TSR [Let's Read] Polyhedron/Dungeon

All but one turned up punctually again, sustaining the run. The stealthy approach they managed last time failed almost immediately, as they blundered into one of the areas trapped with Evard's black tentacles. Fortunately, they were more than a match for the regular gnolls, spending the next three hours mowing through them. Their wizard fell to a sneak attack before they could even roll initiative. The hound archon was hit by glitterdust and teleported away until the blindness wore off. (which has yet to happen) The gnolls in the water were taken out by a combination of summoned dolphins and impatient winter werewolves. The only fly in the ointment, and it's a large one, is that the feral binder was hit by the petrification gaze of the basilisk on the right ear of the kaiju and failed her save, falling into the water below. Fortunately, they still have the potions from the giants two adventures ago so that's a solvable problem. Looks like they'll probably finish this one sometime next session, barring a series of particularly poor rolls.

All but one ( but a different one this week) kept up the massive battle with the Kadtanach and its handlers, filling another 3 hours with non-stop action. They continued to mow through the regular gnolls like wheat, but struggled a bit with the gargoyle's DR until two of them flanked it and set up a full set of sneak attacks to bring it down. When its blindness wore off, the hound archon teleported back on top of one of the towers. Seeing that fighting conventionally was a complete loss, it then teleported into the control room and controlled the beast to do a roll to smush them. Fortunately for them, this took several rounds and they're mostly flyers so this once again did not go as intended. Only the orc was unable to fly or be carried away and failed his climb check to avoid being dropped in the water below, but in the process, got a glimpse of said hidden control room on the beast's neck and shouted it's location out to the others. They then got back on its back first chance they could while it tried to stomp the orc and headed there. The gnolls in the false ceiling tried to do their sneak attack, but it doesn't look like they'll be doing much damage again. But will they be able to find their way down and take control before the attempts to shake them off do too much damage?

Once again all but one turned up punctually. The group finally finished off the big fight on the back of the Kadtanach this week. The big bad almost fell to the priestesses whip, but managed to teleport away after delivering one final cryptic quip to become a recurring antagonist. They trained the werewolves to operate the magical helmet that pilots the beast, headed back to the dropoff point and left them to take their bloody vengeance on the land that locked them up for centuries. The PC's headed back to the astral, tallied up xp & loot, (putting them at level 9, so if advancement continues at the same rate we're now approximately a quarter of the way through the campaign.) did a bit of shopping and reported back. The clues about Greymalkin Academy and finding other sleeping giants are now being investigated by other teams. In the meantime, they had another three options for the next mission. Red dragon drafting, Illithid hunting, or weird recurring geography. They decided to go for the relatively straightforward option of illithid hunting rather than the plots that might actually involve lots of social interaction, so next week it's time for an extended trip into the underdark. They'd better remember to stock up on their anti-mind control powers.

First time in a while every single player was present. I actually got to do a decent amount of prep this time, so while the core of this underdark area is based on Thunder Under Needlespire, the multiple unmapped tunnels leading off that map now connect to other adventures or Maps of Mystery. Since only some of the party members have darkvision, the two sneakiest party members went ahead of the others. They passed several turning points before coming to a junction seeded with Shriekers, which they managed to detect before setting off. They weren't quite so stealthy on the other side, with the noise they made attracting the attention of a deep gnome patrol, but with the help of invisibility and flight, they managed to hide on the ceiling until the gnomes went past them before unleashing sneak attacky death. Continuing down the tunnel, they managed to spot the secret door to the svirfneblin mines, but since the tunnel was gnome sized, our enlarged party member couldn't fit through. The two stealthy party members went on ahead again, coming out in the gnome fungus gardens, while the other 4 looked for a larger way in. They didn't find one, and since the two in the lead decided to start going from burrow to burrow impulsively slaughtering, (soon failing to one-shot entire families so the alarm was raised after a couple of rounds) were forced to get inventive. Fortunately, their Gith leader has a power that lets him swap places with another character, so by crawling through the tunnel and then switching with the orc, they were able to get the rest of the party into the action after a few rounds. The rest of the session turned into another massive battle where the enemies were mostly outclassed, but still managed to get the occasional hit in through sheer weight of numbers. Will they be able to finish them off next session, and will they remember to leave at least a few of them alive for questioning?

Another good turnout with all but one showing up on time. The first hour of the session continued the combat from last time, slaughtering through the svirfneblin until only two out of the 50-odd villagers remained alive, which they stabilised and tied up for later. This is where things get interesting. For the past month or so, I've had a prospective new player hovering around but not actually joining in. We decided that making him a native of Pharagos who could give the others useful exposition would be helpful to the campaign and spent some time between sessions fleshing out his lore. And as the others were cleaning out the remainder of the gnome burrows for whatever treasure they could find, a small glossy black kobold wandered in. Seeing that these were not people to trifle with, he adopted an obsequious tone, and thankfully, realising this wasn't just another NPC, the others did not leap straight to violence either. The other kobold in the party wandered off and stole a little extra treasure for his personal stash while the rest chatted to the new guy, who filled them in on the many factions within and beneath the mountain. Gnomes & dwarves to the north, Illithids in the central deeps, grimlocks nearer the surface, kuo-toa to the east, drow to the southwest and aboleth anywhere flooded, plus an mysterious ancient eldritch evil buried below everything else that was the thing which drew him here in the first place. Since their main objective here is illithid hunting, they decided to systematically take them out, first dealing with their grimlock allies and then moving onto the main course of squid afterwards. Another couple of uneventful wandering monster checks later and they found themselves at the bottom end of the grimlock mines, which was bordered by a bridge over an underground river. Unfortunately for them, a gang of Skum were lurking in the water ready to ambush any passers-by and everyone rolled poorly on their spot checks. Unlike the gnomes, these guys actually have some pretty decent damage-dealing potential, particularly if they get their secondary rake attacks in. But being large, they are having trouble maneuvering in these tunnels compared to the PC's so it still looks like they'll be gone in a few rounds, with the new arrival proving he's quite capable of hanging with the party by one-shotting one of the skum with an empowered scorching ray. Let's find out what twists and turns next week has to bring.

A punctual full house this week. The Skum were easy meat for the party and they resumed the exploration of the mines. Several more rooms of active but currently unoccupied mine later, they found the shaft to the upper levels. Unfortunately, the lift was currently raised so a couple of the flyers had to head up the shaft to get the others up. This is where I found a fairly basic error in the adventure that I was using as the map for this area, Beyond the Light of Reason. Apparently, there are meant to be 5 manticores in area U7, but since they're large creatures, that number is physically impossible to fit into that space. This one definitely needed a bit more stress testing in hindsight. So I merely had them fight two manticores before being able to bring the others up to explore this level. There they found it was mostly occupied by Frost Giants who traded with the Grimlocks on the lower level. Since Illithid rarely come up this close to the surface, they weren't directly mind-controlled and no great fan of the squidfaces condescending attitudes, so after a few good diplomacy rolls, they were quite happy to see a change of management down below as long as the ore supply wasn't disrupted, maybe even increased because it was being shared by fewer factions and would remain neutral while the PC's went back down to deal with them. This unusually peaceful interaction was not to last though. Having heard the fight with the manticores and "seen" the skum bodies floating downriver, the Grimlocks were fully aware there was trouble coming and in defensive positions. The rest of the session turned into another massive running battle through multiple rooms at once, with the Grimlocks use of alchemist fire proving particularly effective in inflicting at least some damage on the PC's until our minidragon cast an ablative protection spell on the whole group. While it still looks like they'll win overall, this isn't a one-sided slaughter like the gnomes were and the troll on the bridge in particular is doing some real damage. How will the PC's resolve this and will there be any Grimlocks left alive at the end to do the mining?

A little less punctual this week, but eventually all but one turned up. This was another one where the battle was so huge it continued the whole session. The Grimlocks continued to fall while doing moderate damage, but our sneakier players noticed that they were using their positions to allow the women & children to escape round the back way. Since they were being kept pretty busy already they decided not to chase them, instead concentrating on mopping up the ones that were attacking them. Eventually they managed to clear areas L5-8 and coup de grace the troll and had a brief breather before resuming exploration. They got to L10 and found that the grimlock barbarians & chief were in surrounding formation around the narrow entrance waiting for their attack. However, they did not reckon on the PC's once again using grease to good effect, turning the raging barbarians into a slippery scrum that's easy prey for their flyers with ranged attacks. Here I once again departed from the adventure as written, substituting the slaad in the book for their Illithid overseer. Seeing that things were going poorly, he, the grimlock fighters & cleric slipped out the back way of L12 to try and get away while the barbarians & chieftan kept up the attack. But our kobold & gith were lurking round by the bridge avoiding the main fight and spotted them from a distance. Will the party be able to handle a fight on two fronts and keep the illithid from getting away? The ones with spell slots are already getting pretty depleted so they'll need to find a point to rest soon, which may force compromises upon them.

Only 5 out of 7 this time, and it's looking pretty likely that there will be more frequent absences in general over the holiday period. Although the number of enemies was going down fairly quickly at this point, there were still enough to keep them busy for most of the session. Our Feral Binder continued to make mincemeat of the barbarians in L10 all on her own, although they scored max damage on her several times and by the end of the fight she was just a few hp from dropping. Meanwhile the fighters, cleric & illithid escaping round the back got webbed up by our gith and massacred by the majority of the party, although the illithid once again dimension doored out of trouble and slipped deeper into the caves. Fortunately, our kobolds had once again decided that slipping off to the east to do some sneaky exploring was the better part of valor and came across the illithid and noncombatant grimlocks trying to escape in a small boat, starting from L15 and heading north under the bridges. A reshaped orb of cold (gotta love that the players have actually paid attention to what spells ignore spell resistance when knowing they're going illithid hunting) managed to flash-freeze the illithid down to negative hp, which was then shattered by the winged kobolds mind blade. Now just the cleric and half the noncombatants remain alive as prisoners and the group has gained enough xp from this massive fight to advance to level 10. But some of the grimlocks did manage to escape, which means there will be reprisals if they hang around for any length of time. But that's a story for another session.

All but one here again, as is becoming almost standard. Having cleared the area, the group had the time to rest without any wandering monsters coming along. Most of the party interrogated the grimlock captives while the kobolds once again wandered off in search of extracurricular treasure. The prisoners were pretty loyal to the illithid, but with a combination of good intimidate and diplomacy, they did manage to get a little more info about the demographics of the nearby illithid settlement and their minions. Meanwhile, the kobolds poked at the cave-in blocking L16, decided they didn't have the strength to dig their way through and went to investigate the waterfall in L15 instead. This triggered the aboleth encounter beneath there which had been laying low, hoping to take over the place now the grimlocks were devastated. It tried to take control of the closer one but failed, keeping him talking while its skum minions ascended from the depths. When they actually went to attack, all its confident talk that the PC's should surrender was proven laughable when 5 out of 6 skum were instantly flash-fried with a single burst of electricity. The fact that it was using illusions to conceal its true position kept it alive for a couple of rounds, but soon the rest of the PC's caught up and noticed that their attacks weren't having the expected effects on the surrounding environment. Once that problem was solved, it was rapidly killed despite no-one on the team being a dedicated swimmer. Having looted its treasure, they turned their attention back to digging through to L16. A bad roll for wandering monsters and subsequent spot check had them hitting green slime on the way in, resulting in some con damage, but this was a speedbump at their level. What actually delayed them somewhat longer was the riddle on the statue inside. They could easily have just taken the magical bird in its hands, but spent a good half an hour of real time dithering over what it meant and if they had to fulfil some kind of conditions to bypass a (nonexistent) trap. Gotta love it when the designers throw in red herrings like that and you can just sit back and be amused at the players antics.

Having finally cleared every nook and cranny of that map, they headed back down the way they came, deciding that going for the illithid prison and maybe getting some allies along the way was probably a better option than going straight for their main settlement. Those of you who've been reading along from the start have probably already guessed that said prison is the Spiral of Manzessine, one of the adventures I've most wanted to run since starting this campaign. This time they rolled lucky on the wandering monster table and had a quiet journey until they got to the big chasm full of glowing green gas that serves as their first line of defence. Initially it seemed like they might actually be sneaky this time, with our feral binder coming forward into the range of the guard's darkvision and saying she was interested in joining up with them while the others held back. It might have even worked as well, as one of her powers makes her immune to mind-reading, she has a good bluff score and illithid have no ranks in sense motive, so it's not actually that hard to trick them if they can't cheat their way through social interactions. But other party members got impatient (and the ruse would have fallen apart as soon as someone who was readable got in range anyway so they didn't feel like having everyone else sit around doing nothing while one did a lengthy infiltration scene) so they teleported or flew over the chasm, cast glitterdust on the area and started engaging in general violence on the flesh golem guards. (some of which didn't work because they forgot what they're immune to) The kobold sniper managed to spot the illithid lurking in the stalactite and nearly one-shotted him despite the cover bonuses, at which point he decided that discretion was the better part of valor, set off the shriekers and dimension doored deeper into the prison. Three of the PC's used their small size or short-range teleportation powers to get through the portcullis, deciding that speed would be a better idea than sticking around fighting the golems. Their quick reactions paid off as they saw the illithid near the end of the corridor alerting the next set of guards. Seeing that it wasn't getting away so easily, it used its mind blast on them. Only one failed and was stunned, but this adds a further complication to their next few rounds. It looks like next session will be filled with entertainingly chaotic action whether they win or lose.

All but one turned up again for another three hours that were heavy on combat and light on roleplaying. They managed to finish off the fleeing illithid before it could do anything else and get everyone through the portcullis without smashing it, but as the githyanki had cast haste on most of the party there was no time to wait for the stunning to wear off the priestess. Seeing regular wooden doors to the north and weird illthid sphincter doors to the south, they decided to go for the more familiar (and easier to break through) option first, which used up another couple of rounds as all that's through them is the storeroom guarded by flesh golems. Since that was a dead end and they had no clue how to use lockpicking on this kind of tech, they had no choice to use excessive force to get through the sphincter. (which prompted exactly the kind of sophomoric humour you'd expect) When they did, they promptly got hit by another mind blast from the fully alerted illthid guards in area 4. Fortunately only two failed their saves, (although one of those was the priestess again, getting a bit frustrated about how much of the session she was spending out of action) and they soon wiped out the two in there. Areas 5 and 6 followed a similar pattern, although they were a bit smarter about dealing with those by having only one person open the doors while the others stood just out of range of mind blast ready to charge. This brought them to the big spiral ramp leading down to the next level. Suspecting there'd be some kind of guard here as well, they tossed a glowing rock down, which got the cryohydra to waste it's breath weapon. This looked like it might actually be more of a threat initially, particularly when our feral binder and minidragon dived in provoking 11 attacks of opportunity each, but thankfully their armor classes are high enough that only a few bites got through and the binder in particular has fire damage on every attack so she did most of the heavy lifting in taking this one down. Having packed as much hydra meat as they can carry away for later they headed down to the next level. Opening the door to area 7, they easily spotted the flesh golems lurking in the alcoves above ready to jump on intruders. But this is where we ran out of time, so whether this fight will be easy as well remains to be seen. How much further through the prison will they get next time and will they pick up another PC along the way, as rescuing prisoners seems an ideal time to introduce someone so I've opened up one more slot. Let's see if the havoc continues next week, or post-festive stupor forces us to delay until the new year.