Session 28: Dirty Fighting and Ominous Slivers

General Summary

Summary: 3 points, plus a bonus for token management for a total of 4.
We return to the party in the midst of combat with some filthy heavily-armored humanoids...

Hostilities Continue

Round 4

• Sunny performs a Defensive Flourish and expends a charge from Deep Rumble, crushing in his chest cavity.
• Maya moves his Moonbeam onto the nearby caster.
• Saf succeeds on her death saving throw.
• Harb strides over to Saf and feeds her a potion of minor healing.
• The caster, weeping black fluid, lashes out with his glaive toward Maya, landing a few solid slashes that break Maya's concentration on the Moonbeam spell.
• Leucis's Spritual Weapon clobbers one guard and the cleric follows up with an unsuccessful strike with his warhammer.
• The other caster continues to flee out of sight upriver.

Round 5

• Sunny uses Heat Metal on one of the guards' morningstars, causing it to sear into his flesh. The guard reacts by tucking the weapon into a ring at his waist, causing it to char his armor as well as more of his underlying flesh, and he goes down screaming. The scent of baked earth and charred flesh fills the air.
• Maya sinks his teeth into the caster but is unable to knock him over. He expends a spell to heal his wolf form.
• Saf sidles up behind the remaining guard, landing a critical hit. Her longsword slides into the back of the neck, nearly beheading him. The guard vomits blood and tar, collapsing.
• Harb joins Maya by the remaining foe but can't get his rapier past the armor.
• The final caster slams his glaive into the ground, causing a small tremor; Maya keeps his feet but Harb struggles. Harb's Boots of Gyromight pulse with a strange energy and keep him upright, then surge out at the caster with invisible force (rule clarification #1), knocking him over dead.

The party declines to chase the escaped caster and ends the combat.

Combat summary:

• Total duration: 5 rounds
• PC drops: Saf, in the third round.
• Rule clarifications:
  1. An enemy was damaged by the Boots of Gyromight when it failed to knock the wearer prone. .
     RAW: "If you are knocked prone while attuned to and wearing these boots, the source of the effect that knocked you prone makes a DC 15 Dexterity save.
     Ruling: As RAW, we just didn't read it carefully in the moment. It did kill an enemy when it shouldn't have, but he was toast one way or another...
• Kill board:
  1. Sunny: One guard with Deep Rumble (4 one guard with Heat Metal (5)
  2. Harb: One guard with a critical rapier strike(2 one caster with boots (5)
  3. Saf: One guard with a longsword strike (5)

After the hostilities

Maya tears the throat out of the downed caster but notes a strange knot of flesh near his throat. The armor on the dead foes is dissolving, melting, or crumbling into a substance somewhere between sludge and mud; wounds on the enemies also show both blood and dark semi-liquids. Saf is able to determine that these were human, but had some other magic applied to them - these people seemed much smaller than their armor would indicate they should be.
Maya takes a closer look into the strange flesh nodule in the throat of the caster, but can't tell what is going on. The outside flesh is slightly raised and a little puckered, like scar tissue; from the inside there's an enclosed hard pocket of tissue. The druid has Harb hold the body still and carefully carves into the chunk, revealing a small gray stone shard. Maya is careful to remove the shard using a small piece of cloth and not touch it directly.
Harb and Leucis regard the piece, but can't seem to place it to anything they've seen before. Harb recalls some people obsessed with a relic made it part of their body in a similar way, but the stone itself doesn't seem familiar. Maya compares it to ritual scarification.
Maya looks over the bodies of the fallen guards and locates a similar hard flesh knob, in different areas of their bodies (thigh, bicep, collarbone, etc.) Kolvonnin uses Lay on Hands on himself and Saf (10 points each) and then collects Cinnamon from his hiding spot. Leucis starts casting Detect Magic as a ritual while Maya collects similar shards from the other bodies.
Saf takes a seat to recover her faculties. Sunny plays a Song of Rest to aid her recovery.
Maya encounters a few difficulties in extracting the shards from the other bodies, but is able to avoid touching them in the process. Leucis completes his ritual and calls out the following:

• The shards have a powerful Enchantment aura.
• The dead enemies have fading auras of Transmutation and Enchantment.
• There's an aura in a nearby dug pit of Conjuration.

Looking closely at the pit, Leucis locates a portable hole partially filled with dirt and claims it for the group. Maya and Harb drag the corpses into the pit.
While arranging the dead, Leucis muses over the fact that one of the guards seemed like he was trying to speak Infernal; the cleric is fluent in that language but couldn't make it out. Maya attempts to determine if these pieces would form a whole, but is not able to draw a solid conclusion - while they look like they might be pieces of the same thing, they don't look like they fit together to make a thing. Kolvonnin calls upon Pelor for his Divine Sense, and detects a whiff of brimstone that seems to indicate that fiends are involved with the shards.
While the paladin and the cleric don't have a lot of experience with demons or devils, they seem confident that they shards may need to be cleansed before they can be destroyed, and that holy water might be a good means of doing that.
Once all the bodies are in the pit, Leucis empties the portable hole's dirt over them. While this is happening, a dirty map falls out. Maya tries to match it up with his maps, but it seems like this one is a much smaller scale.

The party surmises that the dam is the oblong shape in the river, and that the diamond on the south side of the river is where the fleeing caster came from.
Saf recovers her faculties a bit, makes the rounds of people who assisted her:

• She pulls a healing potion from her pack and hands it to Harb. Initially he demurs, but she insists that "obviously it's better that you have it than I do."
• She thanks Kolvonnin with a small bow.
• She then returns to Sunny and thanks him, with a clap on the shoulder.

She lets out a long breath, and the group catches her up on the recent goings-on. Saf explains that while the dead looked human in life, they seemed possessed or enchanted in some way based on her knowledge of Arcana. That doesn't explain the weird physical changes to their blood and fluids, though, and Saf can't shed any direct light on that; she thinks it may have to do with the fiendish influence Kolvonnin detected.
Saf polls the group for what spells and abilities might help resist the effect of the stone shard, and volunteers to try touching one. The group piles a Bless (on Saf, Maya, and Kol) and a bardic inspiration die on Saf, then she touches a shard.
A surge of power shoots up her arm, and in her mind there's a loud and powerful voice before she shakes it off (she makes her Wisdom save with a 30). With the direct experience of the effect, her knowledge of Arcana gives her a little more information:

• The spell used was Dominate Monster.
• Saf is pretty sure it was a ninth level casting of the spell.
• In addition to the sheer raw power involved, Saf noted that the source felt very distant.
• The source of the effect on the other end wasn't a single entity, but a pair of very different things working in concert.

The group decides that the shards are likely safest in the hands of the paladin, so Kolvonnin puts another layer of wrapping around them and put them in his pack. There's a strength of feeling in the group that lingering here much longer is likely to be dangerous, so they decide that the folks in Sohmweyr should be alerted.
The party also decides to cross the river, so they unload Cinnamon and convince him to jump across as the dam (after a few practice jumps over a puddle).

Next steps:

1. Have the out character discussion to determine where the party is heading.
   • Sunny will compose a Sending to a contact in Sohmweyr explaining what's up and potentially getting help.
   • The party will use the response to determine whether they go to Sohmweyr or to the diamond mark on the map.

Session Feedback

Eddy: Kinda slow, so I was extra distractible. Combat could have run faster. Cool moment for the high-stakes save. Tag-teaming the investigator stuff was really interesting, but it took too long. Personal gauge is if I'm too distracted to pay attention, it's going too slowly. Jeremy'y point about hitting a level 9 spell this early sounded bad, but then I realized I have done worse (Mother of Tarrasques, anyone?).
Heather: A bit confusing on the metal armor bit in combat. Excited that the extra attack will be fun.
James: Rolling low on investigative checks doesn't mean we don't get anything, but it may mean information comes at a different pace. About time we're all the same level, been looking forward to it for a while. Got bogged down in the rehash at the front. Combat resolved pretty quickly. Pacing remains tricky, especially in the investigative portions. Maya needs exposure to more dinosaurs for wild-shape reasons.
Jeremy: For the record, first level 9 spell effect at level 6, let's put that little milestone out there. A little slow in spots. A little more flexible on Divine Sense, need to pay closer attention on description wording for spells and abilities, should see if things are exploitable or applicable. Look forward to what's coming next.
Matt: Glad the stupid chance paid off, wasn't expecting a level 9 spell slot though. If I didn't think Saf could do it, I might have looked for someone else to do it. If it was inert, Identify would be useful, but knowing it's inert was a thing that we needed to do. I figured worst case my character gets possessed and has to be dropped by the party. Reasonable risks are who these characters are. But it took her an hour to summon up the courage to take that bold action. Better clarity about the plate armor being metal bit would have been good. Unspecific rules around HP in level-up situations is a downer.
Meg: A little slow but pretty smooth. We suck at solving mysteries.
John: Bad rolls on figuring things out just means it may become more apparent in retrospect. Fortune favoring the bold was fun to see. I tend to reward people for unorthodox uses of things that make sense to me, despite that being an unreliable heuristic for a player knowing whether something will work or not. Setting things up to use multiple characters' skills or abilities (Arcana + Divine Sense) may be too complicated an approach. Pacing is an area of challenge for my skill, especially with a group of 6. We got about as far as I expected, which is good. Flirting with a "favorite moment" thing for end of year, not sure how much I want to spend on that effort-wise.

Rewards Granted

The party at large reached Level 6. They also recovered a portable hole.