Session 7: Ready Orc Not...

In the Gap

The heroes return to Brevin's Gap and share their information about Milo Muranis and the threat of Demogorgon and Jazzulath to Badraa and Domoth Brevin. They task the Bastions with finding Roge and Annet, two of Arlahn's closest friends. Althea finds a note from the Masks, saying they have found another teenager involved in the cult and will be questioning them tonight. Dances on Stumps sweet-talks a fisherwoman named Ol' Salle, who gives him a fish and offers him her boat to go after the captured Gap-dwellers.

Into the tunnels

Taking the boat down to the water, the heroes travel northwest, following the northern cliff. After rowing for about 15 minutes, they find a well-camouflaged opening in the rock wall, and several row boats scuttled with rocks at the base of this opening, under the water. Entering the tunnel, they find a flow of waterflowing down the passage into the ravine, about 2 feet wide. They follow the passage for several hundred yards until they hit an intersection. One way looks to be recently caved in (to the left) and the water seems to be flowing from the right. They decide to follow the water.

A shortcut to horrors!

The right tunnel eventually opens into a large chamber with a central body of water. 4 bodies are seen here in the dim light of Althea's dancing lights. She sends them forward and indentifies from a distance that three of these seem to be townsfolk and one is an orc, all killed with slashing and tearing wounds. As Relic heads into the room and the rest of the group spreads out to investigate, they find themselves caught on near-transparent sticky lines of cave-fishers! These underground monstrosities start reeling their victims toward the ceilings while two hook horrors drop from the ceiling to ambush the party! The party fights off the attacks of the hook horrors while also trying to keep away from jaws and lines of the cave fishers. After a brief skirmish, one hook horror is killed in the lake while the other escapes along the ceiling into a tunnel in the rock wall. Both cave fishers are killed (and Gnarly Toes ends up with some pretty bad rope burns on his hands, the skin torn away from climbing a cave fisher line).

A triumphant ambush

At the other end of the hook horror chamber is a single passage out, with another rivulet running down one side. This passage once again hits a Y intersection. Pausing to listen, the party hears the sounds of orcs from the right side, and decides to set an ambush. R311C, "Relic" stands firm at the entrance to the passage while Dances on Stumps and Gnarly Toes begin to mold earth in front of the warforged, making a deep trap trench for the orcs to fall into. Althea hides around the corner while Xabu prepares to unleash radiant energy on the first orc he sees. A group of 6 orcs and one ogre round the corner, and begin to charge recklessly at the party. Between the clever trap, and the well-prepared attacks of the group, they fall handily to the heroes! As the battle dies down, however, Xabu does a quick count of the bodies and recognizes that he heard one more orc voice than the bodies account for.

A chase and a discovery

Most of the group gives direct chase to the single orc, while Althea cleverly tries to go down the left passage in hopes of cutting off its escape. She doesn't, but we'll get to that later. The group giving chase goes through a series of twisting and intersecting passages like a labyrinth, using cunning and intuition to follow the sounds of the orc. They then come to a great cliff with only a narrow ledge leading to another landing on the other side. Finally, they find the orc climbing a cliff in the final chamber, beside a waterfall and with a glimmering pool at the base. They coordinate an attack and fire, killing the scout.

Meanwhile, Althea discovers that her passage kept curving to the left until it was once again pointing south and leading deeper into the earth. After following for a few hundred feet, she finds a lightly glowing chamber with a 6 foot deep blue-purple rock formation in the middle of it. And Seowin disappears due to the apparent anti-magic properties of this strange rock. Althea, excited at this discovery, regroups with the team and brings them back. They experiment for a while, discovering that the anti-magic properties of this zone are absolute (Even Buscador falls to the ground within 30 feet of this formation). They steel themselves once more, and follow the path of the orc, hoping that it was taking a direct route back to it's stronghold.

The mines begin

As the heroes climb the waterfall and venture into the tunnels beyond, they reach a break in the tunnel - a wide hole of crumbling stone and earth that opens into the rocky worked shaft of a dwarvish mine. They pause at this new revelation, and hear the distant sounds of orcs in the distance of this new zone.