Stone Soules Summary XIX: Spiders and Undead: More Tan-El Fun
Here's the game in brief. If possible, we are going to play more again on Saturday since Edwin didn't feel well enough to play too late tonight.
1. The Spider. We were prepared and tried to kill it. It was above animal intelligence. It at one point dropped a mummified body to us as we were trying to get to it. The body had magical gear, including a mage spell with a 9th, 8th, and 7th level spell on it, cast at the 19th level. This was a serious treasure. We tried to get up further into its lair, but could not. We tried to communicate vocally but could not, though it did speak in its weird language to us.
2. On the way to the spider we found a weird area of the city where the entire vegetation was dead and a dull haze hung over the depression in the city. It was eerie. We came back later to find: it got progressively darker and more evil. The weather in the area was quite perverted. Gram took out his sun coin, and it was then that we noticed a number of black ribbon shapes flying quickly through the air, homing in on us. Henry ID'd this as an attack form of the Grey Philosopher undead monster. We knew this was bad news. Each of two ribbons hit Gram, despite destroying some with missile weapons. They each had a _cause light wounds_ effect on him, in fact directly on his face. We tried to shoot some more, but were forced to retreat. The light did reveal though that we were near a gate house in the city from which the attacks came. As we retreated, the ribbons following us homed in on Ceydric and delivered him a friendly 8X wound, and brought him instantly to 0 hit points. Luckily he could still function at 0, but the turning had been unsuccessful up to this point. Alegra managed (barely) to hold them off as we retreated out of the area. Some hands reached up out of the ground to grab us as we retreated, but we were unable to stick around and examine things. The attack took everyone of Eli's offensive spells to stall, and most of the clerics could not even affect the things. Alegra was the only one who could turn them at all, and even then some managed to get through and tried to come at her, but were destroyed by missile weapons before they reached her. All the while we were healing Ceydric and trying to get out of the area of evil.
Any ideas? We probably play saturday night so suggestions before then could be useful!
kyle/alegra
Other things from the game I did not mention:
1. We cast a Divination on the library:
Very powerful creatures there (no dominant alignment)
Rich treasure is there
"To shatter the retardation of the powers there is beyond your reach."
(There was much speculation on this last phrase. Ultimately we could not get inside without breaking a window, something we did not look forward to the consequences of. For now we have given up on the Library.)
(From before : The castle had "vastly powerful creatures" with both LE and CE, with LE "vastly" dominant. Chances of disturbing CE/Demons were moderate. Chances of disturbing LE mod to high.
[none of this kind of info was gained from out recent Div, specifically showing us that either Golems or creatures of
negligible alignment or varied alignments are in the Libe. I suspect there are Golems no matter what])
2. We checked out the general aspect of the other Hexagonal Area (HA) buildings. The other HA buildings were all varied and some had obviously been hit by SMART (i.e. School of Magical Arts).
3. One of the HA buildings contained a Giant Troll which we trashed but nearly killed Jerem and Canstin (all the more reason to train them). We killed it and got a little bit out of its nest but not much. Giant Trolls where clothes and build a large bird-like nest but were otherwise uninteresting.
4. Despite our scouting, the Behir appeared to leave the city when we thought the Behir was gone already. This was somewhat disturbing.
4a. Alegra does not want to kill the spider.
5. The GP appears to control a relatively large section of the city. To
quote the Sphinx, the Undead "are everywhere and are loosely aligned" in the
GOC.
Alegra/Kyle