The Blood Caravan, Part II

The former prisoners were taken back to the Asylum, which had been cleaned up since the PCs had been there last. The remaining members of the Asylum take in the four easily, mainly because of Uncle Paladin would be useful, Dylan already has an in because of Mars, and the Asylumites are just generally kind-hearted. After a night’s rest, they determine that they will get no physical support, but Uncle Paladin does offer the PCs his magic cloak and wishes them the best of luck.

Back at Merc’s place, they find the green dragon having himself an orc dinner. He informs them that the teleportation pad seemed to have powered down last night. They panic, and then realize that they can just put the key into another hole on the pad and power it up again. This insignificant crisis resolved, they stepped on the pad to take on the remaining forces.

They found themselves in a completely different building. After a moment wondering if they were on the caravan or not, they opened the door to find a narrow hallway with a lot of doors. They open the first door to find a room with the floor covered in ash, many pieces of obsidian furniture, and floating fire lamps. There was also a humanoid elemental, called a genosi in Forgotten Realms, and called a genosi here as well.

The genosi asks who the hell are they, and they just respond that they are here to cash in on a job they had with Malthius some time ago. The genosi responds that Malthius has been dead for years, and the party acts surprised. Okay, they are surprised, mainly because they forgot that Skinlash now runs the caravan and got distracted by the records found in the Architect’s tower. After a moment of pause, they decide it was time to kill the genosi, and attack. The genosi grabs a rod, throws it at the ground, and summons four flamesparks.

The fight was a bit rough, with the explosive abilities of the flamesparks licking the players for a lot of damage, and the encounter power of the genosi knocked down a lot of hit points. Eventually they cornered the genosi, keeping him from using his destructive ranged spells, and they kept their distance from the flamesparks, eventually clearing out the room. They found a rod that would summon a flamespark a day, a handy tool.

They look around the building some more and discover a succubus, just lounging. She feigns interest, gets in a catty argument with the warlock, and eventually offers the party strategy advice when fighting Skinlash, and then says they should come by when they’re done. Realizing the sensitive nature of humanoid/devil relations, they beat feet upstairs to get to the front chambers.

They tromp upstairs to find a ghost string quartet playing for a satyr. The satyr pops up and asks who they are, and they bluff with that same lie about doing a job for a devil some odd years ago. The satyr, not caring either way, falls for it and sits back down. As they move past the satyr, the warlord cracks him in the head with his flail. Oh, that wacky warlord.

The fight gets into swing with the satyr playing his pipes to get the ghosts between him and his enemies, and then running like hell to the other side of the room. The gambit fails when the cleric fires off a turn undead, scattering the ghosts. The warlock’s artifact threw a fit, demanding that the satyr was “responsible” and that the warlock deal with him. So, the satyr collapsed early from the warlord, and it was a matter of cleaning up the obnoxious but nearly harmless ghost musicians.

After the last ghost fell, the warlock got a little dramatic, planning to drive the artifact through the satyr’s skull. In a last-ditch effort, the satyr pulled something out of his pocket and touched it to the artifact while it came towards his head. This caused the artifact to vanish. The satyr quietly died after. It was determined through a number of methods that it was a teleporting stone (adorn with the same symbol they’ve been seeing more often), and that it teleported the artifact towards the blade, which the artifact was happy about. Still, the party was disconcerted…and were less happy when they looked out the window.

The Bloodletters were back, and they were mad. They slammed their floating room thing into the side of the building the party was in, shattering the windows and sending the party for cover. They rolled initiative, ready for vengeance. The axe-wielding bloodletter charged forward, and the sap-wielding one moved around the back to ambush the warlock, while the other two stood in the back flinging bolts and fire spells. The defenses of the players improved significantly, however, and the bloodletters missed more often than they hit. The thief bloodletter was taken down quickly, and when his fighter buddy moved in to attack, he was mainly rebuffed and taken out. It was only the matter of the handling the ranged fighters, who felt content knocking the wizard prone from a distance. An anomaly of the initiative order made it difficult for the wizard bloodletter to use her dangerous AoE ability, and eventually the bloodletters were no more.

With their defeat, their floating fortress could no longer function, and went inert, slipping backwards to slam into the end of the caravan, leaving a huge gash and causing the room to be abandoned in the field. This impressive explosion only set the tone for the final showdown between the party and Skinlash.

They stepped forward into the main hall, a lavishly decorated affair with huge bay windows and a balcony area to find Skinlash, the fat and lazy spined devil, and Horrid, the bloodletter commander. The boss tiredly exclaimed death upon them and the bloodletter stepped to the edge of the stairs down to the main floor, blocking the PCs. They all gather around the top of the stairs, putting themselves in perfect place for the commander’s special ability, the psychic scream. The fighter managed to push him out of range of half the target’s before he could get it off, however. Skinlash stunned the cleric and kept him out of combat for three rounds, but the rest knew to concentrate effort on Horrid, and managed to knock him down before he could do another psychic scream. With this, Skinlash started to panic, and found himself out of range for his more powerful abilities. Nobody moved close to him because of the succubus’s warning, and pushed him away and slammed him with attacks against his abysmal reflex. The leader of the Blood Caravan, out of cronies, ignobly went down, and the horror was disbanded.

They spent a moment congratulating themselves when the arcane spell that bound the bulettes that dragged the Blood Caravan broke, causing them to revolt and dive underground, dragging the caravan with them. The caravan lurched, and the front section broke off and collapsed, while the rest of the caravan was thrown forward by inertia and crashed into it, creating a large ruin. The remaining creatures in the caravan fled, and the party went ahead and ransacked the remains, finding a sizable treasure. They also found that the teleportation pads were non-functional, which means they couldn’t return to their previous location. Still, they were only half a day from the Salt City.

Lessons Learned: Oh, did I learn. I’ve gotten good at describing exactly what each enemy is doing, but there were still moments when the fighter would say ‘that didn’t happen’ and I had to back up because there was an action that they wanted to perform first. I’ve also been throwing in more and more individually made monsters, which are always a lot of fun and interesting, but also a bitch in terms of logistics, so I may have to tone it down if I don’t want to spend 10 hours a week creating the week’s campaign.

Also, distractive activity was pervasive that night, mainly because of where we were playing this time (new location to most), and it took a lot to reel everyone in. It also felt a lot less epic, somehow, mainly because some of the enemies got derailed in their abilities and I designed the final room in an undramatic way. I’ve also been made aware that I do mindscrew stuff a lot; not sure if I want to change that.

Still, now that we are at the halfway point of the heroic tier, I think that it’s gone well so far. People are enjoying the game (I think), and some of the things the world lends itself to are really fun. It’s also been fun to constantly have the players on the move, after a year and a half of having to bring the fight to them.

Now I’ve just got to figure out what the hell they’ll be doing next.