25. Swamp Things

* From the safety of Pyt's drum hut, the party fight a shambling mound and some will-o-wisps. 
** The wisps are using their shock attacks to heal the mound. 
** Clwyd is turned into a giant ape by Wilfred after she is engulfed by the mound. 
** Wilfred eventually loses concentration, Clwyd is engulfed again and is dying. Quinn pulls her out the mass of vines and heals her up with a healer's kit. 
** Pyt turns himself into a mammoth. 
** Malak gets the final blow on the mound, killing it. The wisps flee. 
* The party find the mound's root-stem among the rotting detritus of its corpse. It looks like a piece of black wood with a faintly glowing fractal pattern on it. 
** Wilfred dispels the magic on the root-stem. 
** As the magic dissipates, Malak intuits that the mound had been born of a storm in some way.
** Clwyd informs the group that the island they're on is roughly in the storm path, meaning it's hit by the full force of the migratory storms at least once a year. 
* The next day, they explore the swamp. 
** They note that there are no large creatures in the place. Mostly just birds, frogs, snakes, insects, and the like. 
** They find the top of a stone hut that had been a troll's house. The building seems to have sunk into the swamp, but there's a small hole in the top that leads within. 
** Before they descend, Wilfred catches sight of a large, injured creature in the forest that's watching them. It runs away, but not before the gnome surmises that it was about the size of Bigly. 
* The party head under the swamp. 
** They find a series of worked-clay tunnels that link the igloo-like stone troll huts under the swamp's surface. 
** A swarm of stirges - animals that look like a cross between a bat and a mosquito - attack the party in one of the troll huts. The party eventually kills them all.
** There's a trail of small, circular footprints in the bat shit on the ground. The group follow it to another hole that descends downwards again, into another dome-shaped room. 
** They descend and find that this lower room is much the same as the ones above, though it opens up to more of a cavern. 
** The 'cavern' they are now in has a stone floor and roof, with a number of the troll huts on this level serving like support pillars for the ceiling and that above it. The walls resemble packed earth. There are also a tonne of bio-luminescent mushrooms around the place. 
** Wilfred concludes that the trolls who lived here were idiots. Their homes kept sinking into the swamp, so they just kept laying a floor of stone down on top of them and then building their houses on top of that, only for it to eventually sink as well. 
** Wilfred approaches some of the mushrooms and one of the larger ones gives off a piercing screech, revealing itself to be shrieker fungi. The party hear a large number of figures stirring from all around the cavern in response to the sound.
Category:Part Three