D&D Chronicles: Zillah arrives and explores a citadel

The title of this post might give it away… Yep, another of my Dungeons and Dragons characters has bitten the dust. In fact, three of our party didn’t make it through our mega D&D sleepover this past weekend.

We’re churning through the lower level characters at the moment and it’s getting tedious. Meanwhile our level 5 cleric and magic user keep breezing through, getting increasingly powerful and interesting… Hmm.

So what happened? We decided to storm the fort. We were cautious. We really were. We defeated a tribe of zombies and another advance guard of humanoid creatures… We circumnavigated the fort at least twice to plan the best way in…

And still they ultimately kicked our butts. In the end, three of us were left bleeding out on the floor in the corridor of the fort, ABANDONED by Alix, our level 5 cleric, and Calwyn, our level 5 magic user, who fled the fort to survive another day. Do I sound bitter?

OK, if I could have fled, I would have too, but unfortunately I was already engaged in the battle and teetering on the edge.

Vale Kae. Vale Sparrow the obnoxious (huzzah!). Vale Sir Robin the stupid…

I then sulked and glowered for at least half an hour, almost refused to roll up another character, and contributed acerbic comments to the general play.

And then (sigh) I rolled up another character… another ranger, because I was too grumpy to contemplate a new class and we need a ranger anyway. And it was about 1 o’clock in the morning.

So… Zillah

To be honest, I don’t know Zillah very well yet. She’s one of three young plains folk who have joined Calwyn and Alix. The others are Schill (rogue) and Ammonite (fighter). We three have joined forces on the search for the “Sunless Citadel”, which is rumoured to be a mysterious place of treasure a few days to the north.

Calwyn and Alix decide to accompany us to take on the citadel.

It takes a few days to reach our destination, during which we encounter and defeat an owl bear, a giant scorpion, and a pair of giant black birds. We also find a pit full of wild dog creatures guarding the remains of a fighter — and with some careful strategising and a ball of fire, we retrieve the knight’s magic armour, magic ring and magic mace. Yay for treasure!

The Sunless Citadel is discovered at the bottom of a deep ravine. We descend the stone steps without mishap, although we are forced to fend off a horde of rodents of unusual size (giving Calwyn impressive apoplexy), and arrive at the entrance to a subterranean kingdom…

Dungeon crawl

There follows what I’m assured is a good ol’ fashioned dungeon crawl… multiple chambers with multiple doors of wood or stone, some of them locked, some of them trapped, some of them hidden. Schill the rogue is kept very busy. We all contribute to the problem solving of how to open certain doors — especially when the humanoids we encounter try to barricade us out.

This makes us very curious about what they are protecting, but before we can follow up on this, we get distracted by yet another of the doors.

This takes us down a twisty corridor to a chamber with a dragon fountain and yet another door we can’t open. It has an inscription on it, which roughly translates to “turn to open the way”. There are no knobs or stones or other inscriptions that help… until Schill comes up with the suggestion that Alix should try to turn undead. This works, and the door opens!

More treasure

Inside is a chamber with six sarcophagi and an altar with six drawers, each containing treasure. Someone determines the carved effigies are of elven kind, and Alix is getting a good clerical vibe from the place, leading us to decide these treasures are safe… We acquire the following magic objects, all at least level 3: ring, pair of light mail gloves, bottle with a waxed stopper, orb, potion, and a dagger.

Yay for more treasure!

And that’s where we called it a Sunday afternoon…

Obviously this is a very abbreviated account of about 10 hours of game play over Saturday night and Sunday. I promise you’ll hear from Zillah next time.

Let’s hope she lasts longer than Kae did.

For more D&D Chronicles, click here.