D&D Encounters: Web of the Spider Queen Session 10-11

[Note that your friendly neighbourhood DMs decided to combine sessions 10 and 11 into a single evening, for scheduling reasons.]

Group 1 - by Simon
Our heroes awoke from their extended rest to find that two of their numbers have been teleported back to the surface, and a new pair had joined them, bringing a stack of healing potions to aid the adventurers. Leaving their place of safety, they entered the Flycatcher Tangle, braving a maze of twisting corridors, webs, huge spiders, and drow patrols. They soon came across a blood trail and followed it past drow traps and patrols, finally finding Tharinel, Khara Sulwood's elven companion. He told them that he and Khara had been captured. He had been beaten and left in the Tangle to die, but not before hearing Khara tell the drow that she was the heir to the Lord of Shadowdale and learning that the Pendant of Ashaba had been split in half.	Cave Stalker by Eva Widerman
After patching Tharinel's wounds, they sent him on his way back to the surface with extra food and water. At his insistence, they pressed on to try and rescue Khara, who was likely either in the torture theatre or slave pens ahead. The party pressed on, evading more drow patrols as they moved towards the cheering and jeering they could hear from the torture theatre ahead. Arriving to a scene of blood and death, the party quickly interrupted the two female drow torturers before they could begin to inflict their cruelties on another resident of Shadowdale. As the party moved forward, the torturers summoned demons from pools of blood, and the battle was joined. The first torturer dropped quickly before the combined might of the adventurers, and as she died, her summoned demon also disappeared. The drow spectators joined the fight, slowing the advance of the party but doing little damage, losing plenty of their number in the process. As the battle swung in favor of the adventurers, one of the new party members- a female dragonborn- paused during the fight to kill one of the prisoners from Shadowdale before moving on to attack the last remaining drow torturer. The final drow was knocked unconscious, the last demon defeated. The surviving drow torturer had half of the Pendant of Ashaba at her belt. When the human invoker grabbed the pendant to claim it for the party, magical energy burst from it, and enhanced his equipment and also that of the goblin warlord. The remaining human prisoners were released and rapidly made their way back to the surface while the party interrogated the drow torturer. As the party prepared to head to the slave pens, the dragonborn assassin was teleported to the surface to face Elminster's justice for her murder of the Shadowdale townsperson.

Group 2 of our D&D Encounters

Group 2 - by David

Having stormed the gates of the Drow settlement at Zadzifeirryn, the party at table 2 pressed on into the Underdark.  Between them and the settlement itself lay the Flycatcher Tangle, a maze of tunnels, traps, and dead ends.  Testing their skills to the limit, they managed to make their way through it, scouting passages, puzzling out the maze, and having the occasional swarm of spiders drop out of the darkness onto their heads. 

Finding a trail of blood in the maze, they followed it to Tharinel, the elf who had been with Khara Sulwood; he'd been beaten by the Drow and left for dead in the Tangle.  He knew little of what had become of her, save that there had been talk of taking her to the torture theatre, or to the slave pens.  Healed by our adventurers and restored with a bit of food and water, Tharinel made his way back toward Shadowdale as our heroes pressed further in, attempting to buy him some time by distracting the guards. 

Cloaked with an illusion of all being Drow, they managed to bluff their way past some patrols, and soon enough came to a torture theatre, where the savage Drow were watching human captives being tormented as a spectator sport.  One of them had a silver crescent on her belt that was clearly half of the Pendant of Ashaba.

The party charged into action to put a stop to this horror, wading through a pit of the bodies of former victims.  The torturers used blood-infused magic to summon maw demons: squat, ugly sets of teeth on legs that bit viciously at the heroes.

After a surprising amount of difficulty with climbing out of the pit of bodies (a series of unfortunate Athletics checks having stranded character after character at the bottom), the heroes managed to dispatch the demons.  The torturers, aware that their souls would be dragged off to the Abyss if they died with a summoned demon still present, were sufficiently wounded that they were loath to summon new demons, and chose instead to battle on their own, with the aid of the Drow spectators. In the end though, they were no match for the party.  

With the prisoners freed and half of the Pendant recovered, our heroes need to decide where to go next ...

*Characters need to be from 4th-edition D&D Essential books or you can play using one of our pre-generated characters. A DM is now available starting at 3:30pm Wednesdays to help with any character creations and/or conversions.