Monday, December 7, 2020

Dungeon of the Mad Mage: Vampiric tanking

Online again, due to COVID. Sigh.

We continued our trek through the dungeon. Rust monsters clawed at cracks in the wall (from the other side), but nothing came through. No random encounters, less time lost. Win-win.

We decided on taking a shot at the Xanatar encampment to the south. One invisible owl scouting later, we were fighting an undead beholder with the Xanatar insignia burned into its head. It went down easily enough, but the noise attracted a party of 11 from a nearby chamber. The brawlers (5 goblinoids and 6 humans) included one heavily muscled woman. Solid tried to convince them that we're there to join the party, but they weren't terribly convinced, so it came down to combat.

Now here we were missing our usual fireballing heavy hitter sorceresses, and (unknown to us, at least at first), the encounter had been upscaled by the DM. But it went well nevertheless. Solid and I tanked shoulder to shoulder. I used Shield every turn, started off with a blast of Lightning, then switched to Vampiric Touch. It was the first time the combo paid off, and I siphoned off health doubly thanks to the spell and my necromantic specialization. Ireth and Okos chipped in by healing me and damaging single targets, while machine-gun Tari mowed down enemies one by one. At the end, I patched up the party and cut off the head of the woman - is it our Xanatar boss? We'll find out.

We decided on a short rest there - there were bunks strewn about, anyway. We inspected the room for hidden entrances, and found a small secret room with a magic doorway and a rust monster drawn on it. I convinced the party to leave it alone. Last time, we spent a lot of time on a doorway and couldn't pass anyway. And why would we? We're here to clean house.

Having rested, we passed to the next corridor. Here we had illumination: red crystals. Of course we tried to pry a couple of them out of the wall, but they lost their magic immediately. Instead, we were met by a pair of magical constructs - sentient ballistae! At this point Selene appeared in our party, and a couple fireballs quickly followed.

The room at the end of the corridor was decorated with carvings of drunken dwarves. A column in the middle had what I now assume were taps - it really wasn't clear. I made a skeleton fiddle around with them, and a load of green goo descended on the poor thing - melting it and all of its equipment. Great.

Next was a storage area with 6 large empty tanks of what we assumed had once been beer. There was an undead beholder in one of the tanks, so we killed it. 

Next up: what's behind door number 2?

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