23rd-25th Sypheros 998

998 Sypheros 25th somewhere in the Thornwastes on the outskirts of New Cyre

We are extremely fortunate to have survived the debacle that was our adventure in the Ghost Lord’s lair. It seems that we had misread the situation and therefore selected sub-optimal tactics to achieve the what was in truth the actual mission. I take full responsibility for this error. As the group’s magical tactician, it is my job to identify the mission to customize my spell selection to meet the consequent challenges. It seems that our mission was NOT to fight our way through the Ghost Lord’s traps and minions in order to return his phylactery and ensure his neutrality in the coming war. Instead we were on a mission to RESCUE the vile lich from the hobgoblins of the Redhand Horde! Had I divined our true goal my tactics would very different. I would instead have taken a smaller group to the Lion Shrine which would have depended more upon stealth and would have included Bryanna and excluded our new warforged allies. We would have employed our gnomish skill with illusion to penetrate invisibly to the Ghost Lord’s lair-prison and there we would have given him his phylactery. That accomplished, we could have joined forces with Ghost Lord to annihilate the hobgoblins holding him prisoner. Given the power of the Ghost Lord this would have been a much less difficult proposition than what we actually faced.

Instead I thought to avoid peril to my beloved by leaving her at the elven tree village and we brought our warforged allies to heal and protect Zed. The elves were kind enough to have their gigantic owls ferry our company to the Ghost Lord’s tomb. Our strike force included the warforged artificer Crucible, the warforged heavy infantrymen Prong and Smelt, Elarin our elven sorcerer-swordsman, Pazenga the githerzai martial artist, Zed our warforged champion, and of course myself. The area surrounding the lair was a dusty desert bare of plant life, dubbed the Thornwastes by the local inhabitants. Doubtless the lich’s death powers had something to do with the desolation. The lair itself was an extremely impressive piece of architecture although on a somewhat smaller scale than I had envisioned. The tomb-like structure was built in the shape of an elegant stylized lion. One entered the structure through the lion’s mouth which was in actuality a grand staircase. As we drew close to the “mouth” a huge azure beast detached itself from the shadows of the “gullet” and charged us. The creature was reminiscent of a blue dragon but its wings were small, its torso was long and snake-like, and it had six legs instead of four.

As most of us reeled in confusion and terror, Pazenga sprinted to the creature and delivered a crippling nerve punch behind the one of the reptile’s middle legs. Before the creature could counter-attack our gith ally, Elarin stepped forward shouting words of magic, drew the power about him, and hurled his fire rays at the creature. The soldier-spellbinder’s four fire rays spell burned with a blinding white light that seared the air all around. The spell plowed into the draconic creature burning its chest scales to greasy ash and leaving the flesh underneath scorched, blackened, and oozing fluid. I gagged as the air was filled with the smell of roasting meat. Ignoring Pazenga, the creature roared in agony and instead sought to destroy the source of its pain, our own Elarin. The sapphire reptile charged our elven ally, opening its jaws in order to swallow him in a single gulp but the creature was too weak from its crippling injuries and Elarin dove to safety. I was not willing to give the huge reptile a second chance and drove five force missiles into the seared area of its chest. The draconic beast collapsed to the ground twitching.

After entering the lion-tomb, we sent Pazenga ahead to scout as per our standard reconnaissance protocol. After only a few steps down a narrow stone passage, Pazenga discovered what appeared to be a deadly trap but was in reality merely a pressure plate used to remotely open the front door. It was then that the transparent ectoplasmic form of a huge lion materialized in front of us. The lion-spirit opened its deadly maw and let loose a hideous moaning roar that shook the walls as well as our confidence. Gamely Pazenga attacked the ghost beast with his deadly hands and feat but to little effect. I called from the back rank for Zed to unlimber his ghost-hammer and join in the attack while simultaneously drawing and firing my weaker force missile wand. The magic of Zed’s ghost hammer rendered the spirit’s intangible nature moot. However the ghost-brute was in turn able to easily pass its claws through the warforged’s adamantine skin so as to chill the very magical life force animating him but Zed’s mighty two handed hammer blows destroyed the creature before it had the opportunity to do any serious harm.

After the creature was destroyed I used my powers of divine healing and arcane repairing to ameliorate the worst of Zed’s minor injures. We had only progressed a few score of yards before we were once attacked again by another ghost-lion. The roar of this spirit-creature was even more terrifying than that of the first lion and it caused Elarin and I to lose confidence in our magical prowess. Then the creature attacked Zed in a rage and weakened him with a crippling touch that went right to the core of his construct physiology. Zed, being the stalwart companion that he is, fought on even though he would likely have been slain or at best incapacitated.

Witnessing the danger to my warforged friend restored my resolve and I released the power I had been holding in reserve for just such an emergency. I blasted the creature with a volley of five force missiles. When it did not go down I blasted it a second and then a third time and finally the spirit-cat burst like a soap bubble. With the battle ended I saw to our hurts but it became apparent that I could do nothing about the injuries inflicted upon Zed by the ghost-brute.

My friends and our warforged allies continued on, weakened though we were. We were foolishly secure in the false assurance that at any time we need only place the phylactery in a well traveled area and retreat. After a few short minutes we came upon a room that was suffused with thick mist such as that summoned by Bryanna and myself. We sent Pazenga ahead to reconnoiter as usual and he came upon a chamber filled with shadow hobgoblin warriors. Pazenga attempted to defeat one of the shadow creatures but found them nearly impossible to harm. The shadow beings counter-attack inflicting a significant sword wound on the gith monk. Paz wisely retreated and reported back that there were shadow hobgoblins filling the adjacent room and that they seemed unable to advance to attack and were somehow tied to a particular chamber. I had Pazenga escort me to the mist-filled room adjacent to the shadow chamber.

I was to find out later that in the mist I mistakenly had taken the shadow-hobgoblins to be a new form of undead when in actuality they were a shadow-based magical spell. Shadow magic is a superior form of illusion to which I am intimately familiar, though I have yet to learn a spell of that sub-school. Thinking the creatures were a form of undead, I drew my dawnburst wand and cast a wall of wind spell to clear a line of sight to the shadow creatures. I released the power contained in the wand but the flash of intense white light had no effect on the shadow beings. Before I could begin to understand the nature of my error I was blasted by a volley of force spheres that left me with broken ribs and dislocated collar bone. Pazenga saved me then by scooping up my tiny form and retreating out of the mist chamber.

As soon as I came to my senses I healed myself and we discussed our options. Not perceiving the true situation, it seemed prudent to me to drop the Ghost Lord’s phylactery there, near his henchmen, and retreat while we still lived. The ambush appeared to be unbeatable at the time so we decided to send Pazenga back with the phylactery and an offer of peace. After he did this we quickly exited the lion-tomb thinking that we had achieved our mission. As we sped away from the lion-tomb, hobgoblins appeared in the mouth and eyes and shouted something in Galifarian about having recaptured the phylactery and that the “Honor Guard” should not be allowed to escape. It was then that I realized that the Ghost Lord was a prisoner in his own home, held captive by the hobgoblins of the Redhand. The hobgoblins had made a fatal error, had they not pursued us we would have mistakenly allowed them to retain control of the Ghost Lord thinking that we had already fulfilled our mission.

A hobgoblin sorcerer and two unarmed martial artists rappelled out of the lion’s eyes, exhorted into battle by a female hobgoblin spellbinder that seemed to be their leader. The hobgoblin sorcerer opened the battle with a lightning blast that rocked Zed back on his heels, but it was not sufficient to take our warforged champion out of the battle. The goblinoid pugilists laid into the other warforged, and although the hobgoblins fought bravely, without their army of shadow-warriors they could not hope to prevail. It soon became obvious that my allies had the hobgoblin monks well in hand so I cast a silence on Pazenga knowing he would take the hint and attack the hobgoblin evoker in order to prevent him from killing us with another salvo of lightning bolts or force spheres. The two goblinoid martial artists were quickly dispatched by our combined forces and after Pazenga closed with the hobgoblin warmage the battle was, for most intents and purposes, over.

After our entire party was swarming around the hapless hobgoblin spellbinder, I turned my attention to their leader. I cast a levitation magic on Pazenga in order to lift him up to the female arcanist’s level, but long before he gained the eye-balcony, the witch retreated out of sight. Pazenga gave pursuit but was unable to close due to her excessive lead. Realizing my error in allowing the Redhand to regain the phylactery we resolved to pursue the female hobgoblin in order to recover the item and wrest the Ghost Lord from their control. It took us some time, even with the levitate spell, to ascend to the level of the lion’s eye. While we were climbing and levitating, Zed decided to take up the pursuit of the female leader that Pazenga had given up. We were greatly concerned with the welfare our warforged swordmaster but we needn’t have worried for the “eye” level seemed entirely unpopulated and in a few short minutes we were reunited with Zed in the very trap chamber we had vacated only a few minutes prior. The shadow warriors were nowhere to be seen, leaving me to suspect that they had indeed been summoned by a spellbinder and were not permanent residents of the lion tomb.

After traveling a short distance we came upon a large ceremonial chamber of some sort that was dominated by a marble lion statue with an adjacent pool that was fenced with lion skulls. Floating in the pool was the rotting carcass of a large lion. We had only stepped foot in the chamber when we were attacked by three small undead beings very reminiscent of the deadly aberrations known as dolgaunts. Like dolgaunts, these creatures also possessed a set of two long tentacles but in their case the tentacles grew from the chest not the back. Their tactics were nearly identical to the dolgaunts we had fought after the crash of the Cloudant. They attempted to ensnare Zed and Pazenga in their tentacles and then draw the life force out of their victims. I instinctively knew that the best way to counter the deadly tentacles was to use time-bending magic to slow the creatures so their rope-like limbs could be avoided. For this reason I darted through our ranks and released the power of my time slowing spell. One of the three was able to resist the power of my spell through will force alone but the others began to move with the tell-tale quicksand-like slowness that speaks of the spell’s effects. It was a difficult battle bottled up in the corridor as we were but with the influence of the spell of slowing, Zed and Pazenga were able to defeat the creatures with minimal assistance.

We had only just begun to take stock of our injuries when we were again attacked, this time by an invisible assailant that we presumed to be the hobgoblin leader. She cast a subtle but deadly illusion that made allies appear as enemies and enemies appear as allies. For a short time it seemed that we might all be slain for Zed and Smelt had fallen prey to the insidious illusion spell and attacked Pazenga and each other. Zed was screaming something about Karrnathi zombies. Thinking quickly I darted to the front of the column and cast an illusion of a zombie so that Zed would have an invulnerable target for his fury. This was not completely necessary as it turned out that the cry of a friend in pain would break the glamer and end the spell’s hold. The problem being that surviving a slash from Zed’s razor-sharp adamantine blade is easier said than done.

While this self-destructive skirmish was unfolding the invisible hobgoblin witch began firing spells at our company. Many of them were targeted at Pazenga and had no effect on the strong willed githzerai. By the time the illusion had run its course, the hobgoblin spellbinder had wisely given up on Pazenga as a target and instead began to fire on Elarin. Before the hobgoblin witch could be located, she incapacitated Elarin with a spell that reduced the keen-minded elf to a drooling moron. When the elf continued to ineptly search for her as might a village idiot she blasted him into unconsciousness with an unknown spell. The hobgoblin enchantress had committed a fatal error, however, in that Pazenga had been carefully listening for the chanting of words of power that indicate spell casting. Paz identified her position as floating near the ceiling, the very reason we were unable to locate her. Our gith martial artist ran up the back of the lion statue and tackled the invisible sorceress in mid-air. The two of them plunged to the floor together, though only Zed was visible. I placed another silence magic upon Pazenga to prevent the witch from spell casting but she had prepared countermeasures and thus was barely inconvenienced.

Paz was able to land a couple of blows before the witch again slipped through our fingers with a dematerializing spell of some sort. She had actually moved, invisibly, into the very altar room wherein I had taken refuge. The hobgoblin witch’s illusion spell wore off and she became visible but she managed to cast the spell that had begun this misadventure, the shadow warrior spell. The altar room was now filled with shadowy hobgoblins and I was surrounded and unable to move under the threat of their dark swords. Zed and Pazenga attempted to come to my rescue but our construct-swordsman found the shadow creatures as difficult to slay as had our gith monk. Throwing caution to the wind, Pazenga ignored the shadow spell and simply dove into the room, leaping and cart wheeling around the slashing hobgoblin warriors. The goblinoid echantress retreated before him but he was able deliver a series of painful blows until he, also, was blasted with the unconsciousness spell that had laid Elarin low.

I alone stood between the beguiler witch and escape. Unable to cast spells with Pazenga’s silence so near I was forced to fight with Bryanna’s Staff of Life. I could no more harm the goblin sorceress with it than I could out fence Zed, but I kept her busy long enough for Pazenga to heal himself and reenter the fray. As Pazenga threw a rushing blur of punches and kicks at the female hobgoblin spellbinder, I slipped my wife’s staff between her legs to keep the hobgoblin off balance. In a few heartbeats she was overwhelmed by the sheer speed and intensity of blows and eventually Pazenga was able to strike a nerve bundle in her neck that caused her reel in pain. Sensing victory, Pazenga moved in for the kill, mercilessly inflicting blow after blow, and soon the sorceress collapsed from internal bleeding. Somehow we had managed to survive, against the odds, once again. And more importantly we were in possession of the phylactery as well as other items of arcane power borne by the hobgoblin witch.

We continued our trek through the lion-tomb in the sole remaining direction left to us and soon we came upon what we took to be the throne room of the Ghost Lord. The Ghost Lord was indeed a lich as we had been told, this clear by the dry boney nature of his undead form. He was attended by an unliving warrior sheathed in cloth strips, almost certainly some sort of mummy. Power surrounded the lich’s desiccated corpse as flies surround a rotted sun-cooked carcass. Fighting down my own fear and loathing, I brought the phylactery forward in a gesture of peace. The Ghost Lord must have realized the danger presented by the staff I carried for he would not allow me to approach and instead had his guardian take the phylactery from me.

I did not want to appear weak before the evil magic-user for fear that he would turn on us. Therefore I requested a reward for our service, something an evil creature would understand. The Ghost Lord sent his mummy henchman forth to fetch an amulet as our reward for the phylactery‘s return. We will certainly not try out that amulet until we have the leisure time to study its properties. Treachery is hardly out of the question when dealing with such a vile creature. We bade the undead good riddance and left the lion tomb content to be as far away from that tomb of horrors as possible. Sadly when we reentered the light we saw that our elven escort and their owl companions had been slain by the Redhand. I should have told them to leave and return later but I presumed that the power of flight would keep them safe.

As I write this entry we are encamped within the blasted dustbowl that surrounds the Ghost Lord’s tomb. I am very concerned with our lack of mounts and the impact such a long slow trek might have on our ability to effect the war’s outcome. At the Korranburg Library I once read of a powerful illusion spell that just might help us here. If only I could remember how it goes………..