Black Box: La Llamada de los dioses - Session 11

With this post I'm going on with the campaign log of La Llamada de los dioses I'm refereeing for my regular game group at La Cofradía del rol, for previous campaign sessions you may read these links: #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 #9 #10

Lich by Paraxyzm (CC BY-SA 3.0)

As always remember you may find spoilers, so if you are playing the campaign or think about playing it you probably do not want to read more beyond this point (or perhaps you want, who knows).

In the previous session Grognak was under the evil influence of the crown of the old rules whose tomb they discovered after jumping swiftly to seize it, after this daring and unconscious act he had entered in berserker fury, so he chased the rest of the group who inmediately run to avoid being caught, as the mood of the barbarian wasn't certainly friendly, something you can roughly judge by the following images:

As I was telling you Grognak was chasing the group and they were clever enough to lower the grating protecting the entrance to the clerics chambers as a way to stop his crazy dash. Shortly after acomplishing this they quickly hide in one of the side passages as they soon hear the hasty steps of an Orc patrol coming to the zone to investigate and who stopped right in front of the grating after hearing a few words in their language that echoed through the cavern without knowing exactly where these came from, a moment which Grognak exploited to attack them wihth his sword through the holes of the grating led by his homicidal rage.

In teh combat that followed Orcs fought viciously and even rised the grating to fight the barbarian, although it did them much and soon decided to flee from his rage, it was in this moment that Grognak recovered his sanity free from the influence of the cursed crown and a cloaked Dwarf appeared, known as Aradum Stormpike, who proposed to them to join the group with the following sentence (of course he was Jose's new character):

There's work to do if we want to stay alive,
there will be time for more explanations...

And it's true it wasn't the moment to loiter with introductions because more Orcs were coming and it's a matter of starting to run to achieve advantage over their enemies, achieveing it after going back to the lake and the waterfall they had previously discovered and going into the tunnel which leads to one of the chambers adjacent to the complex entrance (indeed where a dark elf died due to an improvised bomb made whith the powder of the weapons of the Sombra Rauda) they improvised a tramp burning one of the logs they found in the fireplace of the Penumbra clerics chambers, as it burns emerges a cloud of toxic smoke that gets kill one of the chasers of the group and makes the rest flee.

Going back the group decided to explore some zones to which they had not paid much attention, this allowed them to discover the cell where Thoin Hojafuerte, the leader of the dwarfs slaved by Penumbra clerics to enlarge their lair, was confined and free him (this allowed them to get a deal so one of Dwarfs will go with the characters, thanks above all to good work by Kai the samurai), they also ambushed another orcish patrol investigating their fellows' disappearance; after defeating them they reached their lair and set out to to register it in search of supplies and other items that might be useful.

Finally they returned to the cleric's chambers and discovered two adjacent rooms to these, the first one had the ground covered with strange and ominous glyphs and in the second (which is accessed through a secret door that was discovered by Luna, the half-elf) what appear to be the necessary elements to perform a magic invocation: a pentacle inscribed on the floor of the room, a strange book propped on an easel (perhaps a spells handbook?), some skulls covered by skull covered with soot-like powder...

Ilustración de Tazio Bettin (CC BY-SA 3.0 IT), coloured by me

At this point the characters decided to use thesolution they commonly apply to every problem or potentially dangerous situations, and that is none other than lighting a fire (we know that fire purifies everything ...) and providing that the content of the room could be used for not too good purposes doused everything they found with oil and threw a burning torch into the interior, making it all quickly engulfed by flames...

What they not thought was that the "soot" of the skulls was of such an explosive nature as the powder they have used in their makeshift bombs, luckily their saving throws against breath weapons succeeded, otherwise some players would have to start thinking about new characters for the next session...

What will happen in the next session?

As is customary to say:

To be continued...

The graphical elements of these post without proper credits are created with elements from

Freepik and Openclipart.

This entry it's also available in the following languages:
Castellano Català