Moonday, 27 Lamashan (still)

Catching my breath. We’ve a quick break between things attempting to kill us. Perhaps the fact that we’re still alive will annoy Karzoug.

He certainly annoys me.

Fearing that there might be an explosion soon, we left the “projection room” while it still seemed to be producing some sort of weak image but seemed mostly disabled. We went a ways down the hall and paused in what seemed like a defensible spot.

Sabin wanted to memorize a spell so we were going to wait 20 min while he did that. But it was less than a minute before we heard a loud and other-worldly type howl.

Sedgewick looked startled, and said it reminded him of an obscure legend about a very large hound .. a beast from beyond time.

Since that didn’t sound friendly at all, we quickly went into a room to our south, on the theory that whatever it was would have to either break down the door or fight through the doorway, which would limit exposure to our fighters while the healers and magic users did their thing. We had arranged ourselves when …

From behind the door there were shouts from the left. A howl from the right, continuing up to and then past the door. There were sounds of battle from the left now, perhaps in the throne room. We carefully exited our hidey hole, and much to my surprise the party chose to explore the rooms we’d just passed instead of checking out the fight in the room practically next door. Really? Seemed a little risky to me.

We found what appeared to be the guard’s living area, or at least staging area. Opening another door we found .. Karzoug! Again! But at least this time he was less smug.

“What did you release into my realm?”

Now, witty banter is my strong suit and had it not been for the fact that we were discussing something that apparently could worry Karzoug, I’d have been all over this. But we’d also discussed earlier that these apparitions seemed designed to make us burn spells more than anything, and we’d decided to largely ignore them. But I couldn’t resist just one reply.

“We’re not worried. We have the champion of Greed to defend us,” and I pointed at Nolin, who whipped off his bandana to display the Rune of Greed. I thought the Karzoug image was going to explode into little Greedy parts. “This is an outrage!” said Karzoug, visibly upset.

“I’m collecting all seven,” said Nolin.

And then we went to leave, except that Angry Karzoug tried to polymorph Nolin. Which failed, because of his Runeforge-enhanced weapon. Nolin raised his eyebrows and I thought he was going to say something droll, but he just let the spell failure speak for itself.

Takkad kept looking in rooms that did not contain a hideous hound, and most people joined him. Sedgewick said he was going to see if Karzoug would give him any interesting information, and went back to chat with him. And they call me headstrong.

We were slowly searching the (fortunately) empty rooms but I was getting impatient. The Horrible Hound could be stalking us for all we know. There were no sounds anymore from the Throne Room and finally I announced I was going to go check it out because, well, SOMEBODY should.

So using my stealth, I approached the room and looked in. There were 10 harridan bodies there (I think; they were not whole so it was a bit difficult to tell in a glance) and nothing else in the room. Unless it was invisible, it had moved on. And defeated 10 harridans in short order, I thought as I returned to the group.

Sedgewick returned about the same time, looking satisfied so I guess he must have learned stuff from Karzoug. The group as a whole went to view the carnage in the Throne Room. Or perhaps I should call it the Thrown Room, because it looked more like a puppy had tossed ten dolls around like toys, after chewing each of them to a frayed mess.

And, uh, then it came back. It entered the room thru the door to the northeast, and saw us at the same time we saw it. It bounded towards us like a happy puppy, if a happy puppy were slavering, ugly, and insane.

It looked shadowy so I threw a fireball at it before it got too close. Looked unhappy, so probably a good choice. (Although to be honest, I’m not sure it brought a happy face with it to this plane.) Kane attempted to banish it and Takkad started praying even as Sedgewick urged us on with a song of courage. I managed to haste everyone before we resumed the usual fight positions, and the battle was on.

But the battle was not long. The harridans had apparently taken their toll, and it took Nolin, Avia, and Sabin only seconds to dispatch it. Nolin took its head into the room with Karzoug, pausing only long enough to say, “I’ll send you a bill for this later.”

We left before Karzoug could muster up a retort.

We returned to the Thrown Room and decided to examine the room to the north. This has proven to be a questionable decision. Inside the room were some very large giants with some large piles of rocks and very large bows, paired with very large arrows. Eight of them.

I divided the enemy with a wall of force, per usual, leaving two on the side nearest us and six on the other. Then I hasted folks, another pretty standard action. I managed to fireball the two close ones, before the fighters closed. They hammered hard on our fighters, but our healers kept them healthy. One of the distant giants banged on a door and yelled for help, so I put up a wall of flame against that wall, facing the door. And another wall of flame that burned the butts of a couple of those other ones. Then Sedgewick changed from a song of courage to a song of dischord, which caused some of the giants on the other side of the wall to disagree with each other. Physically. Violently.

This proved surprisingly effective. Avia, and then Sabin killed the two close giants and then we watched in amazement as the others just beat each other up. Even those not affected by the song were forced to defend themselves against the ones who were, because they didn’t simply fight each other. They hit anything near them that they disagreed with.

While this was going on, Kane announced storm giants were coming from the Thrown Room. Apparently they’d figured out the fire thing and decided to circle around back. Takkad created a wall of stone to block them temporarily, but we expected that storm giants would likely be able to hack at the stone and eventually remove it.

As they came close to doing this, he put in a circular blade barrier, positioned such that to reach the door leading to our room, they’d need to cross the barrier twice. For good measure, I added another wall of fire too. The results were remarkably effective.

The first who tried came through as a chopped, burnt, corpse-like shape. Dead. Two more entered the blade barrier circle, but after experiencing it once were reluctant to complete the journey and close with us. One was challenged to go through and also emerged dead.

The remaining cloud giants abandoned their effort to attack us through the blade barrier, and circled back around to the door on the north end of the storm giant room. There was only one weakened, injured “champion” storm giant left to rendezvous with the fresh cloud giants. I responded with a mage sword to add to the battle. It turns out there was at least one mage among them, so we traded minor spells: they made fog, and I cast fly on myself and used a staff to create a wind to blow it away.

This battle is sorely depleting our magic. While we have depleted Karzoug’s as well, we may both yet get a chance to recharge.