Everyone takes some time to rest after the battle and get patched up, which seems to be less important than looting the bodies when no one is on the verge of dying. Izzy easily heals everyone who has been hurt and they decide to stay where they are to rest rather than moving on or back up.
Daylor hears some scurrying sounds further down the passage during his watch and passes the information on to the next person. No one else hears noise during the night.
In the morning, or at least after everyone is awake since they're deep underground, they look around the area more closely. The webs that hid the chitines seem to be more than random - they seem to form a barrier between the staircase and the rest of whatever is deeper in the mountain.
As kind of a side note they get into a discussion about how spiders spin the webs. L'oric states they spin them out of their butts, which is pretty much accepted by all of them. Finy gets up his courage and goes to see if that's what happens here.
The chitines are wearing leather loincloth/skirts that don't seem to have any special significance. Izzy checked. Finy goes behind one and lifts up the loincloth of one to find out that it's female and doesn't seem to have any extra parts. The rest of the party is literally cringing at this. They've all noticed that there's something on their stomachs that is probably where they spin webs. They noticed this while trying to look at anything but where Finy was and what he was doing.
Izzy is still trying to figure out the connection between these chitines and Lloth but she's not remembering it. They didn't spend a lot of time on her in classes and she was distracted by a very attractive classmate in the seat next to her at the time. She thinks it was a footnote more than anything important.
They move deeper into the complex. Fiuy and Daylor once again split trap finding duties into each taking one side of the corridor - Daylor to the right and Finy to the left. They keep an eye on things and do more thorough searches about every thirty feet or so. The walls are covered in webs, some thin and wispy while others are more substantial.
From are large cocoons hanging from the stalactites as they proceed. They're pretty certain they know what's in them and that they could have ended up in them as well. They revise how long ago the last party was down here by the fact that they weren't in cocoons. Yet.
Daylor sees a pair of thicker web strands running parallel to the floor and disappearing down the length of the cavern. Finy doesn't see any on his side but is getting very interested in the cocoons as they go. Daylor points out some ledges he's seeing about twenty feet up on the wall, on both sides and in no real pattern. They discuss this and guess they're meant to be nesting/resting places for the chitines as they seem about the right size.
Finy gives in to his curiosity about the cocoons and decides to climb up to get one when he finds one close enough to a ledge to make it possible. It takes him a little work to get up the wall and he's covered in webs by the time he makes it to the ledge. Looking in he confirms that the space is about the size needed for one of the chitines to comfortably fit and there's no webbing in them.
While they watch him make the climb Izzy and Daylor hear noise from further down the hallway. L'oric has been focused on Finy and trying to figure out how to catch him if he falls so he's not paying as much attention as the others. Izzy and Daylor have their focus split between what Finy is doing and watching for trouble.
Finy is at the limit of his reach when he uses his rapier to try to cut the thick strand of webbing holding the cocoon to the stalactite. The light weapon sticks to the web and he yanks it free without pulling himself off the ledge at the same time. Sheathing the now sticky rapier he pulls out his dagger as he's bound and determined to get himself a cocoon now.
Holding his dagger in his teeth he steadies himself to jump from the ledge to the cocoon. L'oric sees this and tries to stop him but Finy leaps. He is able to grab the cocoon and hold onto it as it sways from his momentum. Moving up he starts cutting the strand holding it (and him) to the ceiling.
Everyone is now focused on Finy sawing away at the only thing keeping him from meeting the floor in a rather painful way. Izzy gets everyone to use a blanket to catch him when he falls. She has to use her blanket as L'oric states quite emphatically they're not using his to catch the web covered halfling and whatever is in that cocoon.
The three of them hold the blanket under Finy and brace themselves when he finally severs the web. They're paying complete attention to the task and seem to have forgotten that there was noise further along or they've decided this is a more immediate need. Finy somehow bypasses the blanket to land on the floor below.
In doing so he also crushes the cocoon and falls inside. While the rest of the party is trying to figure out what the heck just happened he's searching what's now all around him. Digging around in old bits of bone and desiccated flesh he finds some buttons and buckles, which he shows the party and then puts into his pocket. They all felt that the cocoons held bodies and now they've confirmed it.
Izzy tries to help Finy out of the mess by grabbing the back of his jacket but he easily avoids her and gets himself out. He's now added bits of bone and desiccated flesh to the webs sticking to him and isn't really a very pleasant sight.
L'oric is bored by Finy's antics now and pays attention to the distance where they heard the noises. They see closer than when they were first heard and he tells that to everyone. They can't interpret the echos to know more than that.
While they're relaying the information a trio of javelins fly into their midst, one of them hitting Izzy and then falling out rather than wedging into her flesh. She's really upset at this happening again. L'oric sets the lantern down behind her so they can try to see what's happening while keeping their hands free.
L'oric casts Light on a rock and throws it down the hallway. It's a large enough radius that it illuminates the entire area including the ceiling. Daylor sees shadows moving around the stalactites and they realize these chitines can also be up there. They take a very brief moment to try to decide what direction the javelins are coming from but can't quite figure out if they're all coming from above or not.
Daylor activates his gloves and moves up the wall and to the edge of the ceiling to try to spot what's up there. L'oric fires an arrow at a shadow and doesn't hear it hit anything, blaming bad dwarven fletching. Izzy picks up the javelin that hit her and sets herself to throw it. Finy has moved behind her and sees her strike a heroic pose worthy of being on a low relief carving. He also sees her fumble the javelin just before she throws it and it falls to the ground behind her.
Finy sees the lantern and looks at his readied crossbow. He takes the time to rip a piece of cloth, wrap it around the head of the bolt, and prepare to send his makeshift fire arrow into the webbing on the ceiling to try to set it on fire, taking away their cover.
Another trio of javelins fly into the group and one finds L'oric on a glancing blow. Finy sets himself and fires his crossbow. The bolt isn't well balanced but it's a large and close enough target that it does tangle itself in the webbing without going out and starts enough of a fire that the web is now burning.
The smoke and distraction prevent anyone from actions and Daylor moves further into the ceiling to try to see something to attack, hopefully without being attacked himself. The webbing burns further as the flames are well established. The chitine moves away from the fire and down the wall opposite of where Daylor is.
Unfortunately for it Izzy is waiting there with a mace full of frustration at not being able to do much in combat to this point. Seeing the chitine fall in front of her she has an outlet for that frustration. With a mighty blow and a ringing "Meeting the dawn, bitch!" she crushes the chitine and it drops into a mangled heap at her feet.
[The image is of two things. The left is the not-to-scale hallway they're progressing. The tick marks are where the rogues do more thorough searches since I had them do 3 checks. The right is the aftermath of the battle with the chitine. Orange is the light spell and the area of webbing being burned (blue Xs). The orange d4 is the current area on fire. The random d6 was Daylor's indication that he was using his gloves and was not on the ground.]
No other attacks come from that end of the hallway. Thinking it through they realize that the thick strands of webbing that Daylor saw are most likely trip wires to alert the chitines (and whatever else is there) that there's prey. Finy pulled on one when he made his climb to get his cocoon. L'oric brings up the idea that they lead back to the main nest but it gets lost in the discussion about trip wires.
Searching further Finy finds a hidden door set into the wall. There's slight depressions that his hands will fit into at about waist level. Holding his hands there Daylor searches out the edges of the door to find it's about five feet high by three feet wide. Plenty tall for halflings, gnomes, and most dwarves. Izzy, L'oric, and Daylor all carefully examine the door in their own ways.
Izzy sees that there's a glyph on the door and as they look at it she understands what it does. If anyone other than a halfling opens the door that person - and many of them around - will get hit with electrical damage. This baffles everyone as to why a door aligned with halflings would be here at all.
Everyone makes suggestions on how to open the door. Finy tries various combinations of words until he says "Open" in halfling. And the door simply opens It's beveled to prevent it from being forced open easily and they're cautious about opening it so they can look inside. There's no traps to be found at the entry so they all move into the room.
L'oric is very excited about the skill necessary to place that glyph and wants to rush in to find out more. He's also looking forward to searching out the place since that seems to be where his interest is. Daylor and Finy want to carefully search the room they're in before they move to the entry to the next room they see. It takes some persuasion to keep Izzy and L'oric from going into the next room first.
The first room has some tables and chairs along with a small flat chest near the doorway. Careful investigation turns up an empty chest and disappointed rogues. They decide it's simply a place to put stuff by the door and turn their attention to the next room.
No traps on the open doorway and in they go.
The next room is far larger. It has more tables, a nook that seems cozy, and a pyramid statue near one side of the room. There's a long table facing it and chairs long one side, also facing the pyramid. The other tables are larger but similar to the ones in the entry area.
The pyramid gets their attention. It's about three feet high and has a scooped out top rather than a point. It's not in bad shape but there's rubble around the base. The top has been hollowed out to about the size of a halfling's cupped hand and there's a desiccated spider corpse in it. Finy crawls around to find writing on the base - in halfling. He translates it for everyone and Izzy writes it in her journal.
THIS IS WHERE THOSE WHO ARE STONE OF HEART AND WILL NOT ATONE BECOME STONE IN TRUTH
They debate this and then look at the rubble around the statue more closely. With some imagination they can see part of a hand in it. The table facing it gets more of a hard look and they see the center chair is more ornate than the two flanking it. Daylor and Finy aren't saying much about this setup.
They range out in the room to examine it further. The furniture is similar in make and there's a secretary desk in the corner with a writing surface and a number of cubbies and cabinets in the top section. It's a rogue magnet which works quite well. They're going to wait for one of the others to detect magic before touching the thing, given the possibilities of that status.
[Entry on the left. The blue is simply furniture, the orange is interesting furniture. The rock thing is the pyramid statue and will be replaced by a d4 in future games because I didn't think of that at the time.]
GM NOTES
Oh yeah. I have notes.
Finy's teleport ring shouldn't have had the effect he had. I did some research and the official 3.5 decision is whatever state you're in when you teleport is the state you arrive in, whatever it is. It started with asking about being prone and then momentum came into it. The answer is that the translocation property is all that changes. So he would have taken falling damage. It was only 10 feet and he's a rogue so even with the negatives I would put on it for him holding/being stuck to the cocoon he'd take almost no damage. I need to let him know about that for the future. I don't expect an argument since I'm using the WotC answer.
I screwed up making the Gloves of Spider Climbing. They last too long. Right now they last 2d6 minutes and the roll had them active for 24 minutes. That's just too long based on the spell. So I'm going to probably take it down to 2d3 minutes to match the spell duration. I can't use combat rounds for measurement because I know he'll use them for non-combat times. Hopefully he'll take the correction well.
The gloves have a random duration and he rolled it when he activated them. I explained that I was the one to roll or what's the point of making it random? He'll still know how long they'll last so the extra thrill of uncertainty is gone. Funny enough we both rolled the same number.
I got all the descriptors for the hideaway they're in from various dungeon dressing products (I can't find the freaking links but I'll get them somewhere). I like how they work together to make something more interesting and unusual. I printed out a bunch of options so I can choose the ones that work best on the fly. I prefer that to planning the whole thing out and then finding that I need to make changes anyway.
I'm also basing the hideaway on the "5 Room Dungeon" designs all over the place. So they'll have 5 rooms that lead into another 5 rooms until they've figured out the hideout. I already know what it's there for and what they'll find but we'll see how it morphs out.
I'm not sure why this session seemed to not have as much going on as the previous ones. My notes are shorter and there's not so many of them. I have to wonder if we just had a slower pace or if I mistimed it. I'll see how the next one goes since there will be combat and other things going on to help keep the excitement level up.
I found that one player specifically was unhappy with the higher amount of ranged combat since she's very bad at it. I need to keep that in mind so there's more melee that she can have a better chance at scoring in and not being so darn frustrated. I'm glad she showed it in this session so that I can make changes to what happens going forward.
I also found one player is all about the dungeon crawling. Ok then. He's very excited about this and about the possibility of finding magic stuff. Knowing that I can tweak the hideout and where it takes them later.
I'm also disappointed that the players for the rogues aren't seeing that I'm all but laying out a guild hall in front of them. Either the players aren't getting it or they're playing it that way. I need to ask which one it is since one answer directly impacts me. I'm thinking it might be a combination since I've already found out that one player isn't the best at piecing together things from clues and hints. I already had to lay things out more explicitly in private conversation for him to follow the breadcrumbs to the answer.
There was also a lot of metagaming going on this time. I finally had to ask flat out if what they're saying is what they're doing. They're better than this. The rogues were about to start looting the secretary desk without checking for magic or saying they were looking for traps. I asked them if that's what they were really going to do - just blindly start opening doors and reaching into cubbies. They were a bit taken aback but I'd had it at that point. I'm not going to apologize. They saw that they were blurring the lines too much for me to know what they were doing so they should be better next time.
No one said they missed the player who had to leave. They did ask about him and whether or not he asked me to run a game for him so they showed some interest at least. They left it with being relieved that they weren't going to have to put up with his wife and the pressures it brought to the group dynamic.
I had a person contact me on one of the Meetup groups asking if they could join the game. He recently signed up for the group and my game has "Closed" as the first word in the title. As a courtesy I asked the group what they wanted to do even though we had discussed and dismissed the possibility of adding another player last session. They said they didn't want another player and like the group we have. I expected that to be the answer so I wasn't surprised. I let the person asking know that I would ask and I just realized I never told him the answer. Whoops. I'll do that and offer to run a game if he gets a group and location together, as I always do.
All in all they're doing well. There may be a slight skill point shift for one of them since they don't need it where it is now and I'm happy to let them move it since the original use was my idea. I'm fair that way. I hate wasted skills and feats.
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