I haven't kept up with these, but we've still been gaming every week!

So this is a multi-session recap. I started trying to phrase last session, but there's so much continuity involved.

Ok.

The players embarked on a series of side treks to clean up what they deemed as 'loose ends'. One of those loose ends was a red dragon named Magg Maul, that had destroyed Owyn's home village of Jemro.

"Payback time for the dragon!" they cheered, knowing full well that they had levelled up beyond what the dragon was when she had first appeared.

So they made their way to the dragon's lair, and buffed to the gils, they invaded.

There was a very cool charge scene in there where she sent her dracotaur barbarians out after the party. This was just after 300 came out.

So these raging barbarian dracotaur (like draconic centaurs, kinda) are all charging out of the cave mouth directly at the party. The party formed a phalanx and started laying waste to these guys in a narrow corridor between a pair of rock formations- they had set weapons, and the psion and caster were laying down massive firepower. Every rank of the dracotaur group charged and either died or nearly died just in that first few rounds of combat.

Within three rounds, they were walking over the piles of corpses, making their way into the cave.

And then the dragon battle. This didn't take very long. They were prepared with eneergy resistance out the wazoo, so the dragon went in with claws and teeth. I remembered she got in a vicious tail slap at someone, and at one point tried to grapple Vork.  She tried to bull rush one of the PCs into a lava pit, but that got foiled as well.

So eventually, the dragon was slain. Ths was a few sessions ago.

And the prize was the great egg- the Egg of Rodnak.

This was a massive artifact- 10' in diameter, 18' high. Quite obviously, an egg. Black with red-crackle. Standing upright in a special holder.

It had a small panel with a 3x3 grid that supposedly 'opened' it. The players weren't sure what was inside.

This was the puzzle for opening the egg:

The numerals written are as follows:

64, 10, 82
60, ?, 15
65, 11, 83

There were 2 dials in the center square (the '?')  so that any number from 00 to 99 could be selected. Can anyone solve the riddle of Rodnak?

It took my players about 2 minutes. I'll get to the next post. Feel free to post your answer to the riddle.

No answers for the riddle yet?

Ok.

Next session, they solve the riddle and open the gateway to the Egg of Rodnak. It beams a doorway-shaped square of light on the ground. One by one, three of the player characters step through... (the fourth, remains behind as a guard. In reality, he missed the next 2 sessions).

..And they are falling.

See, the egg contains a miniaturized prison-plane. A sort of self-contained 'mini-world' that I came up with. In this case, it's an extraplanar prison.

So one by one the players enter this weird prison and they enter from the top. They fall- it's the equivalent of teleporting in at 1000 feet above the ocean.

Luckily, these three guys all had ways to save themselves.
1) Bernard activated a ring of feather falling.  
2) Owyn drank a potion of fly (while falling, he lost 200 feet of altitude, but safely got to flying).
3) Ganex used psionic levitation and immediately controlled his descent.

And then I had the encounter- a Nightwing. Almost invisible against the night sky, it harassed them all the way down. Bernard couldn't control his movement (but at least he wasn't going to die from the fall), so he got the worst of the situation. Owyn and Ganex tried to chase it with spells and eventually managed to destroy it near the end of Bernards touchdown in the water.

They assessed the situation. An endless ocean- with two islands- a large one and a small one. They chose the smaller island.

I'll get to the next post eventually.  

 
3)

Quote from: Abyssal MawNo answers for the riddle yet?

Spoiler

The middle number is 06.

hgjs: Correct!

So after the Nightwing, the three heroes made their way to shore of the smaller island, healed themselves up, and.. lacking a ranger (the ranger missed the next two sessions), they decided to go about handling recon "gnome-style"; they hunted around for a burrowing animal, befriended it and got the lay of the land.

One of the first things they discovered were a series of these massive 'easter-island' style monoliths. Each one depicted a cone-shaped figure with a bowl-shaped concave area in the head. Their burrowing muskrat (I dunno, I sort of invented this critter on the spot) friend also warned them about the inhabitants of the central area of the island- a group of skullcrusher ogres, and their terrible queen.

So they made their way to that area- an underground sprawling cave system, which included a massive cable-car to get you past a sheer drop of 100's of feet (into a spiky stalgmite-pocked area) once you enter the first cave layer.

The PCs puzzled around with the cable system for a while but could not figure out how to operate the 'call' function. They opted instead for flight and levitation, as before. Owyn and Bernard took the precautions of using invisibility as well.

So finally they crossed, and ignoring a deeper series of caves, they instead opted for a more finished area. They quickly ran into a patrol of the Skullcrusher Clan.

Opting not to battle, Ganex used a psionic charm and tried to make friends with the ogres, and it worked. After some brief parlay, they agreed to introduce them to their ruler.

 So they got a fairly quick tour of the ogres lair area and ended up beyond what looked like an underground fortress. There they were met with the ogres ruler.

She turned out to be an Eldritch giantess- an extremely powerful and ancient creature. She immediately sensed the invisible characters and dispelled them.  But since the PCs weren't hostile.. she chose to offer them employment. Her name was Brekke, and she had been a ruler on the PC's home-world of Aedorea during ancient times.

She was impressed by Ganex and Owyn especially, and found Bernard amusing.

She explained that the entire world was a prison- Rodnak was inescapable, and sentenced creatures could never leave their assigned islands without a special item called a Carceran Keystone. It was a huge (5' in diamter) round boulder that would fit into one of the weird moa statues up above. This creates an escape-gate.

She had contracted earlier adventures to steal one for her, but they had failed. She was willing to give the PCs here a chance as well, though.

The players accepted, but asked permission to explore some of the other areas of the caves as well before they went on this journey. Of course Brekke accepts.

(next up: they decided to poke around in the caves a bit).

The PCs asked Brekke about some side layers of the cave that looked fairly remote (this was an area that linked off of the 'pit' part of the caves  where the dropoff from the cable-car was. Ganex and Bernard were especially interested in doing a bit of exploring.

She mentioned that she had never bothered with those areas- they were an older part of the prison complex.

Ok, so off they go. This part of the map had multi-layered platforms and some climbs to do, as well as a natural footbridge span over another deep area.

There were a couple of encounters that were kinda weak "bleeder" type encounters. I had one that was a bunch of gargoyles that attacked as they crossed the footbridge. They responded by using their various flight-like abilities (including a mass-fly spell), and made short work of the gargoyles. They adventured further in, discovered a blasted iron door, and fought some mid-level constructs.

Then they ran across a Roper.

I had always wanted to use one of these creatures in a dungeon. Ropers are a classic.

So anyhow, the battle with the roper was the end of that evening. Bernard used 'free action' to avoid my many grapple attempts with the roper tentacles but I got in some pretty good jabs.

They blasted it to pieces, of course. Ganex studied it's anatomy after it was dead.. and added it into his polymorph repertoire.