A DESERTED CAMP

Our hapless adventurers have wandered into the mining camp they’d set out for at the foot of the Kalani Mountains. Right at the edge of the camp, they run into three nasty carrion eating monsters. The carrion eaters are irritated that the adventurers have encroached their territory, and attack. Dante, Keiron, and the others come out victorious, but not without injury. An otyugh has left Dante with a nasty gash to his upper arm, and the gash has left Dante with Filth Fever.

Three dead bodies lay in front of stables, which at one time held a team of work horses. They explore the stables, but find no horses. Only supplies remain—oats, straw, tack. Dante, William, and Mary study the corpses of both the monsters and the dead men. They discover more dead men surrounding the circle of black ash that was a firepit. As the others make an attempt to find out what happened, Keiron runs to the doorway of the shack that serves as bunkroom, storeroom, and office for the miners.

Keiron peeks inside the doorway and sees a monster half-obscured by darkness, who appears to be munching on a dead corpse. The monster, happily eating, is entirely unaware that Keiron is in the doorway.

The rogue throws a shuriken at it. The small, sharp weapon zings past the monster’s head and embeds in the wooden wall with a thunk. The monster, now alarmed and pissed, whirls around and immediately summons a duplicate of himself. Keiron, ever-brave, decides that he will do battle with it by himself. He announces, “I can handle it. I can take it.”

Keiron tries a strategy using his portable hole and luring the duplicate inside it, but it comes to nothing. He then takes his grappling hooks and attempts to drag the monster and its duplicates (now numbering three), outside.

Dante finally runs over to help and both adventurers now stand outside the doorway. Dante taunts one of the duplicates as Keiron places himself right outside the door. The duplicate is angered enough that it runs straight toward Dante. As it bursts through the doorway, Keiron knocks it out. The unconscious duplicate falls harmlessly to the ground. They celebrate, and then Dante suggests he casts Wall of Blades to finish off the original monster and trap it inside the shack. Keiron suggests just maiming the monster, followed by them attacking it and killing it that way. “After all,” he tells Dante, “We really don’t want the treasure trapped behind a wall of blades, do we?”

Dante goes along with it and casts Wall of Blades in front of the monster. The monster, being somewhat intelligent, comes out of it relatively unscathed, leaving our hapless adventurers with a useless, churning wall of blades in the shack’s main room.

Stymied, Dante attempts to burn a hole through the wooden wall of the shack with the intention of burning the monster with the same spell. But the spell is mostly unsuccessful, and Dante merely burns a tiny peephole through the wall, enough to see that the monster is merely pissed off and not even bloody.

Seemingly left with no other option, Dante and Keiron step inside the shack and begin to do battle with it. The monster pounds them repeatedly, slowly chipping away at their remaining hit points. Dante and Keiron keep sensing success close to their grasp when they see blood pouring from the monster’s wounds. But, their feeling of success is ripped away each time the monster absorbs one of its duplicates, and its wounds quickly heal.

Dante keeps suggesting they call in the newer members of their party, but Keiron thinks they can do it themselves—they always have, after all. As they continue to get hammered by the monster, Dante begins to dream of releasing the wendigo demon to take care of the monster for them, ignoring that the demon might free itself from their control if they released it from the magical flask.

Finally, over Keiron’s loud objections, Dante calls in the others. But by now, the monster has found a good strategy and they can’t do enough damage to it to take it down easily, if at all. Mary can’t think of a spell that won’t do harm to her compatriots as well, so she begins throwing rocks at the monster each round, each time she hits it, doing just 1d6 worth of damage. However, Dante declares that it’s better than nothing. Following Mary’s lead of chipping away little by little, Dante casts consecrated ground underneath the monster, which also deals it 1d6 damage each time it attacks one of them.

However, none of them can seem to land any of their melee or ranged attacks. Arrows fly past the monster’s (and the duplicates’) faces, sword slashes whisper uselessly past the monster’s body.

A very frustrated Dante starts seriously contemplating releasing the wendigo demon inside the shack, running out, and leaving Keiron to deal with the demon and the other monster.