Towering effectiveness

Surveying the scene of carnage, we brushed ourselves down, checked that none of us were still on fire, and then decided to investigate the tower.  The main doors looked completely blocked by rubble, and it was obvious that the main point in ingress was a window on the first floor, accessed via the scaffolding.  Heroically, despite my heavy wounds and missing eyebrows, I sneaked up onto the scaffolding and peered in through the window, which had been enhanced with a set of wooden steps leading up to it, proving that the cultists were using this as their primary access route.  Within was a chamber lit by eight torches and filling the entire floor of the tower.  Although, actually there wasn’t much in the way of a floor – most of it was missing, leaving a large hole into the rubble cluttered interior of the tower.  There were three occupants – two more of the guards we had seen and a strange, red-haired dwarf.  There were also some stairs going up to the floor above.

I dispatched Blinky to go and look in at the windows of the two floors above.  The one immediately above us was a dormitory, with a number more sleeping guards.  Above that was a study, with a wizardy type studying tomes up there.  I returned to my companions and relayed this information to them, which lead to a particularly long, and sotto voce debate on the best thing to do.  Various options were examined and discarded – fighting everyone at the same time; climbing the tower and fighting the wizard first, then working our way down floor by floor, all sorts of crazy ideas.  In the end we decided to attack the three on the first floor, while I cast Fog Cloud on the floor above so that anyone who woke up hearing the fight below would find it difficult to find the stairs and come down to help their friends.

We executed the plan and dashed in.  The fight was fairly short – one of the guards tried to escape by jumping through the hole in the floor, but the strange dwarf and the other guard rapidly fell to our swords, and even the escaping guard was dispatched with arrows by Feyabelle.  There were some strange creatures clearing rubble in the foundations of the tower that ignored us, so we decided to ignore them in return.  That saw them, it did.

We ascended the stairs and I cleared my Fog Cloud, and Arielle and I then started dispatching the sleeping guards above.  This didn’t go entirely according to plan, and they started waking up, but we still finished them off, but not before alerting the wizard on the floor above.  The wizard, who turned out to be some sort of Archdruid (the beard made it obvious), came storming down the stairs and started casting spells at us, starting with Sorrel’s favourite – Spike Growth.  I slipped under the stairs and hid so that I could make a sneak attack as he came past, using my Dagger of Venom.  Next round he gave a puff on his pipe and the smoke that came out transformed into smoky imps that attacked Arielle.  I prepared myself to attack him, but the others came piling up the stairs though and ruined everything by killing him before I got a change.  I did nick his pipe though.

We are now having a ruffle through the papers on his desk in his study above, and looting the place.  Hey, its what we do best.