Session 11: The Depths Below

General Summary

Exploring the remainder of the seemingly-symmetrical complex, the party stumbles onto even more animatronic horrors, some of which spring to life and attack the group, one of which gouges out Ian's eye and replaces it with a clockwork prosthetic.
As the eye attunes to its new owner, the small brass sphere from which it originated springs forward, whirring and tessellating until it takes the form of a small clockwork owl.
When concentrating, Ian finds that he can see through the animatronic bird's eyes as if they were his own.
While facing off against two more clockwork sentries, the party hears the reverberating sound of a battering ram meeting a metal door, followed by the sound of screaming-- humanoid screaming.
Making quick work of the smaller automatons, a hulking monstrosity of gears and pulleys steps around the corner, revealing the source of the ramming sounds: a gargantuan 8-foot long brass polearm in the hands of a clockwork goliath.
As the heroes clash with the artificial beast, the screams from behind the barricaded door continue, the occupants completely unaware of the source of the melee.
Finally, after an exceedingly close battle, the monster is brought down, and the party shouts to notify the voices beyond the barricaded door.
While uneasy at first, finally the door is opened, revealing two trapped miners and three unkempt children bearing regalia of The Triangle.
Bernius Copperhand, the more collected of the two adults, reveals that he and his counterpart Hulrik are the last remaining survivors of the miners described in Raevar's journal.
The pair had been trapped for several days before the Triangle scouting party, consisting of Baradrin, Thommick, and Amren, arrived to scope out the mine.
After some discussion, Copperhand and the rest of the trapped survivors are escorted back to a chamber near the dungeon exit, where they re-barricade the door until the heroes return with the remainder of the Triangle's urchins.
Amren asks the party to pinky-promise that they will return, which Manzana dutifully obliges, swearing to deliver them to Diego safely.
Just before barricading the door, Copperhand gives Brunk a satchel left by one of the deceased miners, filled to the brim with Gnomish blasting charges.
Finally, the group descends the shaft to find a long, straight tunnel with a small chamber in the middle, marked with strange runes in an unknown language.
As the group marches forward, a mechanism clicks, and a massive buzz-saw materializes from a slit in the wall, nearly decapitating Enrique and Ian in the process.
Manzana casts a spell to pull the meaning from the words through arcane means: "Approach now as you would approach Her Malevolence."
After some pondering, Manzana reasons that "Her Malevolence" must be an honorific, and the party safely crawls into the chamber.
Upon investigation, the chamber is revealed to be littered with bodies of dwarven stature, and cryptic nigh-alien devices line the walls between long runs of brass conduit, piping, and various pistons.
Racking her brain, Manzana realizes the gravity of the situation-- they have wandered into a Duergar fortress, the hated enemy of surface dwarves due to the betrayal of their kind in the War of the Wyrm.
Suddenly, the pictograms carved into the walls make sense, and the dwarf is filled with a righteous fury.
Thoroughly looting the bodies of what appear to have been administrators of some kind, the party pushes deeper with heavy coinpurses.
At the end of the hallway, another ladder runs downward for 50-60ft before opening up into a vast stone atrium, walls lined with pitted stone recesses, apparently descending downward without end.
Small wooden walkways are suspended between what appear to be large chunks of floating rock, empowered by some strange magic, leading to a cliff hanging over the seemingly bottomless pit.
At the center of the cliff, a strange dessicated Duergar figure sits illuminated by display runes and projected spellwork, brass valves, rubber tubing, and copper conduit erupting from every orifice and running back into the machinery in heaped bundles.
To the machine's right, a chamber glowing with eldritch magic flashes and groans with arcane energy, as screams carry from inside the infernal contraption-- it becomes clear exactly what kind of dark magic the complex is fuelled by.
As the party cautiously advances, one of the slumbering automatons wake, rushing to the Duergar figure with its weapons drawn.
Manzana walks ahead, her spell of language comprehending still burning in her psyche, and approaches the screen-lit figure.
In a language unknown to the rest of the party, a metallic voice grinds out a number of statements, describing various failed attempts at verifying the 7-foot tall dwarf's identity through arcane means.
Giving up on biometric data collection, the machine posits that, due to her stature and build, Manzana is a Duergar engineer-- the Grey Dwarves of the Underdark have the ability to change their size at will.
Able to comprehend the machine's commands, but unable to reply to them, Manzana carefully expresses nonverbal yes-or-no answers to the bionic foreman's questions, eventually insinuating that she has come to work on the energy core next to the prisoner's chamber.
Satisfied that the massive dwarf and her slaves have finally answered the fortress' maintenance requests, the machine proceeds to allow the party access to the chamber.
Once inside, they immediately smash the two automaton guards to bits, alerting the mechanical overseer to their true intentions.
The party hurriedly plants the blasting charges next to the soul-extraction machine as Brunk cuts the fuses to blow in five minutes.
Bursting through the chamber door, the party runs with prisoners in hand past the Duergar overlord; the jig is up!
As the party makes their way across the wooden walkways, clockwork entities begin to wake inside the chamber.
Two steam-jet propelled automatons land behind them, firing hand-ballista bolts over their heads.
With a mighty roar, Brunk of Briarwood heaves the walkway over, sending the artificial goliath tumbling into the blackness below.
With a surge of pale-blue energy, the Duergar overseer goes limp, his consciousness transferred to a prototype mechanical body just below the surface of the control panel.
Bursting out of the rock, the control surfaces are seemingly destroyed as a 25-ft tall colossus of gears and valves begins to give chase, shaking the ground with each heavy metal footfall.
As if on queue, each of the thousands of pitted indents on the chamber walls begin to light up with the same familiar amber glow emanating from the central furnaces of the automatons they've already fought; the complex contains an army, and it is waking up!
With the rescued children pushed up the ladder, Manzana turns her attention toward the machines in their wake, shrieking into her Wand of Tempest Tongue in an attempt to shatter the ground beneath their feet.
Failing to find purchase on the ladder landing, the machines begin to tumble down into the blackness while thousands of clockwork soldiers continue to scale the walls in order to wreak havoc on the surface.
Dodging traps and leveraging open doors, the party sprints toward the surface level with the rescued prisoners in tow, when the ground bursts behind them with the sound of the damaged colossus climbing through each level by way of the central shaft.
Freeing the group barricaded near the dungeon exit, the full group rushes through the upper layers of the mine, the artificial monster hot on their heels.
By the skin of their teeth, the party makes one final desparate push into the outside air as the blasting charges placed below detonate in a synchronized chain.
Destabilizing the entire complex, the explosion reverberates with tectonic force, collapsing the mine and complex into the endless darkness of the pit in a shower of boulders, topsoil, and stone structure.
After the uneasy respite of a single moment, tending to the wounded and unconscious, the rocks blast forth once again, revealing a battered and blasted clockwork colossus, just barely keeping grip on the side of the pit, belching inky black smog from every exhaust and throwing sparks from each of its joints.
In span of a split second, the mechanical beast lunges forth toward the Triangle's urchins, allowing a singular moment for the party to react as time perception slows to a crawl.
Manzana quickly calls upon the earth to collapse beneath the creature's feet, but it manages to maintain its tenuous footing.
Lilith petitions the raw forces of the wind to hurl the beast into the blackness, but its superhuman strength lends it purchase upon the rock.
Scrugg, ever the deadeye, places two arrows directly into its central processing unit, but a furious momentum keeps the monster moving.
Keerla taps the well of arcane might deep within herself to summon gouts of flame as the frame of the colossus begins to blacken and melt away.
Finally, Enrique petitions the Winged Serpent to manifest the divine might of his ancestor-gods into a mighty smite, but the hulking machine lives.
Ian realizes the futility of the party's attacks, and in a split second of self-sacrifice, pushes the children out of the way, placing himself between the great metal claws of the machine and the innocent urchins.
In a brief moment of desperation, the ranger seals his own fate, tumbling into the black abyss alongside the murderous android-- his life in exchange for the safety of children he had only just met.
After the passage of a few silent minutes, the echoes of the struggle fade away, and Manzana shapes the earth to seal off the entrance into the sorrowful abyss.
Licking their wounds, the adventurers bed down for the evening, exhausted from the harrowing experiences of the day.
"I'll take first watch," Keerla mutters in a forlorn tongue, numb from the agony of loss.
An hour or so passes, and what appears to be another group of adventurers approaches the grieving elf.
There is a brief exchanging of introductions as Stella Realtan explains the reason for their arrival: to find Ian and bring him home.
After a short conversation between Keerla and the mysterious group, they depart into the forest, Stella murmuring to herself about a future she had predicted yet did not come to pass.
With the purpose of their mission lost to the great chasm, the priestess and her retinue depart to search for a different man.
Some time passes, and out of the forest, that man arrives.

Rewards Granted

Oodles of gold, 2 prospectors' stones, raw adamantine, raw mithral, an Icemetal Battleax, and 2 Starmetal weapons.

Campaign

Of Darkness and Thunder

Protagonists

Ian Taggart

Lawful Neutral Human (Hermit)
Ranger // Hunter 4

40 / 40 HP

STR
13

DEX
14

CON
16

INT
9

WIS
16

CHA
11

Manzana

Keerla Roween

Tighearnán "Naushe" Ailín Kearney

NG Human (Gladiator)
Pugilist 5

43 / 43 HP

STR
14

DEX
12

CON
16

INT
8

WIS
14

CHA
10

Report Date

28 Apr 2022

Primary Location

Rhynn Valley

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