Link to the first thread:
That was the first storytime thread on my memory that hit the bump limit, so I've decided to open a new thread for the continued discussion.
Since the story is so huge, nobody stitched together a screencap yet. I'll just do it the easy way and repost every part of the story exactly how the writefag wrote it, with all the same pictures.
Heroes of the Spiderwoods - thread II
Eli Carter
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Joshua Kelly
> Okay, some background. Our party consisted of a wild sorcerer, a paladin, two fighters, a ranger and a monk.
> We all met in the tavern and were offered a quest - we must head to the enchanted elven woods to retrieve a golden cup from it.
> By "elven" I mean that they were elven once, the only elves that live there now are ghosts, zombies and an occasional cursed fellow.
> First off, we do some starter quests in the town, nothing too major.
> We drive off murderous crows and a magic scarecrow from a farm, we take part in a pie eating competition, we help a blacksmith to clear his basement from the corrupted myconids, that sort of stuff.
> All of this is done to gain the trust of local population - and by extension, the local druids
> Soon we earn their trust, but they only tell us can't help us find the cup at all. Since they are not diviners.
> But there's an exiled druidess in the woods, who may know such magic, so we head there.
> Here our DM introduces his homebrewed travel system - there's a hex map of the forest, and each time we move a tile, we must roll the survival check.
> If we fail, he hides all the map from us than rotates it randomly, so we're forced to remember the landmarks.
> Luckily, this never actually comes into play, because we have a ranger with us.
> In fact, we're acting unusually smart for our autistic selves for once, since we do not get lost.
> In fact, we find the witch's hut pretty early.
> Maybe a little too early.
Grayson Jackson
> The hut is there, alright, but the witch isn't home.
> Her guard dog is, though, and it starts barking the moment it sees us.
> One of our fighters decides to distract it with tasty treats and petting, while the rest decides that the home invasion is a really great idea.
> We find nothing especially interesting inside - at least, nothing we wouldn't expect to see in a druid's hut.
> Just some basic furniture, a shelf with potions and a heavily wounded, unconcious deer.
> We barely restrain ourselves from stealing the potions in the witch's absence for five minutes, before she arrives.
> She doesn't take kindly to the intruders at first - in fact, the only reason she decided to listen to us at all is because her dog liked our fighter.
> Every party member tries to ask her for help in his own way.
> The paladin appeals to honor and glory of finding a sacred relic, but the witch doesn't hold much love for her order or religion, so she fails.
> The other fighter asks if they could help her back, but the witch is pretty self-sufficient - she doesn't need anything from murderhobos.
> When everyone tried his hand, the monk steps in.
> He pulls a myconid corpse from his pocket.
> "Maybe we can make a deal. Look, I have this - maybe you could plant him and grow yourself an army, right?"
> The paladin freezes in horror.
> The sorcerer pulls a hood down on his face.
> The ranger covers his ears
> The figher covers the dog's ears.
> There's a dead silence in the air for a few seconds...
> Until the witch starts screaming insults and obscenities at us.
> She polymorphs the monk into a newt and throws him into the bushes with all her strength.
> Then she stares at us.
Grayson Gutierrez
> She continues yelling at us for another five minutes or so, calling us all braindead imbeciles and worse, until she finally calms down and gets it out of her system.
> After successfully deflecting all the blame for home invasion and brining a corrupted myconid to the forest on the monk, we manage to finally start a reasonable discussion.
> She even agrees to help us in order to get rid of murderhobos at her hut the easy way.
> There's a catch - in order to divine the location of the cup, she needs to perform a blood sacrifice that is likely to significantly cripple one of us...
> ...but then again, she also offers us the easy way out - we could simply use the dying deer as a sacrifice and be done with it.
> Luckily, our paladin is always happy to martyr herself for no reason at all - she steps forward and offers her blood instead.
> Good choice, because it turns out that the witch was bullshitting us in order to see if we're sociopathic enough to murder a defenseless animal to find some bejeweled crockery.
> We are totally not, so she finally caves and begins explaining the situation.
> First of all, the forest is divided into three areas of influence - one is controlled by a gigantic minotaur, the other by a hag and the third one is under control of the Necromancer.
> Well, that sounds pretty spooky, but we don't actually need to visit all those places, right?
> She can just divine the location of the cup, and we'll head there.
> Nope! She can't. This magic is beyond her.
> Fuck!
> That is, unless we find a magic mirror for her.
> Yes!
> The magic mirror is located in the hands of the titanic minotaur mentioned above.
> Fuck!
> Alright, fine, we're adventurers. We should be able to handle a minotaur, right?
> After our monk recovers from polymorph (since the witch refuses to dispell it herself). we head out.
Joshua Morgan
> Minotaur's lair is located in the western part of the forest. As the witch told us, goblins serve him - just like grimlocks serve the hag, so we should be careful.
> Naturally, when we hear "be careful", we understand it as "get caught in a goblin ambush"
> For someone of such low CR, goblins manage to put up some resistance, but we win anyway, killing the majority of the fuckers and capturing a few alive.
> The paladin decides that she has huge and important business somewhere else, while the rest of the party interrogates the greenskins.
> Turns out, they really are the servants of the minotaur, but we already know that. We probe the fuckers for more information, until we learn something new.
> First of all, goblins assumed that we're here to save some huntsmen that we never heard about before.
> More importantly, the minotaur has a very unusual pet - a gelatinous cube.
> Well, it's difficult to call him a pet, he just trapped him in a tunnel and uses him as a guard.
> When asked about how they manage to contain the cube, we're told that it's afraid of fire - so they've surrounded him with torches to keep him still.
> After learning everything that we need, we "let them go", grab the paladin and head to the minotaur's lair.
> Since our paladin is the only one with the darkvision, she decides to walk in the front.
> To "scout".
> In heavy armor.
> This genius idea works out just fine, when we walk into the cave's living room and wake up about twenty goblins or so.
> We're totally fucked, aren't we?
> Well, luckily, they aren't all waking up at once - so we're fighting a wave after wave, not a gigantic army.
> That is, for a few rounds, until they all wake up, and we are fighting a gigantic army.
> We end up blowing all of our daily resources on a single encounter.
> We end up blowing all of our hit points too.
> In fact, some of us blow them more than once, such as our fighter, who discovered a new fighting style.
Eli Lee
> Fighting style in question is known as "corpse tanking".
> Every single turn the goblins dropped him into zeroes and stabbed him while he's down to finish him off
> While he's at zeroes, he needed to fail the death saving throw three times in order to actually die.
> Each sucessful attack on goblin's part automatically failed one saving throw.
> However, every round the paladin healed him with lay on hands for one hit point, bringing him back from the brink...
> ...just so he can drop on the ground and become a pin cushion again.
> The fact that no one died during this encounter was a god damn miracle, especially since we were all so close.
> After the battle is over, we barely stop to loot the place - after grabbing and chewing on some of the goblin food, we rush back outside to take a long rest.
> Since there's no way we're fighting the minotaur in our shape, obviously.
> About eight hours later we return to the cave, only to find out that we're not the only guests here.
> The Hag's grimlocks either dug to deep or are assaulting the place on purpose through their tunnels.
> In any case, this fucking kitchen is now filled with new enemies - but not as much, so we kill them all pretty easily.
> This time we go slightly deeper into the room to find some kind of a cold storage, where the goblins kept their food before slaughtering it.
> However, there's nothing inside except for a single huntsman.
> He's really, really happy to see us - especially since the goblins were going to eat him very soon.
> Oh, yeah, the huntsmen, we've heard about those. Aren't there supposed to be more?
> "Oh yes, there were more, but some were cooked a few days ago, then there was some huge battle yesterday, and goblins were hungry after it, so they ate the rest."
> Oh.
> We politely ask him what does he mean by "yesterday".
> "About eight hours ago."
> Oh.
> Well, fuck.
Ryder Allen
> Okay, that... Sucked, but at least we saved one of them. It ain't THAT bad, right?
> We might want to reconsider our policy on eating strange food found on monster kitchens, though.
> After letting the hunstman go, we head further into the caverns, fighting both grimlocks and goblins. along the way, until we find a strange, suspiciously empty tunnel filled with bones.
> This is the moment where I mention that the DM rolls for the wild magic surge every time the sorcerer casts a non-cantrip spell.
> I'm mentioning this right now for no reason at all.
> The walls are decorated with torches - a luxury otherwise absent from this caves, since goblins don't need the light.
> Yeah, that isn't fucking suspicious at all.
> Come on, guys, even we aren't stupid enough to fall for that.
> "This is where they keep the cube!" - the fighter deduces.
> How observant of you.
> "He must be guarding treasures!"
> No. No, no, no, no.
> "I'm gonna find him and poke him with a torch!"
> NO, NO, NO, NO
> After nearly engulfing himself into the cube by accident, since he can't actually see it until he gets too close, the fighter rips a torch from the wall and does exactly what he said.
> Well, if he hoped to intimidate the cube with this gesture, it didn't work.
> He made in angry instead.
> Some hotheads in the party want to fight it - that is, until they look up his stats.
> We all turn and run as fast as we can - and the cube follows.
> Contrary to the popular myth, gelatinous cubes aren't actually slow.
> They simply have no reason to hurry.
James Gutierrez
> Now, normal human beings would run towards the exit from the caverns and take a long rest again, hoping that the cube will get bored and come back.
> Or, well, there will be actually somewhere to run to if we're out in the open.
> Instead, in our panic we run further into the caverns.
> We run and don't look back, because we don't want to know how close is that thing.
> We don't look back, and we don't look sideways too.
> We barely pay attention to the whole goblin warcamp that we run past.
> Shocked goblins try to throw some spears at us, but we don't give a fuck about goblins.
> We need to run.
> And we run...
> ...straight into the dead end.
> Fuck.
> Fuck.
> FUCK.
> This is the moment our DM calls for a smoking break and leaves.
> Meanwhile, we're frantically trying to come up with a plan.
> Well, not a plan, but at least SOMETHING to avert our impending deaths.
> We even remember that we bought a few sacks of salt for some reason, and we try to come up with bullshit reasons why it will totally scare the cube off.
> When the DM returns, he begins describing the horrible screams we hear from the distance.
> Many, many horrible screams that grow louder by the second, until they begin to quiet down.
> ...this THING just ate the whole warcamp, didn't it.
> You know what that means - it isn't blocking our escape anymore, and we can return safely.
> We get all the way back and head down the torch lit tunnel that was previously guarded by the cube.
> At the end of it, there are two doors, one leading to the west, another to the east.
> Our paladin is feeling particularily gung ho today, so she kicks the eastern door down with her hooves.
> Turns out, this door leads to the warcamp.
> And the cube was waiting for us right behind it.
William Bailey
> We hastily kick down the second door - only to find out that it leads to a bottomless pit.
> If we head to the left, we'll fall into the pit and die.
> If we don't, we'll have to fight the cube.
> Bottomless pit it is!
> When we land, it turns out that it wasn't that deep after all, we're barely hurt.
> It's pretty dark in there, however, so we light torches to see where we actually ended up.
> This cavern may be filled with rubble and trash, but it's still a pretty huge place - big enough to house a second warcamp...
> Or a gigantic magic mirror...
> And a single minotaur.
> So it turns out, when grimlocks dug a tunnel, they intended to dig their way into minotaur's chambers and assassinate him.
> However, apparently they fucked it up and collapsed his lair instead.
> Now we're stuck with a gigantic, pissed off minotaur with a warhammer the size of a grown man.
> After we finish shitting our pants, we roll for initiative, and the sorcerer goes first, finally it's his time to shine.
> He lifts his hands up and chants the magic words of the catapult spell - "Allahu akbar!".
> A single rock slowly begins levitating above the ground, and then, with a fwooshing noise, it smashes into the minotaur's head, dealing respectable damage.
> Time to roll for wild magic surge again...
> ...and it actually happens this time.
> Wonder what is he going to roll, wild magic surge table is filled with lolrandumb trash...
> He rolls an 7.
> What does 7 stand for?
> It stands for picrelated, a fireball spell centered on the sorcerer.
> Every single party member is in the fireball radius.
> We are all level three.
> We begin to laugh nervously, as the sorcerer rolls for damage.
> It's more than enough to kill us all, unless we make the dexterity save.
> Our laughter stops being nervous and becomes downright hysterical, as we roll for dexterity.
> None of us except for the sorcerer makes it.
> Fucking Lord.
Jack Garcia
> Okay, so this is the moment when I've realized that I really, really like this campaign, and I want it to continue.
> We can't just die in here, we barely started!
> And I know that DM also put a lot of time and effort into writing this adventure - he actually did it the Wizard of the Coast way, writing down an entire design document.
> He put his soul into this thing. He's laughing now, but there's no way he'll be actually okay with this kind of a stupid ending.
> It takes some effort to stop laughing, but I snap out of it eventually.
> "Hey, uh, DM, you remember that we all have Inspiration points? From roleplaying and all of this?"
> "So?"
> "Well, you know how 5e is the "Leave it up to DM" edition. And remember how we played Star Wars Saga Edition? There were destiny points there, very similiar thing, they could be used for all kinds of things. Like, avoiding damage... Could we maybe use them? To, you know, slightly lower the damage from the fireball?"
> DM is overtaken by doubt, but other players soon begin supporting me, which happens rarely, and persuading him to listen.
> Finally, he agrees - fine, you can halve the damage from the fireball, if you spend your Inspiration.
> "But only this once."
> "And sorcerer doesn't get to use it, since it's his fault."
> Well, shit.
> Campaign saved!
> We are not dead after all!
> But we're simply nearly dead.
> And minotaur was not in the radius of the fireball at all...