Yesterday morning we had someone fly a rope up to the castle and then we all climbed up. We did a bit more scouting and found the castle being guarded by iron golems, which are tough motherfuckers if you’re not familiar. It takes a lot of magic to create even one, and there were dozens walking around.
We tried sneaking into the castle, and we thought we were being clever until we heard the slow clapping.
There was a wizard in pale blue robes, who introduced himself as Colmor and told us that he was one of the four wizards who had found Thomas’s old spellbook and been trying to summon and control the avatars. He explained how we had mostly encountered employees and acolytes up to this point, and told us that the plan had been for each of them to take an Avatar until we killed his friend who was controlling the Avatar of Magma. Now, with the Plane of Ooze being the last chance for them to complete the ritual, the remaining partners were guarding the summoning stones personally.
I always thought the villain monologue was an unrealistic cliche, but man Colmor went on. It seemed stupid for him to reveal all of this information to us, but he seemed pretty confident that he could keep us from talking.
Which was fair. Once he was done talking he called in his golems and proceeded to kick our asses.
We almost died, but then there was a boom and Thomas knocked down the front door of the castle. He didn’t monologue, he just cast a fucking meteor swarm, the most powerful spell I’ve ever seen, and him and Colmor started going at it.
This is when I was knocked out by a golem. I’m told that the rest of the party managed to defeat the golems and ran out to find Colmor standing over the ashes of what had once been Thomas, and managed to defeat the mage. I only came to this morning, and I’m…distraught.
But we got one summoning stone. All it took was the sacrifice of our most magically powerful ally and three party members getting seriously injured.
