2025/01/10: A Materials Hunt in Kaelund Report
General Summary
Malakai, Knight, Kal'vus, Zess, Ba'alzamon, Kelsey
Ba'alzamon was communing with the spirits, so Kal'vus stayed to guard him while the rest of the party went searching for entrances.
The Compass of Dream's didn't point to either of the nearest Underdark entrances. It was swiveling around as if it was trying to point to something much closer. Zess asked if the party had yet investigated that odd catapult stone.
Knight hit the stone with the Dream Master's Nail. All he got from it was endless screaming.
Kelsey moved the stone. There was an oddly deep crack underneath. Knight went to shade form and explored down it. Apparently it was the top extent of a large fissure that extended down into the earth. Zess pulled out a crystal that was the access to a demiplane: Zess, Malakai, and Kelsey piled into the demiplane and Knight took it with him down into the earth. (They left a note for Ba'alzamon and Kal'vus.)
Knight followed the fissure down through layer after layer of rock. He passed cold spots that got almost painful, like a burn in reverse, and which got more dense on the way down. Eventually, though, those stopped, and then the fissure opened up into a small and somewhat unstable cave. There was rubble all over the floor and a hole leading further below. The hole seemed to go through brick. This wasn't just a natural cave.
A strange, distorted call echoed up from below after Knight let the party out. Kelsey confidently identified it as the call of a dinosaur. Kaelund has a lot of dinosaurs. Kelsey hates them.
With the rest of the party safely released, Knight scouted further below. The hole let out into a pitch-dark tunnel that Knight's darkvision revealed to extend thousands of feet into the distance. The walls were made up of weird bricks of different sizes and shapes, squares and blocks with lots of engravings and decorations. It had almost a mosaic look. Towards the far end of the tunnel there were some passages leading off to the sides. The other end, next to the hole, had been filled by rubble.
Kelsey's magic swords spoke up to tell the party that the magical fields in the area felt weird. Blocked off, dense, with what felt almost like spots of antimagic.
The party carefully dropped down past the rubble into the tunnel. Kelsey almost slipped on the rubble, but recovered by jumping off the side and just doing a hero landing in the tunnel. As the party was considering their next move, Ba'alzamon stepped out of the wall by transporting via Renedge. He'd stored Kal'vus away in a portable hole for the trip.
Ba'alzamon's Detect Geometry revealed that the odd wall design wasn't random; there was a sevenfold geometric pattern in the wall bricks. That's a magically significant number: These people knew their magic alongside their geometry. Ba'alzamon let out a single tear of appreciation of its beauty. The intended purpose of the pattern: Make the facility harder to detect, harder to break through. Should defend against seven different dimensions of travel and divination. So what happened to collapse the tunnel?
Knight implied that the Great Rift might have been created by whatever caused this to cave in, or perhaps this was caved in as a side effect of the Rift's creation. What created it? Kelsey said the Great Rift was created long ago due to big magical battles, but the details are unclear. Ba'alzamon suggested Catalus used to use Meridan for dueling other mages, and he might be responsible for it.
The party headed down the corridor after letting Kal'vus out of the portable hole. Suddenly, with no warning, Ba'alzamon found himself buried under a flurry of teeth and claws. A moment later, he was back in Guaradon as his death-prevention contingency teleport went off. He immediately sent a sending to Knight, warning him of what happened. Knight ordered the party back to the entrance, leaving a cloud of Void behind them to block the sight of whatever was down there.
The party made it safely into the cave above. As something inspected and snapped at the Void cloud below, the adventurers discussed their options. They could leave. They could wait for Ba'alzamon to return. Or Killgleam could transport them into whatever dimension these things were attacking from and make it a straight fight.
After consideration and discussion, the party opted for the latter. They weren't ready to give up quite yet. Just in case the tunnel's defenses were still up in the other dimension, the party opted to do the phase shift back inside the tunnel, not in the cave above. As soon as Kelsey dropped down, she found herself grabbed from multiple dimensions; as she shifted planes, she saw that she was surrounded by tentacled velociraptors that seemed to be made of liquid darkness.
(Side note: Kelsey sort of knighted everyone to target them for the plane shift. This may technically make Knight a knight of Kaelund. Yay!)
The rest of the party was brought in with her. They found themselves in a plane of darkness, where the only colors were different flavors of darkness, disrupted by sharp contrast provided by the cloud of Void. Knight, fast on the draw as always, dropped into the throng blades-first, cutting the tentacles to shreds and freeing Kelsey from the grapple. Zess followed him down with a flurry of arrows that turned two of the raptors to pincushions.
The raptors tried to counterattack, but it turned out they couldn't see in the Void cloud, and Knight was in place to intercept the frightening flurry of attacks that came flying in regardless. Kelsey and Kal'vus responded with their own. The last four raptors died in a magnificent display of martial prowess. (Kal'vus was prepped to clean up any spares, but there weren't any; he thoroughly enjoyed watching Kelsey do her thing.)
Covered in all-but-invisible raptor blood and getting increasingly bad feelings about that non-Euclidean darkness plane, the party returned to the Material. The blood came with them. It resisted any material attempts to remove it, being more liquid darkness than physical object, and it even managed to make the fire from Knight's armor into some sort of blacklight fire. The solution: Malakai's Light Grenade. Kelsey, unfamiliar with the spell, got blinded despite her own efforts. Kal'vus nearly got blinded through his magical blindness-preventing sleep mask. Knight avoided the problem by just not having eyes at the time. Zess and Malakai got a little crispy but managed to shrug everything but a few bright afterimages. The sunlight did get rid of the blood!
While the rest of the party was figuring out how to safely remove Old One velociraptor darkness blood, Ba'alzamon had been working on a new spell. "Seven-fold Geometric Planar Protection", or something along those lines. It replicated the intended protection of the hallway walls within a radius based on circle of protection against evil. A quick permanency made duration a nonissue, and Ba'alzamon rejoined the party after an hour of absence.
With the party properly reformed and no new threats having appeared, the adventurers prepared to venture onward. The tunnel was 30 feet tall and 60 feet wide, and very, very long. Ba'alzamon summoned a trap-detecting fog ahead of the party. The fog put out a few green sparks and then dissipated, which is not what it's supposed to do. Summoned squirrels similarly dissipated. Ba'alzamon found this fascinating. A couple other speculative magics suggested something was drawing conjuration magic away to somewhere else, perhaps the Ethereal Plane.
Zess's seeing-eye crow projectiles encountered no traps, so the party moved forward. Kal'vus kindly offered to use what skills his path provided to search for traps, but with the scale involved, Knight (who is mostly immune to traps) opted to just take point and hope to dodge anything that went off. The group made it to the first side hallway without incident. The passage was perfectly smooth obsidian, sort of reflective, with a 10'x10' entrance. The distinct sounds of more raptors echoed from within. Ba'alzamon chucked a Light Grenade inside. It never went off. The party decided there was no immediate reason to draw the attention of more of those things, so they headed for the next passage.
The next hallway was made of jade rather than obsidian. The hallway was 20'x20' and set ten feet off the floor. Looking down the hallway, the adventurers could see that it got increasingly broken up before suddenly turning to uniform white tile. As the party headed down the corridor as a group, those with a sense of smell began to smell an intense scent of iron. It was the sort of smell you'd get from a huge pool of blood.
The next place looked like someone had squared off a gigantic cavern. Inside was a literal jungle walled off by an 80-foot-tall wall of thick metal bars.
Beyond the wall: an absolutely colossal brachiosaur. And either it had no skin, or it had creepy demonic blood-red skin. Also, carnivorous! Ba'alzamon fed the predatory abomination a bunch of red meat, named it Mr. Snookie-Wookums, and started thinking about how to summon it as a minion. (The DM called it a "brachiosaur blood beast", but that's clearly not going to be the official name.)
Rewards Granted
Several darkness-infused arrows
2 xp
Kal'vus
Zess
Knight of Darkhome
Kelsey of Kaelund
Ba'alzamon Dreamender
Malakai
Report Date
10 Jan 2025
Primary Location
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