Session 34: Slaad but True

General Summary

The Guardians opened the session locked in battle with Chaarl Lecroak, the argumentative grey slaad. Using the pond as cover, Chaarl filled the gardens with cloudkill, forcing the party to close in. The Kuo-Toa spearmen fell quickly under the Guardians’ assault, their bodies piling up as the poison fog drifted across the field.   Chaarl proved far more dangerous. His chaotic claws charmed Lucky, and in single brutal strikes he knocked Bob to the ground. Once the charm faded, Lucky seized his moment. After the Kuo-Toa monitor died, he used suggestion to convince the slaad the fight was unwinnable and that helping the Guardians would be wiser. Bruised in body and pride, the slaad agreed and surrendered the first half of the key to Kilgrave’s upper levels.   It was a cryptex, a copper cylinder accompanied by a parchment filled with cryptic references to Harbingers in Sschindylryn, Obaskyte Keep, and Suzail. Three words were underlined: Child, Priest, and Monster.   Following the slaad’s path into the basement, the party discovered statues that matched the parchment’s clues. After a great deal of trial and error, which unleashed glass shards, lightning bolts, and eventually healing bursts, the Guardians realised the missing word was man, which limited the options of where each statue could be placed.   Solving the puzzle revealed a second parchment, blank except for holes. Shadow immediately recognised its purpose. Overlaying it on the first sheet revealed five letters: C R Y P T.   The cryptex sprang open in Shadow’s hands, revealing a golden key and a ciphered document. The key was identified as a Warrior’s Passkey, able to cast knock or transform into a +1 longsword. With it, the party moved to Kilgrave’s upper floor.   There they confronted drider guards and persuaded them to allow passage into the ritual chamber. Inside the shattered greenhouse, Wildstorm, the Drow sorcerer in black robes, was undergoing a ritual of ascension.   Six coffins surrounded a floating platform where four huge elementals, Fire, Water, Earth, and Air, were bound by chains of light to the Guardian’s Tear. Additional beams of magic shot into the coffins, part of the engine powering the ritual.   As the party advanced, the air elemental hurled Lucky backwards, yet the elemental itself was anchored and unable to pursue. Wildstorm intensified the ritual with a vitriolic sphere, striking the group. Bob charged forward only to be impaled by a hidden rotating spear and nearly devoured by a lurking barrel mimic.   Realising Wildstorm’s true nature as a black dragon, Erdan, Solas, and Shadow chose to ignore him and instead focused all fire on the water elemental, the weakest link in the ritual. Lucky fell to Wildstorm’s attacks but was quickly saved by Solas, with Bob’s shouting doing just enough to keep him clinging on.   Wildstorm finally lost his temper, breaking his disguise and revealing his full black dragon form. He swooped down, unleashing a stream of acid that melted flesh from bone, yet the Guardians stayed the course and continued hammering the water elemental.   The moment the elemental died, the ritual destabilised. The six beams began firing at random into the coffins, each blast either revivify or disintegrate, producing victims who were alive or dead depending on whether anyone observed them. This volatile state was intended to fuel Wildstorm’s final ascension.   The sequence went: revivify, revivify, disintegrate, disintegrate, revivify. Wildstorm, struck for one hundred and forty points of damage, awaited the final beam.   Revive or disintegrate. Survival or death.   A natural one.   Wildstorm began to boast, only to take a beam of disintegration directly to the face. His flesh boiled away in an instant, leaving nothing but silence in the ruined greenhouse.   The ritual collapsed. The dragon was gone. And the Guardians stood alone in the aftermath.