Aboleth Group - One more step, and I'll get you with my candle! - LMOP Session 7

10^th July 2019, 7:30 – 10:45pm

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

Our ‘Heroes’ are found, mid-ritual, in Thundertree, having just rested after a couple of difficult encounters with hardy but slow zombies, and weak but vicious twig monsters. And that’s just the first of potentially 3 buildings of zombies, and an unknown number of groups of twigs. The group is in for a tough evening!

They headed to where they thought the garrison was located, on the other side of town, stopping briefly to pop a head in the door of the small cottage near where they are, to check there were no zombies in there. There weren’t.

Arriving at the town square, identified by the once-impressive statue in the middle of a junction of paths, there is a garrison-looking type building on the other side. In a trait that would become common this session, Derrick went to the door, which was opened by Esme’s thaumaturgy spell, and ‘poked his head round the door’.

In this instance, that provoked an attack from the zombie who was standing just inside the door. But Derrick managed to pull back out of the door just in time, and started running back to the rest of the group standing by the statue. The rest managed to fire off some ranged weapons at the zombie before they were surprised by the emergence of two rough-looking wolves from the garrison building. As they ran towards the group, one let out an almighty howl, which made Pruni and Derrick turn and run off in fear, leaving Mallorn and Esme to face the wolves, and the zombie, alone.

As the wolves bore down on the abandoned elf and dwarf, Mallorn considered conjuring up a rabbit to distract the manic zombie wolves who had a relatively defenceless, tall streak of meat dressed up in a simple tunic and pointy hat standing before them. “Ooo. A Bunny!” He thought better of it and attacked instead, blasting them with magic missiles.

Eventually Derrick overcame his fear and came back to pile into the fight. Pruni took a while longer to decide the zombie wolves weren’t as scary as they seemed, and come back. It was a good job they overcame their fear, as Mallorn and Esme were not doing so well. Mallorn had been knocked unconscious, and Esme kept missing with her warhammer. In the end Derrick piled in and smashed through the wolves with a couple of impressive hits, and Pruni eventually returned and took out the zombie. Mallorn needed a healing spell from Esme to regain consciousness.

Battered and beaten, the party needed to press on, in order to clear the town before Reidoth finished his ritual.

Using Reidoth’s magic staff, the party knew there were some twig monsters in the nearby bushes. Pruni wanted to threaten them with a candle. Esme decided to fire blindly into the bush with a sacred flame (and did, surprisingly, manage to hit one!). Derrick got bored and decided to just pile in. He then proceeded to kill a twig blight on every single attempt over the next few swings with his axe – Derrick “Redeemed” Trebuchet has finally found his mojo. The rest of the group cleared out the remainder of the blights, but not before the twigs got a few deep scratches on Derrick.

In more of a rush now, with time pressing, the group check out a couple more buildings. Derrick again tried the ‘pop my head round’ method, and discovered a new kind of plant monster – a needle blight. Two of them, in fact. Both firing needles at Derrick while a little twig blight nipped at his heels. Derrick was pretty beaten up at this point, and retreated, letting others have a go at the over-egoed Christmas trees. They were tougher than the twigs, and managed to have another go at Derrick and Mallorn before being brought down. Derrick fell unconscious, and needed to recover all by himself as everyone else was busy with their tree surgery.

Taking advantage of the rest of the group catching their breath after another tough fight, Mallorn looked around this new building, which seemed to be an old library, or bookshop, or similar. Most items were charred beyond any repair or identification, but Mallorn persisted and searched hard. This proved very fruitful, resulting in not only a few books in pretty good condition, but also a book on Faerun Deity Genealogy (vol 2 of 4), which he seemed to find very interesting, plus a couple of magic scrolls.

Time now running out, they headed for the old forge – the last known location of more zombies, according to Reidoth – who the group was beginning to trust less due to the fact that he hadn’t made their life easy by providing a full ordnance survey map of the town, with GPS locations and specs, first names, and grandmother’s home addresses for all monsters in the town.

Cautious of approaching the forge directly, Mallorn finally put into practice his plan of conjuring a bunny rabbit, and having it run in and out of the building to tempt anything out. Unfortunately, his knowledge of bunny rabbits was lacking, and not only did it not look much like one, but it didn’t much act like one either. So they weren’t tempted. So Pruni decided to sneak in, which she managed, and got a good hit on one of the four zombies present before disengaging and running back outside, with the zombie following – it stumbled right into the prepared attacks of the others and didn’t last long. However, the three other zombies emerged to find Esme by the door and managed to get some good hits on her despite her excellent armour. Mallorn managed to hit with every ray of frost he fired, and the zombies didn’t last long, primarily because Derrick kept killing them, despite being blinded by ash puffs a lot of the time, and even when faced with the “Chumbawumba” zombie, who kept being knocked down….and getting up again.

With Esme and Derrick low on health, and after having both Mallorn and Derrick fall unconscious in the previous hour, it had been a busy session.

And so we leave our ‘Heroes’, with a few unexplored buildings in town, potentially more tree-based monsters, and less than an hour of the ritual to go….