Have now made a tag for this campaign so you can find the relevant posts under "three lunatics and a paladin". The last two sessions we are down a lunatic so we planned a two-session arc without him.
When we left off our heroes had joined the party that defeated the "stink monster" that destroyed the town of Eftly in a tavern back room to talk shop, tell stories of our respective exploits, and be extremely weird when talking about magic. After we did this we divided things up so our sorcerer (the missing lunatic) continued to hang out with their sorcerer (divine soul subclass, of the goddess of magic, natch) and talk shop on the way to solve other background problems.
After distributing various NPCs and the missing PC to go poke various other problems, we reformed into a six-person party (three PCs, three NPCs) consisting of:
The party, all 5th level:
Celyn (one of the lunatics; glass cannon rogue/priest)
Viepuck (the other lunatic present; child bardlock)
Robin (the paladin; a paladin)
Armand (4th level; cleric of the Night Queen, goddess of, among other things, these undead should be resting in peace already)
Emilie (2nd level; a tremendously perky "ganbatte!"-style fighter with an axe she has named Sharp Justice, who is Just Very Excited To Be Noticed By Such Illustrious Heroes)
Odo (1st level; polearm fighter originally from the destroyed Eftly, basically a kid in the guard of the city we're loosely attached to who we've been trying to train up into an additional hero)
in order to deal with our chosen problem: a local lake appears to have a lake monster. It appears to be a giant undead eel. Further, said lake monster is a) getting larger and b) has recently slaughtered the adventuring party attached to the relevant lake city, with the sole survivor being the local wizard who washed ashore, unconscious. Cultural assumptions are that wizards are Up To No Good so this has not helped her reputation at all.
Basically first off we go to the rich suburb of the city on the lake to see what more information we can find and also the wizard lives there so maybe we can find her. Most of the small towns around the lake are basically abandoned because lake monster and this is no exception, but we find a house with a fire going and go knock on the door. A magic mouth spell on the door says "Go away." We go, more or less, 'We found the wizard!' There is a lot of dithering at the door before we determine she isn't answering and Celyn goes fuckit and breaks in because sometimes he will be a rogue damnit.
The party pokes around looking for evidence of life and failing to find it; the lit fire appears to be in an upstairs room. Robin is extremely uncomfortable with this situation but Viepuck goes upstairs and eventually negotiates access from the wizard, who has awakened from her coma but is still a bit delirious.
We troop up. Armand disapproves of the wizard audibly and Robin hushes him. Celyn gets her her tea, identifies it, and swaps from 'cautious' to 'I AM GOING TO HELP YOU WHETHER YOU WANT ME TO OR NOT'. We dump enough healing into her to get her internal wounding sorted out, if also needing to sleep things off, and get both her personal story and the story of what happened to the other adventuring party.
Her personal story: as a trans woman, she grew up utterly fascinated with the concept of transformation, and thus became a transmutation-specialist wizard because sometimes our neurospicy special interests are very career-specific.
The adventuring party: armed with the wizard's water-breathing spell, they ventured into the lake, pursued the giant eel to its lair, and engaged in combat with it; they thought they had it on the ropes until the zombie attack from behind. The surprise attack basically took out the party, starting with the lizardman druid and continuing on through the rest of them; the wizard only escaped because she could cast a misty step (short-range teleport) and thrashed out of the range they were defending, at which point she passed out and washed up on the shore to be discovered by villagers who tentatively refrained from pitchforks and dumped her in her house.
She was not up for venturing into the depths again herself, both because she was still recovering from her coma but also because she has massive PTSD from being nearly slaughtered by zombies that had been hybridized with eels (nonconsensual transmutation being a trigger point for her). However, she could give us a water breathing spell in the morning, and the hospitality of her house for the night.
We hatched a gently deranged plan, slept, and then proceeded to manufacture some chaos.
The deranged plan involved putting a sheep in a rowboat with some giant fucking fishhooks (I forget the terminology here;![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
artan?) and luring the sea serpent out to potentially attack the sheep and then see if we can use a draft team to drag it ashore so we can murder it in comparative peace.
This about 60% worked.
The sheep on its own did not attract any attention - Viepuck's aquatic familiar went down to keep an eye on things, after all - but when I added a magical tremor in the water, the eel was definitely interested in investigating this disruption in the local shipping. It attempted to constriction-murder the rowboat full of sheep and giant wicked fishhooks; the hooks caught; we tried to haul it in; it thrashed enough to rip off a giant chunk of flesh and fled for the depths.
Reveling in "Well, at least we hurt it!" we traipse off, get the water breathing cast on us, and row to the not-quite-island in the center of the lake (there's a limestone formation that comes up to wading depth there) where the lair appears to be. (Grimalkin, Robin's magical mount, remains on the shore. He doesn't approve of water, particularly when the water is dilute undead soup. It messes up his feathers.)
Then we dive. Half the combined party is sufficiently athletic that swimming is a solved problem for them; half the combined party is Club Flailing. (Celyn, Viepuck, and Emilie are Club Flailing.) On our way down we are attacked by a couple of swarms of living eels, which we had been told about and told were fairly easy to scare off. Celyn lets himself get surrounded by them and uses thunderclap - a spell that does damage to everything immediately surrounding the caster - which is not quite enough to get rid of them but it's good to get a benchmark. We get rid of them. Viepuck learns they fear fire and uses illusory fire at the bottom of the lake to scare away aggressive fish, which is of course hilarious.
We get down to the floor of the lake outside the limestone stuff and see some shipwrecks, which the wizard had told them about; her adventuring party had not investigated them, and she suspects that this is where the zombies are lurking. We decide to clear them out.
Armand the cleric is important here because not only can he sense undead with reasonable competence as a cleric of the goddess of putting down the undead like rabid dogs, but before he was a cleric he was a seaman and thus Knows Things About Boats. Viepuck's familiar confirms that yes, there are zombies in there, and runs away from them with great vigor; he also collects data enough to theorize that while we may have guys who can sense undead in our party, they seem to be able to sense the living.
We find some ordinary zombies. While we are engaged with those we encounter some of these eel-hybridized zombies, which use their eel parts to grapple people and haul them in to where various zombies can bite them. They bite hard. Celyn comes to the conclusion that the correct thing to do when grappled is use one of his unreasonable quantities of misty steps to not be grappled, leaving the zombies where he used to be confused at their inability to hit him. He is injured; Armand is injured; Armand heals Celyn; Celyn heals Armand. We have friendly mutual clericing. Meanwhile, Odo is very good with his spear, and Emilie is very frustrated with her spear, spending the entire combat not hitting anything and explaining at length that if only she were wielding Sharp Justice she'd be doing much better. This was last month's session and I don't remember a lot of fight details but, y'know, they were fights. We dealt with a bunch of zombies.
Further fights continue in this vein for a bit, but we are reducing our ambush risk significantly. We eventually hit a spot where we're in a small corridor with ruined cabins on either side of us, where the hull of the ship has collapsed. Nothing in them or immediately visible in the holes; we open the door ahead of us and hock a light spell into it, which lands conveniently next to a zombie.
The plan: Robin holds the door, while Odo with a spear stabs over his shoulder, and everyone else comes up with things to do.
No plan survives encounter with the enemy: after we flush the zombies from the room ahead of us, an eel zombie emerges from the hole in one cabin and eel-grapples Celyn. Celyn is saved from having to solve this by burning another misty step by Viepuck using his eldritch blast to knock the thing back against the wall so it has to let go. At which point an eel swarm emerges from the cabin on the other side and eel-grapples Viepuck.
Robin continues to whackamole the zombies in the door in front of us (with Odo's help) while we deal with our variously eely crises. Viepuck ungrapples himself by blasting the eels off. Emilie, frustrated with the inadequacies of spear fighting, gives up and pulls out her axe (we are doing 'slashing rolls with disadvantage because water') and proceeds to chop a half-dozen eels in half adjacent to Viepuck. This may be the only time she hit anything in melee the entire mini-adventure. Meanwhile Armand is grappled by the eel zombie, Celyn scoots over and jumps in the hole (the boat is resting on the lake floor; getting in and out through this hole definitely requires eeling through constrained spaces so he's not too discommoded by positioning) so he can stab the damn eel zombie, managing to succeed at that due to Viepuck's bardic assistance. Assorted mayhem ensues, and the heavily injured party, after confirming the space is clear, retreats to a bit of the boat that is still solidly constructed, makes fortifications, and takes a breather to heal up.
Emilie does not recover the spear. "It's cursed," she complains. Odo says she should stab with it, not try to swing it, grumbles, and reclaims it; he had lent it to her. Fortified with rest and snacks and such, the party shuffles off to breach the limestone column.
This is unpleasant navigation, but the evidence we have (assembled by Odo and Emilie because hilariously none of the actual party have knowledge: nature) is that these are natural tunnels which have been scraped larger and larger by an increasingly sized undead eel. We get in, the tunnel forks, Viepuck's familiar scouts left and finds a functional but not actual dead end. (No passages larger than a small eel.) We continue, exploring onwards, various investigations happen.
Eventually we find what appears to be an eel spawning ground, and some of the eels here are corrupt or undead or something. Also we find the remains of the previous adventuring party, tied to the wall with a combination of seaweed and eels. Our death cleric goes to investigate them because we suspect they are being turned into zombies; Viepuck wreaths him in imaginary fire to keep the eels from bugging him while he works. Celyn starts casting a detect magic to see what we can see in the area about this. Viepuck, who is feeling traumatised by eel swarm attack previous, wants to take out the spawning ground; he gets Robin to sign on for this, swims up to the top of the room, and casts 'sleep' on the spawning ground.
Most of the normal eels go still and drift downwards.
The undead eels and the unaffected live ones form an eel swarm and start to menace Robin. Armand pauses in his zombie investigation to blast the swarm hard enough that it starts to disperse, and Robin flattens the rest of it. Viepuck goes down to the floor of the cavern and starts butchering sleeping eels because NO EELS. NO.
We determine that the undead eels are basically the force that is trying to turn the late adventuring party into eel zombies, and there is a discussion of what to do now. The process of casting the rituals that would protect the entire corpse set from zombification would take an hour we are not sure we have; we want to take out the boss before nightfall. And then we can recover the corpses and bring them back for a proper funeral.
When asked what to do here, Celyn pointed at the worst-off guy and said, "Do the ritual for that one." Which was deemed, once the ritual was performed, absolutely correct, and Robin's investigations suggested that a second one was warranted, but the others could wait until later. We recovered some stuff (a potion, a ring which was handed to Odo for now) and proceeded to continue with the exploration.
More forks, more sending the familiar to peer at things. The nature-skills NPCs argue to the conclusion that the giant eel went this way, the other tunnels are not suited to its girth, but we peer other ways, and found one passage that leads into basically a chimney. Familiar checks upwards, passage to the surface maybe; familiar checks downwards, aggros the giant eel, flees. So we know what are presumably two ways to get to the thing's lair.
Upon discussion we split the party: Viepuck and Emilie go through the narrow passage to the chimney to be rearguard on the sea serpent's possible escape that way, while everyone else goes through the larger passage. Viepuck established a telepathic bond with Robin using his circlet so we have mutual communication, and we make our way to opposite ends of a large cavern divided by a mass of half-rotted seaweed.
For some reason - possibly because it was lurking around the vicinity of where the familiar had fled in case a living thing emerged again - it was the rearguard that first caught the serpent's attention. Which caused yelling panic and then Emilie grabbing the eldritch child Viepuck and booking it back into the tunnel they had just exited, where the thing could not reach them.
Meanwhile, the remaining crew makes their way into the cavern floor and Celyn spots a zombie in the seaweed and points it out, just as Armand does an undead scan and also points out a zombie in the seaweed. Commence various combat in which we try to eliminate the zombies before the serpent gets back to make our life complicated. (We take out two, and damage the other two. Not bad?)
(There is a whole riff where there are two zombies on Celyn for reasons of positioning approach and Odo is very "you are too lightly armoured for two zombies" and thus favors stabbing the one - not that Celyn objects, two zombies is too many, given their 'one grapples, the others bite hard' tactic - which is made extra-funny when it turns out that Odo and Celyn have the exact same armour class.)
So: the serpent is coming back to hassle the party it can reach, which is in zombie cleanup mode. The two from above, both in the Flailing About Club, work on following it down so they can contribute to the combat. The sea serpent attacks. This is a thing that occupies four squares in a line, more or less, and can coil itself around people and grapple multiples; it begins by grappling Robin, doing minor damage.
Then it does a constriction attack, doing 20 damage.
Zombies are cleaned up in here and we are trying to deal with the damn giant eel. Celyn escapes a grapple from a zombie (again) with misty step (again) and stabs the eel, which means the eel grapples him next. And then constricts Robin again, knocking him to zero. (We have a bunch of custom mortal peril rules that are in play here.)
Viepuck manages to flail into range, hits the serpent with an eldritch blast knocking it back into the wall, which means it loses its grip on the semiconscious Robin but not on Celyn. Armand declares the Night Queen will heal Robin, freeing both the familiar to not be worrying about that (it carries goodberries) and Celyn to stab rather than heal. Celyn (again) escapes the grapple with misty step and interposes himself between its new position and Robin, stabbing it. Armand does a max-power heal and Robin is up again, and able to go engage the serpent, which responds by biting Celyn and knocking him out. Viepuck blasts the thing again, killing it. Celyn gets a hitpoint back from a goodberry, pries himself back upright, finds the dead serpent, and stabs it again, in the head. Possibly multiple times.*
("It's still dead." - The GM)
We investigate the cave and find nothing else. Everyone heals everyone else. (GM comment was "Nobody heals themselves in this party.") Armand does the 'rest in peace dammit' spell on the zombie giant eel and finds that it was a thick sheath of basically ablative zombie material over a magically corrupted inner eel that did not appear to be undead at any point in this cycle; we agreed that this should be dragged back to his local temple to be Properly Investigated By Experts.
Eventually we manage to slosh back out of the lake. Robin's mount Greymalkin proceeds to pounce at him and lecture him about how he is not to go do those sorts of things without him ever again. "You nearly died!" Robin, beleaguered: "I know. I was there."
After dealing with the sea serpent eelthing and taking some recovery time, we took a journey up to Fellburn, a city that is being besieged by a rampaging army of skeletons, to discover that a very organized and competent army is handling that problem and may be technically committing mutiny by doing so. (They were ordered to the national capital and collectively went "You have got to be fucking kidding me" and went to join the skeleton war instead.) We have joined these forces as skirmishers and will probably sort through what happened there in email.
* The only time the party has previously seen Celyn even cranky was when they were doing a very bad job negotiating with a hostile fey while Celyn had been - again - knocked over. Because glass cannon. So him losing his temper enough to be "and now I will stab the corpse a few bonus times because it was insufficiently stabbed previously" is notable.
Genuinely glad to get an opportunity for that bit of his personality to show. One of the symbols of his god is the dual theatre faces....
When we left off our heroes had joined the party that defeated the "stink monster" that destroyed the town of Eftly in a tavern back room to talk shop, tell stories of our respective exploits, and be extremely weird when talking about magic. After we did this we divided things up so our sorcerer (the missing lunatic) continued to hang out with their sorcerer (divine soul subclass, of the goddess of magic, natch) and talk shop on the way to solve other background problems.
After distributing various NPCs and the missing PC to go poke various other problems, we reformed into a six-person party (three PCs, three NPCs) consisting of:
The party, all 5th level:
Celyn (one of the lunatics; glass cannon rogue/priest)
Viepuck (the other lunatic present; child bardlock)
Robin (the paladin; a paladin)
Armand (4th level; cleric of the Night Queen, goddess of, among other things, these undead should be resting in peace already)
Emilie (2nd level; a tremendously perky "ganbatte!"-style fighter with an axe she has named Sharp Justice, who is Just Very Excited To Be Noticed By Such Illustrious Heroes)
Odo (1st level; polearm fighter originally from the destroyed Eftly, basically a kid in the guard of the city we're loosely attached to who we've been trying to train up into an additional hero)
in order to deal with our chosen problem: a local lake appears to have a lake monster. It appears to be a giant undead eel. Further, said lake monster is a) getting larger and b) has recently slaughtered the adventuring party attached to the relevant lake city, with the sole survivor being the local wizard who washed ashore, unconscious. Cultural assumptions are that wizards are Up To No Good so this has not helped her reputation at all.
Basically first off we go to the rich suburb of the city on the lake to see what more information we can find and also the wizard lives there so maybe we can find her. Most of the small towns around the lake are basically abandoned because lake monster and this is no exception, but we find a house with a fire going and go knock on the door. A magic mouth spell on the door says "Go away." We go, more or less, 'We found the wizard!' There is a lot of dithering at the door before we determine she isn't answering and Celyn goes fuckit and breaks in because sometimes he will be a rogue damnit.
The party pokes around looking for evidence of life and failing to find it; the lit fire appears to be in an upstairs room. Robin is extremely uncomfortable with this situation but Viepuck goes upstairs and eventually negotiates access from the wizard, who has awakened from her coma but is still a bit delirious.
We troop up. Armand disapproves of the wizard audibly and Robin hushes him. Celyn gets her her tea, identifies it, and swaps from 'cautious' to 'I AM GOING TO HELP YOU WHETHER YOU WANT ME TO OR NOT'. We dump enough healing into her to get her internal wounding sorted out, if also needing to sleep things off, and get both her personal story and the story of what happened to the other adventuring party.
Her personal story: as a trans woman, she grew up utterly fascinated with the concept of transformation, and thus became a transmutation-specialist wizard because sometimes our neurospicy special interests are very career-specific.
The adventuring party: armed with the wizard's water-breathing spell, they ventured into the lake, pursued the giant eel to its lair, and engaged in combat with it; they thought they had it on the ropes until the zombie attack from behind. The surprise attack basically took out the party, starting with the lizardman druid and continuing on through the rest of them; the wizard only escaped because she could cast a misty step (short-range teleport) and thrashed out of the range they were defending, at which point she passed out and washed up on the shore to be discovered by villagers who tentatively refrained from pitchforks and dumped her in her house.
She was not up for venturing into the depths again herself, both because she was still recovering from her coma but also because she has massive PTSD from being nearly slaughtered by zombies that had been hybridized with eels (nonconsensual transmutation being a trigger point for her). However, she could give us a water breathing spell in the morning, and the hospitality of her house for the night.
We hatched a gently deranged plan, slept, and then proceeded to manufacture some chaos.
The deranged plan involved putting a sheep in a rowboat with some giant fucking fishhooks (I forget the terminology here;
artan?) and luring the sea serpent out to potentially attack the sheep and then see if we can use a draft team to drag it ashore so we can murder it in comparative peace.This about 60% worked.
The sheep on its own did not attract any attention - Viepuck's aquatic familiar went down to keep an eye on things, after all - but when I added a magical tremor in the water, the eel was definitely interested in investigating this disruption in the local shipping. It attempted to constriction-murder the rowboat full of sheep and giant wicked fishhooks; the hooks caught; we tried to haul it in; it thrashed enough to rip off a giant chunk of flesh and fled for the depths.
Reveling in "Well, at least we hurt it!" we traipse off, get the water breathing cast on us, and row to the not-quite-island in the center of the lake (there's a limestone formation that comes up to wading depth there) where the lair appears to be. (Grimalkin, Robin's magical mount, remains on the shore. He doesn't approve of water, particularly when the water is dilute undead soup. It messes up his feathers.)
Then we dive. Half the combined party is sufficiently athletic that swimming is a solved problem for them; half the combined party is Club Flailing. (Celyn, Viepuck, and Emilie are Club Flailing.) On our way down we are attacked by a couple of swarms of living eels, which we had been told about and told were fairly easy to scare off. Celyn lets himself get surrounded by them and uses thunderclap - a spell that does damage to everything immediately surrounding the caster - which is not quite enough to get rid of them but it's good to get a benchmark. We get rid of them. Viepuck learns they fear fire and uses illusory fire at the bottom of the lake to scare away aggressive fish, which is of course hilarious.
We get down to the floor of the lake outside the limestone stuff and see some shipwrecks, which the wizard had told them about; her adventuring party had not investigated them, and she suspects that this is where the zombies are lurking. We decide to clear them out.
Armand the cleric is important here because not only can he sense undead with reasonable competence as a cleric of the goddess of putting down the undead like rabid dogs, but before he was a cleric he was a seaman and thus Knows Things About Boats. Viepuck's familiar confirms that yes, there are zombies in there, and runs away from them with great vigor; he also collects data enough to theorize that while we may have guys who can sense undead in our party, they seem to be able to sense the living.
We find some ordinary zombies. While we are engaged with those we encounter some of these eel-hybridized zombies, which use their eel parts to grapple people and haul them in to where various zombies can bite them. They bite hard. Celyn comes to the conclusion that the correct thing to do when grappled is use one of his unreasonable quantities of misty steps to not be grappled, leaving the zombies where he used to be confused at their inability to hit him. He is injured; Armand is injured; Armand heals Celyn; Celyn heals Armand. We have friendly mutual clericing. Meanwhile, Odo is very good with his spear, and Emilie is very frustrated with her spear, spending the entire combat not hitting anything and explaining at length that if only she were wielding Sharp Justice she'd be doing much better. This was last month's session and I don't remember a lot of fight details but, y'know, they were fights. We dealt with a bunch of zombies.
Further fights continue in this vein for a bit, but we are reducing our ambush risk significantly. We eventually hit a spot where we're in a small corridor with ruined cabins on either side of us, where the hull of the ship has collapsed. Nothing in them or immediately visible in the holes; we open the door ahead of us and hock a light spell into it, which lands conveniently next to a zombie.
The plan: Robin holds the door, while Odo with a spear stabs over his shoulder, and everyone else comes up with things to do.
No plan survives encounter with the enemy: after we flush the zombies from the room ahead of us, an eel zombie emerges from the hole in one cabin and eel-grapples Celyn. Celyn is saved from having to solve this by burning another misty step by Viepuck using his eldritch blast to knock the thing back against the wall so it has to let go. At which point an eel swarm emerges from the cabin on the other side and eel-grapples Viepuck.
Robin continues to whackamole the zombies in the door in front of us (with Odo's help) while we deal with our variously eely crises. Viepuck ungrapples himself by blasting the eels off. Emilie, frustrated with the inadequacies of spear fighting, gives up and pulls out her axe (we are doing 'slashing rolls with disadvantage because water') and proceeds to chop a half-dozen eels in half adjacent to Viepuck. This may be the only time she hit anything in melee the entire mini-adventure. Meanwhile Armand is grappled by the eel zombie, Celyn scoots over and jumps in the hole (the boat is resting on the lake floor; getting in and out through this hole definitely requires eeling through constrained spaces so he's not too discommoded by positioning) so he can stab the damn eel zombie, managing to succeed at that due to Viepuck's bardic assistance. Assorted mayhem ensues, and the heavily injured party, after confirming the space is clear, retreats to a bit of the boat that is still solidly constructed, makes fortifications, and takes a breather to heal up.
Emilie does not recover the spear. "It's cursed," she complains. Odo says she should stab with it, not try to swing it, grumbles, and reclaims it; he had lent it to her. Fortified with rest and snacks and such, the party shuffles off to breach the limestone column.
This is unpleasant navigation, but the evidence we have (assembled by Odo and Emilie because hilariously none of the actual party have knowledge: nature) is that these are natural tunnels which have been scraped larger and larger by an increasingly sized undead eel. We get in, the tunnel forks, Viepuck's familiar scouts left and finds a functional but not actual dead end. (No passages larger than a small eel.) We continue, exploring onwards, various investigations happen.
Eventually we find what appears to be an eel spawning ground, and some of the eels here are corrupt or undead or something. Also we find the remains of the previous adventuring party, tied to the wall with a combination of seaweed and eels. Our death cleric goes to investigate them because we suspect they are being turned into zombies; Viepuck wreaths him in imaginary fire to keep the eels from bugging him while he works. Celyn starts casting a detect magic to see what we can see in the area about this. Viepuck, who is feeling traumatised by eel swarm attack previous, wants to take out the spawning ground; he gets Robin to sign on for this, swims up to the top of the room, and casts 'sleep' on the spawning ground.
Most of the normal eels go still and drift downwards.
The undead eels and the unaffected live ones form an eel swarm and start to menace Robin. Armand pauses in his zombie investigation to blast the swarm hard enough that it starts to disperse, and Robin flattens the rest of it. Viepuck goes down to the floor of the cavern and starts butchering sleeping eels because NO EELS. NO.
We determine that the undead eels are basically the force that is trying to turn the late adventuring party into eel zombies, and there is a discussion of what to do now. The process of casting the rituals that would protect the entire corpse set from zombification would take an hour we are not sure we have; we want to take out the boss before nightfall. And then we can recover the corpses and bring them back for a proper funeral.
When asked what to do here, Celyn pointed at the worst-off guy and said, "Do the ritual for that one." Which was deemed, once the ritual was performed, absolutely correct, and Robin's investigations suggested that a second one was warranted, but the others could wait until later. We recovered some stuff (a potion, a ring which was handed to Odo for now) and proceeded to continue with the exploration.
More forks, more sending the familiar to peer at things. The nature-skills NPCs argue to the conclusion that the giant eel went this way, the other tunnels are not suited to its girth, but we peer other ways, and found one passage that leads into basically a chimney. Familiar checks upwards, passage to the surface maybe; familiar checks downwards, aggros the giant eel, flees. So we know what are presumably two ways to get to the thing's lair.
Upon discussion we split the party: Viepuck and Emilie go through the narrow passage to the chimney to be rearguard on the sea serpent's possible escape that way, while everyone else goes through the larger passage. Viepuck established a telepathic bond with Robin using his circlet so we have mutual communication, and we make our way to opposite ends of a large cavern divided by a mass of half-rotted seaweed.
For some reason - possibly because it was lurking around the vicinity of where the familiar had fled in case a living thing emerged again - it was the rearguard that first caught the serpent's attention. Which caused yelling panic and then Emilie grabbing the eldritch child Viepuck and booking it back into the tunnel they had just exited, where the thing could not reach them.
Meanwhile, the remaining crew makes their way into the cavern floor and Celyn spots a zombie in the seaweed and points it out, just as Armand does an undead scan and also points out a zombie in the seaweed. Commence various combat in which we try to eliminate the zombies before the serpent gets back to make our life complicated. (We take out two, and damage the other two. Not bad?)
(There is a whole riff where there are two zombies on Celyn for reasons of positioning approach and Odo is very "you are too lightly armoured for two zombies" and thus favors stabbing the one - not that Celyn objects, two zombies is too many, given their 'one grapples, the others bite hard' tactic - which is made extra-funny when it turns out that Odo and Celyn have the exact same armour class.)
So: the serpent is coming back to hassle the party it can reach, which is in zombie cleanup mode. The two from above, both in the Flailing About Club, work on following it down so they can contribute to the combat. The sea serpent attacks. This is a thing that occupies four squares in a line, more or less, and can coil itself around people and grapple multiples; it begins by grappling Robin, doing minor damage.
Then it does a constriction attack, doing 20 damage.
Zombies are cleaned up in here and we are trying to deal with the damn giant eel. Celyn escapes a grapple from a zombie (again) with misty step (again) and stabs the eel, which means the eel grapples him next. And then constricts Robin again, knocking him to zero. (We have a bunch of custom mortal peril rules that are in play here.)
Viepuck manages to flail into range, hits the serpent with an eldritch blast knocking it back into the wall, which means it loses its grip on the semiconscious Robin but not on Celyn. Armand declares the Night Queen will heal Robin, freeing both the familiar to not be worrying about that (it carries goodberries) and Celyn to stab rather than heal. Celyn (again) escapes the grapple with misty step and interposes himself between its new position and Robin, stabbing it. Armand does a max-power heal and Robin is up again, and able to go engage the serpent, which responds by biting Celyn and knocking him out. Viepuck blasts the thing again, killing it. Celyn gets a hitpoint back from a goodberry, pries himself back upright, finds the dead serpent, and stabs it again, in the head. Possibly multiple times.*
("It's still dead." - The GM)
We investigate the cave and find nothing else. Everyone heals everyone else. (GM comment was "Nobody heals themselves in this party.") Armand does the 'rest in peace dammit' spell on the zombie giant eel and finds that it was a thick sheath of basically ablative zombie material over a magically corrupted inner eel that did not appear to be undead at any point in this cycle; we agreed that this should be dragged back to his local temple to be Properly Investigated By Experts.
Eventually we manage to slosh back out of the lake. Robin's mount Greymalkin proceeds to pounce at him and lecture him about how he is not to go do those sorts of things without him ever again. "You nearly died!" Robin, beleaguered: "I know. I was there."
After dealing with the sea serpent eelthing and taking some recovery time, we took a journey up to Fellburn, a city that is being besieged by a rampaging army of skeletons, to discover that a very organized and competent army is handling that problem and may be technically committing mutiny by doing so. (They were ordered to the national capital and collectively went "You have got to be fucking kidding me" and went to join the skeleton war instead.) We have joined these forces as skirmishers and will probably sort through what happened there in email.
* The only time the party has previously seen Celyn even cranky was when they were doing a very bad job negotiating with a hostile fey while Celyn had been - again - knocked over. Because glass cannon. So him losing his temper enough to be "and now I will stab the corpse a few bonus times because it was insufficiently stabbed previously" is notable.
Genuinely glad to get an opportunity for that bit of his personality to show. One of the symbols of his god is the dual theatre faces....
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That makes for an interesting read.
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As story arcs go this was nowhere near the party's pinnacles of absolutely unhinged mayhem, but I managed to keep the whole thing in my head, so that is good for something.
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TTRPG stories are usually difficult because of all the implicit context. You did a good job of providing sufficient context despite that with this one.
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I believe they are called bailing hooks. Short hook-on-a-handle used for moving hay bales. I figured they would be in easy and plentiful supply.
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It would have been really alarming if it had stopped being dead when Celyn stabbed it.
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I can't even say Celyn was just making sure it was dead, because that was 100% not remotely in his motivations. :) He was just Big Mad.