The World of Telvar

With the help of the party’s “tuning fork” Henri was able to figure out how to open the door. The door opened into a round shaft going downwards, with a large lever-operated cargo elevator at the top. The shaft goes down about 15 feet, probably stopping just above the water table. Henri climbed down and scouted ahead just a little. He saw a long hallway with a track for carts heading west, then came up to rejoin the party.

We led the horses to a more remote location and staked their harnesses into the ground. Pheraguat’s hippogriff was given orders to stay put unless threatened. We camped with the animals to regain spells.

After opening the door and taking the lift down, Henri led the way under invisibility. After 60’ the corridor took a 90 degree turn to the south. Eventually the corridor opened up into a space that led off to the right. As we approached the space Henri noticed the echo of the party’s footfalls suddenly became much less. He alerted the party that he thought there might be a silence ahead. Star sensed a mind ahead, but it seemed very confused. Just then, a lightning bolt tore through the front of the party, doing 27 damage, doubled for the bounce off the back wall. Wanda was killed, and Chiaro and Magic Lad both dropped to negative HP.

Henri had noticed that a figure that leaned out from the room and cast the lightning bolt; he moved up to the corner. Rangorn and Pheraguat charged forward. Star death’s doored Magic Lad and Alison cast death’s door on Chiaro off of a scroll. Rangorn entered the room to find an elven woman in leather armor, backing away. She held a wand. Rangorn yelled at her to “drop it!” in elvish and she did, in fact, drop the wand. He asked her, “Why are you trying to kill us”. She tried to respond, but seemed unable to form proper words. She then exploded in a fireball, doing 23 points of damage to Henri, Pheraguat, and Rangorn. The mental signature Star was sensing vanished as the woman exploded. The woman seemed not to leave a body behind, but we noticed than an insignia on her belt matched that of the “Slave Lords” (who were defeated 65 years ago). There was also a “big dead thing” in the corner of the room. It looked like an owlbear with eight tentacles and two extra insectoid eyes in the back of its head, and it seemed to have died within the last minute. No tracks led to or from its location, or the location of the woman.

We detected no evil or magic in the room. Star reached out for psychic impressions and detected signs of a “batshit crazy brain”, an “incredibly confused but insanely egotistical and homicidal mind”. He noticed the impression was mainly coming from a puddle on the ground that formed when some superheated steam condensed after the woman’s explosion. (a “snow clone” / simulacrum?)

Magic Lad and Henri did a bit of an autopsy on the owlbear. It looked to have been put together by a very skilled vivisectionist. On the inside, it seemed to have something horrible and “necrotic” wrong with it, which likely caused its death. It seemed like damage done by “negative energy” magic. This effect appeared to be associated with a ruptured clay sphere we also found inside the body. Chiaro noticed the sphere had some residual magic.

We found a secret panel in the floor of the room. A bit of extra searching revealed that there was also a net over the ceiling. The way the net had channels going back into the walls reminded Henri of the way weapons were wired for shocking grasp. Henri cut some of those wires.

We decided to have Maple stoneshape a hole in the floor panel. As soon as a hole was made, the pressurized caustic gas underneath sprayed out and damaged Maple. Fortunately, she was able to neutralize the poison on herself and Chiaro healed her. We decided to retreat to the horses and rest.

We had to get Wanda raised, so this meant Star taking her body back in a bag of holding, while Pheraguat went back on his hippogriff to bring her back to the party afterwards. For provisioning reasons, the party had to fall back to the border while this was happening.

So after all of this did happen, we sent Henri to scout ahead into the room we had been in before, and he found that the body of the mutant owlbear had decomposed into an awful-smelling maggot infested body.

We used Star’s wind wall to help clear the air. Protected by lightning, cold, and fire, Henri opened the southern door to find a tunnel stretching off to the west.

The tunnel went several hundred feet before ending in another vault-like door. In the middle was a cart running on the tracks. We decided to search the whole corridor for secret doors. We ended up finding two! The first was a secret door about 60 feet back from the vault door at the end of the tunnel. Scuff marks on the floor indicated that the heaviest objects were dragged through it. Lichen growing in the cracks suggested it hadn’t been opened in decades. ­The second was a panel high up on the south wall in the middle of the corridor. It also hadn’t been used in a very long time. Searching for traps turned up some odd wire connections from the panel to the tracks running down the corridor.

We decided to stoneshape the wires to sever them, and came back the next day with Rangorn prepped with multiple aid spells, slow poison, and resistance to fire, cold, and lightning. When he opened the panel, he found a large number of suspicious jars with an elaborate mechanism that would have done something unpleasant had we not disabled the wires. They resembled the jars we saw in the pit in the previous room. The jars are also entangled in some sort of wire net, making it seem that they would be hard to remove safely. We decided to close the compartment and walk down the corridor to the other secret door.

Rangorn opened the door and found himself immediately in combat with a huge Frankenstein-like monster that grabbed him and threw him into the room behind! Rangorn rolled to his feet, avoiding the stomp attack of a second Frankenstein monster in the room.

Pheraguat shot one monster with a nonmagical arrow (that still did damage, as it came from his magic bow). Star blasted one with his circlet, but it seemed to be immune. It similarly ignored a magic missile from Wanda. Zippo and Rangorn attacked with melee weapons, but missed. Maple threw a faerie fire, illuminating the golems. A few of the party clerics started casting cure light wounds. One golem punched Pheraguat twice for 20 damage, stunning him. Zippo clocked one with a staff of striking. Pheraguat dropped one with another bowshot. Fearing a possible explosion, several low-hp party members decided to back off a bit. Henri moved in to attack, but missed. Maple dropped a cure light on Pheraguat. Rangorn got punched by the remaining golem. Rangorn and Pheraguat both hit the golem, dropping it to zero and triggering a very odd thing. There was an odd sucking sound, then both of the golems’ bodies snapped towards each other, connecting in the center of the room. Then there was a huge explosion as the positive and negative material in their bodies reacted with each other doing 43 points of damage to those engaged with them in combat (save for half). Rangorn took the full effect and limped out, looking for cure spells that were delivered by Star and Magic Lad.

The room was a 15’ x 15’ room with another valve-like door on the far side. We backed out to rest and recover spells. The door in the back was locked, but not trapped. Neither of the party thieves was able to pick the lock. We decided to spend a couple of days doing extended stoneshaping to get by it. On the other side of the door was a lit room with tables, chairs, and barrels. There was a complex of several rooms (connected by normal doors) with tons of barrels, boxes, and lab equipment. The central room contained four crystalline-walled apparatus. One was broken. One was empty. One contained something that looked generally like the flesh golems we had just fought. And the last contained a burly and “cube-shaped” dwarf. He was recognized by Rangorn and Star as the evil rogue Obmi. The complex clearly was of the era of the Slave Lords (we ended the game for time reasons without searching it thoroughly).

Henri made a Bardic lore check on the elf-woman we had killed and realized that she reminded him of one of the second-tier Slave Lords: a woman known as Marqessa, an elven fighter-mage-thief who has been reported dead five times. She was known for creating mutant monsters for the Slave Lords.