# All-Mage scavenger hunt - the saga continues...



## STARP_Social_Officer (Jul 30, 2006)

OK. So the party are all mages. People who know about this campaign will remember that the party are all members of an arcane order who are on a Flaness-wide scavenger hunt refereed by the Circle of Eight - their rivals from another Guild are slightly ahead of them. Get all eight items, hand them to the designated member of the Eight, get a token, deliver the tokens to Mordenkainen and you win. Simple enough, right?
Well, exactly what I hoped would happen has now happened. The party spend long periods of time discussing appropriate spell use, often in dangerous situations. Last adventure they recovered item number one - a talking sword (getting the sword to _stop _talking is more of a feat), and so this time they decided to go after another item - a dragon's egg. One of the PCs is a half-dragon and so the party went looking for 'mum' in the hills. They'd tried this before, two sessions ago, but were beaten off by an Erinyes and her minions who had enslaved some dwarves and were using them as labourers to mine valuables. The whole affair was taking place in "mum"'s lair in the hills - "mum" had vanished, leaving nothing behind except a vault that the Erinyes couldn't open. The PCs decided to launch an assault but, leaving nothing to chance, made sure they took a small army with them, recruiting a squad of Greysmere dwarves to help them. Unfortunately, the way they chose to do this was letting the bard 'negotiate' with the dwarven commander. Unfortunate, because he happened to do this at a dwarven celebration, meaning he'd consumed way too much of the dwarven ale, and failed his Fortitude save by a quite spectacular margin. This is not a series of events that will endear you to a dwarf, and so, the next morning when he came to, the bard found the attitude of the commander somewhat less than welcoming - he kept calling the bard "O Weak Livered One" and "the Jester". As a result, the negotiation yielded only one squad of a dozen dwarves, and the payment would be 50% of any treasure recovered. When the severely hung-over bard reported this to his companions, the looks on their faces were priceless. But here was the fun part - the bard won a medal by casting _modify memory_ on the dwarf, making the commander remember that he promised the dwarves free of charge. It was a classic spellcasting moment, though from this point on the bard will be known as "monkey" or "jester" with little chance he's going to shake that moniker.
Anyway, with dwarves in tow they headed through the hills, slowed down only by a hill giant with the dwarves foolishly tried to swarm and got clobbered for their trouble. After that, the group found the cave, but found that the Erinyes had learned, and set up a pretty foolproof defence. As soon as the ogre guards saw them coming, they ducked inside the cave, where some bugbears rang an alarm bell. With the use of _prying eyes_, the diviner and team captain discovered that when the alarm was rung, the ogres, plus the bugbears and the four ogre magi, set up barricades in a central cavern and waited for their victims to enter, whereupon they would set upon them with thrown rocks, javelins and nasty spells.
So the party decided not to risk a frontal attack, and sought out the bandit chieftain in the area, who agreed to let past bygones be bygones (the diviner made him strip naked and walk back to his camp at their last meeting) and help the PCs get rid of the devils, provided they gave him a share of what was in the vault. He sent a lizardman druid, a halfling rogue (a very Belkar-like character) and a dozen bandits to help them. So, again, they approached the lair. 
Here was where the spellcasting debate really took off. The warmage wanted to use varying types of attack spells to overwhelm the defenders. The diviner was in favour of a more subtle approach, possibly _invisibility_. The sorcerer agreed with the warmage but had his own views as to the type of spells to use. The bard wanted to sneak in under a flag of negotiation. The NPC wizard came up with a two-pronged assault plan, whereby a small team would dimension door into the cavern, while the rest would swarm through the caves and mop up any strays. This was the plan they settled on after debating it for fifteen minutes. The five mages, plus the druid and the diviner's half-orc minion, appeared in the cavern and started blasting away at the defenders. They unwisely clustered together in the doorway, which helped the two ogre mages who cast _cone of cold_ at them - alas, little damage was done. My favourite part was when the diviner and the sorcerer used _dispel magic_ against the two other ogre mages who had cast _gaseous form _- *thunk*. The bard used glitterdust to blind  the bugbears and some of the ogres - the party took out the remainder until the 'army' arrived and made short work of the rest. The next hurdle was two barbazu, who were guarding the entrance to the inner sanctum - each of them took about six _lightning bolts_ each, and the bard was lucky he didn't get hit by their long, pointy things. Anyway, they made it through and then sent the rogue on a scouting mission. He found a very large, big, dumb ogre and unwisely tried a sneak attack. The PCs heard a stab, a scream, a thud, a scream, a stab, a scream, a big thud, a splat...and silence. Fortunately the ogre had two hp left after that. The only other problem was the erinyes herself, who fast-talked her way into getting the PCs to let her go, but she insisted she see what was in the vault. The half-dragon opened the vault simply by touching it (it was keyed to the dragon's offspring), but all that was inside was...two eggs. This was disappointing to the bandits, but exactly what the PCs were hoping. They came away satisfied, though slightly worried about the erinyes' threat to "kill that bloody dragon". 

What they don't know is that one of the eggs is going to hatch, releasing a half-dragon, half-lion which, despite the gap in species, will be the half-dragon PC's "brother". He'll be charged with looking after it - if anything happens to it, "mum" won't be too pleased with her son.

I loved the way the PCs argued for fifteen minutes about spell use. I was put in mind of the Unseen University wizards from the Discworld. I'm hoping I can get them to bicker for an entire game session. It's all in good fun, of course. Well, it's fun for me, anyway...


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