Averlorn Campaign: Day of the Ice Toad

Recap from 1/1/2011

After completing B5, Horror on the Hill, we were staying with the gray ladies of the hill at their house preparing to head back to town and were paid a visit there by Marut of the Surgeons Guild. The Ladies told us some strange man was outside so we opened the door to investigate and saw it was our former employer from the surgeons. He said "Attend me" so we went outside to see what he wanted. He had come to request our assistance. Marut is one of the head guild masters of the Surgeons of Hechate (a.k.a. the Ghouls) who we have had dealings with in the past. He said that one of his prefects, Wilfred, was in stocks in the town square serving a sentence handed down on him by one of the confessors. He went on to say that he had been in the stocks for some time and was near death so he requested our assistance to aid him.

We left the house of the gray ladies and the hill and returned across the river to Limus Town to find that all was not right in the town. We went to see Wilfred in the town square, healed him, fed him and kept the locals from pelting him with rotten tomatoes and rocks for a while until the surgeons arrived to see to the matter themselves. He told us he had been set up by the Gatherers of the One True Text, an evil cult bent on bringing back the Old Gods (like the Great Old Ones in the Cthulu Mythos - nasty extra-planar demons more than gods). He was accused of beating one Miligro Conje' but swears she had herself beaten to frame him (she is a high dollar courtesan and rumored to be a high priestess of the Gatherers). In the mean time, we started hearing rumors about zombies appearing in the low rent district's cemetery and raising havoc with the locals. We eventually went to the cemetery with Marut when he arrived in town and found a magical glyph on a grave stone there. The glyph was apparently a gate of some sort that was letting zombies through from another location and causing all of the trouble according to Marut. He dispelled it temporarily but said it would probably re-appear later unless dispelled permanently possibly at the point of origin.

The group was festooned with loot from the dungeons below the Monastery of the Hill at this point so we decided to go back to Medea's Gate so we could put some of it in the bank and sell or trade some of the many magic items we had acquired in our adventure.  We had made the journey several times through Hell's Peak pass between Medea's Gate and Limus Town and hadn't had any problems so we were thinking it was a routine trip.  As we approached the pass, a horse with no rider but bearing the livery of the Prophets of Apollo came running our way.  We thought this was odd but managed to catch the horse and add it to our stable of mounts.  When we entered the rough terrain of the pass, we were surprised by two giant Ice Toads that had come down out of their mountain lairs in search of food since the snows had already started falling in the higher elevations of the mountains.  They breathed their icy breath and most of the characters made their saving throws except for our female Elven henchman Cyrcla who took the full amount of damage.  She was frozen solid and quite dead.  The melee turned into a desperate struggle but Lucias eventually managed to slay one of the beasts with the help of the others.  Tok the halfling henchman retrieved the fallen Cyrcla and retreated away from the melee to attempt to revive her to no avail.

Meanwhile, back at the fight, the remaining Ice Toad breathed again and things were looking grim for the group since we took more frost damage. At this point, Teth-en-Aire, seeing his fallen Elven comrade, attacked the beast with Cold Cleaver (his enchanted blade) and landed a mighty blow finally killing it. We gathered up our fallen henchman and resumed our journey to Medea's gate with our sad burden. When we returned to town, we contacted the Surgeons Guild of Hechate to see if they would help us to raise Cyrcla from the dead. Marut said they didn't usually do that for people outside of their guild but that since we had proven so valuable in our assistance to them (we had actually saved Wilfred from the stocks and cleared out the mine in Silverton for them after all) that they could make an exception in our case for a favor. He didn't say what that favor would be but merely that they would be contacting us in the future when it was time to call it in.

So we took care of our banking and trading, geared up and headed back to Limus Town to try and tackle the zombie problem there. On the way back through the pass, once again we were surprised by monsters but this time it was a group of six ogres. They managed to kill some of the horses but we eventually overcame them and relieved them of the sacks of gold they were carrying on their shoulders. Meanwhile, Cyrcla had been raised in Medea's Gate and was left there to recuperate from her frostbite for a month and to recover from the ordeal of being raised from the dead.