Session 17: And we’ll all go down together!
An ongoing adventure of the Mary Lin D&D Club
As Kreppelie’s body sunk into the river and her words sunk in to the party, the kids were in shock, forced to reevaluate everything they thought they knew about the sea hag. She seemed to be saying she’d been protecting the village, not trying to destroy it. She seemed to care about Celeste, not trying to transform her into some kind of monster. Maybe there was more they didn’t know. They did know they didn’t have much time, as they could hear cries of distress from all over the village.
Fighting in disguise, they worked their way back to the bridges towards the most populated areas of the village, the market. Along the way, they saw animated slimes and aggressive oozes overwhelming villagers. The party attacked, saving Grif the village historian and helping save a group of people at the fish market, a group that included Finn, the Mayor’s Assistant. There, Minnie and Mia revealed their identities to him, whereon the flying pixie started to blame the chaos on them. All of it. The slimes, the ruined birthday party, the fish-people at the annual race day, the school not being repainted. Faerun interrupted to point out that the fish were all dying, the river likely just turned to toxic goo, that the sky was raining ooze, and oh, my god, a hundreds foot tall animated pillar of slime was rising from what had been their school. Minnie, who liked spending time in the darker parts of the library, chimed in, “Oh, Jubliex.”
After rescuing Finn, Avery the tiefling fisherman, Felicia, Bob, and Grimble, the party gathered at the fish market. Around them, the village began dissolving into toxic ooze under the onslaught of the towering caustic ooze fiend, Juiblex. And as they watched, Celeste emerged from the stream. She had secreted an unconscious Kreppillie upstream while Faerun’s poison wore off, and returned to see what the party would do next. There was some finger pointing in many directions: the First Assistant to the Mayor blamed the party, Celeste noted that it was Faerun’s-in-disguise-as-Falin’s dagger that incapacitated the sea hag. Meanwhile, Mia, Minnie, and Indigo worried about their pet rescue and axolotl shop.
The group began planning. Indigo suggested she go with Celeste and use her magic to heal Kreppilie from the poison while the rest of the party rescued Warwick and the animals. They tasked the nearby villagers with overseeing the village’s nautical evacuation on, “anything that floats,” and decided to reconvene at Kreppillie’s coven’s home under the lake where some of the party would join and strengthen its numbers. That way, they reasoned, they could meld their magic together to banish Juiblex to from wherever it emerged. A short battle of moonbeams, arrows, daggers, and Minnie’s well-placed particularly scary puddle of phantasmal spilt milk (gelatinous cubes, being acidic, are afraid of milk), followed as the party fought off an ochre jelly, a cultist, and a gelatinous cube to rescue Warwick and see the animals free.
Under the cover of the teenage party, the villagers fled to the docks, pushing off onto the lake on sailboats, fishing boats, row boats, coracles, large slabs of wood, barrels, and anything that might float. The party, fighting backwards against the trailing oozes and seemingly endless pseudopods of the main caustic tower, reached the sailing vessel commissioned by the Tabaxi ambassadors. As the kids sailed away on The Mighty Scratcher, the entirety of the village fled along behind them on anything that would float, behind them, an ever-growing tower of acidic ooze began smothering, poisoning, and dissolving the village of Great Bear Lake.
