Beholder Group - "The Blind Leading The Blind" - Fallen Fortress Session 9

29^th July 2019, 7:45 – 12:15pm

In-game timeline: Start of session, Midsummer’s day +10. End of session, Midsummer’s day +10.

Our “Heroes” face a difficult decision. Whether to head east through a door to the north of them, or south-west through a rift in the earth. Not only that, but the DM threw a spanner in the works by informing them of a door right next to them that they hadn’t managed to spot (nothing to do with the DM forgetting to tell them about it….)

They decide to press on eastwards. Devon can’t hear anything at the door, so throws it open with abandon, only to see that it opens into a small, seemingly empty, room with a door in the opposite wall. Empty rooms immediately arouse suspicion in this group. Especially small ones. They spend what seems like hours (actually just minutes) searching the walls and floors for traps, buttons, knobs, electronic control panels and the like. To no avail. It does indeed seem like a small, empty room.

Devon listens at the next door and for some reason is much more cautious opening this one. It opens into a large, ‘crucifix-shaped’ room. Devon calls down his pet owl, newly christened Nigel – Nige for short – and focuses through his eyes as Nige flies around the large room checking it out. It seems there are closed doors in each ‘arm’ of the crucifix, but otherwise the room is pretty empty. As Devon comes out of his ‘trance’ seeing through Nige’s eyes, he is confronted by a hideous and bloodied goblin right next to his face! A slight scream came from Devon’s lips and a large smell came from his trousers. Only when he heard Drogan chuckling from behind the goblin did he realise it was a jolly jape dreamed up by the increasingly-cheeky Drogan – the goblin was already dead, Drogan soon would be, if Devon had his way!

Deciding that a large, empty room is even more scary than a small, empty room, the party decide to abandon their original plan and head down the rift instead. Nothing if not decisive, this bunch.

And so they make their way to the rift, which is easily navigable, if a little narrow, and slowly make their way along it. Drogan stops the group when he spots a number of large holes in the floor of the rift. Wondering if he could shove Devon down the holes to see what is down there, maybe soaping him up first to make his passage smoother, they instead opt for firing a flaming arrow down one of the holes. This shows it to extend downwards quite a way, before turning and heading in a southerly direction.

Nige isn’t keen on flying down a hole, so they instead send him further down the rift and report back what he sees. It doesn’t go far – there’s a corridor to the north that they surmise joins up with the doorway they found earlier, and another similar corridor offset a little heading south, followed by a small cavern, filled with numerous similar holes, some animal bones, and a faint glow coming out of one of the holes. The rift then closes up and is not passable any further on.

Deciding that glowing holes are not what they came here for, they decide to ignore the cavern, but to check out the southern passage, as it may loop back and be a shortcut to their main aim – which seems to change from recovering a red pear, to killing a druid, to exterminating a frog, to killing anything that moves.

Dwarrow makes the astute observation that the rift is quite recent and seems to have shifted the passageway somewhat. This knowledge doesn’t help them in the slightest, but it makes Dwarrowsteel feel useful to point it out.

Devon sneaks down the passageway while the others wait behind. He encounters a door, but it is a little tight, and not easy to open. So he gives up and comes back to the others. Drogan steps up – subtlety obviously not working, and wanders down the corridor and decides to take a long run up and try to smash through the door. DROGAN SMASH!

Which is exactly what he does. Unfortunately for Drogan, the door was just a little tight, not locked or anything, and he hits it with such force that he powers straight through the door and ends up on the far side of the room. Right next to a growing vine blight. Which hits him with a smash of one of its arms. Drogan looks up, sees a room with 3 vine blights growing in what look like cultivated plots, no other exits, and decides to run back out again. The vine misses its opportunity attack as he runs, and he manages to run out, slamming the door behind him on the way out. Drogan moves ‘vines’ up his ‘Things I Hate’ list. They have jumped above Meepo.

Deciding that this is probably a dead end, the group head back again, to the original plan of heading east from the laboratory room.

The group have learned a lot on this journey. How to cover their tracks is not yet one of them. Leaving previously closed doors open, dead goblins lying all over the ground, and everything burnable now stacked up in the middle of the laboratory may have given away their presence to anything coming that way. And so they were surprised by a very well hidden female bugbear, who waited for them to pass before attacking the rear – who happened to be Alwaith – with a glaive-sickle bastardised weapon. She didn’t last long, however, as Devon and Drogan turned to attack her, but she did manage to get a hit on Drogan before Alwaith took her down. On the plus side, she was carrying a couple of useful potions of healing.

Slightly more careful now, Devon and Nige check out the crucifix room again, and head north into a similar room, this time with some gardening tools on benches and tables. Listening at one of the exit doors from this room, Dwarrow hears some goblin noises from beyond the door, and tries to quietly indicate this to the others, who seem more focussed on the northern door, which led to an empty room containing some freshly turned over earth beds.

In a very un-Droganlike manner, he suggests they ignore the goblin room, and instead they continue on through the empty room and discover what seems to be some sort of shrine – housing an impressively large, well carved wooden tree, with glass tubes holding a purple coloured liquid running down its trunk. There is also an empty cage, containing a table (with tablecloth), knife, fork, chair, bedroll and chamber pot.

Being nervous of the unrecognised runes carved in the floor, Devon tries to impress with his new mage hand expertise, the invisible hand pulling the tablecloth from the table, with only one item of cutlery falling to the floor. It does manage to reveal some writing on the table and, throwing their temporary caution to the wind, Devon steps into the circle of runes to read the message. Luckily, nothing happens. The message seems to have been written by Bella Lightheart who was kept in the cage, confirming to the group that Bella was captured by Belak, not eaten by Calcryx.

They push on. Quite tired now, but not wanting to stop and rest. Boris is dying, after all.

The next room is a library of sorts. After some checking for traps, they decide they don’t have time to look around in great detail, but a cursory glance around does reveal a detailed, hand-written journal on the low-light cultivation of plants. In addition, on a pedestal, is an extract from a book that talked about the use of druidic stone circles as both celestial event predictors, and possibly even transportation devices.

Being kept awake only by adrenaline, they head out of the library and into a corridor, which seems to be lined with small torches and dead or dying pine trees in pots. Nige scouts ahead and reports more of the same. The fact that they aren’t bushes, nor vines, fills the group with a confident swagger, and they walk straight into an ambush with two of the ‘pine trees’ actually being needle blights (they don’t look a lot like pine trees, but the party, and Nige, weren’t paying much attention). Firing a couple of blasts of needles at Drogan, one misses, but the other hits, eating away a little more of Drogan’s health. The party hit back – Drogan running up and killing one of the blights, Devon injuring the other, to be polished off in his usual fashion by “never leave an injured monster standing” Alwaith, with the now common scenario of Dwarrow being a little slow to react, and everything being dead by the time he has readied his weapon. He does offer some well-needed healing to Drogan however.

Finding no more blights of any description in the corridor, they tackle the first door they come to. It’s locked. Devon fails to pick the lock quietly, so Drogan smashes the door in. DROGAN SMASH! The door noisily crashes into the room beyond.

They’ve discovered what appears to be Belak’s study. Graffiti on the walls talk of a time of “Cleansing” which approaches, and mentions of a “black sun” and “Malar’s time” being near at hand (Dwarrow and Alwaith both recognise the name Malar as an evil deity). On, and in, the desk they also find some money, a map of the sword coast area of Faerun, a journal regarding the cultivation of a tree giving magical fruit, and a letter to Belak from some unknown superiors. They also find a couple of crates, but before they open them, Drogan opens the southern door, to be met by a flurry of arrows that were trained on him, two of which manage to hit him. Devon ducks past Drogan to see what is in the room, to be met with a stream of purple bile coming in his direction! He manages to dodge, and runs back in the room, Drogan slams the door shut again. Making loud noises has some repercussions, it seems.

They then decide to open the crates. They are full of glass vials filled with purple liquid. Dwarrow, Devon and Drogan take a vial each, and the group then decide to continue to make noise by smashing all the other vials on the floor.

Player tactics now come to the fore. A pincer movement is suggested, with Drogan attacking from one door, initially drawing their fire while hiding behind his shield, while the others come in the other door to take on the goblins that they know are in the room. The plan works well, helped by the fact that the goblins kept missing their attacks, and ‘vomit-guy’ didn’t recharge his vomit attack. The group piled in and, dodging all the attacks from the goblins, managed to take them out one by one.

Alwaith was surprised, however, by 4 twig blights, who entered the battle from the south, undetected. Making even more noise, and giving enemies even more time to prepare also has repercussions, it seems. Alwaith was surrounded as the others despatched the goblins, even the one that tried to flee south – his running hampered by the thick briars on the ground in that direction. Drogan however kept on missing. Badly. He was so annoyed at himself and his poor aim in this battle, that once the others had taken care of the goblins attacking him, he sat down and sulked. Completely ignoring Alwaith who was under siege by the twig blights, and although they were being taken down, they were getting a number of attacks on him, though generally missed. Devon rushed to Alwaith’s aid, and set in motion his cunning plan of using color spray to blind the whole group of attacking twigs, hopefully not getting Alwaith in the process. Under normal circumstances, an excellent plan. What the party didn’t know, however, is that the twigs have blindsight and were completely unaffected by the color spray. Ah well. Nice idea.

In a cruel twist of fate, just after Drogan decided to sit and sulk rather than take on the last twig blight attacking Alwaith, the blight then got a critical hit on Alwaith, dealing large (for a twig) damage on him. Alwaith was VERY unimpressed with Drogan. VERY unimpressed. Having pissed off most of Oakhurst, Drogan is working his magic on party members.

The last twig was taken down by Dwarrow and the group decide to press into the large cavern nearby – the thick and sharp briars making travel difficult. Drogan clears a path behind them as they go, making progress even slower, but providing them an escape path, if needed.

Devon sends out Nige to do some scouting in the large cavern, and ‘zones in’ to Nige’s eyes and ears, and spots in the distance, behind a walled off area, a large, dark tree. Despite their tiredness, they decide to press on in to the cavern.

Within the briars were more twig blights, and the group faced two more battles with the little buggers – first a group of 4, then a group of 6. Although easily killed, these did nibble away at the health of the group, with successful hits on Drogan and Devon (I know. Devon. Being HIT! Incredible!). Alwaith’s green flame blade helped take down multiple twigs at a time.

The party are getting mightily bored with twigs at this stage. Luckily, no more appeared, and they arrived at the walled off area, beyond which the briars seemed to have been cleared.

Straining his eyes to see what was in there, Alwaith’s super sharp eyesight saw not only the tree, standing beneath a dim beam of light coming from above, but also a large fruit hanging from the tree, and, tightly wrapped in curled branches, the seemingly lifeless body of a humanoid. Perhaps more pressing, however, were the druid, Belak, and a purple-veined bugbear standing just in front of the tree, watching their approach.

With diplomacy not even a word in Drogan’s dictionary, he immediately attacks. The others agree with his assessment of the situation, and join in the attack. This is it!

Drogan’s first attack was a long-ranged one with an axe. Despite being a long way away, he manages to hit the Druid. Drogan then runs forward and launches another axe, scoring another hit on Belak. As Belak raises his staff, Devon ducks away from the others and fires an arrow at the druid, also hitting. Suddenly, the ground beneath Alwaith and Dwarrow starts to writhe and thrash, and tentacles emerge, gripping both of them, making them unable to move.

The bugbear rushes up to Drogan and projectile-vomits purple bile at him. Drogan manages to dodge and in response scores a hit on the bugbear. Dwarrow breaks free of the grasping tentacles, and Alwaith, though unable to move, manages to blast Belak from a distance, dropping him, never to get up again.

As the bugbear trades blows with Drogan, the group are shocked to see the great tree start to move, lumbering towards them, and as Drogan finally manages to take down the bugbear, the tree takes a massive swipe at Drogan, luckily missing with its great, heavy boughs. At the same time, from the branches of the tree, Belak’s giant frog leaps down, landing right next to Devon and trying to bite him with his gaping maw and sticky tongue. He hits! Not only does Devon take damage, but his small body is also completely swallowed by the giant frog and ends up swimming in its stomach acids, trying to get a good hit from the inside, while struggling to stand or swing properly.

Over the next few moments, Alwaith and Devon focus on trying to kill the frog – Alwaith still entangled in the grasping weeds and vines, and so relying on his ranged attacks, despite his struggling to aim properly, and shifting his hex to whatever target he is focusing on. The frog survives long enough to not only deal more acid damage to Devon, still stuck in its stomach, but also to take a bite out of Dwarrowsteel. With a hit from the inside from Devon, and another on the outside from Alwaith, the frog finally went down, its guts spilling over the floor, from which a messy, smelly and really rather disgusting Devon emerges.

Meanwhile the tree is still swiping at Drogan, who is giving as good as he gets. Both Drogan and the tree hit on their next few attacks – Drogan getting dangerously low on health. Dwarrow steps up to the mark, healing Devon and Drogan, and summoning his spiritual weapon to further help out Drogan. Not soon enough – Drogan falls unconscious on the next swipe of the tree – Devon rushes in to stabilise him and get a healing potion down his throat as Alwaith and Dwarrow focus on the tree, both getting good hits on it, and the hefty force damage from the spiritual weapon finally manages to cleave the tree almost in two – Dwarrow claiming the impressive killing blow as the tree stops moving, its limbs sag, and the unconscious, but not dead, body of Bella Lightfoot falls from its grasp. Never one to bask in the glory of his achievements, Dwarrowsteel rushes over to Bella to stabilise her properly and tend her wounds. Devon climbs on Alwaith's shoulders to pick the ruby-red pear hanging from the tree.

 So we leave our brave Heroes – exhausted, battered, bloodied, low on health, very low on spells and abilities, but victorious against Belak, his giant frog, the Gulthias Tree and their minions.