Aboleth Group - Just give me the sodding potion! - LMOP Session 8

10^th July 2019, 8:00 – 10:45pm

In-game timeline: Start of session, day 5. End of session, day 8.

Our “Heroes” are attempting to clear out the zombies and blight creatures from Thundertree before the end of the ritual. They are pretty certain they have cleared out all the zombie creatures, and are feeling a little battered and bruised after some tough fights.

Ignoring the blights they know are somewhere in a nearby set of bushes, they spend a while looking at, and in, another house, which is covered inside in cobwebs. After much debate, deliberation and discussion, they decide to look inside using a glowing arrowhead fired into the building. It seems to show nothing but cobwebs, so they move on the last building they have yet to check out.

Pruni sneaks in, and her great skill as moving silently means the blights in there don’t see her. However, she also doesn’t see them either. But Pruni decides to fire blindly into the bushes, in the hope of hitting one. And hit one she actually did, but unfortunately she gave away her position in firing at them, and 5 of them rushed her, but all managed to miss! Pruni hung around, but called the others in, and they all ran into the house to take on the 5 twig blights, who soon were accompanied by 4 others, and the party ended up being attacked by 9 of the little “blighters”.

What would have been a fairly easy fight, had they been on full health, turned out to be a very risky one. Derrik started off well, taking out a blight with his first swing, but then missed on every attack after that. Esme went down in the first round after taking hits from two of the creatures – the group had lost their healer! After failing her first death save, Pruni broke off from the fight to give Esme their only healing potion, but wasn’t overly keen on doing so – an unconscious Esme somehow managed to utter “I’m dying… give me the sodding potion!!”.

Mallorn launched a couple of rounds of magic missiles, but the decision to hit three different creatures each time proved not ideal, as most of the missiles just injured the blights, rather than killed them. After launching his second spell, a couple of twigs took on Mallorn and brought him down – the party’s second knockout this session. While Pruni and Esme continued to kill the twigs, one by one, and Derrick distracted the others with his wild swinging of his axe, Mallorn slowly bled out. Esme got to him just in time and stabilised him as the last of the twig blights were disposed of. Using the last of her spells, Mallorn received some healing from Esme, and they all sat back and looked over the carnage of dead twigs. The Party had survived, though only just! Two knock-outs and Derrick on only 1hp.

They were so knackered that it took them a while to realise that the fog was starting to lift from around the town, and birdsong was once again heard in Thundertree.

Returning to Reidoth, he confirmed that the ritual was a success, and that Thundertree was well on its way to becoming habitable again. He gave them a reward of a decent amount of coin, and a cup of well-needed restorative tea. While they fully rested he told them what he knew about Cragmaw Castle, including its location, and Wave Echo Spells and the Forge of Spells, though he didn’t know where that was located – just that others are looking for it at the moment, including a group of dwarves, and someone, or something, called Black Spider.

As the party prepare to leave and check out the rest of the town, Reidoth offers them a choice of two sets of tea leaves, from a group of 4. The party identify the one that is a potion of fire resistance, and potion of water breathing, but for some strange reason they instead opt to take the ones that they know are a potion of poison resistance, and a restorative health potion, but they have no idea which is which. Which could prove interesting later.

The following morning, the party head into the now much brighter town of Thundertree, looking for Derrick’s old house. In the new daylight, Derrick recognises his old home, and they all enter, and find the loose flagstone supposedly covering his family’s “meagre possessions”.

Uncovering a pit, with a chest at the bottom, Derrick immediately leaps down to get his heirlooms back, not noticing the many, quite large, holes going into the earth surrounding the pit. As he looks at ‘his’ chest, he is suddenly surrounded by six fire beetles, who start to nip at him as he struggles to wield his great axe in the confined space.

Realising that he cant easily take on these creatures in the pit, and with reduced health, Derrick leaps out of the pit, risking further bites as he jumps. He manages to get out, with the beetles crawling up the sides to follow him, and the creatures are taken down, but not before they get a few more nips in on the party.

Finally free of attacking monsters, the party open the chest to reveal some family heirlooms and a small amount of treasure. As the ‘riches’ store of a family, they are indeed “meagre possessions”, but to a party who have only just seen their first 100gp, it was a true cache. Derrick generously offered all the gold and silver, and one emerald, to go into the ‘joint account’, but this was not enough for Pruni. She wanted all of it. At least all of the emeralds. The biggest threat to the party is indeed from within, it seems.

With at least Mallorn on his side, Derrick did eventually win out with ‘only’ giving the joint account one emerald and all the coins, but Pruni was not happy. She may be testing out her sleight of hand skill in the near future. And then Derrick may refuse to protect her in the next fight. It could all unravel rapidly from this point.

The party decide to spend the rest of the day searching all the properties in the town for ‘loot’, but two of them were sulking, and the other two quite bored, so they didn’t manage to look very hard, and found nothing much of value. They did find the desiccated corpse of an elf, wrapped in spider silk. Pruni and Esme were all for stripping it clean of anything that could be remotely considered valuable. Mallorn, however was more respectful, and said a few words over the body to help its long-past transition to the next plane.

Heading back to the horses, who remarkably were still there, they went back to Phandalin, resting up overnight again with Reidoth so they could travel by day. They decided to not revisit the dragon, and did eventually admit to Reidoth that, in order to gain the seal for the ritual, they agreed to kill Reidoth. A little taken aback, Reidoth suggested they just avoid the dragon, and although they do risk the dragon coming after them when he realises they didn’t fulfil their promise, it’s probably safer than trying to return to the dragon and lie to him.

Arriving back in Phandalin, they spot Quelline, crying into her glass of sherry. It turns out that in their absence, the Redbrands have stepped up their violence, potentially in retribution for the party killing four of their members before heading to Thundertree. Not only has the protection money increased, but they visited Quelline at her farm, destroyed half of her crops (to the tune of 250gp of damage), and, worse still, took Carp away. Quelline thinks that Carp is probably at the Manor house somewhere.

The group resolved to head to the Manor and retrieve Carp and sort out the Redbrands once and for all. Well, after they’ve levelled up (to level 3) and done a bit of shopping first. Got to get priorities right.

And so we leave our “Heroes” in Phandalin, now level 3 with improved powers and spells, wondering if it is too late for Carp. And for Gundren, who may or may not be dead, and may or may not be in Cragmaw Castle.