DF Session 192, Felltower 130 - Down, down, down the GFS

Date: April 14th, 2024

Weather: Sunny, warm.

Characters
Chop, human cleric (301 points)
Hannari Ironhand, dwarf martial artist (301 points)
Thor Halfskepna, human knight (306 points)
Vladimir Luchnick, dwarf martial artist (266 points)
     Darkspire the Inscrutable, human apprentice (125 points)
     Harold, human guard (~80 points)
     Samuel, human guard (~80 points)

We started off in town, gathering rumors and then heading off to the dungeon. Vlad took a note to spend his time between this delve and next investigating the cone-hatted cultists near the Brotherhood Complex.

They made their way to Felltower and in through the front entrance. They wound their way to the altar, and their newest hireling got Puissance +2 on all his weapons for the day.

From there, they went down the GFS to the "apartment level" and began to explore. They systematically shattered a number of those black hemispheres on the ceiling that the bronze spiders keep fixing, and checked a lot of different areas - the colored doors, the werewolf lair, and places nearby - for the ratmen and gnolls. Nothing. A big trip around led them to near Durak's lair, and they heard what they consider to be the sound of him sleeping.

There was debate about rouding up the magic bottles as loot, but that was rejected at the last minute as they approach the "prison" area. There was debate (real world and in-game) about the point of spending Sundays doing un-fun wandering around without actually encountering anything.

So, with a firm push from Hannari, they headed to the second GFS. Thor took some damage trying to open the door with a kick, then more when he did it properly with a hand touch. Getting through the illusionary wall was trickey, but it seemed like saying the Brotherhood's passphrase helped get a second chance to get through, which helped Thor and Samuel - the rest made it through.

On the stairs down, they were attacked by a pair of speeding blades. They broke them down and sent them rattling down to the abyss below, but not before Harold got cut and Vlad was briefly dropped with a crippling leg cut - both speedily healed by Chop, who also put a Curse on one that proved very helpful.

They headed to the third landing, where their notes (from delvers who never made it back, but hey, Summon Spirit) said there was poison gas and a Dispel Magic trap. They got ready and rushed in, planning to run to the left and right out of the danger zone. They didn't make it. They triggered a wave of dangerous effects - a Dispel Magic that took out half of their lightstones, a Deathtouch-like effect on their front three that hammered Samuel, Harold, and Thor, and a greenish mist that inflicted 1d toxic per second despite them holding their breath. They fled, dragging the reeling hirelings behind.

Chop healed everyone on the stairs as fast as possible, draining his power item to do it, and using a Lend Energy charged scroll to replenish himself. They quickly fell to arguing about returning upward to find loot or going down. Over Vlad's strenuous objections, they headed down. There was nothing but abject darkness above and below.

And down.

And down.

And down.

What turned out later to be 6 turns around the stairs they emerged from the darkness.

Queue up the John Williams music.

The walls around the stairs were gone. The stairs, corkscrewing down into the depths, just continued on without any obvious support. Below them, far below them, was a faintly glowing dome. A big one - hundreds of yard across, maybe? - faintly glowing from within with pastel colors. The colors changed as they descended - always soft colors. Sky blue, not dark blue. Indigo or mauve, not deep violet. Soft yellow or orange, not a harsh deep red. They could feel the size of the space around them - it was big. They couldn't see part what was lit by the dome below or their lightstones.

Down, down, down they went.

As they closed in, they saw the GFS didn't end up in the dome, but rather next to it. The dome was clearly over a "city" - they could vaguely make out shapes that had to be building-sized, but no details emerged. Around the city was the inky blackness of water. The stairs ended, 14 more turns down (roughly 1/2 a mile, if the calculations of Hannari's player are correct as they usually are), in a square stone building on an adjoining island, connected to the city's landmass by a causeway or bridge marked on each end by gate-like buildings, and the city itself had a bastion-like setup in from of the dome.

Exhausted from the climb down, the PCs rested at the bottom and took extra time to search. Besides the badly broken bits of two shattered speeding bladeds, they found some sparse but valuable loot. That was a ring (a Potion Ring, from DFT3), a ruby covered with fire-related runes (non-magical - just the overlooked remnants of a broken magic item), and a chunk of metal that Vlad identified as a 1.25 pound lump of Poison Metal (DF8.)

With that, they decided (due to time and my prompting, honestly) to return to the surface rather than risk what defenses the city has. They wanted to identify more about it to get some research done, but they couldn't be sure what awaited them . . . only that no one had been there and returned. So they decided to just do that.

Notes:

- Annoyingly, the loot for the speeding blades says $10/pound for bits, and sends you to DF8, p. 13 for more. That book explains how to value bits, but not how many pounds worth you get from a speeding blade. Sigh. I want an answer more than a method, and this kind of lacks both.

- So that domed city has been sitting under Felltower since my first side-view draw up of Felltower. It's not necessarily the bottom of Felltower, but it is perhaps the bottom of the top of Felltower.

- I had to wing the treasure at the bottom of the GFS a bit. I had notes in a folder that said:

"Potion Ring (empty)
big chunk of mystery metal (poison metal)
Ruby with magic item markings but non magic 5 carats?
No body bits"

So I had to quickly determine a value for poison metal by looking in multiple books - and its size, which I don't know if I ever wrote down, double check the description of a potion ring (to be consistent with my wording in DFT3), and check the ruby value since I no longer use carat prices just ballpark ranges. I honestly didn't expect anyone to go all the way down there this session for sure. But the rough notes are maybe 11 years old, and the first notes on that level date to 2011.

- Before they went down there, the group was having a grumpy discussion about spending Sundays not doing much of anything. The delve to the third landing didn't pan out - the defenses there are pretty brutal - but Hanari's player successfully bullied the one player who was refusing to go deeper. The other two were fine with going . . . and going paid off greatly.

- XP was 4 xp for loot, 1 xp for touching a new level post-return to Felltower (3rd landing), +1 for new exploration (the domed city), +1 for first touch on a new level (the dome city), and +1 for discovering a special location (the domed city) = 8 xp per person. Hanari's player got MVP for pushing the delve that deep and insisting on searching for loot at the bottom; it was a tough call because Chop's healing was critical, and Thor's Sacrificial Block and Sacrificial Parry stopped a lot of potential casualties.

- The city is a special location, but it's not easier than the levels above it. It could be totally lethal for a group of this point total. But it's there for eventually . . . and I promise it's a good one. I'm glad they found it. It, and the level it is on, is full of discoveries waiting for PCs. But I think not yet.

- There is a MST3K reference in that title. Just watch The Mole Men.

- Next time, a gate. They just haven't decided which one, yet. More tomorrow.