Author: Blameless

Flossy

Proceeding north from the hall of mirrors, Janky leads the party into a room littered with emptied potion bottles and other evidence of discarded adventuring. Togy and Janky point Smoll to an unmortared brick in the far wall where she retrieves a skein of unicorn braid from behind the brick. Morn identifies the fibrous assembly as a bowstring [+1 unbreakable] which Janky fashions into a refurbished shortbow christened Flossy.

Janky leads the party south into the recently vacated goblin area. A room east features a central pile of 17 dark stone pieces that Friggiedi realizes, in a flash of savant, could be reassembled into a carved statue of three human warriors. Attempts to reassemble the statue through feats of intellect are ironically interrupted by a sneaking brain dog. Smoll and Janky grease it before it can devour any of Friggiedi’s intellect.

Morn and Janky follow a hallway south that wraps back around to a room with a full scale marionette skeleton suspended by rope from the ceiling. Embossment on a nearby cleaved shield suggests the decedent might be Nimraith, adherent of Lathander. The party liberates his 100 year old remains from the undignified suspension and improvises a blanket shroud and shield monument.

Janky confidently proceeds through a door to the south right onto three waiting shortbow arrows from a goblin defense. Smoll bum-rushes the buick of goblins right behind her own flying hand axes and right ahead of the party taking cover behind her. Morn hexblasts a quad of goblins, painting a mural on the wall with their remains. Smoll bashes the bugbear officer with some flossing support by Janky and continues with two follow-up goblins for dessert. Friggiedi breaks out a mace that procs every hit on three goblins slain.

Shattered Illusions

Discouraged by Morn’s momentary demise, the party camps for the night in the chambers formerly known as Uktarl’s.

Smoll leads the refreshed and revived group back to the mirror hall for another go. The plan this time is to send one adventurer through at a time, methodically engaging copies under an intense focus of ranged attacks before any strength drain can occur. Smoll goes first and experiments with different paths and avoids looking at the mirrors. The same mirrors seem to always make copies while the other mirrors never do.

Janky goes through next and tries different paths while admiring himself in all the mirrors, but again the same mirrors always make copies.

Morn leaps over the suspected floor triggers, but still the same mirrors make copies. His progress is interrupted halfway across when a chanting, laughing patrol of goblins attack Smoll and Janky on the far side. They are repelled for the moment at the cost of a couple of goblins.

Reade suggests a survey of magic detection. Togy identifies the copy-producing mirrors as conjuration magic and one other mirror as illusion magic. Friggiedi explores through the illusion but feels only empty shelves. Janky follows her lead and locates another illusion mirror on his end and finds a bronze mask which he slips on. In addition to enhancing his rugged handsomeness, the masks visage seems vaguely familiar.

When an angry roar presages the return of the fortified goblins, Morn decides to try dispelling the magic mirrors with some well-placed blasts of eldritch. The method proves highly effective, so it is open season on the conjuration mirrors. The party arranges a defense and quickly defeats the bugbear-enhanced goblin surge.

A short rest restores not only health but also drained strength.

Mirror, Mirror

West from Uktarl’s ceded area of control, the party sneaks into a room of mortared bones serving as the den for a pair of grells. Smoll gets grappled more than she prefers, but the party otherwise benefits from an uncharacteristic superiority in damage and wipes them out.

Smoll rests up while Janky and Togy locate some modest riches in the unfortunate remains of misadventuring grell meals [4gp, 13sp]. A discarded bone flute in particular piques Janky’s interest but the sounds of a passing skull-seeking  goblin patrol extinguish any spontaneous jam session.

The party, continuing to follow the dungeon’s right wall, traces back to the column forest off the demon hall. The east hallway features opposing oval mirrors which, when traversed, tend to make aggro copies of the party members. Although not especially tough, the doppelgangers have the alarming effect of draining away strength, in Morn’s case to death.

Morn gets revivified and the party makes a fighting retreat away from the mirror hall  to consider options.

Uktarl

The party wends around this first level of the mad dungeon and finds the easy side of the secret door discovered in the well room a couple of hours ago. Friggiedi looks through the eyeholes but does not see the recent past.

Friggiedi opens the door at the end of a long hallway. The large hall features three large, waterdhavian noble statues. The statues, from south to north, bear the engraved labels Elyndraun, Ruathyndar, and Onthalass. Subsequent goblin emendation relabeled them as Smelly Bottom, Stupid Skull, and Born Toothless, respectively.

Togy locates a broken magical staff in a pile of bones. Friggiedi holds the halves together for Togy to mend. The repaired staff loudly yells, Help! Thief! Criminal! The ruckus attracts a coven of “vampires” who seek to separate dungeon crawling adventurers from their coins. Reade and Morn select “vampire” Kenny and separate him from his insides, sprayed admonishingly across the wall. His cohorts surrender except for one hard-hitting  “vampire”, Dannh, whom Smoll and Morn reduce to his original pocketless, gray, monstrous form.

The acquiescent survivors direct the party toward the lair of their boss, Uktarl. Uktarl runs the criminal gang, or at least what is left of it since his girlfriend, Harria, split the gang and went north. The survivors, actors who could not make a living topside, are given one gold each to exit the dungeon and not return.

The party easily locates Uktarl with his remaining “vampires”. Uktarl gets immediately jumped with a hex from Morn and blindness from Togy. He yields quickly and often. Smoll, unsatisfied with the pace of surrendering, makes an example of Stannh who, like Dannh, returns to a gray monstrosity once slain. Again, all survivors are allowed one gold each to exit the dungeon.

The party secures the vampire lair and takes an hour to recuperate.

Cursed

The sahuagin statue room turns out to be the abode of a gray ooze whom Friggiedi finds most distasteful. Smoll and Reade quickly slay Gary the Gray Ooze. Smoll, Reade, and Morn find no secrets in the room and the magic head turns out to just be a lame light spell. The party returns to the demon carving room.

Friggiedi locates another secret door around a dretch carving which Reade easily opens. The hidden room features a longsword conspicuously displayed in the center near a severed skeletal hand and splatters of dried blood. Smoll picks up the [+1] longsword but cannot manage to set it [cursed] down again. Also of interest are voices emitting from some air vents in the ceiling, but no one can make any sense of the gibberish language.

Sensing no threats other than Smoll Scissorhands waving around her intractable longsword, the room seems safe enough for a short rest to bandage injuries.

The party moves out west and north through apparently unremarkable hallways.

Into the Yawning Portal

Lif is rebuilt over the next six months and reopens. Half orc Friggiedi and all-human Morn Amblecrown make a visit and find Reade tending bar. Reade offers libations. Morn, referred to the adventurers-for-hire by local character Volo, counteroffers a job to locate a missing person. The bad news is that missing Kressando Rosznar’s last known location was in the undermountain beneath the yawning portal. The further bad news is that Kressando is mixed up with slave traders and Xanathar. If there is any good news at all, it’s that Kressando’s sister Esvele Rosznar is loaded with all that lucrative slavetrader wealth of the Rosznar family, and the dungeon itself might contain some finders-keepers valuables. Kressando, or his fresh corpse, can be identified by his platinum signet ring featuring the Roznar crest, a white falcon on a field of blue and their “Fly high stoop swift” motto.

The new party meets up at the Yawning Party. Janky strikes up a social convo with local down-on-his-luck adventure guy Maloon whose CV includes: attacked by Xanathar, eaten up by a brain dog, and thrown out of Force Gray. Maloon’s professional recommendation, whatever that’s still worth, is to avoid going into the undermountain.

Morn approaches extrovert Volo, busily recounting an unrecognizable version of the liberation of the dragon hoard. Volo explains the ancient history of the undermountain which began as the epic project of one Harrister Allekeep who organized some wizards, started a tower going upward, and then pivoted downward to duergar and drow stratum. Much later, entrepreneur Durnam came along and exploited the commercial potential of the dungeon entrance which inherently and monopolistically prohibits magical ingress and egress.

The party pays Durnam’s descent fees and gets lowered to the bottom of the yawn. Nearby skeletons attest to the perils of not setting aside ascent fees. A secret door, inaccessible from this side, suggests a shortcut out of the dungeon from somewhere.

The only (accessible) path into the dungeon is a tunnel that takes the party to a hall of demons carved into the walls. A skeleton has either been arranged to point to a secret door or someone died pointing to a secret door some time ago. Beyond the secret door, a tunnel descends slightly to a carving that warns of certain death. A stench warns of the certain untreated sewage that floods the chamber at the other end of the tunnel. Just around the corner where the sewage gets deeper the party glimpses a sahuagin statue wearing a magical hat, if detect magic serves.

Dragons

Feeling accomplished yet vulnerable, the party calls it a night and camps outside the southern most of the three crumbing bridge doors opened by the appearance of a dwarf, such as sometimes Vincent.

Next day, the well-rested party re-opens the dwarf recognition door to find a small room with a large, cobweb-covered central anvil atop a stone pedestal. Dusty frescos of crafty dwarves adorn three walls. A 1:1 scale stone warhammer embedded in the wall to the left appears to be removable. Stone of Golor translates the inscription across the pedestal as, “Let the hammer fall and the anvil ring”. Smoll obliges the inscription by retrieving the hammer from the wall and walloping the anvil. Everyone in the room feels ten healthier but zero wealthier.

Rather than having the flimsier and less athletic adventurers fail to leap the crumbling span of the middlest bridge, Smoll offers to lift them up 60’ from the hall floor by a rope line one at a time. Similarly unlocked by dwarf disguises, the middle room is the same size as the first and features four rusty suits of dwarven armor in the corners. Dwarven religious inscriptions in the far wall seem to refer to Duma Thoin, dwarven god of secrets. Vincent detects magic in the runes as well as the floor directly before them. Although Reade cannot read the dwarven inscriptions, he knows how to solve a puzzle. He kneels on the magic floor and whispers his secretly bad stewardship of church funds at the runey wall. The floor opens dumping him down a spiral staircase.

The party follows Reade down 120’ to the bottom of the stairs to a hall. Bright sunlight, out of place so far below ground level, radiates from around the north and south turns from the hall. Invisible Reade and Vincent break south to lurk around. Janky, Smoll, and Togy follow north more conspicuously and encounter Barok Hussein Klaanghammerr, wielder of a famous dragon staff and longstanding custodian of the dragon hoard.

Janky and Togy carefully and persuasively undermine Barok’s deeply help loyalty to Lord Neverember who, as everyone knows, only amassed the dragon hoard by embezzling from the good citizens of Waterdeep. Really what the dragon hoard needs is new stewardship to responsibly return the funds to the citizenry either by tax refunds or by hoard-subsidized government services, and it so happens that Windriver Company is shovel-ready to perform that function.

An undisclosed adventurer or two lurking around the vault distract Barok from the negotiation.  He swiftly moves to intercept Reade and Vincent who by now have spotted the alcove brimming with the dragon hoard and shepherds them back to the group.

Barok takes only a little more convincing plus assurances that he will retain the dragon staff and gemstone hoard he originally contracted for guardian services. Janky delivers a persuasive coup d’etat and the dragon hoard is transferred, in principle, to the party. To seal the deal, Togy presents the Stone of Golor to the most interesting Barok, consistent with SoG’s near-constant impeachment of Togy’s company. Barok smashes the SoG upon the ground, liberating a nasty aboleth which Barok, aka Aurinax, quickly annihilates.

Transferring the dragon hoard physically presents logistical challenges. The party’s good working relationship with NGO Force Grey tops their no-bid selection to secure transport of the hoard. Togy makes a sending to Vajra.

On the way out of the vault to greet Force Gray, the party encounters a dark elf contingent led by the unbearably smarmy Jaraxle, aka Zardoz, aka Rongquan, aka Fake Laeral. The real Laeral Silverhand, Vajra, and Force Gray fortunately arrive just behind the dark elves and take them all into custody.

The party wins the day, Vincent receives compensation for his patronage, and everyone takes away a nice finder’s fee share of 2% gross hoard.

The Vault

The party descends 120 feet from the trap door into a wide tunnel that ends at an adamantine panel. Smoll, Vincent, and Reade produce the three keys, touch them against the panel, and the pocket doors slide open to reveal a dwarven hall with symmetrical alcoves of iron doors that do not open in the traditional manner. Overhead, up 60 feet, are three crumbling stone bridges spanning east and west across three center pillars.

The party approaches the middle pair of iron doors on the west side of the hall and taps with the keys. The keys swing the door open, probably because it was not secure in the first place. Beyond, stairs take the party up to the second level.

Along the north-south hall of the second level, three pillars fashioned like warhammers follow a mosaic depicting Moradin crafting dwarves from black material. Togy checks out an area where the mosaic has crumbled off a crack in the wall. The crack turns out to be the residence of a black pudding. The black pudding degrades a lot of armor, weapons, and good health before Reade defeats it with his ruined quarterstaff.

Vincent and Togy repair the items that can be repaired while the party studies the three crumbling bridges that span to the east to three adamantine doors. Fleet-footed Reade sprints across the north bridge as it crumbles and tumbles down into the hall below, almost with Reade. Holding his gift-from-a-queen key to the door on the far side accomplishes nothing. Togy confers with Stone of Golor, suffering from acute boredom and stifling humidity, to learn that the keys have nothing to do with these three doors as far as he cares, and he does not care. It would take a dwarf to go any further in his apathetic opinion.

Smoll works with Vincent and a rope to cross the crumbling southern bridge. Vincent disguises himself as the dwarf in the painting key and the door pops right open.

Kalain

Reade stays back to drag the corpsed drow bodies inside and tidy up the scene. Janky leads the party into the windmill after Vaspar, up a staircase that traces the west wall up the main, round windmill structure to the second level. Vaspar tries to convince landlord Kalain to meet with the party. She’s a bit teched, painting a displacer beast in her studio converted from the millstone room. She’s dressed in what long ago must have been a fine gown, now worn and moldy from constant wear and persistent craziness. She repeatedly expresses a fear that the party are assassins, forgeting any trust Janky manages to develop. She deeply hates someone, probably Lord Neverember who jilted her, but she won’t utter the name out of disgust and no one else wants to guess that name out of caution.

The party gets permission to look around for potential art purchases in exchange for the looted drow coin as collateral.

One of the second level rooms, Kalain’s bedroom, is secured with a conspicuously new lock. Vincent leans into Kalain’s madness by disguising himself as Kalain and then asking herself where she left the key. The gambit fails and Kalain pulls the displacer beast off its canvas and into reality. She flees to her locked room invisibly leaving the party to battle her art.

Janky ballbearings the displacer which gives Smoll enough advantage to beat it back into nonexistence. Smoll breaches Kalain’s safe room. After Kalain’ thunderwave passes, Janky suggests she sits down and calms down. Togy makes a magic search of Kalain’s room but finds nothing beyond the drow coin she is holding. The search happens to detect a second drow coin in Vincent’s possession from the payout by Zardoz Zord for the polar bear capture. Vincent offers the second coin to Kalain as well, and the matched coins snap together.

Togy consults the Stone of Golor. SoG suggests looking for a basement trap door to access the vault. And as for Kalain, SoG recalls that she was a clingy chick that Lord Neverember had to pry off with the gifted windmill. Before that happened, the windmill was inhabited by Aurinax, a seasoned wizard.

The party earnestly searches the first floor for trap doors and soon locates a stone trap door in a small, locked closet beneath the staircase up to Kalain’s studio.

  • Kalain seems to be a jilted lover of Lord Neverember, sent away to live in self-imposed seclusion painting beasts that she can summon. She is cray.
  • Vaspar seems to be a faithful caretaker for Kalain and not a seasoned wizard.
  • The windmill operates as a flophouse for destitute locals, none who seem to realize the enormous fortune secreted beneath them.
  • If Kalain is unaware of the dragon hoard then it must be Aurinax who was the steward of the wealth. What happened to Aurinax?

Converted Windmill

Vincent, re-disguised as the classy and wealthy Lord Vallantahar, returns to Steam & Steel to collect the silvered Warhammer commissioned for key one of the dragon vault. Nothing bad happens.

The party, full of health, spellcasting potential, and wealthy ambition, suppresses all curiosities and social inclinations to head right for the converted windmill in south ward.

The somewhat neglected two story windmill is covered in graffiti and surrounded by other buildings occupied by numerous unknown witnesses. Smoll listens at outside doors and inspects the structure’s walls. Janky and Reade peek into unlocked exterior doors. Togy befriends blind old man Vasper, priest of Ilmater, collecting trash from the yard, and tours the apartment rented to him by the windmill’s landlord, coincidentally Lord Neverember’s jilted significant other who lives in seclusion making impressionistic paintings of foul beasts. Magic detecting Vincent emphatically warns everyone that there are concentrations of hidden magic lurking all around the perimeter.

A drow supervisor appears to the north and proposes, nay demands, some level of profit sharing lest the adventurers meet the same fate as Luth. A couple of his goons nab Janky and pile drive his handsome face into the mud. Reade monk glides the length of the yard, hands the drow supervisor his quarterstaff, and speed bags the drow’s solar plexus. Hand axes and arrows advantageously stack up in the paralyzed supervisor. A henchman, unable to learn vicariously, rushes to his boss’s rescue. Reade doses him with the same stunning treatment before raining a fatal flurry of blows on the supervisor. Smoll pastes a couple of drow in a single combo surge of action. Vince boomerangs his shadow blade through the few remaining drow. The lone survivor runs away now that there are no witnesses to his cowardice.

The supervisor’s personal possessions comprise a vial of poison, studded leather armor, a bougie black cloak, and a single coin of foreign denomination and great potential held in his hand.