Good!Party: The Ascent Into Welfort

We have killed the feathery abomination.

We’re in this sort of horrible sewer where the bird-thing lived, and this is our way into Welfort. We proceed forward and around a corner. We don’t see anything moving, but there’s a green glow coming from around the next corner. We move up as quietly as this group can manage. Tavros looks around the corner.

The room ahead has an underground lake; phosphorescent fungi have overrun the room, and there two particularly large toadstools over at the edge of the water. The ceiling is 20’ high, and Tavros thinks that the whole place may be overrun by a single organism.

Geddy casts Detect Magic and notes the presence of some nifty magic items in a pile of skulls in the corner. He also senses a very powerful magic aura from the very bottom of the lake. Geddy casts Grease and approaches the nearest tendril of fungus; it doesn’t react. He touches it, and it wiggles… almost like a worm. The wormy-bits are camouflaged within the fungus, and appear to be able to move – and to be highly adhesive. When it wriggles, the two toadstools open mouths and exhale small clouds of spores.

Tavros’ sword: Axiomatic, Good, +5; produces a Magic Circle vs. Evil and allows him to cast Greater Dispel Magic 1/day at +15, area affect only.

Geddy casts Grease on Tavros’ sword. Tavros cautiously attacks one of the tentacles, chopping off a tip that wriggles and dies. The two big toadstool things thrash around and screech and then belch spores throughout the entire room. Tavros takes one look at this and decides that we all just need to cover our noses and mouths with cloths before we step into this.

Eva jumps into the water and transforms into a gold dragon. Tavros takes a five foot step and starts slicing. He’s attacking the bigger tendrils now, and hits twice, doing some fairly decent damage. Leira drops a fireball, and the fire does damage; but this thing is so large that it apparently can just soak that kind of damage.

Geddy steps up and plays a power chord on Lichenbacher’s Electric Lute, and strips a section of fungus right off the wall. Several tentacles push into the hallway, placing themselves in reach of Geddy and Leira. More tendrils attack Tavros. Two of them hit him, and then grab him and shove him into one of the toadstools.

Eva uses her fire breath, doing a huge amount of damage to the fungus. It is not happy about that.

It heals.

Tavros decides that this thing is way too strong to escape, so he uses his Frost Breath on the inside of its mouth, doing a decent amount of damage – it does not like that. Leira drops another fireball, doing more damage.

The thing lashes out at Geddy, hits him, and grabs him as well. It starts munching on him as well. It promptly fills the room with spores again, doing a bunch of damage to Eva. Eva tears into the toadstool that’s biting Geddy, managing not to stick to it because Geddy has her thoroughly greased.

Tavros tries to break out, but fails. Leira drops another Fireball, and it fails to save so it takes full damage this time. Geddy, meanwhile, casts Freedom of Movement and is no longer grappled. It attacks him, and does some damage, but it can’t grab him. Eva tears into it again, doing a lot of damage.

Tavros is still being chewed on, but the fungus thing is now looking pretty badly battered. Leira drops another fireball. She follows it up with a quickened magic missile. Tavros pulls himself out, covered in ooze.

Eva dives for the bottom of the lake, and comes back up with a ring of Universal Energy Resistance +15, which Tavros immediately puts on. We then move to check the piles of bones, and gather 26k worth of gold, gems, etc. There is a bag from a dead adventurer, which has a Wand of Cure Moderate 31 charges, 2,800 PP, 4,000 GP in gems, and a +5 Buckler worth 12,500 GP.

We blow more Cure Light wand charges to heal Tavros, Eva, and Geddy.

This area was apparently the garbage dump for the Dark Army’s science experiments. The door on the far side of the dump is a massive, locked, adamantium door. We haven’t found a key yet, so there’s probably nothing down here. Leira hauls out her wand of Knock, and Tavros hauls it open and step through. The other side of the door has a lot of claw marks on it.

There are stairs on the far side.

Geddy: “Hey! Where do these stairs go?”

Tavros: “They go up.”

We make our way up and eventually come up in the old Dark Army Laboratory. We pause to listen at the door. Geddy and Eva can hear sounds of many different creatures moving around, but none of them nearby. Tavros opens the door and steps into the laboratory. There are several tables with unfinished experiments, shelves and armoires. There’s a door on the far side of the room.

Eva and Tavros move to cover the far door, while Leira and Geddy move to investigate the old experiments. As Eva and Tavros approach the door, it bursts open and this horde of mind flayers move through. There’s something very wrong with them, though – they move almost like zombies, and fall on the nearest targets (us). They mind blast the heck out of us, but Eva and Tavros are effectively immune. Geddy gets stunned, though.

The mind flayers assault Eva and Tavros in a horde; two of them manage to get tentacles on her, and one manages to get Tavros. Eva tries to cast a spell but fails; Tavros tries to tear loose and also fails.

Leira drops a fireball on pretty much everybody except herself and Geddy. They hiss at her angrily, looking pretty badly burned. She follows up with a quickened fireball, doing more damage.

Tavros avoids having his brain eaten, and strikes one of the mind flayers on the way in. More of the beasts try to latch onto him, but he shakes this batch off. Four more lurch towards Leira, and just hentai all over her.

Tavros tears loose from the mind flayer that had grappled him.

Leira drops Meteor Swarm, distributing them around the room, and… wipes them out completely. Tavros strolls over and Lays On Hands on Geddy, pulling him back from the edge of death. Geddy then uses a scroll of True Resurrection to bring back Eva. The horde of Mind Flayers is dead.

We can still hear sounds in the distance. The next room has a bunch of old coffins, so probably where stuff was brought in. Leira checks out an experiment and picks up 50,000 GP worth of Sun Rubies. There’s a mummy partly through an embalming process. Geddy starts tearing the wrappings off the mummy, finding a human body underneath. The jars have magically preserved organs.

Tavros approaches the first of the books shelves, He sorts through the books and scrolls on the top: 2.5k worth of animate dead scrolls. There’s also a book covered in human skin, with a title written in Infernal. This is a book of ineffable damnation. We’re… going to destroy that one.

Tavros kicks in the locked cabinet, and smashed the darkskull inside.

Leira moves over to a dead vampire that’s been dissected like a high school science frog. Geddy moves to bookcase #2, finding more scrolls of Animate Dead and two scrolls of Lesser Phylactery, for a total of 4,000 GP. Leira uses the wand of knock this time. Tavros opens this one, setting off a Wail of the Banshee trap, which we all promptly ignore. Evil magic items are worth 23,000.

Tavros moves over to one of the armoires. It’s protected with an energy drain trap. Leira drops another Knock on this. 

Scroll of Power Word Kill
Scroll of Mordenkainen’s Disjunction
Scroll of Imprisonment
Scroll of Freedom

Geddy takes all of those. Leira moves over to the next Armoire. She opens it with Knock. Tavros opens it, ignoring another Wail fo the Banshee. There are records here, tracing to various Bank Accounts in Lamarque. They’re from the time when they were financing the Dark Army. Geddy pulls a Gather Info, and we get ready to steal 93,000 GP from their accounts.

Geddy checks out the potions bookcase. 3 potions of Displacement, 3 of Bestow Curse, and 3 of tongues. We decide that we’re just going to sell all of those, for 4,200 GP. There’s also a long treatise from Kaz Drachma, Kaz Lucian, and Hierophant Malaphar himself. It details their plan to breach the Ghost Tower – the castle of Sandorn in Fanaxia. You must sail to the middle of Mar Dentro; you’ll need three 20th level casters of different types and one of the Vecna artifacts.

…This is probably where they are now. We could probably get by with something sufficiently attuned to Vecna. Leira thinks the crown – which we have – would probably work. The tower exists across various places and times.

We move into the next room, and Tavros immediately goes to touch the sarcophagus. It appears to be some sort of holding tank for souls. It tries to steal his, but he’s too strong for it. Leira goes to check the coffins; they were dug up from around Welfort. There are a couple of posts that have claw-marks, and heavy-duty chains are scattered around. Geddy and Eva go to check the demonic-looking door. The face on it kind of moves and looks at them: “Passssssworrrrd?”

Geddy tries something at random. It doesn’t work, and now we’re in combat again. The face frowns and ghostly faces start forming on the door. One of them jumps out and hits Geddy, but fortunately we’re still protected by Death Ward.

Geddy: “Fuck me! We need to get a password for this thing!”

Eva: “Or destroy it.”

This is basically a living wall, so it’s limited to whatever’s embedded in it. Geddy: “So everybody back off and start blasting this thing.” He retreats.

Tavros steps over and attacks. Leira tries a scorching ray, and finds out that this thing is immune to magic. Eva’s Breath Weapon doesn’t do anything either. It releases a cloud of flying ghost heads which attack us for fairly significant damage, though we are at least relatively safe due to Death Ward. Geddy tries to dispel it and fails. 

Tavros murders it.

Leira uses the Wand of Knock to unlock the adamantine door that's left behind when it dies. There’s some stairs going up, that have been caved in with rubble; we shove that aside, and emerge into the castle proper. The servants here bow their heads and scurry away; they leave us alone. We waltz down the hall and over to the throne room.