Our group continued the fight against the Scribbler, the chief bad guy of the first part of Chapter 5, who turned out not to be much of a threat – at least not against the overly large player group that we have. Coming back to the battle fresh, the players rather rapidly finished him off, despite an effort to summon demons for assistance (which were also destroyed easily). The various layered abilities of the group, combined with some creativity from the players, and their strength becomes rather overwhelming.
Having dispatched the villain, they set about deciphering his riddles, a task made a bit harder with the absence of our Bard this week (who likely would have made it rather trivial). At first, I gave the group time to puzzle it out themselves, but being new to this sort of thing, it required a bit of prompting. However, they rather rapidly picked up on the key pieces, and a few knowledge checks later, had the location of where to head next – the foothills of Rimeskull, far to the north of Varisia. There they would have to puzzle out the next piece – a means to retrieve a set of magical keys from the Runelords. A little bit of preparation and healing, and a greater teleport, and the group was knee deep in the snow.
There they found 7 statues, each a representation of one of the Runelords. The necromancer was the first to realize that a key could be “activated” or retrieved by casting a spell of the specific specialization of the Runelord on their respective statue, and once deciphered, the recovery of 7 keys was fairly easy. However, the magic process awoke a guardian from within the Rimeskull mountain cave – an ancient white dragon who was none too happy with the group.
The beast struck first with surprise with a blast of chilling breath, and then swung wide and around for a second pass. As it approached again, the dragon cast a lighting bolt, then crashed into the cleric for some melee carnage. Conveniently, the rest of the group gathered in front of the beast, as they charged thru the snow to reach the creature, a situation which the dragon used effectively with a second icy blast of its breath. The druid, briefly transforming into a huge Fire Elemental, was badly injured as the frost breath obliterated the elemental in a single moment, leaving the gnome precariously close to the dragon’s claws.
With finished here for the session, the group having suffered serious damage, but only barely having touched the dragon.
