Third D&D Session

I planned on having this posted over the weekend, but "real life" conspired against me. If you haven’t read my posts covering the first session and second session you should probably check those out first or this post probably will not make much sense.

Again, I want to start off by saying thanks to Vanir of Critical Hits for taking the time to run this campaign.

We circled and made a serpentine path with a lot of back-tracking to avoid the zombies on our way to Nonokwesa where we were told Ogar would be. We reached the town, found an inn, asked for Ogar’s whereabouts, and were told to continue north east. After finding Ogar and telling her our story, she increduously replied "Percy had the light and he still fell?!?!". We explained the circumstances and the odds against him and were met with more incredulity, "to only thousands?!?!". This Percy must have been one powerful and potent priest of Pelor.

After convincing her that this was in fact the truth, she send us to find an artifact (a box containing a red, blue, and green stone) in a cave, not to open the box, and take it to Grishnok in NonoKwesa. We reach the unguarded – but well hidden – cave after about 1/2 hour of travelling but discover – to our horror – that the box has benn knocked over over and the stones have spilled out. Dawn magically lifts the stones and puts them back in the box so as to meet the requirement of not touching them and we set out to find Grishnok.

On our way back, we see a 8 or 9 year old girl running from a man with a whip. Jed (my character) shoots him with a magic missile; he must have been a light-weight as he died in one hit. We notice a caravan not far away with other men but, fortunately, they did not witness the preceding events. The child tells us everyone at the caravan except for the children are slavers. We try to negotiate a price for the rest of the children, but are told that they do not have any slaves at the moment and will have to acquire more first. We do not believe them, threaten to leave without paying them anything, they call our bluff and pack up.

About this time, Dawn shows up shifted into the form of the dead slaver and starts arguing with the other men in an attempt to buy the sneaky types time to look in the wagons. The sneaky types are really not all that sneaky and are spotted very easily. We are all threatened and the caravan starts to leave (with Dawn on board).

Jed makes it sound as if the axle on one of the wagons broke; the caravan leader tries to use logic saying that the wagons wouldn’t still be moving if they had broke axles. However, logic does not stand up to Dawn’s ability to lie. She convinces them to stop and check. When the slavers exit the wagons, we attack and dispatch them without too much trouble. The kids ask us to find their siblings who are gods know where by now. We tell them that we will take them to the wise man that we are seeking and that he will help them. The children are not pleased to hear that we are going to see the wizard, the possibly wonderful wizard of Nonokwesa, but reluctantly go with us.

When we reach Grishnok’s house, he asks if we have anything for him at which point we take the opportunity to offer him the children. We are baffled when he asks "what children?", but after looking around, we realize that the children and the wagons that we borrowed from the dead slavers have vanished. Grishnok tells us to follow him into the woods to a stone circle to perform a ritual which will summon a guardian. We are supposed to fight the guardian to receive another artifact; Grishnok gives us glowing weapons to use against darkness at this point.

After performing the ritual to prove that we are honest, compassionate, and courageous by placing the three stones from the box on pedestals at the feet of knight statues (Thimbledorf had to nudge in to place the honesty stone that Dawn placed on the pedestal), we were ready to fight the guardian. Much to our surprise, the guardian was a silver unicorn which proceeded to impale Jed with its horn. However, when we produced our glowing weapons (since this was obviously an evil abomination taking the form of a unicorn), it looked puzzled and stood down. It turns out that this was really all one big misunderstanding, and had a big laugh – except for Jed who was trying to keep his spleen in. But, as promised, the unicorn did give us the artifact: a small flask of black liquid. Grishnok told us we needed to put this in Waterdeep’s water supply to protect him. We called shins as the only other black liquid, while much more viscous than this, was nothing that you would want to poison a metropolis with. After Grishnok drank a couple of drops from the vial, we were more convinced of its safety.

On our way to Waterdeep, we took a quick detour to Triboar to see if we could free the city from the goop. We pulled the remaining three stakes out of the ground (the first was pulled out two sessions ago) but nothing happened. We were able to destroy some of the goop with our glowing weapons and fire, but it would take a week to destroy all of it and the citizens could not have survived in there, so we continued on our way making sure to give Westmarch a wide berth.

During our travel, we spot movement from the woods and a man in black plate armour steps onto the path. LeMarche recognizes him as the one who killed the rest of the unit that he was with and wanted to kill him. However, when the heavily armoured man invoked parley, we convinced LeMarche to hear him out before we killed him. Apparently this man has the darkness in him and struggles with controlling himself; also his family has been kidnapped and he is being forced to attack the forces of light. He used to be one of the most powerful forces of light before these events. We were informed by him that Grishnok only gave us half of what we needed because he was also filled with darkness. If we poured the black fluid into Waterdeep’s watersupply, they would be consumed by evil just as Grishnok had been; this is why he was not afraid to drink from the vial as he was already under its effect.

To protect the town, we have to perform a ritual of cleansing on the vial which converts the poison into a vaccine. We are not sure that we can trust him, but the location for the ritual is on our way. After much muttering and arguing over whether or not we should perform the ritual, Jed gets tired of waiting and begins the rite. As soon as the vial is purified and starts to glow, the world starts getting darker. However, it turns out that we didn’t put the light of the world into the vial as Jed was worried about. Instead, a very large good dragon appeared in the sky and was heading towards us.

Hopefully we will survive to tell the tale of how we valiantly vanquished the vile dragon and saved Waterdeep. If not, I’m sure that D&D Insider’s character generator will be of use.