Players (Characters)
Scott (Rain)
Jeremy (Grokk)
Catherine (Amber)
Tony (Roland)
Rachel (Horkina)
DM: Tom (Garlen)
The party moved quickly south. The passageway led to a balcony overlooking the portcullis they'd avoided. A giant waited on the balcony, watching for intruders to approach the portcullis. Garlen and Rain tumbled to flank, and Grokk and Horkina smashed the giant. Still taking care to be quiet, the party moved to the northwest. The complex changed character, from rough-hewn caverns to carefully constructed and magically lit hallways. Light from a fire spilled into one of the hallways, so the party investigated. A fire giant was slaving over a forge, working on a large set of armor. When he spotted the party, he attempted to use a wand to cast displacement on himself, but failed. Roland used Tasha's Hideous Laughter to bring him to the ground, and the party quickly slew him. Rain kicked some rubble in the corner and found two large jugs of alchemists fire, and also carefully depressurized a chest that would otherwise have sprayed pressurized alchemists fire all over the room. The party left a heavy silver and platinum cage, to be retrieved later.
To the south was a massive circular room with an odd structure in the middle, surrounded by dozens of large six-armed chairs. Five ettins lingered in the room. Roland launched several small bursts of fire while the rest of the party stood back and shelled the creatures with arrows. As the monstrous creatures fell, the party moved in to the room to investiage. The sound of a heavenly chorus and the smell of flowers came in from the west, and three trumpet archons followed, thanking the party for saving the ancient site from the evil taint of the giants. They offered "the nectar of the gods" to Roland, who declined based on Nidrama's warning. Rain sensed deception and called out his own warning, so Roland cast dispel magic on the first of the archons. This revealed her true form: a fey hag. Amber cast silence in the middle of the pack, Roland stepped back, and the rest of the party jumped into melee. Grokk and Garlen both took some strength drain from the hags, but the hags took the worst of the damage as they fell dead from numerous wounds.
The party moved to the west and found a room with a strange fountain producing magical liquid. Leaving it behind, they headed north into a throne room. A door to the west led to a tapestry-covered room filled with spellweaver skeletons. The six-armed skeletons couldn't manage to land any significant blows due to the party's high-quality armor. Once the undead were neutralized, the group stuffed all of the nice tapestries into a bag of holding, and Rain noticed a hidden switch on the north wall beneath a set of baboon masks. The switch opened a shallow drawer containing a staff the party suspected was Alakast. Without any identification spells prepared, though, the party stowed the staff and kept moving.
To the north and west was a room with a colorful diagram on the floor and a mirror on the wall. Alek Tercival sat in a chair in the middle of the room. He called out to the party to enter, but everyone suspected some sort of trap and held back. Realizing his ruse wouldn't work, the false Tercival morphed into his true form -- a creature from the plane of mirrors called a nerra. Four others emerged from the mirror, but a fireball and a couple of sneak attacks dropped the whole group.
Roland teleported back to town with half of the party and most of the treasure, selling off the items the party didn't want and picking up the material components for some identification spells. The staff was in fact Alakast, a demonbane weapon. The liquid in the magical fountain proved to be some sort of artifact, not readily identifiable by Roland's spell, but Grokk drank a bit and found his strength was greatly increased. Horkina and Rain did the same. Roland was also able to identify the mirror as a magical portal, and a careful look showed a distant Alek Tercival reflected in it.
The party stepped into the portal and found themselves separated, in small pentagonal colored rooms with colored mirrors on each wall. Voices seemed to travel from room to room, and the mirrors led to rooms of the indicated color. But there seemed to be multiple rooms of the same color, such that the party couldn't reassemble. Perhaps the right color sequence would lead the party to the exit, but the party didn't know the sequence. Rain recalled there was a pentagon with stars in it on the engraved plate, and looking carefully, noticed a sequence of dots and lines below the engraving that seemed to signify the numbers 3-4-5-1-2-3. People tried various combinations -- perhaps 1 meant red, 2 meant orange, and so on. Eventually Horkina determined the solution: from whatever room you're in, pick the color 3 spots away from it in the original diagram, then the color 4 spots away, then 5, and so on. She called out her solution and then tested it, soon emerging into a small room where Alek Tercival sat mumbling. The rest of the party quickly followed.
Rain dismantled the lock on the iron door at the edge of the room while Roland tried to explain what happened to Tercival, telling him of the disguised hags and their deception. Tercival was upset and ashamed, and feared returning to Cauldron. As the party walked outside into a snowy wasteland, they convinced the paladin they wouldn't publicize the embarrassing details that put him in this position.
Suddenly Nabthatoron, Lord of the Demonskar, appeared a few feet away and began attacking Alek Tercival. The paladin dropped to the ground, dying. Amber aligned everyone's weapons while Garlen dove behind the demon, and Horkina used Alakast to great effect, pounding the evil menace. The glabrezu responded by stunning Horkina. Roland poured a healing potion down Tercival's throat, and Grokk's axe clove deep into the demon's skull, ending this particular threat. Tercival fell to the ground again and spoke out with a voice not his own: "There is naught left for you in Cauldron, heroes! To return is to enter your own graves and to bring doom upon all you love! Trust the sign of the Smoking Eye if you wish to save them all!" This was Nidrama's voice speaking through the paladin, who fell into a coma soon after.
Garlen looked around and surmised the party was well over a thousand miles away from Cauldron, in an icy wasteland to the north. Amber took Redtail high up in the air and spotted a range of mountains to the south. Garlen suggested the party should get some rest and head to the south in the morning.
The party reached level 10.
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