Summary:
1. A Black Pudding envelops Oswyn (Cleric) and devours all his armor and weapons.
2. Arthur (Oathsworn) battles a different Black Pudding, loses his mystical companion great sword, and dies (he is revived later).
3. Zen (Monk) is struck by a powerful Wight that drains a level from him.

PC’s:
Llewelyn, Elf Cleric 8/Wizard 8 of Sehanine Moonbow
Martin, Human Rogue 11 of Bacchus
Rosaline, Half-Elf (Elf lineage) Druid 9 of The Daghda
Zen, Human Monk 10 of St. Agathos [currently at 9th level]
Oswyn, Human Cleric 6 of St. Jasper
Arthur, Human Oathsworn 9 of Celestian
Tiberius, Human Paladin 3/Cleric 7 of St. Ingrid
Gorgat, Half-Orc Barbarian 9 of Haephestus

NPC:
Dhekeon “the Disgraced,” fallen skeletal paladin of St. Justus (seeking redemption)

Game Diary:
The players are making a final push into the Barrowmaze. They can see that the end is in sight. After 3.5 years and 120 game sessions, some players are estimating that they can complete it in a half a dozen or so sessions. I am also getting the feeling that they are ready to go onto our next campaign (a homebrewed version of the Dungeons of Aufstrag, by Troll Lord Games). But before they can move on to that they need to complete this one, and progress through rooms can be slow or fast. In session 119 I spent an hour talking with the players about the upcoming Aufstrag campaign, and then when we started the adventure, they spent the entire session fighting a black pudding in a single room!

Only a third of the nine characters (and NPC) entered a room from the north with three urns in the middle and strange moving images on the south wall. As they were viewing and experimenting with the images on the wall, black ooze began to emerge from the urns. Llewelyn conjured a wall of fire between the black pudding and the small group in the south and the rest of the group in the north. This did confine the black pudding in its movement – but allowed it to focus on the much smaller group! This small group all fought bravely, but Oswyn was attacked repeatedly by its pseudopods and over several rounds, all his armor and weapons failed their saving throws and were destroyed. Zen got some punches in, but that just separated the black pudding into smaller entities (although he did make use of a push maneuver that sometimes hurled the smaller oozes into the wall of fire destroying them). It was a tough battle, and afterward, the group decided to head back to the town of Helix so that Oswyn could get some new armor and weapons.

In Session 120 the group seemed to enter overdrive and plowed their way through nearly 20 rooms and subchambers.

The first set of rooms included a wight. Previous undead they encountered that could level drain always allowed a Constitution saving throw to avoid the level drain, and since Zen is a monk with Con as prime and a Con score in the early 20s, he confidently moved forward to engage it. But they are now in the most deadly part of the Barrowmaze and additionally are quite close to where they think the Tablet of Chaos lies, thus, they discovered a new height of combat challenge when the wight struck Zen and he immediately dropped to the mid-point of his previous level with no saving throw! However, there are at least three members of the group that has access to restoration magic, so they are confident that at least one of them will make their caster level check and restore Zen after the adventure.

The next set of chambers they entered included marble mausoleums with marble statues on top of them. Some of these entities included a dwarf holding a hammer over an anvil, a stag, a man holding a globe of the world on his back, and a kneeling man holding a bowl above his head in supplication to a god. The PCs all suspected a trap, and indeed the statue holding the globe was a trap and several people had to make Dexterity saves to avoid the large marble globe that crashed to the floor when it was dropped on them while trying to open the mausoleum.

The real issue was when a levitating character elevated themselves up in the air to look into the bowl of the marble statue making an offering to a god and saw a black pudding inside! His close presence awakened the black pudding and it sloshed out onto the ground on top of Arthur completely enveloping him and trying to constrict him to death. Arthur had worked hard to acquire through rituals, time off, and the expenditure of money a mystical companion sword of impressive power, but that black pudding kept constricting him and its acid wore him down until he finally died and the black pudding overcame the weapon’s saving throw and it was destroyed. The players had picked a Deck of Dirty Tricks card at the beginning of the session that allowed one character to benefit from a Raise Dead spell and the players used it to bring Arthur back from the dead mere moments after his demise, but his magical sword was now lost.

That game session ended with the large chamber of marble mausoleums explored and looted and with just one more large chamber to explore in this section of the Barrowmaze.

The last two sessions have been intense, but the treasure haul has been good – 12,935 gp in treasure, plus some unidentified magic items. They need all the XP and magic items they can get (I use the 1gp = 1xp rule which encourages players to use their creativity to make that extra push to find and retrieve loot). Some players may want to head back to town to restore Zen’s level and for Arthur to get some replacement equipment, but then again, perhaps they’ll stick around and head into the last big room of this section, for who knows what they will find in it?!…

Summary:
Ever heard of “ant zombies”? What if the fungal-infected ants were giant-sized and had also become undead? What would you do? That is what my players faced in this game session! Also, the group encounters a basilisk, but the druid avoids its gaze by using bat echolocation to “see” it!

PC’s:
Llewelyn, Elf Cleric 8/Wizard 8 of Sehanine Moonbow
Rolando, Hobbit Rogue 7/Pacer 7 of Brandobaris Fleetfoot
Jasper, Dwarf Fighter 4/Cleric 4 of Dumathoin Deepdelver
Remi, Gnome Rogue 7/Illusionist 6 of Hermes
Belden, Gnome Bard 8 of Aengus
Zen, Human Monk 10 of St. Agathos
Rosaline, Half-Elf (Elf lineage) Druid 9 of The Daghda
Magni, Dwarf Fighter 6 of Barundar Battleaxe

Game Diary:
“Ant zombies”? In real life, they are ants that have been infected and manipulated by different types of fungus. But what if ant zombies were “real”? That is, what kind of life and behavior would ants altered by fungus do when animated by the forces of undeath? That is what the Army of the Light puzzled over as they began investigating narrow 5′ x 5′ earthen tunnels created by giant ants. In this case, some of the ants had been infected by fungus growth, and when they died – or were near death – the forces of undeath and Chaos within the Barrowmaze animated these ants.

The last adventure ended with a swarm of 10 of them crawling along the ceiling, walls, and floor of these narrow earthen tunnels. Spells like dark chaos and burning hands usually took care of these ants quite quickly (the majority of the ants they encountered were more like animated exoskeletons and ended up being fragile and hollow when struck). In one larger chamber, they discovered a queen ant that was trying to squeeze out new ants. However, due to the perverse mixture of living ants, fungal infected ants, and fungal infected undead ants, she was trying to birth a type of hybrid ant that the living world – and unliving world – has never seen! When fighting the queen poor Rolando was picked up in the air with her mandibles and shook about, but others charged in and sliced and pierced her until she died, at which point Rolando had to be released from her jaws which remained locked in place even in true death.

Continuing through these tunnels they eventually found more ants that had become “zombies” from a variety of fungus infections. When I showed the players pictures of what they saw (similar to what I am displaying here) and asked if they wanted to investigate the bodies the players were clearly created out by these real-life pictures, and even though several PCs had herbalism and alchemy as their profession (I allow players in my C&C games choose professions to give their characters useful backgrounds to enhance the game), they all said, “Nah, let’s burn these things”! And another burning hands was cast. I don’t think I can blame them, the pictures I showed them were quite creepy. I was trying to take things to a new level and they guessed that trying to cure or heal a fungal infection that had been enhanced by negative undead energy along energy flow from the Tablet of Chaos might challenge even their best clerics since this was something they had never encountered before or even heard of before (I love introducing new concepts into the game – or in this case taking something that was introduced in the Barrowmaze for the GM and augmenting it!).

After clearing out the ant area, the group discovered three dwarves that had been turned into wights, and in another area there were some shriekers that awakened the presence of a basilisk! The noise of the shriekers made communicating and cast V spells impossible, but Rosaline, the druid, was used bat sense echolocation to find the location of the basilisk, and the no-nonsense Llewelyn just held his staff of the pyromancer around the corner into the room and sent out a nearly full damage fireball which destroyed everything in the room. Technically, I think the shriekers should have nullified Rosaline’s echolocation as a bat (“blinding” her with sound, effectively), but I got quite excited when the player described that he was going to have Rosaline use the echolocation to “see” where the basilisk was (her eyes were fully closed). I did have the shriekers prevent conversation as well as spells that needed V components, so I did my job in that respect, but I can’t be upset, player creativity like that needs to be rewarded, and Llewelyn was probably going to throw a fireball in the chamber no matter what.

With the tunnels now fully explored, the group returned to Ironguard Motte.