Session 13 - A Sticky Situation

16 Flaurmont 1010

General Summary

The party decides to go into the front room of the top deck before taking a short rest. They attempt to draw the probable spiders (Elincia changes into spider form to try to identify what spiders are in the room, but is unable to communicate this back to the party!) is out of the room to avoid getting surrounded as happened in the aft room, but apparently the spiders within don't want to play that game. So after a few feints into the room and striking the spiders, then withdrawing, the party moves into the room to engage the spiders in their lair. Once again, there are swarms which keep coming up the staircase, a giant spider deep in the room, and an ettercap. The party seems to be more effective this time around, and chops through the spiders efficiently. They explore the room, but do not find any valuables, just some random sea charts.
While the party is searching the room, Elincia, still in spider form and unable to speak, moves down the stairs to the lower deck on her own. As she explores deeper into the space below, the party senses that something is wrong, and finds themselves in a bottleneck trying to get down the stairs. Tork is fastest to arrive, and soon finds himself engaged with a pair of spiders, as the party trickles into the hallway where this combat is taking place, the danger of the situation continues to grow as more and more swarms of spiders join the fray in a surprisingly small space, but with the spiders able to occupy the same space as a party member, it quickly becomes a saturated battle, where it is hard for the party to concentrate their attacks effectively.
The combat continues, Elincia gets hit hard enough to be transformed back into an Elf, and falls from the ceiling, and finds herself at one end of the hallway, cut off from most of the party. The Ettercap decides she looks tasty, and hits her pretty regularly with her low armor compared to the tanky types, and this creates a bit of a situation, as Seraphina's healing is not ranged, and Leo is stuck upstairs with no line of sight to Elincia (shooting through the grate), and no spell slots available to cast strong heals. Compounding this issue is the fact that with the constraints of the hallway, most of the party can not target the Ettercap, and Tork seems to be having accuracy issues with his spear! Regardless, the party is able to whittle down the remaining spiders (including the Ettercap), and nobody is killed in the process.
The party comes back up to the top deck to take a short rest, restore hit points, and allow for skill refreshes before exploring the rest of the middle deck.
The first room they enter has four wriggling humanoid-shaped objects hanging from the ceiling in what appears to be tightly wrapped spiderweb cocoons. The party decides to try to slice one of these cocoons open to see what is inside, which they are eventually successful at. Unfortunately, the contents turn out to be hostile to the party, rather than happy to have been freed. The creatures that appear are Maw Fiends, giant mouths full of sharp teeth, and upon freeing the first one all four emerge and attack! Belfur, anticipating that there was a decent probability of hostility, positioned himself on the other side of the four creatures, and on his first attack, tested a new cantrip cloud of daggers, which hits three of the four. Now that the party is aware of the hostiles, they quickly do what they do best, which is eliminate hostile creatures!
The party is in fairly good spirits after the battle, and decides they will check out the other doorways around this hallway. Most seem to be unoccupied, with nothing of value, but one room appears to be more actively used, and has palm frond bedding, and a stone tipped spear, and a shield with mildly demonic seeming glyph on the front - they decide to destroy this shield.
Upon opening the last door in the hallway, toward the aft end of the ship, they find a much larger room, with runes painted in blood all throughout the room, as well as a circle (possibly a summoning circle) in the center of the room. Within the circle is a Half-Orc who taunts them quickly and attacks. In addition to the Half-Orc, there are two giant spiders, and later a phasing spider appears within the hallway, attacking Leo, Elincia, and Seraphina. The party engages, and actually does a fairly quick job of taking down the Half-Orc and the spiders, though the phasing spider disappears for a bit before reappearing and re-targeting Elincia.
Having eliminated the threat, the party searches the room, finding a box which contains several magical items: scrolls, two potions (one of water breathing, and one of Heroism), as well as a very fine cloak. In addition to the magic items, there is some gold and silver in the box.

Report Date

02 Mar 2020