Dragon's Demand: For Whom The Bell Tolls

Game Date: 4/26/2014
Location: The Game Keep
Campaign: Dragon's Demand, Session 12
System: Pathfinder
DM: Rusty

The Party:
Halfbeard (Cliff) - Dwarf Ranger
Lilith (James) - Tiefling Paladin
Raz Furian (Matt) - Human Sorcerer
Vires (Daniel) - Human Alchemist

The Session:

Lots To Do

When left off last session, we'd just encountered Azmur the Druid at the old monastery.  Azmur couldn't help us directly because he was being forced to serve our enemy.  However, he still managed to give us a little bit of helpful information.  We have a lot of quests on the table.  We need to find and defeat (or recruit) Aeteperax's four lieutenants:  Azmur, Goladryth, Thaena, and Pentosh.  We need to learn Aeteperax's true name, since we're pretty sure it's not the real Aeteperax.  As long as we're at the monastery, we should try to figure out where all the monks went.  We also need to restore our friend Maffei to her original strength, befriend a few people and factions in Belhaim, and oh yes, if we find the time, actually defeat Aeteperax and save the town from his threats.  Should be a busy fortnight.

Earlier we'd seen someone ringing a bell, so we decided to head in that direction.  We entered one of the buildings and wandered the corridors, passing by most of the doors and looking for ways up to the bell tower.  We were walking through an area filled with sleeping cubicles, when two shadowy creatures attacked us.  They were insubstantial, making it difficult to damage them with anything but spells.  It was difficult to fight them because they could walk through walls, making positioning our party difficult.  They didn't physically damage us, but they had mass compulsion powers and the ability to drain our wisdom.

Eventually we managed to kill them, but the party was a lot stupider afterward.  We continued our search, climbing some stairs and searching more halls.  Eventually we entered an open room with a small overgrown garden, and encountered the naga Thaena.  We tried bluffing her at first, but the naga saw through our lies and turned invisible.  We really wanted to defeat her without killing her, because we thought she might have information we need.

During the fight, Thaena used a power that fascinated us, so some of us wasted a few rounds staring at her pretty scales.  Lilith really turned the fight around with a critical hit to the eyes, permanently blinding the naga.  Once Thaena was defeated, we tied her up and healed her a little so she wouldn't die.  Then we holed up in the naga's bedroom for an extended rest.  Once Thaena was awake, we questioned her, but she wasn't as helpful as we hoped.  We left her tied up and kept searching the building.

At the bottom of the stairwell to the bell tower, we were ambushed.  A human woman - Pentosh the Alchemist - led a group of bat-like grioths.  Pentosh opened the battle by throwing a bomb at us, a move she repeated several more times during the battle.  Halfbeard won initiative, and critted on his opening shot, badly damaging Pentosh and causing her CON bleed.  However, the alchemist was under multiple AC-boosting buffs, so our following attacks missed her a lot.  Raz took advantage of her never-missing magic missiles, but they didn't do a lot of damage.

But difficult as Pentosh was, the grioths were a piece of cake.  We took them out pretty quickly, finishing them off right around the time Pentosh decided she'd had enough.  She fled to another room upstairs.  We pursued, but it took a few rounds getting up that spiral staircase.  Using his boots of spider climbing to bypass the stairs, Vires was the first through the upper door.  He immediately got blasted in the face by a trap Pentosh had set.  The rest of us finally entered the room to find both Vires and Pentosh down.  Despite having survived the fighting, Pentosh had finally succumbed to Halfbeard's CON bleed.

We healed up Vires and tied up Pentosh.  We climbed the rest of the way up the bell tower, where we had a beautiful view of all the surrounding areas.  We cut the rope to the bell to make it harder for anyone else to sound the alarm, then headed back down, down, down.  Exploring the lower levels, we found a secret door leading to an oval room.  There was a pit in the center, with a two-foot wide ledge around the sides of the room.  This could have been tricky for a party so bad at acrobatics checks, but Vires still had his spider boots active, so he helped the party get around the edges.

In another room we found a pool of calm water.  Vires used a water breathing amulet to search the pool, but didn't find anything  As he climbed back out of the pool, something followed him... but that's all we know for now.  Our next session will open with that encounter.