Heather Under Moonlight

Lake Region Saturday Group, 27/12/2025

Plus eight heavy crossbowmen, one of whom is a casualty for the next week because he dropped to 0 without being killed.

The party are still in the abandoned druid's tower. Having spent the night resting in a cave nearby, they emerge with spells and some health recovered and set about exploring the South part of the dungeons. Entering at the little area on the North side, they are attacked by giant centipedes and kill them without any trouble. They shuffle along a little way, past the room with the hanging flower baskets and the discarded needleweed, and come upon a great chamber with a statue covered in yellow mold. Ignoring the statue, they continue on downward into a ballroom with a few leftover needlemen on elevated galleries, which the crossbowmen dispose of easily. Lucius climbs up on top of one of the galleries, slays a needleman, and finds a door. He proceeds to help the others up and stack the party up to open it.

Within is a humanoid slime creature, immune to all weapons but not to Magic Missile. It is brought down with some blasts from Audrey's wand; among the leftover ooze, the party finds a bone case with a scroll of druidic spells. In the room with the creature, there's a stone fountain full of the same slime with a copper carving of an oak tree on top; the party torches the slime and goes up to investigate the fountain. The oak tree seems to be fixed to the fountain, but Thistle gives it a vigorous wiggle and discovers that it twists about. As soon as she does, it withdraws the bolt from two secret doors in the room - and a starved, half-dead black bear, wild with anger, rushes out to attack the party! They slay it quickly and cut it open, finding its brain burned to obsidian, and search the secret rooms. The room which formerly held the bear was now empty, but the other one that had opened contained a simple bird bath. Edith, the thief, drinks the water from the bird bath - and is transformed into a sparrow! The party thinks this is very amusing and collects the water for later use.

At this point, they withdraw into the ballroom and notice that there's a window out into a cave. It must have been there the whole time, and they didn't notice it. (Read: I forgot to mention it. lol.) They then return to the yellow mold statue room, where Audrey the Magic-User tries to collect a sample of the mold - and is poisoned by deadly spores! She is quickly recovered by the hook on the back of Lucius's halberd and a quick Cure Disease from Rachel saves her life. Hearing a loud banging from the cave-facing wall of the ballroom, as if a huge creature were moving up against it, the party decides that discretion is the better part of valor and retreats out of the dungeon.

Retiring to meet with the shipwrecked fishermen, it is decided that they should go to Getford to sell their ill-gotten gains. They sell some samples of the needleweed to a gentleman wizard from Kallithea who is here to do some painting of the scenery (I think that it probably ends up in the hands of the town's cleric, who is a sage with a minor field in plants - as we will see in the Tuesday group's report) and the spell scroll to the druid. The gentleman wizard mentions offhand that Thysrus is trying to send a diplomat to Kallithea.

Thistle is now ready to level up, Audrey is a mold casualty, and Edith has been informed by a criminal contact that some gnolls have been trying to move in on his drug-dealing racket in Tor, so the party decides to go to that city and attend to business there. That's where we left the session until this week, when some very interesting things happened.