Dramatis Personae
Beltin (Aasimar Dirge Bard/Cleric 12).
"Jake" aka Alex, the actual character name but I refuse to go back and edit the old entries (Human Wizard/Rogue 12). MISSING PLAYER
The Smith (LN Half-Giant Aegis/Psychic Warrior 11)
Zai (Human Tetori Monk/Lore Warden Fighter 12).
Glory, aka the Righteous Wrath of Heaven or something similar (Aasimar Synthesist Summoner/Bloodrager 12). The Smith replacement character. The polar opposite of Vol, Glory is a heavenly diplomat as well as an instrument of Heaven's fury against evil.
Even in the high Heavens there is bureaucracy and councils that debate policy issues, and one issue of contention has been the whispers of some lurking peril in the ruins of the once great bastion of darkness, Tsar. Eventually it was decided that a decision about what to do could not be made without more information, and thus Glory was chosen to investigate and evaluate the situation on the material plane.
He descended from the Heavens and found himself on the northern side of the Desolation. He was told to go south and there he would meet men of righteousness on a crusade against evil and that they would help him on his mission. But, as it was his first time on the material plane and the fact that he was bad with directions, Glory ended up mistaking the city of Tsar for the Camp and walked toward it. In the night, demons from the the Tower of Weeping Sores ambushed him and dragged him back to their master.
For a week straight Glory was tortured by General Mirak and his right hand men for both information and sport. They found the idea of an army of angels descending upon them especially humorous.
Then as a new round of "fun" was about to begin, the general was pulled aside and informed of something that interested him greatly. He told Glory he would speak with him later and left him in his cage. He pulled out an amulet from beneath his armor. It glowed briefly and then Glory found himself teleported to a dingy room filled with cages and rusty torture implements.
About 30 minutes later Zai appeared in a cage not far from his, and Glory rejoiced for clearly this meant that the armies of Heaven were assaulting the fortress and coming to save him. Yeah, about that...
"The Material Plane is awful!", Session 18.1 - 11/14/14
As the person making Glory got confused and made him at 12th level instead of 11th, to cut back on confusion and to be fair the party DINGS to level 12. Don't ask for another level at the end of this dungeon because it ain't happening now.
Day 48
Prison break!
Glory is most joyous upon seeing Zai arrive and asks if the forces of St. Alexander (I have no idea...) have come to deliver him from evil and smite the wicked, and at this question Zai is just as confused as the DM.
"Well, I don't know if I would call him a saint," starts Zai, thinking of his amoral mercenary boss Jake/Alex. And then what is really happening comes to light. Bunch of stupid adventurers walked in and quickly got in over their heads. Teleport trap. Captured. So on. Glory is mildly disappointed to say the least, but the two decide they should make their escape.
As his new temp cage isn't magic suppressing, Glory calls forth some of his righteous heavenly wrath, aka summons eidolon suit and rages. That cage didn't know what hit it. At this point the eidolon would get described, but who can remember that shit? It will have to wait for next time.
He then breaks Zai's cage open and the two of them take a closer look around the room. Yep, still looks as bad as it did before from inside the cages, but they notice that in one of the full body cages next to where Glory was detained is the skeletal remains of a man covered in black robes. Knowledge check? Yep, those totally belonged to the priesthood of Orcus. That's weird, thinks the two of them, but yeah better things to do then ponder this mystery.
They make perception checks, fail, and then move toward the exit to the room flanked by the four iron maidens. If they had made it the perception check they would have realized that one of them closest to the door had changed position slightly since they broke free. Instead this comes as a surprise to them when as the near the door, one of the iron maidens flies open and a zombified corpse is ejected, hungry for brains.
Initiative and Glory goes first and throws everything he has at the zombie. It is just a zombie. Like a 1/2 CR zombie. It dies, but "just as planned" thinks the DM: Waste that full attack. As this happens there is another perception check to be made and Zai gets it. The way that zombie came out? It didn't push open the door and lunge, it was forcefully thrown out. With this in mind he looks suspiciously at the iron maiden in time to not be flatfooted when it quickly dashes forward toward him.
Surprise, it's an Iron Maiden Golem! The DM loves this creature so much.
It is open wide, ready to give him a deadly hug. The lid slams down on him and tries to scoop him in, but unfortunately for the golem, it is trying to grapple the grapple master. Zai is nearly closed in but manages to jam his arm into hinges to keep it open, and oh wow does that door slamming hurt.
With the element of surprise gone, the golem goes down quickly not too long after and mostly uneventfully as it never does get to feel Zai inside of it. As a side note, I wonder if the party would take Craft Construct if they knew it only costs 30,000 to make one of these things.
With the battle done, the two go to the door, find it open, and step out of the torture room. They are now in a prison. Cells everywhere with a hallway snaking between them. The cells they see are either empty or have old corpses inside. On the floor is a dried blood trail that is interrupted at times with arrows, also in blood, pointing to in one direction. In common, and also in blood, they see the word EXIT painted on the floor next to the pointing arrow.
How nice of someone to make a blood trail to show people the way out, they think. Seems legit. As they ponder whether to follow the arrow way of the blood trail or follow it backward (as there is no way not involving a blood trail), they hear a loud clanking sound from the non-arrow way, like someone is running a tin cup across the bars of his cell.
They decide to investigate that.
Back in his magically suppressed cell, Beltin contemplates his options and after a while hears what may be the distant sounds of combat (perhaps against an Iron Maiden Golem). He doesn't know what that means, so decides to do what St. Alexander would almost certainly approve of, help himself.
He rattles something metallic against the bars of the cell and tries to call forth his supernatural bardic powers over undeath and make that fucking skeleton walk him over the key. He finds his bardic magic also suppressed, but makes a lovely racket. And then he hears people approaching.
Around the corner walks Zai and some sort of angelic abomination, which based on the glowing caste mark, he recognizes as an eidolon. The skeleton turns toward the newcomers, hostile, and quickly goes down. On its ribs they find a key as well as a pocket watch. They open the cell door for Beltin, introduce themselves, and then examine the watch.
In regards to introductions, there is usual awkwardness surrounding Beltin but it mostly goes unsaid as it's not like he has an undead menagerie with him right now. Upon learning Glory's story and seeing the eidolon, Beltin is reminded of a "heretical" dissertation he had read concerning the strange forms taken by both some evil outsiders as well as angels.
The theory proposed that such beings were simply channeling the power known on the material plane as "eidolon," though perhaps to a greater mastery than commonly seen. It proposed that the "divine" beings were hardly divine so much as shaping their own forms with arcane magic and were actually not much different in reality than the other races.
The author of that work was burned, so Beltin decides not to ask Glory about the truth of those sentiments. He examines the pocket watch found on the skeleton and determines that it is magical; looks like it is an alarm clock that can be magically set from somewhere else and there is seemingly no way to tell when it will go off.
Correctly assuming that if they take the magical trinket it will go off at the most inconvenient time for them, the party decides to leave it on the broken skeleton.
Back down the blood trail goes the party. It winds them through the cell block. As the party goes they notice small silver mirrors on the walls at random intervals and a knowledge check recognizes them as sensors for scrying. Security cameras. The party breaks the ones they see and continue on. The blood trail leads to a large reinforced door. Written on the wall next to it in blood is a single word: "PLAYGROUND."
That claim seems dubious, but it is the only way out. It may even be fun, says Glory, thinking of what playgrounds are like in Heaven. Clearly he has never been to the material plane, and certainly not to a bastion of evil and despair like the Tower of Weeping Sores.
The "Playground"
Glory opens the door and has to make a fort save. Contact poison on the door? Excellent! He makes his save, but as he starts to look around things begin to seem... off. Glory is now high on fear inducing hallucinogenic!
Ahead the party sees rough stone walls at odd irregular angles, seemingly constructed without rhyme or reason, perhaps through many, many castings of Wall of Stone. It is a labyrinth, and the blood trail ends at the beginning. Only darkness and silence awaits.
The next section of the dungeon is the party moving through the claustrophobic passages, first quickly, and then rather slowly once they realized it is full of traps. Darts spit from a wall, there is a pit with spikes and razors that rip your leg as you pull it out, spears from the ceiling, and, of course, obvious pressure plates that spring no trap and are simply there to sow paranoia. More scrying sensor mirrors also appear at seemingly random intervals along the walls.
As the party advances, they begin to catch sight of small flying figures dodging around the maze around them. Glory gets the best look at one of the creatures, a skull suspended in a mass of coils and wires, but by this time he is beginning to realize that his nerves are shot and he is beginning to doubt his perceptions, especially when he started seeing blood running down the walls that no one else could. He doesn't recognize the creature for what it is at any rate.
As they go, Glory rants about the "playground," about how anyone could call this one. This is not how things are done in Heaven, he continues. This isn't right.
"The material plane is awful!" he concludes.
They continue on until finally they find a door, which Zai opens. A needle shoots out from the handle, but he pulls his hand back in time. This act becomes a theme for the rest of the maze, with Zai immediately opening doors without looking for traps that are always there and always the same. At least he has good reflex and always made it.
The party enters into a large hallway. Here too there are random walls of stone blocking straight progress, but they are more haphazard and function less as a maze and more as dividers in the hall to block line of sight to the ends.
At this point perception checks are called for and very faintly the party can hear the sound of a an alarm clock ringing back the way they came, waaaay back.
The party picks one of the two possible ways and begins to walk and as they round a corner Glory sees an emancipated man in rags against the wall. Glory is concerned and begins to move forward and ask the man if he is okay.
As he does so the figure turns to him and begins to scream as it claws out its own eyes with ragged fingernails. And then the figure is gone. It was never then to begin with, but Glory's obvious reaction gives Beltin enough motive to try a heal check.
Check made. Yep, Glory is hallucinating. Tripping balls in fact. A Remove Poison stops that and only then does Glory realize how trippy everything had been since the playground sign, but it does not change the fact that this is not how playgrounds are supposed to be.
At the end of the hall they see two ways to proceed. Straight on is a door and to the left the hallway turns but the way forward there is blocked by a strange fog, seemingly a permanent Obscuring Mist effect. Out of game and not shared with the players, that way is also about 100 feet or so away from one of the two exits out of the area.
The party decides to do the door, Zai opening and triggering the trap of course. Inside they see more stone walls forming a maze, but directly off to one side they see a pile of rotting corpses. Beltin immediately perks up, hoping they belong to him, but a brief glance shows these are just normal dead people. Probably commoners. Not even worth the effort of bringing back.
Still they can't leave the dead like this says Zai and Glory, so they move up to the bodies to cleanse them by fire. As they move up they notice slightly movement from the mound and get ready. They blast the corpses with fire and screeches and a mass of blackness erupts from the burning flesh and rushes toward them.
Shadow Rat Swarm! Fortunately this swarm can be hurt by weapon damage and it goes down easily after the initial blast, with the few remaining rats slipping through the walls incorporeal. They continue around a few corners and see light ahead.
They advance into a open room seemingly free of dangers and as they enter they feel themselves move through a magical barrier of sorts. They easily identify this magic as warding this room against corruption, both from age and from vermin. On the wall is another large written word: "BREAK ROOM."
To be continued...
