At the Mines of Madness Finale

We wrapped up the last session of At the Mines of Madness last week, a session that I've forgotten much of the fine details. I do recall that in a fit of characteristic paranoia the party buried their treasure since they were afraid of it turning them into aberrant horrors, which to be fair was apt since the aberrant corruption caused Liz to grow a carapace over her arm, and Beth's character to grow a gibbering mouth on her side (but since Liz wanted the mouth, they decided to trade). Picking up where we left off, the characters following a trail of dark green slime that lead into the mining quarry, deducing mine 13 to be the source of the problems due to a steady stream of water trickling forth. They figured there was a lot of bad shit inside, but unable to make any worthwhile preparations ventured forth and trounced my skill challenge to avoid getting lost from dimensional warping and psychic static fairly easily. It's good when you have associated skills.


They located the shrine, which had a heavily damaged earth tumbler sitting just outside the entrance. The damage allowed an elemental to mostly free itself from its Khyber dragonshard prison, meaning that they had to fight it and try to rebind it to the shard so that it would stop escaping and harassing them. Despite only being a level 2 solo, its combined slams allowed it to immediately bloody Randy's battlemind, to which he proclaimed that it was a good thing he would doing his job proper, as it could have outright dropped or possibly killed anyone else in the party. I wasn't worried since Liz's rogue is thoroughly optimized and Beth's liberal use of Thunder keyword attacks kept it's Defenses perpetually reduced to brute levels.


Repairing the earth tumbler cost them a Make Whole ritual scroll, but with the net gain of an elemental vehicle I think they're more than willing to call it a wash. Inside the shrine they found more fell taints, some orc skeletons, and a pool containing some chuul nymphs that they sealed with stone sarcophagi because they were ridiculously paranoid at what might happen if they had to go into the water (and Josh failed numerous skill checks to try and freeze it). They did fish out a dead body before hand that had a time-warping wondrous item, so it wasnt all that bad. Their brief venture into the aberrant shrine ended once they'd found a reality tear, sealed it, and toppled an idol dedicated to Dagon.


On their way out of town, they decided to hit up the inn and discovered the last reality tear, so took precautions that involved burning the entire inn to the ground, detonating ale kegs in the cellar where it was located, and then burying the whole site (just to be sure). The only surviving creature was a lowly flumph that the two female players (Liz and Beth) immediately befriended...and queried as to whether it could wear a snazzy hat. The little guy proved useful when they made camp in town and were attacked by a leveled-up ethereal marauder...or rather he would have, had Liz been able to successfully pantomime to the party that there was a monster outside. Eh, it died quickly regardless of its Elite status, so whatever. Randy can drop it off at a Gatekeeper organization in Zarash'ak to up his reputation.


That was the last session in a nutshell, next Tuesday they're off to Greyshore so that they can try and find a boat back to Zarash'ak so that they can report what happened. They do know that someone from Greyshore had stopped by Shardpit to try and buy all the golden relics that they buried, but they don't know why. So...we'll see what happens next week.

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