DND Blog

A place to keep DND session recaps, from various campaigns.

The Hundred and Forty-Fourth Session

August 15, 2026, Campaign: As the ground quakes, evil wakes

We explore the Vault of Sky Diamond some. We determine that the Devils were waiting for us to enter, and open the way for them. Gon-Li was Dominated. We backtrack and defeat them, but wake up a hive of Mage Hunters, and are forced to flee the Vault to reset its security system.

Table of Contents

  1. Last session
  2. Into the Vault
    1. Vault 1
    2. Vault 2
  3. On the hunt for the demon
  4. Next Session

Last session

Merching order:

  1. Percival (with magic lantern)
  2. Ryltar
  3. Embersia
  4. Jerry
  5. Gon-Li, the fake Dean of Divination (with magic lantern)

We're in the Vault of Sky Diamond Academy.

Into the Vault

We carefully march ahead, checking for traps.

We come to a set of doors, heavily inlaid with runes. Ryltar and Percival can't grok it, so Jerry uses her Headband of Comprehend Languages and touches the door. The runes are spells that convey to the protection of the area, and its magical enhancement. And the doors swing open at a touch.

Inside is an octagonal room with a circular basin in the floor at the doorway. In the middle of the room is a massive mechanical Cerberus, and there's a set of mechanical tracks that circle the room on the walls.

Gon-Li says: "This is the Tartarus Contingency. See that little pedestal under the feet, with the hourglass on it? If a dean deactivates this, a timer starts, and this deactivates the more active and volatile magics of the Vault for a while. If it hasn't been reactivated, then the doors will close, and they (the Cerberus) hunts."

We need to activate this timer before we go further. Starting the timer closes the door. We'll need to return and reset the timer to avoid unleashing the construct.

Vault 1

Gon-Li presses his hand to the tablet under the timer. A massive steel ball starts lazily rolling along the metal tracks around the room. The metal doors close, revealing a big recess that the ball goes into: if the ball falls in there, the door is stuck.

We go into the next corridor. It ends in a magic chest, which Ryltar determines will produce a fireball. Gon-Li opens another side corridor off that corridor, which ends in a pair of stone pillars covered in runes, with a Medusa's head between them blindfolded.

Vault 2

We return to the room of Cerberus, and there's the next corridor. A long straight one, ending in another door. We open it, and … a room of eight mage statues, with their outstretched hands in a "Stop" gesture, each outstretched hand a different rune, and their staffs arched over the path too close to pleasantly walk under.

Ryltar looks at the runes: one for each type of spell.

Gon-Li says, "We need to prove our prowess, and I an mot powerful enough to activate any of these." So more than 2nd level spell. And self-targeted spells work.

Ryltar's Level 3 Shield is enough for that.

Embersia's Spirit Guardians for Conjuration.

Jerry's Locate Creature for Divination.

Percival's Fireball for Evocation

Jerry's upcast Silence for Illusion.

Embersia's Gentle Repose at third for Enchantment.

Ryltar's upcast Slow for Transmutation.

We may pass, and so we do so.

There's another little hallway, with an empty niche, which Gon-Li says might be supposed to be empty. One is. He doesn't know which is.

We go down the hallway, and come to another door, which opens to a big room. The walls are covered in pink rhomboid crystals, which Gon-Li names as "Mage hunters," and at that name the walls pulse.

In the center of the hemispherical room are a few more rocks, strewn in a circle. He asks us which way we want to go: left or right? We decide left, and he touches the crystals, opening up another corridor.

We ask how he knows the way; he says he was "explicitly taught."

Another door!

There's a deep pit to the left. And a rising incline to the right. Classic boulder trap! Gon-Li says he hates this part, because the door is the boulder.

The boulder is very convincing! Jerry times to punch the boulder and rolls over and through everyone. It falls into the pit. The hallway that we came from falls.

We go up the incline, and there's another side corridor with another pair of pillars: a viscous black oscillating liguid, which Gon-Li says is "Oblex", a liquid which can consume people and imitate them.

We go up the incline to another door, which we investigate and enter, and through that another door, which we investigate. Percival picks both of these doors. We find ourselves in a maze of twisty little rooms with doors and incongruencies, which we get through by having Jerry knock on the walls and then pull it down.

The next little room's door handle explodes with force when Percival pulls it.

We go another few rooms in before turning around and going back to the timer hound room. There are now three balls lined up, and the last one spirals down the walls slowly as we reset the timer. All the balls disappear, and the timer is reset.

We go back through the hall of mages and have to re-pass them, and then go back to the maze of rooms.

We find a path into a room with warm, moist, sulfurous air, like a demonic sauna. There's a gurgling and bubbling, and the room opens out at the top of a cliff face, above a gurgling, bubbling mud pot.

"What's the point of this mud pot", we ask Gon-Li.

There's a massive brass disc suspended by chains above the mud pot. And as we crowd in to take a look, the mud pot erupts. Many people take damage.

Jerry picks Gon-Li up and climbs across the ceiling of the room, providing a chain of sight to the next door. Gon-Li guides Jerry to the next vault in the mudpot room, which seems empty, but then there's a flicker of a humanoid ghost against the glass.

Down the next corridor there's a room of flickering

Gon-li's face has gone blank. He says, "Nothing is missing, so far. We let them in. I saw a demon, back in the residuum mines." Why didn't he tell us this? He has no answer. What does it look like?

Jabba the Hutt, with tiny legs and tiny bat wings.

He thinks that if there had been an attack on the Vault, there would have been more damage.

Embersia's insight realizes that he had once been dominated, and just now the spell has worn off.

Gon-Li says that the demon wanted him to open the Vault.

So Jerry uses Locate Creature on this demon, and it's back the way we came.

On the hunt for the demon

We find it in the "Mage Hunters" crystal room. We have less than a minute to kill these guys and get out. We don't have a surprise round on it.

  1. Round 1
    1. Percival opens with Mass Suggestion: "Be pacifistic and do not hurt anyone."
    2. Jerry uses Entangle, and the main creature seems restrained. The two minions don't seem to be restrained.
    3. Embersia runs with Flame Strike, hitting all of them for 18 fire and 15 radiant damage.
    4. Ryltar Wish-casts Hallow, with a Daylight effect, preventing demons from charming, possessing, or other thinging.
    5. That Daylight dispells the magical darkness in the room, activating the Mage Hunter crystals in the room. They awake from their sleep to pursue any area where the darkness is dispelled. And we're in the middle of their colony. The rhombuses crack open. Purple wings unfurl, insectoid creatures come from the walls.
    6. The two little devils throw flame at Ryltar. They step out of the Entangle. Ryltar takes 12 necrotic; Jerry takes 24 and is blinded. Jerry's Entangle fades. Then they make two whip attacks against Jerry, bringing her down to 1/3 health.
    7. The Mage Hunters swarm:
      • 3 to the 2 minor devils
      • 2 to the big devil
      • 1 to Jerry: 20 slashing.
      • 4 to Gon-Li: we're able to cut a couple out; Gon-li is downed and fails two death saves from one attack.
      • 2 to Embersia.
    8. Gon-Li succeeds a death save.
  2. Round 2.
    1. Percival grabs Gon-Li and heals him.
    2. Jerry rings the bell and summons the Butler, saying: "Defend Gon-Li against all who attack him." The Butler draws his rapier and prepares to. Jerry drinks a health potion for 5. Jerry is still blind.
    3. The Butler slashes three times, and brings a Mage Hunter low.
    4. Embersia does some Flame Strike.
    5. Ryltar carefully casts Sunburst (con save; we all pass and take half, Gon-Li dies)
    6. The devils thrash about, blinded. At disadvantage they do hit their Mage Hunters.
    7. The Mage Hunters are unaffected by blindness. One tries to kill Jerry and is instead cut by her for 25. The Butler similarly defends itself.
    8. Gon-Li is down, but makes a successful death save.
  3. Round 3.
    1. Percival moves over to Jerry, surviving with 1 HP the reaction attacks, grabs Jerry, and Dimension Doors out.
    2. Jerry digs out healing potions for herself and Percival, and is no longer blinded.
    3. Embersia does 23 healing to all party members, the Butler, and Gon-Li, and flees with her Stormrider Boots, taking the magical lantern with her. One of the Mage Hunters takes 4 lightning damage.
    4. Ryltar grabs Gon-Li and Dimension Doors to the Cerberus room, passing a Charisma save.
    5. The Butler blindly attacks the Mage Hunters.
    6. Jerry hears a tiny ringing in her ear. The Butler has returned to his bell.
    7. Gon-Li finally casts on himself the Scroll of Protection Against Fiends. He was possessed when Jerry gave it to him.
  4. Round 4
    1. Percival drinks a health potion. He elects to stay outside.
    2. Jerry takes the lantern and re-enter the maxe. She sees that the door is still closed.
    3. Embersia runs from the Mage Hunters, but might not make it. Lots of attacks of opportunity,
    4. Ryltar convinces Gon-Li to wait until he's told otherwise.
  5. Round 5.
    1. Percival opens a pocket.
    2. Jerry knocks on the door. "Are you still in there?" she calls, knocking with the Titan Stone Knuckles. The door booms, and something metallic pings in the wall.
    3. Embersia runs from the Mage Hunters, dropping a Wall of Fire to break the attacks of opportunity,
    4. Ryltar tells Gon-Li to continue holding off. He moves towards the
  6. Round 6
    1. Percival files his nails.
    2. Jerry listens at the door. She hears nothing. Thick door.
    3. Embersia does another Wall of Fire in front of the moved Mage Hunters, and bravely runs away, but now she's in the Cerberus Room with Ryltar and Gon-li.
    4. Gon-Li closes the passage into the room.

The ball rolls down the track. The door into the Vault locks. The door next to Jerry unlocks, and opens.

And then there's a piercing tone, and a high-pitched "ulat!" Jerry doesn't recognize it, but Ryltar recognizes the noise as the vault's defenses re-activating. We ask Gon-Li.

"When I said that there's volatile protections, what happens is that it results in more-instantaneous defeats than typical."

"Should we go check?"

Gon-Li hems and haws, but we say yes.

Percival hauls out Mass Heal and we all heal up.

Next Session