Night Below E-mail Turn, 18 January 2000

 

Situation:  The party has been attacked on the docks of Sakar.  They have turned the tide and are looking to finish the battle off quickly.

 

Events (in initiative order):

 

Katrina spins around and before the startled drow behind her can react she lashes out at him with a flurry of blows.  The spin, however, takes her a little farther than expected on her first strike, although she recovers gracefully.  She then plants a solid blow on the drow’s chin and misses with her last strike.  She takes a step back (something she will regret in a few seconds time) and listens for any other threats approaching.  The acoustics in the enclosed warehouse are terrible.  Between the sounds of fighting near here and the sounds of battle where the Dark Stalkers and fending off the kuo-tao she can’t hear much of anything.

 

Drow 6 is still doing his job – taking out the spellcasters.  He aims at Diana.  For a moment he is confused.  He really doesn’t want to attack her, does he?  Of course he does!  He lets loose with two shafts.  The first misses, but the second finds its mark.

 

Behind the archer the invisible drow mage takes a few steps and smiles.  So many of them in such a nice, straight line.  He casts a Lightning Bolt spell right into the middle of the party.  Katrina, K’harn, Diana, Ariessus, Amber, and Narlan are all hit by the electric force.  Nikki, Thengal, and Castinar all feel the charge.  Everybody hit except for Ari manages to avoid most of the blast.  As for a silver lining, the blast also catches Drow 6 and burns him fairly badly.

 

Shrugging off the blackened streaks on her fur, K’harn continues attacking the spider, but doesn’t manage to harm it.

 

The spider, however, has had enough.  It hisses one last time at Matar and then fades from view.

 

Ari growls in frustration when the spider disappears.  Quickly assessing her choices she decides to take care of the archer harassing Diana once and for all.  She calls upon her God to smite the archer.  A pillar of holy fire roars downward, engulfing the doomed drow and burning him to cinders in a heartbeat.

 

Amber also adjusts her target, directing Streekur to attack the rather startled looking drow cleric at L10d.  Streekur darts down, but again fails to score a hit.  Amber uses her boots to fly over to P10c.

 

Seeing the huge demon vanish, drow 4 decides its time to save his own skin.  He turns and begins to run away.  As he does so, Katrina strikes at him, but misses.

 

Castinar is none too happy about the way this battle has gone, especially having an invisible mage dump fireballs and lightning bolts into the party.  He holds Finslayer aloft and asks the blade to allow him to see invisible objects.  His vision clouds for a moment, then clears.  Looking around he spies the mage down in B6.

 

The drow cleric is rather upset.  If the demon had only stuck around a moment longer he would have been able to heal it.  Now the situation is hopeless.  Time to leave.  He turns and begins walking away as he pulls a scroll out of a pack on his belt.  He then stops and reads a prayer on it.  When he finishes the scroll flashes a bright blue color and, when people look again, the drow is gone.  Well, gone to everybody except for Castinar, who still sees him at around I10.

 

OK, now the demon is gone, both the spellcasters have disappeared, and two of the fighters are down.  Drow 7 doesn’t need to be a genius to figure out that it’s time to leave the place.  He turns and runs out, shouldering his bow as he goes.

 

Matar takes a quick look around.  There are no drow standing near him, or even within the distance he could charge to.

 

Shadow isn’t about to let the drow have the last word.  She drops her blade and picks up her bow.  Notching an arrow she estimates the distance to drow 7 and lets loose.  It’s a very long shot – almost 250’, but Shadow still manages to place the arrow almost in the center of the fleeing drow’s back. 

 

Diana knows that the invisible drow mage is somewhere down where most of the drow were when the fight began, but she’s not sure exactly where.  Diana makes her best guess on where the mage is and drops a fireball there. Castinar, able to see the invisible mage, watches him cringe as the fireball goes off behind him.

 

Thengal has the same problem as Matar – no enemies within range, and a long run to catch up with any that he can see. 

 

End of Round

 

Notes:

 

Both Matar and Thengal can go running after the drow, if they wish, but the drow are moving rather quickly.

 

On Diana’s fireball while it’s true both fireball and lightning bolt can be traced back (although not easily unless you are watching for it), that doesn’t mean Diana knows exactly where the caster is for two reasons – first, she simply may have not been looking in the right place when the spells were cast.  Second, that’s a tough estimation of distance.  So I made two rolls, a Spot roll to see if she saw about where the spells came from (DC 15) and then a Wisdom check to see if she estimated the distance properly (DC 12).  She missed the spot check, so didn’t get a good location on him.  She did make the distance estimation check, but that unfortunately put the fireball 30’ away from where the mage was.

 

The wall of the warehouse is 100’ beyond row a.  That puts Drow 7 (who is actually 60’ beyond row a) only 40’ from a door, while Drow 4 is about 130’ away.

 

As a reminder we will not be chatting tomorrow.  I would like to finish the next turn this weekend so we can move on.  Please have your initial intentions in to me by SUNDAY AFTERNOON.  If I feel it’s necessary I’ll put out an intentions summary post on Sunday evening and then the turn on Monday.

 

Saif