Image via Wikipedia(Better late than never) Last Thursday, the party continued to explore the Samaradan Keep. We had decided to make for some stairs we knew to exist in a corner chamber and head down to take a look at the basement. However, the corner chamber was occupado with some nasty looking undead.
So nasty, in fact, that they put the fear into Ogg (the fighter-wizard) and Chewie (the thief). Both men fled down the stairs.
We were, for the moment, already short our barbarian comrade so we hightailed it after them down the stairs. Of course, the disturbed, demented undead followed us down.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Waiting for us in the basement was a nameless horror: dozens of eyes, tentacles, and malice floating in murky shadow. It crushed Chewie in its tentacles before dropping him to the ground unconscious. Ogg, still running, moved past the horror and into the next room. It was filled with wights who were working on a mine tunneled into the stone of the floor.
Unable to find someway to put a dent in the horror, we tried to fight off the wights and the other undead and just stay the hell away from Mr. Tentacles. In the end, we survived by using the vertical mine shaft to take on the wights in a tight space in which they couldn't overwhelm us.
We survived. Even Chewie though he's still unconscious. The wights are gone and the other undead driven back but the way back (and Chewie's body) is still guarded by the floating scare-bear.
My Notes
I had a hard time with this game. Brad, the DM, routinely puts us up against the wall with the odds stacked against us. This is the style the group has been playing since time immemorial and, though I don't agree with it, that's the way we play. So the difficulty of the encounters wasn't itself my issue.
My issues were twofold: first, Brad didn't anticipate that the undead would frighten some of the party. However, the save against their fear effect was pretty high (19) given we started the night 4th level. Looking at that number, the reasonable assumption is that at least one character will fail the save. Because of the fear effect, we triggered multiple encounters via the fleeing characters. Any one of those encounters would have been tough on their own but we ended up with three at once.
My second problem was with Mr. Tentacles. Halfway through the combat we realized that, other than via magic, we couldn't hurt it. It had damage resistance 10/good and we didn't have any magic weapons. Brad finally told us meta-game this information but no one had prepared anything for it. Really, only the cleric could have by using Divine Weapon.
This is the kind of loaded encounter that bugs me. We were given no chance to beat that critter. There were no clues to hip us to the fact that this creature was practically immune to all our attacks. There was no way for us to figure it out either. It was only through meta-game information that we found it out.
It bugged me but we did survive to fight it another day and now we know what we need to do. Still, this was more frustrating than it had to be. Thankfully, we made it over the hump.
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