Ed: DMing; Paul: Godzilla "T-Hex" Hercules (dragonborn warlock 10); Scott: Smudge (shadar-kai rogue 8 / barbarian 2) and Martin (duergar cleric 10); Matt G.: Garth Anon (lion-headed human barbarian 10).
Last time, the party fought some mogrelmen and Bartus was bisected by a trap (like Bishop from Aliens).
Since the clerics have no interest or ability to bring Bartus back to life, T-Hex uses presitidigitation to clean the flesh from his skull and takes the skull with him. And also takes Bartus's maps which largely document areas in "the savage north".
T-Hex discovers a small room/cave with walls that appear to be made of scarred flesh. Another small room is filled with bones.
As T-Hex makes his way back to the rest of the party, an undead baddie lunges out of a dark tunnel to the east. Garth throws a hand axe at the undead, but it bounces off his skull. T-Hex cuts the undead in half and it stops moving.
The corpse has a bag tied to its belt, but the bag is too heavy for mage hand to lift. Garth gets the bag and finds it hold 2,000 electrum pieces.
The dowsers think the unusual magic source we've come to investigate is north-west of our current location, somewhere below. The party has no obvious path to move in that direction, so we explore the passage east.
Garth detects some kind of trap in the wall, and Smudge jams up the openings of what he takes to be dart traps.
The passage opens into a large room with a sixty-foot high ceiling. A seven-foot-tall metal figure shaped like a humanoid stands against the north wall. (A robot?) Against the east wall, a six-foot tall glass urn holds purple wine-like liquid.
Garth thinks it smells roughly like wine from west of the Yellow City.
Smudge mage hands a sample of the wine-like liquid. The fluid bubbles/vibrates a little as the test tube touches it. The wine is acidic. Frustrated that his testing didn't reveal anything else, Smudge throws the vial against the wall. The spilled fluid inches toward the big glass cask.
T-Hex casts arcane eye inside the metal figure's torso. T-Hex fails a Constitution save and has a poor psychological reaction to what he sees inside — the torso and half-ish a head of a human hooked up to tubes pumping around fluid.
Martin casts aura of purity. The muscles of the human meat inside the metal figure start to spasm. Tubes become dislodged and spray goop inside the chest cavity.
An undead enters the room. Garth rages, charges, and kills it. It drops 1,000 cp, 5,000 sp, and 3 pieces of jewelry.
The pathetic creature in the iron man stops gurgling and expires.
We go north, and find another Roman numeral III etched into the ground and filled with metal. There's a square seam around the numerals.
Smudge probes the numerals with his ten-foot pole. "Click" The "III" section of floor sinks and an adjacent spring-loaded section of floor opens. Three barbed arms swing out of the floor, striking Smudge's ten-foot pole.
Rumbling sounds from somewhere above. Smudge makes a Dexterity save and leaps out of the way of a fall of large rocks.
The party moves down a long eastward passage, with Garth leading the way. Garth walks over a trap door, narrowly avoiding a fall down a deep chute.
Looking down the chute, Martin (who has the best darkvision) sees that it's greased and splits in two, with a razor-short edge to the division. Martin ties a rope around his ankle and slides/flies down the tunnel. The tunnel turns north before dumping into a small room littered with dismembered left legs. A grate in the middle of the room is caked with dried blood. There are two doors — north and west.
The rest of the party climbs down the chute.
The party goes through the west door and follows the passage as it turns north into another small room with two other exits. A creature like a giant brain with a beak and tentacles floating in the air (a grell?). Smudge teleports behind it and backstabs with his rapier. Godzilla Hercules finishes it with one swipe of his odachi. The brain beast sinks to the ground and deflates.
Enemies defeated:
Treasure:
