Session 90 - Basement Battle

4 Flaurmont 1011

General Summary

The four undead Pegataurs ended up being just another speed bump along the road, especially as it turns out to be one Pegataur using the Mirror Image spell. The images are quickly dispatched and shortly the Pegataur itself. Seraphina seems to be blowing through her smite reserves with abandon, but she doesn't go easy on the undead.
With the Pegataur taken care of, they continue to explore the basement, which is clearly a very large space relative to the home built on top. Continuing on they come upon a small antechamber leading to another door. Ever eager to open the next door, Seraphina steps into the antechamber, where the floor pivots and drops her into a lower pit which quickly starts to fill with water! Acting quickly, Stavos jams this hinged floor with his Immovable Rod and a sodden Seraphina climbs up a lowered rope.
Proceeding into the next chamber they find a stuffy mist obscuring anything more than a few feet away. Venturing further they are startled by a roar and attacked by an obviously undead and experimented on Sphinx - it sports additional goat and lion heads, some kind of Chimera hybrid, a Sphimera. However, a lone Sphimera is no major hindrance to the party and it is soon returned to a dead state.
Moving back to the antechamber, Tork notices the other two walls of the small room have hidden doors. The first of these opens to a very long east-west hallway, continuing beyond sight and with the faint echoing of machinery coming from the distance. Believing this may lead into the flying city's underworks, the group tries the other door.
This door opens to a shorter hallway, well maintained, with magically lit sconces and a carpet leading to double-doors. These doors open to a much larger room! This room has pillars breaking up a very large span and a lush red carpet running down the center to another set of doors. Overall the room is some 120' x 60', with pillars centered every 10' throughout the entire room, all illuminated magically, making the whole into a grand hall.
Before the far doors there is a Nagpa. a heavily armored skeleton near him and a few others in sight in the room. The Nagpa calls out "Do you have the power source", to which Leo says, "There is no power source, where's my Engineer!" After a brief exchange where neither party is satisfied with the others answers, combat breaks out. From behind several of the pillars even more skeletons (slightly less armored than the ones by the Nagpa) emerge and the party engages.
Stavos moves forward to create some space for the party, and presumably bring the combat to the Nagpa, but he is quickly flanked by the combination of skeletons emerging from behind pillars, and the skeletal knights that similarly move forward to keep the combat away from the Nagpa. Leo tries out his new level-8 spell, Maddening Darkness, which has a range long enough to be placed anywhere in the room, and with a 60' radius sphere could put the entire room in terrifying darkness. He centers the effect toward the back of the room, to presumably remove the Nagpa and most of the knight skeletons from the combat.
Unfortunately, shortly after the darkness envelops the enemies, a gnomish voice is heard and the effect is Dispelled! Leo spies the source of this disruption, a previously-unseen Tarras Firehand, who clearly was affected by the spell before cancelling it. Doubly unfortunate for Leo, the Nagpa understands his magical prowess and turns a charm upon him, making it impossible for Leo to target the Nagpa in any harmful way. The Nagpa also hurls fiery blasts at the party, which deal a good amount of damage.
Tork and Seraphina try to get to the opposing lines of the combat, but are forced to help protect Leo and Elincia as the skeletons descend on the party. It is clear that he wants to rush forward, but the skeletons are able to penetrate the feeble defenses of Leo and Elincia. Stavos takes a vicious wound from one of the knights and feels a general weakening - when he tries to gather himself with a Second Wind, he finds his vigor is not returned. The skeletal knights are clearly a serious threat.
With Leo unable to target the Nagpa, he elects to take Tarras out of the fight, dropping a Forcecage around him. With the opposing gnome out of the way, the balance is a little better, if still a little nerve-wracking for the party.
Just as the combat lines are getting stable, and a couple of the skeletons are down for the count, the Nagpa reaches for a switch on the wall. Large trapdoors open in the ceiling, on the party's half of the room. Two gelatenous cubes and one huge, tentacled, but similarly gooey-compositioned creature, further shift the balance of the fight.
Stavos faces three skeletons and a knight, Seraphina two Knights (one of which she has shattered the weapon of) and a regular skeleton, and, with the addition of the three big creatures partially behind lines, the party is badly outnumbered! Tork intercepts one of the cubes on its way to Leo and Elincia, but somehow loses his normally incredible balance and is absorbed within the Cube! He is able to fight his way back out from the inside, bursting out with a puddle of now inanimate goo spreading on the floor.
Elincia pulls out what may be the turning-point spell, managing to cast a Firestorm that hits just about every enemy in the room! The fiery blast takes out a large number of the lesser skeletons and softens up the two remaining oozes. Seraphina and Stavos are able to take down their Knights eventually, and Leo, Elincia and Tork deal with the cubes, while counterspelling Fireballs from the Nagpa.
When things are getting ominous for the Nagpa, he makes an empty threat to introduce even more creatures via a switch, but nobody falls for it, and he is felled by Stavos.
Unfortunately, he did not provide the party with the "big reveal" of the Nagpa's sinister plans for whatever "power source" they are seeking. The party takes a short rest to recover their breaths from the intense combat as they wait for their captive Gnome Tarras, aka "Larry", who is hopefully feeling a little more talkative this time around.

Report Date

06 Sep 2024