Session 39: The Boys Rekindle Their Oda-iger PTSD

As Vojta goes down, Cho strikes down the ghosts that surround him with a sudden burst of ferocity. Arran cleaves through the swarm of small ghosts with spectral blades, then feeds Vojta a potion to bring him back to consciousness. More small ghosts appear and swarm around Cho, draining his energy. He pushes through the horde to strike down one of the leading ghosts, but it explodes in his face, knocking him out. Nan calls down a pillar of scorching light on the second leading ghost, instantly evaporating it, while Vojta flushes the third away with another tidal wave. With the leading ghosts destroyed, the small ghosts dissipate. The group then retreats inside Nan’s ring to recuperate.

Meanwhile, Grombrin comes to his senses and finds himself near the entrance of Etreath’s temple, having been brought there by Obscurity’s people. He doesn’t know where he is, but figures that he blacked out due to withdrawal symptoms from not smithing for several days. He inspects the stonework of the nearby temple. It is very old and clearly comes from the outer reaches of the elemental plane of earth. He goes inside, hears the voices of the others, and seeks them out. Vojta then explains the situation to him, and he joins them in exploring the temple.

Nan finds a note on the ground in a nearby hallway. It warns them to trust ropes over maps. They continue following the red rope and find a room with gashes in the stone floor. Both doorways are suddenly blocked off by metal bars, while icy mist fills the room. Cho tries to bend the bars, but it turns out to be an unfamiliar, unusually strong material. Vojta turns into a cat and tries to squeeze through, but a wall of force blocks his path. The mist suddenly starts swirling, battering Arran, Nan and Grombrin into the walls.

A blurry figure then appears from the mist and injures Arran with a slash of its huge axe. They can barely see it to fight back, so Nan uses her magic to dispel the mist, revealing the skeletal spectre of a giant. The others strike at it, but it phases into the ethereal plane, becoming immune to attack. Arran baits out an attack and wards it off with a magic barrier. While the giant is briefly corporeal, Cho chops away parts of its legs. The giant goes on to attack and wound Nan, until Grombrin smites it with his axe. Fire bursts from the axe and engulfs the giant’s entire body, crumbling it to dust. The bars blocking the doorways then disappear.

The group moves into the next room. There they see a large glowing moon shape on the floor. The path forward is closed by a stone wall, which the rope passes through. Vojta touches the sigil, which becomes filled in with glowing moonlight. A crescent blade then emerges from the floor and swings for Vojta, but Arran pulls him away just in time. A floating spectral skeleton appears from the light. Vojta promptly turns into a wolf and bites the skeleton’s leg, but it slips away from him and floats into the air. Arran shoots at it with his bow, but the semi-corporeal monster is difficult to hit. Nan hits it with several eldritch blasts, but this prompts the ghost to float over the front liners and attack her. Grombrin chases after it by running up the wall and onto the ceiling with his magic boots, and strikes it with his flaming axe. As it’s distracted, Cho hits it with a javelin, shattering its skull.

As the spectre falls apart, the wall blocking the way forward disappears. The group needs to rest, so they track back to the entrance, but the entrance is blocked off. They return to the moon room and rest there. Afterwards, they find that the rope ends in the next room, but that the hallway continues. The hallway contains a pile of sand, and the next room has a black fog floating near the ceiling. The group turns back and follows the green rope instead.

After a few turns, the green rope cuts off as well. Cho advances down that hallway anyways, but the floor tile suddenly pushes him up into the ceiling. When the stone pillar comes back down, Cho is completely gone. Arran throws an arrow on the tile, but it doesn’t do anything. Grombrin sends a magical message to Cho, but there is no response. Arran jumps over the tile, but he is also shoved up and disappears mid-jump. The other three discuss their options before reluctantly stepping onto the tile as well.

The group is reunited in a new hallway, where the green rope continues. Arran and Nan scout in opposite directions. Arran finds a room with an arrow sticking in the floor, but ignores it and moves on. Nan finds a room with a stinky mass of purple slime in the corner. She backs off from it and joins the others in following after Arran. Arran is nowhere to be found, so they approach the arrow. When they do, a skeletal warrior magically emerges from it. It attacks Cho with an aggressive barrage of greatsword slashes. Cho retaliates with a powerful blow, but feels his strength rapidly draining due to the dark magic infused in the blade. Vojta uses his own magic to counteract Cho’s fatigue, until Cho manages to cleave the warrior in two.

They head further down the hallway in search of Arran. In an upcoming small room, Cho sees some bone shards on the floor. He steps inside only to be pushed up and disappear again. The rest follows. It brings them to a large open room with a huge tree in the centre. Many corpses dangle from its branches. Arran is on the other side of the room. He reunites with them and gets them to carefully search the perimeter of the room. When Arran steps close to one of the tree’s roots, it suddenly wraps around and constricts him.

Arran teleports free from its grasp, while Grombrin surrounds the tree with a wall of fire. The heat causes blood to gush from the bark, providing resistance against the flames. Cho charges in to chop at the trunk, but the roots rapidly batter and constrict him. Nan and Vojta both use their magic to drain the tree’s blood from its vessels, but it has blood to spare. The tree then shakes, awakening a dozen zombies from the ground around its roots. The zombies swarm around Nan, Grombrin, and Vojta, clobbering them and spewing spores that cloud their minds.

Vojta summons a wave of water to blow down the zombies surrounding him, then transforms into an earth elemental. Grombrin invokes the power of Morach to rebuke the undead, but the zombies are unhindered. Apparently, they are not true undead, merely corpses parasitically controlled. Arran notices that the zombies are tethered to the tree by long roots, and that the tree feeds them blood to heal their injuries. He cuts one of the tethers with his rapier, which stops the healing but doesn’t kill the zombie. Arran, Grombrin, and Vojta dispatch multiple zombies in a flurry of blades and strikes, while Nan drains more blood from the tree. Cho continues to be battered and constricted by the tree, stunned from the assault but remaining conscious despite considerable injuries.