2018 09 05 Game Notes

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Traveling Suspicions
To help with moving the unwieldy geomancy artifact, Dave magically fabricates a hitch for it and summons a pair of elementals to pull it along with the group. After about thirty minutes of travel down the upper corridor toward their bypass borehole, Darius & Dave smell a faint scent of stale sweat. Darius breaks off to scout ahead. Maggey suddenly notices that Vasili is not with them anymore and alerts Dave, Paul and Mirja. Mirja searches around, finds some tracks, and then tells the rest of the group that she’s going to find out where the drow went to make sure he’s not double crossing them. She disappears back into the darkness in the direction of the naga cavern.

Drider Spies
Meanwhile, some 550 feet ahead, Darius searches for any sign of the smell he’s smelled, but finds nothing. Still, there’s the sneaking suspicion that he’s being watched. Finally, on instinct, the elf  turns down a side tunnel and finds a pair of driders hiding. Realizing they’ve been spotted, the driders rear up and start to ready their bows, but Darius is faster! He stops the hideous aberrations with a Hold Monster spell, and then goes to work with the Golden Axe, who is overjoyed to be ripping into the evil monsters. As he swings, Darius yells out a warning to his companions, but they’re much too far away to help. His spell holds long enough, though, and with the help of some acrobatic footwork, he finishes off the first drider, while the other flees in the direction of the drow city. Soon Dave, Maggey, and still-green-around-the-gills Paul catch up and fill him in on the situation with Mirja and Vasili. Knowing Mirja can easily track them and catch up, they proceed down the tunnel to get to their bypass route.

Dark Elf Ambush
About 300 feet before the bypass route Darius suddenly senses he’s about to walk into a web. In an amazing acrobatic display, the nimble elf hurls himself into a sidelong twist through a the strands of a giant, previously unseen web stretching across the corridor. Paul, a few feet to his right, walks straight into the web and gets stuck! Maggey and Dave, alerted by Darius’s gymnastics and Paul’s stream of curses, pull up short and avoid getting trapped. Unnatural darkness suddenly descends on the party, turning out the lights on everyone except Paul, who has a preexisting agreement with the forces of magical darkness. Far down the tunnel, a female voice calls out the completion of a spell and toxic gas erupts in the middle of the party. The poison fumes cause burning blisters on the surface of everyone’s skin, inflicting serious damage to the group. Paul ignores the pain and focuses on helping his friends. He radiates a field of celerity, allowing himself and his companions to act more rapidly. He then bursts into flame, quickly incinerating the web that blocks their path.

Punching Back
Things go badly for the drow ambushers. Darius sprints forward to wield axe and song against a trio of Driders. With their enhanced speed, Paul, Dave and Maggey punish their foes with magical explosions of fire and extreme luminance. Even the fabled agility of the drow doesn’t protect them from the surface-worlders’ magical onslaught. A drow priestess and her bodyguard retreat into a side tunnel, but Paul shadow-jumps after them, and lightning-leaps through the two of them to block their escape.

Goldshadow Transformation
All at once, Paul is overcome with a feeling of immeasurable power. Pure energy threatens to explode from every fiber of his being. Kela is with him. Paul’s bracers flow over his body like a force field of shadow, while the Heart of Gold goes into overdrive, reinforcing his mind and spirit to handle and channel the energy coursing through him. Even so, the energy threatens to destroy him. It is very nearly too much. Paul is suddenly aware that he has been stabbed. A drow warrior furiously tries to extricate his sword from Paul’s ribs, but the shadow armor interferes with his plans. The dark elf heaves the blade free, but in his haste, it clatters to the ground. Paul blinks, gaining a slight measure of control over his body and the energy running through it. Perceiving the flow of time becomes difficult. The dark elf woman begins casting a spell. Paul allows elemental fire to escape from his hands and directs it forward. The drow cleric and her bodyguard are vaporized! The walls of the small tunnel around Paul begin to soften. Dave and Darius see a gout of white-hot fire leap from the side-tunnel where Paul disappeared. The fire impacts the far side of the larger tunnel and begins to liquefy the rock.

Rout
Maggey, Dave and Darius seize the opportunity to pick off a number of drow who have started to charge their position from far down the corridor. The drow pull up short when they see Paul’s magical fire… just in time for Dave and Maggey to electrocute or incinerate most of them. Finally, some ten seconds later, Paul manages to wrap his mind around the concept of the True Name of Fire and dismisses the sideways eruption effect. He walks out of the side cavern, careful not to step in any of the places where the rock has started to puddle.

Goldshadow Persuasion
Dave, Darius, Maggey and an onrushing horde of drow foot soldiers doubletake as a Paul-shaped mass of gold-edged shadow walks into the main tunnel and turns to face the last two drow who haven’t fled. Two trails of his shadow spread down the hall rapidly - contours and edges burnished gold - and then leap from the floor to grapple the extremely alarmed drow. The golden shadows pull the drow warrior and spellcaster to Paul, whose face looks like a modern art piece made of shifting gold and darkness. Paul says a few quiet words to the drow males, making clear that only doom waits for any from their city who visit this corridor again. The dark gold coils release the elves, and they flee for home.

Elemental Conduit
The earth elementals Dave hitched to the artifact finally arrive on the scene, and Paul’s golden eyes fix on the Jörðandaplóg. With a motion of his hand, a gust of wind hurls the elementals into the artifact, which immediately absorbs them. A moment later, Paul stops holding back his gathered elemental power and pours everything into the artifact. Elemental fire is followed by lightning, followed by magma, then acid, wind, ice, and finally light and shadow. Maggey conjures a shield to protect herself, Dave and Darius from the incidental effects of the magical torrent, as it rages on, channeling energy from Paul into the artifact. Finally, after almost a minute and a half of the blinding display, Paul regains control of his own body and mind. The pyrotechnics cease. His goldshadow form, now thin and mostly-transparent, now fades away, leaving Paul utterly spent. He collapses to his hands and knees, awake, but focused solely of reconnecting his autonomic functions one-by-one, starting with blood flow, then breathing. Reinhabitation of the body is a helluva thing. While Paul wrestles with his own nervous system, the others see that the geomancy artifact floats somewhat higher above the ground and looks active. Alive. Far from fully charged, but it’s out of sleep mode. Part of Paul’s shadow stretches out to touch the glow of the artifact. Instead of absorbing the shadow, the artifact’s host of runes lights up in brilliant, healthy green.

Artifact Activation
There is an infrasound rumble and pulse that pushes everyone’s hair back and whips their clothes around. The part of the tunnel the group is in twists and enlarges into a sphere. In the center, around the group, there is calm. At the edge, a wind has whipped up to tornado speeds, and boulder-sized hunks peel off of the cavern walls, flying around the edge of the sphere like the accretion disc of a newborn star.

Maggey and Darius notice a commotion in the tunnel back toward Vaalki Tanni at the far end of the light cast by the artifact. Mirja races at full tilt toward them, pursued by a brace of young black dragons. Dave quickly notices as well, and prepares to conjure help, but his gathering spell energy is ripped away by the elemental vortex at the heart of the Jörðandaplóg.

Ranger's Return
Mirja, pushing every bit of strength and athleticism throws herself throw the building maelstrom of wind and rock. The pursuing black dragons are not so skilled - whirling boulders batter the young beasts senseless.

Ascent
With Mirja inside, the elemental vortex begins to ascend through the rock above and gradually increases in speed. The elves and humans inside ascend through the layers of the underdark, bourne upward on a cushion of air. On to the Next Session!