Heroes on the Borderlands · Session 09
An invisible scout, a two-front crypt battle and a long rest that almost becomes permanent.
Scene 01 · Confidence enters Cave G
After clearing two caves in one expedition, the party felt bold enough to enter Cave G—the place other delvers called the Shunned Cave.
Naomi made herself invisible and moved ahead alone. Around a vast underground lake she found four grey oozes clinging to the wet shore. Beyond them, an owlbear prowled the higher stone.
Scene 02 · No pause between monsters
The party fought all four oozes along the lake and spent blood, armour and magic putting them down.
Then the owlbear hit. It drove into the already damaged formation with beak and claws, turning the second fight into punishment for every resource spent in the first. The party killed it, but climbed toward the upper caves seriously hurt.
Scene 03 · An elaborate little trap
Harvey scouted the upper level and found cultists gathered beyond a blind corner. The party answered danger with theatre.
One voice began to sing from down the passage. The cultists followed it around the corner, struck a waiting trip rope and collapsed into a heap at the party’s feet. The ambush worked almost embarrassingly well. One cultist was left alive and tied up for questioning.
“First the song. Then the rope. Then the floor.”
Scene 04 · The Wight’s crypt
Deeper inside Cave G, a crypt opened and its wight came forward. While the party fought the dead ahead, fresh cultists arrived from Cave K below and cut the prisoner free behind them.
The neat ambush became a desperate two-front battle. The route of the reinforcements proved that Cave G connected to Cave K, while the cult’s decorations confirmed that Cave K was the entrance the party had been seeking.
Scene 05 · The lake was not safety
Too wounded to continue, the party rejected the cultist barracks and returned to the underground lake for a long rest. They believed the lower cavern offered fewer ways to be trapped.
During the night, the guard heard a mass of feet in the dark. A zombie horde filled the approach while the party still had neither recovered spells nor restored hit points. They ran from Cave G by the skin of their teeth, but Norman was lost to the dead during the retreat. The others could not reach their fallen halfling cleric and were forced out without him.
They escaped Cave G. Norman did not.
Session 09 · Aftermath
“They chose the lake for safety. The dead chose it too.”
