Play Report 30 — Holy Water

This time, Akela was missing while Hant and Almuund’s players were around.

There are several paths forward into the dungeon, but Hant and Almuund are concerned that if they don’t deal with the surviving corpse-eaters, they will be picked off from behind. They prepare to assault the room that the corpse eaters are hiding in, Hant reloading his pistol and Almuund (who recognizes them as undead beings) preparing to abjure his spiritual enemy.

Unfortunately the foray is disastrous. The duo don’t realize how many corpse-eaters are up there (7!) and when Hant rushes the stairs he rolls disastrously on his initiative. His leg is wounded and he holds his ground, firing into the room and catching one of the creatures in the arm non-lethally. Almuund abjures, but weakly enough that it is inconsequential. The corpse-eaters are cornered and angry and so waste no time in beating Hant into unconsciousness with their elongated limbs – he falls to the floor with a particularly nasty chest wound.

Almuund luckily has a backup plan in the form of a large amount of holy water he has been conjuring whenever he has extra time. He’s got ten flasks of the stuff on him. He douses the entrance to the corpse-eaters lair with one flask, driving them back and making space so that he can heave Hant to safety, leaving a trail of water as he goes. When he gets a brief look into the corpse-eater lair, he sees that it is full of displaced flagstones and has a pit with alcoves below it. He recognizes it as likely an illegal burial site, though whether the nightmare came from that or came from elsewhere but incidentally animated the bodies within is unclear to him (the latter is, in fact, true).

Almuund pours a trail of holy water to dissuade pursuit as he drags Hant out the doors (briefly noting that the basilisk man’s puppet has vanished) and lays him on the floor. Hant needs medical attention but the party worries about the attention they would get from dragging him bleeding into their current rooms. Almuund casts the spell Minion, planning to give whatever being he summons the job of finding adequate supplies to dress the wounds in Hant’s chest. He succeeds in casting the spell, and I quickly collect a list of both dungeon encounters and local animals that would be appropriate results, and roll a Battlefly (from the module City of Poison). Out of the dungeon hovers a many limbed entity resembling a mixture of a dragonfly and a shrimp. It politely agrees to the task at hand, to Almuund’s surprise and carefully flies off, avoiding human eyes. In short order it returns with clean cloth to wrap Hant’s wounds, stolen from an open window in the city’s fortress.

Hant awakens 3 hours later, and the party prepares to reassess their situation and seek additional medical aid.