OAWYM: Breaking Through The Firewall

Game Date: 3/25/2016
Location: The Game Keep
Campaign: OAWYM, Session 25
System: D&D 5e
DM: Rusty

The Party:
Byzun (Gary) - Human Sorcerer
Halfbeard (Daniel, subbing for Cliff) - Dwarf Fighter
Robb (Daniel) - Human Rogue
Val Ravensword (Matt) - Orc Paladin

The Session:

After resting up at the logging camp, we continued our trip to the second ruins site.  After a day's travel we set up camp for the night.  During Byzun's watch, he failed a spot check and we were ambushed by five trolls. Or were we?  After a tough battle, we found out that four of the trolls may have been a hallucination brought on by the stench of Halfbeard's underwear.  Or something.  Moving on...

We reached the ruins the next day.  We looked around and saw some draconic runes engraved on the old buildings.  We took another rest, after which we heard more troll noises.  We took refuge in a tunnel that turned out to be an animal den.  Robb watched from the hole, and saw about fifteen trolls scouting about.  They found our campsite and destroyed it.  We decided to stay put for a bit.

Since we had time to kill, we explored some other tunnels that branched out from the back of the den.  Two of them led to stone rooms.  We crawled through one, and entered the remains of a wine cellar.  The wine bottles were labeled in draconic.  We put a few aside to give to the elves later.  Down one hallway we found a meat locker, still stocked with meat, kept cool through magic.  Some of the meat came from large lizards, and some came from a six-legged cow.

In another room Val triggered a pit trap and hurt herself on some spikes.  After pulling her out, the party locked the trap and explored the room.  We saw a chair designed to accommodate someone with a tail. There were some empty bookshelves but not much of interest.  We didn't see any other exits from this area, so we headed back to the tunnels, through the den, through another tunnel, and into a stone hallway.

This hallway had a secret door, and some stairs going down.  Robb tripped a collapsing stair trap but managed not to fall in.  He reset and locked the trap so the rest of us could follow.  We found a room with a dining table, a buffet table, and an armoire.  Why the hell does this spellcheck not recognize armoire?  Robb unlocked the armoire, accidentally triggering a trap that hit the party with lightning.  We all saved for half damage.

The armoire contained some ruined pieces of silverware, and sixteen gems worth 50 gold each.  Down another hall we entered a huge lounge room with three doors on the opposite wall.  The first door led to a hallway, but we decided to hold off on that one.  The middle door was made of steel, and locked.  Robb opened it and saw a cell filled with ghouls.  We tried to close and lock it again, but they managed to push it open.

It wasn't a bad fight.  Val planned to try out Turn Undead for the first time, but she was last in initiative, and half the ghouls were dead by her turn.  After the fight, Val noticed that they were ghouls of elves, which normally isn't possible.  We opened door number three, and saw an altar to Tiamat.  There was another door in that room, which led to a T-shaped hallway.  We put off going that way and went back to the first of the three doors in the lounge.

Robb sneaked down a hall and looked around the corner, where he saw a flesh golem.  God damn it, spellcheck, golem is a perfectly common word.  The party tried to tiptoe away, but we're not all as stealthy as Robb, and the golem came after us.  We waited for it in the lounge, and Byzun put a wall of fire across the doorway.  We fought it in the doorway until it finally burst through the fire wall.  We knew the golem didn't like fire, so Byzun concentrated on fire spells, eventually delivering the killing blow.

We ended the session there.  We have three possible directions to explore next session - the flesh golem's hallway, and both directions from the T-junction.

OAWYM: Another One Bites The Dust

Game Date: 3/18/2016
Location: The Game Keep
Campaign: OAWYM, Session 24
System: D&D 5e
DM: Rusty

The Party:
Byzun (Gary) - Human Sorcerer
Halfbeard (Cliff) - Dwarf Fighter
Malcer (Graham) - Human Monk
Robb (Daniel) - Human Rogue
Val Ravensword (Matt) - Orc Paladin
Tatio - Malcer's Companion

The Session:
Last session we fought a buttload of orcs.  This session, for variety's sake, we fought a buttload of orcs.

After our victory last session, we bedded down in the ruins to recover.  In the middle of the night, a swarm of giant bats came out of the well in the center of the ruins, but they didn't bother us.  A few hours later they returned to the well.  Once we were all well-rested, we looked around the ruins for clues.  We considered going down into the well, but decided to come back another day.  We left the ruins and rode on to the logging camp.

We asked the lumberjacks if they'd seen any werewolves, but they didn't have a lot of information for us.  They did mention having seen Hassan Gold pass through a while back with some companions.  They allowed us to stay the night.  Later that night, we woke to the sound of orc war drums.  The orcs had surrounded the camp.

Our party picked an entrance and joined the loggers in defending the camp.  Halfbeard, Val, and Tatio stayed on the ground, while Byzun, Malcer, and Robb took positions up on the wall.  The camp faced about a hundred orcs, but a good portion of them were handwaved as being in combat with NPCs, so our combat focused on the ones attacking our part of the wall.  We personally faced two chieftains, two warlords on wolfback, an orc witch, twenty-something orc warriors.

Right at the start of battle, one of the wolf riders jumped up on the wall, taking down Malcer before he even had a turn.  Byzun managed to hit eleven orcs with a fireball, killing eight.  The chieftains climbed the wall and fought Byzun and Robb.  One chieftain in particular chased Robb all over the battlefield, while out-of-character we hummed the Benny Hill theme song. 

Byzun took out a few more orcs with an Ice Storm spell.  He also conjured a magic weapon, but so did the orc witch.  When we were finally down to a few enemies, Halfbeard rolled two consecutive crits to finish the last warlord.  His wolf mount tried to flee but Halfbeard killed it with an opportunity attack.  The witch also fled, but she actually managed to get away. 

Unfortunately, Malcer failed three death saves.  After the battle, we helped the loggers gather their dead, attended some funerals, and patched up some of the damage.  The head merchant was so grateful for our help that he gave us a letter of credit for 20,000 gold.  We rested up and ended the session.  Malcer's player is planning to roll up a Mystic for next session.

After the session, our brave DM attempted the Toe of Satan challenge - can he keep the world's hottest lollipop in his mouth for five minutes?  Let's find out:

OAWYM: Call the Orcan Army

Game Date: 3/4/2016
Location: The Game Keep
Campaign: OAWYM, Session 23
System: D&D 5e
DM: Rusty

The Party:
Byzun (Gary) - Human Sorcerer
Halfbeard (Cliff) - Dwarf Fighter
Malcer (Daniel, subbing for Graham) - Human Monk
Robb (Daniel) - Human Rogue
Val Ravensword (Matt) - Orc Paladin
Tatio - Malcer's Companion

The Session:
Last session we pitted a warship versus a slave ship, and ended up all wet.  Today we started with Malcer, Halfbeard, and Byzun climbing onto a sailing vessel while Val, Robb,and Tatio climbed to shore.  Malcer's group encountered a few Iron Circle sailors, but they were unprepared for a fight.  Halfbeard asked them where their captain was, and they pointed him in the right direction.

Halfbeard tried to intimidate the captain into surrendering, but he wasn't going to go down without a fight.  At first the other sailors just watched the altercation, but after a couple of rounds Val's group climbed onto the ship, and the sailors started to fight back.  It wasn't long before the captain and the four sailors were defeated.  More crew members emerged from below decks, but they surrendered right away. 

We ordered the crew to set sail, and even paid them for their work.  We spent four days sailing to the other side of the island, and docked at a town on the North side.  We ordered the crew to disembark, and sold the ship to a local merchant.

Now to our mission.  Several sessions ago, Dame Gold hired us to find her brother Hassan, in order to cure his lycanthropy.  Failing that, we were to put him out of his misery.  We are no longer in possession of the antidote, so unless we find another cure, we're probably going to have to kill him. 

We asked around town if they knew anything about Hassan Gold, and learned that no one had seen him in a few weeks.  Hassan was an amateur archaeologist, who had been investigating some nearby ruins.  Nobody knew which ruins he had most recently explored, but there were three sites in the area.  The closest was about one day's journey away.

We bought some horses and had our weapons coated in silver.  We headed out in the direction of a logging camp, and stopped at the ruins along the way.  We reached the ruins at night, under a full moon.  We saw what we first thought were some gnolls, and we called out to them.  They appeared to flee, and we started looking for a place to camp for the night.

Alas, it was a trap.  We were soon surrounded by a large number of orcs.  In total we faced 25 opponents: 23 orcs (including a chieftain and a cleric) and two krenshars.  Val spoke to them in Orcish, letting them know we were only looking for werewolves.  The chieftain complimented her Orcish and ordered his troops to allow Val to live.  Then they attacked.

It was a huge, harrowing fight.  Byzun started off with a fireball, which hit five and killed four.  A few rounds later he used another fireball to hit six, killing three.  As the fight went on, we started to form smaller groups.  Val faced three Orcs, while Malcer and Tatio fought seven Orcs and the two Krenshars.  Halfbeard took on the chieftain, Byzun faced the cleric, and Robb used hit-and-run tactics to snipe enemies from a distance. 

Byzun was the first to go down, and we started to get overwhelmed.  The chieftain was very powerful, and took Halfbeard down several times.  Most of us went up and down, getting healed for a few hit points only to go back down the next round.  The only party member to stay on his feet the whole time was Robb, who got chased around the battlefield by the chieftain. 

When Val went down, the Orcs actually went over to her to stabilize her, per the chieftain's orders.  Malcer spent most of the battle unconscious, until finally getting healed by Tatio.  Once up, Malcer dealt a death blow to the chieftain.  The last remaining Orc tried to make a run for it, but Malcer was much faster, and took him down.

The chieftain and the cleric had some nice loot.  Val picked up a set of lightning-resistant plate mail, Byzun acquired a Staff of the Magi, Halfbeard took a +2 breastplate, and Robb wound up with a Ring of Water Elemental Control. We ended the session there, intending to camp for the night.