Green Pass Campaign IV: Yet Another Interlude

I assume this applies to April Dawnbow as well as anyone else who elects to scout the surface with a side tunnel.

You emerge just north of the city square. To the south you can see the rain of lightning from above as before, but it seems less frequent as the green bolts have vanished. Only the orange bolts fall, and where each strikes, you can hear a wail rise like the sudden opening of a torture chamber. There seem to be a number of sharpened stakes around the perimeter of the square, some of them bearing impaled bodies, and not all the bodies are entirely lifeless. The roiling purple clouds above seem to have grown paler and now have a peculiar neon tint to them, as if they are struggling to smother light from the sun above.

To the east you can see a great throng. Even hundreds of yards away, you can easily make out several figures rising high above the crowd. The first is a shaggy winged monstrosity with curled horns, waving what looks like an enormous maul (though it seems but a small scepter in his hands). Its girth must be around 50 times that of a man, with wings up to 25 feet in the air.

What appears to be a wave of stretching rippling arches of shadow stretch out of the ground all around him, large enough to frame his body, constantly fading and reforming in new locations as if drawn by an artist's charcoal and smudged away. With extended observation, you realize that the "arches" are actually portions of the serpentine bodies of some great subterranean creature of shadow. No more than two new arches appear at any one time, so you surmise there must be two of them. A host of smaller human-sized figures surround the tremendous shadow worms, cheering in excitement.

They are all standing in front of the old barracks building, the evident location of the orange beam, and seem rather determined to protect it.

Green Pass Campaign IV, Session 3: Undermined

October 29, Caudex Annales, 70 AUP
The party ascended to the stairs to discover that the chapel had become a cathedral of horrors. Evil signs and markings covered the walls and floor, and all things of beauty had been vandalized or ruined. The old altar was broken, and instead there were five rough hewn stones of some necromantic origin, all of them pumping up various foul energies to the ceiling. Four of them were surrounded by undead: 3 soul-draining spectres, 6 armored black skeletons, 24 orange-eyed funeral pyre zombies, and 4 of the nine-skeleton polearm phalanxes, with each group distributed to a different corner. The center of the room just below the green sky-beam was shrouded by magically-animated fumes and debris, but clearly someone was chanting near the center. The ceiling above had been shattered where the beam had torn a huge hole.

Nothing in the room seemed interested in attacking, with only some slight defensive repositioning to protect the various evil altars. From outside the chapel, a mocking voice announced a challenge to come forth and meet the new rulers of Centerpost.

Instead, the mage Qaldor flew to the vestible and wizard locked the doors. The the party carefully arranged themselves around the apse and waited for the underground team of slimes and oozes to finish tunneling a level below.

Whack-a-mole on hard mode

On the ready mark, the party unloaded a volley of powerful magics at the spectres and zombies. The slimes then collapsed the floor below the enchanted stones, sinking them by ten feet into the floor (taking along the unfortunate prelate in the center). The horde outside banged on the doors while the party slowly mopped up the survivors, summoning in an earth elemental to smash apart any of the ritual stones that the oozes found indigestible.

At this point, April Dawnbow, who was watching out the window from the rafters, announced an incoming wave of gargoyle bogies (margoyles, actually) led by a balrog and another vrock. The squadron smashed through the large stained windows just as the party was retreating back into the tunnels, with Sir Pal, his pet bear, and the hydra covering their evacuation.

The hydra and balrog savaged one another as the vrock and gargoyles beat down the bear and began to surround Sir Pal. Meanwhile, the ooze patrol began to gnaw apart the foundations of four pillars in the center of the chapel which everyone agreed looked plausibly load-bearing.

After a couple rounds of getting clawed by dozens of gargoyle arms, Sir Pal announced a fighting withdrawal, and jumped into the central hole (with the vrock in hot pursuit). At that moment, the ceiling came down on the rest of the margoyle swarms.

Having eliminated one Ominous Sky Beam (tm), the party continued boring east across the city toward the second, while the previously frustrated occupiers above erupted in an unexpected wave of celebration...