As those who know me well should know, one of my life's missions is to seek out and destroy necromancy wherever I might find it. Necromancy is the one thing on Tyrra which might be defined as pure, true evil. Therefore, when I heard recently that there were chaos mounds spouting up in Kincora which were producing undead that were plaguing the landscape, I of course decided to go to Kincora to try to stop them.
I journeyed with Kabaka, my friend from the Silvermyst Court, and my Tyrran
Legion teammate Kimper. It was a long, hard journey from Avendale, and when
we arrived we found that my old friend Eireann, a mystic wood elf whom I knew
from Ravenholt, had also arrived, and Draco, the lizard scavenger who is also
a Tyrran Legion teammate, was there as well.
We were told that these chaos mounds were dangerous, and so we were advised
to bring along a sixth person for the journey. Fortunately, my friend Righty
Weasel was there as well, and so he became our sixth man, which was especially
useful because he supplemented Kabaka to give us two fighters.
The big problem was that we didn't know exactly where we were going. However,
an air elemental soon fixed that for us. When the door blew open, I figured
it was just the wind. However, Eireann informed me that there was an air elemental
in the room that was talking to her. I thought it strange, but then again, Eireann
always seems to have voices in her head, and sometimes they lead somewhere,
so I decided to give it a shot.
The air elemental told us, through Eireann, that it needed our help to investigate
the first chaos mound for the person who summoned it, who was some form of researcher.
Now, intelligent people would have asked the air elemental who the researcher
was, but adventurers don't tend to do intelligent things like that, and so we
all allowed the air elemental to gate us to the chaos mound.
Once there, we were immediately set upon by undead, which I believe were revenants.
They seemed to be reducing our blows to half strength, and that is the trademark
of the revenant.
Fortunately, between Kimper, Draco, and I we had plenty of earth spells to chuck
at them, and even though they were reducing Righty's blows, he was still tearing
through them.
There were three buildings in front of us, and one of them was open, so we went
to that building first. Inside, there was a chaos pit, with a piece of wood
overhanging it that one could safely stand on. On the chaos pit there was a
table, which was set up for some type of gambling game. I was one of the first
people in, and began helping to solve whatever puzzle lay before us, but then
the undead started attacking the people who were still outside, and even Righty
couldn't take four or five undead by himself. Thus, I went back outside to help
Kimper and Righty with the undead while Kabaka, Eireann, and Draco worked on
the puzzle.
The fight with the undead was uneventful. They feared Righty's blade too much
to come after us, and we weren't going to give up our strategic advantage by
going after them. One of the most amusing incidents, though, was when Righty
used an item to curse one of the undead with weakness, so that it continued
to pound us even though it's blows could not damage us at all.
Eventually, the three inside solved the puzzle, and we got a ward key which
opened up the next building. I am not sure exactly who solved it, though I seem
to recall that it was Kabaka who did so.
The next building had a 25 block layout on the floor, where each block had a
letter in it. A voice at the front of the room would ask us questions, and we
would have to step on the correct sequence of letters to answer the question.
I believe it began with Eireann, myself, and one other trying to answer the
questions, and the first question we messed up entirely, all taking damage in
the process.
However, after that everyone else showed up, and we got better, answering the
next three questions in a row successfully. The best answer was supplied by
Kimper. Given a question regarding "32 white horses on a field of crimson,"
she realized that the answer was "teeth."
By doing this, we got the ward key that opened up the last building. We were
attacked in the doorway, but defeated the undead creatures fairly easily.
However, we found that the mound that was in this building kept creating new
undead, and so just killing them wasn't enough. We were clearly going to have
to neutralize the mound somehow. Also, this building was strange because there
was a greater undead, who claimed the building was his school, and that we had
to leave unless we wanted to be his pupils, which we clearly did not.
Unfortunately, he was a caster, and so began giving protectives to the others.
I started chucking in cure light wounds spells to break the shield magics. Finally,
though, the greater undead made a mistake. He gave a shield magic to one of
his minions, but forgot to shield magic himself, and Righty hit him with an
imprison. With him out of the way, we were able to flood into the room, wipe
out all the lesser undead, and finally kill off the greater undead. With that,
the chaos mound stopped working, and we were able to harvest some of its essence
for study, so that we might eventually find out how to destroy it.
The air elemental rifted us back to the tavern, and we met Alexandra, the person
who originally summoned the air elemental to search out the chaos mounds. She
worked for Duke Jason in some capacity, I think as a researcher, and so he had
assigned her to this task. We turned in the pieces of the chaos mound to her,
and she thanked us for our help. Righty left, and the rest of us hung out in
the tavern, waiting to see if we would get more chances to investigate.
And we did. My Avendalian friends Ashe of Clan Blackfist and Sasha d'von Skya
showed up, and they were looking for a group to help them investigate a chaos
mound. We happily consented to go along with them, figuring that the mission
wouldn't be much more difficult than last time.
However, that was a mistaken impression. This time, Alexandra came with us,
and the air elemental gated us out just as before. However, instead of hitting
revenants, we ran into ghasts. Those are creatures that can cause nausea just
with their scent. We had a fair number of poison shields between Kimper, Ashe,
Draco, and myself, but they went fast, and so did our purify bloods. However,
we still had some left when we found the buildings. As before, there were three
buildings, and one was open.
Inside, there was a barbarian who challenged us to some type of initiation by
combat. Ashe accepted the challenge, and fought hard, but could not overcome
the barbarian. Sasha tried next, and dropped a slay into the barbarian, which
did the trick. Having successfully completed the task, we were let into the
next building.
Here, we had to pass some type of puzzle test again, though I do not remember
much specific information about it.
We passed, though, and were allowed to move onto the third building, which contained
some form of greater undead, who told us that we should leave because our presence
was torturing him. We of course refused, and ghasts attacked us. We were almost
out of poison shields, and we dropped fast. Ashe and Sasha both dropped, Draco
dropped, Kabaka dropped, and before long it was down to Kimper, Eireann, and
I. One of the ghasts threw two nausea poisons at me, with the first one contacting
my poison shield, and the other one missing. Being fast set upon by the undead,
we retreated fifty feet away from the building. Kimper gave me her last poison
shield, and then she got taken out by a nausea, leaving it with only Eireann
and I. And that's when I got desperate.
Realizing that our only chance was an onslaught, I started chucking undead destroying
spells at every undead who popped up. Before long, we fought our way back to
where the others were, and managed to get everyone else up. Unfortunately, I
had to kill Kabaka and life him to get rid of the nausea on him because we were
out of purify blood spells. However, soon we were all up and healthy again,
and we rushed in after the greater undead. We had all our earth casters chucking
spells at him while he hid behind the chaos mound, and not even the mound could
save him. Before long, he went down. We again harvested pieces of the chaos
mound for research, and the air elemental took all of us back to the tavern
again.
At that point, a group who I had not seen in a long time, Aduin and his friends,
wandered in. They said that they were going to investigate another chaos mound,
and so we asked to go with them. They said that they could only take so many,
and so I went with Kabaka, Draco, and Eireann, but Kimper stayed to help mind
the tavern at the request of the tavern owner.
This was the least experienced group we had yet traveled with, and thus we expected
a hard fight. The creatures we ended up fighting I believe were ghouls, as they
were capable of swinging paralyze. Without Kimper, we had only two casters capable
of casting unparalyze, which were Aduin and myself, and only one caster capable
of casting life, which was myself.
I should point out that I hate being the only life capable caster on an adventure.
It means everyone else is safe, but if I go down, I am going to end up rezing,
because no one will have the life spells to save me. Nonetheless, without Kimper,
this was the situation I found myself in.
Again, we found ourselves facing three buildings once the air elemental gated
us to our destination. These buildings I have little memory of. We might have
had to solve puzzles again, but I do not recall. Finally, though, we came to
the last building, which housed, as usual, undead. Also, it contained the chaos
mound and a greater undead of some type.
There was a ramp heading up to this building, and so we fought our way up the
ramp. At the top, Kabaka and Draco got taken down, and so I was forced to fight
three undead by myself, with them all swinging paralyze. Now, once before, on
a raid into an attercob lair, I had a celestial caster save everyone's life
by letting loose a flurry of big damage spells. In this situation, Eireann did
the same thing, and thus saved everyone. While I held off the undead on the
ramp, she walked around and blasted them all down with big damage celestial
spells.
This gave me a chance to get Kabaka and Draco back up, and then to raid the
building with the chaos mound and the greater undead. Kabaka pushed in first,
and I came in behind him. Kabaka was getting hit with tons of chaos damage,
but I was behind him pumping elemental healing into him to make certain he would
not fall. Finally, he stopped getting hit with chaos, and went after the greater
undead. With Kabaka acting as a shield, I was able to throw two imprisons at
the greater undead, thus trapping it. We got rid of the rest of the little ones,
and I killed the greater undead. We then harvested chaos mound pieces for study
by Alexandra again, and we went back to the tavern.
I do not know if our actions that day had any effect or not, but I do hope that
they did, and I hope that the scourge that is necromancy was wiped off the Kincora
landscape for at least a little while.
Scribed by Seronia on the 18th day of February in the year 603.