Green Pass Campaign II, Session 8: Boss Battle

I can't really proceed with the fall semester campaign until I get the results of the summer transcribed for posterity. So here's a short summary of the final session, and of the full campaign.

June 27, Caudex Annales, 70 AUP

The party broke into a series of smaller groups, and slowly worked their way back to Balewood Keep. Elven nightblade Terra Daystar and Dunflow the Barbarian had already arrived the previous evening with a report of the shrine battle. The less respectable duo of Meros and Wulfhere arrived together the next morning, Wulfhere sporting a new winged helmet he had looted from his extensive pillaging of the shrine's back rooms. Regrettably, the helm had born an enchantment with the effect of permanently altering his alignment to "Chaotic", and by this point he had decided that the most chaotic course of action was to isolate and murder the castellan. The jewel-snatching nightblade Meros had always been something of a bad seed, and was hardly one to stand in his way.

The two of them lured the castellan and his scribe down to the dungeons, on pretext of having some secret news to report. Wulfhere's mystic aura proved persuasive enough to set up the ambush, and upon arrival, the nefarious pair bolted the dungeon doors behind them and sprang to the attack. Terra, who had never quite trusted the other elf, followed the two of them from the shadows, and observed them through a grated window.

The initial round of combat went poorly, as Meros successfully opened with a choking grasp against the scribe, lifting him helplessly in the air before he could cast a prepared clerical spell from his scroll case. But the castellan was cast from a sterner mold, and his enchanted armor proved impervious to the initial assault. The battled turned hopeless against the conspirators when Terra slipped a magic missile past the bars of the window into Meros' back, disrupting his spell and releasing the scribe. The completion of the scribe's hold person spell ended the assassination attempt abruptly.

Fortunately the castellan did not immediately check the belongings of the traitors, or he would have discovered a freshly cut medusa-head with still potent petrification capabilities. (It was also a small blessing that neither of them thought to use it on the castellan during the fight.) When the rest of the party arrived in the upper bailey, they discovered a warrant had been issued for their arrest, and they were unceremoniously locked into the dungeon.

The following morning, the clearly insane Wulfhere attempted to overpower his guards, and was quickly slain. The rest of the party was hauled up to the great hall for an improvised trial, with the keep's bailiff functioning as prosecutor. They stood accused of having awoken the dead against the express recommendation of the castellan, of having stolen cursed insanity-inflicting relics from the tombs, of harboring assassins, of fraternizing with hobgoblins and cannibalistic lizardmen, and of generally disrupting public order.

The previously arrested (and stripped and mutiliated) visiting cleric, Father Isembart, served as a key witness for the prosecution, forced to testify by written statements due to the splitting of his tongue. His sorry condition earned him great pity from the assembled throng of civilians assembled for the trial, and the official rule of the castellan (under some pressure of rising political unrest and insurrection) was that the party should be immediately exiled into the wilderness. Privately, he communicated his hope that they could find some way to resolve the regional crisis, and he also lent them a fragment of a stone tablet artifact, a fragment recovered by another adventurer decades ago -- one who had emerged as the sole survivor of a doomed expedition.

The party attempted to return back up through the mountains into Green Pass and take refuge at Centerpost, but found the gates at Footman's Notch occupied by hostile forces flying a sinister black banner in place of Durnovar's White Ship. Meros slipped away under pretense of scouting the walls, and instead opted to simply defect to the side of the captors within. When the party was assaulted by a pack of hellhounds during the night -- easily enough dispatched, with the use of the medusa's post-mortem gaze -- it had become obvious that the occupation force was of an entirely fiendish nature. Earning passage across the mountains would only be possible through subterfuge, or by another route.