By Dan "N" Hudon. and Stephen "Laika" Sanford
Saturday:
Greetings mortals (and otherwise)! Here is my account of the events that transpired during our raid of Dame Gloriana's Spelltower.
Upon arriving at the teleport pad and stepping into Dame Gloriana's tower, we entered into a room with a number of animated brooms sweeping the area clean and destroying any dirt they came across, including our dirt from Stonewood that provided our emergency escape route. They had to be disenchanted to retrieve keys from them which could be inserted into a door. (There was also another door that exploded when opened as some sort of security mechanism). Most of the keys when used enacted various curses (releasing imps that mocked us, getting Elwin stuck in a time loop, turning people into animals, making a flesh blanket...) but eventually we found the right one and moved on.
We snuck through a garden courtyard with patrolling sentries that detected movement and vicious dogs sensitive to sound. At the end we killed the guard dog and used its key to enter the next room.
There was a control room of sorts manned by gnomes who had been there since Gloriana's time. They told us that the tower itself is a device for interplanar travel but had fallen into disrepair, and we needed to fix certain mechanisms in connected planes to be able to access the central chamber. The portal would send us to the planes in a random order, with the first being the Elemental Plane of Fire.
In the Fire Plane, the floor was insta-rending lava except for certain stony areas, and a path could be made by killing fire elementals, causing them to cool and turn into stepping stones. It was super slow going, especially for those trying to carry Sir Wilmot's casket, but there were periodically-placed water obelisks that when assembled would turn all the lava to stone for a short period of time, letting everyone move forward quickly before it turned back to lava again. On one of these times, I ran a bit too far before realizing the rest of the party was stuck behind me dealing with some more elementals that had appeared. Realizing that I was in the middle of nowhere with no stepping stones for when the floor heated up again, I found the nearest isolated fire elemental and killed it with a single, quick piercing blow to create a place for me to stand. I was stranded far behind the elementals' back line, but luckily no elementals noticed me. When the next obelisk was activated I started running again, since we were close to the end and someone called out to run as far as we could. But the end was further than we thought and some elementals appeared to stop the main party in their tracks, in an area with no stepping stones and time quickly running out. Apparently at this point the party had resigned themselves to death, with the healers in the back still on stones figuring out how to deal with the mass rending that would soon occur. But as the countdown for the floor becoming lava started - 10, 9, 8... - I, alone on the rapidly heating lava far ahead, suddenly saw another water obelisk near me, and rushed over to try to put it together as my (and the party's, though unbeknownst to me) only chance of survival. Using one hand (since my other hand was unusable due to a magic item power) I frantically assembled the obelisk's pieces - 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, "The floor is-"
Half a second before the word "lava", I put the final piece in place. ((I looked up at an npc nearby, asking if I got it in time. They called out to Renee (who was marshaling the countdown), saying that I had gotten it just *barely* in time, and she announced that the floor was still stone for now.)) The whole party was able to run forward and make it to the end, without any more casualties from the lava!
So, we reached another portal in the fire plane that lead us back to the tower, where there was a room with a furnace. A chimney sweep was trying to clean a poison monster out of the furnace but got eaten. So did J'ortsa, but we got him out. Anyways, eventually we figured out how to get rid of the monster and we started loading in coal that entered the room in the form of coalems (coal golems) when we pushed a button. Luckily there were pickaxes to deal with those.
With the furnace active, we went through another portal to the Fae Wilds. We had to deal with a bunch of goblins, a scarecrow, mushrooms, and a snake (which Bubbles bargained with for a cool hammer) to gather ingredients for hags who looked like gnomes due to a glamor spell. They led us to an alchemy workstation and taught people how to do some alchemy for the next part of repairing the tower. While that was happening (which went well), some of us talked about the memories we'd been seeing.
So, throughout the day there were these floating crystals that when touched would show people memories of things that happened in the tower. I didn't see all of them but heard about the ones I didn't see. They showed Gloriana's sister, Priscilla, getting killed by a mind flayer Aberration, and Gloriana burying herself in her research on teleportation to the point where gnomes had trouble getting her to eat (though James Swift was able to use divine aids to somehow make her eat the food, or at least make it so we could see the part where she does). The memory in the Fae Wilds was of Gloriana being asked to squire to the Knights of the Aberrant Gate by Sir Wilmot, with her agreeing when he said she could make sure what happened to Priscilla wouldn't happen to others.
After Fae, we went to the Abyss to get some abyssal rocks. The Abyss is a truly awful place where there's tons of demons with armor piercing pikes and such who only take damage from magic weapons. Not a fan of those! There were also some rending pits, and some entities that people made ill-advised deals with for cool daggers. Anyways, we got pretty much wiped and people had to make deals (including with an entity who was *totally* just a messenger and not Asmodeus himself, yup definitely) to get the demons to stop attacking and let us through. The portal out had a sensor that would only let humans through (the first of the "Speciesist Doors") but Rosetta was able to disable it temporarily with a Force of Will. Hopefully not too many demons got out.
We were then in a room with Abyssal rocks to mine while some more demons attacked (guess they didn't get the memo). Luckily, I had lugged the pickaxes from the furnace room all day and we had those to mine them quicker. Less luckily, the stones put a random curse on you when you broke them, but we were able to get the pieces of Abyssal Rock (and candy) inside.
As night fell, rhe next plane on the list was the Negative Energy Plane, where healing magic was useless but any dead were revived after a minute. There were all sorts of creatures of darkness attacking while we made our way through, and interestingly, there were some sort of memory apparitions of Gloriana and Priscilla lost in the darkness, who couldn't see or hear us but reacted to and followed our lights. We got them out and they disappeared, letting us get into a room with a compass we needed to fix.
In this room, when someone touched a memory crystal, this time it played for everyone present. We witnessed Gloriana's knighting by Sir Wilmot, with several of the other Knights (Dame Claudia and Sir Roman) present. Gloriana had just finished the teleportation research and would be heading to Lostpeak to join the other knights.
In this room, we had to act out true stories of the Realms in four categories - romance, tragedy, history, and adventure - in order to fill magic books that go on each point of the compass. With the joyous atmosphere and tales of the good old days, it almost felt more like a campfire than a room in an old wizard tower. I could take the time to recount the stories once more, but it would be better to hear them some time in a similar atmosphere of merriment.
Next was another Speciesist Door, except this one didn't just prevent non-humans from entering, but segregated us and teleported us into a cage! It was quite offensive. We were trapped while the humans (and a few others, like Laika and Rosetta - the sensor must have made a mistake) looted the central sanctum of the tower. While trapped, we noticed that behind another layer of magical barrier behind us were all sorts of terrible creatures! Suddenly the barrier in front of us broke down, letting us free along with a gnome and a mushroom. But then, the next layers of the barrier started going down, letting more and more creatures free and sealing the room until we dealt with them all.
There was a chimera, a mind flayer, a bat creature, a giant cyclops skeleton (like Hugo from the siege of Blackwood), a beholder, and a dracolich, and we had to fight them all at once! It was hard, but we succeeded! ((And yes, the big ones were all full giant monster rigs, and they were *amazing*!))
We finally killed them all and were able to leave the tower, our mission complete. People are hard at work transcribing the results of our raid, which will hopefully give us a leg up in our fight against Sir Edwyn Rainecourt.
-N