17th May 2019

Player
Charlotte
Tim
​Dec
​Jay
​Chris

Character
Berta
Tiny Tracey
​Clint
​Valtius
​Turwell
Alton Cracksmasher

Info
Level 3
Level 3
Level 1
​Level 2
Level 2
Level 3 (forcibly recruited)

Session 14, hopefully less unlucky for some?

• More luck than session 13 I hope.

The gates of legendary Castle Torrog stand behind the party and - as always, the path to adventure lies ahead.

The party followed the winding mountain road as it headed into the foothills upon entering the shallow vale, came to a crossroad.

Ahead the party spied a goblin atop the old tower.
The party decided to ignore the tower and turned south to return to the quarry.

• Pretty normal now.

It took a day and a half to reach the quarry. The entire journey passes without incident.

• So far, so good.

Having reached the quarry, the party made a quick scout over the lip of the quarry top.

The party observed a lot of giant spiders, 13 of them to be exact.

• As mentioned in a previous post; the quarry has a normal encounter roll and activity roll.
• The encounter roll generated nothing, but the activity roll was a 20! So a double sized encounter with a giant spider hunting pack occurs!
• I rolled a 4, so 8 giant spiders it was.
• The quarry always has 2d4+2 spiders in the basin, I got a total of 5.
• 13 giant spiders in total.

Not only that, 8 of them were moving out of the quarry and heading west (in the direction of the party).
The party had a few rounds to prepare. They'd seen giant spiders scurrying west previously.
Perhaps, they reasoned. If they hid, that the spiders would pass them by.

• It's fairly solid reasoning. It also splits the spiders into 2 smaller and more manageable groups.

The party chose not to hide in the dilapidated outbuildings and went into some bushes further north.

Would the plan have worked. The party will never know. Turwin stuck his head out of a bush for a look around at exactly the wrong moment.

• There's always got be one, eh?

The spider-pack immediately changed direction and headed straight at them!
The party utilised the same strategy from their last foray into the quarry.

Last time, it had proved not so successful.

• This time however, it would prove a lot more successful!
• This was in part due to some character levelling.
• Alton Cracksmasher had been forcibly recruited several times and had enough XP to reach level 3. Except Alton's player, Jack hadn't bothered to level Alton up.
• At the end of the near party wipe in the previous session, Tim had marched off and found Jack. He then forced Jack to level Alton up.
• Alton had gone from level 1 in the previous session, to level 3 in this session.

The fighters, barbarian and monk formed a loose front line, with the warlock and the cleric in the second line.

The spiders took a couple of rounds to advance. When they drew close enough, the spiders spat webbing at the party. Alton tried to use his monkish skills to deflect the webbing to no avail.

• Tim trying to abuse Alton's new arrow catching ability.
• It turns out you can't use it to catch projectile webbing, who knew?
• Actually, me! Because that's how I ruled it.

A couple of the front line fighters were left entangled. ​
The battle went fairly well for the party.

• Having had some of the characters go up level definitely helped.

Only Tracey got incapacitated, but Tracey was the recipient of an epic critical hit (The spider attacked with advantage and got 2 20s!).

• Talk about overkill! Maybe I should have done quadruple damage. Nahhh! 

After Tracey was revived, the party advanced to the quarry itself. They knew that 5 giant spiders would be waiting there.

The battle with the spiders was not too fierce and the party prevailed without too much trouble.

• Nothing to see here, move along.

​
​​Now to re-enter the spider-caves again.
After heading inside, the party managed to reach the furthest point of their exploration so far.

They continued their unhindered exploration until they learnt that there were only 2 unexplored passages left for them to explore.

• So far, so good.

One passage lead to a dead end. However, upon closer scrutiny the party discovered it was not a dead end. Infact someone had piled up rocks in an attempt to block the passage off. There was a small gap at the top that the party saw nothing through.

The party agreed to not remove the barricade: They were concerned from which side the barricade had been built and how removing the barricade might release something worse on the other side.

• I guess, it wasn't tempting enough.​

So the the party went to the other passage, this lead to a dead end - a cave to be exact, with a hole in the floor.

The roughly circular hole with a diameter of about 15' appeared to be a vertical shaft that led directly downwards for 60' according to their initial observations.
Much of the cave was covered in webbing and the sides of the shaft are heavily coated with webbing.

When the party peered down the shaft, they spotted the dimmest of orange hues coming from below and there was a rhythmic slow flow of air from the shaft. Other than that, there was only inky blackness.

Their curiosity piqued, the party decided to investigate.

• That's it, that's it all it takes to tempt them. An orange glow.​ ​

They did not want to climb the webbing in the shaft and elected to use their own rope instead.
The party also decided that stealth was the order of the day and it was agreed that in absence of a rogue, that Valtius the warlock alone would explore.

• So their choices were:
• Move some rubble to continue exploring the area they were currently in.
• Or figuratively descend into the darkness and unknown. Infact, not only a 4 or 5 storey descend into the darkness and unknown, but to send a single character to do it. We all know right? It's an unwritten rule that going down a level gets harder and more dangerous.
• Looks like the party are back on form!

Valtius descended through the shaft without any mishap. He found himself in a large cavern with 3 exits.

The exit to the north was highlighted and lit by a soft and distant orange glow emanating from beyond the tunnel. Valtius went down through the northern exit which became a tunnel. Ahead was the orange glow.

• Like a moth to a flame. Or... a warlock to an orange glow.

Valtius quietly followed the tunnel for approximately 100' upon which it opened up into another large  high-ceilinged cavern. This cavern was filled with webbing; the orange glow - stronger now, was coming from another exit on the far side of the cavern.

Before entering this cavern, Valtius took a look around the cavern. Then he spotted it: Hanging from the higher webbing and silhouetted by the orange glow was a spider of truly massive proportions. Valtius froze and considered his actions as he watched one of its huge legs silently and effortlessly move. Perhaps it was rousing itself and had become aware of his movement through the webbing.​​

Valtius took it as a sign to retreat. With painstaking slowness he silently made his way to the rope and was pulled up.

• A wise decision.
• If you're wondering, the model for the mega-spider is a £5 plastic toy from Amazon.
• I told Jay to close his eyes before putting it out. His response was, "Oh, maybe not, fuck that, oh god!". 

When he reached the top, he was hesitant to make any noise and told the party that they should leave immediately. They were a bit hesitant to believe him, but took him seriously eventually.

• Tim felt the urge to go and fight it.
• I imagine that this would be incredibly dangerous, I've tried to design the spider to be a fight for level 5 characters. It would probably kill 3-4 characters before the survivors managed to flee.
• It has AC19 - that's like plate mail.
• 200 hp and takes no damage from non-magical sources (it is a partially demonic spider).
• It has a trait called 'Aggressive', this basically allows it to move 80' and attack as a single action. To put that in perspective, most of the PCs have a full movement of no more than 60' per round. Even Valtius 'Run Away!" spell wouldn't help him. All full speed, the spider moves twice as fast as the PCs.
• It has mandibles the size of forearms and does horrible damage.
• It's the size of a bungalow.
• And to top it all off, it talks.

​

• Well you may think, 'That's no so bad.'.
• Except after Valtius went down the shaft, he only explored one of 3 exits.
• One area is 'the spider-nursery', which contains a lot of giant spider eggs.
• But the final area is 'the spider-dormitory' which contains at least 20 inactive giant spiders, waiting to recieve orders.
• When the party does finally return, they will be unaware of this.
• Proving the the old adage 'A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.'. 

Before deciding to retreat, the party decided to explore the dead end with the piled up rocks. The party were worried about the noise that they might make and removed the piled rocks as quietly as they could. Once they had cleared enough rocks to crawl through.

• For a while I thought that they were going to ignore the dead end entirely.

On the other side was a small cavern with no further exits. It was here that the party found a body. And the body they found some treasure and loot!
The party did not hesitate in taking the loot.

• Oh loot. Sweet Loot.
• This area contains some interesting items: A silver lapel button adorned with 9 swords, a red sphere with swirling silver specs, half a map that they they managed to burn to ashes...
  
• By now, the party had realised that this area was completely explored (And looted!).
• I took this opportunity to explain to the players that they could have cleared the area in a single session instead of the 4 it actually took them. But that's the benefit of hindsight.

After this, they decided it was about time to beat a hasty (but silent) retreat.

Most of the journey back to Castle Torrog was uneventful. However when they drew close to the tower, they were attacked by a small band of goblins!.
The goblins didn't pose much of a threat to the party and they were vanquished without drama. But it left the party pondering on whether they had come from the old tower or not?

• They hadn't, it was just a purely random encounter.
• But as far as the players are concerned: "The shadow of the old goblin tower stretches far".

The remainder of the journey was uneventful.

• Boring!
• Session 14 was a pretty straightforward session. I suspected that the party would reach the mega spider in this incursion and so they did.
  
• But what concerned me was if they adopted the usual D&D 'If it's there, then we can kill it.'. This could have resulted in a party wipe. Luckily the urge was brief and easily resisted.
  

End of session fourteen.