"Pathfinder "Shattered Star" session 5 " Topic

Last session: TMP link

Only two players (3 PC's total) made it to this session: the Sorcerer/Cleric, the Gunslinger and the Ninja.

The party, having rid the bridge piling of the Tower Girls and their wererat leader, were now facing a puzzling door.

The ninja made one last sweep of the room and discovered a secret door wherein lay the inert, picked clean skeleton of a local Magnimarian still dressed and with possessions, including rations. Recognized by his unique possessions, the PC's had been previously informed of this gent – that he had been missing for over a month. A successful Healing skill check reveals a mystery… The skeletal form is not the work of vermin or insects, as the rations were intact, and at only a month, he should not be just a skeleton.

An adjusted roll of 27 on a Knowledge: Dungeoneering skill check reveals this skeleton is most likely the victim of a Vampiric Mist.

Players decide there is nothing they can do about that except be on the lookout – if there is a mist about, it had not attacked the Tower Girls over their weeklong stay, so moving on…

The puzzle door I thought as a DM was illogical (more on that below) so I simplified it and they moved on, a 30x30 square room with each corner having a pink jade statuette on a 3ft tall plinth. Much trepidation and checking for magic and traps, nothing found – just finely carved statuettes of four of the seven Runelords. Looted.

Down the hallway at the opposing wall, a smelly smell gets smellier. Bat guano. The passageway constricts at the entrance to a room. A sliver of light about 6in wide and 5ft tall on an opposing wall reveals a green scummy 10ft x 20ft pool with a walkway on either side leading to passages going left or right. The walkways and walls are thick with guano, 30ft overhead are bats en masse.

The gunslinger covers the ninja, who starts down the right side of the guano-slick floor and is slammed by a Giant Amoeba arising suddenly from the scummy water. Takes damage from the hit and acid, but the amoeba fails to adhere/grab the ninja. The ninja makes her REF save to keep from slipping in the guano from the attack, and makes her WILL save to keep from crying out in the surprise of the attack. BUT – the gunslinger fires his musket at the amoeba, the thunderous sound echoing off all the rooms and passageways, sending the bats above into a swarming frenzy.

The gunslinger and the sorcerer/cleric have been hanging back at the passageway constriction this whole time, so it is the ninja who has to field the wrath of the bat swarm as she withdraws back to her cohorts (making her REF saves to keep from slipping and taking minimal damage.) Many of the bats are flitting about, eventually making it to the slit (where they usually escape through at night to feed), the amoeba, as it does each night as well, lurches up at the slit to grab some low-flying bats to feed upon.

The gunslinger decided to end the amoeba by shooting at it as it launches at the bats. More booms, more panicked bats, more echoes, and the amoebas (there were actually two) break apart into amoebic swarms in the pool.

The party decided to keep pressing forward, moving to the right side, where the passage reveals a 10x20 room with many 3in x 3in stone protrusions at the 5ft mark on the walls. The sorcerer/cleric decides to check out the room and had a green slime drop onto her from the ceiling. She takes 1d6 CON damage from the potent acid as it starts eating through her hair, face, armor and clothing, extinguishing the torch. She pulls out some holy water and douses herself with it, thinking that will help, to no avail, taking another 1d6 CON damage the next round. The ninja takes another holy water flask and pours it on her, again, with no effect. The gunslinger makes a successful Knowledge: Dungeoneering check to know that the only thing they can do to stop this slime from killing her is to scrape it off.

The sorcerer/cleric lives… barely. Now with a Constitution of 3, she is basically an invalid until she regains her health and vitality. The party has no spells or abilities to magically enhance the healing process of regaining Constitution points, so they carry her, retreating back to the wererat room, keep watch and rest until the sorcerer/cleric can get around again on her own.

A weeks worth of rest later, they take inventory of themselves. Ninja – fine. Gunslinger – fine. Sorcerer/cleric – Uh… horribly scarred and almost bald from the acid of the green slime, clothing in rags, armor pitted and eaten away to the point of useless. The scraping of the green slime off of her ruined three daggers, but fortunately, the sorcerer/cleric's magic scimitar survived the ordeal. The party did have a looted masterwork chain shirt that she donned for protection until she found something more to her liking.

Putting on their big-adventure faces, they decide to move on to the left side passageway from the pool. It leads another forty feet to a spiral stair going down, with a well-used, so a semi-not-quite-hidden-door, across from it. Checking out the door, it opens into a passage filled with webbing. Never one to left that deter them, they toss some oil and a torch and repeat as they go down to passage until they realize there are small holes in all the walls and ceiling that spiders are coming out of. Beating a hasty retreat, they avoid the spider swarm, but see it congealing & advancing, so attack it with alchemetic fire. The swarm moves up the walls and to the ceiling and they toss some more alchemetic fire at the ceiling. Eventually the swarm disperses.

They head back down the passage, crunching burnt spider exoskeleton remains as they go until they get to a point where the passage opens up. The webs still abound, and two giant spiders are feeding on some large fish near the edge of a body of water at the end of the passage. Upon seeing the PC's, the giant spiders retreat, diving into the water (Giant Water Spiders!) The PC's wait, a Knowledge: Nature check reveals these spiders can hold their breath for maybe 6min. After waiting past that time, the PC's realize the water is not an enclosed pool, but must have an exit to the ocean that the spider left through.

The large fish are dolphins, and the PC's loot a dead body they find within the webbing (gaining a few scrolls and a Ring of Swimming.)

They head back to spiral stairs going down, which opens up on the west to a very large room with the only visible exit on the south. But the room has a loose dirt floor and five mounds rising 10ft, almost to the 15ft ceiling. The ninja makes her check to climb the wall to see if the mounds each have openings… they do, about 4ft around.

After some discussion, they decide to try to Stealth it over (all together, not one at a time) to the exit. Everyone makes their checks in spades except the gunslinger, three giant ants erupt from the closest mounds, attacking. After a round of combat, the other two giant ants come out to attack as well. Much flanking and grabbing with pinchers, and the sorcerer/cleric gets grappled. Two of the ants die, and the sorcerer/cleric gewts dragged halfway to the mound it's ant enemy came from.

The gunslinger decides to try a shot. BOOM, echoes and loudness. The other two ants die at the hands of the ninja, and the sorcerer/cleric is being dragged up the mound to be the next meal – then the player realizes his PC can use fire-ray (ability, not spell, so no concentration check) and blasts the ant the same round the gunslinger gets off his second shot, dead ant.

At this time, we called it, as the rest of this level of the dungeon, they WILL need the rest of the party.

The puzzle door.

The puzzle was presented in the module as an anagram in the Thessalonian language, players would solve it by rearranging the letters to spell the solution using the skymetal tiles (which do 1pt of heat damage every time touched, but must be touched by living skin to lock into place. The words were:

THE EYES = THEY SEE
LISTEN = SILENT

Thessalonian is a dead language in that world – has been for thousands of years. BUT, since the module is written in English, you'd have to assume that English and Thessalonian switched letters/runes on a one-for-one basis for the players to solve the puzzle.

Illogical. I reduced it to making 13 successful Linguistics checks with a DC of 15 (Aid Another applies), and take 1pt of heat damage for every check until there are 13 successful checks.

Did not matter, as one of the PC's has an item that gives him DR1 per attack from fire/heat, so there is no damaging effects. We just considered it "solved" and moved on…

A very enjoyable read! Poor fem-cleric with the melted face.

Because there were only three PC's, I scaled the challenge down by not having the Giant Water Spiders attack (poison) and ignoring the Giant Soldier Ant poison capability. It could have been much deadlier for the three of them.

I was really rolling horribly for the grapple with the ants, even with their +7 CMB for that maneuver. Was hoping to drag a couple of the PC's around for more tension and fear…