Next Come the Flies

So the second party is now celebrating their victory over the innumerable zombies, and decide they they need to take the initiative, and and after healing up they strut out to finish off the necromancer for ever. This goes exactly as well as they expect it to, surprising everyone.

So they don't meet any opposition on their way to the necromancer, and find him, or something that could be him, discussing some matters of utmost importance with his comrades, some wolves. Using their keen senses they discover he is lamenting the absence of someone, or some large group of somethings, and they manage to convince themselves that full out Leroy Jenkinsing is the answer.

The more sneaky members, the rogue and totemist, try to sneak up behind while the others, samurai, warlock, and engineer just stand there pelting ranged attacks. This works well, until the rogue is sneak attacked by a zombie, and has a fight almost to the death with it. This is a cause for alarm, as the rest of the group grapples, literally in the totemist's case, with the wolves. Now the necromancer at this point has hit the warlock with a negative level, a decently long lasting debuff.

The totemist then springs out, grappling the dwarf, who being a wizard is not too good at hand to hand, biting him repeatably until he eventually crits his face off. The wolves at this point are heavily damaged or dead, and so are easily dealt with. Next comes the wolves, and they go down fairly easily, though the lone zombie manages his escape, a fairly might task for a mindless undead. Then comes the loot gathering, gaining one enchanted chain shirt, and one pair of enchanted bracers.

Now they find some more tracks leading them to a small shrine to Nerull, the death god. They are not immediately aware of this, and are not too weary of the pool of dark, almost black, liquid nearby. The warlock's first response is actually to drink it, followed by a confirmation of this request. This actually works out alright, even though he permanently poisons himself with the taint of evil, but gains the ability to make all knowledge checks, and gains a bonus to initiative. So they decide to stopper up a bottle of this stuff, just in case.

They then go back to town asking everyone they see if they can tell them what it is, but most people don't know, this is when they discover a kobold hiding away, with knowledge of just about everything adding at least +20 to his d20 die roll. This results in quite a few answers, though quite a few questions too. Also I feel I should mention that the party totemist is cursed to not see humans, by the necromancer, and it may take a while for this to be cured.

So they do all this, rest up regaining their spells and such, though the party warlock has a slightly less restful night than normal. So then they decide to go back to the shrine, and see what they can do from here. Unfortunately on the way there they are surprised by an enormous praying mantis, approximately the size of a horse. This surprise enables it to grab the rogue, shake him a bit, then have the rogue get hit by a javelin from the party, disposing of the now -6 health rogue. This rogue was also fairly high up, and took 2d6 falling damage from this, giving him a 90% change of dying. I decided he could roll for this, given that it was a life and death situation.


He made it, he got snake eyes, something in all other situations would be bad, but here saved his life. So he lived, but so did the mantis, and it soon flew over to the party warlock, picked him up, and flew away, then proceeded to drop him, bringing him all the way down to -6. The party samurai then threw his short sword with all his might, actually hitting and killing the mantis, resulting in it almost falling on the warlock, doing 3 damage and just about killing him. So this CR3 threat fighting a level 4 party managed to down 2 of them. It was fairly impressive. And then it was over.