The story begins here!How do you invade a fortress vampired by a force of over 200, a quarter or more of which may be hideously empowered by terrible mutations and others still may wield terrible arcane powers? The answer, it turns out, is subterfuge! And so it is that our sorcerer sensibly figured that a dhampir, normally shunned for being very vampiric-looking in modern society, would be more than capable of exploiting his appearance to his advantage in the reverse situation, and sought out the mostly exploded patrol. A round of shouting and confusion later he managed to misdirect them, and lead them back to the inner keep past the fortified gate, straight into the halls where they were easily let off to do their own thing and carry purposefully misleading information to their superiors.
From there, a convenient window into the inner keep was found (elven keep design dictates that the inner keep
is the inner wall, cordoning off an inner courtyard where the peak of the mountain and an altar are placed, making for a rather fetching park) and the rest of the party, taking advantage of the overall confusion and a convenient Hide From Undead, clambered in along a rope. The room we found ourselves in was where they were keeping their blood supplies in moaning, half-conscious form. A hearty debate ensued on the ethics and usefulness of freeing them. Scouting was performed, establishing the location of the sinister lab where the other half of the fabled sun crown was kept under a heavily enchanted glass enclosure while dozens of magical vampire researchers worked in the room on some no doubt horrible projects. Infiltration of such a place would require exceptional cunning.
So we had Max go in there while looking busy and carrying a box. Inside this box were bags of holding, and inside these bags were the rest of the party! This was somewhat surprising to the researchers in the lab, you could say. More surprising still were the ensuing blasts of fireballs and black tentacles that scattered, grappled and otherwise discombobulated their numbers, misting quite a few in the process as the brave adventurers went for a smash-and-grab. A clever plan had been devised for the removal of the glass enclosure, but it turned out that smashing it was equally effective, its purpose having turned out to be to keep the sunlight-shedding artifact
in as opposed to keeping enterprising thieves out.
In what was a rather admirable response time of 18 seconds, three devilish spiders wasted no time in materializing in the room as a first response strike force! They promised to be, and indeed were somewhat inconvenient before we could overwhelm them with our varied powers of disability, death and destruction, destroying one under a rain of dreadful blows and sending the other two teleporting out. Unfortunately, Lee Jez, executor of the smash and grab, was scattered most effectively by this assault, popping off a Dimension Door to get out of the room, with Maeva running to look invisibly for her in the chaos! But before we ran to look for all of them, we modified the box plan to account somewhat for the state of high alert, and after stealing as many research notes as time permitted shoved the remaining party into the bags of holding, putting a relatively safe double layer of Invisibility and Hide From Undead on Max to carry them to the most dangerous place in relation to here that Jez could readily visualize - the cattle room!
Having made this invisible escape, a 10-minute break was taken to get our bearings and perform a Sending to Lee Jez in order to discover whether she was in trouble or if she had kept her head while frantically Dimension Dooring out of the room - fortunately our faith in her had been well-placed, as she had made an escape to the hole in the wall and was even now hiding there from any pursuers. Deeming that Maeva could probably fend for herself, or that we had not the possibility of fending for her, we went out and to the wall, running briefly into a patrol that was tentacled to prevent pursuit. Sure enough, the wizard was there, crown in hand! We got out through the wall the way we came, and rode off into sunset on a roc. Once we regrouped we cast another Sending to check just how screwed Maeva was. Luckily, and very much in line with what you'd expect from her, she seemed to have mysteriously found herself far indeed by some unknown means. Satisfied with this resolution, we made a run for it!
The heist seems to have been a rousing success and, as we would find out soon, does qualify us for the vaunted position of Haeum Sung Certified Adventurer Level 9!
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Topic: [Pathfinder] Haeum Sung (Game over, thanks for playing!) (Read 35429 times)