Arandish Campaign 2010 - Session 15

This session, which took place the Tuesday evening just prior to my leaving town (Eugene, OR) the following Saturday to move to Brockport, New York, was quite action packed!  So too my life has been: as I write this I am sitting in my new place in Brockport, waiting to start teaching classes next week and also preparing to DM my first-ever session over Skype with my Labyrinth Lord group back on the West Coast tonight.

I am confident this rpg'ing-by-Skype will work great, because we already tried it at the session I am about to describe: Hazel's player had also recently moved out of town, but she joined us via Skype and it worked fine!  We could all hear her and see her via a laptop placed strategically in the middle of the room where we game.  Bad ass!

Anyway, at the session in question, the group started in a chamber with a charred dirt mound, sifting through the area for treasure and incidental loot.  What they found instead were a couple of hogtied dwarves, Yor and Dak, two fellow dungeon delvers who were taken unawares by the lizardfolk in a nearby passage a day earlier.  After accepting these two dwarven PCs into the party, the adventurers continued northward into Lizardfolk territory, hacking (the battle-axe wielding dwarves) and slashing (Hazel) and bludgeoning (Innominus) and throwing knives (Uncle Junkal) and ripping with claws (Uncle Junkal's charmed rock troll) as they went.  They entered a large, fortified cavern guarded by armed lizardfolk, who seemed to be especially intent on defending an exit leading east.  The specific details of the PCs' session-long epic battle as wave after wave of Lizardfolk came at them would be far too long and time-consuming to recount fully here.  Suffice to say the party killed twelve lizardfolk and only suffered one casualty, the NPC swordsman Locklear.

After the major bloodbath, the party began exploring the eastern cavern, and discovered a secret door opening upon a narrow eastbound tunnel.  The bulk of the party headed down this tunnel while Uncle Junkal and his rock troll guarded their exit back to the west.  As the party found an underground river at the end of the tunnel, Uncle Junkal was visited by a mummy, who whispered "Return" and attacked the poor Bard after paralyzing the rock troll with its fearsome presence!  Uncle Junkal may have shared his attendant creature's fate had he not rolled his save vs. paralysis with his nightly d30 roll and succeeded!

Fortunately for Uncle Junkal, before the mummy could successfully strike him in battle, Innominus returned from below and turned the mummy!  the mummy fled into the western chamber and vanished mysteriously.

Convinced the mummy's crypt must be nearby, Dak insisted that the party help him sift through the lizardfolk's fortifications, which were formed from piles of stony rubble.  Sure enough, careful search and digging revealed a buried crypt right under their feet!  They pried it open and found a huge stone sarcophagus filled with treasure, including gold, jewelry, multiple potions and scrolls, and a magical sword: a +1 Flame Tongue.

That is where we left off.