Aboleth Group - Twiglets, anyone? - LMOP Session 6

26^th June 2019, 7:30 – 11:00pm

In-game timeline: Start of session, day 5. End of session, day 5.

We rejoin our “Heroes” outside Reidoth’s house, discussing whether to tell him that they agreed, with very little hesitation, to kill Reidoth for the dragon. As Reidoth opens the door to them, ready to welcome them with open arms back into his home, Derrick is in full flow of a sarcastic impression of errr...... of errr...... of errr...... of errr...... of errr...... Reidoth. Is it, hmm?

A hurt and offended Reidoth still invites them in and fetches for them nice cups of tea, though Derrick’s tea seems a little..... weak. Despite the ridicule, Reidoth has even managed to dig out a healing potion for the party – something which the party is in dire need of and that they are starting to appreciate, having almost lost their only healer a couple of hours previously.

Reidoth starts to explain that the second bronze seal that the party obtained from the dragon may have something to do with the lost mine they previously asked about, but he would explain all about that after they have helped him perform his cleansing ritual.

Esme does eventually tell him that they agreed to kill him in exchange for the seals during their negotiation with the dragon, and put forward the dragon’s point of view that he (or she – they didn’t ask) was a natural creature and deserved to live. Reidoth was somewhat taken aback by their agreement to end his life, especially as they didn’t actually say that they wouldn’t actually kill him. He decided to cross that bridge later. But he did agree with the sentiment that the dragon was indeed a natural creature, and re-iterated that he didn’t want it dead, just moved on, so that maybe Thundertree could one day be re-settled by its previous inhabitant families.

Reidoth recharges their ‘twig blight detecting’ staff to its previous 6 charges and tells the party where he thinks the zombies may be found – in the old inn, the smithy and the old garrison. He then begins his ritual, using his seal that the group obtained from the dragon.

The party head out, and aim for the Inn at the top of town. Finding it was easy – it had an old sign outside showing a horse holding a jug of ale. Questioning the validity of the picture, Mallorn and Derrick both tried to work out how a horse could hold a jug of ale. Their resolve to not dither in this session failed at the first hurdle.

The DM expressed, perhaps unfair, surprise that the party remembered that they had been told the zombies will emit a puff of ash when first hurt, and that they should try to avoid this, so they readied their range weapons, as Derrick walked boldly into the Inn whilst the others waited outside. In an unfortunate turn of events, Derrick was very slow off the mark as he spotted two zombies inside the building, and Derrick decided to run back outside to the others, but not before the zombies managed to slam into him - well, one of them ran straight into the wall, but the other did manage to slam Derrick against the brickwork, causing a fair bit of damage. To Derrick, as well as the wall.

Outside, the others started using their ranged weapons against the zombies and found them to be pretty resilient to their attacks, though quite easy to hit. The zombies came at Esme and engaged her in melee attacks, though often missed. The fight went on longer than the party were used to, not helped by additional zombies that kept appearing after each round – in total six zombies took on the group. Esme, in melee with them near the entrance to the inn, took the brunt of the ash clouds that the zombies emitted when they first got hurt, but for the most part was unaffected, and she took on the mantle of “Zombie Queen!”, complete with exclamation mark. Until, that is, she succumbed to the ash at one point, and her subsequent attacks suffered. Zombies were referred to by the party as “already poofed” and “not yet poofed”, to keep track of the likelihood of being affected by ash clouds.

Mallorn also suffered when he entered the melee with a zombie. Not from the zombie – who kept missing – but from Pruni, who fired an arrow at the enemy, badly missed, and hit Mallorn instead. He was not amused. Derrick was also not amused when another zombie managed to get a perfect body slam, crushing him against a rock and knocking him unconscious and he started to bleed out, failing his first death saving throw, and being only one critical fail dice throw from death. Esme ran over to stabilise him as Pruni killed her second zombie, and then Esme and Pruni took out the last two undead between them.  Mallorn had also managed to take out two enemies, despite the threat of friendly fire from Pruni, and Derrick – well, Derrick had at least been a distraction. To be fair to Derrick, he had hit on every attack with each of his javelins – he tended to go for the healthy zombies and bring them close to death, while Pruni mopped up the weak ones and so got all the kills.

Somewhat exhausted and hurt, the party looked into their healing resources, and Esme used her Channel Divinity to restore some health to herself and Derrick, who then remembered he had some abilities that could have proved useful when he was not unconscious, and he used Second Wind to give him some more health and remembered he had Action Surge to get another attack in.

They decided to press on, what with there being a 4-hour time limit to the ritual, despite them almost being brought down in the first encounter, and, after a quick search of the inn and finding nothing, Pruni went to check out the nearby cottage.

She didn’t spot the bushes either side of the door were not actually bushes, and they attacked, scraping a large gash out of her leg before the rest of the party were able to come in and help. Esme and Pruni managed to take out the twig blights with relative ease - now they knew the sort of plant monster that they faced. Or one sort, at least.

A quick search of that cottage produced some cutlery – two knives and a teaspoon to be exact, but nothing else. The party decided that spending time searching, when their time was limited, was probably a bad idea, and resolved to be more focused on killing things rather than finding things in future. We know how well their resolutions tend to pan out.

Heading into the next cottage, Mallorn used a charge of the ‘twig-detector’ to show that there were some baddies in the large, bushy tree in the middle of the two attached cottages. Knowing this, Esme tried to flush them out by moving the ground...slightly... and by making a one-off crackling sound to try to convince them the tree was on fire, despite the fact that the sound lasted about 2 seconds, and finally by shouting “Fire!” unconvincingly in their general direction. Unsurprisingly, nothing stirred.

And so the party decided to search the floor instead, wondering if this flagstone floor was the one they were looking for, for Derrick’s hoard meagre items. At this point, more twig-monsters attacked, unexpectedly from the south. Pruni was the only one actively looking for them (Esme tried, but wasn’t very good at ‘looking’), but she missed her attempt and a bush got a good hit on Esme. As the rest of the party got involved, other moving bushes appeared out of the large tree in the centre, as was pretty obviously going to happen, and the group managed to polish them off with only Pruni getting hit. Mallorn killed 2, and Pruni pruned 3 of them, and even Derrick “Twiglet” Trebuchet managed to break two of them into firewood, finally managing to experience the glory of the kill... of a bunch of sticks. Esme was busy healing herself in the short time it took to dispatch the overgrown Groots.

After 3 fairly destructive battles, the party was battered, and had used many of their abilities, so they decided a short rest was in order. They retired back to the inn, as that was the most intact building and easiest defended, and rested, all using some of their rest to regain health.

And so we leave our “Heroes”, one and a half hours into a four hour ritual, battered and bruised, but alive and in relatively good health, ready to tackle the next group of plants/zombies.