Stonehell session 8

Slim Charles, Pope Leo, and Balian all leveled up after some lucky spins (one extraordinarily so) on the wheel of weal and woe last session.

During the following week, Slim Charles receives a small crate in the mail caravan from the Invincible Overlord's Department of Arcane Standards and Wizardly Measures. This proves to contain an additional step for his tiered, ziggurat-like hat.

The party buys 200' of rope, lamp oil, and rations. All the hirelings get outfitted with polearms. Then, the head back to Stonehell.

The adventurers tramp around the first level, where they engage in a brief labor negotiation with several members of Kobold Trapsetters Local 133, tentatively poke their heads into a cold scary room, and put a pack of cannibals* to the sword with a little help from Phantasmal Forces. Balian narrowly avoids being blinded by a spitting cobra.

Emboldened by his luck, Balian ties himself to the end of the 200' of rope they bought in Halesnug, and has the hirelings lower him down a dry well the party found several weeks before.

(The well is the only downward passage they've discovered; after leveling-up they're drawn to the richer spoils promised by Stonehell's less frequented lower levels. The characters have no idea if the well leads to level two or level three.)

Balian drops through the bottom of the well into a passage covered floor to ceiling with crudely rendered graffiti. He creeps down it some way before bumping into a slavering, tittering gaggle of naked people wielding broken bottles and rusty pipes. Balian apprehends the futility of discourse and—outnumbered—flees with the hooping, hollering horde in hot pursuit. He drops a lantern onto the heads of his enraged pursuers as the trusty hirelings haul him up the well to safety.

When things have quieted down, Balian goes back down the well with the hireling Colwin. The pair explore briefly, wary of the lunatic mob. All they find is a broken rocking horse in the middle of a hallway. Balian learns that Colwin once worked as an antique dealer; he's confident the rocking horse is worthless. They return up the well without further incident.

The reunited party changes tack, and heads back to the cold scary room they dared not enter earlier. While they poked at the bone fragment and rusty metal bits littering the floor, a translucent cloaked skeletal apparition materializes. It vanishes in an explosion of snowflakes when Balian lobs a spear through it, but not before hirelings Colwin and Derric flee in fear.

The remaining party members pry open a pair of stone doors, Pope Leo turns a formation of skeletons, then they decide to turn back to find Colwin and Derric. They bump into Colwin, who had quickly recovered his composure, almost immediately. Finding Derric consumes the remainder of the session. They eventually find him arguing with a large, cryptic stone head.

It was an active and wide-ranging expedition—no treasure, but everyone survived and they mapped a fair-sized area.

* Disturbingly, Slim Charles ordered the reluctant Darric to drag out of the dungeon the spitted, roasted, half eaten body they found the cannibals tucked into. Wizards are crazy bastards.