Tag Archives: kingspire

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Thirty-Fifth Session

Thirty-Fifth Session – It’s back into the caves below the Magnusson crypt to best the Silver Skull!

This is made more complicated by the characters still being body-swapped – but the dice are on our side and the Silver Skull generally loses his spells. With a final acrobatic flourish we dump the skull into Hell and the place tumbles down. Huzzah!

The way back to Kingspire is full of weird random encounters. First some odd cultists we disregard, but then Podrick demands we tamper with “a giant creature whose chains merge with its rotting body. It clutches a book inscribed with arcane symbols. It’s empty eye sockets glow with sickly green light. It moves towards the characters, exuding a horrible stench.” It’s more or less just a troll though so we put paid to it.

Finally we get the swamp-witch’s daughter back to her – she got killed by the devil in the dungeon but the GM lets us “turn them over” and otherwise do heroic spell-casting to save dying NPCs because he’s not fully on board the DCC murder train :-). The witch swaps everyone’s bodies back. Then she suggests Ned goes and enters a wizard Mortal Kombat tournament, which tickles all of our fancies.

Then we screw around in Kingspire for a while, mostly soliciting the local bootmaker. (No, that’s not a James Bond style condom joke.) Also my shadow demon gives us another adventure lead, and gambling gives both another and a cool book called The Sassy Wizard Kid. It is a book of well-known poems, each next to an illustration of a magical device.

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Thirty-Fourth Session

Thirty-Fourth Session – Adventurers, slugs, and undead, oh my! We go to rescue a kidnapped woman from the clutches of demons! And do, kinda sorta.

The party is well and truly jacked up, besides being soul-swapped folks are poisoned, injured… Luckily I missed last session, so Hemp shows up hale and hearty and looks after his twisted brood as we try to heal up for a couple days. Luckily the depredations of camping checks don’t injure us any more. Plus Hemp uses the giant manta ray skin we found to make a tight weatherproof pavilion tent for the group.

We are approached by a party of adventurers looking for “cursed relics.” We assume they just want to rob us, because every magic item we have could be described as a cursed relic. They leave but we prepare a counter-ambush as we’re sure they’ll come back.

They don’t but a shitload of giant slugs do. (I think that’s the official group term for slugs, like a flock or herd or murder.) We have a big bag of salt, which is not as helpful as we’d hoped. We kill them, but are a bit the worse for wear again afterwards.

The next day we find our target dungeon, and enter through a crypt whose skeletons at least have the good grace to have valuables on them! Plus a shadow curse. Well, that beats most of our encounters that have something hideously dangerous but no money, so we are pleased.

After some dungeoning we find the witch’s daughter strapped down getting set to be sacrificed by a barbed devil. We try to intervene but the barbed devil pops a barb burst and kills her. We fight him and Old Man Fish pours healing into the woman, who manages to survive.

We come away with a super evil magic dagger called Abathon, the witch’s daughter, and clear intent to find Duke Magnusson the undead wizard and put paid to him.

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Thirty-Third Session

Thirty-Third Session – We continue to spelunk a somewhat-aquatic tower full of lamprey men and sharks and suchlike.

We find some weird jellyfish suits that promise to let us enter the water, but there’s clearly a big hammerhead shark in there. We start putting together a plan to bait and kill the shark when Gallfred Weasel goes bananas and just jumps in and starts stabbing the shark. Given that he is known for his cowardice only slightly less than his greed, this is concerning.

Sure enough, after we manage to kill the shark without it eating Gallfred, he starts trying to saw a giant clam open and gets his hand horribly mangled and is caught underwater. Finally he comes away with the Horn of the Tudines!

He allegedly just needs this to please his assassin cult buddies but for some reason he feels compelled to blow the horn out on the water, which summons the World Turtle, as one might expect. So we climb onto its shell which naturally has a dungeon in it.

We fight giant sea anemones and then people that have been Flying Dutchman’ed in Pirates of the Caribbean style. They spew out eels and crabs and other gross stuff. (I mean, eels and crabs are tasty, but not when they’re coming out of the undead.)

And then the money shot – everyone gets their minds swapped! I missed the session so not Hemp, but Gallfred’s mind goes into Podrick, Old Man Fish’s into Gallfred, and Podrick’s into Old Man Fish. This, mixed with player names, causes infinite amounts of confusion about who does what for several game sessions.

We get the treasure and extract.

The characters sleep through the night unmolested. Gallfred (Old Man Fish) notes, “Getting to sleep unmolested is tight!”

So apparently there’s a whole nother part of the Sea Queen Escapes where we free a sea queen, but we don’t do that for whatever reason. Instead it’s back to Kingspire to try to get one of our favorite witches to switch everyone’s souls back. Naturally she sends us on a new quest to get that done.

Her daughter Eris has been kidnapped by a pterodactyl-riding wizard, so we’re off to go get her. Nature intervenes.

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Thirty-First Session

Thirty-first Session – We head back into the Kingspire. The weaselly Vizier tries to get the runeblade off of us, so I shoot him in his face for his trouble. Unfortunately two elder kith knights cut down Ned. We manage to save his life, but at the cost of permanent disability (-1 STA and a scar). We kill them all and heft mithril weapons meaningfully.

When we get back to the Crow King we give him his dead lover’s ring and he calls for the Vizier’s head. We say “Oh we just happen to have a fresh vizier head on us, just two silver pieces.”

Anyway, he tell us to stop the time loop we have to kill an “uppity broad” whose sorcery caused the loop, the Lady Ariarch. The degree to which we trust his pronouncements is very low. But after a dinner party, she agrees that she needs to be killed by the Runeblade to stop the loop. Ned does the deed. Afterwards the blade is like “oh you can use me and I’m super powerful and you just have to make the world burn in return”. Ned’s conflicted, so we deconflict him by drugging him like Mr. T in the A-Team.

We get back to the real world/time/whatever, where our followers have captured some random cultists. After some discussion, Old Man Fish sacrifices one to his fell deity. Are we ze baddies?

Back to the mud-farmer village which is all that remains of Kingpsire in the modern day, where Gallfred hangs out with a swamp witch, which is one of his favorite things to do. Sadly, the Elder Kith cultists infesting it aren’t really affected by the fact that we just cancelled their religion by disintegrating all the elder kith, so we murder and loot.

We then “negotiate” with the locals about how they’re free of the cult and should start behaving like civilized people now. But not like us, we’re monsters.

Dungeon Crawl Classics – Thirtieth Session

Thirtieth Session – We go find the other elves out of time that should be against the ones in the castle, but they require slaughter as well, so we oblige.

Then we find a Conan the Barbarian style dead guy and, like Conan, take his sword and armor.

When we go outside we have a Tremors type problem with a big worm. It would have been fairly easy to escape, but Ned starts to cast invisble companion and rolls super, super high. So high that if he finished the spell he’ll get a permanent invisible stalker as a buddy. That’s DCC magic for you! So he stands there chanting while we try to fend off the worm and extract ourselves and Ned.

We manage to extract him and now we have an addition to the party, Luigiroth, who is stronger than any 2 of us combined. 11 HD, AC23, STR 22, invisible, flying… Holy crap!

We head back with the sword, figuring it will somehow stop the time loop, but we’re kinda hazy on how. On the way we befriend a crazy jailer who controls rat swarms.

The time loop has reset since we left so we fight the formorian torturer again and try to save the Crow King’s secret lover again, to no avail. Then it’s back into the eternal battle that fills the Kingspire!