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FR Waterdeep - Session 4

Page history last edited by Jon Goranson 12 years, 8 months ago

Ancient Traps

 

July 7, 2011

 

The group goes into the first area and the harper, Jaress, gets past the door and the first guardians.  The first guardians stand silently in the first room beyond the door, fire angels or fire archons or something with fiery wings.  If it is a carving or statue, it is exquisite.  The group can’t tell from looking at it.  Jaress says something in what the group thinks is Netherese and nothing happens to them with the guardians.  They go to the next door and it takes a while to get past the door.  A short hallway ends with another guardian that is frozen or petrified or something.  However, this time it’s a beholder! 

 

Not knowing how to get past this guardian, the group activates the beholder and it attacks!  The beholder really is controlling things.  It dominates Paavu for several rounds, forcing him to attack the party.  The beholder then disintegrated Jaress!  And slammed the others hard with its eye beams.  However, the group slowly wears it down and finally manages to defeat it.  The t intersection where the beholder was has two doors.  They look at one but activate the trap in trying to open the door!  A pit trap opens up in half the intersection, but many of them manage to jump off and avoid the trap, except Paavu. 

 

Paavu finds himself falling thirty feet below but the group watches as the ceiling above the door has spikes come out of it.  As Paavu nears the floor, he disappears and reappears there but not before a reverse gravity takes affect and he falls forty feet back up and hits the spikes!  And he’s caught on the ceiling now as the reverse gravity wears off, so he could fall again and activate it all again!  But, the others manage to grab him and bring him over to one side. 

 

Lucan jumps into the room beyond the door only to find himself face to face with a golden scaled dragon.  Again, it is as still as a statue but has a crystal ball in front of it, armor and magic behind it and a shelf full of scrolls.  Lucan finds the panel to deactivate the pit trap on the left side and triggers it, shutting the trap door. 

 

The dragon slowly awakens and tells the group it is caught in a powerful geas to guard and protect this stuff by Congenio Ioun himself, and several in the group recognizes the name of a powerful Netherese spell caster.  They talk to the dragon and he is nice enough and not happy at being captured.  They don’t want to fight him but they have to find the scrolls they need. 

 

[something happens]  The group found that the collar the dragon is wearing is the focus for the geas and Paavu and Lucan think they can break it.  Lucan performs a ceremony to make the band as weak as he can and then Paavu hit it with his Holy Avenger, calling upon it's dispelling powers.  It works and the dragon is free!  The dragon is quite happy about that.  However, he also claimed the treasure but he let them have the scrolls as he has read them.  He’s even more eager to do the research for them so he can keep the scrolls so he does that as they decide to search the rest of the place. 

 

The group goes to the other door in the intersection and find the pit trap and disable it.  Then they walk down the narrow hallway.  They find a hallway filled with murder holes and a tiled walkway that’s about six inches wide but it starts after the murder holes and ends before they do.  Vahn is able to jump to it and walk safely without activating anything.  On the other side of it, before another locked door, he finds a panel on the right side and tries to deactivate the trap.  But nothing makes sense and he activates the trap and sends ball lightening down the passageway!  The group moves out but all are hit.  He tries again and the same thing happens.  Finally, Lucan goes down there and realizes that Vahn has been working on the false panel, so finds the real one and deactivates the trap. 

 

Beyond the door, once it is unlocked, is another puzzle.  The group has to find the heaviest ball among eighty one similar ones and place it in the door to open it.  Alex gets to work and soon finds it and puts it in the door, which opens up to reveal a treasure room! 

 

However, this turns out to be a false treasure room, except for some scrolls, as the items are cursed and one almost destroyed all of their coins!  In trying to escape it, several of the group walk to the fey wild and find that a powerful entity of the hunt was imprisoned here, another of Ioun's guardians.  The group bargains with it and frees it, bringing it back to the Realms.  When the hunter comes back, it reveals the secret door and they go into that room to find thirteen chests.  They can choose to open any chest but to do so means they will be affected by a random card from the Deck of Many Things.  And each chest has a full deck of cards that could affect them. 

 

The group opens all of the chests and only has four bad cards, two of which weren’t too bad.  And the treasure they got was well worth it!  They find millions in gold and platinum and many powerful items in this store room. 

 

They are still in the desert and must wait a bit for the dragon to find out about the skulls of skullport but they are much better off than they were. 

 

GM Notes

 

  • The traps were well received and the group liked the traps and things that were meant to challenge the players, not characters.  Old school gaming!  Really allowed several players to shine, which is not a bad thing.
  • I was very happy with how the Deck of Many Things worked out.  It has help set up many new threads, depending on what the players pick.
  • This campaign is probably going to be dark as the characters are really pushing that line. 
  • Won't be playing the next week due to my vacation. 

 

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