Duendewood: the Hand of Vecna

 We proceed up through the mountain, following the trail of Eye of Vecna symbols for about two days, and  eventually climbing high enough to come out above the rain and into the snow. We encounter a couple of frost giants and winter wolves waiting on the path ahead, and blocking our way into a cavern. Martini immediately turns invisible. 

Geddy, Ruin, and Eva stroll towards the giant. The giants rattle something off in their own language. The lead giant speaks Common -- badly -- and introduces itself as Agnis. “You stop!”

Geddy: “We’re just following the trail of these eye-symbols.”

The giants laugh at us and call us dumb. “Big flappy dragon up ahead. You get eaten!”

Geddy: “I mean, I am pretty tasty.”

Giants: “You be dinner?”

Geddy: “Tasty, but poisonous.”

Giant: “Oh, us not know that.”

Geddy: “So can we go through?” 

Giant: “Go see Whitesnow.” He considers. “No.”

Geddy strums his guitar, then casts Mass Suggestion. The head giant shakes it off, but his buddy immediately tries to move away. Agnis drags him back into place: “No! No listen to tiny small poisonous man.” He looks back at us. “Now give us stuff!”

Geddy keeps chatting with them, and we learn about the other frost giants, and the winter wolves, and a watch-hydra -- a cryo-hydra, actually. These two were out on hunting duty for Chief Nimrod, the big chief with big treasure. There’s also a cavern with a hole in the roof that leads up where Aer'lon Whitesnow lives. 

Chief Nimrod values money. Fluffy also has some treasure, but they can’t get it away from him. Geddy offers them a finder’s fee if they’ll take us to Nimrod. Geddy pulls out a silver piece, looks at the frowns, and then starts incrementing up. He kicks them 100 gold.

They lead us inside, and past Fluffy, the hydra. (The password is “puppy”.) There are wolves throughout the caverns, hanging out with the giants. They take us to Chief Nimrod. Nimrod goes off on them; apparently they were supposed to just murder us. 

Geddy insists that he’ll never be able to open the sack without us. The chief grudgingly agrees to let us pass, and Geddy makes a big show of retrieving the axe and the armor -- both of which are giant-sized. The chief is pleased. Geddy attempts to argue that once we’ve finished talking to Aer'lon the dragon, we’ll be back with more treasure. 

Chief Nimrod: “So chief Nimrod gets the axe, and the armor, and half the dragon’s treasure.”

The two lesser frost giants start helping him change out of his current armor. Martini nicks a necklace off the top of the chief’s treasure chest. Then, when the last of the armor is off, Martini stabs him under cover of invisibility. She doesn’t kill him outright, but her sneak attack is still very effective. Geddy whips out a scroll of Animal Trance and attempts to mesmerize the wolves, but fails. Azrael immediately drops an empowered Fireball on them. Ruin tries to attack, but misses. 

Martini makes herself invisible again, this time using Greater Invisibility, and moves around to the other side of the giant. Azrael drops another fireball, then tries a quickened ray of enfeeblement but misses. The giant picks up the nice new axe, getting stabbed by Martini in the process, and turns around and sinks it into the stone trying to kill her. “This good axe!”

The wolves start moving in from the rest of the cavern, and breathe iciness on Eva and Geddy. This is somewhat problematic, since Eva is vulnerable to cold, but not too much. Ruin attacks but misses again and drops his sword. Meanwhile, Agnis steps forward and clubs Eva. The other one tries to attack Martini, who is currently invisible. 

This is when the rest of the giants start moving in. 

Martini kills off the frost giant scrub who just tried to attack her, then starts stabbing the chief. Being invisible and able to use sneak attack, she does a ridiculous amount of damage to him and kills him. (OOC: a record 151 damage in a single round.) Geddy uses a wand fill the corridor with webs. Eva leans out into the hallway and looses a cone of fire, tagging three of the wolves and four of the frost giants. 

Azrael drops a Cloudkill in the hall outside, killing off all but one of the wolves out there and weakening one of the frost giants. The one surviving hallway wolf attacks Geddy but misses; Ruin picks his sword up, and the giant takes a swing at him but misses. The giants start running through the cloudkill and into the room, one of them pushing Ruin aside as he enters. Eva and Geddy attack them as they come past, and one makes the mistake of moving into Martini’s range; she promptly stabs him. 

One giant hits Geddy, but the other one misses. 

Martini starts stabbing the nearest frost giant and takes it down. She turns to another giant and stabs it as well, because why not? It goes down, and she is now out of targets in range. Geddy whips out a wand of Animate Dead, and calls up a Frost Giant skeleton. Eva rips into one of the frost giants and tears him apart. Hallway wolf tags Geddy and Eva with its breath again. 

Azrael zaps the hallway wolf with scorching ray and kills it. Ruin finally gets his shit together and kills the guide frost giant; he turns and attacks the other one, damaging it badly. Martini finishes it. 

Geddy sends skeletal frost giant to face down the two remaining frost giants; by the time they finish beating it down, they’re ready to surrender. The Cloudkill, meanwhile, has gone around the corner and damaged the hydra’s health badly. We follow the cloud and wipe out the hydra. 

There are two giants left and a couple of wolves; they declare Geddy the new chief and leave the cavern. 

1100 platinum, 17,000 GP in gems

Necklace of prayer beads

Elixir of hiding

Pearl of power 2nd level 

300 GP

We stop to rest, and consider the dragon. It does occasionally go out to hunt, but it does keep a pretty close eye on the nest. And it’s definitely a white dragon. This party does have some idea of what we’re doing here; the whole point of this expedition was to retrieve the hand of Vecna before the Order of Secrets got ahold of it. 

It’s a huge white dragon, and terrifying. 

We sit around and come up with a plan, which mainly involves waiting for the dragon to get hungry and wander off. Geddy drops Silence and Mass Invisibility on us, and he and Eva remain behind while we Dimension Door up to the peak. Martini, meanwhile, has dropped Pass Without Trace to hide our tracks and scents. 

We come out on the peak of the mountain, next to the dragon’s treasure hoard. Ruin immediately yanks a magical bow out of the treasure pile.  Azrael claims a magical, gilded horn from a pedestal at the back. There’s also a chest that’s marked with the eye of Vecna; Martini checks it for traps, and she’s sure it does something when you open it but she’s not sure what. 

Ruin snags the chest. Also, the longbow is a +3 flaming composite longbow with +4 strength bonus. The horn is a greater horn of blasting (10d6 sonic damage, stun and damage, worth 70,000 GP). 

Also, as soon as we try to remove the chest we discover that it’s firmly stuck in place. The dragon, however, has become suspicious despite our precautions. It turns back. 

Martini opens the chest, and lying there on the felt is a severed hand. Martini picks it up, and all of a sudden there’s this cracking, tearing sound and the clouds circle overhead; horrible undead flying things are falling from the sky. Ruin immediately grabs her and Azrael and uses Dimension Door to get the hell out of there. The dragon immediately fixates on us, and both it and Eva screech in agony. Eva is gone, and Geddy is stunned. 

Azrael then casts Teleport, and removes us directly down to the Apparatus -- our magical, mechanical crab that let us reach this world in the first place. Azrael considers Martini’s panicked account of the dragon now knowing where we are, and says that it won’t be able to locate the hand once we get inside the crab. "God magic," he explains.

We immediately climb into the crab, and try to make our getaway; only… the hole that we came through is not there. We have effectively cut ourselves off from returning. 

Geddy notes that Fanaxia seems to violate the basic separation between the realm of the gods and the realm of humans; the gods-related creatures were affected by the change. He thinks Eva has probably been shunted to another plane of existence somewhere. And also the white dragon is probably still hunting us. 

We'll be starting with these characters next week, and then shifting over to the Sol Povos party.