Session 26: The Rod of Splendor

The Crowned Maniacs finally find the scepter.

SESSION LOG

Platinum

3/11/202415 min read

Player Characters, Henchmen, Hirelings, & Animals:

The Crowned Maniacs:

Lexis King - Level 2 Human Thief, Neutral Evil

Arctus Thadonius “The Mad Prophet” - Level 2 Half-Elf Cleric/ Magic-User, Chaotic Neutral

John Arbuckle - Level 3 Human Magic-User, Neutral

Butler, Jester, 3 Royal Guards (Lexis)

4 Spearmen, Mule (Arctus)

Down Time Actions - In downtime, King takes the dead gnome’s illusionist spell book to The Society of Spurious Semblances, an Illusionist’s Guild, hoping to get some cash for it at the advice of his Thieves Guild mentor, the Thieves guild naturally knows where to sell items.

The Illusionist’s Guild isn’t particularly interested in the spells, except for one old gnome who approaches King. He walks with a limp, has a golden helmet, and a beard. His eyes light up when he sees the spells you have. “I knew a guy who had these spells once. I actually came here hoping to see him since I have a mithril bar. "The King" offers the spell book for 300 gold, which the old man accepts. He hands over the gold and parts ways with "The King". King realizes only after the gnome is gone that this gold is wet... with fresh blood.

This stains King's fine royal clothes so he decides to track this old man down to see where he lives. He fails in his stealthiness, and the old man turns around, “can I help you?”

The King is caught off guard, so he tries to flip the situation on him. "YEAH MAN WTF YOU GOT BLOOD ALL OVER THE KINGS CLOTHS!!!"

The old man apologizes and suggests "The King" wash the stains out with cold water ASAP.

“The King will give you a break this time and just chuck it up to a senior moment on your part, but I've got my eye on you old man!” The King asks his name before he leaves and he responds, “my names Luf – Lucy, it’s Lucy” Lucy asks if there is any way of repaying him.

"The King" challenges the old man to bring him a magic user capable of casting levitate to become his “Official Court Wizard”.

The old man accepts the challenge and sets off to use his connections to find a suitable wizard.

Enter Jon Arbuckle. A magic user from Paradiso who came to Gnoma Scotia and committed crimes against the BP family. He has been in prison for so long, that he doesn’t remember what he even did to be locked up. The prison takes inventory of every possession of the prisoners when they are committed. The old man is able to discover that Mr. Arbuckle has a spell book with levitate being held for him until his release. The old man pulls some strings and is able to get Jon Arbuckle out on parole. Jon will have to wear an ankle bracelet of trespassing, which will track where he has been and shock him if he willingly harms the BP family.

3/9/23 The old gnome returns to the king and introduces Arbuckle. Since he can cast levitate, the King is interested in giving him a trial run as "Court Wizard", so long as he takes an oath to the King. While being questioned Arbuckle starts babbling and stammering, so "The Mad Prophet" casts the cantrip “cough” on him (Unearthed Arcana), causing him to cough spasmodically and quiet down. Not wanting to return to prison, Arbuckle takes the oath to Lexis king. "The King" then buys Arbuckle a dagger and material components for his spells since he didn’t start with any money or components, just his spell book.

The Thieves Guild tells Lexis King of some high value items in the sewers below, so they head off into the sewers and start to look into rooms on floor 1, that they didn’t enter last time.

They come to a room 5 and find a classroom. Arbuckle scrounges up some chalk, charcoal pencils, and paper and they find nothing else.

They then go to room 4, finding a group of 8 kobolds guarding a couple iron chests. Arbuckle casts detect magic and scans the room, weary that the kobolds are part of some trick. The rest of the party engages the kobolds in combat. Arbuckle detects a faint murmur of magical origin coming from the chests as the party fights the kobolds. After 5 of the kobolds are slain, the remaining 3 flee to a room to the South. The party knows from their map that they ran into a room with no exits, so they turn to the chests. They check for traps and find nothing, so they have the wizard open the chests. He opens one and finds 110 copper pieces in one chest, and another that has 1,000 silver pieces. The group laughingly tells the wizard he can keep the copper he thought was magical and they’ll split the silver. They search extra hard for whatever gave that slight amount of magical glimmer, but they can’t figure out what it was.

The party chase the 3 kobolds that escaped. They open up a door and enter a room where they only see 2 of the 3 kobolds. The kobolds win initiative and dolphin dive to the far side of the room. This causes the party members engaging them to trip a wire of a spear trap! Three spears are fired, one kills the jester, and one of the spears is poisoned, instantly killing another hireling. The party kills two kobolds, then search the room yet are unable to find where the third one went. They spike the door to this room suspecting the third kobold is hiding somewhere in it.

They continue down another hallway on floor 1 and approach a room without a door. Out come 4 sub demons, known as Manes. The party doesn’t realize their puny mortal weapons are useless against such creatures (requiring +1 magic items to hit), so they engage. Lexis King performs a leaping overbear off his Royal Guard into a grapple, which knocks one into a waking unconscious state (temporarily, with 0 permanent damage), but the remaining 3 rip into the party with their claws, dishing out 3 attacks a round per mane. A hireling gets a natural 20, a seemingly perfect hit, but the spear goes right through their body and comes out without causing a scratch. The party then realizes these creatures are out of their league, and they decide to flee. Nobody important dies from the opportunity attacks.

They leave the dungeon entirely, rest up and hire new men at arms to replace the fallen. They also buy an octopus and small aquarium, inkwell, and sapphire for Arbuckle so that he can crush up the gem and harvest ink from the octopus, in order to create the magical ink needed for him to use his “write” spell. This lets him copy over The Mad Prophet’s magic missile spell.

3/11/24 The manes attacked 3 times a round so even though they have some magical firepower now, the party decide to avoid the manes and take the elevator to floor 2.

They come to the door to room 7 and bust in, finding 8 gnolls. Combat ensues with Arbuckle casting magic missile two rounds in a row, King knocks a gnoll out with an overbear into a bear hug, and the rest engage in melee. The first gnoll punches King 3 times in quick succession before getting bear hugged. Then another gnoll ends up on Arbuckle, after he has ran out of spells. King puts the gnoll on Arbuckle in a sleeper hold from behind, making it unconscious. Then Arbuckle punches the held gnoll in the head fatally. The gnolls flee and all but 1 is killed by opportunity attacks. The Crowned Maniacs search the room finding 4k Silver Pieces in sacks, and 130 Copper Pieces on the bodies.

The party takes advantage of this dungeon being under the town and leaves to quickly rest and regain their spells and replace the fallen. The King needs to replace his butler, which is difficult because it sounds like a weird fetish ad when he puts the Ad out, so he raises the pay. The first candidate doesn’t think it’s some weird fetish thing until the King describes the job and so he backs out with a really low reaction roll. The next candidate is a female named Porscha who will do the job for 20 gold. The King has 18 comeliness so she is fascinated by him and agrees to take the oath.

3/12/24 They head back down and go into the room the gnoll fled to. The door isn’t stuck, it’s a doublewide gymnasium door that moves freely. They find themselves in an underground gymnasium where they encounter a gnome and half-elf playing basketball next to some chests.

They challenge the party to a game of PIG, if they have something to wager for the half-elf’s chest of electrum, which they can see is several thousand in quantity. “It’s covered in toxic slime only I know how to remove so if you kill me you’ll never know how to clean it.” The party exchanges 3 point shots, layups, and free throws with the half-elf until both sides have PI. The half-elf makes his shot and it’s up to "The Mad Prophet" to make the follow up shot or they lose. The King gets into position behind the half-elf and as soon as "The Mad Prophet' fails his shot. Once they realizes the game is over, Lexis takes a backstab against the half-elf, slaying him.

The gnome mumbles “sore losers” and gets wrestled to the ground and tied up. He says he doesn’t know how to clean off the coins, because it was the half-elf’s treasure. The Gnome’s just here to play B ball he claims. The party pummels him unconscious and questions him again.

The gnome thinks for a bit and says that salt water would clean off the toxic ooze. Unfortunately for him, Arbuckle has an octopus in salt water right now, so they are able to test this with some salt water from the tank and find that it does nothing to the ooze. They pummel him unconscious again and it becomes clear he doesn’t know how to clean the coins. “He’s seen too much and knows too little..... We must kill the prisoner," says Lexis King. Then he suggests looking through the half-elf’s things and they find a crude map pointing towards some spiral stairs on this level. The Crowned Maniacs decide to tie up the gnome and use him as bait for now.

They head out the gymnasium and find themselves in a chamber with a couple doors. King checks the north door for traps but fails to see the spray trap that soaks the people who enter the door. The party is using a hooded lantern, so the splashing water does not extinguish their light source, but the people who opened the door are soaked. Behind this door is a shower room with shower nozzles and soapy buckets of water, as well as bar soap. Arbuckle has flashbacks to prison and the King’s butler Porsha calls him a pussy for being afraid of the soap. Arbuckle slaps the butler in a fit of PTSD, which forces the King to wrestle him into submission. Arbuckle apologizes and gets over his trauma. Then he realizes that the soap may be able to clean the coins. He takes a bucket of soapy water with a bar of soap inside. He will continually ask to go try this on the coins for the next hour of game play.

They travel along to the East through a couple rooms with sinks and mirrors until they get to a locker room with a bunch of lockers. They find some underwear and towels in the lockers but nothing of note. King checks for traps on a double wide door leading out of this room and notices a wire leading behind the locker nearest to the door, a trap! The party positions themselves where they think they’ll be safe and activate the trap in a controlled manner with the King using a 10’ pole. They hear a click and then a huge slam on the other side of the door but cannot see what happened. King attempts to disable the trap permanently by cutting the string. They go to open the door but it only budges a few inches because a stone wall is now blocking the path. They turn around and head back to the shower room and find the stairs to the first floor in the adjacent room. Arbuckle mentions trying the soap on the coins again.

The party goes south to room 14 where they find an Oakley’s case and small coffer on small pedestals. They check for traps and see none, but still fearing a trap, the team makes the tied up gnome go retrieve the Oakley’s case and coffer. The coffer is trapped, but the gnome makes his save so he doesn’t fall with the coffer into a 20’ pit with spears. The party lowers him down on a rope to retrieve the coffer which has 2,000 Silver Pieces.

They Open the Oakley’s case and find an exquisite pair of crystal lens glasses with a frame made of black opal, (mottled black dark green with golden flecks)

The King dawns the glasses and discovers that by thinking of a place he knows, he is able to see what is going on there. He thinks of the room they found the manes, and sees them sitting around in a circle. Lexis gives the Oakley’s to "The Mad Prophet". Arbuckle suggests washing off those coins. The party continues South to room 15 on floor 2.

They come to a room with a familiar view, the elevator shaft parallel to the elevator they came to this floor on. They don’t see anything in the room so they peak down the shaft and see some sacks of gold. They lower the gnome prisoner down there and the elevator box he’s standing on starts to fall below him. When it gets to the bottom, the walls start caving in. The party yells at him to pick up some gold if he wants to get pulled up, so he grabs a large sack and they real him in along with 400 gold.

Arbuckle wants to wash off the coins now, but they decide to follow the crude map the half-elf had and attempt to open the door. They do, and find themselves surprised by 8 large centipedes. The centipedes do no damage on hit, but they have a weak poison which allows for a +4 on poison save, but is still lethal. Many poison checks are made by the party, but a King's Guard and the mule are not so lucky. Both die from poison. Arbuckle rushes to grab his octopus from the dying mule before they flee. Porsha is killed by poison from an opportunity attack as the party escapes.

The party spikes the door and comes up with a plan to exterminate these bugs. They reason that the bugs are actually pretty weak, we just have to kill them all before they poison us. They rest up and heal then devise a plan to bombard the weak bugs with magic missile and oil flasks with range. Finally they will go in and stomp the remaining. They bust in the door and end up getting 3 turns of surprise, so instead of throwing oil flasks everyone but the prophet and Arbuckle goes in for melee. Arbuckle and the prophet still cast magic missile spells and obliterate the bugs they target. The rest get squashed before they can poison anyone else.

They find no treasure among the centipedes, but see a spiral staircase to the South. Having depleted their spells, they go out and rest up, buy a new mule, and memorize the magical texts again.

3/13/24 When they come back, Arbuckle takes his chance to try out the soapy water on the coins. And what do you know, it works! The party collects the chest of 2k electrum and heads back to the spiral staircase.

They go up the staircase. "The Mad Prophet" is able to detect where a secret door obviously would be Half-Elf style. This reveals an entrance to room 15 on floor 1. (This room is on the public map but there didn’t seem to be a way to get there from floor 1.) It is a small room, with a splendid-looking scepter resting upon a marble column.

They have the prisoner take it and nothing seems to happen to him, other than looking absolutely charming, but the pillar begins to rise up. He puts the rod back and it slinks back down to where it was. The party tries swapping things Indiana Jones style and it doesn’t seem to work with a spear, or any junk they put on the pillar, including the gnome prisoner. Eventually they try some of the cleaned off electrum and notice it rises slower the more electrum they put on. Eventually they place a full large sack of electrum on the pillar and it rests as if the rod was still in place.

The King’s like yeah, I’m gonna hold onto this. He can tell it has charges and can be used either on a person or on an area, but he doesn’t know what either option will do. This rod passively boosts the possessor’s charisma to 18, which in turn, adds 5 to the King’s Comeliness score, which was already 18. This means he now has a comeliness score of 23 while holding onto this rod (highest possible tier for non-dieties), fascinating those with 15 wisdom or less and getting a 46% increase to reaction rolls from comeliness alone. (81% total when you include the 18 charisma 35% reaction bonus)

There’s one glaring issue. On the pommel of the rod "The King" is holding, he sees “Property of BP” inscribed in gold. This means he is able to return the rod to BP for a reward, but any attempt to keep it will make it contraband. This will turn all the citizens of Halifax against him, if it’s found out he has stolen property of BP. Now let’s be real, King is a thief, and this rod is too good to pass up. He conceals the Rod of Splendor on his body and has the tied-up gnome assassinated to cover up lose ends.

Since King a jeweler by trade, he plans to disguise the rod using his jeweler skills. He buys out the whole factory floor where the furnaces are so he can have the entire shop to himself. Nobody can see what he’s doing or the whole town will hunt him down. He melts down some gold and fills in the “Property of BP” mark and replaces it with his own insignia, which he has a mould for. He’ll alter the style a little bit to further disguise the rod as his own. While this is happening, Arbuckle will be paying a magic user to teach him the knock spell, buying a scroll of it, and writing it into his spell book.

King wants to test the rod out. It is easy to find willing test subjects because it isn’t long before his insane comeliness has drawn a crowd of foolish admirers. He gets one to agree to be the target of the rod while the rest have to listen to the "Mad Prophet’s" sermon. Lexis King points the rod at the test subject, and activates the rod. The subject is outfitted with an absolutely stunning outfit made from silk and fine fabrics worth 1,000 gold, highly sought after furs worth 5,000 gold, and even gems worth 4,000 gold in total are studded in all the fashionable places on the clothing to do so.

King wants to see if these clothes are illusory, and so he asks the person to give them to him. The person willingly gives King the clothes, and they seem to be real. Lexis King puts the new drip on and ditches his stained bloody garb.

Now they want to figure out what the area of effect charge does, so he tries to activate this effect, but he is unable to expend the charge in the alleyway they are in. It seems they need more space so they go outside of town to a clearing and he tries again. The rod magically conjures a 3,000 sq. ft tent with furniture and food capable of entertaining 100 men for a day. They have a feast with the foolish crowd of admirers that tagged along listening to their tails.