Batter Up!

Shorter session this week - started later, ended a bit earlier. Brian was back, no Kevin, still no Jeff. In Jeff's absence, we continue to work on getting his character killed...

Having recovered from the nasty Skeletons from Hell (tm), we rushed past the mummy on the throne (which, thankfully, didn't bother with us) and into the next room, lined with (what else) mummified priestesses. As we took stock of our new situation, we were handed our next challenge: a 12-foot tall mummy. Yup, that's right. Because the Skeletons from Hell weren't enough, the undead are now getting BIGGER.

Having had a second or two of warning, the elves had scrambled up onto a high ledge. Unfortunately, this put Craig's elf at eye level with the mummy, which proceeded to grab him and try to use him as a baseball bat. The most effective thing he was able to do for the rest of the combat was wrap himself around the thing's fist, to become more of a boxing glove. Which is better than being a baseball bat, but only by comparison.

As the monster proceeded to try to use Craig to whack various other members of the party (damaging Craig whether it succeeded or not), the rest of us started pumping things into it - arrows, lightning bolts, flame jets, throwing axes, swords, the usual assortment. After several rounds of mayhem, we succeed in dropping the thing - by which point Craig, and Bruce's Centaur Khavi, were both pretty well pulped. Healing spells were passed around liberally.

As we sat to recover YET AGAIN, we heard sounds of fighting in the distance - apparenty, somebody else was invading the complex from some other direction. After a few minutes, we found out who: a group of Drow- a SWAT team of sorts - burst in as we were trying to lick our wounds. After briefly considering, and rejecting, the idea of putting up a fight, we decided to (gasp!) talk to them. Turns out, they're after a half-elven slave - at least, we THOUGHT he was a slave - who had been chained up with us way back on the Orc slaver ship. They agreed to take us to their captain for further clarification; as it seems like there may be a LOT of these Drow around, we really, really hope we don't have to fight our way out of this.

We're Huge! We Rock! We ... oh, *&^%%#!!!

It was a week of ups and downs for our brave adventurers. Brian was out, but Kevin dropped in (Jeff is still AWOL - we hope to see him again someday soon before we kill off his character...).

When last we left our intrepid band, we were staring down at a ship full of slavers, trying to decide whether to storm the ship, do away with the slavers and free the slaves, or whether to use an illusion instead to sneak into a cave behind a frozen waterfall and leave the slavers for another time. The slavers answered the question for us by starting a fight amongst themselves over who's in charge - apparently, the captain and the wizard are missing, and they were having some rather aggressive discussions about alternative authority structures. We decided that the ensuing melee would make an excellent distraction, so Storm the Ship went to the top of the list.

The attack took three prongs: two spellcasters (Azyl and Gus) flew/airwalked to a couple of boats bringing slaver soldiers back from the shore (no need to add more of them to the party) and proceeded to flip them over and then hold them under with magical telekinesis (be careful about using the phrase "we spend the rest of the time drowning them" out of context...) A flying battleship consisting of the airwalking, crossbow-armed centaur and two elven archers made for the aft deck, where swift work was made of the few slaver archers there (my goodness, a ST 19 crossbow leaves a big hole!), clearing the aft castle as a firing platform. Finally, our axe-throwing half-giant did his best MLB pitcher impression, burying two throwing axes into targets for max damage (earning him a new name, Hector Valenzeula, in honor of his fastball). Freed slaves, arrows, and axes poured into the suddenly-outnumbered slavers, and the rest of the fight was over VERY quickly. In about a minute and a half, we had eliminated roughly 25 slavers and taken their ship - we're huge!

After some brief logistical work (relocating the band of folks we'd left on the other side of the island to our new base of operations, going through the slavers' stuff for magic items), we turned to the second part of our plan: enter the caves (in search of the Secret Entrance to the City, so we can rescue our blue furry friend's girlfriend, so he can get us off this rock of chaos - remember, there's an ongoing story here, try to keep up!) So into the caves we went, always going left and following the apparent tracks of some slaver soldiers.

This was fairly uneventful until we came to a room with a mummified high priestess of some sort (apparently immobile) and four well-armed and armored skeletal guards, who had clearly hacked an escaped orc pirate to death some time before. Our half-giant decided that, hey, they're skeletons, how tough could they be? An initial attempt to magically levitate the skeletons served only to wake them and show that they were MUCH tougher than he thought. He and our fire-wizard (the until-recently missing Kevin, arrived just in time to get hacked) took big, nasty cuts in the process of retreating. Eventually, Arcturus the fire-mage's imitation of an F-16 afterburner saved the day with help from the half-giant's axe, some lightning from Azyl, and some morning-star work from the centaur - the rest of us realizing that there was squat-all we could do. We managed to vanquish the skeletons after some scary moments, and now have to hope that the mummified priestess doesn't wake up pissed when we try to move past her. Tune in next week!