Freeport Campaign

The group decided to head south, in order to clear the area between the junction and the waterfall before heading further into the complex. Chow took the lead again, and quickly reported hearing a pair of voices speaking the language of giants. He hid his lightstone and padded quietly into the larger chamber to the south, where he discovered a tall annis hag and well-armed troll sneaking in the direction of the party. As the rogue and Spike moved into the room, the hag filled the room with a cloud of fog to cover her and the troll’s movements. The party moved through the room in slow pursuit, encountering no resistance until Balama cast a preparatory spell, at which point a pair of previously-concealed wyvern tails whipped out of the southern wall to strike at her and Richard. They avoided the deleterious effects of the poison the tails ejected, but hurried along to get out of the trap’s reach.

As the group emerged from the southern exit, they discovered a second bridge across the chasm. Spike muttered in disgust about having missed seeing the bridge when the group had crossed over the chasm from the ogres’ barracks a few minutes earlier, but those thoughts slipped to the back of his mind when he spotted a large humanoid form on the southern end of the rock bridge. While he charged across the bridge, his peripheral vision caught the hag floating in the air to his left. He reported these enemy positions to the group telepathically and moved to engage the troll. Chow followed close behind him, while Richard and Balama discussed various methods for dispatching the hag, who had since summoned numerous mirror images to float in the air around her. Shrugging, Balama attempted to dispel magic in the area around the hag, hoping to remove either the creature’s mirror images or ability to fly. She was gratified at the expression on the hag’s face as she and her flickering sisters suddenly dropped into the darkness below and landed with a sickening crunch.

Meanwhile, Spike and Chow fared much worse at the southern end of the bridge. As Spike fought the troll and yelled to Balama and Richard for backup, an armored ogre ran up to join the fight. The new combatant, presumably the ogre chieftain Graf, howled in rage at the sight of the falling hag and chopped Chow almost in half with a series of vicious blows from an enormous falchion. Enraged, Spike finished off the troll, focused his attention on the ogre, and shouted again for backup. Before Richard could arrive to render aid, the ogre hacked Spike down as well.

The fallen ship captain barely had time to register the familiar shape of Mormekar, the Grim Boatman, before Harrimast followed through on the death pact Richard had brokered between Spike and the Pirate God, shunting Spike back to the land of the living almost at the very instant of his death. In the brief interval between death and renewed life, Spike swore he could hear Harrimast’s mocking laughter at the ironic fact that the very vitality Spike had given up as part of the pact would have been enough to keep him clinging to life after the ogre’s last strike. Spike vowed to himself never to forget that sound, and to have a long talk with Richard about its implications.

Fully healed by the discharged pact, Spike quickly defeated the ogre chieftain. Still angry, he hacked the troll a few more times and set a torch to the creature’s corpse to ensure that it stayed down. The remaining group peered with grim satisfaction into the chasm, where they saw eight balls of floating light sending bolt after bolt of electricity into the screaming hag.

Feeling safe for the moment, the group gathered their foes’ belongings and searched Chow’s possessions to locate his hidden cache of diamonds. In a now-familiar ritual, Richard arranged Chow’s body, sprinkled the diamond dust over his fallen compatriot, and entreated Harrimast to return the rogue to life. As the diamond dust absorbed into Chow’s skin, Spike and Balama reflected on the relative ease with which the spoils of their adventuring careers allowed them to circumvent the finality of death as faced by the vast majority of their fellow humans, and wondered how many lifetimes it would take a typical sailor aboard one of their ships to acquire the amount of wealth currently being consumed in this dank jungle cave. As Chow awakened, Spike thought of his mother.

Somewhat distracted, Richard, Spike, and Balama welcomed Chow back into their midst. While Richard and Chow rested, Spike and Balama packed up the magical gear from the ogre and the troll. After a while, the group headed south out of the chieftain’s quarters. They discovered that an illusionary wall masked an intersection with the passage leading from the waterfall into the first trapped chamber. Satisfied that they had cleared the southern portion of the complex, they headed back across the chasm and continued north.

The rough passageway descended slightly as it ran generally north, and the party soon found themselves standing at an opening into a large chamber of worked stone. Double doors across the chamber and carvings on the walls depicted a fearsome warlord of Chow’s ancestry wielding a cruel-looking sword against assembled divine and infernal foes.

Chow scouted the room, hugging the walls and watching the doors. He noticed several closed arrow slits on the north wall. As he reported this information over the group’s telepathic link, a disembodied arm appeared out of the north wall, striking the rogue and draining some of his recently restore life essence. Chow retreated back toward the rest of the group, followed closely by two ghostly figures that emerged fully from the northern wall on either side of the doors.

Richard called upon the divine power of Harrimast to help defend the party, and the specters fled back through the walls at the sight of the priest’s holy symbol. After a quick discussion, the group decided to press on while the specters were held at bay. Chow checked the doors for traps and, discovering none, picked the lock. The floor of the chamber beyond was laid out in an intricate zigzag pattern, and the walls featured more blocked arrow slits. Suspecting a trap, Chow tried to pick a safe path across the floor to the double doors in the north wall.

Beyond the doors, a hallway ran east and west. As the party headed west, a pair of spectral arms reached out of the wall to attack them, draining life force from them repeatedly. Frustrated, they used a quick combination of teleportative magics to rally on Richard and to move instantly from the tomb to Richard’s cabin aboard his ship, currently in the waters south of Avalon.

Catching their breath, the group discussed how to regain their lost vitality, and whether Kurgan’s Bane, the Black Blade of Aknar Ratalla, was worth the effort of retrieving it.