We rescue a real live Space Princess!

Last Thursday (8/15) being a national holiday in Korea (VJ Day/Korean Independence Day), Wednesday night we finished up our excursion into the vaults beneath the old Spiked Circle stockade that was the source of the Nightzone in our Vaults of Ur campaign.

We started off more or less where we had left off, playing just a bit in play-by-post in our facebook group.  Thidrek had gone down the pit and scouted around, and the rest of the party* followed him down. 

*5 orc magi men at arms left sans spells, their captain Thorn, Tark our NPC ghoul hunter, plus Venerable Carolus, Noctis the Orc, Thidrek, and Maya Culpa (replacing Alexei's other elf PC since she had her body back).

We followed the stream of darkness down a hallway, and were attacked by shadows.  At the same time, a shadow-creature in the stream itself attacked.  It was sort of a "shadow hydra" in that it had lots of shadowy pseudopods that could be destroyed the way hydra heads are, but did strength drain like shadows.  It was a nasty fight, and we lost all of the troops (Tark survived). 

During the battle, Thidrek managed to get to the control panel of a stargate type thing that was producing the darkness, and shut it down.  After we managed to finish off the monsters, we smashed the stargate thing to keep Helemor the Awakened from reactivating it (d'oh!  Found out later we might have been able to use it for planar hopping adventures!).

Exploring a bit more, we found another ghoul altar, with the remains of former companion Yargrob Elderbob.  Carolus pained it up with hippy flowers and teddy bears to reconsecrate it to the Great Bear (he's got a Grateful Dead bear thing for a deity, if you're new to Ur). 

The next room had five sarcophogi, one open (presumably Helemor came out of that one).  Three more had skeletons or other remains of people from before one or another of Ur's ten cataclysms.  The final one (actually the second one we checked after Helemor's, but the last one we opened) contained Lamara the Ancient, a "buxom and comely" survivor of ancient Ur!  We took her back to town and hopefully she will be able to provide us with all sorts of good intel about the wackiness of Ur's ruins!