The party awakens on the cold hard floor of the Ioun Cavern as its come to be known. It has been 913 days since landing in Westeros and though they’ve learned a lot, they continue to learn interesting and terrifying new things.
This morning they are to learn what is behind their next Ioun Stone. This time, a blue sphere.
Knowing a fight is on their hands, they put some distance between each other to prevent any artifact mishaps.
Qhortho drops the stone in place and a giant naga appeared! This is definitely their toughest fight of all the Ioun encounters to date. There were larvae jumping off the damn thing! The party manages to make it through, and their reward is an upgraded Ioun Stone of Wisdom.
They teleport back to the north, where they picked up this stone, and resume their mountain climb.
After another full day’s travel, the peak is finally in sight!
They begin to encounter uniform, thin strands of ice, as if some liquid water must have trickled and frozen along straight lines. The strands of ice are very delicate and break on touch.
About 500 feet from the peak, the mountainside is becoming more and more lined with these ice strands. However, this becomes an advantage for them as they gain strength when en masse and provide great footholds.
Now only 200 feet from the peak, an obscuring ice cloud descends upon them. Just before the cloud reaches them, swarms of giant ice spiders lash out! The cloud continues downwards and obscures their view.
Each of the Assembly swings blindly with their weapons, making contact more often than they’d expected, by letting the enemies land their attacks to give away their locations. Still, its not quite enough.
They use a couple of Fireballs to finish off the ice spiders and a larger ice spider queen, but not without doing tremendous damage to themselves in the process.
However bad, it works out for them and the cloud dissipates. They continue to the peak and survey the surroundings. From this height, they can easily see 150 miles. In some directions anyway. In others, the mountains block the larger distances.
Farron retrieves his compass and finds that it is still pointing to the north-northwest and notices it has a slight downward deflection. They can see the valley between a set of mountains, which must be the Thenn territory, but it is a much steeper direction downward than the compass is pointing. They determine their destination is even farther than they’d thought.
They come up with a plan to use their ability to teleport to take them as far as their eyes can see, regardless of the risk.
Qarzdaq closes his eyes and opens them to reveal themselves on another peak, seemingly exactly where they’d attempted to appear. Still at high altitude, they decide to do it again. This time Farron will be at the helm. He focuses as far as he can see along the imaginary line from the compass… in the middle of a frozen wasteland of apparent nothingness.
He closes his eyes and reopens them.
They look around and they are definitely far north of the mountains from which they teleported. They orient themselves to follow the compass and very soon find themselves at what can only be described as the bank of an ice swamp.
Rather than water, this seems to be chunks of ice floating in a slushy goo. When poked, the chunks of ice sink a bit before floating back to the surface. They look for a way to cross and quickly find a stretch of ice that looks to be more solid, but it is only about 15 feet wide. It seems as if it was designed for this purpose. It looks like the other side may be solid ground, but given that it must run for hundreds of feet, it is difficult to know for sure.
After about 50 feet, a few creatures make themselves known up ahead. They’re relatively small and look like some type of kobolds, though clearly different from the fire-touched ones they’d encountered in the Pit of Light’s Sparks.
The creatures call out in the common tongue: “If you seek to cross, you must pay the toll. It’s just 100 gold for each of us.”
The party exchanges glances… Aran says, “wait… we each pay 100 gold to each of them or we pay 100 gold for each of us to cross?”
The kobolds each extend their hands, indicating it is the former.
This session we end mid-day on Day 914, each member of the Unlikely Assembly has gained 4kXP, bringing their totals to 205.8kXP. Now… what’s the best way to deal with these kobolds, especially given they are a few spell slots down…