Wherein the Expedition Begins a Campaign to Retake Castle Defiant…

After many difficult days of travel, the grand expedition now stands before the ruins of Castle Defiant. The celebratory mood of the smallfolk wanes somewhat when they are not allowed to rush forward to these ruins, but are rather redirected to the crumbling remains of Galentown where they are instructed to raise tents while the soldiers work on scouting out the environs and erect defensive fortifications. These are the Orclands, after all.

While this transpires, Finn will lead a small team of explorers (also known as his fellow PCs) to scout out the castle ruins to ensure that there are no troubles or foul beasts waiting in ambush. Only after he gives the all clear will the expedition look toward entering the castle and working on rebuilding it. Eager to prove himself, Finn accepts this task.

The explorers first do a wide sweep of the ruined castle with an eye toward verifying that there isn’t an inconveniently placed tribe of orcs on the other side, although both Haruki and Ilanna are barely able to conceal their impatience and desire to just get on with the poking around in the ruins. Zistral notes many tracks in the area, many of which he is unable to identify but appear to be large and relatively humanoid. Thankfully, there do not appear to be any lurking orcs waiting in ambush – or, if there are, the explorers failed to notice them – so they press on into the castle ruins themselves.

As expected, they find the interior of the castle to be a complete mess. Weeds from a once pristine garden have overgrown everything and it is clear that nature has started to reclaim this place. There are skeletal remains of fallen defenders everywhere, including within the castle’s well. While looking around, Arn notices movement on the upper levels and discreetly advises Finn who then passes word to the others. They look around for a way to reach these levels. Despite finding two sets of stairs, several of the explorers – Ilanna, Thorondil, and Yusuf – opt the climb up a broken wall while the rest plan to ascend stairs (particularly since Zistral is a Centaur and they suck at climbing.)

Haruki and Zistral head up the stairs first, but as they do, they disturb some sort of strange-looking slimy moss that begins to crawl toward Haruki’s legs and up his boot which the centaur notices. The two promptly retreat back down the stairs upon noting just how extensive this slime is, coughing as spores are kicked up. Above them, Ilanna and Thorondil investigate the very loud noises of the two moving down the stairs, and Ilanna recognizes the moss as ‘slime mold,’ a dangerous flesh-eating thing that puts its victims to sleep via the spores. The elves usually burn it out. Rather than risk this at the moment, the four on the lower level decide to take the other set of stairs up, despite them being much narrower which makes for more difficult going for the larger members of the team.

Upstairs, the two groups begin to converge with Ilanna in the vanguard. They enter a large room where several of them sense another presence but press forward. As Ilanna rounds a corner, she surprises a waiting creature she recognizes as a troll and springs back out of its reach; the beast pursues and strikes, but Ilanna dodges so well that the creatures lumbers past her. She then wheels around and shoots the troll squarely in the back of the head; her arrow strikes the beast’s brain and it falls. Thorn’dil has had a ringside seat to this and the others scramble to investigate the noise but find Ilanna leaning upon her bow and looking thoroughly pleased with herself. She calmly advises them that the creature will regenerate and will need to be decapitated, which Thorn’dil starts doing.

And then, another troll rushes from concealment and charges Yusuf! A fierce melee ensues with the three heavy fighters of the group – Haruki, Yusuf and Zistral – bashing away at the troll. Badly injured, the troll begins to retreat but the three pursue and Haruki finally lunges forward to smash its head to paste with his tetsubo.

While investigating this upper level, the great size of both Haruki and Zistral results in them falling through the already weakened floor; at first, it seems as though Haruki might be able to hold on and Zistral might be able to escape this fate, but the centaur’s attempts to help his ally results in both tumbling down. While looking for a way to aid them, Ilanna briefly catches sight of a bizarre-looking thing near where the two are and recognizes it as an Elder Thing, a sphere of madness. She advises Finn who hesitates for a moment – the logical course of action is for those on the upper level to head for the stairs and navigate down – and in this moment of hesitation, both Thorn’dil and Yusuf chose to begin climbing down. Thus, the decision is made and the three remaining upstairs – Arn, Finn and Ilanna – must climb down. Finn, being a terrible climber, takes an extraordinarily long amount of time to get down and is very pleased that he managed to do so … until Arn slips and falls on top of his fellow mage. Ilanna gets down with no trouble.

In a darkened room slightly apart from the others, Thorn’dil and Yusuf look around. The elf briefly imbues his sword with fire and, in that brief moment, both see the madness sphere lurking nearby.

And then, the fire goes out, leaving them alone in the dark…

Player Notes:

• Per GM, the original plan was not for a “dungeon crawl” but we all had so much fun with this that he adjusted his plan on the fly and now we’re crawling the dungeon. And ending the session right before the madness sphere attacked was perfect timing…
• Finn has Unluckiness and Haruki is a Klutz, so having Finn climb down with Haruki helping him was a recipe for disaster. Still, Finn made his Climb check by 0 (after taking 30x normal to get the +5 for this) … so of course, Arn failed his roll. As Finn’s player, I thought it was appropriate to invoke Unluckiness here and have Arn fall onto Finn … and the GM agreed.
• Ilanna gained the bonus CP for this session after her awesome crit to the brain of the first troll. She dropped it in a single 1-second round while the three heavy fighters – Haruki, Yusuf, Zistral – took forever (like 5 or 6 seconds) to beat down the second troll.