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Woot!  Back already with the 22nd installment of “Homebrewed”!  This one will be shorter than the last because it’s (mostly) the first half of a fairly short dungeon.  I think it’s a dungeon, anyway.  At any rate, Natalia, Iema, and Corin just finished their last job and are eager for another, as they’re trying desperately to scounge up money to afford a nice all-expenses paid trip through the Underdark.  Can’t remember what their newfound chosen career paths were?  Refresh your memory here.

Huskyr the 16^th

We pick up right where we left off, on the night of Huskyr the 16^th, right after we’ve killed off the gnome thieves guild.  We got back to the dwarven thieves guild, which, incidentally, is called White Stone Masons, let them know that we’ve completed the job, and then start trying to brainstorm for other jobs to raise money.  Oh, and we finally learn the guild leader’s name, the one that turned Iema and Corin into stone to make sure that they weren’t found by people who would be looking for us.  (For further explanation that I skipped in the last “Homebrewed,” see Jim’s comment here.  You can also read about the glove that turned them to stone on Jim’s blog here.)  The leader’s name is Gurdren Whitecowl.  Gurdren overhears us trying to figure out what job to do next and admits that our idea about robbing the museum would be the best bet for some fast cash.

Interestingly enough, Gurdren says that he thinks the best time to rob the museum would be during the day because of the way the security is set up.  He says that the first and third floors have traps on them, so that if anyone comes onto those floors, they would automatically have the temporal stasis spell cast on them.  Still, the best stuff is on the first and third floors.  The second floor, he says, doesn’t really have anything worth stealing.  He recommends talking to the Dirt Children thieves guild, a guild consisting of ogres, for more information on how to break into the museum.

Iema, understandably, is reluctant to just go knocking on the door of an ogres-only thieves guild to ask how to rob a museum.  “Is there any way we can get an escort, someone to introduce us?” he asks.

Gurdren, seeing Iema’s point, says, “I’d recommend Durthak.  He’s a half-ogre.  I’ll have him take you in the morning.”

Speaking of morning, it’s getting late, and we all are tired after a long day of killing off short people.  (Thank god I’m not in this D&D world, right?  Otherwise, I’d be toast.)  We agree to go with Durthak and pay the Dirt Children a visit in the morning.

Huskyr the 17^th

After we wake up and eat, Iema gets busy trying to disguise us so we’re not recognized in the city.  Gurdren catches him doing this and suggests we go see a wizard that they call The Barber to cast polymorph on us rather than having Iema disguise us all the time.  It would be easier, he points out.

Corin likes the idea.  “Actually, we should go see him to polymorph us into something that has dark vision before we go into the Underdark,” he says.  “It could be cheaper than buying items to help us with dark vision.”

We all agree this is a great idea.  Before we go leave to pay the ogre guild a visit, we decide to give The Barber, Fezus, a visit.

Fezus runs his business in the poorer section of town.  Boards cover the establishment’s windows.   A sign is nailed to one of the planks.  It reads BARBER.

We go inside.  It’s dark.  We hear what sounds like something dragging across the floor.  After our eyes adjust to the dim lighting, we finally spot the source of the sound:  A gravekin coming towards us, dragging his leg across the floor.

“Hi,” Iema greets him.  “We’d like haircuts.”

Fezus pulls out his scissors.

Iema looks at the blades, then back at Fezus before he clarifies.  “No.  The expensive kind.”

“Ah,” Fezus says.  “I see.” 

He goes about transforming us, although I can’t remember what our new forms look like.  I just remember Jim saying to Phil, “Phil…you’re a black guy!”

“Sweet!” Phil laughs.

[Edit:  As Jim has pointed out in the comments, this is a reference to Family Guy.  Unsurprisingly, since I really don't like that show (shocking, I know), I didn't catch it, but I thought I'd include it here, because it IS pretty funny:

Lois Griffin: [Lois and Peter wait for a pregnancy test] God, I can’t believe we weren’t more careful. This probably happened that night we tried role playing.
Lois Griffin: [flashback] Oh, I need a spankin’. I’m a bad, bad girl.
Peter Griffin: I’m a paladin with 18 charisma and 97 hit points. I can use my Helm of Disintegration and do one D4 damage as my half-elf mage wields his plus-five Holy Avenger.
Lois Griffin: Paladins can’t use the Helm of Disintegration.
Peter Griffin: Oh. Then, I’m a black guuuuy.

Even dumb shows have there moments, but I digress.]

As for the rest of us, I don’t remember what Jim says we looked like.  I think Sunshine stayed the same, though.  But enough of our new identities, we’re off to go chat with some ogres.

We head off to where we’ve been told we can find Durthak.  We find him leaning against the wall.  He looks as though he has no legs below the knee.

Naturally, Iema is the first to speak to him.  “We want some information,” he says.

Durthak, probably knowing that we were coming, doesn’t give us too hard of a time.  It turns out that his legless appearance was just a trick, as he unfolded his legs from beneath him and stands up to his full height.  My own legs hurt just thinking about it.  He indicates we should go elsewhere.

We head to a door.  Durthak knocks.  An ogre opens a window to peer out.  “What’s the password?” he asks gruffly.

“Password,” Durthak responds.

We laugh.  Jim says we all go inside and see a place of “ill repute.”  (Jim’s words.)  Ogres are tossing coins and making bets.

“Betting on if it comes down heads or tails?” Phil guesses.

“No,” Jim says, “betting on whether or not it comes down at all.”

We laugh again.

Durthak takes Natalia, Iema, and Corin to an ogre they call Dirt Gut Maneater.  He’s a scary-looking mofo covered in tattoos.  The tattoos are testaments to Dirt Gut’s past, each one an image depicting some god-awful thing he’s done.  Durthak leaves us alone with Dirt Gut.  Natalia thinks that personally, she would rather deal with Durthak.

Iema tells Dirt Gut that we would like information.

“Then you need give me money,” he says.  “Either dat, or I shake money from you.  But if I do dat, den I be tired, den cranky.  I don’ like dat.”

We agree that we’ll just give him money.  We’d prefer he not be tired or cranky either.  So we fork over the change, and we’re told the following:

There are a couple of guards outside one of the floors.  He calls them “collaborators,” although I’m not sure what he means by that.  He says not to bother trying to bribe them—it can’t be done.  He claims the first and third floors cannot be touched.  He also tells us about devices set up to cast temporal stasis on intruders.  There’s an animal of some kind on the second floor, but he doesn’t know what.  Dirt Gut says he once sent a thief to go check it out, but the thief never came back.

Also in passing, he mentions that there’s a flower shop owner down the street who was killed in her sleep, but nobody knows why.  If that’s not weird on its own, then this will drive the point home:  About a block away, there was a dwarf that brewed his own beer, and he was also killed.  Both of these people had shops within a block radius of the museum.  We wonder if it’s connected.

Iema decides to ask Dirt Gut about entrances to the Underdark from the Emperor’s palace.  That, Dirt Gut doesn’t have any knowledge on.  But Dirt Gut quickly brings us back to the topic at hand, telling us that people deliver food the museum during the day.  He suggests we check that out.

We thank him for the information he’s offered and leave.  Before we go do our little heist, we decide to check out the shops.  Guess what?  We’ve got nothing.  We cannot find any reason for anyone to kill those shop owners.

Next, we plan on how to take care of the guards.  The plan is this:  Iema makes Natalia invisible.  Then he will put a guard to sleep while Corin fascinates the other.  Natalia will kill them as an invisible tiger.

Or something like that.

We go into the alley for buffs:  Invisibility on Natalia, Barkskin on Corin (I’m proud that I actually remembered to do this), Mage Armor on all of us, as well as Cat’s Grace.  Natalia also remembers to cast Greater Magic Fang on Sunshine. 

Our plan to take care of the guards goes off without a hitch.  After we kill the guards, we go into the museum.  We have to make checks (dexterity?) as soon as we go in.  Phil succeeds; me and Jim-as-Corin fail.

“Okay,” Jim announces, “Phil, Iema remembers the pit that is right inside the door.  You immediately step around it when you walk through the door.  Spring, Natalia and Corin forget and step right into the pit.”

Luckily, it’s only a five foot drop.  Granted, that’s just above my head in real life, but Natalia’s taller than I am at her 5’8”.  She falls right into a coffin.  When she gets herself together, she looks around and sees that there are bones scattered about.  She scurries out of the coffin, and she and Corin pull themselves out of the pit.

It doesn’t take us long to get into combat.  As soon as Natalia and Corin have climbed out, a blue-gray wolf comes padding out.  Jim says it would be considered a magical beast called a Tugren.  I guess this is something Jim made up, so let me give a quick explanation:  Jim says it’s just a wolf with a template added to them.  Its history in the world of Valt:  Tugrens are originally from Shoten.  They’re bred from storm elementals and normal wolves.

“Where can I get one of these wolves?” Natalia wonders aloud, impressed.  She doesn’t have a chance to be impressed for long, as we’re jumped by more of them.

Quickly, the wolves trip Iema and Natalia.  Sunshine, a little slow on the uptake, whips around.  “WHAT’S THAT?!  IT’S A WOLF!”

Seriously, she pretty much yells everything.

Corin, luckily, doesn’t get tripped, so he’s still standing.  Sunshine jumps into battle, attacks a wolf, and immediately gets shocked.  Natalia morphs into her brown bear form.  No dire bear here—she’d go through the floor.  Natalia then attacks the wolf that attacked Sunshine, but alas, even though she gets some nice swiping and biting in, she takes lightning damage.

Again, Natalia totally wants one of these wolves.  How freakin’ awesome.

Iema gets up and maneuvers himself behind the wolf attacking Natalia, putting himself in a flanking position.  He attacks, but again, he also takes electrical damage.

During the scuffling, Natalia is knocked prone.  I’m surprised by this; Natalia’s bear forms are usually difficult to trip.  So, naturally, I wasn’t sure how to attack from my position on the floor.

“Getting up takes a move action or partial action or something, right?” I ask Jim.

“You can always attack from your position on the floor.”

I frown.  “While lying on my back?  Like a desperate hooker?”

Jim starts laughing.  “Well, I was thinking more like when Gremlin rolls on his back and start attacking Emmy with all his claws.”

“Like a desperate hooker…I would have never thought to put it like that,” Phil adds.

Okay, so something apparently wrong with me and my analogies.  Nonetheless, I decide not to waste any kind of actions and stay in my desperate hooker position, attacking wolves above me.  It works: Natalia manages to kill off the wolf that she and Sunshine had been working on earlier.

Meanwhile, Jim says that Sunshine “goes to town” biting another wolf.  Iema also attacks, takes more damage, but manages to get himself over to Natalia to heal her up.  Natalia keeps her back on the floor, clawing at wolves around her.

Sunshine now does something a little different:  She flies away, flips over, and then flies back.  She attempts a bite but misses.  We’re still impressed by the flipping action.  Phil asks Jim if he can do a bardic knowledge check to see if he can identify what Sunshine just did.  He rolls well, and Jim says that Iema recognizes it as an aerial tactic normally used by dragons.

Wolves’ turn.  One of them attacks Corin and bounces off him.  Turns out that he just ran into Corin’s Protection from Evil spell.

“They’re evil!” Corin yells. “Kill them!”

We’re trying, Natalia grumbles inside her own head.  Of course, she can’t say that, being in bear form.  Secretly, she’s sad to find that these super-awesome wolves are evil.  I guess that dashes the chances of her ever getting one.  Wah.  But she gets over it, crits, and kills off the remaining wolf.

We all brush ourselves off and Iema compliments Sunshine on her flipping-maneuver.  She says thanks him, but says it make her look silly.  “I look like a turkey,” she complains.  “I am not a turkey.  I am a hawk!”

Yes, Sunshine, yes, you are.

Next, we move into what’s known as the War Room.  Jim immediately has us do reflex saves, which Sunshine fails.  The door explodes and she goes flying.  She seems okay, though.

Okay, that is, until we spot what’s within that room:  A creature with a stretched mask over its face, carrying a braided whip with pieces of glass in it.  Oh, shit.  And here we are, not knowing the safe word.

We roll for initiative.  For once, I kick ass, and Natalia gets to go first.  She charges in to do 52 points of damage.  Iema’s next, then Sunshine, who does her “turkey dance” again.  The creature gets to go soon, though, and whip-stuns Natalia.  He tries to use his whip to yank Iema’s weapons out of his hands, but luckily for us, he doesn’t do so well.  He does better with Corin, managing to yank the boy’s weapon out of his hand and throw it behind him.

Iema manages to finish off the S&M guy, and we enter the War Room.  There are locked cases, which Corin gets to work on.  He manages to get two of them open.  One has a wooden shield.  The other object is a belt with two clips.  One clip says RUKE, but whatever weapon is supposed to be in that is missing.  On the other clip, there is a sheath attached that says CRUAGH.  In it, there is a rapier with CRUAGH written on that as well.  Both the shield and the rapier are magical.  We decide to keep these items.

Next up:  The Hall of Artifacts.  We pop our heads in, but it doesn’t look like anything’s in there.  Corin does some snooping around, and he says it looks like there’s a ward.  Suddenly, red smoke spirals up, and something like a demon appears.  (Jim once told me what exactly it was, but I don’t know these things, people.  So I’m going with demon because it sounded demon-like to me.)

The demon thing looks at us, looks at the red smoke circle around himself, and sighs.  “Very well,” he says.

Because I’m demon-retarded, Jim has to explain to me that the demon can’t get out of his circle.  Hey, how should I know that?  I was a good girl growing up; I spent most of my time doing my homework and watching TV as opposed to summoning Beelzebub.  I wasn’t that bored as a teenager.

So, this demon tells us we’re going to play a little game.  (Yay, a game!)  The game consists of answering riddles.  (Boo, riddles!)  He has a box that has keys to all the other boxes in the room, but that box is protected by a prismatic sphere.  We proceed with the riddles, which I won’t go into, but Jim has them here if you’re interested.  (And you totally should be—Jim had some good ones ready for us.)  I personally don’t care much for riddles.  I’ve never done much of them and don’t really have the patience for them.  Phil, however, is pretty good at them, and got us through the trickier ones.

The last riddle, incidentally, is a trick.  This is how the last riddle plays out:

Demon: Three of one and one of another,
four from a sister and one from a mother.
Take away two when you visit the Hells,
and tell me out loud what your plundering spells.

Sunshine:  “Eat me”?  What kind of answer is that?

Demon [stepping out from the circle]:  Don’t mind if I do.

Yup, that’s right, people.  The answer to the last riddle is “eat me”—and, incidentally, the key words to free the demon from his little circle cage.  Curse you, Sunshine!

So we go into combat.  Once again, I roll highest for initiative.   I tell Jim that she’s casting Handfire and shifting into her brown bear form.  Sunshine attacks but only manages to get one bite in.  Iema starts buffing people. Natalia and Corin attack the demon-guy, but sadly, he resists Natalia’s Handfire.  Damn, I hate blowing a good spell.

The demon tries for Corin, but Corin’s Protection from Evil spell burns him.  The demon looks surprised.  “You brought a paladin on a thieving mission?  Are you guys crazy?”

Note that Corin’s not exactly a paladin; he just has some ranks in it or something, I guess.  At any rate, we’re not exactly in the mood to correct him, since we’re all bleeding from his stupid claws.

When it’s my turn again, I tell Jim that Natalia is going to summon a dire wolverine.  Sadly, I rolled a nat 1 and fail miserably.  Luckily, when it’s Phil’s turn to do something, he rolls much better than I and manages to successfully cast Improved Invisibility on Corin.

Soon, it’s my turn again, and this time (with Phil’s help), I decide I’m going to summon a Tendriculos.  Of course, Jim and Phil have to show me pictures from the book and explain its abilities because I barely could pronounce it, much less figure out what the hell a Tendriculos was.

While Natalia is summoning whatever it is, the demon casts a mirror image spell.  Sunshine nabs one.  “I KILLED ONE!” she yells excitedly as the mirage disappears.  Iema and Corin jump in, taking out images left and right.  Finally, the Tendriculos appears, and we’re like, HELL YEAH, IT’S GONNA KICK THIS DEMON’S ASS.

Except it doesn’t.  It misses all its attacks.  Damn.

So, whatever a Tendriculos is, it makes the demon nervous because he casts an invisibility spell on himself to hide from it.  We all start trying to guess where he’s at and are swinging wildly, only to hit air.  Finally, the demon appears behind the Tendriculos and summons more mirror images of himself.  Gah!  Again, we start furiously popping mirror images left and right.

Then the demon, succeeding on a spell to see invisibility, turns his sights on Corin.  Swiftly, he kills Corin outright.  “That’s what a paladin gets,” he sneers.

How awful.  Natalia’s come to like Corin a lot; I can only imagine how Iema feels about the loss of his companion.  However, we don’t have time to mourn.  Natalia keeps working on mirror images.  Iema has to do a will save, which, luckily, he succeeds at because something outside of his mind was trying to get at his newfound rapier.  The bard manages to fight it off.

However, whatever the demon does is enough to drop Iema.  Natalia casts Healing Circle, which, while it doesn’t get him up to a lot of hit points, it is enough to get Iema back up.  Which is great because Iema really steals the show here:  He draws his rapier.  On it, he notices that a map of the Jade Islands with fire behind it is glowing on the weapon.  He can feel that the rapier is willing him to do something.  Does he give in to it?

“Yes,” Phil answers Jim quickly.  We’re eager to see what the rapier wants Iema to do.

Jim says that Iema’s eyes suddenly turn all blue.  The rapier glows, then something happens—

The demon is gone.  The rapier has cast banishment on it.  HOW AWESOME.

Except, of course, Corin’s dead, and we still have another room to go…

And that, of course, will be continued in the next game.

Tags: D&D, dork training, first D&D game, gaming, homebrew D&D, Homebrewed

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