Picking up right after the previous session, but with two players absent:

Their characters, the magic user Rovan and the fighter Nepomuk, were sidelined for safety reasons by letting them “guard the rear”, where we knew OOC that nothing bad could happen to them.

We decided that the Hobgoblin would follow Darion for the time being, which turned out to be very important, as we were going into an uncharacteristically combat-heavy session – the long, hard fight to save the missing damoselle Gwelayn from the evil Necromancer.

With the maidservant Saril’s help we opened up a hidden door and discovered: a room with a whole crowd of skeletons!

Steel versus Bone

The dwarf Heidel stepped forward, presented his holy symbol, and turned most of them – only four stayed to fight. Darion smashed the first, then quickly a second one. The Hobgoblin failed to hit, but his presence helped to prevent the skeletons swarming our frontline fighter. Heidel stepped in and destroyed a third one, and then Darion broke the last of them to pieces.

Off to a great start – and already two zombies lurched into the room from the north. Energetically, Darion moved on to confront them.

This time we did not do so stellar. Several attacks missed, and the zombies wounded the Hobgoblin, and almost killed him, and hit Darion too, doing a good deal of damage. Zombies: strong!

Saril was frozen in fear, so Alda the thief took the torch and carried it closer.

The Hobgoblin stumbled back with 1 HP, Apoqulis stood at Darion’s side and struck home, but the zombies were tougher than the skeletons. Then finally Darion managed to strike one down with plenty of overkill. Apoqulis wounded his second one again, and Darion circled around it and sliced it in two from behind.

Pumped by his success, he gave the Orc-Axe a well-deserved name: “Slasher”.

Saril was less excited, she had enough of seeing the leering faces of the undead. So we put her with Nepomuk and Rovan. The clerics healed Darion and brought the poor Hobgoblin back to acceptable health levels.

Slash and Splash

We followed the corridor west and found more skeletons, and some of them were probably the ones that were turned earlier, but recovered. Flasks of holy water arced at them – missing the mark, but that is the power of grenade-like missiles: where the actual throw went wide, the splash damage did the job. What was left standing we swarmed with hammer and axe.

At an altar with some half-dried blood and shackles, we went toe to toe with screaming skeletons and beat them down in a tight struggle at close quarters. Alas, one of them struck down Alda the thief!
“Medic! Medic!” we yelled.

Luckily Heidel the Dwarven Cleric was there to hold our smart little thievess back from crossing over into the next world. She got back to her feet and thanked the Dwarf while Darion, the Hobgoblin and Apoqulis rained down blows on the last skeleton until it broke down under our combined fervor.

The blood on the altar was worryingly fresh: Was it Gwelayn’s? Were we too late? What was the necromancer up to? To what horrific end was he sacrificing people here? Would we end up fighting a Zombilayn?

Alda suggested we copy the weird runes edged into the altar for studying later, and we did – then moved forward.

Tapping the walls

Darion had the theory that the Necromancer lair must be near, and probably hidden behind a hidden door, so he asked Alda and Heidel to look for that. They did, but what we found instead was a weird little alcove leading …

… not to the lair, but to a weird new room with swarms of bats, with a hole in the ceiling, for light, and a hole in the floor, a cistern. The room was full of animal feces, and something seemed to move up there on the ceiling. A bad place, but at the same time a possible shortcut into this warren.

We would have saved us some zombie-slaying if we had known that there was a hole here. Something to remember!

Southward, we found more tunnels and a door, behind which we heard multiple repeated metal sounds, like from a weapon-smithy where skeleton smiths forged arms day and night, without pause … it sounded a bit like that, like a big pile of weapons for a future skeleton army.

Looking for Gwelayn

We did not expect Gwelayn in there, so we let the smiths keep working and moved on.

And then we reached an abandoned room and a the tunnel going right, where the six zombies were that we had turned back in the last session – and where Nepomuk and Rovan were guarding the other end.

We met those six zombies and started a long and hard fight. We all took hits while fighting the zombies, often standing in each other’s way. It was slow going, with many misses, luckily from both sides, and slow attrition; the zombies tested our mettle.

The front rank fought, the others tried to shoot through or over them; Alda even shot the Hobgoblin in the back by accident, and got hit by his angry backswing in return. Darion had to physically step between them to break that up and remind everyone that the enemy was right there, groaning and shambling and pummelling Heidel and Apoqulis.

To end our tactical predicament in the bottleneck, Darion called to the others to retreat out into the open space so we could surround the zombies and make our numbers count.

We disentangled slowly – too slowly – and our clerics only made it out alive with luck, and because the Hobgoblin didn’t understand the concept of falling back and held the line behind them.

He paid the price: he went down.

But the party was out and could maneuver better… when suddenly a new contender showed up: Giant centipedes looking for food!

Lots of giant centipedes came up from the south while the zombies came in from the east, and Heidel and Alda somehow got caught in the middle. Darion saw the last hit points go down fast and called for retreat.

You either die a hero … or you live long enough to run away

Yes – Gwelayn was still in there. But we had not the first clue where she was and way too many corridors to check with way too little hit points, and then with Alda getting bitten by a centipede and paralyzed on top of that. The power of facts: We could not save Gwelayn now. We needed to rest, recover, regroup.

Run

And that we did. We half-carried, half dragged Alda away, fled north and shut the door to the cistern room in the faces of the zombies and centipedes. The clerics were down to 1 or 2 hit points and Alda was basically down and vomiting from the centipede poison, the Hobgoblin dead. Darion was still the strongest, but also wounded.

We stumbled out to the orcs and asked them for a resting place. They offered to let us stay with them, but after we had killed a few of them in our initial ill-fated misunderstanding/failure to ask questions, we felt that we might not be completely safe with them. At least a handful of them had to hold a grudge, even if Badushna forgave us so readily.

Plus, Saril was still traumatized from her abduction. She held her own strong grudge against the orcs and didn’t get how we could even talk with these creatures, let alone fight side by side with a hobgoblin.

So we went out, sought a quiet place, a camp site just for us humans, dwarves, and halflings.

There we cleaned our wounds, ate, drank, rested, and made plans.

We discussed going back to the village to bring Saril home and rest fully, but that was six hours there and back, and we had no idea how much time Gwelayn had, if she was alive at all.

We had to let the clerics pray for fresh spells tomorrow, heal themselves up, leave poor sick Alda with Saril out here in the forest, and go in again early tomorrow. We had to use the time while the necromancer was still (we hoped) reeling after losing a significant number of skeletons and zombies.

We’ll be back.

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