Session 18: The one where the party fights dudes in the stables (May 14, 2023)
Last session, our heroes returned to Ivalgo, their mission in Arkos completed. On the voyage back across the sea, Elias saw in the distance more sirens, in addition to winged humanoids. He talked with Captain Nanda del Becco about this, and she expressed confusion and uncertainty about what the arrival of these creatures meant.
Calculating the trip to Bad Zamdorf at about two weeks, the party opted to take a week of downtime in Ivalgo before departing. During this week, Elias quickly rose through the ranks of a smuggling operation in the city, earning 200gp and many high level connections among the criminal underworld. Heph experimented on a new type of projectile weaponry, exhausting himself but arriving at a result he believes he can build on. And Rormir worked with a wizard in Ivalgo City University, acquiring a ring through which he could cast Find Familiar, enabling Karrl the octopus to alter his physical form.
Finally, the day to depart Ivalgo arrived. The party headed to the Reaches in the east of Ivalgo to get their first mounts for the journey. But instead they were met with empty stables and the presence of a group not unlike the Potion Pitstop burglars, who looked ready for a fight.
- The party rolls initiative
- Rormir one-shots a mage, causing the Bless they were concentrating on to drop
- Rormir runs into the left stable and is knocked out by the archer
- He fails his first death saving throw
- Elias bonus action dashes with Cunning Action and has just enough
movement to make it to Rormir
- He revives him with a healing potion
- Heph knocks out a heavy and moves towards the right stable
- On a 25 perception, Rormir notices that the stables had been
evacuated in a rush and that the crates the cloaked figures were hiding behind
were placed there intentionally to form a defensive position
- This wasn’t happenstance: they knew the party was coming
- There is now a gnomish engineer, and archer, and a heavy remaining
- Elias puts both the heavy and archer to sleep, slipping the Band
of Loyalty off the heavy
- His mask remains on
- Next round, Elias takes the ring off the archer as well
- Meanwhile, Heph is fighting the engineer in the right stable
- The engineer casts Burning Hands, catching the dry hay and walls on fire
- The engineer looks familiar to Heph somehow
- Heph fires off the experimental weapon he had been working on
during downtime
- It fires rocks and has a firing mechanism similar to the device he uses to cast Fire Bolt
- It explodes in his face
- The engineer backs Heph into one of the stable stalls
- Both are at 7hp
- Rormir fires off an arrow through the window, hitting the
engineer in the back
- As the mask falls from his face, Heph recognizes him as Toddle Rustweather, an acquaintance from the Alchemist Guild who left Ivalgo about a year prior