return to the dungeon [5e Dwimmermount]

Queen Ilona had spent some time with her horngoblins cleaning out parts of Dwimmermount while the rest of the party were absent. She took several horngoblins down to the cloning chamber and left one of them there as a guard, to insure the cloning chamber would not be used. Surveying the equipment she learned that the power was drained and it may take several days for the machinery to be powered up for another cloning experiment. As she returned to the elevator, her group encountered two minotaurs in the corridor and brief fight and chase ensued down the passageway. There were more minotaurs near their dead king's throne room, and soon only one was left standing. Ilona demanded for it to bend the knee and he did, on the condition that she allow him to clone himself and live on this level. The minotaur, Mangarak Vigileye, told a story of a room that had a stairwell down but it was being blocked by a pool of flesh and muscley sinew, he offered to show Ilona the room but cautioned that her view would have to be quick.

For the minotaur negotiation I googled, and was not entirely surprised to find, a minotaur name generator. It worked pretty good actually!
Because Ilona was by herself, I gave index cards to the other players with stats for the horngoblins. Everybody had fun using the horngoblins' racial abilities during the fight, but in straight one-on-one fights they were clearly outmatched against the minotaurs.

Ilona spent the rest of her time delineating work to the horngoblins. She sent a squad to scout the level the orcs were on and they quickly returned with reports that the passage was blocked, trapped, and set with an ambush. More horngoblins reported seeing dwarves running to the eastern stairwell, and a single kobold had been captured and locked into an unused storage room. Ilona questioned the kobold, Folly, and learned that the dead dwarf, Guran, was a custodian to Dwimmermount, and there are more dwarves living in the lower levels.

She made successful Persuasion checks to get the information out of him, otherwise he would have spat on her.

Days passed and her advisors finally returned. Ilona allowed Mangarak Vigileye to describe the fleshy object blocking the stairwell to Sulla and he immediately noted that the creature sounded like a Psychoplasm, though he wouldn't know what variety of disease had spawned it (atavistic, chaotic or retributive) unless he saw it for himself. They took the elevator down to the level with the cloning chamber and Sulla insisted they stop at the door where the woman Melissia had been trapped. Her voice could be heard inside and he opened the doors with his newly learned Knock spell.

Inside they saw a fairly spartan circular chamber with a beautiful redheaded woman sitting in the center of a summoning circle. She stood up and pleaded that they break the seal of the circle so that she could leave. When questioned about how she had gotten here and why she was trapped in the circle she decided to be honest with them and explain that she was a demon, summoned 200 years ago by a wizard who fled during the fighting of the Typhon Rebellion against Turms Termax, she wanted to find the descendants of this wizard and torture them to death before returning to her home in the Abyss. Horatius didn't have a problem with that and he cut a line in the circle, but this made Sulla and Levity immediately do everything in their power to prevent her from leaving. Melissia charmed Ilona in order to assist her escape but in the end she simply could not get away, and was cut down by Levity and Sulla's magic. As she died Ilona realized she had been charmed and congratulated them on killing her before she could escape.

They finally ventured to the object of their search and prepared themselves to enter the room holding the Psychoplasm.

That's where we ended. It seems like it was a short session, but only because most of it was filled with fighting.