It was a big one today. Mammoth session, and an important story beat for the campaign. Let’s get into it.
The session began with the party, plus Duck and minus Borfel, driving towards Castletown. They got unlucky again, and were caught in another storm, but aside from brief stints where strange, source-less music played, Monk grew a third eye, and everyone but Brakken went invisible, nothing too exciting happened. They did gain a speed boost, however, so were able to reach Castletown just before dusk.
Leaving Clourc behind to guard the well-hidden car (since his player wasn’t able to join again) the trio of Brakken, Monk and Poppy, plus Duck, proceeded to the town gates on foot. There, they discovered them to be closed, and the guard above could not be persuaded or bullied into letting them through. So they investigated other means of entering.
Eventually they found a spot on the outer wall that they figured they could get over, and thanks to Poppy wildshaping into a spider, decent stealth rolls all around, and poor perception checks on my part, they made it into Castletown. However, upon attempting the same trick to get over the walls surrounding the heavily guarded keep, they almost made it but failed their stealth checks at the eleventh hour and were spotted. Thus began the first of what would be several large combats in this session.
Poppy and Monk were already down in the courtyard, while Brakken and Duck were still on the wall. The latter two split up, each charging to the closest tower in the wall to fight the guards there, while the other two began to attack some of the guards from below. As the fight progressed, Poppy ended up back up on the wall with Brakken over the main gate, while Monk went to assist Duck. The guards kept on coming at the party, with a combination of scimitars and crossbows, and while the party didn’t make it through without a few scratches, they ended up wiping out the entire force.
Following this fight, Poppy healed everyone back up to full using Healing Spirit, and when a group of concerned citizens and town guard showed up at the gates, Brakken convinced them everything was alright and they went away. Then the party investigated the doors of the keep itself, and found them barred shut. However, there was also a number of unattended vehicles around the courtyard. Brakken put two and two together.
Using a spare piece of arcanite, Brakken started one of the cars and drove it through the doors, smashing them down. Taking the guards within by surprise, he managed to drive over several of them before crashing into a wall. The rest of the party followed, most notably with Poppy casting Heat Metal on Cousin Dirkolai before he disappeared out through a door. She managed to keep the spell up for almost the full ten rounds, dealing a significant amount of damage to him before it ended.
Thus began the second big fight of the session. The party were facing off against the rest of Cousin Dirkolai’s forces, excluding Dirkolai himself. Without covering it in too much detail, there were zombies, the party was almost wiped out, and in the end, all of the bad guys were dead and none of the party was. With another Healing Spirit, they got almost back up to full, and decided to pursue Dirkolai immediately, ending things once and for all.
Following Dirkolai, the party discovered that the lower floor of the castle, the old dungeon and storage rooms, were completely flooded. Taking the plunge, they encountered a trio of sharks, which they dealt with with much aplomb, and eventually found Dirkolai waiting for them.
He turned out to be quite an opponent. Brakken taking point, the party was able to break down a wall, causing the water to drain and removing their significant disadvantage against the shark-man. But not before Dirkolai beat Duck unconscious, and as the water drained, he was sucked out down the tunnel.
Once the water was down, Poppy tried to head down the tunnel to save Duck, but she found that it ended in a drop. Meanwhile, Brakken and Monk took on Dirkolai. With Poppy’s help after she cast Entangle, and Dirkolai struggling thanks to my terrible rolling, they managed to beat him down quite low, but he eventually knocked them both out. Still stuck in his spot, however, Poppy veritably hulked out from all her friends dying or being apparently dead, growing a bunch of spikes and changing colour, and threw three magic stones at him in a one-two-three that finished him off by exploding out his brain like a gunshot.
Poppy then healed Brakken and Monk to keep them from dying, and turned around to discover a bedraggled Duck come out of the tunnel, after a (very lucky) sequence of rolls that saw him manage to not die. And with that, the great showdown in Castletown was done. The party searched the rest of the keep, finding a bunch of goodies and not another living soul, and then bunkered down for a long rest with the intention of dealing with the fallout of their actions in the morning. And with that, the session ended.
And that was the end of a monster session, the longest we’ve had for a long time. But also, unfortunately, the last session we’ll have for some indeterminate time. I’m not sure when I’ll next be available to play as I’ll be travelling, so the next session will be coming when it’s coming. But, when we come back, we’ll get to see how the fallout of the party killing Dirkolai will shape up, and just what they’ll be getting up to next. So make sure to keep an eye on the blog so you can tune in for that when it comes.