Ed Kickham (DMing), Paul (Zoozeki, Elf Wizard 10), Scott Will (Smudge, Shadar-kai Rogue 8 / Barbarian 2) (Martin, Dwarf Cleric 10), Dane Wortley (Tudoi, Dwarf Cleric 10), and (joining mid-session) Matt G. (Roscoe, Halfling Bard 10).
(Ed briefly tells us that Matt G. played a solo session to explore the unknown features of the churro wand.)
Last time, we were finishing clearing the dragon/mind flayer dungeon under the sea.
We're in a round room with a lava river running through the middle. There's a trap door in the floor (with the sound of spirits), a door to the northeast, and (across the lava river) a door to the southwest.
Past the northeast door, a large room is divided in half by iron bars. On the far side of the iron bars, the walls are rougher and the floor slopes away. The room is unusually clean. The slope past the bars is very steep, like a roller coaster.
Zoozeki sends his salamander familiar through the bars to scout the tunnel. The tunnel gets very narrow — less than two feet wide. Eventually, the familiar hears grumbling and scrabbling and muttering.
Meanwhile, Tudo examines the southeast door in the circular room with the lava river.
[Hmm, do wizards have proprioception of familiar's location?]
The salamander comes to a north-south fork in the narrow tunnel. The scrabbling sounds come from the south. The north tunnel fork eventually stops at the non-hidden side of a hidden door.
The south fork opens into a large room with glows of flickering firelight. The salamander familiar sees the source of the noises — groups of goblins burning stinky things in fires. Dozens of goblins. One of the goblins looks like a chief.
[Matt G. appears and Rosco rejoins the party. Roscoe got his face melted while experimenting with the churro want and lost one point of charisma.] Zoozeki or Smudge uses mage hand to push a button to open the south-west door in the big circular room. A short corridor leads to a room where the ceiling slopes down until it meets the floor a the far end. The room is full of rusted shelving and yellowed, cracked cylinders that might once have been lenses. A pad-locked chest.
Tudo tries to mend one of the cracked lenses. The lens mends.
Zoozeki walks the perimeter of the room, examining the seam of the ceiling and floor, and determines the room is a non-Euclidean space.
Smudge examines the chest. Smudge triggers a poison needle trap and is poisoned, taking 23 damage.
The chest is empty. There is a false bottom, but it's empty too. But... he starts hearing a sound like singing — singing about "false bottoms".
Rosco recognizes the song. He thinks it's a modification of a song from Spinal Tap about bottoms.
Zoozeki casts walk among angles. Everybody joins hands and comes with him. We walk "down" a ramp that squeezes us smaller and smaller, until we pop up the other side.
Everything is dark and pulsating. There's a howling wind. Zoozeki casts light, but the space still seems dim.
A landscape of cyclopean blocks. We try to move, all holding hands. There are creatures and structures and mist.
We hear grunting, and find ourselves on the steps of a ziggurat. There are two creatures on the steps. Zoozeki charms them both.
We reach the top of the ziggurat. A portal that looks like a giant eye scans over the vista spread out below the ziggurat. It has eyelashes.
Zoozeki rolls 22 Arcana to understand the eye. It's an occult symbol that Zoozeki has seen both on this planet and the old planet. People says it's best to leave it alone, because it represents one of the old ones. It's not just any eye, it's a particular eye, a symbol of a particular entity. It's a descendant of The Nameless Mist.
Zoozeki is trying to explain some of this to the others, but he doesn't realize that he's switching between languages with only a work of two of Common thrown in.
What do we see from the top of the ziggurat? In the distance, we can see a MUCH bigger ziggurat with bubbles floating out of it, and enormous mountains beyond that, bigger than any mountains we've seen. In the other direction, we see skyscraper-high waves in the distance.
Zoozeki knows The Old Ones can take different forms on the Astral plane versus the prime material plane. He vaguely recalls something about iridescent bubbles on the astral plane.
Do you want to make a realization about all this? Yes, Zoozeki rolls a 31 Aracana. Zoozeki realizes this isn't the astral or prime material plane. Only a monstorous power from outside time and space could create this place. The bubbles are the key and guardian of the gate.
Roscoe asks if they know who Yog-Sothoth is. The charmed troglodyte-like creatures flip out. They didn't like that at all.
Roscoe casts detect thoughts on the charmed creatures. Their surface thought are absolute TERROR of Roscoe and Yog-Sothoth. Roscoe uses a calming voice and rolls 18 Persuasion to calm them.
Roscoe probes deeper. The creature thinks Yog-Sothoth is the scariest thing, and it sometimes intrudes a little into this place. The creature is also reoccupied with the iridescent bubbles; it worries about them and hates them.
Zoozeki doesn't think the creature are native to this place — that they were brought here — but that they can thrive here.