Between a cock and a hard place

Due to the Chuseok holiday, we had our latest session of Vaults of Ur Tuesday night.  In our last session, we'd been captured by the harpies and their vulture-men underlings.  This was the continuation.

This time, of course Justin was DM, Jeremy played Ripper the Orc, Dean played Very Elder Karl the Cleric of the Great Bear, Tedankhamen returned as Digger the Orc, and I played Thidrek the Sleestak.  We also had our two henchmen crossbowmen, Pliny the Younger and Thodrick (Rick).

We were taken inside the harpies' iron bramble maze (sorta like dense, oversized barbed wire) and stripped of all ranged weapons and combustibles, but left with everything else.  Poor Thidrek.  He first entered the ruins of Ur with nothing but a crossbow, and that beloved weapon was taken from him and smashed.  I think that affected the poor Sleestak, as he had terrible luck with attack rolls the rest of the night.

We were left on our own then, and Digger showed up, having followed us and infiltrated.  He lent Thidrek a crossbow, but it just wasn't the same.  We started exploring the maze, occasionally hearing a cock crow (Justin had prepped a sound effect for this).  The first oddity were roses growing from the brambles that opened and had human eyes in their centers.  Thidrek applied a torch to one, it withered, and tentacles/pseudopods emerged from the wall and ripped poor Pliny apart.  We managed to sever two of them, and punish the third enough that it retreated into the wall.

More rooster calls.

Next, we were ambushed by some oversized vulture-men (the ones we fought before were about 4' tall, these were 7' to 8' tall).  Thidrek took a beating.  Dire Cocks* (the source of the noise) ambushed us from behind at the same time.  Elder Karl's stone fist sent them flying back into the thorns, killing one and rendering the other near death.

After defeating these foes, we found another area where the thorns widened out, with some sort of tower, and lots and lots of round objects all over the ground - vulture-man eggs.  We were smashing them contentedly when another force of giant vulture-men, with two more dire cocks, and a leader giant with plate and two-handed sword attacked.

This was a killer fight.  Thidrek's shield had been splintered already in the previous fight, so I was starting off underprepared and only had three rounds or so to use the crossbow (missing every time).  The cocks battled Karl, the vulture-men fought the shield-wall orcs, and the big leader guy came after Thidrek (who had been trying to shoot him with the crossbow).  Digger went down to negative hit points (but not dead), and Ripper was having strange pains in his red left eye and a sudden urge to strip off his armor.  When he finally succumbed to the urge a couple rounds later, he transformed into a werebear!

Blessed by the Great Bear in his return to the mortal realm, apparently.

Karl got Digger back on his feet, and the big leader turned from poor Thidrek (who while unable to hit, managed to avoid all of the leader's blows as well) to fight the werebear that had just mangled one of his followers.  One more vulture man joined the battle against Elder Karl as one cock went down, and Digger helped out there.  Thidrek fought a normal vulture man, and actually managed to get a bit of damage in before Ripper-bear took down the leader.

About this time, some harpies started flying over the battle.  They made an attack pass, then grabbed the final vulture-man and flew away with him.  Unfortunately, Thidrek was down at negative hit points and Karl was out of spells.

I had to take a short break to help my son, who had woken up, to pee, and when I got back they were wrapping up and I think we had entered the tower to rest up.  We're not dead yet, but we've got a long way to go to get out of this jam!

It was another fun session.  We may not make it out next time, but we'll cause all kinds of havoc on the way.



*Yes, lots of immature dick jokes and bad puns were made for the remainder of the session, and hence the one in the title of this post.