Episode 8: We need to work on our communication a bit still

When last we left this bunch of adventurers they were under Waterdeep trying to hunt down the Mad Mage, Halaster. This party has known each other a whole 24 hours at this point (game-time), and consists of:

Melchizedor, the dwarven Cleric of Heironious

Talon, the Aarakocra (bird-man who can fly) Fighter

Unit 2408, the Warforged (humanoid living construct) Barbarian

Luthis, the Kenku (raven-man who can not fly) Blood Hunter

Evangeline, the Tiefling Paladin of Tyr

We left off mid battle with a sorceress and her two minions. Her flesh golem is dead, killed by Melchizedor, but he is quite wounded himself. The burly human that Unit 2408 and Evangeline are fighting is still alive, as is the sorceress herself.

Luthis speeds over to one side of where Evangeline/Unit 2408/burly human are having their melee and goes to work with his crossbow. Hits the sorceress once for a significant amount of damage.

The burly human, seeing her hit, leaves our combat to hurry to her side. This provides us the opportunity to hit him some more. Sadly, Evangeline misses, but Unit 2408 does hit, wounding him more. The burly human then shoves the sorceress out of this door that was behind the throne. She then proceeds to put up some sort of force wall across the doorway and leave.

As our party rushes up to the doorway to see if we can get through the burly human postures a bit and then saunters off. Unit 2408 stares at him unblinkingly. He is a bit of a machine after all.

At this point we realize there's nothing we can do for that situation so Talon and Unit 2408 start exploring the throne room some more. Evangeline went ahead and healed Melchizedor and Luthis some, they were both pretty drastically injured in that fight. Evangeline has realized at this point that Luthis, while pretty deadly with that crossbow, is actually pretty squishy.

Realizing there wasn't much in the throne room, aside from the fairly impressive wyvern skeleton, we went to the other door in this room. It opened into a small dressing room with clothes, a chest, and other assorted normal things. The party decides to open the chest and in there we find a disguise kit among the normal every day items.

After about 10 minutes the force wall across the door behind the throne drops, so we get to exploring. This door opens onto a hallway running north-south. The north hall continues a fair way and it appears to have a massive double door at the end and a couple of doorways/openings enroute. There are also defaced statues of warriors lining the hall. To the south the hall is much shorter, but it too ends in a doorway and appears to have another door along the way.

Luthis takes off in the lead as he's our only sneaky to check out the southern side-door. We do not let him get too far ahead. Upon not hearing anything behind the door he opens it ... to find it's a small closet. A small closet that is packed to the gills with skeletal heads. Like when you would clean your room as a kid by shoving everything in the closet in hopes of the parents not opening it? Only, skulls. Hundreds of them come barreling out right at Luthis. Thankfully the guy made his save and hopped out of the way in time.

We continued down the hallway to the southern doors and entered what appeared to be another sort of throne room. While folks explored this room Talon decides to grab the helm off the throne and put it on. Seriously. Luckily nothing bad happened. Then after inspecting the throne, he sat on it. Seriously. And something falls out of the ceiling and bounces off the helmet, clattering to the ground. Turns out it's a canister and after fiddling a bit he pulls out a wand.

None of us are wizards of any variety, magic is something we're sorely lacking.

After a bit of investigating of it Talon decides to tap it on his helm. Turns out it's a wand of secrets. It acts as a divining rod for secret doors. This could be useful.

Now if we could only figure out how to do things a little more organized and safely.

Off we go to the northern hallway and stop at the first opening. In this room there is a large statue. It is of a green man with four arms and a fish head. In one hand is a trident. In another hand there's a stone chest. Looking up though there is a shimmering lake of acid.

At one point Talon shoots an arrow into the acid. It of course dissolves but it gave us the idea that there's a few feet worth of acid up there. Luthis investigates the box for a little bit but turns away. Evangeline pulls out her lock-picks but decides the possible acid bath isn't worth it and puts them away, and is now contemplating if she can (or should) swipe the box and dash back out of the room while Luthis starts digging at the floor tiles along the doorway.

Yeah, we need to figure out how to better communicate as a team and with Luthis in general.

And that is where today's game ended, more next week!