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.
No comments:
Post a Comment