Ep 1210: How do we search a town buried under a lake of deadly ooze

Welcome back! When we last left this fun band of adventurers, we had arrived at the ruins of the dwarven city. It is named Daoine Gloine. No, I have no idea how to pronounce that. I can barely spell it. Elle would know, as she is fluent in dwarvish. Anyway, this ruined town holds a high value item in it that we need for our negotiations with the metallic dragons.

This is actually a fairly large town with many towers, sort of shaped like an hour glass. And everything from ground level to 30' in the air is covered in the biggest ooze ever. This thing is probably the size of a small lake quite honestly. We're seriously hoping to not have to fight the thing. If someone falls in/gets sucked into the ooze they will take acid damage. Quite a lot of it in fact, judging by Magnus' brief stint inside.

So we're standing on the outside of this town, outside of the ooze, trying to determine what to do. We don't actually know where in the town this high value item is. Or, in all honesty, if it is even still here. We're just following leads, and this was the next stop. We decided to go up into the ruins of towers ... there's some walkways and some towers tilted over ... and get to the middle of each round part of the hour glass and have Magnus do a locate object. Oddly neither wizard has any scrying type magic.

This is risky because we do not know what the structural integrity of these ruined towers, and if you fall there's the giant lake of deadly ooze below. But it's the best plan we have so off we went to scamper up a handy tipped over tower.

Before we took off though, Leoven did go ahead and do a detect of some sort that shows if there are any: dragons, fey, fiend, undead, and a bunch of other things of questionable integrity within 6 miles of his location. He got back 2 pings: Tsedek (he's our Tiefling, and Tieflings have fiendish bloodlines); and a singular undead somewhere in the lake of deadly ooze.

So we scamper up a handy tower and start travelling over the lake. The tower we're currently walking on is essentially about 10' wide before you get into the danger zone of falling off into the lake of ooze below due to the curvature, so we set ourselves up in the middle single file.

As we're traversing towards the center of the bottom round part of town on this tipped tower turned walkway, when we notice this tube shaped flying black object coming right at us. It resolved itself into a long black mechanical tentacle. That flew right at Itanis and Elle and tried to shove us off of the walkway. Luckily we both made our dexterity checks.

So we did what we like to do, and proceed to thump this thing. Magnus walks up to Leoven and casts haste, so Leoven is practically a bow using version of a machine gun. Which he then puts to good use ... but misses a couple of times. Still does some damage though so this is good. This tentacle is hard to hit because it keeps moving and is fairly skinny. Think thick octopus arm.

We're in essentially a straight line on this "walkway" and fairly close to each other, so Elle decides to be a little cautious spell wise and tosses a ray of frost at the creature. And misses. Dang it. Tsedek and Itanis also miss the creature.

Magnus then walks up to it and smacks it good and dead. Just in time for 3 more to show up.

One tries to shove Tsedek off the walkway and is almost successful, Tsedek is now hanging by his hands on the side of the tower turned walkway. Not good. The next one tries to shove Itanis and Magnus off, unsuccessfully. The next tentacle then goes after Leoven and Elle, and they both were successful at their dexterity checks.

Now the scene is four of us on top of this tower turned walkway with one tentacle in the middle of the party, one hovering on the left side of the walkway, and one hovering on the right side of the walkway. The one on the tower is right in front of Elle, and we all know what she does when trapped/scared. Fire, which is probably not the best idea in this situation.

It's Leoven's turn and he machine guns the tentacle right in front of Elle, and kills it dead. He then proceeds to pull a spider man and go under the tower-walkway close to Tsedek to steady him. Yes, he's walking upside down on the underside of the walkway.

Leoven's killing of this tentacle is good because Elle was about to fireball the whole mess and had quite the internal debate* going. See, with this lake of ooze beneath us she doesn't really want to use up her higher level spells in case she needs to deal with that ooze. But doing a 3rd level fireball means one of the party was going to take damage. So she was standing there debating who would take the damage when Leoven dropped the one right in front of her.

Quick pivot and she tosses a lightning bolt at the tentacle nearest to the dangling Tsedek while Itanis scooped the further away tentacle in a globe of water. Magnus then strides up to the tentacle nearer to Tsedek and smashes it quite dead.

Leoven then does another round of his machine-gun arrows at the tentacle stuck in the globe of water and kills it dead as well.

And that's where we had to end the day. More next week!

* The fact that Elle was debating the right move is a huge improvement for her as she previously has been known to throw fire and think later. The problem remains that she wasn't sure who to do damage to in this scenario. Magnus can take the damage so he's the logical choice, but she doesn't ever want to damage Magnus. She also never wants to harm Itanis, he's her BFF. Tsedek is already in a precarious position so he gets a free pass. So that left the good response being Elle took the damage herself, the evil response being making Leoven taking the damage.