We cut straight to the action this week! We start off with the borrowed Portable Hole courtesy of Shuma the smith, and we’re at the outside of the Mayor’s estate. We set up a cascading action where one puts up the hole and runs through, we follow, and the last guy takes it down and runs around to the front. We hear some noise in the courtyard, which it turns out are little velociraptor-type lizards that patrol the area inside the wall. After getting through the external wall and into a building we immediately encounter a maid and butler. Now they wouldn’t be much trouble to subdue or intimidate, and we were well on our way to controlling them, but in the midst of this an Ogre Mage materializes and attacks with a cone of cold on the group surrounding the maid and butler. The maid and butler are frozen to death, and Mathius is frozen to death (all the way to negative 14 HP from being at full). Then a bit of retroactive activity takes place and the pouch that Mathius is carrying kicks in; seems its hidden power is the ability to cast “Foresight” (a level 9 spell) at caster level 18, once per day. I take considerably fewer HPs due to this and revive in time to see that the Ogre Mage is down, but a group of soldiers are coming in from an attached room. So Mathius wakes up, sees the group of them and casts web to hold them off, but one of them has a ring of free action and escapes that room. By other means.
We investigate the next floor by putting the portable hole on the ceiling and going up. Seems that up there is the evil cleric who escaped us at the temple of Pelor last game. He has some summoned hell hounds and they fight with Copan’s summoned creatures. He is defeated and we have our semi-revenge. Don’t recall who did what, sorry.
There’s some talk of what to do with all the webbed-up guys in the tower, but ultimately Rayson intimidated them or Zuka or Pox convinced them that if they’re here to protect people, then they should guard three people that we discovered locked up.
Our real enemy is further into the manor house, in an upstairs room, and he’s there with his entourage. The cast of villains for this fight scene includes: Garoleth (The villain), the Mayor, three constructs, two hell hounds, and some kind of noble. Now into this small chamber add at least two heroes, two to three summoned copan-creatures™, and you have quite a little scrimmage. In fact, with a bunny, some dogs, and a few other animals involved, I envision the whole thing as a big cloud of dust with arms and paws coming out, like a fight in a warner brothers cartoon.
The main problem with this fight is that every time Rayson or Pox (our big hand-to-hand fighters) want to fight, they get stunned by an attack from Garoleth, who is some sort of mentalist. It’s not until he lifts his hood that we see his slimy tentacles. That’s tentacles, with an N, thank you. He is in fact a Mind Flayer.
A lot of what happens next, with the exception of not having Pox and Rayson right in the thick of the fight, is pretty typical to what we do as a group. Copan calls in the air force. Mathius tenderizes them with a few soft magic missiles. Pon Pon finishes them off boom booms. A problem happens each time that we cast magic at Garoleth, as his spell resistance deflects much of it. When Rayson and Pox are up, they have trouble getting to him with his levitation, but Rayson runs up the walls and Pox does lots of jumping. And the summoned beasties do much gnawing.
I should mention that in the room is a mobile; a strange 4-crystal device dangling in the air in the tower where we are fighting.
Through this all, he tries to bargain with us mentally. First he tries on Pon Pon, who relays his message of wanting to bargain. Most folks just shrug that suggestion off and keep fighting. Then he tries with Rayson and Mathius. Mathius defers to Rayson’s decision, which is basically, die filthy calamari scum. Finally he realizes he’s just biding his time so he tries to open a planar rift and go through to his own dimension. However, something goes terribly wrong and the rift grows and stays open. Mathius’s planar knowledge tells the group to run like hell. We seize what we can and get out of the building. Behind us the building ices over, as whatever unearthly energies lay beyond the opening begin to infect the place. Eventually it stops growing but it will be a while before it closes.
Rayson bargains with the local militia. Seems lots of the guys around town are hirelings, and a few key militia members are actually enchanted (charmed) to be his friend. The mayor has undergone some sort of psychic surgery; his mind has been altered form his normal personality and behavior. We take him to the safe warehouse and meet up with our allies. It will require a Heal and some other stuff to get him back to normal. Our allies are retaking the city a section at a time, but it will take a while. We send messages to Krestible to get us a couple high level Pelor types to come heal this guy’s mind, or do whatever they can. (They’ll need the “Heal” spell and a “Remove Curse”).
Seems that the Flayer, Garoleth, convinced the mayor that Pelorians are evil and that they are trying to seize the town from the inside. From there the mayor did what came natural to someone under such a threat, outlawing the religion and declaring martial law.
5,000 xp. So if you have the full xp, you should be at 16,176, I believe, which means 6th level.
We found a green ring to add to our collection of rings. Mathius has it for now, though he’s claiming the white ring when it shows up, since so far he’s been frozen to death twice. This one is electrical resistance.
I also recall hearing that Pon Pon found his “special” magic item, though I was reading a spell at the time and didn’t hear what it was.