statue.  On the base was the inscription, "By your light we follow."  There was a hole in the statue designed to hold a ritual candle, but we didn't have any candles on us.  After trying a lot of different things, Marrick cut off a piece of a pole he'd been carrying, stuck it in the hole, and set the end on fire.  A hatch opened up and revealed a ladder, which descended down into a storage room.

The floor of the storage room was engraved with a large map.  It showed our continent, but the place names were centuries old.  Searching the room further we found a Hellfire Staff (which we gave to Keyanna) and some healing potions.

After climbing back out, we attempted to investigate the room's only other exit.  Starr had a bad feeling from the doors, but we tried to open them anyway.  They were locked, but Marrick managed to hack them open... setting off a trap which dropped rubble on the party.  The hallway was a dead end, so we headed back to the main hall.  There was one last door we hadn't tried yet on this level.

We opened the doors and faced the animated corpse of a cleric of Ioun.  Its eyes were sewn shut, and it was holding a cage containing a Dwarf head.  This was a long fight.  The cleric wasn't terribly threatening, but it had a huge number of hit points and regeneration.  Starr kept it marked for most of the battle, and our other melee characters kept it surrounded to limit its movement.

Flora kept missing it for most of the battle, but she ended up firing the arrow that finally killed it.  The cleric's death triggered its "Mummy's Curse" power, which infected the entire party with Mummy Rot.

From the corpse's corpse we looted a set of Barrage Bracers.  Marrick had a conversation with the caged Dwarf head, and found out that a demon may have been set loose.  Marrick has to decided to keep the head for a while; hopefully it can give us clues for the rest of the dungeon.

In one of the rooms we had explored earlier, there was a set of stairs leading down to the next level of the dungeon.  That's going to be our next destination.  But first we took an extended rest, and attempted our first saves against Mummy Rot.  Some of the party members were cured, some maintained the same level of the disease, and Flora got worse.  We ended the session there.

Reminders:
We might not have another session of this campaign for a  few weeks.  Everyone needs to bring their characters up to level 6.  There's a slight chance Flora will die next time we take an extended rest (the next stage of Mummy Rot is death).  So Flora intends to stay awake as long as possible.

Unlikely Heroes: The Ball Pit of Doom

Game Date: 4/7/2012
DM: Rusty

The Party:
Derp DuDerp (Cliff): Half-Elf Bard
Flora Oakwillow (Matt): Hamadryad Seeker
Keyanna (Chere): Half-Elf Sorcerer
Lo-Kang & his +1 Shirt of Grooviness (Ted): Warforged Barbarian
Marrick (Greg): Dwarf Knight
Starr (Star): Eladrin Paladin

Do not stare directly into the shirt.

The Session:
After defeating Hymmir the undead mystic and burning his altar, we continued to explore this dungeon.  We next entered a round room that had a few smaller hallways arranged in a spoke pattern.  Some of these hallways were barred off.  Despite being extra cautious, Lo-Kang managed to get grabbed by one of the skeletons these hallways contained.  He quickly defeated it, but the party was soon attacked by a pair of shadows.  We took them out pretty quickly.

On the far end of the room there were some stairs going down.  We decided to put that off until we'd explored all of this level.  We went back to this floor's large central room, which we previously had only skirted around.  In the middle of the room was a walled-off area containing a lot of pillars.  Marrick came across a headless dwarf that was still flopping around.  After a bit more exploring, we were attacked by a Mind Wraith.  This creature had the annoying Aura that extended 3 squares, dazing everyone in it and giving us ongoing damage. 

After killing the Wraith, Marrick dismembered and burned the body of the headless dwarf.  Then we started looking for a place to take an extended rest.  Turns out, the smell of burning dwarf meat was not conducive to sleep.  We tried the altar room, but we'd also cleansed it with fire and it was still a bit to smokey to relax.  So we went to an earlier room (the one with the Scythe trap) and rested there.  Next we went down a hallway diagonal to the central chamber.  It led to a room full of mechanical movement, with iron cogs and rotating gears adorning the walls.  We fought six Festrogs, after which Marrick destroyed some of the gears.

The next room was like a giant ball pit, similar to the kind you see at McDonalds or Chuck E. Cheese.  Fun, eh?  Except instead of brightly-colored plastic balls, it was filled with eyeballs that continually stared at us.  And that's just creepy.

There was another door on the other side of the room, but we experimented with a few things before resigning to cross.  Marrick picked up an eyeball or two, throwing them at the walls to see what would happen.  "Eyeball fight!"  Eventually we began crossing the room.  Marrick fell into a pit, but managed to climb back out.  So we slowly crossed the room single file, wading through the squishy eyeballs, poking the floor with polearms to find more pits.  Suddenly a monstrous mass of flesh, teeth, and eyes erupted from a pit.  It was a Gibbering Mouther, who quickly hit most of us with dazing powers and ongoing damage.

Starr tried to teleport behind him to get into flanking, but that square turned out to be another pit.  We had to end the session there, one round into battle. 

Reminders: 
Several of us have some temporary hit points, ongoing damage, and are dazed.

Left to Right:  Derp, Keyanna, empty space, Displacer Beast, Flora, Marrick/Lo-Kang, Gibbering Mouther, Starr.

Initiative Order: Mouther, Greg, Star, Ted, Matt, Cliff, Chere.  It is the Mouther's turn.