Slain by Elf

The party heads towards a mausoleum, and notices some figures hanging around the entrance. Keeping out of sight, a closer inspection reveals these characters to be skeletal and wearing armour and wielding weapons. The priest uses her knowledge of undead creatures and deduces that they are probably Skeletal Warriors, and describes a few of their traits.

'Should we be scared?', asks the dwarf rogue.

'You've been scared by everything else, so I'm guessing 'yes'', replies the dwarf paladin.

'How far away are we?'

'A couple of hundred feet or so.'

'Is that more than 150?'

The adventuring party heads back to face evil necromancer Morbent Fel, and finds the dead risen from their graves and pulled from their tombs, battling them through graveyards and crypts. One of these undead monsters vanishes from before the eyes of the adventurers, and the priest remembers from this brief glimpse and its general appearance that this monster is likely a wraith, and promptly attempts to turn the invisible undead.

A united breath of relief is sighed by the party as the warlock casts See Invisible and notices the wraith fleeing from the priest through a wall, feared by the holy power invoked. The priest then explains some of the dangers of the wraith that she remembers learning about, including the fact that whilst it cannot directly harm corporeal creatures with physical damage, it has a withering attack that drains the very life force of someone.

The priest, in a moment of adsent-mindedness, then mumbles to herself, 'Hmm, I appear not to have learnt Restoration today'. Even if the party had all ready decided to leave the area and hope the wraith has no means or intent to track them down, those are not really the words you'd like to hear in the situation.

On debating what to do with a creature that attacked our brave adventurers in the Rotting Orchard that is apparently regenerating, it was suggested that they 'cut its head off'.

'What's that going to do?'

'Well, it won't hurt to try,' says the gnome.

This was followed by a suggestion to cut the gnome's head off, just to see how much it 'won't hurt'.

We join our intrepid adventurers, Azok the tauren warrior, Han-shom?ɬ©r the high-elf rogue and Churahl the furbolg shaman as they attempt to infiltrate the notorious Defias hideout known as the Deadmines.

Having successfully traversed a sheer drop by rappelling down with ropes, the three adventurers have alighted on to the rooftop of a two storey building abutting the cliff face they have just descended. Like a well-drilled team of seasoned combatants, the two heavies take point guard positions whilst the lissom elf hangs upside-down over the edge of the rooftop and peers through a window to survey the room beyond. Flipping himself back to the roof with effortless grace, Han reports that the room below them is empty and that he has managed to prise the window open and therefore unobserved entry should be simplicity itself. A slightly dubious growl emanates from Chewy and Han translates to Azok, who doesn't speak Ursine, that the big bear is concerned about fitting his not inconsiderable bulk through the moderate sized window. Han admonishes his friend for being so doubting, and proceeds to demonstrate just how easy it is to gain entry.

With that, he grabs the roof edge with both hands, flips himself over the edge, twisting mid flight and flinging himself into the room. There is a slightly loud thunk as he lands, but Churahl thinks nothing of it and, encouraged by his partner's easy ingress, quickly follows. Unfortunately, Han had not made the elegant landing of unsurpassed finesse that the others might have imagined, and it was perhaps seeing Han spread-eagled over a bureau that distracted the otherwise imperturbable furbolg, causing him to catch his foot on the window ledge and to smash head-first into the bureau, knocking Han on to his back, and leaving himself lying prone on the floor; which was a bit of a shame, as it was at that moment that Azok made his acrobatic entry into the room through the window. Perhaps it was the sight of a furbolg rump smiling at him winningly from beneath its chainmail veil, or the sight of the infallible cat-burgling Han lying on his back on the floor under a pile of papers, but Azok was distracted for a fraction of a second, and clipped the lower edge of the window frame with his knee, sending him headlong into the room and into the already much abused bureau, narrowly missing impaling Churahl's exposed posterior with his mighty tauren horns.

Eventually the dazed and humbled sneaks lift themselves up from the pile of papers, pens and fire tinder that was once a desk and brush themselves down. They look at one another somewhat sheepishly, 'Perhaps the Defias are out to lunch' Han ventures hopefully. As if in answer, the urgent sound of a chair scraping along the floor is heard coming from the next room. The adventurers draw their weapons and hope that the inevitable oncoming battle goes better than their spectacular entry into the building.

It could hardly go worse.

It was the perfect plan: the attractive mage would run in to the cavern catching the attention of the enemy miners, claiming that she was being chased. On getting their attention, and pointing at her comrades 'chasing' her, she would set off an area-of-effect spell, centred on her, to throw as many of them off-guard as possible, and her comrades would then charge in to engage the others. The rogue had even stealthily tracked across to block the opposite exit, in case of runners.

The execution went well. The mage got in to the middle of the miners without threat, cast her spell, and the two fighters charged in behind her to engage the enemy. The other miners retreated, but were surprised by the rogue blocking the path, and turned back in to the room. The warrior ran across the room after striking one miner down to block the third exit in the room, to which the running miners were now headed, and the shaman backed off again to block the entrance through which they had come. The miners had no escape route!

This was when the flaw in the plan became apparent. The miners, with nowhere to run, had to stand and fight, and of the four party members only the non-armour-wearing, low-hit-point mage was near the miners, with the other party members blocking the exits.

Luckily, some quickly-thought-out tactics by the warrior intercepted a couple of possible threats, and the shaman was able to work with the mage to shield her effectively from harm. The Ant Hill Mob rescued Penelope once again!

We are in the city sewers, you don't want to know why. The ranger in our party is looking for tracks, and finds a trail suggesting humanoids passed this way.

'I'm following their movements,' he quips.

Trying to corrupt or in some other way bring about the fall of a paladin ruling the kingdom we're in, our evil selves find it difficult to come up with a decent plan. The most evil thing we decide we can accomplish is to join the city guard and see what havoc we can wreak from the inside.

We see one of the captains of the guard, and he interviews us for our suitability for the role. Our bard does most of the talking, being the charming one and less likely to get us in to trouble, and he also has the wherewithal not to say anything incriminating. When talk turns to a recent raid on a sect of evil clerics, a sect we just happened to have dealings with and escaped from their temple moments before the raid in question, the various gods invoked in the city get mentioned.

Our bard, nicely on the ball, feigns ignorance about anything to do with Hextor, the evil god the clerics worshipped, countering with the notion that he is only familiar with Heironymous, well-known for being a good deity. The captain of the guard finds this subject interesting, and points out that the two gods are in fact brothers. The bard muses on how queer it is for one sibling to be so evil whilst the other is good-aligned. The captain of the guard mentions that it is not uncommon for such a situation to arise, and that there are plenty of siblings who are of such opposite alignments.

'Yarr,' I pipe up, 'I be 'aving a brother sailin' the seas who be pure as driven snow. Arr!'

Perhaps luckily, the captain of the guard doesn't quite see what I'm driving at and we shortly get hired as part of the town guard.

Shuffling the miniatures around the table during an encounter turns the conversation to some of the recent miniatures that have been produced. A new 12" tall red dragon miniature gets mentioned as something quite impressive. Despite how cool it supposedly looks, there are the obvious convenience problems, not least of which is 'where would you keep it when you're not playing? It's not like it will fit in a box'.

'... It comes in a box.'

With a wonderful show of camaraderie, my allies manage to get to my limp and bleeding body with a cure light wounds spell within the round, so I live again! Well, after a fashion, as I am still unconscious. Even with another couple of spells I decide that playing dead is probably the better option, at least until proper fighters have killed the two rogues. A bit more healing later and I feel fit enough to move around again.

We move the dead bodies in to a side room, so that we don't attract too much attention. This is not that much of a solution consideing the goliath barbarian pulverised a passing guard in to his constituent atoms, leaving only his head and his blood intact enough to drag across to us and leave the bloodiest trail you will likely see. Still, moving the bodies out of the main hall still might buy us a few seconds, if anyone who comes along is red-colourblind.

Upon opening the door to the side room we are met with another ambush, and not by guards but by more conspirators. This just isn't our day. The barbarian charges in and attacks the two enemies in the room, after the mage lights them up with glitterdust. It's all under control, but I, Steve the Pirate, want to contribute and taste more blood, yarr! Blood that not be my own, that is.

I start to move in to a position where I can aid my burly chum, but as I do I am surprised by two more assailants in the room who were hiding quite well and outside the burst of the glitterdust. I feel a knife slide in to my spleen, and then my vigour is drained considerably, as I lose 9 points of Constitution as I fail a fortitude saving throw. Not being on full health, being hit for sneak attack damage from an unknown enemy, and then a huge constitution drain leading to death is unlucky. I see that now. I should have enjoyed my time spent at -9 hit points more fully. C'est la mort!