Session 87 - And Yet They Still Survive

Wednesday 11th June 2025

In-game timeline: Alturiak 7 - Alturiak 7

With the party in poor shape, though not too bad health, they face a risky challenge. Solveig is very exhausted, Sanada is miserable and exhausted, Alwaith and Faith are out of spells. They face a large, metal, shielded, clockwork creation, and an angry, well-trained half-orc fighter. Things look bleak. They consider fleeing.

But this is D&D. And this is the Beholder Group. So they decide not to flee, which, to be honest would have been the better option, but instead stand and fight.

And somehow they survive. The DM has no idea how - I mean, it is hardly through good planning on their part - but they do. With the help of Phil Spectre, a spectral wolf and Hallion, who although they did no, or very little damage, they did prove a useful distraction, and with Solveig's seemingly bottomless pool of spells and abilities, they pull through, managing to take down the mighty orc, and eventually wear down the Clockwork Guardian - aided by the fact that their previous moving of the pipe dispensing poison forced the Guardian to spend valuable time moving the pipe back again.

Faith manages to shut off the poison feed, though not before more of it entered the fresh water supply. Solveig manages to not fall unconscious again. Sanada manages to get a few useful hits on the half-orc, though receives some wounds in return. Alwaith's prospects looked bleak at first as he got cut off from his allies, but his magical endless supply of hit point generation pulled him through without too many problems.

They did it.

And only just over half of a very large vat of poison had entered the city's water supply. This group took that as a positive result.

With Sanada very beaten up, exhausted, miserable and, in her view, unable to do anything useful for the group, she decides to head back to the Council of the Veil to help with their, hopefully already begun, efforts to stop an entire city from drinking any fresh water. Good luck with that. Before leaving she does manage to grab some useful alchemy ingredients from the alchemists lab, which Solveig insists would actually be better served in his herbalism kit, for some obscure reason.

The others, now without any spirit or spectral helpers, are keen to press on, having been reminded that they still have no idea where exactly the Vessels are being held, other than some vague locations that are hundreds of square miles in area. With Hallion dead - floating amongst sewage downstream - they have no real idea about the layout of the sewers, so head in the general direction back to Thalios' room, hoping that a more direct route can be found than retracing their footsteps the long way via the "common room". It's gone midnight, and they have not slept since waking early this morning, and they are feeling a little exhausted - full exhaustion could kick in at any moment.

They find what seems to be an underground mausoleum - perhaps they are under a graveyard at this point? - but decide to give it a miss for now and press on, despite Solveig's bottomless-bag-o-spells producing a Detect Magic that shows a faint trace of magic from within a stone tomb.

And then they hit a wall. The route seems to go a long way in the wrong direction, which will take valuable minutes (!) to follow. Alwaith, frustrated, looks for a secret door here, knowing that one of the cultists came this way as a seemingly quick way to get to Thalios earlier. And his perseverance pays off! A secret door is found in the wall, almost exactly where Alwaith looked for it!

Wasting no time, Alwaith finds the opening mechanism and opens the door…

…leading to a dark corridor running parallel to the wall they were following. Another door lies temptingly just across the corridor from where they came in. But there is one problem - or perhaps more than one? A large, slightly glowing spider blocks their path…