The is a continuation of the misadventures of my current Dungeons and Dragons group. If you enjoy this story please leave a like or comment on what could be improved.
Currently the party consists of:
- Koompa, a tortle barbarian with his pet marmot Chunk
- Braelynn Mog, a half-orc paladin who worships Illira
- Galindan Ilphelkiir, a high elf fighter
- Agid, a changeling sorcerer
- Ashryn, a half-moon elf rogue
- Asher Bladewalker, a human blood hunter
Alliances and Betrayals | 4E228, 28 Gaarmun
At the end of the last session Shell Co. had been attacked by unknown assassins and some hired thugs. During this encounter Ashryn, the rogue, met the bad end of both of the assassin’s blades. This would have nearly ended her life if not for the light of Illira. Braelynn, the paladin, managed to quickly cast the spell Revivify, which brought Ashryn’s soul back into her body.
With the threat of the assassins and their thugs mitigated for the time being the party, in classic murder-hobo fashion, began to loot the bodies of the four mercenary thugs. They found a few pouches with some gold in each, weapons that were fairly well made, and a letter.
After reading the letter, the party moved into the open floor of the tavern. The assassins had attacked early in the morning forcing them to move through the rest of the day on minimal sleep. The party decided to wake th purveyor of the bar, a Goliath with a bit of a temper. They found him still drunk and displaying his prominent manhood in a back room behind the bar. Irritable he said he would take care of the bodies in their rooms and closed the door. A few moments later, snoring could be heard through the wooden door.
Koompa decided to make breakfast for the party as they discussed the previous nights events, and their next plans. One long discussion about the assassins later, the party came to the conclusion that recent events with the Forsaken Court, a group that had taken Braelynn’s sister when they were younger, might be why they were attacked. Prior to making the trek northeastward to Wildpeak, Shell Co. had received a tip that Braelynn’s sister was being held by the Forsaken Court in Fenwrath’s capital city of Windcrest. After infiltrating the Forsaken’s hideout, killing several of their members, and allowing their leader to be taken into the hands of Asher’s organization the Collective, Braelynn was relieved to find her sister relatively unharmed. Unfortunately their reunion was short-lived. After returning to the tavern they had been staying at, Shell Co. was teleported to the Feywild by an unknown entity. Upon their return ten days later, Braelynn’s sister had left. Her sister had left a note for Braelynn, upon inspection by Asher, they discovered it was a fake, and that his organization had taken her as an insurance policy for the party to continue the search for the Shards of Chaos. All of this seemed to culminate in the assassination attempt on Braelynn.
While the party discussed these possibilities the bartender they had met the previous evening, Athen, entered the bar and began her morning routine of setting up the tavern for guests. The next step in the party’s plan was to head up the mountain to where the next Shard was supposed to be. In an effort to be more prepared against Zitek, they determined that hiring a few local mercenaries might be a worthy investment. They had a brief conversation with Athen about whom they should hire and when the mercenary Res would return to the bar. As they discussed things with the attractive bartender, the Goliath owner slowly dragged bodies out into the street leaving a long blood trail in his wake.
Slowly through out the day more and more of the local mercenary groups showed up at the Broken Dagger. Once Res showed up, he ordered several shots of a local gin, a small cask of a hard cider, and sat at one of the tables near the fire. The party approached and began to discuss costs in potentially hiring him as a guide up the mountain to the cavern entrance. The party could sense his hesitation to return to the site where he had been trapped for weeks and watched each member of his guild meet their untimely demise. Being the skilled haggler she was, Braelynn managed to get his hefty sum of 650 gold pieces down to 625 gold pieces. Half to be paid up front and half to be paid upon their safe return. After a long look at his dwindling coin purse and a long swig from his cup, Res agreed.
Next on the agenda was hiring a small group for protection to the mountain and further into the caverns below. They saw several menacing looking groups throughout the bar. Most notable of which was a group known as the Barnacle Company that the party had a brief encounter with in the past months. Assuming their were no survivors to the last encounter, the party decided to hire this group, knowing most of their strengths.
They met the leader of the Barnacle Company team in Wildpeak, Arestod, along with his three companions, a sneak thief named Cell, a cleric named Redley, and a barbarian named Strong. For the low price of 250 gold pieces the party managed to convince them to make the journey. After agreeing that all parties should meet at the tavern (preferably sober) in the morning, Shell Co. went off to bed. This time they decided to sleep in shifts just in case the assassins made a second attempt on Braelynn’s life.
After breakfast and almost a day of travel later:
Being led by a mostly sober Res, the party made their way up the mountain eventually coming to a small clearing several thousand feet above the town of Wildpeak. The party was stopped suddenly by Res, who seemed to see something just off the path. In the same instance, Braelynn’s morning star began to glow a faint blue and two crossbow bolts launched from the nearby treeline. She narrowly avoided one and took the other in the shoulder, the head of the bolt barely penetrating her armor. During the attack, the mercenaries from Barnacle Company turned on the party. This would prove to be a terrible mistake on their part. Each gun for hire met their demise in a more gruesome way then the last.
Redley, the cleric, was consumed by an arcane fireball summoned by Agid, the sorcerer. Nothing by a charred corpse remained.
Cell, the sneak thief, connected with Galindan’s homemade bayonet, just before Galindan pulled the trigger firing a .50 caliber ball into his chest. This nearly destroyed Galindan’s musket in the process.
Strong, the barbarian, took slashes from Asher’s gun-sword a few times, before Asher fired a shot into his angry maw.
Arestod, the leader, whom had challenged Braelynn during this encounter, was nearly disintegrated by holy light from Braelynn’s morning star.
This left the two assassin’s to fend for themselves. One of the assassins made the mistake of jumping down from a tree onto Koompa’s shell. After slamming him into a tree, Koompa spun bringing his massive serrated-dragon tooth great sword down onto the assassin’s shoulder severing through most of his body in the process.
The last assassin was magically puppeted toward Asher, in an effort to keep him alive, but met the spiked side of Braelynn’s morning star after she failed to grapple him.
After looting the assassins, and their hired allies, the members of Shell Co. pushed further up the mountain. The wind swirled around them signaling a potential storm, but they pressed forward. After another hour or so, they reached the entrance to the cavern they were looking for. Before Res could warn him, Koompa proceeded forward with Chunk still in the makeshift hammock on his back. Koompa immediately got electrocuted and fell to the ground paralyzed for a several minutes. He then attempted to stand as the party debated how to get him out and took another bolt of arcane lightning to the back. The bolt originated from a small crystal on a pedestal placed inside a hole in the wall of the cave entrance. The party could see several more of these trap crystals further inside the cave.
With Koompa remaining motionless on the floor of the entrance, the party discovered that the lightning crystals had a cool down. Through some skillful archery from Res and Ashryn, and the rock throwing expertise of Galindan, the party managed to knock the lightning crystals off of their pedestals in the wall effectively rendering them useless. Koompa was finally able to stand.
The party decided that this was an excellent place to camp for the evening, before pressing forward into the depths of the dungeon. While the storm raged outside, Galindan chose to spend his watch methodically moving forward down the tunnel. Careful to avoid any more traps he traveled downward until he came across a corpse that appeared to be a few weeks old at best guess. He proceeded to loot the poor soul, finding a few coins, a magic short sword, and a few well made daggers on the body.
The following morning the party continued downward into the depths of the Bonespine Mountains. Shell Co. moved at a relatively slow pace, careful to avoid any further traps. After several hours of a steady spiral, and then a couple of more hours of tunnels that seemed to twist and turn, they reached a large cavern that extended beyond the range of their darkvision. Taking this as a sign to step up, Agid cast an extremely bright daylight spell into the air. Briefly blinded the party could hear the scuttling of creatures that retreated from the light. Once their eyes adjusted they took a look around the open cavern and found a tapestry of Ephedra the goddess of the Underdark along with several tunnels further into the depths.
The party decided to take the central path that seemed to lead further downward. Traveling for about another 30 minutes they began to notice several glowing runes carved into the stone walls. No one in the party recognized any discernible language or pattern to the runes. Their inspection was cut short, however, by a flood of giant spiders coming toward them down the tunnel. Stumbling backward, Koompa, accidentally knocked Asher through the line of runes. For a brief moment Asher levitated off the ground, until it seemed to fade and his feet hit the floor on the other side of a barrier created from the runes. While Koompa and Agid stood their ground the rest of the party moved through the barrier. Koompa and Agid made quick work out of a couple of spiders and then followed realized that they would soon be overwhelmed. The spiders slammed into the barrier a few moments later. A couple of spiders in the front attempted to press through the barrier, but were halted. Seeing that their easy meal was lost the spiders began to fight one another in the tunnel.
Turning their attention away from the warring spiders, most of the party began to inspect the runes along the walls. Koompa, ever the impulsive one, attempted to attack the remaining spiders through the barrier. When his sword collided with barrier Koompa was thrown backward and flew threw the second barrier. Again Koompa and Chunk levitated briefly before slamming down. Both Koompa and Chunk began moving around the small space between the barriers with lightning speed. Zipping back and forth gazing up at the runes, before finally moving threw a third barrier. The rest of the party, paranoid as they were, began to come through the second barrier and they too became hasted. The fun ended when Koompa levitated up and landed on the other side of the third barrier. The party watched as his super speed shifted into super slow. Koompa and Chunk then began to visibly age. Before long the party realized that they were trapped between the barriers with no way back, and they too had to suffer the effects of the barrier that Koompa had traveled through.
One by one they levitated and then dropped onto the other side of the barrier, each of them aging anywhere from five to fifteen years. They were alarmed when they dropped to the other side and realized that the human Res had aged by 70 years. Moving at an extremely slow pace it took them about thirty minutes to get to the fourth barrier and press their way through.
Landing on the other side, the party notice that they were at the end of the line of runes and began to assess the damage to the group. A 93 year old Res no longer seemed to recall where in the dungeon they were, nor how to cast most of his spells. Again the party pressed on, this time even more cautious than before with Braelynn and old Res in the back of the pack.
Before long they approached another cavern, this one noticeably larger than the last, and a small alcove near the exit to this tunnel. Agid moved down the alcove and discovered yet another body. This one appeared to have a red cape draped over his right shoulder. The party had seen this earlier when they were deciding which mercenary band to take to their almost certain demise below the mountains. Agid also found that the armor this corpse was wearing was magical. The armor itself emanated a magical aura of Abjuration magic. He then began to pull the leathers off of the corpse and the resultant let loose a small nest of poisonous spores that had taken up refuge on the corpse. Coughing away the spores Agid removed the armor and gave it to Asher to house in his bag of holding. Moving out of the alcove Agid decided to summon an animal from his bag of tricks to scout out the next open cavern. A randomly drawn jackal was sent forward into the darkness and after a few moments all the party heard was a small yelp and the sound of melting flesh. Agid again cast daylight, and two large piles of acidic ooze were drawn into the light. Though some were heavily damaged in the process, party made quick work of the oozes. Resting only long enough for Asher to provide some first aid, they continued deeper in the depths of the mountain.
The party was left with another three options on what direction they could travel. After a quick debate about the potential dangers of the other routes they decided the route clear of any claw marks was the choice for them. This choice led them to two paths that split into a Y. The left path showed signs of more claw marks, and the smaller right path had the carved head of Ephedra nested inside the wall. Being that some of the party (Agid) was itching for another fight they chose the path with the claw marks. Moving quietly, the tunnel seemed to grow smaller and smaller as they walked. After a few minutes they found the mouth of this tunnel. Just outside the mouth of the tunnel they could barely make out the five snake-like heads of a hydra devouring an old corpse. As if that were not enough, as if fading out of the shadows of their darkvision, they could make out the angry heads of another hydra. The party froze in the shadows and the two hydras fought over the corpse. Shell Co., knowing their limits gingerly began to try and stealth back down the tunnel they had come. Unfortunately for them, the hydras attention snapped to the resulting movement. The party then began to sprint backward down the tunnel. The only thing that saved them was the fact that the tunnel they were currently traversing was to small for the hydras to move through.
After doubling back to the Y intersection of tunnels, the party decided to try its luck with the tunnel that had the head of Ephedra carved into it. Upon inspection of the tunnel, the party found a corpse on the right hand side, that seemed to be charred to a crisp. Noticing that this and the sculpture were no coincidence, Ashryn investigated the head of Ephedra and found that a small pulsating red crystal was inside. She gently removed the crystal and placed it inside a vial that Koompa gave her that would house magical energy without shattering the vial. The crystal radiated heat even through the enchanted vial. The next challenge came in the form of yet another crystal embedded into the tunnel a bit further down. Confident with how she handled the last trap, Ashryn began to disarm this one. Unfortunately she slipped and triggered the remaining charge from the crystal and fell to the ground, paralyzed. After dragging her back, away from trap, Braelynn decisively cast a lesser restoration spell and Ashryn’s muscles loosened.
Another genius throw of a rock from Galindan showed that the crystal had fallen inert after Ashryn triggered it. This allowed the party to enter another large chamber. Taking the time to peruse the room, the party found an exit that looked as though it flowed slightly upward, an exit that looked as though it trended downward, and a small alcove. Inside this alcove, the party found an additional corpse. This body was melted over a very large chest. Once Agid used his wand of detect magic, he found that the chest seemed to be magically trapped with two different enchantments. One of Abjuration and the other of Evocation magic. Koompa then attempted to remove the chest from the alcove, but even with his enhanced strength could not move it.
The party still thinking of the potential dangers that the chest might hold, decided it would be easier to rest for the night and attempt to open the chest once they had rested. Taking up their usual shifts Shell Co. attempted to rest in the darkened depths below the Bonespine Mountains.
The adventure will continue next week after the party’s next session. I hope you enjoy their adventure as much as I do. As always feel free to leave a comment and subscribe below for email notifications whenever I post. Thank you for wasting your time here. 🙂
Fenwrath and Ebriom Homebrew 
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