Monday, October 26, 2009

Game Night: The Wine Caves

The party interrogates the half-drow/half-eladrin poisoners, and have a brief debate over what to do with the prisoners.  The idea of tying them up and taking them on the way out is broached, but Zahar realizes that the half-breeds will just be able to shadow step out of their bonds the second the group leaves.  As such, Zahar believes murder is the only choice.  Shedinn disagrees.  Eventually, the poisoners are allowed to run free, with the party believing the corrupted feywild will kill them.

As if that will happen.

They lift the grate in the room, and enter a series of tunnels.  A little bit of exploration leads to  cavern hallways filled with trickling water.  the group knows this area is riddled with caves, but believe they can find the secret of the place -they know there is a "big leader" somewhere in this cave complex, and want to find out who is running this local drow poisoning operation.

They come across a few shadar-kai resting in a side room by a cavern pool.  the party rushes the room, and make short work of the half-breeds.  Hammer charged into the room while the half-breeds were in their bunk beds, and knocked over one of the beds.  Both Seahorse and Kirra were able to deal huge amounts of damage against the prone targets.

Later, they found another trapdoor leading to deeper caves, and climbed a ladder down to what looked like a cave intersection, with a pool of water in the centre.  They headed in, and found an old eladrin with his hands tied, and deep gashes and cuts on his face.  Naturally, as soon as Hammer approached, the man let out a cloud of glowing blue flies that engulfed Hammer and confused him, as the man shapechanged back into a large-sized, ogre-like form.

The party rushed the man, and two half-breed rogues materialized around them and blinded those they could get close to.  However, the fight went in the party's favour early on, as Hammer quickly fought off the effects of the cloud due to Shedin's "transposition" power.  The Oni they were against was taking serious damage, and soon unleashed another wave of flies that miraculously didn't affect a single party member - even though all but Zahar were in the area of effect. 

When Seahorse chased one of the Shadar-Kai, she leapt into the water, before climbing back up onto a ledge and knocking the shadar-kai prone.  This let the ooze lurking in the water to strike both Seahorse and Zahar, pulling them into its embrace while the Half-breed tried to escape. 

However, the fight would soon end, with the Oni being quickly killed and the party promptly surrounding the ooze and layering attacks upon it.  But the party found some cracks in the wall, and began to wonder if they lead somewhere important - and Hammer realized he'd be able to break down the wall and explore the tunnel obviously beyond...

It was a short game today - two combats, though only one was "from the book".  There was also some light exploration, and a bit of chatting.  Mostly, we didn't want to go too far, since Kirra's player was missing, and I knew a Black Dragon attack was next.  I've been giving away a lot of treasure (still) to catch up to the fact that PCs hit level 9 today, and I still haven't given them half of their level 8 treasure packets.

The second fight didn't go well - bad luck by the Oni meant it had little in the way of powers, though the party did spend a lot of action points and dailies to make sure it went down.  The Gelatinous Cube would've been more difficult, were it not for the fact that no one entered the water until much later in the fight, meaning it was inert for most of the fight.  And I focused on the Engulf power, instead of using its normal attack to knock people immobilized, and then hit them with Engulf.  Whoops.  

Looking forward to the next fight... and some new plot bombs to drop on the group... 

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