2025/04/18: Searching Kierst Isle Part 7
General Summary
Knight, Buzz, Malakai, Rusti, Kal'vus, Kelsey
The start of the session was spent discussing the themes and powers of the prestige classes unlocked by the Trial of Eight Sovereign Seas. Once that was resolved, the party picked up where it had left off: trying to figure out how to get through the petrification dust trap room. A bunch of analysis and testing of the dust room was done. Nothing really worked. Gaseous form things were fine, but even Malakai's energy wings could get petrified even when there wasn't visible dust on them.
Faerie fire revealed the six petrified beings in the room. A sorceress, a fop, a beholder (or some similar creature), and several others. The party's wind elemental found what was presumably the exit, but it had a bunch of necromantic energy leaking out of it. The party eventually decided this was horrible and there was no clear safe way forward.
Rusti communed with her patron god in hopes of guidance. Thezidun's response: "Free the fop, go up a level, free the child. Then go back."
True to the guidance, the party freed Gillian McFoe, Problem Solver, then made their escape back to the previous dungeon. As they headed back towards the Decapitator's trap corridor, they asked McFoe what he was good at. He claimed to be "good at everything." "I'm a superior individual overall." They concluded that he was a multiclassed bard, if perhaps not a musical one.
On the way, the party was blocked by a blackened undead with a big shield. Rusti promptly flushed him down the hallway. He showed up again farther down, looking battered and bedraggled. Knight jogged up to him, phased through him, and decapitated him from behind. Then Knight blinked out of the way before the second shielded undead hiding farther down the hallway could gut him with a nasty-looking short sword.
With the way clear and no urgency driving his steps, Kal'vus kindly gestured the eager Kelsey forward. The undead tried to intercept her with his shield. Kelsey responded by climbing over it to hack his shield arm off. He tried to answer by tackling her and stabbing her with a paralyzing short sword, but instead her newly acquired Scarf of Displacement went off and teleported her back to the rest of the party, leaving him flailing on the ground. Kal'vus calmly stepped forward and put a divine slash down the hallway to thoroughly eviscerate the now exceedingly frustrated death knight.
The party returned to the trap course. Buzz discovered that he could summon his walls of stone down the hallway to block some of the damage. Unfortunately, some traps were visibly able to cut through effortlessly, and the walls meant those blades would be invisible until moments before the runners were skewered.
After much deliberation, the party ended up with Knight, Kal'vus, and the beige ninja Sahzam running the gauntlet without the walls. Buzz and Gillian opted to stay behind. Rusti and Malakai were shrunk and stuck in Knight's pockets.
The corridor was a nightmare, but with exceptional teamwork and a lot of luck, the runners proved equal to the task. The traps that almost ended them included a spear wall, a barrage of knives, and something referred to as the "grapple-chain squelcher". Then a single incredibly toxic poison drop. A magical burning blade. A poison injector. Kal'vus and Knight had to pull the ninja out of a void that sucked his foot and ankle in and tore them off. Finally, a giant weight forced the group to dodge into other traps to get out of the way.
The time-reversing ninja wannabe wasn't doing too hot by the end of it, but Kal'vus and Knight were mostly okay.
(Malakai, immune to blunt damage, may or may not have been left in the maze to wedge something in place. "I am a team member. Not a wooden chock." "Yeah, a wooden chock would break!")
The Decapitator and his team ambushed the group immediately at the end of the course. The Decapitator himself was wielding a throwing guillotine. He was backed up by four big bully Mongol types. The guillotine was a flying, dancing weapon that automatically went first, but Knight was fast enough to react and intercept it, batting it away from the party. Rusti responded to the murder attempts by triple-bouncing Zen Hwan with lightning and cooking him immediately where Sahzam had glued him to the wall.
Kal'vus engaged the now uncontrolled flying decapitation machine. He kept it away from the party while he tried to beat it into submission. Kelsey engaged the thugs, wounding them while Killgleam cast disjunction on the guillotine. Knight eviscerated the thug that had a mancatcher. Rusti finished off the bunch of them with a liquid fireball.
With the last living (or undead) enemies fallen, it was just a matter of subduing the guillotine until it ran out of energy. Then lots of treasure was theirs.
Rewards Granted
Character(s) interacted with
Created Content
Kal'vus
Rusti
Buzz Gizmo
Knight of Darkhome
Kelsey of Kaelund
Malakai
Report Date
18 Apr 2025
Primary Location
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