Session 12
Lanthechilde continues to stay with the party, but has been put in the “notable NPCs” category, and will mostly be treating with the mercenaries - at next civilized stop, Lanthechilde will be going off to pursue her own thing. Her “party items” are pre-emptively split: her ring of protection going to Gurund, her sword +1 going to Haramer, and her shortsword +1 going into the party pot for later.
Day 15
The party has come to an agreement: Galswintha wants a pegasus. Chlodomer wants the dwarven fortress. Shadagrunde wants to cleanse the land of Chaotic ogres.
And Vulfelind wants to kick as much ass as possible.
Achieving most of these things will require bringing in laborers and crafters and animal trainers of unusual specialties … which isn’t going to happen so long as the region is as dangerous as it is. So step one to getting a pegasus, is to clean house.
After some discussion, it is decided that the dwarven fortress should be checked and cleared first, since it would make a good base of operations and will fund the next step: driving out the ogre villages.
The fact that this will coincide nicely with the party’s entrance to higher levels is also good ;-).
The Grim Fist spends most of the remainder of the day carefully examining the entrance and external walls of the dwarven fortress. They don’t find much, and don’t expect to, but it does let them set some boundaries along parts of the map.
Day 16
Haramer, Gurund, Thorismund and Ingunde, and Lanthechilde (and their respective henches) remain with the giantesses, along with the mercenaries, to establish protection while the Grim Fist dungeon delves.
The remainder cautiously make their way into the upper levels of the fortress … and wipe out, in short order, two kobold warbands, three kobold gangs, and several giant fire beetles before finding an entrance down. None of those fights take long, but they decide to back off for the day.
Day 17
The party does a quick confirmation that the top level is cleared, and makes sure that they haven’t missed any secret doors … or at least some reasonable probability thereof.
Since the entrance level of the dwarven keep is fairly simple, this is similarly easy.
Then they go down the stairs to the keep proper, and run into the kobold’s den, where several warbands are in the middle of losing control over a giant boar they were intending to feast on. In the chaos, the party fireballs and then mops up kobolds and boar alike.
Among the treasures is a suit of leather armor +2 … which isn’t as good-looking as Vulfelind’s black widow armor, so she passes it to Grizzba; a shield +1, which goes to Haramer; a dagger +1, which goes to Gurund; and two potions (heroism and invulnerability), which go with Haramer (who gives it to one of his heavy infantry squad-leaders).
Days 18-21
The GM keys up some “test” encounters representative of the difficulty of the dungeon’s level 2 and 3, and adjudicates “how well” the Grim Fist clears out those dungeon layers based on those tests - it’s a bit of a cheat and a shortcut, but aside from bad luck, it simply isn’t likely that anything below the fourth level is going to be an interesting challenge.
… and that’s pretty much how it plays out. Six giant scorpions represent the worst threat the party faces … and even then, no one dies, thanks to two very good saves.
The Grim Fist’s map is updated, and they briefly - very briefly! - think they’ve emptied the keep. And then Galswintha notices that the architecture is different along the back of the keep.
Hastily bricked and plastered, there remain signs of a series of entrances. Toothy grins all around, the party tries to decide whether to go the noisy route or the slow route …
Galswintha pulls out one of the scrolls the party found, “Would a summoned earth elemental do?”
Galswintha first casts clairvoyance to check out the other side … and receives a very odd viewpoint, staring alongside the other side of the wall through a fisheye lens. She waits, and eventually catches sight of a hand - and figures out that there is a person on the other side of the wall, listening carefully! The room seems small and weird through the fisheye lens, but she finally decides to stop worrying about it.
She summons the earth elemental and it breaks open the wall.
A cyclops(!), against all odds, manages to get surprise, ducks under the entrance ceiling and steps around the earth elemental, curses Chlodomer (the one standing guard), then gets initiative and clobbers Chlodomer with a club.
The priests bless those not yet in melee and curse the cyclops; Galagunde manages to blind the cyclops; Vulfelind dives past the cyclops into the next room; Galswintha focuses on directing the earth elemental to attack; and everyone tries to beat on the cyclops.
Cyclops are pretty damned tough, however. Chlodomer stands and gapes, and the cyclops hits him again despite being blind.
Vulfelind hides in the next room, and another round of beating … this time, the earth elemental connects, dealing a grievous injury to the monster. Grizzba tries following suit, hiding on the far side of the cyclops.
And then the cyclops connects with Chlodomer a final time, dropping the white-clad hero with an eye-splattering blow to the face. Vulfelind backstabs the cyclops, the earth elemental hits again, and everyone piles on … and the cyclops continues to stand.
Picking his next target, the cyclops targets the concentrating mage … Galswintha. Who loses concentration and goes down with gruesome scarring, releasing the earth elemental from her control.
And then Grizzba ends the cyclopian tour of life with a high-damage backstab.
Unfortunately, the earth elemental is still loose. Shadagrunde discovers why Galswintha always carried certain scrolls in hand, even though that prevented carrying a weapon easily, and goes diving into his pack for the party’s only scroll of dispel magic.
While he does that, the earth elemental proceeds to clean the party’s collective clocks, an immense, berserk avalanche of destruction. Vulfelind and Grizzba are both killed!
It almost looks on the ropes, staggering past the bodies of the fallen, when Shadagrunde dispels it from this plane, and silence settles into the dimly lit keep storehouse.
What healing can be done, is done; Shadagrunde’s most valuable scroll (two restore life and limb spells) is expended on the thieves; and the party staggers back to the surface.
Month 8, Weeks 3-4, and Month 9
Chlodomer requires a month of rest … and is blind. Galswintha is disfigured. Various henches have also suffered, and civilization is quite a long ways away.
On the plus side, the cyclop’s treasure hoard is useful. A bowl of water elemental commanding and a bag of holding provide the means to thoroughly clean and ransack the top three levels of the keep.
With that done, the party decides to return to civilization long enough for restores, and then back out to the dwarven keep.
It takes two weeks to get back; blindness and disabilities slow the party down substantially. But no serious threats manage to show up.
We end in Orléans.
Session End
The party actually had two restore scroll spells, and would have done okay with just the cyclops … but the earth elemental resulted in two actual corpses, which received higher restore priority.
Not Galswintha’s finest hour.
They almost refused to use the bowl, until I pointed out that a bowl-commanded water elemental would be much, much weaker than a spell-summoned earth elemental. I never thought that would be a feature!
There was a fair amount of leveling, though, and everyone eventually achieved normal status again …
Vulfelind now glows like a candle to undead. Grizzba suffered no side effects.