EvilParty: Release the Kr-- Tarrasque

So, there’s a teleport block on the ruins, or at least on the monster storage room. Which calls for strategy. 

We decide on an aerial assault, with Chuck as invisible mist and Durest using a combination Fly, Silence, and Invisibilty. Silence is an interesting spell: it's an area effect with a ten foot radius, and since most spells have a verbal component it tends to suppress spellcasting. So he doesn't cast the spell on himself; he casts it on a small rock and carries that with him. Once they arrive, he leaves the Rock of Silence at the top of the stairs, and gets ready to head out of range of Silence and cast his next spell. 

He gets to the bottom of the step, turns around, and his mace smacks the door with the sound of a huge gong. (OOC: Durest rolled a 2 on his Move Silently check, and he has a -6 modifier for being not-that-dextrous and also heavily armored, so... yeah. Sneaky, he is not. Not without a lot of magical help.) Durest quickly casts his Ethereal Jaunt spell, just before a bunch of Lammasu come rushing down to investigate. Fortunately, Durest is invisible and intangible now; but the lammasu have passed through the Silence spell around the rock at the top of the stairs, and the effect is unmistakable since it renders them deaf while they're in it. They know something's up. 

Chuck takes this moment to cast Resist Energy on himself. Behind him, he hears someone unlock the door; that would be the guardians arriving. Durest is crossing the room, ethereally, until he gets close enough to the Wall of Force. Chuck, meanwhile, is clinging to the ceiling  when Durest casts Greater Dispel Magic and takes down the Wall of Force. 

Acid floods out into the room just as the lammasu fly in through the door. The scattered monster-pieces start pulling themselves back together. Chuck’s invisibility wears off, and he dissolves into a cloud of mist and hopes not to be noticed. 

Demikos: “Fools! What have you DONE???”

The Celestial Charger tries to turn undead, but fails. A couple of the Lammasu saw where Chuck turned into mist, and start casting Holy Smite. Chuck curses. 

Meanwhile the partly-regenerated monster stands up, mewling. 

Chuck drops a Fireball on the gathered guardians, because he’s annoyed about being smitten. 

“Quickly! Before it regenerates! It’s our only chance! TO ME!” The Golden Protectors charge the monster, just as we'd hoped. The celestial charger goes with them. Durest walks out the door and uses Stone Shape to seal the doorway closed. Two of the Lammasu manage to fly out before it closes, leaving two others trapped inside. 

One of the Lammasu takes the Silence Rock and throws it away. Two cast Holy Smite, damaging Chuck even further. “Oh, you pieces of shit, just wait.” 

Back inside the room, chaos ensues. 

Outside, Durest notices that Chucks’s kind of taking a beating. He returns to the material plane (being ethereal is kind of like being a ghost; you can only interact with certain things and vice versa) and drops Mass Inflict Light Wounds, curing the vampire and damaging everybody else. Meanwhile, the Tarrasque is chomping through its opponent. 

One of the Lammasu casts Magic Circle Against Evil; the other four cast Magic Smite again, trying to take out Chuck. Who responds by moving out of the circle of Lammasu and tossing a Fireball behind him. Four of them die. Meanwhile there are horrible rending sounds and screams behind the stone. 

Durest detours to the treasure pile and starts shoveling things into the bag of holding: a dwarven war axe, a bunch of coins, a couple of other things. Then he heads for the mechanical fireball-scorpion, which Chuck is attempting to claim as his own.

 

The giant monster bursts out of the stone, and one random lammasu who somehow missed all this flees screaming into the night. Durest teleports himself, Chuck, and the fireball scorpion back to the camp. We’re far enough back that we aren’t immediately visible, so we throw the scorpion on one of the wagons and Chuck opens the gate.  He uses the scorpion to throw a couple of fireballs up the air and gets the monster’s attention. 

So, with the goblins lined up from here back to our target, we come out of the gate and then circle around and hide behind the gate. Sure enough, the Tarrasque just comes out and starts eating goblins and following the trail of them like a giant, monstrous ET following the Reese’s Pieces out of the closet. As planned, he’s headed for Morcoast. 

By December, the monster has arrived in Morcoast. It’s… bad. It’s a town of 10,000… or it was. 

We’re officially evil now. Durest would feel a lot worse about this if his god Indra wasn't just perpetually giggling about it in the back of his head.

The Tarrasque arrives at Morcoast just in time for Christmas (or Midwinter Fest, anyway). Meanwhile, we’re back at Wellfort and Malafar is very pleased with us. He tells us he’s going to take us off the leash soon. 

Finally, the Solari in the dark woods split off part of their force to try to contain the Tarrasque, allowing our forces to push forward and take Southfair. And that’s when Malafar calls us in with Cardinal Laroche. It’s time for us to start moving along the northern road. 

So, there’s a disgraced Duke of Sol Povos - Corbin, of Janbridge - who’s sympathetic to our cause, mainly because he’s been sent south "to set the Barony of Springhollow to rights" (which he thinks is beneath him) and also because that was done specifically to take him out of the Sol Povos chain of command and he seriously resents that. As a result, we can bypass him and the barony he currently holds, and follow the north road while eliminating Solari and doing whatever we want with the towns. We ask about appointing regents and follow-up forces to hold the ground we take, but... This is not conquest; Malafar wants us to sow as much chaos as possible. It’s February at this point, and he’s going to teleport us just west of Springhollow on the road to Garamond. 

We consider strategies, and Cardinal Laroche gives us some background. Garamond has a population of about 11,000; the Baron is Fabreeze Poitier, and there are seven Solari left there. Maximilian is the head of them; he’s the Baron’s spymaster and never leaves his side. The others are a druid, Murielle; a famous ogre fighter named Samson, who’s more sophisticated than he seems; and a pair of priests of Artemis. They also suspect that there’s a fighter named Baldwin, who uses the two-bladed sword in the Elvish style. 

Springhollow and Garamond are both home to the furniture barons, who take advantage of the Ruby Woods nearby. The Baron of Garamond is an older man, on his third wife; there’s some cross-marriage between his children and those of the Baron of Springhollow. We mount the scorpion siege engine on a reinforced wagon, and use last session’s Manual of Golem Creation to create an iron golem to pull the cart. Jenny, meanwhile, has had custom barding crafted for her horse so it will have a unicorn horn. 

It would be nice if we had some kind of spy ring of our own, but we don’t. Eh, c'est la guerre. We do what we can, which is mostly murdering people and turning them into undead.

So, next week: the assault on Garamond.