Session 15 - The One With The Pedestals
27th Dec 2020 19:15 - 22:30
In-game timeline: DR1489 Elesias 15 - Eleasias 16
Our "Heroes" stand, imposing and brave, before a closed sarcophagus with dragon iconography and an old, dusty suit of armour on a stand. They spend their usual amount of time working out what to do next.
Mahtis is concerned about being attacked from behind, and so leaps back over the pit to stand guard in the previous room, with the elven marble statues. Kandi decides to join her, but doesn't want to risk leaping over the pit, so slowly and carefully makes his way down and across the base of the pit.
The group decides they want to read the inscription above the archway, but the dust and dirt is getting in the way. In the absence of any normal means of getting rid of the dirt, Mahtis decides to hurl balls of fire at it to try to clear the inscription enough to read it. I'd hate to be present in Mahtis' home on spring-cleaning day!
It works… somehow. Eventually, after much noise, smoke, dust and disruption, the inscription is revealed:
"A dragonpriest entombed alive for transgressions of the Law still retains the honour of his position."
So they begin to suspect that something has been buried alive in the sarcophagus. Not that they weren't already suspicious of that anyway.
Mahtis jumps back over to the tomb, exchanging places with Carro, who joins his elven friend in the other room. Expecting the worst, they discuss whether to just run away and leave everything in peace.
Of course not! Mahtis and TC go about opening the sarcophagus clasps, and then push open the lid, quickly backing off just in case anything was going to leap out of there.
And what emerges seems to not be an elven priest, which they sort of expected, but some troll-like creature, that rises up from the coffin, slowly but deliberately. Mahtis' attempts for the creature to "Calm down, calm down" go unheard or ignored and the monster attacks!
Whilst TC and Mahtis prepare attacks - holding back just in case the creature is actually a well-disguised pacifist - the troll launches into Mahtis, scoring two vicious hits in quick succession and taking Mahtis aback. She and TC respond with their prepared attacks and the creature is hit by both frost and poison from Mahtis. The wounds seem to quickly heal over, however, and the group begin to realise that taking this 'Dragonpriest' down may be harder than it first seemed - and it first seemed pretty hard anyway!
Mahtis manages to heal herself just in time, as the troll lands another attack on her. Carro scores an impressive hit on the creature with his longbow, doing extra damage due to the hunter's mark he had imposed. TC, in a move that surprised himself as much as everyone around him, managed to hit with is acid-burned longsword, finally doing the sort of significant damage that he has always claimed he is capable of, and boosted the attack with his divine smite which was enough to fell the creature! Notch up a kill for TC!
Mahtis tries to chop off its head - after seeing the creature recover for some of its wounds, she was not certain that just because it was down, that it would stay down. Unfortunately her swing to cut off its head was not a good one, and whilst it did cut through some of the neck, it wasn't enough to completely decapitate the troll.
And her concerns were well-founded. Before she could ready her sword to finish the gruesome beheading, the creature started to rise again! It was too weak at this point to attack them, but did manage to raise its hand and point towards the suit of armour standing in the corner.
With everyone now worried about what the armour may do, Kandi plays a ditty on his flute and inspires TC, hoping that this would enable the paladin to score another hit when needed, and Carro fires another arrow at the slowly rising troll body, managing to 'kill' it once more, as it collapsed back to the ground. TC finishes the job Mahtis started and removes the head completely from the body.
Mahtis spots the armour start to move, and hits it with a frostbite attack, whilst Kandi tries to mock the armour before realising that without any means of actually 'hearing' the mocking, the armour is unaffected by this. The troll, meanwhile, now in two parts, starts to move again, though slowly and without much threat - the body starting to bud what looks like a new head, and the head slowly seeming to grow a new body.
The armour, meanwhile, slams into TC. Despite the disruption caused by the frostbite, it manages to hit TC with some force, knocking him back. Carro focuses on the slowly rising troll body, thinking that if ignored, that could start to become dangerous once again, with those sharp claws it was using as weapons. He scores a hit and once again takes the troll to the floor. Killed for the third time!
TC misses the armour with a wild swing that even his bardic inspiration would not have helped with, and Mahtis, on a roll with her frostbite, scores another icy hit. With the troll once again rising to his feet, Kandi takes him down again - kill number four against the troll!
Again, despite the distraction from the frostbite, the armour manages to slam into TC, and Carro, switching his focus to the more dangerous armour from the unmoving troll, misses on his longbow shot. TC misses once again with his sword and Mahtis' usual reliable frostbite attack this time fails to have an effect.
With the troll yet again recovering, the group start to think that maybe they need to hit it with a different kind of attack in order to make it stay down. However, there is no time to plan, so Kandi brings the troll back down with another crossbow bolt - kill number five!
The armour meanwhile, without any distraction from the frostbite, continues to attack Tommy. The paladin is forced to use one of his limited supplies of luck to avoid being hit again, and Carro follows up with a perfect shot against the armour, causing considerable denting and hopefully associated damage to the metal creature. Thomas, it almost goes without saying, missed.
Mahtis decides to join the melee with the armour, after seeing how battered and bruised the paladin is looking, and how ineffectual his longsword seems to be. She manages to hit the armour with her torch, using Kandi's granted bardic inspiration to ensure the hit lands. The troll rises again, and this time Kandi's attack on the troll misses, allowing the troll to recover more and start to stand, despite having no head. The armour, a little annoyed at having a lit torch thrust into its visor, slams into Mahtis and manages to knock her unconscious and she starts to bleed out.
TC gives up with trying to hit the armour with his sword and instead bends down to give Mahtis some healing. The Dragonborn pops back up as if nothing had happened, but misses with her attacks. The troll, meanwhile, rises from the ground and prepares to attack, but Kandi scores a perfect hit with his crossbow and manages to kill the troll once again - kill number six.
The armour's attacks on TC luckily miss, but with Carrow and TC both missing their attacks on it, it's looking a little worrying. However Mahtis steps in to show the paladin how it is done and brings the armour down with one blow.
With both the armour and the troll down, the party were able to use fire to stop the troll parts from regenerating - this seemed to work. No doubt the party will fail to remember this next time they meet a troll, though. They will, no doubt, claim to have seven kills when Kandi retells this story in one of his saga poems, despite only actually meeting two creatures in total.
With TC claiming he needs another long rest, despite it only being about 2 hours since the previous one, Kandi bravely looks inside the now open sarcophagus to find a rich reward of treasure, including an impressive longsword, which TC claims with glee, forgetting how tired he is for a second or two.
Another long discussion ensues between the party as to whether they should rest up, go check on Calcryx, collect Karakas' body, head back to town, or try out the pedestals. I know. They've now had that same conversation a number of times.
They decide it is in everyone's best interest to stop TC's moaning. So they head back to the entrance where they plan to have a long rest. The DM decides against flagging the following rule to the players:
"A character can't benefit from more than one long rest in a 24-hour period, and a character must have at least 1 hit point at the start of the rest to gain its benefits (PHB page 186)"
As they are starting to settle down, they spot a kobold face at the door into the northern part of the Fortress, and strike up a short conversation. That kobold runs off to fetch Yussi, who appears and thanks the group for their work in finding Calcryx and clearing out the Fortress.
It seems the kobolds returned to the Fortress of their own accord, after hearing that it was being cleared out by the party from the kobold prisoners that the group had previously freed. The kobolds found Calcryx shut in her room, and are in the process of trying to calm her down a bit. The remaining goblins in the Fortress were nowhere to be seen, so the suspicion is that they left of their own accord, rather than have to share their lair with a now-more-powerful group of kobolds. All is well with the world. Meepo's loss did not seem to affect the kobolds greatly.
Yussi rewards the party with some spell scrolls and a feather, that she claims has been passed down through their clan leaders, and is possessed with "great magics". Yussi also starts to get fed up with TCs requests for resting and so agrees to post guards in a room for them to spend the next 16 hours or so resting (as they would need to rest for this long in order to get any benefits, as per the rule quoted above :-))
Fully rested and with TC in a more positive mood, what with his new shiny sword and all, they decide to attempt the pedestals.
With a lot of faffing around with the orbs, that the DM has no intention of relating here, as it wasn't all that interesting at the time, let alone relating again after the event, they eventually all decided to stand on a pedestal each and press the button on the door.
At this point each of them faced a test that they had to overcome. Mahtis, despite the incredibly long rest period, does a poor job of trying to stop a pillar that dropped from the ceiling, but the other three manage to perform much more respectably on their individual tests, some helped by the bardic inspiration imparted by Kandi. Together it seems they manage to overcome the tests, as the door before them slowly opens to reveal a short corridor beyond.
And so we leave our "Heroes" standing on small pedestals, Mahtis slightly embarrassed, before an opening door with a dim corridor beyond. Will they leap off their platforms and rush towards certain danger? Or will they spend another 10 minutes talking through their options. Or will they, as seems most likely, take another long rest? We shall see…