Elisssa has decided to retire for awhile from the adventuring life [Laura wanted to try something else]. The reason that I made up for this was a fairly obvious one, the group (characters) keeps getting on Elisssa’s case about killing the hill giant, not being able to pitch a tent or sail a boat. For a dragonborn such insults and snide comments are hard to take. Them not letting her kill the captured slavers was the final straw and furious with the group she stalks off to see her friends and family as soon as they enter Larkson. She takes with her a couple thousand in gold and Krag’s Axe and Bracers and some assorted trinkets and souvenirs.
Later discourse over the course of the session might reveal that Elisssa may come back as the floating crew of available NPC’s for use by players (Torn, Dash, Sushanna, Kane)
The action starts immediately with the first of three encounters for the night. Screams are heard echoing through the temple and grabbing their arms the group rushes to see what’s going on. T’Balktu, Torel, Visra and Stak are joined along the way by a visiting Cleric of Kord from Anvil here to do research at the temple by the name of Spar. [Played by Biminey's owner Temple]
THe five of them find the room that contains the temple’s main ritual circle filled with a vortex of energies. People located in the room are being sucked into the vortex and being… reformed as something else. As the energies die away the group catches a glimpse of Liloth and Phy’el Fleshwalker through a rent in space causing the effects.
An abomination of flesh, humanoid, composed of merged persons in the room roars out a challenge. It’s back bursts and hunks of flesh drop free to create little humanoid creatures dripping flaming slime. The monkeys immediately start flinging their slime around the room and where the gobs hit, invisible before now runes flare and burn out, a few seconds later the bricks blow outwards in blasts of energies and shrapnel.
The group attacks of course, taking down the big creature and then mopping up the smaller ones but not before they cut a wide swatch through the walls, floor and celing of the room destroying large sections of the bricks and subsequently the wardings inlaid upon them.
As they stop and catch their breath they hear more screams, deducing (correctly) that this was a diversion while another attack was going on. They rush through the temple to find the forbidden archives under attack by rats. A section of the floor has fallen away down into the sewers that run under the town and rats are streaming in, each grabbing a scroll or parchement or tome to flee down the hole with it.
They follow, smashing rats as they go. In the dank large sewers they run into Krag’s animus which has formed a temporary body out of rats along with other rat swarms. Due to their positioning Krag has to reveal early on that he can absorb the rat swarms to recover his mass (i.e. recover health) and the group destroys the swarms before working on Krag. (this made the encounter easier on the group by a considerable amount thanks to their smart thinking).
As the mass of rats that is Krag collapses to stream away a red mist shoots off down the sewers. (Krag’s animus).
They follow the animus (and trail of parchment fragments) to Krag’s lair where he’s been feeding the blood of those he’s slain through one of Liloth’s warps. A large chamber has been damned up at the doorway forming a pool of blood like liquid several inches deep. The room is filled with rats each holding a parchment. Right now the rats are being lifted through the portal bearing the parchments. They turn on the group as Torel and Spar both try to bless the portal to destroy it. (A whole hella lot of very low rolls).
Eventually the group gets the warp closed and triggers a trap laid into the room turning the blood into a blood elemental. It’s not designed to be able to stand up against a full group but is aimed to destroy single intruders and the group makes short work of it.
Spar had the idea during the fight to break the dam holding in the blood and if they’d of done that before the fight they could have destroyed the warp and prevented the elemental from spawning but hind sight and all that.
They recovered a bracer and axe that Krag’s been slowly enchanting to replace his lost axe and bracer. He’s a very good enchanter, at odds with his brutal nature but has a knack for things that deal with blood. It’s just hard to enchant things when you’re a ghost. The bracers are similar to Iron Armbands of Power but require a healing surge to activate, after activated they boost edged weapons damage by 2 for the rest of the encounter. The axe gives its wielder a Immediate Reaction ability that grants them a basic melee attack with the axe when an adjacent target is bloodied for the first time and it deals an extra +2 damage when the wielder is bloodied.
The group retreats from the chamber and heads back to the temple. They rest and recover and then work on plans. They talk to the captain of the watch and Garon of the council. Garon is floundering. He’s out of his league with the things that are going on and doesn’t know which way to stumble much less lead. People have been leaving the city out of fear, this is obviously a bad thing for the city’s protection and the party points it out and want him to lock the city down. He’s reluctant to do that, he doesn’t want to be the ‘bad guy’ or institute the martial law that this requires. Larkson has always been a free city and preventing the poeple from leaving strikes him too much like slavery, an act that really runs against his core values especially after having lost his children to slavers. He’s also loath to go against the agreement with the Watch in terms of disbursement of the mercenaries.
He asks Torel and Stak to hire on advisors, a task they reluctantly agree to consider. The group considers their actions and decide to send a fetch out to Biminey asking him to meet them early.
They purchase a longboat and row out to sea, successfully navigating to their general meeting area. They discuss things with Biminey and the others.
Biminey asks them to ask Sushanna to come visit him for multiple reasons, the primary one he wants to teach her the ways of the artificer so that she can at times take control of the airship allowing him freedom to leave the ship.
After discussion they’re going to try and lead a band of mercenaries out of the town to gather information on the hobgoblins who are taking small villages and farmsteads captive as a threat for the town to give them some book, a book they believe holds power over the creatures loosed from Darkmith.
We end our session there.
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