Fifth Session – The group is messed up after their first run at the tentacle pit and needs to rest outside the dungeon. And naturally we are beset by gorilla bears and hydras and decide to bail back to town.
My character (Hemp) gets ambushed and hugged by a “gorilla bear” which could well have been fatal, but I maange to break free and decapitate it in a single blow!
Then, a wounded hydra cursed so it can’t regenerate bullies Ned into helping him get healed in the village. We reenter the nameless village from the Christmas adventure. It suddenly has a name, Cartwell, and more info on their fire deity Aphiel. Hemp takes an interest in it, especially when he hears a magic bow artifact may be in a cave across the Great Rift aka Tentacle Pit.
The group decides there’s no real opportunity to help the hydra so we should try to dupe and kill it. Even a non-regenerated hydra is going to be a problem for our level 1 asses. I register my objection and then go help; as the archer I reckon I’ll at least be the last to die.
And last to die I am – Podrick and Ned get wasted round one and then it chases down Old Man Fish and wastes him. I finish shooting its heads dead and we manage to save our downed party members at the cost of permanent STA loss and hideous scarring. We retreat back to Cartwell to lick our wounds (or, in Hemp’s case, a local trader lady).
While we had spent several sessions making fun of this village for not having a name, Hemp starts getting philosophical. A village worshipping a fire god, that’s a pretty Epicurean and transitory thing, he kinda ended up liking it. And while Aphiel is Chaotic, they’re not a bunch of serial killers, they just are the Live Free Or Die types.
We head back to the tentacle pit after recovering to find that the Knights of Lushnia have been killed by skeletons on its lip. We kill the skeletons and recover intel. Podrick starts jonesing to become one of the order.
Then we work our way back into the tentacle pit dungeon, whacking one cultist at a time and finding some secret passages to get us deeper into the complex. We do find some water that drips up to a puddle on the ceiling like that one John Carpenter movie.
More next time!