Garham to Greyhawk Campaign: Session Eight, the Final Session

Session Eight – August 14, 2010
Cast
Flex, human shield bearer
Clair, hobbit shield bearer
Sein, human shield bearer/rogue
Sanji, human medium

The hunt for the Wight of the Hiddendale had not gone well; Clair had been energy drained. Gregor, their ranger guide, had used a magic flask of smoke to confuse the wight and allow everyone to escape. The Crazy Adventurers retreated to the Village of Hawfair to rest. Specifically, they stayed there for three days, waiting to see if the energy drain was temporary and if Clair would get better; she did not. It was during this time that Sein and Sanji came back to the company.

A messenger working for the Serpenthelm family found them in Hawfair. It turned out that Kevlamin Serpenthelm had family in Greyhawk. Down on their luck, they were looking for help from Kevlamin's company to finance a proper funeral for him. Flex, though he had started out hating Kevlamin, championed the cause of going on a quest to raise Kevlamin and convinced the rest of the company to agree unanimously. They weighed their options and decided to approach the Temple of Zilchus back in the City of Greyhawk. The High Acquisitioners of Zilchus said they could resurrect Kevlamin, but would demand 5,000 gp to do it.

Their best bet of raising the funds was the same quest they had planned to pursue while hunting the Wight of the Hiddendale – to find the Ruined Tower of Elzid. Actually, it turned out to be absurdly easy to find Elzid's tower, as a territorial war was going on between goblin and orc parties and adventuring companies from Greyhawk over the tower at the heart of the Hiddendale. The four remaining members of The Crazy Adventurers actually spent a week exploring the Hiddendale and the Great Hillwood trying to find another a safer route around the fighting parties to the tower, until they encountered by chance a gold dragon that chased everyone else off.

((Spoilers for “A Wizard's Fate” From Dungeon magazine #37))

By now there was almost nothing left of the tower, but a short investigation revealed that a stairwell to a basement level was safe inside the rubble. As they started down the hallway at the bottom of the staircase, they activated a trap that caused a block of stone to slide across the hallway and block off their retreat. Undeterred, they continued down the hallway to a room with a demonic-looking statue in it. As Flex started searching the room, the statue seemed to come to life and attack them. Everyone ganged up on the statue and did enough harm to it to dispel the illusion ; the statue had actually never moved at all.

Trying one of the doors from that room, the company found a corridor with more doors. The door at the end of the corridor was locked, so they concentrated on that. Sein tried to pick the lock and failed. Flex and Sein hacked at the door for awhile with their axes, but were interrupted when a voice whispered to Flex to hand over his magical cloak of protection. Magically compelled, Flex complied and the cloak began floating down the hallway away from them. They were able to catch up to the cloak and snatch it back, though.

Clair had grown impatient waiting for the door to be chopped down and coated it in lamp oil instead. After lighting the door aflame and backing off for a bit, Sein felt something brush by his leg. People started trying to hit his invisible attacker, but found nothing. Since it was not seen heading into the smoke, they could only assume it had run away from them back towards the blocked dungeon entrance.

When the smoke cleared, the company found the interior of the room had been burned away. They thought they were responsible at first, but investigation showed that the fire was weeks old and had destroyed a library. Nothing was found that survived the fire, except for some graphitti scratched into the back wall. This made Flex sure that there was a secret door in the back wall. His 30 minute search of the back wall was weakening the morale of the company until he really did find a secret door and opened it.

The secret door led to a room filled with spider webs and rubble. The four set about searching the room and were shortly attacked by four large spiders, one for each of them. No one had trouble dispatching their spiders except for Sanji, who succumbed to the poison of its bite and was immediately weak from fever. Undeterred, the other three went about searching the rubble, hoping the spiders had guarded something useful. Sanji, in his delirium, said he saw a door in the corner of the room and, sure enough, there was another secret door there.

Behind this secret door was a closet with only a wooden chest in it. Sanji was too weak to leave the middle of the room, so only the other three went into the closet to open the chest – just as Sein set off the fire trap spell on the chest. Flex and Sein were killed outright, while Clair was knocked unconscious. As the flames died down, the invisible imp that had been following them all along came in, watched Sanji die, and then killed Clair in her sleep.

And so, with the passing of Clair, the last original member of the campaign, the Garham to Greyhawk Campaign came to an end with a TPK. As a last footnote, the player of new character Jack Stafford showed up late right after the TPK, but could not have arrived to save anyone because the company had done nothing about the trap blocking the dungeon entrance.