13A:Play/13 Battle in the Bone Room
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Starring: 📜Elistheren, 🌲 Qistis, 📚 Annalana, 🐾 Kaelon, Steinar
Guest Starring: No NPCs
Challenge: Skeletal priests and wraiths; Animated corpses
Location: Dungeon dedicated to the Lich King
Date Played: 2017 May 23
Battle in the Bone Room
📚 Annalana: Annalana shoves the green dragon scale into her backpack and begins sizing up the opponents to get a sense of the flow of battle. Steiner through a huge spell, Bones Beneath, which tears through the minions and animating their skeletons under his command.
Steinar: The odds feel a bit overwhelming. I can see the gleam of redemption in some of the occultist that are surrounding us, though. I call upon the stories of their youth, bringing about their inner hero. I then ripped out their bones and instilled the inner hero they manifested into the bones. IT did quite a good job evening out the fight.
The head priest was pretty strong, and he even had a few traps set up for us! Everyone acted heroically and we were able to win the day. Bickering was at a minimum.
🌲 Qistis: The room is quickly filled with adversaries, though ultimately the battle ends quickly. Mine and Steinar's magics tear through much of their forces, though Annalana and Elistheren take the brunt of the attack. Though they come out alive, they are looking a bit worse for wear.
Exploring the Bone Room
📚 Annalana: The altar has Drow magic. Elis sings a high note which causes a bass reverb that knocks a few skulls loose on Qistis’ head. Annalana and Steinar go to explore one of the rooms, Qistis sends her pet to explore another hallway, and Elis produces a sexy tuning fork to try and find notes that work with the altar. Qistis determines that the altar uses shadow magic, like what she uses. This is an amplification altar that could be charged with other things. Elis and Qistis manage to disarm the altar using the bone of a good priest. Elis does a mind palace thing to remember all of the details of this part of the dungeon.
Steinar: It is bet that I follow along at this point. The group seems to be very on task, and no one seems to be trying to break things.
Everyone gets along rather well, and we are able to make some advances in the room. There isn't too much we can do here, though, except poke and prod aimlessly. We eventually convince Elistheren that we need to move on and come back to catalog everything later. This took a minimal amount of time, to our surprise.
🌲 Qistis: The altar is imbued with drow magics which still hum from within. Elistheren's curiosity gets the better of him and tries to sing to activate the altar. His notes are off, however, and a skull is dislodged from the ceiling and strikes me in the head. At this point I keep my distance from the altar while sending Umbra to scout ahead. Steinar and Annalana explore the other rooms and after coming back I've determined the nature of the magics and the ritual to disarm it. This should hopefully please Annalana and Elistheren as the altar will be disarmed and not destroyed.
Iron Door Room
📚 Annalana: There is a short bridge (20’ down) and the room reeks of death. Qistis warns Annalana that there is a trap, so she goes back to the other room and breaks of a piece of the pew. Annalana then starts smashing the floor, repeatedly until she finds the trap, avoiding it. The skull door knob starts to glow and spew forth insults. Annalana is furious but doesn’t attack the thing outright. Elis gets lowered to the ground by Steinar and Armiounous. This, not surprisingly, draws the attention of a bunch of animated corpses. Elis and Qistis get pulled down into the pit by the looooooong tongued creatures. Annalana throws her pew and parkours off of it, but imperfectly, striking a rock at the base of the fall. She engages with a Wormtongue to defend Qistis.
Steinar: This room contains a broken bridge that spans over a 20 foot pit littered with bodies, ooze, and other nasty things. It is obvious that gong down there is a bad idea, so Elistheren does just that. While doing that, the door knob that is a flying, talking skull hurls insults at us. They are kinda mediocre, but they are also a bit too on point. It is like when a writer breaks the 4th wall and gets a little too meta. I ignored it as a bad plot device.
When Elistheren was in the pit, he awoke a bunch of undead. Some of the undead had extremely long tongues which were like tentacles that attempted to pull us below. I avoided them by staying low to the ground. The rest of the party didn't use this tactic and were pulled down below. I was lucky to have not been caught as I saw the chance I needed when the flying skull returned to the door. I jumped the gap across the bridge was able to make it just in time to open the door before it flew off again.
🌲 Qistis: We head down the northern hallway which Umbra scouted for us. She shared that the was a trap in the room ahead, though is unsure where. For a moment I consider withholding the knowledge, just to see Annalana fall into it but then realize the nature of the trap is unknown and I don't want to kill her so share the information before entering the room. Her methods to attempt to...disarm the trap are brutish to say the least and also hilariously fail. A section of the bridge falls out causing a rather large gap while a skull also pops itself out from the door, taunting us. It is clearly trying to goad us into in-cooperation and sadly gets to some.
We debate how to cross the bridge and for some reason the others decide that it would be a good idea to climb down into the pit under the bridge that smells like death. This of course awakens the undead which were lying beneath. The attacks are quite brutal, eventually forcing all of us down to face them (though most unwillingly).
