January 23, 118 SE
Wounded and wearied from the battle with the shadow creatures, the party decide that it's too late to catch the skeletons, and that they should rest for a few minutes before continuing downwards. The most wounded of the party slip into the alcoves while everyone else stands guard.
Several minutes pass, when they hear several sets of footsteps in the distance, further down the stairs. Based on the volume, they appear to be getting closer. The group decide that they cannot fight in their current condition, and flee back to town.
They run back to town, and frequent backward glances assure them that whatever they heard moving below does not seem to be following them. They pick a defensible building, and rest up, regaining a bit of their strength. In particular, the draining touch of the shadow creature that had affected Kaplan seems to wear off. Short rest completed, they leave the building and head back to the cemetery.
At the mausoleum, the guard has once again been replaced; in fact, it has been augmented. There are now two skeletons and three zombies standing guard. Their previous attempts at stealth having failed, the party try a different approach. They position themselves 120 feet away from the mausoleum, which is the maximum range of most of Ellyanna and Dark Star's spells, and start pelting the undead creatures with ranged attacks.
As before, one of the skeletons retreats down into the sarcophagus, while the four other creatures move forward to attack. Ellyanna, Dark Star, Elvish, and Grrrr Yip attack the creatures with spells, while Calanon fires his shortbow and Kaplan throws his light hammer, before the two warriors switch to melee weapons as the monsters approach.
The second skeleton is destroyed before it reaches Calanon and Kaplan, and one of the zombies is sufficiently weakened such that Kaplan is able to crush its head with a single massive blow of his warhammer. The party begin focusing their attacks on the two remaining zombies, but to their horror, they find that the creatures seem to be able to take an impossible amount of injury without going down.
As the party try to dispatch the two remaining zombies, the fleeing skeleton returns, along with reinforcements: a black-robed mage surrounded by eight grotesque, flabby halfling-sized creatures with sharp claws. Calanon surmises that these are probably the eight fiendish presences that he sensed earlier.
As the fiends and the skeleton charge into combat, the mage casts a spell of Sleep, catching Calanon, Kaplan, and Grrrr Yip in the effect. They all fall to the ground, fast asleep. In response, Elvish tries to wake them using his drum, using as much volume as he can muster; he succeeds in waking Calanon and Grrrr Yip, but not Kaplan.
By this time, the mage has cast a second spell; a protective illusion that summons three duplicates of himself. The party manage to finish off the zombies, but the fiends arrive and surround Calanon. While they are individually not very strong, their numbers are great and, together with the mage, they are able to take down both Calanon and Grrrr Yip. Their front line fallen, the remaining party members start retreating, taking potshots at the fiends as they run.
Elvish, the slowest of the three remaining casters, is caught by the creatures and taken down as well, but as Ellyanna and Dark Star retreat, they manage to destroy the slow-moving creatures one by one, although the mage's spells bring them dangerously close to death themselves. Luckily, the mage appears to run out of long-ranged spells, and he begins charging closer as well.
Finally, the Sleep spell wears off from Kaplan, and upon rising, he starts charging the mage from behind. At the same time, Ellyanna and Dark Star dispatch the last fiend, and the mage's protective illusion wears off. The mage, realizing that his minions are dead and he's nearly out of spells, uses a final spells to teleport himself past Kaplan and makes a run for the mausoleum.
Both Kaplan and the black-robed mage are nearly the same speed, but Kaplan is in much better physical shape, and he catches up to the mage just as they reach the mausoleum. He catches him with a warhammer blow to the back, which send him flying to the ground. The mage cries out something in a language that Kaplan doesn't understand, holding up his arms in surrender, but Kaplan ignores his surrender and finishes him off with a final hammer blow.
Friday, March 27, 2015
Thursday, March 26, 2015
Session 3: The Fate of Frosthaven, Part 3
January 22, 118 SE
The party arrive at Frosthaven around noon, having started out a bit later than usual due to their late arrival at camp the previous night. Kaplan persuades them that they should search the entire town and try to find any other survivors. They make their way to the village's single tavern, located near the center of the village. Similar to the temple, it is ransacked, with a higher density of corpses than other areas of the town. There are no survivors here, so they decide to perform a thorough search, spiraling outwards from the center of town and covering every single building.
Several hours pass as they search, without any results, when eventually they overhear the sound of several voices arguing coming from a nearby house. They approach, and discover that the house has been hastily boarded up and barricaded. The voices within are speaking a rough, gutteral language, but none of the party can understand it.
Kaplan moves to the front door and knocks on it with his hammer, demanding that the voices inside identify themselves. The voices immediately go quiet and there is no response. After waiting a few moments, Kaplan switches to his larger warhammer and bashes the door down. In its weakened state, the door falls easily, and Kaplan has a brief glimpse of a darkened hallway before three arrows shoot out from inside. Two of them strike him, and he is knocked to the ground.
A brutish-looking goblin warrior emerges from inside the building and attacks, while three other goblins fire arrows from behind cover inside the house. The party defeat the four goblins, largely due to a well-aimed Eldritch Blast from Darkstar that nearly kills the goblin leader outright, and a Burning Hands spell from Ellyanna that incinerates two of the three archers.
With the goblins disposed of, the party search through the building. Kaplan notes that goblins are not uncommon in this area, so this group were possibly scavengers or raiders. They find several corpses in the building that have sword wounds, but they are unable to determine whether the wounds are from the goblins' scimitars or the skeletons' swords.
Finding nothing of value in the goblin house, the party continue their search for survivors. They canvas the village for the rest of the day, covering the rest of the buildings, but find no survivors. They do find a few people who seem to have died of exposure rather than injuries, indicating that they might have been saved if they had been found more quickly.
Since the undead seem to have left the village, given that they did not encounter any during their all-day search, the party decide to hole up in a house of the outskirts of the village for the night, resolving to continue their investigation the next day.
January 23, 118 SE
The night is uneventful, and the next morning the party set out to investigate the large set of tracks that they discovered a few days ago. The tracks are those of dozens or possibly hundreds of individuals leaving town to the northeast, but the light snowfall since the tracks were made prevent the group from discerning any significant details. No one is able to think of any major landmarks in the direction the tracks are going, leaving their destination a mystery.
They decide to return to the cemetary and continue investigating there. Darkstar sneaks up to the mausoleum, where he sees, as before, three skeletons standing guard. He returns to the rest of the party and they formulate a plan. They know that they need to take out the skeletons quickly, in order to prevent one of them from fleeing and warning whatever is below the mausoleum of their presence.
They decide to sneak behind the mausoleum, while Darkstar waits at a distance, ready to attack with ranged magic. Ellyanna and Grr Yip sneak to the front of the mausoleum, intending to gain the element of surprise, allowing Grr Yip to prevent the skeletons from fleeing with an Entangle spell, while Ellyanna will try to destroy them with a Burning Hands spell.
Unfortunately, neither of the two adventurers is particularly stealthy, and they alert the skeletons to their presence via noise before they manage to round to the front of the mausoleum. Neither caster is able to get her spell off as two of the skeletons rush forward to attack and, as before, the third runs away to warn whatever creatures lurk below. The party dispatch of the two attacking skeletons, then charge into the darkness, hoping to catch the third skeleton.
The sarcophagus that the skeleton retreated into contains a stairway leading downwards, and the party run down it, with Darkstar trailing, as he had stayed further behind in order to fight from a distance. About 100 feet in, alcoves open on either side of the stairs. Kaplan sees a shadowy figure waiting in ambush on each side, and tries to call out a warning and halt the party, but their momentum is such that he cannot stop them quickly enough. Instead, he is pushed forward directly into the ambush.
The two shadowy creatures, which appear to literally be humanoid-shaped shadows, attack Kaplan, and as they touch him, he feels his strength and lifeforce being drained away. The creatures seem to be resistant to physical attacks, as well as most of the party's magical attacks. However, they do seem to be vulnerable to some of Darkstar and Elvish's force- and psychic-based attacks, and the party manage to destroy the creatures. However, even after they are gone, Kaplan still feels weakened, and during the time they were fighting, the skeleton has managed to flee even further into the darkness ahead.
The party arrive at Frosthaven around noon, having started out a bit later than usual due to their late arrival at camp the previous night. Kaplan persuades them that they should search the entire town and try to find any other survivors. They make their way to the village's single tavern, located near the center of the village. Similar to the temple, it is ransacked, with a higher density of corpses than other areas of the town. There are no survivors here, so they decide to perform a thorough search, spiraling outwards from the center of town and covering every single building.
Several hours pass as they search, without any results, when eventually they overhear the sound of several voices arguing coming from a nearby house. They approach, and discover that the house has been hastily boarded up and barricaded. The voices within are speaking a rough, gutteral language, but none of the party can understand it.
Kaplan moves to the front door and knocks on it with his hammer, demanding that the voices inside identify themselves. The voices immediately go quiet and there is no response. After waiting a few moments, Kaplan switches to his larger warhammer and bashes the door down. In its weakened state, the door falls easily, and Kaplan has a brief glimpse of a darkened hallway before three arrows shoot out from inside. Two of them strike him, and he is knocked to the ground.
A brutish-looking goblin warrior emerges from inside the building and attacks, while three other goblins fire arrows from behind cover inside the house. The party defeat the four goblins, largely due to a well-aimed Eldritch Blast from Darkstar that nearly kills the goblin leader outright, and a Burning Hands spell from Ellyanna that incinerates two of the three archers.
With the goblins disposed of, the party search through the building. Kaplan notes that goblins are not uncommon in this area, so this group were possibly scavengers or raiders. They find several corpses in the building that have sword wounds, but they are unable to determine whether the wounds are from the goblins' scimitars or the skeletons' swords.
Finding nothing of value in the goblin house, the party continue their search for survivors. They canvas the village for the rest of the day, covering the rest of the buildings, but find no survivors. They do find a few people who seem to have died of exposure rather than injuries, indicating that they might have been saved if they had been found more quickly.
Since the undead seem to have left the village, given that they did not encounter any during their all-day search, the party decide to hole up in a house of the outskirts of the village for the night, resolving to continue their investigation the next day.
January 23, 118 SE
The night is uneventful, and the next morning the party set out to investigate the large set of tracks that they discovered a few days ago. The tracks are those of dozens or possibly hundreds of individuals leaving town to the northeast, but the light snowfall since the tracks were made prevent the group from discerning any significant details. No one is able to think of any major landmarks in the direction the tracks are going, leaving their destination a mystery.
They decide to return to the cemetary and continue investigating there. Darkstar sneaks up to the mausoleum, where he sees, as before, three skeletons standing guard. He returns to the rest of the party and they formulate a plan. They know that they need to take out the skeletons quickly, in order to prevent one of them from fleeing and warning whatever is below the mausoleum of their presence.
They decide to sneak behind the mausoleum, while Darkstar waits at a distance, ready to attack with ranged magic. Ellyanna and Grr Yip sneak to the front of the mausoleum, intending to gain the element of surprise, allowing Grr Yip to prevent the skeletons from fleeing with an Entangle spell, while Ellyanna will try to destroy them with a Burning Hands spell.
Unfortunately, neither of the two adventurers is particularly stealthy, and they alert the skeletons to their presence via noise before they manage to round to the front of the mausoleum. Neither caster is able to get her spell off as two of the skeletons rush forward to attack and, as before, the third runs away to warn whatever creatures lurk below. The party dispatch of the two attacking skeletons, then charge into the darkness, hoping to catch the third skeleton.
The sarcophagus that the skeleton retreated into contains a stairway leading downwards, and the party run down it, with Darkstar trailing, as he had stayed further behind in order to fight from a distance. About 100 feet in, alcoves open on either side of the stairs. Kaplan sees a shadowy figure waiting in ambush on each side, and tries to call out a warning and halt the party, but their momentum is such that he cannot stop them quickly enough. Instead, he is pushed forward directly into the ambush.
The two shadowy creatures, which appear to literally be humanoid-shaped shadows, attack Kaplan, and as they touch him, he feels his strength and lifeforce being drained away. The creatures seem to be resistant to physical attacks, as well as most of the party's magical attacks. However, they do seem to be vulnerable to some of Darkstar and Elvish's force- and psychic-based attacks, and the party manage to destroy the creatures. However, even after they are gone, Kaplan still feels weakened, and during the time they were fighting, the skeleton has managed to flee even further into the darkness ahead.
Tuesday, March 17, 2015
Kaplan Brash
Male Human Fighter, Level 1
Played by Alan
Str 15 Dex 13 Con 15 Int 13 Wis 14 Cha 11
HP 12 AC 18 Alignment Neutral Good
Height 6' 2" Weight 220 lbs Age 32
Class Abilities Second Wind, Fighting Style (Protection)
Skills Athletics, Animal Handling, Insight, Survival
Languages Common
Equipment Chain mail, shield, warhammer, light hammer, mason's tools, shovel, chalk (100 pieces), grappling hook, explorer's pack
Vornheim proved to be everything he'd hoped, and nothing like his mother had dreaded. His career as a fortifier for the Town Guard was one of good repute, and for several years he lived in quiet contentment, grateful for each day of hard work, hot meals, and the boisterous companionship of his fellow masons and guardsmen. His skill with the hammer continued to improve, and life would be perfect if not for his one nagging regret, that things had ended things so bitterly with his mother. He would write to her each month in earnest, and more than once he asked her to stay with him and see the life he'd built for himself - her replies were always swift and polite, but never heartfelt.
And so the days passed, with more good in them than bad, until one night when he was woken by a loud banging at his door. To his shock, he was arrested, accused of murders and other heinous acts over the last month that he hadn't committed. Many of his friends and fellow guardsmen were present as he was carried away, watching with frightful eyes. At first, he assumed they were scared for him, but as their testimonies came to light during his trials, he learned that some of those closest to him claimed to have beared witness to the supposed crimes, swearing on their families' honour that the man they saw was Kaplan - they weren't scared for him, he realized, they were scared of him.
The trials were swift and merciless, the judgement brutal. Kaplan was sentenced to one month in the frozen wastes of the mountains, with only a single item of his choosing to take with him - he chose his father's hammer, his most cherished possession. Through some combination of luck, hardiness, survival instincts and determination, Kaplan survived the ordeal, and was allowed to return to his job and dwelling, but it was a shade of his former life. His fellow workers feared and despised him, and he in turn was filled with resentment toward the city. He left, his reputation forever tarnished, with nowhere to go but back to his family home in Frosthaven.
To his surprise, on his return his mother's welcome warm and forgiving, and no trace remained of the dark cloud that had loomed above them for so many years. He told her of the crimes he'd been accused of, though of course word of them had already reached her, and he promised her he was not responsible. She told him there was never a doubt in her mind that he wasn't.
And so Kaplan returned to the life he'd once known. The neighbours of Frosthaven were perhaps less hesitant of him, having known him since he was a boy and being in need of a mason besides, but there was little joy left for him to find in his work. More years went by, and it was enough for him to survive on, but the Kaplan who was ambitious and confident was gone. He laboured mostly to lose himself amidst the toil.
Then, his fate changed a second time, again with him being startled in the night by a loud bang. He leapt from his bed to find his home ambushed by an undead creature. He fought it and killed it, but he was too late - the evil thing had already reached his mother's room and attacked her. Kaplan found her wounded, bleeding to death. Knowing there was little time left for her, she hastened to tell Kaplan a secret she had struggled with keeping from him his whole life. "I'm not your mother, and you're not my child," she said, her words becoming harder to understand as the blood filled her lungs and bubbled up her throat. She began to say more, but whatever Kaplan thought he might have heard in her final, dying murmur might in fact have been anything.
He was still reeling from the shock of so much at once when more undead creatures overwhelmed him. As his strength failed him and the pain overcame him, he began to lose consciousness. It was never his ambition to die in Frosthaven, Kaplan reflected, but somehow after everything he'd been through, it felt oddly appropriate.
Played by Alan
Str 15 Dex 13 Con 15 Int 13 Wis 14 Cha 11
HP 12 AC 18 Alignment Neutral Good
Height 6' 2" Weight 220 lbs Age 32
Class Abilities Second Wind, Fighting Style (Protection)
Skills Athletics, Animal Handling, Insight, Survival
Languages Common
Equipment Chain mail, shield, warhammer, light hammer, mason's tools, shovel, chalk (100 pieces), grappling hook, explorer's pack
Biography Kaplan Brash was born in the modest, unremarkable village of Frosthaven, though it was never his ambition to die there. Frugal and forethoughtful, in his youth Kaplan worked dutifully and spent little, until the day he gave the news to his mother that he was leaving for the metropolis of Vornheim to join the Town Guard. Though she pleaded for him to stay, warning that the decadence and corruption of city life would only bring him misery, Kaplan's mind was set. He packed up what few possessions he cherished, chief among them the mason's hammer that belonged to his late father, and he left.
Vornheim proved to be everything he'd hoped, and nothing like his mother had dreaded. His career as a fortifier for the Town Guard was one of good repute, and for several years he lived in quiet contentment, grateful for each day of hard work, hot meals, and the boisterous companionship of his fellow masons and guardsmen. His skill with the hammer continued to improve, and life would be perfect if not for his one nagging regret, that things had ended things so bitterly with his mother. He would write to her each month in earnest, and more than once he asked her to stay with him and see the life he'd built for himself - her replies were always swift and polite, but never heartfelt.
And so the days passed, with more good in them than bad, until one night when he was woken by a loud banging at his door. To his shock, he was arrested, accused of murders and other heinous acts over the last month that he hadn't committed. Many of his friends and fellow guardsmen were present as he was carried away, watching with frightful eyes. At first, he assumed they were scared for him, but as their testimonies came to light during his trials, he learned that some of those closest to him claimed to have beared witness to the supposed crimes, swearing on their families' honour that the man they saw was Kaplan - they weren't scared for him, he realized, they were scared of him.
The trials were swift and merciless, the judgement brutal. Kaplan was sentenced to one month in the frozen wastes of the mountains, with only a single item of his choosing to take with him - he chose his father's hammer, his most cherished possession. Through some combination of luck, hardiness, survival instincts and determination, Kaplan survived the ordeal, and was allowed to return to his job and dwelling, but it was a shade of his former life. His fellow workers feared and despised him, and he in turn was filled with resentment toward the city. He left, his reputation forever tarnished, with nowhere to go but back to his family home in Frosthaven.
To his surprise, on his return his mother's welcome warm and forgiving, and no trace remained of the dark cloud that had loomed above them for so many years. He told her of the crimes he'd been accused of, though of course word of them had already reached her, and he promised her he was not responsible. She told him there was never a doubt in her mind that he wasn't.
And so Kaplan returned to the life he'd once known. The neighbours of Frosthaven were perhaps less hesitant of him, having known him since he was a boy and being in need of a mason besides, but there was little joy left for him to find in his work. More years went by, and it was enough for him to survive on, but the Kaplan who was ambitious and confident was gone. He laboured mostly to lose himself amidst the toil.
Then, his fate changed a second time, again with him being startled in the night by a loud bang. He leapt from his bed to find his home ambushed by an undead creature. He fought it and killed it, but he was too late - the evil thing had already reached his mother's room and attacked her. Kaplan found her wounded, bleeding to death. Knowing there was little time left for her, she hastened to tell Kaplan a secret she had struggled with keeping from him his whole life. "I'm not your mother, and you're not my child," she said, her words becoming harder to understand as the blood filled her lungs and bubbled up her throat. She began to say more, but whatever Kaplan thought he might have heard in her final, dying murmur might in fact have been anything.
He was still reeling from the shock of so much at once when more undead creatures overwhelmed him. As his strength failed him and the pain overcame him, he began to lose consciousness. It was never his ambition to die in Frosthaven, Kaplan reflected, but somehow after everything he'd been through, it felt oddly appropriate.
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