Slain by Elf

The next phobia is snakes. As the paladin and ranger walk in to the room vipers appear from holes in the wall and strike! A viper slithers towards the ranger's cat, warps itself around it, and...

'Vipers aren't constrictors', says Ganelon, 'they don't wrap themselves around anything'.

'Oh, undead you have no problem with, but the first sight of snakes and you're David Attenborough!' The first viper strikes at the cat and misses. The other six snakes all change course and charge the paladin, as he's such a snake expert.

We have three more fears to face, but after fighting fire we can't quite remember what the others are. Something to do with spiders, snakes, and maybe public speaking. We wander down the stairs to the auditorium to get the speech out of the way first only to see wicker cages suspended above us that stir with life. Stirges fly down and attack!

Ah, right, this is us facing our fear of blood. I don't think we'll have a problem, we've seen plenty of our own blood so far. The first stirge swoops down and latches itself firmly on to Skelra and starts to suck his blood. All in one swing, Ganelon takes a swipe at a stirge in mid-air to slice it in two and cleaves downwards aiming for the tiny winged beast on Skelra.

Skelra freezes in panic as our paladin swings at him. 'What's wrong? You always said that you were going to die to the paladin once we reached 5th level.'

'Yes, but I was expecting him to cast detect evil first.' Luckily, Ganelon is assuming everything around him is evil to save time, and his morning star unerringly finds the stirge on the necromancer, leaving behind just the legs and proboscis of the blood-sucker.

The tiefling is defeated. But only after his short sword strikes Ganelon and the paladin's eminently failable fortitude saving throw actually fails, thanks to a roll of a natural 1, causing the rest of the party to cheer with sympathy; and the elf's cat companion gets a full-round attack on the tiefling, striking with claws, claws, and a bite against a flanked and prone target. Needing only 6s to hit, the impressive rolls of 6, 1, and 1 end up barely grazing the tiefling, which is what you get when a ranger teaches the companion animal.

But the tiefling is defeated and we move on through the rooms, until we manage to bypass the simple corridor we could have walked down instead of the complex rooms of magically shifting doors populated with monsters. We dodged a bullet there.

Entering the room has a voice tell us we need to face our fears, which sounds like fun. Brennan picks the first of four rooms to enter, the rest of us follow. Skelra and I know that we are about to face a fiery challenge, as only we can read the infernal sign, so let the rest of the party know too.

As we enter the room a bunch of candles flare up and blind Brennan before some fire elementals, probably, appear. We aren't entirely sure what they are, as Brennan is the fellow with the knowledge skills, but they look fiery and elementalish.

'I have knowledge–history. Have we fought them before?'

'That's not how history works.' Oh well. But never mind, Brennan's blinding is temporary and he identifies them quickly enough, although common sense has told us not to try to put our tongues on them.

Three elementals are reduced to ashes efficiently, leaving the last remaining elemental a choice of targets now surrounding it. 'This one will attack...', says the GM, assessing the situation, 'the paladin, because the mage isn't here now.'

'That's not fair!', says the paladin. 'If I leave the room, will it go for someone else?'

'If you leave the room', I say, 'I'm getting the evil, intelligent glaive out of the handy haversack (unbranded) and having a go at you myself'. That weapon will be a bone of contention for a little while longer, but it keeps the paladin present for the failed attack.

The last fire elemental is extinguished, leaving us three more fears to face.

The door separating the party magically opens again, reuniting bard and mage with monk, paladin, and ranger. Well, I say ranger, it's more that we have a cat with an elf companion. But now we can join the fight against the tiefling, as Brennan and Skelra enlighten us as to the mechanism for the doors' opening and closing.

To make sure we all get in the room before all the doors shift again I tell the paladin to straddle the doorway to prevent it from closing prematurely.

'No.'

Damn, he saw through my advanced ruse. At least it means we won't split the party again, so to speak.

Will looks back through the archives, curious to see when he joined the group, simultaneously getting a feel for just how long it takes us to work through an adventure. He finds the time he joined, when he takes over from the ninja to show everyone that it can be an impressive class, which is also the first time we give an absent character mummy rot for a jape.

The ninja believed he'd even been inflicted with mummy rot at the time, what with it not having been done before. Ah, great days. 'January 2006?', he says, when Will tells us what he found, 'that's almost 5 years ago'.

We need to be gentle with him, he went to a polytechnic.

The water slide is behind us, most of the party reaching the bottom unscathed. Only the reckless take a bit of bruising, coming to rather an abrupt stop once the slippery stone turns back to the rather more abrasive dry stone floor.

We move onwards, and see what looks to be some chains hanging from the ceiling in the room ahead. The withered body sitting amongst the chains makes it look rather more ominous, but this is the path we have chosen and we must accept the risks.

Of course, it's some kind of chain monster, which becomes quite animated when it senses our presence. Entering combat, we bring all our skills to bear. I use my improved speed and position at the head of the party to breeze through the room and in to a corridor on the other side. Skelra follows close behind.

Ganelon, bravely guarding the rear again, cannot stomp all the way through the room in his armour and has to stop half-way, to face the chain monster for at least one round. And Afutavere's elf-like reactions means he acts after the monster, being hit with an attack of opportunity as he tries to move safely through the room.

That leaves Brennan, who calmly walks from one side of the room to the other, patting Afutavere on the back as he walks past. 'For once I'm glad I got a lower initiative result, as it means the attack of opportunity has been used up.'

The chain monster's a bit nasty, really. The only good aspect of it is that it can't move from the room, which lets us ignore it after a round or two of taking damage without being able to cut through the hardness of the chains. But now we have a new problem.

Pressing ahead, Brennan and Skelra have been split from the party, attacked by a tielfing and somehow having the doorway between two rooms magically disappear. At the same time, new doorways are appearing in the room the rest of us are in. We have no idea why. Instead of wondering what is conjuring the doorways in to and out of existence, Ganelon is more concerned with the company he's keeping. 'Why am I stuck with the losers?'

'Think about it.'

The corridor ahead changes to have a circular cross-section, the water from behind making the floor slippery. Yes, we've found the water slide. The agile members of the party aren't too worried, at least not with getting to the bottom of the slide itself. Ganelon in his plate armour is somewhat concerned, but Brennan volunteers to head down first and take a rope, to ensure it can reach far enough for our paladin to be able to brace himself and not slide to his doom.

Even if we're confident about Brennan sliding his way to the end safely, there is always the danger of what he'll meet at the bottom, particularly if he can't then climb back up quickly. In case of threats, we work out a communication system. 'Scream if you run in to trouble.' It's a tested system, although it rather depends on who's screaming as to how quickly help comes.

'Make it three screams if you want us to follow.'

'In that case, let's hope whatever attacks him doesn't kill him in one blow.'

'Nope', I say, 'that's the genius of the system. If he can't survive long enough to scream three times I don't think we want to go down after him'.

We tie the rope to something sturdy at the top of the corridor and Brennan slides his way down the corridor. 'You're about 30 ft down at the moment', the GM says.

'Does it go straight?'

'To start with, then twists a bit, bears to the right...'

'Bears to the right? Do we need to roll initiative?' Apparently not, and Brennan makes it to the end of the corridor unharmed, sending us a message that he has arrived safely. It's our turn to follow.

After a prank played many years ago, it has been traditional for an absent player to return to the next session to find that his character has been treated badly by fate, changed in some horrid and occasionally irreversible way. Partly because of the initial prank, and partly because one of my own characters became afflicted with the disease yet continued to succeed in the saving throws until the end of the adventure and so lived in ignorant bliss, it has been customary for the character to have mummy rot.

Of course, despite the initial scares and worries about beloved characters dying to a dreadful curse, it didn't take long for players to realise that their character probably didn't have mummy rot for the tenth time, particularly when it happened when they were absent and the party was in the middle of an adventure so far devoid of undead. Never the less, the tradition remains.

This week, Bert is not to be seen and we take a little too much glee in defacing his photocopied character sheet. As much as we want to try to convince him his elf has mummy rot, Will has a better idea. And so Bert is returned his character sheet and, with as straight a face as I can muster, I tell him that 'your pet received some kind of buff, I'm not sure what, I was out of the room when it happened'.

Intrigued, he checks his pet's character sheet and is curiously happy to see that his cat now has DR 5/slashing. He also spots the immunity to mind-affecting effects and, sadly, the crossed-out constitution score. Rather than accepting all this as some benefit, he works out pretty quickly that we let Skelra raise the cat to be an undead companion. Such a shame, it would have been amusing had the penny dropped only during the next session.

He is, however, assuming that we modified the character sheet for giggles, and that his cat really wasn't killed and subsequently raised.

Ghouls! They have a paralysing attack, which could spell trouble if we are all afflicted. But the odds of each of us getting paralysed is surely negligible.

Well, Skelra's minimal armour class pretty much ensures he doesn't last long, particularly as the ghouls get a surprise round against us. But that's only one down and probably all the ghouls will have to celebrate, for what little unlife they have left. Ganelon springs in to action and slices one of the ghouls in half...

'That's a neat trick, I'm using my mace.'

'Okay, you smash him in half.'

...cleaving in to a second to kill two monsters in one swing. Yep, this fight is going to be simple. Even losing Brennan to a paralysing attack in the second round doesn't faze us, as Ganelon and myself are still up and swinging.

Ganelon is still up and swinging. A particularly well-aimed claw digs in to my side and I stiffen up. But it's okay, I drop a ghoul before I am taken out of the fight. It's just Ganelon and the ghoul leader. I know who my gold is on.

Maybe I should have bet on the ghoul, but then how would I collect my winnings? Our paladin's full plate armour isn't entirely impenetrable, the last ghoul standing slashing in through a chink in the paladin's defences. But even though his armour class isn't obscenely high, only stupidly, Ganelon's fortitude saving throw certainly is. He can only be paralysed on a roll of a 1 or a 2. For once, with the rest of the party counting on him, we appreciate this.

The D20 rolls across the table, bumping in to the GM's screen and landing on a 1. Crap, that means the whole party is paralysed with a ghoul ready to suck our attributes dry. But wait, the D20 hasn't landed flat on the table! It is slightly cocked against the GM's screen.

A little tug on the screen confirms that the D20 didn't come to a natural rest, giving the paladin a reroll. Thankfully, the second roll is an easy success and Ganelon finishes the combat by killing the final ghoul. But it was close.

We let the devil out of his cell. And by 'we', I mean 'me and Skelra', whilst the others are taking a see-no-evil approach to our adventuring, heading around the corner so they have plausible deniability over our actions.

No sooner is the cell door open than the devil springs out and teleports away. I'm sure we won't see him again at a critical point in the adventure, it'll be fine. He left his glaive behind too, an intelligent and evil weapon which, after of placating the paladin somewhat, we stuff in to the handy haversack (unbranded) until we decide what to do with it.

Pressing further in to the Asmodean Knot, we encounter a pool of stagnant, murky water. We split up to walk around it when creatures jump out and attack! 'Ghouls!', shouts Brennan, knowledgeable about many monsters.

Brennan makes a knowledge roll and the GM formalises the monsters' identity, 'they are Lacedons'.

'Ah-haaaaaaaa!', gloats Ganelon, at the bard's apparent failure to identify them properly at first. 'You were wr-'

'Lacedons being aquatic ghouls, of course', says the GM.

'-ight.'