The Twenty-Eighth Session

July 25, 2020, Campaign: As the ground quakes, evil wakes

Holy cow. This is the first time we've had all players present since COVID started, I think.

Last session

We spent a lot of time fighting snow elementals.

We're in combat

1. Round whatever: We're still in combat. Bugfood gets et.
   1. A snow elemental bludgeons Bugfood and drags him into itself.
   2. Zelrathi does some Eldritch Blast.
   3. Vurguron attacks one snow elemental and pops it, then moves forward to attack another snow elemental.
2. Round whatever, part 2: Combat finishes.
   1. Salris attacks a snow elemental from partial cover
   2. Ryltar attacks a snow elemental from 3/4 cover, and fails to hit it.
   3. Jerry moves to where can see the upwind snow elemental, and attacks it twice for 23 bludgeoning before moving Hunter's Mark onto it.
   4. The Barlgura does some bludgeoning to the snow elemental holding Bugfood
   5. Bugfood tries to free himself, and eventually succeeds.
   6. Zelrathi attacks the snow elemental holding Vurguron
   7. Vurguron attacks it as well, popping the snow elemental and freeing our path forwards

Bugfood continues upwind, exploring these caves.

Salris tells the Barlgura to stand guard over the pedestal. The Greater Demon fails the check it would use to regain control of its mind, and continues to follow Salris' orders.

Vurguron licks his finger, feels the wind, and continues upwind. It's the same way Bugfood is going, and the rest of the Party follows. We go a couple of turns, and then a big gust of wind blows through the tunnel past us, kicking up flurries. Over the span of a few hundred feet, the snow walls transition back to stone.

The icy wall

We come to a fork in the tunnel. To the left is a smaller path blocked by an ice wall, and to the right is a larger path. The ice wall bulges out into the path. Bugfood directs Vurguron to lick it, but he doesn't. So Bugfood lights a torch and tries to melt the wall. The casters of the group join in, but the wall doesn't melt.

We decide to follow the wind, says Bugfood.

But instead, the Party stays and continues to attack the wall. Vurguron uses his crowbars, and Ryltar uses Shape Water, and Zelrathi uses Firebolt. The ice chunks chipped off the wall form into water and reform as part of the wall; melted water runs back to the wall and reforms as well. The wall is regenerating itself.

Salris decides, with Vurguron's egging-on, to cast Shatter on the wall, doing 32 damage to the wall. As he casts it, standing away from the wall, he sees the wall become solid white with spidercracks. Vurguron charges forward with his crowbar and critically hits the wall, pulling an eight-inch cube of ice out of the wall, which he throws behind him to Bugfood, who throws it away. The wall begins to heal in front of Vurguron, and the chunk of ice dissolves into snow.

Ryltar uses some ice magic, and just as his spell is about to hit the wall, it passes through. He tries to touch the wall, and there's a slight give. He puts his hand in front of him and tries to push through it. He gets stopped by the ice. Someone throws a snowball at the wall, and it hits the wall.

Ryltar, having recently cast ice magic, decides to continually cast Ray of Frost as he walks into the wall. He passes through several feet of ice, and comes upon an empty sphere frozen in the ice, a hollow air-filled space with a central column, where a pale elven male is frozen in the ice column, where the man holds a blue ice wand. The elf holds his side, where purple blood seeps out onto his robes and up into the "air" of the column of ice.

Ryltar decides to come back through the wall to tell the team. He phases out of the wall.

"There's a guy who's in there, holding his side, bleeding upwards in purple blood," he says.

We're searching for the Ice Lord's tomb, but may Zelrathi think that this might be the Ice Lord's tomb. The only thing we know to be in the Ice Lord's tomb is the wand, and Ryltar is pretty sure he saw a wand in there.

Bugfood walks up to the wall to cast Frostbite on himself, to see if he can walk through the wall. He takes some damage, and kinda works, casting it on himself a second time, to see if he can get through. He does, painfully, and Ryltar follows easily with Ray of Frost.

Bugfood casts Identify as a ritual, and while he's doing that, Ryltar starts casting Ray of Frost to reach through the column to grab the wand. His hand reaches the wand, and the column of ice explodes in shards of ice, doing no damage.

Meanwhile, Zelrathi et al. are playing "go fish" with cards.

The Ice Heart of Winter

The ice shards hover in the room, and through these reflective shards Ryltar and Bugfood see a living version of the dead elf, who is speaking to someone:

Belladonna, your return is both a testament of your power and the doom of the world. I curse your existence and hope you suffer a death worthy of your treachery and wickedness. I only wish to see it as well as to see your reaction to my… well…welcome to my sanctum. I hope your sister… was laid to rest gently.

But if by small chance of fate that someone who doesn't strive for your empowering manages to find me, hear this: I give this to you, to carry away and to hide from those who would have it fall into evil hands. There will be others. Keep this safe to prevent her return. (weakens)

I shall be with my friends once more. (dies)

The ice falls and melts.

Ryltar says, "Holy shit."

The wand becomes cold, drawing what little heat is left in his body into the wand. Does he wish to attune to it? Sure.

Ryltar has found the Ice Heart, the wand of the Ice Lord.

The magical ice shards dissolve into fluid, sinking into water that freezes into snowflakes, which sink into the snow floor of the hollow cave. The ice wall itself dissolves similarly, leaving a clear path back to the main hallway.

Ryltar calls out to Zelrathi, "You were right, it was the Ice Heart!"

The game of fish continues, and from behind everyone we hear, "Well, I have two aces," as a spell dissolves to reveal a black-furred Tabaxi: Moon.

She was following us, because Dirius was going someplace else. She says that Dirius doesn't know we're gone, but that the rest of the expedition is behind us. The Barlgura in the distance screams, so we don't want to head backwards. There's some discussion about which direction we want to go: towards the Barlgura, or the

We decide to continue upwind.

Exiting the Temple

We come to a large room, which fades off into the dark distance. There's staircases to the east and west, on the edge of the room's shadows. Ryltar takes two steps into the room and begins to slide into the floor. He can't recover, so he casts Slow on himself for a bit. Salris tries to grab him, but can barely hold him against the slide. Moon and Jerry haul them back.

Salris pulls out his staff and begins to probe the floor, finding that the floor doesn't slope away on the eastern and western edges of the room, leaving a narrow path to walk along each wall. So we tie Bugfood to some ropes that the Party holds onto, and he shimmies forwards along the wall, and comes to an end. Bugfood then tries to step out into the room, and finds a path leading forward. The floor looks intact. We need a way to mark the trail.

Jerry is convinced to pull out one of the bags of rancid organ meat. She proceeds first, wearing the rope harness, spraying organ meat across the invisible floor.

Jerry and Zelrathi find their way across the floor to the western staircase, which goes up a short corridor to books, and a larger room.

Jerry finds her way to the eastern staircase, which curves upwards to a room with the greenery of pine needles. She sees a 40' diameter room, with a pine tree to her left, and at the top the room and the pine tree comes to a point, with a light at the peak. There's a pathway to her right.

The Party goes off to the book room. It's a small library, with three book shelves and a left-side exit. The room is a 40' circle, a library. On the inside corner is a desk with scrolls.

Vurguron, coming up last, cleans up the blood smears with Prestidigitation. We don't want the expedition following ups.

72 feet of books can all be shoved into Jerry's bag of holding. There are books in Elvish and Dwarvish and other languages, describing Storm's Eye. Zelrathi sets aside two books about the celestial powers and Storm's Eye. And there's a letter that seems different, like it's not a letter. It's a spell scroll of Magic Circle, which Bugfood identifies and gives to Ryltar.

We finish ransacking the room, and stick our heads out the far-side exit. The door reveals a long, wide passage, just like the one we finished probing. We retreat to the original room, and continue exploring the invisible paths on the floor, to the south.

The paths lead to the center of a set of radially-symmetric set of paths, leading to a dome in the ceiling above, where there's a central column with an arched doorway into it. From above, it would look like a sixfold snowflake.

The Stairs

Inside the column is a stone brick room, with five other doorways, and a spiral staircase going up. There are no doors in the doorways, and there's nothing to bar the doors with.

So we go up the staircase. One minute, two minutes, five minutes go by. We're still climbing. Ten minutes. Beneath us is darkness without end. Half an hour goes by. Forty-five minutes.

Jerry suggests Zelrathi pass out the cards to keep playing Go Fish, but it won't work while climbing the stairs.

90 bottles of beer on the wall later, we're still walking.

And then a drip of water falls on us.

Around the second 70 bottles of beer on the wall, we make a Constitution save to fight exhaustion, and continue.

Zelrathi proposes taking his potion of fire bird to fly up to see how far above the ceiling is, but the party kinda shouts that down.

The air is slowly getting warmer, and there's another drop of water.

Ryltar looks up and eventually sees a ceiling. The stairs take us there, and the stairs continue into the solid ceiling. Ryltar notices the ceiling is warm to the touch, and he feels the joins of where the water is dropping through a groove in the ceiling. He traces around, and finds it's a door that the water is dripping through.

Through the door

The party heaves at the door, but nope. Eventually Jerry and Salris move the door a bit. The door shifts diagonally, and we see a thin shaft of sunlight.

So we keep pushing.

Vurguron whips out his crowbars, and Vurguron, Jerry and Bugfood pry the door open, despite Bugfood's level of exhaustion. We move the rock to the side, and for the first time in more than a month, see sunlight.

Aboveground

We hear the lapping of waves against rock, sunlight, the breeze. The center of the spiral staircase corresponds to a flat stone, surrounded by jagged rocks on all sides, with waves on all sides around. There are slight paths through the jagged rocks.

We put the rock back, and we put Ryltar's Immovable Rod on top of the rock.

Ryltar looks through the jagged rocks, and discovers that we're on the top of a sloped point of stone, looking out for miles across lapping water, blinding sunlight. There's a shore here, but that's it.

Salris joins him, looking around, and sees no big ocean waves, just small waves. And a mountain to the north.

We think about boats, and we have Quaal's Feather Token of Conjure Boat, capable of carrying all of us, but we're still not sure where we are.

Then we take a long rest.

The sun rises in the first watch. The second watch passes without incident. By the end of the third shift, it's noon. Fourth shift passes into the afternoon.

Bugfood has had his recurring dream of running through a forest and plunging into a lake to see his own face, without eyes. But now the forest he runs through is covered in snow and the river is frozen on the edges, and the village across the river is speckled with snow. When he looks down, he sees his reflection. In the corner of his eye, he sees a blue dot.

Salris' spoon levels up to 1d6 inspiration.

We decide to take the Immovable Rod with us, and to bean the island.

Jerry prepares the Quaal's FeatheFeather Token. She drops it into the water, and it fizzes and foams and suddenly, there's a swan-shaped 50' boat in the water.

Bugfood moves some sand from the beach to the rock, and Bugfood and Ryltar stand by the rock where they prepare to water the buried bean. Bugfood pours some water on the bean at the same time that Ryltar grabs his Immovable Rod. They run away to the beach and jump into the boat. Jerry directs the boat away from shore.

The bean sprouts, and we look back to see: nothing.

Jerry steers the boat in a circle around the island to see what's happening. Bugfood sees a bright light, and tiny pinpricks of pink around the tops of the jagged stones on the crown of the island.

So we sail off to the north, and we gain a level.

Next Session

We left the entire expedition behind; what will come of them?

Things that have been going on while we were underground:

• Battle Locust attacks at Sky Diamond Academy
• Ravines full of giant spiders
• Our individual character goals
• Guy has been working really hard at Sky Diamond on his celestial mechanics stuff, since Bugfood and Ryltar revealed flaws in his theories

Old items:

• Why is Moon with us?
• What do the seized books say about things? There's not much there: notes on summoning elementals, ledgers and documentation of cargo being moved to and from Storm's Eye, letters in Dwarvish, mostly love letters, instructions on crafting magical items and nonmagical items. A wide range of things. Zelrathi picked out two books significant On the Movements of Celestial Bodies, and Curses and Higher Beings.
• What was that distant glowing tower with the people walking around it?

New items:

• Find civilization
• Escort Moon back to Sky Diamond, perhaps?