Sessions 36-38: Gorilla Island: The High Girallon
Post date: Sep 02, 2016 1:27:4 AM
These session summaries were originally posted to The Piazza in January and February 2016, and have been edited to remove spoilers for future sessions. Out-of-character commentary is in italics.
Now that "Winds of Freeport" has concluded, GM Notes for "Gorilla Island" (with stat blocks and other details) have been posted to this wiki.
Session 36 (1/16/2016)
The party returned to the village with their trophies, and told the tale to the vanara leaders. "Grandfather" complimented them on their prowess, and granted the party permission to visit the goddess Der-Maga's shrine. The PCs spent a day or two checking in with the crew they had left on the Growler, and preparing some simple offerings to take to the holy place.
Wokah, the first priest they had met, led them into the jungle towards the base of Mount Girallon. Along the way, the party was attacked by a hungry allosaurus, who grabbed their guide. Damarak channeled energy to heal him, and Virali cast prestidigitation to make him taste awful, making the dinosaur drop him. (I decided to allow this, after a successful Bluff check, because it was a clever idea.) The druid Larkspur wild shaped into elasmosaurus form to overcome the allosaur's sizable reach, and Inacio tumbled past it to flank (he failed to avoid drawing an attack of opportunity, but the dinosaur rolled a natural 1 to hit him). A grease spell from Virali tripped the beast, and Issalia's slumber hex knocked it out briefly. Inacio took advantage of this to pour poison into its mouth. When the poison started to work, the allosaurus woke up, but it died from a severe beating before it could rise.
The party resumed their travel, and reached the shrine without further incident. The shrine was located in a cave on the shoulder of the volcano, directly below the massive formation known as Ape Rock. Wokah instructed them to leave their offerings on the altar of piled stones outside, then led them into the cave. The tunnel opened into a small, dead-end chamber where two man-sized statues of winged apes holding falchions flanked an alcove where a small, crude stone idol of Der-Maga (a pregnant winged ape) was displayed. Wokah prayed before this niche (in Vanaran), explaining that these visitors had received visions leading them here. He then moved aside and asked any any of the PCs wished to offer prayers. Inacio and Damarak chose to do so, asking (in their own native languages, Vanaran and Aquan respectively) for guidance regarding their visions.
The party then heard a voice like that of an elderly female vanara coming from the idol. It spoke in Vanaran to Inacio, welcoming him to the home of his distant kin. It spoke of a threat arising among the four-arms (girallons) that was beyond the monkey-folk's power to end, and asked that he and his companions eliminate it. If they did so, the goddess and her followers would be grateful--and they would see that his genes would not be lost to their race. Also, the Children of Der-Maga would help the party locate the mermaid that the undine cleric sought. Inacio relayed this to the others, minus the part about himself possibly getting a mate out of the deal. [Inacio has a Cha of 5, so the party tries to keep him out of sight whenever they want to make a good impression on anyone. There's also a running joke that the only way he can get any companionship is to pay for it--and vanaras are in short supply in the Serpent's Teeth as it is.]
The party then left the shrine and returned to the village. Their plan now is to deal with the girallons as quickly as possible, so that they can claim their promised rewards. To do this, they will return to their first anchorage at the island, which is on the coast nearest the stone circle where the girallons and kech are known to gather.
As they sailed around the island, the crew spotted a huge eurypterid (sea scorpion) that turned to attack the ship. Inacio manned the ballista, with some deckhands to help him reload more quickly. Larkspur, her crocodile companion, and Inacio's elasmosaurus were already in the water, pacing the boat, when the monster attacked, so they took the brunt of its attacks. As the druid attempted to grapple it in giant squid form, Harissa leaped overboard onto its back, and dealt the killing blow. Damarak healed the party members who needed it, and treated the animal companions for poison from the vermin's stinger.
Session 37 (2/6/2016)
The Growler reached the river mouth, dropped anchor, and the party rested to heal and replenish spells. The next morning, they trekked into the jungle looking for the stone circle.
When they reached the site, they stayed hidden in the trees while they looked around. In a clearing a few hundred feet across were two concentric circles of standing stones, surrounding a small rise. The inner circle was made of trilithons, the outer one of single upright stones. Inside the circles, at the peak of the low hill, was a large slab obviously meant to be some sort of altar. On the far side, rows of stones flanked a path that continued southwards into the jungle. The clearing seemed empty at first, but then the sharper-eyed PCs noticed three unmoving humanoids standing inside the circles.
When the party moved closer to the edge of the trees, they identified the humanoids as kech, and the Larkspur (the undine druid) spotted a girallon resting under a tree a couple hundred feet away. They moved to ambush the four-armed beast, and Larkspur cast entangle on the kech. The girallon managed to rend Harissa (the azhari freebooter) before falling to the party's weapons. However, another kech fired on the party from the trees. That made it a target for the druid's sleet storm.
More kech appeared from the other direction, shooting Damarak (the undine cleric) a few times before succumbing to his call lightning spell, Larkpsur's ball lightning, and other PCs' arrows. One tried to flee, but could not escape the party's range in time. The party then turned its attention to the entangled kech, which turned out to be zombies. These monsters proved too slow to break free of the animated vines and leave the area before being grasped again, so were easy targets for spells that Issalia (the sylph witch) delivered via spectral hand.
However, as the party was mopping up there, a second girallon entered the far side of the clearing. Larkspur attacked it with an ice storm spell, before wild shaping into a stegosaurus. A glitterdust spell from Virali (Harissa's nagaji bard cohort) blinded the girallon for an instant, then Harissa's quick blade wounded it severely [two critical hits!] and one of Damarak's lightning strikes finished it off.
Another kech caught most of the party in an entangle spell, but only the druid's crocodile companion was held fast. The kech then fled into the jungle, but Inacio (the hadozee ranger) drank a potion of haste and took to the trees to pursue it. Virali tagged it with glitterdust, which prevented it from simply vanishing into the jungle. Inacio quickly caught up with it, and they traded blows until Harissa arrived a couple rounds later to help her crewmate finish it off.
Harissa examined the kech's gear: a longbow, arrows, and a sack. The bag held a potion, a small stone cube, and three vanara pelts. This incensed Inacio enough that he skinned the dead kech in revenge.
Meanwhile, the others had not been idle. Damarak studied the henge to look for clues to its purpose. The altar stone was stained brown from repeated sacrifices, and the other stones bore some crude symbols weathered to illegibility. Larkspur returned to her own form and beheaded the two girallons in order to carry trophies back to the vanara village. Issalia examined the dead kech, which carried no gear apart from longbows and arrows.
When Inacio and Harissa returned, Issalia studied the loot, identifying the items as a healing potion, a stone of alarm, and a bag of holding. When the others learned about the vanara pelts, they agreed to carry them back to the village after finishing their current mission to take out the girallon's leader, which they were fairly certain was not among the dead here. Inacio laid the kech spellcaster's hide on the altar stone as a grim message for others of its kind.
The ranger had seen that the rows of stones to the south continued some distance into the jungle, marking a path heading in the general direction of the volcano, They party decided to follow that route next. But first, they made camp a short distance away from the clearing to spend some time recovering from the battle.
While working out the map for this battle, I decided to render it in LEGO, to better help both me and my players visualize the location. Each stud represents a 5-foot space, making the map model above 400 ft x 400 ft. We ran the combat on this map, using microfigures for the PCs and kech, and small microscale models for the girallons and the druid's animal companion and wild shape form. We also used small plates or dice to mark spell effects on the map. This worked out quite well, and gave us a chance to try a larger battle scene that wouldn't fit on a standard 1" grid battle map. More pictures of the model (both pre-game and during play) can be found at my Brickshelf gallery.
Session 38 (2/13/2016)
During the night, the party's sentries spotted some very large bats flying around the nearby jungle. At least once, a pair of them came close enough that the PCs on watch could see that they had kech riding on their backs, but fortunately none of these night-hunters spotted the PCs' hidden camp.
In the morning, the party followed the path into the jungle. After proceeding this way for quite some time, Larkspur spotted girallon tracks coming to and leaving the path at one point. The party decided to follow these tracks, which led them upward beyond where the trees thinned out, and into a steep ravine in the mountainside. The girallon tracks continued into this ravine.
The party could see some cave openings ahead, 30 or more feet above the floor of the ravine. Damarak cast silence on a hammer so that Inacio could climb the stone face and quietly pound in pitons to anchor a rope for the others to climb up to the nearest cave. When he got about halfway up, the edge of the silence spell reached the cave, alerting a kech within. The creature shot arrows at Inacio, who easily dodged and climbed up to the entrance to kill the kech. The cave was also inhabited by a mobat, which tried twice to bull rush the hadozee off the cliff. This simply left it more open to Inacio's weapons, and the ranger finished it off quickly. He then finished installing the rope, and the rest of the party joined him.
From here, they could see other cave mouths further up the ravine, and a tunnel leading towards one of them. They followed this, and discovered a weird, four-horned, ape-headed beast in the next room. Damarak's blessing of fervor spell gave the party the speed to surround it before it could react. The fiendish thing breathed fire onto Harissa, Virali, and the druid's crocodile companion. The cleric blasted it with a holy smite spell that, while it did minor injuries to his allies (the party is entirely CN), it dropped the daemon to 0 hp. Inacio then downed it with his silversheened trident.
As the party fought the daemon, some of them noticed a girallon resting in a chamber beyond it. Despite the silenced hammer being used to mask most of the sounds of combat, the ape quickly came alert. It cast a defensive spell or two, then entered the fray just as the guardian daemon fell. The girallon--a large female wearing a small wooden idol around its neck--recognized Inacio as one of the hated vanara, and managed to rend him. While Damarak channelled healing and Issalia inflicted a touch of idiocy spell, Harissa started to carve into the beast with her yatagan, landing several hits (including two critical hits) that finished it off.
When the girallon fell, its blood left the body in a cloud of mist, which coalesced into a new monster: a blood-red, horned, ape-like fiend with a maw of teeth in the center of its chest. Issalia identified it as a baragara, a chaotic evil outsider, and concluded that it had been possessing the girallon. Her lore was not complete enough to provide any clue to its capabilities or weaknesses. Damarak tried another holy smite, but could not overcome its SR.
The baragara trapped Inacio with a hold spell, and demoralized Harissa, but the freebooter kept fighting. Issalia managed to inflict her evil eye hex on it, making it easier to hit, but the party had trouble getting through its DR. Only the azhari Harissa, using her might of the efreet and dirty fighting, seemed to do much damage to it. The baragara then focused on her, and grabbed hold of her. Even Virali's grease spell was not enough help to let her wriggle free, and the monster's chest-maw began chewing her flesh. However, at this point, the party's luck turned, and the crocodile Atoll landed a brutal critical hit with its tail slap [which benefits from the Improved Natural Attack feat]. Issalia then used her slumber hex on the fiend, and it failed its save and collapsed. The party held their next blows, allowing Atoll to administer a coup de grace that killed the baregara. As the party hacked into it to make sure it was truly dead, its body melted into a pool of gore, splattering the party and thoroughly soaking the exsanguinated girallon's fur.
As Virali made liberal use of prestidigitation to clean her allies, the PCs examined the withered corpse, and the room it came from. The girallon wore an amulet that had a wooden carving of a horned, four-armed ape attached to the same necklace. In the room, they found a black stone idol of the same girallon-like form standing upon a flat-topped boulder. Issalia cast identify and learned that the necklace was an amulet of mighty fists (thundering) and that the idol, carved from magically hardened obsidian, functioned like a darkskull (radiating a continual unhallow and bane effect). Damarak also spent some time examining the idol and wooden unholy symbol, and identified the god depicted as Gral-Bara, Demon Lord of Apes. The party put the idol into their newly-acquired bag of holding to protect themselves from its aura. They also decapitated the girallon priest and added her head to the bag, so that they could display it as a trophy when they returned to the vanara village.
But first, they have to determine if they can clear out the other girallons that they expect to find in these caves--or even safely leave the ravine. Their cleric is nearly out of spells after patching up their latest wounds, and the other spellcasters don't have much magic left, either. But one decision was easy: they unanimously agreed that Larkspur's crocodile Atoll more than earned the magical amulet!
This fight was one of the main boss battles on Gorilla Island, so I deliberately made it very difficult for them. The party is currently 8th level (with Virali, the cohort, at 6th). The ceustrodaemon (or guardian daemon; Bestiary 2) is only CR 6, but has DR 10/good or silver. The baregara (Bestiary 3) is CR 12, with DR 10/good. That DR, and the baragara's high SR, made the fight very challenging for them.
The girallon (Bestiary) was a more intelligent (and evil) "high girallon," as well as a 3rd-level cleric (CR 8). I also adapted the demon-possessed template from Advanced Bestiary for use with baregara (who are CE outsiders, but not demons). That raised the girallon's CR to 11--then they had to fight the expelled fiend itself when its host died. [See my 6/1/2016 "Studded Plate" column for details about this new template, and the high girallon's stat block.]
Between the XP for these monsters (and the puny kech and mobat), and a story award for the major milestone, each PC earned close to 10K of XP this session! They are still 3K-4K short of reaching 9th level, but another average session should get them there.
Here are links to the photos I took of the battle during game, showing the LEGO minis we used: