Seeing is believing

I haven’t been blogging RotW, but tonight’s little bit of ingenuity deserves a mention.

So, we are in the Ivory Labyrinth  – part of The Abyss. The Ivory Labyrinth has several … places. Connected in strange ways. All are mazelike – a simple maze of bones, a swamp of mazelike streams, a lightless maze of caverns. You get the idea.

We were in the slums of Blackburg – a maze of twisy, winding alleyways. A sprawling favella. We needed to get to The Breathless Mountains – a maze of treacherous mountain passes (avalanches, rope bridges, gales – you get the idea). But how?

We dealt with an inhabitant of the Labyrinth. After speaking to it, it descended into a pit. We determined that the pit led to The Lightless Maze. We put some light down there, but on doing so discovered that as soon as we did, the pit no longer connected to that place. Why?

Because we had lit it. Affinity – that was the key. To get to the Breathless Mountains, all we had to do was to create a little piece of those mountains here in the favella. A big ask – the mountains are cold, snowy, mountainous, and uninhabited.

We hatched a plan, and it was awesome. I don’t know if the module permitted it specifically, or if the DM invoked the Rule of Cool.

First, we needed an open area without so many buildings. Our cleric refused to earthquake the slums, but we located a battle in progress – the slums were on fire. We wandered over and earthquaked that whole area. The demons that could fly, scattered. The ones that couldn’t died in the rubble.

While one of us put the nearby fires out with Create Water, our cleric proceeded to use Wall of Stone and Stoneshape to make a mini-mountain, maybe 20 ft high. Craggy. Treacherous.

We then used Obscuring Mist and Sleet Storm to turn it into a cold, sleety, foggy mountainside.

And then – this is the cool bit – we used a Limited Wish to reproduce the effect of an epic Mass Reduce Person. A Limited Wish is more than enough to reduce a party of six by two size categories for a few minutes or so, which is all we needed.

We then proceeded to climb our sleety, foggy, dangerous mountainside. Roped together, hands and feet crawling up the slope. We didn’t know whether it would work or not. We crested a ridge, and found a twisty, dangerous track on the mountainside. The fog cleared a little, and it seemed the maze had obliged us. The air was thin, our breting laboured, and we saw a range of peaks, separated by impossibly deep ravines.

The Breathless Mountains. We are not going to be able to survive for long here. We must find or create a portal to somewhere even worse.