Inside Thistletop
19 March. The first recorded session, and the largest turnout the campaign has had: six players and the DM. It is also the only night Roland appears.
Grace gave the recap, and she gave it as a bit.
"Last time on D&D — we spent some time in the town, talked about how to secure some fishing stuff, go across the ocean, sea, bay thing to get to the keep. And we did that, and we found a cave. Then we found a monster. And the monster found us. And then people almost died. Ta-da!"
Stone had missed that session and said so. Lucian was on three hit points, leaning against the wall of a tunnel under a goblin fortress, and did not appear especially worried about it. There was a southern passage they had not explored. Nobody wanted the southern passage.
"I much rather not find another one," Roland said. "I don't know about you guys."
So they went north, and pushed open the door.
The stone stops being cave
Past the door the natural rock ended and cut stone began, and Thalanadil knew it on sight. It looked very much like the stonework underneath the glassworks in Sandpoint. Same builders, four miles apart, and a lantern burning on a hook at the far end of the hall because somebody living used this corridor.
There were runes embossed into the walls. Not carved recently — worn, inert, and absolutely everywhere, a long repeating pattern of about forty of them, mosaicked across the stone.
While the rest of the party crept up the corridor and argued about doors, Thalanadil stood still and looked. He got out Brodert Quink's field guide and was careful, out loud, about what it was worth: the Oxford English Dictionary has around seven hundred thousand words; Quink's little book has maybe five thousand runes, everything one man had managed to recover of a dead language.
The first pass told him the runes were mostly wards, and that none of them were live. "They may have just deteriorated over the last ten thousand years."
The second pass told him the rest.
The single most repeated rune in the complex is the rune for GREED.
He said it out loud, to Roland, mildly, in the tone of a man noting an odd detail.
"All of these mean greed. How strange."
Then he asked what the theme of the ruin under Sandpoint had been. Wrath, came the answer. He said "huh", more or less, and went back to work.
He did one more thing that nobody noticed and that has since turned out to matter. He refused to write in a borrowed book — "I promise not to deface it, ruin it, lose it" — pulled out his own parchment instead, and spent five or six quiet minutes making a careful freehand copy of one section of the repeating pattern. Forty runes. He could translate six or seven of them.
The parchment is still in his pack.
The doors
Roland went ahead with the lantern to look round the corner, and found two large stone doors carved with deformed monsters clawing their way out of pregnant women of all races.
He looked at them for a moment.
"I quietly think to myself — we probably shouldn't open these doors."
Flightless pointed out, for the record, that this did not apply to birds, who lay eggs.
Behind the doors something was walking. Claws on stone, very soft, back and forth, and then gone.
Grace kicked the doors in.
"If no one stops me, I'm going Kool-Aid man."
What was behind them
Stairs up to a raised platform two feet off the floor. Braziers on the walls giving off a glowing red smoke that washed the whole room crimson. Bas-relief carvings of monsters feasting on fleeing humans.
A black marble altar with bones scattered across it.
And, ten feet tall, a statue: a heavily pregnant woman, otherwise shapely, with a kukri in each taloned hand, a long reptilian tail, bird's talons for feet, and the snarling three-eyed head of a jackal. The kukri in the left hand flickered with fiery orange light. The one in the right glowed cold blue.
Nobody at the table ever named her. Thalanadil could describe that statue in exact detail and had no idea what he was describing.
Also in the room, glowing in the dark, was a large wolfish thing with flames coming out of its eyes and a mane of fire. And it was not alone.
Grace, reasonably: "Just kidding. I'm just kidding. Sorry. Didn't know this one was taken."
Lucian: "Wrong room. I apologise. I was looking for the bathroom."
The dogs rolled initiative badly. Everyone got a turn first.
The doorway
What happened next is the party at its best, and it happened in about ninety seconds of table time.
Thalanadil stopped before spending anything and worked out what they were: lesser fiends, immune to fire, immune to charmed, immune to frightened, and they breathe it. He announced it to the corridor — "if you can't tell, since they're on fire, fire does not hurt them; in fact they can breathe fire, kind of like a little dragon, so we might want to spread out" — and saved everyone a wasted round.
Lucian dug a handful of glowing seeds and a piece of opalescent rock out of his pocket, chanted a prayer to Sarenrae, and threw them through the doorway. They skittered across the floor, arranged themselves into her symbol, and a beam of divine light came down in the doorway itself.
Stone parked himself on the near side of it with a held attack and a divine smite ready.
"I'm waiting for a puppy dog to put his nose through that door, and I smack it off."
The first hellhound came at a run, breathed fire on Lucian and Grace, and stopped dead at the edge of the light. "He doesn't want to step into the light," Lucian said. "It's smarter than your average bear, Boo-Boo."
Thalanadil put sleep on the room, upcast to second circle — forty-seven hit points' worth. Two of the three went down. Lucian slid the moonbeam onto the sleeping one; it woke up in it, took thirteen, staggered out, and Stone smote it for twenty-seven as it came through the door.
"Die, demon."
Then everything else arrived
Goblins came round the corner and started shooting, and the fight stopped being a doorway and started being a corridor with people in it.
Flightless worked the back — cunning-action hide, shortbow, sneak attacks when the goblins were not paying attention and a shrug when they were. At one point she announced her position by shouting that she was hiding, then noted the flaw in this herself:
"It helps when you don't shout that you're hiding, I imagine."
She also opened one attack by making the loudest bird shriek she could.
Grace clopped. She made "really loud horse sounds" and charged a goblin, on the theory that goblins are frightened of horses. The goblin did not appear to believe her. She killed it anyway.
Then the bugbear came.
The bugbear
It had a spiked club, a shield, and an armful of javelins, and it opened with all three javelins at Grace. She took the volley on an armour class of eighteen and smiled at it. Then it settled into club–club–shield, and it hurt.
Everyone put something into it. Roland used Aim and Mystic Mark and hit it twice. Flightless put twelve into it from cover. Thalanadil emptied a magic missile into it. Stone smote it twice, sixteen extra damage on the second. It drank a healing potion mid-fight — "the enemy's not allowed to do that," Lucian complained, "they're supposed to just keep those on them as loot for after we kill them" — and kept coming.
And then the door at the other end of the corridor opened.
A woman behind it cast magic missile. Roland went to one hit point. The man who opened the door came through with a scimitar and a dagger, hit Roland once, and put him on the floor making death saves. The hellhound that had been pacing on the far side finally came out and breathed fire on Flightless and Thalanadil.
Thalanadil went down too.
Lucian: "Guys, I'm starting to get the feeling we weren't supposed to be here."
Flightless: "Why is the DM smiling so big?"
Stone: "Because we kicked the door."
One hit point
Thalanadil made his death save and got up with a single hit point.
What he did with it is the best turn of the session. He stood, cast mirror image on himself, and then walked into melee.
"Like I said, I'm doing something really stupid."
Bonus action shillelagh — an amped-up quarterstaff — and a swing at the wounded hellhound. Natural twenty. Seventeen damage. It had fourteen left.
He hissed at the corpse in the nastiest draconic he knew and turned to Flightless: "Now, if I survive — you can sneak-attack this buttlunch rogue in front of us."
The swordsman looked at the dead hellhound and said, roughly, that he had never liked those things anyway.
Lucian got healing word into Roland and put him back on his feet. Grace, finally out of patience — "I'm real tired of this thing sitting in front of me" — spent a manoeuvre for a +10 to hit and extra damage equal to her level, hit for fourteen, action-surged, and hit again.
The bugbear went down.
The surrender
The woman at the back of the corridor took one look at the field, decided against it, and left. The swordsman used his disengage action, walked out into the open, threw his scimitars on the ground, and said "I surrender."
Then, before anyone asked him anything, he started giving them reasons to take him along.
"Look, I'm hired as a bodyguard. The girl who's in charge of all this — she found me, I'm a mercenary, in the big city a couple of days south."
"Nualia's probably going to be here in a minute or two. And the crazy goblin chief, Ripnugget, he's probably coming from up above. I'm ready to bug out — so if you guys got a way out, I'll be happy to go with you."
Flightless, who had a scimitar wound in her, objected.
"I don't think he's trustworthy, because he freaking stabbed me."
The counter-argument was purely commercial. "I bet you if we paid him, he'd fight for us — at least as much as he fought for the other guys."
The vote
Thalanadil called it, and the reasoning was sound to the point of being unarguable.
"I'm beat up and I'm out of spells, and I think we're not ready to take this place on, and he might know some useful things. I say we take him back to town."
"I've got like one whole hit point and I'm all lightheaded."
Goblins were screeching somewhere to the south. Stone laid a hand on Thalanadil and gave him seven hit points back. They picked up their willing prisoner and went out the way they had come in, through the sea cave, to the boat.
On the way out Thalanadil said the line that turned out to matter most in the entire recorded campaign, and said it as a throwaway about looting:
"I mean, this is like the temple of greed."
Nobody followed it up for four months.
They had won the room. They had killed the goblins' champion, taken a prisoner alive who wanted to be taken, and walked out on a deliberate vote because they had read the situation correctly.
They had also left Nualia Tobyn alive, in her own fortress, with her army intact enough to be angry — and the entire rest of the campaign is downstream of that.