[DnD] Tomb of Horrors (GFF D&D Adventure X)

3 Dice Rolls Save vs weakness

His eyes clouded with blood and his berzerker rage completely blanking his mind, the minotaur continued to swing at the massive zombie. Mid-swing, he caught a glimpse of Slim, lying in a puddle of gore and for the barest fraction of a second, lucidity returned and Beefi was crushed inside at what was certainly going to be the end of his newest friendship.

Which of course served only to boost his rage to new levels.

Slamming his fists against his chest like an angry yeti, Beefi howled a cry of pain and anguish.

MMMMMOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

He smashed his mace once more into the Dracolich, determined that this foe would not escape unpunished.

Play "Now you fucked up" card, Devastating Strike on Dragon
Hit! 15 damage

Also, use the mace power thing to make the dragon re-roll it's save against ongoing damage

There's nowhere I can't reach.

1 Die Roll Enervating Slash vs Draco

I suddenly awaken with the taste of dog on my mouth. Garold, you didn't. This is the last straw. First you use me as a pool cleaner, and now you're trying to kiss me? If the dracolich doesn't kill you, I'll throttle you myself!

I shake the cobwebs from my head, and rise unsteadily to my feet. Summoning the last of my powers, I do my best to enervate the dragon. Unfortunately, my attack misses. I am most discouraged at my inability to hit something this large. Perhaps it's time to face the inevitable.

"Listen, this isn't working out at all. I'm running on fumes, and I just got kissed by a dog. You win, Mr. Dragon. You can have me. Eat me. (Actually, do you even have a stomach?) Ravage me. Make me your slave. Or toothpick. Or whatever.

But just let these idiots go.

I'm dropping my sword right now. This is me, surrendering."

Free Action: Second Wind w/o bonus.
Move Action: Stand from Prone.
Standard Action: Enervating Slash vs Dracolich.
-- 12+2+6=20 < 26 miss.
-- Attacks deal half damage vs. allies (save ends).
Free Action: Drop Rubicant Sword.
Minor Action: Sneakily equip Warblade Scimitar (same to-hit bonus; [W] damage reduced from 1d10 to 1d8.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

10 Dice Rolls uxig's second death save

The geonid's rocky fists open up a fresh wound on Garold's shoulder, but the shifter pays him no particular attention either. You expect a certain amount of being overlooked when you work for a dragon, but this was ridiculous.

If it survived, the Geonid planned to go into burglary. It may in face be invisible.

"What? Surrender? I... I guess so, sure. I feel so... dizzy, now. What did you... I'm on fire again. How did that... wha? The halfling stabbed me in the back while I was looking right at him. Typical halfling. Typical."

Gra-fa-zut quickly yanks the scimitar out of the dragon's flank, hiding it behind his back and whistling innocently.

15 damage to Garold from punch (bloodied)
5 damage to dragon from fire
9 damage to Sam from claw
7 damage to dragon from GFZ's mark response
Dragon saves vs ongoing fire
Dragon saves vs weakness

Sam 13, Garold 6, Gra-fa-zut 25, Uxig 20 (KO), Beefi 17, Geonid 15, Dracolich 14

How ya doing, buddy?

2 Dice Rolls *MORE DAMAGE.

I managed to swiftly step under the attack and promptly drove my blade angrily into the dragon's toe.

"Seems like there's trouble... AFOOT."

I laughed at my own joke. Because it was awesome.

Use swift parry. NO DAMAGE BECAUSE AWESOME.

Piercing strike AGAIN.

23 damage.

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4 Dice Rolls Possible Crit bonus

"Wait, I was surrendering! Why are you still attacking them? Stop that!"

Immediate Interrupt: Aegis of Assault vs. Geonid (instead of Dracolich)
Teleport to G-30, melee basic attack with flanking (+2) and escalating assault bonus (+0).
Hope that 7 damage is enough to kill it. If so, use free surge granted by Ravenclaw Warblade Scimitar property.

Note: Any attack that doesn't include GFZ as a target takes -2 penalty to hit. Claw may or may not have hit the halfling.

_____
TURN BEGINS:

Option A: Geonid is dead

"Oops, sorry about that, force of habit!"

"Anyway, my lord and master, here are some spoils of war which you may find of interest! Wow, look at this magic scroll - it says it can remove a single enduring effect."

"Sir Dragon, you are obviously suffering from an affliction of undeath. Please, allow me to heal you."

Move to E-33, right on top of Slim.
Minor: Rifle through his pack and take out Scroll (Remove Affliction)

.
Standard: Perform ritual on Dracolich.
-- Right, now I get a natural 20 here.
-- Heal Check 24. Dracolich takes damage equal to 1/4 of maximum HP.

_____
Option B: Geonid still lives

"Listen up, rock man. I'm busy surrendering here. Now's not the time to punch wolf-men, no matter how much they deserve it. Buzz off!"

Standard: Booming Blade vs Geonid.
-- 4+2+12=18<20, miss.
-- Missed with Swordmage At-Will: Free Action: Activate Blades of Fiery Wrath
---- Critical hit! 2d6+4+2=18 fire damage.
---- Use surge granted by Ravenclaw Warblade Scimitar.
Move to E-33, right on top of Slim.
Minor: Rifle through his pack and take out Scroll (Remove Affliction)

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

4 Dice Rolls alternative medicine

Here Garold was trying to save a dying man, and this stupid rock thing was inconsiderate enough to walk up and slug him. Couldn't it see he didn't have time to deal with it?. Even worse, the blood from his shoulder was now flowing down his arm onto his hand, making his work on Slim more difficult, and potentially causing more harm by transferring blood-borne pathogens. Garold was starting to get angry. REALLY ANGRY!

With a deepening growl his face grew into a snout, baring long teeth. His hair grew longer and his muscles strained against his clothes.
Minor - Longtooth Shifting.

He turned on the focus of his new rage. It was time to hurt something.
Standard - Serpent Arrow as a melee attack on Geonid. If GFZ already killed it, then as a ranged attack on Dracolich instead.
Hit! 15 damage.

With that taken care of, he returned his attention to Slim on the ground next to him. He tried to think of a proper treatment solution, but his mind was still too clouded by anger to come up with anything useful. This angered him more, and he simply yelled "STOP DYING!" at the unconscious kobold.
Minor - Heal check - stabilize the dying.
Failed.

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2 Dice Rolls *Damage

All thoughts of records, tactics or in fact combat skills were now completely lost to the maddened barbarian. He continued his rythmic strokes, pounding out a violent concerto on the dragon's flanks with his magical, musical mace.

Devastating strike
Hit! 21 damage

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

"A cure for undeath? Necromancy has certainly progressed in the past few centuries. Well, that's very kind of you. Go right ahead, it's not as if I can end up in worse shape if you foul it up."

Gra-fa-zut hurries through the ritual as quickly as he can, rattling off the complex mantras and drawing all the right sigils — more or less. There's a brilliant flash of radiant light as the winds of magic converge on the battered dracolich. The rest of the Five stagger backwards, shielding their eyes (the conscious ones, anyway).

As the spots clear from their eyes, they behold a majestic red dragon standing in the rapidly-dissipating mists, stretching her newly-intact wings for the first time in long ages.

"AT LAST! You are no threat to me now, Cuthbert-thrall. Come, bring your little cudgel against the renewed strength of — wait. My blood. I still don't — you didn't put —"

The dragon's eyes roll back in her head, and she crumples to the cave floor one final time. As her massive head crashes into the rocks, a single jagged tooth snaps free of her jaws and goes skittering across the stone.

Gra-fa-zut raises an eyebrow and double-checks the scroll. Ah, there it is. You have to consecrate the ritual to the subject's preferred deity. Would've been Tiamat in this case, probably. Gra-fa-zut was not particularly religious himself, so he'd just named a god at random. Can't even remember which one. Huh.

"I'm going to call that a technical knockout", the mace mutters uncertainly. "Anybody asks, she was undead the last time we saw her."

"This is bullshit", snarls Murray. "How am I supposed to steal the body and become a nightmarish man-headed dragon beast now? Was it so hard to just behead the damned thing? Honestly."

"Honk honk honk. Honk?"

"Thanks for the offer, but no. What am I gonna do with your body, crap on a fruit stand?"

Victory! An arbitrarily large amount of XP gained.
Yes, the rest of you did enough damage to kill it anyway.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

His foe finally vanquished, the minotaur cast about, looking for something else to vent his anger upon. The halfling looked fair game and the shifter definitely wanted some but the goose, ah yes, the goose knew something, the goose had a glint of pure evil in it's beady eyes and the goose had to die.

Whirling round to face his new enemy, Beefi slipped in the puddle of blood that was slowly spreading out of the Kobold and hit the ground hard, knocking him senseless.

I awoke to find myself covered in blood and spittle. I had no idea why and no idea why I was covered in gashes and bruises. Still, I seemed to be alive and the rest of the Five looked moderately healthy, except for Slim who was having a bit of a lie down.

In a moment of feverish inspiration, I grabbed the large chunk of dragon tooth that was lying on the floor and ran over to see if it would fit the giant lock.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

The ritual killed my new lord and master? No, it cannot be! Such a thing will look horrible on my minion resume! Now, there is only one thing to do. If Gra-fa-zut cannot function as a minion, then he should just be something else!

Surge to full. Pick up sword. Take out Treeform Box. Change into a Banana Tree forever~~~~~~

How ya doing, buddy?

"He changed into a tree?", the child asked. Doubtful, she was, and not for the first time.

"He surely did, my dear, and no one knows why. They could hardly ask him, after all! Trees don't talk — well, most trees. But that's a story for another day. Anyway, that's when the barbarian — the elf, I mean —"

"You said he was a minotaur!"

"So I did, so I did. So the minotaur, yes? He picks up the dragon's tooth, and he jams into that giant padlock with all his strength. Now, a tooth isn't a key. If anyone else had done it, nothing would have happened. But that minotaur never knew his own strength, and he was still full of adrenaline from the battle he didn't even know he'd fought. He smashes that tooth into the lock with all his monstrous might, and well... the lock just split in two, like a log under your papa's axe.

The four of them were mightily scared, even after fighting off that bad old dragon, because that lock had barely been holding as it was and whatever it was keeping imprisoned would have to be fearsome indeed to rattle its cage so. And so they all backed away, except for the blue man, who was a tree now and wasn't much scared of anything except woodpeckers."

"That's stupid. Whatever it was, the dragon was keeping it prisoner, right? It could have been a princess!"

Then it was the old man's turn to favor his grandchild with a doubtful smirk.

"I mean... a very strong princess. A princess of the giants! Do the giants have princesses, grandpa?"

"I have heard tell, Melinda, that the giants govern themselves with a ruling council of their wisest elders. But that's only a rumor, nobody really knows. You can't ask the giants themselves, of course; you'd just sound like a buzzing in their ears, if they even heard you at all. But this is all beside the point. The dragon's prisoner was not any kind of princess, least of all a giant one. It was a mighty yeti!"

"A yeti!", the child exclaimed, horrified. Then: "I don't know what a yeti is."

"No one does", muttered grandpa, putting on his spookiest voice. "They come out of nowhere, it's said, to punish the lazy and the slow. They appear from the darkness, and vanish with the wind. Think of the biggest, strongest man you ever saw. Then double him! And double him again! And give him thick hair, and claws, and vicious fangs, like a grizzly bear! And a horrible roar! Rare is the man who has seen a yeti and lived, my girl, and this one was the worst yeti of them all! The king of the yetis, they called him. The Wendigo.

But, as it happens, the Wendigo owed them a favor. They had set him free, after all. So the Wendigo growls and snarls and waves its claws around — and then he just steps aside, and in the wall of his prison there was a little tunnel. It was much, much too small for the Wendigo. But it was just big enough for the minotaur, and for the rest of them it was quite roomy — and through that tunnel they eventually found their way back to the city. Though it did lead through the sewers first. That was that! The bad old lich never bothered Freeport again."

"What did they do after that?"

"The city paid them quite well for such a heroic deed, as you might imagine, and it was months before they saw fit to strap on their swords again. When they did, it was only because a big fat demon was sitting in the middle of the road on their way to the pub. After that, they had their biggest adventure of all, but — ah, that's enough stories for today. Go on outside and play while the sun's shining."

The old man maintained his indulgent smile until the girl was safely out the door, and then he let out a heavy sigh. The Furious Five had gone on to bigger and better adventures, but none of them were for the ears of a child — and some of them were, to put it frankly, embarrassing. The girl was quick as a whip, and it wouldn't be much longer until she figured out who Grandpa Seamus' stories were really about. He'd given up his old name and his old life a long time ago, and he could do without souvenirs coming to visit. Sam left behind a lot of unpaid debts and a lot of enemies when he disappeared without a trace. His brother Seamus rode in from Waterdeep to find the poor fellow, but with no luck.

Sam never quite got used to the mustache — but if it worked, it worked.

The rest of the Five let him go without much debate, really. Fangus was never really cut out for the violent line of work he'd gone into, and the others, well... how did they put it, these days? "Does not play well with others". Beefi in particular had become downright dangerous to be around, going into one of his fits if you so much as gave him a hearty slap on the back. Uxigson just got more and more bloodthirsty, picking fights he couldn't win and seeming almost resentful of the others when they bailed him out.

The mechanical man that'd signed on with them after the business in the tomb wouldn't even bid him a proper farewell — he just rustled around in his battered rucksack and handed Sam a skull that looked almost exactly like Murray — if a little cold to the touch. The skulls regarded each other with a touch of awe, and in unison, both spoke.

"It worked!"

"Tell me everything. I was in this pit for just ages, but I met some interesting —"

"I WAS IN SPACE."

"What?"

"FOR SERIOUS."

And that was that; The Five went their separate ways. After he and Magberry had settled down, the skulls gradually became quiet and sulky on realizing the future held precious little adventure for them. A handful of bandits had flew Foggy Down in terror with tales of "Screaming Skulls", but otherwise they largely spoke when spoken to.

The old man stood up with a groan, his bones complaining like always. "Boys, I reckon it's time for a lie down. Wake me up for any visitors, yeah?"

"Sure, boss."

"YOU BET!"

The old man's bedroom door clicked shut behind him, and the identical skulls had the same conversation they'd had every afternoon for the better part of a decade.

"HE'S GETTING REALLY OLD!"

"Yeah. He is."

"HE COULD DIE ANY MINUTE NOW!"

"Suppose so."

"DO YOU THINK HIS HEAD MIGHT FALL OFF?"

"Statistically, it's not likely."

"YEAH, BUT IT COULD HAPPEN. IT COULD!"

"Not really."

There is a long, long silence, as the afternoon passes and the sun sinks under the horizon. The old woman comes home from visiting the in-laws, and at length the two halflings share supper by the fire. They go to bed early, as old folks often do, but the entire village is fast asleep when one of the skulls speaks again.

"Well. I suppose it's possible."

Far, far away, the dwarven demigod Tharmekhûl rides his red dragon across the Astral Sea. The great wyrm was still a disobedient and ungrateful servant after all these many years, but the forge lord was not bothered. The dragon would reconcile itself to its lot in time, and time was something Tharmekhûl had in plenty.

All eternity, in fact.

THE END

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?