I have previously posted about the party I call "Three Lunatics and a Paladin". Today's session ended on a gloriously deranged note which I must chronicle.
It must be distinctly understood that everyone in the party has the Fae-Touched feat or nothing absolutely batshit will come of the story I am going to relate. Or, okay, it's still a bit batshit but the whole thing is a whole lot less ridiculous if people forget that every single member of the party has a short-range teleport they can use once a day. More if they have and want to spend a second-list spell slot. (Two party members have those; two do not.)
To reprise, the party:
My character, Celyn: Rogue 2/Priest 2, started with Fae Touched because he's a fairy-faith kinda guy.
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artan's character, Viepuck: Warlock 3/Bard 1, started with variant Fae Touched because his warlock patron (a Great Old One type) did something Strange. Has a familiar who is normally a flying, camouflaging telepathic purple octopus-squid, but who has alternate forms as well (dog, bee, and baby, I think).
paladin_of_gaia's character, Robin: Paladin 4. From the same (technically ruled by an absentee archfey) nation as Celyn, picked up Fae Touched explicitly over the course of Plot.
Kaoity's character, Izgil: Homebrew sorceror 4. Dwarf who's so autistically obsessed with the moon he gained magical powers from it. Also picked up Fae Touched because Plot.
(The overarching plot of this game seems at this point to involve Hostile Fae Activity. I am not sure if that is part of this specific subplot we are working on.)
Summary of the Current Problem:
There is a necromancer, or something like it, (un)living in catacombs under the central keep of the town. We discovered this because it was zombifying babies in utero. It was a mess. Celyn is toweringly furious about it in ways that he is mostly not expressing overtly, but one of the victims was a trans man and he takes that personally. (His god governs all things strange and out of ordered season in nature and thus has a soft spot for trans folks.)
We have gotten access to the catacombs, which were clearly walled up in a way to Keep Undead In, given the holy water trapped locked door and all. In a previous session we killed a minor necromancer left over from the barely-within-living-memory hobgoblin war (who was surfing on a wave of mobile bones) and some giant centipedes and done some exploring, and are down to Two Paths Uninvestigated For This Process. (Several dead ends will need to be cleared out and investigated as part of a longer term plan but they are clearly sufficiently blocked up that none of the current problems are emerging from them.)
The first bit of the game:
We proceed to do more investigating down Option #1, which leads to what appears to be an old gatehouse containing a couple of undead. We get into a fight with the undead, and are victorious, with an interesting event and a concern. The concern is that several shadow-things appeared and hit both Celyn and Viepuck with strength-draining attacks. (Which we will recover with a rest, but still this is a thing to be wary of.) The interesting event is that Robin's magic lantern turns out to have a powerful light spell that it can generate which shadow monsters really do not care for. Viepuck spent his misty step teleport running away from shadows, because twelve-year-olds are not known for their high strength stats and going to zero is Bad. (Not that Celyn is a strength build either but he's at least starting from 10 rather than 8.)
Upon determining that the gatehouse opens up into animal tunnels, basically, which we cannot navigate usefully and which are unlikely to contain a necromancer, we re-bar the door and go to take Option #2 for uninvestigated paths, under the principle that we should prowl through as much of it as possible before the magic light stops making problems for shadows.
And we find ourselves in actual catacombs, the sort with niches for the dead and so on. However, it appears that all the niches have been cleared out, possibly by the people who were burying this place so the undead would stay in, under the principle that reburying an entire catacomb worth of dead is a better plan than simply abandoning it to the forces that were trying to raise a skeleton army. There is a lot of graffiti invoking the Night Queen (goddess who protects against undead, whose holy water was on the door trap), presumably put there by the people who evacuated the dead. We chase a few shadows into corners with the lamp and destroy them.
We found a hole down into a cave containing basically a zombie ogre and filed that as "probably the next major step; solve later".
Eventually we find a long room that is actually full of what appears to be a disorganized heap of skeletons, which is very much not like what we've seen elsewhere; the graffiti here, in addition to the Night Queen stuff, includes a "We're so sorry" that is sort of alarming. The paladin's spidey sense goes off and we peer into the room and find, at the other end of it, a very angry ghost that is hissing at us.
After some mishaps involving Izgil asking it if it understood him in every language he knew and landing on hobgoblin, which sent it into a violent rage, we managed to get it to calm down, and Viepuck's familiar tried to contact it telepathically, because the familiar speaks Halfling, which we were pretty sure it was because the ghost was short. Then the familiar turned into a wailing baby and sat on the ground. The ghost tried to comfort it. Viepuck eventually sorted out a vision of the bodies in the room being murdered by hobgoblins, we managed to confirm that this was indeed what had happened to these skeletons by basic forensics, and Celyn talked to the ghost sufficiently to find a gold ring hidden in the wall which we promised to return to the local halflings, which clearly was one of its lingering earthly concerns. After the ghost confirmed that we would see the skeletons get proper burial rites it faded away, its unfinished business resolved.
We did a little more exploring, got hit by another shadow that seriously drained Viepuck, and retreated to a safe space to rest, where we found some local guards anxiously waiting us (and unable to figure out how to get back through the trapped door) to tell us that there had been more zombie attacks in the town and surrounding villages, one of our friends was dead, and people were freaking out (reasonably). We made clarifying noises at them, set someone to harvest the holy water, showed them how to unlock the door, and asked them for some gear to solve the hole situation (a spear, a rope ladder, pitons, etc.). We also determined that we had enough information that basically undead waves were coming in at dawn, suggesting that the necromancer was doing a nightly ritual which we should probably interrupt promptly.
A short rest later, we go back into the cave, dispatch the ogre, find a magic sword on a skeleton (given to the paladin who is the frontest line of the front line fighters), peer quizzically at a small waterfall, and delve deeper into the space under the catacomb, which clearly dates to a hobgoblin invasion some three hundred years ago.
This is where it gets silly:
And now, in best "remember Alice? this is a song about Alice" mode, I wish you to recall that the entire party can cast misty step once per day. Viepuck has used his. The other three have not.
Our path into the dungeon ends in an apparently dead end room. The walls here are made of dirt somehow magically transformed into a stone-like substance; we have made a number of wisecracks about loadbearing bosses. The room is rectangular in the style of 'normal floor - pit trap - normal floor' only the pit trap is filled with some purply-black substance. Viepuck casts light on a pebble, throws it on the substance, and confirms our suspicion that it is a tar pit trap. On the far wall is a runic inscription.
Someone asks Izgil, who got in trouble for speaking hobgoblin earlier, if he could read it too, and he says, "Yes." So he tries to read the script, and it is not a message, it is something arcane. Even peering at it through his telescope would not help him decipher it, for he is too far away to investigate the magical signatures.
This provokes a certain amount of discussion. Robin has a ring of jumping, and even though the ceiling is low he can probably pull off a leap across the tar pit, he's reasonably deft and hey, it's magic, it might be able to help him manage this without him bashing his head on the roof. However, the paladin cannot read arcane runes.
We investigate the tar pit a little while dithering. Something thrown in on a rope can be pulled out, effortfully, it just has gunk on it. Robin's ring of water walking, which lets him walk on "any liquid", does not permit him to walk on it, so it is not a liquid.
Eventually we remember that we have misty step. (Even the gamemaster had forgotten, and made a comment of "Oh, right, when I was thinking through how you all were going to solve this trap, that was one of the possibilities.") Izgil uses it to go to the other side of the tar pit so that he can investigate the arcane runes, determining thereby that a) there is something magical in the tar pit (incidental knowledge) and b) the wall is basically a dimension door portal that opens at a specific time every day, we do not know what time, but probably at night, because necromancer.
It is approximately 6pm in the gameworld. We think. It is hard to tell, given we have been in a dungeoncrawl all day.
So we have time to kill waiting for the damn thing to open, and thus decide to spend that time figuring out how to engineer a way to get the party across the tar pit. Note: two party members have misty step remaining. One party member does not but is on the portal side of the tar pit. One party member does not and has to figure out how to get to the other side of the tar pit.
We determine that Robin and his ring of jumping can probably manage to get Robin across. This is insufficient solution. He cannot do this carrying Viepuck, that probably would squish someone on the ceiling.
We consider pitons (with a brief moment of hilarity of "how would I get a piton up near the ceiling? Oh right I have a flying familiar"), running a rope between them, and trying to hand-over-hand it or otherwise use that to cross the tar pit. Unfortunately, the dirt crumbles to sand when hammered into and thus no piton could be secured.
The flying familiar aforementioned is not strong enough to carry anyone, even the undernourished twelve year old who is the person who actually needs to solve this problem. Also, this potential solution is extremely silly to even consider.
Viepuck - who needs to solve the problem - can cast spider climb! Casting spider climb and carrying someone, however, has a high risk of the someone being carried falling off and faceplanting into the tar pit after an eight foot drop, which is probably the least optimal way to wind up in the tar pit.
Izgil rummages through his bag for ideas and finds ... an Ewer of Liquid, an item which has three charges per day and produces a varying amount of fluid depending on the value of the fluid produced. The largest possible fluid is water, of which we can, if we expend all uses, produce thirty-six gallons, which is sufficient, after me doing some looking up "how thick does ice need to be to walk on safely" (three inches for a single person, four for a slow-moving party, but also this is distributing the force on a frozen lake, not a single beam) to theoretically produce an ice bridge six inches wide (I said eight in game but I mathed wrong), four inches thick, and spanning the tar pit. (Izgil can also cast shape water, which can be used to freeze water that doesn't have any beings in it, such as water produced by a magic pitcher.)
This is debated at some length. Scootching along the ice balance beam is doable, but would require dexterity checks. However, a thirty-foot ice spear is probably lacking in the tensile strength for someone to cross it, which means a decent chance of someone getting dumped in the tar anyway. However, since the solution to this is "misty step out of it", we give it some serious consideration as a thing to try doing. Izgil has the masonry skills to get the end secure! It's theoretically possible!
It is also theoretically possible that Robin, armed with the ewer, could splash water across the tar and use his ring of water walking to cross it. However, since he could not carry Viepuck, and we can't guarantee enough water for multiple trips anyway, this does not solve any problem that was not already solved by Robin's ring of jumping. (We could temporarily re-divide the magic items and solve some of this that way but that still leaves one person stranded and in need of burning a misty step, and thus is insufficiently engineered gamer derangement.)
In a fit of mild despondency we start poking the spear into the pit trap to see how deep it is, and discover, in the goop, that there are stepping stones that are only about four inches deep, as opposed to the rest of it which is of arbitrary depth. Planning is now reorganized around whether or not we can exploit this.
We also wonder if we can crumble enough wall onto the tar to make a temporary dry bridge before it sinks to run across. We do not actually investigate this very far because we come up with other batshittery.
Discussion of piling rocks on the stepping stones to mark them and provide dry landing spaces is thwarted by a critical shortage of rocks in the creepy dungeon. We could go back to the initial cavern and get some, in theory. We do not get as far as testing this theory before we come up with more bullshit.
"Can I prestidigitate the tar off the stepping stone?" Izgil asks. He can, indeed, shove the tar off one of the near stepping stones; it oozes back over the course of a minute, minute and a half.
But this is interesting! We have discussion of whether he can goopscrape a stone, get on it, clear the next one while keeping his clear, and so on until we can get the party across that way. It is a lot of constant casting of prestidigitation and is deemed difficult but potentially possible.
"Wait, there was a magic thing somewhere down there, can I prestidigitate stuff out of the way to find it?" He tries that. It is not very effective; the goop slides into the created hole faster than he can make much hole. Also, something is alive in there, and shimmies out of range of the disruption, which makes Not Getting Stuck In The Tar At All seem like an even better idea, given tar monster.
"This is a problem for later and a bucket brigade," says Celyn.
This provokes a sudden discussion of whether there is any way of going back to the spring in the aforementioned cavern at the beginning of this section of the dungeoncrawl and bringing back sufficient water to make a competent ice bridge. However, we have no buckets, just small waterskins, and that is not sufficient volume to do anything useful. Further, the person who could theoretically make giant ice cubes with his cantrip spell that we could then move, solving the volume problem, is ... on the wrong side of the tar pit. We toy with that idea for a bit before dropping it.
EDITED TO ADD: Viepuck, being both twelve and a dangerously bored instrument of chaos, tries fishing in the tar pit for tar pit monster with a sausage. It appears uninterested, possibly because sausages are no longer struggling intriguingly.
Finally Izgil has a new new batshit idea, synthesizing most of the previous batshit ideas, and this is the one we implement: he clears a stepping stone, pours water into the gap, and freezes the water, to make a plug stopping the tar from oozing back over it. He tries to make the ice rough rather than slippery, but fails his arcana check to do so.
Once the icy stepping stone plugs are in place, the party hopscotches across the tar pit.
The flying familiar clings to the ceiling and provides helping tentacles to help make sure everyone keeps their balance.
We all make it safely to the other side, expending the charges out of the Ewer of Liquid for our non-freebie capabilities.
Right about then, the portal opens.
As I was writing this I kept remembering more bullshit we came up with that was not in previous renditions of this story; I think I remembered all the nonsense we tried.
This is the sort of thing that happens when you have a party that OOCly knows we're out of gaming time in a half hour and thus don't want to start the final battle and has an IC arbitrary amount of time before something will happen to spend on ridiculous problem solving techniques.
It must be distinctly understood that everyone in the party has the Fae-Touched feat or nothing absolutely batshit will come of the story I am going to relate. Or, okay, it's still a bit batshit but the whole thing is a whole lot less ridiculous if people forget that every single member of the party has a short-range teleport they can use once a day. More if they have and want to spend a second-list spell slot. (Two party members have those; two do not.)
To reprise, the party:
My character, Celyn: Rogue 2/Priest 2, started with Fae Touched because he's a fairy-faith kinda guy.
artan's character, Viepuck: Warlock 3/Bard 1, started with variant Fae Touched because his warlock patron (a Great Old One type) did something Strange. Has a familiar who is normally a flying, camouflaging telepathic purple octopus-squid, but who has alternate forms as well (dog, bee, and baby, I think).paladin_of_gaia's character, Robin: Paladin 4. From the same (technically ruled by an absentee archfey) nation as Celyn, picked up Fae Touched explicitly over the course of Plot.Kaoity's character, Izgil: Homebrew sorceror 4. Dwarf who's so autistically obsessed with the moon he gained magical powers from it. Also picked up Fae Touched because Plot.
(The overarching plot of this game seems at this point to involve Hostile Fae Activity. I am not sure if that is part of this specific subplot we are working on.)
Summary of the Current Problem:
There is a necromancer, or something like it, (un)living in catacombs under the central keep of the town. We discovered this because it was zombifying babies in utero. It was a mess. Celyn is toweringly furious about it in ways that he is mostly not expressing overtly, but one of the victims was a trans man and he takes that personally. (His god governs all things strange and out of ordered season in nature and thus has a soft spot for trans folks.)
We have gotten access to the catacombs, which were clearly walled up in a way to Keep Undead In, given the holy water trapped locked door and all. In a previous session we killed a minor necromancer left over from the barely-within-living-memory hobgoblin war (who was surfing on a wave of mobile bones) and some giant centipedes and done some exploring, and are down to Two Paths Uninvestigated For This Process. (Several dead ends will need to be cleared out and investigated as part of a longer term plan but they are clearly sufficiently blocked up that none of the current problems are emerging from them.)
The first bit of the game:
We proceed to do more investigating down Option #1, which leads to what appears to be an old gatehouse containing a couple of undead. We get into a fight with the undead, and are victorious, with an interesting event and a concern. The concern is that several shadow-things appeared and hit both Celyn and Viepuck with strength-draining attacks. (Which we will recover with a rest, but still this is a thing to be wary of.) The interesting event is that Robin's magic lantern turns out to have a powerful light spell that it can generate which shadow monsters really do not care for. Viepuck spent his misty step teleport running away from shadows, because twelve-year-olds are not known for their high strength stats and going to zero is Bad. (Not that Celyn is a strength build either but he's at least starting from 10 rather than 8.)
Upon determining that the gatehouse opens up into animal tunnels, basically, which we cannot navigate usefully and which are unlikely to contain a necromancer, we re-bar the door and go to take Option #2 for uninvestigated paths, under the principle that we should prowl through as much of it as possible before the magic light stops making problems for shadows.
And we find ourselves in actual catacombs, the sort with niches for the dead and so on. However, it appears that all the niches have been cleared out, possibly by the people who were burying this place so the undead would stay in, under the principle that reburying an entire catacomb worth of dead is a better plan than simply abandoning it to the forces that were trying to raise a skeleton army. There is a lot of graffiti invoking the Night Queen (goddess who protects against undead, whose holy water was on the door trap), presumably put there by the people who evacuated the dead. We chase a few shadows into corners with the lamp and destroy them.
We found a hole down into a cave containing basically a zombie ogre and filed that as "probably the next major step; solve later".
Eventually we find a long room that is actually full of what appears to be a disorganized heap of skeletons, which is very much not like what we've seen elsewhere; the graffiti here, in addition to the Night Queen stuff, includes a "We're so sorry" that is sort of alarming. The paladin's spidey sense goes off and we peer into the room and find, at the other end of it, a very angry ghost that is hissing at us.
After some mishaps involving Izgil asking it if it understood him in every language he knew and landing on hobgoblin, which sent it into a violent rage, we managed to get it to calm down, and Viepuck's familiar tried to contact it telepathically, because the familiar speaks Halfling, which we were pretty sure it was because the ghost was short. Then the familiar turned into a wailing baby and sat on the ground. The ghost tried to comfort it. Viepuck eventually sorted out a vision of the bodies in the room being murdered by hobgoblins, we managed to confirm that this was indeed what had happened to these skeletons by basic forensics, and Celyn talked to the ghost sufficiently to find a gold ring hidden in the wall which we promised to return to the local halflings, which clearly was one of its lingering earthly concerns. After the ghost confirmed that we would see the skeletons get proper burial rites it faded away, its unfinished business resolved.
We did a little more exploring, got hit by another shadow that seriously drained Viepuck, and retreated to a safe space to rest, where we found some local guards anxiously waiting us (and unable to figure out how to get back through the trapped door) to tell us that there had been more zombie attacks in the town and surrounding villages, one of our friends was dead, and people were freaking out (reasonably). We made clarifying noises at them, set someone to harvest the holy water, showed them how to unlock the door, and asked them for some gear to solve the hole situation (a spear, a rope ladder, pitons, etc.). We also determined that we had enough information that basically undead waves were coming in at dawn, suggesting that the necromancer was doing a nightly ritual which we should probably interrupt promptly.
A short rest later, we go back into the cave, dispatch the ogre, find a magic sword on a skeleton (given to the paladin who is the frontest line of the front line fighters), peer quizzically at a small waterfall, and delve deeper into the space under the catacomb, which clearly dates to a hobgoblin invasion some three hundred years ago.
This is where it gets silly:
And now, in best "remember Alice? this is a song about Alice" mode, I wish you to recall that the entire party can cast misty step once per day. Viepuck has used his. The other three have not.
Our path into the dungeon ends in an apparently dead end room. The walls here are made of dirt somehow magically transformed into a stone-like substance; we have made a number of wisecracks about loadbearing bosses. The room is rectangular in the style of 'normal floor - pit trap - normal floor' only the pit trap is filled with some purply-black substance. Viepuck casts light on a pebble, throws it on the substance, and confirms our suspicion that it is a tar pit trap. On the far wall is a runic inscription.
Someone asks Izgil, who got in trouble for speaking hobgoblin earlier, if he could read it too, and he says, "Yes." So he tries to read the script, and it is not a message, it is something arcane. Even peering at it through his telescope would not help him decipher it, for he is too far away to investigate the magical signatures.
This provokes a certain amount of discussion. Robin has a ring of jumping, and even though the ceiling is low he can probably pull off a leap across the tar pit, he's reasonably deft and hey, it's magic, it might be able to help him manage this without him bashing his head on the roof. However, the paladin cannot read arcane runes.
We investigate the tar pit a little while dithering. Something thrown in on a rope can be pulled out, effortfully, it just has gunk on it. Robin's ring of water walking, which lets him walk on "any liquid", does not permit him to walk on it, so it is not a liquid.
Eventually we remember that we have misty step. (Even the gamemaster had forgotten, and made a comment of "Oh, right, when I was thinking through how you all were going to solve this trap, that was one of the possibilities.") Izgil uses it to go to the other side of the tar pit so that he can investigate the arcane runes, determining thereby that a) there is something magical in the tar pit (incidental knowledge) and b) the wall is basically a dimension door portal that opens at a specific time every day, we do not know what time, but probably at night, because necromancer.
It is approximately 6pm in the gameworld. We think. It is hard to tell, given we have been in a dungeoncrawl all day.
So we have time to kill waiting for the damn thing to open, and thus decide to spend that time figuring out how to engineer a way to get the party across the tar pit. Note: two party members have misty step remaining. One party member does not but is on the portal side of the tar pit. One party member does not and has to figure out how to get to the other side of the tar pit.
We determine that Robin and his ring of jumping can probably manage to get Robin across. This is insufficient solution. He cannot do this carrying Viepuck, that probably would squish someone on the ceiling.
We consider pitons (with a brief moment of hilarity of "how would I get a piton up near the ceiling? Oh right I have a flying familiar"), running a rope between them, and trying to hand-over-hand it or otherwise use that to cross the tar pit. Unfortunately, the dirt crumbles to sand when hammered into and thus no piton could be secured.
The flying familiar aforementioned is not strong enough to carry anyone, even the undernourished twelve year old who is the person who actually needs to solve this problem. Also, this potential solution is extremely silly to even consider.
Viepuck - who needs to solve the problem - can cast spider climb! Casting spider climb and carrying someone, however, has a high risk of the someone being carried falling off and faceplanting into the tar pit after an eight foot drop, which is probably the least optimal way to wind up in the tar pit.
Izgil rummages through his bag for ideas and finds ... an Ewer of Liquid, an item which has three charges per day and produces a varying amount of fluid depending on the value of the fluid produced. The largest possible fluid is water, of which we can, if we expend all uses, produce thirty-six gallons, which is sufficient, after me doing some looking up "how thick does ice need to be to walk on safely" (three inches for a single person, four for a slow-moving party, but also this is distributing the force on a frozen lake, not a single beam) to theoretically produce an ice bridge six inches wide (I said eight in game but I mathed wrong), four inches thick, and spanning the tar pit. (Izgil can also cast shape water, which can be used to freeze water that doesn't have any beings in it, such as water produced by a magic pitcher.)
This is debated at some length. Scootching along the ice balance beam is doable, but would require dexterity checks. However, a thirty-foot ice spear is probably lacking in the tensile strength for someone to cross it, which means a decent chance of someone getting dumped in the tar anyway. However, since the solution to this is "misty step out of it", we give it some serious consideration as a thing to try doing. Izgil has the masonry skills to get the end secure! It's theoretically possible!
It is also theoretically possible that Robin, armed with the ewer, could splash water across the tar and use his ring of water walking to cross it. However, since he could not carry Viepuck, and we can't guarantee enough water for multiple trips anyway, this does not solve any problem that was not already solved by Robin's ring of jumping. (We could temporarily re-divide the magic items and solve some of this that way but that still leaves one person stranded and in need of burning a misty step, and thus is insufficiently engineered gamer derangement.)
In a fit of mild despondency we start poking the spear into the pit trap to see how deep it is, and discover, in the goop, that there are stepping stones that are only about four inches deep, as opposed to the rest of it which is of arbitrary depth. Planning is now reorganized around whether or not we can exploit this.
We also wonder if we can crumble enough wall onto the tar to make a temporary dry bridge before it sinks to run across. We do not actually investigate this very far because we come up with other batshittery.
Discussion of piling rocks on the stepping stones to mark them and provide dry landing spaces is thwarted by a critical shortage of rocks in the creepy dungeon. We could go back to the initial cavern and get some, in theory. We do not get as far as testing this theory before we come up with more bullshit.
"Can I prestidigitate the tar off the stepping stone?" Izgil asks. He can, indeed, shove the tar off one of the near stepping stones; it oozes back over the course of a minute, minute and a half.
But this is interesting! We have discussion of whether he can goopscrape a stone, get on it, clear the next one while keeping his clear, and so on until we can get the party across that way. It is a lot of constant casting of prestidigitation and is deemed difficult but potentially possible.
"Wait, there was a magic thing somewhere down there, can I prestidigitate stuff out of the way to find it?" He tries that. It is not very effective; the goop slides into the created hole faster than he can make much hole. Also, something is alive in there, and shimmies out of range of the disruption, which makes Not Getting Stuck In The Tar At All seem like an even better idea, given tar monster.
"This is a problem for later and a bucket brigade," says Celyn.
This provokes a sudden discussion of whether there is any way of going back to the spring in the aforementioned cavern at the beginning of this section of the dungeoncrawl and bringing back sufficient water to make a competent ice bridge. However, we have no buckets, just small waterskins, and that is not sufficient volume to do anything useful. Further, the person who could theoretically make giant ice cubes with his cantrip spell that we could then move, solving the volume problem, is ... on the wrong side of the tar pit. We toy with that idea for a bit before dropping it.
EDITED TO ADD: Viepuck, being both twelve and a dangerously bored instrument of chaos, tries fishing in the tar pit for tar pit monster with a sausage. It appears uninterested, possibly because sausages are no longer struggling intriguingly.
Finally Izgil has a new new batshit idea, synthesizing most of the previous batshit ideas, and this is the one we implement: he clears a stepping stone, pours water into the gap, and freezes the water, to make a plug stopping the tar from oozing back over it. He tries to make the ice rough rather than slippery, but fails his arcana check to do so.
Once the icy stepping stone plugs are in place, the party hopscotches across the tar pit.
The flying familiar clings to the ceiling and provides helping tentacles to help make sure everyone keeps their balance.
We all make it safely to the other side, expending the charges out of the Ewer of Liquid for our non-freebie capabilities.
Right about then, the portal opens.
As I was writing this I kept remembering more bullshit we came up with that was not in previous renditions of this story; I think I remembered all the nonsense we tried.
This is the sort of thing that happens when you have a party that OOCly knows we're out of gaming time in a half hour and thus don't want to start the final battle and has an IC arbitrary amount of time before something will happen to spend on ridiculous problem solving techniques.
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Reminds me of when
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Re: Reminds me of when
It was very clear that what we were *supposed* to do was go back to town and buy potions of fly, but then again, the module assumed we'd have *some* kind of glass cannon spell caster with us, and the party mage was a BARD.
Since it would've been boring as hell to say, "We go back to town on a two week hike through the jungle, buy four potions of fly, and then come back again," we decided to, ahem, get creative. And well, the shambling mound had +5 resistance to fire, which meant it wouldn't ignite in the tar, and my character had "ran away from the family cobbler business because it was so boring" as her backstory, and well.
Next thing you know, we've taken off all our armor, distributed it carefully amongst the party so that we don't put the heavy armor on the heavy person and have the snowshoes (tarshoes?) fail to keep them afloat, and we were shuffling across the tar.
The fight with the juvenile dragons lairing at the top of the tower took 2.5 rounds. Crossing the tarpit took the entire rest of the session. It was glorious. Thank you for putting up with us
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Re: Reminds me of when
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Re: Reminds me of when
(I am super glad the dragon didn't attack us *while* we were crossing the tar pit, though. That would have been quite awkward.)
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no subject
We have set local rat-catcher on double-time-duty to limit that zombie vector. I am planning on coming back with a rat and a larger hook (and probably some people to pull said rope). tar-monster should be removed.
Also if there is a valid eternal tar pit or magic-tar-producing-thing that could be great for boat repair for the local fishing industry.
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