Session 29 - Elemental Eruptions
February 12, 2011 - Elementals and Hill Giants are defeated as the party continues to track Alek.
Huron, Vico, Yggdrasil, The Champ, Snake Eyes
The game starts off with the Stormhammers settling down to rest outside the dead ogre's cave. They double check to make sure it's REALLY dead and not going to rise up as a zombie or something, but the cave is quiet. They notice, again, the heavy, deep wounds it suffered, akin to axe wounds.
The Champ decides that the way he is going to guard Dogmeat is digging a gnoll-sized trench in the ground, putting Dogmeat inside it, then lying on top of it so he is staring down right into the gnoll's face. The Champ has also, apparently, trained himself to sleep with his eyes open, so he spends the entire night glaring at Dogmeat despite being fast asleep.
Yggdrasil isn't there yet, so it turns out only Vico is on watch. The night passes uneventfully, though Vico does spot a strange fox-sized rodent with glowing red eyes and four forelegs. He watches it carefully but it doesn't approach or do anything unusual, so he doesn't react.
In the morning they decide to try to win Dogmeat's loyalty by arming him. They give him some old +1 Leather Armor they had in the bag of holding and give him back the spiked, oozing-blood club that his gnoll companion wielded in the riverbank fight. His eyes light up and he seems much more at peace upon receiving the items. The party seems unconcerned that they just gave Dogmeat a powerful magical weapon attuned to its evil Demon Prince Yeenoghu that only functions in the hands of loyal gnolls, but oh well.
They return to the rock quarry and cross the waste pit, and continue into the mountainous hills. The air starts getting stale and thin, and a noxious smell starts filling the air, like brimstone or some other toxic source. Far off in the distance, they can see two towers or pillar jutting up above the cloud line, though they are too far away and cloaked in haze/smoke to accurately identify.
Eventually they reach a steep shale mountain face, with a thick 10' wide metal pipe protruding from the side, leading into the mountain at a gentle decline. Inside, the smell is stronger, and it is completely dark. The party scouts ahead tentatively, and eventually discover the pipe continues for a short ways before emerging into a large stone quarry. A sloping path descends to the right, leading to an open plain pitted with large cracks and fissures, and dotted with bubbling, hazardous looking liquid pools. On the other side of the plain is a natural slope leading to another ledge at a higher elevation, from which the two columns jut into the sky. The pools gurgle and boil constantly, and look very hot and unpleasant. In some of the pools silt is flowing across the surface, while small fires are actually burning on the surface of another, which seems to be a tar-like substance.
The party edges carefully down the slope, being careful not to get too close to any of the pools and avoiding the larger cracks on the ground, from which they can see steam and light smoke drifting up into the air. Snake Eyes lurks up above, suspicious. As they cross the ground though, the pools erupt and a variety of elementals burst from the pools or coalesce out of the air - a fire elemental, a silt elemental, an air elemental, and some other ones I can't remember now. (Maybe a steam elemental? And a magma one, or a gravel one or something? I dunno.) They quickly learn the air elemental can turn invisible and fly away, as it quickly does so and flies up to attack Snake Eyes. Small toxic slimes also emerge from the pool and jiggle towards the party. They are felled in a single hit, but the party discovers that whenever one is "killed", a previously-killed slime comes back to life and resumes its attacks.
The other elementals attack the party with a variety of wind and fire-based attacks, though Huron's dragonhide armor proves very valuable and negates much, if not all, of the fire damage. The wind elementals don't deal much damage, but prove a pain in the ass as they knock and slide the party around periodically. The party manages to resist (mostly) the elementals' efforts to push them into the boiling liquid pools, however, and kill them all. Actually, Huron delivers the killing blow to every single one, which earns him an as-of-yet unnamed achievement.
They catch their breath and then head up the other hill to the second ledge. As they ascend, they notice the two columns are two massive metal cylinders, likely pipes similar to the one they traveled through a few minutes ago. The two pipes stick straight up into the sky, and every so often a deep echoing bellowing noise emerges from them, resonating around the entire mountain range and ringing in their ears.
They notice that this stone ground is criss-crossed with a variety of long, jagged cracks of different shape and size. Almost the entire ledge is cracked in this manner, though there are a few small uncracked spaces. Huron decides to run across, avoiding as many cracks as possible, to the other end and see what is there. He makes it across untouched, and spots a large natural doorway leading into the mountain, but it is covered with a massive barrier of wood and nails and spikes that has been laid across the entrance.
A bunch of ogres and giants come out and attack, the grounds begins to erupt in caustic spray and scalding steam, but there is a screeching tone that precedes the different blasts. After some trial and error the party figures out the pattern and dispatches the giants, who are knocking them back and throwing rocks etc. Afterwards they head inside, find the giant barracks and hunker down for a rest.
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