Shattered Star: The Second Shard

Game Date: 11/29/2014
Location: The Game Cave
Campaign: Shattered Star, Session 11
System: D&D 5e
DM: Rusty

The Party:
Bjertha Brawlbaker (Matt) - Dwarf Fighter
Looplily "Lilly" Timber (James) - Gnome Cleric/Fighter
Maruca (Daniel) - Human Ranger

The Session:
I missed last week's session, during which they explored an underwater shipwreck, found a brooch which they agreed to return to an undead guy's widow, fought some Darrows and a Dark Mantle, and rescued Fenster the Blight from a torture chamber.  They left off with a choice of two sets of stairs leading down.

Today we picked a stairway and headed for a small room.  As we approached, we were overcome with magical darkness.   We turned around and headed back up the stairs, out of the range of the darkness spell.  As we were moving, Bjertha felt a bolt glance off her armor.  We waited for the spell to end and then rushed back into the room.  We encountered a Darrow named Magister Khrysm, and her two Homunculus henchmen.

The first Homunculus went down easy.  Khrysm killed the second henchman herself, when she hit our party with a Thunderwave spell.  Kelson made the final blow against Khrysm, and we looted the room.  Between Khrysm and the room's closets, we found a few potions, a Wand of Spiritual Weapon (11 charges), 232 gold, 1423 silver, and 2100 copper pieces.  We took a long rest in this room.

We went back up and then down the other set of stairs.  These stairs ended suddenly, but on the way down there was a hidden door.  Slancio felt his piece of shard pulling him towards the next piece, and we followed the secret passage until we reached an altar room.  The second shard was guarded by two giant spiders called Shriezyxs.  But lets just call them spiders because it's easier to type.

The spiders didn't hit often but they hit hard.  They each got three attacks per round, and if they'd ever managed to hit with all three it would likely have killed their target.  Bjertha faced one while Lilly kept the other one occupied.  Lilly dodged each round, keeping the spider busy while Shemus fired damaging arrows at the creature.  Once Lilly's spider was dead, we all concentrated on Bjertha's, taking it out pretty quickly.  Shemus dropped it with an arrow, but it got back up.  Kelson dealt the final killing blow, and Bjertha hacked at the bodies to make sure they didn't get back up again.

The pedestal in the center of the room had grooves to fit all seven shards.  Since this meant we'd probably need to come back here in the future, we went around the rest of the Crow compound and made sure everything else was dead.  Lilly took a sample of some brown fungus which damaged her as she collected it.  She had to do a lot of clever things involving swords and barrels to keep the fungus doing her more harm as she dragged it back out of the dungeon.

We went back to town and headed for the mansion of Sheila Heidmarch.  We found out that the new shard was the Shard of Greed.  We are now taking 40 days of downtime in order to do more research.

Session rewards:
+983 XP each.
65.88 gp each.

Reminders:
As the holidays make a lot of us busy, we are considering taking the rest of December off and resuming sessions in January.

Shattered Star: Follow The Lemure

Game Date: 11/15/2014
Location: The Game Cave
Campaign: Shattered Star, Session 9
System: D&D 5e
DM: Rusty

The Party:
Bjertha Brawlbaker (Matt) - Dwarf Fighter
Looplily "Lilly" Timber (James) - Gnome Cleric/Fighter
Maruca (Daniel) - Human Ranger
Shemus (Cliff) - Elf Ranger

The Session:
We're still exploring the dungeon beneath the former Tower Girls HQ.  Today started with us finding a wand inside a tapestry rod, but we didn't have any party members who could identify it.  We found a magic fountain, but it wasn't healing or anything; the magic just keeps it from overflowing.  In the fountain was a piece of green crystal, but we haven't found a use for it.  In one room we encountered a pair of Lemure Devils, and persuaded them to follow us.

Down one tunnel we found the skeleton of a Bulette.  A gray ooze attacked Bjertha from the mud, corroding her armor.  We all beat the ooze's initiative, and it went down before it got a turn.  Lilly fixed Bjertha's armor with a mending spell, and we kept going.

We reached a large room with about 30 feet of water in the middle.  There were columns along the sides that were shaped like tentacles.  In order to test the water's depth, we sent in one of the Lemures.  It sank and never came back.  So we sent in the other Lemure, which similarly disappeared.  We cast Light on an arrow and fired it into the murky water, and saw something moving down there.  We didn't feel up to this fight yet, so we tried one of the other tunnels.

We found a locked door with a bronze plaque, depicting runes we could not read.  Maruca and Kelson worked on picking the lock, and several die rolls later we finally got in.  The next room was full of cages, some of which held skeletal Fleshdregs.  The creatures attacked, and most of us fought back.  Lilly attacked the empty cages instead, because she had a sudden fear that we would lock her up.  Of course, we might not be tempted to lock her up if she wasn't always doing things like attacking cages, but that's one for the philosophers.

Once the Fleshdregs were dead, we left Lilly to her cage smashing, and looked into the next room.  There was a winch-operated portcullis, and a burnt corpse.  Fearing a fire trap, we used some rope to operate the winch from a distance, then headed on through the doorway.  The next hall appeared to be a nightmare of flame traps, so we held off.  We passed back through the cage room, tiptoed past the obsessed Lilly, and tried another hall.

The next passageway led to a maze.  As Lilly caught up to us we heard a growling, and we soon found ourselves face-to-face with a Hell Hound.  This demonic doggie hit us right away with fire breath, which did a fair amount of damage.  When the breath recharged, he used it a second time and dropped Bjertha.  The party healers patched her up and Shemus dealt the killing blow to the Hell Hound.

We took a short rest and headed into the maze.  We didn't find anything interesting in the maze, and the other end just took us back to the other side of the hallway full of fire traps.  We took out our current piece of the Shattered Star, hoping it would lead us to the next one.  It seemed to be pointing towards the water room we'd considered earlier, so we headed back that way.

We pondered at the edge of the water, not wanting to get our feet wet.  Lilly was the bravest (or most impulsive) of us.  She grabbed a rope and swam across, getting attacked a pair of Sinspawn.  Once Lilly got across Bjertha followed, and a third Sinspawn joined the fray.  Lilly grappled two Sinspawn simultaneously, as Bjertha made to the other side.  The rest of the party fired their ranged weapons at any monsters they could see.

The Sinspawn had the ability to enrage those they attacked, but we never really got to see this in action.  With Lilly holding two of them to keep them from escaping back below the water, we managed to finish them off quickly.  We ended the session there.  Some of us are about to level, so we've decided to take an extended rest if possible.

Shattered Star: Baz the Great and Powerful

Game Date: 11/8/2014
Location: The Game Cave
Campaign: Shattered Star, Session 8
System: D&D 5e
DM: Rusty

The Party:
Bjertha Brawlbaker (Matt) - Dwarf Fighter
Kelson (Ben) - Half-Elf Warlock
Looplily "Lilly" Timber (James) - Gnome Cleric/Fighter
Maruca (Daniel) - Human Ranger
Shemus (Cliff) - Elf Ranger
Slancio Brioso (Thomas) - Human Bard 

Decent-sized party today, though Slancio didn't get to join in until the end.

The Session:

We're still making our way through the depths of the tower. We left off about to enter a door where we heard voices speaking in infernal.  We entered the room and got the creatures' attention  It was two lumpy Lemure Devils, which where easy to kill.  From behind a curtain on one wall, we heard a voice say, "Congratulations you have passed the first test!"  It was an imp who called himself "The Great Suzerain".  He asked us to recover some of his lost minions, and defeat a different devil called Lord Baz.

His deal:  He would have us sign a contract that would keep his own devils from attacking us while we made our way to Baz's territory.  When we returned, Suzerain would make us lieutenants in his army.  We tried to pass on the deal, but our leader/overlord Anya fell for Suzerain's compulsions and demanded that we take the deal.  So we followed her through the tunnels towards Baz's domain, flashing our contract at any of Suzerain's devils we passed.

In one hallway there was another of those statues of a polearm-wielding woman, and as usual Lilly decided to draw a mustache on it.  This statue turned out to be trapped, creating a fireball that did a lot of damage to our party.  Anya took the worst of it, taking a full 21 points of damage.  Even though the party was low on hit points, Lilly decided that this was our best chance to take out Anya once and for all.  The impulsive gnome attacked both Anya and Maruca, and the rest of us had to decide whether to join the battle.

Of course we fought alongside Lilly, though the rest of us avoided harming Maruca.  It was a long battle, and most of us went down at one point or another, to be revived by healing potions and goodberries.  Eventually Anya started to flee, but we kept after her.  It was Kelson who dealt the final blow, after which Bjertha savagely perforated her corpse with a silver dagger.  We looted the body and took a rest.

But Lilly wasn't ready to let things go with the final Tower Girl, Maruca.  It took a lot of work to get the gnome to calm down, and Maruca promised that her allegiance was to Natalya, not Anya.  Lilly still doesn't trust Maruca, but we managed to get them to work together for the remainder of the session.  Lilly is determined to push Maruca down the stairs at some point in the future.

Through another door we found a trail of salt.  Then we fought five devils, which were very easy.  Next we found a set of stairs leading down into the water, but didn't feel like drowning just yet.  In a round room we discovered an underwater observatory, which was the first time we realized how far down we'd come in our explorations.  From the observatory's windows we could see a shipwreck.  We also found a couple of scrolls of underwater breathing, which we will presumably use at some point in the future to explore the shipwreck.  But not today.

In one room we found a cowardly Lemure Devil, who begged us not to hurt him.  He was a bit of an artist, and had decorated the walls of his safe room.  We decided not to kill him, and kept looking for Baz.  The halls finally led us to a round room with a balcony.  Two devils sparred on the ground floor while a pair of imps conversed on the balcony.  Kelson, our infernal-speaking warlock, entered the room and asked to be taken to see Baz.  One persuasion check later, we were escorted to the master's room.

Baz, an Accuser Devil, had the body of a fly and the head of a bad cross-dresser.  Next to his desk was Silencio, our party's bard, who had been missing for several sessions.  The bard's fingers were bleeding from having been forced to strum an instrument for far too long.  Baz seemed happy to see us, probably because he craved more entertainment.  The foppish devil greeted us in an over-the-top manner, but we weren't in the mood to talk.  It wasn't long before initiative was rolled.

Baz turned invisible right off the bat.  We also faced two imps and two devils, and all our enemies were resistant to non-magical weapons.  On Kelson's turn he tried hitting three of the enemies with burning hands, but found they were immune to fire.  Baz dropped Silencio in one hit, but the rest of the party got him back on his feet.

Once Baz had taken enough damage, he indignantly teleported away.  Cleaning up the rest of the enemies was easy, the last one getting talked to death by one of Silencio's bardic powers.  We ended the session there. 

Shattered Star: A Mustache Emergency

Game Date: 11/1/2014
Location: The Game Cave
Campaign: Shattered Star, Session 7
System: D&D 5e
DM: Rusty

The Party:
Bjertha Brawlbaker (Matt) - Dwarf Fighter
Kelson (Ben) - Half-Elf Warlock
Looplily Timber (James) - Gnome Cleric/Fighter
Maruca Notyet (Daniel) - Human Ranger

The Session:
We're still exploring the tower known as the Crow, under the leadership of the were-rat Anya.  In one room we found a familiar-looking statue of a woman with a polearm.  While Looplily drew a mustache on it, the party got attacked by a cavefisher.  Bjertha killed it in the first round.  We then realized we were being followed.  Kelson, a professional criminal, joined our party.  Anya gave him the same deal the rest of us received - Anya gets any loot we find, and we get to live.  Fair enough... for now.

In another area we found a room full of spiderwebs.  Looplily started burning the webs, which drew the attention of three giant spiders.  Once they were dead, we kept exploring.  In another room we found a pool of water, which detected as magical.  Looplily peed in it, and we kept going.

We found a room with several ovens built into the walls.  Bjertha heard some rustling coming from one oven, and went to investigate.  It was full of centipedes, which swarmed her.  Figuring centipedes would be afraid of spiders, Looplily cast an illusion of spiders crawling over Bjertha.  All this really accomplished was to freak Bjertha out.  She stopped, dropped, and rolled madly while the rest of the party helped kill off the swarm.

A bit later we encountered six skeletons.  It wasn't a terrible fight but it took Bjertha down to zero hit points, so the party took a long rest afterwards.  Some of us had earned enough xp to level last session, but it wasn't until this rest that we were allowed to take the level.  Now fully healed and feeling a bit more powerful, we continued our explorations.

We went down some stairs and found an octagonal room.  Four of the walls had double doors, and the floor was covered in slime.  There was another statue of the woman with the polearm, but before Looplily could draw on it we saw the creature who had generated the slime.  It was a giant, maggot-spitting larva.  After killing it we went through the left door.

At the end of a narrow hallway there were two undead.  As Bjertha and Kelson fought them, Looplily tried to run the opposite direction.  Anya and Maruca kept Looplily from running past, instructing her to get back in there and fight.  Looplily wouldn't comply and kept fighting them while trying to run past.  Bjertha and Kelson finished off the undead and turned around to see what the ruckus was.

Bjertha tried to talk everyone down, rolling 20 on persuasion, which was enough to convince Anya not to kill Looplily.  Looplily finally broke through, and ran back to the statue in the octagonal room so she could finally draw a mustache on it.  Apparently it was very important.

In another hall we found a circle of runes, with some dancing flames inside.  Looplily stepped into the circle and was attacked by two small flame beings.  Reasoning that the creatures couldn't leave the circle, we opted to run through and get to the other side of the room.  We did kill one of them as we made our way through, and left the other one alive.

In the next hallway there was a door on the right, from which we could hear a conversation.  Kelson informed us that someone was speaking in the infernal language, but he couldn't make out what they were saying.  We were about to burst in when we ended the session.