Well well, session 3 went off last night with everyone (Jo, Gnatsum, Ghimli, Porra, Alhman) in attendance. I handed out experience to everyone and Jo, Gnatsum and Ghimli leveled to 5th based on the rewards in the old moathouse. Porra and Alhman aren’t far behind, I generally tend to be overly generous with handing out experience to people who aren’t there for a session as I like to keep things fairly close knit.
The session was an affair of incompetence and bungling with some solid 4-5 hours of laughter. The party made it back to Hommlet without any real issues from the Moathouse where they rested and recovered and soaked up their recent life experiences. Alhman went downstairs to talk to the bard with the unpronounable name.
Alhman chats up the bard and learns some things [Bonus exp BTW - D] and he learns that the person mentioned in the journal they found in the Moathouse is in the Inn. Alhman heads upstairs with the vague idea of talking Jo into coming down and flaunting her bosom’s at the guy to get him to come upstairs.
So as Alhman’s telling everyone Jo with the hearing of a hawk using a boom microphone hears a creak outside. Alhman goes to the adjoining room and then out into the hall after trying to see anything under the door through the cracks. The upstairs hall is empty so he heads downstairs, buys some beers and then goes back upstairs and accidentally on purpose spills them all over the hall floor. He hears a faint thump from downstairs as if someone had just landed after jumping from a height. Looking over the balconey he sees nothing all of which helps validate the idea that it was someone invisible.
They decide to rest up for the night and then go visit the mill in the morning. During the night while Gnatsum is on guard the big half orc falls asleep and they wake up to find all their cultist loot gone.
They double check their gear that’s left and head off to the flour mill. Outisde Jo and Gnatsum both spot a metal bird in a tree and Jo sends Gnatsum off to grab it. Meanwhile Alhman heads into the mill where they talk to the two workers in there. During the conversation Alhman notices one of the workers glancing at a trap door every time he brings up the subject of the owner of the mill. The worker’s story though is the owner is gone.
The others make their way inside in time for Gnatsum to intimidate the workers a bit, one runs off in fright and they get what little information out of the other one and then let him go.
Now it becomes the attack of the battle of Annoyance!. They approach the trapdoor to find it inside a field of Silence. Opening the trap door they see utter blackness below as a sphere of Darkness has been cast at the bottom of the ladder leading down. Ghimli casts Dispell Magic but his new found powers fail him. The party scratches its proverbial head a bit trying to figure out who to get past the darkness and eventually Alhman has Gnatsum chop a hole in the floor further out where it would still be in the silence effect but hopefully out of the darkness below so they can see in. The hole is made and Alhman sticks his head down. The evil doers below are ready for him and Alhman raises his head back up with two Magic Missiles burning into his skin. The group meanders a moment and a shimmering bead of some kind comes sailing upstairs through the hole and explodes blasting everyone backwards doing some fairly hefty damage to everyone and dropping the rogue down to nigh death. This all happens inside the silence spell so the only noise is as the blast wave leaves it and pushes stuff around.
Well there’s now a nice big hole leading down and while Ghimli begins healing everyone except Porra who was off watching through the doors for any militia that the two workers they released might be bringing back, Gnatsum makes a running leap down into the darkness. Where he lands on some flooring fragments, trips and takes a hard crash to the ground. Again all in silence of course.
Ghimli at this point grabs a barrel of flour and slams it down the hole into the cellar below generating a huge cloud of flour that covers everything and everyone in gritty white dust.
The remainder of the battle got kind of chaotic but hilariously funny with a lot of failed miserably saves and attacks on the part of our intrepid party and in spite of themselves they manage to defeat the people holed up in the mill cellar. More darkness spells going off, webs, summoned skeletons, Hold Person spells, Cause Fears and pretty much it became the Annoying Mage fight.
During this fight Alhman was quite successful and managed to flank attack two of the cultists and drop them both with a single swing.
The last cultist dropped yet another darkness on himself after casting Webs into the room and then they heard him chanting something else from the darkness. Gnatsum took a swing at the spot he thought he was but nothing was there and they backed out of the darkness and waited for him to come out. (meanwhile 3 turned skeletons are off in the corner gnashing their teeth).
They eventually decided that the cultist had cast invisibility on himself and then levitated himself up and out of the cellar much like they’d seen another cultist attempt to use to get away from them in the Moathouse.
But in total the fight didn’t last but a minute or two so the party was able to do a quick loot of the room with Gnatsum grabbing a trunk. Before that while he was waiting for everyone to get out of the hole using Jo’s Rope Trick he tossed a couple of bodies up stairs for someone else to loot.
They get out of the cellar and high tail it off into the surrounding countryside having Porra use his woodsman skills to hide their back trail. Of course the first mile or two is kinda hard to do anything with as they leave a trail of flour marking their path out of town.
They camp out for a day and go through their stuff, finding their stolen, stolen back, and now re-stolen goods from the Moathouse in the truck. They also find a clue that will lead them to Rastor to talk to a wagon merchant.
Alhman goes back to town to see what’s up and the town is full of stories of all kinds of craziness. Typical stuff there. He tries to buy some horses, five in all, and the stable owner per request from Elmo attempts to get a delayed delivery of the horses while he arranges for the militia captain to drop by. Alhman doesn’t really want to allow this which makes the stable owner more than paranoid that something’s going on and he makes a break for it. After Alhman grabs him he’s pretty sure that something might not be right and he breaks free and runs away yelling for help. Alhman jumps on a horse and takes off straight back to camp.
He comes crashing into camp and it’s pretty obvious he’s just might be moving a little faster than a successful horse purchase might warrant. They sigh, break camp sending the horse off running by itself and have Porra hide their trail they move further into the woods and use Rope Trick to hide out for awhile. For one reason or another no pursuit comes by and they head off to Rastor, the location of which Alhman gained from the bard before the ill fated horse purchase.
The trip was uneventful (many many many fruitless wandering monster rolls later) and we left off just before they decided to go into town.
DM’s Note:
Just some out of context notes. After Spungoir, the guy they rescued came back with tales of his savior the local cult members were on the watch for our party and that’s how and why they were onto them so quickly after they got back. They didn’t kill the party while they were recovering the loot that the party had recovered from the cults recovery of them in the moathouse because it was decided the slaughter of five people after coming back from the moathouse would bring too much attention to them.
I changed some of the classes and spell lists around for the group under the flour mill to make it more challenging in my opinion. It did turn out to be GD funny.
The lack of serious pursuit of the party is quite simple really, Rufus and Burne, both after hearing the stories of Spugnoir, decided to make a trip to the old moathouse so while this was all going on they were off at the moathouse checking it out. This left the town under the capable hands of Elmo but without any real resources to try and track the party down. The only trackers in town didn’t prove as capable in tracking as Porra was in hiding a trail. There’s also the confusion of what really happened at the flour mill and while Elmo and the watch are handy enough in things martial their abilities in deductive reasoning leave something to be desired so they decided to wait for R&B to come back. He did though, since he was sure that “that group of five adventurers” was involved have all the people who sold horses looking out for anyone buying large quantities and to come get him so he could check them out.
And that’s part of the back story on some of the Why’s of what happened on the part of the villains.
