Arandish Campaign 2010 - Sessions 10 and 11

This session report could be called "A Tale of Two Modules."

Session 10 began with the PC's entering a weird valley high on Mount Fenris in Minoch, against the warnings of Zeke Duncaster, an insane hermit whom lives on the mountainside below the valley.  Aficionados will recognize this as the opening of James Raggi's Death Frost Doom, and indeed I am happy to say I successfully lured my party into running through the first couple portions of it.  Upon reaching the snowy valley, the PCs made straight for the cabin, and explored about half of it before deciding to head down the vertical tunnel revealed by opening the trapdoor in the main room.  They made it down, and to the large chapel without much event, then Uncle Junkal (Bard-2) played the bone organ, thereby poisoning himself.  He failed his save and died.  At which point, already spooked by their uncanny surroundings, the remaining PCs decided to carry the fallen bard's body out of the dungeon and get him back to the nearest Minochian town (Farn Junction as it turned out) that contained a cleric of sufficient levels to cast Raise Dead.

Session 11 began with the PCs in Farn Junction.  Hazel and Innominus decided to wait around in town for the two weeks Uncle Junkal needed to recover from his recent raising from the dead.  The NPC Dalgoop (Ranger-2) ventured ahead to Fortinbras (and points further south) to begin gathering intelligence for the group's presumed next mission (i.e., to make contact with the Mizarians and enlist their aid in investigating the rumored trollish threat far to the south).

Once Uncle Junkal was ready to travel, the PCs made for Fortinbras, encountering a vicious rock troll on the way!  I was most excited by this random encounter, as the rock troll is a badass super-troll indigenous to Ara -- maybe the first Ara-specific monster the PCs have yet encountered.  Yet in a brilliant stroke, Uncle Junkal charm person-ed the sonofabitching rock troll before it landed a single attack. 

The PCs -- with the exception of Uncle Junkal, who waited outside town with his newly-charmed rock troll -- then made their way into town, to make contact with Dalgoop and gather rumors about other local opportunities for dungeoneering and loot-gathering.

Hazel and Innominus began hearing tell of a nearby underground dungeon that had once been an ancient prison.  Sufficiently intrigued, and unable to find Dalgoop, the PCs left Fortinbras and headed southwest toward a lonely Minochian peak called Mount Greystone.  Once in the foothills, they came across a mortally wounded human adventurer stumbling through the woods.   Actually, not yet realizing he was a mortally wounded human, Hazel and one of the NPCs tripped him with a tripwire, and he sprawled face-first into the muck.  He mumbled something about "hobgoblins" before dying.

The group ventured uphill to find themselves in a small box canyon with ruined fortifications across its mouth.  they explored the canyon for awhile, finding a strangely warm stream, and an arched entrance at the far end of the canyon with foreboding verses about a "stony hell" etched into a plaque above.  The party camped for the night near a cave with a hot-spring on the north side of the canyon.  In the earliest morning watch, Innominus spotted goblins moving furtively from a small copse on the south side of the canyon toward the east and the ruined fortress at the canyon mouth.

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