Difference between revisions of "Semiramigard Redux"

Latest revision as of 07:49, 30 May 2012

Right after a hard-fought Final Round Harald, Lila, Akim, Haizea, Quiteria, and Dawa take off for Semiramigard. We Teleport to the lower city based on some divination evidence (and a lucky 00 on the teleport roll), then walk across an invisible bridge into the might mesa supporting the upper city. We enter a spacious chamber, filled with fungus, and get attacked by spore-sprouting, fungus-possessed trolls. We take them down, then continue our exploring. We encounter a Drowad, which is a fungus dryad who worships Lloth. She and Quiteria talk for a bit in Undercommon, and she reveals that the Rats of Nimrod and the local Myconoid men used to maitain a balance of power in this dungeon. Once the Rats of Nimrod left for Spain the mushrooms took over, then a Beholder showed up and they started worshipping him as a god. Great.

We continue through the dungeon, fighting more trolls and mushroom guys. We find a dragon skeleton in a room that could not admit entry of a dragon, which is weird, and some giant bacteria encased in cocoons. There is a room with manacles and mysterious bloodstains, and lots and lots of fungus, including a beautiful Drowad cultivated hanging fungal gardens. Very classy. After much wandering and tracking we find a secret trapdoor in the ceiling, and head on up into another dungeon level. There we find tons of Myconoid men in a large chamber. Dawa seems to be the only one who can hear them in his brain, which is too bad. We Fireball them and run out of the room once they start telling him to wait for the Eye. Of course, with our luck we run right into the throne chamber of the Mushroom King, a very deep chasm on one side! Behold his armor, coated with Yellow Mold that assaults any who strike him! Behold his Brown Mold covered shield, which sucks the very heat from your bones! Behold the cloud of spores surrounding him, spores so sharp and invisible that they cut the crap out anyone in melee range! Behold the seven saves you must make by breathing anywhere nearby! Yeah, it sucks fighting this guy, and then the beholder shows up, rising from the chasm. Everyone is making 6 or 8 saves per round, Harald employs the awesome strategy of leaping onto the beholder's head and stabbing it. Characters fall like flies, Akim gets turned to stone, Harald slips off the beholder's head, then gets turned to stone, and Lila saves the day. How, you ask? Well, the party made their saves vs. disintegration, but turnabout is fair play, and the beholder failed his save vs same. Suck it, Eye Tyrant!!

Lila Teleports away with stone Harald, since he has the magic key to open the door and all. The rest of the party wishes they had more spells, more hp, and fewer dwarf statues.

Back at the tournament grounds Lila gets Trappo to un-stone Harald using his stone chip from the Galeb-dur, then gathers some reinforcements for the rescue mission. He, Ellylw and our recently reunited friend Nali teleport back to rejoin the party. We heal up as best we can, summon some new giant bugs to carry stone Akim, and set off. We go up some very long stairs which have 'Nimrod' spelled out in Hebrew over the landings. We fight some sort of Mummy Umber Hulk and some un-turnable vampires. The vampires go hide in a room full of colourful lights. The green one appears to be some sort of anti-magic field, who knows what the others do. After we burn off the vampires' mushroomy overlords (how does that even work?) they willingly accept Quiteria as their mistress and beg her to let them eat one of her party members. She promises to bring them back some other humans later if they'll tell us the way to the treasure chamber. They direct us to the tomb of Arra the beautiful. On the bier is written 'Arra, he failed a resurrection roll'.

In the next room we find Gregor, who has somehow made it here unscathed. We encourage him to try to convert Lila to christianity while unseen opens the door behind his back. Of course we have to go in to make sure nothing was stolen. Inside we find a huge wall of fire with a spinning wheel inside it, and an enormous man with snakes coming out of his shoulders chained to the wall. Behind the wall of fire there are mountains of awesome treasure in some sort of stasis field such that no amount of force can move them. Also, a very large black ball.

The man introduces himself as Zehak, and amuses us with his charming conversation for quite some time. He tells us that the treasure is frozen in time, but would be unfrozen if the wheel stopped. He also offers to cast unlimited limited wishes for us if we would just stop the terrible burning of the fire he is stuck in, just for a moment. We examine the treasure, chat with Zehak, and try to decide what to do next.

After further dallying our good friend Evelake shows up, accompanied by Lady Thora. Evelake says he is just here for some 'fat loot', and maybe to annihilate himself forever, and we should totally team up and he won't do anything tricksy, promise. As we think about it he has a little secret chat with Harald about Dr Lao. He believes Lao's goal is to save the world, then rule it with an iron fist. We are not convinced that the world ending is better than Dr Lao being in charge, but promise to think about it. There is further conversation in languages only small subsets of the party understand, but Gregory is getting more and more anxious at the repeated suggestion that we stop the wheel to grab the treasure.

In the end we decide to jump Evelake before he jumps us. A tense fight ensues - recently beat up Evelake is still really tough! Just when we have finally knocked him down his Kirin intercedes, stopping time to whisk him away. Quiteria resists the time stop however, and is able to bargain for Celdrix's crystal from Evelake's sword before they go. That being all settled, and Lady Thora now apparently sort of on our side, Harald tries to leap through the wheel and fails, severing his arm. We try to use this as a pretext for stopping the wheel but Gregor doesn't buy it. Trappo coshes him magnificently and we drag him and stone Akim outside. Quiteria and Dawa hold the wheel still while the others dash for treasure and try to avoid the horrible black ball. We grab some neat stuff while raven Ellylw plays tag with the black ball, which ends up perilously close to the wheel. Lila tries out the organ, driving her, Dawa and possibly Zehak mad, we start up the wheel again and get out of there as fast as we can.

Outside we catch our breath and retrieve our key as the door slides shut and the treasure chamber disappears for another year. We tear off Gregor's lichy arm for good measure, hide the treasure as well as we can, and settle down to rest.

We rest, heal up, neutralise everyone's poison and re-attach Harald's arm. Gregor grumbles about how some people get all the arm-reattachment but doesn't attack us or anything. Turns out Lila and Dawa's madness cannot be cured by any normal means, which leaves us without a teleport, so we settle down to wait for our Rod of Transport to re-charge. While we wait we examine the loot. Haizea tries on the crown, orb and sceptre, which suit her very well and seem somewhat loath to leave her possession. Now she's a princess! The scroll has some useful spells, particularly stone to flesh.

After a while an ugly-looking guy who comes off as non-human peeks around the corner but scampers off. We decide to move in case he went for reinforcements. Just outside Ara's tomb we meet a lovely lady riding a giant toad monster. She is not very friendly but seems to want our stuff, we fight and learn that our shiny new sword likes to try to take over our opponents' brains, and is totally not cursed in some way we will discover later. The lady flees and we continue on our way. At this point we discover that our map got lost in the fighting somewhere along the way, but our nice vampire friends point us in the right direction and we find our way back to the top of the Nimrod stairs. After getting 'woe' on going North (the way we came from) we head to the unexplored South and find an empty shaft with a giant propeller at the bottom. We jam what looks like the 'on' switch and settle down to wait some more. We have just settled down when a bunch of (Jerks from the Neutral plan) appear from out of no where looking really mad. We try to talk it out but they dispel our tongues and attack. Thora says they think we are Slaad in disguise. After we beat down a few of their number and Harald grabs one of their silver swords they change their minds about parley - too bad we don't have some sort of spell that would allow us to communicate directly. We eventually convince them that we are not Slaad and agree to give them back their shiny sword if they will help guard us while we rest.