Barbigazl Strikes Back! Part Dos

Beyond Saltzburg we found the Fungal forest, with large mushrooms and more hillocks and another underground lake, and a strange creature, and other strange creatures that nicked our party members! Oz was taken first, with Excrutia flying after him (having had a flying spell cast on her earlier), then Gort. Although Excrutia tried to block them from being taken underground, they proved too fast.

Meanwhile, the rest of the party was fending them off. Badly. Morf was targetted (they had a thing for Gnomes), but the others weren't doing better. If the creatures struck, they had a paralysing effect that took a while to wear off. And they weren't pretty to look at either [go Google "descent crawlers"]. Valin was snatched, but the others managed to fend the rest of the creatures off, helped when Excrutia returned to get reinforcements. But that left them three party members down, so down into the dark caves they all went...

And rather than wander around getting lost, Excrutia simply looked for recent drag marks and followed those. This did lead to more creatures, but those great spells Hold Person and Sleep put paid to them. Continuing on, we eventually reached another underground cavern with a high roof (with a hole in it), two racing snails, more creatures, Oz, Gort and an avatar of a god. At least, Morf thought so, it looking like Urdlen, a Gnomish bogeyman of legend (making the creatures Urdlenkin). Not that he was going to succumb to madness at the sight of the creature. No way, not him. Not when he could be paralysed by the aura first.

While Excrutia managed to survive a little longer than the others without becoming paralysed, and got some whacks at Urdlen in, even she went down, although others started to come around by this point. Valin, who had managed to free himself and wander around, also found us and pitched in. One the magic people took out the creatures (Sleep, I think), that just left us hitting on Urdlen, trapped by a web. He didn't last long after all that. [I can't remember when, but I think it was during this fight that Perelay got Mummy Rot, so couldn't heal. If we were to rest, the cleric could deal with that and the curse the next day.]

The best way out was up. While we could get those racing snails to creep up the walls, Excrutia simply flew people up. Yeah, we ain't waiting for no snails. We found ourselves at the bottom of a chasm, or possible a cravasse. Above was a bridge, so at last we had found civilisation! Onwards! [Yep... no rest yet...]

[END]