Back to three lunatics and a paladin.
Dramatis Personae:
Viepuck, noble-annoying brat with a boss
Izgil, the moonlight guy
Celyn, who thought "well, that happened" about a lot of terrible things honestly
Robin, who needs a vacation
When we left off we had done a bit of cleanup in Peydon and were getting ready to deal with larger events.
In the morning, we dodged the Baroness's messenger who had the proclamation that the people who had been heroically going around and killing evil fey should go to the capital for their just rewards so they don't know we got the message for certain, and wandered off into the hills to meet with Raoul, the terrifyingly powerful cleric of the goddess of You Put That Undead Back Down Where You Got It Or So Help Me I Will.
We found Raoul and his two large, alarming bodyguards. Raoul hopes that our time dealing with the troubles in Avail has not been lastingly traumatic; Robin says, "Unfortunately, it has," which the cleric did not appear to know what to do with other than apologize for asking us to deal with more of them.
Raoul casts a spell and a small temple appears which is, alas, not the rumored missing temple ruin in the vicinity. (Me: Ah! The Night Queen's Tiny Temple.) This is the Tiny Temple upgraded version that blocks scrying, so the party and Raoul pile in to talk and leave the bodyguards outside.
Raoul has an explanation for a bunch of things: King Robert is dead. The King has been dead for four years, and has been replaced by a lich named something like Malik. The lich has, in theory, cast two nation-spanning spells, one to notify him whenever he hears people talking about himself, and one to cause the undead waves. Raoul thinks the eavesdropping spell is powerful enough to catch even people using magical/telepathic communication, as one of the clerics who was executed (for being framed for necromantic treason) was careful about speech but used the Sending spell extensively.
Viepuck promptly develops a habit of referring to this entity as "Bobby", not merely to be annoying to nobility but also to be annoying to nobility.
We are further informed that Raoul, the paladin Leonora, and their allies had nearly defeated the lich previously, but it managed to rally, divide its phylactery into three parts, and conceal them. Raoul and company and Leonora and possibly company are set to retrieve two of these parts, and wish to tap the party to obtain the third, which is somewhere in the barony.
The party theorizes that the lich may have been the powerful entity that allied with and then betrayed the Gloomshaper, and possibly that it may have drained magical power from the fey in order to do the undead-raising spell, which is at least a plausible betrayal. (Possibly there was a deal to power the spy spell and it went for a two-for-one?) We have no evidence for this but speculation.
We tell the big cleric what we know and suspect about the baroness, Izgil manages to determine which of the three parts is in which location via magic and passes that information on, and agree to contact him once we have obtained the item. Celyn wishes him luck with all the oomph of a cleric of the god of luck, and Raoul steps out of the tiny temple, takes the hands of his buds, and promptly vanishes.
We, unequipped with teleportation powers and/or flying steeds, prepare to walk. We indicate we are heading for Veltor (the capital) and then proceed to not do that.
On the walk, Izgil does a lot of poking at his two rings to try to figure out how to make them one ring. This keeps him very busy. Viepuck, meanwhile, spends a lot of time using Sending to be a magical telegraph, which keeps him very busy. (He contacts someone in the Western Army to tell him that the Duke needs reinforcements in the civil war. He does a variety of the usual coordination things, including collecting updates from various people. He notes to Raoul that the people of Peydon have a lot of folks suffering from curses and some good PR at some point might be for Night Queen folks who can remove those to go be helpful. He also uses the sending locket to sing, I don't know, the Smurfs song at the baroness every day, and then says "This is getting boring, I'll be at [inn] in Aslain, if you want it come get it" and then pings the barkeep at that inn to say, "Hey there may be guard gossip looking for a kid, lemme know!" and manages to roll high enough on his persuasion to not make it weird.)
When he checks in with the barkeep a day or two later he gets a message that the guards came through looking for "Timmy" (his alias) because they thought he might be in danger, but there was no interesting drama. So he used the locket to say "The guards left last night? I just came in for breakfast?" in order to perpetuate further fuckery.
Anyway. We reached the ruin where we believed (due to both theory and Izgil's magic) that the floating orb we were searching for was located, that being the ruin the baroness had been visiting and had drawings of and so on. This was, apparently, an old wizard academy; what was a lovely planned monastic/scholarly community once upon a time was now a massive ruin with an evil cloud over its sky.
(Human prejudice on this is roughly coming down on the side of "The wizards went off to wizard and look, wizarding happened, at least it's not sufficiently fucked as to cause a nation-spanning magical plague this time.")
We then proceeded to spend an immense amount of the session stymied by a door.
It was a nice door, with something like "Seekers of Souls" inscribed on the lintel in Elvish calligraphy. It slowly cycled through a sequence of words: "Penitent" and then "Truth-Seeker" in the same script, "MASTER" in heavy metal script, and then "Healer" in the original script scratched out with "Corrupter" in floaty black text superimposed on top of it. We studied this at length, up to and including Viepuck bapping the door with a dandelion each word to see what happened ("corrupter" killed it).
Viepuck interrogated the door. The door could not explain anything about the enchantment, which was not part of itself. The door had a mild existential crisis about the fact that it did not think it had ever opened, before deciding that since its function was to divide one side from the other, clearly those things were to remain divided, and thus it was being an exemplar of door-ness by not opening and risking those things mixing.
We try to open the door with mage hand (nothing happens). We debate whether the door is too heavy to be moved (probably not, it's magic).
Eventually Izgil gives up and touches the door (during "Truth-Seeker"). And promptly vanishes. Robin is incredibly alarmed and feels that this was a foolish choice. Before we manage to finish debating what to do about it, Izgil reappears and says, "I tried to open the door to let you all in but it just dumped me out again."
We decide to go through the door. Izgil reports that he was interrogated by the spell, which asked him what he was seeking. He said something about "how the universe works, a topic which has fascinated me since I was young", and after several clarifying exchanges he was allowed to the other side. (Also, when he touched the door again, he went right through.)
Viepuck tried the door. Viepuck said he wanted to learn things! The door asked why. He said, more or less, "For my master." "Who is your master?" "[unpronounceable entity]" "Why does your master want to know things?" "It's ... curious?" Viepuck was dumped on the outside of the door.
Viepuck and Celyn tried the door simultaneously. (Celyn's interview: "What do you seek?" "Change." "What do you change?" "Myself, to be better. The world, to be better." He was permitted access.) Viepuck's interview did not go well again.
Robin touches the door. Robin answers "What do you seek?" with "Peace."
The door has no further questions for Robin. (The door recognizes an absolute cinnamon roll when it sees one.)
Viepuck eventually answers the door that he's trying to help his friends, the people on the other side of the door, and does not bring up his master at all. The door finds this answer acceptable.
Meanwhile we have stared at the ruins. The nice townhouses are wrecked to either side. The temple-like building with the dome that is spewing evil black cloud is before us - round, four doors spaced at the quarters, and with alarming statues of tormented people on its roof. Viepuck blasts a statue, and we see movement. Viepuck interrogates another statue and only gets screaming as an answer. We are all quite disturbed. (Well, that happened.) Robin is extremely upset and wants us to smash all the statues; we are not sure whether or not that actually releases the possible tormented spirits and decide eventually to consult Raoul.
We open the door to the dome. Inside we see a floating orb (such as the one we are looking for) surrounded by an honor guard of twelve ghosts. Two ghosts detach to come attack us. We close the door (and fight the two). When we open the door again, we find that there is an honor guard of twelve ghosts. We decide to stop closing the door.
Izgil decides to drop a blast of light in the room to see if he can clear out the ghosts, but they are rather dextrous ghosts apparently and many of them take half-damage. Celyn thinks he sees the light shimmer through the orb and is perplexed. We learn to our general annoyance that the damage the ghosts do is difficult to heal without a long rest, though the ghosts go down fairly quickly.
It is even more annoying when we figure out that everything in there is a damn illusion, including the ghosts, but that does not actually help us heal the injuries they caused when we weren't aware of that fact. Well, the apparent generation of the evil cloud is not illusory but we can't do anything about it.
Trying to take a break inside the ruin triggers a "You cannot rest here, there are enemies nearby" error so we go outside the infamous door and rest instead. Then we plan on tackling the next plausible bit: a two-story building with a tower in the center, the tower having sheared off/collapsed at contact with the evil cloud. (Well, that happened.)
The antechamber is full of statues that are creepy and also blink and we are not sure if they are the same type of statues as the ones on the dome but also when Robin goes into line of sight of one of them he has to make a save so they do something. There are three rough expressions: malicious, agonized, and determined, and the space right inside the door is in LOS of a malicious statue and two determined ones.
We solve this problem by suppressing the malicious and agonised statues like they were guinea pigs, though with spare blankets and cloaks and such rather than canvas sacks. This is accomplished with mage hand, mostly.
In the room beyond the antechamber, we are at the base of the tower, which is open to the sky that roils with evil clouds that occasionally show signs of something humanoid trying to press out of them like a horror movie. (Well, that happened.) Rather than worry about that too much, we explore to the left. (Options are left, back, right, and down, for the record.)
This is an arced hall with five doors off of it, each of which seems to lead to a ruined study. Celyn is largely indifferent to detailed search because he has a terrible attention span for fussy things; Izgil insists on being methodical and finds things subtler than "the skeleton with a knife lying next to its neck" (Well, that happened.), such as the wall that seems to have been molded like clay by someone trying to claw their way out, or (in the upstairs rooms) a prayer plaque engraved with pleas for forgiveness to possibly the regional genius loci.
The door at the back leads to a large library. Also an arm holding a sword attempts to press out of the clouds above. (Well, that happened.) The library had no remaining books or even sign that books had been rotted out, but it did have a clear-of-dust space with five chairs and a table in it, no more than a month old by the dust reaccumulation, suggesting someone was having a meeting or something.
We could spend time going through this wreckage systematically and it would take a lot of it so we go try the door to the right, which has a short hall and a big iron door with an ornate lock.
Celyn unlocks it, which accomplished nothing, to his moderate bafflement and irritation. Izgil spots that there is an arcane lock which the simple lock Celyn dealt with was merely a cover for, and after some contemplation, he just fucking dispels it.
The room inside is shrouded in darkness that Izgil's moonlight spell presses back, and is a library that has actual books and scrolls in it, though probably only about a third of what it originally had. Possibly more of a small personal study than a library, really. Izgil, whose moonlight helps him spot illusions, notes that the wall looks like it should curve to match the tower and that that is an illusion. We all glare at the wall until we see through the illusion, and then the moonlight spell goes out, leaving us in magical darkness for a hot minute until we fixed that.
Izgil finds the secret door. We do not find a mechanism for the secret door. Robin hits it with a hammer. This solves the secret door problem.
We find a small space with shiny black walls that reflect the viewer's horrible, if miscellaneous, death at them. There is something of a kaleidoscopic variety! (Well, that happened.) In keeping with our developing habit of going "Well, that happened" (Celyn is a good example of, uh... something!) we ignore this in favor of peering at the heavy trap door in the ceiling.
It is determined that Celyn - who has done acrobat stacks before actually, not that that came up - can stand on Robin's shoulders and push open the trap door, which action promptly fills him with a wave of near-suicidal despair and did him damage. (Well, that happened. He actually has a whole thing about this particular bit that I may wind up writing. I could have seen if his protection from madness power did any good maybe.)
Robin heals Celyn a little, because Celyn has spotted the orb at the back end of this room. Viepuck hands him the lead box (another wave of despair hits) and he proceeds to teleport himself most of the way there, walk the rest of the way (which is active work, the zone enforces slowness), and attempts to slam it into the box.
It dodges.
(Well, that happened.)
Celyn cusses it out for dodging, actually, and shouts that it dodged.
Izgil teleports up, gets hit with the wave of despair, and casts a dispel on the orb such that it falls to the floor. Robin, who has had a fly spell cast on him by Viepuck, pops up to lend moral support (and improved saves). Celyn a) grabs the orb in the box, b) teleports back towards the trapdoor to get out of the slow zone, and c) jumps down, confirming that the despair waves only hit in the upstairs (as opposed to 'near the orb') so everyone should get the fuck back down.
Everyone does, though Robin fails his save on the despair wave and hits himself with his hammer, leading Celyn to ask him with some urgency if he is okay.
We take a moment to catch our breath and heal up a bit, and then proceed to start departing the premises so we can tell Raoul we got the damn thing and he can come collect it for destruction purposes now.
As we make it back to the tower room, a human shadow carrying two physical swords extrudes from the doom cloud. (Well, sigh, that happened.)
Robin, still under the effects of the fly spell, engages the thing in midair, and it is determined that the radiant damage from his smite power does much more effect than physical damage. Celyn's response is "I guess I pretend to be a spellcaster now" and we cast a radiant damage spell. The shadow takes a swing at Robin and tries to cast something that Izgil counterspells; Izgil puts a column of light on the thing to ruin its day further. Viepuck has no radiant but he can do force and psychic damage and does so, knocking it back away from Robin.
I will note, as a player aside, that Robin has a habit of rolling flashy critical hits in major combats. (Though this was not major-major.) This is apparently not merely that![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
arcadinal rolls well in major combats; he had to duck out before the fight so I was rolling for him and I rolled an 18 and a 20 and declared a smite on the critical, like ya do. (And did the smite at second level. And because it was against an undead there was an extra die. I rolled 10d8, five of which came up 8. Also there were a 7 and a 6.)
(I then proceeded to take a photo of the dice and sendarcadinal a message reading "I rolled a crit for you".)
Anyway, that ended the fight, and we retreated from the cursed compound though we did grab a couple of cloaks off the statues on the way out. We have now contacted Raoul to say, "OKAY NOW WHAT," and that is where we end.
Dramatis Personae:
Viepuck, noble-annoying brat with a boss
Izgil, the moonlight guy
Celyn, who thought "well, that happened" about a lot of terrible things honestly
Robin, who needs a vacation
When we left off we had done a bit of cleanup in Peydon and were getting ready to deal with larger events.
In the morning, we dodged the Baroness's messenger who had the proclamation that the people who had been heroically going around and killing evil fey should go to the capital for their just rewards so they don't know we got the message for certain, and wandered off into the hills to meet with Raoul, the terrifyingly powerful cleric of the goddess of You Put That Undead Back Down Where You Got It Or So Help Me I Will.
We found Raoul and his two large, alarming bodyguards. Raoul hopes that our time dealing with the troubles in Avail has not been lastingly traumatic; Robin says, "Unfortunately, it has," which the cleric did not appear to know what to do with other than apologize for asking us to deal with more of them.
Raoul casts a spell and a small temple appears which is, alas, not the rumored missing temple ruin in the vicinity. (Me: Ah! The Night Queen's Tiny Temple.) This is the Tiny Temple upgraded version that blocks scrying, so the party and Raoul pile in to talk and leave the bodyguards outside.
Raoul has an explanation for a bunch of things: King Robert is dead. The King has been dead for four years, and has been replaced by a lich named something like Malik. The lich has, in theory, cast two nation-spanning spells, one to notify him whenever he hears people talking about himself, and one to cause the undead waves. Raoul thinks the eavesdropping spell is powerful enough to catch even people using magical/telepathic communication, as one of the clerics who was executed (for being framed for necromantic treason) was careful about speech but used the Sending spell extensively.
Viepuck promptly develops a habit of referring to this entity as "Bobby", not merely to be annoying to nobility but also to be annoying to nobility.
We are further informed that Raoul, the paladin Leonora, and their allies had nearly defeated the lich previously, but it managed to rally, divide its phylactery into three parts, and conceal them. Raoul and company and Leonora and possibly company are set to retrieve two of these parts, and wish to tap the party to obtain the third, which is somewhere in the barony.
The party theorizes that the lich may have been the powerful entity that allied with and then betrayed the Gloomshaper, and possibly that it may have drained magical power from the fey in order to do the undead-raising spell, which is at least a plausible betrayal. (Possibly there was a deal to power the spy spell and it went for a two-for-one?) We have no evidence for this but speculation.
We tell the big cleric what we know and suspect about the baroness, Izgil manages to determine which of the three parts is in which location via magic and passes that information on, and agree to contact him once we have obtained the item. Celyn wishes him luck with all the oomph of a cleric of the god of luck, and Raoul steps out of the tiny temple, takes the hands of his buds, and promptly vanishes.
We, unequipped with teleportation powers and/or flying steeds, prepare to walk. We indicate we are heading for Veltor (the capital) and then proceed to not do that.
On the walk, Izgil does a lot of poking at his two rings to try to figure out how to make them one ring. This keeps him very busy. Viepuck, meanwhile, spends a lot of time using Sending to be a magical telegraph, which keeps him very busy. (He contacts someone in the Western Army to tell him that the Duke needs reinforcements in the civil war. He does a variety of the usual coordination things, including collecting updates from various people. He notes to Raoul that the people of Peydon have a lot of folks suffering from curses and some good PR at some point might be for Night Queen folks who can remove those to go be helpful. He also uses the sending locket to sing, I don't know, the Smurfs song at the baroness every day, and then says "This is getting boring, I'll be at [inn] in Aslain, if you want it come get it" and then pings the barkeep at that inn to say, "Hey there may be guard gossip looking for a kid, lemme know!" and manages to roll high enough on his persuasion to not make it weird.)
When he checks in with the barkeep a day or two later he gets a message that the guards came through looking for "Timmy" (his alias) because they thought he might be in danger, but there was no interesting drama. So he used the locket to say "The guards left last night? I just came in for breakfast?" in order to perpetuate further fuckery.
Anyway. We reached the ruin where we believed (due to both theory and Izgil's magic) that the floating orb we were searching for was located, that being the ruin the baroness had been visiting and had drawings of and so on. This was, apparently, an old wizard academy; what was a lovely planned monastic/scholarly community once upon a time was now a massive ruin with an evil cloud over its sky.
(Human prejudice on this is roughly coming down on the side of "The wizards went off to wizard and look, wizarding happened, at least it's not sufficiently fucked as to cause a nation-spanning magical plague this time.")
We then proceeded to spend an immense amount of the session stymied by a door.
It was a nice door, with something like "Seekers of Souls" inscribed on the lintel in Elvish calligraphy. It slowly cycled through a sequence of words: "Penitent" and then "Truth-Seeker" in the same script, "MASTER" in heavy metal script, and then "Healer" in the original script scratched out with "Corrupter" in floaty black text superimposed on top of it. We studied this at length, up to and including Viepuck bapping the door with a dandelion each word to see what happened ("corrupter" killed it).
Viepuck interrogated the door. The door could not explain anything about the enchantment, which was not part of itself. The door had a mild existential crisis about the fact that it did not think it had ever opened, before deciding that since its function was to divide one side from the other, clearly those things were to remain divided, and thus it was being an exemplar of door-ness by not opening and risking those things mixing.
We try to open the door with mage hand (nothing happens). We debate whether the door is too heavy to be moved (probably not, it's magic).
Eventually Izgil gives up and touches the door (during "Truth-Seeker"). And promptly vanishes. Robin is incredibly alarmed and feels that this was a foolish choice. Before we manage to finish debating what to do about it, Izgil reappears and says, "I tried to open the door to let you all in but it just dumped me out again."
We decide to go through the door. Izgil reports that he was interrogated by the spell, which asked him what he was seeking. He said something about "how the universe works, a topic which has fascinated me since I was young", and after several clarifying exchanges he was allowed to the other side. (Also, when he touched the door again, he went right through.)
Viepuck tried the door. Viepuck said he wanted to learn things! The door asked why. He said, more or less, "For my master." "Who is your master?" "[unpronounceable entity]" "Why does your master want to know things?" "It's ... curious?" Viepuck was dumped on the outside of the door.
Viepuck and Celyn tried the door simultaneously. (Celyn's interview: "What do you seek?" "Change." "What do you change?" "Myself, to be better. The world, to be better." He was permitted access.) Viepuck's interview did not go well again.
Robin touches the door. Robin answers "What do you seek?" with "Peace."
The door has no further questions for Robin. (The door recognizes an absolute cinnamon roll when it sees one.)
Viepuck eventually answers the door that he's trying to help his friends, the people on the other side of the door, and does not bring up his master at all. The door finds this answer acceptable.
Meanwhile we have stared at the ruins. The nice townhouses are wrecked to either side. The temple-like building with the dome that is spewing evil black cloud is before us - round, four doors spaced at the quarters, and with alarming statues of tormented people on its roof. Viepuck blasts a statue, and we see movement. Viepuck interrogates another statue and only gets screaming as an answer. We are all quite disturbed. (Well, that happened.) Robin is extremely upset and wants us to smash all the statues; we are not sure whether or not that actually releases the possible tormented spirits and decide eventually to consult Raoul.
We open the door to the dome. Inside we see a floating orb (such as the one we are looking for) surrounded by an honor guard of twelve ghosts. Two ghosts detach to come attack us. We close the door (and fight the two). When we open the door again, we find that there is an honor guard of twelve ghosts. We decide to stop closing the door.
Izgil decides to drop a blast of light in the room to see if he can clear out the ghosts, but they are rather dextrous ghosts apparently and many of them take half-damage. Celyn thinks he sees the light shimmer through the orb and is perplexed. We learn to our general annoyance that the damage the ghosts do is difficult to heal without a long rest, though the ghosts go down fairly quickly.
It is even more annoying when we figure out that everything in there is a damn illusion, including the ghosts, but that does not actually help us heal the injuries they caused when we weren't aware of that fact. Well, the apparent generation of the evil cloud is not illusory but we can't do anything about it.
Trying to take a break inside the ruin triggers a "You cannot rest here, there are enemies nearby" error so we go outside the infamous door and rest instead. Then we plan on tackling the next plausible bit: a two-story building with a tower in the center, the tower having sheared off/collapsed at contact with the evil cloud. (Well, that happened.)
The antechamber is full of statues that are creepy and also blink and we are not sure if they are the same type of statues as the ones on the dome but also when Robin goes into line of sight of one of them he has to make a save so they do something. There are three rough expressions: malicious, agonized, and determined, and the space right inside the door is in LOS of a malicious statue and two determined ones.
We solve this problem by suppressing the malicious and agonised statues like they were guinea pigs, though with spare blankets and cloaks and such rather than canvas sacks. This is accomplished with mage hand, mostly.
In the room beyond the antechamber, we are at the base of the tower, which is open to the sky that roils with evil clouds that occasionally show signs of something humanoid trying to press out of them like a horror movie. (Well, that happened.) Rather than worry about that too much, we explore to the left. (Options are left, back, right, and down, for the record.)
This is an arced hall with five doors off of it, each of which seems to lead to a ruined study. Celyn is largely indifferent to detailed search because he has a terrible attention span for fussy things; Izgil insists on being methodical and finds things subtler than "the skeleton with a knife lying next to its neck" (Well, that happened.), such as the wall that seems to have been molded like clay by someone trying to claw their way out, or (in the upstairs rooms) a prayer plaque engraved with pleas for forgiveness to possibly the regional genius loci.
The door at the back leads to a large library. Also an arm holding a sword attempts to press out of the clouds above. (Well, that happened.) The library had no remaining books or even sign that books had been rotted out, but it did have a clear-of-dust space with five chairs and a table in it, no more than a month old by the dust reaccumulation, suggesting someone was having a meeting or something.
We could spend time going through this wreckage systematically and it would take a lot of it so we go try the door to the right, which has a short hall and a big iron door with an ornate lock.
Celyn unlocks it, which accomplished nothing, to his moderate bafflement and irritation. Izgil spots that there is an arcane lock which the simple lock Celyn dealt with was merely a cover for, and after some contemplation, he just fucking dispels it.
The room inside is shrouded in darkness that Izgil's moonlight spell presses back, and is a library that has actual books and scrolls in it, though probably only about a third of what it originally had. Possibly more of a small personal study than a library, really. Izgil, whose moonlight helps him spot illusions, notes that the wall looks like it should curve to match the tower and that that is an illusion. We all glare at the wall until we see through the illusion, and then the moonlight spell goes out, leaving us in magical darkness for a hot minute until we fixed that.
Izgil finds the secret door. We do not find a mechanism for the secret door. Robin hits it with a hammer. This solves the secret door problem.
We find a small space with shiny black walls that reflect the viewer's horrible, if miscellaneous, death at them. There is something of a kaleidoscopic variety! (Well, that happened.) In keeping with our developing habit of going "Well, that happened" (Celyn is a good example of, uh... something!) we ignore this in favor of peering at the heavy trap door in the ceiling.
It is determined that Celyn - who has done acrobat stacks before actually, not that that came up - can stand on Robin's shoulders and push open the trap door, which action promptly fills him with a wave of near-suicidal despair and did him damage. (Well, that happened. He actually has a whole thing about this particular bit that I may wind up writing. I could have seen if his protection from madness power did any good maybe.)
Robin heals Celyn a little, because Celyn has spotted the orb at the back end of this room. Viepuck hands him the lead box (another wave of despair hits) and he proceeds to teleport himself most of the way there, walk the rest of the way (which is active work, the zone enforces slowness), and attempts to slam it into the box.
It dodges.
(Well, that happened.)
Celyn cusses it out for dodging, actually, and shouts that it dodged.
Izgil teleports up, gets hit with the wave of despair, and casts a dispel on the orb such that it falls to the floor. Robin, who has had a fly spell cast on him by Viepuck, pops up to lend moral support (and improved saves). Celyn a) grabs the orb in the box, b) teleports back towards the trapdoor to get out of the slow zone, and c) jumps down, confirming that the despair waves only hit in the upstairs (as opposed to 'near the orb') so everyone should get the fuck back down.
Everyone does, though Robin fails his save on the despair wave and hits himself with his hammer, leading Celyn to ask him with some urgency if he is okay.
We take a moment to catch our breath and heal up a bit, and then proceed to start departing the premises so we can tell Raoul we got the damn thing and he can come collect it for destruction purposes now.
As we make it back to the tower room, a human shadow carrying two physical swords extrudes from the doom cloud. (Well, sigh, that happened.)
Robin, still under the effects of the fly spell, engages the thing in midair, and it is determined that the radiant damage from his smite power does much more effect than physical damage. Celyn's response is "I guess I pretend to be a spellcaster now" and we cast a radiant damage spell. The shadow takes a swing at Robin and tries to cast something that Izgil counterspells; Izgil puts a column of light on the thing to ruin its day further. Viepuck has no radiant but he can do force and psychic damage and does so, knocking it back away from Robin.
I will note, as a player aside, that Robin has a habit of rolling flashy critical hits in major combats. (Though this was not major-major.) This is apparently not merely that
arcadinal rolls well in major combats; he had to duck out before the fight so I was rolling for him and I rolled an 18 and a 20 and declared a smite on the critical, like ya do. (And did the smite at second level. And because it was against an undead there was an extra die. I rolled 10d8, five of which came up 8. Also there were a 7 and a 6.)(I then proceeded to take a photo of the dice and send
arcadinal a message reading "I rolled a crit for you".)Anyway, that ended the fight, and we retreated from the cursed compound though we did grab a couple of cloaks off the statues on the way out. We have now contacted Raoul to say, "OKAY NOW WHAT," and that is where we end.