Campaign 4, Session 16

The Heroes return to the Spire and fight the elements...and elementals.

After a good night's rest, the party takes their wagon and returns to The Spire. The group makes their way back in, Mongoose commenting on everything as they move through all the levels. Once they made it through the first four levels, they were reunited with Jarash, now calling himself Jarash the Crablord. He wished them luck and allowed them to pass. The group used their potions of water breathing and began to make their way further into the complex. As they began to make their way further, the water rose to two feet high, making problems for Christie. The clever spellcaster elected to summon a pair of hippocampi for the group to use, particularly herself and Guiliman, who was still wearing platemail.   The first room they passed seemed to be the breeding grounds of crabs, thousands and thousands of crabs all crawling over each other and minding their own business in a small room. They gave this room a wide berth, particularly after Jarash assured them there was nothing valuable in there.   The next room they ran into contained a set of stairs going down further underwater, and the current flowed south toward a waterfall. Unfortunately, there was also a water elemental in the room. The creature put up a bit of a fight, but after nearly dying, it created a giant torment of water, dispelling Christie's magical lights, and fleeing in the darkness. Once the lights were restored, the elemental was nowhere to be found. The group elected to check what was over the waterfall, and found another room about ten feet down, but instead of the nice clear water as they had found currently, it was dirty and muddy water, and a creature they identified as a mudlord threw mudballs at them until they retreated from the falls. They elected instead to take a passageway east, figuring they could come back for the stairs later.   Making their way through the small passageway, they found a much larger water elemental, and the smaller injured one, as well as a portal to the plane of water. A great fight broke out but both elementals were eventually slain. The group investigated the room, finding that the portal was shooting out water at irregular intervals, and that there were two small sized grates that protected tunnels that led down to a completely submerged level. They also found small sized beds on tables but nothing in the way of valuables, only empty crates.   Not wanting to go completely underwater yet, they backtracked and checked out the stairs going down, but the stairs only led to an iron door with no hinges or door handle. The group returned to the eastern chamber.   The group elected to send Christie down, being the only one who would fit, but being that she was a weak swimmer at best, they tied a rope to her and held on, knowing that they would be at a disadvantage once she left as the magical lights would travel with her. Going down the tunnel, she found a strong current of water pulling her down, and then a fork in the tunnel. She explored to the west, and found a door, she then headed to the east as far as she could but found only more tunnel. She made her way back up to the group and explained what she found, but then made her way back down and opened the door.   Water flooded into the room past the open door, and Christie found herself in the same room as the mudlord. She tugged on the rope for the group to pull her back, but the mudlord grabbed her before she could get too far away, and the combined weight of the two of them proved too much for the party to pull up, given that they were also pulling against the current of the water. Christie used one of her teleportation tricks to escape the mudlord and get to the top of the waterfall, where she was found by Jimmy, who had made his way back into the waterfall room upon hearing her screams. Unfortunately, the mudlord elected to travel up the water tunnels and attacked the rest of the group in the eastern chamber.   The battle was long and hard fought, the creature proved to be an elemental in nature, as well as being an amorphous blob of mud, making it hard to injure with nonmagical weapons, and it didn't really have any weak points to exploit. It continued to try to smother and consume members of the party, it slayed the two hippocampi (which proceeded to disappear back to their home plane, infuriating the mudlord) and kept trying to eat Christie. The mudlord seemed to be more intelligent then the other elementals, and after it had be sufficiently beat up by a combination of Guiliman's sword, Jimmy's Daggers, and Han's bombs, it tried to flee back to the plane of water, but because of Christie's magic, Guiliman was able to hit the creature as it fled, killing it.