So let me set the scene. The session began right where we left off, with me as the only one on guard duty as the others slept, facing off against a troll. Unfortunately, the troll got a higher initiative than I did. So it attacked me.
It hit me three times. The first strike took out a chunk of my hit points, the second strike was a critical hit that brought me to unconsciousness, and the third strike automatically made me fail two of my death saves. Not a great situation.
Qiris was next in initiative and the only one with a high enough passive perception to have been awoken by the ruckus. He got up and blasted the troll for some damage while shouting for everyone else to wake. But my turn then came before anyone else’s.
I rolled a 9 and died. So that’s my new record for how quickly I died in a session – less than ten minutes in, I think. But it wasn’t the end for Dribble, as you’ll later see.
The rest of the fight almost turned very bad, as I was the only one with fire damage and thus the only one able to keep the troll from regenerating and thus not dying. The party hammered it with damage as Dorne tanked its retaliation, but the fight didn’t end until Qiris, out of desperation, picked up my corpse and pulled on my tail to launch one tiny last bit of fire at the troll, singing it enough to shut down its regeneration and allow the party to kill it.
Taking my body and the body of the NPC the troll killed, Dorne said a few prayers before the party slipped them into the water. However, after sinking they quickly began to rise again – in the arms of a pack of kuo-toa. These kuo-toa took the party hostage and transported them on a ship to their home on the shore of the lake.
However, when the kuo-toa arrived they were killed by a rival group of kuo-toa and the party came into the care of a high priest. He explained that his daughter had formed a splinter faction that worshipped a new god and he needed to defeat her to bring her followers back into the fold. He wanted the party to pose as gift sacrifices from him to her so they could ambush and defeat her.
The other NPCs were also there – the ones we were split off from last session. The full group merged together once more and one of the other NPCs, a mysterious dragonborn, asked for my body (which the kuo-toa had brought because waste not, want not, and there was good meat on my bones – Dribble would have approved). He took it and cast Raise Dead upon me.
I had some visions along the way. Some lightly touching on my backstory, some touching on the powers the dragonborn was tapping into – which may or may not be connected, I honestly don’t know. Let’s just say, the future will be very interesting for Dribble.
I came back to life but was sorely shaken by the experience and didn’t say much for the rest of the session, except for a brief time where I had to act as a translator. But otherwise, the group was back together. We took a long rest and in the morning went with the high priest to enact his plan.
The plan worked… until it didn’t. We launched the ambush and the combined might of Dorne, Qiris and the high priest quickly defeated the priest’s daughter, but with her dying breath she screeched a prayer into the air. Moments later, the water just past the docks of this village began to bubble.
The kuo-toa around us started to panic as a great being erupted from the water. With two simian heads and several large tentacles, Demogorgon, Prince of the Abyss, began to approach.
Azrul and I immediately failed Charisma saving throws (I wasn’t helped by the significant penalty I was under thanks to have been raised from the dead) upon seeing him, with Azrul falling unconscious and I becoming paralyzed. Luckily, the rest of the party retained their senses and grabbed us as they fled. They were briefly waylaid by some other kuo-toa, but they mostly ignored them and managed to flee into the tunnels, to relative safety.
Eventually Azrul and I came back to our senses. The dragonborn NPC told us he had business to attend to and that we would only slow him down, but his parting words to me were that what he did to me was not done for free. Interesting times for Dribble indeed.
With no clearly better option, we began our journey through the dark once more, heading – as far as we knew – towards the nearby-ish duergar settlement. Several days into the journey we encountered a group of duergar riding some strange beasts and heading in the same direction. We did some trade with them (which I translated for) and then followed their route at a reasonably friendly distance.
However, along the way Qiris spotted some figures in the dark behind us. Humanoid figures. Dorne went forward to warn the duergar and they responded by spurring on their beasts, hurrying away and leaving us alone to deal with whoever this new group was. Then we heard the figures behind us speak, but only I understood what they said: “found you”.
It was the drow. Our former captors. They had managed to track us down.
That’s where the session ended. And what a session. Despite how often my characters die, this is actually the first time I’ve had a character resurrected and where it’s going to lead Dribble, in both the short and long term, should prove to be quite interesting. You’ll even get to see the immediate effects in the next episode, I think.
Things also started to look pretty dicey in that troll fight. Just goes to show how tough encounters can be when you need to do a certain type of damage and don’t really have the means to cause it because the only party member with any capability of doing so is immediately killed. But that often results in some of the more novel solutions that you get in D&D.
And that’s not even mentioning Demogorgon. Let’s not forget that happened.
Anyways, if you’re keen to see how Dribble starts to deal with the new status quo in his life, whether we manage to defeat the drow, and just how many more demon lords we’re going to run into and have to flee from, do be sure to tune in next week for the next episode of Dribble’s Grand Adventure.