TL;DR I haven't been posting much here.
The Update
My players finally reconvened last week, wisely taking a break from the dungeon to re-equip before pushing on into the grip of the duergar Thane, Hrolad Vejik.
Upon their return to town they were met by an old friend; the party's npc fighter who was flung into the multiverse a few sessions ago by a Prismatic Spray. Along with him came his tentative ally, Jonas Arenmoradas, who claims to be related to one of the npcs the party is trying rescue from the Bleak Theater. Convenient timing, no? Hmmmm...
Jonas related his story of being a plane traveler, a "horizon walker" or some such thing, who experienced enormous injuries while traveling on a plane which lacked any sort of biological life. The living machines who dwelt there attempted to reconstruct him, but with mixed results. The party accepted his story with only a sprinkling of salt and laid their plans.
The Thane was not idle in the interim. He spread the word that a group of adventurers from the surface had been sowing destruction in the warrens beneath the Castle and put a price on their heads: 10,000 gp dead, 30,000 gp alive! In addition he fed many captive orcs to the aboleth on level 7, including one or two trolls to be converted into skum.
Return to the Castle
Upon the party's return, the tunnels were quiet... too quiet! They made their way down to level 7 without incident, only to run afoul of the aboleth's newly bolstered slaves. The game ended with the following cliffhanger:
Yes, that's the new npc, Jonas, who is now mostly made of metal, sliding down a chute into an underground lake teeming with leeches, being advanced on by some waterlogged zombies and 4 hungry ropers. Nice knowin' ya, Jonas!
Next Up
The party will have an uphill slog ahead of them, facing multiple motivated opponents. Most of the number crunching for that has been done. However, they party did - as usual - throw me a few curve balls. They finally did some investigation into the single magical boot they found (Pelltar's boot of teleportation), and have begun triangulating its location via various Locate Object spells. They even have a plan; using dimension door to travel to it is, in their eyes, much safer than teleporting, as the off-target chance has less chance of disastrous results, aside from the ascending damage of re-jinking if they land off target. So I guess I'd better prepare 12A, Pelltar's Redoubt for a future session.
That level is a game-changer. Once you get past the few traps, the party will find themselves in possession of several powerful magic items and a full set of spellbooks from a 19th level wizard. Oh and a super-secret lair. ANOTHER super-secret lair.
In addition, I need to go over the Bleak Theater and Narborg again. Once the party gets down there, it's going to be a major series of fights to get to the trapped npc. I can think of no way for them to reach the Theater without alerting the forces of the Thane. Especially since Gunrolz, the mephit, has been assigned to watch the party stealthily and fly ahead of them to warn waiting groups of monsters.
