Telengard 2, session 10: Into the courthouse

I had to cancel last week’s session due to illness, but we were back at it this week, albeit with a skeleton crew — only John, Matt, & Aaron could make this session!  Still, that left a reasonably balanced party of a barbarian, assassin, and cleric, plus the men-at-arms Roger, Dodger, and George Foreman, and Blazer the torchbearer.  The men-at-arms were given shields to go with their short bows, short swords, and leather armor; Blazer was already in mail with a sword, shield, and ten oil flasks, in addition to his torches so he needed no additional armaments.

The party decided to try their luck at exploring the old government building that houses a the court, council, and bank of old Skara Brae.  It was the bank that was the clincher.

The building was fairly solid and had no windows big enough to for the assassin to sneak inside, so they took the front door and forced their way in with a maul.  Inside they fought a variety of monsters.  The old courtroom had a jury of eight cyclopskin, a flying eye prosecutor, and a half-blind beholder as judge.  A well placed sonic blast spell by the cleric, who used his d30 in place of the normal damage roll of d8 (rolling 24!), destroyed all the lesser monsters and injured the beholder badly.  The beholder retreated through a hole in the ceiling, and the party continued exploring, but he sonic boom awoke a very grumpy cyclops and his pet bear.  This proved to be a pretty challenging fight for the party, as the cyclops took full advantage of the C&C grappling rules to pick up and toss the barbarian (killing Roger in the process), and then trying to pull apart the cleric like a fly.  The assassin was badly mauled by the bear, but working together the party managed to down both the bear and the ‘clops.  The cleric and barbarian took to looting the cyclops’ lair while the assassin wandered off to loot the courtroom.  A phenomenal stealth roll kept him out of the beholder’s sight (who had been waiting near the hole in the ceiling to to ambush anyone who came back).  The assassin managed to defeat the wounded beholder, while the rest of the party gathered the loot.

Having taken out the main inhabitants of the building, it was more of a clean-up operation as the party dealt with some giant mushrooms in one office (simply burning them with oil), some Saucer Fungi in the council chambers, and an undead librarian in the archives.  The librarian nearly killed the assassin, who as usual slunk off alone to check out the archives room, while the barbarian was busy pounding away on the vault of the bank, to no effect other than making a lot of noise.  It shushed him when accidentally knocked over an old clay tablet, and then attacked by grabbing him by the throat and choking him, and this prevented him from calling for help.  I imagined the chilling ‘shushing’ scene from Saving Private Ryan, as the assassin was slowly choked out, his friends just yards away and unable to hear him because of all the racket the barbarian was making. But just before he passed out, the assassin managed to draw his sword and clatter it against a wall, making enough noise to draw in the cleric, who was able to turn the thing, and revive the assassin, who was down to -5 or 6 hp.

Examining the archives further, the party found some ledgers of public works and were able to find information on where all the old statutes of the legendary heroes were originally set up.  They also found an old book of the city’s laws, which they sold for a tidy profit to a sage.  Among the cyclops’ treasures was a Tome of Understanding, rolled randomly at the table, which the cleric read.  Keeping with the bibliographic theme, they also realized that the book set on a podium in the building’s foyer was not a visitor’s register but in fact a Bestiary of Blood, completion of which would open the magically locked bank vault!

So now the party has a lot of ‘missions’ should they choose to accept them — tracking down statues, hunting the monsters needed to open the vaults, checking out the rumors they’ve already gathered, and the last big building in the plaza, the Bazaar, still waits.