GotWK Campaign Part 8: Shut Your Drow Hole

This is an account of part 8 of my ongoing campaign set in my homebrewed wild west setting, Guns of the Western Kings.  Get caught up with the previous parts here.

When last we left our heroes, they had rescued Heather (the party healer)'s young daughter Annabelle from the fey realm.  There were some complications, of course.  For one thing, due to the fey realm's interesting relationship with time, Annabelle was now 17 years old instead of 8, which came as a surprise to Heather.  As did the revelation that Heather was a half-fey changeling (a homebrewed race currently in the playtesting stage), which went a long way toward explaining her ability to cast suggestion once per day as a spell-like ability.  During the process of rescuing Annabelle, the party managed to blow up an ancient tower by igniting a room full of a magical ammunition called firecorn, thereby thwarting the goblin king Hizendis' plot to conquer the fey realms, or whatever that little dude was trying to do.  But all of that has little bearing on this chapter of our adventure.  What you do need to know is that Theodore procured a snazzy new mithril great falchion from Annabelle's ogre guard, Heather's dryad mom gave everyone a magical oak leaf that will transform into a tree when they speak her name, and the party rogue Gudguníis is blind now, which makes him fairly unreliable as a sniper.  Also, when the party left the fey realm, they discovered they were an undisclosed amount of time in the future.

And now:

As the party emerges from the mighty oak tree, heads still spinning from the interplanar journey, they notice that, though they had left the woods at the height of summer, the trees are now bare and the ground marked by drifts of snow.  They have little time to absorb the change in surroundings before a hideous yowl smites the cold air.  A hungry mountain lion lopes out from the trees, picking up speed as it charges at the startled party.  Gudguníis takes a blind potshot at the big cat but manages only to scrape some bark off a nearby tree.  Heather opens fire with her own rifle and, thanks to her working eyes, fares much better than the blind rogue. Rusty hurls one of his alchemical bombs and scorches the cougar, and Theodore leaps into the fray with his mighty trident and finishes it off.  Our heroes are back in their home plane and ready to kick some ass.  And Fate, as usual, will soon present them with some ass to kick!


Distant pops indicate a firefight to the northwest.  Alerted, the adventurers hot-foot it through the cold woods.  They discover that the forest ends sooner than it used to; a field of stumps and charred detritus extends from the truncated wood to a large tent-city erected outside the entrance to the Sunbeam Silver Mine.  About half the tents are on fire and bodies lie thick in the streets of frozen mud.  A few sporadic gunshots ring out from the direction of the mine entrance.  A Deuclaire Mining Co. officer stumbles out of the smoke.

“They came out of the mines!" he says, gasping and clutching his wounds.  Heather steals some of the drama from his speech by healing him.  He is grateful, the GM is not.  "It must’ve… it all started earlier today, a mining team broke through into a cavern that shouldn’t have been there.  They… they followed protocol, reported it.  Some soldiers went in to investigate.  They didn’t come back out.  It was spiders and elves - black skinned elves - that came out of the mine.  They started shooting and burning and killing!  Our soldiers were totally unprepared!  But the elves - not the black-skinned ones, the ones from the forest.  We’ve been killing those elves for over a year now, but those crazy point-ear bastards come running in out of nowhere to save our skins.  Shit.”

As they move closer to the mine entrance, the bodies on the ground begin to change.  Not just miners and camp-followers, but grey-uniformed Deuclaire Co. soldiers, black-skinned drow, and even a few giant spiders curled up in their creepy arachnid death-pose.  Leaning against a support beam right at the mine entrance is the cloaked elf they encountered in the woods so recently yet so long ago - the one they had promised to help against the mining company and then inadvertently abandoned.  He is clutching a bleeding gash in his gut, and several other bullet wounds, cuts, and bites color his body.  Once again, Heather swoops in with the healing.

“That which I have stood sentinel against has come to pass," the disappointed elf says.  The drow have seized control of the evil within the mountain, and I… was powerless to stop it.  Please… Put an end to this before it poisons the rest of the world.”

"What is the evil?" asks Heather.  "It might really help if you could give us any information about what we're up against."

Maddeningly, the elf is unwilling to elaborate.  Frustrated, the party advances into the mine.  Most of the hanging oil lamps have been shot out by the dark-dwelling drow, but Theodore locates a working one and they bring light to the darkness.

Rusty offers to scout ahead using a new invisibility potion he's been working on.  Although he is human, he was raised by dwarves and can see pretty well in the dark.  He quaffs his new elixir, vanishes, and scouts the dark mine out ahead of the rest of the party.  He enters a large, open chamber ahead.  There are three exits to additional mine tunnels.  Three drow and two duergar are waiting for something.  Rusty uses his experience as a prospector and miner to determine that one of the drow is standing under a loose support beam.  He throws one of his bombs at the beam; the explosion kills the drow but is not powerful enough to cause a cave in, and in the process Rusty fumbles and drops a handful of empty glass vials, alerting the enemies to his presence.  He flees back down the tunnel toward the rest of the party, pursued invisibly by the two duergar.  The duergar suddenly appear in the midst of the party, laying into them with battleaxes.  As the adventurers fend them off, the two drow fire out of the darkness, catching the party flatfooted to their attacks.  When the last duergar finally goes down, the drow noble hits the party with a fireball bullet (like the one that sheered the paddle off the underground steamboat in this previous adventure).  Theodore and Rusty lead the charge up the corridor, dazzling the dark-dwelling drow with their light and hacking them down.  Blind Gudguníis loots the drow noble's three-barreled rifle and assorted magical bullets.

Rusty begins suffering from a magical malaise brought about by imperfections in his new invisibility potion recipe (or maybe his player was absent), so the rest of the group forged on without him.  They checked out the side tunnels first - clearing out a nest of dire rats from the one on the left and encountering a heat-devouring fungus in the decaying tunnel to the right - before moving on down the central tunnel.

Sneaking ahead, they discover another chamber.  The drow therein spot the party's light and call out, "Jeni onder fortenna ne nateloch?  Jeni ne nateloch?"

None of the party speaks the language of the drow, but Theodore decides to bluff that he does, and responds, "Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra!"

The drow are not fooled.  They respond in Common, "Turn back, surface dwellers, or these hostages die!"  Theodore and Heather sneak a peak into the chamber and see three drow standing over five kneeling human hostages - three miners and two Deuclaire soldiers - standing in front of a huge hole that goes directly down into the heart of the mountain.  Theodore steps forward and attempts to use his business acumen to broker a deal, but the drow seemingly hold all the cards and are unwilling to budge.  Theodore continues slowly moving forward as he talks, and the drow noble repeatedly shouts, "Not another step or the hostages die!" as she presses a wicked-looking dagger to the gagged soldier's throat.  Sensing impending disaster, Heather steps in and suggests that the drow set her knife down.  Despite her high will save and spell resistance, the drow falls for Heather's fey magic and sets the knife down, but the other two drow are getting nervous.  Theodore, spotting his opening, quick-draws his trident and chucks it at the drow leader, only to see it sail over her head and fall into the waiting abyss.

The drow noble is caught off her guard by the sudden attack, but the other two drow each assassinate one of the hostages and take cover behind the others.  Gudguníis makes a natural 20 Perception check and is able to figure out the general layout of the fight, Daredevil-style.  He fires at the drow noble and grazes her.  Then Theodore draws his mithril great falchion and slashes at her.  Overpowered, she pulls her hostage up onto his feet and shoves him at Theodore, then acrobatically leaps over the edge of the pit, grabbing hold of a heretofore unseen strand of spider silk hanging from the ceiling, and plummets out of sight down the hole.  One of the other drow backs up to do the same thing but (thanks to a cleverly played Plot Twist card) trips and falls off the edge, nearly taking his hostage with him.  His screams fade into nothing as he falls seemingly forever.

With one drow left, Gudguníis takes blind aim and fires, unaware that the drow is taking cover behind a hostage or that Theodore is partially in the line of fire.  He rolls a critical hit, blowing the drow's arm off at the shoulder and instantly killing him with the shock.  Heather heals each of the three surviving hostages.  The party loots the one remaining drow corpse and discovers that the dagger the drow leader left behind is adamantine.

They peer over the edge of the hole with their lantern but cannot see the bottom.  They resolve to send blind Gudguníis down the hanging spider silk to see how far down he can go.  However, once he reaches the end of the silk, he is struck by another thread, which begins to pull him to the side.  He fires blindly and yells a warning up to the rest of the party.  Heather holds the lantern out over the pit; at the edge of its illumination there is a man-sized spider reeling Gudguníis in on its strand of silk.  Theodore wraps his whip around the strand of web that the rogue is hanging from and jumps down.  The whip slides down the silk until it is stopped by Gudguníis' hands, but momentum carries Theodore forward.  He swings under Gudguníis and comes up underneath the spider, slamming it with his spiked gauntlet.  As Theodore continues to kip off the wall and swing at the spider, Gudguníis drops his gun, draws his morningstar, grabs the strand connecting himself to the spider, and pulls himself toward the spider.

Heather, meanwhile, organizes the rescued prisoners into holding one end of her 50 ft. rope as she repels down into the pit.  She is also unable to find the bottom of the hole, and having left the lantern up with the prisoners is unable to make out the fight with the spider either.  In a final attempt to try to test the pit's depths, she throws one of her mother's magic oak leaves down the pit.  Before she can speak the command word that will cause it to grow into a tree, she is interrupted by a great commotion.  Gudguníis and Theodore have slain the spider, which lets go of the wall and falls, still attached to Gudguníis.  The added weight of the dead spider causes the silk line to break, and Gudguníis and Theodore plummet into the hole.

The startled prisoners lose their grip on Heather's rope for a split second.  They recover it, but accidentally kick the lantern over the edge.  It lands on a huge spiderweb stretched across the hole, about 20 ft. below Heather, illuminating Gudguníis and Theodore lying prone on the webbing near Gudguníis' rifle and Theodore's trident.  Even Heather's magic leaf is stuck to a strand of spider silk.  As the adventurers free themselves from the sticky, life-saving webbing, they notice one more thing on the opposite wall of the pit - a passage leading deeper into the mountain.

What lies beyond the bottomless spider-hole?  Find out next time!

-your Tamarian d20 despot