Chat Summary for 23 February, 2001

Friday’s session was a combination of time spent up in Jurgenville, finishing things up there, and then moving down into the Underdark.

The first thing on the agenda was money. With the new 3e rules for magic, it is much, much easier (too easy, in the DM’s opinion) for characters to create magic items. Several wanted to do that. This brought up the question of how much personal money each character had. This made the DM realize that he hadn’t been taking personal shares out of the treasure from the last couple encounters, so he went back and figured it all out. Turns out each character got 5,517 gp in personal funds. That also dropped the party’s liquid funds level from 122,000 down to around 70,000.

With the 5K in hand, several players went off and started designing custom magic items. Meanwhile, Thengal requested that the party allocate 6,000 for him to craft a magical blade for Ariessus. Since the party had ended up getting stuff for other people rather than Ari with the items they had planned on using to get Ari stuff, they approved the plan. Ari used her own funds and a friends to create her own armor and shield. Diana then offered to create Goggles of the Underdark, a combination of Goggles of Night and Eyes of the Eagle, for 10,000 gp each. The party wanted to keep an ‘emergency slush fund’ of 30,000 gp, so they approved four of them.

(Note: Something we forgot to calculate in to the party’s liquid fund levels was the 15,000 gp it takes to maintain TSR over the three months. So you’ll actually be down around 20,000. I’ll post the final numbers up on the web site later today.)

In the end, Amber paid Diana to create a Belt of Strength +2, Diana created a Bodice for herself, and Ari made a set of armor and a shield, all in addition to Thengal’s sword. Nikki also wanted to create a few items, but hers were not decided on before the chat session ended. Kat contracted with the Mages’ Guild for an item as well.

Once that was all decided, the next issue was party leadership. Sane was not returning to the Underdark with the party again, so somebody had to take over. Matar was quickly nominated by several people. Nobody objected, so Matar got elected. That’s when Nikki stepped forward and wanted to be the “sub-leader-for-pre-tactical-engagement-planning” (aka, “the bitch”). While Matar wasn’t sure about the idea, he humored the blue witch.

With everything done, the party headed back into the Underdark. They used on of Diana’s portals to get in close to the wormholes. They had to hurry through the area once again. It was obvious that sooner or later they were going to have to deal with the worms. They passed the spot where they battled the slavers and kept pressing on.

Castinar was out ahead. He came back and reported that he could see light ahead. He was sent forward to scout, and returned with a grim face. The party was expecting to find a side passage leading to a den of derro. Castinar found the passage. It had been fortified by the derro, and the ranger saw at least three of his hated enemy manning the small towers.

The party proceeded to ask Castinar questions about what he saw, which he replied to. For details, see the chat log. Search for the word “derro”. Note the DM was NPCing Castinar (and using his alias) during the questioning.

That’s about the time people started falling asleep, so we called it a night, giving the party the opportunity to discuss the situation in e-mail.