AD Dungeons and Dragons Part 2

In which the party explores a basement and escapes the house.




Last time, the party had explored the first several floors of the house, carefully checking for traps along the way and looting what they could from every room they entered. They also sent the ghosts of two children on after one of them possessed Seesil, and finally found a way into the basement (from the third floor somehow).

So we will pick up as the group begins exploring the basement. For the first part of this, Rek's player was absent from the group, so a lot of what she does is dictated by other members of the party/the roll of a die when we weren't sure how she would react.

The first thing we noticed upon descending the stairs was the sound of chanting, which seemed to be coming from all directions at once. It was faint, and we could not make out the words. We allowed this to fall into the background of the basement as we set out to explore it. Eld noticed several crypt doors upon exiting the staircase, set on either side of the hallway we found ourselves in. After carefully checking for traps we attempted to open the door by having Red lift it out of the way (it's always nice to have a strong half-orc barbarian to do the heavy lifting.) Inside each crypt we found stone coffins with names on them, but as we had not paid the best attention to the ghosts of the children or to the deed to the house we had found earlier, we couldn't figure out whose was whose. We opened them all anyway, but there was no hidden treasure. However, in the crypt of Gustav and Elizabeth, we did hear a sort of grinding noise, and as we levered the lid off the last coffin, a carrion crawler burst through the wall and attacked us. (A Carrion Crawler is a D&D monster that is basically a large subterranean centipede that searches for dead things to feed on.)

A picture from the 5th Edition Monster Manual depicting a Carrion Crawler
Image from https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Carrion_crawler

The fight was over relatively quickly, but could have gone worse for us (as Eld was caught in its immediate range, and he would prefer to be shooting arrows from further back) but we had some good rolls, and Seesil kept up Resistance on the crawler's target to boost their saving throws against the venomous stings the crawler can deliver with its tentacles.

Having finished with the crypts, we moved north down a hallway with steps leading further down into a large room with alcoves filled with bedding along each wall and a large well in the center. We found some small trinkets here to scavenge, and then explored the well. There was a bucket on a rope that we lowered in, testing the depth. Somehow (I can't remember the exact order of events at this stage) we determined the water made us feel more whole after drinking or touching it. Seesil cast Detect Magic as the others explored the well, and the well did shine as if something magical was in its depths. Determined to check it out, he dived in, and swam a long ways towards the source of the magic, but was unable to find anything before he had to return to the surface for air. Giving up on that, the party hauled Seesil out, but Rek thought this was all good fun and proceeded to shove Colin into the well as well. (One of the players suggested this would be amusing, but we decided it was unlikely Rek would do that. So we rolled a d20, and said if it were under a 5 she would. We rolled a 2...)

After those shenanigans, we continued down some stairs into another passageway, and down some more stairs. We came to a room lines with 13 niches, each niche containing an odd item. Two paths lead from this room, one sloping down to a portcullis, the other leading along the same level. We explored the same level first, and discovered a series of prison cells. After checking for traps (does anybody sense a pattern here? To be fair our DM is great about this, anytime Eld [it's always Eld] says he's checking for traps, the DM asks how he checks for them. It forces more creativity than just rolling for it at least) we looted what we could from the cells and returned to the portcullis. Rek and Eld managed to get the portcullis open, and we entered a large circular room. The chant (which had slowly become clear to us as people chanting "He is the Ancient, He is the Land") stopped as we entered the room. We saw on either side of us ledges along the walls, and in the center of the room, a dais raised an altar off of the water covered floor. We could discern a pile of garbage in one corner of the room. On the altar, a dwarf in armor was strapped down, and upon seeing us he began struggling and calling for help (this was a new player who joined our group at this point). I don't remember who first approached the altar, but as soon as they did, robed figures appeared on the ledges around the room, and began chanting "One must die! One must die!" Sagira tried to set fire to one of the robed figures, but it didn't notice the flames, and Eld's arrow passed through another one. We freed the dwarf, who introduced himself as Arf. But as soon as it became apparent we were not going to kill him, the chanting became angry, and the garbage rose up in the corner, revealing itself to be a Shambling Mound, which lurched to attack us! It was a long and difficult fight, with Are and Rek charging in to attack it (Are wielding the sword we had pulled off the wall upstairs, as he was otherwise unarmed) while Eld and Sagira launched arrows and flames from afar, and Seesil did a buff and run strategy trying to keep up Resistance on whoever the Mound was focusing on to protect against the status ailments it was attempting to inflict on us, but with the help of some lucky critical on our part and some bad rolls from the DM, we were victorious. As the Shambling Mound sank into the water, the chant dissipated, and we left the room. But before we left the house, there was unexplored basement to look through!

We backtracked far enough to go south of the crypts, and found a room strewn with bones, with an alcove on the far wall and a table in the middle. We set about examining the room, looking for treasure, but as we approached the alcove, a Grick (spell check really does not want me to use that word... you mean Trick? No, it must be Brick! ...) darted out and attacked us! A Grick is a large wormlike creature with four tentacles surrounding a sharp beak  on one end. This was not a particularly hard fight but we were worried that it was calling to others (our nature checks told us it was crying out as we fought but whether in pain or to call others of it's kind we could not say) so we finished it off as quickly as we could and did not stick around in case more showed up.

A Grick from the 5th Edition Monster Manual
Picture from https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Grick

We continued moving south, and found a room with a wooden statue of a man with one hand on a wolf's head and the other holding an orb. Eld moved to take the orb, checking for traps by first looking around it, then waving his hands over it looking for triggers, and finally running his fingers around the orb. But as soon as his fingers touched the orb, 5 robed shadows, very similar to the robed figures in the altar room, materialized around us and attacked! We fought hard again, using similar tactics to before, and were able to finish the shadows off, though Eld and Rek lost a few hit points and points of Strength to the attacks of the shadows.

We were running out of areas to check, so Eld moved on and opened the door to the south of the room we had fought the shadows in. Well, he tried to open the door, only to find his hand engulfed in a sticky substance, trapping him to the doorknob! The door revealed itself to be a mimic, and attempted to eat our ranger. Making matters more difficult, the hallway was short and narrow, limiting who could move to support Eld as he struggled to free himself with his drained strength score. Fortunately we have a fire sorceress in Sagira, and her spells combined with Eld's own slashing attacks with his sword were enough to bring the door crashing down.

Finally, we explored the last room which turned out to be a bedroom. At the foot of the bed was a locked chest, and in the corner a wardrobe. We opened the chest and found 4 mysterious vials, as well as some scrolls and some other loot. But we had no chance to examine that, because Rek opened the wardrobe, and as she did so, two ghasts fell out of the walls next to it and attacked us! After our long time exploring the basement this was our most trying fight yet, and several of us only escaped with minimal hit points, and our healers (both cleric and druid) were low on spell slots by the end, but we managed to destroy both of the undead monsters. As they fell, fully dead at last, the house began to shake down to its very foundations. We ran to make our escape (by DM fiat we ran to a hidden trapdoor we had not actually located prior to this point) and emerged in the den on the first floor of the house.

But the house was much changed from when we had initially explored it! Each room's fireplace belched flames at us, and the air was filled with acrid burning smoke. The doorways were filled with swinging, scything blades that would rip into anyone who attempted to move through them. The windows were bricked over. The house itself was trying to kill us!

Each turn we lingered we had to test our constitution or be rendered immobile to wracking fits of coughing from the smoke filling our lungs, but we persevered. Some of us timed the blades and jumped through (getting advantage on our rolls) and others blundered through on blind luck. Some of us missed our timing by a hair, and only escaped by leaving some of the skin on our backs behind. Seesil shifted his form to a monkey and attempted to leap through the first set of blades with heightened agility, but did not get the timing right and lost his monkey tale, transforming back to his lizard shape on the far side. Sagira lost some blood and fell unconscious after the first blade, and Arf was so long bent over coughing that rats started swarming out of the walls to attack him. Fortunately for us, we only needed to get through one more set of blades to escape. Eld made it first. He looked around the house trying to see if he could help, but the house was bricked over tightly, and his attacks on the window merely bounced off. Then Rek made the leap, and lay in the fresh air clearing her lungs. Seesil used his final spell slot to revive Sagira, and once again lost his tail to a blade as he made his escape, but lived to tell about it. (It will grow back! Lizards!) Colin and Sagira both managed to make the last dive out the door with much less trouble than the first one, and finally poor Arf the dwarf came stumbling out, coughing and heaving but alive. We had survived.

We rested for awhile outside the house, recovering from our near death experience and hardly believing we were all alive. After some time, we recovered enough to keep moving.

We followed the road outside for a long ways until we came upon a village. There was hardly anyone to be seen, but we heard someone crying in one of the houses, so half the party invited themselves in and went to see what the matter was. They found a woman weeping in grief that her daughter had been taken away by the vampire that plagued the village, and she had given up all hope of getting her back. We asked where the vampire was, and she pointed out the window towards a distant castle. We had a new quest!

And that's where we left off a month ago. My recollection is not perfect, but I'm pretty sure I have the basics down pretty well. Our next session is tomorrow, and I hope to post about these more closely to the actual session so I remember them better from here on!