Session 47 — Total Party Kourage

Faced with the option of playing Dagon’s game and entering the darkened tunnels before them, Kaicho, Mav, and Remi decided they were done being his pawns. “Alright, I’ll have to make the decisions for you,” they heard a disembodied voice say. This was followed by the clang of metal on stone and screaming emanating from the tunnels. The silence afterward was tense, but it was finally broken by the shuffling feet of two limping survivors exiting separate tunnels: William and Lianna.

The two collapsed to the floor as the party rushed to their sides. They were badly injured, but worse still was the harrowing sadness in their eyes. Lianna gathered her strength, reentered the tunnel, and returned with Till, the love of her life, dead in her arms. Kaicho rose from William’s side and entered his tunnel to find his dear friends Xan and Karl dead as well. These three had been granted swift and clean deaths. This was not so for Dagon’s final victim. In the central tunnel, soaked in her own blood, lay the butchered Dahlia, Mav’s long lost daughter, whose lifeless eyes still resembled her mother’s.

Mav silently cradled his daughter as the others tried to decide what to do. Dagon offered them time, but could they really trust he wouldn’t stab them in the dark too if they tried to rest? No. They quickly pumped some healing into Lianna and William and called aloud for their enemies to reveal themselves.

Five figures appeared at the entrance to the stone room, the same they met minutes earlier, except Dagon was nowhere to be seen. But the Pisspots wouldn’t let that stop them from trying to fuck up their day.

Immediately William and Lianna were removed from the ensuing battle when the hag magically suggested they rest their weary eyes. With his allies no longer outnumbering his enemies, Remi aggressively rushed in to attack the Governor.

Milo Morstrum suddenly appeared in the center of the room. He was as his friends had last seen him: a deteriorating husk, riven at the seams with brilliant light and bound together by his terrible patron’s fell magic. Kaicho head the Bard’s magnificent whisper in his head, “I never liked your sandwiches,” and he suddenly felt compelled to turn on his own adopted tortle son.

The daggers the Boss flung at Remi bounced harmlessly off his shell but certainly got his attention. In seconds Remi was swarmed by the two hulks and suffered many attacks. Even as he attempted a retreat, the seer magically swapped places with his minions and sent psychic energy surging through their forms that radiated outward, halting the tortle in his tracks and ultimately putting an end to his short life.

Filled with rage at the sight of the hag, Mav rapidly released a volley of arrows as Ragon rushed to rouse William and Lianna. The hag fell unconscious, and as she did her form changed from an old crone to the pale-faced woman Kaicho saw months ago in Dagon’s presence, revealing her to be a changeling in the guise of a hag — a changeling that, as Mierdras, had successfully diverted them from their investigations into Dagon’s work. Milo was quick to revive her, but then William unleashed a bolt of lightning that finally stopped her beating heart.

The spell over him finally broken, Kaicho lunged at the Governor with his blade and landed a devastating blow that knocked him unconscious. He stabbed him while he was down for good measure.

Meanwhile, the star spawns were wrecking the party with their synergistic psychic attacks and brute force, and Milo stabbed many under the cover of invisibility. The Governor even enjoyed a stroke of luck and regained consciousness. Though William landed a fatal sunbeam spell on the seer, it wasn’t enough. Ultimately, Braxis, Mav, Kaicho, Lianna, Ragon, and finally William all fell before the overwhelming might of Dagon’s followers, and each perished. The Pisspots were no more.

Had they survived, they might have learned much about Dagon’s machinations. He was absent from the fight because he was busy defending precious relics at R’lyeh, the sunken city beneath the waves at the whirlpool, from Salendra’s meddling. The man was not a man at all, but half-dragon, half-mindflayer, and the Godspawn of the Mad Tyrant, Cthulhu. They would have witnessed the summoning of the Great Old One into the world, facilitated by the power of the celestial alignment channeled through the Eye of the Beholder, and the widespread destruction he wrought.

Instead, though they fought bravely, they likely suffered cruel torment or annihilation in the afterlife. Such is the reward for hubristic mortals who dare to impede the divine will of the Mad Tyrant…