Let's Play! Temple of Elemental Evil (an audience participation D&D RPG)

And now, we descend to put an end to this Lareth fellow. With nothing hostile hanging out in the moathouse, we take our sweet time, looting a few leftover bodies until we kick in the last door left.



Note: it's been more than a week since we slaughtered his entire platoon of guards right outside his door. This guy either has the world's lowest Listen check, or he's been busy reading Fifty Shades Of Greyhawk.

He calls himself "Lareth the Beautiful" and tells us he's a priest of Lolth (evil goddess of spiders and poison and stuff). Are we here to pay him homage?

I think "homage" is ponce-speak for STAB OUT ALL THE BLOOD YOU HAVE. So yes.




He starts out with an AoE spell - Bane - which gives everyone a -1 to attacks and saving throws. Well, everyone who didn't save, which is only James and Speak. Everyone else surrounds him and starts curbstomping him American History X style. After a few rounds of this, he begs for mercy.



He offers to lead us to the Temple he's been speaking of, and tries to bribe us with a gold chain to spare his life.

So... he's admitted to being a priest of an evil spider goddess, wants to hang out with us and lead us to the Temple of Elemental Evil, and then called us pathetic. We take offense to that last one.

James Birdsong nods to the others, then unleashes the secret monk technique of Stunning Fist. Lareth finds himself frozen in place and staring down a very angry little gnome with a battleaxe.

Vatican Cameo uses the Coup de Grace maneuver on the frozen Lareth, liberating his head from his shoulders. We search his place and find a diary with the location of a nearby town called Nulb. Perhaps in Nulb we can discover more about the Temple. But first...



Hommlet likes us, but I'll bet once our reputation gets back to Lareth's friends, they might not be inclined to offer us in for scones.

Well then, on to Nulb!




Surprisingly, the trip is uneventful. Nulb, however, is a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Pirates openly walk the streets, and nearly everyone is utterly rude. Well, I did say "nearly".



We meet a fancy lad named Bertram.

Bertram is faaaaaaaaabulous. Bertram explains that he was banished from his village for being "different" and hooked up with the pirates not long after. He's also a skilled dentist, which is useful since pirates have no concept of dental hygiene. He's the "cabin boy" for a pirate captain named Tolub. Tolub, however, occasionally gets a bit violent.

"Sometimes he gets mad. Real mad. And he takes it out on me. I try not to take it personally, but sometimes he beats me badly. Last time he broke three ribs. I had a hard time breathing."

Okay, I think it's going to be unanimously decided that whenever we find this Tolub, we're going to kick nine kinds of shit out of him.

We also find the town blacksmith, who seems to be a great deal friendlier than the rest of the folks of Nulb. His name's Otis, and he's a semi-retired adventurer who wouldn't mind going out to see the world before he gets too old to leave town.



Otis seems to know where the Temple is as well.

So then - what say you?

Do we take Otis along? And what should we do about Bertram?

Come along Otis. Do not let Bertram doublecross us though.

A dentist, you say? Shame we can't hire him; I bet that panda's teeth are getting a bit roughed up with all that mauling.

Bump! There is no reason this should be on page four. How's the adventure coming, fearless leader? :)

Due to a recent PC rebuild, I am trying to recover the previous save game file, which seems to be giving some trouble. But I do have a backup plan! Watch this space...

Can we recruit Bertram? Because the party really needs a dedicated dentist.

Okay, I have completed a reinstall and have everything set up - there were issues with the new monitor's default resolution not being supported by an ancient game, but then... the bad news. Save file unrecoverable.

HOWEVER!

I have recreated the party as faithfully as possible and am doing a speed play-through using the decisions that were already made in this thread. I should be up to Nulb in a few days, and will pick up the LP there!

Salutations, Lord Nutenheimer! Glad to hear everything is up and running once more.

And we're back!

When last we left our intrepid heroes, they had done a plethora of good deeds for the people of Hommlet and made their way to Nulb. While Hommlet was a peaceful town containing a few unsavory sorts - Nulb is an absolutely wretched hive of scum and villainy. So far the only decent sorts we've met have been Bertram - a flamboyant pirate dentist stuck in an abusive relationship with Tolub the pirate captain, and Otis - the ex-adventurer turned town blacksmith. Otis has offered to go adventuring with us, but we have heard rumors that he shall only venture out of Nulb once - when you return with him, he leaves. So we shall hold off on hiring him until we truly need reinforcements.

He does, however, point out the location of the Temple of Elemental Evil which Lareth spoke of - such a place is obviously full of evil (and potentially elements) and thus should have the shit kicked out of it in the name of the moon all that is good.

BUT FIRST - we're slightly honor-bound to deal with this Tolub character. So we head to the local tavern where he seems to be the reigning bare-knuckle boxing champion. He has an undefeated record.

We have a half-orc monk.



James Birdsong steps up to Tolub, who's so confident he wagers 100 gold coins on the fight. To his credit, Tolub can hit hard. However, against a monk whose very body is a trained weapon, it's like a sparrow fighting a hurricane. Birdsong's fists, knees, feet, elbows, and I think at one point his ass are like a bag full of flails wrapped over Tolub's head as he's battered into unconsciousness. When he awakens, he honors his debt and pays up. No word is said about Bertram, though, but I have a feeling that Tolub may be a bit humble for a while.

After resting up at a seedy tavern - where apparently the serving wench lifts a few coins out of Fontaine's pocket when he's not looking - our heroes saddle up for a trek to the Temple of Elemental Evil.

The Temple itself is sealed behind two huge locked doors, but we do find a broken-down guard tower, with a seedy-looking sentinel hanging around outside.



We choose Option 1.

By the way, if you're wondering about the slightly strange dialogue here... it seems that in the retelling of our heroes' tale, some statistic rolls were a bit... different. Apparently now at some point in her backstory, Madar Foxfire suffered a head injury that left her without much in the way of intelligence - but somehow has made her an EXCELLENT cleric. You don't need to be smart to kick arse for the Lord, apparently.

We liberate the sentinel's blood from his physical body, and prepare to kick down the door and see what kind of cultist shindig is going on inside.



BALLS.

Madar kicks in the door, and is promptly jumped by a gaggle of guards. If only we had something that could equalize these numbers swiftly...



OH WAIT WE DO.

Spugnoir earns his keep by dropping an arcane IED into the middle of our foes, burning at least half of them to a crisp where they stand. Within a few moments and with the help of Fontaine's pet bear "Bearnado" and a few summoned Celestial War Dogs from Spugnoir, we clear the guard tower of enemies - and everyone goes up a level!

Wounded, though, we head back into Nulb to sell all the loot we've recovered and let our casters memorize some new spells.



This time, however, Fontaine catches the serving wench trying to pickpocket him as we get ready to leave in the morning. When confronted, the innkeeper draws steel and calls some of his thugs up to try and intimidate us, saying that we've insulted his girl's honor and he demands we apologize. With the entire inn full of seedy disreputables, there's one easy solution here.

If you guessed that that solution is "FIREBALL", you would be correct!



Looks like from here on out, we get to stay in this disreputable inn for free.

Although we probably should have checked the Yelp ratings first.

So how are our heroes faring now in their second telling of this tale?



Vatican Cameo now sports a magic longsword that she uses to carve up her foes like a Thanksgiving owlbear. While not the brightest or most personable of our party, she certainly is our top damage dealer, leading the group in both kills and critical hits. When not adventuring, she likes long walks on the battlefield, kittens, and scrapbooking.



James Birdsong, as always, is the backbone of our group. Mostly because he can carry EVERYTHING. However, his isolated training in the monastery coupled with a face like a jarful of smashed asses make him NOT EXACTLY the best person to do the talking for the party. We know there's a gentle soul in there beneath those callused fists and plug-ugly exterior.



And then there's our party's Wealth Redistribution Specialist, the halfling rogue Speak With Bread. sporting a Cloak of Elvenkind and a +2 Poisoned Dagger of Shock (not pictured - but seriously, lightning and poison damage!), is our nimble little backstabber. With her insane Tumble check, she can cartwheel right through a mob of enemies to stab them in the back and escape unscathed.



As previously explained, that childhood head injury left Madar Foxfire a bit wanting in the intellect department - but opened her mind and body up to the divine power of Pelor, making her not only an exceptionally competent healer, but a plate-wearing wrecking machine in a fight. She's also carrying one of our magic weapons, with which she specializes in bringing The Pain to her foes.



Fontaine has found a new role - that of our party sniper. And if anyone gets too close to him, then he just turns into a bear and eats them. Vegetarian elf my entire ass. He's also become rather adept with the Flame Strike spell which is very useful for taking out the opposition's archers early on in a fight.



And then there's that Spugnoir cat. While he's been bogarting all our wizard scrolls - nobody else can use them, so that's fine. Instead of blowing his entire arsenal of spells, though, we've given him a crossbow and a metric arseload of ammunition. He even took the Rapid Reload feat in order to lay down a volley of covering fire for the melee comrades to charge in under. But the main reason we keep him comfortable and well-fed? FIREBALL.

Fireball fireball fireball...

Well played, sir. :) (Seriously, I am squeeing with glee that you're updating again!)

Somehow, I'm a little worried when the party's rogue has both the highest Intelligence AND the highest Charisma...

You're clearly underestimating the requirements of a Wealth Redistribution Specialist, then.

Also, you have Tumble, yet I have the highest Dexterity. Something is not adding up here.

Speak, as a rogue, is ALL SKILLS ALL THE TIME. The new party Face for personal interactions requiring Intimidate, Bluff, or Diplomancy.

Fontaine's Dexterity is all about the longbow, plus using a Dagger +1 to attack in melee using his DEX bonus instead of the lesser STR bonus (thanks to the Weapon Finesse feat).

Second highest Charisma.

I am clearly the charming and endearing sort of village idiot. This is pretty much true in real life too.

Op, my mistake. I bow to your superior charming skills, m'lady!

Funny, this is exactly how I built my Chaosium character too. Of course, in a zombie apocalypse, there's limited use for the party diplomat, and in the meantime, I can't shoot worth shit. >.>

Back into the Temple!

We go back to the ruined tower and Fontaine notices something strange in one of the rooms - a secret door! We head through and down a concealed ladder into what appears to be a secret sub-basement of the tower. After a bit of exploration, we find one ladder that leads to a well by an abandoned shack in the woods, and another that leads to a room with an angry woman who just rushes us without any chance to parlay!



Apparently her name was Smigmal, and she did a number on poor James with that magic sword she was carrying. Spugnoir hasn't got an Identify spell prepped, and since James needs to rest, we should head back to town.

Except wait... is that a side door to the Temple we see on our way out?



You bet it is! We'll just check it out a bit. Don't worry, we're just going in a little bit and then we'll pull out.

Wait.

Never mind, we're checking it out.



I wonder who that chair belongs to. That locked chest there matches a number of other ones we find, and apparently they need specific keys because even Speak is stymied by the locks on them. So we wander around the abandoned first floor and find a few staircases down. We give James a few healing potions in case things go south and tell him to stick close to Madar.

Vatican takes point as we descend...



Room full of ghouls! Oh crap! Oh... wait.

Madar Foxfire uses Turn Undead.

Boom fwoosh - they're all ashes. I fear the day we run into undead that she CAN'T just disintegrate by praying really hard.

I think something was moving in the next room - if it's more undead we can just keep Turning our way through them, this'll be awesome...



THOSE ARE NOT UNDEAD.

A huge ogre and a small platoon of goblins - we send Vatican up to hold the line against the ogre, and Fontaine drops a Flame Strike that incinerates most of the geebas, we focus fire on the few remaining and aside from our barbarian taking a few scrapes, we're unscathed. We're unstoppable, woo! ONWARD!



Rounding a corner, we come across what appear to be two prison cells - one holding two orcs, the other holding two women. The jailer and his bugbear friend aren't immediately hostile, but when he gets uppity about answering our questions, steel is drawn!

Bearnado starts chewing on the jailer's face, while his bugbear pal downs a Potion of Bull's Strength - the wasted action will prove to be his undoing, though, as Vatican sidles around behind him and sticks an axe in his thigh while Speak hits the other side with that poisoned dagger o' lightning carving out his favorite kidney. We pick up their crap, and then head over to the women.

They give us a story about how they were bored in their hometown and came to Nulb for Spring Break or something, got drunk at the Watershed Inn (hey, that place we nuked EVERYONE in!) and woke up here. This justifies our inflammatory response even more, I feel. We ask them how to get them out, and they point out a lever that'll open both cells, releasing the orcs as well.

Deciding to err on the side of mercy, we lift the lever. The girls thank us and run off for home, but the orcs stay behind...

One of them speaks good Common, and thanks us for showing mercy - they offer to join our party!




QUESTION TIME! Do we accept Tuelk and Pintark into the party, and give them the equipment their jailers dropped (none of it is magical) to fill our ranks with some orcish meat shields, or do we send them out into the wilderness to fend for themselves?

CHOOSE WISELY.

Accept all party members! The bigger the party, the harder the partiers can party!

Or something like that.

Send them into the wilderness. If you want more people. Head back to Hommlett and pick up the idiot ranger :)

Well they seem nice and all but we're pretty good at crushing the opposition as it is. How much, exactly, is a "share" of treasure?

Meat shields are good times. We can send them out into the wilderness anyway, just directly ahead of us. :)

Accept them. You can always kick them out once they're back to safety, right?

ROMANCE HER

HOKAY, SO -

When last we leave our intrepid hero, they is been coming across orc prisoners, hokay? And orc prisoners say hey hero dudes, we thanks you much, we wants be hero sidekicks, hokay bro? And heroes is like HMM OKAY ORC BROS and it was total sweet. Total sweet, bro.



We find another locked door - but nothing is locked for long with Speak With Bread on board! Everyone's ready to fight... but no, more prisoners inside that we free and send out of the dungeon. Another prisoner mentions staying at the inn in Nulb, flirting with the barmaid, and then winding up here. I am beginning to think that Nulb is somehow in league with the cultists of the temple. CALL IT A HUNCH.

We clear out the imprisoned folks and go back to scoop up some of the loot that was left behind. We give Tuelk and Pintark some basic gear - they're meat shields, they don't get magic items. Tuelk apparently likes him some maces, as that's all he seems to pick up from corpses. Silver pieces and maces. He's swinging one in each hand... I don't think he was the brightest lad in his orc tribe. We find a nice halberd for Pintark, so he can be a meat shield with some reach. Speak With Bread is the big winner winner chicken dinner, though, as she cadges herself a set of elven chain mail (which is still good for sneakying in) and a ring of invisibility. That may come in handy.

After a bit of healing up, the party starts going room-to-room, clearing out ghouls with Madar Foxfire 's Turn Undead and scooping up the remains. But in the room at the end of the hall - no ghouls BUT OH LOOK AN OGRE.

Fontaine has the first move.



It appears that Flame Strike does indeed work indoors! The ogre makes his save for half damage, still eating sixteen points of damage. If you're wondering why one of our meatshields has the little (Z) sleepy icon, it's because he got KOed and paralyzed, so we shoved him in a closet while we explored some more.

We make short work of the ogre, Madar vaporizes some more ghouls, and then we see a room with no enemies and barrels full of likely treasure?

Trap?

Oh yeah.

Barge right in?

Oh yeah.



That, dear readers, is a Gelatinous Cube. A ten-foot cube of acidic, carnivorous Jell-O. It is perhaps the iconic D&D dungeon monster. And of course our orc is right in the middle of it. Everyone else decides to gang up on the grey ooze in the hallway, while Meatshield #2 hacks away at the cube from the inside. Spugnoir takes a bit of mercy on his fellow hireling and busts out a Lightning Bolt to fry it somewhat, miraculously without singing the orc, and a round later, the wizard kills the big cube of jelly... with a crossbow. He has no sense of drama.

Exploring a bit further, we find an open room instead of these neverending hallways, and in it we find harpies! Fontaine is first up - you know, he's been missing a lot with his longbow, what exactly did we bring a druid along for again...?



That's right. WILD SHAPE. I do not know what a "Legendary Rat" is, so we're going with Polar Bear for the time being.



That's Fontaine standing in the bottom corner. Yep. He's a bear. And deals some WICKED HARSH damage with the whole claw-claw-bite attacky thing. We are steamrolling faces here, so we press on even deeper...

Oh boy, a big room full of bugbears! OH LOOK, FIREBALL.



It bears noting that in this edition of D&D, albeit not in the game itself, the material component for Fireball is a handful of bat guano.

Yes, the staple offensive spell in a wizard's arsenal involves throwing poo at people and setting it on fire.



Wizards. Yeah.

The fight goes on and on and more of these guys keep coming out. Tuelk (Meat Shield #2) is in a bit of a bad way. He limps forward to take attention away from a surrounded comrade, tying up the spellcasting enemy bugbear for a round, but unfortunately exposing his flank --




Goodbye, Meat Shield #2. You've serviced the team well.

His bro does not deal with this well, and goes Full Rimbo on the bugbears, diving right into combat. Unfortunately, he's only level 2, so it takes our barbarian flanking with him to actually make him useful. But we clear the path and head on, with Pintark carrying the corpse of his bro along for a ... whatever orcs do with their dead. Could be honorable burial, might be turning him into cold cuts. DON'T OPPRESS THEIR CULTURE. CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE!

So curious are we about the funeral habits of orcs that we walk right by a hidden door and get jumped.

Spugnoir takes a critical hit to the dome.

SPUGNOIR HAS DIED.

AGAIN.



Spoony, you fucking muppet. We're going to use the Raise Dead scroll now, but don't think we're happy about it. Pintark is KOed, Madar is grievously wounded, James Birdsong is bleeding from a gut wound...

Fontaine drops out of Wild Shape, ducks a swing from a bodyguard, and casts Flame Strike once more - centered on HIMSELF.

Druids, luckily, are protected from friendly fire from their own spells.

The room is cleared in one round. We bring Spugnoir back once more to the land of the living, slap Pintark until he wakes up, and then limp off to town to rest.

Except we can't. Because since we slaughtered the entire staff of the evil Waterside Inn in Nulb - nobody's there to legally rent us a room, so we CAN'T rest there. Back to Hommlet, then!

But wait, that high priest that ambushed us had a diary on him...



Well, well, well...

The plot thickens.

In places where bat and bird crap was not available, they used to collect urine in large quantities and convert calcium nitrate to potassium nitrate.

Okay. I now see why this game sold horribly.

Since the last update, I have clocked eight solid hours of dungeon crawling. There has not been a single dialogue tree option. Everyone in the party has hit max level (10) before we even got into the first elemental dungeon.

It's pretty much nothing but hack-and-slash grindage from here on out. Which makes me a very sad panda because I really love doing audience-participation LPs. But seriously, once you get into the basement of the Temple? It becomes a repetitive grind-fest.

I give Temple of Elemental Evil a 9/10 for mechanics, and a 1/10 for longevity and replay value.

FIN.

Aw, damn. It was a blast to read, but I understand why it would be a pain in the arse to keep up. Thanks, Nute. :)

Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaame. v_v

Lets just say I tore everyone a new one as a fucking bear and call it a day.

That's a shame.

Ah well, at least we'll always have Bear End.

Thanks for doing this, Nute. It really does become just a really basic dungeon crawler...in a really, really HUGE dungeon.