GotWK Campaign Part 9: An Eye For An Eye

This is an account of part 9 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 chased a drow raiding party down into the Sunbeam Silver Mine.  The drow had attacked the mining camp at the surface, surprising both the miners and the elven rangers who had been waging a guerrilla campaign against the mining company.  As the party descends into the mountain in pursuit of the drow, they discover the wounded leader of the elven guerillas.  Bemoaning his failure, he says that if the drow have not seized control of the evil now, they surely would soon, and he implored the adventurers to destroy the evil before the drow can use it.  He is maddeningly unclear what he means by "the evil".  Nevertheless, the party fights its way through a hostage situation, kills a giant spider, and ends up hanging in its web above a seemingly bottomless hole deep into the depths of the mountain.

And now:

The Sniper in the Dark
One single passageway breaks into the side of the bottomless pit - a square entrance large enough that two men might march abreast through it - just above the level of the giant spiderweb.  Heather, Theodore, and Rusty pull themselves free of the sticky webbing and tightrope-walk to the passage.  Gudguníis, the blinded sharpshooter, has considerably more trouble extricating himself, and by the time he makes it to the entrance he is wearing the equivalent of a new suit of clothes in tangled spider silk.  The passageway is freshly carved and climbs steeply down, spiraling roughly around the outside of the bottomless pit.  They follow it for untold hours - possibly days - in the sunless dark before it opens up into a natural cavern.  It is a long cave full of stalagmites and stalactites, obviously carved by water at some time though now it is drier than a coal miner's cough.  Brandishing the lantern, Theodore takes the lead, only to be shot right through the breastplate.

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!