Episode 9 - Part 4 -- The Krathanos Conundrum

Previously...Kydara raised Vasco and Talis from the dead.  They try teleport again...it failed.  They set off to walk to the ruined keep.

A few days later, the party are still walking...

The party muses on the knowledge we have about the current situation: Krathanos was a murderous titan - he vanished from the world 15 centuries ago. They speculate why teleport failed, and theorize that it might be related to being on this other plane.  Somebody casts knowledge planes and realizes that this place has no connection to the astral plane, and perhaps to other planes, so teleport spells don't work properly.  We wonder about shadow spells...the commune spell worked, so there are obviously some planar connections.

Then Vasco notices small things flying ahead - they look like butterflies but are too big...man sized?  They are dark but not black...similar to the dark angel things from the city but not the same.

In the distance the party sees the keep.  The walls are 30 feet tall and 20 feet thick.  There are four towers around a central compound.  It looks partially collapsed.

Vasco takes flight again to see what is ahead.  He sees cage upon cage of girallons.  The flying figures are six dark skinned gargoyles!  Slumped against the wall is a storm titan.  He looks like a bum! He has a gold belt encrusted with fist-sized emeralds! His weapon is an enormous spiked warhammer.  The gargoyles have leather armour and longbows.

The party discusses what to do next.  They need that belt!  Talis persuades them that she can get the titan to come out.  She casts glibness on herself, borrows Zeek's tiara of charisma, and works an amazing bluff.  Talis visits the titan in a dream, charming the heck out of him, and convincing him that there is a really interesting party of adventurers who are waiting to meet him outside.  She succeeds in gaining the Titan's interest, and the gargoyles come out to invite us inside, saying “Krathanos the Conqueror, exiled by the gods for his designs to rule all of creation, and shackled by the treacherous druids of Tilagos until such time as brave stalwarts arrive to free him.”

The audience with Krathanos quickly reveals he is mad with his dedication to be freed from his hateful prison.  At first calmly speaking through his dishevelled appearance, he tells the party he is an honorouable servant of Kord who simply needs to be plane shifted or gated to anywhere but this hateful place.  However, his decorum quickly erodes when he takes offence to something uncommonly innocuous said by Zeek, smashing part of his keep and setting off lightning.  However, he didn’t attack and he’s brought back to the negotiation.  When the party reveals they are only interested in his belt, he reaches into his grubby sack to pull out the head of a minotaur who “had come earlier to purchase his buelt on behalf of the Hand of the Lich-Lord”.  Krathanos boasts how he hates things whose heads don’t batch the rest of their bodies, and he pulled it off.  He then went into a rant about how if out of this place, there would be humans and elves to torment, far more interesting than these beasts and occasional visitors.

Finally, after a moral conundrum about unleashing a menace who had long plagued the world of men and elves into another plane, Vasco decides that the offer of the belt is worth it and offers to dismisses the titan to his own plane in exchange for leaving the belt and the dangerous staff of evocation behind.  Golden belt in each other’s hand to the last moment as a show of 'trust', Vasco seemed to have persuaded Krathanos to part with his staff of evocation (fireball - 1, magic missile - 1 charge, shatter - 1 charge, ice storm - 2 charges, wall of force - 2 charges, chain lightning - 3 charges) as part of the deal for getting him back to his plane. Krathanos does let go of the best, but tries to trick Vasco by grabbing for the staff at the last moment of the gate spell.  He doesn't manage to get it, but does take off wearing his large +2 icy burst greatsword, large +1 mithral full plate of speed, and belt of giant strength +4. Krathanos’ parting words were for the gargoyles and garillons to attack!

A challenging battle ensured, but not too much for the party.  In the end, each of the six gargoyle minions had a +1 composite longbow, and the keep is left in permanent ruin.

Krathanos left a battered iron chest which contained 23,000 sp, three casks of ambergis (worth 50gp / cask), an ivory elf-maiden carved from a dire mammoth’s tusk and inlaid with jewels worth 8,000gp.  Krathanos left his sack at the spot where he had been sitting on the floor near this throne.  In the sack are sixty pounds of grotesque Island trophies – enormous bulette teeth, several now well desiccated girallon heads, and the very recently severed head of a minotaur.