The Hills Have Orcs (and murderous bunnies) [session 22]

Adventurers Present

Bilbo - hobbit
Mossmullet - dwarfley tempest cleric
Orsek - dwarfley barbarian wizard
Red - elfish rogue (for most of the session)
SMASH - dwarfley life cleric

Awakening inside the Temple of Greed, the stalwart adventurers gathered their (gold-heavy) belongings and headed outside to a beautiful morning of sunshine and jackalopes.  As before, the clearing outside the temple was filled with a dozen of the grazing little beasts.  Unlike before, the critters scattered and fled at the approach of the party.  Perhaps feeling a bit peckish, SMASH opted for killing one of the antlered rodents before it got clear.  Surprisingly, this maddened the jackalopes into an all-out assault upon the party; they wheeled in place and charged as one!

The well-armed and armored band of warriors were never particularly likely to be defeated by a clutch of angry bunnies, horns notwithstanding.  That said, the furry furies acquitted themselves rather well; the inflicted some serious damage upon both of the more-poorly-armored party members (now where did that Red get off to this time?), using their antlers to repeatedly gore both Orsek and Bilbo into a rather serious state.  Luckily, the dwarfs & co. finished them off before anything truly tragic could occur.  But the group was left wondering what they might possibly put upon the headstone of a friend who succumbed to the jack-rabbit juggernauts.

The hares killed, skinned and dressed, and the party refreshed by a short rest, they again took to the road toward Cheddarbend.  Though the weather was mild and the babbling river pleasant enough, this day’s sojourn through the hilly badlands around Cheddarbend was not to be an easy one.  At every turn, their travels were interrupted by a series of unhappy encounters.

First there was the noisy, marching company of orcs, stomping and singing loudly as they trod the riverbank.  Our heroes laid in wait for them, taking shelter among the rocks and springing out only once the foolish humanoids stepped into their ambush.  The belated Red's arrows felled a brace.  Bilbo stabbed one nicely.  The dwarfs slew the rest of the dozen using their respective magics: Thunderwave, Burning Hands and Guiding Bolt.  Luckily, none of the shouting savages even struck a blow before their demise.

Later, in a somewhat worrisome turn of events, a second group of jackalopes appeared to disrupt the travellers' lunchtime meal (of jackalope, incidentally), and immediately attacked.  Perhaps they were disgruntled relatives of those bunnies who'd died outside the temple?  Perhaps they were simply enraged by the party's choice of lunchmeat?  They didn’t specify, but rather leaped (and bounded) into battle.  Alas, they did little damage to the adventurers on this occasion.  And so the travellers returned to the path.

The afternoon's encounters were both repeats of the morning's hazards, but with notable differences.  The party was strolling along the river's shore when they rounded a corner and came face-to-face with an even larger company of orcs - this one half again as large as the last!  There was little time to wonder about this surfeit of savage pig-men which apparently roam the hills in large bands, because battle was immediately engaged.  As luck would have it (thanks, Bilbo!), the party stole the initiative and launched their attacks first.  Again, they managed to make their attacks count: Bilbo threw oil, Red shot an arrow (though none of the enemy were felled this time), and the dwarfs again resorted to magic: Shatter, Burning Hands and Guiding Bolt.  After the party’s attack, two-thirds of the savage humanoids lay dead, and the remaining six were badly scorched.  Six singed orcs, as it turns out, are no joke!  They charged and laid about them, three of them ganging up upon and severely wounding poor Red.  The bloody rogue disengaged and killed one with his bow, whereupon his teammates came to his rescue: Orsek rendering Red invisible, and Mossmullet killing another with his mace before challenging the third to do battle with him.  The orc obliged, dealing the dwarf a damaging blow with his orcine great axe.  But the dwarfley cleric's patron deity Varga retaliated for hurting her priest, electrocuting the swine for his trouble.  Meanwhile, SMASH engaged and slew another orc, while Bilbo stabbed his attacker with his magic Frost-blade.  Orsek hacked the last one to death with his great axe.  While the party surely prevailed and escaped serious injury, even that brief taste of combats made clear that if the hobbit's luck hadn't given them the jump upon the orc-men, this encounter might well have led to the death of some or all of our heroes.

Last but…well, yes, also least, of the days travails was a final encounter with a third clutch of horned hares!  The weary and wary adventurers this time took the path of least resistance, and carefully skirted the jackalope-pack.  In what some of the party (Mossmullet, if no one else) felt was a definite relief, this third sighting of jackalopes did not seem inclined toward immediate homicide, laying to rest the fears of the more celestial-minded of the group that they might possibly have offended some great Rabbit-god in the sky by killing and eating his minions.  Whatever the reason, the hares kept their tempers and the party passed without trouble.

Cheddarbend!  What to say about this rustic hamlet in the hills?  That it's curios merchant is crooked and opportunistic?  That he’s also no sharp wit at evaluating gems?  That it boasts not only a temple to Varga Queen of Winter, but also to beloved Termas Tunneller?  That Jimmy "The Beetle" lends gold by the thousands to stray elves and hobbits he’s just met?  Well, yes.  All those things and more.

Or, we could simply stick to the game mechanics:  all of the five adventures turned the profits from plundering the Temple of Greed into enough experience to reach FIFTH LEVEL!!!!

Party Experience Gained
Combat:  115 each
[and everyone got goo-gobs of xp from trading gold for feasts, pledging gold to their patrons, and using gold for magical research]

Roadside Assistance [session 21]

Adventurers Present

Bilbo - hobbit

Mossmullet - dwarfley tempest cleric

Orsek Ungart - dwarfley barbarian wizard
Red - elfish rogue (well, for most of the time)

SMASH - dwarfley life cleric

After a restful night of sleeping deep in the tombs of the undead, our party emerged into the bright and dewy morning from the depths of Varga's hidden shrine-hole.  They had barely finished extracting themselves from their evening's burrow, when they were set upon by a small herd of centaurian road-agents.  A brief discussion played out, as the party considered what and how they might talk their way out of the proposed road-tax the centaurs were apparently levying upon them, but it quickly became clear that certain hot-headed members of the adventurers didn't have the patience for such dissembling.  With a resounding strike of his greataxe, Orsek hacked into one of the larcenous centaurs.  The ensuing battle was quite lopsided in effect: two of the five centaurs fell to SMASH's Command to surrender, while the other three quickly discovered the peril of dwarves and hobbits.  Orsek flew into a rage and suffered almost all of the centaurs attacks, while Mossmullet bushwhacked a couple of the aggressors with an inspired Thunderwave.  The stalwart Bilbo employed his frying pan to good (but limited) effect as well, before dousing one of the hybrid highwaymen with oil.  Orsek's ensuing Burning Hands lit that centaur on fire, and it eventually burned to death.  Mossmullet managed to bash in the skull of one centaur, but it turned out to be one of SMASH's surrendered pair, so the contribution was questionable.  Both Orsek and SMASH attempted to mount and grapple the strangle man-horse creatures, but neither was sufficiently acrobatic (or maybe tall...?) to succeed.  The encounter abruptly ended when the centaur leader called a retreat, and the surviving three centaurs wheeled and galloped away.  Unwilling to let bygones be bygones, SMASH unleashed a devastating Guiding Bolt upon the fleeing equinoid leader, blowing a hole of radiant fury clean through his cowardly back.  Thus ended the lesson: deadly danger comes in short packages!

After looting their slain foes, the happy heroes resumed their morning stroll up the East bank of the river.  No further adventures or encounters offered themselves that day.  At least, not until they reached the first of the foothills surrounding Cheddarbend near dusk.  That was when the travelers noticed a path leading up away from the river into the hills.  Hoping to find some sort of place to shelter overnight, the group followed the path to a large clearing infested with...jackalopes!  Imported directly from South Dakota, these odd little antlered prairie hares bounded around outside a large golden door in the side of a hill.  After cautiously approaching the mutant bunnies while shouting insults and threats, the group found that the furry beasts offered no immediate danger.

Examining the golden doorway, the words "The Temple of Greed" were discovered written upon the lintel, along with "Danger - Do Not Enter" hastily scrawled on the door.  It took Bilbo successfully picking two separate locks to get the party inside the hillside burrow that was the temple, where upon the party found a 40' passageway with a gem & gold encrusted ceiling.  The far side had a doorway with a puzzle-lock word game to solve, the answer to which was "avarice".  Entering inside, they were confronted by a stark choice: two doors to take, and a warning to the effect that Greed was always the RIGHT choice to make.  Taking the RIGHT door, the four dungeoneers avoided the grisly fate of probably immediate death; on their way out they found a deceased skeleton on the other side of the LEFT doorway, apparently poisoned to death by a trap.  The group then solved the puzzle of the three statutes, making a, "secret" door appear and open.  In the process, they also solved a ten-button electrified door puzzle and found an altar stone which liquefied any sacrifice which included all of a supplicant's gold pieces (granting the supplicant an equal number of experience in return).

Before venturing through the hidden door, the group encountered Red, who was apparently loitering in the temple in anticipation of the party showing up (OK, this is a sorry rationalization of one player joining the fun late).  The bolstered group entered a trapped altar room next.  They all benefited from the innate luck of hobbits, when their smallest member solved a multi-pronged trap by simply getting down and rolling over the most obvious portion of it!  The rest followed suit, and nobody died.  Finding a great golden altar, the greedy group tried dragging it back out of the temple but got no farther than the trapped hallway before the illusory nature of the altar revealed itself: it was merely made of stone.  It did, however, cause another hidden doorway to open, letting the explorers into the final trapped hallway of the temple.  Twenty feet into this seventy-foot long hallway, they found a coin slot and a warning that implied that they must pay a toll of over a thousand gold pieces to bypass the trap.  Exhibiting perhaps even a tad more greed than the designers of the temple expected, the thieving party pried up the tile of the coin slot and recovered over 3,000 gold pieces!  They also unknowingly broke the disarming mechanism for the 30' long, 30' deep pit-trap which immediately followed.  That all could have ended badly, for a lesser group of temple-delvers.  But not this lot!  They tied a rope around their small hobbit and sent him forward.  The pit trap opened and sent the hobbit plunging toward a pool of liquefied gold at the bottom of the pit, but the strong dwarves (and an elf) held firm and didn't let the hobbit drown in molten gold.  Finessing the trap open again, the group extracted their dangling scout back from the brink.  They then concocted a plan to use pitons and ropes to safely climb across the side walls of the trap.  Slowly but surely, the entire pack of plunderers made it safely across to the far side of the trap.  Where they were all greatly rewarded by a large room just chalk full of gold pieces!  The final haul of all this loot was almost 15,000 gp!

Exhausted by a very long day of adventuring, and by the very idea of getting that much wealth all in one place, the enriched group settled down for a good long rest.  With Cheddarbend only another day's journey, and White Plume Mountain not far beyond, the group looks forward to spending their newfound wealth upon prayer, research, and carousing, with the prospect of 5th level almost within their grasp!

Party Experience Gained

Combat:  143 each

Exploration:  132 each

[Red and SMASH also got some experience for offering gold to the god of greed]