Session XXX - 26.10.2021

General Summary

• The session starts with a bang as Jo is swallowed whole by the massive worm, who now tries to make an escape by burrowing deep into the icy earth.
• The party quickly follows using spell and sword to fight it, trying to avoid the dangerous poison stinger. After being slowed by barakas and impaled by stone spikes fashioned out of the walls of the cave by Darrak, the work drops into a lower chamber with a thump. With the worm still wriggling on the ground, the party quickly descends into the chamber helped by Darrak’s bird form, slaying the worm and freeing Jo, who survived in the meantime thanks to her healing powers.
• The party investigates the chamber and the body of the worm. They find two exits, one of which leads to the upper chamber, and a strange triangular door, fitted with many many keyholes! A relief above the door shows a soul conductor with souls streaming from it, grasped by a clawed hand and standing in between two keys. On the body they find one black obsidian key with an inscription saying “five from the right and three in between”.
• After investigating the door, but not making much headway in trying to solve which keyhole should be tried, the party decides to go down the second opening of the cave. The long winding tunnel brings them to an underwater chamber, domed by ice and containing two massive ice statues with glowing red eyes, as well as a stone pedestal, with an obsidian key resting on it, matching the one they already found on the corpse of Gurthog and the worm.
• Wary of a trap, Athanatos sends everyone out of the room and decides to try and grab it. As soon as he does, the room starts to tremble. Athanatos barely manages to use his Thunder Step spell to teleport out of the chamber, destroying one of the statues, before the other issues a glowing hot red beam from its eyes and collapses the entrance of the cave. Water can be heard rushing in inside the room, but everyone is safe and Athanatos clutches the key, it says “five from the left and three in between”
• Armed with this new knowledge, the party goes back to the door and thinks hard how to open it. Eventually the two keys are used in a position that would fit the inscription on each key, counting five holes from each side and leaving 3 empty holes in between the keys. This seems to elicit a satisfying click, but the door stays locked.
• A carefully placed dispel magic seems to have an effect on the door, dispelling some dangerous aura, but the lock is not affected. Only when Barakas opens a tear in space and steps beyond the door using his Dimension Door spell, he’s able to discern that beside the two locks that they were able to successfully unlock earlier, another is in place! The party quickly identifies which other holes fit the description on the keys, finally unlocking the nasty door.
• Finally, a new chamber is revealed. The frozen fingers of a gargantuan clawed hand emerge from the frozen ice below, each finger as tall as a grown man. the fingers seem to be lunging for a pedestal, standing right between them. Jo looks down and sees that the fingers are not just statues, but are connected to a giant devil, entombed beneath the ice and looking up at them through the clear surface that makes up the floor of this cavern. Barakas recognizes the place from the book he was given by Mordenkainen, he knows what he must do to free his people.

Report Date

26 Oct 2021