Finishing the Job

Travel through the portal was uneventful, however, the other side was nothing like they had ever encountered. Seering heat and sulfurous fumes immediately buffeted their senses. Looking around, they realized that other than the space around the portal, everything we cooled lava, that would break unless traversed gingerly(difficult terrain). Every turn each player took 10 damage from the heat and fumes. Because of the smoke, their vision was limited to 7 squares. I created a custom maptools light source to mimic this. Finally, out of their site, they were able to hear chanting coming from ahead and to both sides.

Alexander recognized the difficult terrain and immediately used a healing word on Rudy, allowing him a ridiculous of moves, enough to get adjacent to Damakos and immobilize him. At this point, Damakos was in trouble.

The heroes fanned out, attacking both the fire titan and Damakos. A round or 2 later, a second fire titan broke through the crust they were walking on and heaved a ball of lava at the heroes. Damakos fell shortly after that and the heroes decided they wanted to take his body back with them, rather than carve out the eye and deposit the body in the lava.

Once again Alexander's healing word allowed Rudy to get most of the way to the exit, and then hand the body off to Ekeraath. Within a round or 2, only Kuppies and Ford remained. Kuppies did his best, but took several blows, one of which immobilized him. Fortunately, he had one power in reserve and used it to teleport next to Ford who was at the portal. The halfling once again played inadvertent hero and dragged Kuppies to safety on the far side.

I want to get it out in the open, this encounter didn't play out as I had hoped. Immobilizing Damakos at the beginning of the combat really put a crimp in the battle. In the end it worked out well, time wise, as we finished pretty late. But I still would have wanted it to go another turn or two. The players never saw the source of chanting, 3 altars that were spaced around the encounter area. Each had a spell howler of vecna chanting at it. Every 2 turns a new Fire Titan would have been summoned, unless the spell howlers were handled. It didn't quite turn out as I had hoped, but I think everyone was satisfied.