Ghosts of Saltmarsh (#22) - The Isle of the Abbey III

Day 51 - continued

After Navda's unfortunate dunking in green slime, he edged around the pit to examine the door at the end of the north corridor. After negotiating his way around a trip-wire trap across the corridor, which was subsequently disarmed, Navda discovered that the door was indeed a false one as we suspected.

The dungeon expands

We decided to head left and left again from the cross-roads, so that we covered the underground maze in a logical fashion. Unfortunately, Navda discovered trap after trap along each corridor, which took ages for him to either disarm or mark them out as a danger. We decided that we would not go behind the false door as we assumed it to be a stairwell down to another level - we will go back and investigate that area at a later stage.

As we headed back eastwards along the main east-west corridor, Navda unwittingly set off a pit-fall trap but was able to avoid its consequences. We started to cross the area that contained the trap one-by-one but my heavy armour caused me to slip and fall into the spike-lined pit, causing me no small amount of pain.

Whilst I was down the pit, in which I found nothing of value, Navda had explored to the end of the corridor and peeked into the large chamber at the end. Within it he spotted a large crystalline statue of a minotaur and a number of large rotting figures stood still in the darkness beside it.

As I was rescued from the pit, we all heard a stone-on-stone grinding noise, and were surprised by a huge rotting ogre that appeared in the corridor right before us. It was soon joined by a couple of ghasts and a furious melee erupted. A Fireball from Gladreth caused them a great deal of bother though.

I managed to Turn one of the smaller undead beings and Navda killed the other, but not before Gladreth and Druss were taken ill from the stench of the ghasts. Dharion was on form and finished off the other two undead beings in quick succession.

Believing the threat to be over for now, Gladreth advanced into the chamber only to be severely injured by the great axe of the crystalline minotaur figure. Dharion struck the statue in retaliation, but shards of it flew off in a spray of razor sharp splinters causing him to step back in pain.

Gladreth cast a Lightning Bolt but it seemed to shrug off a fair bit of the damage it should have taken. Another Lightning Bolt and Druss's Dragon Breath also failed to cause it much harm, but Drakkon was able to disarm the minotaur, giving the party a much needed respite to re-double their attacks and for me to cast a few Prayers of Healing.

We were all trying our utmost to take the being down, but it stubbornly refused to fall causing most of us grievous wounds and felling Gladreth. My prayers and spells barely kept up with the injuries sustained, but a sudden flurry of blows from the fighters and a well-aimed shot by Navda finally brought the crystalline monster down.

A search of the chamber revealed nothing of value for all of our efforts, so we decided that we should rest up again to regain our spells and to heal. We headed back to the chamber we had slept in the night before, Navda reset the traps and we settled in for a long rest.