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.