Averlorn Campaign - Adventure Module X1 The Lower Levels of the Temple

RECAP from 10/19/2012 Averlorn Session

We started off by searching the area around the first secret door that we had found previously.  We found spy holes looking out over entry area, rotted ropes and levers that did nothing when pulled.  Ragnar the Thugee War Wizard and Skeorn the Thugee Cleric got a rash from a yellow mold like substance that they touched while searching rubble in the corner.  We also found large stone feet on the steps outside above where the destroyed statue used to be.

The group then opened the secret door and found stairs that led to a platform over the giant stone face in the large room beyond the entry corridor where we had fought the natives in the previous session.  Skeorn pulled a lever and fire shot out of the mouth and set the firepit alight again!  While searching below the stairs, Skeorn fell into a trap door and took some damage.  He was in a room full of statues - four on two walls and two on another wall with a passage leading out of the room.  While searching the statues, Ragnar disturbed a group of four deadly poisonous cobras!  Unfortunately, three of the four bit him and he failed all three saving throws!  (he rolled a 2, a 2 and a 3)  It was only a matter of time before he died but Skorn had memorized Delay Poison and cast it on him to buy him some time.  We got back into the canoes and paddled back to the village of Mantru across the lake to see if there was anything that the villagers could do for him but all the village shaman could do was cast delay poison again which bought him another four hours and then he died.  We gave him a proper Viking funeral and put him in a canoe piled with wood, set it alight and sent it adrift into the lake to burn up and eventually sink to the bottom, so that he could rest in Valhalla with the good graces of Odin.

There was another Thugee barbarian warrior that had recently arrived at the village from the ship and he joined the group in Ragnar’s place.  So we headed back to Taboo Island in our canoes and resumed our search of the Temple of the Gods.  Several party members climbed back down into the room below the trap door and resumed the search.  Amul the Monk used his speak with animals ability to talk to the cobras and asked them if it was OK if we searched the statues and they said it was OK as long as we didn't bother them.  Besides, they said we were too big to eat and they were sorry they killed our friend but that he had startled them and they were merely acting in self defense. 

So after searching the room, one of the elves found a secret door in one corner of the room but we didn't open it right away.  Also, Skeorn had set off a pressure plate or something that caused a portcullis to fall over the only other portal out of the room.  The fighter types combined their strength to try to lift it but couldn't get it to budge.  Skeorn opened up a door in another corner that had a puddle of water on the floor around it and sure enough, just like we feared, the room quickly filled up with water which flooded down the hallway past the portcullis and we were forced to wade in waist deep water from that point on since the entire floor was now flooded.

So we opened up the secret door and came out into a hallway at a three way intersection.  This entire area was now flooded as well.  We traveled down one of the branches of the hallway with Skeorn the Thugee War priest and our new barbarian comrade in the lead.  The corridor went on for a ways and then we went up a short flight of stairs to a landing and down a short flight of stairs to a continuation of the hallway.  Once he got to the other side of the hallway beyond the second set of steps, he felt something brush up against his leg and then was attacked by three normal sized crocodiles!  After a brief melee, the three reptiles were killed by the two warriors with some help from the monk and one of the elves wielding spears and afterwards we resumed our search.  At the end of the long hallway was another flooded room in which there was a very wicked looking mace hanging on the wall!  Skeorn picked it up and kept it since it was even more wicked looking than the one he had and looked like the kind of weapon that would suit a Thugee War priest of Odin!

The group searched the room and the barbarian found a small purse with some gold coins in it and a couple of small coral statues that appeared to be worth a decent amount of money!  Aside from these items though, there was nothing else in the room.  We resumed our search and back tracked back to the three way intersection and went down another passageway.  This hallway was lined with a group of cell blocks on both sides with wrought iron bars from floor to ceiling and locked gates designed to keep prisoners in, though it had long ago been abandoned.  At the end of the hallway we found a torture chamber that was similarly abandoned and there were old decayed and rusty implements of torture lying about.  So we went back out into the hallway and down at one end there was a door that Skeorn opened. 

Beyond was another flooded room but this one was very large being some seventy feet square.  As Skeorn waded out into the water, he realized that he was on a landing that had stairs off of it going down deeper into the water!  Realizing that the water was very deep, the Thugee cleric and the barbarian stripped off their armor so they could swim and left their armor hanging on the statues back in the first room to keep it from sitting in the murky water and rusting away. Skeorn swam across to the other side of the room.  There he found a wide passageway in the middle of the one wall with a 20’ wide set of stairs leading up.  Unfortunately, the stairs were blocked with rubble from a cave in, and it looked like the entire staircase area had suffered a cave in long ago and collapsed.  So he couldn’t go up that way.  He swam across to the other side opposite the original landing and ended up at a shallower area which appeared to be a another set of semi circular steps in the water below, leading up to a quarter round dais landing at the highest point before finally reaching another portal that led out of the room.  

As he started walking up the stairs through the continually decreasing depth of water over them, he was attacked by two very large giant crabs that swam up out of the depth of the water of the room and tried to maul him with their four giant pincers!  So Skeorn had no armored protection aside from his shield and during the fight, they managed to cut him up a little, but fortunately, he had help from the archers and wizards across the room on the landing on the other side who pin-cushioned the giant crustaceans with arrows while the two wizards hit them with magical missiles.  We managed to kill one and hurt the other badly enough that Skeorn was able to finish it off with his mace.

Once the crabs were defeated, he was joined by the barbarian, the Monk Amul and Lorinar the Elvish wizard and the four swam across the room after him searching the deep water briefly.  While swimming across the water the barbarian spotted what looked to be a giant dead crab on the bottom but didn’t think anything of it so the three continued across to join Skeorn in the hallway on the other side.  With Skeorn leading the way, the group made its way past some apparent rat tunnels in the walls and to another door at the end of the hallway.  Skeorn entered the room with the barbarian and it appeared to be empty so he started heading to the door on the other side of the room. 

As he was walking through the waist deep water, he stepped over a tripwire and suddenly a gout of burning oil gushed out of an opening in the wall into the room and the hallway beyond burning the four characters with an oily substance that stuck to their skin!  (kind of like Napalm!)  As the four retreated to get away from the burning oil floating on top of the water, they continued getting burned until Lorinar realized that going under the water actually helped to put the fire out.  So the four party members were burned a little but not too badly.  After a few healing spells were cast, the group resumed their search.  This time Skeorn swam over the trip wire to get to the door beyond and didn’t set off the trap again.  When he opened the door, all of the water that had recently flooded the hallway and the other areas beyond rushed out and flooded out into the hall knocking Skeorn off of his feet, and he was pushed into an iron portcullis 10’ down the hall beyond.  He was a little bruised and battered but otherwise all right.

After the water drained out of the hallway we could see that beyond the portcullis was a stair leading down and another door on the left at the top of the landing.  We could also clearly see the trip wire on the floor that set off the burning oil trap which we could now simply step over.  He opened up the door and in the hallway beyond was what appeared to be a well going down further into the earth with gouts of heat and steam billowing up from it!  Whatever was down there was boiling and hot and best to be avoided.  The barbarian easily jumped across the well and Skeorn carefully went around it hugging the walls.  Beyond the well was another really long passageway which the two followed until they came to the other portcullis at the other end in the first room with the statues in it!  So they retrieved their armor and put it back on and went back around to the rest of the group that was still waiting in the larger room above the large flooded room that the others had previously swam accross.

While the other characters were waiting for the four to explore the area beyond the deep water in the large room, and after the water had receded quite a bit when it drained down the stair case, they noticed that what we had previously though was a dead crab in the middle of the room was in fact a very large clam!  At this point we realized that we had most likely found the location of the fabled giant black pearl that we were sent to retrieve – it was likely to be found within the shell of the giant clam!  So Skeorn and the barbarian showed the rest of the group how to circumvent the deep water by going down the other hallway without having to swim and the group descended the stair case beyond the second portcullis at the landing.  When we got to the bottom we noticed it was very hot and steamy due to all of the water running down the staircase into the heat of the room below.  We surmised that there was some sort of natural heat source down here like lava or boiling geysers or something.  So we decided to go back up the stairs for a bit until the steam went away or diminished a bit and our allow our Monk to attempt to extricate the giant black pearl from the maw of the giant clam…

TO BE CONTINUED…