SESSION 44 – July 22, 2018
Zho Ni questions a dead shaman and learns the numbers the Seer started with. We believe we have killed half the ogre war chiefs and half the ogre shamen. Urman wondered if their fanaticism at such losses would impact their morale. A second question about the Seer’s next move yielded no useful information.
Next Zho Ni cast an augury to attempt to acertain what would happen if we went after the Seer, and the answer was WOE, so we elected to rest up.
We rested, relearned spells. We checked and a second iron golem is slowly re-forming in a mist in its shape.
Then we opened the doors from the temple/binding room of the colossus, and found a side passage. There is a room with lots of holy oil. The barrels are covered with many runes and sigils. Otiben carries and oil barrel in and Zho Ni stokes a brazier, and it glows brighter. All the braziers are thus replenished.
We found a supply closet, a workroom with a broken human sized iron golem, and another workroom with ancient books about the iron golems. Urman attemps to look at one and it falls apart. We close the door hoping to prevent the crumbling of the others until we can perhaps find a way to preserve them to be able to use the information. Urman was able to discern that they require some sort of magical crystal to animate them, so we cannot repair it.
Otiben moves ahead of the rest of the party and finds the signs of battle from ogres and mini iron golems. He spots an iron cage and within is one, perhaps the last of the group of researchers from Vadamor. Ignatius Bavarian holds the twin to the messenger ring. His brother is also a researcher and he was pursuing word of an ancient orc city in The Vale, which we deduce is the city in the midst of the Many Mouths where we fought the vampire. The rings are family heirlooms and he wants back the one Urman has. Urman promises to give it back if we get out of this mess alive. We send him back to the temple with the orcs and he will use the ring to message us if the ogres show up.
We learned from Ignatius that he did not tell them anything about his theories about the colossus when The Seer asked him how to remove the wards restraining it. However, they took his notes in which he surmised that the method of attack we witnessed of chanting to extinguish the braziers and then destroying each iron golem would do the trick. He does not know how the colossus is controlled or if The Seer knows how to do so, as he does not speak ogre and they only asked him for information, never giving it. He was captured by the ogres after evading the mini iron golems on the surface in the city.
We move forward and find the winding way up, and are soon faced with large stone doors. Otiben searches and finds no traps. The doors once had a bar on the inside, but it lies cast aside, broken. The door open out. Otiben opened the door just a bit to peek out, and a glyph of warding with fire injured him, Zho Ni, and Batukhan.
We saw multiple goblin archers on the roofs of buildings across from the massive doors, and three woolly rhinos with a pack of goblins behind them.
Urman blew the Horn of Fear and drove off some of them, while Batukhan, Embrek, Zho Ni, and Otiben charged to deal with the woolly rhinos. They obstructed two of them, and the third ran through the doors and three goblins ran from around the corner to join it.
A furious battle ensued where once again, Urman’s bodyguards and Ygritte were knocked down. Rip, Gunnar, Hades, and Puk, with minor help from the hirelings and Ygritte and all of Urman’s memorized magic missiles stopped the goblins and rhino.
In the street, Otiben used his potion of stinking cloud to tie up the gang of goblins while the others fought the rhinos and other goblins. Two ogres climed out of windows and trapped them. A shaman’s chant from a tower next to them negated Zho Ni’s prayer.
The two rhinos and several goblins and the ogres were dropped. Zho Ni was hit hard and nearly felled, but for a wisely consumed healing potion the moment before. Zho Ni also cast hold person on 3 of the goblin archers and tossed his vial of stinking cloud at one of the ogres so Otiben could finish it and finally climb the tower that so loomed over him.
Two goblin archer ran up when the ogres were felled, and shot into the fray, killing one of the goblins.
At the top of the tower, the goblins not held attempted to hit Otiben, and the archers on the battlements across the street shot into his fight.
All the while, the Seer is taunting us that she sees all and knows all, and how to defeat us….
It appears that the morale of The Seer’s forces is OK.
The fight continues….