The Tower of Krolak Nol (Chapter 5)

The last session left the party at the base of the tower of Krolak-Nol, having beaten the skeleton and magma-men encounters.

This session, added a little bit of a twist. We have a new player and a new PC.

How does one introduce a PC midway through an adventure? In D&D it's pretty easy, magic being what it is, nothing really needs to make sense.

What I ended up doing is after having a conversation with the new player, we had the idea of introducing them as an anachronism; an original knight from Jarl Arnesson's party that came to the tower, and who had been petrified. Add in a ritual scroll in the library, and fini! The party now has a full time, female, human, wizard named Capricia .

After the meeting of their new member and some discussion of the mission of the Jarl they proceeded up the tower's floors. Primarily the encounters were resolved by combat.

I played the Red Dragon as a psychopathically delusional treasure hoarder, sitting on a pile of rusty armor.

The floor was dark, and filled with rack and rack of hanging, rusty armor, obscuring the PC's vision, but it was obvious to them that *something* big was there, muttering to itself in an unknown language (draconic).

After lighting up the room and blundering through the armor, they came face to face with the dragon who screamed about intruders come to steal his precious, precious, rusty armor bits.

The fight started out with the dragon winning initiative and spending an action point, and using both its dragon breath and its terrifying presence to open the fight. From there it degenerated into a tooth and nail fight. Other than bloodied breath, the dragon breath never recharged, but the party was quite tired after the fight, using a couple of daily powers and a handful of healing surges.

The pair of Spinagons in the summoning circle was a brief bit of dialog before continuing up the tower. They were not released form their circle, despite coaxing and pleading on the Devil's part.

The top floor of the tower with the bodies of Fendraeus and the Jarl, led to a rather hasty Ragnar immediately grabbing the book, releasing Caramnon and leading up to the climactic fight, if not the last of the adventure.

Caramnon was indeed tentacle-y and poisonous, and his ability to grab and slide people around in combat combined with the party bringing out their own shifty powers led to a battle of constant repositioning. It was quite tactically interesting. Caramnon's breath ability recharged several times during the fight, and his threatening-reach/grab abilities combined well with his close burst poison gas cloud attack. In the end the party defeated him, using the rest of their dailies, some of their magic item daily abilities and some action points. Ragnar was left with 0 healing surges after healing to the point of being unbloodied.

Afterwards, they collected the body of the fallen Jarl Arnesson and the iron crown he was wearing, and returned to deal with the Spinagons.

The party decided that they didn't want to deal with the Devils except to kill them if possible. They tried to trick the Spinagons into a binding agreement that would allow the PC's to attack the Spinagons without reprisal, but they didn't fall for the ploy. After a fair bit of back and forth, the party decided jut to kill the Spinagons and be done with them, breaking the circle and attacking them.

The Spinagons attempted to escape, but were marked, slowed, knocked prone, shifted around and otherwise prevented from leaving before they could be cut down.

And that was the end of Krolak-Nol and this section of the adventure. The PC's set off back south through the Hobgoblin lands towards Prolia and ended the session upon returning to Prauld.

I dropped a few hints of slaver activity in the mountains near Greenhill, and will possibly run the D&D 4e module, H2 Thunderspire Labyrinth in that area, with some rather heavy modifications to make it fit the game world.

Complications around the crown will still come up, but I believe the next session will be a transition from the first story arc to a second story arc which will focus on the gnomes and giants south of the area the Dwarves now claim.