The Dungeon Game: Weekends at Stonehell, session 25
The Crownless Company explore some Wizard Bullshit and find Master Fulkth, the wizard who controls the bugbears on floor 3.
Party Members
- Tina the Titanic - Level 8 Fighter
- Vaco Adjacent - Level 6 Paladin
- Tobias Little, a.k.a. Lil Toby - Level 7 Cleric
- Telperion Desh - Level 7 Lich
- Huntsman - Level 6 Martial Artist
Followers
Tiny Tina (Cleric 7), Princess Pizzabones (Thief 5), Rutger (Robot 7), Captain Nasty (Fighter 6) and Jenx (Level 4 Bombard)
Session Recap
Deciding it was finally time to go find this so called Master Fulkth, the party take the elevator down to floor 3, the smooth walled part of the dungeon still humming with ambient magical energy and giving headaches to everyone in the party who is not magically attuned.
The group skirt around the outside of the quadrant, exploring the rooms and connections, fighting off random Bugbear patrols. They find a winding staircase heading down into the depths of the dungeon, but decide not to pursue that right now, and instead head east, eventually finding what appear to be a lounge and living quarters for the curious pale small men that seem to live on this floor of the dungeon. Due to an ochre jelly being attracted to the party however their new companion, Jenx, ends up fireballing the room, destroying the jelly and also everything else in there as well.
After some uncertainty as to who has the scroll of Knock (With Princess Pizzabones eventually admitting she has it) they use it to open the magically sealed door to the east, which leads into a strange triangular pool of pinkish-grey goop. Vaco Adjacent dives into the pool, and retrieves a blue oval stone, which is identified to be a minor IOUN Stone, which he ends up attuning to.
Heading back south the group run into more bugbears, and get pinched in after Princess Pizzabones appears to trigger some sort of magical alarm in the room, which alerts Fulkth and his bugbear flunkies. While the back line try and handle themselves best they can (which consisted of Lil Toby being confused by a bugbear's Chaos Vomit and wading in swinging his Staff of Friendship to clobber the thing), the front line is handled by Jenx just being exasperated by all these pumpkinheads and throwing a fireball into the room, with the still invisible Princess only barely managing to scurry away into a corner to avoid it.
Having made a bunch of noise the party retreat and wait the hit back, which never seems to come. So instead they approach the room that Fulkth and his remaining bugbears are holed up. The two groups negotiate, but while Fulkth is keenly aware he is very much outnumbered and outpowered by the party, his ego does not allow him to simply give up so he insists they leave his territory, declaring that he has laid his claim to this place first, and threatening to hit them with a fireball if they do not comply.
Rutger the robot decides to distract him, giving a chance for the party to close in and engage, so he crawls along the ceiling and gets within sight of Fulkth. True to his word, the magician unleashes a fireball....right onto himself. The strange magics of the lenses in the room appear to warp and distort the spell, and the magician is engulfed into his own ball of fire, burning to ash.
The two remaining Bugbears, who clearly did not have much interest in their boss anymore, agree to gather whoever else is left and come work for the Crownless Company. The party are not sure they want to keep messing with the magical lenses right now, so explore further south finding a big lab with a strange arcane machine and the faint smell of primates in the air.
While Telperion Desh works on studying and repairing the contraption the group find the adjoining holding cells, now full of just skeletons, dispatching some animated monkey bones in the process. Finally, Telperion declares that the machine is operation and he will attempt to use it boost his already high intellect! He dons the headpiece, while the party politely and wisely step out of the room. However it seems his attempts at fixing the machine were at vain. He tries to start it a couple of times, but the magical energy circuits simply loop in on themselves, building up energy before the entire machine explodes in a storm of lightning and sparks.
With the failed attempt the party decide to call it good, and head back to the surface, Telperion slightly worse for wear and his hair now resembling a dandelion puff from all the electricity that ran through him.
Observations
A fun session this week, as Wizard Bullshit always seems to be. I really enjoy Floor 3 of Stonehell, and my players have also commented on that as well. Fulkth was an interesting encounter, as while strong on his own (being a level 6 magic user), his muscle got obliterated earlier. Some of the players, notably Tina's player, wanted to recruit or possibly arrest the guy, but the text paints him as would by tyrant and egomaniac, so I figured he would not surrender even if it was clearly the only way he was going away with his life.
So instead the stand off happened, and as he tried to cast fireball the random chance turned against him and he rather climatically blew himself up, which gave me quite the chuckle for the rest of the session.
The machine nearby was also an interesting thing. Earlier in the campaign a player had expressed interest in finding some way to uplift Coal the Bear so she (Coal is female in our game) could join the party, and the brain machine on floor 3 was perfect fit for it, so I decided to note that the machine can be disassembled to get the needed equipment to uplift Coal. However at this point we have been using the companion system (where every PC only gets one follower, but they are effectively a secondary character) and so Coal just..made no sense to really uplift. Telperion for better or worse could not roll the 1-in-6 chance to boost his Knowledge score, but also didn't die from the exploding machine.
All in all, this was some good Wizard Bullshit, and I look forward to the players messing around with this part of Stonehell further. Also, they got some more recruits with the Bugbears.