Welcome to Pandemonium
The portal spits us out at Pandesmos Outlook. The transition is as disorienting as planar travel always is, but we're old hands at this by now. Pandemonium itself is another matter: an insane place of crazy winding tunnels, ceaseless howling wind, and a dark gravelly ridgeline stretching away from us.
What we know, and what we've pieced together:
- Myska, the arch demon, is imprisoned here, locked away by the Rod of Several Parts.
- Kas wants to overthrow Vecna, and wants Myska's help to do it.
- The Chimes of Unmaking send things back to their home plane once they're weakened. Crucially, it's not single use, so it could work on Kas too.
- Our connection to Vecna feels stronger here than anywhere else. He may well be on this plane.
The Hand of Vecna tells Sugar which way Kas went, so we follow.
Demons in the Dust
Fell spots four enormous creatures at the bottom of the terrace, skeletal demonic monsters some 250 feet below us. Gnarls thinks demons are supposed to be from the Abyss, so it's weird that they're here. They're huge, fast, and not very bright, wandering around aimlessly in the wind and dust that keeps anyone, demon or adventurer, from seeing very far.
Gnarls casts some spells in prepartion and we descend a level, where we find a glabrezu lying dead. Kas clearly carved his way through with that vicious sword of his.
Then the skeletal demons (dhergoloths) notice us. Or rather, they notice when Fell sneaks up and puts an arrow in one's eye for massive damage. It takes a moment for the nearest one to even register that its buddy is being shot. Sugar uses the dead glabrezu as cover. Gnarls blasts the pack with a fireball. Jain waits, coiled.
The demons scurry 60 feet straight up the 100-foot wall toward us. Fell drops the wounded one with another deadly shot, and Gnarls casts Shatter to bring a huge boulder down on it for good measure. The second one makes the top only to get punched in the face by Jain and finished off by Fell. Two more are on their way up.
Jain leaps off the ledge onto the head of a dhergoloth still 80 feet up the wall, hitting it so hard that it loses its grip. As they plummet together the melee continues, the demon landing some clawed blows. Jain retaliates by decapitating it in midair. Just before they both slam into the ground, she kicks off the corpse with enough force to break her fall, landing unharmed.
Gnarls casts Hold Monster on the last demon as it crests the wall. Sugar accidentally (?) breaks the spell with an arrow. The freed demon leaps at Fell in midair and beats him up pretty badly, though he stays on his feet. Sugar finishes the demon off, then chops some trophies from the corpses. As is her way.
A Sea of Chaos
We travel a fair way further, following the Hand's guidance, before the tunnels open up onto a beach. Beyond it sprawls a sea of chaos: a battlefield strewn with thousands of demon and spider corpses, the fighting still raging across a huge area. Huge spiders and driders march under banners of Lolth. Among them, other spiders with wolf heads.
That tugs at a memory: Myska was called the "Wolf Spider." We postulate that Lolth thinks Vecna's plan of destruction is cool, which puts her against anyone trying to stop him. Kas, meanwhile, wants Myska's help against Vecna. So it's something like a 2v2: Lolth and Vecna versus Kas and Myska, with us in the middle hating everyone's odds.
The battle lines, as best we can make out:
- A fort on the beach, which doubles as Myska's prison. No one significant is attacking it so far.
- A leaning tower wrapped in a giant spider web, with Lolth's forces stationed around it. The main battle seems to be Kas's forces pushing towards the tower, though they haven't reached it yet.
- A tower in the far east where Kas might be, under attack by Lolth's army.
- Lolth's army is led by a Pit Fiend.
Vae's Bargain
While we're surveying the carnage, a female drow named Vae approaches with a proposition: help her get her sister back from the beach fort, where she's also after a magic cloak, and in return she'll tell us about the dangers ahead. The fort holds tons of treasure besides. We tell her to get lost while we deliberate, which turns into a long debate about what taking out one of the four powers would do to the balance of this war, and whether the enemy of our enemy's enemy is any friend of ours.
In the end we take the deal. Vae gives us a token to identify her sister by, and confirms what we suspected: Myska is following the orders of a vampire. Definitely Kas.
We settle on a plan: sneak over to the far fort, where Kas may be. The session ends with the plan made but our feet not yet moving. On Pandemonium, on the eve of... well, you know.
