Session 11 - Spikes and Spiders
March 13, 2009 - The Stormhammers ponder a spike pit and battle spiders and spider-men.
While the Stormhammers rest, they peruse some of the books from the halfling's room and discover that his name was Skaven, one of the three people Drakthar sold the decanter of endless water to. After resting and recovering their abilities, the Stormhammers (consisting of Huron, Yggdrasil, Snake Eyes, Lover and Cram) continue on into the ruins in search of the wands. Huron has cut off Skaven's head and has it on his belt. Gary kicks in a door to find 4 human minions calming sitting at tables, eating some stew and chicken legs. Gary bluffs them and says that Skaven wants them back up on the surface. They ask why, since they just returned from above, and Gary says "DON'T YOU LOVE RAPING AND PILLAGING??" They consider, and agree. They walk out and head for the southern exit.
Huron, Cram, Yggdrasil and Lover ambush them as soon as they notice the wrecked statue and destroyed wall, and all four are slain without any trouble. The Stormhammers feel pretty good about their clever assault and approach another unopened door. Inside they hear voices and a low growling, which Huron identifies as a Dire Wolf...but the voices and growling cease as he's at the door listening.
They kick in the door to find a human guard, two gnolls (one with a spear, one with a longbow) and a dire wolf waiting for them. Yggdrasil runs in, Lover divine challenges the archer, and the fight is on. Huron activates his spider climb boots and scampers up the wall and along the ceiling to get to the human guard. He and Yggdrasil fight the guard and dire wolf. The dire wolf keeps knocking both of them down for a while and chewing their legs off. Lover traps the archer in the corner but rolls horribly for most of the fight. The spear gnoll gets into the previous room with Snake Eyes and Cram. He wounds Snake Eyes, who lets out a wail and flops to the ground, pretending to be dead. The gnoll believes him and turns to attack Cram, and Snake Eyes leaps back up and sneak attacks it. This happens a few times until finally Snake Eyes, while running around the gnoll to get a flank, gets impaled by the furious gnoll on an opportunity attack and falls to 0 hit points...but the gnoll thinks he's faking and bites him for good measure. Eventually Yggdrasil notices and runs in, and he and Cram finish off the gnoll.
After healing up, they investigate the rest of the room, and find a large 20' x 20' pit trap in the floor. They throw the human guard's corpse in and it triggers the trap, revealing a 20' drop onto large metal spikes glistening with poison. This sets off all sorts of ideas in the Stormhammers minds, such as:
- using the wand of control water they have to retrieve water from the underground lake and fill the pit with water so they can swim across (even though they can edge around the outside of the pit without trouble)
- emptying their bag of holding full of loot on the floor so they can fill it with water and fill up the pit
- filling the pit with water so that they can dip their weapons in it to get poisoned weapons
- filling the pit with water and then bringing the poisoned water back to town and POISONING THE WATER SUPPLY
- filling the pit with water so that they can swim down and rip out the spikes and attach them to Yggdrasil
After they finally decide to just leave the pit alone, they check out an adjacent room, which is full of ordinary weapons and light armor. They also take 3 small casks of ale from the room. After, they decide that instead of continuing further into the heart of the ruins, they want to go back and check out the hallway and halfling-sized passageway. The hallway has two walls on the southern wall, and they split up to open them both at the same time. Huron & Lover open the first, while Cram and Snake Eyes open the second. (Justin had to leave so Yggdrasil is being played as a Healbot.) Huron & Lover kick open their door and are immediately pounced upon by three leaping spiders. One bites Lover, and the other two bite Huron (one of which crits him for over 20 dmg). In addition, both of them are poisoned, slowed AND knocked prone. Nothing is in Snake Eyes and Cram's room, so they rush over and help, and the spiders go down relatively quickly, though they do skitter back into the room (which is covered in thick webs) and pounce again.
After cursing the spiders, they investigate the rooms. They are both full of heavy webbing but the walls have been broken down and lead into unworked caverns. Passageways through the webbing have been cleared to walk through. The webbing, while thick and slightly sticky, have lost most of their adhesiveness and don't stick to things without extra effort. Snake Eyes runs back and grabs a halberd and wraps it completely in webbing and puts it into the bag of holding. They decide not to go through the web tunnels.
Returning back to Skaven's room, Snake Eyes squeezes into the halfling-sized tunnel with a light spell cast on a rock so he can see. He crawls through and stops when he can hear skittering and scratching on stone. He uncovers the light stone, revealing a flash of light in which he catches glimpses of another jumping spider, a horse-sized spider with blade-like legs, and a humanoid with spider-ish eyes and mandibles. They recoil at the flash of light and Snake Eyes runs back to the party, and they take shelter in the burned-out barracks to wait for the attack.
A few minutes pass, then a few minutes more. Huron peeks out and sees nothing, so he sneaks out and looks down the hallway. He sees nothing there, so he continues down the hall. Snake Eyes also runs out, heading for the halfling tunnel, but he spots two deathjump spiders hiding in the shadows on the ceiling, about to pounce on Huron, and one of the spider-men (Ettercaps). Snake Eyes leaps backwards into the duergar room and readies his weapons. The spiders pounce on Huron and the Ettercap spits a ball of webbing which explodes, covering a big area with sticky webs, entangling Yggdrasil and Snake Eyes. Another Ettercap lumbers out from around the corner (where they were hiding) with a greataxe, and runs unhindered over the webs to bite Snake Eyes. Snake Eyes resists the poison though. Cram goes to help Huron, who is angrily fighting the spider who pounced on him, and Lover runs into the middle of the fray and fights everyone.
The Stormhammers suffer from a LOT of status effects over the course of the fight, enduring deathjump poison, being slowed, being knocked prone, and being entangled in the webbing ball burst effect. The webbing ettercap also reveals an annoying ability - as a minor action, it can throw a web net on someone, restraining them. Cram finds himself mostly unable to use his burst spells due to the narrow hallway. At one point Lover is webbed to the floor AND wrapped in a web net, and he uses a Hero Point to burst out of the webs and murder the ettercap. (He was able to make 3 saving throws at the start of his turn, to try and escape the 2 web effects. His first two rolls were successes, so he broke free.) Snake Eyes runs into poison trouble as well fighting the ettercaps, and Yggdrasil's single action each round are usually spent healing him or giving him first aid so he can make a saving throw.
Huron reduces one of the deathjump spiders to near-death almost immediately, but for some reason is unable to hit it for the rest of the fight, and spends many rounds taking poison damage and being slowed. However, his fighter's mark keeps the spider from running off. At one point Cram runs up to help out, and is immediately poisoned and slowed for his efforts. The two of them CONTINUE to miss the spider, with melee and magic attacks. The spider (the first combatant to attack) is actually the very last one to die. Lover proves how durable a Lover is in combat, dishing out huge amounts of damage while healing himself and the others.
After the fight, the Stormhammers decide to rest again in the barrack and recover.
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