The Tome of Adventures

the Magnificent Four (plus 2?) paddled a mushroom raft that tasted like chocolate around a submerged lake. The bard swam through a tunnel to a hidden reptilian hatchery, stealing one gold coin and an egg, which was fed to Larry.

They were only eaten a little by Deadly Beast Floaters.

The group chose a likely tunnel to disembark the raft, hoping to find a tribe of dwarves with the deep massage cantrip. Instead, they found the remains of the reptilian race, regressed over millennia to a near-feral state, living in their own waste and communicating by glutteral noises and excreting a foul stench.

After much vomiting, the group was taken to a ruined temple to Calset, where the elder priest of the reptilian tribe claimed them as food. The dragonborn barbarian stepped up, laying claim to the others in her party, which triggered an exhausting 1-on-1 battle with the priest, the barbarian barely surviving.

Stuff… happened. Lol.

In the chaos that followed, and after fixing the statue of Calset in the temple, the party continued on. The bard woke to find a spiderweb ring on her finger. The group chose to walk down the path that didn’t have the massive cat made of fire. Pfft.

Eventually, the group found the others of their strange, cobbled-together party in an alcove looking over what was an illithid city of 75, now grown large with a dark elf encampment, slave corrals, markets, and moat with a large, fortified, open-top pyramid.

Arching and stretching out from the top of the pyramid flashed and roiled a massive, multicolored tear between the planes.

The bard whispered for help from the little spider, Annabelle, then whispered for help again to her ring.

While studying the environment to come up with some plan to get through a hostile, mind-controled city, cross the moat, figure out how to enter the pyramid and fight the big bad and oh my gosh figure out how to close such a huge tear and what are we going to do…

Four large spiders crawled from the dark tunnel, waiting for the plan.

• 

In tonight’s dnd session, the Magnificent Four completed their survey of the ancient abandoned ruin, finding an arcane machine that opened portals to various exotic, mundane, and unknown places above and below ground.

So they decided to crawl single file through hundreds of feet of claustrophobic spider tunnel choked with webs… until the sorcerer fell through a sticky patch of web and down into a spider lair.

Two in the group of spiders attacking bore the “improvements” of the Big Bad, having their heads replaced with glowing orbs powered by strange stones and metal armor bolted to their bodies.

After killing the spiders, the sorcerer set fire to the abundant layers of webbing in the lair, creating an unexpected inferno that the group ran away from…

…straight into Rona, the evil goddess Lolth’s abandoned pet spider, grown to a terrifying size and covered with Rona’s children. Rona was evermore tasked to fling her children out to the ends of the Underdark in search of her missing goddess.

After a careful, respectful conversation, the party learned that Rona was no fan of the Big Bad, as he ruined her children in his experiments and hindered her search for her goddess by having her children killed whenever his servants saw them.

Upon finding out that the party was there to find and kill the Big Bad, Rona allowed them to rest and heal in her nest and take whatever small-folk items her previous meals had left. When the party told her they were from the surface world, and that the surface world was no longer on fire, she gave the bard one of her children, requesting that the spider be brought up to the surface world, so Rona could learn of it.

It was an adorable, fuzzy, peacock spider.

The bard hates spiders, but still promised to protect the tiny spider with the group’s lives, naming the little arachnid Annabelle.

• 

Deep in the underdark, in the forgotten ruins of an ancient, reptilian warrior race, a shrieking mushroom was triggered, resulting in a mighty battle and the players having to listen to shrieking metal for several minutes. Muhaha.

Spectres arrived, drawn by the sound, their great claws raking the actual life force from the players. The spectres were killed over and over, only to return again in an endless cycle controlled by the sound of a ringing bell.

The bell? A bauble worn around the neck of a spectre praying in draconic at the base of a sarcophagus in the nearby catacombs. The party’s dragonborn decided to kneel beside the spectre, repeating the prayer, being taken over, and transported to the overwhelming presence of a Forgotten God.

Stuff… happened.

The dragonborn returned… changed. A peppering of black dragon scales amidst the copper. She’d gained a tail, elongated fingers. In her hands, a rough, savage axe she used on whatever was in the sarcophagus, resulting in a Very Big Boom.

At this point, the bard declared she was done, she wanted to go home, she hated this place and was going to join a circus.

Larry, the worg puppy, reminded her that she was part of the pack. Spectres gone and after a rest, the group decided to do some good ‘old looting.

…and stumbled upon a gelatinous cube birthing two babies. Suddenly, the cavern being spotless up to 10 feet made a lot more sense.

The cube engulfed the dragonborn and the bard, and started digesting Larry before it was brought down. Good girl, gelatinous cube.

As for the babies, the party decided to let them live and grow into deadly acidic jello cubes in their own right.

And in the distance, a tiny shrieking mushroom goes “eep!”

In this DnD session, a triggered trap results in a rockslide, hurtling the Magnificent Four away from the rest of the party and deep into an ancient underground ruin. There they find themselves in a series of test chambers, where they must work together and confess their deepest secrets in order to escape.

Crainuim rat swarms! Invasion of the Duregar King’s palace! A hungry mind-flayer gets lunch! Necrovag! A long-distance conversation with the Big Bad explaining his completely reasonable point of view. Brains on crab legs!

In tonight’s session, the players found out that Larry was a worg, and would grow very large and be very dangerous indeed. Feeding Larry became a priority.

With the duregar army searching the tunnels for our heroes, the adventurers and their mysterious ally finally found the ranger’s mother, weak and abandoned in a cage under the duregar palace. They learned that she had been captured while pursuing her own quest to close a breach between their plane and the abyssal plane, and the group agreed to help her complete her quest.

The group broke into the lower palace to get the mother’s adventuring gear, disturbed the guards in the middle of a romantic interlude, and the bard was tricked by a mimic. Hilarity ensued.

The group then raided the torture chamber, instantly killed the big bad enemy I had been waiting over 2 months to unleash (sigh…D&D), and rescued a young man with a sweet face and a soldier’s eyes that the mother insists is the key to closing the breach.

We played this last dnd session during a camp out in the woods, on the blackest of nights, in an abandoned campground at the end of a healthy hike.

The black dog-like creature, Larry, was officially accepted into the group, despite worries about his deep bloodlust.

One player attempted and failed a solo rescue of the captured player after witnessing one of the horrifying fates for duregar prisoners. Both players were imprisoned.

The player performing reconnaissance of the war camp saw the efficient cruelty of the duregar, and a possible way out of the cavern. She went back to the last free player. After the duo scouted a sweltering lava tunnel, they met a peculiar, dangerous creature, ostracized for some reason from his hive. They promised to reunite him with his people and kill the entity enslaving them, if he would help them free the captured players.

This creature showed them a hidden passage to where he “stole his food” from the duregar.

Once free and reunited, the party rescued the rest of the terrified prisoners, sending them out to be killed by the duregar while they and their new companions made their exit.

By this time, the game devolved into watching the fire burn down before stumbling to bed.

In tonight’s session, the players walked deeper into the earth, quietly reflecting on their situation. Who are the others in their party, really? How far under the mountain must they go? What role are the outcast elves playing here?

A small pack of goblins, the old and the small, fleeing, terrified. Deeper down, the goblin squats, huts destroyed, inhabitants slain. A young stray dog, black as night and speaking of hunger and death. Beyond, a duergar war camp, grinding ever closer to the surface world.

The bard walks over to say hey.

After a failed, emotionally tense battle against an army of duergar, the session ends with the party split. One player is unconscious, dragged deeper into the war camp. Another follows from above, hoping for a rescue opportunity. The third searches from the ground and the fourth from the sky, both anxious to find a safe route past the camp.

The players suspect that there might be something larger at work here than they originally thought.

This session, the players went shopping in Kraghammer, met their first Ashari outcast elf and entered a mine rigged to collapse. They’re headed into the suffocating depths under the Earthspur mountains, carrying 12 sticks of dynamite and a hogshead of black powder.

…I’m sure it will be fine.

Um. This week on How I Traumatized My Friends Who Said They Wanted to Play a Fun Game With Me….

Also, a Child’s Bet with a Devil, the Thorn-walled City, a Lost Mother, Sleepless Dead and Bar Room Brawls in the Dwarven Tourist District!