• 2018.11.15
• Present: Alex, Chris, Carlos, Ryan, Corey
• Party:
  • 🎸 Pankas Dedas, Wood Half-Elf Bard of Whispers
  • 😈 Fisty McKnuckles, Tiefling Fiend Pact Warlock
  • 🛠 Dug "Doorbane" Hammerhound, Dwarf Cleric of the Forge of the Silver Flame
  • 🛡 Tumutch Dijon, Human Pallock of the Forge of the Silver Flame
  • 🦆 Ducky, Gnome Necromancer

tl;dr: The gang arrives in Rave Echo Cave. A couple undead creatures join the party, and Yarno gets soul sucked into his staff.

1. From 3 to 5
2. Thing-a-ma-jig
3. Chesendar Manor
4. Rave Echo Cave
5. Glass Staff

The gang emerges into what seems to be an umberhulk nest. Ducky has been rescued from the umberhulks but is unconscious after the ordeal. Dug revives her and she pulls out Fisty's tome and starts to investigate it. As she flips through the pages, most of them are blank, but here and there are swirling clouds of ink that darken and lighten and then fade away. She whispers into the book as she has seen Fisty do. Fisty, are you in there?

Elsewhere, in the Sunken Place, Fisty stands alone in the swirling shadows, and he hears Ducky's voice drift down from above. As he cries out in answer, Ducky cannot hear him, but sees the swirling ink on the pages begin to form his words. I'm here!

She turns the book upside down and starts to shake it out, and then the book starts to jump and jolt in her hands as though it is shaking itself, and soon it is shaking so violently that it's all she can do to hold on to it. The ink darkens and swirls and starts to float off of the pages and to gather in the air in a pool which collects and solidifies into a humoid shape that eventually becomes tiefling in shape. The form remains as the inkiness fades and recedes to reveal red skin beneath, and the gang can soon recognize Fisty standing there, poured from the pages of the book.

Ducky: Oh, look! It's Fisty! That worked out a lot better than the last time shadow figures came out of a book of mine

Fisty: Hey, guys! Where are we?

The gang starts to catch Fisty up as has become routine now when he reappears after having mysteriously/violently disappeared into his book, and Ducky looks around the cavern and notices all the bones of the bugbears' victims, bleached white and picked clean.

There's not any one full intact skeleton available, so Ducky starts to assemble a hodge-podge assortment of mismatched bones into a shape that is pretty much passable as human. There are a couple of extra gnome bits in there, and some dwarf bones. Several of the pieces probably came from actual humans. The overall effect is pretty patchwork and piecemeal but Ducky feels proud of her work. She starts to wave her hands over the bones and hum to herself.

The rest of the Reserve stops and looks over as the skeleton sits up in the dark and turns to regard Ducky.

Achievement! After 21 sessions of dungeons and dragons, the party necromancer manages to do her first real bit of necromancy 🧟‍♂️

Ducky (to the skeleton): HELLO! Oh my goodness I am so happy you're here! I'm Ducky and these are my friends Dug and Fisty and Pankas and Tumutch. Everybody, this is, erm. Thing-a-ma-jig.

Tumutch (blindly, in the dark): Is there somebody new here? Where'd they come from?

Ducky climbs up Thing-a-ma-jigs ribs like a ladder and hangs on to his back and orders him forward, back into the caves and hopefully toward the exit.

Fisty watches the two of them go, remembering when Ducky used to ride on his back like that :(

As they walk through the caves, Fisty shows Dug a trinket to identify, a dark nautilus shaped whistle kind of thing. Dug determines that it is a very magical item that when used at night will animate any dead nearby and bring them under the control of whoever blew the whistle for a period of time.

Fisty's like, Oh that sounds cool! That sounds like something somebody else around here already does, and he gives a squinty eyed look at Ducky who doesn't notice it because she's too busy riding around on Thing-a-ma-jig.

The gang winds and meanders through the tunnels until they emerge near the crevasse in the cave system under Chesendar Manor, near Yarno's hideout. Fancy that!

Tumutch blinks as he steps out into the light and as his eyes adjust he sees an animated skeleton with Ducky on its back, presumably mid-struggle and trying to choke it out or wrestle it down.

With a cry (NECROMANCYYYYYYY!) Tumutch looses his sword and hacks at the skeleton. Ducky yells and tries to get him to stop but Tumutch just tells her to get out of the way. He's going to smite this skeleton and he doesn't want her to get in the way.

Basically a huge scuffle breaks out with both Ducky and Tumutch looking to the rest of the gang for support in getting Tumutch to settle down and in destroying the undead abomination, respectively, but everybody is pretty much like, no, you two need to figure this out on your own.

At one point Dug, presumably tired of the distraction and ready to get on to bigger and better (and more lucrative) things, tries to cast turn undead on Thing-a-ma-jig, but Thing-a-ma-jig is unimpressed and remains unturned.

Ducky tries several times to show Tumutch how harmless Thing-a-ma-jig is and how in control of him she is by making him dance and do other silly things. She tries to make him display submissiveness by laying down on the ground, but Tumutch just smashes him anyway in his supine state and the un-life fades away.

Ducky just brings him back, tells Tumutch off, climbs up on Thing-a-ma-jig, and the two of them set off to find Yarno.

The group convenes at Yarno's chambers. Yarno notices Thing-a-ma-jig, Ducky's first thrall, and congratulates her on animating her first undead.

Ducky: Well, I had a really good teacher! 😍😍😍

They all rest and then strike out for Rave Echo Cave. The time has finally come to confront the Black Spider.

The group travels for about two days and finally arrives the entrance to what can only be Rave Echo Cave.

This closes #13

When they enter the cave, they hear repeated rhythmic sounds at regular intervals similar to the sounds of a large body water of water approaching and then lapping up onto shore.

Ducky: Ohhhh, it must be wave echo cave! Haha. This whole time I thought it was rave echo cave.

Dug and Fisty fall into a heated argument.

Dug: Okay, time to announce ourselves and go find this Black Spider fellow!

Fisty: What do you mean announce ourselves?

Dug: You know, announce ourselves. I can make my voice boom really loud. It's kind of what we do: we make ourselves known and then diplomatically try to draw the other parties over to our side..

Fisty: No, that's a terrible idea. We need to be sneaky, and to sneak up on the bad guys and then kill them.

Dug: Look, we don't know that they're bad guys, really. But we do know that we're good guys. So we should make sure we know what we're doing before we rush in killing people. This is a political opportunity!

Fisty: You're crazy!

Ducky: Why don't we do it both ways? We'll sneak around all sneaky until we see somebody, and then right before we jump them, Dug, you can announce us with your booming voice.

Fisty and Dug (relucantly): Okay

So they all venture a little deeper into the caves and Dug sees, sticking out from behind a large pillar, a pair of very fancy looking boots, presumably filled with feet which are presumably attached to some kind of human like person.

He takes a deep breath and his voice booms and resonates and reverberates throughout the caves, HELLOOOO FANCY BOOOOOTS!

Fisty's jaw drops open.

Dug: What? This is what we agreed on! I saw somebody so I announced us!

Dug (continuing to boom): This is Dug Doorbane Hammerhound!

The boots don't move because the body attached to them is dead. Dug and Ducky descend on the corpse. Dug starts to loot it while Ducky starts to apply her newfound knack for reanimating the dead.

What used to be what looks like a younger brother of Gundren Rockseeker rises up as a rotting, shambling zombies. Tumutch has a minor necromancy freak-out (again) and hurls a spear into the undead dwarf's shoulder, where it sticks much to the indifference of the zombie and the deep annoyance of Ducky.

Ducky: Could you STOP? These things are expensive and costly!

The boots Dug has procured from the zombie ("he doesn't need them any more!") turn out to be Boots of Stridingn and Leaping which is quite impressive. He gave them to Ducky to wear and she tried them on but didn't have the strength needed to get the most out of them, so she gave them back to Dug. And Dug puts on the very fancy boots.

On their walk through the caves they stumble across a room of five bugbears who seem to be reinforcing a barricade in the room and are "guarding against the undead". The group decides it doesn't need to fight 5 bugbears or a hoard of undead, so they expertly close the door again and walk away but not before Doorbane uses his doormancy to seal the door shut forever and seal them to their doom.

The gang continued through the caverns with Thing-a-ma-jig the skeleton and Tippy Toes the zombie at the front of the pack. They continued across a weird subterranean beach covered with shells and sand and odd fleshy mussels. On the other side, they followed a small tunnel that lead them out into a large open area in the middle of which is a twenty foot deep chasm, inside which are several bugbears, toiling away at smashing the rocks down there under the supervision of a drow.

Fisty walks forward and greets the crew, addressing the drow as "black spider". When all present look confused at this greeting, Fisty calls out, just kidding, SURPRISE FIRE BALL and blasts them to pieces with with a flaming sphere of fiery destruction.

A few survive. One bugbear climbs its way out of the chasm only for Tumutch to shove him back in to the inferno. "Nope! Get back in the flaming abyss!" Ducky fires a couple magic missiles into the drow who is somehow still standing, and then Yarno makes ready to fire a second, follow-up fireball.

As Yarno uses his staff to focus, gather, and then release his spell, three things happen more or less at the same time.

1. a fireball leaps from the end of his staff into the chasm and into the drow itself, which disintegrates in the flames

2. a dark, gnarled purple gem starts to appear at the end of the staff. It looks as though it has been there unseen and undetected for some time, twisting and working its way to the staff itself

   Flashback!

   Yarno wakes up and is less than happy at his circumstances. He demands his staff back from Fisty and Fisty is like, "Ha, chump," and he flies away up into the air and out of reach and is all like, "Neener neener neener." Yarno makes some half-hearted threats but then is ultimately ready to just give up the staff and just go back home.

   Ducky and Dug convince Fisty--or they don't and he just decides on his own--to come back down and return the staff. Fisty winks at Ducky and tosses Yarno his staff.

   Ep. 15

3. Yarno's figure starts to warp and twist as he is pulled physically through the staff and perhaps into the purple gem at its tip, which then starts to pulsate and throb like a beating heart.

In the aftermath, only the staff remains, and it drops with a clatter to the floor. Ducky steps forward and picks it up and when she does, she can feel the throbbing and beating pulse through her and she can feel that Yarno is still nearby but somewhere inaccessible.

She turns and looks at Fisty questioningly.

the end?