Session 4, Mellaril

Do you remember me telling about Elgert Glassgrinder? He sought us out for an actual quest,  if you can believe it! Turns out Glassgrinder isn't his real name. Whatever it  is, he  got kicked out of his clan and wants us to help redeem him. Seems that when he was young,  he borrowed a legendary clan dagger from a relative's tomb and managed to lose it. Typical precentenarian. He dropped it down a crevice in the rock while exploring.  Now he hears it calling out to him. He might be a trifle possessed by the spirits of his ancestors,  fortunately for him as you will see. This entry has an element of tragedy,  though it ends on more of a tragicomic note, you will see.

Elgert led us into the Underdark, following the path of his tensaged quest. Found the lair of the mad fungal druid! We came across a mushroom farm with a mushroom house,  which was a bit of a clue, but not as much of one as the flying zombie sheep heads that attacked us! And I always thought that druids were vegetarians.

We eventually got through his outer defenses of zombie sheep heads and various fungi. Elgert got a faceful of spores, but the rest of us were ok. In his parlour, we fought a rust monster and a kind of mycelinoid that was half zombified. Gave several of us purple pox. Rust monster wisely ran off. Then the druid came downstairs with a couple zombie bodyguards. It was a slimy, glistening thing of nauseating colors.  I barely remember how we defeated it. I don't think I had a spell left. Got him in the end, but both Elgert and N'drak were in a bad way. They wanted to descend into the Underdark and birth mycelinoids. The Dwarven spirits pushing Elgert on were having none of that, but N'drak didn't have that advantage.  Pausing only to loot--got this smashing beard clasp for my ponytail that seems to make me an even smoother talker, but I keep dreaming about interminably arguing dwarves--we rushed back to town, but poor N'drak just wasn't strong enough. He couldn't make it through the night. We were sorrowfully gathering firewood to burn him before he sprouted fruiting bodies and turned into a homicidal champignon, when we got one of our other bits of loot identified as a reincarnation ritual. You can imagine how frantically we rushed around trying to find the right sort of priest and raise money! The clan was very generous as was N'drak's local ambassador,  and we were just able to cover it. The ritual went off, and while a fungus did spring forth from N'drak's corpse, it was a cute fungus leshy instead of a disgusting mycelinoid. And N'drak's soul and memories seem to be mostly inside it! So back down we go, with a very groggy N'drak Mk 2 carefully avoiding any patches of hot butter. We'll see how it goes.