GURPS DF Session 131, Felltower 102 - Lost City 10

Date: Sunday, April 19th, 2020

Weather: Cool and cloudy near Felltower, sweltering and rainy in the Lost City of D'Abo

Characters:
Aldwyn Hale, human knight (297 points)
     Varmus the Hanged, human apprentice wizard (145 points)
"Mild Bruce" McTavish, Jr., human barbarian (267 points)
Crogar, human barbarian (294 points)
Galen Longtread, human scout (431 points)
Gerald Tarrant, human necromancer (374 points)
     2 Skeletons (~35 points)
Hayden the Ebon Page, human knight (307 points)
Ulf Sigurdson, human cleric (306 points)
Wyatt Sorrell, human swashbuckler (293 points)

We started off with the delvers in Sterickburg, gathering rumors including, "You can't trust any damn dirty ape!") and how all of the bodies of water from pools on up in Felltower are connected to each other. The PCs also did some shopping, picking up a few spellstones, but since they expended little last time they had delved. Aldwyn had found and taken on an apprentice wizard

They headed out, met up with Galen on the fringes of town, and headed up to Felltower.

There Ulf put Hide Thoughts on Wyatt and Galen, and himself IIRC, and Gerry created a Skull Spirit.

At the top, the trapdoor was once again locked, and zapped a skeleton. So they headed down through the main entrance, Galen in the lead. Their spikes for the guide ropes were gone. The left pillbox's shutters were open, but Galen waited for a few minutes without hearing or seeing anything. So they crossed over in the usual fashion - jumping Wyatt, Levitate on Ulf, Silence on the spiking, and so on. Everyone crossed. They passed the noisy room quietly, and then had a discussion about the Pool Room. Some new guys wanted to go, but they eventually just decided there wasn't anything valuable or useful there so they moved on.

They headed downstairs, then to the GFS, and then down from there. The stale air downstairs got several of them - Ulf and Aldwyn. The others (including a Luck-using Gerry) managed to deal with it okay. Ulf wondered at a "cure" or magical protection from it, but Mild Bruce scoffed, saying there air is stale and that's that.

They headed quickly to the Lost City gate and found it open. They heard a distant door slam, and then another closer and louder. So they piled right on through the gate after a brief stop to put on Resist Fire on a few people, including Ulf and Varmus and one-two others.

One of them was not Aldwyn, who critically failed his daily HT-2-Enc roll and dropped almost 100% of his FP and nearly collapsed in short order. Pasty knights from Cornwood shouldn't go into the jungle without protection. This immediately derailed the trip.

Ulf recently gained Power Investiture 6 and Sanctuary, and cast it. He opened up a door to a 17-yard cube nowhere space and they entered.

Ulf tried to engage Varmus on the matter of his soul. He replied in a strangled, choking voice, "I worship the Good God. I'm not legally required to discuss my faith." So much for that. Poor Ulf is surrounded by heretics (Bruce, Heyden), clueless wizards (Gerry), all-too-clued-in wizards (Varmus), and disinterested types (Crogar, Galen) and a co-religionist who claims to be an Inquisitor sent to keep tabs on Ulf's religious purity (Wyatt). The others rested. This took the better part of 10 hours, with Aldwyn needing to sleep off his heatstroke and exhaustion, as did Gerry. They managed to recover from the affects of the "stale air," too.

They popped back out into the darkness of the night in the Lost City of D'Abo, more of them protected by Resist Fire including Aldwyn, now. Aldwyn managed to fall of the roof climbing down, though, but was unhurt. The rain made eveything a bit more difficult but it wasn't nearly as hot.

They headed down a different path than before, to avoid any ambushes or traps set on their nearly-identical path each trip. However, they decided to go on Dome Street, past the spooky temple shielded by a magical dome. They did. At night, though, it gave off a black-and-purple radiance (and spooky sounds, but I forgot to mention them) and caused Fright Checks all around. Galen and Heyden failed theirs. Galen was briefly stunned and picked up a quirk (he has a mild phobia related to octopuses and mollusks and such). Heyden got the vapors and fainted away for several minutes. Most of the others were fine, although Ulf was mildly disturbed, too. Wyatt wasn't, and declared himself completely unfazed by the sight.

They pulled back and went around by another route, but then came back into view of the building once again. They all needed Will rolls not to look (Wyatt just went ahead and looked; he made his Fright Check again.) Aldwyn ended up picking up a new quirk - he's afraid of purple, now. Heyden was stunned again (and his player voluntarily got another quirk about fearing ghosts at night; I told him to swap out one of his old ones.) They hurried on.

The trip to their destination was tough. The city was very much alive at night, and everything seemed to be out, hunting, and hostile. Especially as the rain tapered off and the sliver of moonlight came out. The PCs elected to travel with their full lights out, so they were a beacon for anything wanting to find them and were night-blind except for Varmus, who has Night Vision 3 and eyes that reflect like a cat's, and Galen, who was under Dark Vision. They ran into flooding in a street, and their detour through a side street ran them into a 25-30' long slug. They backed out quickly as it sat there eyeing them.

They went around and came up behind the street with the slug, but then Galen spotted vegepygmies crouched in the path ahea, as if in ambush. They backed off, not having Quenton with them to talk and unsure of their reception. They made their way to another route, and then found their chosen path - the north-end rush around the Path of Kings - was flooded. Two crocodiles (or alligators, they're not sure) came after them. Galen shot them both dead in a few seconds. They moved up so Gerry could Zombie one, but then they saw more crocs. They backed off and tried to continue on, but this route was flooded, too. They backtracked, avoiding the crocs who showed up and were now doing dominance-establishing hisses and snaps to determine who got the choice bits of their dead fellows.

They couldn't find an easier route, and they desperately wanted to avoid the Path of Kings because the Kings would give them away with sound even more than all of their light had to vision, they felt.

By this point, they'd been slogging around for a few hours. It's a small city but it's slow going in the rain at night. They crossed the Path of Kings and tried to clamber over some rubble with varying degrees of success, but another giant slug squeezed itself out of a ruined building. They climbed back over as the slug advanced, and move east and then south. They needed to rest - they'd slogged around for hours, it was tiring, not everyone had been able to get sleep (and reset their clocks), and Varmus has Unfit so that didn't help. They dragged him and their tired selves around further, wanting to rest only when they found a safe building.

As they did, several of them saw a bluish glow in the night a short ways off to the West. They all veto'd finding out what it was. Heyden was especially insistent. (GM note - I should have forced Gerry, who has Curious, to roll a self-control roll.) They needed to stop but had no clear or safe place.

Frustrated, Ulf created another (and I quote) "God Damned Sanctuary" and they went in and rested there for another 2 hours.

They popped out again, and moved along the south wall around some ruined buildings in southern Kingston, as they named it. They reached the nearest cover to the bronze/brass gates. After some debating, they sent up Galen to scout a bit and then moved up as group to the gates, going around a wall that blocked easy access. They had a long debated prior to this about if the snakemen used the gate or not. About 1/3 of the group had no opinion, 1/3 said the snakemen use it, and 1/3 that the snakemen didn't flee this way and it was clearly a gate locking in some demon or whatnot.

Galen settled that - he spotted snakeman tracks indicating heavy use, and saw a peg of bronze gleaming with steady use near the door. No key, though, and the gates were locked with a giant intrinsic lock that was vastly too big for normal lockpicks. It clearly needed a key-to-the-city sized key to open it. They put Heyden on guard with See Invisible in the back, and set Wyatt to work to pick the lock. He took extra time (8 minutes), and just managed to pop the lock open. They eased open the gate and moved on, once they were sure the gate wouldn't just lock itself behind them (it couldn't, it required a turned key)

Beyond was a wide corridor that went on at an angle for a few hundred feet, then a narrower passed with a natural tunnel of the side. As they approached it, waves of fist-sized black spiders rushed at them. At least 10 yards deep and 3 yards wide worth of spiders, packed leg to leg. Galen joked it would take a while for him to kill them all. They began to cast spells. Varmus ripped off a large Create Fire to block the way. The spiders kept coming, but stopped just short of the flames as Ulf lashed out with a Sunbolt, Varmus with a Fireball, and then Gerry with an Explosive Skull Missile. Each of the groups hit by the spells just disappeared, leaving no dead spiders or any trace except for scorch marks from spells. More came, and Varmus went to toss another Fireball but critically failed, scorching his hand . . . except he had Resist Fire! (Unluckily, he took enough damage to burn his hand off. Luckily, Gerry's player remembered that Varmus had Resist Fire on. Oh yeah . . .)

They moved down the corridor, avoiding the side passage. On the other end, a passage came into the tunnel from the back-right. Galen spotted more spiders, this time milling around and moving back slowly. They decided to follow. As they did, Galen spotted two thin threads across the passage. He wanted to "disarm" them but couldn't see anything they connected to. So he ducked them after marking them with chalk, and they followed.

Ahead, they saw more of those spiders . . . and webs overhead. They immediately decided to back off and continue south, their original plan.

That took them up a slowly rising tunnel 20' wide and 450 or so feet in length.

Near the end, they saw a widened out room with two doors, and between them another bronze/brass/orichalcum gate. This one had no lock, and seemed like it must retract into the ceiling, or the floor, or both.

They moved up to investigate, and started to move to the door to their right. They posted Galen over on the left. With his Dark Vision, at the end of the area he could see was a giant King Cobra with a female human face, reared up, hood open, staring at them. They all heard a loud rattle. Galen alerted the PCs and took two shots at its eyes, making both shots despite the range and the narrowly space bars of the portcullis (-2 on straight-line shots, -4 on angles), but both came right back at his eyes!

He dove for cover and both missed him. He yelled out what he saw, and the group slowly reacted.

Most of the fighter types took a position and Waited, with no particular trigger (by default, Attack vs. first opponent in reach). Gerry began to cast Great Haste, Varmus Fireball, and Ulf moved in closer to the fighters.

The naga moved forward, hissing with amusement in a feminine, and somehow attractive, voice. With it were three giant snakes, but with each end of the snake had a head! They moved forward in a sidewinder fashion. Galen snapped off two arrows at one of them, and they both missed - Missile Shield. The PCs didn't like their own tactics turned against them.

The snakes and naga moved up to a couple yards short of the portcullis. Gerry sent his skull spirit after it, but it found it couldn't pass the narrow portcullis (it's Diffuse but lacks Infiltration, and the bars were more than skull-width apart. I think the PCs assume it's insubstantial.)

Galen tried to kip up with Acrobatics but failed. So he got up slowly, shooting as he could at the nearest double-ended snake, but the shots all missed. The Naga hissed at him and looked at him, but his Hide Thoughts spell protected him. So it turned its attention elsewhere. Ulf drew his Wand of Holding and zapped it, but it had no effect. It hissed laughter at him, and said, "Your God is weak here, Priest." And the Good God was - Ulf would later find it was a Low Sanctity area.

Varmus tried a Fireball and hit the portcullis instead of his target snake. He started on Pain directed at the naga. The naga tried its powers on Aldwyn or Crogar (I think Crogar) but was resisted.

Meanwhile Crogar had been standing near one of the doors but just waiting. Mild Bruce got impatient and ran at the door and used All-Out Attack to do a running shoulder slam into it to open it. He rolled a critical, and smashed the door open . . . and ran right into three flesh-eating apes! Oops. They quickly mauled him with thighbone clubs - the first hit him in the skull and dealt 20 injury, knocking him down, stunned. The next two hit him in the left leg and torso and wounded him badly. Aldwyn moved up close, but didn't want to have bad footing from Bruce and just waited outside of reach. The apes beat on Mild Bruce a bit more, as Ulf ran up. Ulf scolded Aldwyn, who asked what he expected him to do. "To be a knight and get in there, not do nothing because of bad footing!" So scolded Aldwyn moved in and engaged the apes.

He cut at all three, and decapitated one, but the other shots were dodged. They fought him for a few more seconds but parried his blows narrowly over and over. Ulf meanwhile put Hide Thoughts on him, but with an effective skill of 9, Aldwyn has only a 9 and then a 10 to resist any magical influence.

Gerry finished Great Haste and moved over to Galen and started on Animate Shadow on the naga. The naga hissed laughter at him and said, "My powers protect me more than yours do you, wizard." It resisted Animate Shadow (resisted by Will in my game.) Gerry responded with a Stench spell over a semi-circle on the far side of the gate. The naga was unimpressed.

Crogar, meanwhile, ran over and tried to bash the other door open. He took two tries but couldn't kick it open, when it opened . . . revealing three more apes! Crogar was unhappy at this for some reason. Gerry put Missile Shield on Galen, so he can crit-fish the naga with eye shots (we allow a 3-4 to penetrate Missile Shield and Reverse Missiles).

As this all happened, Heyden was still guarding the rear. He heard a whispering hiss, "You should join our side." He failed to resist, as he stood holding a Strengthen Will spellstone, and he thought that was a great idea! His Per 10 and See Invisible just didn't do it as a rear guard . . . and Wyatt saw nothing. Wyatt meanwhile moved over to support Galen and Gerry and Crogar. Suddenly Ulf and Varmus were attacked. Varmus was bit in the neck by a snakeman who appeared behind him! It bit through his leather neck protection and injected venom . . . which greatly weakened his Will. Ulf was also bitten, and his Will plummeted badly as he failed his roll by 5, even with his Protective Ring.

Galen spotted another snakeman moving up to flank him, Wyatt, and the others . . . the snakeman was invisible but Galen has See Invisible on.

That's when we ran out of time.

This is where we left it:


(The ninja mask denotes a snakeman who is invisible.)

Notes:

Aldwyn showed up with a henchmen. This led, inevitably, to complaints about why Varmus gets a full share, and it doesn't either come out of Aldwyn's share or just as a salary that Aldwyn pays. I had to point out that everyone benefits from having another NPC, some NPCs come for shares (Melchior, Orcish Bob, the Meeposian brothers, Raggi, etc.) and no one has an issue. That seemed to settle that issue. The fact that Varmus also has to contribute to group expenses, pay for his own upkeep, etc. also helped.

Speaking of Aldwyn, we did finally nail down where he's from. Cornwood, ruled by the beloved and heavily armored King Titanius I. Cornwood was already canonically in this game, but not that Aldwyn is from there.

The players had a pre-game discussion this session about buying Wealth, too. The ones who'd benefit from it the most also have the least likelihood of getting it (it's not a Gerry thing, given his Obliviousness and lack of interest in wealth for wealth's sake, for example, and Galen is a hard-hearted minimalist with Intolerance (Urbanites) so he's out, too.) The ones who are most likely to buy it don't have the money or points. And there is an ongoing discussion about how much extra the person with Comfortable gets to skim off of the top for earning extra cash.

The stale air on the lower levels continues to bother them. There is a solution, but it's not really a matter of guess-the-spell or roll-the-skill.

I still have a lot to learn with Roll20. It's very frustrating sometimes. I'll get smoother but I miss face-to-face.

I don't like to end sessions in the dungeon but this was inevitable. The PCs took a long time to get to their destination and the fight wasn't going to be quick, and it was impossible to extricate themselves from it. So be it.

XP for the session was 0, because it's per-delve not per-session, but MVP for the session was Gerry because his player reminded everyone that Varmus has Resist Fire on.