Tomb of Abysthor: Assault on the Temple

Recap from 10/7/05 session

We started the session off with a direct frontal assault on the Temple of Orcus on the Second level of the Tomb of Abysthor.  The assault group consisted of the original player characters and the Knights of the Bitter Rose so it was a pretty formidable force although the wizard Holzbog was not present.  The plan was to go down through the locked door to the stairs leading to the second level and hit the cult hard with the combined force.  The plan immediately started to fall apart when the bard, Ian of Avondale, was blinded by a blindness glyph of warding placed near the door before we even descended the stairs.

We pressed on boldly and immediately ran into a group of skeletons and zombies and then the alarm was sounded and cultists and their minions started pouring out of the doors in the hallway below.  A savage melee commenced with both sides throwing spells at each other, engaging in melee combat and firing missiles as the group tried to turn some of the undead.  The cleric Harold had a necklace of fireballs and started throwing fireballs into the rear ranks of the cultists and their minions which either singed or took out some of their numbers.  We also had a coin with the spell silence cast on it and when the cultists started trying to cast spells, we threw it down the hall near where they were standing to shut them up and keep them from casting spells at us.

One of the players had to leave at this point and then we had three more cultists thrown at us which Harold toasted with one of the lesser fireballs (the six die one).  They promptly withdrew after being burned badly and then we were assailed by a large group of Ogres (six or seven) which fortunately couldn't all attack at once.  One of the four or six die fireballs cleared the hallway of all but one of them except the one wearing plate mail at the front.  Jean Paul managed to retrieve the silent coin as we advanced and he picked it up and threw it down the hallway past the ogre.

After that, the burned cultists returned along with four of the more powerful cultists in the back.  The burned guys moved into the area of the coin and couldn't cast spells for a little while because of the silence spell.  The clerics were accompanied by more undead of course including a shadow which one of the newly arrived more powerful clerics had summoned.  At one point the powerful priests cast some spells at the Paladin, Miles and Harold which effectively held them and did damage at the same time (some kind of signature spell).  John Paul managed to free Miles from the spell with a remove paralysis and Dirk went for the necklace of fireballs that was still on the held Harold.

Meanwhile the Paladin was getting pounded on by the zombies, the shadow and the ogre while he was defenseless.  Harold managed to turn the shadow and it fled.  By the time John Paul was able to get to the Paladin, he was at or below zero hits and when the cleric holding him was hit by another fireball, the spell was broken.  He was in bad shape though and John Paul started dragging him out of there so he could heal him without having him take any more damage.

Meanwhile, Dirk Masters was toasting the senior cultists in the back with the shark-tooth necklace of fireballs.  He hit them with an eight die fireball first doing 37 points of damage to those that were not fortunate enough to make a Dex save - this included two or three of their number.  The next fireball (a four or six die affair) killed a couple of them and took a few of the last ones hit points down by 45 or so (close to death – they were extra crispy).  Harold got free from the Hold spell when the evil cleric got toasted and he was back in action.  They just kept coming until we were down to the two die fireballs.  Dirk kept witling them down with the fireballs while the rest of the group held off the mob.  Harold landed his silence spell on the last senior cultist in the back who couldn't cast any more spells at that point. 

Unfortunately for the Paladin, Dirk rolled a one on the last two die fireball and dropped it right next to him.  The Paladin was killed so John Paul got his body out of there to prevent him from being reanimated later.  Meanwhile the rest of the group fought off the last of the cultists and undead (there were only three cultists left standing at this point) and defeated them in vicious hand to hand combat.  Fortunately they were out of spells at this point and fell in a savage fury of blows.  Towards the end Harold cast his prayer spell in the final melee to bolster his allies and deter our foes.

We managed to kill around twelve or so cultists total (I counted at least ten), around eight ogres and countless zombies and skeletons (around twenty to thirty).  If you add these cultists to the ones killed in the previous foray we are up to eighteen total killed while only losing one of our number (the Paladin).  I guess technically the score is eighteen to three if you count the loss of Syng'l, Hammersmith and the Paladin.  At this point the group is falling back to the shrines to get reinforcements and will be promptly returning to the tomb to finish the job and destroy the altars of the Temple of Orcus.

It was a hell of a fight - non-stop melee for 3 1/2 to 4 hours.  So much for the plan, it fell apart pretty quickly when Ian was taken out of the combat by the blindness glyph.  The silence coin did come in handy though at a key moment and the other silence spell effectively took the last powerful cleric's spell casting ability off of the table.