Securing the Monastery
| <- Just a reminder of who's who in these adventures. This is the map of the monastery. The Heroes don't have a copy, we just use it for reference during exploration. |
Sandy chases another beetle into the chapel, then drops to he haunches, sniffs the air, and whines. Othello bravely sticks his head into the chapel and looks around. Yes, there is that notable fragrance of hyena-butt indicating that pugwampi are near. The party enters the wrecked chapel and investigates. There are marble pews, some cracked or broken. The stone floor is scorched in places, and in other nooks and crannies there is a dirty remnant of red carpeting. Finally, someone looks up. Suspended from the rafters is a nest made of gnoll skulls strung together with cords and lined with rotten carpet and hide. There is a tittering as the unseen gremlins make their presence known. Pugwampi!
At this point, Katie fumbled something or other and fell off the rafters. For extra fun, she grabbed hold of Jasmine and they both went over the edge together. They are both elves, so they used their elven nimbleness to land on their feet and were not badly injured. Othello decided to stop playing nice and summoned a celestial pony next to the king and 2 remaining pugwampi, figuring that if the beams were creaking under the weight of a fat 2' tall gremlin, then a pony should crack it to flinders. Unfortunately, the dry rotted wood gave all over, bringing down Othello and Ibrahim as well. The pony landed on the 2 spare pugwampi and screamed in pain until the summoning ended and it returned to its own reality. Othello was horrified to discover that he was summoning real creatures instead of Platonic archetypes. Now it was the king against 4 heroes and a slightly bored wildcat.
This was a very difficult fight for the heroes, mostly because of the king's unluck aura and his high AC. They couldn't hit him (the probability of a successful hit was small, and smaller still when forced to roll twice)> The king's attacks weren't very good either, so it was a standoff for quite awhile. Othello burned his last two summon spells bringing in dire rats to nip at the king's buttocks. He screamed ina girlish manner but the rats never landed a bite. Eventually I suggested to the players to back out of his unluck aura and shoot him from a distance, which is what eventually brought him down. He had a magic warhammer sized for a much bigger creature; this went to Katie. Othello used his small size (he is a halfling after all) to explore the rafters and loot the pugwampi nest. There were some coins and misc. magic items that nobody wanted but could probably be sold. The party then returned to Almah's camp to recover from their wounds. Jasmine and Othello tried to cook up something special that evening; it was good but not impressive in comparison to their previous efforts.