Party finally faces real challenges – film at 11

In this week’s game taking place in The Night Below, the party finally arrived at one of the deadlier areas – the caverns surrounding the Temple of Jubilex.
Night Below is written as a meat grinder, but after a dozen games or so, the party seems to have made themselves nicely at home in the hellish depths. Couple of near deaths, but no cigar.


Well, in this new area there were some serious dangers to them. First cavern had some piercers and a lurker above, which made for a nice little start to the action. Up next was a cave with a large, intelligent fungus creature, an “Obal,” who just hung out on the ceiling. Even though the creature was not aggressive, Andy’s half elf bard Vaidno shot an arrow at it for fun, and it immediately attacked the half wit and the others with it’s pointy tentacles.

Taking care of the Obal in short order, the party didn’t get time even for a breath as a Black Pudding from the furthest part of the cave rolled in and attacked. It managed to deal a good bit of damage before eventually being reduced to several small and harmless mini-puddings.

In the next cave though was a 12 Level magic-user, a captive of slavers who handed him over to the Mind Flayers, but he managed to escape with his teleport spell just before going beyond the gates of the City of the Glass Pool. Flubbing the spell, he has ended up in this area desperately trying to hold off the beasties within. Insane and desperate, he will do anything to get his hands on a teleport scroll, or anything else to get back to the world above (note: although not done so in the module, I made this guy the same magic shop owner from the town above whom the party knows as having been kidnapped by Drow slavers before the party ventured underground, just to give him a bit of a connection and gravitas).

This guys best item was a very awesome scroll (I took away the portable hole he has in the book, plus a couple of other items I didn’t want players to have). It is a regenerating scroll with Invisible Stalker, Monster Summoning 4, and Fireball on it. Each spell comes back in a few days if you don’t fail a small percentage roll that makes that spell disappear off the scroll for good. Nice, eh? This is a good bit of power to fall into the player’s hands, but with them assaulting the City of the Glass Pool in a few games they need all the help they can get.

The MU had recently cast his fireball and Inviso Stalker spells from the scroll in the last couple of days, so at least those would not be available to the players right away when they got their hands on it. He actually had two Stalkers available as the player come into the area. One to guard the cave entrance, and another to act as bodyguard to him. As the PC’s entered the cave, the first Stalker struck, ringing Vaidno with a powerful blow from out of nowhere. Though invisible, the party managed to defeat it in just a few rounds, just in time for the MU to cast Monster Summoning 4 and bringing a couple of giant wasps unto the battlefield. Unfortunately for me, I never got much fun out of them, because Lumarin the High Elf MU made with his want of lightning and toasted them right up.

Vaidno led the battle against the second Invisible Stalker, and with the help of a couple others took it down. The high level MU didn’t like that, so he unleashed his Polymorph Other upon Vaidno!

OK, here is where I had to make the hard decision regarding System Shock vs. death. I’ve been debating it in relation to the Haste spell. Still wishy washy on this, I decided I needed to go to the book when in doubt. “Andy, do Viadno’s System Shock. Miss and he’s dead.”

I have to admit, despite my doubts about “SS or die” I found the tense drama of that roll to be pretty exhilarating. Here was a PC somebody has been running for more than two years in my game, and his life was dependant on an 80% or less.
Vaidno turned into a small newt. Luckily, he kept his mental facilities, but he was affectively out of combat. Horny as ever, he crawled up Krysantha the female drow’s pants leg to have a look around.

Scorched by a lightning bolt from Lumarin’s wand, and struck by a pair of arrows from Kyrsantha, the MU was put to one hit point, and he went down screaming “I only want to get out of this hell hole!”

Lumarin charmed him (a couple of attempts had already been made by other characters, but they failed), and demanded he change Vaidno back, but unfortunately the MU had used up his dispel magic. Lumarin took pity on the tortured and deranged MU, and traded him a teleport scroll for the awesome regenerating scroll with the cool stuff on it. After being grilled heavily on what little he knew, the MU was allowed to teleport away.

It sure would have been fun for Vaidno to stay a newt for awhile. Too bad Krysantha had dispel magic, and despite being much lower level than the casting MU (who was 12th), managed to turn Vaidno back. Made for an exciting second system shock, however. Vaidno lived to fight another day.

So it turned out to be a pretty brutal game for the party, and luck had a lot to do with nobody getting croaked. They are only half way through the area though, and although they plan to avoid the Temple of Jubilex itself (and passing up some nice treasure) they will trudge through more mayhem before they are out of these particular caverns.

With our D&D games going on hiatus for a bit (couple of players being out of town in June), I’m maybe going to do some change of pace games with some Champions in my old Champions game setting. When we get back to the Night Below in July, I’m gonna kill me some characters!