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| our campaign so far in picture form |
I left off with how we freed all the prisoners and were starting to work our way into the rest of the dungeon to reclaim the evil book that we had for about a minute before it was stolen back from us, all the way at the beginning of our campaign.
So, we were faced with the difficulty of having about 55 freaking people with us, most of them weak, battered prisoners. We armed about fifteen of them and had our cleric and some other guy we had met (probably should have kept the cleric in hindsight though) bring the other 40 people back to the castle town. We had kept one of the prisoners, the guy who helped our assassin defeat the lion with his bare fists, and our DM actually rolled up stats for him and made him a character. He is known only as "The Pugilist" and was played by the DM, who actually made him kind of a nutjob.
As we ascended, we dispatched a few baddies, and found a dark room full of darkness. We spent far too long figuring out that the darkness, while magical, evil darkness, was just darkness, and took some torches and magical lights beyond the evil magical darkness, where we found a magically dark evil portal. We spent far too long talking about and considering the darkness and evilness of the portal, until we finally went through it.
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| something like this, maybe a bit more evil |
Past the magical evil darkness and portal, we found a big room with pillars and stairs. I snuck ahead to inspect the room while everyone else stayed behind, finding a big scary statue. As we were discussing the statue, down the stairs on either side came four robed bad dudes. I was separated from the group, but luckily I had been hiding the whole time, so the bad dudes hadn't seen me. We asked about our fifteen dudes we had brought with us, but the DM says "You never asked them to come through the portal with you."
"What?! But, like, we asked them to come with us, wouldn't they have just followed us?"
"The portal's scary, man! It took you guys like a half hour to decide to go through it."
SIGH. Whatever. We can take four evil dudes, I guess.
When we started combat, I had cast grease on the ground under the dudes, but I realized I couldn't use another action to throw an alchemist's fire on them until the next turn. We had just tried to figure out what to do with our torches, so Tristan, the assassin, throws his torch on the grease, setting the dudes on fire. It was awesome, because I had been waiting to set something on fire with grease for awhile.
The dudes had to spend their turn getting out of the fire, but I was getting pretty nervous being the most ill-suited for combat while separated from my team. Two of the dudes got out of the fire in sight of me, and my escape route was cut off - the middle of the room was on fire, and there were dudes on their side of it between me and everyone else.
While everyone else was on the other side, busy not having the threat of being one shot by an evil dude looming over them, I decided to attack a dude to try and make space for me to run back to the group. The dude I threw daggers at came right up to me, while the other turned himself invisible. I had taken jumping as my latest NWP, so I decided to spend my next turn making a running jump over the fire to get back to my team. I roll to see if I succeed on my jump, which I do, and I roll to see how far I jump, and I jump far enough to clear the fire and make it to the group safely.
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| a little more dramatic than this |
The DM says "Make a dex check."
I think, oh, what, am I going to fall into the fire or something? I make my dex check and wait to see what happens.
"You start running toward the fire and jump up into the air, but you collide with something. The enemy who had made himself invisible was actually in front of you - you jump into him, but successfully bounce off his head and clear the fire, but the impact of jumping into him pushes him into the fire."
As I've said, my character is weak. Like, very weak. I can potentially be one shot at any given time. I frequently miss with my daggers, I frequently run away from danger and when I do get hit, I basically almost die. My combat skills are pretty awful. My only saving grace is that my character is awesome, and I do awesome things, like jumping off bad dudes' faces.
The DM makes a morale check for the evil dude that I kicked into the fire, which he fails. "He's freaking out pretty bad, flailing around on fire on the ground. He thought he was so clever, he was going to sneak up on you while invisible, but instead he gets kicked into the fire by a flying gnome."
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| google image search failed me today |
I successfully regroup with my party members, and we beat the bad dudes. The dude I had knocked into the fire tries to flee, but The Pugilist, being apparently absolutely crazy, grapples him and suplexes him into the fire. Thayne yanks The Pugilist out of the fire, and he dives back into the fire to punch the dude again until he dies. We all kind of yelled at the DM for making The Pugilist flippin' crazy, but it was pretty funny.
We decide to split up to go up the two separate flights of stairs.
I say "One thief should go up either side, so we can scout and search for traps I call Thayne to be in my group, okay bye!" in one quick breath. I ain't going up no scary stairs without a body guard.
There are traps in both hallways, which we both successfully find. My find/remove traps is pretty high, so I find and remove our trap successfully. The assassin fails his remove trap roll, and the DM makes him roll an int check, which he also fails.
"You find a tripwire in front of you and attempt to disarm it. Not thinking too clearly about it, you say "Stand back, I'm going to disarm this trap!" You take your knife and, while standing in front of the wire, you cut it. You hear a 'shink!' and an arrow flies at you from ahead and hits you in the arm. You take three damage."
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| seriously |
As we make our way through the hallways, I make a detect noise check as I'm scouting ahead.
"You hear footsteps nearby to your right."
No duh. Whatever.
We make our way through successfully, and come out in the same room. When we do, however, we see each other as enemies. We realize it as players, but we all roll int checks to see if our characters realize it, and somehow I'm the only flippin' person who misses theirs, even though my intellect is the highest, along with The Pugilist, who is arguably the dumbest NPC we've ever had. Great job, dice.
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| jerks |
Luckily the paladin made his check, so he tells me that the enemies are actually not enemies as The Pugilist makes an attempt to tackle us. The assassin grabs him, and we ask the DM a couple questions for a minute before I say "Duh, we just go back around through the hallway and go up the other staircase."
Problem solved.
In the room, we find a door. I spend 10 minutes arguing with the DM that I should be able to peek into doors without enemies immediately seeing me and attacking us, but I concede and we end up fighting a giant skeleton.
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| maybe not this big |
Another skeleton.
We're super lucky with all these skeletons, because, if you didn't know, they take half damage from piercing and slashing weapons, but our powerhouse paladin uses a mace, which is a blunt weapon, so it deals regular damage.
The rest of us do just about nothing - I do particularly nothing - while Thayne smashes the hell out of the skeleton. Once we defeat it, we find some scary red gems and a hidden compartment, which we knew from previous experience was probably trapped with some kind of magical trap. The DM put in a bunch of magic traps, since thieves can't disarm magic traps. Jerk.
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| something like this I guess |
Since discovering The Pugilist is insane, we started using him as a guinea pig. I ask him to check the compartment, which he does without hesitation, resulting in him taking some magical electrical damage. When I ask him if he found anything, however, the DM rolls some dice and says "No! Nope, nothing!" very suspiciously. After arguing with the DM some more... I roll a perception check to see if I notice that he has anything in his hands or pockets. He has a little bag I hadn't noticed before, so I ask Tristan to pick pocket The Pugilist and take it, which he does. Inside are two rings. We argue some more... about The Pugilist being a thief, if he was actually a thief, whether or not the rings we stole even were the compartment, and finally say screw it, we'll deal with it later.
We head back around to the statue we had seen in the other room, and after briefly discussing whether or not I could use jump to reach the eyesockets to put the obvious evil red gems in them and solve the obvious dungeon puzzle because it would be funny, we just have the paladin do it since he's like eight feet tall.
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| the lines in the skeleton room were me arguing with the DM about peeking |
We stopped right before we went down the evil stairwell that opened up after solving the statue 'puzzle'. Our following session concluded this dungeon, which will be featured soon. Stay tuned!
- D&D Series -
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