Primal Adventures V

(Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four)

Another long absence meant we spent a chunk of time recapping where we'd got to. Then we carried on our trek through the woods, noticing more and more odd things - there didn't seem to be a noticeable sun and, come to think of it, the trees did look a little....tentacly. I put another notch in my "weird stick" and the Shaman consulted the spirits to be told it was the influence of the Far Realm on the world. I mused that I didn't really know how to cure an infection of the world, rather than a person, and the Shaman pointed out we should try and find what was causing it and remove it. After wandering around a bit to figure out which way we'd been going (as the ground didn't seem to be taking footprints) we carried on in the direction we hoped the tribe's camp was - the direction in which it was easier to walk.

Eventually the trees thinned out and we came to a grassy area that was less grassy than we remembered it. After a few feet the grass gave way to...sand? We also seemed to be slowly sliding forwards (towards the "desert"). As we started to take this in, some more floaty-tentacly-things came through the trees and we moved, with great difficulty, towards them to fight them. The ground definitely seemed to resist us moving away from the sandy area, and we still kept sliding towards it. This reduced movement didn't help when the Warden managed to get himself surrounded by tentacle-beasts and took sufficient damage to knock him unconscious.

What followed was mostly the Barbarian hacking away at the things which seemed to hit harder and harder with each successive hit, while I thinned out the minions and the Shaman kept picking up the yo-yoing Warden until he ran out of healing and healing potions. Eventually I went down too (in two hits) and the remaining two had to deal with the last couple of baddies by themselves. Thankfully, the biggest had hit a couple of times and then wandered away, presumably bored. We seem to be letting a lot of things escape.

The fight took all night. A quick post-mortem afterwards seemed to suggest the monsters mostly just got lucky - not missing meant their damage got ramped up to the levels of 6d6. With fewer of us helping to take them down, it took the barbarian longer to deal with them despite being able to throw out large chunks of damage, and the reduced maneuverability meant they could surround us easily. Thankfully the two of us who went unconscious only failed one death saving throw each, but unless we get an extended rest soon we're in a fairly vulnerable situation. The feeling of danger was an interesting extra element to the fight, as we'd been going through without taking a lot of punishment thanks to Longtooth Shifting and our Shaman. So all in all, a pretty good session, even if I did end up with nothing to do by the end.