| Session Date | June 29, 2024 |
| Start Date | 3 Harvester 1273 |
| End Date | 5 Harvester 1273 |
| Starting Location | Party Quarters, Kazakh |
| Ending Location | Demon Gate Room, Giant Fastness |
| Player Characters | Helga, Burt, Nesticus, Mord, Deaglan, Sirius, ZZ |
| Base XP Gained | Carry Over |
| Player Notes | ZZ's Notes |
After a day of rest and extensive preparations and joined by Dimbul and a foreign dwarf named Anborn, the party first passed into the Happy Hunting Grounds via the cubic gate and then plane shifted to the one location in the Giant’s Citadel they knew fairly well, the dungeon. Seeing a pair of Bugbear sentries, the party drew off and cast invisibility 10’ radius, silence 15’ radius, find traps, and find the path. Under a silence spell, Deaglan and Dimbul slipped up on the nearby Bugbears and killed both with backstabs before they even knew their peril. After dragging the corpses out of the main corridor, the party passed a number of rooms they took to be slave quarters. The “path” led them next into a guardroom with a human fighter, four trolls, and a hell hound which negated the advantages of their invisibility. A brief melee ensued, during which Nesticus cast hold portal at the door exiting to the north, preventing a troll from trying to run through it to raise the alarm, presumably. The guards were slain, properly plundered, and the party continued along the “path.”
Nesticus used clairvoyance to scout ahead and found a well-lit, very wide and tall hall running east west with a branch to the north. At the intersection was a fire giant sentry with a hell hound, awake but clearly bored. When the fire giant turned its back, the door was opened and the giant hit with a silence spell, while Deaglan rushed in and backstabbed it with an envenomed blade, killing it quickly and silently. Meanwhile, the party slew the hell hound while Sirius used a phantasmal force to hide the battle from more giant sentries to the north of the T-intersection (there were two hill giants standing sentry before a great double door facing to the east close by and a pair of stone giants along a west door further north – another 20-wide corridor branched east between them. A quick scout revealed a hall with many doors and a pair of Drow sentries guarding it.
But the “path” instead turned west to a wide staircase descending some 40 feet. This they followed. After leveling off it made a hairpin turn and ended at a large double-door. Here Nesticus used ESP and sensed dark and wicked thoughts. Burt followed with another clairvoyance, revealing a pair of Drow elf sentries in a small room. Sirius tried to use an illusion again as the party entered, but the Drow were not at all fooled and rushed to attack. Soon, many more rushed in from doors to east and west. The party threw everything that had, raising a wall of fire around themselves, Mordecai with a flame strike, a bead of force from Deaglan, confusion from Sirius, as well as melee from the fighters and more spells. But the Drow proved to be extremely resistant to magical attacks, though not perfectly so. To the north, a second double door opened and three more Drow appeared, all apparently spellcasters, as well as a shimmering archway of stone, the gate they sought. As Drow leapt through the flames to attack, a battle of spells ensued. Dimbul was burnt to death in a flame strike from a Drow priestess. One Drow spellcaster vanished as a number of demons poured in from side chambers. Meanwhile, Nesticus took the party’s rod of cancellation and rushed the gate, impacting it and causing the archway to crack. But the massive battle continued. Helga slew a Type II demon singlehandedly in an epic show while Sirius managed to read a scroll of protection from demons, which drove back the remaining three demons who eventually simply magically fled the room. It was a brutal finish as the remaining Drow did not blanche and the spellcasters proved to be powerful fighters in their own right. But, finally the Drow were cornered and slain to the last one, and the party breathed a sigh of relief. Their primary mission had been accomplished, but there remained the Giant King somewhere above…