Shard Saga – Torrential rainstorms in Eldeen Reaches

This is the second session of the Eberron campaign in Eldeen Reaches. You can read about the first session here. And my DM told us:

About a month has passed since you retrieved the strange shard of brown crystal. Since that time, the weather patterns around the village have normalized. You now hear rumors of another place in the Eldeen Reaches that has been experiencing strange weather. This other village has been receiving frequent, torrential rainstorms, so much so that the forest close to it has now become a swamp.

We had a new player, who’s playing JaK Bau’er the half-orc avenger. I think he’s looking for something… and he had 24 hours to do so…

Part 1

So the dry spell disappeared from Honeybeech in the first session. In this second session, the village Sugarcliff had tons and tons of rain. We did some preliminary exploring and found the worst affected area, where a part of the forest near the village was turned into a swamp.

I don’t care what my DM says, that’s not a crocodile…

The monsters’ attacks were mainly poisonous. And they moved through water without penalties (which was conveniently difficult terrain for us). We never got to cross that stream in the battle…

And my halfling dealt the finishing blow to that crocodile. Critical hit with a 20 on a d20. Take that, crocodile wannabe.

Near the pool of water where the crocodile started was a small ruin-like opening. The most logical thing to do was to go down it.

We ended up in a long sewer-like tunnel. And the DM planned for a couple of hostiles with long ranged attacks.

Our invoker nicknamed 3 of the monsters as Diarrhoea (elemental. I think it’s Drecht or something), Constipation (the grey coloured blob), and Piece of S*&! (the brown *cough* coloured blob). It didn’t help that the monsters kept flinging stuff off of their bodies on us…

After that long battle, we reached the end of the long tunnel to appear at… another long tunnel.

That is a lot of ground to cover…

Tried a dramatic face off shot.

Sometime during the encounter, a viper horror launched an attack with vines. Vines sprung up from beneath us, and grabbed us. All of us were hit, and immobilised by the vines. The invoker saved out of it first. Then my halfling teleported out of the tendrils’ grip (yay!) and was free.

But the bard had a hardest time. He used a lot of healing on us, and he was struggling to keep all of us alive. He was blinded, vulnerable to poison, taking ongoing 10 damage, and immobilised… (that’s him at the bottom of the picture)

We finished the encounter, but it was late in the day, so we stopped. My DM still had 2 more encounters planned, so we’ll play that another day.

Part 2

The friend playing as the half-orc avenger had something on, so we continued without him. We assumed that we took an extended rest, which also made things easier for the DM to track. Our next encounter brought us the lizard man, the water rune, a zombie and a dog. Or wolf dog. I think.

Half way through the encounter, the water rune filled half the battlefield with water (the left half in the picture), which made it difficult terrain if we fail an Athletics check. I remembered it got progressively harder, from Athletics check 13 to 17.

We reached the last encounter, the final battle at the end of the ruin/tunnel. We killed those lizard men quite easily. I think we let our guard down. We were spamming our daily powers and action points on them. When the last of the lizard men died, this appeared:

With about 75% of our resources spent, the bad-ass lizard (as I’ll call it) came at a very bad time.

It was a tough fight. My halfling maneuvered around the bad-ass lizard to get to the water rune, to try to deactivate some of its powers.

The bard and invoker came along to help with the rune too. But the melee combatants took care of the bad-ass lizard.

As a reward, we were given a blue shard. If attached to a weapon or implement, it adds +1 damage to an acid power. If attached to an armour piece, it resists 2 acid damage.

And Kepler got to keep it.

Miscellaneous thoughts

When I first thought up Kepler, I wanted to play him in third person mode. In previous gameplays, it was “I’m going to move here, and use such-and-such on this bugger”. For this Eberron campaign, I wanted to try “Kepler will hop over here and psychically freak out the zombie”.

I remembered to do so in the first session. In the first part of the second session, I forgot. Then in the second part of the second session, I remembered to roleplay in the third person.

I’m not even sure if my friends noticed it.

Oh, and the water runes were controlled by an Undine (or Ondine).