Dust and Devils Session 3

Baron Denham offers the party a job to help his excavation crew to collect treasure from a pit. Only to find out that the pit is an abyssal monster protecting ruins of an ancient wizard.

Summary

The team meets the wealthy Baron Denham at The Half Moon Saloon who offers them a job to be the "muscle" for his excavation crew. He tells them about the legend of the wizard Hazlik and believes that there is a vast amount of treasure in a pit that he has found and funded an excavation. After some bartering, the party agrees to help the excavation crew for a 12% keep of the finds as well as first dibs on any magic items found.

Horatio recognizes the name of the wizard and explains to the party that he was an old wizard that was obsessed with learning and harassing the powers of all fiends, devils and demons. Armed with this knowledge, the party is now suspecting that there may be some items that may be useful in the coming fight with The Dread Conductor.

Once arriving to the excavation site, they meet Ove and Arup. Ove is the Gnome Artificer and lead engineer on the pit and Arup is an Ogre leading the crew on the dig. After some convincing, the party agrees to use Ove's lift into the pit only to find out that there was an abyssal mouth at the bottom of the pit that they have to fight as they are lowered down on the elevator.

The monster also had the ability to spawn tentacles from the surrounding sides of the pit, but it proved not to be enough as it fought the party. Being thrown off of the side of the lift by a tentacle, Kazuki was able to pull off some spectacular mid-air gunslinging to take out 3 of the monster's tentacles as well as land the killing blow on the main maw.

Once the devouring mouth has been slain, it slowly disappeared to reveal the floor of Hazlik's ruins. The party lowers more into it and starts investigating the dungeon. The main floor they find an octangonal room with bookshelves on 4 corners with a gemstone key hole in the middle of each. Entering one of the connecting hallways Arno was able to disarm the poison dart trap to reveal a trophy room of sorts containing old magic items that used to belong to the famed wizard.

The party then enters a room where they find and investigate a summoning circle just in time for it to summon something.