Session 71 - The Secret Grove
Journal of Celerion
After defeating the evil monk of the Long Death, we quickly worked out the use of the portal upstairs in the temple. Hopefully we can come back inside a year to restore this temple to its previous glory. That might take some doing though as evil seems to pervade the very air there.
Through the portal, we find ourselves on the side of a mountain. First we had to impress the guardian with some sort of performance. I gave an embarrassing sort of dance thing. Embarrassing for both me and my team, but I tried to rise above it and remain unaffected nonetheless.
On the side of the mountain, we were met my a group of dwarves, all kitted out for mining somewhere nearby. They seemed to take offence at our presence, and wanted to escort us to their leader straight away. A breach of security or something. I wanted to ignore them completely, but some of the others didn't want to cause a ruckus, so we joined them.
Dwarves sometimes live in the nastiest little holes. This groups leader was down a mine, past thousands of hand sized spiders just inside the entrance. I must say, my fear of these things started to get the better of me before I calmed myself, and stuck closer to the floor of tunnel. Hateful little things - you just can't keep them all in sight at the same time. Argh!
We met the leader, Dawn Crownshield. He turned out to be a nasty insidious piece of work he did. He tried to get us to get the followers of Nobanion to back off in disrupting their activities here at the mine. Now, we *know* that these are good people he is talking about, so we were much more doubtful of his right to be mining in this area, so we declined to help. But then, to top it off, he tried to coerce Dwertern with magic to be on his side, and to convince us of his merit. Dwertern shrugged off his suggestion and informed us of his attempt. A rare, and thus all the more impressive show of resistance from Dwertern!
We left them to camp out at the probable crossroads site, waiting for our chance to cross to the Secret Grove. But Dawn just couldn't leave well enough alone, and tried to come back at us with a surprise attack. Since this attack, I'm quite happy to give the followers of Nobanion all the information we have on his little setup, and I hope they crush them utterly.
We had no such time for total crushing, so we just wiped out his little attack force, and I personally pushed him off the great steep mountainside at the track. He was lucky he wasn't killed also. He was just so pathetic. Oh, he had plenty of magical attacks at his disposal, and was very well magically protected, but still such a small man, and I'm just talking about stature.
Later, we had to do another dance for another Fey guardian. Again, I tried to rise above the ignominy of it all, but found it difficult.
On the far side, we found ourselves in a very dark forest. Yes, night had just fallen, but I refer more to the evil shadow that we all felt in the twisted vegetation we were met with. Taedor used his magic seeing balls again to get the lay of the land - very handy. We were told of a wall of thorns all around us, trying to focus our direction of travel to the north.
We immediately struck out south, and with the help of Taedor's cloak of levitation and some Swooping Jill Action, we were all over the wall quite easily. The problem wasn't the wall, it was the unseen jeering that unnerved us.
Taedor, again, contributed with a secure shelter for the night, but it wasn't long before we were attacked by some mighty Shadowbound Treants! These great, dark trees started pounding the shelter, and it wasn't going to last long, so we all ran outside to see them off. I spent an extra few seconds collecting my oil skins, and then ran out to throw one all over the nearest tree. Looking around, I then realised that no one had any fire arrows, so my effort was wasted, I performed a couple of hit and run attacks, but Dwertern had made some sort work of one of them, and the others had used magical attacks to such great effect, that I really had little to do.
I did enjoy burning one of them though.