Now that I've achieved the 5th level "raise dead" spell, I think I'm going to be taken far less for granted in our little party. We've been shilling out over 5000 gp every time one of us dies, but now I can take care of that -- at a reduced price. 'Tis a shame that I'm constantly the first one to die.It's not only expensive, but tedious to raise the dead commercially. I'm not there for it, but to re-animate my corpse at a temple, I need to actually have the gold on my person. Often my dilapidated corpse can't handle the extra weight, so we have to trade armors or whatever and then the party has to (I guess) set the gold on top of my body when they slide it across the temple counter.
Mapped out a little bit more of the Shadowdale dungeons.
The change in wall scenery from earthy to castle wall-ish struck us as a bit odd. I mean, we are underground right? Is this some kind of freaky underground castle? Plus there are like, really hard monsters down there. Black dragons and dracoliches. I thought there was only one dracolich, and we got rid of him. These, though, attack a bunch at a time and DON'T get entangled in trees.
I was unconscious at the time, but I guess the rest of the crew met up with this guy named Tarsus. Tarsus? Is that a religious name? It is a religious place. I suspect he's some kind of religious scam artist. Fortunately for him, our one really religious person was conked out cold. Yeah, I know I'm evil, but I'm still religious. Had they known how much a "tithe" is, they probably wouldn't have taken him up on his offer. I woke up and I seriously was like, you guys gave away 10% of our money?
Actually, we didn't even bother counting our money. We are so freaking loaded.
We decided to bail on mapping the rest of level three. There's gotta be some serious awesomeness down there, but we didn't even know why we were there in the first place and we were getting pummeled. Rex wanted us to set a timetable for pulling out, but we decided to just cut and run immediately. Even if we eventually would have found oil in those caverns, I'm pretty confident we made the right decision.
Just like that weird guy said, we journeyed northwest. Bumped into a farmer who had some ettin problems. After killing the giants, he gave us "the first home cooked meal in many days." After that we wound up in a town called either Dagger Falls or Daggerdale. We saw it spelled both ways.
We had to stay in the barn because the inn "doesn't think much of Zhentil Keepers." No idea what that's about. The bå® (Whoa! What form of typing enchantment made "bar" appear that way? Mental note: ask someone about magic typing.) also gave us trouble, but the farming community stood up for us and our ettin-killing ways.
Dagger****(s) did NOT have a notable cave nearby. Instead it had a wonderful magic shop! Finally there's a place for high rollers like us!
After the magic shop, we were ushered to a tower. Yes, it is a maze-y type place, but it's a tower! It's not caverns! It's the Tower of Oxam. Yeah. Never heard of it 'til now. We began mapping it, but didn't quite finish. There's a big chunk missing from the very middle of this map because of our strategy to "always turn left" to avoid getting lost.
Besides the curious "Zhentil squad," we bumped into some other nifty monsters here. Ogres are big, but soft and this particular medusa wouldn't be much without her assortment of griffins. She looks like a more presentable version of the medusa we encountered in Phlan.
Yet another gasping character let us know what was in store for us: beholders.
And not just a couple of beholders, apparently we're talking about a corps of beholders, possibly with their own freaky floating-eye barracks. Now, up until that point in my life, I had heard of beholders. I had heard that they were very frightening and difficult, but a part of me was just like, yes! Let's be rotten to the corps! Soon we encountered the emissary.
Only 75 hp? An ac of 0? Yeah. We got this overgrown sclera covered.
Um. That beholder freaking wailed on us.
We'll have to get the thing next time. Or maybe go back to that cavern with all the dracoliches.
Oooh! Almost forgot. Don't believe me about all this stuff I've talked about? Well we got proof. We recorded the whole thing. Stupidly, Disposo set the continuous video image to show an obnoxious text of the word "mapping" to spin in the foreground the entire time, but you get the gist. To sort of witness everything I've talked about, check this video out:
Feel free to dupe it a thousand times until I see it on late night cable. Yeah. We'll work on better quality.
