Game summary for May 1, 2007; present characters included Aker Cruven (litorian exotic weapon master/ritual warrior), Eol Seregon (half-elf hexblade), Grot Bloodtunneler (shield dwarf barbarian/warmain), Lyrin Sinbal (simian incantatrix/warmage), Morak Beardfist (shield dwarf fighter/rage cleric), Thoril Songsteel (human thug), and Valgen (afflicted wererat human fighter/rogue).
Valgen and the rest of the Mercenaries scaled the chute and entered the small, circular room. With his continual light coin clutched in his teeth, Valgen went to investigate the coffin. He found a total of three in the room, and as he approached, they burst open to reveal three worm-dripping spawn of Kyuss! In seconds they had nearly half a dozen Kyuss worms on him, with one already burrowing into his body. He quickly doused himself with alchemist’s fire, setting himself ablaze. It killed the external worms but burned him sufficiently to force him to change into wererat form. His allies, having never seen him change, stood in stunned amazement.
Grot used his necklace of fireballs, and Lyrin used fireball to help take down the spawn, but one was able to put a worm on Lyrin first. The party killed the remaining worms and extracted the one worm from Valgen’s head. Morak discovered smaller, slower moving worms infesting Valgen’s body. No one was sure how they got there, and there were far too many to remove one by one.
Advancing down the hallway, they ran into a group of five Kyuss spawn in an abandoned training hall. These undead quickly put worms on the warrior cleric, Beardfist, but he was able to fall back and get the worms removed. Another fireball devastated these corpses and returned them to their graves. Moving quickly, the Mercenaries went through some double doors where Beardfist believed he saw something else move through, and they found a short hallway and more doors. They filled the hallway in formation and readied to charge through. As the doors came open, an ugly, hoof-footed tiefling completed a spell, and a giant praying mantis appeared behind the team. It quickly grappled Lyrin, who was in the back.
Inside the room, the party saw a small stone altar with a glowing green scroll upon it. An eerie beam of light projected from the scrolls through another pair of double doors. The tiefling caster was also accompanied by another spawn of Kyuss and a horrific skeleton with a writhing purple tongue and intestines, known as a mohrg. The spawn and mohrg moved to block the doors and began putting worms on the front line and paralyzing people with the mohrg’s lashing tongue. Meanwhile, the tiefling cast a fell spell the likes of which the party had never seen. The group soon discovered it conjured a Kyuss worm into Lyrin’s head!
The mantis was quickly slain by Thoril, and Eol recovered from paralysis thanks to a quickly applied resurgence from Morak Beardfist. Aker and Grot began hammering away at the undead frontline while Valgen stood behind them lashing with his whips through the openings between them. Things seemed to be at a standstill until Lyrin cast black tentacles into the room. This obscured the tiefling for the moment, but a slap from the mohrg’s tongue sent Aker to the ground helpless and paralyzed. Tragedy then followed soon after when the mohrg crushed his skull with a well-placed punch from its bony, iron-hard talons.
The spawn of Kyuss was slain, so Eol tried to move into the room to attack the tiefling, whom had just emerged from the tentacles. Something prevented Eol from entering, and the tiefling hit the mohrg with a harm spell, healing it of all damage it had suffered. Things again came to a stalemate as the party hammered away on the mohrg while the tiefling pumped inflict wounds spells into it to keep it “healthy”. Valgen, Thoril and Lyrin started whittling away at the tiefling with long-reaching whips, arrows and spells, eventually killing him. Shortly thereafter, the mohrg was destroyed.
Dangerously low on resources and with one of their own dead, the group moved into the room as Morak used detect magic. The raw power from the scrolls knocked the dwarf reeling to his knees as he sensed the greatest source of magic he’d ever encountered. Crossing the threshold into the room, the group found it now cloaked in silence. They quickly pulled valuables from the body of the tiefling and must decide what to do about their exhausted spells and slain companion.
