Road to Auer Session 4: Into Briar's Woods

Halanthis, Longshot, Terror, Balziros, Gorg, Nonne, and Harvey made their now much richer selves into Briar’s Woods to investigate the sickness and corruption growing within. The forest was cold, damp, and dark, but luckily, they have both a ranger and a nature cleric, so travel was easy for them. They saw strange purple patches of magical residue that was eating away at trees and plants and seemed to grow around points of magic. While traveling they heard a weird sound and stopped to prepare for whatever was coming. Through the underbrush they saw an armored man peering out, his face pale white, smooth and featureless. Thinking that was creepy they called out a greeting and it pulled out a longbow and opened fire. The group scattered and watched as more creatures like him came out of the underbrush, some with crystal knives and another with spells. As the group harmed these creatures, they saw purple goo bursting from their wounds and the pale skin like substance filling in the gaps. Nonne fought the mage, which was unable to hit him with any of its attacks until its friends got close, then Nonne got hit many times. Balziros took a bite out of one of them and found they tasted terrible. The attacks of these assailants were stronger than expected but they were eventually defeated. The party looted the dissolving bodies and found they all had the daggers and a few pounds of ritual incense, their armor was too saturated with the goo to be useful.

They continued on their journey until Balziros spotted strange yellow musky mist like spores in a small clearing. As the group approached, they saw a body stand up out of the spore filled clearing. They attempted to talk to it but found it was uninterested. Balziros used his channel divinity to try to charm this creature, knowing it was not undead. The more they investigated and intuited they realized this was a plant-based zombie and most likely part of some strange colony. They were kind of right but still wrong. They let it be and watched it bury itself in the spores again and realized the clearing had quite a few of these piles.

The next leg of the journey took them past more areas of corruption and eventually to foothills leading into the larger mountains. They remembered elves lived in this area so Longshot shouted an elvish greeting. They heard the scrambling of claws on stone and a large dragon looking creature with an elf on its back peeked over the rock face. They exchanged greetings and explained their intent. Balziros hissed at the dragon like creature, which they found out was a type of drake, for he did not like lizards bigger than himself. For Balziros it got worse. The party followed the elf and his mount to a large cave in the mountain and found many of the elves had been hit with the sickness as well as the alpha drake, the huge size progenitor of all the drakes in the forest. The drake rider, named Allendar, informed the group that the drakes and the elves became sick when the strange purple rot started to appear. They have seen signs of strange camp sites what seemed to have been the spots dark rituals had been cast at but have been unable to locate the culprits. The party debated options of searching the woods when a sky drake and rider came soaring in and revealed to location of a current ritual site. The party rushed to intervene.

After their short journey they found a broken fort with a wooden ruined palisade around its border. Within they could see a chalky skinned humanoid in robes working on the ritual cauldron with numerous supplicants chanting in front of him. The group made a plan to use a pincer attack and sneak into the ritual and bash heads. It went pretty seamless with Harvey using shatter on the cauldron, spraying purple goo, splashing Terror and the supplicants. The group charged in, bashing the spell casting wight, an undead creature, into a fine pile of mess rather quickly. The supplicants went into a rage, they were berserkers and tore into the party. Longshot made good use of duel wielding blades, even with the magic corruption Terror resisted the magical curse and continued to pelt the berserkers with spells, Gorg switched between using her spear and maul dealing great damage to her foes, Nonne used both his breath weapon and blade, Harvey blasted his foes with eldritch might, Halanthis was terrifying as a large axe beak, and Balziros made good use of primal savagery. Spells and blade saved the day, but the party did notice their magic seemed to be making some of the purple goo spread faster, spores were filling the air around them. They searched the dead and found the wight had an odd selection of spell components, one of which was a unicorn heart. The group advised the lizard folk Balziros to not eat it. the session ended there, as the group felt the air beginning to cool.