The Hazards of a Misplaced Fireball

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The Hazards of a Misplaced Fireball

Written by The Geek on 2015-01-26

You enter a room where the air around you is hot, nearly uncomfortably so. The floor is solid, but it seems the small tunnel you are walking through is surrounded on the sides and top by water, being held back by some mysterious force. This would explain the 3 sets of steel re-enforced doors you had to pry open to get in here. If whatever holds back this water should fail, it could flood the whole complex.

A short bit further, the narrow passage opens into a huge dome-shaped room. This room echoes the hallway, seemingly surrounded by water on all sides except the rocky floor. By the bubbles rising rapidly through the water, you quickly surmise that the water outside this "bubble" must be boiling hot, which explains the stifling heat. In the center of the room stands a Giant Crab! Wow, just one pincer is larger than your whole body!

This is an adventure that I am playing with a group of people at a local gaming store. For those of you in the know, we are playing through 'White Plume Mountain'. This was originally an earlier AD&D version module, that has been edited to be Pathfinder compliant for a party of 6-7th level players.

White Plume Mountain

This party has 7ish players currently (if someone doesnt show up, thier character doesnt play). On this particular night, we had: An Arisen Fighter (arisens are undead), A Psyonic (of some race, I am unsure), A Catfolk Wizard, Dwarven Cleric, Human Sorceror, Orc Improvised Fighter, and myself a Vanaran Hunter with my wolf companion, Atilla.

First, a little bit of backstory: Our arisen character carries a full sized door as a shield, and has for a good part of this adventure. The guy who just rolled his new orc improvised fighter, wants his own door and is totally freaking out about it.

When we encountered the first set of re-enforced double doors, the Arisen decided it would be nice to upgrade from a wooden door to a steel door. Now, these doors are 2 inches thick, solid steel, and 8 feet tall. He rolled to sunder the hinges so he could remove the door. The orc opened the next set of doors and did the same thing to one of the doors. At this point, we did the math and determined that these doors weigh over a ton each. So no, we would not be carrying any doors. In my opinion, these doors should not have even been removed once we learned this. I don't care how good your sundering with your swordbreaker dagger is, you cannot use it to break a hinge holding a 1-ton door.

Crab

So we hit this room, and the first thing my character says is "I'm going to refrain from shooting my bow in here, since we don't know whats keeping that water back. Wouldn't want to accidentally bring all of this water down on us. I guess either the other party members didn't hear me since I'm way in the back, outside all 3 sets of double doors (I'm a recent addition to the group), or my voice didn't carry very well across the gaming table. Because here's what happened next.

It's probably easiest if I take you through things as they happened. We go around the table for turns, and I am the last person who can act.

1: Our Arisen strolls into the room and right up to the crab. This invokes an attack of opportunity, and the grabs snaps up the Arisen in his claw. The Arisen takes 40ish damage.

2: Our Psionic manifests 2 constructs and sends them in closer. On of the constructs does a dimension-shift with the Arisen. Now, the Arisen is once again standing in front of the crab, and the crab now has a construct in its grasp.

3: Orc Fighter runs into the room and tries to attack the crab with a mahogany tabletop he found in another room. He misses.

And then...

4: Catfolk sorceror casts fireball at the crab. Except he doesnt want to hit his party members standing in front of the crab, so instead he sends the fireball ABOVE the crab. Yes, above the crab. Right into the bubble.

Fireball

Yeah. That just happened.

5: The fireball impacts the dome and it bursts. Water comes pouring in.

6: Our Arisen, getting another turn somehow, holds on to his door and floats to the top of the water, and rolls over on top of the door like a makeshift raft. He now has left than 20 hp left.

7: The catfolk sorceror, and his giant wolf, both die in the boiling water.

8: Orc also dies in the water.

Now, there were 3 sets of reinforced doors at the entrance to this chamber. 2 of them had doors removed from the hinges. I argued this point, because the hinges a) were only broken because these guys thought they could carry them before we worked out that they weighed over a ton each, and b) If these hinges were strong enough to hold up a 1 ton door, theres no freaking way they could have been broken by a normal non magical dagger, even if it was a sword breaker. The DM either didn't hear me or he didn’t agree, because I got no answer to my objection.

9: The first set of doors slams shut as the water hits it (yes, the doors open toward the water). The Cleric and Sorceror are standing right outside these doors and get them basically slammed in their faces.

10: The water pressure sunders the threshholds and bends the hinges, throwing the doors open with horrific force. The Cleric and Sorceror both buy the farm between being struck by these 1-ton doors and the boiling water.

11: The second and third pairs of doors each have one door missing, so the water just pours right past them.

12: The water reaches me 80 feet down the hall from where this all started, and I take 46 points of damage. The water sweeps me back 15 feet into a room we previously left.

Now, a little about this room. The floor is covered in water. It turns out there is only a small path around one side of the room, the rest of the room is actually 20 feet deep, except for a much deeper hole in the middle of the room.

13: I get to do something. Now, I usually play where everyone's turns happen at the same time which means I would have been able to act while the Arisen was strolling up to the crab. But in this case, the DM ruled I am now able to react only AFTER all of the above has happened, as if I've been frozen in my spot for the last 15 seconds and just watched everything unfold.

14: I cast Air Bubble on myself and dive into the water of this room, hoping to swim down a little to avoid the boiling hot water. I pull my wolf companion along, using my empathy to relax him. Not before we both take another 35 points of boiling water damage.

15: The psionic spends power points and converts them to health as a swift action, and then manifests a construct and adds swim and fly to the construct. With swim, moving full speed, with the current, he can move about 90 feed in a round. At the end of his round, he is completely healed and on my heels diving into the water behind us.

16: Underwater now, with a magic air bubble around my head, I cast Air bubble on my wolf and then on the psionic when he arrives. We sink further into the water to hatch a plan.

I come up with a plan that involves my ability to summon nature's ally, and the psionic's contruct being able to swim with all of us in tow.

17: I summon 2 small ice elementals, the construct grabs on to the psionic, my wolf, and I and swims up and out of the room, following the current of the water now barreling through the room. Mixing with the cold water, plus the ice elementals in close proximity keeps the water around us cool enough not to cause damage.

18: The elementals don't last long, so the next 2 rounds I summon 2 more elementals as we're moving. We're moving 90 feet a round and the hot water is not only mixing with cold water from 2 other rooms, but also being cooled by the quickly melting ice elementals.

19: Boom. We hit the Sphinx trap. There are walls of force or something similar blocking the way in and out of the passages. A Sphinx is usually sitting here and will ask a riddle depending on which passage you wish to take, and will remove the magical barrier. Now, the barrier doesn't actually STOP anything from passing through, but unless you make a will-save, it will knock you unconscious. We all fail, and out we go.

So, the air bubble spell is only good for 7 minutes. We are knocked out for 180 minutes. The construct has a life of 8 hours, but cannot "think" for itself. Good thing that the last command given to it by the psionic was "get us out of the water". Following its last command, the construct takes our limp forms down a hallway and up a staircase, staying only just above the water as it continues to rise. We wake up 3 hours later, still suspended by the construct, but still alive.

Back in the cavern, the Arisen sees the crab in motion, and manages to attach himself to a stalactite. He is now down to literally no health and since he is already technically dead, it doesn't matter.

So that's it. One fireball, and almost a complete party wipe. 4 party deaths. 1 character hanging from a stalactite, and 2 characters able to lick their wounds and crawl out of the place.

Guess the wizard didn't hear me when I mentioned the danger of shooting arrows in here, let alone fireballs. Silly [dead] wizard.

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