Sunday, 30 June 2013

Skyship Islands 6

  • Alice plays Amarylis, a female Centaur barbarian with a warhammer and an attitude.
  • +Andrew is playing Inigo Yonez, a male Dwarven archaeologist.
  • +Melysa is playing Annona, a female Jungle Elf shaman.
  • Michael plays Engrin, a quiet male Human rogue armed with a crossbow.
  • I'm playing Zanne, the female Human captain of a small skyship. 

Having portaged our boat around the waterfall, we split up - Annona and the leopard head into the jungle to ambush the gar-ogress, while the rest of us pole the boat upstream. The ogress spots the boat and wades after us, but Annona magically tangles her in the vines surrounding the stream. Amarylis leaps onto the bank, almost capsizing the boat as she does so. With his new bow, Engrin puts an arrow through the ogress' leg! I steady the boat and prevent it from drifting back downstream. The ogress breaks free and limps to the bank, pulling a large bottle from a leather bag. Before she can drink from it, she is dropped by one of Annona's arrows. 

The bottle is full of healing potion, and she's armed with a great-axe and a brace of throwing axes. Amarylis takes some of the throwing axes.

Further upstream, some of the party hear a cataract ahead, and also the sound of two gar-ogres - presumably the ogress' boys - engaged in loud conversation. Apparently they have lost a fight against a band of goblins, and are worried how their mother will react. We secure the boat around a bend in the stream, and set up an ambush at the edges of the shallow pool that lies at the bottom of the cataract. As the already-injured ogres splash down into the pool, they are met by a volley of missiles. Amarylis and I rush along the bank to engage them, but they both fall before we can get there.

Like their mother, these ogres are armed with axes and a potion, except that half of their potion had been used already.

Pressing on through the jungle for another few hours, we eventually reach the entrance to the ruins. Engrin and I check the passageway, and discover it has a pressure-pad mechanism to reset all of the traps within the complex. We decide to bypass it, hoping for easy access past any traps that have been already set off, and also hoping not to find any areas that are impassable unless the trap is reset...

Pressing into the gloomy ruins we encounter several set-off traps, with blades and barbs protruding from the walls. They seem to have been deliberately activated and left, with trails showing where goblins have moved around them. As we get deeper into the complex, we hear the sound of a goblin warband marching down the hall! We retreat a little and take cover in some side-corridors, and the group of a dozen or so goblins pass us by.

According to the crude map we'd recovered from one of the journal fragments, we are finally nearing our destination - the location of the final fragment, which will reveal to us the location of the fabled Fountain of Youth and a fabulous treasure!

Only one thing stands in our way - a long hallway, lined with pressure-pad activated dart traps. Without an easy way to block all the darts, I begin tapping out a safe path using my staff to test the paving stones...

>>> To be continued!

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