Tyranny of Dragons - Zero Dark Thirty, FR Style

We got bin Laden Frulahm Mondath!

I think that's his name.  He's one of the high ranking priests of the Cult of the Dragon that's been causing such trouble in northern Faerun of late.  Let me back up to the middle...

When last we left our plucky band of heroes (a band that really needs a name) , they had just infiltrated a large cave complex being used by the cult as...well, no one really knew, that's why the band was in there in the first place.

Having dealt with the door guards, our resident archer felt ill and elected to stay behind and guard our backs by watching the cave mouth.  (Read: Dan couldn't make the game.)  His loss would be sorely felt.  Just around the first corner of the cave, we knew there was a patch of shrooms that, if mixed properly, would give the human and dragon-born darkvision.  Alas, said shroom garden was being tended by two flying kobolds and a big bastard of a lizard beast.

Henry St. John barged right on down a slippery slope rather than take the stairs and proceeded to beat the holy living nine hells out of the lizard beast, while the rest of the party variously shot down the kobolds, and fell face first into the mushroom patch, which stirred up poison spores.  The resultant hallucinations knocked the dragon born tank right out of the fight.  Which would have proven disastrous in the face of kobold reinforcements, except for a well placed shatter spell cast by the death mage - that one spell knocked every last one of the little blighters dead.

Bumper sticker often seen on the
wagons of Forgotten Realms hippies!

Time for some stealth.  Not our fortay.  Our party located a large temple, and opted not to disrupt the ongoing ceremony (Coexist!), the midnight meat locker, and the meat delivery service.  Valuable intel all, but we decided to retreat to a secondary tunnel near the entrance rather than follow the meat delivery wagon - whatever they are delivering the meat to looks like it punches out of our weight class.  Perhaps some other time.

The side tunnel proved to be a guard barracks.  One ambush, fortified by a very useful bless spell from the good cleric Aramis, stopped all but one of the guards from alerting the big bossman.  Unfortunately, one was all it took.  We chased that cowardly bugger right into the lair of Frulah Mondath himself.

Frulah was well prepared, having healed up the tattle-tale guard, and also having cast some weird protection spell that summoned four ghostly cavorting demons - each of which stood as the corner of a spell of protection that caused heavy damage to all who approached the slavering and ranting cleric.  A decent archer sure would have come in handy right about then.

That crazy cleric wound up putting two members of the nameless party down hard before the dwarf could konk him on the head hard enough to put him out of action.  If the party didn't have two healers, somebody could have gotten killed in the encounter.  As it was, the party tied up the fanatic, looted the room, naturally, and high-tailed it out of the cave with valuable intel and a high ranking prisoner to boot.

All in all, it was a good day of dungeon delving.