Because f*ck that guy.

We return from our temporary hiatus to Bhaal’s shitty dinner party. Initiative! The Captain rolls high (31) - but not high enough to beat Orin the Red. Following The Captain is Rusty (29), then The Dark Urge, then Bhaal. I think. He does so many legendary actions, it’s hard to tell when he actually had his turn. Next is Horus and Gary, then Louie and Raymond, then Sarevok, Abazegul, Cletus, and Dennis stone motherless last.

Round 1

Orin decides to kill Cletus, but cannot even approach his AC. Giving up really easily, she uses her second attack on Rusty, but that was a failure too.

The Captain thinks that is uncalled for, so stabs Orin. Hit! Massive damage! She uncanny dodges to halve the damage, So The Captain hits her again. Then he hides under the table. Remember Ethan, he’s only 2’6”, so he can stand up under there. He isn’t prone!

The Dark Urge tosses out a Legendary Action at this point, targeting Rusty. Rusty made his save though, so we have no idea what he was trying to do.

Rusty figures that ganging up on one opponent at a time is good strategy. He uses his bonus action to grow really big, then brings his Akmon, the Hammer of Purphoros down on Orin’s head, concertina-ing her entire body straight down into a pancake. Akmon does fire damage too, so he also cooked the pancake. One down! Then he spins and smashes Sarevok with Akmon, trying to see if he can knock another tooth out. It doesn’t work. Sarevok appears to be resistant to the fire damage. Sarevok then cracks his neck. This was Ethan-code for ‘he turns his armour of “you can’t hurt me” on’, but it took us a while to figure that out.

Bhaal tosses a dagger at someone, but misses. Not clear if this was his turn or a legendary action.

The Dark Urge flies to a strategic spot, and breathes some sort of breath weapon all over Louie and Raymond. Louie makes his save (1/2 damage), Raymond doesn’t (still 1/2 damage - gotta love evasion).

Sarevok gets a legendary action. Why don’t we get those? Anyway, he sees Cletus’ boomerang and correctly infers that Cletus is responsible for his missing teeth. Some of them, anyway. He uses Command on him to do - something? Not sure, because - due to the missing teeth - he can’t cast spells. That was pointless - maybe we don’t want Legendary Actions after all.

Bhaal must be getting fed up with his useless minions, because he finally gets out of his chair! He teleports to the middle of the room (all the better to get you all within my AoE) and looses some attack that makes Cletus and The Captain make Wis saves, which they both fail. They are paralyzed for 1 minute. Dennis could help, if he wasn’t at the bottom of the initiative order! Also, The Captain is currently really well hidden and nobody can find him, even with him telepathically telling Rusty where he is and Rusty passing that information on to the party. The Captain is just too good!

Horus can see Cletus, though, and he casts Lesser Restoration on him. Cletus can move!

Louie and Raymond decide to focus fire with Rusty et al, and bound over to Sarevok. They hit him! He takes no damage! Raymond, thinking laterally, grapples his helmet off with his tongue, thinking maybe it was providing his damage immunity. It wasn’t, but it was a shit hot helmet, so Raymond swallows it. Sarevok turns out to have a massive bald spot.

Sarevok was not happy, so he whips out another legendary action, and uses “Sword of Chaos” on Louie. Louie makes his save, and in addition, Sarevok misses his roll to hit. No effect. Wow, Sarevok’s legendary actions suck.

Abazegul casts some AoE spell on the party. Everyone saves. It was a CON save, so even those with evasion still take half damage.

Cletus decides that damage immunity just means you’re not trying hard enough, and absolutely beats the crap out of Sarevok. After enough damage (spoiler - it was a lot), Sarevok’s armour shatters. This make Sarevok vulnerable to - well, everything, as far as we could tell. In addition it gives everyone a reaction attack on Sarevok. We pile on the damage, and Raymond’s critical hit finally finishes the lispy bastard off.

Cletus wasn’t finished yet. He jogs over to where Sceleritas is hoping nobody will see him, and starts beating him up. Sceleritas shows he is a team player by transferring all the damage he takes to The Dark Urge. Cletus figures this is a cheap way to hit the flying guy he otherwise cannot reach, so he action surges and keeps beating on Sceleritas. If I were The Dark Urge, I’d be getting a bit irritated by now.

Abazegul sucks up to Bhaal by casting mirror image on him, then grows to full dragon form and lightning breaths everyone.

Dennis finally gets a go! He ignores the Dragon in the corner, flies over to Sceleritas and starts hitting him, reasoning that maybe the stun effect will transfer to The Dark Urge and he’ll fall out of the sky. Unfortunately not - the stun effect sticks to Sceleritas, but the damage all goes to the Dark Urge.

Round 2

The Captain saves vs paralysis (nat 20). Then he sneaks attacks Sceleritas (another nat 20) and kills him. The effect of his crit card is to make The Captain immune to 1d4 (3) damage types for 1d4 (4) rounds. He chooses piercing, lightning and necrotic, I think. The Captain then uses his second attack to throw a dagger at The Dark Urge, and does 10. Not satisfied with that, he uses Bigby’s Benificent Bracelet and force slaps The Dark Urge for 52 damage. Then he hides again.

Abazegul gets a legendary action and breaths lightning on Rusty, Louie and Raymond. He missed.

Rusty uses his cerebral circlet on The Dark Urge, doing 48 psychic damage.

The Dark Urge responds by using a legendary action to drop a meteor swarm on Rusty and Louie. Despite being immune to fire, Rusty still ends up looking very poorly, and Louie drops.

The Dark Urge then takes his action, and casts something at Rusty, who makes his save. Someone (Abazegul?) casts Silvery Barbs on Rusty to force him to save again - he does save again. Nice!

Bhaal throws a dagger at The Captain, but misses. He throws on at Raymond - hits! He throws one at Louie’s body - hit! 2 death saves down. Someone hits Louie again - he’s dead.

Interlude 1

Louie gets to choose his afterlife, and opts for hanging out with Selune. She can be found sitting in a moonlit glade, watching a tranquil pond that is acting as a scrying surface, showing the fight. She has a bucket of popcorn that she is munching from. Louie takes a seat next to her and accepts some popcorn, but indicates that he won’t be here long.

Return to the action (1)!

Cletus is running out of opponents that are on the ground, so he goes for the big prize and hits Bhaal.

Abazegul tries to bite Cletus, but frankly nobody knows why he bothered. Miss. So he claws Dennis, hits, and blinds Dennis for 2 turns. Dennis smirks to himself.

It’s Dennis’ turn! For his first hit of the round, he punches his eyes back into working order, coincidentally healing himself up to full HP. Now able to see again, he hits Abazegul, who appears to be immune to stun. So he hits him again. Turns out he is not immune to poison. Paralyzed. Hits him again - crit - and as the result of the crit card, he gets the ability to extract one truthful bit of information from Abazegul. He asks him what Bhaal and his minions greatest weakness is. “Withers can destroy any of the dead three.”

Not sure he heard properly, Dennis asks “Did you say Withers?”.

Interlude 2

Dennis transcends into the mists, and meets Withers. He asks Withers to destroy Bhaal and his minions. Withers says he will not act directly against Bhaal, but he’s happy to kill the minions.

Return to the action (2)!

Dennis fades back into existence, and Ethan robs him of his remaining attack! On the plus side, Abazegul and The Dark Urge are both now dead.

Round 3

The Captain sneak attacks Bhaal and kills him dead. Nice! Unfortunately, it is not possible to murder the God of Murder. That’s a bit questionable - he started this, so it was definitely self defence, not murder. Anyway, Bhaal gets up, is now apparently competely immune to everything, and just starts to walk away.

Rusty revivifies Louie, which is the start of a long and bitter exchange between him and Bhaal. Bhaal is throwing an absolute tantrum, demanding some unspecified apology for something, and Louie, quite correctly, adamantly refuses. Bhaal keeps kiiling him, and we keep bringing him back. For some reason, each time he comes back, he is munching another mouthful of popcorn.

The rest of the party is doing everything they can to hold on to Bhaal and not let him get away, while Rusty and Louie are wracking their brains for some way to shut him down. Rusty sacrifices his self-respect and actually uses divination magic to ask a God for help. He opts for Hephaestus, whi seemed a stand up guy. Hephaestus indicates that banishing him is our only effective method.

Thankfully Louie can cast Banishment, but not often and Bhaal has been saving up his legendary resistances for just this purpose. We try any number of ways to try and bur through his resistances, but being immune to damage, he isn’t willing to expend them on anything short of Banishment.

Eventually, Louie pulls out the wish he picked up in Bluetspur and wishes to banish Bhaal with no chance of saving. Bhaal attempts to Counterspell the wish, but Rusty counterspells Bhaal, and off he goes!

The Captain and Cletus were a bit grumpy at this stage, because they had burned through a lot of consumables by this time.

Oh my God, that’s a lot of loot.

There is a Sword of Chaos. A Helmet of Demonic Protection (currently in Raymond’s stomach). A Crimson Mischief dagger. A Blade of the First Blood dagger. Abazegul had a Sword of Grief, though we had no idea - he never got to use it. Finally there is Sarevok’s Plate Armour of Bhaal, slightly damaged but Rusty should be able to fix it up.

Leaving the cave.

We heal up as many of the dinner guest as we can, and head out. When we reach the altar room with the praying nun, we are blocked by a wall of force. We can’t teleport through it either - we tried. After a chat with the nun, it turns out that she is Sister Morrowin, and her chanting is holding everyone in. She says she cannot take the chance of Bhaal escaping. Cletus tells her not to worry, we killed that dude, but she is not convinced. Eventually she says that if we can refrain from killing a cockroach that is walking past, then we must be telling the truth. Bhaal could never refrain from killing it. Thankfully Dan is unconscious at this point, so we do not have to restrain The Captain and Cletus. Sister Morrowin releases us.

We return everyone to the town, raise as many as we can, and Mizzium is going to stay behind to continue the resurrection train.

It’s Christmas!

Which is weird - it means that the Judeo-Christian tradition exists in Mordentshire.

Cletus is excited and adamant the we should go to his house for Christmas celebrations, so we do. It is snowing in Mordentshire, which makes Cletus very happy.

Cletus’ family are all being sickeningly wholesome, preparing for Saint Nicklaus to visit, hanging lights and decorating. When the lights start to malfunction, the mood sours slightly, and it is revealed that some of Cletus’ family are concerned that something happened to St Nick. The party sets out to visit Grandmother Vesna. If anyone knows what is going on, it will be her.

Grandmother Vesna should talk to her family more

We arrive a Grandma Vesna’s house, and she regales us with a tale of what she saw the other night.

There was a great blizzard, out of which flew fierce monsters. They attacked St Nick and his reindeer - the battle flowed back and forth across the sky. The reindeer were gradually defeated and they became corrupted, joining the enemy. There was a bright flash of lightning which revealed a being, twice the size of a man, standing on a platfor of ice. He cast down St Nick into his home, and then flew down after him.

Then the lights of Spring House went dark, and she hasn’t seen any movement since.

You think you would tell someone about something like that.