Player Characters
Pseth took an extended meditation break, but the party was joined by a new adventurer, Glim Oneshoe, a gnome with a roguish air and a bit of magic twinkle in his eye.
Yzal and Keth went back to through the caverns with the illusory walls to the one where they had fought the drow, searching to make sure that there wasn't yet another illusory wall or other secret that they hadn't uncovered. With Glim's help, they soon left the cavern convinced there was nothing left to see.
Heading through the burial caverns again, down the tunnel, past the barricade where two under-equipped drow and a big spider had tried to stop them before, the party headed down the steep tunnel and came again to the hole in the floor. Realizing that the end of the tunnel, just past the hole, was not naturally occurring, Keth spent a few minutes beating on it until he had carved a passable hole in it. There was a tense moment when Glim, who had been walking along invisibly, tried to get through the hole (it was big enough for him) before Keth was quite finished with it. Trajedy averted, the party moved to check out this new area.
The first cavern they came too was full of dusty webs and two large spiders. The spiders attacked without preamble. Between Keth's axe and Yzal's lightning bolts, the spiders soon collapsed in twitching heaps.
The next cavern proved a bit more challenging. Two driders attacked the party as soon as they entered, one shooting Keth with his bow, the other sending Yzal running into a illusion-hidden pit trap by means of a suggestion. Keth vented his spleen over being plinked with arrows while Glim tried to find the boundary of the pit Yzal had fallen into. Yzal dusted himself off at the bottom of a 60-foot pit.
Keth dispatched his chosen drider, but was reduced to flinging cast off swords and other things at the remaining drider, which was out of reach on the ceiling. Yzal had climbed about halfway up the side of the pit when he saw Glim fall down it. Glim had found the edge of the pit of the hard way. Same for the spikes at the bottom of the pit.
Yzal made it to the top of the pit again, and then was levitated to the ceiling to be in reach of the drider's weapon's. He blasted the drider off the ceiling then.
After a brief bit of healing and cataloguing, they explored the last empty cavern they could find in this section, and then headed back to the hole in the floor. As he had two day's before, Keth leaped down the hole to see what was there. Before he reached the bottom, a huge flame strike engulfed. Glim spotted the fading glyph on the side of the hole, declared the trap "disarmed", and he and Yzal went down, as well.
Keth had spotted a drow head peaking up above the lip of the chasm and run over to take of it. The head had pulled back down, though, and the drow was disappearing into the gloom of the chasm, climbing down a section of a huge spider web as if it was a rope ladder. Keth amused himself by dropping some of the blasted furniture of the small cavern down on top of the drow, though it only seemed to bang him up a bit. By the time Yzal and Glim had shown up, the drow had disappeared into the dark.
The party headed down the spider web ladder after the drow. Seventy feet down they came to a cross-ladder, of sorts, and followed the path that lead right, towards the entrance of another cavern. As they came to the entrance of the cavern, Keth, who was in the lead, came under fire from two drow standing back from the edge.
Keth rushed to them, killing the first quickly, and the other as he tried to run away. The party started to move down the corridor and was hit by an ice storm and then a lightning bolt, from out of nowhere. In the flash, they saw the corridor opened into a large room with a double line of drow warriors across the far side. The first line held glaives at the ready while the back line fired various types of crossbows.
Yzal dropped a fireball in the midst of the drow ranks, while Keth and the invisible Glim charged forward. Keth ducked around the polearms and did what he does best: "Keth kill." Yzal ate a lightning bolt all by himself as Keth kept up what he was doing and Glim, spotting two additional drow in the darkness of a corridor leading out of the room, headed in that direction.
Glim attacked one of the drow, who had a wand, stabbing him and unleashing a spell stored in his dagger. The drow shook off the spell, but died the next round anyway. Glim went invisible again to sneak around the other drow, but found himself under attack despite his invisibility. He stabbed the drow with his other dagger and this time the stored spell took effect, blinding the drow. Keth showed up then and that was that.
The party came back together in the big room to get healed up and start looting bodies when crossbow fire came from the direction of the chasm. Another disgusting undead thing came into the room, along with a new batch of drow warriors with bows.
The disgusting undead thing hit them with its horrifying gaze, causing Keth, who was still living down the last time this had happened, and Glim, who had become invisible again, to cower in fear. Yzal, still under the protection from arrows spell he had cleverly cast earlier, alone was unaffected by the horrifying gaze. He dropped a couple fireballs on the drow and the undead thing. The undead thing died--again--and the surviving drow fled.
The party pulled themselves together again and pushed deeper into this section. They found and ransacked barracks for sentries and officers, and also for drow spellguards. In the officers's room they found some papers detailing the guard shifts of Szith Morcane, which drow outpost they seemed to now be in, as well as a long letter about some happenings in a drow city called Maerimydra. In the spellguards's room, they discovered a drow female in tattered clothes chained to a bed. The woman told her story to Yzal while Keth and Glim inadvertantly blew up the spellguards's spellbooks.
"My name is Istreya," the woman said. "I came back to Szith Morcane to..." She paused and bit her lip. "But everyone was...changed," she continued. "I was betrayed and the spellguards took me as chattel. That was a week ago."
Considering her valid loot, Keth transferred the chain holding her from the bed post to his own belt. Despite this, Istreya healed the injuries Keth and Glim had incurred from the spellbooks. Then the party barricaded the door and prepared to rest for a while.
Everyone got 6000 XP. Yzal and Keth became Level 12. [an error occurred while processing this directive]