Episode 35 - Escape from Ilthe-Ba'Manza!

Sword of Air

Episode XXXV

Escape from Ilthe-Ba’Manza

The Sixteenth Day of Eleint 2020 in the Nurian Era, during the Season of Loende.

We join our heroic comrades at a rare moment of hesitation in the inner courtyard of the fortress of Runor. Ominous Dwarven drumbeats reverberate around the cavern, accompanied by the sound of hundreds of hobnailed, marching feet. Looking over the battlements, to their horror they see the entire colony of Ilthe-Ba’Manza converging upon them. The Mind Flayers move without their usual upright, floaty gracefulness, and instead skitter insect-like from their Illactite hives, across the Sunless Sea and up the rocky pinnacle upon which the ancient citadel squats. Some already climb the outer wall of the fortress, their skin blistered and pustulant, their tentacles writhing with a bestial madness.
“Quickly! We should get inside!” exclaims Elovyn.
“I think we should go inside!” says Haji Baba with conviction, as though it were her idea.
After an embarrassing episode of prostrate, whining hopelessness, Zimlok recovers his senses and scrabbles up from the floor, trying hard not to look sheepish.
“O great golem!” he addresses the awakened statue of Durthane-King, after clearing his throat. “I, Zimlok the Lightbringer, Master of Illusion and Supreme Virtuoso of Arcane Magic, command thee to remain here and fend off those who would do us harm!”
“Durr,” says the bronze golem in a booming, metallic voice, and bows stiffly before picking up its enormous warhammer and striking the hammerhead against its palm with a resonant clang of bloodthirsty anticipation.
Leaving the golem to fend off the fast-closing Illithids, the companions dash inside and find their way back to the chamber containing Kheremblethoth, the diseased Elder Brain. Adjusting Kla’rota’s psionic-resistant helm, Zimlok approaches the vat and thrusts his feathered arms shoulder-deep into the viscous, mucosal soup in which the giant, sickly brain floats and pulsates. Pushing aside folds of soft, fleshy cortex, his fingers find purchase upon a smooth, hard, cold stone that is suspended beneath. Mherren comes to assist, and they manage to roll it free enough that they can see its opaque, black sheen, but it is too massive for them to lift free.
Elovyn is looking on in revulsion. “I… I sense great evil,” she whispers.
Haji Baba: “Well, no sh– ”

*

Zimlok peers closely at the carved eye at the top of the stairwell that leads down into the lower dungeon. “Hmmm,” he muses, as though sifting through multiple ideas in his head, when in fact his mind is a desolate vacuum.
Mherren, convinced some kind of defensive illusion magic is at work here, holds his Dwarfkin amulet aloft and strides purposefully towards the wall.
Donk!
“Ouch!” he says, rubbing his nose. “Well, we can eliminate an illusory wall from our theories.”
Lightstrike, meanwhile, is tracing the contours of the bas-relief, and finds a hidden clockwork mechanism beneath the stone eyelids. But it is either magical in nature, or too intricate for him to trigger.
“It’s clockwork,” he tells the others, slumping in resignation. “But it’s complex – I can’t figure it out.”
“Clockwork, eh?” says Zimlok. “There is a Dwarven goddess… an obscure deity of the clockwork domain… I heard her name in Zobeck once, I think… now, what was it…?”
Five pairs of eyes look expectantly at Zimlok as he scratches his beak pensively.
“Ah, yes! That’s it! …oh, wait… no… erm… hold on…”
Several precious minutes pass by. The sounds of skirmish can be heard faintly from the floors above.
“Rava! The Goddess Rava!” squawks Zimlok, triumphantly.
“Great! So, now what?” asks Lightstrike.
And Zimlok draws himself up tall before the eye, thrusting his chest out and commanding in grandiloquent tones: “Great goddess, reveal your secrets!”
Nothing happens.
“Show us the way!” tries Mherren.
Nothing.
“Open your eye!”
Zip all.
Finally, Elovyn intervenes. “I beseech thee, O Rava! Dispel thine illusions and let us pass!”
And, at the invocation of the goddess’s name, a cold, stale wind suddenly rushes up from the stairway.
“Let’s go!” exhorts Lightstrike, and they scramble down the steps to find an oaken door that was not there when Mherren had previously scouted this area as a fire elemental. (Looks like you found floor 7½! – DM.)

*

They file through the door, and find themselves in what is indubitably the citadel’s torture chamber. Unsettlingly, the limp body of a Dark Elf lies strapped to a rack. It is unmoving, but it’s hard to tell if it still breathes without investigating closer. Hanging from the ceiling are two cages containing partly dismembered yet still-shackled skeletons, and a few busy rats that scatter as soon as the Fellowship enters.
An adjoining room with a single arrow slit window contains some heavy chairs and a plain, rustic table on which sit a few empty pewter bowls and flagons. In one corner is a pile of white cloths and some ceramic jars, and in another corner a threadbare curtain that leads through to another, much smaller, turret-like room.
Zimlok takes a look in the turret, but finds only a crude wooden bench with a hole in the centre. Peering through the hole, he sees a clear drop of hundreds of feet all the way down to the river below.
“This could be our way out!” he squawks eagerly.
Haji Baba rushes to inspect, and then folds her arms in resolute disgust. “I am not escaping through a latrine! I am royalty, y’know!” she says, sniffily.
She goes to root through the items in the opposite corner. One jar is filled with a pungent fungus, a pinch of which she places in her knapsack. Another contains what looks like spider eggs suspended in a white foam, which she secures in her bag; and a third holds a thick, black liquid, which resembles oil but has a putrid odour that burns the back of the throat when inhaled. There is also a leather pouch containing six jet black gemstones, and a silver brooch crafted to look like a bulbous spider. These she places in the bag of holding.
Lightstrike peeks through the arrow slit, which looks out towards the front gate and bridge. From his limited viewpoint, he can just make out a vast army of Duergar camped outside the citadel, with many more still joining, along with massive trundling siege engines, trebuchets and ballistae. Lightstrike flinches momentarily as a slavering, Illithid-shaped shadow climbs past the slit; then he continues to survey the scene.
From the tunnel that Kla’rota had told them leads down to the Drow city of Arach-Lluth, another, bizarre and nightmarish army emerges. Leather-clad Dark Elves, white-haired and exclusively female, with dusky-blue skin and armed with long, curved sabres and crossbows, march forth in square phalanxes. Surrounding them, a monstrous company of long-limbed, spider-faced ettercaps and fang-clacking giant arachnids. Descending from the ceiling on silken threads, strange, aberrant entities hang. Their lower bodies are the thorax and abdomen of huge, hairy spiders, but where their heads should be instead sprout the torsos, heads and arms of naked Drow warriors.
As Lightstrike stares, the foremost phalanx parts and from behind their ranks strides one of these half-spider, half-elven monstrosities. Except this one is bigger than the rest. Much bigger. And next to it hovers a huge Beholder, twice the girth of K’Varn. A soiled cloth is draped over it, and a few of its eye stalks are reduced to mere stumps. Its central eye is cloudy and cataractous, and a tooth-filled grin of purest evil splits its wizened, pinkish hide.
The Spider Queen rears up on her hind legs, and Lightstrike finds his gaze drawn inexorably to this entrancing Drow woman of dark and terrifying aspect. Upon her brow is a horned, silver crown, and the eight legs behind her torso are adorned with golden armlets. All stop to behold this fearsome figure. Even the Deep Dwarven siege engines grind to a creaking halt.
Then, in a terrifying voice seemingly layered of many voices both elven and monstrous, both seductive and maniacal, the Spider Queen speaks: “You will bow to your new queen, or die defending your puny Illithid masters!”
A pause. Then the Duergar begin to strike the ground with the butts of their battle-axes in unison. And, as one, they reply: “We serve the Elder One!”
And the cavern erupts in a hail of arrows, quarrels and flying boulders. As dark sorcery crackles outside, flashing purple and green and lighting up the tabaxi’s wide-eyed visage, Lightstrike tears himself from the window and relates what he sees to his friends, stammering: “No way out the front, that’s for sure!”
Mherren is examining the pile of material by the wall, which reveals itself to be five huge sheets of beautifully spun white silk, interwoven with cobweb designs in golden thread. Beneath these are two lengths of strong, silk rope, which the warlock loops and slings over his shoulder, stuffing the sheets carelessly into the now crammed bag of holding.
Having thought better of escaping through the toilet, Zimlok is wafting his wand of secrets around in elaborately complicated patterns, and a faint, red, smoky glow gradually appears, tracing the outline of one of the flagstones in the guardroom. “There!” he points, and Mherren goes to heave on the stone, but it will not budge. Lightstrike joins him; he wedges his crowbar into the seam, and levers it gently.
The hefty stone lifts away in a cloud of dust, revealing a steeply spiralling, rough-hewn stairwell.

*

The company descend, one after the other, with Mherren bringing up the rear. He carefully replaces the flagstone behind them, and it settles in place with a disconcerting thump of finality. At the front of the line, Haji Baba stops abruptly, so that everyone behind bumps into one another.
She gesticulates wild, meaningless hand signals, and stands aside for the rest to squeeze by, nonplussed. “Just to be sure,” she whispers to herself, and scatters the dust of tracelessness behind her as they go.
For what seems like an eternity they spiral ever downwards, until eventually they begin to hear a running river and distant waterfall up ahead. Lightstrike goes on in front, activating his ring of pass without trace, and catches himself as the ground falls away beneath him. He has emerged at an opening in the sheer cliff wall, now only eighty yards or so above the river.
He signals to the others to join him, and they decide that he should go on ahead and investigate the waterfall, to see if it might offer them a safe place to rest. He borrows Zimlok’s slippers of spiderclimbing to clamber down to the river, whereupon he rubs his ring of water walking and, keeping to the banks, moves furtively downriver. The waterfall itself is upstream from a joining tributary, overflowing from the Sunless Sea far above. Lightstrike spies a ledge halfway up the falls that looks to tuck behind the gushing torrent. Effortlessly shinning up the hundred feet, he finds that the slippery ledge does indeed widen and lead into a large, dank, dripping cavern.
The rogue returns to his comrades and takes a length of the silk rope from Mherren. He makes a swift exit as Zimlok launches into a lengthy and mind-numbingly comprehensive safety protocol for the spell, feather fall. Haji Baba twizzles her staff with boredom. Zellingar produces the latest copy of Holy Fire Weekly and absent-mindedly thumbs through the pages. Only Elovyn listens attentively, with inexplicable fascination, for Mherren…
… suddenly leaps off the edge before Zimlok can finish.
“Nooo!” the wizard cries, as Mherren’s form plummets to the churning waters. “I haven’t finished my briefing!”
Snapping out of her reverie, Haji Baba hurls herself after him, fervently hoping Zimlok will not insist on completing his safety demonstration before casting the spell. To her relief, just as the raging waters are rushing up to meet them, her fall is arrested and both she and Mherren float lazily down, giving her time to unfurl the folding boat before they hit the surface.
Elovyn, Zellingar and Zimlok alight moments later, and the current whisks them away downstream to where Lightstrike is waiting.
Splosh!
A huge boulder lands in the water next to them, and they look around to see the citadel above crawling with Illithids and giant spiders, as massive boulders and gouts of magical energy carve huge chunks from its crumbling walls, which bounce off the rocks and rain down upon the river. At the edge of the battlements can just be discerned the glinting form of a goliath, bronze statue wildly swinging its warhammer as it is swarmed by dozens of Mind Flayers.
Elovyn whispers a prayer to Arden that their tiny craft be protected from any falling rubble, and soon they are out of range and approaching the confluence where Lightstrike is waiting. He has secured one end of the rope to a boulder at the base of the waterfall, and runs across the water to intercept his friends. Mherren just manages to grab the rope from him, and begins to grimly heave hand-over-hand toward the falls. But the current is too strong. Lightstrike pushes from behind, and with the aid of all on board and three mage hands they manage to edge their way upstream until finally, exhausted, they reach their goal.
After a complicated relay of the boots of spider climbing, they all make it to the ledge and cautiously edge along its slippery, precarious extent until it broadens into the safety of the cave. Behind the roaring curtain of water, it feels strangely, perhaps even comfortingly, isolated from the chaos of the cavern of Ilthe-Ba’Manza.
Zimlok checks his dragon amulet, finding no sign of nearby threat. Mherren uses eldritch sight, detecting no magic close by; and Lightstrike testing his newly acquired divine sense, finds no evil influences in the immediate vicinity. Investigating the back of the cave, Haji Baba discovers a passageway that plunges down through the bedrock in a geometric spiral. But there is no sign of man nor beast. It would appear this place is deserted, and relatively safe – for now.

*

They set a watch and make preparations to bed down for the night – if indeed it is night in this gods-forsaken sunless realm. Haji Baba, casting Zellingar a suspicious glance, seizes the opportunity to speak with Elovyn. She probes her about King Eoneril of Qualimor, being careful not to mention the Bloodstone of Orcus they gave to him what seems like an age ago.
“Once, Eoneril was day to Caerdonelle’s night. She had a reputation as a dabbler in sorcery, and had aligned herself to the Fated Priesthood of Yarila and Porevidh, deemed by some more traditional elves – of the classical faiths of Silvanus or Selune – to be a false and dubious cult. Many in Qualimor were turned against her majesty, according to what my dear friend Sumnes has told me, and they wished for the King’s Summer Reign to continue in perpetuity. But then the Shadowmancers of Barad Quali clawed their way to greater influence, and their terrible Shadow was cast over the heart of the King. His soul darkened, and those who had wished for his eternal reign began to repent… or to give themselves over to the Shadowmancers. Why do you ask?”
“Oh. No reason,” says Haji Baba.
“What did you learn of your research?” asks Zimlok, who had taken brief opportunity to scan the documents spilled over K’Varn’s desk, and was now setting them out before him. “Have you heard of these Three Swords of Power and Five Elemental Blades? We wonder if Lightstrike’s Sword of Idu Maagog might be one of them? Could it be the fabled Sword of Hecate?”
“I only had chance to study the Records of Suwen, along with the stone sphere and some fragmented passages I translated from Old Nurian. They speak of an Immortal Pharoah, called Nyarlathotep, although the very name sends shivers down my spine. A Dark Planet, too, known as Yuggoth, and a Toad God, and some entities referred to as the Great Old Ones. Also, something called Zvilpoggua, who raises an army around a ‘Yuggoth Stone’, and a demonic herald called Cassius. That horrific creature, K’Varn, is mentioned, and the loathsome Drow-goddess, Llolth – I fear it was she whom Lightstrike saw just now outside the gates of Runor!”
The Fellowship all draw breath simultaneously, as Elovyn continues. “But the Records of Suwen, they do mention a Sword of Hecate. However, it is not associated with fire; rather, it is named the Sword of Air! It is told how this sword drove mad its wielder, Aka Bakar, adviser to King Bahotep of Arcady, and drove him to his own death. His body was sealed in a great, black pyramid, along with the sword.”
She trails off. “That is all I know, in truth. But please, examine the rest of my research. And let us go together to speak with the arch-mage, Kayden. I know the fate of my god, Arden, is somehow tied to this legendary weapon of air. And I believe you are all linked to it too, somehow… and you!” She looks kindly, and hopefully, at Lightstrike, whose face is still darkened and drawn. “You bear the Mark of the Runechild. It was foretold that in the Dark Days of Prophecy a Champion of Light would arise from the Darkness. A beacon of hope to cast out the Shadow! It renews my faith that the Lost Elder Gods shall return, and my Lord Arden amongst them, even if that should mean the return of the Devils and Dragons that were cast out with them! Oh! Let it be so!”
And, a smile upon her gaunt and muddied face, Elovyn passes out on the cold floor of the cavern. Leaving her to rest after her ordeal at the hands of Xar-graata and his minions, and with a seed of quiet hope planted in their hearts, the Fellowship of the Sword share out their last morsels of elven-bread and settle down to sleep. Those on watch prepare their spells, whet their blades, and look through Elovyn’s papers from the Noldothrond. Mherren spends an hour summoning Viper back from the Abyss, and through his communion with Demogorgon sees first-hand his quasit’s obliteration by the disintegration ray of K’Varn.
After a fitful night’s rest, they begin to stir and gather their belongings, with a mind to follow Ningauble’s advice to travel ever-downwards in order to escape this awful hole. As they are almost prepared for departure, they look round to see that Lightstrike has still not stirred. His face is grey, his chest still.
Haji Baba rushes over to him, followed closely by Elovyn and the rest. The druid shakes him desperately by the shoulders, but his form is limp. She finds a pulse at his wrist, but it is weak and hesitant, and disappears beneath the pressure of her fingertips.
“Help him!” she screams, her eyes moistening.
Elovyn cradles his head in her hands, and all see a white, glowing aura surround Lightstrike’s head and suffuse his entire body. A few tense and silent moments pass, as Elovyn holds him and prays, her entire being radiating kindness and healing warmth.
Then, a thin, wheezing intake of breath. And the rogue’s eyes slowly flutter open. He smiles weakly. “Why… are you all… staring…?” he asks, the natural colour beginning to return to his face.
Mherren glowers at the Sword of Maagog, which has changed from its magical, enlarged form of ravenous, licking flames, and restored to its usual appearance of dull, cold iron. The half-orc rips its scabbard from Lightstrike’s belt, and as he does so a visceral howl of pain escapes the tabaxi’s lips.
“Can you stand?” asks Haji Baba.
“I think so,” says Lightstrike, glancing compulsively towards his precious sword of fire, now in Mherren’s hand.
“Let’s get out of here,” suggests Elovyn, setting off with Zellingar to the hole at the back of the cavern.
“I think we should get out of here!” says Haji Baba.
Zimlok and Mherren exchange a look.

* * *

What lies ahead for our band of intrepid adventurers?
Will they escape the Underdark with their lives?
What will they make of Elovyn’s research?
And if they do escape, where will their quest take them next? … Or will they just go shopping?
Was it truly the Sword of Idu Maagog that nearly killed Lightstrike?
And was it the healing light of the lost Elder God Arden that saved him?
Who is the mysterious priest, Zellingar, who now accompanies them?
And was it really the foul Goddess Llolth herself whom Lightstrike witnessed?
Who will win the desperate battle for Runor?
And will our heroes ever know, as they boldly venture even deeper into the bowels of the earth?
Find out in the next gripping episode of…

The Sword of Air!

Experience: Level 6 + 75 XP each
Treasure:
• Flask of Drow poison, 12 doses (type: injury) DC 13 CON saves (1/min for 2 mins) or poisoned, unconscious (2d4 hours) if failed by 5+
• Pouch of Underdark fungi
• Jar of spider eggs
• 2 silk ropes (100’ each)
• 5 Drow silk tapestries
• Silver brooch with spider design (approx. 150 gp)
• 6 jet gemstones (approx. 600 gp)

Tips from under the hood #6

As a D&D campaign grows more expansive in scope, it can be a good idea to nominate roles for individual players.
These might include:
1. LOREKEEPER
The Lorekeeper keeps a record of any names that crop up over the course of an adventure. These could be the names of villains, allies, or even the local barkeep. They could be the names of factions and organisations, or characters from history and legend that the adventurers discover.

2. TREASURER
The Treasurer logs the party’s pool of funds (as distinct from individual wealth) and keeps an inventory of all the magic items, curios and treasure that they find.

3. CARTOGRAPHER
The Cartographer maps the local area, and any sites the party explores, along with a record of all the place names they come across. Maps needn’t be to scale or overly detailed; rough sketches should be enough to help find the party’s bearings and retrace their steps through forgotten places.

4. QUARTERMASTER
The Quartermaster keeps a tally of rations and essential supplies, sharpens weapons, fixes broken arrows and armour, and looks after mounts and undesignated items, such as those in a bag of holding, ensuring the team is always equipped and ready for adventure!