The castle plans showed that there are a couple of places that we have not checked on the main level. Back to the court yard we go searching everything just to make sure we are not going to be attacked on two sides. In the stables we found a creature that seems to have spiders as pets or minions. Etayne rushed in past Sparna so that she could cast her burning hands and as a result was poisoned losing strength. Since she is the healer I gave her the lessor restoration potion from my pack and let her decide how to use it. We may need a lot more lessor restoration before this is all said and done. At the moment Qatana shows no interest in memorizing lessor restoration and I don’t even know if Etayne has or can learn the spell. Oh well I will leave it up to the two of them to figure it out.

We decided to make our way down to the next level through the trog room. Down the stairs we went to the next room with Sparna in the lead and in the room Sparna found more trogs. The plan was to go back up the stairs and make them come to us. Things got funny at this point as Kali used a spell to make the stairs slippery and the trogs kept stumbling back down the stairs. I was able to kill the two that made it to the room but the rest of them closed the door and fled. While this was funny tactically this plan was a disaster as they retreated to a room where they would have the advantage. Qatana and Kali came up with another plan where they would get to throw spells in the room. Obscuring mist, sound burst, and color spray kind of seemed like a lot of spells to spend on trogs that I was able to kill with two arrows. Since we still have to storm the room I cast enlarge person on Sparna.  While it did allow him to do more damage the spell is not as useful as I had hoped and I am not exactly sure why the gods gave me this spell. There must be some grand plan that I as yet do not understand. He was able to split the Trog leader in half so that is something. All in all the time required to cast this spell makes it use situational at best.  The Trogs now dead we found yet another magic weapon and in fact a cold iron magic weapon. I have no real use for it as the bow is much better for me. Although for a few minutes there was a thought towards getting a weapon that I could use to beat someone senseless. Looking around at the others I realized that there is sometimes too many people trying to get to the front, well except for Etayne who prefers to have someone buff in front of her and Kali who uses her crossbow or spells. In the end for this group of people it is just best that I continue using the bow.  While the fight with the trogs worked out it would have been better to not impede there path to our melee kill zone and I should have waited to shoot arrows as well. We got lucky that these Trogs were on the weak side, except for their leader.

We continued to Search around and found a dungeon with ogrekin in the room. Qatana began some type of strange dialog with these creatures.  Kali and Etayne suddenly started discussing something about feeding the Quickling to the Ogrekin. They had a plan to put the fire potions in the Quickling and then feed it to the Qgrekin. This just seemed like one of those things that if it backfires then most of the party will get hit with a number of doses of Alchemist’s fire that could get us all killed. After some more time to think about it I can almost hear Abby’s voice in my head telling me that feeding a sentient being to Ogrekin is wrong. Although I would really have to ask her if it is worse then what the Quickling was doing. Well I could be completely wrong about it. No one in the group seemed to have an issue with feeding a sentient being to another creature so maybe I just got it wrong again!

Anyway Etayne and Kali really got miffed at me when I shot the arrows at the Big Ogrekin to end the nonsense. Yes it was tough and Olmas almost died again but we made it through with everyone still alive. It could have happened even if we waited around for the 10 minutes to let them get everything in place.

In one of the cages we found a woman in her early 20’s. She called herself Kelda Oxgutter and comes from the north. It turns out that her party was here to raid for loot and the rest of her party was killed. After the harpy I don’t feel as trusting of new people but the others seemed to trust her quickly. In retrospect I was a little rude to her. She has asked for us to help her back to her town and some of us have agreed to travel with her once we have finished up here in Brinewall. Still not sure if that is going to be a good idea or not but I did want to go somewhere interesting. She has agreed to continue further into this quest with us. Clearly her remarks indicate that she believes that the people of the north are far better at combat then southerners.  I guess she has a chance to prove it to us now.

Searching, searching and more searching. We encountered some ridiculously locked and hidden doors earlier. These even took Radella some amount of time to unlock. After opening the second and last lock we found ourselves overlooking the beach. The water marks clearly show that this is underwater at high tide. Water breathing would be very handy if one were to get caught out here as the tide is coming up and could not open the doors. There also must be some type of magic item that will help with breathing under water. Maybe something that also worked in smoke and other situations as well would be handy. Here I am going on about magic things when I haven’t even purchased the magic bow I am carrying from the party or purchased an efficient quiver.  I wonder if I kept raiding castles, fort, and encampments not being held by civilized people what kind of cool magic items I could get.  How many raids would I need to go on to get good equipment? The people from the land of the Linnorm Kings have been using the southern lands as there raiding grounds for a long time so maybe it is not all that bad of a plan.  Kelda herself also admitted that she was down here to raid. So I guess that makes it somewhat profitable.

If I am heading north then it might be wise to look into things to stay warm. The endure elements spell would do the trick but again this may be better on a wand or some type of item that permanently  protects from the cold or maybe some type of magic item that is usable once a day. Endure elements does last for 24 hours so having a magic item that allowed me to cast the spell once a day would work just fine and then I would not have to actually learn the spell. I am not so sure that comprehend languages was the best spell to learn, a couple of scrolls or even a wand seem like they would be just as effective and I don’t really need to use it in combat. I guess in years to come comprehend languages will remain useful as a spell that I always have available. You never know when you want to listen into a conversation or read material written that you normally could not understand. Watching Qatana utilize sound burst today made me wonder if I should learn that spell. The area affect is nice but it really doesn’t do as much damage as my bow. Against small swarming things this could be a useful spell. I wonder if this could be used to kill weeds and unwanted plants. That could be very useful someday when I return home to visit. It sounds like I might be traveling with Qatana for a while longer after BrineWall I will have to ask her to try to see if it effects plants. I don’t think it will effect plants but it would be cool if it did; No more hours of weeding. Oh and I guess that won’t work for weeding between crops. All of this magic at my disposal and I don’t even have something to kill weeds. That burning hands used by Etayne would at least be something or maybe a minor cantrip that does damage would be nice. Clearly the gods do not feel that it is important to take care of weeds or they would have given their followers the proper magic to deal with the weeds.

I wonder if I could create a skeleton and train it to pull weeds but not crops. I could call it ice.

I – indentured

C – Crop

E – Employment

If I need to create more than I can call them ice1, ice2 and so on. Although I think there may be a couple of problems with creating skeletons. The obvious first problem is I can’t create them yet. Secondly I am not sure how trainable they would be. Next I am not sure that people want to be around someone with skeleton slaves working a farm.  Lastly why would I ever go back to farming?

You know insects were always a harder problem to get rid of on the farm. The information on some of the Oracle spells that I have access to in the future show that there are very few spells to help here but holy smite looks like it will do the trick. The spell only affects creatures so that plants will be save. It just seems appropriate that the spell named holy smite would be useful for getting rid of pesky insects.

After freeing Kelda the other door in the room led to one of the sections that we have already seen but have not explored yet. Here we find an interesting decorated wall and doorway dedicated to Pharasma. I stayed in the back to watch for anything coming from behind and to watch the others position themselves to be as close as possible to the action in the front.  There is a part of me that wants to pick up and big metal weapon and jump into the fray but I really like shooting the bow. With this group it is a big advantage as I don’t need to jockey back and forth with the others to get into position.  Granted in small rooms or when Kali uses obscuring mist that puts me out of the battle but that is just the way it works sometimes.

We entered what looked like a crypt. A woman the others thought looked like Pharasma appeared and was insisting that we put down our weapons and enter the temple to receive her blessing. This was obviously a trap but the others continued to talk with this thing. I needed to do something so I ducked into one of the alcoves to wait. Since they are trying to talk with it I decided it would just be best to let them decide when to attack. If the creature attacks first at least I likely would be spared damage from the first wave, well maybe. Once they finally decided that this was an illusion they attacked it and it disappeared. The party started heading one by one to the main part of the cave. Since I had light cast on my armor I remained until last so the others could see their way. The attack of the creature started before I was able to rejoin the party. Once they pointed out the creature I began shooting arrow after arrow at the creature. I heard Kelda complain about not being able to hurt it but frankly I didn’t seem to have any issues hurting the creature. Qatana and the others kept trying to get everyone to talk about how their divine presence is here to defeat this creature. The creature was visibly scared by divine presence and kept attacking Qatana and the others in its defense. This all worked out great for me as I hit this thing with arrow after arrow and it kept attacking the others. I really wonder if this is one of those creatures where you have to have magic weapons to hurt it.  I was told that there are some creatures that can only be damaged by magic weapons. If the party was having that much trouble with the creature I would have used the fire arrow but this creature just didn’t seem that hard to damage. The flying would be a problem for melee but a lot of the major melee people now have bows. I also wonder if the bane arrows for outsider subtype evil would have worked on this creature. Kali would likely know the answer.