Well, well, well. Well, well. Well.
So, not good news this week. It may not be a five session curse anymore, but rest assured, I am still cursed. Today, that curse spread. Today, we TPK’ed.
To begin at the beginning, we began in the haunted forest, attempting to take a long rest. It didn’t go so well. As a “warforged”, I did not need to sleep to rest, so I was left on watch. Unfortunately, my natural 1 on perception meant that I did not see the horrors approaching, because I was too busy having another vision (of being in a familiar-yet-unfamiliar hut in the swamp, from the perspective of the shorter fellow from last time).
The horrors were accompanied by a shadow horror, a much larger creature made of shadow, wearing a cloak of skin. It could teleport through shadows, hit like a truck, and potentially caused fear with each successful strike. Yeah, this wasn’t the easiest fight.
During the surprise round, we were each attacked by a horror. We took some damage, but nothing too serious – healing us all up with Healing Spirit at the end of the last session made the difference in this fight, to be honest. You’ll see what I mean.
Once we could do something, we sort of flailed in panic. We were all pretty low on abilities, which is never a fun situation to be in. Especially with how hard these creatures were hitting us; one of the regular horrors did more than 40 points of damage on Mercenary with a single critical hit.
But flail we did, and eventually brought down horror after horror. Our priest “friend” went down first, then I brought him back up with a risky final spell slot use of Healing Spirit only for Mercenary to go down, then the priest went down again before I could heal anyone, and then Parvus did as well, so I was the only one on my feet, facing off against the shadow horror (which had taken some damage) and the two remaining regular horrors (which had not taken much damage at all). Luckily, I got Mercenary back on her feet and she critically hit the shadow horror, pumping her last smite into her attack and smashing it to dust. Once the regular horrors fluffed their attacks against us, we dealt with them, with the final blow coming from my Shillelagh, I’m proud to say.
To put things in perspective, though, when the fight ended, I had 14 hit points left, Mercenary had 1, and Parvus (whom I healed back up right before the end) had 3. The priest was still unconscious. That’s how close the fight came to wiping us out entirely.
However, it wasn’t the greatest horror from the session (ahaha…ha…). After the fight, we decided to try hiding out in the cellar of the priest’s chapel to take our long rest. The forest wasn’t exactly a friendly place for us. On the way, we ran into a giant insect creature, but we were using the shadow horror’s cloak as a disguise (it was big enough to hide all of us) so it didn’t notice us. We subsequently reached the chapel, entered the cellar, and took our long rest.
After the rest, we could hear noises coming from above. It turned out to be the count and countess. They knew we were there, so we emerged and tried bargaining with them while the priest grovelled in fear. We didn’t end up liking what they were selling, so we tried to kill them. They killed us instead.
Obviously, it was more complicated than that. The count was a wizard and the countess a fighter, one of whom proved to be too much for us and the other not. As the fight began, both the count and the priest ran outside before the door was barred by a trio of bad guys, trapping us inside. The priest ran away and was never seen from again, while the count massacred us with spells. He also Counterspelled about half of the things I tried to cast, rendering me significantly reduced in what I could do during the fight.
Although, his spells did a whole lot of damage to his own people, too. He massively damaged his wife with the Cloudkill he cast into the chapel, and also trapped her for a couple of rounds with Web. Then he put a Wall of Fire through a couple of his dudes, killing them (because, at that point, I had Confused them, so they couldn’t move out of it).
The best combo on our side came from Parvus auto-critically hitting the countess after I cast Hold Person on her, walloping her a couple of times to cleave her in twain. We also managed to kill the escort, again, mostly thanks to the count’s own magic.
Unfortunately, between the spells and the hitting, Mercenary fell first and was dragged out of the chapel to die. Then Parvus went down, when it was just the two of us versus the count and he hit her with Blight. She rolled a natural 1 and another failure on her death saves and died. Finally, I transformed into a Giant Toad, but could do absolutely nothing as the count beat me to unconsciousness and beyond. The gargoyle spirit in the lantern actually stabilised me, but it was all over anyway. With two characters dead and the third captured by a dude who practically killed his own wife, we decided to call it.
RIP Moist. You were a beautiful mushroom that was gone too soon.
So, campaign over. It’s been just under six months, I’ve been through four characters, and that’s that. I’m a bit disappointed, but at the same time, I think I’m becoming inured to character death in D&D. Practice, I guess.
We spent the rest of the session doing what was effectively a session zero for the next campaign, which we will be starting this coming weekend. I’m still not certain about what character I’ll be playing, so nothing’s new there, at least. We’re going to go through Ghosts of Saltmarsh, which we’re all looking forward to, so tune in next week to see how we get on.